The entire pretension is so ridiculous that it is difficult to credit
the extent of its acceptance. I don't mean McGeorge's story, but the
whole sweep of spiritism. It ought to be unnecessary to point out the
puerility of the evidence--the absurd babble advanced as the speech of
wise men submerged in the silent consummation of death, the penny tricks
with bells and banjos, the circus-like tables and anthropomorphic Edens.
Yet, so far as the phrase goes, there is something in it; but whatever
that is, lies in demonstrable science, the investigations of the
subconscious by Freud and Jung.
McGeorge himself, a reporter with a sufficient education in the actual,
tried to repeat impartially, with the vain illusion of an open mind,
what he had been told; but it was clear that his power of reasoning had
been disarranged. We were sitting in the Italian restaurant near his
paper to which he had conducted me, and he was inordinately troubled by
flies. A small, dark man, he was never without a cigarette; he had
always been nervous, but I had no memory of such uneasiness as he now
exhibited.
"It's rather dreadful," he said, gazing at me for an instant, and then
shifting his glance about the white plaster walls and small flock of
tables, deserted at that hour. "I mean this thing of not really
dying--hanging about in the wind, in space. I used to have a natural
dread of death; but now I'm afraid of--of keeping on. When you think of
it, a grave's quite a pleasant place. It's restful. This other--" He
broke off, but not to eat.
"My editor," he began anew, apparently at a tangent, "wouldn't consider
it. I was glad. I'd like to forget it, go back. There might be a story
for you."
Whatever he had heard in connection with the Meeker circle, I assured
him, would offer me nothing; I didn't write that sort of thing.
"You'd appreciate Lizzie Tuoey," he asserted.
McGeorge had been sent to the Meeker house to unearth what he could
about the death of Mrs. Kraemer. He described vividly the location,
which provided the sole interest to an end admitted normal in its main
features. It was, he said, one of those vitrified wildernesses of brick
that have given the city the name of a place of homes; dreadful. Amazing
in extent, it was without a single feature to vary the monotony of
two-storied dwellings cut into exact parallelograms by paved streets;
there was a perspective of continuous facades and unbroken tin roofs in
every direction, with a grocery or drug-store and an occasional saloon
at the corners, and beyond the sullen red steeple of a church.
Dusk was gathering when McGeorge reached the Meekers. It was August, and
the sun had blazed throughout the day, with the parching heat; the smell
of brick dust and scorched tin was hideous. His word. There was, too, a
faint metallic clangor in the air. He knew that it came from the
surface-cars, yet he could not rid himself of the thought of iron
furnace-doors.
He had, of course, heard of the Meekers before. So had I, for that
matter. A crack-brained professor had written a laborious, fantastic
book about their mediumship and power of communication with the other
world. They sat together as a family: the elder Meekers; the wife's
sister; a boy, Albert, of fourteen; Ena, close to twenty; and Jannie, a
girl seventeen years old and the medium proper. Jannie's familiar spirit
was called Stepan. He had, it seemed, lived and died in the reign of
Peter the Great; yet he was still actual, but unmaterialized, and
extremely anxious to reassure every one through Jannie of the supernal
happiness of the beyond. What messages I read, glancing over hysterical
pages, gave me singularly little comfort, with the possible exception of
the statement that there were cigars; good cigars Stepan, or Jannie,
explained, such as on earth cost three for a quarter.
However, most of what McGeorge told me directly concerned Lizzie Tuoey.
The Meekers he couldn't see at all. They remained in an undiscovered
part of the house--there was a strong reek of frying onions from the
kitchen--and delegated the servant as their link with the curious or
respectful or impertinent world.
Lizzie admitted him to the parlor, where, she informed him, the sittings
took place. There wasn't much furniture beyond a plain, heavy table, an
array of stiff chairs thrust back against the walls, and on a mantel a
highly painted miniature Rock of Ages, with a white-clad figure clinging
to it, washed with a poisonous green wave, all inclosed in a glass bell.
At the rear was a heavy curtain that, he found, covered the entrance to
a smaller room.
Lizzie was a stout, cheerful person, with the ready sympathies and
superstitions of the primitive mind of the south of Ireland. She was in
a maze of excitement, and his difficulty was not to get her to talk, but
to arrest her incoherent flood of invocations, saints' names, and
credulity.
Her duties at the Meekers had been various; one of them was the playing
of mechanical music in the back room at certain opportune moments. She
said that Stepan particularly requested it; the low strains made it
easier for him to speak to the dear folks on this side. It couldn't
compare, though, Stepan had added, with the music beyond; and why should
it, Lizzie had commented, and all the blessed saints bursting their
throats with tunes! She swore, however, that she had had no part in the
ringing of the bells or the knocks and jumps the table took.
She had no explanation for the latter other than the conviction that the
dear God had little, if any, part in it. Rather her choice of an agent
inclined to the devil. Things happened, she affirmed, that tightened her
head like a kettle. The cries and groaning from the parlor during a
sitting would blast the soul of you. It was nothing at all for a
stranger to faint away cold. The light would then be turned up, and
water dashed on the unconscious face.
She insisted, McGeorge particularized, that the Meekers took no money
for their sittings. At times some grateful person would press a sum on
them; a woman had given two hundred and seventy dollars after a
conversation with her nephew, dead, as the world called it, twelve
years. All the Meekers worked but Jannie; she was spared every annoyance
possible, and lay in bed till noon. At the suggestion of Stepan, she
made the most unexpected demands. Stepan liked pink silk stockings. He
begged her to eat a candy called Turkish paste. He recommended a "teeny"
glass of Benedictine, a bottle of which was kept ready. He told her to
pinch her flesh black to show--Lizzie Tuoey forgot what.
Jannie was always dragged out with a face the color of wet laundry soap.
She had crying fits; at times her voice would change, and she'd speak a
gibberish that Mr. Meeker declared was Russian; and after a trance she
would eat for six. There was nothing about the senior Meeker Lizzie
could describe, but she disliked Mrs. Meeker intensely. She made the
preposterous statement that the woman could see through the blank walls
of the house. Ena was pale, but pretty, despite dark smudges under her
eyes; she sat up very late with boys or else sulked by herself. Albert
had a big grinning head on him, and ate flies. Lizzie had often seen him
at it. He spent hours against the panes of glass and outside the kitchen
door.
It wasn't what you could name gay at the Meekers, and, indeed, it hadn't
been necessary for the priest to insist on the girl finding another
place; she had decided that independently after she had been there less
than a month. Then Mrs. Kraemer had died during a sitting. She would be
off, she told McGeorge, the first of the week.
The latter, whose interest at the beginning had been commendably
penetrating, asked about Mrs. Meeker's sister; but he discovered nothing
more than that--Lizzie Tuoey allowed for a heretic--she was religious.
They were all serious about the spiritism, and believed absolutely in
Jannie and Stepan, in the messages, the voices and shades that they
evoked.
However, questioned directly about Mrs. Kraemer's presence at a sitting,
the servant's ready flow of comment and explanation abruptly dwindled to
the meager invocation of holy names. It was evidently a business with
which she wanted little dealing, even with Mrs. Kraemer safely absent,
and with no suspicion of criminal irregularity.
The reporting of that occurrence gave a sufficiently clear impression of
the dead woman. She was the relict of August, a naturalized American
citizen born in Salzburg, and whose estate, a comfortable aggregate of
more than two millions, came partly from hop-fields in his native
locality. There was one child, a son past twenty, not the usual inept
offspring of late-acquired wealth, but a vigorously administrative youth
who spent half the year in charge of the family investment in Germany.
At the beginning of the Great War the inevitable overtook the Salzburg
industry; its financial resources were acquired by the Imperial
Government, and young Kraemer, then abroad, was urged into the German
Army.
McGeorge, with a great deal of trouble, extracted some additional angles
of insight on Mrs. Kraemer from the reluctant Lizzie.
She was an impressive figure of a lady in fine lavender muslin ruffles,
a small hat, blazing diamonds, and a hook in her nose, but Roman and not
Jew. A bullying voice and a respectful chauffeur in a glittering car
completed the picture. She had nothing favorable to say for the location
of the Meeker house; indeed, she complained pretty generally, in her
loud, assertive tones, about the inefficiency of city administration in
America, but she held out hopes of improvement in the near future. She
grew impatiently mysterious--hints were not her habit--in regard to the
good shortly to enfold the entire earth. Lizzie gathered somehow that
this was bound up with her son, now an officer in a smart Uhlan
regiment.
A man of Mrs. Kraemer's type, and the analogy is far closer than common,
would never have come to the Meekers for a message from a son warring in
the north of France. It is by such lapses that women with the greatest
show of logic prove the persistent domination of the earliest emotional
instincts. After all, Lizzie Tuoey and Mrs. Kraemer were far more alike
than any two such apparently dissimilar men.
At this point McGeorge was lost in the irrelevancy of Lizzie's mind. She
made a random statement about Mrs. Meeker's sister and a neighbor, and
returned to the uncertain quality of Jannie's temper and the limitations
of a medium. It seemed that Jannie was unable to direct successful
sittings without a day between for the recuperation of her power. It
used her up something fierce. Stepan as well, too often recalled from
the joys of the beyond, the cigars of the aroma of three for a quarter,
grew fretful; either he refused to answer or played tricks, such as an
unexpected sharp thrust in Albert's ribs, or a knocked message of
satirical import, "My! wouldn't you just like to know!"
McGeorge had given up the effort to direct the conversation; rather than
go away with virtually nothing gained, he decided to let the remarks
take what way they would. In this he was wise, for the girl's sense of
importance, her normal pressing necessity for speech, gradually
submerged her fearful determination to avoid any contact with an affair
so plainly smelling of brimstone. She returned to Miss Brasher, the
sister, and her neighbor.
The latter was Mrs. Doothnack, and, like Mrs. Kraemer, she had a son
fighting in the north of France. There, however, the obvious similitude
ended; Edwin Doothnack served a machine-gun of the American
Expeditionary Forces, while his mother was as poor and retiring as the
other woman was dogmatic and rich. Miss Brasher brought her early in the
evening to the Meekers, a little person with the blurred eyes of recent
heavy crying, excessively polite to Lizzie Tuoey. Naturally, this did
nothing to increase the servant's good opinion of her.
The sister soon explained the purpose of their visit: Edwin, whose
regiment had occupied a sacrifice position, was missing. There his
mother timidly took up the recital. The Meekers were at supper, and
Lizzie, in and out of the kitchen, heard most of the developments. When
the report about Edwin had arrived, Mrs. Doothnack's friends were
reassuring; he would turn up again at his regiment, or else he had been
taken prisoner; in which case German camps, although admittedly bad,
were as safe as the trenches. She had been intensely grateful for their
good will, and obediently set herself to the acceptance of their
optimism, when--it was eleven nights now to the day--she had been
suddenly wakened by Edwin's voice.
"O God!" Edwin had cried, thin, but distinct, in a tone of exhausted
suffering--"O God!" and "Mummer!" his special term for Mrs. Doothnack.
At that, she declared, with straining hands, she knew that Edwin was
dead.
Miss Brasher then begged darling Jannie to summon Stepan and discover
the truth at the back of Mrs. Doothnack's "message" and conviction. If,
indeed, Edwin had passed over, it was their Christian duty to reassure
his mother about his present happiness, and the endless future together
that awaited all loved and loving ones. Jannie said positively that she
wouldn't consider it. A sitting had been arranged for Mrs. Kraemer
to-morrow, so that she, without other means, might get some tidings of
the younger August.
Mrs. Doothnack rose at once with a murmured apology for disturbing them,
but Miss Brasher was more persistent. She had the determination of her
virginal fanaticism, and of course she was better acquainted with
Jannie. Lizzie wasn't certain, but she thought that Miss Brasher had
money, though nothing approaching Mrs. Kraemer; probably a small, safe
income.
Anyhow, Jannie got into a temper, and said that they all had no love for
her, nobody cared what happened so long as they had their precious
messages. Stepan would be cross, too. At this Albert hastily declared
that he would be out that evening; he had been promised moving-pictures.
That old Stepan would be sure to bust his bones in. Jannie then
dissolved into tears, and cried that they were insulting her dear
Stepan, who lived in heaven. Albert added his wails to the commotion,
Mrs. Doothnack sobbed from pure nervousness and embarrassment, and only
Miss Brasher remained unmoved and insistent.
The result of this disturbance was that they agreed to try a tentative
sitting. Stepping out into the kitchen, Mrs. Meeker told Lizzie that she
needn't bother to play the music that evening.
Here the latter, with a sudden confidence in McGeorge's charitable
knowledge of life, admitted that Jannie's bottle of Benedictine was kept
in a closet in the room behind the one where the sittings were held. The
Meekers had disposed themselves about the table, the circle locked by
their hands placed on adjoining knees, with Jannie at the head and Mrs.
Doothnack beyond. The servant, in the inner room for a purpose which she
had made crystal clear, could just distinguish them in a dim, red-shaded
light through the opening of the curtain.
By this time familiarity with the proceeding had bred its indifference,
and Lizzie lingered at the closet. The knocks that announced Stepan's
presence were a long time in coming; then there came an angry banging
and a choked cry from Albert. The table plainly rocked and rose from the
floor, and Jannie asked in the flat voice of the tranced:
"Is Edwin there? Here's his mother wanting to speak to him."
The reply, knocked out apparently on the wood mantel, and repeated for
the benefit of the visitor, said that those who had won to the higher
life couldn't be treated as a mere telephone exchange. Besides which, a
party was then in progress, and Stepan was keeping waiting Isabella,
consort of King Ferdinand, a lady who would not be put off. This
business about Edwin must keep. Miss Brasher said in a firm voice:
"His mother is much distressed and prays for him to speak."
The answer rattled off was not interpreted, but Lizzie gathered that it
was extremely personal and addressed to Miss Brasher. There was a
silence after that, and then the table rose to a perceptible height and
crashed back to the floor. In the startling pause which followed a
voice, entirely different from any that had spoken, cried clear and low:
"O God!"
This frightened Lizzie to such an extent that she fled to the familiar
propriety of the kitchen; but before she was out of hearing, Mrs.
Doothnack screamed, "Edwin!"
Nothing else happened. The firm Miss Brasher and her neighbor departed
immediately. Jannie, however looked a wreck, and cold towels and
Benedictine were liberally applied. She sobbed hysterically, and wished
that she were just a plain girl without a call. Further, she declared
that nothing could induce her to proceed with the sitting for Mrs.
Kraemer to-morrow. Stepan, before returning to Isabella of Castile, had
advised her against it. With such droves of soldiers coming over, it was
more and more difficult to control individual spirits. Things in the
beyond were in a frightful mess. They might see something that would
scare them out of their wits.
Mrs. Meeker, with a share of her sister's aplomb, said that she guessed
they could put up with a little scaring in the interest of Mrs. August
Kraemer. She was sick of doing favors for people like Agnes's friend,
and made it clear that she desired genteel associates both in the here
and the hereafter. Jannie's face began to twitch in a manner common to
it, and her eyes grew glassy. At times, Lizzie explained, she would fall
right down as stiff as a board, and they would have to put her on the
lounge till she recovered. Her sentimental reading of Jannie's present
seizure was that she was jealous of Ferdinand's wife.
Not yet, even, McGeorge confessed, did he see any connection between the
humble little Mrs. Doothnack and Mrs. Kraemer, in her fine lavender and
diamonds. He continued putting the queries almost at random to Lizzie
Tuoey, noting carelessly, as if they held nothing of the body of his
business, her replies. While the amazing fact was that, quite aside from
his subsequent credulity or any reasonable skepticism, the two presented
the most complete possible unity of causation and climax. As a story,
beyond which I have no interest, together they are admirable. They were
enveloped, too, in the consistency of mood loosely called atmosphere;
that is, all the details of their surrounding combined to color the
attentive mind with morbid shadows.
It was purely on Lizzie Tuoey's evidence that McGeorge's conversion to
such ridiculous claims rested. She was not capable of invention, he
pointed out, and continued that no one could make up details such as
that, finally, of the Rock of Ages. The irony was too biting and
inevitable. Her manner alone put what she related beyond dispute.
On the contrary, I insisted, it was just such minds as Lizzie's that
could credit in a flash of light--probably a calcium flare--unnatural
soldiers, spooks of any kind. Her simple pictorial belief readily
accepted the entire possibility of visions and wonders.
I could agree or not, he proceeded wearily; it was of small moment. The
fate waited for all men. "The fate of living," he declared, "the curse
of eternity. You can't stop. Eternity," he repeated, with an
uncontrollable shiver.
"Stepan seemed to find compensations," I reminded him.
"If you are so damned certain about the Tuoey woman," he cried, "what
have you got to say about Mrs. Kraemer's death? You can't dismiss her as
a hysterical idiot. People like her don't just die."
"A blood clot." His febrile excitement had grown into anger, and I
suppressed further doubts.
He lighted a cigarette. The preparations for Mrs. Kraemer's reception
and the sitting, he resumed, were elaborate. Mr. Meeker lubricated the
talking-machine till its disk turned without a trace of the mechanism. A
new record--it had cost a dollar and a half and was by a celebrated
violinist--was fixed, and a halftone semi-permanent needle selected.
Lizzie was to start this after the first storm of knocking, or any
preliminary jocularity of Stepan's, had subsided.
Jannie had on new pink silk stockings and white kid slippers. Her head
had been marcelled special, and she was so nervous that she tore three
hair-nets. At this she wept, and stamped her foot, breaking a bottle of
expensive scent.
When Mrs. Kraemer's motor stopped at the door, Lizzie went forward, and
Mrs. Meeker floated down the stairs.
Stopping him sharply, I demanded a repetition of the latter phrase. It
was Lizzie's. McGeorge, too, had expressed surprise, and the girl
repeated it. Mrs. Meeker, she declared, often "floated." One evening she
had seen Mrs. Meeker leave the top story by a window and stay suspended
over the bricks twenty feet below.
Mrs. Kraemer entered the small hall like a keen rush of wind; her manner
was determined, an impatience half checked by interest in what might
follow. She listened with a short nod to Mr. Meeker's dissertation on
the necessity of concord in all the assembled wills. The spirit world
must be approached reverently, with trust and thankfulness for whatever
might be vouchsafed.
The light in the front room, a single gas-burner, was lowered, and
covered by the inevitable red-paper hood, and the circle formed. Lizzie
was washing dishes, but the kitchen door was open, so that she could
hear the knocks that were the signal for the music. They were even
longer coming than on the night before, and she made up her mind that
Stepan had declared a holiday from the responsibilities of a control. At
last there was a faint vibration, and she went cautiously into the dark
space behind the circle. The curtains had always hung improperly, and
she could see a dim red streak of light.
The knocks at best were not loud; several times when she was about to
start the record they began again inconclusively. Stepan finally
communicated that he was exhausted. Some one was being cruel to him.
Could it be Jannie? There was a sobbing gasp from the latter. Mrs.
Kraemer's voice was like ice-water; she wanted some word from August,
her son. She followed the name with the designation of his rank and
regiment. And proud of it, too, Lizzie added; you might have taken from
her manner that she was one of us. Her version of Mrs. Kraemer's
description sounded as though August were an ewe-lamb. McGeorge,
besotted in superstition, missed this.
Independently determining that the moment for music had come, Lizzie
pressed forward the lever and carefully lowered the lid. The soft
strains of the violin, heard through the drawn curtains, must have
sounded illusively soothing and impressive.
"Stepan," Jannie implored, "tell August's mamma about him, so far away
amid shot and shell."
"Who is my mother?" Stepan replied, with a mystical and borrowed
magnificence.
"August, are you there?" Mrs. Kraemer demanded. "Can you hear me? Are
you well?"
"I'm deaf from the uproar," Stepan said faintly. "Men in a green gas. He
is trying to reach me; something is keeping him back."
"August's alive!" Mrs. Kraemer's exclamation was in German, but Lizzie
understood that she was thanking God.
"Hundreds are passing over," Stepan continued. "I can't hear his voice,
but there are medals. He's gone again in smoke. The other----" The
communication halted abruptly, and in the silence which followed Lizzie
stopped the talking-machine, the record at an end.
It was then that the blaze of light occurred which made her think the
paper shade had caught fire and that the house would burn down. She
dragged back the curtain.
McGeorge refused to meet my interrogation, but sat with his gaze
fastened on his plate of unconsumed gray macaroni. After a little I
asked impatiently what the girl thought she had seen.
After an inattentive silence McGeorge asked me, idiotically I thought,
if I had ever noticed the game, the hares and drawn fish, sometimes
frozen into a clear block of ice and used as an attraction by provision
stores. I had, I admitted, although I could see no connection between
that and the present inquiry.
It was, however, his description of the column of light Lizzie Tuoey saw
over against the mantel, a shining white shroud through which the
crudely painted Rock of Ages was visible, insulated in the glass bell.
Oh, yes, there was a soldier, but in the uniform that might be seen
passing the Meekers any hour of the day, and unnaturally hanging in a
traditional and very highly sanctified manner. The room was filled with
a coldness that made Lizzie's flesh crawl. It was as bright as noon; the
circle about the table was rigid, as if it had been frozen into
immobility, while Jannie's breathing was audible and hoarse.
Mrs. Kraemer stood wrung with horror, a shaking hand sparkling with
diamonds raised to her face. It was a lie, she cried in shrill,
penetrating tones. August couldn't do such a thing. Kill him quickly!
The other voice was faint, McGeorge said, hardly more than a sigh; but
Lizzie Tuoey had heard it before. She asserted that there was no chance
for a mistake.
"O God!" it breathed. "Mummer!"
This much is indisputable, that Mrs. Kraemer died convulsively in the
Meeker hall. Beyond that I am congenitally incapable of belief. I asked
McGeorge directly if it was his contention that, through Stepan's
blunder, the unfortunate imperialistic lady, favored with a vignette of
modern organized barbarity, had seen Mrs. Doothnack's son in place of
her own.
He didn't, evidently, think this worth a reply. McGeorge was again lost
in his consuming dread of perpetual being.