Of course he could only describe his impressions very lamely, for they were purely of the mind, and he had no material peg to hang them on, so that I could realize them. But the gist of it was that he had been gradually becoming conscious of what he called 'Presences' in his world. They had no effect on Space-did not leave footprints in its corridors, for instance-but they affected his mind. There was some mysterious contact established between him and them. I asked him if the affection was unpleasant, and he said 'No, not exactly.' But I could see a hint of fear in his eyes. "Think of it. Try to realize what intellectual fear is. I can't, but it is conceivable. To you and me fear implies pain to ourselves or some other, and such pain is always in the last resort pain of the flesh. Consider it carefully and you will see that it is so. But imagine fear so sublimated and transmuted as to be the tension of pure spirit. I can't realize it, but I think it possible. I don't pretend to understand how Hollond got to know about these Presences. But there was no doubt about the fact. He was positive, and he wasn't in the least madnot in our sense. In that very month he published his book on Number, and gave a German professor who attacked it a most tremendous public trouncing. "I know what you are going to say,that the fancy was a weakening of the mind from within. I admit I should have thought of that, but he looked so confoundedly sane and able that it seemed ridiculous. He kept asking me my opinion, as a lawyer, on the facts he offered. It was the oddest case ever put before me, but I did my best for him. I dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense. I told him that, taking all that he had told me as fact, the Presences might be either ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which had inde pendently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally, the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers think they do. It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and I wasn't quite serious. But Hollond was serious enough. "He admitted that all three explanations were conceivable, but he was very doubtful about the first. The projection of the spirit into Space during sleep, he thought, was a faint and feeble thing, and these were powerful Presences. With the second and the third he was rather impressed. I suppose I should have seen what was happening and tried to stop it; at least, looking back that seems to have been my duty. But it was difficult to think that anything was wrong with Hollond; indeed the odd thing is that all this time the idea of madness never entered my head. I rather backed him up. Somehow the thing took my fancy, though I thought it moonshine at the bottom of my heart. I enlarged on the pioneering before him. "Think,' I told him, 'what may be waiting for you. You may discover the meaning of Spirit. You may open up a new world, as rich as the old one, but imperishable. You may prove to mankind their immortality and deliver them for ever from the fear of death. Why, man, you are picking at the lock of all the world's mysteries.' "But Hollond did not cheer up. He seemed strangely languid and dispirited. "That is all true enough,' he said, 'if you are right, if your alternatives are exhaustive. But suppose they are something else, something . . .' What that 'something' might be he had apparently no idea, and very soon he went away. "He said another thing before he left. He asked me if I ever read poetry, and I said, Not often. Nor did he: but he had picked up a little book somewhere and found a man who knew about the Presences. I think his name was Traherne, one of the seventeenth-century fellows. He quoted a verse which stuck to my fly-paper memory. It ran something like this: "Within the region of the air, Compassed about with Heavens fair, Great tracts of land there may be found, Where many numerous hosts, In those far distant coasts, For other great and glorious ends Inhabit, my yet unknown friends." Hollond was positive he did not mean angels or anything of the sort. I told him that Traherne evidently took a cheerful view of them. He admitted that, but added: 'He had religion, you see. He believed that everything was for the best. I am not a man of faith, and can only take comfort from what I understand. I'm in the dark, I tell you. "Next week I was busy with the Chilian Arbitration case, and saw nobody for a couple of months. Then one evening I ran against Hollond on the Embankment, and thought him looking horribly ill. He walked back with me to my rooms, and hardly uttered one word all the way. I gave him a stiff whisky-and-soda, which he gulped down absent-mindedly. There was that strained, hunted look in his eyes that you see in a frightened animal's. He was always lean, but now he had fallen away to skin and bone. "I can't stay long,' he told me, 'for I'm off to the Alps to-morrow and I have a lot to do.' Before then he used to plunge readily into his story, but now he seemed shy about beginning. Indeed I had to ask him a question. ""Things are difficult,' he said hesitatingly, and rather distressing. Do you know, Leithen, I think you were wrong about--about what I spoke to you of. You said there must be one of three explanations. I am beginning to "You can imagine that I was considerably startled. It was lightning out of a clear sky. How the devil could one associate horror with mathematics? I don't see it yet. . . At any rate, I-- You may be sure I cursed my folly for ever pretending to take him seriously. The only way would have been to have laughed him out of it at the start. And yet I couldn't, you know-it was too real and reasonable. Anyhow, I tried a firm tone now, and told him the whole thing was arrant raving bosh. I bade him be a man and pull himself together. I made him dine with me, and took him home, and got him into a better state of mind before he went to bed. Next morning I saw him off at Charing Cross, very haggard still, but better. He promised to write to me pretty often. " The pony, with a great eleven-pointer lurching athwart its back, was abreast of us, and from the autumn mist came the sound of soft Highland voices. Leithen and I got up to go, when we heard that the rifle had made direct for the Lodge by a short cut past the Sanctuary. In the wake of the gillies we descended the Correi road into a glen all swimming with dim purple shadows. The pony minced and boggled; the stag's antlers stood out sharp on the rise against a patch of sky, looking like a skeleton tree. Then we dropped into a covert of birches and emerged on the white glen highway. yarns! "I want to hear the end of your story," I told him, as the lights of the Lodge showed half a mile distant. "The end was a tragedy," he said slowly; "I don't much care to talk about it. But how was I to know? I couldn't see the nerve going. You see I couldn't believe it was all nonsense. If I could I might have seen. But I still think there was something in it— up to a point. Oh, I agree he went mad in the end. It is the only explanation. Something must have snapped in that fine brain, and he saw the little bit more which we call madness. Thank God, you and I are prosaic fellows. "I was going out to Chamonix myself a week later. But before I started I got a post-card from Hollond, the only word from him. He had printed my name and address, and on the other side had scribbled six words -I know at last-God's mercy.-H. G. H.' The handwriting was like a sick man of ninety. I knew that things must be pretty bad with my friend. "I got to Chamonix in time for his funeral. An ordinary climbing accident-you probably read about it in the papers. The Press talked about the toll which the Alps took from intellectuals-the usual rot. There was an inquiry, but the facts were quite simple. The body was only recognized LIVING AGE. VOL. LI. 2696 Du "It seems that he had climbed for a few days with one of the Kronigs and Dupont, and they had done some hairraising things on the Aiguilles. pont told me that they had found a new route up the Montanvert side of the Charmoz. He said that Hollond climbed like a 'diable fou,' and if you know Dupont's standard of madness you will see that the pace must have been pretty hot. 'But Monsieur was sick,' he added; 'his eyes were not good. And I and Franz, we were grieved for him and a little afraid. We were glad when he left us.' "He dismissed the guides two days before his death. The next day he spent in the hotel, getting his affairs straight. He left everything in perfect order, but not a line to a soul, not even to his sister. The following day he set out alone about three in the morning for the Grèpon. He took the road up the Nantillons glacier to the Col, and then he must have climbed the Mummery crack by himself. After that he left the ordinary route and tried a new traverse across the Mer de Glace face. Somewhere near the top he fell, and next day a party going to the Dent du Requin found him on the rocks thousands of feet below. "He had slipped in attempting the most foolhardy course on earth, and there was a lot, of talk about the dangers of guideless climbing. But I guessed the truth, and I am sure Dupont knew, though he held his tongue. We were now on the gravel of the drive, and I was feeling better. The thought of dinner warmed my heart and drove out the eeriness of the twilight glen. The hour between dog and wolf was passing. After all, there was a gross and jolly earth at hand for wise men who had a mind to comfort. The opium trade with China has been subject to so much misconception and misrepresentation that it is too much to hope that the extremists among its opponents will be satisfied even by the new agreement to hasten its extinction which has just been concluded at Peking. Writing more than fifty years ago, a distinguished missionary and pronounced opponent of the opium traffic (the Rev. W. H. Medhurst) said: "The arming of vessels engaged in the opium traffic is simply for their own protection; and all little enough to protect themselves against the rapacious pirates who have of late years infested the coast. As it is told in England, it leads to the conclusion that the opium vessels are armed for the purpose of resisting the revenue officers of China, than which no idea could be more erroneous." But the correction was ignored, and the lie "as told in England" survives to the present day. The inference was implied then, and is implied still, that this armament was employed to force opium on an unwilling people and an obnoxious traffic on the officials of the Empire; the truth being that it was quite unnecessary to employ any force to induce the people to buy the drug and that the officials were eager, every one of them, to attract into channels under their own control a traffic which yielded a steady and lucrative income for which they had not to account. And so with the "Opium War" and "Opium Treaties." It would be interesting to know how many of those who attend and vote, or even of those who speak, at anti-opium meetings have read the instructions of the British Government to Sir Henry Pottinger, in 1841, or the text of the treaties they denounce-or how many have been content to derive their impression from misrepresentations similar to the denunciations of "Chinese Slavery" in South Africa, which were so widely credited in 1906. We are still told of the "opium treaty" and the "opium war" and of the "national crime" of waging one to enforce the other, in absolute disregard of the fact that there is not a word in the Treaty (of 1842) about the admission of opium, Lord Palmerston having expressly laid down that "the Government made no such demand, for they had no right to do so; the Chinese Government being fully entitled to prohibit the importation if it pleased; and British subjects who engage in a contraband trade must take the consequences |