prepared to be tremendously impressed and startled if any manifestations took place. I think we all felt rather foolish, as we did not know each other very well, sitting round there, staring at this very ordinary, rather common, stout little woman, who kept nervously pulling a little tippet of grey wool over her shoulders, closing her eyes and muttering, while she twisted her fingers together. When we had sat silent for about ten minutes Mrs Janey announced in a rather raw whisper that the medium had gone into a trance. “Beautifully,” she added. I thought that Mrs Mahogany did not look at all beautiful. Her communication began with a lot of rambling talk which had no point at all, and a good deal of generalisation under which I think we all became a little restive. There was too much of various spirits who had all sorts of ordinary names, just regular Toms, Dicks and Harrys of the spirit world, floating round behind us, their arms full of flowers and their mouths full of good will – all rather pointless. And though, occasionally, a Tom, a Dick, or a Harry was identified by some of us, it wasn’t very convincing and, what was worse, not very interesting. We got, however, our surprise and our shock, because Mrs Mahogany began suddenly to writhe into ugly contortions and called out in a loud voice, quite different from the one that she had hitherto used:
“Murder!”
This word gave us all a little thrill, and we leant forward eagerly to hear what further she had to say. With every sign of distress and horror Mrs Mahogany began to speak:
“He’s murdered her. Oh, how dreadful. Look at him! Can’t somebody stop him? It’s so near here too. He tried to save her. He was sorry, you know. Oh, how dreadful! Look at him – he’s borne it as long as he can, and now he’s murdered her! I see him mixing it in a glass. Oh, isn’t it awful that no one could have saved her – and he was so terribly remorseful afterwards. Oh, how dreadful! How horrible!”
She ended in a whimpering of fright and horror, and Mrs Janey, who seemed an adept at this sort of thing, leant forward and asked eagerly:
“Can’t you get the name – can’t you find out who it is? Why do you get that here?”
“I don’t know,” muttered the medium; “it’s somewhere near here – a house, an old dark house, and there are curtains of mauve velvet – do you call it mauve? – a kind of blue-red at the windows. There’s a garden outside with a fish-pond and you go through a low doorway and down stone steps.”
“It isn’t near here,” said Mrs Janey decidedly; “all the houses are new.”
“The house is near here,” persisted the medium. “I am walking through it now; I can see the room, I can see that poor woman, and a glass of milk—”
“I wish you’d get the name,” insisted Mrs Janey, and she cast a look, as I thought not without suspicion, round the circle. “You can’t be getting this from my house, you know, Mrs Mahogany,” she added decidedly, “it must be given out by someone here – something they’ve read or seen, you know,” she said, to reassure us that our characters were not in dispute.
But the medium replied drowsily, “No, it’s somewhere near here. I see a light dress covered with small roses. If he could have got help he would have gone for it, but there was no one; so all his remorse was useless . . .”
No further urging would induce the medium to say more; soon afterwards she came out of the trance, and all of us, I think, felt that she had made rather a stupid blunder by introducing this vague piece of melodrama, and if it was, as we suspected, a cheap attempt to give a ghostly and mysterious atmosphere to Christmas Eve, it was a failure.
When Mrs Mahogany, blinking round her, said brightly, “Well, here I am again! I wonder if I said anything that interested you?” we all replied rather coldly, “Of course it has been most interesting, but there hasn’t been anything definite.” And I think that even Mrs Janey felt that the sitting had been rather a disappointment, and she suggested that if the weather was really too horrible to venture out of doors we should sit round the fire and tell old-fashioned ghost stories. “The kind,” she said brightly, “that are about bones and chairs and shrouds. I really think that is the most thrilling kind of all.” Then, with some embarrassment, and when Mrs Mahogany had left the room, she suggested that not one of us should say anything about what the medium had said in her trance.
“It really was rather absurd,” said our hostess, “and it would make me look a little foolish if it got about; you know some people think these mediums are absolute fakes, and anyhow the whole thing, I am afraid, was quite stupid. She must have got her contacts mixed. There is no old house about here and never has been since the original Verrall was pulled down, and that’s a good fifty years ago, I believe, from what the estate agent told me; and as for a murder, I never heard the shadow of any such story.”
We all agreed not to mention what the medium had said, and did this with the more heartiness as we were not any of us impressed. The feeling was rather that Mrs Mahogany had been obliged to say something, and had said that . . .
“Well” [said Cuming comfortably], “that is the first part of my story, and I dare say you’ll think it’s dull enough. Now we come to the second part”:
Latish that evening Dr Dilke arrived. He was not in any way a remarkable man, just an ordinary successful physician, and I refuse to say that he was suffering from overwork or nervous strain; you know, that is so often put into this kind of story as a sort of excuse for what happens afterwards. On the contrary, Dr Dilke seemed to be in the most robust of health and the most cheerful frame of mind, and quite prepared to make the most of his brief holiday. The car that fetched him from the station was taking Mrs Mahogany away, and the doctor and the medium met for just a moment in the hall. Mrs Janey did not trouble to introduce them, but without waiting for this Mrs Mahogany turned to the doctor and, looking at him fixedly, said: “You’re very psychic, aren’t you?” And upon that Mrs Janey was forced to say hastily: “This is Mrs Mahogany, Dr Dilke, the famous medium.”
The physician was indifferently impressed: “I really don’t know,” he answered, smiling. “I have never gone in for that sort of thing. I shouldn’t think I am what you call ‘psychic’ really, I have had a hard scientific training, and that rather knocks the bottom out of fantasies.”
“Well, you are, you know,” said Mrs Mahogany. “I felt it at once; I shouldn’t be at all surprised if you had some strange experiences one of these days.”
Mrs Mahogany left the house and was duly driven away to the station. I want to make the point very clear that she and Dr Dilke did not meet again and that they held no communication except those few words in the hall spoken in the presence of Mrs Janey. Of course Dr Dilke got twitted a good deal about what the medium had said; it made quite a topic of conversation during dinner and after dinner, and we all had queer little ghost stories or incidents of what we considered “psychic” experiences to trot out and discuss. Dr Dilke remained civil, amused, but entirely unconvinced. He had what he called a material, or physical, or medical explanation for almost everything that we said, and, apart from all these explanations, he added, with some justice, that human credulity was such that there was always someone who would accept and embellish anything, however wild, unlikely or grotesque it was.
“I should rather like to hear what you would say if such an experience happened to you,” Mrs Janey challenged him; “whether you use the ancient terms of ‘ghost’, ‘witches’, ‘black magic’, and so on, or whether you speak in modern terms like ‘medium’, ‘clairvoyance’, ‘psychic contacts’, and all the rest of it; well, it seems one is in a bit of a tangle, anyhow, and if any queer thing ever happens to you—”
Dr Dilke broke in pleasantly: “Well, if it ever does I will let you all know about it, and I dare say I shall have an explanation to add at the end of the tale.”
When we all met again the next morning we rather hoped that Dr Dilke
We most of us went to the morning service in the small church that had once been the chapel belonging to the demolished mansion, and which had some rather curious monuments inside and in the churchyard. As I went in I noticed a mortuary chapel with niches for the coffins to be stood upright, now whitewashed and used as a sacristy. The monuments and mural tablets were mostly to the memory of members of the family of Verrall – the Verralls of Verrall Hall, who appeared to have been people of little interest or distinction. Dr Dilke sat beside me, and I, having nothing better to do through the more familiar and monotonous portions of the service, found myself idly looking at the mural tablet beyond him. This was a large slab of black marble deeply cut with a very worn Latin inscription which I found, unconsciously, I was spelling out. The stone, it seemed, commemorated a woman who had been, of course, the possessor of all the virtues; her name was Philadelphia Carwithen, and I rather pleasantly sampled the flavour of that ancient name – Philadelphia. Then I noticed a smaller inscription at the bottom of the slab, which indicated that the lady’s husband also rested in the vault; he had died suddenly about six months after her – of grief at her loss, no doubt, I thought, scenting out a pretty romance.
