Sci-fi has thrived on the philosophical
problems inherent in the potential
existence of intelligent life on other
planets. In the novel History of a World
of Immortals Without a God (1891),
written either by Jane Barlow or her
father (or both, in collaboration) under
the pseudonym Antares Skorpios, the
forbidding immensity of outer space is
conquered by the mysterious powers
of the human mind, and a philosophical
puzzle is answered – but at a terrible
cost. This story follows a similar thread,
but instead of a misanthropic Earthman
inflicting his nihilism on a peaceful alien
civilisation, here the psychic voyage
reveals the terrible truth to a hapless
human dreamer.
MANY YEARS AGO, I lived for some time in the neighbourhood of a private lunatic asylum, kept by my old fellow-student, Dr Warden, and, having always been disposed to specialise in the subject of mental disease, I often visited and studied the various cases placed under his charge. In one among these, that of a patient whom I will call John Lynn, I came to feel a peculiar interest. He was a young man of about twenty-five, of pleasant looks and manners, and to a superficial observer apparently quite free from any symptoms of his malady. His intellectual powers were far above the average, and had been highly trained; in fact, the strain of preparing for a brilliantly successful university examination had proved the cause of a brain fever, followed by a long period of depression, culminating in more than one determined attempt at suicide, which had made it necessary to place him under surveillance.
When I first met him, he had spent six months at Greystones House, and was, in Dr Warden’s opinion, making satisfactory progress towards complete recovery. His mind seemed to be gradually regaining its balance, and the only unfavourable feature in his case was his strong taste for abstruse metaphysical studies, which he could not be prevented from occasionally indulging. But a spell of Kant and Hartmann, Comte and Hamilton, was so invariably followed by a retrograde period of excitement and dejection, that Dr Warden and I tried very hard to keep his thoughts from those pernicious volumes, and quite often we succeeded. My acquaintance with him was several months old, when, one fine mid-summer day, I called at Greystones House after an unusually long absence of a week or more.
The main object of my visit was to borrow a book from John Lynn, and accordingly, after a short conversation with Dr Warden, I asked whether I could see him. ‘Oh, certainly,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m afraid, though, that you won’t find him over-flourishing. He’s been at that confounded stuff, Skleegel and Ficty and Skuppenhoor’ – my friend is no German scholar, and his eccentric pronunciation seemed to accentuate his scorn – ‘hammer and tongs ever since last Monday, and you know what that means. Today, however, he was talking about you at luncheon, which I thought rather a good sign; so perhaps he may come round this time without much trouble.’
Having reached John Lynn’s apartments, however, I did not share the Doctor’s optimism. For though he appeared composed and collected – epithets which, indeed, always sound a warning note – there was a restlessness in the young man’s glance, and a repressed enthusiasm in his tone. Moreover, I found it quite impossible to steer our conversation out of the channel in which his thoughts were setting – the atomic theory. I did my best for some time, but to no purpose at all. The atoms and molecules drifted into everything, through the most improbable crevices, like the dust of an Australian whirlwind. They got into sport, and politics, and parochial gossip, and the latest novel of the season. So at length, abandoning the struggle, I resolved to let him say his say, and the consequence was that, after some half-hour’s discourse, which I will not tempt the reader to skip, I found myself meekly assenting to the propositions of the infinitude of the material universe, and the aggregation and vibration of innumerable homogeneous atoms as the origin of all things, from matter to emotion, from the four-inch brick to the poet’s dream of the Unknown.
‘Now, what has always struck me as strange,’ quoth John Lynn, who at this point leaned forward towards me, and held me with a glittering eye (which to my mind sub-consciously suggested sedatives), ‘what strikes me as strange is the manner in which scientists practically ignore an exceedingly important implication of the theory – one, too, that has been pointed out very distinctly by Lucretius, not to go farther back. I refer to the fact that such a limitless atomic universe necessarily involves the existence, the simultaneous existence, of innumerable solar systems absolutely similar to our own, each repeating it in every detail, from the willow-leaves in the sun to the petals on that geranium-plant in the window, while in each of them history has been identically the same, from the condensation of gaseous nebulae down to stock prices in London at noon today. A minute’s rational reflection shows that the admission is inevitable. Even if the requisite combination doesn’t occur more than once in a tract of a billion trillion quintillions of square miles, what’s that, even squared and cubed, when we have infinite space to draw upon?
‘But, of course, this isn’t all. For it follows from the same considerations that we must recognise the present existence, not only of inconceivably numerous Earths contemporaneous with our own, but also of as many more, older and younger, now exhibiting each successive state, past and future, through which ours has already proceeded, or at which it is destined to arrive. For example, there are some still in the Palaeolithic period, and others where our ancestors are driving their cattle westward over the Asiatic steppes. The battle of Marathon’s going on in one set, and Shakespeare’s writing Hamlet in another. Here they’ve just finished the general election of eighteen hundred and ninety-something, and here they’re in the middle of the next big European war, and here they’re beginning to get over the effects of the submergence of Africa, and the resurrection of Atlantis – and so on to infinity. To make a more personal application, there’s a series of Earths where you at the present moment are playing marbles in a bib, and another where people are coming back from my funeral.’
‘Oh well,’ I said, in a studiously bored way, ‘perhaps these speculations may be interesting enough. But what do they all come to? It seems to me quite easy to understand why scientists ignore them. They’ve so much more promising material on hand. Why should they waste their time over such hopeless hypotheses – or facts, whichever you like?’
‘Then, conceding them to be facts, you consider that they can have no practical significance for science?’ said John Lynn, with a kind of triumph in his tone.
‘Not a bit of it,’ I replied. ‘Supposing that this world is merely one in a crop, all as much alike as the cabbages in a row, and supposing that I am merely one in a bushel of Tom Harlowes, what’s the odds so long as these doubles – or rather infinitibles – are kept separate by those massive distances? If they were to run into each other, I grant that the effect might be slightly confusing and monotonous, but it seems that this is just not possible.’
‘But I believe you’re quite mistaken there, Dr Harlowe,’ he said, still with the suppressed eagerness of a speaker who is clearing the approaches to a sensational disclosure; ‘or would you think a fact had no scientific value, if it went a long way towards accounting for those mysterious phenomena of clairvoyance? For, if what I’ve said is factually true, the explanation is simply this: the clairvoyant has somehow got a glimpse into one of these facsimile worlds, which happens to be a few years ahead of ours in point of time, and has seen how things are going on there.’
‘Really, my good fellow,’ I interposed, ‘considering the billions and quintillions of miles which you were talking about just now, the explanation is hardly as “simple” as you say it is.’
‘It’s still a better one than any that has hitherto been put forward,’ he persisted, with unabated confidence. ‘Why, nowadays, there’s surely no great difficulty in imagining very summary methods of dealing with space. Contrast it with the other difficulty of supposing somebody to have seen something which actually does not exist, and you’ll see that the two are altogether disparate. In short, the whole thing seems clear enough to me on a priori grounds; but, no doubt, that may partly be because I am to a certain extent independent of them, as I’ve lately had an opportunity of visiting a planet which differs from this one solely in having had a small start of it – five years, I should say, or thereabouts.’
Knowing that to reinforce a delusion is always dangerous, I asked, ‘What on earth do you mean, Lynn? Am I to understand that you are meditating a trifling excursion through the depths of space, or has it already come off?’
‘It has,’ he answered.
‘May I ask when?’ I asked, with elaborate sarcasm.
‘Yesterday. I’d like to give you an account of it – and if you’d take a cigar, perhaps you’d look less like a preposterous know-it-all. You really don’t on the present occasion, and it is absurd, not to say exasperating,’ quoth John Lynn, handing me the case, with a good-humoured laugh. I took one, feeling somewhat perplexed at his cheerfulness, as his attacks had hitherto been invariably attended by despondency and gloom; and he resumed his statement as follows:
‘It happened yesterday morning. I was sitting up here, reading a bit of De Natura Rerum, when suddenly I discovered that I was really standing in a very sandy lane, and looking over a low gate into a sort of lawn or pleasure-grounds. Before you say it, I hadn’t fallen asleep. The lawn ran up a slope to the back of a house, all gables, and queer-shaped windows, and tall chimney-stacks, covered with ivy and other creepers – clematis, I think. At any rate, there were sheets of white blossom against the dark green. It’s a place I never saw before, that I’m certain of; there are some points about it that I’d have been likely to remember if I had. For instance, the long semi-circular flights of turf steps to left and right, and the flower-beds cut out of the grass between them into the shape of little ships and boats, a whole fleet, with sails and oars and flags, which struck me as a quaint device. Then in one corner there was a huge puzzle-monkey nearly blocking up a turnstile in the bank; I remember thinking it might be awkward for anyone coming that way in the dark. Looking back down the lane, which was only a few yards of cart-track, there were the beach and the sea close by; a flattish shore with the sand-hills, covered with bent and furze, zig-zagging in and out nearer to and farther from high-water mark. There are miles of that sort of thing along the east coast, and, as a matter of fact, I ultimately found out that it can have been no great distance from Lowestoft – from what corresponds with our Lowestoft, of course, I mean.
‘And I may observe that I never have been in that part of the world, at least, not nearer than Norwich.
‘Well, as you may suppose, such an abrupt change of scene is a rather startling experience; and I must frankly confess that I haven’t the wildest idea how it happened—’
‘But the strange feeling wore off before long, and I began to make observations. As for the time of day, one could see by the shadows and dew on the grass that it was morning, a much earlier hour than it had been here, and the trees and flowers showed that it was early summer. Nobody was visible about the place, but I heard the scraping of a rake upon gravel somewhere near. I set out to find this unseen gardener, and I framed several questions ingeniously designed to extract as much information as possible without betraying my own state of bewildered ignorance.
‘But when I tried to carry out this plan, it proved impossible. The gate at which I stood was unlatched and the banks on either hand were low and easily scalable, but I could not reach those pleasure-grounds. My attempts to do so were repulsed, in a manner which I am totally unable to describe; some strange force, invisible and irresistible as gravity, arrested every movement in that direction, almost before it had been telegraphed from brain to muscle. A few experiments revealed that while I could proceed unchecked to right or left along the shore, I was absolutely prohibited from taking a single step farther inland. I discovered that the water’s edge did not bring me to the end of my tether, but naturally, I did not investigate how far into the sea I could go.
‘I next thought of trying to make my presence audible. This experiment, however, failed even more promptly than the other; I couldn’t utter a sound. I picked up a stone and knocked on the gate; I continued the process for some time before it dawned upon me that my hammering produced no noise whatever. It is true that soon afterwards a ridiculous-looking small terrier came trotting round the corner; but his bored and indifferent air only too plainly proved his arrival to be non propter hoc. I vainly endeavoured to attract his attention, whistling phantom whistles, and slapping my knees, and even going to the length of flourishing defiant legs; he paid no attention to me, and instead saw fit to bark himself hoarse at a flock of sparrows. Altogether it seemed sufficiently obvious that in these new scenes, where and whatever they might be, I was to play the part merely of a spectator, invisible, inaudible, intangible.
‘What happened next was that a glass door in the house opened, and out of it came two ladies, one of whom I recognised as my eldest sister, Elizabeth. There was nothing in her appearance to make me for a moment doubt her identity, though it did strike me that she looked unusually grave and, yes, decidedly older. I was then inclined to attribute this impression to the old-fashioned dress she wore; but I must now suppose her attire to have been whatever is to be the latest novelty for that particular summer. The other girl puzzled me much more, for although there was certainly something familiar about her, I couldn’t fit any name to her; and it wasn’t until I heard my sister call her “Nellie” that I realised she was Helen Ronaldson. She, you know, is a sort of cousin of ours, and my mother’s ward, and has lived with us most of her life; so, there was nothing surprising in finding her and Elizabeth together. The strange thing was that whereas I saw her a few months ago in the guise of an angular, inky-fingered school-girl of fifteen or sixteen at most, yesterday she had shot up to twenty or thereabouts, had grown several inches, and had undoubtedly turned into a young lady.
‘They came down the path, running along inside the boundary-bank, and sat down on a garden seat, behind which I found no difficulty in taking up a position well within eavesdropping distance. I’d begun by this time to suspect how matters stood, and was consequently rather uneasy in my mind. One can’t find oneself suddenly plumped down five years or so ahead of yesterday, without speculating as to how things – and people – have gone on in the meantime. So much may happen in five years. The situation produces the same sort of feeling that I fancy one might have upon finding oneself intact after a railway accident, and proceeding to investigate who among one’s fellow passengers have held together, what number of limbs they still can muster, and so on. Of course, I was not sure that I would learn anything from their conversation; they might have talked for an hour without saying a word to enlighten me; but, as good luck would have it, they were discussing a batch of letters received that morning from various members of the family, about whom I was thus enabled to pick up many more or less disconnected facts. It appeared, for instance, that my sister Maud was married, and living in South Kensington. My brother Dick, who has just got a naval cadetship, was in command of a gunboat somewhere off the Chinese coast. Walter seemed to be doing well on the horse-ranch in the Rockies, which he’s hankering after at present – all satisfactory enough. The only thing that made me uneasy was that for some time neither of them mentioned my mother, and it really was an immense relief to my mind when at last Elizabeth said, “We haven’t got any sweet-pea, and mother always likes a bit for her table.”
“We must get some before we go in. Her cold seems to be much better this morning,” Nellie replied.
“Oh yes, nearly gone. There’s no fear that she won’t be able to appear on Thursday. That would be indeed unlucky; why, a wedding without a mother-in-law would be nearly as bad as one without a bridegroom, wouldn’t it?”
Nellie laughed and blushed, but expressed no opinion, and Elizabeth went on:
“Talking of that, do you expect Vincent this morning?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t sure whether his leave would begin today or tomorrow. He said that if he got it today, he would look in here on his way to Lowestoft.”
“That’s rather a roundabout way from Norwich, isn’t it? You know, Nellie, I’m glad that you’ll be in York next winter. There’s much more going on there, and you can ask me to stay with you!”
‘From these last remarks I inferred two facts respecting Vincent, my youngest brother, neither of which would I have been at all inclined to predict: that he had entered the army, though he has so far displayed no leanings towards a military career; and that he was about to marry Helen Ronaldson. Why, the idea’s absurd! I remember that in the days of their infancy, being nearly contemporaries, they used to squabble a good deal, and at present I believe they regard one another with a feeling of happy indifference. In Vincent’s last letter to me he said he was afraid that he would find the house awfully overrun with girls when he went home, which was, if I’m not mistaken, a graceful allusion to the circumstance that Nellie’s holidays coincide with his own.
‘However, likely or unlikely, I had soon conclusive proof that such was actually the case, as Vincent himself arrived, not easily recognisable, indeed, having developed into a remarkably good-looking young fellow. The discreet way in which Elizabeth presently detached herself from the group and went to gather sweet-pea, would alone have led me to suspect the state of affairs, even if the demeanour of the other two had not made it so very plain before they walked round a corner beyond the range of my observations. But they were scarcely out of sight when there appeared upon the scene a fourth person who took me utterly by surprise, though, of course, if I had considered a little, it was natural enough that I – I mean he – should be there.
‘All the same, it gives one an uncommonly uncanny sensation, I can tell you, to see oneself walk out of a door some way off, stand looking about for a minute or two, and then come sauntering towards one with his hands in your pockets – I’m afraid my pronouns are rather mixed, but I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m not sure whether in such cases we see ourselves as others see us: I should fancy so, for I noticed that I looked extremely – I must hope abnormally – grumpy; I don’t think I was improved either by the short beard he had set up, not to mention several streaks of grey in my hair. Just then I saw Elizabeth crossing the grass to speak to me – I don’t mean to myself, you know, but to him – and I heard her say: “You’re a very unfeeling relative! Have you forgotten that this is my birthday?” This, by the way, fixes the date exactly: it must have been the twenty-third of June, five years ahead from tomorrow. I regret to say that in reply he only gave a sort of grunt, and muttered something about anniversaries being a great bore; and I remember thinking that if I were she I’d leave him to get out of his bad temper myself – I say, these pronouns are really getting quite too many for me …’
‘Your own name is rather a convenient length, why not use it?’ I observed. Lynn considered and adopted the suggestion.
‘Well, then, Elizabeth and John Lynn strolled aimlessly about for a while, but soon went into the house, and after that I saw nobody else, except occasionally the gardener, for what seemed a very long period. I had nothing at all to do, and the time dragged considerably. The strip of beach on which I could move about was hot and glaring, and disagreeably deep in soft sand; yet, for want of better occupation, in the course of the afternoon, I walked more than a mile along it in a northerly direction, until I came to a dilapidated-looking old boat-house, built in a recess between two sandhills, and just beyond the line I couldn’t cross.
‘Having reached this point, and seeing nothing else of interest, I slowly retraced my steps towards the pleasure-grounds’ gate. By this time, it must have been four or five o’clock, and the weather, hitherto bright and clear, showed a change for the worse. An ugly livid-hued cloud was spreading like a bruise over the sky to the southeast, and sudden gusts began to ruffle up the long, bent grasses of the sand-hills on my right hand.
‘When I came near the gate, several people were standing at it, apparently watching two men who were doing something to a small sailing-boat, which lay off a little pier close by. Elizabeth and Nellie, and my other sister Juliet, were there, and Elizabeth was explaining to an elderly man, whom I have never succeeded in identifying, that Jack and Vincent intended to sail across to Graston Spit – she pointed over the water to a low tongue of land at no great distance – which would be Vincent’s shortest way to Lowestoft. “In that case,” said he, “the sooner they’re off the better, for it looks as if we might have a squall before very long, and the glass is by no means steady today.” The women debated among themselves about whether the short trip was advisable, eventually concluding that the two men should give up the idea. John Lynn, whose temper seemed to have somewhat improved, asserted that they would have a splendid breeze, and that he would be back again in an hour or so. Accordingly, they hurried over their adieux, and lost no time in getting off, taking nobody else with them.
‘They had been gone perhaps three-quarters of an hour, when the “splendid breeze” appeared in the shape of a furious squall, hissing and howling on with remarkable suddenness and violence, and brought the girls, who were still out-of-doors, running with dismayed countenances to look over the gate to the sea. The sweeping gusts bore to me fitful snatches of anxious colloquies, the general drift of which, however, seemed to be towards the conclusion that the boat must have got over before the wind sprang up, and that Jack would, of course, wait there until it went down. As the blasts moderated a little, they were accompanied by driving sheets of large-dropped rain, which again sent the girls scurrying indoors, and I was left alone. I thought much upon the boat and its occupants, who must, I thought, be having a rather nasty time of it, unless they had really landed before the squall; for both wind and tide were against them, and a surprising sea had got up already. I consider myself to know something about the management of a boat, and I supposed that my strange double or “fetch”1 might be credited with an equal amount of skill; Vincent, however, has had little or no experience of nautical matters.
‘I reviewed the situation, standing where the shallow foam-slides seethed to my feet, and I found myself contemplating a catastrophe to that John Lynn with a feeling which I can’t either describe or explain. After a while, I began to pace up and down the beach as the light was thickening, when, on turning a corner, I again came in sight of the old boat-house again. Almost at the same moment, my eye was caught by some dark object on the sea, elusively disappearing and reappearing between the folds of grey vapour drifting low upon the water. A longer rift soon showed me plainly that it was a small boat in sorry plight, filling and settling down so fast, that her final disappearance would evidently be a question of a very few minutes. There was nobody in her, and I thought to myself that if anyone had gone overboard in that sea, he must assuredly have preceded her to the bottom. And I felt equally convinced that she was no other than the boat in which I had seen the two Lynns embark.
‘This proved to be both right and wrong: she was the Lynns’ boat, but the Lynns had not gone to the bottom. I now became aware of a human form, which, at not many yards’ distance, was making slow and struggling progress through the swirling surf towards the water’s edge, and had already reached a place shallow enough to admit of wading. As I ran forward, not to assist – having long since ascertained that I could by no means demonstrate my presence – but merely to investigate; it turned out to be John Lynn, half-carrying, and half-dragging along Vincent, who was apparently insensible. I had an awful scare, I can tell you, for he flopped down on the sand when I – when John let him go, in such a lifeless, limp sort of way, that I thought at first the lad had really come to grief. However, I suppose he had only been slightly stunned; at any rate, in a minute or two he sat up, and seemed none the worse. But when he got to his feet, it was evident that he had somehow damaged one of his ankles, and he could hardly attempt the feeblest hobble. All this time the rain was coming down in torrents, and it was blowing so hard that you could scarcely hear yourself speak.
“It’s a good step – more than a mile,” I heard the other John Lynn say. “Do you think you could get as far as the old boathouse? Then you’d be under shelter, while I run back and find some means of getting you home.”
‘They made their way haltingly to the boathouse, which, judging by the cobwebby creaking of the door, had not been entered for many a long day, and into which I was, of course, unable to follow them. Presently, John Lynn came out alone, and set off running towards the house at a very creditable pace, considering the depth of the sand and the weight of his drenched garments. I had found a tolerably sheltered station under the lee of a sandbank, and I decided to wait where I was for his return; but I had to wait much longer than one might have expected. The twilight turned into dusk, and the wind dropped, and the sky cleared, and a large full-moon came out, all in a leisurely way, but there was no sign of anybody coming near us. I couldn’t account for the delay, and abused John Lynn a good deal in consequence of it. I know my wits sometimes go wool-gathering, but I’m certain I should never have been such an ass as to leave another fellow sitting wet through for a couple of hours. Vincent, too, was evidently getting impatient, for I heard him shout “Jack” once or twice, and whistle at intervals in a way which I knew betokened exasperation.
‘At last John Lynn came posting round the corner, apparently in no end of a hurry, but not a soul with him, though he’d been away long enough to have collected half the county. As he ran up to the boat-house, I saw him taking out of his pocket something which gleamed in the moonlight, and was, I’m pretty sure, the top of a flask, so he’d at any rate had the sense to bring some spirits. I wanted to find out whether any more people were on their way, and forgetting for the moment that the boat-house wasn’t in my reach, I went after him to the door. And there two queer things happened.
‘In the first place, I got a glimpse, just for an instant, but quite distinctly, of you, Dr Harlowe; and immediately afterwards an extraordinary feeling of horror came over me, and I began to rush away, I don’t know why or where, but on, on, until the air suddenly turned into a solid black wall, and I went smash against it, and somehow seemed to wake up – sitting here at this table.’
‘That’s the first sensible remark you’ve made today,’ I said, in the most soothingly matter-of-fact tone that I could assume. ‘Only why do you say “seemed”? I should think it was perfectly obvious that you did really wake up – or is there more to follow?’
‘Then I dreamt it all?’ said he.
‘All of it that you haven’t elaborated since then, just by thinking it over,’ I replied.
‘Oh, well,’ said my young friend with a certain air of forbearing superiority, ‘as it happens, I dreamt it no more than you did. But if you prefer it, we’ll call it a dream. At any rate, it wasn’t a bad one. I should feel rather uncomfortable now if it had ended disastrously; however, as far as one can see, nothing worse seemed likely to come of it than Nellie’s being obliged either to postpone her wedding for a week, or to put up with a hobbling bridegroom. Then, as to those disagreeable sensations at the conclusion, I dare say they could have been caused by the process by which one is conveyed back and forward; some phase, no doubt, of disintegration of matter. But you said, didn’t you, that you wanted to borrow Walt Whitman? Here he is – mad Martin Tupper flavoured with dirt, in my judgment; however, you may like him better.’
During the remainder of our interview, John Lynn was so composed and rational that I began to think less seriously of his relapse. After all, many thoroughly sane people had been overcome by vivid and coherent dreams, and I felt no doubt that in his case the impression would wear off in a day or two. As I went out, I communicated these views to Dr Warden, who agreed with my assessment.
This proved to be my last conversation with John Lynn. That very evening I was unexpectedly called away by business, which obliged me to spend several months in America. Upon returning, I found that he had left Greystones House cured, and had gone abroad for a long tour. After which, I heard nothing more about him; as time went by, I thought of him less and less.
In the early summer, five years later – my diary fixes all dates – I happened to be wandering along the eastern coast, and arrived one evening at a remote little seaside place in Norfolk. The next morning, the twenty-third of June, was brilliantly fine, and tempted me out with my photographing gear. My negatives turned out better than usual, and as it was a new fad with me, I became so deeply absorbed in my attempts that I allowed myself to be overtaken, a good way from home, by a violent storm of wind and rain. I had an extremely unpleasant walk home with my unwieldy camera and other paraphernalia; having got into dry clothes, and ascertained that several of my most promising plates had been destroyed, I did not feel enthusiastically benevolent when the landlord appeared in my room.
A young man, he told me, had just come over in the dogcart from Sandford Lodge – Mrs Lynn’s place below – to fetch a doctor for the old lady, who had taken a turn for the worse; the local doctor, however, was on a call several miles away and could not be reached. ‘And so, sir,’ proceeded my landlord, ‘believin’ as you be a medical gentleman, I made bold to mention the suckumstance to you, in case as how you might think on doin’ summat for her.’
Common humanity, of course, compelled me so to go, and I at once set out again through the rain, which still fell thickly. The young man in the dogcart explained as much of the situation as he could along the way. The family, he said, had been at Sandford Lodge for about a couple of years, and were well liked in the neighbourhood. Two gentlemen from the house had been out sailing that afternoon, and had either been caught in the squall, or run into a rock, but had gone down ‘clever and clean’ one way or the other. Mr Jack managed to swim ashore, but there was no sign of his brother, Mr Vincent, who was supposed to be getting married in two days’ time. After the awful news was delivered, they’d found the mistress of the house lying unconscious on the landing and couldn’t rouse her.
The young man drove a few hundred yards down a deeprutted, sandy lane, and pulled up next to an iron gate. ‘There’s a turnstile in the bank to your left, sir,’ he said, as I alighted, ‘and then if you go straight on up the lawn, you’ll find the porch-door open, and there’s safe to be someone about.’
I followed his instructions, feeling a curiously strong impression of familiarity with the place at which I had arrived – the sandy bank, the gate, the slope running up to the creeper-draped gabled house, standing out darkly against the struggling moonbeams. A common enough illusion, I reflected, but it was now without doubt unusually powerful and persistent. It was not dispelled even by my pricking my hand severely in brushing past a puzzle-monkey, which brandished its spiny arms in front of the turnstile. At the door I was met by two girls, who looked stunned and scared, but who reported that their mother had recovered from the long fainting-fit which had so much alarmed them.
They brought me upstairs to the room where she was sitting, and the first sight of her miserable face brought further latent memories to the surface, for she reminded me of someone I had met before, but I couldn’t remember who – even though I knew I was speaking to a Mrs Lynn.
I found the interview dreary and embarrassing. Mrs Lynn was so far recovered that her health called for but little professional discourse, and yet I feared to appear unsympathetic if I hastened away abruptly. At length I decided to end the conversation by producing a visiting-card, which I handed to Mrs Lynn, murmuring something about a hope that if I could at any time be of any service to her she would— But before I was half through my sentence, she started, and uttered an exclamation, with her eyes fixed upon the name and address. ‘Harlowe – Greystones,’ she said; ‘you’re the one who was so kind to poor Jack when he was with Dr Warden!’
As she spoke, a ray of recognition shot into my mind. It could be no one but John Lynn’s mother; of course I remembered John Lynn. Indeed, there was as strong a likeness between her and her son as there can be between an elderly lady and a young man. I was, however, still unable to recall the occasion upon which he had, as I now began to feel dimly aware, described this place to me.
Mrs Lynn appeared to be strangely agitated by her discovery of my identity. She sat for a minute or two glancing from the card to me, and said, ‘Dr Harlowe, I must tell you something that has been upon my mind for a long time.’ She continued, speaking low and rapidly, with many nervous glances towards the door. ‘Perhaps you may have heard that my youngest son Vincent is going to be married. Their wedding was to have been the day after tomorrow, his and Helen Ronaldson’s. She’s my ward, who has lived with us all her life; and they’ve been engaged for nearly a year. Well, Dr Harlowe, my son Jack – you know Jack – has been at home, too, for three or four years, and some time ago I began to suspect a feeling on his part of attachment towards Nellie. I hoped at first that I was mistaken, but lately I’ve realised I’m not. I believe he never realised it himself until the time of his brother’s engagement. And I fear he has at times, just occasionally, shown some jealousy towards Vincent. Not often at all, and nothing serious, you know; indeed, it may be only my own imagination.’
‘Very true,’ I said, because she looked at me as if wishing for assent.
‘But that’s not what I want to tell you,’ she hurried on. ‘Tonight, soon after he came back from that miserable boat, I was in here, when I heard Jack running upstairs, and I went to the door to speak to him, but before I could stop him, he had passed, and gone into his room. Just outside it he dropped something, and I picked it up. It was this!’ She took out of her pocket a small gold horseshoe-shaped locket with an inch or so of broken chain attached to it. One side of its case had been wrenched off at the hinge, showing that it contained a tiny photograph – a girl’s face, dark-eyed and delicately featured.
‘That’s Nellie,’ said Mrs Lynn, ‘and it belongs to Vincent; he always wore it on his watch-chain. So if he had really been washed away, as they said, I don’t understand how Jack came to have it with him. Do you, Dr Harlowe?’ This poor mother leaned forward and laid a hand on my sleeve, in her eagerness for an answer.
‘He might have been trying to rescue his brother – to pull him ashore, or into the boat, and have accidentally caught hold of it in that way,’ I suggested. ‘It looks as if it had been torn off by a strong grip.’
‘Do you think that may be how it was?’ she said with what seemed to me an odd mingling of relief and disappointment in her tone. ‘When I had picked it up, I waited about outside Jack’s door, and thought I heard him unlocking and opening a drawer. Presently he came out, in a great hurry: he ran past, saying, ‘I can’t stop now, mother.’ I went into his room, and the first thing I noticed was the drawer of the writing-table left open. I knew it was the one where he keeps his revolver, and when I looked into it, I saw that the case was empty. Just then I suddenly got very faint, and they say I was unconscious for a long time. One of the maids says that she saw Jack running down towards the beach, about an hour ago. I believe numbers of people are there, searching. I said nothing to anyone about the revolver – perhaps I ought to have done so. What can he have wanted with it? I’ve been thinking that he may have intended to fire it off for a signal, if the night was very dark. Don’t you think that is quite possible?’
‘I don’t know … I can’t say,’ I answered. At this moment a whole sequence of recollections stood out abruptly in my mind, as if my thoughts had been put under a stereoscope.
‘Can you tell me whether there is an old, disused boat-house, perhaps a mile along the shore, built in a hollow between two banks?’ I went on, impatiently adding what particulars I could, in hopes of prompting her memory, which seemed to be at fault.
‘Yes, yes, there is one like that,’ she said at last; ‘in the direction of Mainforthing; I remember we walked as far as it not very long ago.’
‘Someone ought to go there immediately,’ I said, moving towards the door.
‘Why?’ exclaimed Mrs Lynn, following me. ‘Is there any chance that the boys—?’
But I did not wait to explain my reasons, which, in truth, were scarcely intelligible to myself.
Hurrying down the lawn, and emerging on the beach, I fell in with a small group of men and lads, of whom I asked the way to Mainforthing. To the right, they told me by word and gesture, but the search party had set off in the opposite direction. I explained that my object was to find the old boat-house, whereupon they assured me that I would do so easy enough if I kept straight along by the strand for a mile and a bit, and two or three of them accompanied me as I started.
The stretches of crumbling, moon-bleached sand seemed to lengthen out interminably, but at last, round a corner I came breathlessly upon my goal. The door of the boat-house was wide open, and the moonlight streamed brightly through it, full in the face of a youth who, at the moment when I reached the threshold, was standing with his back to the wall, steadying himself by a hold on the window-ledge beside him, and looking as if he had just with difficulty scrambled to his feet. He was staring straight before him with a startled and bewildered expression, and saying ‘Jack – I say, Jack, what the deuce are you up to?’
And not without adequate cause. For opposite to him stood John Lynn – altered, but still recognisable as my former acquaintance – who held in his hand a revolver, which he was raising slowly, slowly, to a level as it seemed with the other’s head. The next instant I had sprung towards him, but he was too quick for me, and, shaking off my grasp on his arm, turned and faced me, still holding his weapon. ‘Dr Harlowe! You here?’ he said, and had scarcely spoken the words when he put the barrel to his temple, and before the echoes of the shot had died on the jarred silence, and while the smoke-wreaths were still eddying up to the boat-house roof, he lay dead at our feet with a bullet in his brain.
The coroner’s jury, of course, returned their customary verdict, perhaps with better grounds than usual. Upon my own private verdict, I have deliberated often and long, but without arriving at any conclusive result. That crime that John Lynn had been about to commit – was it a premeditated one, or had he taken the revolver with some different intention, and then yielded to a sudden mad impulse? This question I can never hope to answer definitely, though my opinion inclines towards the latter. Upon the whole it seems clear to me that by his last act my unhappy friend took the easiest way out of a maze of mortal misery. Furthermore, I cannot avoid the conviction that but if he hadn’t told me of his dream, or trance experiences, a fratricide’s guilt would have been added to the burdens of his mind, and his passion mocked by Fate.
1. Editor’s note: a ‘fetch’ is the Irish folkloric equivalent of a doppelgänger; it is the double of a person who is still alive, and its appearance heralds the death of the person it mimics.