The Purple Cloud Read online

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  THE PURPLE CLOUD

  By

  M.P. Shiel

  1901

  [Greek: estai kai Samos ammos, eseitai Daelos adaelos]

  _Sibylline Prophecy_

  INTRODUCTION

  About three months ago--that is to say, toward the end of May of thisyear of 1900--the writer whose name appears on the title-page receivedas noteworthy a letter, and packet of papers, as it has been his lot toexamine. They came from a very good friend of mine, whose name there isno reason that I should now conceal--Dr. Arthur Lister Browne, M.A.(Oxon.), F.R.C.P. It happened that for two years I had been spendingmost of my time in France, and as Browne had a Norfolk practice, I hadnot seen him during my visits to London. Moreover, though our friendshipwas of the most intimate kind, we were both atrocious correspondents: sothat only two notes passed between us during those years.

  Till, last May, there reached me the letter--and the packet--to which Irefer. The packet consisted of four note-books, quite crowdedthroughout with those giddy shapes of Pitman's shorthand, whose_ensemble_ so resembles startled swarms hovering in flighty poses on thewing. They were scribbled in pencil, with little distinction betweenthick and thin strokes, few vowels: so that their slow deciphering, Ican assure the reader, has been no holiday. The letter also waspencilled in shorthand; and this letter, together with the second of thenote-books which I have deciphered (it was marked 'III.'), I nowpublish.

  [I must say, however, that in some five instances there will occursentences rather crutched by my own guess-work; and in two instances thecharacters were so impossibly mystical, that I had to abandon thepassage with a head-ache. But all this will be found immaterial to thegeneral narrative.]

  The following is Browne's letter:

  'DEAR OLD SHIEL,--I have just been lying thinking of you, and wishingthat you were here to give one a last squeeze of the hand beforeI--"_go_": for, by all appearance, "going" I am. Four days ago, I beganto feel a soreness in the throat, and passing by old Johnson's surgeryat Selbridge, went in and asked him to have a look at me. He mutteredsomething about membranous laryngitis which made me smile, but by thetime I reached home I was hoarse, and not smiling: before night I haddyspnoca and laryngeal stridor. I at once telegraphed to London forMorgan, and, between him and Johnson, they have been opening my trachea,and burning my inside with chromic acid and the galvanic cautery. Thedifficulty as to breathing has subsided, and it is wonderful how littleI suffer: but I am much too old a hand not to know what's what: thebronchi are involved--_too far_ involved--and as a matter of absolutefact, there isn't any hope. Morgan is still, I believe, fondly dwellingupon the possibility of adding me to his successful-tracheotomystatistics, but prognosis was always my strong point, and I say No. Thevery small consolation of my death will be the beating of a specialistin his own line. So we shall see.

  'I have been arranging some of my affairs this morning, and rememberedthese notebooks. I intended letting you have them months ago, but myhabit of putting things off, and the fact that the lady was alive fromwhom I took down the words, prevented me. Now she is dead, and as aliterary man, and a student of life, you should be interested, if youcan manage to read them. You may even find them valuable.

  'I am under a little morphia at present, propped up in a nice littlestate of languor, and as I am able to write without much effort, I willtell you in the old Pitman's something about her. Her name was Miss MaryWilson; she was about thirty when I met her, forty-five when she died,and I knew her intimately all those fifteen years. Do you know anythingabout the philosophy of the hypnotic trance? Well, that was the relationbetween us--hypnotist and subject. She had been under another man beforemy time, but no one was ever so successful with her as I. She sufferedfrom _tic douloureux_ of the fifth nerve. She had had most of her teethdrawn before I saw her, and an attempt had been made to wrench out thenerve on the left side by the external scission. But it made nodifference: all the clocks in hell tick-tacked in that poor woman's jaw,and it was the mercy of Providence that ever she came across _me_. Myorganisation was found to have almost complete, and quite easy, controlover hers, and with a few passes I could expel her Legion.

  'Well, you never saw anyone so singular in personal appearance as myfriend, Miss Wilson. Medicine-man as I am, I could never behold hersuddenly without a sensation of shock: she suggested so inevitably whatwe call "the _other_ world," one detecting about her some odour of theworm, with the feeling that here was rather ghost than woman. And yet Ican hardly convey to you the why of this, except by dry details as tothe contours of her lofty brow, meagre lips, pointed chin, and ashencheeks. She was tall and deplorably emaciated, her whole skeleton,except the thigh-bones, being quite visible. Her eyes were of the bluishhue of cigarette smoke, and had in them the strangest, feeble, unearthlygaze; while at thirty-five her paltry wisp of hair was quite white.

  'She was well-to-do, and lived alone in old Wooding Manor-house, fivemiles from Ash Thomas. As you know, I was "beginning" in these parts atthe time, and soon took up my residence at the manor. She insisted thatI should devote myself to her alone; and that one patient constitutedthe most lucrative practice which I ever had.

  'Well, I quickly found that, in the state of trance, Miss Wilsonpossessed very remarkable powers: remarkable, I mean, not, of course,because peculiar to herself in _kind_, but because they were soconstant, reliable, exact, and far-reaching, in degree. The veriestfledgling in psychical science will now sit and discourse finically toyou about the reporting powers of the mind in its trance state--just asthough it was something quite new! This simple fact, I assure you, whichthe Psychical Research Society, only after endless investigation, admitsto be scientific, has been perfectly well known to every old crone sincethe Middle Ages, and, I assume, long previously. What an unnecessary airof discovery! The certainty that someone in trance in Manchester cantell you what is going on in London, or in Pekin, was not, of course,left to the acumen of an office in Fleet Street; and the society, inestablishing the fact beyond doubt for the general public, has not goneone step toward explaining it. They have, in fact, revealed nothing thatmany of us did not, with absolute assurance, know before.

  'But talking of poor Miss Wilson, I say that her powers were_remarkable_, because, though not exceptional in _genre_, they were sospecial in quantity,--so "constant," and "far-reaching." I believe it tobe a fact that, _in general_, the powers of trance manifest themselvesmore particularly with regard to space, as distinct from time: thespirit roams in the present--it travels over a plain--it does not_usually_ attract the interest of observers by great ascents, or bygreat descents. I fancy that is so. But Miss Wilson's gift was specialto this extent, that she travelled in every direction, and easily in allbut one, north and south, up and down, in the past, the present, and thefuture.

  This I discovered, not at once, but gradually. She would emit a streamof sounds in the trance state--I can hardly call it _speech_, somurmurous, yet guttural, was the utterance, mixed with puffybreath-sounds at the languid lips. This state was accompanied by anintense contraction of the pupils, absence of the knee-jerk,considerable rigor, and a rapt and arrant expression. I got into thehabit of sitting long hours at her bed-side, quite fascinated by her,trying to catch the import of that opiate and visionary language whichcame puffing and fluttering in deliberate monotone from her lips.Gradually, in the course of months, my ear learned to detect the words;"the veil was rent" for me also; and I was able to follow somewhat thecourse of her musing and wandering spirit.

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

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

  She replied, "Us are in a room, eight hundred and eleven miles above. Aman is writing. Us are reading."

  I may tell you two things: first, that in trance she never spoke ofherself as "I," nor even as "we," but, for some unknown reason, in the_objective_ way, as "_us_": "us are," she would say--"us will," "uswent"; though, of course, she was an educated lady, and I don't thinkever lived in the West of England, where they say "us" in that way;secondly, when wandering in the past, she always represented herself asbeing "_above_" (the earth?), and higher the further