Page:Weird Tales v02n04 (1923-11).djvu/5

4 "Very well. These dream lovers were different; the woman for long believed that she would one day meet the man whose picture had, in some mysterious way, been stamped upon her mind, stamped so plainly that she could even tell the color of his hair and eyes, and the man believed that he would one day meet his picture woman as a real flesh and blood woman.

"But, as she grew older, the woman slowly, reluctantly (and never quite fully) came to believe that he whose like ness was stamped upon her mind did not exist at all. Mind you, Rider, she never fully believed this. She tried to make herself believe it, but in her heart of hearts there was always a doubt."

"I remember," said I. "But that is, I believe, more or less true of every woman every woman - and every man."

"Maybe it is," he nodded. "But as for this man, he never doubted; he was true to his dream woman to the end. But she married, they met, and of course the moment they saw each other they loved- and she fainted, and all those things happened."

"But confound it!" I exclaimed. "Well?" he queried sweetly. "What's the idea? Surely you don't take this piece of fiction-this moonshine in the mustard-pot-seriously!"

"Seriously? No," said he. "And yet-"

He was looking at me with an odd expression in his eyes. What in the world was he driving at?

"But let me tell you something, Rider," he said. "To no one have I ever told it, and I know that it will not go farther. It is this: "I am like the two persons in this romance!"

"What?" I cried.

"It is a fact; I am like them," he told me. "Upon my mind is stamped a woman's picture, stamped just as those pictures were stamped upon theirs. Rider, it is as if I had known her, had loved her in some other world." I stared at him. Where on earth had he got it? "Do you think," I asked him, "that you will ever meet the lady?" He shook his head. "No," he smiled. "Being a Darwinian, how can I believe that the woman whose likeness is stamped upon my mind is a real flesh and blood woman? She is nothing. And yet that picture, Rider! As I have said, it is just as if I had known her, had loved her in a preterrestrial life. I see her now."He shut his eyes. A brief silence ensued.

"I see her now just as you can see your father and mother, your brothers and sister. Her hair is black, black as the raven's plumage; her eyes are black, too, and her complexion olive; and she is beautiful, inexpressibly beautiful. Never have I seen a woman with beauty such as hers. It alone would prove that this mysterious picture of mine is of no real woman; her beauty transcends that of the daughters of men."

He opened his eyes, looked at me and laughed softly.

"Perhaps you think that I am a fool, Rider; but what I have just told you is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is even so. If I were not scientific, I could believe that we lived and loved in some other world and that somewhere, some time we would meet in this-or some other. But it can never be."

"The explanation?" I queried.

"I have none. Whence came her picture, I do not know. Something abnormal stamped it upon my cerebrine cells, that is all; and it is nothing, and it signifies nothing. And now note the paradox, Rider-of a truth I am ashamed to say it; in my mind I am sure that this woman of mine is nothing, as sure as I am that certain of our progenitors were apes and that others were slimy things that had crawled up out of the slime of the sea-"

"Then you are not very sure," said I. He smiled a little.

"Though in my mind I am sure of this," he went on, "yet in my heart of hearts at times I am not sure. At such times it seems that there come to me faint memories of another and far more beautiful world-come as faint strains of music come when one does not know whether he is awake or asleep. These times are when I hear certain pieces of music and sometimes when I look upon grand scenery.

"But bah! This is foolishness. Coming as it does, from an evolutionist, it is worse than foolishness, and so now there is an end of it."

He turned his look toward the fire-place and sat gazing into the flames, a strange, shadowy expression in his eyes. For a long time there was silence. Shadows swayed and flickered in the dim light of the great room as though swung and shook by spirit hands; and the Cartesian devil there on the table stared at me with that glassy, mocking smile.

But that devil was not alone. There was an angel beside him. The angel, though, was not looking at me; her eyes were on Henry Quainfan. And as I gazed, a strange thing happened:

It was as though I was in that abysmal darkness which lies beyond the farthest star, that awful night which hides the answer to all man's doubts and questionings; and of a sudden I saw a vision. There-a vision angelic, ineffable, blinding.

I came to earth with a start. My fancy had transformed that creature in her glass prison into a vision wondrous beyond all speech.

I smiled at this momentary phantasm of mine.

And yet-it was as though I had caught a glimpse of the Ultimate Mystery.





O a sudden Henry Quainfan broke the silence. "By the way, Rider, I didn't tell you of that accident (if I may so call it) which I had the other day in the laboratory, did It"

I shook my head.

"It was a strange thing," he went on, "the strangest thing in many a long day! You know, I was carrying on some experiments with"

He ended suddenly and sat staring into the flames. Now, I knew that he had been experimenting, but what those experiments were, I had not the slightest idea. That he was deep in radio-activity and much interested in certain problems of astronomy (a science in which, strange to say, I had never taken any interest) I well knew; but I had no means of telling in what direction his experiments might tend.

Only a day or two before, he had explained to me that marvelous discovery, "negative gravity," or radiation pressure-mathematically deducted by Clerk Maxwell and proved by the Russian Lebedew and the Americans Nichols and Hull.

It was this, Henry had explained, which drives the tail of a comet away from the sun-a phenomenon which had always been a mystery to astronomers and physicists. Fictionists had airily (and mysteriously) overcome gravitation in order to land the super-inventor hero on the Moon or Mars, and readers had accepted their wild fancies with a smile; and yet here was the sun's terrific gravitational pull overcome before their very eyes.

Whereas gravitation acts on the mass radiation pressure acts on the surface area. If a body--the earth, for instance