From Memory's Shrine: The Reminscences of Carmen Sylva

by Carmen Sylva

Exercising the same powers of attraction alike on young and old, and in her own person combining the keenest interest in every intellectual problem with a remarkable capacity for entering into any form of innocent mirth, the young mistress of the Vinea Domini was able to control and blend the different elements of her little society, to a harmony complete and pleasing to all. Representative men in science and art, in literature and politics, met there to discuss topics of gravest import; every talent found welcome recognition. What pretty water-colour sketches were made by the young Prince Reuss, whose long and eventful diplomatic career none yet foresaw! When, later on, I came across the drawings he had made of us children, I had a surprise similar to that told in a preceding chapter, to see the melancholy expression I wore, but was assured by my mother that I did indeed often look thus. I struggled so perpetually to appear cheerful, I could hardly believe that anyone could have seen me looking sad; we keep count of the efforts we make, but cannot judge of the results we achieve. Of the Shakespeare readings, and lectures upon Shakespeare, given by Professor Löbell at our house, I can only speak from hearsay, for I was not present, but all the hearers pronounced them admirable, and I was sorry to be excluded, my curiosity being stimulated by the passages my mother had read to me from some of the plays, and I had wept bitterly over the pathetic scenes concerning poor little Prince Arthur. I was, however, sometimes allowed to make one of the party in the excursions down the Rhine, and I listened, now with delight to the melodious part-songs, now wondering, and storing up in my mind fragments of the animated discourse—on every subject, it seemed to me, of highest interest in heaven or earth—with which the boat’s joyous passengers filled up the intervals of their singing. To draw others into conversation and lead them to impart their deepest thoughts, was one of my mother’s special gifts. Young as she was, her mind had been early matured by sorrow, and she could associate herself as easily with the aims and aspirations of artists and scholars as with the plans of statesmen and politicians. The speculative curiosity of men of science ever had a peculiar fascination for her, and she was no less receptive for schemes of benevolence and philanthropy. All phases of contemporary thought, all shades of opinion, were represented in her drawing-room, together with the harmless mirth, the love of amusement of the junior portion of the assembly. Never, however, in their moments of most reckless high spirits, did any of these young folk overstep the bounds of the strictest decorum and good taste. Had there been any such danger, a word, a look from my mother—nay, the mere presence of my grandmother, in her quiet stately dignity, would have sufficed to call the offender to order. The power can scarcely be over-rated, which well-bred and high-minded women may exercise over their surroundings. Nor had it yet been admitted as a possibility in good society, for young men to allow themselves to take the liberties of which in a modern drawing-room, they are too often guilty towards their hostesses. Once, on a lovely summer’s night, two or three scions of princely houses among the students took it into their heads to serenade my mother from the river; but when next day, to their timid enquiry how she had liked the music, they received the chilling reply that she had certainly heard a noise, but thought it must be some drunken people returning home, their crestfallen looks showed that they would not venture to repeat the experiment.

In this light then, of the woman of varied interests and far-reaching influence did my mother appear to the world at large. It was reserved for her intimates, for her children and attendants, to see her in the hours of despondency, racked with pain, and tortured still more by the gravest fears for the safety of her distant husband and of the child whose life seemed ever but to hang upon a thread. To those who knew of her sleepless nights, of her own bodily sufferings, and anxiety on behalf of others, she might well appear rather under the aspect of a martyr, bowed down by a load of physical and mental anguish, that must in time wear out her powers of resistance. She believed herself constantly to be at the point of death, and those around her often shared her fears.—“Let yourself cry, you have only too good reason for your tears!” was all our good old doctor could find to say to her by way of comfort, one day when he surprised her sobbing in despair.

In every emergency, whether he were called upon for practical advice, or simply to cheer and console when the cloud of sorrow seemed well-nigh overpowering, Perthes proved himself, as my father had foreseen, the kindest and most invaluable of friends. Even friendship, however, was powerless to soften the blow, when after the long separation, the months of weary waiting and intense anxiety, the travellers returned, for it but to become evident to my mother at the first glance at my father’s pale face and wasted form, that the good results hoped for from the voyage were far from being realised. It seemed indeed at first sight to have only done him harm, for he was thinner than ever, with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, suffering moreover from temporary surdity, after-effect of an acute attack of inflammation of the ear, by which he had been laid up at New Orleans. To him the shock, the disappointment can have been no less severe, to find poor little Otto’s condition so much worse, whilst my mother’s state of health seemed also well nigh past hope. It was a melancholy return home. As the travellers approached the porch, towards which my mother’s chair had been wheeled to meet them, the shouts of welcome sent up by the men-servants assembled on the steps, the waving of their plumed caps in the air at their master’s approach, all this semblance of rejoicing died away in a general feeling of consternation, in the mute exchange of glances of dismay, in the unspoken dread of that which should come next.

Had we but known then, in that darkest, saddest hour, that help was already at hand, standing there ready to cross the threshold, when the need should be greatest!

CHAPTER IX
[A FAITH-HEALER]

It was in those days that there suddenly came wafted to us across the ocean the tidings of a wondrous discovery, a strange new pursuit for pastime,—I scarce know what to call it,—a new method of healing and new branch of scientific research, some would say, though certainly in this last particular it has not yet justified its claims to be admitted to rank as a science, but has like that other dark mysterious agent, electricity, of which we also know so little, to this day advanced but little beyond the infantile stage. Animal magnetism, table-turning, spirit-rapping, thought-reading and psychography, each and all of these names have been used in turn to designate the various manifestations of this hitherto unknown, or it may be merely neglected and forgotten force.

Now with regard to the phenomena I am about to describe, there could perhaps scarce be a more accurate and trustworthy witness than a child of nine years, absolutely healthy in mind and body, and bringing the quick observation and clear untroubled gaze of childhood to bear on these strange occurrences, without preconceived leanings towards belief or doubt, and even probably with a little less curiosity than might have belonged to one a few years older. To so young a child, the whole world is a subject of perpetual awe and wonder, nearly every incident in its daily experience being startling and inexplicable, yet all accepted alike in the same spirit of implicit good faith. Was there then after all, in these new occurrences that set everyone talking, anything so much more wonderful than in a hundred others with which we were already familiar? Were we not acquainted with the miracle of the caterpillar’s metamorphosis to the butterfly, of the transformation of the blossom into fruit? And could there be anything at once more natural and more terrible than those frightful spasms that racked my mother’s whole frame, paralysing every movement of her limbs? That this never struck us as anything unusual or uncommon was shown by my answer to another little girl, who had asked me to suggest a new game.—“Let us play at being mother and child,” I promptly replied, “and you shall be the mother, and must sit still in this chair, as you cannot walk about.” And I was honestly surprised both at my little companion’s astonishment and also to hear my mother’s voice calling to me from the next room, enquiring if I thought that a nice sort of game, to be making fun of my mother’s ill-health? I was dreadfully discomfited, but I had meant no harm at all, it simply arose from the impossibility of dissociating in my own mind the idea of one’s mother from that of being lame. I had seen too how completely medical science had been at fault, just with those of my own family who had been obliged to have recourse to the doctors’ skill, one celebrated practitioner after another having tried in vain to bring about some improvement in my father’s health, or to find out a course of treatment that should alleviate my mother’s sufferings, and bring some relief to the constant pain that made my younger brother’s life a martyrdom. It was perhaps the reiterated failure of any of the old recognised methods to work a cure, that rendered us all quite free from prejudice against the pretensions of outsiders, and hearing so much said of the wonderful cures wrought by magnetism, I felt no surprise when I learnt that it was to be tried in my mother’s case. Soon the professional magnetiser appeared upon the scene, in the person of a very stout Englishwoman with beady black eyes, to whom my brothers and I immediately took an intense dislike, on account of her appearance and her very disagreeable manner towards us. Her skill did procure for my mother a little of the rest she stood so much in need of, as the operator could by means of the magnetic passes, or even by merely laying her hand on the patient’s forehead, send her for hours into a deep sleep, from which she could not awake of her own accord. But the fact that the magnetiser had, as she boasted, herself brought fifteen children into the world, had not apparently imbued her with very tender feelings towards children in general, and the influence she was not slow in acquiring over her patient she so thoroughly abused in tyrannising over us, that we three cordially detested her, and were thankful when a too glaring usurpation of authority led to her summary dismissal. Her brief stay in our midst had, however, awakened among us all the desire to ascertain by similar experiments, what latent magnetic power might possibly reside in some of us, and it was very soon shown that my uncle, Nicholas of Nassau, was possessed of a quite exceptional degree of the mesmeric or hypnotic force, which he, a lively, thoughtless youth of twenty, did not scruple to use for all sorts of practical jokes. A favourite one was to prevent his sister’s governess from getting up out of her chair; do what she would, she was as if nailed down to it whenever he chose to forbid her to rise, and he would even sometimes mount his horse and ride away for a couple of hours, deaf to the entreaties and adjurations of his victim. Another time he ordered her to put out her tongue, in the midst of a ceremonious Court dinner, and almost crying with indignation, she was forced to obey. His sisters found it equally impossible to disobey whatever extravagant commands he might lay on them, such as forcing my mother to stand still holding out her hand whilst he threatened to aim a heavy blow at it with his riding-whip. Such displays of his extraordinary and inexplicable powers afforded great amusement to himself and others, above all to the child spectators, who laughed heartily to see their elders for once reduced to such submissiveness. It was therefore a sad disappointment to us when, in consequence of the fits of hysterics into which one or two ladies had been thrown by some of my uncle’s pranks, he was obliged to desist from them. We little ones had enjoyed them the more, that he never tried them on us, from whom it would indeed have been superfluous to exact obedience in this fashion, trained as we were to carry out unquestioningly and with military promptness and exactitude, whatever orders were given us. For this was in the old days, when it seemed to be a recognised thing, that children had come into the world just to do what they were told, and learn whatever was taught them! Nobody thought of asking them if they found it a tedious restraint to behave properly, nor were they consulted as to whether their lessons bored them. If in my youthful days, for instance, I played badly in my piano-lesson, it was so much the worse for me, as I soon found out, when the music-master had gone. As for over-pressure, the word had not been invented then, and nervous fatigue, hysteria and neurasthenia, with all of which the modern child is familiar, had not yet been heard of. Our elders certainly themselves set us a good example in all such respects, and I can remember the severe animadversion passed on the poor degenerate creatures who first indulged in the above unbecoming weaknesses. All through her married life my grandmother had to stand every evening with her ladies, in full dress upright beside the billiard-table, to watch her lord and master’s play, and neither she nor anyone else dared to be tired or feel bored, until the match was finished. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that people in those days knew how to be bored to death with the utmost decorum! There were no comfortable easy-chairs to lean back in; if one sat down at all, it was bolt upright on a chair of most uncompromising severity. For our lessons we had very hard high wooden chairs, from which our poor little legs dangled till they ached, very different from the nice comfortable schoolroom chairs with their foot-rest, which children have now. And worst of all, there was the dreadful invention for deportment, a horrible heart-shaped contrivance, of iron covered with leather, into which we were strapped to make us hold ourselves upright. To my indescribable humiliation, I was sometimes obliged to go for a walk with the odious machine fastened to my back. Even this seemed quite mild though, compared to the means employed in a former generation, one of my great-aunts being able to tell of the spiked collar, which in addition to the iron back-board, she was forced to wear, to prevent her from ever allowing her head to droop. Was it the effect of this instrument of torture, that in her ninetieth year, she had never been known to lean back in her chair?

Out of this hard training, of this undue repression, and as a natural consequence too of the incessant cupping and bleeding, practised on the former generation as a remedy for all existent and non-existent maladies, there came forth another, debilitated, unnerved, an easy prey to the whole host of nervous disorders lying in wait for it. I have lived through and looked on at every phase of the transformation. Healthy as I was, I should hardly have escaped the drastic measures to which the so-called plethoric were subjected, had it not been sufficiently proved that their application had been injurious rather than beneficial to my mother. The immense strides made by medical science of recent years, make it difficult to judge rightly the mental attitude of those, who in their impatience of the inanity and futility of orthodox treatment, seem formerly to have welcomed and blindly followed the advice of every quack, calling himself a mesmeriser. We should be slower to condemn them, had we also suffered from the ignorance and incompetence of the regular practitioner, and perhaps be equally willing to sign a pact with the Evil One and his agents, in order to regain the blessing of health! It was this tendency that led to the first great disappointment of my life, which I experienced when I was only five years old, in the following manner:

I had a little birth-mark on my left cheek, which was a great source of vexation to my parents, nobody understanding in those days how to remove anything of the sort. They were therefore all the more readily disposed to put faith in the assertion of a wandering charlatan, of his ability to make it disappear. I was fetched from my lessons by my father, placed in a chair, and the stranger proceeded to apply a dark fluid from a little phial to the spot, assuring my parents that when this had dried up, they would find on its removal no trace of the mole left. Somehow or other I had understood that by means of this magical process, I should never be naughty again. As might be expected, when the stain of the fluid was washed away, the mole was there just as before, with a slight scar into the bargain, and I was as naughty as ever! That was my first real big disappointment. The next came when I was six, with my first glimpse of the sea. When we reached the shore to go on board the boat, it was low tide, and instead of the wide far-reaching plain of water I was prepared to see, there was nothing but sand, with a few pools. To my mother’s apostrophe,—“Look, Elizabeth! there is the sea!” I could not find a word to say in reply, I was too bitterly disappointed. I had expected to behold a great towering wall of water, like that I was familiar with in the pictures of the crossing of the Red Sea by the Children of Israel. And here was nothing but sand, with a few wretched pools! Afterwards I saw the great expanse of water, always in movement, and stretching out far away, but it was too late then, the first impression was over and all was spoilt. The third disappointment came much later, at first sight of Rome, and does not belong here.

To return to my story. In one of my uncle’s letters from America, he told us of his visit to a house, where the guests were all amusing themselves by setting a table in motion by simply letting their hands rest lightly on it, as they stood round. It had interested him, but he had not been able to induce my father to take any part in the proceedings, the latter declining even to countenance such nonsense, declaring himself the enemy of every sort of humbug. At home, on the contrary, curiosity was immediately aroused, our former experience with the magnetiser and the discovery of my uncle’s marvellous powers, having to a certain extent initiated us into the mysteries of the occult. Young and old, children and grown-up people, we were all pressed into the service, and were soon all standing in a ring round a very big table, our hands resting on it, so that one’s little finger touched that of one’s neighbour on either side. Thus we stood and waited, with some impatience, and a good deal of inward merriment, to see what would occur. Just as we were getting thoroughly disheartened and tired out, a tiny tremor was felt in the table, which then, in spite of its great weight, actually began to move from the spot. Naturally, each one accused the other of pushing, but that explanation would have been neither satisfactory nor admissible, standing as we were with our hands in full view of one another, so that no attempt at cheating could have passed unperceived. And our astonishment was increased when we observed how when my mother was wheeled into the room, she had but to lay her finger ever so lightly on the table, for it at once to begin to move quicker, even setting off to rush about in all directions, so that she had to be pushed after it in her chair. We all followed, with peals of laughter at the strange sight, the ungainly movements of this new sort of dancing-bear, and so much amusement did this afford, that we set to work at once to experiment on all sorts of other inanimate objects. We soon found that all were not in the same degree susceptible of locomotion, nor were all human beings equally endowed with the latent force by which automatic movement could be imparted to things usually inert. Count Oriola proved to be the possessor of a quite exceptional degree of this psychic or magnetic force; he had only to stretch out his hand within a few paces of a small table, and it immediately came marching towards him, apparently with great glee, to our inexpressible delight, but to the unspeakable horror of my governess, from whose sitting-room the table had been borrowed, and who energetically refused to receive such an impish piece of furniture back again!