The Inheritors | Page 4

Before he had voiced his emotions we had passed on.
"I have seen a horse-coper do as much for a stallion," I commented. "I
know there are words that have certain effects. But you shouldn't play
pranks like the low-comedy devil in Faustus."
"It isn't good form, I suppose?" she sneered.
"It's a matter of feeling," I said, hotly, "the poor fellow has lost his
beer."
"What's that to me?" she commented, with the air of one affording a
concrete illustration.
"It's a good deal to him," I answered.
"But what to me?"
I said nothing. She ceased her exposition immediately afterward,
growing silent as suddenly as she had become discoursive. It was rather
as if she had learnt a speech by heart and had come to the end of it. I
was quite at a loss as to what she was driving at. There was a newness,
a strangeness about her; sometimes she struck me as mad, sometimes as
frightfully sane. We had a meal somewhere--a meal that broke the
current of her speech--and then, in the late afternoon, took a by-road
and wandered in secluded valleys. I had been ill; trouble of the nerves,
brooding, the monotony of life in the shadow of unsuccess. I had an
errand in this part of the world and had been approaching it deviously,
seeking the normal in its quiet hollows, trying to get back to my old
self. I did not wish to think of how I should get through the year--of the
thousand little things that matter. So I talked and she--she listened very
well.
But topics exhaust themselves and, at the last, I myself brought the talk
round to the Fourth Dimension. We were sauntering along the forgotten
valley that lies between Hardves and Stelling Minnis; we had been
silent for several minutes. For me, at least, the silence was pregnant

with the undefinable emotions that, at times, run in currents between
man and woman. The sun was getting low and it was shadowy in those
shrouded hollows. I laughed at some thought, I forget what, and then
began to badger her with questions. I tried to exhaust the possibilities
of the Dimensionist idea, made grotesque suggestions. I said: "And
when a great many of you have been crowded out of the Dimension and
invaded the earth you will do so and so--" something preposterous and
ironical. She coldly dissented, and at once the irony appeared as gross
as the jocularity of a commercial traveller. Sometimes she signified:
"Yes, that is what we shall do;" signified it without speaking--by some
gesture perhaps, I hardly know what. There was something
impressive--something almost regal--in this manner of hers; it was
rather frightening in those lonely places, which were so forgotten, so
gray, so closed in. There was something of the past world about the
hanging woods, the little veils of unmoving mist--as if time did not
exist in those furrows of the great world; and one was so absolutely
alone; anything might have happened. I grew weary of the sound of my
tongue. But when I wanted to cease, I found she had on me the effect of
some incredible stimulant.
We came to the end of the valley where the road begins to climb the
southern hill, out into the open air. I managed to maintain an uneasy
silence. From her grimly dispassionate reiterations I had attained to a
clear idea, even to a visualisation, of her fantastic conception--allegory,
madness, or whatever it was. She certainly forced it home. The
Dimensionists were to come in swarms, to materialise, to devour like
locusts, to be all the more irresistible because indistinguishable. They
were to come like snow in the night: in the morning one would look out
and find the world white; they were to come as the gray hairs come, to
sap the strength of us as the years sap the strength of the muscles. As to
methods, we should be treated as we ourselves treat the inferior races.
There would be no fighting, no killing; we--our whole social
system--would break as a beam snaps, because we were worm-eaten
with altruism and ethics. We, at our worst, had a certain limit, a certain
stage where we exclaimed: "No, this is playing it too low down,"
because we had scruples that acted like handicapping weights. She
uttered, I think, only two sentences of connected words: "We shall race

with you and we shall not be weighted," and, "We shall merely sink
you lower by our weight." All the rest went like this:
"But then," I would say ... "we shall not be able to trust anyone.
Anyone may be one of you...." She would answer: "Anyone." She
prophesied a reign of terror for us. As one passed one's neighbour in the
street one