Mystic London by Charles Maurice Davies (best mystery novels of all time .txt) 📖

the manifestation of any of these forms. At this séance I held him firmly by one hand, and a slightly sceptical lady had the other. We never let go for a moment, but during the whole of the sitting, while John King, Katie, and Peter were talking, tiny children's hands were playing with my arm, hands, and hair. There were, of course, no children in the room. Peter, the lugubrious, is great at light porterage. I have known him bring a large collection of valuable Sèvres china, and a timepiece with its glass case, from the chimney-piece to the table—no easy task in the light, much less in blank darkness. He also frequently takes down the pictures from the wall and puts them on the table. Katie winds up a large musical box, and wafts it, while playing, all over the room. Of course we rub our eyes and ask what on earth, if it be on earth, does this mean? I have not—to keep up the diction of my subject—the ghost of an idea. If it's conjuring, why don't the mediums say so, and enter the field openly against Messrs. Maskelyne and Cooke and Dr. Lynn? Even if I had a decided opinion about it I should refrain from propounding it here, because, in the first place, it would be an impertinence, and, in the second, no conclusion can be arrived at upon testimony alone. People must see for themselves and draw their own inferences. In the meantime the thing, whatever it is, grows and grows upwards. A year ago I had to journey down east to find it. Now I must array myself gorgeously like a Staffordshire miner, and seek the salons of the West. The great desideratum, it still appears to me, is that some man with a name in science should examine the matter, honestly resolving to endorse the facts if true, but to expose them mercilessly if there be a loophole for suspicion. Omne ignotum pro magnifico habetur. I used to think ghosts big things, but that was before I knew them. I should think no more of meeting a ghost now than a donkey on a dark night, and would infinitely sooner tackle a spirit than a burglar. People's curiosity is roused, and the sooner somebody gets at the truth the better. It is a somewhat irksome task, it is true; but no general principle can be arrived at except by an induction of particulars. Let us be Baconian, even to our ghosts. If they are ghosts, they are a good deal more substantial than I had thought. If they are not, let somebody, in the name of nineteenth-century science, send them off as with the crow of chanticleer, and let us hear no more of Spirit Faces or Spirit Forms.

CHAPTER XLIV. SITTING WITH A SIBYL.

The connexion of modesty with merit is proverbial, though questioned by Sydney Smith, who says their only point in common is the fact that each begins with an—m. Modesty, however—waiving the question of accompanying merit—is a trait which, in my mystic inquiries and devious wanderings, I meet with far more frequently than might be expected. I have just met with two instances which I hasten to put on record, if only to confute those who say that the age in general, and spirit mediums in particular, are not prone to be modest and retiring. My first modest person was a Spirit Photographer; my second was a Sibyl. I might have looked for bashfulness in the latter, but was certainly surprised to meet with it in the former. I suddenly learnt from the Medium the fact that a Spirit Photographer had settled down in my immediate neighbourhood, and the appearance of his ghostly advertisement brings to my recollection some previous mystic experiences I myself had in this way.

A now celebrated medium, Mrs. Guppy, née Miss Nicholl, was, in the days of her maidenhood, a practitioner of photography in Westbourne Grove; and, as far as I know, she might have been the means of opening up to the denizens of the Summer Land this new method of terrestrial operations. Ever on the qui vive for anything new in the occult line, I at once interviewed Miss Nicholl and sat for my portrait, expecting at the least to find the attendant spirit of my departed grandmamma or defunct maiden aunt standing sentinel over me, as I saw departed relations doing in many cartes de visite in the room. I confess there was a kind of made-up theatrical-property look about the attendant spirits which gave one the idea that the superior intelligences must have dressed in a hurry when they sat or stood for their portraits. They looked, in fact, if it be not irreverent to say it, rather like so many bundles of pneumatical rags than respectable domestic ghosts. However, as long as I got the ghosts I did not care about the dress. Tenue de soir point de rigueur, I would have said, as they do outside the cheap casinos in Paris, or "Evening dress not required," if one must descend to the vernacular. Well, I sat persistently and patiently through I am afraid to say how many operations, and the operator described me as being surrounded by spirits—I always am according to Mediums, but my spirits must be eminently unsociable ones, for they seldom give me a word, and on this occasion refused to be "taken" as resolutely as the bashful gentleman in the Graphic who resisted the operations of the prison officials to obtain a sun-picture of his interesting physiognomy. There was indeed a blotch on one of the negatives, which I was assured was a spirit. I could not see things in that light.

Foiled on this particular occasion my anxiety was dormant, but never died out. I still longed for a denizen of the other world to put in an appearance, and kept on being photographed over and over again until I might have been the vainest man alive, on the bare hope that the artist might be a Medium malgré lui or undeveloped. I had heard there were such beings, but they never came in my way. I was really serious in this wish, because I felt if it could be granted, the possibility of deception being prevented, the objectivity of the phenomena would be guaranteed. At this time I was heretical enough to believe that most ghosts were due to underdone pork or untimely Welsh rare-bits, and that the raps assigned to their agency were assignable to the active toes of the Medium which might be anywhere and up to anything with the opportunities of a dark séance.

A short time since, however, M. Buguet, a celebrated French Spirit Photographer came from Paris to London, and received sitters for the modest sum of 30s. each. This would have been much beyond my means; but I suppose my wish had transpired, and that gentleman sent me an invitation to sit gratis, which, I need not say, I thankfully accepted. I felt sure that M. Buguet did not know either my long-lost grandmother or lamented maiden aunt, so that any portraits I might get from him would be presumably genuine. I sat; and over my manly form, when the negative came to be cleaned, was a female figure in the act of benediction. I have no notion how she got there—for I watched every stage in the operation, and selected my plate myself; but neither, on the other hand, does she bear the faintest resemblance to anybody I ever knew.

Still M. Buguet is not my modest photographer. Elated by success so far, I called on the local gentleman who advertised in the Medium; but the local gentleman was "engaged." I wrote to the local gentleman appointing an interview; but the local gentleman replied not. Yet still his advertisement remains; and I see in every spiritualistic album dozens of "property" relations in the shape of quasi-spirits, and wonder why the local gentleman would not take me, so as to be immortalized in these pages.

Equally modest was the advertising Sibyl. I wrote to the Sibyl, and somebody replied, and "respectfully declined." But I was not to be done. There is more than one Sibyl in the world. I called on No. 2 without announcing my intention or sending in my name. This Sibyl at once admitted me, and I mounted to the first floor front of a respectable suburban lodging-house.

I waited anxiously for a long time, wondering whether Sibyl was partaking of the onions, whose presence in that modest domicile was odoriferously evidenced to my nose, though it was then scarcely half-past one o'clock. Presently a portly middle-aged man, who might have been Sibyl's youthful papa, or rather aged husband, entered, wiping his mouth. He had clearly been partaking of the fragrant condiment.

Where was Sibyl?

"She would be with us directly," the gentleman said, varying the proceedings by picking his teeth in the interim.

She was with us in a minute, and never, I suppose, did picturesque anticipations more suddenly collapse and come to grief than mine. I had pictured Sibyl a bright ethereal being, and the realization of my ideal weighed twelve stone, if an ounce. She was a big, fleshy, large-boned woman of an utterly uncertain age, not without considerable good-nature in her extensive features; but the pervading idea that you had when you looked at Sibyl was that there was too much of her. I could not help thinking of the husband who said he did not like a big wife: he preferred two small ones; and then again I fell into wonderment as to whether the man who was still engaged with his dental apparatus was Sibyl's husband or papa.

I told them I was anxious to test Sibyl's powers; and, with a few passes from his fat dumpy hands, the man soon put her to sleep. It looked to me like an after-dinner nap, but I was told it was magnetic. It might have been. By the way, I had unmistakable evidence from my olfactory organ that Sibyl had been eating onions.

I had provided myself with two locks of hair, as I had heard that "psychometry" was among Sibyl's qualifications. I handed her the first, and she immediately proceeded to describe a series of tableaux which appeared to pass through her mind. She kept handling the lock of hair, and said, "The person to whom this belongs is ill—weak," which was true enough, but might, I thought, be a shot. I should mention, however, that it was quite impossible Sibyl could know me. She had not even heard my name. She then described a bedroom, with some person—she could not see what person—lying in bed, and a lady in a blue dress bending over her. This, again, I thought might flow out as a deduction from her premises of the hair belonging to an invalid. The blue dress was correct enough, but still so little special as to be a very possible coincidence. She then, however, startled me by saying, "I notice this, that on the table by the bedside, where the bottles of medicine are standing, milk has been spilt—a large quantity—and not wiped up." This was a trivial detail, not known to me at the time, but confirmed on subsequent inquiry.

She then passed on to describe a second tableau, where the same person in the blue dress was in a room all hung over with plates, along with a gentleman whom she described very accurately. He was the occupant of the house where the patient lay, and, having a hobby for old china, had turned his dining-room into a sort of crockery shop by hanging it all over with the delf.

This was curious enough, though not very convincing. It seemed as though the influence of this person who had given