The Ghost and Mrs. Muir by R. A. Dick Read Free Book Online Page A

house, which I built with my own hands and have now bought with my own money, which incidentally has gone to my blasted next-of-kin in any case, so what you’re worrying about, me dear, I can’t imagine.”
    In spite of his reassurances Lucy did worry. No one that she had ever met had been on intimate terms with a ghost. Indeed the subject had always been scoffed at by her friends and relations—spectres and phantoms, voices and visions, belonging exclusively in their minds to mediaeval saints or modern lunatics.
    And supposing, thought Lucy in alarm, supposing Captain Gregg were but a figment of her imagination. Women approaching middle age and living alone did sometimes go odd, she had read, and imagined the wildest situations; but after all she was scarcely stepping onto the threshold of middle age, and positively dancing into loneliness, and surely Captain Gregg was wilder than her mind, at the most odd, could invent.
    But this new aspect of the case weighed on her so much that at last it drove her up to London for the day, to visit a psychoanalyst of whom she had once heard her sisters-in-law speak in connection with an unfortunate lady who had suffered from delusions about a very junior curate’s intentions to elope with her.
    After a surprising conversation with this earnest specialist in human peculiarities, which did not so much lay bare as strip to the skeleton her most intimate life, he assured her that she was as normal as any woman could expect to be, though there did seem to be this curious obsession in her subconscious, a craving perhaps for the ideal lover, which made her imagine this Voice, and if she were to continue her visits to him, at three guineas a time, a dozen times or more, they could no doubt sublimate this Voice and rationalize it.
    “I don’t think any one could make my Voice more rational,” said Lucy, “and there’s nothing lover-like about it, I do assure you.”
    “That, of course, is your conscious still attempting to repress your natural instincts,” said the specialist.
    “Then you don’t believe in ghosts at all?” said Lucy.
    “Well, dear lady,” the specialist said guardedly, “there are queerer things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. Come back next week and we will see what we can do.”
    Which, thought Lucy, is not really worth paying five guineas for.
    “As I could have told you,” said Captain Gregg that evening, “but I knew you wouldn’t be satisfied till you’d been.”
    “Do you believe in psychoanalysts?” asked Lucy.
    “It’s a new science, and they are only experimenting,” said Captain Gregg, “and unfortunately they can only experiment with people in this case, neurotic guinea pigs and rabbits being unable to unburden their subconscious in language intelligible to man. It’s rather out of my province in any case.”
    “I thought you would know everything about everything in your state,” said Lucy. “Tell me about it, what is the next world really like?”
    There was a long silence. “No,” said Captain Gregg at last, “it’s too difficult. It’s as if I were asked to explain navigation to a child sailing a celluloid duck in its bath. The words I should have to use would have no meaning for you—there aren’t earthly words to fit this other dimension, just as there weren’t earthly words to fit telegraphy and electricity till the scientists worked their way up to these things. Besides, even if you could understand, I doubt if it would be fair to tell you—I mean it would be like handing you a crib in a difficult grading exam in languages. You might pass out of the first grade all right, but unless you’d sweated the words out for yourself and made them your own, you’d soon fail in the higher grade. No, me dear, fair’s fair, and you’ll have to work out life for yourself, and death.”
    “But I’m not asking you to tell my fortune or give me advice about the future,” protested Lucy. “I just want to