Her mother and father renounced their game of cribbage and bent their heads together over the enigmatic screed, without proffering an opinion. It was evident that they did not wish to hurt their daughter’s feelings by open scepticism. They would have humoured her in anything, no matter how absurd.
I reiterated my suggestion and it was accepted in the spirit of a parlour-game. A line from a book was selected, we all tried—and we all failed hopelessly. None of us got more than two or three consecutive letters right. It is not so easy as it sounds. Try it for yourselves!
At that time, although spiritualism was a great craze in America, and D. D. Home, Eglinton, and other famous mediums, were arousing enormous interest and controversy in England, automatic script was an uncommon phenomenon. Table-rapping, levitation, slate-writing and materialization were the wonders in vogue—and I had then never heard of the “mirror-writing” which has since become a frequent form of automatic expression. Neither, of course, à fortiori, had the young girl who had just produced this mysterious specimen.
We all felt puzzled and impressed at our failure to imitate deliberately the reversed script. Old Vandermeulen picked up the diary and read the reflection of the scrawled page in the wall-mirror.
“Well, it’s sure strange!” he said in his twangy drawl. “Geoff! You write this down in a straightaway hand and we’ll see if we can get any sense out of it. I guess there’s some meaning in it. Pauline ain’t joking.”
Geoffrey obeyed and read out the script again.
“‘lucia 1324 N 8127 W katalina sculle point SWbS 3 trees digge jno dawson youre turne’—It’s exactly like the directions to a pirate’s buried treasure, Father!” he added, excitedly. “Skull and crossbones and all! But of course that’s ridiculous! Though I can’t understand how Pauline could have written it like she did!”
“And I did not know even that I was writing!” asseverated Pauline, “let alone know what I wrote! It was just as if my hand did not belong to me—it was a sort of numbness that made me look down.”
“Tear it up, dear!” implored her mother anxiously. “I am sure it comes from the Devil!” Mrs. Vandermeulen belonged to a particularly strict little sect and was always ready to discern the immediate agency of the Evil One.