Always addressing the hand, his full attention fixed upon it as it moved, he repeated this burden over and over. "We must know exactly what happened in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night! Tell us what happened in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night. . . . What happened in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night?"
Conlon and I both noted that Susan's breathing, hitherto barely to be detected, gradually grew more labored while Doctor Askew insisted upon and pressed home his monotonous refrain. He had so placed himself now that he could follow the slowly pencilled words. More and more deliberately the hand moved; then it paused. . . .
"What happened in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night?" chanted Doctor Askew.
"This ain't right," muttered Conlon. "It's worse'n the third degree. I don't like it."
He creaked uneasily away. The hand moved again, hesitatingly, briefly.
"Ah," chanted Doctor Askew—always to the hand—"it was an accident, was it? How did it happen? Tell us exactly how it happened—exactly how it happened. We must know. . . . How did the accident happen in Mrs. Hunt's room to-night?"
Again the hand moved, more steadily this time, and seemingly in response to his questions.
Doctor Askew glanced up at me with an encouraging smile. "We'll get it now—all of it. Don't worry. The hand's responding to control."
Though sufficiently astonished and disturbed by this performance, I was not, like Conlon, wholly at sea. Sober accounts of automatic writing could be found in all modern psychologies; I had read some of these accounts—given with all the dry detachment of clinical data. They had interested me, not thrilled me. No supernatural power was involved. It was merely the comparative rarity of such phenomena in the ordinary normal course of experience that made them seem awe-inspiring. And yet, the hand there, solely animate, patiently writing in entire independence of a consciously directing will——! My spine, too, like Conlon's, registered an authentic shiver of protest and atavistic fear. But, throughout, I kept my tautened wits about me, busily working; and they drove me now on a sudden inspiration to the writing-table, where I seized pen and paper and wrote down with the most collected celerity a condensed account of—for so I phrased it—"what must, from the established facts, be supposed to have taken place in Mrs. Hunt's boudoir, just after Miss Blake had entered it." I put this account deliberately as my theory of the matter, as the one solution of the problem consistent with the given facts and the known characters involved; and I had barely concluded when I was startled to my feet by Doctor Askew's voice—raised cheerily above its monotonous murmur of questions to the hand—calling my name.
"What are you up to, Mr. Hunt? My little experiment's over. It's a complete success."