The House of Mystery: An Episode in the Career of Rosalie Le Grange, ClairvoyantIrwin, Will
General
The House of Mystery: An Episode in the Career of Rosalie Le Grange, Clairvoyant
Irwin, Will
Clairvoyants -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories
"Everyone of us says to herself, 'It won't leave me!' An' we start to
practice. What are we goin' to do then? You git a sitter. She pays her
two dollars. And _they_ don't come perhaps. Not for that sitter, or the
next sitter, or the next. But you have to give the value for the two
dollars or go out of business. So some day, you guess. That's the funny
thing about this business, anyway. Lots of times you ain't quite sure
whether guessing did it, or spirits. I've glimpsed the ring on a girl's
left hand, and right then my voices have said, 'Engaged!' Now was it me
makin' that voice, or the spirit? I don't know. But when you begin to
guess, you find how easy people are--how they swallow fakes and cry for
more. As sitters go, fakin' gets 'em a lot harder than the real stuff.
An' before long--it's easy--you're slipping the slates or bringing
spooks from cabinets--let me tell you no medium ever did that genuine.
But it's funny how long the real thing stays. Now you--I called your
father Wilfred. Maybe I'll wake up to-morrow night, seein' your face,
and a voice will come right out of the air and say a name--and it'll be
yours. It's happened; it will happen again; but generally when I can't
make any use of it.
"I'm goin' a long way round to get home. There's some so big that they
don't have to fake. Sometimes, of course, the controls won't come to
them, but they can afford to tell a sitter they can't sense nothin',
because the next sitter will get the real stuff--the stuff you can't
fake. Mrs. Fife is that way. I've seen her work and I know. I know just
as well about Mrs. Markham, though I haven't seen her. She keeps tight
shut up away from the rest of us. She never mixes. But some of us have
seen her, they've passed it on.
"Mediums," added Rosalie Le Grange, after a pause, "is a set of pipe
dreamers as a class, but there's one place where you can take their
word like it was sworn to on the Bible. It's when they say somebody has
the real thing. Because mediums is knockers, and when they pass out a
bouquet, you can bet they mean it. No, young man, Mrs. Markham, if she
_does_ play a lone hand, is the real thing. But I may help you waste
your money."
The young man had lost his air of cynical levity, he was regarding
Rosalie Le Grange somewhat as a collector regards a new and
unclassified species.
"Why?" he asked.
"Who's the greatest doctor in the world?" asked Mme. Le Grange.
"Watkins, I suppose," responded the young man.
"What'd you give for a chance to stay in his office a month and see him
work? See?"
He nodded his head.
"Of course."
"I was a darned little fool when I was young," pursued Rosalie Le
Grange, "an' now that I'm gettin' on in years I'm just as darned an old
one. I like to take chances. See?"
"Mme. Le Grange," said her sitter, again clapping her rounded shoulder,
"you're a fellow after my heart."
"Just a second before we come to the bouquets," responded Rosalie Le
Grange, "there's another reason. Can you guess it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account