What had happened? I don't know. It all looked contemptible. One seemed
to see something beyond, something vaster--vaster than cathedrals,
vaster than the conception of the gods to whom cathedrals were raised.
The tower reeled out of the perpendicular. One saw beyond it, not
roofs, or smoke, or hills, but an unrealised, an unrealisable infinity
of space.
It was merely momentary. The tower filled its place again and I looked
at her.
"What the devil," I said, hysterically--"what the devil do you play
these tricks upon me for?"
"You see," she answered, "the rudiments of the sense are there."
"You must excuse me if I fail to understand," I said, grasping after
fragments of dropped dignity. "I am subject to fits of giddiness." I
felt a need for covering a species of nakedness. "Pardon my swearing," I
added; a proof of recovered equanimity.
We resumed the road in silence. I was physically and mentally shaken;
and I tried to deceive myself as to the cause. After some time I said:
"You insist then in preserving your--your incognito."
"Oh, I make no mystery of myself," she answered.
"You have told me that you come from the Fourth Dimension," I remarked,
ironically.
"I come from the Fourth Dimension," she said, patiently. She had the
air of one in a position of difficulty; of one aware of it and ready to
brave it. She had the listlessness of an enlightened person who has to
explain, over and over again, to stupid children some rudimentary point
of the multiplication table.
She seemed to divine my thoughts, to be aware of their very wording. She
even said "yes" at the opening of her next speech.
"Yes," she said. "It is as if I were to try to explain the new ideas of
any age to a person of the age that has gone before." She paused,
seeking a concrete illustration that would touch me. "As if I were
explaining to Dr. Johnson the methods and the ultimate vogue of the
cockney school of poetry."
"I understand," I said, "that you wish me to consider myself as
relatively a Choctaw. But what I do not understand is; what bearing that
has upon--upon the Fourth Dimension, I think you said?"
"I will explain," she replied.
"But you must explain as if you were explaining to a Choctaw," I said,
pleasantly, "you must be concise and convincing."
She answered: "I will."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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