all kinds of wonders which our great grandfathers would have called miracles, but these are nothing but laws that we are beginning to understand. Give me an instance.”
“Well,” I replied at hazard, “if you were assured by someone that a man could live for a thousand years?”
“I should tell him that he was a fool or a liar, that is all. It is impossible.”
“Or that the same identity, spirit, animating principle—call it what you will—can flit from body to body, say in successive ages? Or that the dead can communicate with the living?”
“Convince me of any of these things, Arbuthnot, and mind you I desire to be convinced, and I will take back every word I have said and walk through Fulcombe in a white sheet proclaiming myself the fool. Now, I must get off to the Cottage Hospital to cut out Widow Jenkins’s varicose veins. They are tangible and real at any rate; about the largest I ever saw, indeed. Give up dreams, old boy, and take to something useful. You might go back to your fiction writing; you seem to have leanings that way, and you know you need not publish the stories, except privately for the edification of your friends.”
With this Parthian shaft Bickley took his departure to make a job of Widow Jenkins’s legs.
I took his advice. During the next few months I did write something which occupied my thoughts for a while, more or less. It lies in my safe to this minute, for somehow I have never been able to make up my mind to burn what cost me so much physical and mental toil.
When it was finished my melancholy returned to me with added force. Everything in the house took a tongue and cried to me of past days. Its walls echoed a voice that I could never hear again; in the very looking-glasses I saw the reflection of a lost presence. Although I had moved myself for the purposes of sleep to a little room at the further end of the building, footsteps seemed to creep about my bed at night and I heard the rustle of a remembered dress without the door. The place grew hateful to me. I felt that I must get away from it or I should go mad.
One afternoon Bastin arrived carrying a book and in a state of high indignation. This work, written, as he said, by some ribald traveller, grossly traduced the character of missionaries to the South Sea Islands, especially of those of the Society to which he subscribed, and he threw it on the table in his righteous wrath. Bickley picked it up and opened it at a photograph of a very pretty South Sea Island girl clad in a few flowers and nothing else, which he held towards Bastin, saying:
“Is it to this child of Nature that you object? I call her distinctly attractive, though perhaps she does wear her hibiscus blooms with a difference to our women—a little lower down.”
“The devil is always attractive,” replied Bastin gloomily. “Child of Nature indeed! I call her Child of Sin. That photograph is enough to make my poor Sarah turn in her grave.”
“Why?” asked Bickley; “seeing that wide seas roll between you and this dusky Venus. Also I thought that according to your Hebrew legend sin came in with bark garments.”
“You should search the Scriptures, Bickley,” I broke in, “and cultivate accuracy. It was fig-leaves that symbolised its arrival. The garments, which I think were of skin, developed later.”
“Perhaps,” went on Bickley, who had turned the page, “she” (he referred to the late Mrs. Bastin) “would have preferred her thus,” and he held up another illustration of the same woman.
In this the native belle appeared after conversion, clad in broken-down stays—I suppose they were stays—out of which she seemed to bulge and flow in every direction, a dirty white dress several sizes too small, a kind of Salvation Army bonnet without a crown and a prayer-book which she held pressed to her middle; the general effect being hideous, and in some curious way, improper.
“Certainly,” said Bastin, “though I admit her clothes do not seem to fit and she has not buttoned them up as she ought. But it is not of the pictures so much as of the letterpress with its false and scandalous accusations, that I complain.”
“Why do you complain?” asked Bickley. “Probably it is quite true, though that we could never ascertain without visiting the lady’s home.”
“If I could afford it,” exclaimed Bastin with rising anger, “I should like to go there and expose this vile traducer of my cloth.”
“So should I,” answered Bickley, “and expose these introducers of consumption, measles and other European diseases, to say nothing of gin, among an innocent and Arcadian people.”
“How can you call them innocent, Bickley, when they murder and eat missionaries?”
“I dare say we should all eat a missionary, Bastin, if we were hungry enough,” was the answer, after which something occurred to change the conversation.
But I kept the book and read it as a neutral observer, and came to the conclusion that these South Sea Islands, a land where it was always afternoon, must be a charming place, in which perhaps the stars of the Tropics and the scent of the flowers might enable one to forget a little, or at least take the edge off memory. Why should I not visit them and escape another long and dreary English winter? No, I could not do so alone. If Bastin and Bickley were there, their eternal arguments might amuse me. Well, why should they not come also? When one has money things can always be arranged.
The idea, which had its root in this absurd conversation, took a curious hold on me. I thought of it all the evening, being alone, and that night it re-arose in my dreams. I dreamed that my lost Natalie appeared to me and showed me a picture. It was of a long, low land, a curving shore of which the ends were out of the picture, whereon grew tall palms, and where great combers broke upon gleaming sand.
Then the picture seemed to become a reality and I saw Natalie herself, strangely changeful in her aspect, strangely varying in face and figure, strangely bright, standing in the mouth of a pass whereof the little bordering cliffs were covered with bushes and low trees, whose green was almost hid in lovely flowers. There in my dream she stood, smiling mysteriously, and stretched out her arms towards me.
As I awoke I seemed to hear her voice, repeating her dying words: “Go where you seem called to go, far away. Oh! the wonderful place in which you will find me, not knowing that you have found me.”
With some variations this dream visited me twice that night. In the morning I woke up quite determined that I would go to the South Sea Islands, even if I must do so alone. On that same evening Bastin and Bickley dined with me. I said nothing to them about my dream, for Bastin never dreamed and Bickley would have set it down to indigestion. But when the cloth had been cleared away and we were drinking our glass of port—both Bastin and Bickley only took one, the former because he considered port a sinful indulgence of the flesh, the latter because he feared it would give him gout—I remarked casually that they both looked very run down and as though they wanted a rest. They agreed, at least each of them said he had noticed it in the other. Indeed Bastin added that the damp and the cold in the church, in which he held daily services to no congregation except the old woman who cleaned it, had given him rheumatism, which prevented him from sleeping.
“Do call things by their proper names,” interrupted Bickley. “I told you yesterday that what you are suffering from is neuritis in your right arm, which will become chronic if you neglect it much longer. I have the same thing myself, so I ought to know, and unless I can stop operating for a while I believe my fingers will become useless. Also something is affecting my sight, overstrain, I suppose, so that I am obliged to wear stronger and stronger glasses. I think I shall have to leave Ogden” (his
