“Was she a young woman?”
“No, old.”
“Very old?”
“Not very. There was grey in her hair — a little.”
“How was she dressed?”
“She wore a night-gown, mamma. There were spots on it — like medicine.”
“Had you ever seen her before?”
“I think so.”
“Who was she?”
“Mrs. Allen.”
Her mother sat very still but her clasped hands tightened and a little of the colour faded from her cheeks. There was a Mrs. Allen who had been suffering from an illness which she herself was afraid she had.
“Do you mean Mrs. James Allen who lives on the old Allen farm?” she asked quietly.
“Yes, mamma.”
In the morning they heard of Mrs. Allen’s death. And it was several months before Mrs. Greensleeve again spoke to her daughter on the one subject about which Athalie was inclined to be most reticent. But that subject now held a deadly fascination for her mother.
They had been sitting together in Mrs. Greensleeve’s bedroom; the mother knitting, in bed propped up upon the pillows. Athalie, cross-legged on a hassock beside her, was doing a little mending on her own account, when her mother said abruptly but very quietly:
“I have always known that you possess a power — which others cannot understand.”
The child’s face flushed deeply and she bent closer over her mending.
“I knew it when they first brought you to me, a baby just born.... I don’t know how I knew it, but I did.”
Athalie, sewing steadily, said nothing.
“I think,” said her mother, “you are, in some degree, what is called clairvoyant.”
“What?”
“Clairvoyant,” repeated her mother quietly. “It comes from the French, clair, clear; the verb voir, to see; clair-voyant, seeing clearly. That is all, Athalie.... Nothing to be ashamed of — if it is true,—” for the child had dropped her work and had hidden her face in her hands.
“Dear, are you afraid to talk about it to your mother?”
“N-no. What is there to say about it?”
“Nothing very much. Perhaps the less said the better.... I don’t know, little daughter. I don’t understand it — comprehend it. If it’s so, it’s so.... I see you sometimes looking at things I cannot see; I know sometimes you hear sounds which I cannot hear.... Things happen which perplex the rest of us; and, somehow I seem to know that they do not perplex you. What to us seems unnatural to you is natural, even a commonplace matter of course.”
“That’s it, mamma. I have never seen anything that did not seem quite natural to me.”
“Did you know that Mrs. Allen had died when you — thought you saw her?”
“I did see her.”
“Yes.... Did you know she had died?”
“Not until I saw her.”
“Did you know it then?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how I knew it. I seemed to know it.”
“Did you know she had been ill?”
“No, mamma.”
“Did it in any way frighten you — make you uneasy when you saw her standing there?”
“Why, no,” said Athalie, surprised.
“Not even when you knew she was dead?”
“No. Why should it? Why should I be afraid?”
Her mother was silent.
“Why?” asked Athalie, curiously. “Is there anything to be afraid of with God and all his angels watching us? Is there?”
“No.”
“Then,” said the child with some slight impatience, “why is it that other people seem to be a little afraid of me and of what they say I can hear and see? I have good eyesight; I see clearly; that is all, isn’t it? And there is nothing to frighten anybody in seeing clearly, is there?”
“No, dear.”
“People make me so cross,” continued Athalie,— “and so ashamed when they ask so many questions. What is there to be surprised at if sometimes I see things inside my mind. They are just as real as when I see them outside. They are no different.”
Her mother nodded, encouragingly.
“When papa was in New York,” went on Athalie, “and I saw him talking to some men in a hotel there, why should it be surprising just because papa was in New York and I was here when I saw him?”
“It surprises others, dear, because they cannot see what is beyond the vision of their physical senses.”
Athalie said: “They tease me in school because they say I can see around corners. It makes me very cross and unhappy, and I don’t want anybody to know that I see what they can’t see. I’m ashamed to have them know it.”
“Perhaps it is just as well you feel that way. People are odd. What they do not understand they ridicule. A dog that would not notice a horse-drawn vehicle will bark at an automobile.”
“Mamma?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Do you know that dogs, and I think cats, too, see many things that I do; and that other people do not see.”
“Why do you think so?”
“I have noticed it.... The other evening when the white cat was dozing on your bed, and I was down here on the floor, sewing, I saw — something. And the cat looked up suddenly and saw it, too.”
“Athalie!”
“She did, mamma. I knew perfectly well that she saw what I saw.”
“What was it you saw?”
“Only a young man. He walked over to the window—”
“And then?”
“I don’t know, mamma. I don’t know where they go. They go, that’s all I know.”
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he look at us?”
“Yes.... He seemed to be thinking of something pleasant.”
“Did he smile?”
“He — had a pleasant look.... And once, — it was last Sunday — over by the bed I saw a little boy. He was kneeling down beside the bed. And Mr. Ledlie’s dog was lying here beside me.... Don’t you remember how he suddenly lifted his head and barked?”
“Yes, I remember. But you didn’t tell me why at the time.”
“I didn’t like to.... I never like to speak about these — people — I see.”
“Had you ever before seen the little boy?”
“No, mamma.”
“Was he — alive — do you think?”
“Why, yes. They all are alive.”
“Mrs. Allen was not alive when you saw her over by the door.”
The child looked puzzled. “Yes,” she said, “but that was a little different. Not very different. They are all perfectly alive, mamma.”
“Even the ones we call dead? Are you sure of it?”
“Yes.... Yes, I’m sure of it. They are not dead.... Nothing seems to die. Nothing stays dead.”
“What! Why do you believe that?”
Athalie said slowly: “Somebody shot and killed a poor little dog, once, — just across the causeway bridge.... And the dog came into the garden afterward and ran all around, smelling, and wagging his tail.”
“Athalie! Athalie! Be careful to control your imagination.”
“Yes,” said the child, thoughtfully, “I must be careful to control it. I can imagine almost anything if I try.”
“How hard have you ever tried to imagine some of the things you see — or think you see?”
“Mamma, I never try. I — I don’t care to see them. I’d rather not. Those things come. I haven’t anything to do with it. I don’t know these people, and I am not interested. I did try to see papa in New York — if you call that imagination.”
But her mother did not know what to call it because at the hour when Athalie had seen him, that mild and utterly unimaginative man was actually saying and doing what his daughter had seen and heard.
“Also,” said Athalie, “I was thinking about that poor little yellow dog and wondering whether he was past all suff
ering, when he came gaily trotting into the garden, waving his tail quite happily. There was no dust or blood on him. He rolled on the grass, too, and barked and barked. But nobody seemed to hear him or notice him excepting I.”
For a long while silence reigned in the lamp-lit room. When the other children came in to say good night to their mother she received them with an unusual tenderness. They went away; Athalie rose, yawning the yawn of healthy fatigue:
“Good night, mamma.”
“Good night, little daughter.”
They kissed: the mother drew her into a sudden and almost convulsive embrace.
“Darling, are you sure that nothing really dies?”
“I have never seen anything really dead, mamma. Even the ‘dead’ birds, — why, the evening sky is full of them — the little ‘dead’ ones I mean — flock after flock, twittering and singing—”
“Dear!”
“Yes, mamma.”
“When you see me — that way — will you — speak?”
“Yes.”
“Promise, darling.”
“Yes.... I’ll kiss you, too — if it is possible....”
“Would it be possible?”
The child gazed at her, perplexed and troubled: “I — don’t — know,” she said slowly. Then, all in a moment her childish face paled and she clung to her mother and began to cry.
And her mother soothed her, tenderly, smilingly, kissing the tears from the child’s eyes.
The next morning after the children had gone to school Mrs. Greensleeve was operated on — without success.
CHAPTER III
THE black dresses of the children had become very rusty by spring, but business had been bad at the Hotel Greensleeve, and Athalie, Doris, and Catharine continued to wear their shabby mourning.
Greensleeve haunted the house all day long, roaming from bar to office, from one room to another, silently opening doors of unoccupied chambers to peer about in the dusty obscurity, then noiselessly closing them, he would slink away down the dim corridor to his late wife’s room and sit there through the long sunny afternoon, his weak face buried in his hands.
Ledlie had grown fatter, redder of visage, whiter of hair and beard. When a rare guest arrived, or when local loafers wandered into the bar with the faint stench of fertilizer clinging to their boots, he shuffled ponderously from office to bar, serving as economically as he dared whoever desired to be served.
Always a sprig of something green protruded from his small tight mouth. His pale eyes, now faded almost colourless, had become weak and red-rimmed, and he blinked continually except in the stale semi-darkness of the house.
Always, now, he was muttering and grumbling his disapproval of the children— “Eatin’ their heads off I tell you, Pete! What good is all this here schoolin’ doin’ ’em when they ought to git out some’rs an’ earn their vittles?”
But if Greensleeve’s attitude was one of passive acquiescence, he made no effort to withdraw the children from school. Once, when life was younger, and Jack, his first baby, came, he had dreamed of college for him, and of a career — in letters perhaps — something dignified, leisurely, profound beyond his own limits. And of a modest corner somewhere within the lustre of his son’s environment where he and his wife, grey-haired, might dream and admire, finding there surcease from care and perhaps the peace which passes all understanding.
The ex-”professor” of penmanship had been always prone to dream. No dull and sordid reality, no hopeless sorrow had yet awakened him. Nor had his wife’s death been more real than the half-strangled anguish of a dreamer, tossing in darkness. As for the children, they paid no more attention to Ledlie than they might have to a querulous but superannuated dog.
Jack, now fifteen, still dawdled at school, where his record was not good. Perhaps it was partly because he had no spending money, no clothing to maintain his boyish self-respect, no prospects of any sort, that he had become sullen, uncommunicative, and almost loutish.
Nobody governed him; his father was unqualified to control anybody or anything; his mother was dead.
With her death went the last vestige of any tie that had held the boy to the home anchorage — of any feeling of responsibility concerning the conduct expected and required of him.
He shirked his studies, came home only to eat and sleep, remained out late without explanation or any home interference, except for the constant disputes and quarrels with Doris and Catharine, now aged respectively fourteen and thirteen.
To Athalie he had little to say. Perhaps he did not realise it but he was slightly afraid of her. And it was from her that he took any pains at all to conceal his irregularities.
Once, coming in from school, she had found the house deserted, and Jack smelling of alcohol just slouching out of the bar.
“If you do that again I shall tell father,” she said, horrified.
“What do I care!” he had retorted sullenly. And it was true; the boy no longer cared what anybody might think as long as Athalie already knew and detested what he had done.
There was a garage in the neighbouring village. He spent most of his time hanging around it. Sometimes he came home reeking of oil and gasoline, sometimes his breath was tainted with tobacco and alcohol.
He was so much bigger and older than Athalie that the child had never entirely lost her awe of him. His weakness of character, his failings, and the fact that he was a trifle afraid of her opinion, combined to astonish and bewilder her.
For a long while she tried to understand the gradual but certain reversal of their relations. And one night, still more or less in awe of him, she got out of bed and went softly into his room.
He was not asleep. The sudden apparition of his youngest sister considerably startled him, and he sat up in his ragged night-shirt and stared at her where she stood in the moonlight.
“You look like one of your own spooks!” he said. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I wanted to talk with you, Jack.”
“What about?”
“You.”
For a moment he sat there eyeing her uneasily; then:
“Well, go ahead!” he said ungraciously; and stretched himself back on the pillows.
She came and seated herself on the bed’s edge:
“Jack, please don’t drink beer.”
“Why not? Aw, what do you know about men, anyway? Don’t they all smoke and drink?”
“Mamma asked you not to.”
“Gee-whiz! I was a kid then. But a man isn’t a baby.”
Athalie sighed. Her brother eyed her restlessly, aware of that slight feeling of shame which always invaded his sullen, defiant discontent when he knew that he had lowered himself in her estimation.
For, if the boy was a little afraid of her, he also cared more for her than he ever had for any of the family except his mother.
He was only the average boy, stumbling blindly, almost savagely through the maze of adolescence, with no guide, nobody to warn or counsel him, nothing to stimulate his pride, no anchorage, no experience.
Whatever character he had he had been born with: it was environment and circumstance that were crippling it.
“See here, Athalie,” he said, “you’re a little girl and you don’t understand. There isn’t any harm in my smoking a cigarette or two or in drinking a glass of beer now and then.”
“Isn’t there, Jack?”
“No. So don’t you worry, Sis.... And, say! I’m not going back to school.”
“What?”
“What’s the use? I can’t go to college. Anyway what’s the good of algebra and physics and chemistry and history and all that junk? I guess I’ll go into business.”
“What business?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been working around the garage. I can get a job there if I want it.”
“Did you ask papa?”
“What’s the use? He’ll let me do what I please. I guess I’ll start in to-morrow.”
His father did not interfere wh
en his only son came slouching up to inform him of his decision.
After Jack had gone away toward the village and his new business, his father remained seated on the shabby veranda, his head sunken on his soiled shirtfront, his wasted hands clasped over his stomach.
For a little while, perhaps, he remembered his earlier ambitions for the boy’s career. Maybe they caused him pain. But if there was pain it faded gradually into the lethargy which had settled over him since his wife’s death.
A grey veil seemed to have descended between him and the sun, — there was greyness everywhere, and dimness, and uncertainty — in his mind, in his eyesight — and sometimes the vagueness was in his speech. He had noticed that — for, sometimes the word he meant to use was not the word he uttered. It had occurred a number of times, making foolish what he had said.
And Ledlie had glanced at him sharply once or twice out of his sore and faded eyes when Greensleeve had used some word while thinking of another.
When he was not wandering around the house he sat on the veranda in a great splint-bottomed arm-chair — a little untidy figure, more or less caved in from chest to abdomen, which made his short thin legs hanging just above the floor seem stunted and withered.
To him, here, came his daughters in their soiled and rusty black dresses, just out of school, and always stopping on impulse of sympathy to salute him with, “Hello, papa!” and with the touch of fresh, warm lips on his colourless cheek.
Sometimes they lingered to chatter around him, or bring out pie and cake to eat in his company. But very soon his gaze became remote, and the children understood that they were at liberty to go, which they did, dancing happily away into the outer sunshine, on pleasure bent — the matchless pleasures of the very young whose poverty has not as yet disturbed them.
As the summer passed the sunlight grew greyer to Peter Greensleeve. Also, more often, he mixed his words and made nonsense of what he said.
The pain in his chest and arms which for a year had caused him discomfort, bothered him at night, now. He said nothing about it.
That summer Doris had taken a course in stenography and typewriting, going every day to Brooklyn by train and returning before sunset.
When school began she asked to be allowed to continue. Catharine, too, desired to learn. And if their father understood very clearly what they wanted, it is uncertain. Anyway he offered no objections.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 775