“I don’t think I’ll get into the country much,” I answered.
“Oh, good heavens, I don’t live at Baneful Hall!” That was one of her names for the awesome old estate, which she never called by its somewhat similar title. Sometimes she called it “Chilblains Hall” or “The House of Bane” or “Old Wrack and Ruin.” She was always inventing names which scandalized people who were awed by titles and tradition.
“I live in London! I’m studying art there; you can’t imagine what I had to go through to get Daddy to agree, and finally Mum moved into a flat with me, to chaperone me properly, ugh!She and Daddy think I’ll get it out of my system and come home and marry Niles, but they’re wrong. Next year I’m going to Paris to study; Oh, they don’t even imagine that possibility. It’s going to take a whole year of rows!”
All the young men laughed again, and Niles said, “Perhaps we should marry now, and I’ll take you to Paris.” Clearly this was not the first time he had suggested it.
Stephanie took her hand from his arm and shook her head. “I wouldn’t consider going to Paris with you if we married, though I might be tempted to run away with you and live in sin on the Left Bank.” The young men laughed but blushed and looked a bit flustered. Stephanie viewed their confusion with a smile of delight. I had just seen a mild demonstration of her favorite, most characteristic pleasure: saying or doing something which created a silence of embarrassment or consternation. She glowed in such silences, mischieffairly crackling around her.
“Actually,” she finally admitted, “brother John will go with me, to satisfy the parents.” She tilted her head toward one of the men in uniform, who looked surprised at this news. “But I intend to give him the slip, disappear, and get down to work in peace and solitude, except for the apache dancer I shall take up with.”
She turned to me again. “But first things first. When can you come and pose for me? You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. And you’re going to be my friend. Oh, yes, you are, like it or not, I’ll win you over in spite of my disagreeable, affected, upper-class accent! We all talk that way, can’t be helped.” Now it was my turn to blush, showing that she had read my mind. She shrugged, pursing her lips as if trying to contain her joy at my discomfiture. When I burst out laughing at her expression, she hugged me and declared, in a whisper, that she would be my friend for life, which indeed she became.
In later years, when Stephanie and I recalled that scene, she remembered it as I perceived it at the time—as a fairy tale dream full of innocent princesses and handsome princes.
A few weeks later war was declared. Stephanie never got to Paris, which became an embarcation point for the trenches. Within two years, all the young men who had stood around her laughing were dead.
At first the war seemed certain to be only a brief adventure with slogans and signs and occasional clumps of volunteers marching in cheerful disorder behind a brass band to a train station. As an outsider I saw it as a customary ritual of Europe. It would be over by Christmas, everyone said, and I expected to be home by then, unless weather delayed our sailing till spring. By then I should have built a reputation that would advance my career back home in case a rich suitor did not appear in England. I told Erika my only chance for marriage would be to materialize a rich man at a seance. She did not laugh, only said that I misused my time with Stephanie, learning to be flippant like her instead of going through her to upper class men.
Doctor Willy arranged sittings in his front parlor, and we accepted invitations to other grander houses. Holding seances was more respectable in England than it had been in America. In London alone there were a dozen societies for the protection and advancement of psychics and mediums. The English were more formal than anyone in San Francisco, but they were also, at least in London, more eccentric and more tolerant. A homogeneous people with few im migrants, they smiled upon the few odd-looking people who had the good sense to visit their superior island. For the first time in my life I sensed a lack of hostility toward me as an oriental.
I walked the streets with Erika like any respectable, well-chaperoned young woman; most often we walked the three blocks to the British Museum, where we spent hours nearly every day. Erika had it in her mind that if I simply looked and looked at the thousands of treasures—from the Elgin Marbles to African masks, from Chinese scrolls to Arctic totems—I would enrich my psychic act immeasurably. A bit of automatic writing in ancient runes would be a splendid addition to my act. Eventually we planned that, with Doctor Willy’s help, we would get into the reading room and study esoteric documents with which my controls would later season their talk. But even the open collection could occupy us much longer than we expected to stay in England.
Erika enjoyed our walks and our hours at the museum even more than I did. Her only concern was that the excitement of the war would leave people indifferent to spiritualism. She tried to be philosophical abut that, saying at least we would have enjoyed an exciting vacation. The richness of culture revived all her old scholarly instincts. She haunted libraries and second-hand bookstores, tramped through galleries, and, when not attending one of my sittings, sat with her nose in a book all the time. Of course, the more costly pleasures of London were closed to us since we had almost no cash.
For me the real excitement lay in the fact that I had a friend, Stephanie. I began going to her flat several times a week to pose for a series of drawings. We usually sat in her room, a light high-ceilinged place with a narrow bed, two chairs, and one tall window, “not a proper studio,” Stephanie complained, but a pleasant room facing south, getting the most of the rapidly diminishing warmth and sunlight. While I posed, she talked about herself, her struggles with her parents to get more freedom, to get an education, her ambivalence about marrying Niles, which had now become complicated by her concern for his safety. Both he and her brother had joined their units in France. She wrote to Niles every day, and sometimes read his answering letters to me. He wrote poetry. So did her brother. About those days in that narrow London room, I most remember Stephanie reading the poetry that seemed to pour out of all the young men she knew.
During moments when she rested from drawing me, she asked me about myself. She was enthralled with my description of Hunters Point. She sighed with envy when I described roving over the wrecks half-sunk off the beach or lying in the sun among the rocks in my hiding place. She had never been allowed to wander alone, to be dirty, to eat what she found dropping from shrimp nets. She had never even been allowed to attend school, though, of course, she had been instructed by excellent tutors in her father’s famous library.
She made me tell her over and over again about the earthquake, shuddering with envy at my having been so near the catastrophe. I told her about my mother—as much as I could remember. I cried as I told her, and so did she. Finally I even told her about Norman. She was not shocked, just enormously curious. She knew nothing about the physical details of sex, and when I told her, she laughed and said, “Oh, but how absolutely ludicrous, that’s why everyone does it in the dark, else how to keep a straight face! But is it fun? Women aren’t supposed to like it, but I bet that’s just another of their lies, the bloody men! Tell me how it feels, exactly!” Then she would purse her lips in that mischievous smile while I stammered and blushed.
Stephanie never attended my sittings. She knew I did not want her to. She never asked whether my psychic powers were real. She assumed they were fake, a joke, another piece of mischief that delighted her, especially when she heard that I had attracted clients who were rich and pretentious. She saw no harm in the fraud. “The fools come after it, don’t they? It’s just too bad not to make them pay. Maybe we could induce one of them to part with the family jewels.” Then she would invent an absurd plot for persuading a man (a favorite target was her pompous and rather nasty Uncle Ralph) to become my benefactor. She quite consciously gave me abundant information about the clients she knew anything about, demanding later reports on how I had used it. This information was the only reason Erika let me see her so often. They did not like each other.
In those few months before the end of 1914 she sketched