"Dreamer of dreams! no taunt is in our sadness,What e'er our fears our hearts are with your cause,God's mills grind slow; and thoughtless haste were madness,To gain Heaven's ends we dare not break Heaven's laws."
"Dreamer of dreams! no taunt is in our sadness,What e'er our fears our hearts are with your cause,God's mills grind slow; and thoughtless haste were madness,To gain Heaven's ends we dare not break Heaven's laws."
I must have sat thinking for quite ten minutes when my attention was suddenly attracted by a sound. The sound of paper leaves being rustled. The room was so dead still that the faintest sound would have called my attention, but this sound was by no means faint. I turned my head and looked at the book I had been reading, because, from it, unmistakably the noise proceeded.
I beheld a most enthralling phenomenon. Unseen hands were turning over the pages.
A thrill of intense excitement ran through me, and I stared at the book in breathless interest. The hands seemed to be searching for some particular passage. The number of the page upon which the passage was printed was not, apparently, known to the searcher. I will try to describe what actually happened.
Several leaves of the book were turned over rather rapidly, each leaf making the usual sound which accompanies such an ordinary physical action. Then, as if fearing that the passage required had been overlooked or passed by, several leaves were turned back again.
This manifestation continued for at least ten minutes, and I could see nothing but the pages of the book being turned quite methodically, as by a human hand.
At moments there was rather a long pause in the search, and at the first pause I thought the demonstration might be over, but once again the invisible entity resumed the search, and I found myself saying, "He found something there that interested him. That is why he stopped." For no reason I can give I felt certain my visitor was a male spirit.
On the second pause in the search occurring I had no doubt that again he had found something that interested him. The whole manifestation was very leisurely and wonderfully human. As I sat watching the book being manipulated by unseen fingers, every smallest action suggested design. One could not doubt as to what was taking place. At length there came a pause longer than usual. The book lay flat on its back wide open. There was now no quiver of the leaves. The invisible entity had found what he wanted and gone.
I curbed my curiosity for five minutes more, thenfeeling convinced that I was again alone I stretched out my hand, took the book and, rising, carried it close to the window.
There was still enough light to read by, and the leaves were open at pages 172-173.
I had only read as far as page 137.
I scanned them eagerly, and at once discovered that a mark had been made on the margin of page 172. A long cross had been placed against a paragraph. The mark was such as might have been made by a sharp finger-nail. The words marked were—
"I want to make the distinct assertion that a really existing thing never perishes, but only changes its form."
To-day the mark is as clearly visible on the page as on the day it was made. I can form no conjecture as to who the entity was, but he certainly knew the contents of the book. No one watching the search could doubt that, or that he was desirous of impressing upon the readers of the book a certain fact stated therein, which must have previously attracted his attention.
In the year 1900 we took a house for the winter months in the West End of London.
It was a small house though joined on either side by great mansions, and once upon a time it had actually been a farmhouse standing amid smiling fields.
It retained many relics of its ancient origin in fine oak paneling and quaint nooks and corners, and had been for many of its latter years the town residence of a man whose type had practically died out, the perfect type of our old English aristocracy.
The bedroom I occupied was exceedingly comfortable and warm. The bed, placed against the wall,was exactly opposite to the fireplace, so that lying on my right side I looked straight at the fire and could see the whole room.
I was constantly on the alert, as I knew how full of history such a house must be, but for several weeks I neither saw nor heard anything in the least unusual.
One night, quite unexpectedly, a change occurred. I no longer had the room to myself. A stranger occupied it with me.
It was a cold, snowy night, and I was lying in bed facing the fire and courting sleep, when I heard a sudden noise which was totally different to the sounds made by the dying fire. Take a large sheet of stiff writing paper in your hand and crush it up between your fingers and you will hear the sound I heard. Quite a loud and distinct noise if you happen to be in a very quiet room, at an hour when all the household has retired to bed.
Naturally, I instantly opened my eyes and looked out into the room, which was lit brightly enough by the fire to make all the objects it contained quite distinct.
An armchair was drawn up close to the fire; half an hour before I had been seated in it warming my toes before getting into bed; now it was again filled.
In it sat a man turned sideways towards me. He was lying back with his legs stretched straight out in front of him towards the fire. One of his arms hung over the arm of the chair, and in his clenched hand was a large piece of paper or parchment.
His finely cut profile was clearly outlined, he was clean shaven, and he stared into the fire, his chin sunk in a high black stock.
His hair was powdered and tied behind by a largeblack bow, and he wore bright blue cloth knee breeches, white stockings, silver buckled shoes, and many gold buttons on his blue coat. I did not take in all those details at once; I had ample leisure to do so later. For, I suppose, a full two minutes, I stared very hard at him, and lay very still, knowing full well I was looking at a ghost. Then very cautiously I drew the bedclothes over my head, and shut out the startling vision. I was invaded by wild panic.
I have never been one of those timid women who are frightened by their own shadows. I require to be face to face with a tangible danger before I put faith in its existence, yet, I confess that at that moment I knew what actual fear meant. My heart beat thickly, then seemed to stop, and I was instantly bathed in cold perspiration. I knew that the servants were all in bed two flights of stairs below me, and my husband was out of London, so no calling for help was any use. I therefore forced a sort of spurious desperate courage, and began to be angry with myself for being thus afraid when no cause for fear existed. I treated myself to a scornful lecture. "You who profess to know all about ghosts, you who have actually seen several ghosts, you coward to quail before this one! Don't you know perfectly well that he won't hurt you, that he has a perfect right to sit in that chair, and that it is your duty to speak to him should he show any desire for conversation?"
"I am so terribly alone," pleaded my other self in feeble self-defense.
"Well, what of it? If the whole household was in the room what could they do? You are not a child. Uncover your head and look the specter boldly in the face."
The stillness and hush of deep night, at the hour when sleepers slumber soundest, was upon the house. The traffic of London was muffled in a heavy fall of snow. I could hear nothing but the feeble crackling of the expiring fire in the grate, but gradually I rallied my courage and faculties and peeped stealthily out.
There sat that dark form between me and the fire; there he lay in an attitude of moody carelessness, watching the cooling embers as they faded from scarlet to pink, from pink to yellow, and then fell tinkling into heaps of white ashes. No statue was ever stiller. He did not move in the least, but sat more like an effigy of a man carved out of stone than a creature of flesh and blood.
I closed my eyes and re-opened them, to test the fact whether I was awake or asleep and dreaming. No, I was broad wake and the room was still fairly well lit, and there sat the phantom before the fire, the proud, well-set head with its powdered curls distinctly visible in the red glow of the firelight. I should think an hour must have passed thus, whilst I gazed at the figure before me, taking in every detail. There was no indication that he knew or cared for my presence. The figure sat like a stone.
I came to the conclusion that the phantom was about thirty years of age, and a sailor who had lived in the days of Nelson, judging by his clothes and the pictures I had seen. I noticed particularly his hand clenched on the paper. A white hand, with strong cruel-looking fingers. There is so much character in hands. The face may be drilled into a mere mask, but hands tell tales of their owners. I could imagine the hand that had crushed the paper closing murderouslyon the throat of an adversary, or gripped hard on the hilt of a dagger.
There were moments when the awful inertia of the figure began to play havoc with my nerves, when I would have given anything to make that impassive form move from out its dreary attitude of sullen brooding; anything to cause the profile of the face, with all its gloom and pride, to turn and front me, so that I might know the worst. But the figure never turned, never stirred, but sat with stately head bowed under a weight of thought.
Now and again a little flame would spurt up and glitter on his shoe buckles, his brass buttons, but the fire was dying now, and gradually the figure became more and more indistinct.
Then I slept. I had been feeling drowsy for some time, and fought against it. I had violently resisted sleep, feeling a great repugnance to losing consciousness whilst the specter still sat there, but the blank force of sleep at length overpowered me. When I awoke the cold gray morning light was stealing feebly in through the window. The chair was empty. The figure was gone.
The next night I went to bed full of courage, but I was left alone. If the sailor returned it was not until after I had gone to sleep.
A week later he came back. One moment the chair was empty, the next moment with one wild heart throb I opened my eyes at the sound of crackling paper, and the chair was filled. There he sat in his brooding sullen attitude and continued so to sit till slumber vanquished me. After that I saw him at constant intervals.
By this time I had entirely rid myself of all fear.I did not even desire to change my room which would have been very inconvenient, and I dreaded alarming the household and being left alone to conduct the domestic duties. But though no longer afraid those constant visits began to get on my nerves, and I consulted a Catholic friend who was always sympathetic to the occult side of life.
She said at once that this spirit should be exorcised and set free from the bondage of earth, and that she had an old friend, a Franciscan monk, who was known to be a powerful exorcist. She offered to arrange the matter, and I gladly accepted her suggestion.
It was on an early spring afternoon that Father Reginald Buckler came to the house. In his white habit, sandaled feet and shorn crown, he looked an incongruous figure in that fashionable locality already beginning its social entertainments in view of the season's approach. He was a charming, courteous old man, who took his mission very seriously. After a few words of explanation we mounted to the bedroom floor.
There were four doors opening on to the little landing, and without asking which of the doors led to the haunted chamber, he turned the handle of the right one and entered. Still he put no question, but at once proceeded with the Service of Exorcism.
Sprinkling the four corners of the room with Holy Water, he bade me kneel down in the middle. Then he raised his Crucifix and offered up prayers for the repose of the earth-bound soul, that he might be loosed and set free.
For five weeks longer we remained in the house, but I never saw the sailor again.
We have been given many wonderful dawns this winter, and I have used them eagerly as a cleansing of the war-weary mind and distracted soul. In such ethereal apparitional dawns one walks with the Eternal, and all temporal things fade away. Those pale silver daybreaks have a rapture of their own, they suggest a fresh creation straight from the looms of God. When the hours of day have drawn on the flaming sunset, that exquisitely serene emotion of virgin tranquillity will have passed away, and the horizon will be lurid and grand beneath a grave frowning sadness gathered from the scenes of earth they have brooded over.
Such dawns beckon imperiously to the pilgrim, to leave the shelter of the roof-tree, and come forth to walk with the immortals whilst the Morning Star, the light-bringer, still shines, a white gold radiance in the heavens, and the distance is still dissolved in veils of pearl and opal.
Such daybreaks always rouse in me the urge for wider thought, for the broad day of the mind. Out of the limitless beyond comes the certain knowledge of a something unimagined, lying just outside human thought. I am sure there is so much not yet imagined, something more than mere existence.
There is a wine of happiness in tranquil daybreak, and an aloofness from life that urges one to seek forthat which is beyond comprehension. The draught exalts the soul, and quickens it with unquenchable fire, until the world falls away, far from one, as day wells out of still darkness. Only at such moments do we reach the true horizon.
Again, there is an amnesty in such dawns, a glory of release from the house of bondage. In the great silences, life, as we know it, is remote, and the immensity is a magic that draws the soul, fusing it in a strange passion, so that whatever fulfillment our existence holds is summed in that hour of solitude.
A pale wash of translucent gold is thrown across land and sea. On the far horizon a ship is set in relief, against a core of crimson flame which heralds the sun. A dove coos softly, and on a bare branch a thrush thrills in waves of sound, seeking in the universal ether to reproduce its divine instinct in other feathered hearts that are attuned to its melody.
Such joys as these are transitory, and never wholly possessed. They pass the enclosures of life, and bring one nearer to the beating heart of truth. The agonizing fear of losing hold on them is, in itself, the cause of their dispersal. It is the same at rare moments of semi-consciousness, when one has actually laid hold of a genuine astral experience—and knows it. Then comes the frantic endeavor to hold on—to pin the moment fast and tight, till the whole vision is absorbed. The soul seems to hold its breath! How often, with bitter disappointment I have rushed reluctantly into full waking consciousness—and only half the story told. Fragmentary though such moments are their potency is such that they endure through time. Thank God, that whilst the wedlock of body and soul still holds undissolved there is scope for such joys. Theyare uncommunicable, and may not be shared with others at will, and they tell the soul that she is not of creation and cannot be contained by law. At such hours she learns the truth, that she passes for a brief span into the limited, from out the limitless whence she came. At such sacramental hours one can pray the prayer of Socrates, offered up by the banks of the Illissus:
"O Beloved God of the forests and flocks and all ye Divinities of this place, grant me to become beautiful in the inner man, and that whatever outward things I have may be at peace with those within. May I deem the wise man rich, and may I have so much wealth, and so much only, as a good man can manage to enjoy.
"Do we need anything else, Phædrus? For myself I have prayed enough."
How many people now recall fragments of former lives! Ask the next man you meet if he has any recollections of former existences, and be sure he will not eye you askance as a fugitive from Bedlam. He may smile and shake his head, and regret to say he isn't psychic, but he won't ask you what on earth you mean. This is how we have progressed towards truth in the last thirty years. The truth of reincarnation is being quietly accepted by the West and is now openly preached from many pulpits. If God is love, who could reconcile with any comprehensive idea of justice and law in the world the lives and experiences of common humanity? How reconcile the births taking place in one single day in their vast diversity, by the hell for the criminal, born, nurtured and killed in crime, who never had a chance, and Heaven for the happilyborn, who need never have a temptation? What is the Divine Law lying behind this seeming hideous injustice? Undoubtedly the continuous evolution of the soul in bodies of matter. Men are looking now to the scheme of organic evolution to provide the field for spiritual evolution. They are finding it in the depths of their own consciousness.
I chanced upon one of those fragments of a past life, those islets in eternity in a strange way. I was paying a visit to a stranger in Cambridgeshire, and whilst awaiting her entry I walked round the room looking at some lovely water-colored sketches that hung upon the walls. When their owner entered, and after a few minutes' conversation, I said, "How beautiful those Sicilian scenes are!"
She looked pleased and answered: "I'm so glad you recognize them. I painted them. When were you last in Sicily?"
I had never at that time been in Sicily. I told her so, but I could not tell a stranger that suddenly there had dawned upon me a keen recollection of the country I had certainly been in, though not in this life. The paintings, of course, dealt with a restricted field, but as I looked at them one by one I saw mentally a wide landscape in which each picture formed but a tiny spot. One I remember was a painting of a wonderfully perfect temple, which occupied the whole space of the picture. As I looked at it I saw wide rolling plains, and a wide expanse of blue sea. This I later recognized in Girgenti.
A month or two afterwards my husband and I went to Sicily for the winter, and, as I had expected, the island was perfectly familiar to me. I knew exactly round which bend of the hill I should find atemple, but Syracuse was really my spiritual home. It was there that I had played out one of my many life dramas, and many incidents returned to me as I wandered over the hills, and gathered maiden-hair ferns in the twilight of the empty tombs.
Once I opened my eyes on Stromboli, one of the Æolian or Lipari Isles. Instantly I felt a passion of love for it, an intuition of spiritual delight which is utterly irreducible to terms. I have looked upon it since, and always with an adoration impossible to paint with pen or pencil. I have for weeks anticipated the moment when I should see it again. It means something to me far beyond what the eye can see, the tongue relate, and it is this something lying betwixt rhapsody and lament which draws me by a tenuous chain of thought right back into the womb of time, where buried memory stirs in its long sleep.
Stromboli, so the ancient poets tell us, was the home of the fiery god, Vulcan. That explains much to me, but it unfolds a secret none may learn.
It was in a flaming dawn that I first saw Stromboli rising from amid the numerous isles surrounding it. From its cone shot a great plume of smoke, like a giant ostrich feather, silver tinted. In its ethereal loveliness it seemed to float in the void, half of earth, half of heaven.
Neither bondage of words, nor the cold scrutiny of reason can impinge upon a scene which draws the soul away upon a celestial pilgrimage. Free and elate, she passes beyond the frontiers of life, and like the echoes of the sea when a shell is held to the ear, she hears the pulse of earth beat far away in unfathomable distance. The marvel of the uncreated consumes her in a trance of unincarnate passion.
Those who have once adventured on such pilgrimages are never quite the same again. They become children of "the Divine unrest." They have experienced a moment in which earth and flesh dissolve, in which law is not, in which creeds and covenants find no place, and the hold upon common life with its moving mirages is blotted out. Time and space are annulled, the æon and the second are one. The soul unswathed, has risen from the tomb where the life urge has laid it, and is aglow with the transcendental fires of eternal being. In after days the soul learns to set barriers against such visitants. One must not look upon the other side of the moon too often, for fear one is drawn away from home and kindred. The time is not yet, but it will surely come.
One other curious happening I must relate. Years ago, one autumn when I was in the far north there came a magnificent visitation of falling stars and many aerolites dropped to earth. The display was predicted, and I was on the lookout. It came in a rain of gold and seemingly from all points of the compass. For hours I watched a sight far more marvelous than anything I had anticipated.
When at last I reluctantly went to bed I had a strange dream or, rather, astral experience. I was a Hungarian gipsy, the head or queen of an enormous clan. I heard wild Hungarian music, and saw enormous crowds of my people gathered round me. They were very savage and picturesque, and a ceremony was proceeding.
On the ground, and in the center of a great ring of people, stood a large bowl filled with blood. I stood in front of it and watched the swearing in of new adherents to my clan, by means of the "bloodcovenant." The blood that filled the bowl had been drawn from the veins of my people, and the new adherents were each required to drink from it and swear their allegiance. Only one thing troubled me all through what seemed a long ceremony. My feet caused me pain, and I was aware that they were bare, as were the feet of all my people.
So vivid was the dream that I could visualize my whole life as I lived it on the plains of Hungary, and the scenery surrounding me was lit up by a glorious sunset. There were hundreds of horses grazing loose, as far as the eye could reach, and flocks of enormous white geese, amid which great storks strutted.
Suddenly I awoke with the acute pain in my feet uppermost in my mind. I found myself clad only in my nightgown, walking bare-footed on the rough gravel paths of the garden, whence I had watched the stellar display. I had been walking in my sleep, and the sudden unaccustomed stony hardness of the path under my bare feet had awakened in me the recollection of a past life, in which I had lived, a wild nomad in southern Hungary.
This is the one and only occasion in my life in which I have known somnambulism. Luckily my memory did not fail me on waking and, some time after, when I was able to revisit the scenes of that long ago pilgrimage I was quite familiar with my surroundings.
Buda Pest and the lands lying southward were then my home, a roving home and tent life of infinite variety.
Thus the dead of vanished years are disguised in the present living.
I have no doubt that many people who have not had the interesting experience of remembering oneor more of their former incarnations have been able through some trivial incident to recollect happenings long vanished from their memory. Sometimes the scent of a flower, the glimpse of a scene, a chance word or expression will vividly recall some episode lying hidden for many years in the subconsciousness. Again it will be pulled over the threshold from past to present, from the storehouse of the eternal memory into the everyday working consciousness or mind.
This is not a book for scientists. I will therefore go into no elaborate metaphysics, but will sketch as simply as I can what I mean by subconsciousness. I use the term for the region or zone within us which stores up the residues of past thoughts and experiences. Scientists tell us there are three realms of mind, the super-conscious, the conscious, the subconscious. The conscious mind is what we commonly use. It belongs purely to the objective world, and its instruments are the five senses. The subconscious mind is the storehouse for experiences on the human plane of man's long past. The super-consciousness is independent of the five senses. It is a faculty of perception closely akin to the One force in the Universe, which is inseparably related to all created things. It possesses the attributes of Infinity, is indestructible, immortal, undying. We may forget a fact for many years, then suddenly we remember it. I believe it has come back to us again across the threshold from the subconscious region to our consciousness or mind which is open to everyday observation.
I have become convinced, by personal experience, of the existence in us of this region below the threshold of our ordinary conscious life. When I was young there were many problems I wished to solve, and inthis effort human aid often failed me. My plan was to "sleep on" a problem, ardently desiring before "dropping off" that an answer might be accorded me. I suppose this desire was of the nature of prayer, though addressed to no Deity. Almost invariably the solution was clear and unmistakable to me in the morning.
I lost this great advantage at the age of twenty-one, but even now I can sometimes "get at" a solution by leaving the question severely alone, after turning it well over in my mind. The solution will suddenly pop up, often weeks after I have tried to get at it, and when it comes there, it arrives apropos of nothing, so to speak. It simply dawns in the thick of quite other subjects, which happen at the moment to occupy my mind.
Though I can no more demonstrate to others the existence of the subconsciousness than I can prove the existence of the immortal soul, I have got sufficient proof to satisfy myself, and I believe the same knowledge is open to many of us. Within our being are sympathetic chords that can vibrate to all the symphonies of Nature. There are visions of beauty and depths of feeling which may be seen and felt, if heart and mind are open to the higher influences. The finer forces of Nature, and her immutable laws, are ready to draw nigh to us if we desire to welcome them, and are eager to place ourselves in harmony with the Infinite Source of being. We are in the keeping of the best and highest, and whatever things are pure, whatsoever things are beautiful, whatsoever things are true and high and holy will gravitate towards us in proportion to the degree we desire them. The mysterious gift of existence is in itself a beckoningideal, and a foregleam of the final awakening that will surely be ours.
Now what does the subconsciousness contain?
Firstly, I believe it to be permeated by Deity, and the Divine indwelling. It is the seat of Genius. I believe a genius to be one who is capable of drawing from the contents of his subconsciousness that which outwardly appears as a creation. It is said that genius creates and talent copies. I believe that a man becomes great when he represents the results of countless lives in his individuality, and each life is an arc of the infinite life of the Universe. The man with æons of experience behind him is infinitely moreen rapportwith his subconsciousness than those younger, more immature souls who have as yet experienced few earth lives and who constitute the bulk of humanity.
The eternal mind finds its home in the subconsciousness, by which I mean that nothing is really forgotten by man. This lapse of memory is the passing of the subject from the ordinary mind into the subconsciousness, whence it may later be recovered again. The memory of all our former incarnations I believe to lie hidden in the subconsciousness. It is from this region or zone that one gets sudden uprushes of memory, and such uprushes are induced by stumbling on a chance link between the two zones of consciousness.
Some chance incident, such as the presence of my bare feet upon the rough gravel, touches a correspondence on the other side of the threshold, and lays bare old scenes to the observation of the ordinary mind. It is noteworthy that the matter contained in this up-rushingis recognized first, and the means which brought about the uprush is recognized secondly.
I believe there is a vital communication between consciousness and subconsciousness which could be enormously developed and utilized by practice. The age in which we live has produced the most marvelous triumphs of mind over matter. Access to the subconsciousness is becoming commoner and simpler. We have broken in and harnessed material forces in a manner undreamt of fifty years ago. Yet there is an alas! a fact which detracts from all our legitimate pride in our achievement—the base uses to which our triumphs have been put. The whole of our inventive power has been turned against the life that gave it birth. The parents are being consumed by their own offspring.... Matter evolved out of spirit has threatened destruction to the latter.
The threshold between our ordinary consciousness and the region of subconsciousness seems to me like a bridge which is rarely used, and which separates the country known from the country unknown. I live in the country known, but if I can touch a button at my end I can get a response instantaneously transmitted from the country unknown. The trouble is to find the button. At present I only press it at long intervals and by the merest chance. Still it is something of an achievement to have convinced one's self that such a region actually does exist.
I believe this subconsciousness of ours is in direct contact with the Great Creative Power. "It is God that worketh" in man, and its vital communications are hidden in the infinite eternity. Says a Sufi ideal: "To abide in God after passing away is the work ofthe perfect man, who not only journeys to God—passes from plurality to unity—but in and with God—continuing in the unitive state he returns with God (his subconscious self) to the phenomenal world from which he sets out, and manifests unity in plurality."
Though at present, to all outward seeming, the evolution of the beast is consummated, there is a something that flatly contradicts this apparent certainty. That something is man's subconsciousness, and the Divinity it enshrouds, and which fiercely and irrevocably is set against the bestiality into which he is plunged. War has never been so universally hated as it now is. It is in this vital fact, which cannot be too strongly emphasized, that our future hope lies.
I believe this vital fact to be so strong that entire regeneration is a certainty. Where hitherto this force has lain dormant or been dispersed, disunited and weak in spiritual utterance, it is now a collective force concentrated in millions of lives. All over the earth it is now gathereden masse, and that stupendous aggregate, vivified, sharpened, and intensely accentuated by untold suffering will revolutionize all former weak and fatalistic acquiescence in the inevitability of war. Millions of men have descended into hell, they are there now, but they will arise again from amongst the dead, and ascend one day into the Heaven of peace, and thence they will judge the quick and the dead by a new standard. The standard of the God within, whose voice has been heard at last from out the din of battle. It is the same God who has said to the East:—
"Have perseverance as one who dost forever more endure. Thy shadows (physical bodies) live and vanish, that which is in thee shall live forever, thatwhich in thee knows is not of fleeting life, it is the man that was, that is, that will be, for whom the hour shall never strike."
To-day we all use, in some cases automatically, the powers and aptitudes developed in us in the long and painful evolution of the physical form. As evolution proceeds we will gain a vastly greater control over the subconsciousness, and in æons to come "in the flight of the alone to the alone" union will be achieved. The two will be merged in one.
The Lord Buddha has said that to enter Nirvana is to become fully conscious of our fundamental oneness with the universal life.
"I and my Father are one." Christ's sense of oneness with the Father was essentially Nirvanic.
We have not yet accustomed ourselves to think of evolution in any terms but the material, as a power inherent in matter, Darwin's physical evolution stood for pure materialism. Bergson now carries us a step farther. He introduces us to a spiritual principle. His creative evolution is a spiritual activity seeking freedom of expression in matter. Darwin's struggle for existence is by Bergson transmuted into life, expressing itself through material forms, and life and matter are in constant conflict. Again he points out that the spiritual principle, life, has not "had it all its own way." It has experienced checks, but in two modes of activity it has succeeded, in instinct and intelligence. Thus he draws for us the grandiose upward sweep of a Divine activity. Curbed, it is true, by the crust of matter, but finding ever higher capacities, and higher expression towards that ultimate reality which is creative life and to me is union with that higher self lying in the subconsciousness of all men.
A sea voyage once provided me with a wonderfully lucky experience, inasmuch as it saved me from an extremely bad accident.
I was returning quite alone from the East in a ship crammed full of women and children, most of them soldiers' wives and families going home to escape the hot weather. Many of them were attended by ayahs.
Two days out we ran into a raging storm, and everything was battened down. Owing to the weather, and the excessive crowding, the conditions below soon became very unpleasant, and I asked the captain if I might take possession of the ladies' summer drawing-room on the upper deck and close to the bridge. Seeing that it would not be used by any one else for some time to come he kindly agreed, and I at once settled myself in my eyrie with a few books, and prepared for some days of solitude.
But as the storm did not abate the suffering women and children below claimed my attention. They were confined in an atmosphere which was appalling, they were all terribly ill and utterly helpless. The mothers were unable to attend to their children, most of whom were infants, and the ayahs suffered horribly. Having no cabins they lay groaning on the floors of thecorridors, drenched with water as the ship was awash from stem to stern, and tossed hither and thither as she rolled heavily.
It was never easy to descend from my perch aloft, but the sufferers had to be aided, and day after day I never knew a dry moment till I lay down at night. So far the summer drawing-room remained fairly water-tight in spite of being swept continually by heavy seas, but the noise of the elements was absolutely deafening, and when the captain called upon me we had to shout in each other's ears.
With his connivance I got a shelter rigged up on what appeared to be the only dry spot on board. It was about twelve feet square and walled in with sailcloth, and there the sailors helped to carry a number of tiny children. They were to remain there during the best hours of the day, until their mothers and nurses were capable of attending to them once more.
I took charge at first and found my task no light one. The babies did not seem to appreciate my blandishments. They cried persistently, but luckily their voices were drowned in the roaring of the wind.
At last a cabin boy chanced to look in, and at once sized up the situation. He signaled to me that he knew of something that would ease the tension and then he disappeared. In five minutes he was back brandishing a large bunch of peacock's feathers. These he shook in the face of each infant in turn, at the same time making the most hideous grimaces at them. It was an anxious moment for me, but luckily the effect was electrical. The babies suddenly forgot to yell, they stiffly maintained their equilibrium and stared in a sort of indignant amazement. Then, gradually, as the boy kept going round the circle repeating the process,smiles and dimples began to appear, and in five minutes more the whole crêche was laughing.
I applied for permission to annex that boy; he was indeed a treasure, and the joy in the peacock's feathers never palled. His gutta-percha face had an infinite variety of expression, which he could instantly turn on to suit all occasions. It was a fascinating sight to see him going round the group feeding each baby out of the same bottle, one of the old-fashioned horrors with a long indiarubber tube and teat. Those infants who had contemptuously rejected all my offers of nourishment now sat expectantly agape waiting their turn. The scene always reminded me of the artificial feeding of fowls, by the man who goes round the pens squirting liquid down each gaping throat.
When we landed at Marseilles there was a wonderful parting between the babies and the cabin boy. They clung to him to the last, and howled dismally when they were carried off by their haggard mothers.
One night, during the height of the storm I was asleep on the fixed red velvet seat running round the walls of the summer drawing-room. I lay just under a porthole, to which was attached a rope. The other end of the rope was tied round my arm to prevent my being thrown to the floor by the rolling of the ship.
At five o'clock in the morning I was suddenly awakened by hearing my husband's voice shouting in my ear. (My husband not being on board, but in our home in the North of Scotland.)
"Sit up! Sit up!" shouted his voice commandingly.
Considerably startled I threw myself into a sitting position, and as I did so a gigantic wave shattered the porthole, and the heavy fragments of glass fellon to the pillow where a second before my face had lain.
Of course, the water poured in and over me in volumes, and stopped my wrist watch at five a. m., but I had got used to salt water, and in a few minutes the weary captain had waded in, and was disentangling me from my rope and congratulating me on my lucky escape.
I told him how it was that I had escaped, and he was not in the least skeptical. On the contrary, he said that he had known some curious things happen in his time, for which there was no accounting; but he always kept a black cat on board.
Had the safety of his ship not claimed his whole attention I believe he would have told me some of his experiences, but when, at last, the weather abated he was too much in need of rest to be bothered by any one.
My husband had no knowledge of the service he had rendered me. At five a. m. that morning he was asleep at home, and had no premonition of danger, or any recollection on waking of the rôle his astral counterpart had undoubtedly played.
What is this astral counterpart of man? His soul and spirit dwells in a shroud of flesh, and the feat of getting out of that shroud of flesh at will is the aim of all occultists. It is to the astral world they go, soul and spirit encased in the astral sheath we term the astral body.
During sleep, or in trance, when the normal physical senses are in abeyance, when the body is unconscious in sleep, the mind continues to act in the realm corresponding to the suggestions given when awake. The world at large is open to the highly developed man, andhe will sometimes bring back from his astral plane expeditions memories of what he has seen and heard.
In deep slumber the physical body in healthful repose remains where it has lain down to rest, but the man's higher principles, the astral body encasing the soul and spirit, is invariably withdrawn, and in underdeveloped persons hovers in the immediate neighborhood. In such cases the higher principles, the astral body, soul and spirit of St. Paul's Gospel, are not sufficiently developed to roam, and remain near the physical body in a brooding sleep. All cultured persons in the present day have their astral senses fairly well developed, and have the power during sleep to go where they will, but as yet few have the power to retain the memory of it when returning to the body.
In some cases the astral man during sleep is specially attracted to some one point, and he invariably travels towards it; in other cases he will drift aimlessly about on the astral currents, meeting with experience of all sorts and with people in a similar condition whom he knows. Is there anything very extraordinary in all this, and is not the condition of deep unconscious sleep a demonstration in itself that the physical consciousness has departed elsewhere? As it is no longer functioning on the Physical plane clearly it has found another realm in which it can temporarily exercise its activities.
My husband once had a rather interesting experience of his own, on the Astral plane. He was in bed and asleep on the Physical plane, and he believes that the time must have been between eleven p. m. and twelve a. m. He simply became aware that he was functioning consciously on the Astral plane, and was intensely interested.
He found himself in a strange house of medium size, and he was floating at the top of a flight of stairs leading to an ordinary entrance hall below. At the foot of the stairs hung a lighted lamp, and below the lamp stood a man and woman, who were apparently exchanging a word or two before bidding each other good-night.
My husband instantly conceived the idea of testing and proving his belief, that he was consciously afloat on the Astral plane. If this belief was true, then he ought to be able to pass through the couple standing below, without their being in the least aware of his presence.
In a flash he was downstairs, and his belief stood the test. His imponderable astral body passed without feeling or shock through two ponderable bodies of flesh and blood, and he was out on the other side. The excitement of the adventure awakened him, and he brought back to the Physical plane a clear recollection of all that had happened.
When one thinks of it, the possible presence of total strangers in one's house is rather alarming. Luckily for us such wanderers rarely bring back to waking consciousness the memory of their nocturnal escapades. When we are more advanced in "other side" knowledge we will doubtless refrain from intruding upon the privacy of our neighbors' dwellings, and confine our attentions to realms which are free to all.
It is curious how constantly one hears of the ghosts of priests and monks being seen. I have not met any one yet who has encountered the wraith of an Anglican parson, or a Nonconformist preacher. I wonder why? I presume the latter do sometimes "walk."
Once upon a time, when we were in Rome, my husband and I went to keep an appointment with Monsignor Stonor, who was a great celebrity, and an extremely handsome and charming man. We were being shown upstairs by a servant, and the hour was eleven o'clock on a sunny spring day. I was walking first, my husband following, and at the top of the stairs, coming slowly downward, was an old priest carrying a huge portfolio, under which he seemed to be staggering. He passed the servant, and as he neared me I noticed that the cassock which he wore was torn in great rents in several places. His gray hair hung on his shoulders, though his crown was shaven, and his face was the color of old ivory.
I moved slightly to give him and his burden room to pass, and as he did so our eyes met. His were very strange. They were exactly like points of live flame.
Something about his whole presence struck me as so weird that I turned involuntarily and looked back.
As I did so, I saw my husband walk straight through him. My husband saw nothing. Then I knew and understood.
I did not mention this incident to Monsignor Stonor, but some time after I met his sister, Viscountess Clifden, at Monte Carlo. She was an intimate friend of mine, and one day when an opportunity offered I told her the little story, and asked her if she had ever met with anything of the sort herself. She replied that personally, she had not, but she had heard that several people encountered at different times the old priest in her brother's rooms, though he himself had seen nothing of this apparition.
Lady Clifden enjoyed nothing more than a littleflutter at the tables. She never missed a single day during her long sojourns at Monte Carlo.
Every one knows that the Anglican church-goers in the Principality hurry from church to gaming rooms in order to stake on the numbers of the hymns. Lady Clifden used also to hurry from Mass with any numbers she had caught up, and she considered Sunday her lucky day. Suddenly her luck changed.
She told me that on the previous Sunday she had just pulled off a nice little coup, and was about to grasp it, when, to her horror she saw a skeleton hand stretched forth. Before she could collect her scattered senses the skeleton hand had raked in her gold. Where that gold had gone to worried and puzzled her dreadfully. So it did me! I never heard the last of it. She could not get over her loss.
It was no use suggesting that the hand had belonged to one of the emaciated harpies who prey upon the unwary. Lady Clifden knew all about them, and was a match for the whole gang, had they attacked her. She insisted that the hand that had grasped her gold had neither skin nor flesh upon it, and that she had seen the two bare arm bones from wrist to elbow. We compromised on the suggestion of a third party that it must have been the devil himself, and that the heat he is supposed to engender had melted the gold entirely away.
Monte Carlo is a very interesting place for the clairvoyant to be in, more especially if her vision extends to seeing auras. Perhaps nowhere on earth are the basest human passions more swiftly and violently aroused, and several times, when some tragedy was being enacted, or some enormous coup was being brought off, I have been unable to see details, becausethey were hidden within a dense envelop of dark crimson clouds.
In the rooms a crowd collects swiftly, and from a hundred human auras, all gathered in one compact mass, stream forth emanations of the basest description. Cupidity, envy, revenge, lust of the vilest, despair, ruin, death.
I remember being met one night by a friend in the Attrium who was very excited. "Hurry up," she cried, "the double Duchess has broken the bank and is still playing."
I went into the gambling rooms, and looked for the table at which the Duchess of Devonshire was staking. I knew she would attract a big crowd if she was winning.
I found the table easily enough, not because it was surrounded by a crowd of people, but because it was hidden by a dark and dense crimson fog.
With patience I got through this fog, and watched the handsome Duchess of Devonshire, formerly Duchess of Manchester, and born a Hanoverian, playing with a great quantity of gold, and a pile of thousand franc notes. By bending low down, almost level with the table, I found I got completely out of the fog, and could see clearly underneath it.
One night there was a rush outside, and a huge ring formed to watch "a scrap" taking place between two celebrated members ofla haute cocotterie de Paris.
They were fighting with formidable hatpins, and I understood that the prey they fought over was Leopold, King of the Belgians.
I ran with the crowd, the gambling rooms emptied in a twinkling, for the combat took place in the Casino Square. I squeezed through the excited mob till Igot behind the backers of both parties, who were holding the ring and defying the police.
It was a wonderful sight to witness the combined play of flaming red auras, shot through with vivid flashes like lightning, and blazing jewels.
The duel ended with a few scratches, much tearing of gorgeous raiment and disheveled hair.
How interesting it was to the mystic to feel the psychology of that crowd, and see the thin veneer of civilization stripped off, leaving nothing but the human tiger and ape. Both ladies were eventually led off the arena by the police, not, be it understood, to the police-station, but to their own sumptuous apartments. All the time they shrieked and chattered like infuriated macaws, and between the shrieks they administered resounding smacks upon the cheeks of their patient escort.
Monte Carlo was a wonderful place in those days, in which to study human nature at its best and worst. In latter years it has become meretricious and shabby, and the old magnificence is seen no more. Fifteen to twenty years ago all that was greatest in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, congregated there, and crowned heads mingled freely with the scum of the earth. Constanthabituéswere the Duchess of Devonshire, and her son, Lord Charles Montague; the Duchess of Montrose, known to the ring at Newmarket as "Bobs," and always the personification, to listen to and look at, of a Thames bargee. Leopold of Belgium, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Grand Dukes of Russia, potentates from India, all hobnobbing together and gambling heavily.
I often wonder now what has befallen those brilliant stars of the half-world firmament. Emmeline d'Alençonwith her "bobbed" hair, and her passionate love of animals and birds. The demure Jeanne Ray, who came out every morning to her garden gate, and distributed food to the crowd of paupers and cripples. I have seen peasants kiss the hem of her dress as she walked on an afternoon along the Promenade des Anglais. The beautiful, soulless Mérode, the fierce, stately Otero, and many others who thought nothing of wearing fifty to a hundred thousand pounds' worth of jewels on one evening.
Where are they now? If living they are old! Old! a word more dreaded by their class than death.
I will now relate a very unpleasant experience that befell me thirty years ago, but which has by no means exhausted itself in the passage of years. It still, at long intervals, recurs to me as vividly as when first I passed through the painful hours of its unfoldment.
It was the month of July, and I was making a tour by road through a portion of Scotland, driving my own horse. I was accompanied by a groom and a maid.
One evening we arrived at a well-known inn on Deeside, where I had arranged to pass a couple of nights. I found my room ready for me, an ordinary hotel bedroom, and after supper I retired very early to bed, feeling very sleepy after a long day in the open air.
Towards morning I had a vision. I was a woman who had committed the crime of murder; and I went in hourly terror of discovery and arrest, as the police were actively in search of the criminal. Up to the present I had succeeded in evading them, and no shadow of suspicion had yet fallen upon me, but I lived in constant haunting dread that sooner or later some chance clue would direct their attention to me, and I should be arrested and brought up for trial.
I had no clue in the vision as to how the murderhad been committed. My victim was a man, and a sensation, vague and cloudy, suggested that a quick poison was the mode of destruction I used, but I never gathered why I murdered him, or what relation, if any, he was to me.
The vision was confined to my miserable sensations of fear of detection, and the trouble was that I seemed utterly powerless to keep away from the scene of my crime, a large mansion in the West End of London.
Not only did I haunt the outside of the house, but I had several times contrived to penetrate into the interior without being discovered, the house having stood empty since the crime.
It was a dark, foggy night when I determined again to effect an entrance, and I listened intently in the street before darting up to the front door and fitting my key in the lock. There was not a sound, and I found myself in the interior with the door softly closed behind me.
I carried a candle, which I was about to light, when I saw that the large hall was not in its usual darkness. A dim light burned in a pendant globe, and looking round I perceived abundant evidences that the house was again occupied. Several pairs of men's gloves were neatly folded on the hall table, and a man's silk hat was neatly covered with a cloth. There was not the faintest sound to be heard in the house, and the hour was between eleven and midnight.
Very softly I crept up the wide staircase. My heart was beating tumultuously, and I was in an agony of apprehension. On the first corridor I entered the room where I had concealed the body of the man I had murdered. I had dragged it there and hidden it in a great dress wardrobe. I opened the wardrobedoor and found the interior had been filled with women's clothes, they were swathed in linen sheets. Amongst them I began to search with both hands, but, of course, found no signs of the body, which had long since been removed. However, in some unaccountable way the action of searching seemed to comfort me, and soon I turned to retrace my steps and gain the street once more.
At that second I heard some one approaching, and quick as thought I slipped into the wardrobe and pulled the door close. Some one entered the room and then left it again. In a few more moments the house was again silent as the grave, and I began to creep downstairs very softly.
When halfway down, at a bend which brought me in full view of the hall and the front door in the background, I stopped short at a sound.
Some one was about to enter, some one was fumbling with a latch key at the other side of that door. Another moment and that some one would enter and I would be discovered. There was but one chance. Whoever it was might not come upstairs. He or she might strike off to the left of the hall, where a corridor ran to that end of the house.
I cannot attempt to describe my agonizing terror of suspense, yet I did not lose my presence of mind. Instantaneously I decided what to do, should the one about to enter elect to come straight upstairs.
I hastily lit my candle, carefully shading it with my hand, and crouching low I peered through the banisters, towards the front door. It opened, and a man entered, middle-aged, well dressed, a gentleman, and an utter stranger to me.
He closed the door and turned the key, but drewno bolts. Then he threw off a heavy coat, and placed his hat and gloves on the table. My heart beat to suffocation, as I waited to see which way he would go. He was whistling softly to himself and, turning, began to walk across the hall, heading for the stairs.
Then the moment for action came. I knew now I should have to pass him in order to make my escape. I threw myself into the tragic pose of a somnambulist. I wore a long floating cloak, and I knew my face was white as death, and my eyes wide with sheer terror.
With both hands, one of which held the lighted candle, outstretched gropingly, with distraught gaze fixed in wild vacancy, I slipped silently down the few remaining steps and sped noiselessly in my soft shoes straight across the hall towards him.
Though I never turned my eyes upon him I was aware that he had stopped dead short, and was staring at me in startled amazement. Then fear suddenly invaded him, I could feel it. He fell back as if to let me pass, as I glided silently nearer to him and to the door.
He was backing away from me now, then in another instant, he had turned and fled along the corridor. One more moment and I was safely outside, on the pavement.
I woke up to a brilliant summer morning pouring in at my open window, but I was in no mood to enjoy its loveliness. I was bathed in cold perspiration, I was shivering with pure unadulterated fear. I was prostrate with the violent revulsion of feeling, from acute dread of discovery to partial immunity on gaining the street and escaping from the house. The vividness of every detail was crystal clear, and attended by allthe violent emotions such an adventure and escape would naturally arouse in me, had they happened in the world of realities.
It was hours before I could shake off the horror of the vision, and I left the hotel that day. Nothing would induce me ever to pass another night under that roof.
I had no recurrence of the vision till three months after, then it came again, with all its attendant horrors, when I was asleep in my own bed at home. This was succeeded at long intervals by a vision of my condition of mind as an undiscovered criminal, always evading detection, but without the vision of my return to the scene of the crime. During the last thirty years I have had recurrences of the complete and partial vision, but at long intervals.
A few years ago I happened to be standing with my host in an enormous stone hall, in one of the greatest houses in England. We were discussing the house, and its uncomfortable vastness. There were suites of apartments in outlying parts where whole families might hide for days if housemaids were careless. To reach the dining and drawing-rooms from the bedrooms, if one was tired, was a real weariness.
We were looking up at the great gallery, running round the hall. It was reached by four wide flights of stairs at different corners, and it was full of all sorts of recesses, and massive pieces of old furniture and screens. On the spur of the moment I said to my host, "Wouldn't it be uncanny if we were to see a strange face looking down on us?"
To my surprise, he answered: "Oh! that has often happened. I've often seen strangers looking down. At one time I took them to be inquisitivemembers of my own household, whom I didn't know by sight, and one day I complained about it, to the housekeeper. She looked very much disturbed and told me she had seen the same thing herself. The house is opened on certain days to the public, and she was half inclined to think one of the visitors had escaped from the crowd, and hidden herself for several days, as it was not on a public day that the figure was seen."
"Is it always the same figure?" I asked.
"Oh, no," replied my host. "Always a different one, and always some one quite ordinary and modern looking. The strictest orders are given that none of the servants' friends are to be allowed in this part of the house, and the housekeeper has always been with us and is thoroughly trustworthy. The fact remains an unsolved mystery."
The housekeeper was a very agreeable old woman of the real, old-fashioned type. Very rustling in the evening, in a rich silk gown, and wearing some fine piece of jewelry presented to her by one or other of the crowned heads who had visited the famous house. I had asked her before I left about these mysterious appearances, and she had no explanation to offer. She had ascertained beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they had nothing to do with the household.
"They were always just ordinary looking men and women, such as one meets in the streets every day. Sometimes they seem to have hats on, sometimes their heads appear uncovered," she explained.
This fits in with a belief I have always held that we constantly rub shoulders with the disembodied, without being in the least aware of it. As the Bishop of London once said: "We will find ourselves exactlythe same persons ten minutes after death as we were ten minutes before death."
There are many occasions when we cannot express feeling in intellectual terms owing to the poverty of language. One's life not being a matter of intellectual perception, but a conscious experience, little of it can be made known. The mystic life is really incommunicable.
We regard the Universe through the lens of five very imperfect senses, conscious all the time that there are certainly many more mediums for the expression of consciousness.
Perception is a manifestation of consciousness, and varies enormously in individuals, ranging often above and beneath the normal. Undoubtedly perception can be enormously extended by practice, not only in seeing material objects, but in approaching the borderland of other worlds.
The sight of the Psychic or Medium is not so much vision as a consciousness of the thoughts and feelings of others. It is a sensation rather than a process of thinking, sensation not as we commonly accept the term, but sensation through which mental objects are realized with as great a clarity of vision as physical objects are seen with the naked eye.
This intuitive vision is near akin to ordinary physical vision, inasmuch as the object seen has a real concrete existence. The Psychic feels vibrations and absorbs them.
My explanation of my vision in the Highland inn is that the actual criminal had slept the night before in the room I occupied, and happening to be mediumistic I at once began to absorb the vibrations, and became steeped in all the circumstances, environment, andconditions thrown off by the criminal in connection with the crime.
The vibrations were intensely strong, and still fresh and concentrated. I absorbed them so fully that still at times they steal back across the threshold of my subconsciousness, the vehicle which registers and retains all impressions.
During sleep, when one is off guard, the gate is often ajar, and old memories and incidents steal through, and range at will through the ordinary consciousness.
In daily, normal existence the mind is merely a whirlpool, but undoubtedly the criminal would concentrate mentally on every detail of her crime. There would be a focalization of her mind; a concentration of her whole mental faculties upon this one single subject, and when the mental force is reduced from its normal, dissipated condition into coherency, its power is unlimited. It is possible to catch a physical disease by sleeping in an infected bed. It is quite as easy to catch a mental disease by the same means. Many emotions are highly contagious, notably fear. All are invisible to human sight, and there is rarely any warning. A Psychic may sense something unpleasant before infection is established. In fact, this often happens to quite normal individuals. Something in the atmosphere of a place conveys a warning, is unpleasant or uncongenial and it is avoided. If a warning was conveyed to me in the Highland inn I was too tired to heed it.
At one time in my life I saw a great deal of two intimate and charming friends, Lord and Lady Wynford. Alas! both have now passed over.
Lady Wynford was born Caroline Baillie of Dochfour,and owing to her Scotch blood, and her relationship with many of our great Scotch families, she was profoundly interested in ghosts. Lord Wynford, on the contrary, had an absolute horror of the subject, and always left the room whilst it was under discussion. Though very dissimilar, husband and wife were the best of friends. She was very handsome and a brilliant woman of the world. He was shy, retiring, and deeply religious. A perfect example of a true gentleman of the old school, and an aristocrat to his finger-tips. I was devoted to them both, and they were very kind to me in giving me their warm friendship, though at the time of which I write I was only a girl of about twenty years old.
At that period the great topic of conversation amongst ghost-hunters was Glamis Castle, the most celebrated of all haunted houses. No ghost book is ever considered complete without reference to this celebrated Castle, and the story usually narrated is, that in the secret room some abnormal horror lived, and that the heir, Lord Glamis, and the factor, had to be told of its existence by the Earl of Strathmore in person. This information was of so terrible a nature that it changed not only the lives of those two men, but even their personal appearance. They grew aged and haggard in a single night.
This story was readily discussed in old days by members of the Strathmore family, who were just as keen as outsiders were to probe the mystery. To-day it is universally believed that the monstrosity is at last laid to rest, and that though other ghosts still walk the Castle, the worst has departed forever.
I went one afternoon to see the Wynfords in the hotel in which they stayed whilst in Scotland, andfound Lady Reay with them. She was a wonderful woman in her way, and preserved her youth up till very late in life. Lord Wynford was not present, and Lady Wynford at once greeted me by exclaiming, "We are going to stay at Glamis next week, and Lady Reay has been there and seen a ghost."
"But nottheghost," admitted Lady Reay.
"Then what did you see?" I inquired.
She then told the following story, which has a sequel:—
"I had been in the Castle for three nights and much to my satisfaction seen absolutely nothing. We were a very cheery party, and every one was frightfully thrilled and nervously expectant, but we were very careful not to breathe the word 'ghost' before our host and hostess.
"On the fourth night I was awakened by a moaning sound in my room, and I opened my eyes. The room was in total darkness, but I saw something very bright near the door. I shut my eyes instantly, and pulled the bedclothes over my head in a paroxysm of fear. I longed to light my candles, but didn't dare, and the moaning continued, and I thought I should go quite mad.
"At last I ventured to peep out again. I saw a woman dressed exactly like Mary Tudor, in her pictures, and she was wandering round the walls, flinging herself against them, like a bird against the bars of a cage, and beating her hands upon the walls, and all the time she moaned horribly. I'm sure she was the ghost of a mad woman. Her face and form were lit up exactly like a picture thrown upon a magic lantern screen, and every detail of her dress was clearly defined.
"Luckily she never looked at me, or I should have screamed, and I thought of Lord and Lady I. sleeping in the next room to mine, and wondered how I could reach them. I was really too terrified to move, and the ghost kept more or less to that part of the room where the door was situated.
"I must have lain there awake for two or three hours, sometimes with my head buried under the clothes, sometimes peeping out, when at last the moaning suddenly stopped. I opened my eyes. Thank God, I was alone. The ghost had departed.
"I lay with wide open eyes till daybreak. Then the first thing I did was to run to the mirror to see if my hair had turned white. Mercifully it hadn't, but I looked an awful wreck.
"I told just a few people what I had seen, and contrived to get a wire sent me before lunch. Early in the afternoon I was on the way to Edinburgh."
Such was the story Lady Reay related.
Thirteen years later Captain Eric Streatfield, who was a nephew of Lord Strathmore, and an intimate friend of my husband, told me exactly the same story. He was a boy of six at the time, when the lady of Tudor days appeared moaning in his room, and he said he would never forget the misery of the night he passed. He was very much interested in hearing that Lady Reay had gone through the same experience. He told me another extraordinary story.
Whilst, as a school boy, he was visiting at Glamis Castle with his parents, he noticed that they began to behave in rather a peculiar manner. They were often consulting alone with one another, and constantly scanning the sky from their bedroom window, which adjoined his. For two or three days this sort of thingwent on, and he caught queer fragments of conversation whispered between them, such as, "It doesn't always happen. We might be spared this year, the power must die out some day."