THE SHE-WOLF
LEONARD BILSITER was one of those people who have failed to
find this world attractive or interesting, and who have sought
compensation in an "unseen world" of their own experience or
imagination - or invention. Children do that sort of thing successfully,
but children are content to convince themselves, and do not vulgarise
their beliefs by trying to convince other people. Leonard Bilsiter\'s
beliefs were for "the few," that is to say, anyone who would listen to
him.
His dabblings in the unseen might not have carried him beyond the
customary platitudes of the drawing-room visionary if accident had not
reinforced his stock-in- trade of mystical lore. In company with a friend,
who was interested in a Ural mining concern, he had made a trip
across Eastern Europe at a moment when the great Russian railway
strike was developing from a threat to a reality; its outbreak caught him
on the return journey, somewhere on the further side of Perm, and it was
while waiting for a couple of days at a wayside station in a state of
suspended locomotion that he made the acquaintance of a dealer in
harness and metalware, who profitably whiled away the tedium of the
long halt by initiating his English travelling companion in a
fragmentary system of folk-lore that he had picked up from Trans-Baikal
traders and natives. Leonard returned to his home circle garrulous
about his Russian strike experiences, but oppressively reticent about
certain dark mysteries, which he alluded to under the resounding title
of Siberian Magic. The reticence wore off in a week or two under the
influence of an entire lack of general curiosity, and Leonard began to
make more detailed allusions to the enormous powers which this new
esoteric force, to use his own description of it, conferred on the
initiated few who knew how to wield it. His aunt, Cecilia Hoops, who
loved sensation perhaps rather better than she loved the truth, gave him
as clamorous an advertisement as anyone could wish for by retailing an
account of how he had turned a vegetable marrow into a wood pigeon
before her very eyes.