Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (82 page)

The
hours
passed
slowly.
No
sound
penetrated
from
the
London streets.
It
seemed
the
silence
deepened
to
something
beyond
silence. Beneath
the
surface
the
turmoil
in
my
mind
ran
helter-skelter
among a
thousand
thoughts
and
pictures,
playing
pitch-and-toss
with
my years
in
the
prison
camp,
with
my
reading,
with
my
own
strange experiments
in
escape.
...
I
wondered,
wondered,
for
wonder seemed
the
single
attitude
that
held
calm
and
steady
in
me.
For
the hundredth
time
I
went
over
my
brief
talk
with
Vronski
just
before he
left,
the
few
wild
questions
I
had
put,
the
startling
replies.
Incoherent
and
almost
childish
that
exchange
seemed
now.
Was
there anything
in
particular
I
should
look
for,
I
had
asked,
apart
from
noting what my cousin might say? And Vronski, eyeing me hungrily, had hesitated
a moment, as though reflecting deeply. "A change," he had said at
length, "an alteration—of unexpected kind—a sudden —possibly a very
shocking one." Into my mind leaped the idea of mania. "No, not
that," came the reply, reading my thoughts again. "I mean that its
suddenness, its rapidity—you might find shocking." It was nothing mental,
I realised. "Oh, physical then?" I asked with a little gasp
impossible to repress, and he had nodded, the expression on his face dreadful
almost, because a queer superior smile lay mingled in it. "He might appear
suddenly—rather—different," his words came slowly. I guessed faintly at
what his allusion meant perhaps. I recalled, all in a flash, the stories, my
own casual observations in the past, the fact that for a generation Mantravers
had not grown older, and the unnatural horror of it came back to me like ice.
And Vronski's slow words were still dropping from his lips in whispers.
"The stresses and energies where he has been lie beyond anything we can
know or imagine. Their removal here may result in abrupt collapse of even
dreadful kind. The price must be paid—paid back!—in our
time,
of course." His voice became almost inaudible. "It may be
sudden,"
I
just caught, "what we call sudden."

The
talk ran in a ceaseless circle through my mind, round and round, till any
meaning it might have held was lost, as I sat there watching the sleeper's bed.
My armchair was against the open door. The silence deepened, the cold
increased, the city traffic lay dead, no birds awake, no wind astir. No hint of
sleep came near me. If he wakened—should I dare to ask the thousand questions
raging fn my mind, dare to frame a single one of them? He did not stir an inch,
he did not turn over, trunk and head and limbs lay motionless, and
I
doubt if my eyes ever left his face for more than a few seconds at
a
time.

So
long this silence and immobility continued that, beginning to feel nothing
would ever happen again, I glanced at my wrist-watch, noting that it was close
upon four in the morning, the hour when human vitality sinks to its lowest ebb,
and thinking that daylight must presently come filtering through the blinds. I
can swear that my eyes did not leave his face for longer than ten seconds at
most, but it was in this very brief interval I became aware of a sudden
movement in the still room. I started, gave a jerk as though a bullet had
passed through me, while my questions fled like a flock of terrified sheep. The
movement was of the slightest, but it was real—the opening of his eyelids.
Mantravers was staring at me across the floor. And accompanying this movement
was a low sound that came at me like a bell—his voice.

Caution,
circumspection, sensible action, all forsook me in that instant, and fear went
with them: memory of detailed instruction vanished utterly; caught in a wave of
passionate and overwhelming curiosity, I sprang to my feet, obeying
instinctively my dominating impulse. I was across the strip of intervening
carpet in a second, I rushed up to the bed; with barely a foot between our two
faces, I plumped out my first question, regardless of all else. It was what,
above all, I wanted to know, apparently, for it burst out like an automatic
explosion.

"How
did you do it, Sydney—keep young—arrest age and decay, I mean, for twenty-five
years on end?"

The
question had spurted spontaneously out of my "subconscious," of
course, where it had lain so long, perplexingly unanswered; for I had no
thought of asking it till then, and there were others I had meant to put.

Those
strange electric eyes gazed into mine. He spoke, and his voice again was like a
bell: "A man in his own place," he answered with a curious
gentleness, "is the ruler of his fate. And I found mine."

"How—how
did you get there?" came from my lips, stupidly enough.

"By
leaving—this—this imagery." He made a slight, even a tiny, gesture with
his arm, yet it was as though he swept away the house, London, England itself
and all it stood for in ordinary experience. Imagery! I almost felt myself
swept with it into something beyond all trivial, confined and relative
conditions I had hitherto mistaken for reality and life. Though my mind and
emotions were a boiling cauldron, little clear and steady in them, another
question rising to the surface shot out of its own accord.

"Our knowledge, then—science
--------
"

An
extraordinarily sweet expression stole upon his face. He gently shook his head.
"Unreal," rang the voice, though fainter than before, "and part
of the dream we ourselves create. The How is nothing—
mere effects. Here we can dream effects
only. Knowledge and reality can be known only in the Why—the world of causes. .
. ."

On
the last three words the bell-like quality grew fainter, fading from his voice,
the eyelids dropped slowly over the terrific eyes. I searched for one more
question among the hundreds I longed to ask, but found no single word. He lay
quite still again, apart from the gentle rise and fall of the body that
breathed equably in what men call physical sleep. The queer notion came to me
that he had not really wakened at all, that Mantravers in his totality had
certainly not been there, nor gazed at me, nor spoken, but that only a fraction
of his being, using the familiar terms of limited human intelligence, had
brushed my mind in passing. True enough, of course, the fragment that was
spoken, for even I grasped that, and classifying effects can bring no knowledge
of reality. Science, which explains how a thing happens, can tell nothing as to
why it happens, nor has normal human consciousness any faculty for apprehending
this region of causes. Had he, then, experienced that, dwelt in that, known
reality face to face?

I
remember withdrawing softly, as a giddy man withdraws cautiously from the edge
of a precipice that makes him tremble. Quickly, I jotted down the brief
exchange in a hand that shook a little. I sank back into my deep armchair with
the strange assurance that it would be long before he really woke. I fell
asleep. It was, this time, Vronski's sharp, practical voice that startled me.

"Humph!
So you had to sleep, of course," he exclaimed in a whispered voice
between a snap and a growl, yet somehow not unkindly. "It's six o'clock,
you know. You've lost something, probably." He had already examined the
sleeper, I knew, for he came to me out of the bedroom. His fearful eagerness
was pathetic.

I
shook my head, wide awake on the instant, all my faculties about me. I pushed
my notes towards him.

"What?"
he whispered. "He's waked then—and spoken? You heard it? You put
questions—good ones? You understood—something?" He seized the notes as a
famished man might snatch at food, his hand shaking, while he eyed my face and
the paper alternately like a hungry wolf. I told him briefly what had occurred,
as he read the sentences over and over again, first very rapidly to take in
their general sense, then very slowly, reflectively, laboriously even. They
were laconic enough, but I filled in the blanks in a whisper. His hunger, his
envy, his greed to know, again touched my pity. I felt ashamed of being so
unworthy a go-between.

"Yes,
yes, of course," he was mumbling, as though speaking to himself rather
than to me, "but we both knew that. We've been there before together
already. The why of things, rather than the futile how that science gabbles.
That's the first result of a changed, a different consciousness. But he's been
beyond that—far, far beyond it. That's what I want to know—what the new
faculties that come with a changed consciousness reveal—beyond the region of
causes even. . . ."

His
speech grew so rapid, so involved, I could not follow it. On his face the
ravaged look intensified. He kept one eye, none the less, both ears as well, I
knew, upon the inner room, and then suddenly glanced sharply back at me, as
though my presence had just occurred to him. "There was more, much more,
he wanted—tried—to say, wasn't there?" he shot at me. A quick smile of
apology, of courtesy, accompanied it.

"That's
the impression made upon me," I agreed. "He knew things
impossible—utterly impossible—to communicate in ordinary words."

Vronski
fell silent, thoughtful, for a moment, then went on again, as though talking to
himself rather than to me:

"He
was awake, of course, awake here in our sense," he muttered. "Just
for those moments he was awake here—but to him that would be falling asleep
again. He was talking in his sleep. He had already waked up out of all this
long ago—waked up a second time. To come back to conditions here would be
falling asleep again." His meaning was quite clear to me. Ordinary waking
every morning is merely the gain of increased and clearer consciousness; to
wake up then a second time involves a yet greater gain. "If he had talked
nonsense, instead of sense," Vronski was whispering to himself, "he
could have told more. Yes, yes, as you felt, he was just talking in his
sleep," again picking an earlier thought out of my own mind. "A man
in his own place," he repeated, "is ruler of his fate."

I
stared stupidly, perhaps, yet not as stupidly as I doubtless looked. I
realised, at least, that from the point of view of a different consciousness
having new faculties, our own best scientific dicta must be childishly
inadequate and false. But I found no useful word to say. Fatigue, too, began to
stupefy me. "It was a good question all the same," he went on,
"the one you put. Our three-dimensional consciousness has no faculty that
can know anything of a universe that is certainly many-dimensional. Our best
knowledge is a dream, bom of dream-minds in a dream-civilisation. To tell us
how water runs downhill is to tell us nothing—why it runs downhill is
god-like." He looked me over as man might regard a stupid employee who had
done his best, and then suddenly something I found awful crept into the face.