Weird Women

by Leslie S. Klinger

She herself, so far from attempting to bring on these trance states, or taking any pride therein, was intensely troubled and mortified by them,—would run out of the room, if she felt them coming on in the presence of visitors.

  They were apt to be preceded by severe headaches, but came often without any warning.

  She never, in any instance, recalled anything that happened during the trance, after it was passed.

  She was powerfully and unpleasantly affected by electricity from a battery, or acting in milder forms. She was also unable at any time to put her hands and arms into hot water; the effect was to paralyze them at once.

  Space proved to be no impediment to her vision. She has been known to follow the acts, words, and expressions of countenance of members of the family hundreds of miles away, with accuracy as was afterwards proved by comparing notes as to time.

  The girl’s eyes, after her trances became habitual, assumed, and always retained, the most singular expression I ever saw on any face. They were oblong and narrow, and set back in her head like the eyes of a snake. They were not—smile if you will, O practical and incredulous reader! but they were not—eyes. The eyes of Elsie VennerVI are the only eyes I can think of as at all like them. The most horrible circumstance about them—a circumstance that always made me shudder, familiar as I was with it—was, that, though turned fully on you, they never looked at you. Something behind them or out of them did the seeing, not they.

  She not only saw substance, but soul. She has repeatedly told me my thoughts when they were upon subjects to which she could not by any possibility have had the slightest clew.

  We were never able to detect a shadow of deceit about her.

  The clairvoyance never failed in any instance to be correct, so far as we were able to trace it.

  As will be readily imagined, the girl became a useful member of the family. The lost valuables restored and the warnings against mischances given by her quite balanced her incapacity for peculiar kinds of work. This incapacity, however, rather increased than diminished; and, together with her fickle health, which also grew more unsettled, caused us a great deal of care. The Creston physician—who was a keen man in his way, for a country doctor—pronounced the case altogether undreamt of before in Horatio’s philosophy, and kept constant notes of it. Some of these have, I believe, found their way into the medical journals.

  After a while there came, like a thief in the night, that which I suppose was poor Selphar’s one unconscious, golden mission in this world. It came on a quiet summer night, that ended a long trance of a week’s continuance. Mother had gone out into the kitchen to give an order for breakfast. I heard a few eager words in Selphar’s voice, and then the door shut quickly, and it was an hour before it was opened.

  Then my mother came to me without a particle of color in lips or cheek, and drew me away alone, and told the secret to me.

  Selphar had seen Aunt Alice.

  We sat down and looked at one another. There was a singular, pinched look about my mother’s mouth.

  “Sarah.”

  “Yes.”

  “She says”—and then she told me what she said. She had seen Alice Stuart in a Western town, seven hundred miles away. Among the living, she desired to be counted of the dead. And that was all.

  My mother paced the room three times back and forth, her hands locked.

  “Sarah.” There was a chill in her voice—it had been such a gentle voice!—that froze me. “Sarah, the girl is an impostor.”

  “Mother!”

  She paced the room once more, three times, back and forth. “At any rate, she is a poor, self-deluded creature. How can she see, seven hundred miles away, a dead woman who has been an angel all these years? Think! an angel, Sarah! So much better than I, and I—I loved—”

  Before or since, I never heard my mother speak like that. She broke off sharply, and froze back into her chilling voice.

  “We will say nothing about this, if you please. I do not believe a word of it.”

  We said nothing about it but Selphar did. The delusion, if delusion it were, clung to her, haunted her, pursued her, week after week. To rid her of it, or to silence her, was impossible. She added no new facts to her first statement, but insisted that the long-lost dead was yet alive, with a quiet pertinacity that it was simply impossible to ridicule, frighten, threaten, or cross-question out of her. Clara was so thoroughly alarmed that she would not have slept alone for any mortal—perhaps not for any immortal—considerations. Winthrop and I talked the matter over often and gravely when we were alone and in quiet places. Mother’s lips were sealed. From the day when Sel made the first disclosure, she was never heard once to refer to the matter. A perceptible haughtiness crept into her manner towards the girl. She even talked of dismissing her, but repented it, and melted into momentary gentleness. I could have cried over her that night. I was beginning to understand what a pitiful struggle her life had become, and how alone she must be in it. She would not believe—she knew not what. She could not doubt the girl. And with the conflict even her children could not intermeddle.

  To understand the crisis into which she was brought, the reader must bear in mind our long habit of belief, not only in Selphar’s personal honesty, but in the infallibility of her mysterious power. Indeed, it had almost ceased to be mysterious to us, from daily familiarity. We had come to regard it as the curious working of physical disease, had taken its results as a matter of course, and had ceased, in common with converted Creston, to doubt the girl’s capacity for seeing anything that she chose to, at any place.

  Thus a year worried on. My mother grew sleepless and pallid. She laughed often, in a nervous, shallow way, as unlike her as a butterfly is unlike a sunset; and her face settled into an habitual sharpness and hardness unutterably painful to me.

  Once only I ventured to break into the silence of the haunting thought that, she knew and we knew, was never escaped by either. “Mother, it would do no harm for Winthrop to go out West, and—”

  She interrupted me sternly: “Sarah, I had not thought you capable of such childish superstition, I wish that girl and her nonsense had never come into this house!”—turning sharply away, and out of the room.

  But year and struggle ended. They ended at last, as I had prayed every night and morning of it that they should end. Mother came into my room one night, locked the door behind her, and walking over to the window, stood with her face turned from me, and softly spoke my name.

  But that was all, for a little while. Then,—“Sick and in suffering, Sarah! The girl,—she may be right; God Almighty knows! Sick and in suffering, you see! I am going—I think.” Then her voice broke.

  Creston put on its spectacles and looked wise on learning, the next day, that Mrs. Dugald had taken the earliest morning train for the West, on sudden and important business. It was precisely what Creston expected, and just like the Dugalds for all the world—gone to hunt up material for that genealogical book, or map, or tree, or something, that they thought nobody knew they were going to publish. O yes, Creston understood it perfectly.

  Space forbids me to relate in detail the clews which Selphar had given as to the whereabouts of the wanderer. Her trances, just at this time, were somewhat scarce and fragmentary, and the information she had professed to give had come in snatches and very imperfectly,—the trance being apt to end suddenly at the moment when some important question was pending, and then, of course, all memory of what she had said, or was about to say, was gone. The names and appearance of persons and places necessary to the search had, however, been given with sufficient distinctness to serve as a guide in my mother’s rather chimerical undertaking. I suppose ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would have thought her a candidate for the State Lunatic Asylum. Exactly what she herself expected, hoped, or feared, I think it doubtful if she knew. I confess to a condition of simple bewilderment, when she was fairly gone, and Clara and I were left alone with Selphar’s ghostly eyes forever on us. One night I had to lock the poor thing
into her garret-room before I could sleep.

  Just three weeks from the day on which mother started for the West, the coach rattled up to the door, and two women, arm in arm, came slowly up the walk. The one, erect, royal, with her great steadfast eyes alight; the other, bent and worn, gray-haired and shallow and dumb, crawling feebly through the golden afternoon sunshine, as the ghost of a glorious life might crawl back to its grave.

  Mother threw open the door, and stood there like a queen. “Children, your aunt has come home. She is too tired to talk just now. By and by she will be glad to see you.”

  We took her gently upstairs, into the room where the lilies were mouldering to dust, and laid her down upon the bed. She closed her eyes wearily, turned her face over to the wall, and said no word.

  What was the story of those tired eyes I never asked and I never knew. Once, as I passed the room, I saw,—and have always been glad that I saw,—through the open door, the two women lying with their arms about each other’s neck, as they used to do when they were children together, and above them, still and watchful, the wounded Face that had waited there so many years for this.

  She lingered weakly there, within the restful room, for seven days, and then one morning we found her with her eyes upon the thorn-crowned Face, her own quite still and smiling.

  A little funeral train wound away one night behind the church, and left her down among those red-cup mosses that opened in so few months again to cradle the sister who had loved her. Her name only, by mother’s orders, marked the headstone.

  * * *

  I have given you facts. Explain them as you will. I do not attempt it, for the simple reason that I cannot.

  A word must be said as to the fate of poor Sel, which was mournful enough. Her trances grew gradually more frequent and erratic, till she became so thoroughly diseased in mind and body as to be entirely unfitted for household work, and, in short, nothing but an encumbrance. We kept her, however, for the sake of charity, and should have done so till her poor, tormented life wore itself out; but after the advent of a new servant, and my mother’s death, she conceived the idea that she was a burden, cried over it a few weeks, and at last, one bitter winter’s night, she disappeared. We did not give up all search for her for years, but nothing was ever heard from her. He, I hope, who permitted life to be such a terrible mystery to her, has cared for her somehow, and kindly and well.

  I. Archaic form of “unscathed”

  II. A depiction of Jesus.

  III. About 50 feet.

  IV. Mourning clothes (usually black) worn by a widow.

  V. This story was written at the peak of the spiritualist movement in America.

  VI. Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny is an 1861 novel written by Oliver Wendell Holmes. The titular character is a young woman born to a mother who was bitten by a poisonous snake and consequently develops various serpentine traits (including snake-like eyes).

  Emma Frances Dawson (1839–1926) was born in Bangor, Maine, but didn’t start writing until she moved to San Francisco in the 1870s. Dawson’s mother Lola was divorced and very ill by the time they relocated, and Emma supported them both by writing and teaching music. Although she never wrote a novel, she produced just over a dozen short stories (plus some poetry). Dawson—who was described as “an old maid” and “an eccentric recluse”—wrote work that was admired by Ambrose Bierce and that continues to be anthologized and studied. This tale first appeared in The Argonaut magazine in 1878 and gave the title to Dawson’s 1897 collection An Itinerant House and Other Stories, which has become scarce in the first edition because most copies were destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

  An Itinerant House by Emma Frances Dawson

  “Eternal longing with eternal pain,

  Want without hope, and memory saddening all.

  All congregated failure and despair

  Shall wander there through some old maze of wrong.”I

  His wife?” cried Felipa.

  “Yes,” I answered, unwillingly; for until the steamer brought Mrs. Anson I believed in this Mexican woman’s right to that name. I felt sorry for the bright eyes and kind heart that had cheered Anson’s lodgers through weary months of early days in San Francisco.

  She burst into tears. None of us knew how to comfort her. Dering spoke first: “Beauty always wins friends.”

  Between her sobs she repeated one of the pithy sayings of her language: “It is as easy to find a lover as to keep a friend, but as hard to find a friend as to keep a lover.”

  “Yes,” said Volz, “a new friendship is like a new string to your guitar—you are not sure what its tone may prove, nor how soon it may break.”

  “But at least its falsity is learned at once,” she sobbed.

  “Is it possible,” I asked, “that you had no suspicion?”

  “None. He told me—” She ended in a fresh gust of tears.

  “The old story,” muttered Dering. “Marryatt’s skipper was right in thinking everything that once happened would come again somewhere.”II

  Anson came. He had left the new-comer at the Niantic,III on pretense of putting his house in order. Felipa turned on him before we could go.

  “Is this true?” she cried.

  Without reply he went to the window and stood looking out. She sprang toward him, with rage distorting her face.

  “Coward!” she screamed, in fierce scorn.

  Then she fell senseless. Two doctors were called. One said she was dead. The other, at first doubtful, vainly tried hot sealing-waxIV and other tests. After thirty-six hours her funeral was planned. Yet Dering, once medical student, had seen an electric current used in such a caseV in Vienna, and wanted to try it. That night, he, Volz, and I offered to watch. When all was still, Dering, who had smuggled in the simple things needed, began his weird work.

  “Is it not too late?” I asked.

  “Every corpse,” said he, “can be thus excited soon after death, for a brief time only, and but once. If the body is not lifeless, the electric current has power at any time.”

  Volz, too nervous to stay near, stood in the door open to the dark hall. It was a dreadful sight. The dead woman’s breast rose and fell; smiles and frowns flitted across her face.

  “The body begins to react finely,” cried Dering, making Volz open the windows, while I wrapped hot blankets round Felipa, and he instilled clear coffee and brandy.

  “It seems like sacrilege! Let her alone!” I exclaimed. “Better dead than alive!”

  “My God! say not that!” cried Volz; “the nerve which hears is last to die. She may know all we say.”

  “Musical bosh!” I muttered.

  “Perhaps not,” said Dering; “in magnetic sleepVI that nerve can be roused.”

  The night seemed endless. The room gained an uncanny look, the macaws on the gaudy, old-fashioned wall-paper seemed fluttering and changing places. Volz crouched in a heap near the door. Dering stood by Felipa, watching closely. I paced the shadowy room, looked at the gleam of the moon on the bay, listened to the soughing wind in the gum-trees mocking the sea, and tried to recall more cheerful scenes, but always bent under the weight of that fearful test going on beside me. Where was her soul? Beyond the stars, in the room with us, or “like trodden snowdrift melting in the dark?”VII Volz came behind, startling me by grasping my elbow.

  “Shall I not play?” he whispered. “Familiar music is remembrance changed to sound—it brings the past as perfume does. Gypsy music in her ear would be like holding wild flowers to her nostrils.”

  “Ask Dering,” I said; “he will know best.”

  I heard him urging Dering.

  “She has gypsy blood,” he said; “their music will rouse her.”

  Dering unwillingly agreed. “But nothing abrupt—begin low,” said he.

  Vaguely uneasy, I turned to object; but Volz had gone for his violin. Far off arose a soft, wavering, sleepy strain, like a wind blowing over a field of poppies. He passed, in slow, dramatic style, through t
he hall, playing on the way. As he came in, oddly sustained notes trembled like sighs and sobs; these were by degrees subdued, though with spasmodic outbursts, amid a grand movement as of phantom shapes through cloud-land. One heart-rending phrase recurring as of one of the shadowy host striving to break loose, but beaten back by impalpable throngs, numberless grace-notes trailing their sparks like fireworks. No music of our intervals and our rhythms, but perplexing in its charm like a draught that maddens. Time, space, our very identities, were consumed in this white heat of sound. I held my breath. I caught his arm.

  “It is too bold and distracting,” I cried. “It is enough to kill us! Do you expect to torment her back? How can it affect us so?”

  “Because,” he answered, laying down his violin and wiping his brow, “in the gypsy minor scale the fourth and seventh are augmented. The sixth is diminished. The frequent augmentation of the fourth makes that sense of unrest.”

  “Bah! Technical terms make it no plainer,” I said, returning to the window.

  He played a whispered, merry discordance, resolving into click of castanets, laugh, and dance of a gypsy camp. Out of the whirl of flying steps and tremolo of tambourines rose a tender voice, asking, denying, sighing, imploring, passing into an over-ruling, long-drawn call that vibrated in widening rings to reach the farthest horizon—nay, beyond land or sea, “east of the sun, west of the moon.” With a rush returned the wild jollity of men’s bass laughter, women’s shrill reply, the stir of the gypsy camp. This dropped behind vague, rolling measures of clouds and chaos, where to and fro floated grotesque goblins of grace-notes like the fancies of a madman; struggling, rising, falling, vain-reaching strains; fierce cries like commands. The music seemed another vital essence thrilling us with its own emotion.

  “No more, no more!” I cried, half gasping, and grasping Volz’s arm. “What is it, Dering?”

  He had staggered from the bed and was trying to see his watch. “It is just forty-four hours!” he said, pointing to Felipa.