‘He comes in—oh, it’s a positive fact, for I’ve
seen him myself, just sitting back in my chair here, you know, watching
him as one would a tramp in one’s orchard.’ He cast a candid glance
over his shoulder. ‘First he looks round, like a prying servant. Then
he comes cautiously on—a kind of grizzled, fawn-coloured face,
middle-size, with big hands; and then just like some quiet, groping,
nocturnal creature, he begins his precious search—shelves, drawers that
are not here, cupboards gone years ago, questing and nosing no end, and
quite methodically too, until he reaches the window. Then he stops,
looks back, narrows his foxy lids, listens—quite perceptibly, you know,
a kind of gingerish blur; then he seems to open this corner bookcase
here, as if it were a door and goes out along what I suppose might at
some time have been an outside gallery or balcony, unless, as I rather
fancy, the house extended once beyond these windows. Anyhow, out he
goes quite deliberately, treading the air as lightly as Botticelli’s
angels, until, however far you lean out of the window, you can’t follow
him any further. And then—and this is the bit that takes one’s
fancy—when you have contentedly noddled down again to whatever you may
have been doing when the wretch appeared, or are sitting in a cold
sweat, with bolting eyes awaiting developments, just according to your
school of thought, or of nerves, the creature comes back—comes back;
and with what looks uncommonly like a lighted candle in his hand. That
really is a thrill, I assure you.’

‘But you’ve seen this—you’ve really seen this yourself?’

‘Oh yes, twice,’ replied Herbert cheerfully. ‘And my sister, quite by
haphazard, once saw him from the garden. She was shelling peas one
evening for Sallie, and she distinctly saw him shamble out of the
window here, and go shuffling along, mid-air, across the roaring
washpot down below, turn sharp round the high corner of the house,
sheer against the stars, in a kind of frightened hurry. And then, after
five minutes’ concentrated watching over the shucks, she saw him come
shuffling back again—the same distraction, the same nebulous snuff
colour, and a candle trailing its smoke behind him as he whisked in
home.’

‘And then?’

‘Ah, then,’ said Herbert, lagging along the bookshelves, and scanning
the book-backs with eyes partially closed: he turned with lifted
teapot, and refilled his visitor’s cup; ‘then, wherever you are—I
mean,’ he added, cutting up a little cake into six neat slices,
‘wherever the chance inmate of the room happens to be, he comes
straight for you, at a quite alarming velocity, and fades, vanishes,
melts, or, as it were, silts inside.’

Lawford listened in a curious hush that had suddenly fallen over his
mind. ‘“Fades inside? silts?”—I’m awfully stupid, but what on earth do
you mean?’ The room had slowly emptied itself of daylight; its own
darkness, it seemed, had met that of the narrowing night, and Herbert
deliberately lit a cigarette before replying. His clear pale face, with
its smooth outline and thin mouth and rather long dark eyes, turned
with a kind of serene good-humour towards his questioner. ‘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. ‘“Bizarre,” you said; God knows _I_ am.’ But Herbert still remained
obdurately silent. ‘You remember, perhaps,’ Lawford faintly began
again, ‘our talk the other night?’

‘Oh, rather,’ replied the cordial voice out of the dusk. ‘I suppose you thought I was insane?’

‘Insane!’ There was a genuinely amused astonishment in the echo. ‘You
were lucidity itself.