The Way of Power | Page 2

deafened by our ears
which is distinctly good business in such a fascinating universe.
Like others I lived in perfect satisfaction with the gay ordinary
reflections in the Looking Glass World until the first doubt overtook
me in childhood. My mother, who 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