The Country of the Blind and other Selected Stories Page 36

  ‘And she had been shot through the heart.’

  He stopped and stared at me. I felt all that foolish incapacity an Englishman feels on such occasions. I met his eyes for a moment, and then stared out of the window. For a long space we kept silence. When at last I looked at him he was sitting back in his corner, his arms folded, and his teeth gnawing at his knuckles.

  He bit his nail suddenly, and stared at it.

  ‘I carried her,’ he said, ‘towards the temples, in my arms – as though it mattered. I don’t know why. They seemed a sort of sanctuary, you know; they had lasted so long, I suppose.

  ‘She must have died almost instantly. Only – I talked to her – all the way.’

  Silence again.

  ‘I have seen those temples,’ I said abruptly, and indeed he had brought those still, sunlit arcades of worn sandstone very vividly before me.

  ‘It was the brown one, the big brown one. I sat down on a fallen pillar and held her in my arms.… Silent after the first babble was over. And after a little while the lizards came out and ran about again, as though nothing unusual was going on, as though nothing had changed.… It was tremendously still there, the sun high and the shadows still; even the shadows of the weeds upon the entablature were still – in spite of the thudding and banging that went all about the sky.

  ‘I seem to remember that the aeroplanes came up out of the south, and that the battle went away to the west. One aeroplane was struck, and overset and fell. I remember that – though it didn’t interest me in the least. It didn’t seem to signify. It was like a wounded gull, you know – flapping for a time in the water. I could see it down the aisle of the temple – a black thing in the bright blue water.

  ‘Three or four times shells burst about the beach, and then that ceased. Each time that happened all the lizards scuttled in and hid for a space. That was all the mischief done, except that once a stray bullet gashed the stone hard by – made just a fresh bright surface.

  ‘As the shadows grew longer, the stillness seemed greater.

  ‘The curious thing,’ he remarked, with the manner of a man who makes a trivial conversation, ‘is that I didn’t think – I didn’t think at all. I sat with her in my arms amidst the stones – in a sort of lethargy – stagnant.

  ‘And I don’t remember waking up. I don’t remember dressing that day. I know I found myself in my office, with my letters all slit open in front of me, and how I was struck by the absurdity of being there, seeing that in reality I was sitting, stunned, in that Paestum Temple with a dead woman in my arms. I read my letters like a machine. I have forgotten what they were about.’

  He stopped, and there was a long silence.

  Suddenly I perceived that we were running down the incline from Chalk Farm to Euston. I started at this passing of time. I turned on him with a brutal question, in the tone of ‘Now or never.’

  ‘And did you dream again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He seemed to force himself to finish. His voice was very low.

  ‘Once more, and as it were only for a few instants. I seemed to have suddenly awakened out of a great apathy, to have risen into a sitting position, and the body lay there on the stones beside me. A gaunt body. Not her, you know. So soon – it was not her.…

  ‘I may have heard voices. I do not know. Only I knew clearly that men were coming into the solitude and that that was a last outrage.

  ‘I stood up and walked through the temple, and then there came into sight – first one man with a yellow face, dressed in a uniform of dirty white, trimmed with blue, and then several, climbing to the crest of the old wall of the vanished city, and crouching there. They were little bright figures in the sunlight, and there they hung, weapon in hand, peering cautiously before them.

  ‘And further away I saw others and then more at another point in the wall. It was a long lax line of men in open order.

  ‘Presently the man I had first seen stood up and shouted a command, and his men came tumbling down the wall and into the high weeds towards the temple. He scrambled down with them and led them. He came facing towards me, and when he saw me he stopped.

  ‘At first I had watched these men with a mere curiosity, but when I had seen they meant to come to the temple I was moved to forbid them. I shouted to the officer.

  ‘ “You must not come here,” I cried, “I am here. I am here with my dead.”

  ‘He stared, and then shouted a question back to me in some unknown tongue.

  ‘I repeated what I had said.

  ‘He shouted again, and I folded my arms and stood still. Presently he spoke to his men and came forward. He carried a drawn sword.

  ‘I signed to him to keep away, but he continued to advance. I told him again very patiently and clearly: “You must not come here. These are old temples and I am here with my dead.”

  ‘Presently he was so close I could see his face clearly. It was a narrow face, with dull grey eyes, and a black moustache. He had a scar on his upper lip, and he was dirty and unshaven. He kept shouting unintelligible things, questions, perhaps, at me.

  ‘I know now that he was afraid of me, but at the time that did not occur to me. As I tried to explain to him, he interrupted me in imperious tones, bidding me, I suppose, stand aside.

  ‘He made to go past me, and I caught hold of him.

  ‘I saw his face change at my grip.

  ‘ “You fool,” I cried. “Don’t you know? She is dead!”

  ‘He started back. He looked at me with cruel eyes. I saw a sort of exultant resolve leap into them – delight. Then, suddenly, with a scowl, he swept his sword back – so – and thrust.’

  He stopped abruptly.

  I became aware of a change in the rhythm of the train. The brakes lifted their voices and the carriage jarred and jerked. This present world insisted upon itself, became clamorous. I saw through the steamy window huge electric lights glaring down from tall masts upon a fog, saw rows of stationary empty carriages passing by; and then a signal-box, hoisting its constellation of green and red into the murky London twilight, marched after them. I looked again at his drawn features.

  ‘He ran me through the heart. It was with a sort of astonishment – no fear, no pain – but just amazement, that I felt it pierce me, felt the sword drive home into my body. It didn’t hurt, you know. It didn’t hurt at all.’

  The yellow platform lights came into the field of view, passing first rapidly, then slowly, and at last stopping with a jerk. Dim shapes of men passed to and fro without.

  ‘Euston!’ cried a voice.

  ‘Do you mean—?’

  ‘There was no pain, no sting or smart. Amazement and then darkness sweeping over everything. The hot, brutal face before me, the face of the man who had killed me, seemed to recede. It swept out of existence—’

  ‘Euston!’ clamoured the voices outside; ‘Euston!’

  The carriage door opened admitting a flood of sound, and a porter stood regarding us. The sounds of doors slamming, and the hoof-clatter of cab-horses, and behind these things the featureless remote roar of the London cobble-stones, came to my ears. A truckload of lighted lamps blazed along the platform.

  ‘A darkness, a flood of darkness that opened and spread and blotted out all things.’

  ‘Any luggage, sir?’ said the porter.

  ‘And that was the end?’ I asked.

  He seemed to hesitate. Then, almost inaudibly, he answered, ‘No.

  ‘You mean?’

  ‘I couldn’t get to her. She was there on the other side of the temple— And then—’

  ‘Yes,’ I insisted. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Nightmares,’ he cried; ‘nightmares indeed! My God! Great birds that fought and tore.’

  THE NEW ACCELERATOR

  Certainly, if ever a man found a guinea1 when he was looking for a pin it is my good friend Professor Gibberne. I have heard before of investigators overshooting the mark, but never quite to the extent that he has done. He has really, this time at any rate, wi
thout any touch of exaggeration in the phrase, found something to revolutionize human life. And that when he was simply seeking an all-round nervous stimulant to bring languid people up to the stresses of these pushful days. I have tasted the stuff now several times, and I cannot do better than describe the effect the thing had on me. That there are astonishing experiences in store for all in search of new sensations will become apparent enough.

  Professor Gibberne, as many people know, is my neighbour in Folkestone. Unless my memory plays me a trick, his portrait at various ages has already appeared in The Strand Magazine2 – I think late in 1899; but I am unable to look it up because I have lent that volume to someone who has never sent it back. The reader may, perhaps, recall the high forehead and the singularly long black eyebrows that give such a Mephistophelian3 touch to his face. He occupies one of those pleasant detached houses in the mixed style that make the western end of the Upper Sandgate Road4 so interesting. His is the one with the Flemish gables and the Moorish portico, and it is in the room with the mullioned bay window that he works when he is down here, and in which of an evening we have so often smoked and talked together. He is a mighty jester, but, besides, he likes to talk to me about his work; he is one of those men who find a help and stimulus in talking, and so I have been able to follow the conception of the New Accelerator right up from a very early stage. Of course, the greater portion of his experimental work is not done in Folkestone, but in Gower Street, in the fine new laboratory next to the hospital that he has been the first to use.

  As everyone knows, or at least as all intelligent people know, the special department in which Gibberne has gained so great and deserved a reputation among physiologists is the action of drugs upon the nervous system. Upon soporifics, sedatives, and anaesthetics he is, I am told, unequalled. He is also a chemist of considerable eminence, and I suppose in the subtle and complex jungle of riddles that centres about the ganglion cell and the axis fibre there are little cleared places of his making, glades of illumination, that, until he sees fit to publish his results, are inaccessible to every other living man. And in the last few years he has been particularly assiduous upon this question of nervous stimulants, and already, before the discovery of the New Accelerator, very successful with them. Medical science has to thank him for at least three distinct and absolutely safe invigorators of unrivalled value to practising men. In cases of exhaustion the preparation known as Gibberne’s B Syrup5 has, I suppose, saved more lives already than any lifeboat round the coast.

  ‘But none of these things begin to satisfy me yet,’ he told me nearly a year ago. ‘Either they increase the central energy without affecting the nerves or they simply increase the available energy by lowering the nervous conductivity; and all of them are unequal and local in their operation. One wakes up the heart and viscera and leaves the brain stupefied, one gets at the brain champagne fashion and does nothing good for the solar plexus, and what I want – and what, if it’s an earthly possibility, I mean to have – is a stimulant that stimulates all round, that wakes you up for a time from the crown of your head to the tip of your great toe, and makes you go two – or even three to everybody else’s one. Eh? That’s the thing I’m after.’

  ‘It would tire a man,’ I said.

  ‘Not a doubt of it. And you’d eat double or treble – and all that. But just think what the thing would mean. Imagine yourself with a little phial like this’ – he held up a bottle of green glass and marked his points with it – ‘and in this precious phial is the power to think twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice as much work in a given time as you could otherwise do.’

  ‘But is such a thing possible?’

  ‘I believe so. If it isn’t, I’ve wasted my time for a year. These various preparations of the hypophosphites, for example, seem to show that something of the sort.… Even if it was only one and a half times as fast it would do.’

  ‘It would do,’ I said.

  ‘If you were a statesman in a corner, for example, time rushing up against you, something urgent to be done, eh?’

  ‘He could dose his private secretary,’ I said.

  ‘And gain – double time. And think if you, for example, wanted to finish a book.’

  ‘Usually,’ I said, ‘I wish I’d never begun ’em.’

  ‘Or a doctor, driven to death, wants to sit down and think out a case. Or a barrister – or a man cramming for an examination.’

  ‘Worth a guinea a drop,’ said I, ‘and more – to men like that.’

  ‘And in a duel again,’ said Gibberne, ‘where it all depends oh your quickness in pulling the trigger.’

  ‘Or in fencing,’ I echoed.

  ‘You see,’ said Gibberne, ‘if I get it as an all-round thing it will really do you no harm at all – except perhaps to an infinitesimal degree it brings you nearer old age. You will just have lived twice to other people’s once—’

  ‘I suppose,’ I meditated, ‘in a duel – it would be fair?’

  ‘That’s a question for the seconds,’ said Gibberne.

  I harked back further. ‘And you really think such a thing is possible?’ I said.

  ‘As possible,’ said Gibberne, and glanced at something that went throbbing by the window, ‘as a motor-bus. As a matter of fact—’

  He paused and smiled at me deeply, and tapped slowly on the edge of his desk with the green phial. ‘I think I know the stuff.… Already I’ve got something coming.’ The nervous smile upon his face betrayed the gravity of his revelation. He rarely talked of his actual experimental work unless things were very near the end. ‘And it may be, it may be – I shouldn’t be surprised – it may even do the thing at a greater rate than twice.’

  ‘It will be rather a big thing,’ I hazarded.

  ‘It will be, I think, rather a big thing.’

  But I don’t think he quite knew what a big thing it was to be, for all that.

  I remember we had several subsequent talks about the stuff. ‘The New Accelerator’ he called it, and his tone about it grew more confident on each occasion. Sometimes he talked nervously of unexpected physiological results its use might have, and then he would get a bit unhappy; at others he was frankly mercenary, and we debated long and anxiously how the preparation might be turned to commercial account. ‘It’s a good thing,’ said Gibberne, ‘a tremendous thing. I know I’m giving the world something, and I think it only reasonable we should expect the world to pay. The dignity of science is all very well, but I think somehow I must have the monopoly of the stuff for, say, ten years. I don’t see why all the fun in life should go to the dealers in ham.’

  My own interest in the coming drug certainly did not wane in the time. I have always had a queer twist towards metaphysics in my mind. I have always been given to paradoxes about space and time, and it seemed to me that Gibberne was really preparing no less than the absolute acceleration of life. Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such a preparation: he would live an active and record life indeed, but he would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at twenty-five, and by thirty well on the road to senile decay. It seemed to me that so far Gibberne was only going to do for anyone who took his drug exactly what Nature has done for the Jews and Orientals,6 who are men in their teens and aged by fifty, and quicker in thought and act than we are all the time. The marvel of drugs has always been great to my mind; you can madden a man, calm a man, make him incredibly strong and alert or a helpless log, quicken this passion and allay that, all by means of drugs, and here was a new miracle to be added to this strange armoury of phials the doctors use! But Gibberne was far too eager upon his technical points to enter very keenly into my aspect of the question.

  It was the 7th or 8th of August when he told me the distillation that would decide his failure or success for a time was going forward as we talked, and it was on the 10th that he told me the thing was done and the New Accelerator a tangible reality in the world. I met him as I was going up the Sandgate Hill towards Folkestone – I think I was going to get m
y hair cut; and he came hurrying down to meet me – I suppose he was coming to my house to tell me at once of his success. I remember that his eyes were unusually bright and his face flushed, and I noted even then the swift alacrity of his step.

  ‘It’s done,’ he cried, and gripped my hand, speaking very fast; ‘it’s more than done. Come up to my house and see.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really!’ he shouted. ‘Incredibly! Come up and see.’

  ‘And it does – twice?’

  ‘It does more, much more. It scares me. Come up and see the stuff. Taste it! Try it! It’s the most amazing stuff on earth. He gripped my arm and, walking at such a pace that he forced me into a trot, went shouting with me up the hill. A whole charabancful of people turned and stared at us in unison after the manner of people in charabancs. It was one of those hot, clear days that Folkestone sees so much of, every colour incredibly bright and every outline hard. There was a breeze, of course, but not so much breeze as sufficed under these conditions to keep me cool and dry. I panted for mercy.

  ‘I’m not walking fast, am I?’ cried Gibberne, and slackened his pace to a quick march.

  ‘You’ve been taking some of this stuff,’ I puffed.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘At the utmost a drop of water that stood in a beaker from which I had washed out the last traces of the stuff. I took some last night, you know. But that is ancient history, now.’

  ‘And it goes twice?’ I said, nearing his doorway in a grateful perspiration.

  ‘It goes a thousand times, many thousand times!’ cried Gibberne, with a dramatic gesture, flinging open his Early English carved oak gate.

  ‘Phew!’ said I, and followed him to the door.

  ‘I don’t know how many times it goes,’ he said, with his latch-key in his hand.

  ‘And you—’

  ‘It throws all sorts of light on nervous physiology, it kicks the theory of vision into a perfectly new shape!… Heaven knows how many thousand times. We’ll try all that after— The thing is to try the stuff now.’

  ‘Try the stuff?’ I said, as we went along the passage.