A Passage to India - E. M. Forster [99]
“How can that be?”
“Let us go back to hallucinations. I was watching you carefully through your evidence this morning, and if I’m right, the hallucination (what you call half pressure—quite as good a word) disappeared suddenly.”
She tried to remember what she had felt in court, but could not; the vision disappeared whenever she wished to interpret it. “Events presented themselves to me in their logical sequence,” was what she said, but it hadn’t been that at all.
“My belief—and of course I was listening carefully, in hope you would make some slip—my belief is that poor McBryde exorcised you. As soon as he asked you a straightforward question, you gave a straightforward answer, and broke down.”
“Exorcise in that sense. I thought you meant I’d seen a ghost.”
“I don’t go to that length!”
“People whom I respect very much believe in ghosts,” she said rather sharply. “My friend Mrs. Moore does.”
“She’s an old lady.”
“I think you need not be impolite to her, as well as to her son.”
“I did not intend to be rude. I only meant it is difficult, as we get on in life, to resist the supernatural. I’ve felt it coming on me myself. I still jog on without it, but what a temptation, at forty-five, to pretend that the dead live again; one’s own dead; no one else’s matter.”
“Because the dead don’t live again.”
“I fear not.”
“So do I.”
There was a moment’s silence, such as often follows the triumph of rationalism. Then he apologized handsomely enough for his behaviour to Heaslop at the club.
“What does Dr. Aziz say of me?” she asked, after another pause.
“He—he has not been capable of thought in his misery, naturally he’s very bitter,” said Fielding, a little awkward, because such remarks as Aziz had made were not merely bitter, they were foul. The underlying notion was, “It disgraces me to have been mentioned in connection with such a hag.” It enraged him that he had been accused by a woman who had no personal beauty; sexually, he was a snob. This had puzzled and worried Fielding. Sensuality, as long as it is straightforward, did not repel him, but this derived sensuality—the sort that classes a mistress among motor-cars if she is beautiful, and among eye-flies if she isn’t—was alien to his own emotions, and he felt a barrier between himself and Aziz whenever it arose. It was, in a new form, the old, old trouble that eats the heart out of every civilization snobbery, the desire for possessions, creditable appendages; and it is to escape this rather than the lusts of the flesh that saints retreat into the Himalayas. To change the subject, he said, “But let me conclude my analysis. We are agreed that he is not a villain and that you are not one, and we aren’t really sure that it was an hallucination. There’s a fourth possibility which we must touch on: was it somebody else?”
“The guide.”
“Exactly, the guide. I often think so. Unluckily Aziz hit him on the face, and he got a fright and disappeared. It is most unsatisfactory, and we hadn’t the police to help us, the guide was of no interest to them.”
“Perhaps it was the guide,” she said quietly; the question had lost interest for her suddenly.
“Or could it have been one of that gang of Pathans who have been drifting through the district?”
“Someone who was in another cave, and followed me when the guide was looking away? Possibly.”
At that moment Hamidullah joined them, and seemed not too pleased to find them closeted together. Like everyone else in Chandrapore, he could make nothing of Miss Quested’s conduct. He had overheard their last remark. “Hullo, my dear Fielding,” he said. “So I run you down at last. Can you come out at once to Dilkusha?”
“At once?”
“I hope to leave in a moment, don’t let me interrupt,” said Adela.
“The telephone has been broken; Miss Quested can’t ring up her friends,” he explained.
“A great deal has been broken, more than will ever be mended,” said the other. “Still, there should be some way of transporting this lady back to the civil lines. The resources of civilization are numerous.” He spoke without lo