Lydia was the next to speak.
“This is getting the limit!” she exclaimed. Her voice had a low, rich quality. “What about interviewing the guard again and asking if there’s any hope of moving before next June?”
“I asked him ten minutes ago,” said the bore. “I won’t repeat what he said!”
“Not necessary,” yawned David. “We have imaginations.”
“Yes, and it seems we’ll need our imaginations to-night!” chimed in the chorus girl. “I’ll have to imagine I’m in Manchester!”
“Will you? We shall have to imagine we are at a Christmas house-party,” smiled Lydia, “sleeping on downy beds. By the way, if we’re in for an all-night session I hope the railway company will supply hot-water bottles!” Suddenly she caught the clerk’s eye. She surprised the admiration in it, and was kind. “What will you have to imagine?” she asked. The catastrophe of the snowdrift and the camaraderie of Christmas were loosening tongues. The bore alone had needed no encouragement.
The clerk coloured, though his cheeks were already flushed with fever.
“Eh? Oh! An aunt,” he jerked.
“If she’s like mine, she’s best left to the imagination!” laughed Lydia. “But then she probably isn’t.”
The clerk’s aunt was not like Lydia’s aunt. She was even more trying. But her dutiful nephew visited her periodically, partly for the sake of his financial future, and partly because he had a secret weakness for lonely people.
A little silence fell upon the party. The only one who thought it mattered was the chorus girl. A nervous restlessness possessed her soul, and she declared afterwards that she was sure she had been the first to move unconsciously into the shadow of coming events. “Because, goodness, I was all on edge,” she said, “and why should I have been, I mean nothing had happened yet, and so far the old man in the corner hadn’t opened his mouth. I don’t believe he’d even opened his eyes, he might have been dead. And then, don’t forget, he was right opposite me! And they say I’m psychic.”
But her vague anticipations were not centred solely in the old man in the corner. She, too, had noticed the quick little, half-sly glances of the elderly bore, who, as she knew, was not too elderly to think about her in a certain way. She had also noticed the clerk’s eyes upon her leg, and the rather studious avoidance of any such vulgar interest on the part of the other young man. If Jessie Noyes was very conscious of her physical attractions she claimed it was her business to be. She was well aware of both her power and the limitation of her power, and while the power, despite its small thrills, gave her a secret dread, the limitation was a secret sorrow. How wonderful to be able to conquer a man wholly and eternally, instead of being just an ephemeral taste! Still, she was not bitter. She was anxious and nervous and warm. Life was life....
Driven now by her restlessness, and finding the silence unendurable, she broke it by suddenly exclaiming:
“Well, lets go on! That’s only four of us! What will you have to imagine?”
The question was addressed, not too wisely, to the bore.
“Me? Imagine?” he answered. “I don’t know it’s my habit to imagine. Take things as they come—good, bad, or indifferent—that’s my motto. You learn that when you’ve knocked around as I have.”
“Perhaps I can be more interesting,” said the old man in the corner, opening his eyes suddenly.
He was neither dead nor asleep. As a matter of fact, he had heard every word that had been uttered since the train had steamed out of Euston at 11.37, and the probability of this made more than one of the five people who now turned to him feel a little uncanny. Not that he had heard anything he should not have heard; but a man who listens with his eyes closed, and whose eyes themselves become so peculiarly alive when they are opened—these eyes were like little lamps illuminating things invisible to others—is not the best tonic for frayed nerves.
“Please do, sir,” answered David, after a short pause. “And invent a really good story for us—ours have been most definitely dull.”
“Oh, mine is interesting without any invention,” replied the old man, “and also, incidentally, rather appropriate to the season. I am on my way to interview King Charles the First.”
“Really! With head, or without?” inquired David politely.
“With, I trust,” the old man responded. “I am informed he is quite complete. We are to meet in an old house at Naseby. Frankly I am not very confident that the interview will occur. Charles the First may be bashful, or he may turn out to be just some ordinary cavalier hiding from Cromwell and Fairfax. After three hundred years, identity becomes a trifle confused.” He smiled with cynical humour. “Or, again, he may be—non est. Simply the imagination of certain nervous people who think they have seen him about. But, of course,” he added, after pursing his thin lips, “there is some possibility that he really is about. Yes, yes; if that over-maligned and over-glorified monarch did visit the house on the day of his defeat, and if the house’s walls have stored up any emotional incidents that I can set free, we may add an interesting page to our history.”
“Don’t think me rude,” exclaimed Lydia, “but do you really and truly believe in that sort of thing?”
“Exactly what do you mean by ‘that sort of thing’?” asked the old man.
His tone was disapproving. The elderly bore took up the battle.
“Spooks and ghosts!” he grunted. “Pooh, I say! Stuff and nonsense! I’ve seen the Indian rope trick—yes, and exploded it! In Rangoon. ’23.”
“Spooks and ghosts,” repeated the old man, his disapproval now diverted to the bore. The guard’s voice sounded from a corridor in the distance. Though faint, the source of that was solid enough. “H’m—terms are deceptive. The only true language has no words, which explains, sir, why some people who speak too many words have no understanding.”
“Eh?”
“Now if, by your expression spooks and ghosts, you imply conscious emanations, aftermaths of physical existence capable of independent functioning of a semi-earthly character, well, then I probably do not believe in that sort of thing. There are others, of course, whose opinions I respect, who disagree with me. They consider that you, sir, are doomed to exist perpetually in some form or other. That is, perhaps, a depressing thought. But if, by spooks and ghosts, you imply emanations recreated by acute living sensitiveness or intelligence from the inexhaustible store-houses of the past, then I do believe in that sort of thing. Inevitably.”
The elderly bore was temporarily crushed. So was the chorus girl. But the brother and sister, anxious to be au fait with every phase of progressive thought, if only to discard it, and equipped with sufficient fortitude to withstand its shocks, were intrigued.
“Reduced to words of not more than two syllables,” said David, “you mean we can conjure up the past?”
“Conjure up is not a happy term,” answered the old man. “It suggests magic, and there is nothing magical