The speaker stopped and one of the party, visibly affected, asked:
“And you say you can explain that?”
“Certainly, I discovered the secret. The incident had astonished and even worried me, but you see I disbelieve on principle. Just as others always begin by believing, I begin by doubting, and when I fail to understand I still deny all telepathic communication between two souls, convinced that my own intelligence will find a solution. Well, I turned the matter over in my mind, and after questioning the wives of the absent fishermen I discovered that hardly a week passed without someone, either wife or child, dreaming and announcing that ‘the father had died at sea.’ The terrible, haunting dread of accidents makes them a constant subject of conversation, and fills the thoughts of the women and children. If, by any chance, one of these predictions coincides with a death, at once it is said to be a miracle, for they forget all the dreams, the omens, the sinister forebodings that are not fulfilled. I have myself known fifty cases which were completely forgotten within a week. But if the man had indeed died, the dream was remembered at once and the coincidence attributed to the intervention of the Almighty by some, while others declared it to be due to magnetism.”
One of the party said: “Well, all that is true enough; now for your second story?”
“Oh, the second is rather awkward to tell. It happened to myself and so I don’t place any great value on my own view of the matter. An interested party can never give an impartial opinion. However, here it is:
“Among my acquaintances was a young woman on whom I had never bestowed a thought, at whom I had never even looked with any interest, of whom I had taken no notice, as the saying goes.
“I classed her as an insignificant woman, though she was not bad-looking; I simply knew that she had eyes, a nose, a mouth and some kind of hair, in fact that she was a colourless type. She was one of those beings who only attract passing attention by pure luck: a woman that men do not desire.
“Well, one night as I was writing letters by the fireside before going to bed, I was conscious, in the midst of a riot of ideas, of a series of those mental pictures that sometimes glide through one’s brain in moments of idle dreaming, of a kind of faint breath blowing through me—a slight flutter of the heart—and immediately, without cause, without any logical connection of ideas, I saw as distinctly as if I were touching her the unclothed, full-length vision of the woman to whom I had never given more than a passing thought at any time. And I suddenly discovered in her a hitherto unsuspected attraction, a gentle charm, a languorous fascination. She kindled in me that amorous yearning which makes a man run after a woman. But I soon forgot all about it, I went to bed and fell asleep. Then I dreamed.
“You have probably all dreamt strange dreams in which nothing is impossible, which open every sealed door for you, which reveal unhoped-for joy and provide a master key that uncloses tightly folded arms.
“Which of us in those troubled, exciting, breathless slumbers has not held, embraced, fondled and possessed, with an extraordinary intensity of rapture, the woman who filled his thoughts? And have you ever noticed the exquisite delight these happy dreams give us? The mad intoxication, the throbbing paroxysms; the infinitely caressing, absorbing tenderness that fills your heart for the woman swooning in your arms in that adorable yet brutal illusion that seems so real.
“I felt all this with so fierce a passion that I can never forget. The woman was mine, so much mine that the sweet warmth of her skin clung to my fingers, the smell of her skin clung to my nostrils, the flavour of her kisses to my lips, the sound of her voice to my ears, the soft touch of her arms clung round my body, and the enchantment of her tenderness clung to my whole being long after the delight and disillusion of my awakening.
“I dreamt the same dream three times that night.
“When day dawned I was obsessed by her, she took possession of me, haunting my very soul with such intensity that my every thought was hers.
“At last in despair I dressed and went to see her. As I went up the staircase I trembled all over, my heart beat riotously and my body was filled with yearning.
“I entered the flat. Directly she heard my name she got up and suddenly our eyes met in a long, fixed gaze. I sat down, and stammered out some commonplaces which she apparently did not hear. I knew neither what to say nor what to do. Then, abruptly I seized hold of her and clasped her in my arms, and my dream was realised so quickly, so easily, so feverishly, that I began to doubt whether I was really awake. … She was my mistress for two years …”
“What do you make of it?” asked a voice.
“I think … I think it was just a coincidence! But then, who knows? Perhaps some glance of hers, unnoticed at the time, came back to me that night through one of
