"Mr. Ellingham was anxious to get it," she finished. "He had taken Mr.
Johnson"s overcoat by mistake one night when you were both in the house, and the notes were in it. He saw that the stick was important."
"Clara," Sperry asked, "did you see, the day you advertised for your bag, another similar advertis.e.m.e.nt?"
"I saw it. It frightened me."
"You have no idea who inserted it?"
"None whatever."
"Did you ever see Miss Jeremy before the first sitting? Or hear of her?"
"Never."
"Or between the seances?"
Elinor rose and drew her veil down. "We must go," she said. "Surely now you will cease these terrible investigations. I cannot stand much more.
I am going mad."
"There will be no more seances," Sperry said gravely.
"What are you going to do?" She turned to me, I daresay because I represented what to her was her supreme dread, the law.
"My dear girl," I said, "we are not going to do anything. The Neighborhood Club has been doing a little amateur research work, which is now over. That is all."
Sperry took them away in his car, but he turned on the door-step, "Wait downstairs for me," he said, "I am coming back."
I remained in the library until he returned, uneasily pacing the floor.
For where were we, after all? We had had the medium"s story elaborated and confirmed, but the fact remained that, step by step, through her unknown "control" the Neighborhood Club had followed a tragedy from its beginning, or almost its beginning, to its end.
Was everything on which I had built my life to go? Its philosophy, its science, even its theology, before the revelations of a young woman who knew hardly the rudiments of the very things she was destroying?
Was death, then, not peace and an awakening to new things, but a wretched and dissociated clutching after the old? A wrench which only loosened but did not break our earthly ties?
It was well that Sperry came back when he did, bringing with him a breath of fresh night air and stalwart sanity. He found me still pacing the room.
"The thing I want to know," I said fretfully, "is where this leaves us?
Where are we? For G.o.d"s sake, where are we?"
"First of all," he said, "have you anything to drink? Not for me. For yourself. You look sick."
"We do not keep intoxicants in the house."
"Oh, piffle," he said. "Where is it, Horace?"
"I have a little gin."
"Where?"
I drew a chair before the book-shelves, which in our old-fashioned house reach almost to the ceiling, and, withdrawing a volume of Josephus, I brought down the bottle.
"Now and then, when I have had a bad day," I explained, "I find that it makes me sleep."
He poured out some and I drank it, being careful to rinse the gla.s.s afterward.
"Well," said Sperry, when he had lighted a cigar. "So you want to know where we are."
"I would like to save something out of the wreck."
"That"s easy. Horace, you should be a heart specialist, and I should have taken the law. It"s as plain as the alphabet." He took his notes of the sittings from his pocket. "I"m going to read a few things. Keep what is left of your mind on them. This is the first sitting.
""The knee hurts. It is very bad. Arnica will take the pain out."
"I want to go out. I want air. If I could only go to sleep and forget it. The drawing-room furniture is scattered all over the house."
"Now the second sitting:
""It is writing." (The stick.) "It is writing, but the water washed it away. All of it, not a trace." "If only the pocketbook were not lost.
Car-tickets and letters. It will be terrible if the letters are found."
"Hawkins may have it. The curtain was much safer." "That part"s safe enough, unless it made a hole in the floor above.""
"Oh, if you"re going to read a lot of irrelevant material--"
"Irrelevant nothing! Wake up, Horace! But remember this. I"m not explaining the physical phenomena. We"ll never do that. It wasn"t extraordinary, as such things go. Our little medium in a trance condition has read poor Clara"s mind. It"s all here, all that Clara knew and nothing that she didn"t know. A mind-reader, friend Horace. And Heaven help me when I marry her!"
As I have said, the Neighborhood Club ended its investigations with this conclusion, which I believe is properly reached. It is only fair to state that there are those among us who have accepted that theory in the Wells case, but who have preferred to consider that behind both it and the physical phenomena of the seances there was an intelligence which directed both, an intelligence not of this world as we know it. Both Herbert and Alice Robinson are now p.r.o.nounced spiritualists, although Miss Jeremy, now Mrs. Sperry, has definitely abandoned all investigative work.
Personally, I have evolved no theory. It seems beyond dispute that certain individuals can read minds, and that these same, or other so-called "sensitives," are capable of liberating a form of invisible energy which, however, they turn to no further account than the useless ringing of bells, moving of small tables, and flinging about of divers objects.
To me, I admit, the solution of the Wells case as one of mind-reading is more satisfactory than explanatory. For mental waves remain a mystery, acknowledged, as is electricity, but of a nature yet unrevealed.
Thoughts are things. That is all we know.
Mrs. Dane, I believe, had suspected the solution from the start.
The Neighborhood Club has recently disbanded. We tried other things, but we had been spoiled. Our Kipling winter was a failure. We read a play or two, with Sperry"s wife reading the heroine, and the rest of us taking other parts. She has a lovely voice, has Mrs. Sperry. But it was all stale and unprofitable, after the Wells affair. With Herbert on a lecture tour on spirit realism, and Mrs. Dane at a sanatorium for the winter, we have now given it up, and my wife and I spend our Monday evenings at home.
After dinner I read, or, as lately, I have been making this record of the Wells case from our notes. My wife is still fond of the phonograph, and even now, as I make this last entry and complete my narrative, she is waiting for me to change the record. I will be frank. I hate the phonograph. I hope it will be destroyed, or stolen. I am thinking very seriously of having it stolen.
"Horace," says my wife, "whatever would we do without the phonograph?
I wish you would put it in the burglar-insurance policy. I am always afraid it will be stolen."
Even here, you see! Truly thoughts are things.