For twenty years had Kingston Darnley awaited the call that was to come
to him from Isabel. He had made no effort to anticipate, or even to
summon, the voice that he desired. It seemed to him better, finer, more
loyal, to do nothing, to sit patient until the course of life should
bring him again into touch with what he had lost. At the appointed
moment the voice would reach him, and he would know it. But till that
time should come, his soul revolted against the notion of going out
into the devious byways of foolishness to call up the departed with
necromancy or any other prevailing fad. For all such illegitimate
dealings with the third-rate dead he had the strongest contempt; it
would be a profanity to attempt such proceedings in relation to Isabel;
wherever she was, she must be above those hireling spirits who go out
in attendance on séances and circles. So for many years he maintained
his resolution to be patient, and stiffened himself in disdain of cheap
and common spiritualistic methods. He had no idea that people of any
sense or breeding could find solace in futilities so apparent. Gundred
was his standard by whom he judged all other women’s pretensions; and
Gundred had, not so much a contempt as a rooted religious horror,
immitigable, medieval, of magic, palmistry, psychometry--all the many
names beneath which we disguise our curious longing to pry behind the
veil. The very notion of such things made Gundred so piously angry that
a certain reluctant, stifled belief could be guessed to underlie and
inspire her denunciations. Meanwhile, however, her attitude confirmed
Kingston in his, and he remained quiescent, until at last he came
across Mrs. Mercer-Laporte.
Mrs. Mercer-Laporte was dining with Mrs. Mimburn when Kingston and
Gundred met her, having accepted their aunt’s invitation as a solemn
but displeasing bi-annual duty. Gundred made a point of never evading
it; Gundred made a point of never enjoying it. Minne-Adélaïde, however,
with the years, had grown less flagrant; but the change made her no
less odious than before to Gundred, for her love of the illicit had now
turned from matters of the flesh to the darker mysteries of occultism,
clairvoyance, ghost-raising. She had taken to frequenting circles,
to entertaining phantoms, to wearing weird, shapeless clothes, and
collecting round herself a crowd of people famous in the ‘psychic’
world. And of these Mrs. Mercer-Laporte was the fine flower, the most
exalted, the most spiritual, the choicest in ways and manners.
She was almost obtrusively lady-like, tall and pale, and mild and
bland, in long trailing draperies of blue. She had sweet anæmic
features, and a watery eye that suffused with tears on the slightest
occasion. Her hair was thin and sandy, coiled into a knob on the top
of her narrow head; her mouth was large, lax, emotional; her glances
soulful and celestial. She wore a quantity of mystical-looking chains
and necklaces that gleamed and jingled as she languished from place to
place with a certain priestly elegance. She fell to Kingston’s lot at
dinner, and during the first part of the meal he felt himself truly
unfortunate. At last, however, a chance word caught his attention and
held it.
‘Ah, my dear Mr. Merrington,’ he heard her saying to her other
neighbour in high dulcet tones--‘dear, dear Mr. Merrington, believe me,
I have often had the sweetest converse with my dear dead.’ She sighed,
as if in rapture, while Mr. Merrington helped himself to a cutlet in
aspic. ‘They return to those that love them, Mr. Merrington,’ she went
on, as soon as the cutlet had been safely landed. ‘I never feel that
my dear ones have been lost. They are always near one--it only needs
a suitable medium to produce them. Oh, of course, I am not talking of
silly common séances. _Those_ spirits are people one would not wish to
have anything to do with; but, ah! the sweet and holy talks I have had
with my own beloved ones in suitable surroundings.’
At this point, seeing Mr. Merrington more favourably inclined towards
the cutlet than the conversation, Kingston thought he might be allowed
to take part in the talk.
‘One always feels,’ he said, ‘that from all accounts the spirits that
return must be those of exceedingly weak-minded people. The messages
they make so much ado about conveying are invariably such rubbish.’
Mrs. Mercer-Laporte turned the watery gleam of her smile upon him.
‘What is matter?’ she asked hierophantically. ‘Ah, Mr. Darnley, what
does matter matter? Believe me, you have been unfortunate in the
spirits you have met. In the innumerable vibrations of the Universe
there are rays innumerable that permeate the Whole with their blessed
dew, and consume in their pure radiance all the coarser manifestations
of matter. You speak without that inward higher knowledge which makes
us one with the Infinite, in those far Universes where the Veil of
matter exists no longer, and the blessed dead are free and untrammelled
by any more cares of this vulgar flesh!’ Mrs. Mercer-Laporte stopped
to take breath, and in an abstraction allowed herself to be given an
artichoke. Then, while she was unconsciously devouring it, Kingston
took advantage of the pause in her oration to recall her to the
question that interested him.
‘Then,’ he said, ‘soberly and without mistake, are you really sure that
we can ever converse with our own friends in other states of existence?’
But Mrs. Mercer-Laporte made a profession of irrelevance. In her world
it was the hall-mark of wisdom, the guarantee of occult knowledge to
which the profane crowd can never attain. She would not have lowered
her pretensions by sticking to the point.
‘Go,’ she said majestically, waving an inspired fork, ‘go to dearest
Mr. Minch in Albany Road--49, Albany Road, Mr. Darnley; Albany Road in
Notting Hill, remember. Go to him, Mr. Darnley, and be made happy. How
all of us, bound down in this sphere of matter, how we leap and burn to
attain the higher levels through which for ever the blessed ones are
wandering on their angel wings! Ah, rapture, rapture, Mr. Darnley! Go,
go to Mr. Minch.’
Twaddling and silly as her utterances were, yet the woman was obviously
sincere. Kingston had never met the type before, and now he saw that
it was not quite so cheap and contemptible as he had always imagined.
Predisposed by his secret longings, he prepared to lend a favourable
ear, and the dulled sobriety of his middle-aged calm began to break up
unexpectedly into a St. Martin’s summer of youthful enthusiasm.
‘What does Mr. Minch do?’ he asked.
‘Do?’ replied Mrs. Mercer-Laporte. ‘He draws the pearl from the Secret
Lotus! He will tell you your heart’s desire. He will tell you of the
sweet spirits hovering round you. He can see them all easily, and the
colour of your own soul’s halo he will tell you too. Sometimes it is
pink and sometimes it is blue. Mine,’ she added with pride, ‘is purple.
No one but me has a purple halo, Mr. Darnley. But every one of us has a
colour of our own, and dear Mr. Minch sees them distinctly and clearly,
and tells you all about them, and about the dear spirits as well. And
then, if there is anyone among them, anyone in the precious company
of the invisible with whom you particularly wish to enter into sweet
converse, Mr. Darnley, you might go on to Mr. Muddock at Hindhead.
Mention my name, though, just to show that you have a reverend and
faithful spirit. Mr. Muddock has _the_ most marvellous powers. He is
more than a mere psychometrist. He can actually make the dead resume
the garb of flesh, Mr. Darnley!’ perorated Mrs. Mercer-Laporte with
awful solemnity.
Suddenly Kingston’s resolve of twenty years weakened and broke. The
long odds were that this talk of spirits was the mere nonsense he
had always believed it. But still there could be no possible harm
in trying to find out. And if, in sober truth, Isabel were really
hovering on the edge of the other world, perpetually longing to enter
into communication with him again, how tragically foolish to neglect
the blessed opportunity because of any stupid materialistic qualm of
incredulity. After all, there might be something in it. In the avowed
belief that there was nothing, and the secret trust that there might
be a great deal, he resolved that he would go and see the wonderful
Mr. Minch. He intimated his decision to Mrs. Mercer-Laporte. The sibyl
showed much mystic rapture.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘sweet and holy, sweet and holy. The blessed ones are
waiting for you, Mr. Darnley, I feel convinced of it. I almost think I
see one near you now, but alas, I have not quite reached the percipient
plane as yet. But do go to dear Mr. Minch, and he will tell you her
name and all about her, and what she wants to say to you. I have had
the strangest, most marvellous experiences myself. My own sweet sister
Margaret is always hovering round me, Mr. Darnley. She died when she
was only six days old, and grew up in the spirit world. I recognised
her distinctly, as soon as dear Mr. Minch described her.... Golden
hair, he said, tall, blue eyes, high forehead, graceful figure. Then,
to make _quite_ sure, I said, “Does your name begin with M?” and Mr.
Minch asked the sweet spirit, and told me it said “Yes.” Then, of
course, I knew. “Margaret,” I cried--just like that--“is it Margaret?”
And it _was_ Margaret; she had come to tell me that I must go on
bravely, and everything would come right. Now, wasn’t that a holy,
happy experience, Mr. Darnley? Oh yes, you must go to Mr. Minch. Go
to-morrow night at eight. He has a public circle then, and crowds of
dear poor creatures go to him for help and comfort, and he heals them
all--not only people like you and me, Mr. Darnley, but all the poor
sweet cooks and housemaids.’
Kingston was not quite so strongly impressed as Mrs. Mercer-Laporte had
hoped by the reappearance of the somewhat immature sister Margaret.
Yet, though he derided himself for such weakness, he could no longer
resist the absurd temptation to put things to the test. He was quite
fixed in his determination to see Mr. Minch, if it were only to laugh
at him; and filled up the rest of the evening by cross-examining Mrs.
Mercer-Laporte on all the other pink and purple spirits by whom she was
apparently accompanied wherever she went. Gundred, who looked on the
entertainment as a tiresome duty, calling only for one’s second-best
gown, was surprised to see her husband so much amused and interested.
When he deliberately went across the room after dinner to sit once more
by Mrs. Mercer-Laporte, Gundred was quite startled by such a display
of enthusiasm. However, she quickly noticed that Mrs. Mercer-Laporte
had pink eyelids and a long bony neck; her astonishment subsided into
contemptuous tolerance, and then passed into a pious pity. She thought
how nice it was of Kingston to be so unnecessarily kind to the poor
thing, perhaps the weirdest of Aunt Minna’s weird collection of guests.
Gundred called back her attention to her own behaviour, and set herself
once more to giving an example of nice deportment to this mob of people
who clearly had no notion what decent clothes or manners might mean.
The least touch destroys a delicate balance, and Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s
rather watery personality it was that had the power, after so many
years of hesitation, to decide Kingston upon taking his long-delayed
plunge into spiritualistic circles. Little as he might think of
Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s own rhapsodies, they forced upon his mind the
reflection that many good and presumably prudent people derive much
comfort and sustenance from occult manifestations. With all allowances
made for credulity, hysteria, and affectation there yet, it seemed to
him suddenly, must remain an irreducible minimum of fact about the
ghostly communications which make the consolation of so many sad,
lonely lives. The laws that govern life and death are, when all is said
and done, so dimly, so doubtfully known and guessed, that bold must be
he who dares, on the supposition of impossibility, to deny continued
existence and continued volition to the blessed dead. Who was to take
it upon himself to say confidently that they cannot return, for reasons
that we know not, under natural laws of which we have no more suspicion
than had the eighteenth century of those that give us electricity?
Seeing the incalculable nature of the soul, the impalpable, mysterious
substance of its being, the probabilities that physical death only
give it freedom were, on the whole, very great and worthy of respect.
Why obstinately mock, for the sake of a few frauds and charlatans, at
a deep belief, as old as humanity, which has been held, and is held
to this day, by many of the wisest and holiest among men? What claim
to wisdom has the stiff-necked attitude of mere negation, based on
nothing but ignorant prejudice and the sceptic’s baseless notion of
what may or may not be possible to a thing of whose being, and the
laws that control it, he knows no more than any enthusiastic believer
in apparitions? Why not, then, take the braver, more honest course of
inquiring for one’s self into the circumstances of the spirit-world?
In any case the inquiry could do no harm; either way, one would gain
certainty, instead of the present dreary and unprofitable doubt. And
if Isabel’s purified soul were, after all, by some merciful freak of
creation, still roaming the world in her lover’s neighbourhood, how
utterly, childishly silly not to ascertain the fact and profit by it,
in place of continuing deaf to that dear desired voice, out of puerile
prejudice and a preconceived notion that such things could not be.
Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s enthusiasm had the effect of forcing all these
arguments on Kingston with new and irresistible force. He could hold
out no longer; his loneliness could afford to neglect no chances of
relief; he would try what consolation the Other World had to offer.
At the very notion fresh interest in life began to animate him. Without
any weak cowardice or giving way he had yet, since the tragedy of
twenty years before, lost any personal interest in every-day life,
its bustle and ambitions. That career into which his mother had hoped
so vaguely to push him and support him by the influence of March and
Brakelond, had long since faded from the foreground of his mind.
When at last Lady Adela gently and imperceptibly passed away, she
left her son fairly settled into the position of his wife’s husband.
Concentrated on thoughts of that beautiful past, he never again plucked
up any enthusiasm for the present or the future. It was not that he
was afraid of them, that he had shrinkings or morbid tenderness; they
simply failed to interest him any more. He retired into that small
secret life of his own, and the world gradually came to look on Mr.
Darnley as the pleasant but unnoticeable appendage to Lady Gundred.
Comfortably vast as was his income, Brakelond, that insatiable old
monster, swallowed it all and gave no thanks. Despite his money,
therefore, Kingston soon unconsciously held that subtly meek and
subordinate place of a man whose wife it is that owns the estate and
the money. He had no wish to assert himself, and even at Ivescar it
was Gundred who now held the reins, and concentrated the general gaze
upon herself. Now and then she deplored to their friends her husband’s
apathy towards the Primrose League, but, on the whole, she had
everybody’s agreement when she talked of him as ‘perfectly happy in his
library among his books.’ “To be perfectly happy in one’s library among
one’s books” is the blessed euphemistic privilege of the obscure rich,
and Kingston acquiesced gratefully in his friends’ attitude towards
his remoteness from their life and the empty clamours that seemed to
fill it. Accustomed long since to his own quiet, inconspicuous path, it
was with a kindling of vitality, then, that he contemplated sallying
forth into the spirit world. It was a stirring of his old self, an
emancipation from the obsession of Gundred’s majesty. Half ashamed,
half excited, half contemptuous did Kingston set out to enter into
relations with the dead.
Following Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s recommendation he began with Mr.
Muddock. But Mr. Muddock turned out to be an illiterate and frowzy
prophet, too clearly calculated for the need of ‘poor sweet cooks and
housemaids’ to be of much assistance in the quests of better-educated
people. However, after a brief spasm of disgust, Kingston decided to
continue his enterprise, and gradually found himself involved in the
higher spiritualistic circles. At first he had to be content with
the ordinary hireling mediums, but as time went by, and his appetite
became whetted by the glimpses of apparent truth that he gathered here
and there amid thick and more or less palpable frauds, he began to
be aware that there existed, behind the common world of second-rate
believers, a sort of upper world in touch with the Beyond. To anyone
with money the lower sphere of materialization was open, and the
meetings of Mr. Muddock and his confrères were nightly crowded with
the lonely and the bereaved, eager for a moment’s conversation with
the lost beloved. But these interviews never satisfied Kingston, and,
as he began to discern the higher possibilities behind, he secretly
strained every nerve to enter that set of his own people which held,
or proclaimed that it held, genuine and constant communication with
those ‘that have passed over.’ The task was not altogether easy, and
had to be cautiously ensued, for fear of waking the suspicions and the
disapproval of Gundred. Kingston found himself despising himself for
the cowardice of such a course, until he realized that what he was
aiming at involved no sort of real disloyalty to Gundred, and that
any concealment he might practise was in the interest of her peace
and happiness. Satisfying himself obstinately with this rather jejune
and sophistical excuse, he pursued his way, and at last found himself
admitted to the upper section of the spiritualistic world.
Here at last he met men and women of his own sort, men and women of
birth and breeding and intelligence, whom no cheap claptrap could
convince, no vulgar jugglery deceive. And yet these people, keen and
apparently sensible, believed passionately and whole-heartedly in
the manifestations they evoked. Their lives were ruled by ghostly
advice elicited at their meetings, their desolation consoled by almost
daily conversation with their beloved dead, their doubts turned into
certainty on all points by revelations from beyond the grave. They
claimed impartiality, and cultivated pure enthusiasm. And if the
tragedy of the pitiful, unholy quest had been bitterly heart-rending
among the illiterate and credulous crowds that haunted Mr. Muddock’s
circles, and sustained themselves with ‘demonstrations’ and aitchless
conversation with the inferior dead, far more so was it among these
people of Kingston’s own world, where devotion served as conviction,
and the anguish of longing was forced to masquerade as its own
fulfilment. It was indeed a poignant, tragic life in which Kingston now
found himself. Men and women, one and all, were gaunt and haggard of
soul with their insatiable hunger. Some of them seemed philosophers,
convinced that they were following on the track of a clear truth;
others were manifest saints, gentle sacred souls, hopefully worshipping
a Holy Grail of their own desire’s invention. Exalted, inspired,
rarefied, filled with an apparent serenity of devotion, their company
gave an impression of strange unearthly happiness, until the keen edge
of their underlying agony was seen piercing through the superficial
calm of their lives. The whole air round them was poisoned by loss and
the inability to bear it. Their souls lived in a fierce, unacknowledged
groping after the lost things they had loved. Men for vanished friends,
women for lovers and children long dead--each had some dreadful secret
craving, some inner infidelity towards the Eternal Mercy of life.
There were old polished men of their world, strong intellects sapped,
and keen eyes dulled in one direction only, by some hoarded passion
never to be parted with, not even for the sake of happiness and
peace and wisdom. There were beautiful white-haired women, sweet and
gracious with much sorrow in bygone years, tired with recollections,
and divorced from the heats of life, yet still held in a bitter
bondage, drugging their pain with this piteous, passionate cult for
the burden they had lost. Life and death had combined to offer them
calm and release from torment; but they would have none of any such
release--clung to the ghost of their dead torment, and redoubled it by
the zest with which they told themselves that they soothed it.
Into this world of insatiable emotion Kingston threw himself
heartily--hopefully, too, seeing that the sincerity of his
fellow-worshippers left no room for doubt, and that their enthusiastic
belief seemed to give fair hope that it was justified. But soon he saw
the fearful tragedy that lay beneath their enthusiasm, and realized how
determined an illusion it was that they cultivated. He, too, no less
than they, yearned and groped, but his nature, cooler, perhaps, than
theirs, could not accept for pure gold of revelation the base ore of
hysteria and fanaticism that they unwittingly but obstinately imposed
upon themselves for truth. Their spirit-voices were nothing but the
frustrate echoes of their own cries, cast back to them across the great
gulf that separates the ignorant, unfaithful living from the free,
glorified dead. Sounds and sights floated thick in their midst--honest
sounds and sights, born of no trickery, indeed, but--though none dared
to own it--engendered by the frantic zeal of the searchers themselves.
They and none other supplied the words to which they listened in such
ecstatic awe; they and none other evoked those vanished tones, those
pale reflections of the well-beloved in which they took such comfort.
Their very sincerity, their very rapture, only made more terrible
the delusion on which they sustained themselves, the emptiness of
the phantoms with which they tried to fill the lives that their own
distrust had left to them desolate. Only want of faith can make death
a reality. These sad, starving people, having made reality out of the
shadow, now found themselves forced to create new shadows to exorcise
the old. They had allowed themselves to think that death had power
to sunder their loves, and now, after that first self-deception, the
need was fierce upon them to invent another to nullify the first, and
wipe out that death to which only their weak terrors had given an
objective existence. From the beginning to the end they were altogether
tragic--in their sorrow, in its cause, and in the means they took to
heal it. Kingston, as the meetings passed, found himself more and
more aloof from their consolations, more and more cold towards the
manifestations that made the comfort of their poor struggling days.
It was not here, not amid these faint voices crying what the listeners
wanted to hear, not amid these dim ghosts of bygone passion that his
own still living, throbbing passion could hope to come once more into
contact with Isabel. He pitied his fellow-seekers, but he stood aloof
from them. Sorrowing for the intensity of their false joy, he could
gain from their cult no sustenance for his own hunger. His hunger was
not as theirs, and the beloved fallacies that supported them could
give no nourishment to him. He saw that their quest was false, their
methods a mere sop flung to their own desire. Gradually Kingston
withdrew himself from their company. The spiritualistic world, after
all, held no solid help or conviction for him. He passed away into
everyday life again, and went back to his quiet expectancy at Gundred’s
side. Sooner or later the wonderful thing would happen, sooner or later
the holy mystery of separation stand revealed, but no unlawful human
methods could avail to hurry the processes of God. They of little faith
might make for themselves a world of phantoms in which to worship a
phantom; he must persevere alone, waiting patiently for what was to
come. Gladly, if he could, would he have found satisfaction in the
hollow solace invented by his fellow-seekers, but as his nature, as
his more exalted perceptions, could not allow him any such makeshift
consolation, the sooner he quitted so unwholesome and unsatisfactory a
life the better. At least, he had the comfort of feeling that he had
left no method untried, had not neglected any possible chance. But
the alley into which he had strayed had been found blind, a short cut
towards the Great Nowhere. He must return into the broad, beaten track
of life, and go steadfastly forward, in confidence that somewhere, some
day, he should inevitably meet again his lost companion.