J. D. Beresford

“ They had returned to the influences of their own world; even the garden planned and formalised was a man-made thing. But as they crossed the short, well-kept turf, some common impulse made them pause, and with a movement that seemed to be concerted, turn back to look down over the meadow to the plantation and the solemn stretches of the lake—back to that other world, vague, mysterious and enormously still, into which they had so carelessly penetrated.
No one spoke until Harrison, with an impatient sigh, remarked suddenly: “Oh, come along! let’s get back to sanity.”
“Hm! Yes,” Greatorex agreed. ”

“ The new planet that was rushing in upon us had already torn us from our steady path about the sun, and our old familiar moon dwindled to the size of a sixpence, and, diminishing almost visibly, was within a few hours of destruction. For the moon had fled its old allegiance to the Earth and was rushing to the arms of this great stranger like some passionate, unfaithful lover. ”

“ Harrison murmured to his wife, and took a few steps towards Lady Ulrica and the mysterious visitor. He was a connoisseur of feminine beauty, and he had been struck by what he mentally termed the “exquisite accuracy” of the profile presented to him. It had come clear and sharp against the background of the plantation, white and vivid in the moonlight; a forehead in a vertical line over the delicately rounded chin, a perfectly curved aquiline nose and the suggestion of a fine, sensitive mouth. Harrison saw it as the considered and patient modelling of some idealised profile in a cameo. ”

“ The rest and immensity of nature was an enduring reality with which his love was in perfect accord. He and Phyllis had their place in it. If he could step down, now, to the sombre yews at the lake’s edge and take her in his arms, as he had done a month ago, his last doubts would vanish on the instant. They would be one with the greatness of earth, and able to look down with contempt from their perfect enthronement, at the frivolous and ephemeral superficiality of conventional life.... ”

“ Harrison may have hoped that the shock of his voice, and, perhaps, of his determinedly sceptical attitude, would have exorcised the phantom that was assuredly, so he had already decided, the creation of a moment’s excited imagination. But when he turned back to face the plantation, the pale figure still stood in the same attitude, and seemed now, moreover, to have attained a sharper definition of outline; to be altogether more human and solid. ”

“ They’re on the island there, a big clump of them. Now I think of it, that’s one of the things that made this place so confoundedly unfamiliar to-night. It’s the first time I’ve ever been here when it has been so still that the poplars weren’t talking.”
“Wind!” ejaculated Greatorex. “There is no wind.”
“There has been,” Harrison said, and pointed to the lake whose level surface was now flawed here and there by a tiny ripple that flashed an occasional reflected sparkle from the high moon.
“Queer!” Greatorex ejaculated, and shivered as if he were suddenly cold. ”

“ And it seemed at the same moment as if she also were stealthily retreating, sliding away from them.
“Look out! She’s going!” Harrison cried out. “We mustn’t let her get away like this. She’s—she’s not safe to be left alone. We must catch her.”
But already the stranger was nearly out of sight. For an instant they saw her through the darkness, as an illusive pillar of faint light gleaming among the profound shadows of the yews; a pale uncertain form that vanished even as they started in pursuit. ”

“ But the new planet itself drowned all consciousness of lesser things when it rose magnificently above the eastern horizon. That night it was a full circle of yellow light, and across its great expanse moved one circle of intense blackness, the size of our old moon, a circle that was slowly increasing in size, the shadow of our own Earth. So great a thing appeared this new planet, then, that when its lower rim was at last clear of the horizon, its upper limb towered half-way to the zenith. ”

“ Harrison’s agile mind seized the significance of this evidence in a flash. At one stroke it eliminated the probability of that scarf having been worn by a stranger. If the scarf had lain there by the side of the swooning Miss Messenger, no one but a mad woman could have callously picked it up, worn it and postured before a group of half a dozen people without making the least mention of the helpless figure to whom it belonged. For a moment he played with the thought of a madwoman, but dismissed it. If there was a madwoman in Long Orton or the neighbourhood, he would have heard of her. ”

“ She came straight up the steps without an instant’s hesitation, pushed Henry Wolverton back into the hall, and closed the door with the intent and silent urgency of a conspirator.
He made no attempt to speak, and the young woman crouched in silence behind the door, until they had heard the clutter of heavy footsteps pass by and hurry on, up the Square. The men were not shouting now, but even through the heavy door, Wolverton could hear them gasping and panting as they ran. The sound of it made him think of the hoarse panting of great dogs. ”

“ We could not instantly alter ourselves or our way of life. Religions blazed into a spasmodic fever as men and women sought refuge from the dreadful reality. Crimes of lust and greed increased for the same reason. But for the most part we continued in the old ways by sheer inertia, though there was a new and smaller moon visible to us in the night sky, a moon that waxed with infinite slowness towards the full, and grew larger night by night. We knew by then that the stranger was as big as Jupiter, and with a density little less than that of the Earth. ”

“ He was still the living dead man who had been ejected with just one little sobbing gasp of air out of the narrow tunnel, the bore of his own body, by the premature explosion of the mine he had spent six weeks’ labour in laying. On the further side that explosion had blown out the flank of a hill, but he who had stoppered the narrow vent on the hither side, like a plug of damp earth in the mouth [75] of a rifle-barrel, had been softly expelled into the presence of his fellow-sappers waiting at the junction of the wider tunnel they had bored, with never a mark of injury on him. ”

“ Miss Messenger besought him.
“It could, so far as I can make out, only have been yourself—in a trance,” Harrison replied. He instinctively disliked the sound of that last word, but could find no other. People who have “swooned” or fainted do not walk about in that condition. “Er—you’ve never, I suppose—er—been in that state of unconsciousness before?” he went on quickly, as if to obliterate the effect of the too suggestive word.
“Not actually,” Miss Messenger said, hesitated, and then continued: “but I’ve—felt queer once or twice lately.”
“Queer?” Harrison prompted her. ”

“ Greatorex thrust his hands into the pockets of his dinner-jacket and turned round to observe the phenomenon that had distracted Fell’s attention. For a moment his prominent nose and rather small head came out as an emphatic silhouette against the afterglow in the North-West; and to Fell, already deep in the languors of sentiment, presented an air of picturesque romance. ”

“ And then, by an accident, possibly to verify my theory that it was certainly going to rain, I looked up and realised at once the unspeakable difference between that world and our own.
For on this little earth of ours the sky makes no claim on our attention. It has its effects of cloud and light occasionally, and these effects no doubt may engage at times the interest of the poet or the artist. But to us, ordinary people, the sky is always pretty much the same, and we only look at it when we are expecting rain. Even then we often shut our eyes. ”

“ Yet the real danger of that warning did not terrify him as had the enormous onslaught of noise from the barrage. At the next intermission of the deafening bombardment he stood up, rested his hand on the plinth of the obelisk, and stared, wondering and unafraid, into the great arc of the sky. He could see no aeroplanes.... The stillness was so profound that he could hear with a grateful distinctness the soft clucking ripple of the rising flood. ”

“ Whatever the future might hold for him, he had pierced the veil of the commonplace. He had seen and heard on the Thames Embankment that sacred, mystical procession of the Elephants.
He looked at Mrs. Gibson with something of contempt when she brought him his breakfast next morning. He could not respond to her chatter concerning the foolish detail of last night’s raid. She, poor woman, was afraid that she might, in some unknown way, have offended him. Her last effort was meant as an amiable diversion. One never knew whether people weren’t more scared than they chose to admit. ”

“ And then the shadow fell with such suddenness that it was impossible to say how the certainty had come to us. Everyone knew. The astronomers confirmed one another without a dissentient. And there was nothing in the way. With a horrible unanimity the outer planets had left a clear space for the intruder, while the Earth, with that blundering [70] indifference which is surely its chief characteristic, was stolidly marching straight into the path of destruction. Is there any esoteric significance in the fact that the Earth has a greater density than any other member of the solar system? ”

“ I have to experiment and—see how it comes, you know. Do you think his head is too big?”
I thought it was rather big.
The young modeller regarded his creation with a look in which fondness still seemed to preponderate.
“Perhaps if....” he said; then speech died out of him as his hands again began to fashion and improve his little image of humanity.
And as I watched him a vision came to me. I lost consciousness of the boy and his workshop. I wandered away into a dreamland of the imagination, following the lure of a fantasy deeper and more satisfying than the reality of life. ”

“ There was a perceptible movement of air from the west, the familiar voices of the poplars maintained a perpetual background of sound, and when he had come through the plantation to the edge of the lake, he could hear the minute clashing of the reeds as the chasing ripple of the water set them gently swaying. ”

“ Fell suggested.
“We probably mean the same thing,” Greatorex said. “I’ve got a trick of using prose words to get attention. ‘Wonderful miracle,’ you know, would be either a cliché or bombast in a leader.”
Fell did not appear to hear this explanation. He was looking out over the swell of Orton Park that was separated from Harrison’s garden by the width of the lake. The afterglow was slowly dying and the greens of turf and wood were deepening and hardening into dark masses little softer than the funereal shadows of the clustered yews. ”

“ YOUNG STRICKLAND’S CAREER NO DOUBT the story of the future is written, so far as the future is an expression of present potentialities. We boast our foreknowledge of planetary history, and can prophesy with fine accuracy the occurrence of every major and minor eclipse or occultation in the solar system. But in the most precise science there remains always at least one element that is undefinable and unknowable. The regular traffic of planets about the sun might one day be upset by the coming of an unknown visitor from the deeps of space. The materials of our knowledge are so limited. ”

“ On the other side of the Earth men are feeling an intolerable heaviness. And our speed increases. We have been drawn out of our orbit. We are rushing now to greet the stranger with a kiss of fire. Our circling about the sun is done for ever. ”

“ For though a man may know something of the past, the future is hidden from him, and I represented to him a future that could only be reckoned in a vast procession of centuries. Yet as I came nearer, so near that I could rest my hands on his knees and gaze up closely into his eyes, he shrank a little and leaned slightly away from me, as if he were uncertainly aware of an unfamiliar, distasteful presence. ”

“ It was just possible in the circumstances that there might be something very like an armed revolution, despite the fact that his arguments had been so indubitably sound and right. Henry Wolverton was exceedingly annoyed and upset.
His troubles did not end there. Just as he had succeeded, by a masterly effort of concentration, in putting away the thought of this stupid anomaly and returning to his work, his housekeeper came and tapped at his door—a thing she had been explicitly forbidden to do, at that time of day, in any circumstances whatever. ”