The Dark Labyrinth

by Lawrence Durrell

  Fearmax experimented for several weeks before submitting his work to a neighbouring bookseller, who was a medium, together with a request for his advice. He was encouraged to renew his experiments and he did so gladly, with the wonderful feeling of someone who has found his true place in life. The fruit of these months is to be found in that little pamphlet now a bibliographical rarity, “New Essays by Goldsmith”. His heart had become lighter, his intelligence more alert. He began to attend the local psychic society which met every month, and whose members busied themselves with automatic writing, planchette-messages, and séances given by visiting mediums; it was during one of the latter performances that Fearmax surprised his hosts by falling into a deep sleep, preceded by a sort of seizure, in the course of which he found himself transmitting feverishly for a spirit guide called “French Marie”. Yes, her name should be familiar. It was she, the reader will remember, who predicted not only the date of Edward’s Abdication, but also the exact date and cause of the outbreak of war, among other things.

  Her first message was of no particular importance save that it gave Fearmax exactly the focus he needed for all his nervous energy. His mind began to play upon these studies like a burning-glass. He found that concentration and solitude had given a remarkable command over himself, so that it was not long before he could induce the trance at will, and establish contact with the disembodied voice whose messages were to become of such interest to the public at large.

  It was not long before his growing fame made it possible for him to free himself from the irksome hold of the bookshop. He travelled across England, giving lectures and séances by invitation in many towns. Wherever he went “French Marie” obediently followed, and as obediently answered his questions, however trivial. There was only one unaccountable failure and that was at Hastings. “French Marie” refused to appear, but sent instead an unsatisfactory deputy called “Raja Patma”, who informed him that “French Marie” could not stand the town ever since she spent her earthly honeymoon there. Fearmax, however, had developed into an impressive lecturer. He had studiously modelled his accent on that of the B.B.C. announcers, he had bought himself a velvet cape with a scarlet neck-cord, he had combed his already greying hair back across his head. His confidence in himself (a commodity the absence of which he had been unaware of) grew with every success. His energies were drained off once and for all from the stagnant reaches of aimless reading and speculation. To do him full justice it must be added that he felt for the first time that he had discovered the meaning of the lifelong tendency towards epilepsy. Surely it must have been the magnetic flow of this remarkable gift speaking to him across the dam of books he had erected to hem it in? His health improved with his self-assurance.

  “Mr. Olaf Fearmax, the Exeter Medium.” The Press backed him up, printing almost every one of “French Marie’s” prophecies concerning Derby Winners, Conflagrations, Stock Exchange Slumps. Fearmax was tested by the Royal Society for Occult Studies and emerged unscathed despite his nervousness about the appearance of “French Marie”. But the spirit guide was in first-class form. “French Marie” not only transmitted messages from Edward Gibbon and Ramon Novarro to such of their descendants as might still be living; she also left the “materializations” of her plump hands with unerring accuracy in bubbles of liquid paraffin.

  Walking across London afterwards, towards the Gray’s Inn Road where he lived (he had recently leased a small flat of his own there) Fearmax felt that all his ambitions had been realized. There was nothing more to strive for—except perhaps to preserve his nervous equilibrium under the strain of repeated séances. But he had a mission.

  It was some time before the implications of that work began to hold any meaning for him; it came gradually at first—the dawning realization that “French Marie” and the terms under which she chose to present herself to the world, constituted a commentary on the nature of reality itself. What was a materialization? If there were flesh enough for her to be able to imprint it in paraffin, how was it that the hand he so often felt upon his shoulder should not possess bone and muscle enough to be touched, to be held? How was it that she could sometimes appear in the dim red light of the seance room—a stout, good-looking youngish woman, dressed in flowing evening dresses, and with her hands gathered in front of her, below the heart, after the manner of opera singers? How was it? Why could she not step down one day out of her dimension, rich in the knowledge of both worlds, and be his partner in this? He smiled dryly as he turned from the thought of other urgent considerations. There was his American tour. Would “French Marie” cross the Atlantic for the benefit of the citizens of Chicago and Detroit? Or perhaps, like some French wines, she “did not travel”? Sitting late over a glass of hot milk an idea came to him.

  The next day he was to conduct some private experiments on behalf of a young doctor, Edward Grew, who was very much interested in the physiological and psychological changes which came about during trance conditions. He would ask “French Marie” to send him her black kitten—the kitten without which, it seemed, she could hardly get through the great cycle of development in the spirit world. Fearmax was not surprised to feel the warm furry body of a kitten on his knee as he spoke the next day, but he was surprised when, according to plan, Grew broke his trance and showed him what was to all intents and purposes a real black kitten. The sweat started out among the sparse grey hairs on his scalp. Something had gone wrong, though whether his evil intention or “French Marie’s” carelessness was to blame, they did not know. For several days after that Fearmax was bothered by a phenomenon he had hitherto not experienced; it was a noise, as of a window flying open above his head, and a voice starting to speak before being choked into a whisper; no actual word was articulated, but the sound that came from an invisible throat was obviously made of air propelled through a larynx. This happened several times, often in public places. Nobody but himself seemed to hear it. And during this time it seemed quite impossible to get in touch with the spirit-guide. Meanwhile the “materialized” kitten was carried off to the laboratory of Grew, who examined it and professed it to be a real live kitten. What could all this mean?

  The following Sunday “French Marie” re-established contact and appeared to be in a great state of emotion. Her kitten, she said, had “slipped”. She could not live without it. She must have it back. She was incoherent with grief. That night Grew and Fearmax chloroformed the kitten and buried it in the garden, and for some time things went on as before. “French Marie” not only crossed the Atlantic, she “sent” the audiences which awaited her the other side.

  But this was not to last for ever. After several lucrative years of practice Fearmax noticed that his spirit-guide began to be less dependable. Several times she failed him altogether and he found himself floundering in a shoal of inferior transmitters. He also became anxious about her, for a certain valedictory note appeared in her messages. “It won’t be long,” she said once: and “I shall be gone when you get here”: and “can’t talk much longer.” It was alarming, for “French Marie” was very much more than a source of income; she had become as familiar as a wife or a child. He tuned in (if one may use the language of radio) to her transmissions with the certainty of a listener to a familiar station. He crossed the shoals and eddies of inferior voices clamouring for his attention, as an express train crosses points, to reach her. What would he do without her?

  He broke down twice at Maidstone, once at Leeds, and once in London. Then one day “French Marie” said a tearful and final good-bye and went out like a light. It was during a private séance given for some close friends, and the medium threw himself on his knees, clasping his hands together and called out to her in great anguish not to leave him. She was the first woman to whom he had ever made a declaration of love, and it remained unanswered. He was bitterly humiliated; and found that not only had the spirit vanished, but also the faculty for inducing the seizure which preceded the trance. His gift, it seemed, had gone.

  He retire
d to the house of an admirer in Cornwall, to rest and re-equip himself for further experiment. He felt the loss of “French Marie” almost as much as if she had been a mistress of his; so deeply, in fact, that when one day he opened a newspaper and found that a fellow-medium called Carpenter claimed to have transmitted messages from a “French Marie”, he found himself seized by a paroxysm of jealousy so bitter that he could not speak. He was like a wild man. His friends feared for his reason. He walked about on the Cornish cliffs in the thunderstorms of winter, dragging behind him the sodden folds of his enchanter’s cloak, talking to himself. What was to be done?

  He sought Carpenter out in the East End. The latter was a fall, spindly old man with a bald head, an expression of extreme benevolence, an unctuous delivery, and a bad police-court record. He had been imprisoned three times for fraud. He closed one eye hard, as if he were taking aim down the barrel of a gun, and stared at Fearmax unwinkingly out of the other. What did he want with his questions about “French Marie”? After some reassurance he produced his records of a séance in which “French Marie” had appeared with messages. Fearmax read the shorthand notes with the jealousy growing in him; it was like recognizing a familiar prose style. “French Marie’s” signature was written all over the communication. He went home in a trance—not a professional trance, but a brown study, wondering what it could all mean. A week later Carpenter was killed in a motor accident.

  Fearmax combed the psychic Press for any other references to “French Marie”, but it seemed that but for this faithless transfer of her affections, she had really been carried on to a new cycle of development. There was a spirit-guide called “Bonny Mary” among the repertoire of an Edinburgh medium called Alastair, but she was an irregular and inferior transmitter; no shorthand notes of séances were kept by Alastair, but a scrapbook indicated that her appearance had been contemporaneous with that of “French Marie”. The subject lapsed, and Fearmax was free to continue his life of concentrated meditation. He suffered a good deal from insomnia, and once he heard the disturbing noise of the invisible window flying open above his head. But no voice followed—not even the ghost of a voice that he had identified with “French Marie”. He felt, however, as if it had been a last desperate attempt to get in touch with him before her astral self was propelled beyond all reach upon the giant stairway of development. What was going to happen to him?

  The following summer he had another of the seizures which preceded the trance-condition. But it came of its own accord, was not self-induced, and gave him little promise for the future. The spirit-guides he encountered, too, were of the most ordinary kind—inaccurate, fretful, or simply illiterate. It was humiliating for a medium of his standing to find himself in such an impasse; but Fearmax spent these months reading and writing, opening up correspondences with experts in the various fields, and contributing to the psychic Press on the general implications which lay behind a study of the occult. Some of these productions were far and away above the ordinary ill-digested theories and contentions of the medium class. His immense reading had given him powers of comparison and a range of self-expression denied to his brothers in the craft. It was now that he published the short series of articles which had struck Campion so forcibly. His essay on Lully, and his monograph on the theory of Healing as described in Paracelsus, are, of course, fairly well known to readers interested in the problems they outline. Indeed, Fearmax was well on the way to becoming a natural philosopher of sorts; yet the question of a profession was beginning to irk him. He had become affluent during his term of practice. He was living on capital.

  How Hogarth’s name cropped up, it is not very clear. It was probably Grew who suggested one day that he try a consulting analyst. At any rate, he found himself in the little room where Baird had found so much to think about and so much to say; Fearmax had not the faintest idea what was expected of him. “I am a medium who has lost his gift,” he said simply to Hogarth, almost as if he expected the doctor to produce a packet of pills which would set the matter right. Hogarth, who knew something of automatic writing and kindred subjects, soon had him on to familiar ground. What ensued was more a dialectical battle than an analysis. For once he had found someone as widely read as himself; their conversations developed in volume and content until they sounded (played back on Hogarth’s dictaphone) like the thunderous off-stage exchanges of Nietzsches. Hogarth always recorded his cases on wax, whenever his interest in the case showed him good cause. Fearmax was not sorry to be so honoured. The conversations with Hogarth were a milestone in his life. He learned valuable things. Probably the most valuable of them all was Hogarth’s theory of nervous stress, and his precepts about activity as a form of automatic repose—“sweeping assumptions”, “vague generalizations”, said the Sunday papers of the time. It was Hogarth who taught him to face the thought that he might never be a medium again. There was only one secret he kept—or tried to keep. Here again, of course, he might have known that Hogarth would take the trouble to keep a check on him. Shortly after the death of Carpenter and the examination of the messages transmitted through the egregious Alastair, Fearmax had succumbed to the temptation of fraud. Never having been one, and being interested in the polemics surrounding the whole question of mediumship as a fraudulent profession, he undertook what he described to himself privately as an experiment. He agreed to give a séance, together with three other mediums, to the general public. Looking back on it, in the light of Hogarth’s logic, it seemed to him that perhaps it had been something like an act of desperation. Who knows? His true gift might have awakened. He might not have needed recourse to rubber gloves, moving tables, gramophone records and the like. His choice of Edinburgh, too, was unlucky, for the police had been conducting investigations into the private life of a medium called Pons, who was also to give a demonstration of his powers that evening. The whole incident was very sad. Police were present, an infra-red camera recorded Fearmax’s sleights-of-hand with blasting fidelity. He found himself in the dock with the other mediums, charged under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Only his previous record enabled him to escape a prison sentence by the payment of a large fine.… Hogarth threw the copy of Psychic News containing a record of the case across the table at him one day. Why, he asked, with asperity, had Fearmax never mentioned this discreditable episode? Why indeed?

  But if Hogarth prepared Fearmax to renounce his gift with a good grace, he also showed great curiosity as to the nature of the trance-condition, and even encouraged the medium to give two or three séances for friends, despite the uncertainty of reception. Hogarth listened solemnly to the ridiculous gibberish of inferior spirits, and asked very firmly for some contact to be made with his wife—without effect. Fearmax had sunk, it seemed, to the rank of third-class medium; he could not induce the preliminary seizure at will; his spirit-guides were either tongue-tied or frivolous; he could not guarantee a séance at all, in fact. It was, professionally speaking, no use at all.

  “French Marie”—the only woman he had ever really loved—had gone, and with her his esteem among the general. There remained only the whole unbeaten jungle of the occult for a province of study.

  During the war Fearmax had gone into a strict retreat of atonement for the sin of war, together with a few friends. They had spent their time in Cornwall obstructing the wareffort, answering foolish questions at C.O. Boards, and working vaguely on the land to the intense annoyance of their employers. During this time he founded the group which afterwards came to be known as the Astrophysical Believers. There is not room to go into the philosophy propounded by its founder, but the society flourished and had continued to grow. It had lecture rooms in the Euston Road, and a small publishing house of its own, through which the official propaganda of the body was conducted. It was to this society that Fearmax turned during the period of his analysis by Hogarth, devoting nearly all his spare time to elaborating his Swedenborgian system, and clearing up the obscurer points in a series of extremely well-written pamphlets. It was something to do
. The system demanded an immense amount of elaboration: it professed to bring the whole body of occult thought (even branches like palmistry, alchemy, and astrology) into line with the latest metaphysical ideas of the age. Its existence served as a perpetual irritant to Professor Joad. It was attacked by Ouspensky, Hotchkiss, Eustace Pfoff, and Joseph G. Sthyker, the exponent of Dynamic Massage, as well as the Rudolf Steiner Society. It prospered so greatly that even the Baconian Society attacked it. Fearmax felt that he was making up for lost ground. Perhaps he was to be a new Blavatsky or Krisnamurti.

  “As one crank to another,” said Hogarth one day, “why don’t you go abroad and give the whole thing a rest?”

  The idea was echoed by the inner circle of the Believers. The one outstanding metaphysical account that remained to be settled was with the Society of the Great Pyramid. Their publications were beginning to disturb the Believers with their implications. Someone should visit the Pyramids, make independent observations, and fit them into the general scheme.

  “Whether you believe the world is an egg or an onion,” said Hogarth, “it doesn’t matter. The point is that you are run down, and you will suddenly start going off your rocker unless you take a rest.”