Of course you know your own business, my dear Acton, but if you think of
using the story of the Alderlings--and there is no reason why you should
not, for they are both dead, without kith or kin surviving, so far as I
know, unless he has some relatives in Germany, who would never penetrate
the disguise you could give the case--it seems to me that here is your
true climax. But I necessarily leave the matter to you, for I shall not
touch it at any point where we could come into competition. In fact, I
doubt if I ever touch it at all, for though all psychology is in a manner
dealing with the occult, still I think I have done my duty by that side
of it, as the occult is usually understood; and I am shy of its grosser
instances, as things that are apt to bring one’s scientific poise into
question. However, you shall be the judge of what is best for you to do,
when you have the whole story, and I will give it you without more ado,
merely premising that I have a sort of shame for the aptness of the
catastrophe. I shall respect you more if I hear that you agree with me as
to the true climax of the tragedy, and have the heroism to reject the
final event.
I stayed with Alderling nearly a week, and I will own that I bored
myself. In fact, I am not sure but we bored each other. At any rate, when
I told him, the night before I intended going, that I meant to leave him
in the morning, he seemed resigned, or indifferent, or perhaps merely
inattentive. From time to time we had recurred to the matter of his
experience, or his delusion, but with apparently increasing impatience on
his part, and certainly decreasing interest on mine; so that at last I
think he was willing to have me go. But in the morning he seemed
reluctant, and pleaded with me to stay a few days longer with him. I
alleged engagements, more or less unreal, for I was never on such terms
with Alderling that I felt I need make any special sacrifice to him. He
gave way, suspiciously, rather, and when I came down from my room after
having put the last touches to my packing, I found him on the veranda
looking out to seaward, where a heavy fog-bank hung.
You will sense here the sort of _patness_ which I feel cheapens the
catastrophe; and yet, as I consider it, again, the fact is not without
its curious importance, and its bearing upon what went before. I do not
know but it gives the whole affair a relief which it would not otherwise
have.
He was to have driven me to the station, some miles away, before noon,
and I supposed we should sit down together, and try to have some sort of
talk before I went. But Alderling appeared to have forgotten about my
going, and after a while, took himself off to his studio, and left me
alone to watch the inroads of the fog. It came on over the harbor
rapidly, as on that morning when Mrs. Alderling had been so nearly lost
in it, and presently the masts and shrouds of the shipping at anchor were
sticking up out of it as if they were sunk into a body as dense as the
sea under them.
I amused myself watching it blot out one detail of the prospect after
another, while the fog-horn lowed through it, and the bell-buoy, far out
beyond the light-house ledge, tolled mournfully. The milk-white mass
moved landward, and soon the air was blind with the mist which hid the
grass twenty yards away. There was an awfulness in the silence, which
nothing broke but the lowing of the horn, and the tolling of the bell,
except when now and then the voice of a sailor came through it, like that
of some drowned man sending up his hail from the bottom of the bay.
Suddenly I heard a joyful shout from the attic overhead:
“I am coming! I am coming!”
It was Alderling calling out through his window, and then a cry came from
over the water, which seemed to answer him, but which there is no reason
in the world to believe was not a girlish shout from one of the yachts,
swallowed up in the fog.
His lunging descent of the successive stairways followed, and he burst
through the doorway beside me, and without heeding me, ran bareheaded
down the sloping lawn.
I followed, with what notion of help or hinderance I should not find it
easy to say, but before I reached the water’s edge--in fact I never did
reach it, and had some difficulty making my way back to the house,--I
heard the rapid throb of the oars in the row-locks as he pulled through
the white opacity.
You know the rest, for it was the common property of our
enterprising press at the time, when the incident was fully reported,
with my ineffectual efforts to be satisfactorily interviewed as to
the nothing I knew.
The oarless boat was found floating far out to sea after the fog lifted.
It was useless to look for Alderling’s body, and I do not know that any
search was made for it.