Leithen stopped to refill his pipe, and I mused upon the ironic fate which had compelled a mathematical genius to make his sole confidant of a philistine lawyer, and induced that lawyer to repeat it confusedly to an ignoramus at twilight on a Scotch hill. As told by Leithen it was a very halting tale.
‘But there was one thing I could see very clearly,’ Leithen went on, ’and that was Hollond’s own case. This crowded world of Space was perfectly real to him. How he had got to it I do not know. Perhaps his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some atrophied cell and restored the old instinct. Anyhow, he was living his daily life with a foot in each world.
‘He often came to see me, and after the first hectic discussions he didn’t talk much. There was no noticeable change in him – a little more abstracted perhaps. He would walk in the street or come into a room with a quick look round him, and sometimes for no earthly reason he would swerve. Did you ever watch a cat crossing a room? It sidles along by the furniture and walks over an open space of carpet as if it were picking its way among obstacles. Well, Hollond behaved like that, but he had always been counted a little odd, and nobody noticed it but me.
‘I knew better than to chaff him, and we had stopped argument, so that there wasn’t much to be said. But sometimes he would give me news about his experiences. The whole thing was perfectly clear and scientific and above-board, and nothing creepy about it. You know how I hate the washy supernatural stuff they give us nowadays. Hollond was well and fit, with an appetite like a hunter. But as he talked, sometimes – well, you know I haven’t much in the way of nerves or imagination – but I used to get a little eerie. Used to feel the solid earth dissolving round me. It was the opposite of vertigo, if you understand me – a sense of airy realities crowding in on you – crowding the mind, that is, not the body.
‘I gathered from Hollond that he was always conscious of corridors and halls and alleys in Space, shifting, but shifting according to inexorable laws. I never could get quite clear as to what this consciousness was like. When I asked he used to look puzzled and worried and helpless. I made out from him that one landmark involved a sequence, and once given a bearing from an object you could keep the direction without a mistake. He told me he could easily, if he wanted, go in a dirigible from the top of Mont Blanc to the top of Snowdon in the thickest fog and without a compass, if he were given the proper angle to start from. I confess I didn’t follow that myself. Material objects had nothing to do with the Spacial forms, for a table or a bed in our world might be placed across a corridor of Space. The forms played their game independent of our kind of reality. But the worst of it was, that if you kept your mind too much in one world you were apt to forget about the other, and Hollond was always barking his shins on stones and chairs and things.
‘He told me all this quite simply and frankly. Remember, his mind and no other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him an odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite strange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.’
‘How long was it before he went mad?’ I asked.
It was a foolish question, and made Leithen cross. ‘He never went mad in your sense. My dear fellow, you’re very much wrong if you think there was anything pathological about him – then. The man was brilliantly sane. His mind was as keen as a keen sword. I couldn’t understand him, but I could judge of his sanity right enough.’
I asked if it made him happy or miserable.
‘At first I think it made him uncomfortable. He was restless because he knew too much and too little. The unknown pressed in on his mind, as bad air weighs on the lungs. Then it lightened, and he accepted the new world in the same sober practical way that he took other things. I think that the free exercise of his mind in a pure medium gave him a feeling of extraordinary power and ease. His eyes used to sparkle when he talked. And another odd thing he told me. He was a keen rock-climber, but, curiously enough, he had never a very good head. Dizzy heights always worried him, though he managed to keep hold on himself. But now all that had gone. The sense of the fullness of Space made him as happy – happier, I believe – with his legs dangling into eternity, as sitting before his own study fire.
‘I remember saying that it was all rather like the mediaeval wizards who made their spells by means of numbers and figures.
‘He caught me up at once. “Not numbers,” he said. “Number has no place in Nature. It is an invention of the human mind to atone for a bad memory. But figures are a different matter. All the mysteries of the world are in them, and the old magicians knew that at least, if they knew no more.”
‘He had only one grievance. He complained that it was terribly lonely. “It is the Desolation”, he would quote, “spoken of by Daniel the prophet.” He would spend hours travelling those eerie shifting corridors of Space with no hint of another human soul. How could there be? It was a world of pure reason, where human personality had no place. What puzzled me was why he should feel the absence of this. One wouldn’t, you know, in an intricate problem of geometry or a game of chess. I asked him, but he didn’t understand the question. I puzzled over it a good deal, for it seemed to me that if Hollond felt lonely, there must be more in this world of his than we imagined. I began to wonder if there was any truth in fads like psychical research. Also, I was not so sure that he was as normal as I had thought: it looked as if his nerves might be going bad.
‘Oddly enough, Hollond was getting on the same track himself. He had discovered, so he said, that in sleep everybody now and then lived in this new world of his. You know how one dreams of triangular railway platforms with trains running simultaneously down all three sides and not colliding. Well, this sort of cantrip was “common form”, as we say at the Bar, in Hollond’s Space, and he was very curious about the why and wherefore of Sleep. He began to haunt psychological laboratories, where they experiment with the charwoman and the odd man, and he used to go up to Cambridge for séances. It was a foreign atmosphere to him, and I don’t think he was very happy in it. He found so many charlatans that he used to get angry, and declare he would be better employed at Mothers’ Meetings!’
From far up the glen came the sound of the pony’s hoofs. The stag had been loaded up, and the gillies were returning. Leithen looked at his watch. ‘We’d better wait and see the beast,’ he said.
‘… Well, nothing happened for more than a year. Then one evening in May he burst into my rooms in high excitement. You understand quite clearly that there was no suspicion of horror or fright or anything unpleasant about this world he had discovered. It was simply a series of interesting and difficult problems. All this time Hollond had been rather extra well and cheery. But when he came in I thought I noticed a different look in his eyes, something puzzled and diffident and apprehensive.
‘“There’s a queer performance going on in the other world,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. I never dreamed of such a thing. I – I don’t quite know how to put it, and I don’t know how to explain it, but – but I am becoming aware that there are other beings – other minds – moving in Space besides mine.”
‘I suppose I ought to have realised then that things were beginning to go wrong. But it was very difficult, he was so rational and anxious to make it all clear. I asked him how he knew. There could, of course, on his own showing be no change in that world, for the forms of Space moved and existed under inexorable laws. He said he found his own mind failing him at points. There would come over him a sense of fear – intellectual fear – and weakness, a sense of something else, quite alien to Space, thwarting him. Of course he could only describe his impressions very lamely, for they were purely of the mind, and he had no material peg to hang them on, so that I could realise them. But the gist of it was that he had been gradually becoming conscious of
what he called “Presences” in his world. They had no effect on Space – did not leave foot-prints in its corridors, for instance – but they affected his mind. There was some mysterious contact established between him and them. I asked him if the affection was unpleasant, and he said “No, not exactly.” But I could see a hint of fear in his eyes.
‘Think of it. Try to realise what intellectual fear is. I can’t, but it is conceivable. To you and me fear implies pain to ourselves or some other, and such pain is always in the last resort pain of the flesh. Consider it carefully and you will see that it is so. But imagine fear so sublimated and transmuted as to be the tension of pure spirit. I can’t realise it, but I think it possible. I don’t pretend to understand how Hollond got to know about these Presences. But there was no doubt about the fact. He was positive, and he wasn’t in the least mad – not in our sense. In that very month he published his book on Number, and gave a German professor who attacked it a most tremendous public trouncing.
‘I know what you are going to say – that the fancy was a weakening of the mind from within. I admit I should have thought of that, but he looked so confoundedly sane and able that it seemed ridiculous. He kept asking me my opinion, as a lawyer, on the facts he offered. It was the oddest case ever put before me, but I did my best for him. I dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense. I told him that, taking all that he had told me as fact, the Presences might be either ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which had independently captured the sense of Space’s quality; or, finally, the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers think they do. It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and I wasn’t quite serious. But Hollond was serious enough.
‘He admitted that all three explanations were conceivable, but he was very doubtful about the first. The projection of the spirit into Space during sleep, he thought, was a faint and feeble thing, and these were powerful Presences. With the second and the third he was rather impressed. I suppose I should have seen what was happening and tried to stop it; at least, looking back that seems to have been my duty. But it was difficult to think that anything was wrong with Hollond; indeed, the odd thing is that all this time the idea of madness never entered my head. I rather backed him up. Somehow the thing took my fancy, though I thought it moonshine at the bottom of my heart. I enlarged on the pioneering before him. “Think”, I told him, “what may be waiting for you. You may discover the meaning of Spirit. You may open up a new world, as rich as the old one, but imperishable. You may prove to mankind their immortality and deliver them for ever from the fear of death. Why, man, you are picking at the lock of all the world’s mysteries.”
‘But Hollond did not cheer up. He seemed strangely languid and dispirited. “That is all true enough,” he said, “if you are right, if your alternatives are exhaustive. But suppose they are something else, something …” What that “something” might be he had apparently no idea, and very soon he went away.
‘He said another thing before he left. He asked me if I ever read poetry, and I said, “Not often”. Nor did he: but he had picked up a little book somewhere and found a man who knew about the Presences. I think his name was Traherne, one of the seventeenth-century fellows. He quoted a verse which stuck to my fly-paper memory. It ran something like this:
Within the region of the air,
Compassed about with Heavens fair,
Great tracts of lands there may be found,
Where many numerous hosts,
In those far distant coasts,
For other great and glorious ends
Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.
Hollond was positive he did not mean angels or anything of the sort. I told him that Traherne evidently took a cheerful view of them. He admitted that, but added: “He had religion, you see. He believed that everything was for the best. I am not a man of faith, and can only take comfort from what I understand. I’m in the dark, I tell you …”
‘Next week I was busy with the Chilian Arbitration case, and saw nobody for a couple of months. Then one evening I ran against Hollond on the Embankment, and thought him looking horribly ill. He walked back with me to my rooms, and hardly uttered one word all the way. I gave him a stiff whisky-and-soda, which he gulped down absent-mindedly. There was that strained, hunted look in his eyes that you see in a frightened animal’s. He was always lean, but now he had fallen away to skin and bone.
‘“I can’t stay long,” he told me, “for I’m off to the Alps tomorrow and I have a lot to do.” Before then he used to plunge readily into his story, but now he seemed shy about beginning. Indeed, I had to ask him a question.
‘“Things are difficult,” he said hesitatingly, “and rather distressing. Do you know, Leithen, I think you were wrong about – about what I spoke to you of. You said there must be one of three explanations. I am beginning to think that there is a fourth… ”
‘He stopped for a second or two, then suddenly leaned forward and gripped my knee so fiercely that I cried out. “That world is the Desolation,” he said in a choking voice, “and perhaps I am getting near the Abomination of the Desolation that the old prophet spoke of. I tell you, man, I am on the edge of a terror, a terror”, he almost screamed, “that no mortal can think of and live.”
‘You can imagine that I was considerably startled. It was lightning out of a clear sky. How the devil could one associate horror with mathematics? I don’t see it yet… At any rate, I— You may be sure I cursed my folly for ever pretending to take him seriously. The only way would have been to have laughed him out of it at the start. And yet I couldn’t, you know – it was too real and reasonable. Anyhow, I tried a firm tone now, and told him the whole thing was arrant raving bosh. I bade him be a man and pull himself together. I made him dine with me, and took him home, and got him into a better state of mind before he went to bed. Next morning I saw him off at Charing Cross, very haggard still, but better. He promised to write to me pretty often …’
The pony, with a great eleven-pointer lurching athwart its back, was abreast of us, and from the autumn mist came the sound of soft Highland voices. Leithen and I got up to go, when we heard that the rifle had made direct for the Lodge by a short cut past the Sanctuary. In the wake of the gillies we descended the Correi road into a glen all swimming with dim purple shadows. The pony minced and boggled; the stag’s antlers stood out sharp on the rise against a patch of sky, looking like a skeleton tree. Then we dropped into a covert of birches and emerged on the white glen highway.
Leithen’s story had bored and puzzled me at the start, but now it had somehow gripped my fancy. Space a domain of endless corridors and Presences moving in them! The world was not quite the same as an hour ago. It was the hour, as the French say, ’between dog and wolf’, when the mind is disposed to marvels. I thought of my stalking on the morrow, and was miserably conscious that I would miss my stag. Those airy forms would get in the way. Confound Leithen and his yarns!
‘I want to hear the end of your story,’ I told him, as the lights of the Lodge showed half a mile distant.
‘The end was a tragedy’ he said slowly. ‘I don’t much care to talk about it. But how was I to know? I couldn’t see the nerve going. You see I couldn’t believe it was all nonsense. If I could I might have seen. But I still think there was something in it – up to a point. Oh, I agree he went mad in the end. It is the only explanation. Something must have snapped in that fine brain, and he saw the little bit more which we call madness. Thank God, you and I are prosaic fellows …
‘I was going out to Chamonix myself a week later. But before I started I got a post-card from Hollond, the only word from him. He had printed my name and address, and on the other side had scribbled six words – “I know at last – God’s mercy. – H.G.H.” The handwriting was like a sick man of ninety. I knew that things must be pretty bad with my friend.
‘I got to Chamonix in time for his funeral. An ordinary climbing accident – you probably read about it
in the papers. The Press talked about the toll which the Alps took from intellectuals – the usual rot. There was an inquiry, but the facts were quite simple. The body was only recognised by the clothes. He had fallen several thousand feet.
‘It seems that he had climbed for a few days with one of the Kronigs and Dupont, and they had done some hair-raising things on the Aiguilles. Dupont told me that they had found a new route up the Montanvert side of the Charmoz. He said that Hollond climbed like a “diable fou”, and if you know Dupont’s standard of madness you will see that the pace must have been pretty hot. “But monsieur was sick,” he added; “his eyes were not good. And I and Franz, we were grieved for him and a little afraid. We were glad when he left us.”
‘He dismissed the guides two days before his death. The next day he spent in the hotel, getting his affairs straight. He left everything in perfect order, but not a line to a soul, not even to his sister. The following day he set out alone about three in the morning for the Grepon. He took the road up the Nantillons glacier to the Col, and then he must have climbed the Mummery crack by himself. After that he left the ordinary route and tried a new traverse across the Mer de Glace face. Somewhere near the top he fell, and next day a party going to the Dent du Requin found him on the rocks thousands of feet below.
‘He had slipped in attempting the most foolhardy course on earth, and there was a lot of talk about the dangers of guideless climbing. But I guessed the truth, and I am sure Dupont knew, though he held his tongue …’