The Professor's Mystery
CHAPTER XVII
THE BORDERLAND, AND A NAME
"It's an infernal lie," I said dully.
"Sure it is." Maclean was thoroughly embarrassed and uncomfortable. "Theway I work it out is, there's probably just enough in it somewhere forCarucci to build on. Maybe Reid did get into some mess or other 'wayback before he was married, an' Carucci works that in with what hethinks he knows about the family now, an' dopes out this scandal in highlife business. Or maybe he don't believe it himself, an' just has it infor the old man. You can't tell whether it's muck-rakin' ormud-slingin', but it's bound to be partly both, you see? I only told youso you'd know what was around. Well, are you comin'?"
I got my hat mechanically, and went out with him into the dust and theheat. The sense of unreality that had been upon me that early morning inthe automobile was returned now in the breathless afternoon. The hazyslit of sky overhead, the stark light and shadow of the street, had thetones of a cheap colored photograph. The very smell of the air was likea memory of itself. The roar and jangle of the traffic seemed to comefrom a distance through a stillness that listened; and the wail of ahand-organ on the corner somehow completed and enhanced it all. I hadonly had one serious illness in my life, and that had been long ago; butI remembered that upon my first venturing out of doors after it, thingshad looked so; and I wondered for a moment whether I were going to beill again. But that was nonsense. I was not a person to collapse uponthe 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 hadso much less knowledge than I of its consistency. Grant for once thatLady was Miriam, that she was an only daughter--and they all would havedone even as I had seen them doing. So Lady would have worn her ring, sofeared our growing intimacy, so felt the burden of an abnormality nother own, so confessed to me the barrier and in extremity lied about hername, so the family would have shrunk from any notice, and striven torid themselves of Carucci and of me. Straight this way pointed everyline of mystery since the beginning; here was one logical motive forall. The explanation fitted every fact; only, I could not believe it ofthe people. A small cloud covered the sun, and the hot street turnedsuddenly gray. A horse clocked heavily around the corner, the rumble ofthe wheels behind him suddenly muffled as they struck the asphalt of theavenue. We were going up the steps of a house, a house closed for thesummer with lead-colored board shutters over the lower windows, and anouter door of the same, on which the bright brass disk of a spring locktook the place of a knob. Maclean glanced again up at the number as hepressed the bell.
"Admit one gent and phantoms," he said sniffing. "Now you put your soulin a safe pocket, an' button it in. This gang, they'd snitch it in asecond."
A low-voiced man in a cutaway coat opened the door, and we stood for amoment in a dark hallway smelling of cloth and furniture, while he andMaclean talked together in a half-whisper, I suppose explaining mypresence. Then he opened another door at the side of the hall, andushered us into the front room, where we half groped our way to a seaton the farther side, amid a low rustle of whispers. A grayish twilightfiltered through the bright cracks of the shutters and between theclosed folding doors at the rear. At first, the contrast with the glareof the street made it seem almost absolutely dark; and as my eyesgradually became adapted to the dimness, I remembered being shut in thecloset when I was a child, and how the pale streaks from door-casing andkeyhole had gradually diluted the gloom in just the same way. Therecollection was so vivid that I half imagined here the same rustle andstuffiness of hanging clothes, and the sense of outrage at the shuttingout of daylight. Then slowly the room formed itself out of darkness intograyness: the white ceiling, with its moving shadows and bulbouscloth-enfolded chandelier; the floor and furniture, all shrouded insummer 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 thedozen people or so who sat about in twos and threes talking in whispersand mutterings. At the back of the room were large folding-doors, nowtightly closed. In the corner on the side toward the hall stood a grandpiano, enormous and bare under its pale covering; and the outer wallwas broken by a marble chimneypiece of the fifties whereupon stood lumpsof bric-a-brac tied up in bags. Most of the furniture was ranged rigidlyagainst the wall; but in the center of the floor glimmered dully theuncovered mahogany of a heavy round table. In spite of the dark and thecoolness, the air was close and stuffy, as if with the presence of amultitude; and I was a trifle surprised to find that we were actually sofew.
"What sort of a crowd is this?" I asked Maclean in an undertone. "Ican't make them out."
"Every sort. I mean every sort that's got the social drag or theprominence in this business to get in with the crowd. But inside ofthat, you get 'em all kinds, you see? The chap that let us in is aphilosophy prof, an' a psychic researcher--Shelburgh, his name is. Thatold gink over there alone by himself is some other pioneer o' modernthought. I've got to find out about him later. The rest are mostlysocial lights, I guess. This is the Emmet Langdons' house, an' they'rehere 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 thespookstress. They're off in a bunch!"
A rather heavy woman in a long drab dust-coat had come in, followed byProfessor Shelburgh, who closed the door behind them. I gathered a vagueimpression, only half visual, that she was middle-aged and of thatplumply blond type which ages by imperceptible degrees. She made methink, somehow, of a mass of molasses candy after it has been pulledinto paleness and before it has hardened; but I could not tell whetherthis suggestion came from her voice or from her sleepily effusive manneror 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, pushingback her hair and rubbing her hands over her face as if to shake offdrowsiness; while the others, except Maclean and myself and thegentleman in the corner, drew up their seats in a circle about thetable, and placed their hands upon it. The professor counted the handsaloud in a perfunctory tone, and they all leaned forward, hand touchinghand around the circle.
"Are we all right, Mrs. Mahl?" the professor asked.
"All right--all right--" cooed the medium; "conditions are goodto-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 asnort or a suppressed cough. One of the women began to sing SuwaneeRiver just above her breath, and the others joined in, half-humming,half-crooning. It was like the singing of children in its tonelessunison, in its dragged rhythms and slurring from note to note; and theabsurd resemblance of the scene to a game of Jenkins-Up gave the finaltouch of incongruity. These people, or some of them at least, awaitedthe very presence of the dead; all were in quest of the supernatural orthe unknown. Here were the dimness, the fragile tension, the impalpableweight of mutuality, the atmosphere of a coming crisis; and this in thecommonplace room, closed up for the summer, with the traffic of theavenue outside and the commonplace people within, incongruous in theirordinary clothes, sitting with their hands upon a table and humming ahackneyed melody a little off the key. There was an unreality about itall, a touch of theatrical tawdriness, of mummery and tinsel gold andcanvas distances, an acuteness of that feeling which one always has inthe climaxes of actual life that they can not be quite real because thesetting is not strange enough. The monotonous sound and the close airmade me drowsy, thinking with the hurried vividness of a doze. It wasunnatural for mysteries to happen in a drawing-room; but then, mysterieswere themselves unnatural, and must happen if at all in the world ofthere and then. Though it seemed somehow that a ghost should appear onlyupon the storied battlements of Elsinore to people in archaic dress, yetto Hamlet himself those surroundings were the scene of ordinary days;and the persons of all the wonder-stories had been in th
eir own sightcontemporary citizens. Macbeth saw Banquo at the dinner-table, and itwas 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 onecoughed or stirred. Yet the monotony, despite boredom and drowsiness,did not relax the nervous tension. I still felt that something was goingto happen the next minute; the air grew closer and closer, and the oddsense of crowded human intimacy was more oppressive than at first; andthe rigid regularity of Maclean's audible breathing was enough to tellme that even his skepticism was not proof against the same influence.The circle about the table were swaying their heads a little in timewith their singing, while the old gentleman in the corner fidgeteduneasily. In the street outside, a child began to cry loudly, and wastaken away still wailing around the corner. Surely, I thought, I of allpeople ought to understand that incongruous look of strange thingshappening in actual life: my own had been for weeks a nightmare and aromance; and even now I was groping mentally in the maze of a revelationthat had the lurid logic of a melodrama, flawlessly plausible andincredible only because I was unwilling to believe. Carucci's story wasa fabrication, because tangled marriages and family mysteries happen inbooks and newspapers, among printed people, not among those we know; yetmelodrama itself builds with the material of actuality, and I had beenliving amid family mysteries. Such things do happen to some one; andthat one must be to--to others--the reality that Lady was to me.
I started violently, and sat bolt upright, my hair tingling and everymuscle tightened. A dull rapping, like the sound of a hammer upon woodcovered with cloth, came from the table. The circle were silent, leaningback in their seats, their hands still joined before them. The mediumhad sunk down in her chair, her arms extended along the arms of it, sothat those next her had to reach out to keep hold of her hands. Andabove the group I saw, or imagined that I saw, the vaguest conceivablecloudiness in mid-air, like mist on a foggy night or the glimmer seeninside closed eyelids after looking at a brightly lighted window. Themore I tried to make sure that I saw it, the more I doubted whether itwere not merely imagination. If you hold your spread hand before a darkbackground, you will seem to see a cloudy blur outlining the fingers; itwas like that. The rapping was repeated more loudly, and through thethrobbing in my ears and the almost suffocating oppression, I caughtmyself remembering the scene of the knocking at the gate in Macbeth.Then a voice began to speak: a querulous, throaty contralto that came injerks and pauses. "Here you are again," it said; "I don't--want totalk--to any of you--I feel trouble--somewhere. Where's mother?"
"That's Miriam," said Professor Shelburgh, in the tone of casualrecognition.
I do not know whether it was the shock of the coincident name, or onlythat the heat and the excitement of the day had reached their naturalclimax. But I grew suddenly hot and cold in waves; my skin crawled, andI 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 nouse. I must get out into the open light and air, or I should make anexhibition of myself. I rose and tiptoed hurriedly across the roomthrough an atmosphere that seemed like a heavy liquid, dizzily awarethat Maclean had followed me a step or two and that the group around thetable looked after me in surprise. Somehow, I found the door-handle.While I groped for my hat in the hallway, I heard the querulous jerkyvoices speaking again inside the room. And the next moment I wasstanding on the sun-baked sidewalk, blinking my eyes against the glare,and breathing in deep gulps. A flower-vendor called on the corner, abovethe distant drone of a hand-organ. Horses clumped heavily past. And asparrow sat for a second upon the green top of a hydrant, then flutteredaway, chattering.