Beauty’s husband had become interested in certain souls which had “passed over” into that realm of eternity. He heard his wife and his stepson talking about who were buying Detaze pictures and what prices they were paying, but the sounds passed in one ear and out the other. Mr. Dingle was on the verge of making discoveries so important that he could think about them anywhere, whether he was in the Detaze show rooms, or in a hotel restaurant, or in a motor-car stalled in Fifth Avenue traffic.
To his wife he said gently: “I have learned through Madame Zyszynski that Marcel is waiting for you.” So Beauty had to tear herself away from the elegant and famous persons who wanted to look at her and compare her with the two portraits on the walls—and allow her man of God to take her in a taxicab over to a dingy Sixth Avenue neighborhood, where poor down-and-outs stood in front of blackboards telling them that a cook was wanted in a lumber camp in Maine, or a dishwasher in a Bowery eating-joint at twelve dollars per week and two meals. The most elegant of ladies alighted in front of a delicatessen shop which had a cold turkey and half a boiled ham in the window, entered a narrow hallway lit by a dim gas-jet, climbed some creaking stairs, and entered by a door having the sign, “Madame Zyszynski: Medium.”
The Polish woman had apparently got a new and clean gown in Beauty’s honor; it was black, and had gold stars sewn on it. The medium herself was elderly, stout, and pudgy, with a kindly face, but entirely devoid of color, so that it looked like soft dough; her straight black hair was tied in a knot on top of her head and she was wholly devoid of charm. She said, in uncertain English, that the visitor would oblige her by sitting quietly while she went into a trance, and afterward until she came out. The name of her “control” was “Tecumseh,” and the visitor might ask him questions, but please be polite to him and not excite him. After which she seated herself in an armchair, laid her head back, and presently began to moan and snort and jerk in a most disconcerting way.
Then she became still, and began to speak in a voice that was much deeper than her own, but still foreign. The voice said that a man was there, and he gave the name of Marceau, and he was happy, and he made pictures here also, and he still loved her—he said things that possibly might have been embarrassing to the new husband, had he not known that in the other world there is no marrying or giving in marriage, and no sense of possession. The messages went on and on, and Beauty began to shiver, for it seemed to her that Marcel was really speaking, and it was the same as in the old days. She was such a worldling that it had really never occurred to her that death might not be the end, and now she was so excited that the tears ran down unchecked and stained the front of the very lovely crape dress that she wore.
VI
Of course Lanny had to hear all about that experience. He had to consider every sentence that Beauty could remember, and say whether that didn’t sound like Marcel. Lanny couldn’t be sure, because his mother had been asking questions, and how many hints had she given? The Polish woman claimed not to know a word of what she was saying in her trance; that might be so and again it might not. But Beauty wanted it to be so, and was a little provoked that Lanny wasn’t as enthusiastic as herself. She wanted him to go and have a try, and he promised that he would go after the show was over—they really owed it to Zoltan to stick by him in these crowded closing days.
But Mr. Dingle had time for God, and for all God’s children in God’s heaven; he had standing appointments with the medium twice every day, morning and afternoon; and right while the stock market was throwing all New York into convulsions—going down twenty points and going up ten—the very day after Uncle Horace had made his “killing,” Lanny’s stepfather came to him, saying: “There is a message for you, my son.”
“Indeed?” said the son. “Who from?”
“The name wasn’t given. But your name was.”
“Have you ever mentioned me to Madame Zyszynski?”
“I have been very careful not to. I thought something might come through for you.”
“Did you receive the message yourself?”
“No, a manicurist got it.”
“A manicurist!” Really, that seemed too funny.
“A young woman had a séance early this morning, before she went to her work, and she wrote the message down. Madame kept it by her and asked all her clients if it meant anything to them. It is supposed to be in French, and neither Madame nor Tecumseh nor the manicurist knows any French. Tecumseh repeated it three times, and the girl wrote it the way it sounded.” Mr. Dingle handed his stepson a scribbled piece of brown paper.
There was a trick sentence which Lanny had learned as a boy, and which he used to write out for his American and English friends to puzzle them. It is a sentence made of French words, “Pas de leur Rhône que nous,” and people would say it over and over, thinking French, trying to make it mean French, and failing to realize that they were speaking an English sentence. Now the trick was reversed; an uneducated girl had written something in American, and it was supposed to be read as French: “Brig addy ay voo zavvy rays on.”
Lanny read it two or three times. He said it fast, the way you are supposed to say French; and suddenly he began to turn cold, and the strangest feeling ran over him—no, it wasn’t entirely strange—he had had it once before in his life. Twelve years ago, but it was like yesterday in his memory; the hour just before dawn, when he had lain in his bed in his father’s home, and had seen the first faint traces of light gather together and form an image of Rick, standing at the foot of his bed, mournful, silent, with a red gash across his forehead. Rick still bore the scar of that wound, which he had got when his plane crashed in France and left him at death’s door, a cripple for the rest of his life. That had been Lanny’s first contact with the supernatural—or at least what appeared to be the supernatural. Now here it was again; and here was that same creepy, crawly, cold feeling!
“Brigadier, vous avez raison!” It is the refrain of a humorous French ballad about a cavalryman who always agrees with what his riding companion says, no matter what may be the nature of it. It had been in some book of Denis, fils, or Charlot, in that first happy summer when Lanny had gone to the Château de Bruyne, trembling a little over the strangeness of la vie à trois and wondering how he was going to make out in it. Such a good time they had all had—and that refrain had been one of the jokes with which they had amused themselves. All families develop such passwords to intimacy; and Lanny thought, suppose that Marie had wished to say to him: “I am here, waiting for you”—what could she have contrived that would tell him more certainly than the foolish little verse, which had not crossed his mind in so many years? “Brigadier, vous avez raison!”
VII
Lanny dropped the picture business and the stock market, and took his stepfather’s appointment for the next morning. He sat and watched the pudgy old woman go into her trance, and listened with strained attention to every word that was spoken by the alleged Tecumseh. The visitor came away in that state of tormented uncertainty which dogs the lives of so many truth-seekers in those dim regions of the subconscious. “Marie” had given her name; but then it was a common name, and how could he be sure that his mother or his stepfather had not spoken it in some unguarded moment? And what about the stories of spiritualist mediums making elaborate notes and exchanging data about likely prospects? What Marie said to him through the voice of Tecumseh was what she would have said; but then it was what any woman would have said to the man she had loved and left behind. She wished him happiness in his new love; but wouldn’t any woman in the spirit world do that?
Also there was the possibility of what people called telepathy; “mental telepathy,” they said, meaning to distinguish it from American Telephone and Telegraph! Of course nobody knew what telepathy might be or how it would work; it was just a word, but it helped you, because it seemed easier to believe that somebody might dip into your subconscious mind and pick out something—than that the universe was full of spirits, whispering messages to an Indian, to be
spoken by the vocal cords of an old Polish woman for a price of two dollars. If the spirit of Marie had wanted to talk to Lanny, wouldn’t it have been easier for her to do it that night when he had come back to her home and lain in her bed?
Lanny voiced this idea to Parsifal Dingle, who replied: “Suppose that a hundred years ago somebody had told you that it might be possible to send messages under the ocean, would you have believed him?”
“I suppose I’d have been dubious,” admitted the other.
“Suppose someone had said: ‘It will not be possible to send the message through the water, but only through a copper wire wrapped in the extract of a tropical tree’—that would have sounded rather odd, too.”
Lanny admitted that it was all rather odd; in fact, he had been finding life that way ever since he had begun to think about it instead of just living it. Now he had a new oddity to put with the many others. “Brigadier, vous avez raison!”
VIII
Lanny’s mother-in-law resented the trustees of her late husband’s estate, but she had to manage to get along with them. Mr. Joseph Barnes had come out to Shore Acres to call on the bridal pair; but the other two trustees, Mr. Marston and Mr. Keedle, having been employees of J.P. most of their lives, were not sure of their social status and were awaiting an invitation. Irma had promised to take Lanny to the office to meet them; but it was such a dull duty that she kept putting it off. Now the mother telephoned, saying: “Really, dear, it’s a great discourtesy.” So Irma said to Lanny: “Let’s go this afternoon and get it over with.”
Accordingly, Lanny phoned to Uncle Joseph and made an appointment. The office of the estate was in one of the great office buildings on lower Broadway, and they motored down through heavy traffic; the pressure was such that the chauffeur would have to go a considerable distance to park, and when he came for them he would have to drive round and round the block until they appeared. A car had become more of a nuisance than a convenience on this jam-packed island of Manhattan—which had been bought from the Indians for twenty-four dollars, but now you would pay that price for as much space as the tip of your finger would cover. Now upon this soil had arisen the most amazing of the works of man: a congeries of buildings, from fifty to a hundred stories high, turning the streets into narrow canyons or clefts of granite. If all the people who worked in these warrens had come out of them at once, they would have filled the streets several layers deep. You entered an express elevator, a little silent cell; when it started you felt your entrails sink, and when it stopped they surged up against your heart and lungs.
Uncle Joseph was a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman, like his deceased brother; always well dressed, rather pompous in manner, but friendly enough when you knew him. He had an odd hobby of collecting specimens of the old-time American dime-novels upon which he had been brought up; since Lanny was also a lover of literature, this was a bond of fellowship between them. Uncle Joseph had been a sort of chief clerk for the more brilliant and daring elder brother, and now it was a religion with him to see that Irma’s capital was properly guarded. What she did with the income was none of his business—unless she would permit him to reinvest it in “blue chips.” He hoped that Lanny would be on his side in controversies over this subject, therefore he cultivated the young man with extreme politeness. His suavity was that of the head-waiter in the main dining-room of the Ritzy-Waldorf, and both of them appeared to Lanny as priests who worshiped with the utmost devotion a wooden idol with no brains in its head.
Irma’s father had bequeathed an annuity to Mr. Marston and Mr. Keedle, the other trustees, in order that they might devote their time to watching each other. They were, if possible, even more anxious to please than was the uncle; they bowed and beamed, and told how honored they were, and escorted the young couple through the rooms and showed them typewriters and adding-machines and filing-systems, and introduced them to the head clerk by name, and to the other clerks by a wave of the hand. To Lanny it would always be embarrassing to be mistaken for divinity, but he had to learn to look as if he didn’t mind it. He and his wife sat down in Uncle Joseph’s private office and permitted the three gentlemen to explain upon what principles and by what methods they managed the property. Now and then the bridal pair would nod gravely, expressing their satisfaction.
IX
Lanny, really trying to understand the great metropolis and the things that went on in it, perceived that these three conscientious gentlemen lived and operated in a world entirely controlled by pieces of paper. Not motor-cars and jewels, not even palaces and land were the basis of the Barnes fortune, but a few pieces of paper called “securities,” which were worth more than their weight in anything in the world, even radium. In the estate office were other pieces of paper, a cardfile which listed all the facts about each of the precious ones. Yet other pieces called dividend checks came at regular intervals, and Uncle Joseph signed some more called receipts—and so it went on, day after day, and would go on, world without end. Uncle Joseph knew that it would, because he had the right to name his successor, and was training his oldest son in the office, and had named him in proper legal form—on a piece of paper.
For the keeping of the securities, Irma’s father had found a place where surely neither moth nor rust would corrupt nor thieves break through and steal. It was a private compartment in the vault of one of the three biggest Wall Street banks, where all the resources of modern science had been utilized to contrive a really secure hiding-place for treasures of this sort. Uncle Joseph invited them to inspect it, and Lanny thought it would be interesting, or pretended to. Irma’s father had shown it to her, but she went along for politeness. The great bank was only a few doors away. Their coming was announced by telephone, and they were escorted to the office of the great financier who presided over the institution and who assigned one of the thirty-seven vice-presidents to conduct the distinguished visitors to the vaults.
You descended in an elevator, for they were a hundred feet or more below the surface, cut into the solid rock of Manhattan Island. They were, in effect, a steel box as big as a good-sized house; or rather, a series of boxes, such as the Chinese make, each fitting inside the next. The outermost box was of concrete, and the others of steel. Into the space between two of the steel walls one could, by pressing a lever, introduce hydrocyanic gas, which would instantly kill any living thing. Into the layer next to the concrete a heavy stream of water could be poured, filling it entirely, and flooding any hole or passage which might be dug. In the innermost of the surrounding spaces was a walk, and a man paced round and around it, and there was an arrangement of mirrors whereby he could see all four walls of the vault, and under it and over it. The man was locked in at closing time with a time-lock and could not get out until his time was up; he paced around and around looking into the mirrors, and each time he completed a round he pressed a button, and if he failed to press it within a certain time an alarm bell rang in the nearest police station.
Thus Uncle Joseph thought that the Barnes fortune was safe from mobs and marauders. He wasn’t worried when the price of stocks went down, for what the estate owned it owned outright; the stocks were a share in the producing power of America, which couldn’t fail for long. However, the conscientious Mr. Joseph Barnes had worried a great deal over the fact that the heiress of this tremendous fortune went out so freely into a world consisting largely of night clubs, where she met handsome young men, a percentage Of whom were scoundrels and an even larger percentage wasters. Uncle Joseph’s heart had been in his mouth when he received word about the elopement; but now he was relieved, for this seemed to be a fairly decent sort of young fellow; rather airy, one might say flighty, but well meaning and apparently open to instruction. The keeper of the treasure was watchful and attentive, and took every occasion to impress upon Lanny the gravity of his responsibilities as bearer of the seed and maker of the future.
X
The next day was Wednesday, the twenty-third of October, and Lanny went over to the
show room, where he heard the good news that the Taft family had purchased the two seascapes. At lunchtime, when Lanny looked at the Translux, he found that the market was beginning to slump again. Mrs. Barnes had come to town; she had had a call from her brother, who was getting up another pool, and she was putting in her “pin-money,” a matter of ten thousand dollars. Irma was tempted, but she had given her father a solemn promise that never in her life would she buy a share of stock on margin, and when she heard about the Dingle family’s experience with the spirits, she was more than ever afraid to break her word. Lanny saved her from temptation by inviting her to come to the show rooms and meet the Honorable Winston Churchill, who was reported to be coming.
When they came out, in the latter part of the afternoon, the newsboys were shouting: “Panic in Wall Street!” Lanny read more talk about sponginess, avalanche of selling orders, Niagara of liquidation, complete absence of support. The ticker was two hours behind the market. The bond ticker was giving selected prices for some of the “blue chips,” and showed losses around twenty points, most alarming. Lanny stopped at the hotel for a look at the Translux, and found that he couldn’t get into the room; it was packed with men and women, and on the edges he noticed the worried faces and heard the anxious talk. The closing hour had been terrible, and nobody knew yet what had happened.
Irma’s smart friends talked about nothing else at teatime, or at dinner, or in the evening. Nobody cared what the Right Honorable Winston Churchill had said about Detaze, nobody cared whether Lanny had had a message from his amie in the spirit world. A six-million-share day—think of it! And what was coming tomorrow?
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 88