The Book of Susan

The Fifth Chapter

I

I am an essayist, if anything, trying to tell Susan’s story, and telling it badly, I fear, for lack of narrative skill. So it is with no desire to prolong cheaply a possible point of suspense that I must double back now before I can go forward. My personal interest centers so entirely in Susan herself, in the special qualities of her mind and heart, that I have failed to bring in certain stiff facts—essential, alas, to all further progress. A practiced novelist, handling this purely biographic material—such a man as Clifton Young—would quietly have “planted” these facts in their due order, thus escaping my present embarrassment. But indeed I am approaching a cruel crisis in Susan’s life and in the lives of those dearest to her; a period of sheer circumstantial fatality; one of those incursions of mad coincidence, of crass melodrama, which—with a brutal, ironic, improbability, as if stage-managed by an anarchistic fiend of the pit—bursts through some fine-spun, geometrical web of days, leaving chaos behind; and I am ill-equipped to deal with this chance destruction, this haphazard wantonness.

Even could I merely have observed it from the outside, with æsthetic detachment, it would baffle me now; I should find it too crude for art, too arbitrary. It is not in my line. But God knows the victim of what seems an insane break in Nature is in no mood for art; he can do little more than cry out or foolishly rail!

---

Jimmy returned from his excursion to New York on the Sunday evening preceding Miss Goucher’s letter. She must have been at work on it the next evening when Phil brought him to dine with me. It was our deliberate purpose to draw him out, track his shy impressions of Susan and of her new life in her new world. But it was hard going at first; for ten minutes or so we bagged little but the ordinary Jimmyesque clichés. He had had a great time, etc., etc....

Matters improved with the roast. It then appeared that he had lightly explored with Susan the two-thirds of Gaul omitted from her letter. He had called with her on Heywood Sampson, and fathomed Susan’s allusion to the shy bluebird. Mr. Sampson, he assured us, was a fine old boy—strong for Susan too! He’d read a lot of her poems and things and was going to bring out the poems for her right away. But the bluebird in the bush had to do with a pet scheme of his for a weekly critical review of a different stamp from Hadow Bury’s Whim. Solider, Jimmy imagined; safe and sane—the real thing! If Mr. Sampson should decide to launch it—he was still hesitating over the business outlook—Susan was to find a place on his staff.

Mr. Sampson, Jimmy opined, had the right idea about things in general. He didn’t like Susan’s quick stuff in Whim; thought it would cheapen her if she kept at it too long. And Mr. Sampson didn’t approve of Susan’s remaining third of Gaul, either—her Greenwich Village friends. Not much wonder, Jimmy added; Susan had trotted him round to three or four studios and places, and they were a funny job lot. Too many foreigners among them for him; they talked too much; and they pawed. But some nice young people, too. Most of them were young—and not stuck up. Friendly. Sort of alive—interested in everything—except, maybe, being respectable. Their jokes, come to think of it, were all about being respectable—kidding everyday people who weren’t up to the latest ideas. There was a lot of jabber one place about the “Œdipus Complex,” for example, but he didn’t connect at all. He had his own idea—surely, not of the latest—that a lot of the villagers might feel differently when they began to make good and started their bank accounts. But Susan was on to them, anyway, far more than they were on to her! She liked them, though—in spite of Mr. Sampson; didn’t fall for their craziest ways or notions of course, but was keen about their happy-go-lucky side—their pep! Besides, they weren’t all alike, naturally. Take the pick of them, the ones that did things instead of posing round and dressing the part, and Jimmy could see they might be there. At least, they were on their way—like Susan.

This was all very well, so far as it went; but we had felt, Phil and I, a dumb undercurrent struggling to press upward into speech, and after dinner before the fire, we did our best to help Jimmy free its course. Gradually it became apparent; it rather trickled than gushed forth. Jimmy was bothered, more than bothered; there was something, perhaps there were several things, on his mind. We did not press him, using subtler methods, biding our time; and little by little Jimmy oozed toward the full revelation of an uneasy spirit.

“Did you see Mr. Phar?” Phil asked.

“No,” said Jimmy, his forehead knotting darkly; “I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t too!”

“Why?”

“Well, that letter I had from Susan—the one I showed you, Mr. Hunt—mentioned some unpleasantness with Mr. Phar; and all Saturday afternoon while she was trotting me round, I could see she’d been worrying to herself a good deal.”

“Worrying?”

“Yes. Whenever she thought I wasn’t paying attention her face would go—sort of dead tired and sad—all used up. I can’t describe it. And one or two remarks she dropped didn’t sound as happy as she meant them to. Then, Sunday morning, she had to get some work done, so I took Miss Goucher to church. I’m supposed to be a Catholic, you know; but I guess I’m not much of anything. I’d just as soon go to one kind of church as another, if the music’s good. Anyway, it was a nice morning and Miss Goucher thought I’d like to see the Fifth Avenue parade; so we walked up to some silk-stocking church above Thirty-fourth Street, where they have a dandy choir; and back again afterwards. I stayed at the Brevoort, down near them, you know; and Miss Goucher certainly is a peach. We got along fine. And I found out from her how Mr. Phar’s been acting. He’s a bad actor, all right. I’m just as glad I didn’t run into him. I might have done something foolish.”

“What, for instance?” I suggested.

“Well,” muttered Jimmy, “there’s some things I can’t stand. I might have punched his head.”

Phil whistled softly.

“He’s not what I call a white man,” explained Jimmy, dogged and slow, as if to justify his vision of assault. “He’s a painted pup.”

“Come, Jimmy!” Phil commanded. “Out with it! Hunt and I know he’s been annoying Susan, but that’s all we know. I supposed he might have been pressing his attentions too publicly. If it’s more than that——”

There was an unusual sternness in Phil’s eye. Jimmy appealed from it to mine, but in vain.

“Look here, Mr. Hunt,” he blurted, “Susan’s all right, of course—and so’s Miss Goucher! They’ve got their eyes open. And maybe it’s not up to me to say anything. But if I was in your place, I’d feel like giving two or three people down there a piece of my mind! Susan wouldn’t thank me for saying so, I guess; she’s modern—she likes to be let alone. Why, she laughed at me more than once for getting sort of hot! And I know I’ve a bunch to learn yet. But all the same,” he pounded on, “I do know this: It was a dirty trick of Mr. Phar’s not to stand up for Susan!”

“Not stand up for her! What do you mean?” Phil almost barked.

“Jimmy means, Phil,” I explained, “that some rather vague rumors began not along ago to spread through Maltby’s crowd in regard to Susan—as to why she found it advisable to leave New Haven. Many of his friends know me, of course—or know Gertrude; know all about us, at any rate. It’s not very remarkable, then, that Susan’s appearance in New York—and so far as Maltby’s May-Flies know, in some sense under his wing—has set tongues wagging. I was afraid of it; but I know Maltby’s set well enough to know that to-day’s rumor, unless it’s pretty sharply spiced, is soon forgotten. To-morrow’s is so much fresher, you see. The best thing for innocent victims to do is to keep very still. And then, I confess, it seemed to me unlikely that Maltby would permit anything of the sort to go too far.”

I saw that Jimmy was following my exposition with the most painful surprise. Phil grunted disgustedly as I ended.

“I don’t pretend to much knowledge of that world,” he said deliberately, “but common sense tells me Maltby Phar might think it to his advantage to fan the flame instead of stamping it out. I may be unfair to him, but I’m even capable of supposing he touched it off in the first place.”

“No, Phil,” I objected, “he wouldn’t have done that. But you seem to be right about his failing to stamp out the sparks. That’s what you meant by his not standing up for Susan, isn’t it, Jimmy?”

The boy’s face was a study in unhappy perplexity. “I guess I’m like Professor Farmer!” he exclaimed. “I’m not on to people who act like that. But, Mr. Hunt, you’re dead wrong—excuse me, sir!”

“Go on, Jimmy.”

“Well, I mean—you spoke of vague rumors, didn’t you? They’re not vague. I guess Susan hasn’t wanted to upset you. Miss Goucher told me all about it, and she wouldn’t have done it, would she, if she hadn’t hoped I’d bring it straight back to you? I guess she promised Susan not to tell you, so she told me. That’s the only way I can figure it,” concluded Jimmy.

Phil was grim now. “Give us your facts, Jimmy—all of them.”

“Yes, sir. There’s a Mr. Young; he writes things. He’s clever. They’re all clever down there. Well, Mr. Young’s dead gone on Susan; but then, he’s the kind that’s always dead gone on somebody. It’s women with him, you see, sir. Susan understands. It don’t seem right she should, somehow; but—well, Susan’s always been different from most girls. At least, I don’t know many girls——”

“Never mind that,” prompted Phil.

“No, sir. Talking about things like this always rattles me. I can’t help it. They kind of stick in my throat. Well, Mr. Young don’t want to marry anybody, but he’s been making love to Susan—trying to. He had the wrong idea about her, you see; and Susan saw that, too—saw he thought she was playing him for a poor fish. So—her way—out she comes with it to him, flat. And he gets sore and comes back at her with what he’d heard.” Jimmy’s handkerchief was pulled out at this point; he mopped his brow. “It don’t feel right even to speak of lies like this about—any decent girl,” he mumbled.

“No,” Phil agreed, “it doesn’t. But there’s nothing for it now. Get it said and done with!”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Young told Susan he wasn’t a fool; he knew she’d been—what she shouldn’t be—up here.”

“Hunt’s mistress, you mean?” snapped Phil.

“Yes, sir,” whispered Jimmy, his face purple with agonized shame.

“And then?”

“Susan’s a wonder,” continued Jimmy, taking heart now his Rubicon lay behind him. “Most girls would have thrown a fit. But Susan seems to feel there’s a lot to Mr. Young, in spite of all that rotten side of him. She saw right away he believed that about her, and so he couldn’t be blamed much for getting sore. Anyway, he must have a white streak in him, for Susan talked to him—the way she can—and he soon realized he was in all wrong. But the reason he was in wrong—that’s what finished things between Susan and Mr. Phar! I guess you won’t blame me for wanting to punch his head.”

“No,” I threw in; “I shouldn’t blame you for wanting to punch mine!”

“Give us the reason, Jimmy,” insisted Phil, his grave, Indianlike face stiffened to a mask.

“Mr. Young didn’t get that lie from Mr. Phar,” admitted Jimmy, “but he did take it straight to him, when he first heard it, thinking he ought to know.”

“Good God!” I cried. “Do you mean to tell me Maltby confirmed it?”

“Well,” Jimmy hesitated, “it seems he didn’t come right out and say, ‘Yes, that’s so!’ But he didn’t deny it either. Sort of shrugged his shoulders, I guess, and did things with his eyebrows. Whatever he did or didn’t, Mr. Young got it fastened in his head then and there that Susan——”

But this time Jimmy simply couldn’t go on; the words stuck in his throat and stayed there.

Phil’s eyes met mine and held them, long.

“Hunt,” he said quietly at last, “it’s a fortunate thing for Susan—for all of us—that I have long years of self-discipline behind me. Otherwise, I should go to New York to-morrow, find Maltby Phar, and shoot him.”

Jimmy’s blue eyes flashed toward Phil a startled but admiring glance.

“What do you propose to do, Hunt?” demanded Phil.

“Think,” I replied; “think hard—think things through. Wednesday morning I shall leave for New York.”

II

My prophecy was correct. Wednesday, at 12.03 a. m., I left for New York, in response to the shocking telegram from Lucette. I arrived at Gertrude’s address, an august apartment house on upper Park Avenue, a little before half-past two, dismissed my taxi at the door, noting as I did so a second taxi standing at the curb just ahead of my own, and was admitted to the dignified public entrance-hall with surprising promptness, considering the hour, by the mature buttons on duty. Buttons was a man nearing sixty, at a guess, of markedly Irish traits, and he was unexpectedly wide-awake. When I gave him my name, and briefly stated the reason for my untimely arrival, his deep-set eyes glittered with excited curiosity, while he drew down deep parallels about his mouth in a grimacing attempt at deepest sympathy and profoundest respect. I questioned him. Several persons had gone up to Mrs. Hunt’s apartment, he solemnly informed me, during the past two hours. He believed the police were in charge.

“Police?” I exclaimed, incredulous.

He believed so. He would say no more.

“Take me up at once!” I snapped at him. “Surely there’s a mistake. There can be no reason for police interference.”

His eyes glittered more shrewdly, the drawn parallels deepened yet further as he shot back the elevator door....

It was unmistakably a police officer who admitted me for the first and last time to Gertrude’s apartment. On hearing my name he nodded, then closed the door firmly in the face of Buttons, who had lingered.

“He’s been warned not to tip off the press,” said the police officer, “but it’s just as well to be cautious.”

“The press? What do you mean?” I asked, still incredulous. “Is it a New York custom for police to enter a house of mourning?” I was aware as I spoke of repressed voices murmuring in an adjoining room.

“I’m Sergeant Conlon,” he answered, “in charge here till the coroner comes. He should make it by seven. If you’re the poor lady’s husband, you’ll be needed. I’ll have to detain you.”

As he ended, the murmur ended in the adjoining room, and Lucette walked out from it. She was wearing an evening gown—blue, I think—cut very low, and a twinkling ornament of some kind in her hair. She has fine shoulders and beautiful hair. But her face had gone haggard; she had been weeping; she looked ten years older than when I had last seen her.

“What is it? What is it?” I demanded of her. “I know nothing but your telegram!”

“Looks like murder,” said Sergeant Conlon, dry and short. “I wouldn’t talk much if I was you, not till the coroner gets here. I’m bound to make notes of what you say.”

For the merest hundredth of a second my scalp prickled, my flesh went cold; but sheer incredulity was still strong upon me; it beat back the horror. It was simply not real, all this.

“At least,” I managed, “give me facts—something!”

Then unreality deepened to utter nightmare, passing all bounds of reason. Lucette spoke, and life turned for me to sheer prattling madness; to a gibbering grotesque!

“Susan did it!” she cried, her voice going high and strident, slipping from all control. “I know it! I know she did! I know it! Wasn’t she with her? Alone with her? Who else could have done it! Who else! It’s in her blood!”

Well, of course, when a woman you have played tag with in her girlhood goes mad before you, raves——

How could one act or answer? Then, too, she had vanished; or had I really seen her in the flesh at all? Really heard her voice, crying out....

Sergeant Conlon’s voice came next; short, dry, businesslike. It compelled belief.

“I’ve a question or two for you, Mr. Hunt. This way; steady!”

I felt his hand under my elbow.

Gertrude’s apartment was evidently a very large one; I had vaguely the sensation of passing down a long hall with an ell in it, and so into a small, simply furnished, but tasteful room—the sitting-room for her maids, as I later decided. Sergeant Conlon shut the door and locked it.

“That’s not to keep you in,” he said; “it’s to keep others out. Sit down, Mr. Hunt. Smoke somethin’. Let’s make ourselves comfortable.”

The click of the shot bolt in the lock had suddenly, I found, restored my power of coördination. It had been like the sharp handclap which brings home a hypnotized subject to reason and reality. I was now, in a moment, not merely myself again, but peculiarly alert and steady of nerve, and I gave matter-of-fact assent to Sergeant Conlon’s suggestions. I lit a cigarette and took possession of the most comfortable chair. Conlon remained standing. He had refused my cigarettes, but he now lighted a long, roughly rolled cigar.

“I get these from a fellow over on First Avenue,” he explained affably. “He makes them up himself. They’re not so bad.”

I attempted a smile and achieved a classic reaction. “They look—efficient,” I said. “And now, sergeant, what has happened here? If I’ve seemed dazed for the past ten minutes, it’s little wonder. I hurried down in response to a telegram saying my wife.... You know we’ve lived apart for years?” He grunted assent.... “Saying she had died suddenly. And I walk in, unprepared, on people who seem to me to be acting parts in a crook melodrama of the crudest type. Be kind enough to tell me what it’s all about!”

Sergeant Conlon’s gray-blue eyes fixed me as I spoke. He was a big, thickset man, nearing middle age; the bruiser build, physically; but with a solidly intelligent-looking head and trustworthy eyes.

“I’ll do that, Mr. Hunt,” he assented. “I got Mrs. Arthur to send you that telegram; but I’ll say to you first-off, now you’ve come, I don’t suspect you of bein’ mixed up in this affair. When I shot that ‘It looks like murder’ at you, I did it deliberate. Well—that’s neither here nor there; but I always go by the way things strike me. I have to.” He twirled a light chair round to face me and seated himself, leaning a little forward, his great stubby hands propped on his square knees. “Here’s the facts, then—what we know are facts: It seems, Mrs. Arthur—she’s been visitin’ Mrs. Hunt for two weeks past—she went to the opera to-night with a Mr. Phar; she says you know him well.” I nodded. “Durin’ the last act of the opera they were located by somebody in the office down there and called out to the ’phone—an accident to Mrs. Hunt—see?—important.” Again I nodded. “Mrs. Arthur answered the ’phone, and Doctor Askew—he lives in this house, but he’s Mrs. Hunt’s reg’lar doctor—well, he was on the wire. He just told her to hurry back as fast as she could—and she and Mr. Phar hopped a taxi and beat it up here. Doctor Askew met them at the door, and a couple of scared maids. The doc’s a good man—big rep—one of the best. He’d taken charge and sent on the quiet for us. I got here with a couple of my men soon after Mrs. Arthur——”

“But——”

“I know, I know!” he stopped me off. “But I want you to get it all straight. Mrs. Hunt, sir, was killed—somehow—with a long, sharp-pointed brass paper-knife—a reg’lar weapon. I’ve examined it. And someone drove that thing—and it must’a’ took some force, believe me!—right through her left eye up to the handle—a full inch of metal plumb into her brain!”

I tried to believe him as he said this; as, seeing my blankness, he repeated it for me in other words. For the moment it was impossible. This sort of thing must have happened in the world, of course—at other times, to other people. But not now, not to Gertrude. Certainly not to Gertrude; a woman so aloof, so exquisite, self-sheltered, class-sheltered, not merely from ugliness, from the harsh and brutal, but from everything in life even verging toward vulgarity, coarse passion, the unrestrained....

“That’s the way she was killed, Mr. Hunt—no mistake. Now—who did it—and why? That’s the point.”

At my elbow was a table with a reading-lamp on it, a desk-set, a work-basket, belonging, I suppose, to one of the maids, and some magazines. One magazine lay just before me—The Reel World—a by-product of the great moving-picture industry. I had been staring—unseeingly, at first—at a flamboyant advertisement on its cover that clamored for my attention, until now, with Conlon’s question, it momentarily gained it. The release of a magnificent Superfeature was announced—in no quavering terms. “The Sins of the Fathers” it shrieked at me! “All the thrilling human suspense”; “virile, compelling”; “brimming over with the kind of action and adventure your audiences crave”; “it delivers the wallop!”

Instantly, with a new force, Lucette’s outcry swept back upon me. “Susan did it! Wasn’t she with her? Alone with her? It’s in her blood!”

And at once every faculty of my spirit leaped, with an almost supernatural acuteness, to the defense of the one being on earth I wholly loved. All sense of unreality vanished. Now for it—since it must be so! Susan and I, if need be, against the world!

“Go on, sergeant. What’s your theory?”

“Never mind my theory! I’d like to get yours first—when I’ve given you all I know.”

“All right, then! But be quick about it!”

“Easy, Mr. Hunt! It’s not as simple as all that. Well, here it is: Somewhere round ten o’clock, a Miss Blake—a magazine-writer livin’ on West 10th Street—your ward, I understand——”

“Yes.”

“Well, she calls here, alone, and asks for Mrs. Arthur. Mrs. Hunt’s personal maid—English; she’s no chicken either—she lets her in and says Mrs. Arthur isn’t here—see—and didn’t the door boy tell her so? Yes, says Miss Blake, but she’ll wait for her anyway. The maid—name of Iffley—says she thought that was queer, so she put it to Miss Blake that maybe she’d better ask Mrs. Hunt. Oh, says Miss Blake, I thought she was out, too. But it seems Mrs. Hunt was in her private sittin’ room; she’d had a slight bilious attack, and she’d got her corsets off and somethin’ loose on, the way women do, and was all set for a good read. So the maid didn’t think she could see Miss Blake, but anyhow she took in her card—and Mrs. Hunt decided to see her. That maid Iffley’s an intelligent woman; she’s all broke up, but she ain’t hysterical like the cook—who didn’t see nothin’ anyway. The parlor maid was havin’ her night off, but she’s back now, too, and I’ve got ’em all safe where they can’t talk to outsiders, yet. I don’t want this thing in the papers to-morrow, not if I can help it; I want to keep it dark till I know better where I’m gettin’ off.”

“Right!” I approved. “What’s the maid’s story?”

“Well, I’ve questioned her pretty close, and I think it’s to be relied on. It hits me that way. Mrs. Hunt, she says, when she took in Miss Blake’s card, was lyin’ on her couch in a long trailin’ thing—what ladies call a negligee.”

“Yes?”

“And she was cuttin’ the pages of some new book with that paper-knife I spoke of.”

“Yes?”

“And her dog, a runty little French bull, was sleepin’ on the rug beside the couch.”

“What does that matter?”

“More’n you’d think! He’s got a broken leg—provin’ some kind of a struggle must’a’——”

“I see. Go on!”

“Well, Mrs. Hunt, the maid says, looked at Miss Blake’s card a minute and didn’t say anythin’ special, but seemed kind of puzzled. Her only words was, ‘Yes, I ought to see her.’ So the maid goes for Miss Blake and shows her to the door, which she’d left ajar, and taps on it for her, and Mrs. Hunt calls to come in. So Miss Blake goes in and shuts the door after her, and the maid comes back to this room we’re in now—it’s round the corner of the hall from Mrs. Hunt’s room—see? But she don’t much more than get here—just to the door—when she hears the dog give a screech and then go on cryin’ like as if he’d been hurt. The cook was in here, too, and she claims she heard a kind of jarrin’ sound, like somethin’ heavy fallin’; but Iffley—that’s the maid, they call her Iffley—says all she noticed was the dog. Anyway she listened a second, then she started for Mrs. Hunt’s room—and the cook, bein’ nervous, locked herself in here and sat with her eyes tight shut and her fingers in her ears. Fact. She says she can’t bear nothin’ disagreeable. Too bad about her, ain’t it!”

“And then?” I protested, crossly.

“Well, Mr. Hunt, when the Iffley woman turned the hall corner—the door of your poor wife’s room opens, and Miss Blake walks out. She had the paper-knife in her right hand, and the knife and her hand was all bloody; her left hand was bloody too; and we’ve found blood on her clothes since. There was a queer, vacant look about her—that’s what the maid says. She didn’t seem to see anythin’. Naturally, the maid was scared stiff—but she got one look in at the door anyway—that was enough for her. She was too scared even to yell, she says. Paralyzed—she just flopped back against the wall half faintin’.

“And then she noticed somethin’ that kind of brought her to again! Mr. Hunt, that young woman, Miss Blake—she’d gone quiet as you please and curled herself down on a rug in the hallway—that bloody knife in her hand—and she was either dead or fast asleep! And then the doorbell rang, and the Iffley woman says she don’t know how she got past that prostrate figger on the rug—her very words, Mr. Hunt—that prostrate figger on the rug—but she did, somehow; got to the door. And when she opened it, there was Doctor Askew and the elevator man. And then she passed out. And I must say I don’t much blame her, considerin’.”

“Where’s Miss Blake now?” I sharply demanded.

“She’s still fast asleep, Mr. Hunt—to call it that. The doc says it’s—somethin’ or other—due to shock. Same as a trance.”

I started up. “Where is Doctor Askew? I must see him at once!”

“We’ve laid Miss Blake on the bed in Mrs. Arthur’s room. He’s observin’ her.”

“Take me there.”

“I’ll do that, Mr. Hunt. But I’ll ask you a question first—straight. Is there any doubt in your mind that that young lady—your ward—killed Mrs. Hunt?”

I met his gray-blue glance directly, pausing a moment before I spoke. “Sergeant Conlon,” I replied, while a meteor-shower of speculation shot through me with the rapidity of light waves, “there is no doubt whatever in my mind: Miss Blake could not—and so did not—kill my wife.”

“Who did, then?”

“Wait! Let me first ask you a question, sergeant: Who sent for Doctor Askew?”

“That’s the queerest part of it; Miss Blake did.”

“Ah! How?”

“There’s a ’phone in Mrs. Hunt’s sittin’ room. Miss Blake called the house operator, gave her name and location, and said not to waste a moment—to send up a doctor double-quick!”

“Is that all she said?”

“No. The operator tells me she said Mrs. Hunt had had a terrible accident and was dyin’.”

“You’re certain she said ‘accident’?”

“The girl who was at the switchboard—name of Joyce—she’s sure of it.”

I smiled, grimly enough. “Then that is exactly what occurred, sergeant—a terrible accident; hideous. Your question is answered. Nobody killed Mrs. Hunt—unless you are so thoughtless or blasphemous as to call it an act of God!”

“Oh, come on now!” he objected, shaking his head, but not, I felt, with entire conviction. “No,” he continued stubbornly, “I been turnin’ that over too. But there’s no way an accident like that could ‘a’ happened. It’s not possible!”

“Fortunately,” I insisted, “nothing else is possible! Are you asking me to believe that a young, sensitive girl, with an extraordinary imaginative sympathy for others—a girl of brains and character, as all her friends have reason to know—asking me to believe that she walked coolly into my wife’s room this evening, rushed savagely upon her, wrested a paper knife from her hand, and then found the sheer brute strength of will and arm to thrust it through her eye deep into her brain? Are you further asking me to believe that having done this frightful thing she kept her wits about her, telephoned at once for a doctor—being careful to call her crime an accident—and so passed at once into a trance of some kind and walked from the room with the bloody knife in her hand? What possible motive could be strong enough to drive such a girl to such a deed?”

“Jealousy,” said Sergeant Conlon. “She wanted you—and your wife stood in her way. That’s what I get from Mrs. Arthur.”

“I see. But the three or four persons who know Miss Blake and me best will tell you how absurd that is, and you’ll find their reasons for thinking so are very convincing. Is Mr. Phar still about?”

“He is. I’ve detained him.”

“What does he think of Mrs. Arthur’s nonsensical theory?”

“He’s got a theory of his own,” said Conlon; “and it happens to be the same as mine.”

“Well?”

“Mr. Phar says Miss Blake’s own father went mad—all of a sudden; cut some fancy woman’s throat, and his own after! He thinks history’s repeated itself, that’s all. So do I. Only a crazy woman could ‘a’ done this—just this way. A strong man in his senses couldn’t ‘a’ drove that paper-knife home like that! But when a person goes mad, sir, all rules are off. I seen too many cases. Things happen you can’t account for. Take the matter of that dog now—his broken leg, eh? What are you to make of that? And take this queer state she’s in. There’s no doubt in my mind, Mr. Hunt—the poor girl’s gone crazy, somehow. You nor me can’t tell how nor why. But it’s back of all this—that’s sure.”

Throughout all this coarse nightmare, this insane break in Nature, as I have called it and must always regard it, let me at least be honest. As Conlon spoke, for the tiniest fraction of a second a desolating fear darted through me, searing every nerve with white-hot pain. Was it true? Might it not conceivably be true? But this single lightning-thrust of doubt passed as it came. No, not as it came, for it blotted all clearness, all power of voluntary thought from my mind; but it left behind it a singular intensity of vision. Even as the lightning-pang vanished, and while time yet stood still, a moving picture that amounted to hallucination began to play itself out before me. It was like

... that last
Wild pageant of the accumulated past
That clangs and flashes for a drowning man.

I saw Susan shutting the door of a delicately panelled Georgian room, and every detail of this room—a room I had never entered in the flesh—was distinct to me. Given time, I could have inventoried its every object. I saw Gertrude lying on—not a couch, as Conlon had called it—on a chaise-longue, a book with a vivid green cover in her left hand, a bronze paper knife with a thin, pointed blade in her right. She was holding it with the knuckles of her hand upward, her thumb along the handle, and the point of the blade turned to her left, across and a little in toward her body. She was wearing a very lovely négligé, a true creation, all in filmy tones of old gold. On a low-set tip-table at her elbow stood a reading-lamp, and a small coal-black French bull lay asleep on a superb Chinese rug—lay close in by the chaise-longue, just where a dropped hand might caress him. A light silky-looking coverlet of a peculiar dull blue, harmonizing with certain tones of the rug, was thrown across Gertrude’s feet.

As Susan shut the door, the little bull pricked up his bat-ears and started to uncurl, but Gertrude must have spoken to him, for he settled back again—not, however, to sleep. It was all a picture; I heard no sounds. Then I saw Gertrude put down her book on the table and swing her feet from the chaise-longue, meaning to rise and greet Susan. But, as she attempted to stand up, the light coverlet entangled her feet and tripped her; she lost her balance, tried with a violent, awkward lurch of her whole body to recover herself, and stamped rather than stepped full on the dog’s forepaws. He writhed, springing up between her feet—the whole grotesque catastrophe was, in effect, a single, fatal gesture!—and Gertrude, throwing her hands instinctively before her face, fell heavily forward, the length of her body, prone. I saw Susan rush toward her—— And the psychic reel flickered out, blanked.... I needed to see no more.

“Don’t you agree with me, Mr. Hunt?” Conlon was asking.

“No,” I said bluntly. “No madwoman would have summoned a doctor. Miss Blake called it a terrible accident. It was. Her present state is due to the horror of it. When she wakes, it will all be explained. Now take me to her.”

Conlon’s gray-blue glance fixed me once more. “All right,” he grunted, “I’ve no objections. But I’d ‘a’ thought your first wish would ‘a’ been to see your wife.”

“No,” I replied. “Mrs. Hunt separated from me years ago, for reasons of her own. I bore her no ill will; in a sense, I respected her, admired her. Understand me, Sergeant Conlon. There was nothing vulgar in her life, and her death in this stupid way—oh, it’s indecent, damnable! A cheap outrage! I could do nothing for her living, and can do nothing now. But I prefer to remember her as she was. She would prefer it, too.”

“Come on, then,” said Conlon; pretty gruffly, I thought.

He unlocked the door.

III

It was a singular thing, but so convincing had my vision been to me that I felt no immediate desire to verify the details of its setting by an examination of Gertrude’s boudoir. It had come to me bearing its own credentials, its own satisfying accent of truth. One question did, however, fasten upon me, as I followed Conlon’s bulky form, down the hall to Lucette’s bedroom. Whence had this vision, this psychic reel come to me? What was its source? How could the mere fact of it—clearing, as it did, at least, all perplexities from my own mind—have occurred? For the moment I could find no answer; the mystery had happened, had worked, but remained a mystery.

Like most men in this modern world I had taken a vague, mild interest in psychical research, reading more or less casually, and with customary suspension of judgment, anything of the sort that came in my way. I had a bowing acquaintance with its rapidly growing literature; little more; and until now I had had no striking psychical experiences of my own, and had never, as it happened, attended a séance of any kind, either popular or scientific. Nevertheless, I could—to put it so—speak that language. I was familiar with the described phenomena, in a general way, and with the conflicting theories of its leading investigators; but I had—honestly speaking—no pet theories of my own, though always impatient of spiritistic explanations, and rather inclined to doubt, too, the persistent claim that thought transference had been incontrovertibly established. On the whole, I suppose I was inclined to favor common-sense mechanistic explanations of such phenomena, and to regard all others with alert suspicion or wearily amused contempt.

Now at last, in my life’s most urgent crisis, I had had news from nowhere; now, furthermore, the being I loved and would protect, must protect, had been thrown by psychic shock into that grim borderland, the Abnormal: that land of lost voices, of the fringe of consciousness, of dissociated personalities, of morbid obsession, and wild symbolic dreams. Following on Conlon’s heels, then, I entered a softly illumined room—a restrained Louis Seize room—a true Gertrude room, with its cool French-gray panelled walls; but entered there as into sinister darkness, as if groping for light. The comfortably accustomed, the predictable, I felt, lay all behind me; I must step warily henceforth among shifting shadows and phosphoric blurs. The issues were too terrifying, too vast, for even one little false move; Susan’s future, the very health of her soul, might depend now upon the blundering clumsiness or the instinctive tact with which I attempted to pick and choose my way. It was with a secret shuddering of flesh and spirit that I entered that discreet, faultless room.

Susan was lying on the low single French bed, a coverlet drawn over her; they had removed her trim tailored hat, the jacket of her dark suit, and her walking-boots, leaving them on the couch by the silk-curtained windows, where they had perhaps first placed her. She had not dressed for the evening before coming up to Gertrude’s; it was evidently to have been a businesslike call. Her black weblike hair—smoky, I always called it, to tease her; it never fell lank or separated into strings—had been disordered, and a floating weft of it had drifted across her forehead and hung there. Her face was moon-white, her lips pale, the lines of cheek and chin had sharpened, her eyes were closed. It was very like death. My throat tightened and ached....

Doctor Askew stood across the bed from us, looking down at her.

“Here’s Mr. Hunt,” said Conlon, without further introduction. “He wants to see you.” Then he stepped back to the door and shut it, remaining over by it, at some distance from the bed. His silence was expressive. “Now show me!” it seemed to say. “This may be a big case for me and it may not. If not, I’m satisfied; I’m ready for anything. Go on, show me!”

Doctor Askew was not, as I had expected to find him, old; nor even middle-aged; an expectation caught, I presume, from Conlon’s laconic “One of the best—a big rep”; he was, I now estimated, a year or so younger than I. I had never heard of him and knew nothing about him, but I liked him at once when he glanced humorously up at Conlon’s “He wants to see you,” nodded to me, and said: “I’ve been hoping you’d come soon, Mr. Hunt. I’ve a mind to try something here—if you’ve no objection to an experiment?”

He was a short man, not fat, but thickset like Conlon; only, with a higher-strung vitality, carrying with it a sense of intellectual eagerness and edge. He had a sandy, freckled complexion, bronzy, crisp-looking hair with reddish gleams in it, and an unmistakably red, aggressive mustache, close-clipped but untamed. Green-blue eyes. A man, I decided, of many intensities; a willful man; but thoughtful, too, and seldom unkind.

“Why did you wait for my permission?” I asked.

“I shouldn’t have—much longer,” he replied, his eyes returning to Susan’s unchanging face. “But I’ve read one or two of your essays, so I know something of the feel of your mind. It occurred to me you might be useful. And besides, I badly need some information about this”—he paused briefly—“this very lovely child.” Again he paused a moment, adding: “This is a singular case, Mr. Hunt—and likely to prove more singular as we see it through. I acted too impulsively in sending for Conlon; I apologize. It’s not a police matter, as I at first supposed. However, I hope there’s no harm done. Conlon is holding his horses and trying to be discreet. Aren’t you, Conlon?”

“What’s the idea?” muttered Conlon, from the doorway; Conlon was not used to being treated thus, de haut en bas. “Even if that poor little girl’s crazy, we’ll have to swear out a warrant for her. It’s a police matter all right.”

“I think not,” said Doctor Askew, dismissing Conlon from the conversation. “Have you ever,” he then asked me, “seen Miss Blake like this before?”

I was about to say “No!” with emphasis, when a sudden memory returned to me—the memory of a queer, crumpled little figure lying on the concrete incline of the Eureka Garage; curled up there, like an unearthed cutworm, round a shining dinner-pail. “Yes,” I replied instead; “once—I think.”

“You think?”

I sketched the occasion for him and explained all its implications as clearly and briefly as I could; and while I talked thus across her bed Susan’s eyes did not open; she did not stir. Doctor Askew heard me out, as I felt, intently, but kept his eye meanwhile—except for a keen glance or two in my direction—on Susan’s face.

“All right,” he said, when I had concluded; “that throws more or less light. There’s nothing to worry us, at least, in Miss Blake’s condition. Under psychical trauma—shock—she has a tendency to pass into a trance state—amounting practically to one of the deeper stages of hypnosis. She’ll come out of it sooner or later—simply wake up—if we leave her alone. Perhaps, after all, that’s the wisest thing for us to do.”

On this conclusion he walked away from the bed, as if it ended the matter, and lit a cigarette.

“Well, Conlon,” he grinned, “we’re making a night of it, eh? Come, let’s all sit down and talk things over.” He seated himself on the end of the couch as he spoke, lounging back on one elbow and crossing his knees. “I ought to tell you, Mr. Hunt,” he added, “that nervous disorders are my specialty; more than that, indeed—my life! I studied under Janet in Paris, and later put in a couple of years as assistant physician in the Clinic of Psychiatry, Zurich. Did some work, too, at Vienna—with Stekel and Freud. So I needn’t say a problem of this kind is simply meat and drink to me. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything in the world!”

I was a little chilled by his words, by an attitude that seemed to me cold-bloodedly professional; nevertheless, I joined him, drawing up a chair, and Conlon gradually worked his way toward us, though he remained standing.

“What I want to know, doc,” demanded Conlon, “is why you’ve changed your mind?”

“I haven’t,” Doctor Askew responded. “I can’t have, because I haven’t yet formed an opinion. I’m just beginning to—and even that may take me some time.” He turned to me. “What’s your theory, Mr. Hunt?”

I was prepared for this question; my mind had been busying itself foresightedly with every possible turn our conversation was likely to take. All my faculties were sharpened by strain, by my pressing sense that Susan’s future, for good or evil, might somehow be linked to my lightest word. I had determined, then, in advance, not to speak in Conlon’s presence of my inexplicable vision, not to mention it at all to anyone unless some unexpected turn of the wheel might make it seem expedient. I could use it to Susan’s advantage, I believed, more effectively by indirection; I endeavored to do so now.

“My theory?” I queried.

“As to how Mrs. Hunt met her death. However painful, we’ve got to face that out, sooner or later.”

“Naturally. But I have no theory,” I replied; “I have an unshakable conviction.”

“Ah! Which is——”

“That the whole thing was accidental, of course; just as Miss Blake affirmed it to be over the telephone.”

“You believe that because she affirmed it?”

“Exactly.”

“That won’t go down with the coroner,” struck in Conlon. “How could it? I’d like to think it, well enough—but it don’t with me!”

“Wait, Conlon!” suggested Doctor Askew, sharply. “I’ll conduct this inquiry just now, if you don’t mind—and if Mr. Hunt will be good enough to answer.”

“Why not?” I replied.

“Thank you. Conlon’s point is a good one, all the same. Have you been able to form any reasonable notion of how such an accident could have occurred?”

“Yes.”

“The hell you have!” exclaimed Conlon excitedly, not meaning, I think, to be sarcastic. “Why, you haven’t even been in there”—he referred to Gertrude’s boudoir—“or seen the body!”

“No,” I responded, “but you and Doctor Askew have, so you can easily put me right. Extraordinary as the whole thing is—the one deadly chance in perhaps a million—there’s nothing impossible about it. Merely from the facts you’ve given me, Sergeant Conlon, I can reconstruct the whole scene—come pretty near it, at any rate. But the strength of my conviction is based on other grounds—don’t lose sight of that! Miss Blake didn’t kill Mrs. Hunt; she’s incapable of such an action; and if she didn’t, no one else did. An accident is the only alternative.”

“Well, then,” grunted Conlon, “tell us about it! It’ll take some tellin’!”

“Hold on!” exclaimed Doctor Askew before I could begin. “Sorry, Mr. Hunt—but you remember, perhaps—when you first came in—I had half a mind to try something—an experiment?” I nodded. “Well, I’ve made up my mind. We’ll try it right now, before it’s too late. If it succeeds, it may yield us a few facts to go on. Your suppositions can come afterward.”

I felt, as he spoke, that something behind his words belied their rudeness, that their rudeness was rather for Conlon’s benefit than for mine. He got up briskly and crossed to the bedside. There after a moment he turned and motioned us both to join him.

As we did so, tiptoeing instinctively: “Yes—this is fortunate,” he said; “she’s at it again. Look.”

Susan still lay as I had first seen her, with shut eyes, her arms extended outside the coverlet; but she was no longer entirely motionless. Her left arm lay relaxed, the palm of her left hand upward. I had often seen her hands lie inertly thus in her lap, the palms upward, in those moments of silent withdrawal which I have more than once described. But now her right hand was turned downward, the fingers slightly contracted, as if they held a pen, and the hand was creeping slowly on the coverlet from left to right; it would creep slowly in this way for perhaps eight inches, then draw quickly back to its point of starting and repeat the manœuvre. It was uncanny, this patient repetition—over and over—of a single restricted movement.

“My God,” came from Conlon in a husky whisper, “is she dyin’—or what?”

“Far from it!” said Doctor Askew, his abrupt, crisp speech in almost ludicrous contrast to Conlon’s sudden awe. “Get me some paper from that desk over there, Conlon. A pad, if possible.”

He drew out a pencil from his pocket as he spoke. Conlon hesitated an instant, then obeyed, tiptoeing ponderously, with creaking boots, over to a daintily appointed writing-table, and returning with a block of linen paper. Doctor Askew, meanwhile, holding the pencil between his teeth, had lifted Susan’s unresisting shoulders—too roughly, I thought—from the bed.

“Stick that other pillow under her,” he ordered me, sharply enough in spite of the impeding pencil. “A little farther down—so!”

Susan now lay, no less limply than before, with her trunk, shoulders, and head somewhat raised. Her right hand had ceased its slow, patient movement.

“What’s the idea?” Conlon was muttering. “What’s the idea, doc?”

Whatever it was, it was evident that Conlon didn’t like it.

“Got the pad?” demanded Doctor Askew. “Oh, good! Here!”

He almost snatched the pad from Conlon and tore the blotter cover from it; then he slipped it beneath Susan’s right palm and finally thrust his pencil between her curved fingers, its point resting on the linen block, which he steadied by holding one corner between finger and thumb. For a moment the hand remained quiet; then it began to write. I say “it” advisedly; no least trace of consciousness or purposed control could be detected in Susan’s impassive face or heavily relaxed body. Susan was not writing; her waking will had no part in this strange automatism; so much, at least, was plain to me and even to Conlon.

“Mother of God,” came his throaty whisper again, “it’s not her that’s doin’ it. Who’s pushin’ that hand?”

“It’s not sperits, Conlon,” said Doctor Askew ironically; “you can take my say-so for that.” With the words he withdrew the scribbled top sheet from the pad, glanced at it, and handed it to me. The hand journeyed on, covering a second sheet as I read. “That doesn’t help us much, does it?” was Doctor Askew’s comment, when I had devoured the first sheet.

“No,” I replied; “not directly. But I’ll keep this if you don’t mind.”

I folded the sheet and slipped it into my pocket. Doctor Askew removed the second sheet.

“Same sort of stuff,” he grunted, passing it over to me. “It needs direction.” And he began addressing—not Susan, to Conlon’s amazement—the hand! “What happened in Mrs. Hunt’s room to-night?” he demanded firmly of the hand. “Tell us exactly what happened in Mrs. Hunt’s room to-night! It’s important. What happened in Mrs. Hunt’s room to-night?”

Always addressing the hand, his full attention fixed upon it as it moved, he repeated this burden over and over. “We must know exactly what happened in Mrs. Hunt’s room to-night! Tell us what happened in Mrs. Hunt’s room to-night.... What happened in Mrs. Hunt’s room to-night?”

Conlon and I both noted that Susan’s breathing, hitherto barely to be detected, gradually grew more labored while Doctor Askew insisted upon and pressed home his monotonous refrain. He had so placed himself now that he could follow the slowly pencilled words. More and more deliberately the hand moved; then it paused....

“What happened in Mrs. Hunt’s room to-night?” chanted Doctor Askew.

“This ain’t right,” muttered Conlon. “It’s worse’n the third degree. I don’t like it.”

He creaked uneasily away. The hand moved again, hesitatingly, briefly.

“Ah,” chanted Doctor Askew—always to the hand—“it was an accident, was it? How did it happen? Tell us exactly how it happened—exactly how it happened. We must know.... How did the accident happen in Mrs. Hunt’s room to-night?”

Again the hand moved, more steadily this time, and seemingly in response to his questions.

Doctor Askew glanced up at me with an encouraging smile. “We’ll get it now—all of it. Don’t worry. The hand’s responding to control.”

Though sufficiently astonished and disturbed by this performance, I was not, like Conlon, wholly at sea. Sober accounts of automatic writing could be found in all modern psychologies; I had read some of these accounts—given with all the dry detachment of clinical data. They had interested me, not thrilled me. No supernatural power was involved. It was merely the comparative rarity of such phenomena in the ordinary normal course of experience that made them seem awe-inspiring. And yet, the hand there, solely animate, patiently writing in entire independence of a consciously directing will——! My spine, too, like Conlon’s, registered an authentic shiver of protest and atavistic fear. But, throughout, I kept my tautened wits about me, busily working; and they drove me now on a sudden inspiration to the writing-table, where I seized pen and paper and wrote down with the most collected celerity a condensed account of—for so I phrased it—“what must, from the established facts, be supposed to have taken place in Mrs. Hunt’s boudoir, just after Miss Blake had entered it.” I put this account deliberately as my theory of the matter, as the one solution of the problem consistent with the given facts and the known characters involved; and I had barely concluded when I was startled to my feet by Doctor Askew’s voice—raised cheerily above its monotonous murmur of questions to the hand—calling my name.

“What are you up to, Mr. Hunt? My little experiment’s over. It’s a complete success.”

He was walking toward me with a handful of loose scribbled sheets from the linen block.

“How is she now?” I inquired anxiously, as if she had just been subjected to a dangerous operation.

“All right. Deep under. I shan’t try to pull her out yet. Much better for her to come out of it naturally herself. I suggest we darken the room and leave her.”

“That suits me!” I just caught from Conlon, over by the door.

“She’ll be quite safe alone?”

“Absolutely. I want to read this thing to Conlon and Mrs. Arthur and Mr. Phar, before the coroner gets here. I rather think they’ll find it convincing.”

“Good,” I responded. “But, first of all, let me read them this. I’ve just jotted down my analysis of the whole situation. It’s a piece of cold constructive reasoning from the admitted data, and I shall be greatly surprised if it doesn’t on the whole agree with what you’ve been able to obtain.”

Doctor Askew stared at me a moment curiously. “And if it doesn’t agree?” he asked.

“If it don’t,” exclaimed Conlon, with obvious relief, “it may help us, all the same! This thing can’t be settled by that kind of stuff, doc.” He gave a would-be contemptuous nod toward Doctor Askew’s handful of scrawled pages. “That’s no evidence—whatever it says. Where does it come from? Who’s givin’ it? It can’t be sworn to on the Book, that’s certain—eh? Let’s get outa here and begin to talk sense!” Conlon opened the door eagerly, and creaked off through the hall.

“Go with him,” ordered Doctor Askew. “I’ll put out the lights.” Then he touched my elbow and gave me a slight nod. “I see your point of course. But I hope to God you’ve hit somewhere near it?”

“Doctor,” I replied, “this account of mine is exact. I’ll tell you later how I know that.”

“Ah!” he grunted, with a green-blue flash of eyes. “What a lucky devil I am!... But I’ve felt all along this would prove a rewarding case.”

IV

Up to this point I have been necessarily thus detailed, but I am eager now to win past the cruder melodrama of this insanely disordered night. I am eager to win back from all these damnable and distracting things to Susan. This book is hers, not mine; it is certainly not Sergeant Conlon’s or Doctor Askew’s. So you will forgive me, and understand, if I present little more than a summary of the immediately following hours.

We found Maltby and Lucette in the drawing-room, worn out with their night-long vigil; Maltby, somnolent and savage; Lucette still keyed high, suffering from exasperated nerves which—perhaps for the first time in her life—she could not control. They were seated as far apart as the room permitted, having long since talked themselves out, and were engaged, I think, in tacitly hating one another. The situation was almost impossible; yet I knew I must dominate it somehow, and begin by dominating myself—and in the end, with Conlon’s and Doctor Askew’s help, I succeeded. Conlon, I confess, proved to be an unexpected ally all through.

“Now, Mrs. Arthur, and you, Mr. Phar,” he stated at once as we entered the drawing-room together, “I’ve brought Mr. Hunt in here to read you his guess at what happened last evenin’. Doctor Askew’ll be with us in a minute, and he’s got somethin’ to lay before you.... No; Miss Blake’s not come round yet. The doc’ll explain about her. But we’ll hear from Mr. Hunt first, see? I’ve examined him and I’m satisfied he’s straight. You’ve known him long enough to form your own opinions, but that’s mine. Oh, here’s the doc! Go on, Mr. Hunt.”

With this lead, I was at length able to persuade Lucette and Maltby to listen, sullenly enough, to my written analysis. My feeling toward them both, though better concealed, was quite as hostile as theirs toward me, but I saw that I caught their reluctant attention and that Maltby was somewhat impressed by what I had written, and by my interjected amplifications of the more salient points. I had been careful to introduce no facts not given me by Sergeant Conlon, and when I had finished, ignoring Lucette’s instant murmur of impatience and incredulity, I turned to him and said: “Sergeant, is there anything known to you and not known to me—any one detail discovered during your examination of Mrs. Hunt’s boudoir, say—which makes my deductions impossible or absurd?”

He reflected a moment, then acknowledged: “Well, no, Mr. Hunt. Things might ‘a’ happened like that; maybe they did. But just sayin’ so don’t prove they did!”

“May I ask you a few questions?”

“Sure.”

“Had Mrs. Hunt’s body been moved when you arrived? I mean, from the very spot where it fell?”

“It had and it hadn’t. The doc here found her lyin’ face down on the floor, right in front of the couch. He had to roll her over on her back to examine her. That’s all. The body’s there now like that, covered with a sheet. Nothin’ else has been disturbed.”

“The body was lying face down, you say?”

“Yes,” struck in Doctor Askew; “it was.”

“At full length?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that rather surprising?”

“Unquestionably.”

“How do you account for the position?”

“There’s only one possible explanation,” replied Doctor Askew, as if giving expert testimony from a witness box; “a sudden and complete loss of balance, pitching the body sharply forward, accompanied by such a binding of the legs and feet as to prevent any instinctive movement toward recovery.”

“Thank you. Were there any indications of such binding?”

“Yes. Mrs. Hunt’s trailing draperies had somehow wound themselves tightly about her legs below the knee, and I judge her feet were further impeded by a sort of coverlet which I found touselled up on the rug beneath them.”

“Grant all that!” growled Maltby. “It points to just the opposite of what we’d all like to think is true. If Mrs. Hunt had risen slowly to greet a caller in the usual way—well, she wouldn’t have gotten herself tangled up. She was the last woman in the world to do anything awkwardly. But if she leaped to her feet in terror—what? To defend herself—or try to escape? Don’t you see?”

“Of course we see!” cried Lucette. “It proves everything!”

“Hardly,” I replied. “Try to imagine the scene, Maltby, as you seem to believe it occurred. I won’t speak of the major impossibility—that Susan, a girl you’ve known and have asked to be your wife, could under any circumstances be the author of such a crime! We’ll pass that. Simply try to picture the crime itself. Susan, showing no traces of unnatural excitement, is conducted to my wife’s boudoir. She enters, shuts the door, turns, then rushes at her with so hideous an effect of insane fury that Gertrude springs up, terrified. Susan—more slightly built than Gertrude, remember!—grapples with her, tears a paper knife from her hand, and plunges it deep into her eye, penetrating the brain. Suppose, if you will, that madness lent her this force. But, obviously, for the point of the knife to enter the eye in that way, Gertrude must have been fronting Susan, her chin well raised. Obviously, the force of such a blow would have thrown her head, her whole body, backward, not forward; and if her feet were bound, as Doctor Askew says they were, she must have fallen backward or to one side, certainly not forward at full length, on her face.”

“You’ve said somethin’ this time, Mr. Hunt!” exclaimed Conlon. “There’s a lot to that!”

Maltby was visibly impressed; but not Lucette. “As if,” she said, “Susan wouldn’t have arranged the body—afterward—in any way she thought to her advantage!”

“There wasn’t time!” Doctor Askew objected impatiently. “And,” he went on, “it happens that all this is futile! I have proof here, corroborating Mr. Hunt’s remarkably acute theories in the most positive way.”

But before reading what Susan’s hand had written, he turned to Sergeant Conlon, requesting his close attention, and then gave him briefly a popular lecture on the nature of automatic writing as understood by a tough-minded neurologist with no faith in the supernatural. It was really a masterly performance in its way, for he avoided the jargon of science and cut down to essentials.

“Conlon,” he said, “you’ve often forgotten something, tried to recall it, and finally given it up. We all have. And then some day, when you least expected it and were thinking of something else, that forgotten something has popped into your mind again—eh? All right. Where was it in the meantime, when you couldn’t put your finger on it? Since it eventually came back, it must have been preserved somewhere. That’s plain enough, isn’t it? But when you say something you’ve forgotten ’pops into your mind’ again, you’re wrong. It’s never been out of your mind. What too many of us still don’t know is that a man’s mind has two parts to it. One part, much the smallest, is consciousness—the part we’re using now, the part we’re always aware of. The other part is a big dark storehouse, where pretty much everything we’ve forgotten is kept. We’re not aware of the storehouse or the things kept in it, so the ordinary man doesn’t know anything about it. You’re not aware of your spleen, and wouldn’t know you had one if doctors hadn’t cut up a lot of people and found spleens in every one of them. You believe you’ve got a spleen because we doctors tell you so. Well, I’m telling you now that your mind has a big storehouse, where most of the things you’ve forgotten are preserved. We mind-doctors call it your Unconscious Mind. All clear so far?... Good.

“Now then—when a man’s hypnotized, it means his conscious mind has been put to sleep, practically, and his unconscious mind has, in a sense, waked up. When a man’s hypnotized we can fish all sorts of queer things from his big storehouse, his unconscious mind; things he didn’t know were there, things he’d forgotten.... And it’s the same with what we call trances. A man in a trance is a man whose conscious mind is asleep and whose unconscious mind is awake.

“That’s exactly Miss Blake’s condition now. The shock of what she saw last evening threw her into a trance; she doesn’t know what’s going on round her—but her unconscious mind has a record, a sort of phonograph-record of more or less everything that’s ever happened to her, and if she speaks or writes in this trance state she’d simply play one of these stored-up records for us; play it just like a phonograph, automatically. Her will power’s out of commission, you see; in this state she’s nothing more nor less than a highly complicated instrument. And the record she plays may be of no interest to anybody; some long-forgotten incident or experience of childhood, for example. On the other hand, if we can get the right record going—eh?—we’ve every chance of finding out exactly what we want to know!” He paused, fixing his already attentive pupil with his peculiarly vivid green-blue glance.

“Now, Conlon, get this—it’s important! I must ask you to believe one other thing about the Unconscious Mind—simply take it on my say-so, as a proved fact: When the conscious mind is temporarily out of business—as under hypnotism, or in trance—the unconscious mind, like the sensitive instrument it is, will often obey or respond to outside suggestions. I can’t go into all this, of course. But what I ask you to believe about Miss Blake is this: In her present state of trance, at my suggestion, she has played the right record for us! She has automatically written down for us an account of her experiences last evening. And I assure you this account, obtained in this way, is far more reliable and far more complete than any she could give us in her normal, conscious, waking state. There’s nothing marvellous or weird about it, Conlon. We have here”—and he slightly rattled the loose sheets in his hand—“simply an automatic record of stored-up impressions. Do you see?”

Conlon grunted that he guessed maybe he saw; at any rate, he was willing to be shown.

Then Doctor Askew read us Susan’s own story of the strange, idiotically meaningless accident to Gertrude. As it corresponded in every particular with my vision, I shall not repeat it; but it produced an enormous impression on Sergeant Conlon and Maltby, and even on Lucette. Taken in connection with my independent theory of what must have occurred, they found Susan’s story entirely convincing; though whether Lucette really found it so or had suddenly decided—because of certain uncomfortable accusations against herself made by Susan’s hand—that the whole matter had gone quite far enough and any further publicity would be a mistake, I must leave to your later judgment.

As for the coroner, when at length he arrived, he too—to my astonishment and unspeakable relief—accepted Susan’s automatic story without delay or demur. Here was a stroke of sheer good luck, for a grateful change—but quite as senseless in itself, when seriously considered, as the cruel accident to Gertrude. It merely happened that the coroner’s sister was a professional medium, and that he and his whole family were ardent believers in spiritualism, active missionaries in that cause. He had started life as an East Side street-urchin, had the coroner, and had scrambled up somehow from bondage to influence, fighting his way single-fisted through a hard school that does not often foster illusions; but I have never met a more eagerly credulous mind. He accepted the automatic writing as evidence without a moment’s cavil, assuring us at once that it undoubtedly came as a direct message from the dead.

Doctor Askew’s preliminary explanations he simply brushed aside. If Miss Blake in her present trance state, which he soon satisfied himself was genuine, had produced this message, then her hand had been controlled by a disembodied spirit—probably Mrs. Hunt’s. There was no arguing with the man, and on my part, heaven knows, no desire to oppose him! I listened gratefully for one hour to his wonder tales of spirit revelations, and blessed him when he reluctantly left us—with the assurance that Gertrude’s death would be at once reported as due to an unavoidable accident. It was so announced in the noon editions of the evening papers. Sergeant Conlon and his aids departed by the service elevator, and were soon replaced by a shocked and grieved clergyman and a competent undertaker. The funeral—to take place in New Haven—was arranged for; telegrams were sent; one among them to Phil. Even poor Miss Goucher was at last remembered and communicated with—only just in time, I fear, to save her reason. But of her more in its place. And, meanwhile, throughout all this necessary confusion, Susan slept on. Noon was past, and she still slept.... And Doctor Askew and I watched beside her, and talked together.

At precisely seven minutes to three—I was bending over her at the moment, studying her face for any sign of stirring consciousness—she quietly opened her eyes.

“Ambo,” were her first words, “I believe in God now; a God, anyway. I believe in Setebos——”

V

In my unpracticed, disorderly way—in the hurry of my desire to get back to Susan—I have again overstepped myself and must, after all, pause to make certain necessary matters plain. There is nothing else for it. I have, on reflection, dropped too many threads—the thread of my own vision, the thread of those first two or three pages scrawled by Susan before her hand had fully responded to Doctor Askew’s control; other weakly fluttering, loose-ended threads! My respect for the great narrative writers is increasing enormously, as I bungle onward. “Order is heaven’s first law,” and I wish to heaven it might also more instinctively be mine!

Just after the coroner’s departure Maltby left us, but before he left I insisted upon a brief talk with him in Lucette’s presence. I was in no mood for tact.

“Maltby,” I said, “I can’t stop now for anything but the plain statement that you’ve been a bad friend—to Susan and me. As for you, Lucette, it’s perfectly clear now that Susan believes you responsible for spreading a slanderous lie about her. Between you, directly or indirectly, you’ve managed to get it believed down here that Susan has been my mistress and was forced to leave New Haven because the scandal had grown notorious. That’s why Susan came here, determined to see you, Lucette; that’s why Gertrude received her. Gertrude was never underhanded, never a sneak. My guess is, that she suspected you of slandering Susan, but wasn’t sure; and then Susan’s unexpected call on you——”

Lucette flared out at this, interrupting me. “I’m not particularly interested in your guesswork, Ambrose Hunt! We’ve had a good deal of it, already. Besides, I’ve a raging headache, and I’m too utterly heartsick even to resent your insults. But I’ll say this: I’ve very strong reasons for thinking that what you call a lying slander is a fact. Mr. Phar can tell you why—if he cares to.”

With that, she walked out of the room, and I did not see her again until we met in New Haven at Gertrude’s funeral, on which occasion, with nicely calculated publicity, she was pleased to cut me dead.

When she had gone I turned on Maltby.

“Well?” I demanded.

Maltby, I saw, was something more than ill-at-ease.

“Now see here, Boz,” he began, “can’t we talk this over without quarreling? It’s so stupid, I mean—between men of the world.” I waited, without responding. “I’ll be frank with you,” he mumbled at me. “Fact is, old man, that night—the night Phil Farmer said Susan wanted to see you—was waiting for you in your study—remember? You promised to rejoin me shortly and talk things out.... But you didn’t come back. Naturally, I’ve always supposed since then——”

“You have a scoundrelly imagination!” I exclaimed.

His face, green-pale from loss of sleep, slowly mottled with purplish stains.

“Years of friendship,” he stumbled, thick-voiced, through broken phrases. “Wouldn’t take that from any one else.... Not yourself.... Question of viewpoint, really.... I’d be the last to blame either of you, if—— However——”

“Maltby,” I said, “you’re what I never thought you—a common or garden cad. That’s my deliberate opinion. I’ve nothing more to say to you.”

For an instant I supposed he was going to strike me. It is one of the major disappointments of my life that he did not. My fingers ached for his throat.

Later, with the undertaker efficiently in charge of all practical arrangements, and while Susan still hid from us behind her mysterious veil, I talked things out with Doctor Askew, giving him the whole story of Susan as clearly and unreservedly as I could. My purpose in doing so was two-fold. I felt that he must know as much as possible about Susan before she woke again to what we call reality. What I feared was that this shock—which had so profoundly and so peculiarly affected her—might, even after the long and lengthening trance had passed, leave some mark upon her spirit, perhaps even some permanent cloud upon her brain. I had read enough of these matters to know that my fear was not groundless, and I could see that Doctor Askew welcomed my information—felt as keenly as I did that he might later be called upon to interpret and deal with some perplexing borderland condition of the mind. It was as well at least to be prepared. That was my major purpose. But connected with it was another, more self-regarding. My own vision, my psychic reel, greatly disturbed me. It was not orthodox. It could not be explained, for example, as something swiftly fabricated from covert memories by my unconscious mind, and forced then sharply into consciousness by some freak of circumstance, some psychic perturbation or strain.

My vision of the accident itself—of the manner of its occurrence—might conceivably have been such a fabrication, subconsciously elaborated from the facts given me by Conlon; not so my vision of its setting. I had seen in vivid detail the interior of a room which I had never entered and had never heard described; and every detail thus seen was minutely accurate, for I had since examined the room and had found nothing in it unfamiliar, nothing that did not correspond with what my mind’s eye had already noted and remembered. Take merely one instance—the pattern and color scheme of the Chinese rug beside the chaise-longue. As an amateur in such matters I could easily, in advance of physically looking at it, have catalogued that rug and have estimated its value to a collector. How then to account for this astounding clairvoyance? I could not account for it without widening my whole conception of what was psychically possible. Seated with Doctor Askew in the room where Susan lay withdrawn from us, from our normal world of limited concrete perceptions, I was oppressed as never before by the immensity and deluding vagueness of the unknown. What were we, we men and women? Eternal forces, or creatures of an hour? An echo, from days long past returned to me, Phil’s quiet, firm voice demanding—of Maltby, wasn’t it? Yes, yes, of course—demanding of Maltby: “What is the world, may I ask? And what is Susan?”

Doctor Askew cross-questioned me closely as we sat there, a little off from Susan, our eyes seldom leaving her face. “You must have patience,” he kept assuring me in the midst of his questioning. “It will be much better for her to come out of this thing tranquilly, by herself. We’re not really wasting time.” When his cross-questioning was over he sat silent for a long time, biting at his upper lip, tapping one foot—almost irritably, I thought—on the parquet floor.

“I don’t like it,” he said finally, in his abrupt way. “I don’t like it because I believe you’re telling the truth. If I could only persuade myself that you are either lying or at least drawing a long bow”—he gave a little disgusted snort of laughter—“it would be a great relief to me!”

“Why?”

“Why? Because you’re upsetting my scientific convictions. My mind was all tidied up, everything nicely in order, and now you come raging through it with this ridiculous tale of a sudden hallucinating vision—of seeing things that you’d never seen, never heard described—whose very existence you were completely unaware of! Damn it! I’d give almost anything to think you a cheerful liar—or self-deceived! But I can’t.”

“Still, you must have met with similar cases?”

“Never, as it happens, with one that I couldn’t explain away to my own satisfaction. That’s what irritates me now. I can’t explain you away, Mr. Hunt. I believe you had that experience just as you describe it. Well, then, if you had—what follows?” He pulled for a moment or two at a stubby end of red mustache.

“What does?” I suggested.

“One of three things,” he replied, “all equally impossible. Either your vision—to call it that—was first recorded in the mind of another living person and transferred thence to yours—or it was not. If it wasn’t, then it came direct from God or the devil and was purely miraculous! With your kind permission, we’ll rule that out. But if it was first recorded in the mind of another living person, then we’re forced to accept telepathy—complete thought transference from a distance—accept it as a fact. I never have so accepted it, and hate like hell to do it now! And even if I could bring myself to accept it, my troubles have only begun. From whose mind was this exact vision of the accident to Mrs. Hunt transferred to yours? So far as I can see, the detailed facts of it could have been registered in the minds of only two persons—Miss Blake and your wife. Isn’t that so?”

I agreed.

“All right. See where that leaves us! At the time you received this vision, Miss Blake is lying here in a deep trance, unconscious; and your wife is dead. Which of these incredible sources of information do you prefer? It’s a matter of indifference to me. Either way my entire reasoned conception of the universe topples in ruins!”

“But surely,” I protested, “it might have come to me from Miss Blake, as you suggest, without our having to descend to a belief in spirit communication? Let’s rule that out, too!”

“As you please,” smiled Doctor Askew, pretty grimly. “If you find it easier to believe your vision came from Miss Blake, do so by all means! Personally, I’ve no choice. I can accept the one explanation quite as readily as the other. Which means, that as a thinking being I can accept neither! Both are—absurd. So I can go no further—unless by a sheer act of faith. I’m baffled, you see—in my own field; completely baffled. That’s what it comes to. And I find it all devilishly annoying and inconvenient. Don’t you?”

I did not reply. For a time I mused, drearily enough, turning many comfortless things over in my mind. Then I drew from my pocket the three sheets scribbled by Susan’s hand, before it had responded to Doctor Askew’s insistent suggestions.

“Doctor,” I asked, handing him the scribbled pages, “in view of all I’ve told you, doesn’t what Miss Blake has written here strike you as significant? You see,” I added, while he glanced through them, “how strongly her repressed feelings are in revolt against me—against the tyranny of my love for her. Doesn’t it seem improbable, then, to say the least of it, that my vision could have come from that direction?”

He was reading the pages through again, more slowly. “Jimmy?” he queried to himself. “Oh, yes—Jimmy’s the boy you spoke of. I see—I see.” He looked up, and I did my best to smile.

“That’s a bitter dose of truth for me, doctor; but thank God it came in this way—came in time!”

Except for the punctuation, which I have roughly supplied, the three pages read as follows:

“A net. No means of escape from it. To escape—somehow. Jimmy—— Only wretchedness for Ambo—for us both. How can he care! Insufferably self-satisfied; childishly blind. I won’t—I won’t—not after this. No escape from it—my net. But the inner net—Ambo’s—binding him, too. Some way out. A dead hand killing things. My own father. How he killed and killed—always—more than he knew. Blind. Never felt that before as part of me—of me. Wrong way round though—it enfolds—smothers. I’m tangled there—part of it—forever and ever. Setebos—God of my father—Setebos knows. Oh, how could I dream myself free of it like others—how could I! A net—all a net—no breaking it. Poor Ambo—and his love too—a net. It shan’t hold me. I’ll gnaw through—mouselike. I must. Fatal for Ambo now if it holds me. Fatal—Setebos—Jimmy will——”

“Hum,” said Doctor Askew quietly.

“That doesn’t help me much,” I complained.

“No,” he responded; “but I can’t see that all this has any bearing on the possible source of your vision.”

“I only thought that perhaps this revelation of a repressed inner revolt against me——”

“Yes, I see. But there’s no reasoning about the unthinkable. I’ve already said I can make nothing of your vision—nothing I’m yet prepared to believe.” He handed the three sheets back to me with these words: “But I’m afraid your interpretation of this thing is correct. It’s a little puzzling in spots—curious, eh, the references to Setebos?—still, if I were you, Mr. Hunt, I should quietly withdraw from a lost cause. It’ll mean less trouble all round in the end.” He shook his head impatiently. “These sexual muddles—it’s better to see ’em out frankly! They’re always the devil, anyway! What silly mechanisms we are—how Nature makes puppet-fools of us! That lovely child there—she admires you and wants to love you, because you love her. Why shouldn’t she? What could be a happier arrangement—now? You’ve had your share of marital misfortune, I should say. But Nature doesn’t give a damn for happy arrangements! God knows what she’s after, I don’t! But just at present she seems to be loading the dice for Jimmy—for Jimmy, who perhaps isn’t even interested in the game! Well, such—for our misery or amusement—is life! And my cigarettes are gone.... How about yours——?”

VI

It did not take Susan long to make it perfectly clear to Doctor Askew and me that she had waked from her trance to complete lucidity, showing no traces of any of the abnormal after-effects we had both been dreading. Her first rather surprising words had been spoken just as she opened her eyes and before she had quite realized anything but my familiar presence beside her. They were soon followed by an entirely natural astonishment and confusion. What had happened? Where was she? She sat up in bed and stared about her, her eyes coming to rest on Doctor Askew’s eager, observant face.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Doctor Askew,” he replied quietly. “Don’t be alarmed, Miss Blake. Mr. Hunt and I have been looking after you. Not that you’ve been much trouble,” he smiled; “on the contrary. You’ve been fast asleep for more than twelve hours. We both envy you.”

For a long two minutes she did not reply. Then, “Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh, yes.” Her chin began to quiver, she visibly shuddered through her whole slight frame, and for an instant pressed her palms hard against her eyes. “Ambo,” she murmured, “it was cruel—worse than anything! I got to the ’phone all right, didn’t I? Yes, I remember that. I gave the message. But I knew I must go back to her. So much blood, Ambo.... I’m a coward—oh, I’m a coward! But I tried, I did try to go back! Where did I go, Ambo?”

“You went to sleep like a sensible little woman!” struck in Doctor Askew, briskly. “You’d done all you could, all anyone could—so you went to sleep. I wish to God more women under such circumstances would follow your example! Much better than going all to pieces and making a scene!”

Susan could not respond to his encouraging smile. “To sleep!” she sighed miserably; “just as I did—once before. What a coward I am! When awful things happen, I dodge them—I run away.”

“Nonsense, dear. You knew Gertrude was beyond helping, didn’t you?”

“Yes; but if she hadn’t been?” She shook her head impatiently. “You’re both trying to be kind; but you won’t be able to make me forgive myself—not this time. I don’t rise to a crisis—I slump. Artemis wouldn’t have; nor Gertrude. You know that’s true, Ambo. Even if I could do nothing for her—there were others to think of. There was you. I ought to have been helping you; not you, me.” She put out her hand to me. “You’ve done everything for me, always—and I make no return. Now, when I might have, I—I’ve been a quitter!”

Tears of shame and self-reproach poured from her eyes. “Oh,” she cried out with a sort of fierce disgust, “how I hate a coward! How I hate myself!”

“Come, come!” protested Doctor Askew. “This won’t do, little lady!” He laid a firm hand on her shoulder and almost roughly shook it, as if she had been a boy. “If you’re equal to it, I suggest you get up and wash your face in good cold water. Do your hair, too—put yourself to rights! Things never look quite normal to a woman, you know, when her hair’s tumbling!” His hand slipped from her shoulder to her upper arm; he drew the coverlet from her, and helped her to rise. “All right? Feel your pins under you?... Fine! Need a maid? No?... Splendid! Come along, Mr. Hunt, we’ll wait for the little lady in the drawing-room. She’ll soon pull herself together.”

He joined me and walked with me to the door. Susan had not moved as yet from the bedside.

“Ambo,” she demanded unexpectedly, “does Sister know?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Why isn’t she with me then? Is her cold worse?”

“Rather, I’m afraid. I’ve sent a doctor to her, with instructions to keep her in bed if possible. We’ll go right down when you’re ready and feel up to it.”

“Why didn’t I stay with her, Ambo? I should have. If I had, all this wouldn’t have happened. It was pure selfishness, my coming here to see Mrs. Arthur. I simply wanted the cheap satisfaction of telling her—oh, no matter! I’ll be ready in five minutes or less.”

“Ah,” laughed Doctor Askew, “then we know just what to expect! I’ll order my car round for you in half an hour.”

Phil and Jimmy arrived in town that afternoon and I met them at the Brevoort, where the three of us took rooms, with a sitting-room, for the night. I told them everything that had occurred as fully as I could, with one exception: I did not speak of those first three pages automatically scribbled by Susan’s hand. Nor did I mention my impression—which was rapidly becoming a fixed idea—that my love for her had darkened her life. This was my private problem, my private desolation. It would be my private duty to free Susan’s spirit from this intolerable strain. No one could help me here, not even Susan. In all that most mattered to me, my isolation must from now on be complete.

All else I told them, not omitting my vision—the whole wild story. And, finally, I had now to add to my devil’s list a new misfortune. We had found poor Miss Goucher’s condition much more serious than I had supposed. Doctor Askew had taken us down in his car, and we were met in the nondescript lower hall of the boarding-house by his friend, Doctor Carl—the doctor whom I had sent to Miss Goucher on his advice. Miss Goucher’s heavy chest cold, he at once informed us, had taken a graver turn; double pneumonia had declared itself. Her fever was high and she had lately grown delirious; he had put a trained nurse in charge. The crisis of the disease would probably be passed during the next twelve hours; he was doing everything possible; he hoped for the best.

Susan, very white, motionless, had heard him out. “If Sister dies,” she had said quietly when he ended, “I shall have killed her.” Then she had run swiftly up the stairs and the two doctors had followed her. I had remained below and had not again seen her; but Doctor Askew had returned within ten minutes, shaking his head.

“No one can say what will happen,” I had finally wrested from him. “One way or the other now, it’s the flip of a coin. Carl’s doing his best—that is, nothing, since there’s nothing to do. I’ve warned him to keep an eye on the little lady. I’ll look in again after dinner. Good-by. Better find a room and get some sleep if you can.”

There was little doubt that Miss Goucher’s turn for the worse had come as the result of Susan’s disturbing all-night absence. Susan had made her comfortable and left her in bed, promising to be home before twelve. Miss Goucher had fallen asleep about eleven and had not waked until two. The light she had left for Susan had not been switched off, and Susan’s bed, which stood beside her own, was unoccupied. Feverish from her bronchial cold, she was at once greatly alarmed, and sprang from her bed to go into the sitting-room, half hoping to find Susan there and scold her a little for remaining up so late over her work. She did not even stop to put on a dressing-gown or find her slippers. All this Susan later learned from her red-eyed landlady, Miss O’Neill, whose own bedroom, as it happened, was just beside their own. Miss O’Neill, a meritorious if tiresome spinster of no particular age, had at last been waked from heavy and well-earned sleep by persistent knocking at her door. She had found Miss Goucher standing in the unheated, draughty hall, bare-footed, in her nightgown, her cheeks flushed with mounting fever while her teeth chattered with cold.

Like a sensible woman she had hurried her instantly back to bed, and would have gone at once for a hot-water bottle, if Miss Goucher had not insisted upon a hearing. Miss O’Neill was abjectly fond of Miss Goucher, who had the rare gift of listening to voluble commonplace without impatience—a form of sympathy so rare and so flattering to Miss O’Neill’s so often bruised self-esteem that she would gladly—had there been any necessity—have carried Miss Goucher rent-free for the mere spiritual solace of pouring out her not very romantic troubles to her. She had taken, Susan felt, an almost voluptuous pleasure in this, her one opportunity to do something for Miss Goucher. She had telephoned Gertrude’s apartment for her: “no matter if it is late! I won’t have you upset like this for nobody! They’ve got to answer!” And she had talked with some man—“and I didn’t like his tone, neither”—who had asked her some rather odd questions, and had then told her Miss Blake was O. K., not to worry about Miss Blake; she’d had a fainting-spell and been put to bed; she’d be all right in the morning; sure; well, he was the doctor, he guessed he ought to know! “Queer kind of doctor for a lady,” Miss O’Neill had opined; “he sounded more like a mick!” A shrewd guess, for he was, no doubt, one of Conlon’s trusties.

Miss Goucher had then insisted that she was going to dress and go up at once to Susan, and had even begun her preparations in spite of every protest, when she was seized with so stabbing a pain in her chest that she could only collapse groaning on the bed and let Miss O’Neill minister to her as best she might with water bottles and a mustard plaster borrowed from Number Twelve....

By the time I had tardily remembered to telephone Miss Goucher it was almost nine a. m., and it was Miss O’Neill who had answered the call, receiving my assurances of Susan’s well-being, and informing me in turn that poor Miss Goucher was good and sick and no mistake, let alone worrying, and should she send for a doctor? She was a Scientist herself, though she’d tried a mustard plaster, anyway, always liking to be on the safe side; but Miss Goucher wasn’t, and so maybe she ought. At this point I had naturally taken charge.

And it was at this point in my long, often interrupted relation to Phil and Jimmy that Phil took charge.

“You’re going to bed, Hunt—and you’re going now! There’s absolutely nothing further you can do this evening, and if anything turns up Jimmy or I can attend to it. You’ve been living on your nerves all day and you show it, too plainly. We don’t want another patient to-morrow. Run out and get some veronal powders, Jimmy. Thanks. No protests, old man. You’re going to bed!”

I went; and, drugged with veronal, I slept—slept dreamlessly—for fourteen hours. When I woke, a little past ten, Jimmy was standing beside me.

“Good morning, Mr. Hunt. You look rested up some! How about breakfast?” His greeting went through all the sounds and motions of cheerfulness, but it was counterfeit coin. There was something too obviously wrong with Jimmy’s ordinarily fresh healthy-boy face; it had gone sallow and looked pincushiony round the eyes. I stared at him dully, but could not recall anything that might account for this alteration. Only very gradually a faint sense of discomfort began to pervade my consciousness. Hadn’t something happened—once—something rather sad—and rather horrible? When was it? Where was I? And then the full gust of recollection came like a stiff physical blow over my heart. I sat up with a sharp gasp for breath....

“Well!” I demanded. “Miss Goucher! How is she?”

“She’s dead, sir,” answered Jimmy, turning away.

“And——”

“She’s wonderful!” answered Jimmy.

He had not needed Susan’s name.

Yes, in a sense, Jimmy was right. He was not a boy to look far beneath the surface effects of life, and throughout the following weeks Susan’s surface effect was indeed wonderful. Apparently she stood up to her grief and mastered it, developing an outer stillness, a quietude strangely disquieting to Phil and to me. Gentleness itself in word and deed, for the first time since we had known her she became spiritually reticent, holding from us her deeper thoughts. It was as if she had secretly determined—God knows from what pressure of lonely sorrow—to conventionalize her life, to present the world hereafter nothing but an even surface of unobtrusive conformity. This, we feared, was hereafter to be her wounded soul’s protection, her Chinese Wall. It had not somehow the feel of a passing mood; it had rather the feel of a permanent decision or renunciation. And it troubled our hearts....

I spare you Gertrude’s funeral, and Miss Goucher’s. The latter, held in a small, depressingly official mortuary chapel, provided—at a price—by the undertaker, was attended only by Phil, Jimmy, Susan, Sonia, Miss O’Neill and me. Oh—there was also the Episcopal clergyman, whom I provided. He read the burial service professionally, but well; it is difficult to read it badly. There are a few sequences of words that really are foolproof, carrying their own atmosphere and dignity with them.

Phil and I, at Susan’s request, had examined Miss Goucher’s effects and had made certain inquiries. She had been for many years, we found, entirely alone in the world—a phrase often, but seldom accurately, used. It is a rare thing, happily, to discover a human being who is absolutely the last member of his or her family line; in Miss Goucher’s case this aloneness was complete. But so far as her nonexistent ancestors were concerned, Miss Goucher, we ascertained, had every qualification necessary for a D. A. R.; forebears of hers had lived for generations in an old homestead near Poughkeepsie, and the original Ithiel Goucher had fought as a young officer under Washington. From soldiering, the Gouchers had passed on to farming, to saving souls, to school-teaching, to patent-medicine peddling, and finally to drink and drugs and general desuetude. Miss Goucher herself had been a last flare-up of the primitive family virtues, and with her they were now extinct.

All this we learned from her papers, and from an old lady in Poughkeepsie who remembered her grandfather, and so presumably her mother and father as well—though in reply to my letter of inquiry she forbore to mention them. They were mentioned several times in letters and legal documents preserved by Miss Goucher, but—except to say that they both died before she was sixteen—I shall follow the example of the old lady in Poughkeepsie. She, I feel, and the Roman poet long before her, had what Jimmy calls the “right idea.”...

Miss Goucher, always methodical, left a brief and characteristic will: “To Susan Blake, ward of Ambrose Hunt, Esq., of New Haven, Conn., and to her heirs and assigns forever, I leave what little personal property I possess. She has been to me more than a daughter. I desire to be cremated, believing that to be the cleanest and least troublesome method of disposing of the dead.”

That, with the proper legal additions, was all. Her desire was of course respected, and I had a small earthenware jar containing her ashes placed in my own family vault. On this jar Susan had had the following words inscribed:

MALVINA GOUCHER
A GENTLE WOMAN

VII

On one point Susan was from the first determined: Miss Goucher’s death should make no difference in her struggle for independence; she would go on as she had begun, and fight things through to a finish alone. Neither Phil nor I could persuade her to take even a few days for a complete change of scene, a period of rest and recuperation. Simply, she would not. She settled down at once to work harder than ever, turning out quotable paragraphs for Whim, as daring as they were sprightly; and she resolutely kept her black hours of loneliness to herself. That she had many such hours I then suspected and now know, but on my frequent visits to New York—I had been appointed administrator of Miss Goucher’s more than modest estate—she ignored them, and skillfully turned all my inquiries aside. These weeks following on Miss Goucher’s death were for many reasons the unhappiest of my life.

Never since I had known Susan, never until now, had our minds met otherwise than candidly and freely. Now, through no crying fault on either side—unless through a lack of imagination on mine—barriers were getting piled up between us, barriers composed of the subtlest, yet stubbornest misunderstandings. Our occasional hours together soon became a drab tissue of evasions and cross purposes and suppressed desires. Only frankness can serve me here or make plain all that was secretly at work to deform the natural development of our lives.

There are plays—we have all attended them to our indignation—in which some unhappy train of events seems to have been irrationally forced upon his puppets by the author; if he would only let them speak out freely and sensibly, all their needless difficulties would vanish! Such plays infuriate the public and are never successful.

“Good Lord!” we exclaim. “Why didn’t she say she loved him in the first place!”—or, “If he had only told her his reasons for leaving home that night!”

We, the enlightened public, feel that in the shoes of either the hero or the heroine we must have acted more wisely, and we refuse our sympathy to misfortunes that need never have occurred. Our reaction is perhaps inevitable and æsthetically justified; but I am wondering—I am wondering whether two-thirds of the unhappiness of most mortals is not due to their failure clearly to read another’s thoughts or clearly to reveal their own? Is not half, at least, of the misery in our hearts born of futile misunderstandings, misunderstandings with which any sane onlooker in full possession of the facts on both sides, can have little patience, since he instinctively feels they ought never to have taken place? But it is only in the theater that we find such an onlooker, the audience, miraculously in possession of the facts on both sides. In active life, we are doing pretty well if we can partly understand our own motives; we are supermen if we divine the concealed, genuine motives of another. Certainly at this period Susan, with all her insight, did not seize my motives, nor was I able to interpret hers. Hence, we could not speak out! What needed to be said between us could not be said. And the best proof that it could not is, after all, that it was not....

The conversation that ought to have taken place between us might not unreasonably have run something like this:

Susan: Ambo dear—what is the matter? Heaven knows there’s enough!—but I mean between us? You’ve never been more wonderful to me than these past weeks—and never so remote. I can feel you edging farther and farther away. Why, dear?

I: I’ve been a nuisance to you too long, Susan. Whatever I am from now on, I won’t be that.

Susan: As if you could be; or ever had been!

I: Don’t try to spare my feelings because you like me—because you’re grateful to me and sorry for me! I’ve had a glimpse of fact, you see. It’s the great moral antiseptic. My illusions are done for.

Susan: What illusions?

I: The illusion that you ever have really loved me. The illusion that you might some day grow to love me. The illusion that you might some day be my wife.

Susan: Only the last is illusion, Ambo. I do love you. I’m growing more in love with you every day. But I can’t be your wife, ever. If I’ve seemed changed and sad—apart from Sister’s death, and everything else that’s happened—it’s that, dear. It’s killing me by half-inches to know I can never be completely part of your life—yours!

I:

[But I can’t even imagine what babble of sorrow and joy such words must have wrung from me! Suppose a decent interval, and a partial recovery of verbal control.]

Susan: You shouldn’t have rescued me from Birch Street, Ambo. Everything’s made it plain to me, at last. But I’ve already ground the mud of it into your life now—in spite of myself. You’ll never feel really clean again.

I: What nonsense! Susan, Susan—dearest!

Susan: It isn’t nonsense. You forget; I’m a specialist in nonsense nowadays. Oh, Ambo, how can you care for me! I’ve been so insufferably self-satisfied; so childishly blind! My eyes are wide open now. I’ve had the whole story of what happened that awful night—all of it—from Doctor Askew. He thought he was psycho-analyzing me, while I pumped it out of him, drop by drop. And I’ve been to Maltby, too; yes, I’ve been to Maltby, behind your back. Ambo, he isn’t really certain yet that I didn’t go crazy that night and kill your wife. Neither, I’m sure, is Mrs. Arthur. They’ve given me the benefit of the doubt simply because they dread being dragged through a horrible scandal, that’s all. But they’re not convinced. Of course, Maltby didn’t say so in so many words, but it was plain as plain! He was afraid of me—afraid! I could feel his fear. He thinks madness is in my blood. Well, he’s right. Not just as he means it, but as Setebos means it—the cruel, jealous God of this world!... No, wait, dear! Let me say it out to you, once for all. My father ended a brutal life by an insanely brutal murder, then killed himself; my own father. And I’ve never all these years honestly realized that as part of my life—part of me! But now I do. It’s there, back of me. I can never escape from it. Oh, how could I have imagined myself like others—a woman like others, free to love and marry and have children and a home! How could I!

I: Susan! Is that all? Is it really all that’s holding you from me? Good God, dear! Why, I thought you—secretly—perhaps even unknown to yourself—loved Jimmy!

Susan: Jimmy? You thought——

I: I think so even now. How can I help it? Look.... [And here you must suppose me to show her those first scrawled sheets, written automatically by her hand.] Perhaps I’m revealing your own heart to you, Susan—dragging to light what you’ve tried to keep hidden even from yourself. See, dear. “A net. No means of escape from it. To escape—somehow. Jimmy——”

[And then Susan would perhaps have handed back those scrawled pages to me with a pitying and pitiful smile.]

Susan:

[Author’s Note: This carefully written, imaginary speech has been deleted in toto by Censor Susan from the page proof—at considerable expense to me—and the following authentic confession substituted for it in her own hand. But she doesn’t know I am making this explanation, which will account to you for the form and manner of her confession, purposely designed to be a continuation of my own imaginary flight. In admitting this, I am risking Susan’s displeasure; but conscience forbids me to let you mistake a “genuine human document”—so dear to the modern heart—for a mere effort at interpretation by an amateur psychologist. What follows, then, is veracious, is essentially that solemn thing so dear to a truth-loving generation—sheer fact.]

Ambo dear, I can explain that, but not without a long, unhappy confession. Must I? It’s a shadowy, inside-of-me story, awfully mixed and muddled; not a nice story at all. Won’t it be better, all round, if I simply say again that I love you, not Jimmy, with all my heart?

[No doubt I should then have reached for her hands, and she would have drawn away.]

Ah, no, dear, please not! I’ve never made a clean breast of it all, even to myself. It’s got to be done, though, Ambo, sooner or later, for both our sakes. Be patient with me. I’ll begin at the beginning.

I’m ridiculously young, Ambo; we all keep forgetting how young I am! I’m an infant prodigy, really; you and Phil—and God first, I suppose—have made me so. And the main point about infant prodigies is that experience hasn’t caught up with them. They live in things they’ve imagined from things they’ve been told or read, live on intuition and second-hand ideas; and they’ve no means of testing their real values in a real world. And they’re childishly conceited, Ambo! I am. Less now than some months ago; but I’m still pretty bad....

Well, back in Birch Street, before I came to you, when I was honestly a child, I lived all alone inside of myself. I lived chiefly on stories I made up about myself; and of course my stories were all escapes from reality—from the things that hurt or disgusted me most. There was hardly anything in my life at home that I didn’t long to escape from. You can understand that, in a general way. But there’s one thing you perhaps haven’t thought about; it’s such an ugly thing to think about. I know it isn’t modern of me, but I do hate to talk about it, even to you. I must, though. You’ll never understand—oh, lots of later things—unless I do.

Love, Ambo, human love, as I learned of it there at home—and I saw and heard much too much of it—frightened and sickened me. It was swinish—horrible. Most of all I longed to escape from all that! I couldn’t. I wonder if anyone ever has or can? We are made as we are made.... Yes, I longed to escape from it; but my very made-up story of escape was a disguised romance. Jimmy was to be the gentle Galahad who would some day rescue me. He had done battle for me once already—with Joe Gonfarone. But some day he would come in white, shining armor and take me far away from all the mud and sweat of Birch Street to blue distant hills. Artemis was all mixed up in it, too; she was to be our special goddess; our free, swift, cool-eyed protector. There was to be no heartsick shame, no stuffiness in my life any more forever! But it wasn’t Jimmy who rescued me, Ambo. You did.

Only, when we’ve lived in a dream, wholly, for months and months and months, it doesn’t vanish, Ambo; it never vanishes altogether; it’s part of us—part of our lives. Isn’t it? Gertrude was once your dream, dear; and the dream-Gertrude has never really vanished from your life, and never will. Ah, don’t I know!

Well, then you rescued me; and you and Phil and Maltby and Sister and books and Hillhouse Avenue and France and Italy and England, and my Magic Circle—everything—crowded upon me and changed me and made me what I am; if I’m anything at all! But Birch Street had made me first; and my dreams....

Ambo, I can never make you know what you’ve been to me, never! Cinderella’s prince was nothing beside you, and my Galahad-Jimmy a pale phantom! I shan’t try. And I can never make you know what a wild confusion of storm you sent whirling through me when I first felt the difference in you—felt your man’s need of me, of me, body and soul! You meant me not to feel that, Ambo; but I did. I was only seventeen. And my first reaction was all passionate joy, a turbulent desire to give, give, give—and damn the consequences! It was, Ambo. I loved you.

But given you and me, Ambo, that couldn’t last long. You’re too moral—and I’m too complicated. My inner pattern’s a labyrinth, full of queer magic; simple emotions soon get lost in me, lost and transformed. And please don’t keep forgetting how young I was, and still am; how little I could understand of all I was conceited enough to think I understood! Well, dear, I saw you struggling to suppress your love for me as something wrong, unworthy; something that could only harm us both. And then all that first, swift, instinctive joy went out of me, and my old fear and distrust of what men call love seized me again. “Stuffiness, stuffiness everywhere—it leads to nothing but stuffiness!” I said. “I hate it. I won’t let it rule my life. The great thing is to keep clear of it, clean of it, aloof and free!” The old Artemis-motive swept through me again like a hill-wind—but it came in gusts; and there were days—weeks, Ambo—when I simply wanted to be yours. And one night I threw myself into your arms....

But the next day I was afraid again. The phrase “passion’s slave” got into my head and plagued me. Then you came to me and said, “It’s the end of the road, dear. We can’t go on.” That changed everything once more, Ambo, in a flash. That was my crisis. From that moment, I was madly jealous of Gertrude; knew I always had been, from the first. My telegram to her was a challenge to battle. It was, dear—and I lost. She came back; she was wonderful, too—her way—and the old Gertrude-dream stirred in you again; just stirred, but that was enough. You said to yourself, didn’t you? that perhaps after all the best solution for our wretched difficulties was for Gertrude to return to her home. At least, that would end things. But you couldn’t have said that to yourself if Gertrude had been really repulsive to you. The old dream had fluttered its tired wings, once, Ambo; you know it had!

And so I flopped again, dear! I was sick of love; I hated love! I said to myself, “I won’t have this stupid, brutal, instinctive thing pushing and pulling me about like this! I’ll rule my own life, thanks—my own thoughts and dreams! Freedom’s the thing—the only good thing in life. I’ll be free! Ambo, too, must learn to be free. We can only share what’s honestly best in both of us when at last we are free!”

My Galahad-Jimmy had turned up again, too. Perhaps that had something to do with my final fiercest revolt against you. I don’t know. He was all I had wanted him to be, Ambo; simple and straightforward and clean. Oh, he had his white, shining armor on, bless him! But I didn’t want him to rescue me, for all that; not in the old way. I was just glad my dream-boy had come a little true; that’s all. You were jealous of him, weren’t you? Confess! You needn’t have been.

But here in New York, with Sister, things happened that made a difference....

First of all, dear, I discovered all I had lost in losing you; discovered I couldn’t be free. All I could do was to make some kind of a life of it; for Sister, chiefly. And I tried; oh, I did try! Then those whispered scandals about us began. But it wasn’t the scandal itself that did for me; it was something added to it—by Mrs. Arthur, I suppose—something true, Ambo, that I’d never honestly faced. Suddenly my father rose from the dead! Suddenly I was forced to feel that never, never under any conditions, would it have been possible for me to be yours—bear you children.... Suddenly I felt, saw—as I should have seen long ago—that the strain of evil, perhaps of madness, in my father—the strain that made his life a hell of black passions—must end with me!

Here’s where Jimmy comes back, Ambo—and it’s the worst of all I have to confess. My anxiety was all for you now: not for myself, I happened to love you that way. “Suppose,” I kept thinking, “suppose something should unexpectedly make it possible for Ambo to ask me to be his wife? Suppose Gertrude should fall in love herself and insist on divorce? Or suppose she should die? Ambo would be certain to come to me. And if he did? Should I have the moral courage to send him away? As I must—I must!”

Dear, from that time on a sort of demon in me kept suggesting: “Jimmy—Jimmy’s the solution! He’s almost in love with you now; all he needs is a little encouragement. You could manage it, Susan. You could engage yourself to Jimmy; and then you could string him along! You could make it an interminable engagement, years and years of it, and break it off when Ambo was thoroughly discouraged or cured; you’re clever enough for that. And Jimmy’s ingenuousness itself. You could manage Jimmy.” Oh, please don’t think I ever really listened to my demon, was ever tempted by him! But I hated myself for the mere fact that such thoughts could even occur to me! They did, though, more than once; and each time I had to banish them, thrust them down into their native darkness.

But they didn’t die there, Ambo; they lived there, a hideous secret life, lying in wait to betray me. They never will betray me, of course; I loathe them. But they can still stir in their darkness, make themselves known. That’s what the references to Jimmy mean, Ambo, in those pages I scribbled in my trance; and that’s all they mean. For I don’t love him; I love you.

But I can’t marry you, ever. I can’t. That black strain concentrated in my father—oh, it must die out with me! Just as Sister’s line ended with her.... She ran away from the one love of her life, Ambo—just as I must run away from you. You never knew that about Sister. But I knew it. Sonia told me. Sister told her, the week before Sonia married. Sister felt then that Sonia ought to run away from all that, as she had. But Sonia wouldn’t listen to her....

“Good for Sonia!” I might then have cried out. “God bless her! Hasn’t she made her husband happy? Aren’t her children his pride? Why in heaven’s name should she have denied herself the right to live! And for a mere possibility of evil! As if the blood of any human family on earth were wholly sound, wholly blameless! Sonia was selfish, but right, dear; and Miss Goucher was brave, but wrong! So are you wrong! Actually inherited feeble-mindedness, or insanity, or disease—that’s one thing; but a dread of mere future possibilities, of mere supposed tendencies! Good Lord! The human race might as well commit suicide en bloc! It’s you I love—you—just as you are. And you say you love me. Well, that settles it!”

But who knows? It might have settled it and it might not—could any such imaginary conversation conceivably have taken place. It did not take place. We are dealing, worse luck, with history.

VIII

Perhaps six weeks after Miss Goucher’s death one little conversation, just skirting these hidden matters, did take place between us; but how different was its atmosphere, and how drearily different its conclusion! You will understand it better now that—like a theater audience, or like God—you are in full possession of Susan’s facts and of mine; but I fear it will interest you less. To know all may sometimes be to forgive all; but more often, alas, it is to be bored by everything....

[Firmly inserted note, by Susan: “Rubbish! It’s only when we think we know it all, and don’t really, that we are bored.”]

I had taken Susan for dinner that night to a quiet hotel uptown where I knew the dining-room, mercifully lacking an orchestra and a cabaret, was not well patronized, though the cooking was exceptionally good. At this hotel, by a proper manipulation of the head waiter, it is often possible to get a table a little apart from the other diners—an advantage, if one desires to talk intimately without the annoyance of being overheard. It troubled me to find Susan’s appetite practically nonexistent; I had ordered one or two special dishes to tempt her, but I saw that she took no pleasure in them, merely forcing herself to eat so as not to disquiet me. She was looking badly, too, all gleamless shadow, and fighting off a physical and mental languor by a stubborn effort which she might have concealed from another, but not from me. It was only too plain to me that her wish was to keep the conversation safely away from whatever was busying and saddening her private thoughts. In this, till the coffee was placed before us, I thought best to humor her, and we had discussed at great length the proper format for her first book of poems, which was to appear within the next month. Also, we had discussed Heywood Sampson’s now rapidly maturing plans for his new critical review.

“He really wants me on his staff, Ambo, and I really want to be on it—just for the pleasure of working with him. It’s an absolutely unbelievable chance for me! And yet——”

“And yet——? Is there any reason why you shouldn’t accept?”

“At least two reasons, yes. I’m afraid both of them will surprise you.”

“I wonder.”

“Won’t they? If not, Ambo, you must suppose you’ve guessed them. What are they?”

Susan rather had me here. I had not guessed them, but wasn’t willing to admit even to myself that I could not if I tried. I puckered my brows, judicially.

“Well,” I hesitated, “you may very naturally feel that ‘Dax’ is too plump a bird in the hand to be sacrificed for Heywood’s slim bluebird in the bush. Any new publication’s a gamble, of course. On the other hand, Heywood isn’t the kind to leave his associates high and dry. Even if the review should fail, he’ll stand by you somehow. He has a comfy fortune, you know; he could carry on the review as a personal hobby if he cares to, even if it never cleared a penny.”

Susan smiled, gravely shaking her head: “Cold, dear; stone cold. I’m pretty mercenary these days, but I’m not quite so mercenary as that. Now that I’ve discovered I can make a living, I’m not nearly so interested in it; hardly at all. It’s the stupid side of life, always; I shouldn’t like it to make much difference to me now, when it comes to real decisions. I did want a nice home for Sister, though. As for me, any old room most anywhere will do. It will, Ambo; don’t laugh; I’m in earnest. But what’s your second guess?” she added quickly.

“You’ve some writing you want to do—a book, maybe? You’re afraid the review will interfere?”

“Ah, now you’re a tiny bit warmer! I am afraid it will interfere, but in a much deeper way than that; interfere with me.”

“I don’t quite follow that, do I!”

“Good gracious, no—since you ask. It’s simple enough, though—and pretty vague. Only it feels important—here.” For an instant her hand just touched her breast. “I hate so to be roped in, Ambo, have things staked out for me—spiritually, I mean. Mr. Sampson’s a darling; I love him! But he’s a great believer in ropes and stakes and fences—even barbed wire. I’m beginning to see that the whole idea of his review is a scheme for mending political and moral and social fences, stopping up gaps in them made by irresponsible idealists—anarchists, revolutionary socialists—people like that. People like me, really!—There! Now you do look surprised.”

I was; but I smiled.

“You’ve turned Red, Susan? How long since? Overnight?”

“Not red,” answered Susan, with bravely forced gayety; “pinkish, say! I haven’t fixed on my special shade till I’m sure it becomes me.”

“It’s certain to do that, dear.”

She bobbed me a little bow across the cloth, much in the old happy style—alas, not quite. “But I never did like washed-out colors,” she threw in for good measure.

“You are irresponsible, then! Suppose Phil could hear you—or Jimmy. Jimmy’d say your Greenwich Village friends were corrupting you. Perhaps they are?”

“Perhaps they are,” echoed Susan, “but I think not. I’m afraid it goes farther back, Ambo. It’s left-over Birch Street; that’s what it is. So much of me’s that. All of me, I sometimes believe.”

“Not quite. You’ll never escape Hillhouse, either, Susan. You’ve had both.”

“Yes, I’ve had both,” she echoed again, almost on a sigh, pushing her untasted demi-tasse from her.

Suddenly her elbows were planted on the cloth before her, her face—shadowed and too finely drawn—dropped between her hands, her eyes sought and held mine. They dizzied me, her eyes....

“Ambo,” she said earnestly, “I suppose I’m a dreadful egotist, but more and more I’m feeling the real me isn’t a true child of this world! I love this world—and I hate it. I don’t know whether I love it most or hate it most. I bless it and damn it every day of my life—in the same breath often. But sometimes I feel I hate it most—hate it for its cold dullness of head and heart! Why can’t we care more to make it worth living in, this beautiful, frightful world! What’s the matter with us? Why are we what we are? Half angels—and half pigs or goats or saber-toothed tigers or snakes! Each and every one of us, by and large! And oh, how we do distrust our three-quarters angels—while they’re living, anyway! Dreamers—mad visionaries—social rebels—outcasts! Crucify them, crucify them! Time enough to worship them—ages of to-be-wasted time enough—when they’re dead!” She paused, still holding my eyes, and drawing in a slow breath, a breath that caught midway and was almost a sob; then her eyes left mine.

“There—that’s over. Saying things like that doesn’t help us a bit; it’s—silly.... And half the idealists are mad, no doubt, and have plenty of pig and snake in them, too. I’ve simply coils and coils of unregenerate serpent in me—and worse. Oh, Ambo dear—but I’ve a dream in me beyond all that, and a great longing to help it come true! But it doesn’t—it won’t. I’m afraid it never will—here. Will it there, Ambo? Is there a there?... Have we got all of Sister that clean fire couldn’t take, shut up in that tiny vase?”

“We can hope not, at least,” I replied.

“Hope isn’t enough,” said Susan. “Why don’t you say you know we haven’t! I know we haven’t. I do know it. It’s the only thing I—know!”

A nervous waiter sidled up to us and softly slipped a small metal tray before me; it held my bill, carefully turned face downward.

“Anything more, sir?” he murmured.

“A liqueur?” I suggested to Susan. She sat upright in her chair again, with a slight impatient shake of the head.

I ordered a cigar and a fine champagne. The waiter, still nervously fearful of having approached us at a moment when he suspected some intimate question of the heart had grown critically tense, faded from us with the slightest, discreetest cough of reassurance. He was not one, he would have us know, to obtrude material considerations when they were out of place.

“No; I can’t go with Mr. Sampson,” Susan was saying; “and he’ll be hurt—he won’t be able to see why. But I’m not made to be an editor—of anything. Editors have to weigh other people’s words. I can’t even weigh my own. And I talk of nothing but myself. Ugh!”

“You’re tired out, overwrought,” I stupidly began.

“Don’t tell me so!” cried Susan. “If I should believe you, I’d be lost.”

“But,” I blundered on, “it’s only common sense to let down a little, at such a time. If you’d only take a real rest——”

“There is no such thing,” said Susan. “We just struggle on and on. It’s rather awful, isn’t it?” And presently, very quietly, as if to herself, she said over those words, surely among the saddest and loveliest ever written by mortal man:

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be

That no life lives forever,
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

“To sea,” she repeated; “to sea.... As if the sea itself knew rest!—Now please pay your big fat bill from your nice fat pocketbook, Ambo; and take me home.”

“If I only could!” was my despairing thought; and I astounded the coat-room boy, as I tipped him, by muttering aloud, “Oh, damn Jimmy Kane!”

“Yes, sir—thank you, sir—I will, sir,” grinned the coat-room boy.

On our way downtown in the taxi Susan withdrew until we reached her West Tenth Street door. “Good-night, Ambo,” she then said; “don’t come with me; and thank you for everything—always.” I crossed the pavement with her to the loutish brownstone front-stoop of the boarding house; there she turned to dismiss me.

“You didn’t ask my second reason for not going on the review, Ambo. You must know it though, sooner or later. I can’t write any more—not well, I mean. Even my Dax paragraphs are falling off; Hadow Bury mentioned it yesterday. But nothing comes. I’m sterile, Ambo. I’m written out at twenty. Bless you. Good-night.”

“Susan,” I cried, “come back here at once!” But she just turned in the doorway to smile back at me, waved her hand, and was gone.

I was of two minds whether to follow her or stay. Then, “A whim,” I thought; “the whim of a tired child. And I’ve often felt that way myself—all writers do. But she must take a vacation of some kind—she must!”

She did.

IX

I woke up the next morning, broad awake before seven o’clock, a full hour earlier than my habit. I woke to find myself greatly troubled by Susan’s parting words of the night before, and lay in bed for perhaps twenty minutes turning them over fretfully in my mind. Then I could stand it no longer and rose, bathed, dressed and ate my breakfast in self-exasperating haste, yet with no very clear idea of why I was hurrying or what was to follow. I had an appointment with my lawyer for eleven; I was to lunch with Heywood Sampson at one; after lunch—my immediate business in town being completed—I had purposed to return to New Haven.

Susan would be expecting me for my daily morning call at half-past nine. That call was a fixed custom between us when I was stopping in New York. It seldom lasted over twenty minutes and was really just an opportunity to say good-morning and arrange conveniently for any further plans for the day or evening. But it was now only a few minutes past eight. No matter, Susan was both a nighthawk and a lark, retiring always too late and rising too early—though it must be said she seemed to need little sleep; and I felt that I must see her at once and try somehow to encourage her about her work and bring her back to a more reasonable and normal point of view. “Overstrain,” I kept mumbling to myself, idiotically enough, as I charged rather than walked down Fifth Avenue from my hotel: “Overstrain—overstrain....”

However, the brisk physical exertion of my walk gradually quieted my nerves, and as I turned west on Tenth Street I was beginning to feel a little ashamed of my unreasonable anxiety, was even beginning to poke a little fun at myself and preparing to amuse Susan if I could by a whimsical account of my morning brainstorm. I had now persuaded myself that I should find her quietly at work, as I so usually did, and quite prepared to talk things over more calmly. I meant this time to make a supreme effort, and really hoped to persuade her to do two sensible things: First, to accept Heywood Sampson’s offer; second, to give up all other work for the present, and get a complete rest and change of scene until her services were needed for the review. That would not be for six or eight weeks at the very least.

And I at last had a plan for her. You may or may not remember that Ashton Parker was a famous man thirty years ago; they called him “Hyena Parker” in Wall Street, and no doubt he deserved it; yet he faded gently out with consumption like any spring poet, having turned theosophist toward the end and made his peace with the Cosmic Urge. Mrs. Ashton Parker is an aunt of mine, long a widow, and a most delightful, easy-going, wide-awake, and sympathetic old lady, who has made her home in Santa Barbara ever since her husband’s death there. Her Spanish villa and gardens are famous, and her always kindly eccentricities scarcely less famous than they. I could imagine no one more certain to captivate Susan or to be instantly captivated by her; and though I had not seen Aunt Belle for more than ten years, I knew I could count on her in advance to fall in with my plan. Her hospitality is notorious and would long since have beggared anyone with an income less absurd. Susan should go there at once, for a month at least; the whole thing could be arranged by telegraph. Why in heaven’s name hadn’t I thought of and insisted upon this plan before!

Miss O’Neill, in person, opened the front door for me.

“Oh, Mr. Hunt!” she wailed. “Thanks to goodness you’re here early. I can’t do nothing with Togo. He won’t eat no breakfast, and he won’t let nobody touch him. He’s sitting up there like a—I don’t know what, with his precious tail uncurled and his head sort of hanging down—it’ll break your heart to look at him! I can’t bear to myself, though I’d never no use for the beast, neither liking nor disliking! He’s above his station, I say. But what with all—— And I’ve got to get that room cleared and redone by twelve, feelings or no feelings, and Gawd knows feelings will enter in! Not half Miss Susan’s class either, the new party just now applied, and right beside my own room, too, though well recommended, so I can’t complain!”

I broke through her dusty web of words with an impatient, “What on earth are you talking about, Miss O’Neill?”

“You don’t know?” she gasped. “You don’t——”

“I most certainly do not. Where’s Miss Susan?”

“Oh, Mr. Hunt! If I’d-a knowed she hadn’t even spoke to you! And you with her all evening—treating to dinner and all! But thank Gawd it’s a reel lady she went away with! Miss Leslie, in her big limousine, that’s often been here! That I can swear to you with my own eyes!”

Susan was gone, and gone beyond hope of an immediate return. There is no need to labor the details of her flight. A letter, left for me with Miss O’Neill, gives all the surface facts essential.

“Dear Ambo: Try not to be angry with me; or too hurt. When I left you last night I decided to seize an opportunity which had to be seized instantly, or not at all. Mona Leslie has been planning for a long European sojourn all winter, and for the past two weeks has been trying to persuade me to go with her as a sort of overpaid companion and private secretary. She has dangled a salary before me out of all proportion to my possible value to her, but—never feeling very sympathetic toward her sudden whims and moods—that hasn’t tempted me.

“Now, at the eleventh hour, literally, this chance for a complete break with my whole past and probable future has tempted me, and I’ve flopped. You’ve been urging my need for rest and change; if that’s what I do need this will supply it, the change at least—with no sacrifice of my hard-fought-for financial independence. It was the abysmal prospect, as I came in, of having to go straight to my room—with no Sister waiting for me—and beat my poor typewriter and poorer brains for some sparks of wit—when I knew in advance there wasn’t a spark left in me—that sent me to the telephone.

“Now I’m packed—in half an hour—and waiting for Mona. The boat sails about three a.m.; I don’t even know her name: we’ll be on her by midnight. Poor Miss O’Neill is flabbergasted—and so I’m afraid will you be, and Phil and Jimmy. I know it isn’t kind of me simply to vanish like this; but try to feel that I don’t mean to be unkind. Not even to Togo, though my treachery to him is villainous. It will be a black mark against me in Peter’s book forever. But I can’t take him, Ambo; I just can’t. Please, please—will you? You see, dear, I can’t help being a nuisance to you always, after all. And I can’t even promise you Togo will learn to love you, any more than Tumps—though I hope he may. He’ll grieve himself thin at first. He knows something’s in the air and he’s grieving beside me now. His eyes—— If Mona doesn’t come soon, I may collapse at his paws and promise him to stay.

“Mona talks of a year over there, from darkest Russia to lightest France; possibly two. Her plans are characteristically indefinite. She knows heaps of people all over, of course. I’ll write often. Please tell Hadow and Mr. Sampson I’m a physical wreck—or mental, if it sounds more convincing. I’m neither; but I’m tired—tired—tired.

“If you can possibly help Phil and Jimmy to understand——
“Here’s Mona now. Good-by, dear.
“Your ashamed, utterly grateful

“Susan.

“P. S. I’m wearing your furs.”