His head
was almost entirely bald, and over his turn-down collar his great neck
folded in two distinct reddish collops of flesh. His hands were big and
his fingers almost massive in thickness. He was an excellent business man, of sane judgment and firm will,
without enough imagination to confuse his course of action by showing
him possible alternatives; and his integrity and ability caused him to
be held in universal respect by the world of business and finance. In
the important regions of a man's character, however, and at heart, he
was coarse, brutal almost to savagery, without consideration for others,
and as a result often cruelly unjust to his helpless subordinates. In moments of temper, which were not infrequent, his face turned a dull
purple, while the top of his bald head shone by contrast like white
marble, and the bags under his eyes swelled till it seemed they would
presently explode with a pop. And at these times he presented a
distinctly repulsive appearance. But to a private secretary like Jones, who did his duty regardless of
whether his employer was beast or angel, and whose mainspring was
principle and not emotion, this made little difference. Within the
narrow limits in which any one _could_ satisfy such a man, he pleased
the General Manager; and more than once his piercing intuitive faculty,
amounting almost to clairvoyance, assisted the chief in a fashion that
served to bring the two closer together than might otherwise have
been the case, and caused the man to respect in his assistant a power
of which he possessed not even the germ himself. It was a curious
relationship that grew up between the two, and the cashier, who enjoyed
the credit of having made the selection, profited by it indirectly as
much as any one else. So for some time the work of the office continued normally and very
prosperously. John Enderby Jones received a good salary, and in the
outward appearance of the two chief characters in this history there
was little change noticeable, except that the Manager grew fatter and
redder, and the secretary observed that his own hair was beginning to
show rather greyish at the temples. There were, however, two changes in progress, and they both had to do
with Jones, and are important to mention. One was that he began to dream evilly. In the region of deep sleep,
where the possibility of significant dreaming first develops itself, he
was tormented more and more with vivid scenes and pictures in which a
tall thin man, dark and sinister of countenance, and with bad eyes, was
closely associated with himself. Only the setting was that of a past
age, with costumes of centuries gone by, and the scenes had to do with
dreadful cruelties that could not belong to modern life as he knew it. The other change was also significant, but is not so easy to describe,
for he had in fact become aware that some new portion of himself,
hitherto unawakened, had stirred slowly into life out of the very depths
of his consciousness. This new part of himself amounted almost to
another personality, and he never observed its least manifestation
without a strange thrill at his heart. For he understood that it had begun to _watch_ the Manager! II


It was the habit of Jones, since he was compelled to work among
conditions that were utterly distasteful, to withdraw his mind wholly
from business once the day was over. During office hours he kept the
strictest possible watch upon himself, and turned the key on all inner
dreams, lest any sudden uprush from the deeps should interfere with his
duty. But, once the working day was over, the gates flew open, and he
began to enjoy himself. He read no modern books on the subjects that interested him, and, as
already said, he followed no course of training, nor belonged to any
society that dabbled with half-told mysteries; but, once released from
the office desk in the Manager's room, he simply and naturally entered
the other region, because he was an old inhabitant, a rightful denizen,
and because he belonged there. It was, in fact, really a case of
dual personality; and a carefully drawn agreement existed between
Jones-of-the-fire-insurance-office and Jones-of-the-mysteries, by the
terms of which, under heavy penalties, neither region claimed him out of
hours. For the moment he reached his rooms under the roof in Bloomsbury, and
had changed his city coat to another, the iron doors of the office
clanged far behind him, and in front, before his very eyes, rolled up
the beautiful gates of ivory, and he entered into the places of flowers
and singing and wonderful veiled forms. Sometimes he quite lost touch
with the outer world, forgetting to eat his dinner or go to bed, and lay
in a state of trance, his consciousness working far out of the body. And
on other occasions he walked the streets on air, half-way between the
two regions, unable to distinguish between incarnate and discarnate
forms, and not very far, probably, beyond the strata where poets,
saints, and the greatest artists have moved and thought and found their
inspiration. But this was only when some insistent bodily claim
prevented his full release, and more often than not he was entirely
independent of his physical portion and free of the real region, without
let or hindrance. One evening he reached home utterly exhausted after the burden of the
day's work. The Manager had been more than usually brutal, unjust,
ill-tempered, and Jones had been almost persuaded out of his settled
policy of contempt into answering back. Everything seemed to have gone
amiss, and the man's coarse, underbred nature had been in the ascendant
all day long: he had thumped the desk with his great fists, abused,
found fault unreasonably, uttered outrageous things, and behaved
generally as he actually was--beneath the thin veneer of acquired
business varnish. He had done and said everything to wound all that was
woundable in an ordinary secretary, and though Jones fortunately dwelt
in a region from which he looked down upon such a man as he might look
down on the blundering of a savage animal, the strain had nevertheless
told severely upon him, and he reached home wondering for the first time
in his life whether there was perhaps a point beyond which he would be
unable to restrain himself any longer. For something out of the usual had happened. At the close of a passage
of great stress between the two, every nerve in the secretary's body
tingling from undeserved abuse, the Manager had suddenly turned full
upon him, in the corner of the private room where the safes stood, in
such a way that the glare of his red eyes, magnified by the glasses,
looked straight into his own. And at this very second that other
personality in Jones--the one that was ever _watching_--rose up swiftly
from the deeps within and held a mirror to his face.