could listen. You just hear me--it was real. You ain't a sensitive.
You've followed knowledge and not influences, and it's going to be hard
for me to git this into you. So I'll tell you first how it would have
looked to you, and then how it looked to me. I'm not sayin' what she
gave wasn't something she got out of test books and memorandums,
because I don't know her people or yet how much she'd had to do with
them. It was the way it come out that impressed me. First place, she
didn't go into trance. That's a fake to impress dopes, nine times out
of ten. If you ever git anything real from me, you'll git it out of
half trance. Then she didn't feel around an' fish, an' neither did she
hit the bull's eye every time. She'd get the truth all tangled up. John
would say a true thing, that only _he_ knew, and she'd think she got it
from James. Her sitters were fine acknowledgers, especially the old
maid, and I could tell. That's how I would 'a' looked to you, and now
let me tell you how it struck me. You don't have to believe it.
"I was sittin' there just takin' it all in, when I began to get
influences. Now laugh; but you won't stop me. It never struck me so
strong in my life as it did right there. And it all come from Mrs.
Markham. It was like a sweet smell radiatin' from that room, and just
makin' me drunk. It was like--maybe you've heard John B. Gough speak.
Remember how he had you while you listened? Remember how you believed
like he did and felt everything was right and you could do anything?
Now that is as near like it as I can tell you and yet that _ain't_ it
by half. You ain't a sensitive. You can't git just what I mean.
"An' then _I_ begun to see. I can't tell you all; I was half out; but
just this for a sample: I had a sitter last week, an old lady; an' the
sittin' was a failure. Yes, I was fishin' and pumpin', but she was
close-mouthed an' suspicious. I got it out of her that she was worried
about her boy. I tried a bad love affair for a lead, an' there was
nothing doing. I tried bad habits and it was just as far away; and I
give it up and was thankful I got fifty cents out of her. Well, while I
sat there listenin' to Mrs. Markham, right into my mind came a
picture--the old lady leanin' over a young man--her pale and shaky and
him surprised an' mad,--and he held a pen in his hand, an' I got the
word 'forgery!' That's one of the things I saw while that influence
come from Mrs. Markham; and if you only knew how seldom I git anything
real nowadays, you'd be as crazy as me about her. I just had to use all
the force I've got to look stupid when the sitters went out."
Rosalie had talked on, oblivious to Dr. Blake's anxieties and feelings.
He sat there, the embodiment of disappointment.
"As perfect a case of auto-suggestion as I ever knew," his professional
mind was thinking. But he expressed in words his deeper thought:
"Then that line fails."
"I'm sorry, boy," responded Rosalie, "but I'm doin' my job straight,
and you wouldn't want it done any other way. And I feel you'll git her
somehow; if not this way, some other. And the longer the wait the
stronger the love, _I_ say. She don't seem any too happy, even if Mrs.
Markham does treat her well."
"Doesn't she?" he asked, his face lighting with a melancholy relief.
"Good symptom for you, ain't it? And I can't think of nothing else that
can be on her mind. But how that girl passes her days, I don't know. It
must be dull for her, poor little bird. She and Mrs. Markham ain't much
apart. She looks at Mrs. Markham like a dog looks at his master, she's
that fond of her. Seems to read a lot, and twice they've been out in
the evening--theater, or so the chauffeur said. We don't have no
private car. We hire one by the month from a garage. An' if I ever
liked a girl and wanted to see her happy, that's the one!"
Rosalie rose. "Must do some shoppin'. Can't say I hope for better news
next week, not the kind of good news you're looking for. But I'm hopin'
for good news in the end."
Dr. Blake remained sitting, his head dropped in depression on his
breast. Rosalie stooped to pat it with a motherly gesture.
"Just remember this," she said, "you love her and she loves you or I
miss my guess, an' there ain't no beatin' that combination. If I was
fakin' with you I wouldn't need no more than that to make me see your
two names in a ring. And remember this, too, boy! There never was
anything that turned out just the way you expected. You figure on it
twenty ways. It always beats you; and yet when you look back, you say,
'Of course; what a fool I was.' Good-by, boy--here next Tuesday at
three unless I tell you different by letter." Rosalie was gone.
Dr. Blake walked in the park that night until dawn broke over the city
roofs. And he drew out a dull and anxious existence,--shot and broken
with whims, fancies, all the irregularities of a lover,--during the
week in which he awaited Rosalie's next report.
VIII
THE FISH NIBBLES
Quietly, naturally, giving a preliminary word of direction to the maid
as she lifted the portières, Mrs. Markham entered the drawing room.
Pricking with a sense of impatience, tinctured by nervousness over his
own folly, Robert H. Norcross awaited her there. She stood a moment
regarding him; in that moment, the quick perception, veiled away by an
expression of thought, to which the railroad baron owed so much, took
her all in. Superficially, he saw a tall woman, approaching fifty, but
still vigorous and free from over-burdening flesh.
"Good evening; I am glad to see you," she said quietly. She had a low
voice and pleasing. He remembered then that he had failed to rise, so
intent had he been on her face; and he got to his feet in some
embarrassment. As she approached him, his mind, going from detail to
detail, noticed her powerful head, her Grecian nose, rising without
indentation from a straight forehead, her firm but pleasant mouth, her
large, light gray eyes which looked a little past him. Here was a
person on his own level of daring mental flight. He remembered only one
other woman who had struck him with the force of this one. That other
was an actress, supreme in her generation not so much for temperament
as for mind. As he looked over a reception crowd at her, intellect had
spoken to intellect; they had known each other. So Paula Markham struck
him on first sight.
He was about to speak, but she put in her word first.
"Do you come personally or professionally? I had an engagement for an
unknown visitor on professional business. Are you he? For if you are,
it would be better for you not to tell me your name--I am Mrs.
Markham."
"I came professionally," he said. He paused. The manner of Norcross, on
all first meetings, was timid and hesitating. It was one of his
unconscious tricks. Because of that timidity, new-comers, in trying to
put him at his ease revealed themselves to his shrewd observation. But
there was a real embarrassment at this meeting. He was approaching the
subject which had lain close to his imagination ever since three days
ago, when Bulger said carelessly that a woman had given him the address
of the best spook medium in the business.
"I want to know," he said, "all about--myself."
She laughed lightly as she seated herself in an old-fashioned
straight-back chair.
"If I should tell you that," she said, "I would give you the sum and
substance of human wisdom. That seems to me the greatest mystery of the
unknowable. No human being ever thoroughly understood any other human
being, I suppose,--and yet no human being knows himself. If you search
yourself, you find mystery. If you ask others, you find double mystery.
Perhaps that is the knowledge which is reserved for the Divine."
"That is true," responded Norcross. "That is true. But your spirits--"
"Not mine," she interrupted. "And perhaps not spirits, either. Though
they speak to me, I cannot say that they are real, any more than I can
tell that this table, these clothes"--her long, expressive, ringless
hand swept across the area of her skirt--"than you yourself, are real.
All reality and unreality may dwell in the mind. Though personally,"
she added, "I prefer to believe that this chair, these clothes, you, I,
are real. And if they are real, so are the Voices. At least, so I
believe."
This philosophy was past any power of Norcross for repartee; the
faculties which deal with such things had wasted in him during thirty
years in Wall Street. But the effect of her voice, her ladyhood, and
her command of this philosophy--those moved him.
"Will your voices tell me anything?" he asked, irrelevantly, yet coming
straight to the point.
"Impatience," she answered, "will not help you. The power bloweth where
it listeth. That impatience is one of the roads to trickery employed by
the frauds of--my profession."
A smile lifted the mustache of Norcross.
"You admit that there _are_ frauds in your profession, then?"
"Oh, dear, yes!" she smiled back at him. "It lends itself so easily to
fraud that the temptation among the little people must be
overwhelming--the more because trickery is often more accurate than
real revelation. I will confess to you that this is the rock upon which
my powers and my mission seem sometimes most likely to split. But I
console myself by thinking that all of us, great as well as small, must
be on the verge of it sometimes. Let me draw you a parallel. Perhaps
you know something of the old alchemists. They had laid hold on the
edge of chemistry. But because that truth came confused, because they
all had things by the wrong handle, a thousand of them confused truth
with error until, in the end, they did not know right from wrong. This
force in which you and I are interested is a little like chemistry--it
may be called mental and spiritual chemistry. But because it deals with
the unseen, not with the seen, it is a thousand times more uncertain
and baffling. We have ears, eyes, touch--a great equipment--to perceive
gold, silver, stones, trees, water. But we have only this mind, a
mystery even to ourselves, to perceive an idea, a concept. I wish that
I could express it better"--she broke off suddenly--"and very likely
I'm boring you--but when your whole soul is full of a thing it _will_
overflow." She smiled upon Norcross, as though for sympathy. If he gave
it, his face did not betray him.
"Then you say," returned Norcross with one of his characteristic shifts
to childlike abruptness, "that you never faked?"
Mrs. Markham, as though daring him to provoke her by his
forthrightness, leaned forward and regarded him with amusement on her
lips. "Men are only boys," she said. "My dear sir--I could almost say
'my dear boy'--if I had, would I admit it? You must take me as I am and
form your own conclusions. I shall not help you with that, even though
I admit to you that I don't care very much what your conclusions are.
"To be serious," she added, "it is not a pleasant suspicion to hear of
one's self. Now take yourself--you are a man of large practical
affairs--"
Norcross leaned forward a trifle, as though expecting revelation to
begin. She caught the motion.
"Don't think I'm telling you _that_ from any supernormal source," she
said. "That's my own intelligence--my woman's intuition if you like to
call it so. Your air, your ineptness to understand philosophy, show
that you are not in one of the learned professions, and it is easy to
see, if I may make so bold"--here she smiled a trifle--"that you are no
ordinary person. You have the air of great things about you. Well, if I
should raise suspicion against your business integrity and your
methods, it would hurt for a moment, even if there were truth in it. In
fairness, that is so, is it not?"
"I have to beg your pardon, of course," said Norcross, grown easier in
his manner. "But you must remember that your profession has to prove
itself--that they're all accused of fraud."
"Now that you have apologized," said she, "I will prove that I have
accepted the apology by answering you direct. I am not a fraud. I have
been able to afford not to be. Still, I have a little sympathy with
those who are. Did you ever consider," she went on, "that no fraud
invents anything; that he is only imitating something genuine? Perhaps
it may shake whatever faith you have in me if I tell you whatever these
people profess to do has been done genuinely and without possibility of
fraud."
"Even bringing spirits from a cabinet?" he asked. Just as he spoke that
question, an electric bell rang somewhere to the rear of the
drawing-room. Mrs. Markham sat unmoving for an instant, as though
considering either the sound or his question. The bell tinkled no more.
After a moment, she smiled again.
"You must know more of all these things before I can answer your
question. Haven't we talked enough? Wouldn't it be better, in your
present condition of suspicion, if I try to see what we can do without
seeming any further to inspect you? For you must know that long
preliminary conversation is a stock method with frauds and fakirs."
Norcross's breath came a little faster, and a curious change passed for
a second over his face--a falling of all the masses and lines. Mrs.
Markham rose, sat by the table, under the reading-lamp, and shaded her
eyes with her hand. She spoke now in a different tone, softer and less
inflected.
[Illustration: NORCROSS'S BREATH CAME A LITTLE FASTER]
"I shall probably not go into trance," she said. "That is rare with me,
rare with anyone, though often assumed for effect. Of you, I ask only
that you remain quiet and passive. I'd like less light."
Norcross shot a glance of quick suspicion at her as he rose, reached
for the old-fashioned gas chandelier, and turned the jets down to tiny
points.
"Oh, dear no!" spoke Mrs. Markham, "not so low as that--this is no dark
seance. I merely meant that the lights are too strong for a pair of
sensitive eyes. I feel everything when I am in this condition. Would
you mind sitting a little further away? Thank you. I think that's
right. Please do not speak to me until I speak, and do not be
disappointed if I tell you nothing."
For five minutes, no sound broke the silence in Mrs. Markham's
drawing-room, except the hiss of a light, quick breath and the intake
and outgo of a heavier, slower one. And so suddenly, with such
smothered intensity, that Norcross started in his seat, Mrs. Markham's
voice emitted the first quaver of a musical note. She held it for a
moment, before she began to hum over and over three bars of an old
tune--"Wild roamed an Indian maid, bright Alfaretta." Thrice she hummed
it, still sitting with her hand over her eyes.--"Wild roamed an Indian
maid--" Then silence. But now, the breath of Norcross was coming more
heavily, and the masses of his face had still further fallen. After an
interval, Mrs. Markham spoke, in a low, even tone:
"It is Lallie."
Another period of heavy silence.
"I cannot see her nor hear her speak. Martha, my control, is speaking
for her. But Martha shows me the picture of a child--a little girl in
an old-fashioned dress. And I think she is saying that name--Lallie."
The silence again, so that when Norcross moistened his dry lips with
his tongue the slight smack seemed like the crackle of a fire.
"I see it more clearly now and I understand. The child gave her that
name, but someone else used it for a love name. It was just between
those two." The rest came in scattered sentences, with long pauses
between--"I hear that song again--it was her favorite--I understand now
why it comes--she was singing it when--Yes, you are the man--when you
told her--She calls you Bobbert--and now I cannot see."
A bead of perspiration had appeared so suddenly on the forehead of
Norcross that it had the effect of bursting from a pore. He was on his
feet, was pacing the floor in his jerky little walk. When, after one
course of the drawing-room, he turned back, Mrs. Markham had taken her
hand from her eyes, and was facing him.
"Oh, why did you do that?" she asked. "It has its effect on me--you do
not know how much!" Her manner spoke a smothered irritation. "I shall
not see Lallie to-night. And she was very near."
As though something had clicked and fallen into place within him,
Norcross straightened and stiffened, controlled the relaxed muscles of
his face, flashed his eyes on Mrs. Markham.
"Might I ask some questions?" he said.
"You must sit quietly," she answered, "and though I can never see so
well after the first contact breaks, Martha may speak for you. Sit as
you did, and wait for me." Norcross walked at his nervous, hurried
little pace back to his seat on the sofa. His face was quite controlled
now, and his sharp eyes held all their native cunning. That grip on
himself grew, as he waited for the inert seeress to speak again.
"Martha says, 'I will try,'" she gave out finally. "Quick--with your
question--with your lips, not your mind--I am not strong enough now."
"What was Lallie's real name?"
"Helen."
"Her other name?"
A pause, then:
"Martha is silent. You are testing me. Tell something you want to
know--even advice."
"Was there ever anyone else?"
A pause again, then:
"Never. She loved you wholly. She was angry over a little thing, just
jealousy, during that last quarrel. She had already forgiven. It was
only a girl's whim. Do you want advice?"
Norcross thrusted obliquely from the corner of his eye at Mrs. Markham
and looked down at the floor.
"Ask her if I shall sell," he said.
The answer came so suddenly that it overlapped the last words of his
sentence.
"Martha says that she is going away." No more for two silent minutes;
no more until Mrs. Markham dropped her hand from her eyes, turned to
Norcross, and said in a normal, sprightly tone:
"It is all over for this evening. I suppose the trouble lay in your
last question. I am sorry--if you came here looking for business
advice--that you got only the things of the affections. To your old
love affairs, I had an unusually quick response to-night." She leaned
heavily back in her chair. "Excuse me if I seem tired. There is a kind
of inner strain about this which you cannot know--a strain at the core.
It does not affect the surface, but it makes you languid." Yet her
manner, as she threw herself back, invited him to linger.
"I shall not ask you," she went on, "whether the things I told you
to-night are true. We all have our human vanities in our work; we like
to hear it praised. That is one reason why I do not ask. Then I know
without your confirmation that what I told you was true. When the
control comes as clearly and strongly as it did for a few minutes
tonight,--before you interrupted by rising--the revelations are always
accurate and true. The details I gave you are trivial. That is
generally a feature of a first sitting. The scholars have found an
explanation of that phenomenon, and I am inclined to agree with them.
If I were talking to you over a telephone and you were not sure of my
voice, how should I identify myself? By some trivial incident of our
common experience. For example, suppose I were to call you up
to-morrow. How should I identify myself? Somewhat like this, probably:
'You tried to turn the gas out completely, when I wanted it only
lowered in order to save my eyes.' Wouldn't that identify me to you?"
she paused as for an answer.
"As nearly as you could over a telephone wire," he answered. "You're a
marvelously clever woman, to think of that," he added. Mrs. Markham
answered, on the wings of a light laugh:
"If I appear at all clever by contrast with what you expected to find,
it is because I have not let my mind dwell in a half-world, as have so
many others of my profession. That is the tendency. I have seen no
reason why I should not combat it. I believe, too, that I am the
stronger for it in my work. What was I saying? Oh, yes--about the first
contact. Probably the last thought of the disembodied, upon assuming
the trance state--for I believe that the sender of these messages, like
the receivers, have to enter an abnormal condition--is to prove their
identity. That is only natural, is it not? Would not you do the same?
Think. And what do they have to offer? One of those intimate memories
of years past which linger so long in the mind. Take me for example.
What should I offer to--well, to that one among the disembodied who
means most to me? An adventure in stealing cream from a dairy house!"
As though she were carried away by this memory, her face grew soft and
serious. With an outward sweep of her hands and a quick "but then!" she
resumed:
"The best judges of character--and you must be such a one--make their
mistakes. Why did you ask that question?"
Norcross, glib and effective as his tongue could be when he directed or
traded, found now no better answer than:
"Because I wanted to know, I suppose."
"Were this Helen in the flesh--young and inexperienced as she
was--would you expect her to give you advice in any large affair of
business--would she be basically interested in it? Interested because
it is yours and she loves you, perhaps--but basically? We have no proof
that natures change out there. I suppose that isn't all, either. Is
she, keeping her soul for you in a life which I hope is better--is she
interested in whether or no you make a little more money and position?
I can conceive only one condition in which she would mention your
business. If you were at a crossroads--if great danger or great
deliverance hung on your decision--she might sense that. I think they
must get it, by some process to which we are blind, from other
disembodied spirits."
"Suppose, then, that--Martha I think you call her--had brought some old
business associate. Would he have answered me?"
"Perhaps. But that does not really explain what is in your mind. If
this business matter which perplexes you were so vital, don't you
suppose that some one of those very associates would have rushed to
speak, instead of a dead love? In that way, I think I can construct an
answer--provided you ask that question in good faith. It is, probably,
not very important whether you sell or no."
Mrs. Markham rose on this. Norcross caught the hint in her manner, and
rose with her. A little "oh!" escaped her, and her face lighted.
"I know who you are, now!" she said. "You are Robert H. Norcross of the
Norcross lines!"
Norcross started.
"Please do not think I got _that_ by any supernormal means!" she added
quickly. "I mention it only to be frank with you. From the moment I saw
you, I was perplexed by a memory and a resemblance. Then, too, I caught
the air of big things about you. That attitude which you have just
taken solved it all. It is the counterpart of your photograph in last
Sunday's _Times_--the full-page snap shot. I must be frank with you or
you will not believe me."
The mustache of Norcross raised just a trifle, and his eyes glittered.
"Passing over what I may think of your revelations," he said, "you're a
remarkable woman."
"If you're coming again," said Mrs. Markham, "perhaps you'd better not
delve into my personality. It interferes. Understand, I'm really
flattered to have a man like you take notice of this work. That's why I
ask that your notice shan't be personal. At least not yet."
"Since this is a--a--professional relation, may I ask how much I owe
you?"
"My price is twenty-five dollars a sitting--for those who can afford
it."
Norcross drew out his wallet, handed Mrs. Markham three bills. Without
looking at them, she dropped them on the table beside her. "You see,"
she went on as though her mind were still following their discussion,
"I don't like to talk much with my--patients. I never can know when I
may unconsciously steal from what they tell me."
At the entrance, Norcross hesitated, as though hoping for something
more than a good-night. No more than that did she give him, however. He
himself was obliged to introduce the subject in his mind. "If I should
come again, would Helen tell me more?"
"Perhaps. From the excellent result to-night I should call it likely."
"Then may I come again?" His voice broke once, as with eagerness.
"Certainly. Will you make an appointment?"
"Tuesday night?"
"I had an engagement for Tuesday. Could you come as well on Friday?"
And though it meant postponing a directors' meeting, he answered
promptly:
"Very well. Say Friday at eight."
And now he was in his automobile. He settled himself against the
cushions and held the attitude, without motion. For five minutes he sat
so, until the chauffeur, who had been throwing nervous backward glances
through the limousine windows, asked:
"I beg your pardon, sir, did you say 'home'?"
"Yes, home," responded Norcross. And even on those words, his voice
broke again.