So why should we bother ourselves about the confusion and noise and
darkness which only encompass us for a moment?”

For a firm-rooted believer in such immeasurable ideas as these, which
he punctuated with brisk application of the poker to the brave sparkle
and glow of the fire, Anthony has a very pleasant appreciation of the
measurable and the finite, and nobody with whom I have acquaintance has
so keen a zest for life and its enjoyments as he. He had given us this
evening an admirable dinner, had passed round a port beyond praise,
and had illuminated the jolly hours with the light of his infectious
optimism. Now the small company had melted away, and I was left with
him over the fire in his study. Outside the tattoo of wind-driven sleet
was audible on the window-panes, over-scoring now and again the flap
of the flames on the open hearth, and the thought of the chilly blasts
and the snow-covered pavement in Brompton Square, across which, to
skidding taxicabs, the last of his other guests had scurried, made my
position, resident here till to-morrow morning, the more delicately
delightful. Above all there was this stimulating and suggestive
companion, who, whether he talked of the great abstractions which were
so intensely real and practical to him, or of the very remarkable
experiences which he had encountered among these conventions of time
and space, was equally fascinating to the listener. “I adore life,” he said. “I find it the most entrancing plaything. It’s
a delightful game, and, as you know very well, the only conceivable
way to play a game is to treat it extremely seriously. If you say to
yourself, ‘It’s only a game,’ you cease to take the slightest interest
in it. You have to know that it’s only a game, and behave as if it
was the one object of existence. I should like it to go on for many
years yet. But all the time one has to be living on the true plane as
well, which is eternity and infinity. If you come to think of it, the
one thing which the human mind cannot grasp is the finite, not the
infinite, the temporary, not the eternal.”

“That sounds rather paradoxical,” said I. “Only because you’ve made a habit of thinking about things that seem
bounded and limited. Look it in the face for a minute. Try to imagine
finite Time and Space, and you find you can’t. Go back a million
years, and multiply that million of years by another million, and you
find that you can’t conceive of a beginning. What happened before
that beginning? Another beginning and another beginning? And before
that? Look at it like that, and you find that the only solution
comprehensible to you is the existence of an eternity, something that
never began and will never end. It’s the same about space. Project
yourself to the farthest star, and what comes beyond that? Emptiness? Go on through the emptiness, and you can’t imagine it being finite and
having an end. It must needs go on for ever: that’s the only thing
you can understand. There’s no such thing as before or after, or
beginning or end, and what a comfort that is! I should fidget myself
to death if there wasn’t the huge soft cushion of eternity to lean
one’s head against. Some people say--I believe I’ve heard you say it
yourself--that the idea of eternity is so tiring; you feel that you
want to stop. But that’s because you are thinking of eternity in terms
of Time, and mumbling in your brain, ‘And after that, and after that?’
Don’t you grasp the idea that in eternity there isn’t any ‘after,’
any more than there is any ‘before’? It’s all one. Eternity isn’t a
quantity: it’s a quality.”

Sometimes, when Anthony talks in this manner, I seem to get a glimpse
of that which to his mind is so transparently clear and solidly
real, at other times (not having a brain that readily envisages
abstractions) I feel as though he was pushing me over a precipice,
and my intellectual faculties grasp wildly at anything tangible or
comprehensible. This was the case now, and I hastily interrupted. “But there is a ‘before’ and ‘after,’” I said. “A few hours ago you
gave us an admirable dinner, and after that--yes, after--we played
bridge. And now you are going to explain things a little more clearly
to me, and after that I shall go to bed----”

He laughed. “You shall do exactly as you like,” he said, “and you shan’t be a slave
to Time either to-night or to-morrow morning. We won’t even mention
an hour for breakfast, but you shall have it in eternity whenever you
awake. And as I see it is not midnight yet, we’ll slip the bonds of
Time, and talk quite infinitely. I will stop the clock, if that will
assist you in getting rid of your illusion, and then I’ll tell you a
story, which to my mind, shows how unreal so-called realities are; or,
at any rate, how fallacious are our senses as judges of what is real
and what is not.”

“Something occult, something spookish?” I asked, pricking up my ears,
for Anthony has the strangest clairvoyances and visions of things
unseen by the normal eye. “I suppose you might call some of it occult,” he said, “though there’s
a certain amount of rather grim reality mixed up in it.”

“Go on; excellent mixture,” said I. He threw a fresh log on the fire. “It’s a longish story,” he said. “You may stop me as soon as you’ve
had enough. But there will come a point for which I claim your
consideration. You, who cling to your ‘before’ and ‘after,’ has it
ever occurred to you how difficult it is to say _when_ an incident
takes place? Say that a man commits some crime of violence, can we
not, with a good deal of truth, say that he really commits that crime
when he definitely plans and determines upon it, dwelling on it with
gusto? The actual commission of it, I think we can reasonably argue,
is the mere material sequel of his resolve: he is guilty of it when he
makes that determination. When, therefore, in the term of ‘before’ and
‘after,’ does the crime truly take place? There is also in my story a
further point for your consideration. For it seems certain that the
spirit of a man, after the death of his body, is obliged to re-enact
such a crime, with a view, I suppose we may guess, to his remorse and
his eventual redemption. Those who have second sight have seen such
re-enactments. Perhaps he may have done his deed blindly in this life;
but then his spirit re-commits it with its spiritual eyes open, and
able to comprehend its enormity. So, shall we view the man’s original
determination and the material commission of his crime only as preludes
to the real commission of it, when with eyes unsealed he does it and
repents of it?... That all sounds very obscure when I speak in the
abstract, but I think you will see what I mean, if you follow my tale. Comfortable? Got everything you want? Here goes, then.”

He leaned back in his chair, concentrating his mind, and then spoke:

“The story that I am about to tell you,” he said, “had its beginning
a month ago, when you were away in Switzerland. It reached its
conclusion, so I imagine, last night.