Tales of Space and Time
the past. "_He_ will understand," said Bindon with a sentimental sigh.
"He knows what Evil means--he understands something of the Stupendous
Fascination of the Sphinx of Sin. Yes--he will understand." By that
phrase it was that Bindon was pleased to dignify certain unhealthy and
undignified departures from sane conduct to which a misguided vanity and
an ill-controlled curiosity had led him. He sat for a space thinking how
very Hellenic and Italian and Neronic, and all those things, he had
been. Even now--might one not try a sonnet? A penetrating voice to echo
down the ages, sensuous, sinister, and sad. For a space he forgot
Elizabeth. In the course of half an hour he spoilt three phonographic
coils, got a headache, took a second dose to calm himself, and reverted
to magnanimity and his former design.
At last he faced the unpalatable problem of Denton. It needed all his
newborn magnanimity before he could swallow the thought of Denton; but
at last this greatly misunderstood man, assisted by his sedative and the
near approach of death, effected even that. If he was at all exclusive
about Denton, if he should display the slightest distrust, if he
attempted any specific exclusion of that young man, she
might--_misunderstand_. Yes--she should have her Denton still. His
magnanimity must go even to that. He tried to think only of Elizabeth in
the matter.
He rose with a sigh, and limped across to the telephonic apparatus that
communicated with his solicitor. In ten minutes a will duly attested and
with its proper thumb-mark signature lay in the solicitor's office three
miles away. And then for a space Bindon sat very still.
Suddenly he started out of a vague reverie and pressed an investigatory
hand to his side.
Then he jumped eagerly to his feet and rushed to the telephone. The
Euthanasia Company had rarely been called by a client in a greater
hurry.
So it came at last that Denton and his Elizabeth, against all hope,
returned unseparated from the labour servitude to which they had fallen.
Elizabeth came out from her cramped subterranean den of metal-beaters
and all the sordid circumstances of blue canvas, as one comes out of a
nightmare. Back towards the sunlight their fortune took them; once the
bequest was known to them, the bare thought of another day's hammering
became intolerable. They went up long lifts and stairs to levels that
they had not seen since the days of their disaster. At first she was
full of this sensation of escape; even to think of the underways was
intolerable; only after many months could she begin to recall with
sympathy the faded women who were still below there, murmuring scandals
and reminiscences and folly, and tapping away their lives.
Her choice of the apartments they presently took expressed the vehemence
of her release. They were rooms upon the very verge of the city; they
had a roof space and a balcony upon the city wall, wide open to the sun
and wind, the country and the sky.
And in that balcony comes the last scene in this story. It was a summer
sunsetting, and the hills of Surrey were very blue and clear. Denton
leant upon the balcony regarding them, and Elizabeth sat by his side.
Very wide and spacious was the view, for their balcony hung five hundred
feet above the ancient level of the ground. The oblongs of the Food
Company, broken here and there by the ruins--grotesque little holes and
sheds--of the ancient suburbs, and intersected by shining streams of
sewage, passed at last into a remote diapering at the foot of the
distant hills. There once had been the squatting-place of the children
of Uya. On those further slopes gaunt machines of unknown import worked
slackly at the end of their spell, and the hill crest was set with
stagnant wind vanes. Along the great south road the Labour Company's
field workers in huge wheeled mechanical vehicles, were hurrying back to
their meals, their last spell finished. And through the air a dozen
little private aeroplanes sailed down towards the city. Familiar scene
as it was to the eyes of Denton and Elizabeth, it would have filled the
minds of their ancestors with incredulous amazement. Denton's thoughts
fluttered towards the future in a vain attempt at what that scene might
be in another two hundred years, and, recoiling, turned towards the
past.
He shared something of the growing knowledge of the time; he could
picture the quaint smoke-grimed Victorian city with its narrow little
roads of beaten earth, its wide common-land, ill-organised, ill-built
suburbs, and irregular enclosures; the old countryside of the Stuart
times, with its little villages and its petty London; the England of the
monasteries, the far older England of the Roman dominion, and then
before that a wild country with here and there the huts of some warring
tribe. These huts must have come and gone and come again through a space
of years that made the Roman camp and villa seem but yesterday; and
before those years, before even the huts, there had been men in the
valley. Even then--so recent had it all been when one judged it by the
standards of geological time--this valley had been here; and those hills
yonder, higher, perhaps, and snow-tipped, had still been yonder hills,
and the Thames had flowed down from the Cotswolds to the sea. But the
men had been but the shapes of men, creatures of darkness and ignorance,
victims of beasts and floods, storms and pestilence and incessant
hunger. They had held a precarious foothold amidst bears and lions and
all the monstrous violence of the past. Already some at least of these
enemies were overcome....
For a time Denton pursued the thoughts of this spacious vision, trying
in obedience to his instinct to find his place and proportion in the
scheme.
"It has been chance," he said, "it has been luck. We have come through.
It happens we have come through. Not by any strength of our own....
"And yet ... No. I don't know."
He was silent for a long time before he spoke again.
"After all--there is a long time yet. There have scarcely been men for
twenty thousand years--and there has been life for twenty millions. And
what are generations? What are generations? It is enormous, and we are
so little. Yet we know--we feel. We are not dumb atoms, we are part of
it--part of it--to the limits of our strength and will. Even to die is
part of it. Whether we die or live, we are in the making....
"As time goes on--_perhaps_--men will be wiser.... Wiser....
"Will they ever understand?"
He became silent again. Elizabeth said nothing to these things, but she
regarded his dreaming face with infinite affection. Her mind was not
very active that evening. A great contentment possessed her. After a
time she laid a gentle hand on his beside her. He fondled it softly,
still looking out upon the spacious gold-woven view. So they sat as the
sun went down. Until presently Elizabeth shivered.
Denton recalled himself abruptly from these spacious issues of his
leisure, and went in to fetch her a shawl.
The Man Who Could Work Miracles
THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES
A PANTOUM IN PROSE
It is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I think it
came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a sceptic, and
did not believe in miraculous powers. And here, since it is the most
convenient place, I must mention that he was a little man, and had eyes
of a hot brown, very erect red hair, a moustache with ends that he
twisted up, and freckles. His name was George McWhirter Fotheringay--not
the sort of name by any means to lead to any expectation of
miracles--and he was clerk at Gomshott's. He was greatly addicted to
assertive argument. It was while he was asserting the impossibility of
miracles that he had his first intimation of his extraordinary powers.
This particular argument was being held in the bar of the Long Dragon,
and Toddy Beamish was conducting the opposition by a monotonous but
effective "So _you_ say," that drove Mr. Fotheringay to the very limit
of his patience.
There were present, besides these two, a very dusty cyclist, landlord
Cox, and Miss Maybridge, the perfectly respectable and rather portly
barmaid of the Dragon. Miss Maybridge was standing with her back to Mr.
Fotheringay, washing glasses; the others were watching him, more or less
amused by the present ineffectiveness of the assertive method. Goaded by
the Torres Vedras tactics of Mr. Beamish, Mr. Fotheringay determined to
make an unusual rhetorical effort. "Looky here, Mr. Beamish," said Mr.
Fotheringay. "Let us clearly understand what a miracle is. It's
something contrariwise to the course of nature done by power of Will,
something what couldn't happen without being specially willed."
"So _you_ say," said Mr. Beamish, repulsing him.
Mr. Fotheringay appealed to the cyclist, who had hitherto been a silent
auditor, and received his assent--given with a hesitating cough and a
glance at Mr. Beamish. The landlord would express no opinion, and Mr.
Fotheringay, returning to Mr. Beamish, received the unexpected
concession of a qualified assent to his definition of a miracle.
"For instance," said Mr. Fotheringay, greatly encouraged. "Here would be
a miracle. That lamp, in the natural course of nature, couldn't burn
like that upsy-down, could it, Beamish?"
"_You_ say it couldn't," said Beamish.
"And you?" said Fotheringay. "You don't mean to say--eh?"
"No," said Beamish reluctantly. "No, it couldn't."
"Very well," said Mr. Fotheringay. "Then here comes someone, as it might
be me, along here, and stands as it might be here, and says to that
lamp, as I might do, collecting all my will--Turn upsy-down without
breaking, and go on burning steady, and--Hullo!"
It was enough to make anyone say "Hullo!" The impossible, the
incredible, was visible to them all. The lamp hung inverted in the air,
burning quietly with its flame pointing down. It was as solid, as
indisputable as ever a lamp was, the prosaic common lamp of the Long
Dragon bar.
Mr. Fotheringay stood with an extended forefinger and the knitted brows
of one anticipating a catastrophic smash. The cyclist, who was sitting
next the lamp, ducked and jumped across the bar. Everybody jumped, more
or less. Miss Maybridge turned and screamed. For nearly three seconds
the lamp remained still. A faint cry of mental distress came from Mr.
Fotheringay. "I can't keep it up," he said, "any longer." He staggered
back, and the inverted lamp suddenly flared, fell against the corner of
the bar, bounced aside, smashed upon the floor, and went out.
It was lucky it had a metal receiver, or the whole place would have been
in a blaze. Mr. Cox was the first to speak, and his remark, shorn of
needless excrescences, was to the effect that Fotheringay was a fool.
Fotheringay was beyond disputing even so fundamental a proposition as
that! He was astonished beyond measure at the thing that had occurred.
The subsequent conversation threw absolutely no light on the matter so
far as Fotheringay was concerned; the general opinion not only followed
Mr. Cox very closely but very vehemently. Everyone accused Fotheringay
of a silly trick, and presented him to himself as a foolish destroyer of
comfort and security. His mind was in a tornado of perplexity, he was
himself inclined to agree with them, and he made a remarkably
ineffectual opposition to the proposal of his departure.
He went home flushed and heated, coat-collar crumpled, eyes smarting
and ears red. He watched each of the ten street lamps nervously as he
passed it. It was only when he found himself alone in his little
bed-room in Church Row that he was able to grapple seriously with his
memories of the occurrence, and ask, "What on earth happened?"
He had removed his coat and boots, and was sitting on the bed with his