On the Staircase and Other Uncanny Tales
Date: 1912-12-31T22:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Supernatural Fiction; Ghost Stories; Horror; Mystery
Description: A small collection of stories, exploring the mystery of psychological horrors and supernatural terrors. A haunted staircase… a message that may or may not have come from beyond the grave… a man determined to defy his ghostly visitant… a woman haunted by a terrible suspicion… a horrifying phantom army regiment…
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA

ON
THE  STAIRCASE

AND  OTHER  UNCANNY  TALES

KATHARINE GEROULD

MobileRead Edition
2020

Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould (February 6, 1879 – July 27, 1944) was an American writer. She became noted as a prominent writer of the short story and one of the nation’s foremost essayists.

Compilation by ECM. Contents were originally published 1913 ~ 1922. This book is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- On the Staircase
- Belshazzar’s Letter
- Louquier’s Third Act
- The Wax Doll
- The Eighty-Third

On the Staircase

Probably the least wise way to begin a ghost-story is to say that one does not believe in ghosts. It suggests that one has never seen the real article. Perhaps, in one sense, I never have; yet I am tempted to set down a few facts that I have never turned over to the Society for Psychical Research or discussed at my club. The fact is that I had ingeniously forgotten them until I saw Harry Medway, the specialist – my old classmate – a few years ago. I say “forgotten”; of course, I had not forgotten them, but, in order to carry on the business of life, I had managed to record them, as it were, in sympathetic ink. After I heard what Harry Medway had to say, I took out the loose sheets and turned them to the fire. Then the writing came out strong and clear again – letter by letter, line by line, as fatefully as Belshazzar’s “immortal postscript.” Did I say that I do not believe in ghosts? Well – I am getting toward the end, and a few inconsistencies may be forgiven to one who is not far from discoveries that will certainly be inconsistent with much that we have learned by heart in this interesting world. Perhaps it will be pardoned me as a last nicker of moribund pride if I say that in my younger days I was a crack shot, and to the best of my belief never refused a bet or a drink or an adventure. I do not remember ever having been afraid of a human being; and yet I have known fear. There are weeks, still, when I live in a bath of it. I think I will amend my first statement, and say instead that I do not believe in any ghosts except my own – oh, and in Wender’s and Lithway’s, of course.

Some people still remember Lithway for the sake of his charm. He never achieved anything, so far as I know, except his own delightful personality. He was a classmate of mine, and we saw a great deal of each other both in and after college – until he married, indeed. His marriage coincided with my own appointment to a small diplomatic post in the East; and by the time that I had served my apprenticeship, come into my property, resigned from the service, and returned to America, Lithway’s wife had suddenly and tragically died. I had never seen her but once – on her wedding-day – but I had reason to believe that Lithway had every right to be as inconsolable as he was. If he had ever had any ambition in his own profession, which was law, he lost it all when he lost her. He retired to the suburban country, where he bought a new house that had just been put up. He was its first tenant, I remember. That fact, later, grew to seem important. There he relapsed into a semi-populated solitude, with a few visitors, a great many books, and an inordinate amount of tobacco. These details I gathered from Wender in town, while I was adjusting my affairs.

Never had an inheritance come so pat as mine. There were all sorts of places I wanted to go to, and now I had money enough to do it. The wanderlust had nearly eaten my heart out during the years when I had kicked my heels in that third-rate legation. I wanted to see Lithway, but a dozen minor catastrophes prevented us from meeting during those breathless weeks, and as soon as I could I positively had to be off. Youth is like that. So that, although Lithway’s bereavement had been very recent, at the time when I was in America settling my affairs and drawing the first installment of my beautiful income – there is no beauty like that of unearned increment – I did not see him until he had been a widower for more than two years.

The first times I visited Lithway were near together. I had begun what was to be my almost lifelong holiday by spending two months alone – save for servants – on a houseboat in the Vale of Cashmere; and my next flights were very short. When I came back from those, I rested on level wing at Braythe. Lithway was a little bothered, on one of these occasions, about the will of a cousin who had died in Germany, leaving an orphan daughter, a child of six or seven. His conscience troubled him sometimes, and occasionally he said he ought to go over and see that the child’s inheritance was properly administered. But there was an aunt – a mother’s sister – to look after the child, and her letters indicated that there was plenty of money and a good lawyer to look after the investments. Since his wife’s death, Lithway had sunk into lethargy. He had enough to live on, and he drew out of business entirely, putting everything he had into government bonds. When he hadn’t energy enough left to cut off coupons, he said, he should know that it was time for him to commit suicide. He really spoke as if he thought that final indolence might arrive any day. I read the aunt’s letters. She seemed to be a good sort, and the pages reeked of luxury and the maternal instinct. I rather thought it would be a good excuse to get Lithway out of his rut, and advised him to go; but, when he seemed so unwilling, I couldn’t conscientiously say I thought the duty imperative. I had long ago exhausted Germany – I had no instinct to accompany him.

Lithway, then, was perfectly idle. His complete lack of the executive gift made him an incomparable host. He had been in the house three years, and I was visiting him there for perhaps the third time, when he told me that it was haunted. He didn’t seem inclined to give details, and, above all, didn’t seem inclined to be worried. He sat up very late always, and preferably alone, a fact that in itself proved that he was not nervous. As I said, I had never been interested in ghosts, and the newness of the house robbed fear of all seriousness. Ghosts batten on legend and decay. There wasn’t any legend, and the house was almost shockingly clean. When he told me of the ghost, then, I forbore to ask for any more information than he, of his own volition, gave me. If he had wanted advice or assistance, he would, of course, have said so. The servants seemed utterly unaware of anything queer, and servants leave a haunted house as rats a sinking ship. It really did not seem worth inquiring into. I referred occasionally to Lithway’s ghost as I might have done to a Syracusan coin which I should know him proud to possess but loath to show.

On my return from Yucatan, one early spring, Lithway welcomed me as usual. He seemed lazier than ever, and I noticed that he had moved his looks down from a second-story to a ground-floor room. He slept outdoors summer and winter, and he had an outside stairway built to lead from his library up to the sleeping-porch. A door from the sleeping-porch led straight into his dressing-room. I laughed at his arrangements a little.

“You live on this side of the house entirely now – cut off, actually, from the other side. What is the matter with the east?”

He pointed out to me that the dining-room and the billiard-room were on the eastern side and that he never shunned them. “It’s just a notion,” he said. “Mrs. Jayne” (the housekeeper) “sleeps on the second floor, and I don’t like to wake her when I go up at three in the morning. She is a light sleeper.”

I laughed outright. “Lithway, you’re getting to be an old maid.”

It was natural that I should dispose my effects in the rooms least likely to be used by Lithway. I took over his discarded upstairs study, and, with a bedroom next door, was very comfortable. He assured me that he had no reason to suppose I should ever be disturbed in either room. Moving his own things, he said, had been purely a precautionary measure in behalf of Mrs. Jayne. Curiously enough, I was perfectly sure that his first statement was absolutely true and his second absolutely false. Only the first one, however, seemed to be really my affair. I could hardly complain.

Lithway did seem changed; but I have such an involuntary trick of comparing my rediscovered friends with the human beings I have most recently been seeing that I did not take the change too seriously. He was perfectly unlike the Yucatan Indians; but, on reflection, why shouldn’t he be, I asked myself. Probably he had always been just like that. I couldn’t prove that he hadn’t. Yet I did think there was something back of his listlessness other than mere prolonged grief for his wife. Occasionally, I confess, I thought about the ghost in this connection.

One morning I was leaving my sitting-room to go down to Lithway’s library. The door of the room faced the staircase to the third story, and as I came out I could always see, directly opposite and above me, a line of white banisters that ran along the narrow third-story hall. Mechanically, this time, I looked up and saw – I need not say, to my surprise – a burly negro leaning over the rail looking down at me. The servants were all white, and the man had, besides, a very definite look of not belonging there. He didn’t, in any way, fit into his background. I ran up the stairs to investigate. When I got just beneath him, he bent over towards me with a malicious gesture. All I saw, for an instant, was a naked brown arm holding up a curious jagged knife. The edge caught the little light there was in the dim hall as he struck at me. I hit back, but he had gone before I reached him – simply ceased to be. There was no Cheshire-cat vanishing process. I was staring again into the dim hall, over the white banisters. There were no rooms on that side of the hall, and consequently no doors.

A light broke in on me. I went downstairs to Lithway. “I’ve seen your ghost,” I said bluntly.

What seemed to be a great relief relaxed his features. “You have! And isn’t she extraordinary?”

“She?”

“You say you’ve seen her,” he went on hurriedly.

“Her? Him, man – black as Tartarus. And he cut me over the head.”

“There?” Lithway drew his finger down the place.

“Yes. How did you know? I don’t feel it now.”

“Look at yourself.”

He handed me a mirror. The slash was indicated clearly by a white line, but there was no abrasion.

“That is very interesting,” I managed to say; but I really did not half like it.

Lithway looked at me incredulously. “She has never had a weapon before,” he murmured.

“She? This was a man.”

“Oh, no!” he contradicted. “That’s impossible.”

“He was a hairy brute and full-bearded besides,” I calmly insisted.

Lithway jumped up. “My God! there’s someone in the house.” He caught up a revolver. “Let us go and look. He’ll have made off with the silver.”

“Look here, Lithway,” I protested. “I tell you this man wasn’t real. He vanished into thin air – like any other ghost.”

“But the ghost is a woman.” He was as stupid as a child about it.

“Then there are two.” I didn’t really believe it, but it seemed clear that we could never settle the dispute. Each at least would have to pretend to believe the other for the sake of peace.

“Suppose you tell me about your ghost,” I suggested soothingly. But Lithway was dogged, and we had to spend an hour exploring the house and counting up Lithway’s valuables. Needless to say, there was no sign of invasion anywhere. At the end of the hour I repeated my demand. The scar was beginning to fade, I noted in the mirror, though still clearly visible.

“Suppose you tell me about your ghost. You never have, you know.”

“I’ve only seen her a few times.”

“Where?”

“Leaning over the banisters in the third-floor hall.”

“What is she like?”

“A slip of a girl. Rather fair and drooping, but a strange look in her eyes. Dressed in white, with a blue sash. That’s all.”

“Does she speak?”

“No; but she waves a folded paper at me.”

“What time of day have you seen her?”

“About eleven in the morning.”

The clocks were then striking twelve.

“Well,” I ventured, “that’s clearly the ghost’s hour. But the two of them couldn’t be more different.”

He made me describe the savage again. The extraordinary part of it was that, in spite of his baffling blackness, I could do so perfectly. He was as individual to me as a white man – more than that, as a friend. He had personality, that ghost.

“What race should you say he was?”

I thought. “Some race I don’t know; Zulu, perhaps. A well-built beggar.”

“And you’re perfectly sure he was real – I mean, wasn’t human?”

The distinction made me smile, though the question irritated me. “You can see that if his object was murder he made a poor job. You found all your silver, didn’t you?” Then I played my trump-card. “And do you suppose that a burglar would wander round this countryside in a nose-ring and a loincloth? Nice disguise!”

Lithway looked disturbed. “But the other one,” he murmured. “I don’t understand the other.”

“She seems much easier to understand than mine,” I protested.

“Oh, I don’t mean her!” he said. “I mean it.”

For the first time I began to be afraid that Lithway had left the straight track of common sense. It was silly enough to have two ghosts in a new house – but three!

“It?” I asked.

“The one Wender saw.”

“Oh! Wender has seen one?”

“Six months ago. I’ve never been able to get him here since. It was rather nasty, and Wender – well, Wender’s sensitive. And he’s a little dotty on the occult, in any case.”

“Did he see it at eleven in the morning?”

Lithway seemed irritated. “Of course!” he snapped out. He spoke as if the idiosyncrasy of his damned house had a dignity that he was bound to defend.

“And what was it?”

“A big rattlesnake, coiled to strike.”

Even then I could not take it seriously. “That’s not a ghost; it’s a symptom.”

“It did strike,” Lithway went on.

“Did he have a scar?”

“No. He couldn’t even swear that it quite touched him.”

“Then why did it worry him?”

Lithway hesitated. “I suppose the uncertainty—”

“Uncertainty! If there’s anything less dreadful than an imaginary snake that has struck, it is an imaginary snake that hasn’t struck. What has got into Wender?”

“Fear, apparently,” said Lithway shortly. “He won’t come back. Says a real rattlesnake probably wouldn’t get into a house in Braythe more than once, but an unreal rattlesnake might get in any day. I don’t blame him.”

“May I ask,” I said blandly, “if you are so far gone that you think rattlesnakes have ghosts?”

Lithway lost his temper. “If you want to jeer at the thing, for God’s sake have the manners not to do it in this house! I tell you we have all three seen ghosts.”

“The ghost of a rattlesnake,” I murmured to myself. “It beats everything!” And I looked once more into the mirror. The scar that the knife had made was still perceptible, but very faint. “Did you hunt the house over for the snake?”

“Of course we did.”

“Did you find it?”

“Of course we didn’t – any more than we found your Zulu.”

“Then why did you insist so on hunting the Zulu?”

Lithway colored a little. “Well, to tell the truth, I never wholly believed in that snake. If you or Wender had only seen her, now!”

“I don’t see why Wender was so worried,” I said. “After all, a snake might have got in – and got out.”

“He saw it twice,” explained Lithway.

“Symptoms,” I murmured. “Had he ever had an adventure with a rattlesnake?”

“No.”

“Then why should it make him nervous?”

“I suppose” – Lithway looked at me a little cautiously, I thought – “just because he never had seen one. He said, I remember, that that rattlesnake hadn’t been born yet.”

I laughed. “Wender is sensitive. The ghost of a rattlesnake that has never lived – well, you can’t be more fantastic than that!”

“Wender has a theory,” Lithway said.

But he seemed actually to want to change the subject. Accordingly, I did change it – a little. I didn’t really care for Wender’s theories. I had heard some of them. They included elementals.

“Tell me some more about yours. She’s the most convincing of the three. Do you recognize her?”

“Never saw anyone that looked remotely like her.”

“And you are the first occupant of this house,” I mused. “Was she dressed in an old-fashioned way?”

Lithway actually blushed. “She is dressed rather oddly – her hair is done queerly. I’ve hunted the fashion-books through, and I can’t find such a fashion anywhere in the last century. I’m not in the least afraid, but I am curious about her, I admit.”

“Was Wender’s rattlesnake old-fashioned?”

Lithway got up. “See here,” he said, “I’m not going to stand jollying. That’s the one thing I am afraid of. Should you like to hear Wender’s theory?”

“Not I,” I said firmly. “He believes in two kinds of magic – white and black – and has eaten the fruit of the mango-tree that a fakir has just induced to grow out of the seed before his eyes. He told me once that devils were square. I’m not in the least interested in Wender’s rattlesnake. The wonder is, with his peculiar twist of mind, that he doesn’t insist on living in this house.”

“He particularly hates snakes,” answered Lithway. “He was hoping to see her, but he never could. Nor you, apparently.”

“How often do you see her?”

“About once in six months.”

“And you’re not afraid?”

“Well – she doesn’t do anything to me, you know.” He was very serious.

“Probably couldn’t hurt you if she did – a young thing like that. But why don’t you move out?”

Lithway frankly crimsoned. “I – like her.”

“In spite of her eyes?”

“In spite of her eyes. And – I’ve thought that look in them might be the cross light on the staircase.”

I burst out laughing. “Lithway, come away with me. Solitude is getting on your nerves. We’ll go to Germany and look after your little cousin and the aunt who writes such wonderful letters.”

“No.” Lithway was firm. “It’s too much like work.”

I was serious, for he really seemed to me, at the time of this visit, in rather a bad way. I urged him with every argument I could think of. He had no counter-arguments, but finally he broke out: “Well, if you will have it, I feel safer here.”

“You’ve never seen her anywhere else, have you?”

“No.”

“Then this seems to be the one point of danger.”

“Wender’s theory is that—” he began.

But I persisted in not hearing Wender’s theory. Even when, a week later, my own experience was exactly duplicated and I had spent another day in watching a white line fade off my forehead, I still persisted. But, as Lithway wouldn’t leave the house, I did. I began even to have a sneaking sympathy for Wender. But I didn’t want to hear his theory. Indeed, to this day I never have heard it. Oddly enough, though, I should be willing to wager a good sum that it was accurate.

I was arranging for a considerable flight – something faddier and more dangerous than I had hitherto attempted – and to a friend as indolent as Lithway I could only prepare to bid a long farewell. He positively refused to accompany me even on the earlier and less difficult stages of my journey. “I’ll stick to my home,” he declared. It was a queer home to want to stick to, I thought privately, especially as the ghost was obviously local. He had never seen an apparition except at Braythe – nor had I, nor had Wender. I worried about leaving him there, for the one danger I apprehended was the danger of overwrought nerves; but Lithway refused to budge, and you can’t coerce a sane and able-bodied man with a private fortune. I did carry my own precautions to the point of looking up the history of the house. The man from whom Lithway had bought it, while it was still unfinished, had intended it for his own occupancy; but a lucrative post in a foreign country had determined him to leave America. The very architect was a churchwarden, the husband of one wife and the father of eight children. I even hunted up the contractor: not one accident had occurred while the house was building, and he had employed throughout, most amicably, union labor on its own terms. It was silly of me, if you like, but I had really been shaken by the unpleasant powers of the place. After my researches it seemed clear that in objecting to it any further I shouldn’t have a leg to stand on. In any case, Lithway would probably rather live in a charnel-house than move. I had to wash my hands of it all.

The last weeks of my visit were perfectly uneventful, both for Lithway and me – as if the house, too, were on its guard. I came to believe that there was nothing in it, and if either of us had been given to drinking, I should have called the eleven-o’clock visitation a new form of hang-over. I was a little inclined, in defiance of medical authorities, to consider it an original and interesting form of indigestion. By degrees I imposed upon myself to that extent. I did not impose on myself, however, to the extent of wanting to hear Wender talk about it; and I still blush to think how shallow were the excuses that I mustered for not meeting him at any of the times that he proposed.

This is a bad narrative, for the reason that it must be so fragmentary. It is riddled with lapses of time. Ghosts may get in their fine work in an hour, but they have always been preparing their coup for years. Every ghost, compared with us, is Methuselah. We have to fight in a vulnerable and dissolving body; but they aren’t pressed for time. They’ve only to lie low until the psychologic moment. Oh, I’d undertake to accomplish almost anything if you’d give me the ghost’s chance. If he can’t get what he wants out of this generation, he can get it out of the next. Grand thing, to be a ghost!

It was some years before I went back to Braythe. Wender, I happen to know, never went back. Lithway used to write me now and then, but seldom referred to my adventure. He couldn’t very well, since the chief burden of his letters was always “When are you coming to visit me?” Once, when I had pressed him to join me for a season in Japan, he virtually consented, but at the last moment I got a telegram, saying: “I can’t leave her. Bon voyage!” That didn’t make me want to go back to Braythe. I was worried about him, but his persistent refusal to act on anyone’s advice made it impossible to do anything for him. I thought once of hiring someone to burn the house down; but Lithway wouldn’t leave it, and I didn’t want to do anything clumsy that would imperil him. I was much too far away to arrange it neatly. I suggested it once to Wender, when we happened to meet in London, and he was exceedingly taken with the idea. I half hoped, for a moment, that he would do it himself. But the next afternoon he came back with a lot of reasons why it wouldn’t do – he had been grubbing in the British Museum all day. I very nearly heard Wender’s theory that time, but I pleaded a dinner engagement and got off.

You can imagine that I was delighted when I heard from Lithway, some years after my own encounter with the savage on the staircase, that he had decided to pull out and go to Europe. He had the most fantastic reasons for doing it – this time he wrote me fully. It seems he had become convinced that his apparition was displeased with him – didn’t like the look in her eyes, found it critical. As he wasn’t doing anything in particular except live like a hermit at Braythe, the only thing he could think of to propitiate her was to leave. Perhaps there was a sort of withered coquetry in it, too; he may have thought the lady would miss him if he departed and shut up the house. You see, by this time she was about the most real thing in his life. I don’t defend Lithway; but I thought then that, whatever the impelling motive, it would be an excellent thing for him to leave Braythe for a time. Perhaps, once free of it, he would develop a normal and effectual repugnance to going back, and then we should all have our dear, delightful Lithway again. I wrote triumphantly to Wender, and he replied hopefully, but on a more subdued note.

Lithway came over to Europe. He wrote to me, making tentative suggestions that I should join him; but, as he refused to join me and I didn’t care at all about the sort of thing he was planning, we didn’t meet. I was all for the Peloponnesus, and he was for a wretched tourist’s itinerary that I couldn’t stomach. I hoped to get him in the end to wander about in more interesting places, but as he had announced that he was going first to Berlin to look up the little cousin and her maternal aunt, I thought I would wait until he had satisfied his clannish conscience.

Then, one fine day, his old curiosity would waken, and we should perhaps start out together to get new impressions. That fine day never dawned, however. He lingered on in Germany, following his relatives to Marienbad when they left Berlin for the summer. I hoped, with each mail, that he would announce his arrival in some spot where I could conceivably meet him; but the particular letter announcing that never came. He was quite taken up with the cousins. He said nothing about going home, and I was thoroughly glad of that, at least.

I was not wholly glad, just at the moment, when a letter bounced out at me one morning, announcing that he was to marry the little cousin – by this time, as I had understood from earlier correspondence, a lovely girl of eighteen. I had looked forward to much companionship with the Lithway I had known of old, when he should be free of his obsession. I had thought him on the way to freedom; and here he was, caught by a flesh-and-blood damsel who thrust me out quite as decisively as the phantasmal lady on the staircase. I had decency enough to be glad for Lithway, if not for myself; glad that he could strike the old idyllic note and live again delightfully in the moment. I didn’t go to Berlin to see them married, but I sent them my blessing and a very curious and beautiful eighteenth-century clock. I also promised to visit them in America. I felt that, if necessary, I could face Braythe, now that the ghost was so sure to be laid. No woman would stay in a house where her husband was carrying on, however unwillingly, an affair with an apparition; and, as their address remained the same, I believed that the ghost had given up the fight.

This story has almost the gait of history. I have to sum up decades in a phrase. It is really the span of one man’s whole life that I am covering, you see. But have patience with me while I skim the intervening voids, and hover meticulously over the vivid patches of detail…. It was some two years before I reached Braythe. I don’t remember particularly what went on during those two years; I only know that I was a happy wanderer. I was always a happy wanderer, it seems to me as I look back on life, except for the times when I sank by Lithway’s side into his lethargy – a lucid lethargy, in which unaccountable things happened very quietly, with an utter stillness of context. I do know that I was planning a hunting-trip in British Central Africa, and wrote Lithway that I had better postpone my visit until that was over. He seemed so hurt to think that I could prefer any place to him that I did put it off until the next year and made a point of going to the Lithways.

I had no forebodings when I got out of Lithway’s car at his gate and faced the second Mrs. Lithway, who had framed her beauty in the clustering wistaria of the porch. I was immensely glad for Lithway that he had a creature like that to companion him. Youth and beauty are wonderful things to keep by one’s fireside. There was more than a touch of vicarious gratitude in my open admiration of Mrs. Lithway. He was a person one couldn’t help wanting good things for; and one felt it a delicate personal attention to oneself when they came to him.

Nothing changes a man, however, after he has once achieved his type: that was what I felt most keenly, at the end of the evening, as I sat with Lithway in his library. Mrs. Lithway had trailed her light skirts up the staircase with incomparable grace, smiling back at us over her shoulder; and I had gone with Lithway to the library, wondering how long I could hold him with talk of anything but her. I soon saw that he didn’t wish to talk of her. That, after all, was comprehensible – you could take it in so many ways; but it was with real surprise that I saw him sink almost immediately into gloom. Gloom had never been a gift of Lithway’s; his indolence had always been shot through with mirth. Even his absorption in the ghost had been whimsical – almost as if he had deliberately let himself go, had chosen to be obsessed. I didn’t know what to make of the gloom, the unresilient heaviness with which he met my congratulations and my sallies. They had been perfect together at dinner and through the early evening. Now he fell slack in every muscle and feature; as if the preceding hours had been a diabolic strain. I wondered a little if he could be worried about money. I supposed Lithway had enough – and his bride too, if it came to that – though I didn’t know how much. But one could not be long in the house without noticing luxuries that had nothing to do with its original unpretending comfort. You were met at every turn by some aesthetic refinement as costly as the lace and jewels in which Mrs. Lithway’s own loveliness was wrapped. It was evident from all her talk that her standard of civilization was very high; that she had a natural attachment to shining nonessentials. I was at a loss ; I didn’t know what to say to him, he looked so tired. Such silence, even between Lithway and me, was awkward.

Finally he spoke: “Do you remember my ghost?”

“I remember your deafening me with talk of her. I never saw her.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t have seen her.”

“I saw one of my own, you remember.”

“Oh, yes! A black man who struck at you. You never have had a black man strike at you in real life, have you? ” He turned to me with a faint flicker of interest.

“Never. We threshed all that out before, you. know. I never even saw that particular nigger except at Braythe.”

“You will see him, perhaps, if you are fool enough to go to British Central Africa,” he jerked out.

“Perhaps,” I answered. But I was more interested in Lithway’s adventure. “Do you see your ghost now? ” I had been itching to ask, and it seemed to me that he had given me a fair opening.

Lithway passed his hand across his brows. “I don’t know. I’m not quite sure. Sometimes I think so. But I couldn’t swear to it.”

“Has she grown dimmer, then – more hazy? You used to speak of her as if she were a real woman coming to a tryst: flesh and blood, at the least.”

He looked at me a little oddly. “I’m not awfully well. My eyes play me tricks sometimes… . When you got off the train tonight, I could have sworn you had a white scar on your forehead. As soon as we got out here and I had a good look at you, I saw. you hadn’t, of course.” Then he went back. “I don’t believe I really do see her now. I think it may be an hallucination when occasionally I think I do. Yes, I’m pretty sure that, when I think I do, it’s pure hallucination. I don’t like it; I wish she’d either go or stay.”

“My dear fellow, you speak as if she had ever, in her palmiest days, been anything but an hallucination. Did you get to the point of believing that the girl you say used to hang over the staircase was real?”

“She was more real than the one that sometimes I see there now. Oh, yes, she was real! What I see now – when I see it at all – is just the ghost of her.”

“The ghost of a ghost!” I ejaculated. “It’s as bad as Wender’s rattlesnake.”

Lithway turned to me suddenly. “Where is Wender?”

“Why, don’t you know? Working on American archaeology at some university – I don’t know which. He hadn’t decided on the place, when he last wrote. I was going to get his address from you.”

“He won’t come here, you know. And Margaret’s feelings are a little hurt – he has often been quite near. So there’s a kind of official coolness. She doesn’t know about the ghosts, and therefore I can’t quite explain Wender’s refusals to her. Of course, I know it’s on that account; he’s as superstitious as a woman. But poor Margaret, I suppose, believes he doesn’t approve of my having taken a wife. She’s as sweet as possible about it, but I can see she’s hurt. And yet I’d rather she would be hurt than to know about the house.”

“Why, in Heaven’s name, don’t you sell it and move, Lithway?” I cried.

He colored faintly. “Margaret is very fond of the place. I couldn’t, considering its idiosyncrasy, sell with a good conscience, and if I didn’t sell, it would mean losing a pretty penny – more, certainly, than Margaret and I can afford to. She lost most of her own money, you know, a few years ago.”

“The aunt?”

“Oh, dear, no!” He said it rather hastily. “But you were quite right at the time. I ought to have gone out there ten years ago. Women never know how to manage money.”

I looked him in the eyes. “Lithway, anything in the world is better than staying in this house. You’re in a bad way. You admit, yourself, you’re not well. And Mrs. Lithway would rather cut out the motor and live anywhere than have you go to pieces.”

He laughed. “Tell Margaret that I’m going to pieces – if you dare!”

“I’m not afraid of you, even if I should.”

“No; but wouldn’t you be afraid of her?”

I thought of the utter youth of Mrs. Lithway; the little white teeth that showed so childishly when she laughed; her small white hands that had seemed so weighed down with a heavy piece of embroidery; her tiny feet that- slipped along the polished floors – a girl that you could pick up and throw out of the window.

“Certainly not. Would you?” “I should think so!” He smiled. “We’ve been very happy here. I don’t think she would like to move. I shan’t suggest it to her. And mind” – he turned to me rather sharply – “don’t you hint to her that the house is the uncanny thing you and that fool Wender seem to think it is.”

I saw that there was no going ahead on that tack. Beyond a certain point, you can’t interfere with mature human beings. But certainly Lithway looked ill; and if he admitted ill health, there must be something in it. It was extraordinary that Mrs. Lithway saw nothing. I was almost sorry – in spite of the remembered radiance of the vision on the porch – that Lithway had chosen to fall in love with a young fool. I rose.

“Love must be blind, if your wife doesn’t see you’re pulled down.”

“Oh, love – it’s the blindest thing going, thank God!” He was silent for a moment. “There are a great many things I can’t explain,” he said. “But you can be sure that everything’s all right.”

I was quite sure, though I couldn’t wholly have told why, that everything was at least moderately wrong. But I decided to say nothing more that night. I went to bed.

Lithway was ill; only so could I account for his nervousness, which sometimes, in the next days, mounted to irritability. He was never irritable with his wife; when the tenser moods were on, he simply ceased to address her, and turned his attention to me. We motored a good deal; that seemed to agree with him. But one morning he failed to appear at breakfast, and Mrs. Lithway seemed surprised that I had heard nothing during the night. He had had an attack of acute pain – the doctor had been sent for. There had been telephoning, running to and fro, and talk in the corridors that no one had thought of keying down on my account. I was a little ashamed of not having waked, and more than a little cross at not having been called. She assured me that I could have done nothing, and apologized as prettily as possible for having to leave me to myself during the day. Lithway was suffering less, but, of course, she would be at his bedside. Naturally, I made no objections to her wifely solicitude. I was allowed to see Lithway for a few minutes; but the pain was severe, and I cut my conversation short. The doctor suspected the necessity for an operation, and they sent to New York for a consulting specialist. I determined to wait until they should have reached their gruesome decision, on the off chance that I might, in the event of his being moved, be of service to Mrs. Lithway. In spite of her calm and sweetness, and the perfect working of the household mechanism – no flurry, no fright, no delays or hitches – I thought her, still, a young fool. Any woman, of any age, was a fool if she had not seen Lithway withering under her very eyes.

It was a dreary day during which we waited for the New York physician; one of those days when sunlight seems drearier than mist – a monotonous and hostile glare. I tried reading Lithway’s books, but the mere fact that they were his got on my nerves. I decided to go to my room and throw myself on the resources of my own luggage. There would be something there to read, I knew. I closed the library door quietly and went upstairs. Outside my own door I stopped and looked – involuntarily, with no conscious curiosity – up to the third story hall. There, in the dim corridor, leaning over the balustrade in a thin shaft of sunlight that struck up from the big window on the landing, stood Mrs. Lithway, with a folded paper in her hand, looking down at me. I did not wish to raise my voice – Lithway, I thought, might be sleeping – so did not speak to her. I don’t think, in any case, I should have wanted to speak to her. The look in her eyes was distinctly unpleasant – the kind of look people don’t usually face you with. I remember wondering, as our surprised glances met, why the deuce she should hate me like that – how the deuce a nice young thing could hate anyone like that. It must be personal to me, I thought – no nice young thing would envisage the world at large with such venom. I turned away; and as I turned, I saw her, out of the tail of my eye, walk, with her peculiar lightness of step, along the upper corridor to the trunk-loft. She had the air of being caught, of not having wished to be seen. I opened my bedroom door immediately, but as I opened it I heard a sound behind me. Margaret Lithway stood on the threshold of her husband’s room, with an empty bottle.

“Would you mind taking the car into the village and getting this filled again?” she asked. Her eyes had dark shadows beneath them; she had evidently not slept, the night before.

I flatter myself that I did not betray to her in any way my perturbation. Indeed, the event had fallen on a mind so ripe for solutions that, in the very instant of my facing her, I realized that what I had just seen above-stairs (and seen by mistake, I can assure you; she had fled from me) was Lithway’s old ghost – no less. I took the bottle, read the label, and assured Mrs. Lithway that I would go at once. Mrs. Lithway was wrapped in a darkish house-gown of some sort. The lady in the upper hall had been in white, with a blue sash…. I was very glad when I saw Mrs. Lithway go into her husband’s room and shut the door. I was having hard work to keep my expression where it belonged. For five minutes I stood in the hall; five minutes of unbroken stillness. Then I went to the garage, ordered out the car, and ran into the village, where I presented the bottle to the apothecary. He filled it immediately. As I re-entered the house, the great hall clock struck; it was half past eleven. I sent the stuff – lime-water, I believe – up to Mrs. Lithway by a servant, went into my room, and locked the door.

I cannot say that I solved the whole enigma of Braythe in the hour before luncheon; but I faced for the first time the seriousness of a situation that had always seemed to me, save for Lithway’s curious reactions upon it, more than half fantastic, if not imaginary. I had seen, actually seen, Lithway’s ghost. I had not been meant to see her; and I was inclined to regret the sudden impulse that had led me to leave Lithway’s library and go to my own room. The identity of the “ghost” with Mrs. Lithway was appalling to me – the more so, that there could have been no mistake about the nature of the personality that had reluctantly presented itself to my vision. I found myself saying: “Could that look in her eyes be the cross light on the stairs? ” and then suddenly remembered that I was only echoing the Lithway of years ago. It was incredible that any man should have liked the creature I had seen; and I could account for Lithway’s long and sentimental relation with the apparition only by supposing that he had never seen her, as I had, quite off her guard. But if, according to his hint of the night before, he had come to confound the ghost with the real woman – what sort of marriage was that? I asked myself. The ghost was a bad lot, straight through. It brought me into the realm of pure horror. The event explained – oh, I raised my hands to wave away the throng of things it explained! Indeed, until I could talk once more with Lithway, I didn’t want to face them; I didn’t want to see clear. I had a horrid sense of being left alone with the phantoms that infested the house: alone, with a helpless, bedridden friend to protect. Mrs. Lithway didn’t need protection – that was clearer than anything else. Mrs. Lithway was safe.

Before night, the consultation had been held, and it was decided that Lithway should be rushed straight to town for an operation. The pain was not absolutely constant; he had tranquil moments; but the symptoms were alarming enough to make them afraid of even a brief delay. We were to take him up the next morning. To all my offers of help, Mrs. Lithway gave a smiling refusal. She could manage perfectly, she said. I am bound to say that she did manage perfectly, thinking of everything, never losing her head, unfailingly adequate, though the shadows under her eyes seemed to grow darker hour by hour. A nurse had come down from town, but I could hardly see what tasks Mrs. Lithway left to the nurse. I did my best, out of loyalty to the loyal Lithway, to subdue my aversion to his wife. I hoped that my aversion was quite unreasonable and that, safe in Europe, I should feel it so. I ventured to say, after dinner, that I hoped she would try to get some sleep.

“Oh, yes, I shall!” She smiled. “There will be a great deal to do tomorrow; and the day after, when they operate, will be a strain. There’s nothing harder than waiting outside. I know.” Her eyes filled, but she went on very calmly. “I am so grateful to you for being here and for going up with us. I have no people of my own, you know, to call on. You have been the greatest comfort.” She gave me a cool hand, said “good night,” and left me.

I do not know whether or not Mrs. Lithway slept, but I certainly did not, save in fitful dozes. I was troubled about Lithway: I thought him in very bad shape for an operation; and I had, besides, nameless forebodings of every sort. It was a comfort, the next morning, to hear him, through an open door, giving practical suggestions to his wife and the nurse about packing his things. I went in to see him before we started off. The doctor was downstairs with Mrs. Lithway.

“Sorry to let you in for this, my boy. But you are a great help.”

“Mrs. Lithway is wonderful,” I said. “I congratulate you.”

His sombre eyes held me. “Ah, you will never know how wonderful – never!” He said it with a kind of brooding triumph, which, at the moment, I did not wholly understand. Now, long afterwards, I think I do.

I left him, and crossed the corridor to my own room. A slight rustle made me turn. Mrs. Lithway stood in the upper hall, looking down at me – the same creature, to every detail of dress, even to the folded paper in her hand, that I had seen the previous morning. This time I braced myself to face the ghost, to examine her with a passionate keenness. I hoped to find her a less appalling creature. But, at once, Mrs. Lithway leaned over the rail and spoke to me – a little sharply, I remember.

“Would you please telephone to the garage and say that the doctor thinks we ought to start ten minutes earlier than we had planned? I shall be down directly.”

The hand that held the paper was by this time hidden in the folds of her skirt. She turned and sped lightly along the corridor to the trunk-loft. Save for the voice, it was a precise repetition of what had happened the day before.

“Certainly,” I said; but I did not turn away until she had disappeared into the trunk-loft. I went to the telephone and gave the message; it took only a few seconds. Then I went to my own room, leaving the door open so that I commanded the hall. In a few minutes Mrs. Lithway came down the stairs from the third story. “Did you telephone?” she asked accusingly, as she caught my eye. I bowed. She passed on into Lithway’s room. There was no paper in her hand. I knew that this time there had been no ghost.

Well… Lithway, as everyone knows, died under the ether. His heart suddenly and unaccountably went back on him. He left no will; and, as he had no relations except the cousin whom he had married, everything went to her. I had once, before his second marriage, seen a will of Lithway’s, myself; but I didn’t care to go into court with that information, especially as in that will he had left me his library. I should have liked, for old sake’s sake, to have Lithway’s library. His widow sold it, and it is by now- dispersed about the land. She told me, after the funeral, that she should go on at Braythe, that she never wanted to leave it; but, for whatever reason, she did, after a few years, sell the place suddenly and go to Europe. I have never happened to see her since she sold it, and I did not know the people she sold it to. The house was burned many years ago, I believe, and an elaborate golf-course now covers the place where it stood. I have not been to Braythe since poor Lithway was buried.

I took the hunting-trip that Lithway had been so violently and inexplicably opposed to. I think I was rather a fool to do it, for I ought to have realized, after Lithway’s death, the secret of the house, its absolutely unique specialty. But such is the peacock heart of man that I still, for myself, trusted in “common sense” – in my personal immunity, at least, from every supernatural law. Indeed, it was not until I had actually encountered my savage, and got the wound I bear the scar of, that I gave entire credence to Lithway’s tragedy. I put some time into recovering from the effect of that midnight, skirmish in the jungle, and during my recovery I had full opportunity to pity Lithway.

It became quite clear to me that the presences at Braythe concerned themselves only with major dooms. If Lithway’s ghost had been his wife, his wife must have been a bad lot. I am as certain as I can be of anything that he was exceedingly unhappy with her. It was a thousand pities that, for so many years, he had misunderstood the vision; that he had permitted himself – for that was what it amounted to – to fall in love with her in advance. She was, quite literally, his “fate.” Of course, by this time, I feel sure that he couldn’t have escaped her. I don’t believe the house went in for kindly warnings; I think it merely, with the utmost insolence, foretold the inevitable and dared you to escape it. If I hadn’t gone out for big game in Africa, I am quite sure that my nigger would have got at me somewhere else – even if he had to be a cannibal out of a circus running amuck down Broadway. That was the trick of the house: the worst thing that was going to happen to you leered at you authentically over that staircase. I have never understood why I saw Lithway’s apparition; but I can bear witness to the fact that she was furious at my having seen her – as furious as Mrs. Lithway was, the next day, if it comes to that. It was a mistake. My step may have sounded like Lithway’s. Who knows? At least it should be clear what Lithway meant when he said that he didn’t always know whether he saw her or not. The two were pin for pin alike; The apparition, of course, had, from the beginning, worn the dress that Mrs. Lithway was to wear on the day that Lithway was taken to the hospital. I have never liked to penetrate further into the Lithways’ intimate history. I am quite sure that the folded paper was the old will, but I have always endeavored, in my own mind, not to implicate Margaret Lithway more than that. Of course, there could never have been any question of implicating her before the public.

I never had a chance, after my own accident, to consult Wender. I stuck to Europe unbrokenly for many years, as he stuck to America. Both Wender and I, I fancy, were chary of writing what might have been written. Someday, I thought, we would meet and have the whole thing out; but that day never came. Suddenly, one autumn, I had news of his death. He was a member of a summer expedition in Utah and northern Arizona – I think I mentioned that he had gone in for American ethnology. There are, as everyone knows, rich finds in our western States for anyone who will dig long enough; and they were hoping to get aboriginal skulls and mummies. All this his sister referred to when she wrote me the particulars of his death. She dwelt with forgivable bitterness on the fact of Wender’s having been told beforehand that the particular section he was assigned to was free from rattlesnakes. “Perhaps you know,” she wrote, “that my brother had had, since childhood, a morbid horror of reptiles.” I did know it – Lithway had told me. Wender’s death from the bite of a rattlesnake was perhaps the most ironic of the three adventures; for Wender was the one of us who put most faith in the scenes produced on the stage of Braythe. I never heard Wender’s theory; but I fancy he realized, as Lithway and I did not, that since the “ghosts” we saw were not of the past they must be of the future – a most logical step, which I am surprised none of us should have taken until after the event.

Wender’s catastrophe killed in me much of my love of wandering. At least, it drove me to Harry Medway; and Harry Medway did the rest. I am not afraid of another warrior’s cutting at me with his assegai; but I do not like to be too far from specialists. I have already been warned that I may sometime go blind; and I know that other complications may be expected. Pathology and surgery are sealed books to me; but I still hold so far to logic that I fully expect to die sometime as an indirect result of that wound. The scar reminds me daily that its last word has not been said.

I am a fairly old man – the older that I no longer wander, and that I cling so weakly to the great capitals which hold the great physicians. The only thing that I was ever good at I can no longer do. Curiosity has died in me, for the most part; one or two such mighty curiosities have been, you see, already so terribly appeased. But I think I would rise from my deathbed, and wipe away with my own hand the mortal sweat from my face, for the chance of learning what it was that drove Mrs. Lithway, in midwinter, from Braythe. If I could once know what she saw on the staircase, I think I should ask no more respite. The scar might fulfill its mission.

—

Belshazzar’s Letter

“‘Belshazzar had a letter; he never had but one,’” murmured Fenwick.

I should never have suspected Fenwick of having read, much less having memorized, the works of Emily Dickinson. Fenwick does not read – much; and how should he have got hold of Emily, anyhow? It appeared presently – for of course he was questioned – that he had picked up her poems in the home of a foreign missionary, where he had once perforce been marooned during a cholera epidemic. Fenwick himself is, I fancy, outside all creeds; but he can’t help – given his life – running into missionaries, and he usually speaks well of them. He takes them, at all events, as all in the day’s work, as he reports, from very strange places, to the “interests” that employ him. They have an eye out, those “interests,” for a good many different commodities, though I incline to believe that rubber is the chief. Adventure has never seemed to pry Fenwick loose from his very American moorings, though he told me on a certain occasion, with a dropped jaw (in a kind of wry whisper) that he had lost his religion once just like that – in a typhoon.

I mention these facts concerning Fenwick for reasons that will appear later. He was leaving for San Francisco and the East the next week, by the way, and this was a scratch gathering of friends and acquaintances more or less to do Fenwick honor. Ben Allis and Mrs. Allis were giving the “party.” Nora Pate, Mrs. Allis’s niece, was spending with them an enforced holiday from school. She was at the dinner-table on sufferance merely. It was Nora, with her giggling flapper-ish reference to a ouija-board occurrence at school that had elicited Fenwick’s humorous quotation.

Now you must also know that we were a fairly intimate but more than fairly eclectic group at the Allises’ table. Most of us were bred to one or another form of the Christian religion, went to church spasmodically (except Nora, who of course had to go every Sunday), and comfortably or uncomfortably, according to temperament, let the whole thing slide – took it for granted, or permitted it euthanasia, as it and our souls chose. But Mrs. Conway was a Catholic – “just the ordinary kind,” as she had once said herself, with a sidelong glance at Mrs. Medford, who was waveringly “High;” Allis was a scientific skeptic, and Fenwick a reverent free-thinker. Or so I had gathered. The typhoon had made him a free-thinker, and his inheritance and temperament had apparently kept him reverent. My personal convictions do not matter, but when it comes to ouija-boards, I am all with Allis.

Young Nora had been rather stumped by Fenwick’s quotation. She had probably heard of Belshazzar, but she had never heard of Miss Dickinson, and she certainly did not see what it had to do with the ouija-board revelations at midnight in Betty Dane’s room.

After we had found out just where Fenwick had read Emily Dickinson, the talk swung back to the occult. Mrs. Medford’s pearl-powdered face and naturally red lips were eager. She even wanted the complete account of what had happened in Betty Dane’s room. Nora needed no more encouragement than that.

“Why, Betty was desperate because she couldn’t be at home when her cousin had his leave; and she asked ouija if there wasn’t any chance of his leave being changed. And ouija said, ‘Measles will make you free,’ and of course we all laughed. Then we thought probably her cousin would have measles, so he couldn’t come, and Betty would be free of disappointment. And the next week Pauline Case came down with them – and Betty is at home with her cousin, and she’s going to bring back a book that tells all about everything depending on the way the breath circulates in your body.”

The flushed Nora, at a glance from her aunt, sank out of sight below the conversational tide. But Mrs. Medford had smiled comfortingly at her.

“Prophesying is one thing they won’t usually engage to do, you know,” someone threw in. “I believe even Doyle and Lodge say that.”

“Naturally – since they have to get it out of your subconscious.” This was Mrs. Conway.

Mrs. Medford turned upon her, a little acrid. You may have noticed that the two kinds of “Catholic” don’t mix very well. “Has the Church decided that it’s all your subconscious?”

Mrs. Conway’s smile was all that she herself could have wished it to be. “Why, I believe so. Where else could they get it?”

“Whom do you mean by they ?” the other woman challenged.

“Why, the evil spirits.” Mrs. Conway reached for a mint drop. “You see, the Church had all this to settle so many centuries ago. It’s hardly a new phenomenon.”

If there was irony in Mrs. Conway’s tone, it was not sharp enough to wound Fanny Medford. She looked rather pleadingly at the other woman’s clever, gentle face. “Always evil spirits?” she murmured. “Never good ones?”

Mrs. Conway murmured back, and the two seemed for a moment to be isolated together. “Never good ones; and never the real dead. That is forbidden, you know.”

I had hoped that our moving from the dining-room would break the current, but I had reckoned without Fenwick. We had our coffee all together in Allis’s big library so much the nicest room in the house that I didn’t much wonder at Maud Allis’s refusing, except under great pressure, to drag the women away elsewhere. Nora Pate was sent upstairs to study, and we were freer. As soon as she had gone, Fenwick led us back to the subject. Mrs. Conway sat apart in the shadows, moving a fan slowly. Mrs. Medford fixed her eyes hungrily on Fenwick. The rest of us listened. After all, it was Fenwick’s party.

“Of course you see all kinds of trances, and miracles, and levitation, and tricks, out in the East,” he began. “I confess I’m not much interested in what Hindus and such do. They’re so different, anyhow. But it does interest me to come back to America for the first time since the war, and find everybody going it this way. The Americans and English out there do it, too. But there’s an epidemic here, as far as I can make out. Look at your niece and her ouija-board. And all of us ready to argue about it. Honestly, I’m interested. I’m perfectly open-minded about it, my self. I’m not psychic, or whatever you call it.”

“You don’t have to be psychic. There’s no such thing.” This came out of the shadows where Mrs. Conway’s fan waved.

Mrs. Medford turned and gazed at her, as if trying to penetrate even deeper shadows that lay between them.

“Oh, well, I mean – I sat in on table-tipping once or twice, but I don’t think I added much. I never saw any ghosts, or had anything queer happen to me. I know a man out in Singapore who does automatic writing, though – gets stuff through from his mother. At least, he says he doesn’t believe it’s his mother, but he keeps right on, all the same. He says she has told him things that no one else could have known about.”

“He knew about them, didn’t he?” asked Allis, with heavy matter-of-factness.

“Why, yes – he and she.”

“Well, it all came out of his subconscious.”

“I dare say.” Fenwick set down his coffee-cup and took a cigarette proffered him by Mrs. Allis. “Only I’m sick of you people all wagging your heads and saying the subconscious every time you’re up against it. Why don’t you get busy and explain how the thing works?”

“Ah yes, why don’t you?” Mrs. Medford seized on Fenwick’s challenge as if it were her own.

Allis pulled his mustache and spoke judicially. “I’m not a psychologist myself, as you very well know – not even a biologist. I don’t know that science has explained the technique of it yet, though they are working on this sort of thing all the time. Hysteria, secondary personality, dreams – all these things are being put under the microscope, and they’re finding out.”

“I’d rather believe in spooks than in Freud, any day.” This was Carter, a gay soul.

Allis ignored him. “I dare say you do know, though, that alienists are using automatic writing in their treatment of patients now. They find that some traumas, too deep-laid for hypnotism to probe to, can be brought to the surface by getting the patient to write automatically. That is one for the subconscious, anyhow.”

“But—” this was Fanny Medford, brave on her own account – “what about the things that never were in your subconscious; couldn’t have been there? They get those too – indeed they do.”

“I agree with Fanny and Mr. Fenwick,” said Maud Allis. “I don’t believe it’s the spirits of the dead; but neither do I believe that the psychologists have explained it yet. I’m open-minded.”

“I’m open-minded, too,” laughed young Carter. “Ready to try anything. Except Nora’s ouija-board. That’s too darned easy.”

A slim form in white came out of the shadows – Mrs. Conway, gray-eyed, ivory-cheeked, like a warm ghost. “Can’t you see,” she said, “that an open mind is the most dangerous thing there is? Because if your mind is really open, any evil thing can get in.”

She put her arm round Fanny Medford’s waist, with a soft, sidelong gesture, though she faced our host, directly questioning him. Mrs. Medford stirred a little against the light encircling arm – barely noticing it, it seemed. Her face was flushed beneath her pearl powder. She addressed Allis and Carter, now standing abreast before the fireplace.

“Have you ever tried automatic writing?”

“No.”

“Nor I,” cut in Mrs. Allis, “but I’m going to try sometime. Has anyone here tried it?” Maud Allis went on, looking round at her group.

I shook my head, Fenwick and Carter theirs. Mrs. Conway merely said, “You forget I’m a Catholic.”

“How about Mrs. Medford herself?” Young Carter marked us off on his fingers.

“Oh, I – I’ve tried it, yes. But I can’t do it!” She bit her lip and turned away, and before we quite realized that she was crying, she had made a soft plunge through the wide doorway into the next room. Maud Allis followed her, but returned in a few moments.

“She’ll be all right presently. She’ll come back. It’s just that she is so interested. Ever since her brother, Jack Hilles, was killed, she’s been trying to ‘get through’ to him; and she can’t do it herself. She began going to a medium, and the woman had no sooner established communication for her than she died. Now, Fanny’s rather up against it. She’s not the kind that likes to go to mediums, you know. I’m awfully sorry you started the subject.”

“Why didn’t you stop us, if you knew all that?” Ben queried.

“I didn’t. She just told me about the medium now. Oh, she’ll pull herself together all right. It may do her good to have it out with a sensible crowd like this. We didn’t put it into her head. It’s there all the time – has been, ever since Jack Hilles was killed in the Argonne.”

“Well, we’ll drop it right here,” Allis replied.

But Mrs. Medford was back among us and heard him.

“You won’t drop anything on my account, I hope. Maud may have told you it’s the one thing I’m interested in. It’s just awfully hard luck that I can’t do anything myself. If you people really feel like trying anything, don’t let me stop you. I dare say the rest of you are as bad as I am, anyway. Not ‘psychic’ – though Mrs. Conway says there’s nothing in that.”

“There isn’t,” Mrs. Conway averred again.

“Let’s try it, anyhow,” cried young Carter. “Not table-tipping. Let’s sit about and turn the lights out and each take a pencil, and see if we can do automatic writing.”

Fanny Medford clapped her hands. “Oh, do! Only, of course I can’t. But perhaps” – she looked us over hungrily – “some of you can, and I might get a tip as to the right way to manage. And, anyway, it’s so interesting.” Certainly she had recovered.

“I’m not going to sit with the lights out all the evening,” grumbled Allis. “This was supposed to be, in its humble way, a dinner-party.”

“Well, of course, not all the evening,” Maud conceded. “A quarter of an hour. And then we’ll stop and play bridge.”

“It would be rather fun.” This was Genevieve Ford. I have not mentioned Miss Ford before, simply because she had taken no part in the conversation that I have detailed. She happened to you, once in so often, in somebody’s house, and you didn’t much care, one way or the other. She was just a nice girl, a little more restful than some, perhaps. I think the Allises hoped against hope that someday she and Carter… I don’t know why.

Somehow Miss Ford’s quiet speech clinched it. Perhaps because she had been an outsider through the talk.

“Good for you. Let’s!” Carter dashed to Ben’s table and swept some pencils off it. “Paper, Allis? And more pencils. We’ll scatter about through the rooms so that everyone can have a table-edge or a chair-arm.”

Allis found us pads of paper, and pencils – all except Mrs. Conway, who refused to join us and went off to fetch her knitting. We all looked at each other rather helplessly.

“How do you begin?” I asked.

“I suppose you douse the glim.” Carter snapped off the light nearest to him.

“That’s perfectly unnecessary,” Fenwick commented. “The man I know in Singapore does it anytime – in broad daylight, between courses at tiffin, if he feels like it. All you do is to let your hand go slack, and think about something quite different.”

Mrs. Conway, who had returned with her knitting, intervened. “I wouldn’t think too hard about something quite different, if I were you. That is, not if you want results.”

“But we want to play fair,” Maud Allis protested. “There’s no sense in trying this kind of thing unless you do your best.”

“I only meant,” Mrs. Conway explained, “that if you really want to let them in, you must make your mind as blank as possible. Don’t make an effort to think of anything. Just open the door and wait. You make me feel like an accessory before the fact” – she smiled a little – “except that I really don’t believe anything will happen.”

She withdrew to a sofa and began to knit.

“You just have to be quiet.” Fenwick gave his last explanations. “And let your right arm be comfortably slack, and don’t look at the paper if you do begin to write. And if nothing happens in twenty minutes” – he looked interrogatively at Maud Allis – “then we play bridge, do we?”

Mrs. Allis nodded. “And I’m going to put out some of the lights, whether it’s necessary or not. We’d be rather ridiculous in a glare, and we’d probably all be looking at each other to see if anyone’s else arm was moving.” So she reduced the room to a demi-obscurity, very soothing and noncommittal.

Fenwick sat at the other end of Mrs. Conway’s sofa, resting his pad on his knee. “Won’t your knitting spoil it?” he murmured.

“Dear, no,” she whispered back. “I’ll stop, if you like. But knitting-needles won’t keep them away.”

“No fooling, Ben.” Mrs. Allis’s admonishing words were the last spoken. After that, silence.

I did my best to play the game, but my hand did not move. I became, somehow, perfectly sure that it never would move, and that conviction edged my voluntary slackness of spirit. The corners of the room were too dark for me to see how each fellow-guest was faring; but I noted idly the little stir of Mrs. Conway’s needles, the faint fire-glow on Mrs. Medford’s bent blond head, Ben Allis’s comfortably hunched position, Miss Ford’s graceful, pensive attitude. After fifteen minutes, I constituted myself time-keeper, moving my left hand so that the radium dial of my wristwatch showed. I stared at it until I began to feel prickly all over. If my arm didn’t move then, I thought, I was surely no good at the business; for I was half hypnotized by my concentrated stare at the dial, and my left hand certainly had no physical knowledge of what my right hand, off in space, was doing.

When twenty minutes were up, no one stirred. I decided to give them a little more time, for good measure. The minute-hand crawled as it does when you are taking a pulse or a temperature. Before the half hour was quite reached, Ben Allis leaped to his feet.

“I’m tired of this. There’s nothing in it. Switch on the lights, you people.”

But the others were stretching cramped limbs, rising slowly from their fixed positions, tottering in the half gloom. I had not risen, myself, and I watched them. They looked drugged, unsure, wan and ungraceful in the dim light – purgatorial poor souls. Only for a second; but just for a second the only normal thing in the scene was the implacable motion of Mrs. Conway’s fingers. Then Carter turned on the light at my elbow, and I saw my own pad of paper. The page, ten inches by eight, was covered with the huge scrawl of two words: “Ask Fenwick.” And I had not known, staring at the dial of my watch, that my arm had moved.

The other lights went on, then. People held their sheets of paper up before them like shields, and moved to the nearest lamp. All except Fenwick, who still held to his corner of the sofa.

“Nothing of course.” Mrs. Medford spoke first, then flung her pad down on the table.

“Nothing here.” Ben Allis grinned over his.

“Mine says something!” Maud Allis cried, as she bent over it under a lamp. “But I can hardly read it, it’s so queer.”

Miss Ford and Carter pressed towards her.

“Oh, I see now,” she said. “It’s ‘Ask Fenwick.’”

I bit my lip and delayed my contribution to knowledge. But while Carter and Genevieve Ford were examining the unsoiled whiteness of their sheets of paper, I looked at Fenwick. He sat in his corner, open-eyed now but tired, surrounded by white things. Mrs. Conway had stopped knitting, and was looking at him with concentrated interest. Her hand fluttered over the sheets of paper that lay between them on the sofa, but never once quite touched them.

The group at the table turned to me. “Did you get anything?” they chorused. Their backs were all more or less turned to Fenwick and Mrs. Conway, you understand.

I came forward. “Just like Maud’s. ‘Ask Fenwick.’ Pick up your manuscript, Fenwick,” I called, “and let us see it.”

They all turned, then.

“Why, he’s written heaps!” Mrs. Medford rushed to the sofa, but Mrs. Conway’s lifted hand fended her off from the papers. “Give him time,” she murmured; “he doesn’t realize yet what he’s done.”

Mrs. Medford stopped, but Carter was not so easily dealt with. He strode over and began picking up the sheets of paper.

Fenwick yawned. “Can I have a cigarette? By gum! I think I must have pulled something off, my arm is so tired.” He flexed it as he rose.

“You did, my boy, you did! Well, who says we aren’t psychic?” This was Carter, arranging the sheets in the order in which presumably they had fallen from Fenwick’s busy hand.

An odd look passed between Mrs. Conway and her host. Both started to speak together. Then she yielded to him, nodding acquiescence as Ben said: “They are Fenwick’s property. It’s up to him whether or not he gratifies our curiosity.”

But Fenwick, jaunty now, uncramped, waved his cigarette. “It belongs to the company. I’m delighted to have been successful. But isn’t it extraordinary that I shouldn’t once have realized that I was writing or that I was tearing those sheets off?”

“You did it very quietly. There was no noise,” Mrs. Conway volunteered.

“Can’t we read the stuff, right off?” Carter inquired anxiously.

Allis leaned over and took the papers from him. There must have been four or five sheets. Neither he nor Carter had examined them.

“Fenwick’s property. It’s up to Fenwick.”

“I don’t want the stuff. Let’s read it aloud if it makes any sense.”

Mrs. Conway rose with determination. “Why not hand it over to me? I won’t read it.”

But Mrs. Medford cried out. “Mr. Gregory wrote ‘Ask Fenwick.’ So did Maud Allis. We must ask Fenwick.”

“Yes. What’s the use of spending all this time in an experiment if we can’t see what we’ve accomplished?” Miss Ford voiced her own and Carter’s grievance.

“Well, Fenwick” – Allis’s bantering voice threw in – “if you are ready to vouch for the absolute purity of your subconscious, shall we oblige the ladies?”

Fenwick looked sheepish. “Oh, I say! You don’t mean to load that stuff, whatever it is, off on me. Why, it may be a resume of the last French novel I read – or anything.”

Mrs. Conway spoke, for the first time, with some sharpness. “You don’t, any of you, know what may be there. It may be utter nonsense, or it may be a sermon. But whatever is there comes from no good place.”

Some of us laughed. “You’re very hard on Fenwick’s subconscious,” Allis said.

“It’s the first time you’ve ever done it?” Mrs. Conway asked.

“Absolutely the first.” Fenwick nodded.

“Well, then” – she sighed – “it’s probably all right. They’re usually careful how they begin.” She shrugged her shoulders.

We moved in a body to the big lamp on Allis’s writing table. “Thank goodness, Nora’s upstairs,” Maud Allis giggled in my ear.

Fenwick now had let himself go in the spirit of Carter and Genevieve Ford, as they chaffed him. “All right,” he said; “I may be done for, but who wrote ‘Ask Fenwick?’ Seems to me we’re all tarred with the same brush, anyhow.”

He held up the first page, getting the light over his shoulder, and began to read.

“‘Jack Hilles speaking.’” The manuscript opened like a telephone call.

Fenwick broke off. “Oh, I say, you don’t want me to read this. There can’t be anything in it, and we’d all be sorry to go any further—”

But Mrs. Medford came close to him, her eyes almost glaring with the intensity of her feeling – a queer, soft, mad glare. I saw, like a shot, that she wasn’t going to be easy to manage.

“Mr. Fenwick, you’ve no right to stop,” she panted.

Ben Allis had gone completely white under his pink-and-tan. Later, I knew why, but then I was merely surprised. Ben was not the man to be upset by preposterous hints of the supernatural.

Fenwick tried to temporize. “But, Mrs. Medford, we can’t play with serious matters. We must respect the dead.” Fenwick had not looked ahead; it was obvious that he simply did not wish to be responsible for anything that purported to be a message.

“He’s my brother! And if he gets through to you while I’m here, it’s for me. That is my property.”

Allis came up and looked shamelessly over Fenwick’s shoulder at the writing. “No, it isn’t, Fanny. It’s Fenwick’s. He shall do absolutely what he pleases with it in my house. I’m responsible.”

There was a curious morbid note of confession in his voice. But no one paid any attention to tones of voice, because a very undignified scene followed immediately on his words.

Mrs. Medford clutched the papers that Fenwick held. She got away with the first page, too, and turned her back on us heading for the drawing-room beyond. “Don’t you dare, as you believe in a God, to destroy any of it,” she threw back over her shoulder.

She had to fight for even her one page – not very hard, for of course Fenwick couldn’t struggle with her physically. The two men, Allis and Fenwick, looked ridiculous as they faced each other in the tacit admission that they couldn’t help themselves. Ben pulled himself together quickly. “Get that away from her, Maud – by force, if necessary.”

“But, Ben—”

“I said ‘by force, if necessary,’ Maud,” he repeated sternly.

She flew ahead after Mrs. Medford, obedient, but sowing her path with protesting murmurs.

Genevieve Ford giggled, nervously. Carter raised his eyebrows to the ceiling. “What is up, you fellows?” he asked weakly.

I heard Allis whisper to Fenwick. “Did you ever know him – Hilles?”

“No. Never heard his name till tonight.”

“Then what the devil—”

“I thought you’d come to the devil in time.” This was Mrs. Conway on the outskirts.

An indignant cry came back from Maud Allis. “Really, Ben, I can’t. You’d better come yourself. She won’t give it to me. Fanny, be sensible!” Then the sound trailed away.

We followed – Allis, Fenwick, Miss Ford, and I. We passed through the drawing-room where they had been a few seconds before, and out into the hall. Maud Allis stood there furious, a little disheveled, sucking a hurt finger. “She’s locked herself into the telephone closet. I don’t know what you expect me to do.”

“Not anything more. We can’t help it now. We’ll go away and leave her. She’ll come out.”

But Maud was shaking with anger and nervousness. “How do you know she will? If it’s anything so bad that she oughtn’t to see it, she may never come out. She may just die there.”

Allis smiled, in spite of himself. “People don’t just die in telephone closets. And she’ll come out, if for nothing else, because she wants to see the rest of it.”

“But if it should be so dreadful—”

“It doesn’t make any difference how dreadful it may be. She’ll feel she’s got to see it. Oh, damn!”

Then he moved over to the door of the closet. “Fanny,” he shouted, “we’re going back to the library. If you don’t come out inside of five minutes, we’ll break down the door. Now what a fool thing that was to say,” he murmured, precisely as if we were to blame for his words.

A slender figure in white Spanish lace became suddenly manifest among us. “Mrs. Allis, can I telephone?” Mrs. Conway asked softly.

“No, I’m afraid you can’t.” Maud’s answer was grim. “Fanny Medford has locked herself into the telephone closet with the first sheet of that wretched stuff.”

“Then will someone go out and telephone for me” she gave the number “and ask them to send my car at once?”

“Ben can telephone from the extension upstairs,” Maud suggested sullenly.

“Oh, thank you. I wish he would.”

Allis turned suddenly upon Mrs. Conway. “I can’t pretend that, as a host, I’m proud of my hospitality. But don’t you think it would be kinder all round if we didn’t break up? We might be able to get that poor thing out of her hysteria if we all stuck about and did our best?”

“I have no intention of going before Mrs. Medford does, Mr. Allis,” was the very quiet reply. “I thought it might be a good thing to have the car waiting. Mayn’t I go up and telephone, myself? I think Mr. Allis ought to stay here.”

Maud nodded. “It’s in my room.”

And Mrs. Conway moved upstairs. She leaned over the stair-rail on the first landing and spoke to Fenwick. “Don’t destroy those other pages. If she still wants to see them, she’d better – much better.”

“You don’t know what’s in them,” Fenwick answered. Nor did he, but he evidently considered they were not to be lightly treated.

“It doesn’t make any difference what’s in them. Not even if were the Black Mass.” She went on up.

We went back into the library then, and Allis stood, watch in hand, waiting. He was beginning to mean it, about breaking down the door, I could see. Allis had had a good glimpse of the first page. Fenwick had seen a little. None of the rest of us knew anything but those three first words like a telephone call: “Jack Hilles speaking.”

Before Allis moved, Mrs. Medford came slowly through the drawing-room, holding the sheet of paper very carefully in her hand. A little behind, Mrs. Conway’s white form gently stalked her.

Fanny Medford’s poor little head was held very high. “I suppose you people have read the rest – and doubtless Mr. Fenwick has told you what is in this.” She tapped the paper.

“Not one of us knows anything or has read a word,” Maud Allis declared.

Allis frowned. “That’s not quite true, Maud. I saw a little – a few sentences – of what Mrs. Medford took with her. I dare say Fenwick saw as much. But no one has seen all of it except Mrs. Medford, and no one has seen any of the other sheets. That is the exact state of the case.”

“You will kindly give me the rest of the writing,” Mrs. Medford went on, to Fenwick.

But Mrs. Conway stepped forward and slipped the sheets from Fenwick’s grasp. He let her take them, though he looked at Allis anxiously. The situation was becoming Mrs. Conway’s.

“I have them, you see.” She turned to Mrs. Medford. “And if you insist, you shall have them. Of course I wish you would let me destroy them all, here and now. It isn’t true, you know, that the dead communicate. They don’t.”

Mrs. Medford was shaking, but her voice was still her own. “They do. I know they do. Jack talked to me through Mrs. Weale, who’s dead now. But not this kind of thing. It’s wicked, it’s beastly, what you’ve done!” she cried to Fenwick.

“But, Mrs. Medford, I don’t even know what’s there except the first sentences. I never knew your brother. I don’t believe this stuff, of course.”

“Nobody believes anything, Fanny.” Allis corroborated him. “This sort of thing has been shown up, time and again, for the most arrant trash. It’s just our bad luck that something got written that was upsetting for you.”

“You believe it – you know you do.” Her voice was half a choke in her throat.

To my consternation, Allis did not deny it, at once and with passion. “Fanny, don’t be absurd. You know perfectly well what my attitude to these matters is. Purely scientific skepticism.”

“I say that you believe those things of Jack. As for Mr. Fenwick” – she disposed of him then and there with a look of loathing – “I leave him to the rest of you.”

Maud Allis followed her out of the room.

Allis took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “Any one of you men feel like seeing her home?” he asked. “Fenwick and I would seem to be out of the running.”

Mrs. Conway put out her hand. “Good-night, Mr. Allis. Of course I’m going to take her home. What did you suppose I ordered my car for?” She did not bid the rest of us good-night, but she seemed to address us all in parting. “Naturally, I don’t know what’s in these papers. But I take it, it is something pretty bad – about her brother. Mrs. Medford may have to see them, since I promised her; but I guarantee you they shall be destroyed without my, or anyone’s else, reading them. It’s all nonsense, of course, but you see she half believes. Truly, I’m the best person to see her through, because I can explain it.”

“It’s just some foolish trick of muscles – and rearranging all the words in the dictionary,” burst in Fenwick, hotly.

“Yes.” She smiled. “But what foolish trick? That’s what you can’t explain to her. And I can. You may not think my explanation is correct, but at least it begins at the beginning and sees you through to the end. That is why I shall try to convince her. You open-minded people can’t.”

“Even so,” Allis said, “I don’t see how you’re going to manage it.”

She had turned to go, but she stopped and answered him. “I’ve this advantage, you see. You can’t tell her why it happened. I can. Malice accounts for everything.”

“There’s not an ounce of malice in this crowd,” Carter remarked.

“No, not among us. But the things you let into your foolish minds are all malice. Believe me, they’ve had a ripping time tonight. They have to take what they can find – yes. It’s the way they use it that counts.”

“But suppose whatever it is were true,” Miss Ford murmured. “Suppose it was her brother, after all, getting through.”

“I’ve told you the dead can’t get through – not the real dead. It’s only spirits pretending.”

“You’ll never get her to believe that,” Allis said ruefully. “None of us could believe that.”

“Pardon me, I could,” Mrs. Conway threw back. “And if I can make Mrs. Medford believe it, too, it will be the best way out of the mess you’ve made.”

“Good luck go with you,” he called after her. But he seemed dazed.

When Maud Allis came back, Miss Ford made her adieux, and Carter left with her. They had been, from first to last, outsiders, and perhaps it was the most tactful thing they could have done. I prepared to follow them, and Maud Allis, saying good-night to them, bade me good-night, too.

“I’ve got to see Nora,” she said. “I promised her I would before she went to bed. I meant to cut out from bridge. Probably I shall see you again, Mr. Fenwick. Sorry you have to go, Mr. Gregory.” There was certainly no urge to stay, in her voice. She was more done up than she owned. Yet she had not seen those sheets that Fenwick had written – any more than I had, or Mrs. Conway, or Genevieve Ford, or Carter.

I let Carter and Miss Ford get away a little in front of me, thinking that they were best by themselves, in the fellowship of their detachment from it all. Whatever had happened to the rest of us had left them unscathed. They had not been touched, apparently, by the episode, except to see that Mrs. Medford’s exit was a cue for them to break up the party. I lighted a cigarette in the vestibule, and craned my neck to see them turn the corner. I was jerked back by a clutch on my collar, and I dropped the cigarette.

“Come back in here, you idiot!” said Allis in my ear. “Did you really think you were going?”

Yes, I really had thought so; but I went in again.

I found, when I reached the library (Allis locked the door behind us) that he had furnished Fenwick with a precious drink. He offered me none, and was taking nothing himself. Whiskey is medicine, in these days.

“Fenwick and I need someone else to sit in with us,” Allis declared. “I may have to tell Maud later. That’s neither here nor there. I’m glad those two young people had the sense to go. If they hadn’t, I’d have kicked them out.”

“Well, of course, I’m eaten alive with curiosity,” I admitted. “Only it all sounded like the sort of thing that wouldn’t be mentioned again unless necessary. I never saw a word of the stuff, remember.”

“I saw precious little of it, and Fenwick here saw no more than I did.” Allis began to walk about with his hands in his pockets. “You can see the effect it has had on Fenwick.”

Fenwick’s head was buried in his hands. “I wrote the damned stuff. That’s what gets me.” I saw why Allis had fetched whiskey for him.

“We aren’t going to quote it for your benefit – even if we could,” went on Allis. “But you can take it from us that it was unmitigated filth. We judge by sample.”

“Then why did you give the rest of it to those women?” I shouted. “Why didn’t you burn up what you had your hands on, at least?”

“Easy, now, easy.” But Allis was troubled. He made an eloquent gesture over Fenwick’s bowed head. “We practically had to do what Mrs. Conway said. I believe she is the person to deal with Fanny Medford. Evil spirits are the best way out – if she can take it. And Mrs. Conway is a clever woman. But we three have got to sift the matter. It seemed to be autobiographical, by the way – statement of things done in the past. Buck up, Fenwick. It’s more my fault than yours.”

“Your fault? You didn’t even write ‘Ask Fenwick,’” our friend retorted. The whiskey was strengthening him a little.

Allis paid no attention. “I take it for granted that none of us now present subscribes to Mrs. Conway’s theory. Very well. That’s that. Fenwick wrote automatically a lot of stuff of which he and I have seen a little. It all purported to be Jack Hilles speaking, and on that basis it was Jack Hilles very much giving himself away. Of course, it wasn’t Jack Hilles any more than it was the Secretary of State. Mrs. Conway is right, at least, when she says the dead don’t communicate.”

“Then this kind of thing just flowers naturally out of the rich soil of my mind, I suppose?” Fenwick asked sarcastically.

Allis smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t say that. But you’ve knocked about the world more than most of us, and you’ve seen more than your share of exotic rottenness. Gregory and I would have had to go out and hunt for it. You’ve had it thrust upon your notice. If your subconscious stores it up, it isn’t your fault.”

“But what on earth should make me drag out horrors and attribute them to a man I never laid eyes on, who died fighting for his country in the Argonne?”

“That,” said Allis deliberately, “is where I come in.”

“You?” We both exclaimed.

Allis leaned against the chimney-piece, his hands still in his pockets. “Well, yes. Of course Jack Hilles name was bound to appear if any name appeared – after the way Fanny had gone on. But if that sort of thing was dragged out of you, about Hilles, instead of nice, sweet, comforting things, it was probably be cause my mind was stronger than Fanny Medford’s.”

“Do you mean that you were thinking that kind of thing about Hilles all the time?” Fenwick queried.

“No, I wasn’t thinking those things about him,” Allis answered slowly. “I merely knew those things about him. That is – I never knew he did anything so bad as what was written there, but I knew he was a bad lot.”

“Then why didn’t you write the stuff?”

“Like Mrs. Conway, I’m not open-minded. I disbelieve it too utterly. I’m prejudiced. But I don’t doubt my knowledge acted telepathically on your more sensitive – what shall I say? – mental mechanism. It’s all suggestion. Mrs. Medford involuntarily suggests Jack Hilles to you, and I involuntarily suggest the kind of person I knew him to be.”

We were silent a moment.

“It’s hideous, all the same,” I said finally. “He’s dead, after all – in the Argonne.”

“But not fighting for his country,” Allis remarked quietly. “He was shot for other reasons. I’ve no particular business to know that for a fact, but I do. Fanny Medford never knew the worst of Jack Hilles, but she had no illusions about him until he went into the war. Then he became a hero. When he was ‘killed in the Argonne’ – which is all she knows about it – he was a fortiori a hero: a super-hero, if you like. You may have noticed that Fanny isn’t exactly impersonal in her attitude to life.”

He went on, after a pause. “I hope no one saw anything in my expression…. I was rather shaken by the glimpse I got. I never thought even Jack Hilles went so far as that. I wonder if Fanny saw. She accused me of believing it all. She must have meant she thought I believed it on the score of Fenwick’s automatic writing. I believe it on the score of knowing that Hilles was capable of anything. That, I perhaps didn’t conceal sufficiently. And all of it, I’m banking heavily on Mrs. Conway to explain.”

“I still don’t see why I had to write the miserable stuff,” argued Fenwick though he seemed a little more at ease than he had been.

“Well, I can’t tell you that,” Allis replied. “I’m inclined to believe that Mrs. Conway is wrong about people’s not being, more or less, ‘psychic.’ Certainly even she would have to admit that some are more sensitive, readier vehicles, than others. It looks to me as though you were a corker, Fenwick!”

Fenwick brooded for a time in silence, while Allis and I smoked. At last he spoke. “No, it’s too queer. Evil spirits would explain everything, but I haven’t gone back to the Middle Ages yet. You try to explain it, Allis, by arranging an intricate system of mental telephone wires – installed in an instant, ready for the emergency. That may be accurate, but it’s extremely complicated. Too complicated, I’d say. I’m not contradicting you, you understand. But for myself, I usually take the line of least resistance.” He rose and faced us. His fingers twitched a little as he, in turn, lighted a cigarette.

“Meaning—?” Allis queried.

“Meaning that if Jack Hilles was the kind of person you say he was, the easiest place for that sort of screed to have come from is Jack Hilles.”

Allis’s lips folded themselves firmly. “If you choose to admit the supernatural hypothesis, I suppose it is easy. I was ruling out impossibilities.”

“The fact that you haven’t proved a thing possible doesn’t mean that you’ve proved it impossible, does it? How about you, Gregory?” Fenwick turned to me.

I threw up my hands. “Oh, I’m with Allis. It sounds queer and farfetched and all, but anything is more reasonable than believing the dead communicate in that way. Even Mrs. Conway is more reasonable.”

“Well, I wish to God they had rigged up their wireless on Allis’s roof instead of mine!” Fenwick exploded. He turned his back on us and walked over to a dark window.

I tried to be judicial. “If Allis was thinking about the sort of creature Jack Hilles really was, that in itself accounts for the telepathy business.”

Allis glared at me. “I wasn’t thinking of Jack Hilles. I knew he was a very bad lot, but I wasn’t thinking about it – not at all. I was wondering if Carter and Genevieve Ford would pull it off. And, anyhow, I couldn’t have thought that kind of thing about Hilles. It just wouldn’t naturally have occurred to me. Whereas, it might have, to Fenwick, with his background.”

Ben Allis stopped, suddenly, and I felt the blood in my body, for an instant, back up in its channels. For just as Allis finished speaking, Fenwick drew back from his window and crumpled up against the sofa. No, he did not faint. He was, rather, at bay there, against the world; against Allis and me, who rushed to him at once. I did not try to read that face, though it shouted at me silently. I turned my head away. “Damn you all, damn you all!” Fenwick’s white lips were saying. “And I thought I’d got rid of it forever. Oh, damn you both!” Yet he did not seem to be standing outside his own curse.

Fenwick roused himself at the sound of a knock on the library door, and we faced about. The knock saved us three from something pretty awful.

It was Maud Allis, and in her hand she carried a ouija-board. “I found Nora playing with this thing,” she said; “and after tonight it was more than I could bear. Will you please burn it up now – so I can see it burn?”

“You bet I will!” Allis broke it over his knee, and went to the fire, which had almost died out.

With one eye on Fenwick, slowly, very slowly, composing himself to a normal posture and a normal expression, with a sense that I must keep Maud off him, I drew her away in the direction of the door. “I hope” and I laid my hand on her wrist “the thing hasn’t been worrying Nora. She didn’t get any echoes, did she?”

“Oh dear, no. It had just been writing foolishness – probably the kind of foolishness you would expect to come out of Nora’s subconscious.”

“Nothing about Jack Hilles?” I tried to laugh.

“I should hope not! Betty Dane’s cousin, they’re all in love with; and their matinee heroes; and their school commencement. But I’ve put her to bed and taken it away. I will not have my niece ouija-ing.”

Ouija was now burning brightly above the Cape Cod lighter. Ben Allis called to his wife. “Maud, do get a taxi round at once for Fenwick. He’s tired and doesn’t want to walk.”

“Certainly, I will. Did you people come to any conclusion?”

“Ben has the right of it, I’m sure. Telepathy.” I spoke quite loud. “He’ll tell you all about it. We’re going.”

Maud went off to the telephone.

Fenwick’s voice cut in. “Thanks for thinking of the taxi, Allis. I believe I do want one. Good-night.”

“Shall I come along with you?”- I asked, thinking of Mrs. Conway’s brave support of Fanny Medford.

Allis frowned, and Fenwick, though he had got him self in hand, seemed to cringe a little before the frown. “No, thanks. I’m going straight to bed. It’s needless to say, I suppose, that this thing shall go no further, as far as I am concerned. I can’t say it has been a pleasant evening, but it has been interesting. It’s funny, isn’t it” – he spoke rapidly, but carefully – “that a party of friends can react so differently? Mrs. Conway thinks it’s evil spirits; I think Hilles did get through; and you and Allis think it was all communicated from Allis’s subconscious to mine. But we all hope that Mrs. Conway will convince Mrs. Medford.”

No; he could evidently take care of himself now. Mrs. Allis, returning, rallied him as she said good-night.

“Your taxi is there already, I think, Mr. Fenwick. What do you think of Belshazzar’s letter now? I’m sorry you had to get the letter.”

It was all right for Maud to carry things off lightly – probably she felt it was her duty – but it didn’t help Allis and me so much as she doubtless hoped.

“I think I can promise 1 never to meddle with this sort of thing again,” he said gravely. “I’m convinced it was the real thing. Your husband thinks he was responsible. He’ll explain to you.”

Allis answered the plea that sounded faintly in Fenwick’s voice. “Yes, Maud shall have my telepathy theory. I think she’ll agree. Maud, do go to the door with Fenwick. There’s no fender here, and I don’t like to leave ouija.”

Maud Allis, as you may have made out, was a good wife who never argued an absurdity if her husband perpetrated it. She preceded Fenwick to the hall.

Allis gripped my hand. “I shall tell Maud exactly what I said. You’ll tell nobody anything.”

“Of course not. For Mrs. Medford’s sake, if nothing else.”

Allis relaxed his grip. “Yes – and Fenwick’s, too. I’ve been fond of him for a long time. Perhaps he’ll never give himself away again.”

“Perhaps not,” I agreed. “Asia is a large continent. He may come to believe it was Hilles communicating, you know.”

“Well, I rather hope he does. Fenwick’s got to live. But you and I don’t believe it.”

“No, we don’t.”

“It’s queer,” Allis mused; “you and I are the only ones of the crowd who know what happened; and the one thing we are most anxious for is that everyone concerned – even Fenwick himself – should be convinced of some explanation we know is wrong. We want Mrs. Medford to believe Mrs. Conway; I want Maud to believe what I said here a while ago; and I even want Fenwick to believe that the dead communicate. We’re a scientific lot, aren’t we?”

“I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather believe any of those things than believe what I do,” I said grimly. I remembered Fenwick’s face.

“Exactly. Poor science!”

Mrs. Allis returned, and I bade my host and hostess good-night. This time I did not go back again.

—

Louquier’s Third Act

Louquier had been crossed in love. The old phrase covers his case. The girl does not matter, the circumstances do not matter; nothing matters except that Louquier had fallen in love, and that the lady had not reciprocated not at least effectively, to the point of marrying Louquier. She does not come into the story in her own person; only as a cause. She affected Louquier; and his state is responsible for what happened. Of course Louquier’s own temperament counts largely; other men might have been affected differently. Louquier, crossed in love, was a very special human formula.

Louquier was cursed with a small patrimony that made it entirely unnecessary for him to work, so long as his tastes remained simple. The lady apart, he had no ambitions; he was, I regret to say, the sort of obsolescent fool who thinks that it is more lovely to be than to do, and that your most serious task in life is to adorn and beautify your personality. If he had been up to it, he would have been a first-class dilettante. He would have loved rejecting (like Walter Pater) exquisite cinerarias of the wrong color, or leaving a concert-hall because Beethoven was too vulgarly romantic. But he could never have done either, for the simple reason that his good, garish taste would never have given him the tip. His way did not lie through Art. He was too easily pleased. He loved Beauty even when it was merely pretty. No, his way did not lie through Art.

Louquier knew something of all this and wisely did not try for instincts that he did not possess. But he had his own way of being a highbrow. He could first isolate and then appreciate an emotion or a sensation – either in himself or in others. He loved the quiet dramas that take place within an individual nature; he could scent psychologic moments from afar. The twist of a mouth or the lift of an eyebrow meant to him unutterable things. He would carry home with him a gesture, a phrase, a twitch of the mask, and before his comfortable fire sit, as in a parquet-box, watching a gorgeous third act of his own creation. It should be said here that Louquier was usually right about his third acts and seldom mistook a curtain-raiser for a play. He had a flair. He rejected, at sight, the kind of human being to whom no spiritual adventures come; and could recognize hysterical imitation a mile away. He despised emotion for emotion’s sake. It might be as slight as you liked, but it must be the real thing. He was perfectly sincere in his own amorous misadventure; he suffered as naively as a boy of eighteen. His heart was veritably broken, and when he withdrew from the world it was to nurse a real wound.

Louquier had brown eyes, brown hair, brown skin, the lean figure that best sorts with that general brownness and half presupposes an eye-glass. He did not, however, wear an eye-glass; and he had large, white, tombstone teeth – not the teeth of his type. He was a good fellow, and popular with men. You see, he never told anyone about his passion for other people’s crises; he kept it very shyly and decently to himself. Moreover, no one ever brought first-aid to the emotionally injured more promptly than Louquier, so people told him things. Yet, as he had no business, and had wandered a good deal (in the most conventional ways), he had no fixed circle of friends. At any given moment, in any given place, he was apt to be rather solitary.

That is enough about Louquier’s personality. If you can’t “get” him, I can hardly give him to you.

Louquier withdrew, as I say, into himself – retreated to a house that, by accident of a cousin’s investment, now, the cousin being dead, belonged to him. He had hitherto rented it, for the few years that he had owned it; but the lease had expired, and it struck Louquier that he had never lived in a house of his own. That in itself might give him a sensation – a conventional one, but worth experiencing. As he couldn’t marry, and had no religion, perhaps it was as near as he would ever come to feeling like a pillar of society. It was really that sense of the curious value of living under one’s own vine and fig-tree which drew him. His natural instinct would have been to retire to mountain-fastnesses, or discover some Ravenswoodish ruin in which to shiver. You can see that he was very hard hit, and that he was not a subtle person.

The villa was at least remote from the scene of his discomfiture. It was a smallish, comfortable, rather ugly mansion on the bank of the Assiniboine, one of the older houses on Wellington Crescent, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Girdled by a high wall, its best rooms arranged at the back, facing the river, to which its tangled garden sloped negligently down, “Whitewood” had a wholly English flavor of privacy and comfort. It was at once modest and sturdy; it lived to itself, and asked favors of no one – least of all the favor of looking into its neighbors premises. That suited Louquier perfectly; he saw at once that a British tradition was there to offset the newness of Winnipeg. Of course, being officially an American, he couldn’t well taste the essence of being “colonial,” but he thought he could be secluded and guindé and “middle” with the best. It quite suited his present temper, and he established himself. Good servants sprang miraculously into being on the spot – probably because he was a bachelor. The Assiniboine was a noble stream; the wall round his garden was very high; it was delightfully incongruous of him to be there at all; he was pleased with himself for having had the courage to come. He felt more steeped in foreignness than if he had done something more exotic. He saw no one, except for necessary business. He did not wish to force the note. He rather liked subjecting his dramatic sense to local color. Still, he never forgot the girl, for he had been very hard hit. At this stage of Louquier’s life he even shrank a little from encountering a woman.

Then – it was hard to say just when, for his experience was very gradual – he began to be uncomfortable; he could not precisely say how or why. He had mapped out for himself a course of reading that included some notorious modern Frenchmen. (This was all before the war.) He hoped, I fancy, to get a sensation out of reading Huysmans on the banks of the Assiniboine. Certainly any effect that Huysmans and Catulle Mendès could succeed in producing, in Winnipeg, would be a real effect, not meretriciously aided. The long evenings were a good time to read. During the day, he wandered about out of doors or went about the slow business of regenerating the interior of the house. One of his concessions had been to buy furniture in bulk, on the spot; but there were still gaps to be filled and rearranging to be done. His library was disfigured by a hideous stained-glass window. He was always planning to have it replaced; but in the end he kept it because he thought the Indians would have liked it. You can see how unworthily Louquier amused himself. The fact is that he was very tired of it all – “it all” being life. He was bored with his own depression; but he simply could not bestir himself for an antidote. For a long time he felt, peevishly, that it was up to Wellington Crescent to be the antidote.

The spring came early that year, and, as I said, Louquier spent a good deal of time out of doors. Once, driven forth by his curious mental discomfort which had begun in the late winter, he took a train to Calgary. He returned almost immediately, and while he found that he was glad to get back, still, Calgary had not done for him what he hoped. Calgary was nauseous in retrospect without making him feel that Winnipeg was heaven. The fact is, Winnipeg was no place for Louquier. But his discomfort was of that peculiar kind which one does not run away from. At first it showed itself in mere inability to keep his mind on his book or on anything else. Louquier took a blue-pill and hired a horse to ride. But still he could not, in the evenings, keep his mind on anything. Then he wondered if the stained-glass window were not responsible: he hated it so. Even with the curtain drawn across it at night, he was conscious of it behind his back. The stained glass was not a picture, and was a design only by courtesy. It looked like what one used to see through an old-fashioned kaleidoscope; or, rather, it looked like circumstantial evidence of a lunatic’s having been turned loose in a kindergarten. Yet the weeks went by, and he did not replace it. A morbid indolence was gaining the secret channels of his soul. His mind seemed as complicated an organism as the body, and it felt as your body feels when you have a bad case of grippe – he seemed to have mental hands and feet and vital organs, all of which ached and were tired. Yet he was still perfectly capable of admiring the technique of En Ménage – when he could pay attention to it. That was the trouble: he could not concentrate. Each thing refused to hold him and passed him on to another. He was a shuttlecock among a thousand battledores. He was not consciously averse to any of the physical facts of his life, except the stained-glass window. Finally he took to keeping the curtain drawn across it all day; but when the sun struck it, it spotted and dashed and figured the pale silk curtain. That was dreadful – to think that it had power to make over something else in its own indecent likeness. Louquier did rouse himself to get a heavy drapery of red rep hung over it. He felt that life would be better after that; but then the almond-smell began.

Louquier was never able positively to account for the odor of bitter almonds that beset him in the late spring. It had nothing to do with the vegetation at “Whitewood.” He sniffed every flower, shrub, and tree to find out. It was not merely in Louquier’s mind, for when he went in to town or rode about the environs of Winnipeg he escaped it utterly. Nor was it the natural effluvium of the Assiniboine River. Besides, it was noticeable only in the house. He remarked it at first without suspicion, with a languid curiosity. He was almost happy, the one or two days that he spent sniffing. It gave him something to think about, for a few hours; something to do for its own sake. When he had proved the innocence of nature, he investigated the house. He crept down into the kitchen one afternoon when both the servants were safe elsewhere, opened canisters, and peeped into cupboards. He could find no source for the odor. The almond-smell surrounded him faintly in the kitchen as it did everywhere else, but there was no sharp increase of it in any corner to guide him. So he eliminated the kitchen from his conjectures, but he did not get rid of the smell. It was not unpleasant in itself, but it was too constant. To sit in the library, day after day, beside the red rep curtain and smell bitter almonds was too much – just too much.

Louquier had, of course, questioned the cook in the beginning; but she had disavowed completely all culinary use of almonds. At last, however – he had sniffed all the furniture by this time, and he was convinced that no upholstery or varnish was responsible – he decided to get rid of the cook. The odor had not been there when he settled in the villa, and that he did not carry the scent upon himself was proved by the fact that only in his own house were his nostrils oppressed by it. Of course he had sniffed through his whole wardrobe. It might be that his cook was an almond-carrier, as some people are typhoid-carriers. Getting rid of her meant getting rid also of his capable manservant, for the two were united in the bonds of matrimony. It was a great nuisance, for they served him well; but in the end he did it. Louquier could not bring himself to put to the woman a straight question as to whether any of her toilet accessories were almond-scented. He had attested the fact of the pervasive odor and shown that he objected to it; if she used almond soap or anything of the kind, it was up to her, on that hint, to change her cosmetic habit. But there was no sign of her making any such concession to his prejudices. He shrank from active discussion of so personal a matter. He had given hints enough, and his hints were disregarded. Either the woman wasn’t responsible, or, being responsible, she chose not to reform. There was only one way out: he sacked them both.

The almond episode had no real sequel, but it had two important results. In the first place, the servants were not easily replaced. They left their “situation,” undoubtedly spreading tales. Louquier was probably the victim of a servile boycott. At all events, he could not find their equivalents, and he had no friend among the Winnipeg ladies to turn to for counsel. It reduced itself to his getting on with a charwoman who came to get his breakfast and departed after cooking him an early and unspeakably English dinner. An old Scotchman pottered about the garden for a few hours each day. This domestic discomfort was one result of the almond nuisance. The other was a serious impairment of Louquier’s nervous condition. The mental discomfort became acute. That he was not the easy prey of obsessions is shown by the fact that he really did, within a week or so after the servants departure, cease to notice the almond-smell. Had he been a nervous wreck, it would have been only too easy for him to invent the odor for himself; and that he did not do. It was really gone, and his nostrils bore unimpeachable witness to the fact.

I do not offer Louquier’s refusal to shut up the villa and leave Winnipeg as an evidence of sanity. To leave would have been the most sensible thing he could do. But there his mortal indolence came in. He could go about sniffing, but he could not go about packing. He simply stuck on, the worse for wear. Louquier also, of course, had the universal male illusion: namely, that he was a practical person. It was much more sensible to stay on a few months more and rent, if he could, in the autumn; no one would rent in the spring, anyhow; it would be a bad advertisement to leave so soon; and, besides, he was saving money. Everything, you see, combined to keep him there.

Early in May he heard from a kind friend that the lady had announced her engagement. That disposed of any wandering notions he might have had of departure. It would be to insult his own heart to pretend it was a casino when it was really a tomb. Meanwhile the mental discomfort grew and grew like a secret malady. It is only fair to say that Louquier did not in the least enjoy his own drama. He would have given the world and all to be happy.

By mid-May, Huysmans, Catulle Mendès et Cie were flung aside. Louquier simply could not stand literature. He took to American fiction, which again shows his sanity. The novels disgusted him, but for a time they worked; even the love-making did not depress him, for it was very badly done. But after a fortnight the charm failed. He found himself idly inverting all the situations – making the characters (when there were any) sardonically and plausibly do something quite different. His running marginal gloss turned the most ridiculous and optimistic plots into the most logical and depressing horrors. The hero ceased, for Louquier, to rescue the heroine; the heroine walked not unscathed through her vicious context; the villains flourished like the green bay-tree, refusing either to reform or to perish. He stopped reading our serious contemporaries and took to the humorists. But he soon found that one cannot laugh indefinitely alone.

By June, Louquier was really in a bad way. If he had not tried to be sensible, he would have done much better; but he was busy adorning his personality with an iron will. At that stage of the game, an iron will was about as useful to him as the red curtain over the stained-glass window. He ought, in the interests of health and happiness, to have wobbled a little; to have seized on Falstaffian wisdom and run away. His brown face was growing white with his effort. But Louquier was perfectly sincere in not seeing it that way. Remember, too, that his chosen diversion was failing him. A recluse on the banks of the Assiniboine, he had no third acts to divine. His flair, disused, became temporarily lost to him, and he found the Winnipeg streets barren of drama. He could not even reconstruct the tragedy of his own charwoman, though obviously every charwoman must have had one. The Scotch gardener was as impenetrable as a Scotch mist. Louquier gave up riding; he gave up his blue-pills; he stuck to his own vine and upas-tree. If he had not always expected to leave Winnipeg in the autumn, I think he would have gone under. But he did not – quite.

Louquier was now afraid. Up to that time he had not experienced fear; his condition had stopped at acute discomfort. It was very like a bodily ailment, not serious, for which people try home remedies. The home remedies had not worked, but he was not going to a specialist for a malady that seemed to attack him in one spot as much as, and no more than, in another. He would, you might say, hardly know whether to choose an aurist or an orthopedist. His broken heart, his indolence, and his iron will combined to keep him passive; and he called it being sensible. Thanks to the girl, flavor had gone out of life like the taste out of honey; it was a thick, insipid glue. It was wearing; it was disagreeable; but it could be borne, since other men had borne it. Then, as I say, fear came.

Louquier was sitting alone in his library, trying to read. The charwoman had left a few hours since; the gardener, of course, long before that. Quite suddenly, he realized that he had a new fact to reckon with. He laid his book down very softly on the table, rose, by the aid of his iron will, from his chair, and walked slowly across to the corner of the room between the fireplace and the built-in bookshelves. A light chair that stood in his way he moved, first passing his hand across its satin seat. Then he took his stand in the exact corner of the room, facing outward, arms truculently folded. He stood there for about five minutes, his eyes glancing hither and yon. Then he walked back, lugged his easy-chair over by the fireplace and set it with its back to the wall. Before leaving it, he passed his hand carefully down the wall behind it. Then he moved the table, with the lamp, over beside the armchair. Thus the chair was hemmed in between the square table on one side and the jutting chimney-breast on the other. Behind it was a windowless wall. Louquier then sat down and took up his book again. He knew as well as if he had seen it with his eyes or heard it with his ears, where the thing was that disturbed him, but he refused to treat it as anything more than a manifestation of impudence. He trusted that by putting it, as it were, in its place, he could teach it manners – perhaps discourage it finally. The presence was perceptible to no sense; it flowed from spot to spot as quietly as air; but Louquier knew at any given moment where it was. He knew, too, whether it faced him or turned away; and he was more comfortable when it turned away. He kept his eyes on his book; he turned over pages; he even lighted and smoked a cigarette. He put up a brave front to the beastly thing. All the same, he knew that if it did not go away, he should have to sit there all night. He was not going to turn his back to it, to pass through the door; and he would not, positively would not (here was the iron will), back out of the room. Besides, if the thing followed him upstairs, it would be worse. He could not switch on the upstairs lights from below. It was very curious, how much he seemed to know about the thing its size, for example, and the measure of its gait as it moved. He had even a vague impression of its shape, though his eye could not detect the faintest alteration in the look of the spot where it so definitely stood. He had as yet no means of knowing whether it was malevolent or not, but he loathed it. Occasionally he looked up from his book, oriented the presence, and looked directly at it with bored and scornful eyes. That was all he could do – get up again, he would not. Nor would he speak to it. He had a curious conviction that that way lay madness. No; he would meet it on its own ground. It moved, and he might move; it directed itself in some unnamable way towards him, and he would stare at it insolently; it occupied its place, and he would definitely occupy his own. But he would not speak; he would not probe the laws of its being further than itself announced them. The merest visual sign would have been an immense relief to him – a devil with cloven hoof, a ghost draped in white, would have been child’s play. Then he could have trusted his eye or his ear; as it was, he had to depend wholly on this nameless sense which placed his enemy for him. That nameless sense must not get blunted. He must keep very wide awake lest his enemy steal a march on him. Above all, he must not pretend to be unaware, and at the same time must pretend not to be frightened. How much intelligence the thing had, of course he did not know. It might be laughing at his bluff, but at least he would keep it up. He hoped he should not grow sleepy. He had long since given up coffee and other stimulants. Louquier had become a man for whom there is absolutely no sense in keeping awake.

After an hour, during which Louquier turned over just forty pages – he kept careful track of his intervals – the thing departed by the door open into the hall. Louquier felt it go. He had a very pretty problem to face, then: whether to follow it or not. If he did not, it meant sitting all night in his library – a great nuisance and a craven act. It would prove to the thing that he was afraid of it, and that would be exceedingly unfortunate. He ought, of course, to pretend that he was tired and wanted to go to bed – and to go. On the other hand, it was going to be a difficult business to blow out the lamp, walk into a dark hall, and mount the dark stairs to his bedroom. True, he could not see the thing, even in the lighted room; but he doubted if, in the dark, he could place it at all. It could be lived with only if it could be placed – delimited, as it were. He would not answer for his perfect conduct if the thing turned out to be lurking in the hall. He had no clue whatever to the intelligence of this besetting presence; but he felt, somehow, that it gauged him by the visual signs he gave. It might, if he stayed there, know that he was afraid of it; still, it might not be clever enough to make that inference. Whereas if he rushed out into the darkness, he could not answer for what he should do – something, very likely, that would show beyond question how terrified he was. He might even blunder into the thing itself, in the dark. He was by no means sure that it was perceptible even to the touch, yet he dreaded the thought of such an impact as though it had been certain death. There was nothing for him to do but stay – though, for all he knew, the thing might already have wandered out into the night. He would not even get up and shut the door. How did he know whether doors were an obstacle to it? And if it should elect to come back, through the closed door, he would be more mocked than ever – to say nothing of the sense he would have of being shut in with it, without redress. No, there was nothing for it but for him to stay – and to fend off sleep somehow. If he should drowse and it should return, he would be left to its unclean mercy. Louquier was angry. First, the girl; then the stained-glass and the bitter almonds; then the recognized but unadmitted stupidity of his whole Winnipeg idea; the acute discomfort – and now this.

Louquier got through the night without mischance. Towards dawn he grew so sleepy that nothing but sleep seemed to matter; his stupor blunted all his nerves. He fell asleep in his chair, indeed, and woke up with the streaming light of morning. The room was clear and free; you would never have guessed that anything save the commonplace had inhabited it. Naturally, Louquier took the line of wondering if he had not eaten something that oppressed him; though why boiled lettuce should introduce you to the supernatural! The memory was vivid, however, and he saw a man about installing electric switches below-stairs – one inside the library door, and one in the hall outside. The business took a day or two, and until it was done Louquier went straight from his dining-room to his bedroom, locked the door, and read there. He did not sleep very well on these nights. For one thing, he was acutely ashamed of being upstairs behind a locked door; for another, he had a very definite conception – though he had no corroborative “sense” of it – of the thing’s ranging about below in unholy and unlawful occupation of his, Louquier’s, premises. No man really likes to pull the bedclothes over his head while the burglar is frankly stealing the plate below, even though he may wisely choose to do so; and that is precisely what it seemed to Louquier that he was doing. Still he was not, for any consideration of mere dignity, going to risk another encounter until he had guarded his exit with electricity. With the lights properly installed, electric switches marking his natural line of progress from after-dinner coffee to bed, he returned to his habit of spending the evening in the library. The fact that there was nothing he really wanted to read – ergo, no joy to be had in sitting there, anyhow – tipped all his plans and precautions with irony. Still, a man has to assume that his routine – whatever it may be – has an unimpeachable reason for being, or he has given up the game completely. Louquier was not ready to destroy his convention and let life depart.

The next fortnight, to Louquier, was a long, cumulative agony. There would be no point in making a diary of it; given the initial facts, psychic and physical, which I have tried to make clear, one has only to let logic deal with the situation. Each day became, in its turn, a new irritation as well as a fresh irritant. Night after night he faced the thing in his library. Its hours of appearing and disappearing differed slightly, from evening to evening; it chose apparently, not to work like an automaton or a mechanism, but to create to the end its impression of individuality, of volition. It kept its appointment irregularly, as though it had other engagements; but it always kept it.

Of course, in the long, irrelevant, sunlit hours, he balanced in his mind the possibilities of the thing’s getting at his sanity. But he took his sanity objectively, too. If his body was the citadel that must not crumble, his healthy mind was the garrison within that must, if possible, live on, and live on without surrendering. He did not want to crawl out by any subterranean passage, and then make a hopeless running fight of it. Not he! He stood on his rights; but he stood even more, soldier-fashion, on his counted ammunition and the state of his supplies. You could not truthfully say, however, that the wall was unbreached. There were some nasty little breaks in it here and there – as if the girl, the stained-glass, and the almond-smell, the unaccountable discomfort of all the months, had been spies doing effective work with in, while awaiting the real coup. Louquier was not, nervously, all that he might have been. Already, after a fortnight, he felt less able to combat the thing. If it had appeared irregularly, so that Louquier could have held it, to any extent, dependent on outside causes – the weather, his digestion, anything – it would have been easier. But whatever else might come or go, and though it chose its precise hour to suit itself, it never failed him. “Old Faithful,” he jeered silently to himself once. Sometime between dusk and dawn he could be sure of it. In the third week of his siege he began definitely to fear that he could not keep up his bluff much longer. He had a horrid vision of some surrendering gesture of his – speaking to it, or going on his knees to it. He loathed it almost more than he feared it. It seemed a dishonorable enemy for a man to be up against. He would not be treated like a soldier and a gentleman, if he did surrender.

Then came a night when Louquier walked from dining-room to library, preternaturally grave. He felt so sapped and shrunken that he wasted no gestures in bravado. He let himself walk like a tired man – which he was. He put his tobacco beside him; he piled up his books; he passed his hand over the hollow of the chair before seating himself; he shook the lamp a little to see if there was oil enough to last out the night, if need be. All that was mere ritual – and how tired he was of it! If the thing would only let up on him for once – give him a rest, a chance to revictual himself and bury his dead! This inevitable vigilance was like a cancer, eating daily further into his vital tissue. Should he never again be able to live carelessly, as other men do? In an hour, or two hours, or three, he would look up from his book and be aware of its entrance; would diagnose its actual mood and select his mask accordingly; would go through the same difficult and wearisome ordeal. When its whim was spent, and it took leave of him, he would go upstairs to bed. Towards morning he would sleep. He had never shut the door against it, judging that his state of mind would be worse if, to his knowledge, it came through a closed door. He left the portal hospitably open, and it entered like any human through the passage provided. Good God! how bored he was!

He did not have to wait long tonight. It came as early as if it had rushed straight from dinner. Immeditely he knew how it placed itself – in a Morris-chair opposite him, beside a French window that led into the garden. There was something jaunty and flippant in its manner. Absurd though it may sound to speak of the thing’s manner, it is quite within the facts as Louquier’s mind registered them. He was aware, as I have said, of its gait; some stir of the displaced air where it moved informed him. He perceived, though by none of the five senses, mass and coherence in this creature, just as some hitherto useless convolution of his brain registered its temper. It breathed its humor to him tonight in some exact, unnamable way. Louquier leaned his head back and waited. Perhaps it would go early; perhaps it had merely looked in to remind him, and would presently be off, having other Stygian fish to fry. He hoped so, for he was very tired. He even felt drowsiness coming on before its time, and Louquier had no spur to prick him awake. None but fear; and its sharp edge was blunted with much roweling of his own flesh. He closed his eyes occasionally for an instant, as one does to push sleep out with the firm, sudden gesture of opening the eyelids. And at last, in one of those lightning-brief intervals, the thing moved towards him. The event was all too quick for Louquier to think, to diagnose afresh its mood. He knew only, as he had never known before, that he must have done with it. He had reached the point known to all of us – though, thank heaven, in other contexts – when ennui becomes a passion like hatred or blood-lust, when weariness turns from a sigh to a shriek. And with that sense he knew that the enemy was at last in the citadel. His sanity was threatened. He dared wait no longer for its moment. Louquier caught up a light chair that stood near and brought it heavily down on the spot where the thing stood. The slim chair rocked on its broken legs, and sank down in a mass of splinters. For the first time, Louquier turned his back on the presence and fled from the room. He did not care; he was not afraid any more as he rushed up the stairs; he was only passionately excited and conscious of relief at having at last acted, in however mad a way. All his sanity had gone into the blow; it was Louquier’s protest, the protest of the whole of him, of the integral man, against the sly and foul attack on his integrity. That was what the thing had desired – to resolve his integrity, to riddle his ego, and shred up his very soul; to leave him incapable of saying “I” with conviction. It had wanted to disintegrate Louquier, to smash his singleness into bits, to turn him to a loose agglomeration of mental dust so that no man again should be able to say, “This is Louquier.” Louquier knew as well as any of us that you do not combat the psychic fact with physical weapons, yet the violent gesture had seemed his only way out. Though he could not hope to destroy the thing, he could perhaps prove to it that he was not a mere puddle of fear. Practically, it was as silly as trying to stab a ghost; yet it had counted, to Louquier himself. He had no notion that he had hurt the thing, but he had shown that his muscles were still at the service of his hatreds. Just before he rose, he had felt himself going; the very marrow of his nature oozing away through unguessed channels. By that one gesture the faithful flesh had saved him.

Or, at least, so he thought, standing in his bedroom, erect and panting, facing the door with clenched hands. A trickle of blood across one knuckle elated him; it showed that he had put forth strength, that the chair had really crashed and splintered under his hands. Within him, the blood pumped through his heart; he felt its healthy, impatient motions through his body. Would the thing rush up the stairs to avenge itself? He did not care. Let it come. It might kill him, but not, now, before he had made his gesture; not before he had let it know how he loathed it, and how little it had mesmerized his spirit. He could at least die a free man, overmatched, but not cowed. For the first time in months Louquier felt genial, like a man playing an honest part in a world of other men. All the last weeks he had seemed to himself isolated, shamefully, as a criminal is isolated, because he is not worthy to associate with others. All the things that had happened to him had seemed chosen and selected for the purpose of showing him that he was small game of a very dirty sort.

Louquier, standing there, triumphant over the unreal, with blood on his knuckles from a smashed and splintered chair, is an absurd figure to the inward eye. He was more like a silly and complacent drunken gentleman than a hero who has fought with the powers of darkness. I am aware of that. But Louquier, to whom, aforetime, a lifted hand or a réverence de la cour could seem, for reasons, an epic gesture, did not see himself in that light. He was conscious only that for the first time since he had said good-bye to the girl, he had expressed himself. Hanging the red rep curtain, for example, had been the mere pout of the aesthete. Sacking the cook was a weak artificial gesture. But now he walked into his dressing-room and washed the blood – it was only a drop or two – off his knuckle with the beautiful physical simplicity of a navvy. It was an honorable wound; and honorable wounds got in the day’s work you stanch as quickly as you can.

Louquier’s sense of the presence had never worked, away from it. He did not know whether it remained below or had departed from his house. It had not followed him, and after half an hour he realized that it did not mean to leap to its revenge. He mused a little, strategically. It seemed possible that his enemy, insulted by a mere thing of flesh, might bide its time – wait for him to sleep and then pursue him. He fancied it very angry; so angry, perhaps, that it would not leave his roof before it had struck back. Note that Louquier, on reaffirming his independence, in defying his terror, had no sense whatever of stepping out from under an obsession. The thing was not an obsession; it was real, and it had been – perhaps still was – there. His conception of facts had not been false; his attitude to them, only, had been wrong. He realized, for example, that he must watch until morning, for he still did not wish to be helpless in sleep before his enemy. So far as he knew, the only power that could prevail against it was the sovereign sun. Still the practical man, he made with alert and vivid gestures his preparations for the night: drew an easy-chair under the light, put on a comfortable dressing-gown, set a pitcher of cold water on the table beside him, and took up one of the humorists. Tobacco was not forgotten. It was an hour or more, though, before he either smoked or read; for quite that length of time he waited for a sign. The silence of night ebbed and flowed around him. External sounds – a voice, carriage-wheels, the stir of an animal in the shrubbery – fell across it occasionally; but every now and then he would seem to reach some central pool of stillness, and then that sense in him which perceived the presence would be strainingly on its guard. No sign came, however – none at all; and after an hour he relaxed a little and lighted a pipe.

The hours that followed were singularly monotonous. Suspicion, reassurance, false alarms and quick reactions followed one another interminably. Louquier was perfectly sure that something would happen before morning; that his enemy, having perfected its plan, would mount in search of him. Thence resulted a curious ignorance of how time was passing. He had covered his watch with a cushion so as not to hear its ticking, for though the straining of that sense was not listening, it was more like listening than anything else. The dawn, when it came, was incredible to him; it seemed impossible that the thing should not have struck before fleeing, though the dim light on the waters of the Assiniboine proved to him that he was safe. Louquier, still half-dressed, threw himself on his bed and slept. He dreamed, a chain of dreams, about the girl, and woke jaded.

The disapproving charwoman had set out his breakfast in response to his ring from above-stairs. Louquier went straight to the dining-room and ate. His first cigarette he took outside in the garden; there was time enough, in all conscience, to revisit the battlefield. To him, among the flowerbeds, appeared the charwoman, twisting her apron in red, wet hands. She had found the heap of broken wood, and all the self-righteousness of her clan was in arms. She had not touched nothing, so help her; she had looked in with her mop and all, before breakfast, and – she had seen what she had seen. She had not gone in; she had left things as they was for the master to see with his own eyes. Louquier, standing on the threshold of the garden door, his back to the light, realized swiftly that there were three possibilities – to affect not to believe her, to admit that he had done it himself, or to say that it was very curious and perfectly incomprehensible. It does not matter which one he chose, for it is plain to see that with charring easy come by, to say nothing of plenty of places nearer ’ome, and her with three children to leave all day by theirselves – it is plain to see that all three must inevitably have led to the same conclusion. Either she had been called a liar, or Louquier drank, or he couldn’t keep other people from playing the monkey with his property. The charwoman, of course, gave notice, to take effect after dinner that evening. Louquier thought for a moment of asking the gardener if he could cook; but whatever the gardener could have cooked, Louquier knew certainly he could not have eaten. Nor would he for the twentieth time consult an employment agency in vain. It was a dog’s life, and he wouldn’t live it. He would go to a hotel.

You are not to think that Louquier intended even then to run away. He formed, during the day, a somewhat complicated plan. Mingled with the relief of his decision to sleep and eat elsewhere – the charwoman, showing a proper pride to the last, burned everything she cooked for him that day – was the annoyance of realizing that he must also stick by. He must not really leave the house; he must spend much of his day there. Also – and this was most important of all – he must be at his post during the long evening. If the thing returned, it must find him on the spot. His relation to it had become to Louquier the most important present fact of life, the fact he could least ignore. It it did not come well, after, say, three nights, he might honorably assume that it did not intend to return. Then he could shut up the villa and leave Winnipeg, if he liked. The practical man could no longer insist that he was saving money by living in his own house if he was sleeping and eating at an inn. He could tell the agent that he found it hard to get satisfactory servants; that wouldn’t give the house a black eye. The practical man, absolved and justified, could go anywhere he liked, having done, in perfect dignity, with his Winnipeg adventure. You may infer from all this that Louquier was a different man after dealing, in however absurd a way, with his enemy. But he was not precisely different; he had merely, as it were, rearranged the furniture; a number of things had gone into the attic. His mind was in no sense a new house, or even a refurnished one.

To prove this, I have only to tell you that Louquier felt his enemy, if anything, more actual, more dangerous, than during the long vigil in his bedroom the night before. It had not perished. Was a mock-Sheraton chair ever known to destroy an elemental being? The fact that it had delayed its revenge seemed to Louquier significant and appalling, and reinforced his conception of it as a creature of complicated intelligence. It was not a mere evil impulse, to spend itself in windy, ungoverned ways. It could control itself, hold off, plan – achieve, probably. It is no exaggeration to say that Louquier looked forward to the evening as being very probably fatal to him. If his will had not already been made, he would, I fancy, have made it that day. You are to realize that Louquier did not feel himself strong; he only felt himself decent. He had hit back and proved himself normal. What gesture he should find to meet it with again, he did not know – perhaps none. For that matter, it might bring seven other devils with it when it came again. Louquier was very tired, and his domestic arrangements and disarrangements did not make him less so. At the end of the afternoon he flung himself down in his hotel bedroom and slept, waking only in time for a late and hasty dinner. He dressed for dinner, too, which cut his margin down. As he got into a cab and gave his own address to the driver, he had all the sense of being late for an important engagement. He distinctly wanted to be first on the ground. Besides, he had to light up the house and fling open the windows – to say nothing of arranging the library, as usual, for the encounter.

First on the ground he was. He had plenty of time to make his preparations to the last detail. He was more tired than he remembered having been at all; but he had taken coffee and did not fear sleep. He thought with irritation of the tourist crowd he had left in the hotel – a mob with suitcases, ready to go on to Banff and Lake Louise. They had been very irrelevant to his own situation – or was he merely irrelevant to theirs? Sitting in his library, he recalled their fantastic hats and voices. Suppose he had kidnapped one or two of them, and chucked them into his library there above the Assiniboine! He felt injured; he almost wished he could have.

The evening lengthened; and still Louquier sat there, back against the wall, flimsily barricaded as usual. The thing was late, very late. Ten o clock, and still it had nut come. He read a little, or pretended to, then at last lit a cigarette. And as if the striking of the match had been a signal, his enemy entered. Louquier’s heart sank; he knew then that all day, beneath his certainty, he had nursed a frail hope that it would not return; that it had had enough of him. Just as always, his sense placed it for him, showed him where it moved and how it felt. It moved haltingly, jerking from corner to corner, as if the anger in his famous gesture had maimed it. But it did not sit down. It moved about the room in odd curves and tangents, limping ever a little nearer to Louquier. Louquier could not stir; he could not even, this time, rise. Never had the thing so concentrated its emotion on him; it focused him as with straight glances from its invisible eyes. He had not dreamed that he, that any man, could be hated like that. The thing was hate, as God is love. It came swerving towards him like a drunken doom. Louquier sat braced in his chair, his right hand, with the lighted cigarette, shaking. There was no redress for this; the thing had stripped itself of manner and of all hypocrisy. It was coming; it was on him. Intenser than a physical touch, it covered him, pushing him back against the cushions until the chair strained and creaked. His head bent backward over the rim of the chair – his neck felt like to break. Had it been human, its breath would have suffocated him, so close was its invisible countenance to his. He could not move his legs or feet, or his left arm, but his right elbow, pushed out across the wideish arm of the chair, had a little margin still. He drove his elbow out farther, then strained up a tense forearm and dug the lighted cigarette into the air directly in front of his own face. So complete was his consciousness of this terrible imponderable thing that he expected it to feel pain. He held the cigarette there implacably, not three inches from his own nose. In about ten seconds the lighted end went out. Yet he held it there, as if the dead cigarette could still brand his enemy. Slowly, very slowly, he got the sense of the thing’s slipping from him, of its weakly pulling away. It seemed to withdraw, a loose and diminished being, out into the room. He could lift his head again ; he could lean forward, could stir his legs and feet. It was still there, but its hatred seemed weaker, like the hatred of a sick man. Louquier’s eyes never left it, but he threw away the cigarette stub and reached out to the box at his left for another, which he lighted and began to smoke. His neck ached shockingly, and he was limp from the pressure of his antagonist – that curious, weightless pressure on his body, as of air on the lungs. As he smoked, he watched it. It drew farther and farther away, proceeding now with indecision, different indeed from the angry lurches by which it had approached him. It seemed vaguer, weaker, almost helpless. For an instant it seemed to Louquier that the thing was groping for the door and could not find it – as if he had blinded it. Then it disappeared utterly, flowing aimlessly, feebly, across the threshold. He was aware of it to the last – knowing even the moment of its crossing the threshold and the instant when there was no vestige left of it.

For a half-hour Louquier sat on in his library, smoking, but not pretending to read. The thing would not come back that night, he knew; it had gone with all the gestures of defeat. He left the house then, though he took the precaution of leaving the light in the hall to burn on until daylight. He wanted no ambushes. Walking through the garden to the street was perhaps the worst moment Louquier had ever had, for the night was at his back. Safe in his bed at the hotel, he fell instantly asleep, and did not wake until the sun was high.

Louquier had been tired many times in Winnipeg – during the last month almost continuously so. But his weariness on this day was such a weariness of the body as he had not hitherto known. He felt sick, as if he had drunk deep the night before; he had all the sensations of recovering from orgy. His face in the mirror frightened him. Positively, it was a marvel that he had stood out against his enemy as he had. He had a desperate desire to send the keys to his agent and to fling himself into a train; but after a day of conflict, during which all his food tasted fever-soaked, and his feet seemed cunningly wrapped in lead, he decided that he must go back once more to Wellington Crescent. After that, he would be free. Louquier’s ardor had ebbed; the magnificent physical rage that had enabled him to smash the chair down upon his enemy, and then rush past it up the stairs, even the tense and quiet determination with which he had pushed the lighted cigarette into its face, were gone. He was very clear as to what had happened. The thing had nearly had him; his mind was just on the point of surrendering before its advance, and the stupid, loyal flesh had stepped in and saved him. Twice his arm had been lifted, by no conscious volition of his own, when his brain had accepted defeat. What he had feared the first time was madness; the second time he had feared only death. Still, even from that lesser catastrophe, it was his body that had defended him, and with no orders from him. The body had done enough; he ought to give it rest, let its noble instincts relax and recuperate. Suppose he went again: would it not be too much to ask of the taxed flesh? He had no reason to suppose that if he spent another evening in his unloved library, anything whatever would “happen.” He fancied the thing was tired of the game. Yet he could not promise that; and he knew that, should it reappear, he could not combat it with mind alone. Never, for example, could he focus his weary emotions sufficiently to meet its hatred with like hatred – if, indeed, anything human could. This thing carried no useless baggage; it could give itself entirely to its business of hating; and its capacity was one of the well-kept secrets of the universe. No; if he met it again, he would have simply to hope that his body would make another effort. He had done nothing, really, except register his attitude to the presence; but that, only his body had been capable of doing. He had expressed himself to it only in two wild, instinctive gestures. Would there be strength enough there for another, if another were needed? How could he go?

Yet, in the end, Louquier went. He could never have done with the enemy until he had passed an evening in his library unvisited by it. He longed passionately to ask someone to go with him. A bellboy from the hotel would do. But he knew such an evening would be no test. He ordered a cab to come for him at eleven, and told the driver not to ring the bell, but to whistle outside. When he reached the gate, it seemed to him that he could not enter; but something – the rusted remnant of his iron will, perhaps – carried him in. In his pocket he had a loaded pistol a quaint notion, which none the less gave him some comfort. Completely uncorporeal as the thing was, it seemed to understand his motions. He could not speak to it; his silent spirit could not communicate with its silence; he could make it know what he felt about it, apparently, only by the gestures of some low fellow in a rage. Oh, it was a vulgar beast!

Pistol cocked in his hand, Louquier sat through his first half-hour, waiting. There was no sign of its approach. Then, little by little, he became aware that it was not going to come. So slowly did this assurance gain on him that he knew it only as a deepening peace, gradual as the long northern twilight. The room was splendidly empty of the presence – empty of it to all eternity. He could fling his keys at the agent, and take a train tomorrow. He had the definite sense of having crossed something; of being on the other side of a gulf; of having emerged from a region of horror and having left a big neutral space between it and him. It even came over him as he sat there, healthily lulled, that he had, without knowing it, experienced a third act of his own. Louquier’s enemy was at last, for him, behind footlights. He had got his grip, and could now deal with the episode as drama. It “composed” for him: clear proof that he was blessedly outside it; and that he was again (as it had intended he never should be) Louquier. His weariness became pleasant, turned to a velvet drowsiness. Not once, since the girl had rejected him, had he known such peace. He could almost, with half-shut eyes, envisage a future – a happy future that he could build with patience and delight. Louquier drowsed, sunk in his chair. He knew now that it would not come, and he felt safe as a child in its cradle. He was too dog-tired to mind the discomfort of his position. Presently he slept profoundly, his head on his curled arm.

The cabman’s whistle sounded in the late evening, and Louquier came up through layers of sleep to greet it. In that waking instant before the pattern of life is wholly clear, he jumped, startled. His cramped, unconscious fingers closed tight on the trigger of the pistol, and he fired, as neatly as if he had meant to. Louquier was even spared the knowledge of what he had done, for the bullet, knowing what it was made for and knowing nothing else, went straight. For he had won his moral victory; and there was nothing left his baffled enemy but to stoop to physical accident. At last the impatient cabman’s ring pealed through the house, but no one answered it.

—

The Wax Doll

Most women, I believe, are bad citizens; and I have come to the conclusion that they have to be. That is my only apology for having been a bad citizen myself. The sense of guilt is still heavy on me – after some years. I don’t know why, unless it is because I used to be a suffragist; and if you take suffrage in a decent spirit, it develops your conscience. All that parading and speechifying, I suppose, did something to me; for though I acted on instinct, and all the worrying was done afterwards – well, I did worry. I am sure that I should have gloried in my behavior (or at least have thought it inevitable) if I hadn’t once gazed at the vote as though it were a sacrament. My tale is not a suffrage argument – either for or against. I am not interested in suffrage any more. But I have had the Furies after me because, at one strange moment of my life, I ranged myself against the forces of government: ranged myself against them because I hadn’t a principle to fit the case. I had to act as my feelings dictated, and my feelings had never had a bowing acquaintance with the criminal code. I am quite aware that a lot of women – perhaps most – will think I behaved very ill. I am nearly sure that I did. Yet would they, if caught unawares (oh, the mental “unpreparedness” of most of us!) have done differently? I should like to know – though I am now very far away from the scene of my civic turpitude, and very safe. What would a good citizen have done? And if he would have done the opposite of what I did, what good did the parading and speechifying do me, after all? Did I behave like a woman out of a harem? Or are there people who would think that my instincts weren’t immoral? I put it all as a question, because the Furies have forcibly fed me some bitter doses. Of course, I know there was more than a dash of cowardice in my behavior; but it was the kind of cowardice that I had, from my earliest years, been led to consider honorable, for a woman. The whole thing is just a muddle. Why, even now, rack my memories as I can, I don’t positively know. Still, at the time, I acted as if I thought so… . This story, by the way, has nothing whatever to do with suffrage: I only brought that in by way of showing that I, the protagonist – ah, no, not the protagonist! – wasn’t wholly the old-fashioned woman. But shadows of the “keepsake” cling about us still, I suppose, though we may be as square-toed as you like.

I don’t think my offense was extraditable. I hope not, though I have never inquired. But certainly it didn’t seem, afterwards, as if America were the place for me, or I the person for America. I’ve stayed away ever since. It’s more fun, too. And in so many strange and lovely places I’ve wandered to – for I’ve wandered like an Englishwoman in a pith helmet – my little adventure has looked, in retrospect, so innocent. China, for example, was a great comfort. Still, her face haunts me – always will. And not only hers, but the other one: the face I never, thank God, even saw! Perhaps, if I really had seen it, I should never have had to worry. But I don’t really believe that: it’s part of my trouble that I can’t. The uncertainty is just the humor with which fate salts things. The dish will be a savory to the end of time. Well, here it is.

I had taken my ticket for Worden – a Connecticut village on the very edge of the Sound. The expresses flash by it too quickly for one to read the name on the little station, and most people probably have never heard of it. It was familiar to me because I often went there, spring and autumn, to visit the Peeles. Their place lay three miles from the village, on a lovely inlet all their own; and my dread of the journey on a New Haven “accommodation” came to be inhibited utterly by_the prospect of delicious salty drives, in an open motor, along the curve of the coast. Worden itself I had never noticed much, for the Peeles never kept me waiting there. I should say it was a dreary, down-at-heel hamlet, like so many others: all ugly frame houses and one cheap brick block; with four or five little churches, all violently snobbish, no doubt, in the matter of creed, but making up for it by the communistic dreadfulness of their architecture. That is all I ever knew about Worden.

I had a little time to wait. (It was, by the way, the old Grand Central, not the new station that is said to have replaced it.) I had checked my luggage, and had nothing but a novel to carry. I was taking a disagreeably early train, and felt rather sleepy still. In spite of the gloominess of the women’s waiting-room, I decided to stay there, for the big waiting-room outside was possessed by a chattering horde of immigrants: one of those organized alien crowds that appear sporadically in our big terminals, evidently ready to be shipped into the patient West. Everyone knows the kind of thing I mean: huge parcels labeled “Disinfected,” hatless women and fantastic infants, shrill and guttural sounds in the air, gestures of excitement and discouragement, somewhere in the background a responsible agent with – presumably – tickets. They swarmed over the big waiting-room, and I withdrew to the stuffier apartment. The matron was not about, and there were not many people in there – a few women washing their faces in the farther room, after a night journey, and one or two tired creatures with children.

There was nothing interesting to look at, in my half-hour, but I was determined to save my novel for the train, which I knew would stop everywhere and be a little later at every station. So I stared about – it was as much a matter of pure chance as that – at the few other women. I nearly remonstrated, I remember, with one woman who was crossly scolding a bewildered child for everything it did and did not do. I wish I had; for, by the look of her, a remonstrance would have led to a long and unpleasant conversation. In fact, that was why I didn’t: so little do we know, at any given moment, what is good for us. My glance rested instead – driven by my own stupid intention – on a young woman sitting in a rocking-chair in the far corner. She rocked with a steady jerkiness, and at every forward motion one of the rockers grazed a battered suitcase that stood beside her. She herself was shabby, was uninteresting, I fancied, to the core. But I was determined to take my mind off the unreasonable mother near me. So I stared at her. She had been crying, I thought; and my imagination constructed mechanically a parting from some man. She did not look, at least, as though she would cry at leaving her mother. You know what I mean: she was young, and seemed respectable enough in a shoddy way, but her eyes were very big, and there was a sort of awareness in them. Still, she didn’t powder her nose, or even open her cheap vanity bag to contemplate herself in a mirror, and I – still cogitating rather sleepily – was grateful to her. I was, already, so tired of those gestures! Heavens, but I was on the wrong track! But one will clutch at anything when one is bored.

Her face, if you will believe me, was not interesting in any way. I was sure that everything about her was cheap: her birth, her traditions, her ideas, her clothes, her fate. I dare say, at that time, I should have expected her to be transformed by a vote. Perhaps she would have been: it is not for me to say. But the only emotion she excited was the familiar one of wonder that there should be so many colorless common people in the world, and that those common millions should somehow manage to compound decent nations. She rocked away, as I say, without stopping. Once she dropped her vanity bag, and she bent down in a great hurry to retrieve it. All her money in it, I suppose. Just a shabby, young, scarcely pretty, totally unimportant creature. I finally felt, though she seemed not to have noticed me at all, that I couldn’t bear to stare at her any more. She was too tiresomely ordinary. I have often felt aggrieved that, since a face was to haunt me, it should have been so uninteresting a one: neither tragic nor comic; just one of the boring millions. Oh, I’ve suffered.

I looked at my watch. It was high time for the train to be announced, and I sauntered forth into the big waiting-room to inquire. It would be five minutes more, I learned, before it was made up; and I went back. Think of it: I went back. And they write silly poetry about being the captain of one’s soul. The immigrants were just too nasty and depressing: that was why I went back. And I might have been a free woman, if I hadn’t gone. Well, there she was. And just because I had been staring at this indistinguishable creature before, I turned to her again. Her eyes were shut, but she was still rocking – some people can’t help it, once in a rocking-chair – and a virulent red flower in her shabby blue hat rocked with her. Did I mention that she had a red flower in her hat? I had noticed that before. It was the kind you can buy at a ten-cent store. Even with her eyes closed to the world, she was still clutching her vanity bag with tight fingers, as though her shapeless embryonic soul were in it – being incubated.

The matron came in and waddled across the room to put up the window shade. (Where do station matrons come from? They all come, evidently, from the same place, and I never saw one who looked trustworthy.) My young woman’s eyes were still closed, but the fat creature, in reaching the shade, knocked against her chair and startled her. The matron immediately waddled away and disappeared within, but the girl rocked wildly for a moment – on account, I dare say, of the concussion – and her foot, or the point of the rocker, something, anyhow, upset the battered suitcase. I was on my feet by this time, ready to walk out to my train, but I saw the suitcase open as it fell. Words cannot say how unnecessary, how fortuitous, it was that my eyes should have been turned, at that instant, in that direction. But they were… . The girl jumped; her vanity bag clattered to the floor, and she bent over the suitcase. Before I could turn away, she had managed to shut it, but also before I could turn away, I had seen a largish package done up in crumply white cloth – and, shaken across the edge of the suitcase as it opened, emerging from the loose, formless package within, a tiny, waxy wrist and hand. At the same instant – just the infinitesimal hint of time that it took for the girl to settle the bundle in place and fasten the feeble spring of the suitcase once more – I saw the girl’s face perfectly white, as she crouched on the floor. Some women with bad hearts go white easily, but this was an inimitable, a symbolic whiteness. There was no question in my mind as I turned away – which I did as quickly as the gesture could be accomplished – that this was the pallor of the utmost possible human terror. You would look like that, not after the beasts got you, but at the very moment when you felt yourself being flung to them. In midair, descending to their hot breath, you would be white as she was white. Or, at least, so I take it. The peculiar startling hue of her face in that one glimpse has remained with me. I find myself matching other pallors with it and finding them creamy. I have stood above the wonderful whiteness of the dead, and her remembered face has turned that whiteness to ivory.

Yes, I turned away. I could not face her when she rose. The little waiting-room, I saw just then, had emptied itself, except for a woman asleep on a couch with her head on a carpetbag. There were women in the inner room, but they could have seen nothing. I heard her sit down heavily again in the rocking-chair; I heard a little clatter and knew that she was picking up her precious vanity bag. But I could not have turned round and looked at her again. If I had, she would have known. Don’t you see? That was my first instinct: not to let her dream that, in that gasping instant, I had seen. The most reassuring thing I could do, to put her out of her pain, was to walk slowly towards my train, like any woman walking towards any train. I tell you that whiteness was awful. I couldn’t have beheld it again. The one important thing in the world seemed to be that she should get some blood back into her face. Oh, it didn’t matter if she died, but it did matter that no one should be so afraid as that. Of course, even in those few steps, I was conscious of another point of view: I knew that I could speak to the matron. But I didn’t want to bring her into it, with her sly, evil face and hovering fat hands. Crime seemed beside the point: I just couldn’t augment a terror like that. I’ve never seen anything like it – though, as you might say, I live with it and see it every day. By the time I had got out of the women’s room, I was saying to myself quite seriously that it might not have been what I thought. It might, you know – I still say it seriously – have been a wax doll. Any time, all these years, I could have gone into court and sworn that I didn’t know it wasn’t a wax doll. It was the whiteness, the awful whiteness, of the woman’s face. That didn’t fit any theory but the worst.

I had a few thoughts, in the midst of my general haze – little thready wisps hanging in a blur. I reflected, while I made my way through the crowd of aliens and officials of every kind, that my chance was not yet gone. Yes, of course: I could report my suspicion to any gray-coated official creature. “A young woman (a red flower in her hat) sitting in the women’s waiting-room, with, beside her, a battered suitcase that might bear looking into.” Oh, yes, I could do that. I was quite aware of it before I reached the gate. If I did, I might end in Bellevue; I should certainly end in the newspapers. I didn’t see my way to doing it, and I marched on. I assure you I thought of those things, and I felt that it would be willful and wicked, on the part of circumstance, to pillory me with her in the daily press, in court-rooms, under the insincere eyes of counsel. Dreadful things happen in the world all the time: why should I involve myself in a drama that did not concern me, that only wanted passionately (oh, that whiteness!) not to concern me? What were the police for? Was I to do their dirty work; to snoop about, and spy, and give information? There was a deep, deep aversion in me to being the instrument of the poor girl’s undoing. It would have been like giving up, from my very hearthstone, some fainting creature the hounds were after. It was very ancient, of course, that aversion. She may have deserved anything the law could do to her. I dare say she did. But was I to hand her over, remembering that whiteness? It seemed like my duty to protect her from anything, no matter how righteous, that she was so afraid of as that. Could, indeed, anything be righteous, the contemplation of which turned a human being into that sort of pitiful pulp? I know that my attitude was full of flaws, morally and logically speaking, but it was my attitude, and I couldn’t, all of a sudden, like that, get rid of it. It was “wished on” to me. I don’t pretend that my dread of the newspapers and the courts was noble; yet that aversion, too, was ancient and decent – just as it was ancient and decent of me to think in that connection (as I did) of my relatives. I am not defending myself: I am only telling you how I felt. There was, besides, my constitutional and conventional unreadiness to believe that a thing which looks lurid really is lurid. Very likely it would have been masculine of me to report her, but I am sure that it was equally masculine of me to invent the wax-doll hypothesis and to envisage Bellevue. I don’t know what the masculine mind would have done with the whiteness. I only know what my mind did with it; or, rather, what it did to me.

“In less time than it has taken to tell it,” as the books say, I was in the Worden train, which was precisely as dreary as usual. I don’t think any of my fellow passengers were so commonplace, quite, as the girl in the waiting-room, but they were not striking. They were merely the predestined prey of a New Haven “accommodation.” Very likely you know the look. There was no parlor-car, and I settled myself on the shady side of the train, and opened my novel. The gesture, naturally, was mere bravado. Never was best-seller more vainly sold; for I’ve never read it. I threw it away later: flung it into the sea, wouldn’t let Clara Peele read it. I could hold it open before me in the train, but I could not keep it by me longer than that. I felt as though it had a spot of blood on it. The journey was not pleasant, but it came to an end as journeys do. I said poetry to myself all the way. Not that I got much out of the poetry, but there are some long tilings (Swinburne’s Dolores, for example) that just settle into the clacking rhythm of the train itself and tide you over. It seems to be what they were written for. Before I got out at Worden I looked for Ellis Peele, and saw him waiting there with the car. I was glad. Indeed, I nearly upset him by the vigor with which I flung myself at him to shake his hand, and then rushed to shut myself into the tonneau. He wanted to look for my luggage, but I assured him it would not be on that train. They had promised me in New York that it should be, but I felt I couldn’t endure the delay of his looking for my portmanteaux and carrying them to the car. Of course. Ellis paid no attention to me, and went down the platform to the baggage-car. I leaned over the side of the motor and contemplated, in real agony, the Baptist church. It looked, I remember, as though, on completion, it had been immersed, and there had been too much bluing in the water. You see … the conductor (symbol of authority) was still walking up and down the platform, and just as I got out of the train I had seen, alighting from the second car ahead, a shabby young woman (with a red flower in her hat) who carried a battered suitcase. I had been given another chance. Not that I could have taken it, once having thrown it away – I should by that time have been myself in a very inconvenient position. But the conductor was there to remind me, somehow, of what a bad citizen I had been.

Perhaps, if the girl had seen me, she would not have recognized me, but the most important thing to me in the world at that moment – I am sure everyone will understand that – was that she should not see me. Of course, as I realized later, either she had never noticed me at all, or she didn’t dream that I was on the Worden train. But I wasn’t capable of realizing anything then except that I must lean over the side of the car and stare at the Baptist church. My back must have looked very seasick.

I felt better when the train puffed away; at least, the conductor had gone. There was the ticket agent left, to be sure, and he also had a uniform. Still, he didn’t seem so official nearly, and he hadn’t come from New York. I longed to look out of the tail of my eye and see what direction the girl had taken; I never in my life wanted to do anything so much. Yet never has my whole body wanted to do anything so little. Of course, I didn’t turn – though I was ready to, with a jerk, if she should come in sight.

Ellis came back without my portmanteaux, voluble about the evils of the system. I had quite expected them to be there, but I patronized him for his credulity. It was all I could do to pay him back for my terrible five minutes of staring at the church. And then I found that that unconscionably domestic man had errands to do. I was to dodge the girl about the main street of Worden! Or so I feared. In point of fact, though my field of vision seemed unnaturally enlarged, as if I had grown eyes at the side of my head, I didn’t see her anywhere; and when we finally took the road to the inlet I breathed again, as if my heart were a real heart.

The road to the inlet is winding and varied – and very bad. Sometimes you are within sight of the Sound, and sometimes you poke muddily through thin woods: unbeautiful, deserted, too scrubby even for Sunday-school picnics. The last part lies straight along the shore, but even in the first two miles, when you are beset by the scrubby woods, the salt is clean and stinging in the air. Released from town, I always immensely liked the drive. On that day, my one desire was to get to the Peeles’ comfortable, safe house. My conversation was not up to much, for I could remember nothing discussable except the humble stridency of the Baptist church. “The woodspurge has a cup of three.” I found that I had a much clearer picture of it than Ellis Peele, though he must have spent hours of his life, instead of five minutes, waiting opposite it. I got him to laughing in the end, and his laughter was delightful to my ears.

The car was crawling through deep, wet ruts, in the last stretch of woods before we were to come into the open. Ellis took a muddy turn very slowly … and ever so gently I groaned. “Sorry this road’s in such beastly shape,” he threw back over his shoulder.

“It is in beastly shape,” I found strength to murmur. For me it was in beastly shape, indeed; since, a good way ahead of us, I saw a woman trudging with drabbled skirts, carrying a suitcase.

Ellis presently noticed her. “Halloo! Somebody walking it – a woman. She must be going to North Worden: quite a jaunt. I say, Alice, suppose we give her a lift when we catch up?” He stopped the car just then, to get out and do something to one of its myriad organs.

“She’d probably be insulted if you did.”

“Don’t you believe it! Since these last rains people have been mighty grateful.” His head was bent, and I barely caught the cheerful words.

“I won’t have it, Ellis. I can’t make conversation with strange people.”

“Whew!” He straightened himself, came round, and got into his seat again. “Since when have you been such a snob? It’s not a month ago that you made me take in an old couple – made me take them clear over to North Worden, for the matter of that.”

I clutched the rail in front of me. “They were old, Ellis. This woman walks like a young person. It’s different.”

“You must be pretty far-sighted.” He craned his neck to see. “She walks – to my eye – as though she were tired. Come, be a Christian, Alice. She’s got a suitcase, too.”

“I won’t have it.” My voice was very snappy. We were near enough then – though still crawling – for me to see a spot of color that I knew: a red flower nodding, as it must (I felt) have nodded, from the beginning of time, over the crown of the woman’s hat.

“But she’s got a suitcase – a heavy one. She’s bent over with it.”

My nerves had at last gone back on me. I believe, indeed, that I was just about to shriek in his ear: “I know she has a suitcase, you fool!” when luckily we met a deep lake of water, and splashed through it with noises of the Deluge. That gave me time to bite my words back; and at just that moment we passed her. She did not look up, but drew aside into the trees – not to be bespattered, one might plausibly have assumed. Through the Deluge noises I heard Ellis grunt peevishly: “Oh, very well, but I don’t know what’s struck you.” Then, mercifully, we got past her, but not before I had recognized the hat, the vanity bag, even the contour of the averted face. I did not look back; I never saw her again. But Ellis Peele did, and I had to meet more kind protesting words: “I say, Alice, she’s gone into the woods. She must think there’s a short cut that way, and there isn’t. She’ll get up to her knees; get lost, maybe. Mayn’t I just cut back and tell her – if you won’t have her in?”

“You don’t want to reverse the car on a road like this.”

“No, but I could get out and walk back.”

“I will not be left alone in the car.”

He looked at me then. I shut my eyes. It was my good fortune probably to look very ill, for he suddenly became solicitous about me. “Are you ill, Alice?”

I didn’t open my eyes. “Ill enough to be pretty anxious to get to the house.”

“Oh, well, of course we’ll get on.” And there was no more talk of helping the woman. But he did give another look back, and I had a last report. “I can see her in among the trees. She’s just resting, I guess – sitting on her suitcase, anyhow.”

Before we made the last turn to the shore he stared back once more down the wood-road, but he gave me no information, and I took it that he did not see her – that she had stayed among the trees.

My sudden turn was purely nervous. I wasn’t ill in any real sense, but I was very grateful that I had looked ill. I didn’t know that one’s nerves could so befriend one. I was made to lie down at once, but I couldn’t stay on the couch more than an hour. Even that was pretty hard. Still, it wouldn’t do for Clara to hear me pacing the floor. Feeling that I should surely want, at once, a lot of my own things, she insisted on sending Ellis back, in spite of my protests, to meet the next train from New York. Poor Clara! If she had known that she was giving me poison! I begged him to wait until afternoon; I assured him that I needed nothing, that he must be tired, that I couldn’t bear to have luncheon put off – all the things kind people pay no attention to, taking them for mere manners. But he went.

I borrowed a tea-gown and slippers of Clara, I drank beef tea and took valerian, I was very affectionate to the baby, and cringed properly before its nurse. I think I talked a lot – cheerfully. I seemed to have entered on a new life: not a nice one. I could not imagine against what unwonted obstacles I might have to brace myself in that unfamiliar world. Lilliput or Brobdingnag could not be stranger. Perhaps I caught the first hiss of the Furies’ wings as I waited for Ellis Peele to return. I know that, many times, as I lay on the long window-seat, that girl’s face appeared and hovered before my seaward-gazing eyes. Very distinctly it came and hung there, white as nothing else has ever been, between me and the smooth gray of the Sound. I have never wholly rid my life of it; but it has never been so vivid since. The face, that morning, was the best sort of hallucination: something that you could take oath before a notary public that you had seen.

Ellis came back at last with the portmanteaux. He was very amiable, by way of showing me that I had put him to no trouble. By way of showing me also, I suppose, that he bore me no grudge for what he must have considered my abominable behavior earlier, he mentioned cheerfully an incident of the second trip.

“Do you remember the woman you wouldn’t let me give a lift to?”

I didn’t answer. I was looking out through the open window at the waves, and between me and the gray uneven horizon I saw, as clearly as I now see the pen with which I write, a white, white face. The irony of answering would have broken me.

“I picked her up again, going back to Worden – beyond where we passed her, a little nearer the village. But still in the woods. I hope you don’t think it disrespectful to you, Alice, but this time I did offer to give her a lift. She was floundering about in the beastly mud, and looked awfully tired. You needn’t have been afraid of her dignity, my dear; she got in like a shot.”

“With you?” It almost amused me to ask that idle question, with the face outside there – a face of flesh; no ghost, mind you – so clearly communing with me.

“No, in your place. I tried to pass the time of day with her, but I didn’t get very far. She must have started for North Worden and given it up as a bad job. But I took a leaf out of your book, there: I didn’t ask her whether she had or not, because I might have had to offer to run her over. And the going is too much.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Nothing. She asked about trains, and when she found there wasn’t one to New York for two hours, she said she’d rather walk, thank you. I fairly stared at her – wanting to walk through that darned mud. It’s one to you, Alice, for sure. Of course, I never make anyone drive with me, so I stopped and let her out. I felt better about it when I handed over the suitcase. It was light as a feather; must have been empty.”

A wave of nervous nausea kept me from speaking for a moment. I shut my eyes, and before I opened them again I turned my head from the window. Then I selected the piano to stare at. I was tired of faces.

“Did you see her again?”

“No. I wouldn’t have. I pointed out to her the footpath across Merry’s farm. It’s full half a mile shorter that way and couldn’t well be muddier than the road.”

“You’re a chivalrous creature, Ellis. I hope you feel rewarded for teaching me manners.”

“Oh, you were done up. Of course, it wouldn’t have done to take her in while you were feeling ill. And I don’t think she was particularly grateful to me, though she was polite enough. As I said, I think it’s one to you. My reward was just about commensurate with my deserts.”

Clara yawned a little and got up. “What was your reward, after all – except boring Alice and me with your wandering females?”

“Oh, a very medieval one. I found a big red flower in the tonneau when I got home. Must have dropped off her hat. But I’m not sentimental about it, Clara, my love. I gave it to the cook as I came in. She’s always trimming hats. I assure you it was a lovely flower – awfully red and big.”

I knew so well what to say that I turned to Alice and spoke directly to her. “Don’t you think, if only on baby’s account, it had better be put in the fire? I shouldn’t want stray millinery in the house.”

“Of course.” Clara started off at once – for the kitchen quarters, no doubt.

“Oh, you women!” groaned Ellis. “What’s wrong with a flower? And it’s the cook, not the nurse. I’m sure she loved it. She doesn’t know where it came from. I tell you it was gorgeous.”

My calm was shattered. “Ellis Peele, it was a horror!”

He turned on me a face of wonder. “’Twasn’t! But how in the world do you know?”

Clara, on the threshold, saved me. “Why, Ellis, of course it would have been – the kind of woman you say she was. Anyhow, we won’t have it about. Men have no sense. If you gave it to the cook, she might think she ought to use it. And she often shakes her hats at baby and lets him pull the flowers.”

She disappeared. For the first time in my life, I was grateful to Clara’s particular weakness, which amounted to a hygienic muddle of wild apprehensions and even wilder precautions. I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t disinfect the cook before returning. For my part, Heaven knew, I was quite willing she should.

“Flowers!” It was a welcome cue to Ellis. “Insects, birds, fruits, trees! I assure you, bees and cats and all sorts of woodland creatures follow her bonnets home from church. The woman’s a park!”

I laughed a little, very badly. But I admitted to myself that chance, having that day crushed me, was now staying its hand. Their mere foolishness had saved me from giving myself away. I hoped it was an omen. Still, I did not care to look out again across the water – just then. Clara returned, and I rose, a little waveringly, to go upstairs.

“Well, is the holocaust over?” Ellis jeered.

“All over. How could you be so silly?”

Ellis raised his hands to heaven. “It’s lucky the woman didn’t leave anything I might have handed over to baby. A doll, for example.”

I think Clara turned on him then. I heard: “Ellis, you never would.” But at that point I fainted. I remember nothing about the swoon, of course – not even feeling ill before I fell. But they said I went down quite gently and limply. I fancy I was simply very tired of coincidences.

They kept me in bed for a few days, and must have given me heart stimulants and such, for I began to plot and plan very lucidly before I was allowed to get up. The events that I have enumerated had, by that time, arranged themselves neatly and vividly in my memory – no more detail, and no less, than what I have told you. My recollections of that day have never sifted themselves further. I remember, as I remembered then, everything I have set down here, and nothing more.

Several things were quite clear to me, before I came downstairs. The first was that I must get away as soon as possible. I could not take drives in their motor; I could not go along the wood-road back and forth to Worden. That way lay hysteria, if not something worse. I could even see myself scratching and digging in the woods, round about a certain spot, wherever the sodden leaves had been disturbed…. I might not be able to avoid driving with Ellis and Clara to the station when I left; but I would sit with him, on however fantastic a pretext. Nothing – not if I died for it – would drag me into the tonneau. Yes, I must go at once, and I invented a specialist – in Boston. That took a little thinking, as well as, later, a good deal of lying; for life seldom took me to Boston, and the Peeles knew it. But it was perfectly clear to me – as clear as an axiom or two times five – that I could not take any train that would deposit me in the Grand Central station. I was very hard hit, you see, from the first; and living in the house with a good citizen would never make it better. From Boston, I remembered, a blessed through train curved down somehow to Washington, and I could get back to New York by railroads that, in those days, ended weakly in ferries. The hypothetical specialist in Boston could tell me a lot of interesting things about myself that I could neatly summarize in letters. My further plan was to get out of the country before I really needed to consult a specialist. Then, when I did have to, it could be a Frenchman. I knew the kind of question they put to you when your nerves are shot to pieces, and I could almost imagine myself, at need, telling my story to a Frenchman. You can see what I mean. Thank Heaven, I’ve never had to; the wide world has set me up again.

I followed my program, got through it all successfully and plausibly. There was not a hitch. The baby, even, one day, ran a temperature, so that I could go down alone to the water and drown my novel. So smoothly did my mind work – now that I could no longer consider myself a moral creature; it hadn’t worked smoothly while I still had my chance – that I led up cannily, for some hours, to the geste of borrowing Clara’s blue glasses for the unavoidable last drive to Worden. They were an immense help. Clara sat behind with the portmanteaux. I was sorry for her, in spite of her ignorance; but, even could I have afforded it, there was not a pretext, in heaven or earth, for giving them a new car. And at least, I reflected, as we crunched along through the unchanging mud, it – the wax doll, I mean – had never been in the car.

That is really all. For I told you in the beginning what my life has been since that day. And, pray, do not think that I do not like my life, even though I seem to myself to be the only person in the world to know what whiteness can mean. I have times (on my worst days) of addressing myself in the cold terms of “accessory after the fact”; yes. But I have times, too, of thinking that if I had given her away, I should have loathed myself forever. Those are the days when the face comes back to me, and on the whole, you know, they are the best – except for the days when some miracle of height or valley or builded house so intervenes that I forget it all. I have occasionally a desire, so intense that it burns my mind, to know what a good citizen would think of me. But I know, too, what the desire is worth; for Ellis Peele is a good citizen – none better – and I was at exceeding pains not to ask him. I was wrong, by the way, just now, about my worst days. My worst days – but they come very seldom, for I’m in the main a sane creature – are those when I tell myself, in all sincerity, that I have no scrap of real proof that it wasn’t a wax doll.

—

The Eighty-Third

Having at last reached a provincial city of a neutral country (not my own, though mine, too, still calls itself neutral), and being provided for the first time in many months with the ordinary comforts of life, I feel it my duty to set down certain facts that have recently come to my notice. They cannot possibly be printed until the war is over, and I question very much whether they can be printed then. There will be, if I mistake not, a very strict censorship exercised by the conquerors. Indeed, the mere fact that a neutral press has not yet got hold of the details I have to relate – or dared to print them if it has a hint – shows what the fear of the invaders already is. Besides, this is not a gossipy time. We do not glory in our neutrality; we cling to it as a drowning man to a tiny splinter of his wrecked ship; we are terribly afraid of saying the least thing, publicly or privately, that may draw attention to us. Nothing but a happy series of accidents can keep us out of the conflict, and, indeed, when it is all settled, we shall have scarce more shrift than the conquered belligerents. I do not even dare name the army to which the 83d regiment belongs. By the time this document comes to light – if it ever does – it will be easy enough to guess.

When what, in my youth, was known as the “Great War” or the “World War” was going on – the war that began in August, 1914 – I had a mighty desire to see something of its terrors. I was completing my education, and I had no great taste for learning. I thought I should do much better flying above a battlefield than acquiring knowledge – since all knowledge, I thought, was destined to be presently superseded. My family would not hear of it, however – they had always frowned on my aviator’s ambitions. So I never got in on the “Great War” at all; and, like most other people, I thought it meant my last chance. Obviously, there was never going to be another big armed conflict. This was a madness; the world for ever after would be sane. We were very innocent in those days. Certainly, when I sulked at being kept at home, it was honest sulking with real provocation. I never dreamed that when I had reached the prime of life I should see a struggle that would throw the whole world into terror – not merely half of it. We were all proud of the Congress of 1917, you know – I speak as a man old before my time, to generations yet unborn. There won’t, I think, be even a fiction of a Congress after this war. It will be more like a gigantic peace palaver in a reeking jungle. But I am not concerned to prophesy, for to deal with that future we shall need vast and exotic vocabularies. Small use the Oxford dictionary will be, alas! to our children – or Esperanto, either.

I have double-locked my doors; I have shuttered the lower half of my windows; and I have looked quizzically at my fountain-pen, as if it were an object that might sometime be dug up to bear witness to a lost civilization. All the little things of every day have a trick now of seeming vitally important – they may pass so soon, with us to whom they belonged.

Outside in the street it is very quiet. Even in this remote little neutral town there is no pretense of “business as usual.” Business will never be “as usual” again; it will be different. But this is as near as I can get, at present, to the atmosphere in which I was bred, and I will try to write as a plain man writes.

I have been for some months previous to this in a corner of the war-zone. That is, as I intended it should be, a vague statement. Most of the planet is, if not part of the war-zone, at least belligerent territory. I am a good linguist, owing to experiences of my childhood and early youth; I speak, fairly well, a lot of languages that in my day were not considered part of one’s education. My parents were wanderers, and I had the oddest collection of nurses and attendants that any child ever had. Luckily, their talk stuck by me – I never forgot any idiom I had learned. So I got on better than most would have done when I was caught by the war in a foreign country. I had luck, too, in my country; I could actually, thanks to a nurse I had once had for a year, talk with the peasants.

I cannot say that I had any plan when the war broke out. Everyone knew that, once started, it would work as it did – spreading like a forest fire with a gale to aid it. Nation by nation, tribe by tribe, race by race came into it; and all a neutral could do was to edge along, little stage by little stage, to some extraordinary spot that by accident was not technically involved. Practically and commercially, of course, everything and everyone is involved.

I have had, naturally, a good many hairbreadth escapes. Neutrals are so few that no one considers them of the slightest importance; and I have found that if you have a passport you are likely to be arrested as a spy. I destroyed my passport early in the game for fear it should get me into trouble. I lived like an animal, where I could – suspecting everything and everyone, and never dreaming of depending on any habitation for more than a night. After three months of the war, as I was “inching” along to a neutral frontier, I began to hear on the timid lips of noncombatants constant reference to a terrible regiment belonging to one of the allied groups. I will not be more definite than that. I never asked questions, but I stored away what I heard. Eventually I learned the facts.

You must understand that I traveled as light as a hobo. I had a certain amount of money secreted about my person, but wherever it was possible I paid in physical labor for my plate of food or my bit of cottage floor. My familiarity with the language stood in in good stead. Without it, every man’s hand would have been against me, for I was obviously not a native, and might have been, to the peasants’ inexperienced imaginations, anything. I always put my cards on the table – not merely my own hand, you might say, but the whole pack. I made no indiscreet inquiries; I helped the people when and as I could; and I told them of myself frankly that I was trying to work my way to a neutral country. My poverty of aspect robbed me, to begin with, of any too unwelcome importance. I told them directly that I had no political sympathies, but that I loathed all slaughter and cruelty, and wanted, as my own country was not at war, to get out of the way of any army whatsoever – being (this I tried to show) meanwhile, en route, a decent person. Often I took the man of the house – when there was one – aside, gave my pistol to him for the night, and half stripped myself to show him I was concealing no other weapons. The knowledge of my money-belt I kept to myself; though, in the morning, I gave the people a coin or two if it seemed that currency would be of any use to them.

This, roughly, was the mode of my existence for three months following the outbreak of the conflagration. If my progress towards safety and comfort (both of which can be only comparative – and temporary, even more than comparative) seems incredibly slow, I can only point out the fact that every step I took was precarious and that a snail’s pace was inevitable. I had to dodge both the invading and defending armies; all means of transportation, down to the most aged donkey, were commandeered; the fighting radius of any given corps was immensely extended by scouts; the noncombatants were suspicious of every human creature not personally known to them. Remember that everyone except the young people had been eyewitnesses of an earlier war which was supposed to surpass in horror everything hitherto known to history. This is a grave generation, all over the world; and the particular nation in whose territory I found myself has been played with after a fashion that no one – least of all itself – can understand. I had to make wide detours, and sometimes judged it best to skulk out of a village almost before I had taken stock of it. But a number of the peasants were unbelievably humane; and a hurried clasp of the hand in the dawn was sometimes an almost intolerable parting. At such a time a human relation becomes historic in twenty-four hours.

It was in the village of V——— that I first heard anything definite about the mysterious regiment. The one-armed son of the blacksmith had returned from the nearest town, full of tales. I listened, not too credulous, for the tales were wild. The opposing armies, as everyone knows, are a medley of races; and one hint of the exotic will breed hideous anecdote. I was welcome that night at the little public-house – I know not what else to call it, for it was scarcely an inn. The villagers gathered and drank, men and women together, a villainous local wine – moderately, in no spirit of orgy, though here and there the fantastic costume of some refugee goatherd from the hills seemed to make the scene dance before my eyes.

The gist of the report brought by the blacksmith’s son was that the 83d regiment was in the field, and that they might look for heavier trouble than was yet upon them. Every week men were hurried off to camp from this or that village. Officials would descend to prod and poke peasants supposed exempt. Unless you had lost an arm or a leg, no chronic ailment, no guarantee of over or under age, availed you. Presently there would be only women, cripples, and imbeciles left. I could vouch, myself, for the truth of that; with my own eyes I had seen the little population of non-combatants dwindle terrifically in the province. Then would come the turn of the 83d regiment. It skulked behind the others and did its trick, apparently, after the fighting was done and towns lay waste and helpless. They were on no army list, mind you. Officially, there was no 83d regiment; but its name was in everyone’s mouth – at least, in such mouths as dared to speak in a whisper among tried companions.

“But what do they do?” I asked – my first leading question in many weeks. “Do they massacre and plunder – jackals following their fighting brothers?”

“Some folk say they are not human at all.” This was the sulky reply of the blacksmith’s son.

The women crossed themselves, and I began to disbelieve the tale, root and branch – though I had heard of the 83d before. Still: demons – we had not come to that.

“They pass in the night – in the night; and they speak no tongue that mortal has ever heard.” An old woman crooned this in her corner, then covered her face with her dirty, gaudy shawl.

“Demons!” The word ran like a flame round the room, and presently they were all crossing themselves and swaying back and forth in a gloomy ecstasy of terror.

“Who has seen them?” The question was asked directly of the crippled messenger by a woman with a harsh voice. I judged from the attitude of the rest that only the common danger permitted her to be of their company. But the mutter of “Demons! demons!” drowned the sneer with which she followed up her question. Children, waking, stuck their heads out of their mothers’ shawls, and their whimpering had to be quieted before the blacksmith’s son could reply.

“The bellows-mender’s wife in W———. She saw them and ran all night through swamps and woods to reach her own place. She had taken the journey in hope of news of her husband and son. Aie! but she came running back when she had a glimpse by moonlight of the 83d. She is half crazed, and the other womenfolk told me. She wrings her hands and tears her coif. W——— buzzes with the tale.”

“Half crazed, indeed! Who needs demons when men can be so like them?” This from the harsh-voiced woman outcast.

The rising murmur of anger was checked by the village priest, and the woman on her three-legged stool finally fell silent.

“I don’t say they are demons,” returned the blacksmith’s son. “All that is foolishness.” He assumed a jauntier air. “But they are not like other men. They do not march like other men. Some are carried in litters.”

“Oh – oh!” There was a common protest. “Regiments do not carry their wounded on the march. And if they are demons, they cannot be wounded. You have drunk the moonlight, brother.”

“I do not know the truth. Some say they are demons, I tell you. That is foolishness. Some say they are cannibals that feast as they go. And some say they are great gray apes from Africa. But all say that it is better to be shot than to meet the 83d after a battle. They are not as other men. Now I have no more to say.”

I have recorded this as accurately as I can, because it was the longest conversation I ever heard on the subject. After that night I met the tale everywhere, but never with such wealth of hypothesis. The rumor of the regiment ran like wildfire about the country. It was a terror too great for telling: “the 83d” – and then talk stopped, save perhaps for a phrase of vague and desperate fear. Speech dried on their starved lips. At first I wondered at it; but came to the conclusion after many a chilled night in a rickety grange that they positively feared lest explicit discussion should, like an incantation, raise the object of their terrors bodily before them. There was trouble enough and to spare, without the 83d. Death by wounds and exposure can scarcely be so bad as this more lingering dissolution to which non-combatants are presently destined. For there is no hope in this war – none. The melting-pot we used to talk of so glibly in times of peace is seething over a planet-wide fire; all races are thrust in, and are steeping in the poisons of Africa and Asia. No man knows what will come of it – but the 83d is trying to tell.

There is good reason why a document that must lie for a long time in an inside pocket should not be too bulky, so I will not describe further the months of my flight. I was trying all the time for a certain point on the frontier of the little nation which at present is offering me such scant protection as “neutrality” affords; but I had to take a zigzag course, often actually doubling back on my tracks. Almost everyone knows something about this war at first hand, so I will not describe the prolonged despair of existence in a stricken country. I never really got hardened to it, because there has never been a single relieved moment when one could look forward with hope. You face every horror; and there are vaster horrors behind, like a rear-guard stretching from pole to pole. The devil has been in their counsels; and he has proved himself, once again, a medievalist. Bloodshed is healthy compared with his subtleties. Ah, why talk of the devil, when we may all, before we die, have fetich officially thrust upon us? To what future am I addressing myself? And what difference can a detail like this I have knowledge of make to a posterity that comes out of such a melting-pot? Still, I was born in the nineteenth century, and some archaic notions stick – the respect for curious documents, for example – the respect for data and for historians!

I had come to the village of Z——— on the last lap of my flight. My money was running low – going faster, in point of fact, near the frontier, since there was some hope of getting across and making purchases. I always gave money, as I said, when I thought it could help. I was determined to save some, and not be absolutely penniless when I myself reached a neutral state. So for some weeks previous to actual escape, I went at a cripple’s pace. I took no doubtful short cuts and put up at no inns; I no longer sought out the biggest farm in the village, or asked for meat or beer. I crawled very close to the earth; I lived like a slug. When I reached Z———, I walked round the little settlement – skirted it in search of the feeblest building that could call itself a shelter. I begged some porridge, towards twilight, from a farm-wench, and some rods beyond I found a building just to my purpose – a tumble-down grange, all chinks and falling rubble, which was evidently wholly disused. It was essential that I should be alone, that my presence should be unsuspected. The tide of actual conflict was rolling towards the confines of the little state, and suspicion rode on the spray of the bloody waves. Only in the dusk should I have dared to beg my porridge, trusting to the mere whisper of familiar words; for though I was browned and dirty and limping, my features were not of the country and would have belied my accent. All day I had heard cannonading, as I crept from covert to covert and rock to rock. Perhaps, I thought, as I huddled under the densest bit of thatch I could find, I should not reach neutrality, after all – should roll over in an ignominious heap on the bristling verge of safety.

I cannot say how long I slept – for sleep I did: a dogged sleep of the body which the mind was powerless to prevent. When I woke, the moon-rays were falling crazily through the jagged holes in the roof, making little idiotic pools of light on the floor. The atmosphere was thick with sound. At first I could distinguish nothing, though I knew physically, from head to foot, that the noise was sinister. Then something woke me out of my doze – a shadowy stirring in the opposite corner of my den. That was near, was concrete, was imminent; and I got my pistol into position. It was not a soldier, I felt sure; one soldier would scarcely be hiding in such a place. I whispered a sharp query in the native tongue; and very slowly the dark huddle shaped itself into a woman’s form. Well – I was not yet afraid of a woman; and I put the pistol into my pocket, though I kept my hand on it.

As she came out into one of the rays of light, I saw that she was a mere peasant-girl, barefoot, in ragged clothes, her terrified mind as ragged as her garb. We looked each other over in silence; and presently, to judge from the evidence of her features, her wits began to reassemble themselves. I ventured to question her. How could we two miserable creatures be foes?

“What is it?” There was no need of being more definite than that. The thick, disturbed volume of sound outside called for explanation; if you could have heard it from Mars, you would have known it stood for danger. Yet it was a mere faint thrumming on the strings of peril – no explosions, no sharp reports, no shouting. The elements of noise were soft and stealthy – gentle thuddings on the worn earth, faint creakings, hoarse whispers; as it were, a death-rattle filling the whole atmosphere. I cannot describe it, but it made shrapnel seem healthy – something to which a man would bare his breast gladly. This sounded rather like the nether slime of danger. The very fear it caused was unhealthy – a crooked trail of paralysis through the nerve-paths. My hand was steady, but my legs shook beneath me; my blood was warm, but things mopped and mowed in my brain. As yet, I had not stirred to look; but, as if my ears had not told me enough, my nostrils began to detect a faint, sickening smell. It was as if the dead had risen out of their trenches, with a little clatter of corrupted bones and weak motions of decomposing flesh. A terror that you could hear and smell, but as yet nameless and invisible.

“What is it?” I repeated my raucous whisper.

“The Eighty-Third!” The girl gasped it out, then keeled over on the floor.

A sane little current of curiosity began to wind through my veins. If this was the 83d, I would behold it. I stepped over the girl’s body, touching her slightly in the movement. She had fainted, apparently, and it was safer so. I went to the slit of a window. Luckily the overhanging thatch kept my face in the shadow; I was safe from the 83d until they began to search. I looked in silence, guarding my very breath. It was not a time to bear witness to one’s own existence.

I do not know how long I crouched there, watching. For crouch I did; mere leaning against the wall would not have sufficed. I needed support from every direction; my hands as well as my feet demanded the close proximity of something solid. I could not count on any inward strength to hold myself upright, could not count on muscles to do their duty at any distance from a firm basis.

Can I ever describe, for cold information to those who may read this document, what I became aware of during the next quarter of an hour? I say “became aware of” advisedly; for though now, in the half-obscurity, I saw, the facts seemed at first to beat even more heavily on other senses than that of vision. Sight, at all events, did not utterly replace sound and smell, even though I was all a-stare in my shadowed recess. And it cannot have been for more than a quarter of an hour that I looked. As soon as I understood, I dropped back into my ruinous shelter and let the 83d go on without my witness. Yes, it must have taken me just about that time to get through my head the quis and qualis of the 83d.

And, after all, all I have to do is to set down those unassailable facts. I have only to announce, in one careful sentence, the particular business of the 83d. Yet the necessary few firm words seem to rot and drop away under my pen. Moreover, since mine is evidence that must tip the scales against a monumental incredibility, perhaps I had best be chronological – so far as I can. I will be brief – I must be.

Shreds of the talk already recorded came back to me in the first moments. “They pass in the night – in the night; they speak no tongue that mortal has ever heard; they do not march like other men; some are carried in litters; some say they are great gray apes from Africa….” I remembered, and I bore witness. They did not march like other men; the litters were there…. The few males of the depopulated village must have been shot or otherwise disposed of when the regiment first entered. From beginning to end I saw, of the village inhabitants, only women; yet from beginning to end I did not hear one scream. The horror that denied to me the comforting heat of anger and left me shivering must have stifled their voices in their throats. Sheer loss of sense and wits, I hope, came to the victims; but if madness blessed them, it was a dumb madness. At least, near though I was in my low-pitched upper chamber, I heard no voice rise above the hoarse mutter of the soldiers. Soldiers! Well, any human creature that goes out to destroy an enemy may be called a soldier. And, worst of all, there were men there who looked like other men – a few Europeans in uniform to command that monstrous company.

Though the purpose of the invaders soon became tragically clear to me – women only were the picked and chosen prey, and even with shut eyes I should have known – I still marveled a little. This was no orgy of inflamed soldiery. The 83d shuffled and shambled about its business, under orders from its few commanders. They burned no cottages; I saw no attempt to loot even food or drink. The very stillness of the scene made it more devilish; here was no spontaneous glutting of appetite – bestial, but natural like all bestial things. In some human brain all this had been coldly conceived, and by human beings it was being coldly carried out. I saw a misshapen man drag a girl across the road; they disappeared among the tall rows of the standing wheat. Even then I had not the key of the enigma. Only when I saw a man in uniform light a match and look at his watch, then make a signal, did understanding begin to come. At his gesture the litters were flung down, and things rose out of them. I thought I was going mad; that I was not really seeing what I thought I saw – the ghosts of misbegotten creatures in a macabre group, proceeding with motions unspeakably grotesque and vile to a sinister Sabbath. I could not believe it; the one illuminating word did not come to focus my bewilderment. I saw women disappearing by handfuls in the midst of loathsome groups – parodies of the human body that had been garbed in a nightmare. And still the word did not come.

Then from a little close beneath my shadowed window a figure – legless, armless – became evident to me. The moon by a special act of grace showed me the face clear – white as ice, with a fixed, mutilated grin; apishly conceived, and wrought in some stuff not like flesh. Yet in that all but decomposing medium something stood for envy…. The word had come. I knew; and I fell back, crouched on guard over the fainting woman beside me. That I could, at need, kill her where she lay, was the one hint of God in the universe.

Half stupefied, I stayed there beside her for I do not know how long. I nursed my pistol with loving slyness, and watched her face, on which one ray of moonlight fell through the gaping thatch. This heavy-featured farm-wench seemed to me the purest thing in the world. Why? Because, I suppose, I had a cartridge there for her; because it was absolutely in my power to preserve her as she was. She might have been maid, wife, or widow; she was absolutely saved from the 83d. They might Suspect the ruin in which we were lying hid, might search it, but I could reach her first. I was so close to her that I touched her; my hand would have to move only a few inches to reach a vital spot. Whatever happened, it would have time to make that journey. She seemed to me sacred, as I bent over her; she was like a miraculous image of Diana saved from the sack of a town. If she had been steeped in all uncleanness before she took shelter in that disrupted pile of thatch and rubble, she would still now, by contrast to what she might have been, appear the purest of the pure. For one forgot latitude and longitude; this village seemed the world – no less; and she of all living women was spared the horror of that night. Would not her coarse comeliness become a legend, and she the saint of a new cult?

I set down these wanderings of my thought to show that it was in the power of the 83d to divorce a man from reason. I knew, of course, that at any moment they might think it worth while to enter, to climb up the worm-eaten ladder and make a few bayonet-passes in the dark. But I had no sense of danger; death was no peril to face, and from the things that really looked like peril I had the means to deliver us both. They could not take from me the freedom of my right hand – they would not have time. I was glad of that swoon, prolonging itself beside me. If she had come out of it to babble, I should have had to shoot at once. I felt a childish eagerness in having her preserved. I was all given over to my myth. If I had been a woman, I should have gone mad there in the checkered obscurity; mere consciousness of my sex saved me to this temporary light-headedness. And the possession of a pistol in working order seemed a miracle; I recognized in it the interposing finger of Jehovah. I remember once wondering dizzily why I was chosen, as minor prophets must have wondered why they were rapt from their herds and tribes-fellows.

Gradually, as the moon set and the night wore on, the 83d girded up its smitten loins for departure. It was true, they passed “in the night – in the night”; and no man knew what or whence they were. No man save me; and still, after these harrowed weeks, I bear about me the sense of a peculiar destiny, in that I have it in my power to give this testimony. My giddiness began and passed with that hour, and though I left my shelter before dawn and made my way westward, what I saw and heard, even as I fled from it – writhing shapes of women and guttural moans and stricken whispers from cottage windows – confirmed what my steady gaze from under the deep eaves had earlier told me. Hatred, with other normal powers, came back to me then; I developed at least a feeble, white man’s hatred of my own with which to meet inadequately the hatred that had taken shape and action before my eyes that night.

For in the idea that created the 83d there was nothing so decent, because nothing so spontaneous, as lust of blood or lust of the flesh. Probably the plan was never committed to writing or to formal speech; but the black hint must have sped southward, eastward, through a hundred minds, before the 83d could be recruited – creatures that were polluted to the marrow in rare and horrible ways; gathered from sun-infested lands and brought overseas to furnish the last argument of hate. This was the plan: that those who did not go the clean, cruel way of death should be defiled past hope. The fountain of life should be fouled. No surviving enemy should rear fighting men and clean women. The 83d would take away all hope – even the winded, rickety hopes that look timidly forward to a future some ages off. The conquerors would not even mate with their victims. The rebellious seed should die utterly, and it should not have even a mongrel’s claim to a pedigree. Atavism should not have a chance with sports and mutations…. The victors would then people the world from the yellow? the black, and the brown; from traditionless creatures of whom they could be sure because they were stuff of their own souls. Did those who slew so gallantly in our youth, with shibboleths upon their lips, think of this – a war without shibboleths, where no man calls even blasphemously upon the name of God, though here and there a turban may be knotted in orthodox folds, or a juju be tucked away in a loincloth? No man fights now for “democracy” or any other windy word; white or black, he fights only for his personal right to live. Peace and poverty, twin-born of our last war, have brought us to this one almost unarmed; and what can the little ammunition we have garnered do against the spawn of a whole hemisphere? Moreover, the flower of the Western world went then, and there has scarce been time for a second blooming. It seems hard to believe that there were ever mild creatures like Crusaders or Jacobites on our planet. For the end is not yet; and though a few countries are allowed still to play at neutrality like children, their toy will be taken from them whenever the strong men think it time. The East has grimaced in front of the Western mirror until it has learned the little it wants of us. But now it is all too clear that with whichever of the polyglot alliances the white man fights, his preservation is not really desired. Small chance of this ever getting to the light! So why waste words?

I left the girl on the floor of the grange that had sheltered us both. She had recovered from unconsciousness only to pant thickly and, when I bade her be quiet, to fall asleep. Comparative stillness shrouded the village during those few moments when she breathed so hard and muttered her questions. She could well believe that I told her – as I did – the truth in saying that the 83d had gone. Some deep, bewildered exhaustion claimed her, for she asked no questions about what had happened while she lay there. I left her, as I say. It was the only thing I could do. She was safe from the pestilence that had walked in the darkness. Her life had at least been touched by a miracle; she would have to face the horror of waking as best she could. My exalted mood had passed with the passing of the stench and sound – all that faint and filthy clamor – and I no longer idealized her. I was simply very pityingly glad that to one human being something had been spared. I preserved, in my flight, no illusions about her. I was bent doggedly on my own salvation, for the situation was such that I could not hope to save others. Perhaps I was deceived as to the value of my own life; but I struggled for it because it seemed to me that my knowledge gave me some worth. Otherwise, I grant you, it would have been more decent not to save a single cartridge.

The story of my progress to the place where I now am does not much matter. The 83d – or that detachment of it which I had seen – was very near the border; and I had not far to go. Yet it was a hard and haunted path that I took, for I knew this enemy would take cover in the daytime, and the deep reaches of woods which I had hitherto counted most friendly were likely to hold a poisonous encampment. I steered in the open by the distant sound of cannonading, veering hither and yon like an irresponsible breeze. In two days I was clear of any possible route of theirs. They are not fighters, the 83d; they are not (what is the old phrase we used to utter with perfect seriousness?) medically fit. That is it: they are not medically fit. Led by a few competents, they skulk in the safe desolation created for them by the fighting men. Even if one were given to irony, one could scarcely recommend the Red Cross to follow in the wake of the 83d. Besides, the Red Cross is said to have died an early death in this war. The bulk of the combatants do not understand conventions, and the notion of immunity has never got inside their skulls.

Here, this afternoon, as I write, I am glad of only one thing: that I can still feel a good, old-fashioned anger with a spice of chivalry in it. We have all been unutterably foolish, I think – though I speak only as a survivor – in the generations immediately past. We praised peace; then we leaped to the sword. War depleted and enfeebled us, then turned us callous to its own horrors. We had not the strength either to be ruthless or effectually to loathe ruthlessness. With our love of little states and our distrust of big ones, we drew, ourselves, the few remaining teeth we had. The half of the world that had not mulcted itself of its youth saw its chance. They have no need of justifying formulas; the loose and convenient solidarity of hate serves their turn. For the white men who are fighting, on this side and on that, mark my words, are negligible. They are to be used and flung aside. The strong and secret bond is among all those who are not white. I think perhaps in the beginning the missionaries were to blame – or rather the nations back of them who would not live up to the professions of their emissaries. In giving the lower races license, by our example, to fight, we did not inevitably impose upon them our rules of warfare. As might have been expected, they took the fact and let the method go. And the cure for war is not more war. Animals all! and tooth and claw will have their way at the last. Britons – and others – never would be slaves, I remember. Well, you cannot tame a zebra, I believe. His individuality resists all hints. But you can kill him. Kill! Kill! … We let ourselves in for it; and, so far as I can see, we are to be thrust back to the spawning chaos of pre-Promethean myth. How far away they sound – those tinkling, sweet philosophies!

I have finished. I should never have permitted myself these musings, for I have never been what in my time was called a thinking man. I lack the learning a publicist needs. But so definitely do I feel myself on the dizzy verge – and alone on that verge – of all that we used glibly to call “life,” that there is a kind of solemnity even in seeing my pen trace the familiar characters on the page. Any cry out of the old time is justified, though the ghosts of our ancestors writhe in disapprobation. Had I had more hope of this document’s surviving, I should have held (if possible) to a colder tone; to the unmalleable idiom of the perfect testimony. As it is, it is – almost – only for Heaven that I write. But I swear before that invisible witness that, so far as lay in my verbal power, I have spoken sheer truth. And it is not fitting that a man who has seen the 83 d should perish in silence. My pessimism may be unjustified, and then my facts will serve a purpose; whereas, if I am right in my saddest conjectures, it will not matter – nothing on this planet will matter, again, for an age or two.

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