(Scene 4.2 - The Kensington Gore Ladies Croquet Club)
A bump and the oak panelled room had arrived at its destination. Another turn of the curious key and the door through which they had entered opened again onto a large round room ceilinged and walled with glass panels. It was more a dome than a room. It was the secret observatory atop the Albert Hall. Everyone had thought the idea preposterous when Vivie Raffles had requested it. Nothing could have been more outrageous. But then one person spoke to another person and that other person spoke to another, each personage more shadowy than the last, and eventually the word arrived at the Palace. And at the Palace there was a nod. Under the guise of maintenance, Royal Engineers secretly appended the clubhouse of the Kensington Gore Ladies Croquet Club to the structure of the Albert Hall. Fine and strange it was. Huge telescopes pointed at the stars. Glass and mirrors, contraptions, devices and mere gadgets all gleamed in the electric light that Vivie Raffles now clamped into being.
‘Well, here we all are, show us! Show us now.’ said Alice.
Vivie opened the Gladstone bag and carefully pulled from it a glass ball about eight inches in diameter on a rim of gold in a setting of garish jewels.
‘Has anyone seen this before?’
‘Yes, certainly’ said Gwendolyn, ‘it is the crystal ball that old Mrs Jacobs uses in her sham séances. The gold is paint the gems are paste.’
‘Look,’ said Alice, ‘this is the one you press to get the smoke effect.’ She reached and pressed what, in a more opulent object d’art, would have been a ruby and blue smoke streamed and coiled into the globe. ‘Ta dah!’ she cried.
‘It’s inky baby powder, isn’t it?’ said Gwendolyn.
‘Johnston’s finest, yes,’ Alice nodded. I sat with Mrs Jacobs and read to her when she caught the flu last winter. I know how she makes the table rise up and everything. I could teach Harry Weiss a thing or two, trust me.
‘Right,’ said Vivie, ‘now watch this.’ She screwed the bulb off its base and wiped it clean. She spilled out the powder. She reassembled it and put it back on the table, tapping twice with a letter opener. What you are about to see sent Mrs Jacobs into a real tizzy, let me tell you. She called me straight away. She was chalk white when I got there, ready to call for an exorcist, she was, until I said I’d deal with it.
The four women stared at the fake crystal ball beginning to feel a bit foolish as the clock ticked on. Each looked sidelong at the others.
‘Perhaps we should all hold hands,’ said Alice.
‘If you like,’ said Vivie.
‘Would it help?’ asked Alice.
‘No,’ said Vivie.
Irate, Vivie tapped again and this time the air in the ball darkened.
‘There look now’, she said.
Within the globe, tiny lightning cracked and sizzled.
‘This really shouldn’t be happening,’ said Eliza. The ball is just fake.
‘Oh, but it is, my dear, it is happening’, said Vivie, ‘watch closely’.
‘Something certainly is happening before our eyes,’ said Alice, her eyes transfixed by the globe.
The frost in the glass cleared. They saw four figures in a desolate winter. One was apparently ranting but if there was a voice it was silent as was the wind seemingly swirling in the crystal ball.
‘That one’, Alice said pointed to the raging man, ‘he is very handsome, isn’t he? There seems divine fire in him’.
‘Almost beautiful,’ said Gwendolyn, ‘could it be a woman in man’s clothes?’
‘No,’ said Vivie, ‘it isn’t. I’d know.’
‘Yes but what of the other three?’ Eliza asked. Do we know any of them?’
‘The puffy pink one is the mountebank Crowley, I’m sure,’ said, Vivie Raffles. I neither like nor trust him. He will be a danger to the world and himself one day, however foolish he looks now.’
‘I think the one with the fierce moustache might be the mesmeriser George Gurdjieff’ said Gwendolyn. I met him once in Paris. ‘His eyes gave me a creepy feeling so it stuck in my mind; you don’t forget those eyes in a hurry. He does it deliberately, I’m sure.’
‘The other I do not know but have decided not to like him for his grubbiness alone’, said Vivie. ‘He is some purveyor of foul magic from the Balkans I expect. The place is full of them.’
‘And then there is the handsome one,’ said Alice.
‘Yes he is the puzzle, isn’t he?’ said Eliza.
The scene evaporated and the glass cleared.
‘Oh,’ said Alice, ‘is that all?’
There was a silence and then Gwendolyn spoke. This device is a fraud. What happened isn’t possible.’
‘But all of us have seen it,’ said Vivie, ‘and our eyes are clear. That is our purpose, isn’t it?’ Her voice became more solemn. ‘We see things as they are without dreams or fancy.’
‘Yes our eyes are clear. That is the trouble. It is what binds us four together, is it not?’ said Gwendolyn. ‘We see things as they truly are, an uncommon affliction. We each faced the giddy illusions of mankind, our feet on the ground even as we flew past stars.’
‘Yes we all swore the oath, we shall not forget it, but what is it we have seen, really?’ asked Eliza. ‘Must it signify at all?’ It seems just to be four men arguing, doesn’t it?’
‘One of whom is very handsome.’ smiled Alice.
‘And three of whom, I, for one, would not care to share a railway carriage with,’ said Gwendolyn.
Eliza leaned forward ‘But does it matter and is it any business of ours?’
There was silence.
‘I think,’ said Vivie slowly, ‘that what matters is that it was impossible for us to see it in a fake crystal ball.’ Whatever, is happening in the universe out there must be powerful beyond our knowing. Such things must be a worry for us, surely’.
Gwendolyn spoke quietly, ‘and if not us...who else?’
Thus the matter was settled. Something had to be done but what? Eliza went to the ice cabinet and produced a bottle of champagne. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘a triple toast this time, to commerce, may we profit; to mystery, may it know its place; to adventure, here we come!’ She handed around frosted glasses and popped the cork, one handed with a flick of her thumb.
‘Yes,’ said Vivie Raffles thoughtfully as she took a glass, ‘you are right to ask that Wendy, who else? Who, other than we, has this disturbed? That is where we must start’. She raised an eyebrow at Eliza. Eliza rolled her eyes.
‘Oh alright, I’ll do it then,’ she said without conviction but not truly displeased.
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