that there’s love--and love. Tony will care for me always, in one way,
more than anything else. But through these last years I’ve become a
different creature. I’m not precisely the woman he loved. ‘Strange eyes,
new limbs’--and ‘_no_ lips to kiss.’ It’s not mere loss of any looks I
had. If I were maimed as I am, and still cared, we could subsist,
perhaps, on mere caring. It’s the lack of longing, the coldness of the
grave between us, the absolute deadness of desire. I’ve sifted that
tenderness of his to the last grain, and there’s not a whit of passion
in it. How should there be? It would be morbid if there were.”
“How can you speak for Tony?”
“I speak for him by the letter of the law. It’s not that, by accident, I
can no longer be Tony’s wife--your ‘inhibitions’ might manage that. It’s
that I am wooden to his touch. In that sense, there _is_ no life left in
me. If I were a ghost, I couldn’t be more fleshless. When Tony kisses
me--sometimes he does--I wonder why any two people have ever kissed. At
that rate, he won’t want to kiss me very long. For coldness breeds
coldness. Take that back to your cloister for a new addition to the sum
of knowledge.”
“It’s not as if you didn’t love him.” I was perplexed, but I clung to
that.
“That is where you are wrong. It is precisely as if I didn’t love him.
Oh, if I longed for him, however vainly, it would be a very different
problem, my dear Garda--and one I probably shouldn’t trouble you with.
All I can get from Tony I do get. From me Tony gets nothing. He’s simply
my kind Providence. Oh, I wouldn’t stick at alimony, you know--if that
were all. I’d take it in a minute.”
“But there is something beyond all this, Joan; something that you are,
unalterably, to each other.”
“Nothing”--and her voice sounded very clear and very cold--“that makes a
man and a woman find it imperative to live under the same roof. One can
be Beatrice at a distance. In fact, one usually is. And I never was
precisely Beatrice, you know, Garda.”
“But Tony loves you.” I clung to it doggedly.
“He’s happier away from me--perhaps because he loves me.”
“Aren’t you quibbling?”
With a sudden movement she flung off her veil and stared fixedly at me.
I did not flinch outwardly--one could not, for very shame, be weak with
Joan Delabere--but within me it was as if every bone in my body had
turned to arctic ice.
“That was brutal of you, Joan.” My voice, I suspect, was as cold as the
rest of me. But what an argument to let fly at me, with a turn of the
hand!
“I thought you needed strong drink. You looked it. I have it on tap for
people who are fools enough to ask for it.” She flung the veil
negligently by, and rested her head comfortably on the pillow. “We’ll
face the rest of it in the light of this.” She stared past me out of the
window. “Oh, Garda, Garda, if I were playing for sympathy, it _would_ be
a low trick; but I am playing only for Tony. I have to show you his
side.”
I stole a look at her, while she was not facing me. Her argument was
perfectly good; it covered all points. I turned my eyes away.
“What does Tony say? You must have had it out with him.”
“Often. The last time I had it out with him, I didn’t have to make Miss
Stanley write for his ticket. He rushed to town and bought it himself.”
“Poor Tony!”
“That’s what I wanted you to say. Oh, I know you don’t mean it quite as
I mean it. But you will, before the end.”
I thought very carefully before I spoke. “He has had hard luck with his
bargain, but so have you. Your contract was the same. I suppose you’ll
both have to abide by the results.”
“Ah, but I haven’t had such hard luck as Tony!”
The tears came to my eyes. “My dear, I think you have--if that’s any
comfort.”
“You mean that he can get away from this thing that lies here, and that
I can’t? True; and that is what Tony himself for a long time felt, I
fancy. But I think he has come to see now how much more fortunate I am;
for he has learned that I don’t feel. The days go by like long
shimmering stretches of the desert. They shift and reshape themselves;
but in the end they’re all the same. I don’t know by what law the
physical catastrophe has managed to get at the very springs of the soul
and dry them up; but I know that it has. The brain is left, but the
heart is dried. And, accordingly, I see the terms of that contract more
clearly than any one else, perhaps, ever has. For it’s not simply over
for me with Tony; it’s over for me with everything. So long as you’re
human, you may have a future--though sometimes you have to stoop pretty
low to get it. I’m not human, and there’s no future at all for me. I can
no more ‘care’ than I can walk. And therefore I’m a negligible quantity.
It’s monstrous that I should interfere with any normal creature’s
life.”
“My dear Joan”--I put it to her--“would you be so insistent on Tony’s
marrying again if you died?”
“I shouldn’t have to be,” she flashed back at me. “Time and Tony would
look out for that. But as it is, though I’m quite dead, I lie here and
haunt Tony. And that’s not decent.”
“I wonder if you really hate him,” I mused. It was always best to say to
Joan Delabere whatever crossed one’s mind. She herself would never keep
the buttons off the foils.
Her eyes filled. “I’m excessively fond of Tony. I even feel about
him--as sometimes one insanely feels it about a stranger--as if in some
other life we had had a past together. I am always thinking, ‘How odd
that I seem to know him so well.’ There was a long interval, you see,
when only my body and the things they did to it in hospitals seemed to
count; and just a few little feeble memories come across the interval to
account for his being here. Indeed, indeed, I am fond of him, Garda; but
not as I used to be. It’s as if, one of those times when they had me
unconscious, they had cunningly removed my heart--as if there were a
seat of the soul that a knife could find. And I think, if I could see
Tony provided for--if I could arrange for him like a French mamma--I
should be a curiously happy creature because of this anæsthetic state.
There’s the case complete.”
“What do you really want? That he should fall in love with another
woman?”
“Ultimately that, I suppose. But--don’t you see?--I want him in a
position to love and woo any woman he pleases. The women who would take
him as he is aren’t the women that would make him happy. I want him free
to carry his heart, his hand, and all his young magnificence to some
piece of loveliness who’ll have better luck than I did.”
“There are plenty of girls who wouldn’t marry a man, however ‘free,’ so
long as his first wife lived.”
Joan tossed her head. “I’d like to see any girl tell him she wouldn’t
marry him on _my_ account! Send such a little fool to me. I’d soon have
her at the nearest parson’s in an agony of impatience.”
Then and there, at the very heart of the tangle, I laughed.
“Joan, Joan, how could any man forego living with you?”
She turned her face to me again. I came back to the situation.
“What I want, please, Garda,” she went on crisply, “is a new law:
divorce on demand, as they have it in France. Have you any political
pull, anywhere? I should be willing to pay. Tony, that is, ought to be
willing to run to a fat sum in his own interests.”
Her irony hurt like a rusty knife. It didn’t leave a clean wound. “I’m
afraid if you want a divorce, there will have to be collusion. Tony will
have to help you out.”
“Precisely what he won’t do. And when you come to think of it, it’s a
grim and sordid thing to ask any man to go in for. So you think we shall
have to wait?”
“I can see nothing else.”
“You lack imagination, Garda. But I have liked to talk to you. It’s a
little hard to talk to Tony. He aches so with the strain of not giving
himself away! But it’s odd, isn’t it, that there should be no divorce
for decent people in our easy-going land? Somebody simply has to be a
horror, somewhere. Why don’t you write a book about it, Garda? You used
always to be scribbling.”
“Stop girding at me, Joan, and say what you really have to say.”
She beat her hands softly together, and moaned. “Oh, don’t you see?
There’s bound to be another woman some time. Tony can’t live forever
tied to a cold caricature of a wife. And I want her to be the right
woman; and my brain tells me that, as things are, there’s little or no
chance of that. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair, that we should be damned
in the end just because in the beginning we were a shade too decent to
do the things that damn other people!”
“Time is up, I’m afraid, Mrs. Delabere.” It was the pale Miss Stanley
who said it, cheerfully, after her light tap at the door had been
answered. Having given her warning, she closed the door again and walked
softly away.
Slowly Joan Delabere drew her veil over her face again, and arranged it
in careful folds about her. It was like a corpse enshrouding itself with
its own hands.
I rose and stood beside her. “I haven’t a way out for you, Joan. But
don’t you see that it’s just the chance of such bad luck as yours that
makes the magnificence of the whole contract? I don’t think I ever
realized before”--I used my words deliberately--“what a splendid
sporting proposition marriage is. I shall never blame either you or Tony
for anything you do. But if you don’t do anything, I shall consider you
the best losers I’ve ever known.”
She lay with shut eyes, and I put my hand on her forehead. I could not
kiss that terrible veil. Finally she spoke, very quietly. “You were the
last cartridge I had left, and you missed fire. I’ll never
believe--never--in anything men do needlessly for other men’s pain. I’ll
mock at us forever for being squeamish--only to come heaven knows what
cropper in the end. Perhaps the only way out my brain will succeed in
devising is for it deliberately to run itself off the track. I fancy
that _would_ make it easier for Tony. But it’s a little rough of you to
tell me I’m not a sport. Who would let me in on any game, now? Is it
_my_ fault that I’m disqualified?”
“Joan, Joan!” I cried, bending to her, “didn’t I say you were
magnificent?”
She took my hand in hers, and stroked it gently for good-bye. “You said
so many things I was glad to hear! I have liked talking to you, my dear.
I hoped you could help, but I might have known there was no help. I’ve
spent a long time on it, myself.” She raised my hand to her lips.
“Good-bye, dear. Thank you a hundred times for coming.” Her voice was
very low and sweet. “You always were a bit of a prig, Garda.” She turned
her face from me as the nurse and two servants entered the room.
Before I drove off I gave a long look at the stately lines of the
façade. My mind recurred to the symbol of disaster. In the thickening
twilight I seemed to perceive the squat form seated on the threshold;
but the shadows were too heavy along the eastern front of Tony
Delabere’s house for me to make out the jewel.
XII
BELSHAZZAR’S LETTER
“‘Belshazzar had a letter; he never had but one,’” murmured Fenwick.
I should never have suspected Fenwick of having read, much less having
memorized, the works of Emily Dickinson. Fenwick does not read--much;
and how should he have got hold of Emily, anyhow? It appeared
presently--for of course he was questioned--that he had picked up her
poems in the home of a foreign missionary, where he had once perforce
been marooned during a cholera epidemic. Fenwick himself is, I fancy,
outside all creeds; but he can’t help--given his life--running into
missionaries, and he usually speaks well of them. He takes them, at all
events, as all in the day’s work, as he reports, from very strange
places, to the “interests” that employ him. They have an eye out, those
“interests,” for a good many different commodities, though I incline to
believe that rubber is the chief. Adventure has never seemed to pry
Fenwick loose from his very American moorings, though he told me on a
certain occasion, with a dropped jaw (in a kind of wry whisper) that he
had lost his religion once--just like that--in a typhoon.
I mention these facts concerning Fenwick for reasons that will appear
later. He was leaving for San Francisco and the East the next week, by
the way, and this was a scratch gathering of friends and acquaintances
more or less to do Fenwick honor. Ben Allis and Mrs. Allis were giving
the “party.” Nora Pate, Mrs. Allis’s niece, was spending with them an
enforced holiday from school. She was at the dinner-table on sufferance
merely. It was Nora, with her giggling flapper-ish reference to a
ouija-board occurrence at school that had elicited Fenwick’s humorous
quotation.
Now you must also know that we were a fairly intimate but more than
fairly eclectic group at the Allises’ table. Most of us were bred to one
or another form of the Christian religion, went to church spasmodically
(except Nora, who of course had to go every Sunday), and comfortably or
uncomfortably, according to temperament, let the whole thing slide--took
it for granted, or permitted it euthanasia, as it and our souls chose.
But Mrs. Conway was a Catholic--“just the ordinary kind,” as she had
once said herself, with a sidelong glance at Mrs. Medford, who was
waveringly “High;” Allis was a scientific skeptic, and Fenwick a
reverent free-thinker. Or so I had gathered. The typhoon had made him a
free-thinker, and his inheritance and temperament had apparently kept
him reverent. My personal convictions do not matter, but when it comes
to ouija-boards, I am all with Allis.
Young Nora had been rather stumped by Fenwick’s quotation. She had
probably heard of Belshazzar, but she had never heard of Miss Dickinson,
and she certainly did not see what it had to do with the ouija-board
revelations at midnight in Betty Dane’s room.
After we had found out just where Fenwick had read Emily Dickinson, the
talk swung back to the occult. Mrs. Medford’s pearl-powdered face and
naturally red lips were eager. She even wanted the complete account of
what had happened in Betty Dane’s room. Nora needed no more
encouragement than that.
“Why, Betty was desperate because she couldn’t be at home when her
cousin had his leave; and she asked ouija if there wasn’t any chance of
his leave being changed. And ouija said, ‘Measles will make you free,’
and of course we all laughed. Then we thought probably her cousin would
have measles, so he couldn’t come, and Betty would be free of
disappointment. And the next week Pauline Case came down with them--and
Betty _is_ at home with her cousin, and she’s going to bring back a book
that tells all about everything depending on the way the breath
circulates in your body.”
The flushed Nora, at a glance from her aunt, sank out of sight below the
conversational tide. But Mrs. Medford had smiled comfortingly at her.
“Prophesying is one thing they won’t usually engage to do, you know,”
some one threw in. “I believe even Doyle and Lodge say that.”
“Naturally--since they have to get it out of your subconscious.” This
was Mrs. Conway.
Mrs. Medford turned upon her, a little acrid. You may have noticed that
the two kinds of “Catholic” don’t mix very well. “Has the Church decided
that it’s all your subconscious?”
Mrs. Conway’s smile was all that she herself could have wished it to be.
“Why, I believe so. Where else could they get it?”
“Whom do you mean by ‘they’?” the other woman challenged.
“Why, the evil spirits.” Mrs. Conway reached for a mint drop. “You see,
the Church had all this to settle so _many_ centuries ago. It’s hardly a
new phenomenon.”
If there was irony in Mrs. Conway’s tone, it was not sharp enough to
wound Fanny Medford. She looked rather pleadingly at the other woman’s
clever, gentle face. “Always evil spirits?” she murmured. “Never good
ones?”
Mrs. Conway murmured back, and the two seemed for a moment to be
isolated together. “Never good ones; and _never_ the real dead. That is
forbidden, you know.”
I had hoped that our moving from the dining-room would break the
current, but I had reckoned without Fenwick. We had our coffee all
together in Allis’s big library--so much the nicest room in the house
that I didn’t much wonder at Maud Allis’s refusing, except under great
pressure, to drag the women away elsewhere. Nora Pate was sent upstairs
to study, and we were freer. As soon as she had gone, Fenwick led us
back to the subject. Mrs. Conway sat apart in the shadows, moving a fan
slowly. Mrs. Medford fixed her eyes hungrily on Fenwick. The rest of us
listened. After all, it was Fenwick’s party.
“Of course you see all kinds of trances, and miracles, and levitation,
and tricks, out in the East,” he began. “I confess I’m not much
interested in what Hindus and such do. They’re so different, anyhow. But
it does interest me to come back to America for the first time since the
war, and find everybody going it this way. The Americans and English out
there do it, too. But there’s an epidemic here, as far as I can make
out. Look at your niece and her ouija-board. And all of us ready to
argue about it. Honestly, I’m interested. I’m perfectly open-minded
about it, myself. I’m not psychic, or whatever you call it.”
“You don’t have to be ‘psychic.’ There’s no such thing.” This came out
of the shadows where Mrs. Conway’s fan waved.
Mrs. Medford turned and gazed at her, as if trying to penetrate even
deeper shadows that lay between them.
“Oh, well, I mean--I sat in on table-tipping once or twice, but I don’t
think I added much. I never saw any ghosts, or had anything queer happen
to me. I know a man out in Singapore who does automatic writing,
though--gets stuff through from his mother. At least, he says he doesn’t
believe it’s his mother, but he keeps right on, all the same. He says
she has told him things that no one else could have known about.”
“_He_ knew about them, didn’t he?” asked Allis, with heavy
matter-of-factness.
“Why, yes--he and she.”
“Well, it all came out of his subconscious.”
“I dare say.” Fenwick set down his coffee-cup and took a cigarette
proffered him by Mrs. Allis. “Only I’m sick of you people all wagging
your heads and saying ‘the subconscious’ every time you’re up against
it. Why don’t you get busy and explain how the thing works?”
“Ah yes, why don’t you?” Mrs. Medford seized on Fenwick’s challenge as
if it were her own.
Allis pulled his moustache and spoke judicially. “I’m not a psychologist
myself, as you very well know--not even a biologist. I don’t know that
science has explained the technique of it yet, though they are working
on this sort of thing all the time. Hysteria, secondary personality,
dreams--all these things are being put under the microscope, and they’re
finding out.”
“I’d rather believe in spooks than in Freud, any day.” This was Carter,
a gay soul.
Allis ignored him. “I dare say you do know, though, that alienists are
using automatic writing in their treatment of patients now. They find
that some traumas, too deep-laid for hypnotism to probe to, can be
brought to the surface by getting the patient to write automatically.
That is one for the subconscious, anyhow.”
“But--” this was Fanny Medford, brave on her own account--“what about
the things that never were in your subconscious; couldn’t have been
there? They get those too--indeed they do.”
“I agree with Fanny and Mr. Fenwick,” said Maud Allis. “I don’t believe
it’s the spirits of the dead; but neither do I believe that the
psychologists have explained it yet. I’m open-minded.”
“I’m open-minded, too,” laughed young Carter. “Ready to try anything.
Except Nora’s ouija-board. That’s too darned easy.”
A slim form in white came out of the shadows--Mrs. Conway, gray-eyed,
ivory-cheeked, like a warm ghost. “Can’t you see,” she said, “that an
open mind is the most dangerous thing there is? Because if your mind is
really open, any evil thing can get in.”
She put her arm round Fanny Medford’s waist, with a soft, sidelong
gesture, though she faced our host, directly questioning him. Mrs.
Medford stirred a little against the light encircling arm--barely
noticing it, it seemed. Her face was flushed beneath her pearl powder.
She addressed Allis and Carter, now standing abreast before the
fireplace.
“Have you ever tried automatic writing?”
“No.”
“Nor I,” cut in Mrs. Allis, “but I’m going to try sometime. Has any one
here tried it?” Maud Allis went on, looking round at her group.
I shook my head, Fenwick and Carter theirs. Mrs. Conway merely said,
“You forget I’m a Catholic.”
“How about Mrs. Medford herself?” Young Carter marked us off on his
fingers.
“Oh, I--I’ve tried it, yes. But I can’t do it!” She bit her lip and
turned away, and before we quite realized that she was crying she had
made a soft plunge through the wide doorway into the next room. Maud
Allis followed her, but returned in a few moments.
“She’ll be all right presently. She’ll come back. It’s just that she is
so interested. Ever since her brother, Jack Hilles, was killed, she’s
been trying to ‘get through’ to him; and she can’t do it herself. She
began going to a medium, and the woman had no sooner established
communication for her than she died. Now, Fanny’s rather up against it.
She’s not the kind that likes to go to mediums, you know. I’m awfully
sorry you started the subject.”
“Why didn’t you stop us, if you knew all that?” Ben queried.
“I didn’t. She just told me about the medium now. Oh, she’ll pull
herself together all right. It may do her good to have it out with a
sensible crowd like this. We didn’t put it into her head. It’s there all
the time--has been, ever since Jack Hilles was killed in the Argonne.”
“Well, we’ll drop it right here,” Allis replied.
But Mrs. Medford was back among us and heard him.
“You won’t drop anything on my account, I hope. Maud may have told you
it’s the one thing I’m interested in. It’s just awfully hard luck that I
can’t do anything myself. If you people really feel like trying
anything, don’t let me stop you. I dare say the rest of you are as bad
as I am, anyway. Not ‘psychic’--though Mrs. Conway says there’s nothing
in that.”
“There isn’t,” Mrs. Conway averred again.
“Let’s try it, anyhow,” cried young Carter. “Not table-tipping. Let’s
sit about and turn the lights out and each take a pencil, and see if we
can do automatic writing.”
Fanny Medford clapped her hands. “Oh, do! Only, of course I can’t. But
perhaps”--she looked us over hungrily--“some of you can, and I might get
a tip as to the right way to manage. And, anyway, it’s so interesting.”
Certainly she had recovered.
“I’m not going to sit with the lights out all the evening,” grumbled
Allis. “This was supposed to be, in its humble way, a dinner-party.”
“Well, of course, not all the evening,” Maud conceded. “A quarter of an
hour. And then we’ll stop and play bridge.”
“It would be rather fun.” This was Genevieve Ford. I have not mentioned
Miss Ford before, simply because she had taken no part in the
conversation that I have detailed. She happened to you, once in so
often, in somebody’s house, and you didn’t much care, one way or the
other. She was just a nice girl, a little more restful than some,
perhaps. I think the Allises hoped against hope that some day she and
Carter.... I don’t know why.
Somehow Miss Ford’s quiet speech clinched it. Perhaps because she had
been an outsider through the talk.
“Good for you. Let’s!” Carter dashed to Ben’s table and swept some
pencils off it. “Paper, Allis? And more pencils. We’ll scatter about
through the rooms so that everyone can have a table-edge or a
chair-arm.”
Allis found us pads of paper, and pencils--all except Mrs. Conway, who
refused to join us and went off to fetch her knitting. We all looked at
each other rather helplessly.
“How do you begin?” I asked.
“I suppose you douse the glim.” Carter snapped off the light nearest to
him.
“That’s perfectly unnecessary,” Fenwick commented. “The man I know in
Singapore does it any time--in broad daylight, between courses at
tiffin, if he feels like it. All you do is to let your hand go slack,
and think about something quite different.”
Mrs. Conway, who had returned with her knitting, intervened. “I wouldn’t
think too hard about something quite different, if I were you. That is,
not if you want results.”
“But we want to play fair,” Maud Allis protested. “There’s no sense in
trying this kind of thing unless you do your best.”
“I only meant,” Mrs. Conway explained, “that if you really want to let
them in, you must make your mind as blank as possible. Don’t make an
effort to think of anything. Just open the door and wait. You make me
feel like an accessory before the fact”--she smiled a little--“except
that I really don’t believe anything will happen.”