How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?
It is an enterprise you rush into while you dream, and are glad to make your escape with wet hair and every limb shaking.
The bullet is not run, the blade not forged, the man not born; even the winged words of truth drop at your feet like lumps of lead.
You require for such a desperate encounter an enchanted and poisoned shaft dipped in a lie too subtle to be found on earth.
An enterprise for a dream, my masters!
‘I began my exorcism with a heavy heart, with a sort of sullen anger in it too.
Jim’s voice, suddenly raised with a stern intonation, carried across the courtyard, reproving the carelessness of some dumb sinner by the river-side.
Nothing—I said, speaking in a distinct murmur—there could be nothing, in that unknown world she fancied so eager to rob her of her happiness, there was nothing, neither living nor dead, there was no face, no voice, no power, that could tear Jim from her side.
I drew breath and she whispered softly,
“He told me so.”
“He told you the truth,” I said.
“Nothing,” she sighed out, and abruptly turned upon me with a barely audible intensity of tone:
“Why did you come to us from out there?
He speaks of you too often.
You make me afraid.
Do you—do you want him?”
A sort of stealthy fierceness had crept into our hurried mutters.
“I shall never come again,” I said bitterly. “And I don’t want him.
No one wants him.”
“No one,” she repeated in a tone of doubt.
“No one,” I affirmed, feeling myself swayed by some strange excitement. “You think him strong, wise, courageous, great—why not believe him to be true too?
I shall go to-morrow—and that is the end.
You shall never be troubled by a voice from there again.
This world you don’t know is too big to miss him.
You understand?
Too big.
You’ve got his heart in your hand.
You must feel that.
You must know that.”
“Yes, I know that,” she breathed out, hard and still, as a statue might whisper.
‘I felt I had done nothing.
And what is it that I had wished to do?
I am not sure now.
At the time I was animated by an inexplicable ardour, as if before some great and necessary task—the influence of the moment upon my mental and emotional state.
There are in all our lives such moments, such influences, coming from the outside, as it were, irresistible, incomprehensible—as if brought about by the mysterious conjunctions of the planets.
She owned, as I had put it to her, his heart.
She had that and everything else—if she could only believe it.
What I had to tell her was that in the whole world there was no one who ever would need his heart, his mind, his hand.
It was a common fate, and yet it seemed an awful thing to say of any man.
She listened without a word, and her stillness now was like the protest of an invincible unbelief.
What need she care for the world beyond the forests? I asked.
From all the multitudes that peopled the vastness of that unknown there would come, I assured her, as long as he lived, neither a call nor a sign for him.
Never.
I was carried away.
Never!
Never!
I remember with wonder the sort of dogged fierceness I displayed.
I had the illusion of having got the spectre by the throat at last.
Indeed the whole real thing has left behind the detailed and amazing impression of a dream.
Why should she fear?