The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders by Lord Dunsany

Author:Lord Dunsany
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940456201
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2015-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVII

THE colonel turned to his coffee, and drank it in silence. No doubt my reader can think of some suitable comments that some of us might have made when his story ceased; but none happened to occur to any of us at the time. Most of us also drank coffee, or a liqueur. And then the colonel said, “I did not feel that I was falling. I felt that the wind was blowing by, and that the ground was coming up to me. Then darkness and silence, but for Sinadryana’s spell. That’s how it was; and I was a blue butterfly.

“Don’t ask me about distance and time, because I can’t answer you. In a second or so, perhaps less, I was back in England. There are fellows who study that kind of thing in Benares, and I believe in Tibet, and probably other places along the Ganges besides. You must go to one of them if you want to know about that. And I suppose that fellow Sinadryana knows all about it too. In fact he must do so, or he couldn’t have done it. But I wouldn’t ask any favour from him after the way he has behaved in this club, and I wouldn’t advise you to. But there it was: he moved me from North Africa back to England in a couple of seconds, and I was a blue butterfly. A queer trick to play on a member of the Electors, and as long as he’s a member here I don’t know who’s safe from him. One of these days he’ll go too far, and play one of his tricks on a member of the committee. Then they will see what I meant.”

“And you say you were a blue butterfly?” I said.

“A blue butterfly,” said the colonel. “And he had put me on the side of a chalk hill; obviously England. You could tell that by the flowers. So much for distance. And as for time, it was late in the summer. I could tell that by the flowers too.”

He looked at our little group that was listening to him.

“That was a very odd experience,” said Major Brinner. And we felt that the comment sufficed for all of us.

“Well,” said the colonel, “it is no use objecting to one thing more than another. What I object to is that he played those tricks at all. I was a blue butterfly. I told you that he had made me a moth. But this was strangely different. More different than you might easily realize, unless you had been one of them. One difference was a difference of speed, such as there is between a farm-cart and a fast motor. And I found all my habits were different. For instance, before the time when moths are most active I went to sleep. But at the moment I tell of it was bright sunlight and I floated and danced on the warm air in what, looking back on it, was a very undignified way.

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