CHAPTER I

THE DEAD RAPPER

I had known Harry Carthew as a second-year man at Oxford. He never completed his course or took a degree because family reasons, some catastrophe of some kind or another--made it imperative for him to earn a living at once. As an undergraduate he was an ardent anti-Spiritualist.

He dropped out of sight of our little world and I had only heard of him casually as having something to do with oil wells in Mexico and had not come into contact with him for years. I was therefore rather surprised to receive a letter from him which showed that he was in London and knew that I was working on research subjects. His letter was couched in rather non-committal terms, and though he was a man whom I had never known well, he expressed an anxiety to meet me again and lay before me certain psychical problems that were puzzling him.

I make it an invariable rule never to discuss psychic matters with people who are ignorant or sceptical of them, unless the sceptics are of a class sufficiently educated to be able to appreciate the absolute facts of the phenomena associated with Spiritualism.

It is impossible to convince a non-scientific person by facts, as he can never assure himself that the possibility of fraud has been absolutely eliminated. A scientist or an engineer can assure himself fairly easily of the genuineness or otherwise of phenomena provided that he is given every latitude for research. But it is difficult to convince either a clergyman or an ordinary medical man of the reality of any psychic phenomena because he is not mentally trained in the same inexorably logical processes of thought as are the engineers and scientists.

Experience has taught me to mistrust the man who approaches with indirect advances to the subject of Spiritualism. I prefer the definite challenge of a critical journalist who demands facts and judges on facts, for it is undoubtedly an axiom that the Seeker after Truth, however sceptical he may be, has no hostile influence in a properly constituted circle.

It has ever been a matter of regret to me that the mass of Spiritualists hold the fallacious idea that a sceptical influence can hinder a séance. For it is not the lack of belief or disbelief of the one or few sceptics that weakens the influence. It is the mass belief of the whole circle in the hostile influence of the sceptic that does the harm.

After thinking matters over I decided that it might be wrong to prejudice Carthew by his undergraduate views. After all, some years had passed, and if every Oxford man held to the eccentric habits and beliefs of his puppy days the world would be a sorry place. I wrote to him asking him to dine with me at my club during the following week.

He had changed so much that when he entered the smoking room I did not recognize him. Tropical sunlight had bronzed and wrinkled his skin, his eyes had the clear hard steel-grey fadedness of the blue iris that comes to men who have gazed long across deserts. Malaria had thinned down his form and his hands were big-veined and tremulous with quinine.

Over the meal he told me a good deal about his life abroad, and I realized something of the deadly loneliness of a white man’s life in the dull oil fields of Mexico. Four other whites to speak to and for the rest native peons, Indians and a sprinkling of Chinese coolies.

A bottle of good wine is a splendid lubricant for the human tongue, and the Burgundy--a “Clos du Poi,” ’84--soon eased him of all awkwardness. Over the coffee and cigars he came to his point.

“You still go on with Spiritualism, don’t you, Grey?”

“Yes,” I answered him, “but I thought that you did not believe in it.” His answer almost shocked me with its violence.

“God! but I wish that I did not!” He was silent with emotion for a moment, then resumed: “You know I never believed in it at the House. I always thought you fellows were simply running it as a craze, but up at Los Chicharras--that was the third big oil gusher that the Company owned--there was a Cornish mining engineer, Bill Tregarthen.

“He was a queer fish, a silent man; squat-shaped, broad as he was long and full of queer fancies. He had a little planchette board that he used to consult about everything, and I have seen him sit there in the patio of the office building with the little jigger dancing about over reams of paper.

“I thought he was crazy, but he persuaded me to try the thing, _and I got messages, too_. One day it spelt out a message from Ellen, and Ellen has been dead for four years--she was my old nurse--Ellen----

“Even then I was only half convinced. One’s brain plays one strange tricks down there in the Tierra Caliente, and I have seen an upturned mountain standing on its head in the desert--mirage of course, and I used to think the planchette mental mirage, subconscious stuff of some kind--and I didn’t believe.

“Then Tregarthen used to laugh at me for a fool, and one night he blazed up into a strange bit of rage and stood there in the moonlight shaking his fist at me. ‘We Cornish folk have known the unwrit lore for all time,’ said he. ‘Old odd people we are and we know old odd things. I tell you. I will tell you that I am right when I am dead. You will not listen to me now, but you shall listen then, indeed.’

“Lots of the stuff he raved at us that night, but I and another man at last calmed him down and got him off to bed. I thought little enough of it at the time, and a week later I went back from Los Chicharras to the Offices at Tampico.

“I suppose it was a month later that I heard the first knock. It was past midday, right in the heart of the siesta hour. Not a soul moving, the very dogs silent in the streets, and the whole place a blinding blaze of sunlight.

“I knew at once--that’s the odd thing about it. _I knew instantly in my heart that Tregarthen was dead._

“That was six months ago, and since then I keep on hearing the raps. I know that Tregarthen is keeping his pledge, but I cannot answer him back; I cannot get into touch with him.

“Now tell me this--with all your knowledge of these things, can you help me?”

I asked him what he had done, and he told me a long chronicle of visits to mediums in New York, of an attempt to talk through a voodoo woman in New Orleans, and of honest, patient sittings in a little suburban circle in London.

Carthew was clearly desperate and absolutely in earnest. I knew without his telling me what was at the back of his mind.

The problem was a peculiar one, for here was a live man to all intents haunted by a malicious spirit now on another plane. Carthew’s character was a strong one, though of a low and violent type. This mental persecution had produced a prodigious feeling of hatred for the dead man--a feeling of hatred that had not existed when he was alive, for then the hatred was all on Tregarthen’s side.

There was also the possibility that the knock was pure hallucination and not a genuine clairaudient phenomenon at all.

I asked Carthew if he could give me particulars of how Tregarthen died, and I was not surprised to learn that his end had been a violent one.

A small oil gusher had broken out as an offshoot from the larger one. In order to cut off the flow and waste of oil it is the practice to force a dynamite cartridge into these small leads. This when exploded breaks the natural channel of the oil and blocks the outlet.

Tregarthen, through an accident or carelessness--he was a deep drinker--had destroyed himself when preparing the charge.

I asked Carthew if he was prepared to attend a séance or two and if he would put himself completely in my hands. He assented readily, reasserting his dominant desire to be able to talk back to Tregarthen.

I was holding private séances twice a week then, but my little circle was, though powerful enough for research work, quite unsuitable for dealing with an abnormal case of undesired communication. During the week I got into touch with a private medium whose faculty of clairaudience was coupled with an excellent nervous system, and I reinforced the circle by the addition of Dr. Miller,[1] who, though not a professed Spiritualist, is no sceptic concerning occult phenomena and is admittedly one of the most successful practitioners of curative psychology that we have to-day.

A few days later Carthew came to my chambers in the Temple and was introduced to the members of the circle. I placed him on the left-hand contact side of the medium and lowered the lights.

The medium engaged in this case was under double controls, one a spirit called “Louis,” the other a rather elusive and intermittent control that answered to the name of “Montecatini.”

The trance state was entered almost immediately and “Louis” took control. I asked him to find Tregarthen and he showed considerable reluctance, insisting that he was “not there.” The control “Louis” was then dispossessed by “Montecatini,” who answered in an entirely different voice and showed a distinct and separate personality.

“I can find him,” said Montecatini, and almost on the echo of the words a distinct audible rap came from the ceiling of the room.

Carthew recognized it instantly and flinched as if it were a personal blow at him.

“Have you got Tregarthen there?” I asked.

“No, they won’t let him come here,” was the answer.

“Why won’t they let him come?”

“Afraid of him.”

“Who is it rapping, then?”

“It’s a sent rap for somebody. I didn’t do it.”

“Who is the rap for?”

“For the brown man.” (Carthew was sunburnt.)

“He wants to speak to the spirit who sends it.”

“He can’t, it’s from a bad spirit.”

“But you said you could find Tregarthen.”

“I have found him, but I can’t bring him.”

“Why not?”

“He is too heavy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Too heavy--too low down--too much hatred.”

“Can’t Louis help you bring him?”

This was answered after a pause by the voice of Louis.

“We will try if you all help--but the brown man is hindering us.”

I then determined to break the circle and set Carthew on a chair outside. “If you want to get through to Tregarthen,” I told him, “you must subdue that hatred of yours. I am going to try for Tregarthen by the direct voice method.”

I placed an ordinary gramophone trumpet on a light table within the circle, then we rejoined hands and concentrated.

“Can you get Tregarthen now?” I asked.

“Yes, he is coming--but he doesn’t want to come.”

“I want him to speak to us through the trumpet,” I told them.

Almost immediately there were three knocks on the table close by the trumpet. Then the voice came out of the trumpet, not out of the medium, but it was the voice of Montecatini.

“He’s a bad spirit and he won’t talk,” said the control.

“Ask him if he knows who’s here?”

“Carthew!” blared the trumpet _in the voice of Tregarthen_.

I heard the crash of Carthew’s chair falling back as he rose, and then his words:

“Tregarthen--at last!”

The trumpet chuckled at him, a hard sardonic chuckle, and it was a dreadful thing to hear.

“Stop that, Tregarthen,” I said sharply. “Now listen to me. You must stop sending these knocks. You have proved to Carthew that you were right, and for the future there is no sense in it.”

Again the trumpet began to chuckle.

“I want Carthew--here,” said the voice of Tregarthen. “I want him to keep me company where I am now.”

The medium began to writhe uneasily, and I suddenly realized that something dangerous had happened. The two normal controls, “Louis” and “Montecatini,” whom we had sent to fetch Tregarthen’s spirit, had disappeared _and Tregarthen himself had taken over control_. Something of a spirit of uneasiness and a general sense of danger began to spread through the circle.

I called to Carthew to come into the circle again and to cross his hands, grasping my wrist and Miller’s, so as not to break the chain when entering.

“Now man!” I told him, “here is your chance. We have Tregarthen here, and we will help you all we can. You must fight him with the whole of your will-power. Defy him, raise him to anger, and at the crucial point I will do something which will destroy his power over you for ever! Now!”

Carthew’s grip burnt into my wrists as he took hold of himself, and then all the bitter, dominant hatred that was in the man flamed out.

He stood in the circle towering above us on our chairs and he poured into that trumpet a breadth of bilingual Spanish and English invective that would have led to murder anywhere.

He paused for breath and from the trumpet came no chuckle, but a spluttering, stammering, furious attempt to reply. I had no need to prompt him to go on. He laced into his ghostly antagonist as if he had the earthly body there in front of him. All the pent-up hatred of the past months winged his words. The consciousness of his torment made his quarrel just, and at the height of his peroration I concentrated the whole of my psychic energies and made the four exorcism signs of the martinist ritual, bidding Tregarthen begone, never to return and never to be able to send a rap, and instantly broke the circle. I then roused the medium from the trance with a couple of simple passes.

The reaction from the violence of the séance left us all spent and shaken. The medium recovered, remembering nothing, but feeling unusually exhausted. Later experiments with her showed that the domination by the Tregarthen control was purely temporary and that “Louis” and “Montecatini” had reasserted command.

My own opinion is that nothing but the intense “hate concentration” of Carthew toward his ghostly antagonist could have enabled Tregarthen to assume control at all.

It was a duel of wills between the living and the dead, fought over the narrow no-man’s land of the earth and spirit planes, and I am not sure that it was not a duel which ended fatally for the soul of Tregarthen. Carthew at any rate was free of all trouble afterwards, but wild horses could not drag him to a séance.

Miller was more convinced by this astonishing séance than by far more material phenomena that he had seen. The following day, though, he sent me an explanation of the whole affair argued out on his own lines. He held that Carthew was the subject of an obsession and that the whole of the phenomena were due to subconscious hypnotism of the medium alternatively by me as a believer in Spiritualism and by Carthew.

The direct voice he ascribed to unconscious or subconscious ventriloquism by the medium, and he pointed out that the words uttered by Tregarthen were precisely what one would expect Carthew to say if Carthew were in Tregarthen’s place. In other words, we were present at an amazing duel between Carthew’s conscious mind and an obsession of his subconscious mind that had built itself into a malignant identity.

It is interesting as a psychological theory, but in point of fact I hold it to be entirely wrong. We argued it out a good deal together, but experiments in psychic science can seldom be repeated, and, as I say, Carthew refused to submit to any further attempt to evoke Tregarthen.

As a man I sympathize with him, and he was really very grateful to us--but as a scientist I would have liked to try again in order to attempt to convince Miller.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] All names of people and places have been changed, but Dr. Miller’s cures of “shell shock” during the war have shown that one’s estimate of his powers was perfectly correct.