The circle was equally puzzled.

  “Some poor chap out of the lower spheres, I think,” said Bolsover. “Orthodox folk say we should avoid them. I say we should hurry up and help them.”

  “Right, Bolsover!” said Mailey, with hearty approval. “Get on with it, quick!”

  “Can we do anything for you, friend?”

  There was silence.

  “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand the conditions. Where is Luke? He’ll know what to do.”

  “What is it, friend?” asked the pleasant voice of the guide.

  “There is some poor fellow here. We want to help him.”

  “Ah! yes, yes, he has come from the outer darkness,” said Luke in a sympathetic voice. “He doesn’t know. He doesn’t understand. They come over here with a fixed idea, and when they find the real thing is quite different from anything they have been taught by the Churches, they are helpless. Some adapt themselves and they go on. Others don’t, and they just wander on unchanging, like this man. He was a cleric, and a very narrow, bigoted one. This is the growth of his own mental seed sown upon earth—sown in ignorance and reaped in misery.”

  “What is amiss with him?”

  “He does not know he is dead. He walks in the mist. It is all an evil dream to him. He has been years so. To him it seems an eternity.”

  “Why do you not tell him—instruct him?”

  “We cannot. We—”

  The trumpet crashed.

  “Music, Smiley, music! Now the vibrations should be better.”

  “The higher spirits cannot reach earth-bound folk,” said Mailey. “They are in very different zones of vibration. It is we who are near them and can help them.”

  “Yes, you! you!” cried the voice of Luke.

  “Mr. Mailey, speak to him. You know him!” The low mutter had broken out again in the same weary monotone.

  “Friend, I would have a word with you,” said Mailey in a firm, loud voice. The mutter ceased and one felt that the invisible presence was straining its attention. “Friend, we are sorry at your condition. You have passed on. You see us and you wonder why we do not see you. You are in the other world. But you do not know it, because it is not as you expected. You have not been received as you imagined. It is because you imagined wrong. Understand that all is well, and that God is good, and that all happiness is awaiting you if you will but raise your mind and pray for help, and above all think less of your own condition and more of those other poor souls who are round you.”

  There was a silence and Luke spoke again.

  “He has heard you. He wants to thank you. He has some glimmer now of his condition. It will grow within him. He wants to know if he may come again.”

  “Yes! Yes!” cried Bolsover. “We have quite a number who report progress from time to time. God bless you, friend. Come as often as you can.” The mutter had ceased and there seemed to be a new feeling of peace in the air. The high voice of Wee One was heard.

  “Plenty power still left. Red Cloud here. Show what he can do, if Daddy likes.”

  “Red Cloud is our Indian control. He is usually busy when any purely physical phenomena have to be done. You there, Red Cloud?”

  Three loud thuds, like a hammer on wood, sounded from the darkness.

  “Good evening, Red Cloud!”

  A new voice, slow, staccato, laboured, sounded above them.

  “Good day, Chief! How the squaw? How the papooses? Strange faces in wigwam to-night.”

  “Seeking knowledge, Red Cloud. Can you show what you can do?”

  “I try. Wait a little. Do all I can.”

  Again there was a long hush of expectancy. Then the novices were faced once more with the miraculous.

  There came a dull glow in the darkness. It was apparently a wisp of luminous vapour. It whisked across from one side to the other and then circled in the air. By degrees it condensed into a circular disc of radiance about the size of a bull’s-eye lantern. It cast no reflection round it and was simply a clean-cut circle in the gloom. Once it approached Enid’s face and Malone saw it clearly from the side.

  “Why, there is a hand holding it!” he cried, with sudden suspicion.

  “Yes, there is a materialized hand,” said Mailey. “I can see it clearly.”

  “Would you like it to touch you, Mr. Malone?”

  “Yes, if it will.”

  The light vanished and an instant afterwards Malone felt pressure upon his own hand. He turned it palm upwards and clearly felt three fingers laid across it, smooth, warm fingers of adult size. He closed his own fingers and the hand seemed to melt away in his grasp.

  “It has gone!” he gasped.

  “Yes! Red Cloud is not very good at materializations. Perhaps we don’t give him the proper sort of power. But his lights are excellent.”

  Several more had broken out. They were of different types, slow-moving clouds and little dancing sparks like glowworms. At the same time both visitors were conscious of a cold wind which blew upon their faces. It was no delusion, for Enid felt her hair stream across her forehead.

  “You feel the rushing wind,” said Mailey. “Some of these lights would pass for tongues of fire, would they not? Pentecost does not seem such a very remote or impossible thing, does it?”

  The tambourine had risen in the air, and the dot of luminous paint showed that it was circling round. Presently it descended and touched their heads each in turn. Then with a jingle it quivered down upon the table.

  “Why a tambourine? It seems always to be a tambourine,” remarked Malone.

  “It is a convenient little instrument,” Mailey explained. “The only one which shows automatically by its noise where it is flying. I don’t know what other I could suggest except a musical-box.”

  “Our box here flies round something amazin’,” said Mrs. Bolsover. “It thinks nothing of winding itself up in the air as it flies. It’s a heavy box too.”

  “Nine pounds,” said Bolsover. “Well, we seem to have got to the end of things. I don’t think we shall get much more to-night. It has not been a bad sitting—what I should call a fair average sitting. We must wait a little before we turn on the light. Well, Mr. Malone, what do you think of it? Let’s have any objections now before we part. That’s the worst of you inquirers, you know. You often bottle things up in your own minds and let them loose afterwards, when it would have been easy to settle it at the time. Very nice and polite to our faces, and then we are a gang of swindlers in the report.”

  Malone’s head was throbbing and he passed his hand over his heated brow.

  “I am confused,” he said, “but impressed. Oh, yes, certainly impressed. I’ve read of these things, but it is very different when you see them. What weighs most with me is the obvious sincerity and sanity of all you people. No one could doubt that.”

  “Come. We’re gettin’ on.” said Bolsover.

  “I try to think the objections which would be raised by others who were not present. I’ll have to answer them. First, there is the oddity of it all. It is so different to our preconceptions of spirit people.”

  “We must fit our theories to the facts,” said Mailey. “Up to now we have fitted the facts to our theories. You must remember that we have been dealing to-night—with all respect to our dear good hosts—with a simple, primitive, earthly type of spirit, who has his very definite uses, but is not to be taken as an average type. You might as well take the stevedore whom you see on the quay as being a representative Englishman.”

  “There’s Luke,” said Bolsover.

  “Ah, yes, he is, of course, very much higher. You heard him and could judge. What else, Mr. Malone?”

  “Well, the darkness! Everything done in darkness. Why should all mediumship be associated with gloom?”

  “You mean all physical mediumship. That is the only branch of the subject which needs darkness. It is purely chemical, like the darkness of the photographic room. It preserves the delicate physical substance which, drawn from the human body, is the basis of these phenomena. A cabinet is used for the purpose of condensing this same vaporous substance and helping it to solidify. Am I clear?”

  “Yes, but it is a pity all the same. It gives a horrible air of deceit to the whole business.”

  “We get it now and again in the light, Mr. Malone,” said Bolsover. “I don’t know if Wee One is gone yet. Wait a bit! Where are the matches?” He lit the candle, which set them all blinking after their long darkness, “Now let us see what we can do.”

  There was a round wood platter or circle of wood lying among the miscellaneous objects littered over the table to serve as playthings for the strange forces. Bolsover stared at it. They all stared at it. They had risen but no one was within three feet of it.

  “Please, Wee One, please!” cried Mrs. Bolsover.

  Malone could hardly believe his eyes. The disc began to move. It quivered and then rattled upon the table, exactly as the lid of a boiling pot might do.

  “Up with it, Wee One!” They were all clapping their hands.

  The circle of wood, in the full light of the candle, rose upon edge and stood there shaking, as if trying to keep its balance.

  “Give three tilts, Wee One.”

  The disc inclined forward three times. Then it fell flat and remained so.

  “I am so glad you have seen that,” said Mailey. “There is Telekenesis in its simplest and most decisive form.”

  “I could not have believed it!” cried Enid.

  “Nor I,” said Malone. “I have extended my knowledge of what is possible. Mr. Bolsover, you have enlarged my views.”

  “Good, Mr. Malone!”

  “As to the power at the back of these things I am still ignorant. As to the thing themselves I have now and henceforward not the slightest doubt in the world. I know that they are true. I wish you all good night. It is not likely that Miss Challenger or I will ever forget the evening that we have spent under your roof.”

  It was like another world when they came out into the frosty air, and saw the taxis bearing back the pleasure-seekers from the theatre or cinema palace. Mailey stood beside them while they waited for a cab.

  “I know exactly how you feel,” he said, smiling. “You look at all these bustling, complacent people, and you marvel to think how little they know of the possibilities of life. Don’t you want to stop them? Don’t you want to tell them? And yet they would only think you a liar or a lunatic. Funny situation, is it not?”

  “I’ve lost all my bearings for the moment.”

  “They will come back to-morrow morning. It is curious how fleeting these impressions are. You will persuade yourselves that you have been dreaming. Well, good-bye—and let me know if I can help your studies in the future.”

  The friends—one could hardly yet call them lovers—were absorbed in thought during their drive home. When he reached Victoria Gardens Malone escorted Enid to the door of the flat, but he did not go in with her. Somehow the jeers of Challenger which usually rather woke sympathy within him would now get upon his nerves. As it was he heard his greeting in the hall.

  “Well, Enid. Where’s your spook? Spill him out of the bag on the floor and let us have a look at him.”

  His evening’s adventure ended as it had begun, with a bellow of laughter which pursued him down the lift.

  CHAPTER V

  WHERE OUR COMMISSIONERS HAVE A REMARKABLE EXPERIENCE

  Malone sat at the side table of the smoking-room of the Literary Club. He had Enid’s impressions of the séance before him—very subtle and observant they were—and he was endeavouring to merge them in his own experience. A group of men were smoking and chatting round the fire. This did not disturb the journalist, who found, as many do, that his brain and his pen worked best sometimes when they were stimulated by the knowledge that he was part of a busy world. Presently, however, somebody who observed his presence brought the talk round to psychic subjects, and then it was more difficult for him to remain aloof. He leaned back in his chair and listened.

  Polter, the famous novelist, was there, a brilliant man with a subtle mind, which he used too often to avoid obvious truth and to defend some impossible position for the sake of the empty dialectic exercise. He was holding forth now to an admiring, but not entirely a subservient audience.

  “Science,” said he, “is gradually sweeping the world clear of all these old cobwebs of superstition. The world was like some old, dusty attic, and the sun of science is bursting in, flooding it with light, while the dust settles gradually to the floor.”

  “By science,” said someone maliciously, “you mean, of course, men like Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Barrett, Lombroso, Richet, and so forth.”

  Polter was not accustomed to be countered, and usually became rude.

  “No, sir, I mean nothing so preposterous,” he answered, with a glare. “No name, however eminent, can claim to stand for science so long as he is a member of an insignificant minority of scientific men.”

  “He is, then, a crank,” said Pollifex, the artist, who usually played jackal to Polter.

  The objector, one Millworthy, a free-lance of journalism, was not to be so easily silenced.

  “Then Galileo was a crank in his day,” said he. “And Harvey was a crank when he was laughed at over the circulation of the blood.”

  “It’s the circulation of the Daily Gazette which is at stake,” said Marrible, the humorist of the club. “If they get off their stunt I don’t suppose they care a tinker’s curse what is truth or what is not.”

  “Why such things should be examined at all, except in a police court, I can’t imagine,” said Polter. “It is a dispersal of energy, a misdirection of human thought into channels which lead nowhere. We have plenty of obvious, material things to examine. Let us get on with our job.”

  Atkinson, the surgeon, was one of the circle, and had sat silently listening. Now he spoke.

  “I think the learned bodies should find more time for the consideration of psychic matters.”

  “Less,” said Polter.

  “You can’t have less than nothing. They ignore them altogether. Some time ago I had a series of cases of telepathic rapport which I wished to lay before the Royal Society. My colleague Wilson, the zoologist, also had a paper which he proposed to read. They went in together. His was accepted and mine rejected. The title of his paper was ‘The Reproductive System of the Dung-Beetle.’”

  There was a general laugh.

  “Quite right, too,” said Polter. “The humble dung-beetle was at least a fact. All this psychic stuff is not.”

  “No doubt you have good grounds for your views,” chirped the mischievous Millworthy, a mild youth with a velvety manner. “I have little time for solid reading, so I should like to ask you which of Dr. Crawford’s three books you consider the best?”

  “I never heard of the fellow.”

  Millworthy simulated intense surprise.

  “Good Heavens, man! Why, he is the authority. If you want pure laboratory experiments those are the books. You might as well lay down the law about zoology and confess that you had never heard of Darwin.”

  “This is not science,” said Polter, emphatically.

  “What is really not science,” said Atkinson, with some heat, “is the laying down of the law on matters which you have not studied. It is talk of that sort which has brought me to the edge of Spiritualism, when I compare this dogmatic ignorance with the earnest search for truth conducted by the great Spiritualists. Many of them took twenty years of work before they formed their conclusions.”

  “But their conclusions are worthless because they are upholding a formed opinion.”

  “But each of them fought a long fight before he formed that opinion. I know a few of them, and there is not one who did not take a lot of convincing.”

  Polter shrugged his shoulders.

  “Well, they can have their spooks if it makes them happier so long as they let me keep my feet firm on the ground.”

  “Or stuck in the mud,” said Atkinson.

  “I would rather be in the mud with sane people thin in the air with lunatics,” said Polter. “I know some of these Spiritualists people and I believe that you can divide them equally into fools and rogues.”

  Malone had listened with interest and then with a growing indignation. Now he suddenly took fire.

  “Look here, Polter,” he said, turning his chair towards the company, “it is fools and dolts like you which are holding back the world’s progress. You admit that you have read nothing of this, and I’ll swear you have seen nothing. Yet you use the position and the name which you have won in other matters in order to discredit a number of people who, whatever they may be, are certainly very earnest and very thoughtful.”

  “Oh,” said Polter, “I had no idea you had got so far. You don’t dare to say so in your articles. You are a Spiritualist then. That rather discounts your views, does it not?”

  “I am not a Spiritualist, but I am an honest inquirer, and that is more than you have ever been. You call them rogues and fools, but, little as I know, I am sure that some of them are men and women whose boots you are not worthy to clean.”

  “Oh, come, Malone!” cried one or two voices, but the insulted Polter was on his feet. “It’s men like you who empty this club,” he cried, as he swept out. “I shall certainly never come here again to be insulted.”

  “I say, you’ve done it, Malone!”

  “I felt inclined to help him out with a kick. Why should he ride roughshod over other people’s feelings and beliefs? He has got on and most of us haven’t, so he thinks it’s a condescension to come among us.”

  “Dear old Irishman!” said Atkinson, patting his shoulder. “Rest, perturbed spirit, rest! But I wanted to have a word with you. Indeed, I was waiting here because I did not want to interrupt you.”

  “I’ve had interruptions enough!” cried Malone. “How could I work with that damned donkey braying in my ear?”