BEFORE THE PUBLIC
The large hall of the Lennox is filled with a curious and heterogeneous
assemblage of men and women. The majority of those present are believers
in spiritism, and ready and more than willing to credit all the
phenomena witnessed to spirit agency. A few are there who came in the
honest endeavor to learn the truth and to discover if there is something
in the mystic realms beyond the sight which may be made clear to their
comprehension. There are others, however, who came with malice
aforethought, desiring to thwart and expose the trickery which they
believe is practised by the medium.
Before all this multitude she whom we have called Mrs. Lucien appears to
give an exhibition of psychometric reading and slate-writing.
She has changed slightly since we saw her. She is even thinner and more
ethereal looking than she was then. Her eyes have a pained, timid look
in them, as if the life she is leading is fraught with haunting ghosts
and mocking spectres, with tortured nerves and sleepless nights. Mrs.
Lucien has had much to cause her extreme dejection and pain.
These exhibitions which she gives are for the most part but as dreams to
her. She has little realization of what she says or does in the trance
state into which she passes. But it has happened once or twice that she
has been unable to become fully passive and entranced. Then she has been
obliged to simulate such a condition or wholly disappoint her audience
and make an utter failure of her work. It is the fear of this deception,
to which she may be compelled to resort at any time, which frightens her
and fills her with self-loathing.
She has that fear upon her now as she comes forward and sits down before
the audience, her pale face waxen in the gaslight.
If she should fail! She sits very still, seeking to hold her thoughts in
abeyance, that she may woo that sweet forgetfulness and waking dream
which reveals to her the mysteries of the invisible.
It is coming.
Her hands grow cold and sink weightily upon her lap. She feels the
mystic power enveloping her, creeping down, over and around her. The
lights grow dimmer and dimmer. Her eyelids are freighted with leaden
compresses.
Soon eyes and ears are closed to all external sights and sounds. Strange
melodies, fitful and harmonious, sound within, and strange lights, like
electric sparks, flash across and illumine the recesses of her brain.
She feels as if mind and body had become separate and apart. Thoughts
new and uncalled for come to overwhelm her. Then voices from out of the
distance are heard. Words, words come in numbers, half-consciously to
her lips, but she hears them as afar off. She sees with closed eyes, and
in this inner vision message after message written out before her.
Words written upon a scrap of paper and crushed in her hand stand out in
bright distinctness before her mental vision. Words in languages other
than those she speaks are known to her. She forgets them as soon as
uttered. No—hark! “Tell Harry his mother is waiting for him.”
Did her lips utter those words? She cannot tell. Words, words,
words—where do they come from? She is under control. No power or
volition of her own consciousness moves her. Songs, sweet songs, she
hears. Does she sing them? Is she out of mortal life or in it?
It is over!
The world in which she has been living floats away like evanescent smoke
in ether-filled space. She awakens to the unfriendly glare of the
foot-lights, the restless, garish crowd, the unfeeling world again.
Ugh! She shudders. If she could never more waken. Whence comes this
pain, this actual pain which racks her?
Even that is over at last, and she can arise and escape from it all. How
gladly she would shut herself up in her own little room with Dolores
again. But it must not be. The five dollars a night for these
exhibitions must be earned and laid by for Dolores.
She puts on her wraps and enters her carriage to be whirled away to the
hotel, her temporary abiding place. What are her thoughts and
reflections upon this lonely, homeward ride!
“O God, O God!” she is saying; “show me some other way! Am I wrong,
wicked to do this? Where does it come from, this power? From Thee or
from the shades of darkness? If I only knew! If I only knew! Why did it
ever come to me? Why should my life be so differently ordered from that
of other and happier women? Can it be I am the same who was once safe
and sheltered in the comforts of home? Safe? Did not the serpent enter
my Eden—even there?
“O God! why did it come? Can this life be real? If I could but waken and
find it all a dream.”