“I’m out of this deal. Ask the Professor. He’s the authority on spooks. What does it all mean, Lomax? Can you give an explanation that doesn’t outrage commonsense?”
The Professor smiled. The eyes in that clean-cut face twinkled.
“Commonsense?” He shrugged his shoulders. “We want to start by defining that—by defining all our senses—and we should never finish.” He looked with his challenging smile round the group. “I see you are inviting me to throw away my last little shred of reputation as a sane,” he said, humorously. “Well, I will not venture on any explanation of my own. The evidence, with all respect to Hetty here, is insufficient. We only know that she had a dream and a hallucination twice repeated. We know that the hallucination corresponds to a photograph in Captain Sergeantson’s pocket. We do not know what basis there is—if any—for her dream. But I will give you two alternative explanations that might be suggested by other people.—Will that satisfy you?”
“Go ahead, Professor,” said Forsdyke. “Don’t ask me to believe in ghosts, that’s all!”
“I don’t ask you to believe in anything,” replied the Professor. “I don’t ask you to believe in the reality of your presence and ours in this room. If you have ever read old Bishop Berkeley you will know that you would find it exceedingly difficult to evade the thesis that it may all be an illusion. Your consciousness—whatever that is—builds up a picture from impressions on your senses. You can’t test the reality of the origin of those impressions—you can only collate the subjective results. Everything—Time and Space—may be an illusion for all you or I know!”
“I heard that in my dream!” Hetty broke in. “Someone said it: ‘Time and Space are an illusion!’ I remember it so clearly now!” Her eyes glistened with excitement.
“All right, Hetty,” said her father. “Let the Professor have his say. It’s his turn. And don’t take us out of our depth, Lomax. You know as well as I do what I mean by commonsense.”
The Professor laughed.
“Well, I’m not going to guarantee either of the explanations, Forsdyke. I merely put them before you. The first is the out-and-out spiritualist explanation. Let us see what we can make of that. You must assume, with the spiritualists, that man has a soul which survives with its attributes of memory, volition, and a certain potentiality for action upon what we know as matter. Captain Sergeantson here vouches for the fact that a certain German spy, Karl Wertheimer, was shot in London six months ago. The spiritualist would allege that it is possible—under certain conditions which are very imperfectly under human command—for the soul (we’ll call it that) of Karl Wertheimer to put itself into communication with his old associates who still remain in the world of the living. There is an enormous mass of human testimony—which you may reject as worthless if you like—to the possibility of such a thing. Assume it is possible. Karl Wertheimer was a spy so successful, according to Captain Sergeantson, that it is reasonable to suppose that spying was his natural vocation, his life-passion, as much as painting pictures is the life-passion of an artist. It may be assumed that, if anything survives, one’s life-passion survives. Now suppose that Karl Wertheimer’s late employers believe in the possibility of communication with their late agent—that they find a medium—in this case, the young girl that Hetty saw in her dream—who can be controlled by the defunct Karl Wertheimer—through whom they can speak to him and receive communications from him—what is more natural than that they should do so? Admitting the premises, difficult as they are, it appears to me that the discarnate soul of Karl Wertheimer would be an extremely valuable secret agent——”
“Yes, suppose—suppose——” said Forsdyke. “It is all supposition. And it doesn’t explain Hetty’s dream.”