“The other moment,” the doctor said at last, with a pitying smile, “is when the soul returns to its prison after one of those flights which men call dreams. You know that theory of the dream?” Baumgartner asked abruptly. The answer was a nod as hasty, but the doctor seemed unconvinced, for he went on didactically: “You visit far countries in your dreams; your soul is the traveller. You speak to the absent or the dead; it is your soul again; and we dismiss the miracle as a dream! I fix the moment as that of the soul’s return because its departure on these errands is imperceptible, but with its return we awake. The theory is that in the moment of waking the whole experience happens like the flash of an electric spark.”
The boy murmured very earnestly that he saw; but he was more troubled than enlightened, and what he did see was that he had picked up a very eccentric acquaintance indeed. He was not a little scared by the man’s hard face and molten eyes; but there was a fascination also that could not be lost upon an impressionable temperament, besides that force of will or character which had dominated the young mind from the first. He began to wish the interview at an end—to be able to talk about it as the extraordinary sequel of an extraordinary adventure—yet he would not have cut it short at this point if he could.
“I grant you,” continued the doctor, “that the final flight of soul from body is infinitely the more precious from my point of view. But how is one to be in a position to intercept that? When beloved spirits pass it would be cold-blooded desecration; and public opinion has still to be educated up to psychical vivisection! I have myself tried in vain to initiate such education. I have applied for perfectly private admission to hospital deathbeds, even to the execution-shed in prisons. My applications have been peremptorily refused.”
Pocket’s thoughts went off at a gruesome tangent.
“You could see a man hanged!” he shuddered, and himself saw the little old effigy on the model drop in Marylebone Road.
“Why not?” asked the other in wide wonder. “But as I am not allowed,” he continued in lighter key, “I have to do the best I can. If I cannot be in at the death, I may still by luck be in at a dream or two! And now you may guess why I wander with my camera where men come in to sleep in broad daylight. I prowl among them; a word awakens them; and then I take my chance.”
“They’re not all like that man this morning, then,” remarked Pocket, looking back on the inanimate clod reclining in the dew.
The doctor deliberated with half-shut eyes that seemed to burn the brighter for their partial eclipse.
“This morning,” he rejoined, “was like no other. I owe you some confidence in the matter. I had the chance of a lifetime this morning—thanks to you!”
“Thanks to me?” repeated Pocket. A flash enlightened him. “Do you mean to say I—you took me—walking——?”