Mary's heart was still pounding, but her face now showed nothing of her inward agitation. On Mrs. Wardeel's introducing her to Barney, they exchanged a conventional smile, then walked side by side towards a room at the back of the house. As they did so, she was wondering what could possibly have brought to such a gathering the type of man she knew him to be, and, even more extraordinary, why he should be using a title to which she believed he had no right.
The room they entered was long and fairly broad and looked larger than it was in fact because all its furniture - except a desk at one end - had been removed and replaced by seven rows of fold-up wooden chairs. Some twenty people had already taken their seats. Most of them were middle-aged and fairly prosperous looking; there were more women than men, and among the former were two Indian ladies wearing caste marks and saris.
Barney ran his eye swiftly over such of their faces as he could see from where he stood and decided that they looked a more normal crowd than he had expected - in fact, they might all have been collected in one swoop by clearing and transporting the occupants of the lounge of any of the better-class South Kensington hotels. Mary nodded a greeting to a few of them, then took the chair that he was holding for her. As he sat down beside her he said:
'I gather that you are one of the older inhabitants of this village, Mrs. Mauriac?'
'Oh, I . . .' her mouth felt dry and her voice threatened to rise from nervous tension. With an effort she got it under control. 'I'm far from that. This is only the third meeting that I've attended.'
Barney noted that she had no French accent, then he replied:
'Even that puts you quite a bit ahead of me. Do you find the teaching easy to follow?'
'Some of it.' To cover her confusion Mary hurried on. 'I find the arguments for believing in Reincarnation simple and convincing, and I've become terribly interested in that. But I'm still a long way from understanding the Theosophical doctrine.'
'Really!' He raised his eyebrows. 'I was under the impression that Theosophists were anti-doctrinaire. I thought they concerned themselves only with getting at the original wisdom that is said to lie at the root of all the great religions, but most of which has since been obscured by the teachings introduced by many generations of ignorant priests.'
'That's quite true; Theosophy does not conflict with Christianity or Buddhism in their best sense. But all the same it has its own doctrine, and much of it seems awfully complicated to me. You see, it isn't as though this was a course of lectures in which one starts at the beginning; each is on a different aspect of the ancient teaching, and newcomers like you and I have to do our best to pick up what we can as we go along.'
Having by this time had a chance to take full stock of Mary, Barney was congratulating himself on his luck in acquiring so unexpectedly such a glamorous companion with whom to listen to what he anticipated would be a lot of twaddle; but he was temporarily prevented from developing the acquaintance further by the arrival of an elderly lady, leaning on an ebony walking stick, who greeted Mary with a smile, took the chair on her other side, and began to talk to her about the last meeting.
During the next five minutes another dozen or so people arrived, including a fat, squat Indian wearing thick-lensed glasses, and with protruding teeth, who from his bowing and smiling to right and left seemed to know nearly everyone there. Then Mrs. Wardeel came in followed by a small, bald man in a dark grey suit who looked as if he might have been a bank manager. He walked round to a chair behind the desk while she paused beside it. Silence fell and she said:
'Dear followers of the Path, Mr. Silcox is well known to most of you. We are blessed in having him with us again. Old friends and new alike will, I know, benefit from another of his talks. This evening he is going to speak to us on the True Light to be found in the Gospels.'
Mrs. Wardeel took a seat that had been kept for her in the front row and Mr. Silcox stood up. Without any unctuous preamble he went straight into his subject, which was to place a new interpretation on many of the sayings of Jesus Christ, given the assumption that He believed in Reincarnation, was Himself in His last incarnation, and was really referring to such matters most of the time.
According to Mr. Silcox, when our Lord spoke of His 'Father', He was referring not to a father either physical or divine, but to His own complete personality built up during countless incarnations, only a fragment of which He had brought down with Him to earth.
This argument was based on the Reincarnationist belief that everyone's parents are chosen for them only to ensure that they are given the sort of start in life best suited to provide them with an opportunity to learn whatever lessons are decreed for them in their new incarnation; and that they are their own father in the sense that their egos have already been formed by certain of their experiences during a long succession of past lives.
In support of this contention the speaker drew attention to that passage in the Second Commandment to the effect that God would 'visit the sins of the fathers upon the children even unto the third and fourth generation'.
'Could any sane person,' Mr. Silcox asked, 'believe a just god capable of showing such vicious malice as to threaten the innocent and unborn with dire chastisement for evil done by their physical parents or grandparents?' Clearly the explanation of this apparently harsh decree was that, each of us being spiritually the child of the personality we had created for ourselves in previous lives, if we did evil in our present incarnation we should have to pay for it in the future, and it might take us three or four more incarnations before we had fully worked off our debt.
All this was new to Barney and, far from being bored as he had expected, he found it deeply interesting; so for the next half-hour he gave his mind almost entirely to following Mr. Silcox's interpretation of the sayings of Our Lord.
Mary, on the other hand, was hardly listening. The main arguments for Reincarnation were already known to her, and her thoughts had gone back five years to the last time she had seen Barney. That had been in the grey dawn of early morning in a room of a small hotel in Dublin. He had not long got out of the bed they had shared and, having dressed, he had kissed her goodbye with the cheerful words:
'I'll see you again soon, sweetheart, and we'll have better fun next time.' But there had been no next time and, although she had searched high and low for him, she had never seen him again until tonight. With a sick feeling she went back in her mind over the whole sordid story of her life as Mary McCreedy.
Her mother had earned a precarious living as a small-part actress in musical comedy, vaudeville and anything else that offered. About her father she knew nothing except that, according to her mother, he was a naval officer and had been lost at sea while she was still an infant. As no reference was ever made to any of his family she suspected that he had never married her mother. In any case, whether or not she was illegitimate, she knew that to have been the case with her brother, Shaun, who had been born three years after herself. His father had been a Dublin business man, known to her during her childhood as Uncle Patrick. She assumed now that in those days he largely supported the household, as they had lived in reasonable comfort and she and her brother had been educated privately. But when she was fifteen 'Uncle' Patrick had died, and they had had to move to a much poorer part of the city.
Shortly afterwards her mother had taken her away from the Convent she was attending, to have her taught dancing. The following year she appeared in Pantomime and, as she was a well-developed girl for her age she had, by lying about it, got herself a job when barely seventeen in the Cabaret of a Dublin night-club.
Meanwhile her mother, having failed to find another permanent protector, and harassed by debt, had taken to the bottle; then, before Mary had been many months in Cabaret, on the way home one Saturday night in a state of liquor her mother had been knocked down and killed by a bus. After that Mary had had to move with her young brother into two rooms, and had become the sole support of their little household.
The night-club where sh
e worked would not have been worthy of the name by continental standards, so hedged about was it with restrictions imposed by a Municipality under the moral influence of the Roman Catholic Church. There were no near-nude floor shows, nor was drinking permitted till the small hours of the morning. In fact, it was little more than a restaurant that hired a troupe of girls to sing and dance in little numbers which would not give offence to family parties and, in theory at least, the girls were all respectable. But, of course, between shows they were expected to act as dance-hostesses to any man who might ask them and so, inevitably, they were inured to receiving certain propositions.
Mary had been aware that some of her companions owed their smarter clothes and expensive trifles to accepting such offers, and she had not got on less well with any of them on that account; but at eighteen the teaching of the nuns still had a strong influence upon her. Moreover, she cherished romantic ideas that in due course a Prince Charming would come along, and that she would be shamed if, on his marrying her, she were not still a virgin. Yet, with a young brother to keep as well as herself, although the Church school to which he went had waived his fees since their mother's death, she found it ever harder to make ends meet.
That had been the situation when she met Barney Sullivan. He had come in one evening with several other young roisterers and picked her out to dance with. She had been attracted at once by his merry smile and carefree gaiety, but at the end of the evening he had casually given her a handsome tip and made no suggestion of seeing her again, However, in the weeks that followed he had come in on several occasions after dinner with three or four other well-off young fellows out for a good time, danced with her, and given her the impression that he had fallen for her. Then one night he had turned up with the same little crowd of friends, this time slightly tight, but most cheerfully so; and, after sharing a bottle of champagne with her, he had suggested that she should sleep with him. On her making her usual reply that she was 'not that sort of a girl' he had refused to believe her, declaring with a laugh that all the girls there did if a chap could make it worth their while; but he had not pressed her further.
A few nights later he had come there again, and that night it so happened that she was in desperate trouble. Her young brother, who was in his last term at school, was the treasurer of the football club, and he had confessed to her that afternoon that he had spent the money entrusted to him. If he could not replace it by the following day he would be found out and branded as a thief. It was only a matter of six pounds odd, but she had not got it and had already had from the management an advance on her wage to pay the rent. She had intended to humiliate herself by attempting to borrow from some of the other girls, but that would have meant a further debt round her neck that it would be a struggle to repay. Barney, flushed with champagne and with a pocket full of money from a lucky day at the races, had offered her twenty pounds if she would do as several of the other girls had, and go to bed with him. Attracted to him as she was, and harassed by her anxiety about her brother, she had given way to his pleading.
No sooner had they left the club than she began to regret her decision and, for her, the next hour was one of misery. Although she was a normal healthy girl fully capable of passion, she was totally inexperienced; so a combination of panic, guilt and - much as she needed the money - shame at having succumbed to earning it in this way, temporarily rendered her frigid. Barney, feeling on top of the world, and his finer senses dulled by the wine he had drunk, swiftly set himself to overcome her unresponsiveness. It was only afterwards, as she lay weeping in his arms, that he realized to his considerable distress that she had been a virgin.
But for her matters had not ended there. At first she had put down his non-reappearance at the club to disappointment in her; then, to her horror, she realized that she was going to have a baby. Instantly she jumped to the conclusion that he was purposely avoiding her because he suspected that he might have given her one. She did not know his address and, although she asked all sorts of people, none of them knew it either. It was not until some weeks later that a friend of his came to the club and was able to tell her that he had gone off to America quite suddenly, without even saying goodbye to his circle of boon companions.
Meanwhile her life had become one long agony of anxiety and fear. In vain she lit candles and prayed morning, noon and night to Our Lady for a natural release from her condition; her prayers remained unanswered. At length she confided in one of the other, older, girls and learned that she could be got out of her trouble; but it was going to cost a lot of money. As she was as hard-up as ever, and the matter was urgent, there was only one thing for it; her friend arranged for her to borrow the bulk of the money from a money-lender, and she had to begin accepting the offers of men who came to the club, whether she liked them or not, as the only means of repaying the instalments on the loan.
She soon learned that such encounters were not always unpleasant, but in most instances she found them loathsome and degrading. Moreover, as the club was very far from being thought of as a centre of prostitution, advances of that kind were made to the girls there only occasionally, and it soon became apparent to her that Barney had treated her with exceptional generosity; which meant that a considerable time must elapse before she was entirely free from her debt.
Those months remained vivid in her memory: the horror and pain of the illegal operation; her misery at having to give up practising her religion because she could not bring herself to confess to having committed so grievous a sin; the nausea that had at times assailed her from having to submit to the caresses of half-drunken men; the awful strain of having to pretend to enjoy it when, tired from a long evening's dancing and aching for her bed, she had been driven miles out into the country by some stranger to be made love to in the back of his car; and the shame aroused in her by the sneering looks or lecherous grins of slatternly chambermaids who had shown her up with men to tawdry bedrooms in dubious little hotels.
And her penance had lasted longer than it need have done, since, to bring some cheer into her life, she had given way to the understandable weakness of using part of the money she earned to buy better clothes and many small luxuries which she could not before afford. With the interest on her debt, it had been ten months before she had managed to get clear finally. Then, shortly afterwards, during a fortnight's holiday at the seaside, she had met Teddy Morden; and he had taken her to London, freeing her from her past, and giving her his love, his name and a happy married life.
Yet even four years as a contented wife had not made her feelings about Barney Sullivan less bitter. It was his act which had resulted in those ten months during which she had hardly known a day free from anxiety, or disgust with herself at the life she had been forced into leading! It never entered her mind that if a man paid a girl to go to bed with him he was entitled to assume that she knew how to look after herself, and was not responsible for what might become of her afterwards. As she saw it, he should have known that he might have put her in the family way and come to the club again to find out if she was all right; instead of which, as it appeared to her, he had deliberately refrained from doing so from fear that she might be pregnant by him, then gone off to America leaving her to her unhappy fate. In consequence, in her mind he had become the symbol of all that is mean and contemptible in a man.
With a little start she suddenly realized that Mr. Silcox had come to the end of his talk. During the ten minutes that followed several members of the audience asked him questions, which he answered with easy assurance. Then Mrs. Wardeel moved a vote of thanks to him which met with decorous applause, after which she said:
'Now, dear fellow followers of the Way, let us rearrange the chairs and see what Mrs. Brimmings has in store for us. No doubt some of you will have heard of Mrs. Brimmings. From the accounts I have had she is a remarkably gifted medium and under her control, the Chinese Mandarin Chi-Ling - whose last incarnation took place some two hundred years ago - she is able to make contact with not only the
first, but also the second and third, astral planes. We are most fortunate in having her with us tonight.'
Everyone stood up. The unoccupied chairs were put back against the wall and the rest formed into a large circle, in the middle of which a chair was placed for Mrs. Brimmings. As Mrs. Wardeel led her forward to it, Barney saw that she was a small, faded elderly woman with grey hair scragged back into a bun, and wearing rather shoddy clothes. It occurred to him that she might easily be taken for a charwoman, and a moment later she said to Mrs. Wardeel in accents that reinforced that impression:
'May I 'ave a rug, dear. Me poor feet get so cold when I'm out of me body.'
A rug was duly fetched and wrapped round her, then the company settled down and, crossing their arms, all linked hands with their neighbours. Before taking her place in the circle Mrs. Wardeel switched out all the lights except one with a heavy blue shade, thus darkening the room to a faint bluish gloom, in which the medium could be seen only as a dark shape; then she said in a deep whisper:
'For the two new friends who are with us tonight, I shall give the usual warning, Whatever may happen, no one must break the circle by letting go the hand of his neighbour. To do so would be to place the medium in grave danger by bringing her spirit back to her body too suddenly. And no one should address her unless called on to do so.'
After that, silence fell, broken only by an occasional half-suppressed cough or the faint creak of one of the wooden chairs as someone eased his position. To Barney the silence seemed to continue for a long time, which he judged to be about twenty minutes, although in fact it was little more than ten. But it had the effect of creating a definite atmosphere of tension and expectancy.
At length a faint blob of light appeared high up in a corner of the room. It flickered about uncertainly for a little then, to Barney's surprise, descended on his own forehead. With difficulty he suppressed an exclamation; but, almost instantly, it moved again and came to rest for a moment on the forehead of a man nearly opposite to him, after which it disappeared.
The Satanist Page 6