“His wife was sitting with her back to me and from the way she spoke I think she must have been eating some sort of sweet or lozenge at the time. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘We did it at home dozens of times before I was married.’
“And I don’t know what put it into my head, Christina Alberta; it seemed almost as though it was something behind myself that did it, or it may have been a sort of antagonism I have always felt about that man Hockleby; but anyhow, I said, ‘I’d really like to try some of this table-turning.’
“The younger Miss Solbé, she’s really quite a charming young lady when you get to know her, and it seems she has been reading a little occult literature lately——”
“How old is she, Daddy?” asked Christina Alberta, regarding him with a look of novel suspicion.
“I don’t think she can be very much more than thirty-two or three. Thirty-four at the outside. And really quite well-read, quite well-read. Well, anyhow, she said she would like to try it. And Miss Hockleby, evidently she had been brought up on strictly sceptical lines by her father, she was curious too. So to cut a long story short, we tried it. Only Mr. Hockleby objected and Mrs. Hockleby overruled that. She was the only one among us who had ever seen anything of the sort before, and so it was she who arranged things and told us what to do. We chose a very solid table, the one that usually has the big aspidistra on it, and while we were turning out the light——”
“But why did you do that, Daddy?”
“One always does that,” said Mr. Preemby. “It makes the atmosphere more favourable. We lit a candle which Miss Margaret Rewster got for us and turned out all the electric lights; and while we were doing this, in came young Mr. Charles Fenton and said—what did he say? A peculiar expression. Ah, yes! ‘Gollys,’ he said, ‘what’s up?’”
“Was that the young man with the motor bicycle?”
“Yes. The young man from Cambridge. We explained what we were doing and asked him to join us. He declared he knew nothing of psychic phenomena, had never experimented with it at all and seemed very doubtful about taking part in the trial. ‘I don’t think there’s anything in it,’ he said. ‘We shall just waste our time.’ Indeed I remember now that he did go out intending to visit a music-hall, and then he came back and said it was raining. It’s very important to note that he was not at all eager to join us and that he was quite uninformed about occult things because, you see, as I will tell you, we found out presently that he was a person of exceptional psychic gifts, much greater psychic gifts than anyone else among us.
“Well, we arranged ourselves about the table in the usual manner, thumbs and little fingers touching, and for a time nothing seemed to happen at all. We found Miss Emily Rewster was peeping in through the slightly open door, and perhaps that may have had an unfavourable influence. I suppose she wondered what we were doing and why we had asked her sister for a candle. Then Mr. Fenton got very restive and grumbled to himself and said it was the silliest way of passing an evening he had ever tried. It was a little difficult to persuade him to keep silence and persevere. ‘All right,’ said he, with a kind of resentment. ‘Have it your own way.’ And then suddenly came two violent raps, raps like little pistol shots, not immediately under the table it was, but as if it was in the air a foot or so under the table. And then the table began to move. Slowly at first, shifting along the floor, and then quite strongly twisting and pushing up against our hands. It was very weird and impressive, Christina Alberta, very weird and impressive indeed. It rose nearly two feet I should think and then Mr. Hockleby broke the circle and it fell rather heavily, I fancy, and the leg hit his shin. He uttered an exclamation and stooped to rub his leg, and in the indistinct light he hit his head on the edge of the table. It seemed almost a judgment on his scepticism I thought. We turned up one or two of the lights to attend to him. ‘I don’t like this,’ said Mr. Fenton. ‘This is a bit too rum for me.’