To Devonham, meanwhile, LeVallon's behaviour was polite and kind and
distant; he did not show distrust of any sort, but he betrayed a
certain diffidence, reserve and caution. Trust he felt; sympathy he did
not feel. To the amusement of Fillery, he suggested almost a kind of
mild contempt when dealing with him, and this amusement was increased
by the fact that it obviously annoyed Devonham, while it gratified
his chief. For towards Fillery, LeVallon behaved with an intimate and
understanding sympathy that proved his instantaneous affection based
upon mutual comprehension. It seemed that LeVallon and Fillery had
known one another always.
It was doubtless, due to this innate sympathy between them that Edward
Fillery's rare gift of absorbing the content of another's mind, even to
the point of taking on that other's conditions, physical and emotional
at the same time, was so successful. By means of a highly developed
power of auto-suggestion, he had learned so to identify his own mind,
thought, feeling with those of a patient, that there resulted a kind of
merging by which he literally became that patient. He felt with him.
As a subject sees the pictures in the hypnotiser's mind, perceives
his thoughts, divines his slightest will, so Fillery, reversing the
process, could realize for the moment exactly what his patient was
thinking, feeling, desiring. It was of great use to him in his strange
practice.
This gift, naturally, varied in degree, and was not invariably
successful. In some cases he only felt, the emotion alone being thus
transferred; in others he only saw what the patient saw, or thought
he saw, the accompanying emotion being omitted; in others again, as
in cases of vision at a distance, either of time or space, he had
been able to follow the "travelling sight" of his patient, whose
consciousness in trance was operating far away, and thus to check for
subsequent verification exactly what that patient saw. He had shared
strange experiences with others--with a man, for instance, in whom
sight was transferred to the tip of his index finger, so that he could
read a book by passing that finger along the printed line; with a
woman, again, in whom "exteriorized consciousness" manifested itself,
so that, if the air several inches from her face was pinched or struck,
the impact was received and an actual bruise produced upon her skin.
This extension of consciousness, its seeds already in his nature,
he had trained and developed to a point where he could almost rely
upon auto-suggestion bringing about quickly the desired conditions.
Its success, however, as mentioned, was variable. With "N. H.,"
especially now, this variableness was marked; sometimes it was so
easily accomplished as to seem natural and without a conscious effort,
while at other times it failed completely. Since it was in no sense an
attempt to transfer anything from his own mind to that of the patient,
Fillery felt that his promise to his colleague was not involved.
The following scene describes the first time in which the process
took place with his new patient. Fillery himself wrote down the
words, supplied the detailed description, filled in the emotion and
psychology, but exactly as these occurred and as he felt them, both
when these took place, respectively, in his own consciousness and in
that of his patient. Part of the time he was present, part of it he
was not visibly so, being screened from observation, yet so placed
that he could note everything that happened. It is clear, however,
that his mind was so intimately _en rapport_ with the thoughts and
feelings of "N. H.," that he experienced in his own being all that
"N. H." experienced. The description was written immediately after
the occurrence, though some of it, the spoken language in particular,
was jotted down in his hiding place at the actual moment.
The interlacing of the two minds, their interpenetration, as it were,
one occasionally dominating the other, is curious to trace and far from
difficult to disentangle. Similarly the interweaving of LeVallon and
"N. H." is noticeable. The description given by Devonham of the portion
of the occurrence he witnessed personally, or heard about from Nurse
Robbins and the attendants--this description reduces the whole thing
to the commonplace level of "a slight seizure accompanied by signs of
violence and moments of delirium due to excitement and fatigue, and
soon cured by sleep."
The occurrence took place precisely at the period when the moon was at
the full.