THE BORDERLAND, AND A NAME
"It's an infernal lie," I said dully.
"Sure it is." Maclean was thoroughly embarrassed and uncomfortable. "The way I work it out is, there's probably just enough in it somewhere for Carucci to build on. Maybe Reid did get into some mess or other 'way back before he was married, an' Carucci works that in with what he thinks he knows about the family now, an' dopes out this scandal in high life business. Or maybe he don't believe it himself, an' just has it in for the old man. You can't tell whether it's muck-rakin' or mud-slingin', but it's bound to be partly both, you see? I only told you so you'd know what was around. Well, are you comin'?"
I got my hat mechanically, and went out with him into the dust and the heat. The sense of unreality that had been upon me that early morning in the automobile was returned now in the breathless afternoon. The hazy slit of sky overhead, the stark light and shadow of the street, had the tones of a cheap colored photograph. The very smell of the air was like a memory of itself. The roar and jangle of the traffic seemed to come from a distance through a stillness that listened; and the wail of a hand-organ on the corner somehow completed and enhanced it all. I had only had one serious illness in my life, and that had been long ago; but I remembered that upon my first venturing out of doors after it, things had looked so; and I wondered for a moment whether I were going to be ill again. But that was nonsense. I was not a person to collapse upon the hearing of bad news; and besides, this news, I did not believe. Maclean had not believed it himself, in telling it to me. Only, he had so much less knowledge than I of its consistency. Grant for once that Lady was Miriam, that she was an only daughter—and they all would have done even as I had seen them doing. So Lady would have worn her ring, so feared our growing intimacy, so felt the burden of an abnormality not her own, so confessed to me the barrier and in extremity lied about her name, so the family would have shrunk from any notice, and striven to rid themselves of Carucci and of me. Straight this way pointed every line of mystery since the beginning; here was one logical motive for all. The explanation fitted every fact; only, I could not believe it of the people. A small cloud covered the sun, and the hot street turned suddenly gray. A horse clocked heavily around the corner, the rumble of the wheels behind him suddenly muffled as they struck the asphalt of the avenue. We were going up the steps of a house, a house closed for the summer with lead-colored board shutters over the lower windows, and an outer door of the same, on which the bright brass disk of a spring lock took the place of a knob. Maclean glanced again up at the number as he pressed the bell.
"Admit one gent and phantoms," he said sniffing. "Now you put your soul in a safe pocket, an' button it in. This gang, they'd snitch it in a second."
A low-voiced man in a cutaway coat opened the door, and we stood for a moment in a dark hallway smelling of cloth and furniture, while he and Maclean talked together in a half-whisper, I suppose explaining my presence. Then he opened another door at the side of the hall, and ushered us into the front room, where we half groped our way to a seat on the farther side, amid a low rustle of whispers. A grayish twilight filtered through the bright cracks of the shutters and between the closed folding doors at the rear. At first, the contrast with the glare of the street made it seem almost absolutely dark; and as my eyes gradually became adapted to the dimness, I remembered being shut in the closet when I was a child, and how the pale streaks from door-casing and keyhole had gradually diluted the gloom in just the same way. The recollection was so vivid that I half imagined here the same rustle and stuffiness of hanging clothes, and the sense of outrage at the shutting out of daylight. Then slowly the room formed itself out of darkness into grayness: the white ceiling, with its moving shadows and bulbous cloth-enfolded chandelier; the floor and furniture, all shrouded in summer covers of grayish denim; and the indefinite shade of the walls, lightened here and there by the square of a picture turned back outward, and darkened by the gloom of the corners and the blurred figures of the dozen people or so who sat about in twos and threes talking in whispers and mutterings. At the back of the room were large folding-doors, now tightly closed. In the corner on the side toward the hall stood a grand piano, enormous and bare under its pale covering; and the outer wall was broken by a marble chimneypiece of the fifties whereupon stood lumps of bric-à-brac tied up in bags. Most of the furniture was ranged rigidly against the wall; but in the center of the floor glimmered dully the uncovered mahogany of a heavy round table. In spite of the dark and the coolness, the air was close and stuffy, as if with the presence of a multitude; and I was a trifle surprised to find that we were actually so few.
"What sort of a crowd is this?" I asked Maclean in an undertone. "I can't make them out."
"Every sort. I mean every sort that's got the social drag or the prominence in this business to get in with the crowd. But inside of that, you get 'em all kinds, you see? The chap that let us in is a philosophy prof, an' a psychic researcher—Shelburgh, his name is. That old gink over there alone by himself is some other pioneer o' modern thought. I've got to find out about him later. The rest are mostly social lights, I guess. This is the Emmet Langdons' house, an' they're here somewhere. I can't see faces yet, can you?"
I shook my head. "We seem to be in Sunday edition company, anyway."
"Sure. All head-liners. Faces on file in every office. Hullo, here's the spookstress. They're off in a bunch!"
A rather heavy woman in a long drab dust-coat had come in, followed by Professor Shelburgh, who closed the door behind them. I gathered a vague impression, only half visual, that she was middle-aged and of that plumply blond type which ages by imperceptible degrees. She made me think, somehow, of a mass of molasses candy after it has been pulled into paleness and before it has hardened; but I could not tell whether this suggestion came from her voice or from her sleepily effusive manner or was a mere fancy about a physical presence which I could hardly see. She took off her hat and coat, and sat down at the center-table, pushing back her hair and rubbing her hands over her face as if to shake off drowsiness; while the others, except Maclean and myself and the gentleman in the corner, drew up their seats in a circle about the table, and placed their hands upon it. The professor counted the hands aloud in a perfunctory tone, and they all leaned forward, hand touching hand around the circle.
"Are we all right, Mrs. Mahl?" the professor asked.
"All right—all right—" cooed the medium; "conditions are good to-day—I can feel 'em comin' already—sing to me, somebody."
The old gentleman in the corner made a dull sound that might have been a snort or a suppressed cough. One of the women began to sing Suwanee River just above her breath, and the others joined in, half-humming, half-crooning. It was like the singing of children in its toneless unison, in its dragged rhythms and slurring from note to note; and the absurd resemblance of the scene to a game of Jenkins-Up gave the final touch of incongruity. These people, or some of them at least, awaited the very presence of the dead; all were in quest of the supernatural or the unknown. Here were the dimness, the fragile tension, the impalpable weight of mutuality, the atmosphere of a coming crisis; and this in the commonplace room, closed up for the summer, with the traffic of the avenue outside and the commonplace people within, incongruous in their ordinary clothes, sitting with their hands upon a table and humming a hackneyed melody a little off the key. There was an unreality about it all, a touch of theatrical tawdriness, of mummery and tinsel gold and canvas distances, an acuteness of that feeling which one always has in the climaxes of actual life that they can not be quite real because the setting is not strange enough. The monotonous sound and the close air made me drowsy, thinking with the hurried vividness of a doze. It was unnatural for mysteries to happen in a drawing-room; but then, mysteries were themselves unnatural, and must happen if at all in the world of there and then. Though it seemed somehow that a ghost should appear only upon the storied battlements of Elsinore to people in archaic dress, yet to Hamlet himself those surroundings were the scene of ordinary days; and the persons of all the wonder-stories had been in their own sight contemporary citizens. Macbeth saw Banquo at the dinner-table, and it was the people in the street who crowded to look upon the miracles.
The eventless waiting drew out interminably. There were long silences, then the humming of some other tune; and it was an episode when some one coughed or stirred. Yet the monotony, despite boredom and drowsiness, did not relax the nervous tension. I still felt that something was going to happen the next minute; the air grew closer and closer, and the odd sense of crowded human intimacy was more oppressive than at first; and the rigid regularity of Maclean's audible breathing was enough to tell me that even his skepticism was not proof against the same influence. The circle about the table were swaying their heads a little in time with their singing, while the old gentleman in the corner fidgeted uneasily. In the street outside, a child began to cry loudly, and was taken away still wailing around the corner. Surely, I thought, I of all people ought to understand that incongruous look of strange things happening in actual life: my own had been for weeks a nightmare and a romance; and even now I was groping mentally in the maze of a revelation that had the lurid logic of a melodrama, flawlessly plausible and incredible only because I was unwilling to believe. Carucci's story was a fabrication, because tangled marriages and family mysteries happen in books and newspapers, among printed people, not among those we know; yet melodrama itself builds with the material of actuality, and I had been living amid family mysteries. Such things do happen to some one; and that one must be to—to others—the reality that Lady was to me.
I started violently, and sat bolt upright, my hair tingling and every muscle tightened. A dull rapping, like the sound of a hammer upon wood covered with cloth, came from the table. The circle were silent, leaning back in their seats, their hands still joined before them. The medium had sunk down in her chair, her arms extended along the arms of it, so that those next her had to reach out to keep hold of her hands. And above the group I saw, or imagined that I saw, the vaguest conceivable cloudiness in mid-air, like mist on a foggy night or the glimmer seen inside closed eyelids after looking at a brightly lighted window. The more I tried to make sure that I saw it, the more I doubted whether it were not merely imagination. If you hold your spread hand before a dark background, you will seem to see a cloudy blur outlining the fingers; it was like that. The rapping was repeated more loudly, and through the throbbing in my ears and the almost suffocating oppression, I caught myself remembering the scene of the knocking at the gate in Macbeth. Then a voice began to speak: a querulous, throaty contralto that came in jerks and pauses. "Here you are again," it said; "I don't—want to talk—to any of you—I feel trouble—somewhere. Where's mother?"
"That's Miriam," said Professor Shelburgh, in the tone of casual recognition.
I do not know whether it was the shock of the coincident name, or only that the heat and the excitement of the day had reached their natural climax. But I grew suddenly hot and cold in waves; my skin crawled, and I felt at once a strangling hurry of heart-beats and a hollow nausea. For an instant, I set my teeth and tried to master it; but it was no use. I must get out into the open light and air, or I should make an exhibition of myself. I rose and tiptoed hurriedly across the room through an atmosphere that seemed like a heavy liquid, dizzily aware that Maclean had followed me a step or two and that the group around the table looked after me in surprise. Somehow, I found the door-handle. While I groped for my hat in the hallway, I heard the querulous jerky voices speaking again inside the room. And the next moment I was standing on the sun-baked sidewalk, blinking my eyes against the glare, and breathing in deep gulps. A flower-vendor called on the corner, above the distant drone of a hand-organ. Horses clumped heavily past. And a sparrow sat for a second upon the green top of a hydrant, then fluttered away, chattering.