I SHUT the door and stood at the open window. Blackness. No spot of light, no twinge of movement marred the black of the world. I was tense with an expectancy. The black of the world was torture but I faced it. I knew the next step would bring me full within it: the blackness would speak. The night....
The bell of my telephone. There it was! A piercing channel to my ears, whereby the night would speak.
I took up the receiver. “Yes,” I said.
“Hold the wire.... Long distance.”
Faint buzzing, piercings of sound poured with the night into my ear.
“Hello.” “Yes.” “Doctor John Mark?” “Yes.” “Is this Doctor John Mark?” “Yes.”
“Please hold the wire, sir. Huntington,Long Island ... wishes to speak to Doctor Mark.”
“This is Huntington Hospital.”
“This is Doctor Mark.” I spoke to the night. “What is it?”
“This is Dr. John Mark?” A pause.
“Doctor, there has been an accident. An automobile accident. Your parents——”
“Are they at the hospital?”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Are they——”
“Better come out, sir,” said the night. I rang off.
...What are you doing now?Mrs. Lansdowne’s voice.
...Your will, what is it touching?The horror of Doctor Stein.
A train was pulling out. I caught it. I had no sense other than this full immersion in the night. And in consummation. And all of it still a Threshold.... A taxi rushed meto the hospital. A tall interne with gentle eyes came to me.
“Are you Doctor Mark?”
I nodded.—I am this night! What monstrous irony is this, calling me by a name that brings to gentle eyes commiseration and respect?
“We did what we could.”
“Both of them?” I spoke low, fearing an echo in the empty hall.
He bowed his head and shut his lips against the anatomical details that urged them.
“And Fergus, the chauffeur?”
“He is not in danger. He was thrown free through the windshield. Contusions. Lacerations. A simple fracture in shoulder and arm.Theywere pinned in. Windows shut. It was raining hard. Do you ... do you ... want to see them?”
I shook my head. I saw them clear enough.
“First,” I said, “let me see Fergus.”
The boy lay in his high bed, bandaged: his bruised face gleaming with a spiritual torturethat was almost like thirst in its need of being quenched.
He did not wait for the door to shut. He shouted:
“It was no accident! It was foul play, I tell you! Murder!”
I pressed him back on his pillow. He struggled. So I let him half rise, knowing his need for spiritual quenchment more dangerous than his wounds.
“It must have been done at the garage. The six nuts of the left front wheel. Kill me this instant, if it ain’t the truth. While I was havin’ supper. Foul play it was. They left the bolts in. Devilish. As soon as I speeded up, on the curve, after the tracks.... It was someone hellish. Kill me if it wasn’t. Oh—kill me at any rate.” He plunged his face in the pillows. He moaned. Then his pain sobered him.
I wanted to soothe him with my hand. I could not touch him.
“Be quiet, Fergus. I am sure you are right. No one is blaming you. Be quiet, I say.”
A fleshly gray-haired man, his smooth, round face a daze of terror, waited at the door. He owned the garage where my parents’ car had stayed while they dined with friends, while Fergus supped, while the rain fell. The man was named Dukes. He drove me silent to the place of the deaths.
The open road was washed fresh with the rain. Clouds still hung black, and the air blasted like wet words, clean and ominous, against the drought of my face. We crossed railroad tracks, and stopped.
“That last bump done it, sir,” said Mr. Dukes. “Shook the bolts out. The nuts was gone already.”
The car was ditched rubbish against a telegraph post, a shut and mangled wreck. Fifty yards beyond, also in the ditch, we found intact the tire and rim of the left wheel, where they had rolled together.
We returned to the garage. Death wasthere in the open mouths of the men, in their blanched eyes, in the heavy hanging shadows.
“I’m an honest man, sir,” said Mr. Dukes to me. “If this here was murder and has to do with any o’ mine, I’ll see this here place which is all I has in the world a heap of ashes before I’ll spare myself.”
“What motive,” said I, “could any of your men have had in such a thing?”
“None,” growled Dukes. The men’s murmur wreathed about me, an assent that was ready to rage into flame at the kindle of any doubt of mine.
“Any boys about? Mischief-makers? Rowdies?”
“None.”
“Any strangers?”
A man came forward: a lean, cave-jawed fellow with the eyes of a starved poet.
“There was that stranger that come askin’ fer work.”
He spoke not to me, but to Dukes. The men wreathed closer to him. They felt that hiswords were a healing truth. They were one, sustaining him in what he was ready to say.
“’Bout 8.30 it was or 9.00. While that car was here.”
The man was eloquent: quietly sure of himself, as if the assent of his fellows transfigured his words.
“He come to the floor and he says: ‘Lookin’ fer a mechanic?’ The car was the last in, and was goin’ out first. It was right there, next that oil-tank. I says: ‘No chance’. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘won’t you go and ask the boss? Won’t cost you nothin’.’ I looks at him. ‘No chance,’ I says, an’ then, sudden, surprisin’ myself, I gives in: I says: ‘But if you wants, why—I’ll go.’ So I leaves him.”
“Alone?”
His eyes burst at me. Then he remembered who I was. Pity controlled his eyes.
“I couldn’t tell, mister. Jesus!—how could I tell? The man looked all right. What we got to fear, usual, ’cept somethin’ lyin’ loose gets swiped? I wasn’t gone a minute.”
I felt sorry for him. I nodded.
“I come back. An’ he was standin’ there. His hat in his hand. A funny guy, he seemed then: like no mechanic. Sort o’ seemed I hadn’t seen him before. I tells him: ‘Nothin’ doin’.’ I wasn’t gone a minute. He nods. Puts on his hat. Lights out.”
“What did he look like?”
The man writhed in the effort of search and of articulation.
“He was funny lookin’. Didn’t look like no mechanic. I dunno. The light ain’t much, you see, on the floor. He was dressed dark-like ... and ... I dunno ... seems sort o’ like his head, it was white.”
I AM in my room. My watch says 1.30.
The smoke of Doctor Stein’s pipe lingers like the fume of a spent flame that was the life of sun and stars and earth. All of my room is the echo of a song. It is outside me, but my senses wistfully can touch it. I touch my body, taking off my clothes. My body has the flavor to my senses, not of the real but of the reminiscent.
I lie in bed. The white sheets fold about me like a dream. I switch off the lamp: blackness moves dense upon me and within me: and the light that is gone dwells in my memory like a light of fancy.
I shut my eyes. This twisted horror, life ... Philip murdered and my parents murdered, Mildred grimacing their death with her fairness, they with their horror swarming upon Mildred.... I cannot meet it with my mind.I am sunk in this twisted terror. Naught is outside me for my mind to meet, save the voice that came from the worn throat of Mrs. Landsdowne:
“What are you doing?... But you must go on.... When to-morrow takes its place beyond to-day, you will know. And I will help you know.”
A flowing water, the promise of her words. I plunge in it. I lie in it, I sleep....