The Way of Power | Page 3

no more; and letters came from Bermuda and all was well and I triumphed. But we had not done with the gods. At the earliest possible moment news came that her nephew, a young officer in the army, loved by her as a son, had been stabbed to death in the bazaar at Kandahar by an Indian lunatic. The man, who had apparently never seen him before, came up behind and drove a knife deep down between his shoulders and so an end.
Then indeed I began to think, for I had known my cousin well; he was a real person to me and here was a thing done before my eyes. How had this strange message fled overseas from India (for the time matched)? Why had it not come to his mother? Why had my grandmother misread it? Why, when my cousin had been promoted and we all were glad, had that news come in a slow letter? Why had the murderer, for it seemed it must be he, announced it to a woman he had never heard of? Then there must be some natural affinity with misfortune in this mysterious kind of intelligence! And had God or the Devil anything to do with it? And what good did it do?
Youth can think when it chooses, and no answer given by the elders to the questions I propounded met the facts to my satisfaction. They didn't know. They retired on "coincidence," but I reflected that a world where such coincidences happen would really be such a miracle in itself that it only brought the difficulty a step nearer. And again when, not long after, another case happened which I could verify--the mother of a sailor hearing his voice crying for help, and finding that that night his boat had been overturned on the way to his ship and his life all but lost--it was clear to me that behind the well-polished mirror into which we all look for our impressions of the world was a dark hinterland where very strange forces played or worked on lines of their own, having no relation at all to anything we know and yet with a queer wireless which they used with people whose aerials were ready to tune in. How and why? But I called it the private telegraph wire, for wireless had not yet been reflected on the Mirror of the Passing Show--the world we lived in.
So then I began to read hungrily, untiringly, and for years such books as those of Podmore, Myers, Flammarion, and many more--the adventures and experiments of Sir William Crookes and the leading men of the Society for Psychical Research in England deserving special mention because they were so flawlessly honest and possessed by the desire for truth. They led me gradually into divergent paths, the magic of the ancient world and of the medieval times, and still I got no light. The more I studied the subject, the more impossible seemed any theory that the spirits of the dead should return to communicate with the living for the purpose of uttering the platitudes attributed to them. For one thing, these books admitted that the phantasms of the living could be seen also, and as a girl my own eyes had seen the appearance of a relation then at a distance pass through a room when I was alone. Nothing happened as a result, but I had seen and realized that my first belief that these things were always connected with death and misfortune was.. mistaken. And as to any instruction from departed spirits worth the paper it is written on, from that day to this I have never heard of or read any remark from a supposed departed spirit which is not platitude pure and simple. Even the spirits of the mightiest are not exempt from this unlucky law of platitude and become as tedious and obvious as the rest. But I came to the conclusion that when a very large amount of fraud is excluded there remains certain evidence of some strange forces at work in some of these dubious manifestations and materializations. But what? And where could any sort of evidence be got hold of which would lead to a clue?
Meanwhile I had some interesting personal experiences as the years went by. I touch briefly on a few of these. I was staying with the mother and sisters of a very near relation who was on a voyage. One night I dreamed I saw him limping along the deck in great pain; I told them at breakfast and met with the usual laughter. But I wrote, and--yes--he had fallen down a hatchway, had not meant to tell us, and how had I known? I developed too a curious faculty of sensing some people's thoughts