Read Ebook: Punch or the London Charivari Volume 150 May 24 1916 by Various

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 182 lines and 15465 words, and 4 pages

THE LAST MIRACLE

LONDON T. WERNER LAURIE CLIFFORD'S INN 1906

"My domain how lordly large, sublime! Time's my domain; my seedfield's Time."

THE LAST MIRACLE

Towards the end of May 1900 the writer received as noteworthy a letter and packet of papers as it has been his lot to examine. They came from a good friend of mine, a Dr A. Lister Browne, M.A. Oxon., F.R.C.P., whom, as it happened that for some years I had been living mostly in France, and Browne being in Norfolk, I had not seen during my visits to London. Moreover, as we were both bad correspondents, only three notes had passed between us in the course of those years.

The following is Browne's letter:--

"I have been arranging some of my affairs, and remembered these note-books which I intended letting you have long ago; but you know my habit of putting things off, and, moreover, the lady was alive from whose mouth I took down the words. She is now dead, and, as a man of books, you should be interested, if you can manage to read them.

"Well, you never knew anyone so weird in appearance as my friend, Miss Wilson. Medicineman as I am, I could never see her without a shock, she so suggested what we call 'the other world.' Her brow was lofty, her lips thin, her complexion ashen, and she was execrably emaciated; her eyes were of the hue of mist; at forty her wisp of hair was withered to white.

"She lived almost alone in old Marsham manor-house, five miles from Ash Thomas, and I, just beginning in these parts at the time, soon took up my residence at the manor, she insisting that I should give up myself to her.

"Well, I quickly found that in the state of trance Miss Wilson possessed very queer powers--queer, I mean, not because peculiar to herself in kind, but because so far-reaching in degree. Most people are now talking with an air of discovery about the reporting powers of the mind in its trance state, as though the fact had not been fully known to every old crone since the Middle Ages; but the certainty that someone in a trance in Manchester may tell what is going on in Glasgow was not, of course, left to the discovery of an office in Fleet Street, and the psychical people in establishing the fact for the public have not gone one step towards explaining it.

"This much I soon got to find out. She would give out a stream of sounds in the trance state--I can hardly call it speech, so murmurous, yet guttural, was the utterance, mixed with puffy breath-sounds at the lips, this state being accompanied by contraction of the pupils, failure of the knee-jerk, rigour, and a rapt expression, so I got into the habit of tarrying for hours by her bedside, fascinated by her, trying to catch the news of those musings which came mounting from her mouth; and in the course of months my ear learned to make out the words: 'the veil was rent' for me also, and I was able to follow somewhat the trips of her straying spirit.

"At the end of six months I heard her one day repeat some words which were familiar to me. They were these: 'Such were the arts by which the Romans extended their conquests, and attained the palm of victory; and the concurring testimony of different authors enables us to describe them with precision....' I was startled: they are part of Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' which I readily guessed that she had never read.

"I said in a stern voice: 'Where are you?'

"She replied: 'Us are in a room, eight hundred miles above. A man is writing. Us are reading.'

"To her excursions in this last direction, however, there seemed to exist certain limits: I say seemed, for I can't be sure, and only mean that she never, in fact, went far in this direction. Three, four thousand 'miles' were common figures in her mouth in describing her distance 'above'; but her distance 'within' never got beyond sixty-three. She appeared, in relation to the future, to be like a diver in the sea who, the deeper he dives, finds a more resistant pressure, till at no great depth resistance grows to prohibition, and he can no further dive.

"Well, no more now. I know you will think of me sometimes. You will have to, by the way, because I am making you one of my executors. 'A long farewell!' ..."

MY VISIT TO SWANDALE

I have been asked by the publishers who bring out this book to add yet a mite to the mass of writing which has appeared in regard to the late events, for how are the mighty fallen! and, as when an oak announces its downfall through the forest, so here it was only natural that the little fowl should fly and flap, with outcries of sharp shrillness! Much, then, has been written and said; and if I now place my small word with the books already sprung out of what we call "The Revival" and, rather blatantly, the "Abolition of Christianity," my excuse lies in the circumstance that during those storms I was much with Aubrey Langler, and that, long before those events, I was probably his closest friend.

I can, therefore, give details as to that gracious life and the strifes in which he had a hand not very possible to another writer.

It was my way to stay with Langler at least thrice a year. My crowded town-life was a rude enough contrast with his eremite mood, so I rarely failed to avail myself of his invitations. Of these he gave me one in the August of the year of the Pope's visit, and shortly afterwards I started for Alresford .

There happened to travel in the rail-train with me a remarkable man: certainly, I think that I never beheld a larger human being, except in an exhibition. We were alone in my carriage, and I was able to take note of him. His vast jacket was of satin, and from every button ran two cords of silk, ending in a barrel-shaped ornament of silk, such as used, I believe, to be called "frogs"; his shirt was frilled and limp; and he wore four or five rings. This was enough to prove him a foreigner, though otherwise his dress was ordinary. He sat with his fat legs wide apart, smiling at the world in the most good-humoured, yet sneering way, showing some very long top teeth.

All the time his hand travelled to and fro, fro and to, in a rub along the tightly-clad length of his thigh.

The man seemed most happy. From the manner in which his eyes, half hid by their sleepy lids, hovered anon upon me, I could see that he was longing to speak out some of his self-satisfaction; and after some short time he did indeed speak, saying with a drowsy drawl through his nostrils, exhibiting the sneer of his teeth, and speaking English without a hint of foreignness:

In this way he went on purring; did not stop; would not permit me to say anything. His utterance was lazy, nasal; and ever and anon he pipped from his lips, as he droned and rubbed his thigh, a dry pin-point of nothing: this, one could see, was a habit of his being. I cannot now recall a thousandth part of his talk, but I do recall that, as he droned on and on from topic to topic, this thought roved through my brain: "But what a head! what a fount of ideas!"

The man made upon me an impression of great grossness, perhaps from his big bulk, or his manner of ironing his thigh, or his ejection of nothings, or that wallowing in his own self-satisfaction. Round his chin and cheeks ran a bandage of iron-grey beard; his hair was scanty, and bald at the temples, where his forehead ran up into two gulfs of bare skin, so that the skimpy region of hair on his great head resembled a jacket much too small for the person who wears it.

I suppose that to be caressed by a force is always pleasant--the purring of a petted cat!--and I understood that the Baron Gregor Kol?r was a force.

For now I knew his already well-known name, inasmuch as, after turning away from me on the platform, he turned again, fumbled fretfully for his card, and gave it me. I gave him mine. Then, with a bow-legged rolling of gait which bowled his head aside at each stride, he strolled to the brougham awaiting him.

His brougham and mine ran along the same road for some distance--Goodford, his bourne, being only five miles from Swandale--till we parted at a meeting of roads, and he passed from my mind for a season.

THE WREN

As I went on towards Swandale the thought suddenly struck me that my driver's back was strange to me. I bent forward, and asked him what, then, had become of Robinson.

"I wish I could tell you, sir," was his answer, "but seemingly that's just what nobody knows."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Robinson has been missing for three days, sir," he said--"since Thursday noon, high or low, no one can find him: and cut up is what Mr and Miss Langler are about it."

This Robinson, a very handsome man, well under forty years, was a part of Swandale, and long known to me; but now the carriage rolled over broken stones, and I asked no more. Soon thereafter we passed into the gorge which runs into Swandale.

The fame of this vale is at present pretty far-spread, yet of the "pen-pictures" which have appeared of it I know of none which portrays half its witchery. The piling up of details is, in fact, fruitless, for not the pen, but the brush, is fashioned to paint. I may repeat, however, that the vale is an oval, the gorge being at the south-east, in which already the ear is caught by that sound of waters whose chant pervades the vale , and one goes on through an air of perfumes to a giant portal, till, in contrast with the wildness of the approach, Swandale itself dawns upon the eye in all its rusticity--a rusticity attained by the touchiest art, for I think that throughout the dale there was not at that time a coo or a drain not due to the care of its designer. Langler had, in fact, given many years and the mass of his fortune to the making of this garden.

Langler was now a man of forty, with some silver in his hair, and Miss Emily at this time twenty-seven.

They formed something of a contrast, she was so much darker than he, for Langler had light, wavy hair, parted in the middle over the broadest brow, a brow parcelled up into lax fields by the furrows of "much learning." He wore no hair on the face, save side-whiskers down the longish hollow of his cheeks, cheeks which looked no wider than the breadth of his broad chin: a massive countryman's-face, yet with something wistful and ill-fated about the eyes and the thick lips, which ever bore a sad smile. His "bone-in-the-throat" drew the eye by its prominence! He always impressed one as being better groomed than other men, I never could tell why, since he was ever quite plainly dressed, but in the very pink of correctness somehow.

However, in a certain--shall I say cynicalness?--of look there was resemblance between the two--or, say, criticalness, scepticism: both had a trick of screwing up at the cheek-bones a little and piercing into anything new or curious that was in question.

It is commonly known now that both were beings of uncommon endowment, and so kin and kind were they, that they appeared to live, as it were, a twin life.

When we went into the cottage I found waiting to welcome me several men and women servants--a small crowd of much more than ordinary comeliness. Langler said then to me: "have you heard about my poor friend?"

It was nothing new for him to speak so of his servant, so I knew that he referred to Robinson, and replied: "I have heard something. Can't you form any idea what has become of him?"

"No idea so far," he answered; "I am giving my mind to it."

"He should be found, then," I said; at which Langler smiled.

Miss Emily was rather behind us in the passage, and at that moment I heard her say: "Aubrey, here is John running after us with something."

I turned, and saw this John pelting up the boards embedded in the soil which served as steps from the bridge to the cottage. He held a spade in the left hand and some object on the right palm; Langler turned to him; and at once I saw that the thing on the man's palm lived, fluttered a wing, was a bird.

"What!" said Langler, "a wren?"

"Why, it is ill," said Miss Emily.

"I found it caught in the vine tendrils, miss," said John.

Everybody bent over it.

"I have never seen it before," said Langler.

She was rather palish.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet