The water was shallow and
clear, and at the bottom of it I saw its white remains. The water had
disintegrated the cardboard, and it had become no more than a few strips
and shreds of sodden paper. The centre of the fountain was a marble
Italian Cupid which squirted the water out of a wine-skin held under its
arm. And crawling up its leg was the caterpillar. Strange and scarcely
credible as it seemed, it must have survived the falling-to-bits of its
prison, and made its way to shore, and there it was, out of arm’s reach,
weaving and waving this way and that as it evolved its cocoon. Then, as I looked at it, it seemed to me again that, like the
caterpillar I had seen last night, it saw me, and breaking out of the
threads that surrounded it, it crawled down the marble leg of the Cupid
and began swimming like a snake across the water of the fountain towards
me. It came with extraordinary speed (the fact of a caterpillar being
able to swim was new to me), and in another moment was crawling up the
marble lip of the basin. Just then Inglis joined us. “Why, if it isn’t old ‘Cancer Inglisensis’ again,” he said, catching
sight of the beast. “What a tearing hurry it is in.”

We were standing side by side on the path, and when the caterpillar had
advanced to within about a yard of us, it stopped, and began waving
again, as if in doubt as to the direction in which it should go. Then it
appeared to make up its mind, and crawled on to Inglis’ shoe. “It likes me best,” he said, “but I don’t really know that I like it. And as it won’t drown I think perhaps----”

He shook it off his shoe on to the gravel path and trod on it. *       *       *       *       *

All afternoon the air got heavier and heavier with the Sirocco that was
without doubt coming up from the south, and that night again I went up
to bed feeling very sleepy; but below my drowsiness, so to speak, there
was the consciousness, stronger than before, that there was something
wrong in the house, that something dangerous was close at hand. But I
fell asleep at once, and--how long after I do not know--either woke or
dreamed I awoke, feeling that I must get up at once, _or I should be too
late_. Then (dreaming or awake) I lay and fought this fear, telling
myself that I was but the prey of my own nerves disordered by Sirocco or
what not, and at the same time quite clearly knowing in another part of
my mind, so to speak, that every moment’s delay added to the danger. At
last this second feeling became irresistible, and I put on coat and
trousers and went out of my room on to the landing. And then I saw that
I had already delayed too long, and that I was now too late. The whole of the landing of the first floor below was invisible under
the swarm of caterpillars that crawled there. The folding doors into the
sitting-room from which opened the bedroom where I had seen them last
night, were shut, but they were squeezing through the cracks of it, and
dropping one by one through the keyhole, elongating themselves into mere
string as they passed, and growing fat and lumpy again on emerging. Some, as if exploring, were nosing about the steps into the passage at
the end of which were Inglis’ rooms, others were crawling on the lowest
steps of the staircase that led up to where I stood. The landing,
however, was completely covered with them: I was cut off. And of the
frozen horror that seized me when I saw that, I can give no idea in
words. *       *       *       *       *

Then at last a general movement began to take place, and they grew
thicker on the steps that led to Inglis’ room. Gradually, like some
hideous tide of flesh, they advanced along the passage, and I saw the
foremost, visible by the pale grey luminousness that came from them,
reach his door. Again and again I tried to shout and warn him, in terror
all the time that they would turn at the sound of my voice and mount my
stair instead, but for all my efforts I felt that no sound came from my
throat. They crawled along the hinge-crack of his door, passing through
as they had done before, and still I stood there making impotent efforts
to shout to him, to bid him escape while there was time. *       *       *       *       *

At last the passage was completely empty: they had all gone, and at that
moment I was conscious for the first time of the cold of the marble
landing on which I stood barefooted. The dawn was just beginning to
break in the Eastern sky. *       *       *       *       *

Six months later I met Mrs Stanley in a country house in England. We
talked on many subjects and at last she said:

“I don’t think I have seen you since I got that dreadful news about
Arthur Inglis a month ago.”

“I haven’t heard,” said I. “No? He has got cancer. They don’t even advise an operation, for there
is no hope of a cure: he is riddled with it, the doctors say.”

Now during all these six months I do not think a day had passed on which
I had not had in my mind the dreams (or whatever you like to call them)
which I had seen in the Villa Cascana. “It is awful, is it not?” she continued, “and I feel, I can’t help
feeling, that he may have----”

“Caught it at the villa?” I asked. She looked at me in blank surprise. “Why did you say that?” she asked. “How did you know?”

Then she told me. In the unoccupied bedroom a year before there had been
a fatal case of cancer. She had, of course, taken the best advice and
had been told that the utmost dictates of prudence would be obeyed so
long as she did not put anybody to sleep in the room, which had also
been thoroughly disinfected and newly white-washed and painted. But----




THE CAT


Many people will, doubtless, remember that exhibition at the Royal
Academy, not so many seasons ago, which came to be known as Alingham’s
year, when Dick Alingham vaulted, with one bound, as it were, out of the
crowd of strugglers and seated himself with admirably certain poise on
the very topmost pinnacle of contemporary fame. He exhibited three
portraits, each a master-piece, which killed every picture within range. But since that year nobody cared anything for pictures whether in or out
of range except those three, it did not signify so greatly. The
phenomenon of his appearance was as sudden as that of the meteor, coming
from nowhere and sliding large and luminous across the remote and
star-sown sky, as inexplicable as the bursting of a spring on some
dust-ridden rocky hillside. Some fairy godmother, one might conjecture,
had bethought herself of her forgotten godson, and with a wave of her
wand bestowed on him this transcendant gift. But, as the Irish say, she
held her wand in her left hand, for her gift had another side to it. Or
perhaps, again, Jim Merwick is right, and the theory he propounds in his
monograph, “On certain obscure lesions of the nerve centres,” says the
final word on the subject.