old friends—whom he had often led around street corners and relieved of
half-crowns—did not improve with his worldly prospects. And Ulick stood
and meditated while the double torrent of the London traffic went
roaring east and west; and as a charitable old lady was about to press a
penny into his hand, Tom Glauber, the dandy president of the Old
Stage-Doorers, came along, and the men greeted cordially. Von Glauber
seemed interested in something that Ulick had to tell, and the two went
off very confidentially, arm-in-arm.
“It would be a sensation if, for once, the O.S.D.’s and the N.S.D.’s
acted in unison,” agreed Tom Glauber.
And on the night when _Pride of Race_ was produced at the Sceptre, both
clubs attended in full strength, every man with a crook-handled
walking-stick, and a parcel buttoned under his coat. The piece had just
concluded a run of three hundred nights, and every reader is acquainted
with the plot, which is of modern Italy and Rome of to-day, to quote the
programme. We all know how the young Marchese di Monte Polverino, in
whose veins ran the bluest blood of the Latin race, secretly wedded
Aquella Guazetta, the tripe-seller, who had won his lofty affections in
the guise of a Bulgarian Princess, and how the dread secret of Aquella’s
origin was revealed at the very moment when the loftiest and most
exclusive of the Roman nobility were about to welcome the newly made
Marchesa into their ranks.... Aquella, her brain turned by the acuteness
of her mental suffering, greets the revelation with a peal of frenzied
laughter. Now this laughter was a continual obstacle, during rehearsals,
in the path of Mrs. Gudrun. Said she:
“The peculiarity and originality of my genius, as Cluffer says, consists
in the fact that I can’t do the things that might be expected of me—not
for filberts; while I _can_ do the things that mightn’t. If I can’t
really hit off that laugh, I’ll have a woman in the wings to do it for
me. But my impression is that I shall be all right at night. Don’t
forget, Gormleigh, that you’re not to tub the chandelier altogether; I
hate to play to a dark house.”
“Py vich innovation,” said Gormleigh afterwards, “de gonsbirators vas
enapled to garry out their blan. Himmel!” he cried, dabbing his
overflowing eyes with an antediluvian silk pocket-handkerchief, “shall I
effer forget—no, not vile I lif—de face of dot jung man!”
For at the moment when Monte Polverino’s scorn of the lovely plebeian he
has wedded is expressed in words—when Aquella, pierced to the heart by
being called “a low-born vulgarian” and a “peasant huckster,” is about
to utter her famous yell of frenzied laughter, the Old Stage-Doorers and
the New Stage-Doorers hung out their boots. A _chevaux de frise_ of
walking-sticks, from each of which depended a pair of these
indispensable articles of attire, graced the gallery, distinguished the
upper circle, and appeared upon the level of the pit. Stricken to the
soul, faltering and ghastly under his paint, and shaking in the most
sumptuous pair of patent leathers, white kid topped, in which he had yet
appeared, De Boo blankly contemplated the horrid spectacle; while Mrs.
Gudrun, to whose somewhat latent sense of humor the spectacle appealed,
burst into peal upon peal of the wildest laughter ever heard beyond the
walls of an establishment for the care of the mentally afflicted. “The
grandeur, poignancy, and reality of the acting,” wrote Cluffer, of the
_Morning Whooper_, “was acknowledged by a crowded house with a deafening
and unanimous outburst of applause.”
“Both Mrs. Gudrun and Mr. De Boo attained the highest level of dramatic
expression,” pronounced Mullekens, of the _Daily Tomahawk_. “It was the
touch of Nature which attunes the universe to one throb of universal
relationship.”
The play was a success. Even the “Boo’s!” of both the clubs, united for
the nonce in disapprobation, could not rob Leo of his laurels. He wears
them to-day, for _Pride of Race_ has enjoyed a tremendous run.
“We’ve made the beggar’s reputation instead of sending him back to the
boot-shop and that poor girl,” said Ulick Snowle to Tom Glauber next
day.
“Possibly,” said Tom Glauber, sniffing at his inseparable carnation.
“But it’s all the better for the girl, I imagine, in the long run.”
A SPIRIT ELOPEMENT
When I exchanged my maiden name for better or worse, and dearest
Vavasour and I, at the conclusion of the speeches—I was married in a
traveling-dress of Bluefern’s—descended the steps of mamma’s house in
Ebury Street—the Belgravian, _not_ the Pimlican end—and, amid a
hurricane of farewells and a hailstorm of pink and yellow and white
_confetti_, stepped into the brougham that was to convey us to a
Waterloo Station, _en route_ for Southampton—our honeymoon was to be
spent in Guernsey—we were perfectly well satisfied with ourselves and
each other. This state of mind is not uncommon at the outset of wedded
life. You may have heard the horrid story of the newly-wedded cannibal
chief, who remarked that he had never yet known a young bride to
disagree with her husband in the early stages of the honeymoon. I
believe if dearest Vavasour had seriously proposed to chop me into
_cotêlettes_ and eat me, with or without sauce, I should have taken it
for granted that the powers that be had destined me to the high end of
supplying one of the noblest of created beings with an _entrée_ dish.
We were idiotically blissful for two or three days. It was flowery
April, and Guernsey was looking her loveliest. No horrid hotel or
boarding-house sheltered our lawful endearments. Some old friends of
papa’s had lent us an ancient mansion standing in a wild garden, now one
pink riot of almond-blossom, screened behind lofty walls of lichened red
brick and weather-worn, wrought-iron gates, painted yellow-white like
all the other iron and wood work about the house.
“Mon Désir” the place was called, and the fragrance of potpourri yet
hung about the old paneled salons. Vavasour wrote a sonnet—I have
omitted to speak before of my husband’s poetic gifts—all about the
breath of new Passion stirring the fragrant dust of dead old Love, and
the kisses of lips long moldered that mingled with ours. It was a lovely
sonnet, but crawly, as the poetical compositions of the Modern School
are apt to be. And Vavasour was an enthusiastic convert to, and follower
of, the Modern School. He had often told me that, had not his father
heartlessly thrown him into his brewery business at the outset of his
career—Sim’s Mild and Bitter Ales being the foundation upon which the
family fortunes were originally reared—he, Vavasour, would have been,
ere the time of speaking, known to Fame, not only as a Minor Poet, but a
Minor Decadent Poet—which trisyllabic addition, I believe, makes as
advantageous a difference as the word “native” when attached to an
oyster, or the guarantee “new laid” when employed with reference to an
egg.
Dear Vavasour’s temperament and tastes having a decided bias towards the
gloomy and mystic, he had, before his great discovery of his latent
poetical gifts, and in the intervals of freedom from the brain-carking
and soul-stultifying cares of business, made several excursions into the
regions of the Unknown. He had had some sort of intercourse with the
Swedenborgians, and had mingled with the Muggletonians; he had coquetted
with the Christian Scientists, and had been, until Theosophic Buddhism
opened a wider field to his researches, an enthusiastic Spiritualist.
But our engagement somewhat cooled his passion for psychic research, and
when questioned by me with regard to table-rappings, manifestations, and
materializations, I could not but be conscious of a reticence in his
manner of responding to my innocent desire for information. The
reflection that he probably, like Canning’s knife-grinder, had no story
to tell, soon induced me to abandon the subject. I myself am somewhat
reserved at this day in my method of dealing with the subject of spooks.
But my silence does not proceed from ignorance.
Knowledge came to me after this fashion. Though the April sun shone
bright and warm upon Guernsey, the island nights were chill. Waking by
dear Vavasour’s side—the novelty of this experience has since been
blunted by the usage of years—somewhere between one and two o’clock
towards break of the fourth day following our marriage, it occurred to
me that a faint cold draft, with a suggestion of dampness about it, was
blowing against my right cheek. One of the windows upon that side—our
room possessed a rather unbecoming cross-light—had probably been left
open. Dear Vavasour, who occupied the right side of our couch, would
wake with toothache in the morning, or, perhaps, with mumps! Shuddering,
as much at the latter idea as with cold, I opened my eyes, and sat up in
bed with a definite intention of getting out of it and shutting the
offending casement. Then I saw Katie for the first time.
She was sitting on the right side of the bed, close to dear Vavasour’s
pillow; in fact, almost hanging over it. From the first moment I knew
that which I looked upon to be no creature of flesh and blood, but the
mere apparition of a woman. It was not only that her face, which struck
me as both pert and plain; her hands; her hair, which she wore dressed
in an old-fashioned ringletty mode—in fact, her whole personality was
faintly luminous, and surrounded by a halo of bluish phosphorescent
light. It was not only that she was transparent, so that I saw the
pattern of the old-fashioned, striped, dimity bed-curtain, in the
shelter of which she sat, quite plainly through her. The consciousness
was further conveyed to me by a voice—or the toneless, flat, faded
impression of a voice—speaking faintly and clearly, not at my outer, but
at my inner ear.
“Lie down again, and don’t fuss. It’s only Katie!” she said.
“Only Katie!” I liked that!
“I dare say you don’t,” she said tartly, replying as she had spoken, and
I wondered that a ghost should exhibit such want of breeding. “But you
have got to put up with me!”
“How dare you intrude here—and at such an hour!” I exclaimed mentally,
for there was no need to wake dear Vavasour by talking aloud when my
thoughts were read at sight by the ghostly creature who sat so
familiarly beside him.
“I knew your husband before you did,” responded Katie, with a faint
phosphorescent sneer. “We became acquainted at a _séance_ in North-West
London soon after his conversion to Spiritualism, and have seen a great
deal of each other from time to time.” She tossed her shadowy curls with
a possessive air that annoyed me horribly. “He was constantly
materializing me in order to ask questions about Shakespeare. It is a
standing joke in our Spirit world that, from the best educated spook in
our society down to the most illiterate astral that ever knocked out
‘rapport’ with one ‘p,’ we are all expected to know whether Shakespeare
wrote his own plays, or whether they were done by another person of the
same name.”
“And which way was it?” I asked, yielding to a momentary twinge of
curiosity.
Katie laughed mockingly. “There you go!” she said, with silent contempt.
“I wish _you_ would!” I snapped back mentally. “It seems to me that you
manifest a great lack of refinement in coming here!”
“I cannot go until Vavasour has finished,” said Katie pertly. “Don’t you
see that he has materialized me by dreaming about me? And as there
exists _at present_”—she placed an annoying stress upon the last two
words—“a strong sympathy between you, so it comes about that I, as your
husband’s spiritual affinity, am visible to your waking perceptions. All
the rest of the time I am hovering about you, though unseen.”
“I call it detestable!” I retorted indignantly. Then I gripped my
sleeping husband by the shoulder. “Wake up! wake up!” I cried aloud,
wrath lending power to my grasp and a penetrative quality to my voice.
“Wake up and leave off dreaming! I cannot and will not endure the
presence of this creature another moment!”
“_Whaa_——” muttered my husband, with the almost inebriate incoherency of
slumber, “_whasamaramydarling?_”
“Stop dreaming about that creature,” I cried, “or I shall go home to
Mamma!”
“Creature?” my husband echoed, and as he sat up I had the satisfaction
of seeing Katie’s misty, luminous form fade slowly into nothingness.
“You know who I mean!” I sobbed. “Katie—your spiritual affinity, as she
calls herself!”
“You don’t mean,” shouted Vavasour, now thoroughly roused, “that you
have seen _her_?”
“I do mean it,” I mourned. “Oh, if I had only known of your having an
entanglement with any creature of the kind, I would never have married
you—never!”
“Hang her!” burst out Vavasour. Then he controlled himself, and said
soothingly: “After all, dearest, there is nothing to be jealous of——”
“I jealous! And of that——” I was beginning, but Vavasour went on:
“After all, she is only a disembodied astral entity with whom I became
acquainted—through my fifth principle, which is usually well
developed—in the days when I moved in Spiritualistic society. She was,
when living—for she died long before I was born—a young lady of very
good family. I believe her father was a clergyman ... and I will not
deny that I encouraged her visits.”
“Discourage them from this day!” I said firmly. “Neither think of her
nor dream of her again, or I will have a separation.”
“I will keep her, as much as possible, out of my waking thoughts,” said
poor Vavasour, trying to soothe me; “but a man cannot control his
dreams, and she pervades mine in a manner which, even before our
engagement, my pet, I began to find annoying. However, if she really is,
as she has told me, a lady by birth and breeding, she will
understand”—he raised his voice as though she were there and he intended
her to hear—“that I am now a married man, and from this moment desire to
have no further communication with her. Any suitable provision it is in
my power to make——”
He ceased, probably feeling the difficulty he would have in explaining
the matter to his lawyers; and it seemed to me that a faint mocking
sniggle, or rather the auricular impression of it, echoed his words.
Then, after some more desultory conversation, we fell soundly asleep. An
hour may have passed when the same chilly sensation as of a damp draft
blowing across the bed roused me. I rubbed my cheek and opened my eyes.
They met the pale, impertinent smile of the hateful Katie, who was
installed in her old post beside Vavasour’s end of the bolster.
“You see,” she said, in the same soundless way, and with a knowing
little nod of triumph, “it is no use. He is dreaming of me again!”
“Wake up!” I screamed, snatching the pillow from under my husband’s head
and madly hurling it at the shameless intruder. This time Vavasour was
almost snappish at being disturbed. Daylight surprised us in the middle
of our first connubial quarrel. The following night brought a repetition
of the whole thing, and so on, _da capo_, until it became plain to us,
to our mutual disgust, that the more Vavasour strove to banish Katie
from his dreams, the more persistently she cropped up in them. She was
the most ill-bred and obstinate of astrals—Vavasour and I the most
miserable of newly-married people. A dozen times in a night I would be
roused by that cold draft upon my cheek, would open my eyes and see that
pale, phosphorescent, outline perched by Vavasour’s pillow—nine times
out of the dozen would be driven to frenzy by the possessive air and
cynical smile of the spook. And although Vavasour’s former regard for
her was now converted into hatred, he found the thought of her
continually invading his waking mind at the most unwelcome seasons. She
had begun to appear to both of us _by day as well as by night_ when our
poisoned honeymoon came to an end, and we returned to town to occupy the
house which Vavasour had taken and furnished in Sloane Street. I need
only mention that Katie accompanied us.
Insufficient sleep and mental worry had by this time thoroughly soured
my temper no less than Vavasour’s. When I charged him with secretly
encouraging the presence I had learned to hate, he rudely told me to
think as I liked! He implored my pardon for this brutality afterwards
upon his knees, and with the passage of time I learned to endure the
presence of his attendant shade with patience. When she nocturnally
hovered by the side of my sleeping spouse, or in constituence no less
filmy than a whiff of cigarette-smoke, appeared at his elbow in the face
of day, I saw her plainly, and at these moments she would favor me with
a significant contraction of the eyelid, which was, to say the least of
it, unbecoming in a spirit who had been a clergyman’s daughter. After
one of these experiences it was that the idea which I afterwards carried
into execution occurred to me.
I began by taking in a few numbers of a psychological publication
entitled _The Spirit-Lamp_. Then I formed the acquaintance of Madame
Blavant, the renowned Professoress of Spiritualism and Theosophy.
Everybody has heard of Madame, many people have read her works, some
have heard her lecture. I had heard her lecture. She was a lady with a
strong determined voice and strong determined features. She wore her
plentiful gray hair piled in sibylline coils on the top of her head,
and—when she lectured—appeared in a white Oriental silk robe that fell
around her tall gaunt figure in imposing folds. This robe was replaced
by one of black satin when she held her _séances_. At other times, in
the seclusion of her study, she was draped in an ample gown of Indian
chintz innocent of cut, but yet imposing. She smiled upon my new-born
desire for psychic instruction, and when I had subscribed for a course
of ten private _séances_ at so many guineas a piece she smiled more.
Madame lived in a furtive, retiring house, situated behind high walls in
Endor’s Grove, N.W. A long glass tunnel led from the garden gate to the
street door, for the convenience of Mahatmas and other persons who
preferred privacy. I was one of those persons, for not for spirit worlds
would I have had Vavasour know of my repeated visits to Endor’s Grove.
Before these were over I had grown quite indifferent to supernatural
manifestations, banjos and accordions that were thrummed by invisible
performers, blood-red writing on mediums’ wrists, mysterious characters
in slate-pencil, Planchette, and the Table Alphabet. And I had made and
improved upon acquaintance with Simon.
Simon was a spirit who found me attractive. He tried in his way to make
himself agreeable, and, with my secret motive in view—let me admit
without a blush—I encouraged him. When I knew I had him thoroughly in
hand, I attended no more _séances_ at Endor’s Grove. My purpose was
accomplished upon a certain night, when, feeling my shoulder violently
shaken, I opened the eyes which had been closed in simulated slumber to
meet the indignant glare of my husband. I glanced over his shoulder.
Katie did not occupy her usual place. I turned my glance towards the
armchair which stood at my side of the bed. It was not vacant. As I
guessed, it was occupied by Simon. There he sat, the luminously
transparent appearance of a weak-chinned, mild-looking young clergyman,
dressed in the obsolete costume of eighty years previously. He gave me a
bow in which respect mingled with some degree of complacency, and
glanced at Vavasour.
“I have been explaining matters to your husband,” he said, in that
soundless spirit-voice with which Katie had first made me acquainted.
“He understands that I am a clergyman and a reputable spirit, drawn into
your life-orbit by the irresistible attraction which your mediumistic
organization exercises over my——”
“There, you hear what he says!” I interrupted, nodding confirmatively at
Vavasour. “Do let me go to sleep!”
“What, with that intrusive beast sitting beside you?” shouted Vavasour
indignantly. “Never!”
“Think how many months I have put up with the presence of Katie!” said
I. “After all, it’s only tit for tat!” And the ghost of a twinkle in
Simon’s pale eye seemed to convey that he enjoyed the retort.
Vavasour grunted sulkily, and resumed his recumbent position. But
several times that night he awakened me with renewed objurgations of
Simon, who with unflinching resolution maintained his post. Later on I
started from sleep to find Katie’s usual seat occupied. She looked less
pert and confident than usual, I thought, and rather humbled and fagged,
as though she had had some trouble in squeezing her way into Vavasour’s
sleeping thoughts. By day, after that night, she seldom appeared. My
husband’s brain was too much occupied with Simon, who assiduously
haunted me. And it was now my turn to twit Vavasour with unreasonable
jealousy. Yet though I gloried in the success of my stratagem, the
continual presence of that couple of spooks was an unremitting strain
upon my nerves.
But at length an extraordinary conviction dawned on my mind, and became
stronger with each successive night. Between Simon and Katie an
acquaintance had sprung up. I would awaken, or Vavasour would arouse, to
find them gazing across the barrier of the bolster which divided them
with their pale negatives of eyes, and chatting in still, spirit voices.
Once I started from sleep to find myself enveloped in a kind of
mosquito-tent of chilly, filmy vapor, and the conviction rushed upon me
that He and She had leaned across our couch and exchanged an intangible
embrace. Katie was the leading spirit in this, I feel convinced—there
was no effrontery about Simon. Upon the next night I, waking, overheard
a fragment of conversation between them which plainly revealed how
matters stood.
“We should never have met upon the same plane,” remarked Simon silently,
“but for the mediumistic intervention of these people. Of the man”—he
glanced slightingly towards Vavasour—“I cannot truthfully say I think
much. The lady”—he bowed in my direction—“is everything that a lady
should be!”
“You are infatuated with her, it is plain!” snapped Katie, “and the
sooner you are removed from her sphere of influence the better.”
“Her power with me is weakening,” said Simon, “as Vavasour’s is with
you. Our outlines are no longer so clear as they used to be, which
proves that our astral individualities are less strongly impressed upon
the brains of our earthly sponsors than they were. We are still
materialized; but how long this will continue——” He sighed and shrugged
his shoulders.
“Don’t let us wait for a formal dismissal, then,” said Katie boldly.
“Let us throw up our respective situations.”
“I remember enough of the Marriage Service to make our union, if not
regular, at least respectable,” said Simon.
“And I know quite a fashionable place on the Outside Edge of Things,
where we could settle down,” said Katie, “and live practically on
nothing.”
I blinked at that moment. When I saw the room again clearly, the chairs
beside our respective pillows were empty.
Years have passed, and neither Vavasour nor myself has ever had a
glimpse of the spirits whom we were the means of introducing to one
another. We are quite content to know ourselves deprived for ever of
their company. Yet sometimes, when I look at our three babies, I wonder
whether that establishment of Simon’s and Katie’s on the Outside Edge of
Things includes a nursery.
THE WIDOW’S MITE
People bestowed that nickname upon little Lord Garlingham years ago,
when he was the daintiest of human playthings ever adored by a young
mother. Shutting my eyes, I can recall him, all golden curls and frills,
sitting on the front seat of the victoria with Toto, the Maltese.
Japanese pugs had not then come into fashion, nor the ubiquitous
automobile. Gar is the Widow’s Mite still, but for other reasons. He was
a charming, irresolute, impulsive child, who invariably meant
“macaroons” when he said “sponge cake.” It recurs to me that he was
passionately fond of dolls, not nigger Sambo dolls, or sailor dolls, or
Punchinelli with curved caps and bells, or policemen with large feet so
cunningly weighted that it is next door to impossible to knock them
over, but frilled and furbelowed dollies of the gentler sex. There was a
blue princess in tulle with a glass chandelier-drop tiara, and a dancing
girl in pink, and a stout, shapeless, rag lady, whose features were
painted on the calico ball that represented her head, and whose hair
resembled the fringe of a black woollen shawl. Holding her by one leg,
Gar would sink to sleep upon his lace-trimmed pillows in a halo of
shining curls, and Lady Garlingham’s last new friend or latest new
adorer would be brought up to the night nursery for an after-dinner peep
at “my precious in his cot.”