(From _The Metropolitan_)
“Belshazzar had a letter,
He never had but one,”
murmured Fenwick.
I should never have suspected Fenwick of having read, much less
having memorized, the works of Emily Dickinson. Fenwick does not
read--much; and how should he have got hold of Emily, anyhow? It
appeared presently--for of course he was questioned--that he had
picked up her poems in the home of a New England foreign missionary,
where he had once perforce been marooned during a cholera epidemic.
Fenwick himself is, I fancy, outside all creeds; but he can’t
help--given his life--running into missionaries, and he usually
speaks well of them. He takes them, at all events, as all in
the day’s work, as he reports, from very strange places, to the
“interests” that employ him. They have an eye out, those “interests,”
for a good many different commodities, though I incline to believe
that rubber is the chief. Adventure has never seemed to pry Fenwick
loose from his very American moorings, though he told me on a certain
occasion, with a dropped jaw (in a kind of wry whisper) that he had
lost his religion once--just like that--in a typhoon.
I mention these facts concerning Fenwick for reasons that will
appear later. He was leaving for San Francisco and the East the next
week, by the way, and this was a scratch gathering of friends and
acquaintances more or less to do Fenwick honor. Ben Allis and Mrs.
Allis were giving the “party.” Nora Pate, Mrs. Allis’s niece, was
spending with them an enforced holiday from school. She was at the
dinner-table on sufferance merely. It was Nora, with her giggling
flapperish reference to a ouija-board occurrence at school that had
elicited Fenwick’s humorous quotation.
Now you must also know that we were a fairly intimate but more than
fairly eclectic group at the Allis’s table. Most of us were bred
to one or another form of the Christian religion, went to church
spasmodically (except Nora, who of course had to go every Sunday),
and comfortably or uncomfortably, according to temperament, let the
whole thing slide--took it for granted, or permitted it euthanasia,
as it and our souls chose. But Mrs. Conway was a Catholic--“just the
ordinary kind,” as she had once said herself, with a sidelong glance
at Mrs. Medford, who was waveringly “High”; Allis was a scientific
skeptic, and Fenwick a reverent free-thinker. Or so I had gathered.
The typhoon had made him a free-thinker, and his inheritance and
temperament had apparently kept him reverent. My personal convictions
do not matter, but when it comes to ouija-boards, I am all with Allis.
Young Nora had been rather stumped by Fenwick’s quotation. She had
probably heard of Belshazzar, but she had never heard of Emily, and
she certainly did not see what it had to do with the ouija-board
revelations at midnight in Betty Dane’s room.
After we had found out just where Fenwick had read Emily Dickinson,
the talk swung back to the occult. Mrs. Medford’s pearl-powdered
face and naturally red lips were eager. She even wanted the complete
account of what had happened in Betty Dane’s room. Nora needed no
more encouragement than that.
“Why, Betty was desperate because she couldn’t be at home when her
cousin had his leave; and she asked ouija if there wasn’t any chance
of his leave being changed. And ouija said, ‘Measles will make you
free,’ and of course we all laughed. Then we thought probably her
cousin would have measles, so he couldn’t come, and Betty would be
free of disappointment. And the next week Pauline Case came down with
them--and Betty _is_ at home with her cousin, and she’s going to
bring back a book that tells all about everything depending on the
way the breath circulates in your body.”
The flushed Nora, at a glance from her aunt, sank out of sight below
the conversational tide. But Mrs. Medford had smiled comfortingly at
her.
“Prophesying is one thing they won’t usually engage to do, you know,”
someone threw in. “I believe even Doyle and Lodge say that?”
“Naturally--since they have to get it out of your subconscious.” This
was Mrs. Conway.
Mrs. Medford turned upon her, a little acrid. You may have noticed
that the two kinds of “Catholic” don’t mix very well. “Has the Church
decided that it’s all your subconscious?”
Mrs. Conway’s smile was all that she herself could have wished it to
be. “Why, I believe so. Where else could they get it?”
“Whom do you mean by ‘they’?” the other woman challenged.
“Why, the evil spirits.” Mrs. Conway reached for a mint drop. “You
see, the Church has had all this to settle so _many_ centuries ago.
It’s hardly a new phenomenon.”
If there was irony in Mrs. Conway’s tone, it was not sharp enough
to wound Fanny Medford. She looked rather pleadingly at the other
woman’s clever, gentle face. “Always evil spirits?” she murmured.
“Never good ones?”
Mrs. Conway murmured back, and the two seemed for a moment to be
isolated together. “Never good ones; and _never_ the real dead. That
is forbidden, you know.”
I had hoped that our moving from the dining room would break the
current, but I had reckoned without Fenwick. We had our coffee all
together in Allis’s big library--so much the nicest room in the house
that I didn’t much wonder at Maud Allis’s refusing, except under
great pressure, to drag the women away elsewhere. Nora Pate was
sent upstairs to study, and we were freer. As soon as she had gone,
Fenwick led us back to the subject. Mrs. Conway sat apart in the
shadows, moving a fan slowly. Mrs. Medford fixed her eyes hungrily on
Fenwick. The rest of us listened. After all, it was Fenwick’s party.
“Of course you see all kinds of trances, and miracles, and
levitation, and tricks, out in the East,” he began. “I confess
I’m not much interested in what Hindus and such do. They’re so
different, anyhow. But it does interest me to come back to America
for the first time since the war, and find everybody going it this
way. The Americans and English out there do it, too. But there’s
an epidemic here, as far as I can make out. Look at your niece and
her ouija-board. And all of us ready to argue about it. Honestly,
I’m interested. I’m perfectly open-minded about it, myself. I’m not
psychic, or whatever you call it.”
“You don’t have to be ‘psychic.’ There’s no such thing.” This came
out of the shadows where Mrs. Conway’s fan waved.
Mrs. Medford turned and gazed at her, as if trying to penetrate even
deeper shadows that lay between them.
“Oh, well, I mean--I’ve sat in on table-tipping once or twice, but
I don’t think I added much. I never saw any ghosts, or had anything
queer happen to me. I know a man out in Singapore who does automatic
writing, though--gets stuff through from his mother. At least, he
says he doesn’t believe it’s his mother, but he keeps right on, all
the same. He says she has told him things that no one else could have
known about.”
“_He_ knew about them, didn’t he?” asked Allis, with heavy
matter-of-factness.
“Why, yes--he and she.”
“Well, it all came out of his subconscious.”
“I daresay.” Fenwick set down his coffee-cup and took a cigarette
proffered him by Mrs. Allis. “Only I’m sick of you people all wagging
your heads and saying, ‘the subconscious’ every time you’re up
against it. Why don’t you get busy and explain how the thing works?”
“Ah, yes, why don’t you?” Mrs. Medford seized on Fenwick’s challenge
as if it were her own.
Allis pulled his moustache and spoke judicially. “I’m not a
psychologist myself, as you very well know--not even a biologist.
I don’t know that science has explained the technique of it yet,
though they are working on this sort of thing all the time. Hysteria,
secondary personality, dreams--all these things are being put under
the microscope, and they’re finding out.”
“I’d rather believe in spooks than in Freud, any day.” This was
Carter, a gay soul.
Allis ignored him. “I daresay you do know, though, that alienists are
using automatic writing in their treatment of patients now. They find
that some traumas, too deep-laid for hypnotism to probe to, can be
brought to the surface by getting the patient to write automatically.
That is one for the subconscious, anyhow.”
“But--” this was Fanny Medford, brave on her own account--“what about
the things that never were in your subconscious; couldn’t have been
there? They get those too--indeed they do.”
“I agree with Fanny and Mr. Fenwick,” said Maud Allis. “I don’t
believe it’s the spirits of the dead; but neither do I believe that
the psychologists have explained it yet. I’m open-minded.”
“I’m open-minded, too,” laughed young Carter. “Ready to try anything.
Except Nora’s ouija-board. That’s too darned easy.”
A slim form in white came out of the shadows--Mrs. Conway, gray-eyed,
ivory-cheeked, like a warm ghost. “Can’t you see,” she said, “that an
open mind is the most dangerous thing there is? Because if your mind
is really open, any evil thing can get in.”
She put her arm round Fanny Medford’s waist, with a soft, sidelong
gesture, though she faced our host, directly questioning him. Mrs.
Medford stirred a little against the light encircling arm--barely
noticing it, it seemed. Her face was flushed beneath her pearl
powder. She addressed Allis and Carter, now standing abreast before
the fireplace.
“Have you ever tried automatic writing?”
“No.”
“Nor I,” cut in Mrs. Allis, “but I’m going to try sometime. Has
anyone here tried it?” Maud Allis went on, looking round at her group.
I shook my head, Fenwick and Carter theirs. Mrs. Conway merely said,
“You forget I’m a Catholic.”
“How about Mrs. Medford herself?” Young Carter marked us off on his
fingers.
“Oh, I--I’ve tried it, yes. But I can’t do it!” She bit her lip and
turned away, and before we quite realized that she was crying she had
made a soft plunge through the wide doorway into the next room. Maud
Allis followed her, but returned in a few moments.
“She’ll be all right presently. She’ll come back. It’s just that she
is so interested. Ever since her brother, Jack Hilles, was killed,
she’s been trying to ‘get through’ to him; and she can’t do it
herself. She began going to a medium, and the woman had no sooner
established communication for her than she died. Now, Fanny’s rather
up against it. She’s not the kind that likes to go to mediums, you
know. I’m awfully sorry you started the subject.”
“Why didn’t you stop us, if you knew all that?” Ben queried.
“I didn’t. She just told me about the medium now. Oh, she’ll pull
herself together all right. It may do her good to have it out with a
sensible crowd like this. We didn’t put it into her head. It’s there
all the time--has been, ever since Jack Hilles was killed in the
Argonne.”
“Well, we’ll drop it right here,” Allis replied.
But Mrs. Medford was back among us and heard him.
“You won’t drop anything on my account, I hope. Maud may have told
you it’s the one thing I’m interested in. It’s just awfully hard luck
that I can’t do anything by myself. If you people really feel like
trying anything, don’t let me stop you. I daresay the rest of you
are as bad as I am, anyway. Not ‘psychic’--though Mrs. Conway says
there’s nothing in that.”
“There isn’t,” Mrs. Conway averred again.
“Let’s try it, anyhow,” cried young Carter. “Not table-tipping. Let’s
sit about and turn the lights out and each take a pencil, and see if
we can do automatic writing.”
Fanny Medford clapped her hands. “Oh, do! Only, of course, I can’t.
But perhaps”--she looked us over hungrily--“some of you can, and I
might get a tip as to the right way to manage. And, anyway, it’s so
interesting.” Certainly she had recovered.
“I’m not going to sit with the lights out all the evening,” grumbled
Allis. “This was supposed to be, in its humble way, a dinner-party.”
“Well, of course, not all the evening,” Maud conceded. “Quarter of an
hour. And then we’ll stop and play bridge.”
“It would be rather fun.” This was Genevieve Ford. I have not
mentioned Miss Ford before, simply because she had taken no part in
the conversation that I have detailed. She happened to you, once in
so often, in somebody’s house, and you didn’t much care, one way or
the other. She was just a nice girl, a little more restful than some,
perhaps. I think the Allises hoped against hope that some day she and
Carter.... I don’t know why.
Somehow, Miss Ford’s quiet speech clinched it. Perhaps because she
had been an outsider through the talk.
“Good for you. Let’s!” Carter dashed to Ben’s table and swept some
pencils off it. “Paper, Allis? And more pencils. We’ll scatter
about through the rooms so that everyone can have a table-edge or a
chair-arm.”
Allis found us pads of paper and pencils--all except Mrs. Conway, who
refused to join us and went off to fetch her knitting. We all looked
at each other rather helplessly.
“How do you begin?” I asked.
“I suppose you douse the glim.” Carter snapped off the light nearest
to him.
“That’s perfectly unnecessary,” Fenwick commented. “The man I know
in Singapore does it any time--in broad daylight, between courses at
tiffin, if he feels like it. All you do is to let your hand go slack,
and think about something quite different.”
Mrs. Conway, who had returned with her knitting, intervened. “I
wouldn’t think too hard about something quite different, if I were
you. That is, not if you want results.”
“But we want to play fair,” Maud Allis protested. “There’s no sense
in trying this kind of thing unless you do your best.”
“I only meant,” Mrs. Conway explained, “that if you really want to
let them in, you must make your mind as blank as possible. Don’t
make an effort to think of anything. Just open the door and wait.
You make me feel like an accessory before the fact”--she smiled a
little--“except that I really don’t believe anything will happen.”
She withdrew to a sofa and began to knit.
“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 blonde head, Ben Allis’s comfortably
hunched position, Miss Ford’s graceful, pensive attitude. After
fifteen minutes, I constituted myself timekeeper, 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.