HOW SPOOKING BEGAN IN YOZGAD

On an afternoon late in February 1917 a Turk mounted on a weary horse arrived in Yozgad. He had come a 120-mile journey through snowbound mountain passes from railhead at Angora, and he carried a belated mail for us prisoners of war.

I could not feel grateful to him, for my share was only one postcard. It was from a very dear aunt. But I knew that somewhere in the Turkish Post Office were many more—from my wife, my mother, and my father. So I grumbled at all things Ottoman. I did not know this innocent-looking piece of cardboard was going to provide the whole camp with a subject for discussion for a year to come, and eventually prove the open sesame that got two of us out of Turkey.

Mail Day at Yozgad meant visits. The proper thing to do, after giving everybody time to read their letters several times over, was to go from room to room and pick up such scraps of war news as had escaped the eye of the censor. Some of us received cryptograms, or what we thought were cryptograms, from which we could reconstruct the position on the various fronts (if we had imagination enough), and guess at the progress of the war. The news that somebody’s father’s trousers had come down was, I remember, the occasion of a very merry evening, for it meant that Dad’s Bags (or Baghdad) had fallen at last. If, as occasionally happened, we found hidden meanings where none was intended, and captured Metz or Jerusalem long before such a possibility was dreamt of in England, it did more good than harm, for it kept our optimism alive.

I allowed the proper period to elapse and then crossed to the Seaman’s room. “Come in,” said Tudway to my enquiring head, “Mundey has been round already and we can give you all the news.” (Mundey was our Champion Cryptogrammist.)

We discussed the various items of news in the usual way, and decided that the war could not possibly last another three months. Then Alec Matthews turned to me:

“Had you any luck, Bones? What’s your mail?”

“Only a postcard,” I said. “No news in it, but it suggests a means of passing the evenings. I’m fed up with roulette and cards myself, and I’d like to try it.”

“What’s the suggestion?” Alec asked.

“Spooking,” said I.

“Cripes!” said Alec.

We began next night, a serious little group of experimenters from various corners of the earth. Each of us in his own little sphere had seen something of the wonders of the world and was keen to learn more. There was “Doc.” O’Farrell, the bacteriologist, who had fought sleeping-sickness in Central Africa. He argued that the fact that we could not see them was no proof that spooks did not exist, and told us of things revealed by the microscope, things that undoubtedly “are there,” with queer shapes and grisly names. (The pictures he drew of some of his pet “bugs” gave me a new idea for my next nightmare.) Then there was Little, the geologist from the Sudan, who knew all about the earth and the construction thereof, and had dug up the fossilized remains of weird and enormous animals. His pets were as big as the Doc.’s were small. There was Price, the submarine man from under the sea, and Tudway (plain Navy) from on top of it. And there is a saying about those who go down to the sea in ships which was never truer than of these two men. There was Matthews, from India, sapper and scientist. He knew all about wireless telegraphy and ether and the various lengths of the various kinds of waves, and he did not see why “thought waves” should not exist in some of the gaps in the series which we thought to be empty. And there was the writer, who knew nothing of scientific value. He had studied psychology at College, and human nature amongst the jungle folk in Burma.

Such was the group which first took up spooking. None of us knew anything about the subject, but my postcard gave clear instructions and we followed them. Matthews brought in the best table we possessed (a masterpiece made by Colbeck out of an old packing-case), and Doc. groomed the top of it with the corner of his embassy coat, so as to make it slippery enough for the Spook to slide about on with comfort.

Tudway and Price cut out squares of paper, and Little wrote a letter of the alphabet on each and arranged them in a circle round the edge of the table. I polished the tumbler in which we hoped to capture the Spook, and placed it upside down in the centre of the circle. Everything was ready. We had constructed our first “Ouija.”

“Now what do we do?” Doc. asked.

“Two of us put a finger lightly on the glass, close our eyes and make our minds blank.”

“Faith!” said the Doc., “we’d better get a couple of Red Tabs from the Majors’ House; this looks like a Staff job. An’ what next?”

“Then the glass should begin to move about and touch the letters. Somebody must note down the ones touched.”

Doc. sat down and put his forefinger gingerly on the glass. I took the place opposite him. Price and Matthews, pencil in hand, leant forward ready to take notes. Little and Tudway and Dorling and Boyes stood round to watch developments. Doc. and I closed our eyes and waited, fingers resting lightly on the glass, arms extended. For perhaps fifteen minutes there was a tense silence and our arms grew unendurably numb. Nothing happened.

Our places at the table were taken by two other investigators, and their’s in turn by two more, but always with a total absence of any result. We warmed the glass over a tallow candle—somebody had said it was a good thing to do—and re-polished the table. Then Doc. and I tried again.

“Ask it some question,” Price whispered.

“WHO—ARE—YOU?” said the Doc. in sepulchral tones, and forthwith I was conscious of a tilting and a straining in the glass, and then, very slowly, it began to move in gradually widening circles. It touched a letter, and the whole company craned their necks to see it.

“B!” they whispered in chorus.

It touched another. “R!” said everybody.

“I believe it is going to write ‘Brown,’” said Dorling, and the movement suddenly stopped.

“There ye go spoilin’ everything with yer talkin’,” growled the Doc., his Irish accent coming out under the influence of excitement. “Will ye hold your tongues now, and we’ll be after tryin’ again!”

We tried again—we tried for several nights—but it was no use. The glass did not budge, or, if it did, it travelled in small circles and did not approach the letters. We blamed our tools for our poor mediumship and substituted a large enamelled tray for the table, which had a crack down the centre where the glass used to stick. The tray was an improvement and we began to reach the letters. But we never got sense. The usual sÉance was something like this:

Doc.: “Who are you?” Answer: “DFPBJQ.”

Doc.: “Try again. Who are you?” Answer: “DFPMGJQ.”

Matthews.: “It’s obviously trying to say something—the same letters nearly, each time. Try again.”

Doc.: “Who are you?” Answer: “THRSWV.”

Matthews: “That’s put the lid on. Ask something else.”

Doc.: “Have you anything to say?” Answer: “WNSRYKXCBJ,” and so on, and so on, page after page of meaningless letters. It grew monotonous even for prisoners of war, and in time the less enthusiastic investigators dropped out. At the end of a fortnight only Price, Matthews, Doc. O’Farrell and myself were left. We were intrigued by the fact that the glass should move at all without our consciously pushing it—I shall never forget Alec Matthews’s cry of wonder the first time he felt the “life” in the glass—and we persevered.

Then our friend Gatherer came in. He said he didn’t care very much for this sort of thing, but he knew how to do it and would show us. He placed his fingers on the glass and addressed the Spook. We, as became novices, had always shown a certain respect in our manner of questioning the Unknown. Gatherer spoke as if he were addressing a defaulter, or a company on parade, with a ring in his voice which indicated he would stand no nonsense. And forthwith the glass began to talk sense. Its answers were short—usually no more than a “yes” or a “no”—but they were certainly understandable. Once more we were all intensely interested. Gatherer did more than add fuel to the waning fire of our enthusiasm. He presented us with his own spook-board, which he and another officer had made some months before, and used in secret. It was a piece of sheet iron on which the glass moved much more smoothly than on the tray or the table, and he suggested pasting down the letters in such a way that they could not be knocked off by the movement of the glass. Later on Matthews still further improved it by adding a raised “scantling” round the edge which prevented the glass from leaving the circle.

Gatherer was in great request, for without him we could get nothing, try we never so hard. But he would not come—he “disliked it”—he “had other things to do,” he “might come tomorrow,” and so on. Ah, Gatherer, you have much to answer for! Had you never shown us that intelligible replies could be obtained, I might have remained an honest little enquirer, happy in the mere moving of the glass. But now, mere movement was no longer satisfying. We were tired of our own company, and knew one another as only fellow-prisoners can. We wanted a chat with somebody “outside,” somebody with ideas culled beyond our prison walls, whose mind was not an open book to us, whose thoughts were not limited to the probable date of the end of the war or of the arrival of the next mail from home. It did not matter who it was—Julius CÆsar or Socrates, Christopher Columbus or Aspasia (it is true we rather hoped for Aspasia, especially the Doc.), but any old Tom, or Dick, or Harry would have been welcome. You ought to have known that, Gatherer, for you were a prisoner, too; but you were callous, and left us alone to record our meaningless X’s, and Y’s and Z’s.

After another week of failure we grew desperate. “If we get nothing to-night,” said Matthews, “we’ll chuck it.”

We tried hard, and got nothing.

“One more shot, Bones,” said the Doc., sitting down opposite me.

I glanced at him, and from him to Price and Matthews. Disappointment was written on every face. Success had seemed so near, and we had laboured so hard. Was this to end as so many of our efforts at amusement had ended, in utter boredom?

The doctor began pulling up the sleeves of his coat as though he were leading a forlorn hope.

“Right you are, Doc.” I put my fingers on the glass. “One more shot,” and as I said it the Devil of Mischief that is in every Celt whispered to me that the little man must not go empty away. We closed our eyes.

“For the last time,” said the Doc. “WHO—ARE—YOU?”

The glass began to move across the board.

“S-,” Matthews read aloud, “A-L-L-Y—SALLY!”

“Sally,” Price repeated, in a whisper.

“Sally,” I echoed again.

The Doc. wriggled forward in his chair, tugging up his coat-sleeves. “Keep at it,” he whispered excitedly. “Keep at it, we’ve got one at last.” And then in a loud voice that had a slight quaver in it—

“GOOD EVENING, SALLY! HAVE YE ANYTHIN’ TO TELL US?”

Sally had quite a lot to tell us. She made love to Alec Matthews (much to his delight) in the most barefaced way, and then coolly informed him that she preferred sailor-boys. Price beamed, and replied in fitting terms. She talked seriously to the Doc. (who had murmured—out of jealousy, I expect—that Sally seemed a brazen hussy), and warned us to be careful what we said in the presence of a lady. (That “presence of a lady” startled us—most of us hadn’t seen a lady for nearly three years.) She accused me of being unbecomingly dressed. (Pyjamas and a blanket—quite respectable for a prisoner.) Then she complained of “feeling tired,” made one or two most unladylike remarks when we pressed her to tell us more, and “went away.”

I had fully intended to tell them that I had steered the glass, with my eyes shut, from my memory of the position of the letters. But the talk became too good to interrupt. There were theories as to who Sally could be. Was she dead, or alive, or non-existent? Was the glass guided by a spook or by subconscious efforts? Then round again on to the old argument of why the glass moved at all. Was it the unconscious exercise of muscular force by one or both of the mediums or was it some external power? I lay back and listened to the sapper and the submarine man and the scientist from Central Africa. Others dropped in and added their voices and extracts from their experience to the discussion. Dorling had schoolboy reminiscences of a thought-reading entertainment, which was somehow allied to the subject in hand. Winnie Smith knew someone—I think it was one of his second cousins in Russia, or a crowned head, or somebody of the kind—who had a pet spook in the house. I told my story of the dak bungalow in Myinmu Township in Burma, where there is a black ghost-dog, who does not mind revolver bullets. We talked, and we talked, and we talked, forgetting the war and the sentries outside and all the monotony of imprisonment. And always the talk rounded back to Sally and the spook-glass that moved no one knew how. The others slipped away to bed, and we were left alone. Alec, Price, the Doc., and myself. I braced myself to confess the fraud, but Doc. raised his tin mug:

“Here’s to Sally and success, and many more happy evenings,” said he.

Facilis descensus Averni! I lifted my mug with the rest, and drank in silence. Little I guessed how much water was to flow under the bridges before I could make my confession, or under what strange conditions that confession was to be made.

---

Next day I woke—a worm. I felt as if I had caught myself taking sweeties from a child. They had all accepted the wonder of the previous night so uncritically. It was a shame. It was unforgivable! I would get out of bed. I would go across and tell them at once.

“Don’t,” said the Devil of Mischief. “Stay where you are. It was only a rag. If you really want to tell them, any old time will do. Besides, it’s beastly cold this morning, and you’ve got a headache. Stay in bed!”

“But it wasn’t a rag. We were experimenting in earnest,” said I. “That’s why it was so mean.” I got one foot out of bed.

“Stay where you are, I tell you,” said the Devil. “You gave them a jolly good evening, and you can have plenty more.”

I pulled my foot back under the blankets again. Yes, we had had a jolly evening—the Doc. himself had said so. I would think it over a little longer.

I thought it over—and started up again.

“You ass!” said the Devil. “They’ll only laugh at you! The whole thing’s a fraud, anyway. Let them find out for themselves. Oliver Lodge, Conan Doyle, and the rest of the precious crew are victims in the same way.”

“I won’t,” said I. “I’m going to tell them.” I got up and dressed slowly.

“See here,” said the Devil. “What you gave them last night was something new to talk about. Carry on! It does them good. It sets them thinking. Carry on!”

“And what sort of a swine will I look when they find me out?” said I.

“But they won’t,” said the Devil.

“But they will—they must,” said I, and opened the door.

On the landing outside was our “Wardie,” once of America, doing MÜller’s exercises to get the stiffness out of his wounded shoulder. That was a Holy Rite, which nothing was allowed to interrupt. But to-day he stopped and faced me. I think my Devil must have entered into him.

“Hello, Bones, you sly dog!” said he.^[2]

“What’s up, Wardie?”

“Oh, you don’t get me with your larks,” he said, grinning at me. “I know you, you old leg-puller!”

I made to pass on.

“You and your Sally,” he chuckled.

“Oh, that!” I said, and tried again to pass.

“Come on, Bones,” he continued; “how d’you do it?”

“Why, that’s spooking, Wardie,” said I.

“Oh, get on with you! You don’t catch me! I’m too old a bird, Sonny. How’s it done?”

“You’ve seen! You sit with your fingers on a glass, and the glass moves about.”

“Yes, yes, it moves all right. But this Sally business? These answers?”

“That’s what everybody’s trying to find out, Wardie.”

“I’ll find out one of these fine days, Bones me boy!” He dug his thumb into my ribs and laughed at me.

“Right-o, Wardie,” said I, and went back into my room. My dander was up.