SITTING WITH A SIBYL.
The connexion of modesty with merit is proverbial, though questioned by
Sydney Smith, who says their only point in common is the fact that each
begins with an--m. Modesty, however--waiving the question of
accompanying merit--is a trait which, in my mystic inquiries and devious
wanderings, I meet with far more frequently than might be expected. I
have just met with two instances which I hasten to put on record, if
only to confute those who say that the age in general, and spirit
mediums in particular, are not prone to be modest and retiring. My first
modest person was a Spirit Photographer; my second was a Sibyl. I might
have looked for bashfulness in the latter, but was certainly surprised
to meet with it in the former. I suddenly learnt from the Medium the
fact that a Spirit Photographer had settled down in my immediate
neighbourhood, and the appearance of his ghostly advertisement brings to
my recollection some previous mystic experiences I myself had in this
way.
A now celebrated medium, Mrs. Guppy, née Miss Nicholl, was, in the days
of her maidenhood, a practitioner of photography in Westbourne Grove;
and, as far as I know, she might have been the means of opening up to
the denizens of the Summer Land this new method of terrestrial
operations. Ever on the qui vive for anything new in the occult line, I
at once interviewed Miss Nicholl and sat for my portrait, expecting at
the least to find the attendant spirit of my departed grandmamma or
defunct maiden aunt standing sentinel over me, as I saw departed
relations doing in many cartes de visite in the room. I confess there
was a kind of made-up theatrical-property look about the attendant
spirits which gave one the idea that the superior intelligences must
have dressed in a hurry when they sat or stood for their portraits. They
looked, in fact, if it be not irreverent to say it, rather like so many
bundles of pneumatical rags than respectable domestic ghosts. However,
as long as I got the ghosts I did not care about the dress. Tenue de
soir point de rigueur, I would have said, as they do outside the cheap
casinos in Paris, or "Evening dress not required," if one must descend
to the vernacular. Well, I sat persistently and patiently through I am
afraid to say how many operations, and the operator described me as
being surrounded by spirits--I always am according to Mediums, but my
spirits must be eminently unsociable ones, for they seldom give me a
word, and on this occasion refused to be "taken" as resolutely as the
bashful gentleman in the _Graphic_ who resisted the operations of the
prison officials to obtain a sun-picture of his interesting
physiognomy. There was indeed a blotch on one of the negatives, which I
was assured was a spirit. I could not see things in that light.
Foiled on this particular occasion my anxiety was dormant, but never
died out. I still longed for a denizen of the other world to put in an
appearance, and kept on being photographed over and over again until I
might have been the vainest man alive, on the bare hope that the artist
might be a Medium malgré lui or undeveloped. I had heard there were such
beings, but they never came in my way. I was really serious in this
wish, because I felt if it could be granted, the possibility of
deception being prevented, the objectivity of the phenomena would be
guaranteed. At this time I was heretical enough to believe that most
ghosts were due to underdone pork or untimely Welsh rare-bits, and that
the raps assigned to their agency were assignable to the active toes of
the Medium which might be anywhere and up to anything with the
opportunities of a dark séance.
A short time since, however, M. Buguet, a celebrated French Spirit
Photographer came from Paris to London, and received sitters for the
modest sum of _30s._ each. This would have been much beyond my means;
but I suppose my wish had transpired, and that gentleman sent me an
invitation to sit gratis, which, I need not say, I thankfully accepted.
I felt sure that M. Buguet did not know either my long-lost grandmother
or lamented maiden aunt, so that any portraits I might get from him
would be presumably genuine. I sat; and over my manly form, when the
negative came to be cleaned, was a female figure in the act of
benediction. I have no notion how she got there--for I watched every
stage in the operation, and selected my plate myself; but neither, on
the other hand, does she bear the faintest resemblance to anybody I ever
knew.
Still M. Buguet is not my modest photographer. Elated by success so far,
I called on the local gentleman who advertised in the _Medium_; but the
local gentleman was "engaged." I wrote to the local gentleman appointing
an interview; but the local gentleman replied not. Yet still his
advertisement remains; and I see in every spiritualistic album dozens of
"property" relations in the shape of quasi-spirits, and wonder why the
local gentleman would not take me, so as to be immortalized in these
pages.
Equally modest was the advertising Sibyl. I wrote to the Sibyl, and
somebody replied, and "respectfully declined." But I was not to be done.
There is more than one Sibyl in the world. I called on No. 2 without
announcing my intention or sending in my name. This Sibyl at once
admitted me, and I mounted to the first floor front of a respectable
suburban lodging-house.
I waited anxiously for a long time, wondering whether Sibyl was
partaking of the onions, whose presence in that modest domicile was
odoriferously evidenced to my nose, though it was then scarcely
half-past one o'clock. Presently a portly middle-aged man, who might
have been Sibyl's youthful papa, or rather aged husband, entered, wiping
his mouth. He had clearly been partaking of the fragrant condiment.
Where was Sibyl?
"She would be with us directly," the gentleman said, varying the
proceedings by picking his teeth in the interim.
She _was_ with us in a minute, and never, I suppose, did picturesque
anticipations more suddenly collapse and come to grief than mine. I had
pictured Sibyl a bright ethereal being, and the realization of my ideal
weighed twelve stone, if an ounce. She was a big, fleshy, large-boned
woman of an utterly uncertain age, not without considerable good-nature
in her extensive features; but the pervading idea that you had when you
looked at Sibyl was that there was _too much of her_. I could not help
thinking of the husband who said he did not like a big wife: he
preferred two small ones; and then again I fell into wonderment as to
whether the man who was still engaged with his dental apparatus was
Sibyl's husband or papa.
I told them I was anxious to test Sibyl's powers; and, with a few passes
from his fat dumpy hands, the man soon put her to sleep. It looked to me
like an after-dinner nap, but I was told it was magnetic. It might have
been. By the way, I had unmistakable evidence from my olfactory organ
that Sibyl _had_ been eating onions.
I had provided myself with two locks of hair, as I had heard that
"psychometry" was among Sibyl's qualifications. I handed her the first,
and she immediately proceeded to describe a series of tableaux which
appeared to pass through her mind. She kept handling the lock of hair,
and said, "The person to whom this belongs is ill--weak," which was true
enough, but might, I thought, be a shot. I should mention, however, that
it was quite impossible Sibyl could know me. She had not even heard my
name. She then described a bedroom, with some person--she could not see
what person--lying in bed, and a lady in a blue dress bending over her.
This, again, I thought might flow out as a deduction from her premises
of the hair belonging to an invalid. The blue dress was correct enough,
but still so little special as to be a very possible coincidence. She
then, however, startled me by saying, "I notice this, that on the table
by the bedside, where the bottles of medicine are standing, milk has
been spilt--a large quantity--and not wiped up." This was a trivial
detail, not known to me at the time, but confirmed on subsequent
inquiry.
She then passed on to describe a second tableau, where the same person
in the blue dress was in a room _all hung over with plates_, along with
a gentleman whom she described very accurately. He was the occupant of
the house where the patient lay, and, having a hobby for old china, had
turned his dining-room into a sort of crockery shop by hanging it all
over with the delf.
This was curious enough, though not very convincing. It seemed as though
the influence of this person who had given me the hair was stronger than
that of the hair itself. With the second lock of hair we failed utterly.
She said that also came from a sick person, but a person not sick with
the same disease as the other. She was quite positive they came from
different people, and asked me to feel the difference of texture. I am
sorry, for Sibyl's sake, to say they both came from the same person, and
were cut at the same time, though from different parts of the head,
which made one look silkier than the other.
As a test of Sibyl's clairvoyance, this was not very satisfactory. She
read the inscription on a card when her eyes were bandaged, pressing it
to her forehead; but then olden experiences in the way of blindman's
buff convince me that it is very difficult to say when a person is
properly blinded.
Altogether, then, I never quite got over my previous disappointment at
Sibyl's bulk. Had she been pretty and frizzle-headed like Miss Annie Eva
Fay, or like Miss Showers or Miss Florence Cook, I might have been
disposed to make more of her coincidences and to wink at her failures.
We _are_ so liable to be led away by our feelings in these matters.
Sibyl was large, had eaten onions, and would have been improved if she
had brushed her hair, and so I am afraid I rather grudged the somewhat
exorbitant fee which the fat-handed man--not Sibyl--took and pocketed in
an interval of his dental pursuit, and I passed out from that suburban
lodging, none of us, I fancy, very well satisfied with one another. I
have an idea I unconsciously expressed my inner feelings of
disappointment with Sibyl and something stronger in reference to her
male companion.