The Inheritors | Page 2

"Alas, no!" I answered. "You must know that."
"You would like to be?"
"We should all of us like," I answered; "though it is true some of us
protest that we aim for higher things."
"I see," she said, musingly. As far as I could tell she was coming to
some decision. With an instinctive dislike to any such proceeding as
regarded myself, I tried to cut across her unknown thoughts.

"But, really--" I said, "I am quite a commonplace topic. Let us talk
about yourself. Where do you come from?"
It occurred to me again that I was intensely unacquainted with her type.
Here was the same smile--as far as I could see, exactly the same smile.
There are fine shades in smiles as in laughs, as in tones of voice. I
seemed unable to hold my tongue.
"Where do you come from?" I asked. "You must belong to one of the
new nations. You are a foreigner, I'll swear, because you have such a
fine contempt for us. You irritate me so that you might almost be a
Prussian. But it is obvious that you are of a new nation that is
beginning to find itself."
"Oh, we are to inherit the earth, if that is what you mean," she said.
"The phrase is comprehensive," I said. I was determined not to give
myself away. "Where in the world do you come from?" I repeated. The
question, I was quite conscious, would have sufficed, but in the hope, I
suppose, of establishing my intellectual superiority, I continued:
"You know, fair play's a jewel. Now I'm quite willing to give you
information as to myself. I have already told you the essentials--you
ought to tell me something. It would only be fair play."
"Why should there be any fair play?" she asked.
"What have you to say against that?" I said. "Do you not number it
among your national characteristics?"
"You really wish to know where I come from?"
I expressed light-hearted acquiescence.
"Listen," she said, and uttered some sounds. I felt a kind of unholy
emotion. It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of
wind through a breathless day. "What--what!" I cried.
"I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension."

I recovered my equanimity with the thought that I had been visited by
some stroke of an obscure and unimportant physical kind.
"I think we must have been climbing the hill too fast for me," I said, "I
have not been very well. I missed what you said." I was certainly out of
breath.
"I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension," she repeated with admirable
gravity.
"Oh, come," I expostulated, "this is playing it rather low down. You
walk a convalescent out of breath and then propound riddles to him."
I was recovering my breath, and, with it, my inclination to expand.
Instead, I looked at her. I was beginning to understand. It was obvious
enough that she was a foreigner in a strange land, in a land that brought
out her national characteristics. She must be of some race, perhaps
Semitic, perhaps Sclav--of some incomprehensible race. I had never
seen a Circassian, and there used to be a tradition that Circassian
women were beautiful, were fair-skinned, and so on. What was
repelling in her was accounted for by this difference in national point of
view. One is, after all, not so very remote from the horse. What one
does not understand one shies at--finds sinister, in fact. And she struck
me as sinister.
"You won't tell me who you are?" I said.
"I have done so," she answered.
"If you expect me to believe that you inhabit a mathematical
monstrosity, you are mistaken. You are, really."
She turned round and pointed at the city.
"Look!" she said.
We had climbed the western hill. Below our feet, beneath a sky that the
wind had swept clean of clouds, was the valley; a broad bowl, shallow,

filled with the purple of smoke-wreaths. And above the mass of red
roofs there soared the golden stonework of the cathedral tower. It was a
vision, the last word of a great art. I looked at her. I was moved, and I
knew that the glory of it must have moved her.
She was smiling. "Look!" she repeated. I looked.
There was the purple and the red, and the golden tower, the vision, the
last word. She said something--uttered some sound.
What had happened? I don't know. It all looked contemptible. One
seemed to see something beyond, something vaster--vaster than
cathedrals, vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals
were raised. The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw
beyond it, not roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, an
unrealisable infinity of space.
It was merely momentary. The tower