“I’m going to walk up to Claridge’s,” said Sir Bussy.

“This affair has left me stuffy. You go that way?”

“As far as Pontingale Street, yes.”

“Come on to Claridge’s. My nieces are having a great dance there. . . . That ectoplasm fairly turned me sick. . . . I’ve done with this spook business for good and all.”

“I always wanted to keep out of it,” said Mr. Parham.

The two men set out side by side, and for a time each pursued his own thoughts. Sir Bussy’s led him apparently to some conclusion, for suddenly he said, “Gaw”— as if he tapped a nail on the head.

“Parham, were you awake all through that séance?”

“No. I was bored. I fell asleep.”

“I fell asleep.” Sir Bussy reflected. “These séances make you sleep — and dream. That’s the trick of them.”

Mr. Parham looked at his companion, startled. Had he too dreamt? And what had he dreamt?

“I dreamt about the things those fellows, Camelford and Hamp, were saying the other night.”

“Curious!” said Mr. Parham, but he felt the thing was much more curious than his voice betrayed. What if they had had the same dream?

“I seemed to see their arguments in a sort of realized kind of way.”

How poor the man’s powers of expression!

“You and I were on opposite sides,” he added. “Daggers drawn.”

“I hope not.”

“There was a war. Gaw! I can’t tell you. Such a war! It was like trying to plug a burst steam pipe.” Sir Bussy left his hearer to imagine what that meant. And Mr. Parham was able to imagine.

“I cornered the chemicals,” said Sir Bussy. “I and Camelford. We kind of held it up. We did our best. But at last the natural lunacy in things got loose and — everything seemed to blow to pieces. There was a nasty little toad of a sojer. BANG!”

“That was the waking up?”

“That was the waking up.”

Then Sir Bussy went off at a tangent. “We rich men — I mean we big business people — we’ve been backing the wrong horse. We’ve been afraid of Bogey Bolshevik and all the new things, and damn it! it’s the OLD things that mean to bust up affairs. We’re new things ourselves. What did J. C. say? No good putting new wine in old bottles. . . . The world’s rising and splashing over. The old notions and boundaries won’t hold it. . . . I wish I could describe my dream to you. Extraordinary it was. And you were in it somehow all through. . . . And Camelford. . . . Hamp was American ambassador. Crazy, it was. . . .”

Now this was getting more and more remarkable. But no — it was not the same dream — similar, perhaps. It was impossible that it could have been the same. . . .

A dream, as everyone knows, can happen with incredible rapidity. It may all have happened in a second. The sounds of Sir Titus Knowles turning on lights and bumping about with the medium and snarling at him had no doubt provided the gunfire and flashes and evoked warlike images in both their awakening minds. And the rest had arisen from what lay ready in their antagonistic attitudes.

Sir Bussy went on with conviction: “If we don’t see to it, these Old Institutions of yours and all that — these old things that ought to be cleaned up and put away now — will upset the whole human apple cart — like some crazy old granny murdering a child. Foreign offices, war offices, sovereignty, and clutter like that. Bloody clutter. Bloodstained clutter. All that I got as clear as day. They can’t hold things any longer. They’ve got to be superannuated, shoved away in the attic. I didn’t realize. We’ve got to do something about it soon. Damn soon. Before another smash. We new people. We’ve just floated about getting rich and doing nothing about it. . . . Buying and selling and amalgamating and monopolizing isn’t enough. The worst thing in life is to have power and not use it to the full. . . . There wasn’t a thing in my nightmare that might not happen.”

Mr. Parham waited for what might come next. It was extraordinary, this parallelism, but still his reason insisted they could not have had the same identical dream.

“Was there,” he said, “by any chance, a sort of Lord — Lord Protector in your dream?”

“No,” said Sir Bussy. “There was just a damned pigheaded patriotic imperial government and a war. Come to think of it, there was something — a sort of dictatorship. They put Labour out of business. I thought the chap was Amery. A sort of lofty Amery. Amery drawn out elegant — if you understand me. He didn’t amount to much. What mattered was the ideas behind him.”

“And where did I come in?”

There was a catch in Mr. Parham’s breath.

“You were on the side of the government and we argued. You were for the war. In this dream I seemed always to be meeting you and arguing. It made it very real. You were some sort of official. We kept on arguing. Even when the bombs were bursting and they tried to shoot me.”

Mr. Parham was to a certain extent relieved. Not completely but sufficiently. There had been a dream, evidently, a similar dream; a clearly similar dream. It is a distinctive feature of the séance condition that people should have similar dreams; but his dream and Sir Bussy’s had not been the same dream. Not exactly the same dream. They had visualized the expectation of a possible war that haunted both their minds, but each in his own fashion — each with his own distinctive personal reference. That was it. The brief and tragic (and possibly slightly absurd) reign of Mr. Parham as Lord Paramount could be locked forever in his own breast.

But what was Sir Bussy saying?

He had been telling something of his dream that Mr. Parham had missed.

“We’ve got to give people a juster idea of what is going on and give it ’em quick. Or they’ll fall into unutterable smash-up. Schools — you can’t. You can’t get the necessary QUALITY in teachers. Universities lock themselves against us. Yes, they do. We’ve got to snatch the new generation out of the hands of doddering prigs and pedants and tell ’em, tell ’em, tell ’em. Catch the oversplash of life. In new ideas, in new organizations. The way out is through books, newspapers, print, talk. . . . ‘Light, more light,’ as old Gutty said.” (Did he mean Goethe?)

“I’m coming into the newspaper world, Parham, I tell you. You’ve often suggested it, and here I am doing as you said. You know a thing or two. This sort of war drift can only BE stopped by a big push the other way. Bigger than anything done so far. Crowds of people in earnest. The Big Push for the new world! What of a big Sunday paper — that’s the day they read — to give ’em science, give them the drift and meaning of the new world that — was it Camelford said it?— the new world that’s trying to get born. . . . Or was it that chap from Geneva? . . . Warn them how Granny still mutters and messes about with the knives............