"Very well," I said, "I'll come at sunrise. But aren't you tired now?
You've been talking and listening all day."
"Yes; I'll go to sleep for a bit. And won't you go for a walk? You
always get disagreeable towards evening if you've had no exercise."
"Where shall I go?" I asked.
He thought a moment, smiling,
"Go to the very top of Monte Gennaro," he said, "to get the biggest
view possible, and stand there and in a loud voice thank God for
everything that there is. Say it for yourself and for me. Say 'Francis
and I give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory.' That's about all that
there is to say, isn't it?"
"I can't think of anything else."
"Off you go, then," he said. "Oh, Lor'! I wish I was coming too. But
I'll go to sleep instead. Good-bye."
* * * * *
I woke very early next morning, before sunrise, with the impression
that somebody had called to me from outside, and putting on a coat, I
went out into the garden to see whether it was Francis's voice that I
heard. But he lay there fast asleep, and I supposed that the impression
that I had been called was but part of a dream. Overhead the stars were
beginning to burn dim in a luminous sky, and in the East the sober
dove-colour of dawn was spreading upwards from the horizon, growing
brighter every moment. Very soon now the sun would rise, and as I had
promised to come out then and read Francis the chapter in St John about
the Resurrection morning, it was not worth while going back to bed
again.
So waiting for him to awake, I took up the Bible, which still lay open
on his table where I had laid it yesterday, with "Emma" and "Alice in
Wonderland," and as I waited I read to myself the verses that I should
presently read aloud to him. Just as I began the first ray of the sun
overtopped the steep hill-side to the East, and shone full on the page.
It did not yet reach the bed where Francis lay asleep.
"And when she had thus said, she turned herself and saw Jesus standing,
and knew not that it was Jesus.
"Jesus saith unto her, 'Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou?'
She, supposing him to be the gardener...."
At that moment I looked up, for I thought I heard footsteps coming
towards me along the terrace, and it crossed my mind that this was
Pasqualino arriving very early to help in the house and garden, though,
as it was Sunday, I had not expected him. But there was no one visible;
only at the entrance to the pergola, which was still in shadow, there
seemed to be a faint column of light. I saw no more than that, and the
impression was only vague and instantaneous, and perhaps the first
sunray on the book had dazzled me....
And then I looked there no more, for a stir of movement from the bed
made me turn, and I saw Francis sitting up with his hands clasped
together in front of him. And whether it was but the glory of the
terrestrial dawn that now shone on his face or the day-spring of the
light invisible, so holy a splendour illuminated it that I could but
look in amazement on him. He was gazing with bright and eager eyes to
the entrance of the pergola, and in that moment I knew that he saw
there Him whom Mary supposed to be the gardener.
Then his clasped hands quivered, and in a voice tremulous with love and
with exultation:
"Rabboni!" he said, and his joyful soul went forth to meet his Lord.
* * * * *
Never have I felt the place so full of his dear and living presence as
in the days that followed. It was so little of him that we laid in the
English cemetery here, no more than the discarded envelope which he
had done with, and the love of our comradeship seemed but to have been
more closely knit. Day after day, and all day long, Francis was with
me in an intensity of actual presence that never lost its security or
its serenity. For a week I remained there, and hourly throughout it
I expected to see him in bodily form or to hear the actual sound of
his voice. But I am sure that no appearance of him, such as we call
a ghost, or any hearing of his voice, could possibly have added to
the reality of his companionship. What those laws are which sometimes
permit us to be conscious with physical eye or ear of someone who
has passed over that stream which daily seems to me more narrow, we
do not certainly know; but never before did I realize how little the
mere satisfaction of vision or audition matters, when the inward sense
of the presence of the dead is so vivid. Nor was it I alone who felt
this, for Seraphina has told me how often in those days she would hear
the stir of a rattled door-handle or steps along the kitchen passage
when she was at her cooking, and look round, expecting to see "her
Signorino," before she recollected that she would see him no more. It
was the same with Pasqualino, and, oddly enough, though the islanders
are full of superstitious terror of the dead, and avoid certain places
as haunted and uncanny, neither she nor he felt the slightest fear at
the thought of seeing Francis, but looked round for him with bright
eager faces which disappointment clouded again.
And for me he was always there: in that hot blink of premature summer
he came down to bathe, and lay beside me on the beach; he swam with
me to the rock of the cache; he sat with me at meals; one afternoon
he came up to the top of Monte Gennaro, to pick the orchises of the
spring and to say his Gloria for himself. There was no break at all
in our companionship; indeed, it but seemed, as I have said, to have
grown intenser and more vivid. And that which, when he lay dying,
seemed quite impossible, namely, that I should come back to the island
and the villa again now that I should not find him here, has become
perfectly natural, since I shall most assuredly find him here. He will
be with me in England, too, and wherever I may go during the period
of my mortal days, I shall find him, not by any act of faith that the
dead die not, nor by any theoretical conviction that his individuality
survives, but from the plain experience that it is so.... And when the
dimness and the dream of life vanish from my awakening vision, I know
also that among the first who will give me welcome will be Francis, and
his grey merry eyes will greet me....
* * * * *
I arrived back to a cold and snowy England towards the end of the
month, and as soon as I got home unlocked the drawer in which I had
placed on a certain day last January the two "posthumous packets," as
Francis called them, which we had severally prepared. As the reader
may remember, we had packed them to serve as a test concerning the
possibility of spirit-communication, and in mine I had placed a "J"
nib, a five-franc piece and some carbolic tooth-powder, and had written
directions on it that it was to be sent to him to deal with in the
event of my dying first. While I was doing this upstairs, he was making
ready his packet in the sitting-room, and on my return gave it me
wrapped up and bound with string and sealed. There in its drawer it had
lain till to-day, and the time was now come when the test could be put.
The box in which he had disposed a certain object or objects unknown
to me was some six inches long, and about the same across.
* * * * *
I at once went to a friend who is much immersed in spiritualistic
affairs, and asked him to arrange a sitting for me with some medium
whom he believed to have power, and believed not to be fraudulent. (It
did not really matter whether the medium was fraudulent or not, since
no amount of trickery could discover the contents of that package.) I
asked that my name should not be given, but that a sitting should be
arranged on some appointed day. I begged him, finally, to come with
me, so that between us we might get a fairly complete account of what
occurred, and to be a witness. I may add that I was not at all sanguine
as to anything occurring.
* * * * *
Accordingly a few days afterwards Jack Barrett arrived, and together we
drove off to the medium's house. The packet that Francis had made still
lay in the locked drawer of a black oak table, and I said no word to my
friend either about Francis, whom he had known slightly, or about the
packet.
The procedure was of the kind common to trance-mediums. We sat in a
small front-room of a rather dingy house in a dull respectable street.
The room was partially darkened by the drawing of curtains over the
window, but there was a bright fire burning on the hearth, and a lamp
turned low was placed for my friend and me on a small round table, so
that we could see sufficiently to write without difficulty. The medium
herself was a pleasant-looking woman, about thirty years of age, with a
slight cockney accent and a quiet level voice. Before the sitting began
she made us an explanation of her powers, which I will give for what
it is worth. Since she was a child she had often gone off into queer
trances, which she could induce at will. When she awoke from them, she
never knew more than that she had been having very vivid dreams, and
talking to unknown people, but all recollection of what had passed
instantly faded from her memory. Subsequently she married and had one
child, a girl, who died at the age of ten. But, going into a trance a
day or so after her death, the mother was aware when she awoke that
she had been talking to her child. Thereafter she cultivated her gift,
getting her husband or a friend to sit with her when she was in trance,
and listen to and take down what she said. When in trance she spoke
in Daisy's voice, not in her own, and the dead child told her about
its present state of existence. Daisy described other dead people whom
she came across, and could transmit messages from them. Such was Mrs.
Masters's account of her gift.
She asked me only one question, and that was whether I wanted to get
into communication with a dead friend. I told her that this was so, and
then quite suddenly found myself harbouring a strong distaste for all
these proceedings. I should certainly have gone away and had no sitting
at all, if I had not recollected my promise to Francis to go through
with it. It seemed to me like taking some sacred thing into a place of
ill-fame....
All that follows is a compilation from our joint notes, and I
have inserted nothing which did not appear in the notes or in the
recollection of both of us.
The medium sat close to me in a high chair opposite the fire, so that
her face was clearly visible. Her eyes were closed and she had her
hands on her lap. For about five minutes she remained thus, and then
her breathing began sensibly to quicken; she gasped and panted, and her
hands writhed and wrestled with each other. That passed, and she sat
quite quiet again.
Presently she began to whisper to herself, and though I strained my
ears to listen, I could catch no words. Very soon her voice grew
louder, but it was a perfectly different voice from that in which she
had spoken to us before.... It was a high childish treble, with a
little lisp in it. The first coherent words were these:
"Yes, I'm here. Daisy's here. What shall I tell you about?"
"Ask her," said Barrett to me.
"I want to know if you can tell me anything about a friend of mine," I
said.
"Yes, here he comes," she said.
She then told us that he--whoever it was--was in the room, and was
looking into my face, and was rather puzzled because I did not appear
to see him. He put his hand on my shoulder and was talking to me
and smiling, and again seemed puzzled that I could not hear him. She
proceeded to describe him at length with very great accuracy, and
presently, in answer to a question, spelled out the whole of his name
quite correctly. She told us that he had not long passed over; he had
been on this side but a few weeks before, that he had died not in
England, and not fighting, but he was connected with fighting. She said
he was talking about an island in the sea, and about bathing, and about
a garden where he had died; did I not recollect all those things?
Now so far all that had been told us could easily be arrived at
and accounted for by mind-reading. All those things were perfectly
well known to me, and contributed no shred of proof with regard to
spirit-communication. For nearly an hour the medium went on in this
manner, telling me nothing that I did not know already, and before the
hour was up I had begun to weary of the performance. As a whole it was
an extraordinary good demonstration of thought-reading, but nothing
more at all. Indeed, I had ceased to take notes altogether, though
Barrett's busy pencil went writing on, when quite suddenly I took my
own up again, and attended as intently as I possibly could.
Francis told her, she said, that there was a test, and the test was in
a box, and the box was in a big black drawer. "It's a test, he says
it's a test," she repeated several times.
Then she stopped, and I could hear her whispering again.
"But it's silly, it's nonsense," she said. "It doesn't mean anything."
She laughed, and spoke again out loud.
"He says, 'Bow, wow, wow! Puss,'" she said. "He says, 'Gott strafe the
V.C.' He says it's a parrot. He says it's a grey feather of a parrot
and something else besides. Something about burning, he says. He says
it's a cinder. It's a cinder and a parrot's feather. That's what he
says is the test."
It was not long after this that the coherent speaking ceased and
whisperings began again. Presently the medium said, still in the
child's voice, that the power was getting less. Then the voice stopped
altogether, and soon afterwards I saw her hands twisting and wrestling
together. She stretched out her arms with the air of a tired woman, and
rubbed her eyes, and came out of trance.
My friend and I went home, and before we opened the box we compared
and collated our notes. Then I unlocked the drawer, took out Francis's
packet and broke the seals and cut the string. The cardboard box
contained a piece of paper folded round one of Matilda's grey feathers
and a fragment of burned coal.
* * * * *
Now I see no possible way of accounting for this unless we accept Mrs.
Masters's explanation, and believe that in some mysterious manner
Francis, his living self, was able to tell her while in this trance
what were the contents of the packet he had sealed up. No possible
theory of thought-transference between her and anyone living in the
conditions of this earthly plane will fit the case, for the simple
reason that no one living here and now has ever had the smallest
knowledge of what the packet contained. That information had never,
until the moment that Mrs. Masters communicated it to me and my friend,
been known to more than one person. Francis had made the packet,
had sealed it up, and in that locked drawer it had remained till we
opened it after this sitting. I can conceive of no possible channel
of communication except one, namely, that Francis himself spoke in
some mysterious way to the medium's mind. My reason and my power of
conjecture are utterly unable to think of any other explanation.
So accepting that (for a certain reason to be touched on later, I
rather shrink from accepting it), it follows as possible that all the
earlier part of the sitting, which can certainly be accounted for by
the established phenomenon of thought-transference, may not have been
due to thought-transference at all, but to direct communication also
with Francis. And yet while the medium was speaking, telling me that he
was looking into my face, and wondering that I could not see him, I,
who have so continually with me the sense of his personal presence, had
no such feeling. That Francis whom I knew, the same one who is now so
constantly with me, did not seem to be there at all ...
Now I reject altogether the theory of the Roman Catholic Church,
namely, that when we try to communicate with the dead and apparently
succeed in so doing, we are not really brought into connection with
them, but into connection with some evil spirit who impersonates them.
I cannot discover or invent the smallest grounds for believing that;
it seems to me more a subject for some gruesome magazine tale than
a spiritual truth. But what does seem possible is this, that we are
brought into connection not with the soul of the departed, his real
essential personality, the thing we loved, but with a piece of his mere
mechanical intelligence. Otherwise it is hard to see why those who
have passed over rarely, if ever, tell us, except in the vaguest and
most unconvincing manner, about the conditions under which they now
exist. They speak of being happy, of being busy, of waiting for us, but
they tell us nothing that the medium could not easily have invented
herself. No _real_ news comes, nothing that can enable us to picture in
the faintest degree what their life over there is like. Possibly the
conditions are incommunicable; they may find it as hard to convey them
as it would be to convey the sense and the effect of colour to a blind
man. Material and temporal terms must naturally have ceased to bear
any meaning to them, since they have passed out of this infinitesimal
sphere of space and time into the timeless and immeasurable day, the
sun of which for ever stands at the height of an imperishable noon. If
they could tell us of that, perhaps we should not understand.
The upshot, then, is this: I believe that when the medium, sitting
opposite the fire in that dim room, said what was in the sealed packet,
the discarnate mind of Francis told her what was there. I believe
the door between the two worlds not to be locked and barred; certain
people--such as we call mediums--have the power of turning the handle
and for a little setting this door ajar. But what do we get when the
door is set ajar? Nothing that is significant, nothing that brings us
closer to those on the other side. If I had not already believed in
the permanence and survival of individual life, I think it more than
possible that the accurate and unerring statement of what was in the
sealed packet might have convinced me of it. But it brought me no
nearer Francis.
* * * * *
A great event has happened, for America has joined the cause of the
Allies. That was long delayed, but there is now no possibility of
doubting the wisdom of such delay, if from it sprang the tremendous
enthusiasm which shows how solid is the nation's support. What this
event means to the cause of the Allies cannot be over-estimated, for
already it is clear that Russia is as unstable as a quicksand, and none
knows what will be swallowed up next in those shifting, unfathomable
depths. There is something stirring there below, and the first cries of
liberty and unity which hailed the revolution have given place to queer
mutterings, unconjecturable sounds....
April is nearly over, and spring, which came so late here in England
that long after Easter the land lay white under unseasonable snows,
has suddenly burst out into full choir of flower and bird-song. The
blossoms that should have decked last month, the daffodils that should
have "taken the winds of March with beauty," have delayed their golden
epiphany till now, and it is as if their extra month of sleep had given
them a vigour and a beauty that spring never saw before. The April
flowers are here too, and the flowers of May have precociously joined
them, and never was there such bustle among the birds, such hurried
transport of nest-building material. But through all the din of the
forest-murmurs sounds the thud of war.
How still it was on that Easter morning....