CHAPTER VI

IN WHICH CONSTANTINE HAS A VISION

Although he had not the slightest difficulty in recounting the precise phrases of conversations and the exact details of actions which had their habitat in New York during the previous hour and a quarter, Karl did unquestionably feel the need of choosing his words when he began to tell Hooper how a new and wholly entrancing phase of his extraordinary powers was opened up by the discovery that mere distance no longer diminished his sense of hearing. It was so vitally important to be accurate. First impressions are of prime value in describing a sensation. If a man only retained his first impression of the taste of alcohol what a sober world it would be!

When his conscious intelligence quitted the room in which he and Hooper were sitting, he had no fixed objective in his mind. This fresh departure was noteworthy, and, indeed, absolutely essential to the theory propounded by Sir William Macpherson, namely, that Karl was a living installation of wireless telegraphy. If this rough-and-ready definition of the phenomenon were reasonably correct, it was essential that the human “station” should have the power of receiving as well as transmitting the electrical influences which called into activity its sixth sense. Hitherto Grier had, so to speak, swept the mental horizon with a searchlight, hoping or expecting to find the object he sought. Now, in a state of quiescence, yet tuned to the proper pitch by the sound of one of those strong, deep words which vibrate back to the twilight of human origins, he was encountered by another radio-active force, and became, for a time, a machine-like recorder of impressions.

After the familiar passing through darkness into light--this momentary eclipse being apparently a mechanical readjustment of the normal functions of the brain to their novel requirements--he found himself a spectator of a meeting between two men, a meeting which was seemingly taking place in a second-floor office overlooking the junction of two busy thoroughfares.

He could hear nothing. He was in the position of an audience watching the cinematographic representation of an express train thundering through a station--there was all the realism of life and motion, but no sound. In his case, of course, there were the added illusions of color and sunlight, nor was the vision distracted by perplexing flutterings of a winding film.

One of the men was Constantine, tall, sallow-faced, dark-eyed, habited in evening dress, but showing an Oriental love of display by the pair of diamond studs blazing in his shirt-front, the thrilling design of his brocade waistcoat, and the braid, two inches wide, which seamed his trousers. His companion, also attired in the garb abhorred by George Bernard Shaw, was, in all save his un-American aspect (both men being unmistakably “aliens”) the exact antithesis of Constantine. A short, tubby man, the product, it appeared, of a Polish-Jew father and a Mexican half-caste mother, he might be likened to a human olive. He was so round, so greeny-bronze in complexion, that Karl, summing him up afterwards, said:

“When I meet him, I shall half expect to see him preserved in vinegar inside a bottle with a flamboyant label.”

The two were discussing a matter of grave interest, judging by their faces. Karl made a sub-conscious effort to listen to what they were saying, but it failed, though he subsequently recalled a faint knowledge of vague sounds, as though he were endeavoring to hear through thick glass.

The room was sumptuously furnished. The walls were decorated with photographs, large and small, of gentlemen with wide and expressive mouths and abundant hair, and of ladies with goo-goo eyes and even more abundant hair, wearing picture hats for the most part. Several framed letters, either typewritten or hugely scrawled, were crowded together over the fireplace, and they set forth in unguarded terms the varied excellences of “Dear Steindal,” or “Mr. Wilhelm Steindal,” or “Wilhelm Steindal, Esq.” Through the open windows Karl saw electric cars hurrying to and fro beneath, the bright steel rails commanding a clear center of the street, while the general traffic was made up of light trolleys, delivery vans and bicycles, with hardly ever a cab or private carriage. On two sides of a diminutive street lamp he read “Broadway” and “W. 22d St.,” so he assumed that he had, for some occult reason, found his way to New York.

His attention was caught by the flush of anger on Constantine’s face. The Armenian emphasized his comment with a passionate thump of his clenched fist on the table. Steindal, if the fat man were the recipient of those flattering letters, seemed to be expostulating. After some argument, in which Constantine was apparently brought round to the other’s view, the olive-skinned person stretched out a pulpy hand for a code book, which he consulted, and framed a message.

And now, for the first time to his adult knowledge, Karl _purposely changed his position_ without interrupting his sight of events in the least degree. That is to say, his experiments of the two previous nights had the aspect of a very vivid dream, but, on this occasion, he acted as if he had the power of physical movement. When he saw Maggie Hutchinson at Manhattan Beach he endeavored to “stoop” over the hotel table, and also to “step off” the veranda on to the grass lawn beyond, but he succeeded in neither instance.

To-day, except that his body was in Oxford, he fancied he had complete liberty of movement in New York.

So he passed behind Constantine’s companion, looked over his shoulder, and read what he had written. The words “Margaret Hutchinson” stood out clearly from a jumble of nonsense. Karl had never used a code, and the meaningless nature of the script puzzled him until he saw that the writer had jotted down sentences opposite each word on a separate sheet of paper. Perusal of this key soon made the message coherent. It read:

“Meet the _Merlin_ on arrival at Liverpool on the 10th inst. Offer Miss Margaret Hutchinson star concert at St. James’s Hall in my name, and promise her prolonged engagement on good terms for exclusive contract, Steindal.”

There was an evil leer on Steindal’s face when he read the draft to Constantine, and the unpleasant smile with which the latter showed his curt approval warned Grier that an ulterior purpose lay behind an offer which, under ordinary circumstances, should prove very acceptable to any girl at the outset of a professional career. Karl was eager to learn more of the compact into which these two had entered, but, strive as he might, he could only distinguish certain faint, quick, vibrating noises which had a vague resemblance to taps on a cymbal. He did not realize, until later, that he was, even then, extending his range of hearing, and the sounds he caught were the clanging bells of the street-cars!

Steindal summoned an assistant, gave him the cablegram, with instructions, and Constantine and he, donning dust-coats, descended to the street. It was a perfect joy to Karl to discover that he could accompany them. They were taken down by an elevator--which smacks of Cork though it is pure American--and passed out into the street.

And then Karl Grier’s sixth sense took its first ride on a Broadway car! Being on the up-town track it was crowded with the latest flight of business people.

“Did the conductor take your fare and ring you up on the indicator? Anyhow, he would say things if you tried to work in a sixpence for a dime,” cried Hooper, when Karl reached this part of his story; and the spirit passenger confessed to a singular dread of being in the way of the men and women who were standing between the seats and clinging on to the straps.

This was a somewhat remarkable instance of a mental record of a purely physical sensation. Once he began to roam about during his trances he had to learn that matter and space did not exist for him in their every-day acceptance.

The car swung round a curve into Madison Square, crossed 23d Street, swept past a number of fine hotels, shops, newspaper offices, and theaters, passed under a section of the elevated railway, and clanged its rapid way towards newer New York.

At last Constantine and Steindal alighted opposite a spacious restaurant, and Grier, being a ghost of quick perception, saw that even a rich man like the Armenian would use the street-car in preference to a brougham, because it was much safer and twice as speedy.

He went with the pair up the steps of the restaurant and noted the deferential smirk of the head waiter. Nothing would have pleased him more than to play some prank on this flunky, but the means did not exist, so he perforce rested content with a careful scrutiny of his surroundings. In another week or two the patrons of this fashionable eating-house would be scattered over the cooler parts of the earth. Already the attendance was thin, but there were sufficient diners to warrant the cosmopolitan claims of America’s chief city.

All speculation on this and kindred matters was, however, suddenly extinguished by a subtle, immensely remote, yet quite distinct sound of harmonious music. And then, with an exquisite delight that was almost painful in its intensity, he became aware that he was listening to the strains of a band playing one of Strauss’s waltzes. With each few bars the lilt of the composition became clearer, the orchestration more defined, until he could distinguish the violins, the piano, the piccolo, and, finally, the clarionets.

His brain reeled under the intensity of this new emotion, and there was some danger that he might react into physical consciousness, had not a voice whispered, at exceedingly close quarters:

“Dot _schwein-hund_ Steindal says we cahnd gook a _poulet en casserole_ worth a cent.”

It was the deferential head waiter murmuring confidences to the manager!

So the music had bridged the void! He could hear as well as see across the Atlantic! Again had that strange gift of language prepared the way for the exercise of an unknown faculty. Rhythm, singing, those inarticulate sounds which Noiré calls _clamor concomitans_, were the first utterances of primitive man when working in concert. Every savage race sings and dances, whether in peace or war. Uncivilized men work best when they can sing. In olden days soldiers sang as they marched against the enemy, and civilization has only substituted the bugles and drums for the songs.

Beyond all question the unfettered exercise of Karl’s additional sense, that marvelous adjunct whereby his visual and auricular nerves annihilated distance, arose from the chance that an orchestra, mainly consisting of stringed instruments, struck up a measured cadence at a moment when Karl was actually straining his faculties to obtain some more precise notion of all that was taking place.

And now Grier, who was somewhat in the position of an operator controlling some rarely sensitive electrical apparatus, learnt that he must focus the instrument with delicate precision if he were to avoid confusion. So he bent his attention on the pair at the table, seated himself metaphorically astride the iced cantaloup which decorated the center of their board, and gathered in each word they uttered, with the added zest of seeing the wary glances, the twitching nostrils, the drawn lips.

Steindal had ordered a meal with the air of a connoisseur. That he had not exercised much tact in conveying his wants to the head waiter has been proved by the latter’s private opinion whispered in New York and overheard in Oxford.

But Constantine merely toyed with the banquet, and his nervous state of preoccupation only increased as the champagne rose to his head.

“I believe that girl will bring me bad luck,” was the first connected phrase he uttered which Karl could associate with Maggie Hutchinson’s personality, granted that she was the unseen attraction drawing him across the Atlantic. How well he remembered the Armenian’s voice, though a decade had passed since the last time he had heard it on board the P. & O. steamship _Ganges_, in Tilbury Dock, when Constantine gave him a gold watch and chain. The watch was ticking in his waistcoat pocket at that very moment, but the chain, being of a size that provoked caustic undergraduate humor, lay in a drawer.

“Bad luck! There’s no such thing, _amigo mio_! Bad management? Yes, it abounds, but, where women are concerned, I flatter myself that I know the sex. Fair, frail, and fickle, dark, deep, and _da capo_--that’s how I classify ’em.”

This new voice was that of an unctuous devil. Grier, with his finely tuned ear for vocal effects, fancied that a boa-constrictor might speak with such a voice. It was the oil in the man-olive which gave his speech its smoothness.

Steindal laughed softly at his own cheap wit, but Constantine was not amused.

“I tell you, Steindal,” he said, “that you do not understand the nature of a girl brought up in the home atmosphere which surrounded Maggie Hutchinson. Damn it, man, it is that sanctity of hers which renders her attractive to me. What is a pretty face or a fairy-like figure? A mere commodity, a ‘cheap lot, slightly soiled’ in the catalogue of life. _That’s_ the sort of woman _you_ have in your mind, and I don’t want her.”

“Sanctity, at Maggie’s age, consists of soap and water and a soft skin. We have a Spanish proverb: ‘_el corazón manda las carnes_’--the heart controls the body, and I know that when a woman’s desires outrun her means she begins to weigh her scruples to see if they are really as heavy as she fancies. Just let Maggie Hutchinson taste success, popularity, the delights of money-spending, and then withdraw the pleasant cup before she has drunk too deeply! Bah! Don’t talk to me of sanctity! To the man of the world, _es de vidrio la mujer_--woman is made of glass!”

Steindal, scoffing in the complacency of his knowledge, tilted some champagne down his wide throat. Karl, feverishly anxious to discover what plot these twentieth century ghouls were hatching against a young and innocent girl, concentrated his thoughts on Constantine with some reminiscence of that masterfulness he exhibited as a boy on board the _Ganges_.

He carried his intent too far. Constantine suddenly grew livid with fear. He turned in his chair, gazed at the floor, and sprawled over the table, sweeping glass and plates away with a crash.

“Look!” he shrieked in an eerie falsetto. “Can’t you see that shark deep down there in the black water? It will devour me! Oh, help, help!”