Louis leaned back and laughed.
‘There isn’t a knocker,’ he said. ‘You were startled a week ago, and said the same thing. So I took the knocker off. The letters slide in now. But you heard a knock, did you?’
‘Didn’t you?’ said I.
‘Why, certainly. But it wasn’t the postman. It was the Thing. I don’t know what it is. That makes it so interesting.’
Now if there is one thing that the hypnotist, the believer in unexplained influences, detests and despises, it is the whole root-notion of spiritualism. Drugs are not more opposed to his belief than the exploded, discredited idea of the influence of spirits on our lives. And both are discredited for the same reason; it is easy to understand how brain can act on brain, just as it is easy to understand how body can act on body, so that there is no more difficulty in the reception of the idea that the strong mind can direct the weak one, than there is in the fact of a wrestler of greater strength overcoming one of less. But that spirits should rap at furniture and divert the course of events is as absurd as administering phosphorus to strengthen the brain. That was what I thought then.
However, I felt sure it was the postman, and instantly rose and went to the door. There were no letters in the box, and I opened the door. The postman was just ascending the steps. He gave the letters into my hand.
Louis was sipping his coffee when I came back to the table.
‘Have you ever tried table-turning?’ he asked. ‘It’s rather odd.’
‘No, and I have not tried violet-leaves as a cure for cancer,’ I said.
‘Oh, try everything,’ he said. ‘I know that that is your plan, just as it is mine. All these years that you have been away, you have tried all sorts of things, first with no faith, then with just a little faith, and finally with mountain-moving faith. Why, you didn’t believe in hypnotism at all when you went to Paris.’