Whether they thought that he was my keeper or that I was his keeper is a
discussion between us which still continues.

It is necessary in this narrative to preserve the utmost exactitude of
detail. After leaving my friend at the House I took the cab on a few
hundred yards to an office in Victoria-street which I had to visit. I
then got out and offered him more than his fare. He looked at it, but
not with the surly doubt and general disposition to try it on which is
not unknown among normal cabmen. But this was no normal, perhaps, no
human, cabman. He looked at it with a dull and infantile astonishment,
clearly quite genuine. "Do you know, sir," he said, "you've only given
me 1s.8d?" I remarked, with some surprise, that I did know it. "Now you
know, sir," said he in a kindly, appealing, reasonable way, "you know
that ain't the fare from Euston." "Euston," I repeated vaguely, for the
phrase at that moment sounded to me like China or Arabia. "What on
earth has Euston got to do with it?" "You hailed me just outside Euston
Station," began the man with astonishing precision, "and then you
said----" "What in the name of Tartarus are you talking about?" I said
with Christian forbearance; "I took you at the south-west corner of
Leicester-square." "Leicester-square," he exclaimed, loosening a kind of
cataract of scorn, "why we ain't been near Leicester-square to-day. You
hailed me outside Euston Station, and you said----" "Are you mad, or am
I?" I asked with scientific calm.

I looked at the man. No ordinary dishonest cabman would think of
creating so solid and colossal and creative a lie. And this man was
not a dishonest cabman. If ever a human face was heavy and simple and
humble, and with great big blue eyes protruding like a frog's, if ever
(in short) a human face was all that a human face should be, it was the
face of that resentful and respectful cabman. I looked up and down the
street; an unusually dark twilight seemed to be coming on. And for one
second the old nightmare of the sceptic put its finger on my nerve. What
was certainty? Was anybody certain of anything? Heavens! to think of the
dull rut of the sceptics who go on asking whether we possess a future
life. The exciting question for real scepticism is whether we possess a
past life. What is a minute ago, rationalistically considered, except
a tradition and a picture? The darkness grew deeper from the road. The
cabman calmly gave me the most elaborate details of th