Part 21

"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.

III

After a little, with nothing apparently following, the girl's expectancy faded; her expression grew petulant once more, and she drew sharply away from McGeorge, exactly as if he had forced a kiss on her and she was insulted by the indignity. Lord! he thought, with an inward sinking, what she'll do to me now will be enough!

He rose uneasily and walked to the mantel, where he stood with his back to Jannie, looking down absently at the fringed gray asbestos of a gas hearth. An overwhelming oppression crept over him when there was a sudden cold sensation at the base of his neck, and a terrific blow fell across his shoulders.

McGeorge wheeled instinctively, with an arm up, when he was smothered in a rain of stinging, vindictive battering. The blows came from all about him, a furious attack against which he was powerless to do anything but endeavor to protect his head. No visible person, he said solemnly, was near him. Jannie was at the other side of the room.

"Did you see her clearly while this was going on?" I asked.

Oh, yes, he assured me sarcastically; he had as well glanced at his diary to make sure of the date. He then had the effrontery to inform me that he had been beaten by Mr. Meeker's cane without human agency. He had seen it whirling about him in the air. McGeorge made up his mind that the hour of his death had arrived. A fog of pain settled on him, and he gave up all effort of resistance, sinking to his knees, aware of the salt taste of blood. But just at the edge of unconsciousness the assault stopped.

After a few moments he rose giddily, with his ears humming and his ribs a solid ache. The cane lay in the middle of the room, and Jannie stood, still across the parlor, with her hands pressed to scarlet cheeks, her eyes shining, and her breast heaving in gasps.

"Why not after such a violent exercise?"

McGeorge ignored my practical comment.

"She was delighted," he said; "she ran over to me and, throwing her arms about my neck, kissed me hard. She exclaimed that I had helped Jannie when everything else had failed, and she wouldn't forget it. Then she rushed away, and I heard her falling up-stairs in her high-heeled slippers."

Naturally he had half collapsed into a chair, and fought to supply his laboring lungs with enough oxygen. It's an unpleasant experience to be thoroughly beaten with a heavy cane under any condition, and this, he was convinced, was special.

I asked if he was familiar with Havelock Ellis on hysterical impulses, and he replied impatiently that he wasn't.

"There are two explanations," I admitted impartially, "although we each think there is but one. I will agree that yours is more entertaining. Jannie was jealous again. The Roman orgies, the young person from the _grands boulevards_, were more than she could accept; and she tried, in the vocabulary lately so prevalent, a reprisal. But I must acknowledge that I am surprised at the persistent masculine flexibility of Stepan."

"It was at the next sitting," McGeorge concluded, "that Stepan announced the wedding of Ena and me. The spirits awaited it. There was a row in the Meeker circle; but he dissolved, and refused to materialize in any form until it was accomplished."

"To the music of the spheres," I added, with some attempt at ordinary decency.

THE CENTENARIAN[15]

[Note 15: Copyright, 1919, by Harper & Brothers. Copyright, 1920, by Will E. Ingersoll.]

BY WILL E. INGERSOLL

From _Harper's Magazine_

There were few who knew--and, frankly, there were few who seemed to care to know--what Old Dalton meant when he mumbled, in his aspirate and toothless quest for expression of the thoughts that doddered through his misty old brain, "Thay wur-rld luks diff'rent now--all diff'rent now, yagh!" Sometimes he would go on, after a pause, in a kind of laborious elucidation: "Na, na! Ma there, now, she's gone. I--egh, egh--I went to school 'long of her; an' et didn't matter so much, mun, about th' rest going, 's long as she wer' here. But now--she's gone, ey. Agh-m! Ey, now she's gone-like, an' th' ain't nobody to help me keep--keep a-hold o' things. I'm a hundred years old, mun. Agh-m! You wouldn't--you wouldn't know what I was meanin', now, when I tell you this here world has growed all yellow-like, this month back. Ey, that's it, mun--all queer-like. Egh, it's time I was movin' on--movin' on."

Part of this monologue--a very small part--was Old Dalton's own, repeated over and over, and so kept in mind ever since the more initiative years a decade ago when he first began to think about his age. Another part of the utterance--more particularly that about "movin' on"--consisted of scraps of remarks that had been addressed to him, which he had hoarded up as an ape lays away odds and ends, and which he repeated, parrotlike, when the sun and his pipe warmed Old Dalton into speech. But that idea that the earth was growing yellow--that was a recent uncanny turn of his fancy, his own entirely.

He was pretty well past having any very definite inclination, but there seemed no special reason why the old man should wish to "move on." He appeared comfortable enough, pulling away at his blackened old pipe on the bench by the door. No man above fifty, and few below that age, enjoyed better health than he had; and many of fifty there are who _look_ nearer death than Old Dalton did.

"Crack me a stick 'r two o' wood, grampa," his married great-granddaughter, with whom he lived, would sometimes say; and up and at it the old man would get--swinging his ax handily and hitting his notch cleanly at every clip.

Assuredly, his body was a wonderful old machine--a grandfather's clock with every wheel, bearing, and spring in perfect order and alignment. Work had made it so, and work kept it so, for every day after his smoke Old Dalton would fuss about at his "chores" (which, partly to please him, were designedly left for him to do)--the changing of the bull's tether-picket, watering the old horse, splitting the evening's wood, keeping the fence about the house in repair, and driving the cows o' nights into the milking-pen.

To every man in this world is assigned his duty. To every man is given just the mental and physical equipment he needs for that duty. Some men obtusely face away from their appointed work; some are carried afield by exigency; some are drawn by avarice or ambition into alien paths; but a minor proportion of happy ones follow out their destiny. There do not occur many exceptions to the rule that the men who find their work and do it, all other conditions being equal, not only live to old age, but to an extreme, a desirable, a comfortable, and a natural old age.

Old Dalton had been built and outfitted to be a simple, colloquial home-maker, family-raiser, and husbandman. His annals were never intended to be anything more than plain and short. His was the function of the tree--to grow healthily and vigorously; to propagate; to give during his life, as the tree gives of its fruit and shade, such pleasant dole and hospitable emanation as he naturally might; and in the fullness of time to return again to the sod.

He had found and done thoroughly this appointed work of his. He was doing it still, or at least that part of it which, at the age of one hundred years, fittingly remained for him to do. He was tapering off, building the crown of his good stack. When Death, the great Nimrod, should come to Old Dalton, he would not find him ready caught in the trap of decrepitude. He would find him with his boots on, up and about--or, if in bed, not there except as in the regular rest intervals of his diurnal round.

And the fact that he, a polyp in the great atoll of life, had found his exact place and due work was the reason that, at one hundred years, life was yet an orange upon the palate of Old Dalton.

Nanny Craig--who later became Mother Dalton--had, in remote eighteen hundred and twenty, been a squalling, crabbed baby, and had apparently started life determined to be crotchety. If she had adhered to this schedule she would have been buried before she was sixty and would have been glad to go. But Old Dalton--then young Dave Dalton--married her out of hand at seventeen, and so remade and conserved her in the equable, serene, and work-filled atmosphere of the home he founded that Nanny far outdid all her family age records, recent or ancestral, and lived to ninety-three. She was seven years younger than Dave, and now three months dead.

Dave had missed her sorely. People had said the Message would not be long coming to him after she went. Perhaps if he had been in the usual case of those who have passed the seventh decade--weary and halt and without employment or the ability or wish for it--he would have brooded and worried himself into the grave very soon after the passing of his old "mate" and one living contemporary. But he was a born, inured, and inveterate worker, and as long as there were "chores" for him to do he felt ample excuse for continuing to exist. Old Dalton still had the obsession, too, that while and where he lived he was "boss" and manager; and one solid, sustaining thought that helped to keep him living was that if he died the Dalton farm (it was the original old homestead that these young descendants of his occupied) would be without its essential head and squire.