Out of the Air

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

Retracing his steps, he went from room to room until, many times, he had made a complete survey of the second floor. He crossed and recrossed his own trail, as the excitement of the quest mounted in him.

“Ah!” he exclaimed aloud, “here it is! You can’t escape your soul-mate, Lutetia.”

It was not because the room was so much bigger than the rest that he made this decision; it was only because it was so much more quaint. At one side it merged, by means of a slender doorway, with the galleried piazza. From it, by means of that tiny flight of stairs, Lutetia could have descended to the first floor of that mid-Victorian addition. “I take it all back, Lutetia,” he approved. “Middle of the nineteenth century or not, it’s a wonder—this combination.” At the back of Lutetia’s room was a third door; as slender as the door leading to the gallery, but much lower; not four feet high. Lindsay pushed it open, crawled on hands and knees through it. He had of course, on his first exploration, entered the small room into which it led. But he had gone in and out without careful examination; it had seemed merely a four-walled room. Coming into it, however, from Lutetia’s bedroom, it suddenly acquired character.

The walls were papered in white. And on the mid-Victorian dado scarcely legible now, he suddenly discovered drawings. Drawings of a curious character and of a more curious technique. He followed their fluttery maze from wall to wall—a flight of little beings, winged at the shoulders and knees, with flying locks and strange finlike hands and feet; fanciful, comic, tender.

“Oh!” Lindsay emitted aloud. “Ah!” And in an instant: “I see! This room belonged to that child Hyde spoke of.”

He ascended to the garret. This was of course the big storeroom of the Colonial imagination. It too was quite empty. At one spot a post—obviously not a roof-support—ran from floor to ceiling. Lindsay gazed about a little unseeingly. “I wonder what that post was for?” he questioned himself absently. After a while, “What’s become of that child?” he demanded of circumambient space.

As though this offered food for reflection, he descended by means of the main stairway to the lower floor; sat on the doorsteps a while. He mused—gazing out into the green-colored, sweet-scented June afternoon. After an interval he arose and repeated his voyage of exploration.

Again he was struck with the friendly quality of the old place. That physical dampness, which long vacant houses hold in solution, seemed entirely to have disappeared before the flood of June sunshine. The spiritual chill, which always accompanies it—that sinister quality so connotative of congregations of evil spirits—he again observed was completely lacking. As he emerged from one room to enter another, it seemed to him that the one back of him filled with—companionship, he described it to himself. As he continued his explorations, it seemed to him that the room he was about to enter would offer him not ghostly but human welcome. That human welcome did not come, of course. Instead, there surged upon him the rich odors of the lilacs and syringas; the staccato greetings of the birds.

After a while he went downstairs again. Sitting in the front doorway, he fell into a rich revery.

This was where Lutetia Murray wrote the books which had so intrigued his boyish fancy. Mentally he ran over the list: The Sport of the Goddesses, The Weary Time, Mary Towle, Old Age, Intervals, With Pitfall and with Gin, Cynthia Ware— Details came up before his mental vision which he had entirely forgotten and now only half remembered; dramatic moments; descriptive passages; conversational interludes; scenes; epigrams.... He tried to imagine Lutetia Murray at Blue Meadows. The picture which, in college, he had cut from a book-house catalogue, flashed before him; he had found it among his papers. The figure was standing.... He had looked at it only yesterday, but his masculine observation retained no details of the gown except that it left her neck and arms bare. The face was in profile. The curling hair rose to a high mass on her head. The delicate features were mignonne, except for the delicious, warm, lusciously cut mouth— Was she blonde or brunet he wondered. She died at forty-five. To David Lindsay at twenty-two, forty-five had seemed a respectable old age. To David Lindsay at twenty-eight, it seemed almost young. She was dead, of course, when he began to read her. Oh, if he could only have met her! It was a great pity that she had died so young. Her work—he had made a point of this in his thesis—had already swung from an erratic, highly colored first period into a more balanced, carefully characterized second period; was just emerging into a third period that was the union of these two; big and rounded and satisfying. But death had cut that development short. In the last four years Lindsay had seen a great deal of death and often in atrocious form. He had long ago concluded that he had thought on the end of man all the thoughts that were in him. But now, sitting in the scented warmth of Lutetia’s trellised doorway, he found that there were still other thoughts which he could think.