Chapter VIII: The Fish Nibbles

Quietly, naturally, giving a preliminary word of direction to the maid as she lifted the portières, Mrs. Markham entered the drawing room. Pricking with a sense of impatience, tinctured by nervousness over his own folly, Robert H. Norcross awaited her there. She stood a moment regarding him; in that moment, the quick perception, veiled away by an expression of thought, to which the railroad baron owed so much, took her all in. Superficially, he saw a tall woman, approaching fifty, but still vigorous and free from over-burdening flesh.

"Good evening; I am glad to see you," she said quietly. She had a low voice and pleasing. He remembered then that he had failed to rise, so intent had he been on her face; and he got to his feet in some embarrassment. As she approached him, his mind, going from detail to detail, noticed her powerful head, her Grecian nose, rising without indentation from a straight forehead, her firm but pleasant mouth, her large, light gray eyes which looked a little past him. Here was a person on his own level of daring mental flight. He remembered only one other woman who had struck him with the force of this one. That other was an actress, supreme in her generation not so much for temperament as for mind. As he looked over a reception crowd at her, intellect had spoken to intellect; they had known each other. So Paula Markham struck him on first sight.

He was about to speak, but she put in her word first.

"Do you come personally or professionally? I had an engagement for an unknown visitor on professional business. Are you he? For if you are, it would be better for you not to tell me your name--I am Mrs. Markham."

"I came professionally," he said. He paused. The manner of Norcross, on all first meetings, was timid and hesitating. It was one of his unconscious tricks. Because of that timidity, new-comers, in trying to put him at his ease revealed themselves to his shrewd observation. But there was a real embarrassment at this meeting. He was approaching the subject which had lain close to his imagination ever since three days ago, when Bulger said carelessly that a woman had given him the address of the best spook medium in the business.

"I want to know," he said, "all about--myself."

She laughed lightly as she seated herself in an old-fashioned straight-back chair.

"If I should tell you that," she said, "I would give you the sum and substance of human wisdom. That seems to me the greatest mystery of the unknowable. No human being ever thoroughly understood any other human being, I suppose,--and yet no human being knows himself. If you search yourself, you find mystery. If you ask others, you find double mystery. Perhaps that is the knowledge which is reserved for the Divine."

"That is true," responded Norcross. "That is true. But your spirits--"

"Not mine," she interrupted. "And perhaps not spirits, either. Though they speak to me, I cannot say that they are real, any more than I can tell that this table, these clothes"--her long, expressive, ringless hand swept across the area of her skirt--"than you yourself, are real. All reality and unreality may dwell in the mind. Though personally," she added, "I prefer to believe that this chair, these clothes, you, I, are real. And if they are real, so are the Voices. At least, so I believe."

This philosophy was past any power of Norcross for repartee; the faculties which deal with such things had wasted in him during thirty years in Wall Street. But the effect of her voice, her ladyhood, and her command of this philosophy--those moved him.

"Will your voices tell me anything?" he asked, irrelevantly, yet coming straight to the point.

"Impatience," she answered, "will not help you. The power bloweth where it listeth. That impatience is one of the roads to trickery employed by the frauds of--my profession."

A smile lifted the mustache of Norcross.

"You admit that there _are_ frauds in your profession, then?"

"Oh, dear, yes!" she smiled back at him. "It lends itself so easily to fraud that the temptation among the little people must be overwhelming--the more because trickery is often more accurate than real revelation. I will confess to you that this is the rock upon which my powers and my mission seem sometimes most likely to split. But I console myself by thinking that all of us, great as well as small, must be on the verge of it sometimes. Let me draw you a parallel. Perhaps you know something of the old alchemists. They had laid hold on the edge of chemistry. But because that truth came confused, because they all had things by the wrong handle, a thousand of them confused truth with error until, in the end, they did not know right from wrong. This force in which you and I are interested is a little like chemistry--it may be called mental and spiritual chemistry. But because it deals with the unseen, not with the seen, it is a thousand times more uncertain and baffling. We have ears, eyes, touch--a great equipment--to perceive gold, silver, stones, trees, water. But we have only this mind, a mystery even to ourselves, to perceive an idea, a concept. I wish that I could express it better"--she broke off suddenly--"and very likely I'm boring you--but when your whole soul is full of a thing it _will_ overflow." She smiled upon Norcross, as though for sympathy. If he gave it, his face did not betray him.

"Then you say," returned Norcross with one of his characteristic shifts to childlike abruptness, "that you never faked?"

Mrs. Markham, as though daring him to provoke her by his forthrightness, leaned forward and regarded him with amusement on her lips. "Men are only boys," she said. "My dear sir--I could almost say 'my dear boy'--if I had, would I admit it? You must take me as I am and form your own conclusions. I shall not help you with that, even though I admit to you that I don't care very much what your conclusions are.

"To be serious," she added, "it is not a pleasant suspicion to hear of one's self. Now take yourself--you are a man of large practical affairs--"

Norcross leaned forward a trifle, as though expecting revelation to begin. She caught the motion.

"Don't think I'm telling you _that_ from any supernormal source," she said. "That's my own intelligence--my woman's intuition if you like to call it so. Your air, your ineptness to understand philosophy, show that you are not in one of the learned professions, and it is easy to see, if I may make so bold"--here she smiled a trifle--"that you are no ordinary person. You have the air of great things about you. Well, if I should raise suspicion against your business integrity and your methods, it would hurt for a moment, even if there were truth in it. In fairness, that is so, is it not?"

"I have to beg your pardon, of course," said Norcross, grown easier in his manner. "But you must remember that your profession has to prove itself--that they're all accused of fraud."

"Now that you have apologized," said she, "I will prove that I have accepted the apology by answering you direct. I am not a fraud. I have been able to afford not to be. Still, I have a little sympathy with those who are. Did you ever consider," she went on, "that no fraud invents anything; that he is only imitating something genuine? Perhaps it may shake whatever faith you have in me if I tell you whatever these people profess to do has been done genuinely and without possibility of fraud."

"Even bringing spirits from a cabinet?" he asked. Just as he spoke that question, an electric bell rang somewhere to the rear of the drawing-room. Mrs. Markham sat unmoving for an instant, as though considering either the sound or his question. The bell tinkled no more. After a moment, she smiled again.

"You must know more of all these things before I can answer your question. Haven't we talked enough? Wouldn't it be better, in your present condition of suspicion, if I try to see what we can do without seeming any further to inspect you? For you must know that long preliminary conversation is a stock method with frauds and fakirs."

Norcross's breath came a little faster, and a curious change passed for a second over his face--a falling of all the masses and lines. Mrs. Markham rose, sat by the table, under the reading-lamp, and shaded her eyes with her hand. She spoke now in a different tone, softer and less inflected.

"I shall probably not go into trance," she said. "That is rare with me, rare with anyone, though often assumed for effect. Of you, I ask only that you remain quiet and passive. I'd like less light."

Norcross shot a glance of quick suspicion at her as he rose, reached for the old-fashioned gas chandelier, and turned the jets down to tiny points.

"Oh, dear no!" spoke Mrs. Markham, "not so low as that--this is no dark seance. I merely meant that the lights are too strong for a pair of sensitive eyes. I feel everything when I am in this condition. Would you mind sitting a little further away? Thank you. I think that's right. Please do not speak to me until I speak, and do not be disappointed if I tell you nothing."

For five minutes, no sound broke the silence in Mrs. Markham's drawing-room, except the hiss of a light, quick breath and the intake and outgo of a heavier, slower one. And so suddenly, with such smothered intensity, that Norcross started in his seat, Mrs. Markham's voice emitted the first quaver of a musical note. She held it for a moment, before she began to hum over and over three bars of an old tune--"Wild roamed an Indian maid, bright Alfaretta." Thrice she hummed it, still sitting with her hand over her eyes.--"Wild roamed an Indian maid--" Then silence. But now, the breath of Norcross was coming more heavily, and the masses of his face had still further fallen. After an interval, Mrs. Markham spoke, in a low, even tone:

"It is Lallie."

Another period of heavy silence.

"I cannot see her nor hear her speak. Martha, my control, is speaking for her. But Martha shows me the picture of a child--a little girl in an old-fashioned dress. And I think she is saying that name--Lallie."

The silence again, so that when Norcross moistened his dry lips with his tongue the slight smack seemed like the crackle of a fire.

"I see it more clearly now and I understand. The child gave her that name, but someone else used it for a love name. It was just between those two." The rest came in scattered sentences, with long pauses between--"I hear that song again--it was her favorite--I understand now why it comes--she was singing it when--Yes, you are the man--when you told her--She calls you Bobbert--and now I cannot see."

A bead of perspiration had appeared so suddenly on the forehead of Norcross that it had the effect of bursting from a pore. He was on his feet, was pacing the floor in his jerky little walk. When, after one course of the drawing-room, he turned back, Mrs. Markham had taken her hand from her eyes, and was facing him.

"Oh, why did you do that?" she asked. "It has its effect on me--you do not know how much!" Her manner spoke a smothered irritation. "I shall not see Lallie to-night. And she was very near."

As though something had clicked and fallen into place within him, Norcross straightened and stiffened, controlled the relaxed muscles of his face, flashed his eyes on Mrs. Markham.

"Might I ask some questions?" he said.

"You must sit quietly," she answered, "and though I can never see so well after the first contact breaks, Martha may speak for you. Sit as you did, and wait for me." Norcross walked at his nervous, hurried little pace back to his seat on the sofa. His face was quite controlled now, and his sharp eyes held all their native cunning. That grip on himself grew, as he waited for the inert seeress to speak again.

"Martha says, 'I will try,'" she gave out finally. "Quick--with your question--with your lips, not your mind--I am not strong enough now."

"What was Lallie's real name?"

"Helen."

"Her other name?"

A pause, then:

"Martha is silent. You are testing me. Tell something you want to know--even advice."

"Was there ever anyone else?"

A pause again, then:

"Never. She loved you wholly. She was angry over a little thing, just jealousy, during that last quarrel. She had already forgiven. It was only a girl's whim. Do you want advice?"

Norcross thrusted obliquely from the corner of his eye at Mrs. Markham and looked down at the floor.

"Ask her if I shall sell," he said.

The answer came so suddenly that it overlapped the last words of his sentence.

"Martha says that she is going away." No more for two silent minutes; no more until Mrs. Markham dropped her hand from her eyes, turned to Norcross, and said in a normal, sprightly tone:

"It is all over for this evening. I suppose the trouble lay in your last question. I am sorry--if you came here looking for business advice--that you got only the things of the affections. To your old love affairs, I had an unusually quick response to-night." She leaned heavily back in her chair. "Excuse me if I seem tired. There is a kind of inner strain about this which you cannot know--a strain at the core. It does not affect the surface, but it makes you languid." Yet her manner, as she threw herself back, invited him to linger.

"I shall not ask you," she went on, "whether the things I told you to-night are true. We all have our human vanities in our work; we like to hear it praised. That is one reason why I do not ask. Then I know without your confirmation that what I told you was true. When the control comes as clearly and strongly as it did for a few minutes tonight,--before you interrupted by rising--the revelations are always accurate and true. The details I gave you are trivial. That is generally a feature of a first sitting. The scholars have found an explanation of that phenomenon, and I am inclined to agree with them. If I were talking to you over a telephone and you were not sure of my voice, how should I identify myself? By some trivial incident of our common experience. For example, suppose I were to call you up to-morrow. How should I identify myself? Somewhat like this, probably: 'You tried to turn the gas out completely, when I wanted it only lowered in order to save my eyes.' Wouldn't that identify me to you?" she paused as for an answer.

"As nearly as you could over a telephone wire," he answered. "You're a marvelously clever woman, to think of that," he added. Mrs. Markham answered, on the wings of a light laugh:

"If I appear at all clever by contrast with what you expected to find, it is because I have not let my mind dwell in a half-world, as have so many others of my profession. That is the tendency. I have seen no reason why I should not combat it. I believe, too, that I am the stronger for it in my work. What was I saying? Oh, yes--about the first contact. Probably the last thought of the disembodied, upon assuming the trance state--for I believe that the sender of these messages, like the receivers, have to enter an abnormal condition--is to prove their identity. That is only natural, is it not? Would not you do the same? Think. And what do they have to offer? One of those intimate memories of years past which linger so long in the mind. Take me for example. What should I offer to--well, to that one among the disembodied who means most to me? An adventure in stealing cream from a dairy house!" As though she were carried away by this memory, her face grew soft and serious. With an outward sweep of her hands and a quick "but then!" she resumed:

"The best judges of character--and you must be such a one--make their mistakes. Why did you ask that question?"

Norcross, glib and effective as his tongue could be when he directed or traded, found now no better answer than:

"Because I wanted to know, I suppose."

"Were this Helen in the flesh--young and inexperienced as she was--would you expect her to give you advice in any large affair of business--would she be basically interested in it? Interested because it is yours and she loves you, perhaps--but basically? We have no proof that natures change out there. I suppose that isn't all, either. Is she, keeping her soul for you in a life which I hope is better--is she interested in whether or no you make a little more money and position? I can conceive only one condition in which she would mention your business. If you were at a crossroads--if great danger or great deliverance hung on your decision--she might sense that. I think they must get it, by some process to which we are blind, from other disembodied spirits."

"Suppose, then, that--Martha I think you call her--had brought some old business associate. Would he have answered me?"

"Perhaps. But that does not really explain what is in your mind. If this business matter which perplexes you were so vital, don't you suppose that some one of those very associates would have rushed to speak, instead of a dead love? In that way, I think I can construct an answer--provided you ask that question in good faith. It is, probably, not very important whether you sell or no."

Mrs. Markham rose on this. Norcross caught the hint in her manner, and rose with her. A little "oh!" escaped her, and her face lighted.

"I know who you are, now!" she said. "You are Robert H. Norcross of the Norcross lines!"

Norcross started.

"Please do not think I got _that_ by any supernormal means!" she added quickly. "I mention it only to be frank with you. From the moment I saw you, I was perplexed by a memory and a resemblance. Then, too, I caught the air of big things about you. That attitude which you have just taken solved it all. It is the counterpart of your photograph in last Sunday's _Times_--the full-page snap shot. I must be frank with you or you will not believe me."

The mustache of Norcross raised just a trifle, and his eyes glittered.

"Passing over what I may think of your revelations," he said, "you're a remarkable woman."

"If you're coming again," said Mrs. Markham, "perhaps you'd better not delve into my personality. It interferes. Understand, I'm really flattered to have a man like you take notice of this work. That's why I ask that your notice shan't be personal. At least not yet."

"Since this is a--a--professional relation, may I ask how much I owe you?"

"My price is twenty-five dollars a sitting--for those who can afford it."

Norcross drew out his wallet, handed Mrs. Markham three bills. Without looking at them, she dropped them on the table beside her. "You see," she went on as though her mind were still following their discussion, "I don't like to talk much with my--patients. I never can know when I may unconsciously steal from what they tell me."

At the entrance, Norcross hesitated, as though hoping for something more than a good-night. No more than that did she give him, however. He himself was obliged to introduce the subject in his mind. "If I should come again, would Helen tell me more?"

"Perhaps. From the excellent result to-night I should call it likely."

"Then may I come again?" His voice broke once, as with eagerness.

"Certainly. Will you make an appointment?"

"Tuesday night?"

"I had an engagement for Tuesday. Could you come as well on Friday?"

And though it meant postponing a directors' meeting, he answered promptly:

"Very well. Say Friday at eight."

And now he was in his automobile. He settled himself against the cushions and held the attitude, without motion. For five minutes he sat so, until the chauffeur, who had been throwing nervous backward glances through the limousine windows, asked:

"I beg your pardon, sir, did you say 'home'?"

"Yes, home," responded Norcross. And even on those words, his voice broke again.

Mrs. Markham stood beside the table, hardly moving, until she knew by whir and horn that the Norcross automobile was gone. Then she sent Ellen to bed, and herself moved quickly to a secretary in the little alcove library back of the drawing-room. Taking a key from her bosom, she unlocked a drawer and took out a packet of yellow legal cap paper. Holding this document concealed in a fold of her waist, she passed rapidly to an apartment upstairs. She opened the door softly, and listened. Nothing sounded within but the light, even breathing of a sleeper. After a moment, she crossed the room, finding her way expertly in the darkness. Well within, she knelt and began some operation on the floor.

And her hand made a slip. A crash echoed through the house. Following the startled, half-articulate cry of a sudden awakening, Mrs. Markham, still finding her way with marvelous precision in the darkness, passed through a set of portières and crossed to the bed.

"Hush, dear," she said, "I only came upstairs to borrow a handkerchief. Go to sleep. I'm sure it won't bother your rest. Don't think of it again."