It was another week before the chance came. And I was a little surprised when Maclean conducted me not to the closed house we had before visited, but to the house on Ninety-second Street to which I had followed Doctor Paulus on his way home.
"Oh, they meet around at one another's houses," Mac explained as we went up the steps. "It's a gang of social lights that's runnin' these stunts as a fad, you see? An' the psychic researchers, they ring in. Now this time, see if you can't keep something on your stomach besides your hand. You missed a pile of fun last performance."
It was a very different sort of house from the other; wide open and full of the sense of family inhabitance, a house full of silk hangings and new mahogany and vases of unseasonable flowers, an orchid of a house, a house where people would be like their own automobile, polished and expensive and a trifle fast. Professor Shelburgh was there, looking a little out of his element; and the others, by what I could tell, were mostly the same people as before; but there were more of them, twenty or twenty-five all told, chattering in groups about the brilliant room and giving it almost the air of a reception. It was evening, and the electric light and the formal dress of most of the guests added to the impression. I had my first good look at the medium before the proceedings began; a fattish, fluffy woman with large eyes, pale-haired and slow-moving, whose voluble trivialities of conversation and dress exaggerated both vulgarism and convention. For a moment or two, I wrestled with an uncanny certainty of having seen her somewhere before, groping about among recollections. Then all at once I remembered; she was the woman who had been with us in the trolley accident, the woman who had so curiously discovered the whereabouts of the chain.
As before, the circle formed about the center-table consisted of only a dozen or so, and the rest of us were left sitting about the walls. The doors were closed, and the extinguishing of the lights left the room in almost utter darkness. The greenish pallor about the edges of the windows made it possible to imagine rather than to see. The gloom had the solidity of closed eyelids; and perhaps because of the sudden transition from brilliant light, it had the same fullness of indefinite color and movement; as when one suddenly buries one's face in the pillow, with the light still burning. I caught myself unconsciously straining my eyes to observe these half-imaginary after-images. And despite the difference of environment, the sitters had hardly begun their tuneless crooning of old songs before I felt the same breathless closeness as before, the same saturated oppression, the same feeling of uncomfortable and even indecent overcrowding.
I steadied myself with long breaths, bracing involuntarily against the tension. Then all at once, the door opened silently and softly closed; and as I turned to look some one rustled past me, visible only as a solid shadow in the gloom, and without a word slipped into a seat at the table. The others made room, and a chair was moved up quietly, no one speaking or even pausing in the song. But my heart pounded in my ears and my hands heated as I clenched them, for somehow I knew as certainly as if I could have plainly seen that the new-comer was Mrs. Tabor.
And it was as if she brought with her an increase of the already tense expectancy, as if her own nervous trouble spread out about her like a deepening of color, like a drop of blood falling into water already tinged with red. It was my own imagination, of course, the excitement of being close upon my quest, and the reaction of silence closing over the interruption of her entrance; but I felt the exertion of breathing, as if I were immersed up to the chin in water. If the atmosphere had been like a weight before, it was now like a deliberately closing vise. In the intervals of the droning hum at the table, the silence took on a quality of brittleness. Little brushings and rustlings ran in waves around the room, and I thought how a breeze runs over a field of tall grass, where each tuft in turn takes up its neighbor's restlessness. It occurred to me suddenly that most of the people here were women; and the sense of crowded presence led me to imagining crowds and throngs of women grouped in pictures or dancing in rows upon the stage. And then I remembered sharply that I could not see Mrs. Tabor and wondered whether my certainty that it was she had any more foundation than these other fantasies. I heard my own breathing, and that of many others. I felt vaguely irritated that all these breathings were not keeping time, and instinctively brought my own into the rhythm of the predominating number.
A chair creaked softly, and I started, while the skin tightened over my cheeks and my tongue dried and tasted salt. The medium seemed to be writhing about, making little soft urging noises, like muffled groans or the nameless sound that goes with lifting a heavy burden or suddenly exerting the whole strength of the body. Then the peculiar padded rapping began. The incongruously matter-of-fact voice of the professor asked: "Are the hands all here?" and the circle counted in a low tone while the raps went irregularly on. Some woman across the room giggled nervously. Why these trivial details did not interrupt and relieve the tension, I do not know; but their very absurdity seemed to intensify it; I was hot and puffy and a trifle faint. Suddenly Maclean gripped my knee, and muttered: "Look at the table— My God, look at the table—!"
I do not know just how to describe it; to say that I saw is not literally accurate, for it was really too dark to see; the table and the group around it were no more than a bulk in the midst of darkness. But as I strained my eyes toward it, that blur of unconvincing cloudiness which I had seen or fancied before swelled into mid-air, showing against the dark like black with light upon it against black in shadow. And illuminated as it were by that visible darkness, the table beneath it rose up from its place under the circle of hands, wavered as though afloat upon the rising stream of a fountain, then settled with a thud and a creak down again upon the floor. There was a momentary silence, full of crowded breathings. While I was wondering confusedly how much of it I had only imagined, Professor Shelburgh said calmly: "That's the best levitation we've had so far. Who did it? Who is there?" And the throaty, querulous contralto answered: "I did. Miriam. Do you want any more?"
Another man somewhere in the circle stammered uncomfortably: "I—well—er—I beg your pardon, but—could you move something quite beyond our reach? One of those things on the bookcase, for instance?"
"What for?" whined the voice, "you wouldn't believe it anyway— I don't want to talk to you— Is mother there?"