Chapter IV: Part 4

I was arranging for a considerable flight--something faddier and more dangerous than I had hitherto attempted--and to a friend as indolent as Lithway I could only prepare to bid a long farewell. He positively refused to accompany me even on the earlier and less difficult stages of my journey. “I’ll stick to my home,” he declared. It was a queer home to want to stick to, I thought privately, especially as the ghost was obviously local. He had never seen an apparition except at Braythe--nor had I, nor had Wender. I worried about leaving him there, for the one danger I apprehended was the danger of overwrought nerves; but Lithway refused to budge, and you can’t coerce a sane and able-bodied man with a private fortune. I did carry my own precautions to the point of looking up the history of the house. The man from whom Lithway had bought it, while it was still unfinished, had intended it for his own occupancy; but a lucrative post in a foreign country had determined him to leave America. The very architect was a churchwarden, the husband of one wife and the father of eight children. I even hunted up the contractor: not one accident had occurred while the house was building, and he had employed throughout, most amicably, union labor on its own terms. It was silly of me, if you like, but I had really been shaken by the unpleasant powers of the place. After my researches it seemed clear that in objecting to it any further I shouldn’t have a leg to stand on. In any case, Lithway would probably rather live in a charnel-house than move. I had to wash my hands of it all.

The last weeks of my visit were perfectly uneventful, both for Lithway and me--as if the house, too, were on its guard. I came to believe that there was nothing in it, and if either of us had been given to drinking, I should have called the eleven-o’clock visitation a new form of hang-over. I was a little inclined, in defiance of medical authorities, to consider it an original and interesting form of indigestion. By degrees I imposed upon myself to that extent. I did not impose on myself, however, to the extent of wanting to hear Wender talk about it; and I still blush to think how shallow were the excuses that I mustered for not meeting him at any of the times that he proposed.

This is a bad narrative, for the reason that it must be so fragmentary. It is riddled with lapses of time. Ghosts may get in their fine work in an hour, but they have always been preparing their _coup_ for years. Every ghost, compared with us, is Methuselah. We have to fight in a vulnerable and dissolving body; but they aren’t pressed for time. They’ve only to lie low until the psychologic moment. Oh, I’d undertake to accomplish almost anything if you’d give me the ghost’s chance. If he can’t get what he wants out of this generation, he can get it out of the next. Grand thing, to be a ghost!

It was some years before I went back to Braythe. Wender, I happen to know, never went back. Lithway used to write me now and then, but seldom referred to my adventure. He couldn’t very well, since the chief burden of his letters was always “When are you coming to visit me?” Once, when I had pressed him to join me for a season in Japan, he virtually consented, but at the last moment I got a telegram, saying: “I can’t leave her. _Bon voyage!_” That didn’t make me want to go back to Braythe. I was worried about him, but his persistent refusal to act on any one’s advice made it impossible to do anything for him. I thought once of hiring some one to burn the house down; but Lithway wouldn’t leave it, and I didn’t want to do anything clumsy that would imperil him. I was much too far away to arrange it neatly. I suggested it once to Wender, when we happened to meet in London, and he was exceedingly taken with the idea. I half hoped, for a moment, that he would do it himself. But the next afternoon he came back with a lot of reasons why it wouldn’t do--he had been grubbing in the British Museum all day. I very nearly heard Wender’s theory that time, but I pleaded a dinner engagement and got off.

You can imagine that I was delighted when I heard from Lithway, some years after my own encounter with the savage on the staircase, that he had decided to pull out and go to Europe. He had the most fantastic reasons for doing it--this time he wrote me fully. It seems he had become convinced that his apparition was displeased with him--didn’t like the look in her eyes, found it critical. As he wasn’t doing anything in particular except live like a hermit at Braythe, the only thing he could think of to propitiate her was to leave. Perhaps there was a sort of withered coquetry in it, too; he may have thought the lady would miss him if he departed and shut up the house. You see, by this time she was about the most real thing in his life. I don’t defend Lithway; but I thought then that, whatever the impelling motive, it would be an excellent thing for him to leave Braythe for a time. Perhaps, once free of it, he would develop a normal and effectual repugnance to going back, and then we should all have our dear, delightful Lithway again. I wrote triumphantly to Wender, and he replied hopefully, but on a more subdued note.

Lithway came over to Europe. He wrote to me, making tentative suggestions that I should join him; but, as he refused to join me and I didn’t care at all about the sort of thing he was planning, we didn’t meet. I was all for the Peloponnesus, and he was for a wretched tourist’s itinerary that I couldn’t stomach. I hoped to get him in the end to wander about in more interesting places, but as he had announced that he was going first to Berlin to look up the little cousin and her maternal aunt, I thought I would wait until he had satisfied his clannish conscience. Then, one fine day, his old curiosity would waken, and we should perhaps start out together to get new impressions. That fine day never dawned, however. He lingered on in Germany, following his relatives to Marienbad when they left Berlin for the summer. I hoped, with each mail, that he would announce his arrival in some spot where I could conceivably meet him; but the particular letter announcing that never came. He was quite taken up with the cousins. He said nothing about going home, and I was thoroughly glad of that, at least.

I was not wholly glad, just at the moment, when a letter bounced out at me one morning, announcing that he was to marry the little cousin--by this time, as I had understood from earlier correspondence, a lovely girl of eighteen. I had looked forward to much companionship with the Lithway I had known of old, when he should be free of his obsession. I had thought him on the way to freedom; and here he was, caught by a flesh-and-blood damsel who thrust me out quite as decisively as the phantasmal lady on the staircase. I had decency enough to be glad for Lithway, if not for myself; glad that he could strike the old idyllic note and live again delightfully in the moment. I didn’t go to Berlin to see them married, but I sent them my blessing and a very curious and beautiful eighteenth-century clock. I also promised to visit them in America. I felt that, if necessary, I could face Braythe, now that the ghost was so sure to be laid. No woman would stay in a house where her husband was carrying on, however unwillingly, an affair with an apparition; and, as their address remained the same, I believed that the ghost had given up the fight.

This story has almost the gait of history. I have to sum up decades in a phrase. It is really the span of one man’s whole life that I am covering, you see. But have patience with me while I skim the intervening voids, and hover meticulously over the vivid patches of detail.... It was some two years before I reached Braythe. I don’t remember particularly what went on during those two years; I only know that I was a happy wanderer. I was always a happy wanderer, it seems to me as I look back on life, except for the times when I sank by Lithway’s side into his lethargy--a lucid lethargy, in which unaccountable things happened very quietly, with an utter stillness of context. I do know that I was planning a hunting-trip in British Central Africa, and wrote Lithway that I had better postpone my visit until that was over. He seemed so hurt to think that I could prefer any place to him that I did put it off until the next year and made a point of going to the Lithways.

I had no forebodings when I got out of Lithway’s car at his gate and faced the second Mrs. Lithway, who had framed her beauty in the clustering wistaria of the porch. I was immensely glad for Lithway that he had a creature like that to companion him. Youth and beauty are wonderful things to keep by one’s fireside. There was more than a touch of vicarious gratitude in my open admiration of Mrs. Lithway. He was a person one couldn’t help wanting good things for; and one felt it a delicate personal attention to oneself when they came to him.

Nothing changes a man, however, after he has once achieved his type: that was what I felt most keenly, at the end of the evening, as I sat with Lithway in his library. Mrs. Lithway had trailed her light skirts up the staircase with incomparable grace, smiling back at us over her shoulder; and I had gone with Lithway to the library, wondering how long I could hold him with talk of anything but her. I soon saw that he didn’t wish to talk of her. That, after all, was comprehensible--you could take it in so many ways; but it was with real surprise that I saw him sink almost immediately into gloom. Gloom had never been a gift of Lithway’s; his indolence had always been shot through with mirth. Even his absorption in the ghost had been whimsical--almost as if he had deliberately let himself go, had chosen to be obsessed. I didn’t know what to make of the gloom, the unresilient heaviness with which he met my congratulations and my sallies. They had been perfect together at dinner and through the early evening. Now he fell slack in every muscle and feature, as if the preceding hours had been a diabolic strain. I wondered a little if he could be worried about money. I supposed Lithway had enough--and his bride too, if it came to that--though I didn’t know how much. But one could not be long in the house without noticing luxuries that had nothing to do with its original unpretending comfort. You were met at every turn by some æsthetic refinement as costly as the lace and jewels in which Mrs. Lithway’s own loveliness was wrapped. It was evident from all her talk that her standard of civilization was very high; that she had a natural attachment to shining non-essentials. I was at a loss; I didn’t know what to say to him, he looked so tired. Such silence, even between Lithway and me, was awkward.

Finally he spoke: “Do you remember my ghost?”

“I remember your deafening me with talk of her. I never saw her.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t have seen her.”

“I saw one of my own, you remember.”

“Oh, yes! A black man who struck at you. You never have had a black man strike at you in real life, have you?” He turned to me with a faint flicker of interest.

“Never. We threshed all that out before, you know. I never even saw that particular nigger except at Braythe.”

“You will see him, perhaps, if you are fool enough to go to British Central Africa,” he jerked out.

“Perhaps,” I answered. But I was more interested in Lithway’s adventure. “Do you see your ghost now?” I had been itching to ask, and it seemed to me that he had given me a fair opening.

Lithway passed his hand across his brows. “I don’t know. I’m not quite sure. Sometimes I think so. But I couldn’t swear to it.”

“Has she grown dimmer, then--more hazy? You used to speak of her as if she were a real woman coming to a tryst: flesh and blood, at the least.”

He looked at me a little oddly. “I’m not awfully well. My eyes play me tricks sometimes.... When you got off the train to-night, I could have sworn you had a white scar on your forehead. As soon as we got out here and I had a good look at you, I saw you hadn’t, of course.” Then he went back. “I don’t believe I really do see her now. I think it may be an hallucination when occasionally I think I do. Yes, I’m pretty sure that, when I think I do, it’s pure hallucination. I don’t like it; I wish she’d either go or stay.”

“My dear fellow, you speak as if she had ever, in her palmiest days, been anything but an hallucination. Did you get to the point of believing that the girl you say used to hang over the staircase was real?”

“She was more real than the one that sometimes I see there now. Oh, yes, she was real! What I see now--when I see it at all--is just the ghost of her.”

“The ghost of a ghost!” I ejaculated. “It’s as bad as Wender’s rattlesnake.”

Lithway turned to me suddenly. “Where is Wender?”

“Why, don’t you know? Working on American archæology at some university--I don’t know which. He hadn’t decided on the place, when he last wrote. I was going to get his address from you.”

“He won’t come here, you know. And Margaret’s feelings are a little hurt--he has often been quite near. So there’s a kind of official coolness. She doesn’t know about the ghosts, and therefore I can’t quite explain Wender’s refusals to her. Of course, I know it’s on that account; he’s as superstitious as a woman. But poor Margaret, I suppose, believes he doesn’t approve of my having taken a wife. She’s as sweet as possible about it, but I can see she’s hurt. And yet I’d rather she would be hurt than to know about the house.”

“Why, in Heaven’s name, don’t you sell it and move, Lithway?” I cried.

He colored faintly. “Margaret is very fond of the place. I couldn’t, considering its idiosyncrasy, sell with a good conscience, and if I didn’t sell, it would mean losing a pretty penny--more, certainly, than Margaret and I can afford to. She lost most of her own money, you know, a few years ago.”

“The aunt?”

“Oh, dear, no!” He said it rather hastily. “But you were quite right at the time. I ought to have gone out there ten years ago. Women never know how to manage money.”

I looked him in the eyes. “Lithway, anything in the world is better than staying in this house. You’re in a bad way. You admit, yourself, you’re not well. And Mrs. Lithway would rather cut out the motor and live anywhere than have you go to pieces.”

He laughed. “Tell Margaret that I’m going to pieces--if you dare!”

“I’m not afraid of you, even if I should.”

“No; but wouldn’t you be afraid of her?”

I thought of the utter youth of Mrs. Lithway; the little white teeth that showed so childishly when she laughed; her small white hands that had seemed so weighed down with a heavy piece of embroidery; her tiny feet that slipped along the polished floors--a girl that you could pick up and throw out of the window.

“Certainly not. Would you?”

“I should think so!” He smiled. “We’ve been very happy here. I don’t think she would like to move. I shan’t suggest it to her. And mind”--he turned to me rather sharply--“don’t you hint to her that the house is the uncanny thing you and that fool Wender seem to think it is.”

I saw that there was no going ahead on that tack. Beyond a certain point, you can’t interfere with mature human beings. But certainly Lithway looked ill; and if he admitted ill health, there must be something in it. It was extraordinary that Mrs. Lithway saw nothing. I was almost sorry--in spite of the remembered radiance of the vision on the porch--that Lithway had chosen to fall in love with a young fool. I rose.

“Love must be blind, if your wife doesn’t see you’re pulled down.”

“Oh, love--it’s the blindest thing going, thank God!” He was silent for a moment. “There are a great many things I can’t explain,” he said. “But you can be sure that everything’s all right.”

I was quite sure, though I couldn’t wholly have told why, that everything was at least moderately wrong. But I decided to say nothing more that night. I went to bed.

Lithway _was_ ill; only so could I account for his nervousness, which sometimes, in the next days, mounted to irritability. He was never irritable with his wife; when the tenser moods were on, he simply ceased to address her, and turned his attention to me. We motored a good deal; that seemed to agree with him. But one morning he failed to appear at breakfast, and Mrs. Lithway seemed surprised that I had heard nothing during the night. He had had an attack of acuter pain--the doctor had been sent for. There had been telephoning, running to and fro, and talk in the corridors that no one had thought of keying down on my account. I was a little ashamed of not having waked, and more than a little cross at not having been called. She assured me that I could have done nothing, and apologized as prettily as possible for having to leave me to myself during the day. Lithway was suffering less, but, of course, she would be at his bedside. Naturally, I made no objections to her wifely solicitude. I was allowed to see Lithway for a few minutes; but the pain was severe, and I cut my conversation short. The doctor suspected the necessity for an operation, and they sent to New York for a consulting specialist. I determined to wait until they should have reached their gruesome decision, on the off chance that I might, in the event of his being moved, be of service to Mrs. Lithway. In spite of her calm and sweetness, and the perfect working of the household mechanism--no flurry, no fright, no delays or hitches--I thought her, still, a young fool. Any woman, of any age, was a fool if she had not seen Lithway withering under her very eyes.

It was a dreary day during which we waited for the New York physician; one of those days when sunlight seems drearier than mist--a monotonous and hostile glare. I tried reading Lithway’s books, but the mere fact that they were his got on my nerves. I decided to go to my room and throw myself on the resources of my own luggage. There would be something there to read, I knew. I closed the library door quietly and went up-stairs. Outside my own door I stopped and looked--involuntarily, with no conscious curiosity--up to the third-story hall. There, in the dim corridor, leaning over the balustrade in a thin shaft of sunlight that struck up from the big window on the landing, stood Mrs. Lithway, with a folded paper in her hand, looking down at me. I did not wish to raise my voice--Lithway, I thought, might be sleeping--so did not speak to her. I don’t think, in any case, I should have wanted to speak to her. The look in her eyes was distinctly unpleasant--the kind of look people don’t usually face you with. I remember wondering, as our surprised glances met, why the deuce she should hate me like that--how the deuce a nice young thing could hate any one like that. It must be personal to me, I thought--no nice young thing would envisage the world at large with such venom. I turned away; and as I turned, I saw her, out of the tail of my eye, walk, with her peculiar lightness of step, along the upper corridor to the trunk-loft. She had the air of being caught, of not having wished to be seen. I opened my bedroom door immediately, but as I opened it I heard a sound behind me. Margaret Lithway stood on the threshold of her husband’s room, with an empty bottle.

“Would you mind taking the car into the village and getting this filled again?” she asked. Her eyes had dark shadows beneath them; she had evidently not slept, the night before.

I flatter myself that I did not betray to her in any way my perturbation. Indeed, the event had fallen on a mind so ripe for solutions that, in the very instant of my facing her, I realized that what I had just seen above-stairs (and seen by mistake, I can assure you; she had fled from me) was Lithway’s old ghost--no less. I took the bottle, read the label, and assured Mrs. Lithway that I would go at once. Mrs. Lithway was wrapped in a darkish house-gown of some sort. The lady in the upper hall had been in white, with a blue sash.... I was very glad when I saw Mrs. Lithway go into her husband’s room and shut the door. I was having hard work to keep my expression where it belonged. For five minutes I stood in the hall; five minutes of unbroken stillness. Then I went to the garage, ordered out the car, and ran into the village, where I presented the bottle to the apothecary. He filled it immediately. As I re-entered the house, the great hall clock struck; it was half past eleven. I sent the stuff--lime-water, I believe--up to Mrs. Lithway by a servant, went into my room, and locked the door.

I cannot say that I solved the whole enigma of Braythe in the hour before luncheon; but I faced for the first time the seriousness of a situation that had always seemed to me, save for Lithway’s curious reactions upon it, more than half fantastic, if not imaginary. I had seen, actually seen, Lithway’s ghost. I had not been meant to see her; and I was inclined to regret the sudden impulse that had led me to leave Lithway’s library and go to my own room. The identity of the “ghost” with Mrs. Lithway was appalling to me--the more so, that there could have been no mistake about the nature of the personality that had reluctantly presented itself to my vision. I found myself saying: “Could that look in her eyes be the cross light on the stairs?” and then suddenly remembered that I was only echoing the Lithway of years ago. It was incredible that any man should have liked the creature I had seen; and I could account for Lithway’s long and sentimental relation with the apparition only by supposing that he had never seen her, as I had, quite off her guard. But if, according to his hint of the night before, he had come to confound the ghost with the real woman--what sort of marriage was _that_? I asked myself. The ghost was a bad lot, straight through. It brought me into the realm of pure horror. The event explained--oh, I raised my hands to wave away the throng of things it explained! Indeed, until I could talk once more with Lithway, I didn’t want to face them; I didn’t want to see clear. I had a horrid sense of being left alone with the phantoms that infested the house: alone, with a helpless, bedridden friend to protect. Mrs. Lithway didn’t need protection--that was clearer than anything else. Mrs. Lithway was safe.

Before night, the consultation had been held, and it was decided that Lithway should be rushed straight to town for an operation. The pain was not absolutely constant; he had tranquil moments; but the symptoms were alarming enough to make them afraid of even a brief delay. We were to take him up the next morning. To all my offers of help, Mrs. Lithway gave a smiling refusal. She could manage perfectly, she said. I am bound to say that she did manage perfectly, thinking of everything, never losing her head, unfailingly adequate, though the shadows under her eyes seemed to grow darker hour by hour. A nurse had come down from town, but I could hardly see what tasks Mrs. Lithway left to the nurse. I did my best, out of loyalty to the loyal Lithway, to subdue my aversion to his wife. I hoped that my aversion was quite unreasonable and that, safe in Europe, I should feel it so. I ventured to say, after dinner, that I hoped she would try to get some sleep.

“Oh, yes, I shall!” She smiled. “There will be a great deal to do to-morrow; and the day after, when they operate, will be a strain. There’s nothing harder than waiting outside. I know.” Her eyes filled, but she went on very calmly. “I am so grateful to you for being here and for going up with us. I have no people of my own, you know, to call on. You have been the greatest comfort.” She gave me a cool hand, said “good night,” and left me.

I do not know whether or not Mrs. Lithway slept, but I certainly did not, save in fitful dozes. I was troubled about Lithway: I thought him in very bad shape for an operation; and I had, besides, nameless forebodings of every sort. It was a comfort, the next morning, to hear him, through an open door, giving practical suggestions to his wife and the nurse about packing his things. I went in to see him before we started off. The doctor was down-stairs with Mrs. Lithway.

“Sorry to let you in for this, my boy. But you are a great help.”

“Mrs. Lithway is wonderful,” I said. “I congratulate you.”

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.

“Well--I don’t need to go into it all. Indeed, there were many details that Madame C. had forgotten, and that she naturally couldn’t ask the girl to refresh her memory of for my benefit. What was troubling Madame was the girl’s condition. Apparently, she had loved the man consumingly, and considered herself virtually dead--entirely negligible at least, as pitiful and worthless a thing as a child-widow in India. But you’ve noticed, perhaps, that the very humble are sometimes positively overweening about some special thing. The damned worms _won’t_ turn--any more than if they were elephants in the path! And so it was with her.

“She was determined to go out and fetch his body home. The people in Mozambique had to confess that they didn’t know where those sacred remains were. The epidemic had run through the little camp, and, by the time the man himself had keeled over, the few natives that were left hadn’t nerve enough to do anything for him. They remembered him, raving with fever and dropping among the corpses. A few, who were not already stricken, got away--probably considering that there was a lively curse on his immediate neighborhood. There had been complete demoralization. A few of them had eventually strayed back, as I said, joining any one who would take them home. Their casual employments delayed them a good deal, and by the time they turned in a report--to use formal language in a case where it is a sore misfit--there was nothing to be done. I didn’t get this from Madame C.; I got it from her, later, when she told me everything she knew about it. But I put it in here, which is, after all, where it belongs.”

Chalmers stopped--he had been talking steadily--and lighted a cigarette. I took the opportunity to sip a little whiskey. Through his introduction, I had been staring at him fixedly. My own cigarette had burned to ashes in my fingers; when I felt the spark touch them, I dropped the thing, still without looking at it, into the tray. He hunched his shoulders in the speckled brown coat and bent forward, his arms folded on the table. The little movement of his head from side to side was very like a tortoise.