by Sarah Waters
Miss Haxby said that she had been advising me against marking women out for special privileges. That I had made a ‘protégée’—she pronounced it queerly—of one particular prisoner, and she thought the prisoner less steady than she seemed. The girl was Dawes, the ‘Spiritist’.
Mr Shillitoe said ‘Ah’ in a slightly different tone, when he heard that. He said he often thinks of Selina Dawes, and wonders how her new habits suit her.
I told him they suit her very ill. I said she was weak—he answered at once, that that did not surprise him. All people of her type were weak, he said, it was that quality that made them a vehicle for the unnatural influences they termed spiritual . Spiritual they might be, but there was ‘nothing of God in them’—nothing holy, nothing good—and they must all, at the last, reveal themselves as wicked. Why, Dawes was a proof of it! He would like to see every Spiritualist in England in a prison cell, locked up beside her!
I stared at him. Beside me, Miss Haxby draw her mantle a little higher about her shoulders. I said, slowly, that he was right. That Dawes, I thought, had been used—impressed—by some queer power. But she was a gentle girl, and the loneliness of prison life told on her. When a fancy came to her, she could not shake it off. She needed guidance.
‘She has the guidance of her matrons,’ said Miss Haxby, ‘as all the women have.’
I said that she needed the guidance of a Visitor—of a friend, from beyond the prison walls. She needed an object upon which to fasten her thoughts, while she worked, or while she lay still and silent—at night, when the wards were quiet. ‘For then, I think she feels those morbid influences come upon her. And she is weak, as I have said. I think they—baffle her.’
The matron said then that, if they were to indulge the women every time they thought themselves baffled, they should have to bring in a troop of ladies to do the work!
But Mr Shillitoe had narrowed his eyes a little, and now tapped with his foot upon the flags of the passage, considering. I watched his face, and Miss Haxby watched it: we stood before him like the two fierce mothers—one true, one false—who stood before Solomon, arguing over a child . . .
And then at last he turned to his matron and said he thought, after all, that ‘Miss Prior might be right’. They had a duty to their prisoners—a duty to protect them, as well as to punish. Perhaps that protection, in Dawes’s case, could be applied a little more—thoughtfully. A troop of ladies was what they needed, indeed! ‘We should be grateful that Miss Prior is willing to devote her labour to the task.’
Miss Haxby said then that she was grateful for it. She made him a curtsey, and her ring of keys let out a muffled ring.
When she had gone, Mr Shillitoe took my hand again. ‘How proud your father would be,’ he said, ‘if he could only see you now!’
10 March 1873
So many people come for the dark circles now, we have to put Jenny at the door when the room is full, to take their cards & tell them to come back another evening. It is mostly ladies that come, though some bring gentlemen. Peter prefers the ladies. He goes among them & lets them hold his hand & feel his whiskers. He has them light his cigarettes. He says ‘My eye, but you’re a beauty! You’re the best beauty I saw, this side of Paradise!’ He says things like that & they laugh & answer ‘O, you naughty thing!’ They think that kisses from Peter Quick don’t count.
The gentlemen he teases. He says ‘I saw you last week, visiting a pretty girl. Didn’t she like the flowers you took her!’ Then he looks at the gentlemen’s wives & he whistles & says ‘Well, I can see which way the wind is blowing here, & shall say no more.’ He says ‘I am a chap that knows how to keep a secret, all right!’ Tonight there was a gentleman in the circle, a Mr Harvey, that had a silk hat with him. Peter took the hat & put it on his own head, & walked about the parlour. He said ‘Now I am a regular swell. You may call me Peter Quick of Savile Row. I should like my spirit-chums to see me in this.’ Mr Harvey said then ‘Well, you may keep it’ & Peter answered ‘May I?’ in a tone of wonder. When he came back into the cabinet however, he showed me the hat & whispered ‘Now, what shall I do with this? Shall I put it in the chamber-pot in Mrs Brink’s room?’ I heard that & laughed, they heard me laughing in the circle & I called out ‘O! Peter is teasing me!’
When they searched the cabinet later of course, it was perfectly empty, & then everybody shook their heads to think of Peter walking in the spirit-world in Mr Harvey’s hat. Then afterwards they found the hat. It had been put upon the picture-rail in the hall, & its brim was broken & its crown struck clean through. Mr Harvey said that after all, it was too solid a thing to make the journey through the spheres, but that Peter was very brave to try to take it. He held it as if it might be made of glass. He says he will have it put in a frame as a spiritual trophy.
Ruth told me later however, that the hat was not from Savile Row, but only from some cheap tailor’s at Bayswater. She said Mr Harvey might hold himself like a rich man, but she didn’t think much of his taste in toppers.
21 November 1874
It is not quite midnight, and bitterly cold and bleak, and I am tired, and dull with chloral—but the house is quiet, and I must write this. I have had another of those visits or signs, from Selina’s spirits. And where can I say it, except here?
It came while I was at Garden Court. I went there this morning and stayed until three, and when I came home I came straight, as I always do, to this room; and then I knew at once that something had been touched or taken, or tampered with. The room was dark, I couldn’t see that anything was changed, I only felt it. My first terrible thought was, that perhaps Mother had gone to my desk and found this book, and sat and read it.
But it was not the book; and when I took another step, I saw. There were flowers here, in a vase from the mantel. The vase was placed upon my desk, and there were orange-blossoms in it—orange-blossoms, in an English winter!
I couldn’t go to them at once. I could only stand, with my cloak still upon me and my gloves tight in my fist. There was a fire lit, and the air was warm and had the flowers’ scent upon it—it was that, I suppose, that I had caught before. Now it made me tremble. I thought, She has done this to please me, and it has made me afraid.—They made me frightened of her!
Then I thought, What a fool you are! This is like seeing Pa’s hats upon the stand. They must be from Priscilla. Priscilla has sent us flowers, from Italy . . . And then I did go to them, and held them to my face. Only from Pris, I thought, only from Pris.—And sharp as the fear, there came a stab of disappointment.
But still, I was not sure. I thought I ought to be certain. I put the vase down, then rang for Ellis, then walked about the room until I heard her hand upon the door. But it wasn’t Ellis—it was Vigers, with her long face leaner and paler than ever and her sleeves rolled to her elbows. Ellis, she said, was setting the table in the dining-room: there had been only her and Cook to answer my bell. I said, Never mind, she would do. I said, ‘These flowers—who brought them?’
She looked stupidly at the desk, the vase, and then at me again—‘Please miss?’
The flowers! They hadn’t been there when I went out. Someone had brought them to the house, someone had placed them in the majolica vase. Was it her?—It was not her. Had she been at home all day?—she said she had. Then a boy must have called, I said, with parcels. Who were the parcels from? Was it my sister, Miss Priscilla—Mrs Barclay—in Italy?
She did not know.
I said, did she know anything? I said, she must go and get Ellis. She went quickly, then brought Ellis to the door, and then they both stood blinking at me while I paced and gestured and said, The flowers! The flowers! Who had brought the flowers to my room, and placed them in the vase there? Who had taken the parcel, that my sister had sent?
‘Parcel, miss?’—There had been no parcels.
No parcels from Priscilla?—No parcels from anyone.
Now I was afraid again. I raised my hand to my lip, and I think Ellis saw it tremble. She said, S
hould she take the flowers away?—and I did not know, I did not know what I should tell her, what I should do. She waited, and Vigers waited; and as I stood, uncertain, there came the sound of a door, and the rustle of Mother’s skirts—‘Ellis? Ellis, are you there?’ She had been ringing.
Now I said quickly, ‘That will do, that will do! Leave the flowers and go, both of you!’
But Mother was quicker than I. She had stepped into the hall, looked up, and seen the servants at my door.
‘What is it, Ellis? Margaret, is that you?’ Her footstep sounded on the stair. I heard Ellis turn and say that Miss Margaret, ma’am, was asking after some flowers.—And then Mother’s voice again: flowers? What flowers?
‘It’s nothing, Mother!’ I called. Ellis and Vigers still hesitated at the door. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Go.’ But now Mother was behind them, blocking their path. She looked at me, then at the desk—Why, she said, what lovely blossoms! Then she looked at me again. What was the matter? she said. Why did I look so pale? Why was it so dark here? She made Vigers take a taper to the fire and light the lamp.
I said that nothing was the matter. I had made a mistake, and was very sorry to have troubled the girls.
Mistake? she said. What sort of a mistake? ‘Ellis?’
‘Miss Prior said she didn’t know who brought the flowers, ma’am.’
‘Not know? Margaret, how can you not have known?’
I said then that I did know, and had only been confused. I said—I said that I had brought the flowers myself. I looked away from her, but felt her gaze grow sharper. At last she murmured to the girls, and they left at once, and she stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. I flinched to have her here—she comes only at night, usually. Now she said, What was this nonsense? I answered, still not catching her eye, that it was not nonsense, only a silly mistake. That she need not stay. That I must take off my shoes and change my gown. I moved about her, hung up my cloak, let my gloves fall—picked them up—let them fall a second time.
She said, What did I mean, mistake? How could I have bought such flowers, and then forgotten? What was I thinking of? And then, to grow so nervous before the maids . . .
I said that I had not been nervous; but even as I spoke I heard my voice, and how it trembled. She came a little closer. I made a gesture—put my hand upon my arm, I think, before she could close her own fingers on the flesh of it—and turned aside. But then I saw the blossoms before me, and caught their scent again, stronger than before, and I turned again, away from them. If she doesn’t leave me, I thought, I shall weep, or strike her!
But still she came on. She said, ‘Are you well?’—and, when I made no answer—‘You are not well . . .’
She had seen this coming, she said. I had been too much from the house, I was not fit for it. It was inviting my old illness back.
‘But I am perfectly well,’ I said.
Perfectly well? Would I only listen to the sound of my own voice? Would I think of how I had sounded, to the girls? They would be downstairs now, their heads together, whispering—
‘I am not ill!’ I cried then. ‘I am very fit and well, and quite cured of my old nervousness! Everyone has said it. Mrs Wallace has said it.’
Mrs Wallace, she replied, did not see me when I was like this. Mrs Wallace did not see me after my trips to Millbank, pale as a spectre. She did not see me sitting at my desk, wakeful and nervous, until all hours of the night . . .
She said that; and I knew then that, careful as I have been—still and secret and silent as I have been, in my high room—she has been watching me, as Miss Ridley watches, and Miss Haxby. I said that I had always been wakeful, even before Pa died, even as a girl. That the wakefulness meant nothing—and that anyway, the medicine always cured it, and made me rest. She said, seizing on the one narrow point, that as a girl I had been indulged. She had left me too much to the care of my father and he had spoiled me; and it was the recklessness of the spoiling that led to the intemperance of my grief—‘I have always said it! And now, to see you picking your own wilful way again towards illness—’
I cried then that, if she did not let me alone, I really should be ill! and I took a few determined steps away from her and stood with my face near to the window. I cannot remember what she said then: I wouldn’t listen, or answer—at last she said I must go down and sit with her, and if I had not come to her in twenty minutes she would send Ellis. Then she left.
I stood and gazed from the window. There was a boat upon the river, with a man bringing a hammer down upon a sheet of steel. I watched his arm as it lifted and fell, lifted and fell. I saw sparks leap from the metal, but the blow, each time, took a second to sound—the hammer was always raised again before the thud of the steel could catch it.
I counted thirty blows, then went down to Mother.
She said nothing more to me, but I saw her studying my face and hands for signs of weakness, and I gave her none. Later I read Little Dorrit to her, very steadily, and now I have screwed my lamp down very low, and I move my pen across the page so carefully—it is possible to be careful, even with the chloral in me—that she might come and press her ear to the panels of my door, she would not hear me. She might kneel and put her eye to the key-hole. I have stopped it up with cloth.
The orange-blossoms I have before me now. Their scent is so heavy upon the close air of my room, it makes me giddy.
23 November 1874
I went back to-day to the reading-room at the Association of Spiritualists. I went to look again for Selina’s story, and to study that troubling portrait of Peter Quick, and to stand before the cabinet of moulds. I found it just, of course, as I left it last time, with the shelves and the wax and plaster limbs with a layer of dust upon them, quite undisturbed.
As I stood gazing at them, Mr Hither came to me. He was shod, this time, in a pair of Turkish sandals, and at his lapel there was a flower. He said that he and Miss Kislingbury had been sure I would return to them—‘and here you are, and I am very pleased to see it’. Then he peered at me. ‘But what is this? Your look is such a dark one! Our exhibits have made you thoughtful, I can see. That is good. But they shouldn’t make you frown, Miss Prior. They should make you smile.’
I did smile then; and then he smiled, and his eyes grew clearer and kinder than ever. No other reader coming to the room, we stood and talked, for almost an hour. I asked him, amongst other things, how long it was that he had called himself a spiritualist?—and why he had become one.
He said, ‘It was my brother who first joined the Movement. I thought him a terribly believing sort of chap, to follow such nonsense. He said he could see our mother and father in Heaven, watching all the things we did. I could imagine nothing more terrible!’
I asked, what was it then, that made the change in him? and he hesitated, then answered, that his brother had died. I said at once that I was sorry; but he shook his head, and almost laughed—‘No, you must never say that, not here. For within a month of his passing, my brother came back to me. He came and embraced me, he was as real to me as you are—fitter than he was in life, and with all the marks of his illness quite gone from him. He came, and told me to believe. Still, however, I refused the truth of it. I explained his visit away as a kind of fancy; and when more signs came, I explained them away, too. It is amazing what one will explain away, when one is stubborn! At last, however, I saw. Now my brother is my dearest friend.’
I said, ‘And you are aware of spirits, all about you?’—Ah, he said then, he is aware of them when they come to him. He has not the powers of a great medium. ‘I catch glimpses, only—“a little flash, a mystic hint”, as Mr Tennyson has it—rather than seeing vistas. I hear notes—a simple tune, if I am fortunate. Others, Miss Prior, hear symphonies.’
I said, To be aware of spirits . . .
‘One cannot but be aware of them, when one has seen them once! And yet’—he smiled—‘to gaze at them, too, may be frightening.’ He folded his arms; then gave me this curious example.
He said I must imagine that nine-tenths of the people of England had a condition of the eye, a condition which prevented them from appreciating, say, the colour red. He said I must imagine myself afflicted with such a condition. I would drive through London, I would see a blue sky, a yellow flower—I would think the world a very fine place. I would not know I had a condition that quite prevented me from seeing part of it; and when some special people told me that I had—told me of another, marvellous colour—I would think that they were fools. My friends, he said, would agree with me. The newspapers would agree with me. Everything I read, indeed, would confirm me in my belief that those people were fools; Punch would even print cartoons to demonstrate how foolish they were! I would smile at those cartoons, and be very content.
‘Then,’ he went on, ‘a morning comes and you awaken—and your eye has corrected itself. Now you can see pillar-boxes and lips, poppies and cherries and guardsmen’s jackets. You can see all the glorious shades of red—crimson, scarlet, ruby, vermilion, carnation, rose . . . You will want to hide your eyes, at first, in wonder and fear. Then you will look, and you will tell your friends, your family—and they will laugh at you, they will frown at you, they will send you to a surgeon or a doctor of the brain. It will be very hard, to become aware of all those marvellous scarlet things. And yet—tell me, Miss Prior—having seen them once, could you bear ever to look again, and see only blue, and yellow, and green?’
I did not answer him for a moment, for his words made me terribly thoughtful. When I did speak at last, what I said was, ‘Suppose a person were to be what you have described’—I was thinking, of course, of Selina. I said, ‘Suppose she sees the scarlet. What ought she to do?’
‘She must seek others out,’ he answered at once, ‘who are like her! They will guide her, and keep her from the dangers of herself . . .’
