“You just have to be quiet.” Fenwick gave his last explanations. “And
let your right arm be comfortably slack, and don’t look at the paper if
you do begin to write. And if nothing happens in twenty minutes”--he
looked interrogatively at Maud Allis--“then we play bridge, do we?”
Mrs. Allis nodded. “And I’m going to put out some of the lights, whether
it’s necessary or not. We’d be rather ridiculous in a glare, and we’d
probably all be looking at each other to see if anyone’s else arm was
moving.” So she reduced the room to a demi-obscurity, very soothing and
non-committal.
Fenwick sat at the other end of Mrs. Conway’s sofa, resting his pad on
his knee. “Won’t your knitting spoil it?” he murmured.
“Dear, no,” she whispered back. “I’ll stop, if you like. But
knitting-needles won’t keep them away.”
“No fooling, Ben.” Mrs. Allis’s admonishing words were the last spoken.
After that, silence.
I did my best to play the game, but my hand did not move. I became,
somehow, perfectly sure that it never would move, and that conviction
edged my voluntary slackness of spirit. The corners of the room were too
dark for me to see how each fellow-guest was faring; but I noted idly
the little stir of Mrs. Conway’s needles, the faint fire-glow on Mrs.
Medford’s bent blond head, Ben Allis’s comfortably hunched position,
Miss Ford’s graceful, pensive attitude. After fifteen minutes, I
constituted myself time-keeper, moving my left hand so that the radium
dial of my wrist-watch showed. I stared at it until I began to feel
prickly all over. If my arm didn’t move then, I thought, I was surely no
good at the business; for I was half hypnotized by my concentrated stare
at the dial, and my left hand certainly had no physical knowledge of
what my right hand, off in space, was doing.
When twenty minutes were up, no one stirred. I decided to give them a
little more time, for good measure. The minute-hand crawled as it does
when you are taking a pulse or a temperature. Before the half hour was
quite reached, Ben Allis leaped to his feet.
“I’m tired of this. There’s nothing in it. Switch on the lights, you
people.”
But the others were stretching cramped limbs, rising slowly from their
fixed positions, tottering in the half gloom. I had not risen, myself,
and I watched them. They looked drugged, unsure, wan and ungraceful in
the dim light--purgatorial poor souls. Only for a second; but just for a
second the only normal thing in the scene was the implacable motion of
Mrs. Conway’s fingers. Then Carter turned on the light at my elbow, and
I saw my own pad of paper. The page, ten inches by eight, was covered
with the huge scrawl of two words: “Ask Fenwick.” And I had not known,
staring at the dial of my watch, that my arm had moved.
The other lights went on, then. People held their sheets of paper up
before them like shields, and moved to the nearest lamp. All except
Fenwick, who still held to his corner of the sofa.
“Nothing--of course.” Mrs. Medford spoke first, then flung her pad down
on the table.
“Nothing here.” Ben Allis grinned over his.
“Mine says something!” Maud Allis cried, as she bent over it under a
lamp. “But I can hardly read it, it’s so queer.”
Miss Ford and Carter pressed towards her.
“Oh, I see now,” she said. “It’s ‘Ask Fenwick.’”
I bit my lip and delayed my contribution to knowledge. But while Carter
and Genevieve Ford were examining the unsoiled whiteness of their sheets
of paper, I looked at Fenwick. He sat in his corner, open-eyed now but
tired, surrounded by white things. Mrs. Conway had stopped knitting, and
was looking at him with concentrated interest. Her hand fluttered over
the sheets of paper that lay between them on the sofa, but never once
quite touched them.
The group at the table turned to me. “Did you get anything?” they
chorused. Their backs were all more or less turned to Fenwick and Mrs.
Conway, you understand.
I came forward. “Just like Maud’s. ‘Ask Fenwick.’ Pick up your
manuscript, Fenwick,” I called, “and let us see it.”
They all turned, then.
“Why, he’s written _heaps_!” Mrs. Medford rushed to the sofa, but Mrs.
Conway’s lifted hand fended her off from the papers. “Give him time,”
she murmured; “he doesn’t realize yet what he’s done.”
Mrs. Medford stopped, but Carter was not so easily dealt with. He strode
over and began picking up the sheets of paper.
Fenwick yawned. “Can I have a cigarette? By gum! I think I must have
pulled something off, my arm is so tired.” He flexed it as he rose.
“You did, my boy, you did! Well, who says we aren’t psychic?” This was
Carter, arranging the sheets in the order in which presumably they had
fallen from Fenwick’s busy hand.
An odd look passed between Mrs. Conway and her host. Both started to
speak together. Then she yielded to him, nodding acquiescence as Ben
said: “They are Fenwick’s property. It’s up to him whether or not he
gratifies our curiosity.”
But Fenwick, jaunty now, uncramped, waved his cigarette. “It belongs to
the company. I’m delighted to have been successful. But isn’t it
extraordinary that I shouldn’t once have realized that I was writing or
that I was tearing those sheets off?”
“You did it very quietly. There was no noise,” Mrs. Conway volunteered.
“Can’t we read the stuff, right off?” Carter inquired anxiously.
Allis leaned over and took the papers from him. There must have been
four or five sheets. Neither he nor Carter had examined them.
“Fenwick’s property. It’s up to Fenwick.”
“I don’t want the stuff. Let’s read it aloud if it makes any sense.”
Mrs. Conway rose with determination. “Why not hand it over to me? I
won’t read it.”
But Mrs. Medford cried out. “Mr. Gregory wrote ‘Ask Fenwick.’ So did
Maud Allis. We _must_ ask Fenwick.”
“Yes. What’s the use of spending all this time in an experiment if we
can’t see what we’ve accomplished?” Miss Ford voiced her own and
Carter’s grievance.
“Well, Fenwick”--Allis’s bantering voice threw in--“if you are ready to
vouch for the absolute purity of your subconscious, shall we oblige the
ladies?”
Fenwick looked sheepish. “Oh, I say! You don’t mean to load that stuff,
whatever it is, off on me. Why, it may be a résumé of the last French
novel I read--or anything.”
Mrs. Conway spoke, for the first time, with some sharpness. “You don’t,
any of you, know what may be there. It may be utter nonsense, or it may
be a sermon. But whatever is there comes from no good place.”
Some of us laughed. “You’re very hard on Fenwick’s subconscious,” Allis
said.
“It’s the first time you’ve ever done it?” Mrs. Conway asked.
“Absolutely the first.” Fenwick nodded.
“Well, then”--she sighed--“it’s probably all right. They’re usually
careful how they begin.” She shrugged her shoulders.
We moved in a body to the big lamp on Allis’s writing table. “Thank
goodness, Nora’s upstairs,” Maud Allis giggled in my ear.
Fenwick now had let himself go in the spirit of Carter and Genevieve
Ford, as they chaffed him. “All right,” he said; “I may be done for, but
who wrote ‘Ask Fenwick’? Seems to me we’re all tarred with the same
brush, anyhow.”
He held up the first page, getting the light over his shoulder, and
began to read.
“‘Jack Hilles speaking’.” The manuscript opened like a telephone call.
Fenwick broke off. “Oh, I say, you don’t want me to read this. There
can’t be anything in it, and we’d all be sorry to go any further----”
But Mrs. Medford came close to him, her eyes almost glaring with the
intensity of her feeling--a queer, soft, mad glare. I saw, like a shot,
that she wasn’t going to be easy to manage.
“Mr. Fenwick, you’ve no right to stop,” she panted.
Ben Allis had gone completely white under his pink-and-tan. Later, I
knew why, but then I was merely surprised. Ben was not the man to be
upset by preposterous hints of the supernatural.
Fenwick tried to temporize. “But, Mrs. Medford, we can’t play with
serious matters. We must respect the dead.” Fenwick had not looked
ahead; it was obvious that he simply did not wish to be responsible for
anything that purported to be a message.
“He’s my brother! And if he gets through to you while I’m here, it’s for
me. That is my property.”
Allis came up and looked shamelessly over Fenwick’s shoulder at the
writing. “No, it isn’t, Fanny. It’s Fenwick’s. He shall do absolutely
what he pleases with it in my house. I’m responsible.”
There was a curious morbid note of confession in his voice. But no one
paid any attention to tones of voice, because a very undignified scene
followed immediately on his words.
Mrs. Medford clutched the papers that Fenwick held. She got away with
the first page, too, and turned her back on us--heading for the
drawing-room beyond. “Don’t you dare, as you believe in a God, to
destroy any of it,” she threw back over her shoulder.
She had to fight for even her one page--not very hard, for of course
Fenwick couldn’t struggle with her physically. The two men, Allis and
Fenwick, looked ridiculous as they faced each other in the tacit
admission that they couldn’t help themselves. Ben pulled himself
together quickly. “Get that away from her, Maud--by force, if
necessary.”
“But, Ben----”
“I said ‘by force, if necessary,’ Maud,” he repeated sternly.
She flew ahead after Mrs. Medford, obedient, but sowing her path with
protesting murmurs.
Genevieve Ford giggled, nervously. Carter raised his eyebrows to the
ceiling. “What is up, you fellows?” he asked weakly.
I heard Allis whisper to Fenwick. “Did you ever know him--Hilles?”
“No. Never heard his name till to-night.”
“Then what the devil----”
“I thought you’d come to the devil in time.” This was Mrs. Conway on the
outskirts.
An indignant cry came back from Maud Allis. “Really, Ben, I can’t. You’d
better come yourself. She won’t give it to me. Fanny, be sensible!” Then
the sound trailed away.
We followed--Allis, Fenwick, Miss Ford, and I. We passed through the
drawing-room where they had been a few seconds before, and out into the
hall. Maud Allis stood there furious, a little dishevelled, sucking a
hurt finger. “She’s locked herself into the telephone closet. I don’t
know what you expect me to do.”
“Not anything more. We can’t help it now. We’ll go away and leave her.
She’ll come out.”
But Maud was shaking with anger and nervousness. “How do you know she
will? If it’s anything so bad that she oughtn’t to see it, she may never
come out. She may just die there.”
Allis smiled, in spite of himself. “People don’t just die in telephone
closets. And she’ll come out, if for nothing else, because she wants to
see the rest of it.”
“But if it should be so dreadful----”
“It doesn’t make any difference how dreadful it may be. She’ll feel
she’s got to see it. Oh, damn!”
Then he moved over to the door of the closet. “Fanny,” he shouted,
“we’re going back to the library. If you don’t come out inside of five
minutes, we’ll break down the door. Now what a fool thing that was to
say,” he murmured, precisely as if we were to blame for his words.
A slender figure in white Spanish lace became suddenly manifest among
us. “Mrs. Allis, can I telephone?” Mrs. Conway asked softly.
“No, I’m afraid you can’t.” Maud’s answer was grim. “Fanny Medford has
locked herself into the telephone closet with the first sheet of that
wretched stuff.”
“Then will some one go out and telephone for me”--she gave the
number--“and ask them to send my car at once?”
“Ben can telephone from the extension upstairs,” Maud suggested
sullenly.
“Oh, thank you. I wish he would.”
Allis turned suddenly upon Mrs. Conway. “I can’t pretend that, as a
host, I’m proud of my hospitality. But don’t you think it would be
kinder all round if we didn’t break up? We might be able to get that
poor thing out of her hysteria if we all stuck about and did our best?”
“I have no intention of going before Mrs. Medford does, Mr. Allis,” was
the very quiet reply. “I thought it might be a good thing to have the
car waiting. Mayn’t I go up and telephone, myself? I think Mr. Allis
ought to stay here.”
Maud nodded. “It’s in my room.” And Mrs. Conway moved up-stairs. She
leaned over the stair-rail on the first landing and spoke to Fenwick.
“Don’t destroy those other pages. If she still wants to see them, she’d
better--much better.”
“You don’t know what’s in them,” Fenwick answered. Nor did he, but he
evidently considered they were not to be lightly treated.
“It doesn’t make any difference what’s in them. Not even if were the
Black Mass.” She went on, up.
We went back into the library then, and Allis stood, watch in hand,
waiting. He was beginning to mean it, about breaking down the door, I
could see. Allis had had a good glimpse of the first page. Fenwick had
seen a little. None of the rest of us knew anything but those three
first words like a telephone call: “Jack Hilles speaking.”
Before Allis moved, Mrs. Medford came slowly through the drawing-room,
holding the sheet of paper very carefully in her hand. A little behind,
Mrs. Conway’s white form gently stalked her.
Fanny Medford’s poor little head was held very high. “I suppose you
people have read the rest--and doubtless Mr. Fenwick has told you what
is in this.” She tapped the paper.
“Not one of us knows anything or has read a word,” Maud Allis declared.
Allis frowned. “That’s not quite true, Maud. I saw a little--a few
sentences--of what Mrs. Medford took with her. I dare say Fenwick saw as
much. But no one has seen all of it except Mrs. Medford, and no one has
seen any of the other sheets. That is the exact state of the case.”
“You will kindly give me the rest of the writing,” Mrs. Medford went on,
to Fenwick.
But Mrs. Conway stepped forward and slipped the sheets from Fenwick’s
grasp. He let her take them, though he looked at Allis anxiously. The
situation was becoming Mrs. Conway’s.
“I have them, you see.” She turned to Mrs. Medford. “And if you insist,
_you_ shall have them. Of course I wish you would let me destroy them
all, here and now. It isn’t true, you know, that the dead communicate.
They don’t.”
Mrs. Medford was shaking, but her voice was still her own. “They do. I
know they do. Jack talked to me through Mrs. Weale, who’s dead now. But
not this kind of thing. It’s wicked, it’s beastly, what you’ve done!”
she cried to Fenwick.
“But, Mrs. Medford, I don’t even know what’s there--except the first
sentences. I never knew your brother. I don’t believe this stuff, of
course.”
“Nobody believes anything, Fanny.” Allis corroborated him. “This sort of
thing has been shown up, time and again, for the most arrant trash. It’s
just our bad luck that something got written that was upsetting for
you.”
“You believe it--you know you do.” Her voice was half a choke in her
throat.
To my consternation, Allis did not deny it, at once and with passion.
“Fanny, don’t be absurd. You know perfectly well what my attitude to
these matters is. Purely scientific skepticism.”
“I say that you believe those things of Jack. As for Mr. Fenwick”--she
disposed of him then and there with a look of loathing--“I leave him to
the rest of you.”
Maud Allis followed her out of the room.
Allis took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “Any one of you
men feel like seeing her home?” he asked. “Fenwick and I would seem to
be out of the running.”
Mrs. Conway put out her hand. “Good-night, Mr. Allis. Of course I’m
going to take her home. What did you suppose I ordered my car for?” She
did not bid the rest of us good-night, but she seemed to address us all
in parting. “Naturally, I don’t know what’s in these papers. But I take
it, it is something pretty bad--about her brother. Mrs. Medford may have
to see them, since I promised her; but I guarantee you they shall be
destroyed without my, or anyone’s else, reading them. It’s all nonsense,
of course, but you see she half believes. Truly, I’m the best person to
see her through, because I can explain it.”
“It’s just some foolish trick of muscles--and rearranging all the words
in the dictionary,” burst in Fenwick, hotly.
“Yes.” She smiled. “But _what_ foolish trick? That’s what you can’t
explain to her. And I can. You may not think my explanation is correct,
but at least it begins at the beginning and sees you through to the
end. That is why I shall try to convince her. You open-minded people
can’t.”
“Even so,” Allis said, “I don’t see how you’re going to manage it.”
She had turned to go, but she stopped and answered him. “I’ve this
advantage, you see. You can’t tell her _why_ it happened. I can. Malice
accounts for everything.”
“There’s not an ounce of malice in this crowd,” Carter remarked.
“No, not among us. But the things you let into your foolish minds are
all malice. Believe me, they’ve had a ripping time to-night. They have
to take what they can find--yes. It’s the way they use it that counts.”
“But suppose whatever it is were true,” Miss Ford murmured. “Suppose it
was her brother, after all, getting through.”
“I’ve told you the dead can’t get through--not the real dead. It’s only
spirits pretending.”
“You’ll never get her to believe that,” Allis said ruefully. “None of us
could believe that.”
“Pardon me, I could,” Mrs. Conway threw back. “And if I can make Mrs.
Medford believe it, too, it will be the best way out of the mess you’ve
made.”
“Good luck go with you,” he called after her. But he seemed dazed.
When Maud Allis came back, Miss Ford made her adieux, and Carter left
with her. They had been, from first to last, outsiders, and perhaps it
was the most tactful thing they could have done. I prepared to follow
them, and Maud Allis, saying good-night to them, bade me good-night,
too.
“I’ve got to see Nora,” she said. “I promised her I would before she
went to bed. I meant to cut out from bridge. Probably I shall see you
again, Mr. Fenwick. Sorry you have to go, Mr. Gregory.” There was
certainly no urge to stay, in her voice. She was more done up than she
owned. Yet she had not seen those sheets that Fenwick had written--any
more than I had, or Mrs. Conway, or Genevieve Ford, or Carter.
I let Carter and Miss Ford get away a little in front of me, thinking
that they were best by themselves, in the fellowship of their detachment
from it all. Whatever had happened to the rest of us had left them
unscathed. They had not been touched, apparently, by the episode, except
to see that Mrs. Medford’s exit was a cue for them to break up the
party. I lighted a cigarette in the vestibule, and craned my neck to see
them turn the corner. I was jerked back by a clutch on my collar, and I
dropped the cigarette.
“Come back in here, you idiot!” said Allis in my ear. “Did you really
think you were going?”
Yes, I really had thought so; but I went in again.
I found, when I reached the library (Allis locked the door behind us)
that he had furnished Fenwick with a precious drink. He offered me none,
and was taking nothing himself. Whiskey is medicine, in these days.
“Fenwick and I need someone else to sit in with us,” Allis declared. “I
may have to tell Maud later. That’s neither here nor there. I’m glad
those two young people had the sense to go. If they hadn’t, I’d have
kicked them out.”
“Well, of course, I’m eaten alive with curiosity,” I admitted. “Only it
all sounded like the sort of thing that wouldn’t be mentioned again
unless necessary. I never saw a word of the stuff, remember.”
“I saw precious little of it, and Fenwick here saw no more than I did.”
Allis began to walk about with his hands in his pockets. “You can see
the effect it has had on Fenwick.”
Fenwick’s head was buried in his hands. “I wrote the damned stuff.
That’s what gets me.” I saw why Allis had fetched whiskey for him.
“We aren’t going to quote it for your benefit--even if we could,” went
on Allis. “But you can take it from us that it was unmitigated filth. We
judge by sample.”
“Then why did you give the rest of it to those women?” I shouted. “Why
didn’t you burn up what you had your hands on, at least?”
“Easy, now, easy.” But Allis was troubled. He made an eloquent gesture
over Fenwick’s bowed head. “We practically had to do what Mrs. Conway
said. I believe she _is_ the person to deal with Fanny Medford. Evil
spirits are the best way out--if she can take it. And Mrs. Conway is a
clever woman. But we three have got to sift the matter. It seemed to be
autobiographical, by the way--statement of things done in the past. Buck
up, Fenwick. It’s more my fault than yours.”
“Your fault? You didn’t even write ‘Ask Fenwick,’” our friend retorted.
The whiskey was strengthening him a little.
Allis paid no attention. “I take it for granted that none of us now
present subscribes to Mrs. Conway’s theory. Very well. That’s that.
Fenwick wrote automatically a lot of stuff of which he and I have seen a
little. It all purported to be Jack Hilles speaking, and on that basis
it was Jack Hilles very much giving himself away. Of course, it wasn’t
Jack Hilles any more than it was the Secretary of State. Mrs. Conway is
right, at least, when she says the dead don’t communicate.”
“Then this kind of thing just flowers naturally out of the rich soil of
my mind, I suppose?” Fenwick asked sarcastically.
Allis smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t say that. But you’ve knocked about the
world more than most of us, and you’ve seen more than your share of
exotic rottenness. Gregory and I would have had to go out and hunt for
it. You’ve had it thrust upon your notice. If your subconscious stores
it up, it isn’t your fault.”
“But what on earth should make me drag out horrors and attribute them to
a man I never laid eyes on, who died fighting for his country in the
Argonne?”
“That,” said Allis deliberately, “is where I come in.”
“You?” We both exclaimed.
Allis leaned against the chimney-piece, his hands still in his pockets.
“Well, yes. Of course Jack Hilles’ name was bound to appear if any name
appeared--after the way Fanny had gone on. But if that sort of thing was
dragged out of you, about Hilles, instead of nice, sweet, comforting
things, it was probably because my mind was stronger than Fanny
Medford’s.”
“Do you mean that you were thinking that kind of thing about Hilles all
the time?” Fenwick queried.
“No, I wasn’t _thinking_ those things about him,” Allis answered slowly.
“I merely _knew_ those things about him. That is--I never knew he did
anything so bad as what was written there, but I knew he was a bad lot.”
“Then why didn’t you write the stuff?”
“Like Mrs. Conway, I’m not open-minded. I disbelieve it too utterly. I’m
prejudiced. But I don’t doubt my knowledge acted telepathically on your
more sensitive--what shall I say?--mental mechanism. It’s all
suggestion. Mrs. Medford involuntarily suggests Jack Hilles to you, and
I involuntarily suggest the kind of person I knew him to be.”
We were silent a moment.
“It’s hideous, all the same,” I said finally. “He’s dead, after all--in
the Argonne.”
“But not fighting for his country,” Allis remarked quietly. “He was
shot--for other reasons. I’ve no particular business to know that for a
fact, but I do. Fanny Medford never knew the worst of Jack Hilles, but
she had no illusions about him until he went into the war. Then he
became a hero. When he was ‘killed in the Argonne’--which is all _she_
knows about it--he was _a fortiori_ a hero: a super-hero, if you like.
You may have noticed that Fanny isn’t exactly impersonal in her attitude
to life.”
He went on, after a pause. “I hope no one saw anything in my
expression.... I was rather shaken by the glimpse I got. I never thought
even Jack Hilles went so far as that. I wonder if Fanny saw. She accused
me of believing it all. She must have meant she thought I believed it on
the score of Fenwick’s automatic writing. I believe it on the score of
knowing that Hilles was capable of anything. That, I perhaps didn’t
conceal sufficiently. And all of it, I’m banking heavily on Mrs. Conway
to explain.”
“I still don’t see why I had to write the miserable stuff,” argued
Fenwick--though he seemed a little more at ease than he had been.
“Well, I can’t tell you that,” Allis replied. “I’m inclined to believe
that Mrs. Conway is wrong about people’s not being, more or less,
‘psychic.’ Certainly even she would have to admit that some are more
sensitive, readier vehicles, than others. It looks to me as though you
were a corker, Fenwick!”