“Surely you might have taken some step
in order to try to avert the tragedy.”

He shook his head. “What step precisely?” he said. “Was I to go to Sir Henry and
tell him that once more I had seen him in the tube in the act of
committing suicide? Look at it like this. Either what I had seen was
pure illusion, pure imagination, in which case it had no existence or
significance at all, or it was actual and real, and essentially it had
happened. Or take it, though not very logically, somewhere between
the two. Say that the idea of suicide, for some cause of which I knew
nothing, had occurred to him or would occur. Should I not, if that was
the case, be doing a very dangerous thing, by making such a suggestion
to him? Might not the fact of my telling him what I had seen put
the idea into his mind, or, if it was already there, confirm it and
strengthen it? ‘It’s a ticklish matter to play with souls,’ as Browning
says.”

“But it seems so inhuman not to interfere in any way,” said I, “not to
make any attempt.”

“What interference?” asked he. “What attempt?”

The human instinct in me still seemed to cry aloud at the thought of
doing nothing to avert such a tragedy, but it seemed to be beating
itself against something austere and inexorable. And cudgel my brain
as I would, I could not combat the sense of what he had said. I had no
answer for him, and he went on. “You must recollect, too,” he said, “that I believed then and believe
now that the thing had happened. The cause of it, whatever that was,
had begun to work, and the effect, in this material sphere, was
inevitable. That is what I alluded to when, at the beginning of my
story, I asked you to consider how difficult it was to say when an
action took place. You still hold that this particular action, this
suicide of Sir Henry, had not yet taken place, because he had not
yet thrown himself under the advancing train. To me that seems a
materialistic view. I hold that in all but the endorsement of it, so to
speak, it had taken place. I fancy that Sir Henry, for instance, now
free from the material dusks, knows that himself.”

Exactly as he spoke there swept through the warm lit room a current of
ice-cold air, ruffling my hair as it passed me, and making the wood
flames on the hearth to dwindle and flare. I looked round to see if the
door at my back had opened, but nothing stirred there, and over the
closed window the curtains were fully drawn. As it reached Anthony, he
sat up quickly in his chair and directed his glance this way and that
about the room. “Did you feel that?” he asked. “Yes: a sudden draught,” I said. “Ice-cold.”

“Anything else?” he asked. “Any other sensation?”

I paused before I answered, for at the moment there occurred to me
Anthony’s differentiation of the effects produced on the beholder by
a phantasm of the living and the apparition of the dead. It was the
latter which accurately described my sensations now, a certain physical
shrinking, a fear, a feeling of desolation. But yet I had seen nothing. “I felt rather creepy,” I said. As I spoke I drew my chair rather closer to the fire, and sent a swift
and, I confess, a somewhat apprehensive scrutiny round the walls of the
brightly lit room. I noticed at the same time that Anthony was peering
across to the chimney-piece, on which, just below a sconce holding two
electric lights, stood the clock which at the beginning of our talk he
had offered to stop. The hands I noticed pointed to twenty-five minutes
to one. “But you saw nothing?” he asked. “Nothing whatever,” I said. “Why should I? What was there to see? Or
did you----”

“I don’t think so,” he said. Somehow this answer got on my nerves, for the queer feeling which had
accompanied that cold current of air had not left me. If anything it
had become more acute. “But surely you know whether you saw anything or not?” I said. “One can’t always be certain,” said he. “I say that I don’t think I
saw anything. But I’m not sure, either, whether the story I am telling
you was quite concluded last night. I think there may be a further
incident. If you prefer it, I will leave the rest of it, as far as I
know it, unfinished till to-morrow morning, and you can go off to bed
now.”

His complete calmness and tranquillity reassured me. “But why should I do that?” I asked. Again he looked round on the bright walls. “Well, I think something entered the room just now,” he said, “and
it may develop. If you don’t like the notion, you had better go. Of
course there’s nothing to be alarmed at; whatever it is, it can’t hurt
us. But it is close on the hour when on two successive nights I saw
what I have already told you, and an apparition usually occurs at the
same time. Why that is so, I cannot say, but certainly it looks as if
a spirit that is earth-bound is still subject to certain conventions,
the conventions of time for instance. I think that personally I shall
see something before long, but most likely you won’t. You’re not such a
sufferer as I from these--these delusions----”

I was frightened and knew it, but I was also intensely interested, and
some perverse pride wriggled within me at his last words. Why, so I
asked myself, shouldn’t I see whatever was to be seen?... “I don’t want to go in the least,” I said. “I want to hear the rest of
your story.”

“Where was I, then? Ah, yes: you were wondering why I didn’t do
something after I saw the train move up to the platform, and I said
that there was nothing to be done. If you think it over, I fancy you
will agree with me.... A couple of days passed, and on the third
morning I saw in the paper that there had come fulfilment to my vision. Sir Henry Payle, who had been waiting on the platform of Dover Street
Station for the last train to South Kensington, had thrown himself in
front of it as it came into the station. The train had been pulled up
in a couple of yards, but a wheel had passed over his chest, crushing
it in and instantly killing him. “An inquest was held, and there emerged at it one of those dark stories
which, on occasions like these, sometimes fall like a midnight shadow
across a life that the world perhaps had thought prosperous. He had
long been on bad terms with his wife, from whom he had lived apart,
and it appeared that not long before this he had fallen desperately in
love with another woman. The night before his suicide he had appeared
very late at his wife’s house, and had a long and angry scene with
her in which he entreated her to divorce him, threatening otherwise
to make her life a hell to her. She refused, and in an ungovernable
fit of passion he attempted to strangle her. There was a struggle, and
the noise of it caused her manservant to come up, who succeeded in
over-mastering him. Lady Payle threatened to proceed against him for
assault with the intention to murder her.