“Not much.”
“I shouldn’t tell you in confidence, of course. So you can hand on all my remarks to your side, for there is one great mercy that has come out of all to-day’s misery: I have no longer any secrets. My echo has gone—I call the buzzing sound in my ears an echo. You see, I have been unwell ever since that expedition to the caves, and possibly before it.”
The remark interested him rather; it was what he had sometimes suspected himself. “What kind of illness?” he enquired.
She touched her head at the side, then shook it.
“That was my first thought, the day of the arrest: hallucination.”
“Do you think that would be so?” she asked with great humility. “What should have given me an hallucination?”
“One of three things certainly happened in the Marabar,” he said, getting drawn into a discussion against his will. “One of four things. Either Aziz is guilty, which is what your friends think; or you invented the charge out of malice, which is what my friends think; or you have had an hallucination. I’m very much inclined”—getting up and striding about—“now that you tell me that you felt unwell before the expedition—it’s an important piece of evidence—I believe that you yourself broke the strap of the field-glasses; you were alone in that cave the whole time.”
“Perhaps. . . .”
“Can you remember when you first felt out of sorts?”
“When I came to tea with you there, in that garden-house.”