"No, no!" Eusapia warmly replies, "it will do it."
I will note here that at the moment when I proposed to point out the mechanism, there passed through my mind the method of pressing upon the little tube. Immediately the watch was brought back to the table; and, very distinctly, three separate times, we heard it sound a quarter to eleven.
Eusapia was evidently very tired; her burning hands seemed to contract or shrivel; she gasped aloud with heaving breast, her foot kept quitting mine every moment, scraping the floor and tediously rubbing along it back and forth. She uttered hoarse panting cries, shrugging up her shoulders and sneering; the sofa came forward when she looked at it, then recoiled before her breath; all the instruments were thrown pell-mell upon the table; the tambourine rose almost to the height of the ceiling; the cushions took part in the sport, overturning everything on the table; M. M. was thrown from his chair. This chair—a heavy dining-room chair of black walnut, with stuffed seat—rose into the air, came up on the table with a great clatter, then was pushed off.
Eusapia seems shrunken together and is very much affected. We pity her. We ask her to stop. "No, no!" she cries. She rises, we with her; the table leaves the floor, rises to a height of twenty-four inches, then comes clattering down.
Eusapia sinks prostrated into a chair. We sit there troubled, amazed, in consternation, with a tense and constricted feeling in the head, as if the atmosphere were charged with electricity.
With many precautions, M. F. succeeds in calming the agitation of Eusapia. After about a quarter of an hour she returns to herself. When the lamps are again lighted, she is seen to be very much changed, her eye dull, her face apparently diminished to half its usual size. In her trembling hands she feels the pricking of needles which she asks us to pull out. Little by little she completely recovers her senses. She appears to remember nothing, not to comprehend at all our expressions of wonder. All that is as foreign to her as if she had not been present at the sitting. She isn't interested in it. So far as she is concerned, it would seem as if we were speaking of things of which she had not the faintest idea.
What have we seen? mystery of mysteries!
We took every precaution not to be the dupes of complicity, of fraud. Superhuman forces acting near us, so near that we heard the very breathing of a living being,—if living being it were,—such are the things our eyes took cognizance of for two mortal hours.
And when, on looking back, doubts begin to creep into the mind, we must conclude that, given the conditions in which we were, the chicanery necessary to produce such effects would be at least as phenomenal as the effects themselves.
How shall we name the mystery?