Many Dimensions, Charles Williams [black authors fiction TXT] 📗

wearing the Crown, had directed his eyes

and

mind towards Chloe. For the first few moments half a score of ordinary

irrelevant thoughts leapt in his mind. She was efficient, she was

rather good-looking, she was, under the detached patience with which

she

took his dictation, avid of ideas and facts, she was desirous—but of

what Lord Arglay doubted if she knew and was quite certain he did not.

He put the irrelevancies aside, by mere habitual practice, held his

mind

empty and prepared, as if to receive some important answer which could

then be directed to its proper place in the particular order to which

it belonged, allowed the image of Chloe Burnett and the thought of her

home to enter, and shut his mind down on them. The Crown pressed on

his forehead; he involuntarily united the physical consciousness and

the

mental; either received the other. His interior purpose suddenly lost

hold; a dizziness caught him, through which he was aware only of a

dominating attraction—his being yearned, to some power above, around,

within him. The dizziness increased and then was gone; his head ached;

the Stone pressed heavily on it, then more lightly. He found himself

opening his eyes.

 

He opened them on a strange room, and realized that he was standing by

the door. It was a not too well furnished roon -not, obviously, his

own kind. There were two comfortable armchairs; there was a bookcase;

a

table; another chair; pictures; a little reproduction of the Victory of

Samothrace, a poor Buddha, a vase or two. On the table a box of

cigarettes and a matchbox; some sort of needlework; a book; the Neu

Statesman. Lord Arglay drew a deep breath. So it worked. He walked to

the table, then he went over to the window and looked out. It was the

ordinary suburban street, a few ordinary people—three men, a woman,

four

children. He felt the curtains—they seemed actual. He felt himself

with the same result. He went back to the table and picked up the New

Statesman, then he sat down in one of the comfortable chairs as if to

consider. But as he leant back against the cushions he remembered that

the experiment was only half done; he could consider afterwards. The

immediate thing was to return with the paper; if that were done, all

was

done that could be at the moment. “I wish there were someone here to

speak to,” he thought. “I wonder—I suppose they would see me.” He

thought of going down into the street and asking his way to some

imaginary road, but the difficulty in passing anyone outside Chloe

Burnett’s room occurred to him and he desisted. Return, then. He

gripped the New Statesman tightly, and began to think of Sir Giles

at Ealing. But the notion of introducing Sir Giles offended him; so,

almost as much, did the thought of Reginald Montague, and he was

content at last to make an image, as near as possible, of the room from

which he had ‘Come, with the thought of his secretary attached to it.

“My dear child,” Lord Arglay said unconsciously, and shut his eyes.

 

When, after a similar play of feeling to that which he had experienced

before, he opened them to see Reginald Montague in front of him there

flashed across his mind the idea that the Crown had somehow muddled

things. But it was gone as he came to himself and recognized that he

had indeed returned. He looked at his watch; the whole episode had

taken exactly five minutes. He sat for a minute, then he got up,

walked across to Chloe and gave her the paper. “Yours, I think, Miss

Burnett? I’m sorry to give you the trouble of carrying it back,” he

said, and wondered whether he had only imagined the look of relief in

her eyes. “Well,” he went on to the other two, “it seems you’re quite

right. I don’t know what happens or how, but if this sort of thing can

go on indefinitely, space doesn’t exist—for purposes of travel.”

 

“You see it?” Reginald cried out.

 

“Certainly I see it,” Lord Arglay answered. “It’s a little startling

at first and I want to know several more things, but they can wait.

At the moment I have enough to brood on. But We’re forgetting our

duty. Miss Burnett, wouldn’t you like to try the… to put on the

Crown of Suleiman?”

 

“No,” said Chloe. “No, thank you, Lord Arglay. Thank you all very

much, but I think I had better go.”

 

“Go—at once?” Arglay asked, “But give me a few more minutes and we’ll

all go back together.”

 

“I shouldn’t press Miss Burnett to stop if she wants to go,” Sir Giles

said. “The station is about the fourth turning on the right.”

 

“Thank you, Sir Giles,” Chloe answered him. “Thank you for showing me

the—the Crown. Good night, Mr. Montague. Good night, Lord Arglay.”

 

“All right, Giles,” Arglay stopped a movement Tumulty had not made.

“I’ll see Miss Burnett out.” As the room door closed behind them he

took her arm. “Why the rush?” he asked gently.

 

“I don’t… I don’t really know,” Chloe said. “I’m being rather silly

but I felt I couldn’t stop there just now. It is rather upsetting,

isn’t it? And… O I don’t know. I’m sorry to seem a fool.”

 

“You are not in the least like a fool,” the Chief Justice said equably.

“And you will tell me tomorrow what the matter is. Are you sure you

are all right now?”

 

“Quite all right,” Chloe said as he opened the door for her “Yes,

really, Lord Arglay.” She added with a sudden rush of temper, “I don’t

like Sir Giles.”

 

“I couldn’t,” Arglay smiled at her, “have much use for a secretary who

did like Sir Giles. Or Reginald either, for that matter. A vulture

and

a crow—but that’s between ourselves, Well, if you will go, good night.”

 

“Good night,” Chloe said, took a step forward, and looked back

suddenly.

“You aren’t going to try it again yourself.?”

 

“Not I,” Lord Arglay said. “I’m going to talk to them a little and

then

go. No more aerial flights to-day. Till tomorrow then.” He watched

her out of the gate and well along the street before he returned to the

others.

 

He discovered then that Reginald had not been wasting his time.

Anxious to lay hands as soon as possible on some of the colossal

fortune

that seemed to be waiting, the young man had extracted permission from

Sir Giles to make an effort to remove a small chip from the Stone, and

had been away to bring a chisel and hammer from the tool-box. Arglay

looked at Tumulty.

 

“You’re sure it won’t damage it?” he asked.

 

“They all say it won’t,” Sir Giles answered. “The fellow I had it from

and Ali Khan who was here the other night and the manuscripts and all.

The manuscripts are rather hush-hush about it all—damnably veiled

and hinting. ‘The division is accomplished yet the Stone is unchanged,

and the virtues are neither here nor there but allwhere’—that kind

of thing. They rather suggest that people who get the bits had better

look out, but that’s Reginald’s business—and his covey of company-promoters. He’d better have a clause in the agreement about not

being responsible for any damage to life or limb, but it’s not my

affair. I don’t care what happens to them.”

 

“Who is this Ali Khan?” Arglay asked, watching Reginald arrange the

Stone conveniently.

 

“A fellow from the Persian Embassy,” Sir Giles told him. “He was on to

me almost as soon as I reached England, wanting to buy it back. So I

had him out here to talk to him about it, but he couldn’t tell me

anything I didn’t know or guess already. “

 

Reginald struck the chisel with the hammer, and almost fell forward

on to the table. For, unexpectedly, since the Stone had been hard

enough to the touch, it yielded instantaneously to the blow, and, as

Reginald straightened himself with an oath, they saw, lying on the

table by the side of the Crown, a second Stone apparently the same in

all respects as the first.

 

“Good God!” Lord Arglay exclaimed, while Reginald gazed open-mouthed

at the result of his work, and Sir Giles broke into a cackle of high

laughter. But they all gathered round the table to stare.

 

Except that one Stone was in the Crown and the other not they could not

find any difference. There was the same milky colour, flaked here and

there with gold, the same jet-black markings which might be letters and

might be only accidental colouring, the same size, the same apparent

hardness.

 

“‘The division is accomplished yet the Stone is unchanged’”, Lord

Arglay

quoted at last, looking at his brother-in-law. “It is, too. This is

all very curious.”

 

Tumulty had thrust Reginald aside and was peering at the two Stones.

After a minute, “Try it again, Reginald,” he said -“the new one, not

the old. Come round here, Arglay.” He caught the Chief Justice by the

arm and brought him round the table. “There,” he said, “now watch.”

He himself, while Lord Arglay leant forward over the table, moved a

step

or two off and squatted down on his heels, so that his eyes were on a

level with the Stone. “Now slowly, Reginald, slowly.”

Montague adjusted it, set the chisel on it, raised the hammer, and

struck, but this time with less force. The watchers saw the chisel

move

down through the Stone which seemed to divide easily before it and fall

asunder on both sides. Sir Giles scrambled to his feet and he and Lord

Arglay leaned breathlessly forward. There on the table, exactly alike,

lay two Stones, each a faithful replica of its original in the Crown.

 

Montague put the chisel and hammer down and stepped back. “I say,” he

said,.“I don’t like this. Stones don’t grow out of one another in

this way. It’s… it’s uncanny.”

 

“Stones don’t carry you five miles through the air,usually,” Arglay

said

drily. “I think you’re straining at a gnat. Still…” The perfect

ease with which the Stone had recreated itself, a ghastly feeling of

its capacity to go on producing copies of itself to infinity, the

insane simplicity, the grotesque finality, of the result, weighed on

his

mind, and he fell silent.

 

Sir Giles, alert and eager, picked them up. “Just a moment,” he said,

“let me weigh them.”

 

He went to a corner of the room where a small balance stood in a glass

case, and put one of the Stones on the scales. For a minute he

stared at it, then he looked over his shoulder at the Chief Justice.

 

“I say, Arglay,” he cried, “it doesn’t weigh anything.”

 

“Doesn’t weigh-” Lord Arglay went across to him. The Stone lay in the

middle of the scale, which remained perfectly poised, balanced against

its fellow, apparently unweighted by what it bore.

 

“But-” Arglay said, “but-But it does weigh…. I mean I can feel

its pressure if I hold it. Very light, but definite.”

 

“Well, there you are,” Giles said. “Look at it.” With the tweezers he

picked up a gramme weight and dropped it on the other scale, which

immediately sank gently under it.

 

“There,” he said, “the balances are all right. ltjust doesn’t weigh.”

He

took up the Stone and they returned to the table, where all three stood

staring at the marvel, until Sir Giles grew impatient.

 

“We look like Hottentots staring at an aeroplane,” he said. “Reginald,

you baboon-headed cockatoo, show a little gratitude. Here instead of a

mere chip you can give every one of your degenerate Jew millionaires a