About three months ago--that is to say, toward the end of May of this
year of 1900--the writer whose name appears on the title-page received
as noteworthy a letter, and packet of papers, as it has been his lot to
examine. They came from a very good friend of mine, whose name there is
no reason that I should now conceal--Dr. Arthur Lister Browne, M.A.
(Oxon.), F.R.C.P. It happened that for two years I had been spending
most of my time in France, and as Browne had a Norfolk practice, I had
not seen him during my visits to London. Moreover, though our friendship
was of the most intimate kind, we were both atrocious correspondents: so
that only two notes passed between us during those years.
Till, last May, there reached me the letter--and the packet--to which I
refer. The packet consisted of four note-books, quite crowded
throughout with those giddy shapes of Pitman's shorthand, whose
_ensemble_ so resembles startled swarms hovering in flighty poses on the
wing. They were scribbled in pencil, with little distinction between
thick and thin strokes, few vowels: so that their slow deciphering, I
can assure the reader, has been no holiday. The letter also was
pencilled in shorthand; and this letter, together with the second of the
note-books which I have deciphered (it was marked 'III.'), I now
publish.
[I must say, however, that in some five instances there will occur
sentences rather crutched by my own guess-work; and in two instances the
characters were so impossibly mystical, that I had to abandon the
passage with a head-ache. But all this will be found immaterial to the
general narrative.]
The following is Browne's letter:
'DEAR OLD SHIEL,--I have just been lying thinking of you, and wishing
that you were here to give one a last squeeze of the hand before
I--"_go_": for, by all appearance, "going" I am. Four days ago, I began
to feel a soreness in the throat, and passing by old Johnson's surgery
at Selbridge, went in and asked him to have a look at me. He muttered
something about membranous laryngitis which made me smile, but by the
time I reached home I was hoarse, and not smiling: before night I had
dyspnoca and laryngeal stridor. I at once telegraphed to London for
Morgan, and, between him and Johnson, they have been opening my trachea,
and burning my inside with chromic acid and the galvanic cautery. The
difficulty as to breathing has subsided, and it is wonderful how little
I suffer: but I am much too old a hand not to know what's what: the
bronchi are involved--_too far_ involved--and as a matter of absolute
fact, there isn't any hope. Morgan is still, I believe, fondly dwelling
upon the possibility of adding me to his successful-tracheotomy
statistics, but prognosis was always my strong point, and I say No. The
very small consolation of my death will be the beating of a specialist
in his own line. So we shall see.
'I have been arranging some of my affairs this morning, and remembered
these notebooks. I intended letting you have them months ago, but my
habit of putting things off, and the fact that the lady was alive from
whom I took down the words, prevented me. Now she is dead, and as a
literary man, and a student of life, you should be interested, if you
can manage to read them. You may even find them valuable.
'I am under a little morphia at present, propped up in a nice little
state of languor, and as I am able to write without much effort, I will
tell you in the old Pitman's something about her. Her name was Miss Mary
Wilson; she was about thirty when I met her, forty-five when she died,
and I knew her intimately all those fifteen years. Do you know anything
about the philosophy of the hypnotic trance? Well, that was the relation
between us--hypnotist and subject. She had been under another man before
my time, but no one was ever so successful with her as I. She suffered
from _tic douloureux_ of the fifth nerve. She had had most of her teeth
drawn before I saw her, and an attempt had been made to wrench out the
nerve on the left side by the external scission. But it made no
difference: all the clocks in hell tick-tacked in that poor woman's jaw,
and it was the mercy of Providence that ever she came across _me_. My
organisation was found to have almost complete, and quite easy, control
over hers, and with a few passes I could expel her Legion.
'Well, you never saw anyone so singular in personal appearance as my
friend, Miss Wilson. Medicine-man as I am, I could never behold her
suddenly without a sensation of shock: she suggested so inevitably what
we call "the _other_ world," one detecting about her some odour of the
worm, with the feeling that here was rather ghost than woman. And yet I
can hardly convey to you the why of this, except by dry details as to
the contours of her lofty brow, meagre lips, pointed chin, and ashen
cheeks. She was tall and deplorably emaciated, her whole skeleton,
except the thigh-bones, being quite visible. Her eyes were of the bluish
hue of cigarette smoke, and had in them the strangest, feeble, unearthly
gaze; while at thirty-five her paltry wisp of hair was quite white.
'She was well-to-do, and lived alone in old Wooding Manor-house, five
miles from Ash Thomas. As you know, I was "beginning" in these parts at
the time, and soon took up my residence at the manor. She insisted that
I should devote myself to her alone; and that one patient constituted
the most lucrative practice which I ever had.
'Well, I quickly found that, in the state of trance, Miss Wilson
possessed very remarkable powers: remarkable, I mean, not, of course,
because peculiar to herself in _kind_, but because they were so
constant, reliable, exact, and far-reaching, in degree. The veriest
fledgling in psychical science will now sit and discourse finically to
you about the reporting powers of the mind in its trance state--just as
though it was something quite new! This simple fact, I assure you, which
the Psychical Research Society, only after endless investigation, admits
to be scientific, has been perfectly well known to every old crone since
the Middle Ages, and, I assume, long previously. What an unnecessary air
of discovery! The certainty that someone in trance in Manchester can
tell you what is going on in London, or in Pekin, was not, of course,
left to the acumen of an office in Fleet Street; and the society, in
establishing the fact beyond doubt for the general public, has not gone
one step toward explaining it. They have, in fact, revealed nothing that
many of us did not, with absolute assurance, know before.
'But talking of poor Miss Wilson, I say that her powers were
_remarkable_, because, though not exceptional in _genre_, they were so
special in quantity,--so "constant," and "far-reaching." I believe it to
be a fact that, _in general_, the powers of trance manifest themselves
more particularly with regard to space, as distinct from time: the
spirit roams in the present--it travels over a plain--it does not
_usually_ attract the interest of observers by great ascents, or by
great descents. I fancy that is so. But Miss Wilson's gift was special
to this extent, that she travelled in every direction, and easily in all
but one, north and south, up and down, in the past, the present, and the
future.
This I discovered, not at once, but gradually. She would emit a stream
of sounds in the trance state--I can hardly call it _speech_, so
murmurous, yet guttural, was the utterance, mixed with puffy
breath-sounds at the languid lips. This state was accompanied by an
intense contraction of the pupils, absence of the knee-jerk,
considerable rigor, and a rapt and arrant expression. I got into the
habit of sitting long hours at her bed-side, quite fascinated by her,
trying to catch the import of that opiate and visionary language which
came puffing and fluttering in deliberate monotone from her lips.
Gradually, in the course of months, my ear learned to detect the words;
"the veil was rent" for me also; and I was able to follow somewhat the
course of her musing and wandering spirit.
At the end of six months I heard her one day repeat some words which
were familiar to me. They were these: "Such were the arts by which the
Romans extended their conquests, and attained the palm of victory; and
the concurring testimony of different authors enables us to describe
them with precision..." I was startled: they are part of Gibbon's
"Decline and Fall," which I easily guessed that she had never read.