by E. F. Benson
He looked at me with that distant penetrating glance which seemed to be focused on some inconceivable remoteness, and laughed.
‘No, that wasn’t the coincidence,’ he said, ‘at least, that coincidence, if you call it so, is not the point of the story. As for the name of the station, that will come very soon now.’
‘Oh, there is more, then, is there?’ I asked.
‘Certainly; you told me to tell it you at length. That’s only the prologue, or the first act. Shall I go on?’
‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’
‘Well, there I was again in Arthur’s room; the whole vision had lasted perhaps a minute, and he was quite unaware that I had done anything but stare at the chess-board, and when he made that move which upset my plans, give a cry of surprise and dismay . . . And then as I told you, we talked for a little, and he mentioned that he and his wife were possibly going up to Yorkshire for Whitsuntide, to a place called Helyat, which she had lately inherited on the death of an uncle. It was up on the moors, he said, with a little shooting in the autumn, and just now some rather good trout-fishing. If they went, they would be there for a fortnight or so; perhaps I would come up for a week, if I was doing nothing particular. I said I should be delighted to, but this was contingent, of course, on their going, and the matter was left vague. I saw neither of them again, nor did I hear any more till, ten days afterwards, I got a telegram from him – he always sends a telegram in preference to a letter, because he says it receives more attention – asking me to come up as soon as ever I liked. If I would let him know the day and the time of my train, they would meet me: their station was Helyat. Helyat, I may say, was not the name of the station in the vision I have told you.
‘There was an ABC time-table in the house. I looked out Helyat, found a train that started and arrived at convenient hours, and I telegraphed to Arthur that I would travel by it next day. So that was settled.
‘The weather in London that week had been extremely oppressive, and I welcomed the idea of getting up on to the Yorkshire moors. Moreover, since the day when I had experienced that odd vision I had gone about with a strong sense of some impending disaster. I told myself, in the way one does, that the heat and sultriness of town were responsible for my depressed spirits, but I knew very well that it was the vision that lay at the root of them. I never shook off the consciousness of it; it lay like some leaden weight upon me, it got between the normal sunlight of life and myself like some menacing thunder-cloud. And now, the moment that I had sent off that telegram, the exhilaration at the thought of getting into a high and bracing air completely passed, and the dread of some imminent peril took such possession of me that I nearly sent a second telegram on the heels of the first to say that I could not manage to come after all. But why I connected these forebodings with my journey or my stay at Helyat I had no idea, and search my mind as I might there was no conceivable reason for doing so. I told myself that this was one of those causeless fears which sometimes obsess people of the steadiest nerves, and that to yield to it was to take a definite step in the direction of mental unbalance. It would never do to let oneself become the prey of such unreasonable terrors.
‘I made up my mind therefore to go through with it, not only for the sake of not losing a pleasant week in the country, but even more for the sake of proving to myself the unreasonableness of my fears. I arrived accordingly at the terminus next morning, with a quarter of an hour to spare, found a corner seat, engaged a place in the restaurant-car for lunch, and settled down. Just before the train started the ticket-inspector came round, and as he clipped my ticket, looked at the name of my destination.
‘ “Change at Corstophine, sir,” he said, and now you know the name of the station at which I alighted in that vision.
‘I felt panic invading my very bones, but I asked one question.
‘ “Do I wait there long?” I said.
‘He consulted a time-table which he pulled out of his pocket.
‘ “Just an hour, sir,” he said. “A branch line takes you on to Helyat.” ’
I broke my determination not to interrupt him.
‘Corstophine?’ I said. ‘I’ve seen that name lately in the paper.’
‘So have I. We’re just coming to that,’ said he. ‘And then the panic grew beyond my control. I could not resist it any longer, and I got out of the train. With some difficulty I managed to obtain my luggage from the van, and I sent a telegram to Arthur Temple saying I was detained. A minute later the train started, and there I was on the platform, already terribly ashamed of myself, but knowing in some interior cell of my brain that I was right in doing what I had done. In some manner, as yet inscrutable to me, I had obeyed the warning which I had received ten days ago.
‘I dined that evening at my club, and after dinner read in an evening paper about a terrible railway accident that had occurred during the afternoon at Corstophine. The fast train from London, by which I should have travelled, stopped there at two-fifty-three p.m.; the train taking the branch line which goes up into the moors and stops at Helyat was due to start at three-fifty-four. It starts, so said the account, from the down platform, crosses on to the up line, along which it runs for some hundred yards, and then branches off to the right. About the same time an up-express is due to pass through Corstophine without stopping. Usually the local train to Helyat waits on the down line for it to pass; this afternoon, however, the express was late, and the Helyat train was signalled to start. Whether owing to a mistake of the signalman, who had not put up the signal against the express, or whether the driver of the express had not seen it, was not yet clear, but what had happened was that while the Helyat train was on the section of the up line, the express, running at full speed to make up time, dashed into it. The engine and front carriage of the express was wrecked, and the other train reduced simply to matchwood: the express had gone through it like a bullet.’
Again he paused; this time I did not interrupt.
‘So, there was my vision,’ he said, ‘and there was the interpretation of the warning it sent me. But there remains a little more to tell you, which, to my mind, is as curious from the point of view of the scientific investigator of such phenomena as anything yet. It is this.
‘I instantly made up my mind to start for Helyat next day. Vision and fulfilment alike, as far as I was concerned, had done their work, and I had an immense curiosity to ascertain whether all the imagery and scenery of the vision had an actual existence here on earth, or whether it was an impulse, so to speak, from the immaterial world, clothing itself in forms of time and space. I must confess that I hoped it was the former, that I should find at Corstophine what I imagined I had seen there, for that would show me how closely the two worlds are interlinked or dovetailed together, so that the one can use for our mortal sense the scenery of the other . . . So I telegraphed again to Arthur Temple, saying that I should arrive at the same hour next day.
‘Again, therefore, I went to the London terminus, and again the ticket inspector told me I must change at Corstophine. The papers that morning were full of this terrible accident, but he assured me that the line was already clear, and that I should get through. An hour before we were due there we passed into the black country of collieries and manufacture; the sun was hidden in the murk of the smoke-belching chimneys, and when we stopped at the station where I was to change the earth was shrouded under that gross and unnatural twilight in which I had seen it before. And, exactly as before, I gave my luggage in charge of the porter, and set out to explore a place I had never seen, but knew with a vividness which no normal exercise of memory can give. There on the right of the station yard were the allotment gardens, behind which rose the line of moors, among which, no doubt, Helyat lay, and there, to the left, were the roofs of sheds, with tall chimneys vomiting smoke, and there in front of me was the mean, steep street stretching into an endless perspective. But today, instead of finding a dea
d and uninhabited town, it was full of busy crowds hurrying about. Children were playing in the gutters, cats sat and made their toilets on doorsteps; the sparrows pecked at the refuse heaps that strewed the road. That seemed natural; when my spirit, or my astral body or whatever you care to call it, visited Corstophine before I belonged, potentially, to the dead, and the living were outside my ken. Now, potentially, I belonged to the living, and they swarmed about me.
‘I went quickly up the street, for from my previous experience I knew that there was not more than time to go to the place which I must visit, and return to catch my train. It was swelteringly hot, and curiously dark; the darkness increased every moment as I hurried along. Then the houses on the left came to an end, and I looked over grimy fields, and then the houses on the right ceased also, and the road made a sharp turn. Presently I was walking below the stone wall, too high to look over, and there was the iron gate ajar, and the rows of tombstones within, and against the blackened sky the roofs and spire of the cemetery chapel. Once more I passed up the grass-grown gravel, and there was an empty space in front of the chapel, with just one gravestone standing apart from the rest.
‘I crossed the grass to it and saw that it was overgrown with moss and lichen. I scraped with my stick the surface of the stone on which was cut the name of the man who lay below it – or woman, maybe – and then, lighting a match, for it was impossible to read the letters in the darkness, I saw that it was my own name and none other that was chiselled there. There was no date, there was no text; there was just my name and nothing else.’
He paused again. Some time during the course of his story my servant must have brought out a tray of syphons and whisky, and put on the table a lamp that now burned there unwaveringly in the still air. But I had not been aware of his coming or going; I had known no more of it than Fred had known of his opponent’s move at chess while the vision filled the field of his conscious perceptions. He helped himself to something; I did the same, and he spoke again.
‘It is arguable,’ he said, ‘that at some time in my life I had been to Corstophine, and had done exactly what I did in my vision. I can’t prove that I haven’t, because I can’t account for every day that I have spent since I was born. I can only say that I have absolutely no recollection of having done so, or of ever having heard of such a place as Corstophine. But if I had, it is on the cards that my vision was only a recollection, and that its preventing my going to Corstophine on a particular day when, if I had gone there, I should certainly have been killed in a railway accident was only a coincidence. If that had happened, and if my body had been identified, my remains would certainly have been buried in that cemetery, because my executor would have found in my will the wish that, unless there were strong reasons for the contrary, I should be buried in the graveyard nearest to the place in which I had died. Naturally I don’t care what happens to my body when I have done with it, and I don’t want it be to a sentimental nuisance to other people.’
He sat up, stretched himself, and laughed.
‘That would have been a very elaborate coincidence,’ he said, ‘and the coincidence would have had a longer arm than ever if they had observed that close to my grave there was buried another Fred Bennett. I must say that the simpler explanation appeals to me more.’
‘And what is the simpler explanation?’ I asked.
‘The one that you really believe in, though your reason revolts against it because it has not the faintest idea of the law that lies behind it. It’s a law all the same, though it doesn’t manifest itself so often as that which governs the rising of the sun. Let’s say, then, that it’s a law loosely analogous to that which regulates the appearance of comets, though of course it is far more frequent in its manifestations. Perhaps it requires for its manifestation a certain psychical perception given to some people and not to others, just in the same way as it requires a certain physical perception to hear the squeal of those bats which are flitting overhead. I can’t hear them personally, but I think you told me before that you can. I perfectly accept your word for it, though the noise doesn’t reach my senses.’
‘And the law?’ I asked.
‘The law is that in the real world, in the true existence beyond the “muddy vesture of decay”, the past and the present and the future are one. They are a point in eternity which can be perceived, and handled all round. Difficult to express, but that’s the kind of thing. Occasionally, and in the case of some people, the muddy vesture can be stripped off, though only intermittently and for a moment, and then they perceive and know. It’s very simple really, and, as a matter of fact, you believe it all the time.’
‘I know I do,’ said I, ‘but just because it is so rare, and because it is so abnormal, I want to try to account for everything of the sort which I hear by an extension of the physical senses. Thought-reading, telepathy, suggestion; all these are natural phenomena. We know a little about them, and we’ve got to exclude them first before we accept anything so strange as a vision of the future.’
‘Exclude them, then,’ he said. ‘I’m quite with you. But you mustn’t think that I put clairvoyance or knowledge of the future on a different plane to any of those. It’s only an extension of a natural law, a branch line, so to speak, that led to Helyat, off the main line. It’s part of the system.’
There was something to think about there, and we were both silent. I could hear the squeak of the bats, and Fred couldn’t, but I should have thought it very materialistic of him to deny that I heard them just because his ears were deaf to them. I thought over the story, point by point; and, as he had said, I knew I really agreed with him on the principle that from somewhere out of what we think of as the great void, merely because we do not rightly know what is there, there did come, and had come, and would come, these wireless messages to the receivers that were in tune with them. There was the dead town of his vision, uninhabited, because potentially he was of the dead, and then it became a live town, because, having taken the warning, he was of the living. And then a bright and brilliant and go-to-bed notion struck me.
‘Ha! I’ve picked a hole,’ I said. ‘When you saw the vision, Corstophine was without inhabitants, because you were dead. Wasn’t it so?’
He laughed again.
‘I know exactly what you are going to ask,’ he said. ‘You’re going to ask about the porter at the station, to whom I gave my luggage. I can’t explain that. Perhaps his appearance was like the last conscious view of the anaesthetist, who stands by you when you are having gas, and is the final link with the material world. He was like Arthur Temple, you will remember.’
The Temple
Frank Ingleton and I had left London early in July with the intention of spending a couple of months at least in Cornwall. This sojourn was not by any means to be a complete holiday, for he was a student of those remains of prehistoric civilisation which are found in such mysterious abundance in the ancient county, and I was employed on a book which should have already been approaching completion, but which was still lamentably far from its consummation. Naturally there was to be a little golf and a little sea-bathing for relaxation, but we were both keen on our work and meant to have gathered in a respectable harvest of industry before we returned.
The village of St Caradoc’s, from all accounts, seemed likely to be favourable to our projects, for there were remains in the neighbourhood which had never been thoroughly investigated by any archaeologist, and its position on the map, remote from any of the more celebrated holiday centres, promised a reasonable tranquillity. It supplied, also, the desirable relaxations; the clubhouse of a pleasantly hazardous golf-course stood at the bottom of the hotel garden, and five minutes’ walk across the sand-dunes among which the holes were placed led to the beach. The hotel was comfortable, and at present half empty, and Fortune seemed to smile on our undertakings. We settled down, therefore, without further plans. Frank meant, before he left, to visit other parts of
the county, but here, within a mile of the hotel, was that curious circle of monoliths, like some Stonehenge in miniature, known as the ‘Council of Penruth’. It had always been supposed, so Frank told me, that it was some place of Druidical worship, but he distrusted the conclusion and wanted to study it minutely on the spot.
I went there with him by way of an evening saunter on the second day after our arrival. The shortest way was along the sand-dunes, and thence up a steep, grassy slope on to the ploughed stretches of the uplands. In that warm, soft climate the wheat was in full ear, and beginning already to turn ripe and tawny. A very narrow path led across these cornfields to our destination, and from far off one could see the circle of stones, four to five feet high, standing there, black and austere, against the yellowing grain. Though all the country round was in cultivation no plough had furrowed the interior of the circle, and inside was the ancient turf of the downs, short and velvety, with patches of thyme and harebells. It seemed odd; a plough could have passed backwards and forwards between the monoliths and a half-acre of land have been made fruitful.
‘But why isn’t it ploughed?’ I asked.
‘Oh, you’re in the land of superstitions and ancient sorceries,’ he said. ‘These circles are never touched or made use of. And do you see, the path across the fields by which we have come passes round it; it doesn’t run across it. There it goes again on the far side, pursuing the same line after making the detour.’
He laughed.
‘The farmer of the land was up here this morning when I was making some measurements,’ he said. ‘He went round it, I noticed, and when his dog came inside after some interesting smell, he called it back, and cuffed it, and rapped out: “Come out of that there; and never do you go within again.” ’
