Adam Mars-Jones - Cedilla

Contriving to fling mesmerised trains

Mrs Eddy took the decision to move from New Hampshire altogether. She had been disrespectfully treated by the local press in Concord, to the point where she had been required to demonstrate her mental competence in a court of law. If I had been writing a proper play, with multiple characters, this would have been a scene of wild comedy, with the omnipotent bureaucrat being dragged into court and required to prove that she was in possession of all her marbles, rather than some confused old dear being manipulated and bled white by those she trusted.

The quest for a new home was an urgent one, the need for secrecy vital. Her trustees found her a suitable nest — this was Chestnut Hill, a stone mansion of some thirty-four rooms, set in twelve acres of woodland. They set about modifying it to her requirements at extreme speed. Hundreds of labourers worked in shifts day and night, with prodigious arc-lights making good the short hours of winter sunlight. Mrs Eddy’s personal chambers exactly reproduced the layout and decor of her rooms at Pleasant View. There was an electric lift to spare her the effort of stairs. Steel safes were set in the walls of the landings, for the safe storage of documents — many of them giving accounts of her past rather different from the approved version. She had steadily been acquiring these for years. In the protected spaces of Mrs Eddy’s safes the urge to suppress information and the urge to preserve it reached a strange equilibrium, a sort of peace.

The actual transfer of Mrs Eddy from one place to another involved activity more appropriate to an army on manœuvres than an individual moving house. Everything was done at night and in secrecy. Only when all the baggage had been delivered and installed did the mistress of the house follow with her retinue. She travelled by train, but not in the ordinary way. One locomotive went ahead of her train, and another drew up the rear, in a sort of convoy arrangement. It isn’t clear whether the extra locomotives were there to block with sheer metallic bulk the rays of malign animal magnetism, or whether they were physical barriers, shock absorbers even, in the event that mental malpracticians maddened with hate somehow contrived to fling against their target mesmerised trains of their own. The precautions were effective, and the party travelled to Chestnut Hill without incident.

When the doors of the great house closed behind Mrs Eddy, they were locked and barred from within, and six armed men kept watch that night outside the house. What they were shutting out, of course, was far less relevant than what they were shutting in — a woman who had set her face against dying, but whose body, approaching its ninetieth year, was making its own arrangements. This was the point at which my play, my monologue, my one-man-show, began.

That was the theory. In practice I couldn’t make the monster come alive on the page, and it was all very well having her look back on her long and crowded life, all the way to those early years which she had largely obliterated from the record, sending her agents to buy up documentary evidence, but there was such a lot to explain and organise. And how much was she supposed to know about herself? She couldn’t be a complete hypocrite (no one would invent something as zany as Christian Science for fun), but nor could she completely toe her own party’s line. If she had doubts then I had to show them plausibly poking through. It was harder than any school essay. Getting under Lorca’s tingling skin was a pushover by comparison.

I decided to compromise by introducing another character as a foil for Mrs Eddy. A two-hander wasn’t a lot less practical to stage than a solo act, and it would be far easier to get the words flowing. The other part would be a newcomer to the set-up at Chestnut Hill, thus doing most of my work for me.

Despite all the secrecy of the organisation this could smoothly be managed, thanks to a peculiarity of the church’s constitution. It was one of the bye-laws that any church member must be available to serve Mrs Eddy in her home, at ten days’ notice. The membership roster was a permanent solution to the servant problem! The stipulated period was originally a year, which was then raised to three. A member conscripted to the household staff in this way but leaving before due time, ‘upon Mrs. Eddy’s complaint thereof, shall be excommunicated from The Mother Church’.

In practice the bye-law wasn’t invoked. It was best if the actual atmosphere of the household didn’t become too widely known. Those who knew Mrs Eddy day to day found it hard to hold on to their admiration. Sometimes she was serene, lovable and wholly electric with dynamic charm, and sometimes … sometimes she was not. There was no shortage of willing helpers, which was a mercy. In those days gossip networks were very local. As long as servants were recruited from distant towns (or preferably farms), and returned there after their term of service, then Mrs Eddy’s name was likely to keep its lustre. At last Christian Science had found a purpose for the poor and the poor in heart.

Enter, in my play, farm-girl of Irish descent Ellen McAlvey, seventeen, unable to believe her luck at joining the household of a living God. A trusting girl in the house of the Most High.

My title creaked and shifted under the weight of the new character, the new situation. It became The Prophetess and the Colleen . I was very happy with that. I absolutely adored the word ‘colleen’, but it’s not an easy one to bring into general conversation.

I found no difficulty in writing speeches for this subsidiary character, her elation slightly dashed by the discovery that it was part of her duties, as a member of the household, to prevent such common occurrences of Error as snowfalls and thunderstorms. Ellen fully believed that Mother could dissipate a storm-cloud simply by looking at it, but doubted her own talents in that line.

When the shrieking started in the night, and Ellen took her place among the watchers round Mother’s bedside, all of them facing outwards to counter the incoming storm of malicious animal magnetism, her faith was not shaken. Indeed it was intensified by the revelation of how desperately Mother’s enemies wanted to harm her and bring her ministry down.

Sleepless nights, though, began to take a toll on her emotional stability … All in all, Ellen’s voice rather went to my head. Reading what I had set down, I kept vowing to cut down on charm and Irishry, but in practice each draft was more blarney-ridden than the last. There was an Irish nurse doing shifts at the time, who greeted the smallest deviation from routine with formulas like ‘That just about put the heart across me’. Ellen picked up her bad habits and added more.

Neutralising opiates on a fantastic scale

It wasn’t hard to decide on the climactic incident of the drama. Late editions of Science and Health took an oddly sophistical position about morphine, authorising its injection in cases of violent pain, not to relieve pain but to lull the belief in it, after which the sufferer would recover the ability to handle his or her own case mentally.

There had been reports from the 1870s of Mrs Eddy’s own use of the drug. Continuing rumours prompted an article in which she acknowledged that in the distant past her regular physician had prescribed morphine, ‘when he could do no more for me’, but that the glorious revelations of Christian Science had made it redundant. True, she had voluntarily taken large doses at one time, but that was to ascertain whether Christian Science could block the working of the drug — ‘I say with tearful thanks, “The drug has no effect upon me whatever.”’

In 1906 she wrote to the directors of her board of trustees asking that three more students be taught by a doctor the technique of giving morphine by hypodermic injections (in addition to the household attendant who already had that skill). Three more students! What must the directors have thought? Perhaps only that she was exercising Mind’s sovereign power as only she knew how, and neutralising opiates on a fantastic scale. She often said, ‘I am working on a plane that would mean instantaneous death to any of you …’ Perhaps this was what she meant.