"There are influences not yet fully understood which can traverse space, which can touch not as a hand touches, but as unmistakably. I imagined the soul of the double touched in this way, the waters troubled."
"Troubled! Troubled!"
It was Mr. Harding who had spoken, almost lamentably. His powerfully shaped head now drooped forward on his breast.
"I imagined," continued Malling, "a sort of gradual disintegration beginning, and proceeding, in the double—a disintegration of the soul, if such a thing can be conceived of."
His piercing eyes went from Chichester to Harding.
"Or, no," he corrected himself. "Perhaps that is an incorrect description of my—very imaginative—flight through speculation the other night. Possibly I should say a gradual transference, instead of disintegration of soul. For it seemed to me as if the man who watched might gradually, as it were, absorb into himself the soul of the double, but purified. For the watcher has the tremendous advantage of seeing the hypocrite living the hypocrite's life, while the hypocrite is only seen. Might not the former, therefore, conceivably draw in strength, while the other faded into weakness? Ignorance is the terrible thing in life, I think. Now the man who watched would receive knowledge, fearful knowledge, but the man who was watched, while perhaps suffering first uneasiness, then possibly even terror, would not, in my conception, ever clearly understand. He would not any longer dare at night to sit down alone to fill up that dreadful diary. He would not any longer perhaps—I only say perhaps—dare to commit the deeds the record of which in the past the diary held. But his lesson would be one of fear, making for weakness, finally almost for nothingness. And the other night I conceived of him at last fading away in the gloom of his room with the darkened window."
"That was your end!" said Mr. Harding, in a low voice.
"Yes, that was my end."
"Then," said Chichester, "you think the lesson men learn from being contemplated tends only to destroy them?"
But Malling, now with a smiling change to greater lightness and ease, hastened to traverse this statement.