Three mornings ago Berselius, who rarely dreamt, had awakened from a long night of hunting in Dreamland. In Dreamland he had cast off his new personality and became his old self, and then, in his hunting shirt and with a cordite rifle in his hand, accompanied by the Zappo Zap, he had tracked elephant herds across illimitable plains.
He had awakened to his new self again with the full recognition in his mind that only a few moments ago he had been thinking with that other man’s brain, acting under his passions, living his life.
The Berselius of Dreamland had not the remotest connection with, or knowledge of, the Berselius of real life. Yet the Berselius of real life was very intimately connected with the Berselius of Dreamland, knew all his actions, knew all his sensations, and remembered them to the minutest detail.
The next night he did not dream at all—not so on the third night, when the scene of horror by the Silent Pools was reenacted, himself in the original role. The incidents were not quite the same, for scenes from real life are scarcely ever reproduced on the stage of Dreamland in their entirety; but they were ghastly enough in all conscience, and Berselius, awake and wiping the sweat from his brow, saw them clearly before him and remembered the callousness with which he had watched them but a few moments ago.
No man can command his dreams; the dreaming man lives in a world beyond law, and it came as a shock to Berselius that his old self should be alive in him like this, powerful, active, and beyond rebuke.
Physically, he was a wreck of his old self, but that was nothing to the fact which was now borne in on him—the fact that this new mentality was but a thin shell covering the old, as the thin shell of earth, with its flowers and pleasant landscapes, covers the burning hell which is the earth’s core.
The thing was perfectly natural. A great and vivid personality, and forty years of exuberant and self-willed life had at a stroke been checked and changed. The crust of his mind had cooled; tempestuous passions had passed from the surface, giving place to kindlier emotions, but the furnace was there beneath the flower garden just as it is in the case of the earth.
Captain Berselius was still alive, though suppressed and living in secrecy. At night, touched by the magic wand of sleep, he became awake, and became supreme master of the tenement in the cellars of which he was condemned to sleep by day.
So far from having been touched by death, Captain Berselius was now secure from death or change; a thing not to be reasoned with or altered—beyond human control—yet vividly alive as the fabled monster that inhabits the cellars of Glamis Castle.
Between the dual personalities of the man complete fission had taken place, a terrible accident of the sort condemning the cast-off personality to live in darkness beyond the voice of mind or amendment.