THE SCENT
There was no one but myself in the smaller of the two smoking-rooms when he entered. I had picked up an evening paper, and was boring myself with it for a few minutes in front of the fire, before going on to bore myself somewhere else. He walked rapidly to the fireplace and rang the bell, and then turned abruptly to me.
"Hullo! How are you! Didn't know you were here." Then he caught sight of the evening paper in my hands and asked me for God's sake to put that thing down. I put it down and asked him what was the matter. He was very pale and had just the appearance of a man whose nerves were suffering from over-strain.
"I must tell you," he said abruptly. "I'm glad I found you. It's the most perfectly—"
He stopped there because the waiter who answered the bell had just entered. He ordered some brandy and resumed again.
"You will laugh your head off by the time I have finished my story, ghastly though it is. You won't believe a word of it. See here."
He picked up the paper which I had thrown down, opened it rapidly, and handed it to me with his finger on one particular paragraph. The paragraph referred to an inquest on a somewhat commonplace suicide in Soho. The suicide, an Italian judging by his name, had flung himself from a window on the first floor, and had broken his neck on the pavement. Evidence was given by those who knew him that he had been very queer in his manners of late, and the usual verdict had been returned.
"Well?" I said.
"It's God's mercy that I wasn't a witness at that inquest."
"What does it matter?" I replied. "I suppose you saw the accident. You are required to go and say that; it doesn't hurt you. Nobody thinks any the worse of you. It may be a little tiresome, but there is nothing to bring you to this condition, even if you had really given evidence, which it seems you haven't."
The waiter brought the brandy. He drank it, ordered another, and continued more quietly.
"I am afraid I have let the thing prey on my mind a little. I confess that I have had a shock. The story is not at all what you imagine. I did not witness the accident; it was only within the last two hours that I heard of it, but I know how it was that it happened."
He paused. I selected another cigar, lit it, and said nothing. He continued:
"You know me well enough to know my interest in anything which is a little out of the way. I will even run some slight risk to meet and talk with a man who is not as other men are, or, better still, a woman who is not as other women are. I have a fancy for human curiosities; I should like to take a museum and collect them."
"Yes," I said, "I know that. You will get yourself into trouble one of these days."
He went on speaking.
"About a week ago I went down Wardour Street and saw an Italian looking in at a shop window. I did not know that he was an Italian at the time. The national characteristics were not very strongly marked in him. He was quite well dressed, rather like a well-to-do young City man. His head was abnormal. The breadth from the end of the eyebrow to the ear was enormous. His eyes were not of the same colour; his skin was like parchment; he continually moved the tip of his nose. His nostrils opened and shut. He looked to me to be a very queer beast indeed, and I meant to talk to him.
"After a while he went into a restaurant. I waited ten minutes and then went in after him. I sat down at the same table, and, by way of opening a conversation, knocked over his glass of claret, breaking the glass. Then, of course, I apologised and ordered a waiter to replace it. He at once countermanded the order, and turned to me, saying in excellent English, 'Pray do not trouble. I had quite finished with it.'
"'But,' I said, 'you must let me. Your glass was untouched.'
"'Yes,' he said, 'but I never drink it.'
"I looked amazed. 'I could explain,' he added, 'but it is a little difficult to understand, and it would bore you.'
"'The only things that I care about,' I replied, 'are the things which are not ordinary, and are a little difficult to understand. Unless you are a dipsomaniac, triumphing over temptation, I fail to see why you should order wine which you have no intention of drinking.'
"'Your explanation is wrong,' he replied. 'I ordered the claret because I wanted to smell it.'
"As he seemed to find that conclusive, I observed that even that did not clear the thing up.
"'You must know,' he said a little impatiently, 'that with some people the scents of different objects have curious results. The possibilities implied in the sense of smell are enormous. In most people they are undeveloped; in very few are they at all understood. The connection between a scent and a memory has been noticed. I have seen a woman who smelt wallflowers for the first time for ten years burst into tears. The scent of eau de Cologne is supposed to be refreshing, and that of ammonia to be vivifying, and that of ether sickening. No scent possesses the very curious attraction for a human being that valerian does for the lower animals.'
"'The whole art of obtaining a new sensation by the use of scents is absolutely unknown to most people. Most women divide scents vaguely into opaque and transparent; most virtuous women prefer the transparent. But that is really as far as they have gone. As for the effect of those scents which are not pleasant to anybody, and therefore are generally called by an unpleasant name, there seems to be no knowledge at all.'
"'I knew a case,' I said, 'of a gardener who had to work in a hothouse filled with lilies-of-the-valley. He fainted away.'
"My Italian friend took up the story.
"'And when he recovered consciousness he was angry and entreated to be put back again?'
"'Yes,' I said, 'but how did you know it?'
"'Because I know the effect of different scents.'
"I was more fascinated than ever, and made him talk for a long time. Several times he seemed to be hesitating whether or not to tell me something, and I urged him on. It came at last. He had got a secret. He had invented a scent and was assured of the marvellous power of it, but not of the whole of its effects, afterwards or immediate. These he was investigating. 'And,' he added impressively, 'it gives one an entirely new way of living.'
"'I wish,' I said, 'that you were a poor man wanting money with which to carry on your experiments. If I offered to finance you perhaps you would let me witness some of them. I love nothing better than to see something new.'
"'I do not want any money,' he answered laughing. 'My workshop is near here, and I will show it to you if you care to take the risk of coming.'
"'I will come,' I replied, 'with pleasure.'
"And we both walked out together. He took me up a side-street, and then up a precipitous staircase to the first floor of a dingy-looking house. He had three large rooms there, opening into one another. He made me wait in the first, which was somewhat poorly furnished as a library, and he went through into the others. After about ten minutes he came back and fetched me through the second room, where a lot of things were cooking over tiny little spirit lamps, and into the third. The third was furnished as the first, but it was much more luxurious. He opened a corner cupboard and took down an ordinary glass stopper bottle, unlabelled and containing a colourless liquid.
"'That is it,' he said smiling; 'that is what makes all things new.'
"Of course by this time I knew he was cracked, but I asked him how.
"'After frequent inhalations of this scent,' he said, 'one loses all sense of limitations or conditions. One believes that one can walk straight through a brick wall, or fly in the air, or live in the year one, or in the year two million, or in any intervening year. One is sure that he can do anything which it occurs to him that he would like to do. One has a feeling of complete omnipotence, and that means a feeling of complete happiness. No one conscious of a limitation can be completely happy. At present the effects are very transient, but I may be able to improve upon that.'
"'One moment,' I said. 'This scent does not really remove limitations and conditions.'
"'Subjectively, yes, objectively, no; but that matters little. Nothing can be unreal to us at the time that we fully believe it to be real. It is because the effects are illusive that I now refrain from experimenting with myself unless there is someone in the room with me. It is a hard struggle to keep off it. Frankly, I was very glad when you suggested that you should come here. Now, watch me.'
"He removed the stopper, and for perhaps two minutes continued to inhale the perfume. Then he put the stopper back again in the bottle and set it down on the table by his side. He did not change in appearance in the least. Half-jokingly I asked him if he could now write stories like Mr Rudyard Kipling.
"'Better,' he said, 'infinitely better. They are nothing. I will show you one very short thing.'
"He took paper, pen and ink, and covered one sheet with feverish haste. Then he handed it to me with an air of triumph. It was absolute nonsense from beginning to end, and absolutely incoherent. There were phrases in it which we had used in our conversation, phrases which he might have seen in advertisements on hoardings, two or three lines of a song which is very popular just now, the whole strung together anyhow. I looked over it.
"'Capital,' I said; 'and can you fly?'
"'Of course.' He got up and opened the window. I let him climb up on the ledge, where a nervous man would certainly have fallen. I saved him only just in time, and he was angry with me. As I told him unfortunately I was not able to fly and wished for his company, he sat down and talked rubbish about the things which he said he could do for about five minutes. Then he stretched himself and yawned.
"'It has passed off now,' he said. I had a long argument with him, but it was of no use. He would not give up the bottle and he would not promise to leave it alone in the future, and he would not tell me what he called it. To irritate him I said that the whole thing was a fraud from beginning to end; the bottle contained water, and nothing else. I picked it up, took a long sniff at it, and went out.
"In the street a moment later I called a cabman and told him to drive to Downing Street. I wanted to show Lord Salisbury the means of destroying any nation. I had the power of destroying any nation, and I wished to use it for the benefit of England. Long before the cab reached Downing Street I also stretched my arms and yawned, and knew that the effect had gone off. I drove back to my chambers.
"To-day I read of the suicide. He had tried to fly and he did it because I suggested it to him when he was in that state the other day. It was my fault, really."
He picked up his second glass of brandy and began sipping it. He talked it over for a long time, but he would not contradict himself or be shaken in any way.
It is at any rate perfectly true that at the sale of the suicide's property he made some large purchases. I found that out afterwards from the auctioneer.
He is living abroad now.