He was playing chess with a fellow club member and I sat down to watch. I know something about chess and I think his playing very well displayed his character. He won, with skill of aggressive attack. But there was about it something you didn't like. His incisive moving of his men, as though there could be no doubt that it was the correct move; and his whole attitude made you hope it wasn't. It was a quite informal game. Once Blaine made an obvious, rather silly mistake, exposing a piece. His opponent offered to have him take it back. He didn't; he pretended it was what he wanted to do, taking the loss rather than admit his error.
Then he was finished and turned to me. I was there to interview him for the Editor of a booklet being issued by the Royal Astronomical Society of London. It seems that the Society was issuing a booklet with little character sketches of the people from whom they had obtained donations—sort of a tribute of thanks. I was commissioned to write the one on Blaine.
"Did they tell you how much I gave them?" he demanded of me now.
I shook my head.
"No," I said.
His smile was ironic. "I gave them a hundred pounds. What they wanted, and expected, was ten thousand. So now you'll write something very nice about me which they hope will flatter me so I'll give them more. Don't bother, young man."
Blaine was a bachelor. My first impression of him was that he was doing some woman a favor by keeping himself in that category.
So much for J. Walter Blaine.
It was the next night that the weird thing struck at me. I was walking along the edge of the park, alone on my way to the mid-town office of Amalgamated Newscasters. The street was fairly brightly lighted. I recall that there chanced to be no pedestrians near me, just an empty length of grey-white stone pavement in front of me, with the park on one side. And quite suddenly it was as though I had stepped through a black door into nothingness! I could have been stricken blind, yet it was not that, for in another split-second I could see a dim, red radiance and hear voices. Then I could see the shapes of people—three men and a woman—stumbling like myself on a strange earthy ground here in the red darkness.