Mrs. Spash interrupted his laughter. “Do you see Mr. Monroe?” she asked in a pleased tone. “Well, I declare! Aren’t you the fortunate creature. I never see him!”
“All the time,” Lindsay answered shortly. “If I could only get it. I feel so stupid, so incredibly gross and lumbering and heavy. I’d do anything—”
He arose and walked over to the picture of Lutetia Murray which still hung above the fireplace. He stared at her hard. “I’d do anything for her, if I could only find out what it was.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Spash admitted dispassionately, “that’s the thing everybody felt about her, they’d do anything for her. Not that she ever asked them to do anything—”
Lindsay began to pace the length of the long room. “What is happening? Has the old ramshackle time-machine finally broken a spring so that, in this last revolution, it hauls, out of the past, these pictures of two decades ago? Or is it that there are superimposed one on the other two revolving worlds—theirs and ours—and theirs or ours has stopped an instant, so that I can glance into theirs? I feel as though I were in the dark of a camera obscura gazing into their brightness. Or have those two years in the air permanently broken my psychology; so that through that rift I shall always have the power to look into strange worlds? Or am I just piercing another dimension?”
Mrs. Spash had been following him with her faded, calm old eyes. Apparently she guessed these questions were not addressed to her. She kept silence.
“I’ve racked my brain. I lie awake nights and tear the universe to pieces. I outguess guessing and outconjecture conjecture. My thoughts fly to the end of space. My wonder invades the very citadel of fancy. My surmises storm the last outpost of reality. But it beats me. I can’t get it.” Lindsay stopped. Mrs. Spash made no comment. Apparently her twenty years’ training among artists had prepared her for monologues of this sort. She listened; but it was obvious that she did not understand; did not expect to understand.
“Does she want me to stay here or go there?” Lindsay demanded of the air. “If here, what does she want me to do? If there—where is there? If there, what does she want me to do there? Is her errand concerned with the living or the dead? If the living, who? If the dead, who? Where to find them? How to find them?” He turned his glowing eyes on Mrs. Spash. “I only know two things. She wants me to do something. She wants me to do it soon. Oh, I suppose I know another thing— If I don’t do it soon, it will be too late.”
Mrs. Spash was still following him with her placid, blue, old gaze. “There, there!” she said soothingly. “Now don’t you get too excited, Mr. Lindsay. It’ll all come to you.”
“But how—” Lindsay objected. “And when—”