by E. F. Benson
The pencil gave a great dash across the paper, and instantly Archie knew that his hand had returned to its normal allegiance. At once the sea-thoughts that had occupied him seethed and roared in his brain, and his hand was straining to put them down. He tore off the involuntary message from his block, and, laying it aside, plunged with all the force of his conscious self into this ecstasy of conveying, with black marks on white paper, all that had obsessed him this morning as he swam out to sea, and lay between sun and water, the happiest of earthly animals, and the nearest to the key of the symbol. Then, after a half-hour of pure interpretation, that was finished too, and he lay back in his chair and picked up the Martin-message again. It seemed a nonsensical affair when he so regarded it. What was his warning, after all? What did that mean? He had had no warning of any sort. But it was strange that, after all those years of silence, Martin should come to guide him again, though at the self-same time he told him not to look for further guidance.
Archie put the paper with its well-remembered, upright handwriting back on the table again, lay back in his long chair, drowsy, and fatigued after his spell of fiery writing. Almost at once sleep began to invade him; the outline of the stone-pine, etched against the sky, grew blurred as his eyelids fluttered and closed. And then, without pause or transition, he saw a white statue standing close to him, on the neck of which there wriggled the tail of a worm, protruding from the fair white surface, and instantly his forgotten dream leaped into his mind, with a pang of horror. That was what his dream had been: there had been a statue standing just there, white in the moonlight, and even as he worshipped and adored it with love and boundless admiration, those foul symbols of decay had wreathed about it. Next moment he plucked himself from his dozing, and there was no statue there at all, but the far more comfortable figure of Jessie, standing in its place, with laughter in her eye.
“Oh, that’s what you do, Archie,” she said, “when you pretend to come out into the garden to work, and despise Harry and me for sleeping.”
Archie jumped up from his chair and brandished in her face the pages of his consciously written manuscript. The leaf on which the message from Martin was written still lay apart from those on the table.
“I may have closed my eyes for one second,” he said. “But I’ve written all that since lunch. Oh, it’s got the sea in it, Jessie; I really believe there’s the sea there. I’ll read it you this evening, if you’ll apologize for saying that I go to sleep instead of writing.”
She picked up the other leaf.
“Yes, I apologize,” she said, “though you were asleep when I came out. But I want to hear what you’ve written, so I apologize for having thought so. And there’s this other page as well.”
Archie took it from her.
“That doesn’t belong,” he said. “That—”
He paused a moment.
“Do you remember what I told you about the messages I used to have from Martin when I was a child?” he asked.
Jessie nodded.
“Yes; and they have ceased altogether for years, haven’t they?” she said quickly.
“Until today. Just now, half an hour ago, I had another. But I can’t make anything out of it. He tells me that I’ve had a warning. I don’t know what it means.”
Jessie felt all the habitual contempt of the thoroughly normal and healthy mind for anything akin to psychical experiences. All ghosts, in her view, were to be classed under the headings of rats or lobster-salad; all such things as table-tappings and the doings of mediums under the heading of trickery. But, knowing what she did of Archie’s childish experiences, she could not put them down as trickery, and so was unable exactly to despise them as fraudulent. For that very reason she rather feared them; they made her feel uncomfortable.
She glanced at the paper he held out to her, but without taking it.
“Oh, Archie I distrust all that,” she said. “I was really very glad when you told me that for all these years you had had no communication from him. Please don’t have any more.”
He laughed. They had talked about this before.
“But you don’t understand,” he said. “It has nothing to do with my wanting or not; it just comes. This afternoon I couldn’t help writing any more than—than one can help sneezing.”
“You can if you rub your nose the wrong way,” said Jessie flippantly.
“No amount of rubbing my nose either the right way or the wrong way would have the slightest effect,” said Archie. “The thing is imperative: if Martin wants me to write, I must write. But he says here that he’s not going to guide me; I must look after myself. I’m sorry for that.”
“I’m not,” said Jessie quickly. “There’s something strange and uncanny about it. I’m not sure that I think it’s right even.”
She paused a moment.
“Archie, do you really believe that it is the spirit of Martin that makes you write?” she said. “Are you sure—”
He interrupted her.
“I know what you mean,” he said. “It’s what the Roman Catholics teach, that any communication of the sort, given that it is genuine, and not some mere mediumistic trick, is not less than converse with some evil being impersonating, masquerading as the spirit from whom the communication apparently comes. Do you mean that?”
Jessie frowned, fingering the edge of the table.
“Yes, I suppose I do,” she said. “I think the whole thing is dangerous; I don’t think it’s a thing to meddle with.”
“But I don’t meddle with it,” said Archie. “It meddles with me. Besides, did you ever hear of such an unwarranted assumption? Mightn’t I almost as well say that a letter which reaches me from my mother doesn’t really come from her, but from some evil creature impersonating her? It seems simpler to suppose that it comes from her, that her signature is genuine, just as I believe Martin’s to be. Do you really think that when I was a poor little consumptive chap at Grives I was really possessed by an evil spirit? Isn’t that rather too horrible an imagining? A nice state the next world must be in, if that sort of thing is allowed! I don’t for a moment think it is. Can you reconcile with the idea of supreme Love governing and creating all life, the notion that there, behind the scenes, there are evil and awful beings who can get leave to communicate with a child, as I was, pretending to be the spirit of the brother I never knew? Does it sound likely?”
Jessie paused a moment again. She hated the subject, she hated the idea of Archie’s being concerned in these dim avenues to the unseen. She had, for herself, a perfectly unreasoning and childlike faith that there was this world, and the next world, and that God reigned supreme over both. But somehow it offended this instinctive attitude that the next world, and those who had gone there, should be mixed up with this world. They were not dead; she did not think they had ceased to exist; but they had done with this world, and it was something like a profanity to meddle with them. But then Archie had not meddled, as he most truly said: they seemed to have meddled with him. Their meddling had stopped altogether for a dozen years, and here on this half-sheet of paper was the evidence that something of the sort had begun again.
“I thought you had dropped all interest in it,” she said. “I thought it was all finished, like a childish fairy-story, like the Abracadabra legend Cousin Marion told me about. Oh, there’s tea; shall we have tea?”
Pasqualino had spread their table underneath the stone-pine, and she hailed this as a possible dismissal of the whole affair. She did not want to talk any more about it, and, if below her silence there should lurk a fear, she preferred to cover it up, not examine it. Archie got up.
“Certainly let us have tea,” he said. “Perhaps your mind will be clearer after tea. I’m not going to quit the question, Jessie. The historian is at his histories, and we shall be alone, you and I, and I want to talk it out. Something has happened, you see, this afternoon. Martin—or somebody—has written again. You were quite right to imagine that for me the whole thing was finished, had become an Abracada
bra-myth as you said. As far as normal life goes, I thought it had too. But I always knew that it might come back. And it has come back without my asking for it, though it—he—says he’s going to leave me alone. But, after all, he says, ‘You’ve got to do your best and your highest.’ Now I ask you, as a reasonable female, does that look like a message from a devil? No, it’s Martin all right, bless him. But let’s have tea.”
They moved across into the shadow of the pine, where the table sparkled with the specks of stray sunshine that filtered through the boughs. And Jessie, sane and normal, held on to those evidences of the kindly ordinary human life, as an anchor to prevent her drifting out into perilous seas. But to Archie no seas were perilous: they might engulf his body and drown him, and, as it seemed to him, they might engulf his spirit, but they were not perilous in his view. They were just the sea, the great encompassing presence…
“Archie, you are so odd,” she said, knowing that he meant to have the subject talked out, and that his will dominated hers, “You spend the day bathing and sailing and writing; you eat and you sleep, and then suddenly you spring a surprise upon me, and show me a letter you have had from Martin. Which is you, the surprise or the Archie that I know?”
Archie’s mouth was extraordinarily full of rusk and cherry-jam. He politely disposed of them before replying.
“But they’re both me,” he said. “Of course we have all two existences.”
“Dual personality?” she asked.
“Dual fiddlesticks. What I mean is that in everybody there is the conscious self and the subconscious self, but they do not make a dual personality, but one personality. Most people—you, for instance, or Harry, or my mother—transact everything through the conscious personality. For all practical purposes your subconscious self doesn’t exist. But in some, and I’m one of them—the subconscious self is accessible. I can reach it if I want. I can make it act. It is the essential life which we all of us contain, and, as such, it is that part of ourselves with which the essential life of those who have quitted this unessential life can communicate. Martin doesn’t communicate with that part of me which directs and controls my conversation with you. He speaks to my subconscious self, and, by some rather unusual arrangement, my subconscious life can speak to my conscious life and convey what he says to my hand, or, as once happened, when at Grives I heard him call me, to my ear. I am a medium in fact, though that would usually suggest something charlatanish. I can bring my subconscious life to the surface; sometimes, as when Martin speaks to it, it comes to the surface of its own accord, with strong compulsion over my conscious self.”
He paused a moment.
“It’s all very odd,” he said. “Until this afternoon, my subconscious self had lain quite quiet for years. Now suddenly it asserts itself and produces that page of writing, because Martin talked to it, and told it to make my hand write. What other explanation is there, unless indeed you imagine that I have merely perpetrated a silly hoax? But I swear to you that something outside myself made me write. Baldly stated, it was Martin who spoke to my subconscious self, and my subconscious self said to my conscious self, ‘Take a pencil and write.’ I know that is so.”
Once again Jessie had to anchor herself against this current running out to sea. There was Archie sitting opposite her, large and brown and hungry, talking of things which were altogether fantastic, unless they were dangerous. And somehow, they were not either fantastic or dangerous to him; they were as ordinary as the cherry-jam which he was so profusely eating. She had suddenly come on a great undiscovered tract of country, dubious and full of dangers.
“I dislike it all,” she said. “I’m too ordinary, I suppose, my—my subconscious self doesn’t act, you would say. But what proof is there that there is such a thing as the subconscious self? Why should I suppose that there is anything of the sort? I have no reason to suppose it. It is all nonsense.”
Archie laughed.
“My dear Jessie,” he said, “you are arguing not with me but with yourself. You have an uneasy conviction that I am right.”
“Not a bit,” she said. “I want a proof.”
Archie rubbed his hand over his head.
“I wonder how I can give it you most easily,” he said. “Of course there are lots of ways, though it is quite a long time since I have practised any of them.”
He thought for a moment.
“Well, here’s one,” he said. “The subconscious self—to talk more nonsense, as you say—is practically unlimited by the material laws of the world. It is a sort of X-ray, a sort of wireless… I can set my subconscious self to work, and I will, to prove its existence to you.”
His voice sank a little, and Jessie saw that his eyes were fixed on a bright speck of sunlight that gleamed on the table-cloth. A sudden ridiculous terror seized her.
“Don’t, Archie,” she said. “It’s such nonsense.”
“It isn’t nonsense,” said he quietly, “and you mustn’t be such a baby. There’s nothing to be frightened at.”
As he spoke he took his eyes off the bright speck at which he had been staring, and looked at her with his blue, dancing glance.
“What are you going to do?” she said.
“Whatever you like. Let me look at that bright spot there, while you sit quiet, for two minutes, and I’ll tell you anything you choose. Think of something, anything will do, and I’ll tell you what you’re thinking about.”
“Oh, just thought-reading,” said she.
“Just thought-reading! But what is thought-reading? If you can remember what you thought about when you went up to your bedroom to sleep after lunch today, for instance, I’ll tell you that. Or, there is Harry writing his history lecture for next term at this moment. I’ll tell you the words he is writing. At least I think I shall be able to. But I’m out of practice. I have not cultivated the particular mood for years. But I had it when I was a child, and I expect I can get back into it.”
Jessie felt an extreme curiosity about this. She had, even as Archie had said, an uneasy conviction that he was right, and for her peace of mind she longed to have that conviction shattered. In her reasonable self she did not believe that Archie could possibly tell her what Harry was writing, but behind that reasonable self sat something unreasonable which wanted to be convinced that this was all nonsense.
“But you won’t have a fit or anything, will you?” she asked.
“No. Pour boiling tea over me if I do, and I shall come to myself.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to look at something bright. That spot of sun on the table-cloth will do. Then I shall just submerge, like a submarine, and tell you what Harry is writing at this moment, if that is the test you select. What fun it all is! I haven’t done it, as I said, for ever so long. Oh, take a bit of paper, and write down what I say. I don’t suppose I shall be able to remember it.”
Again his voice sank, as he fixed his eyes on the bright spot he had indicated, and Jessie, watching him, pencil and paper in hand, saw an extraordinary change come over his face. For a few seconds it got troubled, and his eyes stared painfully, while his breath came quickly in and out of his nostrils. Then he grew quite quiet again, his mouth smiled, and he spoke very slowly as if the words were dictated by a writer.
“It is hopeless to try to comprehend in the whole,” he said, “the splendour of that unique age. We can only think of it in fragments. One afternoon there was a new play by Sophocles; another day Pericles made the funeral oration for the fallen; on another the great Propylaea to the Acropolis were finished, Socrates talked in the market-place, or supped with Alcibiades. In the space of a few years all those things happened, and as yet more than twenty centuries have failed to grasp their full significance. And in this, my last lecture to you—”
Archie rubbed his eyes and sat up.
“He has finished for the present,” he said.
There was a stir in the room just above them, where they sat in the garden, and Harry looked
out.
“Any tea left?” he said.
Archie looked up.
“Hullo, Harry,” he said. “I thought you were going to finish your lecture and not appear till dinner.”
“I was, but I think I’ll finish it up tomorrow.”
“Bring it down and read us as far as you’ve got,” said Archie. “Jessie won’t mind.”
“All right. It got a little purplish at the end, and that’s why I stopped. I hate purples.”
He moved away from the window, and Archie spoke to Jessie. “Did I say anything?” he asked.
“Yes; I’ve got it all down.”
Archie jumped up.
“Now you’ll see,” he said. “You won’t sauce me again in—in the wicious pride of your youth, as Mr. Venus remarked. I’m sure I got through that time.”
* * * *
It was the knowledge that he had indeed “got through” that Jessie took up to bed with her that night. Word for word Harry had read out at the end of his lecture precisely the sentences that Archie, in that queer dreamy state, had dictated to her, just before Harry had looked out of the window and asked if there was any tea left. There was no room for doubt: even as Archie had said, some piece of his mind had been able to divine exactly what Harry was writing at that moment. In his conscious state he could not know what that was, but according to his own account certain people, of whom he was one, were able to direct not only their conscious selves but also the subconscious self that lay below. It, so he asserted, was practically unfettered by material laws: it could perceive what was happening at a distance, at a spot invisible to it, and it could penetrate as by some X-ray process into other minds. For its free action (in his case at any rate) the conscious self had to be obliterated; by looking at that bright spot on the table-cloth he had been able to put it to sleep, to hypnotize it, thus allowing the subconscious self to pass the portals where normally the conscious self kept guard, and to do its errand.