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The Major rose from the table. "Then, sir," said he, with concentrated indignation, "I decline to continue this game. A human fool I can tolerate for a partner, but if I am to be hampered by a damned spirit " "You've no right to say that," cried Whibley hotly. "I apologise," returned the Major coldly; "we will say a blessed spirit.
Whibley would amuse himself of an evening asking it questions, being careful to choose tolerably simple themes, such as, "Are you there?" "Are you happy?" and so on. The Spirit made the cabinet crack three times for "Yes" and twice for "No." Now and then it would reply both "Yes!" and "No!" to the same question, which Whibley attributed to over-scrupulousness.
Some of us went for work, to "do" the Salons after we had "done" the Royal Academy and the New Gallery, then the Academy's only London rival: Bob Stevenson for the Pall Mall, D.S. MacColl for the Spectator, Charles Whibley for the National Observer.
Charles Whibley, bound to the presupposed paradox of America's pathetic senescence and total deficiency in humour, blithely gives away his case in the vehement assertion that America's greatest national interpreter is Mark Twain!
I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of 'The Golden Age, Barry Pain, now a well known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older than the rest.
To please Whibley, I assisted at some of the earlier seances, but during my presence it invariably maintained a reticence bordering on positive dulness. I gathered from Whibley that it disliked me, thinking that I was unsympathetic. The complaint was unjust; I was not unsympathetic, at least not at the commencement.
I can see it does." One evening she caused quite a scene at the club. Whibley had been playing whist, with the Major for a partner. "I I am very sorry, Major," replied Whibley apologetically. "I I somehow felt I I ought to play that queen." "Entirely your own inspiration, or suggested?" persisted the Major, who had, of course, heard of "Maria." Whibley admitted the play had been suggested to him.
"Many cartloads of our fellow-creatures are once in six weeks carried to slaughter," says Henry Fielding, in his Enquiry ; and well has Mr. Whibley described the period as "Newgate's golden age." As for Tyburn Tree, we read in its Annals, for example, "1752. July 13. Eleven executed at Tyburn." We can only glance at one or two further instances of the diffusion of "Blandy's fatal fame."
The fame of Whibley's Spirit became noised abroad, with the result that Whibley was able to command the willing service of more congenial assistants, and Jobstock and myself were dismissed. But we bore no malice. Under these more favourable conditions the Spirit plucked up wonderfully, and talked everybody's head off.
Three times we went over the whole thing again from the beginning, which meant six hundred and six tiltings of the table, and then suddenly the explanation struck me "Eastern Hemisphere." Whibley had asked it for any information it might possess concerning his wife's uncle, from whom he had not heard for months, and that apparently was its idea of an address.
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