Part 9
His sombre eyes held me. “Ah, you will never know how wonderful--never!” He said it with a kind of brooding triumph, which, at the moment, I did not wholly understand. Now, long afterwards, I think I do.
I left him, and crossed the corridor to my own room. A slight rustle made me turn. Mrs. Lithway stood in the upper hall, looking down at me--the same creature, to every detail of dress, even to the folded paper in her hand, that I had seen the previous morning. This time I braced myself to face the ghost, to examine her with a passionate keenness. I hoped to find her a less appalling creature. But, at once, Mrs. Lithway leaned over the rail and spoke to me--a little sharply, I remember.
“Would you please telephone to the garage and say that the doctor thinks we ought to start ten minutes earlier than we had planned? I shall be down directly.”
The hand that held the paper was by this time hidden in the folds of her skirt. She turned and sped lightly along the corridor to the trunk-loft. Save for the voice, it was a precise repetition of what had happened the day before.
“Certainly,” I said; but I did not turn away until she had disappeared into the trunk-loft. I went to the telephone and gave the message; it took only a few seconds. Then I went to my own room, leaving the door open so that I commanded the hall. In a few minutes Mrs. Lithway came down the stairs from the third story. “Did you telephone?” she asked accusingly, as she caught my eye. I bowed. She passed on into Lithway’s room. There was no paper in her hand. I knew that this time there had been no ghost.
Well.... Lithway, as every one knows, died under the ether. His heart suddenly and unaccountably went back on him. He left no will; and, as he had no relations except the cousin whom he had married, everything went to her. I had once, before his second marriage, seen a will of Lithway’s, myself; but I didn’t care to go into court with that information, especially as in that will he had left me his library. I should have liked, for old sake’s sake, to have Lithway’s library. His widow sold it, and it is by now dispersed about the land. She told me, after the funeral, that she should go on at Braythe, that she never wanted to leave it; but, for whatever reason, she did, after a few years, sell the place suddenly and go to Europe. I have never happened to see her since she sold it, and I did not know the people she sold it to. The house was burned many years ago, I believe, and an elaborate golf-course now covers the place where it stood. I have not been to Braythe since poor Lithway was buried.
I took the hunting-trip that Lithway had been so violently and inexplicably opposed to. I think I was rather a fool to do it, for I ought to have realized, after Lithway’s death, the secret of the house, its absolutely unique specialty. But such is the peacock heart of man that I still, for myself, trusted in “common sense”--in my personal immunity, at least, from every supernatural law. Indeed, it was not until I had actually encountered my savage, and got the wound I bear the scar of, that I gave entire credence to Lithway’s tragedy. I put some time into recovering from the effect of that midnight skirmish in the jungle, and during my recovery I had full opportunity to pity Lithway.
It became quite clear to me that the presences at Braythe concerned themselves only with major dooms. If Lithway’s ghost had been his wife, his wife must have been a bad lot. I am as certain as I can be of anything that he was exceedingly unhappy with her. It was a thousand pities that, for so many years, he had misunderstood the vision; that he had permitted himself--for that was what it amounted to--to fall in love with her in advance. She was, quite literally, his “fate.” Of course, by this time, I feel sure that he couldn’t have escaped her. I don’t believe the house went in for kindly warnings; I think it merely, with the utmost insolence, foretold the inevitable and dared you to escape it. If I hadn’t gone out for big game in Africa, I am quite sure that my nigger would have got at me somewhere else--even if he had to be a cannibal out of a circus running amuck down Broadway. That was the trick of the house: the worst thing that was going to happen to you leered at you authentically over that staircase. I have never understood why I saw Lithway’s apparition; but I can bear witness to the fact that she was furious at my having seen her--as furious as Mrs. Lithway was, the next day, if it comes to that. It was a mistake. My step may have sounded like Lithway’s. Who knows? At least it should be clear what Lithway meant when he said that he didn’t always know whether he saw her or not. The two were pin for pin alike. The apparition, of course, had, from the beginning, worn the dress that Mrs. Lithway was to wear on the day that Lithway was taken to the hospital. I have never liked to penetrate further into the Lithways’ intimate history. I am quite sure that the folded paper was the old will, but I have always endeavored, in my own mind, not to implicate Margaret Lithway more than that. Of course, there could never have been any question of implicating her before the public.
I never had a chance, after my own accident, to consult Wender. I stuck to Europe unbrokenly for many years, as he stuck to America. Both Wender and I, I fancy, were chary of writing what might have been written. Some day, I thought, we would meet and have the whole thing out; but that day never came. Suddenly, one autumn, I had news of his death. He was a member of a summer expedition in Utah and northern Arizona--I think I mentioned that he had gone in for American ethnology. There are, as every one knows, rich finds in our western States for any one who will dig long enough; and they were hoping to get aboriginal skulls and mummies. All this his sister referred to when she wrote me the particulars of his death. She dwelt with forgivable bitterness on the fact of Wender’s having been told beforehand that the particular section he was assigned to was free from rattlesnakes. “Perhaps you know,” she wrote, “that my brother had had, since childhood, a morbid horror of reptiles.” I did know it--Lithway had told me. Wender’s death from the bite of a rattlesnake was perhaps the most ironic of the three adventures; for Wender was the one of us who put most faith in the scenes produced on the stage of Braythe. I never heard Wender’s theory; but I fancy he realized, as Lithway and I did not, that since the “ghosts” we saw were not of the past they must be of the future--a most logical step, which I am surprised none of us should have taken until after the event.
Wender’s catastrophe killed in me much of my love of wandering. At least, it drove me to Harry Medway; and Harry Medway did the rest. I am not afraid of another warrior’s cutting at me with his assegai; but I do not like to be too far from specialists. I have already been warned that I may sometime go blind; and I know that other complications may be expected. Pathology and surgery are sealed books to me; but I still hold so far to logic that I fully expect to die some time as an indirect result of that wound. The scar reminds me daily that its last word has not been said.
I am a fairly old man--the older that I no longer wander, and that I cling so weakly to the great capitals which hold the great physicians. The only thing that I was ever good at I can no longer do. Curiosity has died in me, for the most part; one or two such mighty curiosities have been, you see, already so terribly appeased. But I think I would rise from my death-bed, and wipe away with my own hand the mortal sweat from my face, for the chance of learning what it was that drove Mrs. Lithway, in midwinter, from Braythe. If I could once know what she saw on the staircase, I think I should ask no more respite. The scar might fulfil its mission.
THE TORTOISE
“There are only three things worth while--fighting, drinking, and making love.” It was Chalmers who said it to me as we came out of the theatre, and were idling along towards the club. We had been seeing a very handsome--almost elegant--melodrama. Very impressionable chap, Chalmers, I thought, for I was quite sure that he had never done any fighting; he was apparently a total abstainer; and he positively ran--as whole-heartedly as a frightened cow--from a petticoat.
“What about work?” I asked, as we turned into the club. Chalmers is a fiend for work: always shut up in his laboratory, dry-nursing an experiment.
“Work is an anodyne--a blooming anodyne.” He hunched his shoulders, and his brown coat--the coat of a toilsome recluse, if ever there was one; there’s something peculiarly unworldly about brown tweed for a man’s wear--creased into lumpier curves than ever.
“It’s a mighty slow one. If I wanted a quick effect, I think I’d take to cocaine. Must be exciting, slewing round the corners of Montmartre, dropping your francs into a basket that swings down from God knows where, with the blessed stuff all in it waiting to be inhaled. And all over inside of a year.” Thus I to Chalmers, knowing that we were very far from Montmartre. Chalmers, I should say, was magnificently dependable; you were as safe in dropping a lurid suggestion on him as on the shell of an ancient turtle. I rather liked that idea, which struck me just then; in fact, his clothes were much the color of tortoise-shell.
“But I don’t want it over. You see ... I’ve agreed to hang on.” His keen glance at me, more than his words, savored of explanation.
“Oh!” I made the syllable as non-committal as possible. The lips at one moment so fluent in confession will grow stiff with resentment after the hour of confidence is over. For that reason, I dislike to have people tell me things: I always expect that they will some day hate me, merely because they told.
We sat down at a table, and I ordered a high-ball. Chalmers fussed for a moment, and then committed himself to a _pâté_ sandwich with apollinaris. I didn’t think of asking him to join me. We had been trying for five years to get Chalmers to take a drink. For a year, there were always bets going on it; but it had been a long time now since any of us had made or lost anything on the chance of Chalmers’s potations.
At the same time, my curiosity was aroused. There had never been any mystery about Chalmers. There isn’t any about a tortoise, if it comes to that. The beast has been made much of mythologically, I believe; but even in India they only accuse him of holding up the world. No one pretends, so far as I know, that he keeps anything under his shell except himself. But Chalmers didn’t seem to be even bearing a burden. He was simply Chalmers. He had come among us, an accredited student of physics, with letters of introduction from German professors and Colonial Dames; he had performed the absolutely necessary conventional duties; he was vaguely related to people that every one knew; he was so obviously a gentleman that no one would ever have thought of affirming it. His holidays were all accounted for--in fact, he usually spent them with one or another of our own group. There wasn’t--there isn’t now--a single thing about Chalmers that any one could have the instinct to investigate. It had never occurred to any of us that we didn’t know as much about Chalmers as we did about the people we had been brought up with. We happened not to have been brought up with him, because he had happened to be brought up abroad. His father had been a consul somewhere.
On this occasion, anyhow, my curiosity got the better of my fixed rule. I decided to lead Chalmers on.
“Do you mean to say that your noble industry is nothing but a poor substitute for a drug?”
He smiled quaintly. His green eyes shone under his dark eyelashes. Very taking eyes they were: well set in his head and pleasantly intimate, with a near-sighted brilliancy.
“I didn’t say it was a poor substitute. And, anyhow, cocaine might charm away the hours, but only work can charm away the years. I’ve got into my stride--for eternity, it would seem. And some day, you know, I may, quite incidentally, do something in spectrum analysis that will be significant. I’ve got all the time in the world.”
“Are you so sure?”
“Well--it looks as if I were in for a long wait.”
He spoke as unconcernedly as if he had his lease of life locked up in his safe-deposit drawer.
I drank some whiskey and waited a minute, wondering whether to push his confidence over the edge, send it spinning into an abyss of revelation. Finally, I decided.
“I didn’t know that anything but a contract with the devil could make you so sure.”
“Oh, it doesn’t have to be with the devil.” He sipped his virtuous apollinaris. “Did you notice the heroine’s sister?” he went on.
I hadn’t noticed her much. I had been paying my money to see Maude Lansing act, and my frugal eyes had attached themselves to her exclusively, from the first act to the last.
“A vague little blonde thing, wasn’t she?”
“Blonde, but not so vague as you’d think. At least, I don’t think she’d be vague if you gave her anything to do. She had to be vague to-night, of course. But didn’t you see her deliberately subduing herself to the part--holding herself in, so as not to be too pretty, too angry, too subtle, too much in love? She did everything vaguely, I imagine, so as not to hog the stage. But give her a chance, and she’d play up. I was always expecting, you know, that she _would_ hog the stage. She could have done it.... It quite got me going.”
“Did you think her better than Maude Lansing?” It was something new, at least, to have him notice a woman so closely.
Chalmers tasted his _pâté_ and half-nodded approvingly at it.
“Oh, I don’t know anything about that. She is the only woman I have ever seen who looked like the girl I married.”
I set down my glass quickly. I had drunk most of the whiskey, and therefore none of it was spilled. Chalmers married! Why--why--we knew all about him, from cradle to laboratory; or, at least, as much as men do know of other men who have no scrapes to be got out of. I looked narrowly at Chalmers. Was it possible that he had been lying low all these years, with the single intention of perpetrating eventually the supreme joke? And if he was merely a humorist of parts, why had he not assembled the crowd? Why had he selected only one of his intimates? His intimates! That was precisely what we were. Yet none of us knew that he had been married. Chalmers himself might easily not have mentioned a dead wife, but no end of people, first and last, had turned up and contributed to Chalmers’s biography, and it was odd that none of them should have mentioned his bereavement. Unless----
“No one knows I am married. No one has ever known. If I told you all about it, you’d see why. And I think I shall. That girl started it all up again.”
He leaned across the table and laid his hand on my arm. His eyes glinted encouragingly at me. “Cheer up, old man! You’re not in for anything sordid. But curious--oh, very, very curious! Yes, I think, without vanity, I may say _very_ curious.... I meant what I said just now, coming out of the theatre. There aren’t but three things worth while--and I mayn’t have them. I mayn’t fight, because I might get killed before I’ve a right to; I don’t drink, for the sake of the paltry hours that might be subtracted from the sum of my years if I did; and, being married, I naturally can’t very well make love. Can I?” He turned on me with such a tone of ingenuous query that I wondered if it was a joke, after all.
I tried to be cynical. “That depends....”
“Oh, no, it doesn’t!” It was the old Chalmers who smiled at me--ingratiating, youthful, adventurous, gay. I had often wondered why Chalmers looked adventurous, his habits being, if ever any man’s were, regular to the point of monotony. It occurred to me now that perhaps he looked adventurous because he had had his adventure already. In any case, it was very satisfactory to find at last something in his life that matched with the look in his eyes--something that would take the curse off his even temperament and equable ways.
“Very, very curious,” he repeated. “And all these years I’ve wanted to tell somebody, just in case I should drop out suddenly. I’ve left written instructions, but I should really like some one to understand. It’s all rather preposterous.”
“It’s preposterous that you should suddenly be married.”
“Yes--of course. Well--I’ve got on pretty well, and I’d rather you didn’t mention it to any of the others. But if anything should turn up, you can say you knew it all along.”
“Fire ahead.”
On the strength of the narrative about to come, I ordered another high-ball. Sometimes you want something to fiddle with, something to intervene between you and your friend when it is hard for eyes to meet. But he had promised me that it should be nothing sordid, and when the drink came I set it trustfully to one side--in reserve, as it were.
“Time was, when I knocked about the world a bit. My parents were dead, I had no close kin, and there was money enough to do what I wanted to, provided I wanted something modest. I had a great notion, when I came out of Göttingen, of a _wanderjahr_. Only I was determined it shouldn’t be hackneyed. There was a good deal of Wilhelm Meister in it, all the same, with a strong dash of Heine. I fancied myself, rather, at that time; wanted to be different--like every other young pilgrim. I didn’t want the common fate--not I. I hadn’t any grievance against the world, because I had a complete faith in the world’s giving me what I wanted, in the end. But I distinctly remember promising myself to be remarkable. I shan’t, of course, unless there is something in spectrum analysis. I used to quote Heine to myself:
‘Du stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt! Du wolltest glücklich sein, unendlich glücklich, Oder unendlich elend, stolzes Herz, Und jetzo bist du elend.’
Of course, I never believed that I should be ‘unendlich elend,’ but I should have preferred that to anything mediocre. At that age--you know what we’re like. The man who would look at the stars by daylight and tumbled into the well. That’s us, to the life.
“I met her in a villa above Ravello. Some charming French people--or, at least, Monsieur was French, though Madame and the money were American--were keeping guard over her. The American wife had known her somewhere, and was being good to her in her great misfortune. I won’t go into explanations of how I came to frequent their villa. They were among the scores of people I had met and known in this or that pleasant, casual way. I used to go up and dine with them; I prolonged the Italian interlude in my _wanderjahr_, more or less for the sake of doing so. I had notions of going on to Egypt, but there was time enough for that. I stayed on even more because I liked the villa--an old Saracen stronghold on the edge of the Mediterranean, modernized into comfort--than because I liked them, though they were pleasant enough.
“At first I wished the girl were not there. She never talked; she was just a stiff figure, swathed in black up to her throat, sitting day by day almost motionless on a parapet. She was a harsh note. Wherever you were, she was in the middle distance, a black figure looking out to sea. It didn’t take many days for her to get on my nerves. She was like a portent. I fancy she got on theirs, too, but they were helpless. I gathered that Madame C. had a good deal of talk with her daily, in hours when they were alone; and before very long she permitted me to share her perplexities. She didn’t want to desert her young friend; but the girl seemed to have sunk into a kind of apathy. She thought, perhaps, a specialist ought to see her. A very American touch, that! Unluckily, the girl had no close kin; there was no one to turn her over to officially.
“Before long, I knew the whole story. The young lady’s fiancé was a civil engineer, and had been employed by Portuguese interests in East Africa. He had gone into the interior--more or less--on a job for the Nyassa Company: headquarters, Mozambique. There was supposed to be money in it, because the Portuguese had been growing ashamed of their colonial reputation, and had been bucking up to some extent. Hence the job with the Nyassa Company. She had wanted to go out with him, but he would not permit it. Quite right, too. Mozambique’s no place for a woman--or Lourenço Marques, either. _I_ know. Damn their yellow, half-breed souls!... She had been waiting for him to finish his job in the interior, and come home to marry her. The date of their marriage, I imagine, had not been very far off.
“Suddenly, letters had ceased to come. There had been a horrid interval of months when there was no word out of Africa for her. Cablegrams were unanswered. The people at the other end must have been very unbusinesslike not to give her some inkling of the reason why they couldn’t deliver them. I suppose it was the uncertainty. There he was, up on the verge of Rhodesia or beyond, prospecting, surveying, exploring: it was quite on the cards that he should lose his way, or be infinitely delayed, or fail somehow of his communications with headquarters on the coast. Beastly months for her, anyhow! Then letters did come. I never saw any of them, but I can imagine just the awkward vocabulary of them: a Portuguese head clerk in Mozambique trying to break it to her ornately that her man had died of fever up-country. Can’t you imagine those letters--in quaint, bad English, on thin paper, worn to utter limpness and poverty with being clutched and carried and cried over? I never saw them, but I can.