Chapter 16

But Christina was seized with an idea. She woke David in the night and spoke to him tensely.

"David," she cried, gripping him by the arm. "David! We cannot live for ever. Do you hear me? Look, David, look hard! Look where you looked before. Can you see nothing for me--for us, David?"

He was sitting up, and the spell of her inspiration claimed him. He opened his eyes wide and searched the barren darkness for a sign. He groped with his mind, tore at the bonds of the present.

"Do you see nothing?" whispered Christina. "Oh, David, there must be something. Look--look hard!"

For the space of a hundred seconds they huddled on the bed, David fumbling with the keys of destiny, Christina waiting, breathless.

"Lie down," said David at last. "You are going to die, little cousin. It is all well." His voice was the calmest in the world. "And you!" cried Christina; "David, and you?"

"I see nothing," he said.

"Poor David!" murmured his wife, clinging to him. "But I am sure all will yet be well, David. Have no fear, my husband."

She murmured on in the dark, with his arm about her, and promised him death, entreated him to believe with her, and coaxed him with the bait of the grave. They were bride and groom again, they two, and slept at last in one another's arms.

In the morning all was well with Christina, and she bustled about as of old. David was still, and hoped ever, with a tired content in what should happen, a languor that forbade him from railing on fate. Together they prepared matters as for a journey.

"If the black trousers come frayed again," said Christina, "try to remember that the scissors are better than a knife. And the seeds are all in the box under our bed."

"In the box under our bed," repeated David carefully. "Yes, under the bed. I will remember."

"And this, David," holding up piles of white linen, "this is for me. You will not forget?"

"For you?" he queried, not understanding.

"Yes," she answered softly. "I will be buried in this."

He started, but recovered himself with a quivering lip.

"Of course," he answered. "I will see to it. I must be very old, Christina."

She came over and kissed him on the forehead.

In the middle of the afternoon she went to bed, and he came in and sat beside her. She held his hand, and smiled at him.

"Are you dying now?" he asked at length.

"Yes," she said. "What shall I tell Frikkie and the kleintje from you?"

"Tell them nothing," he said, after a pause. "It cannot be that I shall be apart from you all long. No; I am very sure of that."

She pressed his hand, and soon afterwards felt some pain. It was little, and she made no outcry. Her death was calm and not strongly distressing, and the next day David put her into the ground where her sons lay.

But, as I have made clear, he did not die till long afterwards, when he had sold his farm and come to live in the little white house in the dorp, where colors jostled each other in the garden, and fascinated children watched him go in and come out. I think the story explains that perpetual search of which his vacant eyes gave news, and the joyous alacrity of his last home-coming, and the perfect technique of his death. It all points to the conclusion, that however brave the figures, however aspiring their capers, they but respond to strings which are pulled and loosened elsewhere.

XII

THE HIDDEN WAY

A veil 'twixt us and Thee, dread Lord, A veil 'twixt us and Thee! Lest we should hear too clear, too clear, And unto madness see.

Carrick crossed the fields in time to see, from the low bank above the churchyard, the children coming forth from Sunday school in the church, blinking contentedly at the late summer sunlight and all the familiar world from which, for two hours, they had been exiles. A little behind them came Mr. Newman, carrying his sober hat in his hand, and the curate.

"Hi!" called Carrick, and they turned toward him as he came down the bank, with his sly spaniel shambling at his heels.

The curate looked with disfavor at Carrick's worn tweed clothes and his general week-day effect. "I think," he said primly, "I'll be getting along."

"I should," said Carrick shortly, turning his back on him. "I want to speak to you, Newman."

"Then we will walk together," agreed Mr. Newman. "Good-bye till this evening," he called after the departing curate.

It was an afternoon of June, languid and fragrant; the declining sun was in their faces as they went in company under the high arches of the elms, in a queer contrast of costume and personality. Carrick, the man of science, the adventurer in the bypaths of knowledge, affronted the Sabbath in the clothes which gave offence to the curate. He was a thin, impatient man, standing on the brink of middle age, with the hard, intent face of one accustomed to verify the evidence of his own senses. A habit he had of doing his thinking in the open air had left him tanned and limber; he walked easily, with the light foot of an athlete, while Mr. Newman, decorous in the black clothes which are the uniform of the regular churchgoer, trod deliberately at his side and mopped his brow with a handkerchief.

"It was very warm in the church this afternoon," explained Mr. Newman mildly. "Very warm."

He was an older man than Carrick, and altogether a riper and most complacent figure. He had a large and benevolent face, which would have been common-place but for a touch of steadfastness and serenity which dignified it, and an occasional vivacity of the kindly eyes. One perceived in him a man who had come smoothly through life, secure in plain faiths and clear hopes, unafraid of destiny. Something reverend in his general effect accentuated his difference from his companion.

"Ventilation," Carrick was saying. "On an afternoon like this you might as well shut those children up in a family vault. Twenty of them, all breathing carbonic acid gas, besides yourself--and that ass!"

"You mean the curate?" inquired Mr. Newman. "Really, he isn't an ass. He didn't like your clothes--that was all."

"What's the matter with 'em?" demanded Carrick, inspecting his shabby sleeve. "You don't want me to dress up like--like you, do you?"

"My dear fellow!" Mr. Newman smiled protestingly, lifting a suave hand. "I don't care how you dress. I don't want you to 'make broad your phylacteries,' you know."

Carrick snorted, and they walked in silence through the little village that lay below the church.

The matter they had in common, which bridged their diversity and made it possible for them to be, after their fashion, friends, was their interest in the subject which Carrick had made his own--experimental psychology. Like all successful business men, Mr. Newman had an unschooled aptitude for the science, and had practised it with profit on his competitors and employees before he knew a word of its technology. In Carrick's bare and lamp-lit study they had joined forces to bewilder and undermine the intelligence of the sly spaniel, and there had been sessions of hypnotism, with Mr. Newman rigid in trances, while Carrick groped, as it were, among the springs of his mind. The pair of them had incurred the indignation of European authorities, writing in obscure and costly little journals whose names the general public never heard. The bond of martyrdom-- martyrdom in print--united them.

"By the way," suggested Mr. Newman, when the village was behind them and they were walking between high hedgerows flamboyant with summer growth. "By the way, wasn't there something you wanted to speak to me about?"

"Eh? Oh yes," replied Carrick. "Bother! I want you to come to my place to-night to try something--something new, a big thing."

"To-night?" said Mr. Newman. "No, not to-night, Carrick."

"Why not?" demanded Carrick. "I tell you, it's a big thing. I've had an idea of it for some time; those clairvoyant tests put me on to it; but I've only just got it clear. It's big."

Mr. Newman shook his head. "Not to-night," he said. "You're a queer fellow, Carrick; you never can remember what day of the week it is for more than five minutes at a time."

"Oh!" Carrick scowled. "You mean it's Sunday. But this--I tell you, this isn't just an ordinary thing, Newman. I'll explain--it's new and it's big!"

"No," said Newman. "Not to-night, Carrick, please!"

"Hang it!" said Carrick. He would have spoken more liberally, but the choice was between restraint in language and the loss of Mr. Newman as an acquaintance. That had been made clear soon after their first meeting.

Mr. Newman smiled, and rested a large hand on Carrick's arm.

"We go by different roads to our goal, Carrick," he said, "but it is the same goal. We serve the same Master, under different names and in different ways. You call Him Science and I call Him Christ--the same Master, though; and my services take me to church to-night. But to- morrow, if you like, I will come over to your place."

"Get back," said Carrick violently to the dog. "To heel, you beast!"

The fork of the road was in front of them; they paused at the division of the way.

"Will that suit you?" inquired Mr. Newman. "I can come round after dinner."

Carrick gave him a look in which contempt, fury, and a certainly involuntary liking were strangely at war.

"Of all the sanctimonious asses," he said, and broke off. "Good- night!" he concluded abruptly.

"I'll come, then," said Mr. Newman, smiling. "Good-night, my dear fellow."

He went off at his deliberate gait, humming to himself the tune of the last hymn which the children had sung at the Sunday school. Evening was settling about him on the trees and fields; after the still heat of the sun, it was like an amen to the day, a vast low note of organ music. There was a pond gleaming among the trees.

"He leadeth me beside the still waters," he said aloud to himself, and then Carrick's footsteps were audible behind him. He turned. Carrick came up swiftly.

"Don't eat much dinner to-morrow night," he said, with immense seriousness.

"It's more hypnotism, then?" inquired Mr. Newman.

Carrick nodded. "Yes," he said. "But--it's a big thing, all the same."

He clicked to his dog and went off abruptly, passing with long, jerky strides into the enveloping stillness of the evening, and Mr. Newman resumed his homeward walk, taking up his mood of reflective quiet at the point where Carrick had broken in upon it. He was a man made for the Sabbath; he breathed its atmosphere of a day consecrated to observances with a pleasure that was almost sensuous. For him, piety was that manner of life which gave the quality of Sunday to each other of the seven days of the week, softening them and rendering them august with the sense of a great adorable Presence presiding over their hours.

The curate who disliked Carrick occupied the pulpit that evening; he preached from half a text, after the manner of curates. "For they shall see God"--he repeated it in a poignant undertone--he, tall and young and priestly in his vestments, seen against the dim glory of a stained window--and Mr. Newman, attentive in his pew, leaned forward suddenly to hear, like a man touched by excitement.

Carrick's study was one of a pair of rooms he had added to the farmhouse which he inhabited, a long apartment of many windows, designed for spaciousness, and possessing no other good quality. No fire could warm more than an end of it, and his lamp, wherever it was placed, was but a heart of light in a body of shadow. He had furnished it with the things he required; a desk was here, a table there, bookcases were along the walls, a variety of chairs stood where he happened to push them. It had the air of a waiting-room or a mortuary.

Carrick was at his desk when Mr. Newman, on the Monday evening, was shown in to him by the ironclad widow who kept house for him. He looked up with impatience as his guest entered.

"Oh, it's you?" was his greeting.

"Good evening," said Mr. Newman cheerfully. "You'd forgotten to expect me, I suppose. But I'm here, all the same."

"All right," said Carrick. "Sit down somewhere, will you?"

He rose and shoved a chair forward with his foot for Mr. Newman's accommodation, and began to walk slowly to and fro with his hands in his pockets.

"Well," said Newman; "and what's this miracle we're to work?"

"I'll show you," said Carrick, still walking. He stopped and turned toward his guest. "Newman," he said, "where do you reckon you were a hundred years ago?"

Mr. Newman laughed, crossing his legs as he sat.

"I'm not as old as that," he replied. "Whatever place you're thinking of, I wasn't there."

Carrick was frowning thoughtfully. "I'm not thinking of places," he said. "You--you exist; the matter that composes you is indestructible; the--the essential you, the thing in that matter that makes it mean something, the soul, if you like--that's indestructible, too. Everything's indestructible. A hundred years hence, you'll be somewhere; but where were you--you, that is--a hundred years ago?"

He pointed the "you" with a jabbing forefinger as he spoke it, standing in front of Mr. Newman in the lamplight and talking down to him.

"Oh!" said Mr. Newman, "I see--yes! A hundred years, ago I was part of my Maker's unfinished plan of to-day."

"Were you?" said Carrick, snapping at him. "You were, eh? Part of-- we'll see! Come over to the big chair and undo your collar."

Mr. Newman rose; the big arm-chair was his place when Carrick hypnotised him, and the loosening of his collar was part of the ritual.

"What is the idea?" he asked, fumbling at his stud.

"Tell you afterwards," said Carrick. "If I told you now, you'd not get it out of your mind. Can't you get that collar off, man?"

"It was stiff," apologised Mr. Newman, arranging himself in the large chair. "How are you going to do it?"

Carrick's hot hand pressed his head back on the cushions.

"Shut up," he was told. "Let yourself go, now; just let yourself go."

The chair faced the blank, bare wall of the room; there was nothing in front of Mr. Newman for his eyes to rest on and take hold of. Carrick's hands no longer touched his head; he was alone in his chair, in a posture of ease, with the gear of his mind slacked off, his consciousness unmoored to drift with what-ever current should flow about it. He knew, without noting it, that something like a fog was creeping up about him; the pale wall became a bank of mist, stirring slowly; his pulse was a rhythm that lulled him faintly. He-- the aggregate of powers, capacities habits that made the sum of him-- was adrift, flowing like a vapor that leaks into the air and thins abroad. A coolness was on his forehead as of a little breeze.

Carrick, behind the chair, saw that his head drooped, and came round to look at him. He seemed to slumber with his eyes half open, and his plump hands, white and luxurious, were clasped in his lap. Carrick considered him and then crossed to his desk to get his pipe. He expected to have to wait for some time.

But it was less than five minutes before Mr. Newman stirred like a man who moves in his-sleep and emitted a long gusty sigh. His hands unclasped; he drove up to consciousness like a diver who shoots up through strangling fathoms of water to the generous air above. Life was compelling him; through the confusion of his senses he felt Carrick's hand on his shoulder and heard him speaking.

"Feeling quite all right--what? Here, drink some of this. It's only water. A drop more? Right!"

Mr. Newman pushed the glass away and sat upright, staring wide-eyed into the curious face of Carrick, who bent over him, tumbler in hand.

"All right?" asked Carrick again.

"Yes--now," replied Mr. Newman slowly. "But--what did you do to me, Carrick?"

Carrick gave a relieved snort and set the tumbler down on the mantelshelf.

"What did I do?" he repeated. "Opened a door for you--that's all. What did you find the other side?"

Mr. Newman passed an uncertain hand across his eyes. The feeling with which he had returned to consciousness, that liberties had been taken with him, was leaving him as the familiar ugly room grew about him again.

"It was queer," he said doubtfully, and Carrick bent his head in eagerness to listen.

"You've been hypnotised before, often enough. What was queer?"

"Hypnotism is unconsciousness, so far as I'm concerned," said Mr. Newman. "But this--wasn't! Not dreams, either; the thing was so absolutely real."

"Go on," said Carrick, as he paused to ponder.

"I felt myself going off, you know, just as usual--the mistiness, the reposefulness, the last moment when one would rebel if one could--but one can't; that was all ordinary. And then came the blank, that second of utter emptiness, as though one were alone in the wilderness of outer space, and light were not yet created. As a rule, that ends it; one's asleep then. But this time I wasn't. It seemed--it sort of dawned toward me----" Mr. Newman groped for a word which eluded him, with a face that brooded heavily.

"What did?" demanded Carrick.

"It was a lightness, first of all, a thinning of the dark, that grew and broadened till it was like a thing coming at me--like something thrown at me. And suddenly it was all about me, and I was in it, and it was daylight--just ordinary daylight, you know. There was a white, flat road, with a hedge on one side and a low leaning fence on the other, and over the fence there were fields; and I was walking along by the roadside, with the thick powdery dust kicking up from under my feet as I went."

He paused. "Yes?" cried Carrick. "Yes? Yes?"

"I don't remember what I was thinking," said Mr. Newman. "Perhaps I wasn't thinking. I saw a signpost farther along the road with something like a long bundle--it was rather like a limp bolster, I fancy--hanging from it. I was staring toward it, when there came a noise behind me, like a trumpet being blown, and I turned to see a coach with four horses come tearing along toward me, with a red- coated man at the back, blowing a horn. The roof of it was crowded with people curiously dressed; they all looked down on me as they came abreast, and their faces had a sort of strange roughness. I saw them as clearly as all that--a coarseness, it was--a kind of cruel stupidity. Several of them seemed to be pock-marked, too. It struck me; I wondered how a coach-load of such people had been gathered together; and I might have wondered longer; but one of them laughed, a great neighing guffaw of a laugh, as the coachman swung his whip."

Mr. Newman paused, and his hand floated to his face again.

"It cut me across here," he said thoughtfully. "It--it hurt. Awfully!"

Carrick nodded.

"And that was all," Mr. Newman went on. "At the sting of the lash, as though some one had turned a switch, the daylight went out--to the sound of that gross animal laugh. There was again the frozen dark, the solitude--the chill--and I heard you saying, as from another planet, across great gulfs of space: 'Drink some of this!' Only--"

"Yes?"

"It's like a memory of something that actually took place. I ought to have a weal just below my eyes where the whip took me-it wasn't five minutes ago. I remember the dusty smell of that white road-and how the thing that hung on the signpost was-some-how-ugly and nasty. It's awfully queer, Carrick."

"Yes!" Carrick sank his hands in his pockets and walked away to the shadowy far end of the room. Mr. Newman sat in thought, flavoring the vivid quality of his vision, with his underlip caught up between his teeth. The great room was silent for a space of minutes.

"I say!" Carrick spoke from the other end of it.

"What?"

"That signpost you saw-it wasn't a signpost, you know."

"What was it, then?"

"It was a gallows," said Carrick, "with a man hanging on it."

There was a pause. "Eh?" said Mr. Newman, and rose from his chair. "Carrick, what exactly did you do to me?"

"I sent you back a hundred years," Carrick answered, in a measured voice. His excitement got the better of his restraint and his voice cracked. "Part of the-what was it you said you were, Newman?" he cried, on a note of shrillness. "I tell you, man, you've proved a hundred things you never dreamed of-theories of mine. You've proved them, I tell you. I've dipped you back into the past as I dip my hands into water. What you saw was what happened; it was you-you, man, a hundred years ago. Oh, why did I stop at a hundred? A thousand, a dozen thousand years would have been as easy."

He came down the long room almost at a run.

"Newman," he said, taking the elder man by the arm with a swift, feverish hand; "we've got 'em, all those old diploma-screened fools that call us quacks-Zinzau, Berlier, von Rascowicz, Scott-Evans-we've got 'em. We'll make 'em squeal. Before I've done with you, we'll see what the earth was like when it was in the pot, being cooked. You shall be a batwinged lizard again, and a cave-dweller, and a flint man. We'll turn you loose through history-our special correspondent at the siege of Troy-what?"

He broke into high, uncontrollable laughter.

"The Wandering Jew," he babbled. "We'll show him!"

Mr. Newman heard him with growing wonder, but now he shook his arm loose.

"Get yourself a drink," he said. "You're raving. I want to talk to you."

The word was enough; Carrick stopped laughing, and walked away toward his desk. Mr. Newman, standing by the big arm-chair from which he had just risen, looked after him with a sudden liveliness growing in his face. The experience through which he had just come, abiding with him as so secure a memory, precluded the doubts he might otherwise have felt; Carrick's words and his excitement, so unusual in him, and the clear, unquestionable sense of recollection with which he summoned again to his mind the white dusty road, the swaying body of the hanged man, the drum of the hoofs of the coach-horses-these stormed his reason and forced conviction on him.

"The siege of Troy, you said?" he asked, with a nervous titter. The thing was gripping him.

Carrick had seated himself at his desk, as though to steady himself by the sight of its prosaic litter. He looked up now, his face composed and usual in the light of the reading lamp.

"Or anywhere," he said shortly. He nodded two or three times impressively; he was master of himself again. "It's true, Newman; I can do it; I've opened the door. We must have a few more tests and verify the method by trying it on another subject. Then we'll go to war with the professors."

"Ye-es," agreed Mr. Newman absently. "Anywhere, you said? You can open my eyes at any period in time? You can do that, Carrick?"

"Well," began Carrick, and paused. "Why?" he demanded. "What have you got in your mind?"

Mr. Newman came slowly down toward him till he leaned across the top of the desk facing the younger man. He was smiling still, but a fire had lit in his eyes, something adventurous and strong looked out through them. The elderly stout man was braced and exalted like a martyr going to the stake.

"Can you?" he repeated. "Can you, Carrick? Say--can you do that?"

"Unless----" hesitated the other, staring at him. "But--you must have been somewhere, at any time. Yes, I can do it."

Mr. Newman's eyes looked over his head and beyond him.

"Then," he said, and a deep note reverberated in his even voice-- "then show me the day on which Christ died!"

He continued to look past Carrick at the shadowy end of the room, still smiling his strange and uplifted smile.

Carrick moved in his chair, with a half-gesture as of irritation.

"Look here," he said. "Pull yourself together, Newman. There are limits, you know, after all."

Two days elapsed before the evening on which the attempt was to be made; Carrick, alleging difficulties and dangers with long scientific names, had refused to try it earlier. He had been unwilling to try it at all.