“‘The knee hurts. It is very bad. Arnica will take the pain out.’
“I want to go out. I want air. If I could only go to sleep and forget it. The drawing-room furniture is scattered all over the house.”
“‘It is writing.’ (The stick.) ‘It is writing, but the water washed it away. All of it, not a trace.’ ‘If only the pocketbook were not lost. Car-tickets and letters. It will be terrible if the letters are found.’ ‘Hawkins may have it. The curtain was much safer.’ ‘That part’s safe enough, unless it made a hole in the floor above.’”
“Oh, if you’re going to read a lot of irrelevant material--”
“Irrelevant nothing! Wake up, Horace! But remember this. I’m not explaining the physical phenomena. We’ll never do that. It wasn’t extraordinary, as such things go. Our little medium in a trance condition has read poor Clara’s mind. It’s all here, all that Clara knew and nothing that she didn’t know. A mind-reader, friend Horace. And Heaven help me when I marry her!”
As I have said, the Neighborhood Club ended its investigations with this conclusion, which I believe is properly reached. It is only fair to state that there are those among us who have accepted that theory in the Wells case, but who have preferred to consider that behind both it and the physical phenomena of the seances there was an intelligence which directed both, an intelligence not of this world as we know it. Both Herbert and Alice Robinson are now pronounced spiritualists, although Miss Jeremy, now Mrs. Sperry, has definitely abandoned all investigative work.
Personally, I have evolved no theory. It seems beyond dispute that certain individuals can read minds, and that these same, or other so-called “sensitives,” are capable of liberating a form of invisible energy which, however, they turn to no further account than the useless ringing of bells, moving of small tables, and flinging about of divers objects.
To me, I admit, the solution of the Wells case as one of mind-reading is more satisfactory than explanatory. For mental waves remain a mystery, acknowledged, as is electricity, but of a nature yet unrevealed. Thoughts are things. That is all we know.
Mrs. Dane, I believe, had suspected the solution from the start.