Most of the people at the tea were English.” They had attended seances at home in England and hoped they could persuade me to hold a sitting on board ship. They would be happy to pay. The offer was made by an Englishman who said he knew Doctor Willy and other supporters of spiritualism whose names I did not recognize. He was a barrister who had defended some mediums in court. “Our laws are barbaric, I’m afraid, but our movement is the strongest in the world.” Erika immediately accepted his invitation while saying (in a choked voice that afflicted her whenever she refused money) that I never accepted payment.
So I ended up doing sittings almost every night. When I complained, Erika said, “Nonsense. it’s only an hour a day, and when we dock, scores of people will leave the ship advertising you all over Europe.” I argued that the sitting might be only an hour a day, but the identity as a psychic was full time, putting off the young people I would like to meet. Erika did not even bother to answer my foolish hope that I could meet people in any normal way.
We landed at Southampton, then took a train to London, where Doctor Willy met us at Victoria Station. Reporters and photographers had followed him, so that instead of craning my neck to look up at that vast cathedral of trains, or anything else that might be included in my long-awaited first glimpse of London, I was forced to hide my face in the hood of my cloak. Erika spoke brightly and charmingly to the reporters while we walked to a cab followed by porters carrying our luggage. I realized then how firmly she stood between me and other people. I hardly ever spoke to a stranger except during sittings.
Doctor Willy helped me into a closed, horse-drawn cab. He waited until the luggage had been loaded and the cab had begun to move. Then he squeezed my hand and welcomed me. His damp eyes glowed in his round, smiling face as he talked, as if continuing our last conversation, about the coming of “a new, glorious epoch of human love and achievement.” He paused only once, to point out the British Museum, which was very near the house where we were to live.
It stood in a long row of identical three-story stone houses behind low wrought-iron fences, older and more austere than the wooden houses of San Francisco, but similar in their narrow huddling line and in their floorplan. On the first floor were two parlors and a dining room. The second floor was Doctor Willy’s bedroom, sitting room, and office. On the third floor Erika and I each had a small room, with a third room empty except for a desk and cot. Above us was an attic where two servant girls slept after they had climbed the four flights of steps from the basement where they did the cooking and laundry.
Compared to the Robertson mansion, this house was cramped and chilly, its furniture shabby and stiff, but I liked its plain, indifferent looks. Doctor Willy was renting the house from a distant cousin who had acquired it as payment of a debt. The cousin lived on a grand estate in the country, “…which you will see before the week is out. For my cousin’s daughter is to be married, and we are all invited to the wedding. Until then you must rest and gather your energies. You will need them, for many people are eager to welcome you and your divine powers.”
During the next few days Doctor Willy took us out in an open carriage, showing us the traditional sights of London. We saw Buckingham Palace, Saint Paul’s, the Tower, Westminster, Parliament, and a great many parks and gardens. The sun shone brightly every day, the air was close, and the Thames stank like Butchertown. We had left San Francisco shrouded in its usual summer fog and had come to a London heat wave. “Hold your nose and enjoy it,” said Doctor Willy, “for soon the long summer days grow short and the winter comes here like … like a dark, soggy bog.” We made many jokes during that week about Doctor Willy’s soggy bog.
Early on a Sunday morning we were all packed up into a motor car, which Doctor Willy kept in a garage on the outskirts of London, and driven northwest for the wedding. It was about a two-hour drive in the large, slow car on mostly dirt roads. Once through the front gate of the cousin’s estate, it took another half hour to drive to the huge house occupied by the family of Willy’s cousin, cared for by troops of servants, and still partly supported by local tenant farmers. Seventy people had stayed overnight. Hundreds more—friends and distant relations—drove in as we did for the ceremony and garden reception.
I felt completely out of place. People seeing my silk pajamas thought I was from China. A couple of men in army uniforms spoke to me in Mandarin, which I did not understand at all. Some of the older men just stared fiercely. Later I realized that their disapproval was aimed more at Doctor Willy than at me. They felt he was rather a distant releative to have rated an invitation; to have brought along two American strangers (one of them very odd inddeed) was “a bit cheeky.” But when Doctor Willy told them my profession, they relented. One of them spent an hour talking to me about psychic experiences.
The wedding was held in a partially-restored fourteenth century chapel a short walk from the house. It held about two hundred people; the rest of us sat on folding chairs spread over the lawn beyond the crumbled west wall, not yet rebuilt. Sun streamed through other openings in the walls, but the roof was solid with new wooden beams connecting the mossy stone walls. After the wedding we walked back to the gardens south of the house, where servants poured champagne near tables laden with food, surrounding a cake that seemed as tall as I. Everything seemed larger, brighter, warmer than real life. It was like a vivid, golden dream-and in a way it was a dream.
I looked around that park, with its groups of graceful ladies and gentlemen standing under the trees sipping champagne and knew I would be mad to hope that any man of this class would marry me. There was one group in particular which symbolized the hopelessness of my position. Near a gleaming white summer house stood a girl all in pink, maid of honor to the bride, her sister, Stephanie, a special favorite of Doctor Willy. Someone had handed her a rosy parasol, which cast a pinker glow on her skin so that, in her soft, lacy gown, with her golden curly hair piled high, she looked like a fairy princess in one of the old books Miss Harrington kept at the Butchertown Library.
She was surrounded by young men in reserve army officers’ uniforms. She held the arm of one of the officers, and from the way he stood beside her, I saw that he was the successful one of her suitors. They were all talking animatedly, and she shook her golden head vigorously as though she disagreed with whatever they said. She laughed, shook her head, talked. They listened, admired, laughed.
I stood watching her and thinking that she was, like me, about nineteen, but that was the only resemblance between us. She had been born to a pink and golden life through which she would glide gracefully, while I stood forever outside doing my cheap, devious little act.
Suddenly Doctor Willy took my arm and pushed me into the group. “Stephanie wants to meet you. You will love each other. She is my favorite niece.” Of course, she wasn’t really his niece—their relation was too distant and diluted to have a name.
“Now this is the way women should dress,” said Stephanie. “Everything I wear is bound tight at the throat, at the wrists, at the waist. I’m locked in, and these wretched skirts are set to trip me if I take one genuine stride!” She shook my hand. “Oh, how I wish I was an American! Women aren’t so tied up in knots in your country. You already have the vote in some states, right? Is it in … Wyoming?”
“I don’t know,” and all the young men laughed as if I had said something very witty. They stood at polite attention as Doctor Willy introduced me.
The one whose arm Stephanie held was called Niles, and he explained that Stephanie was a feminist who knew all sorts of facts, like voting in Wyoming. “She’s quite right, of course. Our generation is going to break out of all the old prisons. Stephanie’s a good deal cleverer than I, you know, and fine artist. She shouldn’t have to waste her energy chaining herself to lamp posts. Her painting is extraordinary!”
“Not yet,” said Stephanie. “But it will be.” She spoke with a simple, straightforward, innocent determination. At that moment I would have given anything for that innocence—it seemed a form of invincible power. “Uncle Willy has told me