Flaws in the Time Scheme by J. D. Beresford
Flaws in the Time Scheme is a short fiction series that was first published in 1918, in Beresford’s anthology Nineteen Impressions. It consists of three stories that have no other connection other than they were obviously the result of the author exploring concepts related to time. All three stories are quite short, and appear together, one after the other, on this page.
The first story, “An Effect of Reincarnation”. It’s about a man who, undergoes past-life regression therapy, resulting in him adopting a new outlook on life. In my opinion, the second story, “A Case of Prevision”, is the best of the three. It’s a clever work of speculative fiction about a man who begins seeing things that are not there. The third story, “The Late Occupier” is the hardest to read and understand. I didn’t get it at all, and found it such hard going that I could not face reading it again to try and figure out what it’s about.
To the Best of my knowledge, the three stories that make up Flaws in the Time Scheme has never been republished collectively, and “An Effect of Reincarnation” does not appear to have be republished at all. However, “A Case of Prevision” was included in Things That Wait in the Dark, published by Kingsbrook Publishing in 2022, while “The Late Occupier” was republished in A Wave of Fear (1973).
About J. D. Beresford
The son of a clergyman, John Davys Beresford was an English writer, who wrote the first critical study of of H. G. Wells. He is mostly remembered for his ghost stories, horror stories, and works of science fiction.
Beresford was born in Castor (a village near the City of Petersbrough). While still young, he contracted polio. The disease left him partially disabled. Although he trained to be an architect, Beresford changed track, becoming a professional writer instead, initially working as a journalist. He also wrote book reviews for The Manchester Guardian.
Beresford wrote a number of novels, gaining much praise for The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911), which Graham Greene described as “One of the finest and most neglected novels of this period between the great wars”.
In addition to his novels, Beresford published three story collections: Nineteen Impression (1919), Signs and Wonders (1921), and The Meeting Place and Other Stories (1929).
Flaws in the Time Scheme — Table of Contents
1. An Effect of Reincarnation
By J. D. Beresford
(Online Text )
“The argument applies with equal force to the past,” declaimed Mallett, in his autocratic way. “If we have lived before, it is part of the essential scheme of things that we should have no recollection of past lives, the memory of them would be unendurable.”
Someone had to counter Mallett’s dogmatism, and I looked at Graves, who nobly responded.
“I don’t agree,” he said. “It has always seemed to me a final argument against reincarnation, this oblivion of the past. If we progress we must progress by the accumulation of knowledge. What good is it to me to have suffered for faults in the past, if I have no consciousness left of the penalty paid; or what good to punish me in this life for the long forgotten faults of the past? Do you wait till next week to punish a child or a dog for its misdemeanours?”
Mallett cocked his legs on to the mantelpiece.
“Yours is the common confusion, my dear Graves,” he said, “the confusion between memory and consciousness The first we can define for ordinary purposes, the second we cannot; but it is surely clear that the two concepts are not interdependent. At least it is demonstrable that consciousness can survive loss of memory. Wherefore it seems to me quite possible that temperament may be moulded through consciousness. As to your second instance, I admit that the laws of Karma are outside my scope, but as regards your first, I say it is conceivable to account by this moulding of temperament through suffering or pleasure, for the strange characteristics that are born with us. …”
He had much more to say, and Graves and I combined to oppose him. Birch, like the dear fellow he is, said nothing. One could see how he wavered to the side of the last speaker. There is “nothing in Birch,” we all say, but everyone likes him. Mallett is cursedly clever, and we put up with him.
“Well, Tommy,” Mallett said at last, turning to Birch. “You’ve been the silent listener. Let’s hear your judgment.”
“It’s frightfully difficult, of course,” was Tommy’s characteristic answer, and we all laughed. Tommy laughed with us; he was content to be popular, he did not strive to emulate the cleverness of Mallett, or even of Graves and myself. …
I walked home with Birch and he asked me if I did not think that one ought to take more interest in the subject we had been discussing that evening. I thought he seemed strangely impressed by our superficial generalisations. But Birch is always asking advice and trying to act upon it, so I told him to join the Theosophical Society. I did not think he would take me literally, but he said at once:
“I suppose they know a lot about that sort of thing.”
“Oh! yes,” I replied. “They know everything about that sort of thing. I believe they can even give you some information as to your past incarnations.”
I did not see Birch again for nearly a month, and then he came to my rooms one evening. He was looking perplexed and uncertain. I had never before seen him look anything but amiable or wistfully reverential, and I was surprised.
“What’s up, Tommy?” I asked.
To my astonishment he sat down deliberately in my one decent arm-chair, and then blushed a little and edged forward on the seat as if to demonstrate that he did not intend to make himself too comfortable.
I sat down in the basket-chair which I hate, but which had always seemed to suit Tommy so admirably.
“What’s up, Tommy?” I repeated.
“It’s frightfully difficult,” he said. I had heard that remark from him many times.
“What, in particular?” I asked.
“I’ve learnt who I was in my last incarnation,” said Tommy solemnly. “It makes a big difference to one.”
“Great snakes,” I ejaculated.
He looked at me doubtfully. “It’s serious,” he said.
“Well, who were you, old chap?” I asked. One never took Birch seriously.
“Thomas Bilney,” he said.
“So you stuck to the Tommy?” I interpolated.
“It’s very wonderful,” he went on, without noticing my facetiousness. “I didn’t believe it quite, when the psychometrist first told me. I didn’t think I could ever have been a martyr. But I got hold of Gairdner’s History, and it began to come to me.”
“How? Come to you?” I asked. He was so intensely earnest that I felt a little thrill of superstition run through me. The most practical man has something of the mystic in him.
“It explained things,” said Birch. “You know how I have always dreaded fire.”
“Have you?” I said. “But how is that explained?”
“Bilney was burnt,” returned Tommy. He tried to say it impressively, but it was a bad sentence for oratorical effect.
“Oh! bad luck,” I said. “How?”
“You’re not very well up in English history, are you?” he remarked. Even with the weak ending, such a comment from Tommy was enough to take one’s breath away.
“I don’t think I got as far as Bilney’s burning,” I said.
“He was an English martyr,” said Tommy solemnly, “a licensed preacher in the reign of Henry the Eighth, and although he was always a sound Catholic on most points, he didn’t believe in pilgrimages and relic worship. He was imprisoned in the Tower, and recanted, but afterwards he was ashamed of himself for having gone back on his principles and started preaching again in the fields, and he was burnt at the stake in London.”
“Look here, Tommy,” I said when he had got this off, “it doesn’t sound a bit like you.”
“That’s because you don’t understand me,” replied Tommy.
I looked at him in wonder. If this new development of his had always been inherent in him, I was compelled to admit that I had never understood him.
“You surely don’t believe …?” I began.
Tommy interrupted me. “I didn’t at first,” he said. ” I thought it was all Tommy … I thought it was all foolishness. But so many things have turned up since. I can understand so much, now, which was incomprehensible before; things in myself, things I felt impelled to do—and never did. And now it’s all been made plain, I’ve got to alter my life. I—I’ve got to be more definite, you know.”
“How?” I put in succinctly.
“Well, I’ve often disagreed with you and Mallett and Graves and all of them, inside; but I’ve been afraid to speak out, because I’ve always felt you’d think me such a silly ass. Now I see that that was all wrong—I’m not going to deny my own opinions any more. It’s—it isn’t right.”
A man suddenly attacked by a mild old rabbit might feel somewhat as I felt when Tommy Birch made this announcement. Yet, despite his still obvious feebleness, and his new phrases—borrowed, I suspect, from his Theosophical friends—I was impressed. The man’s perfect belief in the revelation which had been made to him, had a curiously convincing quality.
I have been an agnostic on intellectual grounds for many years, but sometimes the fierce sincerity of a preacher has given me a sudden twinge of doubt. I have wondered whether such perfect faith were possible if there be no foundation for it. I had a precisely similar twinge, now. After all, this theory of reincarnation was as sane as any other theory. It might be possible for a man to learn something of a previous existence. And here was Birch, so completely convinced and honest; so altered, moreover, by his conviction. …
We all thought he was altered,—not by any means for the better. Mallett tried to laugh him out of it; argued with him, was,—I admit,—quite brilliant in his attack.
But Tommy was immovable. He opposed, finally, the one insuperable reply of the believer.
“All very well for you fellows to argue and all that,” he said, “but you see I know. It isn’t a question of evidence with me, now, I just feel sure about it.”
Our combined efforts—we combined for once—were childishly feeble in opposition to this convinced “I know” of Birch’s. He sat there smiling, his round, stupid face expressing a fatuous obstinacy; something, also, of the complacent spiritual pride of the enlightened. Our bullying merely afforded him cause for satisfaction. He was being martyred for his principles once more; and this time he had no intention of making any recantation.
After two or three evenings we decided to leave him alone, but he had become an insufferable nuisance. Before his conversion he agreed with us all in turn; now he disagreed, with equal catholicity. In his foolish, halting way he would come in at the end of one’s argument with, “I don’t know that I agree with you.” He seldom got further than that, because he never had any intelligent reason for his difference of opinion.
I think he was eager to stimulate a further attack upon his position. In that, he was not successful, for we were all determined not to reopen that subject. He got some satisfaction, perhaps, from our unanimous avoidance of his case—it was another aspect of martyrdom.
He soon lost his popularity, but we should probably have put up with him for the sake of old times and in the hope that the phase would pass, had he not tried to start propaganda. That was too much. We could not put up with his incessant, irrelevant, nervous interpolations of Theosophic principles.
We turned him out one evening; it was a physical expulsion but gently conducted. Afterwards we steadfastly refused to admit him to our rooms. He went on trying for some time; but when we gave him a choice between coming in and keeping quiet, or going away, he would retreat meekly with the air of a martyr dying for his faith.
I lost sight of him for two years, and then I met him in the Strand one afternoon. He was wearing semi-clerical garb and told me that he was going out as a kind of lay missionary to China.
He was more foolish than ever, and his belief in the revelation that had been made to him was still unshaken.
No doubt he would make a good average missionary.
Mallett said that we needn’t be anxious about him, that it wasn’t in the scheme of things that he would be killed twice for the same offence. …
And, curiously enough, Mallett was right in this particular, for Tommy was the only member of a certain up-country station who escaped death in the last Boxer rising.
2. A Case of Prevision
By J. D. Beresford
(Online Text )
This extraordinary case of prevision is supported by unusually sound evidence. In the first place we have the testimony of Mr. Galt, whose account of the incidents which preceded the catastrophe is circumstantial, consistent and exceedingly convincing. In the second place we have the valuable corroboration of Mr. Henderson, to whom the incidents above referred to were narrated before the event which gave them such peculiar value. Finally, we have Mr. Jessop’s own letters to his friend. No discrepancies have been found during a long and careful examination of these three sources, and yet the precisians in this field of research have refused to admit that the case has been demonstrated beyond any possibility of doubt. This caution appears excessive to the small group of people acquainted with the facts, and it has been decided by those most nearly interested, that it is advisable to give prominence to the whole of the circumstances, since this is a matter which gives us a curious insight into man’s relation to eternity, and demonstrates how arbitrary are our conceptions of time and space. …
Mr. Mark Jessop was a man of thirty-five. He was tall, slight and had a pronounced stoop. Mr. Galt describes him as having a high, rather narrow forehead, more noticeable inasmuch as he was prematurely bald over the temples; and mentions that he always wore gold-mounted spectacles. Mr. Jessop’s name will be known to many as an architect of unusual promise, with a distinctive style which is commonly associated with his treatment of small country houses. He was unmarried, and at the time of the occurrences about to be set out was making a very decent income.
In the early March of last year, after repeated warnings by his medical adviser, Mr. Jessop decided to take a six weeks’ rest. He had certainly been overworking and was very run down; but even so, he would probably have deferred his holiday if he had not begun to have doubts as to the failure of his eyesight.
The symptoms were peculiar, and it seems very probable that he was even then experiencing some form of prevision. From Mr. Galt’s account, it appears that Jessop occasionally saw on his drawing-paper, lines that had never been drawn, and that he suffered considerable perplexity in consequence. On one such occasion, he told Galt, he went home believing that he had finished a certain detail drawing, and was very vexed the next morning to find the work incomplete; he believed for a few minutes that someone had carefully erased his pencil marks. Unhappily, from our point of view, he was able to convince himself by an examination of the paper that this was not the case, and he did not, therefore, mention the circumstance to anyone in his office. This last instance of the increasing unreliability of his vision was the proximate cause of his leaving town. He accounted for his hallucinations by the fact that he had unusual powers of visualisation, but as he said to Galt, these powers, so valuable to him in his profession, would become an intolerable nuisance if his conceptions were thus to become prematurely objectified.
He decided, therefore, to take a complete rest for six weeks, and persuaded his friend Galt, also an architect, to stay with him for the first fortnight. They elected to go to St. Ives, a place neither of them had visited before.
There can be no doubt that Jessop was in a highly-strung, nervous state. The journey upset him and for the first two days after his arrival in Cornwall, he hardly went outside the house. The weather, it is true, was very inclement, with a north-west wind and a fine driving mist of rain, but this, alone, would not have kept him indoors.
On the third day, however, the wind veered to the east, and a spell of bright, warm days followed. Galt then persuaded his friend to go out for long walks, which he did although still fretful and nervous about himself. Several times during the next few days he asked Galt anxiously, if he could see certain vessels in the bay, and Galt says that on more than one occasion he was unable to see the boats Jessop tried to indicate. But if these hallucinations were veridical or not cannot be proved, as Galt never attempted to verify them. He did not ask for any description of the boats, nor look out later to see if boats subsequently appeared in the places indicated. He was, indeed, chiefly occupied in trying to distract his friend’s attention from the subject of his symptoms, and avoided any reference to the question of the hallucinations.
During the first ten days of their stay in St. Ives, the two friends seem to have kept to the two main outlets from the town. They started for their walks either by way of the Penzance road, through Carbis Bay and Lelant, or by the Land’s End road through Stennack, going through Zennor or taking the path to Gurnard’s Head. On the eleventh day, however, a Thursday, the weather changed again, and in the afternoon they decided not to go too far from home.
They, therefore, made their way by the harbour and the wharf to the “Island,” and from there discovered the existence of the Porthmeor beach, which they had not seen before. It was not actually raining at the moment, so they skirted the beach and wandered along the footpath which leads to Clodgy.
This path follows the cliff edge. About a quarter of a mile from the town, there is an open triangle of turf and cliffs run out in a small headland, a favourite place for tourists in the summer, and known as Man’s Head Rock, from a resemblance to a face which may be found in a great stone that is poised on the top of the cliff. From here the path turns to the left and four rough steps lead upwards to a small granite quarry. The cliff at this corner is, perhaps, eighty feet high.
It was at this point that the incident occurred.
Jessop was first up the steps and he paused at the top and then drew back. “Good Lord!” he said. “There has been a landslip here. How terribly dangerous. Anyone might easily walk over these steps.” He was inured to looking down from heights, and though momentarily alarmed at coming on the chasm so suddenly, he spoke quite calmly.
“Let me see,” said Galt, and Jessop made way for him.
Galt says that when he had climbed the steps and saw a table of flat ground before him, he was far more horrified than he could have been by the sight of any landslip. He hesitated for a moment and then decided to treat the matter as calmly as possible.
“What do you mean, Jessop?” he asked. “It’s perfectly flat, safe walking, here.”
“Flat, safe walking?” repeated Jessop. “You must be mad.”
“Oh! well, I’ll soon prove it,” returned Galt, and took a step forward.
“God! man, don’t be a fool,” shouted Jessop, and clutched his friend fiercely by the coat tails, dragging him backwards, so that the two of them nearly fell together down the steps.
It came to Galt at that moment that the only thing to do was to take Jessop firmly in hand, to demonstrate beyond any shadow of doubt that what he saw as a chasm was in fact solid ground.
“Look here, old chap,” Galt said. “This is another of your hallucinations, and I’m going to prove it to you. Now, do be quite calm about it and listen to me. There hasn’t been any landslip, there’s a flat table of land there, and I’m going to walk on it.”
Jessop gripped his friend by the arm. “Are you absolutely sure?” he asked. “This is horrible; horrible.”
“I’m absolutely sure,” returned Galt, “and when you see me walking over this abyss of yours, the fancy will leave you for good and all.”
“Wait a bit, wait a bit,” said Jessop hurriedly. “Let me have another look first.” He went up again to the top step and looked down.
“Well?” asked Galt, close at his elbow.
“To me,” said Jessop, “there’s a gap between us and the continuation of the path, at least one hundred and fifty feet across, and all the debris is piled in a steep bank”—he pointed to the left—”that runs up there almost to the surface. Just underneath us there is a clear drop of sixty or seventy feet on to a huge, fallen obelisk of rock, a monolith, oh! ten or twelve feet across. It is quite fresh from the cleavage on this side, splintered and shining where the loose earth hasn’t covered it. I can’t see how long it is because the end runs under the debris.”
Galt looked and saw nothing but a flat table of firm ground. “You’re wonderfully circumstantial,” he said, “but there’s nothing of the kind there. Let me show you.”
Jessop grabbed him nervously by the arm again. “Oh, I can’t, Galt,” he said. “I can’t. It’s too awful.”
“Don’t be an ass!” replied Galt, in a sturdy, common-sense tone. “You must get rid of these visions of yours, and I’m going to help you.” He wrenched himself away from Jessop and stepped on to the path ahead of him.
“Galt! Galt!” shrieked Jessop. “Oh! God, he’s gone!” He hid his eyes in his hands, and began to shudder.
“What the devil do you mean?” asked Galt, standing two yards away. “I haven’t gone.”
At that, Jessop looked up with a very scared face and for a moment peered straight at Galt. “Where are you?” he said, trembling. “Where are you?”
“Why here; within two yards of you,” was the answer.
“I can’t see you,” said Jessop. He was now clutching the top step, and looking down into his imagined chasm.
“Look up!” said Galt. “Here I am! Quite close to you!”
“I can’t see you,” said Jessop again. He sat down on the second step and began to cry.
Galt immediately rejoined him, and laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder.
At the touch of Galt’s hand, Jessop looked up. “I couldn’t see you,” he sobbed. The tears were streaming down his face. …
Galt saw that this was no time for further demonstration of his friend’s defects of vision, and took him straight back to their lodgings; but after dinner he deliberately reopened the subject. He thought that it was essential for Jessop to realise the nature of his hallucination.
Jessop appeared not unwilling to discuss the topic, and that evening he repeated his description of what he had seen and, also, explained that the instant Galt walked beyond the steps he had disappeared, “like a figure in a trick cinematograph film.”
Finally he agreed to Galt’s suggestion, that they should return to the same place the next day, and that Jessop, himself, should walk on the ground that he could not see. He was sensible about the affair, that evening: admitted that it was a hallucination, and speculated vaguely on the question of auto-suggestion. “With a power of visualisation like mine,” he said, “a strong suggestion would present a wonderfully real picture. Subconsciously I may have been thinking of landslips when we reached that place. …”
The next morning, Friday, was a fine, clear day and they set out for Man’s Head Rock about half-past ten. Jessop was in rather better spirits that morning, and on the way he discussed hypnotic and post-hypnotic suggestion and asked Galt whether he thought he could make a sufficiently strong counter-suggestion to overcome the hallucination of the landslip.
Galt played up to this idea, and did his best by making such remarks as “It was all pure imagination on your part,” or “When we get to the place, you will see firm, flat ground ahead of you.” And Jessop replied, “Yes, yes, of course I shall. No doubt of it.”
When they reached the steps, he stopped and said, “Let me go first.” Galt agreed and watched him attentively as he walked up the four steps. At the top he halted abruptly and then turned back, looking very white and scared. “It’s still there,” he said.
Galt at once decided to take the thing in hand. “Look here, old chap,” he said. “You must have faith in me! You agree that this is only a hallucination. Now, trust me and walk over. The moment you touch the ground on the other side, the vision will vanish.”
“All right,” returned Jessop nervously. But when he reached the top step he sat down. “I can’t,” he said, “I simply can’t.”
“You must,” replied Galt.
Jessop merely shook his head.
“I say you must,” insisted Galt, and, as Jessop made no reply, he began to bully him, saying finally, “Look here, if you won’t go, I shall make you.”
Then Jessop began to cry in the same pitiful way he had cried the day before. “I can’t,” he blubbered, “I simply can’t. For God’s sake don’t make me.”
Galt desisted. He could not stand the sight of Jessop’s tears. …
They did not return to the steps on Saturday or Sunday, but they discussed the problem at great length. “I think I could go, if I were by myself,” Jessop said once or twice, and, also, “I will go back when I’ve recovered my strength a bit.”
Galt did not insist again, and on the Monday he returned to town. Jessop’s last words at the station were, “I shall go back to that place when I’m stronger. I know it’s all imagination. …”
Galt received three letters in all, from Jessop, during the following fortnight. The first, unhappily, was destroyed, but Galt remembers that Jessop wrote that he was going to the steps in a few days’ time to make another essay, and added that he always felt better in the early morning and would walk over to the place before breakfast.
The second letter is cheerful in tone, and the beginning describes the writer’s doings, especially a long drive he had taken to Land’s End. On the fifth sheet he writes: “I am feeling much better now and am beginning to look forward to a return to work. I am very tired of doing nothing down here. Touching that hallucination of mine, I feel quite certain it will not recur and mean to go over to Man’s Head Rock one morning early next week. I am determined that if the hallucination still persists, I will walk boldly over my imagined landslip.”
It was a couple of days after he had received this letter that Galt gave Henderson the main facts of the case as here set out. Henderson agreed with Gait, that Jessop had been under the influence of some curious auto-suggestion which he could not afterwards throw off.
In the third letter, there is one further reference to the vision. Jessop wrote: “By the way, I have not been to the steps again, and I expect you will think me a procrastinator, but I mean to lay this bogey before I return. It is light at five o’clock, now, and as I don’t sleep well in the morning, I think I shall go early one day. I don’t quite know why, but I do shrink a little from the place still, and at sunrise my head is always perfectly clear. I am sanest at cockcrow. You know, I have always been a little mad.”
Galt received this letter on the fourth of April. He did not answer it at once, as he judged from the general tone of it that his friend was practically cured.
Four days later his eye was caught by a small paragraph in the morning paper, headed “Cliff accident in Cornwall,” which ran as follows: “On Tuesday morning the body of a man was discovered at the foot of a cliff near St. Ives in Cornwall. The man was quite dead when found, having fallen head down on to a large boulder, his skull being completely smashed by the blow. The body has not yet been identified, but is believed to be that of a visitor who has been staying in the town for some weeks. It is thought that the unfortunate man was walking along the cliff in the dark, as the body was first seen by a labourer going to work at six o’clock in the morning. The inquest is to be held to-morrow.”
Galt was so alarmed by this paragraph that he at once sent off a prepaid telegram to Jessop, asking for news of him. He received an answer in an hour’s time from the landlady of the rooms they had occupied. The telegram ran: “Mr. Jessop fallen over cliff. Please come at once.”
Galt had just time to catch the 10.30 from Paddington.
On his arrival he learned at once from the landlady that there had been a great landslip by Man’s Head Rock. Many people had heard it in the night, and she was not at all surprised when she heard Mr. Jessop getting up at daybreak, as she supposed he was going out to discover the origin of the noise—”like thunder it was,” said the landlady.
Early the next morning Galt went out to Man’s Head Rock. He found that the steps were still in place, but trembling on the verge of an abyss.
At the bottom of the chasm, he saw one huge monolith of granite; its face, where not covered with loose earth, was bright and glittering. The end of it was buried in the debris of the landslip. …
3. The Late Occupier
By J. D. Beresford
(Online Text )
The dull, smooth voice continued its tedious recountal of inessential things, in speech patterned by the phraseology of the house-agent. I had long ceased to gather the sense of the monologue. But every now and again the flat tone was lifted by the ring of one word which found a response in the dead echoes of that unfurnished room. That response hung in my ears; began presently to take shape in my mind. He used that word constantly, lingering almost imperceptibly upon it as though it were a valuable thing, some word he had acquired with difficulty and was now proud to display. At the very beginning of our interview I had noted his precision in using it. He had placed it carefully in his sentences, had given it a post of honour, and yet, with the apparent fastidiousness of an artist, he had seemed to frame for it an entourage that should support rather than emphasise, lest by too glaring a contrast the word should fail to impress one with its complete Tightness, inevitableness. It was that word at last which took possession of me, so that I responded to it even as that horrible unfurnished room responded. “The late occupier … the recent occupier … occupier …”; with every repetition the force of the response grew, till every energy in bare wall, plank floor and bleak fire-place echoed and trembled.
My fascination intensified to fear. What had been a murmur, a mere redundant shaping and mumbling of his definite word, grew to a horrible shouting acclamation. Every sleeping atom in the bleak, grey room was stirring; awakened to a resentful, threatening activity. I would have stopped his discourse, screamed down his recurrent use of the fateful word, but I was paralysed with a still, cold terror. And before I could rally the mischief was done. …
The past which is the present, vibrated once more to a repetition of the old horror, while I, the spectator, spirit of the future in those scenes, slipped unseen through the interstices of incorporated thought.
Backwards I slid through a rush of imperfectly visualised action, in which blurred and dim shapes leapt, staggered and trembled past in a blind streak of furious involution, grey with the speed of confused, blended colour. Until that swift, sickening retrogression was done, I hung giddily between being and consciousness, but when the awful journey had been accomplished I lost sense of being.
He was not then without hope, though he laughed discordantly as he pointed out the words, and his wife shrank and winced, fearing some subtle blasphemy.
“‘Occupy till I come,'” he read. “It’s an omen, I take that as an explicit direction. We’ll hang on, Mary; we’ll hang on till our last gasp, if we have to bar them out.”
He laughed again and the pale woman shuddered. Was it for this she had lived? To the very heart of her, she longed for the enclosing rampart of fortressed respectability. If it had been the most meagre of cottages, two rooms and the rent paid every week, she would have been happy. This threat of dun [1] and bailiff overbore her strength.
Why would he fight? Why did he find incomprehensible glory in menacing society? Why would he not accept defeat, and take a lower place where they could find security? They could live on so little. …
The old obsession had taken shape in him with that word. “I will occupy,” became his phrase; and, later, he spoke of himself as “the occupier.”
His tenacity would have been magnificent, had it not been so pitifully incongruous. Never could he have reasonably hoped. Yet even as he sat bowed over the table, forehead on knuckles, while they carried Mary away to the respectable grave she had sought as her last request, he stiffened himself to new effort. Craftily he shot the bolts of the door when the meagre procession had crawled out of sight.
As his beard grew, a new light came into his tawny eyes. He was waiting for the first onslaught. He longed for the active fight with men. It was wearing to fight always with ideas. He went out seldom, and in the street he was almost furtive. Always he brought home more provision than was immediately required.
He rejoiced to be behind those bolted doors and tight-closed windows again. The new light grew in his eyes, and sometimes he was impatient with those long-suffering, meek-spirited creditors who delayed to attack him.
Yet his cunning did not forsake him, when they came at last. He parleyed with them from an upper window, gave them a little hope. He wanted to lead them on. …
They soon came back, and afterwards he had the joy of watching the shabby figure in the road, the little slinking man who kept to the railings and regarded the house askance. …
He began to mutter to himself after a time, resentful that no more belligerent methods were being undertaken. He muttered the word to himself, and dwelt with pride on his self-conferred title. “Do your little worst,” he muttered. “I am the occupier and I will remain the occupier till the end.”
He grew more fierce when they cut off the water,—the gas had been cut off long ago. He resented that, as savouring of trickery. But the cistern was more than half full when he found out that no more water was coming in, and he knew that that would last him for a very long time. He need only drink the water, there was no need for him to wash in his beleaguered city.
He was over-careful with that water. He denied himself needlessly. It was thirst that fed his resentment to such a fever pitch. He would keep comparatively quiet during the day, fearing lest they might obtain some faculty to enter the house by force if he were too violent.
But at night he threw off all restraint. There was no house very near and no one passed along that road after dark. He might have gone out at night, he could have brought in water; but he grew increasingly cautious. He would give them no opportunity. He would occupy till It came, and when they broke in at last they would not find him there, but only a shape which would concern him no longer.
He slept a little when first the darkness covered him. He had no candles, oil or matches, and it seemed natural to lie down and sleep an hour after sunset. But he always woke soon after midnight, and then he would go down to the front room and indulge his resentment. During those long hours of darkness he impressed walls, ceiling and floor of that room with his single idea. He screamed the word aloud and shouted it in his thoughts until every fibre about him was strained to that one key-note. …
Then I missed him, and as I searched feebly among the unmaterial transparencies that were growing more and more evanescent, I saw the symbol of the little shabby figure from the road, staring in at the window.
Amid a turmoil of strange gyrations, I caught a sight of him in that zinc box, huddled knees to chin like a prehistoric corpse—there was yet enough water left to cover him. Afterwards I floated for unrealised years in immensity until a well-known word caught my attention, an enormous word that tapered across the whole arc of heaven. …
“The late occupier …” continued the dull smooth voice. I found that the incredible fool was telling me his version of the story.
I left him with fierce haste.
I left him stupidly affronted and wondering.
J. D. Beresford (1873 – 1947)
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1. The word dun has several meanings. In the context of the story, it indicates a demand for payment.