The Man from the Clouds | Page 8

nearly walked straight
into the wall of an out-house before I saw a sign of them.
And then I remember rather hazily knocking at a door and presently
finding myself in a low kitchen with a peat fire burning on an open
hearth and what seemed to be dozens of people sitting round it. I
probably counted each of them three or four times over.
They gave me a huge bowl of milk and a pile of oat cakes and cheese,
and the one item of my programme I carried out faithfully was to eat
like a famished animal. I believe I put some sort of an accent into the
few words I murmured, but most of the time my mouth was too full for
much conversation. I know that I never attempted any explanation of
how I got there, and that night nobody asked me, and I certainly
postponed the patriotic John Bull business.
When I finished my supper I felt better, but still a little dazed. There
now seemed to be fewer in the family, but my eyes must still have been
multiplying them for I thought there were three or four rather pretty
girls, presumably daughters, with high pink cheeks, when there actually
turned out next morning to be only two; and two poor idiots,
presumably sons, with unpleasant stares and stubbly beards and open
mouths, when daylight revealed only one. In fact the father of the
household and his wife were the only people I counted accurately.
And then I remember being led to the barn, and seeing a vast pile of
soft hay and throwing myself into the midst of it; and there my
recollections of that day end. I actually had not even enquired into what
part of the world I had dropped.

IV
THE SUSPICIOUS STRANGER
There seem to be two distinct kinds of dreamers; to judge at least from
their confessions next morning. There is the superior kind which
dreams a condensed novel and remembers it distinctly to retail at
breakfast, and there is the inferior kind which only carries away a
vague impression of having vaguely striven to stride out and escape
from some nebulous horror, or of trying to purchase a pound of golf
balls at a counter which would persist in turning into a couple of
parallel bars or a roll-top writing desk. Personally I belong to the
inferior species, and I cannot even swear that I really had a dream at all
that night. I only know that when I woke up at last I found that my
oilskin was unbuttoned and thrown back, whereas I thought I had gone
to sleep with it buttoned up; and that when I noticed this, I then began
to have a confused memory of a dream wherein I was seized by some
one or something and struggled violently to free myself.
I sat up in my bed of straw and looked round me. The sunshine was
streaming through a small window and under the door, but the door
was closed, the bar was very still and quite empty save for my own
presence, and the crowing of a cock and the clucking of hens were at
first the only sounds that reached me from outside. Then I became
conscious of a soft and regular "swish," rising and falling constantly
and perpetually, and I remembered the sea close at hand, and a shiver
of gratitude ran through me to think how narrowly I had escaped
having that heaving surface fathoms over my head.
I have often wished since that I had lain there for a little while and tried
to remember the dream, and whether I had actually gone to sleep with
my oilskin buttoned, while the circumstances, such as they were, were
fresh in my memory. When I thought of them afterwards I could swear
to nothing and finally concluded the whole thing was probably fancy.
But if by any chance it were not, then evidently some one had tried to
search me in the night, and who would it be likely to be but my
vanished acquaintance on the shore, or his confederates? And in that

case one of them must have been lurking very close at hand. However,
when I tried to piece my recollections together afterwards it was too
late to make anything of them at all.
I only know for certain that I missed nothing from my pockets, and that
as a matter of fact I had actually carried nothing in them that would
have given me away--so far at least as I could judge.
These, as I say, were my subsequent reflections. What I did at the time
was not to think about the matter any further, but jump up, open the
barn door and walk out into