CHAPTER XV
AN INTERLUDE OF PEACE
Hindhead—“A Duet”—A Haunted House—A Curious Society—Preternatural Powers—The Little Doctor—The Shadow of Africa.
When we returned to England I found that the house in which we hoped that the cure would be completed was not yet ready. It was a considerable mansion planned upon a large scale, so that it was not surprising that it had taken some time to build. We were compelled to take a furnished house at Haslemere until the early months of 1897, when we moved up to Moorlands, a boarding house on Hindhead close to the site of my building. There we spent some happy and busy months until the house was ready in the summer. I had taken up riding, and though I was never a great horseman I was able from that time onwards to get a good deal of health and pleasure out of it, for in that woody, healthy country there are beautiful rides in every direction, and the hunting, in which I joined, was at least picturesque. About June we moved into the new house, which I called Undershaw—a new word, I think, and yet one which described it exactly in good Anglo-Saxon, since it stood under a hanging grove of trees.
I have said little, during these years spent in the quest of health, concerning my literary production. The chief book which I had written since “The Refugees” was a study of the Regency with its bucks and prizefighters. I had always a weakness for the old fighting men and for the lore of the prize-ring, and I indulged it in this novel. At the time boxing had not gained the popular vogue which I have been told that this very book first initiated, and I can never forget the surprise of Sir George Newnes when he found out what the new serial was about. “Why that subject of all subjects upon earth?” he cried. However, I think that the readers of “The Strand” found that I had not chosen badly, and the book is one which has held a permanent place as a picture of those wild old days. I wrote a considerable number of short tales during those years, and finally in 1898 a domestic study, “A Duet,” which was an attempt at quite a different form of literature—a picture in still life, as it were. It was partly imaginative and partly founded upon early experiences of my own and of friends. It led, I remember, to a public bickering with a man who has done good work as a critic, Dr. Robertson Nicoll. He took exception to some passage in the book, which he had every right to do. But he wrote at that time for six or seven papers, under different names, so that it appeared as if a number of critics were all condemning me when it was really only one. I thought I had a grievance, and said so with such vehemence that he stated that he did not know whether to answer me in print or in the law courts. However, it all blew over and we became very good friends. Another book of those days was “Uncle Bernac,” which I never felt to be satisfactory, though I venture to claim that the two chapters which portray Napoleon give a clearer picture of him than many a long book has done, which is natural enough, since they are themselves the quintessence of a score of books.
So much for my work. I had everything in those few years to make a man contented, save only the constant illness of my partner. And yet my soul was often troubled within me. I felt that I was born for something else, and yet I was not clear what that something might be. My mind felt out continually into the various religions of the world. I could no more get into the old ones, as commonly received, than a man could get into his boy’s suit. I still argued on materialist lines. I subscribed to the Rationalist Association and read all their literature carefully, but it was entirely destructive and one cannot permanently live on that alone. Besides, I was sure enough of psychic phenomena to be aware that there was a range of experience there which was entirely beyond any rational explanation, and that therefore a system which ignored a great body of facts, and was incompatible with them, was necessarily an imperfect system. On the other hand, convinced as I was of these abnormal happenings, and that intelligence, high or low, lay behind them, I by no means understood their bearing. I still confused the knocking at the door with the friend outside, or the ringing of the bell with the telephone message. Sometimes I had the peace of despair, when one felt that one could never possibly arrive at any conclusions save negative ones, and then again some fresh impulse of the soul would start one upon a new quest. In every direction, I reached out, but never yet with any absolute satisfaction. I should have been relieved from all my troubles could I have given heartfelt adhesion to any form of orthodoxy—but my reason always barred the way.
During all the Egyptian and other periods of our exile I had never ceased to take the psychic subject very seriously, to read eagerly all that I could get, and from time to time to organize séances which gave indifferent but not entirely negative results, though we had no particular medium to help us. The philosophy of the subject began slowly to unfold, and it was gradually made more feasible, not only that life carried on, enclosed in some more tenuous envelope, but that the conditions which it encountered in the beyond were not unlike those which it had known here. So far I had got along the road, but the overwhelming and vital importance of it all had not yet been borne in upon me.
Now and then I had a psychic experience somewhat outside the general run of such events. One of these occurred when I was at Norwood in 1892 or 1893. I was asked by the Society of Psychic Research whether I would join a small committee to sit in and report upon a haunted house at Charmouth in Dorchester. I went down accordingly together with a Dr. Scott and Mr. Podmore, a man whose name was associated with such investigations. I remember that it took us the whole railway journey from Paddington to read up the evidence as to the senseless noises which had made life unendurable for the occupants, who were tied by a lease and could not get away. We sat up there two nights. On the first nothing occurred. On the second Dr. Scott left us and I sat up with Mr. Podmore. We had, of course, taken every precaution to checkmate fraud, putting worsted threads across the stairs, and so on.
In the middle of the night a fearsome uproar broke out. It was like some one belabouring a resounding table with a heavy cudgel. It was not an accidental creaking of wood, or anything of that sort, but a deafening row. We had all doors open, so we rushed at once into the kitchen, from which the sound had surely come. There was nothing there—doors were all locked, windows barred, and threads unbroken. Podmore took away the light and pretended that we had both returned to our sitting-room, going off with the young master of the house, while I waited in the dark in the hope of a return of the disturbance. None came—or ever did come. What occasioned it we never knew. It was of the same character as all the other disturbances we had read about, but shorter in time. But there was a sequel to the story. Some years later the house was burned down, which may or may not have a bearing upon the sprite which seemed to haunt it, but a more suggestive thing is that the skeleton of a child about ten years old was dug up in the garden. This I give on the authority of a relation of the family who were so plagued. The suggestion was that the child had been done to death there long ago, and that the subsequent phenomena of which we had one small sample were in some way a sequence to this tragedy. There is a theory that a young life cut short in sudden and unnatural fashion may leave, as it were, a store of unused vitality which may be put to strange uses. The unknown and the marvellous press upon us from all sides. They loom above us and around us in undefined and fluctuating shapes, some dark, some shimmering, but all warning us of the limitations of what we call matter, and of the need for spirituality if we are to keep in touch with the true inner facts of life.
I was never asked for a report of this case, but Podmore sent one in, attributing the noises to the young man, though as a fact he was actually sitting with us in the parlour when the tumult broke out. A confederate was possible, though we had taken every step to bar it, but the explanation given was absolutely impossible. I learned from this, what I have often confirmed since, that while we should be most critical of all psychic assertions, if we are to get at the truth, we should be equally critical of all negatives and especially of so-called “exposures” in this subject. Again and again I have probed them and found them to depend upon prejudice or upon an imperfect acquaintance with psychic law.
This brings me to another curious experience which occurred about this time, probably in 1898. There was a small doctor dwelling near me, small in stature, and also, I fear, in practice, whom I will call Brown. He was a student of the occult, and my curiosity was aroused by learning that he had one room in his house which no one entered except himself, as it was reserved for mystic and philosophic purposes. Finding that I was interested in such subjects, Dr. Brown suggested one day that I should join a secret society of esoteric students. The invitation had been led up to by a good deal of preparatory inquiry. The dialogue between us ran somewhat thus:
“What shall I get from it?”
“In time, you will get powers.”
“What sort of powers?”
“They are powers which people would call supernatural. They are perfectly natural, but they are got by knowledge of deeper forces of nature.”
“If they are good, why should not every one know them?”
“They would be capable of great abuse in the wrong hands.”
“How can you prevent their getting into wrong hands?”
“By carefully examining our initiates.”
“Should I be examined?”
“Certainly.”
“By whom?”
“The people would be in London.”
“Should I have to present myself?”
“No, no, they would do it without your knowledge.”
“And after that?”
“You would then have to study.”
“Study what?”
“You would have to learn by heart a considerable mass of material. That would be the first thing.”
“If this material is in print, why does it not become public property?”
“It is not in print. It is in manuscript. Each manuscript is carefully numbered and trusted to the honour of a passed initiate. We have never had a case of one going wrong.”
“Well,” said I, “it is very interesting and you can go ahead with the next step, whatever it may be.”
Some little time later—it may have been a week—I awoke in the very early morning with a most extraordinary sensation. It was not a nightmare or any prank of a dream. It was quite different from that, for it persisted after I was wide awake. I can only describe it by saying that I was tingling all over. It was not painful, but it was queer and disagreeable, as a mild electric shock would be. I thought at once of the little doctor.
In a few days I had a visit from him. “You have been examined and you have passed,” said he with a smile. “Now you must say definitely whether you will go on with it. You can’t take it up and drop it. It is serious, and you must leave it alone or go forward with a whole heart.”
It began to dawn upon me that it really was serious, so serious that there seemed no possible space for it in my very crowded and pre-occupied life. I said as much, and he took it in very good part. “Very well,” said he, “we won’t talk of it any more unless you change your mind.”
There was a sequel to the story. A month or two later, on a pouring wet day, the little doctor called, bringing with him another medical man whose name was familiar to me in connection with exploration and tropical service. They sat together beside my study fire and talked. One could not but observe that the famous and much-travelled man was very deferential to the little country surgeon, who was the younger of the two.
“He is one of my initiates,” said the latter to me. “You know,” he continued, turning to his companion, “Doyle nearly joined us once.” The other looked at me with great interest and then at once plunged into a conversation with his mentor as to the wonders he had seen and, as I understood, actually done. I listened amazed. It sounded like the talk of two lunatics. One phrase stuck in my memory.
“When first you took me up with you,” said he, “and we were hovering over the town I used to live in, in Central Africa, I was able for the first time to see the islands out in the lake. I always knew they were there, but they were too far off to be seen from the shore. Was it not extraordinary that I should first see them when I was living in England?”
“Yes,” said Brown, smoking his pipe and staring into the fire. “We had some fun in those days. Do you remember how you laughed when we made the little steamboat and it ran along the upper edge of the clouds?”
There were other remarks as wild. “A conspiracy to impress a simpleton,” says the sceptic. Well, we can leave it at that if the sceptic so wills, but I remain under the impression that I brushed against something strange, and something which I am not sorry that I avoided. It was not Spiritualism and it was not Theosophy, but rather the acquisition of powers latent in the human organization, after the alleged fashion of the old gnostics or of some modern fakirs in India, though some doubtless would spell fakirs with an “e.” One thing I am very sure of, and that is that morals and ethics have to keep pace with knowledge, or all is lost. The Maori cannibals had psychic knowledge and power, but were man-eaters none the less. Christian ethics can never lose its place whatever expansion our psychic faculties may enjoy. But Christian theology can and will.
To return to the little doctor, I came across him again, as psychic as ever, in Portland, Oregon, in 1923. From what I learned I should judge that the powers of the Society to which he belonged included that of loosening their own etheric bodies, in summoning the etheric bodies of others (mine, for example) and in making thought images (the steamboat) in the way that we are assured is possible by will-power. But their line of philosophy or development is beyond me. I believe they represent a branch of the Rosicrucians.
All seemed placid at this time. My wife was holding her own in winter as well as in summer. The two children, Mary and Kingsley, were passing through the various sweet phases of human development, and brought great happiness into our lives. The country was lovely. My life was filled with alternate work and sport. As with me so with the nation. They were years of prosperity and success. But the shadow of South Africa was falling upon England, and before it passed my personal fortunes, as well as so many more, were destined to be involved in it. I had a deep respect for the Boers and some fear of their skill at arms, their inaccessible situation, and their sturdy Teutonic tenacity. I foresaw that they would be a most dangerous enemy, and I watched with horror the drift of events which from the time of the ill-judged Jameson Raid never ceased to lead to open war. It was almost a relief when at last it came and we could clearly see the magnitude of our task. And yet few people understood it at the time. On the very eve of war I took the chair at a dinner to Lord Wolseley at the Authors’ Club and he declared that we could send two divisions to Africa. The papers next day were all much exercised as to whether such a force was either possible to collect or necessary to send. What would they have thought had they been told that a quarter of a million men, a large proportion of them cavalry, would be needed before victory could be won. The early Boer victories surprised no one who knew something of South African history, and they made it clear to every man in England that it was not a wine glass but a rifle which one must grasp if the health of the Empire was to be honoured.