Athalie

Neither spoke for a moment or two; then he said, quietly: "I did not know you were clairvoyant."

"I – see clearly – now and then."

"I understand. It is nothing new to me."

"You do understand then?"

"I understand that some few people see more clearly than the great majority."

"Do you?"

"No… There was a comrade of mine – a Frenchman – Jacques Renouf. He was like you; he saw."

"Is he living? – I mean as we are?"

"No."

"Was he tall, olive-skinned, black-bearded – "

"Yes," said Dane coolly; "did you see him just now?"

"Yes."

"I wondered… There are moments when I seem to feel his presence. I was thinking of him just now. We were on the upper Amazon together last winter."

"How did he die?"

"He'd been off by himself all day. About five o'clock he came into camp with a poisoned arrow broken off behind his shoulder-blade. He seemed dazed and stupefied; but at moments I had an idea that he was trying to tell us something."

Dane hesitated, shrugged: "It was no use. We left our fire as usual and went into the forest about two miles to sleep. Jacques died that night, still dazed by the poison, still making feeble signs at me as though he were trying to tell me something… I believe that he has been near me very often since, trying to speak to me."

"He laid his hand on your shoulder, Captain Dane."

Dane's stern lips quivered for a second, then self-command resumed control. He said: "He usually did that when he had something to tell me… Did he speak to me, Miss Greensleeve?"

"He spoke to me."

"Clearly?"

"Yes. He said: 'Would you please say to him that the greatest of all the ancient cities is hidden by the jungle near the source of the middle fork. It was called Yhdunez.'"

For a long while Dane sat silent, his chin resting on his clenched hand, looking down at the rug at his feet. After a while he said, still looking down: "He must have found it all alone. And got an arrow in him for his reward… They're a dirty lot, those cannibals along the middle fork of the Amazon. Nobody knows much about them yet except that they are cannibals and their arrows are poisoned… I brought back the arrow that I pulled out of Jacques… There's no analysis that can determine what the poison is – except that it's vegetable."

He leaned forward, as though weary, resting his face between both hands.

"Yhdunez? Is that what it was called? Well, it and everything in it was not worth the life of my friend Renouf… Nor is anything I've ever seen worth a single life sacrificed to the Red God of Discovery… Those accursed cities full of vile and monstrous carvings – they belong to the jaguars now. Let them keep them. Let the world's jungles keep their own – if only they'd give me back my friend – "

He rested a moment as he was, then straightened up impatiently as though ashamed.

"Death is death," he said in matter-of-fact tones.

Athalie slowly shook her head: "There is no death."

He nodded almost gratefully: "I know what you mean. I dare say you are right… Well – I think I'll go back to Yhdunez."

"Not this evening?" she protested, smilingly.

He smiled, too: "No, not this evening, Miss Greensleeve. I shall never care to go anywhere again – "… His face altered… "Unless you care to go – with me."

What he had said she would have taken gaily, lightly, had not the gravity of his face forbidden it. She saw the lean muscles tighten along his clean-cut cheek, saw the keen eyes grow wistful, then steady themselves for her answer.

She could not misunderstand him; she disdained to, honouring the simplicity and truth of this man to whom she was so truly devoted.

Her abandoned sewing lay on her lap. Hafiz slept with one velvet paw entangled in her thread. She looked down, absently freeing thread and fabric, and remained so for a moment, thinking. After a while she looked up, a trifle pale:

"Thank you, Captain Dane," she said in a low voice.

He waited.

"I – am afraid that I am – in love – already – with another man."

He bent his head, quietly; there was no pleading, no asking for a chance, no whining of any species to which the monarch man is so constitutionally predisposed when soft, young lips pronounce the death warrant of his sentimental hopes.

All he said was: "It need not alter anything between us – what I have asked of you."

"It only makes me care the more for our friendship, Captain Dane."

He nodded, studying the pattern in the Shirvan rug under his feet. A procession of symbols representing scorpions and tarantulas embellished one of the rug's many border stripes. His grave eyes followed the procession entirely around the five-by-three bit of weaving. Then he rose, bent over her, took her slim hand in silence, saluted it, and asking if he might call again very soon, went out about his business, whatever it was. Probably the most important business he had on hand just then was to get over his love for Athalie Greensleeve.

For a long while Athalie sat there beside Hafiz considering the world and what it was threatening to do to her; considering man and what he had offered and what he had not offered to do to her.

Distressed because of the pain she had inflicted on Captain Dane, yet proud of the honour done her, she sat thinking, sometimes of Clive, sometimes of Mr. Wahlbaum, sometimes of Doris and Catharine, and of her brother who had gone out to the coast years ago, and from whom she had never heard.

But mostly she thought of Clive – and of his long silence.

Presently Hafiz woke up, stretched his fluffy, snowy limbs, yawned, pink-mouthed, then looked up out of gem-clear eyes, blinking inquiringly at his young mistress.

"Hafiz," she said, "if I don't find employment very soon, what is to become of you?"

The evening paper, as yet unread, lay on the sofa beside her. She picked it up, listlessly, glancing at the headings of the front page columns. There seemed to be trouble in Mexico; trouble in Japan; trouble in Hayti. Another column recorded last night's heat and gave the list of deaths and prostrations in the city. Another column – the last on the front page – announced by cable the news of a fashionable engagement – a Miss Winifred Stuart to a Mr. Clive Bailey; both at present in Paris —

She read it again, slowly; and even yet it meant nothing to her, conveyed nothing she seemed able to comprehend.

But halfway down the column her eyes blurred, the paper slipped from her hands to the floor, and she dropped back into the hollow of the sofa, and lay there, unstirring. And Hafiz, momentarily disturbed, curled up on her lap again and went peacefully to sleep.

CHAPTER XV

TO her sisters Athalie wrote:

"For reasons of economy, and other reasons, I have moved to 1006 West Fifty-fifth Street where I have the top floor. I think that you both can find accommodations in this house when you return to New York.

"So far I have not secured a position. Please don't think I am discouraged. I do hope that you are well and successful."

Their address, at that time, was Vancouver, B. C.

To Clive Bailey, Jr., his agent wrote:

"Miss Athalie Greensleeve called at the office this morning and returned the keys to the apartment which she has occupied.

"Miss Greensleeve explained to me a fact of which I had not been aware, viz.: that the furniture, books, hangings, pictures, porcelains, rugs, clothing, furs, bed and table linen, silver, etc., etc., belong to you and not to her as I had supposed.

"I have compared the contents of the apartment with the minute inventory given me by Miss Greensleeve. Everything is accounted for; all is in excellent order.

"I have, therefore, locked up the apartment, pending orders from you regarding its disposition," – etc., etc.

The tall shabby house in Fifty-fourth Street was one of a five-storied row built by a speculator to attract fashion many years before. Fashion ignored the bait.

A small square of paper which had once been white was pasted on the brick front just over the tarnished door-bell. On it was written in ink: "Furnished Rooms."

Answering in person the first advertisement she had turned to in the morning paper Athalie had found this place. There was nothing attractive about it except the price; but that was sufficient in this emergency. For the girl would not permit herself to remain another night in the pretty apartment furnished for her by the man whose engagement had been announced to her through the daily papers.

And nothing of his would she take with her except the old gun-metal wrist-watch, and Hafiz, and the barred basket in which Hafiz had arrived. Everything else she left, her toilet silver, desk-set, her evening gowns and wraps, gloves, negligées, boudoir caps, slippers, silk stockings, all her bath linen, everything that she herself had not purchased out of her own salary – even the little silver cupid holding aloft his torch, which had been her night-light.

Never again could she illuminate that torch. The other woman must do that.

She went about quietly from room to room, lowering the shades and drawing the curtains. There was brilliant colour in her cheeks, an undimmed beauty in her eyes; pride crowned the golden head held steady and high on its slender, snowy neck. Only the lips threatened betrayal; and were bitten as punishment into immobility.

Her small steamer trunk went by a rickety private express for fifty cents: with the basket containing Hafiz, her suit-case, and a furled umbrella she started for her new lodgings.

Michael, opening the lower grille for her, stammered: "God knows why ye do this, Miss! Th' young Masther'll be afther givin' me the sack av ye lave the house unbeknowns't him!"

"I can't stay, Michael. He knows I can't. Good-bye!"

"Good-bye Miss! God be good to ye – an' th' pusheen – !" laying a huge but gentle paw on Hafiz's basket whence a gentle plaint arose.

And so Athalie and Hafiz departed into the world together; and presently bivouacked; their first étape on life's long journey ending on the top floor of 1006 West Fifty-fifth Street.

The landlady was a thin, anxious, and very common woman with false hair and teeth; and evidently determined to secure Athalie for a lodger.

But the terms she offered the girl for the entire top floor were so absurdly small that Athalie hesitated, astonished and perplexed.

"Oh, there's a jinx in the place," said the landlady; "I ain't aiming to deceive nobody, and I'll tell you the God-awful truth. If I don't," she added naïvely, "somebody else is sure to hand it to you and you'll get sore on me and quit."

"What is the matter with the apartment?" inquired the girl uneasily.

"I'll tell you: the lady that had it went dead on me last August."

"Is that all?"

"No, dearie. It was chloral. And of course, the papers got hold of it and nobody wants the apartment. That's why you get it cheap – if you'll take it and chase out the jinx that's been wished on me. Will you, dearie?"

"I don't know," said the girl, looking around at the newly decorated and cheerful rooms.

The landlady sniffed: "It certainly was one on me when I let that jinx into my house – to have her go dead on me and all like that."

"Poor thing," murmured Athalie, partly to herself.

"No, she wasn't poor. You ought to have seen her rings! Them's what got her into trouble, dearie; – and the roll she flashed."

"Wasn't it suicide?" asked Athalie.

"I gotta tell you the truth. No, it wasn't. She was feeling fine and dandy. Business had went good… There was a young man to visit her that evening. I seen him go up the stairs… But I was that sleepy I went to bed. So I didn't see him come down. And next day at noon when I went up to do the room she lay dead onto the floor, and her rings gone, and the roll missing out of her stocking."

"Did the man kill her?"

"Yes, dearie. And the papers had it. That's what put me in Dutch. I gotta be honest with you. You'd hear it, anyway."

"But how could he give her chloral – "

The anxious, excited little woman's volubility could suffer restraint no longer:

"Oh, he could dope her easy in the dark!" she burst out. "Not that the house ain't thur'ly respectable as far as I can help it, and all my lodgers is refined. No, Miss Greensleeve, I won't stand for nothing that ain't refined and genteel. Only what can a honest woman do when she's abed and asleep, what with all the latch keys and entertainin', and things like that? No, Miss Greensleeve, I ain't got myself to blame, being decent and law-abiding and all like that, what with the police keeping tabs and the neighbourhood not being Fifth Avenoo either! – and this jinx wished on me – "

"Please – "

"Oh, I suppose you ain't a-goin' to stay here now that you've learned all about these goin's on and all like that – "

"Please wait!" – for the voluble landlady was already beginning to sniffle; – "I am perfectly willing to stay, Mrs. Meehan, – if you will promise to be a little patient about my rent until I secure a position – "

"Oh, I will, Miss Greensleeve! I ain't plannin' to press you none! I know how it is with money and with young ladies. Easy come, easy go! Just give me what you can. I ain't fixed any too good myself, what with butchers and bakers and rent owed me and all like that. I guess I can trust you to act fair and square – "

"Yes; I am square – so far."

Mrs. Meehan began to sob, partly with relief, partly with a general tendency to sentimental hysteria: "I can see that, dearie. And say – if you're quiet, I ain't peekin' around corners and through key-holes. No, Miss Greensleeve; that ain't my style! Quiet behaved young ladies can have their company without me saying nothing to nobody. All I ask is that no lady will cut up flossy in any shape, form, or manner, but behave genteel and refined to one and all. I don't want no policeman in the area. That ain't much to ask, is it?" she gasped, fairly out of breath between eloquence and tears.

"No," said Athalie with a faint smile, "it isn't much to ask."

And so the agreement was concluded; Mrs. Meehan brought in fresh linen for bed and bathroom, pulled out the new bureau drawers and dusted them, carried away a few anæmic geraniums in pots, and swept the new hardwood floor with a dry mop, explaining that the entire apartment had been renovated and redecorated since the tragic episode of last August, and that all the furniture was brand new.

"Her trunks and clothes and all like that was took by the police," explained Mrs. Meehan, "but she left some rubbish behind a sliding panel which they didn't find. I found it and I put it on the top shelf in the closet – "

She dragged a chair thither, mounted it, and presently came trotting back to the front room, carrying in both arms a bulky box of green morocco and a large paper parcel bursting with odds and ends of tinsel and silk. These she dumped on the centre table, saying: "She had a cabinet-maker fix up a cupboard in the baseboard, and that's where she kept gimcracks. The police done me damage enough without my showin' them her hidin' place and the things she kept there. Here – I'll show it to you! It's full of keys and electric wires and switches – "

She took Athalie by the arm and drew her over to the west side of the room.

"You can't see nothing there, can you?" she demanded, pointing at the high wainscoting of dull wood polished by age.

Athalie confessed she could not.

"Look!"

Mrs. Meehan passed her bony hand along the panels until her work-worn forefinger rested on a polished knot in the richly grained wood. Then she pushed; and the entire square of panels swung outward, lowering like a drawbridge, and presently rested flat on the floor.

"How odd!" exclaimed Athalie, kneeling to see better.

What she saw was a cupboard lined with asbestos, and an elaborate electric switchboard set with keys from which innumerable insulated wires radiated, entering tubes that disappeared in every direction.

"What are all these for?" she asked, rising to her feet.

"Dearie, I've got to be honest with you. This here lady was a meejum."

"A – what?"

"A meejum."

"What is that?"

"Why don't you know, dearie? She threw trances for twenty per. She seen things. She done stunts with tables and tambourines and accordions. Why this here place is all wired and fixed up between the walls and the ceiling and roof and the flooring, too. There is chimes and bells and harmonicas and mechanical banjos under the flooring and in the walls and ceiling. There's a whispering phonograph, too, and something that sighs and sobs. Also a machine that is full of singing birds that pipe up just as sweet and soft and natural as can be.

"On rainy days you can amuse yourself with them keys; I don't like to fool with them myself, being nervous with a weak back and my vittles not setting right and all like that – " Again she ran down from sheer lack of breath.

Athalie gazed curiously at the secret cupboard. After a few moments she bent over, lifted and replaced the panelling and passed her slim hand over the wainscot, thoughtfully.

"So the woman was a trance-medium," she said, half to herself.

"Yes, Miss Greensleeve. She read the stars, too, and she done cards on the side; you know – all about a blond gentleman that wants to meet you and a dark lady comin' over the water to do something mean to you. She charged high, but she had customers enough – swell ladies, too, in their automobiles, and old gentlemen and young and all like that… Here's part of her outfit" – leading Athalie to the centre table and opening the green morocco box.

In the box was a slim bronze tripod and a big sphere of crystal. Mrs. Meehan placed the tripod on the table and set the crystal sphere upon it, saying dubiously: "She claimed that she could see things in that. I guess it was part of her game. I ain't never seen nothing into that glass ball, and I've looked, too. You can have it if you want it. It's kind of cute to set on the mantel."

She began to paw and grub and rummage in the big paper parcel, scratching about in the glittering mess of silk and embroidery with a pertinacity entirely gallinaceous.

"You can have these, too," she said to Athalie – "if you want 'em. They're heathen I guess – " holding up some tawdry Japanese and home-made Chinese finery.

But Athalie declined the dead woman's robes of office and Mrs. Meehan rolled them up in the wrapping paper and took them and herself off, very profuse in her gratitude to Athalie for consenting to occupy the apartment and thereby remove the "jinx" that had inhabited it since the tragedy of the month before.

A very soft and melancholy mew from the basket informed the girl that Hafiz desired his liberty. So she let him out and he trotted at her heels as she walked about inspecting the apartment. Also he did considerable inspecting on his own account, sniffing at every door-sill and crack, jumping up on chairs to look out of windows, prowling in and out of closets, his plumy tail jerking with dubiousness and indecision.

The apartment was certainly clean. Evidently the house had been a good one in its day, for the trim was dark old mahogany, rich and beautiful in colour; and the fireplace was rather pretty with its acanthus leaves and roses deeply carved in marble which time had toned to an ivory tint.

The darkly stained floor of hardwood was, of course, modern. So were the new and very hideous oriental rugs made in Hoboken, and the aniline pink wall-paper, and the brand new furniture still smelling of department store varnish. Hideous, too, were the electric fixtures, the gas-log in the old-time fireplace, and the bargain counter bric-a-brac geometrically spaced upon the handsome old mantel.

But there were possibilities in the big, square room facing south and in the two smaller bed chambers fronting the north. A modern bathroom connected these.

To find an entire top floor in New York at such a price was as amazing as it was comfortable to the girl who had not expected to be able to afford more than a small bedroom.

She had a little money left, enough to purchase food and a few pots and pans to cook it over the gas range in one of the smaller rooms.

And here she and Hafiz had their first meal on the long world-trail stretching away before her. After which she sat for a while by the window in a stiff arm-chair, thinking of Clive and of his silence, and of the young girl he was one day to marry.

Southward, the lights of the city began to break out and sparkle through the autumn haze; tall towers, hitherto invisible, suddenly glimmered against the sky-line. A double vista of lighted street lamps stretched east and west below her.

The dusty-violet light of evening softened the shabby street below, veiling ugliness and squalor and subtly transmuting meanness and poverty to picturesqueness – as artists, using only the flattering simplicity of essentials, show us in etching and aquarelle the romance of the commonplace. And so the rusty iron balconies of a chop suey across the street became quaint and curious: dragon and swinging gilded sign, banner and garish fretwork grew mellow and mysterious under the ruddy Hunter's Moon sailing aloft out of the city's haze like a great Chinese lantern.

From an unseen steeple or two chimes sounded the hour. Farther away in the city a bell answered. It is not a city of belfries and chimes; only locally and by hazard are bell notes distinguishable above the interminable rolling monotone of the streets.

And now, the haze thickening, distant reverberations, deep, mellow, melancholy, grew in the night air: fog horns from the two rivers and the bay.

Leaning both elbows on the sill of the opened window Athalie gazed wearily into the street where noisy children shrilled at one another and dodged vehicles like those quick tiny creatures whirling on ponds.

Here and there, the flare of petroleum torches lighted push-carts piled with fruit or laden with bowls of lemonade and hokey-pokey. Sidewalks were crowded with shabby people gossiping in groups or passing east and west – about what squalid business only they could know.

On the stoops of all the dwellings, brick or brownstone, people sat; the men in shirt-sleeves, the young girls bare-headed, and in light summer gowns. Pianos sounded through open parlour windows; there was dancing going on somewhere in the block.

Eastward where the street intersected the glare of the dingy avenue, a policeman stood on fixed post, the electric lights guttering on his metal-work when he turned. Athalie had laid her cheek on her arms and closed her eyes, from fatigue, perhaps; perhaps to force back the tears which, nevertheless, glimmered on her lashes where they lay close to the curved white cheeks.

Little by little the girl was taking degree after degree in her post-graduate course, the study of which was man.

And for the first time in her life a new reaction in the laboratory of experience had revealed to her a new element in her analysis; bitterness.

Which is akin to resentment. And to these it is easy to ally recklessness.

There came to her a moment, as she sat huddled there at the window, when endurance suddenly flashed into a white anger; and she found herself on her feet, pacing the room as caged things pace, with a sort of blindly fixed purpose, seeing everything yet looking at nothing that she passed.

But after this had lasted long enough she halted, gazing about her as though for something that might aid her. But there was only the room and the furniture, and Hafiz asleep on a chair; only these and the crystal sphere on its slim bronze tripod. And suddenly she found herself on her knees beside it, staring into its dusky transparent depths, fixing her mind, concentrating every thought, straining every faculty, every nerve in the one desperate and imperative desire.

But through the crystal's depths there is no aid for those who "see clearly," no comfort, no answer. She could not find there the man she searched for – the man for whom her soul cried out in fear, in anger, in despair. As in a glass, darkly, only her own face she saw, fire-edged with a light like that which burns deep in black opals.

Prone on the floor at last, her white face framed by her hands, her eyes wide open in the dark, she finally understood that her clear vision was of no avail where she herself was concerned; that they who see clearly can never use that vision to help themselves.