第29章

"I wonder if you will understand it.You ought to, of course, better than me, for you know something of philosophy.But it took me a long time to get the hang of it, and I can't give you any kind of explanation.He was my fag at Eton, and when I began to get on at the Bar I was able to advise him on one or two private matters, so that he rather fancied my legal ability.He came to me with his story because he had to tell someone, and he wouldn't trust a colleague.He said he didn't want a scientist to know, for scientists were either pledged to their own theories and wouldn't understand, or, if they understood, would get ahead of him in his researches.He wanted a lawyer, he said, who was accustomed to weighing evidence.That was good sense, for evidence must always be judged by the same laws, and I suppose in the long-run the most abstruse business comes down to a fairly simple deduction from certain data.Anyhow, that was the way he used to talk, and I listened to him, for I liked the man, and had an enormous respect for his brains.At Eton he sluiced down all the mathematics they could give him, and he was an astonishing swell at Cambridge.He was a simple fellow, too, and talked no more jargon than he could help.I used to climb with him in the Alps now and then, and you would never have guessed that he had any thoughts beyond getting up steep rocks.

"It was at Chamonix, I remember, that I first got a hint of the matter that was filling his mind.We had been taking an off-day, and were sitting in the hotel garden, watching the Aiguilles getting purple in the twilight.Chamonix always makes me choke a little-it is so crushed in by those great snow masses.I said something about it--said I liked the open spaces like the Gornegrat or the Bel Alp better.He asked me why: if it was the difference of the air, or merely the wider horizon? I said it was the sense of not being crowded, of living in an empty world.

He repeated the word 'empty' and laughed.

"'By "empty" you mean,' he said,'where things don't knock up against you?'

I told him No.I mean just empty, void, nothing but blank aether.

"You don't knock up against things here, and the air is as good as you want.It can't be the lack of ordinary emptiness you feel.""I agreed that the word needed explaining.'I suppose it is mental restlessness,' I said.'I like to feel that for a tremendous distance there is nothing round me.Why, I don't know.Some men are built the other way and have a terror of space.'

"He said that that was better.'It is a personal fancy, and depends on your KNOWING that there is nothing between you and the top of the Dent Blanche.And you know because your eyes tell you there is nothing.Even if you were blind, you might have a sort of sense about adjacent matter.Blind men often have it.But in any case, whether got from instinct or sight, the KNOWLEDGE is what matters.'

"Hollond was embarking on a Socratic dialogue in which I could see little point.I told him so, and he laughed."'I am not sure that I am very clear myself.But yes--there IS a point.

Supposing you knew-not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition--that what we call empty space was full, crammed.

Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills and houses, but with things as real--as real to the mind.Would you still feel crowded?'

"'No,' I said, 'I don't think so.It is only what we call matter that signifies.It would be just as well not to feel crowded by the other thing, for there would be no escape from it.But what are you getting at? Do you mean atoms or electric currents or what?'

"He said he wasn't thinking about that sort of thing, and began to talk of another subject.

"Next night, when we were pigging it at the Geant cabane, he started again on the same tack.He asked me how I accounted for the fact that animals could find their way back over great tracts of unknown country.I said I supposed it was the homing instinct.

"'Rubbish, man,' he said.'That's only another name for the puzzle, not an explanation.There must be some reason for it.

They must KNOW something that we cannot understand.Tie a cat in a bag and take it fifty miles by train and it will make its way home.That cat has some clue that we haven't.'

"I was tired and sleepy, and told him that I did not care a rush about the psychology of cats.But he was not to be snubbed, and went on talking.

"'How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain or a nerve which responds to the invisible world?

How if all Space be full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? A dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit.Why? Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to travel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligence than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus.'

"But at that point I fell asleep and left Hollond to repeat his questions to a guide who knew no English and a snoring porter.

"Six months later, one foggy January afternoon, Hollond rang me up at the Temple and proposed to come to see me that night after dinner.I thought he wanted to talk Alpine shop, but he turned up in Duke Street about nine with a kit-bag full of papers.He was an odd fellow to look at--a yellowish face with the skin stretched tight on the cheek-bones, clean-shaven, a sharp chin which he kept poking forward, and deep-set, greyish eyes.He was a hard fellow, too, always in pretty good condition, which was remarkable considering how he slaved for nine months out of the twelve.He had a quiet, slow-spoken manner, but that night I saw that he was considerably excited.

"He said that he had come to me because we were old friends.He proposed to tell me a tremendous secret.'I must get another mind to work on it or I'll go crazy.I don't want a scientist.

I want a plain man.'