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to a fellow who has made a

fortune in gallipots and other pottery ware and is called Angus M.

Sheldrake. He is an American and may have left London by now.”

 

“But,” Chloe cried, “do you mean he’s sold his one Stone already?”

 

“No,” Lord Arglay said. “He has divided it and sold the new one.”

 

“But he was going to have it set!” Chloe said.

 

“But he had a chance of meeting Angus M. Sheldrake, who is the richest

man that ever motored across Idaho, and as Angus was leaving London,

Reginald scrapped the setting, took an hour to convince him, and did

it. While Bruce Cumberland was talking to me about the necessity of

caution. Caution! With Reginald being creative. Do you know I entirely

forgot he could do that? Ring up the Savoy and see if the unmentionable

Sheldrake is still there.”

 

Chloe leapt to the telephone. After a few minutes-“He’s left London

till Monday,” she said.

 

“And to-day’s Friday,” Lord Arglay said. “I wish I had Reginald in the

dock on an embezzlement charge. Well—I don’t want to see the Ambassador

till I’ve seen Giles; not after this morning. You know I’m terrified in

case he does start multiplying—either he or Reginald. But I can’t bring

him back quicker; if I try he’ll just stop away. I really don’t see

what else we can do—till Monday. I can talk to Reginald of course, and

I will.”

 

“Do you believe in it?” Chloe asked.

 

“In the Stone?” Arglay said. “I suppose I do—in a sense. I don’t know

what your friend means by calling it the end of desire.”

 

“What do you think he meant by saying that the way to the Stone was in

the Stone?” Chloe asked again. “And what is the way?’

 

“I do not know what he meant,” Arglay answered, “though certainly the

way to any end is in that end itself For as you cannot know any study

but by learning it, or gain any virtue but by practising it, so you

cannot be anything but by becoming it. And that sounds obvious enough,

doesn’t it? And yet,” he went on as if to himself, “by becoming one

thing a man ceases to be that which he was, and no one but he can tell

how tragic that change may be. What do you want to be, Chloe?”

 

The use of her name was natural enough to pass outwardly unheeded, if

not unnoticed by some small function of her mind which made a sudden

movement of affection towards him. “I do not know,” she said.

 

“Nor I,” he said, “for myself any more than for you. I am what I am,

but it is not enough.”

 

“You—the Chief Justice,” she said.

 

“I am the Chief Justice,” he answered, “but the way is in the end, and

how far have I become justice? Still”-he recovered lightness and

pointed to the typescript of Organic Law -“still we do what we can.

Well-Look here now, you can’t do anything till Monday. If there are

any developments I will let you know.”

 

“Are you sure I can’t do anything?” she said doubtfully.

 

“Neither of us can,” Arglay answered. “You may as well clear off now.

Would you like to use the Stone to go home by?”

 

“No, thank you,” she said. “I think I’m afraid of the Stone.”

 

“Don’t think of it more than you can help between now and Monday,”

Arglay advised her. “Go to the theatre to-night if you can. If anything

happens messenger boys in a procession such as preceded the queen of

Sheba when she came to Suleiman shall be poured out to tell you all.”

 

“I was going to the theatre,” she said, “but I thought of postponing

it.”

 

“Nonsense,” said the ChiefJustice. “Come on Monday and we’ll tackle Sir

Giles and the Ambassador and Angus M.

Sheldrake and Reginald and the Hajji and-Bruce Cumberland—and if there

are any more we will deal with them also. Run along.”

 

By midnight however Chloe almost wished she had not followed Lord

Arglay’s advice. For she was conscious that the evening had not been a

success, and that the young man who accompanied her was conscious of it

too. This annoyed her, for in matters of pleasure she had a high sense

of duty, and not to cause gaiety appeared to her as a failure in

morals. Besides, Frank Lindsay was working very hard—for some

examination in surveying and estate agency—working in an office all day

and then at home in the evening, and he ought to be made as happy as

possible. But all her efforts and permissions and responses had been

vain; she had said good night to her companion with an irritable sense

of futility which she just prevented herself expressing. He had, as a

matter of fact, been vainly contending all the evening, without knowing

it, against two preoccupations in Chloe’s mind—the Stone and Lord

Arglay. Not only did the Stone lie there, a palpitating centre of

wonder and terror, but against the striving endeavour of Frank

Lindsay’s rather pathetic culture moved the assured placidity of Lord

Arglay’s. It did not make Frank less delightful in the exchanges

discoverable by him and her together, but it threw into high relief the

insufficiency of those exchanges as more than an occupation and a means

of oblivion; it managed to spoil them while providing no substitute and

no answer for the desires that thrilled her.

 

It seemed to her that all things did just so much and no more. As,

lying awake that night, she reviewed her activities and preoccupations,

there appeared nothing that consumed more than a little part of her

being, or brought her, by physical excitement or mental concentration,

more than forgetfulness. Nothing justified her existence. The immortal

sadness of youth possessed her, and a sorrow of which youth is not

always conscious, the lucid knowledge of her unsatisfied desires. There

was nothing, she thought, that could be trusted; the dearest delight

might betray, the gayest friendship open upon a treachery and a

martyrdom. Of her friends, of her young male friends especially,

pleasant as they were, , there was not one, she thought, who held that

friendship important for her sake rather than for his own enjoyment.

Even that again was but her own selfishness; what right had she to the

devotion of any other? And was there any devotion beyond the sudden

overwhelming madness of sex? And in that hot airless tunnel of emotion

what pleasure was there and what joy? Laughter died there, and

lucidity, and the clear intelligence she loved, and there was nothing

of the peace for which she hungered.

 

Her thought went off at a tangent to Reginald Montague’s preoccupation

with the Stone. If there could be an end to desire, was it thus that

it should be used? Was it only that men might hurry the more and hurl

themselves about as if the speed of Chloe Burnett or Reginald

Montague were of moment to the universe? She hated Montague, she hated

Sir Giles, she hated Frank Lindsay—poor dear!— she

hated—no, she did not hate Lord Arglay, but she hated the old man who

had come to her and talked of kings and prophets and

heroes till she was dizzy with happiness and dread. Most of all she

hated herself. The dark mystery of being that possessed

her held no promise of light, but she turned to it and sank into it

content so to avoid the world.

Chapter Four

VISION IN THE STONE

 

Lord Arglay spent some part of the same. evening in trying to define

the process of his thought on organic law and a still larger part in

contemplation of the Stone in his possession. The phrase that had most

struck him in Chloe’s account of her conversation with Hajji Ibrahim

was not, as with her, “the Way to the Stone which is in the Stone,” but

the more definite “movement in time and place and thought.” The same

question that had struck Sir Giles inevitably occurred to him; if in

place, then why not in time? He wondered whether Sir Giles and

Palliser, whoever Palliser might be, were making experiments with it

that very evening at Birmingham. The difficulty, he thought, was

absurdly simple, and consisted merely in the fact of the Stone itself.

Supposing you willed to return a year, and to be again in those exact

conditions, interior and exterior,in which you had been a year ago—why

then, either you would have the Stone with you or you would not. If you

had, you were not the same: if you had not, then how did you return,

short of living through the intervening period all over again? Lord

Arglay shuddered at the possibility. It would be delightful, he

thought, to know again the thrill which had gone through him when he

had heard of his appointment to the office he held. But to have to go

again through all those years of painful appeals, difficult judgements,

distressing decisions, which so often meant unhappiness to the

innocent—no. Besides—supposing you did. When you reached again this

moment you would again return by virtue of the Stone—and so for ever.

An infinite series of repetitions of those same few years, a being

compelled to grow

no older, a consciousness forbidden to expand or to die. So far as Lord

Arglay could see five minutes’ return would be fatal; if, now, he

willed himself back at the beginning of his meditations necessity would

keep him thinking precisely those thoughts through an everlasting

sequence. For if you willed yourself back you willed yourself precisely

to be without the Stone; otherwise you were not back in the past as the

past had truly been. And Lord Arglay had a suspicion that the Stone

would be purely logical.

 

Yes, he thought, but what, in that sense, were the rules of its pure

logic? How could you exist in that past again except by virtue of the

Stone? if that were not there you yourself could not be there. The

thing was a contradiction in terms; you could not be in the past

without the Stone yet with the Stone you could not be in the past. Then

the Stone could not act in time. But Chloe’s visitor had said it could.

And a Stone that could create itself out of itself and could deal as it

had dealt with space ought to be able to deal in some way or other with

time. For time was the same thing as space, or rather duration was a

method of extension—that was elementary. “Extension,” he thought, “I

extend myself into—into what? Nothingness; the past is not; it doesn’t

exist.” He shook his head; so simple a solution had never appealed to

him. Every infinitesimal fraction of a second the whole universe peeled

off, so to speak, and passed out of consciousness, except for the

extremely blurred pictures of memory, whatever memory might be. Out of

existence? that was his difficulty; was it out of existence? He

remembered having read somewhere once a fantastic theory that whenever

a man made a choice, a real choice—whenever he definitely did one of

two things he also did at the same moment the other and brought an

entire new universe into being that he might do so. For otherwise an

infinite number of potentialities would exist for ever unfulfilled—which, the writer had said, though Lord Arglay had forgotten his

reasons, was absurd. It had occasionally consoled him, or at least had

appeared

to him as a not disagreeable hope, when the Court had rejected an

appeal from a sentence of death, to think that at the same time, in a

new universe parting from this one as the Stone before him

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