No one moved, however; and the excuse of joining Fell was spoilt by his arrival at the cedar.
“Do help yourself to coffee and anything you want, Mr. Fell,” Mrs. Harrison said. “If you can see, that is.” She was certainly doing her best to keep the conversation at the right after-dinner level. She was so far successful that for a minute or two little spurts of irrelevant talk continued to start up and die away again, like the uncertain catspaws of wind before a flat calm.
It was Harrison himself who at last anticipated the inevitable. He must have felt, as everyone had—including his plucky but finally despairing wife—that it was inevitable. There was something that urged them, something more than that quiet determination of Vernon’s, although his very silence conveyed a perpetual sense of remonstrance. But this other, greater influence was with them as an almost palpable presence. It was like a force exhausting them and drawing them into a common focus.
None of them was more keenly aware of it than Fell, though he attributed the weakness that was overcoming him to a particular source. For here, with the arm of his chair almost touching that of Lady Ulrica’s, he was planning an interview with Phyllis that held no least hint of the renunciation of love. He was giving way freely and without reserve to his dream. Moreover, he had a curious sense of instant accomplishment, as if at that very moment his spirit and the spirit of Phyllis had touched and coalesced. He was drifting into far heights of remote and supernal ecstasy, when the thin, high voice of Harrison recalled him to earth; and he started as though, on the verge of sleep, he had been brutally jarred and awakened by the violent slamming of a door.
“Hm! hm! Well, Vernon,” Harrison said. “We’re all waiting for that statement of your case.”
Vernon’s chair creaked slightly as if he had suddenly leaned forward.
This moment of their beginning, when by some undivinable act of common consent all oppositions had been temporarily relinquished and they were agreed at least to listen, was, also, the moment of greatest darkness. Presently the moon transmuted from copper to brass would rise above the house and give validity and form to all that was now being created in the profundity of the night. But when Vernon began to speak, he was hidden from them; they realised him only as a voice, that issued with a steady and increasing definition out of the silence and the shadows.
He talked well, pleading without passion for an unprejudiced examination of all the new “facts” in psychical research. He had a scholarly knowledge of his subject and gave his instances and authorities, building up as it seemed to Lady Ulrica, to Fell, and even to Greatorex, a case that it would be very hard to knock down.
Not once did Harrison interrupt him, and during Vernon’s occasional pauses the immense stillness of the night seemed to close in upon the little group under the cedar with a sudden intensity. The slender stream of his steady speech was like a little candle, burning delicately in the darkness, and when it was extinguished, his listeners were freshly aware of themselves and their surroundings. In those moments of almost painful silence, they sought to recover their consciousness of the familiar world by restless movements and faint articulations. Chairs creaked, someone sighed, and once Greatorex rather brutally coughed.
Nearly at the end of his long speech, however, Vernon’s tone became more emotional. He was talking, then, of materialisations and of the strange and as yet unrecognised form of matter—provisionally known as the ectoplasm or teleplasm—that issues from the body of the medium, is manifested in visible forms that can be successfully photographed, and can handle material objects.