I think I tried to scream, but could not, I know I tried to move
and could not. And it crept closer. “Then I suppose the terror which held me spellbound so spurred me that I
must move, for next moment I heard a cry break from my lips, and was
stumbling through the passage. I made one leap of it down the grass
slope, and ran as I hope never to have to run again. What direction I
took I did not pause to consider, so long as I put distance between me
and that place. Luck, however, favoured me, and before long I struck the
track by the river, and an hour afterwards reached the lodge. “Next day I developed a chill, and as you know pneumonia laid me on my
back for six weeks. “Well, that is my story, and there are many explanations. You may say
that I fell asleep on the lawn, and was reminded of that by finding
myself, under discouraging circumstances, in an old Picts’ castle, where
a sheep or a goat that, like myself, had taken shelter from the storm,
was moving about. Yes, there are hundreds of ways in which you may
explain it. But the coincidence was an odd one, and those who believe in
second sight might find an instance of their hobby in it.”

“And that is all?” I asked. “Yes, it was nearly too much for me. I think the dressing-bell has
sounded.”




OUTSIDE THE DOOR


The rest of the small party staying with my friend Geoffrey Aldwych in
the charming old house which he had lately bought at a little village
north of Sheringham on the Norfolk coast had drifted away soon after
dinner to bridge and billiards, and Mrs Aldwych and myself had for the
time been left alone in the drawing-room, seated one on each side of a
small round table which we had very patiently and unsuccessfully been
trying to turn. But such pressure, psychical or physical, as we had put
upon it, though of the friendliest and most encouraging nature had not
overcome in the smallest degree the very slight inertia which so small
an object might have been supposed to possess, and it had remained as
fixed as the most constant of the stars. No tremor even had passed
through its slight and spindle-like legs. In consequence we had, after a
really considerable period of patient endeavour, left it to its wooden
repose, and proceeded to theorise about psychical matters instead, with
no stupid table to contradict in practice all our ideas on the subject. This I had added with a certain bitterness born of failure, for if we
could not move so insignificant an object, we might as well give up all
idea of moving anything. But hardly were the words out of my mouth when
there came from the abandoned table, a single peremptory rap, loud and
rather startling. “What’s that?” I asked. “Only a rap,” said she. “I thought something would happen before long.”

“And do you really think that is a spirit rapping?” I asked. “Oh dear no. I don’t think it has anything whatever to do with spirits.”

“More perhaps with the very dry weather we have been having. Furniture
often cracks like that in the summer.”

Now this, in point of fact, was not quite the case. Neither in summer
nor in winter have I heard ever furniture crack as the table had
cracked, for the sound, whatever it was, did not at all resemble the
husky creak of contracting wood. It was a loud sharp crack like the
smart concussion of one hard object with another. “No, I don’t think it had much to do with dry weather either,” said she
smiling. “I think, if you wish to know, that it was the direct result of
our attempt to turn the table. Does that sound nonsense?”

“At present, yes,” said I, “though I have no doubt that if you tried you
could make it sound sense. There is, I notice, a certain plausibility
about you and your theories----”

“Now you are being merely personal,” she observed. “For the good motive, to goad you into explanations and enlargements. Please go on.”

“Let us stroll outside, then,” said she, “and sit in the garden, if you
are sure you prefer my plausibilities to bridge. It is deliciously warm,
and----”

“And the darkness will be more suitable for the propagation of psychical
phenomena. As at séances,” said I. “Oh, there is nothing psychical about my plausibilities,” said she. “The
phenomena I mean are purely physical, according to my theory.”

So we wandered out into the transparent half light of multitudinous
stars. The last crimson feather of sunset, which had hovered long in the
West, had been blown away with the breath of the night wind, and the
moon, which would presently rise, had not yet cut the dim horizon of the
sea, which lay very quiet, breathing gently in its sleep with stir of
whispering ripples. Across the dark velvet of the close-cropped lawn,
which stretched seawards from the house, blew a little breeze full of
the savour of salt and the freshness of night, with, every now and then,
a hint so subtly conveyed as to be scarcely perceptible of its travel
across the sleeping fragrance of drowsy garden-beds, over which the
white moths hovered seeking their night-honey. The house itself, with
its two battlemented towers of Elizabethan times, gleamed with many
windows, and we passed out of sight of it, and into the shadow of a
box-hedge, clipped into shapes and monstrous fantasies, and found chairs
by the striped tent at the top of the sheltered bowling-alley. “And this is all very plausible,” said I. “Theories, if you please, at
length, and, if possible, a full length illustration also.”

“By which you mean a ghost-story, or something to that effect?”

“Precisely: and, without presuming to dictate, if possible, first-hand.”

“Oddly enough, I can supply that also,” said she. “So first I will tell
you my general theory, and follow it by a story that seems to bear it
out. It happened to me, and it happened here.”

“I am sure it will fill the bill,” said I. She paused a moment while I lit a cigarette, and then began in her very
clear, pleasant voice. She has the most lucid voice I know, and to me
sitting there in the deep-dyed dusk, the words seemed the very
incarnation of clarity, for they dropped into the still quiet of the
darkness, undisturbed by impressions conveyed to other senses. *       *       *       *       *

“We are only just beginning to conjecture,” she said, “how inextricable
is the interweaving between mind, soul, life, call it what you
will--and the purely material part of the created world. That such
interweaving existed has, of course, been known for centuries; doctors,
for instance, knew that a cheerful optimistic spirit on the part of
their patients conduced towards recovery; that fear, the mere emotion,
had a definite effect on the beat of the heart, that anger produced
chemical changes in the blood, that anxiety led to indigestion, that
under the influence of strong passion a man can do things which in his
normal state he is physically incapable of performing. Here we have
mind, in a simple and familiar manner, producing changes and effects in
tissue, in that which is purely material.