The next thing I have to relate about John Powles is so startling that I dread the criticism it will evoke; but if I had not startling stories to tell, I should not consider them worth writing down. I left my house in Bayswater one Sunday evening to dine with Mr. and Mrs. George Neville in Regent's Park Terrace, to have a séance afterwards with Miss Showers. There was a large company present, and I was placed next to Miss Showers at table. During dinner she told me complainingly that her mother had gone to Norwood to spend the night, and she (Rosie) was afraid of sleeping alone, as the spirits worried her so. In a moment it flashed across me to ask her to return to Bayswater and sleep with me, for I was most desirous of testing her powers when we were alone together. Miss Showers accepted my invitation, and we arranged that she should go home with me. After dinner, the guests sat for a séance, but to everybody's surprise and disappointment, nothing occurred. It was one o'clock in the morning when Miss Showers and I entered a cab to return to Bayswater. We had hardly started when we were greeted with a loud peal of laughter close to our ears. "What's the matter, Peter?" demanded Miss Showers. "I can't help laughing," he replied, "to think of their faces when no one appeared! Did you suppose I was going to let you waste all your power with them, when I knew I was going home with you and Mrs. Ross-Church? I mean to show you what a real good séance is to-night."
When we reached home I let myself in with a latchkey. The house was full, for I had seven children, four servants, and a married sister staying with me; but they were all in bed and asleep. It was cold weather, and when I took Miss Showers into my bedroom a fire was burning in the grate. My sister was occupying a room which opened into mine; but I locked her door and my own, and put the keys under my pillow. Miss Showers and I then undressed and got into bed. When we had extinguished the gas, we found the room was, comparatively speaking, light, for I had stirred the fire into a blaze, and a street lamp just opposite the window threw bars of light through the venetian blinds, right across the ceiling. As soon as Miss Showers had settled herself in bed, she said, "I wonder what Peter is going to do," and I replied, "I hope he won't strip off the bed-clothes." We were lying under four blankets, a counterpane, and an eider-down duvet, and as I spoke, the whole mass rose in the air, and fell over the end of the bed, leaving us quite unprotected. We got up, lit a candle, and made the bed again, tucking the clothes well in all round, but the minute we laid down the same thing was repeated. We were rather cross the second time, and abused Peter for being so disagreeable, upon which the voice declared he wouldn't do it any more, but we shouldn't have provoked him to try. I said, "You had much better shew yourself to us, Peter. That is what I want you to do." He replied, "Here I am, my dear, close to you!" I turned my head, and there stood a dark figure beside the bed, whilst another could be plainly distinguished walking about the room. I said, "I can't see your face," and he replied, "I'll come nearer to you!" Upon this the figure rose in the air until it hung suspended, face downward, over the bed. In this position it looked like a huge bat with outspread wings. It was still indistinct, except as to substance, but Peter said we had exhausted all the phosphorus in our bodies by the long evening we had spent, and left him nothing to light himself up with. After a while he lowered himself on to the bed, and lay between Miss Showers and myself on the outside of the duvet. To this we greatly objected, as he was very heavy and took up a great deal of room; but it was some time before he would go away.
During this manifestation, the other spirit, whom Peter called the "Pope," kept walking about and touching everything in the room, which was full of ornaments; and Peter called out several times, "Take care, Pope! take care! Don't break Mrs. Ross-Church's things." The two made so much noise that they waked my sister in the adjoining room, and she knocked at the door, asking in an alarmed voice, "Florence! whom have you there? You will wake the whole house." When I replied, "Never mind, it's only spirits," she gave one fell shriek and dived under her bed-clothes. She maintains to this day that she fully believed the steps and voices to be human. At last the manifestations became so rapid, as many as eight and ten hands touching us at once, that I asked Miss Showers if she would mind my tying hers together. She was very amiable and consented willingly. I therefore got out of bed again, and having securely fastened her hands in the sleeves of the nightdress she wore, I sewed them with needle and thread to the mattress. Miss Showers then said she felt sleepy, and with her back to me—a position she was obliged to maintain on account of her hands being sewn down—she apparently dropt off to sleep, though I knew subsequently she was in a trance.
For some time afterwards nothing occurred, the figures had disappeared, the voices ceased, and I thought the séance was over. Presently, however, I felt a hand laid on my head and the fingers began to gently stroke and pull the short curls upon my forehead. I whispered, "Who is this?" and the answer came back, "Don't you know me? I am Powles! At last—at last—after a silence of ten years I see you and speak with you again, face to face." "How can I tell this is your hand?" I said. "Peter might be materializing a hand in order to deceive me." The hand immediately left my head and the back of it passed over my mouth, when I felt it was covered with short hair. I then remembered how hairy John Powles' hands had become from exposure to the Indian sun whilst shooting, and how I had nicknamed him "Esau" in consequence. I recollected also that he had dislocated the left wrist with a cricket ball. "Let me feel your wrist," I said, and my hand was at once placed on the enlarged bone. "I want to trace your hand to where it springs from," I next suggested; and on receiving permission I felt from the fingers and wrist to the elbow and shoulder, where it terminated in the middle of Miss Showers' back. Still I was not quite satisfied, for I used to find it very hard to believe in the identity of a person I had cared for. I was so terribly afraid of being deceived. "I want to see your face," I continued. "I cannot show you my face to-night," the voice replied, "but you shall feel it;" and the face, with beard and moustaches, was laid for a moment against my own. Then the hand was replaced on my hair, and whilst it kept on pulling and stroking my curls, John Powles' own voice spoke to me of everything that had occurred of importance when he and I were friends on earth. Fancy, two people who were intimately associated for years, meeting alone after a long and painful separation, think of all the private things they would talk about together, and you will understand why I cannot write down the conversation that took place between us that night here. In order to convince me of his identity, John Powles spoke of all the troubles I had passed through and was then enduring—he mentioned scenes, both sad and merry, which we had witnessed together; he recalled incidents which had slipped my memory, and named places and people known only to ourselves. Had I been a disbeliever in Spiritualism, that night must have made a convert of me. Whilst the voice, in the well-remembered tones of my old friend, was speaking, and his hand wandered through my hair, Miss Showers continued to sleep, or to appear to sleep, with her back towards me, and her hands sewn into her nightdress sleeves, and the sleeves sewn down to the bed. But had she been wide awake and with both hands free, she could not have spoken to me in John Powles' unforgotten voice of things that had occurred when she was an infant and thousands of miles away. And I affirm that the voice spoke to me of things that no one but John Powles could possibly have known. He did not fail to remind me of the promise he had made, and the many times he had tried to fulfil it before, and he assured me he should be constantly with me from that time. It was daylight before the voice ceased speaking, and then both Miss Showers and I were so exhausted, we could hardly raise our heads from the pillows. I must not forget to add that when we did open our eyes again upon this work-a-day world, we found there was hardly an article in the room that had not changed places. The pictures were all turned with their faces to the wall—the crockery from the washstand was piled in the fender—the ornaments from the mantel-piece were on the dressing-table—in fact, the whole room was topsy-turvy.
When Mr. William Fletcher gave his first lecture in England, in the Steinway Hall, my husband, Colonel Lean, and I, went to hear him. We had never seen Mr. Fletcher before, nor any of his family, nor did he know we were amongst the audience. Our first view of him was when he stepped upon the platform, and we were seated quite in the body of the hall, which was full. It was Mr. Fletcher's custom, after his lecture was concluded, to describe such visions as were presented to him, and he only asked in return that if the people and places were recognized, those who recognized them would be brave enough to say so, for the sake of the audience and himself. I can understand that strangers who went there and heard nothing that concerned themselves would be very apt to imagine it was all humbug, and that those who claimed a knowledge of the visions were simply confederates of Mr. Fletcher. But there is nothing more true than that circumstances alter cases. I entered Steinway Hall as a perfect stranger, and as a press-writer, quite prepared to expose trickery if I detected it. And this is what I heard. After Mr. Fletcher had described several persons and scenes unknown to me, he took out a handkerchief and began to wipe his face, as though he were very warm.
"I am no longer in England, now," he said. "The scene has quite changed, and I am taken over the sea, thousands of miles away, and I am in a chamber with all the doors and windows open. Oh! how hot it is! I think I am somewhere in the tropics. O! I see why I have been brought here! It is to see a young man die! This is a death chamber. He is lying on a bed. He looks very pale, and he is very near death, but he has only been ill a short time. His hair is a kind of golden chestnut color, and he has blue eyes. He is an Englishman, and I can see the letter 'P' above his head. He has not been happy on earth, and he is quite content to die. He pushes all the influences that are round his bed away from him. Now I see a lady come and sit down beside him. He holds her hand, and appears to ask her to do something, and I hear a strain of sweet music. It is a song he has heard in happier times, and on the breath of it his spirit passes away. It is to this lady he seems to come now. She is sitting on my left about half way down the hall. A little girl, with her hands full of blue flowers, points her out to me. The little girl holds up the flowers, and I see they are woven into a resemblance of the letter F. She tells me that is the initial letter of her mother's name and her own. And I see this message written.
"'To my dearest friend, for such you ever were to me from the beginning. I have been with you through all your time of trial and sorrow, and I am rejoiced to see that a happier era is beginning for you. I am always near you. The darkness is fast rolling away, and happiness will succeed it. Pray for me, and I shall be near you in your prayers. I pray God to bless you and to bless me, and to bring us together again in the summer land.'
"And I see the spirit pointing with his hand far away, as though to intimate that the happiness he speaks of is only the beginning of some that will extend to a long distance of time. I see this scene more plainly than any I have ever seen before."
These words were written down at the time they were spoken. Colonel Lean and I were sitting in the very spot indicated by Mr. Fletcher, and the little girl with the blue flowers was my spirit child, "Florence," whose history I shall give in the next chapter. But my communications with John Powles, though very extraordinary, were not satisfactory to me. I am the "Thomas, surnamed Didymus," of the spiritualistic world, who wants to see and touch and handle before I can altogether believe. I wanted to meet John Powles and talk with him face to face, and it seemed such an impossibility for him to materialize in the light that, after his two failures with Miss Showers, he refused to try. I was always worrying him to tell me if we should meet in the body before I left this world, and his answer was always, "Yes! but not just yet!" I had no idea then that I should have to cross the Atlantic before I saw my dear old friend again.