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By Root 1081 0

My father, who often in the evenings came into the library from the drawing-room, would naturally have taken the diametrically opposite view; but in this, as in so many things, he tended to give precedence to my mother. On the present occasion, I recall there was some uncertainty, none the less. The directions to the short shelf on the left and before the corner were very generous, since the first corner was at the far end of the room. On each slip my mother wrote the name of the book and its author, and the quotation itself. Here she has put: “Short shelf. The 7th book, Wingfield’s ‘Charity’—has no green. On trying on far side (enter from Dr-Room) ‘History of Lancashire’ by Bunning, no green on it. On entering from Hall, 7th book, counting from the right, ‘The Silver Charger’ by E. Manning GREENE, page 34 has only, ‘it could be said that the knight was returned, and all well about him, save that his heart went out in the night to his dear ones left behind.’ A true message from Cecil.” In this careful record her natural honesty is shown as clearly as her credulity; the phrase “counting from the right” shows her awareness that books are normally counted from the left, but her conviction at the outcome is undimmed. Even her square, rather unformed, hand seems eloquent to me now of her stubbornness and innocence. Beneath this she has written, as always, “Present”: and each witness has put his signature, as if subscribing to the larger truth of the proceedings. “Louisa Valance. Edwin Valance. Dudley Valance. Daphne Valance. 23rd March 1918.” (On the matter of my father’s participation, it was notable that Lara’s messages never referred to him—until, once this fact had been commented on in a telephone conversation, the following week brought one expressly for him.)

I have spoken facetiously, but out of distaste, for there was an atmosphere, indescribable but unforgettable, in the library on these occasions; and one that came increasingly to linger, so that even at other times it seemed to darken the air in that already gloomy chamber. It was not at all, to my sense, that of a supernatural presence, but rather of hopes, and therefore fears, painfully laid bare. In a way it was the library I would most have liked to do away with, when I remodelled the house; the air of bogus method, of wilful tampering with broken hearts, seemed to haunt its dark alcoves and peer forth from the little carved faces on the book-shelves. You may think it strange, and weak-willed in me not to have broached the matter directly with my mother; to which I can only say that in all probability you never knew her.

There were other friends, no doubt, who acquiesced and even looked hopefully on the outcome of this psychical quackery—Lady Adeline, old Brigadier Aston at Uffington, who had lost all three of his boys. But my wife and I quickly came to deplore the hold Mrs. Aubrey had over my mother. Interspersed with evidently random book-tests came others so pointedly specific as to arouse suspicion in us (though in my mother, of course, only heightened conviction). One week the test led us to a Westminster Review with a poem of Cecil’s own in it, and the lines, “When you were there, and I away / But scenting in the Alpine air the roses of an English May”—a poem written in fact to a Newnham girl he was keen on, but to my mother’s eye a perfectly adequate parable of the afterlife. Another gave her a line from Swinburne (a poet she hadn’t previously approved of), “I will go back to the great sweet mother”; she didn’t seem to mind that the great sweet mother in question was the English Channel. She was accustomed to receiving answers to her questions and satisfaction of her demands; had it not been so pathetic I might have been more moved to laughter at the spectacle of her determination, brought face to face with the meaningless results of these latterday sortes Virgilianae. My wife was once so bold as to ask her mother-in-law why, if Cecil had wanted to tell her “Love is love alway,” he had not simply said as much to Lara, rather than putting her through