“But what did you think it meant?” said Christina Alberta sharply, and her perplexed gaze searched his profile. His blue eyes stared at things far away beyond the distant hills, strange things, fantastic empires, secret cities, mystical traditions, and his brows were knit in the effort to keep his story together.
“All in good time,” said Mr. Preemby. “Let me tell my story in my own way. I was telling you, I think, that young Mr. Fenton said he felt heavy and strange. Mrs. Hockleby happily was quite equal to that situation. She had seen the same thing before. ‘Don’t struggle against it,’ she said. ‘Let yourself go. Just lean back in your chair. If you want to lie quiet, do. If you want to say anything, do. Let the influence work.’ And she turned to me and whispered ‘trance.’
“‘What is a trance?’ said Mr. Fenton—just like that. ‘What is a trance?’
“She began moving her hands in front of his face, ‘making passes,’ I think they call it. He shut his eyes, gave a sort of sigh and his head lolled back. We all sat round him waiting, and presently he began to mutter.
“At first it was just nonsense. ‘Oojah Woojer Boojer,’ words like that. Then more distinctly, ‘Oujah the Wise Man, Sargon’s servant. Oujah comes to serve Sargon. To awaken him.’ After that he seemed to wander off into sheer rubbish. ‘Why is a mouse when it spins?’ he whispered in his own voice and then, ‘That damned Spare Part.’
“Mrs. Hockleby said that was quite characteristic of this sort of trance, and then Mr. Hockleby got a writing-pad and a pencil to take down anything more that was said.
“And presently when Mr. Fenton spoke again, he did not speak in his own voice but in a kind of hoarse whisper quite different from his usual voice. It was the voice of this Oujah speaking—Oujah the control. With a slight accent—Sumerian I suppose.
“Well, the things he said were very astonishing indeed. I think that this Oujah was anxious to secure my attention by convincing me that he knew of things, intimate things that nobody else could know. At the same time he did not wish the others to know too clearly what he was aiming at. How did it go? What can I remember? Mr. Hockleby has a lot of it written down, but so far I have not had time to make a copy. ‘Child of the sea and the desert,’ he said, ‘the blue waters and the desert sand.’ Is it too fanciful to find an allusion to Sheringham in that? ‘Cascades and great waters and a thing like a wheel on a blue shield.’ That is more puzzling. But ‘cascades and great waters’ set me thinking of our big washers. And you remember the swastika on our blue delivery vans, Christina Alberta? Is not that oddly suggestive of a thing like a wheel on a blue shield? The Norse peoples called the swastika the fire-wheel. ‘Armies with their white garments fluttering, the long lines drawn out—armies of delivery.’ That again is queer. One is reminded of armies and also—don’t think me absurd!—of the drying-ground and the vans. It is like one thing becoming transparent and your seeing the other behind it.”
“Are you sure of the exact phrases, Daddy?”
“Mr. Hockleby has them written down. If I have not got them quite right you will be able to read his notes.”