Читать книгу Verena in the Midst - E. V. Lucas - Страница 18

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Dearest Aunt Verena,—I hope you are really better, or—if that is too much to hope yet—that you are going on all right. As soon as the Doctor says so, I am coming to peep at you.

We are living in a state of great excitement because Mother’s old friend Mrs. Blundry is here for a few days and she talks of nothing but spiritualism. You know she lost her son Savile in the War—or, to use her own word, she “gave” him—and every night she gets out the paraphernalia of communication and has conversations with him. I used to think of death with terror—and indeed I do now, of my own—but the late Savile Blundry is transforming us all into frivolous heartless creatures! From his mother’s report of what he says, the grave has taught him nothing, and most of his remarks are only to the effect that it’s “jolly decent over there.”

Father is furious about it all and says that the duty of the dead is to be dead: but of course he can’t be brutal like that to Mrs. Blundry. The fact, however, remains that she sees far more of her Savile now than she ever did when he was alive. Of course, if talking to the boy, or thinking she does so, brings any comfort, one should be glad of it—and there seem to be lots of people getting such comfort, or groping after such comfort, all over the world—but really, dead people do seem to have so little to say. When it comes to that, so do live people.

We have already had one real séance here, when father was out, and wonderful results were said to be obtained, but to my naughty sceptical mind they weren’t of any interest whatever. After a number of false starts and accusations of undue control, and so forth, we got a name spelt out which with a little lenience could be translated into Cyrus Bowditch-Kemp by one of the women present, who, when she was a girl, had known a man of that name who died in Rangoon twenty years ago. This was, of course, frightfully thrilling. Then he was asked if he had a message for any member of the company and he said “Yes” and this was the message: “Wind in the daffodils”; and the woman nearly fainted when she remembered that one spring afternoon when Bowditch-Kemp was calling, there was a gale which swayed the daffodils at the edge of the lawn. That was all, but it was considered to be marvellous and to prove that Mr. Bowditch-Kemp was now the woman’s “watcher,” as they are called.

I hope you are not shocked: but you said you wanted to know all that we were doing. People take this new spiritualism so differently; and of course, as I said, if it is a comfort one is only too glad, but it can be a kind of drug too, and there is no doubt that it has made things very easy for too many charlatans.—Your loving

Hazel