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The Unknown Guest by Maurice Maeterlinck

III. THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE FUTURE

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The persons who watched in the two rooms were questioned by Mr. J. G. Piddington, a member of the council of the S. P. R., and declared that they had not any expectation of what they discovered.

I need hardly add that Mrs. Verrall had never heard anything about the happenings in the haunted house and that the watchers were completely ignorant of Mrs. Verrall's existence.

Here then is a wry curious prediction of an event, insignificant in itself, which is to happen, in a house unknown to the one who foretells it, to people whom she does not know either. The spiritualists, who score in this case, not without some reason, will have it that a spirit, in order to prove its existence and its intelligence, organized this little scene in which the future, the present and the past are all mixed up together. Are they right? Or is Mrs. Verrall's subconsciousness roaming like this, at random, in the future? It is certain that the problem has seldom appeared under a more baffling aspect.

We will now take another premonitory dream, strictly controlled by the committee of the S. P. R.[1] Early in September, 1893, Annette, wife of Walter Jones, tobacconist, of Old Gravel Lane, East London, had her little boy ill. One night she dreamt that she saw a cart drive up and stop near when she was. It contained three coffins, "two white and one blue. One white coffin was bigger than the other; and the blue was the biggest of the three." The driver took out the bigger white coffin and left it at the mother's feet, driving off with the others. Mrs. Jones told her dream to her husband and to a neighbour, laying particular stress on the curious circumstance that one of the coffins was blue.

[1] Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 493.

On the 10th of September, a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Jones was confined of a boy, who died on the 29th of the same month. Their own little boy died on the following Monday, the 2nd of October, being then sixteen months old. It was decided to bury the two children on the same day. On the morning of the day chosen, the parish priest informed Mr. and Mrs. Jones that another child had died in the neighbourhood and that its body would be brought into church along with the two others. Mrs. Jones remarked to her husband:

"If the coffin is blue, then my dream will come true. For the two other coffins were white."

The third coffin was brought; it was blue. It remains to be observed that the dimensions of the coffins corresponded exactly with the dream premonitions, the smallest being that of the child who died first, the next that of the little Jones boy, who was sixteen months old, and the largest, the blue one, that of a boy six years of age.

Let us take, more or less at random, another case from the inexhaustible Proceedings.[1] The report is written by Mr. Alfred Cooper and attested by the Duchess of Hamilton, the Duke of Manchester and another gentleman to whom the duchess related the incident before the fulfilment of the prophetic vision:

[1] Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 505.

"A fortnight before the death of the late Earl of L.--," says Mr. Cooper, "in 1882, I called upon the Duke of Hamilton, in Hill Street, to see him professionally. After I had finished seeing him, we went into the drawing-room where the duchess was, and the duke said to me:

"'Oh, Cooper, how is the earl?'

"The duchess said, 'What earl?' and, on my answering, 'Lord L--,' she replied: