Coombe House had been transformed into one of the most practical nursing
homes in London. The celebrated ballroom and picture gallery were filled
with cots; a spacious bedroom had become a perfectly equipped operating
room; nurses and doctors moved everywhere with quiet swiftness. Things
were said to be marvellously well done because Lord Coombe himself held
reins which diplomatically guided and restrained amateurishness and
emotional infelicities.
He spent most of his time, when he was in the house, in the room on the
entrance floor where Mademoiselle had found him when she had come to him
in her search for Robin.
He had faced ghastly hours there as the war news struck its hideous
variant note from day to day. Every sound which rolled through the
street had its meaning for him, and there were few which were not
terrible. They all meant inhuman struggle, inhuman suffering, inhuman
passions, and wounds or death. He carried an unmoved face and a
well-held head through the crowded thoroughfares. The men in the cots in
his picture gallery and his ballroom were the better for the outward
calm he brought when he sat and talked to them, but he often hid a mad
fury in his breast or a heavy and sick fatigue.
Even in London a man saw and heard and was able, if he had an
imagination, to visualise too much to remain quite normal. He had seen
what was left of strong men brought back from the Front, men who could
scarcely longer be counted as really living human beings; he had talked
to men on leave who had a hideous hardness in their haggard eyes and who
did not know that they gnawed at their lips sometimes as they told the
things they had seen. He saw the people going into the churches and
chapels. He sometimes went into such places himself and he always found
there huddled forms kneeling in the pews, even when no service was being
held. Sometimes they were men, sometimes women, and often they writhed
and sobbed horribly. He did not know why he went in; his going seemed
only part of some surging misery.
He heard weird stories again and again of occult happenings. He had been
told all the details of Lady Maureen's case and of a number of other
cases somewhat resembling it. He was of those who have advanced through
experience to the point where entire disbelief in anything is not easy.
This was the more so because almost all previously accepted laws had
been shaken as by an earthquake. He had fallen upon a new sort of book
drifting about. He had had such books put into his hands by
acquaintances, some of whom were of the impressionable hysteric order,
but many of whom were as analytically minded as himself. He found much
of such literature in the book shops. He began to look over the best
written and ended by reading them with deep attention. He was amazed to
discover that for many years profoundly scientific men had been
seriously investigating and experimenting with mysteries unexplainable
by the accepted laws of material science. They had discussed, argued and
written grave books upon them. They had been doing all this before any
society for psychical research had founded itself and the intention of
new logic was to be scientific rather than psychological. They had
written books, scattered through the years, on mesmerism, hypnosis,
abnormal mental conditions, the powers of suggestion, even unexplored
dimensions and in modern days psychotherapeutics.
"What has amazed me is my own ignorance of the prolonged and serious
nature of the investigation of an astonishing subject," he said in
talking with the Duchess. "To realise that analytical minds have been
doing grave work of which one has known nothing is an actual shock to
one's pride. I suppose the tendency would have been to pooh-pooh it. The
cheap, modern popular form is often fantastic and crude, but there
remains the fact that it all contains truths not to be explained by the
rules we have always been familiar with."
The Duchess had read the book he had brought her and held it in her
hands.
"Perhaps the time has come, in which we are to learn the new ones," she
said.
"Perhaps we are being forced to learn them--as a result of our
pooh-poohing," was his answer. "Some of us may learn that clear-cut
disbelief is at least indiscreet."
Therefore upon a certain morning he sat long in reflection over a letter
which had arrived from Dowie. He read it a number of times.
* * * * *
"I don't know what your lordship may think," Dowie said and he felt she
held herself with a tight rein. "If I may say so, it's what's going to
come out of it that matters and not what any of us think of it. So far
it seems as if a miracle had happened. About a week ago she wakened in
the morning looking as I'd been afraid she'd never look again. There was
actually colour in her thin little face that almost made it look not so
thin. There was a light in her eyes that quite startled me. She lay on
her bed and smiled like a child that's suddenly put out of pain. She
said--quite quiet and natural--that she'd seen her husband. She said he
had _come_ and talked to her a long time and that it was not a dream,
and he was not an angel--he was himself. At first I was terrified by a
dreadful thought that her poor young mind had given way. But she had no
fever and she was as sweet and sensible as if she was talking to her
Dowie in her own nursery. And, my lord, this is what does matter. She
sat up and _ate her breakfast_ and said she would take a walk with me.
And walk she did--stronger and better than I'd have believed. She had a
cup of tea and a glass of milk and a fresh egg and a slice of hot
buttered toast. That's what I hold on to, my lord--without any thinking.
I daren't write about it at first because I didn't trust it to last. But
she has wakened in the same way every morning since. And she's eaten the
bits of nice meals I've put before her. I've been careful not to put her
appetite off by giving her more than a little at a time. And she's slept
like a baby and walked every day. I believe she thinks she sees Captain
Muir every night. I wouldn't ask questions, but she spoke of it once
again to me.
"Your obedient servant,
SARAH ANN DOWSON."
Lord Coombe sat in interested reflection. He felt curiously uplifted
above the rolling sounds in the street and the headlines of the pile of
newspapers on the table.
"If it had not been for the tea and egg and buttered toast she would
have been sure the poor child was mad." He thought it out. "An egg and a
slice of buttered toast guarantee even spiritual things. Why not? We are
material creatures who have only material sight and touch and taste to
employ as arguments. I suppose that is why tables are tipped, and
banjos fly about for beginners. It's because we cannot see other things,
and what we cannot see-- Oh! fools that we are! The child said he was
not an angel--he was himself. Why not? Where did he come from?
Personally I believe that he _came_."