CALLIFER: I prayed. You see, in those days I believed. I wish you hadn’t come back. I’d forgotten what you looked like. I don’t care to remember faces. When I shave, I shave without a mirror.

JAMES: Did the doctor bring me to?

CALLIFER: Oh, no. You were awake before he came.

JAMES: It isn’t possible, is it, I mean—what Potter thought?

CALLIFER: If you were dead it would have been a miracle, and if it were a miracle God would exist. That hideous picture there would have a meaning. But if God existed, why should He take away His faith from me? I’ve served Him well. I go on serving Him. The saints have dark nights, but not for thirty years. They have moments when they remember what it felt like to believe.

JAMES: Do you remember nothing?

CALLIFER: I don’t want to remember. You shouldn’t have come.

JAMES: Tell me what you remember.

CALLIFER (drinking): The shed and you lying there and Potter struggling with your arms.

JAMES: And then?

CALLIFER: I prayed. I was a model priest, you see, with all the beliefs and conventions. Besides, I loved you. Yes, I remember now, how I loved you. I couldn’t have a child, and I suppose you took his place. Let me have one more drink. (He pours out a drink but does not drink.) When I had you on my knees I remember a terrible pain—here. So terrible I don’t think I could go through it again. It was just as though I was the one who was strangled—I could feel the cord round my neck. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t speak, I had to pray in my mind, and then your breath came back, and it was just as though I had died instead. So I went away to bury myself in rooms like this.

JAMES: What did you pray?

CALLIFER: It’s so long ago.

JAMES: Try to remember.

CALLIFER: What difference would it make to you?

JAMES: I’ve been close to despair too.

CALLIFER (changing the subject): What made you remember me?

JAMES: Potter’s widow.

CALLIFER: Is he dead? Poor fellow. And so you came to me? Do I look as though I could be of any use to anyone at all? (Pause.) It was an awful moment, finding you dead in that way.

JAMES: Dead?

CALLIFER: I mean you seemed to me dead.

JAMES: What did you do?