A lot of people found out a hell of a lot in the month or two following that May. I’ll lay you whatever odds you want that there hasn’t been such a period for taking stock of truth since the start of Western civilization. I found out things about the world and the people in it, and I found out things about myself.
I wasn’t the same Jonathan Holding that wound up on this coast, which shall still be nameless but which was for me, in a very true sense, the seacoast of Bohemia. (I’ve still got my habit of allusive quotations, I see.) How I got there, why my left hand is a finger the poorer and my brain a great many thoughts the richer, how I saved Jeannot from the Little Massacre at Eaux-des-Anges and how I failed to save old Patelin, how I accidentally made contact with the Free French—or Fighting French, as they are now by name and have always been by spirit—by asking at a bakery for my own particular hard-to-get kind of croissant, all that’s a long story and a different one. Just the end of it has to be mentioned here to explain why I wound up at the dinner table with Colonel von Schwarzenau and why Dr. Palgrave baffled the Gestapo by laying—and creating—a black-faced ghost.
“We can get you on a ship,” de Champsfleuris told me. When I had last seen him he was some sort of an under-secretary in the foreign department. Now he looked as much at home in his crude fisher’s garments and his stocking cap as ever he had in a white tie at a reception. “It is simple, that. Within eight days a fishing boat leaves which will not arrest itself until it has arrived at—” No, I’ll x out that word; it would indicate the coast. Say England, Portugal, Africa, whatever strikes your fancy. “But you must live somewhere until then. The inn is not safe. An American—but, yes, you still retain the slightest of accents, my friend—living here to no purpose— We do not have tourists now. And still less safe to establish you with one of my friends, for I would imperil not only you but him.” He mused, and then his eyes glinted as I had once seen them glint when he remembered that a Ruritanian Plyszt took diplomatic precedence over a Graustarkian Glagoltnik. “Dr. Palgrave,” he said softly.
“Who’s he?” I asked.
“You do not know of Dr. Palgrave, you an American? But then I ask myself how many Americans know of your fine surrealist work. Each man to his field, and the greatest in his field may be unknown save to himself. This Dr. Palgrave, he has a villa here, where his laboratory also finds itself.”
“Research? What sort?”
De Champsfleuris’s eyes twinkled. “Ah! That you will learn, my friend, do not fear. He is a strange one, that. I do not know myself, me, Henri-Marie de Champsfleuris, who can tell at a glance if a diplomat is authorized to make twice the concessions which he offers, I do not know if that one is one of the greatest men in the world or only one of the greatest fools. You are an artist; perhaps you will tell me.”
“And he is—” I felt a little awkward as to how to put it. “He is one of us?”
“No— Alas, no. He has not awakened himself. He is as you were, my friend, a few short months ago. If he knew why you were here and what it is that you think to do when you leave here, I should not speak for his reception. But say only that you are an American from his old university. Say that you interest yourself— Are you acquainted with time theory?”
I nodded. “It’s one of the few aspects of modern thought that we surrealists found material in.”
“Good. Then talk to him of that. He will invite you to stay at the villa. Stay there, and do nothing until I send word to you through the postman Soisson.”
It seemed a curious station on the underground railway, to spend a week in a luxurious villa talking time theory. But I had no suspicion then of how curious. I certainly never expected to meet, at my first dinner there, the head of the local Gestapo. Which brings us back now to when you came in.
Herr Oberst Heinz von Schwarzenau would be a fine name for one of the lean and leering Gestapo villains beloved of melodrama; but this jolly little man with the round, beaming face and the pudgy white hands hardly seemed at first glance to live up to his label. Dr. Palgrave wasn’t too well cast as the Mad Scientist, either. His hair was neatly combed and his eyes were mildly blinking. His dinner jacket hung on his thin stooped shoulders about as gracefully as it might have decorated a scarecrow. There was nothing colorful or eccentric about him but his conversation. That was enough.
“You may define a dimension as you will, my dear colonel,” he observed over the fish. “You may quite correctly term it the degree of manifoldness of a magnitude or any other proper terminological gibberish your methodical mind chooses to employ. But a dimension is basically a measure of extent; and if extent is measurable, then extension is possible.”
The colonel beamed. “I am not sure if you are playing with ideas, or simply with words. What is your opinion, Mr. Holding?”
I had to fight to keep from jumping each time he addressed me. I had to remind myself that my exploits in the Little Massacre had been strictly anonymous and that the Gestapo, so far as I knew, had no more information on me than that I was a practitioner of degenerate art but otherwise harmless. I was, I kept saying to myself, far safer here, as a sort of purloined letter in person, than anywhere else. But I have since wondered how
