IX
IX
Lindsay sat in the big living-room beside the refectory table. Mrs. Spash moved about the room dusting; setting its scanty furnishings to rights. On the long table before him was set out a series of tiny villages, some Chinese, some Japanese: little pink or green-edged houses in white porcelain; little thatched-roofed houses in brown adobe; pagodas; bridges; pavilions. Dozens of tiny figures, some on mules, others on foot, and many loaded with burdens walked the streets. A bit of looking-glass, here and there, made ponds. Ducks floated on them, and boats; queer Oriental-looking skiffs, manned by tiny, half-clad sailors; Chinese junks. In neighboring pastures, domestic animals grazed. Roosters, hens, chickens grouped in back areas.
“That’s just what Miss Murray used to do,” Mrs. Spash observed. “She’d play with them toys for hours at a time. And of course Cherry lovedthem more than anything in the house. That’s the reason I stole them and buried them.”
“How did you manage that exactly?” Lindsay asked.
“Oh, that was easy enough,” Mrs. Spash confessed cheerfully. “Between Miss Murray’s death and the auction, I was here a lot, fixing up. They all trusted me, of course. Those toys was all set out in little villages by the Dew Pond. Nobody knew that they were there. So I just did them up in tissue paper and put them in that big tin box and hid them in the bushes. One night late I came back and buried them. Folks didn’t think of them for a long time after the auction. You see, nobody had touched them during Miss Murray’s illness. And when they did remember them, they thought they had disappeared during the sale.” Mrs. Spash paused a moment. Her face assumed an expression of extreme disapproval. “Other things disappeared during the sale,” she accused, lowering her voice.
“Who took them?” Lindsay asked.
All the caution of the Yankee appeared in Mrs. Spash’s voice. “I don’t know as I’d like to say,because it isn’t a thing anybody can prove. I have my suspicions though.”
Lindsay did not continue these inquiries.
“Where did Miss Murray get all these toys?”
“Well, a lot of ’em came from China. Miss Murray had a great-uncle who was a sea-captain. He used to go on them long whaling voyages. He brought them to her different times. Miss Murray had played with them when she was a child, and so she liked to have little Cherry play with them. Sometimes they’d all go out to the Dew Pond—Miss Murray, Mr. Monroe, Mr. Gale, Mr. Lewis, and spend a whole afternoon laying them out in little towns—jess about as you’ve got ’em there. There was two little places on the shore that Miss Murray had all cut down, so’s the bushes wouldn’t be too tall. They useter call the pond the Pacific Ocean. One of them cleared places was the China coast and the other the Japanese coast. They’d stay there for hours, floating little boats back and forth from China to Japan. And how they’d laugh! I useter listen to their voices coming through the window. But then, the house was always full of laughter. Itbegan at seven o’clock in the morning, when they got up, and it never stopped until—after midnight sometimes—when they went to bed. Oh, it was such a gay place in those days.”
Lindsay arose and stretched. But the stretching did not seem so much an expression of fatigue or drowsiness as the demand of his spirit for immediate activity of some sort. He sat down again instantly. Under his downcast lids, his eyes were bright. “These walls are soaked with laughter,” he remarked.
“Yes,” Mrs. Spash seemed to understand. “But there was tears too and plenty of them—in the last years.”
“I suppose there were,” Lindsay agreed. He did not speak for a moment; nor did Mrs. Spash. There came a silence so concentrated that the sunlight poured into it tangible gold. Then, outside a thick white cloud caught the sun in its woolly net. The world gloomed again.
“She’s sad still,” Lindsay dropped in absent comment.
“Yes,” Mrs. Spash agreed.
“I wonder what she wants?” Lindsayaddressed this to himself. His voice was so low that perhaps Mrs. Spash did not hear it. At any rate she made no answer.
Another silence came.
Mrs. Spash finished her dusting. But she lingered. Lindsay still sat at the table; but his eyes had left the little villages arranged there. They went through the door and gazed out into the brilliant patch of sunlight on the grass. There spread under his eyes a narrow stretch of lawn, all sun-touched velvet; beyond a big crescent of garden. Low-growing zinnias in futuristic colors, high phlox in pastel colors; higher, Canterbury bells, deep blue; highest of all, hollyhocks, wine red. Beyond stretched further expanses of lawn. One tall, wide wine-glass elm spread a perfect circle of emerald shade. One low, thick copper-beech dropped an irregular splotch of luminous shadow. Beyond all this ran the gray, lichened stone wall. And beyond the stone wall came unredeemed jungle. Mrs. Spash began, all over again, to dust and to arrange the scanty furniture. After a while she spoke.
“Mr. Lindsay—”
Lindsay started abruptly.
“Mr. Lindsay—that time you fainted when you first saw me, setting out there on the door-stone, you remember—?”
Lindsay nodded.
“Well, who was you expecting to see?”
Lindsay, alert now as a wire spring, turned on her, not his eyes alone, nor his head; but his whole body. Mrs. Spash was looking straight at him. Their glances met midway. The old eyes pierced the young eyes with an intent scrutiny. The young eyes stabbed the old eyes with an intense interrogation. Lindsay did not answer her question directly. Instead he laughed.
“I guess I don’t have to answer you,” he declared. “I had seen her often then.... I had seen the others too.... I don’t know whyyoushould have frightened me whentheydidn’t.... I think it was that I wasn’t expecting anything human.... I’ve seen them since.... They never frighten me.”
Mrs. Spash’s reply was simple enough. “I see them all the time.” She added, with a delicate lilt of triumph, “I’ve seen them for years—”
Lindsay continued to look at her—and now his gaze was somber; even a little despairing. “What do they want? What doesshewant?”
Mrs. Spash’s reply came instantly, although there were pauses in her words. “I don’t know. I’ve tried.... I can’t make out.” She accompanied these simple statements with a reinforcing decisive nod of her little head.
“I can’t guess either—I can’t conjecture— There’s something she wants me to do. She can’t tell me. And they’re trying to help her tell me. All except the little girl—”
“Do you see the little girl?” Mrs. Spash demanded. “Well, I declare! That’s very queer, I must say. I never see Cherry.”
“I wish I saw her oftener,” Lindsay laughed ruefully. “Shedoesn’t ask anything of me. She’s just herself. But the others—Gale—Monroe— My God! It’s killing me!” He laughed again, and this time with a real amusement.
Mrs. Spash interrupted his laughter. “Do you see Mr. Monroe?” she asked in a pleased tone.“Well, I declare! Aren’t you the fortunate creature. I never seehim!”
“All the time,” Lindsay answered shortly. “If I could only get it. I feel so stupid, so incredibly gross and lumbering and heavy. I’d do anything—”
He arose and walked over to the picture of Lutetia Murray which still hung above the fireplace. He stared at her hard. “I’d do anything for her, if I could only find out what it was.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Spash admitted dispassionately, “that’s the thing everybody felt about her, they’d do anything for her. Not that she ever asked them to do anything—”
Lindsay began to pace the length of the long room. “What is happening? Has the old ramshackle time-machine finally broken a spring so that, in this last revolution, it hauls, out of the past, these pictures of two decades ago? Or is it that there are superimposed one on the other two revolving worlds—theirs and ours—andtheirsorourshas stopped an instant, so that I can glance intotheirs? I feel as though I were in the dark of a camera obscura gazing into theirbrightness. Or have those two years in the air permanently broken my psychology; so that through that rift I shall always have the power to look into strange worlds? Or am I just piercing another dimension?”
Mrs. Spash had been following him with her faded, calm old eyes. Apparently she guessed these questions were not addressed to her. She kept silence.
“I’ve racked my brain. I lie awake nights and tear the universe to pieces. I outguess guessing and outconjecture conjecture. My thoughts fly to the end of space. My wonder invades the very citadel of fancy. My surmises storm the last outpost of reality. But it beats me. I can’t get it.” Lindsay stopped. Mrs. Spash made no comment. Apparently her twenty years’ training among artists had prepared her for monologues of this sort. She listened; but it was obvious that she did not understand; did not expect to understand.
“Does she want me to stayhereor gothere?” Lindsay demanded of the air. “Ifhere, what does she want me to do? Ifthere—where isthere? Ifthere, what does she want me to dothere? Is her errand concerned with the living or the dead? If the living, who? If the dead, who? Where to find them? How to find them?” He turned his glowing eyes on Mrs. Spash. “I only know two things. She wants me to do something. She wants me to do it soon. Oh, I suppose I know another thing— If I don’t do it soon, it will be too late.”
Mrs. Spash was still following him with her placid, blue, old gaze. “There, there!” she said soothingly. “Now don’t you get too excited, Mr. Lindsay. It’ll all come to you.”
“But how—” Lindsay objected. “And when—”
“I don’t know—but she’ll tell you somehow. She’s cute— She’s awful cute. You mark my words, she’ll find a way.”
“That’s the reason I don’t have you in the house yet, Mrs. Spash,” Lindsay explained.
“Oh, you don’t have to tell me that,” Mrs. Spash announced, triumphant because of her own perspicuity.
“It’s only that I have a feeling that she can do it more easily if we’re alone. That’s why Isend you home at night. She comes oftenest in the evening when I’m alone. They all do. Oh, it’s quite a procession some nights. They come one after another, all trying—” He paused. “Sometimes this room is so full of their torture that I— You know, it all began before I came here. It began in an apartment in New York. It was in Jeffrey Lewis’ old rooms. He tried to tell me first, you see.”
“Did you see Mr. Lewis there?” Mrs. Spash asked this as casually as though she had said, “Has the postman been here this morning?” She added, “I see him here.”
“No, I didn’t see him,” Lindsay explained grimly, “but I felt him. And, believe me, I knew he was there. He was the only one of the lot that frightened me. I wouldn’t have been frightened if I had seen him. It was he, really, who sent me here. I work it out that he couldn’t get it over and he sent me to Lutetia because he thought she could. I wonder—” he stopped short. This explanation came as though something had flashed electrically through his mind. But he did not pursue that wonder.
“Well, don’t you get discouraged,” Mrs. Spash reiterated. “You mark my words, she’ll manage to say what she’s got to say.”
“Well, it’s time I went to work,” Lindsay remarked a little listlessly. “After all, the life of Lutetia Murray must get finished. Oh, by the way, Mrs. Spash,” Lindsay veered as though remembering suddenly something he had forgotten, “do other people see them?”
“No—at least I never heard tell that they did.”
“How did the rumor get about that the place was haunted, then?”
“I spread it,” Mrs. Spash explained. “I didn’t want folks breaking in to see if there was anything to steal. And I didn’t want them poking about the place.”
“How did you spread it?”
“I told children,” Mrs. Spash said simply. “Less than a month, folks were seeing all kinds of ridic’lous ghosts here. Nobody likes to go by alone at night.”
“It’s a curious thing,” Lindsay reverted to his main theme, “that I know her message hasnothing to do with this biography. I don’t know how I know it; but I do. Of course, that would be the first thing a man would think of. It is something more instant, more acute. It beats me altogether. All I can do is wait.”
“Now don’t you think any more about it, Mr. Lindsay,” Mrs. Spash advised. “You go upstairs and set to work. I’m going to get you up the best lunch today you’ve had yet.”
“That’s the dope,” Lindsay agreed. “The only way to take a man’s mind off his troubles is to give him a good dinner. You’ll have to work hard, though, Eunice Spash, to beat your own record.”
Lindsay arose and sauntered into the front hall and up the stairs. He turned into the room at the right which he had reserved for work, now that Mrs. Spash was on the premises. At this moment, it was flooded with sunlight.... A faint odor of the honeysuckle vine at the corner seemed to emanate from the light itself....
Instantly ... he realized ... that the room was not empty.
Lindsay became feverishly active. Eyes down,he mechanically shuffled his papers. He collected yesterday’s written manuscript, brought the edges down on the table in successive clicks, until they made an even, rectangular pile. He laid his pencils out in a row. He changed the point in his penholder. He moved the ink-bottle. But this availed his spirit nothing. “I am incredibly stupid,” he said aloud. His voice was low, but it rang as hollowly as though he were from another world. “If you could only speak to me. Can’t you speak to me?”
He did not raise his eyes. But he waited for a long interval, during which the silence in the room became so heavy and cold that it almost blotted out the sunlight.
“But have patience with me. I want to serve you. Oh, you don’t know how I want to serve you. I give you my word, I’ll get it sometime and I think not too late. I’ll kill myself if I don’t. I’m putting all I am and all I have into trying to understand. Don’t give me up. It’s only because I’m flesh and blood.”
He stopped and raised his eyes.
The room was empty.
That afternoon Lindsay took a walk so long, so devil-driven that he came back streaming perspiration from every pore. Mrs. Spash regarded him with a glance in which disapproval struggled with sympathy. “I don’t know as you’d ought to wear yourself out like that, Mr. Lindsay. Later, perhaps you’ll need all your strength—”
“Very likely you’re right, Mrs. Spash,” Lindsay agreed. “But I’ve been trying to work it out.”
Mrs. Spash left as usual at about seven. By nine, the last remnant of the long twilight, a collaboration of midsummer with daylight-saving, had disappeared. Lindsay lighted his lamp and sat down with Lutetia’s poems. The room was peculiarly cheerful. The beautiful Murray sideboard, recently discovered and recovered, held its accustomed place between the two windows. The old Murray clock, a little ship swinging back and forth above its brass face, ticked in the corner. The old whale-oil lamps had resumed their stand, one at either end of the mantel. Old pieces, old though not Lutetia’s—they were gone irretrievably—bits picked up here and there, made thedeep sea-shell corner cabinet brilliant with the color of old china, glimmery with the shine of old pewter, sparkly with the glitter of old glass. Many chairs—windsors, comb-backs, a Boston rocker—filled the empty spaces with an old-time flavor. In traditional places, high old glasses held flowers. The single anachronism was the big, nickel, green-shaded student lamp.
Lindsay needed rest, but he could not go to bed. He knew perfectly well that he was exhausted, but he knew equally well that he was not drowsy. His state of mind was abnormal. Perhaps the three large cups of jet-black coffee that he had drunk at dinner helped in this matter. But whatever the cause, he was conscious of every atom of this exaggerated spiritual alertness; of the speed with which his thoughts drove; of the almost insupportable mental clarity through which they shot.
“If this keeps up,” he meditated, “it’s no use my going to bed at all tonight. I could not possibly sleep.”
He found Lutetia’s poems agreeable solace at this moment. They contained no anodyne for his restlessness; but at least they did not increase it.Her poetry had not been considered successful, but Lindsay liked it. It was erratic in meter; irregular in rhythm. But at times it astounded him with a delicate precision of expression; at moments it surprised him with an opulence of fancy. He read on and on—
Suddenly that mental indicator—was it a flutter of his spirit or merely a lowering of the spiritual temperature?—apprised him that he was not alone.... But as usual, after he realized that his privacy had been invaded, he continued to read; his gaze caught, as though actually tied, by the print.... After a while he shut the book.... But he still sat with his hand clutching it, one finger marking the place.... He did not lift his eyes when he spoke....
“Tell the others to go,” he demanded.
After a while he arose. He did not move to the other end of the room nor did he glance once in that direction. But on his side, he paced up and down with a stern, long-strided prowl. He spoke aloud.
“Listen to me!” His tone was peremptory. “We’ve got to understand each other tonight. I can’t endure it any longer; for I know as well as you that the time is getting short. You can’t speak to me. But I can speak to you. Lutetia, you’ve got to outdo yourself tonight. You must give me a sign. Do you understand? Youmustshow me. Now summon all that you have of strength, whatever it is, to give me that sign—do you understand,all you have. Listen! Whatever it is that you want me to do, it isn’t here. I know that now. I know it because I’ve been here two months— Whatever it is, it must be put through somewhere else. An idea came to me this morning. I spent all the afternoon thinking it out. Maybe I’ve got a clue. It all started in New York.Hetried to get it to me there. Listen! Tell me! Quick! Quick! Quick! Do you want me to go to New York?”
The answer was instantaneous. As though some giant hand had seized the house in its grip, it shook. Shook for an infinitesimal fraction of an instant. Almost, it seemed to Lindsay, walls quivered; panes rattled; shutters banged, doorsslammed. And yet in the next infinitesimal fraction of that instant he knew that he had heard no tangible sound. Something more exquisite than sound had filled that unmeasurable interval with shattering, deafening confusion.
Lindsay turned with a sharp wheel; glared into the dark of the other side of the room.
Lindsay dashed upstairs to his desk. There he found a time-table. The ten-fifteen from Quinanog would give him ample time to catch the midnight to New York. He might not be able to get a sleeping berth; but the thing he needed least, at that moment, was sleep. In fact, he would rather sit up all night. He flung a few things into his suitcase; dashed off a note to Mrs. Spash. In an incredibly short time, he was striding over the two miles of road which led to the station.
There happened to be an unreserved upper berth. It was a superfluous luxury as far as Lindsay was concerned. He lay in it during what remained of the night, his eyes shut but his spiritmore wakeful than he had ever known it. “Every revolution of these wheels,” he said once to himself, “brings me nearer to it, whatever it is.” He arose early; was the first to invade the washroom; the first to step off the train; the first to leap into a taxicab. He gave the address of Spink’s apartments to the driver. “Get there faster than you can!” he ordered briefly. The man looked at him—and then proceeded to break the speed law.
Washington Square was hardly awake when they churned up to the sidewalk. Lindsay let himself in the door; bounded lightly up the two flights of stairs; unlocked the door of Spink’s apartment. Everything was silent there. The dust of two months of vacancy lay on the furnishings. Lindsay stood in the center of the room, contemplating the door which led backward into the rest of the apartment.
“Well, old top,you’renot going to trouble me any longer. I get that with my first breath. I’ve done whatshewanted and whatyouwanted so far. Now what in the name of heaven is the next move?”
He stood in the center of the room waiting, listening.
And then into his hearing, stretched to its final capacity, came sound. Justsoundat first; then a dull murmur. Lindsay’s hair rose with a prickling progress from his scalp. But that murmur was human. It continued.
Lindsay went to the door, opened it, and stepped out into the hall. The murmur grew louder. It was a woman’s voice; a girl’s voice; unmistakably the voice of youth. It came from the little room next to Spink’s apartment.
Again Lindsay listened. The monotone broke; grew jagged; grew shrill; became monotonous again. Suddenly the truth dawned on him. It was the voice of madness or of delirium.
He advanced to the door and knocked. Nobody answered. The monotone continued. He knocked again. Nobody answered. The monotone continued. He tried the knob. The door was locked. With his hand still on the knob, he put his shoulder to the door; gave it a slow resistless pressure. It burst open.
It was a small room and furnished with theconventional furnishings of a bedroom. Lindsay saw but two things in it. One was a girl, sitting up in the bed in the corner; a beautiful slim creature with streaming loose red hair; her cheeks vivid with fever spots; her eyes brilliant with fever-light. It was she who emitted the monotone.
The other thing was a miniature, standing against the glass on the bureau. A miniature of a beautiful woman in the full lusciousness of a golden blonde maturity.
The woman of the miniature was Lutetia Murray.
The girl—