IN WHICH CONSTANTINE HAS A VISION
Although he had not the slightest difficulty in recounting the precise
phrases of conversations and the exact details of actions which had
their habitat in New York during the previous hour and a quarter,
Karl did unquestionably feel the need of choosing his words when he
began to tell Hooper how a new and wholly entrancing phase of his
extraordinary powers was opened up by the discovery that mere distance
no longer diminished his sense of hearing. It was so vitally important
to be accurate. First impressions are of prime value in describing a
sensation. If a man only retained his first impression of the taste of
alcohol what a sober world it would be!
When his conscious intelligence quitted the room in which he and
Hooper were sitting, he had no fixed objective in his mind. This fresh
departure was noteworthy, and, indeed, absolutely essential to the
theory propounded by Sir William Macpherson, namely, that Karl was a
living installation of wireless telegraphy. If this rough-and-ready
definition of the phenomenon were reasonably correct, it was essential
that the human “station” should have the power of receiving as well as
transmitting the electrical influences which called into activity its
sixth sense. Hitherto Grier had, so to speak, swept the mental horizon
with a searchlight, hoping or expecting to find the object he sought.
Now, in a state of quiescence, yet tuned to the proper pitch by the
sound of one of those strong, deep words which vibrate back to the
twilight of human origins, he was encountered by another radio-active
force, and became, for a time, a machine-like recorder of impressions.
After the familiar passing through darkness into light--this momentary
eclipse being apparently a mechanical readjustment of the normal
functions of the brain to their novel requirements--he found himself a
spectator of a meeting between two men, a meeting which was seemingly
taking place in a second-floor office overlooking the junction of two
busy thoroughfares.
He could hear nothing. He was in the position of an audience watching
the cinematographic representation of an express train thundering
through a station--there was all the realism of life and motion, but no
sound. In his case, of course, there were the added illusions of color
and sunlight, nor was the vision distracted by perplexing flutterings
of a winding film.
One of the men was Constantine, tall, sallow-faced, dark-eyed, habited
in evening dress, but showing an Oriental love of display by the pair
of diamond studs blazing in his shirt-front, the thrilling design of
his brocade waistcoat, and the braid, two inches wide, which seamed his
trousers. His companion, also attired in the garb abhorred by George
Bernard Shaw, was, in all save his un-American aspect (both men being
unmistakably “aliens”) the exact antithesis of Constantine. A short,
tubby man, the product, it appeared, of a Polish-Jew father and a
Mexican half-caste mother, he might be likened to a human olive. He was
so round, so greeny-bronze in complexion, that Karl, summing him up
afterwards, said:
“When I meet him, I shall half expect to see him preserved in vinegar
inside a bottle with a flamboyant label.”
The two were discussing a matter of grave interest, judging by their
faces. Karl made a sub-conscious effort to listen to what they were
saying, but it failed, though he subsequently recalled a faint
knowledge of vague sounds, as though he were endeavoring to hear
through thick glass.
The room was sumptuously furnished. The walls were decorated with
photographs, large and small, of gentlemen with wide and expressive
mouths and abundant hair, and of ladies with goo-goo eyes and even more
abundant hair, wearing picture hats for the most part. Several framed
letters, either typewritten or hugely scrawled, were crowded together
over the fireplace, and they set forth in unguarded terms the varied
excellences of “Dear Steindal,” or “Mr. Wilhelm Steindal,” or “Wilhelm
Steindal, Esq.” Through the open windows Karl saw electric cars
hurrying to and fro beneath, the bright steel rails commanding a clear
center of the street, while the general traffic was made up of light
trolleys, delivery vans and bicycles, with hardly ever a cab or private
carriage. On two sides of a diminutive street lamp he read “Broadway”
and “W. 22d St.,” so he assumed that he had, for some occult reason,
found his way to New York.
His attention was caught by the flush of anger on Constantine’s face.
The Armenian emphasized his comment with a passionate thump of his
clenched fist on the table. Steindal, if the fat man were the recipient
of those flattering letters, seemed to be expostulating. After some
argument, in which Constantine was apparently brought round to the
other’s view, the olive-skinned person stretched out a pulpy hand for
a code book, which he consulted, and framed a message.
And now, for the first time to his adult knowledge, Karl _purposely
changed his position_ without interrupting his sight of events in the
least degree. That is to say, his experiments of the two previous
nights had the aspect of a very vivid dream, but, on this occasion, he
acted as if he had the power of physical movement. When he saw Maggie
Hutchinson at Manhattan Beach he endeavored to “stoop” over the hotel
table, and also to “step off” the veranda on to the grass lawn beyond,
but he succeeded in neither instance.
To-day, except that his body was in Oxford, he fancied he had complete
liberty of movement in New York.
So he passed behind Constantine’s companion, looked over his shoulder,
and read what he had written. The words “Margaret Hutchinson” stood
out clearly from a jumble of nonsense. Karl had never used a code, and
the meaningless nature of the script puzzled him until he saw that the
writer had jotted down sentences opposite each word on a separate sheet
of paper. Perusal of this key soon made the message coherent. It read:
“Meet the _Merlin_ on arrival at Liverpool on the 10th inst. Offer
Miss Margaret Hutchinson star concert at St. James’s Hall in my name,
and promise her prolonged engagement on good terms for exclusive
contract, Steindal.”
There was an evil leer on Steindal’s face when he read the draft to
Constantine, and the unpleasant smile with which the latter showed
his curt approval warned Grier that an ulterior purpose lay behind an
offer which, under ordinary circumstances, should prove very acceptable
to any girl at the outset of a professional career. Karl was eager to
learn more of the compact into which these two had entered, but, strive
as he might, he could only distinguish certain faint, quick, vibrating
noises which had a vague resemblance to taps on a cymbal. He did not
realize, until later, that he was, even then, extending his range
of hearing, and the sounds he caught were the clanging bells of the
street-cars!
Steindal summoned an assistant, gave him the cablegram, with
instructions, and Constantine and he, donning dust-coats, descended
to the street. It was a perfect joy to Karl to discover that he could
accompany them. They were taken down by an elevator--which smacks of
Cork though it is pure American--and passed out into the street.
And then Karl Grier’s sixth sense took its first ride on a Broadway
car! Being on the up-town track it was crowded with the latest flight
of business people.
“Did the conductor take your fare and ring you up on the indicator?
Anyhow, he would say things if you tried to work in a sixpence for a
dime,” cried Hooper, when Karl reached this part of his story; and the
spirit passenger confessed to a singular dread of being in the way of
the men and women who were standing between the seats and clinging on
to the straps.
This was a somewhat remarkable instance of a mental record of a purely
physical sensation. Once he began to roam about during his trances
he had to learn that matter and space did not exist for him in their
every-day acceptance.
The car swung round a curve into Madison Square, crossed 23d Street,
swept past a number of fine hotels, shops, newspaper offices, and
theaters, passed under a section of the elevated railway, and clanged
its rapid way towards newer New York.
At last Constantine and Steindal alighted opposite a spacious
restaurant, and Grier, being a ghost of quick perception, saw that even
a rich man like the Armenian would use the street-car in preference to
a brougham, because it was much safer and twice as speedy.
He went with the pair up the steps of the restaurant and noted the
deferential smirk of the head waiter. Nothing would have pleased him
more than to play some prank on this flunky, but the means did not
exist, so he perforce rested content with a careful scrutiny of his
surroundings. In another week or two the patrons of this fashionable
eating-house would be scattered over the cooler parts of the earth.
Already the attendance was thin, but there were sufficient diners to
warrant the cosmopolitan claims of America’s chief city.
All speculation on this and kindred matters was, however, suddenly
extinguished by a subtle, immensely remote, yet quite distinct sound
of harmonious music. And then, with an exquisite delight that was
almost painful in its intensity, he became aware that he was listening
to the strains of a band playing one of Strauss’s waltzes. With each
few bars the lilt of the composition became clearer, the orchestration
more defined, until he could distinguish the violins, the piano, the
piccolo, and, finally, the clarionets.
His brain reeled under the intensity of this new emotion, and there was
some danger that he might react into physical consciousness, had not a
voice whispered, at exceedingly close quarters:
“Dot _schwein-hund_ Steindal says we cahnd gook a _poulet en casserole_
worth a cent.”
It was the deferential head waiter murmuring confidences to the manager!
So the music had bridged the void! He could hear as well as see across
the Atlantic! Again had that strange gift of language prepared the
way for the exercise of an unknown faculty. Rhythm, singing, those
inarticulate sounds which Noiré calls _clamor concomitans_, were the
first utterances of primitive man when working in concert. Every savage
race sings and dances, whether in peace or war. Uncivilized men work
best when they can sing. In olden days soldiers sang as they marched
against the enemy, and civilization has only substituted the bugles and
drums for the songs.
Beyond all question the unfettered exercise of Karl’s additional
sense, that marvelous adjunct whereby his visual and auricular nerves
annihilated distance, arose from the chance that an orchestra, mainly
consisting of stringed instruments, struck up a measured cadence at a
moment when Karl was actually straining his faculties to obtain some
more precise notion of all that was taking place.
And now Grier, who was somewhat in the position of an operator
controlling some rarely sensitive electrical apparatus, learnt that he
must focus the instrument with delicate precision if he were to avoid
confusion. So he bent his attention on the pair at the table, seated
himself metaphorically astride the iced cantaloup which decorated the
center of their board, and gathered in each word they uttered, with
the added zest of seeing the wary glances, the twitching nostrils, the
drawn lips.
Steindal had ordered a meal with the air of a connoisseur. That he had
not exercised much tact in conveying his wants to the head waiter has
been proved by the latter’s private opinion whispered in New York and
overheard in Oxford.
But Constantine merely toyed with the banquet, and his nervous state of
preoccupation only increased as the champagne rose to his head.
“I believe that girl will bring me bad luck,” was the first connected
phrase he uttered which Karl could associate with Maggie Hutchinson’s
personality, granted that she was the unseen attraction drawing him
across the Atlantic. How well he remembered the Armenian’s voice,
though a decade had passed since the last time he had heard it on board
the P. & O. steamship _Ganges_, in Tilbury Dock, when Constantine gave
him a gold watch and chain. The watch was ticking in his waistcoat
pocket at that very moment, but the chain, being of a size that
provoked caustic undergraduate humor, lay in a drawer.
“Bad luck! There’s no such thing, _amigo mio_! Bad management? Yes, it
abounds, but, where women are concerned, I flatter myself that I know
the sex. Fair, frail, and fickle, dark, deep, and _da capo_--that’s how
I classify ’em.”
This new voice was that of an unctuous devil. Grier, with his finely
tuned ear for vocal effects, fancied that a boa-constrictor might speak
with such a voice. It was the oil in the man-olive which gave his
speech its smoothness.
Steindal laughed softly at his own cheap wit, but Constantine was not
amused.
“I tell you, Steindal,” he said, “that you do not understand the nature
of a girl brought up in the home atmosphere which surrounded Maggie
Hutchinson. Damn it, man, it is that sanctity of hers which renders her
attractive to me. What is a pretty face or a fairy-like figure? A mere
commodity, a ‘cheap lot, slightly soiled’ in the catalogue of life.
_That’s_ the sort of woman _you_ have in your mind, and I don’t want
her.”
“Sanctity, at Maggie’s age, consists of soap and water and a soft
skin. We have a Spanish proverb: ‘_el corazón manda las carnes_’--the
heart controls the body, and I know that when a woman’s desires outrun
her means she begins to weigh her scruples to see if they are really
as heavy as she fancies. Just let Maggie Hutchinson taste success,
popularity, the delights of money-spending, and then withdraw the
pleasant cup before she has drunk too deeply! Bah! Don’t talk to me of
sanctity! To the man of the world, _es de vidrio la mujer_--woman is
made of glass!”
Steindal, scoffing in the complacency of his knowledge, tilted some
champagne down his wide throat. Karl, feverishly anxious to discover
what plot these twentieth century ghouls were hatching against a young
and innocent girl, concentrated his thoughts on Constantine with some
reminiscence of that masterfulness he exhibited as a boy on board the
_Ganges_.
He carried his intent too far. Constantine suddenly grew livid with
fear. He turned in his chair, gazed at the floor, and sprawled over the
table, sweeping glass and plates away with a crash.
“Look!” he shrieked in an eerie falsetto. “Can’t you see that shark
deep down there in the black water? It will devour me! Oh, help, help!”