"Mrs. Ravenshaw, as became an imaginative writer, was of this idealistic temperament, receptive, confiding; but her husband was a man of business, and wanted to see value for his money. He explained his views to me in a confidential voice while we waited. 'Yes, they had undoubtedly seen and heard strange things. They had seen bodies—living human bodies—floating in the air—yes, floating in the frowsy atmosphere of this shabby parlour, atmosphere which it were base flattery to call "air." They had enjoyed this abnormal experience; but, after all, how is the cause of humanity, or the march of enlightenment to be advantaged by the flotation of an exceptional subject here and there? If everybody could float, well and good. The gain would be immense, except for boot-makers and chiropodists, who must suffer for the general weal. But for mediumistic persons, at the rate of one per million of the population, to be carried by viewless powers on the empty air was of the smallest practical use. An improvement in the construction of balloons would be infinitely more valuable.'
"We waited nearly an hour in all—we had arrived half an hour before the stated opening of the séance, and we waited five and twenty minutes more, and were yawning and fidgeting hopelessly before the door opened, and a dismal-looking man with a pallid face and long hair, came into the room, followed by a slovenly woman in black, with bare arms, and a towzled, highly artistic flaxen head. He bowed solemnly to the assembled company, looked from the company to the woman, and murmured in a sepulchral voice, 'My wife,' by way of general introduction.
"The flaxen-headed lady seated herself at the large round table, and the dark-haired vampire-like man crept about the room inviting his audience to take their places at the same mystic table. We formed a circle, hand touching hand, the long-haired professor on one side of the table, the flaxen wife on the other. Gerald and I were separated by the width of the table, and the enthusiastic novelist and her practical husband were also as far apart as circumstances would permit.
"My next neighbour on the right was a tall, burly man with a strong North of Ireland accent, a captain in the mercantile marine, Mrs. Ravenshaw informed me. The people who met in this dreary room had come by some knowledge of one another's social status and opinions, although conversation was sternly discouraged as offensive to the impalpable company we were there to cultivate. A gloomy silence, and a vaguely uncomfortable expectancy of something ghastly were the prevailing characteristics of the assembly.
"Mrs. Ravenshaw had informed me that the seaman on my right was an unbeliever, and that he courted the spirits only with the malicious desire of doing them a bad turn. There had been the premonitory symptoms of a row on more than one occasion, and he had been the source and centre of the adverse feeling which had shown itself at those times.
"My left-hand neighbour was an elderly woman in black, who looked like a spinster, and who, instead of the bonnet of everyday life, wore a rusty Spanish mantilla, and a black velvet band across her high narrow forehead, confining braids of chestnut hair whose artificial origin was patent to every eye. As the séance progressed she frequently shed tears. Mrs. Ravenshaw, who was in her confidence, whispered to me that this lady came there to hold mystic converse with an officer in the East-India Company's Service, to whom she had been betrothed thirty years before, and who had died in Bengal, after marrying the daughter of a native money-lender and an English governess. It comforted his devoted sweetheart to hear from his own lips, as it were, that he had led a wretched existence with his half-caste wife, and had never ceased to repent his inconstancy to his dearest Amanda. Amanda was the name of the lady in the mantilla, Amanda Jones. It amuses me to recall these details, to dwell upon the opening of a scene which I entered upon so casually, and which was to exercise so lasting an influence upon my life.
"The séance proceeded after the vulgar routine of such mysteries in England and in America. We sat in the frowzy darkness, and heard each other's breathing as we listened to the mysterious rappings, now here, now there, now high, now low, as of some sportive dressmaker rapping her thimbled finger on table, or shutter, or ceiling, or wall. We heard strange messages thumped out, or throbbed out by the excitable mahogany, which became more and more vehement, as if the beating of our hearts, the swift current of blood in all our arteries were being gradually absorbed by that vitalised wood. The German woman translated the rappings into strange scraps of speech, which for some of the audience were full of meaning—private communications from friends long dead, allusions to the past, which were sometimes received in blank wonder, sometimes welcomed as proof irresistible of thought-transference between the dead and the living. The mighty dead, with names familiar to us all, condescended to hold communion with us. Spinosa, Bacon, Shelley, Sir John Franklin, Mesmer—a strange mixture of personalities—but, alas! the feebleness of their communications gave a crushing blow to the theory of a progressive existence beyond the grave.
"'I should like to know how it's done,' said the sea-captain, suddenly, in an aggressive voice, which irreverent interruption the professor and some of the audience rebuked by an indignant hush.
"The whole business wearied me. I was moved to melancholy rather than to laughter as I realized the depth of human credulity which was indicated by the hushed expectancy of the dozen or so of people sitting round a table in the dark in a shabby Bloomsbury lodging-house, and expecting communications from the world after death—the inexplicable shadow-land of which to think is to enter into the regions of all that is most serious and solemn in human thought—through the interposition of a shabby charlatan who took money for the exhibition of his power.
"I sat in the darkness, bored and disgusted, utterly incurious, desiring nothing but the close of the manifestations and escape into the open air, when suddenly, in a faint light, which came I knew not whence, I saw a face on the opposite side of the circle of faces, a face which assuredly had not been among the audience before the lamp was darkened at the beginning of the séance. Yet so far as my sense of hearing, which was particularly acute, could inform me, no door had opened, no footstep had crossed the floor since we had seated ourselves at the table, and had formed the circle, hand touching hand.