For where were we, after all? We had had the medium’s story elaborated
and confirmed, but the fact remained that, step by step, through her
unknown “control” the Neighborhood Club had followed a tragedy from its
beginning, or almost its beginning, to its end.
Was everything on which I had built my life to go? Its philosophy, its
science, even its theology, before the revelations of a young woman who
knew hardly the rudiments of the very things she was destroying?
Was death, then, not peace and an awakening to new things, but a
wretched and dissociated clutching after the old? A wrench which only
loosened but did not break our earthly ties?
It was well that Sperry came back when he did, bringing with him a
breath of fresh night air and stalwart sanity. He found me still pacing
the room.
“The thing I want to know,” I said fretfully, “is where this leaves us?
Where are we? For God’s sake, where are we?”
“First of all,” he said, “have you anything to drink? Not for me. For
yourself. You look sick.”
“We do not keep intoxicants in the house.”
“Oh, piffle,” he said. “Where is it, Horace?”
“I have a little gin.”
“Where?”
I drew a chair before the book-shelves, which in our old-fashioned house
reach almost to the ceiling, and, withdrawing a volume of Josephus, I
brought down the bottle.
“Now and then, when I have had a bad day,” I explained, “I find that it
makes me sleep.”
He poured out some and I drank it, being careful to rinse the glass
afterward.
“Well,” said Sperry, when he had lighted a cigar. “So you want to know
where we are.”
“I would like to save something out of the wreck.”
“That’s easy. Horace, you should be a heart specialist, and I should
have taken the law. It’s as plain as the alphabet.” He took his notes of
the sittings from his pocket. “I’m going to read a few things. Keep what
is left of your mind on them. This is the first sitting.
“‘The knee hurts. It is very bad. Arnica will take the pain out.’
“I want to go out. I want air. If I could only go to sleep and forget
it. The drawing-room furniture is scattered all over the house.”
“Now the second sitting:
“‘It is writing.’ (The stick.) ‘It is writing, but the water washed it
away. All of it, not a trace.’ ‘If only the pocketbook were not lost.
Car-tickets and letters. It will be terrible if the letters are found.’
‘Hawkins may have it. The curtain was much safer.’ ‘That part’s safe
enough, unless it made a hole in the floor above.’”
“Oh, if you’re going to read a lot of irrelevant material--”
“Irrelevant nothing! Wake up, Horace! But remember this. I’m not
explaining the physical phenomena. We’ll never do that. It wasn’t
extraordinary, as such things go. Our little medium in a trance
condition has read poor Clara’s mind. It’s all here, all that Clara
knew and nothing that she didn’t know. A mind-reader, friend Horace. And
Heaven help me when I marry her!”
********
As I have said, the Neighborhood Club ended its investigations with
this conclusion, which I believe is properly reached. It is only fair to
state that there are those among us who have accepted that theory in the
Wells case, but who have preferred to consider that behind both it and
the physical phenomena of the seances there was an intelligence which
directed both, an intelligence not of this world as we know it. Both
Herbert and Alice Robinson are now pronounced spiritualists, although
Miss Jeremy, now Mrs. Sperry, has definitely abandoned all investigative
work.
Personally, I have evolved no theory. It seems beyond dispute that
certain individuals can read minds, and that these same, or other
so-called “sensitives,” are capable of liberating a form of invisible
energy which, however, they turn to no further account than the useless
ringing of bells, moving of small tables, and flinging about of divers
objects.
To me, I admit, the solution of the Wells case as one of mind-reading is
more satisfactory than explanatory. For mental waves remain a mystery,
acknowledged, as is electricity, but of a nature yet unrevealed.
Thoughts are things. That is all we know.
Mrs. Dane, I believe, had suspected the solution from the start.
The Neighborhood Club has recently disbanded. We tried other things, but
we had been spoiled. Our Kipling winter was a failure. We read a play or
two, with Sperry’s wife reading the heroine, and the rest of us taking
other parts. She has a lovely voice, has Mrs. Sperry. But it was all
stale and unprofitable, after the Wells affair. With Herbert on a
lecture tour on spirit realism, and Mrs. Dane at a sanatorium for the
winter, we have now given it up, and my wife and I spend our Monday
evenings at home.
After dinner I read, or, as lately, I have been making this record of
the Wells case from our notes. My wife is still fond of the phonograph,
and even now, as I make this last entry and complete my narrative, she
is waiting for me to change the record. I will be frank. I hate the
phonograph. I hope it will be destroyed, or stolen. I am thinking very
seriously of having it stolen.
“Horace,” says my wife, “whatever would we do without the phonograph?
I wish you would put it in the burglar-insurance policy. I am always
afraid it will be stolen.”
Even here, you see! Truly thoughts are things.