The Bachelors Read Online Free PDF

have been
too generous and have stood by too long and let others take first place. You were
born to be a leader but you have not yet fulfilled yourself. Now is the time to
start living your true life.’ Patrick moaned. His mouth drooped, the lower lip
disappearing into his chin. He looked very ill by the dim green light, and even
when he had come round and the full lights were on, his complexion was more
grey and the lines on his face deeper than before he had gone under. He was
genuinely shaken.
    ‘Amazing,’
Marlene whispered after the séance. For Henry was Harry’s real name, and the
Carl who was going to act as control in the promised future might very
conceivably be that Carl, her boy friend that was, who had been killed in a
motor-race in 1938; and indeed Marlene had been moved to wonder as far as she
dared how Harry and Carl were making out together in the land of perpetual
summer. And it had been summer-time when Harry had found out about Carl. But
the possibility of Carl’s acting as the spirit control between Harry and the
medium seemed to make everything all right, and indeed there was an authentic
rightness in the idea, for although Harry’s had been the more dynamic
personality, there was no use pretending that Carl’s had not been the rarer.
    And she
thought it very like Harry to urge her to push herself to the fore. It was
exactly what Harry would advise, being now incapacitated, or rather released
from materialistic endeavours. It was almost as if Harry were urging her to
take his place in life. It was so true that she had always let others take
place before her.
    Marlene,
in order to be fair, went and attended a séance of another spiritualist group
on an island near Richmond. But this was a disappointment, for the people were
not quite the reasonable, respectable, sort one expected to find in the
spiritualist movement. One young man had hair waving down to his waist. One
middle-aged woman with a huge blotchy face wore a tight cotton dress although
it was early March. The place was not heated, and Marlene shivered. The woman
in the tight cotton dress told Marlene she was going to give clairvoyance. She
told Marlene nothing about Harry, only advised her to be careful of false
friends, and not to despair, she wouldn’t end her life alone.
    ‘I’m
not despairing,’ Marlene said.
    The
other members looked at Marlene with hushed hostile warnings, since she was
interrupting the woman in her trance.
    So
Marlene remained with the Wider Infinity at Victoria. Soon, however, inspired
by the dynamic spirit of Harry, she began to note this and that member who was
perhaps unworthy of its high purpose. She led a purgative faction.
    ‘We
must,’ she said to Ewart Thornton, that big sane grammar-school master, ‘rid
our Body of the cranks.’
    ‘I
quite agree,’ Ewart said. ‘They lower the tone.’
    Two
clergymen who were unembarrassed by wives or livings were retained; several women
cashiers and book-keepers who did not mind the journey from Wembley, Osterley
and Camberwell on Monday and Thursday evenings; two middle-aged retired
spinsters who were interested in art; one or two of Marlene’s old friends who,
however, were erratic in their attendance; a childless married couple in their
early thirties; three widows; an Indian student who had been doing undefined
research at the British Museum for fifteen years; a retired policeman whose
wife, not a spiritualist, was a doctor’s receptionist; Ewart Thornton, the
schoolmaster; and Patrick Seton, who was, by common consent, the life and soul
of the Circle.
    ‘We
must have a cross-section of the community,’ Marlene declared. ‘A sane
cross-section. Why can’t we have a labourer, for instance?’
    No
labourer who was worthy of his hire could be found. Ewart Thornton, however,
was the means of introducing to the group a number of single schoolmasters and
civil servants who, although interested in spiritualism, had never had
sufficient courage to attend a