'Metempsychosis is not a theory, it is a fact. I can testify to it from my personal experience. I know it. I can distinctly recall my former life. I can tell you who I was, who my friends were, what I did, what I felt, everything, down to the very dishes I preferred for dinner.'
Chalks scanned Blake's features for an instant with an intentness that suggested a mingling of perplexity and malice; then, all at once, I saw a light flash in his eyes, which forthwith began to twinkle in a manner that struck me as ominous.
'In my early youth,' Blake continued, 'this memory of mine was, if I may so phrase it, piecemeal and occasional. Feeling that I was no ordinary man, conscious of strange forces struggling in me, I would obtain, as it were, glimpses, fleeting and unsatisfactory, into a former state. Then they would go, not for long intervals to return. As time elapsed, however, these glimpses, to call them so, became more frequent and lasting, the intervals of oblivion shorter; and at last, one day on Hampstead Heath, I identified myself in a sudden burst of insight. I was walking on the Heath, and thinking of my work—marvelling at a certain quality I had discerned in it, which, I was convinced, would assure it everlasting life: a quality that seemed not unfamiliar to me, and yet which I could associate with none of the writers whose names passed in review before my mind; not with Byron, or Shelley, or Keats, not with Wordsworth or Coleridge, Goethe or Dante, not even with Homer. I mean the quality which I call universal—universal in its authenticity, universal in its appeal. By-and-bye, I took out a little pocket mirror that I always carry, and looked into it, studying my face. One glance sufficed. There, suddenly, on Hampstead Heath, the whole thing flashed upon me. I saw, I understood; I realised who I was, I remembered everything.'
'Stop right there, Mr. Blake,' called out Chalks in stentorian tones. 'Don't you say another word. I'm going to hail you by your right name in half-a-minute. I guess I must have recognised you the very first time I clapped eyes on your distinguished physiognomy; only I couldn't just place you, as we say over in America. But there was a je ne sais quoi in the whole cut of your jib as familiar to me as rolls and coffee. I tried and tried to think when and where I'd had the pleasure before. But now that you speak of a former state of existence—why, I'm there! It was all I needed, just a little hint like that, to jog my memory. Talk about entertaining angels unawares! The beard, eh? And the yaller cloak? And ain't there a statue of you up Boulevard Haussmann way? Shakesy, old man, shake!'
And Chalks got hold of his victim's hand and wrung it fervently. 'I'm particularly glad to meet you this way,' he added, 'because I was Queen Elizabeth myself; and I can't begin to tell you how sort of out of it I felt, alone here with all this degenerate posterity.'
Blake coldly withdrew his hand, frowning loftily at Chalks. 'You should reserve your nonsense for more appropriate occasions,' he said. 'Though you speak in a spirit of foolish levity, you have builded better than you knew. I am indeed Shakespeare re-incarnated. My books alone would prove it; they could have been dictated by no other mind. But—look at this.'
He produced from an interior pocket a case of red morocco and handed it to me. 'You,' he said, with a flattering emphasis upon the pronoun, 'you are a man who can treat a serious matter seriously. What do you think of that?'
The case contained a photograph, and the photograph represented the head and shoulders of Mr. Blake and a bust of Shakespeare, placed cheek by jowl. In the pointed beard and the wide-set eyes there were, perhaps, the rudiments of something remotely like a likeness.
'Isn't that conclusive?' he demanded. 'Doesn't that place the fact beyond the reach of question?'
'You've got more hair than you used to have,' said Chalks. 'I'm talking of the front hair—your forehead ain't as high as it was. But your back hair is all right enough.'