Perceval Gibbon - The Second Class Passenger

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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.

"I don't want to mix up a matter of clear science with your religious
emotions," he had declared. "And I've got a certain amount of
religion of my own, for that matter. I manage to believe in it
without corroboration; what's the matter with yours, that you can't
do the same?"

But it was not corroboration which Mr. Newman desired. He had not so
much argued as insisted; and it had been difficult to reason with his
manner of one buoyed up, exalted, inspired. He had had his way, on
the sole condition that he should wait two days--"and give sanity a
chance," Carrick had added.

But on the stroke of nine, on the appointed evening, he was standing
within the door of Carrick's study, his hat in his hand, a white silk
muffler about his neck, instead of a collar.

"I was very careful to eat very little at dinner," were his first
words.

Carrick, who had been looking forward to his arrival with nervous
dread, glanced up sharply with an affectation of annoyance at an
interruption.

"More fool you," he barked, in his harshest voice. Mr. Newman smiled,
and laid his hat down on the table and began to unwind his muffler.

Carrick frowned at him. "I'm rather busy to-night, Newman," he said.
That had no effect. He rose. "Besides, something has occurred to me,
and--it is not safe, you know."

Mr. Newman laid his muffler beside his hat; without it he had a
curiously incomplete and undressed appearance. He turned round.

"Oh yes, it is," he contradicted mildly. "As safe as it was on
Monday, at any rate!"

"Ah!" Carrick caught him up eagerly. "But that wasn't safe, either.
I hadn't thought of this then. You see, we don't understand yet how
the thing applies. What is it that becomes conscious in the period
you see? Is it you, in an earlier incarnation? If so, supposing I--I
let go of you at a time when you were dead! What happens then? Do I
get you back--or what?"

He tried to make the consideration graphic, driving it at Mr.
Newman's serenity with a knit brow and a moving forefinger.

Mr. Newman shook his head. "I don't know," he answered, unmoved by
Carrick's fervor. "I can't tell you that. But--you leave me where you
found me--in the hands of my God."

With the same quiet cheerfulness, he crossed to the big chair, turned
it to face the wall, and sat down in it. "I'm quite ready," he said.

Carrick was still standing by the table. He was frowning heavily; the
proceeding was utterly against his inclination. When Mr. Newman
spoke, he sighed windily, a sigh of resignation, of defeat.

"I warned you," he said, and wiped the palms of his hands on his
trousers for what he had to do.

A less honest man than Carrick, finding himself in the like
predicament, might plausibly have contrived a failure. Nothing easier
than to tell Mr. Newman that nerves, a mental burden, or what not,
stood in the way of the adventure. Mr. Carrick got to work forthwith.

Mr. Newman, supine in his chair, knew the preliminary stages of the
process well. They took longer than usual to-night; both of them were
unkeyed and had to compose themselves to the affair. But at last the
visible world, the wall before him, commenced to dislimn; it shifted;
it became mist, writhing and tinged with faint colors, that submerged
his will and his consciousness, till they sank, gathering impetus,
into a void below--the vacancy of the spirit that looses its hold on
the body and is rudderless. He knew the blackness which is death, the
momentary throe of entering it, the shock, the sense of chill, the
dumbness.

"Ah!" Carrick saw that his head fell, and ceased his labors. He
stood, gaunt and perplexed, contemplating the body from which he had
expelled the will, the life--the soul. It was a plump body, well
clad, well fed, a carcase that had absorbed much of its world. It
cost labor and the pains of innumerable toilers to clothe it, nourish
it, maintain it, guard, comfort, and embellish it. And an effort of
ten minutes was enough to drain it of all save the fleshly, the mere
bestial. The habit of his mind impelled him to sneer as he stood
above it, to moralise in the tune of cynicism. "Ecce homo!" were the
words he chanced upon; but the flavor of them troubled him when he
remembered the goal of the journey upon which that absent spirit had
departed.

"Oh, Lord!" said Carrick, in a kind of whispering panic.

He cast scared looks to and fro, as though he feared the great room
should contain a spy upon him. It was empty save for him and that
witless body. He put his hands together with the gesture of a child
and shut his eyes tight.

"Our Father," he began, "Which art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name!"

The place was as still as a church. He recited his prayer aloud, in a
quiet, careful voice that echoed faintly among the book-shelves.

He bad got as far as "Thine is the kingdom, the power"--no farther--
when Mr. Newman stirred, and he gabbled the words to an end hastily
before he opened his eyes. Mr. Newman came back to consciousness
with a rush; his body inflated with life, his still face woke, and
his vacant eyes, meeting Carrick's and recognising him, suddenly lit
with sense--and terror.

"I say!" exclaimed Carrick; "will you have some water?"

His hand groped for the glass on the mantelshelf, but he continued to
look at Mr. Newman, and presently he forgot the glass. Terror was the
word, the terror of a man who finds--unawaited, ambushed in his
being--depths and capacities unguessed and appalling. A blank,
horror-ridden face fronted his own, till Mr. Newman put his hands
before his face and shuddered. "What is it?" cried Carrick. "Old
chap, what's up?"

"My God!"

It was not an expletive, but a prayer, a supplication. Mr. Newman
dashed the hands from his face and sprang up. Carrick caught him by
the arm.

"I say," he cried. "It's rot. It's a fake--it must be! Whatever
happened--it's not a sure thing. Pull yourself together, Newman. I--I
may be wrong; perhaps it's all an induced--you know, an illusion. I
say, look here----"

"No!"

Gently, but with decision, Mr. Newman put his friendly hand away.
"It's not an illusion," he said.

He walked away. Carrick stood staring after him, a battlefield of
compunctions and a growing curiosity. Mr. Newman was wrestling with
his trouble in the shadows; minutes passed before he came again into
the lamplight. His face was blenched, but something like a stricken
purpose dwelt on it.

"I'll tell you," he said. Then, wildly, "Oh, man! why did you let me?
This trick of yours--it's the knowledge of good and evil; it's the
forbidden fruit. Why did you let me?"

Carrick stammered futilely; there was no answer possible to give.

"I am a Christian," went on Mr. Newman, as though he appealed for
justification. "By my lights I serve God. I try not to judge others.
I've not judged you, have I, Carrick? You--you don't go to church,
but I make a friend of you, don't I?"

"Yes," said Carrick.

"Then--why--" cried Mr. Newman--"why, of all people, should I--oh,
Carrick, I don't know how to tell you."

Let Carrick's answer be remembered when his epitaph is written.

"Then don't tell me," he said. "I don't want to hear."

Mr. Newman shook his head. He had come to a standstill at the side of
the big chair. He looked old and stricken and sad.

"Ah," he said. "But listen all the same."

He remained standing while he told his tale, with eyes that sought
Carrick's listening face and fell away again.

"It took you longer than it usually does," he said; "to send me on, I
mean. I expect I wasn't as good a subject as usual, too. I know I was
full of a sort of gladness and expectation, for I didn't doubt that
you could do it. I had a feeling that I was going to see--really to
see, with mortal eyes--Him, my Redeemer, the Son of God! I wasn't
afraid--only joyful with a great solemnity. I carried it with me,
that joy, into the fog and darkness; it was all that I knew when the
utter night surged up and gulfed me, and even life was forgotten. I
was to see Him, like the pure in heart who are to see God. I had had
that wonder in my mind since Sunday evening; the curate preached on
it--and I--I thought my heart was pure."

His fearful eyes fluttered to Carrick's face and sank.

"The light came as it came before," he went on, quickly and
miserably. "First a sense of something that was not mere darkness,
infinitely distant, but swooping down upon me at an unimaginable
speed, broadening more quickly than the sense could follow--and then
it was daylight all about me, and I was in the world, seeing,
hearing, and--yes, and speaking, speaking, Carrick. Oh, my God!"

He shivered and put a hand out to the arm of the big chair. Carrick
said nothing.

"It's so clear," said Mr. Newman. "If it weren't so clear, I might
persuade myself that it was an illusion, a vision--but it's not. It
happened. The first thing I know was that it was very hot. A sun
stood in the sky; its rays beat on me, and they were strong. I was in
a crowd of people, and they--we, that is--we all stood facing a
building, a white building with a great door. There were many of us;
I was thrust between two big hairy men, and there was a great noise.
Everybody was shouting. I was shouting too. I had both my arms raised
above my head, with my fists clenched--like that----"

Mr. Newman raised his shut hands as high as he could; his tragic face
compelled Carrick's eyes.

"But my arms were bare and very brown, I noticed. I was shouting
vehemently, frantically, in some strange tongue. It was a language I
do not know; but I knew what I was shouting, and I know still."

He stopped. Carrick waited.

"What was it?" he asked at last.

For answer Mr. Newman raised his arms again, the hands clenched, in a
sudden and savage gesture.

"I was shouting like this," he said, and raised a voice that Carrick
did not recognize. "Crucify Him! Crucify Him!"

He dropped his arms and stood staring at Carrick; then covered his
face with his hands.

Carrick stood aghast and shaken. At last he went to his friend and
took his arm.

XIII

THE STRANGE PATIENT

There were only two arrivals by the train from London when it stopped
at the little flower-banked station of Barthiam; and Mary, who was
waiting for it, had no difficulty in deciding which of them was
Professor Fish. That great man never failed to look the part. His
tall, lean figure, stooping at the shoulders, his big, smooth-shaven
face, mildly abstracted behind his glasses, but retaining always
something of a keen and formidable character, his soft hat and great
flapping ulster, made up a noticeable personality anywhere. He seemed
alone to crowd the little platform; the small man who accompanied him
was lost in his shadow.

"Professor Fish?" accosted Mary primly, at his elbow.

He turned upon her with a movement like a swoop.

"I am Mary Pond," she explained. "My father was called away to a
case, so he sent me to meet you and bring you up to the house. I have
a fly waiting."

"Ah!" The Professor nodded and was bland. "Very good of you to take
the trouble, Miss Pond. I am much obliged." He stepped aside to let
his companion be seen. "This," he explained, "is your--er--guest."

Mary put out her hand, but the little man, who had been standing
behind the Professor, made no motion to take it. He was staring at
the planks of the platform; he lifted his eyes for an instant to
glance at her, and dropped them again at once. Mary saw a listless,
empty face, pale eyes, and pale hair, a mere effect of vacuity and
weakness. The man drooped where he stood as though he were no more
than half alive; his clothes were grotesquely ill-fitting. A little
puzzled, she looked up to the Professor, and saw that he was watching
her.

"How do you do?" she asked gently of the little man.

The Professor answered for him. "He does very well, Miss Pond," he
said robustly. "Much better than he thinks. Between ourselves,"
dropping his voice and nodding at her with intention, "a most
remarkable case. Very remarkable indeed. And now, if I can find a
porter, we might as well be moving."

He seemed to hesitate for a moment before leaving them; then he set
off down the platform. He walked with long strides in great spasms of
energy, as he did everything. Mary turned from looking after him to
the little creature beside her with a sense of absurd contrast. As
she did so she saw that he too was looking after the Professor, and
his empty face had suddenly become intent; it was hardened and
vicious, with the parted lips and narrow eyes of hate. The man had
discovered some spring of life within his listless body. It lasted
only while one might draw a full breath; then he saw her scrutiny,
and sank again to his still dreariness. It was a startling thing to
see that flabby little insignificance strengthen to such a force of
feeling, and Mary was conscious of a sort of alarm. But before she
could frame a thing to say the Professor was back again, and the
atmosphere of his vigour had enveloped them.

Professor Fish sat next to her in the cab, and the new patient, who
was to be an inmate of her house for some time to come, leaned
against the cushions opposite, with eyes half closed and his coarse
hands folded in his lap. The Professor talked without ceasing, gazing
through the open window at the fat lands of Kent unfolded beside the
road and torpid under the July sun; but Mary found more of interest
in the still face before her, cryptic and mysterious in its utter
vacancy. So little it expressed besides weakness that Mary wondered
what illness could thus have cut the man off from the world. She was
used to the waste products of life; one "resident patient" succeeded
another at her father's house, and to each she was a deft nurse and a
supple companion. They had in common, she found, a certain
paltriness; most of them had been overtaxed by easy burdens; but this
man's aspect conveyed suggestions of a long struggle with a burden
beyond all strength. The meanness of him, all his appearance of
having begun in the gutter and failed there, touched her not at all;
Mary had had too much to do with human flesh in the raw to be greatly
concerned about such matters as that.

Dr. Pond was at home to meet them when the cab drew up at the door,
an elderly, good-natured man, white-haired and sprucely white-
bearded. He greeted Professor Fish with some deference, and helped
the new patient carefully forth from the cab. It was Mary's duty to
see the one trunk of new shining tin carried in and placed in the
room that was prepared for the house's new inmate. This done, she
went to the others in the little drawing-room. Her father and
Professor Fish were seated in the window, busy with talk; the new
patient had an upright chair against the wall, and sat in it with the
same lassitude and downcast gaze which had already drawn Mary's
wondering compassion. The Professor rose at her entry.

"Ah! Miss Pond," he said in his cheerful, booming voice, "I was just
giving your father a few particulars about our young friend."

"I should like to hear them," she answered, taking the chair he
reached for her. "You see, I shall have a good deal to do with him."

Old Dr. Pond nodded. "Mary," he said, "is my right hand, Professor."

"Of course," agreed the Professor. "I can see that."

He was seated again, and he leaned across to Mary confidentially,
with an explanatory forefinger hovering.

"As I told your father, Miss Pond, it isn't necessary to go far back
in the case," he said. "As a matter of fact, I took this case up--
experimentally. The subject was a good one for a--well, call it a
theory of mine, a new idea in pathology. You see? I wanted to try it
on the dog before publishing it, and our young friend there"--he
nodded at the back of the room and sank his voice--"he was the dog.
You understand?"

Mary nodded, and the Professor smiled.

"Well," he said, "I have succeeded. The patient is convalescent,
but--you see how he is. He has very little vital force, and also,
occasionally, delusions. Merely ephemeral, you know, but delusions.
He wants quiet chiefly, and very little else--just that atmosphere of
repose and--er--peace which you can create for him, Miss Pond."

"These delusions," put in Dr. Pond, "are they of any special
character!"

"H'm!" The Professor stroked his chin. "No," he said. "Curious, you
know, but not symptomatic." His hard eye scanned the old doctor
purposely. "Sometimes," he said slowly, "he thinks he has been dead,
and that I brought him back to life."

"And he hates you for it," suggested Mary. The Professor stared at
her in open astonishment.

"How on earth did you know that?" he cried.

"I saw him looking after you in the station," Mary explained. "He
just--glared."

"I see." Professor Fish was always rather extravagant in manner and
speech; his relief now seemed a little exaggerated. He drew a deep
breath and glanced past Mary to the patient on his chair at the far
end of the room. "Yes," he said, "at such times he is distinctly
resentful. I don't wonder you noticed it."

"Your letter didn't mention his name," said Mary.

"I should call him Smith," answered the Professor.

"It's a good name. And that, I think, is all there is to tell. Oh, by
the way, though he has no suicidal tendency, of course, or I
shouldn't put him here; but all the same----"

Mary nodded. "Quite so," she said. "No razor."

"Exactly," said the Professor. "And no money. Give him the things he
needs, and let me have the bill."

He rose and reached for his hat.

"But you will stay and have something to eat," protested old Dr.
Pond.

"Can't," answered the Professor. "Got an engagement in town. I've
just time to catch the train back. Now, you quite understand about
this case? Just quietness and soothing companionship, you know, fresh
air and sleep, and all that."

"We quite understand," said Mary. "We'll do our best."

"I'm sure you will," said Professor Fish cordially. He moved over to
where the patient sat; he had not moved at all. He continued to gaze
at the carpet while the tall Professor stood over him.

"Now, Smith," said the Professor in his loud voice, "I'm off. You're
in good hands here, you know. You've only to take it easy and rest."

"Rest?" Smith repeated the word in a hoarse whisper; it was the
first he had spoken. He looked up, and his eye went to the
Professor's face with a sort of challenge.

"Yes," said the Professor. "Good-bye."

Smith continued to look at him, but answered nothing. Professor Fish
shrugged his shoulders and turned away sharply.

"He'll soon pick up," he said to Dr. Pond. "And now I really must
go."

He shook hands with Mary with a manner of cheerful vigour, beaming at
her through his gold-rimmed glasses, big, whimsical, and quick. A
moment later, Dr. Pond was showing him out, and Mary, alone with her
patient, had another glimpse of hate and contempt animating and
enlivening that weak and formless face.

She waited till she heard the front door close and the Professor's
departing feet crunch on the gravel of the garden path. Then she went
and put a hand on the little man's shoulder.

"You look very tired," she said, quietly, in her level, pleasant
voice. "Would you like to go to your room and lie down? And I will
send you up some tea."

There was a long pause, and she thought he was not going to answer.
But she waited restfully, and at last he sighed.

"Yes," he said wearily, "that's what I want."

His voice had the flat tones of Cockneydom, but Mary took no note of
it.

"Then let me show you the way," she said, still gently; and he rose
at the word and followed her upstairs.

In this manner the new patient was installed in the household of Dr.
Pond. He slipped into his place like a shadow, displacing nothing.
The Doctor, swollen with the distinction of a visit by Professor Fish
in person, would willingly have made a fuss of him, if it had been
possible. But Smith was not amenable to polite attentions. To
attempts to render him particular consideration he opposed a barren
inertia; one could as easily have been obliging to a lamp-post. The
man's consciousness seemed to exist in a vacuum; he lived in a
solitude to which the kindly Doctor could never penetrate. Once,
certainly, his persistent geniality won him a rebuff. It was at
breakfast, and he was following his custom of endeavoring to trap
Smith into conversation. Smith sat opposite him at the table, staring
vacantly at the tablecloth.

"It is a fine morning," the Doctor observed, "I wonder, now, Mr.
Smith, if you would care for a little drive with me. I have some
brief visits to pay here and there, and I could drop you here again
before I go on. The fresh air would do you good--freshen you up, you
know; put a little life into you. Come, now! what do you say to
accompanying me?"

Smith said nothing, but his cheek twitched once. "Come now!" pressed
the Doctor persuasively. "See what a lovely day it is. Sun, fresh
air, the smell and sight of the fields--it'll put fresh life into
you."

Smith's white face worked slightly. "Ere," he said, and paused. The
Doctor bent forward, pleased. "Go to 'ell!" said Smith thoughtfully.

Mary had much more success with him; a slender link of sympathy had
established itself between the healthy, tranquil girl and this dreary
wisp of a man. She asked him no questions, and in return for her
forbearance he would sometimes speak to her voluntarily. He would
emerge from his trance-like apathy to watch her as she went about her
household duties. Professor Fish had spoken truly when he said that
Mary Pond knew how to create about her an atmosphere of serenity. The
tones of her quiet voice, the gentleness of her movements, the kindly
sobriety of her regard seemed to fortify her patient. For her part, a
genuine compassion for the little man was mixed with some liking; he
was a furtive and vulgar creature at the best, but his dependence on
her, his helplessness and trouble, reached to the maternal in her
honest heart. She could manage him; but for her strategy he would
have lived in his bed, day and night, in a sort of half torpor.

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