Part 18

My position was awkward, bent over as I was, without anything to lean on; but I clutched Willy’s wrists oblivious of all else, and was shaken by his wrestling. He pulls us to and fro, he pumps and trembles, tosses and writhes, whispers with foaming lips: “Talk, talk!” “The chain, the chain!” “The chain,” repeats the devoted von K. “Surely my Minna may ask that the circle be properly closed!” The longer we sit, the harder we have to try to keep the dwindling conversation going. The Baron encourages us. “Talk, gentlemen. Professor G., you are going to sleep. Herr Mann, are you talking?” “Yes, Baron, I am talking as hard as I can.” The audience pulls itself together and utters the sheerest twaddle into the dark. Reicher, the actor, helps himself out with a sonorous “_Rhabarber, Rhabarber!_” The music is painful. We are weary to tears of the music-box’s one tinkling little tune, but when the concertina sets in, with wheezing and puffing, then we want the harmless tinkling back again. If it is hard for Willy, it is not easy for us. Almost another hour has passed since the intermission. My back aches, but I ignore it. The medium starts out of deep trance. He gives a violent jerk, and seems to be trying to expel something by means of lurches and lunges. “Brava, Minna,” von K. cajoles her. “You’re on the way, we can all see that. You’ve only to take hold, it will be wonderful, I’ll like you twice as much.” In vain. Not a sign. Even Herr von K.’s blandishments are without result. Resignation glides into all our hearts. For my part, I feel I have no luck with the mysteries. I shall go on as before, granting the possibility of all sorts of things; but I shall have seen nothing. Well, so much the worse for me. Dyed-in-the-wool materialists have spent evenings here. So have open enemies, protesting that the whole thing was a trick. So have irascible physicists with their insistence on the laws of nature. And one and all have come and seen and gone away with their so-called scepticism shaken. Whereas my scepticism, which by comparison with theirs is belief, a faith in nothing and everything--what name shall I give it?--will have proved essentially unproductive, nihilistic. A slight, unmistakable bitterness comes over me. Well, anyhow, the impressions of the evening have been worth taking away.

Our host tries a last expedient. He takes a high tone, and speaks: “Now, Minna, let’s be fair. We have been sitting here over two hours, you cannot say we have been impatient. But everything has its limits. We’ll give you another five or ten minutes, and then if nothing happens we will call a halt, and these gentlemen will go home and some of them will certainly think that you can do nothing. They will have no faith in your powers and they will say so, and the sceptics will be pleased.”--“No, no,” says von K., and seconds the Baron while seeming to contradict him. “No, Herr Baron, don’t talk like that--isn’t she just on the point of doing it? She knows best what she is about, does my Minna; she puts out her little arm, and when she has stretched it far enough--eh, what did you say? Want the music stopped? What did you say, Minna darling?”

The medium has interrupted him in a whisper. The music is still, we are all still. There comes again, in a painful stammer: “The handkerchief!”

“The handkerchief,” repeats Herr von K. authoritatively. “She knows just what she is about; she is going to do it for us, is my little Minna!”

“By all means,” says the Baron. “If that’s all, here is the handkerchief.” He takes a large fresh one out of his pocket, holds it by one corner, and drops it on the floor near the table, where it lies, a white gleam in the twilight. We all lean over and stare at it.

“Push the table further back,” Willy whispers. His face is lying on his hands. Is that right? “No, not that way.” He cannot see, but in his dream he knows what is going on, and that something is not as he would have it. Impatiently, just as though he saw, he tells the Baron what to do. He wants the table further over, first somewhat to the left and then nearer to our host. There. That is right. There is now more space between the table and the handkerchief. “The circle,” whispers Willy; we squeeze each other’s hands. “Talk,” he whispers, and we hasten to comply. I begin to utter some nonsense to my neighbour the Pole, I have turned my head and begun to speak, when I hear somebody say, with artificial calm: “It’s coming.” I jerk my head round.

You know the place in _Lohengrin_, in the first act, after Else’s prayer, when the chorus begins in unison: “_Seht! Welch seltsam Wunder!_” It was just like that. The handkerchief had got up. It rose from the floor. Before all our eyes, with a swift, assured, vital, almost beautiful movement it rose out of the shadow into the rays of light, which coloured it reddish; I say rose, but rose is not the word. It was not that it was wafted up, empty and fluttering. Rather it was taken and lifted, there was an active agency in it, like a hand, you could see the outline of the knuckles, from which it hung down in folds; it was manipulated from the inside, by some living thing, compressed, shaken, made to change its shape, in the two or three seconds during which it was held up in the lamplight. Then, moving with the same quiet assurance it returned to the floor.

It was not possible--but it happened. May lightning strike me if I lie. Before my uncorrupted eyes, which would have been just as ready to see nothing, in case nothing had been there, it happened. Indeed, it presently happened again. Scarcely had the handkerchief reached the floor when it came back up again into the light, this time faster than before; plainly and unmistakably we saw something clutching it from within, the members of something that held it--it looked to be narrower than a human hand, more like a claw. Down, and up again, for the third time up. The handkerchief was violently shaken by the something inside it, and tossed toward the table, with a poor aim, for it hung by one corner and then fell to the floor.

Loud shouts of applause and vivas for Minna. Several times the Baron leaned over to ask me if I saw, if I could see everything quite clearly. I certainly did; how could I have helped it, unless I had shut my eyes? And I had never kept them wider open in my life. I had seen greater things on this earth, more beautiful, more worthy of admiration. But never before had I seen the impossible happening despite its own impossibility; and so I kept saying in rather a shaken voice: “Very good, very good!” though for my own part I felt anything but good. Here I sat, holding in my very own hands Willy’s wrists in their tricot sleeves; while immediately next to me I saw his knees in the custody of the Pole. Not a thought, not a notion, not the shadow of a possibility that the boy sleeping here could have done what was happening there. And who else? Nobody. And still it was done. It gave me a queasy feeling.

The lifting of the handkerchief, I heard said round me, was regularly the introductory phenomenon. The spell was broken. The medium, who had been strangely still during these events, sat up with a shiver and whispered: “Put away the music-box. The bell.” “The bell,” cries von K., all enthusiasm. “Where is my Minna’s bell? The bell, on the basket! Good, now we’re off again!” The Baron obeys. He takes away the music-box and puts the bell on the wastepaper-basket, its ribbons gleaming in the dusk, and the metal shining redly. Willy carries his hands and ours to his brow. He sighs. Then the bell is taken--impossible, of course, but it is taken--by a hand, for what else can take a bell by the handle? Taken, lifted up, held high and slanting, rung violently, carried in a curve through the air, rung again, and then with a swing and a clatter flung under the chair of one of the audience.

Slight seasickness. Profound wonderment, with a tinge, not of horror, but of disgust. Minna’s praises resound, loud and unceasingly. “Unbelievable!” one of the novices cries out. Her head--what am I saying? I mean his head, Willy’s head--leans toward mine, like a little child he lays his temple against mine. Good lad, nice lad! You have done marvels. Shaken and respectful, I let his head rest against mine. But the Baron says:

“Here, Minna, is something new for you. You haven’t seen it yet, but it is quite easy to use. It is a bell. You press it, strike on it from above, you see. Like this. Then it rings. You do it, Minna. Here is the bell.”

And he sets it on the basket. Tense expectation. At once we hear a feeling round the bell, as though fingers were touching it uncertainly. They take it up, shake it slightly; it rings, but not in the right way.

“Not like that,” says the Baron. “You don’t understand. Let me show you. There, that’s how it’s done.” He strikes the button. “The circle,” whispers Willy, quivering, against my cheek. But the Baron cannot make the circle and strike the bell both at the same time. He asks Minna to realize this. Hardly has he resumed his seat when the fingering and touching begin again. At last the trick is successful. The fingers strike the bell from above, weakly, like a child; but the task is definitely performed. The clapper sounds.

“Brava, Minna,” shouts the audience. “Fantastic!” somebody says. But we have no time to surrender to our sensations; for more follows. Hardly has the Baron taken away the bell, when the basket begins to move. Something knocks it, it totters and tips over; then it is lifted from the floor and held high in the air. It hangs there askew and unsteady in the red light, outlined by its illuminated ribbons, for three or four seconds long, then tumbles to the floor.

“Did you see that? Did you see that?” asks the Baron, pridefully. We admit that we are impressed. Willy hangs sideways from his chair, in deep trance. Certainly a man must stand in need of profound and dreamless sleep, after so intense a dream that the events of it are actually projected outside of him! Wait. Let me think. Let me withdraw within myself and try to divine where may be the point, when the magical moment, in which a dream-picture objectivates itself and becomes a spatial reality, before the eyes of other people. Nausea. Clearly this point does not lie within the plane of our consciousness, or of the laws of knowledge as we know them. If anywhere, it is located in that state in which I see this lad now before me, and which is certainly a gate--whither? Behind the house, behind the world?... But I admit that this is not thinking at all--only a mild form of seasickness.

To set things going again, the Baron starts up the music-box. He also makes a change in the control. Von K. and I are released. I grope my way in the dark to the other end of the chain and find a seat beside Reicher, who sits next my host. I have the little table before me. And scarcely have I taken my chair, and my neighbours’ hands, when a fingering begins at the music-box on the table. The Baron hastens to stop the music. And in the stillness, before my eyes, that see nothing whatever, there is a scratching, rustling, and mysterious feeling-about over the handle of the instrument, a trying to turn it. Ah, you deep and immemorially light-shy creature, compact of dream and matter, what are you doing there in front of our noses? Crick, the handle is turned, the works go round. “Tell it to stop,” says the Baron. At my command it stops. “Go on,” I say. And the music plays. This happens several times. You sit there, bending forward, you command the impossible, and you are obeyed, by a spook, a panic-striken little monster from behind the world....

A pause. Then arises a varied activity among the light rings on the floor. They are shoved to and fro, tossed from place to place. One rises from the floor with its gleaming string hanging down. It is held up, carried through space, brought to the table, where it wants to be put down, and is, with a clumsiness which might lead one to think that its motive force was blind. But probably the thing is timid, afraid of being seen, afraid of venturing too far into the circle of lamplight on the table. The ring is moved to the nearest corner of the table, by a kind of stealthy shove that makes the felt scrape along the wood. It just balances. At the same time the thing, in its blind, clumsy trepidation, knocks so hard against the table that it shakes. Tut, tut, you hole-and-corner fish out of water, why, and with what monstrous knuckles, are you knocking like that on our good table, before our face and eyes? Just as I am thinking this, plop, a ring flies into my face. Something has flung it at me, it drops on my knee and thence at my feet. What a playful monster! We all laugh. But it is not amusement we feel, rather a sort of sinking sensation at the chilling arrogance of this something or other which is perhaps only a distressingly complicated kind of humbug. But, as I said, a civilized. It did not throw the music-box in my face, but tactfully chose one of the soft little rings. People have had their ears boxed, and other practical jokes have been played, such as unlacing boots. Somebody had his wristwatch taken off and carried about the room. But nobody, it is unanimously affirmed, has ever suffered any serious harm from these powers, and that is an indication of good sense and decent feeling. On the other hand, they do unmistakably tend to become demoralized, to play silly tricks and make unmotivated displays of strength. The need of constant oversight, guidance, and direction is plain--as, for instance, when the agency now set to work, with a good deal of persistence, to upset the music-box standing on the table. The Baron was alarmed for his instrument, and begged Minna to spare him the heart-breaking annoyance which any kind of repair work costs in these days. In vain. “It” obstinately persisted in overturning the box, on which lay the slate and slate-pencil, likewise in danger of breaking.

Something had to be done by way of distraction, and the Baron thought of the typewriting-machine, which stood on the floor in front of the curtain, with paper inserted ready for use. “Write, Minna,” he said. “Do something useful. We will listen to you, and then we shall have the writing, to prove that we are not hypnotized, as some of your enemies say.” The thing seems able to listen to reason, it desists from its efforts at the box. We wait. And, on my honour, the writing-machine begins to click, there on the floor. This is insane. Even after all we have already seen, it is in the highest degree startling, bewildering, ridiculous; the fantasticality of the thing is even fascinating. Who is it writing on the machine? Nobody. Nobody is lying there on the carpet in the dark and playing on the machine, but it is being played on. Willy’s arms and legs are held fast. Even if he could get an arm free, he could not reach the machine with it; and as for his feet, even if they could reach that far they could not touch single types on the machine, they would tread on several at once. No, it is not Willy. But there is nobody else. What else can we do but shake our heads and laugh? The writing is being done with the right touch, a hand is certainly touching the keys--but is it really only one hand? No, if you ask me, there are surely two hands; the sounds are too quick for one, they sound as though proceeding from the fingers of a practised typist; we come to the end of a line, the bell rings, we hear the carriage being drawn back, the new line begins--the sound breaks off and a pause ensues.

Then somewhat further back, in front of the dark background of the curtain, suddenly, swiftly, and fleetingly, the following little apparition. Something appears, a longish something, vague, and whitely shimmering; in size and general shape like a human forearm, with closed fist--but not certainly recognizable as such. It comes and goes, showing itself before our eyes, lighted by a sort of flash of white lightning that issues from its own right side and wholly obscures whatever shape it has--then it is gone.

“There, there is a materialization for you,” says our host, pointing to it. “I’m glad you have seen one. Wait, perhaps it will make an impression for us.” And he pleads with Minna to put her hand into the plate of flour on the table. But I did not for a minute believe that she would, and she did not, we waited in vain. It was quite light on the table, the phantom would have exposed itself all too defencelessly to our view, and to do that did not in the least correspond to the image I had made to myself of the shy, sly, stealthy, equivocal character of our elusive guest: a character too insignificant to have evil intent, on the contrary probably quite well-meaning, but weak-minded and embarrassed.--Nothing further happened. General fatigue, it seemed, had supervened. Willy whispered: “Merry Christmas!” The sitting was over.

It was odd to see in the bald white light the felt ring lying there at my feet where it had no business to be. Remarkable, too, to observe the typed writing on the machine, a perfectly nonsensical jumble of large and small letters; presumably it would have been different if Willy himself knew how to type. He still lay drunk with sleep, leaning sideways across the arm of one of the controls. I went up to him, tapped him on the shoulder, and told him it had been a brilliant sitting. He looked dumbly up at me with his sleepy eyes, and a good-natured, rather sad little smile was on his face.

We moved back by groups into the library, in animated discussion over what we had seen. Tea was served, and did us all much good. The evening finished off with stage stories narrated by Reicher.

* * * * *

Well, now, what had I seen? Two-thirds of my readers will answer: swindle, sleight-of-hand, deception. Some day, when our knowledge of these matters has progressed, the field will be popularized, and they will deny that such was their judgment. Even now, and even if they take me for a credulous and suggestible fad-chaser, the testimony of trained experimenters like the French scholar Gustave Geley ought to make them less glib. Geley closes his report with the categorical statement: “I do not merely say that there was no deception present in these sittings; I say that the possibility of deception was ruled out.” That is absolutely my own position. I am in that intriguing and confounded state of mind in which reason commands us to recognize what reason on the other hand would reject as impossible. The nature of the phenomena I have described makes it inevitable that the idea of deception should afterwards haunt the minds even of those who saw with their own eyes; only to be laid, over and over, by the evidence of the senses, by the reflection that deception was definitely impossible.

But, it will be objected, three-quarters of all the mediums _are_ swindlers, and have been exposed as such.--That is a fact, a bewildering one; the more so that in many of these cases, I might even say in most of them, the _dolus_, the intent to deceive, is absent. I am convinced that even our good Willy, if he had had the chance, would have started hocus-pocussing and so have seriously compromised his position; for it is conceivable that in his dream he makes no distinction between what he does with his own hand and what in “other” ways; and being moved by the quite comprehensible desire to produce an effect, he might, if he had been “uncontrolled,” have set to, been discovered, and so discredited the experiments. And this would not have been any evidence whatever against the genuineness of the occult phenomena which were produced when he was in safe arrest.

The whole affair, however trifling it looks on the surface, is serious enough to warrant explanations in a serious and even a solemn key. Having seen what I saw, I consider it my duty to bear witness that in the experiments during which I was present, any mechanical deception or sleight-of-hand tricks were humanly impossible. Some may find such testimony reckless; and our reason even obliges and forces us to do so; for we do immediately twist and turn to find a middle way out, by which we may somehow, even verbally, avoid the alternative of deception or reality. “Delusion” is such a word; its very vagueness helps by preventing us from seeing to the bottom of it. The two conceptions of reality and of deception are mingled in it, and perhaps the mingling has more justification than we know, and is less strange in nature than it is to our downright processes of thought. I will say, then, that what I saw had to do with an occult delusion in the domain of organic life; with bewilderingly deep and sub-human complexes, at once primitive and involved. These, undignified by nature and trivial in their activity as they are, are well calculated to be offensive to our proud æsthetic sense, but to deny their abnormal reality would be nothing less than unreasonable obstinacy.