Twelve Stories and a Dream (12 page)

He stood up without heeding me, took the middle of the hearthrug, and
faced me. For a moment he regarded his feet thoughtfully, and then for
all the rest of the time his eyes were on the opposite wall, with an
intent expression. He raised his two hands slowly to the level of his
eyes and so began....

Now, Sanderson is a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Four Kings,
which devotes itself so ably to the study and elucidation of all the
mysteries of Masonry past and present, and among the students of this
lodge Sanderson is by no means the least. He followed Clayton's motions
with a singular interest in his reddish eye. "That's not bad," he
said, when it was done. "You really do, you know, put things together,
Clayton, in a most amazing fashion. But there's one little detail out."

"I know," said Clayton. "I believe I could tell you which."

"Well?"

"This," said Clayton, and did a queer little twist and writhing and
thrust of the hands.

"Yes."

"That, you know, was what HE couldn't get right," said Clayton. "But how
do YOU—?"

"Most of this business, and particularly how you invented it, I don't
understand at all," said Sanderson, "but just that phase—I do." He
reflected. "These happen to be a series of gestures—connected with a
certain branch of esoteric Masonry. Probably you know. Or else—HOW?" He
reflected still further. "I do not see I can do any harm in telling you
just the proper twist. After all, if you know, you know; if you don't,
you don't."

"I know nothing," said Clayton, "except what the poor devil let out last
night."

"Well, anyhow," said Sanderson, and placed his churchwarden very
carefully upon the shelf over the fireplace. Then very rapidly he
gesticulated with his hands.

"So?" said Clayton, repeating.

"So," said Sanderson, and took his pipe in hand again.

"Ah, NOW," said Clayton, "I can do the whole thing—right."

He stood up before the waning fire and smiled at us all. But I think
there was just a little hesitation in his smile. "If I begin—" he said.

"I wouldn't begin," said Wish.

"It's all right!" said Evans. "Matter is indestructible. You don't think
any jiggery-pokery of this sort is going to snatch Clayton into the
world of shades. Not it! You may try, Clayton, so far as I'm concerned,
until your arms drop off at the wrists."

"I don't believe that," said Wish, and stood up and put his arm on
Clayton's shoulder. "You've made me half believe in that story somehow,
and I don't want to see the thing done!"

"Goodness!" said I, "here's Wish frightened!"

"I am," said Wish, with real or admirably feigned intensity. "I believe
that if he goes through these motions right he'll GO."

"He'll not do anything of the sort," I cried. "There's only one way out
of this world for men, and Clayton is thirty years from that. Besides...
And such a ghost! Do you think—?"

Wish interrupted me by moving. He walked out from among our chairs and
stopped beside the tole and stood there. "Clayton," he said, "you're a
fool."

Clayton, with a humorous light in his eyes, smiled back at him. "Wish,"
he said, "is right and all you others are wrong. I shall go. I shall get
to the end of these passes, and as the last swish whistles through the
air, Presto!—this hearthrug will be vacant, the room will be blank
amazement, and a respectably dressed gentleman of fifteen stone will
plump into the world of shades. I'm certain. So will you be. I decline
to argue further. Let the thing be tried."

"NO," said Wish, and made a step and ceased, and Clayton raised his
hands once more to repeat the spirit's passing.

By that time, you know, we were all in a state of tension—largely
because of the behaviour of Wish. We sat all of us with our eyes on
Clayton—I, at least, with a sort of tight, stiff feeling about me as
though from the back of my skull to the middle of my thighs my body had
been changed to steel. And there, with a gravity that was imperturbably
serene, Clayton bowed and swayed and waved his hands and arms before us.
As he drew towards the end one piled up, one tingled in one's teeth. The
last gesture, I have said, was to swing the arms out wide open, with the
face held up. And when at last he swung out to this closing gesture I
ceased even to breathe. It was ridiculous, of course, but you know that
ghost-story feeling. It was after dinner, in a queer, old shadowy house.
Would he, after all—?

There he stood for one stupendous moment, with his arms open and his
upturned face, assured and bright, in the glare of the hanging lamp. We
hung through that moment as if it were an age, and then came from all
of us something that was half a sigh of infinite relief and half a
reassuring "NO!" For visibly—he wasn't going. It was all nonsense. He
had told an idle story, and carried it almost to conviction, that was
all!... And then in that moment the face of Clayton, changed.

It changed. It changed as a lit house changes when its lights are
suddenly extinguished. His eyes were suddenly eyes that were fixed, his
smile was frozen on his lips, and he stood there still. He stood there,
very gently swaying.

That moment, too, was an age. And then, you know, chairs were scraping,
things were falling, and we were all moving. His knees seemed to give,
and he fell forward, and Evans rose and caught him in his arms....

It stunned us all. For a minute I suppose no one said a coherent thing.
We believed it, yet could not believe it.... I came out of a muddled
stupefaction to find myself kneeling beside him, and his vest and shirt
were torn open, and Sanderson's hand lay on his heart....

Well—the simple fact before us could very well wait our convenience;
there was no hurry for us to comprehend. It lay there for an hour; it
lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to this day. Clayton
had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so near to and so far from
our own, and he had gone thither by the only road that mortal man
may take. But whether he did indeed pass there by that poor ghost's
incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly by apoplexy in the
midst of an idle tale—as the coroner's jury would have us believe—is
no matter for my judging; it is just one of those inexplicable riddles
that must remain unsolved until the final solution of all things shall
come. All I certainly know is that, in the very moment, in the very
instant, of concluding those passes, he changed, and staggered, and fell
down before us—dead!

"It isn't every one who's been a god," said the sunburnt man. "But it's
happened to me. Among other things."

I intimated my sense of his condescension.

"It don't leave much for ambition, does it?" said the sunburnt man.

"I was one of those men who were saved from the Ocean Pioneer. Gummy!
how time flies! It's twenty years ago. I doubt if you'll remember
anything of the Ocean Pioneer?"

The name was familiar, and I tried to recall when and where I had read
it. The Ocean Pioneer? "Something about gold dust," I said vaguely, "but
the precise—"

"That's it," he said. "In a beastly little channel she hadn't no
business in—dodging pirates. It was before they'd put the kybosh on
that business. And there'd been volcanoes or something and all the rocks
was wrong. There's places about by Soona where you fair have to follow
the rocks about to see where they're going next. Down she went in twenty
fathoms before you could have dealt for whist, with fifty thousand
pounds worth of gold aboard, it was said, in one form or another."

"Survivors?"

"Three."

"I remember the case now," I said. "There was something about salvage—"

But at the word salvage the sunburnt man exploded into language so
extraordinarily horrible that I stopped aghast. He came down to more
ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly. "Excuse me," he said,
"but—salvage!"

He leant over towards me. "I was in that job," he said. "Tried to make
myself a rich man, and got made a god instead. I've got my feelings—

"It ain't all jam being a god," said the sunburnt man, and for some time
conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms. At last he
took up his tale again.

"There was me," said the sunburnt man, "and a seaman named Jacobs, and
Always, the mate of the Ocean Pioneer. And him it was that set the
whole thing going. I remember him now, when we was in the jolly-boat,
suggesting it all to our minds just by one sentence. He was a wonderful
hand at suggesting things. 'There was forty thousand pounds,' he said,
'on that ship, and it's for me to say just where she went down.' It
didn't need much brains to tumble to that. And he was the leader from
the first to the last. He got hold of the Sanderses and their brig; they
were brothers, and the brig was the Pride of Banya, and he it was bought
the diving-dress—a second-hand one with a compressed air apparatus
instead of pumping. He'd have done the diving too, if it hadn't made him
sick going down. And the salvage people were mucking about with a chart
he'd cooked up, as solemn as could be, at Starr Race, a hundred and
twenty miles away.

"I can tell you we was a happy lot aboard that brig, jokes and drink
and bright hopes all the time. It all seemed so neat and clean and
straightforward, and what rough chaps call a 'cert.' And we used to
speculate how the other blessed lot, the proper salvagers, who'd started
two days before us, were getting on, until our sides fairly ached. We
all messed together in the Sanderses' cabin—it was a curious crew, all
officers and no men—and there stood the diving-dress waiting its turn.
Young Sanders was a humorous sort of chap, and there certainly was
something funny in the confounded thing's great fat head and its stare,
and he made us see it too. 'Jimmie Goggles,' he used to call it, and
talk to it like a Christian. Asked if he was married, and how Mrs.
Goggles was, and all the little Goggleses. Fit to make you split. And
every blessed day all of us used to drink the health of Jimmy Goggles in
rum, and unscrew his eye and pour a glass of rum in him, until, instead
of that nasty mackintosheriness, he smelt as nice in his inside as
a cask of rum. It was jolly times we had in those days, I can tell
you—little suspecting, poor chaps! what was a-coming.

"We weren't going to throw away our chances by any blessed hurry, you
know, and we spent a whole day sounding our way towards where the Ocean
Pioneer had gone down, right between two chunks of ropy grey rock—lava
rocks that rose nearly out of the water. We had to lay off about half a
mile to get a safe anchorage, and there was a thundering row who should
stop on board. And there she lay just as she had gone down, so that
you could see the top of the masts that was still standing perfectly
distinctly. The row ending in all coming in the boat. I went down in the
diving-dress on Friday morning directly it was light.

"What a surprise it was! I can see it all now quite distinctly. It was
a queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People over here
think every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore and palm trees
and surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance, wasn't a bit that way.
Not common rocks they were, undermined by waves; but great curved banks
like ironwork cinder heaps, with green slime below, and thorny shrubs
and things just waving upon them here and there, and the water glassy
calm and clear, and showing you a kind of dirty grey-black shine, with
huge flaring red-brown weeds spreading motionless, and crawling and
darting things going through it. And far away beyond the ditches and
pools and the heaps was a forest on the mountain flank, growing again
after the fires and cinder showers of the last eruption. And the other
way forest, too, and a kind of broken—what is it?—ambytheatre of black
and rusty cinders rising out of it all, and the sea in a kind of bay in
the middle.

"The dawn, I say, was just coming, and there wasn't much colour about
things, and not a human being but ourselves anywhere in sight up or down
the channel. Except the Pride of Banya, lying out beyond a lump of rocks
towards the line of the sea.

"Not a human being in sight," he repeated, and paused.

"I don't know where they came from, not a bit. And we were feeling so
safe that we were all alone that poor young Sanders was a-singing. I was
in Jimmy Goggles, all except the helmet. 'Easy,' says Always, 'there's
her mast.' And after I'd had just one squint over the gunwale, I caught
up the bogey and almost tipped out as old Sanders brought the boat
round. When the windows were screwed and everything was all right, I
shut the valve from the air belt in order to help my sinking, and
jumped overboard, feet foremost—for we hadn't a ladder. I left the boat
pitching, and all of them staring down into the water after me, as my
head sank down into the weeds and blackness that lay about the mast.
I suppose nobody, not the most cautious chap in the world, would have
bothered about a lookout at such a desolate place. It stunk of solitude.

"Of course you must understand that I was a greenhorn at diving. None of
us were divers. We'd had to muck about with the thing to get the way of
it, and this was the first time I'd been deep. It feels damnable. Your
ears hurt beastly. I don't know if you've ever hurt yourself yawning or
sneezing, but it takes you like that, only ten times worse. And a pain
over the eyebrows here—splitting—and a feeling like influenza in the
head. And it isn't all heaven in your lungs and things. And going down
feels like the beginning of a lift, only it keeps on. And you can't turn
your head to see what's above you, and you can't get a fair squint at
what's happening to your feet without bending down something painful.
And being deep it was dark, let alone the blackness of the ashes and mud
that formed the bottom. It was like going down out of the dawn back into
the night, so to speak.