The Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan Page A

had accompanied my contemplations of the previous day. I
believed
now that I could make something of the task. Also I found my imagination far more lively. I convinced myself that in a year’s time there would be a new lord chancellor and a new lord of appeal. I beheld them sitting in the lords, but the figure on the Woolsack was so blurred that I could not recognize it. But I saw the new lord clearly, and his face was the face of young Molsom, who had only taken silk two years ago. Molsom’s appointment was incredible, but, as often as the picture of the scarlet benches of the Upper House came before me, there was Molsom, with his dapper little figure and his big nose and his arms folded after his habit. I realized that I was beginning to use the “mind’s eye,” to see things, and not merely to think them.
    The Times
was brought to my bedside at eight, and I opened it eagerly. There was the judgement in my case, delivered, as I had expected, by Boland. It ran not to a whole column, but to less than three-quarters; but I had been right on one point—it was broken up into three paragraphs. The substance of the judgement was much as I had foreseen, but I had not been lucky in guessing the wording, and Boland had referred to only two of the cases I had marked down for him . . .
    But there was one amazing thing. He had used the sentence about
uberrimae fidei
—very much in the form I had anticipated. More— far more.
The Times
had that rare thing, a misprint: it had
uberrimi
, the very blunder I had made myself in my anticipatory jottings.
    This made me feel solemn. My other correct anticipations might be set down to deductions from past knowledge. But here was an indubitable instance of anticipatory perception.
    From that hour I date my complete conversion. I was as docile now as Sally, and I stopped trying to reason. For I understood that, behind all the régime and the exercises, there was the tremendous fact of Professor Moe himself. If we were to look into the future it must be largely through his eyes. By the sheer power of intellect he had won a gift, and by some superabundant force of personality he was able to communicate in part that gift to others.
    I am not going to attempt to write in detail the story of the next two days, because external detail matters little; the true history was being made in the heads of the seven of us. I went obediently through the prescribed ritual. I pored over
The Times
as if my salvation depended upon it. I laboured to foresee the next day’s issue, and I let my mind race into the next year. I felt my imagination becoming more fecund and more vivid, and my confidence growing hourly. And always I felt behind me some mighty impetus driving me on and holding me up. I was in the charge of a Moses, like the puzzled Israelites stumbling in the desert.
    I spent the intervals with a rod beside the Arm, and there I first became conscious of certain physical symptoms. An almost morbid nervous alertness was accompanied by a good deal of bodily lassitude. This could not be due merely to the diet and lack of exercise, for I had often been sedentary for a week on end and lived chiefly on bread and cheese. Rather it seemed that I was using my nervous energy so lavishly in one direction that I had little left for the ordinary purposes of life . . . Another thing. My sight is very good, especially for long distances, and in dry-fly fishing I never need to use a glass to spot a fish. Well, in the little fishing I did that day, I found my eyes as good as ever, but I noted one remarkable defect. I saw the trout perfectly clearly, but I could not put a fly neatly over him. There was nothing wrong with my casting; the trouble was in my eye, which had somehow lost its liaison with the rest of my body. The fly fell on the water as lightly as thistledown, but it was many inches away from the fish’s nose.
    That day the professor made us fix our minds principally on the