Part 19

“Pembroke,” I said, “I’m outdone with confinement on this island of yours. I’m irritated past endurance. If you don’t promptly speed me on my way elsewhere the tension inside me is going to get too much for me. Something inside me is going to snap and I’ll do something desperate, something you’ll regret.”

He looked me straight in the eyes, handsome in his fantastic toggery; calm and cool, to all appearance.

“Are you, by any chance,” he drawled, “threatening to shoot me?”

“I haven’t made any threats,” I retorted, hotly, “and I have no intentions of shooting you or anybody. I realize that this island of yours is part of the British Empire and that in no part of it are homicides or murderous assaults condoned or left unpunished. But, since you use the word ‘threat,’ I am ready to make a threat. If you don’t soon set me free of my present captivity, if you don’t soon put me in the way of getting home, I’ll not shoot you or any human being, but I will shoot that devilish gander; and, I promise you, if I shoot at him I’ll hit him and if I hit him I’ll kill him. I fancy those are plain words and I conjecture that you understand me fully, with all the implications of what I say.”

Pembroke’s expression of face appeared to me to indicate not only amazement and surprise, but the emotions of a man at a loss and momentarily helpless in the face of wholly unexpected circumstances.

“You come with me!” he snapped.

I followed him along the beach to the village, and, as we went, wondered to see him apparently comfortable in his tight-fitting suit and bare headed beneath the fierce radiance of the merciless sun rays, while I rejoiced in my flimsy garments and at being sheltered under the very adequate Panama I had chosen from the headgear Fong had offered me.

We passed the end of the steel picket fence, the two beach guards saluting Pembroke, and, I thought, suppressing a tendency to grin at me. Just around the point was a wide aviation field with a long row of hangars opposite the beach. I marveled, for I had caught no glimpse of any avion in the air over or about the island.

A half dozen Asiatics, apparently Annamites, rose as we approached and stood respectfully, eyes on Pembroke. He uttered some sort of order in a tongue unknown to me and two of them set wide open the doors of one of the hangars. In it, to my amazement, I saw a Visconti biplane, one of the fastest and most powerful single-seaters ever built.

“What do you think of that?” Pembroke queried.

“I am astonished,” I answered. “I was certain that no specimen of this type of machine had ever been on this side of the Atlantic.”

“This is the first and only Visconti to be set up on this side of the ocean,” he replied. “The point is; could you fly it?”

“I think I could,” I said, “and I am sure I could try.”

“Try then,” Pembroke snapped. “I make you a present of it. The sooner you’re off and away the better I’ll be pleased.”

He spoke at some length, apparently in the same unknown tongue, and strode off towards his palace.

I spent that day and most of the next going over that Visconti biplane, with the deft, quick assistance of the docile Annamites. If there was anything about it defective, untrustworthy or out of order I could not find it. On the third morning (I had dined at Radnor’s both evenings), equipped admirably by Fong, who instantly provided me with whatever I asked for, I rose in that Visconti biplane, and, contrary to my fears, reached Miami in safety. But I was so overstrained by anxiety that it required six weeks in a sanitarium to make me myself again. During those, apparently, endless hours in the air I had been expecting every moment that something cunningly arranged beforehand and undiscoverable to my scrutiny in my inspections and reinspections, was going to go wrong with my conveyance and instantaneously annihilate me. The strain all but finished me. However, all’s well that ends well.

1922

AFTERWORD

AFTERWORD

EIGHT of the stories in this book I did not compose. I dreamed them, and in each the dream or nightmare needed little or no modification to make a story of it.

The one exception is Floki’s Blade, which is based on an alleged nightmare narrated to me by an acquaintance, who, when I said that I should like to make a story of it, declared that he made me a present of the ideas in the dream. From what he told me I have taken the conception of the magic sword, conferring on its wielder superhuman strength and also potent to discern foe from friend; likewise the locality of the tale; all the rest is mine.

The latter part of Alfandega 49A I dreamed, as now written, after I heard of the manner of the death of my acquaintance whom I have renamed Pake.

Lukundoo was written after my nightmare without any manipulation of mine, just as I dreamed it. But I should never have dreamed it had I not previously read H. G. Wells’ very much better story, “Pollock and the Porroh Man.” Anyone interested in dreams might relish comparing the two tales. They have resemblant features, but are very unlike, and the differences are such as no waking intellect would invent, but such as come into a human mind only in a nightmare dream.

The others are paragon nightmares.

The House of the Nightmare is written just as I dreamed it, word for word, since I had the concurrent sensations of reading the tale in print and of it all happening to me in the archaic times when all motor-cars were right-hand-drive and with gear-shift-levers outside the tonneau. The dream had the unusual peculiarity that I woke after the second nightmare, so shaken that my wife had to quiet and soothe me as if I had been a scared child; and then I went to sleep again and _finished the dream_! Its denouement came as a complete surprise to me, as much of a shock as the climax of The Snout or of Amina.

It will be easy to realize that anyone dreaming such narratives as The Picture Puzzle, The Message on the Slate and The Pig-skin Belt just had to write them into stories to get them out of his system.

EDWARD LUCAS WHITE.

=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=

Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Inconsistent hyphens left as printed.