heights of his profession had he not determined to sacrifice worldly prospects in order to help what seemed to him to be a great truth. As Malone was eager for knowledge and Marvin was equally keen to impart it, the waiters at the Literary Club found it no easy matter to get them away from the corner-table in the window at which they were wont to lunch. Looking down at the long grey curve of the Embankment and the noble river with its vista of the bridges, the pair would linger over their coffee, smoking cigarettes and discussing various sides of this most gigantic and absorbing subject, which seemed already to have disclosed new horizons to the mind of Malone.
There was one warning given by Marvin which aroused impatience amounting almost to anger in Malone's mind. He had the hereditary Irish objection to coercion, and it seemed to him to be appearing once more in an insidious and particularly objectionable form.
"You are going to one of Bolsover's family séances," said Marvin. "They are, of course, well known among our people, though few have been actually admitted, so you may consider yourself privileged. He has clearly taken a fancy to you."
"He thought I wrote fairly about them."
"Well, it wasn't much of an article, but still, among the dreary, purblind nonsense that assails us it did show some traces of dignity and balance and sense of proportion."
Malone waved a deprecating cigarette.
"Bolsover's séances and others like them are, of course, thing of no moment to the real psychic. They are like the rude foundations of a building, which certainly help to sustain the edifice, but are forgotten when once you come to inhabit it. It is the higher superstructure with which we have to do. You would think that the physical phenomena were the whole subject—those and a fringe of ghosts and haunted houses—if you were to believe the cheap papers which cater for the sensationalist. Of course, these physical phenomena have a use of their own. They rivet the attention of the inquirer and encourage him to go farther. Personally, having seen them all, I would not go across the road to see them again. But I would go across many roads to get high messages from the beyond."
"Yes, I quite appreciate the distinction, looking at it from your point of view. Personally, of course, I am equally agnostic as to the messages and the phenomena."
"Quite so. St. Paul was a good psychic. He makes the point so neatly that even his ignorant translators were unable to disguise the real occult meaning, as they have succeeded in doing in so many cases."
"Can you quote it?"
"I know my New Testament pretty well, but I am not letter-perfect. It is the passage where he says that the gift of tongues, which was an obvious sensational thing, was for the uninstructed, but that prophecies—that is, real spiritual messages—were for the elect. In other words, that an experienced Spiritualist has no need of phenomena."
"I'll look that passage up."
"You will find it in Corinthians, I think. By the way, there must have been a pretty high average of intelligence among those old congregations if Paul's letters could have been read aloud to them and thoroughly comprehended."
"That is generally admitted, is it not?"
"Well, it is a concrete example of it. However, I am down a side-track. What I wanted to say to you is that you must not take Bolsover's little spirit circus too seriously. It is honest as far as it goes, but it goes a mighty short way. It's a disease, this phenomena hunting. I know some of our people, women mostly, who buzz around séance rooms continually, seeing the same thing over and over, sometimes real, sometimes, I fear, imitation. What the better are they for that as souls or as citizens or any other way? No; when your foot is firm on the bottom rung don't mark time on it, but step up to the next rung and get firm upon that."
"I quite get your point. But I'm still on the solid ground."
"Solid!" cried Marvin. "Good Lord! But the paper goes to press to-day and I must get down to the printer. With a circulation of ten thousand or so we do thing modestly, you know—not like you plutocrats of the daily Press. I am practically the staff."
"You said you had a warning."
"Yes, yes, I wanted to give you a warning." Marvin's thin eager face became intensely serious. "If you have any ingrained religious or other prejudices which may cause you to turn down this subject after you have investigated it, then don't investigate at all—for it is dangerous."
"What do you mean—dangerous?"
"They don't mind honest doubt or honest criticism, but if they are badly treated they are dangerous."
"Who are 'they'?"
"Ah, who are they? I wonder. Guides, controls, psychic entities of some kind. Who the agents of vengeance—or I should say, justice—are, is really not essential. The point is that they exist."
"Oh, rot, Marvin!"
"Don't be too sure of that."
"Pernicious rot! These are the old theological bogies of the Middle Ages coming
