ou that within a few
weeks I had made myself an intimate friend of Black's. I shall never
forget the first time I went to his room; I hope I shall never see such
abject, squalid misery again. The foul paper, from which all pattern or
trace of a pattern had long vanished, subdued and penetrated with the
grime of the evil street, was hanging in mouldering pennons from the
wall. Only at the end of the room was it possible to stand upright, and
the sight of the wretched bed and the odour of corruption that pervaded
the place made me turn faint and sick. Here I found him munching a piece
of bread; he seemed surprised to find that I had kept my promise, but he
gave me his chair and sat on the bed while we talked. I used to go to
see him often, and we had long conversations together, but he never
mentioned Harlesden or his wife. I fancy that he supposed me ignorant of
the matter, or thought that if I had heard of it, I should never connect
the respectable Dr. Black of Harlesden with a poor garreteer in the
backwoods of London. He was a strange man, and as we sat together
smoking, I often wondered whether he were mad or sane, for I think the
wildest dreams of Paracelsus and the Rosicrucians would appear plain and
sober fact compared with the theories I have heard him earnestly advance
in that grimy den of his. I once ventured to hint something of the sort
to him. I suggested that something he had said was in flat contradiction
to all science and all experience. "No," he answered, "not all
experience, for mine counts for something. I am no dealer in unproved
theories; what I say I have proved for myself, and at a terrible cost.
There is a region of knowledge which you will never know, which wise men
seeing from afar off shun like the plague, as well they may, but into
that region I have gone. If you knew, if you could even dream of what
may be done, of what one or two men have done in this quiet world of
ours, your very soul would shudder and faint within you. What you have
heard from me has been but the merest husk and outer covering of true
science--that science which means death, and that which is more awful
than death, to those who gain it. No, when men say that there are
strange things in the world, they little know the awe and the terror
that dwell always with them and about them." There was a sort of
fascination about the man that drew me to him, and I was quite sorry to
have to leave London for a month or two; I missed his