THE FOURTH NIGHT
Judge Bell and I climbed up the shifting cliff of sand and paused at
the top, out of breath.
While we had been in the cabin holding the séance, a fog had risen. The
sun was hidden behind a gray bank, barely causing a brighter patch of
mother-of-pearl in the western sky, where feathery clouds were heaped
high, one upon the other, like the soft silken cushions of the fairy
princess’s bed. Mist swept around the top of the dunes and filled
the hollows. Lakes of fog spread themselves at our feet, deceptively
solidifying the craters between the hills into opaque pools of silver.
Vapor eddied in slow masses backward and forward, disclosing the dunes
and hiding them again at the will of the sluggish wind. Outlines were
dim; the blue of the ocean had become invisible. Distances were so
distorted that it seemed as if in three strides one might reach the
outside shore, where the surf was roaring.
The rain of yesterday had pounded every track out of the wet dark sand,
leaving it imprinted with a wind-stamped water-mark. The grass-topped
pyramid where Ruth and I had played with the children last summer was
dissolved. There was no formation in all that desolate region which
bore any resemblance to it. The dunes must have challenged the sea to a
wild race during the hurricane, with a gale driving the bitter sand so
swiftly that whole hills were moved. The pounding of the breakers was
reminiscent of the orgy they had indulged in during the storm, crashing
as clearly across the waste as if we were listening where the foam
fell. Our damp clothes clung to us, and our faces became wet and our
lips tasted salt.
I turned to the silent judge, whose rugged figure, buffeted by many
tempests of the soul as well as of the sea, stood staunchly beside me
in the dusk, a strong defense. His introspective vision penetrated
further than the eye could follow.
“Who do you think was speaking to us, back there in the hut?” I asked.
“Why, Mattie,” he answered in a surprised tone.
“But I do not understand it.”
Judge Bell smiled slowly, making no reply. He did not expect me to
understand.
* * * * *
We descended from the dripping dunes at the place where the judge had
left his handkerchief tied to a tree-top to mark the path that dipped
into the thicket. The groaning of a fog-horn at the coast-guard station
followed us, and the tidal breeze laid an icy hand upon our backs.
The way home was traversed quickly, for it was downhill most of the
distance. When we drew near the railroad tracks I caught the judge by
his coat.
“Judge,” I said, “I was going to the Sailor’s Rest, because I can’t
stay in the House of the Five Pines any longer, but if you will come up
and spend the night there, too, I will go back. I hadn’t intended to
tell you, but--there are very strange manifestations in that old house,
far more amazing than what we saw this afternoon, and you ought to know
about them. You owe it to yourself not to miss them; it is research
work. I’ll stay there once more if you will. Can you come?”
The judge’s face glowed like a scientist about to resolve the
atmosphere into its component parts.
“I’ll come,” he swore. “I’ll be there; watch out for me!”
“Well, then, now!”
“No,” he insisted, “not right away. I’ve got to go home first--the
cow--but I’ll be back. Depend on me!”
He started off on a dog-trot up the railroad track, making a short-cut
through the back of the town. Reluctantly I turned away toward my own
house and sat down on the step. It did not seem worth while to go in
and unpack any more of Jasper’s things. I might never live there.
While light lasted I lingered outside and looked at the quiet bay
and the fishermen returning from their boats. They wore high red
rubber boots and gray flannel shirts open at the throat. Barefooted
children in denim overalls came running to meet them on the boardwalk,
and tugged at their brown hands and begged for rides upon their
shoulders.... And I had thought that some day children might be
running down our flagging--but now, I did not know.
I could see the old arcade grinning at me, were I forced to go back
to New York, and the sign in the corridors leaped into malicious
letters, “Dogs and children not allowed.” I remembered the sort of man
who returned there at night, stepping languidly out of a yellow cab,
light-wood cane under one arm while he paid the driver, nothing waiting
for him but a fresh bunch of bills under his door. And those other
ne’er-do-well tenants, hatless and unpressed, affecting sandals to save
socks, having nothing in common with their sporty neighbors but the
garbage-pail on the fire-escape. After three days of the promised land,
must I go back to that?
Why didn’t the judge come?
I went inside and lit the lamps, because I dared not let the house
grow dark before entering, then sank down by the window and rocked
nervously, watching the street. But what I saw was not the stalwart
figure of my old friend approaching through the evening haze, but the
grotesque contour of the town crier, preceded by his bell.
_Clang, clang, clankety-clang!_ He swung the big brass tongue as if
all the world were waiting for his message.
In front of the House of the Five Pines he stopped short and with his
back to it, read out to the bay: “Burr ... buzz.... Sheriff’s auction
... Long Nook Road ... Monday....”
He swung his bell again and hobbled up the street. It was late for the
town crier to be abroad and he was in a hurry.
“That will be the next thing,” I thought; “that will happen to me. Some
day the bell-man will be going up and down the boardwalk advertising
another house for sale, and that one will be mine.”
The idea was so discouraging that I tried to think of something not so
lugubrious. Where was the judge? I picked up the magazine that he had
thrust upon me earlier in the day and began to read it.
The cover had a large eye in the center from which shot orange rays,
and underneath were symbols I did not understand. The paper was cheap
but well printed, one of those ventures in sect literature which,
like those dedicated to social propaganda, are always coming and
going on the market and sending out subscription-blanks with every
issue. The advertisements were, for the most part, how to get fat
and how to get thin, where to send words for songs and how to sell
motion-picture scenarios. The editorial matter was equally erratic.
One erudite article held my interest: a savant had written of the
“aura” that surrounds a person. This is the light which exudes from
his body, an excrescence imperceptible to the agnostic outside the
realm of “truth,” but plainly visible to the initiate. The aura was
supposed to radiate various distances, depending on the magnetism of
the subject, and its hue changed with the individual. Red was the
color of youth and exuberance, blue designated the purist, purple
betrayed sex passion, and yellow surrounded the intellectual. Pink
and heliotrope were the auras of the artistic; green was the halo of
genius. In life this color might not be evident, but after death, the
body being expressed in highly magnetized atoms, the color of the aura
was quite clear, being, in fact, the sole attribute of the apparition.
That is, instead of being visited by the subject reincarnated in mortal
form, you beheld his astral color. Understanding his temperament in
life, you recognized him by the aura which represented him. Although
most difficult to discern with the naked eye, this aura could easily be
photographed, and photographs were reproduced on the next page--shadowy
outlines of nude figures. Much space was devoted to the female aura,
posed in interesting silhouette with a wavy water-line around it, like
the coast upon a map. The subjects’ names were given. It was hoped that
later they would be able to reproduce the aura of a specter, to print a
colored photograph of light alone.
I shut the magazine. It had made fascinating reading, but I would have
to procure the observations of more than one savant to be convinced.
I began to see how profound a study the psychic might become, and why
Mattie and the New Captain had spent all their time on it and gathered
together so many books on the occult. It was not so simple as I had
supposed when I knew nothing at all about it. Did the judge believe
this? I wished that he would come.
It was nine o’clock.
If only this gnawing in my fagged brain to discover the cause of my
nocturnal obsessions had taken some other form of elucidation! Why
did I force my addled intellect to prove or disprove this theory
of spiritism, this revived dogma of the Dark Ages, culled from all
religions? I had never subjected Christianity to such severe criticism.
After childhood, one ceases to question the code of morality under
which he has been brought up; it is his then, for better or for worse.
To argue is to lose the nuance of faith. Would a child, I wondered,
brought up in the House of the Five Pines, take ghosts as easily
as I took Jonah? He certainly would not grow up into materialism
by believing that the age of miracles was past. He would take the
supernatural as a matter of course. One could hear the family arguing
at the breakfast-table:
“I heard something last night; it must have been grandmother.”
And another child, with its mouth full of grapefruit: “No,
_great_-grandmother. I saw her.”
And the bobbed-hair one: “It couldn’t have been Grandmother Brown,
because the aura was yellow, and she never had anything in her bean.”
Then they would go roller-skating, leaving the subleties of color
emanations to solve or dissolve themselves.
But I had not been brought up that way. I had plunged into this
atmosphere unprepared. I never felt more ancient than at that moment,
when I realized that I was too old to learn.
What was keeping the judge?
It was ten o’clock.
I got up and looked out of the window. The street was quiet and dark
as the water beyond it. Cold stars shone feebly through the clouds
above the bay, and the revolving planet at the lighthouse on Long Point
blinked every minute. From the highlands another light shone steadily,
and at the entrance to the harbor a bell-buoy swung sadly back and
forth. The waves, rocking the floating tongue, set it ringing louder
as they rose in strength, and let it die away again to the tinkle of a
tea-bell. I was glad the fog-horns were not groaning in the harbor. I
hate fog-horns.
No man ever knows the weariness of a woman who waits for him. No
man has ever experienced to the full the hours when the night
grows longest, when the mind catches at the faintest sound in the
thoroughfare and listens to the ebb of footsteps that after all were
not quite the ones expected. Because, universally, it is the woman who
is in the house and the man who is outside, he has missed for centuries
the finest form of torture devised by the unthinking and the tardy and
the dissipated for those who must sit at the window. There is no use
in saying afterward, “Why did you wait up?” and the tired reply, “I
won’t again.” She will do so again, goaded by forebodings that grow
with the minutes, and she will keep on sitting up for him until the end
of life, when, if there is any justice, the man will go first into the
meandering meadows and on the banks of the last river wait for a cycle
or two.
Every far-away sound attaches profound significance to itself--a piano,
a child crying, a window being raised; and the night seems full of
freight-trains chugging up a grade, although you never hear an engine
all day long. I have heard the whistle of steamboats in inland cities.
But worse is that rattle and bang up the street, that clinking of
bottles and running feet, that continued panting of the engine which
it is not worth while to shut off, by which you know that you have sat
up till the milk is being delivered and that it is _too late_!
Why did the judge not come? It was after eleven o’clock.
I wished that it was Jasper for whom I was waiting, for more reasons
than the obvious one. Jasper would prove that the phenomena which had
harassed the House of the Five Pines were not psychic; Judge Bell would
prove that they were.
* * * * *
A hand on the window-pane! On the outside of the window-pane was a
hand. There was no body to it, but in the lower corner of the window
where I sat a hand was feeling around. It was a small hand. It knocked.
At the sound of flesh on glass my heart rebelled; it ceased functioning
altogether.
The hand knocked again, impatiently. Then a voice was added.
“Let me in! Anybody home?”
Something about the homely words released a spring, and my heart jumped.
“Who is it?”
“Me! Open the door!”
I unlatched the kitchen shutter and peered out. A diminutive youngster,
too short to be visible above the window-sash, was coming around from
the side of the captain’s wing.
“Gee, I pretty near went away again, only I saw the window was lighted.”
“Why didn’t you go to the door?”
“I did! The front door.”
That was why I had not heard him.
“I would have gone,” the boy continued, still full of his own troubles,
“only he give me the quarter before I came.”
“The judge?” I interrupted.
“No, Isabella; he broke his arm.”
“He broke his arm?”
“Cranking his Ford.” The boy made a windmill motion. “He was just
starting out.”
“Coming here?”
“I don’t know. My mother said likely--She leave me come to tell you,
but she said it was just as well.”
“Just as well?”
“Yes, she was helpin’ over there to-night; everybody is. He said to
tell you if you was afraid to stay here alone all night, to come back
down to his house with me; but my mother says she wouldn’t if she was
you, and anyway, there ain’t room.”
For a moment I was too stunned to be angry. Then I thought I might
as well take the matter easily. The child had no idea what he was
repeating.
“Tell the judge it will be all right,” I answered. “And tell your
mother-- Don’t tell your mother anything!”
He had admitted receiving his quarter, and he had frightened me so
badly that I would not offer him more. He backed away and slid through
the hedge, and then he ran.
However, I did not immediately reënter the house. With my cape wrapped
round me I stood outside, wondering what to do.
It was too late to go anywhere. Alf locked up the Sailor’s Rest at the
respectable hour of ten, and every cottage in the village was dark by
half-past. Even before that they would have given me scant welcome, for
I could tell from the remarks repeated by the boy that I had fallen
heir to the suspicion in which they held Mattie. The judge’s home, my
natural refuge, was full of sickness and of gossips, of bandages and
hostility. I was furious with the judge for breaking his arm. Why
didn’t he install a self-starter?
I considered the possibility of finding my way to the Winkle-Man’s or
to Mrs. Dove’s, my old laundress, but as I never had taken them into
my confidence before, it was literally too late to begin. I could not
imagine living in the town longer than to-morrow morning if I was found
in the position of begging lodging from door to door. And I had not
actually made up my mind to abandon the place altogether; the instinct
for home-making was too strong.
The night was damp and foggy, but still I lingered in the yard.
The old house fairly yawned with peace. Such a quiet, innocent,
companionable house! The five pine-trees swept the roof with the rhythm
of the sea in their misty branches.
My chance glance clung to them.
There was a red light in the tops of the trees.
The red light came from the skylight--the skylight of my house--in the
roof of the loft. The red light was shining from the little secret room.
Could it be a fire? No flames crackled up through the rotten
shingles.... Some one--? There had not been a sound to-night.
The red light made a glowing rectangle so bright that the roof was
invisible. It had the effect of being suspended high in space, like a
phantasmagoric banner of the witches. The outlines of four panes of
glass made a black cross upon it.
“The attribute of the apparition.... The aura of youth is red,” said
the savant.
I did not stay to take any photographs. I fled.
Like the boy before me, I backed out of the yard, stumbled through the
hedge, and then ran. Turning to look back, I saw that the skylight
still burned on redly through the branches of the pines.
I spent the night under an old dory on the beach.