"She can do it," cried Clarke. "She can move a chair from A to B without bringing to bear any of the known forces. She can suspend the law of gravity. She can make a closed piano play, and she can read sealed letters in an ebony box tightly closed and locked."
"You claim too much, my friend," replied Weissmann, ironically. "We shall be satisfied with much less. If she will change one one-hundredth part of a grain from one scale to another, under my conditions, I will be satisfied. The most wonderful phenomena taking place in the dark have no value to me."
Mrs. Lambert interposed. "Please don't argue--it prevents the coming of the spirits."
Both men felt rebuked and the group again settled into silence. Suddenly, Kate began to laugh, "Isn't it childish? Really, Morton, if our friends could see us sitting around here in the dark, as we are now, they would roar. Why should it all be so silly, Mr. Clarke?"
"It is not silly if we take the right view. We must sit together in order to get into harmony. We further these conditions by sitting in subdued light with fingers touching. Song adds still more to this concert of thought. Nothing is really silly or prosaic--all depends upon the minds of those--"
He was in the midst of an elaborate defence of spirit methods when Viola's hand began to leap as if struggling to be free. She moaned and sighed and writhed so powerfully that her chair creaked. "Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" she cried, gaspingly.
"Is she trying to free her hands?" Morton asked himself, with roused suspicion. "Is this a ruse to cover some trick?"
Mrs. Lambert spoke quietly. "She is going! Sing something, Anthony."
Clarke began to hum a monotonous tune, while Morton, bending towards the girl, listened to her gurgling moans with growing heartache. "She seems in great pain, Mrs. Lambert. Don't you think we'd better release her? I do not care to purchase sensation so clearly at her expense."
"Don't be alarmed, she always seems to suffer that way when some great manifestation is about to take place."
The poor girl's outcries so nearly resembled those of a death struggle that Kate at last rose. "Turn up that light! She is being strangled!"
"Please be silent!" said Clarke, almost angrily. "Take your hands from her, gentlemen! You are too 'strong'--and do not startle her! Be quiet everybody!"
Morton took his hand away in anger and disgust. "All this is a ruse to weaken our grasp upon her," he thought. "Even the mother, so serene, so candid, is aiding the deception."