The Inheritors

“Ideas,” she said. “Oh, as for ideas⁠—”

“Well?” I hazarded, “as for ideas⁠—?”

We went through the old gateway and I cast a glance over my shoulder. The noon sun was shining over the masonry, over the little saints’ effigies, over the little fretted canopies, the grime and the white streaks of bird-dropping.

“There,” I said, pointing toward it, “doesn’t that suggest something to you?”

She made a motion with her head⁠—half negative, half contemptuous.

“But,” I stuttered, “the associations⁠—the ideas⁠—the historical ideas⁠—”

She said nothing.

“You Americans,” I began, but her smile stopped me. It was as if she were amused at the utterances of an old lady shocked by the habits of the daughters of the day. It was the smile of a person who is confident of superseding one fatally.

In conversations of any length one of the parties assumes the superiority⁠—superiority of rank, intellectual or social.

I expressed lighthearted acquiescence.

“Listen,” she said, and uttered some sounds. I felt a kind of unholy emotion. It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of wind through a breathless day. “What⁠—what!” I cried.

“I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension.”

I recovered my equanimity with the thought that I had been visited by some stroke of an obscure and unimportant physical kind.

“I think we must have been climbing the hill too fast for me,” I said, “I have not been very well. I missed what you said.” I was certainly out of breath.

“I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension,” she repeated with admirable gravity.

“Oh, come,” I expostulated, “this is playing it rather low down. You walk a convalescent out of breath and then propound riddles to him.”

I was recovering my breath, and, with it, my inclination to expand. Instead, I looked at her. I was beginning to understand. It was obvious enough that she was a foreigner in a strange land, in a land that brought out her national characteristics. She must be of some race, perhaps Semitic, perhaps Sclav⁠—of some incomprehensible race. I had never seen a Circassian, and there used to be a tradition that Circassian women were beautiful, were fair-skinned, and so on. What was repelling in her was accounted for by this difference in national point of view. One is, after all, not so very remote from the horse. What one does not understand one shies at⁠—finds sinister, in fact. And she struck me as sinister.

“You won’t tell me who you are?” I said.

“I have done so,” she answered.

“If you expect me to believe that you inhabit a mathematical monstrosity, you are mistaken. You are, really.”

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.

“You!” I said, sharply. She answered, “You see.” She was smiling. She had been so much in my thoughts that I was hardly surprised⁠—the thing had even an air of pleasant inevitability about it.

“You must be a cousin of mine,” I said, “the name⁠—”

“Oh, call it sister,” she answered.

I was feeling inclined for farce, if blessed chance would throw it in my way. You see, I was going to live at last, and life for me meant irresponsibility.

“Ah!” I said, ironically, “you are going to be a sister to me, as they say.” She might have come the bogey over me last night in the moonlight, but now⁠ ⁠… There was a spice of danger about it, too, just a touch lurking somewhere. Besides, she was good-looking and well set up, and I couldn’t see what could touch me. Even if it did, even if I got into a mess, I had no relatives, not even a friend, to be worried about me. I stood quite alone, and I half relished the idea of getting into a mess⁠—it would be part of life, too. I was going to have a little money, and she excited my curiosity. I was tingling to know what she was really at.

“And one might ask,” I said, “what you are doing in this⁠—in this.⁠ ⁠…” I was at a loss for a word to describe the room⁠—the smugness parading as professional Bohemianism.

It was very cold and hideously late; away in those endless small hours when the pulse drags, when the clock-beat drags, when time is effaced.

“You see?” she said suddenly.

“Oh, I see,” I answered⁠—“and⁠ ⁠… and now?”

“Now we are almost done with each other,” she answered.

I felt a sudden mental falling away. I had never looked at things in that way, had never really looked things in the face. I had grown so used to the idea that she was to parcel out the remainder of my life, had grown so used to the feeling that I was the integral portion of her life⁠ ⁠… “But I⁠—” I said, “What is to become of me?”

She stood looking down at the ground⁠ ⁠… for a long time. At last she said in a low monotone:

“Oh, you must try to forget.”

A new idea struck me⁠—luminously, overwhelming. I grew reckless. “You⁠—you are growing considerate,” I taunted. “You are not so sure, not so cold. I notice a change in you. Upon my soul⁠ ⁠…”

Her eyes dilated suddenly, and as suddenly closed again. She said nothing. I grew conscious of unbearable pain, the pain of returning life. She was going away. I should be alone. The future began to exist again, looming up like a vessel through thick mist, silent, phantasmal, overwhelming⁠—a hideous future of irremediable remorse, of solitude, of craving.

“You are going back to work with Churchill,” she said suddenly.

“How did you know?” I asked breathlessly. My despair of a sort found vent in violent interjecting of an immaterial query.