“I’m dead beat. I feel it all over me. It seems to take a lot out of me.”
The three looked at me curiously. They obviously regarded me as a medium who had been under “control.” (En passant, I wonder if the “exhaustion” of all mediums after a séance is not due to similar causes?)
“Right you are, Bones,” said Price, “I’ll take your place. You come and note down.”
I took his pencil and notebook, and he sat down to the board with the Doc. The glass moved and touched letters, but they made, of course, nothing intelligible. After a space, when I had rested, Doc. said his arm was tired and suggested I should take his place. I did so. Price and I were now at the glass. Somebody asked a question. I started to reply in the usual way, but luckily realized in time what I was doing, and instead of giving a coherent answer, allowed the glass to wander among the X’s and Y’s at its own sweet will. It had flashed across my mind that so long as I obtained answers only when the Doc. was my partner, no “sceptic” could tell which of the two of us was controlling the glass. If, on the other hand, I obtained answers in conjunction with others as well as when with the Doc., while no other pair in combination could do so, I was clearly indicated as the control, and a very simple process of elimination would doom me to discovery. I therefore came to a hurried decision that only when the Doc. was my partner should the Unknown be allowed to speak, and it was not till long after the Spook had proved to the satisfaction of our “enquirers” its own separate existence that I permitted myself to break this resolution.
So Price and I continued to bang out unintelligible answers until everybody was tired of it. Matthews, who amongst other objectionable pieces of knowledge had acquired something of Mathematics, then worked out the Combinations and Permutations of four spookists, two together, and insisted we should test them all. We did. The only result was pages of Q’s and M’s, of X’s, Y’s and Z’s. Bones and the Doc. were the only pair who got answers.
At our after-séance talk, this led to a new discovery—new, that is, for us. It was obvious that mediums must be en rapport! We attacked the subject from all sides, and as usual others joined in our discussion. When I went to bed, Matthews was demonstrating, with the aid of two tallow candles on a deal box, something about wave-lengths, and positive and negative electricity, and tuning up and down to the same pitch. I am sure I don’t know what it was all about, but it clearly proved the necessity of something being en rapport with something else in the material world. Therefore why not the same necessity for spiritual things? So far as I remember, Alec, old man, your theory was quite sound—it was your facts that were wrong! Perhaps I should have told you so, and saved you much hard thinking: but put yourself in my place—wasn’t it fun?
Thus we continued for several evenings. The camp looked on with mingled amusement and interest. Our séances began to be a popular form of evening entertainment. Quite a little crowd would gather round the board, and ask questions of the Spook. For the most part, at this stage, the audiences were sceptical—they suspected a trick somewhere, though they could not imagine how it was done. Curiously enough, suspicion centred not on me, but on the perfectly innocent Doctor. The poor man was pestered continually to reveal the secret. He swore vehemently that he had nothing to do with it, but it was pointed out to him that the glass only wrote when he was there—a fact he could not deny.
This sceptical attitude of the camp was of the utmost value to me. It amounted to a challenge and spurred me to fresh efforts. The whole affair being a rag, with no definite aim in view, it would not have been fair play to the enquirers to have told an out-and-out lie. But I considered it quite legitimate to dodge their questions if I could do so successfully. The following is a type of the conversations that were common at this period:
“Look here, Bones, is this business between you and the Doc. straight?”