Part 35 (1/2)
No, the whole question at present must be determined by our recognition or non-recognition of the photographs produced.
If Mr Boursnell or any other photographer can produce (_as he has done_) my old nurse, who died twenty-three years ago, and was never photographed in her life, then we must find some other suggestion than that of ”common or garden faking” as a solution of the mystery. There she sits, as in life, with a little knitted shawl round her shoulders and the head of a tiny child upon her lap. The eyes are closed, and give a dead look to the face, yet the features are to me quite unmistakable, and no one knew the dear old woman so well as I did.
Again, I have in my little picture gallery, an old and very well-known Oxford professor, in whose house I stayed many times.
Quite unexpectedly he appeared on one of Mr Boursnell's plates last summer, and although this special photograph is fainter than the one just described, the likeness can only be denied by someone more anxious to be sceptical than truthful. I compared the photograph with an engraving of the professor in much earlier life--which is to be found in the Life published since he pa.s.sed away--with an artist friend (who had not known him). We went over the features one by one, and my friend said she noticed only one small difference, the exact length of the upper lip, and this, she considered, would be amply accounted for by the lapse of time between the two pictures and the slight lengthening of the upper lip owing to loss of teeth. The professor pa.s.sed away as an old man; the picture engraved in the Life represents him as he was at least twenty years before his death.
But the most interesting point to me in this photograph, is the appearance on his lap of a much loved dog, a rather large fox terrier named ”Bob.” I had not noticed Bob until a daughter of the professor pointed him out to me, and now I cannot understand having missed him at first.
Bob was not only the most important person in the Oxford household, but he was good enough to be very fond of me, so it seems to me quite natural that he should have come with his master to pay me a visit.
I remember arriving at the house one dark winter's evening after an absence of over two years, and Bob's welcome to me was so ecstatic that he nearly knocked me down in a vain attempt to get his paws round my neck.
I heard the professor, who was always rather jealous of Bob's affections, say in a whisper to his wife: ”Most touching thing I ever saw, that dog's welcome when Miss Bates arrived!”
Dear Bob! I am so glad he can still come and see me, with his dearly loved master.
Another shuffle of the photographs brings to the top a sweet girlish face and figure, ”sixteen summers or something less.”
She appeared first upon a plate in the summer of 1905, but so indistinctly as to the _face_ that I could not recognise it.
A few months ago the same figure appeared again, but quite clearly this time, and involuntarily, as I looked at it, I exclaimed: ”_Why, of course, it is Lily Blake!_”
Now it is nearly thirty years since I met this charming child; during my first visit to Egypt. She and her father (a well-known physician) and her aunt, were spending a six weeks' holiday in Cairo, and I saw more of her than would otherwise have been the case, because she was the playmate of another young girl--the child of friends of mine at Shepheard's Hotel.
Lily was a sweet-looking, delicate girl, with soft, sleepy blue eyes, and was always dressed in a simple, artistic fas.h.i.+on. A few months after our return to England I saw in the papers the death of this pretty child; for she was little more at the time. I wrote a letter of condolence and sympathy, which was at once answered by the aunt in very kind fas.h.i.+on; and since then I have seen nothing to remind me of Lily until this last year has brought her once more within my ken. I am only too thankful to realise that any influence so pure and beautiful as hers, may be around me sometimes in my daily life.
And now let me say, in the words of our great novelist:
”Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out!”
Only I trust in this case we have managed to rise a little above the usual atmosphere of Vanity Fair.
Surely the aim of all psychic research should be to give us a _scientific_, as we have already, thank G.o.d, a spiritual, foundation for the ”Hope that is in us.”
Spirit photographs and spirit materialisations and abnormal visions or abnormal sounds amount to very little, if we look upon them as an end in themselves, and not as the symbols and the earnest of those greater things which ”Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of _man_ to conceive.”
I remember, years ago, in the course of a deeply interesting conversation with Phillipps Brooks, the late Bishop of Ma.s.sachusetts, that I asked him what he thought about modern theosophy, which was just then becoming a _culte_ in his native town of Boston. There was a great deal of talk at the time about the new philosophy and the wonderful phenomena said to accompany its propaganda. Sir Edwin Arnold had written his ”Light of Asia,” and Oliver Wendell Holmes had welcomed it with wondering awe, as something approaching a new revelation. And smaller people were talking about the historical Blavatsky tea-cups, and hidden heirlooms found in Indian gardens, and some of us were wondering how soon we should learn to fly, and what would come next.
The bishop's answer to my question was so genial, so characteristic, and showed such divine common-sense!
”It is not a question of _flying_,” he said. ”I should like to fly as much as anybody; and a queer sort of bird I should appear!” (He was well over six feet, and broad in proportion.)
”If you suddenly found you could fly,” he continued, ”it would be _absorbing_ on Monday morning, _intensely interesting_ on Tuesday, _interesting_ on Wednesday, and _quite pleasant_ on Thursday, but by the end of the week it would be getting normal, and you would want to discover some other new power. No, believe me, the real question is not _flying_, but WHERE you would fly, and WHAT YOU WOULD DO WHEN YOU GOT THERE.”
This sums up the case in a nut sh.e.l.l, and seems to me only another way of saying: ”Don't forget the spiritual significance beneath the scientific symbol.”