"I must do my duty," persisted the other.
"Do it, then," said Lucas, standing square across the door. "Do it, and see if you can explain afterwards how you did it. I am not a woman who can be insulted with safety; my arrest will have to be explained to St. Petersburg, and you will have to pay for it. I saw how she was being handled, and how your duty was being done. I tell you, you're in danger. Be careful!"
"So?" replied the officer slowly. He turned to the folk who were the absorbed audience of this conference. "Move away, there," he commanded harshly. "This is none of your business. Off with you!"
They shifted back reluctantly, and he waited till he could speak unheard by them. Then he turned to Lucas again with a touch of the confidential in his manner.
"What do you want with her?" he asked.
"Want with her?" repeated Lucas, not immediately comprehending. Then, as the man's meaning reached him he trembled. "I don't want her," he cried. "I don't want her. You want her, not I; and you shan't have her. Do you understand? You shan't have her!"
"Shan't I?" retorted the officer, but there was indecision in his voice.
"No!" said Lucas.
There was a pause. Neither of them was sure of himself. The officer found himself in face of a situation which he could not gauge; and it would never do for a provincial police official to attract notice in remote St. Petersburg. For all he knew, this flimsy little man, who had snatched his Jewess from him, might be able to set in motion those mills which grind erring servants of the State into disgrace and ruin. He certainly had a large and authoritative way with him.
"Will you come to the Bureau, then, and speak with the chief?" he suggested. "You see, your action causes a difficulty."
"No, I won't," said Lucas flatly.
He also was in doubt. It seemed to him that he stood in a considerable peril, and he was aware that his mood of high temper was failing him. It needed an effort to maintain an assured and uncompromising front. Behind him, on the unlighted stairs, the woman breathed heavily. He summoned what he had of stubbornness to uphold him. The affair so far had gone valiantly; he meant that it should continue on the same plane.
He saw the officer hesitate frowningly, and quaked. In a moment the man might make up his mind and seize him; there was an urgent necessity for some action that should quell him. Like all weak men, he saw a resource in violence, and as the officer opened his lips to speak again he interrupted.
"No more!" he shouted. "You have heard what I had to say; that is enough. Now go!"
He pointed frantically with his flute, and the officer, at the sudden lifting of his arm, made a surprised movement, which Lucas misunderstood.
With a cry that was half terror and half ecstasy he smote, and the flute beat the officer's cap down over his eyes.
"Yei Bohu!" ejaculated the officer, falling back,
Lucas did not wait for him to thrust the cap away and recover himself. He had done his utmost, and the next step must rest with Providence. It was but two paces to the doorway. The officer was not quick enough to see his panic-stricken retirement. He recovered his sight only to see the slam of the door, which seemed to close in his face with a contemptuous and defiant emphasis. It was like a final fist shaken at him to drive home a warning. He shook his head despondently.
On the other side of the door Lucas, fighting with his loud breath, heard his slow footsteps on the cobbles as he departed. He waited, hardly daring to relax his mind to hope, till he heard the party of them drawing off. He was weak with unaccustomed emotions.
What struck him as marvelous was that the woman, whose face he had last seen as a writhen mask of fear, should appear in the light of his room with her calm restored, with nothing but some disorder of her hair and dress to betoken her troubles. Even the child in her arms, worn out with weeping perhaps, had fallen asleep. He stared at the pair of them vacantly. His lamp, his music, all the apparatus of his gentle and decorous existence were as he had left them; their familiar and prosaic quality made his adventure appear by contrast monstrous.
The Jewess was watching him. In her dark, serious way she had a certain striking beauty. Her grave eyes waited for him to look at her.
"What is it?" he said at last.
"If I might put the child down," she suggested timidly.
Lucas pointed to the double-doors of his bedroom. "My bed is in there," he answered. She lowered her head, as though in obedience to a command he had given, and carried the child out. Lucas watched her go, and then crossed the room to a cupboard which contained, among other things, a bottle of brandy.
While he was drinking she returned, pausing in the door to look back at the child. He noticed that she left the door partly open to hear it if it should wake, and somehow this struck him as particularly moving.
She came across the room to him, with her steadfast eyes on his face, and, without speaking, fell on her knees before him and put the edge of his coat to her lips.
Lucas stood while she did it; he hardly dared to move and interrupt that reverent and symbolic act of gratitude. But once again, as when on the pavement she had held the child to him in frantic appeal, the simple soul within him flamed into splendor, and he was in touch with great passions and mighty emotions. It is the mood of martyrs and heroes. He looked down to her dark eyes, bright with swimming tears, and helped her to her feet.
"You shall be safe here," he told her. "Nobody shall touch you here."
She believed it utterly; he was a champion sent straight from God; she had seen him conquering and irresistible. To fear now would be a blasphemy.
"I am quite safe," she agreed. "I am not afraid. To-morrow some of my people will come for me."
He nodded. "There is some food in the cupboard there," he told her. "Milk, too, if the child wants it. And nobody can come up the stairs without meeting me; and if they try, God help them!"
She half smiled at the idea. "They would never dare," she agreed confidently.
He would have been glad of his overcoat, but that was in his bedroom, and he dreaded the indelicacy of going there while she was present. So in the event he bade her a brief good-night, and found himself on the dark and chilly stairs without so much as a pillow or a blanket to make sleep possible. For lack of anything else in the shape of a weapon, he had brought his silver-keyed flute with him; if he were invaded in the small hours it might serve him again; it seemed to have a virtue for quelling police officials.
About three o'clock in the morning he awoke from an uneasy doze, chilled to the marrow, and was prompted to try if the flute would still make music. It would not. It is too much to ask of any instrument that has been used as an instrument of war. It had saved a Jewess and her child, magnified its owner into a man of action, and was thenceforth silent for ever.
"I must have hit that officer pretty hard," was the reflection ofRobert Lucas.
The episode closed shortly before noon next day, when two elderly men of affairs came to fetch his guests away. They entered the room while he was entertaining the baby with a whistled selection from his repertoire of flute music, and he broke off short as they regarded him from the doorway. The Jewess looked up alertly as they entered.
They bowed to Lucas with a manner of servility in which there was an ironic suggestion, while their eyes examined him shrewdly. They were bearded, aquiline persons, soft-spoken and withal formidable. He had a notion that they found him amusing, but suppressed their amusement.
"Then it is you we have to thank," said the elder of them, when formal greetings had been exchanged, "for the safety of this girl and her child."
"I don't want any thanks," protested Lucas.
He could not tell them how the thanks he had already received transcended any words they could speak.
"It was a villainous thing," he went on. "I'm glad I could help. Er— is the silversmith all, right?"
"Money was paid," answered the grey-haired Jew; "he is safe, therefore. But he spent the night in chains, while his wife was here with you."
He spoke with a pregnant gravity. The Jewess started up and addressed him in a tongue Lucas could not understand. He saw that she pointed to him and to the bedroom and to the stairs, and that she spoke with heat. The old Jew heard her intently.
"So!" he said, in his deep voice. "Then we have more to thank you for than we thought. You gave up your rooms, it seems?"
"It is nothing," said Lucas. "You see, a lady—well, I could hardly—"
"Yes, I see," agreed the old Jew. "I have to do with a noble spirit. And you do not want any thanks? So? But we Jews, we have more things to give than thanks, and better things."
"I don't want anything," Lucas answered him. "I'm glad everything's all right."
"You are very good," said the old man, "very good and generous. But some day, perhaps, you will have a need—and then you will find that our people do not forget."
The Jewess had nothing to take with her but her child. She bowed her head and murmured something as she passed out, and the baby laughed at him.
"Our people do not forget," repeated the old Jew, as he bowed himself forth.
"Well," said Lucas, half aloud, when he was once more alone in his room, "that's finished, anyhow."
It was the knell of his greater self, of the man he had contrived to be for a few hours. He sat in his chair, dimly realizing it, with vague and wordless regrets. Then, upon the table, he saw the flute, and rose to put it in the cupboard. It would never be useful again, but he did not want to throw it away.
The old dramas, which somehow came so close to reality with so little art—or because of so little art—had a way of straddling time like life itself. "Twenty years elapse between Acts II and III," the playbills said unblushingly, and the fact is that what most men sow at twenty they reap at forty; the twenty years do elapse between the acts. The curtain that goes down on Robert Lucas in his room at Tambov rises on Robert H. Lucas in New York, with the passage of time marked on him as clearly as on a clock. With grey in his beard and patches on his boots, and quarters in a boarding-house in Long Island City, he is still concerned with leather, but no longer prosperous. His work involves much calling on dealers and manufacturers, and their manner of receiving him has done nothing to harden his manner of diffidence and incompetence. His linen strives to be inconspicuous; his clothes do not inspire respect; the total effect of him is that of a man who has been at great pains to plant himself in a wrong environment. Tambov now is no more than a memory; it is less than an experience, for it has left the man unchanged. It is a thing he has seen—not a thing he has lived.
The accident that gave his name and the address of his boarding-house a place in the papers has no part in his story; he was an unimportant witness in the trial of a man whom he had seen in the street cutting blood-spots out of his clothing. He had bought a paper which mentioned him to read on the ferry as he returned home, and had been mildly thrilled to find that an artist had sketched him and immortalized him in his columns. And next morning came the letter.
"Guelder and Zorn" was the name engraved across the head of it, in a slender Italian script; it conveyed nothing to him. The body of the communication was typewritten, and stated that if Mr. Robert H. Lucas would present himself at the above address, the firm would be glad to serve him. Nothing more.
"Mean to say you haven't heard of Guelder and Zorn?" demanded the young man whose place at breakfast in the boarding-house was opposite to him, when he asked a question. "Say—d'you know what money is? Hard, round flat stuff—money? You do know that, eh? Well, Guelder and Zorn is the same thing."
Somebody laughed. Lucas looked round rather helplessly.
"They say," he explained, referring to the letter, "that they'll be glad to serve me."
"Then you might lend me a couple of million," suggested the young man opposite, with entire disbelief. "Them Jews would never miss it."
Lucas had the sense to drop the matter there. He put the letter in his pocket and went on with his breakfast, and listened with incredulous interest to the talk that went on about the wealth, the greatness, the magnificence and power of the financial house which professed itself anxious to be of use to him. He was sorry to have to leave the table before it came to an end.
It is characteristic of him that the letter aroused no wild hopes, nor even an acute curiosity. He came, in the course of the morning, to the offices of Messrs. Guelder and Zorn in much the same frame of mind he brought to his business efforts. They were near, but not in, Wall Street—a fact of some symbolic quality which he, of course, could not appreciate. He stood on the edge of the side-walk for some moments, looking up at the solid, responsible block of building which anchored their fortunes to earth, till some one jostled him into the gutter. Then he recollected himself and prepared to enter the money- mill.
A hall porter like a comic German heard his inquiry, scrutinized him with a withering glare, and jerked a thumb towards a door. He found himself in such an office as may have seen the first Rothschild make his first profits—a room austere as a chapel, rigidly confined to the needs of business. A screen, pierced by pigeon-holes, cut it in half. Experience has proved that no sum of money is too large to pass through a pigeon-hole.
"Veil?"
A whiskered, spectacled face, framed in the central pigeon-hole, with eyes magnified by the spectacles, regarded him sharply.
"Oh!" He recalled himself to his concerns with a jerk, and fumbled in his pockets. "I had a letter," he explained.
"Vere is de letter?"
He found it, after an exciting search, and passed it over. The whiskered face developed a hand to receive it.
"I don't know what it's about," explained Lucas.
"Perhaps your people have made a mistake in the name, or something."
"Our beoble," said the face in the pigeon-hole, with malignant emphasis, "do nod make mistagues!"
There was an interval while the letter was read, and Lucas stood and fidgeted, with a sense that he was intrusive and petty and undesired. "Yes," said the owner of the spectacles, at length. "You vait. I vill enguire."
He left his pigeon-hole unshuttered, and to Lucas, while he waited, it seemed that several men came to it and glanced at him forbiddingly. None spoke; they just looked as though in righteous indignation at his presence, with seventy-five cents in his pocket, in that high temple of finance. Then the whiskered and spectacled face fitted itself again into the aperture.
"So you are Mr. Robert H. Lugas, are you?" it inquired. "Den vere vas you in de year 1886?"
"Where was I?" repeated Lucas vaguely. "Let me see! 1886—yes! I was in Russia then—in Tambov."
"Yes." The other's regard was keen. "An' now tell me aboud de man dat lived obbosite to you in Tambov?"
"Do you mean the silversmith?" said Lucas. The other nodded. "Oh, him! He was a Jew. They expelled him."
"And his vife?"
"His wife! They expelled her too," he answered. "I never heard of her again."
"Vot vas de last you heard of her?"
"Oh, that!"
Lucas was staring at him vacantly. It did not occur to him that, by not answering promptly, he might give ground for doubt and suspicion. The question had re-illuminated in his mind—perhaps for the first time since the event which it touched—that night of twenty years before. He flavored again the heady and effervescent vintage of strong action, of crowded happenings and poignant emotions.
"Veil?" demanded the other.
"There was a police officer," began Lucas obediently; "his name was Semianoff;" and in bald, halting words he told the story. He told it absently, languidly, for no words within his reach could convey the thing as it dwelt in his memory, the warmth and color of it, its uplifting and transfiguring quality.
The man behind the pigeon-hole heard him intently.
"Yes," he said again, as Lucas finished. "You are de man. Ve do not reguire further broof, Mr. Lugas."
He produced a slip of paper and a pen which he laid on the ledge before his pigeon-hole.
"I am instrugted to say dat if you vill fill in and sign dis cheque, ve vill cash it."
"Eh?" Lucas was slow to understand.
"Ve vill cash it," repeated the other. "You fill it in—and sign it— and I vill cash it now."
"But"—Lucas took the pen from him in mere obedience to his gesture— "but—what for?"
"My instrugtions are to cash it—no more!"
Lucas stared at the tight-lipped, elderly face, like the face of a wise and distrustful gnome, and held the pen uncertainly above the cheque form.
"How much am I to write?" he asked.
"I haf no instrugtions about de amount," was the reply.
"But," cried Lucas, "I might write fifty thousand dollars!"
"My instrugtions are to cash de cheque ven you haf written it."
"Oh!" said Lucas.
He stared incredulously at the face for some moments and then wrote a cheque for the sum he had named—fifty thousand dollars. He was about to add his signature when something occurred to him.
"Is it because I went across the road to that little woman inTambov?" he asked suddenly.
The whiskered face answered composedly: "No. It is because you went out of your rooms and slept on de stairs."
"Because"—he seemed puzzled—"but that is a thing—why, any gentleman would do it."
"Dose are my instrugtions," said the man behind the pigeon-hole.
"I see."
Lucas stood upright, the uncompleted cheque in his fingers. All surprise and excitement had vanished from his regard; he seemed taller and stronger than he had been a minute before. He had yet many calls to make, and, in the nature of things, many rebuffs to receive, before he went home to supper; and the money in his pocket totaled seventy-five cents. He needed new boots, new clothes, leisure, consideration, and a sight of his native land; in short, he needed fifty thousand dollars.
"You will cash this because I didn't fail to respect a helpless woman?" he asked, in level tones.
The whiskered cashier replied: "Yes. Because you gave up your room and kept watch on de stairs."
Lucas laughed gently. "That is not the way to deal with a gentleman," he said. "I will make your firm a present of fifty thousand dollars."
He showed the cheque he had written, with the figures clear and large. And then, with leisurely motions, he tore it across and again across.
"Much obliged," said Robert H. Lucas, and made for the door.
Bearded, bowed, with hard blue eyes that questioned always, so we knew David Uys as children; an old, remotely quiet man, who was to be passed on the other side of the street and in silence. I have wondered sometimes if the old man ever noticed the hush that, ran before him and the clamor that grew up behind, the games that held breath, while he went by, and the children that judged him with wide eyes. He alone, of all the people in the little dorp, made his own world and possessed it in solitude; about him, the folk held all interest in community and measured life by a trivial common standard. At his doorstep, though, lay the frontier of little things; he was something beyond us all, and therefore greater or less than we. The mere pictorial value of his tall figure, the dignity of his long, forked beard, and the expectancy of his patient eyes, must have settled it that he was greater. I was a child when he died, and remember only what I saw, but the rest was talk, and so, perhaps, grew the more upon me.
One day he died. For years he had walked forth in the morning and back to his house at noon, a purple spot on the raw color of the town. He had always been still and somewhat ominous, and conveyed to all who saw him a sense of looking for something. But on this day he went back briskly, walking well and striding long, with the gait of one that has good news, and he smiled at those he passed and nodded to them, unheeding or not seeing their strong surprise nor the alarm he wrought to the children. He went straight to his little house, that overlooks a crowded garden and a pool of the dorp spruit, entered, and was seen no more alive. His servant, a sullen Kafir, found him in his bed when supper-time came, called him, looked, made sure, and ran off to spread the news that David Uys was dead. He was lying, I have learned, as one would lie who wished to die formally, with a smile on his face and his arms duly crossed. This is copiously confirmed by many women who crowded, after the manner of Boers, to see the corpse; and of all connected with him, I think, his end and the studied manner of it, implying an ultimate deference to the conventions, have most to do with the awe in which his memory is preserved.
Now, a death so well conceived, so aptly preluded, must, in the nature of things, crown and complete a life of singular and strong quality. A murder without a good motive is mere folly; properly actuated, it is tragedy, and therefore of worth. So with a death one seldom dies well, in the technical sense, without having lived well, in the artistic sense; and a man who will furnish forth a good death- bed scene seldom goes naked of an excellent tradition. I have been at some pains to discover the story of David Uys; and though some or the greater part of it may throw no further back than to the vrouws of the dorp, it seems to me that they have done their part at least as well as David Uys did his, and this is the tale I gleaned.
When David was a young man the Boers were not yet scattered abroad all over the veldt, and the farms lay in to the dorps, and men saw one another every day. There was still trouble with the Kafirs at times, little risings and occasional murders, with the sacking and burning of homesteads, and it was well to have the men within a couple of days' ride of the field-cornet, for purposes of defense and retaliation. But when David married all this weighed little with him.
"What need of neighbors?" he said to his young wife. "We have more need of land—good land and much of it. We will trek."
"It shall be as you will, David," answered Christina. "I have no wish but yours, and neighbors are nothing to me."
There was a pair of them, you see—both Boers of the best, caring more for a good fire of their own than to see the smoke from another's chimney soiling the sky. Within a week of their agreement the wagons were creaking towards the rising sun, and the whips were saluting the morning. David and Christina fronted a new world together, and sought virgin soil. For a full month they journeyed out, and out-spanned at last, on a mellow evening, on their home.
"Could you live here, do you think, Christina?" asked David, smiling, and she smiled back at him and made no other answer.
There was no need for one, indeed, for no Boer could pass such a place. It was a rise, a little rand, flowing out from a tall kopje, grass and bush to its crown, and at its skirts ran a wide spruit of clear water. The veldt waved like a sea—not nakedly and forlorn, but dotted with grey mimosa and big green dropsical aloes, that here and there showed a scarlet plume like a flame. The country was thigh-deep in grass and spoke of game; as they looked, a springbok got up and fled. So here they stayed.
David and his Kafirs built the house, such a house as you see only when the man who is to make his home in it puts his hand to the building. David knew but one architecture, that of the great hills and the sky, and when all was done, the house and its background clove together like a picture in a fit frame, the one enhancing the other, the two being one in perfection. It was thatched, with deep eaves, and these made a cool stoep and cast shadows on the windows; while the door was red, and took the eye at once, as do the plumes of the aloes. It was not well devised—to say so would be to lend David a credit not due to him; but it occurred excellently.
The next thing that occurred was a child, a son, and this set the pinnacle on their happiness. His arrival was the one great event in many years, for the multiplication of David's flocks and herds was so well graduated, the growth of his prosperity so steady and of so even a process, that it tended rather to content than to joy. It was like having money rather than like getting it. In the same barefoot quiet their youth left them, and the constant passing of days marked them, tenderly at first and then more deeply. Their boy, Frikkie, was a man, and thinking of marrying, when the consciousness of the leak in their lives, stood up before them.
They were sitting of an evening on the stoep, watching the sun go down and pull his ribbons after him, when Christina spoke.
"David," she said, "yesterday was twenty-five years since our marriage. We—we are growing old, David."
She spoke with a falter, believing what she said. For though the blood is running strong and warm, and the eye is as clear as the heart is loyal, twenty-five years is a weary while to count back to one's youth.
David turned and looked at her. He saw for a moment with her eyes— saw that the tenseness of her girlhood had vanished, and he was astonished. But he knew he was strong and hale, well set-up and a good man to be friends with, and as he gripped his knees, he felt the tough muscle under his fingers, and it restored him.
"Christina," he said, seeing she was troubled, "it is the same with both of us. You are not afraid to grow old with me, little cousin?"
She came closer to him but said nothing. It was soon after that, and a wonderful thing in its way, such as David had never heard of before, that there came to them another boy, a wee rascal that shattered all the cobwebs of twenty-five years, and gave Christina something better to think of than the footsteps of time.
Frikkie had been glorious enough in his time, and was glorious enough still, for the matter of that; but this was a creature with exceptional points, which neither David nor Christina—nor, to do him justice, Frikkie—could possibly overlook. Frikkie had a voice like a bell, and whiskers like the father of a family, and stood six foot two in his naked feet, and lacked no excellence that a sturdy bachelor should possess. But the other, who was born to the name of Paul, lamented his arrival with a vociferous note of disappointment in the world that was indescribably endearing; had a head clothed in down like the intimate garments of an ostrich chick, and was small enough for David to put in his pocket. He brought a new horizon with him and imposed it on his parents; he was, in brief, a thing to make a deacon of a Jew peddler.
Thereafter, life for David and Christina was no longer a single phenomenon, but a series of developments. It was like sailing in agreeably rough water. No pensive mood could survive the sight of mighty Frikkie gambolling like a young bull in the company of Paul; nor could quiet hours impart a melancholy while the welkin rang with the voice of the kleintje bullying the adoring Kafirs. Where before life had glided, now it steeplechased, taking its days bull-headed, and Paul grew to the age of four as a bamboo grows, in leaps.
Then Frikkie, the huge, the hairy, the heavy-footed, the man who prided himself on his ability to make circumstances, discovered, in a revealing flash, that he was, after all, a poor creature, and that the brightest being on earth was Katje Voss, whose people had settled about thirty miles off—next door, as it were. Katje held views not entirely dissimilar, but she consented to marry him, and the big youth walked on air. Katje was a dumpy Boer girl, with a face all cream and roses, and a figure that gave promise of much fat hereafter. Christina had imagined other things, but the ideal is a rickety structure, and she yielded; while David had never considered such an emergency, and consented heartily. Behind Frikkie's back he talked of grandchildren, and was exceedingly happy.
Then his dream-fabric tumbled about his ears.
Frikkie had ridden off to worship his beloved, and David and Christina, as was their wont, sat on the stoep. They' watched the figure of their son out of sight, and talked a while, and then lapsed into the silence of perfect companionship. The veldt was all about them, as silent and friendly as they, and the distance was mellow with a haze of heat. From the kraals came at intervals the voice of little Paul in fluent Kafir; David smiled over his pipe and nodded to his wife once when the boy's voice was raised in a shout. Christina was sewing; her thoughts were on Katje, and were still vaguely hostile.
Of a sudden she heard David's pipe clatter on the ground, and looked sharply round at him. He was staring intently into the void sky; his brows were knitted and his face was drawn; even as she turned he gave a hoarse cry.
She rose quickly, but he rose too, and spoke to her in an unfamiliar voice.
"Go in," he said. "Have all ready, for our son has met with a mishap.He has fallen from his horse."
She gasped, and stared at him, but could not speak.
"Go and do it," he said again, looking at her with hard eyes; and suddenly she saw, as by an inward light, that here was not madness, but truth. It spurred her.
"I will do it," she said swiftly. "But you will go and bring him in?"
"At once," he replied, and was away to the shed for the cart. TheKafirs came running to inspan the horses, and shrank from him as theyworked. He was white through his tan, and he breathed loud. LittlePaul saw him, and sat down on the ground and cried quietly.
Before David went his wife touched him on the arm, and he turned. She was white to the lips.
"David," she said, and struggled with her speech. "David."
"Well?" he answered, with a pregnant calm.
"David, he is not—not dead?"
"Not yet," he answered; "but I cannot say how it will be when I get there." A tenderness overwhelmed him, and he caught a great sob and put his arm about her. "All must be ready, little cousin. Time enough to grieve afterwards—all our lives, Christina, all our lives!"
She put her hand on his breast.
"All shall be ready, David," she answered. "Trust me, David."
He drove off, and she watched him lash the horses down the hill and force them at the drift—he, the man who loved horses, and knew them as he knew his children. His children! She fled into the house to do her office, and to drink to the bottom of the cup the bitterness of motherhood. A cool bed, linen, cold water and hot water, brandy and milk, all the insignia of the valley of the shadow did she put to hand, and con over and adjust and think upon, and then there was the waiting. She waited on the stoep, burning and tortured, boring at the horizon with dry eyes, and praying and hoping. A lifetime went in those hours, and the sun was slanting down before the road yielded, far and far away, a speck that grew into a cart going slowly. By and by she was able to see her husband driving, but nobody with him—only a rag or a garment that fluttered from the side. Her mind snatched at it; was it—God! what was it?
David drove into the yard soberly; she was at the stoep.
"All is ready," she said, in a low voice. "Will you bring him in?"
"Yes," he said; and she went inside with her heart thrashing like a kicking horse.
David carried in his son in his arms; he was not yet past that. On the white bed inside they laid him, and where his fair head touched the pillow it dyed it red. Frikkie's face was white and blue, and his jaw hung oddly; but once he was within the door, some reinforcement of association came to Christina, and she went about her ministry purposefully and swiftly, a little comforted. At the back of her brain dwelt some idea such as this: here was her house, her home, there David, there Frikkie, here she, and where these were together Death could never make the fourth. The same thought sends a stricken child to its mother. David leant on the foot of the bed, his burning eyes on the face of his son, and his brows tortured with anxiety. Christina brought some drink in a cup and held it to the still lips of the young man.
"Drink. Frikkie," she pleaded softly. "Drink, my kleintje. Only a drop, Frikkie, and the pain will fly away."
She spoke as though he were yet a child, for a mother knows nothing of manhood when her son lies helpless. The arts that made him a man shall keep him a man; so she coaxed the closed eyes and the dumb mouth.
But Frikkie would not drink, heard nothing, gave no sign. Christina laid drenched cloths to his forehead, deftly cleansed and bandaged the gaping rent in the base of the skull whence the life whistled forth, and talked to her boy all the while in the low crooning mother voice. David never moved from the foot of the bed, and never loosed his drawn brows. In came little Paul silently and took his hand, but he never looked down, and the father and the child remained there throughout the languid afternoon.
Evening cool was growing up when Frikkie opened his eyes. Christina was wetting towels for bandages, and her back was towards him, but she knew instantly, and came swiftly to his side. David leaned forward breathlessly, and little Paul cried out with the grip of his hand. They saw a waver of recognition in Frikkie's eyes, a fond light, and it seemed that his lips moved. Christina laid her ear to them.
"And—a—shod—horse!" murmured Frikkie. Nothing more. An hour after he was cold, and David was alone on the stoep, questioning pitiless skies and groping for God, while Christina knelt beside the bed within and wept blood from her soul.
They buried Frikkie in a little kraal on the hillside, and David made the coffin. When he nailed down the lid he was an old man; when the first red clod rang on it, he felt that life had emptied itself. When they were back in the house again, Christina turned to him.
"You knew," she said, in a strange voice—"you knew, but you could not save him." And she laughed aloud. David covered his face with his hands and groaned, but the next instant Christina's arms were about him.
Yet of their old life, before the deluge of grief, too much was happy to be all swamped. Time softened the ruggedness of their wound somewhat, and a day came when all the world was no longer black. Little Paul helped them much, for what had once been Frikkie's was now his; and as he grew before their eyes, his young strength and beauty were a balm to them. David was much abroad in the lands now, for he was growing mealies and rapidly becoming a rich man; and as he rode oft in the morning and rode in at sundown, his new gravity of mind and mien broke up to the youngster who jumped at the stirrup with shouts and laughter, and demanded to ride on the saddle-bow. At intervals, also, Paul laid claim to a gun, to spurs, to a watch, to all the things that go in procession across a child's horizon, and Christina was not proof against the impulse to smile at him.
It is not to be thought, of course, that the shock of foreknowledge, of omnipotent vision, had left David scathless. Though the other details of the tragedy shared his memory, and elbowed the terrifying sense of revelation, he would find himself now and again peering at the future, straining to foresee, as a sailor bores at a fog-bank. Then he would catch himself, and start back shuddering to the instant matters about him. Eventualities he could meet, but in their season and hand to hand; afar off they mastered him. Christina, too, dwelt on it at seasons; but, by some process of her woman's mind, it was less dreadful to her than to David: she, too, could dream at times.
One day she was at work within the house, and Paul ran in and out. She spoke to him once about introducing an evil-smelling water- tortoise; he went forth to exploit it in the yard. From time to time his shrill voice reached her; then the frayed edges of David's black trousers of ceremony engaged her, to the exclusion of all else. Between the scissors and the needle, at last, there stole on her ear a faint tap, tap—such a sound as water dropping on to a board makes. It left her unconscious for a while, and then grew a little louder, with a note of vehemence. At last she looked up and listened. Tap, tap, it went, and she sprang from her chair and went to the stoep and looked out along the road. Far off on the hillside was a horse, ridden furiously on the downward road, and though dwarfed by the miles, she could see the rider flogging and his urgent crouch over the horse's withers. It was a picture of mad speed, of terror and violence, and struck her with a chill. Were the Kafirs risen? she queried. Was there war abroad? Was this mad rider her husband?
The last question struck her sharply, and she glanced about. Little Paul was sitting on a stone, plaguing the water-tortoise with a stick, and speaking to himself and it. The sight reassured her, and she viewed the rider again with equanimity. But now she was able to place him: it was David, and the horse was his big roan. The pace at which he rode was winding up the distance, and the hoofs no longer tap-tapped, but rang insistently. There was war, then; it could be nothing else. Her category of calamities was brief, and war and the death of her dear ones nearly exhausted it.
David galloped the last furlongs with a tightened rein, and froth snowed from the bit. He pulled up in the yard and slipped from the saddle. Christina saw again on his face the white stricken look and the furrowed frown that had stared on Frikkie's death. David stood with the bridle in his hand and the horse's muzzle against his arm and looked around. He saw Christina coming toward him with quick steps, and little Paul, abandoning the skellpot, running to greet him. He staggered and drew his hand across his forehead.
Christina had trouble to make him speak. "A dream," he kept saying, "an evil dream."
"A lying dream," suggested Christina anxiously.
"Yes," he hastened to add, "a lying dream."
"About—about little Paul?" was her timid question.
David was silent for a while, and then answered. "I saw him dead," he replied, with a shudder. "God! I saw it as plain as I saw him a moment ago in the kraal."
They heard the child's gleeful shout the same instant. "I've got you!I've got you!" he cried from without.
"He has a water-tortoise," explained Christina with a smile. "Paul," she called aloud, "come indoors."
"Ja," shouted the child, and they heard him run up the steps of the stoep.
"Look," he said, standing at the door, "I found this in the grass.What sort is it, father?"
David saw something lithe and sinuous in the child's hands, and stiffened in every limb. Paul had a skaapstikker in his grip, the green-and-yellow death-snake that abounds in the veldt. Its head lay on his arm, its pin-point eyes maliciously agleam, and the child gripped it by the middle. Christina stood petrified, but the boy laughed and dandled the reptile in glee.
"Be still, Paul," said David, in a voice that was new to him—"be still; do not move."
The child looked up at him in astonishment. "Why?" he began.
"Be still," commanded David, and went over to him cautiously. The serpent's evil head was raised as he approached, and it hissed at him. Paul stood quite quiet, and David advanced his naked hand to his certain death and the delivery of his child. The reptile poised, and as David snatched at it, it struck—but on his sleeve. The next instant was a delirious vision of writhing green and yellow; there was a cry from Paul, and the snake was on the floor. David crushed it furiously with his boot.
Christina snatched the child. "Did it bite you, Paul!" she screamed."Did it bite you?"
The boy shook his head, but David interposed with a voice of thunder.
"Of course it did!" he vociferated with blazing eyes; "what else did my dream point to? But we'll fight with God yet. Bring me the child, Christina."
On the plump forearm of Paul they found two minute punctures and two tiny points of blood. David drew his knife, and the child shrieked and struggled.
"Get a hot iron, Christina," cried David, and gripped Paul with his knees.
In the morning the room was wild and grisly with blood and the smell of burnt flesh, and David lay face downwards on the floor, writhing as the echoes of Paul's shrieks tortured his ears. But in the next room little Paul was still for ever, and all the ghostly labor was to no purpose.
I suppose there is some provision in the make of humanity for overflow grief, some limit impregnable to affliction; for when little Paul was laid beside his brother, there were still David and Christina to walk aimlessly in their empty world. Their scars were deep, and they were crippled with woe, and it seemed to them they lived as paralytics live, dead in all save in their susceptibility to torture. Moreover, there was a barrier between them in David's disastrous foreknowledge, for Christina could not throw off the thought that it contained the causal elements which had robbed her of her sons. Pain had fogged her; she could not probe the matter, and sensations tyrannised over her mind. David, too, was bowed with a sense of guilt that he could not rise to throw off. All motive was buried in the kraal; and he and his wife sat apart and spent days and nights without the traffic of speech.
But Christina was seized with an idea. She woke David in the night and spoke to him tensely.
"David," she cried, gripping him by the arm. "David! We cannot live for ever. Do you hear me? Look, David, look hard! Look where you looked before. Can you see nothing for me—for us, David?"
He was sitting up, and the spell of her inspiration claimed him. He opened his eyes wide and searched the barren darkness for a sign. He groped with his mind, tore at the bonds of the present.
"Do you see nothing?" whispered Christina. "Oh, David, there must be something. Look—look hard!"
For the space of a hundred seconds they huddled on the bed, David fumbling with the keys of destiny, Christina waiting, breathless.
"Lie down," said David at last. "You are going to die, little cousin. It is all well." His voice was the calmest in the world. "And you!" cried Christina; "David, and you?"
"I see nothing," he said.
"Poor David!" murmured his wife, clinging to him. "But I am sure all will yet be well, David. Have no fear, my husband."
She murmured on in the dark, with his arm about her, and promised him death, entreated him to believe with her, and coaxed him with the bait of the grave. They were bride and groom again, they two, and slept at last in one another's arms.
In the morning all was well with Christina, and she bustled about as of old. David was still, and hoped ever, with a tired content in what should happen, a languor that forbade him from railing on fate. Together they prepared matters as for a journey.
"If the black trousers come frayed again," said Christina, "try to remember that the scissors are better than a knife. And the seeds are all in the box under our bed."
"In the box under our bed," repeated David carefully. "Yes, under the bed. I will remember."
"And this, David," holding up piles of white linen, "this is for me.You will not forget?"
"For you?" he queried, not understanding.
"Yes," she answered softly. "I will be buried in this."
He started, but recovered himself with a quivering lip.
"Of course," he answered. "I will see to it. I must be very old,Christina."
She came over and kissed him on the forehead.
In the middle of the afternoon she went to bed, and he came in and sat beside her. She held his hand, and smiled at him.
"Are you dying now?" he asked at length.
"Yes," she said. "What shall I tell Frikkie and the kleintje from you?"
"Tell them nothing," he said, after a pause. "It cannot be that I shall be apart from you all long. No; I am very sure of that."
She pressed his hand, and soon afterwards felt some pain. It was little, and she made no outcry. Her death was calm and not strongly distressing, and the next day David put her into the ground where her sons lay.
But, as I have made clear, he did not die till long afterwards, when he had sold his farm and come to live in the little white house in the dorp, where colors jostled each other in the garden, and fascinated children watched him go in and come out. I think the story explains that perpetual search of which his vacant eyes gave news, and the joyous alacrity of his last home-coming, and the perfect technique of his death. It all points to the conclusion, that however brave the figures, however aspiring their capers, they but respond to strings which are pulled and loosened elsewhere.
A veil 'twixt us and Thee, dread Lord, A veil 'twixt us and Thee!Lest we should hear too clear, too clear, And unto madness see.
Carrick crossed the fields in time to see, from the low bank above the churchyard, the children coming forth from Sunday school in the church, blinking contentedly at the late summer sunlight and all the familiar world from which, for two hours, they had been exiles. A little behind them came Mr. Newman, carrying his sober hat in his hand, and the curate.
"Hi!" called Carrick, and they turned toward him as he came down the bank, with his sly spaniel shambling at his heels.
The curate looked with disfavor at Carrick's worn tweed clothes and his general week-day effect. "I think," he said primly, "I'll be getting along."
"I should," said Carrick shortly, turning his back on him. "I want to speak to you, Newman."
"Then we will walk together," agreed Mr. Newman. "Good-bye till this evening," he called after the departing curate.
It was an afternoon of June, languid and fragrant; the declining sun was in their faces as they went in company under the high arches of the elms, in a queer contrast of costume and personality. Carrick, the man of science, the adventurer in the bypaths of knowledge, affronted the Sabbath in the clothes which gave offence to the curate. He was a thin, impatient man, standing on the brink of middle age, with the hard, intent face of one accustomed to verify the evidence of his own senses. A habit he had of doing his thinking in the open air had left him tanned and limber; he walked easily, with the light foot of an athlete, while Mr. Newman, decorous in the black clothes which are the uniform of the regular churchgoer, trod deliberately at his side and mopped his brow with a handkerchief.
"It was very warm in the church this afternoon," explained Mr. Newman mildly. "Very warm."
He was an older man than Carrick, and altogether a riper and most complacent figure. He had a large and benevolent face, which would have been common-place but for a touch of steadfastness and serenity which dignified it, and an occasional vivacity of the kindly eyes. One perceived in him a man who had come smoothly through life, secure in plain faiths and clear hopes, unafraid of destiny. Something reverend in his general effect accentuated his difference from his companion.
"Ventilation," Carrick was saying. "On an afternoon like this you might as well shut those children up in a family vault. Twenty of them, all breathing carbonic acid gas, besides yourself—and that ass!"
"You mean the curate?" inquired Mr. Newman. "Really, he isn't an ass.He didn't like your clothes—that was all."
"What's the matter with 'em?" demanded Carrick, inspecting his shabby sleeve. "You don't want me to dress up like—like you, do you?"
"My dear fellow!" Mr. Newman smiled protestingly, lifting a suave hand. "I don't care how you dress. I don't want you to 'make broad your phylacteries,' you know."
Carrick snorted, and they walked in silence through the little village that lay below the church.
The matter they had in common, which bridged their diversity and made it possible for them to be, after their fashion, friends, was their interest in the subject which Carrick had made his own—experimental psychology. Like all successful business men, Mr. Newman had an unschooled aptitude for the science, and had practised it with profit on his competitors and employees before he knew a word of its technology. In Carrick's bare and lamp-lit study they had joined forces to bewilder and undermine the intelligence of the sly spaniel, and there had been sessions of hypnotism, with Mr. Newman rigid in trances, while Carrick groped, as it were, among the springs of his mind. The pair of them had incurred the indignation of European authorities, writing in obscure and costly little journals whose names the general public never heard. The bond of martyrdom— martyrdom in print—united them.
"By the way," suggested Mr. Newman, when the village was behind them and they were walking between high hedgerows flamboyant with summer growth. "By the way, wasn't there something you wanted to speak to me about?"
"Eh? Oh yes," replied Carrick. "Bother! I want you to come to my place to-night to try something—something new, a big thing."
"To-night?" said Mr. Newman. "No, not to-night, Carrick."
"Why not?" demanded Carrick. "I tell you, it's a big thing. I've had an idea of it for some time; those clairvoyant tests put me on to it; but I've only just got it clear. It's big."
Mr. Newman shook his head. "Not to-night," he said. "You're a queer fellow, Carrick; you never can remember what day of the week it is for more than five minutes at a time."
"Oh!" Carrick scowled. "You mean it's Sunday. But this—I tell you, this isn't just an ordinary thing, Newman. I'll explain—it's new and it's big!"
"No," said Newman. "Not to-night, Carrick, please!"
"Hang it!" said Carrick. He would have spoken more liberally, but the choice was between restraint in language and the loss of Mr. Newman as an acquaintance. That had been made clear soon after their first meeting.
Mr. Newman smiled, and rested a large hand on Carrick's arm.
"We go by different roads to our goal, Carrick," he said, "but it is the same goal. We serve the same Master, under different names and in different ways. You call Him Science and I call Him Christ—the same Master, though; and my services take me to church to-night. But to- morrow, if you like, I will come over to your place."
"Get back," said Carrick violently to the dog. "To heel, you beast!"
The fork of the road was in front of them; they paused at the division of the way.
"Will that suit you?" inquired Mr. Newman. "I can come round after dinner."
Carrick gave him a look in which contempt, fury, and a certainly involuntary liking were strangely at war.
"Of all the sanctimonious asses," he said, and broke off. "Good- night!" he concluded abruptly.
"I'll come, then," said Mr. Newman, smiling. "Good-night, my dear fellow."
He went off at his deliberate gait, humming to himself the tune of the last hymn which the children had sung at the Sunday school. Evening was settling about him on the trees and fields; after the still heat of the sun, it was like an amen to the day, a vast low note of organ music. There was a pond gleaming among the trees.
"He leadeth me beside the still waters," he said aloud to himself, and then Carrick's footsteps were audible behind him. He turned. Carrick came up swiftly.
"Don't eat much dinner to-morrow night," he said, with immense seriousness.
"It's more hypnotism, then?" inquired Mr. Newman.
Carrick nodded. "Yes," he said. "But—it's a big thing, all the same."
He clicked to his dog and went off abruptly, passing with long, jerky strides into the enveloping stillness of the evening, and Mr. Newman resumed his homeward walk, taking up his mood of reflective quiet at the point where Carrick had broken in upon it. He was a man made for the Sabbath; he breathed its atmosphere of a day consecrated to observances with a pleasure that was almost sensuous. For him, piety was that manner of life which gave the quality of Sunday to each other of the seven days of the week, softening them and rendering them august with the sense of a great adorable Presence presiding over their hours.
The curate who disliked Carrick occupied the pulpit that evening; he preached from half a text, after the manner of curates. "For they shall see God"—he repeated it in a poignant undertone—he, tall and young and priestly in his vestments, seen against the dim glory of a stained window—and Mr. Newman, attentive in his pew, leaned forward suddenly to hear, like a man touched by excitement.
Carrick's study was one of a pair of rooms he had added to the farmhouse which he inhabited, a long apartment of many windows, designed for spaciousness, and possessing no other good quality. No fire could warm more than an end of it, and his lamp, wherever it was placed, was but a heart of light in a body of shadow. He had furnished it with the things he required; a desk was here, a table there, bookcases were along the walls, a variety of chairs stood where he happened to push them. It had the air of a waiting-room or a mortuary.
Carrick was at his desk when Mr. Newman, on the Monday evening, was shown in to him by the ironclad widow who kept house for him. He looked up with impatience as his guest entered.
"Oh, it's you?" was his greeting.
"Good evening," said Mr. Newman cheerfully. "You'd forgotten to expect me, I suppose. But I'm here, all the same."
"All right," said Carrick. "Sit down somewhere, will you?"
He rose and shoved a chair forward with his foot for Mr. Newman's accommodation, and began to walk slowly to and fro with his hands in his pockets.
"Well," said Newman; "and what's this miracle we're to work?"
"I'll show you," said Carrick, still walking. He stopped and turned toward his guest. "Newman," he said, "where do you reckon you were a hundred years ago?"
Mr. Newman laughed, crossing his legs as he sat.
"I'm not as old as that," he replied. "Whatever place you're thinking of, I wasn't there."
Carrick was frowning thoughtfully. "I'm not thinking of places," he said. "You—you exist; the matter that composes you is indestructible; the—the essential you, the thing in that matter that makes it mean something, the soul, if you like—that's indestructible, too. Everything's indestructible. A hundred years hence, you'll be somewhere; but where were you—you, that is—a hundred years ago?"
He pointed the "you" with a jabbing forefinger as he spoke it, standing in front of Mr. Newman in the lamplight and talking down to him.
"Oh!" said Mr. Newman, "I see—yes! A hundred years, ago I was part of my Maker's unfinished plan of to-day."
"Were you?" said Carrick, snapping at him. "You were, eh? Part of— we'll see! Come over to the big chair and undo your collar."
Mr. Newman rose; the big arm-chair was his place when Carrick hypnotised him, and the loosening of his collar was part of the ritual.
"What is the idea?" he asked, fumbling at his stud.
"Tell you afterwards," said Carrick. "If I told you now, you'd not get it out of your mind. Can't you get that collar off, man?"
"It was stiff," apologised Mr. Newman, arranging himself in the large chair. "How are you going to do it?"
Carrick's hot hand pressed his head back on the cushions.
"Shut up," he was told. "Let yourself go, now; just let yourself go."
The chair faced the blank, bare wall of the room; there was nothing in front of Mr. Newman for his eyes to rest on and take hold of. Carrick's hands no longer touched his head; he was alone in his chair, in a posture of ease, with the gear of his mind slacked off, his consciousness unmoored to drift with what-ever current should flow about it. He knew, without noting it, that something like a fog was creeping up about him; the pale wall became a bank of mist, stirring slowly; his pulse was a rhythm that lulled him faintly. He— the aggregate of powers, capacities habits that made the sum of him— was adrift, flowing like a vapor that leaks into the air and thins abroad. A coolness was on his forehead as of a little breeze.
Carrick, behind the chair, saw that his head drooped, and came round to look at him. He seemed to slumber with his eyes half open, and his plump hands, white and luxurious, were clasped in his lap. Carrick considered him and then crossed to his desk to get his pipe. He expected to have to wait for some time.
But it was less than five minutes before Mr. Newman stirred like a man who moves in his-sleep and emitted a long gusty sigh. His hands unclasped; he drove up to consciousness like a diver who shoots up through strangling fathoms of water to the generous air above. Life was compelling him; through the confusion of his senses he felt Carrick's hand on his shoulder and heard him speaking.
"Feeling quite all right—what? Here, drink some of this. It's only water. A drop more? Right!"
Mr. Newman pushed the glass away and sat upright, staring wide-eyed into the curious face of Carrick, who bent over him, tumbler in hand.
"All right?" asked Carrick again.
"Yes—now," replied Mr. Newman slowly. "But—what did you do to me,Carrick?"
Carrick gave a relieved snort and set the tumbler down on the mantelshelf.
"What did I do?" he repeated. "Opened a door for you—that's all.What did you find the other side?"
Mr. Newman passed an uncertain hand across his eyes. The feeling with which he had returned to consciousness, that liberties had been taken with him, was leaving him as the familiar ugly room grew about him again.
"It was queer," he said doubtfully, and Carrick bent his head in eagerness to listen.
"You've been hypnotised before, often enough. What was queer?"
"Hypnotism is unconsciousness, so far as I'm concerned," said Mr. Newman. "But this—wasn't! Not dreams, either; the thing was so absolutely real."
"Go on," said Carrick, as he paused to ponder.
"I felt myself going off, you know, just as usual—the mistiness, the reposefulness, the last moment when one would rebel if one could—but one can't; that was all ordinary. And then came the blank, that second of utter emptiness, as though one were alone in the wilderness of outer space, and light were not yet created. As a rule, that ends it; one's asleep then. But this time I wasn't. It seemed—it sort of dawned toward me——" Mr. Newman groped for a word which eluded him, with a face that brooded heavily.
"What did?" demanded Carrick.
"It was a lightness, first of all, a thinning of the dark, that grew and broadened till it was like a thing coming at me—like something thrown at me. And suddenly it was all about me, and I was in it, and it was daylight—just ordinary daylight, you know. There was a white, flat road, with a hedge on one side and a low leaning fence on the other, and over the fence there were fields; and I was walking along by the roadside, with the thick powdery dust kicking up from under my feet as I went."
He paused. "Yes?" cried Carrick. "Yes? Yes?"
"I don't remember what I was thinking," said Mr. Newman. "Perhaps I wasn't thinking. I saw a signpost farther along the road with something like a long bundle—it was rather like a limp bolster, I fancy—hanging from it. I was staring toward it, when there came a noise behind me, like a trumpet being blown, and I turned to see a coach with four horses come tearing along toward me, with a red- coated man at the back, blowing a horn. The roof of it was crowded with people curiously dressed; they all looked down on me as they came abreast, and their faces had a sort of strange roughness. I saw them as clearly as all that—a coarseness, it was—a kind of cruel stupidity. Several of them seemed to be pock-marked, too. It struck me; I wondered how a coach-load of such people had been gathered together; and I might have wondered longer; but one of them laughed, a great neighing guffaw of a laugh, as the coachman swung his whip."
Mr. Newman paused, and his hand floated to his face again.
"It cut me across here," he said thoughtfully. "It—it hurt.Awfully!"
Carrick nodded.
"And that was all," Mr. Newman went on. "At the sting of the lash, as though some one had turned a switch, the daylight went out—to the sound of that gross animal laugh. There was again the frozen dark, the solitude—the chill—and I heard you saying, as from another planet, across great gulfs of space: 'Drink some of this!' Only—"
"Yes?"
"It's like a memory of something that actually took place. I ought to have a weal just below my eyes where the whip took me-it wasn't five minutes ago. I remember the dusty smell of that white road-and how the thing that hung on the signpost was-some-how-ugly and nasty. It's awfully queer, Carrick."
"Yes!" Carrick sank his hands in his pockets and walked away to the shadowy far end of the room. Mr. Newman sat in thought, flavoring the vivid quality of his vision, with his underlip caught up between his teeth. The great room was silent for a space of minutes.
"I say!" Carrick spoke from the other end of it.
"What?"
"That signpost you saw-it wasn't a signpost, you know."
"What was it, then?"
"It was a gallows," said Carrick, "with a man hanging on it."
There was a pause. "Eh?" said Mr. Newman, and rose from his chair."Carrick, what exactly did you do to me?"
"I sent you back a hundred years," Carrick answered, in a measured voice. His excitement got the better of his restraint and his voice cracked. "Part of the-what was it you said you were, Newman?" he cried, on a note of shrillness. "I tell you, man, you've proved a hundred things you never dreamed of-theories of mine. You've proved them, I tell you. I've dipped you back into the past as I dip my hands into water. What you saw was what happened; it was you-you, man, a hundred years ago. Oh, why did I stop at a hundred? A thousand, a dozen thousand years would have been as easy."
He came down the long room almost at a run.
"Newman," he said, taking the elder man by the arm with a swift, feverish hand; "we've got 'em, all those old diploma-screened fools that call us quacks-Zinzau, Berlier, von Rascowicz, Scott-Evans-we've got 'em. We'll make 'em squeal. Before I've done with you, we'll see what the earth was like when it was in the pot, being cooked. You shall be a batwinged lizard again, and a cave-dweller, and a flint man. We'll turn you loose through history-our special correspondent at the siege of Troy-what?"
He broke into high, uncontrollable laughter.
"The Wandering Jew," he babbled. "We'll show him!"
Mr. Newman heard him with growing wonder, but now he shook his arm loose.
"Get yourself a drink," he said. "You're raving. I want to talk to you."
The word was enough; Carrick stopped laughing, and walked away toward his desk. Mr. Newman, standing by the big arm-chair from which he had just risen, looked after him with a sudden liveliness growing in his face. The experience through which he had just come, abiding with him as so secure a memory, precluded the doubts he might otherwise have felt; Carrick's words and his excitement, so unusual in him, and the clear, unquestionable sense of recollection with which he summoned again to his mind the white dusty road, the swaying body of the hanged man, the drum of the hoofs of the coach-horses-these stormed his reason and forced conviction on him.
"The siege of Troy, you said?" he asked, with a nervous titter. The thing was gripping him.
Carrick had seated himself at his desk, as though to steady himself by the sight of its prosaic litter. He looked up now, his face composed and usual in the light of the reading lamp.
"Or anywhere," he said shortly. He nodded two or three times impressively; he was master of himself again. "It's true, Newman; I can do it; I've opened the door. We must have a few more tests and verify the method by trying it on another subject. Then we'll go to war with the professors."