§ 2
Mr. Preemby h’rrmped and began a new section of his narrative.
“It was in the evening after dinner,” he said, “that things really began. I went into the smoking-room—to smoke—and afterwards I went into the drawing-room, and when I went into the drawing-room I had no more thought of occult phenomena, Christina Alberta, than I had of flying over the moon. But as I came into the drawing-room I saw Miss Solbé looking at her Patience cards which she had just put out, and the way she was holding her hands on the table reminded me of the way I had read that people put their hands together on the table when they were trying experiments in table-turning. And almost without thinking I said: ‘Why, Miss Solbé, the way you are holding your hands is just the way they do when they are going to do table-turning!’ I said it just like that.
“Mr. Hockleby was reading his paper at the time—the Times, I think, but it may have been the Morning Post—but he put it down when he heard me say that and he looked over his glasses at me and said, ‘You don’t believe in that sort of thing, Mr. Preemby, surely?’
“His wife was sitting with her back to me and from the way she spoke I think she must have been eating some sort of sweet or lozenge at the time. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘We did it at home dozens of times before I was married.’
“And I don’t know what put it into my head, Christina Alberta; it seemed almost as though it was something behind myself that did it, or it may have been a sort of antagonism I have always felt about that man Hockleby; but anyhow, I said, ‘I’d really like to try some of this table-turning.’
“The younger Miss Solbé, she’s really quite a charming young lady when you get to know her, and it seems she has been reading a little occult literature lately——”
“How old is she, Daddy?” asked Christina Alberta, regarding him with a look of novel suspicion.
“I don’t think she can be very much more than thirty-two or three. Thirty-four at the outside. And really quite well-read, quite well-read. Well, anyhow, she said she would like to try it. And Miss Hockleby, evidently she had been brought up on strictly sceptical lines by her father, she was curious too. So to cut a long story short, we tried it. Only Mr. Hockleby objected and Mrs. Hockleby overruled that. She was the only one among us who had ever seen anything of the sort before, and so it was she who arranged things and told us what to do. We chose a very solid table, the one that usually has the big aspidistra on it, and while we were turning out the light——”
“But why did you do that, Daddy?”
“One always does that,” said Mr. Preemby. “It makes the atmosphere more favourable. We lit a candle which Miss Margaret Rewster got for us and turned out all the electric lights; and while we were doing this, in came young Mr. Charles Fenton and said—what did he say? A peculiar expression. Ah, yes! ‘Gollys,’ he said, ‘what’s up?’”
“Was that the young man with the motor bicycle?”
“Yes. The young man from Cambridge. We explained what we were doing and asked him to join us. He declared he knew nothing of psychic phenomena, had never experimented with it at all and seemed very doubtful about taking part in the trial. ‘I don’t think there’s anything in it,’ he said. ‘We shall just waste our time.’ Indeed I remember now that he did go out intending to visit a music-hall, and then he came back and said it was raining. It’s very important to note that he was not at all eager to join us and that he was quite uninformed about occult things because, you see, as I will tell you, we found out presently that he was a person of exceptional psychic gifts, much greater psychic gifts than anyone else among us.
“Well, we arranged ourselves about the table in the usual manner, thumbs and little fingers touching, and for a time nothing seemed to happen at all. We found Miss Emily Rewster was peeping in through the slightly open door, and perhaps that may have had an unfavourable influence. I suppose she wondered what we were doing and why we had asked her sister for a candle. Then Mr. Fenton got very restive and grumbled to himself and said it was the silliest way of passing an evening he had ever tried. It was a little difficult to persuade him to keep silence and persevere. ‘All right,’ said he, with a kind of resentment. ‘Have it your own way.’ And then suddenly came two violent raps, raps like little pistol shots, not immediately under the table it was, but as if it was in the air a foot or so under the table. And then the table began to move. Slowly at first, shifting along the floor, and then quite strongly twisting and pushing up against our hands. It was very weird and impressive, Christina Alberta, very weird and impressive indeed. It rose nearly two feet I should think and then Mr. Hockleby broke the circle and it fell rather heavily, I fancy, and the leg hit his shin. He uttered an exclamation and stooped to rub his leg, and in the indistinct light he hit his head on the edge of the table. It seemed almost a judgment on his scepticism I thought. We turned up one or two of the lights to attend to him. ‘I don’t like this,’ said Mr. Fenton. ‘This is a bit too rum for me.’
“I asked him to try just once more.
“‘I don’t like this table riding up like this,’ he said. ‘It’s such a bad example for the chairs. Suppose some of them start playing cup and ball with us! You might get a nasty toss from a buck-jumping chair. And besides, it’s a lot too like a Channel crossing for my taste.’
“I think we were all a good deal excited by what had happened, and all the others, even Mr. Hockleby, were eager to continue.
“‘Next time I shall press down,’ he said. I think he was a little suspicious that either his wife or me had something to do with the phenomena. Evidently spiritualism was a long-standing dispute between him and his wife. His wife said she had seen tables move before, but none so actively as this one had done.
“Down we sat again. We had hardly waited a minute before the table began rocking about in the most extraordinary fashion, and then absolutely flew up so violently that the elder Miss Solbé was thrown back over that Ottoman there is there, and I was bumped under my chin. At the same time there was a perfect volley of cracks, like somebody cracking his fingers, but ever so much louder. It was quite a comfort to have the lights up again and see Mr. Hockleby holding the table down firmly in its proper place. ‘Damn you,’ he said—quite loudly. ‘Damn you. Keep down.’ Miss Hockleby and her father picked up Miss Solbé, who was on the floor in a sort of hysterical fit of laughter, with her feet waving about.
“‘I don’t like this,’ said Mr. Fenton. ‘It goes through one like an electric shock.’
“He spoke quite simply.
“The only one of us who had had any experience with occult phenomena was Mrs. Hockleby, and she had not done anything of the sort since her marriage to Mr. Hockleby five or six years before, because of his scepticism. She said now that it was very evident that some very strong and resolute spirit was present and was trying to communicate with us, and she explained a simple and safe method of getting into communication. We were to reform the circle round the table and we were to call over the alphabet, and when we came to the letter the spirit wanted there would be a rap and so we should be able to arrive at something definite. There is a sort of code quite well understood it seems in the spirit world, in which you convey ‘No’ by one rap and ‘Yes’ by two, and so on.
“We set to work at this,” said Mr. Preemby. “We asked if the spirit would like to spell out anything and it answered with two very loud raps, and then Mr. Hockleby read out the letters: A B C and so on. When it got to S the spirit gave a rap so loud it made me jump.”
“And what did you spell out, Daddy?”
“A name quite unknown to me then—SARGON, and then KING OF KINGS. We asked: was the spirit that was communicating with us Sargon? The answer came No. Was Sargon present? Yes. Then who was our communicant? OUJAH. Who was Oujah? WISE MAN. It was a very slow process spelling out the words in this way, and by the time we had got so far we were all very tired. Mr. Fenton in particular was very tired. He yawned and seemed greatly exhausted, and said at last he felt so weary and muzzy that he must go to bed. That was really very natural, because though none of us realized it at the time he was the actual medium under Oujah’s control. He went to bed and we tried to go on without him, but the magic had departed and we could not get so much as a rap. So we sat for a time talking all this over. Mr. Hockleby in particular was greatly flabbergasted, and then the rest of us went to bed.”
“Evidently Mr. Fenton made the raps,” said Christina Alberta.
“Evidently his presence was necessary for the raps to be made,” corrected Mr. Preemby. “Quite unconsciously he was a Mejum.”
There was a pause.
“Go on with the story,” said Christina Alberta.