‘Will you have another glass?’ I asked.
‘I never take more than three glasses usually,’ he replied.
‘Oh, port doesn’t count,’ I answered.
He had now had four and a half glasses that evening, and had just come to a point at which such remarks as my last, however silly it may seem here, appear to have wisdom. And, as I spoke, I poured into his glass that curious shining wine, that has somewhat the taste of sherry strangely enchanted. It was now beside him, and we spoke of other things. But when he sipped the Tokay, I said to him rather haltingly, ‘I want to ask you about a future life.’
I said it haltingly, because, when two people are speaking, if one of them lacks confidence the other is more apt to assume it. Certainly Spanley did. He replied, ‘Heaven. Undoubtedly Heaven.’
‘Yes, ultimately of course,’ I said. ‘But if there were anything in the theories one sometimes hears, transmigration and all that, I was wondering if that might work first.’
There was a certain look of caution yet on his face and, so I went rambling on, rather than leave a silence in which he would have to answer, and by the answer commit himself to concealment of all I wanted to know. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘going to other lives after this one, animals and all that, and working upwards or downwards in each incarnation, according to whether or not; you know what I mean.’
And then he drained the glass and I poured out another; and, sipping that almost absently, the look of caution went, and I saw instead so beautiful a contentment reigning there in its place, flickering as it seemed with the passage of old reminiscences, that I felt that my opportunity must be come, and there and then I said to him: ‘You see I’ve been rather fond of dogs; and, if one chanced to be one of them in another incarnation, I wonder if there are any hints you could give me.’
And I seem to have caught the right memory as it floated by on waves of that wonderful wine, for he answered at once: ‘Always go out of a room first: get to the door the moment it’s opened. You may not get another chance for a long time.’
Then he seemed rather worried or puzzled by what he had said, and cleared his throat and searched, I think, for another topic; but before he had time to find one I broke in with my thanks, speaking quickly and somewhat loudly, so as to frighten his thoughts away from any new topic, and the thoughts seemed easily guided.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said, ‘very much indeed. I will say that over and over again to myself. I will get it into my very; you know, my ego. And so I shall hope to remember it. A hint like that will be invaluable. Is there anything more you could tell me, in case?’
And at the same time, while I spoke to him and held his attention, I refilled his glass with a hand that strayed outside the focus of the immediate view of either of us.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s always fleas.’
‘Yes that of course would be rather a drawback,’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he answered. ‘I rather like a few fleas; they indicate just where one’s coat needs licking.’
And a sudden look came over his face again, as though his thoughts would have strayed where I did not want them, back to strict sobriety and the duller problems of this life. To keep him to the subject that so profoundly interested me I hastily asked his advice, an act which in itself helps to hold the attention of any man.
‘How can one best ingratiate oneself, and keep in with the Masters?’
‘Ah, the Masters,’ he muttered, ‘the Great Ones. What benevolence! What wisdom! What power! And there was one incomparably greater and wiser than all of them. I remember how, if he went away for a day, it used to alter the appearance of the whole world; it affected the sunlight; there was less brightness in it, less warmth. I remember how, when he came back, I used to mix myself a good stiff whisky and soda and….’
‘But dogs,’ I said, ‘dogs don’t drink whisky.’
I learned afterwards never to interrupt him, but I couldn’t help it now, and I wanted to get the truth, and thought he was talking mere nonsense; and yet it wasn’t quite.
‘Er, er, no,’ said Dean Spanley, and fumbled awhile with his memories, till I was afraid I had lost touch with the mystery that I had planned so long to explore. I sat saying never a word. And then he went on again.
‘I got the effect,’ he said, ‘by racing round and round on the lawn, a most stimulating effect; it seems to send the blood to the head in a very exhilarating manner. What am I saying? Dear me, what am I saying?’
And I pretended not to have heard him. But I got no more that night. The curtain that cuts us off from all such knowledge had fallen. Would it ever lift again?
A few nights later I met the Dean at the club. He was clearly vague about what we had talked of when he had dined with me, but just a little uneasy. I asked him then for his exact opinion about my port, until I had established it in his mind that that was my principal interest in the evening we spent together and he felt that nothing unusual could have occurred. Many people would have practised that much deception merely to conceal from a friend that he had drunk a little more wine than he should have; but at any rate I felt justified in doing it now, when so stupendous a piece of knowledge seemed waiting just within reach. For I had not got it yet. He had said nothing as yet that had about it those unmistakable signs of truth with which words sometimes clothe themselves. I dined at the next table to him. He offered me the wine-list after he had ordered his port, but I waved it away as I thanked him, and somehow succeeded in conveying to him that I never drank ordinary wines like those. Soon after I asked him if he would care to dine again with me; and he accepted, as I felt sure, for the sake of the Tokay. And I had no Tokay. I had returned the bottle to my friend, and I could not ask for any of that wine from him again. Now I chanced to have met a Maharajah at a party; and, fixing an appointment by telephoning his secretary, I went to see him at his hotel. To put it briefly, I explained to him that the proof of the creed of the Hindus was within my grasp, and that the key to it was imperial Tokay. If he cared to put up the money that would purchase the imperial Tokay, he would receive nothing less than the proof of an important part of his creed. He seemed not so keen as I thought he would be, though whether because his creed had no need of proof, or whether because he had doubts of it, I never discovered. If it were the latter, he concealed it in the end by agreeing to do what I wished; though, as for the money, he said: ‘But why not the Tokay?’ And it turned out that he had in his cellars a little vault that was full of it. ‘A dozen bottles shall be here in a fortnight,’ he said.
A dozen bottles! I felt that with that I could unlock Dean Spanley’s heart, and give to the Maharajah a strange secret that perhaps he knew already, and to much of the human race a revelation that they had only guessed.
I had not yet fixed the date of my dinner with Dean Spanley, so I rang him up and fixed it with him a fortnight later and one day to spare.
And sure enough, on the day the Maharajah had promised, there arrived at his hotel a box from India containing a dozen of that wonderful wine. He telephoned to me when it arrived, and I went at once to see him. He received me with the greatest amiability, and yet he strangely depressed me; for,