of thing behind me. And I am a medium. Look at me! Aren’t I more real
to you than any of the others? Don’t I belong to your plane in a way
that none of the others do? I may be occasionally fraudulent, and I can
no more get Napoleon here than I can fly, but I’m genuine as well. Oh,
Mr. Tilly, be indulgent to us poor human creatures! It isn’t so long
since you were one of us yourself.”
The mention of Napoleon, with the information that Mrs. Cumberbatch had
never been controlled by that great creature, wounded Mr. Tilly again.
Often in this darkened room he had held long colloquies with him, and
Napoleon had given him most interesting details of his life on St.
Helena, which, so Mr. Tilly had found, were often borne out by Lord
Rosebery’s pleasant volume _The Last Phase_. But now the whole thing
wore a more sinister aspect, and suspicion as solid as certainty bumped
against his mind.
“Confess!” he said. “Where did you get all that Napoleon talk from? You
told us you had never read Lord Rosebery’s book, and allowed us to look
through your library to see that it wasn’t there. Be honest for once,
Mrs. Cumberbatch.”
She suppressed a sob.
“I will,” she said. “The book was there all the time. I put it into
an old cover called ‘Elegant Extracts....’ But I’m not wholly a fraud.
We’re talking together, you a spirit and I a mortal female. They can’t
hear us talk. But only look at me, and you’ll see.... You can talk to
them through me, if you’ll only be so kind. I don’t often get in touch
with a genuine spirit like yourself.”
Mr. Tilly glanced at the other sitters and then back to the medium,
who, to keep the others interested, was making weird gurgling noises
like an undervitalised siphon. Certainly she was far clearer to him
than were the others, and her argument that she was able to see and
hear him had great weight. And then a new and curious perception came
to him. Her mind seemed spread out before him like a pool of slightly
muddy water, and he figured himself as standing on a header-board
above it, perfectly able, if he chose, to immerse himself in it. The
objection to so doing was its muddiness, its materiality; the reason
for so doing was that he felt that then he would be able to be heard by
the others, possibly to be seen by them, certainly to come into touch
with them. As it was, the loudest bangs on the table were only faintly
perceptible.
“I’m beginning to understand,” he said.
“Oh, Mr. Tilly! Just jump in like a kind good spirit,” she said. “Make
your own test-conditions. Put your hand over my mouth to make sure that
I’m not speaking, and keep hold of the trumpet.”
“And you’ll promise not to cheat any more?” he asked.
“Never!”
He made up his mind.
“All right then,” he said, and, so to speak, dived into her mind.
He experienced the oddest sensation. It was like passing out of some
fine, sunny air into the stuffiest of unventilated rooms. Space and
time closed over him again: his head swam, his eyes were heavy. Then,
with the trumpet in one hand, he laid the other firmly over her mouth.
Looking round, he saw that the room seemed almost completely dark, but
that the outline of the figures sitting round the table had vastly
gained in solidity.
“Here I am!” he said briskly.
Miss Soulsby gave a startled exclamation.
“That’s Mr. Tilly’s voice!” she whispered.
“Why, of course it is,” said Mr. Tilly. “I’ve just passed over at Hyde
Park Corner under a traction engine....”
He felt the dead weight of the medium’s mind, her conventional
conceptions, her mild, unreal piety pressing in on him from all sides,
stifling and confusing him. Whatever he said had to pass through muddy
water....
“There’s a wonderful feeling of joy and lightness,” he said. “I can’t
tell you of the sunshine and happiness. We’re all very busy and active,
helping others. And it’s such a pleasure, dear friends, to be able to
get into touch with you all again. Death is not death: it is the gate
of life....”
He broke off suddenly.
“Oh, I can’t stand this,” he said to the medium. “You make me talk such
twaddle. Do get your stupid mind out of the way. Can’t we do anything
in which you won’t interfere with me so much?”
“Can you give us some spirit lights round the room?” suggested Mrs.
Cumberbatch in a sleepy voice. “You have come through beautifully, Mr.
Tilly. It’s too dear of you!”
“You’re sure you haven’t arranged some phosphorescent patches already?”
asked Mr. Tilly suspiciously.
“Yes, there are one or two near the chimney-piece,” said Mrs.
Cumberbatch, “but none anywhere else. Dear Mr. Tilly, I swear there are
not. Just give us a nice star with long rays on the ceiling!”
Mr. Tilly was the most good-natured of men, always willing to help
an unattractive female in distress, and whispering to her, “I shall
require the phosphorescent patches to be given into my hands after the
séance,” he proceeded, by the mere effort of his imagination, to light
a beautiful big star with red and violet rays on the ceiling. Of course
it was not nearly as brilliant as his own conception of it, for its
light had to pass through the opacity of the medium’s mind, but it was
still a most striking object, and elicited gasps of applause from the
company. To enhance the effect of it he intoned a few very pretty lines
about a star by Adelaide Anne Procter, whose poems had always seemed to
him to emanate from the topmost peak of Parnassus.
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Tilly!” whispered the medium. “It was lovely! Would
a photograph of it be permitted on some future occasion, if you would
be so kind as to reproduce it again?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mr. Tilly irritably. “I want to get out. I’m
very hot and uncomfortable. And it’s all so cheap.”
“Cheap?” ejaculated Mrs. Cumberbatch. “Why, there’s not a medium in
London whose future wouldn’t be made by a real genuine star like that,
say, twice a week.”
“But I wasn’t run over in order that I might make the fortune of
mediums,” said Mr. Tilly. “I want to go: it’s all rather degrading.
And I want to see something of my new world. I don’t know what it’s
like yet.”
“Oh, but, Mr. Tilly,” said she. “You told us lovely things about it,
how busy and happy you were.”
“No, I didn’t. It was you who said that, at least it was you who put it
into my head.”
Even as he wished, he found himself emerging from the dull waters of
Mrs. Cumberbatch’s mind.
“There’s the whole new world waiting for me,” he said. “I must go and
see it. I’ll come back and tell you, for it must be full of marvellous
revelations....”
Suddenly he felt the hopelessness of it. There was that thick fluid
of materiality to pierce, and, as it dripped off him again, he began
to see that nothing of that fine rare quality of life which he had
just begun to experience, could penetrate these opacities. That was
why, perhaps, all that thus came across from the spirit-world, was so
stupid, so banal. They, of whom he now was one, could tap on furniture,
could light stars, could abound with commonplace, could read as in a
book the mind of medium or sitters, but nothing more. They had to pass
into the region of gross perceptions, in order to be seen of blind eyes
and be heard of deaf ears.
Mrs. Cumberbatch stirred.
“The power is failing,” she said, in a deep voice, which Mr. Tilly felt
was meant to imitate his own. “I must leave you now, dear friends----”
He felt much exasperated.
“The power isn’t failing,” he shouted. “It wasn’t I who said that.”
But he had emerged too far, and perceived that nobody except the medium
heard him.
“Oh, don’t be vexed, Mr. Tilly,” she said. “That’s only a formula. But
you’re leaving us very soon. Not time for just one materialisation?
They are more convincing than anything to most inquirers.”
“Not one,” said he. “You don’t understand how stifling it is even to
speak through you and make stars. But I’ll come back as soon as I find
there’s anything new that I can get through to you. What’s the use of
my repeating all that stale stuff about being busy and happy? They’ve
been told that often enough already. Besides, I have got to see if it’s
true. Good-bye: don’t cheat any more.”
He dropped his card of admittance to the séance on the table and heard
murmurs of excitement as he floated off.
* * * * *
The news of the wonderful star, and the presence of Mr. Tilly at
the séance within half an hour of his death, which at the time was
unknown to any of the sitters, spread swiftly through spiritualistic
circles. The Psychical Research Society sent investigators to take
independent evidence from all those present, but were inclined to
attribute the occurrence to a subtle mixture of thought-transference
and unconscious visual impression, when they heard that Miss Soulsby
had, a few minutes previously, seen a news-board in the street outside
recording the accident at Hyde Park Corner. This explanation was rather
elaborate, for it postulated that Miss Soulsby, thinking of Mr. Tilly’s
non-arrival, had combined that with the accident at Hyde Park Corner,
and had probably (though unconsciously) seen the name of the victim on
another news-board and had transferred the whole by telepathy to the
mind of the medium. As for the star on the ceiling, though they could
not account for it, they certainly found remains of phosphorescent
paint on the panels of the wall above the chimney-piece, and came
to the conclusion that the star had been produced by some similar
contrivance. So they rejected the whole thing, which was a pity, since,
for once, the phenomena were absolutely genuine.
Miss Soulsby continued to be a constant attendant at Mrs. Cumberbatch’s
séance, but never experienced the presence of Mr. Tilly again. On
that the reader may put any interpretation he pleases. It looks to me
somewhat as if he had found something else to do.
Mrs. Amworth
Mrs. Amworth
The village of Maxley, where, last summer and autumn, these strange
events took place, lies on a heathery and pine-clad upland of Sussex.
In all England you could not find a sweeter and saner situation.
Should the wind blow from the south, it comes laden with the spices
of the sea; to the east high downs protect it from the inclemencies
of March; and from the west and north the breezes which reach it
travel over miles of aromatic forest and heather. The village itself
is insignificant enough in point of population, but rich in amenities
and beauty. Half-way down the single street, with its broad road and
spacious areas of grass on each side, stands the little Norman Church
and the antique graveyard long disused: for the rest there are a
dozen small, sedate Georgian houses, red-bricked and long-windowed,
each with a square of flower-garden in front, and an ampler strip
behind; a score of shops, and a couple of score of thatched cottages
belonging to labourers on neighbouring estates, complete the entire
cluster of its peaceful habitations. The general peace, however, is
sadly broken on Saturdays and Sundays, for we lie on one of the main
roads between London and Brighton and our quiet street becomes a
race-course for flying motor-cars and bicycles. A notice just outside
the village begging them to go slowly only seems to encourage them to
accelerate their speed, for the road lies open and straight, and there
is really no reason why they should do otherwise. By way of protest,
therefore, the ladies of Maxley cover their noses and mouths with
their handkerchiefs as they see a motor-car approaching, though, as
the street is asphalted, they need not really take these precautions
against dust. But late on Sunday night the horde of scorchers has
passed, and we settle down again to five days of cheerful and leisurely
seclusion. Railway strikes which agitate the country so much leave us
undisturbed because most of the inhabitants of Maxley never leave it at
all.
I am the fortunate possessor of one of these small Georgian houses,
and consider myself no less fortunate in having so interesting and
stimulating a neighbour as Francis Urcombe, who, the most confirmed
of Maxleyites, has not slept away from his house, which stands just
opposite to mine in the village street, for nearly two years, at which
date, though still in middle life, he resigned his Physiological
Professorship at Cambridge University and devoted himself to the study
of those occult and curious phenomena which seem equally to concern the
physical and the psychical sides of human nature. Indeed his retirement
was not unconnected with his passion for the strange uncharted places
that lie on the confines and borders of science, the existence of
which is so stoutly denied by the more materialistic minds, for he
advocated that all medical students should be obliged to pass some sort
of examination in mesmerism, and that one of the tripos papers should
be designed to test their knowledge in such subjects as appearances
at time of death, haunted houses, vampirism, automatic writing, and
possession.
“Of course they wouldn’t listen to me,” ran his account of the matter,
“for there is nothing that these seats of learning are so frightened
of as knowledge, and the road to knowledge lies in the study of things
like these. The functions of the human frame are, broadly speaking,
known. They are a country, anyhow, that has been charted and mapped
out. But outside that lie huge tracts of undiscovered country, which
certainly exist, and the real pioneers of knowledge are those who, at
the cost of being derided as credulous and superstitious, want to push
on into those misty and probably perilous places. I felt that I could
be of more use by setting out without compass or knapsack into the
mists than by sitting in a cage like a canary and chirping about what
was known. Besides, teaching is very bad for a man who knows himself
only to be a learner: you only need to be a self-conceited ass to
teach.”
Here, then, in Francis Urcombe, was a delightful neighbour to one
who, like myself, has an uneasy and burning curiosity about what he
called the “misty and perilous places”; and this last spring we had a
further and most welcome addition to our pleasant little community,
in the person of Mrs. Amworth, widow of an Indian civil servant.
Her husband had been a judge in the North-West Provinces, and after
his death at Peshawar she came back to England, and after a year in
London found herself starving for the ampler air and sunshine of the
country to take the place of the fogs and griminess of town. She had,
too, a special reason for settling in Maxley, since her ancestors up
till a hundred years ago had long been native to the place, and in
the old church-yard, now disused, are many grave-stones bearing her
maiden name of Chaston. Big and energetic, her vigorous and genial
personality speedily woke Maxley up to a higher degree of sociality
than it had ever known. Most of us were bachelors or spinsters or
elderly folk not much inclined to exert ourselves in the expense and
effort of hospitality, and hitherto the gaiety of a small tea-party,
with bridge afterwards and goloshes (when it was wet) to trip home in
again for a solitary dinner, was about the climax of our festivities.
But Mrs. Amworth showed us a more gregarious way, and set an example
of luncheon-parties and little dinners, which we began to follow. On
other nights when no such hospitality was on foot, a lone man like
myself found it pleasant to know that a call on the telephone to Mrs.
Amworth’s house not a hundred yards off, and an inquiry as to whether
I might come over after dinner for a game of piquet before bed-time,
would probably evoke a response of welcome. There she would be, with a
comrade-like eagerness for companionship, and there was a glass of port
and a cup of coffee and a cigarette and a game of piquet. She played
the piano, too, in a free and exuberant manner, and had a charming
voice and sang to her own accompaniment; and as the days grew long
and the light lingered late, we played our game in her garden, which
in the course of a few months she had turned from being a nursery for
slugs and snails into a glowing patch of luxuriant blossoming. She
was always cheery and jolly; she was interested in everything, and in
music, in gardening, in games of all sorts was a competent performer.
Everybody (with one exception) liked her, everybody felt her to bring
with her the tonic of a sunny day. That one exception was Francis
Urcombe; he, though he confessed he did not like her, acknowledged that
he was vastly interested in her. This always seemed strange to me, for
pleasant and jovial as she was, I could see nothing in her that could
call forth conjecture or intrigued surmise, so healthy and unmysterious
a figure did she present. But of the genuineness of Urcombe’s interest
there could be no doubt; one could see him watching and scrutinising
her. In matter of age, she frankly volunteered the information that she
was forty-five; but her briskness, her activity, her unravaged skin,
her coal-black hair, made it difficult to believe that she was not
adopting an unusual device, and adding ten years on to her age instead
of subtracting them.
Often, also, as our quite unsentimental friendship ripened, Mrs.
Amworth would ring me up and propose her advent. If I was busy writing,
I was to give her, so we definitely bargained, a frank negative, and
in answer I could hear her jolly laugh and her wishes for a successful
evening of work. Sometimes, before her proposal arrived, Urcombe would
already have stepped across from his house opposite for a smoke and a
chat, and he, hearing who my intending visitor was, always urged me
to beg her to come. She and I should play our piquet, said he, and
he would look on, if we did not object, and learn something of the
game. But I doubt whether he paid much attention to it, for nothing
could be clearer than that, under that penthouse of forehead and thick
eyebrows, his attention was fixed not on the cards, but on one of the
players. But he seemed to enjoy an hour spent thus, and often, until
one particular evening in July, he would watch her with the air of a
man who has some deep problem in front of him. She, enthusiastically
keen about our game, seemed not to notice his scrutiny. Then came that
evening, when, as I see in the light of subsequent events, began the
first twitching of the veil that hid the secret horror from my eyes. I
did not know it then, though I noticed that thereafter, if she rang up
to propose coming round, she always asked not only if I was at leisure,
but whether Mr. Urcombe was with me. If so, she said, she would not
spoil the chat of two old bachelors, and laughingly wished me good
night.
Urcombe, on this occasion, had been with me for some half-hour
before Mrs. Amworth’s appearance, and had been talking to me about
the mediæval beliefs concerning vampirism, one of those borderland
subjects which he declared had not been sufficiently studied before
it had been consigned by the medical profession to the dust-heap of
exploded superstitions. There he sat, grim and eager, tracing, with
that pellucid clearness which had made him in his Cambridge days so
admirable a lecturer, the history of those mysterious visitations. In
them all there were the same general features: one of those ghoulish
spirits took up its abode in a living man or woman, conferring
supernatural powers of bat-like flight and glutting itself with
nocturnal blood-feasts. When its host died it continued to dwell in the
corpse, which remained undecayed. By day it rested, by night it left
the grave and went on its awful errands. No European country in the
Middle Ages seemed to have escaped them; earlier yet, parallels were to
be found, in Roman and Greek and in Jewish history.
“It’s a large order to set all that evidence aside as being moonshine,”
he said. “Hundreds of totally independent witnesses in many ages
have testified to the occurrence of these phenomena, and there’s no
explanation known to me which covers all the facts. And if you feel
inclined to say ‘Why, then, if these are facts, do we not come across
them now?’ there are two answers I can make you. One is that there
were diseases known in the Middle Ages, such as the black death, which
were certainly existent then and which have become extinct since, but
for that reason we do not assert that such diseases never existed.
Just as the black death visited England and decimated the population
of Norfolk, so here in this very district about three hundred years
ago there was certainly an outbreak of vampirism, and Maxley was the
centre of it. My second answer is even more convincing, for I tell you
that vampirism is by no means extinct now. An outbreak of it certainly
occurred in India a year or two ago.”
At that moment I heard my knocker plied in the cheerful and peremptory
manner in which Mrs. Amworth is accustomed to announce her arrival, and
I went to the door to open it.
“Come in at once,” I said, “and save me from having my blood curdled.
Mr. Urcombe has been trying to alarm me.”
Instantly her vital, voluminous presence seemed to fill the room.
“Ah, but how lovely!” she said. “I delight in having my blood curdled.
Go on with your ghost-story, Mr. Urcombe. I adore ghost-stories.”
I saw that, as his habit was, he was intently observing her.
“It wasn’t a ghost-story exactly,” said he. “I was only telling our
host how vampirism was not extinct yet. I was saying that there was an
outbreak of it in India only a few years ago.”
There was a more than perceptible pause, and I saw that, if Urcombe was
observing her, she on her side was observing him with fixed eye and
parted mouth. Then her jolly laugh invaded that rather tense silence.
“Oh, what a shame!” she said. “You’re not going to curdle my blood
at all. Where did you pick up such a tale, Mr. Urcombe? I have lived
for years in India and never heard a rumour of such a thing. Some
story-teller in the bazaars must have invented it: they are famous at
that.”
I could see that Urcombe was on the point of saying something further,
but checked himself.
“Ah! very likely that was it,” he said.
But something had disturbed our usual peaceful sociability that night,
and something had damped Mrs. Amworth’s usual high spirits. She had no
gusto for her piquet, and left after a couple of games. Urcombe had
been silent too, indeed he hardly spoke again till she departed.
“That was unfortunate,” he said, “for the outbreak of--of a very
mysterious disease, let us call it, took place at Peshawar, where she
and her husband were. And----”
“Well?” I asked.
“He was one of the victims of it,” said he. “Naturally I had quite
forgotten that when I spoke.”
The summer was unreasonably hot and rainless, and Maxley suffered much
from drought, and also from a plague of big black night-flying gnats,
the bite of which was very irritating and virulent. They came sailing
in of an evening, settling on one’s skin so quietly that one perceived
nothing till the sharp stab announced that one had been bitten. They
did not bite the hands or face, but chose always the neck and throat
for their feeding-ground, and most of us, as the poison spread, assumed
a temporary goitre. Then about the middle of August appeared the first
of those mysterious cases of illness which our local doctor attributed
to the long-continued heat coupled with the bite of these venomous
insects. The patient was a boy of sixteen or seventeen, the son of
Mrs. Amworth’s gardener, and the symptoms were an anæmic pallor and a
languid prostration, accompanied by great drowsiness and an abnormal
appetite. He had, too, on his throat two small punctures where, so Dr.
Ross conjectured, one of these great gnats had bitten him. But the odd
thing was that there was no swelling or inflammation round the place
where he had been bitten. The heat at this time had begun to abate, but
the cooler weather failed to restore him, and the boy, in spite of the
quantity of good food which he so ravenously swallowed, wasted away to
a skin-clad skeleton.