said it; it was just his thought.
But as if he spoke the soundless language of animals, they understood,
and they clambered and leaped over each other to do his bidding. Then a
huddled wave of them surged up in front of where he sat, and as it broke
in foam of evil eyes and paws and switching tails, it disclosed the two
whom he had ordered to be brought before him.
“And what shall I do with them?” he asked himself, cudgelling his
monkey-brain for some infamous invention.
“Kiss each other,” he said at length, in order to inflame the brutality
of his jealousy further, and he laughed chatteringly, as their white
trembling lips met. He felt that all remnants of humanity were draining
from him; there was but a little left in his whole nature that could be
deemed to belong to a man. A hundred awful schemes ran about through his
brain, as sparks of fire run through the charred ashes of burnt paper.
And then Julia turned her face towards him. In the hideous entry that
she had made in that wave of apes her hair had fallen down and streamed
over her shoulders. And at that, the sight of a woman’s hair unbound,
the remnant of his manhood, all that was not submerged in the foulness
of his supreme apehood, made one tremendous appeal to him, like some
final convulsion of the dying, and at the bidding of that impulse his
hands came together and snapped the image in two.
Something screamed; the whole temple yelled with it, and mixed with it
was a roaring in his ears as of great waters or hurricane winds. He
stamped on the broken image, grinding it to powder below his heel, and
felt the ground and the temple walls rocking round him.
Then he heard someone not far off speaking in human voice again, and no
music could be so sweet.
“Let’s get out of the place, darling,” it said. “That was an earthquake,
and the horses have bolted.”
He heard running steps outside, which gradually grew fainter. The moon
shone whitely into the little chamber with the grotesque stone apes, and
at his feet was the powdered blue glaze and baked white clay of the
image he had ground to dust.
“THROUGH”
Richard Waghorn was among the cleverest and most popular of professional
mediums, and a never-failing source of consolation to the credulous.
That there was fraud, downright, unadulterated fraud mixed up with his
remarkable manifestations it would be impossible to deny; but it would
have been futile not to admit that these manifestations were not wholly
fraudulent. He had to an extraordinary degree that rare and inexplicable
gift of tapping, so to speak, not only the surface consciousness of
those who consulted him, but, in favourable circumstances, their inner
or subliminal selves, so that it frequently happened that he could speak
to an inquirer of something he had completely forgotten, which
subsequent investigation proved to be authentic.
So much was perfectly genuine, but he gave, as it were, a false frame to
it all by the manner in which he presented these phenomena. He
pretended, at his séances, to go into a trance, during which he was
controlled sometimes by the spirit of an ancient Egyptian priest, who
gave news to the inquirer about some dead friend or relative, sometimes
more directly by that dead friend or relative who spoke through him.
As a matter of fact, Waghorn would not be in a trance at all, but
perfectly conscious, extracting, as he sat quiescent and with closed
eyes, the knowledge, remembered or even forgotten, that lurked in the
mind of his sitter, and bringing it out in the speech of Mentu, the
Egyptian control, or of the lost friend or relative about whom inquiry
was being made. Fraudulent also, as purporting to come from the
intelligence of discarnate spirits, were the pieces of information he
gave as to the conditions under which those who had “passed over” still
lived, and it was here that he chiefly brought consolation to the
credulous, for he represented the dead as happy and busy, and full of
spiritual activities. This information, to speak frankly, he obtained
entirely from his own conscious mind. He made it up, and we cannot
really find an excuse for him in the undoubted fact that he sincerely
believed in the general truth of all he said when he spoke of the
survival of individual personality.
Finally, deeply dyed with fraud, and that in crude, garish colours, were
the spirit-rappings, the playing of musical boxes, the appearance of
materialized spirits, the smell of incense that heralded Cardinal
Newman, all that bag of conjuring tricks, in fact, which disgraces and
makes a laughing-stock of the impostors who profess to be able to bring
the seen world into connection with the unseen world. But to do Waghorn
justice, he did not often employ those crude contrivances, for his
telepathic and thought-reading gifts were far more convincing to his
sitters. Occasionally, however, his powers in this line used to fail
him, and then, it must be confessed, he presented his Egyptian control
with every trapping and circumstance of degrading device.
Such was the general scheme of procedure when Richard Waghorn, with his
sister as accomplice in case mechanical tricks were necessary, undertook
to reveal the spirit world to the material world. They were a pleasant,
handsome pair of young people, gifted with a manner that, if anything,
disarmed suspicion too much, and while futile old gentlemen found it
quite agreeable to sit in the dark holding Julia’s firm, cool hand,
similarly constituted old ladies were the recipients of thrilling
emotions when they held Richard’s, the touch of which, they declared,
was strangely electric. There they sat while Richard, breathing deeply
and moaning in his simulated trance, was the mouthpiece of Mentu and
told them things which, but for his indubitable gift of thought-reading,
it was impossible for him to know; or, if the power was not coming
through properly, they listened, hardly less thrilled, to
spirit-rappings and musical boxes and unverifiable information about the
conditions of life where the mortal coil hampers no longer. It was all
very interesting and soothing and edifying. And then one day there
occurred an irruption of something wholly unexpected and inexplicable.
Brother and sister were dining quietly after a busy, but unsatisfactory
day when the tinkling summons came from the telephone, and Richard
found that a loud voice, belonging, so it said, to Mrs. Gardner, wanted
to arrange a sitting alone for next day. No address was given, but he
made an appointment for half-past two, and without much enthusiasm went
back to his dinner.
“A stranger,” he said to his sister, “with no address and no reference
or introduction. I hope I shall be in better form to-morrow. There was
nothing but rappings and music to-day. They are boring, and also they
are dangerous, for one may be detected at any time. And I got an
infernal blow on my knuckles from that new electric tapper.”
Julia laughed.
“I know. I heard it,” she said. “There was quite a wrong noise in one of
the taps as we were spelling out ‘silver wing.’”
He lit his cigarette, frowning at the smoke.
“That’s the worst of my profession,” he said. “On some days I can get
right inside the mind of the sitter, and, as you know, bring out the
most surprising information; but on other days--to-day, for
instance--and there have been many such lately--there’s a mere blank
wall in front of me. I shall lose my position if it happens often;
nobody will pay my fees only to hear spirit-rappings and generalities.”
“They’re better than nothing,” said Julia.
“Very little. They help to fill up, but I hate using them. Don’t you
remember, when we began investigating, just you and I alone, how often
we seemed on the verge of genuine supernatural manifestations? They
appeared to be just round the corner.”
“Yes; but we never turned the corner. We never got beyond mere
thought-reading.”
He got up.
“I know we didn’t, but there always seemed a possibility. The door was
ajar; it wasn’t locked, and it has never ceased to be ajar. Often when
the mere thought-reading, as you call it, is flowing along most
smoothly, I feel that if only I could abandon my whole consciousness a
little more completely, something, somebody would really take control of
me. I wish it would; and yet I’m frightened of it. It might revenge
itself for all the frauds I’ve perpetrated in its name. Come, let’s play
piquet and forget about it all.”
* * * * *
It was settled that Julia should be present next day when the stranger
came for her sitting, in order that if Richard’s thought-reading was not
coming through any better than it had done lately, she should help in
the rappings and the luminous patches and the musical box. Mrs. Gardner
was punctual to her appointment, a tall, quiet, well-dressed woman who
stated with perfect frankness her object in wishing for a séance and her
views about spirit-communication.
“I should immensely like to believe in spirit-communication,” she said,
“such as I am told you are capable of producing; but at present I
don’t.”
“It is important that the atmosphere should not be one of hostility,”
said Waghorn in his dreamy, professional manner.
“I bring no hostility,” she said. “I am in a state, shall we say, of
benevolent neutrality, unless”--and she smiled in a charming
manner--“unless benevolent neutrality has come to mean malevolent
hostility. That, I assure you, is not the case with me. I want to
believe.” She paused a moment.
“And may I say this without offence?” she asked. “May I tell you that
spirit-rappings and curious lights and sounds of music do not interest
me in the least?”
They were already seated in the room where the séance was to be held.
The windows were thickly curtained, there was only a glimmer of light
from the red lamp, and even this the spirits would very likely desire to
have extinguished. If this visitor took no interest in such things,
Waghorn felt that he and his sister had wasted their time in adjusting
the electric hammer (made to rap by the pressure of the foot on a switch
concealed in the thick rug underneath the table) behind the
sliding-panel, in stringing across the ceiling the invisible wires on
which the luminous globes ran, and in making ready all the auxiliary
paraphernalia in case the genuine telepathy was not on tap. So with
voice dreamier than before and with slower utterance as he was supposed
to be beginning to sink into trance, he just said:
“I can’t foretell the manner in which they may choose to make their
presence known.”
He gave one loud rap, which perfectly conveyed the word “No” to his
sister, indicating that the conjuring tricks were not to be used.
Subsequently, if really necessary, he could rap “Yes” to her, and the
music and the magic lights would be displayed. Then he began to breathe
quickly and in a snorting manner, to show that the control was taking
possession of him.
“My brother is going into trance very quickly,” said Julia, and there
was dead silence.
Almost immediately a clear and shining lucidity spread like sunshine,
after these days of cloud, over Waghorn’s brain. Every moment he found
himself knowing more and more about this complete stranger who sat with
hand touching his. He felt his sub-conscious brain, which had lately
lain befogged and imperceptive, sun itself under the brilliant clarity
of illumination that had come to it, and in the impressive bass in which
Mentu was wont to give vent to his revelations he said:
“I am here; Mentu is here.”
He felt the table rocking beneath his hands, which surprised him, since
he had exerted no pressure on it, and he supposed that Julia had not
understood his signal, and was beginning the conjuring tricks. One hand
of his was in hers, and by the pressure of his finger-tips he conveyed
to her in code, “Don’t do it.” Instantly she answered back, “I wasn’t.”
He paid no more heed to that, though the table continued to oscillate
and tip in a very curious manner, for his mind was steeped in this flood
of images that impressed themselves on his brain.
“What shall Mentu tell you to-day?” he went on, with pauses between the
sentences. “Someone has come to consult Mentu. It is a lady, I can see
her. She wears a locket round her neck, below her coat, with a piece of
black hair under glass between the gold.”
He felt a slight jerk from Mrs. Gardner’s hand, and in finger-tip code
said to Julia, “Ask her.”
Julia whispered across the table:
“Is that so?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Gardner, and Waghorn heard her take her breath quickly.
He just remembered that she was not in mourning; but that made no
difference. He knew, not guessing, that Mrs. Gardner wished to know
something from the man or woman on whose head that hair once grew which
was contained in the locket that rested unseen below her buttoned
jacket. Then the next moment he knew also that this was a man’s hair.
Thereafter the flood of sun and precise mental impressions poured over
him in spate of bright waters.
“She wants to know about the boy whose hair is in the locket. He is not
a boy now. He is, according to earth’s eyes, a grown man. There is a D;
I see a D. Not Dick, not David. There is a Y. It is Denys. Not Saint
Denys, not French. English Denys--Denys Bristow.”
He paused a moment, and heard Mrs. Gardner whisper:
“Yes; that is right.”
Waghorn gave vent to Mentu’s jovial laugh.
“She says it is right,” he said. “How should not Mentu be right? Perhaps
Mentu is right, too, when he says that Denys is her brother? Yes; that
is Margaret Bristow who sits here, though not Margaret Bristow now.
Margaret----”
Waghorn saw the name quite clearly, but yet he hesitated. It was not
Gardner at all. Then it struck him for the first time that nothing was
more likely than that Mrs. Gardner had adopted a pseudonym. He went on:
“Margaret Forsyth is Denys’s sister. Margaret wants to know about Denys.
Denys is coming. He will be here in a moment. He has spoken of his
sister before. He did not call her Margaret. He called her Q--he called
her Queenie. Will Queenie speak?”
Waghorn felt the trembling of her hand; he heard her twice try to speak,
but she was unable to control the trembling in her voice.
“Can Denys speak to me?” she said in a whisper. “Can he really come
here?”
Up to this moment Waghorn had been enjoying himself immensely, for after
the days in which he had been unable to get into touch with this rare
and marvellous gifts of consciousness-reading, it was blissful to find
his mastery again, and, besieged with the images which Margaret
Forsyth’s contact revealed to him, he had been producing them in Mentu’s
impressive voice, revelling in his restored powers. Her mind lay open to
him like a book; he could read where he liked on pages familiar to her
and on pages which had remained long unturned. But at this moment, as
sudden as some qualm of sickness, he was aware of a startling change in
the quality of his perceptions. Fresh knowledge of Denys Bristow came
into his mind, but he felt that it was coming not from her, but from
some other source. Some odd buzzing sang in his ears, as when an
anæsthetic begins to take effect, and opening his eyes, he thought he
saw a strange patch of light, inconsistent with the faint illumination
of the red lamp, hovering over his breast. At the same moment he heard,
though dimly, for his head was full of confused noise, the violent
rapping of the electric hammer, and already only half conscious, felt an
impotent irritation with his sister for employing these tricks. He
struggled with the oncoming of the paralysis that was swiftly invading
his mind and his physical being, but he struggled in vain, and next
moment, overwhelmed with the onrush of a huge, enveloping blackness, he
lost consciousness altogether. The trance that he had often simulated
had invaded him, and he knew nothing more.
* * * * *
He came to himself again, with the feeling that he had been recalled
from some vast distance. Still unable to move, he sat listening to the
quick panting of his own breath before he realized what the noise was.
His face, from which the sweat poured in streams, rested on something
cold and hard, and presently, when he opened his eyes, he saw that his
head had fallen forward upon the table. He felt utterly exhausted and
yet somehow strangely satisfied. Some amazing thing had happened.
Then as he recovered himself he began to remember that he had been
reading Mrs. Gardner’s, or Mrs. Forsyth’s mind when some power external
to himself took possession of him, and on his left he heard Julia’s
voice speaking very familiar words.
“He is coming out of his trance,” she said. “He will be himself again in
a moment now.”
With a sense of great weariness he raised his head, disengaged his hands
from those of the two women, and sank back in his chair.
“Draw back the curtains,” he said to Julia, “and open the window. I am
suffocating.”
She did as he told her, and he saw the red rays of the sun near to its
setting pour into the room, while the breeze of sunset refreshed the
air. On his right still sat Mrs. Forsyth, wiping her eyes, and smiling
at him; and having opened the window, Julia came back to the table,
looking at him with a curious, anxious intentness.
Then Mrs. Forsyth spoke.
“It has been too marvellous,” she said. “I cannot thank you enough. I
will do exactly as you, or, rather, Denys, told me about the test; and
if it is right, I will certainly leave my house to-morrow, taking my
servants with me. It was so like Denys to think of them, too.”
To Waghorn this meant nothing whatever; she might have been speaking
Hebrew to him. But Julia, as she often did, answered for him.
“My brother knows nothing of what happened in his trance,” she said.
Mrs. Forsyth got up.
“I will go straight home,” she said. “I feel sure that I shall find just
what Denys described. May I telephone to you about it at once?”
“Yes, pray do,” said Julia. “We shall be most anxious to hear.”
Richard got up to show her out, but having regained his feet, he
staggered, and collapsed into his chair again. Mrs. Forsyth would not
hear of his attempting to move just yet, and Julia, having taken her to
the door, returned to her brother. It was usual for him, when the
sitting was over, to feign great exhaustion, but the realism of his
acting to-day had almost deceived her into thinking that something not
yet experienced in their séances had occurred. Besides, he had said such
strange, detailed, and extraordinary things. He was still where she had
left him, and there could be no reason, now that they were alone, to
keep up this feigned languor.
“Dick,” she said, “what’s the matter? And what happened? I couldn’t
understand you at all. Why did you say all those things?”
He stirred and sat up.
“I’m better,” he said. “And it is you who have to tell me what happened.
I remember up to a certain point, and after that I lost consciousness
completely. I remember thinking you were rocking the table, and I told
you not to.”
“Yes; but I wasn’t rocking it. I thought you were.”
“Well, it was neither of us, then,” said he. “I was vexed because Mrs.
Gardner--Mrs. Forsyth had said she didn’t want that sort of thing, and I
was reading her as I never read any one before. I told her about the
locket and the black hair, I got her brother’s name, I got her name and
her nickname Queenie. Then she asked if Denys could really come, and at
that moment something began to take possession of me. I think I saw a
light as usual over my breast, and I think I heard a tremendous
rapping. Did you do either of those, or did they really happen?”
Julia stared at him for a moment in silence.
“I did neither of those,” she said; “but they happened. You must have
pressed the breast-pocket switch and trod on the switch of the hammer.”
He opened his coat.
“I had not got the breast-pocket switch,” he said, “and I certainly did
not tread on the hammer-switch.”
Julia moved her chair a little closer to him.
“The hammer did not sound right,” she said. “It was ten times louder
than I have ever heard, and the light was quite different somehow. It
was much brighter. I could see everything in the room quite distinctly.
Go on, Dick.”
“I can’t. That’s all I know until I came to, leaning over the table and
bathed in perspiration. Tell me what happened.”
“Dick, do you swear that is true?” she asked.
“Certainly I do. Go on.”
“The light grew, and then faded again to a glimmer,” she said, “and then
suddenly you began to talk in a different voice: it wasn’t Mentu any
longer. Mrs. Forsyth recognized it instantly, and I thought what
wonderful luck it was that you should have hit on a voice that was like
her brother’s. Then it and she had a long talk; it must have lasted half
an hour. They reminded each other how Denys had come to live with her
and her husband on their father’s death. He was only eighteen at the
time and still at school. He was killed in a street accident, being run
over by a bicycle two days before her birthday. All this was correct,
and I thought I never heard you mind-reading so clearly and quickly; you
hardly paused at all.”
Julia was silent a moment.
“Dick, don’t you really know what followed?” she asked.
“Not in the smallest degree,” he said.
“Well, I thought you had gone mad,” she said. “Mrs. Forsyth asked for a
test, something that was not known to her, and never had been known to
her, and you gave it instantly. You laughed, Denys laughed, the voice
that spoke laughed, and told her to look behind the row of books beside
the bed in the room that was still known as Denys’s room, and she would
find tucked away a little cardboard box with a gold safety-pin set with
a pearl. He had bought it for her birthday present, and had hidden it
there till the day came. He was killed, as I told you, two days before.
And she, half sobbing, half laughing, said, ‘O Denys, how deliciously
secretive you used to be!’”
“And is that what she is going to telephone about?” asked Waghorn.
“Yes, Dick. What made you say all that?”
“I don’t know, I tell you. I didn’t know I said it. And was that all?
She said something about leaving her house to-morrow and taking the
servants. What did that mean?”
“You got very much distressed. You told her she was in danger. You
said----” Julia paused again. “You said there was something coming, fire
from the clouds, and a rending. You said her country house, which I
gathered was down somewhere near Epping, would be burst open by the fire
from the clouds to-morrow night. You made her promise to leave it and
take the servants with her. You said her husband was away, which again
is the case. And she asked if you meant Zeppelins, and you said you
did.”
Waghorn suddenly got up.
“‘You meant,’ ‘you said,’ ‘you did,’” he cried. “What if it’s ‘he
meant,’ ‘he said,’ ‘he did’?”
“It’s impossible,” she said.
“Good Lord! What’s impossible?” he asked. “What if I really am that
which I have so long pretended to be? What if I am a medium, one who is
the mysterious bridge between the quick and the dead? I’m frightened,
but I’m bound to say I’m horribly interested. All that you tell me I
said when I was in trance never came out of Mrs. Forsyth’s mind. It
wasn’t there. She didn’t know about the pearl pin; she had never known
it. Nor had I ever known it. Where did it come from, then? Only one
person knew, the boy who died ten years ago.”
“It yet remains to be seen whether it is true,” said she. “We shall
know in an hour or two, for she is motoring straight down to her house
in the country.”
“And if it turns out to be true, _who_ was talking?” said he.
* * * * *
The sunset faded into the dusk of the clear May evening, and the two
still sat there waiting for the telephone to inform them whether the
door which, as Waghorn had said, had seemed so often ajar, and never
quite closed, was now thrown open, and light and intelligence from
another world had shone on his unconscious mind. Presently the tinkling
summons came, and with an eager curiosity, below which lurked that fear
of the unknown, the dim, mysterious land into which all human creatures
pass across the closed frontier, he went to hear what news awaited him.
“Trunk call,” said the operator, and he listened.
Soon the voice came through.
“Mr. Waghorn?” it said.
“Yes.”
“I have found the box in exactly the place described. It contained what
we had been told it would contain. I shall leave the house, taking all
the servants away, to-morrow.”
* * * * *