Читать книгу Mirror of Dreams - Martin Louis Alan Gompertz - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Professor Waldenstein was undoubtedly Austrian—and German-Austrian at that—in fact, he made no bones about it. For which reason probably John Oxley made up to him on board the Narkunda—Fate, in the person of the P. and O. steward, having put Carruthers, Oxley, and Waldenstein into the same cabin. Oxley had views about the future of Europe, and, moreover, a certain feeling that, quite apart from world reconstruction for mere selfish ends, the proper way to end a contest was with a certain amount of dignified hand-shaking and some measure of new-found mutual respect.

Further, Waldenstein was a gentleman, and he was an earnest student of the type that used to fill Germany before Prussia got the whip-hand. He was also—which is essentially German—a dreamer of dreams, and so at the opposite pole to Oxley. On the other hand, he could amass facts in a fashion that compelled Oxley’s admiration. It was Oxley’s own long suit, though he had several other Aces and Kings in the hand that Fate had dealt out to him to play the game of life with.

Waldenstein was an oldish man—a good many years older than his cabin mates. Nevertheless, he limped slightly from a shortened thigh-bone which had come into contact with the fuse of an 18-pounder somewhere in 1917.

The Austrian was a professor, and his business was archæology of the most archaic. He took no great interest in such modern matters as Rome or Greece, or even the day or two older civilisations of Assyria or Egypt. The recent excavations in India aroused his interest somewhat more—they added a few thousand years to history, but that, according to Waldenstein’s mind, was merely like arguing as to whether it is five minutes to midday or five minutes two seconds to the same hour. The clock that he envisaged went back to the small hours, and the pictures that he was trying to construct in his methodical, German way were of civilisations of the dawn of time, and the matter that lay at his heart was as to whether he could prove by cold, hard facts that man had existed—man as we know him—in the inter-glacial periods. The ticks on the dial of that clock are by tens of thousands of years.

Before the war his name was beginning to be known all through Europe among such circles as are interested in this line of research. America knew him, too. He had a theory that what was wanted was more research in the East, and his great sorrow was that the war had put a stop to all chance of that. Now, however, it seemed that things were getting better; prejudice was fading away, and after infinite trouble, and thanks to the good offices of some British scientists, he had succeeded in getting permission to travel through India and carry out certain journeys in the Eastern Himalayas. For this he was really extremely grateful and humbly prepared to put up with distrust and dislike on the part of many folk he might meet in his wanderings, though they, as a matter of fact, had much less reason than he had to be bitter about the late war.

He was grateful, also, that he had been put into a cabin with Oxley—his remembrances of dealings with British officers were more pleasant than those of his meetings with many civilians. He expanded, therefore, from time to time and talked more and more as the voyage went on. His talk was worth listening to if one happened to be interested in his line of work.

“You go to High Asia, too—hein?” he said to Carruthers and Oxley one evening when the three were sitting out on deck, watching the lights of Aden fading astern. “It is good—there is much to find there—it is the nursery of life, of human life, which is so old, so old. So much work to be done that we may read the book of the past of which some little is written in the folk-lore, the legends, which every race has. Men talk as though they knew all, that the little piece they see is all there is, that they know everything. We become like senseless children because we have so many toys now, and all of them machinery—aeroplanes, wireless, newspapers, all so great, wonderful things. We are convinced that they are new, that never the world knew any such wonders, that long ago men had nothing but stones and sticks. And talking always as if it were all progress, as if man never retrograded. Yet all the while other men dig up older and older things, forgotten cities whose handiwork is as good as that of to-day. And never they think of other powers that men might have had and lost again. No—anything new must be modern—the result of man’s great advance these last few years. They don’t understand that a century is less than a hair on the yard measure of time. Just because we have begun to know something about electricity. And what is electricity? Just life—just that—as Bose showed us with the flowers—how they live—how they die. And so wireless and television and all such things are but life again—nothing new—life so old. Only men have found a new way to make it work with copper and brass and wire made in so big machines, and so they think no one before could make it work—because they have never found any big machines in the old cities where they dig. Never they think that cleverer men might have used those powers without all the new, clumsy machines.”

“And what do you think, Professor?” asked Carruthers.

“Me? I think they are all wrong. I do not think we discover; I think we begin to find again—that is all. Slowly we find again that which was lost, or destroyed like the library of Alexandria. Man gets so far—a little way—and then he thinks he knows so much. And then come the Barbarians with fire and sword, and away it all goes, and he begins again and forgets that he knew anything ever. And still he comes, the Barbarian, only now he will come for a time with new fire and new swords—cleverer machinery—until he makes such wreck that he has to go back to the old things again, like in Russia.

“Or sometimes it may not be the Barbarian—it may be disease or famine or natural cataclysm—but always comes something to push man back as though to make him start again—to keep him busy. It is like as if the Almighty did not want him to go too fast—wants to stop him, like a father would stop a child too forward—bring him back to simpler toys.

“Why did the Ice Ages come? I think—only no one listens to me yet; they will perhaps some day if I live long enough to show them what they call facts, nails that can be driven into their too thick heads—that man was before the Ice, that the Ice swept over him like the Barbarians and took everything he knew, brought him back to the beginnings once more, and made him humble again. And perhaps some day it will come again—it, or the Barbarian or the new germs—but I think perhaps the Ice. And then they will not talk any more of progress and of civilisation and of wars or of peace—they will huddle in holes and caves and go back slowly to the Stone Age, because the machines cannot be made any more, and they will forget they were ever anything different. Then, when some clever man makes an axe of metal instead of out of stone, they will clap their hands and say how clever he is, man, because he has found out something that no man ever found out before.

“And here and there one or two will have kept some little memories and tell old, old stories, and legends will grow up about the wonderful things the gods used to do—how they talked without being near, and how they flew into the sky like birds, and could see in the dark, and had wonderful weapons that killed far, far away. Man always talks of killing, for it means power to him, God-power. But, after a while, they will get much cleverer, so clever that they will laugh at the talk of these odd people who tell the stories and call them folk-lore and superstition, because such things could never have been possible. How could man kill farther than a spear or an arrow could reach? How could he fly without wings, like birds? And so they will go on, getting cleverer and cleverer until they get clever enough to start scientific societies and make theories to show that nobody ever knew anything before, and then, perhaps, find out the use of steam again and clap still more loudly and give up all the superstitions and get quite civilised once more.”

The Professor stopped his oration for a minute to light the ragged butt of his Dutch cheroot. Then he continued again:

“Then they will take up archæology and, a hundred thousand years hence, some professor he will dig up a skull—yours or mine, or my cousin’s, who was killed by a shell splinter. And they will prove from that, that the man was one of the first who had learnt to walk upright, and although he was still very near to the animals and could not talk properly, yet he could make very rough stone weapons. They will point to the hole in the skull made by the shell splinter and draw pictures of the stone axe that made it. They will call him the ‘Dawn Man’ and draw pictures of him and his wife, who lived in holes in the ground and ate raw meat, because they know nothing about crops or fields.”

Carruthers sat looking at the tall, spare figure in the rather ill-fitting, loose clothes and the unkempt beard with the gaunt face of a seer who sat in the deck-chair next to him, gazing out over the darkening sea. A lonely man, he thought, a seeker of visions on a lonely road; and perhaps following mere marsh-lights that had no substance. Oxley would think that, of course, only he would not put it into those words; his phrasing would be terser and less grammatical. All the same, John encouraged the Austrian to talk like this. He could be good enough at getting people to talk—half his success in the Intelligence Service had been due to that. He could, moreover, act, if necessary, and make people think that he really believed what they were saying—a gift entirely denied to Tom.

“You think, then, that human life is much older than we imagine?” put in Oxley. “But what reasons are there for your theory?”

“Only calculations on an unreliable time-piece,” said Waldenstein. “It is a clock we want, and no clock have we. We make a clock of the earth—of the strata of the rocks, only we are not sure—we say that that is older than this and this came before that, but when we have to put it into years and centuries we are lost and uncertain. One man talks of ten thousand years, another man of five million, and they both talk of the same time, and the one who talks loudest, the papers, they print all he says, and the people who read say that it must be the truth because it is in the papers. I make my calculations, and they do not agree with any of the others, but I do not make so much noise that the papers they print me. But I think I am right, and if I am right, then man, he was here with and before the Ice, and he was the same man as we are now. Therefore, he must have known very much, for he had had a long time, such a long time, to learn. Then, why did he forget it all, unless it was that life became for him so difficult to live that he had no time to think or learn at all? Only the old memories remained a little—what we call folk-lore—the old stories—the fairy-tales—some little of the past that he had kept.

“Sometimes I think that he did not forget—not all of him—that some of him kept the old knowledge, only it was hidden, and it will come out again some day. Perhaps it is hidden in the great hills or in the old countries like China—perhaps a few still know it. But that is not the professor who speaks; it is the dreamer. Once Germany and Austria had many dreamers, only materialism stopped them dreaming.”

The Professor stopped a minute and sighed because materialism had done worse things than stop dreamers dreaming.

“And when I think that, then I think sometimes that it is not all the Almighty who does things. I become a child and think of devils who would use knowledge to blind man whom they hate and wish ill to, and that perhaps sometimes wise men have hidden knowledge lest it should be used for bad purpose. If the papers heard me say that, they would print it in fat, black letters and talk about democracy. As though all men were fit for the same things! Does one give to the child the tools one gives to the grown man? If one did, the children would soon have no fingers left. And yet that is democracy, put shortly. And democracy is not new, as the talkers would make us think. It is old—so old. But it is an old toy pulled out of the rubbish-heap of the nursery, and so the children shout and call it new, and the wise men have to be quiet because the children make so much noise.”

The Professor rose to his feet and looked at his rather turnip-shaped watch.

“It is time we changed for dinner,” said he, “and it is my turn to go first to-night.”

He walked forward to the companion-way, punctiliously moving aside to allow a couple of laughing, chattering girls to pass, and they looked at him rather superciliously as they did so. Waldenstein was scrupulously polite in his foreign way, excessively so sometimes. Then he went down to the stuffy cabin to put on the rather old-fashioned and ill-cut dinner-jacket which British convention demanded that he should don to eat his somewhat sparing evening meal.

Oxley and Carruthers looked after him in silence as he went.

“Rather a quaint type to find on a post-war P. and O.,” remarked Oxley when the Professor had disappeared. “A mixture of Germany and Austria at their best, I think—polite, what you people call a sahib, amazingly erudite and yet modest beyond the average of his type. And talks like something that’s outside of time altogether. He’d probably be perfectly at home if he walked into a pyramid and found a living Pharaoh—one would hear them swopping notes without any restraint. He’d probably feel in more congenial company than he does here.”

“Except that he’d certainly rub Pharaoh up the wrong way by telling him that he was ultra-modern and lacked a proper sense of proportion of time,” said Carruthers. “But he’s interesting and makes you think a bit. I wonder what he meant about knowledge having been hidden and that it might be found in the high hills or in the old countries?”

“Probably been reading theosophic books, like you have. I’ve met lots of that type from time to time, but they’re generally women. They’re all imbued with the same idea, that knowledge must be old and must be hidden and mixed up with something exotic, such as your lamas and skushoks. Personally I think most of it is twaddle and generally goes with an inability to understand facts. But there, Waldenstein is an exception, and that intrigues me about him.”

Oxley relapsed into silence again. The voyage had done him good out of all proportion to the short period of time he had been on board; he was beginning to sleep regularly without any drug assistance, and his head no longer ached from concentrated thought.

Carruthers pulled out a packet of letters from his pocket, received that morning at Aden, where they had arrived from India the previous Wednesday, selected one, and began re-reading it, a letter from a friend of his, Bob Sanderson, dealing mostly with arrangements for their trip which Sanderson was making for him.

One paragraph in particular attracted Carruthers’ attention, a paragraph that sent his thoughts back several years, and which referred to one of the links in what Oxley would persist in calling his Irish chain—“a lot of holes tied together with invisible links.”

“I spent Christmas at Delhi with Ross, who seems just the same as ever—he’s got a job at the Secretariat, but I think he hankers after a district once more. We talked a lot about the old days and the police officer’s life in a district—rather to Mrs. Ross’s annoyance. I think she’s trying to wean him from such things. She loves Delhi and Simla, and has frankly no interest in wild and woolly life. I fancy it is that that made Ross take the job—he felt he owed her something for the plucky way she’d played up when he had a district. Bashehr, of course, cropped up and the old bungalow. Ross still says he’s sure there was something there that night, although he saw nothing, and of course I certainly didn’t, and still am perfectly convinced that you dreamt it all.”

Carruthers put down the letter and leant back in his chair, thinking of the past—of a year before the war, when he was stationed in Northern India and, with Sanderson, had gone for a two months’ shoot into Spiti via Bashehr, and on the way had run into Ross, then a comparatively junior member of the Indian Police.

The three of them had spent a memorable night in a disused and tumble-down bungalow, which they had been glad to reach because there was heavy rain—aftermath of the monsoon—and everything was soaking wet and cold.

Carruthers could see it all again so clearly. The big room with the crude fireplace, in which sizzled a fire of wet pine-wood, giving more smoke than flame—three men round a rickety old table with a couple of broken chairs—the third man, himself, sitting on a soaked mule-trunk, over which he had spread his mackintosh—the aluminium plates and cups pushed back on the table. A couple of hurricane lanterns gave just enough light to make the shadows darker and threw up the dinginess of the colour-washed mud walls of a sickly green hue, from which, here and there, the plaster had peeled off in patches. On the walls an old picture or two hung crookedly, and the ghosts of some old, faded curtains flapped in the wet wind that beat against the shattered panes of the windows. The servants were putting out the beds, and Carruthers remembered how, whenever they went out of the lamp-lit room, they never went alone, but always in pairs.

The bungalow, of course, was reputed to be haunted; nothing extraordinary in that, because the Indian is superstitious to a degree, and every old bungalow in India is automatically supposed to be haunted. But of this one the men were really afraid, and only the presence of Ross and his couple of policemen had forced the unwilling coolies to bring up the luggage in the dark. They were now huddled together round a fire in one of the outbuildings whose roof was, for the main part, holes—but that was, to their minds, preferable, despite the pouring rain, to spending the hours of darkness in the rather less leaky shelter of the house itself.

“What’s the story?” Carruthers had asked, and Ross admitted that he didn’t really know himself, but that the police naik, who was a local man, could probably enlighten them on it. They had sent for him—a tall, well-built Punjabi Mussulman—and he had given them the story as he knew it, obviously torn between the veneer of civilisation gained by contact with sahibs who say that ghosts are not and the racial fear of the supernatural inherent in his composition.

“It was a long time ago, sahib, quite thirty years ago, that part of it, though there was more before when Finlison Sahib came here first after the great trouble.”

“He means the Mutiny,” Ross had explained. “Old Finlayson lost his wife at Cawnpur, and it rather turned his head, so he chucked his job and tried to start a plantation out here. I’ve heard that part of the story before. He found the plantation didn’t pay, and joined trading to it as well, in which he was helped by his son, Hugh. The latter made several journeys up towards Central Asia for trading purposes, but didn’t do very well out of it. The old man died somewhere in the seventies, and, a good deal later, the son came back with a lady, presumably his wife. She never appeared in civilisation, but she was supposed to be a native of some part he’d been to—either a Turki or a Thibetan damsel. At least, that was the story. I came across scrappy notes of it in some old records of my office. Then both of them died, and there was a baby too. Anyway, about a week after that the policeman happened round here and saw the three of them buried. There was a cholera epidemic on, and nobody worried very much. The place has been deserted ever since.”

He nodded to the naik, who continued:

“It was the year of the bad sickness, when thousands and thousands of people died. Finlison Sahib and the bibi were here, and they did not want to go away because the bibi was near her time and it was her first child. There was no one to help, but Finlison Sahib had got in a hill-woman to look after the bibi, one to whom the bibi had been kind when her baby was born. The night that the bibi’s hour came upon her the sahib was smitten with the sickness and died before he saw the child, and later the bearer died too, and the other servants ran away, all except the pahareen, who was a brave woman. And then, before dawn, when the child—a girl—was but a few hours old, the bibi died also.

“So the hill-woman put the baby in a small room with her own child, which was but a few weeks old, and set out to her village, about a koss away down the hill, to get her husband and his brother that they might bury the sahib and the bibi and the bearer. But when they got back, lo! her child was dead—bitten by a snake—and the other child was no longer there, and yet the doors of the bungalow had been locked so that no wild beast could have come there, and there were no men anywhere near.

“They feared exceedingly, therefore, and consulted what they should do, because they were afraid to go and say that the sahib’s baby had disappeared. And after a while they thought it best to bury the body of their own child, which was very fair, with the sahib and the bibi and say that they had buried it somewhere else. This they did, and then the brother went into the Commissioner Sahib and made report, but it was several days before he got there. Then came the Police Sahib, and, doubtless thinking that there might not be truth in the story, for in those days there were many bad men in these hills, he opened the grave just enough to see that it was indeed the sahib and the bibi and a baby, and that they had not been killed. Then he read out of a book over it, as is the sahibs’ custom—my father was with him—and had a mound made. Thereafter he went down to the village and such of the servants and coolies who had worked about the house as he could find he beat violently with his own hands, being a sahib of the old kind, because they had run away. Some also my father beat afterwards. But to the hill-woman the Commissioner Sahib gave reward and some land, but shortly afterwards her husband also died. Only when she was dying did she tell the story to my mother, whom she knew, and, since it was an old story, my father said nothing about it to anyone. Doubtless the woman had not locked the door properly, and the child had been carried off by a panther, of whom there are many here. No men could have come there, nor would they have taken away a baby a few hours old and stolen nothing else.”

“The graves are outside in the garden,” put in Ross. “Later on they had a stone put up—the Commissioner did that—you’ll see it to-morrow. Naturally, after all that the local people swear it’s haunted.”

“No one will come here now, especially at night,” continued the naik, “because there are terrible ghosts. As the sahibs know, many of our people fear greatly the ghost of a woman dying in childbed—she who walks with her feet turned backwards. And they say also that the sahib comes here seeking the lost child, and that if any see him they die, for he is very angry because the servants ran away when he was dead and left the bibi alone except for the hill-woman. They have not even stolen much from the house, and yet there were many badmashes in these parts who would steal whatever they could.”

Carruthers could recall the incidents as clearly as if they had been yesterday—the Punjabi’s talk as he told the story, Ross’s interjected explanations—his and Sanderson’s bearers listening in the background with something not unlike fear on their usually stolid faces. Remembered, too, the steady drip-drip of rain on the roof and the patter against the windows, and the sudden gusts of wind that flapped the faded curtains. It had been eerie enough that evening to satisfy any lovers of ghost-stories.

And then they had gone to bed; all three in the same room, with the excuse that it was the least leaky one in the house. Sanderson’s exploration of one or two of the others had possibly been rather perfunctory, and, anyway, they certainly did smell damp and vault-like.

In spite of ghost-stories, they slept, all three of them. But somewhere in the small hours Carruthers woke—or so it seemed to him—and got up and went into the next room. He didn’t know why he had done this, and he remembered that he took no light, which was most unwise, because there are always snakes in old houses of that sort. But in the big bedroom next door no lamp was necessary, for there was a lighted lamp on the table, on which was a cloth and jugs and some cups and saucers and a plate or two. And on the bed was a woman, and somehow he knew she was dead. There was light showing through a room beyond, in which also was a bed, on which lay a bearded man, and he, too, seemed to be dead. From a door on the right came the thin wail of a child, and Carruthers, going over to it, looked within and saw upon a heap of blankets, wrapped in a strange assortment of clothes, the wizened face of a new-born baby. Near it lay another, slightly older, baby of darker hue, and that was undoubtedly dead.

He turned back for a minute irresolutely, but it never seemed to him that he dreamed. Then he became aware that he was no longer alone: from the farther room, clinging feebly to the door-jamb, and then to chair and sofa, foot by foot, sweat streaming from his forehead above the sunken, hollow eyes, came the gaunt, bearded figure of a man struggling to make his slow way to the bed where the woman lay—a man who strove to speak, but from whose pale, twisted lips came no sounds. Carruthers seemed unable to speak or act, and it appeared to him that the man did not see him as, painfully and slowly, he made his way to the bed and collapsed. It was as if Carruthers were bound hand and foot and gagged. Presently the man raised himself tremblingly, pulled himself up to the bed, and tried to feel the woman’s bosom, as one would do who sought to see if life was still fluttering there. Then he looked wildly round the room, as though in search of something else, tried to call again, then swayed back to the floor in agony. A minute later his face calmed—calmed in a most wonderful way—calmed as though he understood that his doubts and fears were childish—calmed and grew contented; and then Carruthers understood that this was really death. But still he stood there, unable to move, for what seemed hour after hour. Again he became aware of footsteps, soft, muffled footsteps, and the sound of doors opening, and the lamp fluttered as a gust of air beat into the room and two men entered—a gaunt old man and a younger man of Mongol aspect, wearing a hill-man’s duffle. The old man was clad in a heavy, wadded coat of rather Chinese cut, and on his head was a close-fitting riding-cap of fur. He looked around the room and then at the woman on the bed, and his look was one of great tenderness and compassion. The younger man stood there impassive, as though awaiting some orders.

Then again came the wail of the child in the little dressing-room, and with a surprisingly swift step the old man passed so close to Carruthers that the latter could have touched him, and yet the old man seemed not to see him. He was back in an instant, bearing in his arms the child, and there was a fierce joy in his face as he looked down at it, standing by the side of the dead mother, scanning first her face and then the features of the child.

At last he laid the child upon the sofa and spoke to the younger man in some strange tongue, and the two of them took up the body of the bearded man and carried it over to the next room, where Carruthers could see them straightening it out on the bed.

The old man came back and bent over the dead woman, smoothing her rich, dark hair. And presently he loosed something about her neck—a row of small stones, it seemed to be, bearing a quaintly shaped gold ornament—one that was to become strangely familiar to Carruthers in the after-years—and, taking it, bound it round the baby’s neck. Then he gathered up some clothing and a cloak that hung upon the wall, wrapped the baby in the cloak and, with one last, long look at the dead woman, went out of the room. Carruthers heard a few low words in the strange tongue; then came the sound of receding footsteps, the cautious closing of doors, and silence. And suddenly blackness descended upon him, and the next thing that he remembered was being back in his own bed again, feeling chilled and cold, with the first light of dawn stealing in through the ragged curtains.

He sat up in bed, looked round him, and saw that the others were fast asleep, got out of bed slowly, and then realised that the safety-pin with which he had fastened his pyjama-jacket the night before was missing—his servant was careless in the matter of buttons. He looked for it in the bed and couldn’t find it—pulled on the great-coat that served as dressing-gown and extra blanket, and deliberately and quietly walked across the room to the door at the far end, which was shut, as it had been all the evening before.

His movement aroused Ross, who asked him what he was doing, and Carruthers explained just a little.

“You look as if you’d been seeing ghosts,” said Ross, a matter-of-fact Scotsman. “Ghost-stories at night, mixed with tinned sausages, are bad for you. Go back to bed.”

“I’m going to look,” said Carruthers doggedly. “I’ve never been into that room, but, unless they’ve taken away the furniture, I’ll tell you exactly what it’s like.”

He did so in detail, and Ross marvelled at the way the man could remember a dream.

“All right—I’m coming, too. I’ll bet you a bottle of whisky that you’re wrong in every point,” said he, as he opened the door which was stiff and needed considerable force.

Somebody had evidently moved the furniture, and some of it was missing, but such as there was, the old-fashioned bed, the long chair to which the bearded man had clung as he came in, the now moth-eaten sofa at the far side, were just exactly what Tom had described and Ross havered.

“Maybe it’s second sight,” he said; “I’ve heard of things like that. But you dreamed it, man, all the same; you never opened that door without waking me and Sanderson, too, if he’s anywhere near as light a sleeper as I am.”

Carruthers stood looking round the room, and then moved over to the corner where, just as he had seen it during the night, a door stood half-open giving on to a small dressing-room. Almost he had expected to see the heap of blankets in the corner and hear the child’s wail. But there was nothing there now, and the only thing on the table was a broken saucer of old willow-pattern, which Carruthers remembered had been the pattern on the other crockery he had seen and subsequently described to Ross. Then, suddenly, he caught the faint gleam of metal on the floor as the first rays of the sun—the weather had cleared during the night—shot in at the broken window. He had stooped down to pick up a small, shining object, and Ross had asked him what it was.

“Only the pin I lost last night,” Carruthers had replied, in a matter-of-fact voice. “It was fastening my pyjama-coat when I went to bed and I couldn’t find it this morning.”

“Honest?” said Ross, struggling still between incredulity and the conviction born of Carruthers’ description of the room which, as Ross knew, none of the three of them had entered the night before.

“Honest,” Carruthers had replied, as the two of them returned to where Sanderson was making loud noises to attract the servants with the morning tea.

Carruthers sat there on the steamer’s deck, in the growing darkness, recalling all that, until at last Oxley roused him out of his thoughts by reminding him that there were only five minutes left before dinner, and they had better hurry down to change, and thus brought Tom back to the present as he folded up Sanderson’s letter and put it back into his pocket.

But, while he was dressing, he recalled the scene once more, and his thoughts concentrated again on the shape of the ornament attached to the string of stones which the queer old man had bound about the baby’s neck.

It was possibly that incident which, somehow or other, turned the conversation to the path of ghosts and the occult generally a couple of nights later, and Waldenstein had launched out on a theory which might or might not have satisfactorily accounted for some of the apparently inexplicable experiences which two other men—acquaintances of Carruthers—had retailed in the smoking-room.

“The photographic plate,” said Waldenstein. You make an exposure and then the picture is there on the plate. But until you have made development with chemicals you see nothing. It is what you call latent. Perhaps, also, everything is like that and takes in pictures and hides them until something—it may be some certain light, it may be some other factor we know not, perhaps some particular power of some particular individual—calls out the picture again.

“We all live by electricity—perhaps, also, we are transmitters of waves like those of wireless, and so can make pictures on things without knowing it. And if that were so, then such powers would be at their highest at moments of strain, times such as death or great peril. That would explain very much of the ghost-stories, of the deathbed appearances, and things like that. It would explain why most ghost-stories deal with murders or death in some unusual way. Perhaps, also, some of us are receivers and are able to pick up such transmitted pictures, like the wireless does. Why not? Only people are so stupid and superstitious, and they talk of ghosts in such silly fashion that the other half of the world laughs at them, just because neither half knows how to think properly and to reason. It may be so—it may be so. Perhaps it is something remaining of the lost power of the lost ages before the Ice came when people did not require wireless to communicate over space.”

And then the Professor slid out of the conversation—slid back a few hundred thousand or a few million years into some speculation about the inter-glacial periods, the book on which and on man’s life therein was, he hoped firmly, to be the monumental work of his studious life.