The Wanderings of a Spiritualist

My explanation is that by a miracle of packing the whole of the plant had been compressed into the rag doll, or little cloth cylinder already mentioned. The scrabbling of the hands under the cloth was to smooth out the leaves after it was freed from this covering. I observed that the leaves were still rather crumpled, and that there were dark specks of fungi which would not be there if the plant were straight from nature's manufactory. But it was wonderfully done when you consider that the man was squatting in our midst, we standing in a semi-circle around him, with no adventitious aid whatever. I do not believe that the famous Mr. Maskeleyne or any of those other wise conjurers who are good enough occasionally to put Lodge, Crookes and Lombroso in their places, could have wrought a better illusion.

The fellow had a cobra with him which he challenged me to pick up. I did so and gazed into its strange eyes, which some devilry of man's had turned to a lapis lazuli blue. The juggler said it was the result of its skin-sloughing, but I have my doubts. The poison bag had, I suppose, been extracted, but the man seemed nervous and slipped his brown hand between my own and the swaying venomous head with its peculiar flattened hood. It is a fearsome beast, and I can realise what was told me by a lover of animals that the snake was the one creature from which he could get no return of affection. I remember that I once had three in my employ when the "Speckled Band" was produced in London, fine, lively rock pythons, and yet in spite of this profusion of realism I had the experience of reading a review which, after duly slating the play, wound up with the scathing sentence, "The performance ended with the production of a palpably artificial serpent." Such is the reward of virtue. Afterwards when the necessities of several travelling companies compelled us to use dummy snakes we produced a much more realistic effect. The real article either hung down like a pudgy yellow bell rope, or else when his tail was pinched, endeavoured to squirm back and get level with the stage carpenter, who pinched him, which was not in the plot. The latter individual had no doubts at all as to the dummy being an improvement upon the real.

Never, save on the west coast of Africa, have I seen "the league-long roller thundering on the shore," as here, where the Indian Ocean with its thousand leagues of momentum hits the western coast of Ceylon. It looks smooth out at sea, and then you are surprised to observe that a good-sized boat has suddenly vanished. Then it scoops upwards once more on the smooth arch of the billow, disappearing on the further slope. The native catamarans are almost invisible, so that you see a row of standing figures from time to time on the crest of the waves. I cannot think that any craft in the world would come through rough water as these catamarans with their long outriggers can do. Man has made few more simple and more effective inventions, and if I were a younger man I would endeavour to introduce them to Brighton beach, as once I introduced ski to Switzerland, or auto-wheels to the British roads. I have other work to do now, but why does not some sportsman take the model, have it made in England, and then give an exhibition in a gale of wind on the south coast. It would teach our fishermen some possibilities of which they are ignorant.

As I stood in a sandy cove one of them came flying in, a group of natives rushing out and pulling it up on the beach. The craft consists only of two planks edgewise and lengthwise. In the nine-inch slit between them lay a number of great twelve-pound fish, like cod, and tied to the side of the boat was a ten-foot sword fish. To catch that creature while standing on a couple of floating planks must have been sport indeed, and yet the craft is so ingenious that to a man who can at a pinch swim for it, there is very small element of danger. The really great men of our race, the inventor of the wheel, the inventor of the lever, the inventor of the catamaran are all lost in the mists of the past, but ethnologists have found that the cubic capacity of the neolithic brain is as great as our own.

There are two robbers' castles, as the unhappy visitor calls them, facing the glorious sea, the one the Galle Face, the other the Mount Lavinia Hotel. They are connected by an eight-mile road, which has all the colour and life and variety of the East for every inch of the way. In that glorious sun, under the blue arch of such a sky, and with the tropical trees and flowers around, the poverty of these people is very different from the poverty of a London slum. Is there in all God's world such a life as that, and can it really be God's world while we suffer it to exist! Surely, it is a palpable truth that no one has a right to luxuries until every one has been provided with necessities, and among such necessities a decent environment is the first. If we had spent money to fight slumland as we spent it to fight Germany, what a different England it would be. The world moves all the same, and we have eternity before us. But some folk need it.

A doctor came up to me in the hotel and told me that he was practising there, and had come recently from England. He had lost his son in the war, and had himself become unsettled. Being a Spiritualist he went to Mrs. Brittain, the medium, who told him that his boy had a message for him which was that he would do very well in Colombo. He had himself thought of Ceylon, but Mrs. B. had no means of knowing that. He had obeyed the advice thus given, and was glad that he had done so. How much people may miss by cutting themselves away from these ministers of grace! In all this opposition to Spiritualism the punishment continually fits the crime.

Once again we shed passengers and proceeded in chastened mood with empty decks where once it was hard to move. Among others, good Bishop Banister of Kwang-si had gone. I care little for his sacramental and vicarious doctrines, but I am very sure that wherever his robust, kindly, sincere personality may dwell is bound to be a centre of the true missionary effort – the effort which makes for the real original teaching of his Master, submission to God and goodwill to our fellow men.

Now we are on the last lap with nothing but a clear stretch of salt water between our prow and West Australia. Our mission from being a sort of dream takes concrete form and involves definite plans. Meanwhile we plough our way through a deep blue sea with the wind continually against us. I have not seen really calm water since we left the Canal. We carry on with the usual routine of ship sports, which include an England and Australia cricket match, in which I have the honour of captaining England, a proper ending for a long if mediocre career as a cricketer. We lost by one run, which was not bad considering our limited numbers.

Posers of all sorts are brought to me by thoughtful inquirers, which I answer when I can. Often I can't. One which is a most reasonable objection has given me a day's thought. If, as is certain, we can remember in our next life the more important incidents of this one, why is it that in this one we can remember nothing of that previous spiritual career, which must have existed since nothing can be born in time for eternity? Our friends on the other side cannot help us there, nor can even such extended spiritual visions as those of Vale Owen clear it up. On the whole we must admit that our Theosophical friends, with whom we quarrel for their absence of evidence, have the best attempt at an explanation. I imagine that man's soul has a cycle which is complete in itself, and all of which is continuous and self conscious. This begins with earth life. Then at last a point is reached, it may be a reincarnation, and a new cycle is commenced, the old one being closed to our memory until we have reached some lofty height in our further journey. Pure speculation, I admit, but it would cover what we know and give us a working hypothesis. I can never excite myself much about the reincarnation idea, for if it be so, it occurs seldom, and at long intervals, with ten years spent in the other spheres for one spent here, so that even admitting all that is said by its supporters it is not of such great importance. At the present rate of change this world will be as strange as another sphere by the time we are due to tread the old stage once more. It is only fair to say that though many spiritualists oppose it, there is a strong body, including the whole French Allan Kardec school, who support it. Those who have passed over may well be divided upon the subject since it concerns their far future and is a matter of speculation to them as to us.

Thrasher whales and sperm whales were seen which aroused the old whaling thrill in my heart. It was the more valuable Greenland whale which I helped to catch, while these creatures are those which dear old Frank Bullen, a childlike sailor to the last, described in his "Cruise of the Cachelot." How is it that sailors write such perfect English. There are Bullen and Conrad, both of whom served before the mast – the two purest stylists of their generation. So was Loti in France. There are some essays of Bullen's, especially a description of a calm in the tropics, and again of "Sunrise seen from the Crow's Nest," which have not been matched in our time for perfection of imagery and diction. They are both in his "Idyls of the Sea." If there is compensation in the beyond – and I know that there is – then Frank Bullen is in great peace, for his whole earthly life was one succession of troubles. When I think of his cruel stepmother, his dreadful childhood, his life on a Yankee blood ship, his struggles as a tradesman, his bankruptcy, his sordid worries, and finally, his prolonged ill-health, I marvel at the unequal distribution of such burdens. He was the best singer of a chanty that I have ever heard, and I can hear him now with his rich baritone voice trolling out "Sally Brown" or "Stormalong." May I hear him once again! Our dear ones tell us that there is no great gap between what pleases us here and that which will please us in the beyond. Our own brains, had we ever used them in the matter, should have instructed us that all evolution, spiritual as well as material, must be gradual. Indeed, once one knows psychic truth, one can, reasoning backwards, perceive that we should unaided have come to the same conclusions, but since we have all been deliberately trained not to use our reason in religious matters, it is no wonder that we have made rather a hash of it. Surely it is clear enough that in the case of an artist the artistic nature is part of the man himself. Therefore, if he survives it must survive. But if it survives it must have means of expression, or it is a senseless thing. But means of expression implies appreciation from others and a life on the general lines of this one. So also of the drama, music, science and literature, if we carry on they carry on, and they cannot carry on without actual expression and a public to be served.

To the east of us and just beyond the horizon lie the Cocos Islands, where Ross established his strange little kingdom, and where the Emden met its end – a glorious one, as every fair minded man must admit. I have seen her stern post since then in the hall of the Federal Parliament at Melbourne, like some fossil monster, once a terror and now for children to gaze at. As to the Cocos Islands, the highest point is, I understand, about twenty feet, and tidal waves are not unknown upon the Pacific, so that the community holds its tenure at very short and sudden notice to quit.

On the morning of September 17th a low coast line appeared upon the port bow – Australia at last. It was the edge of the West Australian State. The evening before a wireless had reached me from the spiritualists of Perth saying that they welcomed us and our message. It was a kind thought and a helpful one. We were hardly moored in the port of Fremantle, which is about ten miles from the capital, when a deputation of these good, kind people was aboard, bearing great bunches of wild flowers, most of which were new to us. Their faces fell when they learned that I must go on in the ship and that there was very little chance of my being able to address them. They are only connected with the other States by one long thin railway line, 1,200 miles long, with scanty trains which were already engaged, so that unless we stuck to the ship we should have to pass ten days or so before we could resume our journey. This argument was unanswerable, and so the idea of a meeting was given up.

These kind people had two motors in attendance, which must, I fear, have been a strain upon their resources, for as in the old days the true believers and practical workers are drawn from the poor and humble. However, they certainly treated us royally, and even the children were packed into the motors. We skirted the Swan River, passed through the very beautiful public park, and, finally, lunched at the busy town, where Bone's store would cut a respectable figure in London, with its many departments and its roof restaurant. It was surprising after our memories of England to note how good and abundant was the food. It is a charming little town, and it was strange, after viewing its settled order, to see the mill where the early settlers not so very long ago had to fight for their lives with the black fellows. Those poor black fellows! Their fate is a dark stain upon Australia. And yet it must in justice to our settlers be admitted that the question was a very difficult one. Was colonisation to be abandoned, or were these brave savages to be overcome? That was really the issue. When they speared the cattle of the settlers what were the settlers to do? Of course, if a reservation could have been opened up, as in the case of the Maoris, that would have been ideal. But the noble Maori is a man with whom one could treat on equal terms and he belonged to a solid race. The Aborigines of Australia were broken wandering tribes, each at war with its neighbours. In a single reservation they would have exterminated each other. It was a piteous tragedy, and yet, even now in retrospect, how difficult it is to point out what could have been done.

The Spiritualists of Perth seem to be a small body, but as earnest as their fellows elsewhere. A masterful looking lady, Mrs. McIlwraith, rules them, and seems fit for the part. They have several mediums developing, but I had no chance of testing their powers. Altogether our encounter with them cheered us on our way. We had the first taste of Australian labour conditions at Fremantle, for the men knocked off at the given hour, refusing to work overtime, with the result that we carried a consignment of tea, meant for their own tea-pots, another thousand miles to Adelaide, and so back by train which must have been paid for out of their own pockets and those of their fellow citizens. Verily, you cannot get past the golden rule, and any breach of it brings its own punishment somehow, somewhere, be the sinner a master or a man.

And now we had to cross the dreaded Bight, where the great waves from the southern ice come rolling up, but our luck was still in, and we went through it without a qualm. Up to Albany one sees the barren irregular coast, and then there were two days of blue water, which brought us at last to Adelaide, our port of debarkation. The hour and the place at last!

CHAPTER III

Mr. Hughes' letter of welcome. – Challenges. – Mr. Carlyle Smythe. – The Adelaide Press. – The great drought. – The wine industry. – Clairvoyance. – Meeting with Bellchambers. – The first lecture. – The effect. – The Religious lecture. – The illustrated lecture. – Premonitions. – The spot light. – Mr. Thomas' account of the incident. – Correspondence. – Adelaide doctors. – A day in the Bush. – The Mallee fowl. – Sussex in Australia. – Farewell to Adelaide

I was welcomed to Australia by a hospitable letter from the Premier, Mr. Hughes, who assured me that he would do what he could to make our visit a pleasant one, and added, "I hope you will see Australia as it is, for I want you to tell the world about us. We are a very young country, we have a very big and very rich heritage, and the great war has made us realise that we are Australians, proud to belong to the Empire, but proud too of our own country."

Apart from Mr. Hughes's kind message, my chief welcome to the new land came from Sydney, and took the queer form of two independant challenges to public debate, one from the Christian Evidence Society, and the other from the local leader of the materialists. As the two positions are mutually destructive, one felt inclined to tell them to fight it out between themselves and that I would fight the winner. The Christian Evidence Society, is, of course, out of the question, since they regard a text as an argument, which I can only accept with many qualifications, so that there is no common basis. The materialist is a more worthy antagonist, for though he is often as bigotted and inaccessible to reason as the worst type of Christian, there is always a leaven of honest, open-minded doubters on whom a debate might make an impression. A debate with them, as I experienced when I met Mr. MacCabe, can only follow one line, they quoting all the real or alleged scandals which have ever been connected with the lowest forms of mediumship, and claiming that the whole cult is comprised therein, to which you counter with your own personal experiences, and with the evidence of the cloud of witnesses who have found the deepest comfort and enlarged knowledge. It is like two boxers each hitting the air, and both returning to their respective corners amid the plaudits of their backers, while the general public is none the better.

Three correspondents headed me off on the ship, and as I gave each of them a long separate interview, I was a tired man before I got ashore. Mr. Carlyle Smythe, my impresario, had also arrived, a small alert competent gentleman, with whom I at once got on pleasant terms, which were never once clouded during our long travels together upon our tour. I was fortunate indeed to have so useful and so entertaining a companion, a musician, a scholar, and a man of many varied experiences. With his help we soon got our stuff through the customs, and made the short train journey which separates the Port of Adelaide from the charming city of that name. By one o'clock we were safely housed in the Grand Central Hotel, with windows in place of port holes, and the roar of the trams to take the place of the murmurs of the great ocean.

The good genius of Adelaide was a figure, already almost legendary, one Colonel Light, who played the part of Romulus and Remus to the infant city. Somewhere in the thirties of last century he chose the site, against strong opposition, and laid out the plan with such skill that in all British and American lands I have seen few such cities, so pretty, so orderly and so self-sufficing. When one sees all the amenities of the place, botanical gardens, zoological gardens, art gallery, museum, university, public library and the rest, it is hard to realise that the whole population is still under three hundred thousand. I do not know whether the press sets the tone to the community or the community to the press, but in any case Adelaide is greatly blessed in this respect, for its two chief papers the Register and the Advertiser, under Sir William Sowden and Sir Langdon Bonython respectively, are really excellent, with a worldwide Metropolitan tone.

Their articles upon the subject in which I am particularly interested, though by no means one-sided, were at least informed with knowledge and breadth of mind.

In Adelaide I appreciated, for the first time, the crisis which Australia has been passing through in the shape of a two-years drought, only recently broken. It seems to have involved all the States and to have caused great losses, amounting to millions of sheep and cattle. The result was that the price of those cattle which survived has risen enormously, and at the time of our visit an absolute record had been established, a bullock having been sold for £41. The normal price would be about £13. Sheep were about £3 each, the normal being fifteen shillings. This had, of course, sent the price of meat soaring with the usual popular unrest and agitation as a result. It was clear, however, that with the heavy rains the prices would fall. These Australian droughts are really terrible things, especially when they come upon newly-opened country and in the hotter regions of Queensland and the North. One lady told us that she had endured a drought in Queensland which lasted so long that children of five had never seen a drop of rain. You could travel a hundred miles and find the brown earth the whole way, with no sign of green anywhere, the sheep eating twigs or gnawing bark until they died. Her brother sold his surviving sheep for one shilling each, and when the drought broke had to restock at 50s. a head. This is a common experience, and all but the man with savings have to take to some subordinate work, ruined men. No doubt, with afforestation, artesian wells, irrigation and water storage things may be modified, but all these things need capital, and capital in these days is hard to seek, nor can it be expected that capitalists will pour their money into States which have wild politicians who talk lightly of past obligations. You cannot tell the investor that he is a bloated incubus one moment, and go hat in hand for further incubation the next. I fear that this grand country as a whole may suffer from the wild ideas of some of its representatives. But under it all lies the solid self-respecting British stuff, which will never repudiate a just debt, however heavily it may press. Australians may groan under the burden, but they should remember that for every pound of taxation they carry the home Briton carries nearly three.

But to return for a moment to the droughts; has any writer of fiction invented or described a more long-drawn agony than that of the man, his nerves the more tired and sensitive from the constant unbroken heat, waiting day after day for the cloud that never comes, while under the glaring sun from the unchanging blue above him, his sheep, which represent all his life's work and his hopes, perish before his eyes? A revolver shot has often ended the long vigil and the pioneer has joined his vanished flocks. I have just come in contact with a case where two young returned soldiers, demobilised from the war and planted on the land had forty-two cattle given them by the State to stock their little farm. Not a drop of water fell for over a year, the feed failed, and these two warriors of Palestine and Flanders wept at their own helplessness while their little herd died before their eyes. Such are the trials which the Australian farmer has to bear.

While waiting for my first lecture I do what I can to understand the country and its problems. To this end I visited the vineyards and wine plant of a local firm which possesses every factor for success, save the capacity to answer letters. The originator started grape culture as a private hobby about 60 years ago, and now such an industry has risen that this firm alone has £700,000 sunk in the business, and yet it is only one of several. The product can be most excellent, but little or any ever reaches Europe, for it cannot overtake the local demand. The quality was good and purer than the corresponding wines in Europe – especially the champagnes, which seem to be devoid of that poison, whatever it may be, which has for a symptom a dry tongue with internal acidity, driving elderly gentlemen to whisky and soda. The Australian product, taken in moderate doses, seems to have no poisonous quality, and is without that lime-like dryness which appears to be the cause of it. If temperance reform takes the sane course of insisting upon a lowering of the alcohol in our drinks, so that one may be surfeited before one could be drunken, then this question of good mild wines will bulk very largely in the future, and Australia may supply one of the answers. With all my sympathy for the reformers I feel that wine is so useful a social agent that we should not abolish it until we are certain that there is no via media. The most pregnant argument upon the subject was the cartoon which showed the husband saying "My dear, it is the anniversary of our wedding. Let us have a second bottle of ginger beer."

We went over the vineyards, ourselves mildly interested in the vines, and the children wildly excited over the possibility of concealed snakes. Then we did the vats and the cellars with their countless bottles. We were taught the secrets of fermentation, how the wonderful Pasteur had discovered that the best and quickest was produced not by the grape itself, as of old, but by the scraped bloom of the grape inserted in the bottle. After viewing the number of times a bottle must be turned, a hundred at least, and the complex processes which lead up to the finished article, I will pay my wine bills in future with a better grace. The place was all polished wood and shining brass, like the fittings of a man-of-war, and a great impression of cleanliness and efficiency was left upon our minds. We only know the Australian wines at present by the rough article sold in flasks, but when the supply has increased the world will learn that this country has some very different stuff in its cellars, and will try to transport it to their tables.

We had a small meeting of spiritualists in our hotel sitting-room, under the direction of Mr. Victor Cromer, a local student of the occult, who seems to have considerable psychic power. He has a small circle for psychic development which is on new lines, for the neophytes who are learning clairvoyance sit around in a circle in silence, while Mr. Cromer endeavours by mental effort to build up the thought form of some object, say a tree, in the centre of the room. After a time he asks each of the circle what he or she can see, and has many correct answers. With colours in the same way he can convey impressions to his pupils. It is clear that telepathy is not excluded as an explanation, but the actual effect upon the participants is according to their own account, visual rather than mental. We had an interesting sitting with a number of these developing mediums present, and much information was given, but little of it could be said to be truly evidential. After seeing such clairvoyance as that of Mr. Tom Tyrell or others at home, when a dozen names and addresses will be given together with the descriptions of those who once owned them, one is spoiled for any lesser display.

There was one man whom I had particularly determined to meet when I came to Australia. This was Mr. T. P. Bellchambers, about whom I had read an article in some magazine which showed that he was a sort of humble Jeffries or Thoreau, more lonely than the former, less learned than the latter, who lived among the wild creatures in the back country, and was on such terms with our humble brothers as few men are ever privileged to attain. I had read how the eagle with the broken wing had come to him for succour, and how little birds would sit on the edge of his pannikin while he drank. Him at all cost would we see. Like the proverbial prophet, no one I met had ever heard of him, but on the third day of our residence there came a journalist bearing with him a rudely dressed, tangle-haired man, collarless and unkempt, with kind, irregular features and clear blue eyes – the eyes of a child. It was the man himself. "He brought me," said he, nodding towards the journalist. "He had to, for I always get bushed in a town."

This rude figure fingering his frayed cap was clearly out of his true picture, and we should have to visit him in his own little clearing to see him as he really was. Meanwhile I wondered whether one who was so near nature might know something of nature's more occult secrets. The dialogue ran like this:

"You who are so near nature must have psychic experiences."

"What's psychic? I live so much in the wild that I don't know much."

"I expect you know plenty we don't know. But I meant spiritual."

"Supernatural?"

"Well, we think it is natural, but little understood."

"You mean fairies and things?"

"Yes, and the dead."

"Well, I guess our fairies would be black fairies."

"Why not?"

"Well, I never saw any."

"I hoped you might."

"No, but I know one thing. The night my mother died I woke to find her hand upon my brow. Oh, there's no doubt. Her hand was heavy on my brow."

"At the time?"

"Yes, at the very hour."

"Well, that was good."

"Animals know more about such things."

"Yes."

"They see something. My dog gets terrified when I see nothing, and there's a place in the bush where my horse shies and sweats, he does, but there's nothing to see."

"Something evil has been done there. I've known many cases."

"I expect that's it."

So ran our dialogue. At the end of it he took a cigar, lighted it at the wrong end, and took himself with his strong simple backwoods atmosphere out of the room. Assuredly I must follow him to the wilds.