The Ghost Feeler (7 page)

As he spoke he saw the answer trembling joyously upon her lips; but it died in the ensuing silence, and she stood motionless, resisting the persuasion of his hand.

‘What is it?' he entreated.

‘Wait a moment,' she said, with a strange hesitation in her voice. ‘Tell me first, are you quite sure of yourself? Is there no one on earth whom you sometimes remember?'

‘Not since I have seen you,' he replied; for, being a man, he had indeed forgotten.

Still she stood motionless, and he saw that the shadow deepened on her soul.

‘Surely, love,' he rebuked her, ‘it was not that which troubled you? For my part I have walked through Lethe. The past has melted like a cloud before the moon. I never lived until I saw you.'

She made no answer to his pleadings, but at length, rousing herself with a visible effort, she turned away from him and moved towards the Spirit of Life, who still stood near the threshold.

‘I want to ask you a question,' she said, in a troubled voice.

‘Ask,' said the Spirit.

‘A little while ago,' she began, slowly, ‘you told me that every soul which has not found a kindred soul on earth is destined to find one here.'

‘And have you not found one?' asked the Spirit.

‘Yes; but will it be so with my husband's soul also?'

‘No,' answered the Spirit of Life, ‘for your husband imagined that he had found his soul's mate on earth in you; and for such delusions eternity itself contains no cure.'

She gave a little cry. Was it of disappointment or triumph?

‘Then – then what will happen to him when he comes here?'

‘That I cannot tell you. Some field of activity and happiness he will doubtless find, in due measure to his capacity for being active and happy.'

She interrupted, almost angrily: ‘He will never be happy without me.'

‘Do not be too sure of that,' said the Spirit.

She took no notice of this, and the Spirit continued: ‘He will not understand you here any better than he did on earth.'

‘No matter,' she said; ‘I shall be the only sufferer, for he always thought that he understood me.'

‘His boots will creak just as much as ever —'

‘No matter.'

‘And he will slam the door —'

‘Very likely.'

‘And continue to read railway novels —'

She interposed, impatiently: ‘Many men do worse than that.'

‘But you said just now', said the Spirit, ‘that you did not love him.'

‘True,' she answered, simply; ‘but don't you understand that I shouldn't feel at home without him? It is all very well for a week or two – but for eternity! After all, I never minded the creaking of his boots, except when my head ached, and I don't suppose it will ache
here;
and he was always so sorry when he had slammed the door, only he never
could
remember not to. Besides, no one else would know how to look after him, he is so helpless. His inkstand would never be filled, and he would always be out of stamps and visiting-cards. He would never remember to have his umbrella recovered, or to ask the price of anything before he bought it. Why, he wouldn't even know what novels to read. I always had to choose the kind he liked, with a murder or a forgery and a successful detective.'

She turned abruptly to her kindred soul, who stood listening with a mien of wonder and dismay.

‘Don't you see', she said, ‘that I can't possibly go with you?'

‘But what do you intend to do?' asked the Spirit of Life.

‘What do I intend to do?' she returned, indignantly. ‘Why, I mean to wait for my husband, of course. If he had come here first
he
would have waited for me for years and years; and it would break his heart not to find me here when he comes.' She pointed with a contemptuous gesture to the magic vision of hill and vale sloping away to the translucent mountains. ‘He wouldn't give a fig for all that,' she said, ‘if he didn't find me here.'

‘But consider,' warned the Spirit, ‘that you are now choosing for eternity. It is a solemn moment.'

‘Choosing!' she said, with a half-sad smile. ‘Do you still keep up here that old fiction about choosing? I should have thought that
you
knew better than that. How can I help myself? He will expect to find me here when he comes, and he would never believe you if you told him that I had gone away with someone else – never, never.'

‘So be it,' said the Spirit. ‘Here, as on earth, each one must decide for himself.'

She turned to her kindred soul and looked at him gently, almost wistfully. ‘I am sorry,' she said. ‘I should have liked to talk with you again; but you will understand, I know, and I dare say you will find someone else a great deal cleverer —'

And without pausing to hear his answer she waved him a swift farewell and turned back towards the threshold.

‘Will my husband come soon?' she asked the Spirit of Life.

‘That you are not destined to know,' the Spirit replied.

‘No matter,' she said, cheerfully; ‘I have all eternity to wait in.'

And still seated alone on the threshold, she listens for the creaking of his boots.

A Journey

As she lay in her berth, staring at the shadows overhead, the rush of the wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into circles of wakeful lucidity. The sleeping-car had sunk into its night-silence. Through the wet window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long stretches of hurrying blackness. Now and then she turned her head and looked through the opening in the hangings at her husband's curtains across the aisle ...

She wondered restlessly if he wanted anything and if she could hear him if he called. His voice had grown very weak within the last months and it irritated him when she did not hear. This irritability, this increasing childish petulance seemed to give expression to their imperceptible estrangement. Like two faces looking at one another through a sheet of glass they were close together, almost touching, but they could not hear or feel each other: the conductivity between them was broken. She, at least, had this sense of separation, and she fancied sometimes that she saw it reflected in the look with which he supplemented his failing words. Doubtless the fault was hers. She was too impenetrably healthy to be touched by the irrelevancies of disease. Her self-reproachful tenderness was tinged with the sense of his irrationality: she had a vague feeling that there was a purpose in his helpless tyrannies. The suddenness of the change had found her so unprepared. A year ago their pulses had beat to one robust measure; both had the same prodigal confidence in an exhaustless future. Now their energies no longer kept step: hers still bounded ahead of life, preempting unclaimed regions of hope and activity, while his lagged behind, vainly struggling to overtake her.

When they married, she had such arrears of living to make up: her days had been as bare as the whitewashed schoolroom where she forced innutritious facts upon reluctant children. His coming had broken in on the slumber of circumstance, widening the present till it became the encloser of remotest chances. But imperceptibly the horizon narrowed. Life had a grudge against her: she was never to be allowed to spread her wings.

At first the doctors had said that six weeks of mild air would set him right; but when he came back this assurance was explained as having of course included a winter in a dry climate. They gave up their pretty house, storing the wedding presents and new furniture, and went to Colorado. She had hated it there from the first. Nobody knew her or cared about her; there was no one to wonder at the good match she had made, or to envy her the new dresses and the visiting-cards which were still a surprise to her. And he kept growing worse. She felt herself beset with difficulties too evasive to be fought by so direct a temperament. She still loved him, of course; but he was gradually, undefinably ceasing to be himself. The man she had married had been strong, active, gently masterful: the male whose pleasure it is to clear a way through the material obstructions of life; but now it was she who was the protector, he who must be shielded from importunities and given his drops or his beef-juice though the skies were falling. The routine of the sick-room bewildered her; this punctual administering of medicine seemed as idle as some uncomprehended religious mummery.

There were moments, indeed, when warm gushes of pity swept away her instinctive resentment of his condition, when she still found his old self in his eyes as they groped for each other through the dense medium of his weakness. But these moments had grown rare. Sometimes he frightened her: his sunken expressionless face seemed that of a stranger; his voice was weak and hoarse; his thin-lipped smile a mere muscular contraction. Her hand avoided his damp soft skin, which had lost the familiar roughness of health: she caught herself furtively watching him as she might have watched a strange animal. It frightened her to feel that this was the man she loved; there were hours when to tell him what she suffered seemed the one escape from her fears. But in general she judged herself more leniently, reflecting that she had perhaps been too long alone with him, and that she would feel differently when they were at home again, surrounded by her robust and buoyant family. How she had rejoiced when the doctors at last gave their consent to his going home! She knew, of course, what the decision meant; they both knew. It meant that he was to die; but they dressed the truth in hopeful euphuisms, and at times, in the joy of preparation, she really forgot the purpose of their journey, and slipped into an eager allusion to next year's plans.

At last the day of leaving came. She had a dreadful fear that they would never get away; that somehow at the last moment he would fail her; that the doctors held one of their accustomed treacheries in reserve; but nothing happened. They drove to the station, he was installed in a seat with a rug over his knees and a cushion at his back, and she hung out of the window waving unregretful farewells to the acquaintances she had really never liked till then.

The first twenty-four hours had passed off well. He revived a little and it amused him to look out of the window and to observe the humours of the car. The second day he began to grow weary and to chafe under the dispassionate stare of the freckled child with the lump of chewing-gum. She had to explain to the child's mother that her husband was too ill to be disturbed: a statement received by that lady with a resentment visibly supported by the maternal sentiment of the whole car ...

That night he slept badly and the next morning his temperature frightened her: she was sure he was growing worse. The day passed slowly, punctuated by the small irritations of travel. Watching his tired face, she traced in its contractions every rattle and jolt of the train, till her own body vibrated with sympathetic fatigue. She felt the others observing him too, and hovered restlessly between him and the line of interrogative eyes. The freckled child hung about him like a fly; offers of candy and picture-books failed to dislodge her: she twisted one leg around the other and watched him imperturbably. The porter, as he passed, lingered with vague proffers of help, probably inspired by philanthropic passengers swelling with the sense that ‘something ought to be done'; and one nervous man in a skull-cap was audibly concerned as to the possible effect on his wife's health.

The hours dragged on in a dreary inoccupation. Towards dusk she sat down beside him and he laid his hand on hers. The touch startled her. He seemed to be calling her from far off. She looked at him helplessly and his smile went through her like a physical pang.

‘Are you very tired?' she asked.

‘No, not very.'

‘We'll be there soon now.'

‘Yes, very soon.'

‘This time tomorrow –'

He nodded and they sat silent. When she had put him to bed and crawled into her own berth she tried to cheer herself with the thought that in less than twenty-four hours they would be in New York. Her people would all be at the station to meet her – she pictured their round unanxious faces pressing through the crowd. She only hoped they would not tell him too loudly that he was looking splendidly and would be all right in no time: the subtler sympathies developed by long contact with suffering were making her aware of a certain coarseness of texture in the family sensibilities.