Arthur & George

the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.’
    Arthur had been educated, during those most plastic years, in the school of medical materialism. Any residue of formal religion had been expunged; yet he remained metaphysically respectful. He admitted the possibility of a central intelligent cause, while being unable to identify that cause, or understand why its designs should be brought to fulfilment in such roundabout and often terrible ways. As far as the mind and the soul went, Arthur accepted the scientific explanation of the day. The mind was an emanation of the brain, just as bile was an excretion of the liver – something purely physical in character; while the soul, as far as such a term could be admitted, was the total effect of all the hereditary and personal functionings of the mind. But he also recognized that knowledge never stayed still, and that today’s certainties might become tomorrow’s superstitions. Therefore, the intellectual duty to continue looking never ceased.
    At the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, which met every second Tuesday, Arthur encountered the city’s more speculative minds. Telepathy being much under discussion, Arthur found himself one afternoon sitting in a curtained and unmirrored room with a local architect, Stanley Ball. They placed themselves back to back and several yards apart; Arthur, with a drawing pad on his knee, sketched a shape and attempted by a powerful concentration of the mind to convey the image to Ball. The architect then drew whatever form his own mind seemed to propose. Then they reversed the procedure, with the architect as shape-despatcher and the doctor as recipient. The results, to their astonishment, showed a matching significantly above the random. They repeated the experiment enough times for a scientific conclusion to be reached: namely that, given a natural sympathy between conductor and receiver, thought-transference could indeed take place.
    What might this mean? If thought could be transferred across distance without any evident means of conveyance, then the pure materialism of Arthur’s teachers was, at the very least, too rigid. The congruence of drawn shapes he had achieved with Stanley Ball did not allow the return of angels with shining swords. But it nevertheless raised a question, and a stubborn one at that.
    Many others were simultaneously pushing at the ironclad walls of a materialist universe. The mesmerist Professor de Meyer, who was famous – according to the Portsmouth newspapers – across the continent of Europe, came to town and induced various healthy young men to do his bidding. Some stood with their mouths agape, incapable of closing them despite laughter from the auditorium; others fell to their knees and were unable to rise without the Professor’s permission. Arthur inserted himself into the line of candidates on stage, but Meyer’s technique left him unmesmerised and unimpressed. It smacked more of vaudeville than of scientific demonstration.
    He and Touie began attending seances. Stanley Ball was often present; also General Drayson the Southsea astronomer. They found the instructions for conducting a circle in
Light
, the weekly psychical paper. Proceedings would begin with a reading of the first chapter of Ezekiel: ‘Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go.’ The prophet’s vision – of the whirlwind and the great cloud and the brightness and the fire and the four cherubim each with four faces and each with four wings – prepared those present to be receptive. Then it was the flickering candle, the felty dimness, the concentration of mind, the emptying of self and the communal waiting. Once, a spirit answering to the name of Arthur’s great-uncle appeared behind him; on another occasion, a black man with a spear. After a few months , spirit lights became occasionally visible, even to him.
    Arthur was uncertain how much evidential weight should be granted to these collaborative circles. He was more convinced by an elderly psychic he met at the house of General Drayson. After various preparations of a rather thespian nature, the old man went into a heavy-breathing trance and began dispensing both advice and spirit