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Transcriber’s note:

      Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE

by

E. F. BENSON . . Author of

“Dodo Wonders,” “Miss Mapp,” “Colin,” etc. ::  ::






London: Hutchinson and Co.
Paternoster Row, E.C. Printed in Great Britain
at the Pitman Press, Bath




CONTENTS


                             PAGE

  “AND THE DEAD SPAKE----”      7

  THE OUTCAST                  37

  THE HORROR-HORN              63

  MACHAON                      83

  NEGOTIUM PERAMBULANS        107

  AT THE FARMHOUSE            131

  INSCRUTABLE DECREES         155

  THE GARDENER                177

  MR. TILLY’S SÉANCE          199

  MRS. AMWORTH                223

  IN THE TUBE                 247

  RODERICK’S STORY            269




“And the Dead Spake----”




“And the Dead Spake----”


There is not in all London a quieter spot, or one, apparently, more
withdrawn from the heat and bustle of life than Newsome Terrace. It is
a cul-de-sac, for at the upper end the roadway between its two lines
of square, compact little residences is brought to an end by a high
brick wall, while at the lower end, the only access to it is through
Newsome Square, that small discreet oblong of Georgian houses, a relic
of the time when Kensington was a suburban village sundered from the
metropolis by a stretch of pastures stretching to the river. Both
square and terrace are most inconveniently situated for those whose
ideal environment includes a rank of taxicabs immediately opposite
their door, a spate of ’buses roaring down the street, and a procession
of underground trains, accessible by a station a few yards away,
shaking and rattling the cutlery and silver on their dining tables. In
consequence Newsome Terrace had come, two years ago, to be inhabited
by leisurely and retired folk or by those who wished to pursue their
work in quiet and tranquillity. Children with hoops and scooters are
phenomena rarely encountered in the Terrace and dogs are equally
uncommon. In front of each of the couple of dozen houses of which the Terrace
is composed lies a little square of railinged garden, in which you
may often see the middle-aged or elderly mistress of the residence
horticulturally employed. By five o’clock of a winter’s evening
the pavements will generally be empty of all passengers except the
policeman, who with felted step, at intervals throughout the night,
peers with his bull’s-eye into these small front gardens, and never
finds anything more suspicious there than an early crocus or an
aconite. For by the time it is dark the inhabitants of the Terrace have
got themselves home, where behind drawn curtains and bolted shutters
they will pass a domestic and uninterrupted evening. No funeral (up to
the time I speak of) had I ever seen leave the Terrace, no marriage
party had strewed its pavements with confetti, and perambulators were
unknown. It and its inhabitants seemed to be quietly mellowing like
bottles of sound wine. No doubt there was stored within them the
sunshine and summer of youth long past, and now, dozing in a cool
place, they waited for the turn of the key in the cellar door, and the
entry of one who would draw them forth and see what they were worth. Yet, after the time of which I shall now speak, I have never
passed down its pavement without wondering whether each house, so
seemingly-tranquil, is not, like some dynamo, softly and smoothly
bringing into being vast and terrible forces, such as those I once
saw at work in the last house at the upper end of the Terrace, the
quietest, you would have said, of all the row. Had you observed it with
continuous scrutiny, for all the length of a summer day, it is quite
possible that you might have only seen issue from it in the morning
an elderly woman whom you would have rightly conjectured to be the
housekeeper, with her basket for marketing on her arm, who returned
an hour later. Except for her the entire day might often pass without
there being either ingress or egress from the door. Occasionally a
middle-aged man, lean and wiry, came swiftly down the pavement, but
his exit was by no means a daily occurrence, and indeed when he did
emerge, he broke the almost universal usage of the Terrace, for his
appearances took place, when such there were, between nine and ten in
the evening. At that hour sometimes he would come round to my house
in Newsome Square to see if I was at home and inclined for a talk a
little later on. For the sake of air and exercise he would then have an
hour’s tramp through the lit and noisy streets, and return about ten,
still pale and unflushed, for one of those talks which grew to have
an absorbing fascination for me. More rarely through the telephone I
proposed that I should drop in on him: this I did not often do, since I
found that if he did not come out himself, it implied that he was busy
with some investigation, and though he made me welcome, I could easily
see that he burned for my departure, so that he might get busy with his
batteries and pieces of tissue, hot on the track of discoveries that
never yet had presented themselves to the mind of man as coming within
the horizon of possibility. My last sentence may have led the reader to guess that I am indeed
speaking of none other than that recluse and mysterious physicist Sir
James Horton, with whose death a hundred half-hewn avenues into the
dark forest from which life comes must wait completion till another
pioneer as bold as he takes up the axe which hitherto none but
himself has been able to wield. Probably there was never a man to whom
humanity owed more, and of whom humanity knew less. He seemed utterly
independent of the race to whom (though indeed with no service of love)
he devoted himself: for years he lived aloof and apart in his house
at the end of the Terrace. Men and women were to him like fossils to
the geologist, things to be tapped and hammered and dissected and
studied with a view not only to the reconstruction of past ages, but
to construction in the future. It is known, for instance, that he made
an artificial being formed of the tissue, still living, of animals
lately killed, with the brain of an ape and the heart of a bullock,
and a sheep’s thyroid, and so forth. Of that I can give no first-hand
account; Horton, it is true, told me something about it, and in his
will directed that certain memoranda on the subject should on his death
be sent to me.