CHAPTER XVII

ACROSS THE THRESHOLD

Once upon a time I had an interesting experience showing how often one may be in the presence of the disembodied without being in the least aware of the fact.

It was a bright, cold day in October, with a biting wind and brilliant sunshine. About midday I was walking up a long avenue leading to a great house. On either side of me, for a mile or so, lay flat, open grass country, pasturages full of grazing cattle. The trees bordering the avenue stood at about thirty feet apart; they were gigantic beeches of considerable age. Their silvery trunks of wide girth were smooth and straight, and in no way impeded the view on all sides. The avenue was wide and straight and bordered by grass out of which the trees sprang.

As I turned in at the lodge gate I noticed, without any particular interest, a woman walking in front of me, but in a very few moments I began to pay more attention to her obvious peculiarities. She was about twenty-five to thirty feet ahead of me, moving in the same direction, and the view I had of her back began to puzzle me. On that decidedly chilly morning she wore a white muslin dress, a material never used out of doors even in summer in that northern clime. Over her shoulders floated something mauve and flimsy, and on her head was what looked like an old-fashioned poke-bonnet.

Her back looked young, and yet she was a creature of a bygone century, and knowing every one within a twenty-mile radius of where I walked I speculated as to who she could possibly be.

Perhaps what puzzled me most was how she had managed to avoid the attention of the village children, who would at once have been alive to the novelty of her whole appearance. I looked forward to hearing all about her at the big house, and as seemed highly probable, meeting her face to face and obtaining an introduction to her.

Then it suddenly occurred to me to overtake her and pass her; we were both walking very slowly. I at once quickened my steps, but somehow I never seemed to gain on her. Even this did not rouse in me the faintest suspicion of being in the presence of a disembodied soul, it merely sharpened my curiosity and urged me to greater efforts.

I moved from the road to the grass which I calculated would deaden the sound of my footsteps, then I began to run.

Still no success! The lady never turned her head to right or left, but was clearly aware of my pursuit, for apparently without the least effort she kept her distance from me.

At the moment when I was feeling rather baffled and very much puzzled I caught sight of my friend, N., in the distance coming to meet me. "Ah!" I thought, as I at once slowed down to draw breath, "she will have to pass her and she'll tell me what her face is like."

I kept eyes and attention closely fixed on the two figures as they drew nearer and nearer to one another. Now the stranger appeared to be exactly at an equal distance between us, when, lo! she simply vanished as utterly and entirely as the electric light one switches off in a room. One second there she was, perfectly and clearly visible, the next second, there she was not. I looked foolishly around, though I knew that neither to right or left was there any hiding-place, moreover my eyes had been fully upon her when she vanished, flicked out--

How well I remember N. running up to me and without any greeting, we both simultaneously burst out--

"Did you see her?"

N. told me that the inside of the poke-bonnet was empty. The lady had no face.

Of course we gazed around and searched behind the boles of the trees, but we were both aware how foolish any such proceeding was, for we had both been staring hard at her when she disappeared.

There was a bygone tragedy connected with that part of the avenue, but on discussing the matter with the owner of the great house we all had to come reluctantly to the conclusion that the woman we had seen had no connection with that story. A former Lady Dalrymple had been murdered by one of her servants in the avenue about a hundred years previously, but the portraits of the deceased and the lady we had seen bore not the smallest resemblance. It was said that "Lady Dalrymple walked"--a tall, massive figure clad in a dark, heavy cloak sprinkled with snow. She had been done to death one January night in a snowstorm which had hidden her remains for several days.

The apparition we had seen was that of a very slender girl or young woman. The interesting fact that I wish to emphasize is that had this young drama in muslin turned aside, slipped through the light fence, and struck off across the fields it would never have occurred to either N. or me that she was not physical. We would have speculated as to who she was, but out of common civility we would not have followed her. We would have made casual inquiries as to who she was, simply out of curiosity aroused by her peculiar attire, and then the trifling incident would have been forgotten.

That sudden vanishing has rooted the experience firmly in my mind, and I have long since become convinced that the little story I have just told is an extremely common one. I believe such disembodied spirits are constantly with us, and that many of us see them, pass them in the streets, stand beside them in crowds, and accept them perfectly naturally as physical entities in no way different from what we are ourselves.

Many people believe that our faculties have a limit beyond which we cannot go, but this is certainly not so, as it is now proved that some people have the X-ray sight by nature and can see far more than others. This faculty has nothing to do with keenness of sight, it is a question of sight which is able to respond to different series of vibrations. Undoubtedly there are many entities about us who do not reflect rays of light that we can see, yet who may reflect those other rays of rates of vibration which can be photographed.

It is extremely difficult for the average person to grasp the reality of that which we cannot see with our physical eyes, and to realize how very partial our sight is, yet science continually demonstrates to us worlds of teeming life of whose very existence we should be ignorant so far as our senses are concerned.

What ought clearly to be grasped is the fact that we are not separated from the so-called dead, save by the limitation of our consciences. We have not lost those gone before, we have only lost the power to see them, and very occasionally that power is restored to us, by what means we know not. All visible things are the result of invisible causes, and doubtless those denizens of the subtler worlds come amongst us with a distinct purpose in view. Sometimes that purpose can be traced to remorse, revenge, a quest, a strong attraction to the scene of a crime, but in many other cases no object can be discerned.

The condition of the observer is constantly found to be absolutely normal. The mental conditions of both myself and N. were, as far as we could tell, quite normal. Our mental activity was no greater, no more vivid or more accurate than usual, yet we both saw an object that was beyond normal sense and rational vision.

The fact that so often there is no connecting link between the apparition and his or her surroundings induces me to believe that we are everywhere surrounded by the denizens of the other world, and on rare occasions we catch a glimpse of them.

Here is another utterly trivial story which emphasizes the above suggestion.

I was lunching with my husband in a house built within the last fifty years. The only former occupants were known to us. We were discussing a