“If not,” he said truculently, “if they are really spirits, why can’t they tell us what is going on, not in some vague place where they are always happy, but here and now, in the next house? I don’t ask for prophecy, but for some evidence of their knowledge. Are the Germans getting ready to fight England? Is Horace here the gay dog some of us suspect?”
As I am the Horace in question, I must explain that Herbert was merely being facetious. My life is a most orderly and decorous one. But my wife, unfortunately, lacks a sense of humor, and I felt that the remark might have been more fortunate.
“Physical phenomena!” scoffed the cynic. “I’ve seen it all--objects moving without visible hands, unexplained currents of cold air, voice through a trumpet--I know the whole rotten mess, and I’ve got a book which tells how to do all the tricks. I’ll bring it along some night.”
Mrs. Dane smiled, and the discussion was dropped for a time. It was during the coffee and cigars that Mrs. Dane made her announcement. As Alice Robinson takes an after-dinner cigarette, a custom my wife greatly deplores, the ladies had remained with us at the table.
“As a matter of fact, Herbert,” she said, “we intend to put your skepticism to the test tonight. Doctor Sperry has found a medium for us, a non-professional and a patient of his, and she has kindly consented to give us a sitting.”
“Hold up your right hand and state by your honor as a member in good standing that you have not primed her, Sperry.”
“Absolutely not,” he said, gravely. “She is coming in my car. She doesn’t know to what house or whose. She knows none of you. She is a stranger to the city, and she will not even recognize the neighborhood.”
The butler wheeled out Mrs. Dane’s chair, as her companion did not dine with her on club nights, and led us to the drawing-room doors. There Sperry threw them, open, and we saw that the room had been completely metamorphosed.
Mrs. Dane’s drawing-room is generally rather painful. Kindly soul that she is, she has considered it necessary to preserve and exhibit there the many gifts of a long lifetime. Photographs long outgrown, onyx tables, a clutter of odd chairs and groups of discordant bric-a-brac usually make the progress of her chair through it a precarious and perilous matter. We paused in the doorway, startled.