The Gap in the Curtain

by John Buchan

  I must say that this rather impressed me. He had chosen exactly those whom I had selected at dinner the previous night as the careful as opposed to the carefree. He wanted people whose physical vitality was low, and who were living on the edge of their nerves, and he had picked them unerringly out of Sally’s house party.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll have a talk to him after dinner. But I want you to be guided by me, and if I think the thing fishy to call it off. If the man is as clever as you say, he may scare somebody into imbecility.”

  Before I dressed I rang up Landor, and was lucky enough to find him still in London. Landor, besides being a patent-law barrister pretty near the top of his branch, is a fellow of the Royal Society, and a devotee of those dim regions where physics, metaphysics, and mathematics jostle each other. He has published and presented me with several works which I found totally incomprehensible.

  When I asked him about Professor Moe he replied with a respectful gurgle. “You don’t mean to say you’ve got him at Flambard? What astounding luck! I thought he had gone back to Stockholm. There are scores of people who would walk twenty miles barefoot to get a word with him.”

  Landor confirmed all that Sally had said about the professor’s standing. He had been given the Nobel Prize years ago, and was undoubtedly the greatest mathematician alive. But recently he had soared into a world where it was not easy to keep abreast of him. Landor confessed that he had only got glimmerings of meaning from the paper he had read two days before to the Newton Club. “I can see the road he is travelling,” he said, “but I can’t quite grasp the stages.” And he quoted Wordsworth’s line about “Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.”

  “He’s the real thing,” I asked, “and not a charlatan?”

  I could hear Landor’s cackle at the other end of the line.

  “You might as well ask a conscript to vouch for Napoleon’s abilities as ask me to give a certificate of respectability to August Moe.”

  “You’re sure he’s quite sane?

  “Absolutely. He’s only mad in so far as all genius is mad. He is reputed to be a very good fellow and very simple. Did you know that he once wrote a book on Hans Andersen? But he looked to me a pretty sick man. There’s a lot of hereditary phthisis in his race.”

  Dinner that evening was a pleasanter meal for me. I had more of an appetite, there was a less leaden air about my companions in fatigue, the sunburnt boys and girls were in good form, and Reggie Daker’s woebegone countenance was safe on its pillow. Charles Ottery, who sat next to Pamela Brune, seemed to be in a better humour, and Mrs. Lamington was really amusing about the Wallingdon stables and old Wallingdon’s stable-talk. I had been moved farther down the table, and had a good view of Professor Moe, who sat next to our hostess. His was an extraordinary face—the hollow cheeks and the high cheekbones, the pale eyes, the broad high brow, and the bald head rising to a peak like Sir Walter Scott’s. The expression was very gentle, like a musing child, but now and then he seemed to kindle, and an odd gleam appeared in his colourless pits of eyes. For all his size he looked terribly flimsy. Something had fretted his body to a decay.

  He came up to me as soon as we left the dining room. He spoke excellent English, but his voice made me uneasy—it seemed to come with difficulty from a long way down in his big frame. There was a vague, sad kindliness about his manner, but there was a sense of purpose too. He went straight to the point.

  “Some time you are going to give me your attention, Sir Edward, and I in return will give you my confidence. Her ladyship has so informed me. She insists, that gracious one, that I must go to bed, for I am still weary. Shall our talk be tomorrow after breakfast? In the garden, please, if the sun still shines.”

  Chapter 3

  I find it almost impossible to give the gist of the conversation which filled the next forenoon. We sat in wicker chairs on the flags of the Dutch garden in a grilling sun, for heat seemed to be the one physical comfort for which the professor craved. I shall always associate the glare of a June sky with a frantic effort on my part to grasp the ultimate imponderables of human thought.

  The professor was merciful to my weakness. He had a great writing pad on his knee, and would fain have illustrated his argument with diagrams, but he desisted when he found that they meant little to me and really impeded his exposition. Most scientists use a kind of shorthand—formulas and equations which have as exact a meaning for them as an ordinary noun has for the ordinary man. But there was no chance for this shorthand with me. He had to begin from the very beginning, taking nothing for granted. I realized his difficulty. It was as if I had had to argue an intricate case, not before a learned judge, but before an intelligent ignoramus, to whom each technical legal term had to be laboriously explained.

  There was another difficulty, which applied not to me only, but to the most intelligent auditor in the world. Suppose you are trying to expound to a man who has been stone-deaf from birth the meaning of sound. You can show him the physical effects of it, the brain and sense reactions, but the fact of sound you cannot bring home to him by any diagram or calculation. It is something for him without sensory vividness, altogether outside his realized universe. It was the same with the professor’s exposition of strange new dimensions, the discovery of which depended on logical processes. I could not grasp them imaginatively, and, not having lived as he had done with the arguments, I could not comprehend them intellectually.

  But here—very crudely and roughly—is the kind of thing he tried to tell me.

  He began by observing that in the blind instinct of man there was something which the normal intellect lacked—a prevision of future happenings, for which reason gave no warrant. We all of us had occasionally dim anticipations of coming events, lurking somewhere in our nerves. A man walking in the dark was aware subconsciously of a peril and subconsciously braced himself to meet it. He quoted the sentences from Bergson which I have put at the head of the chapter. His aim was to rationalize and systematize this anticipatory instinct.

  Then he presented me with a theory of time, for he had an orderly mind, and desired to put first things first. Here he pretty well bogged me at the start. He did not call time a fourth dimension, but I gathered that it amounted to that, or rather that it involved many new dimensions. There seemed to be a number of worlds of presentation travelling in time, and each was contained within a world one dimension larger. The self was composed of various observers, the normal one being confined to a small field of sensory phenomena, observed or remembered. But this field was included in a larger field and, to the observer in the latter, future events were visible as well as past and present.

  In sleep, he went on, where the attention was not absorbed, as it was in waking life, with the smaller field of phenomena, the larger field might come inside the pale of consciousness. People had often been correctly forewarned in dreams. We all now and then were amazed at the familiarity with which we regarded a novel experience, as if we recognized it as something which had happened before. The universe was extended in time, and the dreamer, with nothing to rivet his attention to the narrow waking field, ranged about, and might light on images which belonged to the future as well as to the past. The sleeper was constantly crossing the arbitrary frontier which our mortal limitations had erected.

  At this point I began to see light. I was prepared to assent to the conclusion that in dreams we occasionally dip into the future, though I was unable to follow most of the professor’s proofs. But now came the real question. Was it possible to attain to this form of prevision otherwise than in sleep? Could the observer in the narrow world turn himself by any effort of will into the profounder observer in the world of ampler dimensions? Could the anticipating power of the dreamer be systematized and controlled, and be made available to man in his waking life?

  It could, said the professor. Such was the result of the researches to which he had dedicated the last ten years of his l
ife. It was as a crowning proof that he wished an experiment at Flambard.

  I think that he realized how little I had grasped of his exposition of the fundamentals of his theory. He undertook it, I fancy, out of his scrupulous honesty; he felt bound to put me in possession of the whole argument, whether I understood it or not. But, now that he had got down to something concrete which I could follow, his manner became feverishly earnest. He patted my knee with a large lean hand, and kept thrusting his gaunt face close to mine. His writing pad fell into the lily pond, but he did not notice it.

  He needed several people for his experiment—the more the better, for he wanted a variety of temperaments, and he said something, too, about the advantage of a communal psychical effort . . . But they must be the right kind of people—people with highly developed nervous systems—not men too deeply sunk in matter. (I thought of Evelyn and the Lamingtons and old Folliot.) He deprecated exuberant physical health or abounding vitality, since such endowments meant that their possessors would be padlocked to the narrower sensory world. He ran over his selection again, dwelling on each, summing each up with what seemed to me astounding shrewdness, considering that he had met them for the first time two days before. He wanted the hungry and the forward-looking. Tavanger and Mayot. “They will never be content,” he said, “and their hunger is of the spirit, though maybe an earthy spirit . . .” Myself. He turned his hollow eyes on me, but was too polite to particularize what my kind of hunger might be . . . Charles Ottery. “He is unhappy, and that means that his hold on the present is loose . . .” Sally Flambard. “That gracious lady lives always sur la branche—is it not so? She is like a bird, and has no heavy flesh to clog her. Assuredly she must be one.” Rather to my surprise he added Reggie Daker. Reggie’s recent concussion, for some reason which I did not follow, made him a suitable object . . . Above all, there was Goodeve. He repeated his name with satisfaction, but offered no comment.

  I asked him what form his experiment would take.

  “A little training. No more. A little ascesis, partly of the body, but mainly of the mind. It must be disciplined to see what it shall see.”

  Then, speaking very slowly, and drawing words apparently from as deep a cavern as that from which he drew his breath, he explained his plan.

  There must be a certain physical preparation. I am as unlearned in medical science as in philosophy, but I gathered that recently there had been some remarkable advances made in the study of the brain and its subsidiary organs. Very likely I am writing nonsense, for the professor at this point forgot about tempering the wind to the shorn lamb, and poured forth a flood of technicalities. But I understood him to say that, just as the cortex of the brain was the seat of the intellectual activities, so the subcortical region above the spinal cord was the home of the instinctive faculties. He used a lot of jargon, which, not being an anatomist, I could not follow, but he was obliging enough to draw me a diagram in his pocketbook, the writing pad being in the lily pond.

  In particular there was a thing which he called an “intercalated cell,” and which had a very special importance in his scheme. Just as the faculty of sight, he said, had for its supreme function the creation of an extended world, a world of space perception, so the instinct which had its seat in this cell specialized in time-perception . . . I had been reading lately about telegnosis, and mentioned that word, but he shook his head impatiently. The faculty he spoke of had nothing to do with telegnosis. “You have not understood my exposition,” he said. “But no matter. It is enough if you understand my purpose.”

  It was desirable to stimulate the functioning of this cell. That could only be done in a small degree. A certain diet was necessary, for he had discovered that the cell was temporarily atrophied by the wrong foods. Also there was a drug, which acted upon it directly.

  At this I protested, but he was quick to reassure me. “On my honour,” he cried, “it is the mildest drug. Its bodily effect is as innocuous as a glass of tonic water. But I have proved experimentally that it lulls the other faculties, and very slightly stimulates this one of which I speak.”

  Then he revealed his main purpose.

  “I am still groping at the edge of mysteries,” he said. “My theory I am assured is true, but in practice I can only go a very little way. Some day, when I am ashes, men will look at the future as easily as today they look out of a window at a garden. At present I must be content to exemplify my doctrine by small trivial things. I cannot enable you to gaze at a segment of life at some future date, and watch human beings going about their business. The most I hope for is to show you some simple matter of sense-perception as it will be at that date. Therefore I need some object which I am assured will be still in existence, and which I am also assured will have changed from what it now is. Name to me such an object.”

  I suggested, rather foolishly, the position of the planets in the sky.

  “That will not do, for now we can predict that position with perfect certainty.”

  “A young tree?”

  “The visible evidence of change would be too minute. I cannot promise to open up the future very far ahead. A year—two years maybe—no more.”

  “A building which we all know, and which is now going up?”

  Again he shook his head. “You may be familiar with the type of the completed structure, and carry the picture of it in your memory . . . There is only one familiar object, which continues and likewise changes. You cannot guess? Why, a journal. A daily or weekly paper.”

  He leaned towards me and laid a hand on each of my knees.

  “Today is the sixth of June. Four days from now, if you and the others consent, I will enable you to see for one instant of time— no longer—a newspaper of the tenth day of June next year.”

  He lay back in his chair and had a violent fit of coughing, while I digested this startling announcement . . . He was right on one point—a newspaper was the only thing for his experiment; that at any rate I saw clearly. I own to having been tremendously impressed by his talk, but I was not quite convinced; the thing appeared to be clean out of nature and reason. You see, I had no such stimulus to belief as a scientist would have had who had followed his proofs . . . Still, it seemed harmless. Probably it would end in nothing—the ritual prepared, and the mystics left gaping at each other . . . No. That could scarcely happen, I decided; the mystagogue was too impressive.

  The professor had recovered himself, and was watching me under drooped eyelids. All the eagerness had gone out of his face, but that face had the brooding power and the ageless wisdom of the Sphinx. If he were allowed to make the experiment something must happen.

  Lady Flambard had promised to abide by my decision . . . There could be no risk, I told myself. A little carefulness in diet, which would do everybody good. The drug? I would have to watch that. The professor seemed to read my thoughts, for he broke in:

  “You are worrying about the drug? It is of small consequence. If you insist, it can be omitted.”

  I asked how he proposed to prepare the subjects of his experiment. Quite simply, he replied. A newspaper—The Times, for example— would be made to play a large part in our thoughts . . . I observed that it already played a large part in the thoughts of educated Englishmen, and he smiled—the first time I had seen him smile. There was an air of satisfaction about him, as if he knew what my answer would be.

  “I see no objection to what you propose,” I said at last. “I warn you that I am still a bit of a skeptic. But I am willing, if you can persuade the others.”

  He smiled again. “With the others there will be no difficulty. Our gracious hostess is already an enthusiast. Before luncheon I will speak to Mr. Tavanger and Mr. Mayot—and to Mr. Ottery when he returns. I shall not speak to them as I have spoken to you.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because they are longing for such a revelation as I propose, whereas you care not at all. But I would be
g of you to say a word on my behalf to Sir Robert Goodeve. His co-operation I especially seek.”

  He raised with difficulty his huge frame from the wicker chair, blinking his eyes in the hot sun, and leaning on a sundial as if he were giddy. I offered my arm, which he took, and together we went under the striped awning, which shaded one part of the terrace, into the coolness of the great hall.

  You know the kind of banality with which, out of shyness, one often winds up a difficult conversation. I was moved to observe, as I left him, that in four days I hoped to be introduced to a new world. He made no answer. “To enter, waking, into the world of sleep,” I added fatuously.

  Then he said a thing which rather solemnized me.

  “Not only the world of sleep,” he said. “It is the world to which we penetrate after death.”

  As I watched his great back slowly mounting the staircase, I had a sudden feeling that into the peace of Flambard something fateful and tremendous had broken.

  Chapter 4

  I do not know what Professor Moe said to Tavanger and Mayot. I knew both men, but not intimately, for they were a little too much of the unabashed careerist for my taste, and I wondered how, in spite of his confidence, he was going to interest their most practical minds.

  After luncheon I wanted to be alone, so I took my rod and went down to the Arm, beyond the stretch where it ran among water-meadows.

  It was a still, bright afternoon, with a slight haze to temper the glare of the sun. The place was delicious, full of the scents of mint and meadowsweet, yellow flag irises glowing by the water’s edge, and the first dog roses beginning to star the hedges. There was not much of a rise, but I caught a few trout under the size limit, and stalked and lost a big fellow in the mill pool. But I got no good of the summer peace, and my mind was very little on fishing, for the talk of the morning made a merry-go-round in my head.