Moonchild (Annotated)

Chapter 3

THE COUNTESS MOTTICH was far more famous than most Prime Ministers or Imperial Chancellors. For, to the great bewilderment of many alleged men of science, she had the power of small objects to move without apparent physical contact. Her first experiments had been with a purblind old person named Oudouwitz, who was in love with her in his senile way. Few people swallowed the published results of his experiments with her. If convinced they would have been very much startled. For she was supposed to be able to stop clocks at will, to open and close doors without approaching them — and other feats of the same general type. But she had sobered down since leaving the Professor — which she had done, just as soon as she had acquired enough money to get married to the man she wanted. Her power had left her instantly, strange to say; and many were the theories propounded connecting these circumstances. But her husband had displeased her; she had flown off in a rage — and her power had returned! But most of her sensational feats were relegated to the bad mad old days of wild and headstrong youth; at present she merely undertook to raise light small objects, such as tiny celluloid spheres, from the table, without touching them.

So Cyril explained, when Lisa asked “What does she do?”

(The Countess was supposed to know no English. She spoke it as well as anyone in the room, of course.)

“She moves things,” he said; “manages to get hold of a couple of hairs when we’re tired of looking at foolishness for hours together, twists them in her fingers, and, miracle of miracles! the ball rises in the air. This is everywhere considered by all rightly-disposed people to be certain proof of the immortality of the soul.”

“But doesn’t she challenge you? ask you to search her, and all that?”

“Oh yes! You’ve got the same chance as a deaf man has to detect a mistake in a Casals recital. If she can’t get a hair, she’ll pull a thread from her silk stockings or her dress; if you get people that are really too clever for her, then ‘the force is very weak this afternoon,’ though she keeps you longer than ever in the hope of tiring your attention, and perhaps to pay you out for baffling her!”

Grey said all this with an air of the most hideous boredom. It was evident that he hated the whole business. He was restless and anxious, too, with another part of his brain; Lisa could see that, but she dared not question him. So she went on the old track.

“Doesn’t she get messages from the dead?”

“It’s not done much now. It’s too easy to fake, and the monied fools lost interest, as a class. This new game tickles the vanity of some of the sham scientific people, like Lombroso; they think they’ll make a reputation like Newton out of it. They don’t know enough science to criticize the business on sensible lines. Oh, really, I prefer your fat friend with the large building and the letter about a journey!”

“You mean that the whole thing is absolute fraud?”

“Can’t say. Hard to prove a negative, or to affirm a universal proposition. But the onus of proof is on the spiritualists, and there are only two cases worth considering, Mrs. Piper, who never did anything very striking, anyhow, and Eusapia Palladino.”

“She was exposed in America some time ago,” said the girl, “but I think it was only in the Hearst newspapers.”

“Hearst is the American Northcliffe,” explained Cyril for the benefit of the Pasha. “And so is Northcliffe,” he added musingly and unblushingly!

“I’m afraid I don’t know who Northcliffe is,” said Akbar.

“Northcliffe was Harmsworth.” Cyril’s voice was caressing, like one soothing a fractious child.

“But who was Harmsworth?” asked the Turk.

The young magician, in a hollow tone: “Nobody.”

“Nobody?” cried Akbar. “I don’t understand!”

Cyril shook his head solemnly and sadly.” “There ain’t no such person.” Akbar Pasha looked at Grey as if he were a ghost. It was a horrible trick of the boy’s. He would invite confidence by a sensible, even possibly a bright, remark; then, in an explanatory way, he would lead his interlocutor, with exquisite skill, through quaking sands of various forms of insanity, only to drop them at the end into the bog of dementia. The dialogue suddenly realized itself as a nightmare. To Cyril it was probably the one genuine pleasure of conversation. He went on, in a brisk professional manner, with a suave persuasive smile; “I am trying to affirm the metaphysical dogma enunciated by Schelling in his philosophy of the relative, emphasizing in particular the lemma that the acceptation of the objective as real involves the conception of the individual as a tabula rasa, thus correlating Occidental theories of the Absolute with the Buddhist doctrine of Sakyaditthi! But confer in rebuttal the Vagasaneyi-Samhita-Upanishad!” He turned brusquely to Lisa with the finality of one who has explained everything to the satisfaction of everybody. “Yes, you do right to speak in defence of Eusapia Palladino; we will investigate her when we reach Naples.”

“You seem determined that I should go to Naples?”

“Nothing to do with me: the master’s orders. He’ll explain, by-and-by. Now let’s prove that this lady, whose locks are bushy and black as a raven’s, has no hairs concealed upon her person!”

“I hate you when you’re cynical and sarcastic.”

“Love me, love my dog!” —

Simon Iff arrested his attention with an imperious gesture.

“Come into the garden, Maud,” said Cyril suddenly; “For the black bat, Night, hath flown.” He took her by the arm.

“Girl,” he said, when they were among the flowers with his long arms about her, and a passionate kiss still flaming through every nerve of both their bodies, “I can’t explain now, but you’re in the most deadly danger from these people. And we simply can’t get rid of them. Trust us, and wait! Till they’re gone, keep away from them: make any excuse you like, ‘if it’s necessary; sham a hysterical attack and bolt if the worst comes to the worst — but don’t let either of them manage to scratch you! It might be your death.”

His evident earnestness did more than convince her. It reassured her on her whole position. She realized that he loved her, that his manner was merely an ornament, an affectation like his shaved head and his strange dress. And her own love for him, freed from all doubt, rushed out as does the sun from behind the crest of some cold pyramid of rock and ice, in mountain lands.

When they returned to the studio, they found that the simple preparations for the séance had been completed. The medium was already seated at the table, with the two men one on either side of her. Before her, between her hands, were some small spheres of celluloid, a couple of pencil-ends, and various other small objects. These had been “examined” with the utmost care, as who should examine the tail of a dog to find out whether he would bite. The history of spiritualism is that of blocking up every crack in a room with putty, and then leaving the door wide open.

It may well be doubted whether even the most tedious writer could describe a séance with success. People generally have an idea that there is something exciting and mysterious about it. In reality, people who boast of their ability to enjoy their third consecutive sleepless night have been known to pray their Maker for sudden death at least two hours before the occurrence of the first “phenomenon.” To be asked to keep the attention unceasingly on things of not the slightest intrinsic interest or importance is absolutely maddening to anyone above the mental level of a limpet.

“Observe how advantageously we are placed,” whispered Cyril to Lisa as they took seats on the divan, toward which the table had been drawn. “For all we know, one or both those men are in collusion with Mottich. I’d stake my life Simple Simon isn’t; but I wouldn’t expect my own twin brother to take my word for it, in a matter like this. Then the curtains have been drawn; why? To help the force along. Yet it is supposed to be kinetic force; and we cannot even imagine how light could interfere with it. Otherwise, it is that the light ‘distresses the medium in her peculiar state.’ Just as the policeman’s bull’s-eye distresses the burglar in his peculiar state! Now look here! These arguments about ‘evidential’ phenomena always resolve themselves into questions of the conditions prevailing at the time; but the jest is that it always turns out that the argument is about conjuring tricks, not about ‘forces’ at all.”

“Won’t she mind us talking?”

“Mediums always encourage the sitters to talk. The moment she sees us getting interested in what we are saying, she takes the opportunity to do the dangerous, delicate part of the trick; then she calls our attention, says we must watch her very carefully to see that the control is good and no cheating possible, because she feels the force coming very strong. Everybody disguises himself as a cat at a mouse hole — which you can keep up, after long training, for about three minutes; then the attention slackens slightly again, and she pulls off the dear old miracle. Listen!”

Simon Iff was engaged in a violent controversy with the Pasha as to the disposition of the six legs at their end of the table. On the accurate solution of this problem, knotty in more than one sense, depended the question as to whether the medium could have kicked the table and made one of the balls jump. If it were proved that it was impossible, the question would properly arise as to whether a ball had jumped, anyhow.

“Isn’t it the dullest thing on earth?” droned Cyril. But, even without what he had said in the garden, she would have known that he was lying. For all his nonchalance, he was watching very acutely; for all his bored, faded voice, she could feel every tone tingling with suppressed excitement. It was certainly not the séance that interested him; but what was it?

The medium began to moan. She complained of cold; she began to twist her body about; she dropped her head suddenly on the table in collapse. Nobody took any particular notice; it was all part of the performance. “Give me your hands!” she said to Lisa, “I feel you are so sympathetic.” As a matter of fact, the girl’s natural warmth of heart had stirred her for a moment. She reached her hands out. But Simon Iff rose from the table and caught them. “You may have a hair or a loose thread,” he said sharply. “Lights up, please, Cyril!”

The old mystic proceeded to make a careful examination of Lisa’s hands. But Cyril watching him, divined an ulterior purpose. “I say,” he drawled, “I’m afraid I was in the garden when you examined the Countess. Oughtn’t I to look at her hands if this is to be evidential?” Simon Iff’s smile showed him that he was on the right track. He took the medium’s hands, and inspected them minutely. Of course he found no hairs; he was not looking for them. “Do you know,” he said, “I think we ought to file off these nails. There’s such a lot of room for hairs and things.”

The Pasha immediately protested. “I don’t think we ought to interfere with a lady’s manicuring,” he said indignantly. “Surely we can trust our eyes!”

Cyril Grey had beaten lynxes in the Open Championship; but he only murmured: “I’m so sorry, Pasha; I can’t trust mine. I’m threatened with tobacco amblyopia.”

The imbecility of the remark, as intended, came near to upset the Turk’s temper.

“I’ve always agreed with Berkeley,” he went on, completely changing the plane of the conversation, while maintaining its original subject, “that our eyes bear no witness to anything external. I am afraid I’m only wasting your time, because I don’t believe anything I see, in any case.”

The Turk was intensely irritated at the magician’s insolence. Whenever Cyril was among strangers, or in any danger, he invariably donned the bomb-proof armour of British aristocracy. He had been on the “Titanic”; a second and a half before she took the last plunge, he had turned to his neighbour, and asked casually, “Do you think there is any danger?”

Half an hour later he had been dragged into a boat, and, on recovering consciousness, took occasion to remark that the last time he had been spilt out of a boat was in Byron’s Pool — “above Cambridge, England, you know” — and proceeded to relate the entire story of his adventure. He passed from one story to another, quite indifferent to the tumult on the boat, and ended by transporting the minds of the others far from the ice of the Atlantic to the sunny joys of the May Week at Cambridge. He had got everybody worked up as to what would happen after “First shot just before Ditton, and missed by half a blade; Jesus washed us off, and went away like the devil! Third were coming up like steam, with Hall behind them, and old T. J. cursing them to blazes from his gee; it was L for leather all up the Long Reach; then, thank goodness, Hall bumped Third just under the Railway Bridge: Cox yelled, and there was Jesus —” But they never heard what happened to the first boat of that excellent college, for Grey suddenly fainted, and they found that he was bleeding slowly to death from a deep wound over the heart.