Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “Look; it is coming.”

  The medium’s head had fallen back, and over his chest, in the region of the heart, there appeared a faint, luminous area, inside which there was going on some energy, some activity. Whorls and spirals of grey, curling and intertwining and growing thicker and extending, began building themselves up in the air. For some little while I could not make out what it was that was thus taking shape in the red twilight; then as the materialization progressed, it defined itself into a human form swathed in some misty and opaque vesture. At the top, above shoulders now quite formed, there rose the outline of a head; features growing every moment more distinct fashioned the face of it, and, pallid and silent, fading into darkness below, stood the head and torso of a human being.

  The face was clearly recognizable; it was scarce an hour since I had looked on those features, but it wore so heart-broken an anguish in the curves of that beautiful mouth and in the tortured eyes, that my throat worked for very pity and compassion.

  Then Roupert spoke.

  “Frank,” he said.

  The head bowed, the lips moved, but I heard nothing.

  “Why are you not in your body?” he asked.

  This time there came a whisper just audible.

  “I can’t, I can’t,” he said. “Someone is there; someone terrible. For God’s sake, help me!”

  The white agonized face grew more convulsed.

  “I can’t bear it,” it said.... “For God’s sake, for God’s sake!...”

  I looked away from that face for a moment to the hearthrug where a sudden noise attracted my attention. Fifi was sitting bolt upright looking eagerly upwards, and the noise I heard was the pleased thumping of her tail.

  Then she came cautiously forward, still gazing at the image which an hour before had driven her frenzied with rage and terror, uttering little anxious whinings, seeking attention. Finally she held out a paw, and gave the short whisper of a bark with which she demands the notice of her favourites.... And if I had been inclined to doubt before, I think that I would now have been convinced that here in some inscrutable manifestation was the true Frank Hampden.

  Once more Roupert spoke.

  “I will do all that man can do, Frank,” he said, “and by God’s grace we will restore you.”

  The figure slowly faded; some of it seemed withdrawn back into the medium, some to be dispersed in the dusk. Before long Reid’s breath again grew quick and laboured, as he passed out of trance, and then drenched with sweat he came to himself.

  Roupert told him that the séance had been successful, and then, turning on the light again, we all sat still while the medium recovered from his exhaustion. Before he left, Roupert engaged him to hold himself in readiness for a further séance next day, in case he was telephoned for; and when he had gone, we drew up our chairs to the fire, while Fifi went nosing about the room as if searching for traces of a friend. For a long time Roupert sat in silence, frowning heavily at the fire, asking me some question from time to time, to satisfy himself that our impressions had been identical. Then he appeared to make up his mind.

  “I shall do it,” he said; “at least, I shall make the attempt. That was Frank whom we saw just now; up to that point my theory is confirmed. Of course, there’s a risk — there’s an awful risk. But, Archdale, wouldn’t anybody take any risk to cure the anguish we looked upon? That was a human spirit, man, disembodied but not dead, and it knows that its earthly habitation is being defiled and profaned by that murderous occupant. It sees the horrors that its own hands work; the brain that was its pleasant servant is planning worse things yet. I can’t doubt that this is so. No reasonable man can doubt so incredible and so damnable a thing. But if the struggle that there must be is too much for the body that we seek to free, good Lord, what a tale for a coroner’s inquest!”

  “You mean that you risk your cousin’s death?” I asked.

  “Necessarily; who can tell what will happen? But that is not all. For of what nature is the spirit which we hope to expel from that poor lad’s body? A strong and a desperate one, or it could never have taken possession of it. It will cling with all its force to the tenement which it has usurped, and if we drive it out, if God helps us to do that, what awful and evil power will once more be abroad! But we can’t help that. There is holy justice and reparation to be done, and we can’t count the cost. Now, let me think again!”

  He got up and began pacing up and down the room, now muttering to himself, now speaking aloud as if in argument with me.

  “It’s a terrible risk for Reid, too,” he said, “for Reid most of all, for he will be in deep trance; such power of faith as we can exert must defend him first of all.... Yet, we can’t get at Rolls, I tell you, without the medium.... I must, of course, tell Reid everything, and ask him if he will take the risk.... He may refuse, though I don’t think he will, for there’s the courage of a saint in that man.... Then there’s Frank, Frank’s body, I mean. That must be absolutely unconscious when the operation takes place; no human nerves could stand it, nor with that fiend in possession would he consent to it.... Deep, the deepest possible unconsciousness.... By Jove, there’s that new German drug, which appears safe enough, and it certainly produces a sleep that comes nearest of all to death; it seems to stupefy the very spirit itself.... Hyocampine, of course; don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it.... Tasteless too; it’s a good thing that the criminal classes can’t get hold of it.... Well, there we are.... Prayer and faith in an Almighty power.... Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord.... He does too, if our motives are right; that’s one of the few facts we can be quite sure about.... You can run a lot of risks if you utterly believe that.”

  Suddenly the whole burden of perplexity and anxious thought seemed lifted off his mind.

  “I’ll go and see Reid to-morrow morning,” he said. “I believe he will consent when he knows all. And you? Do you want to see the end of it? And look on the glory of God? Come if you like, but if you come, you must be strung up to the highest pitch of trust and serenity that you are capable of. Yes, do be here. You believe that all evil, however deadly and powerful, is altogether inferior in calibre and fighting power to good. Also I shall like a friend at my elbow. Perhaps I oughtn’t to urge that as a reason, for I don’t want any personal feeling to influence you. Only come if you want to witness the power of God, not Reid’s, not mine; we are nothing at all except mere mossy channels.”

  For one moment he paused, and I knew that he was wavering himself, in the weakness of the flesh; but instantly he got hold of himself again.

  “There’s only one power that can’t fail,” he said. “Hell crashes into fragments against it.”

  Next morning I got a note from Roupert, saying that Reid consented, and asking me to come in to his house punctually at half-past two, if I had decided to be with him. When I arrived I found Roupert and Frank Hampden sitting over their coffee in the study. Hampden had just drunk his.

  “Isn’t there a home for cats somewhere in Battersea?” he was asking. “I’ll go and find a new one for you, as yours appears to have vanished entirely.”

  He yawned.

  “It’s a feeble habit to go to sleep after lunch,” he said, “but I really think I shall have a nap. I’ve got an astonishing inclination that way. Give me half an hour, will you, and then we’ll go down to the cats’ home, and get a large fat cat.”

  I guessed that Roupert had already given his cousin the dose of hyocampine, but just as the latter was pulling a chair round so that he need not face the light, he spoke.

  “Make a proper job of it, Frank,” he said, “and lie on the sofa. One always wakes feeling cramped if one goes to sleep in a chair.”

  Hampden’s eyelids were already drooping, but he shuffled heavily across to the sofa.

  “All right,” he mumbled, “sorry for being so rude, Mr. — Mr. Archdale, but I must have just forty — I wonder why forty—”

  And immediately he went to sleep.

  Roupert wait
ed a moment, but Hampden did not stir again. Then he went out, and returned with Reid, who had been waiting in his bedroom. All explanations had already been made, and in silence we darkened the room by drawing the thick curtains across the window. Only a little light came in from their edges, but, as last night, the firelight flickered on the walls. Then Roupert locked the door, and we took our places round the table.

  “Into Thy hands, O Lord, we commend our spirits,” he said.

  Before many minutes were over the medium’s head dropped forward, and after a little struggle he went into trance.

  “The spirit of James Rolls,” said Roupert.

  In the silence that followed I could hear the slow breathing of Hampden as he slept in that remote unconsciousness. A chink of light from the window fell full on his face, and I could see it very distinctly. Then, I heard him breathing quicker, and a shudder passed through him, shaking the sofa where he lay. His face, hitherto serene and quiescent, began to twitch.

  “He can’t wake,” whispered Roupert. “I gave him the full dose.”

  Then, not from the door at all, but from the direction of the sofa there came an icy blast of wind, and simultaneously a shattering rap from the table.

  “Is that James Rolls?” asked Roupert.

  Three raps answered him.

  “Then in the name of God,” said Roupert, in a loud, steady voice, “come from where you are, and be made manifest.”

  Suddenly Hampden began to groan. His mouth worked, and he ground his teeth together. A horrible convulsion seized his face, a distortion of rending agony, like that which sometimes seizes on a dying man whose body clings desperately to the spirit that is emerging from it. A rattle and a strangled gulping came from his throat, and the foam gathered on his lips.

  “It is there that you are, James Rolls,” said Roupert in a loud voice of exultation. “In the name of God, come out!”

  The convulsions redoubled themselves; the body writhed and bent like that of a poisoned man. Then round the face, brightest about the mouth, there formed a pale greenish light, corrupt and awful. It began to wreathe itself into lines and curves, weaving and intertwining; it grew in height, like a luminous column built without hands, in the darkness; it defined itself into human form, until in the air just above the recumbent body it stood complete. With its emergence the convulsions and the groanings subsided, and at the end, when this wraith in semblance of a swathed man, with face of such murderous cruelty that I shuddered as I looked at it, stood fully fashioned and finished, the body of Frank Hampden lay quite still, in that sleep which was nearest of all to death.

  Then Roupert’s voice spoke again, clear and peremptory and triumphant.

  “Begone, James Rolls!” he cried.

  Very slowly the materialized spirit began to move, floating like a balloon in an almost windless air. Slowly it drifted towards us, with its eyes fixed on the unconscious medium and alight with awful purpose, its mouth curled into some sort of hellish smile. It came quite close to him, as if sucked there, and the edge of its outline began to extend towards him a feeler, as of a little whirlpool of water drawn down into a sink, till the end of it just touched him....

  “In the name of the Holiest, and by the power of the Highest,” shouted Roupert, “I bid you go to the place that He has appointed for you.”

  Then... I can only describe what happened by saying that some shock, blinding, deafening, overwhelming every sense, shook the room. It leaped into a blaze of light, a thunder of sound rent the air, and yet I knew that all this came from within, was the echo of the spiritual crisis that raged round us made manifest to the bodily sense. And silence as of the frozen Polar night succeeded....

  Then once again a light began to be built up over Hampden’s body that lay utterly still beside the curtains. It fashioned itself, but only very faintly, into the outline of a man, and this seemed to be drawn inwards and absorbed by that motionless figure. We waited till it had disappeared altogether.

  The medium stirred and struggled.

  “It is over,” he said, and laid his head on his arms.

  Roupert got up and drew back the curtains. From outside the door came scratchings and whinings, and presently he unlocked it, and let Fifi in. She saluted everybody in her exuberant fashion; then came to the sofa, sniffed and jumped up on it, wagging her tail.

  It was not till late in the afternoon that Frank Hampden came to himself. A beautiful spirit looked out of those jolly boyish eyes.

  MRS. ANDREWS’S CONTROL

  MRS. ANDREWS was certainly Athenian by nature, and it was her delight not only to hear some new thing, but to put it into practice. Enjoying excellent health, she was able to take almost any liberties with her constitution, and for a long time was absorbed in the maelstrom of diets, each of which seemed to suit her to perfection. For a couple of months she adopted the Pembroke treatment, and droves of sheep were sacrificed to supply her with sufficient minced mutton, while the utmost resources of the kitchen boiler were needed to give her the oceans of hot water which she found it necessary to drink all day except at meals. Having obtained the utmost benefits derivable from this system, she nourished her ample and vigorous frame, by way of a change, on pyramids of grated nuts, carefully weighed out, and it cannot be doubted that she would enthusiastically have fed herself on chopped-up hard-boiled egg, like a canary, if she could have found any system of diet that inculcated such a proceeding.

  Her husband, for all his mild and apparently yielding disposition, must at bottom have been a man of iron soul, for he absolutely refused to embark on any of these experiments, though he never dissuaded his wife from so doing, and stuck firmly, like a limpet, to his three solid and satisfactory meals, not disdaining minced mutton, nor even a modicum of milled nuts, when he felt that they would be agreeable, but adding them to his ordinary diet, without relying on them. The two, childless and middle-aged, lived in extreme happiness and comfort together, and no doubt Mrs. Andrews’s enthusiasms, and the perennial amusement her husband derived from them, served to keep the sunlight of life shining on them. They were never bored and always busy, which, perhaps, even more than diet, secured them serenity of health.

  But the time came when Mrs. Andrews, in an unacknowledged despair of feeling better and more vigorous physically than she always did, turned her Athenian mind towards mental and psychical fads. She began by telling the fortunes of her friends by means of cards, and, though she could always say how she knew, following the rules of her primer, that her husband had had scarlet fever when he was twenty-three, yet the fact that she knew it perfectly well without the help of the cards made the divination rather less amazing. She tried Christian Science, though only for a short time, since no amount of demonstration over false claims could rid her one day of the conviction that she had a raging toothache, whereas the dentist convinced her in a moment, by the short though agonizing application of the pincers, that he could remove the toothache, which had resisted all the precepts of her temporary creed.

  An excursion into the realms of astrology succeeded this, and conjointly a study of palmistry, and at this point her husband, for the first time, began to take an interest in his wife’s preoccupations. It certainly did seem very odd that his horoscope should testify to the identical events which the lines in his hand so plainly showed his wife, and certain apparent discrepancies were no doubt capable of explanation. When he knew that the right hand indicated what Nature meant him to be, and the left what he had made of himself, it could not but be gratifying to find he had lived so closely up to his possibilities, and it was pleasant, again, to find his wife so enthusiastic about his plump, pink palm.

  “A most remarkable hand, dear,” she said. “I never saw evidence of such pluck and determination. And look at your Mount of Jupiter! Splendid!” Mr. Andrews did not know exactly what the Mount of Jupiter was, but he knew what pluck and determination were.

  “Upon my word, my dear,” he said, “there may be something in it. I will borrow your primer,
if I may. And now about the future.”

  Mrs. Andrews was already peering eagerly into the future. This was as splendid as the Mount of Jupiter.

  “Such a line of life!” she said. “Let me see, you are fifty-eight, are you not? Well, on it goes — sixty, seventy, eighty, without a break in it. Why, I declare it reaches ninety, Henry!”

  This was very gratifying, and it showed only ordinary politeness on Henry’s part to inquire into his wife’s prospects.

  “Ah, I haven’t such a line as you, dear,” she said. “But, after all, if I live in perfect health till I am eighty-two, which is what my hand tells me, I’m sure there’s no reason to complain, and I for one shan’t.”

  But when Mrs. Andrews had told the fortunes of her husband and all her friends, and secured them, on the whole, such charming futures, it was no wonder that she went further into matters more psychical and occult. A course of gazing into the most expensive crystal proved disappointing, since she could never see anything except the reflection of the objects in the room, while her husband, now actively taking part in these investigations, merely fell asleep when he attempted to see anything there. They both hoped that this might not be ordinary sleep, but the condition of deep trance which they found was one of the accompanying phenomena, and productive of great results; but these trances were so deep that no recollection of what occurred therein ever remained in his mind, with the exception of one occasion, on which he dreamed about boiled rabbit. As he had partaken of this disgusting provender at lunch that day, both Mrs. Andrews and he regarded this dream as retrospective in character, and as not possessed of prophetic significance.

  It was about this time that they both became members of the Psychical Research Society, and their attention could not but be struck by the wonderful phenomena resulting from the practice of automatic writing. If you had a psychical gift in this direction — and it was now the settled conviction of both Henry Andrews and his wife that they had — all apparently that had to be done was to hold a pencil over a writing-pad conveniently placed, abstract your mind from the hand that held the pencil, and sit there to see what happened. The theory was that some controlling spirit might take possession of the pencil and dictate messages from the other world, which the pencil would record. Eager study of the psychical journals warned them that patient practice might be necessary before any results were arrived at, the reason being that the control must get used to the novel instrument of communication; and warning was given that they must not be discouraged if for a long time nothing was recorded on the paper except meaningless lines. But it appeared that most people, if they would only be patient enough, would be rewarded by symptoms of the presence of a control before very long, and when once a beginning was made, progress was apt to be very rapid. It was recommended also that practice should be regular, and, if possible, should take place at the same time every day.