May 12
In the fortnight past I have had few evenings to myself, but tonight there are no sittings, so I will take this time to bring my journal up to date.
The Clerkenwell household is small. Besides Madame Rulenska, Mr. Dodds and myself, there is the cook, Mrs. Bragg, and the maid-of-all work Milly. Mrs. Bragg’s cooking runs to mutton, potatoes, cabbage and suet puddings, and not the spicy vegetarian dishes I grew accustomed to at Lansdowne Road. Milly is a plump, rosy-cheeked country girl of seventeen or so. She puts me so much in mind of the girls I knew in the Borders that I think we could be good friends; but Madame Rulenska makes it clear that as her assistant, I must keep the servants in their place.
No fashionable West End ladies, no duchesses or famous authors attend Madame Rulenska’s séances. Her clients are people of modest means, widows of clerks and shopkeepers — chapel-goers with an unquestioning belief in an afterlife and the possibility of messages from beyond.
As she explained, though she sees her vocation as a caller-up of spirits, Madame Rulenska has also taught herself some simple stage conjurer’s tricks. A part of my duties is to assist in displays of what she calls clairvoyance — the reading of things that are hidden. In one of her popular entertainments, a member of the audience is asked to write a series of numbers on a thick piece of card. Then I hold up the card so that the numbers are visible to the audience, but hidden from Madame Rulenska, who sits the front of the room. Madame R. hesitates for a while, as though the spirits (who supposedly are dictating the hidden numbers) are absent or inattentive. My task is to encourage her efforts, until finally, as revelation strikes, she reads off the correct numbers, one after another. This performance never fails to impress the onlookers, and convinces them of Madame’s psychic powers, but the trick is absurdly simple enough once you know how it is done. All it requires is a good memory, and an ability to think on one’s feet.
In Madame Rulenska’s method, each number from 0 to 10 has a secret word assigned to it (and these words are changed from one performance to the next). For example:
Zero: Listen
One: Look
Two: But
Three: Is
Four: Ask
Five: What
Six: Yes
Seven: Please
Eight: Now
Nine: Tell
Ten: Madame
And so if the numbers on the card are 5, 2, 7, 6, 8, each sentence I speak to Madame must begin with one of the secret words, and the conversation might go something like this:
Me: “What (5) do the spirits tell you?”
Madame R: “Wait a moment, the message is not clear.”
Me: “But (2) do you not hear what they are saying?”
Madame R: “Only very faintly. Wait, there is something . . . ”
Me: “Please (7) try to listen more carefully.”
Madame R: (With a touch of annoyance) “Really, I am doing my best.
Me: (Soothingly) “Yes (6) of course, Madame, we understand that.”
Madame R: “(Brow wrinkled, listening hard) “Ah, that is much better!”
Me: “Now (8) are you able to tell us the numbers?”
Madame: “Yes, certainly. They are 5, 2, 7, 6, 8.”
(Delighted applause)
I am becoming quite clever at this game, and I find that I enjoy the challenge. It is trickery, to be sure, but I think of a fairly harmless kind. I am much less comfortable with invoking the spirits of the dead. I feel it is very wrong to profit from a widow’s bereavement, or a mother’s desperate grief.
But now Madame Rulenska has added another stage trick. Each of our guests is asked to write a question on a card, then seal the card carefully into an envelope, and sign their name in ink across the seal. I collect the envelopes in a basket and take them out of the room — “to avoid any psychic interference,” Madame Rulenska explains, obscurely. Then she leans back in her chair, breathes deeply, and drifts into trance. Our visitors, abuzz with anticipation, are left to chat among themselves.
After thirty minutes or so I return with the basket of envelopes. I choose half a dozen at random and pass them to their owners for inspection, asking them to confirm that the flaps are still firmly sealed down and the signatures intact. Then I gather up the envelopes and hand the basket to Madame Rulenska, now apparently deep in trance. She chooses an envelope, presses it with a dramatic gesture to her brow, and calls upon one of her spirits to read what is written inside. The odour of incense, oppressively strong in that close room, conceals the faint whiff of benzine that a sensitive nose might otherwise detect.
For that is how the trick, is done: with a benzine-soaked sponge, wiped over the front of the envelope until, briefly, the paper becomes transparent, and I am able to read what is written on the card inside. Then I take another, identical, blank envelope, write this question across the sealed flap, and mark it with the questioner’s initials. That envelope, meant for Madame Rulenska’s eyes alone, goes into the basket along with all the others.
There are two spirits whose task it is to answer questions. Running Wolf — so Madame Rulenska tells me — is an Iroquois chief from the wilds of Canada. He has a deep, gruff voice, and speaks in a peculiar sort of pidgin English. And then there is the Countess Violette, the shy sweet-voiced spirit of a French aristocrat, guillotined in the Revolution.
They take turn about manifesting themselves at our sittings. Both are very popular with our visitors, and no one seems to mind that their replies are too vague and general to be much help.
For example, this afternoon one of the ladies wrote on her card, “Where shall I look for my missing amber brooch?”
The Countess Violette, always eager to oblige, said, “Eet ees très necessaire to make a thorough search of your house, with particular regard to your bed chambre.” (Which reply the lady received with a nod and a grateful smile — as though she could not have worked this out for herself.)
In another session a gentleman asked for investment advice, and was advised by Running Wolf to proceed with care, like a hunter in the forest, “for him who runs with heavy feet may lose much wampum.”
For our afternoon sittings we draw the curtains and sit in half-light — an atmosphere of gloom being, I expect, more comfortable for spirit visitors than ordinary daylight. In the evenings, with the séance room plunged into darkness, Madame Rulenska’s performances grow more adventurous, and she is finding new ways to make use of what she calls my “psychokinetic gifts”. Besides the usual raps and knocks and dancing furniture, with my assistance she produces thrilling effects with “spirit lights”. While our guests sit hands clasped in marvelling silence, I make hundreds of tiny points of light appear, and drift slowly round the room like luminous snowflakes, or fallen stars. “How strange! How wonderful!” I hear the astonished whispers, as the last of the lights float away, and audience begins to stir.
It is a trick that never fails to enchant and mystify. Our audiences leave with a comforting assurance that the spirit world exists, and is near enough at times to touch our own. No one suspects that in Madame Rulenska’s bag of tricks is a vial of phosphorous oil, or that after the séance Millie comes with her broom to sweep from behind the furniture hundreds of tiny scraps of silk.