H G Wells Omnibus, page 591
He read through his manuscript, and then sat thinking and gnawing his knuckle. It would look queer now if he owned up. He must beat Wedderburn. He forgot the examples of those starry gentlemen, John Burns and Bradlaugh. Besides, he reflected, the glimpse of the rest of the slip he had had was after all quite accidental, forced upon him by chance, a kind of providential revelation rather than an unfair advantage. It was not nearly so dishonest to avail himself of that as it was of Broome, who believed in the efficacy of prayer, to pray daily for a firstclass. “Five minutes more,” said the demonstrator, folding up his paper and becoming observant. Hill watched the clock hands until two minutes remained; then he opened the book of answers, and, with hot ears and an affectation of ease, gave his drawing of the lenticel its name.
When the second pass list appeared, the previous positions of Wedderburn and Hill were reversed, and the spectacled girl in green, who knew the demonstrator in private life (where he was practically human), said that in the result of the two examinations taken together Hill had the advantage of a mark—167 to 166 out of a possible 200. Everyone admired Hill in a way, though the suspicion of “mugging” clung to him. But Hill was to find congratulations and Miss Haysman’s enhanced opinion of him, and even the decided decline in the crest of Wedderburn, tainted by an unhappy memory. He felt a remarkable access of energy at first, and the note of a democracy marching to triumph returned to his debating society speeches; he worked at his comparative anatomy with tremendous zeal and effect, and he went on with his aesthetic education. But through it all, a vivid little picture was continually coming before his mind’s eye—of a sneakish person manipulating a slide.
No human being had witnessed the act, and he was cocksure that no higher power existed to see it; but for all that it worried him. Memories are not dead things, but alive; they dwindle in disuse, but they harden and develop in all sorts of queer ways if they are being continually fretted. Curiously enough, though at the time he perceived clearly that the shifting was accidental, as the days wore on his memory became confused about it, until at last he was not sure—although he assured himself that he was sure—whether the movement had been absolutely involuntary. Then it is possible that Hill’s dietary was conducive to morbid conscientiousness; a breakfast frequently eaten in a hurry, a midday bun, and, at such hours after five as chanced to be convenient, such meat as his means determined, usually in a chophouse in a back street off the Brompton Road. Occasionally he treated himself to threepenny or ninepenny classics, and they usually represented a suppression of potatoes or chops. It is indisputable that outbreaks of self-abasement and emotional revival have a distinct relation to periods of scarcity. But apart from this influence on the feelings, there was in Hill a distinct aversion to falsity that the blasphemous Landport cobbler had inculcated by strap and tongue from his earliest years. Of one fact about professed atheists I am convinced; they may be—they usually are—fools, void of subtlety, revilers of holy institutions, brutal speakers, and mischievous knaves, but they lie with difficulty. If it were not so, if they had the faintest grasp of the idea of compromise, they would simply be liberal churchmen. And, moreover, this memory poisoned his regard for Miss Haysman. For she now so evidently preferred him to Wedderburn that he felt sure he cared for her, and began reciprocating her attentions by timid marks of personal regard; at one time he even bought a bunch of violets, carried it about in his pocket, and produced it with a stumbling explanation, withered and dead, in the gallery of old iron. It poisoned, too, the denunciation of capitalist dishonesty that had been one of his life’s pleasures. And, lastly, it poisoned his triumph in Wedderburn. Previously he had been Wedderburn’s superior in his own eyes, and had raged simply at a want of recognition. Now he began to fret at the darker suspicion of positive inferiority. He fancied he found justifications for his positions in Browning, but they vanished on analysis. At last—moved, curiously enough, by exactly the same motive forces that had resulted in his dishonesty—he went to Professor Bindon, and made a clean breast of the whole affair. As Hill was a paid student, Professor Bindon did not ask him to sit down, and he stood before the professor’s desk as he made his confession.
“It’s a curious story,” said Professor Bindon, slowly realising how the thing reflected on himself, and then letting his anger rise,—“A most remarkable story. I can’t understand your doing it, and I can’t understand this avowal. You’re a type of student—Cambridge men would never dream—I suppose I ought to have thought—Why did you cheat?”
“I didn’t cheat,” said Hill.
“But you have just been telling me you did.”
“I thought I explained—”
“Either you cheated or you did not cheat.—”
“I said my motion was involuntary.”
“I am not a metaphysician, I am a servant of science—of fact. You were told not to move the slip. You did move the slip. If that is not cheating—”
“If I was a cheat,” said Hill, with the note of hysterics in his voice, “should I come here and tell you?”
“Your repentance, of course, does you credit,” said Professor Bindon, “but it does not alter the original facts.”
“No, sir,” said Hill, giving in in utter self-abasement.
“Even now you cause an enormous amount of trouble. The examination list will have to be revised.”
“I suppose so, sir.”
“Suppose so? Of course it must be revised. And I don’t see how I can conscientiously pass you.”
“Not pass me?” said Hill. “Fail me?”
“It’s the rule of all examinations. Or where should we be? What else did you expect? You don’t want to shirk the consequences of your own acts?”
“I thought, perhaps”—said Hill. And then, “Fail me? I thought, as I told you, you would simply deduct the marks given for that slip.”
“Impossible!” said Bindon. “Besides, it would still leave you above Wedderburn. Deduct only the marks— Preposterous! The Departmental Regulations distinctly say—”
“But it’s my own admission, sir.”
“The Regulations say nothing whatever of the manner in which the matter comes to light. They simply provide—”
“It will ruin me. If I fail this examination, they won’t renew my scholarship.”
“You should have thought of that before.”
“But, sir, consider all my circumstances—”
“I cannot consider anything. Professors in this College are machines. The Regulations will not even let us recommend our students for appointments. I am a machine, and you have worked me. I have to do—”
“It’s very hard, sir.”
“Possibly it is.”
“If I am to be failed this examination, I might as well go home at once.”
“That is as you think proper.” Bindon’s voice softened a little; he perceived he had been unjust, and, provided he did not contradict himself, he was disposed to amelioration. “As a private person,” he said, “I think this confession of yours goes far to mitigate your offence. But you have set the machinery in motion, and now it must take its course. I—I am really sorry you gave way.”
A wave of emotion prevented Hill from answering. Suddenly, very vividly, he saw the heavily lined face of the old Landport cobbler, his father. “Good God! What a fool I have been!” he said hotly and abruptly.
“I hope,” said Bindon, “that it will be a lesson to you.”
But, curiously enough, they were not thinking of quite the same indiscretion.
There was a pause.
“I would like a day to think, sir, and then I will let you know—about going home, I mean,” said Hill, moving towards the door.
The next day Hill’s place was vacant. The spectacled girl in green was, as usual, first with the news. Wedderburn and Miss Haysman were talking of a performance of The Meistersingers when she came up to them.
“Have you heard?” she said.
“Heard what?”
“There was cheating in the examination.”
“Cheating!” said Wedderburn, with his face suddenly hot. “How?”
“That slide—”
“Moved? Never!”
“It was. That slide that we weren’t to move—”
“Nonsense!” said Wedderburn. “Why! How could they find out? Who do they say—?”
“It was Mr. Hill.”
“Hill!”
“Mr. Hill!”
“Not—surely not the immaculate Hill?” said Wedderburn, recovering.
“I don’t believe it,” said Miss Haysman. “How do you know?”
“I didn’t,” said the girl in spectacles. “But I know it now for a fact. Mr. Hill went and confessed to Professor Bindon himself.”
“By Jove!” said Wedderburn. “Hill of all people. But I am always inclined to distrust these philanthropists-on-principle—”
“Are you quite sure?” said Miss Haysman, with a catch in her breath.
“Quite. It’s dreadful, isn’t it? But, you know, what can you expect? His father is a cobbler.”
Then Miss Haysman astonished the girl in spectacles.
“I don’t care. I will not believe it,” she said, flushing darkly under her warm-tinted skin. “I will not believe it until he has told me so himself—face to face. I would scarcely believe it then,” and abruptly she turned her back on the girl in spectacles, and walked to her own place.
“It’s true, all the same,” said the girl in spectacles, peering and smiling at Wedderburn.
But Wedderburn did not answer her. She was indeed one of those people who seem destined to make unanswered remarks.
THE REMARKABLE CASE OF DAVIDSON’S EYES
The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable enough in itself, is still more remarkable if Wade’s explanation is to be credited. It sets one dreaming of the oddest possibilities of intercommunication in the future, of spending an intercalary five minutes on the other side of the world, or being watched in our most secret operations by unsuspected eyes. It happened that I was the immediate witness of Davidson’s seizure, and so it falls naturally to me to put the story upon paper.
When I say that I was the immediate witness of his seizure, I mean that I was the first on the scene. The thing happened at the Harlow Technical College, just beyond the Highgate Archway. He was alone in the larger laboratory when the thing happened. I was in a smaller room, where the balances are, writing up some notes. The thunderstorm had completely upset my work, of course. It was just after one of the louder peals that I thought I heard some glass smash in the other room. I stopped writing, and turned round to listen. For a moment I heard nothing; the hail was playing the devil’s tattoo on the corrugated zinc of the roof. Then came another sound, a smash—no doubt of it this time. Something heavy had been knocked off the bench. I jumped up at once and went and opened the door leading into the big laboratory.
I was surprised to hear a queer sort of laugh, and saw Davidson standing unsteadily in the middle of the room, with a dazzled look on his face. My first impression was that he was drunk. He did not notice me. He was clawing out at something invisible a yard in front of his face. He put out his hand slowly, rather hesitatingly, and then clutched nothing. “What’s come to it?” he said. He held up his hands to his face, fingers spread out. “Great Scott!” he said. The thing happened three or four years ago, when everyone swore by that personage. Then he began raising his feet clumsily, as though he had expected to find them glued to the floor.
“Davidson!” cried I. “What’s the matter with you?” He turned round in my direction and looked about for me. He looked over me and at me and on either side of me, without the slightest sign of seeing me. “Waves,” he said; “and a remarkably neat schooner. I’d swear that was Bellows’ voice. Hullo!” He shouted suddenly at the top of his voice.
I thought he was up to some foolery. Then I saw littered about his feet the shattered remains of the best of our electrometers. “What’s up, man?” said I. “You’ve smashed the electrometer!”
“Bellows again!” said he. “Friends left, if my hands are gone. Something about electrometers. Which way are you, Bellows?” He suddenly came staggering towards me. “The damned stuff cuts like butter,” he said. He walked straight into the bench and recoiled. “None so buttery that!” he said, and stood swaying.
I felt scared. “Davidson,” said I, “what on earth’s come over you?”
He looked round him in every direction. “I could swear that was Bellows. Why don’t you show yourself like a man, Bellows?”
It occurred to me that he must be suddenly struck blind. I walked round the table and laid my hand upon his arm. I never saw a man more startled in my life. He jumped away from me, and came round into an attitude of self-defence, his face fairly distorted with terror. “Good God!” he cried. “What was that?”
“It’s I—Bellows. Confound it, Davidson!”
He jumped when I answered him and stared—how can I express it?—right through me. He began talking, not to me, but to himself. “Here in broad daylight on a clear beach. Not a place to hide in.” He looked about him wildly. “Here! I’m o f. ” He suddenly turned and ran headlong into the big electromagnet—so violently that, as we found afterwards, he bruised his shoulder and jawbone cruelly. At that he stepped back a pace, and cried out with almost a whimper: “What, in Heaven’s name, has come over me?” He stood, blanched with terror and trembling violently, with his right arm clutching his left, where that had collided with the magnet.
By that time I was excited and fairly scared. “Davidson,” said I, “don’t be afraid.”
He was startled at my voice, but not so excessively as before. I repeated my words in a clear and as firm a tone as I could assume. “Bellows,” he said, “is that you?”
“Can’t you see it’s me?”
He laughed. “I can’t even see it’s myself. Where the devil are we?”
“Here,” said I, “in the laboratory.”
“The laboratory!” he answered in a puzzled tone, and put his hand to his forehead. “I was in the laboratory—till that flash came, but I’m hanged if I’m there now. What ship is that?”
“There’s no ship,” said I. “Do be sensible, old chap.”
“No ship!” he repeated, and seemed to forget my denial forthwith. “I suppose,” said he slowly, “we’re both dead. But the rummy part is I feel just as though I still had a body. Don’t get used to it all at once, I suppose. The old ship was struck by lightning, I suppose. Jolly quick thing, Bellows—eigh?”
“Don’t talk nonsense. You’re very much alive. You are in the laboratory, blundering about. You’ve just smashed a new electrometer. I don’t envy you when Boyce arrives.”
He stared away from me towards the diagrams of cryohydrates. “I must be deaf,” said he. “They’ve fired a gun, for there goes the puff of smoke, and I never heard a sound.”
I put my hand on his arm again, and this time he was less alarmed. “We seem to have sort of invisible bodies,” said he. “By Jove! there’s a boat coming round the headland. It’s very much like the old life after all—in a different climate.”
I shook his arm. “Davidson,” I cried, “wake up!”
It was just then that Boyce came in. So soon as he spoke Davidson exclaimed: “Old Boyce! Dead too! What a lark!” I hastened to explain that Davidson was in a kind of somnambulistic trance. Boyce was interested at once. We both did all we could to rouse the fellow out of his extraordinary state. He answered our questions, and asked us some of his own, but his attention seemed distracted by his hallucination about a beach and ship. He kept interpolating observations concerning some boat and the davits, and sails filling with the wind. It made one feel queer, in the dusky laboratory, to hear him saying such things.
He was blind and helpless. We had to walk him down the passage, one at each elbow, to Boyce’s private room, and while Boyce talked to him there, and humoured him about this ship idea, I went along the corridor and asked old Wade to come and look at him. The voice of our Dean sobered him a little, but not very much. He asked where his hands were, and why he had to walk about up to his waist in the ground. Wade thought over him a long time—you know how he knits his brows—and then made him feel the couch, guiding his hands to it. “That’s a couch,” said Wade. “The couch in the private room of Prof. Boyce. Horsehair stuffing.”
Davidson felt about, and puzzled over it, and answered presently that he could feel it all right, but he couldn’t see it.
“What do you see?” asked Wade. Davidson said he could see nothing but a lot of sand and broken-up shells. Wade gave him some other things to feel, telling him what they were, and watching him keenly.
“The ship is almost hull down,” said Davidson presently, apropos of nothing.
“Never mind the ship,” said Wade. “Listen to me, Davidson. Do you know what ‘hallucination’ means?”
“Rather,” said Davidson.
“Well, everything you see is hallucinatory.”
“Bishop Berkeley,” said Davidson.
“Don’t mistake me,” said Wade. “You are alive and in this room of Boyce’s. But something has happened to your eyes. You cannot see; you can feel and hear, but not see. Do you follow me?”
“It seems to me that I see too much.” Davidson rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. “Well?” he said.
“That’s all. Don’t let it perplex you. Bellows here and I will take you home in a cab.”
“Wait a bit.” Davidson thought. “Help me to sit down,” said he presently; “and now—I’m sorry to trouble you—but will you tell me all that over again?”
