Virtually buried in a raft of ethical tracts of the Middle Kingdom, all
more or less repetitions of Lao-tsze's insistence on heaven's quiet way,
I ignored the sounding of the telephone; but its continuous bur--I had
had the bell removed--triumphed over my absorption, and I answered
curtly. It was McGeorge. His name, in addition to the fact that it
constituted an annoying interruption, recalled principally that, caught
in the stagnant marsh of spiritism, he had related an absurd fabrication
in connection with the Meeker circle and the death of Mrs. August
Kraemer.
Our acquaintance had been long, but slight. He had never attempted to
see me at my rooms, and for this reason only--that his unusual visit
might have a corresponding pressing cause--I directed Miss Maynall, at
the telephone exchange, to send him up. Five minutes later, however, I
regretted that I had not instinctively refused to see him. It was then
evident that there was no special reason for his call. It was
inconceivable that any one with the least knowledge of my prejudices and
opinions would attempt to be merely social, and McGeorge was not
without both the rudiments of breeding and good sense.
At least such had been my impression of him in the past, before he had
come in contact with the Meekers. Gazing at him, I saw that a different
McGeorge was evident, different even from when I had seen him at the
Italian restaurant where he had been so oppressed by the fear not of
death, but of life. In the first place, he was fatter and less nervous,
he was wearing one of those unforgivable soft black ties with flowing
ends, and he had changed from Virginia cigarettes to Turkish.
A silence had lengthened into embarrassment, in which I was combating a
native irritability with the placid philosophical acceptance of the
unstirred Tao, when he asked suddenly:
"Did you know I was married?" I admitted that this information had
eluded me, when he added in the fatuous manner of such victims of a
purely automatic process, "To Miss Ena Meeker that was."
I asked if he had joined the family circle in the special sense, but he
said not yet; he wasn't worthy. Then I realized that there was a valid
reason for his presence, but, unfortunately, it operated slowly with
him; he had to have a satisfactory audience for the astounding good
fortune he had managed. He wanted to talk, and McGeorge, I recalled, had
been a man without intimates or family in the city. Almost uncannily, as
if in answer to my thought, he proceeded:
"I'm here because you have a considerable brain and, to a certain
extent, a courageous attitude. You are all that and yet you won't
recognize the truth about the beyond, the precious world of spirits."
"Material."
However, I indicated in another sense that I wasn't material for any
propaganda of hysterical and subnormal seances. His being grew inflated
with the condescending pity of dogmatic superstition for logic.
"Many professors and men of science are with us, and I am anxious, in
your own interest, for you to see the light. I've already admitted that
you would be valuable. You can't accuse me of being mercenary." I
couldn't. "I must tell you," he actually cried out, in sudden surrender
to the tyrannical necessity of self-revelation. "My marriage to Ena was
marvelous, marvelous, a true wedding of souls. Mr. Meeker," he added in
a different, explanatory manner, "like all careful fathers, is not
unconscious of the need, here on earth, of a portion of worldly goods.
For a while, and quite naturally, he was opposed to our union.
"There was a Wallace Esselmann." A perceptible caution overtook him, but
which, with a gesture, he evidently discarded. "But I ought to explain
how I met the Meekers. I called." I expressed a surprise, which he
solemnly misread. "It became necessary for me to tell them of my
admiration and belief," he proceeded.
"I saw Mrs. Meeker and Ena in the front room where the sittings are
held. Mrs. Meeker sat straight up, with her hands folded; but Ena was
enchanting." He paused, lost in the visualization of the enchantment.
"All sweet curves and round ankles and little feet." Then he
unexpectedly made a very profound remark: "I think pale girls are more
disturbing than red cheeks. They've always been for me, anyway. Ena was
the most disturbing thing in the world."
Here, where I might have been expected to lose my patience disastrously,
a flicker of interest appeared in McGeorge and his connection with the
Meekers. A normal, sentimental recital would, of course, be
insupportable; but McGeorge, I realized, lacked the cooerdination of
instincts and faculties which constitutes the healthy state he had
called, by implication, stupid. The abnormal often permits extraordinary
glimpses of the human machine, ordinarily a sealed and impenetrable
mystery. Hysteria has illuminated many of the deep emotions and
incentives, and McGeorge, sitting lost in a quivering inner delight, had
the significant symptoms of that disturbance.
He may, I thought, exhibit some of the primitive "complex sensitiveness"
of old taboos, and furnish an illustration, for a commentary on the
sacred Kings, of the physical base of religious fervor.
"An ordinary prospective mother-in-law," said McGeorge, "is hard enough,
but Mrs. Meeker----" He made a motion descriptive of his state of mind
in the Decker parlor. "Eyes like ice," he continued; "and I could see
that I hadn't knocked her over with admiration. Ena got mad soon, and
made faces at her mother when she wasn't looking, just as if she were a
common girl. It touched me tremendously. Then--I had looked down at the
carpet for a moment--Mrs. Meeker had gone, without a sound, in a flash.
It was a good eight feet to the door and around a table. Space and time
are nothing to her."
Silence again enveloped him; he might have been thinking of the
spiritistic triumphs of Mrs. Meeker or of Ena with her sweet curves.
Whatever might be said of the latter, it was clear that she was no
prude. McGeorge drew a deep breath; it was the only expression of his
immediate preoccupation.
"It was quite a strain," he admitted presently. "I called as often as
possible and a little oftener. The reception, except for dear Ena, was
not prodigal. Once they were having a sitting, and I went back to the
kitchen. Of course Lizzie Tuoey, their former servant, was no more, and
they had an ashy-black African woman. Some one was sobbing in the front
room--the terrible sobs of a suffocating grief. There was a voice, too,
a man's, but muffled, so that I couldn't make out any words. That died
away, and the thin, bright tones of a child followed; then a storm of
knocking, and blowing on a tin trumpet.
"A very successful sitting. I saw Jannie directly afterward, and the
heroic young medium was positively livid from exhaustion. She had a shot
of Benedictine and then another, and Mr. Meeker half carried her up to
bed. I stayed in the kitchen till the confusion was over, and Albert
came out and was pointedly rude. If you want to know what's thought of
you in a house, watch the young.
"Ena was flighty, too; it irritated her to have me close by--highly
strung. She cried for no reason at all and bit her finger-nails to
shreds. There was a fine platinum chain about her neck, with a diamond
pendant, I had never seen before, and for a long while she wouldn't tell
me where it had come from. The name, Wallace Esselmann, finally emerged
from her hints and evasions. He was young and rich, he had a waxed
mustache, and the favor of the Meekers generally.
"Have you ever been jealous?" McGeorge asked abruptly. Not in the degree
he indicated, I replied; however, I comprehended something of its
possibilities of tyrannical obsession. "It was like a shovelful of
burning coals inside me," he asserted. "I was ready to kill this
Esselmann or Ena and then myself. I raved like a maniac; but it
evidently delighted her, for she took off the chain and relented.
"At first," McGeorge said, "if you remember, I was terrified at the
thought of living forever; but I had got used to that truth, and the
blessings of spiritualism dawned upon me. No one could ever separate Ena
and me. The oldest India religions support that----"
"With the exception," I was obliged to put in, "that all progression is
toward nothingness, suspension, endless calm."
"We have improved on that," he replied. "The joys that await us are
genuine twenty-two carat--the eternal companionship of loving ones, soft
music, summer----"
"Indestructible lips under a perpetual moon."
He solemnly raised a hand.
"They are all about you," he said; "they hear you; take care. What
happened to me will be a warning."
"Materialize the faintest spirit," I told him, "produce the lightest
knock on that Fyfe table, and I'll give you a thousand dollars for the
cause." He expressed a contemptuous superiority to such bribery. "By
your own account," I reminded him, "the Meekers gave this Esselmann
every advantage. Why?"
McGeorge's face grew somber.
"I saw him the next time I called, a fat boy with his spiked mustache on
glazed cheeks, and a pocketful of rattling gold junk, a racing car on
the curb. He had had Ena out for a little spin, and they were discussing
how fast they had gone. Not better than sixty-eight, he protested
modestly.
"Albert hung on his every word; he was as servile to Esselmann as he was
arrogant to me. He said things I had either to overlook completely or
else slay him for. I tried to get his liking." McGeorge confessed to me
that, remembering what the Meekers' old servant had told him about
Albert's peculiar habit, he had even thought of making him a present of
a box of flies, precisely in the manner you would bring candy for a
pretty girl.
"It began to look hopeless," he confessed of his passion. "Ena admitted
that she liked me better than Wallace, but the family wouldn't hear of
it. Once, when Mr. Meeker came to the door, he shut it in my face. The
sittings kept going right along, and the manifestations were wonderful;
the connection between Jannie and Stepan, her spirit control, grew
closer and closer. There was a scientific investigation--some professors
put Jannie on a weighing-machine during a seance and found that, in a
levitation, she had an increase in weight virtually equal to the lifted
table. They got phonograph records of the rapping----"
"Did you hear them?" I interrupted.
"They are still in the laboratory," he asserted defiantly, "But I have a
photograph that was taken of an apparition." He fumbled in an inner
pocket and produced the latter. The print was dark and obscured, but
among the shadows a lighter shape was traceable: it might have been a
woman in loose, white drapery, a curtain, light-struck; anything, in
fact. I returned it to him impatiently.
"That," he informed me, "was a Christian martyr of ancient times."
"Burned to a cinder," I asked, "or dismembered by lions?"
"Can't you even for a minute throw off the illusion of the flesh?"
"Can you?"
He half rose in a flare of anger; for my question, in view of his
admissions, had been sharply pressed.
"All love is a sanctification," McGeorge said, recovering his temper
admirably. "The union of my beloved wife and me is a holy pact of
spirits, transcending corruption."
"You married her against considerable opposition," I reminded him.
"I had the hell of a time," he said in the healthy manner of the former
McGeorge. "Everything imaginable was done to finish me; the powers of
earth and of the spirit world were set against me. For a while my human
frame wasn't worth a lead nickel."
"The beyond, then, isn't entirely the abode of righteousness?"
"There are spirits of hell as well as of heaven."
"The Chinese," I told him, "call them Yin and Yang, spirits of dark and
light. Will you explain--it may be useful, if things are as you say--how
you fought the powers from beyond?"
"Do you remember what Lizzie Tuoey thought about Jannie and Stepan?" he
asked, apparently irrelevantly. "That time Stepan had an engagement with
Isabella of Spain." I didn't. "Well, she said that Jannie was jealous of
the queen."
McGeorge had, by his own account, really a dreadful time with what was
no better than common or, rather, uncommon murder. Two things were
evident on the plane of my own recognition--that he had succeeded in
holding the illusive affections of Ena, no small accomplishment in view
of her neurotic emotional instability, and that the elder Meekers had an
interest in the most worldly of all commodities, not exceeded by their
devotion to the immaculate dream of love beyond death.
The girl met McGeorge outside the house; he called defiantly in the face
of an unrelenting, outspoken opposition. It was in the Meeker front room
that he first realized his mundane existence was in danger. He could
give no description of what happened beyond the fact that suddenly he
was bathed in a cold, revolting air. It hung about him with the
undefinable feel and smell of death. A rotten air, he described it, and
could think of nothing better; remaining, he thought, for half a minute,
filling him with instinctive abject terror, and then lifting.
Ena, too, was affected; she was as rigid as if she were taking part in a
seance; and when she recovered, she hurried from the room. Immediately
after McGeorge heard her above quarrelling with Jannie. She returned in
tears, and said that they would have to give each other up. Here
McGeorge damned the worlds seen and unseen, and declared that he'd never
leave her. This, with his complete credulity, approached a notable
courage or frenzy of desire. He had no doubt but they would kill him.
Their facilities, you see, were unsurpassed.
Worse followed almost immediately. The next morning, to be accurate,
McGeorge was putting an edge on his razor--he had never given up the old
type--when an extraordinary seizure overtook him; the hand that held the
blade stopped being a part of him. It moved entirely outside his will;
indeed, when certain possibilities came into his shocked mind, it moved
in opposition to his most desperate determination.
A struggle began between McGeorge in a sweating effort to open his
fingers and drop the razor to the floor, and the will imposing a deep,
hard gesture across his throat. He was twisted, he said, into the most
grotesque positions; the hand would move up, and he would force it back
perhaps an inch at a time. During this the familiar, mucid feel closed
about him.
I asked how the force was applied to his arm, but he admitted that his
fright was so intense that he had no clear impression of the details.
McGeorge, however, did try to convince me that his wrist was darkly
bruised afterward. He was, he was certain, lost, his resistance
virtually at an end when, as if from a great distance, he heard the
faint ring of the steel on the bath-room linoleum.
That, he told himself, had cured him; the Meekers, and Ena in
particular, could have their precious Wallace Esselmann. This happened
on Friday, and Sunday evening he was back at the Meeker door. The frenzy
of desire! Love is the usual, more exalted term. Perhaps. It depends on
the point of view, the position adopted in the attack on the dark enigma
of existence. Mine is unpresumptuous.
They were obviously surprised to see him,--or, rather, all were but
Ena,--and his reception was less crabbed than usual. McGeorge, with what
almost approached a flash of humor, said that it was evident they had
expected him to come from the realm of spirits. In view of their
professed belief in the endless time for junketing at their command,
they clung with amazing energy to the importance of the present faulty
scheme.
Ena was wonderfully tender, and promised to marry him whenever he had a
corner ready for her. McGeorge, a reporter, lived with the utmost
informality with regard to hours and rooms. He stayed that night almost
as long as he wished, planning, at intervals, the future. Sometime
during the evening it developed that Jannie was in disfavor; the
sittings had suddenly become unsatisfactory. One the night before had
been specially disastrous.
Stepan, in place of satisfying the very private curiosity of a
well-known and munificent politician, had described another party that
had made a wide ripple of comment and envious criticism among the
shades. It had been planned by a swell of old Rome, faithful in every
detail to the best traditions of orgies; and Stepan's companion, a
French girl of the Maison Doree, had opened the eyes of the historic
fancy to the latent possibilities of the dance.
Jannie, at this, had spoiled everything, but mostly the temper of the
munificent politician, by a piercing scream. She had gone on, Ena
admitted, something terrible. When Mr. Meeker had tried to bundle her to
bed, she had kicked and scratched like never before. And since then she
declared that she'd never make another effort to materialize shameless
spirits.
Argument, even the temporary absence of Benedictine, had been
unavailing. Very well, Mrs. Meeker had told her grimly, she would have
to go back to cotton stockings; and no more grilled sweetbreads for
supper, either; she'd be lucky if she got scrapple. She didn't care;
everything was black for her. Black it must have been, I pointed out to
McGeorge; it was bad enough with worry limited to the span of one
existence, but to look forward to a perpetuity of misery--
McGeorge returned the latter part of the week with the plans for their
marriage, an elopement, considerably advanced; but only Jannie was at
home. She saw him listlessly in the usual formal room, where--he almost
never encountered her--he sat in a slight perplexity. Jannie might be
thought prettier than Ena, he acknowledged, or at least in the face. She
had quantities of bright brown hair, which she affected to wear, in the
manner of much younger girls, confined, with a ribbon, and flowing down
her back. Her eyes, too, were brown and remarkable in that the entire
iris was exposed. Her full under lip was vividly rouged, while her chin
was unobtrusive.
That evening she was dressed very elaborately. The pink silk stockings
and preposterous kid slippers were in evidence; her dress was black
velvet, short, and cut like a sheath; and there was a profusion of lacy
ruffles and bangles at her wrists. To save his soul, McGeorge couldn't
think of anything appropriate to talk about. Jannie was a being apart, a
precious object of special reverence. This, together with her very human
pettishness, complicated the social problem. He wanted excessively to
leave,--there was no chance of seeing Ena,--but neither could he think
of any satisfactory avenue of immediate escape.
Jannie's hands, he noticed, were never still; her fingers were always
plaiting the velvet on her knees. She would sigh gustily, bite her lips,
and accomplish what in an ordinary person would be a sniffle. Then
suddenly she drew nearer to McGeorge and talked in a torrent about true
love. She doubted if it existed anywhere. Spirits were no more faithful
than humans.
This, for McGeorge, was more difficult than the silence; all the while,
he told me, his thoughts were going back to the scene in the bath-room.
He had no security that it wouldn't be repeated and with a far different
conclusion. He had a passing impulse to ask Jannie to call off her
subliminal thugs; the phrasing is my own. There was no doubt in his
disordered mind that it was she who, at the instigation of the elder
Meekers, was trying to remove him in the effort to secure Wallace
Esselmann.
She dissolved presently into tears, and cried that she was the most
miserable girl in existence. She dropped an absurd confection of a
handkerchief on the floor, and he leaned over, returning it to her.
Jannie's head drooped against his shoulder, and, to keep her from
sliding to the floor, he was obliged to sit beside her and support her
with an arm. It had been a temporary measure, but Jannie showed no signs
of shifting her weight; and, from wishing every moment for Ena's
appearance, he now prayed desperately for her to stay away.
McGeorge said that he heard the girl murmur something that sounded like,
"Why shouldn't I?" Her face was turned up to him in a way that had but
one significance for maiden or medium. She was, he reminded me, Ena's
sister, about to become his own; there was a clinging, seductive scent
about her, too, and a subtle aroma of Benedictine; and, well, he did
what was expected.
However, no sooner had he kissed her than her manner grew inexplicable.
She freed herself from him, and sat upright in an expectant, listening
attitude. Her manner was so convincing that he straightened up and gazed
about the parlor. There was absolutely no unusual sight or sound; the
plain, heavy table in the center of the room was resting as solidly as
if it had never playfully cavorted at the will of the spirits, the
chairs were back against the walls, the miniature Rock of Ages, on the
mantel, offered its testimony to faith.
One insignificant detail struck his eye--a weighty cane of Mr. Meeker's
stood in an angle of the half-opened door to the hall, across the floor
from where Jannie and he were sitting.