"AND you really believe," I asked, "that you can transmit your thoughts to a girl six hundred miles away?"
"I have always communicated with Euphemia when we were separated," Percy Lagare replied earnestly. "Through all my childhood she was my only friend. Euphemia and I have shared everything—even our thoughts."
"Give me some proof," I suggested. "What is Euphemia doing now?"
Percy made no immediate answer. In his eyes there came that faraway look that set him apart from the other boys in our university. The incident occurred, as I now vividly recall, in the twilight of a late October evening. We were sitting on a balcony that overlooked the back campus. It was not a cheerful scene that lay before us, the trees bare-limbed and gaunt above a carpet of seared leaves, the sky losing its last glow of daylight. Suddenly Lagare's rapt expression gave place to one of extreme terror. Clutching my hand and seeming not to see me, he cried out sharply. Then, for the space of five minutes, the longest I have ever endured, he was silent. And then:
"She is safe now, but she has been in great danger, calling upon me for help. I can never see her. I can only hear the messages she sends," he said.
That evening Lagare seemed shaken, though not in fear for Euphemia's safety. I was entirely unconvinced, however, until he brought me, two days later, a letter from Euphemia telling of a narrow escape from drowning. The experience, I remember, rendered me deciddly uncomfortable. A practical boy of nineteen, I was little interested in psychic phenomena. I was interested, however, in Perey Lagare. He was my David and I his Jonathan—the only close friend Lagare had on the campus.
In appearance, in taste, in fineness of sensibility, Lagare was different from the other boys. There was about him a classical beauty reminiscent of Greek art. Tall and slightly built he was, with an abundance of fair hair that swept back from a forehead high and broad. He was at college only one year, and during that time was as completely untouched by the life about him as were the chaste marble statues in the foyer. I thought him very lonely until he told me of Euphemia.
Euphemia was the woman he loved, the woman who loved him, and who knew scarcely another man. For generations Lagare's family and Euphemia's had lived on island plantations off the coast of South Carolina, isolated from the mainland, but accessible by row boat to each other. They made few trips to the mainland, but the little boats, for two hundred years, had, with unbroken frequency, crossed the narrow channel that separated the two islands.
Sons and daughters had been tutored at home, and then sent abroad to complete their education. Though the Hugers and Lagares were not prolific people, there had always been a son of each who had carried on the name. Now Percy represented the last of the Lagares and Euphemia the last of the Hugers.
When my friend first mentioned Euphemia to me, he said that he had always loved her. Having no other playmates, like Ferdinand and Miranda, they had, through each other, discovered the existence of love. Their mothers, the closest friends, had, before their births, Lagare told me, spent hours together anticipating the arrival of their children. Percy and Euphemia were born during one of the frightful equinoctial storms so prevalent off the southern coast.
"Old Jeremiah, our household servant," Lagare told me one day, when he had lapsed into a story-telling mood, "loves to talk of that night.
"'Yo' sho' is meant fo' sumpin' turrible, Marse Pu'sy,' he said. 'When I heared yo' liftin' up yo' voice 'ginst de elements o' de Lawd, I says to yo' pa dat he best consecrate dat young un, dat de debbil done sont his spell on him. But, praise Gawd, effen yo' ain't broke up de tempest and save us, Marse Pu'sy.'"
Stranger to me, however, than Jeremiah's interpretations of the night was the psychic communication that passed between Percy's mother and Euphemia's.
"My mother," Lagare continued, "felt that her spirit went out to meet her friend's, and she knew that Euphemia was born. When she described her experiences to Mrs. Huger, she found that Euphemia's mother, too, had been conscious of the same merging of spirit."
As far as Lagare knew, this was the only psychic experience of which the two women had been conscious. The fact, however, that his mother, in perfect health, had died at precisely the time that Mrs. Huger, a consumptive, had died, led him to believe that there was much that had not been told him.
Those portions of the sciences that border on the abstruse interested Lagare. Wireless telegraphy and telephony he regarded as the means by which physical barriers were to be erased.
LAGARE did not re-enter the university the following fall. It seemed to me altogether right that he should return to his plantation, his books, and to Euphemia, whom he soon married. As for me, I anticipated with eagerness the time when I might visit them in their island home. Winters, however, were filled with college activities, and during the sultry sea island summers the Lagares roamed, Nomad fashion, in Alaska and the Canadian Rockies.
Then came the war and for me American cantonments and France. Percy Lagare volunteered, but, on account of underweight and a certain fragility of appearance, he was rejected.
It was, therefore, not until the fall of 1918 that I visited the plantation. Lagare, accompanied by the faithful Jeremiah, met me on the mainland and carried me across in his motor-boat. In the late afternoon we tied to the pier and walked together through the sandy paths arched by great pines from which hung the tropical gray moss. Stretching as far as the eye could see, lay fields still white with unpicked cotton, dotted here and there by the bright bandannas and gay shirts of the negroes who were filling their crocus bags. The house was large and impressive, after the manner of pioneer colonial architecture, with pillars and a piazza as a happy after-thought.
