I
OMBOS
We were talking at the club about spirit manifestations, and retailing the usual second or third-hand accounts of family spooks and deceased aunts showing themselves to their sorrowing relatives.
"It is strange the tricks which our brains will sometimes play us," said Barton. "I remember once seeing a ghost myself, and I can tell you that the sensation is a very curious one. It was a good many years ago, when I was out in Bombay in the National Indian Bank, and I had been sitting up until the early hours trying to trace some fraudulent entries in the bank's books by one of our clerks who had absconded with a considerable sum of money.
"Everybody in the bank building had long since gone home or to bed, where I ought to have been myself, so I was vastly astonished when I looked up from the ledger to see somebody sitting at the desk where I myself had been writing a few moments before. I felt quite upset for a moment, until I recognised the intruder. He was nebulous, but I could see plainly enough who it was."
"A member of your family in England?" asked Duckford, who was a firm believer in the good old-fashioned second sight of the Scotch Highlanders. Barton answered in his peculiarly quiet way.
"No, it was myself. The appearance of seeing an image of one's self is not altogether unusual, I believe. But, of course, such a thing is really all nonsense ... a matter of nerves."
"Now, I do not think it is fair of you to put all such things down to nerves," said Captain Crabbe, who had returned wounded from France after being in the field since the outbreak of the Great War. "If one cannot always explain, one need not therefore ridicule." Crabbe made this remark with a gravity that was somewhat unusual with him.