Following Mrs. Mercer-Laporte’s recommendation he began with Mr. Muddock. But Mr. Muddock turned out to be an illiterate and frowzy prophet, too clearly calculated for the need of ‘poor sweet cooks and housemaids’ to be of much assistance in the quests of better-educated people. However, after a brief spasm of disgust, Kingston decided to continue his enterprise, and gradually found himself involved in the higher spiritualistic circles. At first he had to be content with the ordinary hireling mediums, but as time went by, and his appetite became whetted by the glimpses of apparent truth that he gathered here and there amid thick and more or less palpable frauds, he began to be aware that there existed, behind the common world of second-rate believers, a sort of upper world in touch with the Beyond. To anyone with money the lower sphere of materialization was open, and the meetings of Mr. Muddock and his confrères were nightly crowded with the lonely and the bereaved, eager for a moment’s conversation with the lost beloved. But these interviews never satisfied Kingston, and, as he began to discern the higher possibilities behind, he secretly strained every nerve to enter that set of his own people which held, or proclaimed that it held, genuine and constant communication with those ‘that have passed over.’ The task was not altogether easy, and had to be cautiously ensued, for fear of waking the suspicions and the disapproval of Gundred. Kingston found himself despising himself for the cowardice of such a course, until he realized that what he was aiming at involved no sort of real disloyalty to Gundred, and that any concealment he might practise was in the interest of her peace and happiness. Satisfying himself obstinately with this rather jejune and sophistical excuse, he pursued his way, and at last found himself admitted to the upper section of the spiritualistic world.

Here at last he met men and women of his own sort, men and women of birth and breeding and intelligence, whom no cheap claptrap could convince, no vulgar jugglery deceive. And yet these people, keen and apparently sensible, believed passionately and whole-heartedly in the manifestations they evoked. Their lives were ruled by ghostly advice elicited at their meetings, their desolation consoled by almost daily conversation with their beloved dead, their doubts turned into certainty on all points by revelations from beyond the grave. They claimed impartiality, and cultivated pure enthusiasm. And if the tragedy of the pitiful, unholy quest had been bitterly heart-rending among the illiterate and credulous crowds that haunted Mr. Muddock’s circles, and sustained themselves with ‘demonstrations’ and aitchless conversation with the inferior dead, far more so was it among these people of Kingston’s own world, where devotion served as conviction, and the anguish of longing was forced to masquerade as its own fulfilment. It was indeed a poignant, tragic life in which Kingston now found himself. Men and women, one and all, were gaunt and haggard of soul with their insatiable hunger. Some of them seemed philosophers, convinced that they were following on the track of a clear truth; others were manifest saints, gentle sacred souls, hopefully worshipping a Holy Grail of their own desire’s invention. Exalted, inspired, rarefied, filled with an apparent serenity of devotion, their company gave an impression of strange unearthly happiness, until the keen edge of their underlying agony was seen piercing through the superficial calm of their lives. The whole air round them was poisoned by loss and the inability to bear it. Their souls lived in a fierce, unacknowledged groping after the lost things they had loved. Men for vanished friends, women for lovers and children long dead—each had some dreadful secret craving, some inner infidelity towards the Eternal Mercy of life. There were old polished men of their world, strong intellects sapped, and keen eyes dulled in one direction only, by some hoarded passion never to be parted with, not even for the sake of happiness and peace and wisdom. There were beautiful white-haired women, sweet and gracious with much sorrow in bygone years, tired with recollections, and divorced from the heats of life, yet still held in a bitter bondage, drugging their pain with this piteous, passionate cult for the burden they had lost. Life and death had combined to offer them calm and release from torment; but they would have none of any such release—clung to the ghost of their dead torment, and redoubled it by the zest with which they told themselves that they soothed it.

Into this world of insatiable emotion Kingston threw himself heartily—hopefully, too, seeing that the sincerity of his fellow-worshippers left no room for doubt, and that their enthusiastic belief seemed to give fair hope that it was justified. But soon he saw the fearful tragedy that lay beneath their enthusiasm, and realized how determined an illusion it was that they cultivated. He, too, no less than they, yearned and groped, but his nature, cooler, perhaps, than theirs, could not accept for pure gold of revelation the base ore of hysteria and fanaticism that they unwittingly but obstinately imposed upon themselves for truth. Their spirit-voices were nothing but the frustrate echoes of their own cries, cast back to them across the great gulf that separates the ignorant, unfaithful living from the free, glorified dead. Sounds and sights floated thick in their midst—honest sounds and sights, born of no trickery, indeed, but—though none dared to own it—engendered by the frantic zeal of the searchers themselves. They and none other supplied the words to which they listened in such ecstatic awe; they and none other evoked those vanished tones, those pale reflections of the well-beloved in which they took such comfort. Their very sincerity, their very rapture, only made more terrible the delusion on which they sustained themselves, the emptiness of the phantoms with which they tried to fill the lives that their own distrust had left to them desolate. Only want of faith can make death a reality. These sad, starving people, having made reality out of the shadow, now found themselves forced to create new shadows to exorcise the old. They had allowed themselves to think that death had power to sunder their loves, and now, after that first self-deception, the need was fierce upon them to invent another to nullify the first, and wipe out that death to which only their weak terrors had given an objective existence. From the beginning to the end they were altogether tragic—in their sorrow, in its cause, and in the means they took to heal it. Kingston, as the meetings passed, found himself more and more aloof from their consolations, more and more cold towards the manifestations that made the comfort of their poor struggling days.

It was not here, not amid these faint voices crying what the listeners wanted to hear, not amid these dim ghosts of bygone passion that his own still living, throbbing passion could hope to come once more into contact with Isabel. He pitied his fellow-seekers, but he stood aloof from them. Sorrowing for the intensity of their false joy, he could gain from their cult no sustenance for his own hunger. His hunger was not as theirs, and the beloved fallacies that supported them could give no nourishment to him. He saw that their quest was false, their methods a mere sop flung to their own desire. Gradually Kingston withdrew himself from their company. The spiritualistic world, after all, held no solid help or conviction for him. He passed away into everyday life again, and went back to his quiet expectancy at Gundred’s side. Sooner or later the wonderful thing would happen, sooner or later the holy mystery of separation stand revealed, but no unlawful human methods could avail to hurry the processes of God. They of little faith might make for themselves a world of phantoms in which to worship a phantom; he must persevere alone, waiting patiently for what was to come. Gladly, if he could, would he have found satisfaction in the hollow solace invented by his fellow-seekers, but as his nature, as his more exalted perceptions, could not allow him any such makeshift consolation, the sooner he quitted so unwholesome and unsatisfactory a life the better. At least, he had the comfort of feeling that he had left no method untried, had not neglected any possible chance. But the alley into which he had strayed had been found blind, a short cut towards the Great Nowhere. He must return into the broad, beaten track of life, and go steadfastly forward, in confidence that somewhere, some day, he should inevitably meet again his lost companion.

CHAPTER XV

‘Dear Jim,’ said Gundred, ‘how happy he sounds!’ She folded up her son’s letter again, and put it deftly back into its envelope. He wrote to her once a week without fail from school, a neat, colourless letter, breathing duty and regard. To his father the boy wrote as the mood took him—careless, untidy epistles about the topic of the moment. ‘Another cup of tea, dear?’ she asked her husband, smiling at him across the table.

Kingston looked at her with the approval that her appearance never failed to challenge. A crystalline perfection always hung about her, a clear, precise faultlessness that was always cool and fresh and pleasant. Age could do nothing against her. This morning, as for a thousand mornings past, as she would be for a thousand mornings to come, she was tranquil, exquisite, satisfactory. If she did not actually sparkle, she was always in a serene glow of elegance, her clear golden hair unalterably waved and curled, her garments refreshing in their unobtrusive charm of cut and make, her hands well-kept, white, delightful, flickering here and there from tea-caddy to cream-jug with a charming, housewifely preoccupation.

Kingston, with a vivid recollection of the sibylline untidiness that haunted spiritualistic circles, brought a new appreciation to bear on Gundred’s unchangeably well-bred calm of look and dress and manner. She was very restful to be with. Pure milk, after all, certainly was better, in the long run, than intoxicants.

‘Thanks, dear,’ he replied, accepting a cup of tea into which Gundred had dutifully poured the cream that he still hated as much as ever, but which twenty years’ experience of her immitigable firmness had taught him to accept without vain murmurings. ‘I think I will run down and see Jim one of these days. You come with me?’