"You ought to be, Arbuthnot.If it isn't enough to drive a man mad when he sees himself exactly reproduced in an utterly impossible moving-picture show exhibited by an utterly impossible young woman in an utterly impossible underground city, then Idon't know what is.
"What do you mean?" I asked, starting.
"Mean? Well, if you didn't notice it, there's hope for you.""Notice what?"
"All that envoy scene.There, as I thought, appeared Yva.Do you admit that?""Of course; there could be no mistake on that point.""Very well.Then according to my version there came a man, still young, dressed in outlandish clothes, who made propositions of peace and wanted to marry Yva, who wanted to marry him.Is that right?""Absolutely."
"Well, and didn't you recognise the man?""No; I only noticed that he was a fine-looking fellow whose appearance reminded me of someone.""I suppose it must be true," mused Bickley, "that we do not know ourselves.""So the old Greek thought, since he urged that this should be our special study.'Know thyself,' you remember.""I meant physically, not intellectually.Arbuthnot, do you mean to tell me that you did not recognise your own double in that man? Shave off your beard and put on his clothes and no one could distinguish you apart."I sprang up, dropping my pipe.
"Now you mention it," I said slowly, "I suppose there was a resemblance.I didn't look at him very much; I was studying the simulacrum of Yva.Also, you know it is some time since--I mean, there are no pier-glasses in Orofena.""The man was you," went on Bickley with conviction."If I were superstitious I should think it a queer sort of omen.But as I am not, I know that I must be mad.""Why? After all, an ancient man and a modern man might resemble each other.""There are degrees in resemblance," said Bickley with one of his contemptuous snorts."It won't do, Humphrey, my boy," he added."I can only think of one possible explanation--outside of the obvious one of madness.""What is that?"
"The Glittering Lady produced what Bastin called that cinematograph show in some way or other, did she not? She said that in order to do this she loosed some hidden forces.I suggest that she did nothing of the sort.""Then whence did the pictures come and why?""From her own brain, in order to impress us with a cock-and-bull, fairy-book story.If this were so she would quite naturally fill the role of the lover of the piece with the last man who had happened to impress her.Hence the resemblance.""You presuppose a great deal, Bickley, including supernatural cunning and unexampled hypnotic influence.I don't know, first, why she should be so anxious to add another impression to the many we have received in this place; and, secondly, if she was, how she managed to mesmerise three average but totally different men into seeing the same things.My explanation is that you were deceived as to the likeness, which, mind you, I did not recognise; nor, apparently, did Bastin.""Bastin never recognises anything.But if you are in doubt, ask Yva herself.She ought to know.Now I'm off to try to analyse that confounded Life-water, which I suspect is of the ordinary spring variety, lightened up with natural carbonic acid gas and possibly not uninfluenced by radium.The trouble is that here Ican only apply some very elementary tests."So he went also, in an opposite direction to Bastin, and I was left alone with Tommy, who annoyed me much by attempting continually to wander off into the cave, whence I must recall him.I suppose that my experiences of the day, reviewed beneath the sweet influences of the wonderful tropical night, affected me.At any rate, that mystical side of my nature, to which Ithink I alluded at the beginning of this record, sprang into active and, in a sense, unholy life.The normal vanished, the abnormal took possession, and that is unholy to most of us creatures of habit and tradition, at any rate, if we are British.
I lost my footing on the world; my spirit began to wander in strange places; of course, always supposing that we have a spirit, which Bickley would deny.
I gave up reason; I surrendered myself to unreason; it is a not unpleasant process, occasionally.Supposing now that all we see and accept is but the merest fragment of the truth, or perhaps only a refraction thereof? Supposing that we do live again and again, and that our animating principle, whatever it might be, does inhabit various bodies, which, naturally enough, it would shape to its own taste and likeness? Would that taste and likeness vary so very much over, let us say, a million years or so, which, after all, is but an hour, or a minute, in the aeons of Eternity?
On this hypothesis, which is so wild that one begins to suspect that it may be true, was it impossible that I and that murdered man of the far past were in fact identical? If the woman were the same, preserved across the gulf in some unknown fashion, why should not her lover be the same? What did I say--her lover? Was I her lover? No, I was the lover of one who had died--my lost wife.Well, if I had died and lived again, why should not--why should not that Sleeper--have lived again during her long sleep?
Through all those years the spirit must have had some home, and, if so, in what shapes did it live? There were points, similarities, which rushed in upon me--oh! it was ridiculous.
Bickley was right.We were all mad!
There was another thing.Oro had declared that we were at war with Germany.If this were so, how could he know it? Such knowledge would presume powers of telepathy or vision beyond those given to man.I could not believe that he possessed these;as Bickley said, it would be past experience.Yet it was most strange that he who was uninformed as to our national history and dangers, should have hit upon a country with which we might well have been plunged into sudden struggle.Here again I was bewildered and overcome.My brain rocked.I would seek sleep, and in it escape, or at any rate rest from all these mysteries.