Graham Green
   
                      Proof Positive


Файл с книжной полки Несененко Алексея
OCR: Несененко Алексей январь 2004

   
   The tired voice went on. It seemed to surmount enormous obstacles 
to speech. The man's sick, Colonel Crashaw thought, with pity and 
irritation. When a young man he had climbed in the Himalayas, and he 
remembered how at great heights several breaths had to be taken for 
every step advanced. The five-foot-high platform in the Music Rooms of 
The Spa seemed to entail for the speaker some of the same effort. He 
should never have come out on such a raw afternoon, thought Colonel 
Crashaw, pouring out a glass of water and pushing it across the 
lecturer's table. The rooms were badly heated, and yellow fingers of 
winter fog felt for cracks in the many windows. There was little doubt 
that the speaker had lost all touch with his audience. It was 
scattered in patches about the hall - elderly ladies who made no 
attempt to hide their cruel boredom, and a few men, with the 
appearance of retired officers, who put a show of attention.
   Colonel Crashaw, as president of the local Psychical Society, had 
received a note from the speaker a little more than a week before. 
Written by a hand which trembled with sickness, age or drunkenness, it 
asked urgently for a special meeting of the society . An 
extraordinary, a really impressive, experience was to be described 
while still fresh in the mind, thought what the experience had been 
was left vague. Colonel Crashaw would have hesitated to comply if the 
note had not been signed by a Major Philip Weaver, Indian Army, 
retired. One had to do what one could for a brother officer; the 
trembling of the hand must be either age or sickness.
   It proved principally to be the latter when the two men met for the 
first time on the platform. Major Weaver was not more than sixty, 
tall, thin, and dark, with an ugly obstinate nose and satire in his 
eye, the most unlikely person to experience anything unexplainable. 
What antagonised Crashaw most was that Weaver used scent; a white 
handkerchief which drooped from his breast pocket exhaled as rich and 
sweet an odour as a whole altar of lilies. Several ladies prinked 
their noses, and General Leadbitter asked loudly whether he might 
smoke.
   It was quite obvious that Weaver understood. He smiled 
provocatively and asked very slowly, "Would you mind not smoking? My 
throat has been bad for some time." Crashaw murmured that it was 
terrible weather; influenza throats were common. The satirical eye 
came round to him and considered him thoughtfully, while Weaver said 
in a voice which carried halfway across the hall, "It's cancer in my 
case."
   In the shocked vexed silence that followed the unnecessary intimacy 
he began to speak without waiting for any introduction from Crashaw. 
He seemed at first to be in a hurry. It was only later that the 
terrible impediments were placed in the way of his speech. He had a 
high voice, which sometimes broke into a squeal, and must have been 
peculiarly disagreeable on the parade ground. He paid a few 
compliments to the local society; his remarks were just sufficiently 
exaggerated to be irritating. He was glad, he said, to give them the 
chance of hearing him; what he had to say might alter their whole view 
of the relative values of matter and spirit.
   Mystic stuff, thought Crashaw.
   Weaver's high voice began to shoot out hurried platitudes. The 
spirit, he said, was stronger than anyone realised; the physiological 
action of heart and brain and nerves were subordinate to the spirit. 
The spirit was everything. He said again, his voice squeaking up like 
bats into the ceiling, "The spirit is so much stronger than you 
think." He put his hand across his throat and squinted sideways at the 
window-panes and the nuzzling fog, and upwards at the bare electric 
globe sizzling with heat and poor light in the dim afternoon. "It's 
immortal," he told them very seriously, and they shifted, restless, 
uncomfortable, and weary, in their chairs.
   It was then that his voice grew tired and his speech impeded. The 
knowledge that he had entirely lost touch with his audience may have 
been the cause. An elderly lady at the back had taken her knitting 
from a bag, and her needles flashed along the walls when the light 
caught them, like a bright ironic spirit. Satire for a moment deserted 
Weaver's eyes, and Crashaw saw the vacancy it left, as though the ball 
had turned to glass.
   "This is important," the lecturer cried to them. "I can tell you a 
story -" His audience's attention was momentarily caught by this 
promise of something definite, but the stillness of the lady's needles 
did not soothe him. He sneered at them all: "Signs and wonders," he 
said.
   Then he lost the thread of his speech altogether.
   His hand passed to and fro across his throat and he quoted 
Shakespeare, and then St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians. His speech, 
as it grew slower, seemed to lose all logical order, though now and 
then Crashaw was surprised by the shrewdness in the juxtaposition of 
two irrelevant ideas. It was like the conversation of an old man which 
flits from subject to subject, the thread a subconscious one. "When I 
was a Simla," he said, bending his brows as though to avoid the 
sunflash on the barrack square, but perhaps the frost, the fog, the 
tarnished room broke his memories. He began to assure the wearied 
faces all over again that the spirit did not die when the body died, 
but that the body only moved at the spirit's will. One had to be 
obstinate, to grapple...
   Pathetic, Crashaw thought, the sick man's clinging to his belief. 
It was as if life were an only son who was dying and with whom he 
wished to preserve some form of communication...
   A note was passed to Crashaw from the audience. It came from a Dr. 
Brown, a small alert man in the third row; the society cherished him 
as a kind of pet sceptic. Thenoteread: "Can't you make him stop? The 
man's obviously very ill. And what good is his talk, anyway? "
   Crashaw turned his eyes sideways and upwards and felt his pity 
vanish at sight of the roving satirical eyes that gave the lie to the 
tongue, and at the smell, overpoweringly sweet, of the scent in which 
Weaver had steeped his handkerchief. The man was an "outsider"; he 
would look up his record in the old Army Lists when he got home.
   "Proof positive," Weaver was saying, sighing a shrill breath of 
exhaustion between the words. Crashaw laid his watch upon the table, 
but Weaver paid him no attention. He was supporting himself on the rim 
of the table with one hand. "I'll give you," he said, speaking with 
increasing difficulty, "proof pos...." His voice scraped into 
stillness, like a needle at a record's end, but the quiet did not 
last. From an expressionless face, a sound which was more like a high 
mew than anything else, jerked the audience into attention. He 
followed it up, still without a trace of any emotion or understanding, 
with a succession of incomprehensible sounds, a low labial whispering, 
an odd jangling note, while his fingers tapped on the table. The 
sounds brought to mind innumerable seances, the bound medium, the 
tambourine shaken in mid-air, the whispered trivialities of loved 
ghosts in the darkness, the dinginess, the airless rooms.
   Weaver sat down slowly in his chair and let his head fall 
backwards. An old lady began to cry nervously, and Dr. Brown scrambled 
on to the platform and bent over him. Colonel Crashaw saw the doctor's 
hand tremble as he picked the handkerchief from the pocket and flung 
it away from him. Crashaw, aware of another and more unpleasant smell, 
heard Dr. Brown whisper: "Send them all away. He's dead."
   He spoke with a distress unusual in a doctor accustomed to every 
kind of death. Crashaw, before he complied, glanced over Dr. Brown's 
shoulder at the dead man. Major Weaver's appearance disquieted him. In 
a long life he had seen many forms of death, men shot by their own 
hand, and men killed in the field, but never such a suggestion of 
mortality. The body might have been one fished from the sea a long 
while after death; the flesh of the face seemed as ready to fall as an 
over ripe fruit. So it was with no great shock of surprise that he 
heard Dr. Brown's whispered statement: "The man must have been dead a 
week."
   What the Colonel thought of most was Weaver's claim - "Proof 
positive" - proof, he had probably meant, that the spirit outlived the 
body, that it tasted eternity. But all he had certainly revealed was 
how, without the body's aid, the spirit in seven days decayed into 
whispered nonsense.