THE full account of “N.H.,” with all he said and did, his effect upon others, his general activities in a word, it is impossible to compress intelligibly into the compass of these notes. A complete report Edward Fillery indeed accumulated, but its publication, he realized, must await that leisure for which his busy life provided little opportunity. His eyes, mental and physical, were never off his “patient,” and “N.H.,” aware of it, leaped out to meet the observant sympathy, giving all he could, concealing nothing, yet debarred, it seemed, by the rigid limitations of his own mental and physical machinery, as similarly by that of his hearers, from contributing more than suggestive and tantalizing hints. Of the use of parable he, obviously, had no knowledge.

His relations with others, perhaps, offered the most significant comments on his personality. Fillery was at some pains to collect these. The reactions were various, yet one and all showed this in common, a curious verdict but unanimous: that his effect, namely, was greatest when he was not there. Not in his actual presence, which promised rather than fulfilled, was his power so dominating upon mind and imagination as after the door was closed and he was gone. The withdrawal of his physical self, its absence as Fillery had himself experienced one night on Hampstead Heath as well as on other occasions brought his real presence closer.

It was Nayan who first drew attention to thi? remarkable characteristic. She spoke about him often now with Dr. Fillery, for as the weeks passed and she realized the uselessness, the impossibility, of the plan she had proposed to herself, she found relief in talking frankly about him to her older friend.

“Always, always after I leave him,” she confessed, “a profound and searching melancholy gets hold of me, poignant as death, yet an extraordinary unrealized beauty behind it somewhere. It steals into my very blood and bones. I feel an intense dissatisfaction with the world, with people as they are, and a burning scorn for all that is small, unworthy, petty, mean and yet a hopelessness of ever attaining to that something which he knows and lives so easily.” She sighed, gazing into his eyes a moment. “Or of ever making others see it,” she added.

“And that ‘something,’” he asked, “can you define it?”

She shook her head. “It’s in me, within reach even, but the word he used is the only one forgotten.”

“Perhaps has it ever occurred to you? that he simply cannot describe it. There are no words, no means at his disposal no human terms?”

“Perhaps,” she murmured.

“Desirable, though?” he urged her gently.

She clasped her hands, smiling. “Heavenly,” she murmured, closing her eyes a moment as though to try and recall it. “Yet when I’m with him,” she went on, “he never quite realizes for me the state of wonder and delight his presence promises. His personality suggests rather than fulfils.” She paused, a wistful, pained expression in her dark eyes. “The failure,” she added quickly, lest she seem to belittle him of whom she spoke, “of course lies in myself. I refuse, you see I can’t say why, though I feel it’s wise to let myself be dominated by that strange, lost part of me he stimulates.”

“True,” interposed Dr. Fillery. “I understand. Yet to have felt this even is a sign —”

“That he stirs the deepest, highest in me? This hint of divine beauty in the unrealized underself?”

He nodded. There was an odd touch of sadness in their talk. “I’ve watched him with many types of people,” he went on thoughtfully, almost as though thinking aloud in his rapid way, “I’ve talked with him on many subjects. The meanness, jealousy, insignificance of the Race shocks and amazes him. He cannot understand it. He asked me once ‘But is no one born noble? To be splendid is such an effort with them!’ Splendour of conduct, he noticed, is a calculated, rarely a spontaneous splendour. The general resistance to new ideas also puzzles him. ‘They fear a rhythm they have never felt before,’ as he put it. To adopt a new rhythm, they think, must somehow injure them.’ That the Race respects a man because he possesses much equally bewilders him. ‘No one serves willingly or naturally,’ he observed, ‘or unless someone else receives money for drawing attention loudly to it.’ Any notion of reward, of advertisement, in its widest meaning, is foreign to his nature.”

He broke off. Another pause fell between them, the girl the first to break it:

“He suffers,” she said in a low voice. “Here he suffers,” and her face yearned with the love and help she longed to pour out beyond all thought of self or compensation, and at the same time with the pain of its inevitable frustration; and, watching her, Dr. Fillery understood that this very yearning was another proof of the curious impetus, the intensification of being, that “N.H.” caused in everyone. Yet he winced, as though anticipating the question she at once then put to him:

“You are afraid for him, Edward?” her eyes calmly, searchingly on his. “His future troubles you?”

He turned to her with abrupt intensity. “If you, Iraida, could not enchain him “ He broke off. He shrugged his shoulders.

“I have no power,” she confessed. “An insatiable longing burns like a fire in him. Nothing he finds here on earth, among men and women, can satisfy it.” A faint blush stole up her neck and touched her cheeks. “He is different. I have no power to keep him here.” Her voice sank suddenly to a whisper, as though a breath of awe passed into her.

“He is here now at this very moment, I believe. He is with us as we talk together. I feel him.” Almost a visible thrill passed through her. “And close, so very close to you.”

Dr. Fillery made no sign by word or gesture, but something in his very silence gave assent.

“And not alone,” she added, still under her breath. It seemed she looked about her, though she did not actually move or turn her head. “Others of his kind, Edward come with him. They are always with him I think sometimes.” Her whisper was fainter still.

“You feel that too!” He said it abruptly, his voice louder and almost challenging. Then he added incongruously, as though saying it to himself this time, “That’s what I mean. I’ve known it for a long time —”

He looked at the girl sharply with unconcealed admiration. “It does not frighten you?” he asked, and in reply she said the very thing he felt sure she would say, hoping for it even while he shrank:

“Escape,” he heard in a low, clear voice, half a question, half an exclamation, and saw the blood leave her face.

The instinctive “Hush!” that rose to his lips he did not utter. The sense of loss, of searching pain, the word implied he did not show. Instead, he spoke in his natural, everyday tone again:

“The body irks him, of course, and he may try to rid himself of it. Its limitations to him are a prison, for his true consciousness he finds outside it. The explanation,” he added to himself, “of many a case of suicidal mania probably. I’ve often wondered —”

He took her hand, aware by the pallor of her face what her feelings were. “Death, you see, Nayan, has no meaning for him, as it has for us who think consciousness out of the body impossible, and he is puzzled by our dread of it. ‘We,’ he said once, ‘have nothing that decays. We may be stationary, or advance, or retreat, but we can never end.’ He derives oh, I’m convinced of it from another order.

Here amongst us he is inarticulate, unable to express himself, hopeless, helpless, in prison. Oh, if only —”

“He loves you” she said quickly, releasing her hand. “I suppose he realizes the eternal part of you and identifies himself with that. In you, Edward, lies something very close to what he is, akin he needs it terribly, just as you “ She became confused.

“Love, as we understand it,” he interrupted, his voice shaking a little, “he does not, cannot know, for he serves another law, another order of being.”

“That’s how I feel it too.”

She shivered slightly, but she did not turn away, and her eyes kept all their frankness.

“Our humanity,” she murmured, “writes upon his heart in ink that quickly fades —”

“And leaves no trace,” he caught her up hurriedly. “His one idea is to help, to render service. It is as natural to him as for water to run down hill. He seeks instinctively to become one with the person he seeks to aid. As with us an embrace is an attempt at union, so he seeks, by some law of his own being, to become identified with those whom he would help. And he helps by intensifying their consciousness somewhat as heat and air increase ordinary physical vitality. Only, first there must be something for him to work on. Energy, even bad, vicious, wrongly used, he can work on. Mere emptiness prevents him. You remember Lady Gleeson —”

“We most of us are too empty,” she put in with quiet resignation. “Our sense of that divine beauty is too faint —”

“Rather,” came the quick correction, “he stands too close to us. His effect is too concentrated. The power at such close quarters disturbs and overbalances.”

“That’s why, then, I always feel it strongest when he’s left.”

He glanced at her keenly.

“In his presence,” she explained, “it’s always as though

I saw only a part of him, even of his physical appearance, out of the corner of my eye, as it were, and sometimes —”

She hesitated. He did not help her this time. “As if those others, many others, similar to himself, but invisible, crowding space about us, were intensely active.” Her voice hushed again. “He brings them with him as now. I feel it, Edward, now. I feel them close.” She looked round the empty room, peering through the window into the quiet evening sky. Dr. Fillery also turned away. He sighed again. “Have you noticed, too,” he went on presently, yet half as if following his own thoughts, and a trifle incongruously, “the speed and lightness his very movements convey, and how he goes down the street with that curious air of drawing things after him, along with him, as trains and motors draw the loose leaves and dust —”

“Whirling,” her quick whisper startled him a little, as she turned abruptly from the window and gazed straight at him. He smiled, instantly recovering himself. “A good word, yes whirling but in the plural. As though there were vortices about him.”

It was her turn to smile. “That might one day carry him away,” she exclaimed. They smiled together then, they even laughed, but somewhere in their laughter, like the lengthening shadows of the spring day outside, lay an incommunicable sadness neither of them could wholly understand.

“Yet the craving for beauty,” she said suddenly, “that he leaves behind in me” her voice wavered “an intolerable yearning that nothing can satisfy nothing here. An infinite desire, it seems, for for —”

Dr. Fillery took her hand again gently, looking down steadily into the clear eyes that sought his own, and the light glistening in their moisture was similar, he fancied for a moment, to the fire in another pair of shining eyes that never failed to stir the unearthly dreams in him.

“It lies beyond any words of ours,” he said softly. “Don’t struggle to express it, Iraida. To the flower, the star, we are wise to leave their own expression in their own particular field, for we cannot better it.”

A sound of rising wind, distant yet ominous, went past the window, as for a moment then the girl came closer till she was almost in his arms, and though he did not accept her, equally he did not shrink from the idea of acceptance for the first time since they had known one another. There was a smell of flowers; almost in that wailing wind he was aware of music.

“Together,” he heard her whisper, while a faint shiver was it of joy or terror? ran through her nerves. “All of us when the time comes together.” She made an abrupt movement. “Just as we are together now! Listen!” she exclaimed.

“We call it wind,” she whispered. “But of course really it’s behind beyond inside isn’t it?”

Dr. Fillery, holding her closely, made no answer. Then he laughed, let go her hands, and said in his natural tone again, breaking an undesirable spell intentionally, though with a strong effort: “We are in space and time, remember. Iraida. Let us obey them happily until another certain and practical thing is shown us.”

The faint sound that had been rising about them in the air died down again.

They looked into each other’s eyes, then drew apart, though with a movement so slight it was scarcely perceptible. It was Nayan and Dr. Fillery once more, but not before the former had apparently picked out the very thought that had lain, though unexpressed, in the latter’s deepest mind its sudden rising the cause of his deliberate change of attitude. For she had phrased it, given expression to it, though from an angle very different to his own. And her own word, “escape,” used earlier in the conversation, had deliberately linked on with it, as of intentional purpose.

“He must go back. The time is coming when he must go back. We are not ready for him here not yet.”

Somewhat in this fashion, though without any actual words, had the idea appeared in letters of fire that leaped and flickered through a mist of anguish, of loss, of loneliness, rising out of the depths within him. He knew whence they came, he divined their origin at once, and the sound, though faint and distant at first, confirmed him. Swiftly behind them, moreover, born of no discoverable antecedents, it seemed, rose simultaneously the phrase that Father Collins loved: “A Being in his own place is the ruler of his fate.” Father Collins, for all his faults and strangeness, was a personality, a consciousness, that might prove of value. His extraordinarily swift receptiveness, his undoubted telepathic powers, his fluid, sensitive, protean comprehension of possibilities outside the human walls, above the earthly ceiling, so to speak.... Value suddenly attached itself to Father Collins, as though the name had been dropped purposely into his mind by someone. He was surprised to find this thought in him. It was not for the first time, however, Dr. Fillery remembered.

In Nayan’s father, again, an artist, though not a particularly subtle one perhaps, lay a deep admiration, almost a love, he could not explain. “There’s something about him in a sense immeasurable, something not only untamed but untamable,” he phrased it. “His gentleness conceals it as a summer’s day conceals a thunderstorm. To me it’s almost like an incarnation of the primal forces at work in the hearts of my own people” he grew sad “and as dangerous probably.” He was speaking to his daughter, who repeated the words later to Dr. Fillery. The study of Fire in the elemental group had failed. “He’s too big, too vast, too formless, to get into any shape or outline my tools can manage, even by suggestion. He dominates the others Earth, Air, Water and dwarfs them.”

“But fire ought to,” she put in. “It’s the most powerful and splendid, the most terrific of them all. Isn’t it? It regenerates. It purifies. I love fire —”

Her father smiled in his beard, noticing the softness in her manner, rather than in her voice. The awakening in her he had long since understood sympathetically, if more profoundly than she knew, and welcomed.

“He won’t hurt you, child. He won’t harm Nayushka any more than a summer’s day can hurt her. I see him thus sometimes,” he mumbled on half to himself, though she heard and stored the words in her memory; “as an entire day, a landscape even, I often see him. A stretch of being rather than a point; a rushing stream rather than a single isolated wave harnessed and confined in definite form as we understand being here,” he added curiously. “No, he’ll neither harm nor help you,” he went on; “nor any of us for that matter. A dozen nations, a planet, a star he might help or harm” he laughed aloud suddenly in a startled way at his own language “but an individual never!” And he............