John Silence Stories quotes

… his eyes, as he always did when he wished to absorb the real meaning of a recital that might be inadequately expressed, for by this method he found it easier to set himself in tune with the living thoughts that lay behind the broken words.

By his friends John Silence was regarded as an eccentric, because he was rich by accident, and by choice⁠—a doctor.

That a man of independent means should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly doctoring folk who could not pay, passed their comprehension entirely. The native nobility of a soul whose first desire was to help those who could not help themselves, puzzled them.

“It connotes a slightly increased sensibility, nothing more,” he would say.

“The true clairvoyant deplores his power, recognising that it adds a new horror to life, and is in the nature of an affliction. And you will find this always to be the real test.”

Thus it was that John Silence, this singularly developed doctor, was able to select his cases with a clear knowledge of the difference between mere hysterical delusion and the kind of psychical affliction that claimed his special powers.

And the words were significant of the methods of this remarkable man, the keynote of whose power lay, perhaps, more than anything else, in the knowledge, first, that thought can act at a distance, and, secondly, that thought is dynamic and can accomplish material results.

“Learn how to think,” he would have expressed it, “and you have learned to tap power at its source.”

To look at—he was now past forty—he was sparely built, with speaking brown eyes in which shone the light of knowledge and self-confidence, while at the same time they made one think of that wondrous gentleness seen most often in the eyes of animals.

And his desire to help was probably of equal strength with his desire to know and to investigate.

The motor stopped with a deep purring sound, as though a great black panther lay concealed within its hood

, and the doctor—the “psychic doctor,” as he was sometimes called—stepped out through the gathering fog, and walked across the tiny garden that held a blackened fir tree and a stunted laurel shrubbery.

“So, you see, side by side with this extravagant, apparently causeless merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless terror. The drug produced the laughter, I knew; but what brought in the terror I could not imagine. Everywhere behind the fun lay the fear.

It was terror masked by cap and bells; and I became the playground for two opposing emotions, armed and fighting to the death.

Gradually, then, the impression grew in me that this fear was caused by the invasion—so you called it just now—of the ‘person’ who had wakened me: she was utterly evil; inimical to my soul, or at least to all in me that wished for good.

Its indifference to human kind, its serene superiority to the obvious, struck him forcibly with fresh meaning; so remote, so inaccessible seemed the secret purposes of its real life, so alien to the blundering honesty of other animals.

Its absolute poise of bearing brought into his mind the opium-eater’s words that “no dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the mysterious”

; and he became suddenly aware that the presence of the dog in this foggy, haunted room on the top of Putney Hill was uncommonly welcome to him. He was glad to feel that Flame’s dependable personality was with him.

He stepped quickly forward and placed himself upon the exact strip of carpet where it walked.

But no cat is ever taken by surprise!

The moment he occupied the space of the Intruder, setting his feet on the woven roses midway in the line of travel, Smoke suddenly stopped purring and sat down. If lifted up its face with the most innocent stare imaginable of its green eyes.

handed the bag through the window of the moving train; and at the same time poured into his ears a long sentence, spoken rapidly and low, of which he was able to comprehend only the last few words:

“À cause du sommeil et à cause des chats.”

In reply to Dr. Silence, whose singular psychic acuteness at once seized upon this Frenchman as a vital point in the adventure, Vezin admitted that the man had impressed him favourably from the beginning, though without being able to explain why.

At first, however, Vezin said, he noticed very little of all this. The attempt at analysis came much later. What struck him then was only the delightful contrast of the silence and peace after the dust and noisy rattle of the train.

He felt soothed and stroked like a cat.

“Like a cat, you said?” interrupted John Silence, quickly catching him up.

He was even able to forget that with his tourist appearance he was a false note in a charming picture, and he melted more and more into the scene, feeling delightfully insignificant and unimportant and unselfconscious.

It was like becoming part of a softly coloured dream which he did not even realise to be a dream.

On the eastern side the hill fell away more sharply, and the plain below ran off rather suddenly into a sea of gathering shadows in which the little patches of woodland looked like islands and the stubble fields like deep water.

He sat there for some time pondering, bathed in the waves of murmurs and half-lost echoes that rose to his ears, muffled by the leaves of the plane trees.

The whole town, and the little hill out of which it grew as naturally as an ancient wood, seemed to him like a being lying there half asleep on the plain and crooning to itself as it dozed.

And, presently, as he sat lazily melting into its dream, a sound of horns and strings and wood instruments rose to his ears, and the town band began to play at the far end of the crowded terrace below to the accompaniment of a very …

He wandered about the town till he knew every street and alley. The people suffered him to come and go without let or hindrance, though it became clearer to him every day that he was never free himself from observation.

The town watched him as a cat watches a mouse.

And he got no nearer to finding out what they were all so busy with or where the main stream of their activities lay. This remained hidden. The people were as soft and mysterious as cats.

… to himself, “I suspect in this case that Vezin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out of the intense activities of a past life, and that he lived over again a scene in which he had often played a leading part centuries before.

For strong actions set up forces that are so slow to exhaust themselves, they may be said in a sense never to die.

In this case they were not vital enough to render the illusion complete, so that the little man found himself caught in a very distressing confusion of the present and the past;

I remembered my companion’s singular words up in my bedroom before dinner; and then I turned and noted carefully the stern countenance of the Colonel as he faced us and lit his big black cigar before speaking.

The threshold of an adventure, I reflected as I waited for the first words, is always the most thrilling moment⁠—until the climax comes.

But Colonel Wragge hesitated—mentally—a long time before he began.

“Why should you?” said the doctor, with his first laugh that evening. He got up and hung the map upon the wall again. “But I do—because these things are my special study—and let me add that

I have yet to come across a problem that is not natural, and has not a natural explanation. It’s merely a question of how much one knows⁠—and admits.

”

Personally, I was glad to be in the open air, for the atmosphere of the house was heavy with presentiment. The sense of impending disaster hung over all.

Fear stalked the passages, and lurked in the corners of every room.

It was a house haunted, but really haunted; not by some vague shadow of the dead, but by a definite though incalculable influence that was actively alive, and dangerous. At the least smell of smoke the entire household quivered.

a little centre of wind in the stillness. Overhead the boughs stirred and trembled where the smoke disappeared. Otherwise, not a tree sighed, not a sound made itself heard.

The wood was still as a graveyard.

A horrible idea came to me that the course of nature was about to change without warning, had changed a little already, that the sky would drop, or the surface of the earth crash inwards like a broken bubble.

… an involuntary shudder ran over me, for my companion turned with a confident look to reassure me, and he was so completely master of himself that I at once absorbed from his abundance, and felt the chinks of my failing courage beginning to close up.

To meet his eye in the presence of danger was like finding a mental railing that guided and supported thought along the giddy edges of alarm.

“I am quite ready,” I whispered, turning to listen for approaching footsteps.

He took my hand and shook it, and the contact seemed to shake into me something of his supreme confidence.

The eyes and hands of a strong man can touch the soul.

I think he guessed my thought, for a passing smile flashed about the corners of his mouth.

And, as the train ran downhill with brakes on and steam shut off, he put his head out of the window and one by one saw the old familiar landmarks in the dusk.

They stared at him like dead faces in a dream.

Queer, sharp feelings, half poignant, half sweet, stirred in his heart.

Harris tightened his hold upon the stranger’s arm as he heard. At the moment he had room for one emotion only. It did not seem to him odd that this stranger should have such intimate knowledge of his mind.

“It is, alas, chiefly the evil emotions that are able to leave their photographs upon surrounding scenes and objects,”

the other added, “and who ever heard of a place haunted by a noble deed, or of beautiful and lovely ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon? It is unfortunate.

In the conventional life at home they certainly seemed ordinary enough, but suddenly, as we passed through these gates of the wilderness, I saw them more sharply than before, with characters stripped of the atmosphere of men and cities.

A complete change of setting often furnishes a startlingly new view of people hitherto held for well-known; they present another facet of their personalities.

I seemed to see my own party almost as new people—people I had not known properly hitherto, people who would drop all disguises and henceforth reveal themselves as they really were. And each one seemed to say: “Now you will see me as I am.

… common instinct, and, without speech, made our way back slowly to the stockade, Maloney humming snatches of his songs, Sangree in front with his gun, prepared to shoot at a moment’s notice, and the women floundering in the rear with myself and the extinguished lanterns.

Yet it was only a dog!

Really, it was most singular when one came to reflect soberly upon it all.

He was coming out, like myself, to sniff the air; and I was not surprised, for its sweetness after the rain was intoxicating. And he came on all fours, just as I had done. I saw a head thrust round the edge of the tent.

And then I saw that it was not Sangree at all. It was an animal.

And the same instant I realised something else too—it was the animal; and its whole presentment for some unaccountable reason was unutterably malefic.

“Then isn’t that the best way to cure the fool—the brute—?” thundered the clergyman, half rising to his feet.

“Certainly it would be an easy and undiscoverable form of murder,” was the stern reply, spoken as calmly as though it were a remark about the weather.

Maloney collapsed visibly, and I gathered the wood over the fire and coaxed up a blaze.

“One’s useless and the other’s dangerous,” I replied under my breath, conscious of a keen desire to laugh, and leaving him to choose. “Safety lies in following our leader—”

“I’m not thinking of myself,” he interrupted sharply; “only, if anything happens to Joan tonight I’m going to shoot first⁠—and pray afterwards!”

Maloney put the book back into his hip-pocket, and peered out of the doorway. “What is he up to now, in the devil’s name, I wonder!” he added; “going round Sangree’s tent and making gestures.

“I think he did, sir, if I may say so. I seemed to lose sight of him, as it were—” The man stammered, evidently convinced by now that he had earned his dismissal.

“He come in so funny, just like a cold wind,”

he added boldly, setting his heels at attention and looking his master full in the face.

The green study was further provided with a secret spyhole; for John Silence liked when possible to observe his patient’s face before it had assumed that mask the features of the human countenance invariably wear in the presence of another person.

A man sitting alone wears a psychic expression; and this expression is the man himself.

It disappears the moment another person joins him. And Dr. Silence often learned more from a few moments’ secret observation of a face than from hours of conversation with its owner afterwards.