"Give me a piece of squash pie!"
I remarked to Miss Fellows that I supposed this to be a modern and
improved version of the ancient drop of water which was to cool the
tongue of Dives. She replied that it was the work of a mischievous
spirit who had nothing better to do; they would not infrequently take in
that way the reply from the lips of another. I am not sure whether we
are to have lips in the spiritual world, but I think that was her
expression.
Through all the nonsense and confusion of these daily messages, however,
one restless, indefinite purpose ran; a struggle for expression that we
could not grasp; a sense of something unperformed which was tormenting
somebody.
One week we had been so much more than usually annoyed by the dancing of
tables, shaking of doors, and breaking of crockery, that I lost all
patience, and at length vehemently dared our unseen tormentors to show
themselves.
"Who and what are you?" I cried, "destroying the peace of my family in
this unendurable fashion. If you are mortal man, I will meet you as
mortal man. Whatever you are, in the name of all fairness, let me see
you!"
"If you see me it will be death to you," tapped the Invisible.
"Then let it be death to me! Come on! When shall I have the pleasure of
an interview?"
"To-morrow night at six o'clock."
"To-morrow at six, then, be it."
And to-morrow at six it was. Allis had a headache, and was lying down
upstairs. Miss Fellows and I were with her, busy with cologne and tea,
and one thing and another. I had, in fact, forgotten all about my
superhuman appointment, when, just as the clock struck six, a low cry
from Miss Fellows arrested my attention.
"I see it!" she said.
"See what?"
"A tall man wrapped in a sheet."
"Your eyes are the only ones so favored, it happens," I said, with a
superior smile. But while I spoke Allis started from the pillows with a
look of fear.
"_I_ see it, Fred!" she exclaimed, under her breath.
"Women's imagination!" for I saw nothing.
I saw nothing for a moment; then I must depose and say that I _did_ see
a tall figure, covered from head to foot with a sheet, standing still in
the middle of the room. I sprang upon it with raised arm; my wife states
that I was within a foot of it when the sheet dropped. It dropped at my
feet,--nothing but a sheet. I picked it up and shook it; only a sheet.
"It is one of those old linen ones of grandmother's," said Allis,
examining it; "there are only six, marked in pink with the boar's-head in
the corner. It came from the blue chest up garret. They have not been
taken out for years."
I took the sheet back to the blue chest myself,--having first observed
the number, as I had done before with the underclothes; and locked it
in. I came back to my room and sat down by Allis. In about three minutes
we saw the figure standing still as before, in the middle of the room.
As before, I sprang at it, and as before the drapery dropped, and there
was nothing there. I picked up the sheet and turned to the numbered
corner. It was the same that I had locked into the blue chest.
Miss Fellows was inclined to fear that I had really endangered my life
by this ghostly rendezvous. I can testify, however, that it was by no
means "death to me," nor did I experience any ill effects from the
event.
My friend, the clergyman, made me the desired visit in January. For a
week after his arrival, as if my tormentors were bent on convincing my
almost only friend that I was a fool or a juggler, we had no disturbance
at all beyond the ordinary rappings. These, the reverend gentleman
confessed were of a singular nature, but expressed a polite desire to
see some of the extraordinary manifestations of which I had written him.
But one day he had risen with some formality to usher a formal caller to
the-door, when, to his slight amazement and my secret delight, his
chair--an easy-chair of good proportions--deliberately jumped up and
hopped after him across the room. From this period the mystery
"manifested" itself to his heart's content. Not only did the
rocking-chairs, and the cane-seat chairs, and the round-backed chairs,
and Tip's little chairs, and the affghans chase him about, and the heavy
_tête-à-tête_ in the corner evince symptoms of agitation at his
approach, but the piano trundled a solemn minuet at him; the heavy
walnut centre-table rose half-way to the ceiling under his eyes; the
marble-topped stand, on which he sat to keep it still, lifted itself and
him a foot from the ground; his coffee-cup spilled over when he tried to
drink, shaken by an unseen elbow; his dressing-cases disappeared from
his bureau and hid themselves, none knew how or when, in his closets and
under his bed; mysterious uncanny figures, dressed in his best clothes
and stuffed with straw, stood in his room when he came to it at night;
his candlesticks walked, untouched by hands, from the mantel into space;
keys and chains fell from the air at his feet; and raw turnips dropped
from the solid ceiling into his soup-plate.
"Well, Garth," said I one day, confidentially, "how are things? Begin to
have a 'realizing sense' of it, eh?"
"Let me think awhile," he answered.
I left him to his reflections, and devoted my attention for a day or two
to Gertrude Fellows. She seemed to have been of late receiving less
ridiculous, less indefinite, and more important messages from her
spiritual acquaintances. The burden of them was directed at me. They
were sometimes confused, but never contradictory, and the sum of them,
as I cast it up, was this:--
A former occupant of the house, one Mr. Timothy Jabbers, had been in
early life connected in the dry-goods business with my wife's father,
and had, unknown to any but himself, defrauded his partner of a
considerable sum for a young swindler,--some five hundred dollars, I
think. This fact, kept in the knowledge only of God and the guilty man,
had been his agony since his death. In the parlance of Spiritualism, he
could never "purify" his soul and rise to a higher "sphere" till he had
made restitution,--though to that part of the communications I paid
little attention. This money my wife, as her father's sole living heir,
was entitled to, and this money I was desired to claim for her from Mr.
Jabbers's estate, then in the hands of some wealthy nephews.
I made some inquiries which led to the discovery that there had been a
Mr. Timothy Jabbers once the occupant of our house, that he had at one
period been in business with my wife's father, that he was now many
years dead, and that his nephews in New York were his heirs. We never
attempted to bring any claim upon them, for three reasons: in the first
place, because we knew we shouldn't get the money; in the second,
because such a procedure would give so palpable an "object" in people's
eyes for the disturbances at the house that we should, in all
probability, lose the entire confidence of the entire non-spiritualistic
community; thirdly, because I thought it problematical whether any
constable of ordinary size and courage could be found who would
undertake to summon the witness to testify in the county court at
Atkinsville.
I mention the matter only because, on the theories of Spiritualism, it
appeared to give some point and occasion to the phenomena, and their
infesting that particular house.
Whether poor Mr. Timothy Jabbers felt relieved by having unburdened
himself of his confession, I cannot state; but after he found that I
paid some attention to his messages, he gradually ceased to express
himself through turnips and cold keys; the rappings grew less violent
and frequent, and finally ceased altogether. Shortly after that Miss
Fellows went home.
Garth and I talked matters over the day after she left. He had brought
his "thinking" to a close, whittled his opinions to a point, and was
quite ready to stick them into their places for my benefit, and leave
them there, as George Garth left all his opinions, immovable as the
everlasting hills.
"How much had she to do with it now,--the Fellows?"
"Precisely what she said she had, no more. She was a medium, but not a
juggler."
"No trickery about the affair, then?"
"No trickery could have sent that turnip into my soup-plate, or that
candlestick walking into the air. There _is_ a great deal of trickery
mixed with such phenomena. The next case you come across may be a
regular cheat; but you will find it out,--you'll find it out. You've had
three months to find this out, and you couldn't. Whatever may be the
explanation of the mystery, the man who can witness what you and I have
witnessed, and pronounce it the trick of that incapable, washed-out
woman, is either a liar or a fool.
"You understand yourself and your wife, and you've tested your servants
faithfully; so we're somewhat narrowed in our conclusions."
"Well, then, what's the matter?"
I was, I confess, a little startled by the vehemence with which my
friend brought his clerical fist down upon the table, and exclaimed:--
"The Devil?"
"Dear me, Garth, don't swear; you in search of a pulpit just at this
time, too!"
"I tell you I never spoke more solemnly. I cannot, in the face of facts,
ascribe all these phenomena to human agency. Something that comes we
know not whence, and goes we know not whither, is at work there in the
dark. I am driven to grant to it an extra-human power. Yet when that
flabby Miss Fellows, in the trance state, undertakes to bring me
messages from my dead wife, and when she attempts to recall the most
tender memories of our life together, I cannot,"--he paused and turned
his face a little away,--"it would be pleasant to think I had a word
from Mary, but I cannot think she is there. I don't believe good spirits
concern themselves with this thing. It has in its fair developments too
much nonsense and too much positive sin; read a few numbers of the
'Banner,' or attend a convention or two, if you want to be convinced of
that. If they 're not good spirits they're bad ones, that's all. I've
dipped into the subject in various ways since I have been here;
consulted the mediums, talked with the prophets; I'm convinced that
there is no dependence to be placed on the thing. You never learn
anything from it that it is worth while to learn; above all, you never
can trust its _prophecies_. It is evil,--_evil_ at the root; and except
by physicians and scientific men it had better be let alone. They may
yet throw light on it; you and I cannot. I propose for myself to drop it
henceforth. In fact, it looks too much toward putting one's self on
terms of intimacy with the Prince of the Powers of the Air to please
me."
"You're rather positive, considering the difficulty of the subject," I
said.
The truth is, and it may be about time to own to it, that the three
months' siege against the mystery, which I had held so pertinaciously
that winter, had driven me to broad terms of capitulation. I assented to
most of my friend's conclusions, but where he stopped I began a race for
further light. I understood then, for the first time, the peculiar charm
which I had often seen work so fatally with dabblers in Spiritualism.
The fascination of the thing was upon me. I ransacked the papers for
advertisements of mediums. I went from city to city at their mysterious
calls. I held _séances_ in my parlor, and frightened my wife with
messages--some of them ghastly enough--from her dead relatives, I ran
the usual gauntlet of strange seers in strange places, who told me my
name, the names of all my friends, dead or alive, my secret aspirations
and peculiar characteristics, my past history and future prospects.
For a long time they never made a failure. Absolute strangers told me
facts about myself which not even my own wife knew: whether they spoke
with the tongues of devils, or whether, by some unknown laws of
magnetism, they simply _read my thoughts_, I am not even now prepared to
say. I think if they had made a miss I should have been spared some
suffering. Their communications had sometimes a ridiculous aimlessness,
and occasionally a subtle deviltry coated about with religion, like a
pill with sugar, but often a significant and fearful accuracy.
Once, I remember, they foretold an indefinite calamity to be brought
upon me before sunset on the following Saturday. Before sunset on that
Saturday I lost a thousand dollars in mining stock which had stood in
all Eastern eyes as solid as its own gold. At another time I was warned
by a medium in Philadelphia that my wife, then visiting in Boston, was
taken suddenly ill. I had left her in perfect health; but feeling
nevertheless uneasy, I took the night train and went directly to her. I
found her in the agonies of a severe attack of pleurisy, just preparing
to send a telegram to me.
"Their prophecies are unreliable, notwithstanding coincidences," wrote
George Garth. "Let them alone, Fred, I beg of you. You will regret it if
you don't."
"Once let me be fairly taken in and cheated to my face," I made reply,
"and I may compress my views to your platform. Until then I must gang my
own gait."
I now come to the remarkable portion of my story,--at least it seems
to me the remarkable portion under my present conditions of vision.
In August of the summer following Miss Fellows's visit, and the
manifestations in my house at Atkinsville, I was startled one pleasant
morning, while sitting in the office of a medium in Washington Street in
Boston, by a singularly unpleasant communication.
"The second day of next May," wrote the medium,--she wrote with the
forefinger of one hand upon the palm of the other,--"the second of May,
at one o'clock in the afternoon, you will be summoned into a spiritual
state of existence."
"I suppose, in good English, that means I'm going to die," I replied,
carelessly. "Would you be so good as to write it with a pen and ink,
that there may be no mistake?"
She wrote it distinctly: "The second of May, at one o'clock in the
afternoon."