“Looks like doing this all night,” I said. “It’s getting wearisome. Curse it a bit, someone.”
“Leave that damned ‘D’ alone!” said an obliging spectator.
“-O-N-T S-W-E-A-R,” the Spook went on at once. We had got our bearings again.
One evening some fiend—I think it was Holyoake—suggested turning the circle with the letters face downwards, a number being written on the back of each letter. The numbers touched were to be noted down, and any message given was to be deciphered afterwards. The inversion was made and it gave me furiously to think. The problem would have been easy enough had it merely meant a reversal of all the motions of the glass—i.e., if all the letters were diametrically opposite to their usual stations, as happened when the board was merely twisted round a half-revolution. I was accustomed to that; but this was different. Take an ordinary dinner-plate. Mark the points of the compass on it. Now, for the sake of clearness, revolve the plate on the axis of the North-South line, and turn it face downwards. The North point is still in the same position. So is the South point; but while East has changed places with West, North-East has become not South-West but North-West; East-Nor’-East has become not West-South-West but West-Nor’-West, and so on. Given time, I could no doubt have worked out the position of each letter as I came to it, and moved the glass with fair accuracy. But to have altered the usual rate of movement would have aroused suspicion. The glass must move at the usual pace, or not at all; but how to do it? My memory had created for itself a picture of the board. Given any one letter, I could visualize the positions of the rest almost automatically, and my hand could guide the glass to them with as little conscious effort as a pianist, given his C natural, finds in hitting the right keys in the dark. Imagine the state of mind of a musician who finds the C natural in the usual place, but the bass notes on his right and the treble notes on his left!
Opposite me the Doc. sat. He had nothing to trouble him, no problem to work out. His one task in life was to let his hand follow the movements of the glass, to wait for it to move, and then neither hinder nor help but go whither it led. To him it did not matter where the letters were—they might be upside down or inside out for all he cared. The Spook would take him there. He breathed easily, in the serenity of a full faith, while the glass moved slowly round and round and I thought and thought and thought. I tried hard to construct in my mind a looking-glass picture of the board, and failed. To give myself time I worked out the positions of the N and the O, and for a spell answered every question with a “No.” Then all of a sudden the solution flashed into my mind. After all, I was the Spook. There was, therefore, no reason why I should not, like every other decently educated spook, be able to see things through a table, or any other small impediment of that sort. Instead of imagining myself to be looking down at the board from above the table, I only had to imagine myself to be looking up at the board from below the table to have everything in its right position once more. In thirty seconds the glass was writing as freely as ever.
I do not think my friends ever realized the difficulty of the task they had set me, or how near we were that night to failure. Certainly I got no credit for the performance. For I, like the Doc., was only a medium. The credit went where it belonged—to the Spook.
“You birds satisfied?” asked the Doc. genially, as he leaned back in his ricketty chair, smoking a cigarette after the trial. “How long are we going to keep up this testing business? Seems to me the Spook has had you cold every time. For myself, I’d like to get on to something more interesting.”
“So would I,” said I, and I spoke from the bottom of my heart. “The position seems to me to be this. Either Doc.’s fudging, or he’s not, and——”
“I tell you I’m not,” said the Doc. emphatically.
“Some of us don’t believe you,” said I; “that’s why they are testing you.”