THE MEDIUM was a little brown, dumpy woman with skirts almost to the floor and a hat like a basin, pulled well down. Except for a purple wispy scarf about her neck, she looked as indeterminately round and ordinary as a loaf of bread.
“I thought she’d be different from that. I thought she might wear special clothes, you know, like fortune-tellers do.” Emily sighed disappointedly as they waited hidden in the alcove behind the brown velvet curtains.
“Perhaps she’s got better clothes on underneath her coat, and we’ll see them when she takes it off,” Charlotte suggested.
But the medium took off nothing save her gloves, revealing podgy, shapeless hands with a plain gold band on the wedding finger, and no such huge amethyst or topaz or turquoise rings as both Charlotte and Emily thought would be appropriate. Her hat hung over her eyes like continuous brows, from under which she peered morosely. She did not smile and almost did not speak, arranging the room as matter-of-factly as a doctor or lawyer arranging a consulting room.
The dim side lamps were unlit today. The center lamp was pulled right down over the table, which normally stood beside Mrs. Chisel-Brown’s armchair near the fireplace to hold her photographs. Now moved to the middle of the room, it held only one photograph, a large one of Arthur in uniform, at which Charlotte looked with interest from between the curtains, her face and mouth pressed to their thick and yielding pile. Arthur’s face was set as sternly as in the photograph upstairs, but did not grimace this time. His eyes gazed out as if they passed the photographer without noticing him. The moustache was different, too, clipped very neat and small.
The medium sat down at last, folding her hands over her fat brown bag, and beckoned to Mr. and Mrs. Chisel-Brown to do the same; for though it was their house, they seemed uncertain, hesitant. They lowered themselves silently, and afterwards Miss Agnes came forward and took the farthest chair from Charlotte and Emily, the one that faced them across the table. She twisted her fingers together nervously and twisted and turned her head. She touched her throat sometimes with a gesture that Mr. Chisel-Brown also used for touching his moustache. The medium gazed at Miss Agnes for a minute; and then suddenly she turned and gazed at the curtains behind which stood Charlotte and Emily. Charlotte felt as if her eyes stared straight into the medium’s beneath that basin hat; but the medium’s face changed not at all, remained quite blank and still. After a moment she turned back to the table, to the light, to the three Chisel-Browns, and setting her bag beside her with a surprisingly large sound, she laid her hands out flat on the table. She nodded to the others, and they did the same, so that there were eight flat starfish hands.
Nothing happened for a long time. Emily fidgeted and sucked the curtains and sighed with such loud sighs that Charlotte thought she would be heard. She herself wanted to cough. The velvet tickled her nose, and one of her feet started to go numb. Her eyes swam with gazing at the light. It felt like gazing into the bright center of a dim flower, the opposite of a sunflower, the hands like part of the flower, not part of the people.
Suddenly the medium spoke, making them jump after the long silence. She spoke slowly at first, then a little faster, though her voice kept its same flat tone.
“A . . . I get . . . I seem to get A. . . . Does anyone here know someone whose name begins with A?”
Mr. Chisel-Brown touched his moustache again and nodded sharply. Mrs. Chisel-Brown bent her head and left it bent. Miss Agnes said, “Yes,” very quietly.
“A wants to get in touch with someone else—A again—is that right?”
This time Miss Agnes nodded. No one else moved. The medium sat on solidly, hunched, and for another moment dumb. Then she spoke again, and her voice was changing, becoming deeper, fuller, faster, if still as monotonous.
“I have a message from A . . . to A . . . to Ag . . . Agnes—is that right? All right, all right, all right. Aggie, soldier, soldiers, soldiers—no soldiers, eyes blind—Aggie.”
The three Chisel-Browns were watching the medium, eyes fixed, faces tense. Charlotte realized she had never seen Mrs. Chisel-Brown concerned before about anything except food.
Again there was a pause, a long one, seeming longer at such a time.
The voice returned, deeper but getting higher, shriller as it went on.
“No soldiers, no soldiers, Aggie, eyes blind, eyes blind, Aggie, Aggie, Aggie.”
Miss Agnes leaned forward. She cried out, twisting, twisting with her hands. “Arthur, Arthur, is that really you . . .?”
But at the same instant the voice began to die to a mutter, an incoherent mumble. “Eyes blind, eyes blind . . .”
And suddenly everything had changed. The medium became rigid, staring, and remained so for a long moment, her rounded back turned straight as wood. Then all at once she started to shiver, to shake, like a brick wall shivering in an earthquake. Sounds were coming out of her very fast, but no words or no words they could comprehend. Charlotte found herself choked on the nap of the curtain, gripping it and staring, scarcely bothering any more to keep herself fully hidden.
The sounds turned into a regular panting; the movement became a regular rocking back and forth. A voice came, quite high this time, a child’s voice or a girl’s.
“Emily,” it cried. “Emily, Emily, Emily, are you there? Are you all right? I can’t find you, Emily, where are you? There’s so much noise, Emily, Emily.”
Emily had cried out before Charlotte could stop her and was running out into the room.
“Clare, oh, Clare,” she called, her voice excited at first, then almost immediately desperate. “Oh, Clare, where are you, Clare?” Coming face to face with the dumpy medium, she stared at her uncomprehendingly and burst into the most bitter tears—turning back uncertainly to Charlotte and, seeing only Charlotte, crying more bitterly than ever and rushing out of the room.