“It was extraordinary—quite,” Doctor Fletcher acknowledged. “The verses in your mind gave rise to the young man with wings; but what made him tell you to go to Lancaster?” The bishop was silent. “Had you been planning to go to Lancaster? To meet me, for instance?”
“No. I didn’t feel up to the trip.”
“Some shaft of memory projecting itself on the weakened consciousness during sleep,” Doctor Fletcher reflected. “A lucky accident for the prisoner.”
“It was not an accident,” observed the bishop calmly. “It was an intervention.”
The doctor considered. “A lot about dreams—unknown. Theories. Memory, personality, suggestion, telepathy—more, likely before we let go and say supernatural.”
“If there is anything supernatural.” The bishop caught it up. “Perhaps it is all in nature, only we don’t know. The most advanced of us stands before psychology like an ancient cave-dweller before electricity. We see gleams from the penumbra of a new universe. Two hundred years ago everybody jumped at that word supernatural, and burned some of the people concerned and worshipped others. To-day we clamor as promptly that there isn’t any penumbra or any universe, but somebody has scratched a match. However”—the clear, assured voice, so compelling in its flexibility, its sympathy, changed swiftly—“however, Jim, we both use very beautiful long words when we prod each other a bit. Don’t we?”
“Why do you put rubber pads on that horse in summer?” inquired the doctor, and the talk fell to Billy’s shoeing.
After lunch the bishop and the great doctor, the “Jim” of his lifelong friendship, went into a pleasant room with broad open windows looking over the drowsy garden. Muslin curtains flapped in the breeze; bees hummed outside; the fragrance of roses was in the air, and a puff of wind lifted to them the smell of honeysuckle. The old friends sat and smoked and talked cheerfully of big affairs and of little ones, of the bills before Congress, of the last scientific discovery, of the doctor’s grandchildren, of boys of fifty years ago and doings of them then and now. Then, when the cigars were finished, Everingham, the village physician, had come in and there had been twenty minutes of serious short questions and answers, and then Everingham had gone and the two were together alone again. Doctor Fletcher was silent. He got up and went to the window and stood with his back turned and his hands in his pockets looking out on the garden. With that the telephone on the study-table rang and the bishop went to answer it. But as he stood with his hand at the receiver, ready to take it down, he turned his face to his friend with an unspoken question, and the great doctor wheeled sharply and crossed the room in long strides, and his arm was around his friend’s shoulder.
“Tell me, Jim,” the bishop said quietly.
“I can’t,” said the doctor, and his forehead suddenly was against the black clerical coat.