by Rebecca West
Meanwhile Father would be cooking chops or steak or fish for high tea in a frying-pan that sent up a curling incense of onions, and little George was set to make toast and founder it with a good block of beef dripping; and usually there was a glass dish of tinned fruit in syrup. After Father and George had cleared the table they would sit down to lessons: not the lessons the boy had brought from school. Since they dealt with the world of the living they were unprofitable to him. The lessons he had to learn now were in the nature of vocational training. ‘That’s the ticket, that’s the ticket,’ Father would say. ‘You slip the wedge in between the slates and write – and talk, talk quick! Then if the pencil scratches they don’t hear it. That’s right – keep going – when you’re at a loss cry out loud and happy – “I can feel them! Oh, they’re so close the blessed spirits!” With a little catch in your breath. That’s done already is it? Ah, whose fingers has my boy got? You won’t disgrace your dad!’ So the whole evening went by, all diligence and praise. Momma used to sit quietly, saying sometimes, ‘I heard you move then, honey,’ but sinking deeper and deeper into a drowse, until she no longer took any more doses from the bottle at her elbow. For half an hour before his bedtime the gaslight was turned out, so that he could put into practice what he had been taught. Then his father came into his own, his voice became sweet and strong and charged with ecstasy, and George glowed with a junior version of his pride. They could feel the manual and vocal tricks cohering together into a presentation that they laid before an invisible audience; they knew themselves priests and creators.
It was not so nice when Father was away. Momma had only one accomplishment, the making of raps; but that she taught him thoroughly. They would sit in the dark kitchen together while the tap-taps travelled round the kitchen along the skirting and up one side of the fireplace, like a question, and then went across the mantelpiece and down the other side of the fireplace, like an answer, or made the table quiver under the fusillade, or even the chairs beneath them. ‘Make ’em ring, honey, make ’em ring out like bells!’ she would exhort him, and cry out, ‘That’s Momma’s boy!’ when he got the right hopeful resonance. But after a certain hour she would forget to teach him, and would pass into a delirium of tapping, rocking to and fro in her basket-chair, and making the kitchen echo till it seemed the house must fall in on them, while in her rich yet flat voice she sang hymn after hymn, freshening the tone every now and then with a dose from the bottle. In the end, as always, she fell into a drowse; and it was difficult work shaking her awake so that she would go to bed. Sometimes, indeed, she would not let herself be roused and would only settle herself deeper in the basket-chair, chuckling, ‘Run away to bed, honey, and let Momma rest till she feels better.’
It was not so nice, and it happened more and more frequently. For it was not often now that the Manistys could work at him. Occasionally, especially on Sundays, they mounted to the rooms above, and were very busy dusting the aspidistras and the glass aeolians that dangled at the doors, taking the pleated papers out of the grates and lighting fires, until Father looked at his watch and said ‘They’ll be here in five minutes if they found old Parkyns’s fly at the station. Better begin.’ Then Momma and George would stand by the harmonium and sing ‘Let Us Gather by the River’, while Father swayed over the keyboard, milking the melody out of the keys with his long supple fingers, until the crepey widow or the palsied old gentleman had infirmly descended at the gate. Time was when the searchers after the dead had been younger: had been comparatively young as the fathers and mothers of young men are apt to be, as pitifully young as their widows must be. But that time had not lasted long – ‘You’d think they’d be ashamed to forget so soon,’ Father used to say – and George had then been too small to be trusted in the company of believers, though he had crawled about on the floor and received instruction in the art of wire-laying. Since then the rush had dwindled year by year; and now Father had to travel about, seeking after the seekers for the dead, and would be at home for at best three days out of the week.
It was mainly the seekers for the dead he sought; though about his pursuit there was a certain delicacy. Mr Sprott of York might have been a gold-mine, particularly as dead Phyllis Sprott’s maid had come into the fold of the faithful in Birmingham, and ‘there’s nothing’, as Father used to say, ‘they won’t tell you, without having the faintest idea they’ve told you anything.’ But he always preferred to rely on the mere séance fees alone. ‘After all,’ he used to say, exchanging a nod with Momma, ‘we’re luckier than most.’ Momma sighed. ‘Yes, poor blessèd Pop,’ turning up her eyes to the shadowed ceiling. ‘So we’ll leave ’em be, we’ll leave ’em be,’ he used to say, jerking his head over his shoulder, as if there stood behind him hosts of the credulous bereaved; and through the half-light one could see his fingers darting and interweaving in some new technical trick.
For lately his technique, from being his joy and pride, had changed into an agonized preoccupation. It accounted for the lesser but far more harrowing part of his trips about the country. First of all he would read, either in the daily papers or in some journal of his craft, an account of some new medium, and sit swaying his cooling cup of tea in the air and groaning aloud, ‘They can’t do that. No one could do that! Yet I wonder. I wonder – I wish I could see this fellow working.’ Then he would get up and walk about the room saying, ‘I couldn’t do that, you know, I couldn’t do what the papers say that chap does. But they’re all such liars.’ Nevertheless he would know no rest till he had made arrangements to attend one of the new medium’s séances, and usually not even then. He was himself again only when he was able to push open the door into the flame-driven darkness that was his home and cry out, ‘Momma! George! Are you there? Why of course you’re there! Well it was nothing, nothing at all! He did that old trick that Herb Waterbury taught me way back in nineteen hundred. Say, have you got sausages the way I asked you to? Now watch me do a swell piece of cooking.’ And he would have a happy time with the frying-pan, explaining to them just how long he had been baffled and what had given the show away. ‘It’s all right!’ he used to end up by saying; and then, after a pause, he would add, ‘It’s all right, up till now.’
His return was always as triumphant, though the advent of ectoplasm sorely grieved him. A real or fancied identification with inflated calves’ lights touched his professional dignity. ‘“I’m a spiritualist medium,” I said to him, “and a spiritualist medium I remain, without setting up for a tripe-shop,’” he once reported, ‘and me that never has any insides in the house except liver, and that I wouldn’t if it weren’t good for the blood.’ But in spite of this invariable triumph Father seemed to be suffering from these researches. Perhaps the suspense was too much for him. At any rate he lost weight, he began to cough, when he put up his hand to the gas-jet one seemed to be able to see the light through it. ‘For crying out loud,’ said Momma at breakfast one morning, ‘why do you want to run around the country snooping after fellows like these fellows that don’t matter two hoots anyhow?’ ‘Oh, one wants to know,’ said Father, stirring his tea. ‘Oh, for the Lord’s sake what is there to know?’ asked Momma. But he answered her only with the resolute, weak, and apprehensive stare of a very ill man; which indeed he was now to such an extent that he could no longer conduct a séance by himself. For some time past he had fallen into the habit of taking George with him, although the boy was only sixteen, and handing the séance over to him. Shy as the boy was, this was heaven to him. He loved the feeling of sitting in the blackness facing his father, with their four perfect hands weaving unseen a web of emotion that fell on their companions and made those their subjects. He loved hearing his father’s voice throb and soar in the ecstasy of the seer, and letting his own voice come jagged out of his throat, and recognizing them as the same voice. He loved leaving the hot room and the tearful thanks, and the moist handshakes, and travelling home in the tube beside his wonderful father, who was insubstantial as flame, as delicate as a pointed church w
indow.
Every day his father was looking more and more wonderful. But he had been looking very old, and the night he came back from Liverpool, where he had gone for the double reason of holding a séance and seeing a medium who claimed to get spirit writing without the slate, he looked very young. That was what struck George when he raised his eyes from his hands and saw his father standing at the open door. ‘I don’t believe Dad’s looked as young as this all the time I can remember him,’ he thought, and shot a glance at Momma, wondering if she would notice it too; but for some time she had been drowsing, her chin was down among her sausage-curls on her bust. Looking back at his father, he saw that the gaslight was showing crystal beads of rain on his coat, and that his draggled hat hung from his lax hand. He had not, as he always had done before, left his wet clothes in the hall above. ‘Why, Father, let me take your things!’ he said. His father allowed it but did not help, standing quite still, and murmuring ‘My dear boy.’ When he was free of his things he went over and sat down on the floor in front of Momma, leaning back against her knees. ‘I’m sick, Cora,’ he said, ‘the way I was when you found me in that hotel in Pittsburg.’ She stirred in her drowse and, putting out her hand to the new weight on her knee, stroked his hair. ‘It’s grand to be back,’ he said, stretching back his throat, seeking her with his blazing eyes, his bright cheeks. ‘I know you’ll look after me.’ Then his head slipped forward, and he sat nodding into the shadows, trouble growing in his eyes. ‘Maybe it was because I was sick, but I couldn’t see how that chap worked his tricks. Not one of them. But maybe it was because I was sick. Cora! Cora!’ he called quite loudly. ‘Do you think there’s something in it after all?’
Momma was nearly fetched out of her drowse. She made her automatic response at that hour, her raps began to travel round the skirting, up the side of the fireplace; but sleep took her before they crossed the mantelpiece. It sounded as if a question had been asked, but the answer was not given. Father’s chin dropped, his lips twitched in a desperate grimace, his hands began to practise with an invisible slate. George ran forward and knelt beside him. ‘Father, let me help you to bed,’ he begged. ‘I don’t want to go to bed,’ said Father, ‘you’d think bed was a medicine the way some people talk. It’s just something you lie down on.’ ‘Well let me get the doctor.’ ‘I don’t want a doctor,’ said Father, ‘he couldn’t tell me what’s worrying me. That’s all that’s the matter with me. A bit of worry. And anyway no doctor knows as much about sickness as your momma here. She’s a grand nurse. I never would have got out of Pittsburg alive if it hadn’t been for her. Would I, dear?’ ‘But, Father –’ ‘George, let me alone. Leave us alone. You mustn’t come between Momma and me. We’re all right together. See?’ He looked up into the boy’s face and his eyes changed as if a cloud of colder thought had blown across his mind. In a remote whisper he said, ‘Kiss me, boy.’ Then he went on, ‘We’ll be all right, we’ll go to bed when Momma’s ready. And in the meantime I want to practise something. So goodnight, son.’
When George and the daily maid tiptoed into the room in the morning they found him still sitting with his head against Momma’s knees; and Momma’s grief at the moment of waking, and for ever afterwards, was frenzied and despairing. She offered George no help – but then for years it had been taken for granted that her relationship with the practical was tenuous in the extreme – in working out the problem of how he must live. Their position was not desperate. Ira Wickett had left some provision for his daughter. The house was theirs, and there was a little money. But it was not quite enough. There was needed exactly that sum that Father had made out of his séances. It was plain, therefore, that the problem was virtually solved: George must give the séances his father had given. It was an easy solution, and indeed there was no other. The lessons in mediumship his father had given him every evening had gravely interfered with his general education; he had no friends outside the spiritualist world whose influence he could evoke to give him employment; and, indeed, if he had been able to do so it would have been useless, for his mother’s state of health would have prevented his going out to work every morning. For she was not getting over her loss, on the contrary she was every day more subject to it. She was in a perpetual state of hysteria that seemed at times to be verging on a more delusionary condition. Almost every day she would sit in her basket-chair making raps, and would suddenly forget what she was doing and shriek with fear at the raps, and wonder if they were Father coming back to her, and then cry because she had been so cowardly as to be afraid of dear Father. In the evening it was better, for she fell into her drowse earlier and earlier; but it was quite impossible to think of leaving her every day.
So, though without vanity, he expected to be civilly received, as one who is properly shouldering his responsibilities, when he told his schoolmaster that he was leaving school at the end of the term and was going to be a medium. He was surprised, he was hurt, when he saw a look in the man’s eye that plainly meant something very different. He had always known that all his teachers pitied him for something to do with his parentage, but he had thought this due to the preference for insipidity which is almost part of education. So far as he had seen anything of the homes of other children, their mothers were far inferior to his own in richness, their fathers far inferior to his in every conceivable quality that could be admired. But now he perceived that his parents had been blamed for a specific reason, and that now he too was going to be blamed instead of being pitied.
George did not like it, because the little man had always been very kind to him. He had an impulse to defend himself, to explain how his father’s lessons in legerdemain had kept him back in his studies. But he had to bite his lip and break off the sentence. People did not understand about that. It would seem to the schoolmaster as if he was confessing that his father had been a cheat and that he was going to be one; and he could not find the words to explain that really it was not like that at all. He felt helpless and unhappy, and more than ever conscious of the coldness of the little man’s eyes. He wanted to rouse his sympathies by telling him about his mother, how ill she was, how she thought that the rappings she herself had made were spirit messages, but it struck him immediately that that also would not do. He had to stand stupidly looking down at the floor till the schoolmaster, speaking to him more icily than he had ever done before, told him he could go.
That was the first time that George felt conscious of a difference between himself and other people, which consisted in his inability to be candid about many of the things concerning which they had nothing to hide. It depressed him every time he thought of it during the following winter, although his happiest moments came when he was giving his séances. He would leave the dark house, made desolate by Momma weeping and moaning, or laughing loudly over some small inexplicable joke, he would travel across London, or across England, it might be, to a room where something so delightful was to happen that at any point in his journey he could dismiss its tedium by resting his forehead on his hand and thinking how presently he would be sitting in the blackness, using his hands as his father taught him, palming the slate without a sound so quickly that it never showed a trace of the hand’s heat, and letting his voice bell in his throat so that it sounded like his father’s and whipped up the passions of the hidden people all about him, so that though the eye saw nothing the mind saw a circle of blazing light. There was always a point in the séance when this light grew so strong that he knew that he himself could not be responsible for it and he felt his father’s spirit sitting close to him. Whatever he said then meant something to all of the sitters. The light would blaze higher, it would recede, when the poor real light flooded the room it was obvious that virtue had gone out of him. As they pressed in on him he would forget how he had spent weeks piecing together the convincing messages from the dead for which they thanked him, it would seem that the unknown dead had spoken through his lips, that the known dead had kissed him on the lips, and he would go out into the night dazzled and
smiling and drunken. But in the third-class carriage he would remember that he had lied, and his chin would fall lower and lower inside his turned-up collar. When he got back to the silent house Momma would be lying in her bed, breathing stertorously, but as unlike herself as she had been a year or two ago as if she were dead; as unresponsive to the hand he laid on her, the mouth he pressed on her forehead, as if she were dead; dumbfoundingly just a body. He would stand beside her, looking up at the ceiling, asking what that which is not the body is, and where it goes, as if he expected to find it a small moth folded somewhere on the cornice of the discoloured plaster.
George slept late after such nights; but after one such he woke early, one morning in the March following his father’s death. For his mother stood by his bedside, calmer than she had been for months, and more brisk and purposeful than he had seen her since his childhood, though she was so bodily destroyed that for a second or two he looked at her in horror without listening to what she had to say. Her sausage-curls, which she now neither dyed nor brushed, were greasy, grey, soiled springs, her cheeks were purple, her stoutness was so increased that her dressing-gown did not meet. He cried out in pain, ‘Oh, Momma, Momma!’ But she hushed him with a finger and said, ‘Quiet now, your dad’s right nervous.’ The hair standing up on his head, he lay still. She went on, ‘You know well’s I do he hasn’t been home for months. And here was I thinking he was just like the ones I had before him. But he’s back sitting in the kitchen, and he’s looking peaked. He’s got a story of having been on a long journey.’ She passed the lapel of her dressing-gown across her lips and stared in front of her under knit brows, as if weighing evidence. ‘It’s a queer story, but I believe it. So we’ll treat him right. Come down and talk to him while I cook him some breakfast. He’s looking real peaked I tell you.’