‘I wouldn’t begin,’ said Wish.
‘It’s all right!’ said Evans. ‘Matter is indestructible. You don’t think any jiggery-pokery of this sort is going to snatch Clayton into the world of shades. Not it! You may try, Clayton, so far as I’m concerned, until your arms drop off at the wrists.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ said Wish, and stood up and put his arm on Clayton’s shoulder. ‘You’ve made me half believe in that story somehow, and I don’t want to see the thing done.’
‘Goodness!’ said I, ‘here’s Wish frightened!’
‘I am,’ said Wish, with real or admirably feigned intensity. ‘I believe that if he goes through these motions right he’ll go.’
‘He’ll not do anything of the sort,’ I cried. ‘There’s only one way out of this world for men, and Clayton is thirty years from that. Besides.... And such a ghost! Do you think——?’
Wish interrupted me by moving. He walked out from among our chairs and stopped beside the table and stood there. ‘Clayton,’ he said, ‘you’re a fool.’
Clayton, with a humorous light in his eyes, smiled back at him. ‘Wish,’ he said, ‘is right and all you others are wrong. I shall go. I shall get to the end of these passes, and as the last swish whistles through the air, Presto!—this hearthrug will be vacant, the room will be blank amazement, and a respectably dressed gentleman of fifteen stone will plump into the world of shades. I’m certain. So will you be. I decline to argue further. Let the thing be tried.’
‘No,’ said Wish, and made a step and ceased, and Clayton raised his hands once more to repeat the spirit’s passing.
By that time, you know, we were all in a state of tension—largely because of the behaviour of Wish. We sat all of us with our eyes on Clayton—I, at least, with a sort of tight, stiff feeling about me as though from the back of my skull to the middle of my thighs my body had been changed to steel. And there, with a gravity that was imperturbably serene, Clayton bowed and swayed and waved his hands and arms before us. As he drew towards the end one piled up, one tingled in one’s teeth. The last gesture, I have said, was to swing the arms out wide open, with the face held up. And when at last he swung out to this closing gesture I ceased even to breathe. It was ridiculous, of course, but you know that ghost-story feeling. It was after dinner, in a queer, old shadowy house. Would he, after all——?