The butler wheeled out Mrs. Dane’s chair, as her companion did not dine
with her on club nights, and led us to the drawing-room doors. There
Sperry threw them, open, and we saw that the room had been completely
metamorphosed.
Mrs. Dane’s drawing-room is generally rather painful. Kindly soul that
she is, she has considered it necessary to preserve and exhibit there
the many gifts of a long lifetime. Photographs long outgrown, onyx
tables, a clutter of odd chairs and groups of discordant bric-a-brac
usually make the progress of her chair through it a precarious and
perilous matter. We paused in the doorway, startled.
The room had been dismantled. It opened before us, walls and
chimney-piece bare, rugs gone from the floor, even curtains taken from
the windows. To emphasize the change, in the center stood a common pine
table, surrounded by seven plain chairs. All the lights were out save
one, a corner bracket, which was screened with a red-paper shade.
She watched our faces with keen satisfaction. “Such a time I had doing
it!” she said. “The servants, of course, think I have gone mad. All
except Clara. I told her. She’s a sensible girl.”
Herbert chuckled.
“Very neat,” he said, “although a chair or two for the spooks would have
been no more than hospitable. All right. Now bring on your ghosts.”
My wife, however, looked slightly displeased. “As a church-woman,” she
said, “I really feel that it is positively impious to bring back the
souls of the departed, before they are called from on High.”
“Oh, rats,” Herbert broke in rudely. “They’ll not come. Don’t worry. And
if you hear raps, don’t worry. It will probably be the medium cracking
the joint of her big toe.”
There was still a half hour until the medium’s arrival. At Mrs. Dane’s
direction we employed it in searching the room. It was the ordinary
rectangular drawing-room, occupying a corner of the house. Two windows
at the end faced on the street, with a patch of railed-in lawn beneath
them. A fire-place with a dying fire and flanked by two other windows,
occupied the long side opposite the door into the hall. These windows,
opening on a garden, were closed by outside shutters, now bolted. The
third side was a blank wall, beyond which lay the library. On the fourth
side were the double doors into the hall.
As, although the results we obtained were far beyond any expectations,
the purely physical phenomena were relatively insignificant, it is not
necessary to go further into the detail of the room. Robinson has done
that, anyhow, for the Society of Psychical Research, a proceeding
to which I was opposed, as will be understood by the close of the
narrative.
Further to satisfy Mrs. Dane, we examined the walls and floor-boards
carefully, and Herbert, armed with a candle, went down to the cellar
and investigated from below, returning to announce in a loud voice which
made us all jump that it seemed all clear enough down there. After that
we sat and waited, and I daresay the bareness and darkness of the
room put us into excellent receptive condition. I know that I myself,
probably owing to an astigmatism, once or twice felt that I saw wavering
shadows in corners, and I felt again some of the strangeness I had felt
during the day. We spoke in whispers, and Alice Robinson recited the
history of a haunted house where she had visited in England. But Herbert
was still cynical. He said, I remember:
“Here we are, six intelligent persons of above the average grade, and in
a few minutes our hair will be rising and our pulses hammering while a
Choctaw Indian control, in atrocious English, will tell us she is happy
and we are happy and so everybody’s happy. Hanky panky!”
“You may be as skeptical as you please, if you will only be fair,
Herbert,” Mrs. Dane said.
“And by that you mean--”
“During the sitting keep an open mind and a closed mouth,” she replied,
cheerfully.
As I said at the beginning, this is not a ghost story. Parts of it we
now understand, other parts we do not. For the physical phenomena we
have no adequate explanation. They occurred. We saw and heard them. For
the other part of the seance we have come to a conclusion satisfactory
to ourselves, a conclusion not reached, however, until some of us had
gone through some dangerous experiences, and had been brought into
contact with things hitherto outside the orderly progression of our
lives.
But at no time, although incredible things happened, did any one of us
glimpse that strange world of the spirit that seemed so often almost
within our range of vision.
Miss Jeremy, the medium, was due at 8:30 and at 8:20 my wife assisted
Mrs. Dane into one of the straight chairs at the table, and Sperry, sent
out by her, returned with a darkish bundle in his arms, and carrying a
light bamboo rod.
“Don’t ask me what they are for,” he said to Herbert’s grin of
amusement. “Every workman has his tools.”
Herbert examined the rod, but it was what it appeared to be, and nothing
else.
Some one had started the phonograph in the library, and it was playing
gloomily, “Shall we meet beyond the river?” At Sperry’s request we
stopped talking and composed ourselves, and Herbert, I remember, took
a tablet of some sort, to our intense annoyance, and crunched it in his
teeth. Then Miss Jeremy came in.
She was not at all what we had expected. Twenty-six, I should say, and
in a black dinner dress. She seemed like a perfectly normal young
woman, even attractive in a fragile, delicate way. Not much personality,
perhaps; the very word “medium” precludes that. A “sensitive,” I think
she called herself. We were presented to her, and but for the stripped
and bare room, it might have been any evening after any dinner, with
bridge waiting.
When she shook hands with me she looked at me keenly. “What a strange
day it has been!” she said. “I have been very nervous. I only hope I can
do what you want this evening.”
“I am not at all sure what we do want, Miss Jeremy,” I replied.
She smiled a quick smile that was not without humor. Somehow I had never
thought of a medium with a sense of humor. I liked her at once. We
all liked her, and Sperry, Sperry the bachelor, the iconoclast, the
antifeminist, was staring at her with curiously intent eyes.
Following her entrance Herbert had closed and bolted the drawing-room
doors, and as an added precaution he now drew Mrs. Dane’s empty wheeled
chair across them.
“Anything that comes in,” he boasted, “will come through the keyhole or
down the chimney.”
And then, eying the fireplace, he deliberately took a picture from the
wall and set it on the fender.
Miss Jeremy gave the room only the most casual of glances.
“Where shall I sit?” she asked.
Mrs. Dane indicated her place, and she asked for a small stand to be
brought in and placed about two feet behind her chair, and two chairs
to flank it, and then to take the black cloth from the table and hang it
over the bamboo rod, which was laid across the backs of the chairs. Thus
arranged, the curtain formed a low screen behind her, with the stand
beyond it. On this stand we placed, at her order, various articles from
our pockets--I a fountain pen, Sperry a knife; and my wife contributed a
gold bracelet.
We all felt, I fancy, rather absurd. Herbert’s smile in the dim light
became a grin. “The same old thing!” he whispered to me. “Watch her
closely. They do it with a folding rod.”
We arranged between us that we were to sit one on each side of her, and
Sperry warned me not to let go of her hand for a moment. “They have a
way of switching hands,” he explained in a whisper. “If she wants to
scratch her nose I’ll scratch it.”
We were, we discovered, not to touch the table, but to sit around it at
a distance of a few inches, holding hands and thus forming the circle.
And for twenty minutes we sat thus, and nothing happened. She was
fully conscious and even spoke once or twice, and at last she moved
impatiently and told us to put our hands on the table.
I had put my opened watch on the table before me, a night watch with a
luminous dial. At five minutes after nine I felt the top of the table
waver under my fingers, a curious, fluid-like motion.
“The table is going to move,” I said.
Herbert laughed, a dry little chuckle. “Sure it is,” he said. “When we
all get to acting together, it will probably do considerable moving. I
feel what you feel. It’s flowing under my fingers.”
“Blood,” said Sperry. “You fellows feel the blood moving through the
ends of your fingers. That’s all. Don’t be impatient.”
However, curiously enough, the table did not move. Instead, my watch,
before my eyes, slid to the edge of the table and dropped to the floor,
and almost instantly an object, which we recognized later as Sperry’s
knife, was flung over the curtain and struck the wall behind Mrs. Dane
violently.
One of the women screamed, ending in a hysterical giggle. Then we heard
rhythmic beating on the top of the stand behind the medium. Startling
as it was at the beginning, increasing as it did from a slow beat to
an incredibly rapid drumming, when the initial shock was over Herbert
commenced to gibe.
“Your fountain pen, Horace,” he said to me. “Making out a statement for
services rendered, by its eagerness.”
The answer to that was the pen itself, aimed at him with apparent
accuracy, and followed by an outcry from him.
“Here, stop it!” he said. “I’ve got ink all over me!”
We laughed consumedly. The sitting had taken on all the attributes of
practical joking. The table no longer quivered under my hands.
“Please be sure you are holding my hands tight. Hold them very tight,”
said Miss Jeremy. Her voice sounded faint and far away. Her head was
dropped forward on her chest, and she suddenly sagged in her chair.
Sperry broke the circle and coming to her, took her pulse. It was, he
reported, very rapid.
“You can move and talk now if you like,” he said. “She’s in trance, and
there will be no more physical demonstrations.”
Mrs. Dane was the first to speak. I was looking for my fountain pen, and
Herbert was again examining the stand.
“I believe it now,” Mrs. Dane said. “I saw your watch go, Horace, but
tomorrow I won’t believe it at all.”
“How about your companion?” I asked. “Can she take shorthand? We ought
to have a record.”
“Probably not in the dark.”
“We can have some light now,” Sperry said.
There was a sort of restrained movement in the room now. Herbert turned
on a bracket light, and I moved away the roller chair.
“Go and get Clara, Horace,” Mrs. Dane said to me, “and have her bring a
note-book and pencil.” Nothing, I believe, happened during my absence.
Miss Jeremy was sunk in her chair and breathing heavily when I came back
with Clara, and Sperry was still watching her pulse. Suddenly my wife
said:
“Why, look! She’s wearing my bracelet!”
This proved to be the case, and was, I regret to say, the cause of
a most unjust suspicion on my wife’s part. Even today, with all the
knowledge she possesses, I am certain that Mrs. Johnson believes that
some mysterious power took my watch and dragged it off the table, and
threw the pen, but that I myself under cover of darkness placed her
bracelet on Miss Jeremy’s arm. I can only reiterate here what I have
told her many times, that I never touched the bracelet after it was
placed on the stand.
“Take down everything that happens, Clara, and all we say,” Mrs. Dane
said in a low tone. “Even if it sounds like nonsense, put it down.”
It is because Clara took her orders literally that I am making this
more readable version of her script. There was a certain amount of
non-pertinent matter which would only cloud the statement if rendered
word for word, and also certain scattered, unrelated words with which
many of the statements terminated. For instance, at the end of the
sentence, “Just above the ear,” came a number of rhymes to the final
word, “dear, near, fear, rear, cheer, three cheers.” These I have cut,
for the sake of clearness.
For some five minutes, perhaps, Miss Jeremy breathed stertorously, and
it was during that interval that we introduced Clara and took up our
positions. Sperry sat near the medium now, having changed places with
Herbert, and the rest of us were as we had been, save that we no longer
touched hands. Suddenly Miss Jeremy began to breathe more quietly, and
to move about in her chair. Then she sat upright.
“Good evening, friends,” she said. “I am glad to see you all again.”