'Well, my man, you've served in the army.'
'Aye, sir.'
'Not long discharged?'
'No, sir.'
'A Highland regiment?'
'Aye, sir.'
'Stationed at Barbados?'
'Aye, sir.'
It was a trick, yet it was a true trick; mysterious at first, simple when explained.
'You see, gentlemen, the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.'
Arthur had been educated, during those most plastic years, in the school of medical materialism. Any residue of formal religion had been expunged; yet he remained metaphysically respectful. He admitted the possibility of a central intelligent cause, while being unable to identify that cause, or understand why its designs should be brought to fulfilment in such roundabout and often terrible ways. As far as the mind and the soul went, Arthur accepted the scientific explanation of the day. The mind was an emanation of the brain, just as bile was an excretion of the liver – something purely physical in character; while the soul, as far as such a term could be admitted, was the total effect of all the hereditary and personal functionings of the mind. But he also recognized that knowledge never stayed still, and that today's certainties might become tomorrow's superstitions. Therefore, the intellectual duty to continue looking never ceased.
At the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, which met every second Tuesday, Arthur encountered the city's more speculative minds. Telepathy being much under discussion, Arthur found himself one afternoon sitting in a curtained and unmirrored room with a local architect, Stanley Ball. They placed themselves back to back and several yards apart; Arthur, with a drawing pad on his knee, sketched a shape and attempted by a powerful concentration of the mind to convey the image to Ball. The architect then drew whatever form his own mind seemed to propose. Then they reversed the procedure, with the architect as shape-despatcher and the doctor as recipient. The results, to their astonishment, showed a matching significantly above the random. They repeated the experiment enough times for a scientific conclusion to be reached: namely that, given a natural sympathy between conductor and receiver, thought-transference could indeed take place.
What might this mean? If thought could be transferred across distance without any evident means of conveyance, then the pure materialism of Arthur's teachers was, at the very least, too rigid. The congruence of drawn shapes he had achieved with Stanley Ball did not allow the return of angels with shining swords. But it nevertheless raised a question, and a stubborn one at that.
Many others were simultaneously pushing at the ironclad walls of a materialist universe. The mesmerist Professor de Meyer, who was famous – according to the Portsmouth newspapers – across the continent of Europe, came to town and induced various healthy young men to do his bidding. Some stood with their mouths agape, incapable of closing them despite laughter from the auditorium; others fell to their knees and were unable to rise without the Professor's permission. Arthur inserted himself into the line of candidates on stage, but Meyer's technique left him unmesmerised and unimpressed. It smacked more of vaudeville than of scientific demonstration.
He and Touie began attending séances. Stanley Ball was often present; also General Drayson the Southsea astronomer. They found the instructions for conducting a circle in Light, the weekly psychical paper. Proceedings would begin with a reading of the first chapter of Ezekieclass="underline" 'Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go.' The prophet's vision – of the whirlwind and the great cloud and the brightness and the fire and the four cherubim each with four faces and each with four wings – prepared those present to be receptive. Then it was the flickering candle, the felty dimness, the concentration of mind, the emptying of self and the communal waiting. Once, a spirit answering to the name of Arthur's great-uncle appeared behind him; on another occasion, a black man with a spear. After a few months, spirit lights became occasionally visible, even to him.
Arthur was uncertain how much evidential weight should be granted to these collaborative circles. He was more convinced by an elderly psychic he met at the house of General Drayson. After various preparations of a rather thespian nature, the old man went into a heavy-breathing trance and began dispensing both advice and spirit communications to his small, hushed audience. Arthur had come fully armed with scepticism – until the misted-over eyes were directed towards him, and a frail, distant voice pronounced the words,
'Do not read Leigh Hunt's book.'
This was more than uncanny. For some days, Arthur had been privately wondering whether or not to read Hunt's Comic Dramatists of the Restoration. He had not discussed the matter with anyone; and it was hardly a dilemma with which he would bother Touie. But then to be given such a precise answer to his unvoiced question… It could not be a magician's trick; it could only have happened through the ability of one man's mind to gain access in a so far inexplicable way to another man's mind.
Arthur was so persuaded by the experience that he wrote it up for Light. Here was further proof that telepathy worked; for the moment, nothing more. This much so far he had seen: what was the minimum, not the maximum, that could be deduced? Though if reliable data continued to accrue, then more than the minimum might have to be considered. What if all his previous certainties became less certain? And what, for that matter, might the maximum turn out to be?
Touie regarded her husband's involvement in telepathy and the spirit world with the same sympathetic and watchful interest that she brought to his enthusiasm for sport. The laws of psychical phenomena seemed to her as arcane as the laws of cricket; but she sensed that with each a certain result was desirable, and amiably presumed that Arthur would inform her when such a result had been obtained. Besides, she was now much absorbed in their daughter, Mary Louise, whose existence had come about through the application of the least arcane and least telepathic laws known to mankind.
George
George's 'apology' in the newspaper affords the Vicar a new line of inquiry. He calls on William Brookes, the village ironmonger, father of Frederick Brookes, George's supposed cosignatory. The ironmonger, a small, rotund man in a green apron, takes Shapurji into a storeroom hung with mops and pails and zinc baths. He removes his apron, pulls out a drawer and hands over the half-dozen letters of denunciation his family has received. They are written on the familiar lined paper torn from a notebook; although the penmanship varies more.
The top letter is in a childish, unconfident scrawl. 'Unless you run away from the black I'll murder you and mrs brookes I know your names and I'll tell you wrote.' Others are in a hand which, even if disguised, seems more forceful. 'Your kid and Wynn's kid have been spitting in an old woman's face at Walsall station.' The writer demands that money be sent to Walsall Post Office in recompense. A subsequent letter, pinned to this one, threatens prosecution if the demand is not met.
'I assume you sent no money.'
'Course not.'
'But you showed the letters to the police?'
'Police? Not worth their time or mine. It's just kids, isn't it? And as it says in the Bible, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will ne'er harm me.'