Lindsay drove directly from the Quinanog station to the Quinanog Arms.
The Arms proved to be a tiny mid-Victorian hotel, not an inexact
replica--and by no means a discreditable one--of many small rustic
hotels that he had seen in England and France. Indeed Quinanog, as he
caught it in glimpses, might have been one part of France or one part of
England--that region which only the English Channel prevents from being
the same country. The motor, which conducted him from the station to the
Arms, drove on roads in which high wine-glass elms made Gothic arches;
between wide meadowy stretches, brilliant with buttercups, daisies,
iris; unassertive, well-proportioned houses with roomy vegetable plots
and tiny patches here and there of flower garden. He arrived at so early
an hour that the best of the long friendly day stretched before him. He
felt disposed to spend it merely in reading and smoking. He had plenty
to smoke; he had seen to that himself in New York. And he had plenty to
read; Spink Sparrel had seen to that in Boston. The bottom of one of his
trunks was covered with Lutetia Murray's works.
But although he smoked a great deal, he did not read at all. Until
luncheon he merely followed his impulses. Those impulses took him a
little way down the main street, which ran between comfortable, white
colonial houses, set back from the road. He walked through the tiny
triangular Common. He visited the little, poster-hung post-office;
looked into the big neatly arranged general store; strolled back again.
His impulses then led him to explore the grounds of the Arms and
deposited him finally in the hammock on the side porch. After a simple
and very well-cooked luncheon, his languor broke into a sudden
restlessness. "Where is the Murray place?" he asked of the proprietor of
the Arms, whose name, the letterhead of the Arms stationery stated, was
Hyde.
"The Murray place!" Hyde repeated inquiringly. He was a long,
noncommittal-looking person with big pale blue eyes illuminating a sandy
baldness. "Oh, the _Murray_ place! You mean the old Murray place."
"I mean the house, whichever and wherever it is, that Lutetia Murray,
the author, used to live in."
"Oh, sure! I get you. You see it's been empty for such a long spell that
we forget all about it. The old Murray place is on the road to West
Quinanog."
"It isn't occupied, you say?"
"Lord, no! Hasn't been lived in since--well, since Lutetia Murray died.
And that was--let me see--" Hyde cast a reflective eye upward. "Ten,
eleven, twelve--oh, fifteen or twenty, I should say. Yes, all of fifteen
years."
"Does it still belong in the Murray family?"
"Lord bless your soul, no. There hasn't been a Murray around these parts
since--well, since Lutetia Murray died."
"Who owns it now?"
"The Turners. They bought it when it came up for sale after Miss
Murray's death."
"Well, weren't there any heirs?"
"There was a niece--her brother's little girl. They had to sell the
place and everything in it. There never _was_ a sale in Quinanog like
that. Why, folks say that the mahogany would bring fancy prices in New
York nowadays."
"Didn't they get as much as they should have?" Lindsay asked idly.
"Oh Lord, no! And they found her estate was awful involved, and the
debts et up about all the auction brought in."
"What became of the little girl?"
"Some cousins took her."
"Where is she now?"
"Never heard tell."
"Has anybody ever lived in the Murray place since the family left?"
"No, I believe not."
"Is it to let?"
"Yes, and for sale."
"Well, why hasn't it let or sold?"
"Oh, I dunno exactly. It's a great big barn of a place. Kinda
ramshackle, and of course it's off the main-traveled road. You'd need a
flivver, at least, to live there nowadays. And there ain't a single
modern improvement in it. No bathroom, nor electric lights, not set
tubs, nor any of the things that women like. No garage neither."
"Every disability you quote makes it sound all the better to me,"
Lindsay commented. He meditated a moment. "I'd like to go over and look
at it this afternoon. Is there anyone here to drive me?"
"Yes, Dick'll take you in the runabout." Hyde appeared to meditate in
his turn, and he cocked an inquiring eye in Lindsay's direction. "You
wasn't thinking of hiring the place, was you?"
Lindsay laughed. "I should say I wasn't. No, I just wanted to look at
it."
"I was going to say," Hyde went on, "that it's a very pleasant location.
City folks always think it's a lovely spot. If you was thinking of
hiring it, my brother's the agent."
Lindsay laughed again. "Hiring a house is about as far from my plans at
present as returning to France."
"Well," Hyde commented dryly, "judging from the way the Quinanog boys
feel, I guess I know just about how much you want to do that."
"How soon can we go to the Murray place?" Lindsay inquired.
"Now--as far as Dick's concerned."
"By the way," Hyde dropped, as he turned toward the garage, "the Murrays
called the place Blue Medders."
"Blue Meadows," Lindsay repeated aloud. And to himself, "Blue Meadows."
And again, though wordlessly, "Blue Meadows." It was apparent that he
liked the sound and the image the sound evoked.
The runabout chugged to Blue Meadows in less than ten minutes. The road
branched off from the State highway at the least frequented place in its
ample stretch; ran for a long way to West Quinanog. On this side road,
houses were few and they grew fewer and fewer until they left Blue
Meadows quite by itself. Its situation, though solitary, was not lonely.
It sat near the road. Perhaps, Lindsay decided, it would have been too
near if stately wine-glass elms, feathered with leaves all along their
lissom trunks, in collaboration with a high lilac hedge now past its
blooming, had not helped to sequester it. From the street, the house
showed only a roof with two capacious chimneys, the upper story of its
gray clapboarded facade.
Dick, a gangling freckled youth, slowed down the machine as if in
preparation for a stop. "I've got the key," he volunteered, "if you want
to go in."
Until that moment Lindsay had entertained no idea of going in. But
Dick's words fired his imagination. "Thanks, I think I will."
Dick handed over the long, delicately wrought key. He made no move to
follow Lindsay out of the car. "If you don't mind," he said, "I'll run
down the road to see a cousin of mine. How soon before you'll want to
start back?"
"Oh, give me half an hour or so," Lindsay decided carelessly.
The runabout chugged into the green arch which imprisoned the distance.
Alone, Lindsay strolled between lilac bushes and over the sunken flags
which led to the front door. Then, changing his mind, he made an
appraising tour about the outside of the place.
Blue Meadows was a big old house: big, so it seemed to his amateur
judgment, by an incredible number of rooms; and old--and here his
judgment, though swift, was more accurate--to the time of two hundred
years. Outside, it had all the earmarks of Colonial architecture--plain
lines, stark walls, the windows, with twenty-four lights, geometrically
placed; but its lovely lines, its beautiful proportions, and the soft
plushy nap which time had laid upon its front clapboardings mitigated
all its severities. The shingles of the roof and sides were
weather-beaten and gray, the blinds a deep old blue. At one side jutted
an incongruous modern addition; into the second story of which was set a
galleried piazza. At the other side stretched an endless series of
additions, tapering in size to a tiny shed.
"This is Lutetia's house!" Lindsay stopped to muse. "Is it true that I
spent two years with the French Army? Is it true that I served two more
with the American Army? Oh, to think you didn't live to see all that,
Lutetia!"
A lattice arched over the doorway and on it a big climbing rose was just
coming into bud. The beautiful door showed the pointed architrave, the
leaded side panels, the fanlight, the engaged columns, of Colonial
times. It resisted the first attack of the key, but yielded finally to
Lindsay's persuasion. He stepped into the hall.
It was a rectangular hall, running straight to the back of the house.
Pairs of doors, opposite each other, gaped on both sides. At the left
arose a slender straight stairway, mahogany-railed. Lindsay strolled
from one room to the other, opening windows and blinds. They were big
square rooms, finished in the conventional Colonial manner, with
fireplaces and fireplace cupboards. The wallpaper, faded and stained,
was of course quite bare of pictures and ornaments. He stopped to
examine the carving on the white, painted panels above the
fireplace--garlands of flowers caught with torches and masks.
Smiling to himself, Lindsay returned to the hall. "Oh, Lutetia, I should
like to have seen you here!" he remarked wordlessly.
Behind the stairway, at the back, appeared another door. He opened it
into darkness. Fumbling in his pocket, he produced a box of matches,
lighted his way through the blackness; again opened windows and
shutters. This proved to be the long back room so common in Colonial
homes; running the entire width of the house. There were two fireplaces.
One was small, with a Franklin stove. The other--Lindsay calculated that
it would take six-foot logs. Four well-grown children, shoulder to
shoulder, could have walked into it. This room was not entirely empty.
In the center--by a miracle his stumbling progress had just avoided
it--was a long table of the refectory type. Lindsay studied the position
of the two fireplaces. He examined the ceiling. "You threw the whole lot
of little rooms together to make this big room, Lutetia. You're a lady
quite of my own architectural taste. I, too, like a lot of space."
He continued his explorations. From one side of the long living-room
extended kitchen, laundry; servants' rooms and servants' dining-room; an
endless maze of butteries, pantries, sheds. Lindsay gave them short
shrift. At the other side, however, lay a little half-oval room, the
first floor of that Victorian addition which he had marked from the
outside.
"Oh, Lutetia, Lutetia, how could you, how could you?" he burst out at
first glance. "To add this modern bit to that fine Colonial stateliness!
Perhaps we're not kindred souls after all."
Hugging the wall of this room and leading to the second floor was a
stairway so narrow that only one person could mount it at a time.
Lindsay proved this to his own satisfaction by ascending it. It opened
into a big back room of the main house, the one with the galleried
piazza. Lindsay opened all the windows here; and then went rapidly from
room to room, letting in the June sunshine.
They were all empty, of course--and yet, in a dozen plaintive
ways--faded wall spaces, which showed the exact size of pictures, nails
with carpet tufts still clinging to them, a forgotten window shade or
two--they spoke eloquently of habitation. Indeed, the whole place had a
friendly atmosphere, Lindsay reflected; there was none of the cold, dead
connotation of most long-empty houses. This old place was spiritually
warm, as though some reflection of a long-ago vivid life still hung
among its shadows. From the dust, the stains, the cobwebs, it might have
been vacant for a century. From the welcoming warmth of its quiet rooms,
it might have been vacant but for a day.
Through the back windows, Lindsay looked down onto what must once have
been a huge rectangle of lawn; and near the house, what must once have
been an oval of flower garden. The lawn, stretching to a stone
wall--beyond which towered a chaos of trees--was now knee-deep in
timothy-grass; the garden had reverted to jungle. He studied the garden.
Close to the house, an enormous syringa bush heaped into a mountain of
fragrant snow. Near, a smoke-bush was just beginning to bubble into
rounds of blood-scarlet gauze. Strangled rosebushes showed yellow or
crimson. Afar an enormous patch of tiger lilies gave the effect of a
bizarre, orchidous tropical group. The rest was an indiscriminate
early-summer tangle of sumac; elderberry; bayberry; silver birches; wild
roses; daisies; buttercups; and what would later be Queen Anne's lace
and goldenrod. From a back corner window, it seemed to him that he
caught a glint of water; but he could not recapture it from any other
point of view. However, he lost all memory of this in a more affording
discovery. For the front windows gave him the reason of the name, Blue
Meadows. Across the road stretched a series of meadows, all bluish
purple with blooming iris.
Lindsay contemplated this charming prospect for a long interval.
"And now, Lutetia," he suddenly turned and addressed the empty rooms, "I
want to find _your_ room. Which of these six was it?"
Retracing his steps, he went from room to room until, many times, he had
made a complete survey of the second floor. He crossed and recrossed his
own trail, as the excitement of the quest mounted in him.
"Ah!" he exclaimed aloud, "here it is! You can't escape your soul-mate,
Lutetia."
It was not because the room was so much bigger than the rest that he
made this decision; it was only because it was so much more quaint. At
one side it merged, by means of a slender doorway, with the galleried
piazza. From it, by means of that tiny flight of stairs, Lutetia could
have descended to the first floor of that mid-Victorian addition. "I
take it all back, Lutetia," he approved. "Middle of the nineteenth
century or not, it's a wonder--this combination." At the back of
Lutetia's room was a third door; as slender as the door leading to the
gallery, but much lower; not four feet high. Lindsay pushed it open,
crawled on hands and knees through it. He had of course, on his first
exploration, entered the small room into which it led. But he had gone
in and out without careful examination; it had seemed merely a
four-walled room. Coming into it, however, from Lutetia's bedroom, it
suddenly acquired character.
The walls were papered in white. And on the mid-Victorian dado scarcely
legible now, he suddenly discovered drawings. Drawings of a curious
character and of a more curious technique. He followed their fluttery
maze from wall to wall--a flight of little beings, winged at the
shoulders and knees, with flying locks and strange finlike hands and
feet; fanciful, comic, tender.
"Oh!" Lindsay emitted aloud. "Ah!" And in an instant: "I see! This room
belonged to that child Hyde spoke of."
He ascended to the garret. This was of course the big storeroom of the
Colonial imagination. It too was quite empty. At one spot a
post--obviously not a roof-support--ran from floor to ceiling. Lindsay
gazed about a little unseeingly. "I wonder what that post was for?" he
questioned himself absently. After a while, "What's become of that
child?" he demanded of circumambient space.
As though this offered food for reflection, he descended by means of the
main stairway to the lower floor; sat on the doorsteps a while. He
mused--gazing out into the green-colored, sweet-scented June afternoon.
After an interval he arose and repeated his voyage of exploration.
Again he was struck with the friendly quality of the old place. That
physical dampness, which long vacant houses hold in solution, seemed
entirely to have disappeared before the flood of June sunshine. The
spiritual chill, which always accompanies it--that sinister quality so
connotative of congregations of evil spirits--he again observed was
completely lacking. As he emerged from one room to enter another, it
seemed to him that the one back of him filled with--_companionship_, he
described it to himself. As he continued his explorations, it seemed to
him that the room he was about to enter would offer him not ghostly but
human welcome. That human welcome did not come, of course. Instead,
there surged upon him the rich odors of the lilacs and syringas; the
staccato greetings of the birds.
After a while he went downstairs again. Sitting in the front doorway, he
fell into a rich revery.
This was where Lutetia Murray wrote the books which had so intrigued his
boyish fancy. Mentally he ran over the list: _The Sport of the
Goddesses_, _The Weary Time_, _Mary Towle_, _Old Age_, _Intervals_,
_With Pitfall and with Gin_, _Cynthia Ware_-- Details came up before his
mental vision which he had entirely forgotten and now only half
remembered; dramatic moments; descriptive passages; conversational
interludes; scenes; epigrams.... He tried to imagine Lutetia Murray at
Blue Meadows. The picture which, in college, he had cut from a
book-house catalogue, flashed before him; he had found it among his
papers. The figure was standing.... He had looked at it only yesterday,
but his masculine observation retained no details of the gown except
that it left her neck and arms bare. The face was in profile. The
curling hair rose to a high mass on her head. The delicate features were
_mignonne_, except for the delicious, warm, lusciously cut mouth-- Was
she blonde or brunet he wondered. She died at forty-five. To David
Lindsay at twenty-two, forty-five had seemed a respectable old age. To
David Lindsay at twenty-eight, it seemed almost young. She was dead, of
course, when he began to read her. Oh, if he could only have met her! It
was a great pity that she had died so young. Her work--he had made a
point of this in his thesis--had already swung from an erratic, highly
colored first period into a more balanced, carefully characterized
second period; was just emerging into a third period that was the union
of these two; big and rounded and satisfying. But death had cut that
development short. In the last four years Lindsay had seen a great deal
of death and often in atrocious form. He had long ago concluded that he
had thought on the end of man all the thoughts that were in him. But
now, sitting in the scented warmth of Lutetia's trellised doorway, he
found that there were still other thoughts which he could think.
* * * * *
The runabout chugged up the road presently. "Ben waiting long?" the
freckled Dick asked with a cheery shamelessness.
"No, I've been looking the house over. Wonderful old place, isn't it?"
"Don't care much for it myself," Dick answered. "I don't like anything
old--old houses or that old truck the summer folks are always buying.
Things can't be too new or up-to-date for me."
Lindsay did not appear at first to hear this; he was still bemused from
the experiences of the afternoon. But as they approached the Arms, he
emerged from his daze with a belated reply. "Well, I suppose a lot of
people feel the way you do," he remarked vaguely. "Mr. Hyde tells me
that the Murray place hasn't been let for fifteen years. I expect the
rest of the people around here don't like old houses."
"Oh, that ain't the reason the Murray house hasn't let," Dick explained
with the scorn of rustic omniscience. "They say it's haunted."
* * * * *
"What rent do they ask for the Murray house?" Lindsay asked Hyde that
evening.
Hyde scratched the back of his head. His face contracted with that
mental agony which afflicts the Yankee when an exact statement is
demanded of him. "Well, I shouldn't be surprised if you could get it for
two hundred dollars the season," he finally brought out.
Lindsay considered, but apparently not Hyde's answer; for presently he
came out with a different question. "Why do they say it's haunted?"
Hyde emitted a short contemptuous laugh. "Did you ever hear of any house
in the country that's been empty for a number of years that worn't
considered haunted?"
"No," Lindsay admitted. "I am disappointed, though. I had hoped you
would be able to tell me about the ghost."
"Well, I can't," Hyde asserted scornfully, "nor nobody else neither."
The two men smoked in silence.
After a while Lindsay made the motions preliminary to rising. He knocked
the ashes out of his pipe; put his pipe in his pocket; withdrew his feet
from their comfortable elevation on the piazza rail. Finally he
assembled his full height on the floor, but not without a prolonged
stretching movement. "Well," he said, halfway through the yawn, "I guess
you can tell that brother of yours that I'm going to hire the Murray
house for the season."
Hyde was equally if not more _degage_. He did not move; nor did he
change his expression. "All right," he commented without enthusiasm,
"I'll let him know. How soon would you like to go in, say?"
"As soon as I can buy a bed." Lindsay disappeared through the doorway.
* * * * *
Two days later Lindsay found himself comfortably settled at Blue
Meadows. Upstairs--he had of course chosen Lutetia's room--was a cot and
a bureau of soft wood. Downstairs was a limited assortment of cheap
china; cheaper cutlery; the meagerest possible cooking equipment.
But there was an atmosphere given to Lindsay's room by Lutetia's own
picture hanging above the bureau. And another to the living-room by
Lutetia's own works--a miscellaneous collection of ugly-proportioned,
ugly-colored, late-nineteenth-century volumes--ranged on the broad shelf
above the fireplace; by Lindsay's writing materials scattered over the
refectory table. Economical as he had been inside, he had exploded into
extravagance outside. A Gloucester hammock swung at the back. A
collection of garden materials which included a scythe, a spade, a
sickle, a lawn-mower, and a hose filled one corner of the barn.
Already--his back still complained of the process--he had cut the
spacious lawn.
He was at one and the same time sanely placid and wildly happy.
Every morning he awoke with the sun and the birds. Adapting himself with
an instant spiritual content to the fact that he was no longer in France
and would not have to fly, he turned over to take another nap. An hour
or two later, he was up and eating his self-prepared breakfast. The rest
of the day was reading Lutetia; musing on Lutetia; "scything" or
"sickling," as he called it in his letters to Spink, in the garden;
reflecting on Lutetia; exploring the neighborhood on foot; meditating on
Lutetia; reading and rereading the mass of Spink's data on Lutetia;
hosing the garden; making notes on Spink's data on Lutetia and thinking
of his notes on Spink's data on Lutetia. He awoke in the morning with
Lutetia on his mind. He fell asleep at night with Lutetia in his heart.
He had come to realize that Lutetia, the author, was even better than he
had supposed her. His college thesis had described her merely as the
Mrs. Gaskell of New England. Now, mentally, he promoted her to its Jane
Austen. His youth had risen to the lure of her color and fecundity, but
his youngness had not realized how rich she was in humor; how wise; what
a tenderness for people informed her careful, realistic detail. It was a
triumph to find her even better than the flattering dictum of his boyish
judgment.
Exploring Lutetia's domain gave results only second in satisfaction to
exploring Lutetia's mind. It was obvious at his first inspection that
the garden had once stretched contrasting glories of color and perfume.
A careful study from the windows was even more productive than a close
survey. There, definitely, he could trace the remains of flower-plots;
pleached paths; low hedges and lichened rocks. Resurrecting that garden
would be an integral part of the joy of resurrecting Lutetia. By this
time also, he had explored the barn. There, a big roomy lower floor
sustained only part of a broken stairway. The equally roomy upper floor
seemed, from such glimpses as he could get below, to be piled with
rubbish. Some day, he promised himself, he would clean it out. Beyond,
and to the right of the barn, bounded by the stone wall, scrambled a
miniature wilderness. That wilderness evaded every effort of
exploration. Only an axe could clear a trail there. Another day he would
tackle the wilderness. But in the meantime he would devote himself to
garden and lawn; in the meantime also loaf and invite his soul. After
all, that was his main reason for coming to Quinanog. Whenever he
thought of this, he took immediately to the Gloucester hammock.
Every morning he walked briskly over the long mile of road, shaded with
wine-glass elms, slashed with vistas of pasture, pond, and brook which
lay between Blue Meadows and the Quinanog post-office. When he had
inquired for his mail--usually he had none--he strolled over to the
general store and made his few simple purchases. He had followed this
routine for ten days before it occurred to him that he had not seen a
newspaper since he settled himself at Blue Meadows. "I'll let it go that
way, I guess," he said to himself. He noticed at first with a little
embarrassment and then with amusement that the groups in the post-office
waiting for mail, the customers at the general store, were all quietly
watching him. And one morning this floated to him from behind a pile of
cracker boxes:
"He's the nut that's taken the Murray place. Lives all alone--batching
it. Some sort of highbrow."
Gradually, however, he made acquaintance. Silas Turner, who owned the
next farm to Blue Meadows, offered him a ride one morning on the road.
Out of a vague conversation on the weather and real estate, Mr. Turner
dropped one interesting fact. He had known Lutetia Murray. This
revelation kept Lindsay chatting for half an hour while Mr. Turner
spilled a mass of uncorrelated details. Such as Miss Murray's
neighborliness; the time her cow ran away and Art Curtis brought it
back; how Miss Murray admired Mis' Turner's beach plum jelly so much
that Mis' Turner always made some extra just for her. As they parted he
let fall dispassionately: "She was a mighty handsome woman. Fine
figure!" He added, still dispassionately but with an effect somehow of
enthusiastic conviction, "She kept her looks to the last day of her
life."
Useless, all this, for a biography, Lindsay reflected; but it gave him
an idea. He bought that day a second-hand bicycle at the Quinanog
garage; and thereafter, when the devil of restlessness stirred in his
young muscles, he trundled about the countryside in search of those
families mentioned in Lutetia's letters. Some were utterly gone from
Quinanog, some were not affording, and some added useful detail; as when
old Mrs. Apperson produced a dozen letters written from Europe during
Lutetia's first trip abroad. "I'd have admired to go to Europe, but it
never came so's I could," said Mrs. Apperson. "When Miss Murray went,
she wrote me from every city, telling me all about it. I read 'em over a
lot--makes me feel as though I'd been there too. And every Decoration
Day," she added inconsequently, "I put a bunch of heliotrope on her
grave. She just loved the smell of heliotrope."
Somehow, Lindsay had never even thought of Lutetia's grave. The next day
he made that pilgrimage. The graveyard lay near the town center,
overtopped by the pine-covered hill which bore three austere white
buildings--church, town-hall, and grange. The grave itself was in a
patch of modern tombstones, surrounded by the flaking slabs of two
centuries ago. The stone was featureless, ill-proportioned; the
inscription recorded nothing but her name and the dates of her birth and
death.
The note which most often came out of these wayside gossipings was a
high one--of the gaiety and the brilliancy of the Blue Meadows
hospitality. Apparently people were coming and going all the time; some
distinguished; some undiscovered: but all with personality. When Lindsay
returned from such a talk, the old house glowed like an opal--so full
did it seem of the colors of those vivacious days.
But he was not quite content to be long away from his own fireside. The
friendly atmosphere of the Murray house continued to exercise its
enchanting sway. He always felt that one room became occupied the
instant he left it, that the one he was about to enter was already
occupied--and this feeling grew day by day, augmented. It brought him
back to the house always with a sense of expectancy. "Lutetia's house is
my hotel-lobby, my movie, my theater, my grand opera, my cabaret," he
wrote Spink. "There's a strange fascination about it--a fascination with
an element of eternal promise."
At times, when he entered the trellised doorway, he found himself
expecting someone to come forward to greet him. It kept occurring to him
that a neighbor had stopped to call, was waiting inside for him.
Sometimes in the middle of the night he would drift slowly out of a
delicious sleep to a sense, equally delicious, of being most gently and
lovingly companioned in the room; sometimes in the morning he would wake
up with a snap, as though the house were full of company. For a moment
the whole place would seem brilliant and gay, and then--it was as though
a bubble burst in the air--he was alone. "It's almost as good," he wrote
Spink, "as though you were here yourself, you goggle-eyed hick, you!"
Once or twice he caught himself talking aloud; addressing the empty air.
He stifled this impulse, however. "People always have a tendency to get
bughouse," he explained to Spink, "when they live alone. I used to do
that in your rooms. I'm going to try to keep sane as long as possible."
Ten days increased rather than diminished this impression. By this time
he had burned his thesis and was now making notes that were part the
direct product of Spink's data and part the byproduct of Lutetia's own
works. The syringas were beginning to run down; but the roses were
coming out in great numbers. The hollyhocks had opened flares of color
under the living-room window. The lawn was as close to plush as constant
care could make it. The garden was not yet quite cleaned out. He was
glad, for he liked working there. It was not a whit less friendly than
the house. Indeed, he felt so companioned there that sometimes he looked
up suddenly to see who was watching his efforts to resurrect a neglected
rosebush; or to uproot a flourishing patch of poison ivy. The evenings
were long, and as--consciously girlish and in quotation marks he wrote
Spink--"lovely." His big lamp made a spot of golden color in the shadowy
long room. One northeaster, which lasted three days, gave him dark and
damp excuse for three days of roaring fire. Much of that time he sat
opposite the blazing logs in the big, rush-bottomed piazza chair which
he had purchased, smoking and reading Lutetia. Now and then, he looked
up at Lutetia's picture, which he had finally brought down from his
bedroom.
Perhaps it was the picture which made him feel more companioned here
than anywhere in the house or out. The living-room was peculiarly rich
with presence, so rich that he left it reluctantly at night and returned
to it as quickly as possible in the morning; so rich that often he
smiled, though why he could not have said; so rich that in the evening
he often looked up suddenly from his book and stared into its shadowy
length for a long, moveless--and breathlessly expectant--interval.
Indeed that sensation so concretely, so steadily, so persistently
augmented that one evening--
He had been reading ever since dark; and it was getting late. Finally he
arose; closed the door and windows. He came back to the table and stood
leaning against it, idly whistling the _Sambre et Meuse_ through his
teeth, while he looked at Lutetia's portrait.
He took up _The Sport of the Goddesses_ just to look it over ... turned
a page or two ... became immersed.... Suddenly ... he realized that he
was not alone....
He was not alone. That was conclusive. That he suddenly and absolutely
knew; though how he knew it he could not guess. His eyes stopped, in the
midst of Lutetia's single grim murder, fixed on the printed line. He
could not move them along that line. He did not mind that. But he could
not move them off the page. And he did mind that; for he wanted--most
intensely wanted--to lift his gaze. After lifting it, he presently
discovered, he would want to project it to the left. Whoever his visitor
was, it sat at the left. That he knew, completely, absolutely, and
conclusively; but again, how he knew it, he did not know.
An immeasurable interval passed.
He tried to raise his eyes. He could not accomplish it. The air grew
thick; his hands, still holding the book, turned cold and hard as clamps
of iron. His eyes smarted from their unwinking immobility. This was
absurd. Breaking this deathly ossification was just a matter of will. He
made himself turn a page. Five lines down he decided; he would look up.
But he did not look up. He could not. He wanted to see ... but something
stronger than desire and will withheld him. He read; turned another
page. Five lines down....
Ah ... the paralysing chill was moving off.... In a moment ... he was
going to be able.... In a moment....
He lifted his eyes.... He gazed steadily to the left....