IN WHICH THE READER IS SHOWN THE HABITS OF A NOTORIOUS CRIMINAL
We will now leave that little group with whom we have made our first exploration of these grey and ill-defined, but immensely important, regions of human thought and experiences. From the researchers we will turn to the researched. Come with me and we will visit Mr. Linden at home, and will examine the lights and shades which make up the life of a professional medium.
To reach him we will pass down the crowded thoroughfare of Tottenham Court Road, where the huge furniture emporia flank the way, and we will turn into a small street of drab houses which leads eastwards towards the British Museum. Tullis Street is the name and 40 the number. Here it is, one of a row, flat-faced, dull-coloured and commonplace, with railed steps leading up to a discoloured door, and one front-room window, in which a huge gilt-edged Bible upon a small round table reas
sures the timid visitor. With the universal pass-key of imagination we open the dingy door, pass down a dark passage and up a narrow stair. It is nearly ten o’clock in the morning and yet it is in his bedroom that we must seek the famous worker of miracles. The fact us that he has had, as we have seen, an exhausting sitting the night before, and that he has to conserve his strength in the mornings.
At the moment of our inopportune, but invisible, visit he was sitting up, propped by the pillows, with a breakfast-tray upon his knees. The vision he presented would have amused those who have prayed with him in the bumble Spiritualist temples, or had sat with awe at the séances where he had exhibited the modern equivalents of the gifts of the Spirit. He looked unhealthily pallid in the dim morning light, and his curly hair rose up in a tangled pyramid above his broad, intellectual brow. The open collar of his night-shirt displayed a broad, bull’s neck, and the depth of his chest and spread of his shoulders showed that he was a man of considerable personal strength. He was eating his breakfast with avidity while he conversed with the little, eager, dark-eyed wife who was seated on the side of the bed.
“And you reckon it a good meeting, Mary?”
“Fair to middling, Tom. There was two of them researchers raking round with their feet and upsetting everybody. D’ye think those folk in the Bible would have got their phenomena if they had chaps of that sort on the premises? ‘Of one accord,’ that’s what they say in the book.”
“Of course!” cried Linden heartily. “Was the Duchess pleased?”
“Yes, I think she was very pleased. So was Mr. Atkinson, the surgeon. There was a new man there called Malone of the Press. Then Lord and Lady Montnoir got evidence, and so did Sir James Smith and Mr. Mailey.”
“I wasn’t satisfied with the clairvoyance,” said the medium. “The silly idiots kept on putting things into my mind. ‘That’s surely my Uncle Sam,’ and so forth. It blurs me so that I can see nothing clear.”
“Yes, and they think they are helping! Helping to muddle you and deceive themselves. I know the kind.”
“But I went under nicely and I am glad there were some fine materializations. It took it out of me, though. I’m a rag this morning.”
“They work you too hard, dear. I’ll take you to Margate and build you up.”
“Well, maybe at Easter we could do a week. It would be fine. I don’t mind readings and clairvoyance, but the physicals do try you. I’m not as bad as Hallows. They say he just lies white and gasping on the floor after them.”
“Yes,” cried the woman bitterly. “And then they run to him with whisky, and so they teach him to rely on the bottle and you get another case of a drunken medium. I know them. You keep off it, Tom!”
“Yes, one of our trade should stick to soft drinks. If he can stick to vegetables, too, he’s all the better, but I can’t preach that while I am wolfin’ up ham and eggs. By Gosh, Mary! it’s past ten and I have a string of them comin’ this morning. I’m going to make a bit to-day.”
“You give it away as quick as you make it, Tom.”
“Well, some hard cases come my way. So long as we can make both ends meet what more do we want? I expect they will look after us all right.”
“They have let down a lot of other poor mediums who did good work in their day.”
“It’s the rich folk that are to blame not the Spirit-people,” said Tom Linden hotly. “It makes me see red when I remember these folk, Lady This and Countess That, declaring all the comfort they have had, and then leaving those who gave it to die in the gutter or rot in the workhouse. Poor old Tweedy and Soames and the rest all living on old-age pensions and the papers talking of the money that mediums make, while some damned conjuror makes more than all of us put together by a rotten imitation with two tons of machinery to help him.”
“Don’t worry, dear,” cried the medium’s wife, putting her thin hand caressingly upon the tangled mane of her man. “It all comes level in time and everybody pays the price for what they have done.”
Linden laughed loudly. “It’s my Welsh half that comes out when I flare up. Let the conjurors take their dirty money and let the rich folk keep their purses shut. I wonder what they think money is for. Paying death duties is about the only fun some of them seem to get out of it. If I had their money…”
There was a knock at the door.
“Please, sir, your brother Silas is below.”
The two looked at each other with some dismay.
“More trouble,” said Mrs. Linden sadly.
Linden shrugged his shoulders. “All right, Susan!” he cried. “Tell him I’ll be down. Now, dear, you keep him going and I’ll be with you in a quarter of an hour.”
In less time than he named he was down in the front-room—his consulting room—where his wife was evidently having some difficulty in making agreeable conversation with their visitor. He was a big, heavy man, not unlike his elder brother, but with all the genial chubbiness of the medium coarsened into pure brutality. He had the same pile of curly hair, but he was clean-shaven with a heavy, obstinate jowl. He sat by the window with his huge freckled hands upon his knees. A very important part of Mr. Silas Linden lay in those hands, for he had been a professional boxer, and at one time was fancied for the welter-weight honours of England. Now, as his stained tweed suit and frayed boots made clear, he had fallen on evil days, which he endeavoured to mitigate by cadging on his brother.
“Mornin’, Tom,” he said in a husky voice. Then as the wife left the room: “Got a drop of Scotch about? I’ve a head on me this morning. I met some of the old set last night down at ‘The Admiral Vernon.’ Quite a reunion it was—chaps I hadn’t seen since my best ring days.”
“Sorry, Silas,” said the medium, seating himself behind his desk. “I keep nothing in the house.”