“Dear Marion: I’ve been racking my brain for a solution to your problem, but nothing comes. You have lost a friend and I see no way for you to regain her at present. I learned tonight that she is in Nice. But I don’t want you to go there seeking a reconciliation, for you wouldn’t do it without making things bad all around. You would be obliged to say that you went to Bellagio as my agent to discover what had happened to her money. I’ve arranged—guided by your report—for the complete untangling of her affairs. She has recovered in full. But the machinery devised to effect this restoration of her property without offence to her is frail enough. I believe and hope it will go, but it won’t stand any wrenches being tossed into it.
“The postscript to your letter broke me all up. She left Bellagio about four, you said … drenching rain … heartsick and betrayed … by you and me—who would have laid down and died for her! … Stuffy little steamer to Como … Probably spent the night there—or maybe caught a train over to Milan … wondering where to go … what to do next! My dear—was there ever a more pitiful state of things? … Consult Jack about this. Ask him if he sees any other way out. If neither you nor he can think of a plan by which you can communicate with her without jeopardizing everything we have tried to do for her, better keep away! I’m devastated over the situation, but—there you are!”
Then he wrote a letter to Helen which he had no intention of mailing, tore it into small bits, undressed, went to bed, tried to read, turned out the light, relaxed.
For a long time it had been his custom, just before dropping off, to attempt an inward look. His corridor—as he called it—was, of course, a mere hallucination developed and encouraged by his own quest of it. He had long since decided that the corridor was but an eccentric property of his own imagination, located somewhere in that No-Man’s-Land between fading consciousness and sleep.
It amused him to search for it, and, by practice, he had been able to arrest the clouding of his consciousness at the exact phase where his curious phantom resided.
The clearness of it depended upon his mood; and his mood—in respect to the corridor—was determined by the projects he happened to be working on in the field of personality projection.
Usually a very thin, faint pencil of promising yellow light streaked down the middle of the corridor’s rough flagging—the flagging was always rough as if paved with cobblestones. There would be but an instant of it. The big doors would part, and the light would shine through … just enough to nourish a great hope.
Tonight—perhaps because of the investment he had made, his intense concentration upon the subject he had endeavoured to make clear to Brent, and the emotional strain incident to both—his mood, he found, was unusually conducive to a materialization of the corridor.
As he neared that grey twilight of consciousness, it came sharply into focus. The doors, instead of parting a little, slowly, tentatively, were opening! The corridor was flooded with a shimmering radiance.
After that, events moved with bewildering swiftness. The corridor suddenly seemed objectified—a thing apart from himself—and he walked into it! A terrific roar deafened him … Finding the blinding glare at the big doors too painful to face, he turned his attention to the objects against the wall, blinking in his effort to accommodate his eyes to the dazzling light.
All endeavours to recall, afterwards, exactly what he saw there were futile. They belonged to a narrowly restricted phase of half-consciousness, and were not to be reconstructed elsewhere. He was left only with a very hazy impression that he had seen his own laboratory—the oven, the black switchboard, the little vice screwed to the table. His diminutive blast-furnace was at top heat. White flames jutted out about the hinges. Doubtless that accounted for the roar. There was also a nebulous recollection left that the door of the five-foot cabinet, containing all the apparatus he had been at such pains to manufacture over a period of many months, stood wide open … He had almost decided, a few days earlier, to dismantle it and have it carted off before some inquisitive colleague in the hospital discovered what an audacious thing he had had in mind, and chaffed him about …
Well—be he waking or sleeping, sane or crazy—there it was!
In the lowest compartment there was a box containing the vacuum tubes; but they were not arranged in the order of the tubes in his cabinet!
He had summoned all his efforts to concentrate on that illusory tube-box, and the exertion aroused him to full consciousness.
Tossing aside the bedclothes, he leaped out drenched with perspiration and trembling so he could barely stand. For an hour he sat at his desk, drawing diagrams of another experimental hookup of his tubes. He was unable to shake off the impression that he was on the edge of discovery. A strange sensation of exultancy possessed him.
Mechanically putting on his street clothes, he went down into the deserted lobby and sought the outer air. For miles and miles he walked, neither knowing nor caring where he went; walked with long strides, seeing nothing; utterly absorbed by the curious experience that still clung to him like a garment … When dawn broke, he found himself down at the ferry-docks.
Returning to the hotel, he bathed, breakfasted, and drove to the station. Securing a compartment, he went to bed and slept dreamlessly all day. When he awoke it was dark, and for a moment he was unable to recall where he was. Then remembrance came, and he smiled broadly. A strange sense of mastery exalted him. He laughed, and recalled Randolph. Randolph had laughed. Randolph had found the grass greener; everything tuned up to a higher key; every sensation more intense. He laughed as Randolph had laughed!
“And once I thought him crazy!”
He sat on
