“There was something so odious, so coarse, so unfeeling about this that
I instantly drew my head in, pulled the blind down again, and then, for
what reason I do not know, turned on the electric light in order to see
what time it was. The hands of my watch pointed to half-past eleven. “It was then for the first time, I think, that a doubt crossed my mind
as to the nature of what I had just seen. But I put out the light again,
got into bed, and began to think. We had dined; I had gone to a party, I
had come back and written letters, had gone to bed and had slept. So how
could it be half-past eleven?... Or--_what_ half-past eleven was it? “Then another easy solution struck me; my watch must have stopped. But
it had not; I could hear it ticking. “There was stillness and silence again. I expected every moment to hear
muffled footsteps on the stairs, footsteps moving slowly and smally
under the weight of a heavy burden, but from inside the house there was
no sound whatever. Outside, too, there was the same dead silence, while
the hearse waited at the door. And the minutes ticked on and ticked on,
and at length I began to see a difference in the light in the room, and
knew that the dawn was beginning to break outside. But how had it
happened then that if the corpse was to be removed at night it had not
gone, and that the hearse still waited, when morning was already coming? “Presently I got out of bed again, and with the sense of strong physical
shrinking I went to the window and pulled back the blind. The dawn was
coming fast; the whole street was lit by that silver hueless light of
morning. But there was no hearse there. “Once again I looked at my watch. It was just a quarter-past four. But I
would swear that not half an hour had passed since it had told me that
it was half-past eleven. “Then a curious double sense, as if I was living in the present and at
the same moment had been living in some other time, came over me. It was
dawn on June 25th, and the street, as natural, was empty. But a little
while ago the driver of a hearse had spoken to me, and it was half-past
eleven. What was that driver, to what plane did he belong? And again
_what_ half-past eleven was it that I had seen recorded on the dial of
my watch? “And then I told myself that the whole thing had been a dream. But if
you ask me whether I believed what I told myself, I must confess that I
did not. “Your man did not appear at breakfast next morning, nor did I see him
again before I left that afternoon. I think if I had, I should have told
you about all this, but it was still possible, you see, that what I had
seen was a real hearse, driven by a real driver, for all the ghastly
gaiety of the face that had looked up to mine, and the levity of his
pointing hand. I might possibly have fallen asleep soon after seeing
him, and slumbered through the removal of the body and the departure of
the hearse. So I did not speak of it to you.”

       *       *       *       *       *

There was something wonderfully straightforward and prosaic in all this;
here were no Jacobean houses oak-panelled and surrounded by weeping
pine-trees, and somehow the very absence of suitable surroundings made
the story more impressive. But for a moment a doubt assailed me. “Don’t tell me it was all a dream,” I said. “I don’t know whether it was or not. I can only say that I believe
myself to have been wide awake. In any case the rest of the story
is--odd.”

“I went out of town again that afternoon,” he continued, “and I may say
that I don’t think that even for a moment did I get the haunting sense
of what I had seen or dreamed that night out of my mind. It was present
to me always as some vision unfulfilled. It was as if some clock had
struck the four quarters, and I was still waiting to hear what the hour
would be. “Exactly a month afterwards I was in London again, but only for the day. I arrived at Victoria about eleven, and took the underground to Sloane
Square in order to see if you were in town and would give me lunch. It
was a baking hot morning, and I intended to take a bus from the King’s
Road as far as Graeme Street. There was one standing at the corner just
as I came out of the station, but I saw that the top was full, and the
inside appeared to be full also. Just as I came up to it the conductor
who, I suppose, had been inside, collecting fares or what not, came out
on to the step within a few feet of me. He wore grey trousers, brown
boots, a black coat buttoned, a straw hat, and over his shoulder was a
strap on which hung his little machine for punching tickets. I saw his
face, too; it was the face of the driver of the hearse, with a mole on
the left cheek. Then he spoke to me, jerking his thumb over his
shoulder. “‘Just room for one inside, sir,’ he said. “At that a sort of panic-terror took possession of me, and I knew I
gesticulated wildly with my arms, and cried, ‘No, no!’ But at that
moment I was living not in the hour that was then passing, but in that
hour which had passed a month ago, when I leaned from the window of your
bedroom here just before the dawn broke. At this moment too I knew that
my spy-hole had been opposite the spy-hole into the spiritual world. What I had seen there had some significance, now being fulfilled, beyond
the significance of the trivial happenings of to-day and to-morrow. The
Powers of which we know so little were visibly working before me. And I
stood there on the pavement shaking and trembling. “I was opposite the post-office at the corner, and just as the bus
started my eye fell on the clock in the window there. I need not tell
you what the time was. “Perhaps I need not tell you the rest, for you probably conjecture it,
since you will not have forgotten what happened at the corner of Sloane
Square at the end of July, the summer before last. The bus pulled out
from the pavement into the street in order to get round a van that was
standing in front of it. At the moment there came down the King’s Road a
big motor going at a hideously dangerous pace. It crashed full into the
bus, burrowing into it as a gimlet burrows into a board.”

He paused. “And that’s my story,” he said. THE MAN WHO WENT TOO FAR


The little village of St Faith’s nestles in a hollow of wooded hill up
on the north bank of the river Fawn in the county of Hampshire, huddling
close round its grey Norman church as if for spiritual protection
against the fays and fairies, the trolls and “little people,” who might
be supposed still to linger in the vast empty spaces of the New Forest,
and to come after dusk and do their doubtful businesses. Once outside
the hamlet you may walk in any direction (so long as you avoid the high
road which leads to Brockenhurst) for the length of a summer afternoon
without seeing sign of human habitation, or possibly even catching sight
of another human being.