Collected works of j s f.., p.904
Collected Works of J S Fletcher, page 904
“Look here, Dan!” he exclaimed. “I’m going down! If the end’s coming, then — —”
But Mequillen laid a hand on his arm and drew him forward, at the same time removing the muffler from his head. “We will go down soon, Cockerlyne,” he said. “We must, for we shall have to tell them. But first — look! You can look with safety now.”
And then Cockerlyne, following his friend’s instructions, looked, and saw widespread above him the dome of the heavens. But never had he so seen it in all his life. From north to south, from east to west, it glowed with the effulgence of shining brass; and in the north-east hung a great globe of fiery red, vaster in dimension than the sun which the world had known till then, and, even when seen through the protections which Mequillen had prepared, coruscating and glittering with darting and leaping flame.
“My God!” said Cockerlyne, in a hushed voice. “My God! Dan, is that — It?”
“That is It,” answered Mequillen quietly. “It is now nearly twice the magnitude of our sun, and it is coming nearer. This is no time to make calculations, or even speculations; but I believe it is, at any rate, as near to us as our sun is. Come away, Cockerlyne; I want to look out on the world. Hold my hand and follow me.”
And he dragged Cockerlyne away through a trap-door and into a dark passage, and then into a darker room.
“Keep your hands over your spectacles for a while, and get accustomed to the light by degrees,” he said. “I am going to open an observation shutter here, through which we can see a vast stretch of country to the north. It will be a surprise to me if much of it is not already in flames. Now, if you are ready.”
Cockerlyne covered his eyes as he heard the click of the observation shutter. Even then, and through the thick black glasses which he was wearing, he felt the extraordinary glare of the light which entered. Presently Mequillen touched his arm.
“You can look now,” he said. “See. it’s just as I thought! The land’s on fire!”
Cockerlyne looked out upon the great sweep of hill and valley, wood and common which stretches across the fairest part of Surrey from the heights above Shere and Albury to those beyond Reigate. He saw the little villages, with their spires and towers and red roofs and tall grey gables; he saw the isolated farms, the stretches of wood, the hillside coppices, the patches of heath and the expanses of green which indicated land untouched by spade or plough.
It was a scene with which he had been familiar from boyhood. Of late he had explored every nook and corner of it with Addie Mequillen, and at all times of the year it had seemed beautiful to him. But under the glare and brilliance of this extraordinary light everything seemed changed. All over that vast prospect great pillars of smoke and flame were rising to the sky. From the valley beneath them came the shrieks and cries of men and women, and as the two men watched they saw the evergreens in Mequillen’s garden suddenly turn to the whiteness of paper, and shrivel and disappear in fine ashes.
“Look there!” whispered Mequillen, pointing a shaking finger. “There — Dorking’s on fire! And yonder, Reigate, too!”
Cockerlyne tried to speak, but his tongue rattled in his mouth like a dry pea, in a drier pod. He touched Mequillen’s arm and pointed downward, and Mequillen nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “We had better go down to them; they’ve got to know.”
He took Cockerlyne by the hand and led him back to the observatory, which, in spite of the fact that all its shutters were drawn, was full of light. And as they stepped into it a spark of white flame suddenly appeared in the woodwork, and ran like lightning round the rim of the dome.
“On fire!” said Mequillen quietly. “It’s no good, Cockerlyne; we can’t do anything. The end’s come! We — oh, my God, what’s this? What is this? Cockerlyne — Cockerlyne, where are you?”
For just as suddenly as they had seen the greyness of the great fog snatched away from the earth, so now they saw the extraordinary light which had succeeded it snatched away. It was gone in the flash of an eye, with the speed of lightning, and as it went they felt the earth move and shudder, and all around them fell a blackness such as they had never known. And as the two men gripped each other in their terror there suddenly burst upon the dome of the observatory a storm of what seemed to be bullets — fierce, insistent, incessant. The serpent-like trail of fire in the woodwork quivered once and died out. And Mequillen, trembling in every limb, released his hold on Cockerlyne, and staggered against the nearest wall.
“Rain!” he said. “Rain!”
In the darkness, Mequillen heard Cockerlyne first stumble about, and then fall heavily. Then he knew that Cockerlyne had fainted, and he made his way to a switch and turned on the electric light, and got water to bring him round. But when he came round, Cockerlyne for some minutes croaked and gabbled incessantly, and it was not until Mequillen had hurried down to the dining-room for brandy for him that he regained his senses and was able to sit up, gasping and staring about him. He pointed a shaking finger to the aperture in the dome, through which the rain was pouring, unheeded by Mequillen, in a ceaseless cascade.
“Where is — It?” he gasped. “What — what’s come of It?”
Mequillen shook him to his feet, and made him swallow more brandy.
“Pull yourself together, Cockerlyne!” he said. “This is no time to talk science; this is a time to act. Come down, man; we must see to the women! We’ve just escaped from fire; now we’re likely to meet our deaths by water. Listen to that rain, Here, help me to close that shutter. Now, downstairs! It’s lucky we’re on a hillside, Cockerlyne! But the people in the valleys! Come on!”
And, leaving Cockerlyne to follow him, Mequillen ran down through the house, to find his sister and the housekeeper in the hall. As he saw them, he knew that they had realised what he now had time to realise — that the terrible heat was dying away, and that it was becoming easier and easier to breathe. As he passed it he glanced at a hanging thermometer, and saw the mercury falling in a steady, swift descent.
Mequillen caught his sister in his arms and pressed her to him. She looked anxiously into his face.
“Dick?” she said.
“He’s safe — he’s coming,” said Mequillen.
Addie suddenly collapsed, and hid her face in her hands. The housekeeper was already in a heap in the nearest chair, sobbing and moaning. And as Cockerlyne came slowly down the stairs, Mequillen saw that, strong man as he was, his nerves had been shaken so much that he was trembling like a leaf. Once more Mequillen had to summon all his energies together in the task of bringing his companions round, and as he moved about from one to the other his quick ear heard the never-ceasing rattle of the rain, which was heavier than any tropical rain that ever fell. And presently he caught the sound of newly forming cascades and waterfalls, cutting new ways from the hilltops to the level lands of the valleys. Now the normal coolness of middle winter was coming back. The women picked up the wraps they had thrown aside; the men hurried into greatcoats. And as the February dawn came grey and slow across the hills, Mequillen and Cockerlyne went up to the observatory, and into the little look-out turret from which they had seen the spirals of smoke and flame rising from the land only a few hours before.
The rain was still falling, but with no more violence than that of a tropical rainstorm. But the air was throbbing, pulsating, humming with the noise of falling waters. A hundred yards away from the house a churning and seething mass of yellow foam was tearing a path, wide and deep, through a copse of young pine; down in the valley immediately beneath them lay a newly formed lake. In the valleys on every side, as far as the eye could reach, lay patches of silvery hue, which they knew to be great sheets of water; and now the air was cool, and the hitherto tortured lungs could breathe it in comfort.
“Mequillen,” said Cockerlyne, after a long silence, “what happened?”
But Mequillen shook his head.
“I am as a child standing at the edge of a great ocean,” he answered. “I cannot say definitely. I think that the great star which we saw, rushing upon us, was suddenly arrested, split into fragments, when that darkness fell, and that we were saved. Once more, Cockerlyne, the old world, a speck in space, will move on. For look there!”
And Cockerlyne turned as Mequillen pointed, and saw, slowly rising over the Surrey hills, the kindly sun of a grey February morning.
THE END
The Other Sense
I
OCT. 21ST. — They have told me to-day, with obvious reluctance, and in the kindest fashion, that I am to go to-morrow to the house of a Dr. Schreiber, in whose care I am to remain until I am restored to health. Restored to health! — my God! I am as healthy a lad of nineteen (I believe) as any one would wish to meet; certainly I have no recollection of any illness beyond a dose of measles when I was seven, and a very slight touch of scarlet fever a few years ago. Restored to health! — no, that is merely their kind way of putting it. What they really mean is: I am to go and live with this Dr. Schreiber, whoever he may be, until he, and they, and the doctors whom they have brought to see me so often lately, think I am — sane.
That, of course, is the real truth. I have often wondered, as I have grown up out of my lonely childhood towards manhood, how strange it is that what seems so easy to the child about truth-telling seems so difficult to the man — now I am beginning to understand. All the same, it would have been much more to my taste if my guardian and his wife had said to me, “Angus, we’re very, very sorry, but the doctors and we don’t think everything is as it should be with your intellect, and Dr. Schreiber is a famous mental specialist, and — —” so on.
But then — equally, of course — they couldn’t have said that to me if they really believe that I am mad. And they do. I know — I have seen them not once, but a thousand times since I came here to London from Alt-na-Shiel two years ago (when shall I see it again, and the mists on the mountains!), watching me as country folk watch the freaks at a fair. There is a puzzled look which comes into their faces; their brows knit, and their lips are slowly compressed, or pursed up, and — if they think I do not see them — they look at each other and shake their heads and sigh.
I cannot think of more than three things which should make them believe me mad. One is that I am very fond of solitude, liking to be left to myself as much as I can. Another is that I think a great deal — just as I read a great deal — and that I sometimes frown at my thoughts, sometimes smile at them, sometimes laugh, long and loud, at them. Perhaps, when Major Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy and I are alone after dinner, he reading The Times and she busied with her knitting, behaviour of this sort on my part may seem strange — it is only now occurring to me that it may. Certainly I have seen the Major drop his newspaper and jump — literally jump — in his arm-chair when, thinking of something that amused me, I have indulged in a sudden peal of laughter — yet why should one not laugh whenever one sees or thinks of something to laugh at? But I have found that a great many of the people whom I have met in London only laugh when a sort of signal is given. Those are two reasons. The only other reason I can think of is that I have told them once or twice — just as I told the doctors whom they have at times brought to see me — that I can see things which, I find out, most other people do not or cannot see. The first time I told them, for instance, of the spirit which I have seen a score or so of times at Alt-na-Shiel, they stared at me as if I were telling them lies, and they both looked curiously uncomfortable. Now, my old nurse, Margaret Lang, never looked uncomfortable when I told her of these things, neither did Dugald Graeme, my father’s old body-servant. They seemed to realize and to understand my meaning.
I have been thinking to-day (since I heard what my guardian and his wife had to tell me — he, poor man, in his stiff military-modelled sentences, and she more by tears than by words) about my life as a child and afterwards as a boy. Alt-na-Shiel is in one of the loneliest glens of the Strathern Mountains-a very great way indeed from the railways. There my father — Angus Maclntyre, like myself — went to live just after he was married to my mother, and there my mother died just after I was born. My father was a man of books, and after my mother’s death he thought of nothing but books. Margaret Lang — helped by Dugald Graeme — brought me up, but after I was able to walk, my real nurse and mother was the open air. I used to sit out — anywhere — all day long, content to see the sky, and hear the countryside sounds, and smell the heather and the gorse and the bracken. And I cannot remember, looking back, when it was that I did not see things that other people did not see. I was never afraid of anything that I ever saw.
I have gone on seeing ever since — now, usually, at long intervals. When I was seventeen my father died, and it was found that Major Kennedy, a distant connection, was to be my guardian, and that I was to live with him until my twenty-first year. That is why I am now writing this in my journal in my own room in Major Kennedy’s house in Bayswater — and why I am to-morrow to take up my residence with Dr. Schreiber at Wimbledon Common. Possibly I am writing it because, for anything I know, this may be my last day of complete liberty. I do not know what the rules are in these private mad-houses — if this to which I am going is such a place.
If I may speak frankly to myself in these pages, I must say that I cannot see why I should be considered at all mentally afflicted. I am, as things go, fairly well educated; fond as I am of solitude, I am fond of games, especially of football, golf, and tennis; I am certainly very strong in body, and of rude health. And as for my appetite...
However, they say I suffer from occasional delusions. We shall see.
II
Oct. 2nd. — I came here — to Dr. Schreiber’s house — yesterday afternoon, accompanied by Dr. Wilkinson, one of the two doctors who have been to see me so often lately. The parting between the Kennedys and myself made me think of the conventional descriptions of boys going to school. Major Kennedy shook hands with me at least six times, and Mrs. Kennedy cried. Dr. Wilkinson and I talked football all the way from Bayswater to Wimbledon, and I found out that he got his Blue at Oxford — I forget in what year.
Just before we got to Wimbledon Common I thought I would have a little straightforward conversation with Dr. Wilkinson.
“Look here, sir,” I said. “You, in common with Dr. Gordon and Major and Mrs. Kennedy, think I am a little mad?”
“I think that a few months’ residence with Dr. Schreiber will turn you out as fit as a fiddle,” he replied. “Why do most people give an evasive answer when it would be much simpler to tell the truth in one word?” I asked him.
“Ah, why don’t they?” he answered. “I’ve often wondered that myself.”
“Or, again,” said I, “how is it that people who happen through no fault of their own to possess a certain faculty, or certain faculties, which other people — most people — do not possess, are invariably considered to be — queer?”
He shook his head, and I relapsed into such a profound and cogitative silence that at last he asked me what I was thinking about.
“I was thinking, sir,” I replied, “how admirably you would have filled the rôle of those physicians of the Middle Ages who, whenever powerful monarchs or statesmen wanted to get rid of any person inimical to them, were ever ready to testify to their madness and to enclose them within a dungeon or an oubliette, or — —”
“Well, you’ll not find Dr. Schreiber’s place much of a dungeon, my boy!” he said, laughing. “Here we are, so you can see for yourself.”
I got out of the brougham and looked about me. This house is an old-fashioned structure of red brick, covered over with climbing plants, and it stands in the midst of a bright green lawn, the flower-beds and borderings of which are just now cheerful with a profusion of autumn blooms. There is not a suspicion of anything prison-like about it — on the contrary, its appearance suggests freedom and liberty. My first glance at it forced me to set up a comparison between it and Bayswater.
Dr. Schreiber came out to meet us. He is a youngish man — perhaps thirty-five, perhaps forty — tall, muscular, broad-shouldered, bronzed, cheery. I should have taken him for one of the sweller sort of professional cricketers rather than for what I was led to believe him — a private mad-house keeper. He welcomed me in a very friendly way, and after Dr. Wilkinson had gone volunteered to show me round the house and grounds. I was somewhat astonished to find no one about, except servants in the house and a gardener sweeping up fallen leaves on the lawn.
“Where, sir,” I asked, “are the rest of us?”
“The rest of whom?” he inquired, looking surprised.
“The rest of your other mad folk,” I answered. “I am sent here because they think me mad.”
He laughed — burst, rather, into laughter — and slapped my shoulders.
“Oh, hang all that, old chap!” he said. “There’s no one here but you, myself, my assistant, Pollard, who’s a real good sort, and the servants. You’re as free as air here, and if I don’t give you a first-class time it won’t be my fault.”
Later we fell to talking about golf. To-day, after he had been to visit his patients — he seems to have a pretty extensive practice — we managed to get a full round in before dusk came on. He beat me by two up and one to play.
III
Oct. 27th. — I have been very happy here so far — much happier, I believe — nay, am sure, than I have ever been since I left Alt-na-Shiel. Life is very pleasant in this house, and with Dr. Schreiber. He is very different, I think, to all other men I have ever met. I have been with him frequently to visit some of his poorer patients — it seemed to me that he laughs them out of their complaints. I do not mean that he laughs at them, but that his cheeriness is infectious, and lifts them out of themselves. He is certainly a great man — a big human.
Last night, after dinner, he and I were playing billiards, and somehow — I do not know how — we reached the question of what those other people call my delusion. We sat down — this was the first time I had ever spoken of it to him — and I told him of some things which I had seen — especially of the ghost (if it is a ghost) of the parish clerk of Ardnashonach. Instead of looking as if he could scarcely believe his ears (as Major Kennedy looks), or shaking his head (as Dr. Wilkinson did), he listened most intently, and asked me a lot of questions. Not questions about myself, which is what I detest, but sensible questions.
