by Rebecca West
George followed her down the creaking stairs into the kitchen where there was nothing but the raw morning light. She nodded to an empty chair and said, in the ironical tone of one who forgives but dreads to be laughed at for forgiving so tries to put a complexion of mockery on it all, ‘Well, here’s the boy,’ and sharply bade George in an undertone, ‘Give your dad a kiss.’ Then she turned to the kitchen-range and busied herself with a frying-pan of bacon. ‘Momma,’ said George. ‘Momma.’ Over her shoulder she said, ‘It’s your dad you should talk to. Make him feel at home. We’ve both wanted him at home, I’m sure.’
He knelt down beside the empty space she kept on looking at, and whispered, ‘Father, father.’ It might be so. But he had hardly time to drop his lids, so that in darkness he might see better, before a whimper from his mother brought him up again. She was leaning against the mantelpiece, shaking with a fever and crying out in a delirium which did not leave her until three days after, when she died. George’s grief was greater than he had expected, for he had never felt much emotion about her other than a joy in the lusciousness she had had before she got so ill. He admired the doctor very much, and was puzzled and worried because he had an air of impatience and even disgust when he came into the house, and always spoke curtly to him. He was relieved when the doctor said that he would come in the day after the funeral to have a look at him. It showed there was no actual ill-feeling.
But the doctor was still curt when he said, ‘I thought so. Your lungs are pretty bad. Be careful of yourself, or there’ll be TB and a sanatorium. No hard work, no indoor work.’ He gave brief directions for a regime, and was out in the garden on his way to his car as he gave the last. ‘And, above all, no drink.’
‘I never drink,’ said George.
‘Not yet, perhaps, but you’d better guard against it.’
‘Why?’ asked George. Then, as his eyes met the doctor’s, he cried out indignantly, ‘My mother didn’t drink. She took it sometimes as medicine because her heart was so bad. But she didn’t drink.’
The doctor was silenced. He made a step back towards the boy, and stopped; and his hands described a gesture of apology.
George bowed his head in acknowledgement and stood staring at something light on the ground that had caught his eye. Up till that moment he had always taken his mother’s behaviour as just a mother’s behaviour. He did not know that all mothers did not become comatose in the evening after a gradual mellowing; the very smell that hung about her he had accepted as the usual attribute of a mother. But he was suddenly and immediately convinced.
‘She must have been a very remarkable woman in her youth,’ said the doctor uncomfortably.
‘Who told you that?’ asked George; and with a rush of hope he added, ‘Did you know my father?’
‘No,’ said the doctor, ‘but I have read about her.’
‘Where, where?’ asked George.
‘Goodbye, I will look in again,’ flustered the doctor.
George’s eye went back to the light object on the ground. He had been convinced of something else. If the doctor had read of his mother it could only be because she had at some time been exposed as a fraudulent medium. He remembered now that it had always been kept a secret that she had been Cora, that he had been told from his childhood that he must never mention Grandpop Ira in front of any of the believers.
He was conscious that the light object he was looking at was a cluster of snowdrops. Their whiteness and the innocence of their slenderness and drooping bells were to him a symbol of everything that his circumstances were not. For a minute he had a wild impulse to run through the gate and throw himself on the mercy of the doctor, who was sitting in his car, having some difficulty with his clutch. But he reflected that the doctor, though plainly possessed of full affinity with success and respectability, would not help him. Did not the advice the doctor had just before given him sentence him to being a medium and nothing else?
The next six years passed slowly, miserably, successfully. George was at first known as the boy medium, and as he grew into manhood ladies often likened him to the poet Shelley. He would look like a young, dying god when they bound his hands and tied him up in the cabinet, a lock of his fine goldish-brown hair falling over his forehead, his mouth pressed as if in pain, his thin frame heaving with the deep sighs breathed in expectation of his ordeal. While they sat in darkness it was as if a living god moved among them, showering prodigies, writing messages, giving flowers, creating out of space the hands of beloveds that caressed as they had done when living, filling the air so full of spirits that some, unable to insert themselves in the sequence of materializations, rapped the walls and furniture till it was like a bombardment. When they untied the knots at the end of the séance he was very nearly a dead god. His white skin, glazed with the most delicate conceivable form of sweat, looked like fine porcelain; he hardly breathed, but joy lingered on his lips. He would refuse all company to the station, and would sit with bent spine, with hanging head, to his journey’s end. He was hungry not only for the immortality of his dear ones, but for honour, so that when he re-entered the dark house he could comfort himself with no fantasy about them. If it had been Father’s step he had heard on the stairs, if suddenly Momma’s raps had started in the basement below, he would have remained sitting on his bed, with his head on his hands. There were too many accusations to be made if he had opened the door; there were too few conceivable defences.
Loneliness was George’s tragedy. He could make no friends, among the believers, not so much because he felt he could not be friendly with people whom he cheated, as because he knew that those with whom he would much rather be friends would feel like that; and soon, too, he found himself calculating that this remoteness was of commercial value to him, in enhancing the effect of his personality. Since he was so successful he was able to afford good holidays, to stay at moderately expensive hotels in England and in Switzerland where he could come in contact with the friends he desired; but though he had the presentability that is cultivated by those who are doubtful of themselves it was cancelled by the sense of guilt that tied his tongue. It was during one such holiday that, shut in his room in the evenings, he wrote an article on the sorrows of a man who was brought up to be a fraudulent medium and could do no other work, and sent it to a London newspaper which published it over a pseudonym and sent him a few guineas for it. It relieved his feelings for a time, and he got a bitter and contemptuous kind of pleasure from seeing the article attacked as untrue in the correspondence columns by believers whom he had often cheated. It brought him a letter from a female medium, who was careful to give only a box number at a stationer’s shop, confessing that she too was in a like position, having been reared to deceive and having no other means of livelihood nor relations who could help her to them. George was sorry for her, though for some reason he visualized her as being like Momma in her last stages, purplish and stout and bedressing-gowned, and he answered her kindly. But the correspondence naturally languished after a few exchanges; it could hardly consist of anything but reiterated complaints and commiserations. Perhaps the best thing his article did for him was to mitigate his sense of unimportance and isolation; for the newspaper liked to keep in touch with him, since he could supply them with possible explanations of the miracles imputed to any sensational new medium.
But often George thought that he should not have written that article, particularly while he was conducting a séance or had just given a very successful one. Was it right to make people think that there was nothing in spiritualism when night after night he felt his father close to him in the darkness? There might be tricks, and tricks again, but there was also a magical transfusion of matter, a sieve-like quality of this world that let in siftings from eternity. It was little enough when he wanted the whole of his father back again just as he used to be, but was it not something that that very night he had been certain, as the knots round his ankles fell unloosed in a second, that his hands had superhuman agility because they w
ere not his but his father’s? He was thinking that very thought as he stood putting on his overcoat after a séance at Barnet when a man he knew, one of the believers, came in and told him he would be welcome at a demonstration by a voice medium that was taking place at a private house not far distant. He said he would go, because of a hope that there his father might be also, which turned, as soon as the open air fanned his face, into a weariness that he should leave one circle of fools sitting in darkness round a cheat to go to another.
But this other séance was not in darkness. Round a large drawing-room furnished in the Victorian style with brass chandeliers, a prodigious mantelpiece crowned by a large marble presentation clock, and many gold-framed pictures representing Highland cattle, undaunted by the bright lights, undaunted by all the respectability, the medium was running about with a long trumpet in her hand. She was the most fairylike person he had ever seen. She wore a dress of accordion-pleated blue muslin, falling from a band of silk that girded a bust as flat and narrow as a child of ten’s though she was perhaps eighteen; and because of her floating skirts and the way her light brown gold-dusted hair blew back from her forehead, she seemed to flutter and poise like a winged sprite as she ran about the room, holding out her trumpet to each of the dozen persons that were sitting there in turn. Her lips perpetually curved in a gentle smile; she waited till each had alternately put his ear to the trumpet and spoken into it, for perhaps three minutes, then, breaking into a freshet of nervous, high-pitched yet soft laughter, she pulled the trumpet away and sped on with it to someone else. She came to George very soon after he had entered the room, but at first he did not take the end of the trumpet from her, he was marvelling so much at her extreme pallor, which suggested not that she had no blood but that her blood was more ethereal than other people’s. But she remained in front of him, rising and falling slightly on her toes, and perpetually smiling, till he put his ear to the trumpet. A far whisper said, ‘It’s … ther.’ It must be Father; for nobody had ever called his mother anything but Momma. He said, ‘Is that you, Father?’ The whisper answered, ‘Yes.’ He stared along the trumpet into the medium’s pale shining grey eyes, which looked at once blind and farseeing, which brightly turned about and seemed to bless by not recognizing the essential quality of anything on which they lay. In full faith he cried down the trumpet, ‘Did you help me with my hands tonight?’ and the whisper answered, ‘Yes, my son, and in many other ways.’ He dropped his end of the trumpet, and stood with his jaw dropping, wishing that he had not been one of the fools he himself habitually cheated, asking questions that suggested their correct answers. But on the medium’s face was a smile so sweet that it might well have been the centre and source of a halo. He shuddered, knowing that he was in the presence of a true medium; and then shuddered again, for as she stepped away from him she had laughed, and he had desired her as he had never desired any woman.
After the séance George was introduced to her; her name was Ivy Bentham. She talked to him pleasantly with that wonderful laugh coming up to the surface, sometimes merely shimmering behind her words. When somebody told her that he too was a medium he thought she looked distressed, and his heart stood still lest it had got abroad that he was a false medium, and she had heard. But she let him travel with her back to London, and leave her at the boarding-house where she lived with her mother, who at the moment was, she explained, absent in the North nursing a sister through a dangerous illness; and she told him too that he might telephone the next day. There was no question but that she liked him, and though of course he was not good enough for her he might have been her husband and her servant had he not been cursed with this heritage of fraud and trickery. When he got home to the dark and empty house that night he shouted oaths at the creaking on the stairs, the stirrings down in the basement. If they were what he had sometimes thought they were, so much the better. He told them three weeks later that it was because they had made him what they had that he was going to do this dirty trick and marry Ivy while her mother was away, and not tell her the truth till he had had one month of perfect happiness. But he did not abuse them. He felt a kinship with all evil, a need for alliance against the good, for he was haunted by a fear that one of the angels who spoke through Ivy’s trumpet, who, she had shyly and even uncomfortably told him, had watched over her since she was ten years old, might tell her what he was. He even planned that he would bring her back there to make his confession. For he felt that Father with his twisting white fingers would bring a touch of legerdemain to the situation which would turn it all to the family’s account; and he felt that Momma, sitting in the basement making her raps, would wear it all down, would make the angels sink into such a thick drowse as her own. He knew himself doubly a Judas for these plans because it was not until he had heard his father whispering down her trumpet, and had asked her solemnly if there was no trickery in her voices, and she had as solemnly denied it, that he had known for certain that the dead are alive and can be called on for aid according to their quality.
‘You look so white!’ Ivy had said to George as they left the Registry Office. They had had no difficulty in getting married, although her mother was still at Whitley Bay, and seemed from her letters frigidly displeased at the mere notion of her daughter’s engagement, because, to his surprise, she was as old as he was: she was twenty-three. But that whiteness, which was indeed excessive, vanished almost as soon as they started their honeymoon at Swanage. He was delighted simply to be there, a married man, which was such an ordinary, unexceptional sort of thing to be, and had great delight in getting into conversation with people and telling them that in London he was a bank clerk; and he was amazed to find that Ivy was enjoying the same sort of pleasure. She had, it appeared, told the landlady that before her marriage she had been a private secretary. But their chief delight was their possession of each other. Ivy was magic, she was marvellous, she was worthy of these gifts which, when he thought of them, cooled him with reverence. She had everything, even a beautiful melancholy, which he thought not unnatural in one who was in touch with the secrets of eternity. Sometimes she would look wildly into his face and then dissolve into weeping that was the sad and enchanting sister of her laughter. He would comfort her until she slept, and then he would go out and walk by the sea thinking how wicked he was: the false that had seduced into union the true. He had deceived her utterly. She would look into his face sometimes and say, ‘You know I can’t imagine your doing anything wrong.’
But for the most part it was ecstasy, if they embraced, or if they did not. Perhaps George’s highest ecstasy was when for three days he had spared her his passion, and he felt in tune with her purity, so that like her he was unassailable. He felt a great pity for all other human beings. He even thought of the poor fat and mottled old fraudulent medium who had written to him about his article, and routed her address out of his notebook, and sent a letter telling her not to despair, because there was some truth in spiritualism, there were mediums so holy that they could pierce the veil between the worlds and could let loose the radiance of eternity on mortal man. It was unfortunate that just after that his passion broke loose and he was her lover more urgently for a night than, he thought, any man had any right to be to his wife. He was afraid he had offended her, for she was very remote all that morning, and would not go out with him, saying she wanted to write a letter. But she had really written a letter, she had nearly finished the box of pale blue fancy stationery they had bought.
As the time for his return drew nearer his distress grew more unconcealable. He would bury his face in the pillow, groaning, ‘I don’t want to go back!’ And she, poor thing, thinking she understood, thinking merely that he meant that he had been happy here and did not want to go back to his work, was kind to him. Sometimes he even played with the idea of not telling her. But he would not let the dead that are damned master him quite to that extent; even if he invoked their aid after he did it, he must align himself with the beloved saved by that one act of confession. He must, to
raise one practical point, give her the chance of leaving him, of deciding, even though she would forgive his prostitution of what was to her a holy cult, whether she could face being his wife if he was exposed as a fraud. Remembering the sickening hours he had spent in a Public Library reading up the exposure of Momma in the nineties, he felt he had to put that to her; although he meant to put it to her in the dark house, where Momma’s raps under their feet might somehow turn the balance.
So she said again, ‘You look so white!’ when the cab stopped among the grassy ruts in the road that was already shadowed by the butt of the hill in front of the afternoon sun. George smiled at her, and told her to take her time in collecting the smaller packages, and lifted out the suitcases. Very slowly he carried them up the path and rang the bell at the front door. The patterns of clear glass on the panes of frosted glass seemed to let out darkness into the day, instead of letting the day into the darkness, as it was meant. When the old daily maid came he said, ‘How are you, Mary?’ and carried the suitcase into the hall. For a minute he stood feeling the full weight of the shadow on his shoulders. Then his eye was caught by something on the hall table, and he bent forward. Then he straightened himself again and looked down the black staircase that led down to the basement. ‘Poor old Father!’ he said. ‘Poor old Momma.’