"You know, fair play's a jewel. Now I'm quite willing to give you
information as to myself. I have already told you the essentials--you
ought to tell me something. It would only be fair play."
"Why should there be any fair play?" she asked.
"What have you to say against that?" I said. "Do you not number it among
your national characteristics?"
"You really wish to know where I come from?"
I expressed light-hearted 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 turned round and pointed at the city.
"Look!" she said.
We had climbed the western hill. Below our feet, beneath a sky that the
wind had swept clean of clouds, was the valley; a broad bowl, shallow,
filled with the purple of smoke-wreaths. And above the mass of red roofs
there soared the golden stonework of the cathedral tower. It was a
vision, the last word of a great art. I looked at her. I was moved, and
I knew that the glory of it must have moved her.
She was smiling. "Look!" she repeated. I looked.
There was the purple and the red, and the golden tower, the vision, the
last word. She said something--uttered some sound.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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