When a woman's imagination, still young and ardent, begins to find
the things of earth as Hamlet found them, "weary, flat, stale,
and unprofitable," it is only natural that she should turn with a
longing mind to the life that earth cannot give, the something unseen
and mysterious that certain gifted individuals have attributed to
themselves the power of seeing. Vera, after six years of marriage, six
years of unlimited wealth and unconscious self-indulgence, had begun to
discover that most things were stale, and some things weary, and all
things unprofitable; and then, to a mind steeped in modern poetry and
modern romance, and the modern music that always means something more
than mere combinations of harmonious sounds, there had come a yearning
for the higher life, the transcendental life that only the elect can
realise, and only the earth-weary can ardently desire.
Francis Symeon was the philosopher to whom she turned with
unquestioning faith; for even those who had spoken lightly of his
creed and of his reasoning faculty had admitted that the man was
essentially sincere, and that the faith he offered his followers was
for him as impregnable as the rock of Holy Scripture.
He was announced on the following day as the clock in Vera's
morning-room struck three, a punctuality so exceptional as to seem
almost uncanny, when compared with the vague sense of time in the rest
of her acquaintance. She received him in a room where there was no
fear of interruption--her sanctuary, more library than boudoir, where
the books she loved, her poets and novelists and philosophers, in the
bindings she had herself invented, filled her book-cases, alternating
with black-and-white portraits of the gods of her idolatry--Browning,
Tennyson, Byron, Scott, de Musset, Heine, Henry Irving, Gounod. Only
the dead had place there--the dead musician, the dead poet, the dead
actor. It was death that made them beloved and longed for. They had
gone from her reach for ever; and it was this sense of something for
ever lost that made them adorable.
Mr. Symeon looked round the walls with evident admiration.
"I see you prefer the faces of the noble dead to water-colour sketches
and majolica plates," he said. "Divine books, divine faces, those are
the best companions a woman can have."
"I spend a good deal of my life in this room," Vera answered. "I have
no children. I suppose if I had I should spend most of my time with
them. I should not have to choose my companions among the dead."
"You have chosen them among the living," Mr. Symeon answered in a
voice that thrilled her. "Do you think that Tennyson is dead? He who
knew that the whole question of religion hinges upon the after life:
immortality or a godless universe. Or Browning, who has gone to the
very core of religion, whose magnificent mind grasped the highest and
deepest in Divine love and Divine power? Such spirits are unquenchable.
This rag of mortality upon which they hang must lie in the dust, but
for the elect death is only the release of the immaterial from the
material, the escape of the butterfly from the worm. You have the
assurance from the lips of Christ: God is the God of the living; and
for those whose existence on earth is only the apprenticeship to
immortality, there is no such thing as death."
This was the chief article in Mr. Symeon's creed; hinted at, but not
formally stated in his contributions to the magazine which he edited.
He claimed immortality only for the elect--for those in whom the spirit
predominated over the flesh. To Vera there was no new idea in his
exposition of faith. She had a feeling that she had always known this,
from the time she stood beside Shelley's grave in the shadow of the
Roman Cenotaph, and that other grave under the hill, the resting-place
of Shelley's Adonais. The thought of corruption had been far from her
mind, albeit she knew that the heart of one poet and the wasted form
of the other were lying in the darkness below those spring flowers on
which her tears were falling, and it was no surprise to her to hear a
serious man of sixty years of age declare his faith in the unbroken
chain of life.
"I saw that you were not one of those who scoff at transcendental
truths," Mr. Symeon said, after a few moments' silence. "I read in your
eyes last night that you are one of us in spirit, though you may know
nothing of our creed. You must join our society."
"Your society?"
"Yes, Madame Provana. We are a company of friends in the world of sense
and in the world of spirit. The majority of us have crossed the river.
As corporal substance they have ceased to be; their dwelling is in the
starlit spaces beyond Acheron. For the common herd they are dead; but
for us they are as vividly alive as they were when they walked among
the vulgar living, and wore life's vesture of clay. They are nearer
to us since they have passed the gulf, and we understand them as we
never could while they wore the livery of earth. They are our close
companions. The veil that parted us is rent, and we see them face to
face."
Vera listened in silence, and the grave, slow speech went on without a
break.
"We have our meetings. We discuss the great problems, the everlasting
mysteries; we press forward to the higher life. We are not afraid
of being foolish, romantic, illogical. We are prepared for contempt
and incredulity from the outside world; but for us, whose minds have
received the light from those other minds, who have been consoled in
our sorrows, strengthened in our faith by those influencing souls,
there is nothing more difficult in our creed than in that of Newman,
who saw behind each form of material beauty the light, the flower, the
living presence of an angel. The spirits of the illustrious dead are
our angels; and our communion with them is the joy of our lives. We
call ourselves simply Us. Our chosen poets, philosophers, painters,
musicians, even the great actors of the past, those ardent spirits in
whom genius was unquenchable by death, men and women whose minds were
fire, and their corporal existence of no account in the forces of their
being: those who have lived by the spirit and not by the flesh--all
these are of our company. These are the influencing souls who are
our companions in the silence and seclusion of our lives. Not by the
trumpery expedient of an alphabet rapped out upon a table, or by the
writing of an unguided pencil; but by the communion of spirit with
spirit, we feel those other minds in converse with our own. They teach,
they exhort, they uplift us to their spirit world, sometimes in hours
of meditation, and sometimes in the closer communion of dreams."
"Are their voices heard--do they speak to you?" Vera asked, deeply
moved, her own voice trembling a little.
"Only in dreams. Speech is material, and belongs to the earthly
machine. It is not from lip to ear, but from mind to mind that the
message comes."
"And do they appear to you? Do you see them as they were on earth?"
Vera asked.
The November twilight had filled the room with shadow, and the face
of the spiritualist, the sharply-cut features, and hollow cheeks, and
luminous grey-green eyes, looked like the face of a ghost.
"Only in dreams is it given to us to look upon the disembodied great.
We feel, and we know! That is enough. But in some rare cases--where the
earthly vesture has worn to its thinnest tissue--where death has set
its seal upon the living, to one so divested of mortal attributes, so
marked for the spirit world, the vision may be granted. Such an one may
see."
"You have known...?" faltered Vera.
"Yes, I knew such a case. In the final hour of an ebbing life the chain
of wedded love that death had broken was reunited, and the wife died
with her last long gaze turned to the vision of her husband. Her last
word was 'reunited!'"
Vera was strangely impressed. It was not easy for the unbelieving to
make a mock of Mr. Symeon's creed. The force of his convictions, the
ideas that he had cultivated and brooded upon for the larger part of
his life, had so possessed the man, that even scoffers were sometimes
moved by his absolute sincerity, and found themselves, as it were
unawares, treating his theories almost seriously. For Vera, in whom
imagination was the greater part of mind, there was no inclination to
scoff, but rather a most earnest desire that the spiritualist's creed
might be justified by her own experience, that it might be granted to
her to sit in the melancholy solitude of that room, with a volume of
Browning on her lap, and to feel that the poet was near her, that an
invisible spirit was breathing enlightenment into her mind, as she read
the dying words of the beloved apostle in "A Death in the Desert,"
which had been to her as a new gospel--and to know that when she raised
her eyes to the portrait on the wall, it was not the dead, but the
living upon whom she looked.
This was involved in the creed of her Church--the Communion of Saints.
Were not the gifted, who had lived free from all the grossness of clay,
from the taint of earthly sin, worthy to be numbered among the saints,
and like them gifted with perpetual life, perpetual fellowship with the
faithful who adored them?
When he left the great, silent house Mr. Symeon knew that he had made
a proselyte. Though Vera had said little, it was impossible to mistake
the fervour with which she had welcomed his revelation of the spirit
world. Here was a mind in want of new interests, a heart yearning for
something that the world could not give.
She sat by the dying fire, in the gathering darkness, long after her
visitor had left her. Yes, this had been her need of late--something to
think of, something to wish for. Her life--so over full of the things
that women desire, pomp and luxury, troops of friends, jewels and fine
clothes, the "too much" that money always brings with it--had vacant
spaces, and hours of vague depression, in which the sense of loneliness
became an aching pain.