Mrs. Alderling stood looking at him, not me, with a smile hovering about
the corners of her mouth, which, when it decided not to alight anywhere,
scarcely left her aspect graver for its flitting. She said at last, in
her slow, deep-throated voice, “I guess I will let you tell him.”
“Oh, I’ll tell him fast enough,” said Alderling, nursing his knee, and
bringing it well up toward his chin, between his clasped hands. “Marion
has always had the notion that I should live again if I believed I
should, and that as I don’t believe I shall, I am not going to. The joke
of it is,” and he began to splutter laughter round the stem of his pipe,
“she’s as much of an agnostic as I am. She doesn’t believe she is going
to live again, either.”
Mrs. Alderling said, “I don’t care for it in my case.” That struck me as
rather touching, but I had no right to enter uninvited into the intimacy
of her meaning, and I said, looking as little at her as I need, “Aren’t
you both rather belated?”
“You mean that protoplasm has gone out?” he chuckled.
“Not exactly,” I answered. “But you know that a great many things are
allowed now that were once forbidden to the True Disbeliever.”
“You mean that we may trust in the promises, as they used to be called,
and still keep the Unfaith?”
“Something like that.”
Alderling took his pipe out, apparently to give his whole face to the
pleasure of teasing his wife.
“That’ll be a great comfort to Marion,” he said, and he threw back his
head and laughed.
She smiled faintly, vaguely, tolerantly, as if she enjoyed his pleasure
in teasing her.
“Where have you been,” I asked, “that you don’t know the changed attitude
in these matters?”
“Well, here for the last three years. We tried it the first winter after
we came, and found it was not so bad, and we simply stayed on. But I
haven’t really looked into the question since I gave the conundrum up
twenty years ago, on what was then the best authority. Marion doesn’t
complain. She knew what I was when she married me. She was another. We
were neither of us very bigoted disbelievers. We should not have burned
anybody at the stake for saying that we had souls.”
Alderling put back his pipe and cackled round it, taking his knee between
his hands again.
“You know,” she explained, more in my direction than to me, “that I had
none to begin with. But Alderling had. His people believed in the future
life.”
“That’s what they said,” Alderling crowed. “And Marion has always thought
that if she had believed that way, she could have kept me up to it; and
so when I died I should have lived again. It is perfectly logical, though
it isn’t capable of a practical demonstration. If Marion had come of a
believing family, she could have brought me back into the fold. Her great
mistake was in being brought up by an uncle who denied that he was living
here, even. The poor girl could not do a thing when it came to the life
hereafter.”
The smile now came hovering back, and alighted at a corner of Mrs.
Alderling’s mouth, making it look, oddly enough, rather rueful. “It
didn’t matter about me. I thought it a pity that Alderling’s talent
should stop here.”
“Did you ever know anything like that?” he cried. “Perfectly willing to
thrust me out into a cold other-world, and leave me to struggle on
without her, when I had got used to her looking after me. Now I’m not so
selfish as that. I shouldn’t want to have Marion living on through all
eternity if I wasn’t with her. It would be too lonely for her.”
He looked up at her, with his dancing eyes, and she put her hand down
over his shoulder into the hand that he lifted to meet it, in a way that
would have made me sick in some people. But in her the action was so
casual, so absent, that it did not affect me disagreeably.
“Do you mean that you haven’t been away since you came here three years
ago?” I asked.
“We ran up to the theatre once in Boston last winter, but it bored us to
the limit.” Alderling poked his knife-blade into the bowl of his pipe as
he spoke, having freed his hand for the purpose, while Mrs. Alderling
leaned back against the slim column again. He said gravely: “It was a
great thing for Marion, though. In view of the railroad accident that
didn’t happen, she convinced herself that her sole ambition was that we
should die together. Then, whether we found ourselves alive or not, we
should be company for each other. She’s got it arranged with the
thunderstorms, so that one bolt will do for us both, and she never lets
me go out on the water alone, for fear I shall watch my chance, and get
drowned without her.”
I did not trouble myself to make out how much of this was mocking, and as
there was no active participation in the joke expected of me, I kept on
the safe side of laughing. “No wonder you’ve been able to do such a lot
of pictures,” I said. “But I should have thought you might have found it
dull--I mean dull together--at odd times.”
“Dull?” he shouted. “It’s stupendously dull! Especially when our country
neighbors come in to ‘‘liven us up.’ We’ve got neighbors here that can
stay longer in half an hour than most people can in a week. We get tired
of each other at times, but after a call from the people in the next
house, we return with rapture to our delusion that we are interesting.”
“And you never,” I ventured, making my jocosity as ironical as possible,
“wear upon each other?”
“Horribly!” said Alderling, and his wife smiled contentedly, behind him.
“We haven’t a whole set of china in the house, from exchanging it across
the table, and I haven’t made a study of Marion--you must have noticed
how many Marions there were that she hasn’t thrown at my head. Especially
the Madonnas. She likes to throw the Madonnas at me.”
I ventured still farther, addressing myself to Mrs. Alderling. “Does he
keep it up all the time--this blague?”
“Pretty much,” she answered passively, with entire acquiescence in the
fact if it were the fact, or the joke if it were the joke.
“But I didn’t see anything of yours, Mrs. Alderling,” I said. She
had had her talent, as a girl, and some people preferred it to her
husband’s,--but there was no effect of it anywhere in the house.
“The housekeeping is enough,” she answered, with her tranquil smile.
There was nothing in her smile that was leading, and I did not push my
inquiry, especially as Alderling did not seem disposed to assist. “Well,”
I said, “I suppose you will forgive to science my feeling that your
situation is most suggestive.”
“Oh, don’t mind _us!_” said Alderling.
“I won’t, thank you,” I answered. “Why, it’s equal to being cast away
together on an uninhabited island.”
“Quite,” he assented.
“There can’t,” I went on, “be a corner of your minds that you haven’t
mutually explored. You must know each other,” I cast about for the word,
and added abruptly, “by heart.”
“I don’t suppose he meant anything pretty?” said Alderling, with a look
up over his shoulder at his wife; and then he said to me, “We do; and
there are some very curious things I could tell you, if Marion would ever
let me get in a word.”
“Do let him, Mrs. Alderling,” I entreated, humoring his joke at her
silence.
She smiled, and softly shrugged, and then sighed.
“I could make your flesh creep,” he went on, “or I could if you were not
a psychologist. I assure you that we are quite weird at times.”
“As how?”
“Oh, just knowing what the other is thinking, at a given moment, and
saying it. There are times when Marion’s thinking is such a nuisance to
me, that I have to yell down to her from my loft to stop it. The racket
it makes breaks me all up. It’s a relief to have her talk, and I try to
make her, when she’s posing, just to escape the din of her thinking. Then
the willing! We experimented with it, after we had first noticed it, but
we don’t any more. It’s too dead easy.”
“What do you mean by the willing?” I asked.
“Oh, just wishing one that the other was there, and there he or she is.”
“Is he trying to work me, Mrs. Alderling?” I appealed to her, and she
answered from her calm:
“It is very unaccountable.”
“Then you really mean it! Why can’t you give me an illustration?”
“Why, you know,” said Alderling more seriously than he had yet spoken, “I
don’t believe those things, if they are real, can ever be got to show
off. That’s the reason why your ‘Quests in the Occult’ are mainly such
rubbish, as far as the evidences are concerned. If Marion and I tried to
give you an illustration, as you call it, the occult would snub us. But,
is there anything so very strange about it? The wonder _is_ that a man
and wife ever fail of knowing each what the other is thinking. They
pervade each other’s minds, if they are really married, and they are so
present with each other that the tacit wish should be the same as a call.
Marion and I are only an intensified instance of what may be done by
living together. There is something, though, that is rather queer, but it
belongs to psychomancy rather than psychology, as I understand it.”
“Ah!” I said. “What is that queer something?”
“Being visibly present when absent. It has not happened often, but it has
happened that I have seen Marion in my loft when she was really somewhere
else and not when I had willed her or wished her to be there.”
“Now, really,” I said, “I must ask you for an instance.”
“You want to heap up facts, Lombroso fashion? Well, this is as good as
most of Lombroso’s facts, or better. I went up one morning, last winter,
to work at a study of a Madonna from Marion, directly after breakfast,
and left her below in the dining-room, putting away the breakfast
things. She has to do that occasionally, between the local helps, who
are all we can get in the winter. She professes to like it, but you
never can tell, from what a woman says; she has to do it, anyway.” It is
hard to convey a notion of the serene, impersonal acquiescence of Mrs.
Alderling in taking this talk of her. “I was banging away at it when I
knew she was behind me looking over my shoulder rather more stormily
than she usually does; usually, she is a dead calm. I glanced up, and
saw the calm succeed the storm. I kept on, and after awhile I was aware
of hearing her step on the stairs.”
Alderling stopped, and smoked definitively, as if that were the end.
“Well,” I said, after waiting a while, “I don’t exactly get the unique
value of the incident.”
“Oh,” he said, as if he had accidentally forgotten the detail, “the steps
were coming up?”
“Yes?”
“She opened the door, which she had omitted to do before, and when she
came in she denied having been there already. She owned that she had been
hurrying through her work, and thinking of mine, so as to make me do
something, or undo something, to it; and then all at once she lost her
impatience, and came up at her leisure. I don’t exactly like to tell what
she wanted.”
He began to laugh provokingly, and she said, tranquilly, “I don’t mind
your telling Mr. Wanhope.”
“Well, then, strictly in the interest of psychomancy, I will confide that
she had found some traces of a model that I used to paint my Madonnas
from, before we were married, in that picture. She had slept on her
suspicion, and then when she could not stand it any longer, she had come
up in the spirit to say that she was not going to be mixed up in a
Madonna with any such minx. The words are mine, but the meaning was
Marion’s. When she found me taking the minx out, she went quietly back to
washing her dishes, and then returned in the body to give me a sitting.”