HOW THE MEDIUMS WERE TESTED
There was an empty room that formed part of the passage-way between the
two portions of the Upper House. It was insanitary, draughty, and
cheerless. It had an uneven brick floor of Arctic coldness. The view
from the broken-paned, closely-barred window was restricted to a blank
wall and a few ruined houses. Here, in the early days before the Turk
increased our accommodation, five unhappy officers of the Worcester
Yeomanry had learned the full bitterness of captivity. They were not
very big men, but when they were all lying down on the floor together
(as they usually were, poor devils) there was barely space to step
between them, which shows the size of the room. Of its general
undesirability no better proof is wanted than that it remained
uninhabited after the “Cavalry Club” had found better quarters. One
thing only would have induced anyone to take up his dwelling there—the
hope of privacy. But the room was not even private. It was a
thoroughfare, the only means of getting from the northern to the
southern half of the house.
It was not allowed to remain quite idle. Its dirty “white”-washed walls,
brushwood ceiling, broken windows, and uneven floor saw the birth of
many schemes for alleviating the monotony of existence in Yozgad. Here
was rehearsed our first Christmas Pantomime—“The Fair Maid of
Yozgad”—which is perhaps unique amongst pantomimes in that it had to be
performed secretly, at midnight, after the guards had done their nightly
round. For in it Holyoake and Dorling had given full rein to our
feelings towards our captors, and it would not have been polite—or
judicious—for “honoured guests” to have expressed themselves quite so
freely in public. Here Sandes’s orchestra of home-made instruments used
to hold their practices, which caused a keen student of Darwin to vow he
had no further interest in one branch of evolution—that of music. Here
“Little, Stoker & Co.” made their gallant attempt to start an illicit
still, and here, finally, the “Spook” took up his abode.
The tests were spread over several evenings. I can only give brief
samples of what occurred. When Doc. and I sat down to the table we were
the centre of a little crowd of spectators and “detectives,” for there
was nothing secret about the séances.
“Bandage the beggars for a start,” somebody suggested.
Handkerchiefs were tied round our eyes.
“Who are you?” asked Alec.
The glass began to move about. I was writing rubbish. Some sceptic
laughed.
“Wait a bit,” said Price. “It always begins like that. Now who are you?”
“S-I-double L-Y, Silly!” the sceptic read out. “That’s rather a poor
shot for ‘Sally.’ The bandage affects the Spook, it seems.”
“A-S-S,” the Spook went on. “I-T M-A-K-E-S N-O D-I-F-F-E-R-E-N-C-E.”
“We’ll see!” said the sceptic. I felt the board being moved under my
hand. “Now who are you?”
As the glass circled under my right hand, I felt for and found the
secret nicks with my left thumb.
“U T-H-I-N-K U A-R-E C-L-E-V-E-R.”
Slim Jim was lounging about the room. He was Doc.’s prize patient and
was at that time afflicted with the enormous appetite that follows a
long bout of dysentery and fever.
“Poses as a thought-reader, does he?” he said. “Here! What am I thinking
about?”
“Your dinner,” said the Spook, and everybody laughed.
And so on. Mistakes were made, of course, and the glass frequently went
to “next-door” letters, but not more so than on ordinary occasions. It
became generally accepted by the company that whether the mediums had
their eyes bandaged or not, and whether the position of the board was
altered or not, it made no difference.
Once, when the board was moved, my questing thumb failed to locate the
nicks! I was in a quandary, for I dared not feel openly for the guiding
marks. But I got my position in another way. The glass began to bang
away at one spot.
“Right,” said Matthews. “Get on.”
Still the glass banged away at the same letter.
“All right, I’ve got that one,” Alec repeated.
But the glass paid no attention. It continued the monotonous tapping.
“Looks like doing this all night,” I said. “It’s getting wearisome.
Curse it a bit, someone.”
“Leave that damned ‘D’ alone!” said an obliging spectator.
“-O-N-T S-W-E-A-R,” the Spook went on at once. We had got our bearings
again.
One evening some fiend—I think it was Holyoake—suggested turning the
circle with the letters face downwards, a number being written on the
back of each letter. The numbers touched were to be noted down, and any
message given was to be deciphered afterwards. The inversion was made
and it gave me furiously to think. The problem would have been easy
enough had it merely meant a reversal of _all_ the motions of the
glass—_i.e._, if all the letters were diametrically opposite to their
usual stations, as happened when the board was merely twisted round a
half-revolution. I was accustomed to that; but this was different. Take
an ordinary dinner-plate. Mark the points of the compass on it. Now, for
the sake of clearness, revolve the plate on the axis of the North-South
line, and turn it face downwards. The North point is still in the same
position. So is the South point; but while East has changed places with
West, North-East has become not South-West but North-West;
East-Nor’-East has become not West-South-West but West-Nor’-West, and so
on. Given time, I could no doubt have worked out the position of each
letter as I came to it, and moved the glass with fair accuracy. But to
have altered the usual rate of movement would have aroused suspicion.
The glass must move at the usual pace, or not at all; but how to do it?
My memory had created for itself a picture of the board. Given any one
letter, I could visualize the positions of the rest almost
automatically, and my hand could guide the glass to them with as little
conscious effort as a pianist, given his C natural, finds in hitting the
right keys in the dark. Imagine the state of mind of a musician who
finds the C natural in the usual place, but the bass notes on his right
and the treble notes on his left!
Opposite me the Doc. sat. He had nothing to trouble him, no problem to
work out. His one task in life was to let his hand follow the movements
of the glass, to wait for it to move, and then neither hinder nor help
but go whither it led. To him it did not matter where the letters
were—they might be upside down or inside out for all he cared. The Spook
would take him there. He breathed easily, in the serenity of a full
faith, while the glass moved slowly round and round and I thought and
thought and thought. I tried hard to construct in my mind a
looking-glass picture of the board, and failed. To give myself time I
worked out the positions of the N and the O, and for a spell answered
every question with a “No.” Then all of a sudden the solution flashed
into my mind. After all, I _was_ the Spook. There was, therefore, no
reason why I should not, like every other decently educated spook, be
able to see things through a table, or any other small impediment of
that sort. Instead of imagining myself to be looking _down_ at the board
from _above_ the table, I only had to imagine myself to be looking _up_
at the board from _below_ the table to have everything in its right
position once more. In thirty seconds the glass was writing as freely as
ever.
I do not think my friends ever realized the difficulty of the task they
had set me, or how near we were that night to failure. Certainly I got
no credit for the performance. For I, like the Doc., was only a medium.
The credit went where it belonged—to the Spook.
“You birds satisfied?” asked the Doc. genially, as he leaned back in his
ricketty chair, smoking a cigarette after the trial. “How long are we
going to keep up this testing business? Seems to me the Spook has had
you cold every time. For myself, I’d like to get on to something more
interesting.”
“So would I,” said I, and I spoke from the bottom of my heart. “The
position seems to me to be this. Either Doc.’s fudging, or he’s not,
and——”
“I tell you I’m _not_,” said the Doc. emphatically.
“Some of us don’t believe you,” said I; “that’s why they are testing
you.”
“Blow me tight! They’re testing you as much as me! I know nothin’ about
it!”
“Well, put it this way: either _we_ are fudging or we are not. Will that
satisfy you, Doc.?”
“The way I’d put it,” said the little man, “would be—either _you_ are
pullin’ our blooming legs off or we’ve struck a sixty-horse-power,
armour-plated spook of the very first quality. An’ faith, I wouldn’t put
it past ye—ye vagabond!”
“Right-o!” I laughed. “Assume I’m fudging. What does it mean? You’ll
admit I’ve been properly blindfolded?”
“We do,” said Matthews and Price together.
“I know _I_ was,” grumbled the Doc., rubbing his eyes.
“Therefore it must have been memory work. D’you think you can remember
the position of all the letters on the board without looking at them?”
“Sorra a wan!” said the Doctor.
“I believe I could,” said Matthews.
“Well, shut your eyes and try to push the glass to them,” I suggested.
Matthews sat down. He started well, but he had no guide except his own
general position and soon went hopelessly astray. “It would need a lot
of practice,” he said.
“Seen me practising, any of you?” I asked.
“We have _not_,” said the Doc., “an’ what’s more we know you haven’t got
the patience for it. Besides, you couldn’t have told us all these things
we’ve had out of the board.”
“The thing that knocks the memory theory on the head,” said Price, “is
the fact of the board being moved about after you were blindfolded. No
amount of memory would help you if you couldn’t see.”
“I couldn’t see—I didn’t even try,” I answered with perfect truth.
“Besides, you old ass,” Price went on with a grin, “we know you forget
your tie as often as not, and you forgot your lines at the Panto, though
you’d only about five, and you nearly left out the Good Fairy’s song
altogether.” He began to laugh. “The idea of accusing you of having a
memory, Bones, is too blessed ridiculous for words. It’s worse than
believing in the Spook.”
“You needn’t rub it in,” said I. “If I did not remember my exact lines
at the Panto, I made others just as good, I haven’t got a blooming
photographic snapshot camera of a memory like Merriman’s, but it’s as
good as my neighbour’s, anyway.”
By now they were all laughing at me. I quoted poetry I had learned at
school to prove I had a memory. They only laughed the more.
“What’s the day of the week?” the Doc. asked suddenly, as if he had
forgotten an engagement.
“Hanged if I know,” said I. It was easy for a prisoner to forget the day
of the week.
“There ye are, ye see!” said the Doc., and they all jeered, loud and
long.
They agreed it could not be done by memory.
“Can you think of any other way of fudging it?” I asked. They could not.
“Then if it is not my memory it must be yours, Doc.”
“What’s the good of sayin’ it is me when I’m tellin’ ye it’s not,” said
the Doc. wrathfully. “You are as bad as the worst sceptic in the place.
I couldn’t do it if I tried, nor could the best man among you. It can’t
be a fudge! Look the facts in the face and admit it!”
“I don’t see how it can,” said Matthews. “We must look for some other
explanation—telepathy, or subconscious communication, or something of
that sort. That’s the next problem.”
“We are getting on,” I said.
We were. But not in the sense they imagined.
Advanced investigators of Spiritualism are like sword-swallowers. They
can take in with ease what no ordinary mortal can stomach. For in
matters of belief, as elsewhere, “_il n’y a que le premier pas qui
coute_.” It is all a matter of practice and experience. We in Yozgad had
not yet acquired the capacity of an Oliver Lodge or a Conan Doyle, but
we were getting along very well for beginners. The stage of
“True-believerdom” was in sight when my little flock would cease from
talking about “elementary details” and concentrate their attention on
the “greater truths of the World Beyond.” Once a medium has been
accepted as _bona fide_ he has quite a nice job—as easy as falling off a
log, and much more amusing. _Experto credo!_
The growth of a belief is difficult to describe, for growth is not a
matter of adding one piece here and another there. It is not an addition
at all, it is a process; and the most that can be done in describing it
is to state a few of the outstanding events and say, “this marks one
stage in the process, that another.” But the process itself does not
move by jerks. Nor is it the sum total of these separate events. In any
investigation each point as it is reached is subjected to proof. Once
passed as proved it forms in its turn part of the foundation for a
further advance in belief. It is the part of the investigator to make
certain he does not admit as correct a single false deduction. If he
does the whole of his subsequent reasoning is liable to be affected.
It is particularly easy, in a question like spiritualism, to allow
fallacy to creep in. There is a basis of curious phenomena which
certainly exist and are recognized by scientists as indubitable facts.
But the investigator must be careful, _in every instance_, to assure
himself that he is in the presence of the genuine phenomenon, and not of
an imitation of it, and, as a matter of fact, this is sometimes
impossible to do. Thus there is no doubt that the glass will move
without the person whose fingers are resting on it exercising any force
consciously. In the early days of honest experiment, we had satisfied
ourselves on this point. It was within the experience of all of us. Many
of us (I myself was one) could move it alone, without conscious effort;
and before long we came to expect the movement to take place, and to
regard it as the natural consequence of placing our hands in a certain
position. When I began to move the glass consciously there was no
outward indication that any change had taken place, and nobody could
prove I was pushing it rather than “following” it. Nevertheless, the
investigators were no longer in the presence of the genuine phenomenon,
though they thought they were.
From the knowledge that the movement of the glass could be caused by an
unconscious exercise of force, to the belief that the _rational_
movement of the glass was caused in the same unconscious way, was but a
little step. It is a step which many eminent men have taken after years
of patient investigation. My friends could hardly have been blamed had
they taken it at once. The fact that they saw fit to test the “mediums”
and failed to discover the fraud does not prove they were fools. It does
show that at least they were moderately careful, and it should be noted
that the reasoning by which they led themselves astray was well based on
facts. The trouble was it did not take into consideration _all_ the
facts that were relevant. They argued: “We ourselves moved the board
round. The only means by which we could tell the new position of the
letters was by looking. Bones was blindfolded. He could not see.
Therefore he could not know the new position of the board.”
The relevant fact omitted was that man possesses the sense of touch as
well as of vision. It was a failure of observation as well as of logic.
They should have watched my left thumb.
Then, as corroboration, they argued: “It is notorious Bones’s memory
failed him at the Pantomime, and on other similar occasions. Therefore
Bones has a bad memory. No man with a bad memory could carry in his head
the position of twenty-six letters. Therefore Bones did not do so”—which
neglects the fact that stage-memory is a thing quite apart and by
itself.
Had anyone observed my thumb, groping cautiously for the secret marks, I
should have failed. Nobody observed it. Therefore I succeeded. It was
only a very small instance of incomplete observation, but it made all
the difference.
There is a further point to remember. While these tests were proceeding,
the Spook was not idle. He did not take them lying down. The best
defence is always attack. It would never do to allow the investigators
to assume the complete control of the operations, to concentrate on any
single point, or to examine their own reasoning in all its nakedness.
Therefore, while they were trying to discover the origin of the rational
movement of the glass, the Spook counter-attacked continually by framing
his replies to their questions in such a way as to divert the interest
of the audience to the subject matter of the answers and away from the
manner in which they were obtained. The Spook gave, for instance,
appreciations of the military situation on various fronts which formed
splendid food for discussion and eventually led to the issue at frequent
intervals of a Spook Communique. There was one famous night which did
much to establish the authenticity of our “control.” In answer to a
query about the progress of the war, the Spook told us that America was
ready to lend a hand.
“What’s America going to do?” Alec Matthews asked.
“Troops—ready now—waiting,” came the answer.
“Where are they waiting, and how many?”
“At sea—100,000.”
An excited buzz of conversation rose round the table.
“Just a minute,” said a Transport expert. “What shipping have they got?”
(I was now on dangerous ground, and I knew it. I made a rapid
calculation.)
“Three-quarter million tons,” came the answer.
“Where bound?” asked the expert coldly.
“Vladivostock.”
“Russia—by Jove!” “Perhaps the Caucasus!” “We may get out this summer
after all.” The audience had got quite excited. Their whispered comments
reached me as I waited for the next question.
“Composition of the force?”—the expert continued his cross-examination.
“Three complete divisions. Five hundred aeroplanes. Motor fleet.”
“Total number of ships, please?”
“Large and small, 102.” There was no pause between question and answer.
Several of the audience had pencil and paper out (including the
Transport specialist), and were making detailed calculations.
“By Jove,” said the expert, “the figures work out about correct, so far
as I can see.” Then, in a fit of suspicion: “Do you know anything about
transport, Doc.?”
“Devil a bit,” said the Doctor. “An’ I know Bones doesn’t. He’s only a
week-end gunner.”
“We all know that,” said Alec.
I grinned and bore it. I knew only one thing about transport. I had read
somewhere and some-when that a modern division needs seven tons of
shipping per head for a long voyage, and my poor old memory had stored
up this useless bit of lore. The Spook got the credit and went on
cheerily to outline the American scheme for strengthening the Russian
front. Next day, in the lane, Staff Officers spent a happy morning
arguing about the length of time it would take the Siberian railway to
transport the troops to the front!
Meanwhile another factor was contributing greatly to overcome the
suspicions of the camp in general and of my own investigators in
particular. The Hospital House Spook was going great guns. It produced
some first-rate “evidential” matter about various officers—usually
relating to some secret of a “lurid” past which was grudgingly admitted
by the victim to be true—and was exceedingly well informed on matters
relating to the war. Neither Nightingale nor Bishop had any special
acquaintance with the geography of the Western Front—(that was an
“accepted fact” in the camp)—yet their Spook continually referred to
obscure towns and villages all along the line! This was regarded as a
peculiar phenomenon. It is a still more curious phenomenon why the
average Britisher always _will_ under-estimate the strength of his
opponent.
Then one morning our orderly came in with a dixieful of the whole-wheat
mush which we dignified with the name of porridge. He had obviously
something to tell us. He stood rubbing the instep of one foot slowly up
and down the calf of the other leg, and regarding me whimsically.
“What’s up, Hall?” asked Pa Davern.
Hall ran his fingers reflectively through his hair.
“I dunno, Sir,” he said, “but it looks as if our show’s gettin’ left.
The ’Orsepital ’Ouse Spook’s been and gone off the water waggon, I
reckon.”
“How?” I asked. A fear seized me that my rival had been found out. That
would mean my downfall, too.
“Breakin’ windows and such,” Hall said; “reg’lar Mafficking night they
’ad last night. Put the wind up them all proper.”
“Poltergeistism!” I ejaculated.
“Beg pardon, Sir,” said Hall, “that’s a new one. I didn’t set out for to
upset you.”
“He’s not swearing, for once, Hall,” said Pa Davern. “Tell us about it.”
We learned that the night before there had been a séance in the Hospital
House. A new spook had appeared, calling herself “Millicent the
Innocent.” Asked what she was “innocent” of—a perfectly natural question
in view of the name—she grew exceedingly angry and threatened to show
her power. Some daring member of the audience challenged her to “carry
on,” and immediately a window-pane was smashed inwards, from the
outside, a washstand holding a basin full of water was upset, and a
large wooden chandelier crashed down from its hook on the wall. The room
was well lit at the time. It was a good twenty feet above ground level,
the guards had completed their evening round, and all prisoners were
locked inside the house. Nobody was within a dozen feet of any of the
objects affected.
After breakfast I went down to the Hospital House and interviewed Mundey
and Edmonds. They were elated and not a little excited by the adventures
of the night before. They showed me the record of the séance, and sent
me to examine the broken pane.
I saw it could have been broken with a stick from the window of a
neighbouring room—a dark little closet at the head of the stairs. I went
there. The window was nailed up and covered with cobwebs. Perfect! But
in the grime on a little ledge below the window was the fresh imprint of
a foot. I took my embassy cap and dusted it over. It was clear my rival
had a confederate. Except for that little slip over the footprint his
work had been very thorough, and I wondered who it could be. In those
days I knew Hill only by sight, or I might have guessed.
The camp buzzed with the discussion of the new phenomenon. Compared with
this exhibition of the power of the Unseen over material things, the
rational movements of the glass had become a very minor problem. I hoped
it might be forgotten altogether, or accepted much as we laymen accept
the beating of our hearts—as the necessary but inexplicable condition
for the continued existence of human life. But Alec Matthews was a
persistent and uncomfortably thorough person. He came up to me one
morning as I sat sunning myself against the south wall. I saw from his
eye there was something in the wind.
“Morning, Bones. I wanted to see you. Little and I and a few more have
been talking over those last séances. Would you object very much to one
more test?”
“I thought you were all satisfied,” I said. “Tests are a nuisance. I
don’t want to waste more time over them.”
“Doc. said the same,” said Alec. “But he has agreed, if you are willing.
I’m pretty well satisfied myself already, but if we come through this,
it will clinch it.”
“What’s the test?” I asked.
“We’d rather not tell you,” said Alec, “and we haven’t told Doc.
either.”
“Right-o,” I replied. “Let’s go and join the Majors. They’re watching
the ducks in the lane.”
Matthews declined the proffered entertainment. Instead, he went off to
Little “to get things ready” for the test. I spent an unhappy day
wondering what on earth the test could be that required so much
preparation. In the evening a rather larger number than usual gathered
round the spook-board. Doc. and I sat down in our usual places.
“Do you want us blindfolded?” I asked, tendering a handkerchief.
“Not at all,” said Alec. “I don’t believe sight comes into it, anyway.
Even if it did, it would not be of any use to-night.”
“It might be more satisfactory, though it is beastly uncomfortable,” I
suggested.
One of the audience then blindfolded me, but it was carelessly done, and
I could still see the ground at my feet and the nearest edge of the
spook-board.
“Are you ready?” Alec asked of the spook-board.
“Yes,” came the answer.
“This is a test,” Matthews explained. “We want to find out what directs
the glass to the letters. Previous tests indicate it is not done by the
mediums—”(I breathed more freely after that, old chap)—“but it may be
caused by one of the spectators unconsciously exercising a sort of
hypnotic influence over the mediums—in short by Telepathy. I have
prepared a new circle of letters, in triplicate. The original is here,
in this room, and will be produced shortly. The duplicate and triplicate
are in Little’s room. The triplicate is smaller in size and so
constructed as to revolve inside the duplicate. It will be set running
by Boyes and Little, who will leave their room before it stops and guard
the door. I want to see if the glass can write on the original circle in
the code formed by the revolving circle with the duplicate. If it can,
it proves that the movement is not controlled, consciously or
unconsciously, by any human agency, for nobody knows the code, as there
will be nobody in the room when the revolving circle stops.”
Doc. and I put our fingers back on the glass.
“Ha! ha! ha!” It wrote at once.
“You’re laughing,” said Price. “Can you do it?”
“Easy,” said the Spook.
The new circle of letters prepared by Matthews was substituted for the
one I knew so well, and word was sent to Little and Boyes to start the
code wheel spinning.
“Can you write on this new arrangement of the letters?” Matthews asked.
The glass began to revolve slowly round and round the board.
“It is examining the letters,” said somebody.
“Yes,” came the answer from the board. “Ask something.”
“Good enough,” said Matthews. “Now write in code. Tell us who you are in
code.”
There was a long pause.
“The glass feels quite dead, as if there’s nothing here,” said the Doc.
at last.
“I expect it has gone next door to examine the code,” said somebody,
with a laugh that sounded a trifle forced.
“B-M-X,” the glass wrote.
“Is that who you are?”
“B-M-X,” said the glass again.
“Is that your name? It seems very short.”
“B-M-X,” again.
“Are you writing code?”
There was another long pause.
“My bandage is slipping,” said I. “Tie it up, someone.”
“Oh, never mind your bandage,” said Alec. “Take it off, it can make no
difference.”
I took it off, and lit a cigarette with my right hand still on the
glass.
“That’s good,” I said. “You can’t taste smoke with your eyes shut.”
“You’ve been thinking about smoking instead of keeping your mind blank!”
said the Doc. “That’s why it stopped. It’ll go now, under normal
conditions.”
“Are you writing code?” Alec repeated.
“B-M-X—B-M-X—B-M-X.”
“That may be the code for ‘yes,’” said Price. “Go and see, Little.”
Little went out to examine the code. While he was away the glass kept up
a monotonous B-M-X, B-M-X.
Little came back. “Can’t make it out,” he said; “it’s not code for
‘yes.’ B-M-X is V——”
“Don’t tell us what it is,” Alec interrupted. “Come on, what’s your
name?”
Before he got the question out the glass was writing again. A
steady string of some thirty to forty unintelligible letters.
“F-G-F-K-V-H-M-D-O-H-O-M-X-O-F-T-T-O-M-U-D-A-N-M-F-G-U-F-N-V-C-F-K-M-T-M-F-N.”
“Can you repeat all that?” Price asked.
The glass repeated it a second and a third time without variation.
“Looks as if we are getting something,” said Alec. “Now please give us a
message.”
The glass replied at considerable length, and again repeated the reply
three times over. Thus it went on for the best part of an hour,
answering questions in code, and repeating each answer three times.
“I think we’ve got enough to go on with,” said Price, “and anyway,
whatever this stuff may be, whether it makes sense or not, we’re up
against one thing, and that is, how the deuce can these long rigmaroles
of letters be repeated with such accuracy?”
While Little and Boyes adjourned with the record to see if they could be
deciphered, the company discussed the evening’s performance.
“Whatever Little’s verdict may be,” said the Doc., “the sceptics who
think I am doing this have had a bit of a jar to-night.”
“How so?” I asked innocently.
The Doc. tapped the spook-board with a grimy forefinger.
“This is a new arrangement of the letters,” he said, “which was sprung
on me to-night.”
“Well, what about it?” I asked.
The Doc. leant across the board and glared at me. “What about it? Why,
ye cormorant! Who but you accused me the other night of rememberin’ the
letters, an’ how can I remember them when I’ve never seen them before?
Yet the thing wrote sense! It said, ‘Yes, ask something,’ in plain
Sassenach!”
I looked at the board critically.
“That cock won’t fight, Doc.,” I said. “So far as I can see, this circle
looks like a copy of the old one. I remember that combination N-I-F next
each other.”
“It’s not quite the same,” said Alec. “I’ve changed a few of the
letters.” He produced the old board and put it alongside the new one.
“You see the T and the W have changed places, and so have the B and the
M. And both the T and the M come into the Spook’s answer to ‘Ask
something.’”
“Yes,” said the Doc., “and here’s another change—the V and the D.”
“I didn’t change that,” said Alec quickly.
“But ye did,” persisted the Doctor. “The old one reads from left to
right, S D V, and the new one S V D.”
“So it does,” said Alec; “that was an accidental change.”
“Dash it!” said I. “I never spotted that, either.”
I don’t know why my remark escaped notice, but it did. Somebody
suggested we should go on spooking, and I put my fingers on the glass
again with a feeling of thankfulness. The glass began to move.
“I know who this is,” the Doc. said, without opening his eyes. “It’s
Silas P. Warner.”
“Quite right,” said Price, eyeing Doc. with a growing suspicion. “How
did you know before I read it out?”
“Why, of all unbelievers,” said Doc. the Innocent, looking at Price in
astonishment; “of all the unbelievers! Faith! D’ye think I’m a lump of
wood, or what? D’ye think I’ve sat here night after night and hour after
hour, fingerin’ this blessed glass, an’ don’t know the difference _in
feel_ between one Spook and another?”
This was new to me—the “difference in feel” was quite unconsciously
caused on my part—but it was up to me to support the Doc.
“I’ve noticed that myself,” I said. “Every one of them writes a
different way.”
“Of course, _what_ they say is always characteristic,” said Price. “I
admit that! But here is Doc. recognizing them not from what they say,
but from the way they say it—from the way the glass moves.”
“An’ why not?” said the Doc. “Silas has one way of writing—he’s
energetic and slap-bang. An’ Sally has another—she’s world-wise and
knowing. But Dorothy! Dorothy that’s always gentle and sweet! She is the
one _I_ like!”
We were all still laughing and teasing the Doc. when Little came back.
“No good,” he said, “the stuff won’t make sense. I’ve been right through
it.”
“Then we’ve got to explain how It remembered and managed to repeat all
that rigmarole,” said Price.
“Let’s ask Silas,” Alec suggested, and Doc. and I put our fingers on the
glass again.
Then Boyes burst into the room, waving a sheet of paper. “It’s all
right,” he gasped breathlessly. “The blessed thing has been coding our
code! It’s been writing one letter to the left all the way through, and
makes perfect sense. Listen.” He began reading out the decoded
sentences. I looked across at Doc. He was grinning at me—a most
aggressive grin! I leant back in my chair and poured myself out a tot of
Raki from Alec’s bottle.
“I feel I deserve this,” I said, raising my mug.
“Bones, ye thief of the world!” said Doc. “Pass that bottle! Ye had no
more to do with it than the rest of us.”
“That he had not,” said Alec. “Circulate the poison! Mugs up, you
fellows. The thing’s proved, so here’s to the Spook that Doc. says feels
the nicest.”
“Dorothy,” we said, in chorus.