It was then Antonia who said, as if with frivolity, “We’re off!” Miss Latimer sat silent, her head bent down in an attitude brooding and remote.
The table, returning to the level, after a pause rocked slowly to and fro. “Cicely, if it raps, will you say the alphabet for it, while I spell?” Antonia murmured. He recognized the forced commonplace of her voice. Miss Latimer bowed her head in answer.
The table rocked more and more violently. Antonia had half to rise in her chair to keep her hands upon it as it tipped from her toward Miss Latimer. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was still, and then he heard a soft yet sharp report, as if of a small electric shock in the very wood itself.—One, two, three; a pause; and—One, two, three, again. A rhythm distinct and detestable.
Conjecture raced through his mind. He had said that he had played the game; but he had only seen the table turned and tipped; he had never heard these sounds. Unable to distrust his senses, though aware that any one else’s he would have distrusted, he located them in the very wood under their hands. They did not come from Miss Latimer’s toe-joints; nor from his or Tony’s. Well, what of it? It was some oddity of magnetism, like the tipping, and, now that the experience was actually upon them, he felt, rather than any panic, a dry, almost a light curiosity, seeing, with relief for his delay, that to have interfered, to have stopped the game and made a row, would have been to dignify it and fix it in Tony’s unsatisfied mind stamped with a fear more definite than any she had felt.
“Are you there?” Miss Latimer was saying, in a prim, automatic voice, as of one long accustomed to these communions—“One for No, and three for Yes and two for Uncertain. Is that agreed?”
The table rapped three times.
“Are you ready? Shall I begin the alphabet?”
Again three raps.
Her voice now altered. It was almost dreamily, with head bent down, that she began, evenly, to enumerate the letters. “A, B”—a rap fell neatly at the second sound. “B,” Antonia announced. Miss Latimer resumed: “A, B, C, D, E”—another rap arrested her.
“Oh—it is going to be ‘Bevis'!—It’s for you, Bevis!” Antonia murmured.