"Open the door. It is one of my dearest friends."
"You must not give a sitting. I won't have it."
The knock was repeated and she hurried away, leaving the boy confused,
angry, and helpless.
She returned, accompanied by two women. The first of them was a
diminutive, gray-haired lady, with a frank and smiling face, whose dress
proclaimed a prosperous and happy station in life. Her companion was a
tall young girl, whose spring suit, quiet in color and exquisitely
tailored, became her notably. The youth thought, "What a stylish girl!"
And the sight of her calmed him instantly.
"Victor," said his mother, and her tone was one of relief, "these are my
dearest friends, Mrs. Joyce and Leonora Wood, her niece."
Victor bowed without speaking, for the heart of battle was still in him.
Mrs. Joyce cried out: "What a fine, big fellow! I didn't expect such a
stalwart son."
"Please be seated," said Mrs. Ollnee. "My son has just arrived. He saw
that dreadful article in the paper and came to defend me."
"That was fine of you," exclaimed Mrs. Joyce to Victor. "That same
article brought us. I would have been here before only we don't take the
_Star_, and I did not see the article until about an hour ago."
Mrs. Ollnee took up her explanation. "But, Louise, Victor says he will
not go back to college."
Mrs. Joyce was quick to apprehend the situation. "I suppose that
outrageous article made it appear necessary for you to defend both your
mother and yourself," she said, searchingly.
Victor was not disposed to gloze matters in the least. "It made a fool
of me," he responded, bitterly. "It made it impossible for me to look my
friends in the face. How could I convince them that I was not sharing in
the profits of my mother's business? I told them I didn't know where my
allowance came from, but of course no one believed me. I know now, and I
despise the whole business. I've come down here to take my mother out of
it."
The three women looked at one another sympathetically. Mrs. Joyce, who
knew Mrs. Ollnee's history intimately, only smiled as she answered: "I
don't see that you need to feel ashamed of your mother's profession. A
medium is one of the most precious instruments in this world. She brings
solace to many a sorrowing heart. Why is her work less honorable than
singing, for example? Furthermore, no one is obliged to come to her. We
sit of our own choice, and if we are not pleased we can refuse to pay,
and we need not return. So you see it is a free contract, after all."
Her reasoning staggered Victor. He was confused also by her frank and
charming manner. He perceived that his problem was not so simple as he
had imagined. Hitherto, his life had been single-hearted, with nothing
more difficult to decide than a question of moral philosophy; but here,
now, he stood confronted by an entirely baffling entanglement of human
wills. This woman, so evidently of the higher world of wealth and
culture, accepted his mother's claims, and this profoundly impressed
him.
Mrs. Joyce continued. "Don't take this newspaper attack too seriously,
Mr. Ollnee. It was meant to be nasty, and it _is_ nasty; but it is not
fatal. It is a cloud that will soon blow over and leave you and your
mother unharmed."
"It will never blow over for me," he replied, passionately, "and you
must not include me in this thing. I've lived a long way from it thus
far, and I don't intend to mix up with this kind of hokus-pokus."
"Victor," called his mother, warningly.
He corrected himself. "Of course I don't accuse you of wilfully
deceiving anybody. I'm willing to grant that you _think_ these Voices
are real; but my teacher, Doctor Boyden, says that mediumship is only a
kind of hysteria--"
Mrs. Joyce laughed. "Yes, I've read Doctor Boyden's books. What does he
know about it? Did he ever study a wonderful psychic like your mother?
Has he candidly examined these phenomena? Never in his life! I know all
about that kind of investigator. He is basing his conclusions on
somebody's else's conjectures or prejudices."
Victor defended his master. "He has tried to experiment. He's offered
prizes for mediums to meet him, but they have refused. Not one would sit
with him."
"Why should they? Would you have your mother seek him out to convince
him? Why doesn't he come to her. There he sits in his chair, pretending
to say that these phenomena are impossible, whereas I know, from many
personal tests, that these voices are not merely real, but that they
come from my dear ones on the other side and that they sustain and
comfort me."
Victor was silenced, and his discomfiture was made the more complete by
the smiling gaze of the young girl, who was evidently enjoying his
perplexity. Nevertheless, though he did not continue the argument, he
held to his opinion that they were all victims of his mother's
unconscious necromancy.
Mrs. Joyce continued. "You say you know nothing about it. Why not find
out something about it? Here is your mother. Study her."
"Why don't we have a sitting now?" exclaimed Miss Wood. "It would be fun
to see his face when the horns began to dance about."
Mrs. Ollnee looked a little worried. "Not now, Leo, I'm too upset. It's
been a terrible day for me. I haven't eaten a thing."
Mrs. Joyce rose. "You poor dear! Let's go get something. Come this
instant. You'll go, Mr. Ollnee."
His first impulse was to refuse, but as he studied his mother's pale
face and thought of the good effect of the outside air he relented.
"Yes, I'll go," he replied, ungraciously.
Miss Wood came over to him and tried to soften his mood. "I know how you
feel about all this, and I know how brutal a scientific sharp can be. My
professors were all against it. Just the same, it's a wonderful old
world; a good deal more wonderful than some of our teachers admit."
He did not reply to this, but stood watching his mother as she put on
her hat and wrap. Her whole expression had changed. Her face had lighted
up and her delicacy of feature and small, graceful hands denoted to him
as never before the woman of natural refinement and intelligence. It was
hard to consider her at the moment the victim of a brain disorder, and
yet--
Mrs. Joyce led the way down the creaking stairs, and Victor, following
in sullen silence, was surprised and a little daunted to find a
luxurious automobile waiting for them. He rebelled at the curb. "You go
on without me," he said, harshly. "I'll stay here till you come back."
"Oh no," exclaimed Mrs. Joyce. "Please come with us. Your mother will
not be happy without you."
Miss Wood remarked, humorously, "Never refuse a dinner or a ride in a
motor-car; that's my motto."
His mother timidly lifted her face. "Victor, Mrs. Joyce is my most loyal
friend. I owe her more than you know. I _wish_ you would come."
He yielded with a sense of stepping down, but as he found himself seated
beside Miss Wood and whirring swiftly up the street his inflexible
attitude softened. "For this one night I will follow; after that I
lead," he promised himself.
The girl mocked him with subtle intonation. "I am glad of any mystery
and romance which remains in this old world, and I never quarrel with
fate. If any one is disposed to exchange an autocar ride for so
intangible a thing as a voice, I trade."
A little later she reverted to his problem. "What right have you to pass
judgment on your mother without examining her? I was just as skeptical
as you are when I met her first, but she _forced_ me to believe. I am
perfectly certain that she would upset Doctor Boyden. If he would come
down quietly and sit with her she'd convince even him. She is a very
dear little woman, and we all love her."
Mrs. Joyce leaned over and spoke in his ear. "It is only through devoted
beings like your mother that the bereaved are assured of life
everlasting. She doesn't _tell_ me that my son is living beyond the
veil; _she brings him to me_. I hear his voice and touch his hand."
To this sort of thing he was forced to listen during their course down
the shining avenue, and it made the whole city as unreal as a dream.
When they rolled up to the wide portals of a towering hotel a new
anxiety presented itself. "Suppose mother should be recognized as we
enter? Suppose they arrest her here."
A realization of his own poverty and youth and general helplessness came
over him with crushing effect as he trod the hall, which seemed very
vast and splendid in his eyes. He was subdued, too, by the thought that
he had not silver enough in his pocket to fee the girl who took their
wraps. His resolution to fight, to earn not only his own living but to
rescue his mother, became fainter each moment. "Can it be that yesterday
I was behind the bat?" he asked himself. "Surely I must be dreaming."
He perceived another side to his mother's character. She seemed quite at
ease amid all this splendor, and accepted whatever Mrs. Joyce did for
her as something quite definitely her due.
There was no indication of the Sabbath in the gorgeous dining-room, and
nothing to show that sorrow or poverty existed in the world; and seeing
his mother's face flushed with pleasure, the perplexed youth relented a
little further. "This one night she may have, but it must be the last of
such entertainment on such terms."
There was in him beneath all this antagonism a kind of dignity and manly
strength which pleased Mrs. Joyce. She was glad to see him lighten up,
and she exerted herself to that end. "There now," she said, looking
about the room. "Let's forget all of our troubles. Let us suppose that
all our friends 'on the other side' are at dinner also."
Victor sat in silence what time his mother decided whether she would
have asparagus soup or consomme. It was his first experience with that
degree of wealth which takes no thought of price, and glancing at the
figures on the bill of fare his hair rose. Never in his life had he
eaten a meal which cost as much as this one order of soup, and the fact
that his mother gaily ordered the best indicated to him how deeply
indebted she already was to her patroness. "There must be some very
definite need which she supplies," he conceded, "or Mrs. Joyce would not
so gladly pay her bills."
At the same time his respect and admiration for his mother returned. As
the dinner went on her cheeks glowed with faint color. Her years of
trouble seemed to slip away from her. She took on youthful grace and
charm, glancing often at her handsome son with eyes of maternal pride
and content. "It is so good to have you here," she silently expressed.
He had never seen this care-free side of her, and the gayer she grew the
more alien, in a sense, she became. She was instinctively the lady, of
that he was assured, and though she could not follow Miss Wood in all of
her flights of fancy and allusion, she plainly showed unusual powers of
appreciation.
The talk also brought out the extraordinary intimacy of the three women.
It appeared that Mrs. Joyce and Mrs. Ollnee were inseparable, that she
often took his mother to the opera and to the theater, and as they
discussed various singers and actors, whose names alone he knew, his
sense of being suburban deepened. "Why does this vivid and cultured
woman seek my mother's society? For what reason does she lavish money
upon her? Is it because of her personal charm? No," he decided, "that
cannot be the reason." Beneath her cordial tone he thought he detected
the reserve of one who is being kind to a dependent. "She's being nice
to mother," he concluded, "because she thinks she's getting something
special from her. Mother is a freak, not a friend. She considers her a
kind of spiritual telephone."
Although Miss Wood devoted herself to the task of amusing him, and his
face lost some of its gravest lines, yet he could not be denoted a
careless youth, even when the wine came on. He was thinking too deeply
to be outwardly ready of retort. It was too sudden a change from the
pastoral air and quiet streets of Winona to be instantly assimilated. He
remained sullen.
His mother eyed him apprehensively but admiringly. "He looks like his
father," she whispered to Mrs. Joyce.
He would have been inhuman had he not responded to certain charms in
Miss Wood. She had a fine profile, he admitted, finer than that of any
girl he knew. Her eyes, too, were a little disturbing by reason of the
small wrinkles of laughter at the corners, but she irritated him. She
was perfectly sure of herself. Nothing that he did or failed to do
affected her in any other way apparently than to deepen her amusement.
Her manner seemed to say, "Wait a few days and see what a fool you'll
find yourself out to be. You're nothing but a great big country lad,
trying to be a philosopher, trying to live up to a rigid code of morals.
It's all a pose, a ludicrous attitude of boyish defiance."
She said nothing of this of course; on the contrary, she talked of
things in which he was interested, trying politely to meet him half way.
She was actually a year or two younger than he, but she gave off the air
of being five years older. She had explored immense tracts of human
life, or at least of social life, of which he had no knowledge, and this
came out in her casual references to New York and Paris. Her home was in
Los Angeles, but she was now staying with her aunt.
He lost his sullen reserve. The soup, the wine, the bird, and the maid
softened his stern mood. By the time the coffee came on he was talking
almost boyishly with his hostess and his face had lost its troubled
lines.
His perplexities came back as Mrs. Joyce passed two bills to the waiter
in payment for their dinner, and he watched from the corner of his eye
to see how much change came back. Two dollars! Eighteen dollars for four
dinners! "Great Scot!" he inwardly groaned. "It would take me a week to
earn our share of this meal!" And a returning sense of his mother's
subconscious iniquity reclad him with gloom.
The ride back to California Avenue was less festive, for Mrs. Joyce took
occasion to say: "My advice is this. Return to college and obtain your
degree. I will take care of your dear little mother."
"I can't do that," he said. "I've quit. There is no use talking about
that."
"You shouldn't take this newspaper attack too seriously," remarked Miss
Wood. "Reporters are always exposing mediums. It is quite habitual with
them, and besides, your mother has been through it before."
"Is that true?" he asked, with sharpened assault.
"Yes," Mrs. Ollnee admitted. "I've been attacked in this way twice."
"Since I have been grown up?"
"Yes; once since you went to Winona."
"I didn't know that. Why didn't you tell me?"
Mrs. Joyce interposed. "What was the use? You could have done nothing.
We who understand these matters make allowances for the reporter's
trade. He must earn a living some way."
As she said this Victor recalled the cynical close of the article.
"Probably the true-blue believer will condemn the detective and not the
culprit," the lines ran. "There are dupes so purblind, so infatuated
that nothing, not even the boldest chicanery can shake their faith;
nevertheless, a few will take this article for what it is, a full and
clear expose of a shrewd and conscienceless trickster." And yet, as he
faced these intelligent women, Victor could not think of them as being
deceived by open chicanery, much less could he admit for a moment that
his mother was capable of resorting to it.
It was a dramatic and moving experience for him to go from this
cushioned, splendid chariot back to the shabby little apartment which
was the only home in the wide world for either his mother or himself. He
was filled with a kind of rage at her, at fate, and at himself, and no
sooner were they inside the door than he turned upon her with a note of
resentful resolution in his voice.
"Mother, how could you let me in for all of this? Why did you send me to
college, knowing that sooner or later exposure must come?"
"I trusted the voices," she replied, "just as I must continue to trust
them in the future."
"Now, mother," he rejoined with a certain foreboding grimness of
inflection, "we've got to get right down to brass tacks on that
business. I can't go on any longer in ignorance of who I am and what you
are. I want to know all about you and all about my father. Who was my
father? What was he? Did he believe in this thing?"
Her eyes fell. "No, not while he was on this life's plane. Indeed, it
was my 'work' that--that separated us. He hated it and was very harsh
about it. But the first thing he did after he passed on was to come back
and tell me that I was right after all. He asked me to forgive him."
"Is that his picture up there on the wall? What did he do for a living?"
"He was a really fine mind, Victor; one of those men who might have been
eminent had they gone out into the world. He was a student and a
thinker, but he was not ambitious. He was content to be the principal of
a village school and live quietly; and we were very happy till The
Voices began."
"Did he know you had The Voices when he married you?"
"Yes, I told him all about them, but he only laughed at me. I suppose he
thought it was just a fancy on my part. Anyhow, he did not take them
seriously, and during our courtship they gave me freedom. My guide said
I need not sit for a while and father guarded me from all the evil ones
on that side who are so ready to rush in and take possession of a
medium. For two years I had no touch of 'the power,' and I really
thought it had all gone away from me. Then you came and I was very ill,
and father, my control, returned to tell me that you would be a great
man. 'Hereafter,' he said, 'I will direct you in the education of your
son.' Why, Victor, he named you. He said you should be called Victor
because you would overcome all opposition."
"Well, just how did your separation come about?"
"When my control began to demand things from me your father accused me
of playing tricks and sternly forbade any more of it. I tried not to go
into trance. I fought 'the power' and this angered father. He came upon
me so strong that I could do nothing with him. I heard The Voices all
the time and your father thought me crazy. I had what seemed like
epileptic fits. I seemed to lose my identity--but I didn't; I knew all
that was going on. It seemed as if I went out of my body while others
entered it and used it to torment and perplex your father. Then he
became convinced that I was abnormal in some way and experimented with
me--all in a very skeptical spirit--and gradually he lost his regard for
me. I became only 'a case of hysteria' to him. I could see him change
from day to day. He grew colder and more critical and more aloof all the
time. This made me so ill that I was unable to keep my feet--I grew old
rapidly, and another younger and prettier woman, one of his teachers,
gained the love I had lost and at last he went away with her."
There was a little silence before Victor was able to ask, "Where did he
go?"
"He went to Denver, and I never saw him again. He died not long after."
"Then did you take to making a living out of the ghost-room?"
"After your father left I asked my guides why they permitted him to
leave me, and they said it was considered necessary to keep me in 'the
work.' 'You were too happy,' they said. 'You are too valuable an
instrument to live out your life simply as wife and mother. You are now
to be devoted to higher aims.' Since then whenever I have tried to get
out of 'the work' they have brought me back. Oh, you don't know what a
clutch they have on me. They know my income to a dollar. They let me
have just enough to live on and to educate you, but they won't let my
rich friends provide me with an income. I must do their will exactly or
they punish me."
As she enlarged upon this phase of her life Victor was appalled by it.
Her madness--and madness it seemed to him--was now a settled and
specific part of her life. "How do they punish you?" he asked, after a
pause.
"They do not hesitate to throw me into convulsions, or make me do things
that rob me of my friends. They bring disaster upon me whenever I try to
walk my own road. Every investment I make on my own judgment they
defeat. Did you ever plague an ant or a bug by putting something in its
way, checking its advance, no matter in which direction it went?"