Arthur & George

anyone glibly decide that the history of what the species had for millennia agreed to call the soul was now at an end? Human beings would continue to develop, and therefore whatever was inside them must also develop. Even a clodhopping sceptic could surely see that.
    Outside Cairo, while Touie was breathing deep the desert air, Arthur had read histories of Egyptian civilization and visited the tombs of the pharaohs. He concluded that while the ancient Egyptians had indubitably raised the arts and sciences to a new level, their reasoning power was in many ways contemptible. Especially in their attitude to death. The notion that the dead body, an old, outworn greatcoat which once briefly wrapped the soul, should be preserved at any cost was not just risible; it was the last word in materialism. As for those baskets of provisions placed in the tomb to feed the soul upon its journey: how could a people of such sophistication be so emasculated in their minds? Faith endorsed by materialism: a double curse. And the same curse blighted every subsequent nation and civilization that came under the rule of a priesthood.
    Back in Southsea, he had not found General Drayson’s arguments sufficient. But now psychic phenomena were being vouched for by scientists of high distinction and manifest probity, like William Crookes, Oliver Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace. Such names meant that the men who best understood the natural world – the great physicists and biologists – had also become our guides to the supernatural world.
    Take Wallace. The co-discoverer of the modern theory of evolution, the man who stood at Darwin’s side when they jointly announced the idea of natural selection to the Linnaean Society. The fearful and the unimaginative had concluded that Wallace and Darwin had delivered us into a godless and mechanistic universe, had left us alone upon the darkling plain. But consider what Wallace himself believed. This greatest of modern men maintained that natural selection accounted only for the development of the human body, and that the process of evolution must at some point have been supplemented by a supernatural intervention, when the spirit’s flame was inserted into the rough developing animal. Who dared claim now that science was the enemy of the soul?
    George & Arthur
    It was a cold, clear February night, with half a moon and a heavenful of stars. In the distance the head gear of Wyrley Colliery stood out faintly against the sky. Close by was the farm belonging to Joseph Holmes: house, barn, outbuildings, with not a light showing in any of them. Humans were sleeping and the birds had not yet woken.
    But the horse was awake as the man came through a gap in the hedge on the far side of the field. He was carrying a feed-bag over his arm. As soon as he became aware that the horse had noticed his presence, he stopped and began to talk very quietly. The words themselves were a gabble of nonsense; it was the tone, calming and intimate, that mattered. After a few minutes, the man slowly began to advance. When he had made a few paces, the horse shook its head, and its mane was a brief blur. At this, the man stopped again.
    He continued his gabble of nonsense, however, and continued looking straight towards the horse. Beneath his feet the ground was solid after nights of frost, and his boots left no print on the soil. He advanced slowly, a few yards at a time, stopping at the least sign of restiveness from the horse. At all times he made his presence evident, holding himself as tall as possible. The feed-bag over his arm was an unimportant detail. What mattered were the quiet persistence of the voice, the certainty of the approach, the directness of the gaze, the gentleness of the mastery.
    It took him twenty minutes to cross the field in this way. Now he stood only a few yards distant, head on to the horse. Still he made no sudden move, but continued as before, murmuring, gazing, standing straight, waiting. Eventually, what he had been expecting took place: the horse, reluctantly at first, but then unequivocally, lowered its head.
    The man, even now, made no sudden reach. He let a minute or two pass, then crossed the final yards and hung the feed-bag gently round the horse’s neck. The animal kept its head lowered as the man proceeded to stroke it, murmuring all the while. He stroked its mane, its flank, its back; sometimes he just rested his hand against the warm skin, making sure that contact between the two of