Yet chance in a sense now governs it. I mean, my
entering the condition of Higher Space seems to depend upon the chance
of this and that circumstance. For instance, the mere sound of that
German band sent me off. Not that all music will do so, but certain
sounds, certain vibrations, at once key me up to the requisite pitch,
and off I go. Wagner's music always does it, and that band must have
been playing a stray bit of Wagner. But I'll come to all that later. Only first, I must ask you to send away your man from the spy-hole." John Silence looked up with a start, for Mr. Mudge's back was to the
door, and there was no mirror. He saw the brown eye of Barker glued to
the little circle of glass, and he crossed the room without a word and
snapped down the black shutter provided for the purpose, and then heard
Barker snuffle away along the passage. "Now," continued the little man in the chair, "I can begin. You have
managed to put me completely at my ease, and I feel I may tell you my
whole case without shame or reserve. You will understand. But you must
be patient with me if I go into details that are already familiar to
you--details of Higher Space, I mean--and if I seem stupid when I have
to describe things that transcend the power of language and are really
therefore indescribable." "My dear friend," put in the other calmly, "that goes without saying. To
know Higher Space is an experience that defies description, and one is
obliged to make use of more or less intelligible symbols. But, pray,
proceed. Your vivid thoughts will tell me more than your halting words." An immense sigh of relief proceeded from the little figure half lost in
the depths of the chair. Such intelligent sympathy meeting him half-way
was a new experience to him, and it touched his heart at once. He leaned
back, relaxing his tight hold of the arms, and began in his thin,
scale-like voice. "My mother was a Frenchwoman, and my father an Essex bargeman," he said
abruptly. "Hence my name--Racine and Mudge. My father died before I ever
saw him. My mother inherited money from her Bordeaux relations, and when
she died soon after, I was left alone with wealth and a strange freedom. I had no guardian, trustees, sisters, brothers, or any connection in the
world to look after me. I grew up, therefore, utterly without education. This much was to my advantage; I learned none of that deceitful rubbish
taught in schools, and so had nothing to unlearn when I awakened to my
true love--mathematics, higher mathematics and higher geometry. These,
however, I seemed to know instinctively. It was like the memory of what
I had deeply studied before; the principles were in my blood, and I
simply raced through the ordinary stages, and beyond, and then did the
same with geometry. Afterwards, when I read the books on these subjects,
I understood how swift and undeviating the knowledge had come back to
me. It was simply memory. It was simply _re-collecting_ the memories of
what I had known before in a previous existence and required no books to
teach me." In his growing excitement, Mr. Mudge attempted to drag the chair forward
a little nearer to his listener, and then smiled faintly as he resigned
himself instantly again to its immovability, and plunged anew into the
recital of his singular "disease." "The audacious speculations of Bolyai, the amazing theories of
Gauss--that through a point more than one line could be drawn parallel
to a given line; the possibility that the angles of a triangle are
together _greater_ than two right angles, if drawn upon immense
curvatures--the breathless intuitions of Beltrami and Lobatchewsky--all
these I hurried through, and emerged, panting but unsatisfied, upon the
verge of my--my new world, my Higher Space possibilities--in a word, my
disease! "How I got there," he resumed after a brief pause, during which he
appeared to be listening intently for an approaching sound, "is more
than I can put intelligibly into words. I can only hope to leave your
mind with an intuitive comprehension of the possibility of what I say. "Here, however, came a change. At this point I was no longer absorbing
the fruits of studies I had made before; it was the beginning of new
efforts to learn for the first time, and I had to go slowly and
laboriously through terrible work. Here I sought for the theories and
speculations of others. But books were few and far between, and with the
exception of one man--a 'dreamer,' the world called him--whose audacity
and piercing intuition amazed and delighted me beyond description, I
found no one to guide or help. "You, of course, Dr. Silence, understand something of what I am driving
at with these stammering words, though you cannot perhaps yet guess what
depths of pain my new knowledge brought me to, nor why an acquaintance
with a new development of space should prove a source of misery and
terror." Mr. Racine Mudge, remembering that the chair would not move, did the
next best thing he could in his desire to draw nearer to the attentive
man facing him, and sat forward upon the very edge of the cushions,
crossing his legs and gesticulating with both hands as though he saw
into this region of new space he was attempting to describe, and might
any moment tumble into it bodily from the edge of the chair and
disappear form view. John Silence, separated from him by three paces,
sat with his eyes fixed upon the thin white face opposite, noting
every word and every gesture with deep attention. "This room we now sit in, Dr. Silence, has one side open to space--to
Higher Space. A closed box only _seems_ closed. There is a way in and
out of a soap bubble without breaking the skin." "You tell me no new thing," the doctor interposed gently. "Hence, if Higher Space exists and our world borders upon it and lies
partially in it, it follows necessarily that we see only portions of all
objects. We never see their true and complete shape. We see their three
measurements, but not their fourth. The new direction is concealed from
us, and when I hold this book and move my hand all round it I have not
really made a complete circuit. We only perceive those portions of any
object which exist in our three dimensions; the rest escapes us. But,
once we learn to see in Higher Space, objects will appear as they
actually are. Only they will thus be hardly recognisable! "Now, you may begin to grasp something of what I am coming to." "I am beginning to understand something of what you must have suffered,"
observed the doctor soothingly, "for I have made similar experiments
myself, and only stopped just in time--"

"You are the one man in all the world who can hear and understand, _and_
sympathise," exclaimed Mr. Mudge, grasping his hand and holding it
tightly while he spoke. The nailed chair prevented further excitability.