Sight Unseen

Sight Unseen
by Mary Roberts Rinehart

I
The rather extraordinary story revealed by the experiments of the
Neighborhood Club have been until now a matter only of private record.
But it seems to me, as an active participant in the investigations, that
they should be given to the public; not so much for what they will add
to the existing data on psychical research, for from that angle they were
not unusual, but as yet another exploration into that still uncharted
territory, the human mind.
The psycho-analysts have taught us something about the individual
mind. They have their own patter, of complexes and primal instincts, of
the unconscious, which is a sort of bonded warehouse from which we
clandestinely withdraw our stored thoughts and impressions. They lay
to this unconscious mind of ours all phenomena that cannot otherwise
be labeled, and ascribe such demonstrations of power as cannot thus be
explained to trickery, to black silk threads and folding rods, to slates
with false sides and a medium with chalk on his finger nail.
In other words, they give us subjective mind but never objective mind.
They take the mind and its reactions on itself and on the body. But
what about objective mind? Does it make its only outward
manifestations through speech and action? Can we ignore the effect of
mind on mind, when there are present none of the ordinary media of
communication? I think not.
In making the following statement concerning our part in the strange
case of Arthur Wells, a certain allowance must be made for our
ignorance of so-called psychic phenomena, and also for the fact that
since that time, just before the war, great advances have been made in

scientific methods of investigation. For instance, we did not place Miss
Jeremy's chair on a scale, to measure for any loss of weight. Also the
theory of rods of invisible matter emanating from the medium's body,
to move bodies at a distance from her, had only been evolved; and none
of the methods for calculation of leverages and strains had been
formulated, so far as I know.
To be frank, I am quite convinced that, even had we known of these
so-called explanations, which in reality explain nothing, we would have
ignored them as we became involved in the dramatic movement of the
revelations and the personal experiences which grew out of them. I
confess that following the night after the first seance any observations
of mine would have been of no scientific value whatever, and I believe
I can speak for the others also.
Of the medium herself I can only say that we have never questioned her
integrity. The physical phenomena occurred before she went into trance,
and during that time her forearms were rigid. During the deep trance,
with which this unusual record deals, she spoke in her own voice, but
in a querulous tone, and Sperry's examination of her pulse showed that
it went from eighty normal to a hundred and twenty and very feeble.
With this preface I come to the death of Arthur Wells, our acquaintance
and neighbor, and the investigation into that death by a group of six
earnest people who call themselves the Neighborhood Club.
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The Neighborhood Club was organized in my house. It was too small
really to be called a club, but women have a way these days of
conferring a titular dignity on their activities, and it is not so bad, after
all. The Neighborhood Club it really was, composed of four of our
neighbors, my wife, and myself.
We had drifted into the habit of dining together on Monday evenings at
the different houses. There were Herbert Robinson and his sister Alice -
not a young woman, but clever, alert, and very alive; Sperry, the
well-known heart specialist, a bachelor still in spite of much feminine

activity; and there was old Mrs. Dane, hopelessly crippled as to the
knees with rheumatism, but one of those glowing and kindly souls that
have a way of being a neighborhood nucleus. It was around her that we
first gathered, with an idea of forming for her certain contact points
with the active life from which she was otherwise cut off. But she gave
us, I am sure, more than we brought her, and, as will be seen later, her
shrewdness was an important element in solving our mystery.
In addition to these four there were my wife and myself.
It had been our policy to take up different subjects for these
neighborhood dinners. Sperry was a reformer in his way, and on his
nights we generally took up civic questions. He was particularly
interested in the responsibility of the state to the sick poor. My wife and
I had "political" evenings. Not really politics, except in