The Seance

by John Harwood

  "How would I know if I did?" I asked uneasily.

  "You feel ... taken up ... they are so strong, sometimes, you think they will shake you to pieces. And then when they leave you, emptied out ... like a vessel used and thrown away .... When I was young, like you, I was filled with their light ... now they hardly come to me at all. But you never forget, my dear, you never forget."

  She patted my hand again and sighed deeply, and I found tears pricking my own eyes.

  "But if they don't come to you—" I ventured. Mrs. Veasey did not immediately reply. On the other side of the railings, the foundling girls were gathered about the yard in two and threes and fours, or playing at jump-rope; they might have been the very same girls that Annie and I had watched ten years before.

  "We must help people believe," she said at last, "like your poor Mama. There isn't a medium in London who doesn't pretend, sometimes, and how can it be wrong to bring comfort to them that mourn?"

  "And—do people have to pay to come to your séances?"

  "Goodness no, my dear; we take up a small collection afterwards, and those that can afford it, give what they can. But no one in need is ever turned away."

  "Mrs. Veasey," I said after a pause, "have you ever seen a spirit?"

  "No, my dear, not with these eyes. The gift didn't take me that way. But you know, my dear, there's something about you ... I shouldn't be at all surprised if you were chosen."

  "But I don't want to be chosen," I said, "only for Mama to be happy again."

  " That's a sign of a true gift, my dear, not wanting it. And as for your Mama, why don't you bring her to our meeting tomorrow?"

  "Mama has not left the house for years," I said, "but I should like to come to you myself, if I may."

  At half past six the following evening, therefore, I let myself out of the house, telling Mama that I had a headache and needed to walk. She had sunk further toward her old blank misery, but I did not want to risk another summoning until I had seen how Mrs. Veasey conducted a séance. It was the first week of June, and still broad daylight, but the evening chill was already upon the air. The Society's door was open; I went on up a narrow staircase, as Mrs. Veasey had told me, and into a dim, panelled room in which the curtains were already drawn. The only furniture was a large circular table, around which half a dozen people were already seated, including Mrs. Veasey, who sat with her back to a small fire of coals. She greeted me warmly, introduced me to the circle, and invited me to sit opposite her, between a Mr. Ayrton, whose wife was on the other side of him, and an elderly woman called Miss Rutledge. There was also another middle-aged couple, Mr. and Mrs. Bachelor, and Mr. Carmichael, an immensely fat man whose several chins spilled out onto a vast expanse of waistcoat. He had moist, pale eyes, and wheezed softly as he breathed.

  These people, as I would learn, were Mrs. Veasey's regular sitters. Several others appeared during the next few minutes until the last place at the table had been taken, whereupon Mr. Ayrton rose and shut the door. He then invited us to join hands and sing "Abide with Me," which we did rather discordantly, along with several other hymns, whilst Mrs. Veasey slumped lower in her chair and appeared to doze.

  Mrs. Veasey had told me about spirit controls, but I was still startled when she began to speak in a gruff man's voice, greeted by Mr. Ayrton as "Captain Veasey." The messages were commonplace but affecting; Mr. Carmichael, for instance, was told that Lucy was watching over him, as always, and that his "present difficulty" would resolve itself very soon, whereupon he gave a great wheezing sigh, almost a sob, and bowed his head. Everyone in the circle received a message, and I saw how the sitters hung upon every word. The message for me was "Alma says you have done right," and even though I knew that Mrs. Veasey's trance was feigned—indeed, I thought her left eyelid quivered very slightly as she (or rather the Captain) spoke—it still brought a lump to my throat.

  She had ceased to speak, and I thought the séance had ended, when her eyes, which had been closed throughout the performance, flew open, apparently fixed upon an invisible object floating somewhere above the table.

  "Alma," said the Captain's harsh voice, "Alma will speak through Constance."

  There was a collective gasp from the sitters; the hair rose upon the back of my neck. Mrs. Veasey started violently, and seemed to become conscious of her surroundings.

  "Miss Langton," she said hoarsely, "you must do as he bids. Close your eyes, and summon the image of your sister."

  Her voice was urgent, peremptory; I could not tell whether she was feigning or not. I closed my eyes, feeling my companions' hands trembling in mine, and tried to fix my mind upon Alma. After a little I became aware of a faint buzzing vibration, running up my arms and through my body.

  "I can feel the power," said Mrs. Veasey. "Is there anybody here?"

  It is only pins and needles, I told myself fearfully, willing the vibration to stop. But it seemed to me that words were welling up in my throat, threatening to choke me if I did not speak, and to forestall the sensation I began to chant in my Alma-voice, as I had done the other evening, sounds to the tune of "All Things Bright and Beautiful," and slowly the tension relaxed, and my hands ceased to tremble.

  "Alma," said Mrs. Veasey, "tell us why you have come." The hoarseness had left her voice.

  "For Mama," I piped.

  "You have a message for your Mama?"

  "Tell Mama"—I paused, thinking rapidly—"tell Mama ... safe in Heaven. Tell Mama to come here."

  "We shall. And—would you like to speak to anyone else?"

  I did not reply, but lapsed back into my chanting, letting it gradually die away, and a few moments later pretended to wake.

  Three days later, my mother emerged blinking into the light. Though she was not yet sixty, she might have been my great-grandmother, clad in a frayed mourning-dress of rusty brown and clinging tightly to my arm. Her expression, as she gazed about her, was bewildered but strangely incurious, and I became aware that she could not actually see the things I was pointing at; she had grown so shortsighted that her world had shrunk to a circle a few feet across.

  Mrs. Veasey had told me privately that she felt sure Alma would want to speak through me again, and thus it proved. I felt my mother's hand quivering in mine as I began to sing in my Alma-voice, and though she asked more or less the same questions, and received more or less the same answers, as on the first evening in the drawing room, she was still in tears of joy when the performance ended. We remained for some time afterward talking to Mr. and Mrs. Ayrton, who had lost both their sons to the cholera, and I invited them to tea the following week, thinking that all would be well.

  And so for a while it seemed. Mama remained obsessed with Alma to the exclusion of all else—she refused to be fitted with spectacles on the ground that there was nothing she needed to see—but I was so delighted to see her in company, I did not care that the talk was all of bereavements in this world and joyful reunions in the next. The Society met twice a week, and in between séances I would sometimes sit with Mrs. Veasey on the bench outside the Foundling Hospital. There she would instruct me in the arts of mediumship, always on the understanding that we were simply helping the spirits in their task, and suggest messages that Alma might give to other sitters. I came to realise that she had chosen me as her successor, though I was never sure of her motives, just as I was never quite certain whether she believed or not: I suspect that, like me, she had had glimpses of a power, fleeting and uncertain, coming upon you when you least expected it.

  There was, she insisted, an affinity between us; but I was aware, too, that we were bound by our mutual confidences; neither could afford to expose the other, and I sometimes wondered if this was why she had chosen me. I noticed, too, that the contributions increased as our partnership developed; all of the money, of course, went to Mrs. Veasey, but though my conscience often troubled me, the deception did not seem wicked, since it was done for Mama's sake. Our Society was far from grand; it admitted both impoverished gentry and respec
table women of the housekeeping class, people on the fringe of their station. Most of the sitters, including, of course, Mama, were eager, if not determined, to believe whatever the medium told them, and with Mrs. Veasey's assistance I began to gain a reputation, which was both exhilarating and alarming. I enjoyed, I confess, the power it conferred upon me, to have grown men and women hanging upon my words. And sometimes—though I was never sure of it—I felt that my feigned trance was becoming a real one. Sounds would grow louder: The creaking of the coals in the grate, the faint whistle of Mr. Carmichael's asthmatic breathing, until the blood seemed to wash and boom in my ears, and then the sounds would begin to shape themselves into words, or rather the shadow of words, like conversation heard a long way off. And yet the more I practised, the less I believed in anything like the realm of spirits we invoked with such assurance.

  I had hoped that Mama would be content with regular messages from Alma, but as the autumn advanced and the days grew shorter, the old haunted look crept back into her eyes. Hearing Alma's voice was no longer proof enough; my mother wanted to see, to touch, to hold her, and having learned from the other sitters that there were mediums who could make spirits visible, she began to wonder aloud why I would not take her to see one. Mrs. Veasey disapproved of manifestations; the use of the cabinet, she would declare in righteous tones, was a sure sign of trickery. This was not an argument I wished to pursue with Mama; I thought of contriving a message from Alma along the lines of "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed," but I doubted whether it would subdue her craving. And so I decided to attend a manifestation séance myself, in the hope that I might stumble upon someone who could present a convincing Alma to my mother's fading sight.

  Several members of our circle had spoken, though not within Mrs. Veasey's hearing, of a Miss Carver, whose sittings were held in her father's house in Marylebone High Street. Katie Carver was said to be very pretty, and capable of summoning not only her "control," an equally attractive spirit by the name of Arabella Morse, but a whole troop of them. Only after I had secured my place at a sitting, and handed over a guinea ("for charitable causes"), did it strike me that I should have given a false name. Miss Lester, the young woman who had taken my money, showed me into a dimly lit room furnished, like our own in Lamb's Conduit Street, with a large circular table, but richly carpeted. Candles burned upon the table and within an alcove in the far corner. The alcove was about six feet square, with heavy curtains draped from the ceiling to the floor, tied back at the front to show that there was nothing inside except a plain upright chair.

  When all the places had been taken (there were, I think, about fifteen of us), Miss Carver herself appeared, and all the gentlemen rose to their feet and bowed. She was certainly pretty; small and buxom and fair, with her hair plaited and wound about her head, and clad in a plain white muslin gown. Miss Lester introduced us one by one; the sitters were more elaborately and expensively dressed than Mrs. Veasey's, but the only name I would recall was that of Mr. Thorne, a tall, fair-haired young man sitting across the table from me. Something in his expression—a hint of sardonic amusement?—attracted my attention, and I noticed that Miss Carver looked very hard at him when his turn came to be introduced.

  I knew that in these séances, the medium sat within the cabinet, but I was surprised when, at a signal from Miss Carver, several of the gentlemen (but not Mr. Thorne) accompanied her to the alcove and watched while Miss Lester, using what appeared to be silk scarves, tied her securely to the chair. The knots were examined; the gentlemen returned to their places; Miss Lester extinguished the light in the cabinet, drew the curtains, and asked us all to join hands. "You must not break the circle unless a spirit invites you to," she said. "The manifestations are a great strain for Miss Carver, and she may be harmed if you do not do exactly as instructed." She then invited us to sing "O God, Our Help in Ages Past," took up the candelabra, and went quietly from the room, leaving us in complete darkness.

  We had sung perhaps half a dozen hymns, led by a strong baritone voice somewhere on my right, when I became aware of a faint glow from the direction of the cabinet. It brightened into a luminous halo, hovering around the outline of a head, and seemed to unfurl downward into the figure of a woman, veiled in draperies of light. She glided away from the cabinet and began a circuit of the table. As she came nearer I could see the movement of her limbs beneath the veil, and then the gleam of eyes and the suggestion of a smile. Her effect was manifest in the quickened breathing of my companions.

  "Arabella," said a male voice from the darkness to my left, "will you come to me?"

  She passed behind my chair, trailing a distinct odour of perfume (and, I thought, of flesh), and drifted closer to the table until the man who had spoken was faintly illuminated by the glow of her robes. Then she kissed the top of his bald head, prompting a deep sigh from the audience before she glided away again. She had gone about three-quarters of the way round when I heard a muffled exclamation and the scrape of a chair, and another light floated up from the darkness in front of her: a small phial of radiance, lighting up the face of Mr. Thorne as he stretched out his other hand and grasped the retreating spirit by the wrist.

  "There is no need to struggle, Miss Carver," he said drily. "My name is Vernon Raphael, from the Society for Psychical Research. Would you care to explain yourself to the company?"

  The room was suddenly in uproar. My hands were released, chairs were overthrown, and several matches flared, showing Mr. Thorne—or, rather, Mr. Raphael—holding at arm's length a very angry Miss Carver, whose stays and drawers were plainly visible beneath diaphanous layers of what appeared to be butter muslin. A second later, she had torn herself free and darted back into the cabinet, wrenching the curtains closed behind her.

  I expected the sitters to drag her out again, but to my astonishment, several of the men seized Vernon Raphael instead, calling his intervention an outrage and a violation and a damned disgrace as they propelled him toward the door. On impulse, I rose and followed them. "All right, all right; I'll go quietly," I heard Vernon Raphael say as they hustled him down the front steps. His hat was flung after him into the street. With no one taking the slightest notice of me, I took my cloak and bonnet from the hall-stand and followed him down the steps. There I waited until I heard the door close behind me; Vernon Raphael was walking slowly away, brushing the dirt from his hat.

  He looked at me ruefully as I came up beside him.

  "Have you too come to reproach me with cruelty to spirits, Miss, er—?"

  "Miss Langton. And no, I have not; I only wanted—"

  I paused, wondering what exactly I did want of him. In daylight his hair was straw-coloured, with a reddish tinge; his eyes were an intense, rather cold shade of blue, and his face had a slightly vulpine cast, but I liked the humorous edge to his voice. We began to walk again; it was late in the afternoon, and the street was relatively quiet.

  "Are you employed by the Society, Mr. Raphael, to seek out fraud?" Mrs. Veasey had warned me against the Society for Psychical Research; sceptics and unbelievers, she called them, with no respect for the departed.

  "Well, yes, in a way; I am one of their professional investigators. And you, Miss Langton? What brings you to Miss Carver's parlour?"

  Again I wished I had not revealed my name; what if he were to turn his attentions to Holborn? But then it struck me that we had little to fear, now that I knew him.

  "Curiosity," I said. "Do you think, Mr. Raphael, that all spirit mediums are cheats?"

  "All manifestation mediums, yes."

  "And mental mediums?" I had heard the term from Mrs. Veasey.

  He looked at me curiously. "I see you know something of the subject. Some are frauds; the others mostly self-deluded."

  "Mostly?"

  "Well ... I am a sceptic, not an out-and-out atheist—not yet, at any rate. Gurney and Myers—you know of them?—have assembled some very remarkable cases; they are looking at subjects who claim to have seen the appar
ition of a friend or relation at the moment of that person's death, but the verdict is not yet in. And you, Miss Langton? What do you believe?"

  "I do not know what I believe, but"—I decided after all to risk it—"my sister died when I was five, and my mother has been prostrate with grief ever since. Frankly, Mr. Raphael, if I could find a medium who could convince her that Alma is safe in Heaven, I would want her to have that comfort. And so I wondered—whether there is anyone you could recommend."

  "My business, Miss Langton"—he sounded more amused than indignant—"is to expose frauds, not to recommend them."

  "It is all very well for you, Mr. Raphael, who are clever and confident and at home in the world, but for those like my mother, who are simply crushed by the weight of grief, why deprive them of the comfort a séance can bring?"

  "Because it is false comfort."

  " That is a harsh doctrine, Mr. Raphael; a man's creed, if I may say so. Have you never lied, or kept silent, to spare the feelings of another? If you had lost a brother, let us say, and your own mother had been prostrated by grief, would you sternly insist—as my father did—that she take no comfort in séances?"

  He looked, to do him justice, a little abashed.

  "I confess, Miss Langton, that I should be reluctant to disabuse her. But, to take the other side of the coin, what of those mediums who prey unscrupulously—for monetary gain—upon the bereaved? Do you think they should be allowed free rein?"

  "I suppose not," I said reluctantly. "But they are not all like that."

  "You speak from experience, evidently."

  "Only a little ... so there is no one, then, that you are prepared to name?"

  "Surely, Miss Langton, your mother needs the help of a doctor, not a medium."

  "A doctor has been seeing her for the last twelve years, without doing her the slightest good."

  "I see ... The difficulty, Miss Langton, is that if I were to direct you to a known, or even a suspected fraud, I would be breaching my duty to the Society. And besides ... Miss Carver is generally considered the best in London; you have seen for yourself how zealously her admirers defend her."