by A. S. Byatt
“I have to make known to you that an event of similar magnitude has just taken place in the field in which I have the honour to work, the field of Randolph Henry Ash. Letters have been discovered between him and the woman poet Christabel LaMotte, that are going to electrify—to upheave—the relevant associated fields. I cannot quote these letters—I have seen only a small few at this time. I can only express the hope that they may be freely made available to all scholars of all nations, for it is in the interest of international communication, free movement of ideas and intellectual property that they be most widely accessible.”
The finale of Cropper’s lecture was a product of his passion. The truth was, he had come to love the bright transparencies of the things he had acquired, almost as much as the things themselves. When he thought of Ash’s snuff-box, he thought not of the weight of it in his hand, the cold metal warming in his own dry palm, but also now of the enamelled cover magnified on the screen. Ash had never seen such gilded birds of Paradise, such blooming grapes, such deep red roses, though all their colours had been fresher in his time. He had never seen the sheen on the pearly rim as the light touched it through Cropper’s projector. At the end of the lecture, Cropper would present this object in hologram, floating in the church like a miraculously levitated object.
“Look,” he would say, “at the museum of the future. The Russians are already stocking their museums not with sculptures or ceramics, nor with copies in fibreglass or plaster, but with these constructions of light. Everything can be everywhere, our culture can be, is, worldwide. The original objects must be preserved where the air is best, where breath cannot harm them, as the cave-paintings at Lascaux have been damaged by those who came to marvel at them. With modern technology, mere possession of the relics of the past is of little importance. All that is of importance is that those entrusted with the care of these fragile and fading things should have the requisite skills—and resources—to prolong their life indefinitely, and to send their representations, fresh, vivid, even, as you have seen, more vivid than in the flesh, so to speak, journeying round the world.”
At the end of his lecture, Cropper would take out Ash’s large gold watch, and check with it his own perfect timing: 50 minutes 22 seconds, this time. He had given up his naive youthful practice of publicly claiming the watch, with a little joke about continuity, Ash’s time and Cropper’s. For although the watch had been purchased with his own funds, it was arguable that by his own arguments it should be stowed away safely in the Stant cabinets. He had wondered once about juxtaposing it in his, its owner’s, hand, with a hologram of itself. But he saw that his emotions, which were violent, about Ash’s watch, were private, not to be confused with his public appeals. For he believed the watch had come to him, that it had been meant to come to him, that he had and held something of R. H. Ash. It ticked near his heart. He would have liked to be a poet. He put it on the edge of the pulpit, to time his responses while he took questions, and it beat away cheerfully, whilst the Press took hold of the Unknown Sex Life of Eminent Victorians.
Meanwhile he followed up his vague memory that there had been mention of Christabel LaMotte in the papers of his ancestress Priscilla Penn Cropper. He telephoned Harmony City and asked for a search to be done of P. P. Cropper’s correspondence, which he had routinely copied into his computer archives. This produced, by fax the next day, the following letter.
Dear Mrs Cropper,
I am sensible of yr kind Interest in me—across all the wild wastes—shrieking gulls and tossing Ice—of the Atlantic. Indeed it is as strange a thing—that You—in your pleasantly Hot desert—should have knowledge of my small struggles—as that the Telegraph should utter imperatives of Arrest, or sale of Men and Commodities—from Continent’s Rim to Rim. But we live in a time of Change—I am told. Miss Judge, whose elegant Mind is habituated to the Gusts of the Invisible Powers, received an Intuition last night that the Veil of Flesh and Sense shall be rent away—there shall be no more Hesitation or gentle knocking on the Portal—but the Cherubim, the Living Creatures, shall walk the Earth, connected to us. And this she perceives as she perceives Matter of Fact—the moonlight and firelight in her quiet room—the cat—all sparks of electricity and Rays of starting hairs—coming in out of the Garden.
You say—you are told—that I have some Power—as a Medium. Indeed it is not so. I see not nor hear much that delights and pleasantly—Exhausts—the sensitive Motor—of Mrs Lees. I have seen Wonders worked by Her. I have heard Twang ling Instruments—all diffused through the Air, now here, now there, and in all places at once. I have seen Spirit hands of great beauty, and felt them Warm my own, and melt, or Evaporate in my clasp. I have seen Mrs Lees Crowned with Stars, a true Persephone, a light in Darkness. I have seen also a cake of Violet soap go spiralling like an angry Bird above our heads and heard it utter a strange Hum. But I have no—Skill—it is not skill—I have no Attraction, I Magnetise no vanished beings—they come not—Mrs Lees says they will, and I have Faith.
I have, it seems, a power of Scrying. I see Creatures—Animate and Inanimate—or Intricate Scenes—I have tried the Crystal Ball and also a Pool of Ink in a Dish—wherein I have seen these things: a Woman sewing, her face turned away, a great Gold Fish, whose every scale could be reckoned, an ormolu Clock I later—a week or more—first saw in its Solid Presence on the shelf of Mrs Nassau Senior—a suffocating Mass—of Feathers. These things begin—as points of Light—they cloud and thicken—and are present as it were solid.
You ask, as to my Faith. I do not know. I know true Faith when I meet it—as George Herbert who spoke daily to his Lord—chiding him for harshness it may be as:
O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue
To crie to thee
And then not heare it crying!
But in his poem “Faith” he does speak—of the Grave—and beyond—in great security.
What though my bodie runne to dust?
Faith cleaves unto it, counting ev’ry grain
With an exact and most particular trust
Reserving all for flesh again.
With what bodies, think you, with what corporeal nature come they, who crowd against our windows and are made solid in our thick air? Are they the bodies of the Resurrection? Are they, as Olivia Judge believes, manifest in temporary withdrawal of both Matter and Kinetic Force from the indomitable medium? What do we clasp if we are granted the unspeakable Grace—of Clasping—again? Orient and immortal wheat, Mrs Cropper, incorruptible—or the simulacra of our Fallen Flesh?
Dust falls from us daily as we walk, dust of us, lives a little in the air and is Trodden—we sweep away—Parts of Ourselves—and shall all these—jots and omicra—cohaere? O we die daily—and there—is it all reckoned and gathered, husks restored to gloss and bloom?
Flowers full—full of Scent—on our Tables—wet with the asperges—of this world—or that? But they wither and die, like any other. I have a Wreath—all brown now—of white rosebuds—will it bloom again—there?
And then I would ask of you, if you are wise, why those who come from, from that world—those visitants, those Revenants, those Loved Ones—why are they all so Singly and Singularly Cheerful in their mode of address? For we are taught that there is eternal progression—perfection by degrees—no sudden Bliss. Why may we not hear the Voices of Righteous Anger? We are guilty towards Them, we have Betrayed—for our own good—should they not Chide and be Terrible?
What constraint of Flesh or decorum renders them, I would inquire, so uniformly Saccharine, Mrs Cropper? Is there in our sad Age no wholesome Wrath, divine or human? As for me, I strangely hunger to hear—not assurances of Peace and Sanctification—but the True Human Voice—of wounds—and woe—and Pain—that I might share it—if it might be—as I should share it—as I would share All—with those I loved—in my earthly Life—
But I run on—maybe incomprehensibly. I have a Desire. I will not tell you what it is, for I am adamant I shall tell none—until—I have—the Substan
ce of it.
A crumb, Mrs Cropper, of living dust, in my hand. A crumb. So far denied …
Your friend, in thought,
C. LaMotte
Cropper decided that this letter showed strong symptoms of derangement. He left its interpretation aside for the moment. It gave him a pang of pure hunting pleasure. He was on the scent. It was in the house of Miss Olivia Judge, at a seance of Mrs Lees, that Randolph Henry Ash had carried out what he had once, in a letter to Ruskin, called “my Gaza exploit,” a name by which the episode was generally known in scholarly circles since Cropper, in The Great Ventriloquist, had used it as a chapter heading. In fact this letter was Ash’s only reference to the episode, which had presumably given rise to his poem Mummy Possest. Cropper took down his copy of The Great Ventriloquist and looked up his reference:
I do not think you should allow yourself to be taken in by these ghouls and goblins who play with our most sacred fears and hopes, in the desire, often enough simply to enliven the humdrum with a frisson, or to compose, conduct and orchestrate as it were the vulnerable passions of the bereaved and the desperate. I do not deny that human and inhuman things are maybe made manifest at such times—tricksy little goblins may walk and tap and tremble inkwells—men and women in the dark may hallucinate, as is well known in the case of the sick or the wounded. We have all, my dear friend, an infinite capacity to be deceived by desire, to hear what we long to hear, to see what we incessantly form to our own eye or ear as gone and lost—this is a near-universal human feeling—easy to play upon, as it is most highly-strung and unstable.
I was at a seance, a week back, where I made myself unpopular to the point of hissing and scratching—by catching at a floating wreath which dropped wet drops on my brow, and finding I was clutching the hand of the medium—one Mrs Hella Lees, who, when not transported, is a sombre enough Roman-looking matron, with a pallid face and dark shadows under liquid blackish eyes—but who can twist and howl and thrash with her arms when the spirits lay hold on her, greatly facilitating the withdrawal of a few fingers from the precautionary hands that clasp hers on the table. We sat in the dark—moony light through the curtains, a glow in the hearth from a dying fire—and saw much the usual things, I suppose, hands appearing (with long trailing muslinish drapes over their joins) above the far edge of the table, a fall of hothouse flowers from the air, the shuffling advance of an armchair from a corner, and the patting of our knees and ankles by something fleshy and certainly warm. And winds in our hair and floating phosphorous lights, you may imagine.
I am convinced as I may be that we are all being practised upon—I will not say by a simple fraud—but by someone who lives by such practising. So I put up my arms, and fished and pulled, and down came the house of cards, as far as I am concerned, with a veritable clattering to the ground of travelling fire-irons and thudding of books and tablelegs and dissonant chords on the concealed accordions and clack of the tongue of the handbell—all, I have no doubt, connected to the person of Mrs Lees by a Lilliputian cat’s-cradle of invisible threads. I have been much abused, since, for my Gaza exploit, and indeed called to task for a kind of mental destruction of spirit-matter and sensitive souls. A great bull in a china shop, I felt myself to be, amongst all the floating gauze and tinkling cymbals and soft perfumes. But if it were so, if the departed spirits were called back—what good does it do? Were we meant to spend our days sitting and peering into the edge of the shadows? Much is said of the experiences of Sophia Cotterell, who is said to have held her dead baby on her knee for a quarter of an hour whilst its hands patted its father’s cheeks. If this is fraud, playing on a mother’s harrowed feelings, it is wickedness indeed. But if it is not—and if the soft loading of the knee be not a goblin or a product of the imagination—does it not still make us tremble with a kind of sick distaste, to see such frenzied dwelling in the dark …?
In any case, here was trickery.…
Cropper thought fast. What if LaMotte, who seemed to be at the house of Olivia Judge, had also been present at the Gaza Exploit? An account of this seance existed also in The Shadowy Portal, the autobiographical reminiscences of Mrs Lees. As was her custom, Mrs Lees had protected the names of her clients and the private nature of the messages they had received. There had been twelve people at the seance, of whom three had retired into an inner room to receive particular communications, as the spirit guides had instructed through Mrs Lees. It was clear from Priscilla Cropper’s correspondence that Olivia Judge, an active promoter of many good causes, had at that time housed a group of female searchers after enlightenment, in her house in Twickenham. Priscilla Cropper had been in regular communion with Mrs Judge, who sent her regular accounts of the marvels evinced by Mrs Lees, as well as of the progress of other good causes, meetings, for spiritual healing and Fourierist doctrine, the emancipation of women and the proscription of strong drink.
The group in Twickenham was known as the Vestal Lights, a name that Cropper thought to be an affectionate term used among its members, rather than anything more formal. It might be that Christabel LaMotte had joined the Vestal Lights. Cropper was catching up on the biography of LaMotte, hampered by lack of access to the Lincoln papers, and by an incapacity to read the Lacanian riddles in which feminist speculations were couched. He was at this stage unaware of the lost year of LaMotte’s life, and not fully apprised of the circumstances of the death of Blanche Glover. He went to the London Library, at the top of which is an excellent shelf of spiritualist writings, and asked for The Shadowy Portal, which was out to another reader. He tried the British Library, whose copy had been, he was informed by a polite note, destroyed by enemy action. He sent off to Harmony City for a microfilm, and waited.
James Blackadder, with none of Cropper’s gusto, was picking his way through the London Library’s Shadowy Portal. He too had begun in total ignorance of the movements of Christabel LaMotte, and lacked Cropper’s certain knowledge of any connection between LaMotte and Hella Lees in 1861. But he had picked up an earlier reference to Mrs Lees in a letter Sir George had tried to intrigue him with, and he was engaged in a thorough rereading of Ash’s known work and life round the crucial months of 1859. He had read an article on Actiniae, or sea anemones, without enlightenment, and had noticed an absence of information about Ash in early 1860. He had reread Mummy Possest, which he had always thought anomalous in its hostility to its female protagonist and by extension to women in general. He asked himself now if this hitherto unexplained burst of bitterness was connected to the poet’s feelings about Christabel LaMotte. Or, of course, his wife.
The Shadowy Portal was a rich violet in colour, with gilded leaves and an embossed design on its cover, of a gilded dove, bearing a wreath, emerging from a keyhole-shaped black space. Inside, glued to the frontispiece, inside a frame of Puginesque arches, was a photograph of the medium, oval in shape. It showed a dark-skirted woman, seated at a table, her heavily beringed hands clasped on her lap, her beaded front hung with jet necklaces and a heavy funereal locket. Her hair, which hung about her face, was black and glossy, her nose aquiline and her mouth large. Her eyes, under heavy black brows, were deepset, and, as Ash had said, shadowed. It was a powerful face, strong-boned and fleshy together.
Blackadder leafed through the introductory matter. Mrs Lees came from a Yorkshire family with Quaker connections and had “seen” grey strangers in an early Quaker Meeting, where she was accustomed to seeing threads and clouds of odylic light run about the heads and shoulders of the Elders. On visiting a pauper hospital, at the age of twelve, with her mother, she had observed thick clouds of dove-grey or purplish light hovering above the forms of the sick, and had been able accurately to predict who would die and who would recover. She had become entranced in a Meeting and had given an oration in Hebrew, a language of which she knew nothing. She had provoked winds in closed rooms, and had seen her dead grandmother perched on the end of her bed, singing and smiling. Rapping, table-shifting and written messages on slates had followed, and a career as
a private medium. She had also had some success as a public speaker of Spiritual Discourses, under the control of her spirit guides, who were mostly a Red Indian girl called Cherry (an affectionate abbreviation of Cherokee) and a dead Scottish professor of chemistry, one William Morton, who had had a hard passage working out the debris of his spiritual scepticism before he realised his true nature and his mission to aid and inform those mortals still in the flesh. Some of these Discourses, on such topics as “Spiritualism and Materialism,” “Physical Manifestation and Spectral Light,” or “Standing on the Threshold,” were appended to the volume of reminiscences. These discourses, whatever their ostensible subject, all had a certain sameness—possibly the effect of trance—related to “that protoplasm of human speech flavoured with mild cosmic emotion” which Podmore discovered in the “dead level” style and sentiment of another inspired speaker.
Ash’s Gaza Exploit had raised her to an unusual pitch of unforgiving wrath.
Sometimes you may hear a positive person say, “The spirits are never able to perform in my presence.” Very likely—very likely indeed! But it should be no boast. If it is a fact, it is almost a disgraceful one. The fact that any human beings can take with them an element of such positiveness, a scepticism of such power, that it may overcome the influence of a mind disembodied, is certainly not to the credit of the individual. A positive mind entering a circle or seance for the investigation of spiritualism is like introducing a ray of light into the dark compartment of the photographer when not wanted; or like taking up a seed from under the ground to see if it be growing; or like any other violent intervention in the processes of nature.