Perceval Gibbon - The Second Class Passenger

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The last question struck her sharply, and she glanced about. Little
Paul was sitting on a stone, plaguing the water-tortoise with a
stick, and speaking to himself and it. The sight reassured her, and
she viewed the rider again with equanimity. But now she was able to
place him: it was David, and the horse was his big roan. The pace at
which he rode was winding up the distance, and the hoofs no longer
tap-tapped, but rang insistently. There was war, then; it could be
nothing else. Her category of calamities was brief, and war and the
death of her dear ones nearly exhausted it.

David galloped the last furlongs with a tightened rein, and froth
snowed from the bit. He pulled up in the yard and slipped from the
saddle. Christina saw again on his face the white stricken look and
the furrowed frown that had stared on Frikkie's death. David stood
with the bridle in his hand and the horse's muzzle against his arm
and looked around. He saw Christina coming toward him with quick
steps, and little Paul, abandoning the skellpot, running to greet
him. He staggered and drew his hand across his forehead.

Christina had trouble to make him speak. "A dream," he kept saying,
"an evil dream."

"A lying dream," suggested Christina anxiously.

"Yes," he hastened to add, "a lying dream."

"About--about little Paul?" was her timid question.

David was silent for a while, and then answered. "I saw him dead," he
replied, with a shudder. "God! I saw it as plain as I saw him a
moment ago in the kraal."

They heard the child's gleeful shout the same instant. "I've got you!
I've got you!" he cried from without.

"He has a water-tortoise," explained Christina with a smile. "Paul,"
she called aloud, "come indoors."

"Ja," shouted the child, and they heard him run up the steps of the
stoep.

"Look," he said, standing at the door, "I found this in the grass.
What sort is it, father?"

David saw something lithe and sinuous in the child's hands, and
stiffened in every limb. Paul had a skaapstikker in his grip, the
green-and-yellow death-snake that abounds in the veldt. Its head lay
on his arm, its pin-point eyes maliciously agleam, and the child
gripped it by the middle. Christina stood petrified, but the boy
laughed and dandled the reptile in glee.

"Be still, Paul," said David, in a voice that was new to him--"be
still; do not move."

The child looked up at him in astonishment. "Why?" he began.

"Be still," commanded David, and went over to him cautiously. The
serpent's evil head was raised as he approached, and it hissed at
him. Paul stood quite quiet, and David advanced his naked hand to his
certain death and the delivery of his child. The reptile poised, and
as David snatched at it, it struck--but on his sleeve. The next
instant was a delirious vision of writhing green and yellow; there
was a cry from Paul, and the snake was on the floor. David crushed it
furiously with his boot.

Christina snatched the child. "Did it bite you, Paul!" she screamed.
"Did it bite you?"

The boy shook his head, but David interposed with a voice of thunder.

"Of course it did!" he vociferated with blazing eyes; "what else did
my dream point to? But we'll fight with God yet. Bring me the child,
Christina."

On the plump forearm of Paul they found two minute punctures and two
tiny points of blood. David drew his knife, and the child shrieked
and struggled.

"Get a hot iron, Christina," cried David, and gripped Paul with his
knees.

In the morning the room was wild and grisly with blood and the smell
of burnt flesh, and David lay face downwards on the floor, writhing
as the echoes of Paul's shrieks tortured his ears. But in the next
room little Paul was still for ever, and all the ghostly labor was to
no purpose.

I suppose there is some provision in the make of humanity for
overflow grief, some limit impregnable to affliction; for when little
Paul was laid beside his brother, there were still David and
Christina to walk aimlessly in their empty world. Their scars were
deep, and they were crippled with woe, and it seemed to them they
lived as paralytics live, dead in all save in their susceptibility to
torture. Moreover, there was a barrier between them in David's
disastrous foreknowledge, for Christina could not throw off the
thought that it contained the causal elements which had robbed her of
her sons. Pain had fogged her; she could not probe the matter, and
sensations tyrannised over her mind. David, too, was bowed with a
sense of guilt that he could not rise to throw off. All motive was
buried in the kraal; and he and his wife sat apart and spent days and
nights without the traffic of speech.

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."

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