REVOLVER
Rome was not built in a day, and I had my little sea of troubles to navigate before reaching the safe harbour of the Witch’s Den. My new-born hope of capturing Kiazim was barely a fortnight old when the spooking in our house came to a sudden end. On the 23rd of May a party of 28 rank and file arrived at Yozgad, to act as additional orderlies to the officers in our camp. A travel-worn, starved, and fever-stricken little band were these “honoured guests of Turkey”: they had been driven, much as stolen cattle were driven by Border raiders in the old days, across the deserts from Baghdad and Sinai, herded at their journey’s end in foul cellars and filthy mud huts, and left unclothed, unfed, unwarmed, to face the winter as best they might. Seven out of every ten Britishers who left Kut as prisoners died in the hands of their “hosts.” The state in which these gallant fellows reached Yozgad roused the camp to fury, but it was a very helpless fury. We could do nothing.
The immediate consequence of their arrival was the opening of the “Schoolhouse,” or, as it was more commonly called, “Posh Castle.” Thirteen officers moved into it, taking with them their quota of orderlies, and three of the thirteen were Price, Matthews, and Doc. O’Farrell. Their departure put an end to the séances in our house. After our previous exhaustive experiments I dared not suddenly discover somebody else en rapport with me.
But in the Hospital House spooking went on cheerily all the summer under the auspices of Bishop and Nightingale, and it gave the camp much to think about. There was the episode of Colonel Coventry’s sealed letter, which the Spook read with the greatest ease. Mundey, as true a believer as any of my converts in the Upper House, assured Coventry the letter had never left his possession. He was perfectly honest in his assurance. The courage with which he stood up for his convictions moved my admiration. It was no fault of his that he was unconsciously up against a first-class conjuror,[[8]] and that he did not know the letter had been removed, steamed, read, copied, resealed and replaced. The episode is merely another instance of faulty observation. It supports the argument which “common sense” opposes to spiritualists. Because X or Y or any other eminent scientist or honourable man vouches for the correctness of a fact, it does not follow that the fact is so. All X and Y can really vouch for is that it is so to the best of their belief. Nor does it follow that because scores of persons observed the same details as X and Y, these details are either complete or correct. How many members of a music-hall audience can see how a conjuring trick is done? For every one who has noticed the key move there will be a hundred who did not. In matters of observation the truth is not to be discovered by a show of hands.
Then there was the episode of the floating bucket. In view of our success in instilling credulity, it may be thought that soldiers are for some reason peculiarly gullible. But we gulled others as well—farmers, lawyers, and business men. Lieutenant McGhie, for example, was a dour Scot, not a regular soldier, but an ordinary sensible business man, with a liking for donning khaki when there was the chance of a scrap, and taking it off again when all was quiet. He had “done his bit” in the Boer War before he went killing Turks at Oghratina. He could not be called either a nervous or an imaginative man. He was one of many at a Hospital House séance who saw a bucket “float across the room.” “Nobody could have thrown it—it was quite impossible!” Yet Nightingale threw that bucket! I can only account for this and similar cases by the assumption that the effect of a séance—of the feeling that one is dealing with an unknown force—is to blind one’s powers of observation much as the unknown motor-car makes the savage bury his nose in the sand. Indeed, it does more than blind, it distorts. One more instance of the methods by which interest was kept alive. Upstairs in the Hospital House Mundey and Edmonds, who were recording for Bishop and Nightingale, found one evening that they could get only the first half of each message. Every sentence tailed off into nothingness. This was “discovered” to be due to the fact that downstairs Hill and Sutor were “blocking the line,” and getting the second halves of the messages. We had never heard of “cross-correspondence.” Nightingale and Hill invented it between them (after all, it is a natural sort of leg-pull), and carried it a step further than any professional medium I have ever read of.
The man responsible for pushing the glass in the Hospital House séances was Nightingale. The position of his fellow-medium, Bishop, was exactly analogous to that of Doc. O’Farrell—he was perfectly innocent of any suspicion that the whole affair was not genuine. The manifestations were worked by Hill at a given signal from Nightingale, so that they synchronized with the writing on the board. Two other people were “in the know”—Percy Woodland and Taylor, and very carefully they guarded the secret. This information I learned for certain in August of the same year, when Nightingale, Hill and I swopped confidences. Until my own spook-club had broken up, I had paid no attention to the occasional advances in search of truth which my rivals had made. It was amusing to learn that my admission of faking took a weight off their minds—they had felt pretty certain all along that the Upper House show was also a fraud, but had been puzzled by my reticence and were obviously relieved to learn the truth. At the time of our mutual confessions, Nightingale was dreadfully tired of being dragged out night after night by enthusiastic spook chasers, and was racking his brains to discover some means of giving it up without causing offence. As one of his converts—Lieutenant Paul Edmonds—had already written a book on the new revelations of Nighty’s spook, confession had become rather difficult.
“Don’t confess,” I said. “Let’s get the Pimple well on the string first.”
“But how?” asked Nighty.
None of us knew. We could only imitate Mr. Micawber and hope something would turn up.
Something did turn up—it always does if you wait long enough. Early in September, Cochrane and Lloyd, walking up and down the hockey ground, noticed a leather strap sticking out of the earth. The magpie instinct was by this time well developed in the camp. At one time or another we had all been so hard up that we now made a habit of collecting tins, bits of string, pieces of wood, old nails, scraps of sacking—in short, everything and anything which might some day have a possible use for some project yet unborn. The sum total, hidden under your mattress, was technically known as “cag.” A leather strap, with a buckle, was “valuable cag.” So Cochrane and Lloyd tugged at it. It came up—with a revolver and holster attached! They smuggled their find to bed under the nose of the unobservant sentry. We talked of the discovery in whispers, and wondered what had happened to the unfortunate Armenian who had buried it.