The Inheritors | Page 3

filled its place again and I looked
at her.
"What the devil," I said, hysterically--"what the devil do you play these
tricks upon me for?"
"You see," she answered, "the rudiments of the sense are there."
"You must excuse me if I fail to understand," I said, grasping after
fragments of dropped dignity. "I am subject to fits of giddiness." I felt a
need for covering a species of nakedness. "Pardon my swearing," I
added; a proof of recovered equanimity.
We resumed the road in silence. I was physically and mentally shaken;
and I tried to deceive myself as to the cause. After some time I said:
"You insist then in preserving your--your incognito."
"Oh, I make no mystery of myself," she answered.
"You have told me that you come from the Fourth Dimension," I
remarked, ironically.

"I come from the Fourth Dimension," she said, patiently. She had the
air of one in a position of difficulty; of one aware of it and ready to
brave it. She had the listlessness of an enlightened person who has to
explain, over and over again, to stupid children some rudimentary point
of the multiplication table.
She seemed to divine my thoughts, to be aware of their very wording.
She even said "yes" at the opening of her next speech.
"Yes," she said. "It is as if I were to try to explain the new ideas of any
age to a person of the age that has gone before." She paused, seeking a
concrete illustration that would touch me. "As if I were explaining to
Dr. Johnson the methods and the ultimate vogue of the cockney school
of poetry."
"I understand," I said, "that you wish me to consider myself as
relatively a Choctaw. But what I do not understand is; what bearing
that has upon--upon the Fourth Dimension, I think you said?"
"I will explain," she replied.
"But you must explain as if you were explaining to a Choctaw," I said,
pleasantly, "you must be concise and convincing."
She answered: "I will."
She made a long speech of it; I condense. I can't remember her exact
words--there were so many; but she spoke like a book. There was
something exquisitely piquant in her choice of words, in her
expressionless voice. I seemed to be listening to a phonograph reciting
a technical work. There was a touch of the incongruous, of the mad,
that appealed to me--the commonplace rolling-down landscape, the
straight, white, undulating road that, from the tops of rises, one saw
running for miles and miles, straight, straight, and so white. Filtering
down through the great blue of the sky came the thrilling of
innumerable skylarks. And I was listening to a parody of a scientific
work recited by a phonograph.

I heard the nature of the Fourth Dimension--heard that it was an
inhabited plane--invisible to our eyes, but omnipresent; heard that I had
seen it when Bell Harry had reeled before my eyes. I heard the
Dimensionists described: a race clear-sighted, eminently practical,
incredible; with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse; with no feeling for
art and no reverence for life; free from any ethical tradition; callous to
pain, weakness, suffering and death, as if they had been invulnerable
and immortal. She did not say that they were immortal, however. "You
would--you will--hate us," she concluded. And I seemed only then to
come to myself. The power of her imagination was so great that I
fancied myself face to face with the truth. I supposed she had been
amusing herself; that she should have tried to frighten me was
inadmissible. I don't pretend that I was completely at my ease, but I
said, amiably: "You certainly have succeeded in making these beings
hateful."
"I have made nothing," she said with a faint smile, and went on
amusing herself. She would explain origins, now.
"Your"--she used the word as signifying, I suppose, the inhabitants of
the country, or the populations of the earth--"your ancestors were mine,
but long ago you were crowded out of the Dimension as we are to-day,
you overran the earth as we shall do to-morrow. But you contracted
diseases, as we shall contract them,--beliefs, traditions; fears; ideas of
pity ... of love. You grew luxurious in the worship of your ideals, and
sorrowful; you solaced yourselves with creeds, with arts--you have
forgotten!"
She spoke with calm conviction; with an overwhelming and
dispassionate assurance. She was stating facts; not professing a faith.
We approached a little roadside inn. On a bench before the door a
dun-clad country fellow was asleep, his head on the table.
"Put your fingers in your ears," my companion commanded.
I humoured her.
I saw her lips move. The countryman started, shuddered, and by a

clumsy, convulsive motion of his arms, upset his quart. He rubbed his
eyes.