Lukundoo and Other Stories

by Edward Lucas White

  “But,” she protested, carried away by her surprise, “you are called the greatest clairvoyant on earth.”

  “And I have schemed, advertised lavishly, spent money like water, bribed reporters, bought editors, cajoled managers, hoodwinked owners and won over their wives and daughters through laborious years to produce that impression. It is no growth of accident, no spontaneous recognition of self-evident merit.

  “But,” she argued, “are you a fiend doing all this for the delight of deceiving for deception's sake? Are you a man wealthy by inheritance and choosing this form of activity for the pleasure it gives you?”

  “By no means Madame,” he denied, “I live by my wits.”

  “Your surroundings tell me that you live well,” she suggested. “Better than my surroundings reveal,” he rejoined.

  “Then your wits are good wits,” she ventured.

  “None better of their kind on earth,” he naïvely admitted, wholly off his guard. “And they are not overtaxed?” she asked.

  “Deception is not hard,” he told her, “the world is full of fools and even the sensible are easy to deceive.”

  “From what I have read,” she continued, “you do not deceive. Your advice is good. Your precepts guide your clients right. Your suggestions lead to success. Your predictions come to pass, your conjectures are verified.”

  “All that is true enough,” he allowed. “Then how can you call your clients dupes, your methods mummeries, your answers lies?” She wound up triumphantly.

  “I did not call my answers lies,” he disclaimed. “Mummeries I deal in and to dupes. Dupes they are all. They pour gold into my lap to tell them what they already knew if they but reasoned it out calmly with themselves. They babble to me all they need to know and pay me insensately for it when I fling back to them a patchwork of the fragments I have extracted from their stories of expectations, apprehensions and memories.”

  “But if you do all that you must be a real judge of human nature, a genuine reader of hearts, a keen-brained counsellor.”

  “I am all that and more,” he bragged. He had lost every trace of agitation and bore himself with a dashing self-confidence of manner, extremely engaging. “I cannot minister to a mind diseased; but I am called on to prescribe for all sorts of delusions, follies, blunders, miseries and griefs. I could count by thousands the men and women I have saved, the lives I have made happy, the difficulties I have annihilated, the aspirations I have guided aright.”

  “Then you must have an immense experience of human frailties and human needs.”

  “Vast, enormous, incalculable,” he declared.

  “Your advice then should be valuable.”

  “It is valuable,” he boasted.

  “Then advise me, I am in extreme distress. I have felt that no one could help me. The belief that you might has given me a ray of hope. You have expressed a regard for me altogether extraordinary. Will it not lead you to help me?”

  “Any advice and help, any service in my power you may be sure shall be yours,” he said earnestly. “But let me ask you first, how was it that you did not seek the advice of some business-man, lawyer or clergyman? You are not at all of the light-headed type of those frivolous women who flock to me and to others like me. You have common sense, unalterable principles, rat3nal instincts and personal fastidiousness, why did you not go to one of the recognized, established, honored advisers of humanity? Tell me that if you please?”

  “It was because of the dream,” she faltered.

  “The dream!” he exclaimed. “A dream sent you to me? What sort of a dream?”

  “I had come to feel that there could be no hope for me,” she said. “But about a month ago I had a dream in which I was told 'The seventh advertisement in the seventh column of the seventh newspaper in the seventh drawer of the linen room will point for you the way to escape from your miseries and win what you desire.' There should have been no papers in my linen-room and it made me feel foolish to want to go and look. Also the servants knew I never went there, so I had to watch until the housekeeper was out and no maids were on that floor. Sure enough I found seven old newspapers in the seventh drawer, and on the seventh page of the lowermost paper, on the seventh column, the seventh advertisement was yours.”

  “And you came to me because of that dream?”

  “Yes: — and; — ” she hesitated.

  “Well,” he interrupted, “the reasons why you came are not so important. What I want to be sure of is this. Even if you were led to come by a mere coincidence acting on your feelings, are you now, from cool, deliberate reflection, determined to consult me? Would it not be better to take my advice at this point and go to one of the world's regular, accredited dispensers of wisdom?”

  “I have made up my mind to consult you,” she said. “It is not a passing whim, but a settled resolve.”

  “Then madame,” he said, his manner wholly changing, “you must tell me all your troubles without any reservation of any kind. If I am to help you I must know your case as completely as a physician would have to know your symptoms in an illness. Tell me plainly what your trouble is.

  She began to pluck at her veil with her gloved hands.

  “Oh,” she gasped, “let me moisten my lips. Just a swallow of water.” For all his lameness he was surprisingly agile, as he wrenched himself up, tore open the rear door and almost instantly hobbled back with a glass and silver pitcher on a small silver tray.

  She took off her veil and one glove. Several swallows were required to compose her. When she was calm again he sat looking at her with a face full of inquiry, but without uttering any questions.

  “You do not know,” she said, “how hard it is to begin.”

  “For the third time, Madame,” he said, “I advise you not to consult me, to go elsewhere.”

  “Are you not willing to help me?” she asked, softly.

  “Utterly willing,” he said, “but timid, timid as a doctor would be about prescribing for his own child. Yours is the first case ever brought to me in which I feared the effect of personal bias dimming my insight or deflecting my judgment. I have a second confession to make to you. Before you married, a man desperately in love with you came to me for help. Among other things he gave me the day, hour and minute of your birth and of his and asked me to cast both horoscopes and infer his chances of success. I had and have no faith in astrology, yet I had cast my own horoscope long before from mere curiosity. When I cast yours I was amazed at the clear indications of a connection between your fate and mine. I did not believe anything of the Babylonian absurdities, yet the coincidence struck me. Perhaps I am influenced by it yet. Under such an influence, even more than under that of my feeling for yourself, my acumen is likely to be impaired. I again advise you to go elsewhere.”

  “I am all the more determined to consult you and you only.”

  He bowed without any word and waited in silence for her to go on. She stared at him with big melting eyes, her face very pale.

  “My husband does not love me,” she said.

  “Not love you?” Vargas exclaimed, startled. “Do you mean seriously to tell me that, you who have been loved by hundreds, been adored, worshipped, courted by so many, for despair of gaining whom men have gone mad, who have had your choice of so many lovers, are not prized by the man who succeeded in winning you?”

  “Yes,” she barely breathed. “He does not prize me, nor love me at all.”

  “Does he love any one else?”

  Out of her total paleness she flushed rose pink from throat to hair. “Yes,” she admitted.

  “Who is she?” Vargas demanded.

  “His first wife.”

  Vargas staggered to his feet. “I did not so much as know that your husband had been married before,” he gasped, “let alone that he was divorced.”

  “He was not divorced,” she stated. “Not divorced,” he quavered.

  “No, he was a widower when I married him.” Vargas collapsed back into his chair.

&
nbsp; “I do not understand,” he told her. “Does he love a dead woman?”

  “Just that,” she asseverated.

  “This will not do,” the clairvoyant told her, “I cannot come nearer to helping you at this rate. Try to give me the information you think necessary, not by splinters and fragments, but as a whole. Make a connected exposition of the circumstances. Begin at the beginning.

  “That is harder,” she mused, “I always want to begin anything at the last chapter.”

  “Woman fashion,” he commented. “You are above that in most things, I know. Try a straight story from the beginning.”

  She reflected:

  “The beginning,” she said, “was before I began to remember. David and I were playmates before we could talk. Boy and girl, lad and lass, we always belonged to each other, there was no love-making between us, I think, for it was all love-living. I do not believe he ever asked me to marry him or promised to marry me, or so much as talked marriage. But we had a clear understanding that we were to marry as soon as we could, at the earliest possible day. He did not merely seem wrapped up in me, he was. God knows he was all my life. Then he had no more than seen Marian Conway when he fell in love with her. There is no use in dwelling on what I suffered. He married almost at once and I gave myself up to that empty life of frivolity which made me a reigning beauty and brought me scores of suitors for none of whom I cared anything and which gave me not a particle of satisfaction. Then after they had lost both their children Marian died. David was frightfully overcome by his loss. He had loved her inconceivably and he showed his grief in the most heart-rending ways. He had the coffin opened over and over after it had been closed. He had it even lifted out of the grave and opened yet once more for one more look at her face. He spent every moment from her death to her burial in a sort of adoration of her corpse, and he did stranger things. I do not know whether it was Mr. Llewellyn's valet who told, but at any rate the story got out among the servants. The night before she was buried he had her laid out in her coffin and a second coffin exactly like it set beside her's. He stayed locked in the room all night. They believed he lay in the other coffin. At any rate in the morning it was closed, and he did not allow it to be opened. What he had placed in it no one knew. They said it was as heavy as the other. Two hearses, one behind the other, carried the coffins to the graveyard. Her grave is not under the monument — you have seen the monument?”

  “No,” he said, “only a picture of it.”

  “Well, she is not buried under it, and the second coffin was placed on hers.” She stopped.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Oh,” she cried, “it is so hard to go on. But it is true. As soon as David was free I felt I had an object in life. I–I followed him, I might almost say pursued him all over the world, and when we met I courted him, and it seems strange, but I asked him to marry me. And — “ she hesitated — “he refused twice.”

  “He did not want to marry you?” Vargas asked incredulously.

  “He refused. It was at Cairo, that first time. He said he could not love anyone any more, all his love, his very self, was buried in Marian's grave. The second time was at Hongkong. Then he said he always had cared for me and still cared for me, but that affection was as nothing compared to his passion for Marian, that he would never marry, and especially he would not marry me because of his regard for me, that I would not be contented or happy with him, that I was thinking of the lad he had been and that boy was buried in his wife's grave, that he was nothing more than a walking ghost, a wraith of what he had been, a spirit condemned to wander its allotted time on earth until his hour should come and he be called to join Marian.

  “The third time was in Paris. He said he was indifferent to everything, to anything, to love or hate or death or life; that he cared nothing whether he married me or not. If I cared as much as I seemed to he would marry me to please me. I told him that what I had always wanted was to be with him, that what I most wanted was to spend with him as much as possible of my time until death parted us. He said if that was what I wanted I could have it, but he was nothing more than a shadow of his old self and I was sure to be unhappy. And I am unhappy. He is generosity, gentleness, kindness and consideration itself, but he does not care. I hoped, of course, that his grief for Marian would soften, fade away and vanish, that he would cease to mourn for her, that his interest in life would reawaken, that I could win his love and that we would both be happy. But I am not. His utter indifference to me, to anything, to everything is preying on my feelings, I must do something. I shall lose my mind.”

  “Is that all?” Vargas asked.

  “It is enough,” she asserted, “and more than enough. Do you think it a small matter?”

  “Not in the least,” he declared, “I comprehend your disappointment in respect to your hopes, your chagrin at your baffled efforts to win him back to be his old self, your pain at his inertness. But by your own showing you have no grievance against your husband.”

  “That I have not,” she maintained. “Not a shadow of a grievance against him. My grievance is for him as much as for myself and against — against the way the world is made.”

  Vargas looked at her for some little time.

  “You do not say what you are thinking,” she interrupted.

  “I am considering how to express it,” he said. “However I express it I am sure to offend you.”

  “Not a bit,” she replied. “Say it at once.”

  “You must realize that if I am to advise you truly I must speak plainly,” he hesitated.

  “I do realize it,” she told him.

  “You will then pardon what I have to say?” he ventured.

  “I will pardon anything except beating about the bush,” she rapped out.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “it seems to me that your coming to me, your state of mind, your trouble, as you have related it all turns upon a piece of femininity to which you should be altogether superior, to which I should have imagined you were altogether superior. You look, and I have always imagined you, free from any trace of the eternal feminine. Here it crops out. Men in general find that women in general have no feeling for the mutuality of a contract. Some women may be exceptions, but women habitually ignore the other side of a contract and see only their own side. Here you display the same defect. Mr. Llewellyn practically proposed a contract to you: on his side he to marry you, on your side, you to put up with his complete indifference to you, to everything, and be content with his actual companionship such as he is. He has fulfilled and is fulfilling his part of the contract, you seek escape from yours.”

  “I think,” she snapped. “You are insufferably brutal.”

  “The eternal feminine again,” he retorted.

  “Worse and more of it. I told you I should offend you.”

  “You do offend me. I have confidence in you, but I did not come here to be scolded or to be preached at. I do not want criticism, I want advice. Don't tell me my shortcomings, real or imaginary, think over my troubles and my needs and tell me what to do.”

  “That is plain enough,” he asserted. “Do your obvious duty. Keep your part of your contract with your husband. Give no sign that you suffer from the absence of feeling of which he warned you. Make the most of your life with him. Hope for a change in him but do not try to force it, do not rebel if it does not come.”

  “I know I ought to endure,” she wailed. “But I cannot, I must do something. I must act. I must.”

  “You have asked for my advice,” he said, “and you have it.”

  “And what good is it to me?” she objected, “I ask for help and you string out platitudinous precepts like a snuffy, detestable old-fashioned evangelical dominie. Is this all the help you can give me?”

  “All,” said Vargas humbly. “If I knew of any other it should be at your service.”

  “You could consult your slate for me, as I proposed,” she suggested.

  “Great heavens above!” he cried, “I have told you t
hat all that is imposture.”

  “It might turn out genuine for once,” she persisted. “Don't people have real trances? Don't many people believe in the answers from slates and planchettes and ouija boards?”

  “Perhaps they do,” Vargas admitted. “But I never had a real trance, never saw one, never knew of one. And to my knowledge no slate or other such device ever gave any answer or wrote anything unless I or some other shuffler made it write or answer.”

  “But could you not try just once for my sake,” she implored.

  “Why on earth,” he demanded, “are you, so sane and sensible in appearance, so set on this mummery?”

  “Because of the other dream,” she faltered.

  “The other dream!” he exclaimed. “You had another dream?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I was going to tell you but you interrupted me. The dream about the advertisement did not convince me. I felt it might be coincidence after all. That was more than a month ago and I disregarded it. But night before last I dreamed I was told, 'The message on the slate will be true.' I fought against it all day yesterday, all last night. To-day I gave up and came. I want you to consult your slate for me.”

  “Madame,” he said, “this is dreadful. Can nothing make you see the truth. There is not anything supernatural about this trade of mine. It is as simple as a Punch and Judy show. There the puppets do nothing save as the showman controls them; so of my slate and of my trances.”

  “But it might surprise you,” she persisted. “It might come true once. Won't you try for me?”

  “I know,” he mused, “that there is such a thing as auto-hypnotism. To humor you I might try to put myself into a genuine trance. But there would be nothing about it to help you, just a mere natural sleep, artificially induced. If I babbled in it the words would have no significance, and no writing would appear on the slate unless I put it there.”

  “Just try,” she pleaded, “for my sake, to quiet me. If there is nothing, then I shall believe you.”

  “There will be nothing on the slate,” he main tained. “But suppose I should mumble some fragments of words. You might take those accidental vocables for a revelation, they might become an obsession upon you, they might warp your judgment and do you great harm. I feel we should be running a foolish risk. Give up this idea of the trance and the slate, I beg of you.”