第31章

"The funny thing was that he never seemed to see my difficulty.

When I kept bringing him back to it he shied off with a new wild theory of perception.He argued that the mind can live in a world of realities without any sensuous stimulus to connect them with the world of our ordinary life.Of course that wasn't my point.I supposed that this world of Space was real enough to him, but I wanted to know how he got there.He never answered me.He was the typical Cambridge man, you know--dogmatic about uncertainties, but curiously diffident about the obvious.He laboured to get me to understand the notion of his mathematical forms, which I was quite willing to take on trust from him.Some queer things he said, too.He took our feeling about Left and Right as an example of our instinct for the quality of Space.

But when I objected that Left and Right varied with each object, and only existed in connection with some definite material thing, he said that that was exactly what he meant.It was an example of the mobility of the Spacial forms.Do you see any sense in that?"I shook my head.It seemed to me pure craziness.

"And then he tried to show me what he called the 'involution of Space,' by taking two points on a piece of paper.The points were a foot away when the paper was flat, they coincided when it was doubled up.He said that there were no gaps between the figures, for the medium was continuous, and he took as an illustration the loops on a cord.You are to think of a cord always looping and unlooping itself according to certain mathematical laws.Oh, I tell you, I gave up trying to follow him.And he was so desperately in earnest all the time.By his account Space was a sort of mathematical pandemonium."Leithen stopped to refill his pipe, and I mused upon the ironic fate which had compelled a mathematical genius to make his sole confidant of a philistine lawyer, and induced that lawyer to repeat it confusedly to an ignoramus at twilight on a Scotch hill.As told by Leithen it was a very halting tale.

"But there was one thing I could see very clearly," Leithen went on, "and that was Hollond's own case.This crowded world of Space was perfectly real to him.How he had got to it I do not know.Perhaps his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some atrophied cell and restored the old instinct.

Anyhow, he was living his daily life with a foot in each world.

"He often came to see me, and after the first hectic discussions he didn't talk much.There was no noticeable change in him--a little more abstracted perhaps.He would walk in the street or come into a room with a quick look round him, and sometimes for no earthly reason he would swerve.Did you ever watch a cat crossing a room? It sidles along by the furniture and walks over an open space of carpet as if it were picking its way among obstacles.Well, Hollond behaved like that, but he had always been counted a little odd, and nobody noticed it but me.

"I knew better than to chaff him, and had stopped argument, so there wasn't much to be said.But sometimes he would give me news about his experiences.The whole thing was perfectly clear and scientific and above board, and nothing creepy about it.You know how I hate the washy supernatural stuff they give us nowadays.Hollond was well and fit, with an appetite like a hunter.But as he talked, sometimes--well, you know I haven't much in the way of nerves or imagination--but I used to get a little eerie.Used to feel the solid earth dissolving round me.

It was the opposite of vertigo, if you understand me--a sense of airy realities crowding in on you-crowding the mind, that is, not the body.

"I gathered from Hollond that he was always conscious of corridors and halls and alleys in Space, shifting, but shifting according to inexorable laws.I never could get quite clear as to what this consciousness was like.When I asked he used to look puzzled and worried and helpless.I made out from him that one landmark involved a sequence, and once given a bearing from an object you could keep the direction without a mistake.He told me he could easily, if he wanted, go in a dirigible from the top of Mont Blanc to the top of Snowdon in the thickest fog and without a compass, if he were given the proper angle to start from.I confess I didn't follow that myself.Material objects had nothing to do with the Spacial forms, for a table or a bed in our world might be placed across a corridor of Space.The forms played their game independent of our kind of reality.But the worst of it was, that if you kept your mind too much in one world you were apt to forget about the other and Hollond was always barking his shins on stones and chairs and things.

"He told me all this quite simply and frankly.Remember his mind and no other part of him lived in his new world.He said it gave him an odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite strange world of Space that flowed around them.He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.""How long was it before he went mad?" I asked.

It was a foolish question, and made Leithen cross."He never went mad in your sense.My dear fellow, you're very much wrong if you think there was anything pathological about him--then.

The man was brilliantly sane.His mind was as keen is a keen sword.I couldn't understand him, but I could judge of his sanity right enough."I asked if it made him happy or miserable.