Affinity (31 page)

As I stood gazing at them, Mr Hither came to me. He was shod, this time, in a pair of Turkish sandals, and at his lapel there was a flower. He said that he and Miss Kislingbury had been sure I would return to them—‘and here you are, and I am very pleased to see it’. Then he peered at me. ‘But what is this? Your look is such a dark one! Our exhibits have made you thoughtful, I can see. That is good. But they shouldn’t make you frown, Miss Prior. They should make you smile.’

I did smile then; and then he smiled, and his eyes grew clearer and kinder than ever. No other reader coming to the room, we stood and talked, for almost an hour. I asked him, amongst other things, how long it was that he had called himself a spiritualist?—and why he had become one.

He said, ‘It was my brother who first joined the Movement. I thought him a terribly believing sort of chap, to follow such nonsense. He said he could see our mother and father in Heaven, watching all the things we did. I could imagine nothing more terrible!’

I asked, what was it then, that made the change in him? and he hesitated, then answered, that his brother had died. I said at once that I was sorry; but he shook his head, and almost laughed—‘No, you must never say that, not
here
. For within a month of his passing, my brother came back to me. He came and embraced me, he was as real to me as you are—fitter than he was in life, and with all the marks of his illness quite gone from him. He came, and told me to believe. Still, however, I refused the truth of it. I explained his visit away as a kind of fancy; and when more signs came, I explained
them
away, too. It is amazing what one
will
explain away, when one is stubborn! At last, however, I saw. Now my brother is my dearest friend.’

I said, ‘And you are aware of spirits, all about you?’—Ah, he said then, he is aware of them when they
come
to him. He has not the powers of a great medium. ‘I catch glimpses, only—“a little flash, a mystic hint”, as Mr Tennyson has it—rather than seeing vistas. I hear notes—a simple tune, if I am fortunate. Others, Miss Prior, hear symphonies.’

I said, To be aware of spirits . . .

‘One cannot
but
be aware of them, when one has seen them once! And yet’—he smiled—‘to gaze at them, too, may be frightening.’ He folded his arms; then gave me this curious example. He said I must imagine that nine-tenths of the people of England had a condition of the eye, a condition which prevented them from appreciating, say, the colour red. He said I must imagine myself afflicted with such a condition. I would drive through London, I would see a blue sky, a yellow flower—I would think the world a very fine place. I would not know I had a condition that quite prevented me from seeing part of it; and when some special people told me that I had—told me of another, marvellous colour—I would think that they were fools. My friends, he said, would agree with me. The newspapers would agree with me. Everything I read, indeed, would confirm me in my belief that those people were fools;
Punch
would even print cartoons to demonstrate how foolish they were! I would smile at those cartoons, and be very content.

‘Then,’ he went on, ‘a morning comes and you awaken—and your eye has corrected itself. Now you can see pillar-boxes and lips, poppies and cherries and guardsmen’s jackets. You can see all the glorious shades of red—crimson, scarlet, ruby, vermilion, carnation, rose . . . You will want to hide your eyes, at first, in wonder and fear. Then you will look, and you will tell your friends, your family—and they will laugh at you, they will frown at you, they will send you to a surgeon or a doctor of the brain. It will be very hard, to become aware of all those marvellous scarlet things. And yet—tell me, Miss Prior—having seen them once, could you bear ever to look again, and see only blue, and yellow, and green?’

I did not answer him for a moment, for his words made me terribly thoughtful. When I did speak at last, what I said was, ‘Suppose a person were to be what you have described’—I was thinking, of course, of Selina. I said, ‘Suppose she sees the scarlet. What ought she to do?’

‘She must seek others out,’ he answered at once, ‘who are like her! They will guide her, and keep her from the dangers of herself . . .’

The emergence of spirit-mediumship, he said, is a very grave thing, still imperfectly understood. The person I was thinking of would know herself prey to all manner of changes of the body and the mind. She was being led to the threshold of another world and invited to look across it; but while there would be ‘wise guides’ there, ready to counsel her, there would also be ‘base, obsessing spirits’. Such spirits might appear to her charming and good—but they would seek only to use her, for their own gain. They would want her to lead them to the earthly treasures they had lost, and pined for . . .

I asked, How could she guard herself, from spirits like that?—He said she must take care, in the choosing of her earth-friends. He said, ‘How many young women have there been, driven to despair—driven to madness!—by the improper application of their powers? They might be invited to call on the spirits for sport—they must not do that. They might be persuaded to sit too frequently, in carelessly got-together circles—that will tire and corrupt them. They might be encouraged to sit alone—that is the very worst way, Miss Prior, that they could apply their powers. I knew a man once—a young man, quite a gentleman, I knew him because I was taken to him by a hospital chaplain, a friend of mine. The gentleman was admitted to the chaplain’s ward after being found almost dead from a badly cut throat; and he made my friend a curious confession. He was a passive writer—do you know the term? He had been encouraged by a thoughtless friend to sit with pen and paper, and after a time there had come spirit-messages to him, through the independent motion of his arm . . .’

That, said Mr Hither, is a fine spiritualist trick; he said I would find many mediums doing that, to a sensible degree. The young man he spoke of now, however, was not sensible. He began to sit at night, alone—after that, he found that the messages came faster than ever. He began to be roused from sleep. His hand would wake him, twitching upon the coverlet. It would twitch until he put a pen in it and permitted it to write—then he would write upon paper, upon the walls of his room, upon his own bare flesh! He would write until his fingers blistered. The messages he believed at first to come from his own dead relatives—‘But you can be sure, no good soul would torment a medium like that. The writings were the work of a single base spirit.’

This spirit finally revealed itself to the gentleman in the most horrible way. It appeared to him, Mr Hither said, in the shape of a toad, ‘and it entered his own body, here’—he touched his shoulder, lightly—‘at the joint of the neck. Now that low spirit was inside him, and had him in his power. It proceeded to prompt him, Miss Prior, to commit a host of filthy deeds; and the man could do nothing . . .’

This, he said, was a torture. At last the spirit had whispered to the man that he should take a razor, and cut off one of his own fingers with it. And the man did take the razor; but instead of his hand, he put it to his throat—‘He was trying, you see, to get the spirit out, and it was that, that had led to him being admitted to the hospital. They saved his life there; but the obsessing spirit had him in his power still. His old base habits returned, and he was declared deranged. They have him now, I think, on the ward of an asylum. Poor man! How differently his story would have turned out—do you see?—if he had only sought out those of his own kind, who could have counselled him wisely . . .’

I remember him lowering his tone as he spoke these last few words, and seeming to gaze at me very meaningfully—I thought then that he might have guessed I had Selina Dawes in mind, since I had shown such interest in her last time. We stood a moment in silence. He seemed to hope that I would speak. But I could not, there was not time—for we were disturbed now by Miss Kislingbury, who pushed at the reading-room door and called Mr Hither to her. He said, ‘Just a moment, Miss Kislingbury!’, and he put his hand upon my arm, murmuring, ‘I wish we might talk further. Should you like that? You must be sure to come another time—will you? And find me out, when I have less to occupy me here?’

I, too, was sorry that he must leave me. After all, I should like to know more of what he thinks about Selina. I should like to know how it must have been for her, to have been obliged to see those scarlet things he spoke of. I know she was afraid—but she was fortunate, she told me once: she did have wise friends, to guide her, to take her gifts and shape them and make them
rare
.

So I think she believes. But who did she have, really? She had her aunt—who made a turn of her. She had Mrs Brink, of Sydenham—who brought strangers to her, and had a curtain hung, that she might sit behind it and be tied with a velvet collar and a rope; who kept her safe, for her own mother’s sake—and for Peter Quick to find her.

What did
he
do to her, or prompt her to do, that led her to Millbank?

And who has she now to guard her there? She has Miss Haxby, Miss Ridley, Miss Craven. In all the gaol, there is no-one to be kind to her, no-one at all, save mild Mrs Jelf.

I heard Mr Hither’s voice, and Miss Kislingbury’s, and another visitor’s; but the reading-room door stayed shut, no-one came. I was still standing before the cabinet of spirit-moulds; now I stooped to study them again. The hand of Peter Quick’s sat in its old place upon the lowest shelf, its blunt fingers and its swollen thumb close to the glass. It seemed solid to me, last time I looked at it; to-day, however, I did what I had not done then, and moved to the side of the cabinet to study it from there. I saw then how the wax ended, neatly, at the bone of the wrist. I saw how absolutely hollow it was. Inside it, marked out very clearly upon the yellowing surface of the wax, are the creases and whorls of a palm, the dents of knuckles.

I have been used to thinking of it as a hand, and very solid; more properly, however, it is a kind of
glove
. It might have been cast there a moment before, and still be cooling from the closeness of the fingers that had dropped it.—The idea made me nervous, suddenly, of the empty room. I left it, and came home.

Now Stephen is here, I can hear him talking to Mother, his voice is raised and rather peevish. He has a case that was due to come before the courts to-morrow, but the client has fled to France, and now the police cannot pursue him. Stephen must give the matter up, and lose his fee.—There comes his voice again, louder than before.

Why do gentlemen’s voices carry so clearly, when women’s are so easily stifled?

24 November 1874

To Millbank, to Selina. I went to her—I went to one or two other women first, and made a show of putting down the details of their talk inside my book—but I went to her at last, and when I did she asked me at once, How had I liked my flowers? She said she had sent them to remind me of Italy, to make me think of the warm days there. She said, ‘The spirits carried them. You may keep them for a month, they won’t wither.’

I said they frightened me.

I stayed with her for half an hour. At the end of that time there came the slamming of the ward gate and the sound of footsteps—Selina said quietly then: ‘Miss Ridley,’ and I moved to the bars, and when the matron passed the cell I signalled to her that she might release me. I stood very stiffly, saying only, ‘Good-bye, Dawes.’ Selina had placed her hands before her, and her face was meek; now she curtseyed to me and answered: ‘Good-bye, Miss Prior.’ I know she did it for the matron’s sake.

I stood and watched Miss Ridley then, as she drew closed the gate to Selina’s cell. I watched the turning of the key in the stiff prison lock. I wished the key were mine.

2 April 1873

Peter says I must be fastened in my cabinet. He came to the circle tonight & put his hand upon me very hard, & when he went beyond the curtain he said ‘I cannot come among you until I have fulfilled a task I have been given. You know I am sent to you to show the truths of Spiritualism. Well, there are disbelievers in this city, people that doubt the existence of spirits. They mock the powers of our media, they think our media leave their places & walk about the circles in disguise. We cannot appear where there are doubts & unbeliefs like that.’ I heard Mrs Brink say then ‘There are no doubters here Peter, you may come among us as you always have’, & he answered ‘No, there is something that must be done. Look here, & you will see my medium, & you will tell & write of this & then perhaps the unbelieving will believe.’ Then he caught hold of the curtain & drew it slowly back -

He had never done such a thing before. I sat in my dark trance, but felt the circle gazing at me. A lady asked ‘Do you see her?’ & another answered ‘I see the shape of her in her chair.’ Peter said ‘It hurts my medium to have you look at her while I am here. The doubting makes me do this, but there is another thing that I can do, it will make a test. You must open the drawer in the table & bring me what you find there.’ I heard the drawer open & then a voice say ‘There are ropes here’ & Peter said ‘Yes, bring them to me.’ Then he bound me to my seat saying ‘You must do this now at each dark circle. If you do not do this I will not come’. He tied me at the wrists & at the ankles & he put a band across my eyes. Then he went into the room again & I heard a chair scrape & he said ‘Come with me.’ He brought a lady to me, it was a lady named Miss d’Esterre. He said ‘Do you see Miss d’Esterre, how my medium is fastened? Put your hand upon her & tell me if those bonds are tight. Take off your glove.’ I heard her glove drawn off & then her fingers came upon me, with Peter’s fingers pressing them & making them hot. She said ‘She is trembling!’ & Peter said ‘It is for her sake I do this.’ Then he sent Miss d’Esterre back to her seat & he leaned to me, whispering ‘It is for you I do this’ & I answered ‘Yes, Peter.’ He said ‘I am all your power’ & I said I knew it.

Then he put a band of silk across my mouth & then drew the curtain closed & went among them. I heard a gentleman say then ‘I don’t know Peter, I can’t be quite easy about this. Won’t it harm Miss Dawes’s powers for her to be fastened like that?’ Peter laughed. He said ‘Well, she would be a very poor medium if all it took to weaken her were 3 or 4 silk cords!’ He said that the cords held my mortal parts but as for my spirit, that could never be bound or locked. He said ‘Don’t you know that it is the same for locksmiths with spirits as with love? Spirits laugh at them.’