He
still held tightly to the arms as though they could keep him in the
world of sanity and three measurements, and only now and again released
his left hand in order to mop his face. He looked very thin and white
and oddly unsubstantial, and he stared about him as though he saw into
this other space he had been talking about. John Silence, too, felt warm. He had listened to every word and had
made many notes. The presence of this man had an exhilarating effect
upon him. It seemed as if Mr. Racine Mudge still carried about with
him something of that breathless Higher-Space condition he had been
describing. At any rate, Dr. Silence had himself advanced sufficiently
far along the legitimate paths of spiritual and psychic transformations
to realise that the visions of this extraordinary little person had a
basis of truth for their origin. After a pause that prolonged itself into minutes, he crossed the room
and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking out a small book with a red
cover. It had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his pocket and
proceeded to open the covers. The bright eyes of Mr. Mudge never left
him for a single second. "It almost seems a pity," he said at length, "to cure you, Mr. Mudge. You are on the way to discovery of great things. Though you may lose
your life in the process--that is, your life here in the world of
three dimensions--you would lose thereby nothing of great value--you
will pardon my apparent rudeness, I know--and you might gain what is
infinitely greater. Your suffering, of course, lies in the fact that
you alternate between the two worlds and are never wholly in one or the
other. Also, I rather imagine, though I cannot be certain of this from
any personal experiments, that you have here and there penetrated even
into space of more than four dimensions, and have hence experienced the
terror you speak of." The perspiring son of the Essex bargeman and the woman of Normandy bent
his head several times in assent, but uttered no word in reply. "Some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your
former lives, has favoured the development of your 'disease'; and the
fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading
by the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge,
has further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of
direct inner experience. None of the knowledge you have foreshadowed
has come to you through the senses, of course." Mr. Mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began to tremble slightly. A wind again seemed to pass over his surface and again to set it
curiously in motion like a field of grass. "You are merely talking to gain time," he said hurriedly, in a shaking
voice. "This thinking aloud delays us. I see ahead what you are coming
to, only please be quick, for something is going to happen. A band is
again coming down the street, and if it plays--if it plays Wagner--I
shall be off in a twinkling." "Precisely. I will be quick. I was leading up to the point of how to
effect your cure. The way is this: You must simply learn to _block the
entrances_." "True, true, utterly true!" exclaimed the little man, dodging about
nervously in the depths of the chair. "But how, in the name of space,
is that to be done?" "By concentration. They are all within you, these entrances, although
outer cases such as colour, music and other things lead you towards
them. These external things you cannot hope to destroy, but once the
entrances are blocked, they will lead you only to bricked walls and
closed channels. You will no longer be able to find the way." "Quick, quick!" cried the bobbing figure in the chair. "How is this
concentration to be effected?" "This little book," continued Dr. Silence calmly, "will explain
to you the way." He tapped the cover. "Let me now read out to you
certain simple instructions, composed, as I see you divine, entirely
from my own personal experiences in the same direction. Follow these
instructions and you will no longer enter the state of Higher Space. The entrances will be blocked effectively." Mr. Mudge sat bolt upright in his chair to listen, and John Silence
cleared his throat and began to read slowly in a very distinct voice. But before he had uttered a dozen words, something happened. A sound
of street music entered the room through the open ventilators, for a
band had begun to play in the stable mews at the back of the house--the
March from _Tannhäuser_. Odd as it may seem that a German band should
twice within the space of an hour enter the same mews and play Wagner,
it was nevertheless the fact. Mr. Racine Mudge heard it. He uttered a sharp, squeaking cry and
twisted his arms with nervous energy round the chair. A piteous look
that was not far from tears spread over his white face. Grey shadows
followed it--the grey of fear. He began to struggle convulsively. "Hold me fast! Catch me! For God's sake, keep me here! I'm on the rush
already. Oh, it's frightful!" he cried in tones of anguish, his voice
as thin as a reed. Dr. Silence made a plunge forward to seize him, but in a flash, before
he could cover the space between them, Mr. Racine Mudge, screaming and
struggling, seemed to shoot past him into invisibility. He disappeared
like an arrow from a bow propelled at infinite speed, and his voice
no longer sounded in the external air, but seemed in some curious way
to make itself heard somewhere within the depths of the doctor's own
being. It was almost like a faint singing cry in his head, like a voice
of dream, a voice of vision and unreality. "Alcohol, alcohol!" it cried, "give me alcohol! It's the quickest way. Alcohol, before I'm out of reach!" The doctor, accustomed to rapid decisions and even more rapid action,
remembered that a brandy flask stood upon the mantelpiece, and in less
than a second he had seized it and was holding it out towards the space
above the chair recently occupied by the visible Mudge. Then, before
his very eyes, and long ere he could unscrew the metal stopper, he saw
the contents of the closed glass phial sink and lessen as though some
one were drinking violently and greedily of the liquor within. "Thanks! Enough! It deadens the vibrations!" cried the faint voice
in his interior, as he withdrew the flask and set it back upon the
mantelpiece. He understood that in Mudge's present condition one side
of the flask was open to space and he could drink without removing the
stopper. He could hardly have had a more interesting proof of what he
had been hearing described at such length. But the next moment--the very same moment it almost seemed--the German
band stopped midway in its tune--and there was Mr. Mudge back in his
chair again, gasping and panting! "Quick!" he shrieked, "stop that band! Send it away! Catch hold of me! Block the entrances! Block the entrances! Give me the red book! Oh, oh,
oh-h-h-h!!!" The music had begun again. It was merely a temporary interruption.