Tales of Space and Time
complete history of her life they made to leave the shop. Thereupon Mrs.
Cave, still clinging to hope, asked for the clergyman's address, so
that, if she could get anything out of Cave, she might communicate it.
The address was duly given, but apparently was afterwards mislaid. Mrs.
Cave can remember nothing about it.
In the evening of that day, the Caves seem to have exhausted their
emotions, and Mr. Cave, who had been out in the afternoon, supped in a
gloomy isolation that contrasted pleasantly with the impassioned
controversy of the previous days. For some time matters were very badly
strained in the Cave household, but neither crystal nor customer
reappeared.
Now, without mincing the matter, we must admit that Mr. Cave was a liar.
He knew perfectly well where the crystal was. It was in the rooms of Mr.
Jacoby Wace, Assistant Demonstrator at St. Catherine's Hospital,
Westbourne Street. It stood on the sideboard partially covered by a
black velvet cloth, and beside a decanter of American whisky. It is from
Mr. Wace, indeed, that the particulars upon which this narrative is
based were derived. Cave had taken off the thing to the hospital hidden
in the dog-fish sack, and there had pressed the young investigator to
keep it for him. Mr. Wace was a little dubious at first. His
relationship to Cave was peculiar. He had a taste for singular
characters, and he had more than once invited the old man to smoke and
drink in his rooms, and to unfold his rather amusing views of life in
general and of his wife in particular. Mr. Wace had encountered Mrs.
Cave, too, on occasions when Mr. Cave was not at home to attend to him.
He knew the constant interference to which Cave was subjected, and
having weighed the story judicially, he decided to give the crystal a
refuge. Mr. Cave promised to explain the reasons for his remarkable
affection for the crystal more fully on a later occasion, but he spoke
distinctly of seeing visions therein. He called on Mr. Wace the same
evening.
He told a complicated story. The crystal he said had come into his
possession with other oddments at the forced sale of another curiosity
dealer's effects, and not knowing what its value might be, he had
ticketed it at ten shillings. It had hung upon his hands at that price
for some months, and he was thinking of "reducing the figure," when he
made a singular discovery.
At that time his health was very bad--and it must be borne in mind that,
throughout all this experience, his physical condition was one of
ebb--and he was in considerable distress by reason of the negligence,
the positive ill-treatment even, he received from his wife and
step-children. His wife was vain, extravagant, unfeeling, and had a
growing taste for private drinking; his step-daughter was mean and
over-reaching; and his step-son had conceived a violent dislike for him,
and lost no chance of showing it. The requirements of his business
pressed heavily upon him, and Mr. Wace does not think that he was
altogether free from occasional intemperance. He had begun life in a
comfortable position, he was a man of fair education, and he suffered,
for weeks at a stretch, from melancholia and insomnia. Afraid to disturb
his family, he would slip quietly from his wife's side, when his
thoughts became intolerable, and wander about the house. And about
three o'clock one morning, late in August, chance directed him into the
shop.
The dirty little place was impenetrably black except in one spot, where
he perceived an unusual glow of light. Approaching this, he discovered
it to be the crystal egg, which was standing on the corner of the
counter towards the window. A thin ray smote through a crack in the
shutters, impinged upon the object, and seemed as it were to fill its
entire interior.
It occurred to Mr. Cave that this was not in accordance with the laws of
optics as he had known them in his younger days. He could understand the
rays being refracted by the crystal and coming to a focus in its
interior, but this diffusion jarred with his physical conceptions. He
approached the crystal nearly, peering into it and round it, with a
transient revival of the scientific curiosity that in his youth had
determined his choice of a calling. He was surprised to find the light
not steady, but writhing within the substance of the egg, as though that
object was a hollow sphere of some luminous vapour. In moving about to
get different points of view, he suddenly found that he had come between
it and the ray, and that the crystal none the less remained luminous.
Greatly astonished, he lifted it out of the light ray and carried it to
the darkest part of the shop. It remained bright for some four or five
minutes, when it slowly faded and went out. He placed it in the thin
streak of daylight, and its luminousness was almost immediately
restored.
So far, at least, Mr. Wace was able to verify the remarkable story of
Mr. Cave. He has himself repeatedly held this crystal in a ray of light
(which had to be of a less diameter than one millimetre). And in a
perfect darkness, such as could be produced by velvet wrapping, the
crystal did undoubtedly appear very faintly phosphorescent. It would
seem, however, that the luminousness was of some exceptional sort, and
not equally visible to all eyes; for Mr. Harbinger--whose name will be
familiar to the scientific reader in connection with the Pasteur
Institute--was quite unable to see any light whatever. And Mr. Wace's
own capacity for its appreciation was out of comparison inferior to that
of Mr. Cave's. Even with Mr. Cave the power varied very considerably:
his vision was most vivid during states of extreme weakness and fatigue.
Now, from the outset this light in the crystal exercised a curious
fascination upon Mr. Cave. And it says more for his loneliness of soul
than a volume of pathetic writing could do, that he told no human being
of his curious observations. He seems to have been living in such an
atmosphere of petty spite that to admit the existence of a pleasure
would have been to risk the loss of it. He found that as the dawn
advanced, and the amount of diffused light increased, the crystal became
to all appearance non-luminous. And for some time he was unable to see
anything in it, except at night-time, in dark corners of the shop.
But the use of an old velvet cloth, which he used as a background for a
collection of minerals, occurred to him, and by doubling this, and
putting it over his head and hands, he was able to get a sight of the
luminous movement within the crystal even in the daytime. He was very
cautious lest he should be thus discovered by his wife, and he practised
this occupation only in the afternoons, while she was asleep upstairs,
and then circumspectly in a hollow under the counter. And one day,
turning the crystal about in his hands, he saw something. It came and
went like a flash, but it gave him the impression that the object had
for a moment opened to him the view of a wide and spacious and strange
country; and, turning it about, he did, just as the light faded, see
the same vision again.
Now, it would be tedious and unnecessary to state all the phases of Mr.
Cave's discovery from this point. Suffice that the effect was this: the
crystal, being peered into at an angle of about 137 degrees from the
direction of the illuminating ray, gave a clear and consistent picture
of a wide and peculiar countryside. It was not dream-like at all: it
produced a definite impression of reality, and the better the light the
more real and solid it seemed. It was a moving picture: that is to say,
certain objects moved in it, but slowly in an orderly manner like real
things, and, according as the direction of the lighting and vision
changed, the picture changed also. It must, indeed, have been like
looking through an oval glass at a view, and turning the glass about to
get at different aspects.
Mr. Cave's statements, Mr. Wace assures me, were extremely
circumstantial, and entirely free from any of that emotional quality
that taints hallucinatory impressions. But it must be remembered that
all the efforts of Mr. Wace to see any similar clarity in the faint
opalescence of the crystal were wholly unsuccessful, try as he would.
The difference in intensity of the impressions received by the two men
was very great, and it is quite conceivable that what was a view to Mr.
Cave was a mere blurred nebulosity to Mr. Wace.
The view, as Mr. Cave described it, was invariably of an extensive
plain, and he seemed always to be looking at it from a considerable
height, as if from a tower or a mast. To the east and to the west the
plain was bounded at a remote distance by vast reddish cliffs, which
reminded him of those he had seen in some picture; but what the picture
was Mr. Wace was unable to ascertain. These cliffs passed north and
south--he could tell the points of the compass by the stars that were
visible of a night--receding in an almost illimitable perspective and
fading into the mists of the distance before they met. He was nearer the
eastern set of cliffs, on the occasion of his first vision the sun was
rising over them, and black against the sunlight and pale against their
shadow appeared a multitude of soaring forms that Mr. Cave regarded as
birds. A vast range of buildings spread below him; he seemed to be
looking down upon them; and, as they approached the blurred and
refracted edge of the picture, they became indistinct. There were also
trees curious in shape, and in colouring, a deep mossy green and an
exquisite grey, beside a wide and shining canal. And something great and
brilliantly coloured flew across the picture. But the first time Mr.
Cave saw these pictures he saw only in flashes, his hands shook, his
head moved, the vision came and went, and grew foggy and indistinct. And
at first he had the greatest difficulty in finding the picture again
once the direction of it was lost.
His next clear vision, which came about a week after the first, the
interval having yielded nothing but tantalising glimpses and some useful
experience, showed him the view down the length of the valley. The view
was different, but he had a curious persuasion, which his subsequent
observations abundantly confirmed, that he was regarding this strange
world from exactly the same spot, although he was looking in a different
direction. The long facade of the great building, whose roof he had
looked down upon before, was now receding in perspective. He recognised
the roof. In the front of the facade was a terrace of massive
proportions and extraordinary length, and down the middle of the
terrace, at certain intervals, stood huge but very graceful masts,
bearing small shiny objects which reflected the setting sun. The import
of these small objects did not occur to Mr. Cave until some time after,
as he was describing the scene to Mr. Wace. The terrace overhung a
thicket of the most luxuriant and graceful vegetation, and beyond this
was a wide grassy lawn on which certain broad creatures, in form like
beetles but enormously larger, reposed. Beyond this again was a richly
decorated causeway of pinkish stone; and beyond that, and lined with
dense _red_ weeds, and passing up the valley exactly parallel with the
distant cliffs, was a broad and mirror-like expanse of water. The air
seemed full of squadrons of great birds, man{oe}uvring in stately
curves; and across the river was a multitude of splendid buildings,
richly coloured and glittering with metallic tracery and facets, among a
forest of moss-like and lichenous trees. And suddenly something flapped
repeatedly across the vision, like the fluttering of a jewelled fan or
the beating of a wing, and a face, or rather the upper part of a face
with very large eyes, came as it were close to his own and as if on the