THE SÉANCE OF HORNS
Two-thirty found me on the porch of the judge’s house again, picking up
a modern magazine of the occultists which lay there on the table. This
time, because I would have liked to read it, the judge showed up on the
minute.
“You can take it home with you,” he said, noting my disappointment.
Was he glad of a proselyte, I wondered.
The townspeople stared when we appeared on the front street together,
but then, they always stared at me. I had not asked where we were
going--to one of the rickety store-buildings on the water-front, I
fancied, in some back room over tidewater.
Instead, we turned off at the railroad track and skirting the town
dump, where, on a briery height, the refuse of the entire population
was spread out to breed mosquitoes, took a little path through the
marshy woods at the base of the sand-dunes, and followed it two miles.
Blueberry-bushes at our feet grew green and high, rid of their prolific
harvest. Wintergreen berries were turning red, anticipating frost. The
leaves of the sumac were wine-colored, and the dark racemes hung like
tassels heavy with their glutinous ripened seeds. Goldenrod and purple
asters rioted along the path, and tiger-lilies bordered the black
ponds. Scarlet-winged blackbirds flitted through the low branches of
the oaks, and wild canaries dived from sight. Bayberry and sassafras
made the air sweet, and the brown pine-cones crunched under foot. The
October sunshine, released after yesterday’s storm, danced between the
interlacings of the wild grape-vine, which covered the undergrowth with
its mocking pattern.
The soil of the woods was shallow, and the trees, sending their roots
too quickly into sterile sea sand, shriveled and died before they had
reached maturity, so that the forest was half-new and half as dead as
if it had been burned. Growth here was quick and almost tropical, a
glad green and a fast sunset of color, and then stale brown stalks.
The dunes, bearing down upon the woods from the ocean on the far
side of the cape, spared nothing. Little by little they covered the
trees--first a soft pile of sand, no larger than a child would play
with, heaped upon the surface roots, then a half-hill, out of which
the fighting trunks protruded, and at last a hard plateau, with the
remnants of the highest branches thrusting futile twigs, barren of
leaves, up into the mocking sun. The sand suffocated the pines and
buried them, so that, climbing up out of the swampy valley into the
immensity of the yellow dunes, we walked upon buried forests.
“How far?” I asked the judge. I supposed that we would trudge on to the
sea.
“Not far,” he answered.
To my surprise, he turned to the right along the crest of the last
great dune above the tree-tops, then slid back, down an unbroken hill
into the woods once more, and I felt the roof of a hut under my feet.
Here was a hermitage, not on the path where wandering steps would ever
find it, but hidden in this spot accessible only to those who knew the
way.
The top of the low cabin hidden under the trees was half-buried in the
sand of the dune behind it. We slid down off the roof and knocked at
the front door. A colored man opened it cautiously, bowed gravely,
and let us in. We found ourselves in a darkened room with five other
persons, who were quietly waiting for us, sitting in a half-circle on
the bare floor.
A colored man on Cape Cod is as exotic a growth as mistletoe. Where
this one dark-skinned man had come from I could not guess; why he
stayed was easier to imagine. His power as the representative of
another race was as unquestioned as a white man’s is in an African
jungle or a Chinese in Alaska. He was not so old as to have lost the
use of his keenest faculties, nor so young as to under-estimate them.
He was small of stature, with an intellectual face and quick-moving
light-palmed hands. He wore a white tight-fitting jersey and
high-turned corduroy trousers. The great toes of his bare feet were
separated, like those of an ape. He seemed like a mixture of a cave-man
and the motion-picture conception of a cave-man; as if, knowing the
value of his picturesqueness, he not so much cultivated as accepted it.
There were no chairs or tables; the bunk was covered with boughs and
fastened to the wall, but there was a very capable-looking blue-flame
oil-stove and also a phonograph. The windows on either side were
shielded with curtains of yellow-batiked cheese-cloth that our host
must have purloined from an art-student.
“He’s educated,” whispered the judge, motioning me to join the circle
seated on the sandy floor.
“I can see that,” I answered.
The men who had met here were all matter-of-fact and uncompromisingly
solid. One was a captain of a fishing-vessel, another a “gob” off
one of our cruisers, a third I recognized as the proprietor of the
“Bee-hive” general store. The other two were Portuguese. The store
proprietor kept talking about having to get back at five to let “Will”
go home for supper. The captain was garrulously explaining about other
séances he had attended, better ones, which statement was heartily
argued by the sailor-boy, who claimed he had attended them from Maine
to Panama, and never found any one as good as this here colored
man. One of the Portuguese kept asking over and over again, “Do you
see anything new for me?” in a hopeless voice, and the other one
continually urged him to “shut up.”
The medium began to speak.
“This is very unusual,” he said, “to give a séance by daylight. I only
agreed to it to please our friend here of the navy, who has been an
inspiration to me in his enthusiasm and who was most anxious to get
into contact with his dear ones once more before he left us for foreign
waters. I trust all will go well, as usual. You will pardon me while I
darken the room.”
I was left gasping. He spoke with the accent of Harvard, in the manner
of an English drawing-room. I had half-expected some African voodoo
revelations. Now I did not know what to expect.
The judge smiled at me.
The medium went outside the hut and closed the wooden shutters.
Instantly we were plunged into impenetrable dark. I could just see the
circle of strained faces as he reëntered, closed the door, and bolted
it. I had not known that a séance would be like this. “Take hold of
hands,” he commanded, and I grasped that of the judge on my right and,
on my left, the horny palm of the sailor.
“Don’t be afraid, little girl,” whispered the “gob.” “This is going to
be good.”
Then the phonograph began to play, and to my overstrained nerves
the ordinary xylophone record, put on with a soft needle and some
attachment which made it repeat for half an hour, sounded like a
far-off echo of the jungle days which this son of the African tribes
was trying to reproduce. He had seated himself on a stool with his back
to the wall before us and half a dozen long megaphones at his feet.
“Watch the horns,” he drawled in a sing-song voice. “Ebenezer is a long
time coming.”
But I could not see them now; I could see nothing. Only a white blur
marked the place where his body might still be; I could not swear to
it. Then a voice began to sing with the phonograph, an unmistakable
negro voice, rising and wailing with a maudlin sentimental cadence,
without pause and without words. I wanted to scream out, “Stop singing!
Stop that music! I can’t think.” And then I had just wit enough left
to realize that that was precisely what he wanted--we were being
hypnotized. I felt my mind oozing out into the blackness and only
knew, because of the tightened grip on my hands of the judge and of
the sailor, that my body was left behind. Something touched me on the
shoulder.
“Look out, there’s the horn! Don’t you see it?” Some one whispered.
I strained my eyes above my head, but I could see nothing.
“There it goes!” This was the judge’s excited comment.
Still I could see nothing. The medium continued to sing.
“It’s flying around the room,” breathed the captain.
What did they mean was flying around the room? It was most aggravating.
Was it supposed to be the horn that was flying around the room?
“It’s stopped in front of you, judge,” whispered the sailor.
I felt the judge’s hand tighten on mine. “Is that you, Ebenezer?” he
asked, quaveringly.
And the voice, a throaty disguise of the voice of the medium, answered:
“This is Ebenezer. What can I do for you? How de do, how de do, folks!”
It seemed to come from all over the room at once, now above my head,
now across from me. “How de do, how de do to-day!”
“Fine,” some one answered.
“Ebenezer, how about that money you promised me?” the sailor began,
trying to force his personality upon the control. But Ebenezer would
have none of him. “This is Mattie, this is Mattie,” it was whispering.
What? I had not been listening accurately. It had never crossed my mind
that this farce could be directed toward me.
“Ask it something,” urged the judge in a fierce whisper.
“You ask,” I whispered back.
“Aw, who is Mattie?” the disappointed sailor growled under his breath.
But the excitement of the quest had caught me at last, and I was
panting for the next words from that strange, disembodied voice.
“This is Mattie,” it repeated, fainter now. “Doesn’t anybody want to
speak to Mattie?”
“Where are you, Mattie?” demanded the judge.
There was a dreadful silence.
“They never answer that,” whispered the ship-captain. “You’d better try
something else.” Then, addressing the spirit of Mattie directly, the
captain asked: “Who do you want to speak to? Can you tell?”
“To the woman,” wailed the voice.
“To you,” they all hissed at me.
“What do you want?” I besought it.
“You must leave.”
“Leave where?”
“The house.”
A murmur of opposition went around the circle. Enmeshed in a bad
dream as I was, I was grateful to them for their loyalty. They would
not have me put out. And then another meaning to these words made my
flesh creep. The judge at the same moment asked the question that was
trembling on my lips.
“What house?”
“The house of th-three--seven--”
“It’s trying to say it,” he assured me; “they can’t get numbers very
well. Yes, Mattie?”
But the control had been seized by another spirit and, with a great
pounding of the trumpet on the floor, announced: “Is the captain here?
Is the captain here? I am Jacques Davit who went down on the _Dolly
B._”
This was a great strong masculine spirit. I had no hope of hearing from
Mattie now.
The captain sat up stiffly and was swearing under his breath. “Gosh
willikins, I’m a son of a-- Jacques Davit! Hello, Jack!”
“Too bad,” murmured the judge to me. “Wait, we’ll get her again.”
“I’m out o’ luck all around!” said my horny-handed colleague in deep
disgust.
One of the Portuguese kept repeating: “Do you see any change for me? Do
you see any change for me?”
I could not keep my mind on what the control was perpetrating in the
name of Jacques. Like the veriest devotee among them I wished to get
hold of Mattie again.
“Get Mattie back,” I whispered to the judge.
And immediately the masculine tones changed to the light fluttering
voice that had been hers. “Five pines, five pines, five pines,” it
repeated rapidly, like a telephone-operator.
“Mattie,” I demanded, no longer surprised at my own voice, “what is in
that secret room?”
“Huh?” interrupted the sailor, grasping my hand harder.
I felt that every one in the circle was straining for the answer. The
phrase “secret room” had won instant coöperation. We bent forward in
abysmal darkness, listening through the silence, till even the sand
blown down on the roof grated on our raw nerves. The phonograph had
stopped playing. Then one word hung in the air like a floating feather:
“_Murder!_”
That was all. As if the circle had been cut with a sharp knife, every
one dropped hands and pushed back from the others. Some one rushed over
to the door and unbolted it, and the light struck in across the floor.
The horns lay in a disordered heap at the foot of the medium, who was
slowly running his fingers through his kinky hair, as if coming back
to life. The men stood up and breathed hard, without looking at one
another.
“What was it she asked?” the Portuguese was saying; but no one answered
him. Nor did they look at me. They made me feel guilty, an accomplice
to some dark deed they did not understand. No more did I understand
it, I wanted to scream at them! The judge was taking money out of his
pocket, and handed five one-dollar bills to the colored man, who had
revived enough by now to take up a general collection.
“Good-by,” said the sailor genially. “I didn’t find out nothin’, but it
was worth it, anyway, to be in on that. Say, he’s good, ain’t he?” He
followed me to the door. “Say,” he whispered, “if anything, you know,
turns up, let me know, will you? I’d take it as a favor. I’m off from
three to five, short leave. See you to-morrow, corner of Long Wharf.”
I smiled hysterically. These were strange days for me. I had been at a
séance, and made a date with a sailor!