The Mystery of a Turkish Bath
"I hope, Madame Zairoff," she said, in her brisk, lively, fashion, "that
you will give me a little enlightenment about what you said yesterday.
This is just a leisure time with most of us, and I suppose mental
culture is not incompatible with hygienic pursuits."
"Assuredly not," said the Princess, smiling. "The more you cultivate
the mind the less you feel or care for the ailments of the body, and to
give those ailments even occasional insignificance, is to first forget,
and then banish them. If you draw your mind away from the thought of
pain, you cease to feel pain."
"But that would require a far stronger mental capacity than we possess,"
said Mrs Masterman. Then she suddenly remembered that she had not felt
a single gouty twinge the whole evening, because her mental
consciousness had been unusually excited. This remembrance made her
grow suddenly thoughtful and attentive to the discussion.
"I think," said Princess Zairoff, gently; "that we all make a great
mistake in setting any absolute limit to our mental capacity. It is
quite within our own power to dwarf or extend it. If we are content to
rest satisfied with a small amount of knowledge we can do so, and even
cease to suffer in our own self-esteem by feeling we are stupid, or
indolent, or ignorant. Our perceptions are gradually blunted, and
society is kind enough to case most of its remarks and opinions in a
sugar-coating, so that the real truth never reaches us. We gradually
find, then, that an opinion that soothes our personal vanity and
self-esteem is a very pleasant opinion. So long as we cherish that
falsehood, so long do we blunt our faculties of progress. Now it seems
a very extraordinary thing to me, who have long been accustomed to
investigate and direct the psychic side of nature, to find such numbers
and numbers of people who don't believe in _any psychic laws at all_,
far less care to investigate them as knowledge. The reason is simply
this, that they all are convinced that _one_ trivial, petty earth-life
is the one life for which they were created and are responsible,
therefore the only one they feel bound to investigate."
She paused and looked at the circle of grave and wondering faces.
"You have heard of the law of Karma, I suppose?" she said.
There was a murmur, vague, spontaneous, or doubtful, according to the
amount of comprehension excited by the question.
"It is a pity," resumed the Princess, "that it is not more generally
understood. What is the difficulty? I learnt it in my childhood just
as your English children learn their catechism. You have taken up the
doctrine of Evolution very strongly, but Karma is its very leading law,
so to speak. Man is perpetually working out and developing afresh the
energies, aspirations, and character with which his spirit was
originally endowed. He becomes, as it were, the product of the better
part of himself, that struggles to the surface again and again during
periods of incarceration in the flesh."
"Then you would convey that we all live over and over again?"
"Most certainly. It is the only rational way to account for the
injustice, the sorrows, and the miseries of earth. It gives long
opportunities for the modification of character; it acts as retribution
to the evil and the vicious and the selfish; it gives a far deeper sense
of responsibility than the shallow acceptance of mere creeds, because a
man's good or evil deeds become a series of actions with inevitable
consequences. If you teach him that he can throw off the results of a
bad life, and of all it has entailed upon his fellow man, by a brief
spell of penitence, or a blind, irrational faith in the sacrifice of a
Being he has neglected and ignored during the greater part of that life,
you really are only pandering to the selfish and cowardly side of his
nature."
A little shudder ran through the group at these bold words. Mrs Ray
Jefferson lifted her head and cast glances of triumph about, as one who
should say, "I told you she would shock you all!"
There was scarcely a man or woman there who did not attend church on
Sundays, and who had not managed to make a comfortable compact between
the tenets of religion and the demands of social and worldly pleasures.
Not one who, if taken to task on the momentous subject of a spiritual
future, could have given any rational explanation of why he or she held
certain vague ideas on the subject of salvation, or put off the deeper
consideration of the subject to some indefinite period when they would
have had their fill of vanities, and lost either the means or the desire
to pursue them.
And yet there was a subtle _frou-frou_ of rustling skirts as the women
drew slightly away, and a decided appearance of discomfort on the faces
of the men, to whom an unpleasant truth was suddenly and sharply
conveyed, and who found themselves strangely powerless to combat, or
argue out its real meaning.
CHAPTER NINE.
DISCUSSION.
Colonel Estcourt came to the rescue.
"No doubt," he said, "the subject and this view of the subject seems a
little strange to our friends here. We must remember they have not been
accustomed to hear it freely discussed, as we have."
"It _is_ strange," said Mrs Jefferson, rallying her energies, "but we
should not shirk its consideration for that reason. I quite agree with
Madame Zairoff that people don't think half seriously enough of their
real natures, the mysterious inner _something_ which we all feel we
possess, but whose voice we stifle in the din of the world. And yet,"
she added, sighing pathetically as she looked at the great Worth's
`creation,'--"the vanities are very pleasant. Why should we turn
anchorites?"
"There is not the slightest necessity to do that," said the princess,
smiling at the unuttered thought she had read in that glance. "Far from
it. The gravest duties of life are generally those that meet us in the
world, and are called forth by our actions in that world. All lives are
not meant to be isolated, and certainly none for the whole period of
earth life. A person would have to be very sure that he was _free_ to
cut himself adrift from his fellows before he would even be permitted to
do it."
"Permitted!" echoed Mrs Jefferson, rather vaguely. "But by whom?"
"The teachers of occult science," answered the Princess Zairoff.
"But who are they?" exclaimed the little American.
"That I cannot tell you," she answered, gravely. "They exist, and their
influence is already beginning to make itself felt. But it would be a
poor triumph to unveil the highest wisdom that humanity can ever learn,
in order to satisfy the idle and the curious, and the lovers of marvels.
Those who desire to learn can always do so, but nothing is forced upon
you, or even obtruded. I should not have opened my lips on the subject
had you not expressed a desire to hear something about it."
"I suppose," said Mrs Jefferson, eagerly, "you yourself are a believer
in occultism?"
"Madame Zairoff is a great deal more than that," said Colonel Estcourt;
"she is one of its most earnest students and most ardent votaries. If
you knew half of her marvellous powers you would congratulate yourselves
upon being permitted to receive her, unless, indeed," he added, with a
questioning glance at the beautiful woman beside him, "she has a fancy
to make converts."
The men became eager of entreaties to her so made, but the women held
back a little.
Princess Zairoff, however, assured them she had no intention of
proselytising. "It is quite true I am deeply interested in this
subject," she said, "but I should be sorry to bore you all with my
views, or the reasons for my holding those views. Psychic inquiry
demands a great deal more than cursory study. There are many mysteries
of nature that men have looked upon as enigmas, until patience and
research have solved them for them. Then they marvel how they could
have been blind so long! Magnetism, spiritualism, and clairvoyance have
all their mystical, as well as their explicable, side. It is only
because they don't readily lend themselves to the comprehension of our
material nature, that we try to scoff them into the limbo of absurdity
and imposture."
"Ah," said Mrs Jefferson. "Talking of clairvoyance, _that_ I do
believe in. I knew a coloured woman in America--the way that woman
would tell you things--it was enough to make your flesh creep! She'd
just go quietly off to sleep, and you might ask her anything you liked,
and she'd tell you; and it was all as true as possible."
The princess met Julian Estcourt's eyes, and smiled strangely. Mrs
Jefferson caught the glance.
"Perhaps," she said, "you're a clairvoyant?"
"I used to be," she said, gravely. "Perhaps my faculties have grown
blunted, for want of use. They are far from being as keen as they were
in India. However," and she smiled at the circle of faces, "I wonder if
any of you would believe me if I told you what you were talking about at
dinner time. First of all, you must remember, your conversation could
not have been betrayed to me by my friend, as he was not there, and that
my rooms are on the opposite wing to the dining saloon. Well, you
discussed different phases of spiritualism. This lady," she indicated
Mrs Masterman, "gave her experiences of imposture; you," looking at
Mrs Jefferson, "combated those experiences by your own, and this
gentleman."--she smiled at the cynical individual, who was hovering on
the outskirts of the circle--"silenced you all by reducing your theories
to strong commonsense facts. Shall I quote his own words? After the
rate people have been running after spiritual phenomena, they are
absolutely refreshing. He said that it was an intensely humiliating
idea to find oneself at the beck and call of any other human being when
you imagined you had done with this life."
"Good gracious!" almost screamed Mrs Jefferson, "but how on earth did
you hear all this? It's positively alarming."
"Well," said the princess, still smiling at the pale and
conscience-stricken faces, "you see I have a--faculty shall I call it?--
that enables me to hear and see anything I am curious about, or
interested in. I don't believe I could even explain how I do it; but it
seems easy and natural enough to myself. I only paid you a brief visit
to-night, more that I might have a little bit of proof to give you, that
the powers I spoke of do exist, and are capable of being trained to
almost any extent, if the motives for developing them are good. Have I
convinced you?"
She rose as she spoke, and stood facing them in her beautiful indolent
grace. She was garbed in some white soft stuff, which floated round her
like a cloud, the wide hanging sleeves were lined with faint shell-like
pink, and fell away from her bare lovely arms to the hem of her floating
draperies. She looked like some goddess of mythology, rather than a
living woman, and as Julian Estcourt gazed at her he felt a sudden
thrill of awe.
Could that more than mortal beauty ever really be his--his in the common
prose of possession that can never be disassociated with marriage--the
prose that is to the delicate subtle beauty of love, what the rough
touch is to the wings of the butterfly, the bloom of the grape?
For a moment the thought seemed like sacrilege. He could have fallen at
her feet in a sudden adoration of the divine beauty and purity of
embodied womanhood. "If ever she has lived before," he said in his
heart, "it must have been as a vestal virgin, or a martyred saint.
Where in the world is such another woman?"
The voice of the cynical philosopher broke on his ear and disturbed his
thoughts. "Madame, it is my humble opinion that you could convince us
of anything you desired. Happy are those who have so charming a