Malone shook his head.
“Anyone would remark on a coloured shirt and a clerical collar.”
Mr. Bolsover laughed. “You’re a hard proposition. So was I once, so I can’t blame you. But I called here with a purpose. I expect you are a busy man and I know that I am, so I’ll get down to the brass tacks. First, I wanted to say that all our people that have any sense are pleased with the article. Mr. Algernon Mailey wrote me that it would do good, and if he is pleased we are all pleased.”
“Mailey the barrister?”
“Mailey, the religious reformer. That’s how he will be known.”
“Well, what else?”
“Only that we would help you if you and the young lady wanted to go further in the matter. Not for publicity, mind you, but just for your own good—though we don’t shrink from publicity, either. I have psychical phenomena séances at my own home without a professional medium, and if you would like…”
“There’s nothing I would like so much.”
“Then you shall come—both of you. I don’t have many outsiders. I wouldn’t have one of those psychic research people inside my doors. Why should I go out of my way to be insulted by all their suspicions and their traps? They seem to think that folk have no feelings. But you have some ordinary common sense. That’s all we ask.”
“But I don’t believe. Would that not stand in the way?”
“Not in the least. So long as you are fair-minded and don’t disturb the conditions, all is well. Spirits out of the body don’t like disagreeable people any more than spirits in the body do. Be gentle and civil, same as you would to any other company.”
“Well, I can promise that.”
“They are funny sometimes,” said Mr. Bolsover, in reminiscent vein. “It is as well to keep on the right side of them. They are not allowed to hurt humans, but we all do things we’re not allowed to do, and they are very human themselves. You remember how The Times correspondent got his head cut open with the tambourine in one of the Davenport Brothers’ séances. Very wrong, of course, but it happened. No friend ever got his head cut open. There was another case down Stepney way. A money-lender went to a séance. Some victim that he had driven to suicide got into the medium. He got the money-lender by the throat and it was a close thing for his life. But I’m off, Mr. Malone. We sit once a week and have done for four years without a break. Eight o’clock Thursdays. Give us a day’s notice and I’ll get Mr. Mailey to meet you. He can answer questions better than I. Next Thursday! Very good.” And Mr. Bolsover lurched out of the room.
Both Malone and Enid Challenger had, perhaps, been more shaken by their short experience than they had admitted, but both were sensible people who agreed that every possible natural cause should be exhausted—and very thoroughly exhausted—before the bounds of what is possible should be enlarged. Both of them had the utmost respect for the ponderous intellect of Challenger and were affected by his strong views, though Malone was compelled to admit in the frequent arguments in which he was plunged that the opinion of a clever man who has had no experience is really of less value than that of the man in the street who has actually been there.
These arguments, as often as not, were with Mervin, editor of the psychic paper Dawn, which dealt with every phase of the occult, from the lore of the Rosicrucians to the strange regions of the students of the Great Pyramid, or of those who uphold the Jewish origin of our blonde Anglo-Saxons. Mervin was a small, eager man with a brain of a high order, which might have carried him to the most lucrative heights of his profession had he not determined to sacrifice worldly prospects in order to help what seemed to him to be a great truth. As Malone was eager for knowledge and Mervin was equally keen to impart it, the waiters at the Literary Club found it no easy matter to get them away from the corner-table in the window at which they were wont to lunch. Looking down at the long, grey curve of the Embankment and the noble river with its vista of bridges, the pair would linger over their coffee, smoking cigarettes and discussing various sides of this most gigantic and absorbing subject, which seemed already to have disclosed new horizons to the mind of Malone.
There was one warning given by Mervin which aroused impatience amounting almost to anger in Malone’s mind. He had the hereditary Irish objection to coercion and it seemed to him to be appearing once more in an insidious and particularly objectionable form.
“You are going to one of Bolsover’s family séances,” said Mervin. “They are, of course, well known among our people, though few have been actually admitted, so you may consider yourself privileged. He has clearly taken a fancy to you.”
“He thought I wrote fairly about them.”
“Well, it wasn’t much of an article, but still among the dreary, purblind nonsense that assails us it did show some traces of dignity and balance and sense of proportion.”
Malone waved a deprecating cigarette.
“Bolsover’s séances and others like them are, or course, things of no moment to the real psychic. They are like the rude foundations of a building which certainly help to sustain the edifice, but are forgotten when once you come to inhabit it. It is the higher superstructure with which we have to do. You would think that the physical phenomena were the whole subject—those and a fringe of ghosts and haunted houses—if you were to believe the cheap papers who cater for the sensationalist. Of course, these physical phenomena have a use of their own. They rivet the attention of the inquirer and encourage him to go further. Personally, having seen them all, I would not go across the road to see them again. But I would go across many roads to get high messages from the beyond.”
“Yes, I quite appreciate the distinction, looking at it from your point of view. Personally, of course, I am equally agnostic as to the messages and the phenomena.”
“Quite so. St. Paul was a good psychic. He makes the point so neatly that even his ignorant translators were unable to disguise the real occult meanings as they have succeeded in doing in so many cases.”
“Can you quote it?”
“I know my New Testament pretty well, but I am not letter-perfect. It is the passage where he says that the gift of tongues, which was an obvious sensational thing, was for the uninstructed, but that prophecies, that is real spiritual messages, were for the elect. In other words that an experienced Spiritualist has no need of phenomena.”
&nbs
p; “I’ll look that passage up.”
“You will find it in Corinthians, I think. By the way, there must have been a pretty high average of intelligence among those old congregations if Paul’s letters could have been read aloud to them and thoroughly comprehended.”
“That is generally admitted, is it not?”
“Well, it is a concrete example of it. However, I am down a side-track. What I wanted to say to you is that you must not take Bolsover’s little spirit circus too seriously. It is honest as far as it goes, but it goes a mighty short way. It’s a disease, this phenomena hunting. I know some of our people, women mostly, who buzz around séance rooms continually, seeing the same thing over and over, sometimes real, sometimes, I fear, imitation. What better are they for that as souls or as citizens or in any other way? No, when your foot is firm on the bottom rung don’t mark time on it, but step up to the next rung and get firm upon that.”