Affinity (36 page)

I looked at Peter then, & saw him smile. He said ‘My medium’s nature is very special. You believe that to be a medium you must hold your spirit aside to let another spirit come. That however, is not how it is. You must rather be a servant of the spirits, you must become a plastic instrument for the spirits’ own hands. You must let your spirit be
used
, your prayer must be always
May I be used
. Say that, Selina.’ I said it, then he said to Miss Isherwood ‘Tell her to say it.’ She said ‘Say it Miss Dawes’ & I said again ‘May I be used.’ He said ‘Do you see? my medium must do as she is bid. You think she is awake but she is entranced. Tell her to do another thing.’ I heard Miss Isherwood swallow, then she said ‘Will you stand up Miss Dawes?’ but Peter said at once ‘You must not ask Will you, you must command her.’ Miss Isherwood said then ‘
Stand up Miss Dawes!
’ & I stood, & Peter said ‘Say another thing.’ She said ‘Join your hands, open & shut your eyes, say Amen’ & I did all these things & Peter laughed, his voice growing higher. He said ‘Tell her to kiss you.’ She said ‘Kiss me Miss Dawes!’ He said ‘Tell her to kiss me!’ & she said ‘Miss Dawes, kiss Peter!’ Then he said ‘Tell her to take off her gown!’ Miss Isherwood said ‘O, I cannot do that!’ He said ‘
Tell her!
’ & then she told me. Peter said ‘Help her with the buttons’, & when she did she said ‘How fast her heart beats!’

Then Peter said ‘Now you see my medium unclothed. That is how the spirit appears when the body has been taken from it. Put your hand upon her, Miss Isherwood. Is she hot?’ Miss Isherwood said I was very hot. Peter said ‘That is because her spirit is very near the surface of her flesh. You must also become hot.’ She said ‘Indeed I feel very hot.’ He said ‘That is good, but you are not hot enough for development to happen, you must let my medium make you hotter. You must take off your gown now & you must grasp Miss Dawes.’ I felt her do all this, my eyes being still shut tight, because Peter had not said that I might open them. I felt her arms come about me & her face come close to mine. Peter said ‘How do you feel now Miss Isherwood?’ & she answered ‘I am not sure, sir.’ He said ‘Tell me again, what must your prayer be?’ & she said ‘May I be used.’ He said ‘Say it then.’ She said it, & then he said she must say it faster, which she then did. Then he came & put his hand upon her neck & she gave a jog. He said ‘O, but your spirit is still not hot enough! It must grow so hot you will feel it melting, you will feel mine come & take its place!’ He put his arms about her & I felt his hands on me, now we had her hard between us & she began to shake. He said ‘What is the medium’s prayer Miss Isherwood? What is the medium’s prayer?’ & she said it, over & over & over until her voice grew faint, & then Peter whispered to me ‘Open your eyes.’

11 December 1874

I have continued to wake all week to that impossible sound, the sound of the Millbank bell ringing the women to their labour. I have imagined them rising, pulling on their woollen stockings and their linsey gowns. I have imagined them standing at their gates with their knives and trenchers, warming their hands against their mugs of tea, then settling to their work and feeling their hands grow cold. Selina, I think, is among them again, for I have felt the darkness lift a little from that portion of me that has shared her cell. But I know she is wretched; and I have not been to her.

At first it was fear, and shame, that kept me from her. Now it is Mother. She has grown querulous again, as I have grown well. The day after the doctor’s visit she came to sit with me, saw Vigers bring another plate, and shook her head—‘You wouldn’t be ill like this,’ she said, ‘if you were married.’ Yesterday she stood and watched while I was bathed, but would not let me dress. She says I must keep to my room, in a bed-gown. Then Vigers came from the closet carrying the walking-suit I have had made for Millbank: it had been put there and forgotten on the night of the supper, and she meant I suppose to tidy it. I saw it, saw the lime upon it, and remembered Miss Brewer staggering against the wall. Mother looked once at me, then nodded to Vigers. She told her to take the gown and clean it, then put it away. And when I said that she must wait—that I would need the gown for Millbank—Mother said, I surely did not mean to continue with my visits, now that
this
had happened?

Then she said to Vigers, more quietly: ‘Take the gown and go.’ And Vigers looked once at me, then went. I heard her footsteps, fast, upon the staircase.

And so, we had the same dreary argument. ‘I won’t let you go to Millbank,’ said Mother, ‘since going there makes you so ill.’ I said she could not stop me from going if I still chose to. She answered, ‘Your own sense of propriety should prevent you. Your own sense of loyalty, to your mother!’

I said that there was nothing improper about my visits, nor anything disloyal, how could she think it? She said, was it not disloyalty, to shame her as I had at the supper-party before Mr Dance and Miss Palmer? She said she had known it all along, and now Dr Ashe had said as much: the visits to Millbank had made me ill again, just as I had been growing well. I had had too much freedom, my temperament did not suit it. I was too susceptible, visiting the rough women of the gaol made me forget the proper way of things. I had too many blank hours and grew fanciful—
&c
.
&c
.

‘Mr Shillitoe,’ she said at last, ‘has sent a note, enquiring after you.’ It turned out that a letter came the day after my visit. She said she would write an answer to it, saying I was too ill to return.

I had argued and grown weak. Now I saw how it was with her and felt a surge of temper. I thought:
Damn you, you bitch!
—I heard the words hissed very plainly in my head, as by a second, secret mouth. They were so plain I flinched, thinking that Mother must hear them too. But she had only crossed to the door and not looked back; and when I saw how firm her step was, then I knew how I must be. I took my handkerchief and wiped my lips. I called, that she need not write the letter. I would send a note to Mr Shillitoe myself.

I said she was right. I would give Millbank up. I said it, and wouldn’t catch her eye, I suppose she read it as shame, for she came to me again and put her hand upon my cheek. ‘It is only your own health,’ she said, ‘that I am thinking of.’

Her rings were cold upon my face. I remembered then how she had come when they had saved me from the morphia. She had come in her gown of black, and with all her hair unfastened. She had put her head upon my breast until my night-gown was wet with her tears.

Now she handed me paper and a pen, and stood at the foot of the bed and watched me write. I wrote:

Selina Dawes
Selina Dawes
Selina Dawes
Selina Dawes

and, seeing the pen move across the page, she left me. Then I burned the paper in the grate.

Then I rang for Vigers and said there had been a mistake, she must clean my gown but return it to me, later, when my mother had gone out; and Mrs Prior need know nothing of it, nor Ellis.

Then I asked, Had she any letters that must be posted?—and, when she nodded and said she had one, I told her she might run with it now to the letter-box, and that, if anyone asked, she was to say it was for me. She kept her eyes well lowered as she made me her curtsey. That was yesterday. Later Mother came, and put her hand to my face again. This time, however, I pretended sleep, and didn’t look at her.

Now there is the sound of a carriage in the Walk. Mrs Wallace is coming, to take Mother to a concert. Mother will be here in a moment, I think, to give me my medicine before she leaves.

I have been to Millbank, and seen Selina; and now, everything is changed.

They were ready for me there, of course. I think the Porter was keeping watch for me, for he seemed knowing when I went to him; and when I reached the women’s gaol I found a matron waiting, and she took me at once to Miss Haxby’s room, and Mr Shillitoe was there, and Miss Ridley. It was like my first interview—that seems in a different life to me now, though it did not this afternoon. Even so, I felt the change between that time and this, for Miss Haxby didn’t smile at all, and even Mr Shillitoe looked grave.

He said he was very glad to see me there again. He had begun to fear, after his letter to me went unanswered, that the business upon the wards last week might have frightened me from them for ever. I said that I had only been a little unwell, and that the letter had been put aside by a careless servant. I saw Miss Haxby studying the shadows about my cheeks and eyes as I spoke—I think my eyes were dark, from that draught of laudanum. I think I should have been worse, however, without it, for I had not been out of my room, before to-day, for more than a week, and the medicine did lend me a kind of strength.

She said she hoped that I was quite recovered; then, that she was sorry not to have been able to talk to me, after the breaking-out. ‘There was no-one to tell us what happened, apart from poor Miss Brewer. Dawes, I’m afraid, has been very stubborn.’

I heard the scuff of Miss Ridley’s shoes, as she shifted to a more comfortable pose. Mr Shillitoe said nothing. I asked how long it was that they had kept Selina in the darks?—‘Three days,’ they told me. Which is as long as they are allowed to keep a woman there, ‘without a legal order’.

I said, ‘Three days seems very hard.’

For assaulting a matron? Miss Haxby did not think so. She said Miss Brewer was so badly hurt and shocked that she has gone from Millbank—gone from prison service altogether. Mr Shillitoe shook his head. ‘A very bad affair,’ he said.

I nodded, then asked, ‘And how is Dawes?’—‘She is quite,’ said Miss Haxby, ‘as wretched as she should be.’ They had her now picking coir on Mrs Pretty’s ward, she said; and all plans of sending her to Fulham were, of course, forgotten. Here she held my gaze. She said, ‘I imagine you, at least, will be glad of that.’

I had thought of this. I said, very steadily, that I was glad of it. For it was now more than ever that Dawes would need a friend, to counsel her. It was now, much more than before, that she would need a Visitor’s sympathies—

‘
No
,’ said Miss Haxby. ‘No, Miss Prior.’ How could I argue that, she asked, when it was my sympathies that had so worked on Dawes already, they had made her harm a matron and upset her cell? When it was my attentions to her that had led directly to this crisis? She said, ‘You call yourself her friend. Before your visits, she was the quietest prisoner in Millbank! What kind of friendship is it, that can provoke such passions in a girl like that?’

I said, ‘You mean to stop my visits to her.’

‘I mean to keep her calm, for her own sake. She will not be calm, with you about her.’

‘She will not be calm, without me!’

‘Then she will have to learn it.’

I said, ‘Miss Haxby’—but I stumbled over the words, for I had almost said
Mother
! I put a hand to my throat, and looked at Mr Shillitoe. He said, ‘The breaking-out was very serious. Suppose, Miss Prior, she should strike
you
next time?’

‘She won’t strike
me
!’ I said. I said, Couldn’t they see, how terrible her plight was, and how my visits eased it? They must only think of her: an intelligent girl, a gentle girl—the quietest girl, as Miss Haxby had said, in all of Millbank! They must think of what the prison had done to her—how it had made her, not sorry, not good, but only so miserable, so incapable of imagining the other world beyond her cell, that she had struck the matron who had come to tell her she must leave it! ‘Keep her silent, keep her unvisited,’ I said, ‘I think you will drive her mad—or else, you’ll kill her . . .’

I went on like this, and couldn’t have been more eloquent had I been arguing for my own life—I know now, it
was
my life I argued for; and I think the voice I spoke with came from another. I saw Mr Shillitoe grow thoughtful, as he had before. I am not sure what was said between us then. I only know he agreed, at last, that I might see her, and they would watch to see how well she did. ‘Her matron,’ he said, ‘Mrs Jelf, has also spoken in your behalf’—that seemed to influence him.

When I looked at Miss Haxby I found her gaze quite lowered; only after Mr Shillitoe had left us, and I rose to make my way to the wards, did she lift her eyes to me again. I was surprised, then, by her expression, for it was not angry so much as awkward, self-conscious. I thought, She has been shamed before me, and of course feels the sting of it. I said, ‘Let us not quarrel, Miss Haxby,’ and she answered at once that she had no wish to quarrel with me. But I had come into her gaol, knowing nothing about it—Here she hesitated, and glanced quickly at Miss Ridley. She said, ‘I must answer of course to Mr Shillitoe; yet, Mr Shillitoe cannot govern here, because this is a gaol for women. Mr Shillitoe doesn’t understand its tempers and its moods. I once joked with you that I had spent many terms in prison—so I have, Miss Prior, and I know all the twisting ways that prison habits can turn. I think that, like Mr Shillitoe, you do not know, you cannot guess, the nature of the—’ she seemed to grasp after a word, and then repeated, ‘of the
temper
—of the queerness of the temper—of a girl such as Dawes, when she is shut up—’

Still she seemed to grope for words: she might have been one of her own women, seeking a term out of the prison ordinary and being unable to find it. I knew, however, what she meant. But the temper she was talking of, it is gross, it is commonplace, it is what Jane Jarvis has, or Emma White—it is not Selina’s, it is not mine. I said, before she could speak again, that I would keep her cautions in mind. Then she studied me a little longer, then let Miss Ridley take me to the cells.

I felt the drug upon me, as we walked the white prison passages; I felt it more than ever when we reached the wards, for there were breezes there that made the gas-jets flicker, so that all the solid surfaces seemed to shift and bulge and shiver. I was struck, as always, by the grimness of the penal ward, its fetid air and silence; and when Mrs Pretty saw me come she gave a leer, and her face seemed wide and strange to me, as if reflected in a sheet of buckling metal. ‘Well, well, Miss Prior,’ she said—I am sure she said this. ‘And are you back again, to see your own wicked lamb?’ She took me to a door, then put her eye to its inspection slit, very slyly. Then she worked at the lock, and at the bolt of the gate behind it. ‘Go on, ma’am,’ she said at last. ‘She has been meek as anything since her spell in the darks.’