“That’s exactly what you did,” I said, “when you wakened me. I thought I should have died.”
“I can’t say how distressed I am,” answered the spectre. “It is just an instance of what I was trying to explain. We don’t know how we are going to manifest ourselves.”
“Don’t apologize,” I replied, “for a constitutional peculiarity. To what do you attribute your success to night?”
“Partly to your extremely receptive condition, partly to the whisky you took in the smoking-room, but chiefly to the magnetic environment.”
“Then you do not suffer at all from aphasia just now?”
“Not a touch of it at this moment, thank you; but, as a rule, we all do suffer horribly. This accounts for everything that you embodied spirits find remarkable and enigmatic in our conduct. We mean something, straight enough; but our failure is in expression. Just think how often you go wrong yourselves, though your spirits have a brain to play on, like the musician with a piano. Now we have to do as well as we can without any such mechanical advantage as a brain of cellular tissue”—here he suddenly took the form of a white lady with a black sack over her head, and disappeared in the wainscot.
“Excuse me,” he said a moment afterwards, quite in his ordinary voice, “I had a touch of it, I fancy. I lost the thread of my argument, and am dimly conscious of having expressed myself in some unusual and more or less incoherent fashion. I hope it was nothing at all vulgar or distressing?”
“Nothing out of the way in haunted houses, I assure you,” I replied, “merely a white lady with a black sack over her head.”
“Oh, that was it,” he answered with a sigh; “I often am afflicted in that way. Don’t mind me if I turn into a luminous boy, or a very old man in chains, or a lady in a green gown and high-heeled shoes, or a headless horseman, or a Mauth hound, or anything of that sort. They are all quite imperfect expressions of our nature,—symptoms, in short, of the malady I mentioned.”
“Then the appalling manifestations to which you allude are not the apparitions of the essential ghost? It is not in those forms that he appears among his friends?”