"'Yes, sixty or seventy,' was the answer, like an echo. Here Blake's thought governed, but it was evident that the psychic had no clear conception of what this reference to Schumann meant in the first instance, for 'E. A.' was unable to complete his sentence, which should have read: 'Have Schumann return a certain étude which I took.—E. A.' Furthermore, the psychic evidently believed in the truth of the message or she would not have gone into it with such particularity; she would have been lacking in caution to have given me such definite and detailed information, knowing that it was all false.
"So far as my own mind is concerned, I had no knowledge of such a music publisher as Schumann. Smart I had met. Blake, however, knew of both firms. The entire message and the method of its communication were deeply exciting at the time, and completed what seemed like a highly intellectual test of identity, and we both left the house of the psychic with a feeling of having been very near to our dead friend.
"'To identify one of these bars of music would be a good test,' said Blake, 'but to find that étude at Schumann's would be a triumph.'
"'To find the manuscript fragment would be still more convincing,' was my answer.
"Imagine my disappointment when, in answer to my inquiry, Schumann replied that no such étude had ever been in his hands, and Alexander's family reported that no fragment called 'Unghere' could be found among the composer's manuscripts."
Fowler shared my regret. "What about the other messages? Were they all disappointing?"
"No; some of them were not. The most intimate were true; and a signature which came on the slate under test conditions, and which I valued very little at the moment, turned out to be almost the exact duplicate of Alexander's signature as he used to write it when a youth twenty years ago. As a matter of fact, it closely resembled the signature appended to a framed letter which used to hang upon the wall of his study. But, even so, its reproduction under these conditions is sufficiently puzzling."
"What was Blake's conclusion? Did he put the same value upon it all that you did?"
"Yes, I think he was quite as deeply impressed as I. He said the music seemed like Alexander's music, somehow distorted by the medium through which it came. 'It was like seeing Alexander through a pane of crinkly glass,' he put it. And he added: 'I had the sense of being in long-distance contact with the composer himself.' He had no doubt of the supernormal means through which our writing came, but he remains doubtful of the value of the music as evidence of 'Ernest's' return from the world of shadows."
"Have you tried to secure more of the music?" Fowler asked.