Mrs. Morrel's Last Séance

I HAD ATTENDED ALL the séances of Mrs. Joaquine Morrel during the two previous winters; and of all the mediums I have sat with, in the States or in Europe, she was the best. Sometimes, of course, she was not in the right mood or condition, or whatever it is; and the phenomena were trivial; sometimes we got mere trickery, and that poorly done. Like most other mediums, public or even private, if real phenomena did not come, Mrs. Morrel would do her best to produce imitations. Sometimes she would quite deliberately use trickery rather than endure the exhaustion and nausea which always followed the genuine exercise of her powers.

But often at her séances I had seen phenomena which I did not believe to have been produced by trickery. I did not profess to be able to find any explanation of them; and I was profoundly sceptical about their having anything to do with the spirits of the dead. I inclined to the theory that they were produced by the obscure and mysterious action of the subconscious, or, if you prefer it, the subliminal self. But whatever their cause, I saw phenomena which I accounted genuine; and, as I say, after these Mrs. Morrel was in a state of utter prostration. She seemed not only to have lost vital force, but actually to have lost blood, so weak and pale and shrunken was she.

I came to the séance on the fourth of last December with no great expectations: for it was a mere chance whether the phenomena would be interesting, or more or less trickery. Besides, the night was very cold, and the weather had been abominable; and that was against Mrs. Morrel’s being in a favourable condition for the best exercise of her powers. But I had not been in the room with her three minutes before I was sure that she was in uncommonly good spirits; and I began to expect a good sitting.

I was the first to arrive; and we chatted for a few minutes about what she had been doing since the last séance I had attended, and about the members of the circle which was to sit that night. I became aware that one of the reasons of her good spirits was that she was wearing a new dress, a black, watered silk. I complimented her on it; and she made me feel the material, what a good, thick, serviceable silk it was. She was plainly so proud of it that I again complimented her on her taste, and congratulated her on having got so exactly what she wanted and such an excellent fit. Indeed, the dress suited her very well, for she was a dark, almost swarthy, black-haired, biggish woman, and stout, weighing over eleven stone. Her rather heavy face lighted up and grew quite animated at my compliments.

Then the other members of the circle began to arrive, singly or two at a time. There was Eric Magnus, who was even more sceptical than I, though for the last year he had ceased to deny, in anything like his old tone of conviction, that we did sometimes get genuine, inexplicable phenomena at Mrs. Morrel’s séances. There were Harold Beveridge and Walters, the Professor of Mathematics, both of them very careful and shrewd observers of psychical phenomena; and there were Dr. and Mrs. Paterson, Mrs. Grant, Admiral Norton, and a man of the name of Thompson of whom I knew very little, since he had only lately attended the séances. These five were of the credulous type which sees, or makes itself see, anything, and were of very little account in matters psychical.

Of course, the circle was rather too large. I have always seen the best phenomena when the circle has been composed of three men and two women.

Last of all came two strangers, who, I gathered, had never sat with Mrs. Morrel, or with anyone else—a Mr. and Mrs. Longridge. Longridge was a man of about forty-five, of a short, square, stout figure, clean-shaven, with a heavy, masterful jaw, thin lips, and keen black eyes, deep-set under projecting brows. He looked a man of uncommon force of character; and I hoped that Mrs. Morrel would keep off trickery, for he was the very man, if he detected it, to make a row. I fancied that I had seen his face among a set of portraits of captains of industry in a magazine.

His wife was a very pretty, even beautiful, woman of about twenty-eight, with large, dark-brown eyes and dark-brown hair. Her cheeks were pale and she looked fragile; she gave me the impression of having been broken down by some great trouble. It was plain that she was strung up to the highest pitch; her eyes were restless and excited, and her lips kept twitching. Longridge looked rather bored.

Mrs. Morrel welcomed them with great deference, and Mrs. Longridge came into the room wearing a cloak of sables over her black evening gown. All the members of the circle, except Professor Walters, are rich people, but not to the point of being able to pay two thousand pounds for a sable cloak. I took it that Longridge was a millionaire. When his wife found that the room was quite warm, she gave him the cloak, and he laid it on the little writing-table, against the wall, by the door.

We were all assembled by a quarter to nine; and I explained to the Longridges the conditions of the séance, especially begging them on no account, whatever happened, to break the circle by loosing the hand of the person on either side of them. Then we settled down on our chairs in a half-circle before the cabinet, which was formed by a curtain hung on a rod across a corner of the room. The curtain was drawn back and it was quite plain that but for Mrs. Morrel’s chair the cabinet was empty.

Mrs. Morrel went into it and drew the curtain. Magnus turned out two of the gas-jets of the chandelier, and left the third burning about three-quarters of an inch. It gave less light than a candle would have done.

We joined hands, and Mrs. Grant went to the piano and began to play softly. We talked quietly. I had placed myself between Mr. and Mrs. Longridge. Magnus sat on the other side of Longridge. I realised even more clearly that Mrs. Longridge was strung up to a pitch of extraordinary tenseness. She answered my occasional remarks to her in strained tones; and her hand was rigid, and so cold that it kept mine chilled. Two or three times I begged her to let herself relax, but it was no use.

Every now and then I felt her quiver. Longridge was relaxed enough; he was leaning back in his chair, his hand was warm and limp in mine, and two or three times I heard him sigh impatiently. It was plain that he had only come to please his wife, and expected nothing.

We sang the hymn “Lead, Kindly Light,” and then we went on talking. It was about half an hour after we had sat down that I heard in the cabinet the sound of scratching which always preceded Mrs. Morrel’s going into a trance.

The talk died down in a momentary hush; Mrs. Grant left the piano and sat down on her chair at the end of the half-circle nearest the piano; and Mrs. Longridge said, in a shaky whisper:

“Is it going to begin?”

“Very soon,” I said, and I felt that she was quivering, or, to be exact, trembling violently; and after that she was trembling most of the time.

The first phenomenon was a ball of light. It began in a faint luminousness about three feet from the floor in front of the curtain of the cabinet, and grew stronger and stronger till it was a ball of greenish, phosphorescent light, some six inches in diameter, and about the strength of the light given out by those marine animalculae which are called sea-stars; not, that is, as bright as the light of a glow-worm. Longridge sat upright in his chair.

The ball of light disappeared suddenly, and from beyond the end of the half-circle a voice began to speak, the voice of Thomas. We were familiar with it; sometimes he would materialise and move about the room, an odd, dwarfish figure; sometimes we only heard his voice. Mrs. Longridge was still, no longer trembling, but breathing quickly.

I knew that we were going to have an interesting sitting. But it seemed to me that the atmosphere was different from that of any other sitting at which I had been present. There was a sense of strain in it, rather oppressive and unnerving. I thought Mrs. Longridge’s emotion had infected me.

Two or three lights floated across the room and faded; as one of them passed it, I caught a glimpse of Thomas’s rather impish face—only his face.

He talked for a while, the usual aimless, trivial, and rather tiresome talk, chiefly to Admiral Norton, who wanted to know what would be the upshot of a naval scandal which was agitating the public mind. Thomas’s views on it were those of a schoolboy of fourteen.

Then he said: “Sister Sylvia is coming.”

There came from the cabinet the figure of a nun, a familiar figure at Mrs. Morrel’s séances. She went by the name of Sister Sylvia. She talked to one and another of us. There was very little more to her talk than to that of Thomas. Mrs. Longridge was panting softly, and holding my hand tighter; Longridge, too, had tightened his grip, and was leaning forward.

There was a breath of cold air (a very common phenomenon at séances), then Sister Sylvia said: “There’s a little girl here. She wants——”

I heard Mrs. Longridge gasp, and without finishing her sentence, Sister Sylvia went back into the cabinet with quite unusual swiftness. It was almost, if one might say so, as if she had been sucked back into it.

Another light floated across the room and faded. Then the rings of the curtain grated softly along the rod, and there came out of the cabinet the figure of a child, a little girl. Then I saw that the curtain was half-drawn, a thing which had never happened at one of Mrs. Morrel’s séances before, and I could see dimly the figure of Mrs. Morrel on her chair in the cabinet.

The child came straight to Mrs. Longridge. Mrs. Longridge sank back in her chair, gasping painfully, and her nerveless hand would have slipped from mine had I not held it firmly.

The child stood before her, and said in a faint, shrill voice: “Oh, Mummy!”

Mrs. Longridge burst out sobbing, tried vainly to tear her hand from mine, and cried wildly: “Oh, Maisie! Maisie!”

I heard Mrs. Morrel shuffle in the cabinet. Then suddenly Longridge’s hand gripped mine with a vicelike, crushing grip. He said hoarsely: “Don’t go back, Maisie! Stay with us—try to stay with us—hard!” Then he hissed: “Will her to stay, Grace! Hold her! Will her to stay!”

He crouched forward, and I saw the glimmer of his eyes staring at the dim figure of Mrs. Morrel.

Mrs. Longridge and the child were murmuring to one another in broken, staccato voices, just repeating one another’s names. When Longridge had spoken, Mrs. Longridge was silent. She seemed to stiffen, and her breathing was slower, coming in long-drawn gasps; plainly she was concentrating herself in the effort of will.

Longridge was crushing my hand; I thought that the bones would go. The pain was confusing.I thought that the child had her arms round Mrs. Longridge’s neck.

There were some seconds, perhaps fifteen, of tense stillness. It seemed to me that the air of the room grew more and more oppressive with the sense of a straining, silent struggle, but that feeling might have been caused by the pain of Longridge’s grip. Then I felt rather than saw that the child was being drawn back to the cabinet. Longridge crouched forward in his intense effort, never stirred, never loosened his crushing grip.

Mrs. Grant burst out crying; Magnus cried in a high-pitched, squeaky whisper: “Keep still! Keep still! Don’t break the circle!” I heard the Admiral rap out an oath; then I saw that Mrs. Morrel was swaying on her chair.

The child seemed to be about two feet from Mrs. Longridge, bent forward as though her arms were round her neck and she was holding on to it.

Then Mrs. Morrel rose from her chair, swaying, clutching at the air with twisting arms; then she pitched forward on her face, half in the cabinet and half out of it.

As she came to the ground the child cried in quite another voice, a deeper, louder voice:

“I can’t get back!”

We were all on our feet at once.

Longridge cried: “Come along! Come along!” thrust me aside, and picked up the child.

Magnus sprang to the gas, but in his excitement, instead of turning it up, he turned it off, and we were in pitch darkness. The door opened; a sheet of light from the hall fell into the room, and in it I saw Longridge’s face, very white and glistening with sweat. He was carrying the child in his arms, wrapped in his wife’s sable cloak. I only caught a glimpse of them as he hurried out of the room. His wife followed him quickly, and slammed the door after her.

I made for the door. I ran into a chair; then I ran into Professor Walters. Just as my hand touched the wall I heard the house door bang.

The Admiral struck a match. I opened the door, ran down the hall, and opened the house door. A big, closed motor-car was gliding swiftly down the street.

I came quickly back to the room. The gas had been lighted, and everyone was talking at once, wildly. I hurried to Mrs. Morrel, who still lay where she had fallen, and raised her. To my amazement it was no more than if I were lifting a child of twelve. As I laid her on the sofa my sleeve-link caught in her dress. It tore a patch out of that strong new silk as if it had been tissue-paper. The bodice had fitted like a glove; it hung about her shrunken bust in great wrinkles. Her face was bloodless and shrunken; her black hair and eyebrows were a curious, dead, lustreless white; and, oddest of all, the iris, and even the black pupils of her eyes, had gone grey, as if the colour had been bleached out of them.

Mrs. Grant had a bottle of strong smelling-salts, the Admiral got some brandy from the servant, and we tried our best to revive her. Our efforts were useless. She was dead.

We sent for a doctor. He could do nothing. He talked about heart-failure, and seemed to have it firmly in his mind that Mrs. Morrel was an albino.

Eric Magnus and I were the last to leave, and we came away together.

As we turned up the street he said:

“It was a good thing that I noticed the draught when the door of the room was opened to let the child slip in.”

“I noticed a breath of cold air; in fact, I noticed several during the evening,” I said. “But if the door was opened, why didn’t the light from the hall lamp fall into the room? It was burning brightly.”

“Oh, it was turned down, and then up again,” he said confidently.

“It might have been,” said I; and for the next twenty yards he said nothing.

Then he broke out:

“It was a splendid fake—splendid! I never saw a better! What accomplices! It was first-rate acting—absolutely first-rate!”

“Yes; acting that turned the lady’s hands icy.And accomplices? An accomplice of Mrs. Morrel’s in a two-thousand-pound sable cloak! That is a bit hard to swallow,” I said.

“Hired, my dear fellow—hired,” he said confidently.

“It might be,” I said. “A hired cloak and a form of heart disease which turns a swarthy woman into an albino.”

“Oh, yes, that was odd; but I have no doubt that it sometimes acts like that.”

“Haven’t you?” I said.

We separated at the end of the street, and I was glad to be rid of him. I wanted to think it out quietly. I could not; my mind was in a whirl, and it would not clear.

The next day I set about trying to find out something about the Longridges. I was quite unsuccessful; I could not find a trace of them. They were unknown in spiritist circles by name; no medium of my acquaintance recognised either of them from my description. Also, I could find no one of the name of Longridge among our captains of industry. I was forced to the conclusion that, like so many other people, they had come to the séance under false names. So many people are ashamed of their interest in spiritism.