On the Borderland

by F. Britten Austin

Old Vandermeulen had a delicate daughter, Pauline, then about nineteen years of age and in the incipient stages of consumption. Under medical advice, he was accustomed to take her each winter for a cruise around the West Indies in his steam yacht. That year, young Geoffrey Vandermeulen persuaded his father to ship me as medical officer. There was nothing alarming in the young girl’s condition, of course, or a much older and more experienced man would have accompanied them. She was merely delicate.

We were a small party on board: the old man, his wife—a faded old lady with no personality whatever—Pauline, Geoffrey, and myself. Geoffrey was an ordinary, high-spirited young man, intelligent and a pleasant companion, but not particularly remarkable. His sister was mildly pretty but utterly devoid of attractiveness, extremely shy, and given to sitting in blank reverie over a book. Although she always had one in her hand, she read, as a matter of fact, very little. It was just an excuse for day-dreaming. Of this girl the old man, otherwise as keen as a razor and as hard as nails—commercially, I believe, he was little better than a pirate—was inordinately fond. Outside business, she was the absorbing passion of his life. There was no whim of hers that he would not gratify. It was rather pathetic to see the old scoundrel hanging over her frail innocence, all that he had of idealism centred in her threatened life.

The cruise was pleasant but uneventful enough for some weeks. We pottered down through the Bahamas to Jamaica and then turned eastward with intent to visit the various ports of the Antilles as far south as Barbados.

It was one evening while we were chugging peacefully across the Caribbean Sea that occurred the first of the remarkable incidents which made this voyage so memorable to me. I remember the setting of it perfectly. We were all in the saloon; I suppose because the night was for some reason unpleasant. The weather was calm, at any rate. Geoffrey and I were reading. Old Vandermeulen and his wife were playing cribbage. Pauline was sitting at a writing-table fixed in a corner of the saloon, entering up the day’s trivial happenings in the diary which she religiously kept. I remember glancing at her and noticing that she was chewing the nail of her left thumb—a habit of which I was vainly trying to break her—as she stared vacantly at the bulkhead, no doubt ransacking her memory for some incident to record.

Suddenly she turned round upon us with a startled cry.

“Look, Mamma!—I have scrawled all over my diary without knowing that I did it!—Isn’t that strange!”

We all of us looked up languidly. The mother made some banal remark, but did not withdraw her attention from her cards. The father glanced affectionately toward her without ceasing to count up the score he was about to peg on the board. Geoffrey and I continued our reading.

But the girl had been puzzling over the scrawl and all at once she jumped up from her seat and came across to us.

“Look!” she said. “Isn’t it funny? These words—they’re all like the words on blotting-paper—they go backwards and inside out! And there are figures, too!—Whatever could have made me do it?—And I don’t remember doing it either, though of course I must have done so. There was nothing on that page a minute before, I am sure of that!”

There was something curiously uneasy in the girl’s manner, a note in her voice that impressed me. I got up, took the open diary from her hand and there sure enough was a large uneven scrawl, two lines of it, diagonally across the page, and, as she said, reversed, as though it had been blotted down upon it.