THE LAST MIRACLE
By M. P. SHIEL
_Author of "The Yellow Danger," "The Lord of the Sea," "The Evil
that Men do," "The Yellow Wave," etc._
LONDON
T. WERNER LAURIE
CLIFFORD'S INN
1906
"My domain how lordly large, sublime!
Time's my domain; my seedfield's Time."
THE LAST MIRACLE
Towards the end of May 1900 the writer received as noteworthy a letter
and packet of papers as it has been his lot to examine. They came from a
good friend of mine, a Dr A. Lister Browne, M.A. Oxon., F.R.C.P., whom,
as it happened that for some years I had been living mostly in France,
and Browne being in Norfolk, I had not seen during my visits to London.
Moreover, as we were both bad correspondents, only three notes had
passed between us in the course of those years.
But in the May of 1900 there reached me the letter--and the packet--to
which I refer, the packet consisting of four note-books full of
shorthand, the letter also pencilled in shorthand, and this letter,
together with the note-book marked "I.," I now publish.
[The note-book marked "II." has already appeared under the title of "The
Lord of the Sea," and that marked "III." under the title of "The Purple
Cloud," each in three languages; while that marked "IV." has been judged
unsuitable to publication.]
The following is Browne's letter:--
"DEAR OLD MAN,--I have been thinking of you, wishing that you were here
to give me a last squeeze of the hand before I--_go_. Four days ago I
felt a soreness in the throat, so in passing by old Johnson's surgery at
Selbridge, I 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 stridor. I at
once telegraphed to London for Horsford, and he and Johnson have been
opening my inside and burning it with the cautery, so I am breathing
easier now, and it is wonderful how little I suffer; but I am too old a
hand not to know what's what: the bronchi are involved--_too far_, and,
as a matter of fact, there isn't any hope. Horsford is still fondly
hoping to add me to his successful-tracheotomy statistics; but I have
bet him not, and the consolation of my death will be the beating of a
specialist in his own line.
"I have been arranging some of my affairs, and remembered these
note-books which I intended letting you have long ago; but you know my
habit of putting things off, and, moreover, the lady was alive from
whose mouth I took down the words. She is now dead, and, as a man of
books, you should be interested, if you can manage to read them.
"I am under a little morphia at present, propped up in a nice little
state of languor, so I will give 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 all those fifteen
years. Do you know anything of the philosophy of the hypnotic trance?
That was the relation between us--hypnotist and subject. She suffered
from _tic_ of the fifth nerve, had had all her teeth drawn before I knew
her, and an attempt had been made to wrench out the nerve by the
external scission. But it made no difference: all the clocks in
purgatory tick-tacked in that poor woman's jaw, and it was a mercy of
Providence that ever she came across me.
"Well, you never knew anyone so weird in appearance as my friend, Miss
Wilson. Medicineman as I am, I could never see her without a shock, she
so suggested what we call 'the other world.' Her brow was lofty, her
lips thin, her complexion ashen, and she was execrably emaciated; her
eyes were of the hue of mist; at forty her wisp of hair was withered to
white.
"She lived almost alone in old Marsham manor-house, five miles from Ash
Thomas, and I, just beginning in these parts at the time, soon took up
my residence at the manor, she insisting that I should give up myself to
her.
"Well, I quickly found that in the state of trance Miss Wilson possessed
very queer powers--queer, I mean, not because peculiar to herself in
kind, but because so far-reaching in degree. Most people are now talking
with an air of discovery about the reporting powers of the mind in its
trance state, as though the fact had not been fully known to every old
crone since the Middle Ages; but the certainty that someone in a trance
in Manchester may tell what is going on in Glasgow was not, of course,
left to the discovery of an office in Fleet Street, and the psychical
people in establishing the fact for the public have not gone one step
towards explaining it.
"But, speaking of poor Miss Wilson, I say that her powers were queer
because so special in quantity. I believe it to be a fact that, in
general, the powers of trance manifest themselves with respect to space,
as distinct from time: the spirit roams in _the present_, travels over a
plain, doesn't usually astonish one by huge ascents or descents. I fancy
that this is so. But Miss Wilson's gift was queer to this degree, 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 much I soon got to find out. She would give out 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 lips,
this state being accompanied by contraction of the pupils, failure of
the knee-jerk, rigour, and a rapt expression, so I got into the habit of
tarrying for hours by her bedside, fascinated by her, trying to catch
the news of those musings which came mounting from her mouth; and in
the course of months my ear learned to make out the words: 'the veil was
rent' for me also, and I was able to follow somewhat the trips of her
straying 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 readily guessed that she had never read.
"I said in a stern voice: 'Where are you?'
"She replied: 'Us are in a room, eight hundred miles above. A man is
writing. Us are reading.'
"I may tell you two things: first, that in trance she never spoke of
herself as '_I_' but, for some reason, as '_us_': '_us_ are,' she would
say, '_us_ will'; secondly, that when wandering in the past she
represented herself as being _above_ (the earth?), and higher the
farther back she went; in describing present events she appears to have
felt herself _on_ (the earth); while, as to the future, she always
declared that '_us_' were so many miles '_within_' (the earth).
"To her excursions in this last direction, however, there seemed to
exist certain limits: I say seemed, for I can't be sure, and only mean
that she never, in fact, went far in this direction. Three, four
thousand 'miles' were common figures in her mouth in describing her
distance 'above'; but her distance 'within' never got beyond
sixty-three. She appeared, in relation to the future, to be like a diver
in the sea who, the deeper he dives, finds a more resistant pressure,
till at no great depth resistance grows to prohibition, and he can no
further dive.
"I am afraid I can't go on, though I had a good deal to tell you about
this lady. During fifteen years, off and on, I sat listening by her
couch to her murmurs. At last my ear could catch the meaning of her
briefest breath. I heard the 'Decline and Fall' almost from beginning to
end. Some of her reports were the merest twaddle; over others I have
hung in a sweat of interest. About the fifth year it struck me that I
might just as well jot down some of her mouthings, and the note-book
marked 'I.' belongs to the seventh year. Its history is this: I heard
her one afternoon murmuring in the tone which she used when _reading_,
asked her where she was, and she replied: 'Us are forty-five miles
within: us read, and another writes'; from which I concluded that she
was some forty to sixty years in the future. I believe you may find it
curious, if you are able to read my notes.
"But no more of Mary Wilson now, and a little of A. L. Browne,
F.R.C.P.!--with a breathing-tube in his trachea, and Eternity under his
bed now. Isn't that a curious beast, my dear boy, the thing you call a
'modern man'? Is he not? Here am I writing to you about Miss Mary Wilson
and her freights of froth, and all the time I know what this frame of
mine will be to-morrow night; I know and am not afraid. Am I a saint,
then? At least a hero? No, I am a modern man, a know-nothing. The Lord
have mercy upon my never-dying soul! _if_ my soul is never-dying, and
_if_ ... rather a mess.
"Well, no more now. I know you will think of me sometimes. You will have
to, by the way, because I am making you one of my executors. 'A long
farewell!' ..."
_Here begins the Note-book marked_ I."
CHAPTER I
MY VISIT TO SWANDALE
I have been asked by the publishers who bring out this book to add yet a
mite to the mass of writing which has appeared in regard to the late
events, for how are the mighty fallen! and, as when an oak announces its
downfall through the forest, so here it was only natural that the little
fowl should fly and flap, with outcries (sometimes) of sharp shrillness!
Much, then, has been written and said; and if I now place my small word
with the books already sprung out of what we call "The Revival" and,
rather blatantly, the "Abolition of Christianity," my excuse lies in the
circumstance that during those storms I was much with Aubrey Langler,
and that, long before those events, I was probably his closest friend.
I can, therefore, give details as to that gracious life and the strifes
in which he had a hand not very possible to another writer.
It was my way to stay with Langler at least thrice a year. My crowded
town-life was a rude enough contrast with his eremite mood, so I rarely
failed to avail myself of his invitations. Of these he gave me one in
the August of the year of the Pope's visit, and shortly afterwards I
started for Alresford (Swandale lies five miles north-west of Alresford
by carriage-road).
There happened to travel in the rail-train with me a remarkable man:
certainly, I think that I never beheld a larger human being, except in
an exhibition. We were alone in my carriage, and I was able to take note
of him. His vast jacket was of satin, and from every button ran two
cords of silk, ending in a barrel-shaped ornament of silk, such as used,
I believe, to be called "frogs"; his shirt was frilled and limp; and he
wore four or five rings. This was enough to prove him a foreigner,
though otherwise his dress was ordinary. He sat with his fat legs wide
apart, smiling at the world in the most good-humoured, yet sneering way,
showing some very long top teeth.
All the time his hand travelled to and fro, fro and to, in a rub along
the tightly-clad length of his thigh.
The man seemed most happy. From the manner in which his eyes, half hid
by their sleepy lids, hovered anon upon me, I could see that he was
longing to speak out some of his self-satisfaction; and after some short
time he did indeed speak, saying with a drowsy drawl through his
nostrils, exhibiting the sneer of his teeth, and speaking English
without a hint of foreignness:
"The landscape is not displeasing to me. Oh no; it is not so bad. There
now, you see, that little farm: it is not so bad. But it is not
romantic--not _plantureux_. It would be strange to me if the English
were other than they are. The English are an exact expression of
England--their character, constitution, Church, everything. The cliffs
of Dover, now. Cæsar might have foretold their future from their mere
appearance as he approached them; a traveller might just look at them
from his ship, and go back home saying: 'I know the English'--if he be a
man of force and grasp and insight. Oh no; that is a little hyperbole
perhaps--my little tendency to hyperbole. But, I assure you, the
landscape does not displease me...."
In this way he went on purring; did not stop; would not permit me to say
anything. His utterance was lazy, nasal; and ever and anon he pipped
from his lips, as he droned and rubbed his thigh, a dry pin-point of
nothing: this, one could see, was a habit of his being. I cannot now
recall a thousandth part of his talk, but I do recall that, as he droned
on and on from topic to topic, this thought roved through my brain: "But
what a head! what a fount of ideas!"
The man made upon me an impression of great grossness, perhaps from his
big bulk, or his manner of ironing his thigh, or his ejection of
nothings, or that wallowing in his own self-satisfaction. Round his chin
and cheeks ran a bandage of iron-grey beard; his hair was scanty, and
bald at the temples, where his forehead ran up into two gulfs of bare
skin, so that the skimpy region of hair on his great head resembled a
jacket much too small for the person who wears it.
A few minutes before our arrival at Alresford something led him to tell
me that he was about to join the house-party of the Prime Minister at
Goodford. His servants, I soon saw, were in the carriage next to ours,
for as the train drew up a valet ran out to help his master to alight,
but his master coolly made use of _my_ shoulder to help himself out as
he limped heavily to the platform, and did it with such an air of
patronage and old friendship, that, for the life of me, I couldn't help
feeling flattered.
I suppose that to be caressed by a force is always pleasant--the purring
of a petted cat!--and I understood that the Baron Gregor Kolár was a
force.
For now I knew his already well-known name, inasmuch as, after turning
away from me on the platform, he turned again, fumbled fretfully for his
card, and gave it me. I gave him mine. Then, with a bow-legged rolling
of gait which bowled his head aside at each stride, he strolled to the
brougham awaiting him.
His brougham and mine ran along the same road for some
distance--Goodford, his bourne, being only five miles from
Swandale--till we parted at a meeting of roads, and he passed from my
mind for a season.