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  Lucas stood before her in his shirt sleeves. The twilight was still coming in through the window, but the green student's lamp was lighted.

  “Well ?” he said, “safely back again. Not so very bad, was it ?”

  Except for the awful swoop into space, Veronica could not honestly say that it had been bad, and admitted as much.

  Lucas heaved a sigh of relief, which ended in a yawn, stretched himself, and walked about the room as if to relieve cramped limbs. A little cold wind blew in through the window and stirred a great pile of manuscript in Lucas's handwriting that lay upon the desk. Veronica wondered where he had got it from, it had not been there when she had closed her eyes a few moments before. The cold air from without made Lucas shiver, and he picked up his coat that lay on the floor and slid himself into it. The action made Veronica realize that she, too, was cold, perishingly cold, as if with the chill of outer space, and. a convulsive shudder ran through her. Lucas smiled as if he had been watching for this to happen, and took up a small vacuum flask that stood upon the desk. A curl of steam ascended into the air as he unscrewed the cover.

  “Cold ?” he said. “You always are after a trance. Have some hot coffee,” and he poured the contents of the flask into a cup that stood ready to hand.

  “If I had known that we were going to have such a long seance,” he said, “I would have had a supply for myself as well. As it is, I will have to be content with beer. I don't like to take spirits after an outing of this kind. You drink that off while I go and hunt up some beer.”

  Left alone, Veronica sipped her coffee, wondering what the meaning of Lucas's behaviour might be. She noticed that the light in the room was getting brighter, though the student's lamp on the desk was looking palid and unwholesome. The brightening light was coming from the window. A twitter and rustle from the ivy announced that the sparrows were rousing ; Veronica, bewildered, wondered what could have disturbed them at that hour of the night. Lucas returned with his beer and switched off the lamp on the desk, and Veronica saw that the room was full of a cold grey light, twilight indeed, but the growing, not the waning, twilight, and she suddenly realized that in some peculiar way, seven hours had vanished out of her life. She had never lost consciousness ; for some few seconds she had swooped into space and then returned, from a half to two minutes might have elapsed in the process, but seven hours had vanished out of her life, leaving no break to mark their going. She had passed from the twilight of night to the twilight of dawn, and what had been done to her in that interval she would never know ; the seven hours were gone beyond recall, and could never be accounted for. There was Lucas, looking very tired but quite ordinary and matter of fact ; there was that great pile of manuscript, evidently written during those seven hours, but of whose nature she was ignorant, and there was the little cold dawn-wind coming in at the window after the hot London night.

  A fresh horror had been added to Veronica's cup of life, the horror of that lost seven hours and what might: have occurred during that time. She looked fixedly at Lucas, as if she would drag the truth from him by the very intensity of her gaze.

  “What happened while I—was asleep ?”

  “You went out.”

  “Out. What do you mean ?”

  “Out of your body. Your soul went out of your body. I pushed you out.”

  “But why. What for ?”

  “Because I wanted to use your body as the receiving-instrument of a wireless telephone. When you are in your body, the impulses of your mind control the vocal cords, and you speak ; but if you are out of your body, the impulses of other people's minds can be made to control your vocal cords, and they speak. Do you know any German ? No ? Well, you have been talking it fluently all night and told me a lot of things I wanted to know. That is why you are useful to me, little girl, and that is why I want to keep you. You can go about and have as good a time as you like, provided you do not impair your sensitiveness, but you must not go away.” He came close up to her and gazed deeply and fixedly into her eyes. “You can go just the length of your chain, but not further. Understand ?”

  Veronica received his explanation without grasping its import. It was so much beyond the sphere of her concepts that it conveyed very little to her. She realized that Lucas made some curious use of her, that he set a good deal of value on her as an instrument, and that she would be kept, as a domestic animal is kept, under the best conditions, but for the uses of its master. Horror and fear overcame her ; the whole transaction was not human ; Lucas was not regarding her as a human being, but as a tool or instrument ; the purposes for which he was using her were not human purposes, motived by lust or greed, but some ultra-human or infra-human aim, altogether outside the scope of our earth-life. What he was trying to do, she did not know, but she was certain he was damaging her soul ; in spite of his pleasantness and agreeableness he was hurting her in some way that was not physical, but that was doing her infinitely more harm than anything done to her body ever could have done. She was afraid with a cold and deadly fear, a fear not of the body, but of the soul ; a fear, not of our earth, with its human wickedness, but of outer space and the things that are not human. Lucas himself was not quite human. Sitting there on the office table, swinging his legs and drinking beer out of a tea-cup, he looked more than human, he looked positively ordinary,’ but she knew that he was not. She stared at him intently, trying to solve the riddle ; what was it about him that was not human ? It was his hands, his eyes, and, funnily enough, his feet. Veronica could not make out why she included his feet in her inventory, but she did.

  Looking up, he met her gaze and smiled at her over the tea-cup.

  “Go to bed, Miss Mainwaring,” he said.

  “I am not sleepy,” she replied.

  “Of course, I forgot. You have had seven hours double-distilled sleep. I am, though, if you are not, so I will bid you good-night, or good-morning, whichever you prefer.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  VERONICA FOUND THAT, FROM THE MUNDANE point of view, her life was an easy one. There was no drudgery over typewriting or bookkeeping ; all day she could do as she pleased, read, sew, knit jumpers, walk in the park, go to a cinema, anything, in fact, so long as she did not over-tire herself, for that made Lucas very cross indeed.

  Three or four nights a week Ashlott would bring a message to say that she was wanted in the office, and then Lucas, gazing deeply into her eyes, would push her soul out into space and use her body for his own purposes. At dawn she would return to the vacated tenement, frightened, dazed, and utterly cold. Never again, however, did she experience the complete loss of memory that had occurred on the occasion of her first trance. Shreds of consciousness carried over ; sometimes she would be aware of faces that moped and mowed at her as she swept on the downward curve of her arc, and, like a frightened bird, she would round the nadir and speed upwards to the dawn clouds. Upon one terrible, never-to-be-forgotten night, they had chased her through inter-planetary space, and she had woken up, long before her appointed time, shrieking with terror, to find Lucas, half angry, half alarmed, holding her down in her chair. She had told him of the fiend faces and clawing hands that had pursued her, but he merely shrugged his shoulders and offered no comment or explanation, though she noticed that it was some time before he summoned her again.

  She had been three weeks in that strange house, and a sultry August had changed into a burning September, when Lucas came to her with a key in his hand.

  “A pity I never thought of it before, but here is the key of the Square gardens, you can go and sit there in the evenings while I am away. I am getting off for the week-end,” he added.

  A little later she saw him in motor-cycling kit, and guessed that his holiday would be spent on the open road. Wistfully she thought of clear wind-swept spaces and fresh air. Bloomsbury, never a very cheerful part of London, is the most intolerable, cat-haunted vacancy in the summer. Veronica went over to the Square gardens and played ball with a languid child whose nurse desired to read a nove
lette, and when the child went in to its tea she fetched a book and sat under the trees. The gardens were a godsend ; though parched and faded, there was some green left, and at any rate she was not between four walls.

  Meanwhile, Lucas, having cleared the London traffic, was speeding North at a good pace. He, too, was rejoicing in freedom from bricks and mortar. It was a long while since he had had his motor-cycle out ; the amount of time he was spending over Veronica Mainwaring and the results he was obtaining from her made it necessary for him to employ the week-ends in catching up with his regular work. But it was worth it, such a medium was not to be met with every day. Clear as a bell, the messages came through, and he was getting them co-ordinated ; bit by bit he was piecing together the rituals of the higher degrees of the great Fraternity to which he belonged. Lucas chuckled as he thought of what his private safe contained.

  He was sliding down the northern face of the hills that guard London, city staleness left behind and the trees thick overhead. The wind of his speed sang in his ears, and his blood sang, too, for he was a man, and young, and even his wholehearted absorption in his occult studies had not deprived him of his manhood. Sometimes he wondered if it were worth it, this ascetic strictness of discipline, this sacrifice of the things that made life worth living for most men. Ahead of him and behind him were other motor-cycles, some with a sidecar attached, some with a girl on the carrier. Lucas had never taken a girl on his carrier ; one of the brethren, perhaps, who happened to be in a hurry, but a girl, never. Women did not come into his life. The Order to which he belonged did not admit them, and the few women he had known in his journalistic days had slipped out of his life when he joined the Order.

  He stopped for tea at a wayside inn. In the bay window of the parlour a young fellow and a flapper were eating eggs and watercress and chaffing each other. Lucas was no hermit. Unless his skin lied, there was Latin blood in him, and his temperament had the quick liveliness of the South. He watched the man and his girl, and felt out of it. For the first time since he had escaped from the turgid ’teens, he considered a woman attentively. It might be rather amusing to take a girl out. Of course, he had his work to do, nothing could be allowed to interfere with that, but why should he cut himself off from all the pleasant things of life ? He was no better than General Sawberry, who was dedicated to a bath chair and a respirator. Why should he work like a galley-slave to win power and independence when by the time he had obtained them he would be too old and too inured to his solitude to be able to enjoy them ? Lucas finished his tea thoughtfully ; a new idea had been presented to him, and he was assessing it. What would be the effect upon his life if he admitted to it that neglected factor ? Trained to absolute self-control by the great Fraternity whose pupil and servant he was, he had had little difficulty in banishing from his life women and all the tangled problems they presented. Completely possessed, body and soul, by his absorbing studies, he had hardly missed them, or realized how much his life deviated from the normal till he had sat, a solitary observer, watching the great game of man and woman being played under his eyes. Perhaps if he had maintained his almost monastic isolation in the old Bloomsbury house, having speech with no woman save Mrs. Ashlott, who, good soul though she was, was not one to tempt virtue from the narrow way, his humanity might have continued its slumber; but into his seclusion he had introduced a disturbing element. Veronica Mainwaring when he first saw her, haggard, shabby and weary, had not been, any more than the butler's good woman, an object of allurement ; indeed, he had classed them both together as the ordinary females of everyday life, a different species to the wonder-woman of novel and stage, and had regarded her impersonally, looking upon her simply as an instrument to serve his ends, like typewriter and telephone ; using her when required and putting her by when her purpose was served. But Veronica, unluckily for her, had not remained as she was when she entered the big house in the Square ; Lucas, in order to ensure her efficiency, had had her fed and cared for, and the result had shown on other planes than the psychic one. The dull skin had cleared, the heavy eyes had brightened, and the frail figure had filled out surprisingly quickly. And with the return of vitality a change had come in her spiritual quality ; the life in her, which hitherto had had all it could do to hold its own, to maintain its slight tenement in face of the forces that assailed it, now began to overflow in subtle vibrations that Lucas, quick to sense an atmosphere, had become aware of.

  Veronica, who regarded Lucas as a bird regards a cat, had exercised upon him none of the feminine arts that come so readily to the least sophisticated of women, but the pressure of the race behind her had flowed out, and Lucas, who had so carefully guarded himself from all calls of the race, found the tide about his feet before he was aware of its existence for him. That thing had befallen him against which he had carefully guarded himself all his life; he had formed a tie, some external object had become necessary to his inner being, the subtle barriers were down, and through the breach, narrow as yet, the race-tides were beginning to pour in.

  Veronica's presence intensified his self-consciousness, caused the pressure of his vitality to rise ; life appeared in more vivid colours when she was present ; she was a stimulus to him, and deprived of her, the characteristic reaction of the dram-drinker set in, and life felt stale, flat and unprofitable.

  All this was not present to the man's consciousness, however, as he wheeled the heavy cycle into the roadway and stood debating. All he realized was that he was missing something which appeared to be amusing, and was wondering whether it was worth the trouble of obtaining. Had he suspected the true nature of his impulse, there would have been little hesitation in his mind ; he would have set his back to London and sent the little machine ripping down the long straight road. He, knowing what he did, dared not risk the bursting of the dykes so carefully built to hold his power within himself ; but Nature is an old and subtle woman, jealous of her own way, and she did not reveal to him the meaning of the call that sounded in his ears. It is not her will that any of her children should break from their allegiance ; in humankind she works with the group as her unit, and it is not well that any one individual should liberate himself from the restraints of social life while still free to reap the advantages of the social organization.

  Occult power can be obtained in two ways, by placing oneself in the van of evolution, where force has not yet been confined in form but lies loose, as it were, free to enter whatever channel is opened to it ; or by retreating to the rear of the race, where-unabsorbed force is again available. Lucas had chosen the latter path ; he, with all the endowments of modern humanity, had deliberately reverted to an earlier phase of evolution, to a time when space was void and forms were being built, before the time when Jehovah had made it plain to man that he was his brother's keeper and accountable for him, Lucas, the non-social, the solitary, and therefore the free, had been drawn into the current of evolution ; his race had captured him, he who had set out to master his race and was well on the road to accomplishment was a Samson shorn of his locks ; his source of strength had been his complete freedom from all sense of obligation to his kind, and therefore from scruple or remorse, which naturally placed him at a great advantage in dealing with men who were subject to both ; like an electric filament, the occulist of the left-hand path can only glow in a moral vacuum, and Lucas's soul was no longer Hermetically sealed.

  It was the beginning of the end, had he known it, when he wheeled his cycle out into the road with the handle-bars to the South, for a prince of evil must become a slave of good, a slave beaten with many rods, before he can win back to the cross-roads where he turned to the left. Nature had caught Lucas ; would he escape from her in time to resume his own dark path, or would he, swept by her ever-swiftening current, be returned to the pit whence he had issued by unnatural means, to start again the slow and painful ascent, aeons behind the evolution of his race, and suffering acutely because he would retain his consciousness of better things ?

  That day, for the first t
ime since he had left his boyhood behind him, Lucas had had a thought that did not centre about his own ego—he had handed the key of the gardens to Veronica, and thereby Nature had noosed him, for when a man says to evil, “Be thou my good,” he can own no divided allegiance, for his god is the most jealous of all the gods, and his own human nature will betray him should one thought stray from its dark loyalty, It is only the very strong who can hope to swim against the current of the universe.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE SUN HAD SET, AND THE GLOW OVER THE London chimney pots was failing, but Veronica still sat on in the shabby garden of the Bloomsbury Square. She had not sat under a tree since she had left the little Surrey village that now seemed like some dim memory of another existence. She was languid and apathetic ; the air, stale and heavy, hung about her without movement: ; her mind was almost a blank, for Lucas's operations had tended to slow her mental processes, and, although a background of fear still remained, she no longer planned escape. She felt herself to be helpless, completely under Lucas's control, and she had no thought of defying her gaoler, but merely a dim hope that his will might alleviate her lot, and that he would not lay upon her burdens too great to be borne.

  She did not perceive a man who stood behind the railings, watching her through the scanty privet hedge that enclosed the gardens. Locked up in her own thoughts, the London square had faded, and she was back again on the Surrey hills. Her old daydreams were rising before her mind in little pictures ; the Prince Charming, who had never appeared, was evoked from his palace in the clouds and set to his task of dragon-slaying (the dragon being Lucas), and then she would fly away, as with the wings of a dove, and be at peace. No castle in the clouds did she construct for herself, the Surrey hills were good enough for her tired little soul ; the rambler roses, the pear trees, and the tall blue lupins of her little garden, with the old servant, half nurse half housekeeper, to give her her tea, and the cat purring on the rag mat before the kitchen hearth. Meanwhile, the man watched her through the railings.