I still reasoned that all this was hallucination due to my solitude, and the fact that I had lost all weight and sense of resistance.  I endeavoured to recover that sense by banging myself about the sphere, by pinching my hands and clasping them together.  Among other things, I lit the light, captured that torn copy of Lloyd’s, and read those convincingly realistic advertisements about the Cutaway bicycle, and the gentleman of private means, and the lady in distress who was selling those “forks and spoons.”  There was no doubt they existed surely enough, and, said I, “This is your world, and you are Bedford, and you are going back to live among things like that for all the rest of your life.”  But the doubts within me could still argue:  “It is not you that is reading, it is Bedford, but you are not Bedford, you know.  That’s just where the mistake comes in.”

“Confound it!” I cried; “and if I am not Bedford, what am I?”

But in that direction no light was forthcoming, though the strangest fancies came drifting into my brain, queer remote suspicions, like shadows seen from away.  Do you know, I had a sort of idea that really I was something quite outside not only the world, but all worlds, and out of space and time, and that this poor Bedford was just a peephole through which I looked at life? ...

Bedford!  However I disavowed him, there I was most certainly bound up with him, and I knew that wherever or whatever I might be, I must needs feel the stress of his desires, and sympathise with all his joys and sorrows until his life should end.  And with the dying of Bedford—­what then? ...

Enough of this remarkable phase of my experiences!  I tell it here simply to show how one’s isolation and departure from this planet touched not only the functions and feeling of every organ of the body, but indeed also the very fabric of the mind, with strange and unanticipated disturbances.  All through the major portion of that vast space journey I hung thinking of such immaterial things as these, hung dissociated and apathetic, a cloudy megalomaniac, as it were, amidst the stars and planets in the void of space; and not only the world to which I was returning, but the blue-lit caverns of the Selenites, their helmet faces, their gigantic and wonderful machines, and the fate of Cavor, dragged helpless into that world, seemed infinitely minute and altogether trivial things to me.

Until at last I began to feel the pull of the earth upon my being, drawing me back again to the life that is real for men.  And then, indeed, it grew clearer and clearer to me that I was quite certainly Bedford after all, and returning after amazing adventures to this world of ours, and with a life that I was very likely to lose in this return.  I set myself to puzzle out the conditions under which I must fall to earth.

Chapter 21

Mr. Bedford at Littlestone