‘Why,’ he said, ‘I mean frankly just that. Besides, it’s Grisel’s own phrase; and an old nurse we used to have said much the same. He comes, or it comes towards you, first just walking, then with a kind of gradually accelerated slide or glide, and sweeps straight into you,’ he tapped his chest, ‘me, whoever it may be is here. In a kind of panic, I suppose, to hide, or perhaps simply to get back again.’
‘Get back where?’
‘Be resumed, as it were, via you. You see, I suppose he is compelled to regain his circle, or Purgatory, or Styx, whatever you like to call it, via consciousness. No one present, then no revenant or spook, or astral body, or hallucination: what’s in a name? And of course even an hallucination is mind-stuff, and on its own, as it were. What I mean is that the poor devil must have some kind of human personality to get back through in order to make his exit from our sphere of consciousness into his. And naturally, of course to make his entrance too. If like a tenuous smoke he can get in, the probability is that he gets out in precisely the same fashion. For really, if you weren’t consciously expecting the customary impact (you actually jerk forward in the act of resistance unresisted), you would not notice his going. I am afraid I must be horribly boring you with all these tangled theories. All I mean is, that if you were really absorbed in what you happened to be doing at the time, the thing might come and go, with your mind for entrance and exit, as it were, without your being conscious of it at all.’ There was a longish pause, in which Herbert slowly inhaled and softly breathed out his smoke.
‘And what—what is the poor wretch searching for? And what—why, what becomes of him when he does go?’
‘Ah, there you have me! One merely surmises just as one’s temperament or convictions lean. Grisel says it’s some poor derelict soul in search of peace—that the poor beggar wants finally to die, in fact, and can’t. Sallie smells crime. After all, what is every man?’ he talked on; ‘a horde of ghosts—like a Chinese nest of boxes—oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front—in our ancestors, back and back, until—’
‘“Until?”’ Lawford managed to remark.
‘Ah, that settles me again. Don’t they call it an amoeba? But really I am abjectly ignorant of all that kind of stuff. We are all we are, and all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is after all just what the old boy said—it’s only the impossible that’s credible; whatever credible may mean....’
It seemed to Lawford as if the last remark had wafted him bodily into the presence of his kind, blinking, intensely anxious old friend, Mr Bethany. And what leagues asunder the two men were who had happened on much the same words to express their convictions.
He drew his hand gropingly over his face, half rose, and again seated himself. ‘Whatever it may be,’ he said, ‘the whole thing reminds me, you know—it is in a way so curiously like my own—my own case.’
Herbert sat on, a little drawn up in his chair, quietly smoking. The crash of the falling water, after seeming to increase in volume with the fading of evening, had again died down in the darkness to a low multitudinous tumult as of countless inarticulate, echoing voices.