Out of the Air Part 16

"She's sad still," Lindsay dropped in absent comment.

"Yes," Mrs. Spash agreed.

"I wonder what she wants?" Lindsay addressed this to himself. His voice was so low that perhaps Mrs. Spash did not hear it. At any rate she made no answer.

Another silence came.

Mrs. Spash finished her dusting. But she lingered. Lindsay still sat at the table; but his eyes had left the little villages arranged there.

They went through the door and gazed out into the brilliant patch of sunlight on the gra.s.s. There spread under his eyes a narrow stretch of lawn, all sun-touched velvet; beyond a big crescent of garden.

Low-growing zinnias in futuristic colors, high phlox in pastel colors; higher, Canterbury bells, deep blue; highest of all, hollyhocks, wine red. Beyond stretched further expanses of lawn. One tall, wide wine-gla.s.s elm spread a perfect circle of emerald shade. One low, thick copper-beech dropped an irregular splotch of luminous shadow. Beyond all this ran the gray, lichened stone wall. And beyond the stone wall came unredeemed jungle. Mrs. Spash began, all over again, to dust and to arrange the scanty furniture. After a while she spoke.

"Mr. Lindsay--"

Lindsay started abruptly.

"Mr. Lindsay--that time you fainted when you first saw me, setting out there on the door-stone, you remember--?"

Lindsay nodded.

"Well, who was you expecting to see?"

Lindsay, alert now as a wire spring, turned on her, not his eyes alone, nor his head; but his whole body. Mrs. Spash was looking straight at him. Their glances met midway. The old eyes pierced the young eyes with an intent scrutiny. The young eyes stabbed the old eyes with an intense interrogation. Lindsay did not answer her question directly. Instead he laughed.

"I guess I don't have to answer you," he declared. "I had seen her often then.... I had seen the others too.... I don't know why _you_ should have frightened me when _they_ didn't.... I think it was that I wasn't expecting anything human.... I've seen them since.... They never frighten me."

Mrs. Spash's reply was simple enough. "I see them all the time." She added, with a delicate lilt of triumph, "I've seen them for years--"

Lindsay continued to look at her--and now his gaze was somber; even a little despairing. "What do they want? What does _she_ want?"

Mrs. Spash's reply came instantly, although there were pauses in her words. "I don't know. I've tried.... I can't make out." She accompanied these simple statements with a reinforcing decisive nod of her little head.

"I can't guess either--I can't conjecture-- There's something she wants me to do. She can't tell me. And they're trying to help her tell me. All except the little girl--"

"Do you see the little girl?" Mrs. Spash demanded. "Well, I declare!

That's very queer, I must say. I never see Cherry."

"I wish I saw her oftener," Lindsay laughed ruefully. "_She_ doesn't ask anything of me. She's just herself. But the others--Gale--Monroe-- My G.o.d! It's killing me!" He laughed again, and this time with a real amus.e.m.e.nt.

Mrs. Spash interrupted his laughter. "Do you see Mr. Monroe?" she asked in a pleased tone. "Well, I declare! Aren't you the fortunate creature.

I never see _him_!"

"All the time," Lindsay answered shortly. "If I could only get it. I feel so stupid, so incredibly gross and lumbering and heavy. I'd do anything--"

He arose and walked over to the picture of Lutetia Murray which still hung above the fireplace. He stared at her hard. "I'd do anything for her, if I could only find out what it was."

"Yes," Mrs. Spash admitted dispa.s.sionately, "that's the thing everybody felt about her, they'd do anything for her. Not that she ever asked them to do anything--"

Lindsay began to pace the length of the long room. "What is happening?

Has the old ramshackle time-machine finally broken a spring so that, in this last revolution, it hauls, out of the past, these pictures of two decades ago? Or is it that there are superimposed one on the other two revolving worlds--theirs and ours--and _theirs_ or _ours_ has stopped an instant, so that I can glance into _theirs_? I feel as though I were in the dark of a camera obscura gazing into their brightness. Or have those two years in the air permanently broken my psychology; so that through that rift I shall always have the power to look into strange worlds? Or am I just piercing another dimension?"

Mrs. Spash had been following him with her faded, calm old eyes.

Apparently she guessed these questions were not addressed to her. She kept silence.

"I've racked my brain. I lie awake nights and tear the universe to pieces. I outguess guessing and outconjecture conjecture. My thoughts fly to the end of s.p.a.ce. My wonder invades the very citadel of fancy. My surmises storm the last outpost of reality. But it beats me. I can't get it." Lindsay stopped. Mrs. Spash made no comment. Apparently her twenty years' training among artists had prepared her for monologues of this sort. She listened; but it was obvious that she did not understand; did not expect to understand.

"Does she want me to stay _here_ or go _there_?" Lindsay demanded of the air. "If _here_, what does she want me to do? If _there_--where is _there_? If _there_, what does she want me to do _there_? Is her errand concerned with the living or the dead? If the living, who? If the dead, who? Where to find them? How to find them?" He turned his glowing eyes on Mrs. Spash. "I only know two things. She wants me to do something.

She wants me to do it soon. Oh, I suppose I know another thing-- If I don't do it soon, it will be too late."

Mrs. Spash was still following him with her placid, blue, old gaze.

"There, there!" she said soothingly. "Now don't you get too excited, Mr.

Lindsay. It'll all come to you."

"But how--" Lindsay objected. "And when--"

"I don't know--but she'll tell you somehow. She's cute-- She's awful cute. You mark my words, she'll find a way."

"That's the reason I don't have you in the house yet, Mrs. Spash,"

Lindsay explained.

"Oh, you don't have to tell me that," Mrs. Spash announced, triumphant because of her own perspicuity.

"It's only that I have a feeling that she can do it more easily if we're alone. That's why I send you home at night. She comes oftenest in the evening when I'm alone. They all do. Oh, it's quite a procession some nights. They come one after another, all trying--" He paused. "Sometimes this room is so full of their torture that I-- You know, it all began before I came here. It began in an apartment in New York. It was in Jeffrey Lewis' old rooms. He tried to tell me first, you see."

"Did you see Mr. Lewis there?" Mrs. Spash asked this as casually as though she had said, "Has the postman been here this morning?" She added, "I see him here."

"No, I didn't see him," Lindsay explained grimly, "but I felt him. And, believe me, I knew he was there. He was the only one of the lot that frightened me. I wouldn't have been frightened if I had seen him. It was he, really, who sent me here. I work it out that he couldn't get it over and he sent me to Lutetia because he thought she could. I wonder--" he stopped short. This explanation came as though something had flashed electrically through his mind. But he did not pursue that wonder.

"Well, don't you get discouraged," Mrs. Spash reiterated. "You mark my words, she'll manage to say what she's got to say."

"Well, it's time I went to work," Lindsay remarked a little listlessly.

"After all, the life of Lutetia Murray must get finished. Oh, by the way, Mrs. Spash," Lindsay veered as though remembering suddenly something he had forgotten, "do other people see them?"

"No--at least I never heard tell that they did."

"How did the rumor get about that the place was haunted, then?"

"I spread it," Mrs. Spash explained. "I didn't want folks breaking in to see if there was anything to steal. And I didn't want them poking about the place."

"How did you spread it?"

"I told children," Mrs. Spash said simply. "Less than a month, folks were seeing all kinds of ridic'lous ghosts here. n.o.body likes to go by alone at night."

"It's a curious thing," Lindsay reverted to his main theme, "that I know her message has nothing to do with this biography. I don't know how I know it; but I do. Of course, that would be the first thing a man would think of. It is something more instant, more acute. It beats me altogether. All I can do is wait."

"Now don't you think any more about it, Mr. Lindsay," Mrs. Spash advised. "You go upstairs and set to work. I'm going to get you up the best lunch today you've had yet."

"That's the dope," Lindsay agreed. "The only way to take a man's mind off his troubles is to give him a good dinner. You'll have to work hard, though, Eunice Spash, to beat your own record."