Being the Account of Dr. Nebogipfel's Sojourn in
Llyddwdd
How an Esoteric Story Became Possible
THE ESOTERIC STORY BASED ON THE CLERGYMAN'S DEPOSITIONS
The Anachronic Man
The Chronic Argo
Originally from The Science Schools Journal (1888)
published by the Royal College of Science
About half-a-mile outside the village of Llyddwdd by the road that
goes up over the eastern flank of the mountain called Pen-y-pwll to
Rwstog is a large farm-building known as the Manse. It derives this
title from the fact that it was at one time the residence of the
minister of the Calvinistic Methodists. It is a quaint, low, irregular
erection, lying back some hundred yards from the railway, and now fast
passing into a ruinous state.
Since its construction in the latter half of the last century
this house has undergone many changes of fortune, having been abandoned
long since by the farmer of the surrounding acres for less pretentious
and more commodious headquarters. Among others Miss Carnot, “the Gallic
Sappho” at one time made it her home, and later on an old man named
Williams became its occupier. The foul murder of this tenant by his two
sons was the cause of its remaining for some considerable period
uninhabited; with the inevitable consequence of its undergoing very
extensive dilapidation.
The house had got a bad name, and adolescent man and Nature
combined to bring swift desolation upon it. The fear of the Williamses
which kept the Llyddwdd lads from gratifying their propensity to invade
its deserted interior, manifested itself in unusually destructive
resentment against its external breakables. The missiles with which
they at once confessed and defied their spiritual dread, left scarcely
a splinter of glass, and only battered relics of the old-fashioned
leaden frames, in its narrow windows, while numberless shattered tiles
about the house, and four or five black apertures yawning behind the
naked rafters in the roof, also witnessed vividly to the energy of
their rejection. Rain and wind thus had free way to enter the empty
rooms and work their will there, old Time aiding and abetting.
Alternately soaked and desiccated, the planks of flooring and wainscot
warped apart strangely, split here and there, and tore themselves away
in paroxysms of rheumatic pain from the rust-devoured nails that had
once held them firm. The plaster of walls and ceiling, growing
green-black with a rain-fed crust of lowly life, parted slowly from the
fermenting laths; and large fragments thereof falling down inexplicably
in tranquil hours, with loud concussion and clatter, gave strength to
the popular superstition that old Williams and his sons were fated to
re-enact their fearful tragedy until the final judgment. White roses
and daedal creepers, that Miss Carnot had first adorned the walls with,
spread now luxuriantly over the lichen-filmed tiles of the roof, and in
slender graceful sprays timidly invaded the ghostly cobweb-draped
apartments. Fungi, sickly pale, began to displace and uplift the bricks
in the cellar floor; while on the rotting wood everywhere they
clustered, in all the glory of the purple and mottled crimson,
yellow-brown and hepatite. Woodlice and ants, beetles and moths, winged
and creeping things innumerable, found each day a more congenial home
among the ruins; and after them in ever-increasing multitudes swarmed
the blotchy ,toads. Swallows and martins built every year more thickly
in the silent, airy, upper chambers. Bats and owls struggled for the
crepuscular corners of the lower rooms. Thus, in the Spring of the year
eighteen hundred and eighty-seven, was Nature taking over, gradually
but certainly, the tenancy of the old Manse. “The house was falling
into decay,” as men who do not appreciate the application of human
derelicts to other beings' use would say, “surely and swiftly.” But it
was destined nevertheless to shelter another human tenant before its
final dissolution.
There was no intelligence of the advent of a new inhabitant in
quiet Llyddwdd. He came without a solitary premonition out of the vast
unknown into the sphere of minute village observation and gossip. He
fell into the Llyddwdd world, as it were, like a thunderbolt falling in
the daytime. Suddenly, out of nothingness, he
was. Rumour,
indeed, vaguely averred that he was seen to arrive by a certain train
from London, and to walk straight without hesitation to the old Manse,
giving neither explanatory word nor sign to mortal as to his purpose
there: but then the same fertile source of information also hinted that
he was first beheld skimming down the slopes of steep Pen-y-pwll with
exceeding swiftness, riding, as it appeared to the intelligent
observer, upon an instrument not unlike a sieve and that he entered the
house by the chimney. Of these conflicting reports, the former was the
first to be generally circulated, but the latter, in view of the
bizarre presence and eccentric ways of the newest inhabitant, obtained
wider credence. By whatever means he arrived, there can be no doubt
that he was in, and in possession of the Manse, on the first of May;
because on the morning of that day he was inspected by Mrs. Morgan ap
Lloyd Jones, and subsequently by the numerous persons her report
brought up the mountain slope, engaged in the curious occupation of
nailing sheet-tin across the void window sockets of his new domicile —
“blinding his house", as Mrs. Morgan ap Lloyd Jones not inaptly termed
it.
He was a small-bodied, sallow faced little man, clad in a
close-fitting garment of some stiff, dark material, which Mr. Parry
Davies the Llyddwdd shoemaker, opined was leather. His aquiline nose,
thin lips, high cheek-ridges, and pointed chin, were all small and
mutually well proportioned; but the bones and muscles of his face were
rendered excessively prominent and distinct by his extreme leanness.
The same cause contributed to the sunken appearance of the large
eager-looking grey eyes, that gazed forth from under his phenomenally
wide and high forehead. It was this latter feature that most powerfully
attracted the attention of an observer. It seemed to be great beyond
all preconceived ratio to the rest of his countenance. Dimensions,
corrugations, wrinkles, venation, were alike abnormally exaggerated.
Below it his eyes glowed like lights in some cave at a cliff's foot. It
so over-powered and suppressed the rest of his face as to give an
unhuman appearance almost, to what would otherwise have been an
unquestionably handsome profile. The lank black hair that hung unkempt
before his eyes served to increase rather than conceal this effect, by
adding to unnatural altitude a suggestion o£ hydrocephalic projection:
and the idea of something ultra human was furthermore accentuated by
the temporal arteries that pulsated visibly through his transparent
yellow skin. No wonder, in view even of these things, that among the
highly and over-poetical Cymric of Llyddwdd the sieve theory of arrival
found considerable favour.
It was his bearing and actions, however, much more than his
personality, that won over believers to the warlock notion of matters.
In almost every circumstance of life the observant villagers soon found
his ways were not only not
their ways, but altogether
inexplicable upon any theory of motives they could conceive. Thus, in a
small matter at the beginning, when Arthur Price Williams, eminent and
famous in every tavern in Caernarvonshire for his social gifts,
endeavoured, in choicest Welsh and even choicer English, to inveigle
the stranger into conversation over the sheet-tin performance, he
failed utterly. Inquisitional supposition, straightforward enquiry,
offer of assistance, suggestion of method, sarcasm, irony, abuse, and
at last, gage of battle, though shouted with much effort from the road
hedge, went unanswered and apparently unheard. Missile weapons, Arthur
Price Williams found, were equally unavailing for the purpose of
introduction, and the gathered crowd dispersed with unappeased
curiosity and suspicion. Later in the day, the swarth apparition was
seen striding down the mountain road towards the village, hatless, and
with such swift width of step and set resolution of countenance, that
Arthur Price Williams, beholding him from afar from the Pig and Whistle
doorway was seized with dire consternation, and hid behind the Dutch
oven in the kitchen till he was past. Wild panic also smote the
school-house as the children were coming out, and drove them indoors
like leaves before a gale. He was merely seeking the provision shop,
however, and erupted thencefrom after a prolonged stay, loaded with a
various armful of blue parcels, a loaf, herrings, pigs' trotters, salt
pork, and a black battle, with which he returned in the same swift
projectile gait to the Manse. His way of shopping was to name, and to
name simply, without solitary other word of explanation, civility or
request, the article he required.
The shopkeeper's crude meteorological superstitions and
inquisitive commonplaces, he seemed not to hear, and he might have been
esteemed deaf if he had not evinced the promptest attention to the
faintest relevant remark. Consequently it was speedily rumoured that he
was determined to avoid all but the most necessary human intercourse.
He lived altogether mysteriously, in the decaying manse, without mortal
service or companionship, presumably sleeping on planks or litter, and
either preparing his own food or eating it raw. This, coupled with the
popular conception of the haunting patricides, did much to strengthen
the popular supposition of some vast gulf between the newcomer and
common humanity. The only thing that was inharmonious with this idea of
severance from mankind was a constant flux of crates filled with
grotesquely contorted glassware, cases of brazen and steel instruments,
huge coils of wire, vast iron and fire-clay implements, of
inconceivable purpose, jars and phials labelled in black and scarlet —
POISON, huge packages of books, and gargantuan
rolls of cartridge paper, which set in towards his Llyddwdd quarters
from the outer world. The apparently hieroglyphic inscriptions on these
various consignments revealed at the profound scrutiny of Pugh Jones
that the style and title of the new inhabitant was Dr. Moses
Nebogipfel, Ph.D., F.R.S., N.W.R.,
PAID: at
which discovery much edification was felt, especially among the purely
Welsh-speaking community. Further than this, these arrivals, by their
evident unfitness for any allowable mortal use, and inferential
diabolicalness, filled the neighbourhood with a vague horror and lively
curiosity, which were greatly augmented by the extraordinary phenomena,
and still more extraordinary accounts thereof, that followed their
reception in the Manse.
The first of these was on Wednesday, the fifteenth of May, when
the Calvinistic Methodists of Llyddwdd had their annual commemoration
festival; on which occasion, in accordance with custom, dwellers in the
surrounding parishes of Rwstog, Pen-y-garn, Caergyllwdd, Llanrdd, and
even distant Llanrwst flocked into the village. Popular thanks to
Providence were materialised in the usual way, by means of plum-bread
and butter, mixed tea,
terza, consecrated flirtations,
kiss-in-the-ring, rough-and-tumble football, and vituperative political
speechmaking. About half-past eight the fun began to tarnish, and the
assembly to break up; and by nine numerous couples and occasional
groups were wending their way in the darkling along the hilly Llyddwdd
and Rwstog road. It was a calm warm night; one of those nights when
lamps, gas and heavy sleep seem stupid ingratitude to the Creator. The
zenith sky was an ineffable deep lucent blue, and the evening star hung
golden in the liquid darkness of the west. In the north-north-west, a
faint phosphorescence marked the sunken day. The moon was just rising,
pallid and gibbous over the huge haze-dimmed shoulder of Pen-y-pwll.
Against the wan eastern sky, from the vague outline of the mountain
slope, the Manse stood out black, clear and solitary. The stillness of
the twilight had hushed the myriad murmurs of the day. Only the sounds
of footsteps and voices and laughter, that came fitfully rising and
falling from the roadway, and an intermittent hammering in the darkened
dwelling, broke the silence. Suddenly a strange whizzing, buzzing whirr
filled the night air, and a bright flicker glanced across the dim path
of the wayfarers. All eyes were turned in astonishment to the old
Manse. The house no longer loomed a black featureless block but was
filled to overflowing with light. >From the gaping holes in the roof,
from chinks and fissures amid tiles and brickwork, from every gap which
Nature or man had pierced in the crumbling old shell, a blinding
blue-white glare was streaming, beside which the rising moon seemed a
disc of opaque sulphur. The thin mist of the dewy night had caught the
violet glow and hung, unearthly smoke, over the colourless blaze. A
strange turmoil and outcrying in the old Manse now began, and grew ever
more audible to the clustering spectators, and therewith came clanging
loud impacts against the window-guarding tin. Then from the gleaming
roof-gaps of the house suddenly vomited forth a wonderous swarm of
heteromerous living things — swallows, sparrows, martins, owls, bats,
insects in visible multitudes, to hang for many minutes a noisy,
gyring, spreading cloud over the black gables and chimneys. . . and
then slowly to thin out and vanish away in the night.
As this tumult died away the throbbing humming that had first
arrested attention grew once more in the listener's hearing, until at
last it was the only sound in the long stillness. Presently, however,
the road gradually awoke again to the beating and shuffling of feet, as
the knots of Rwstog people, one by one, turned their blinking eyes from
the dazzling whiteness and, pondering deeply, continued their homeward
way.
The cultivated reader will have already discerned that this
phenomenon, which sowed a whole crop of uncanny thoughts in the minds
of these worthy folk, was simply the installation of the electric light
in the Manse. Truly, this last vicissitude of the old house was its
strangest one. Its revival to mortal life was like the raising of
Lazarus. From that hour forth, by night and day, behind the tin-blinded
windows, the tamed lightning illuminated every corner of its quickly
changing interior. The almost frenzied energy of the lank-haired,
leather-clad little doctor swept away into obscure holes and corners
and common destruction, creeper sprays, toadstools, rose leaves, birds'
nests, birds' eggs, cobwebs, and all the coatings and lovingly fanciful
trimmings with which that maternal old dotard, Dame Nature, had tricked
out the decaying house for its lying in state. The magneto-electric
apparatus whirred incessantly amid the vestiges of the wainscoted
dining-room, where once the eighteenth-century tenant had piously read
morning prayer and eaten his Sunday dinner; and in the place of his
sacred symbolical sideboard was a nasty heap of coke. The oven of the
bakehouse supplied substratum and material for a forge, whose snorting,
panting bellows, and intermittent, ruddy spark-laden blast made the
benighted, but Bible-lit Welsh women murmur in liquid Cymric, as they
hurried by: “Whose breath kindleth coals, and out of his mouth is a
flame of fire.” For the idea these good people formed of it was that a
tame, but occasionally restive, leviathan had been added to the terrors
of the haunted house. The constantly increasing accumulation of pieces
of machinery, big brass castings, block tin, casks, crates, and
packages of innumerable articles, by their demands for space,
necessitated the sacrifice of most of the slighter partitions of the
house, and the beams and flooring of the upper chambers were also
mercilessly sawn away by the tireless scientist in such a way as to
convert them into mere shelves and corner brackets of the atrial space
between cellars and rafters. Some of the sounder planking was utilised
in the making of a rude broad table, upon which files and heaps of
geometrical diagrams speedily accumulated. The production of these
latter seemed to be the object upon which the mind of Dr. Nebogipfel
was so inflexibly set. All other circumstances of his life were made
entirely subsidiary to this one occupation. Strangely complicated
traceries of lines they were — plans, elevations, sections by surfaces
and solids, that, with the help of logarithmic mechanical apparatus and
involved curvigraphical machines, spread swiftly under his expert hands
over yard after yard of paper. Some of these symbolised shapes he
despatched to London, and they presently returned,
realised, in
forms of brass and ivory, and nickel and mahogany. Some of them he
himself translated into solid models of metal and wood; occasionally
casting the metallic ones in moulds of sand, but often laboriously
hewing them out of the block for greater precision of dimension. In
this second process, among other appliances, he employed a steel
circular saw set with diamond powder and made to rotate with
extraordinary swiftness, by means of steam and multiplying gear. It was
this latter thing, more than all else, that filled Llyddwdd with a
sickly loathing of the Doctor as a man of blood and darkness. Often in
the silence of midnight — for the newest inhabitant heeded the sun but
little in his incessant research — the awakened dwellers around
Pen-y-pwll would hear, what was at first a complaining murmur, like the
groaning of a wounded man, “
gurr-urrurr-
URR
“, rising by slow gradations in pitch and intensity to the likeness of a
voice in despairing passionate protest, and at last ending abruptly in
a sharp piercing shriek that rang in the ears for hours afterwards and
begot numberless gruesome dreams.
The mystery of all these unearthly noises and inexplicable
phenomena, the Doctor's inhumanly brusque bearing and evident
uneasiness when away from his absorbing occupation, his entire and
jealous seclusion, and his terrifying behaviour to certain officious
intruders, roused popular resentment and curiously to the highest, and
a plot was already on foot to make some sort of popular inquisition
(probably accompanied by an experimental ducking) into his proceedings,
when the sudden death of the hunchback Hughes in a fit, brought matters
to an unexpected crisis. It happened in broad daylight, in the roadway
just opposite the Manse. Half a dozen people witnessed it. The
unfortunate creature was seen to fall suddenly and roll about on the
pathway, struggling violently, as it appeared to the spectators, with
some invisible assailant. When assistance reached him he was purple in
the face and his blue lips were covered with a glairy foam. He died
almost as soon as they laid hands on him.
Owen Thomas, the general practitioner, vainly assured the
excited crowd which speedily gathered outside the Pig and Whistle,
whither the body had been carried, that death was unquestionably
natural. A horrible zymotic suspicion had gone forth that the deceased
was the victim of Dr. Nebogipfel's imputed aerial powers. The contagion
was with the news that passed like a flash through the village and set
all Llyddwdd seething with a fierce desire for action against the
worker of this iniquity. Downright superstition, which had previously
walked somewhat modestly about the village, in the fear of ridicule and
the Doctor, now appeared boldly before the sight of all men, clad in
the terrible majesty of truth. People who had hitherto kept entire
silence as to their fears of the imp-like philosopher suddenly
discovered a fearsome pleasure in whispering dread possibilities to
kindred souls, and from whispers of possibilities their
sympathy-fostered utterances soon developed into unhesitating
asserverations in laud and even high-pitched tones. The fancy of a
captive leviathan, already alluded to, which had up to now been the
horrid but secret joy of a certain conclave of ignorant old women, was
published to all the world as indisputable fact; it being stated, on
her own authority, that the animal had, on one occasion, chased Mrs.
Morgan ap Lloyd Jones almost into Rwstog. The story that Nebogipfel had
been heard within the Manse chanting, in conjunction with the
Williamses, horrible blasphemy, and that a “black flapping thing, of
the size of a young calf", had thereupon entered the gap in the roof,
was universally believed in. A grisly anecdote, that owed its
origination to a stumble in the churchyard, was circulated, to the
effect that the Doctor had been caught ghoulishly tearing with his long
white fingers at a new-made grave. The numerously attested declaration
that Nebogipfel and the murdered Williams had been seen hanging the
sons on a ghostly gibbet, at the back of the house, was due to the
electric illumination of a fitfully wind-shaken tree. A hundred like
stories hurtled thickly about the village and darkened the moral
atmosphere. The Reverend Elijah Ulysses Cook, hearing of the tumult,
sallied forth to allay it, and narrowly escaped drawing on himself the
gathering lightning.
By eight o'clock (it was Monday the twenty-second of July) a
grand demonstration had organised itself against the “necromancer”. A
number of bolder hearts among the men formed the nucleus of the
gathering, and at nightfall Arthur Price Williams, John Peters, and
others brought torches and raised their spark-raining flames aloft with
curt ominous suggestions. The less adventurous village manhood came
straggling late to the rendezvous, and with them the married women came
in groups of four or five, greatly increasing the excitement of the
assembly with their shrill hysterical talk and active imaginations.
After these the children and young girls, overcome by undefinable
dread, crept quietly out of the too silent and shadowy houses into the
yellow glare of the pine knots, and the tumultuary noise of the
thickening people. By nine, nearly half the Llyddwdd population was
massed before the Pig and Whistle. There was a confused murmur of many
tongues, but above all the stir and chatter of the growing crowd could
be heard the coarse, cracked voice of the blood-thirsty old fanatic,
Pritchard, drawing a congenial lesson from the fate of the four hundred
and fifty idolators of Carmel.
Just as the church clock was beating out the hour, an occultly
originated movement up hill began, and soon the whole assembly, men,
women, and children, was moving in a fear-compacted mass, towards the
ill-fated doctor's abode. As they left the brightly-lit public house
behind them, a quavering female voice began singing one of those
grim-sounding canticles that so satisfy the Calvinistic ear. In a
wonderfully short time, the tune had been caught up, first by two or
three, and then by the whole procession, and the manifold shuffling of
heavy shoon grew swiftly into rhythm with the beats of the hymn. When,
however, their goal rose, like a blazing star, over the undulation of
the road, the volume of the chanting suddenly died away, leaving only
the voices of the ringleaders, shouting indeed now somewhat out of
tune, but, if anything, more vigorously than before. Their persistence
and example nevertheless failed to prevent a perceptible breaking and
slackening of the pace, as the Manse was neared, and when the gate was
reached, the whole crowd came to a dead halt. Vague fear for the future
had begotten the courage that had brought the villagers thus far: fear
for the present now smothered its kindred birth. The intense blaze from
the gaps in the death-like silent pile lit up rows of livid, hesitating
faces: and a smothered, frightened sobbing broke out among the
children. “Well,” said Arthur Price Williams, addressing Jack Peters,
with an expert assumption of the modest discipleship, “what do we do
now, Jack?” But Peters was regarding the Manse with manifest
dubiety, and ignored the question. The Llyddwdd witch-find seemed to be
suddenly aborting.
At this juncture old Pritchard suddenly pushed his way forward,
gesticulating weirdly with his bony hands and long arms. “
What!“
he shouted, in broken notes, “fear ye to smite when the Lord hateth?
Burn the warlock!” And seizing a flambeau from Peters, he flung
open the rickety gate and strode on down the drive, his torch leaving a
coiling trail of scintillant sparks on the night wind. “Burn the
warlock,” screamed a shrill voice from the wavering crowd, and in a
moment the gregarious human instinct had prevailed. With an outburst of
incoherent, threatening voice, the mob poured after the fanatic.
Woe betide the Philosopher now! They expected barricaded
doors; but with a groan of a conscious insufficiency, the hinge-rusted
portals swung at the push of Pritchard. Blinded by the light, he
hesitated for a second on the threshold, while his followers came
crowding up behind him.
Those who were there say that they saw Dr. Nebogipfel, standing
in the toneless electric glare, on a peculiar erection of brass and
ebony and ivory; and that he seemed to be smiling at them, half
pityingly and half scornfully, as it is said martyrs are wont to smile.
Some assert, moreover, that by his side was sitting a tall man, clad in
ravenswing, and some even aver that this second man — whom others deny
— bore on his face the likeness of the Reverend Elijah Ulysses Cook,
while others declare that he resembled the description of the murdered
Williams. Be that as it may, it must now go unproven for ever, for
suddenly a wonderous thing smote the crowd as it swarmed in through the
entrance. Pritchard pitched headlong on the floor senseless. While
shouts and shrieks of anger, changed in mid utterance to yells of
agonising fear, or to the mute gasp of heart-stopping horror: and then
a frantic rush was made for the doorway.
For the calm, smiling doctor, and his quiet, black-clad
companion, and the polished platform which upbore them, had vanished
before their eyes!
A silvery-foliaged willow by the side of a mere. Out of the
cress-spangled waters below, rise clumps of sedge-blades, and among
them glows the purple fleur-de-lys, and sapphire vapour of
forget-me-nots. Beyond is a sluggish stream of water reflecting the
intense blue of the moist Fenland sky; and beyond that a low
osier-fringed eyot. This limits all the visible universe, save some
scattered pollards and spear-like poplars showing against the violet
distance. At the foot of the willow reclines the Author watching a
copper butterfly fluttering from iris to iris.
Who can fix the colours of the sunset? Who can take a cast of
flame? Let him essay to register the mutations of mortal thought as it
wanders from a copper butterfly to the disembodied soul, and thence
passes to spiritual motions and the vanishing of Dr. Moses Nebogipfel
and the Rev. Elijah Ulysses Cook from the world of sense.
As the author lay basking there and speculating, as another once
did under the Budh tree, on mystic transmutations, a presence became
apparent. There was a somewhat on the eyot between him and the purple
horizon — an opaque reflecting entity, making itself dimly perceptible
by reflection in the water to his averted eyes. He raised them in
curious surprise.
What was it?
He stared in stupefied astonishment at the apparition, doubted,
blinked, rubbed his eyes, stared again, and believed. It was solid, it
cast a shadow, and it upbore two men. There was white metal in it that
blazed in the noontide sun like incandescent magnesium, ebony bars that
drank in the light, and white parts that gleamed like polished ivory.
Yet withal it seemed unreal. The thing was not square as a machine
ought to be, but all awry: it was twisted and seemed falling over,
hanging in two directions, as those queer crystals called triclinic
hang; it seemed like a machine that had been crushed or warped; it was
suggestive and not confirmatory, like the machine of a disordered
dream. The men, too, were dreamlike. One was short, intensely sallow,
with a strangely-shaped head, and clad in a garment of dark olive
green, the other was, grotesquely out of place, evidently a clergyman
of the Established Church, a fair-haired, pale-faced
respectable-looking man.
Once more doubt came rushing in on the author. He sprawled back
and stared at the sky, rubbed his eyes, stared at the willow wands that
hung between him and the blue, closely examined his hands to see if his
eyes had any new things to relate about them, and then sat up again and
stared at the eyot. A gentle breeze stirred the osiers; a white bird
was flapping its way through the lower sky. The machine of the vision
had vanished! It was an illusion — a projection of the subjective —
an assertion of the immateriality of mind. “Yes,” interpolated the
sceptic faculty, “but
how comes it that the clergyman is still
there?“
The clergyman had not vanished. In intense perplexity the author
examined this black-coated phenomenon as he stood regarding the world
with hand-shaded eyes. The author knew the periphery of that eyot by
heart, and the question that troubled him was, “Whence?” The clergyman
looked as Frenchmen look when they land at Newhaven — intensely
travel-worn; his clothes showed rubbed and seamy in the bright day.
When he came to the edge of the island and shouted a question to the
author, his voice was broken and trembled. “Yes,” answered the author,
“it is an island. How did you get there?”
But the clergyman, instead of replying to this asked a very
strange question.
He said “Are you in the nineteenth century?” The author made him
repeat that question before he replied. “Thank heaven,” cried the
clergyman rapturously. Then he asked very eagerly for the exact date.
“August the ninth, eighteen hundred and eighty-seven,” he
repeated after the author. “Heaven be praised!” and sinking down on the
eyot so that the sedges hid him, he audibly burst into tears.
Now the author was mightily surprised at all this, and going a
certain distance along the mere, he obtained a punt, and getting into
it he hastily poled to the eyot where he had last seen the clergyman.
He found him lying insensible among the reeds, and carried him in his
punt to the house where he lived, and the clergyman lay there
insensible for ten days.
Meanwhile, it became known that he was the Rev. Elijah Cook, who
had disappeared from Llyddwdd with Dr. Moses Nebogipfel three weeks
before.
On August 19th, the nurse called the author out of his study to
speak to the invalid. He found him perfectly sensible, but his eyes
were strangely bright, and his face was deadly pale. “Have you found
out who I am?” he asked.
“You are the Rev. Elijah Ulysses Cook, Master of Arts, of
Pembroke College, Oxford, and Rector of Llyddwdd, near Rwstog, in
Caernarvon.”
He bowed his head. “Have you been told anything of how I came
here?”
“I found you among the reeds,” I said. He was silent and
thoughtful for a while. “I have a deposition to make. Will you take it?
It concerns the murder of an old man named Williams, which occurred in
1862, this disappearance of Dr. Moses Nebogipfel, the abduction of a
ward in the year 4003 ——“
The author stared.
“The year of our Lord 4003,” he corrected. “She would come. Also
several assaults on public officials in the years 17,901 and 2.”
The author coughed.
“The years 17,901 and 2, and valuable medical, social, and
physiographical data for all time.”
After a consultation with the doctor, it was decided to have the
deposition taken down, and this is which constitutes the remainder of
the story of the Chronic Argonauts.
On August 28th, 1887, the Rev Elijah Cook died. His body was
conveyed to Llyddwdd, and buried in the churchyard there.
THE ESOTERIC STORY BASED ON THE CLERGYMAN'S DEPOSITIONS
Incidentally it has been remarked in the first part, how the
Reverend Elijah Ulysses Cook attempted and failed to quiet the
superstitious excitement of the villagers on the afternoon of the
memorable twenty-second of July. His next proceeding was to try and
warn the unsocial philosopher of the dangers which impended. With this
intent he made his way from the rumour-pelted village, through the
silent, slumbrous heat of the July afternoon, up the slopes of
Pen-y-pwll, to the old Manse. His loud knocking at the heavy door
called forth dull resonance from the interior, and produced a shower of
lumps of plaster and fragments of decaying touchwood from the rickety
porch, but beyond this the dreamy stillness of the summer mid-day
remained unbroken. Everything was so quiet as he stood there expectant,
that the occasional speech of the haymakers a mile away in the fields,
over towards Rwstog, could be distinctly heard. The reverend gentleman
waited, then knocked again, and waited again, and listened, until the
echoes and the patter of rubbish had melted away into the deep silence,
and the creeping in the blood-vessels of his ears had become
oppressively audible, swelling and sinking with sounds like the
confused murmuring of a distant crowd, and causing a suggestion of
anxious discomfort to spread slowly over his mind.
Again he knocked, this time loud, quick blows with his stick,
and almost immediately afterwards, leaning his hand against the door,
he kicked the panels vigorously. There was a shouting of echoes, a
protesting jarring of hinges, and then the oaken door yawned and
displayed, in the blue blaze of the electric light, vestiges of
partitions, piles of planking and straw, masses of metal, heaps of
papers and overthrown apparatus, to the rector's astonished eyes.
“Doctor Nebogipfel, excuse my intruding,” he called out, but the only
response was a reverberation among the black beams and shadows that
hung dimly above. For almost a minute he stood there, leaning forward
over the threshold, staring at the glittering mechanisms, diagrams,
books, scattered indiscriminately with broken food, packing cases,
heaps of coke, hay, and microcosmic lumber, about the undivided house
cavity; and then, removing his hat and treading stealthily, as if the
silence were a sacred thing, he stepped into the apparently deserted
shelter of the Doctor.
His eyes sought everywhere, as he cautiously made his way
through the confusion, with a strange anticipation of finding
Nebogipfel hidden somewhere in the sharp black shadows among the
litter, so strong in him was an indescribable sense of perceiving
presence. This feeling was so vivid that, when, after an abortive
exploration, he seated himself upon Nebogipfel's diagram-covered bench,
it made him explain in a forced hoarse voice to the stillness — “He is
not here. I have something to say to him. I must wait for him.” It was
so vivid, too, that the trickling of some grit down the wall in the
vacant corner behind him made him start round in a sudden perspiration.
There was nothing visible there, but turning his head back, he was
stricken rigid with horror by the swift, noiseless apparition of
Nebogipfel, ghastly pale, and with red stained hands, crouching upon a
strange-looking metallic platform, and with his deep grey eyes looking
intently into the visitor's face.
Cook's first impulse was to yell out his fear, but his throat
was paralysed, and he could only stare fascinated at the bizarre
countenance that had thus clashed suddenly into visibility. The lips
were quivering and the breath came in short convulsive sobs. The
un-human forehead was wet with perspiration, while the veins were
swollen, knotted and purple. The Doctor's red hands, too, he noticed,
were trembling, as the hands of slight people tremble after intense
muscular exertion, and his lips closed and opened as if he, too, had a
difficulty in speaking as he gasped, “Who — what do you do here?”
Cook answered not a word, but stared with hair erect, open
mouth, and dilated eyes, at the dark red unmistakeable smear that
streaked the pure ivory and gleaming nickel and shining ebony of the
platform.
“What are you doing here?” repeated the doctor, raising himself.
“What do you want?”
Cook gave a convulsive effort. “In Heaven's name,
what
are you?” he gasped; and then black curtains came closing in from every
side, sweeping the squatting dwarfish phantasm that reeled before him
into rayless, voiceless night.
The Reverend Elijah Ulysses Cook recovered his perceptions to
find himself lying on the floor of the old Manse, and Doctor
Nebogipfel, no longer blood-stained and with all trace of his agitation
gone, kneeling by his side and bending over him with a glass of brandy
in his hand. “Do not be alarmed, sir,” said the philosopher with a
faint smile, as the clergyman opened his eyes. “I have not treated you
to a disembodied spirit, or anything nearly so extraordinary . . . may
I offer you this?”
The clergyman submitted quietly to the brandy, and then stared
perplexed into Nebogipfel's face, vainly searching his memory for what
occurrences had preceded his insensibility. Raising himself at last,
into a sitting posture, he saw the oblique mass of metals that had
appeared with the doctor, and immediately all that happened flashed
back upon his mind. He looked from this structure to the recluse, and
from the recluse to the structure.
“There is absolutely no deception, sir,” said Nebogipfel with
the slightest trace of mockery in his voice. “I lay no claim to work in
matters spiritual. It is a bona fide mechanical contrivance, a
thing emphatically of this sordid world. Excuse me — just one minute.”
He rose from his knees, stepped upon the mahogany platform, took a
curiously curved lever in his hand and pulled it over. Cook rubbed his
eyes. There certainly was no deception. The doctor and the machine had
vanished.
The reverend gentleman felt no horror this time, only a slight
nervous shock, to see the doctor presently re-appear “in the twinkling
of an eye” and get down from the machine. From that he walked in a
straight line with his hands behind his back and his face downcast,
until his progress was stopped by the intervention of a circular saw;
then, turning round sharply on his heel, he said:
“I was thinking while I was . . . away . . . Would you like to
come? I should greatly value a companion.”
The clergyman was still sitting, hatless, on the floor. “I am
afraid,” he said slowly, “you will think me stupid ——“
“Not at all,” interrupted the doctor. “The stupidity is mine.
You desire to have all this explained . . . wish to know where I am
going first. I have spoken so little with men of this age for the last
ten years or more that I have ceased to make due allowances and
concessions for other minds. I will do my best, but that I fear will be
very unsatisfactory. It is a long story . . . do you find that floor
comfortable to sit on? If not, there is a nice packing case over there,
or some straw behind you, or this bench — the diagrams are done with
now, but I am afraid of the drawing pins. You may sit on the Chronic
Argo!”
“No, thank you,” slowly replied the clergyman, eyeing that
deformed structure thus indicated, suspiciously; “I am
quite
comfortable here.”
“Then I will begin. Do you read fables? Modern ones?”
“I am afraid I must confess to a good deal of fiction,” said the
clergyman deprecatingly. “In Wales the ordained ministers of the
sacraments of the Church have perhaps
too large a share of
leisure ——“
“Have you read the Ugly Duckling?”
“Hans Christian Andersen's — yes — in my childhood.”
“A wonderful story — a story that has ever been full of tears
and heart swelling hopes for me, since first it came to me in my lonely
boyhood and saved me from unspeakable things. That story, if you
understand it well, will tell you almost all that you should know of me
to comprehend how that machine came to be thought of in a mortal brain.
. . Even when I read that simple narrative for the first time, a
thousand bitter experiences had begun the teaching of my isolation
among the people of my birth — I knew the story was for me. The ugly
duckling that proved to be a swan, that lived through all contempt and
bitterness, to float at last sublime. >From that hour forth, I dreamt
of meeting with my kind, dreamt of encountering that sympathy I knew
was my profoundest need. Twenty years I lived in that hope, lived and
worked, lived and wandered, loved even, and at last, despaired. Only
once among all those millions of wondering, astonished, indifferent,
contemptuous, and insidious faces that I met with in that passionate
wandering, looked
one upon me as I desired . . . looked ——“
He paused. The Reverend Cook glanced up into his face, expecting
some indication of the deep feeling that had sounded in his last words.
It was downcast, clouded, and thoughtful, but the mouth was rigidly
firm.
“In short, Mr. Cook, I discovered that I was one of those
superior Cagots called a genius — a man born out of my time — a man
thinking the thoughts of a wiser age, doing things and believing things
that men now
cannot understand, and that in the years ordained
to me there was nothing but silence and suffering for my soul —
unbroken solitude, man's bitterest pain. I knew I was an Anachronic
Man; my age was still to come. One filmy hope alone held me to life, a
hope to which I clung until it had become a certain thing. Thirty years
of unremitting toil and deepest thought among the hidden things of
matter and form and life, and then
that, the Chronic Argo,
the ship that sails through time, and now I go to join my
generation, to journey through the ages till my time has come.”
Dr. Nebogipfel paused, looked in sudden doubt at the clergyman's
perplexed face. “You think that sounds mad,” he said, “to travel
through time?”
“It certainly jars with accepted opinions,” said the clergyman,
allowing the faintest suggestion of controversy to appear in his
intonation, and speaking apparently to the Chronic Argo. Even a
clergyman of the Church of England you see can have a suspicion of
illusions at times.
“It certainly
does jar with accepted opinions,” agreed
the philosopher cordially. “It does more than that — it defies
accepted opinions to mortal combat. Opinions of all sorts, Mr. Cook —
Scientific Theories, Laws, Articles of Belief, or, to come to elements,
Logical Premises, Ideas, or whatever you like to call them — all are,
from the infinite nature of things, so many diagrammatic caricatures of
the ineffable — caricatures altogether to be avoided save where they
are necessary in the shaping of results — as chalk outlines are
necessary to the painter and plans and sections to the engineer. Men,
from the exigencies of their being, find this hard to believe.”
The Rev. Elijah Ulysses Cook nodded his head with the quiet
smile of one whose opponent has unwittingly given a point.
“It is as easy to come to regard ideas as complete reproductions
of entities as it is to roll off a log. Hence it is that almost all
civilised men believe in the
reality of the Greek geometrical
conceptions.”
“Oh! pardon me, sir,” interrupted Cook. “Most men know that a
geometrical point has no existence in matter, and the same with a
geometrical line. I think you underrate . . .”
“Yes, yes,
those things are recognised,” said Nebogipfel
calmly; “but now . . . a cube. Does that exist in the material
universe?”
“Certainly.”
“An instantaneous cube?”
“I don't know what you intend by that expression.”
“Without any other sort of extension; a body having length,
breadth, and thickness, exists?”
“What other sort of extension
can there be?” asked Cook,
with raised eyebrows.
“Has it never occurred to you that no form can exist in the
material universe that has no extension in time? ... Has it never
glimmered upon your consciousness that nothing stood between men and a
geometry of four dimensions — length, breadth, thickness, and
duration — but the inertia of opinion, the impulse from the
Levantine philosophers of the bronze age?”
“Putting it that way,” said the clergyman, “it does look as
though there was a flaw somewhere in the notion of tridimensional
being; but” . . . He became silent, leaving that sufficiently eloquent
“but” to convey all the prejudice and distrust that filled his mind.
“When we take up this new light of a fourth dimension and
reexamine our physical science in its illumination,” continued
Nebogipfel, after a pause, “we find ourselves no longer limited by
hopeless restriction to a certain beat of time — to our own
generation. Locomotion along lines of duration — chronic navigation
comes within the range, first, of geometrical theory, and then of
practical mechanics. There
was a time when men could only move
horizontally and in their appointed country. The clouds floated above
them, unattainable things, mysterious chariots of those fearful gods
who dwelt among the mountain summits. Speaking practically, men in
those days were restricted to motion in two dimensions; and even there
circumambient ocean and hypoborean fear bound him in. But those times
were to pass away. First, the keel of Jason cut its way between the
Symplegades, and then in the fulness of time, Columbus dropped anchor
in a bay of Atlantis. Then man burst his bidimensional limits, and
invaded the third dimension, soaring with Montgolfier into the clouds,
and sinking with a diving bell into the purple treasure-caves of the
waters. And now another step, and the hidden past and unknown future
are before us. We stand upon a mountain summit with the plains of the
ages spread below.”
Nebogipfel paused and looked down at his hearer.
The Reverend Elijah Cook was sitting with an expression of
strong distrust on his face. Preaching much had brought home certain
truths to him very vividly, and he always suspected rhetoric. “Are
those things figures of speech,” he asked; “or am I to take them as
precise statements? Do you speak of travelling through time in the same
way as one might speak of Omnipotence making His pathway on the storm,
or do you — a — mean what you say?”
Dr. Nebogipfel smiled quietly. “Come and look at these
diagrams,” he said, and then with elaborate simplicity he commenced to
explain again to the clergyman the new quadridimensional geometry.
Insensibly Cook's aversion passed away, and seeming impossibility grew
possible, now that such tangible things as diagrams and models could be
brought forward in evidence. Presently he found himself asking
questions, and his interest grew deeper and deeper as Nebogipfel slowly
and with precise clearness unfolded the beautiful order of his strange
invention. The moments slipped away unchecked, as the Doctor passed on
to the narrative of his research, and it was with a start of surprise
that the clergyman noticed the deep blue of the dying twilight through
the open doorway.
“The voyage,” said Nebogipfel concluding his history, “will be
full of undreamt-of dangers — already in one brief essay I have stood
in the very jaws of death — but it is also full of the divines'
promise of undreamt-of joy. Will you come? Will you walk among the
people of the Golden Years? . . .”
But the mention of death by the philosopher had brought flooding
back to the mind of Cook, all the horrible sensations of that first
apparition.
“Dr. Nebogipfel . . . one question?” He hesitated. “On your
hands . . .
Was it blood?“
Nebogipfel's countenance fell. He spoke slowly.
“When I had stopped my machine, I found myself in this room as
it used to be.
Hark!“
“It is the wind in the trees towards Rwstog.”
“It sounded like the voices of a multitude of people singing . .
. when I had stopped I found myself in this room as it used to be. An
old man, a young man, and a lad were sitting at a table — reading some
book together. I stood behind them unsuspected. 'Evil spirits assailed
him,' read the old man; 'but it is written, “to him that overcometh
shall be given life eternal”. They came as entreating friends, but he
endured through all their snares. They came as principalities and
powers, but he defied them in the name of the King of Kings. Once even
it is told that in his study, while he was translating the New
Testament into German, the Evil One himself appeared before him. . .'
Just then the lad glanced timorously round, and with a fearful wail
fainted away . . .
“The others sprang at me... It was a fearful grapple... The old
man clung to my throat, screaming 'Man or Devil, I defy thee . . .'
“I could not help it. We rolled together on the floor . . . the
knife his trembling son had dropped came to my hand . . . Hark!”
He paused and listened, but Cook remained staring at him in the
same horror-stricken attitude he had assumed when the memory of the
blood-stained hands had rushed back over his mind.
“Do you hear what they are crying?
Hark!“
Burn the warlock! Burn the murderer!
“Do you hear? There is no time to be lost.”
Slay the murderer of cripples. Kill the devil's claw!
“Come! Come!”
Cook, with a convulsive effort, made a gesture of repugnance and
strode to the doorway. A crowd of black figures roaring towards him in
the red torchlight made him recoil. He shut the door and faced
Nebogipfel.
The thin lips of the Doctor curled with a contemptuous sneer.
“They will kill you if you stay,” he said; and seizing his unresisting
vistor by the wrist, he forced him towards the glittering machine. Cook
sat down and covered his face with his hands.
In another moment the door was flung open, and old Pritchard
stood blinking on the threshold.
A pause. A hoarse shout changing suddenly into a sharp shrill
shriek.
A thunderous roar like the bursting forth of a great fountain of
water.
The voyage of the Chronic Argonauts had begun.
END
