第32章

"At first I think it made him uncomfortable.He was restless because he knew too much and too little.The unknown pressed in on his mind as bad air weighs on the lungs.Then it lightened and he accepted the new world in the same sober practical way that he took other things.I think that the free exercise of his mind in a pure medium gave him a feeling of extraordinary power and ease.His eyes used to sparkle when he talked.And another odd thing he told me.He was a keen rockclimber, but, curiously enough, he had never a very good head.Dizzy heights always worried him, though he managed to keep hold on himself.But now all that had gone.The sense of the fulness of Space made him as happy--happier I believe--with his legs dangling into eternity, as sitting before his own study fire.

"I remember saying that it was all rather like the mediaeval wizards who made their spells by means of numbers and figures.

"He caught me up at once.'Not numbers,' he said."Number has no place in Nature.It is an invention of the human mind to atone for a bad memory.But figures are a different matter.All the mysteries of the world are in them, and the old magicians knew that at least, if they knew no more.'

"He had only one grievance.He complained that it was terribly lonely.'It is the Desolation,' he would quote, 'spoken of by Daniel the prophet.' He would spend hours travelling those eerie shifting corridors of Space with no hint of another human soul.

How could there be? It was a world of pure reason, where human personality had no place.What puzzled me was why he should feel the absence of this.One wouldn't you know, in an intricate problem of geometry or a game of chess.I asked him, but he didn't understand the question.I puzzled over it a good deal, for it seemed to me that if Hollond felt lonely, there must be more in this world of his than we imagined.I began to wonder if there was any truth in fads like psychical research.Also, I was not so sure that he was as normal as I had thought: it looked as if his nerves might be going bad.

"Oddly enough, Hollond was getting on the same track himself.

He had discovered, so he said, that in sleep everybody now and then lived in this new world of his.You know how one dreams of triangular railway platforms with trains running simultaneously down all three sides and not colliding.Well, this sort of cantrip was 'common form,' as we say at the Bar, in Hollond's Space, and he was very curious about the why and wherefore of Sleep.He began to haunt psychological laboratories, where they experiment with the charwoman and the odd man, and he used to go up to Cambridge for seances.It was a foreign atmosphere to him, and I don't think he was very happy in it.He found so many charlatans that he used to get angry, and declare he would be better employed at Mother's Meetings!"From far up the Glen came the sound of the pony's hoofs.The stag had been loaded up and the gillies were returning.Leithen looked at his watch."We'd better wait and see the beast," he said.

"...Well, nothing happened for more than a year.Then one evening in May he burst into my rooms in high excitement.You understand quite clearly that there was no suspicion of horror or fright or anything unpleasant about this world he had discovered.

It was simply a series of interesting and difficult problems.

All this time Hollond had been rather extra well and cheery.But when he came in I thought I noticed a different look in his eyes, something puzzled and diffident and apprehensive.

"'There's a queer performance going on in the other world,' he said.'It's unbelievable.I never dreamed of such a thing.I--I don't quite know how to put it, and I don't know how to explain it, but--but I am becoming aware that there are other beings--other minds--moving in Space besides mine.'

"I suppose I ought to have realised then that things were beginning to go wrong.But it was very difficult, he was so rational and anxious to make it all clear.I asked him how he knew.'There could, of course, on his own showing be no CHANGEin that world, for the forms of Space moved and existed under inexorable laws.He said he found his own mind failing him at points.There would come over him a sense of fear--intellectual fear--and weakness, a sense of something else, quite alien to Space, thwarting him.Of course he could only describe his impressions very lamely, for they were purely of the mind, and he had no material peg to hang them on, so that I could realise them.But the gist of it was that he had been gradually becoming conscious of what he called 'Presences' in his world.They had no effect on Space--did not leave footprints in its corridors, for instance--but they affected his mind.There was some mysterious contact established between him and them.I asked him if the affection was unpleasant and he said 'No, not exactly.'

But I could see a hint of fear in his eyes.

"Think of it.Try to realise what intellectual fear is.Ican't, but it is conceivable.To you and me fear implies pain to ourselves or some other, and such pain is always in the last resort pain of the flesh.Consider it carefully and you will see that it is so.But imagine fear so sublimated and transmuted as to be the tension of pure spirit.I can't realise it, but Ithink it possible.I don't pretend to understand how Hollond got to know about these Presences.But there was no doubt about the fact.He was positive, and he wasn't in the least mad--not in our sense.In that very month he published his book on Number, and gave a German professor who attacked it a most tremendous public trouncing.