第 2 页

whispered doubtfully. Presently he glanced at the door and back to

the figure. Then he stole on tiptoe out of the room, glancing at his

companion after each elaborate pace.

He closed the door noiselessly. The house door was standing open, and

he went out beyond the porch, and stood where the monkshood rose at

the corner of the garden bed. From this point he could see the stranger

through the open window, still and dim, sitting head on hand. He had not

moved.

A number of children going along the road stopped and regarded the

artist curiously. A boatman exchanged civilities with him. He felt

that possibly his circumspect attitude and position seemed peculiar and

unaccountable. Smoking, perhaps, might seem more natural. He drew pipe

and pouch from his pocket, filled the pipe slowly.

"I wonder,"... he said, with a scarcely perceptible loss of complacency.

"At any rate we must give him a chance." He struck a match in the virile

way, and proceeded to light his pipe.

Presently he heard his landlady behind him, coming with his lamp lit

from the kitchen. He turned, gesticulating with his pipe, and stopped

her at the door of his sitting-room. He had some difficulty in

explaining the situation in whispers, for she did not know he had a

visitor. She retreated again with the lamp, still a little mystified to

judge from her manner, and he resumed his hovering at the corner of the

porch, flushed and less at his ease.

Long after he had smoked out his pipe, and when the bats were abroad,

his curiosity dominated his complex hesitations, and he stole back into

his darkling sitting-room. He paused in the doorway. The stranger

was still in the same attitude, dark against the window. Save for the

singing of some sailors aboard one of the little slate-carrying ships

in the harbour, the evening was very still. Outside, the spikes of

monkshood and delphinium stood erect and motionless against the shadow

of the hillside. Something flashed into Isbister's mind; he started, and

leaning over the table, listened. An unpleasant suspicion grew stronger;

became conviction. Astonishment seized him and became--dread!

No sound of breathing came from the seated figure!

He crept slowly and noiselessly round the table, pausing twice to

listen. At last he could lay his hand on the back of the armchair. He

bent down until the two heads were ear to ear.

Then he bent still lower to look up at his visitor's face. He started

violently and uttered an exclamation. The eyes were void spaces of

white.

He looked again and saw that they were open and with the pupils rolled

under the lids. He was suddenly afraid. Overcome by the strangeness of

the man's condition, he took him by the shoulder and shook him. "Are you

asleep?" he said, with his voice jumping into alto, and again, "Are you

asleep?"

A conviction took possession of his mind that this man was dead. He

suddenly became active and noisy, strode across the room, blundering

against the table as he did so, and rang the bell.

"Please bring a light at once," he said in the passage. "There is

something wrong with my friend."

Then he returned to the motionless seated figure, grasped the shoulder,

shook it, and shouted. The room was flooded with yellow glare as his

astonished landlady entered with the light. His face was white as he

turned blinking towards her. "I must fetch a doctor at once," he said.

"It is either death or a fit. Is there a doctor in the village? Where is

a doctor to be found?"

CHAPTER II. THE TRANCE

The state of cataleptic rigour into which this man had fallen, lasted

for an unprecedented length of time, and then he passed slowly to the

flaccid state, to a lax attitude suggestive of profound repose. Then it

was his eyes could be closed.

He was removed from the hotel to the Boscastle surgery, and from the

surgery, after some weeks, to London. But he still resisted every

attempt at reanimation. After a time, for reasons that will appear

later, these attempts were discontinued. For a great space he lay in

that strange condition, inert and still neither dead nor living but, as

it were, suspended, hanging midway between nothingness and existence.

His was a darkness unbroken by a ray of thought or sensation, a

dreamless inanition, a vast space of peace. The tumult of his mind had

swelled and risen to an abrupt climax of silence. Where was the man?

Where is any man when insensibility takes hold of him?

"It seems only yesterday," said Isbister. "I remember it all as

though it happened yesterday--clearer perhaps, than if it had happened

yesterday."

It was the Isbister of the last chapter, but he was no longer a

young man. The hair that had been brown and a trifle in excess of the

fashionable length, was iron grey and clipped close, and the face that

had been pink and white was buff and ruddy. He had a pointed beard shot

with grey. He talked to an elderly man who wore a summer suit of drill

(the summer of that year was unusually hot). This was Warming, a London

solicitor and next of kin to Graham, the man who had fallen into the

trance. And the two men stood side by side in a room in a house in

London regarding his recumbent figure.

It was a yellow figure lying lax upon a water-bed and clad in a flowing

shirt, a figure with a shrunken face and a stubby beard, lean limbs and

lank nails, and about it was a case of thin glass. This glass seemed

to mark off the sleeper from the reality of life about him, he was a

thing apart, a strange, isolated abnormality. The two men stood close to

the glass, peering in.

"The thing gave me a shock," said Isbister "I feel a queer sort of

surprise even now when I think of his white eyes. They were white, you

know, rolled up. Coming here again brings it all back to me.

"Have you never seen him since that time?" asked Warming.

"Often wanted to come," said Isbister; "but business nowadays is too

serious a thing for much holiday keeping. I've been in America most of

the time."

"If I remember rightly," said Warming, "you were an artist?"

"Was. And then I became a married man. I saw it was all up with black

and white, very soon--at least for a mediocre man, and I jumped on to

process. Those posters on the Cliffs at Dover are by my people."

"Good posters," admitted the solicitor, "though I was sorry to see them

there."

"Last as long as the cliffs, if necessary," exclaimed Isbister with

satisfaction. "The world changes. When he fell asleep, twenty years

ago, I was down at Boscastle with a box of water-colours and a noble,

old-fashioned ambition. I didn't expect that some day my pigments would

glorify the whole blessed coast of England, from Land's End round again

to the Lizard. Luck comes to a man very often when he's not looking."

Warming seemed to doubt the quality of the luck. "I just missed seeing

you, if I recollect aright."

"You came back by the trap that took me to Camelford railway station.

It was close on the Jubilee, Victoria's Jubilee, because I remember the

seats and flags in Westminster, and the row with the cabman at Chelsea."

"The Diamond Jubilee, it was," said Warming; "the second one."

"Ah, yes! At the proper Jubilee--the Fifty Year affair--I was down at

Wookey--a boy. I missed all that.... What a fuss we had with him! My

landlady wouldn't take him in, wouldn't let him stay--he looked so queer

when he was rigid. We had to carry him in a chair up to the hotel. And

the Boscastle doctor--it wasn't the present chap, but the G.P. before

him--was at him until nearly two, with, me and the landlord holding

lights and so forth."

"It was a cataleptic rigour at first, wasn't it?"

"Stiff!--wherever you bent him he stuck. You might have stood him on

his head and he'd have stopped. I never saw such stiffness. Of course

this"--he indicated the prostrate figure by a movement of his head--"is

quite different. And, of course, the little doctor--what was his name?"

"Smithers?"

"Smithers it was--was quite wrong in trying to fetch him round too soon,

according to all accounts. The things he did. Even now it makes me feel

all--ugh! Mustard, snuff, pricking. And one of those beastly little

things, not dynamos--"

"Induction coils."

"Yes. You could see his muscles throb and jump, and he twisted about.

There was just two flaring yellow candles, and all the shadows were

shivering, and the little doctor nervous and putting on side, and

him--stark and squirming in the most unnatural ways. Well, it made me

dream."

Pause.

"It's a strange state," said Warming.

"It's a sort of complete absence," said Isbister.

"Here's the body, empty. Not dead a bit, and yet not alive. It's like a

seat vacant and marked 'engaged.' No feeling, no digestion, no beating

of the heart--not a flutter. _That_ doesn't make me feel as if there was

a man present. In a sense it's more dead than death, for these doctors

tell me that even the hair has stopped growing. Now with the proper

dead, the hair will go on growing--"

"I know," said Warming, with a flash of pain in his expression.

They peered through the glass again. Graham was indeed in a strange

state, in the flaccid phase of a trance, but a trance unprecedented in

medical history. Trances had lasted for as much as a year before--but at

the end of that time it had ever been waking or a death; sometimes first

one and then the other. Isbister noted the marks the physicians had

made in injecting nourishment, for that device had been resorted to to

postpone collapse; he pointed them out to Warming, who had been trying

not to see them.

"And while he has been lying here," said Isbister, with the zest of a

life freely spent, "I have changed my plans in life; married, raised

a family, my eldest lad--I hadn't begun to think of sons then--is an

American citizen, and looking forward to leaving Harvard. There's

a touch of grey in my hair. And this man, not a day older nor wiser

(practically) than I was in my downy days. It's curious to think of."

Warming turned. "And I have grown old too. I played cricket with him

when I was still only a lad. And he looks a young man still. Yellow

perhaps. But that is a young man nevertheless."

"And there's been the War," said Isbister.

"From beginning to end."

"And these Martians."

"I've understood," said Isbister after a pause, "that he had some

moderate property of his own?"

"That is so," said Warming. He coughed primly. "As it happens--have

charge of it."

"Ah!" Isbister thought, hesitated and spoke: "No doubt--his keep here is

not expensive--no doubt it will have improved--accumulated?"

"It has. He will wake up very much better off--if he wakes--than when he

slept."

"As a business man," said Isbister, "that thought has naturally been in

my mind. I have, indeed, sometimes thought that, speaking commercially,

of course, this sleep may be a very good thing for him. That he knows

what he is about, so to speak, in being insensible so long. If he had

lived straight on--"

"I doubt if he would have premeditated as much," said Warming. "He was

not a far-sighted man. In fact--"

"Yes?"

"We differed on that point. I stood to him somewhat in the relation of

a guardian. You have probably seen enough of affairs to recognise that

occasionally a certain friction--. But even if that was the case, there

is a doubt whether he will ever wake. This sleep exhausts slowly, but

it exhausts. Apparently he is sliding slowly, very slowly and tediously,

down a long slope, if you can understand me?"

"It will be a pity to lose his surprise. There's been a lot of change

these twenty years. It's Rip Van Winkle come real."

"It's Bellamy," said Warming. "There has been a lot of change certainly.

And, among other changes, I have changed. I am an old man."

Isbister hesitated, and then feigned a belated surprise. "I shouldn't

have thought it."

"I was forty-three when his bankers--you remember you wired to his

bankers--sent on to me."

"I got their address from the cheque book in his pocket," said Isbister.

"Well, the addition is not difficult," said Warming.

There was another pause, and then Isbister gave way to an unavoidable

curiosity. "He may go on for years yet," he said, and had a moment of

hesitation. "We have to consider that. His affairs, you know, may fall

some day into the hands of--someone else, you know."

"That, if you will believe me, Mr. Isbister, is one of the problems most

constantly before my mind. We happen to be--as a matter of fact, there

are no very trustworthy connections of ours. It is a grotesque and

unprecedented position."

"It is," said Isbister. "As a matter of fact, it's a case for a public

trustee, if only we had such a functionary."

"It seems to me it's a case for some public body, some practically

undying guardian. If he really is going on living--as the doctors, some

of them, think. As a matter of fact, I have gone to one or two public

men about it. But, so far, nothing has been done."

"It wouldn't be a bad idea to hand him over to some public body--the

British Museum Trustees, or the Royal College of Physicians. Sounds a

bit odd, of course, but the whole situation is odd."

"The difficulty is to induce them to take him."

"Red tape, I suppose?"

"Partly."

Pause. "It's a curious business, certainly," said Isbister. "And