"Miss Latimer is tired," said Bevis, looking across at her, feeling reluctance in her colourless replies. "And I"m tired, too. We"d both rather, far, play bridge."
But to this Miss Latimer at once said coldly: "No, I am not tired.
Bridge is the more tiring of the two."
"Of course it is. We can all go to sleep around the table, if we like.
It"s in the corridor, isn"t it? I"ll get it." Antonia tossed aside her knitting and moved away.
For a moment, after she had left the room, the young man sat on, his hands still clasped behind his head, and contemplated Miss Latimer, meditating a further appeal. But her pale little profile, fixed impa.s.sively on the fire, offered no hint of response. Much as she might dislike the game, she would never take sides with him against Antonia.
Any appeal that might be made must be to Antonia herself, and, after the moment"s pause, he rose and limped after her.
She was outside in the broad bal.u.s.traded corridor from which one looked down into the hall, and she had lifted a bowl of flowers from a little mahogany table that stood there.
Bevis closed the door behind him. He, also, laid his hands on the table, arresting her.
"Tony," he said, "give it up." The door was closed, but he spoke in a low voice. "I don"t like it."
"Why not?" She, too, spoke in a low voice; and she stood still, her eyes on his.
"I don"t like it," he repeated. "It"s not right. Not now. After what"s happened in these years."
Oh, what a blunder! What a cursed blunder! He saw, as he spoke the words, the fire they lighted in her. She had been an actress, dressed for a part, pretending gaiety and revival to inveigle him into an experiment. Over the table, her hands hard grasped upon the edge, she kept her eyes fixed on him.
"You _do_ believe in it, then?--That the spirits of the dead speak through it?"
Cursed blunder! How pale she had become, as if beneath the actress"s rouge. There was no laughter left, or pretence of gaiety.
"No: I don"t believe it"s spirits. I believe, as you said, that it"s subconscious trickery. And it"s not a time to mess about with it. That"s all. It"s ugly: out of place."
"If it"s only that--subconscious trickery--that"s what I believe too--why should you mind so much;--or even ugliness?"
"And why should you want so much to do it, if that"s all you believe?
It"s because you believe more, or are afraid of more, that I ask you to give it up."
"But isn"t that the very reason why you should consent? So that my mind may be set at rest? Don"t be angry with me, Bevis. That frightens me more than anything--as you told me. I am not afraid of this, unless you make me so by taking it so seriously."
She had him there, neatly. And why should he mind so much? He did mind, horridly. But that was all the more reason for pretending not to.
"Very well," he said dryly. "I"m not angry. I don"t consent, though; I submit. Here; let me carry it for you."
But he had forgotten his leg. He stumbled as he lifted the table and could only help Antonia carry it into the room and set it down before the fire.
"There; it will do nicely there," said Antonia. "And those three little chairs." Her voice was still unsteady.
Miss Latimer looked round at them as they entered, and then rose. "Isn"t this table a little rickety?" she asked, placing her finger-tips upon it and slightly shaking it.
"It"s the one we always use," said Antonia. "It"s quite solid. If you wanted to tip it, you couldn"t."
"I"ve seen larger and firmer tables tipped, by people who wanted to,"
said Miss Latimer. "I have, I am sorry to say, often seen people cheat at table-turning."
"You don"t suspect Bevis, or me, I hope!" laughed Antonia, taking her place.
"Not at all. But people don"t suspect themselves," said Miss Latimer.
She, too, sat down.
"It"s very good of you, of both of you, to humour me," said Antonia, still laughing. "I promise you both not to cheat."
"Shall I put out the lamps?" asked Bevis coldly.
And it was still Antonia who directed the installation, replying: "Oh, no; that"s not at all necessary. We have never sat in the dark. It was broad daylight, before tea, with Mr. Foster."
Bevis took his place and they laid hands lightly upon the table.
"And we may go on talking," Antonia added.
But they did not talk. As if the very spirit of dumbness had emanated from their outspread hands, they sat silent and Bevis felt at once the m.u.f.fled rhythm of their hearts beating in syncopated measure. The pulsations were heavy in his finger-tips and seemed to be sending little electric currents into the wood beneath them. Observant, sceptical, and, with it all, exasperated, he watched himself and felt sure that soon the table, yielding to some interplay of force, would begin to tip. Long moments pa.s.sed, however, and it did not stir, and after his first intense antic.i.p.ation his attention dropped, with a sense of comparative relief, to more familiar uses. He had not looked at either of his companions, but he now became aware of them, of their breathing and their heart-beats, with an intimacy which, he felt, turning his thoughts curiously, savoured of the unlawful. People were not meant to be aware of each other after such a fashion, with consciousness fallen far below the normal mental meeting-ground to the fundamental crucibles of the organism, where the physical machinery and the psychical personality became so mysteriously intermingled. There, in the first place--it pleased him to trace it out, and he was glad to keep his mind occupied--there lay the basis of his objection to the ambiguous pastime.
As he meditated it, his awareness of this intimacy became so troubling that, withdrawing his thoughts from it decisively, he fixed them upon the mere visual perception of Antonia"s hands, and Miss Latimer"s. Miss Latimer"s were small, dry, light. The thumb curled back, the palm was broad, the finger-tips were squared, though narrow. He had no link with them, no clue to them, and, though he strove to see them as objects only, as pale patterns on the dark wood, he was aware, disagreeably, that he shrank from them and their hidden yet felt significance.
Antonia"s hands he knew so well. But he was not to rest in the mere contemplation of their beauty. Everywhere, to-night, the veils of appearance were melting before the emergence of operative yet, till now, unrecognized reality; and so it was that Antonia"s hands, as he looked at them, ceased to express her soft, sweet life, its delicacy, its mournfulness, its merriment, and, like the breathing and the heart-beats, conveyed to him the mysterious and fundamental sources of her being, all in her most potent and most unconscious. Laid out upon the darkness, they were piteous hands; helpless and abandoned to destiny.
And his own? Small, delicately fashioned, if resolute, they expressed his own personality in what it had of closest and most alien. He did not like himself, seen at these close quarters, or, rather, he frightened himself. The physical machinery was too fragile an apparatus in his construction. It did not secure him sufficiently. It did not sufficiently secure Antonia. Nerves rather than flesh and blood made his strength, and flesh and blood, dogged, confident, and blind, was a better barrier against fear than mere intelligence. There was more fear in him now than in Antonia, or he was more aware of what was to be feared--which came to the same thing. While she wandered sadly in dreams and abandoned herself to peril because she did not know where peril lay, he saw and felt reality, sharply, subtly, like a scent upon the breeze, like a shadow cast by an unseen presence; and because he was so subtle, so conscious, and so resolute, he was responsible. That was what it came to for him, with a suddenness that had in it an element of physical shock. It was he alone who saw where peril lay and he alone who could withhold Antonia from thus spreading her spirit upon the darkness.
He looked back at her hands and a pang of terror sped through him.
Something had happened to them; something had pa.s.sed from them, or into them. He was an a.s.s, of course, an impressionable, nervous a.s.s; yet he saw them as doomed, unresisting creatures; and, while he still controlled himself to think, feeling himself infected with the virus of the horrid game, the table suddenly, as if with a long-drawn, welling sigh, stirred, rose--he felt it rising under his fingers--and slowly tipped toward Miss Latimer.
It was then Antonia who said, as if with frivolity, "We"re off!" Miss Latimer sat silent, her head bent down in an att.i.tude brooding and remote.
The table, returning to the level, after a pause rocked slowly to and fro. "Cicely, if it raps, will you say the alphabet for it, while I spell?" Antonia murmured. He recognized the forced commonplace of her voice. Miss Latimer bowed her head in answer.
The table rocked more and more violently. Antonia had half to rise in her chair to keep her hands upon it as it tipped from her toward Miss Latimer. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was still, and then he heard a soft yet sharp report, as if of a small electric shock in the very wood itself.--One, two, three; a pause; and--One, two, three, again. A rhythm distinct and detestable.
Conjecture raced through his mind. He had said that he had played the game; but he had only seen the table turned and tipped; he had never heard these sounds. Unable to distrust his senses, though aware that any one else"s he would have distrusted, he located them in the very wood under their hands. They did not come from Miss Latimer"s toe-joints; nor from his or Tony"s. Well, what of it? It was some oddity of magnetism, like the tipping, and, now that the experience was actually upon them, he felt, rather than any panic, a dry, almost a light curiosity, seeing, with relief for his delay, that to have interfered, to have stopped the game and made a row, would have been to dignify it and fix it in Tony"s unsatisfied mind stamped with a fear more definite than any she had felt.
"Are you there?" Miss Latimer was saying, in a prim, automatic voice, as of one long accustomed to these communions--"One for No, and three for Yes and two for Uncertain. Is that agreed?"
The table rapped three times.
"Are you ready? Shall I begin the alphabet?"
Again three raps.
Her voice now altered. It was almost dreamily, with head bent down, that she began, evenly, to enumerate the letters. "A, B"--a rap fell neatly at the second sound. "B," Antonia announced. Miss Latimer resumed: "A, B, C, D, E"--another rap arrested her.
"Oh--it is going to be "Bevis"!--It"s for you, Bevis!" Antonia murmured.
"Rap!" said the table.
"That is No. It is not for Captain Saltonhall," said Miss Latimer drowsily and, drowsily, she took up the alphabet. The table, uninterrupted by any comment, spelled out the word, "Beside."