His

head was almost entirely bald, and over his turn-down collar his great

neck folded in two distinct reddish collops of flesh. His hands were

big and his fingers almost massive in thickness.

He was an excellent business man, of sane judgment and firm will,

without enough imagination to confuse his course of action by showing

him possible alternatives; and his integrity and ability caused him to

be held in universal respect by the world of business and finance. In

the important regions of a man’s character, however, and at heart, he

was coarse, brutal almost to savagery, without consideration for

others, and as a result often cruelly unjust to his helpless

subordinates.

In moments of temper, which were not infrequent, his face turned a

dull purple, while the top of his bald head shone by contrast like

white marble, and the bags under his eyes swelled till it seemed they

would presently explode with a pop. And at these times he presented a

distinctly repulsive appearance.

But to a private secretary like Jones, who did his duty regardless

of whether his employer was beast or angel, and whose mainspring was

principle and not emotion, this made little difference. Within the

narrow limits in which any one could satisfy such a man, he

pleased the General Manager; and more than once his piercing intuitive

faculty, amounting almost to clairvoyance, assisted the chief in a

fashion that served to bring the two closer together than might

otherwise have been the case, and caused the man to respect in his

assistant a power of which he possessed not even the germ himself. It

was a curious relationship that grew up between the two, and the

cashier, who enjoyed the credit of having made the selection, profited

by it indirectly as much as any one else.

So for some time the work of the office continued normally and very

prosperously. John Enderby Jones received a good salary, and in the

outward appearance of the two chief characters in this history there

was little change noticeable, except that the Manager grew fatter and

redder, and the secretary observed that his own hair was beginning to

show rather greyish at the temples.

There were, however, two changes in progress, and they both had to

do with Jones, and are important to mention.

One was that he began to dream evilly. In the region of deep sleep,

where the possibility of significant dreaming first develops itself, he

was tormented more and more with vivid scenes and pictures in which a

tall thin man, dark and sinister of countenance, and with bad eyes, was

closely associated with himself. Only the setting was that of a past

age, with costumes of centuries gone by, and the scenes had to do with

dreadful cruelties that could not belong to modern life as he knew it.

The other change was also significant, but is not so easy to

describe, for he had in fact become aware that some new portion of

himself, hitherto unawakened, had stirred slowly into life out of the

very depths of his consciousness. This new part of himself amounted

almost to another personality, and he never observed its least

manifestation without a strange thrill at his heart.

For he understood that it had begun to watch the Manager!

II

It was the habit of Jones, since he was compelled to work among

conditions that were utterly distasteful, to withdraw his mind wholly

from business once the day was over. During office hours he kept the

strictest possible watch upon himself, and turned the key on all inner

dreams, lest any sudden uprush from the deeps should interfere with his

duty. But, once the working day was over, the gates flew open, and he

began to enjoy himself.

He read no modern books on the subjects that interested him, and, as

already said, he followed no course of training, nor belonged to any

society that dabbled with half-told mysteries; but, once released from

the office desk in the Manager’s room, he simply and naturally entered

the other region, because he was an old inhabitant, a rightful denizen,

and because he belonged there. It was, in fact, really a case of dual

personality; and a carefully drawn agreement existed between

Jones-of-the-fire-insurance-office and Jones-of-the-mysteries, by the

terms of which, under heavy penalties, neither region claimed him out

of hours.

For the moment he reached his rooms under the roof in Bloomsbury,

and had changed his city coat to another, the iron doors of the office

clanged far behind him, and in front, before his very eyes, rolled up

the beautiful gates of ivory, and he entered into the places of flowers

and singing and wonderful veiled forms. Sometimes he quite lost touch

with the outer world, forgetting to eat his dinner or go to bed, and

lay in a state of trance, his consciousness working far out of the

body. And on other occasions he walked the streets on air, half-way

between the two regions, unable to distinguish between incarnate and

discarnate forms, and not very far, probably, beyond the strata where

poets, saints, and the greatest artists have moved and thought and

found their inspiration. But this was only when some insistent bodily

claim prevented his full release, and more often than not he was

entirely independent of his physical portion and free of the real

region, without let or hindrance.

One evening he reached home utterly exhausted after the burden of

the day’s work. The Manager had been more than usually brutal, unjust,

ill-tempered, and Jones had been almost persuaded out of his settled

policy of contempt into answering back. Everything seemed to have gone

amiss, and the man’s coarse, underbred nature had been in the ascendant

all day long: he had thumped the desk with his great fists, abused,

found fault unreasonably, uttered outrageous things, and behaved

generally as he actually was—beneath the thin veneer of acquired

business varnish. He had done and said everything to wound all that was

woundable in an ordinary secretary, and though Jones fortunately dwelt

in a region from which he looked down upon such a man as he might look

down on the blundering of a savage animal, the strain had nevertheless

told severely upon him, and he reached home wondering for the first

time in his life whether there was perhaps a point beyond which he

would be unable to restrain himself any longer.

For something out of the usual had happened. At the close of a

passage of great stress between the two, every nerve in the secretary’s

body tingling from undeserved abuse, the Manager had suddenly turned

full upon him, in the corner of the private room where the safes stood,

in such a way that the glare of his red eyes, magnified by the glasses,

looked straight into his own. And at this very second that other

personality in Jones—the one that was ever watching—rose up

swiftly from the deeps within and held a mirror to his face.

A moment of flame and vision rushed over him, and for one single

second—one merciless second of clear sight—he saw the Manager as the

tall dark man of his evil dreams, and the knowledge that he had

suffered at his hands some awful injury in the past crashed through his

mind like the report of a cannon.

It all flashed upon him and was gone, changing him from fire to ice,

and then back again to fire; and he left the office with the certain

conviction in his heart that the time for his final settlement with the

man, the time for the inevitable retribution, was at last drawing very

near.

According to his invariable custom, however, he succeeded in putting

the memory of all this unpleasantness out of his mind with the changing

of his office coat, and after dozing a little in his leather chair

before the fire, he started out as usual for dinner in the Soho French

restaurant, and began to dream himself away into the region of flowers

and singing, and to commune with the Invisibles that were the very

sources of his real life and being.

For it was in this way that his mind worked, and the habits of years

had crystallised into rigid lines along which it was now necessary and

inevitable for him to act.

At the door of the little restaurant he stopped short, a

half-remembered appointment in his mind. He had made an engagement with

some one, but where, or with whom, had entirely slipped his memory. He

thought it was for dinner, or else to meet just after dinner, and for a

second it came back to him that it had something to do with the office,

but, whatever it was, he was quite unable to recall it, and a reference

to his pocket engagement book showed only a blank page. Evidently he

had even omitted to enter it; and after standing a moment vainly trying

to recall either the time, place, or person, he went in and sat down.

But though the details had escaped him, his subconscious memory

seemed to know all about it, for he experienced a sudden sinking of the

heart, accompanied by a sense of foreboding anticipation, and felt that

beneath his exhaustion there lay a centre of tremendous excitement. The

emotion caused by the engagement was at work, and would presently cause

the actual details of the appointment to reappear.

Inside the restaurant the feeling increased, instead of passing:

some one was waiting for him somewhere—some one whom he had definitely

arranged to meet. He was expected by a person that very night and just

about that very time. But by whom? Where? A curious inner trembling

came over him, and he made a strong effort to hold himself in hand and

to be ready for anything that might come.

And then suddenly came the knowledge that the place of appointment

was this very restaurant, and, further, that the person he had promised

to meet was already here, waiting somewhere quite close beside him.

He looked up nervously and began to examine the faces round him. The

majority of the diners were Frenchmen, chattering loudly with much

gesticulation and laughter; and there was a fair sprinkling of clerks

like himself who came because the prices were low and the food good,

but there was no single face that he recognised until his glance fell

upon the occupant of the corner seat opposite, generally filled by

himself.

“There’s the man who’s waiting for me!” thought Jones instantly.

He knew it at once. The man, he saw, was sitting well back into the

corner, with a thick overcoat buttoned tightly up to the chin. His skin

was very white, and a heavy black beard grew far up over his cheeks.