Dare I say it? Dare I say that I, a plain, prosaic lieutenant in therepublican service have done the incredible things here set out for the loveof a woman--for a chimera in female shape; for a pale, vapid ghost ofwoman-loveliness? At times I tell myself I dare not: that you will laugh,and cast me aside as a fabricator; and then again I pick up my pen andcollect the scattered pages, for I MUST write it--the pallid splendour ofthat thing I loved, and won, and lost is ever before me, and will not beforgotten. The tumult of the struggle into which that vision led me stillthrobs in my mind, the soft, lisping voices of the planet I ransacked for itssake and the roar of the destruction which followed me back from thequest drowns all other sounds in my ears! I must and will write--itrelieves me; read and believe as you list.
At the moment this story commences I was thinking of grill- ed steakand tomatoes--steak crisp and brown on both sides, and tomatoes red as asetting sun!
Much else though I have forgotten, THAT fact remains as clear as thelast sight of a well-remembered shore in the mind of some wave-tossedtraveller. And the occasion which produced that prosaic thought was anight well calculated to make one think of supper and fireside, though theone might be frugal and the other lonely, and as I, Gulliver Jones, the poorforesaid Navy lieutenant, with the honoured stars of our Republic on mycollar, and an undeserved snub from those in authority rankling in myheart, picked my way homeward by a short cut through the dismalness of aNew York slum I longed for steak and stout, slippers and a pipe, with allthe pathetic keenness of a troubled soul.
It was a wild, black kind of night, and the weirdness of it showed up asI passed from light to light or crossed the mouths of dim alleys leadingHeaven knows to what infernal dens of mystery and crime even in thislatter-day city of ours. The moon was up as far as the church steeples;large vapoury clouds scudding across the sky between us and her, and astrong, gusty wind, laden with big raindrops snarled angrily round cornersand sighed in the parapets like strange voices talking about things not of human interest.
It made no difference to me, of course. New York in this year ofgrace is not the place for the supernatural be the time never so fit forwitch-riding and the night wind in the chimney-stacks sound never somuch like the last gurgling cries of throttled men. No! the world wasvery matter-of-fact, and particularly so to me, a poor younger son withfive dollars in my purse by way of fortune, a packet of unpaid bills in mybreastpocket, and round my neck a locket with a portrait therein of thatdear buxom, freckled, stub-nosed girl away in a little southern seaporttown whom I thought I loved with a magnificent affection. Gods! I hadnot even touched the fringe of that affliction.
Thus sauntering along moodily, my chin on my chest and much tooabsorbed in reflection to have any nice apprecia- tion of what washappening about me, I was crossing in front of a dilapidated block ofhouses, dating back nearly to the time of the Pilgrim Fathers, when I had avague consciousness of something dark suddenly sweeping by me-- athing like a huge bat, or a solid shadow, if such a thing could be, and thenext instant there was a thud and a bump, a bump again, a half-stifled cry,and then a hurried vision of some black carpeting that flapped and shookas though all the winds of Eblis were in its folds, and then apparentlydisgorged from its inmost recesses a little man.
Before my first start of half-amused surprise was over I saw him bythe flickering lamp-light clutch at space as he tried to steady himself,stumble on the slippery curb, and the next moment go down on the back ofhis head with a most ugly thud.
Now I was not destitute of feeling, though it had been my lot to seemen die in many ways, and I ran over to that motionless form without anidea that anything but an ordinary accident had occurred. There he lay,silent and, as it turned out afterwards, dead as a door-nail, the strangest oldfellow ever eyes looked upon, dressed in shabby sorrel- coloured clothesof antique cut, with a long grey beard upon his chin, pent-roof eyebrows,and a wizened complexion so puckered and tanned by exposure to Heavenonly knew what weathers that it was impossible to guess his nationality.
I lifted him up out of the puddle of black blood in which he was lying, and his head dropped back over my arm as though it had been fixed to hisbody with string alone. There was neither heart-beat nor breath in him,and the last flicker of life faded out of that gaunt face even as I watched.
It was not altogether a pleasant situation, and the only thing to do appearedto be to get the dead man into proper care (though little good it could dohim now!) as speedily as possible. So, sending a chance passer-by intothe main street for a cab, I placed him into it as soon as it came, and therebeing nobody else to go, got in with him myself, telling the driver at thesame time to take us to the nearest hospital.
"Is this your rug, captain?" asked a bystander just as we were drivingoff.
"Not mine," I answered somewhat roughly. "You don't suppose I goabout at this time of night with Turkey carpets under my arm, do you? Itbelongs to this old chap here who has just dropped out of the skies on tohis head; chuck it on top and shut the door!" And that rug, the verymain- spring of the startling things which followed, was thus care- lesslythrown on to the carriage, and off we went.
Well, to be brief, I handed in that stark old traveller from nowhere atthe hospital, and as a matter of curiosity sat in the waiting-room while theyexamined him. In five minutes the house-surgeon on duty came in to seeme, and with a shake of his head said briefly-"Gone, sir--clean gone! Broke his neck like a pipe-stem. Moststrange-looking man, and none of us can even guess at his age. Not afriend of yours, I suppose?""Nothing whatever to do with me, sir. He slipped on the pavementand fell in front of me just now, and as a mat- ter of common charity Ibrought him in here. Were there any means of identification on him?""None whatever," answered the doctor, taking out his notebook and, asa matter of form, writing down my name and address and a few briefparticulars, "nothing what- ever except this curious-looking bead hunground his neck by a blackened thong of leather," and he handed me a thingabout as big as a filbert nut with a loop for suspension and apparently ofrock crystal, though so begrimed and dull its nature was difficult to speakof with certainty. The bead was of no seeming value and slipped unintentionally into my waistcoat pocket as I chatted for a few minutesmore with the doctor, and then, shaking hands, I said goodbye, and wentback to the cab which was still waiting outside.
It was only on reaching home I noticed the hospital porters hadomitted to take the dead man's carpet from the roof of the cab when theycarried him in, and as the cab- man did not care about driving back to thehospital with it, and it could not well be left in the street, I somewhatreluctantly carried it indoors with me.
Once in the shine of my own lamp and a cigar in my mouth I had acloser look at that ancient piece of art work from heaven, or the otherplace, only knows what ancient loom.
A big, strong rug of faded Oriental colouring, it covered half the floorof my sitting-room, the substance being of a material more like camel'shair than anything else, and run- ning across, when examined closely, weresome dark fibres so long and fine that surely they must have come fromthe tail of Solomon's favourite black stallion itself. But the strangestthing about that carpet was its pattern. It was threadbare enough to allconscience in places, yet the design still lived in solemn, age-wasted hues,and, as I dragged it to my stove-front and spread it out, it seemed to methat it was as much like a star map done by a scribe who had latelyrecovered from delirium tremens as anything else. In the centre appeareda round such as might be taken for the sun, while here and there, "in thefield," as heralds say, were lesser orbs which from their size and positioncould represent smaller worlds circling about it. Between these orbswere dotted lines and arrow-heads of the oldest form pointing in alldirections, while all the intervening spaces were filled up with wovencharacters half-way in appearance between Runes and Cryptic-Sanskrit.
Round the borders these characters ran into a wild maze, a perfect jungleof an alphabet through which none but a wizard could have forced a wayin search of meaning.
Altogether, I thought as I kicked it out straight upon my floor, it wasa strange and not unhandsome article of furniture--it would do nicely forthe mess-room on the Carolina, and if any representatives of yonderpoor old fel- low turned up tomorrow, why, I would give them a couple of dollars for it. Little did I guess how dear it would be at any price!
Meanwhile that steak was late, and now that the tempor- aryexcitement of the evening was wearing off I fell dull again. What a dark,sodden world it was that frowned in on me as I moved over to the windowand opened it for the benefit of the cool air, and how the wind howledabout the roof tops. How lonely I was! What a fool I had been to askfor long leave and come ashore like this, to curry favour with a set ofstubborn dunderheads who cared nothing for me--or Polly, and could notor would not understand how important it was to the best interests of theService that I should get that promotion which alone would send me backto her an eligible wooer! What a fool I was not to have volunteered forsome desperate service instead of wast- ing time like this! Then at leastlife would have been interesting; now it was dull as ditch-water, withwretched vistas of stagnant waiting between now and that joyful day whenI could claim that dear, rosy-checked girl for my own. What a fool I hadbeen!
"I wish, I wish," I exclaimed, walking round the little room, "I wish Iwere--"While these unfinished exclamations were actually passing my lips Ichanced to cross that infernal mat, and it is no more startling than true, butat my word a quiver of expectation ran through that gaunt web--a rustle ofantici- pation filled its ancient fabric, and one frayed corner surged up, andas I passed off its surface in my stride, the sentence still unfinished on mylips, wrapped itself about my left leg with extraordinary swiftness and soeffectively that I nearly fell into the arms of my landlady, who opened thedoor at the moment and came in with a tray and the steak and tomatoesmentioned more than once already.
It was the draught caused by the opening door, of course, that hadmade the dead man's rug lift so strangely-- what else could it have been?
I made this apology to the good woman, and when she had set the tableand closed the door took another turn or two about my den, con-tinuing asI did so my angry thoughts.
"Yes, yes," I said at last, returning to the stove and taking my stand,hands in pockets, in front of it, "anything were better than this, any enterprise however wild, any adventure however desperate. Oh, I wish Iwere anywhere but here, anywhere out of this redtape-ridden world of ours!
I WISH I WERE IN THE PLANET MARS!"How can I describe what followed those luckless words? Even as Ispoke the magic carpet quivered responsively under my feet, and anundulation went all round the fringe as though a sudden wind wereshaking it. It humped up in the middle so abruptly that I came downsitting with a shock that numbed me for the moment. It threw me on myback and billowed up round me as though I were in the trough of a stormysea. Quicker than I can write it lapped a corner over and rolled me in itsfolds like a chrysalis in a cocoon. I gave a wild yell and made one franticstruggle, but it was too late. With the leathery strength of a giant and theswiftness of an accomplished cigar- roller covering a "core" with leaf, itswamped my efforts, straightened my limbs, rolled me over, lapped me infold after fold till head and feet and everything were gone-- crushed lifeand breath back into my innermost being, and then, with the last particleof consciousness, I felt myself lifted from the floor, pass once round theroom, and finally shoot out, point foremost, into space through the openwindow, and go up and up and up with a sound of rending atmospheresthat seemed to tear like riven silk in one pro- longed shriek under my head,and to close up in thunder astern until my reeling senses could stand it nolonger. and time and space and circumstances all lost their meaning tome.