Henry S. Whitehead

“ Da Silva invariably returned, even to the humblest, which is one of the marks of a gentleman anywhere.
Jaffray da silva shifted one thin leg, draped in spotless white drill, over the other, and lighted a fresh cigarette.
"Even my friends smile at me, Mr. Lee," he replied, with a tolerant smile, which lightened for an instant his melancholy, ivory-white countenance. "They laugh at me more or less because I admit I believe in Jumbees. It is possible that everybody with even a small amount of African blood possesses that streak of belief in magic and the like. ”

“ Everything involved is so difficult to record that one tends to flounder helplessly. I have said that the revelation established in my mind a certain connection which reason had not allowed me to formulate consciously before. This connection, I need no longer hesitate to hint, had to do with the old Copenhagen mirror whose suggestions of motion had so impressed me on the morning of the disappearance, and whose whorl-like contours and apparent illusions of suction had later exerted such a disquieting fascination on both Robert and me. ”

“ But he dared not shoot the lynx. He dared not shoot the lynx because he had one cartridge left, and one only. The great ravenous animal, with the deadly hunger-courage of the far North, had utterly put aside all his natural fear of Man. Pete could thrust his rifle against the satiny black fur which showed through the chinks of the hut and blow it to pieces at any time.
But he dared not. He dared not because he had no matches. By a stroke of the wildest ill-fortune he had destroyed a full box, the last box in his store, by omitting to close it before striking one on its side. ”

“ They would never grow old, and would need neither food nor drink.
To make his prison tolerable he sent ahead of him certain books and writing materials, a chair and table of stoutest workmanship, and a few other accessories. He knew that the images which the glass would reflect or absorb would not be tangible, but would merely extend around him like a background of dream. His own transition in 1687 was a momentous experience; and must have been attended by mixed sensations of triumph and terror. ”

“ Thus Robert, influenced into a desire to press upon the "door," had been lured within. Such visualizations depended wholly on telepathy, since no one inside the mirror could see out into the world of men.
It was, in truth, a strange life that Holm and his company had lived inside the glass. Since the mirror had stood for fully a century with its face to the dusty stone wall of the shed where I found it, Robert was the first being to enter this limbo after all that interval. ”

“ Lee heaved a sigh.
"Thank you, Mr. Da Silva, very much indeed, sir," said he, thoughtfully, and made as though to rise. His service wrist-watch indicated 6 o'clock.
"Let us have a fresh swizzel, at least, before you go," suggested Mr. Da Silva. "We have a saying here in the island, that 'a man can't travel on one leg!' Perhaps you've heard it already."
"I have," said Mr. Lee.
"Knud, Knud! You hear, mon? Knud,–tell Charlotte to mash up another bal' of ice,–you hear? Quickly now," commanded Mr. Da Silva. ”

“ Pete was on board a ship now, a ship bound to Labrador, and he was using old-fashioned sulfur matches to light his pipe against the wind up on deck.
It occurred to the thin match that she might never get her chance, even though the box should be resurrected, because she was quite out of sight. Even if someone opened the box again, she was wedged in so tightly that she might not even be seen. Well, there was no use in borrowing trouble! She knew she could not regulate the universe. ”

“ They had no further contact with her; she was ostracized, a pariah of a match—too thin, and too brown on one side, and with a head too little symmetrical and too little apt to light at the first draw along the box-side for any self-respecting match to notice her at all!
Pete Jenkins went all the way to New York. By the time he arrived there were four of the nine left. The thin match was still in her corner, wedged in. It was better for her there, on the whole, she had come to believe. The pressure of the feeling against her had sent up strongly into her head the idea of her destiny. ”

“ By every right and custom of West Indian society, Mr. Da Silva was a colored gentleman, whose social status was as clear-cut and definite as a cameo.
These islands are largely populated by persons like Mr. Da Silva. Despite the difference in their status from what it would be in North America, in the islands it has its advantages,–among them that of logic. To the West Indian mind, a man whose heredity is seven-eighths derived from gentry, as like as not with authentic coats-of-arms, is entitled to be treated accordingly. ”

“ I have spoken of the glass as storing up the images of these regions, but this is really an inexact definition. In truth, each of the mirror scenes formed a true and quasi-permanent fourth-dimensional projection of the corresponding mundane region; so that whenever Robert moved to a certain part of a certain scene, as he moved into the image of my room when sending his telepathic messages, he was actually in that place itself, on earth—though under spatial conditions which cut off all sensory communication, in either direction, between him and the present tri-dimensional aspect of the place. ”

“ He heard, though vaguely, of the laborer's belief that Sven Garik, who had long ago gone back to his home in Sweden, and Garrity, one of the smaller planters now on the island, were "wolves!" Lycanthropy, animal-metamorphosis, it appeared, formed part of this strange texture of local belief.
Mr. Jaffray Da Silva was one-eighth African. He was, therefore, by island usage, "colored," which is as different from being "black" in the West Indies as anything that can be imagined. Mr. Da Silva had been educated in the continental European manner. ”

“ Somehow I was sure that young Robert Grandison was still alive.
That I should be receptive of such a notion will not seem strange to those who know of my long residence in the West Indies and my close contact with unexplained happenings there. It will not seem strange, either, that I fell asleep with an urgent desire to establish some sort of mental communication with the missing boy. Even the most prosaic scientists affirm, with Freud, Jung, and Adler, that the subconscious mind is most open to external impression in sleep ”

“ But there was no way to regulate these chances. A match could only wait and hope, and the thin match waited and hoped with a good courage, resolved to light quickly and burn as clearly and steadily as she possibly could, if ever her chance should come.
Pete, it seemed, had no particular use for the remaining matches in this box. He had, in fact, quite forgotten them. For the box, very weak and wobbly now, had been packed inside the pocket of a jacket which Pete had replaced with a sweater a day out from New York and placed inside a gripsack. ”

“ Research showed him that the principle of reflection undoubtedly forms the chief gate to all dimensions beyond our familiar three; and chance placed in his hands a small and very ancient glass whose cryptic properties he believed he could turn to advantage. Once "inside" this mirror according to the method he had envisaged, he felt that "life" in the sense of form and consciousness would go on virtually forever, provided the mirror could be preserved indefinitely from breakage or deterioration.
Holm made a magnificent mirror, such as would be prized and carefully preserved ”

“ This was, of course, only the common destiny of all matches—to set something on fire. It might be anything, from a joss-stick to a great conflagration; but it was to start fire. That, she knew by instinct, was the great thing. ”

“ He could not touch any of the parts of these scenes—walls, trees, furniture, and the like—but whether this was because they were truly non-material, or because they always receded at his approach, he was singularly unable to determine. Everything seemed fluid, mutable, and unreal. When he walked, it appeared to be on whatever lower surface the visible scene might have—floor, path, greensward, or such; but upon analysis he always found that the contact was an illusion. ”

“ They shift and 'weave,' as a full-blooded African does–standing on one foot and resting the other–you've noticed that, of course–or scratching the supporting ankle with the toes of the other foot. They do not swing in the sense that they seem to be swung on a rope,–that is not what it means; they do not twirl about. But they do–always–face the oncomer. . . .
"I walked on, slowly, and passed them; and they kept their faces to me as they always do. I'm used to that....
"I went up the steps of the house to the front gallery, and found Mrs. Iversen waiting for me. ”

“ I need mention only briefly my method of restoring Robert in a seemingly normal way—how I smuggled him out of the window in an old hat and sweater of mine, took him down the road in my quietly started car, coached him carefully in a tale I had devised, and returned to arouse Browne with the news of his discovery. He had, I explained, been walking alone on the afternoon of his disappearance; and had been offered a motor ride by two young men who, as a joke and over his protests that he could go no farther than Stamford and back, had begun to carry him past that town. ”

“ Fate placed her in that particular kind of box which was labeled as a “Product of Finland, Average Contents Sixty Sticks.” There was also other printed information on the box-label, couched in some Scandinavian language for anyone who might be able to read it.
Life in a family, even one averaging sixty members, is a decidedly different matter from being one item in a phalanx, a horde, of hundreds of millions, all exactly alike. Just here was where the thin match’s troubles began. ”

“ Mr. Lee, when I looked back, down the steps, after what must have been a fifth of a second's inattention, that little old black woman who had been huddled up there on the lowest step, apparently sound asleep, was gone. She had vanished utterly–and, Mr. Lee. a little white dog, about the size of a French poodle, was bounding up the steps toward me. With every bound, a step at a leap, the dog increased in size. ”

“ Theoretically speaking, a prisoner in the glass could in a few moments go anywhere on our planet—into any place, that is, which had ever been reflected in the mirror's surface. This probably applied even to places where the mirror had not hung long enough to produce a clear illusory scene ”

“ These sensations wore off after a long while, Robert's body becoming an organized whole rather than a number of protesting parts. Of all the forms of expression, speech remained the most difficult; doubtless because it is complicated, bringing into play a number of different organs, muscles, and tendons. Robert's feet, on the other hand, were the first members to adjust themselves to the new conditions within the glass. ”

“ Reflecting on this after waking, I found the circumstance closely allied to the reversal of perspective which made Robert seem to grow larger when receding and smaller when approaching. Here, too, was a physical reversal—for every detail of his coloring in the unknown dimension was the exact reverse or complement of the corresponding color detail in normal life. In physics the typical complementary colors are blue and yellow, and red and green. These pairs are opposites, and when mixed yield gray. Robert's natural color was a pinkish-buff, the opposite of which is the greenish-blue I saw. ”

“ Lee, that he had put feet on his Jumbees mostly for the sake of a convenient rime,–poetic license.' The Hanging Jumbees have no feet. It is one of their peculiarities. Their legs stop at the ankles. They have abnormally long, thin legs–African legs. They are always black, you know. Their feet–if they have them–are always hidden in a kind of mist that lies along the ground where-ever one sees them. ”

“ He had studied the world around him, and chafed at the limitations of human knowledge and capability. Eventually he sought for dark ways to overcome those limitations, and gained more success than is good for any mortal. ”

“ The planters and storekeepers had smiled, though with varying degrees of intensity, and had replied that the Danes had invented Jumbees, to keep their estate-laborers indoors after nightfall, thus ensuring a proper night's sleep for them, and minimizing the depredations upon growing crops. ”