Evening approached by the time Fielding and Miss Quested met and had the first of their curious conversations. He had hoped, when he woke up, to find someone had fetched her away, but the College remained isolated from the rest of the universe. She asked whether she could have "a sort of interview," and, when he made no reply, said, "Have you any explanation of my extraordinary behavior?"
"None," he said curtly. "Why make such a charge if you were going to withdraw it?"
"Why, indeed."
"I ought to feel grateful to you, I suppose, but - "
"I don't expect gratitude. I only thought you might care to hear what I have to say."
"Oh, well," he grumbled, feeling rather schoolboyish, "I don't think a discussion between us is desirable. To put it frankly, I belong to the other side in this ghastly affair."
"Would it not interest you to hear my side?"
"Not much."
"I shouldn't tell you in confidence, of course. So you can hand on all my remarks to your side, for there is one great mercy that has come out of all today's misery: I no longer have any secrets. My echo has gone - I call the buzzing sound in my ears an echo. You see, I have been unwell ever since that expedition to the caves, and possibly before it."
The remark interested him rather; it was what he had sometimes suspected himself. "What kind of illness?" he inquired.
She touched her head at the side, then shook it.
"That was my first thought, the day of the arrest: hallucination."
"Do you think that would be so?" she asked with great humility. "What should have given me a hallucination?"
"One of three things certainly happened in the Marabar," he said, getting drawn into a discussion against his will. "One of four things. Either Aziz is guilty, which is what your friends think; or you invented the charge out of malice, which is what my friends think; or you have had an hallucination. I'm very much inclined -" getting up and striding about - "now that you tell me that you felt unwell before the expedition - it's an important piece of evidence - I believe that you yourself broke the strap of the field-glasses; you were alone in that cave the whole time."
"Perhaps..."
"Can you remember when you first felt out of sorts?"
"When I came to tea with you there, in that garden-house."
"A somewhat unlucky party. Aziz and old Godbole were both ill after it too."
"I was not ill - it is far to vague to mention: it is all mixed up with my private affairs. I enjoyed the singing...but just about then a sort of sadness began that I couldn't detect at the time...no, nothing as solid as sadness: living at half pressure expresses it best. Half pressure. I remember going on to polo with Mr. Heaslop at the Maidan. Various other things happened - it doesn't matter what, but I was under par for all of them. I was certainly in that state when I saw the caves, and you suggest (nothing shocks or hurts me) - you suggest that I had an hallucination there, the sort of thing - though in awful form - that makes some women think they've had an offer of marriage when none was made."
"You put it honestly, anyhow."
"I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere."
Liking her better, he smiled and said, "It'll get us to heaven."
"Will it?"
"If heaven existed."
"Do you not believe in heaven, Mr. Fielding, may I ask?" she said, looking at him shyly.
"I do not. Yet I believe that honesty gets us there."
"How can that be?"
"Let us go back to hallucinations. I was watching you carefully through your evidence this morning, and if I'm right, the hallucination (what you call half pressure, quite as good a word) disappeared suddenly."
She tried to remember what she had felt in court, but could not; the vision disappeared whenever she wished to interpret it. "Events presented themselves to me in their logical sequence," was what she said, but it hadn't been that at all.
"My belief - and of course I was listening carefully, in case you would make some slip - my belief is that poor McBryde exorcised you. As soon as he asked you a straightforward question, you gave a straightforward answer, and broke down."
"Exorcise in that sense. I thought you meant I'd seen a ghost."
"I don't go to that length!"
"People whom I respect very much believe in ghosts," she said rather sharply. "My friend Mrs. Moore does."
"She's an old lady."
"I think you need not be impolite to her, as well as to her son."
"I did not intend to be rude. I only meant it is difficult, as we get on in life, to resist the supernatural. I've felt it coming on me myself. I still jog on without it, but what a temptation, at forty-five, to pretend that the dead live again; one's own dead; no one else's matter."
"Because the dead don't live again."
"I fear not."
"So do I."