The Way of Power | Page 3

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 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