Sight Unseen
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Mary Roberts Rinehart >> Sight Unseen
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8 Sight Unseen
by Mary Roberts Rinehart
I
The rather extraordinary story revealed by the experiments of the
Neighborhood Club have been until now a matter only of private
record. But it seems to me, as an active participant in the
investigations, that they should be given to the public; not so
much for what they will add to the existing data on psychical
research, for from that angle they were not unusual, but as yet
another exploration into that still uncharted territory, the human
mind.
The psycho-analysts have taught us something about the individual
mind. They have their own patter, of complexes and primal instincts,
of the unconscious, which is a sort of bonded warehouse from which
we clandestinely withdraw our stored thoughts and impressions. They
lay to this unconscious mind of ours all phenomena that cannot
otherwise be labeled, and ascribe such demonstrations of power as
cannot thus be explained to trickery, to black silk threads and
folding rods, to slates with false sides and a medium with chalk
on his finger nail.
In other words, they give us subjective mind but never objective
mind. They take the mind and its reactions on itself and on the
body. But what about objective mind? Does it make its only
outward manifestations through speech and action? Can we ignore
the effect of mind on mind, when there are present none of the
ordinary media of communication? I think not.
In making the following statement concerning our part in the strange
case of Arthur Wells, a certain allowance must be made for our
ignorance of so-called psychic phenomena, and also for the fact that
since that time, just before the war, great advances have been made
in scientific methods of investigation. For instance, we did not
place Miss Jeremy's chair on a scale, to measure for any loss of
weight. Also the theory of rods of invisible matter emanating from
the medium's body, to move bodies at a distance from her, had only
been evolved; and none of the methods for calculation of leverages
and strains had been formulated, so far as I know.
To be frank, I am quite convinced that, even had we known of these
so-called explanations, which in reality explain nothing, we would
have ignored them as we became involved in the dramatic movement of
the revelations and the personal experiences which grew out of them.
I confess that following the night after the first seance any
observations of mine would have been of no scientific value whatever,
and I believe I can speak for the others also.
Of the medium herself I can only say that we have never questioned
her integrity. The physical phenomena occurred before she went into
trance, and during that time her forearms were rigid. During the
deep trance, with which this unusual record deals, she spoke in her
own voice, but in a querulous tone, and Sperry's examination of her
pulse showed that it went from eighty normal to a hundred and twenty
and very feeble.
With this preface I come to the death of Arthur Wells, our
acquaintance and neighbor, and the investigation into that death by
a group of six earnest people who call themselves the Neighborhood
Club.
********
The Neighborhood Club was organized in my house. It was too small
really to be called a club, but women have a way these days of
conferring a titular dignity on their activities, and it is not
so bad, after all. The Neighborhood Club it really was, composed
of four of our neighbors, my wife, and myself.
We had drifted into the habit of dining together on Monday evenings
at the different houses. There were Herbert Robinson and his sister
Alice--not a young woman, but clever, alert, and very alive;
Sperry, the well-known heart specialist, a bachelor still in spite
of much feminine activity; and there was old Mrs. Dane, hopelessly
crippled as to the knees with rheumatism, but one of those glowing
and kindly souls that have a way of being a neighborhood nucleus.
It was around her that we first gathered, with an idea of forming
for her certain contact points with the active life from which she
was otherwise cut off. But she gave us, I am sure, more than we
brought her, and, as will be seen later, her shrewdness was an
important element in solving our mystery.
In addition to these four there were my wife and myself.
It had been our policy to take up different subjects for these
neighborhood dinners. Sperry was a reformer in his way, and on his
nights we generally took up civic questions. He was particularly
interested in the responsibility of the state to the sick poor. My
wife and I had "political" evenings. Not really politics, except in
their relation to life. I am a lawyer by profession, and dabble a
bit in city government. The Robinsons had literature.
Don't misunderstand me. We had no papers, no set programs. On the
Robinson evenings we discussed editorials and current periodicals,
as well as the new books and plays. We were frequently acrimonious,
I fear, but our small wrangles ended with the evening. Robinson was
the literary editor of a paper, and his sister read for a large
publishing house.
Mrs. Dane was a free-lance. "Give me that privilege," she begged.
"At least, until you find my evenings dull. It gives me, during all
the week before you come, a sort of thrilling feeling that the
world is mine to choose from." The result was never dull. She
led us all the way from moving-pictures to modern dress. She led
us even further, as you will see.
On consulting my note-book I find that the first evening which
directly concerns the Arthur Wells case was Monday, November the
second, of last year.
It was a curious day, to begin with. There come days, now and then,
that bring with them a strange sort of mental excitement. I have
never analyzed them. With me on this occasion it took the form of
nervous irritability, and something of apprehension. My wife, I
remember, complained of headache, and one of the stenographers had
a fainting attack.
I have often wondered for how much of what happened to Arthur Wells
the day was responsible. There are days when the world is a place
for love and play and laughter. And then there are sinister days,
when the earth is a hideous place, when even the thought of
immortality is unbearable, and life itself a burden; when all that
is riotous and unlawful comes forth and bares itself to the light.
This was such a day.
I am fond of my friends, but I found no pleasure in the thought of
meeting them that evening. I remembered the odious squeak in the
wheels of Mrs. Dane's chair. I resented the way Sperry would clear
his throat. I read in the morning paper Herbert Robinson's review
of a book I had liked, and disagreed with him. Disagreed violently.
I wanted to call him on the telephone and tell him that he was a
fool. I felt old, although I am only fifty-three, old and bitter,
and tired.
With the fall of twilight, things changed somewhat. I was more
passive. Wretchedness encompassed me, but I was not wretched. There
was violence in the air, but I was not violent. And with a bath and
my dinner clothes I put away the horrors of the day.
My wife was better, but the cook had given notice.
"There has been quarreling among the servants all day," my wife said.
"I wish I could go and live on a desert island."
We have no children, and my wife, for lack of other interests, finds
her housekeeping an engrossing and serious matter. She is in the
habit of bringing her domestic difficulties to me when I reach home
in the evenings, a habit which sometimes renders me unjustly
indignant. Most unjustly, for she has borne with me for thirty years
and is known throughout the entire neighborhood as a perfect
housekeeper. I can close my eyes and find any desired article in my
bedroom at any time.
We passed the Wellses' house on our way to Mrs. Dane's that night,
and my wife commented on the dark condition of the lower floor.
"Even if they are going out," she said, "it would add to the
appearance of the street to leave a light or two burning. But some
people have no public feeling."
I made no comment, I believe. The Wellses were a young couple, with
children, and had been known to observe that they considered the
neighborhood "stodgy." And we had retaliated, I regret to say, in
kind, but not with any real unkindness, by regarding them as
interlopers. They drove too many cars, and drove them too fast; they
kept a governess and didn't see enough of their children; and their
English butler made our neat maids look commonplace.
There is generally, in every old neighborhood, some one house on
which is fixed, so to speak, the community gaze, and in our case it
was on the Arthur Wellses'. It was a curious, not unfriendly
staring, much I daresay like that of the old robin who sees two
young wild canaries building near her.
We passed the house, and went on to Mrs. Dane's.
She had given us no inkling of what we were to have that night, and
my wife conjectured a conjurer! She gave me rather a triumphant
smile when we were received in the library and the doors into the
drawing-room were seen to be tightly closed.
We were early, as my wife is a punctual person, and soon after our
arrival Sperry came. Mrs. Dane was in her chair as usual, with her
companion in attendance, and when she heard Sperry's voice outside
she excused herself and was wheeled out to him, and together we
heard them go into the drawing-room. When the Robinsons arrived she
and Sperry reappeared, and we waited for her customary announcement
of the evening's program. When none came, even during the meal, I
confess that my curiosity was almost painful.
I think, looking back, that it was Sperry who turned the talk to the
supernatural, and that, to the accompaniment of considerable gibing
by the men, he told a ghost story that set the women to looking back
over their shoulders into the dark corners beyond the zone of
candle-light. All of us, I remember, except Sperry and Mrs. Dane,
were skeptical as to the supernatural, and Herbert Robinson believed
that while there were so-called sensitives who actually went into
trance, the controls which took possession of them were buried
personalities of their own, released during trance from the
sub-conscious mind.
"If not," he said truculently, "if they are really spirits, why can't
they tell us what is going on, not in some vague place where they are
always happy, but here and now, in the next house? I don't ask for
prophecy, but for some evidence of their knowledge. Are the Germans
getting ready to fight England? Is Horace here the gay dog some of
us suspect?"
As I am the Horace in question, I must explain that Herbert was
merely being facetious. My life is a most orderly and decorous one.
But my wife, unfortunately, lacks a sense of humor, and I felt that
the remark might have been more fortunate.
"Physical phenomena!" scoffed the cynic. "I've seen it all--objects
moving without visible hands, unexplained currents of cold air, voice
through a trumpet--I know the whole rotten mess, and I've got a book
which tells how to do all the tricks. I'll bring it along some night."
Mrs. Dane smiled, and the discussion was dropped for a time. It was
during the coffee and cigars that Mrs. Dane made her announcement.
As Alice Robinson takes an after-dinner cigarette, a custom my wife
greatly deplores, the ladies had remained with us at the table.
"As a matter of fact, Herbert," she said, "we intend to put your
skepticism to the test tonight. Doctor Sperry has found a medium
for us, a non-professional and a patient of his, and she has kindly
consented to give us a sitting."
Herbert wheeled and looked at Sperry.
"Hold up your right hand and state by your honor as a member in
good standing that you have not primed her, Sperry."
Sperry held up his hand.
"Absolutely not," he said, gravely. "She is coming in my car. She
doesn't know to what house or whose. She knows none of you. She
is a stranger to the city, and she will not even recognize the
neighborhood."
II
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."
I caught Herbert's eye, and he grinned.
"Good evening, little Bright Eyes," he said. "How's everything in
the happy hunting ground tonight?"
"Dark and cold," she said. "Dark and cold. And the knee hurts.
It's very bad. If the key is on the nail--Arnica will take the
pain out."
She lapsed into silence. In transcribing Clara's record I shall
make no reference to these pauses, which were frequent, and
occasionally filled in with extraneous matter. For instance, once
there was what amounted to five minutes of Mother Goose jingles.
Our method was simply one of question, by one of ourselves, and of
answer by Miss Jeremy. These replies were usually in a querulous
tone, and were often apparently unwilling. Also occasionally there
was a bit of vernacular, as in the next reply. Herbert, who was
still flippantly amused, said:
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