“It’s a convention,” said Anthony Carling
cheerfully, “and not a very convincing one. Time, indeed! There’s no
such thing as Time really; it has no actual existence. Time is nothing
more than an infinitesimal point in eternity, lust as space is an
infinitesimal point in infinity. At the most, Time is a sort of tunnel
through which we are accustomed to believe that we are travelling.
There’s a roar in our ears and a darkness in our eyes which makes it
seem real to us. But before we came into the tunnel we existed for ever
in an infinite sunlight, and after we have got through it we shall exist
in an infinite sunlight again. 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 tartoo 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 ye 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. I do
not, at any rate, expect to experience any more of it. Well, a month ago
I was returning late on a very wet night from dining out. There was not
a taxi to be had, and I hurried through the pouring rain to the
tube-station at Piccadilly Circus, and thought myself very lucky to
catch the last train in this direction. The carriage into which I
stepped was quite empty except for one other passenger, who sat next the
door immediately opposite to me. I had never, to my knowledge, seen him
before, but I found my attention vividly fixed on him, as if he somehow
concerned me. He was a man of middle age, in dress-clothes, and his face
wore an expression of intense thought, as if in his mind he was
pondering some very significant matter, and his hand which was resting
on his knee clenched and unclenched itself. Suddenly he looked up and
stared me in the face, and I saw there suspicion and fear, as if I had
surprised him in some secret deed.
“At that moment we stopped at Dover
Street, and the conductor threw open the doors, announced the station
and added, ‘Change here for Hyde Park Corner and Gloucester Road.’
That was all right for me since it meant that the train would stop at
Brompton Road, which was my destination. It was all right apparently,
too, for my companion, for he certainly did not get out, and after a
moment’s stop, during which no one else got in, we went on. I saw him,
I must insist, after the doors were closed and the train had started.
But when I looked again, as we rattled on, I saw that there was no one
there. I was quite alone in the carriage.
“Now you may think that I had had one
of those swift momentary dreams which flash in and out of the mind in
the space of a second, but I did not believe it was so myself, for I
felt that I had experienced some sort of premonition or clairvoyant
vision. A man, the semblance of whom, astral body or whatever you may
choose to call it, I had just seen, would sometime sit in that seat
opposite to me, pondering and planning.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why should
it have been the astral body of a living man which you thought you had
seen? Why not the ghost of a dead one?”
“Because of my own sensations. The
sight of the spirit of someone dead, which has occurred to me two or
three times in my life, has always been accompanied by a physical
shrinking and fear, and by the sensation of cold and of loneliness. I
believed, at any rate, that I had seen a phantom of the living, and that
impression was confirmed, I might say proved, the next day. For I met
the man himself. And the next night, as you shall hear, I met the
phantom again. We will take them in order.
“I was lunching, then, the next day
with my neighbour Mrs. Stanley: there was a small party, and when I
arrived we waited but for the final guest. He entered while I was
talking to some friend, and presently at my elbow I heard Mrs.
Stanley’s voice— “‘Let me introduce you to Sir Henry Payle,’
she said.
“I turned and saw my vis-à-vis
of the night before. It was quite unmistakably he, and as we shook
hands he looked at me I thought with vague and puzzled recognition.
“‘Haven’t we met before, Mr.
Carling?’ he said. ‘I seem to recollect—’
“For the moment I forgot the strange
manner of his disappearance from the carriage, and thought that it had
been the man himself whom I had seen last night.
“Surely, and not so long ago,’ I
said. ‘For we sat opposite each other in the last tube-train from
Piccadilly Circus yesterday night.’
“He still looked at me, frowning,
puzzled, and shook his head.
“‘That can hardly be,’ he said.
‘I only came up from the country this morning.’
“Now this interested me profoundly,
for the astral body, we are told, abides in some half-conscious region
of the mind or spirit, and has recollections of what has happened to it,
which it can convey only very vaguely and dimly to the conscious mind.
All lunch-time I could see his eyes again and again directed to me with
the same puzzled and perplexed air, and as I was taking my departure he
came up to me.
“‘I shall recollect some day,’ he
said, ‘where we met before, and I hope we may meet again. Was it
not—?’ — and he stopped. ‘No: it has gone from me,’ he
added.”
The log that Anthony had thrown on the
fire was burning bravely now, and its high-flickering flame lit up his
face.
“Now, I don’t know whether you
believe in coincidences as chance things,” he said, “but if you do,
get rid of the notion. Or if you can’t at once, call it a coincidence
that that very night I again caught the last train on the tube going
westwards. This time, so far from my being a solitary passenger, there
was a considerable crowd waiting at Dover Street, where I entered, and
just as the noise of the approaching train began to reverberate in the
tunnel I caught sight of Sir Henry Payle standing near the opening from
which the train would presently emerge, apart from the rest of the
crowd. And I thought to myself how odd it was that I should have seen
the phantom of him at this very hour last night and the man himself now,
and I began walking towards him with the idea of saying, ‘Anyhow, it
is in the tube that we meet to-night.’ ... And then a terrible and
awful thing happened. Just as the train emerged from the tunnel he
jumped down on to the line in front of it, and the train swept along
over him up the platform.
“For a moment I was stricken with
horror at the sight, and I remember covering my eyes against the
dreadful tragedy. But then I perceived that, though it had taken place
in full sight of those who were waiting, no one seemed to have seen it
except myself. The driver, looking out from his window, had not applied
his brakes, there was no jolt from the advancing train, no scream, no
cry, and the rest of the passengers began boarding the train with
perfect nonchalance. I must have staggered, for I felt sick and faint
with what I had seen, and some kindly soul put his arm round me and
supported me into the train. He was a doctor, he told me, and asked if I
was in pain, or what ailed me. I told him what I thought I had seen, and
he assured me that no such accident had taken place.
“It was clear then to my own mind
that I had seen the second act, so to speak, in this psychical drama,
and I pondered next morning over the problem as to what I should do.
Already I had glanced at the morning paper, which, as I knew would be
the case, contained no mention whatever of what I had seen. The thing
had certainly not happened, but I knew in myself that it would happen.
The flimsy veil of Time had been withdrawn from my eyes, and I had seen
into what you would call the future. In terms of Time of course it was
the future, but from my point of view the thing was just as much in the
past as it was in the future. It existed, and waited only for its
material fulfilment. The more I thought about it, the more I saw that I
could do nothing.”
I interrupted his narrative.
“You did nothing?” I exclaimed.
“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 overmastering him. Lady Payle threatened to proceed
against him for assault with the intention to murder her. With this
hanging over his head, the next night, as I have already told you, he
committed suicide.”
He glanced at the clock again, and I
saw that the hands now pointed to ten minutes to one. The fire was
beginning to burn low and the room surely was growing strangely cold.
“That’s not quite all,” said
Anthony, again looking round. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to
hear it to-morrow?”
The mixture of shame and pride and
curiosity again prevailed.
“No: tell me the rest of it at
once,” I said.
Before speaking, he peered suddenly at
some point behind my chair, shading his eyes. I followed his glance, and
knew what he meant by saying that sometimes one could not be sure
whether one saw something or not. But was that an outlined shadow that
intervened between me and the wall? It was difficult to focus; I did not
know whether it was near the wall or near my chair. It seemed to clear
away, anyhow, as I looked more closely at it.
“You see nothing?” asked Anthony.
“No: I don’t think so,” said I.
“And you?”
“I think I do,” he said, and his
eyes followed something which was invisible to mine. They came to rest
between him and the chimney-piece. Looking steadily there, he spoke
again.
“All this happened some weeks ago,”
he said, “when you were out in Switzerland, and since then, up till
last night, I saw nothing further. But all the time I was expecting
something further. I felt that, as far as I was concerned, it was not
all over yet, and last night, with the intention of
assisting any
communication to come through to me from — from beyond, I went into
the Dover Street tube-station at a few minutes before one o’clock, the
hour at which both the assault and the suicide had taken place. The
platform when I arrived on it was absolutely empty, or appeared to be
so, but presently, just as I began to hear the roar of the approaching
train, I saw there was the figure of a man standing some twenty yards
from me, looking into the tunnel. He had not come down with me in the
lift, and the moment before he had not been there. He began moving
towards me, and then I saw who it was, and I felt a stir of wind
icy-cold coming towards me as he approached. It was not the draught that
heralds the approach of a train, for it came from the opposite
direction. He came close up to me, and I saw there was recognition in
his eyes. He raised his face towards me and I saw his lips move, but,
perhaps in the increasing noise from the tunnel, I heard nothing come
from them. He put out his hand, as if entreating me to do something, and
with a cowardice for which I cannot forgive myself, I shrank from him,
for I knew, by the sign that I have told you, that this was one from the
dead, and my flesh quaked before him, drowning for the moment all pity
and all desire to help him, if that was possible. Certainly he had something
which he wanted of me, but I recoiled from him. And by now the train was
emerging from the tunnel, and next moment, with a dreadful gesture of
despair, he threw himself in front of it.”
As he finished speaking he got up
quickly from his chair, still looking fixedly in front of him. I saw his
pupils dilate, and his mouth worked.
“It is coming,” he said. “I am to
be given a chance of atoning for my cowardice. There is nothing to be
afraid of: I must remember that myself..
As he spoke there came from the
panelling above the chimney-piece one loud shattering crack, and the
cold wind again circled about my head. I found myself shrinking back in
my chair with my hands held in front of me as instinctively I screened
myself against something which I knew was there but which I could not
see. Every sense told me that there was a presence in the room other
than mine and Anthony’s, and the horror of it was that I could not see
it. Any vision, however terrible, would, I felt, be more tolerable than
this clear certain knowledge that close to me was this invisible thing.
And yet what horror might not be disclosed of the face of the dead and
the crushed chest ... But all I could see, as I shuddered in this cold
wind, was the familiar walls of the room, and Anthony standing in front
of me stiff and firm, making, as I knew, a call on his courage. His eyes
were focused on something quite close to him, and some semblance of a
smile quivered on his mouth. And then he spoke again.
“Yes, I know you,” he said. “And
you want something of me. Tell me, then, what it is.”
There was absolute silence, but what
was silence to my ears could not have been so to his, for once or twice
he nodded, and once he said, “Yes: I see. I will do it.” And with
the knowledge that, even as there was someone here whom I could not
see, so there was speech going on which I could not hear, this terror of
the dead and of the unknown rose in me with the sense of powerlessness
to move that accompanies nightmare. I could not stir, I could not speak.
I could only strain my ears for the inaudible and my eyes for the
unseen, while the cold wind from the very valley of the shadow of death
streamed over me. It was not that the presence of death itself was terrible;
it was that from its tranquillity and serene keeping there had been
driven some unquiet soul unable to rest in peace for whatever ultimate
awakening rouses the countless generations of those who have passed
away, driven, no less, from whatever activities are theirs, back into
the material world from which it should have been delivered. Never,
until the gulf between the living and the dead was thus bridged, had it
seemed so immense and so unnatural. It is possible that the dead may
have communication with the living, and it was not that exactly that
so terrified me, for such communication, as we know it, comes
voluntarily from them. But here was something icy-cold and crime-laden,
that was chased back from the peace that would not pacify it.
And then, most horrible of all, there
came a change in these unseen conditions. Anthony was silent now, and
from looking straight and fixedly in front of him, he began to glance
sideways to where I sat and back again, and with that I felt that the
unseen presence had turned its attention from him to me. And now, too,
gradually and by awful degrees I began to see ...
There came an outline of shadow across
the chimney-piece and the panels above it. It took shape: it fashioned
itself into the outline of a man. Within the shape of the shadow details
began to form themselves, and I saw wavering in the air, like something
concealed by haze, the semblance of a face, stricken and tragic, and
burdened with such a weight of woe as no human face had ever worn. Next,
the shoulders outlined themselves, and a stain livid and red spread out
below them, and suddenly the vision leaped into clearness. There he
stood, the chest crushed in and drowned in the red stain, from which
broken ribs, like the bones of a wrecked ship, protruded. The mournful,
terrible eyes were fixed on me, and it was from them, so I knew, that
the bitter wind proceeded ...
Then, quick as the switching off of a
lamp, the spectre vanished, and the bitter wind was still, and opposite
to me stood Anthony, in a quiet, bright-lit room. There was no sense of
an unseen presence any more; he and I were then alone, with an
interrupted conversation still dangling between us in the warm air. I
came round to that, as one comes round after an anesthetic. It all swam
into sight again, unreal at first, and gradually assuming the texture of
actuality.
“You were talking to somebody, not to
me,” I said. “Who was it? What was it?”
He passed the back of his hand over his
forehead, which glistened in the light.
“A soul in hell,” he said.
Now it is hard ever to recall mere
physical sensations, when they have passed. If you have been cold and
are warmed, it is difficult to remember what cold was like: if you have
been hot and have got cool, it is difficult to realise what the
oppression of heat really meant. Just so, with the passing of that presence,
I found myself unable to recapture the sense of the terror with which,
a few moments ago only, it had invaded and inspired me.
“A soul in hell?” I said. “What
are you talking about?”
He moved about the room for a minute or
so, and then came and sat on the arm of my chair.
“I don’t know what you saw,” he
said, “or what you felt, but there has never in all my life happened
to me anything more real than what these last few minutes have brought.
I have talked to a soul in the hell of remorse, which is the only
possible hell. He knew, from what happened last night, that he could
perhaps establish communication through me with the world he had
quitted, and he sought me and found me. I am charged with a mission to a
woman I have never seen, a message from the contrite ... You can guess
who it is...”
He got up with a sudden briskness.
“Let’s verify it anyhow,” he
said. “He gave me the street and the number. Ah, there’s the
telephone book! Would it be a coincidence merely if I found that at No.
20 in Chasemore Street, South Kensington, there lived a Lady Payle?”
He turned over the leaves of the bulky
volume.
“Yes, that’s right,” he said.
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From Your Dark Side
