Question

face on the wall complete notes

Answer 1

We were talking of events which cannot be explained by natural causes at Dabney's last evening. Most of us had given an instance without producing much effect. Among the strangers to me was a little man with an anxious face. He watched each speaker with the closest attention, but said nothing. Then Dabney wishing to include him in the talk, turned to him and asked if he had no experience he could narrate - no story that could be explained. He thought a moment. "Well," he said, 'not a story in the ordinary sense of the word; nothing like most of your examples. Truth, I always believe, is not only stringer than a made up story, but also greatly more interesting. I could tell you an occurrence which happened to me personally and which strangely enough completed itself only this afternoon."       We begged him to begin.       "A year or two ago," he said, "I was in rooms in an old house in Great Ormond Street. The bedroom walls had been painted by the previous tenant, but the place was damp and there were great patches on the walls. One of these - as indeed often happens - exactly like a face. Lying on a bed in the morning and delaying getting up I came to think of it as real as my fellow lodger. In fact, the strange thing was that while the patches on the wall grew larger and changed their shapes, this never did. It remained just the same.       "While there I fell ill with influenza, and all day long I had nothing to do but read or think, and it was then that the face began to get a firmer hold of me. It grew more and more real and remarkable. I may say that it filled my thoughts day and night. There was a curious curve of the nose and the forehead was remarkable, in fact the face of an uncommon man, a man in a thousand."       "Well, I got better, but the face still controlled me, found myself searching the streets for one like it. Somewhere, I was convinced, the real man must exist, and him I must meet. Why, I had no idea; I only knew that he and I were in some way linked by fate. I often went to places where people gather in large numbers - political meetings, football matches, railway stations. But all in vain. I had never before realized as I then did how many different faces of man there are and how few. For all faces differ, and yet they can be grouped into few types."       "The search became a madness with me. I neglected everything else. I stood at busy corners watching the crowd until people thought me mad, and the police began to know me and be suspicious. I never looked at women; men, men, men, all the time."