The House of Souls

very glad indeed. I was not s

things are not very lively just now. But have y

he air was quiet; a sweet breath came from the great wood on the hillside above, and with it, at intervals, the soft murmuring call of the wild doves. Below, in the long lovely valley, the rive

the operation is a perfectly sim

no danger at a

d myself to transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. I have heard myself called quack and charlatan and impostor, but all the while I

ubtfully at Dr. Raymond. 'Are you perfectly sure, Raymond, that your theory is

le-aged man, gaunt and thin, of a pale yellow complexion, but as

has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet-I say that all these are but dreams and shadows: the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these "chases in Arras, dreams in a career," beyond them all as beyond a veil. I

hite mist gathering ov

the brink of a strange world, Raymond, if what you sa

f a moment's idle thought followed up upon familiar lines and paths that I had tracked a hundred times already, the great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of light, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and great oceans in which no ship has sailed (to my belief) since a Man first lifted up his eyes and beheld the sun, and the stars of heaven, and the quiet earth beneath. You will think all this high-flown language, Clarke, but it is hard to be literal. And yet; I do not know whether what I am hinting at cannot be set forth in plain and homely terms. For instance, this world of ours is pretty well girded now with the telegraph wires and cables; thought, with something less than the speed of thought, flashes from sunrise to sunset, from north to south, across the floods and the desert places. Suppose that an electrician of to-day were suddenly to perceive that he and his friends have merely been playing with pebbles and mistaking them for the foundations of the world; suppose that such a man saw uttermost space lie open before the current, and words of men flash forth to the sun and beyond the sun into the systems beyond, and the voices of articulate-speaking men echo in the waste void that bounds our thought. As analogies go, that is a pretty good analogy of what I have done; you can understand now a l

wrote to me? I thought it w

he rest into t

nse, I assure you. Indeed, it is bette

responsibility. Something might go wrong; you wou

e gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her l

d motioned Clarke into his laboratory. It had once been a billiard-room, and was lighted by a glass dome in the centre of the ceiling, whence the

shelves all around laden with bottles and phials of all shapes and colours,

the way, though I don't think he ever found it himself. That is a strange sa

in in one corner, the two armchairs on which Raymond and Clarke were sitting; that was all, except

, and began raising and lowering it, letting down the seat, setting the back at various angles, and adjusting the foot-rest

I have a couple of hours' work before me; I was

gestion of odour, in the room; and as it grew more decided he felt surprised that he was not reminded of the chemist's shop or the surgery. Clarke found himself idly endeavouring to analyse the sensation, and, half conscious, he began to think of a day, fifteen years ago, that he had spent in roaming through the woods and meadows near his old home. It was a burning day at the beginning of August, the heat had dimmed the outlines of all things and all distances wi

ke; there's nothing unwholesome about it.

overpowered all. His fancies made him wander, as he had wandered long ago, from the fields into the wood, tracking a little path between the shining undergrowth of beech-trees; and the trickle of water dropping from the limestone rock sounded as a clear melody in the dream. Thoughts began to go astray and to mingle with other recollections; the beech alley was transformed to a path beneath ilex-trees, and here and there a vine climbed from bough to bough, and sent up waving tendrils and drooped with purple grapes, and the sparse grey-green leaves of a wild olive-tree stood out against the dark shadows of the ilex. Clarke, in the deep folds of dream, was consc

ond pouring a few drops of some oily fluid i

st have tired you out. It is done now. I am goin

, and to awake in London, shuddering at his own sleeping fancies. But at last the door opened, and the doctor returned, and behind him came a girl of about seventeen, dressed a

. You are quite free. Are you willi

, de

Here is the chair, Mary. It is quite easy. J

eady. Give me a kis

r arms upon her breast as a little child about to say her prayers. The bright light of the lamp beat full upon her, and Clarke watched changes fleeting over that face as the changes of the hills when the summer clouds float across the sun. And then she lay all white and still, and the doctor turned up one of her eyelids. She was quite unconscio

d was still perfectly cool. 'There is no

ing. There was an old clock in the passage. Clarke felt sick

ht, looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible; but in an instant the wonder faded, and gave place to the most awful terror. The muscles of he

bedside. She was lying wide-awake, rolling he

pity; she is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be