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hair, "this really won't do. The man really did lose a ship.
Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, I took his ship."
Dr. Quayle swung round for an instant so that his silk-lined
overcoat rustled, and stared singularly at Turnbull. Then he said
with hurried amiability: "Why, of course you did. Quite so, quite
so," and with courteous gestures went striding up the garden
path. Under the first laburnum-tree he stopped, however, and
pulling out his pencil and notebook wrote down feverishly:
"Singular development in the Elenthero-maniac, Turnbull. Sudden
manifestation of Rapinavititis--the delusion that one has stolen
a ship. First case ever recorded."
Turnbull stood for an instant staggered into stillness. Then he
ran raging round the garden to find MacIan, just as a husband,
even a bad husband, will run raging to find his wife if he is
full of a furious query. He found MacIan stalking moodily about
the half-lit garden, after his extraordinary meeting with
Beatrice. No one who saw his slouching stride and sunken head
could have known that his soul was in the seventh heaven of
ecstasy. He did not think; he did not even very definitely
desire. He merely wallowed in memories, chiefly in material
memories; words said with a certain cadence or trivial turns of
the neck or wrist. Into the middle of his stationary and
senseless enjoyment were thrust abruptly the projecting elbow and
the projecting red beard of Turnbull. MacIan stepped back a
little, and the soul in his eyes came very slowly to its windows.
When James Turnbull had the glittering sword-point planted upon
his breast he was in far less danger. For three pulsating seconds
after the interruption MacIan was in a mood to have murdered his
father.
And yet his whole emotional anger fell from him when he saw
Turnbull's face, in which the eyes seemed to be bursting from the
head like bullets. All the fire and fragrance even of young and
honourable love faded for a moment before that stiff agony of
interrogation.
"Are you hurt, Turnbull?" he asked, anxiously.
"I am dying," answered the other quite calmly. "I am in the quite
literal sense of the words dying to know something. I want to
know what all this can possibly mean."
MacIan did not answer, and he continued with asperity: "You are
still thinking about that girl, but I tell you the whole thing is
incredible. She's not the only person here. I've met the fellow
Wilkinson, whose yacht we lost. I've met the very magistrate you
were hauled up to when you broke my window. What can it
mean--meeting all these old people again? One never meets such
old friends again except in a dream."
Then after a silence he cried with a rending sincerity: "Are you
really there, Evan? Have you ever been really there? Am I simply
dreaming?"
MacIan had been listening with a living silence to every word,
and now his face flamed with one of his rare revelations of life.
"No, you good atheist," he cried; "no, you clean, courteous,
reverent, pious old blasphemer. No, you are not dreaming--you are
waking up."
"What do you mean?"
"There are two states where one meets so many old friends," said
MacIan; "one is a dream, the other is the end of the world."
"And you say----"
"I say this is not a dream," said Evan in a ringing voice.
"You really mean to suggest----" began Turnbull.
"Be silent! or I shall say it all wrong," said MacIan, breathing
hard. "It's hard to explain, anyhow. An apocalypse is the
opposite of a dream. A dream is falser than the outer life. But
the end of the world is more actual than the world it ends. I
don't say this is really the end of the world, but it's something
like that--it's the end of something. All the people are crowding
into one corner. Everything is coming to a point."
"What is the point?" asked Turnbull.
"I can't see it," said Evan; "it is too large and plain."
Then after a silence he said: "I can't see it--and yet I will try
to describe it. Turnbull, three days ago I saw quite suddenly
that our duel was not right after all."
"Three days ago!" repeated Turnbull. "When and why did this
illumination occur?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]