"So, like myself," said Stahl, as he carefully tended the flame of the spirit-lamp between them, "you have escaped by the skin of your teeth, as it were. And I congratulate you--heartily."
"You write your version now, and I'll write mine--indeed it is already almost finished--then we'll compare notes. Perhaps we might even publish them together."
He poured out the fragrant coffee. They faced each other across the little table. But O'Malley did not take the bait. He wished to hear the balance his companion still might tell.
"With the discharge of your patient the trouble ceased at once, then?"
"Comparatively soon. It gradually subsided, yes."
"I came back to my senses. I recovered my control. The insubordinate impulses I had known retired." He smiled as he sipped his coffee. "You see me now," he added, looking his companion steadily in the eyes, "a sane and commonplace ship's doctor."
"On what you missed, yet almost accomplished," the other finished. "You might have known, like me, the cosmic consciousness! You might have met the gods!"
"In a strait-waistcoat," the doctor added with a snap.
They laughed at one another across their coffee cups as once before they had laughed across their glasses of Kakhetian wine--two eternally antagonistic types that will exist as long as life itself.
But, contrary to his expectations, the German had little more to tell. He mentioned how the experience had led his mind into strange and novel reading in his desire to know what other minds might have to offer by way of explanation, even the most fanciful and far-fetched. He told, though very briefly, how he had picked up Fechner among others, and carefully studied his "poetic theories," and read besides the best accounts of "spiritistic" phenomena, as also of the rarer states of hysteria, double-consciousness, multiple personality, and even those looser theories which suggest that a portion of the human constitution called "astral" or "etheric" may escape from the parent center and, carrying with it the subtler forces of desire and yearning, construct a vivid subjective state of mind which is practically its Heaven of hope and longing all fulfilled.
He did not, however, betray the results upon himself of all this curious reading and study, nor mention what he found of truth or probability in it all. He merely quoted books and authors, in at least three languages, that stretched in a singular and catholic array from Plato and the Neo-Platonists across the ages to Myers, Du Prel, Flournoy, Lodge, and Morton Prince.