City and town life -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
One night, after a long wrangle which ended in a discourse by the
"father," a strange thing happened. Larmy and It were contending as to
whether It was merely a hypnotic influence on the boy, of someone living
whom they did not know, or what It claimed to be, a disembodied spirit.
By way of diversion, the reporter had just run a binder's needle under
one of the boy's finger-nails to see whether he would flinch. Then the
Voice that was coming from David's mouth spoke and said: "I will show
you something to prove it;" and the entranced boy rose and went to the
back room, while the two others followed him.
He turned the lever that flashed the light on his linotype, and set the
little motor going. He lifted up the lid of the metal-pot, to see if the
fire was keeping it molten. Then the boy sat at the machine with his
hands folded in his lap, gazing at the empty copy-holder out of dead
eyes. In a minute--perhaps it was a little longer--a brass matrix
slipped from the magazine and clicked down into the assembler; in a
second or two another fell, and then, very slowly, like the ticks of a
great clock, the brasses slipped--slipped--slipped into their places,
and the steel spaces dropped into theirs. A line was formed, while the
boy's hands lay in his lap. When it was a full line he grabbed the
lever, that sent the line over to the metal-pot to be cast, and his hand
fell back in his lap, while the dripping of the brasses continued and
the blue and white keys on the board sank and rose, although no finger
touched them.
Larmy squinted at the thing, and held his long, fuzzy, unshaven chin in
his hand. When the second line was cast the reporter broke the silence
with: "Well, I'll be damned!" And the Voice from David's mouth replied:
"Very likely." And the clicking of the brasses grew quicker.
Seven lines were cast and then the boy got up and went back to the couch
in the front room, where he yawned himself, apparently, through three
strata of consciousness, into his normal self. They took a proof of what
had been cast, but it was in Latin and they could not translate it.
David himself forgot about it the next day, but the reporter, being
impressed and curious, took the proof to the teacher of Latin at the
college, who translated it thus: "_He shall go away on a long journey
across the ocean, and he shall not return, yet the whole town shall see
him again and know him--and he shall bring back the song that is in his
heart, and you shall hear it._"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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