I recently came across a horror story by the neglected novelist May Sinclair that immediately reminded me of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's horror stories, a story that has been featured in a whole series of articles on here.
The Flaw in the Crystal, which was first published in 1912, will probably not inspire quite so many articles as The Parasite did, but it has some material that is worth quoting. As is often the case, it is mainly the metaphysical elements and some connections I noticed that inspire commentary.
Both novellas feature a woman who uses supernatural methods to influence people, however May Sinclair's Agatha Verrall is very different from Conan Doyle's evil witch Helen Penclosa in that she tries to use her powers ethically and for the good of others.
Agatha Verrall's gift
Agatha Verrall has a psychic gift: she can affect people remotely by concentrating her mind on them. She discovered this gift accidentally and uses it deliberately.
Agatha uses her gift to heal people telepathically. Her friend Rodney Lanyon is her first subject. He has a troublesome, demanding wife, a 'mass of furious and malignant nerves' who often drives him to breaking point. As a sanity-saving exercise he regularly escapes to Agatha's house, which he sees as his refuge, his place of peace.
Although Agatha loves Rodney, she refrains from using her gift to make him come to visit her but uses it – without his knowledge - to make him well when he comes of his own free will.
Agatha Verrall's first encounter with her gift
Where Conan Doyle's Helen Penclosa learned her hypnotic techniques in Trinidad, Agatha Verrall's gift just came to her. I find it significant that it found her at a time when she was very badly affected by seeing how much Rodney was suffering:
“It was...her compassion, that had wrecked her as she stood aside, cut off from him, he on the verge and she near it, looking on, powerless to help while Bella tore at him. Talk of the verge, the wonder was they hadn't gone clean over it, both of them.”
I have highlighted some possible clues here:
“She couldn't say then from what region, what tract of unexplored, incredible mystery her help had come. It came one day, one night when she was at her worst. She remembered how with some resurgent, ultimate instinct of surrender she had sunk on the floor of her room, flung out her arms across the bed in the supreme gesture of supplication, and thus gone, eyes shut and with no motion of thought or sense in her, clean into the blackness where, as if it had been waiting for her, the thing had found her.
It had found her. Agatha was precise on that point. She had not found it. She had not even stumbled on it, blundered up against it in the blackness. The way it worked, the wonder of her instantaneous well-being had been the first, the very first hint she had that it was there.“
This may seem like some sort of miraculous deliverance, but something that appears when someone is at rock bottom may not always be benevolent. Distress signals attract predators.
I wonder whether May Sinclair ever experienced anything like that herself. Did something metaphysical come to her rescue when she was at a very low ebb and desperate for help?
Agatha Verrall learns how to work her gift
In order to access her powers, Agatha switches off all contact with the real world and turns inside. She drops out, turns on and tunes in. She could be describing the creative process, the contact with the daemon, here:
“She had found out the secret of its working and had controlled it, reduced it to an almost intelligible method. You could think of it as a current of transcendent power, hitherto mysteriously inhibited. You made the connection, having cut off all other currents that interfered, and then you simply turned it on. In other words, if you could put it into words at all, you shut your eyes and ears, you closed up the sense of touch, you made everything dark around you and withdrew into your innermost self; you burrowed deep into the darkness there till you got beyond it; you tapped the Power as it were underground at any point you pleased and turned it on in any direction.“
Did May Sinclair travel deep into the darkness inside herself and tap some creative power?
Agatha Verrall's attitude towards her gift
Agatha comes to understand more of the powers that she thinks of as uncanny and unaccountable. She realises that distance is no object when it comes to influencing Rodney:
“She was beginning to see more and more how it worked; how inevitably, how infallibly it worked. She was even a little afraid of it, of what it might come to mean. It did mean that without his knowledge, separated as they were and had to be, she could always get at him.”
When she realises that she has the ability to force Rodney to visit her, to her credit she is appalled:
“And supposing it came to mean that she could get at him to make him do things? Why, the bare idea of it was horrible.”
This is the opposite of Helen Penclosa, who uses her hypnotic powers only to compel people to obey her will. She forces Austin Gilroy to visit her; she makes him behave like someone in love with her.
Where Helen Penclosa asks for her victims' consent before hypnotising them, Agatha sees nothing wrong in healing Rodney without first asking his permission: after all, it is for his own good. She is not being irresponsible: before daring to attempt to heal him, she tested her powers on herself many times to prove that they work.
The result of her intervention speaks for itself; Rodney makes an abrupt and incredible recovery:
“Before it had come to her, he had been, ever since she knew him, more or less ill, more or less tormented by the nerves that were wedded so indissolubly to Bella's. He was always, it seemed to her terror, on the verge. And she could say to herself, "Look at him now!" “
This resurrection justifies Agatha's actions, in her own eyes at least.
When something seems too good to be true...
Needless to say, Agatha Verrall's powers and the psychic intrusions that they entail soon get her into trouble. We will see how everything goes horribly wrong after she heals another friend.
