The Second Class Passenger Part 38

"You mean the curate?" inquired Mr. Newman. "Really, he isn't an a.s.s.

He didn't like your clothes--that was all."

"What's the matter with 'em?" demanded Carrick, inspecting his shabby sleeve. "You don't want me to dress up like--like you, do you?"

"My dear fellow!" Mr. Newman smiled protestingly, lifting a suave hand. "I don't care how you dress. I don't want you to 'make broad your phylacteries,' you know."

Carrick snorted, and they walked in silence through the little village that lay below the church.

The matter they had in common, which bridged their diversity and made it possible for them to be, after their fashion, friends, was their interest in the subject which Carrick had made his own--experimental psychology. Like all successful business men, Mr. Newman had an unschooled apt.i.tude for the science, and had practised it with profit on his compet.i.tors and employees before he knew a word of its technology. In Carrick's bare and lamp-lit study they had joined forces to bewilder and undermine the intelligence of the sly spaniel, and there had been sessions of hypnotism, with Mr. Newman rigid in trances, while Carrick groped, as it were, among the springs of his mind. The pair of them had incurred the indignation of European authorities, writing in obscure and costly little journals whose names the general public never heard. The bond of martyrdom-- martyrdom in print--united them.

"By the way," suggested Mr. Newman, when the village was behind them and they were walking between high hedgerows flamboyant with summer growth. "By the way, wasn't there something you wanted to speak to me about?"

"Eh? Oh yes," replied Carrick. "Bother! I want you to come to my place to-night to try something--something new, a big thing."

"To-night?" said Mr. Newman. "No, not to-night, Carrick."

"Why not?" demanded Carrick. "I tell you, it's a big thing. I've had an idea of it for some time; those clairvoyant tests put me on to it; but I've only just got it clear. It's big."

Mr. Newman shook his head. "Not to-night," he said. "You're a queer fellow, Carrick; you never can remember what day of the week it is for more than five minutes at a time."

"Oh!" Carrick scowled. "You mean it's Sunday. But this--I tell you, this isn't just an ordinary thing, Newman. I'll explain--it's new and it's big!"

"No," said Newman. "Not to-night, Carrick, please!"

"Hang it!" said Carrick. He would have spoken more liberally, but the choice was between restraint in language and the loss of Mr. Newman as an acquaintance. That had been made clear soon after their first meeting.

Mr. Newman smiled, and rested a large hand on Carrick's arm.

"We go by different roads to our goal, Carrick," he said, "but it is the same goal. We serve the same Master, under different names and in different ways. You call Him Science and I call Him Christ--the same Master, though; and my services take me to church to-night. But to- morrow, if you like, I will come over to your place."

"Get back," said Carrick violently to the dog. "To heel, you beast!"

The fork of the road was in front of them; they paused at the division of the way.

"Will that suit you?" inquired Mr. Newman. "I can come round after dinner."

Carrick gave him a look in which contempt, fury, and a certainly involuntary liking were strangely at war.

"Of all the sanctimonious a.s.ses," he said, and broke off. "Good- night!" he concluded abruptly.

"I'll come, then," said Mr. Newman, smiling. "Good-night, my dear fellow."

He went off at his deliberate gait, humming to himself the tune of the last hymn which the children had sung at the Sunday school.

Evening was settling about him on the trees and fields; after the still heat of the sun, it was like an amen to the day, a vast low note of organ music. There was a pond gleaming among the trees.

"He leadeth me beside the still waters," he said aloud to himself, and then Carrick's footsteps were audible behind him. He turned.

Carrick came up swiftly.

"Don't eat much dinner to-morrow night," he said, with immense seriousness.

"It's more hypnotism, then?" inquired Mr. Newman.

Carrick nodded. "Yes," he said. "But--it's a big thing, all the same."

He clicked to his dog and went off abruptly, pa.s.sing with long, jerky strides into the enveloping stillness of the evening, and Mr. Newman resumed his homeward walk, taking up his mood of reflective quiet at the point where Carrick had broken in upon it. He was a man made for the Sabbath; he breathed its atmosphere of a day consecrated to observances with a pleasure that was almost sensuous. For him, piety was that manner of life which gave the quality of Sunday to each other of the seven days of the week, softening them and rendering them august with the sense of a great adorable Presence presiding over their hours.

The curate who disliked Carrick occupied the pulpit that evening; he preached from half a text, after the manner of curates. "For they shall see G.o.d"--he repeated it in a poignant undertone--he, tall and young and priestly in his vestments, seen against the dim glory of a stained window--and Mr. Newman, attentive in his pew, leaned forward suddenly to hear, like a man touched by excitement.

Carrick's study was one of a pair of rooms he had added to the farmhouse which he inhabited, a long apartment of many windows, designed for s.p.a.ciousness, and possessing no other good quality. No fire could warm more than an end of it, and his lamp, wherever it was placed, was but a heart of light in a body of shadow. He had furnished it with the things he required; a desk was here, a table there, bookcases were along the walls, a variety of chairs stood where he happened to push them. It had the air of a waiting-room or a mortuary.

Carrick was at his desk when Mr. Newman, on the Monday evening, was shown in to him by the ironclad widow who kept house for him. He looked up with impatience as his guest entered.

"Oh, it's you?" was his greeting.

"Good evening," said Mr. Newman cheerfully. "You'd forgotten to expect me, I suppose. But I'm here, all the same."

"All right," said Carrick. "Sit down somewhere, will you?"

He rose and shoved a chair forward with his foot for Mr. Newman's accommodation, and began to walk slowly to and fro with his hands in his pockets.

"Well," said Newman; "and what's this miracle we're to work?"

"I'll show you," said Carrick, still walking. He stopped and turned toward his guest. "Newman," he said, "where do you reckon you were a hundred years ago?"

Mr. Newman laughed, crossing his legs as he sat.

"I'm not as old as that," he replied. "Whatever place you're thinking of, I wasn't there."

Carrick was frowning thoughtfully. "I'm not thinking of places," he said. "You--you exist; the matter that composes you is indestructible; the--the essential you, the thing in that matter that makes it mean something, the soul, if you like--that's indestructible, too.

Everything's indestructible. A hundred years hence, you'll be somewhere; but where were you--you, that is--a hundred years ago?"

He pointed the "you" with a jabbing forefinger as he spoke it, standing in front of Mr. Newman in the lamplight and talking down to him.

"Oh!" said Mr. Newman, "I see--yes! A hundred years, ago I was part of my Maker's unfinished plan of to-day."

"Were you?" said Carrick, snapping at him. "You were, eh? Part of-- we'll see! Come over to the big chair and undo your collar."

Mr. Newman rose; the big arm-chair was his place when Carrick hypnotised him, and the loosening of his collar was part of the ritual.

"What is the idea?" he asked, fumbling at his stud.

"Tell you afterwards," said Carrick. "If I told you now, you'd not get it out of your mind. Can't you get that collar off, man?"

"It was stiff," apologised Mr. Newman, arranging himself in the large chair. "How are you going to do it?"

Carrick's hot hand pressed his head back on the cushions.

"Shut up," he was told. "Let yourself go, now; just let yourself go."