CHAPTER ONE

Were I to tell how I came to know that Dean Spanley had a secret, I should have to start this tale at a point many weeks earlier. For the knowledge came to me gradually; and it would be of little interest to my readers were I to record the hints and guesses by which it grew to a certainty. Stray conversations gradually revealed it, at first partly overheard from a little group in a corner of a room at the Olympus Club, and later addressed directly to myself. And the odd thing is that almost always it was what Dean Spanley did not say, rather than any word he uttered, a checking of speech that occurred suddenly on the top of speculations of others, that taught me he must be possessed of some such secret as nobody else, at any rate outside Asia, appears to have any inkling of. If anyone in Europe has studied the question so far, I gladly offer him the material I was able to glean from Dean Spanley, to compare and check with his own work. In the East, of course, what I have gathered will not be regarded as having originality.

I will start my story then, on the day on which I became so sure of some astonishing knowledge which Dean Spanley kept to himself, that I decided to act upon my conviction. I had of course cross-examined him before, so far as one can cross-examine an older man in brief conversation in a rather solemn club, but on this occasion I asked him to dine with me. I should perhaps at this point record the three things that I had found out about Dean Spanley: the first two were an interest in transmigration, though only shown as a listener, greater than you might expect in a clergyman; and an interest in dogs. Both these interests were curiously stressed by his almost emphatic silences, just when it seemed his turn to speak upon either of these subjects. And the third thing I chanced to find was that the Dean, though at the club a meagre drinker of wine, was a connoisseur of old port. And it was this third interest of the Dean’s that is really the key to the strange information that I am now able to lay before the public. Well then, after many days, during which my suspicions had at first astonished me, and then excitedly ripened, I said to Dean Spanley in the reading-room of the club, ‘Of course the difficulty about transmigration is that nobody ever yet remembered having lived a former life.’

‘H’m,’ said the Dean.

And there and then I asked him if he would dine with me, giving as my reason what I knew to be the only one that would have any chance of bringing him, my wish to have his advice upon some vintage port that had been left me by an aunt, and which had been given to her by Count Donetschau a little before 1880. The port was as good as I had been able to buy, but I doubt if he would have drunk it on that account without any name or history, any more than he would have spoken to a man who was dressed well enough, but who had not been introduced to him.

‘Count Donetschau?’ he said a little vaguely.

‘Count Shevenitz-Donetschau,’ I answered.

And he accepted my invitation.

It was a failure, that dinner. I discovered, what I should have known without any experiment, that one cannot make a rather abstemious dean go past the point at which the wit stands sentry over the tongue’s utterance, merely by giving him port that he likes. He liked the port well enough, but nothing that I could say made him take a drop too much of it. Luckily I had not given myself away, had not said a word to let him see what I was after. And in a month I tried again. I said I found some port of a different vintage, hidden among the rest, and would value his opinion as to which was the better. And he accepted; and this time I had my plan.

Dinner was light, and as good as my cook could make it. Then came the vintage port, three glasses the same as last time and no more, except for half a glass of the old kind for sake of comparison, and after his three and a half glasses came my plan.

‘I have a bottle of imperial Tokay in the cellar,’ I said.

‘Imperial what!’ said the Dean.

‘Imperial Tokay,’ I said.

‘Imperial Tokay,’ he repeated.

‘Yes,’ I said. For I had been able to get the loan of one from a friend who in some way had become possessed of half a dozen of this rare wine, that until a little while ago was only uncorked by command of Emperors of Austria. When I say the loan of a bottle, I mean that I had told my friend, who was totally unscientific, that there was something I wanted to draw out of this dean, and that I saw no other way of doing it than to offer him a wine, when he had come to his ordinary limit of drinking, so exciting that he would go further from that point, and that anything left in the bottle, ‘after you have made your dean drunk,’ as he put it, would be returned to him. I really think that the only reason he gave me the priceless bottle was for a certain unholy joy that his words implied. I doubt if my researches, which without that imperial Tokay would have been impossible, will be of any interest to him. Well, the imperial Tokay was brought in, and I poured out a glass for Dean Spanley. He drank it off at once. I don’t know if a dean has a different idea of Heaven, some clearer vision of it, than the rest of us. I shall never know. I can only guess from what I saw in the eyes of Dean Spanley as that imperial Tokay went down.

‘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?