out of trance what she had said, for otherwise she must have recognised
at the mention of the garden-room her own description of it, and when
soon after dinner we adjourned there, it was clear that, unless she
was acting an inexplicable part, the sight of it twanged no chord of
memory. There we made the very simple arrangements to which she was
accustomed.
As the procedure in such sittings is possibly unfamiliar to the reader,
I will describe quite shortly what our arrangements were. We had no
idea what form these manifestations--if there were any--might take,
and therefore we, Charles and I, were prepared to record them on the
spot. We three sat round a small table about a couple of yards from
the fire, which was burning brightly; Mrs. Forrest seated herself in
a big armchair. Exactly in front of her on the table were a pencil
and a block of paper in case, as often happened, the manifestation
took the form of automatic script--writing, that is, while in a state
of trance. Charles and I sat on each side of her, also provided with
pencil and paper in order to take down what she said if and when (as
lawyers say) the control took possession of her. In case materialised
spirits appeared, a phenomenon not as yet seen at her séances, our idea
was to jot down as quickly as possible whatever we saw or thought we
saw. Should there be rappings or movements of furniture, we were to
make similar notes of our impressions. The lamp was then turned down,
so that just a ring of flame encircled the wick, but the firelight was
of sufficient brightness, as we tested before the séance began, to
enable us to write and to see what we had written. The red glow of it
illuminated the room, and it was settled that Charles should note by
his watch the time at which anything occurred. Occasionally, throughout
the séance a bubble of coal-gas caught fire, and then the whole room
started into strong light. I had given orders that my servants should
not interrupt the sitting at all, unless somebody rang the bell from
the garden-room. In that case it was to be answered. Finally, before
the séance began, we bolted all the windows on the inside and locked
the door. We took no other precautions against trickery, though, as a
matter of fact, Mrs. Forrest suggested that she should be tied into her
chair. But in the firelight any movement of hers would be so visible
that we did not adopt this precaution. Charles and I had settled to
read to each other the notes we made during the sitting, and cut out
anything that both of us had not recorded. The accounts, therefore, of
this sitting and of that which followed next day are founded on our
joint evidence. The sitting began.
Mrs. Forrest was leaning back at ease with her eyes open and her hands
on the arms of her chair. Then her eyes closed and a violent trembling
seized her. That passed, and shortly afterwards her head fell forward
and her breathing became very rapid. Presently that quieted to normal
pace again, and she began to speak at first in a scarcely audible
whisper and then in a high shrill voice, quite unlike her usual tones.
I do not think that in all England there was a more disappointed man
than I during the next half-hour. “Starlight,” it appeared, was in
control, and Starlight was a personage of platitudes. She had been a
nun in the time of Henry VII, and her work was to help those who had
lately passed over. She was very busy and very happy, and was in the
third sphere where they had a great deal of beautiful music. We must
all be good, said Starlight, and it didn’t matter much whether we were
clever or not. Love was the great thing; we had to love each other
and help each other, and death was no more than the gate of life, and
everything would be tremendously jolly.... Starlight, in fact, might be
better described as clap-trap, and I began thinking about Parkes....
And then I ceased to think about Parkes, for the shrill moralities
of Starlight ceased, and Mrs. Forrest’s voice changed again. The
stale facility of her utterance stopped and she began to speak, quite
unintelligibly, in a voice of low baritone range. Charles leaned across
the table and whispered to me.
“That’s the new control,” he said.
The voice that was speaking stumbled and hesitated: it was like that
of a man trying to express himself in some language which he knew very
imperfectly. Sometimes it stopped altogether, and in one of these
pauses I asked:
“Can you tell us your name?”
There was no reply, but presently I saw Mrs. Forrest’s hand reach
out for the pencil. Charles put it into her fingers and placed the
writing-pad more handily for her. I watched the letters, in capitals,
being traced. They were made hesitatingly, but were perfectly legible.
“Swallow,” she wrote, and again “Swallow,” and stopped.
“The bird?” I asked.
The voice spoke in answer; now I could hear the words, uttered in that
low baritone voice.
“No, not a bird,” it said. “Not a bird, but it flies.”
I was utterly at sea; my mind could form no conjecture whatever
as to what was meant. And then the pencil began writing again.
“Swallow, swallow,” and then with a sudden briskness of movement, as
if the guiding intelligence had got over some difficulty, it wrote
“Swallow-tail.”
This seemed more abstrusely senseless than ever. The only connection
with swallow-tail in my mind was a swallow-tailed coat, but whoever
heard of a swallow-tailed coat flying?
“I’ve got it,” said Charles. “Swallow-tail butterfly. Is it that?”
There came three sudden raps on the table, loud and startling. These
raps, I may explain, in the usual code mean “Yes.” As if to confirm
it the pencil began to write again, and spelled out “Swallow-tail
butterfly.”
“Is that your name?” I asked.
There was one rap, which signifies “No,” followed by three, which
means “Yes.” I had not the slightest idea of what it all signified
(indeed it seemed to signify nothing at all), but the sitting had
become extraordinarily interesting if only for its very unexpectedness.
The control was trying to establish himself by three methods
simultaneously--by the voice, by the automatic writing, and by rapping.
But how a swallow-tail butterfly could assist in some situation which
was now existing in my house was utterly beyond me.... Then an idea
struck me: the swallow-tail butterfly no doubt had a scientific name,
and that we could easily ascertain, for I knew that there was on my
shelves a copy of Newman’s _Butterflies and Moths of Great Britain_, a
sumptuous volume bound in morocco, which I had won as an entomological
prize at school. A moment’s search gave me the book, and by the
firelight I turned up the description of this butterfly in the index.
Its scientific name was _Papilio Machaon_.
“Is Machaon your name?” I asked.
The voice came clear now.
“Yes, I am Machaon,” it said.
With that came the end of the séance, which had lasted not more than
an hour. Whatever the power was that had made Mrs. Forrest speak
in that male voice and struggle, through that roundabout method of
“swallow, swallow-tail, Machaon,” to establish its identity, it now
began to fail. Mrs. Forrest’s pencil made a few illegible scribbles,
she whispered a few inaudible words, and presently with a stretch and a
sigh she came out of trance. We told her that the name of the control
was established, but apparently Machaon meant nothing to her. She was
much exhausted, and very soon I took her across to the house to go to
bed, and presently rejoined Charles.
“Who was Machaon, anyhow?” he asked. “He sounds classical: more in your
line than mine.”
I remembered enough Greek mythology to supply elementary facts, while I
hunted for a particular book about Athens.
“Machaon was the son of Asclepios,” I said, “and Asclepios was the
Greek god of healing. He had precincts, hydropathic establishments,
where people went to be cured. The Romans called him Aesculapius.”
“What can he do for you then?” asked Charles. “You’re fairly fit,
aren’t you?”
Not till he spoke did a light dawn on me. Though I had been thinking so
much of Parkes that day, I had not consciously made the connection.
“But Parkes isn’t,” said I. “Is that possible?”
“By Jove!” said he.
I found my book, and turned to the accounts of the precinct of
Asclepios in Athens.
“Yes, Asclepios had two sons,” I said--“Machaon and Podaleirios. In
Homeric times he wasn’t a god, but only a physician, and his sons were
physicians too. The myth of his godhead is rather a late one----”
I shut the book.
“Best not to read any more,” I said. “If we know all about Asclepios,
we shall possibly be suggesting things to the medium’s mind. Let’s
see what Machaon can tell us about himself, and we can verify it
afterwards.”
It was therefore with no further knowledge than this on the subject
of Machaon that we proposed to hold another séance the next day. All
morning the bitter air had been laden with snow, and now the street
in front of my house, a by-way at the best in the slender traffic of
the town, lay white and untrodden, save on the pavement where a few
passengers had gone by. Mrs. Forrest had not appeared at breakfast, and
from then till lunch-time I sat in the bow-window of the garden-room,
for the warmth of the central heating, of which a stack of pipes was
there installed, and for securing the utmost benefit of light that
penetrated this cowl of snow-laden sky, busy with belated letters. The
drowsiness that accompanies snowfall weighed heavily on my faculties,
but as far as I can assert anything, I can assert that I did not
sleep. From one letter I went on to another, and then for the sixth
or seventh time I tried to open my story. It promised better now
than before, and searching for a word that would not come to my pen,
I happened to look up along the street which lay in front of me. I
expected nothing: I was thinking of nothing but my work; probably I
had looked up like that a dozen times before, and had seen the empty
street, with snow lying thickly on the roadway.
But now the roadway was not untenanted. Someone was walking down the
middle of it, and his aspect, incredible though it seemed, was not
startling. Why I was not startled I have no idea: I can only say that
the vision appeared perfectly natural. The figure was that of a young
man, whose hair, black and curly, lay crisply over his forehead. A
large white cloak reaching down to his knees enveloped him, and he
had thrown the end of it over his shoulder. Below his knees his legs
and feet were bare, so too was the arm up to the elbow, with which he
pressed his cloak to him, and there he was walking briskly down the
snowy street. As he came directly below the window where I sat, he
raised his head and looked at me directly, and smiled. And now I saw
his face: there was the low brow, the straight nose, the curved and
sunny mouth, the short chin, and I thought to myself that this was none
other than the Hermes of Praxiteles, he whose statue at Olympia makes
all those who look on it grow young again. There, anyhow, was a boyish
Greek god, stepping blithely and with gay, incomparable grace along
the street, and raising his face to smile at this stolid, middle-aged
man who blankly regarded him. Then with the certainty of one returning
home, he mounted the steps outside the front door, and seemed to pass
into and through it. Certainly he was no longer in the street, and, so
real and solid-seeming had he been to my vision, that I jumped up, ran
across the few steps of garden, and went into the house, and I should
not have been amazed if I had found him standing in the hall. But there
was no one there, and I opened the front door: the snow lay smooth
and untrodden down the centre of the road where he had walked and on
my doorstep. And at that moment the memory of the séance the evening
before, about which up till now I had somehow felt distrustful and
suspicious, passed into the realm of sober fact, for had not Machaon
just now entered my house, with a smile as of recognition on some
friendly mission?
We sat again that afternoon by daylight, and now, I must suppose, the
control was more actively and powerfully present, for hardly had Mrs.
Forrest passed into trance than the voice began, louder than it had
been the night before, and far more distinct. He--Machaon I must call
him--seemed to be anxious to establish his identity beyond all doubt,
like some newcomer presenting his credentials, and he began to speak of
the precinct of Asclepios in Athens. Often he hesitated for a word in
English, often he put in a word in Greek, and as he spoke, fragments of
things I had learned when an archæological student in Athens came back
into my mind, and I knew that he was accurately describing the portico
and the temple and the well. All this I toss to the sceptic to growl
and worry over and tear to bits; for certainly it seems possible that
my mind, holding these facts in its subconsciousness, was suggesting
them to the medium’s mind, who thereupon spoke of them and, conveying
them back to me, made me aware that I had known them.... My forgotten
knowledge of these things and of the Greek language came flooding back
on me, as he told us, now half in Greek, and half in English, of the
patients who came to consult the god, how they washed in the sacred
well for purification, and lay down to sleep in the portico. They often
dreamed, and in the interpretation of their dreams, which they told to
the priest next day, lay the indication of the cure. Or sometimes the
god healed more directly, and accompanied by the sacred snake walked
among the sleepers and by his touch made them whole. His temple was
hung with _ex-votos_, the gifts of those whom he had cured. And at
Epidaurus, where was another shrine of his, there were great mural
tablets recording the same....
Then the voice stopped, and as if to prove identity by another means,
the medium drew the pencil and paper to her, and in Greek characters,
unknown apparently to her, she traced the words “Machaon, son of
Asclepios....”
There was a pause, and I asked a direct question, which now had been
long simmering in my mind.
“Have you come to help me about Parkes?” I asked. “Can you tell me what
will cure him?”
The pencil began to move again, tracing out characters in Greek. It
wrote [Greek: phengos x], and repeated it. I did not at once guess
what it meant, and asked for an explanation. There was no answer, and
presently the medium stirred, stretched herself and sighed, and came
out of trance. She took up the paper on which she had written.
“Did that come through?” she asked. “And what does it mean? I don’t
even know the characters....”
Then suddenly the possible significance of [Greek: phengos x] flashed
on me, and I marvelled at my slowness. [Greek: phengos], a beam of
light, a ray, and the letter [Greek: x], the equivalent of the English
_x_. That had come in direct answer to my question as to what would
cure Parkes, and it was without hesitation or delay that I wrote to
Symes. I reminded him that he had said that he had no objection to
any possible remedy, provided it was not harmful, being tried on his
patient, and I asked him to treat him with X-rays. The whole sequence
of events had been so frankly amazing, that I believe the veriest
sceptic would not have done otherwise than I did.
Our sittings continued, but after this day we had no further evidence
of this second control. It looked as if the intelligence (even the
most incredulous will allow me, for the sake of convenience, to call
that intelligence Machaon) that had described this room, and told Mrs.
Forrest that he had work to do here, had finished his task. Machaon had
said, or so my interpretation was, that X-rays would cure Parkes. In
justification of this view it is proper to quote from a letter which I
got from Symes a week later.
“There is no need for you to come up to break to Parkes that an
operation lies in front of him. In answer to your request, and
without a grain of faith in its success, I treated him with X-rays,
which I assured you were useless. To-day, to speak quite frankly,
I don’t know what to think, for the growth has been steadily
diminishing in size and hardness, and it is perfectly evident that it
is being absorbed and is disappearing.
“The treatment through which I put Parkes is that of ----. Here in
this hospital we have had patients to whom it brought no shadow of
benefit. Often it had been continued on these deluded wretches till
any operation which might possibly have been successful was out of
the question owing to the encroachment of the growth. But from the
first dose of the X-rays, Parkes began to get better, the growth was
first arrested, and then diminished.
“I am trying to put the whole thing before you with as much
impartiality as I can command. So, on the other side, you must
remember that Parkes’s was never a proved case of cancer. I told
you that it could not be proved till the exploratory operation took
place. All the symptoms pointed to cancer--you see, I am trying to
save my own face--but my diagnosis, though confirmed by ----, may
have been wrong. If he only had what we call a benign tumour, the
case is not so extraordinary; there have been plenty of cases when
a benign tumour has disappeared by absorption or what not. It is
unusual, but by no means unknown. For instance....
“But Parkes’s case was quite different. I certainly believe he had
a cancerous growth, and thought that an operation was inevitable if
his life was to be saved. Even then, the most I hoped for was an
alleviation of pain, as the disease progressed, and a year or two
more, at the most, of life. Instead, I apply another remedy, at
your suggestion, and if he goes on as he has been doing, the growth
will be a nodule in another week or two, and I should expect it to
disappear altogether. Taking everything into consideration, if you
asked me the question whether this X-ray treatment was the cause of
the cure, I should be obliged to say ‘Yes.’ I don’t believe in such
a treatment, but I believe it is curing him. I suppose that it was
suggested to you by a fraudulent, spiritualistic medium in a feigned
trance, who was inspired by Aesculapius or some exploded heathen
deity, for I remember you said you were going down into the country
for some spiritual business....
“Well, Parkes is getting better, and I am so old-fashioned a fellow
that I would sooner a patient of mine got better by incredible
methods, than died under my skilful knife.... Of course, we trained
people know nothing, but we have to act according to the best chances
of our ignorance. I entirely believed that the knife was the only
means of saving the man, and now, when I stand confuted, the only
thing that I can save is my honesty, which I hereby have done. Let me
know, at your leisure, whether you just thought you would, on your
own idea, like me to try X-rays, or whether some faked voice from the
grave suggested it.
“Ever yours,
“Godfrey Symes.
“P.S.--If it was some beastly voice from the grave, you might tell me
in confidence who the medium was. I want to be fair....”
That is the story; the reader will explain it according to his
temperament. And as I have told Parkes, who is now back with me again,
to look into the garden-room before post-time and take a registered
packet to the office, it is time that I got it ready for him. So here
is the completed packet in manuscript, to be sent to the printer’s.
From my window I shall see him go briskly along the street down which
Machaon walked on a snowy morning.
Negotium Perambulans....
Negotium Perambulans....
The casual tourist in West Cornwall may just possibly have noticed,
as he bowled along over the bare high plateau between Penzance and
the Land’s End, a dilapidated signpost pointing down a steep lane
and bearing on its battered finger the faded inscription “Polearn
2 miles,” but probably very few have had the curiosity to traverse
those two miles in order to see a place to which their guide-books
award so cursory a notice. It is described there, in a couple of
unattractive lines, as a small fishing village with a church of no
particular interest except for certain carved and painted wooden panels
(originally belonging to an earlier edifice) which form an altar-rail.
But the church at St. Creed (the tourist is reminded) has a similar
decoration far superior in point of preservation and interest, and thus
even the ecclesiastically disposed are not lured to Polearn. So meagre
a bait is scarce worth swallowing, and a glance at the very steep lane
which in dry weather presents a carpet of sharp-pointed stones, and
after rain a muddy watercourse, will almost certainly decide him not
to expose his motor or his bicycle to risks like these in so sparsely
populated a district. Hardly a house has met his eye since he left
Penzance, and the possible trundling of a punctured bicycle for half
a dozen weary miles seems a high price to pay for the sight of a few
painted panels.
Polearn, therefore, even in the high noon of the tourist season, is
little liable to invasion, and for the rest of the year I do not
suppose that a couple of folk a day traverse those two miles (long ones
at that) of steep and stony gradient. I am not forgetting the postman
in this exiguous estimate, for the days are few when, leaving his
pony and cart at the top of the hill, he goes as far as the village,
since but a few hundred yards down the lane there stands a large
white box, like a sea-trunk, by the side of the road, with a slit for
letters and a locked door. Should he have in his wallet a registered
letter or be the bearer of a parcel too large for insertion in the
square lips of the sea-trunk, he must needs trudge down the hill and
deliver the troublesome missive, leaving it in person on the owner, and
receiving some small reward of coin or refreshment for his kindness.
But such occasions are rare, and his general routine is to take out
of the box such letters as may have been deposited there, and insert
in their place such letters as he has brought. These will be called
for, perhaps that day or perhaps the next, by an emissary from the
Polearn post-office. As for the fishermen of the place, who, in their
export trade, constitute the chief link of movement between Polearn and
the outside world, they would not dream of taking their catch up the
steep lane and so, with six miles farther of travel, to the market at
Penzance. The sea route is shorter and easier, and they deliver their
wares to the pier-head. Thus, though the sole industry of Polearn is
sea-fishing, you will get no fish there unless you have bespoken your
requirements to one of the fishermen. Back come the trawlers as empty
as a haunted house, while their spoils are in the fish-train that is
speeding to London.
Such isolation of a little community, continued, as it has been, for
centuries, produces isolation in the individual as well, and nowhere
will you find greater independence of character than among the people
of Polearn. But they are linked together, so it has always seemed
to me, by some mysterious comprehension: it is as if they had all
been initiated into some ancient rite, inspired and framed by forces
visible and invisible. The winter storms that batter the coast, the
vernal spell of the spring, the hot, still summers, the season of rains
and autumnal decay, have made a spell which, line by line, has been
communicated to them, concerning the powers, evil and good, that rule
the world, and manifest themselves in ways benignant or terrible....