Читать книгу Storytelling. The adventure of the creeping man and other stories - Сборник - Страница 6

Dion Fortune

One of Taverner’s cases will always stand out in my mind – the case of Black, the airman. The ordinary doctor would have bromided Black into an asylum, but Taverner staked the sanity of two people upon a theory, and saved them both.

Early in May I was sitting with him in his Harley Street consulting-room, taking down case notes while he examined his patients. We had dispatched various hysterics and neurotics to other specialists for treatment, when a man of an entirely different type was ushered in by the butler. He looked absolutely healthy, his face was tanned with the open air and had no sign of nervous tension; but when I met his eyes I noticed something unusual about them. The expression was peculiar.

They did not hold the haunting fear one so often sees in the eyes of the mentally sick; he reminded me of nothing in the world but a running hound that has sighted its prey.

“I think I am going off my head,” announced our visitor. “What form does your trouble take?” inquired Taverner. “Can’t do my work. Can’t sit still. Can’t do a thing except tear all over the country in my car as hard as ever I can lick. Look at my endorsements.” He held out a driving license filled with writing. “Next time they’ll quod me, and that will finish me off altogether. If they shut me up inside four walls I’ll buzz around like a cockchafer in a bottle till I knock myself to pieces. I’d go clean mad if I couldn’t move about. The only relief I get is speed, to feel that I am going somewhere. I drive and drive and drive till I’m clean tuckered out, and then I roll into the nearest wayside pub and sleep; but it doesn’t do me any good, because I only dream, and that seems to make things more real, and I wake up madder than ever and go on driving again.”

“What is your work?” said Taverner.

“Motor-racing and flying.”

“Are you Arnold Black, by any chance?” asked Taverner.

“That’s me,” said our patient. “Praise the Lord I haven’t lost my nerve yet.”

“You had a crash a little while ago, did you not?” inquired my colleague.

“That was what started the trouble,” said Black. “I was all right till then.

Banged my head, I suppose. I was unconscious three days, and when I came round I was seedy, and have been so ever since.”

I thought Taverner would refuse the case, for an ordinary head injury could have little interest for him, but instead he asked: “What made you come to me?”

“I was on my beam ends,” said Black. “I’d been to two or three old ducks, but could get no sense out of them; in fact I’ve just come on from the blankest geyser of the lot.” He named a name of eminence. “Told me to stop in bed a month and feed up. I wandered down the road and liked the look of your brass plate, so I came in. Why? Aren’t I in your line?

What do you go in for? Babies or senile decay?”

“If a chance like that brought you to me, you probably are in my line,” said Taverner. “Now tell me the physical side of your case. What do you feel like in yourself?”

Our patient wriggled uneasily in his chair.

“I dunno,” he said. “I feel more of a fool than anything else.”

“That,” said Taverner, “is often the beginning of wisdom.”

Black half turned away from us. His painfully assumed jauntiness fell from him. There was a long pause, and then he blurted out:

“I feel as if I were in love.”

“And you’ve been hard hit?” suggested Taverner.

“No, I’ve not,” said the patient. “I’m not in love, I only feel as if I were.

There isn’t a girl in the case – not that I know of, anyway and yet I’m in love – horribly in love – with a woman who doesn’t exist. And it’s not the tomcat side of me, but the biggest and best that there is in me. If I can’t get someone to love me back in the same way that I am loving, then I’ll go off my head. All the time I feel that there must be someone somewhere, and that she’ll suddenly turn up. She must turn up.” His jaw set in a savage line. “That’s why I drive so much, because I feel that round the next bend I’ll find her.”

The man’s face was quivering, and I saw that his hands were wet with sweat.

“Have you any mental picture of the woman you are seeking?” asked Taverner.

“Nothing definite,” said Black. “I only get the feel of her. But I shall know her when I see her; I am certain of that. Do you think such a woman exists? Do you think it is possible I shall ever meet her?” He appealed to us with a child’s pathetic eagerness.

“Whether she is in the flesh or not I cannot say at the present moment,” said Taverner, “but of her existence I have no doubt. Now tell me, when did you first notice this sensation?”

“The very first twinge I had of it,” explained Black, “was we got into the nose dive that put me to bed. We went down, down, down, faster and faster, and just as we were going to crash I felt something. I can’t say I saw anything, but I got the feel of a pair of eyes. Can you realize what I mean? And when I came round from my three days’ down-and-out I was in love.”

“What do you dream about?” asked Taverner.

“All sorts of things; nothing especially nightmary.”

“Do you notice any kind of family likeness in your dreams?”

“Now you come to mention it, I do. They all take place in brilliant sunshine. They aren’t exactly Oriental, but that way inclined.”

Taverner laid before him a book of Egyptian travel illustrated in watercolours.

“Anything like that?” he inquired.

“My hat!” exclaimed the man. “That’s the very thing.” He gazed eagerly at the pictures, and then suddenly thrust the book away from him. “I can’t look at them,” he said; “It makes me feel – ” he laid his hand on his solar plexus, hunting for a simile – “as if my tummy had dropped out.”

Taverner asked our patient a few more questions, and then dismissed him with instructions to report himself if any further developments took place, saying that it was impossible to treat his trouble in its present phase. From my knowledge of Taverner’s ways I knew that this meant that he required time to carry out a psychic examination of the case, which was his peculiar art, for he used his trained intuition to explore the minds of his patients as another man might use a microscope to examine the tissues of their bodies.

As it was a Friday afternoon, and Black was our last patient, I found myself free after his departure, and was walking down Harley Street wondering how I should dispose of my weekend, for an invitation I had counted upon had unexpectedly failed me. As I took a short cut through a mews lying behind the house I saw Black manoeuvring a car out of a garage. He saw me, too, and hailed me as a friend.

“You wouldn’t care for a joy ride, I suppose? I am off on the trail again.

Like to join me in running down the fair unknown?”

He spoke lightly, but I had had a glimpse of his soul, and knew what lay beneath. I accepted his offer, to his evident pleasure; he filled the gap left by the defection of my friends, and, moreover, I should learn more by accompanying him on one of his journeys than a dozen consulting-room examinations would tell me.

Never shall I forget that drive. He behaved normally till we got clear of the outlying suburbs, and then as dusk began to fall a change came over the man. At a secluded spot in the road he halted the car and stopped the engine. In the perfect stillness of that spring evening we listened to the silence. Then Black rose up in the driving-seat and uttered a peculiar cry; it was upon three minor notes, like a birdcall.

“What did you do that for?” I asked him.

“I dunno,” he said; “it might attract her attention. You never know. It’s not worth missing a chance, anyway.”

He restarted the car, and I realized that the quest had begun in good earnest. I watched the needle of the speedometer creeping round the dial as we hurtled into the gathering dusk.

The hedges fell away on either side of us in a grey blur. Towns and villages passed us with a roar, their inhabitants luckily keeping out of our path. Gradients we took in our stride, and dropped into valleys like a stone from a sling. Presently from the top of a crest, we felt the Channel wind in our faces. Black hurled the car down a hill like the side of a house and pulled up dead, the bonnet nosing against promenade railings.

Ahead lay the sea. Nothing else, I am convinced, could have stopped our career. Black stared at the surf for a few moments; then he shook his head.

“I have missed her again,” he said, and backed the car off the pavement.

“I got nearer to her tonight than I have ever done, though.”

We put up for the night at an hotel, and next day Black drove me back again. I stipulated that we should get in before dusk. I had no wish to accompany him in pursuit of his dream again.

On my return I reported my experience to Taverner.

“It is an interesting case,” he said, “and I think it will furnish a remarkably good instance of my reincarnation theory.”

I knew Taverner’s belief that the soul has lived many lives before the present one, and that the experiences of those lives go to make up the character of today. When confronted by a mental state for which he could find no adequate cause in the present, it was his custom to investigate the past, getting the record of the previous lives of his patient by those secret means of which he was master. During the early days of my association with Taverner I considered these records imaginary, but when I saw how Taverner, working upon this idea, was able to foretell not only what a person would do, but in what circumstances he would find himself, I began to see that in this curious old theory of the East we might find the key to much of the baffling mystery of human life.