He laughed, filling his pipe—the laugh of a man too surely self-convinced to regard criticism of his faith.
“Patsy,” he said, “had no Ghost-Leech to touch her well. Poor little Patsy! But she’s better among the flowers.”
“Of Paradise, I suppose you mean? Well, if she is, she is,” I said, as if I were deprecating the inevitably undesirable. “But what is a Ghost-Leech?”
“A Ghost-Leech,” he said—“the sort, anyhow, that I’ve knowledge of—is one who has served seven years goal-keeper in the hurling-matches of the dead.”
I stared at him. Was he really going, or gone, off his head? He laughed again, waving his hand to reassure me.
“You may accept my proof or not. Anyhow, Bobo’s recovery was proof enough for me. A sense of humour, I admit, is outside our conception of the disembodied. We lay down laughter with life, don’t we? You’d count it heresy to believe otherwise. Yet have you ever considered how man’s one great distinctive faculty must be admitted into all evidence of his deeds upon earth, as minuted by the recording angel? It must be admitted, of course, and appreciatively by the final assessor. How could he judge laughter who had never laughed? The cachinnatory nerve is touched off from across the Styx—wireless telegraphy; and man will laugh still, though he be damned.”
“Kelvin! my good soul!”
“The dead, I tell you, do not put off their sense of humour with their flesh. They laugh beyond the grave. They are full of a sense of fun, and not necessarily the most transcendent.”
“No, indeed, by all the testimony of spiritualism.”
“Well; now listen. I was staying once in a village on the west coast of Ireland. The people of my hamlet were at deadly traditional feud with the people of a neighbouring hamlet. Traditional, I say, because the vendetta (it almost amounted to one) derived from the old days of rivalry between them in the ancient game of hurling, which was a sort of primitive violent “rugger” played with a wooden ball. The game itself was long fallen into disuse in the district, and had been supplanted, even in times out of memory, by sports of a gentler, more modern cast. But it, and the feud it had occasioned, were still continued unabated beyond the grave. How do I know this? Why, on the evidence of my Ghost-Leech.