Aliens

"It is Christmas," explained my friend lightly. "And we always like to be jolly, you know. When is Mr. Carville due?"

A swift shadow crossed her face and was gone.

"How can I know?" she replied. "Perhaps next week, perhaps ... but I do not know."

"I was just saying," said Bill hurriedly, "what a pity he couldn"t have got in for Christmas."

"Never," said Mrs. Carville, watching the children eating chocolates.

"Never can he get in for Christmas. Every year it is the same since we are married. Always, always at sea."

She looked around at us vaguely, as though she feared, somehow, that we did not believe, or understand her. But I think we did. I think we saw suddenly the secret of this lonely woman"s soul. We saw it as she looked round at us, the immediate and precipitous chasm between such a life as she led, and the life of one like my friend, ever close to her husband, understanding his whims, his fears, his hopes, his follies and his victories. We saw the desolation of the sea-wife, the long lonely nights, the ever-present apprehension of loss. We understood the pathos of the scaldino. And swift upon this new interpretation we saw the great dangers of such a life to a woman of imperfect culture, strong pa.s.sion and yet n.o.ble aspiration. We saw, too, another and more particular tragedy possible to her, in being forever debarred from her husband"s innermost life. That vague look of distress was pregnant with meaning. She wished to say--how much! Yet in English she had not the words. For a moment there was a silence, and then once more she rose, this time to bid us adieu. We were all under an impulse, I have since learned, to press her to stay to dinner. Each was doubtful how the others would take it, and with reason, for this one feast of the year has taken on a sacramental character in recent times. We prefer, without any diminution of our Christian charity and goodwill, to eat it by ourselves. And so Mrs. Carville bade us good-bye, and was followed unwillingly by two young gentlemen who wanted to stay.

"I"ll come over this evening and bring Ben and Beppo for an hour, may I?" I said.

"You must not let them be in your way," she replied. The smile of the children was reward for a good deal of inconvenience.

"Mrs. Carville, you mustn"t put it that way. We shall always be glad to have them, out of business hours. And to-night is holy to children everywhere. They shall light the candles on our tree. You know what Flaubert once said of children--"a little thing like that in the house is the only thing that matters.""

Her eyes dropped to the heads of the children in front of her, and her face became suddenly grave, set in a pose of quiet thought.

"Did he say so?" she remarked soberly. "Well, perhaps he was right." And she took the children by the hand and went out.

And we had them back in the evening, which became uproarious. My friend greeted them dressed up as Santa Claus, with an immense cotton-wool beard and motor-goggles. We initiated them into the mysteries of Hunt the Slipper and Musical Chairs. Indeed, when neighbours began to drop in, as they did later on, they interrupted five children playing Nuts in May. Foolish old parlour-tricks we had forgotten since our own early childhood came back to memory and evoked shrieks of laughter. At ten, when I took them, well wrapped up, down our snow-trench and along the sidewalk to their own door, they were in a trance of mingled happiness and fatigue.

"Here they are, safe, Mrs. Carville," I said as she opened the door, "but very sleepy."

"You are very kind," she said. "They must go to bed. But you will come in, and drink a gla.s.s of wine? No?"

"Yes," I said, suddenly pushing aside the diffidence that years of literature had bred. "Yes, I will take a gla.s.s of wine with you, Mrs.

Carville. To the coming year."

"Oh, but," she said, laughing over her shoulder as she led the way into the parlour, "Have you the gift of good fortune that you bring to me for this next year? I hope you have. Here is the wine. My husband gets it when he goes to Ancona. The wine of Umbria. You like it?"

"To next year," I said as she filled two gla.s.ses from a large wickered flask. "And what is left of this," I added. She sat on a white chair in front of a wall covered with books, a brilliant, tragic, yet smiling figure of a beautiful woman, charming in the kindly coquetry of the moment. For that is how I interpreted her mood, that she divined my diffidence with feminine quickness and sought innocently enough to help me along. And I made up my mind to take the chance, should it appear, and warn her of what we had feared. She would take it from me, knowing of my diffidence. As she sat there, she filled one of my ideals; the robust and beautiful mother. I will have none of your pale, puling madonnas. I have never been under the influence of women, but I delight in them tall and strong and with the splendid beauty of health and maturity. Against her husband"s books, which made a background of colour and gold like old tapestry for her head, she was a wonderful complexity of vigorous, abounding life and still decorative outline. She turned and looked at me after setting down her gla.s.s and found me watching her. She smiled in a friendly way.

"You know," she said, "we have bought a home on Staten Island? Well, when we are fixed, you will come and see us--when my husband is home.

You will, all?"

"I will anyhow," I said. "I like your husband and I like your two boys, and...."

"And me?" she inquired with a smile that pursed her lips. "You no like me?" I laughed.

"I did not say that," I observed. "How could it be otherwise? Even though you will be offended, I must wonder if you know how much you mean to him."

"To him?" she echoed vaguely, in alarm.

"To your husband," I went on. "You see, he has told me a good deal of his life. And I think you have made all the difference in it. He is not a noisy man, you know, but he made it very clear at times how very much you mean to him."

She was looking at me steadily while I said this, stroking little Ben"s head as he slumbered. Her eyes were very bright, and they searched my face relentlessly.

"And you think I do not know that?" she asked slowly.

"You will think me presumptuous to have said so much. You must forgive a shy man who means no ill. Of course, you know that. What I pray for this coming year is that you will not forget it."

There was a long silence, and I fixed my eyes on a bra.s.s ash-tray and a row of corn-cobs that stood on a little table by the radiator. At length she rose and gently lifted the children to their feet, holding them close to her.

"You think bad of me, then?" she queried in a curiously toneless voice.

"Who? I?"

"All of you."

"You know we do not. You must blame only me for this. We think bad of you! Listen, Mrs. Carville. My business is with books and you may think I know nothing of the life you and your husband live. But my business is also with humanity. It is for humanity I live, for them I work, and their praise is my reward. I am, in a way, in love with humanity. All the time I want _people_. They are the only thing that matters. And this gives me a light on a good deal you might think I missed. I know how quickly people break and are carried away. I know the strongest are often the weakest. I know we often give way just when we feel strong. I know something of illusions. So I have spoken. To-morrow you will laugh and say, "It don"t matter what he thinks," And I still wish you a Happy New Year. Will you wish me one? Because I love people, humanity, so much?" And I made my way, rather overcome by feeling, out to the hall.

As I raised the latch to go out, I looked back at her. She stood at the parlour door, the light of the hall-lamp throwing her features into sharp relief.

"Wait," she said softly. I waited.

"You think bad of me?" she said again. "Why, what have I done?"

"No!" I said. "You wrong us. We should not dare ..."

"Surely," she replied, looking at me in an odd, arch manner. "So I was thinking. Good night. It is Christmas. I do not think bad of you. Good night."

And then I was running through the snow.

I did not recount this conversation in all its details to the supper party I found in the studio. I wanted to think it out. I wanted to recall and consider this--to me--very unusual interview with a married woman. I was reminded, as I lay unsleeping that night, of Mr. Carville"s enigmatic saying that "the things in books had always eluded him." As one with a certain interest in books, I had remembered his words. And it seemed that, if I looked at life honestly, the things in books would elude me too. The problem occupied me for days. I was aghast at my own obtuseness, for I was unable to decide from Mrs. Carville"s conduct what her real att.i.tude towards us might be. I did not know whether she were wayward or not. I felt bitterly that such things could not happen in a book, in a best seller.

And when the days pa.s.sed, white shrouded, and we discussed the theories we had made and demolished, I found to my astonishment that my friends had taken up a remote position on the subject. They were extremely doubtful about my story of the auto. Most likely, said they, it was a late Store delivery van. I had imagined so much. They paid detestable tribute to my imaginative powers. Married people are like this. With disconcerting abruptness, they wheel round together and go off at some incalculable tangent, serenely unconscious of any need for explanation.

They made matters worse by harping on my imagination. And they capped all by declaring that I was a bad man and hoped I would keep my evil thoughts to myself at the Festive Season.

It is here that Miss Fraenkel interposed, all unconsciously, and became the cause of our presence at a most singular catastrophe, the collapse of the aeroplane in the snow. For had we not gone out that night to visit Miss Fraenkel and with her see the New Year safely born, we should have had no vivid memory of that terrible descent, nor understood how Fate had woven our neighbours" destinies, and how inexplicably she can drive to ruin at the moment of victory.

My friends had been to New York during the day, I remember, visiting friends in Lexington Avenue, and they mentioned at dinner a report in the paper that Mr. Francis Lord was to fly from the Gottschalk grounds, on the banks of Lake Champlain, to New York and give a demonstration of the aeroplane over the city. New machines had come from England, hope sprang eternal in the reporting breast, and events of staggering scientific import were foreshadowed. Other experts were pessimistic.

They claimed their own apparatus was better than D"Aubigne"s and so got a little advertis.e.m.e.nt for themselves. Other experts again blamed the administration in a vague way. An eminent actress was interviewed and spoke of her new telephone play without adding much to the national stock of wisdom. A famous evangelist of the rough-house type proposed to use the new apparatus for reaching distant settlements.

I don"t think we took the news very seriously. We are, as I have said, inured to wonders and inclined to let science do her worst. We belong to that cla.s.s of people who, although they keep silent on the subject, hate science very heartily. My friend trumpets science loudly enough at times, I know; but he hates her in his heart, for he loves children and birds and flowers, and the colours of the distant hills when evening falls. And like us, he admires Miss Fraenkel, perhaps the most unscientific creature in the United States. He feeds her pa.s.sion for details of English life in the most shameless way. On this particular evening he entranced her with a description of the Scottish custom of sitting on the plinth of St. Paul"s Cathedral in London and welcoming the new year with bottles of whisky. Every Scotsman south of the Tweed was under oath to appear in the churchyard in kilts and tartan-plaid at midnight. Most of them, he added, wore red beards. Miss Fraenkel"s fine hazel eyes grew round as she visualized this frightful throng gathered among the graves of the churchyard. It occurred to me that it only showed, after all, how difficult it is to convey in words a just notion of a foreign land, and how easy it is for "travellers" tales" to become incredible fabrications. How would the quiet townships of rural England, where the names of people and places go back to Saxon days, credit us if we told them of our tavern known as Slovitzsky"s, where citizens, of all the races of Europe, sang "Auld lang Syne"? Not in kilts, it is true, but in costumes even more surprising to the aforesaid quiet townships.

We get a good deal of fun out of Miss Fraenkel, no doubt, but it may be that she, without ever giving away the secret, gets a good deal of fun out of us. Sometimes there is a whimsical glint in her hazel eyes that makes me reflect....

We were chatting quietly, after we had left her, full of good resolutions, and we were climbing Pine Street, the deep snow making the pa.s.sage difficult, when we heard the strange sound of the rejoicing in New York, twenty miles away. And it was without any thought of coming peril, without any thought of our neighbours, that we paused at the top of the ridge and looked across the valley. Indeed, we spoke of a previous New Year when we had sallied out from our flat and joined the tumultuous citizens in the streets. Above us was the dark blue sky of a wintry midnight, obscured here and there by indeterminate blotches of moving cloud, and far away to the eastward lay a long, low glare pierced by a single white light, the lantern of the Metropolitan Tower in New York.

We paused and stood close together upon the immediate edge of the vacant plot, now several feet deep in snow, our figures throwing long shadows upon the ghostly purity of the covering. And we became aware that we were not watching so much as listening, for on the freshening easterly wind there was borne such a rumour as men are not often permitted to make or to hear. It could scarcely be called a noise; it was rather a terrible and confusing _presence_ translated into sound. So enormous was it, and so distant, that it enfolded us like a foreboding of disaster.

It was as though one were listening to the cheering of innumerable myriads on another planet. There was neither cessation to it nor paroxysm, neither surging up nor dying away. It was a continuous and prodigious drone. And the wonder of it was driven, if possible, a notch higher when it was known that this uproar was caused, not by the moans of a lost world falling down through inconceivable s.p.a.ces to Gehenna, but by the million tin horns which the people of New York deemed a fitting tribute to the New Year. It was a fan-fare _in excelsis_, defying criticism and distance. It was the apotheosis of Manhattan, a sky-sc.r.a.per of dizzy sound. It was, moreover, the expression of a primal and singularly innocent joy, the joy of a young nation on beholding a New Year. It was almost as though, in the cataclysm of hideous and unlooked-for calamities, in the vanishing of cities and kingdoms, in the irruption of mountains and the sinking of t.i.tanic ships beneath the waves, even the recurrence of the seasons had become an adventure and a matter of supreme wonder.

A million tin horns!

I suppose it was our preoccupation with the solemnity of the hour and the stupendous accompaniment of it that prevented our seeing at first a strange and disquieting signal. My friend suddenly grasped my arm and pointed to a black bank of cloud over Newark, where there shone a tiny constellation of three green lights. And the sound of New York"s jubilation was forgotten. With murmured exclamations we stood with our faces raised towards this new yet familiar portent. And as we gazed the green rays were borne beyond the cloud bank and were seen moving more and more rapidly against the dark blue of the star-lit heavens. Moved as by one impulse, we plunged into the snow and took a few steps, as though to gain a nearer view of this strangely beautiful object. Almost immediately it was above us and the thuttering roar of its machinery came dully to our ears in waves and sharp gusts of sound. And we cried "Oh!" involuntarily, for we could see the dark spread of the vans plunging frantically in the air. I remember I stretched out my arms in an impotent gesture of aid, for with the speed of a bird of prey the dark ma.s.s lurched in a flat swaying parabola towards the earth, spinning the while upon itself, and striking the deep bed of snow, burst into a ma.s.s of blinding flame.

So sudden was the catastrophe that we stood there in the brilliantly illuminated snow, rigid with stupefaction, staring at the intense glare.