The Third Window

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“Not at all. But people don’t suspect themselves,” said Miss Latimer. She, too, sat down.

“It’s very good of you, of both of you, to humour me,” said Antonia, still laughing. “I promise you both not to cheat.”

“Shall I put out the lamps?” asked Bevis coldly.

And it was still Antonia who directed the installation, replying: “Oh, no; that’s not at all necessary. We have never sat in the dark. It was broad daylight, before tea, with Mr. Foster.”

Bevis took his place and they laid hands lightly upon the table.

“And we may go on talking,” Antonia added.

But they did not talk. As if the very spirit of dumbness had emanated from their outspread hands, they sat silent and Bevis felt at once the muffled rhythm of their hearts beating in syncopated measure. The pulsations were heavy in his finger-tips and seemed to be sending little electric currents into the wood beneath them. Observant, sceptical, and, with it all, exasperated, he watched himself and felt sure that soon the table, yielding to some interplay of force, would begin to tip. Long moments passed, however, and it did not stir, and after his first intense anticipation his attention dropped, with a sense of comparative relief, to more familiar uses. He had not looked at either of his companions, but he now became aware of them, of their breathing and their heart-beats, with an intimacy which, he felt, turning his thoughts curiously, savoured of the unlawful. People were not meant to be aware of each other after such a fashion, with consciousness fallen far below the normal mental meeting-ground to the fundamental crucibles of the organism, where the physical machinery and the psychical personality became so mysteriously intermingled. There, in the first place—it pleased him to trace it out, and he was glad to keep his mind occupied—there lay the basis of his objection to the ambiguous pastime. As he meditated it, his awareness of this intimacy became so troubling that, withdrawing his thoughts from it decisively, he fixed them upon the mere visual perception of Antonia’s hands, and Miss Latimer’s. Miss Latimer’s were small, dry, light. The thumb curled back, the palm was broad, the finger-tips were squared, though narrow. He had no link with them, no clue to them, and, though he strove to see them as objects only, as pale patterns on the dark wood, he was aware, disagreeably, that he shrank from them and their hidden yet felt significance.

Antonia’s hands he knew so well. But he was not to rest in the mere contemplation of their beauty. Everywhere, to-night, the veils of appearance were melting before the emergence of operative yet, till now, unrecognized reality; and so it was that Antonia’s hands, as he looked at them, ceased to express her soft, sweet life, its delicacy, its mournfulness, its merriment, and, like the breathing and the heart-beats, conveyed to him the mysterious and fundamental sources of her being, all in her most potent and most unconscious. Laid out upon the darkness, they were piteous hands; helpless and abandoned to destiny.

And his own? Small, delicately fashioned, if resolute, they expressed his own personality in what it had of closest and most alien. He did not like himself, seen at these close quarters, or, rather, he frightened himself. The physical machinery was too fragile an apparatus in his construction. It did not secure him sufficiently. It did not sufficiently secure Antonia. Nerves rather than flesh and blood made his strength, and flesh and blood, dogged, confident, and blind, was a better barrier against fear than mere intelligence. There was more fear in him now than in Antonia, or he was more aware of what was to be feared—which came to the same thing. While she wandered sadly in dreams and abandoned herself to peril because she did not know where peril lay, he saw and felt reality, sharply, subtly, like a scent upon the breeze, like a shadow cast by an unseen presence; and because he was so subtle, so conscious, and so resolute, he was responsible. That was what it came to for him, with a suddenness that had in it an element of physical shock. It was he alone who saw where peril lay and he alone who could withhold Antonia from thus spreading her spirit upon the darkness.

He looked back at her hands and a pang of terror sped through him. Something had happened to them; something had passed from them, or into them. He was an ass, of course, an impressionable, nervous ass; yet he saw them as doomed, unresisting creatures; and, while he still controlled himself to think, feeling himself infected with the virus of the horrid game, the table suddenly, as if with a long-drawn, welling sigh, stirred, rose—he felt it rising under his fingers—and slowly tipped toward Miss Latimer.