The Way of Power | Page 2

had trained me to be perfectly fearless in matters of the imagination, told me a strange experience which had befallen her and her sisters and it set me thinking.
Her father owned many ships. A little dance was to be given, and she and her sister were practicing some dance music two evenings before, with a third sister to turn the leaves--three happy girls. The drawing-room was a very large one with dividing folding doors thrown back. As they played, the standing sister suddenly caught my mother's hands and the tune crashed in discord. Leaning round the folding door was a man roughly dressed in a thick short coat. He called out authoritatively "Stop the music," and, as they thought, drew back behind the folding doors and was gone. I should explain that only two of the three saw. One saw nothing, which is curious but not unusual in such cases. Two saw and heard. My mother said that no thought of what is called the supernatural struck them, but they were frightened because a strange sudden man in the house when it is shut up for the night is not altogether a pleasant visitation. Still, it might have been someone to see their father on business. The three rushed into the dining room with their tale and behold their father was dozing in his armchair at the head of the empty table after dinner, his glass of punch beside him. When the house was searched and nothing found they could not explain the man though they could not dismiss him from their minds; and the dance arrangements went on until next evening. Then, as again they were rattling off their music, came interruption. My grandfather put his head round the folding doors exactly as the stranger had done. . . . "Stop the music," he said. "One of the ships has gone down with all hands. There can be no dance tomorrow." The man they had seen sounded, he thought, very like the captain of the lost ship. They could get no nearer to a clue but the thing was as certain to the two from whom I heard it as the sight of each other.
Now when one hears a personal experience like this from people one knows do not lie, it is either dismissed as hallucination, or makes an impression coloring all opinion. I turned it over and over in a very young mind and accepted it as what people called "a ghost," but that did not last. A ghost is only a symptom. Why did ghosts come to some people and not to others? And, if they came at all, from where and for what purpose? Was their country far or near? I had no fear, but deep curiosity, and from that moment knew that the shining surface of the mirror of the world may be jarred by quite other reflections than those one reckons on. But the question in my mind was, Where do they come from? Is there another world beside this which is their domain? Even then, I did not think this covered all the ground.
My next experience, a personal one, was startling. My grandmother was strongly clairvoyant. Though I did not even know the word then, I knew that when she dreamed a thing it had an odd way of coming true; and always in the disagreeable things no one likes to face. In particular, she had an ominous recurrent dream which was followed by the Unpleasant as surely as a dog follows his master. I hated that dream, but set it down to some crank in grandmothers from which young people had nothing to fear. It coincided more or less. That was all, but it had a kind of interest difficult to escape.
I was very young and in the rather conceitedly skeptical stage of that youth of whom the great Master of Trinity, Cambridge, remarked, "We are none of us infallible; not even the youngest of us." However, one morning she came down to breakfast with a very grave face and began at once.
"A very curious thing happened last night. No, not a dream. I was awake, and I saw in my room a tall man in a turban and a sort of robe. He knocked three times on the wall. I saw him do it, and somehow I knew it meant the three-syllabled name of a place and that some terrible misfortune had happened there. Mark my words, we shall hear something from Bermuda."
A very near relation was holding a high position there at the time and for a moment I was startled, but youth is always a little over-clever and I said arrogantly, "As nobody in Bermuda wears a turban that doesn't seem likely!" and went my way in peace.
She said