Time Travel Omnibus, page 53
Some people still remember Lithway for the sake of his charm. He never achieved anything, so far as I know, except his own delightful personality. He was a classmate of mine, and we saw a great deal of each other both in and after college—until he married, indeed. His marriage coincided with my own appointment to a small diplomatic post in the East; and by the time that I had served my apprenticeship, come into my property, resigned from the service, and returned to America, Lithway’s wife had suddenly and tragically died. I had never seen her but once—on her wedding day—but I had reason to believe that Lithway had every right to be as inconsolable as he was. If he had ever had any ambition in his own profession, which was law, he lost it all when he lost her. He retired to the suburban country, where he bought a new house that had just been put up. He was its first tenant, I remember. That fact, later, grew to seem important. There he relapsed into a semi-populated solitude, with a few visitors, a great many books, and an inordinate amount of tobacco. These details I gathered from Wender in town, while I was adjusting my affairs.
Never had an inheritance come so pat as mine. There were all sorts of places I wanted to go to, and now I had money enough to do it. The wanderlust had nearly eaten my heart out during the years when I had kicked my heels in that third-rate legation. I wanted to see Lithway, but a dozen minor catastrophes prevented us from meeting during those breathless weeks, and as soon as I could I positively had to be off. Youth is like that. So that, although Lithway’s bereavement had been very recent, at the time when I was in America settling my affairs and drawing the first installment of my beautiful income—there is no beauty like that of unearned increment—I did not see him until he had been a widower for more than two years.
The first times I visited Lithway were near together. I had begun what was to be my almost lifelong holiday by spending two months alone—save for servants—on a house-boat in the Vale of Cashmere; and my next flights were very short. When I came back from those, I rested on level wing at Braythe. Lithway was a little bothered, on one of these occasions, about the will of a cousin who had died in Germany, leaving an orphan daughter, a child of six or seven. His conscience troubled him sometimes, and occasionally he said he ought to go over and see that the child’s inheritance was properly administered. But there was an aunt—a mother’s sister—to look after the child, and her letters indicated that there was plenty of money and a good lawyer to look after the investments. Since his wife’s death, Lithway had sunk into lethargy. He had enough to live on, and he drew out of business entirely, putting everything he had into government bonds. When he hadn’t energy enough left to cut off coupons, he said, he should know that it was time for him to commit suicide. He really spoke as if he thought that final indolence might arrive any day. I read the aunt’s letters. She seemed to be a good sort, and the pages reeked of luxury and the maternal instinct. I rather thought it would be a good excuse to get Lithway out of his rut, and advised him to go; but, when he seemed so unwilling, I couldn’t conscientiously say I thought the duty imperative. I had long ago exhausted Germany—I had no instinct to accompany him.
Lithway, then, was perfectly idle. His complete lack of the executive gift made him an incomparable host. He had been in the house three years, and I was visiting him there for perhaps the third time, when he told me that it was haunted. He didn’t seem inclined to give details, and, above all, didn’t seem inclined to be worried. He sat up very late always, and preferably alone, a fact that in itself proved that he was not nervous. As I said, I had never been interested in ghosts, and the newness of the house robbed fear of all seriousness. Ghosts batten on legend and decay. There wasn’t any legend, and the house was almost shockingly clean. When he told me of the ghost, then, I forbore to ask for any more information than he, of his own volition, gave me. If he had wanted advice or assistance, he would, of course, have said so. The servants seemed utterly unaware of anything queer, and servants leave a haunted house as rats a sinking ship. It really did not seem worth inquiring into. I referred occasionally to Lithway’s ghost as I might have done to a Syracusan coin which I should know him proud to possess but loath to show.
On my return from Yucatan, one early spring, Lithway welcomed me as usual. He seemed lazier than ever, and I noticed that he had moved his books down from a second-story to a ground-floor room. He slept outdoors summer and winter, and he had an outside stairway built to lead from his library up to the sleeping-porch. A door from the sleeping-porch led straight into his dressing-room. I laughed at his arrangements a little.
“You live on this side of the house entirely now—cut off, actually, from the other side. What is the matter with the east?”
He pointed out to me that the dining-room and the billiard-room were on the eastern side and that he never shunned them. “It’s just a notion,” he said. “Mrs. Jayne” (the housekeeper) “sleeps on the second floor, and I don’t like to wake her when I go up at three in the morning. She is a light sleeper.”
I laughed outright. “Lithway, you’re getting to be an old maid.”
It was natural that I should dispose my effects in the rooms least likely to be used by Lithway. I took over his discarded up-stairs study, and, with a bedroom next door, was very comfortable. He assured me that he had no reason to suppose I should ever be disturbed in either room. Moving his own things, he said, had been purely a precautionary measure in behalf of Mrs. Jayne. Curiously enough, I was perfectly sure that his first statement was absolutely true and his second absolutely false. Only the first one, however, seemed to be really my affair. I could hardly complain.
Lithway did seem changed; but I have such an involuntary trick of comparing my rediscovered friends with the human beings I have most recently been seeing that I did not take the change too seriously. He was perfectly unlike the Yucatan Indians; but, on reflection, why shouldn’t he be, I asked myself. Probably he had always been just like that. I couldn’t prove that he hadn’t. Yet I did think there was something back of his listlessness other than mere prolonged grief for his wife. Occasionally, I confess, I thought about the ghost in this connection.
One morning I was leaving my sitting-room to go down to Lithway’s library. The door of the room faced the staircase to the third story, and as I came out I could always see, directly opposite and above me, a line of white banisters that ran along the narrow third-story hall. Mechanically, this time, I looked up and saw—I need not say, to my surprise—a burly negro leaning over the rail looking down at me. The servants were all white, and the man had, besides, a very definite look of not belonging there. He didn’t, in any way, fit into his background. I ran up the stairs to investigate. When I got just beneath him, he bent over towards me with a malicious gesture. All I saw, for an instant, was a naked brown arm holding up a curious jagged knife. The edge caught the little light there was in the dim hall as he struck at me. I hit back, but he had gone before I reached him—simply ceased to be. There was no Cheshire-cat vanishing process. I was staring again into the dim hall, over the white banisters. There were no rooms on that side of the hall, and consequently no doors.
A light broke in on me. I went down-stairs to Lithway. “I’ve seen your ghost,” I said bluntly.
What seemed to be a great relief relaxed his features. “You have! And isn’t she extraordinary?”
“She?”
“You say you’ve seen her,” he went on hurriedly.
“Her? Him, man—black as Tartarus. And he cut me over the head.”
“There?” Lithway drew his finger down the place.
“Yes. How did you know? I don’t feel it now.”
“Look at yourself.”
He handed me a mirror. The slash was indicated clearly by a white line, but there was no abrasion.
“That is very interesting,” I managed to say; but I really did not half like it.
Lithway looked at me incredulously. “She has never had a weapon before,” he murmured.
“She? This was a man.”
“Oh, no!” he contradicted. “That’s impossible.”
“He was a hairy brute and full-bearded besides,” I calmly insisted.
Lithway jumped up. “My God! there’s some one in the house.” He caught up a revolver. “Let us go and look. He’ll have made off with the silver.”
“Look here, Lithway,” I protested. “I tell you this man wasn’t real. He vanished into thin air—like any other ghost.”
“But the ghost is a woman.” He was as stupid as a child about it.
“Then there are two.” I didn’t really believe it, but it seemed clear that we could never settle the dispute. Each at least would have to pretend to believe the other for the sake of peace.
“Suppose you tell me about your ghost,” I suggested soothingly. But Lithway was dogged, and we had to spend an hour exploring the house and counting up Lithway’s valuables. Needless to say, there was no sign of invasion anywhere. At the end of the hour I repeated my demand. The scar was beginning to fade, I noted in the mirror, though still clearly visible.
“Suppose you tell me about your ghost. You never have, you know.”
“I’ve only seen her a few times.”
“Where?”
“Leaning over the banisters in the third-floor hall.”
“What is she like?”
“A slip of a girl. Rather fair and drooping, but a strange look in her eyes. Dressed in white, with a blue sash. That’s all.”
“Does she speak?”
“No; but she waves a folded paper at me.”
“What time of day have you seen her?”
“About eleven in the morning.” The clocks were then striking twelve.
“Well,” I ventured, “that’s clearly the ghost’s hour. But the two of them couldn’t be more different.”
He made me describe the savage again. The extraordinary part of it was that, in spite of his baffling blackness, I could do so perfectly. He was as individual to me as a white man—more than that, as a friend. He had personality, that ghost. “What race should you say he was?”
I thought. “Some race I don’t know; Zulu, perhaps. A well-built beggar.”
“And you’re perfectly sure he was real—I mean, wasn’t human?” The distinction made me smile, though the question irritated me. “You can see that if his object was murder he made a poor job. You found all your silver, didn’t you?” Then I played my trump-card. “And do you suppose that a burglar would wander round this countryside in a nose-ring and a loin-cloth? Nice disguise!”
Lithway looked disturbed. “But the other one,” he murmured. “I don’t understand the other.”
“She seems much easier to understand than mine,” I protested. “Oh, I don’t mean her!” he said. “I mean it.” For the first time I began to be afraid that Lithway had left the straight track of common sense. It was silly enough to have two ghosts in a new house—but three! “It?” I asked. “The one Wender saw.”
“Oh! Wender has seen one?”
“Six months ago. I’ve never been able to get him here since. It was rather nasty, and Wender—well, Wender’s sensitive. And he’s a little dotty on the occult, in any case.”
“Did he see it at eleven in the morning?”
Lithway seemed irritated. “Of course!” he snapped out. He spoke as if the idiosyncrasy of his damned house had a dignity that he was bound to defend.
“And what was it?”
“A big rattlesnake, coiled to strike.”
Even then I could not take it seriously. “That’s not a ghost; it’s a symptom.”
“It did strike,” Lithway went on.
“Did he have a scar?”
“No. He couldn’t even swear that it quite touched him.”
“Then why did it worry him?”
Lithway hesitated. “I suppose the uncertainty——”
“Uncertainty! If there’s anything less dreadful than an imaginary snake that has struck, it is an imaginary snake that hasn’t struck. What has got into Wender?”
“Fear, apparently,” said Lithway shortly. “He won’t come back. Says a real rattlesnake probably wouldn’t get into a house in Braythe more than once, but an unreal rattlesnake might get in any day. I don’t blame him.”
“May I ask,” I said blandly, “if you are so far gone that you think rattlesnakes have ghosts?”
Lithway lost his temper. “If you want to jeer at the thing, for God’s sake have the manners not to do it in this house! I tell you we have all three seen ghosts.”
“The ghost of a rattlesnake,” I murmured to myself. “It beats everything!” And I looked once more into the mirror. The scar that the knife had made was still perceptible, but very faint. “Did you hunt the house over for the snake?”
“Of course we did.”
“Did you find it?”
“Of course we didn’t—any more than we found your Zulu.”
“Then why did you insist so on hunting the Zulu?”
Lithway colored a little. “Well, to tell the truth, I never wholly believed in that snake. If you or Wender had only seen her, now!”
“I don’t see why Wender was so worried,” I said. “After all, a snake might have got in—and got out.”
“He saw it twice,” explained Lithway.
“Symptoms,” I murmured. “Had he ever had an adventure with a rattlesnake?”
“No.”
“Then why should it make him nervous?”
“I suppose”—Lithway looked at me a little cautiously, I thought—“just because he never had seen one. He said, I remember, that the rattlesnake hadn’t been born yet.”
I laughed. “Wender is sensitive. The ghost of a rattlesnake that has never lived—well, you can’t be more fantastic than that!”
“Wender has a theory,” Lithway said.
But he seemed actually to want to change the subject. Accordingly, I did change it—a little. I didn’t really care for Wender’s theories. I had heard some of them. They included elementals.
“Tell me some more about yours. She’s the most convincing of the three. Do you recognize her?”
“Never saw any one that looked remotely like her.”
“And you are the first occupant of this house,” I mused. “Was she dressed in an old-fashioned way?”
Lithway actually blushed. “She is dressed rather oddly—her hair is done queerly. I’ve hunted the fashion-books through, and I can’t find such a fashion anywhere in the last century. I’m not in the least afraid, but I am curious about her, I admit.”
“Was Wender’s rattlesnake old-fashioned?”
Lithway got up. “See here,” he said, “I’m not going to stand jollying. That’s the one thing I am afraid of. Should you like to hear Wender’s theory?”
“Not I,” I said firmly. “He believes in two kinds of magic—white and black—and has eaten the fruit of the mango-tree that a fakir has just induced to grow out of the seed before his eyes. He told me once that devils were square. I’m not in the least interested in Wender’s rattlesnake. The wonder is, with his peculiar twist of mind, that he doesn’t insist on living in this house.”
“He particularly hates snakes,” answered Lithway. “He was hoping to see her, but he never could. Nor you, apparently.”
“How often do you see her?”
“About once in six months.”
“And you’re not afraid?”
“Well—she doesn’t do anything to me, you know.” He was very serious.
“Probably couldn’t hurt you if she did—a young thing like that. But why don’t you move out?”
Lithway frankly crimsoned. “I—like her.”
“In spite of her eyes?”
“In spite of her eyes. And—I’ve thought that look in them might be the cross light on the staircase.”
I burst out laughing. “Lithway, come away with me. Solitude is getting on your nerves. We’ll go to Germany and look after your little cousin and the aunt who writes such wonderful letters.”
“No.” Lithway was firm. “It’s too much like work.”
I was serious, for he really seemed to me, at the time of this visit, in rather a bad way. I urged him with every argument I could think of. He had no counterarguments, but finally he broke out: “Well, if you will have it, I feel safer here.”
“You’ve never seen her anywhere else, have you?”
“No.”
“Then this seems to be the one point of danger.”
“Wender’s theory is that—” he began.
But I persisted in not hearing Wender’s theory. Even when, a week later, my own experience was exactly duplicated and I had spent another day in watching a white line fade off my forehead, I still persisted. But, as Lithway wouldn’t leave the house, I did. I began even to have a sneaking sympathy for Wender. But I didn’t want to hear his theory. Indeed, to this day I never have heard it. Oddly enough, though, I should be willing to wager a good sum that it was accurate.
I was arranging for a considerable flight—something faddier and more dangerous than I had hitherto attempted—and to a friend as indolent as Lithway I could only prepare to bid a long farewell. He positively refused to accompany me even on the earlier and less difficult stages of my journey. “I’ll stick to my home,” he declared. It was a queer home to want to stick to, I thought privately, especially as the ghost was obviously local. He had never seen an apparition except at Braythe—nor had I, nor had Wender. I worried about leaving him there, for the one danger I apprehended was the danger of overwrought nerves; but Lithway refused to budge, and you can’t coerce a sane and able-bodied man with a private fortune. I did carry my own precautions to the point of looking up the history of the house. The man from whom Lithway had bought it, while it was still unfinished, had intended it for his own occupancy; but a lucrative post in a foreign country had determined him to leave America. The very architect was a churchwarden, the husband of one wife and the father of eight children. I even hunted up the contractor: not one accident had occurred while the house was building, and he had employed throughout, most amicably, union labor on its own terms. It was silly of me, if you like, but I had really been shaken by the unpleasant powers of the place. After my researches it seemed clear that in objecting to it any further I shouldn’t have a leg to stand on. In any case, Lithway would probably rather live in a charnel-house than move. I had to wash my hands of it all.
