Five nights at the Five Pines

by Harriet A. Gaul

The sunset, flaming through the windows that faced the west, now made a red light everywhere that touched into form the tall bookcase where I had found the message from Mattie, burnished the gold in a Chinese cabinet brought back by some seafarer, and fell softly upon the ivory mantel at the end of the room. I made a fire with driftwood which lay piled in a rough box, had my tea in front of it, and then began again on the books. There was no likelihood that more notes would tumble out of them, unless it should be a will, or maybe an old tintype or a valentine. I shook each volume carefully.

There are people who can straighten up a library or turn a vacuum-cleaner on a bookcase in a hurry, but to me it is a labor that time forgets. There is always a clipping to be cut from a stale newspaper, or a review that has not been read before, or old acquaintances among long-closed volumes that lure one on, page by page. It takes me hours to go over a five-foot bookshelf with a dust-rag. And to-night was no exception. Particularly fascinating were the books of the New Captain on esoteric philosophy. There was no getting away from them; here was the “foreign religion” he and Mattie had embraced and the “books to prove it by.”

There was nothing modern. One great tome was Madame Blavatsky’s “Isis Unveiled,” Eastern theosophy set forth in defiant terms to a skeptical audience of 1875. Luckily, I had read it before, or I should have been reading it yet. I was already informed as to the writings on the Temple of Karnac that were identical with those on the walls of a ruin in Yucatan, proving that the religious rites of Asia and America were the same in the days before the Pyramids, when Atlantis was a continent in the middle of the ocean and the British Isles were under the sea. I wished that the New Captain had heard a certain lecture that I had recently heard delivered by a savant, who claimed that the secret of how to cut a canal from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean was well understood by the Magi of the Orient and that it was only due to international politics that it had never been attempted. Because, forsooth, it would incidentally cause the Sahara to be partially inundated and to “bloom like a rose,” but that the redistribution of the waters of the world would engulf all of England. Poor England! As if she, like myself, did not have enough trouble with what was in her house, without being swamped by what was under it! However, this erudite lecturer had just been released from a sanitarium, we learned afterward, and to it he was shortly returned, the Mecca of most of those who follow worlds too far.

Blavatsky’s story of the ball of fire which turned itself into a cat and frisked around the room, before floating up the chimney, was marked. It could have happened in this very room. There was a white sheet of paper pinned to the wall opposite me, with a round black disk on it, that might have been there when she wished to go into a trance. I felt that if I looked at it long enough I might see means by which Mattie aided concentration a ball of fire turning into a cat. I wondered what they would have thought of Hudson’s drummer, who, although locked up in a cell, played upon his drum which was left behind in his lodging-house to keep awake the enemies who had thrown him into jail? Or of Conan Doyle’s poltergeists who threw pebbles at the man seeking shelter in a bomb-cellar? But they had manifestations of their own, no doubt, and perhaps I should come across some record of them, although they had worked out their philosophy before the days when one could simply seize a pencil and write upon a roll of wall-paper facts dictated by one’s “control.”

Mattie and the New Captain had had no opportunity to be influenced by the great mass of post-war spiritualistic literature. The fragments from which they formed their code were bits of gold for which they had to wash many cold streams of Calvinistic thought. They must have gloated over each discovery like misers. I could see them sitting here in this room on a winter evening, the shutters closed, the lean fire crackling, the two heads bent beneath the oil-lamp, exclaiming over some nugget of wisdom which would corroborate their own experiences. Those were the times when “old Mis’ Hawes” must have called and bellowed and pounded on the floor without getting Mattie to answer any summons to the front bedroom on the other side of the house.

Mattie and the New Captain may not have known anything about photographing fairies, or the S. P. R., or the S. P. C. A., for that matter, but cats they knew. I had found the saucers of seven of them in the kitchen and strings on all the chairs, as if Mattie had sometimes tied them up. There was a book on the shelves about a cat: “The World of Wonders, or Divers Developments Showing the Thorough Triumph of Animal Magnetism in New England, Illustrated by the Power of Prevision in Matilda Fox,” published in Boston in 1838. It was enlivened with pen-and-ink drawings showing Mrs. Matilda Fox being hypnotized by a feather, with the cat in her lap, which, according to the text, licked her neck until it sent her spirit soaring from her body in aërial journeys to distant lands. As far as I had time to read I could not ascertain whether the author was in earnest or whether he was trying to ridicule animal magnetism, but I could not help wondering if the book had not had some influence on the legacy in favor of a home for cats, which had defrauded Mattie. If any one could be put in a trance by the manipulation of the tongue of a cat, perhaps she had not been entirely altruistic in her harboring of the creatures. Certainly, the one who had rushed wildly out of the house as we came in was glad to make its escape. Where were the rest of the cats that belonged to the saucers? Catching fish on the beach in the moonlight, possibly, and hypnotizing sand-pipers.

The books that told of cataleptic sleep were all well worn. The New Captain lived in the days when the subject of a wandering mesmerist would allow himself to be stretched out in a village drugstore window, remaining inert between two chairs for days at a time, while the curious glued their eyes to the glass and tried to stay there long enough to see him move or catch a confederate sneaking in to feed him. But this sleep was only the imperfect imitation of the somnambulance which the East Indians had practised for centuries. Theirs was true life-in-death, when the heart ceased to beat and the body grew cold, and yet, to a disciple of the occult, there was a way of reviving it. The theory of vampires rose from this phenomenon, and that of catalepsy, for if a tomb were opened and the corpse found without decay it was easy enough to ascribe the wilting of a child, in the meantime, to the thirst of the absent spirit for blood to satisfy its coffined body. More persons would have lived for longer periods if, instead of making sure of death by driving a stake through the possessed one’s heart, they had made sure of life by breathing into his mouth and unwinding the tight shroud. The ancient Orientals understood this. The holy fakirs permitted themselves to be buried and dug up again, to the glory of God, only making sure beforehand that their bodies were not interred in ground infested with white ants. But the New Captain had the Puritan’s respect for life and death. He dreaded that he would come to life again in an iron-bound box, or he would not have despised undertakers or written into the will which we had seen at the Winkle-Man’s the clause about Mattie spending a week beside his body. He must have thought it was only due to her that he had been called back before from the first of the seven planes, and that his celestial passport was spurious unless she signed it. Poor Mattie! No one had sat beside her after her tired spirit had freed itself.

I picked up another book.

French, this time. It was called “Les Secrets du Petit Albert,” and dealt with necromancy of the eighteenth century. There was also a French book on astrology, illustrated with crude drawings of the sacred signs of the zodiac and diagrams of potent numbers. Another one, “Le Dragon Rouge, ou L’Art de Commander les Esprits Célestes,” was not more than three by four inches, and half an inch thick. Its brittle yellow pages were bound in worn calfskin, and gave explicit directions how to conjure up the devil and how to send him back to his own kingdom when one had done with him. My scant school French could barely master the archaic forms, but I gave Mattie full credit for being able to read all the volumes stored on her top shelf. Her ancestry was traditionally French, according to the judge’s story, for she had been picked up from a ship just off Quebec, and the grooves of her mind would run easily to the mother-tongue. A recluse will master a foreign language for the mental exercise it affords. Perhaps in some other nook of the house I should find her French grammar, but here, indeed, were books that some one must have been able to read,—a significant part of their highly specialized library.

I began reading aloud from “Le Dragon Rouge”: