“It is rather a curious method,” protested Chaffery; “to test one’s principles of action by judging the resultant actions on some other principle, isn’t it?”
Lewisham took a moment to think. “I suppose that is so,” he said, in the manner of a man convinced against his will.
He perceived his logic insufficient. He suddenly thrust the delicacies of argument aside. Certain sentences he had brought ready for use in his mind came up and he delivered them abruptly. “Anyhow,” he said, “I don’t agree with this cheating. In spite of what you say, I hold to what I said in my letter. Ethel’s connexion with all these things is at an end. I shan’t go out of my way to expose you, of course, but if it comes in my way I shall speak my mind of all these spiritualistic phenomena. It’s just as well that we should know clearly where we are.”
“That is clearly understood, my dear stepson-in-law,” said Chaffery. “Our present object is discussion.”
“But Ethel—”
“Ethel is yours,” said Chaffery. “Ethel is yours,” he repeated after an interval and added pensively—“to keep.”
“But talking of Illusion,” he resumed, dismissing the sordid with a sign of relief, “I sometimes think with Bishop Berkeley, that all experience is probably something quite different from reality. That consciousness is essentially hallucination. I, here, and you, and our talk—it is all Illusion. Bring your Science to bear—what am I? A cloudy multitude of atoms, an infinite interplay of little cells. Is this hand that I hold out me? This head? Is the surface of my skin any more than a rude average boundary? You say it is my mind that is me? But consider the war of motives. Suppose I have an impulse that I resist—it is I resist it—the impulse is outside me, eh? But suppose that impulse carries me and I do the thing—that impulse is part of me, is it not? Ah! My brain reels at these mysteries! Lord! what flimsy fluctuating things we are—first this, then that, a thought, an impulse, a deed and a forgetting, and all the time madly cocksure we are ourselves. And as for you—you who have hardly learned to think for more than five or six short years, there you sit, assured, coherent, there you sit in all your inherited original sin—Hallucinatory Windlestraw!—judging and condemning. You know Right from Wrong! My boy, so did Adam and Eve ... so soon as they’d had dealings with the father of lies!”
At the end of the evening whisky and hot water were produced, and Chaffery, now in a mood of great urbanity, said he had rarely enjoyed anyone’s conversation so much as Lewisham’s, and insisted upon everyone having whisky. Mrs. Chaffery and Ethel added sugar and lemon. Lewisham felt an instantaneous mild surprise at the sight of Ethel drinking grog.
At the door Mrs. Chaffery kissed Lewisham an effusive good-bye, and told Ethel she really believed it was all for the best.