Their letters dropped from the
ceiling--unstamped--and spirits used to squatter up and down their
staircases all night. But they had never come into contact with kittens.
Lone Sahib wrote out the facts, noting the hour and the minute, as every
psychical observer is bound to do, and appending the Englishman's letter
because it was the most mysterious document and might have had a bearing
upon anything in this world or the next. An outsider would have
translated all the tangle thus: "Look out! You laughed at me once, and now
I am going to make you sit up."
Lone Sahib's coreligionists found that meaning in it; but their
translation was refined and full of four-syllable words. They held a
sederunt, and were filled with tremulous joy, for, in spite of their
familiarity with all the other worlds and cycles, they had a very human
awe of things sent from ghostland. They met in Lone Sahib's room in
shrouded and sepulchral gloom, and their conclave was broken up by a
clinking among the photo frames on the mantelpiece. A wee white kitten,
nearly blind, was looping and writhing itself between the clock and the
candlesticks. That stopped all investigations or doubtings. Here was the
manifestation in the flesh. It was, so far as could be seen, devoid of
purpose, but it was a manifestation of undoubted authenticity.
They drafted a round robin to the Englishman, the backslider of old days,
adjuring him in the interests of the creed to explain whether there was
any connection between the embodiment of some Egyptian god or other (I
have forgotten the name) and his communication.
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