by Sarah Waters
Then he showed me to the reading-room. It seemed modest enough to me—the kind of library, I suppose, that might be kept in clubs or little colleges. It had three or four book-cases, all of them very full, and a rack of wands, with newspapers and magazines hung out upon them like dripping laundry. It had a table and leather chairs, and a variety of pictures on the walls, and a glass-fronted cabinet—the cabinet is the really curious or I should say horrible thing, though I didn’t know that until later. I went only, at first, to the books. They reassured me. For the fact is, I had begun to wonder why, after all, I had gone in there, and what it was that I was looking for. At a book-case, however—well, a book may be on any queer subject, but one can at least always be certain how to turn a page and read it.
And so, I stood and looked across the shelves, and Mr Hither bent to whisper with a lady who was seated at the table. She was the only other reader there, and quite elderly, and she had one soiled white-gloved hand upon the pages of a pamphlet, keeping it open. When she had first caught sight of Mr Hither she had made an urgent, beckoning gesture. Now she said, ‘Such a wonderful text! So inspiring!’
She lifted her hand, and her pamphlet sprang shut. I saw its title—it was Odic Power.
The shelves before me, I saw now, were filled with books bearing such titles; and yet, when I drew one or two of them forth, the advice they gave seemed of the very plainest—such as, ‘On Chairs’, which cautioned against the influences which gathered in stuffed or cushioned chairs used promiscuously by many persons, and advised spirit-mediums to seat themselves on cane-bottomed or wooden-seated chairs only. When I read this I had to turn my head, for fear that Mr Hither would look and catch me smiling. Then I left the book-shelves, and wandered towards the rack of newspapers, and at last I turned my eyes to the pictures on the wall above it. These were of ‘Spirits Manifested Through the Mediumship of Mrs Murray, October 1873’, and showed a lady looking placid in a chair beside a photographer’s palm while, behind her, loomed three misty white-robed figures—‘Sancho’, ‘Annabel’ and ‘Kip’, said the label on the frame. They were more comical even than the books, and I thought suddenly and painfully, Oh, how I wish Pa might have seen these!
As I thought it I felt a movement at my elbow, and I started. It was Mr Hither.
‘We are rather proud of those,’ he said, nodding to the photographs. ‘Mrs Murray has such a powerful control. Do you note the detail, look, on Annabel’s gown? We had a piece of that collar framed beside the pictures once, but within a week or two of our having obtained it, it had—after the manner of spirit-stuff, alas for us!—quite melted away. We were left with nothing but an empty frame.’ I stared at him. He said, ‘Yes, oh yes.’ Then he moved beyond me to the glass-fronted cabinet, and he waved for me to follow, saying, Now, these were the real pride of their collection; and here, at least, they had evidence a little more permanent . . .
His voice and manner were intriguing. From a distance it had seemed to me as if the cabinet might be filled with broken statuary, or with pale rocks. When I drew near, however, I saw that the display behind the glass was not of marble, but of plaster and of wax—plaster casts, and waxen moulds, of faces and fingers, feet and arms. Many were distorted, rather strangely. Some were cracked, or yellowing with age and with exposure. Each had a label on it, as the spirit-photographs had.
I looked again at Mr Hither. ‘You are familiar, of course,’ he said, ‘with the process? Ah, well, it is as simple and as clever as can be! One materialises one’s spirit, and provides two pails—one of water and the other of melted paraffin-wax. The spirit obliges with a hand or a foot, or whatever; the limb is plunged first into the wax, and then, very swiftly, into the water. When the spirit departs, it leaves a mould behind. Few, of course,’ he added apologetically, ‘are perfect. And not all are so robust that we can venture making casts from them in plaster.’
It seemed to me that most of the objects before us were quite horribly imperfect—identifiable by some small, grotesque detail, a toe-nail or a wrinkle or a prick of lashes at a bulging eye; yet incomplete, or bent, or strangely blurred, as if the participating spirits had begun the journey back to their own realm with the wax still warm about their limbs. ‘See this little cast here,’ said Mr Hither. ‘This was made by an infant spirit—do you see the dear little fingers, the dimpling arm?’ I saw it, and felt queasy. It looked, to me, like nothing so much as a baby born, grotesque and incomplete, before its time. I remember my mother’s sister being delivered of such a thing when I was young, and how the adults whispered over it, and how the whispers haunted me and brought me dreams. I looked away, into the lowest, dimmest corner of the cabinet. Here, however, was the grossest thing of all. It was the mould of a hand, the hand of a man—a hand of wax, yet hardly a hand as the word has meaning, more some awful tumescence—five bloated fingers and a swollen, vein-ridged wrist, that glistened, where the gas-light caught it, as if moist. The infant cast had made me queasy. This made me almost tremble, I cannot say why.
And then I saw the label upon it—and then I did shake.
‘Hand of Spirit-Control “Peter Quick”,’ it said. ‘Materialised by Miss Selina Dawes.’
I looked once at Mr Hither—who was still nodding over the dimpled baby’s arm—and then, trembling as I was, I couldn’t help but move a little closer to the glass. I gazed at the bulging wax, and remembered Selina’s own slender fingers, the delicate bones that move in her wrists as they arch and dip above the putty-coloured wool of prison stockings. The comparison was horrible. I became aware of myself suddenly, stooped low before the cabinet, misting the dull glass with my quick breaths. I straightened—but must have done so too swiftly, for what I felt next was the grip of Mr Hither’s fingers upon my arm. ‘My dear, are you quite well?’ he said. The lady at the table looked up and put one grimy white hand before her mouth. Her pamphlet sprang closed again and tumbled to the floor.
I said the stooping had made me dizzy, and that the room was very warm. Mr Hither brought a chair and made me sit in it—that brought my face close to the cabinet, and again I shuddered; but when the lady reader half-rose and asked, Should she fetch a glass of water and Miss Kislingbury? I told her that I was quite all right now, that she was very kind and must not trouble. Mr Hither, I thought, studied me, but quite evenly; and I saw him looking at my coat and gown. It occurs to me now, of course, that perhaps many ladies go to those rooms in the colours of mourning, claiming chance, and curiosity, have sent them over the threshold and up the stairs; perhaps some of them even swoon, at the cabinet of wax. For when I looked again at the moulds upon the shelves, Mr Hither’s gaze and voice grew gentle. He said, ‘They are a little queer, aren’t they? But rather marvellous, for all that?’
I didn’t answer him, but let him think what he liked. He told me again then about the wax, the water, the dipping limbs; and at last I grew calm. I said, that I supposed the mediums who brought the ghosts that made the moulds were very clever ones?—and at that, he looked thoughtful.
‘I should say powerful rather than clever,’ he said, ‘—no cleverer than you or I, perhaps, in matters of the brain. These are matters of the spirit, and that is rather different.’ He said it is that that can make the spiritualist faith sometimes seem such a ‘rag-tag affair’ to non-believers. The spirits have no time, he said, for age, or station, ‘or any mortal distinction like that’, but find the gift of mediumship scattered amongst the people, like so much grain in a field. I might visit with some great gentleman, he said, that might be sensitive; in the gentleman’s kitchen there will be a girl, blackening her master’s boots—it might be she who is the sensitive one. ‘Look here’—he gestured again to the cabinet. ‘Miss Gifford, who made this mould—she was a parlour-maid, she never knew her powers until her mistress fell ill with a tumour; then she was guided to place her hands upon the lady’s flesh and the tumour was healed. And here, Mr Severn. He is a boy of sixteen, has been bringing spirits since he was ten. I have seen mediums of three and
four. I have known babies gesture from their cradles—take up pens and write, that the spirits love them . . .’
I looked back to the shelves. After all, I knew very well why I had gone into those rooms, and what it was I had been looking for there. I put my hand to my breast and nodded to the waxen hands of ‘Peter Quick’. I said, What of that medium, Selina Dawes? Did Mr Hither know anything, at all, of her?
Oh, he said at once—and as he said it the lady at the table again lifted her eyes to us. Oh, but of course! Had I never heard, of poor Miss Dawes’s misfortune? ‘Why, they have her in a prison cell, locked up!’
He shook his head, and looked very grave. I said then that after all I believed I had heard something of that. But I had not thought to find Selina Dawes so celebrated . . .
Celebrated? he said. Ah, not in the larger world perhaps. But amongst spiritualists—why, every spiritualist in the country must have trembled, when he heard of poor Miss Dawes’s apprehension! Every spiritualist in England had his eyes upon the details of her trial—and wept, too, when he heard the outcome of it; wept—or should have wept—for her sake and for his own. ‘The law has us as “rogues and vagabonds”,’ he said. ‘We are meant to practise “palmistry and other subtle crafts”. What was Miss Dawes charged with? Assault, was it?—and fraud? What calumny!’
His cheek had grown quite pink. His passion astonished me. He asked me, was I familiar with all the details of Miss Dawes’s arrest and imprisonment?—and when I answered that I knew only a little, but should certainly like to know more, he took a step towards the shelves of books, ran his eyes and fingers along a set of leather volumes, then drew one forth. ‘See here,’ he said, lifting the cover. ‘This is The Spiritualist, one of our newspapers. Here are last year’s numbers, from July until December. Miss Dawes was taken by the police—when was it?’
‘I believe it was August,’ said the lady with the soiled gloves. She had overheard all our talk, and still looked on. Mr Hither nodded, then turned the pages of the magazine. ‘Here it is,’ he said after a moment. ‘Look here, my dear.’
I gazed at the line of print to which he gestured. ‘SPIRITU-ALIST PETITIONS URGED FOR MISS DAWES,’ it said. ‘Materialising Medium Detained by Police. Spiritualist Testimonies Discounted.’ Beneath this was a brief report. It described the apprehension and detainment of the materialising medium Miss Dawes, following the death of her patron, Mrs Brink, during a private development sitting at Mrs Brink’s residence at Sydenham. The subject of the sitting, Miss Madeleine Silvester, was also understood to have been injured. The disturbance was thought to have originated with Miss Dawes’s spirit-control ‘Peter Quick’, or with a low and violent spirit masquerading as that control . . .
This was the same account that I had had, from the matron Miss Craven, and from Stephen, and Mrs Wallace, and Selina herself—though it was the first, of course, to chime with hers and paint the spirit as the guilty one. I looked at Mr Hither. I said, ‘I hardly know what to make of this. Really, I know nothing of spiritualism. You think Selina Dawes has been abused—’
Grossly abused, he said. He was quite certain of it. I answered, ‘You are certain of it’—for I had remembered something from Selina’s own story. ‘But was every spiritualist as confident as you? Were there not some, who were less convinced?’
He bowed his head a little. There were, he said, some doubts, ‘in certain circles’.
Doubts? Did he mean, as to her honesty?
He blinked, and then he lowered his voice, in surprise and a kind of reproach. ‘Doubts,’ he said, ‘as to Miss Dawes’s wisdom. Miss Dawes was a powerful medium, but also a rather young one. Miss Silvester was even younger—just fifteen, I think. It is often to just such mediums as that, that boisterous spirits attach themselves; and Miss Dawes’s control—Peter Quick—was sometimes very boisterous indeed . . .’
He said it was perhaps not quite prudent of Miss Dawes to have exposed her sitter, alone and unsupervised, to such a spirit’s attentions—for all that she had done it before, with other ladies. There was the question of Miss Silvester’s own undeveloped gifts. Who knew how they might not have worked on Peter Quick? Who knew but that the sitting was invaded by some base power? Such powers, as he had said, made special objects of the inexperienced—used them, to make their mischief with. ‘And it is mischief,’ he said, ‘—not the marvels of our movement! no, never those!—that the papers seize on. There were many spiritualists, I am afraid—and some of them the very people who had most celebrated her successes!—who turned their backs to poor Miss Dawes, when she stood most in need of their good wishes. And now, I hear, the experience has quite embittered her. She has turned her back to us—even to those of us who would be still her friends.’
I gazed at him in silence. To hear him celebrate Selina; to hear her called, respectfully, ‘Miss Dawes’, ‘Miss Selina Dawes’, instead of ‘Dawes’ or ‘prisoner’, or ‘woman’—well, I cannot say how disconcerting that was. It was one thing to have had her story from her own lips, in that dim half-world of the wards, so different, I realise now, to all the worlds that I am used, that no-one in it—not the women, not the matrons, not even myself when I am there—seem quite substantial or quite real. It was very different to hear it here, told by a gentleman. I said at last, ‘And was she really so successful then, before her trial?’—and at that he clasped his hands together as if in rapture and said, My goodness me, but yes, her séances were things of wonder! ‘She was never so famous, of course, as the best of the London mediums—as Mrs Guppy, Mr Home, Miss Cook, of Hackney . . .’
Them I had heard of. Mr Home, I knew, was said to be able to float through windows, and to handle coals from an open fire. Mrs Guppy was once transported, from Highbury to Holborn—‘Transported,’ I said, ‘whilst writing “onions” on her shopping-list?’
‘Now you smile,’ said Mr Hither. ‘You are like everybody else. The more extravagant our powers are, the more you care for them, for then you may disclaim them as a nonsense.’
His gaze was still kind. I said, Well, perhaps he was right. But Selina Dawes: her powers were not usually so startling as Mr Home’s and Mrs Guppy’s—were they?
He gave a shrug, and said that his definition of the startling, and mine, might be quite different. As he spoke he stepped again to the shelves and drew another volume from them—it was The Spiritualist again, but an earlier number. He took a moment to find the piece he wanted, then passed it to me, saying, Was that what I would term ‘startling’?
The report told of Selina leading a séance at Holborn, where there were bells brought in the darkness and shaken by spirits, and a voice that whispered through a paper tube. He handed me a second book—a different paper, I forget the title of it, it described a private meeting at Clerkenwell, at which invisible hands dropped flowers, and chalked names upon a slate. An earlier number of the same newspaper told of a grieving gentleman, amazed to find a message from the spirit-world stand out, in words of crimson, on Selina’s naked arm . . .
This, I suppose, was the time she had told me of. She had spoken of it proudly, as a ‘happy time’ for her; but her pride had made me sad even then—now the memory of it made me sadder. The flowers and the paper tubes, the words marked out upon her flesh—it seemed a tawdry sort of show, even if put on by spirits. She had held herself at Millbank as an actress might, surveying a marvellous career. Behind the newspaper reports now I thought I saw that career for what it really was—the career of a butterfly or a moth, a career passed in the homes of strangers, a career spent lurching from one dreary district to the next, performing garish tricks for petty payments, like a music-hall turn.
I thought of the aunt, who had set her upon it. I thought of the lady who died—Mrs Brink. I had not realised until Mr Hither told me of it now, that Selina had lived with Mrs Brink, in her own house—‘Oh yes,’ he said. He said it was that which made the charges that were levelled against Selina—charges of deception, as well as of violence—so very gross; for Mrs Brink h
ad so admired her, she had given a home to her—‘was quite a mother to her’. It was through her care that Selina’s gifts were nurtured, and grew. It was at the house at Sydenham that she first acquired her spirit-control, ‘Peter Quick’.
I said, And yet, it was Peter Quick that so frightened Mrs Brink—so frightened her, she died?
He shook his head. ‘It seems a curious business to us, a thing that no-one could explain except the spirits. Alas, they were not called, to speak in Miss Dawes’s defence.’
His words intrigued me. I looked at the first paper he had shown me, that was dated for the week of her arrest. I asked, had he the later numbers? Did they report the trial, the verdict, the taking of her to Millbank? He said, Of course, and after a moment’s search he found them for me, and fastidiously tidied the earlier volumes away. I brought a chair up to the table, setting it far from the white-gloved woman, and placing it at an angle which put the cabinet of moulds out of my gaze. Then, when Mr Hither had smiled, and bowed, and left me, I sat and read. I had my note-book with me, there were phrases in it I had copied from the prison histories at the British Museum. Now I folded those pages away and began to take notes instead on Selina’s trial.
First they question Mrs Silvester, the American woman, the mother of the nervous girl, Mrs Wallace’s friend. She is asked, ‘When did you first make the acquaintance of Selina Dawes?’—and she answers: ‘It was at a séance at the house of Mrs Brink, in July. I had heard her spoken of, in London, as a very clever medium, and I wanted to see her for myself.’
‘And what was your opinion of her?’—‘I saw at once that she was very clever indeed. She also seemed modest. There were two rather wild young gentlemen at the meeting, who I thought she might try to flirt with. She did not, and I was glad of it. She seemed quite the girl of quality that everybody painted her. Of course, I should not on any other terms have allowed the intimacy between her and my daughter to develop.’