“Then you know what a type she was, I suppose,” he turned to the others,
“and as they’re both dead it’s no contravention of the club etiquette
against talking of women, to speak of her. I can’t very well give the
instance--the sign--that Rulledge is seeking without speaking of her,
unless I use a great deal of circumlocution.” We all urged him to go on,
and he went on. “I had the facts I’m going to give, from Mrs. Ormond. You
know that the Ormonds left New York a couple of years ago?”
He happened to look at Minver as he spoke, and Minver answered: “No; I
must confess that I didn’t even know they had left the planet.”
Wanhope ignored his irrelevant ignorance. “They went to live
provisionally at a place up the Housatonic road, somewhere--perhaps
Canaan; but it doesn’t matter. Ormond had been suffering some time with
an obscure affection of the heart--”
“Oh, come now!” said Rulledge. “You’re not going to spring anything so
pat as heart-disease on us?”
“Acton is all ears,” said Minver, nodding toward me. “He hears the weird
note afar.”
The psychologist smiled. “I’m afraid you’re not interested. I’m not much
interested myself in these unrelated instances.”
“Oh, no!” “Don’t!” “Do go on!” the different entreaties came, and after a
little time taken to recover his lost equanimity, Wanhope went on: “I
don’t know whether you knew that Ormond had rather a peculiar dread of
death.” We none of us could affirm that we did, and again Wanhope
resumed: “I shouldn’t say that he was a coward above other men I believe
he was rather below the average in cowardice. But the thought of death
weighed upon him. You find this much more commonly among the Russians, if
we are to believe their novelists, than among Americans. He might have
been a character out of one of Tourguénief’s books, the idea of death was
so constantly present with him. He once told me that the fear of it was a
part of his earliest consciousness, before the time when he could have
had any intellectual conception of it. It seemed to be something like the
projection of an alien horror into his life--a prenatal influence--”
“Jove!” Rulledge broke in. “I don’t see how the women stand it. To look
forward nearly a whole year to death as the possible end of all they’re
hoping for and suffering for! Talk of men’s courage after that! I wonder
we’re not _all_ marked.’
“I never heard of anything of the kind in Ormond’s history,” said
Wanhope, tolerant of the incursion.
Minver took his cigar out to ask, the more impressively, perhaps, “What
do you fellows make of the terror that a two months’ babe starts in its
sleep with before it can have any notion of what fear is on its own
hook?”
“We don’t make anything of it,” the psychologist answered. “Perhaps the
pathologists do.”
“Oh, it’s easy enough to say wind,” Rulledge indignantly protested.
“Too easy, I agree with you,” Wanhope consented. “We cannot tell what
influences reach us from our environment, or what our environment really
is, or how much or little we mean by the word. The sense of danger seems
to be inborn, and possibly it is a survival of our race life when it was
wholly animal and took care of itself through what we used to call the
instincts. But, as I was saying, it was not danger that Ormond seemed to
be afraid of, if it came short of death. He was almost abnormally
indifferent to pain. I knew of his undergoing an operation that most
people would take ether for, and not wincing, because it was not supposed
to involve a fatal result.
“Perhaps he carried his own anodyne with him,” said Minver, “like the
Chinese.”
“You mean a sort of self-anaesthesia?” Wanhope asked. “That is very
interesting. How far such a principle, if there is one, can be carried in
practice. The hypnotists--”
“I’m afraid I didn’t mean anything so serious or scientific,” said the
painter.
“Then don’t switch Wanhope off on a side track,” Rulledge implored. “You
know how hard it is to keep him on the main line. He’s got a mind that
splays all over the place if you give him the least chance. Now, Wanhope,
come down to business.”
Wanhope laughed amiably. “Why, there’s so very little of the business.
I’m not sure that it wasn’t Mrs. Ormond’s attitude toward the fact that
interested me most. It was nothing short of devout. She was a convert.
She believed he really saw--I suppose,” he turned to me, “there’s no harm
in our recognizing now that they didn’t always get on smoothly together?”
“Did they ever?” I asked.
“Oh, yes--oh, yes,” said the psychologist, kindly. “They were very fond
of each other, and often very peaceful.”
“I never happened to be by,” I said.
“Used to fight like cats and dogs,” said Minver. “And they didn’t seem to
mind people. It was very swell, in a way, their indifference, and it did
help to take away a fellow’s embarrassment.”
“That seemed to come mostly to an end that summer,” said Wanhope, “if you
could believe Mrs. Ormond.”
“You probably couldn’t,” the painter put in.
“At any rate she seemed to worship his memory.”
“Oh, yes; she hadn’t him there to claw.”
“Well, she was quite frank about it with me,” the psychologist pursued.
“She admitted that they had always quarreled a good deal. She seemed to
think it was a token of their perfect unity. It was as if they were each
quarreling with themselves, she said. I’m not sure that there wasn’t
something in the notion. There is no doubt but that they were
tremendously in love with each other, and there is something curious in
the bickerings of married people if they are in love. It’s one way of
having no concealments; it’s perfect confidence of a kind--”
“Or unkind,” Minver suggested.
“What has all that got to do with it!” Rulledge demanded.
“Nothing directly,” Wanhope confessed, “and I’m not sure that it has much
to do indirectly. Still, it has a certain atmospheric relation. It is
very remarkable how thoughts connect themselves with one another. It’s a
sort of wireless telegraphy. They do not touch at all; there is
apparently no manner of tie between them, but they communicate--”
“Oh, Lord!” Rulledge fumed.
Wanhope looked at him with a smiling concern, such as a physician might
feel in the symptoms of a peculiar case. “I wonder,” he said absently,
“how much of our impatience with a fact delayed is a survival of the
childhood of the race, and how far it is the effect of conditions in
which possession is the ideal!”
Rulledge pushed back his chair, and walked away in dudgeon. “I’m a busy
man myself. When you’ve got anything to say you can send for me.”
Minver ran after him, as no doubt he meant some one should. “Oh, come
back! He’s just going to begin;” and when Rulledge, after some pouting,
had been _pushed down into his chair again,_ Wanhope went on, with a
glance of scientific pleasure at him.