E. F. Benson - The Complete Short Stories of E. F. Benson - 70+ Titles in One Edition

“You ought to muffle your knocker,” I said, “anyhow during the time of meals.”

Louis leaned back and laughed.

“There isn’t a knocker,” he said. “You were startled a week ago and said the same thing. So I took the knocker off. The letters slide in now. But you heard a knock, did you?”

“Didn’t you?” said I.

“Why, certainly. But it wasn’t the postman. It was the Thing. I don’t know what it is. That makes it so interesting.”

Now if there is one thing that the hypnotist, the believer in unexplained influences, detests and despises, it is the whole root-notion of spiritualism. Drugs are not more opposed to his belief than the exploded, discredited idea of the influence of spirits on our lives. And both are discredited for the same reason; it is easy to understand how brain can act on brain, just as it is easy to understand how body can act on body, so that there is no more difficulty in the reception of the idea that the strong mind can direct the weak one, than there is in the fact of a wrestler of greater strength overcoming one of less.

But that spirits should rap at furniture and divert the course of events is as absurd as administering phosphorus to strengthen the brain. That was what I thought then.

However, I felt sure it was the postman, and instantly rose and went to the door. There were no letters in the box, and I opened the door. The postman was just ascending the steps. He gave the letters into my hand.

Louis was sipping his coffee when I came back to the table.

“Have you ever tried table-turning?” he asked. “It’s rather odd.”

“No, and I have not tried violet-leaves as a cure for cancer,” I said.

“Oh, try everything,” he said. “I know that that is your plan, just as it is mine. All these years that you have been away, you have tried all sorts of things, first with no faith, then with just a little faith, and finally with mountain-moving faith. Why, you didn’t believe in hypnotism at all when you went to Paris.”

He rang the bell as he spoke, and his servant came up and cleared the table. While this was being done we strolled about the room, looking at prints, with applause for a Bartolozzi that Louis had bought in the New Cut, and dead silence over a “Perdita” which he had acquired at considerable cost. Then he sat down again at the table on which we had dined. It was round, and mahogany—heavy, with a central foot divided into claws.

“Try its weight,” he said; “see if you can push it about.”

So I held the edge of it in my hands, and found that I could just move it. But that was all; it required the exercise of a good deal of strength to stir it.

“Now put your hands on the top of it,” he said, “and see what you can do.”

I could not do anything, my fingers merely slipped about on it. But I protested at the idea of spending the evening thus.

“I would much sooner play chess or noughts and crosses with you,” I said, “or even talk about politics, than turn tables. You won’t mean to push, nor shall I, but we shall push without meaning to.”

Louis nodded.

“Just a minute,” he said, “let us both put our fingers only on the top of the table and push for all we are worth, from right to left.”

We pushed. At least I pushed, and I observed his finger-nails. From pink they grew to white because of the pressure he exercised. So I must assume that he pushed too. Once, as we tried this, the table creaked. But it did not move.

Then there came a quick peremptory rap, not I thought on the front door, but somewhere in the room.

“It’s the Thing,” said he.

Today, as I speak to you, I suppose it was. But on that evening it seemed only like a challenge. I wanted to demonstrate its absurdity.

“For five years, on and off, I’ve been studying rank spiritualism,” he said. “I haven’t told you before, because I wanted to lay before you certain phenomena which I can’t explain, but which now seem to me to be at my command. You shall see and hear, and then decide if you will help me.”

“And in order to let me see better, you are proposing to put out the lights,” I said.

“Yes; you will see why.”

“I am here as a sceptic,” said I.

“Scep away,” said he.

Next moment the room was in darkness, except for a very faint glow of firelight. The window-curtains were thick, and no street-illumination penetrated them, and the familiar, cheerful sounds of pedestrians and wheeled traffic came in muffled. I was at the side of the table towards the door; Louis was opposite me, for I could see his figure dimly silhouetted against the glow from the smouldering fire.

“Put your hands on the table,” he said, “quite lightly, and—how shall I say it—expect.”

Still protesting in spirit, I expected. I could hear his breathing rather quickened, and it seemed to me odd that anybody could find excitement in standing in the dark over a large mahogany table, expecting. Then—through my fingertips, laid lightly on the table, there began to come a faint vibration, like nothing so much as the vibration through the handle of a kettle when water is beginning to boil inside it. This got gradually more pronounced and violent till it was like the throbbing of a motor-car. It seemed to give off a low humming note. Then quite suddenly the table seemed to slip from under my fingers and began very slowly to revolve.

“Keep your hands on it and move with it,” said Louis, and as he spoke I saw his silhouette pass away from in front of the fire, moving as the table moved.

For some moments there was silence, and we continued, rather absurdly, to circle ’round, keeping step, so to speak, with the table. Then Louis spoke again, and his voice was trembling with excitement.

“Are you there?” he said.

There was no reply, of course, and he asked it again. This time there came a rap like that which I had thought during dinner to be the postman. But whether it was that the room was dark, or that despite myself I felt rather excited too, it seemed to me now to be far louder than before. Also it appeared to come neither from here nor there, but to be diffused through the room.

Then the curious revolving of the table ceased, but the intense, violent throbbing continued. My eyes were fixed on it, though owing to the darkness I could see nothing, when quite suddenly a little speck of light moved across it, so that for an instant I saw my own hands. Then came another and another, like the spark of matches struck in the dark, or like fireflies crossing the dusk in southern gardens. Then came another knock of shattering loudness, and the throbbing of the table ceased, and the lights vanished.

Such were the phenomena at the first séance at which I was present, but Fielder, it must be remembered, had been studying, “expecting,” he called it, for some years. To adopt spiritualistic language (which at that time I was very far from doing), he was the medium, I merely the observer, and all the phenomena I had seen that night were habitually produced or witnessed by him. I make this limitation since he told me that certain of them now appeared to be outside his own control altogether. The knockings would come when his mind, as far as he knew, was entirely occupied in other matters, and sometimes he had even been awakened out of sleep by them. The lights were also independent of his volition.

Now my theory at the time was that all these things were purely subjective in him, and that what he expressed by saying that they were out of his control meant that they had become fixed and rooted in the unconscious self, of which we know so little, but which, more and more, we see to play so enormous a part in the life of man. In fact, it is not too much to say that the vast majority of our deeds spring, apparently without volition, from this unconscious self. All hearing is the unconscious exercise of the aural nerve, all seeing of the optic, all walking, all ordinary movement seem to be done without the exercise of will on our part. Nay more, should we take to some new form of progression, skating, for instance, the beginner will learn with falls and difficulty the outside edge, but within a few hours of his having learned his balance on it, he will give no more thought to what he learned so short a time ago as an acrobatic feat than he gives to the placing of one foot before the other.