THE SECOND NIGHT
So Mattie had committed suicide.
The knowledge changed the day for me, altered the whole circumstance
of our moving in, made a mist of what had before been as clear as
sunlight, forced me from the relationship of a buyer into the moral
position of a murderer. It seemed hardly possible that one could, with
no intent of evil, be the sole cause of such a tragedy! And we had
been frankly glad, had almost laughed, when we had found that she was
dead! Never was I further from hilarity than that second evening in our
new home, when I stood at the great window looking at the bit of sea
through the pine-trees, the note from Mattie crumpled in my hand.
The sun had set behind the sand-dunes and the bay was liquid red with
the reflection. It had lost the quality of water and had become blood.
So must it have looked to Mattie, not once but many times during the
years that she had tended the terrible “Mis’ Hawes,” after she had
grown out of being the barefoot girl whom the boy had chased through
the drying-frames. There was no cod spread out to the salt winds now.
The whole industry had vanished as completely as the owners of it, and,
to take the place of these persons indigenous to the sea, was only
myself, a stranger sleeping in their beds, one who could only guess out
their histories and who knew nothing of their thwarted ambitions and
their dreams.
Tell me your dreams!... But your dream is you.
We are our dreams--and the dream is all!
What had Mattie’s reveries been during all those twilights when
she must have stood at this same window with the New Captain and,
after him, alone? However dreary, they could not have included the
possibility of being driven forth. It had been left for me, in my
presumptuous selfishness, to add that cataclysm. Now I was the one to
be alone here. Was it to be the lot of some woman always to be left at
this window at sunset, to face the growing shadows in solitude? Would
it be that way with me, too?
Some Puritanical instinct in me, deeper-rooted than the casual
conscience of the Middle West where I had been born, tracing back to
forefathers whose stern necessities of doctrine were related to this
atmosphere, made me wonder if the justice which ought to be meted out
to me, the murderer of Mattie, would be that, for some reason still
obscure, my husband would never return and fate would force me to
change places with the woman whose house I had usurped and leave me
stranded there.
I checked myself. This was no mood with which to meet the night. That
life had stripped Mattie at last even of her dwelling, leaving her
body as bereft as her soul, was no precedent for me to follow, or I
would end, as she had, in the bottom of the bay. I was grateful to
her that she had not chosen the house for her act of renunciation.
If her revenge upon me had taken the form of hanging herself, so
that I would have unexpectedly come upon her body, swinging from the
kitchen-rafters, in the dark--I put that thought away, too, and tried
to occupy myself.
The sunset, flaming through the windows that faced the west, now made
a red light everywhere that touched into form the tall bookcase where
I had found the message from Mattie, burnished the gold in a Chinese
cabinet brought back by some seafarer, and fell softly upon the ivory
mantel at the end of the room. I made a fire with driftwood which lay
piled in a rough box, had my tea in front of it, and then began again
on the books. There was no likelihood that more notes would tumble
out of them, unless it should be a will, or maybe an old tintype or a
valentine. I shook each volume carefully.
There are people who can straighten up a library or turn a
vacuum-cleaner on a bookcase in a hurry, but to me it is a labor
that time forgets. There is always a clipping to be cut from a
stale newspaper, or a review that has not been read before, or old
acquaintances among long-closed volumes that lure one on, page by page.
It takes me hours to go over a five-foot bookshelf with a dust-rag. And
to-night was no exception. Particularly fascinating were the books of
the New Captain on esoteric philosophy. There was no getting away from
them; here was the “foreign religion” he and Mattie had embraced and
the “books to prove it by.”
There was nothing modern. One great tome was Madame Blavatsky’s “Isis
Unveiled,” Eastern theosophy set forth in defiant terms to a skeptical
audience of 1875. Luckily, I had read it before, or I should have been
reading it yet. I was already informed as to the writings on the Temple
of Karnac that were identical with those on the walls of a ruin in
Yucatan, proving that the religious rites of Asia and America were the
same in the days before the Pyramids, when Atlantis was a continent
in the middle of the ocean and the British Isles were under the sea.
I wished that the New Captain had heard a certain lecture that I had
recently heard delivered by a savant, who claimed that the secret of
how to cut a canal from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean was
well understood by the Magi of the Orient and that it was only due
to international politics that it had never been attempted. Because,
forsooth, it would incidentally cause the Sahara to be partially
inundated and to “bloom like a rose,” but that the redistribution of
the waters of the world would engulf all of England. Poor England! As
if she, like myself, did not have enough trouble with what was _in_
her house, without being swamped by what was under it! However, this
erudite lecturer had just been released from a sanitarium, we learned
afterward, and to it he was shortly returned, the Mecca of most of
those who follow worlds too far.
Blavatsky’s story of the ball of fire which turned itself into a cat
and frisked around the room, before floating up the chimney, was
marked. It could have happened in this very room. There was a white
sheet of paper pinned to the wall opposite me, with a round black
disk on it, that might have been there when she wished to go into a
trance. I felt that if I looked at it long enough I might see means by
which Mattie aided concentration a ball of fire turning into a cat.
I wondered what they would have thought of Hudson’s drummer, who,
although locked up in a cell, played upon his drum which was left
behind in his lodging-house to keep awake the enemies who had thrown
him into jail? Or of Conan Doyle’s poltergeists who threw pebbles at
the man seeking shelter in a bomb-cellar? But they had manifestations
of their own, no doubt, and perhaps I should come across some record
of them, although they had worked out their philosophy before the
days when one could simply seize a pencil and write upon a roll of
wall-paper facts dictated by one’s “control.”
Mattie and the New Captain had had no opportunity to be influenced by
the great mass of post-war spiritualistic literature. The fragments
from which they formed their code were bits of gold for which they
had to wash many cold streams of Calvinistic thought. They must have
gloated over each discovery like misers. I could see them sitting here
in this room on a winter evening, the shutters closed, the lean fire
crackling, the two heads bent beneath the oil-lamp, exclaiming over
some nugget of wisdom which would corroborate their own experiences.
Those were the times when “old Mis’ Hawes” must have called and
bellowed and pounded on the floor without getting Mattie to answer any
summons to the front bedroom on the other side of the house.
Mattie and the New Captain may not have known anything about
photographing fairies, or the S. P. R., or the S. P. C. A., for that
matter, but cats they knew. I had found the saucers of seven of them in
the kitchen and strings on all the chairs, as if Mattie had sometimes
tied them up. There was a book on the shelves about a cat: “The World
of Wonders, or Divers Developments Showing the Thorough Triumph of
Animal Magnetism in New England, Illustrated by the Power of Prevision
in Matilda Fox,” published in Boston in 1838. It was enlivened with
pen-and-ink drawings showing Mrs. Matilda Fox being hypnotized by a
feather, with the cat in her lap, which, according to the text, licked
her neck until it sent her spirit soaring from her body in aërial
journeys to distant lands. As far as I had time to read I could not
ascertain whether the author was in earnest or whether he was trying to
ridicule animal magnetism, but I could not help wondering if the book
had not had some influence on the legacy in favor of a home for cats,
which had defrauded Mattie. If any one could be put in a trance by the
manipulation of the tongue of a cat, perhaps she had not been entirely
altruistic in her harboring of the creatures. Certainly, the one who
had rushed wildly out of the house as we came in was glad to make its
escape. Where were the rest of the cats that belonged to the saucers?
Catching fish on the beach in the moonlight, possibly, and hypnotizing
sand-pipers.
The books that told of cataleptic sleep were all well worn. The New
Captain lived in the days when the subject of a wandering mesmerist
would allow himself to be stretched out in a village drugstore window,
remaining inert between two chairs for days at a time, while the
curious glued their eyes to the glass and tried to stay there long
enough to see him move or catch a confederate sneaking in to feed him.
But this sleep was only the imperfect imitation of the somnambulance
which the East Indians had practised for centuries. Theirs was true
life-in-death, when the heart ceased to beat and the body grew cold,
and yet, to a disciple of the occult, there was a way of reviving
it. The theory of vampires rose from this phenomenon, and that of
catalepsy, for if a tomb were opened and the corpse found without decay
it was easy enough to ascribe the wilting of a child, in the meantime,
to the thirst of the absent spirit for blood to satisfy its coffined
body. More persons would have lived for longer periods if, instead of
making sure of death by driving a stake through the possessed one’s
heart, they had made sure of life by breathing into his mouth and
unwinding the tight shroud. The ancient Orientals understood this.
The holy fakirs permitted themselves to be buried and dug up again,
to the glory of God, only making sure beforehand that their bodies
were not interred in ground infested with white ants. But the New
Captain had the Puritan’s respect for life and death. He dreaded that
he would come to life again in an iron-bound box, or he would not have
despised undertakers or written into the will which we had seen at the
Winkle-Man’s the clause about Mattie spending a week beside his body.
He must have thought it was only due to her that he had been called
back before from the first of the seven planes, and that his celestial
passport was spurious unless she signed it. Poor Mattie! No one had sat
beside her after her tired spirit had freed itself.
I picked up another book.
French, this time. It was called “Les Secrets du Petit Albert,” and
dealt with necromancy of the eighteenth century. There was also a
French book on astrology, illustrated with crude drawings of the
sacred signs of the zodiac and diagrams of potent numbers. Another
one, “Le Dragon Rouge, ou L’Art de Commander les Esprits Célestes,” was
not more than three by four inches, and half an inch thick. Its brittle
yellow pages were bound in worn calfskin, and gave explicit directions
how to conjure up the devil and how to send him back to his own kingdom
when one had done with him. My scant school French could barely master
the archaic forms, but I gave Mattie full credit for being able to read
all the volumes stored on her top shelf. Her ancestry was traditionally
French, according to the judge’s story, for she had been picked up from
a ship just off Quebec, and the grooves of her mind would run easily
to the mother-tongue. A recluse will master a foreign language for the
mental exercise it affords. Perhaps in some other nook of the house I
should find her French grammar, but here, indeed, were books that some
one must have been able to read,--a significant part of their highly
specialized library.
I began reading aloud from “Le Dragon Rouge”:
“Je te conjure, O Esprit! Deparoitre dans la minute par la force du
grand Adonay, par Eloim, par Ariel, par Jehovam, par Agla, Tagla,
Mathon, Oarios, Almouzin, Arios, Menbrot, Varios, Pithona, Magots,
Silphae, Cabost, Salamandre, Tabots, Gnomus Terrae, Coelis, Godens,
Aqua, Gingua, Janua, Etituamus, Zariatnatmik, A. E. A. J. A. T. M. O.
A. A. M. V. P. M. S. C. T. G. T. C. G. A. J. E. Z.”
[“I conjure thee, O Spirit, to appear instantly through the will of the
great Adonay”--etc.]
The little magic book then went on to say that if this were repeated
twice, Lucifer would appear immediately. I thought perhaps it would be
just as well to discontinue reading.
Had they actually attempted materialization up here in this very room
in the old house on the tip end of the cape? There was nothing against
it. If it were possible anywhere to conjure up the shades of the dead,
or the devils themselves, this was as apt a place as any--a hamlet at
the tip of a barren cape that extended into the ocean a hundred and
forty miles, a house separated from that hamlet by its bad repute, as
well as its location, a room cut off from the rest of the house, and
two people in it who had no contact with realities, to whom each was
the other’s world and this world not all. If any one was able to cut
through the opaque cloud of dogma surrounding metaphysical subjects
to a glimpse of realities beyond, I believed that Mattie had done so.
And then, I realized that I had come by a circuitous path of my own to
the very same conclusion that all the townspeople had long since come
to--that Mattie was clairvoyant.
Would that help her now? Did she know where her spirit would dwell
more accurately than those who were orthodox? Could she return the
more easily from Stygian shores? Or was that power of prevision only a
mortal faculty that passed with her passing and that, while it was able
to call up others from the further world, could not bring back itself?
There was a story of an old nurse of mine that I wished I had
forgotten--how she was once governess in a house where a strange
foreign gentleman had intercourse with spirits; how he used to talk to
them as he walked about the rooms--and was happy in their friendship
and sullen when they would not appear.
“That was all right for him,” she used to say; “but after he left, the
spirits that he had called up to amuse him still hung around. That they
did, and I could never get rid of them. Try as I would,--paint, paper,
or insect-powder,--every dark night when I was alone one or the other
of them would brush up against me and stay just where I could never
quite see it until dawn.”
It was a dark night and I was alone. I sincerely hoped that whatever
had been conjured up by Mattie would not brush past me. At any rate, I
had no mind to sleep upstairs again in that little gabled room. I did
not argue with myself about the headboard; it was too late at night for
that. I opened up a folding sofa in the room that I was in, where the
New Captain must have slept many times, and lay down. The sound of the
full tide on the rising, answering the questioning of the Five Pines
trees, made a lullaby.
It was with a shock and the feeling that I had been asleep a long
time that I woke up, hearing some one coming down the stairs. The
little kitchen-stairs, it must be, that pitched down from the upper
room like a ladder, for the main stairs were too far away for me to
have heard any footfall on them. And this was not the clumping step
of a full-sized man. This was the stealthy, soundless tread of a body
without weight. But still it was unmistakable.
I sat up in chilled terror, gathering the bed-clothes around me with
that involuntary gesture known to all women surprised in their sleep,
and waited for whoever it was to come through the kitchen into my room.
But no one entered my room.
At the foot of the stairs some one tried a door, rattled a latch, and
went back up again. For a brave second I thought I would leap out of
bed and run and push the bolt on the kitchen door, but before I managed
to start I heard the footsteps coming down upon me. This time they
would keep on, I thought; but again slowly, laboriously, they went
back up, and every time they lost themselves upstairs it seemed as if
I heard the weight of a person thrown against a door. Or did it go
through the door and then throw its weight against it? I strained to
listen. Then the steps would come down again. The inside door of the
eaves closet upstairs was locked. I had left it the way I had found it,
but the steps seemed not to be within that secret room to-night, but
without, as if last night a presence had been struggling to get through
the closet into my room and now was trying to get back. Tortured,
restless footsteps going up and down the stairs, up and down, up and
down.
Every time they reached the bottom and tried the kitchen door, I
swooned with terror. When they rattled the latch and went back up again
I clutched my knees and did not breathe till they returned.
At cockcrow they ceased of their own volition, and, my will released,
my body fell exhausted.