Possession (64 page)
Authors: A.S. Byatt
James Blackadder, with none of Cropper’s gusto, was picking his way through the London Library’s
Shadowy Portal
. He too had begun in total ignorance of the movements of Christabel LaMotte, and lacked Cropper’s certain knowledge of any connection between LaMotte and Hella Lees in 1861. But he had picked up an earlier reference to Mrs Lees in a letter Sir George had tried to intrigue him with, and he was engaged in a thorough rereading of Ash’s known work and life round the crucial months of 1859. He had read an article on
Actiniae
, or sea anemones, without enlightenment, and had noticed an absence of information about Ash in early 1860. He had reread
Mummy Possest
, which he had always thought anomalous in its hostility to its female protagonist and by extension to women in general. He asked himself now if this hitherto unexplained burst of bitterness was connected to the poet’s feelings about Christabel LaMotte. Or, of course, his wife.
The
Shadowy Portal
was a rich violet in colour, with gilded leaves and an embossed design on its cover, of a gilded dove, bearing a wreath, emerging from a keyhole-shaped black space. Inside, glued to the frontispiece, inside a frame of Puginesque arches, was a photograph of the medium, oval in shape. It showed a dark-skirted woman, seated at a table, her heavily beringed hands clasped on her lap, her beaded front hung with jet necklaces and a heavy funereal locket. Her hair, which hung about her face, was black and glossy, her nose aquiline and her mouth large. Her eyes, under heavy black brows, were deepset, and, as Ash had said, shadowed. It was a powerful face, strong-boned and fleshy together.
Blackadder leafed through the introductory matter. Mrs Lees came from a Yorkshire family with Quaker connections and had “seen” grey strangers in an early Quaker Meeting, where she was
accustomed to seeing threads and clouds of odylic light run about the heads and shoulders of the Elders. On visiting a pauper hospital, at the age of twelve, with her mother, she had observed thick clouds of dove-grey or purplish light hovering above the forms of the sick, and had been able accurately to predict who would die and who would recover. She had become entranced in a Meeting and had given an oration in Hebrew, a language of which she knew nothing. She had provoked winds in closed rooms, and had seen her dead grandmother perched on the end of her bed, singing and smiling. Rapping, table-shifting and written messages on slates had followed, and a career as a private medium. She had also had some success as a public speaker of Spiritual Discourses, under the control of her spirit guides, who were mostly a Red Indian girl called Cherry (an affectionate abbreviation of Cherokee) and a dead Scottish professor of chemistry, one William Morton, who had had a hard passage working out the debris of his spiritual scepticism before he realised his true nature and his mission to aid and inform those mortals still in the flesh. Some of these Discourses, on such topics as “Spiritualism and Materialism,” “Physical Manifestation and Spectral Light,” or “Standing on the Threshold,” were appended to the volume of reminiscences. These discourses, whatever their ostensible subject, all had a certain sameness—possibly the effect of trance—related to “that protoplasm of human speech flavoured with mild cosmic emotion” which Podmore discovered in the “dead level” style and sentiment of another inspired speaker.
Ash’s Gaza Exploit had raised her to an unusual pitch of unforgiving wrath.
Sometimes you may hear a positive person say, “The spirits are never able to perform in my presence.” Very likely—very likely indeed! But it should be no boast. If it is a fact, it is almost a disgraceful one. The fact that any human beings can take with them an element of such positiveness, a scepticism of such power, that it may overcome the influence of a mind disembodied, is certainly not to the credit of the individual. A positive mind entering a circle or seance for the investigation of spiritualism is
like introducing a ray of light into the dark compartment of the photographer when not wanted; or like taking up a seed from under the ground to see if it be growing; or like any other violent intervention in the processes of nature.
A positive mind may well say, “Why can the spirits not show themselves in the light of day as well as in the dark?” Professor Morton’s reply to this is that we see how many natural processes are subject to fluctuations in light and dark. The leaves of a plant do not produce “oxygen” without
sunlight
, and Professor Draper has recently shown that the relative powers of different rays to decompose carbon move through the spectrum thus: yellow, green, orange, red, blue, indigo, violet. Now the spirits have steadily indicated that their materialism is best effected in those rays which are at the blue and indigo and violet end of the spectrum. If a seance could be lit by a violet ray from a prism we might see marvels. I have found that a small quantity of indigo light from a thick pane of glass over a lantern allows our spirit friends marvellous freedom to bring us gifts of a solid kind, or to make themselves airy forms, for a time, from the substance of the
medium
and of the gases and solids present in the room. They cannot work in harsh light, and past centuries have known this by experiment. Do not ghosts appear at twilight, and the Celtic races meet the messengers of the dead in what they call the Black Month?
Now, a positive mind often brings with it a cloud of odylic fire of a disagreeable red or yellow colour, flaming and angry, which the medium and any other sensitive person may perceive. Or such a person may emit a kind of chill—like the cold rays from the fingers of Jack Frost—which may penetrate the atmosphere and prevent the aura, or the spiritual matter, from accumulating. I feel such freezing presences as a blow in my lungs, even before the cutaneous surface is aware of them. All exosmose action ceases, and the consequence is, there is no atmosphere out of which the spirit can produce manifestations.
Perhaps the most terrible example of the effects of such a presence on the delicate operations of spirit communication is the damage wreaked by the self-regarding behaviour of the poet Randolph Ash at a seance I held at Miss Olivia Judge’s house, in
the days when that group of marvellously sensitive women, the Vestal Lights, were gathered together under her roof for the purpose of sustained enquiry into spiritual Truth. Miss Judge has a beautiful house, Yew Tree Lodge, in Twickenham, near the river, and many marvellous things have happened there, many gatherings of the living and the departed, many signs and supremely comforting sounds and utterances. Elementals from the water play on her lawns and can be heard laughing at her window in the twilight. Her guests have been distinguished men and women: Lord Lytton, Mr Trollope, Lord and Lady Cotterell, Miss Christabel LaMotte, Dr Carpenter, Mrs de Morgan, Mrs Nassau Senior.
At the date I speak of, we were engaged in a series of profoundly illuminating talks with our spirit friends and guides, and many marvels had been vouchsafed to us. It was made known to me, I think by Lord Lytton, that Mr Ash was greatly desirous of attending a seance. When I demurred—for it is often harmful to disrupt a circle which is working well together—I was told that Mr Ash had experienced a recent loss, and was in great need of spiritual consolation and comfort. I was still doubtful, but the case was forcefully pleaded and I agreed. It was a condition on Mr Ash’s part, that no one should know in advance of his identity or purpose in coming, so that, he said, he should not impinge on the naturalness of the circle. I agreed to this condition.
It is not too much to say that upon Mr Ash’s entry into Miss Judge’s drawing-room I felt a
blast
of sceptical cold in my face and a kind of choking fog in my throat. Miss Judge asked me if I felt quite well and I said I believed I felt a chill coming on. Mr Ash shook my hand nervously, and the electricity of his touch revealed a paradox to me—beneath the congealed ice of his scepticism burned a spiritual sensitivity and force of unusual power. He said to me in a jocular tone, “So it is you who calls spirits from the vasty deep?” I told him, “You should not mock. I have no power to summon spirits. I am their instrument; they speak through me, or not, as they please, not as I please.” He said, “They speak to me too, through the medium of language.”
He looked about him nervously and did not address the rest of the assembled company, which included seven ladies and four
gentlemen, as well as myself. Of the Vestal Lights, all were present, as at all the previous sittings, to wit, Miss Judge, Miss Neve, Miss LaMotte and Mrs Furry.
We sat around the table in near darkness, as was our custom. Mr Ash was not next to me, but on the right of the gentleman beside me—as was our practice, we all clasped hands. I felt still the weight of cold in my lungs and throat, and had to cough repeatedly, so much so that Miss Judge asked if I were ill. I said I was prepared to try if our friends would speak, but I feared they would not, as the atmosphere was inhospitable. After a time I felt a terrible coldness creeping up my legs and my frame began to tremble greatly. Many trances are preceded by a moment of nausea and giddiness, but the trance into which I now fell was preceded by the shaking of approaching death, and Mr Ritter on my right remarked that my poor hands were as cold as stones. I have no more conscious memory of the events of that seance, but Miss Judge kept notes which I reproduce
as they stand:
Mrs Lees shook all over and a strange raucous voice cried out, “Do not force me.” We asked if it was Cherry and were told, “No, no, she will not come.” We asked who it was again and were told “Nobodaddy” with a horrible laugh. Miss Neve said the undeveloped spirits must be playing tricks on us. Then there was a violent cracking and rapping, and several of us felt our skirts lifted and our knees patted by spirit hands. Mrs Furry asked if Adeline, her baby daughter, was present. The horrible voice cried out, “There is no child.” It then added, “Curiosity killed the cat” and other silly phrases. A large book, from the table beside Mrs Lees, was flung across the room amidst laughter.
Miss Neve said that perhaps there was a hostile presence in the room. One of the other ladies present, who had never before displayed any skill as a medium, began to weep and laugh, crying out in German “Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint.” A voice spoke through Mrs Lees saying “Remember the stones.” Someone present cried out “Where are you?” and for answer we all heard the sound of flowing water and waves, with marvellous distinctness. I asked if
there was a particular spirit present who wished to speak to one of our company. The answer came back through Mrs Lees, that yes, there was present a spirit who had had great difficulty in making itself known but might speak if anyone who felt themselves addressed were to follow the medium into the inner room. As she spoke, a marvellously sweet voice said, “I bring gifts of reconciliation,” and a white hand was seen hovering above the table, carrying a marvellous white wreath, with the dew still fresh upon it, and surrounded by a crown of silvery lights. The medium slowly rose to go into the inner room, and two of the ladies, both much moved, and indeed sobbing, rose to follow her, when Mr Ash cried out, “Oh, you shall not escape me,” and snatched at the air, crying out “Lights! Lights!” The medium collapsed in a dead faint, and another lady fell back in her chair and was soon seen, when the lights were put on, to be without consciousness. Mr Ash was clutching the medium’s wrist, which he claimed had been transporting the wreath, though how
that
could be, considering where it fell, and where the “gentleman” and the medium were found, defies understanding.
Now here was chaos, and considerable danger, all caused by Mr Ash’s impulsive and destructive acts. Two delicate organisations disturbed—my own and that of the other lady, who was experiencing her first trance in these desperate circumstances. And the poet seemed quite unaware of the harm he might do to a disembodied mind attempting, heroically and with critical effort, to
materialise
itself in a new and experimental form. Miss Judge records that I myself lay with a chill and livid face, uttering deep groans. The poet meanwhile compounded his act of folly by releasing my wrist and rushing to the side of the other lady, seizing her by the shoulders, despite urgent assurances from the other Vestal Lights, that it was dangerous to disturb or startle a person so entranced. He was, they tell me, calling out in an uncontrolled and frantic manner, “Where is the child? Tell me what they have done with the child.” I understood at the time that Mr Ash was enquiring after the spirit of a departed child of
his own, but I am told that this could not be the case, as Mr Ash is childless. At this point a voice spoke through my lips, saying “Whose were the stones?”
The other lady became very ill, very pale, her breathing irregular, her pulse weak and fluttering. Miss Judge asked Mr Ash to leave, which he refused to do, saying that he wanted an answer, and that he had been “practised upon.” I came to my senses at this point and saw him; he looked most horrid and uncontrolled, with veins standing on his brow, and a most
thunderous
expression. All round him was a fiery mass of dull red actinic light, seething with hostile energies.
He seemed to me in that moment a
demon
and I asked, weakly, that he should be requested to leave. At the same time two of the Vestal Lights bore away the unconscious body of our friend. This lady
did not recover consciousness
for two whole days, to the great distress of the company, and when she did, seemed unable to speak and unwilling to eat or drink, so great was the shock to her delicate form of the terrible acts which had taken place.
Mr Ash nevertheless took it upon himself to communicate,
as a matter of fact
, to various persons, that he had detected “cheating” at the seance, at which he represented his own position as that of a detached observer. He was far from that, very far, as I hope the account of Miss Judge, as well as my own, will bear witness. When he later wrote his cleverly insinuating poem,
Mummy Possest
, he was taken by the general public as a champion of
reason
against knavery. Happy are they who have been persecuted for truth’s sake—I suppose we must say—but there is no harder blow to bear than
indirect malice
, bred I am sure of impotent disappointment, for Mr Ash’s whole manner was that of a
seeker
betrayed by his own positivism into the frustration of any communication he might have received.
And for my pain, and that of the other afflicted lady, not a thought, not a flicker of regard!!