Short Stories 1927-1956 Read Online Free PDF Page A

deliberate yawning, had the least effect upon Mr Bloom’s fluency. ‘Lung trouble’ appeared to have been the primary cause of his secretary’s final resignation. But if the unfortunate young man had night after night been submitted to the experience that I was now enduring , exasperation and boredom alone would have accounted for it. How on earth indeed, I asked myself, could he have endured Mr Bloom so long.
    I ceased to listen. The cascade of talk suddenly came to an end. Mr Bloom laid his hands on either side of his dessert plate and once more fixed me in silence under his glasses. ‘You, yourself, have possibly dabbled a little in my hobby?’ he enquired.
    I had indeed. In my young days my family had possessed an elderly female friend – a Miss Algood. She had been one of my mother’s bridesmaids ,and it was an unwritten law in our household that all possible consideration and affection should be shown to her in all circumstances. She, poor soul, had come down in the world – until indeed she had come down at last to one small room on the top floor in lodgings in Westbourne Park. She was gaunt, loquacious, and affectionate; and she had a consuming interest in the other world. I hear her now: ‘On the other side, my dear Charles.’ ‘Another plane, Charles.’ ‘When I myself pass over.’ It is curious; she was absolutely fearless and quixotically independent.
    For old sake’s sake, and I am afraid for very little else, I used to go to tea with her occasionally. And we would sit together, the heat welling up out of the sun-struck street outside her window; and she would bring out the hateful little round Victorian table, and the wine-glass and the cardboard alphabet; and we would ask questions of the unseen, the mischievous and the half-crazy concerning the unknowable; and she would become flushed and excited,her lean hands trembling, while she urged me now to empty my mind, and now, to concentrate! And though I can honestly say I never deliberately tampered with that execrable little wine-glass in its wanderings over the varnished table; and though she herself never, so far as I could detect, deliberately cooked the messages it spelt out for us; we enjoyed astonishing revelations. Revelations such as an intelligent monkey or parrot might invent – yet which by any practical test proved utterly valueless.
    These ‘spiritistic’ answers to our cross-examination were at the same time so unintelligibly intelligent, and yet so useless and futile, that I had been cured once and for all of the faintest interest in ‘the other side’ – thus disclosed I mean. If anything, in fact, the experience had even a little tarnished the side Mr Bloom now shared with me.
    For this reason alone his first mention of the subject had almost completely taken away my appetite for his chicken, his jelly and his champagne. After all, that ‘other side’s’ border-line from which, according to the poet, no traveller returns, must be a good many miles longer even than the wall of China, and not all its gates can lead to plains of peace or paradise or even of mere human endurableness.
    I explained at last to Mr Bloom that my interest in spiritualism was of the tepidest variety. Alas, his prominent stone-blue eyes – lit up as they were by this concentrated candle-light – incited me tobe more emphatic than I intended. I told him I detested the whole subject. ‘I am convinced,’ I assured him, ‘that if the messages, communications, whatever you like to call them, that you get that way are anything else than the babblings and mumblings of sub-consciousness – a deadly dubious term, in itself – then they are probably the work of something or somebody even more “sub” than that.’
    Convinced! I knew, of course, practically nothing at first hand about the subject – Miss Algood, poor soul, was only the fussiest and flimsiest ofamateurs – but ignorance, with a glimmer of intuition, perhaps gives one assurance.