Vera, the Medium

by Richard Harding Davis

Although but lately established in New York, the persons Dr. Rainey introduced had already made themselves comparatively well-known. For the last six weeks as “headliners” at one of the vaudeville theatres, and as entertainers at private houses, under the firm name of “The Vances,” they had been giving an exhibition of code and cipher signaling. They called it mind reading. During the day, at the house of Vance and his wife, the girl, as “Vera, the Medium,” furnished to all comers memories of the past or news of the future. In their profession, in all of its branches, the man and the girl were past masters. They knew it from the A, B, C of the dream book to the post-graduate work of projecting from a cabinet the spirits of the dead. As the occasion offered and paid best, they were mind readers, clairvoyants, materializing mediums, test mediums. From them, a pack of cards, a crystal globe, the lines of the human hand, held no secrets. They found lost articles, cast horoscopes, gave advice in affairs of the heart, of business and speculation, uttered warnings of journeys over seas and against a smooth-shaven stranger. They even stooped to foretell earthquakes, or caused to drop fluttering from the ceiling a letter straight from the Himalayas. Among those who are the gypsies of the cities, they were the aristocrats of their calling, and to them that calling was as legitimate a business as is, to the roadside gypsy, the swapping of horses. The fore-parents of each had followed that same calling, and to the children it was commonplace and matter-of-fact. It held no adventure, no moral obloquy.

“Prof.” Paul Vance was a young man of under forty years. He looked like a fox. He had red eyes, alert and cunning, a long, sharp-pointed nose, a pointed red beard, and red eyebrows that slanted upward. His hair, standing erect in a pompadour, and his uplifted eyebrows gave him the watchful look of the fox when he hears suddenly the hound baying in pursuit. But no one had ever successfully pursued Vance. No one had ever driven him into a corner from which, either pleasantly, or with raging indignation, he was not able to free himself. Seven years before he had disloyally married out of the “profession” and for no other reason than that he was in love with the woman he married. She had come to seek advice from the spirit world in regard to taking a second husband. After several visits the spirit world had advised Vance to advise her to marry Vance.

She did so, and though the man was still in love with his wife, he had not found her, in his work, the assistance he had hoped she might be. She still was a “believer”; in the technical vernacular of her husband—“a dope.” Not even the intimate knowledge she had gained behind the scenes could persuade her that Paul, her husband, was not in constant communication with the spirit world, or that, if he wished, he could not read the thoughts that moved slowly through her pretty head.

At the time of his marriage, the girl Vera, then a child of fourteen, had written to Vance for help. She was ill, without money, and asked for work. To him she was known as the last of a long line of people who had always been professional mediums and spiritualists, and, out of charity and from a sense of noblesse oblige to one of the elect of the profession, Vance had made her his assistant. He had never regretted having done so. The bread cast upon the waters was returned a thousandfold. From the first, the girl brought in money. And his wife, the older of the two, had welcomed her as a companion. After a fashion the Vances had adopted her. In the advertisements she was described as their “ward.”

Vera now was twenty-one, tall, wonderfully graceful, and of the most enchanting loveliness. Her education had been cosmopolitan. In the largest cities of America she had met persons of every class—young women, old women, mothers with married sons and daughters; women of society as it is exploited in the Sunday supplements; school girls, shop girls, factory girls—all had told her their troubles; and men of every condition had come to scoff and had remained to express, more or less offensively, their admiration. Some of the younger of these, after a first visit, returned the day following, and each begged the beautiful priestess of the occult to fly with him, to live with him, to marry him. When this happened Vera would touch a button, and “Mannie” Day, who admitted visitors, and later, in the hall, searched their hats and umbrellas for initials, came on the run and threw the infatuated one out upon a cold and unfeeling sidewalk.

So Vera had seen both the seamy side of life and, in the drawing rooms where Vance and she exhibited their mind reading tricks, had been made much of by great ladies and, for an hour as brief as Cinderella’s, had looked upon a world of kind and well-bred people. Since she was fourteen, for seven years, this had been her life—a life as open to the public as the life of an actress, as easy of access as that of the stenographer in the hotel lobby. As a result, the girl had encased herself in a defensive armor of hardness and distrust, a protection which was rendered futile by the loveliness of her face, by the softness of her voice, by the deep, brooding eyes, and the fine forehead on which, like a crown, rested the black waves of her hair.

In her work Vera accepted, without question, the parts to which Vance assigned her. When in their mummeries they were successful, she neither enjoyed the credulity of those they had tricked nor was sobered with remorse. In the world Vance found a certain number of people with money who demanded to be fooled. It was his business and hers to meet that demand. If ever the conscience of either stirred restlessly, Vance soothed it by the easy answer that if they did not take the money some one else would. It was all in the day’s work. It was her profession.

As she entered the library of Mr. Hallowell, which, with Vance, she already had visited several times, she looked like a child masquerading in her mother’s finery. She suggested an ingenue who had been suddenly sent on in the role of the Russian adventuress. Her slight girl’s figure was draped in black lace. Her face was shaded by a large picture hat, heavy with drooping ostrich feathers; around her shoulders was a necklace of jade, and on her wrists many bracelets of silver gilt. When she moved they rattled. As the girl advanced, smiling, to greet Mr. Hallowell, she suddenly stopped, shivered slightly, and threw her right arm across her eyes. Her left arm she stretched over the table.

“Give me your hand!” she commanded. Dubiously, with a watchful glance at Vance, Mr. Hallowell leaned forward and took her hand.

“You have been ill,” cried the girl; “very ill—I see you—I see you in a kind of faint—very lately.” Her voice rose excitedly. “Yes, last night.”