occult, nor when the current started that way. But one of the reporters
who happened to be driven off the street by the rain one night found
Henry and David in the office with a homemade planchette doing queer
things. They made it tell words in the middle of pages of newspapers
that neither had opened. They made it write answers to sums that neither
had calculated, and they made it give the names of Henry's relatives
dead and gone--also those that were living, whom David, who was
operating it, did not know. The thing would not move for the man, but
the boy's fingers on it made it fly. Some way the triangular board
broke, and the reporter and Henry were pop-eyed with wonder to see David
hold his hands above the pencil and make it write, dragging a splinter
of board behind it. David yawned five or six times and lay down on the
office couch, and when he got up a moment later his hands were fingering
the air, his lips fluttering like the wings of fledglings, and he seemed
to be trying some new kind of lingo. He did not look about him, but went
straight to the table, gripped the air above the pencil with the broken
board upon it, and the pencil came up and began writing something,
evidently in verse. David's face was shiny and smiling the while, but
his eyes were fixed, though his lips moved as they do when one writes
and is unused to it. Larmy stared at the boy with open mouth, clearly
afraid of the spectacle that was before him. A night creaking of the
building made him jump, and he moistened his lips as the pencil wrote
on. When the sheet was filled, the pencil fell and David looked about
him with a smile and dropping his head on the desk began to yawn. He
seemed to be coming out of a deep sleep, and grinned up blinking: "Gee,
I must 'a' gone to sleep on you fellows. I was up late last night."
Larmy told the boy what had happened, and the three of them looked at
the paper, but could make nothing of it. David shook his head.
"Not on your life," he laughed. "What do you fellers take me for--a
phonograph having the D. T.'s, or a mimeograph with a past? Uh-huh! Not
for little David! Why--say, that is some kind of Dutch!"
The reporter knew enough to know that it was Latin, but his High School
days were five years behind him, and he could not translate it. The
Latin professor at the college, however, said that it seemed to be an
imitation of Ovid.
And the next time the reporter saw a light in the office window he broke
into the seance. When the boy and his girl were not holding down the
sofa at her father's home, or when there was no dance at the Imperial
Club hall, nor any other social diversion, David and Larmy and the
reporter would meet at the office and dive into things too deep for
Horatio's philosophy.
Their favourite theme was the immortality of the soul, and when they
were on this theme David would get nervous, pace up and down the office,
and finally throw himself on the lounge and begin to yawn. Whereupon a
control, or state of mind, or personality that called itself Fra
Guiseppi would rise to consciousness and dominate the boy. Larmy and the
reporter called it "father," and talked to it with considerable
jocularity, considering that the father claimed they were talking to a
ghost. It would do odd things for them; go into rooms where David had
never been: describe their furnishings and occupants accurately; read
the numbers on watches of prominent citizens, which the reporter would
verify the next day; and pretend to bring other departed spirits into
the room to discuss various matters. Larmy had a pleasant social chat
with Karl Marx, and had the spirits hunting all over the kingdom-come
for Tom Paine and Murat. But the messenger either could not find them,
or the line was busy with someone else, so these worthies never
appeared.
Still, this must be said of the "father," that it had a philosophy of
life, and a distinct personality far deeper and more charming and in
some way sweeter than David's; that it talked with an accent, which to
the hearers seemed Italian, and in a voice that certainly could not have
been the boy's by any trick of ventriloquism. One night in their talks
Larmy said:
"'Father,' you say you believe that the judgments of God are just--how
do you account for the sufferings, the heartaches, the sorrows, the
misery that come in the wake of those judgments? Here is a great railway
accident that strikes down twenty people, renders some cripples for
life, kills others. Here is a flood that sweeps away the property of
good men and bad men. Is that just? What compensation is there for it?"
The "father" put his chin in one hand and remained silent for a time, as
one deep in thought; then he replied:
"That is--what you call--life. That is what makes life, life; what
makes it different from the existence we know now. All your misfortunes,
your hardships, your joys, all your miseries and failures and
triumphs--these are the school of the soul which you call life. It is a
preparation for the hereafter."
And David waking knew nothing of the thing that possessed him sleeping.
When they told him, he would smoke his cigarette, and make reply that he
must have had 'em pretty bad this time, or that he was glad he wasn't
that "buggy" when he was awake.
David's talent soon became known in the office. We used to call it his
spook, but only once did we harness it to practical business and that
was when old Charley Hedrick, the local boss, was picking a candidate
for the Legislature. The reporter and Larmy asked the "father" one night
if it could get us connected with Mr. Hedrick. It said it would try; it
needed help. And there appeared another personality with which they were
more or less familiar, called the Jew. The Jew claimed to be a literary
man, and said it would act as receiver while the father acted as
transmitter on Hedrick. Then they got this one-sided telephonic
conversation in a thick, wheezy voice that was astonishingly like
Hedrick's:
"Harmony--hell, yes; we're always getting the harmony and the
Worthington state bank gets the offices." Then a pause ensued. "Well,
let'em bolt. I'm getting tired of giving up the whole county ticket to
them fellows to keep 'em from bolting." After another pause, he seemed
to answer someone: "Oh, Bill?--you can't trust him! He's played both
sides in this town for ten years. What I want isn't a man to satisfy
them, but just this once I want a man who won't be even under the
suspicion of satisfying them. I want a fellow to satisfy me." The other
side of the telephone must have spoken, for this came: "Well, then,
we'll bust their damn bank! Did you see their last statement: cash down
to fifteen per cent. and no dividends on half a million assets for a
year and a half? Something's rotten there. They're a lot of 'toads in a
poisoned tank,' as old Browning says. If they want a fight, they can
have it." After the silence he replied: "I tell you fellows they can't
afford a fight. And, anyway, there'll never be peace in this town till
we get things on the basis of one bank, one newspaper, one wife and one
country, and the way to do that is to get out in the open and fight. If
I've got as much sense as a rabbit I say that Ab Handy is the man, and
whether I'm right or wrong I'm going to run him." He seemed to retort to
some objector: "Yes, and the first thing you know he'd come charging up
to the Speaker's desk with a maximum freight-rate bill, or a stock-yards
bill--and where would I be? I tell you he won't stand hitched. He'll
swell up like a pizened pup, and you couldn't handle him. Where'd any of
us be, if the Representative from this county got to pawing the air for
reform? I know Jake as though I'd been through him with a lantern."
There must have been a discussion of some kind among the others, for a
lengthy interim followed; then the voice continued: "Elect him?--of
course we can elect him. I can get five hundred from the State Committee
and we can raise that much down here. This is a Republican year, and we
could elect Judas Iscariot against any of the eleven brethren this year
on the Republican ticket, and I tell you it's Ab. You fellows can do as
you please, but I'm going to run Ab."
Then, being full of political curiosity rather than impelled by a desire
for psychological research, the reporter slipped out and waited in a
stairway opposite the Exchange National Bank building until the light in
Hedrick's law office was extinguished. Then he saw old Charley and his
henchmen come out, one at a time, look cautiously up and down the street
and go forth in different, devious ways. The story in our paper the next
day of the candidacy of Ab Handy threw consternation into the ranks of
the enemy. We had printed the conversation as it had occurred, after
which five men publicly contended that one of their number was a
traitor.
The summer browned the pastures, and the coming of autumn brought
trouble for David Lewis, president of the Imperial Dancing Club,
short-stop for the Maroons, snare-drummer in the band, and operator of
linotypes. We who are at the period of life where love is a harvest
forget the days of the harrow, and are prone to smile at the season of
the seeding. We do not know that the heaviest burden God puts on a
young soul is a burden of the heart. A travelling silk-salesman, with a
haughty manner and a two-hundred-dollar job, saw the blonde in the
Racket Store and began calling at her father's home like the captain of
an army with banners. David, being only an armour-bearer at fifteen
dollars a week, found heartbreak in it all for him. A girl of twenty is
so much older than a boy of twenty-one that the blonde began to assume a
maternal attitude toward the boy, and he took to walking afield on
Sundays, looking at the sky in agony and asking his little
"now-I-lay-me" God, what life was given to him for. He fabricated a
legend that she was selling herself for gold, and when the haughty
manner and the blonde sped by David's window behind jingling
sleigh-bells that winter, David, sitting at the machine, got back proofs
from the front office that looked like war-maps of a strange country.
Moreover he let his matrices go uncleaned until they were beardy as
wheat and the bill of repairs on the machine had begun to rise like a
cat's back.
All of this may seem funny in the telling, but to see the little
Welshman's heart breaking in him was no pleasant matter. The girls in
the office pitied the boy, and hoped the silk-drummer would break her
heart. The town and the Imperial Club, whereof David was much beloved,
took sides with him, and knew his sorrow for their own. As for the
blonde, it was only nature asserting itself in her; so David got back
his little chip diamonds, and his bangle bracelet, and his copy of
"Riley's Love Songs," and there was the "mist and the blinding rain" for
him, and the snow of winter hardened on the sidewalks.
To console himself, the boy traded for a music-box, which he set going
with a long brass lever. Its various tunes were picked in holes on
circular steel sheets, which were fed into the box and set whirling with
the lever. At night when Larmy wasn't enjoying what David called a
spook-fest, the boy would sit in the office by the hour and listen to
his music-box. He must have played "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" a
hundred lonesome times that winter (it had been their favourite
waltz--his and the girl's--at the Imperial Club), and it was a safe
guess that if the boys in the office, as they passed the box at noon,
would give the lever a yank, from the abdomen of the contrivance the
waltz song would begin deep and low to rumble and swell out with all the
simulation of sorrow that a mechanical soul may express.
As the winter deepened, Larmy and the reporter and the "father" had more
and more converse. The "father" explained a theory of immortality which
did not interest the reporter, but which Larmy heard eagerly. It said
that science would resolve matter into mere forms of motion, which are
expressions of divine will, and that the only place where this divine
will exists in its pure state, eluding the so-called material state, is
in the human soul. Further, the "father" explained that this soul, or
divine will, exists without the brain, independent of brain tissue, as
may be proved by the accepted phenomena of hypnotism, where the soul is
commanded to leave the body and see and hear and feel and know things
which the mere physical organs can not experience, owing to the
interposition of space. The "father" said that at death the Divine Will
commands the ripened seed of life to leave the body and assume
immortality, just as that Will commands the seeds of plants and the
sperm of animals to assume their natural functions. The Thing that
talked through David's lips said that the body is the seed-pod of the
soul, and that souls grow little or much as they are planted and
environed and nurtured by life. All this it said in many nights, while
Larmy wondered and the reporter scoffed and stuck pins in David to see
if he could feel them. And the boy wakened from his dreams always to
say: "Gimme a cigarette!" and to reach over and pull the lever of his
music-box, and add: "Perfessor, give us a tune! Hen, the professor says
he won't play unless you give me a cigarette for him."
One night, after a long wrangle which ended in a discourse by the
"father," a strange thing happened. Larmy and It were contending as to
whether It was merely a hypnotic influence on the boy, of someone living
whom they did not know, or what It claimed to be, a disembodied spirit.
By way of diversion, the reporter had just run a binder's needle under
one of the boy's finger-nails to see whether he would flinch. Then the
Voice that was coming from David's mouth spoke and said: "I will show
you something to prove it;" and the entranced boy rose and went to the
back room, while the two others followed him.
He turned the lever that flashed the light on his linotype, and set the
little motor going. He lifted up the lid of the metal-pot, to see if the
fire was keeping it molten. Then the boy sat at the machine with his
hands folded in his lap, gazing at the empty copy-holder out of dead
eyes. In a minute--perhaps it was a little longer--a brass matrix
slipped from the magazine and clicked down into the assembler; in a
second or two another fell, and then, very slowly, like the ticks of a
great clock, the brasses slipped--slipped--slipped into their places,
and the steel spaces dropped into theirs. A line was formed, while the
boy's hands lay in his lap. When it was a full line he grabbed the
lever, that sent the line over to the metal-pot to be cast, and his hand
fell back in his lap, while the dripping of the brasses continued and
the blue and white keys on the board sank and rose, although no finger
touched them.
Larmy squinted at the thing, and held his long, fuzzy, unshaven chin in
his hand. When the second line was cast the reporter broke the silence
with: "Well, I'll be damned!" And the Voice from David's mouth replied:
"Very likely." And the clicking of the brasses grew quicker.
Seven lines were cast and then the boy got up and went back to the couch
in the front room, where he yawned himself, apparently, through three
strata of consciousness, into his normal self. They took a proof of what
had been cast, but it was in Latin and they could not translate it.
David himself forgot about it the next day, but the reporter, being
impressed and curious, took the proof to the teacher of Latin at the
college, who translated it thus: "_He shall go away on a long journey
across the ocean, and he shall not return, yet the whole town shall see
him again and know him--and he shall bring back the song that is in his
heart, and you shall hear it._"
The next week the "Maine" was blown up, and in the excitement the
troubles of David were forgotten in the office. Moreover, as he had to
work overtime he put his soul deeper into the machine, and his nerves
took on something of the steel in which he lived. The Associated Press
report was long in those days, and the paper was filled with local news
of wars and rumours of wars, so that when the call for troops came in
the early spring, the town was eager for it, and David could not wait
for the local company to form, but went to Lawrence and enlisted with
the Twentieth Kansas. He was our first war-hero for thirty years, and
the town was proud of him. Most of the town knew why he went, and there
was reproach for the blonde in the Racket Store, who had told the girls
it would be in June and that they were going East for a wedding trip.
When David came back from Lawrence an enlisted man, with a week in which
to prepare for the fray, the Imperial Club gave him a farewell dance of
great pride, in that one end of Imperial Hall was decorated for the
occasion with all the Turkish rugs, and palms, and ferns, and
piano-lamps with red shades, and American flags draped from the electric
fixtures, and all the cut-glass and hand-painted punch-bowls that the
girls of the T. T. T. Club could beg or borrow; and red lemonade and
raspberry sherbet flowed like water. Whereat David Lewis was so pleased
that he grew tearful when he came into the hall and saw the splendour
that had been made for him. But his soul, despite his gratitude to the
boys and girls who gave the party, was filled with an unutterable
sadness; and he sat out many dances under the red lamp-shades with the
various girls who had been playing sister to him; and the boys to whom
the girls were more than sisters were not jealous.
As for the blonde, she beamed and preened and smiled on David, but her
name was not on his card, and as the silk-salesman was on the road, she
had many vacant lines on her programme, and she often sat alone by a
card-table shuffling the deck that lay there. The boy's eyes were dead
when they looked at her and her smile did not coax him to her. Once when
the others were dancing an extra David sat across the room from her, and
she went to him and sat by him, and said under the music:
"I thought we were always going to be friends--David?" And after he had
parried her for a while, he rose to go away, and she said: "Won't you
dance just once with me, Dave, just for old sake's sake before you go?"
And he put down his name for the next extra and thought of how long it
had been since the last June dance. Old sake's sake with youth may mean
something that happened only day before yesterday.
The boy did not speak to his partner during the next dance but went
about debating something in his mind; and when the number was ended he
tripped over to the leader of the orchestra, whom he had hired for
dances a score of times, and asked for "Love's Golden Dream Is Past" as
the next "extra." It was his waltz and he didn't care if the whole town
knew it--they would dance it together. And so when the orchestra began
he started away, a very heart-broken, brown-eyed, olive-skinned little
Welshman, who barely touched the finger-tips of a radiant, overdeveloped
blonde with roses in her cheeks and moonlight in her hair. She would
have come closer to him but he danced away and only hunted for her soul
with his brown Celtic eyes. And because David had asked for it and they
loved the boy, the old men in the orchestra played the waltz over and
over again, and at the end the dancers clapped their hands for an
encore, and when the chorus began they sang it dancing, and the boy
found the voice which cheered the "Men of Harlech," the sweet, cadent
voice of his race, and let out his heart in the words.
When he led her to a seat, the blonde had tears on her eyelashes as she
choked a "good-by, Dave" to him, but he turned away without answering
her and went to find his next partner. It was growing late and the crowd
soon went down the long, dark stairway leading from Imperial Hall, into
the moonlight and down the street, singing and humming and whistling
"Love's Golden Dream," and the next day they and the town and the band
came down to the noon train to see the conquering hero go.
It was lonesome in the office after David went, and his music-box in the
corner was dumb, for we couldn't find the brass lever for it, though the
printers and the reporters hunted in his trunk and in every place they
could think of. But the lonesomest things in the world for him were the
machines. The big press grew sulky and kept breaking the web, and his
linotype took to absorbing castor-oil as if it were a kind of hasheesh.
The new operator could run the new machine, but David's seemed to resent
familiarity. It was six months before we got things going straight after
he left us.
He wrote us soldier letters from the Presidio, and from mid-ocean, and
from the picket-line in front of Manila. One afternoon the messenger-boy
came in snuffling with a sheet of the Press-report. David's name was
among the killed. Then we turned the column rules on the first page and
got out the paper early to give the town the news. Henry Larmy brought
in an obituary, the next day, which needed much editing, and we printed
it under the head "A Tribute from a Friend," and signed Larmy's name to
it.
The boy had no kith or kin--which is most unusual for a Welshman--and
so, except in our office, he seemed to be forgotten. A month went by,
the season changed, and changed again, and a year was gone, when the
Government sent word to Larmy--whom the boy seemed to have named for
his next friend--that David's body would be brought back for burial if
his friends desired it. So in the fall of 1900, when the Presidential
campaign was at its height, the conquering hero came home, and we gave
him a military funeral. The body came to us on Labor Day, and in our
office we consecrated the day to David. The band and the militia company
took him from the big stone church where sometimes he had gone to
Sunday-school as a child, and a long procession of townsfolk wound
around the hill to the cemetery, where David received a salute of guns,
and the bugler played taps, and our eyes grew wet and our hearts were
touched. Then we covered him with flowers, whipped up the horses and
came back to the world.
That night, as it was at the end of a holiday, the Republican Committee
had assigned to our town, for the benefit of the men in the shops, one
of the picture-shows that Mark Hanna, like a heathen in his blindness,
had sent to Kansas, thinking our State, after the war, needed a spur to
its patriotism in the election. The crowd in front of the post-office
was a hundred feet wide and two hundred feet long, looking at the
pictures from the kinetoscope--pictures of men going to work in mills
and factories; pictures of the troops unloading on the coast of Cuba;
pictures of the big warships sailing by; pictures of Dewey's flagship
coming up the Hudson to its glory; pictures of the Spanish ships lying
crushed in Manila harbour.
Larmy and the reporter were sitting kicking their heels on the stone
steps of the post-office opposite the screen on which the pictures were
flickering. Some they saw and others they did not notice, for their talk
was of David and of the strange things he had shown to them.
"How did you ever fix it up in your mind?" asked Larmy.
"I didn't fix it up. He was too many for me," was the reporter's answer.
"The little rooster couldn't have faked it up?" questioned Larmy.
"No--but he might have hypnotised us--or something."
"Yes--but still, he might have been hypnotised by something himself,"
suggested Larmy, and then added: "That thing he did with the
linotype--say, wasn't that about the limit? And yet nothing has come of
that prophecy. That's the trouble. I've seen dozens of those things, and
they always just come up to the edge of proving themselves, but always
jump back. There is always----"
"My God, Larmy, look--look!" cried the reporter.
And the two men looked at the screen before them, just as the backward
sway of the crowd had ceased and horror was finding a gasping voice upon
the lips of the women; for there, walking as naturally as life, out of
the background of the picture, came David Lewis with his dark sleeves
rolled up, his peaked army hat on the back of his head, a bucket in his
hand, and as he stopped and grinned at the crowd--between the
lightning-flashes of the kinetoscope--they could see him wave his free
hand. He stood there while a laugh covered his features, and he put his
hand in his pocket and drew out a key-ring, which he waved, holding it
by some long, stemlike instrument. Then he snapped back into nothing.
And the operator of the machine, being in a hurry to catch the
ten-thirty train, went on with his picture-show and gave us President
McKinley and Mark Hanna sitting on the front steps of the home in
Canton, then followed the photograph of the party around the big table
signing the treaty of peace. As the crowd loosened and dissolved, Larmy
and the reporter stood silently waiting. Then, when they could get away
together, the reporter said:
"Come, let's go over to the shop and think about this thing."