Four Weird Tales | Page 5

out of hours.
For the moment he reached his rooms under the roof in Bloomsbury, and had changed his
city coat to another, the iron doors of the office clanged far behind him, and in front,
before his very eyes, rolled up the beautiful gates of ivory, and he entered into the places
of flowers and singing and wonderful veiled forms. Sometimes he quite lost touch with
the outer world, forgetting to eat his dinner or go to bed, and lay in a state of trance, his
consciousness working far out of the body. And on other occasions he walked the streets
on air, half-way between the two regions, unable to distinguish between incarnate and
discarnate forms, and not very far, probably, beyond the strata where poets, saints, and
the greatest artists have moved and thought and found their inspiration. But this was only
when some insistent bodily claim prevented his full release, and more often than not he
was entirely independent of his physical portion and free of the real region, without let or
hindrance.
One evening he reached home utterly exhausted after the burden of the day's work. The
Manager had been more than usually brutal, unjust, ill-tempered, and Jones had been
almost persuaded out of his settled policy of contempt into answering back. Everything
seemed to have gone amiss, and the man's coarse, underbred nature had been in the
ascendant all day long: he had thumped the desk with his great fists, abused, found fault
unreasonably, uttered outrageous things, and behaved generally as he actually
was--beneath the thin veneer of acquired business varnish. He had done and said
everything to wound all that was woundable in an ordinary secretary, and though Jones
fortunately dwelt in a region from which he looked down upon such a man as he might
look down on the blundering of a savage animal, the strain had nevertheless told severely
upon him, and he reached home wondering for the first time in his life whether there was

perhaps a point beyond which he would be unable to restrain himself any longer.
For something out of the usual had happened. At the close of a passage of great stress
between the two, every nerve in the secretary's body tingling from undeserved abuse, the
Manager had suddenly turned full upon him, in the corner of the private room where the
safes stood, in such a way that the glare of his red eyes, magnified by the glasses, looked
straight into his own. And at this very second that other personality in Jones--the one that
was ever watching--rose up swiftly from the deeps within and held a mirror to his face.
A moment of flame and vision rushed over him, and for one single second--one merciless
second of clear sight--he saw the Manager as the tall dark man of his evil dreams, and the
knowledge that he had suffered at his hands some awful injury in the past crashed
through his mind like the report of a cannon.
It all flashed upon him and was gone, changing him from fire to ice, and then back again
to fire; and he left the office with the certain conviction in his heart that the time for his
final settlement with the man, the time for the inevitable retribution, was at last drawing
very near.
According to his invariable custom, however, he succeeded in putting the memory of all
this unpleasantness out of his mind with the changing of his office coat, and after dozing
a little in his leather chair before the fire, he started out as usual for dinner in the Soho
French restaurant, and began to dream himself away into the region of flowers and
singing, and to commune with the Invisibles that were the very sources of his real life and
being.
For it was in this way that his mind worked, and the habits of years had crystallised into
rigid lines along which it was now necessary and inevitable for him to act.
At the door of the little restaurant he stopped short, a half-remembered appointment in his
mind. He had made an engagement with some one, but where, or with whom, had
entirely slipped his memory. He thought it was for dinner, or else to meet just after dinner,
and for a second it came back to him that it had something to do with the office, but,
whatever it was, he was quite unable to recall it, and a reference to his pocket
engagement book showed only a blank page. Evidently he had even omitted to enter it;
and after standing a moment vainly trying to recall either the time, place, or person, he
went in and sat down.
But though the details had escaped him, his subconscious memory seemed to know all