Graham Green

Proof Positive

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.

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