The Dark Labyrinth

The Medium

“Mr. Fearmax?”

Fearmax detached himself from those absorbing preoccupations which kept him for the greater part of the day lying down in his bunk, and turned slowly to find that Campion had entered the cabin. “Yes,” he said.

“I learned your name from Baird. I wonder if you can be the same Fearmax who used to give séances in the Euston Road before the war?”

Fearmax fixed a confused eye upon his visitor. Campion went on, with the utmost politeness. “Not that I ever came to any of them, but I saw them advertised in the weeklies; and some time afterwards I read a series of articles in a paper called The Occult which seemed to me to be quite extraordinary.”

Fearmax made a gesture of the hand and Campion obediently sat down. “Are you the same?” he said.

Fearmax made an attempt to sit up, but his lassitude was too great. He turned, therefore, on his side and rested his head upon one elbow. His voice was hoarse. “I am the Olaf Fearmax,” he said slowly. “No doubt you’ve read about my exposure as a common fraud. I wrote those articles and I gave séances in the Euston Road.”

Campion said crisply, “My name is Campion. I am a painter. I carried those articles about with me for years. The idea of reality you put forward in them was something for which I owe you a great debt.”

Fearmax frowned and then smiled; a polar smile of indifference and apathy. “I’m glad,” he said. Campion lit a cigarette. “At the time I read them”, he said, “I was coming out of what you call the First Astral State and entering the second. I felt that I knew so clearly what you were talking about, that I wanted to meet you. I wrote you a letter.”

Fearmax knitted his brows once more. “One gets so many letters,” he said, “I’m sorry if I didn’t answer it.”

Campion brushed the idea aside summarily. His face had become animated and his eyes sparkled: “The theory of the life-death polarity is something which I’ve actually proved for myself — in my own life. You remember? That when the death-principle asserts itself in our lives reality itself gets turned inside out, so that instead of being detached from it — watching it happen as an extraneous thing — one begins to manufacture it, like a silkworm manufactures its own cocoon?”

Fearmax sat up and yawned. “I was much younger then,” he said. “I thought I was being original. I had not read the Chinese then, or even the medieval people of the Caballa. Did you say you were a painter?”

“Yes,” said Campion. “I am putting everything I’ve got into painting — and yet it is the least part of me.” He put his hands upon his knees carefully, cautiously, almost as if to balance himself as he talked of these vertiginous things. “I’ve followed out the cycle you mentioned,” he said, “but I’m beginning to wonder whether your theory covered the whole of experience — or only a part. When one begins, you say, reality is everything that is outside; when the principle of death germinates, first as a conscious idea, then as a fugitive subconscious premonition, finally as something beyond these: when that happens the fundamental nature of reality is changed. The individual gets fixed in his destiny and irresistibly begins to manufacture his own personal myth, his reality. Around himself there gradually accumulates a kind of mythological ectoplasm — it informs his acts and his words. The cocoon forms in which his — for want of a better word — immortal self is enshrined. Meanwhile his stance vis-à-vis life and society becomes as irrevocably fixed as an atrophied bone. What he does he is forced to do by the very nature of his mythopaeic role; like Luther saying, ‘Here I stand. I can do no other.’” As he said the words Campion threw his arms wide and an expression of pain seemed to settle on his features. Fearmax felt suddenly ten years younger. His eyes cleared and a smile settled upon that harsh mouth, in those eyes in their charred orbits. “How well,” he said, “how very well you put it.”

Campion went on like a river in spate almost unconscious that he had an audience. “Then it is that you begin to loosen the ties of duty and obligation. If you have been a husband or a lover or a banker you renounce the role in order to withdraw more fully on to the stage of your own personal myth. You condense and refine. And when people you knew come up and take your hand, recalling incidents of ten years back, you wonder if they realize that they are talking to a corpse.”

He licked his lips and stubbed out his cigarette on the floor. “Or else”, says Fearmax, “you accept dutifully, joyfully, the demands made upon you by obligation, secure that your world is your own even if it is bounded by a nutshell, circumscribed by monogamy or the calendar. Joyfully, Mr. Campion, joyfully. But what has all this to do with painting, may I ask?”

“Exactly,” said Campion. “It has nothing to do with it — and everything. Painting by the power of the hand and eye is one thing. Painting with the lust of the soul is quite another. I am spinning a myth about myself in a series of canvases. It is so lucid and clear that it scares me. I am not troubled now by what I might be unable to say. I am troubled by what I shall, unknown to myself, reveal. And yet the process is irresistible. I am forced to separate from people and conditions because, like a leper, I am afraid of infecting them with my own contrived disease.”

He got up and walked up and down, striking his knee with a rolled-up newspaper from time to time. Fearmax watched him curiously. It reminded him of his own years of anguish and questioning in Exeter before he found what he thought would become his true métier. There was something very appealing about Campion’s fierce and uncompromising forthrightness.

“Sit down,” he said slowly. “And if it doesn’t bore you I will tell you about my own life. You can ‘compare the experience, not the events, with your own. Perhaps we shall each see more clearly.”

Fearmax was a remarkable type of the provincial derailed by wide reading. An orphan, he had spent all the long years of a friendless youth working as a bookseller’s assistant in Exeter. His childhood, which was spent behind the rusting iron gates and faded shrubbery of a provincial orphanage, had been remarkable for nothing except a tendency to fits which were diagnosed as epileptic. He was a sickly child, and at the age of thirteen his wards were happy to be rid of him; the special food and treatment recommended for him by a humane district doctor was something that did not come into the terms of reference under which the institution worked. He suffered, indeed, not from any marked cruelty on the part of the guardians as from the neglect inseparable from the routine of all institutions. He never smiled during his childhood; the fact was borne upon him one day when he caught sight of his face in the long mirror of a Hastings hotel, after one of his early triumphs as a medium. He saw his face — parched and pale from those years of concentrated reading — twisted into a wolfish grin. It was a smile — a simulacrum of happiness — that he saw trying to break through the armature of lean skin and bone which was his face.

At thirteen the bookseller’s shop seemed an exciting place. The only book he had seen was the institution Bible, which was kept chained to a wooden eagle in the chapel, and out of which the Rev. Dohgerty read the children pejorative and declamatory extracts on Sunday. His voice raged like a toothache across the visions of John or the fearful lists of prohibitions shored up in Leviticus. They did not understand, but they trembled.

The bookshop was different. There were books full of drawings and engravings, books on history and science, on topography; there were children’s books and novels in bright wrappers. The bookseller was a kindly fattish man who disguised a sense of failure and depression, in a false Pickwickian benevolence and loquacity. He was kind to the boy, found him lodgings, trained him in the trade, and occasionally saw to it that he had somewhere to go on holidays and at Christmas. Fearmax was in heaven. Though he was so poor that his wages only just covered his board and lodging, the freedom of this new life stimulated him. He had no friends, but he had the streets of the town to explore, and as many books as he wished to read at his elbow. For five years he was contented with life; but by the time he had turned eighteen the restlessness of a delayed adolescence began to take possession of him. Was he to spend the whole of his life as a bookseller’s assistant in a provincial town? And yet he had no hopes, no plans, no shadow of a programme for a new life to replace this one which offered, it is true, few material difficulties. To a great degree it was the reading that had been responsible for this; his mind had begun to lead him down strange by-paths of literature, strange back-alleys of thought and speculation; tiring quickly of novels and romances, he had begun to feed upon the out-of-the-way, the speculative, the occult. Indeed, by the time he was twenty-one his reading was immense though sporadic. He had created around himself a jungle of ill-cultivated plants — philosophies, with their weird blooms and stunted systems, like Christian Science or Theosophy. It was a disinterested hunger for some illuminating text which would explain not only the mystery of the world around him, but also his existence in it. What was he doing on earth? Since he had no friends to ask these questions of, there remained only the dusty attics of the shop. Surely there among the thousand books there might be some product of illumination and reason mixed which would put him into focus with himself. It was at this time that he began to be conscious that he was lonely. All these years he had not recognized the numb anaesthetic feeling that filled so much of his life with an unexpressed — indeed an inarticulate — anguish. He walked about most of the night through the rainy streets of the town, wrapped in his old policeman’s cape and hood, absently trying empty cigarette-machines in shop-doors, or studying his own features reflected in the windows of shops. So great was the singleness of mind that moved him, that he never thought of wanting either money or a woman. His book-filled dusty lodging differed from his book-filled dusty office only in that it contained a hip-bath, a chamber-pot and an iron bedstead. Rising at five, he would sluice his lean body with the icy water from the jug, and be already taking down the shutters of the shop by seven o’clock, winter and summer. In his work he was punctual, diligent and uncommunicative. But every spare moment of his time was spent at the little desk under the grimy window, reading. He travelled into Tibet with Huc and Gabet; he tried to solve the puzzle of the Inca stone alphabet with Fédor; Froebenius excited him by his records of customs and parables; the raw images of Nostradamus assuaged and tantalized him with their beauties and half-concealed promises; the incunabula, the prophetic books, the books of ritual — everything promised, and everything disappointed. He sat absolutely motionless on his three-legged stool, his rounded shoulders letting his head rest upon the thin shank of an arm in its frayed cuffs, and read until he was dizzy. “Why”, said the bookseller one day, “are you reading so much? You don’t seem to enjoy it. It’s like you are studying for an exam. Books are for pleasure, you know.” The remark struck him. A pleasure! Did he get any pleasure, in the strict meaning of the term, from them? Did he, if it came to that, understand exactly what the word meant? What was pleasure? He read like a hungry animal. By his thirtieth year he seemed to have become a charnel house of blasted hopes and other men’s writings. What was he searching for? Neither pleasure nor instruction or even illumination seemed to be at the back of this hunger — but something that should combine, should synthesize all three; neither truth nor beauty, but a Something which would offer him a foothold. Something which would bridge the gap between the universe of light and matter, and the small circumscribed universe of the world he lived in — two book-filled rooms linked by streets ghostly with rain and mist.

It was at this time that the old Methodist preacher took to calling at the shop for books. Fearmax would hear the stairs creak under his heavy frame, and the rap of his wooden leg on the linoleum of the top landing. He would put his book away and wait for the door to open and admit the portly, silver-haired figure. Snowden was a strange choleric old man, but an excellent buyer. He would stand leaning on his stick and look across at Fearmax in silence for a moment, while he took out his silver snuff-box and grabbed up a pinch in his knotted rheumatism-twisted finger and thumb. “I want everything on the following subjects,” he would announce, consulting a list taken from his waistcoat-pocket. He seemed to have plenty of money, and was able to buy himself complete sets of the books he wanted, without any hesitation. He too, seemed filled with a wayward discontent that impressed Fearmax as bearing a likeness to his own. “Young man,” he said once, “you no doubt think me mad. I am not buying books for a library. I read them. Yes, even the ‘Golden Bough’ and suchlike dullness. Reading is like a worm in the marrow.” He came a few steps nearer, peering at the younger man through his light blue, innocent old eyes. “A worm in the marrow,” he repeated in a whisper. Fearmax put a chair for him, and taking his list from his hand, ran up a ladder and started to hunt. As usual there were out-of-the-way things. Budge’s “Egyptian Book of the Dead”, Evans-Wentz, Férier’s pamphlet on the Hero Cult, Pamfrey on Prayer, Donne’s Sermons. The old man in the chair suddenly began to talk. “You will be thinking”, he said, “that it’s my faith I’ve lost, hunting in all these books. Yes, and you won’t be wrong. After fifty years in the Ministry too, and me surely near the edge of the grave.” Fearmax turned round on his ladder and gazed at him with his mouth open. Snowden seemed half-asleep. His hair twinkled in silver points as the faint rays of spring sunlight touched it. He smiled.

“Here we are, in our old age, suddenly woken up with the feeling that there is something wrong. Suddenly it seems as if a whole tract of knowledge had been withheld from me; knowledge of the ordinary secular affairs of men. After all, what am I? What have I been preaching all these years? I am a doctor of souls, am I not? And therefore a specialist in sin? And do I know what sin is? Have I explored it? Have I entered into the real world at any point and transformed it, so that what I have is my own by right of experience, and not an algebraic incantation taught me when I was a child? These are the questions you’ll come to one day — I hope before you reach my age.” He stood up and tapped his way to the foot of the ladder. “Have you ever seen a Minister of God who discovered one day that prayer is useless?” he asked in a surprisingly gentle and naive voice. “Look upon him. Useless. Useless.” Fearmax came gently down his ladder with the books under his arm. He was too astonished to speak.

Snowden took them from him and examined the titles slowly and with care. Then he tapped his way downstairs again to pay for them, without saying good-bye. Some weeks later his death was announced in the paper. The obituary notice told Fearmax only that his wife had died the year before, and that he had been living in retirement in a country cottage outside the town.

It was at this period too that his own life took a turn for the better. During a sleepless summer night, when he was thirty-eight, his hand took up a pencil and began to write, he knew not what, in the margin of a book. In the morning he suddenly felt as he awoke that he had been granted, after all these years of searching, an outlet, a gift, a skill of his own.

The phenomenon of automatic writing he had read about; and had not believed in it, except as a form of wilful autointoxication. Yet he saw, with numb apprehension one night, that his hand, without dictation, was writing upon the flyleaf and margins of Isaac’s Bookseller a series of disconnected words and phrases. He had been particularly tired that day, having made a bus journey to the country to buy up a collection of books belonging to a deceased lawyer. The next day and the next there was no sign on the part of his hand to perform anything beyond its normally dictated functions. But he put a writing-pad and pencil beside his bed, and on the third day found the phenomenon repeated. He began to write fluently and copiously in the notebook; and what he wrote made sense. It was a long, rather disjointed message from a woman to her husband. He puzzled over it all that day. It was not written in his own handwriting, yet in a hand that was quite consistent and well-formed.

Fearmax experimented for several weeks before submitting his work to a neighbouring bookseller, who was a medium, together with a request for his advice. He was encouraged to renew his experiments and he did so gladly, with the wonderful feeling of someone who has found his true place in life. The fruit of these months is to be found in that little pamphlet now a bibliographical rarity, “New Essays by Goldsmith”. His heart had become lighter, his intelligence more alert. He began to attend the local psychic society which met every month, and whose members busied themselves with automatic writing, planchette-messages, and séances given by visiting mediums; it was during one of the latter performances that Fearmax surprised his hosts by falling into a deep sleep, preceded by a sort of seizure, in the course of which he found himself transmitting feverishly for a spirit guide called “French Marie”. Yes, her name should be familiar. It was she, the reader will remember, who predicted not only the date of Edward’s Abdication, but also the exact date and cause of the outbreak of war, among other things.

Her first message was of no particular importance save that it gave Fearmax exactly the focus he needed for all his nervous energy. His mind began to play upon these studies like a burning-glass. He found that concentration and solitude had given a remarkable command over himself, so that it was not long before he could induce the trance at will, and establish contact with the disembodied voice whose messages were to become of such interest to the public at large.

It was not long before his growing fame made it possible for him to free himself from the irksome hold of the bookshop. He travelled across England, giving lectures and séances by invitation in many towns. Wherever he went “French Marie” obediently followed, and as obediently answered his questions, however trivial. There was only one unaccountable failure and that was at Hastings. “French Marie” refused to appear, but sent instead an unsatisfactory deputy called “Raja Patma”, who informed him that “French Marie” could not stand the town ever since she spent her earthly honeymoon there. Fearmax, however, had developed into an impressive lecturer. He had studiously modelled his accent on that of the B.B.C. announcers, he had bought himself a velvet cape with a scarlet neck-cord, he had combed his already greying hair back across his head. His confidence in himself (a commodity the absence of which he had been unaware of) grew with every success. His energies were drained off once and for all from the stagnant reaches of aimless reading and speculation. To do him full justice it must be added that he felt for the first time that he had discovered the meaning of the lifelong tendency towards epilepsy. Surely it must have been the magnetic flow of this remarkable gift speaking to him across the dam of books he had erected to hem it in? His health improved with his self-assurance.

“Mr. Olaf Fearmax, the Exeter Medium.” The Press backed him up, printing almost every one of “French Marie’s” prophecies concerning Derby Winners, Conflagrations, Stock Exchange Slumps. Fearmax was tested by the Royal Society for Occult Studies and emerged unscathed despite his nervousness about the appearance of “French Marie”. But the spirit guide was in first-class form. “French Marie” not only transmitted messages from Edward Gibbon and Ramon Novarro to such of their descendants as might still be living; she also left the “materializations” of her plump hands with unerring accuracy in bubbles of liquid paraffin.

Walking across London afterwards, towards the Gray’s Inn Road where he lived (he had recently leased a small flat of his own there) Fearmax felt that all his ambitions had been realized. There was nothing more to strive for — except perhaps to preserve his nervous equilibrium under the strain of repeated séances. But he had a mission.

It was some time before the implications of that work began to hold any meaning for him; it came gradually at first — the dawning realization that “French Marie” and the terms under which she chose to present herself to the world, constituted a commentary on the nature of reality itself. What was a materialization? If there were flesh enough for her to be able to imprint it in paraffin, how was it that the hand he so often felt upon his shoulder should not possess bone and muscle enough to be touched, to be held? How was it that she could sometimes appear in the dim red light of the seance room — a stout, good-looking youngish woman, dressed in flowing evening dresses, and with her hands gathered in front of her, below the heart, after the manner of opera singers? How was it? Why could she not step down one day out of her dimension, rich in the knowledge of both worlds, and be his partner in this? He smiled dryly as he turned from the thought of other urgent considerations. There was his American tour. Would “French Marie” cross the Atlantic for the benefit of the citizens of Chicago and Detroit? Or perhaps, like some French wines, she “did not travel”? Sitting late over a glass of hot milk an idea came to him.

The next day he was to conduct some private experiments on behalf of a young doctor, Edward Grew, who was very much interested in the physiological and psychological changes which came about during trance conditions. He would ask “French Marie” to send him her black kitten — the kitten without which, it seemed, she could hardly get through the great cycle of development in the spirit world. Fearmax was not surprised to feel the warm furry body of a kitten on his knee as he spoke the next day, but he was surprised when, according to plan, Grew broke his trance and showed him what was to all intents and purposes a real black kitten. The sweat started out among the sparse grey hairs on his scalp. Something had gone wrong, though whether his evil intention or “French Marie’s” carelessness was to blame, they did not know. For several days after that Fearmax was bothered by a phenomenon he had hitherto not experienced; it was a noise, as of a window flying open above his head, and a voice starting to speak before being choked into a whisper; no actual word was articulated, but the sound that came from an invisible throat was obviously made of air propelled through a larynx. This happened several times, often in public places. Nobody but himself seemed to hear it. And during this time it seemed quite impossible to get in touch with the spirit-guide. Meanwhile the “materialized” kitten was carried off to the laboratory of Grew, who examined it and professed it to be a real live kitten. What could all this mean?

The following Sunday “French Marie” re-established contact and appeared to be in a great state of emotion. Her kitten, she said, had “slipped”. She could not live without it. She must have it back. She was incoherent with grief. That night Grew and Fearmax chloroformed the kitten and buried it in the garden, and for some time things went on as before. “French Marie” not only crossed the Atlantic, she “sent” the audiences which awaited her the other side.

But this was not to last for ever. After several lucrative years of practice Fearmax noticed that his spirit-guide began to be less dependable. Several times she failed him altogether and he found himself floundering in a shoal of inferior transmitters. He also became anxious about her, for a certain valedictory note appeared in her messages. “It won’t be long,” she said once: and “I shall be gone when you get here”: and “can’t talk much longer.” It was alarming, for “French Marie” was very much more than a source of income; she had become as familiar as a wife or a child. He tuned in (if one may use the language of radio) to her transmissions with the certainty of a listener to a familiar station. He crossed the shoals and eddies of inferior voices clamouring for his attention, as an express train crosses points, to reach her. What would he do without her?

He broke down twice at Maidstone, once at Leeds, and once in London. Then one day “French Marie” said a tearful and final good-bye and went out like a light. It was during a private séance given for some close friends, and the medium threw himself on his knees, clasping his hands together and called out to her in great anguish not to leave him. She was the first woman to whom he had ever made a declaration of love, and it remained unanswered. He was bitterly humiliated; and found that not only had the spirit vanished, but also the faculty for inducing the seizure which preceded the trance. His gift, it seemed, had gone.

He retired to the house of an admirer in Cornwall, to rest and re-equip himself for further experiment. He felt the loss of “French Marie” almost as much as if she had been a mistress of his; so deeply, in fact, that when one day he opened a newspaper and found that a fellow-medium called Carpenter claimed to have transmitted messages from a “French Marie”, he found himself seized by a paroxysm of jealousy so bitter that he could not speak. He was like a wild man. His friends feared for his reason. He walked about on the Cornish cliffs in the thunderstorms of winter, dragging behind him the sodden folds of his enchanter’s cloak, talking to himself. What was to be done?

He sought Carpenter out in the East End. The latter was a fall, spindly old man with a bald head, an expression of extreme benevolence, an unctuous delivery, and a bad police-court record. He had been imprisoned three times for fraud. He closed one eye hard, as if he were taking aim down the barrel of a gun, and stared at Fearmax unwinkingly out of the other. What did he want with his questions about “French Marie”? After some reassurance he produced his records of a séance in which “French Marie” had appeared with messages. Fearmax read the shorthand notes with the jealousy growing in him; it was like recognizing a familiar prose style. “French Marie’s” signature was written all over the communication. He went home in a trance — not a professional trance, but a brown study, wondering what it could all mean. A week later Carpenter was killed in a motor accident.

Fearmax combed the psychic Press for any other references to “French Marie”, but it seemed that but for this faithless transfer of her affections, she had really been carried on to a new cycle of development. There was a spirit-guide called “Bonny Mary” among the repertoire of an Edinburgh medium called Alastair, but she was an irregular and inferior transmitter; no shorthand notes of séances were kept by Alastair, but a scrapbook indicated that her appearance had been contemporaneous with that of “French Marie”. The subject lapsed, and Fearmax was free to continue his life of concentrated meditation. He suffered a good deal from insomnia, and once he heard the disturbing noise of the invisible window flying open above his head. But no voice followed — not even the ghost of a voice that he had identified with “French Marie”. He felt, however, as if it had been a last desperate attempt to get in touch with him before her astral self was propelled beyond all reach upon the giant stairway of development. What was going to happen to him?

The following summer he had another of the seizures which preceded the trance-condition. But it came of its own accord, was not self-induced, and gave him little promise for the future. The spirit-guides he encountered, too, were of the most ordinary kind — inaccurate, fretful, or simply illiterate. It was humiliating for a medium of his standing to find himself in such an impasse; but Fearmax spent these months reading and writing, opening up correspondences with experts in the various fields, and contributing to the psychic Press on the general implications which lay behind a study of the occult. Some of these productions were far and away above the ordinary ill-digested theories and contentions of the medium class. His immense reading had given him powers of comparison and a range of self-expression denied to his brothers in the craft. It was now that he published the short series of articles which had struck Campion so forcibly. His essay on Lully, and his monograph on the theory of Healing as described in Paracelsus, are, of course, fairly well known to readers interested in the problems they outline. Indeed, Fearmax was well on the way to becoming a natural philosopher of sorts; yet the question of a profession was beginning to irk him. He had become affluent during his term of practice. He was living on capital.

How Hogarth’s name cropped up, it is not very clear. It was probably Grew who suggested one day that he try a consulting analyst. At any rate, he found himself in the little room where Baird had found so much to think about and so much to say; Fearmax had not the faintest idea what was expected of him. “I am a medium who has lost his gift,” he said simply to Hogarth, almost as if he expected the doctor to produce a packet of pills which would set the matter right. Hogarth, who knew something of automatic writing and kindred subjects, soon had him on to familiar ground. What ensued was more a dialectical battle than an analysis. For once he had found someone as widely read as himself; their conversations developed in volume and content until they sounded (played back on Hogarth’s dictaphone) like the thunderous off-stage exchanges of Nietzsches. Hogarth always recorded his cases on wax, whenever his interest in the case showed him good cause. Fearmax was not sorry to be so honoured. The conversations with Hogarth were a milestone in his life. He learned valuable things. Probably the most valuable of them all was Hogarth’s theory of nervous stress, and his precepts about activity as a form of automatic repose—“sweeping assumptions”, “vague generalizations”, said the Sunday papers of the time. It was Hogarth who taught him to face the thought that he might never be a medium again. There was only one secret he kept — or tried to keep. Here again, of course, he might have known that Hogarth would take the trouble to keep a check on him. Shortly after the death of Carpenter and the examination of the messages transmitted through the egregious Alastair, Fearmax had succumbed to the temptation of fraud. Never having been one, and being interested in the polemics surrounding the whole question of mediumship as a fraudulent profession, he undertook what he described to himself privately as an experiment. He agreed to give a séance, together with three other mediums, to the general public. Looking back on it, in the light of Hogarth’s logic, it seemed to him that perhaps it had been something like an act of desperation. Who knows? His true gift might have awakened. He might not have needed recourse to rubber gloves, moving tables, gramophone records and the like. His choice of Edinburgh, too, was unlucky, for the police had been conducting investigations into the private life of a medium called Pons, who was also to give a demonstration of his powers that evening. The whole incident was very sad. Police were present, an infra-red camera recorded Fearmax’s sleights-of-hand with blasting fidelity. He found himself in the dock with the other mediums, charged under the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Only his previous record enabled him to escape a prison sentence by the payment of a large fine.… Hogarth threw the copy of Psychic News containing a record of the case across the table at him one day. Why, he asked, with asperity, had Fearmax never mentioned this discreditable episode? Why indeed?

But if Hogarth prepared Fearmax to renounce his gift with a good grace, he also showed great curiosity as to the nature of the trance-condition, and even encouraged the medium to give two or three séances for friends, despite the uncertainty of reception. Hogarth listened solemnly to the ridiculous gibberish of inferior spirits, and asked very firmly for some contact to be made with his wife — without effect. Fearmax had sunk, it seemed, to the rank of third-class medium; he could not induce the preliminary seizure at will; his spirit-guides were either tongue-tied or frivolous; he could not guarantee a séance at all, in fact. It was, professionally speaking, no use at all.

“French Marie”—the only woman he had ever really loved — had gone, and with her his esteem among the general. There remained only the whole unbeaten jungle of the occult for a province of study.

During the war Fearmax had gone into a strict retreat of atonement for the sin of war, together with a few friends. They had spent their time in Cornwall obstructing the wareffort, answering foolish questions at C.O. Boards, and working vaguely on the land to the intense annoyance of their employers. During this time he founded the group which afterwards came to be known as the Astrophysical Believers. There is not room to go into the philosophy propounded by its founder, but the society flourished and had continued to grow. It had lecture rooms in the Euston Road, and a small publishing house of its own, through which the official propaganda of the body was conducted. It was to this society that Fearmax turned during the period of his analysis by Hogarth, devoting nearly all his spare time to elaborating his Swedenborgian system, and clearing up the obscurer points in a series of extremely well-written pamphlets. It was something to do. The system demanded an immense amount of elaboration: it professed to bring the whole body of occult thought (even branches like palmistry, alchemy, and astrology) into line with the latest metaphysical ideas of the age. Its existence served as a perpetual irritant to Professor Joad. It was attacked by Ouspensky, Hotchkiss, Eustace Pfoff, and Joseph G. Sthyker, the exponent of Dynamic Massage, as well as the Rudolf Steiner Society. It prospered so greatly that even the Baconian Society attacked it. Fearmax felt that he was making up for lost ground. Perhaps he was to be a new Blavatsky or Krisnamurti.

“As one crank to another,” said Hogarth one day, “why don’t you go abroad and give the whole thing a rest?”

The idea was echoed by the inner circle of the Believers. The one outstanding metaphysical account that remained to be settled was with the Society of the Great Pyramid. Their publications were beginning to disturb the Believers with their implications. Someone should visit the Pyramids, make independent observations, and fit them into the general scheme.

“Whether you believe the world is an egg or an onion,” said Hogarth, “it doesn’t matter. The point is that you are run down, and you will suddenly start going off your rocker unless you take a rest.”

Fearmax had aged a great deal. “Hogarth,” he said, “if I don’t return …” Hogarth snorted. “No. I’m serious,” said Fearmax, “quite serious. I’ve seen something here.” He held out his wrinkled palm. Hogarth looked at it through the huge magnifying glass. “It’s probably a love affair. You’ll probably meet ‘French Marie’ on the boat-train and elope with her.”

Fearmax winced and put his hand back in his pocket. He did not refer to the subject again, but at the end of the week he informed Hogarth that he planned to leave towards the end of the month. Hogarth congratulated him. To tell the truth he was getting rather bored with Fearmax. He had been a most useful case to treat because of his professional pursuits. Fearmax would, in the long run, have to work out his own destiny.

Campion listened with intense concentration to this recital of Fearmax’s life. His eyes never moved from the face of the elder man, and he never attempted to smile at any of the half-humorous asides of the medium. He seemed to find the story quite absorbing. It seemed in some way to bear comparison with his own experience, but he did not say how, or to what degree. He simply smoked in silence and, when Fearmax had finished, stayed gazing at the floor in an abstracted sort of way.

Fearmax felt tired and yet proud of himself, to be able to drag out these torn susceptibilities and old memories so fluently before a stranger — a non-professional stranger, that is.

It was something that Hogarth had made possible — an estimate of his life and work in objective terms. He was filled with gratitude suddenly for the absent Hogarth, who had so patiently endured his growing pains, his faults, his lapses.

“And you expect to get some further bearing on reality from the Great Pyramid?” said Campion with the faintest note of cynicism.

“Let me put it this way,” said Fearmax. “To endeavour to reduce the universe to a system is one thing. To maintain that system as anything but a personal view is another. If I seem touchy or slightly ashamed of some of the things I say it is not because I don’t believe in them. They are valid for me; but I have the horrifying knowledge that several hundred men and women have become my disciples, and accept my view of the world as right for them, without bothering to think for themselves along original lines. In the final analysis the Great Pyramid will give me only what I set out to find in it. It is unlikely that it will conflict with the general theories I have erected into a philosophy; if it did, I should probably neglect those elements quite unconsciously, and find myself selecting others. But it’s the disciples that bother me. Tell me, as a painter, have you ever influenced enough people to find a school growing up devoted to your manner?”

“Yes,” said Campion.

“It is horrible, is it not?”

“Yes.”

“A total disregard for the experience, the struggle, the whatnot, that lies behind every new step in technique, of expression. Well, what ails me is that my own original man, the suffering part, is prevented from growing by the dead weight of discipleship.”

“Why don’t you shake it off? Renounce it?”

“Why don’t I? I ask myself. I don’t.”

“There are things one can’t.” Campion was thinking now of Francesca. She would be looking out of the window and weeping. If he could eliminate women from his scheme of things how smooth everything would be. Fearmax was saying softly, “I’m not sure that the weakness, the corruption of one’s doctrine, if you like, isn’t necessary. After all, what one discovers one must unload — the imperative is inflexible.”

Yes, there was the rub. “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Campion lit another cigarette and, taking leave of Fearmax, sauntered on deck. A fierce competition in deck quoits was going on. Mrs. Truman was winning. In the lee of a ventilator Graecen was doing his bit towards the post office career of Miss Dale.

“It’s more than just melody,” he was saying. “It’s form too. Now, you just compare this one with John Gilpin.”

Baird was lying flat on his back with a pipe between his teeth. He was asleep.

“Come on, Mother,” said Campion to Mrs. Truman. “Time to do your pitcher.” He had immediately struck a chord of sympathy with the Trumans, immediately adopted something of Truman’s own benevolent attitude towards her. He saw her almost as soon as he boarded the Europa, a fine-looking woman with a grave and noble head in repose. He had noticed her standing at the rail — her hair lifted from the side of her head by the wind to disclose small well-shaped ears, a cigarette in her mouth. Later at dinner their eyes had met in one of those unspeaking, spontaneous recognitions upon which the inner erotic world of each of us is built. Elsie Truman was beautiful. Later he had joined the little circle of pontoon-players and had met her husband. Truman was warm and friendly. They found Campion capital company, and when the sea became calm, he dragged his little folding easel and paints on deck, and promised to paint her portrait.

“Wait,” said Mrs. Truman. “I ought to do my ‘air.”

“Do your ’air nothing,” said Campion. “Come and sit down here.” At the stern of the ship was a great locker brimming with coils of rope. It was comfortable enough, and dazzling light was broken by the awning into patches of lemon-yellow, green, mauve. Campion looked at her as she moved about with a detached, yet rather greedy eye. It was a magnificent head. He could have broken it off and walked away with it under his arm. He took her chin and tilted it until the firm line of flesh from the high cheekbones was thrown in shadow. “Now,” he said with stern compressed lips. “Stay like that.”

“Mind you make it like me,” said Mrs. Truman. “You’re not one of them modern painters are you?” Campion grunted. He was squeezing paint on to his palette and setting up his stretched canvas.

“And make me young,” said Mrs. Truman.

“You’re young enough,” he said, still busy, his mind working on ways and means. It was like watching a dentist sterilize his equipment. “A Hecuba,” he said, and at last stood up. He was looking at her now as if she were a lump of inanimate matter; it was a glance in which was mixed some of his mind’s delight in the smooth lines of the chin and mouth.

“So you want a likeness?” he said grimly, in a faraway voice. “I wonder if you’ve ever seen yourself?”

Mrs. Truman was startled out of her self-possession. She blushed. “The face of a great courtesan,” said Campion, more to himself than to anyone else. He had put a brush between his teeth now and was drawing in soft pencil on the canvas.

“I suppose you know all about them,” said Mrs. Truman, uncomfortably aware that under the badinage there might lie observations of some interest. Campion seemed to be breaking up her face into small fragments. It was no longer a synthesis — an entity called Mrs. Truman — which faced him, but a series of plastic forms and planes. It was a disturbing scrutiny. She became aware that her nose was unpowdered (“Stop squinting,” said Campion peremptorily), and that the spot on her lip looked awful.

“A courtesan,” repeated Campion. “Now if you’d lived in the south there might have been scope for your talents.”

Mrs. Truman moistened her lips and said nothing. Campion mixed smears of paint on to his palette, lit a cigarette, leaving it balanced upon a stanchion and said: “I had a girl who looked like you when I was an undergraduate. She was jolly and rough — like a blast of hot air from a tube-station. But she couldn’t make love.”

“Must have come from Scotland,” she said.

“She came from Leeds.”

“It’s a libel,” said Mrs. Truman, scratching one ankle with the sole of her shoe.

“It wasn’t till I met a Rumanian girl in Paris that I discovered the fact,” admitted Campion. He was talking in order to see the fugitive expressions of interest and amusement flit across his sitter’s face. “Her name was Lola.”

“Exotic,” suggested Mrs. Truman.

“She was an awful slut really. She lay in bed all day eating chocolates with soft centres and reading novels; but she hummed like a top in the evening.”

“So Leeds girls don’t hum, eh?” said Mrs. Truman, with good-natured amusement. “Better ask my husband. He knows Leeds.”

“You’re moving,” said Campion with a sigh, waking up from his trance and staring at her bad-temperedly. She apologized and made an attempt to freeze back into her original pose. Campion moved her head back, holding it by the nose. “There,” he said.

“I hope”, said Mrs. Truman, “that you don’t make me look like Lola. My husband is old-fashioned, you know.”

“Don’t you want a likeness?” said Campion ironically. But now he had sunk back into his concentration. He had begun to build up the portrait in a series of blocks of colour. His small ringers gripped the tall brushes tightly, with a nervous energy, as if he were afraid of dropping them. They reminded Mrs. Truman of the claws of a bird. From time to time he whistled to himself softly, or paused to drag at his cigarette.

After half an hour he allowed her a rest, and they sat together smoking and looking at the vague series of blobs on the canvas. “It looks like a street scene in Barcelona,” she said. “Here’s the fire brigade, and there’s the main street.”

“That, my good woman, is your nose emerging.”

“Bright brown?”

“A scorbutic tendency which is due to being unable to sit still without fidgeting for a second.”

“Well, I never,” said Mrs. Truman. She retired for a minute to powder it.

When she emerged on deck again Campion had started in on the painting without her. She threw away her cigarette and sat down again in the required pose. “Tell me,” she said, “how do artists happen?” It was a question that had occurred to her as she examined her face in the smoky little mirror of the cabin.

Campion was as far away as ever now. “Do you really want to know? Or are you wasting my time?”

She pursed her lips and shook her head. Campion painted on in silence for a moment. “It’s easy,” he said at last. “When they’re babies you drop them on their heads or neglect them, so they are driven to try and recapture something; so they learn a skill; then those as are bad artists are content to go on copying Nature, while those as are good — something funny happens to them.”

“What?” she said. Under his lightness she felt as if there were something else, something profound perhaps.

“They begin to make love to the object.”

“How?”

“In paint. This face of yours is so lovely. I am in a sort of inner sense making love to it with every brush-stroke. You can’t have a purer love than that can you? Which probably explains why I am so unprincipled in my private life. But this is far deeper than just sleeping with you.”

Mrs. Truman blushed crimson. Campion went on painting, apparently unaware that he had said anything to disturb her. His hands moved quickly, mixing the paint, and applying light dabs of it to the rough hollow canvas. Indeed, she suddenly had a suffocating feeling of self-consciousness, as if indeed each brush-stroke were a soft kiss, an endearment. After the session was over she went down to her cabin once more and stared at her own features in the glass. She could dimly locate its familiar qualities — good-humour, honesty, ingenuity. Was beauty among those qualities, and, if so, in what did it lie?

Her husband, who was lying in his bunk with a newspaper, turned a quizzical eye upon her. “I see,” he said, “getting vain, eh? You’ll be heading for Hollywood next.”

Mrs. Truman sat down beside him and asked in her most serious tone: “Would you say I was beautiful? I mean beautiful—the word.”

Her husband went on with his reading, absently patting her shoulder. “Yes,” he said vaguely. “Of course.” Mrs. Truman got up with dignity. “You don’t have to tell me lies, you don’t,” she said, and went on deck. Campion and Graecen were smoking over the painting. “Of course,” Campion was saying, “if you get the massive butt of the nose, the sort of way the root thickens into the frontal bone, the whole face falls into shape.”

She turned away disappointedly and strolled forward to her favourite place on A deck. They spoke as if her face were something quite separate from herself, something that was completely detached; not as if it were a personal instrument on which she registered her moods and graces. Elsie Truman looked out over the calm sea, to where the snow-capped mountains of the Peloponnesus glowed in the azure sky. Flying fish exploded in flashing beads of light at the passage of the Europa through the still sea; farther away a dolphin jumped into the air and disappeared again, leaving a black blot like an ink-stain. Tonight they would make the Piraeus. Tomorrow Crete.

They had yet to hear of the labyrinth.