Time Travel Omnibus, page 54
The last weeks of my visit were perfectly uneventful, both for Lithway and me—as if the house, too, were on its guard. I came to believe that there was nothing in it, and if either of us had been given to drinking, I should have called the eleven-o’clock visitation a new form of hang-over. I was a little inclined, in defiance of medical authorities, to consider it an original and interesting form of indigestion. By degrees I imposed upon myself to that extent. I did not impose on myself, however, to the extent of wanting to hear Wender talk about it; and I still blush to think how shallow were the excuses that I mustered for not meeting him at any of the times that he proposed.
This is a bad narrative, for the reason that it must be so fragmentary. It is riddled with lapses of time. Ghosts may get in their fine work in an hour, but they have always been preparing their coup for years. Every ghost, compared with us, is Methuselah. We have to fight in a vulnerable and dissolving body; but they aren’t pressed for time. They’ve only to lie low until the psychological moment. Oh, I’d undertake to accomplish almost anything if you’d give me the ghost’s chance. If he can’t get what he wants out of this generation, he can get it out of the next. Grand thing, to be a ghost!
It was some years before I went back to Braythe. Wender, I happen to know, never went back. Lithway used to write me now and then, but seldom referred to my adventure. He couldn’t very well, since the chief burden of his letters was always “When are you coming to visit me?” Once, when I had pressed him to join me for a season in Japan, he virtually consented, but at the last moment I got a telegram, saying: “I can’t leave her. Bon voyage!” That didn’t make me want to go back to Braythe. I was worried about him, but his persistent refusal to act on any one’s advice made it impossible to do anything for him. I thought once of hiring some one to bum the house down; but Lithway wouldn’t leave it, and I didn’t want to do anything clumsy that would imperil him. I was much too far away to arrange it neatly. I suggested it once to Wender, when we happened to meet in London, and he was exceedingly taken with the idea. I half hoped, for a moment, that he would do it himself. But the next afternoon he came back with a lot of reasons why it wouldn’t do—he had been grubbing in the British Museum all day. I very nearly heard Wender’s theory that time, but I pleaded a dinner engagement and got off.
You can imagine that I was delighted when I heard from Lithway, some years after my own encounter with the savage on the staircase, that he had decided to pull out and go to Europe. He had the most fantastic reasons for doing it—this time he wrote me fully. It seems he had become convinced that his apparition was displeased with him—didn’t like the look in her eyes, found it critical. As he wasn’t doing anything in particular except live like a hermit at Braythe, the only thing he could think of to propitiate her was to leave. Perhaps there was a sort of withered coquetry in it, too; he may have thought the lady would miss him if he departed and shut up the house. You see, by this time she was about the most real thing in his life. I don’t defend Lithway; but I thought then that, whatever the impelling motive, it would be an excellent thing for him to leave Braythe for a time. Perhaps, once free of it, he would develop a normal and effectual repugnance to going back, and then we should all have our dear, delightful Lithway again. I wrote triumphantly to Wender, and he replied hopefully, but on a more subdued note.
Lithway came over to Europe. He wrote to me, making tentative suggestions that I should join him; but, as he refused to join me and I didn’t care at all about the sort of thing he was planning, we didn’t meet. I was all for the Peloponnesus, and he was for a wretched tourist’s itinerary that I couldn’t stomach. I hoped to get him in the end to wander about in more interesting places, but as he had announced that he was going first to Berlin to look up the little cousin and her maternal aunt, I thought I would wait until he had satisfied his clannish conscience. Then, one fine day, his old curiosity would awaken, and we should perhaps start out together to get new impressions. That fine day never dawned, however. He lingered on in Germany, following his relatives to Marienbad when they left Berlin for the summer. I hoped, with each mail, that he would announce his arrival in some spot where I could conceivably meet him; but the particular letter announcing that never came. He was quite taken up with the cousins. He said nothing about going home, and I was thoroughly glad of that, at least.
I was not wholly glad, just at the moment, when a letter bounced out at me one morning, announcing that he was to marry the little cousin—by this time, as I had understood from earlier correspondence, a lovely girl of eighteen. I had looked forward to much companionship with the Lithway I had known of old, when he should be free of his obsession. I had thought him on the way to freedom; and here he was, caught by a flesh-and-blood damsel who thrust me out quite as decisively as the phantasmal lady on the staircase. I had decency enough to be glad for Lithway, if not for myself; glad that he could strike the old idyllic note and live again delightfully in the moment. I didn’t go to Berlin to see them married, but I sent them my blessing and a very curious and beautiful eighteenth-century clock. I also promised to visit them in America. I felt that, if necessary, I could face Braythe, now that the ghost was so sure to be laid. No woman would stay in a house where her husband was carrying on, however unwillingly, an affair with an apparition; and, as their address remained the same, I believed that the ghost had given up the fight.
This story has almost the gait of history. I have to sum up decades in a phrase. It is really the span of one man’s whole life that I am covering, you see. But have patience with me while I skim the intervening voids, and hover meticulously over the vivid patches of detail . . . It was some two years before I reached Braythe. I don’t remember particularly what went on during those two years; I only know that I was a happy wanderer. I was always a happy wanderer, it seems to me as I look back on life, except for the times when I sank by Lithway’s side into his lethargy—a lucid lethargy, in which unaccountable things happened very quietly, with an utter stillness of context. I do know that I was planning a hunting-trip in British Central Africa, and wrote Lithway that I had better postpone my visit until that was over. He seemed so hurt to think that I could prefer any place to him that I did put it off until the next year and made a point of going to the Lithways’.
I had no forebodings when I got out of Lithway’s car at his gate and faced the second Mrs. Lithway, who had framed her beauty in the clustering wisteria of the porch. I was immensely glad for Lithway that he had a creature like that to companion him. Youth and beauty are wonderful things to keep by one’s fireside. There was more than a touch of vicarious gratitude in my open admiration of Mrs. Lithway. He was a person one couldn’t help wanting good things for; and one felt it a delicate personal attention to oneself when they came to him.
Nothing changes a man, however, after he has once achieved his type: that was what I felt most keenly, at the end of the evening, as I sat with Lithway in his library. Mrs. Lithway had trailed her light skirts up the staircase with, incomparable grace, smiling back at us over her shoulder; and I had gone with Lithway to the library, wondering how long I could hold him with talk of anything but her. I soon saw that he didn’t wish to talk of her. That, after all, was comprehensible—you could take it in so many ways; but it was with real surprise that I saw him sink almost immediately into gloom. Gloom had never been a gift of Lithway’s; his indolence had always been shot through with mirth. Even his absorption in the ghost had been whimsical—almost as if he had deliberately let himself go, had chosen to be obsessed. I didn’t know what to make of the gloom, the unresilient heaviness with which he met my congratulations and my sallies. They had been perfect together at dinner and through the early evening. Now he fell slack in every muscle and feature, as if the preceding hours had been a diabolic strain. I wondered a little if he could be worried about money. I supposed Lithway had enough—and his bride too, if it came to that—though I didn’t know how much. But one could not be long in the house without noticing luxuries that had nothing to do with its original unpretending comfort. You were met at every turn by some aesthetic refinement as costly as the lace and jewels in which Mrs. Lithway’s own loveliness was wrapped. It was evident from all her talk that her standard of civilization was very high; that she had a natural attachment to shining non-essentials. I was at a loss; I didn’t know what to say to him, he looked so tired. Such silence, even between Lithway and me, was awkward.
Finally he spoke: “Do you remember my ghost?”
“I remember your deafening me with talk of her. I never saw her.”
“No, of course you wouldn’t have seen her.”
“I saw one of my own, you remember.”
“Oh, yes! A black man who struck at you. You never have had a black man strike at you in real life, have you?” He turned to me with a faint flicker of interest.
“Never. We threshed all that out before, you know. I never even saw that particular nigger except at Braythe.”
“You will see him, perhaps, if you are fool enough to go to British Central Africa,” he jerked out.
“Perhaps,” I answered. But I was more interested in Lithway’s adventure. “Do you see your ghost now?” I had been itching to ask, and it seemed to me that he had given me a fair opening.
Lithway passed his hand across his brows. “I don’t know. I’m not quite sure. Sometimes I think so. But I couldn’t swear to it.”
“Has she grown dimmer, then—more hazy? You used to speak of her as if she were a real woman coming to a tryst: flesh and blood, at the least.”
He looked at me a little oddly. “I’m not awfully well. My eyes play me tricks sometimes . . . When you got off the train to-night, I could have sworn you had a white scar on your forehead. As soon as we got out here and I had a good look at you, I saw you hadn’t, of course.” Then he went back. “I don’t believe I really do see her now. I think it may be an hallucination when occasionally I think I do. Yes, I’m pretty sure that, when I think I do, it’s pure hallucination. I don’t like it; I wish she’d either go or stay.”
“My dear fellow, you speak as if she had ever, in her palmiest days, been anything but an hallucination. Did you get to the point of believing that the girl you say used to hang over the staircase was real?”
“She was more real than the one that sometimes I see there now. Oh, yes, she was real! What I see now—when I see it at all—is just the ghost of her.”
“The ghost of a ghost!” I ejaculated. “It’s as bad as Wender’s rattlesnake.”
Lithway turned to me suddenly. “Where is Wender?”
“Why, don’t you know? Working on American archaeology at some university—I don’t know which. He hadn’t decided on the place, when he last wrote. I was going to get his address from you.”
“He won’t come here, you know. And Margaret’s feelings are a little hurt—he has often been quite near. So there’s a kind of official coolness. She doesn’t know about the ghosts, and therefore I can’t quite explain Wender’s refusals to her. Of course, I know it’s on that account; he’s as superstitious as a woman. But poor Margaret, I suppose, believes he doesn’t approve of my having taken a wife. She’s as sweet as possible about it, but I can see she’s hurt. And yet I’d rather she would be hurt than to know about the house.”
“Why, in Heaven’s name, don’t you sell it and move, Lithway?” I cried.
He colored faintly. “Margaret is very fond of the place. I couldn’t, considering its idiosyncrasy, sell with a good conscience, and if I didn’t sell, it would mean losing a pretty penny—more, certainly, than Margaret and I can afford to. She lost most of her own money, you know, a few years ago.”
“The aunt?”
“Oh, dear, no!” He said it rather hastily. “But you were quite right at the time. I ought to have gone out there ten years ago. Women never know how to manage money.”
I looked him in the eyes. “Lithway, anything in the world is better than staying in this house. You’re in a bad way. You admit, yourself, you’re not well. And Mrs. Lithway would rather cut out the motor and live anywhere than have you go to pieces.”
He laughed. “Tell Margaret that I’m going to pieces—if you dare!”
“I’m not afraid of you, even if I should.”
“No; but wouldn’t you be afraid of her?”
I thought of the utter youth of Mrs. Lithway; the little white teeth that showed so childishly when she laughed; her small white hands that had seemed so weighed down with a heavy piece of embroidery; her tiny feet that slipped along the polished floors—a girl that you could pick up and throw out of the window.
“Certainly not. Would you?”
“I should think so!” He smiled. “We’ve been very happy here. I don’t think she would like to move. I shan’t suggest it to her. And mind”—he turned to me rather sharply—“don’t you hint to her that the house is the uncanny thing you and that fool Wender seem to think it is.”
I saw that there was no going ahead on that tack. Beyond a certain point, you can’t interfere with mature human beings. But certainly Lithway looked ill; and if he admitted ill health, there must be something in it. It was extraordinary that Mrs. Lithway saw nothing. I was almost sorry—in spite of the remembered radiance of the vision on the porch—that Lithway had chosen to fall in love with a young fool. I rose.
“Love must be blind, if your wife doesn’t see you’re pulled down.”
“Oh, love—it’s the blindest thing going, thank God!” He was silent for a moment. “There are a great many things I can’t explain,” he said. “But you can be sure that everything’s all right.”
I was quite sure, though I couldn’t wholly have told why, that everything was at least moderately wrong. But I decided to say nothing more that night. I went to bed.
Lithway was ill; only so could I account for his nervousness, which sometimes, in the next days, mounted to irritability. He was never irritable with his wife; when the tenser moods were on, he simply ceased to address her, and turned his attention to me. We motored a good deal; that seemed to agree with him. But one morning he failed to appear at breakfast, and Mrs. Lithway seemed surprised that I had heard nothing during the night. He had had an attack of acute pain—the doctor had been sent for. There had been telephoning, running to and fro, and talk in the corridors that no one had thought of keying down on my account. I was a little ashamed of not having awaked, and more than a little cross at not having been called. She assured me that I could have done nothing, and apologized as prettily as possible for having to leave me to myself during the day. Lithway was suffering less, but, of course, she would be at his bedside. Naturally, I made no objections to her wifely solicitude. I was allowed to see Lithway for a few minutes; but the pain was severe, and I cut my conversation short. The doctor suspected the necessity for an operation, and they sent to New York for a consulting specialist. I determined to wait until they should have reached their gruesome decision, on the off chance that I might, in the event of his being moved, be of service to Mrs. Lithway. In spite of her calm and sweetness, and the perfect working of the household mechanism—no flurry, no fright, no delays or hitches—I thought her, still, a young fool. Any woman, of any age, was a fool if she had not seen Lithway withering under her very eyes.
It was a dreary day during which we waited for the New York physician; one of those days when sunlight seems drearier than mist—a monotonous and hostile glare. I tried reading Lithway’s books, but the mere fact that they were his got on my nerves. I decided to go to my room and throw myself on the resources of my own luggage. There would be something there to read, I knew. I closed the library door quietly and went up-stairs. Outside my own door I stopped and looked—involuntarily, with no conscious curiosity—up to the third-story hall. There, in the dim corridor, leaning over the balustrade in a thin shaft of sunlight that struck up from the big window on the landing, stood Mrs. Lithway, with a folded paper in her hand, looking down at me. I did not wish to raise my voice—Lithway, I thought, might be sleeping—so did not speak to her. I don’t think, in any case, I should have wanted to speak to her. The look in her eyes was distinctly unpleasant—the kind of look people don’t usually face you with. I remember wondering, as our surprised glances met, why the deuce she should hate, me like that—how the deuce a nice young thing could hate any one like that. It must be personal to me, I thought—no nice young thing would envisage the world at large with such venom. I turned away; and as I turned, I saw her, out of the tail of my eye, walk, with her peculiar lightness of step, along the upper corridor to the trunk-loft. She had the air of being caught, of not having wished to be seen. I opened my bedroom door immediately, but as I opened it I heard a sound behind me. Margaret Lithway stood on the threshold of her husband’s room, with an empty bottle.
