He felt, as he spoke, that he disliked it very much. So strongly did he
dislike it that he wondered at Antonia for her suggestion.
"Why, how solemn you are, Bevis! It's only a game, as you say. I believe
you really are a little scared of it, like Mr. Foster, and think it may
rap out something rude. You have a guilty secret, Bevis!"
"Many, no doubt."
"You do believe in it, then?--that it's supernatural?"
From his sofa, over his cigarette-smoke, his eye at this met hers with a
sort of reminder, half grim, half weary. "Still catechisms?" it asked
her.
She laughed, and now he knew that in her laugh he heard bravado.
"As if a game could be!" she answered herself. "At the worst it's only
Cicely's subconscious trickery. Isn't it, Cicely? Are you tired? Will
you try it? I'm longing for it now. It's just what we need. It will do
us good."
"I am not tired. But why do you think a game will do us good, Antonia?"
Miss Latimer asked.
Antonia looked down at her fondly; but did he not now detect the fever
in her eye. "Games are good for dreary people. We are all dreary, aren't
we? I know, at least, that I am. So be kind, both of you, and play with
me."
"Miss Latimer is tired," said Bevis, looking across at her, feeling
reluctance in her colourless replies. "And I'm tired, too. We'd both
rather, far, play bridge."
But to this Miss Latimer at once said coldly: "No, I am not tired.
Bridge is the more tiring of the two."
"Of course it is. We can all go to sleep around the table, if we like.
It's in the corridor, isn't it? I'll get it." Antonia tossed aside her
knitting and moved away.
For a moment, after she had left the room, the young man sat on, his
hands still clasped behind his head, and contemplated Miss Latimer,
meditating a further appeal. But her pale little profile, fixed
impassively on the fire, offered no hint of response. Much as she might
dislike the game, she would never take sides with him against Antonia.
Any appeal that might be made must be to Antonia herself, and, after the
moment's pause, he rose and limped after her.
She was outside in the broad balustraded corridor from which one looked
down into the hall, and she had lifted a bowl of flowers from a little
mahogany table that stood there.
Bevis closed the door behind him. He, also, laid his hands on the table,
arresting her.
"Tony," he said, "give it up." The door was closed, but he spoke in a
low voice. "I don't like it."
"Why not?" She, too, spoke in a low voice; and she stood still, her eyes
on his.
"I don't like it," he repeated. "It's not right. Not now. After what's
happened in these years."
Oh, what a blunder! What a cursed blunder! He saw, as he spoke the
words, the fire they lighted in her. She had been an actress, dressed
for a part, pretending gaiety and revival to inveigle him into an
experiment. Over the table, her hands hard grasped upon the edge, she
kept her eyes fixed on him.
"You _do_ believe in it, then?--That the spirits of the dead speak
through it?"
Cursed blunder! How pale she had become, as if beneath the actress's
rouge. There was no laughter left, or pretence of gaiety.
"No: I don't believe it's spirits. I believe, as you said, that it's
subconscious trickery. And it's not a time to mess about with it. That's
all. It's ugly: out of place."
"If it's only that--subconscious trickery--that's what I believe
too--why should you mind so much;--or even ugliness?"
"And why should you want so much to do it, if that's all you believe?
It's because you believe more, or are afraid of more, that I ask you to
give it up."
"But isn't that the very reason why you should consent? So that my mind
may be set at rest? Don't be angry with me, Bevis. That frightens me
more than anything--as you told me. I am not afraid of this, unless you
make me so by taking it so seriously."
She had him there, neatly. And why should he mind so much? He did mind,
horridly. But that was all the more reason for pretending not to.
"Very well," he said dryly. "I'm not angry. I don't consent, though; I
submit. Here; let me carry it for you."
But he had forgotten his leg. He stumbled as he lifted the table and
could only help Antonia carry it into the room and set it down before
the fire.
"There; it will do nicely there," said Antonia. "And those three little
chairs." Her voice was still unsteady.
Miss Latimer looked round at them as they entered, and then rose. "Isn't
this table a little rickety?" she asked, placing her finger-tips upon it
and slightly shaking it.
"It's the one we always use," said Antonia. "It's quite solid. If you
wanted to tip it, you couldn't."
"I've seen larger and firmer tables tipped, by people who wanted to,"
said Miss Latimer. "I have, I am sorry to say, often seen people cheat
at table-turning."
"You don't suspect Bevis, or me, I hope!" laughed Antonia, taking her
place.
"Not at all. But people don't suspect themselves," said Miss Latimer.
She, too, sat down.
"It's very good of you, of both of you, to humour me," said Antonia,
still laughing. "I promise you both not to cheat."
"Shall I put out the lamps?" asked Bevis coldly.
And it was still Antonia who directed the installation, replying: "Oh,
no; that's not at all necessary. We have never sat in the dark. It was
broad daylight, before tea, with Mr. Foster."
Bevis took his place and they laid hands lightly upon the table.
"And we may go on talking," Antonia added.
But they did not talk. As if the very spirit of dumbness had emanated
from their outspread hands, they sat silent and Bevis felt at once the
muffled rhythm of their hearts beating in syncopated measure. The
pulsations were heavy in his finger-tips and seemed to be sending little
electric currents into the wood beneath them. Observant, sceptical, and,
with it all, exasperated, he watched himself and felt sure that soon the
table, yielding to some interplay of force, would begin to tip. Long
moments passed, however, and it did not stir, and after his first
intense anticipation his attention dropped, with a sense of comparative
relief, to more familiar uses. He had not looked at either of his
companions, but he now became aware of them, of their breathing and
their heart-beats, with an intimacy which, he felt, turning his thoughts
curiously, savoured of the unlawful. People were not meant to be aware
of each other after such a fashion, with consciousness fallen far below
the normal mental meeting-ground to the fundamental crucibles of the
organism, where the physical machinery and the psychical personality
became so mysteriously intermingled. There, in the first place--it
pleased him to trace it out, and he was glad to keep his mind
occupied--there lay the basis of his objection to the ambiguous pastime.
As he meditated it, his awareness of this intimacy became so troubling
that, withdrawing his thoughts from it decisively, he fixed them upon
the mere visual perception of Antonia's hands, and Miss Latimer's. Miss
Latimer's were small, dry, light. The thumb curled back, the palm was
broad, the finger-tips were squared, though narrow. He had no link with
them, no clue to them, and, though he strove to see them as objects
only, as pale patterns on the dark wood, he was aware, disagreeably,
that he shrank from them and their hidden yet felt significance.
Antonia's hands he knew so well. But he was not to rest in the mere
contemplation of their beauty. Everywhere, to-night, the veils of
appearance were melting before the emergence of operative yet, till now,
unrecognized reality; and so it was that Antonia's hands, as he looked
at them, ceased to express her soft, sweet life, its delicacy, its
mournfulness, its merriment, and, like the breathing and the
heart-beats, conveyed to him the mysterious and fundamental sources of
her being, all in her most potent and most unconscious. Laid out upon
the darkness, they were piteous hands; helpless and abandoned to
destiny.
And his own? Small, delicately fashioned, if resolute, they expressed
his own personality in what it had of closest and most alien. He did not
like himself, seen at these close quarters, or, rather, he frightened
himself. The physical machinery was too fragile an apparatus in his
construction. It did not secure him sufficiently. It did not
sufficiently secure Antonia. Nerves rather than flesh and blood made his
strength, and flesh and blood, dogged, confident, and blind, was a
better barrier against fear than mere intelligence. There was more fear
in him now than in Antonia, or he was more aware of what was to be
feared--which came to the same thing. While she wandered sadly in dreams
and abandoned herself to peril because she did not know where peril lay,
he saw and felt reality, sharply, subtly, like a scent upon the breeze,
like a shadow cast by an unseen presence; and because he was so subtle,
so conscious, and so resolute, he was responsible. That was what it came
to for him, with a suddenness that had in it an element of physical
shock. It was he alone who saw where peril lay and he alone who could
withhold Antonia from thus spreading her spirit upon the darkness.
He looked back at her hands and a pang of terror sped through him.
Something had happened to them; something had passed from them, or into
them. He was an ass, of course, an impressionable, nervous ass; yet he
saw them as doomed, unresisting creatures; and, while he still
controlled himself to think, feeling himself infected with the virus of
the horrid game, the table suddenly, as if with a long-drawn, welling
sigh, stirred, rose--he felt it rising under his fingers--and slowly
tipped toward Miss Latimer.
It was then Antonia who said, as if with frivolity, "We're off!" Miss
Latimer sat silent, her head bent down in an attitude brooding and
remote.
The table, returning to the level, after a pause rocked slowly to and
fro. "Cicely, if it raps, will you say the alphabet for it, while I
spell?" Antonia murmured. He recognized the forced commonplace of her
voice. Miss Latimer bowed her head in answer.
The table rocked more and more violently. Antonia had half to rise in
her chair to keep her hands upon it as it tipped from her toward Miss
Latimer. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was still, and then he
heard a soft yet sharp report, as if of a small electric shock in the
very wood itself.--One, two, three; a pause; and--One, two, three,
again. A rhythm distinct and detestable.
Conjecture raced through his mind. He had said that he had played the
game; but he had only seen the table turned and tipped; he had never
heard these sounds. Unable to distrust his senses, though aware that any
one else's he would have distrusted, he located them in the very wood
under their hands. They did not come from Miss Latimer's toe-joints; nor
from his or Tony's. Well, what of it? It was some oddity of magnetism,
like the tipping, and, now that the experience was actually upon them,
he felt, rather than any panic, a dry, almost a light curiosity, seeing,
with relief for his delay, that to have interfered, to have stopped the
game and made a row, would have been to dignify it and fix it in Tony's
unsatisfied mind stamped with a fear more definite than any she had
felt.
"Are you there?" Miss Latimer was saying, in a prim, automatic voice, as
of one long accustomed to these communions--"One for No, and three for
Yes and two for Uncertain. Is that agreed?"
The table rapped three times.
"Are you ready? Shall I begin the alphabet?"
Again three raps.
Her voice now altered. It was almost dreamily, with head bent down, that
she began, evenly, to enumerate the letters. "A, B"--a rap fell neatly
at the second sound. "B," Antonia announced. Miss Latimer resumed: "A,
B, C, D, E"--another rap arrested her.
"Oh--it is going to be 'Bevis'!--It's for you, Bevis!" Antonia murmured.
"Rap!" said the table.
"That is No. It is not for Captain Saltonhall," said Miss Latimer
drowsily and, drowsily, she took up the alphabet. The table,
uninterrupted by any comment, spelled out the word, "Beside."
"Beside. How odd," said Antonia.
It was very wearisome. Already they seemed to have sat there for hours.
His fear had not returned; but curiosity no longer consciously sustained
him. An insufferable languor, rather, fell upon him and fumes of sleep
seemed to coil heavily about his eyelids. He wished he could have a
cigarette. He wished the thing would go more quickly and be over.
"T,H,E," had been spelled out and Antonia had reported "the." Miss
Latimer's drugged voice had taken up the alphabet again and the table
had rapped at "F."
Now the word demanded nearly the whole alphabet for the finding of its
letters. "O" came. Then "U."
Antonia sat still. Her eyes were fixed, strangely, devouringly, upon
Miss Latimer, whose head, drooping forward, seemed that of a swooning
person. "F,O,U,N,T," she spelt.
Not till then did it flash upon him, and it came from Antonia's face
rather than from the half-forgotten phrase.
He sprang up, stumbling, nearly falling, catching at Antonia's shoulder
to right himself. "Stop the damned thing!" he exclaimed, and he lifted
her hands. "It's quoting you!"
Miss Latimer's hands slid into her lap. She sat as if profoundly asleep.
Antonia rose from her place, and at last she looked at him. "Beside the
fountain. Beside the fountain. He is there," she said.
He had seized her arms now as if to hold her back more forcibly.
"Nonsense!" he cried loudly. "Miss Latimer is a medium--as you know. Her
subconsciousness got at yours. They are the words you used the other
morning."
"He is there," she repeated; "and I must see him. He has come for me.
And I must see him."
He held her for a moment longer, measuring his fear by hers. Then,
releasing her, "Very well," he said. "I'll come too. We shall see
nothing." But he was not sure.
They crossed the room, Antonia swiftly going before him. She paused so
that he might come up with her before she drew back the curtain from
the third window. The moon was high. The cedar was black against the
brightness. They looked down into the flagged garden and saw the empty
moonlight. Empty. Nothing was there.
"Are you satisfied?" Bevis asked her. He placed his arm around her waist
and a passionate triumph filled him. Empty. They were safe.
Motionless within his grasp she stared and stared and found nothing.
Only the fountain was there, a thin spear of wavering light, and the
fritillaries, rising like ghosts from their narrow beds.
"Are you satisfied?" Bevis repeated. They seemed measurelessly alone
there at the exorcised window, alone, after the menace, as they had
never been. He held her closely while they looked out, putting his other
arm around her, too, as if for final security. "Will you come away with
me to-morrow?" he whispered.
She looked at him. No; it was not triumph yet. Her eyes were empty; but
of him, too. They showed him only a blank horror.
"What does it mean?" she said.
Dropping the curtain behind them, he looked round at Miss Latimer. Had
she just moved forward? Or for how long had she been leaning like that
on the table, her head upon her arms?
"It means her," he said. "She read your fear; she saw it. Have you had
enough of it, Tony? Have you done playing with madness?"
"How could she read my fear? I was not thinking of it. I had forgotten
it. It was not she. It came from something else." She was shuddering
within his arms, and her eyes, with their devouring question, were on
the seated figure.
"No, it didn't. From nothing else at all. It came from you and from
me--and from her; all of us together. It was some power in her that
conveyed it to our senses."
"You, I, and she--and something else," said Antonia. She drew away from
him and went toward the fire, but so unsteadily that she had to pause
and lay her hand on a chair as she went. At the table she stopped. Miss
Latimer still sat fallen forward upon it. Silently Antonia stood looking
at her.
"She's asleep, I think," said Bevis. He wished that she were dead. "It
has exhausted her."
Antonia put out her hand and touched her. "It never was like this
before.--Yes," she said, after a pause, "she is breathing very quietly.
She must be asleep. And I will go now."
She moved away swiftly; but, striding after her, he caught her at the
door, seizing her hand on the lock.
"What do you want?" she said, stopping still and looking at him.
He said nothing for a moment. "You mustn't be alone," he then answered.
"What do you mean?" she repeated, and she continued to look at him with
a cold gentleness. "I must be alone."
"I must come with you. I make my claim; in spite of what you feel; for
your sake."
Still with the cold gentleness, she shook her head. "You don't
understand," she said. "You couldn't say that, if you understood.
Good-night."
When she had closed the door behind her, he stood beside it for a long
moment, wondering, even still, if he should not follow her. Then he
remembered Miss Latimer, sleeping there--or was she sleeping?--behind
him. He went back round the screen. She had not stirred and, after
looking at her for a moment, he leaned over her, as Antonia had done,
and listened. She was breathing slowly and deeply, but now he felt sure
that she was not asleep. The pretence was a refuge she had taken against
revelations overpowering to her as well as to Antonia. She was not
asleep, and should he leave her alone in the now haunted room?
Restless, questioning, he limped up and down; and, going again to the
window, he drew the curtain and again looked out. Nothing. Of course
nothing. Only the fountain and the white fritillaries, strange, ghostly,
pallid, and brooding. Well, they would get through the night. To-morrow
should be the end of it. He promised himself, as he turned away, that
Antonia should come with him to-morrow.
VI
He heard, as he waked next morning, that it was heavily raining. When he
looked out, the trees stood still in grey sheets of straightly falling
rain. There was no wind.
The mournful, obliterated scene did not oppress him. The weather was all
to the good, he thought. He had always liked a rainy day in the country;
and ghosts don't walk in the rain. If Malcolm hadn't come in the
moonlight, he wouldn't come now. He felt sunken, exhausted, and rather
sick; yet his spirits were not bad. He was fit for the encounter with
Antonia.
When he went down to the dark dining-room, darker than ever to-day, he
found only one place laid. The maid told him that both the ladies were
breakfasting in their rooms. This was unexpected and disconcerting. But
he made the best of it, and drank his coffee and ate kedgeree and toast
with not too bad an appetite. A little coal fire had been lighted in
the library, and he went in there after breakfast and read the papers
and wrote some letters, and the morning passed not too heavily. But, at
luncheon-time, his heart sank, almost to the qualm of the night before,
when he found still only one place laid. After half an hour of
indecision over his cigarette, he wrote a note and sent it up to
Antonia.
"_Dearest Tony_, You don't want to drive me away, I suppose? Because I
don't intend to go. When am I to see you? I hope you aren't unwell?
Yours ever, BEVIS."
The answer was brought with the smallest delay.
"_Dearest Bevis_, I'm not ill, only so dreadfully tired. Cicely will
give you your tea and dine with you. I will see you to-morrow. Yours
ever, TONY."
This consoled him much, though not altogether. And the handwriting
puzzled him. He had never seen Tony write like that before. He could
infer from the slant of the letters that she had written in bed; but it
was in a hand cramped and controlled, as though with surely unnecessary
thought and effort.
He was horridly lonely all the afternoon.
Tea was brought into the library and with it came Miss Latimer. She wore
rain-dashed tweeds and under her battered black felt hat her hair was
beaded with rain. At once he saw that she was altered. It was not that
she was more pale than usual; less pale, indeed, for she had a spot of
colour on each cheek, but, as if her being had gathered itself together,
for some emergency, about its irreducible core of flame, she showed, to
his new perception of her, an aspect at once ashen and feverish; and
even though in her entrance she was composed, if that were possible,
beyond her wont, his subtle sense of change detected in her self-mastery
something desperate and distraught.
She did not look at him as she went to the tea-table, drawing off her
wet gloves. The table had been placed before the fire, and Bevis, who
had risen on her entrance, dropped again into his seat, the capacious
leather divan set at right angles to the hearth, its back to the window.
Miss Latimer, thus, facing him across the table as she measured out the
tea, was illuminated by such dying light as the sombre evening still
afforded.
They had murmured a conventional greeting and he now asked her if she'd
been out walking in this bad weather. It was some relief to see that she
had not been with Tony the whole day through.
"Only down to the village," she said. "There is a woman ill there."
He went on politely to enquire if she weren't very wet and would not
rather change before tea--he wouldn't mind waiting a bit; but she said,
seating herself and pouring on the boiling water, that she was used to
being wet and did not notice it.
He was determined not to speak of Antonia and to ask no questions. To
ask questions would be to recognize the new bond between her and
Antonia. But, unasked, emphasizing to his raw consciousness his own
exclusion, she said: "Antonia is so sorry to leave you alone like this.
She had one of her bad nights and thought a complete rest would do her
good."
He reflected that it was more dignified to show strength by generosity
and to play into her hands. "Does she have bad nights?" he asked.
"Oh, very. Didn't you know?" said Miss Latimer. "She's obliged to take
things."
"Drugs, do you mean?" He had not known at all. "That's very bad for
her."
"Very bad. But her doctor allows it apparently."
"She took one last night and it did no good?"
"None at all. I hope she is getting a little sleep now. Sugar?" Miss
Latimer poised a lump before him in the tongs and, on his assent,
dropped it into his cup. Could two creatures have looked more cosy,
shut, for the blind-man's-holiday hour, into the tranquil intimacy of
the studious room, with the even glow of its tended fire, the cheer of
its humming kettle, the scented promise of its tea-table? She passed him
toasted scones from the hot-water-basin and offered home-made jam. He
wanted no jam, but he found himself quite hungry, absurdly so, he
thought, until he remembered that he had really eaten no lunch. He was
coming, now that the opening had been made, and while he ate his scone,
to a new decision. It was the moment, and perhaps the only one he would
have, for finding out just how much she counted against him. He
determined, if it were necessary, on open warfare.
"I don't think Wyndwards suits Tony," he said.
"Don't you?" Miss Latimer returned, but quite without impertinence.
"She's always been very well here before."
"Before what?"
"Her husband's death," Miss Latimer replied.
"Yes," said Bevis, disconcerted. "Well, it's that, perhaps."
"It is that undoubtedly," said Miss Latimer. Her voice, high and piping,
was as dry and emotionless as her horrid little hands. What control it
showed that it should be so! He felt that he hated her; hated her the
more that she was not wishing to score off him as he wished to score off
her. Yet he did not dislike her, if one could draw that distinction. And
now he noticed, as she lifted her cup, that her hand trembled, as if
with the slight, incessant shaking of palsy. The fear of an emergency
burned in her. He felt sure that she, too, had not slept.
"Well, it all comes to the same thing, doesn't it?" he said. "Since
Malcolm's death the place oppresses her. Quite naturally; and it would
be much better that she should leave it; as soon as possible."
"I don't think it would do Antonia any good to leave Wyndwards," said
Miss Latimer, not looking at him.
"You think it would do her good if I did, I imagine," Bevis commented,
with his dry laugh. "Thanks awfully."
She sat silent.
"You saw, of course, last night, how it was with us," he said. "Perhaps
you saw it before."