第33章

"I know what you are going to say,--that the fancy was a weakening of the mind from within.I admit I should have thought of that but he looked so confoundedly sane and able that it seemed ridiculous.He kept asking me my opinion, as a lawyer, on the facts he offered.It was the oddest case ever put before me, but I did my best for him.I dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense.I told him that, taking all that he had told me as fact, the Prescences might be either ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which had independently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally, the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers think they do.It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and Iwasn't quite serious.But Holland was serious enough.

"He admitted that all three explanations were conceivable, but he was very doubtful about the first.The projection of the spirit into Space during sleep, he thought, was a faint and feeble thing, and these were powerful Presences.With the second and the third he was rather impressed.I suppose I should have seen what was happening and tried to stop it; at least, looking back that seems to have been my duty.But it was difficult to think that anything was wrong with Hollond; indeed the odd thing is that all this time the idea of madness never entered my head.Irather backed him up.Somehow the thing took my fancy, though Ithought it moonshine at the bottom of my heart.I enlarged on the pioneering before him.'Think,' I told him, 'what may be waiting for you.You may discover the meaning of Spirit.You may open up a new world, as rich as the old one, but imperishable.You may prove to mankind their immortality and deliver them for ever from the fear of death.Why, man, you are picking at the lock of all the world's mysteries.'

"But Hollond did not cheer up.He seemed strangely languid and dispirited.'That is all true enough,' he said,'if you are right, if your alternatives are exhaustive.But suppose they are something else, something....What that 'something' might be he had apparently no idea, and very soon he went away.

"He said another thing before he left.We asked me if I ever read poetry, and I said, not often.Nor did he: but he had picked up a little book somewhere and found a man who knew about the Presences.I think his name was Traherne, one of the seventeenth-century fellows.He quoted a verse which stuck to my fly-paper memory.It ran something like'Within the region of the air, Compassed about with Heavens fair, Great tracts of lands there may be found, Where many numerous hosts, In those far distant coasts, For other great and glorious ends Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.'

Hollond was positive he did not mean angels or anything of the sort.I told him that Traherne evidently took a cheerful view of them.He admitted that, but added: 'He had religion, you see.

He believed that everything was for the best.I am not a man of faith, and can only take comfort from what I understand.I'm in the dark, I tell you...'

"Next week I was busy with the Chilian Arbitration case, and saw nobody for a couple of months.Then one evening I ran against Hollond on the Embankment, and thought him looking horribly ill.

He walked back with me to my rooms, and hardly uttered one word all the way.I gave him a stiff whisky-and-soda, which he gulped down absent-mindedly.There was that strained, hunted look in his eyes that you see in a frightened animal's.He was always lean, but now he had fallen away to skin and bone.

"'I can't stay long,' he told me, 'for I'm off to the Alps to-morrow and I have a lot to do.' Before then he used to plunge readily into his story, but now he seemed shy about beginning.

Indeed I had to ask him a question.

"'Things are difficult,' he said hesitatingly, and rather distressing.Do you know, Leithen, I think you were wrong about--about what I spoke to you of.You said there must be one of three explanations.I am beginning to think that there is a fourth.

"He stopped for a second or two, then suddenly leaned forward and gripped my knee so fiercely that I cried out.'That world is the Desolation,' he said in a choking voice, 'and perhaps I am getting near the Abomination of the Desolation that the old prophet spoke of.I tell you, man, I am on the edge of a terror, a terror,' he almost screamed, 'that no mortal can think of and live.'

You can imagine that I was considerably startled.It was lightning out of a clear sky.How the devil could one associate horror with mathematics? I don't see it yet...At any rate, I--You may he sure I cursed my folly for ever pretending to take him seriously.The only way would have been to have laughed him out of it at the start.And yet I couldn't, you know--it was too real and reasonable.Anyhow, I tried a firm tone now, and told him the whole thing was arrant raving bosh.I bade him be a man and pull himself together.I made him dine with me, and took him home, and got him into a better state of mind before he went to bed.Next morning I saw him off at Charing Cross, very haggard still, but better.He promised to write to me pretty often...."The pony, with a great eleven-pointer lurching athwart its back, was abreast of us, and from the autumn mist came the sound of soft Highland voices.Leithen and I got up to go, when we heard that the rifle had made direct for the Lodge by a short cut past the Sanctuary.In the wake of the gillies we descended the Correi road into a glen all swimming with dim purple shadows.

The pony minced and boggled; the stag's antlers stood out sharp on the rise against a patch of sky, looking like a skeleton tree.

Then we dropped into a covert of birches and emerged on the white glen highway.