The Green Overcoat/Chapter 7

was glad to get back to his lodgings on that Thursday night; he was beginning to feel the weariness of the Lion.

I will not deny that some vanity had arisen in him, for he felt the approach of a little local fame. Now vanity, especially when it is connected with the approach of a little local fame, is not good for Professors, even in this world; for their chances in the next it is fatal. It is a foible only too acceptable as an instrument to the Enemy of Souls.

Full of this vague sensation of well-being, it was a shock to Professor Higginson to find Geoge [sic] Babcock waiting for him in his rooms.

Hidden in the right-hand pocket of George Babcock's coat was the letter. It was not type-written. It was a familiar letter. It was signed by a single uninitialed name, for its author was a peer.

Higginson came into the room nervously, less and less pleased to see who his visitor was, but that visitor had something very definite to do.

"I say, Higginson," he cried suddenly, rising as suddenly at his colleague's entry into the room, "you know I don't believe a word of it!"

"A word of what?" said Higginson tartly.

"Oh, you know," said Babcock, sitting down again as did Higginson also, and fixing the psychologist with his strong eyes. "You 've told everybody, and everybody 's talking. All this 'psychical experience,' Higginson! All these—damn it, why you 're talking ghosts now!"

He sat back and waited.

"Babcock," said Higginson, in much the same tones as he had used to fire upon the less defended Mr. Garden, "Babcock, you won't believe a plain human tale? The Evidence of a witness? True evidence, Babcock?"

"Oh, I believe you had some—some, well, let 's say some mental experience, all right; but I don't believe in all that monkey business. … No! … I 'm interested, Higginson. That 's why I 've come." He leant forward. "I 'm really interested."

"You don't believe that I saw … what I say I saw?" said Higginson solemnly.

"Why, my dear Higginson, you know—one sees things when one 's asleep. Simple?"

"You don't believe," reiterated Higginson, "that I heard what I say I heard?"

"Oh, I believe that right enough," answered Babcock impatiently. "What 's 'hearing'? My dear fellow, for one case of optical suggestion there are ten cases of aural!"

"Suggestion be !" cried Professor Higginson too suddenly.

"It 's a funny thing, Higginson," said Babcock, looking curiously at him and pinning his colleague down with that look, "it 's a funny thing that you spook Johnnies don't seem to know what evidence is. … Ever heard a clever counsel briefed in Poison? … I have."

"I" began Professor Higginson, but Babcock interrupted.

"Now, I knew a fellow once in Italy, not like you, my dear Higginson, not half so honest a man, but he had got hold of what convinces people. … It 's not what's true, it 's what convinces."

Babcock smiled oddly as he said this.

"He didn't publish it … and" (this more slowly) "I will tell you what it was, for it impressed me. He came into my room early one morning—I knew him well enough—and he told me the whole story of Adowa. The telegraph hadn't brought it, Higginson" (shaking a finger). "We hadn't heard of it. No one in Europe, no one in Egypt. The fight was … well, 'lowing for longitude … not twelve hours old. And, mind you, he didn't give a sort of hint; he didn't work your telepathy stunt." Babcock began to emphasise. "He described the whole thing quite clearly: with little men and bushes and hot sand standing clear, like three or four little coloured pictures. Eh? 'Coloured'. Painted. You could smell the heat. And he saw a sort of local storm on the scrub in the valley; he did!—least, he said he did! He saw the poor fellows left behind—the wounded, you know: he saw the faces of the torturers." Babcock stopped a second and changed his tone. He looked unpleasantly in earnest. "He told me I might make money over it," he went on. "I was in touch with one of the English papers. Like a fool, I didn't believe him. After that the telegrams came in …"

Professor Higginson was watching his colleague; his head stood forward on his long neck. He was fascinated and a little frightened.

"Well," said Babcock, sitting down again and speaking with less apparent purpose, "that 's all. I think he was a charlatan. I don't know how he got the thing. I 've known news spread in Africa among savages a thousand miles in half a day. … Anyhow, that sort of thing might convince. To tell you the honest truth, Higginson, your story doesn't."

Poor Mr. Higginson flushed. He did not like to be talked to like that. Babcock waited for his reply. It came at last, and came in the expected form.

"I can tell you, Babcock," began Higginson slowly, "something I 've told no one else. You 've driven me to do it. You know—you 've heard—that … that, well, that I saw: that I not only heard singing, but saw? I saw a multitude of men—and women, Babcock."

He passed his hand over his face and wished himself well out of it—but Sin is a hard master.

"Well?" asked Babcock, quite unchanged in face.

"Well," proceeded Professor Higginson, still more slowly, "this is what I have got to tell you. Many, all of those faces—and mind you they talked to me, Babcock, they talked to me" (the Professor was warming to his work)—"I didn't know. But I knew one, Babcock," and here Higginson's voice fell (as his trick had grown to be during these recitals) to a deeper tone. "Do you know who it was? … It was poor Morris!"

Babcock rose again and came and stood over the wretched Philosopher. The Philosopher looked up like a child, an erring child.

"Good Heavens!" sighed Babcock. "What extraordinary ideas you have! That 's not what people notice. Why, men can do that in their sleep." Then with sudden vigour, "What else did you see, Higginson? Something you couldn't have known? Something nobody knew?"

Professor Higginson thought. Detailed imaginative fiction had never been in his line, though he had dealt in it pretty freely all that day. He thought hard and confusedly; but what he said at the end of the process was startling enough.

"Very well, Babcock, listen to this. There was in that crowd a figure very different from the others—a mad figure, you will say. Most mournful eyes, Babcock, and—well, it's unpleasant, but it smelt of seaweed."

"Oh!" said Babcock. "Was it dressed?"

Mr. Higginson thought a minute.

"Yes, it was dressed," he ventured, groping his way. "Yes, it was dressed. … It was very oddly dressed. You know … you see … it had dripping wet clothes on, dark blue. But, Babcock" (here Higginson had an inspiration, and very proud of it he was), "it had no arms!"

"Oh," said Babcock, musing, "it had no arms."

There was a gap in their conversation, an end to Babcock's pushing, an end to Higginson's lying. A let up. An interval of repose.

It was Babcock who broke it.

"Well," he sighed, "I can't make head or tail of all this, Higginson! Anyhow, I must be going. It 's interesting. I know you think you had these experiences, but, frankly, all that kind of thing 's beyond me. I don't think it 's there. I think it floats in men's brains—false, like dreams," and he got up to go.



But for the next half hour he was at the telephone again, talking to London and to the Ancient Aristocracy of Britain and to The Howl.

When he rose from the machine it was just eleven. The Howl prints news up to two o'clock. Smart Rag!

Next morning (Friday), when he came downstairs, Professor Higginson received a slight but very unpleasant shock. It was a shock of a kind one does not often receive.

Like all the rest of the world. Professor Higginson read The Howl at breakfast. The Howl is very well edited; it gives you your thrill in a short compass, and every day has some new Portent to present.

That day the Portent was Sleeping Sickness on a Huge Scale in London. Ten millionaires were down with it and a politician was threatened. It wasn't true, and there was a leader on it. But true or false, it was of less consequence to Mr. Higginson than one fairly prominent but short item upon the front page. It was not the chief item on it; the chief item was some rubbish about a man it called "the Kaiser." It was perhaps the second or the third piece of news in importance.

The corpse was dressed in blue. It was drowned. It had no arms—a sort of monster.

Professor Higginson was unhappy, very unhappy indeed. He also felt sick.

Gusts of fear swept over his simple soul. There were moments when he almost smelt the pit, and he groaned in spirit.

So powerful was the effect upon him, that he was half persuaded of some connection between his foolish lie and doubtful superhuman powers. He didn't like it. It gave him a sense of possession. It left him not his own master.

He would not take up the paper again. He left it folded upon his table, and went out a little groggily to walk up the street to College and to take his class.

But when Professor Higginson appeared before his class he was nervously conscious that a great number of young eyes were watching him with quite as much amusement as interest.

Not that he was stared at. Provincials are too polite for that, and the earnest provincials who attend their Universities are perhaps the politest class in England. But whenever he looked up from his notes he met the glance shy and suddenly withdrawn, now from the left, now from the right, which told him that of the fifty or sixty students before him not one was ignorant of the Great Adventure.

His subject that morning was The Hypergraphical Concatenation of the Major Sensory Criteria and Psycho-hylomorphic Phenomena in their Relation of the Subjective to the Objective Aspects of Reflex Actions—a fascinating theme! And one which, upon any other day, he would have analysed with the mouldy bravura that he had cultivated.

But that morning something flagged. The interest of the class was elsewhere, and Professor Higginson knew only too well where it was! His misfortune or accident was already so much public property that the youths and maidens and the respectful dependants and servitors of the University as well were universally acquainted with it. He felt again that touch of vanity in the midst of his embarrassment!

The great clock of the University buildings boomed out noon. He shut his notes, looked with his weary eyes at the young faces before him, now lifted to his own, and said—

"Next time we will take the Automatic Functions of Guest and Bunny. It is new ground, and I think it will interest you."

A timid, fair-haired girl to the rear of the left centre asked whether they need buy the third edition; she only had the second. He said, full of thought for her purse, that there was no necessity to do such a thing, whereat the student added—

"But, Professor Higginson, it deals with the Subliminal Phenomena of a Loss of Mem"

"That 'll do! That 'll do!" cried Professor Higginson sharply.

He could have sworn that he heard a titter! He looked up wearily at the window as his class tramped out.

It was raining.

When he had changed his Cap and Gown for the bowler hat, umbrella and mackintosh of his civilisation, he stepped out under the archway into the street, glad to be rid of his duties for the day, profoundly glad to be alone. He had fallen, as his habit was, into a conversation with himself, half aloud, happily oblivious of the suspicious glances of passers-by, which he would have imagined to be testimony to his unhappily growing fame, when he received a sharp blow upon the back from the open hand of some vigorous person, and turned round with an exclamation to see no less than Babcock—again.

Professor Higginson turned under his umbrella to catch that figure at his side, and saw beyond it a very different figure—a figure draped entirely in a long raincoat of some sort trailing almost to the ground; peeping above the front of that coat was a clerical dog-collar, and above the clerical dog-collar a long face, the eyes of which always looked towards some spot far off.

"Well, Higginson," said Babcock, "you 've done it now!"

"Done what?" said Professor Higginson, knowing only too well what he had done.

"Made yourself famous," said George Babcock shortly.

"I don't know that!" said Professor Higginson, and he nervously wondered whether the drip upon his back were from his own umbrella or his neighbour's. "Of course, a thing like that will be talked about."

"It 's what you said about the heavenly singing that did it," said George Babcock brutally; and as he said it Professor Higginson, glancing at him sideways, saw a definite curl downwards upon the big, loose lips.

As they passed the door of the University Common Room, Babcock halted and said—

"Well, I 'm going in! Are you coming with me, Higginson?"

"No!" said Professor Higginson, with singular determination.

"All right," said Babcock, not insisting. "Charles will see you home. I ought to have told you, this is my wife's brother Charles; he 's a parson," he added rudely, as though the external signs of that profession were absent. "You go with him, Charles. It 's on your way. Tell Clara I 'm coming. Back before one."

And George Babcock the strong pushed through the swing doors of the Club, and left his brother-in-law and his colleague in the rain outside.

Professor Higginson and the religious person walked for a few minutes in silence. For one thing the Philosopher did not know the name of the minister, and it was the minister who first broke that silence.

"You 've heard singing!" he said abruptly, and as he said it he still stared in front of him as at some distant point beyond this world, and steered himself by his great nose. He did not look at his companion, and he repeated in tones of subdued wonder, "You heard singing. I read it in the Ormeston paper to-day."

Professor Higginson had never in his life been rude to a man at the first meeting. He did not know how it was done.

"Yes," he said … "after a fashion.

"Ah!" said the Reverend Charles, and they went on another fifty yards in silence through the rain. The streets were quite deserted.

Professor Higginson was appalled to find his companion's hand laid firmly upon his shoulder; the other hand held the umbrella above. The parson looked immensely into his eyes.

"I wish I were you," he said, "or, rather, I don't wish I were you." Then he loosed hold, and they walked on together again.

Professor Higginson was profoundly uncomfortable. He was Professor of Subliminal Psychology and far be it from him to fall into the vulgar errors of the materialist, but the man did seem to him a little cracked; and when he whispered for the third time, "You heard singing!" Professor Higginson was in that mood wherein weak men run. Now Professor Higginson prided himself that he was not a weak man.

The Reverend Charles began talking very loudly to himself, not in the half-tones of self-communion common to the academic temper, but quite out loud, almost as though he were preaching.

"Singing! 'Lovely chaunting voices, singing to the sound of harps, and in that light which dieth not, for they that stand in it are the inheritors of the world to come.' … … That 's from Pearson," he added abruptly, changing to a perfectly natural tone. "Do you know Pearson's work?"

"No," said Professor Higginson, immensely relieved at the change in the tone. "No, to tell the truth, I do not."

"He saw what you saw," said the Reverend gentleman, nodding gravely under his umbrella as he strode forward; "but he hadn't your chance of convincing the world. No!"

And here he shook his head as gravely as he had nodded it.

The rain still fell. The wet street still stretched out before them.

"It has been given to many men," began the Reverend Charles again in a totally different tone, this time the intellectual interrogative, "to see the hidden places, but your chance?"

Professor Higginson said nothing, he was beginning to feel uncomfortable again. He was not a materialist—what man of his great attainments could be? But on the other hand there was such a thing as going too far in the other direction. Then he reasoned with himself. The Reverend Charles had no weapon. He, the Professor, was a tall man, and—hang it all! he had no right to be certain that the man was mad.

They had come to Professor Higginson's door. There, in the pouring rain, Professor Higginson put in the latch key, opened the door, and asked in common courtesy whether his colleague's brother-in-law would come in.

His colleague's brother-in-law half shut a dripping umbrella, held out a huge and bony hand, fixed the embarrassed Don with luminous, distant eyes, grasped his nervously offered hand in return, and said sadly, with a world of meaning—

"No! I will not come in! I will leave you to Those Voices of the Great Peace!"

Then it was that Professor Higginson noticed, standing in the mean little hall humbly enough, a mean little man, short, wearing a threadbare coat, and a drenched bowler hat.

"Professor Higginson," said this apparition gently, "Professor Higginson, I presume?"

"What?" snapped the Professor, still holding the Parson's hand, like the handle of a pump.

"May I see you a moment? I represent The Sunday Machine."

"No," thundered Professor Higginson, dropping the reverend hand in his excitement. "I 'm tired, it 's not lunch time yet, I don't know what you mean!"

The little man was at once flabbergasted and hurt. The Reverend Charles smiled a cadaverous smile, but one as luminous as his eyes.

"May I supply the place?" he said in a voice that was musical in two tones.

He stood there winningly in the open doorway with his dripping umbrella and his huge, unoccupied right hand still held out.

The little reporter, not quite understanding what he should do, grasped that great hand, just as Professor Higginson hand grasped it, and then stood helpless.

Professor Higginson was at the end of his patience. He said sharply—

"You must come again! You must come again! This isn't the moment."

In another minute he would have apologised for his abruptness, but the little journalist had pride and had already gone out, without an umbrella, thrusting his pathetic little note-book into his threadbare pocket; and the Reverend brother-in-law, after giving one great revealing look into the darkness of the hall, had gone out also. Professor Higginson heard the door slam behind him: His curiosity prompted him to gaze upon them out of a window. They were going off together through the rain, into the heart of the town, and it seemed to the Philosopher that the Parson was more animated than before. He turned to his companion continually, and his gestures were broad. More fame was brewing!

All that Friday afternoon he kept his room. He forbade Mrs. Randle to admit a soul. He went to bed early and slept ill. The wages of sin is death.

Professor Higginson came down next morning in a very miserable mood. A vast pile of letters stood beside his plate, and there also he saw The Howl, folded, keeping its dreadful secret—he was sure it had one for him.

The sheet, with its harmless outer cover, its advertisements of patent poisons and its bold title menaced him. It fascinated him too. He hesitated, reached for it, opened it, and the blow fell.

To his horror, there stared him in the face two great lines—nay, three, of huge block headline type, counting more in the front page of that day than the sleeping sickness, than the might of Germany, or the turpitude of Kalmazoo.

They ran thus—

There are parts of the body that grow cold under excitement of an unpleasant type. Among these may be noted the forehead, certain muscles upon either side of the vertebræ, and the region of the knees.

Had Professor Higginson been free to note these interesting phenomena proceeding in his own person, it might have been of advantage to science. All he knew was that he felt extremely ill. He pushed his breakfast plate away from him, folded the paper into two, rose from the table, and stood bending over the mantelpiece with his head upon his hand. Then he mastered himself, sat down, and began to read this—

What followed, and what his pained eyes most wearily discerned, was the nature of the proof: the impossibility that anyone in Ormeston should have heard of that drowned thing upon the French coast; the hour in which Professor Higginson had told a colleague of the experience—fully four hours before the discovery itself was made—five hours before the belated Breton telegram had reached The Howl from its Paris office. The whole thing was a convincing chain. And with that dreadful knowledge men have that they are in for it, Professor Higginson laid the paper down, and wondered how much must be endured before the blessed touch of death.