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SHADOW LAND OR  LIGHT FROM THE OTHER SIDE by Elisabeth d’Esperance(1897)

Once someone remarked to me. "Why don’t you ask for something?" I had really never thought of asking for anything myself always being sufficiently interested in observing the actions of Yolande whenever I did by chance get an opportunity of seeing what was going on. But on hearing this query Yolande looked at me enquiringly and I asked her to give me a rose, - a black rose. That will puzzle her, I thought to myself as I then hardly imagined such a flower existed.

Instantly Yolande dipped her fingers into the pitcher and brought out a dark object, dripping with moisture, and handed it to me triumphantly. It was a rose of a distinctly blue black color, the like of which neither I nor any of those assembled had seen. It was a magnificent specimen, though valuable for its uniqueness rather than its beauty at least to my taste.

This little attention on the part of Yolande was also worthy of remark, for she very seldom favored me with any notice, seeming rather to ignore me, or to accept my presence in the cabinet as a necessary evil.

There seemed to exist a strange link between us. I could do nothing to ensure her appearance amongst us. She came and went, so far as I am aware, entirely independent of my will, but when she had come, she was, I found, dependent on me for her brief material existence. I seemed to lose, not my individuality, but my strength and power of exertion, and though I did not then know it, a great portion of my material substance. I felt that in some way l was changed, but the effort to think logically in some mysterious way affected Yolande, and made her weak.

The stronger and livelier she became the less inclination I had to think or reason, but the power of feeling became intensified to a painful extent; I do not mean in the physical sense, but the mentaI, my brain apparently becoming a sort of whispering gallery where the thoughts of other persons resolved themselves into an embodied form and resounded as though actual substantial objects.

Was any one suffering, I felt the pain. Was any one worried or depressed, I felt it instantly. Joy or sorrow made themselves in some way perceptible to me. I could not tell who among the friends assembled was suffering, only that the pain existed and was in some way reproduced in myself.

If anyone left his or her seat, thus breaking the chain, this fact was communicated to me in a mysterious but unmistakable manner.

Sometimes Yolande's peregrinations caused me a vague anxiety. She evidently enjoyed her brief stay in our midst and was so bold, in spite of her apparent timidity that I was often tormented by fears of what she might do and had a weird sort of feeling that any accident or imprudence on her part would fall back on myself, though in what way I had no clear idea. I had that to learn later.

If at any time my feeling of anxiety really took the shape of a thought, I discovered that it caused Yolande to return to the cabinet reluctantly always, and sometimes with a childish petulence, which showed that my thought exercised a compelling power over her actions, and that she only came back to me because she could not help herself.