The Land of Mist

THE LAND OF MIST

The figure was moving forward. Everyone sat spellbound, with staring eyes. Miss Badley began to giggle hysterically. Weatherby lay back in his chair, gasping with horror. Neither Malone nor Enid felt any fear, but were consumed with curiosity. How marvellous to hear the humdrum flow of life in the street outside and to be face to face with such a sight as that. Slowly the figure moved round. Now it was close to Enid and between her and the red light. Stooping, she could get the silhouette sharply outlined. It was that of a little, elderly woman, with sharp, clear-cut features.

“It’s Susan!” cried Mrs. Bolsover. “Oh, Susan, don’t you know me?”

The figure turned and nodded her head.

“Yes, yes, dear, it is your sister Susie,” cried her husband. “I never saw her in anything but black. Susan, speak to us!”

The head was shaken.

“They seldom speak the first time they come,” said Mrs. Linden, whose rather blase, business-like air was in contrast to the intense emotion of the company. “I’m afraid she can’t hold together long. Ah, there! She has gone!”

The figure had disappeared. There had been some backward movement towards the cabinet, but it seemed to the observers that she sank into the ground before she reached it. At any rate, she was gone.

“Gramophone, please!” said Mrs. Linden. Everyone relaxed and sat back with a sigh. The gramophone struck up a lively air. Suddenly the curtains parted, and a second figure appeared.

It was a young girl, with flowing hair down her back. She came forward swiftly and with perfect assurance to the centre of the circle.

Mrs. Linden laughed in a satisfied way.

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“Now you will get something good,” she said. “Here is Lucille.”

“Good evening, Lucille!” cried the Duchess. “I met you last month, you will remember, when your medium came to Maltraver Towers.”

“Yes, yes, lady, I remember you. You have a little boy, Tommy, on our side of life. No, no, not dead, lady! We are far more alive than you are. All the fun and frolic are with us!” She spoke in a high clear voice and perfect English.

“Shall I show you what we do over here?” She began a graceful, gliding dance, while she whistled as melodiously as a bird. “Poor Susan could not do that. Susan has had no practice. Lucille knows how to use a built-up body.”

“Do you remember me, Lucille?” asked Mailey.

“I remember you, Mr. Mailey. Big man with yellow beard.” For the second time in her life Enid had to pinch herself hard to satisfy herself that she was not dreaming. Was this graceful creature, who had now sat down in the centre of the circle, a real materialization of ectoplasm, used for the moment as a machine for expression by a soul that had passed, or was it an illusion of the senses, or was it a fraud? There were the three possibilities. An illusion was absurd when all had the same impression. Was it a fraud? But this was certainly not the little old woman. She was inches taller and fair, not dark. And the cabinet was fraud-proof. It had been meticulously examined. Then it was true. But if it were true, what a vista of possibilities opened out. Was it not far the greatest matter which

could claim the attention of the world!

Meanwhile, Lucille had been so natural and the situation was so normal that even the most nervous had relaxed.

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The girl answered most cheerfully to every question, and they rained upon her from every side.

“Where did you live, Lucille?”

“Perhaps I had better answer that,” interposed Mrs. Linden. “It will save the power. Lucille was bred in South Dakota in the United States, and passed over at the age of fourteen. We have verified some of her statements.”

“Are you glad you died, Lucille?”

“Glad for my own sake. Sorry for mother.” “Has your mother seen you since?”

“Poor mother is a shut box. Lucille cannot open the lid.” “Are you happy?”

“Oh, yes, so gloriously happy.”

“Is it right that you can come back?”

“Would God allow it if it were not right? What a wicked man you must be to ask!”

“What religion were you?” “We were Roman Catholics.” “Is that the right religion?”

“All religions are right if they make you better.” “Then it does not matter.”

“It is what people do in daily life, not what they believe.” “Tell us more, Lucille.”

“Lucille has little time. There are others who wish to come. If Lucille uses too much power, the others have less. Oh, God is very good and kind! You poor people on earth do not know how good and kind He is because it is grey down there. But it is grey for your own good. It is to give you your chance to earn all the lovely things which wait for you. But you can only tell how wonderful He is when you get over here.”

“Have you seen him?”

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“Seen Him! How could you see God? No, no, He is all round us and in us and in everything, but we do not see Him. But I have seen the Christ. Oh, He was glorious, glorious! Now, good-bye – good-bye!” She backed towards the cabinet and sank into the shadows.

Now came a tremendous experience for Malone. A small, dark, rather broad figure of a woman appeared slowly from the cabinet. Mrs. Linden encouraged her, and then came across to the journalist.

“It is for you. You can break the circle. Come up to her.” Malone advanced and peered, awestruck, into the face of

the apparition. There was not a foot between them. Surely that large head, that solid, square outline was familiar! He put his face still nearer – it was almost touching. He strained his eyes. It seemed to him that the features were semifluid, moulding themselves into a shape, as if some unseen hand was modelling them in putty. “Mother!” he cried. “Mother!”

Instantly the figure threw up both her hands in a wild gesture of joy. The motion seemed to destroy her equilibrium and she vanished.

“She had not been through before. She could not speak,” said Mrs. Linden, in her business-like way. “It was your mother.” Malone went back half-stunned to his seat. It is only when these things come to one’s own address that one understands their full force. His mother! Ten years in her grave and yet standing before him. Could he swear it was his mother? No, he could not. Was he morally certain that it was his mother? Yes, he was morally certain. He was shaken to the

core.

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But other wonders diverted his thoughts. A young man had emerged briskly from the cabinet and had advanced to the front of Mailey, where he had halted.

“Hullo, Jock! Dear old Jock!” said Mailey. “My nephew,” he explained to the company. “He always comes when I am with Linden.”

“The power is sinking,” said the lad, in a clear voice. “I can’t stay very long. I am so glad to see you, Uncle. You know, we can see quite clearly in this light, even if you can’t.”

“Yes, I know you can. I say, Jock. I wanted to tell you that I told your mother I had seen you. She said her Church taught her it was wrong.”

“I know. And that I was a demon. Oh, it is rotten, rotten, rotten, and rotten things will fall!” His voice broke in a sob.

“Don’t blame her Jock, she believes this.”

“No, no, I don’t blame her! She will know better some day. The day is coming soon when all truth will be manifest and all these corrupt Churches will be swept off the earth with their cruel doctrines and their caricatures of God.”

“Why, Jock, you are becoming quite a heretic!”

“Love, Uncle! Love! That is all that counts. What matter what you believe if you are sweet and kind and unselfish as the Christ was of old?”

“Have you seen Christ?” asked someone. “Not yet. Perhaps the time may come.” “Is he not in Heaven, then?”

“There are many heavens. I am in a very humble one. But it is glorious all the same.”

Enid had thrust her head forward during this dialogue. Her eyes had got used to the light and she could see more clearly than before. The man who stood within a few feet of

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her was not human. Of that she had no doubt whatever, and yet the points were very subtle. Something in his strange, yel- low-white colouring as contrasted with the faces of her neighbours. Something, also, in the curious stiffness of his carriage, as of a man in very rigid stays.

“Now, Jock,” said Mailey, “give an address to the company. Tell them a few words about your life.”

The figure hung his head, exactly as a shy youth would do in life.

“Oh, Uncle, I can’t.”

“Come, Jock, we love to listen to you.”

“Teach the folk what death is,” the figure began. “God wants them to know. That is why He lets us come back. It is nothing. You are no more changed than if you went into the next room. You can’t believe you are dead. I didn’t. It was only when I saw old Sam that I knew, for I was certain that he was dead, anyhow. Then I came back to mother. And” – his voice broke – “she would not receive me.”

“Never mind, dear old Jock,” said Mailey. “She will learn wisdom.”

“Teach them the truth! Teach it to them! Oh, it u so much more important than all the things men talk about. If papers for one week gave as much attention to psychic things as they do to football, it would be known to all. It is ignorance which stands – “

The observers were conscious of a sort of flash towards the cabinet, but the youth had disappeared.

“Power run down,” said Mailey. “Poor lad, he held on to the last. He always did. That was how he died.”

There was a long pause. The gramophone started again. Then there was a movement of the curtains. Something was

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emerging. Mrs. Linden sprang up and waved the figure back. The medium for the first time stirred in his chair and groaned.

“What is the matter, Mrs. Linden?”

“Only half-formed,” she answered. “The lower face had not materialized. Some of you would have been alarmed. I think that we shall have no more tonight The power has sunk very low.”

So it proved. The lights were gradually turned on. The medium lay with a white face and a clammy brow in his chair, while his wife sedulously watched over him, unbuttoning his collar and bathing his face from a water-glass. The company broke into little groups, discussing what they had seen.

“Oh, wasn’t it thrilling?” cried Miss Badley. “It really was most exciting. But what a pity we could not see the one with the semimaterialized face.”

“Thanks, I have seen quite enough,” said the pompous mystic, all the pomposity shaken out of him. “I confess that it has been rather too much for my nerves.”

Mr. Atkinson found himself near the psychic researchers. “Well, what do you make of it?” he asked.

“I have seen it better done at Maskelyne’s Hall,” said one. “Oh, come, Scott!” said the other. “You’ve no right to say

that. You admitted that the cabinet was fraud-proof.”

“Well, so do the committees who go on the stage at Maskelyne’s.”

“Yes, but it is Maskelyne’s own stage. This is not Linden’s own stage. He has no machinery.”

“Populus vult decepi,” the other answered, shrugging his shoulders. “I should certainly reserve judgment.” He moved away with the dignity of one who cannot be deceived, while his more rational companion still argued with him as they went.

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CHAPTER VI

IN WHICH THE READER IS

SHOWNTHE HABITS

OF A NOTORIOUS CRIMINAL

WE will now leave that little group with whom we have made our first exploration of these grey and ill-defined, but immensely important, regions of human thought and experiences. From the researchers we will turn to the researched. Come with me and we will visit Mr. Linden at home, and will examine the lights and shades which make up the life of a professional medium.

To reach him we will pass down the crowded thoroughfare of Tottenham Court Road, where the huge furniture emporia flank the way, and we will turn into a small street of drab houses which leads eastwards towards the British Museum. Tullis Street is the name and 40 the number. Here it is, one of a row, flat-faced, dull-coloured and commonplace, with railed steps leading up to a discoloured door, and one front-room window, in which a huge gilt-edged Bible upon a small round table reassures the timid visitor. With the universal pass-key of imagination we open the dingy door, pass down a dark passage and up a narrow stair. It is nearly ten o’clock in the morning and yet it is in his bedroom that we must seek the famous worker of miracles. The fact us that he has had, as we have

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seen, an exhausting sitting the night before, and that he has to conserve his strength in the mornings.

At the moment of our inopportune, but invisible, visit he was sitting up, propped by the pillows, with a breakfast-tray upon his knees. The vision he presented would have amused those who have prayed with him in the bumble Spiritualist temples, or had sat with awe at the seances where he had exhibited the modern equivalents of the gifts of the Spirit. He looked unhealthily pallid in the dim morning light, and his curly hair rose up in a tangled pyramid above his broad, intellectual brow. The open collar of his nightshirt displayed a broad, bull’s neck, and the depth of his chest and spread of his shoulders showed that he was a man of considerable personal strength. He was eating his breakfast with avidity while he conversed with the little, eager, dark-eyed wife who was seated on the side of the bed.

“And you reckon it a good meeting, Mary?”

“Fair to middling, Tom. There was two of them researchers raking round with their feet and upsetting everybody. D’ye think those folk in the Bible would have got their phenomena if they had chaps of that sort on the premises? ‘Of one accord’, that’s what they say in the book.”

“Of course!” cried Linden heartily. “Was the Duchess pleased?”

“Yes, I think she was very pleased. So was Mr. Atkinson, the surgeon. There was a new man there called Malone of the Press. Then Lord and Lady Montnoir got evidence, and so did Sir James Smith and Mr. Mailey.”

“I wasn’t satisfied with the clairvoyance,” said the medium. “The silly idiots kept on putting things into my mind. ‘That’s

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