Authors: Sarah Waters
The great high bed has Mrs Brink’s mother’s white lace gown laid out upon it, which Mrs Brink says she hopes I will wear. But I should not be surprised if I do not close my eyes at all tonight. I have been standing at the window, looking at the lights of the town. I have been thinking of the very great & marvellous change that has come so suddenly upon me, & all because of Mrs Brink’s dream!
The Crystal Palace I will admit looks something now, with all its lamps lit.
Part Two
23 October 1874
It has grown colder this week. The winter has come early, as it came early in the year that Pa died, and I’ve begun to see the city change again, as I watched it changing in the miserable weeks when he lay ill. The hawkers on the Walk now stand and stamp their ragged-booted feet, cursing the cold; and where horses wait you see knots of children, huddling at the side of the beasts’ great wet flanks for the sake of their heat. There was a mother and her three sons found starved and frozen to death, Ellis told me, in a street across the river from here, two nights ago. And Arthur says that when he drives along the Strand in the hours before dawn, he sees beggars crouched in doorways with their blankets rimed with frost.
There have come fogs, too—yellow fogs and brown fogs, and fogs so black they might be liquid soot—fogs that seem to rise from the pavements as if brewed in the sewers in diabolical engines. They stain our clothes, they fill our lungs and make us cough, they press against our windows—if you watch, in a certain light, you may see them seeping into the house through the ill-fitting sashes. We are driven into evening darkness now, at three or four o’clock, and when Vigers lights the lamps the flames are choked, and burn quite dim.
My own lamp is burning very dimly now. It is as dim, almost, as the rush-lamps that used to be lit for us at night, when we were children. I remember very clearly lying, counting the bright spaces in the rush-lamp’s chimney, knowing I was the only wakeful person in all the house, hearing my nurse breathe in her bed, and Stephen and Pris sometimes snore, sometimes whimper, in theirs.
I still recognise this room as the one we slept in then. There are still marks on the ceiling where a swing once hung, and still some of our nursery books upon my shelves. There is one there—I see the spine of it now—that was a favourite of Stephen’s. It has pictures of devils and phantoms in it, painted vividly, and the object of it is that you must gaze at each figure very hard, then look quickly at a blank wall or a ceiling—when you do that, you see the phantom floating there, very clearly, but in quite a different colour to the original.
How my mind runs to ghosts, these days!
It has been dull, at home. I went back this morning to read at the British Museum—but it was darker than ever there, because of the fogs, and at two o’clock the murmur was sent out that the reading-room was to be closed. There are always complaints when that happens, and calls for lights to be brought; but I—who was taking notes from a prison history, as much for idleness’ sake as for any more serious purpose—I didn’t mind it. I thought it even rather marvellous, to emerge from the museum and find the day become so grey and thick, and so unreal. I never saw a street so robbed of depth and colour as Great Russell Street was then. I almost hesitated to step into it, in fear that I would grow as pale and insubstantial as the pavements and the roofs.
Of course, it is the nature of fog to appear denser from a distance. I did not grow vaguer, but stayed sharp as ever. There might have been a dome about me then, that moved when I did—a dome of gauze, I saw it very clearly, it was the kind that servants set on plates of summer cakes to keep the wasps from them.
I wondered if every other person who walked along that street saw the dome of gauze that moved when they did, as clearly as I saw mine.
Then the thought of those domes began to oppress me; I thought I ought to walk and find a cab-rank, and take a carriage home, and keep the blinds down till I got there. I started to walk towards Tottenham Court Road; and, as I went, I gazed at the names upon the door-plates and the windows that I passed—taking a sad kind of comfort from the thought of how little that parade of shops and businesses had changed, since I walked there with my arm in Pa’s . . .
And even as I thought it, I saw a square of brass beside a door that seemed to shine a little brighter than the plates on either side of it; and then I drew close, and I saw the plate’s dark legend. It said:
British National Association of Spiritualists—Meeting-Room, Reading-Room and Library
.
That name-plate was never there, I am sure, two years ago; or perhaps I only never saw it then, when spiritualism was nothing to me. Seeing it now I stopped, then went a little nearer to it. I couldn’t help but think, of course, of
Selina
—it is still a novelty to me, to write her name. I thought,
She
might have come here, when she was free; she might have passed me on this very street. I remembered waiting at that corner once for Helen, in the days when I first knew her. Perhaps Selina passed me then.
The thought was a curious one. I looked again at the brass name-plate, and then at the handle of the door; and then I grasped the handle and turned it, and went inside.
There was nothing to see, at first, but a narrow staircase—for the rooms there are all on the first and second floors, above a shop, and you must climb to them. The stairs take you to a little office. It is panelled with wood, quite handsomely, and has wooden blinds that, to-day, were turned flat against the fogs beyond the windows; between the windows there is a very large picture—done badly, I thought—of
Saul at the House of the Witch of Endor
. There is a carpet of crimson, and a desk; and seated at the desk I found a lady with a paper and, beside her, a gentleman. The lady had a brooch of silver at her breast, cast in that device of clasping hands one sees sometimes on grave-stones. The gentleman wore slippers, worked in silk. They saw me and smiled, then looked sorry. The man said he was afraid the stairs were very steep ones; and then: ‘What a shame, you have had a wasted climb! Did you want the demonstration? It has been cancelled, because of the fog.’
He was very ordinary and kind. I said I hadn’t come for the demonstration, but—what was perfectly true—that I had stumbled on their doorstep quite by chance, and crossed it out of curiosity. And at that they looked, not sorry, but horribly
sage
. The lady nodded and said, ‘Chance, and curiosity. What a marvellous conjunction!’ The gentleman reached to shake my hand; he was the daintiest man, with the slenderest feet and hands, I think I ever remember seeing. He said, ‘I’m afraid we have little enough to interest you, in this sort of weather, which keeps all our visitors away.’ I mentioned their reading-room. Was it open? Might I use it? It was, I might—but they would charge me a shilling. It didn’t seem like a very great sum. They had me sign my name in a book upon the desk—‘
Miss Pri-or
,’ said the man, tilting his head to read it. The lady, he told me then, was named Miss Kislingbury. She is the secretary of the place. He is its curator, and his name is Mr Hither.
Then he showed me to the reading-room. It seemed modest enough to me—the kind of library, I suppose, that might be kept in clubs or little colleges. It had three or four book-cases, all of them very full, and a rack of wands, with newspapers and magazines hung out upon them like dripping laundry. It had a table and leather chairs, and a variety of pictures on the walls, and a glass-fronted cabinet—the cabinet is the really curious or I should say horrible thing, though I didn’t know that until later. I went only, at first, to the books. They reassured me. For the fact is, I had begun to wonder why, after all, I had gone in there, and what it was that I was looking for. At a book-case, however—well, a book may be on any queer subject, but one can at least always be certain how to turn a page and read it.
And so, I stood and looked across the shelves, and Mr Hither bent to whisper with a lady who was seated at the table. She was the only other reader there, and quite elderly, and she had one soiled white-gloved hand upon the pages of a pamphlet, keeping it open. When she had first caught sight of Mr Hither she had made an urgent, beckoning gesture. Now she said, ‘Such a wonderful text! So inspiring!’
She lifted her hand, and her pamphlet sprang shut. I saw its title—it was
Odic Power
.
The shelves before me, I saw now, were filled with books bearing such titles; and yet, when I drew one or two of them forth, the advice they gave seemed of the very plainest—such as, ‘On Chairs’, which cautioned against the influences which gathered in stuffed or cushioned chairs used promiscuously by many persons, and advised spirit-mediums to seat themselves on cane-bottomed or wooden-seated chairs only. When I read this I had to turn my head, for fear that Mr Hither would look and catch me smiling. Then I left the book-shelves, and wandered towards the rack of newspapers, and at last I turned my eyes to the pictures on the wall above it. These were of ‘Spirits Manifested Through the Mediumship of Mrs Murray, October 1873’, and showed a lady looking placid in a chair beside a photographer’s palm while, behind her, loomed three misty white-robed figures—‘Sancho’, ‘Annabel’ and ‘Kip’, said the label on the frame. They were more comical even than the books, and I thought suddenly and painfully, Oh, how I wish Pa might have seen these!
As I thought it I felt a movement at my elbow, and I started. It was Mr Hither.
‘We are rather proud of those,’ he said, nodding to the photographs. ‘Mrs Murray has such a powerful control. Do you note the detail, look, on Annabel’s gown? We had a piece of that collar framed beside the pictures once, but within a week or two of our having obtained it, it had—after the manner of spirit-stuff, alas for us!—quite melted away. We were left with nothing but an empty frame.’ I stared at him. He said, ‘Yes, oh yes.’ Then he moved beyond me to the glass-fronted cabinet, and he waved for me to follow, saying, Now, these were the real pride of their collection; and here, at least, they had evidence a little more permanent . . .
His voice and manner were intriguing. From a distance it had seemed to me as if the cabinet might be filled with broken statuary, or with pale rocks. When I drew near, however, I saw that the display behind the glass was not of marble, but of plaster and of
wax
—plaster casts, and waxen moulds, of faces and fingers, feet and arms. Many were distorted, rather strangely. Some were cracked, or yellowing with age and with exposure. Each had a label on it, as the spirit-photographs had.
I looked again at Mr Hither. ‘You are familiar, of course,’ he said, ‘with the process? Ah, well, it is as simple and as clever as can be! One materialises one’s spirit, and provides two pails—one of water and the other of melted paraffin-wax. The spirit obliges with a hand or a foot, or whatever; the limb is plunged first into the wax, and then, very swiftly, into the water. When the spirit departs, it leaves a mould behind. Few, of course,’ he added apologetically, ‘are perfect. And not all are so robust that we can venture making casts from them in plaster.’
It seemed to me that most of the objects before us were quite horribly
im
perfect—identifiable by some small, grotesque detail, a toe-nail or a wrinkle or a prick of lashes at a bulging eye; yet incomplete, or bent, or strangely blurred, as if the participating spirits had begun the journey back to their own realm with the wax still warm about their limbs. ‘See this little cast here,’ said Mr Hither. ‘This was made by an infant spirit—do you see the dear little fingers, the dimpling arm?’ I saw it, and felt queasy. It looked, to me, like nothing so much as a baby born, grotesque and incomplete, before its time. I remember my mother’s sister being delivered of such a thing when I was young, and how the adults whispered over it, and how the whispers haunted me and brought me dreams. I looked away, into the lowest, dimmest corner of the cabinet. Here, however, was the grossest thing of all. It was the mould of a hand, the hand of a man—a hand of wax, yet hardly a hand as the word has meaning, more some awful tumescence—five bloated fingers and a swollen, vein-ridged wrist, that glistened, where the gas-light caught it, as if moist. The infant cast had made me queasy. This made me almost tremble, I cannot say why.
And then I saw the label upon it—and then I did shake.
‘Hand of Spirit-Control “Peter Quick”,’ it said. ‘Materialised by Miss Selina Dawes.’
I looked once at Mr Hither—who was still nodding over the dimpled baby’s arm—and then, trembling as I was, I couldn’t help but move a little closer to the glass. I gazed at the bulging wax, and remembered Selina’s own slender fingers, the delicate bones that move in her wrists as they arch and dip above the putty-coloured wool of prison stockings. The comparison was horrible. I became aware of myself suddenly, stooped low before the cabinet, misting the dull glass with my quick breaths. I straightened—but must have done so too swiftly, for what I felt next was the grip of Mr Hither’s fingers upon my arm. ‘My dear, are you quite well?’ he said. The lady at the table looked up and put one grimy white hand before her mouth. Her pamphlet sprang closed again and tumbled to the floor.
I said the stooping had made me dizzy, and that the room was very warm. Mr Hither brought a chair and made me sit in it—that brought my face close to the cabinet, and again I shuddered; but when the lady reader half-rose and asked, Should she fetch a glass of water and Miss Kislingbury? I told her that I was quite all right now, that she was very kind and must not trouble. Mr Hither, I thought, studied me, but quite evenly; and I saw him looking at my coat and gown. It occurs to me now, of course, that perhaps many ladies go to those rooms in the colours of mourning, claiming chance, and curiosity, have sent them over the threshold and up the stairs; perhaps some of them even swoon, at the cabinet of wax. For when I looked again at the moulds upon the shelves, Mr Hither’s gaze and voice grew gentle. He said, ‘They
are
a little queer, aren’t they? But rather marvellous, for all that?’