F. Britten Austin

“ It was really Christine sitting there, filling that usually empty chair, breathing with slight rise and fall of her bosom as she gazed into the fire. And if the other were a dream—the happy past that she called up in imagination—just an old man’s dream, why he would allow himself, that sentimental self in him that none but himself had ever seen, the happiness of the illusion to the full. ”

“ As though roused from a dream by the crash of its contact with the brass curb, the girl started and turned to her companion. He picked up the crystal, starred and fissured with its fall—henceforth useless.
“Oh, Jim!” she cried in poignant regret. “We shall not see—— What is going to happen this time?”
[Pg 186]
She held his hand between her two, gazed up into his face in fond anxiety, yearned out to him.
He put down the crystal, drew her close, enfolded her.
“Love!” he answered. “Love—once more and for always! And, to us, dear, nothing else matters. It is the one reality.” ”

“ The air about them seemed mysteriously charged with tumultuous passion, with the inaudible vociferations of that surging mob. To both, it seemed as though they [Pg 171] were in contact with a real crowd, beset by the vague, fierce emotions that gather and roll in the collective, primitive soul of humanity in congregation. It set their hearts to a quicker beat, bewildered their brains with unheard clamours.
The girl in the vision—so strikingly like the girl in the chair that she seemed a duplication of her personality—drew herself erect on the edge of the crowd and wiped her eyes. ”

“ But Horst, with a blood-curdling scream of terror, had flung himself at the charthouse door, thrown it open. They heard the hiss and sough of the dark seas. He plunged out, blindly, head-foremost. Then, just beyond the threshold, he stopped, recoiled, staggered back into the charthouse.
“No!” he gasped, hoarsely. “No!—I can’t face them! I can’t face them!—I can’t die!—I dare not!”
He shook in a palsy of the faculties. His eyes agonizedly sought their unsympathetic faces. The German submarine commander is a pariah among seafaring men, whatever their nationality. ”

“ He put up the receiver, turned to his wife with a grim smile.
“Now we shall see what Harry’s other choice is like,” he said.
She was not to be diverted.
“But, Jack—you’ll tell her?—You must tell her!” she implored.
He looked her full in the eyes. His voice was grave.
“Evelyn! Are you tired of our life together? Do you prefer him to me?”
She turned away her head with a hopeless gesture.
“Oh, don’t ask me! Don’t tempt me!—I don’t want to think of myself—I only want to do what is right! And how can it be right to—to let him go away like a stranger from all that was his!” ”

“ Captain Strong!—a younger, slighter Captain Strong—but undoubtedly he. I saw the flash of his eyes under the heavy brows, the living man! My consciousness checked for a moment at this phenomenon of duplication, and then accepted it. It seemed another part of me that was listening to the deep breathing of the man at my side—I felt myself mingling with what I saw almost as with actual reality—let myself drift as in a dream where the fantastic ceases to be strange. ”

“ I shall never love another woman.”
She ignored the sombre vaticination, determined to keep on a safer plane of futurity.
“Oh, wouldn’t you like to see, Jack? Fifty years ahead—and all that will happen in the meantime?” There was just a hint of seriousness in the light tone, in the bright eyes which smiled into his. “If one could only know!” Her face went wistful. “I often wonder—these crystal-gazers and people—whether they can really see——” She looked up at, him. “Jack! You are so clever and know everything—don’t you know any place where one can go and really see what is going to happen?” ”

“ Lucia! To say that we were startled is to understate our astonishment—we were dumbfounded. The first word of the cryptic message! We gazed at her for a moment as at a complete stranger from the clouds—and indeed she looked it, as she smiled at us with bright malicious eyes. The diffident Pauline we knew had completely disappeared.
“She is possessed!” screamed her mother. “Oh, God—restore her! restore her!”
The girl stood up suddenly from her chair, passed her hand over her eyes, shook herself as though shaking off sleep. She turned away from us deliberately. ”

“ Every year has been full, full to the brim, with sympathy and love.” She sighed, gazing into the fire. “And that’s the only thing in life that matters—the only thing. Success without love would have been very barren to you, wouldn’t it, Harry?” Her eyes came round to him.
“Dead Sea fruit, my darling,” the illusion was almost perfect to him, the irony without bitterness, scarcely perceived, “dust and ashes at the core.” He smiled at her from a strangely sentimental self that was almost foreign to him and yet his own. “Christine, without you I should not really have lived.” ”

“ The watchers turned to the entranced woman as though involuntarily expecting a reply through her from that mysterious region where her soul was in touch with the long-past tragedy she had revealed. She still wept silently in that awful sleep which was no sleep. But no word passed her lips. Only the clock she held upon her lap struck one silvery note, marking the half-hour.
At the sound the doctor turned from the fireplace and took up the clock. He gazed, with a passionate intensity, upon the inscription on the back.
“Marcelle!” he murmured. “Our love ceases not when time itself shall cease! ”

“ She stared, as if spell-bound, at the dark curtains from which her father’s oval face detached itself in the illumination of the table. The glass slipped from her fingers, smashed.
Forsdyke’s story ceased abruptly. Four pairs of alarmed eyes focussed themselves upon his daughter. Jimmy, involuntarily, had half risen from his chair. The movement seemed to recall the girl to her surroundings. She shuddered and then, with an evident effort of will, brought back her gaze to the table. Her smile routed the momentary anxiety of her companions. ”

“ The two young men had been yarning with the chief engineer in the pleasant warmth of the engine-room, when a glance at the clock reminded them that it was the hour when the steward brought biscuits and cocoa to the charthouse. Light-hearted as boys, their unpleasant thoughts of the captain dissipated by the cheerful talk in which they had been indulging, they scrambled up the iron-runged ladder from the warm, oily depths to the black, damp chill of the outer night. ”

“ She shook her head again. “We must be reasonable, Jack. If I saw any chance——”
“Yes,” he interrupted, brutally, “if you saw any chance of my driving you about in six months’ time in a big motor-car like James Arrowsmith’s—then you would condescend to love me!”
She stood up, her eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, don’t, Jack!” She turned away her head, pressed her hand to her eyes, dropped it in a hopeless gesture. She faced him again, her sensitive mouth quivering at the corners, her expression appealing from misery to compassion. Evidently, she hardly dared trust herself to speak. ”

“ I recognized it—the priest who had slumbered at his post!—and then, with a curious little internal shock, but vaguely, as if these later incidents belonged to another existence, the full recognition dawned upon me—the wretched native who had loitered about the deserted pagoda of Cho-lon, the conjurer of the café, the conjurer who—ages since—had filled the saloon of the Mary Gleeson with smoke and incense from the red fire of a bronze bowl! His ugly face contorted with vindictive cunning, he crept now upon the oblivious lovers locked in their passionate embrace. ”

“ Vincent posted himself by the German’s side, his levelled revolver held just out of reach of a sudden snatch.
The German tried one more expostulation.
“This is madness!” he cried. “You surely do not propose to commit a cold-blooded murder!”
“One!” said Chassaigne, grimly. “Two more minutes, monsieur!”
The German laughed diabolically.
“Very well, then! Commit your murder! Much will it profit you! I am the only man in the world who can influence that young woman. Whatever you may think, you cannot transform her personality. Ottilie Rosenhagen she is and Ottilie Rosenhagen she will remain!” ”

“ In the shadow of the trees lurked a vague white figure. Toward it, across the moonlit open space, came another—a native girl. I could see her clearly. She was so daintily beautiful that I could not but suspect foreign blood in her. The best-looking Annamite girl I had seen was gross compared with her delicate charm. For all that, she was genuinely Oriental in type. Her lithe little figure, clad in a simple twisted robe, approached swiftly, her head turning from side to side in bird-like enquiry, peeping behind each bush she passed. ”

“ We returned to Saigon on the steam-tram and shortly afterward we found ourselves seated on the deserted terrace of a café, trickling water through the sugar into our absinthe, for all the world as though we were in some bankrupt quarter of Marseilles. Natives thronged around us pestering us to buy all sorts of worthless trifles in their horrible pidgin-French—petit négre they call it. Their ‘Mossieu acheter—mossieu acheter’ at every moment thoroughly exasperated me. But Captain Strong sat lost in a brooding reverie where he did not even hear them. ”

“ The crystal held her still as its centre—like the lens of a cinematograph following always the chief personage upon the screen—and, watching her, the man and woman in the chair forgot the globe that they held with cataleptic rigidity, forgot the diminished scale of the vision. Their perceptions adjusted themselves like those of children who day-dream among their toys, and it seemed to both of them that they gazed into a real scene with full-sized human emotions at clash in the acute earnestness of present life. ”

“ No man could have the iron will—he glanced straight into the blue eyes of the impassive Horst, read nothing—no man could stand the strain without betraying himself. The murderer brought back to the scene of his crime broke down into confession—and, if he were the murderer of the Gloucester City, Horst was being brought back with ironic inexorability to the site of his assassination, brought back by those subtle, apparently normal, everyday circumstances from which there is no escape. ”

“ There was only redly illumined smoke rolling upward from a dull red glow and an atmosphere of sweet sickly fumes that held my body in a drugged paralysis.
“Still I gazed, fascinated. Those thick, wreathing masses of smoke were shaping themselves—shaping themselves into something—something columnar. I watched like one in a dream, and as I watched a part of me attained to consciousness of Captain Strong sitting in frozen immobility by the side of me. The wreathing smoke coalesced, formed itself into something whose outlines were not yet clear. ”

“ He looked white and ill, thoroughly shaken. His friend, contemplating him, was impressed by his appearance. Could such a shock be produced by a merely imagined resemblance? He felt that it could not—and then those three moles! His mind reverted to the young woman, to her indubitably genuine non-recognition, and he felt more than ever puzzled. With a quiet deliberation he drew up a chair and seated himself close to his comrade. ”

“ The only sounds were the creaking of gear as the Upsal rose and subsided on the swell, the swish and suck of the long [Pg 251] waves that ran past her in the darkness beyond the open charthouse door.
Lyngstrand’s mouth had set in a thin line. His lips, compressed, opened but slightly as he spoke.
“Captain Horst,” he said, with grim distinctness, “you are certainly going to die. I give you the privilege of the warning you did not extend to your victims.”
Horst looked up suddenly. His eyes, blue still, but crazed with terror, fixed themselves upon the gray eyes that met them pitilessly. ”

“ He lifted her hand.
“Gnädige Frau,” he said, and the level, passionless voice gave no hint to those ignorant of the language of the purport of the German words which followed, “when you wake from this sleep you will entirely forget the hideous dream through which you have passed. You will never remember it, waking or asleep. You will think of your husband as you have always thought of him—faithful and loving. You will completely resume your normal [Pg 49] life. You will not even be aware that you have slept. It will seem to you as if you had only just sat down in this chair. ”

“ I married her eighteen months ago and she’s everything to me. I don’t think there’s another woman like her in the world! And she feels the same about me. That’s the right sort of married life, isn’t it?”
He waited for her agreement. Her tongue seemed to be sticking to the roof of her dry mouth. She could only nod, speechlessly, and try to smile. Something seemed to be crying out in her: “Harry! Harry!” Another part of her consciousness prayed desperately for guidance. ”

“ She is possessed by an evil spirit! My Pauline! My Pauline!” She sank on her knees by one of the swivel-chairs, gave herself up to agonized prayers. “Oh, God, cast out the evil one! Oh, God, cast out the evil one!”
Thinking that this strange incident had already lasted more than long enough, I took a step toward the girl with a vague idea (though I didn’t quite know how) of breaking the hypnosis. She stood looking upward still, with a wheedling, diabolical smile, into apparent nothingness.
“We will go together—we two—with the treasure, say, John Dawson?” ”

“ The old man stared speechlessly. His faculties seemed inhibited under the shock. The red faded out of his round face, left it ashen gray under the close-cropped white hair. Kranz, watching him narrowly, feared for his heart. He made a brusque little gesture as though seizing control of himself.
“Herr Gott! It’s—it’s his voice!” he gasped.
His eyes turned to Kranz and there was fear in them, a primitive fear of the supernatural. Trembling, he reeled rather than walked to the chair by the table with the telephone, dropped heavily into it. ”

“ As he expected, the shock of this armed entry so vividly recalled the night of terror in Lille when the girl-victims were snatched from their violated homes, had sufficed to reawaken the personality which had then agonized in its last moments of freedom.
Vincent enfolded her, murmuring reassuring words as he caressed the head that hid itself upon his breast. Her body shook with violent sobs.
The German stood up, placed himself, with a shrug of the shoulders, between the double file of infantrymen. The officer produced a notebook, asked a few questions of Chassaigne, jotted down the replies. ”

“ Geoffrey, who was peering over his shoulder, uttered a startled exclamation.
“And look!” he cried. “There’s your Katalina!” He pointed to a small islet just north of Old Providence, a mere dot on the chart. “Santa Katalina!—My hat! that is weird!”
It certainly was. From whatever stratum of Pauline’s consciousness her writing had emanated, it was an amazing thing that she should have written down the exact latitude and longitude of a tiny island off the Nicaraguan coast and named it correctly. Even I could not help feeling that it was more than a fortuitous coincidence, that it was uncanny. ”