“And I beg of you to try it. You said you would do anything for me. That is what I want and nothing else.”
He shook his head, his expression crestfallen, baffled, puzzled, even alarmed.
“If you insist — ” he faltered.
“I do insist,” she said.
“You wish,” he inquired, “to proceed exactly as I usually do with my simulated trance and pretended spirit replies?”
“Precisely,” she affirmed.
He opened a drawer below one of the cabinets and took out a hinged double slate. It was made like a child's school-slate, but the rims instead of being wood, were of silver, the edges beaded and the flat of each rim chased in a pattern of pentacles, swastikas and pentagrams; a pentacle, a right-hand swastika, a pentagram, a left-hand swastika and so on all round. In the drawer was a box of fresh slate-pencils. This he held out to her and told her to choose one. At his bidding she broke off a short fragment and put it between the two Leaves of the slate, the four faces of which were entirely blank.
“Settle yourself in your chair,” he instructed her, “hold the slate in your lap. Hold it fast with both hands. First take off your other glove.”
As she did this he settled himself into the armchair opposite her, took a silver paper-knife from the table and held it upright, gazing at its point.
“You are not to move or speak until I tell you,” he directed her.
So they sat, she holding in her lap the slate shut fast upon the pencil within, her fingers enforcing its closure; he gazing intently at the point of the scimitar-shaped paper-knife. She became aware of the slow, pompous tick of a tall clock in the hallway; of faint noises, as of activity in a pantry, proceeding from somewhere in the rear of the house and barely audible through the closed window. She had expected to see him stiffen, his eyes roll up or some such manifestation appear. Nothing of the kind happened. For a long time, a very long time, she watched him staring fixedly at the sharp end of the paper-cutter. Then she saw it waver, saw his eyes close and his head, propped against the back of the armchair, move ever so little sideways, as the neck-muscles relaxed. His hands opened, the knife dropped on his knee and he was to all appearances peacefully asleep. Presently his even, regular breathing was a sound more apparent than the tick of the clock outside.
All of a sudden Mrs. Llewellyn felt herself ridiculous. Here she was, holding a childish toy, facing a strange man with whom she was entirely alone and who was apparently enjoying a needed snooze. She had an impulse to laugh and was on the point of rising, disembarrassing herself of her burden and leaving the house.
At that instant she felt a movement between the fast-shut slates. They lay level upon her lap, firmly set. She had not jarred or tilted them, yet she felt the pencil move. Felt it move and heard it too. Her mood of impatient self-contempt and irritated derision was instantly obliterated under a wave of terrified awe. She controlled a spasm of panic, an impulse to let go her hold upon her frightful charge, to scream, to run away. Rigid, trembling, breathing quick, her heart hammering her ribs, she sat, her fingers gripping the slates, listening for another movement. It came. Faintly at first, she felt and heard it, then more distinctly. Slowly, very slowly, with intervals of silence, the bit of pencil crawled, tapped and scratched about. While listening to it, and still more while listening for it, she was under so terrific a tension that she felt if nothing happened to relieve her, she must faint or shriek. When she continued listening for a long, an interminable, an unbearable time and heard nothing but the clock in the hall and Vargas' breathing in the room, she felt she was about to do both.
Then the clairvoyant uttered a choked sound, the incipience of that feeble wailing groan or groaning wail of a sleeper in a nightmare. His feet moved, his undeformed leg stiffened, his hands clenched, his head rolled from side to side, he writhed, the effort expended at each successive groan was more and more excessive, each sound feebler and more pitiful.
Then Mrs. Llewellyn did scream.
Instantly Vargas struggled into a sitting posture, his face contorted, his eyes bulging, staring at her.
“Did I speak, did I speak?” he gasped.
Mrs. Llewellyn was past articulation, but she shook her head. “I passed into a real trance, a real trance,” he babbled.
She could only cling to the slate and gaze.
“I had a frightful dream,” Vargas panted, “I dreamed there was a message on the plate. It frightened me, but what it was has escaped me.”
“There is a message on the slate,” she managed to utter, “I heard the pencil writing.” Vargas, holding to the back of his chair, assisted himself to his feet. From her fingers, mechanically clenched on it, he gently disengaged the slate and put it on the table. Opening one of the cabinets he took out a decanter and two glasses, half filling one he placed it in her numb grasp.
“Drink that,” he dictated, draining the other full glass as he spoke.
Half dazed she obeyed him. Her face flushed angrily and the glass broke as she set it down. “You have given me brandy!” she cried in indignation.
“You needed it,” he asserted. “It will steady you, but you will not feel it. Compose yourself and we will look at the slate.”
She stood up beside him and he laid the slate open. There was writing on each leaf of it, on one side legible, on the other reversed.
“Oh,” she said and sat down heavily. He brought a small chair, set it beside hers and seated himself upon it, the slates open in his hands, before them both. Fine-lined, legible, plainly made by the point of the pencil, was the writing, on one leaf of the slates; on the other reversed writing with coarse strokes, plainly made by the splintered end, which was worn slightly at one place. All the writing was in the same individual script.
“This is not my handwriting,” said Vargas. “It is my husband's,” she gasped. The words on the slate were: “That which is buried in that coffin is alive. If disinterred it will die.” Vargas opened the other cabinet. The inside of its door was a mirror. Before this he held the slates. On the other leaf the broad-stroked script showed the same words.
“What does it mean?” she pleaded, “oh! what does it mean?”
“It doesn't mean anything,” said Vargas, roughly.
“How can that be,” she moaned. “It must mean something. It does mean something. I feel it does.”
“That is just the point,” he said, “that is what I feared before, and warned you of. Here are some chance words. They mean nothing, except that you or I or both of us have been intensely strung up with emotion. But if you cannot see that or be made to see that, you are lost. If you feel that they mean something, then they do mean that something to you, that that is your danger. Do not yield to it.”
“Do you mean to tell me, to try to convince me that those words, twice written, in the same handwriting, in my husband's hand of all hands, formed upon those slates while I held them myself, came there by accident?”
“Not by accident,” he argued. “By some operation of unguessed forces set in motion by your excitement or mine or both; but blind forces, meaningless as the voices in dreams.”
“Am I to believe meaningless,” she demanded, “the voices in my dreams that sent me to that advertisement and to you and told me expect an answer from the slates, a true answer?”
“Madame,” he reasoned, “the series of coincidences is startling, but it is nothing but a series of coincidences. Try to rise superior to it.”
“And you won't help me,” she wailed. “You won't tell me what this message means — ”
“I have told you my belief as to how it originated,” he said, “I have told you that I do not attach any other significance to it.”
“Oh,” she groaned, “I must go home.”
“Your carriage is at the door,” he said.
“My carriage!” she exclaimed. “How did it get there?”
“Not your own carriage,” he explained, “but one for you. I telephoned for it.”
“You have not l
eft me an instant,” she asserted incredulously.
“When I brought you a glass of water I told the maid to telephone for a carriage and tell it to wait. It will be there.”
“I thank you,” she said, “and now, what do I owe you? What is your fee?” Vargas flushed all over his face and neck, a deep brownish-red.
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” he said with great dignity, “I take pay from my dupes for my fripperies of deception. But no money, not all the money on earth could pay me to do what I have done for you to-day, no sum could induce me to go through it again for anyone else. For you I would do anything. But what I have done was not done for payment, nor will anything I may do be done except for you, for whom I would do any service in my power.”
“I ask your pardon,” she said. “Where is the carriage? I shall faint if I stay here.”
Some weeks later, in the same room, the clairvoyant and the lady again faced each other.
“I had hoped never to see you again,” he said.
“Did you imagine that I could escape from the compulsion of all that series of manifestations?” she asked.
“I tried to believe that you might,” he answered.
“Have you been able to shake off its hold on you?” she demanded.
“Not entirely,” he confessed. “But dazing as the coincidences were, the effect on my emotions will wear off, like the smart of a burn; and, as one forgets the fury of past sufferings, I shall forget the turmoil of my feelings. There was no clear intelligibility, no definite significance in it at all.”
“Not in that message!” she exclaimed.
“Certainly not,” he asseverated.
“Yes there was,” she contradicted.
“Madame,” he said earnestly, “if you fancy you perceive any genuine coherence in those fortuitous words you have put the meaning there yourself, your imagination is riveting upon your soul fetters of your own forging.”
“My imagination and my soul have nothing to do with my insight into the spirit of that message,” she said calmly. “My heart cries out for help and my intellect has pondered at leisure upon what you call a fortuitous series of coincidences, a chance string of meaningless words. I see no incoherence, rather convincing coherence, in the sequence of your reading of horoscopes, my dreaming of dreams, leading up to the imperative behest given me from your slate.”
“Madame,” he cried, “this is heart-rending. I told you I dreaded the effect upon you of any sort of mummery. You forced me to it. I should have had strength to refuse you. I yielded. Now my cowardice will ruin you.”
“Was not your trance genuine?” she queried. “Entirely genuine, entirely too genuine.”
“Did not the writing appear upon the slate independent of your will or of mine?” she demanded.
“It did,” he admitted. “Can you explain how it came there?” she wound up. “Alas, no,” he confessed, shaking his head.
“You can scarcely reproach me for accepting it as a message,” she concluded triumphantly.
“I do not reproach you,” he said, “I reproach myself as culpable.”
“I rather thank you for what you have done for me,” she almost smiled at him. “It gives me hope. I have meditated carefully upon the message and I am convinced that I comprehend its meaning.”
“That is the worst possible state of mind you could get into,” he groaned. “Can I not make you realize the truth? It is not as you think you see it.”
“I do not think,” she said. “I know. I am convinced, and I mean to act on my convictions.”
“This is terrible,” he muttered. Then he controlled himself, shifted his position in his chair and asked: “And what are your convictions? What do you mean to do?”
“My conviction,” she said, “is that David's love for Marian is in some way bound up with whatever he had buried in that coffin. I mean to have the coffin disinterred.”
“Madame,” he said, “this thing gets worse the more you tell me of it. You are in danger of coming under the domination of a fixed idea, even if you are not already under its sway. Fight against it. Shake it off.”
“There is no use in your talking that way to me,” she said. “I mean to do it. I shall do it.”
“Has your husband consented?” Vargas asked.
“He has,” she replied.
“Do you mean to tell me that he has agreed to your opening his wife's grave?”
“He has agreed,” she asserted.
“But did he make no demur?” the clairvoyant inquired.
“He said he did not care what I did, I could do anything I pleased.”
“Was that all he said?” Vargas persisted.
“Not all,” she admitted. “He asked me if I had not told him that what I wanted in this life was to spend as much as possible of my time on earth with him, for us two to be together as much as circumstances would allow, and as long as death would permit. I told him of course I had said it, not once but over and over. He asked me if I still felt that way. I told him I did. He said it made no difference to him he was past any feelings, but if that was what I really wanted he advised me to let that grave alone.”
“Take his advice, by all means,” Vargas exclaimed. “It is good advice. You let that grave alone.”
“I am determined,” she told him. “Madame,” he said, “will you listen to me?”
“Certainly,” she replied. “If you have anything to say to the purpose. But not to fault-findings or to scoldings.”
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” Vargas began, “what happened during your former visit to me has demolished the entire structure of my spiritual existence. I had the sincerest disbelief in astrology, in prophecy, in ghosts, in apparitions, in superstitions, each and all, in supernaturalism in general, in religions, individually and collectively, in the idea of future life. Upon the most materialistic convictions my intellectual life was placid and unruffled, and my soul-life, if I had any, undisturbed by anything save occasional and very evanescent twinges of conscience over the contemptible duplicity of my way of livelihood. Intermittently only I despised myself. Mostly I only despised my dupes and generally not even that. Rather I merely smiled tolerantly at the childishness of their profitable credulity. Never did I have the remotest approach to any shadow of belief that there could be anything occult beneath or behind any such jugglery as I continually made use of. The matter of your horoscope and mine I took as mere coincidence. It might affect my feelings, never my reason; my heart, never my head. My head is involved now, my reason at fault. In the writing on that slate I am face to face with something, if not supernatural, at least preternatural. The thing is beyond our ordinary experience of the ordinary operation of those forces which make the world go. It depends upon something not yet understood, not necessarily inexplicable, but unexplained. It is uncanny. I don't like it. Yet I do not yield to its influence. I am not swept away. If I dwell upon it, I know it will unsettle my reason. I do not mean to dwell upon it, I mean to get away from it, to ignore it, to forget it, and I counsel you to do likewise.”
“Your counsel,” she said, “has a long-winded preamble, but is entirely unacceptable.”
“I have more to say,” he went on. “Mere bewilderment of mind is not an adequate ground for action. There is a fine old proverb that says, 'When in doubt, do nothing.' Take its advice and your husband's; do nothing.”
“But I am not in doubt,” she protested. “I am convinced that I was meant to come to you, that the message was meant for me, and that I know what it means. I am determined to act upon it.”
He shook his head with a gesture of despair, but continued:
“I have more yet to say and on another point. I advise you to go away from all this. You should and you can. You have your own wealth and your husband's opulence at your disposal. You have one of the finest steam-yachts on the seas awaiting your pleasure. Much as you have traveled, the globe has many fascinating regions still new to you. Your husband and you have practically not traveled at all since your marriage. You
should still hope for your husband's recovery of his spirits by natural means. Travel is the most obvious prescription. Try that. Because your husband had not emerged from his brooding upon his loss and grief during two years of wandering alone with a valet; because he has not recovered his spirits after two years of matrimony spent in the neighborhood of his first wife's grave, in mansions full of memories of her, is no reason for not hoping that his elasticity will revive during months or years spent with you among delightful scenes of novelty, far from anything to recall his mind to old associations.”
“I have no hope in any such attempt,” she said wearily. “When I cannot bear my life here with a mate who is no more than a likeness of the man I loved, why drag this soulless semblance about the oceans of the earth in the hope of seeing it awake to love me? Shall I expect a miracle from salt air or the rays of the Southern cross?”
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” Vargas said, “I have taken the liberty of making inquiries, quite unobtrusively, concerning your husband's treatment of you. I find that it is the general impression that he is a very uxorious, a very loverly husband. Except the barest minimum required for his affairs, he spends his entire time with you. His best friends, his boyhood's chums, his life-long cronies he never converses with, never chats with, hardly talks to, and for all his genial cordiality and courtesy, barely more than greets in passing. He is seldom seen at his clubs and very briefly. To all appearances he devotes himself to you wholly. You have all the external trappings of happiness: health, beauty, a devoted husband, the most desirable intimates, countless friends, luxurious surroundings, and unlimited affluence. It is for you to put life into all this, it is your duty to recall to it what you miss. You should leave no natural means untried turning to what you propose.”
“My determination is irrevocably taken,” she said. “But what do you expect to find in the coffin?” he queried.
Lukundoo and Other Stories Page 11