Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (68 page)

I
had
years
of
"sympathetic
thought,"
stimulated
by
fierce
mental and
physical
anguish
of
distinctly
"concentrated"
kind.

Let
us
leave
it
at
that.
.
.
.

Mantravers
had
disappeared,
leaving
not
a
wrack
behind.
Hi
presto! and
the
fellow
was
gone.
He
vanished—into
,an
empty
and
unfurnished
house.
He
was
just
over
sixty
when
he
went,
and
he
was
just over
sixty
when
he
returned.
I
was
present
when
he
returned
and
I can
testify.
I
knew
him
before
and
after.
The
clothes
he
went
in
were the
clothes
he
came
back
in—an
everyday
tweed
suit
with
a
blue
bow tie.
He
had
been
away
for
over
four
years.
He
came
into
view
again, re-emerged
into
our
ordinary
three-dimensional
categories,
into
our ordinary
life
and
world
that
is,"precisely
and
exactly
as
he
left
it— almost.
Changes
of
a
kind
there
were,
but
to
describe
them
here would
be
to
anticipate
unduly.
They
shall
be
told
in
their
proper
place and
sequence.
.
.
.

Other
letters
from
Vronski
reached
me
in
my
prison
camp,
though most
of
them,
since
they
dealt
with
"escape,"
were
too
censored
to be
intelligible.
A
book
or
two
came
as
well,
articles
and
pamphlets, undoubtedly
sent
by
him.
My
mind,
whether
"over
the
edge"
or
not, being
neither
mathematical
nor
metaphysical,
made
little
headway with
them,
though
I
read—waded
through
them
rather—with
undeniable
interest
and
excitement.
Other
cases
of
"total
disappearance" were
discussed
and
analysed,
and
such
cases,
apparently,
were
not
so rare
as
I
had
imagined.
There
were
certain
places,
certain
spots
of loneliness
on
the
world's
surface,
regions
of
wild
and
hostile
desolation,
regions
avoided
rather
by
commonplace
humanity,
where
such queer
"vanishings"
had
occurred
too
frequently
to
be
normally
explained,
and
my
mind,
"ignorant
but
open,"
simple
certainly,
struggled
with
these
strange
and
semi-marvellous
accounts,
accounts,
moreover,
painfully
documented
with
names
and
dates
and
other
evidence we
usually
accept
as
honest.

Such
disappearances,
however,
hardly
applied,
I
felt,
to
a
Bayswater street
and
a
dwelling-house
plastered
with
agents'
boards.
It
was
the deeper,
more
philosophical
articles
that
held
my
interest
chiefly,
the writers
who
suggested
that
"escape"
from
the
limited
life
we
know was
possible,
desirable
as
well.
Life,
declared
one
writer,
was
nothing but
a
prison-house,
cage,
and
we
were
wise
to
admit
frankly
that
it
was horrible.
We
were
prisoners
in
it,
slaves,
caught
helplessly
by
the
bars of
space
and
time
which
were
our
ghastly
limitations.
Yet
a
way
of escape,
"though
few
there
be
that
find
it,"
offered,
the
A
B
C
of
this way
being
to
"go
against
nature,"
since
nature
kept
us
stupefied
within our
bars.
The
great
majority,
of
course,
dominated
by
the
herd-instinct,
obeyed
the
shibboleths
of
the
herd.
These
never
could,
because
they
never
wanted
to,
escape.
Only
the
few
who
resisted
the stunning,
deadening
influence
of
the
herd,
of
nature,
need
ever
dare to
make
the
attempt.
.
.
.