Helen Vardon's confession
and to savour again and yet again the bitterness of the Dead Sea fruit
of sorrow.
So it was with me in these unhappy days. The seclusion of the workshop
gave me the opportunity for long hours of meditation, in which I would
trace and retrace the growth of my love for Jasper, would think with
passionate regret of what might have been, and speculate vaguely upon
the future. So far from seeking distraction in these first days of my
trouble, I kept aloof from my comrades, so far as I could; shut myself
in the workshop, or in my room, or wandered abroad alone, following
the great eastern thoroughfares where I was secure from the chance of
meeting a friend.
But the distractions which I would have avoided came unsought. First,
there was the visit with Peggy to Miss Tallboy-Smith. It was due but a
day or two after my parting with Jasper, and I loathed the thought of
it; but it had to be; for who could say how much it might mean to
Peggy? And as it turned out, I should never have forgiven myself if I
had failed her. I had looked for a rather dull social call flavoured
with porcelain. But it was quite otherwise. Miss Tallboy-Smith had at
length heard of Peggy’s genius and had invited a few specially choice
connoisseurs to meet her, including Mr. Hawkesley--unless he had
invited himself. At any rate, there he was, reverential and admiring,
but yet with a certain air of proprietorship which I noted with
interest and not without approval. It was quite a triumph for Peggy,
and she took it very modestly, though with very natural satisfaction.
To me, however, there was a fly in the ointment, though quite a small
one; for Mr. Hawkesley proposed an exploration of the Wallace
Collection, which Peggy had never seen, and which I felt bound, for
her sake, to agree to. But I looked forward with prospective relief to
the time--not far distant, I suspected--when these two pottery
enthusiasts would be intimate enough to dispense with a chaperon.
Then there came a distraction of another kind. One evening after tea,
Lilith took me apart, and looking at me with some concern, said: “Our
Sibyl has not been herself of late. I hope she is not being worried
about anything.”
“We all have our little troubles, Lilith,” I replied, “and sometimes
we don’t take them so resignedly as we should.”
“No,” she rejoined. “Resignation is easier when the troubles are
someone else’s. But we are very concerned to see you looking so
sad--not only Margaret and I, but all of us. We are all very fond of
you, Sibyl, dear, and any of us would think it a privilege to be of
help to you in any way. You know that, don’t you?”
“I have good reason to. No woman could have found kinder or more
helpful friends than I have in this house.”
“Well,” she said, “friends are for use as well as for companionship.
Don’t forget that, if there is any little service that any of us can
render you.”
I thanked her very warmly, and she then opened a fresh topic.
“Some time ago, Sibyl, we were speaking of psychical experiments, and
I suggested that you might like to see some carried out by my friend,
Mr. Quecks, who is an authority on these subjects. Mr. Quecks was away
from home at the time, on a lecturing tour in Kent; but he is home
again now. I wrote to him about you and have had one or two talks with
him, and he has asked me to invite you to a little demonstration that
he is giving to some friends next Friday evening. Would you care to
come with me?”
I would much rather not have gone, but I knew that a refusal would
disappoint Lilith, who had set her heart on converting me.
Accordingly, I accepted the invitation, and we were arranging details
of the expedition when Peggy joined us. As soon as she heard what was
afoot she was all agog.
“Oh, what fun!” she exclaimed. “You’ll let me come, too, won’t you,
Lilith? I did so enjoy it last time.”
Lilith, however, was by no means eager for her company, for the
Titmouse was a rank unbeliever, and made no secret of it.
“What is the use of your coming, Peggy?” said she. “You don’t believe
in the super-normal. You would only come to scoff.”
“Perhaps I should remain to pray,” rejoined Peggy. “It is no use
preaching to people who are already convinced. And I should just love
it. That Quecks man is so _frightfully_ amusing. He is the funniest
little guffin you ever saw, Sibyl. Won’t you let me come, Lilith?”
“Of course you can come if you really want to,” Lilith replied with
evident reluctance. “But you shouldn’t speak of Mr. Quecks as if he
were a mountebank or a buffoon. He may not be handsome, but he is a
very learned man and very sincere.”
“I beg your pardon, Lilith,” said Peggy. “I won’t call him a guffin
any more. And thank you ever so much for letting me come.”
The arrangements being thus settled, it is only fair to Peggy to say
that she endeavoured, as far as possible, to treat the demonstration
quite seriously. Even in our private conversations she made no further
disparaging references to Mr. Quecks, though I did gather that her
anxiety to be present at the séance was not unconnected with a desire
to keep an eye on him to see that he did not impose on me.
Mr. Quecks’ house was situated in a quiet street off Cromwell Road,
Kensington, and the “demonstration” took place in a large room
intermediate in character between a library and a drawing-room,
lighted by three electric bulbs, all of which were encased in silk
bags, so that the illumination was of a twilight dimness. The visitors
were about a dozen in all, and while we were waiting for the late
arrivals Mr. Quecks made a few observations upon super-normal
phenomena in general.
To me he required no disparagement from Peggy or anyone else, his own
appearance doing all that was necessary in that respect. The first
glance at him impressed me disagreeably; but then he was a manifestly
uncomely man, with a large, bald face and long, greasy black hair,
which was brushed straight back and accumulated in an untidy bush at
the nape of his neck. He spoke unctuously, and his manner was
confident, persuasive, didactic and authoritative, and he gave me the
impression of a man who was accustomed to dealing chiefly with
women--his present audience was composed of them exclusively.
“In interpreting the results of the experiments which we are about to
perform,” he observed, “we have to bear in mind that psychical and
super-normal phenomena, inasmuch as they are not concerned with
material things, are not directly appreciable by the senses. We cannot
see or touch the subliminal self, either our own or that of others.
But neither can we see the electric current or the Hertzian waves. We
know of their existence and properties indirectly, through their
effects. Electricity can be transformed into heat, light or sound, and
these can be perceived by means of the radiator, the electric lamp or
the telephone, which act directly on our senses. So it is with the
hidden subconscious self. Invisible itself, it can be made to produce
effects which are perceptible to the conscious mind through the
senses, and through those effects its own existence is revealed.”
This sounds reasonable enough; but the experiments themselves were
rather disappointing on the whole. Perhaps I expected too much; or
perhaps the preoccupied state of my mind did not allow me to bring to
them sufficient interest or attention. Moreover, Mr. Quecks had an
assistant (I had almost said “confederate”) whose appearance pleased
me no more than his own; a wall-eyed, taciturn woman of about
thirty-five, of the name of Morgan, who acted as the “percipient”--the
word “medium,” I noticed, was not used--and helped to prejudice me
against the experiments.
We began with a demonstration of thought-transference, which I found
dull, tiresome and unconvincing. Probably I was unreasonable; but the
apparent triviality of the proceedings, which resembled a solemn and
unspeakably dull drawing-room game, influenced my judgment. The
percipient, Miss Morgan, being seated, blindfolded, in the middle of
the room, a pack of playing cards and another pack of cards, each of
which bore a single capital letter, were produced. A card was drawn
out at random and held up behind the percipient and in view of
everyone else, including Mr. Quecks, who held the percipient’s hand.
Miss Morgan then guessed the card or the letter. Sometimes she guessed
correctly, sometimes nearly correctly, sometimes quite incorrectly.
The proportion of correct guesses, Mr. Quecks informed us, was vastly
greater than could be accounted for on the law of probabilities. And I
dare say it was. But the exhibition left me cold, as did those of
table-tilting and planchette writing which followed. Even the
“_pendule explorateur_,” which had so impressed me on a previous
occasion, fell flat on this. For, since that rather startling
experience, I had given some thought to the magic pendulum, and
believed that I had found at least a partial explanation of its
powers. Accordingly, when my turn came to try the “autoscope,” I took
the string in my fingers and shut my eyes; and when Mr. Quecks
objected to this, I gazed fixedly at the opposite wall, seeing neither
the pendulum nor the clockwise alphabet. Under these conditions the
pendulum was a complete failure; it would spell nothing. But when I
looked steadily at the pendulum and the letters, the swinging ball
spelled out clearly the word that I chose--Lilith.
I was thus in a decidedly sceptical frame of mind when the next set of
experiments began; and even these produced, at first, no effect on me
other than a slight tendency to yawn. Their object was to demonstrate
the existence of a “psychometric” power or faculty; that is to say, a
power to detect in certain material objects a permanent impression
left by contact with some particular person. Such a faculty, Mr.
Quecks explained to us, was possessed by certain exceptionally
sensitive persons. He had it to some extent himself, but in Miss
Morgan it was developed in a really remarkable degree, as the
experiments which were to follow would convince us.
Hereupon Miss Morgan was once more blindfolded, all the lights but one
were switched off, so that the room was almost in darkness, and the
demonstration began. One of the visitors, at Mr. Quecks’ whispered
request, slipped a ring from her finger and passed it to him. By him
it was handed to Miss Morgan, who solemnly applied it to her forehead.
Then followed an interval of expectant silence, in which I thought I
heard a faint giggle from Peggy Finch, who sat in the row in front of
me.
At length Miss Morgan opened her mouth and spake. It seemed that she
was seeing visions, and these she described in detail. Naturally I was
unable to check them, nor could I judge whether they had any relation
to the ring. The owner of that article stated, at the close of the
experiment, that the visions, as described, corresponded closely to
certain places and events which were known to her and to no one else.
Which seemed conclusive enough; but yet it left me only with a feeling
that the whole proceeding was ridiculous and trivial.
The next experiment was performed with a glove from the hand of
another visitor, and when this was concluded, Mr. Quecks whispered to
a lady in the front row, who whispered to Peggy, who turned to me.
“He wants your handkerchief, Sibyl,” she said in a low whisper.
I took my handkerchief from my pocket and gave it to Peggy, who
squeezed it up into a ball and passed it to the lady in front, who
passed it to Mr. Quecks, who handed it to Miss Morgan; who, in her
turn, applied it to her forehead as if it had been an ice-bag, and
assumed an attitude of intense mental concentration. And again the
sound of a suppressed giggle came from the neighbourhood of the
Titmouse.