‘I knew all this before,’ she said, after a singular exchange of questions and answers about the nature of communion with invisible sources of mood and feeling, ‘only I suppose my brain had not got big enough, or whatever it was, to tell it. Like your poets you used to tell me about who couldn’t find their rhymes, perhaps.’
And her laughter flowed about him in a rippling flood that instantly woke his own. They always laughed. They felt so happy. It was a communion between old souls that surely had bathed deeply in the experiences of life before they had become imprisoned in the particular bodies known as Paul Rivers and Margaret Christina Messenger.
He became convinced, too, more and more that she really did not speak at all—that no actual sound set the waves of air in motion—but that she put her words into him in the form of thoughts, and that he it was, in order to grasp them clearly, who clothed them with the symbols of sound and language. It was essentially of the nature of inspiration. She blew the ideas into his heart and mind.
And many things that he asked her were undoubtedly little more than his own thoughts, half-formed and vague, lying in the depths of him.
‘Then, over there, where you now are, is it—more real? Are you, as it were, one stage nearer to the great Reality? What’s it like——?’
‘It’s through the real “Crack,” I think,’ she answered. ‘Everything is here that I imagined—but really imagined—on earth. And people who imagined nothing, or wanted only the world, find very little here.’
‘Then is the change very great——?’
‘It doesn’t seem to me like a change at all. I’ve been here before for visits. Now I’ve come to stay, that’s all!’
‘You yourself have not changed?’
She roared with laughter, till he felt that his question was really absurd.