Beyond the Barrier

AUGUST, 1922

BY A DOCTOR’S WIFE

I

I OPENED my eyes. On the white lake above my head, silver fish were swimming, in curious geometric designs that elaborated the forms of their bodies. Now there were five; now, at the close of a bewildering interweaving of flashing bodies, there were six. The curves grew wider; they opened; a seventh entered. The mystic number Mas complete.

I looked at my nurse. Without raising her eyes, she took up a piece of linen upon which she was embroidering strange scrolls. Even as I looked, a curve began to crawl. I turned hurriedly back to the pure white lake above my head, fearful lest I had lost some movement in the intricate puzzle of silver light; distressed lest, through the relaxing of my will, the wandering of my attention, those mystic symbols of my faith might cease to be. One by one they were extinguished on that cold hard lake of white. I had failed them.

‘The fishing boats are coming home. It is very pretty. Don’t you want to look at them ? How many can you see.’

Why was my nurse trying to test me out in this hateful calculating way? She could read my every thought. That Mas one of her cruel advantages, for on her forehead, as on the forehead of my doctor, was pricked in smudgy red the sign of souls that were lost — the cross of the hypocrite, that was no true cross, strong in its uprightness, but a crooked slanting ugly scar. In spite of my deplorable weakness, I was still permitted to struggle against such spirits of darkness as these.

And those boats. She saw, and she knew that I saw, against the cold light of a winter sunset, four; and now there M’ere six. Soon perhaps would come the mystic seventh, upon whose presence their safety hung. They were making valiant headway against a strongly ebbing tide. Their sails were furled, their engines silenced by distance; but there was no magic in the power that drove them home; they Mere spluttering in, as usual.

She knew, too, that I saw, though perhaps she did not see herself, — she was fortunately sometimes blinded; or was she only oblivious from sheer stupidity and obstinacy, — the dark hulks that shadowed them. Red lights were breaking out upon them as they swung idly to and fro, casting no anchor within the breakwater, held by desires stronger than wind or tide. Their leader was long and low, and her masts shot skyward at bow and stern. The green of her starboard light was as full of malignant life as the eyes of a hungry brute; the red was cruel as blood.

The short winter twilight was almost gone. While I could still trace the serpent-like outline of the craft, I must act. By the absolute concentration of the power for good still left in me, by a supreme act of self-forgetting will, I might make it burst into flames. I set my mind to the task. The flames burst forth. They died away. The night was black. It sucked me in.

The next day I was called upon to pay the penalty for my defiance of the powers of evil. At my head stood a strange woman. In a smooth French voice, from which the nasality had been wiped out by the broken English she was talking, she read aloud my thoughts as they jumped from one estimate to another of my husband’s ability to pay for the boat which I had burned. It would beggar him, if my thoughts betrayed the truth; it would worse than beggar him, if I thought too high a figure. Seven hundred, a million, nine hundred and ninety-nine — the sums tore through my mind with a recklessness that was betraying their falsity, was numbing my hope of concealment. Her smile was as faultless as the arrangement of her hair. It never left her lips as my figures rose and fell in breathless irregularity, but always, in spite of my frantic effort, toward higher levels. And always, in mockery of my misery, I could hear the rhythmic explosions of a gas engine at work.

‘Can’t you make them stop that noise?’ I asked my nurse.

‘They will stop soon,’ she said. ‘It is almost dinner-time. Have you ever been in the shipyard? And seen the subchasers they built during the war?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, as casually as I could; ‘their designer was so good as to take us over one, and I have met them outside on their speed tests.’

So answering, I thought bitterly of the speed for evil that the boat which those fiends had already started rebuilding at my husband’s expense would have. She would rush down the open lane of water that her own fires burned clear of ice, loaded with the souls of the despairing, of those responsible for their despair. Would my own daughter be among them? Her father imprisoned for debt, who would save her? As hostage for the payment, they would claim her.

That night they took her. But before they had bound her fast in the lowest hold of that deep ploughing bow, I had followed her in her flight through darkness that was seared with flames.

When I came to the crossing under the turbulent current of the channel, choosing my way blindly among caverns where whispered the voices of many waters, I lost her. Yet twice already I had threaded those caverns — twice, naked of body. Now I had failed, because it was my sold that was perishing of the cold. I threw what was left of me upon the darkness.

A man stood before me with a kindly wrinkled face and mild blue eyes.

‘There is one sacrifice for her salvation that you have not yet made. It lacks but this test. Will you dare it?’ He laid his gnarled hand gently upon my shoulder.

‘Only tell me,’ I gasped.

‘ We are making the sacrificial bread,’ he said. ‘For the kneading of it, human strength, human hands are required. The heat of it is as white as is the bread. You will live, but brave men will shrink from looking on you. Will you — ’

I fell upon the task. With the flesh crackling from my hands, I tore at that surging mountain of bread. It engulfed me; I was lost in pain. The light grew more intense. I saw as in a mirror against its glowing side the seared horror that was my face. I fell into nothingness.

I found myself. I was in pursuit of that ship. I rushed from land to land, from shore to shore, and knew only that now I was in a harbor, searching wildly, now on the docks, hunting among staunch ocean-going steamers for a phantom ship. At last I reached the far edge of the world, where a forest clothed its last and most awful of precipices, the trees clinging to which had been turned to stone. The light of the forest was cold as stone is cold, and of a gray such as the sky in its mercy never makes known to men. It was the color of their corpses mouldering in the earlh. Chained to a branch which, even as it bent before the blast, had been turned to stone, was a bird. It sang, and I knew it for the soul of the singer whose voice, my mother said, had made women weep. I, too, must soon take my place upon those granite boughs. Would it be granted to me once and again in the empty months to sing? Probably not. I had not consciously added to the flood of women’s tears.

But even now the precious moments of my freedom were slipping by me in selfish speculation. I looked wildly about me, and there, casting anchor on the sea at the mountain’s inner rim, was the ship. Into an opening in her bow, I slipped all that was left me of what I had brought — a pair of waterproofed shoes. Seeing those, would my child know that I had done what I could? At least she would be spared the sight of my face. Perhaps when I was turned to stone, the scars of my disfigurement might flow together. But now I was grateful that she would never have to see me as I was.

II

‘You must eat. See, I have here the lamb chop which you yourself asked for. Nothing can cure you but eating. Why, then, will you not eat?’

I looked at my nurse in amazement, and then realized that the muddy red sign had slipped from her forehead. In her human stupidity she had asked the question, for her power to read my thoughts was for the moment gone. It was a lamb chop which she offered me. How could I, who had kneaded the sacrificial bread, eat of the symbol which the world’s Saviour had made his own? I refused to eat.

‘Some fish, then?'

Did the woman’s blasphemy know no bounds? They were the reincarnation of the crew of that phantom ship — evil spirits whom I had sunk, but not annihilated. Eat them, and by coalescing their spirits with mine, weaken my own miserable power for good, strengthen the world’s power for evil? It was unthinkable.

At the end of countless repetitions of her foolish formula: ‘If you eat, you will get well,’she took the temptation from me, saying reproachfully, —

‘You cannot realize, perhaps, that for an hour and a half, three times each day, I stand here by your side, trying in ihe only way we know to make you well — through food. You are making it hard, not only for me but for the maids in the kitchen, who are not through with their work till your tray returns.’

I took a spoonful of the fruit in great haste. That amount of poison I could, no doubt, assimilate. I was sorry for her when she was human and tired, and for the maids. It did seem strange, however, that all my food could be poisoned without their coöperation.

That night, my daughter came to me. It was very cold, and the windows, heavily frosted, were only partly opened. Noiselessly she opened the one beside my nurse. Instantly I felt the sudden current of cold air that always warned me of danger. The nurse turned on her cot in the corner. I saw my child change before my eyes into a big black slimy creature, with a broad flat head. She passed round and round the cot of my nurse in ever-narrowing curves, and from her body fell glistening ropes that lay on the bed like taut drawn snakes, holding my nurse fast in unconsciousness. Then, from the window, she drew in her coils a boat of curving prow and stern, lined with soft white fur, its rails filagreed in silver.

‘I have come to fetch you, mother,’ she said, and her clear young voice never faltered. ‘You never cry, mother. Your eyes are too hard and bright. You must plunge into the sea. Don’t shrink away like that, mother. It is cold, but see the fur in my boat. I thought even of that. And when you come back, your eyes will be soft with water that will look like tears. O mother,’ — her poor voice broke pitifully, she was my child again, — ‘tell me quick — you are not afraid?’

‘I cannot cry, child,’ I said. ‘My eyes are parched with pain.’

But all she answered was, ‘Are you coming, mother?'

I sprang from my bed. Of course I was going where she went.

My nurse clutched me as I fell. She had been sleeping with the eye that her evil spirit controlled toward me. So I had failed.

The night wore on. I could not sleep. I was watching the window. Over and over again in my mind was tossed the ugly doubt: did my child think that it was fear which had held me back? Poor little soul, she despised fear so cruelly. And I had n’t been really afraid at all, only inexplicably slow.

‘Why did you try to get up in the night? Do you not realize that, you have not strength to take safely one step unsupported? If you should fall, before I could reach you, you might break your hip.’ My nurse’s tones were insistent with worry.

Because she had been asleep, it was obvious that she had not been able to read my mind. The advantage was mine. I would not yield it. So I turned my face to the wall.

‘If you have any wish, you have only to mention it,’ she continued more kindly. ‘That is your husband’s order. Of course, you do not realize that I am on double duty now, because nurses are so scarce on account of the influenza. I am doing my best . Usually, when you stir, I waken; but last night, on account of the awful storm, I found it hard to go to sleep at first. I was glad to see that you were sleeping peacefully.’

‘I did not want to waken you, you looked so tired,’ I said. ‘How long have you been nursing?'

And she answered as clearly and distinctly as before: ‘Since the Middle Ages I have been in his service. Four hundred and twenty-one years it is that I have worked for him. Nurses have ever been the handmaidens most favored of the devil, the instruments best adapted to work the more subtle of his purposes.’

‘Won’t you come to my bedside?’ I asked. While she was honest, I need not be afraid of her. ' Yet your eyes,’ — I looked long and questioningly into them but without understanding,— ‘your eyes are as blue as God’s own skies. But your face — it is so strange that they did not more cleverly blend your face and his. That upward curve on your check is so blatantly characteristic, is n’t it? One gets so tired of seeing it on the stage. That was why I liked that last Mephistopheles I saw. He was in that haunting shade of faun that the woods have in the spring, that certain spirits — ’

I shut my lips firmly. Ignorance was never power; it behooved me to guard her ignorance.

‘And yet you can talk so logically,’ was all she said.

The petty logic of everyday life, of course, I thought impatiently; but when it came to an understanding of the deeper problems of life, I was becoming more and more hopelessly incompetent. If only in my wanderings I might run across Royce. He would n’t be like Seneca and Epictetus, and even Marcus Aurelius, who never looked up, only drew closer together beneath the pale shadows of the aspen trees when I passed by. He must surely remember me. Besides, he was the only one that James had thought really believed in his own philosophical theories, even in summer. ‘Even in summer.’ Professor James had told me so himself. And it was cold now; it was n’t summer, it was winter, and he would be spared the extreme test. So Royce had believed something all the time that he seemed to me just to be comforting his doubts with the wealth of words that his imagination loved. If only I had not been too young and timid to insist, on his telling me just what it was that he actually could call true! It might help me now, it might, it might — And yet, an immortality that was not of time. What could that mean, anyway? And the ding-an-sich — one must n’t talk German any more; that, at least, was true.

Across my misgivings, broke a clear voice, sweet as the honey that orangeblossoms yield.

It is I, mother. Ask what you will. Only this time you must be quick, mother, quick!'

‘Teach me something, child,’ I faltered, ‘something — ’

O mother, mother, you have lost me! You should have asked for something to eat. I have brought the apple vvith me. And now you cannot even look on it. And it is a snow-apple, too. O mother, do you remember that night when the moon had dropped from out the sky and was hanging just above the cypresses?'

‘But how can you remember that when you were not there?’ I questioned her. ‘I missed you so! And coming up the coast, when the ship lurched and the oranges dropped in showers from the trees in her hold, I used to wait for you to come running to pick them up. But you never came. The air in the hold was close and sweet — ’

‘Would you like the windows opened, madam? The room seems fresh to me.’

The child was gone, and that cloying odor of exquisite sweetness under a dewy night was gone with her.

That night she returned again, but not to me. Though I pressed my head against the door beside my bed, the door that opened into the superintendent’s room, and though I stopped breathing that I might hear, I caught only the sound of gold and yet more gold falling with a soft clink upon a stone floor. At last their voices rose: —

‘I have given you all that I have, and yet you will not tell me what to do. Everything is so strange, so different here; but you ’ve seen so many people die, some of them must have come back to tell you all about it. They have, haven’t they? And you’ll tell me all you know — ’

The child’s voice dropped to a caressing cuddling tone. ‘What have I done already? Why, I have been to see mother, of course. Poor mother, she is so serious, she wants to know what no one ever knows. I’d have more gold to give you if this is n’t enough, only —

‘Well, you see, I could n’t help it. He was walking without legs, and he had medals on his breast. I’m afraid he was a German. Oh, don’t look at me like that! I know I oughtn’t, to have given him anything. Do you think that is why I’ve lost the way — to punish me, I mean; and so I can’t get back to mother?

‘You know, and you’ve got to tell me. If you don’t, I’ll make you wish you had: I’ll choose to change into you! You think I can’t? But that is what we do here all the time. Everybody changes into everybody else, and people get so diluted and thin and queer, that they don’t, know themselves. That is the way it will be with you. Only I won’t let you be cruel, then, and I ’ll know what you know — the way to mother.’

‘Don’t worry about me, dear,’ I cried as loudly as I could. ' But tell me, is it a moral as well as a physical confusion?’

‘How did you know, mother?’ she questioned eagerly. ‘That is just the trouble. This hidden world of realities, behind the veil of causality, where there is no where, and where the when is not. Oh, why did men dream such foolish dreams about reality? because, what man, dreaming, wills, that becomes reality itself.

‘It is awful, mother. We are always bumping into each other, and we never know ourselves at that. Oh, that’s our house I smell burning! And father — mother! mother!’

The child’s voice rose to a shriek of more than mortal terror. She snatched me up, and we flew together down the wind toward that long white line of smoke.

Her father lay on the narrow couch he always loved. The cool white sheet was folded close about his neck, the blankets turned back about his hips. One of the blankets had a tear in it. The flames entered the room, first in one corner and then in another. The smile deepened on his dear face. But even as I stood in an agony of helplessness, the flames fell upon it. They ate it away —

III

' If you shriek like that, you will disturb the other patients. Did you have a bad dream?’

I could not answer. A big black gate was slowly opening in the corner of my room. Now the whole side of the room was falling away, and beyond it was the abyss into which worlds fell when they were lost. It swallowed them without a sound because it was nothing, nothing at all: black, soundless, sightless nothingness. They could not, should not, must not push me there. I measured the seconds of my life by the strength of my will. I struggled wildly.

‘ Don’t try to raise yourself. Let me help you. It is lunch-time now. Today you will want to eat everything that I have brought you.’

‘How delicately you serve my food,’ I said, scrutinizing the tray of dainties, ‘ and how very patient you are! ’

‘And my reward?’

I raised my glass of water. On its surface was a lake of quicksilver. In its depths rested an ivory dagger set in turquoises, but in their hearts red fires played.

‘Would you prefer grape juice or orange juice? Your husband has had an ice chest set just outside your door. You see how you are worrying us. Why did you refuse to drink your eggnog this morning? Do you not know that in pellagra you must have vitamines?

‘ Pellagra ’ — ‘ vitamines,’ — the words were worse than Greek to me. Now Greek — on the wall above the window I watched the pretty letters twine and untwine among laurel wreaths, silver or green like moonlight on moss. Now they were dancing, and a phi was bowing to a kappa. Pretty soon the beta would come and try to separate them. What was it she had asked about eggnogs? I would not drink them? Of course I would not, when they were thick with gluey poison. Poison and quicksilver — how could the devil expect to catch me by such childish tricks as these! ‘C’est à rire,’ I murmured wearily.

‘ You will not drink, you will not eat. What shall I do? Can you suggest anything that you would eat or drink?’

‘An egg,’ I said at last, ‘ boiled four minutes. And please be sure that it is brought to me in the shell, unbroken.’

In ten minutes, by my wrist watch, it was brought to me. I broke it. The yolk was lying against one side of the shell. In that short time the devil had acted. I did not explain my refusal to eat the tainted thing. Of course not. She could read, when her attention was focused upon me, my most fleeting thought.

In the night, I awoke. I was alone, alive, on a vast plain strewn with the bare bones of all mankind. Someone was pressing a warm cup against my lips. I took it. I had to; for in me alone remained the source of life of all the generations of men still waiting to be born. The bitter edge of the cold blunted. I began in trembling haste to pick up those scattered bones, and to arrange them one by one in the decent pattern they had had before their coffins had rotted away. It was getting bleaker and colder, but the light was changing.

Suddenly I saw my nurse. She looked so frail, and yet so pretty, in her flimsy night-robe.

Have you anything on your feet?’ I asked quite crossly; for I could not but be anxious about her.

She breathed a sigh of relief as I drained the last drop, and for answer pattered off to bed.

I spent the rest of the night on whirling spheres, and found each sphere a life nearer to the perfect life, a sphere nearer to the perfect sphere. And now at last I had reached the limit of my possibility of perfection.

A voice broke over me: ‘You have failed and yet you have not failed. It was written that they should sacrifice a mother, too.’

‘But I was too poor and weak to choose,’ I faltered.

‘There is no choice,’ was the sad answer. ‘Of the primary atom you were the only direct living descendant. The time had come. You have never failed to struggle; that was all that we could expect or demand.’

‘And now?’

‘The world which you know is in ruins behind you.’

‘And yet — ’ I strained my eyes into the dark distance. Gradually, far below me I made out a long slide of white thrown across the confusion.

‘All that science has taught men has been swallowed in the abyss of their cruelty, of their barbarity.’ The voice became almost a wail. ‘And that which you see is the only attempt at antisepsis which it has occurred to their bewildered minds to make. It is chalk. Watch the devils blacken it.’

Of a sudden, the barrenness was swarming with swarthy, leering black men. In their midst a father was trying to cover with his own body his son.

‘But that is hell,’ I gasped.

‘The hell that jour rarefied New England atmosphere has never suffered you to consider except as an intellectual absurdity, an age-worn bugaboo for children and simpletons. But here you see it in all its loathsome crudity. Curious it is that, in spite of your idealism, you have never properly evaluated the creative power of fear, the —’

‘They’re pinching the child!’ I shrieked.

‘ Why should n’t they? ’hedemanded. ‘Your world destroyed, there is nothing else for them to do.’

I woke to hear an infant crying. The nurse said that a nice lusty little fellow had just been born. I thought of my child in the hold of that ship of iniquity, and stifled a groan.

‘ If he disturbs you —’

I was wondering what flowers the mother would like best. The world had need of mothers now. Just why, I could not seem to remember. Oh, yes, it was the war, and France’s decadent mother-spirit that was not responding to the strain.

IV

The next morning I wondered why it was that, on waking, I could not always remember what I had agonized over the day before. And if I could not remember, was it really worth the agonizing?

This, in spite of what they tell me was the curiously precise logic of my conversation, was, I believe, my first, rational thought, the opening wedge that forced the gate of the barrier.

I tried to turn over. I hunted for my body, and when I found it, it was nothing but a shell, with fold on fold of burning flesh clinging to it. I tried to crawl into it, but first I had to tear away the flesh. I could not find the shell. Yet there was nowhere else that I could go —

In the middle of the night, I awoke with a start. The light was very dim. In one awful moment I knew why. A monstrous black bird was covering it. His eyes were white as hot iron is white, they were brilliant as sun striking on ice, yet they were cut like diamonds, and sparkled maliciously as he turned his heavy head from side to side. In his claws he held a bird whose breast was as blue as the sea, whose wings were as white as its foam. His hooked beak plunged into the tender flesh, his black head was hidden in the drift of feathers falling from her breast. And the feathers were all red with blood. I struggled impotently. He looked at me and jabbed again.

‘ It is nothing, I do not mind — ’ It was my child’s voice I heard, in stifled agony. ‘If only mother need not know! She is sick, she is dying —’

I lay as one paralyzed, frozen with horror. If I moved, he would murder her.

She clung to the electric cord, then cuddled nearer to him, with body all relaxed, inviting the attack. He fixed his blinding eyes on me, made as if to launch himself, and then I saw her fall across his pathway, and heard her cry: —

‘I am young. You shall stay with me. She is — mother! ’

Was it only my own shriek I heard? I was staggering across the floor.

‘You have had an unusually good night’s sleep. You have not moaned at all. See, I have fixed the grape-fruit a new way this morning. If you eat, you will get well, you know. And you will eat? You must not forget that every day I have to write down exactly what you have eaten. You really cannot imagine how eagerly your husband hopes each day —’

‘I will try,’ I said, ‘though why I should have the luxury of grape-fruit at this season of the year, when they are starving in Europe, I do not understand.’

‘You do not have to,’ the nurse said kindly. ‘Only eat. That is all you have to do.’

I took the grape-fruit, determined by the broken cells the two sections in which my medicine was hidden, and then courageously ate all but that. Only the day before I had caught on the arm of the chair in which my husband had sat a glimmering of that hateful red symbol of evil. Somehow they must have succeeded in corrupting his staunch integrity. And so I could n’t take his medicine. I did n’t mind starving my body, of course, if I could save my soul.

When I awoke, I was really afraid to breathe. I ordered my nurse to rush for sheets and to stuff them against the cracks beneath the doors. Yet she hesitated when I insisted peremptorily on her throwing wide open the windows.

‘It is very cold outside,’ she said, ‘but I am going to do what you ask. Please don’t make me do things that are either too dangerous or too foolish, will you?’

‘It is not foolish,’ I answered, not stopping, of course, to go into needless explanations. She knew as well as I that the night before, my poor husband in desperation had transmuted his spirit’s essence into a marvelous white light, which in brilliancy had exceeded his extreme calculations, but in curative power had not only failed utterly, but had been followed by a poisonous gas. It was strange that he had not realized that the forces of evil would of necessity rush into the vacuum created by the defeat of the positive forces of good. On the window-ledges were standing pools of queerly colored snow that was not snow at all, but the chemical which, through its constant evaporation, was filling the room with floating discs of poisonous matter.

I tried accurately to gauge the currents of air. Close to the southeastern window, where the air seemed to be moving most rapidly, I had her place my chair. Her eyes were so very blue. I told her so.

‘And yet you will not eat to please me. Or,’ she smiled cheerily, ‘will you? What shall it be?'

I could only turn my head away sadly, even bitterly. Her hypocrisy was so commonplace, so crude. From the well of the centuries she had drawn no subtlety; yet in experience she had found a superficial sort of sympathy. And the conscientious attention she gave me night and day was duty well done, if only it were not done in the service of such a master!

My thoughts were rudely diverted by the sounds which I dreaded above all others to hear. They told me that my husband and, perhaps, my daughter were yet once again undergoing the tortures that, bravely borne, suffered them to come before me. I could hear the wild singing of the screws, the creak of the steel ropes, the heavy descent of the rollers that crushed and crushed yet once again their outstretched bodies. For the first time, I heard them force my husband to complain. He was growing older with every hateful day; he could not know that I might hear him. ‘I can — not.’ Had he failed of strength to say the ‘not’? Had I imagined it? The rollers began to rise —

And then the door opened and they stood before me, rosy-cheeked, slapping off the snow. But the ice of torture that had bound their spirits no human warmth could melt. Their eyes told me that.

‘You never saw anything like it, mother! It’s up to your neck, and such fun! The oldest inhabitant and that is old Doctor — Why, mother, what is the matter? Do you want something?’

Held close in a chair of cunningly wrought silver, I was rising as gently as if in a dream toward a sky veiled in shining light. Behind me, another day was breaking for mortals, and the low hills glowed purple against crimson clouds. I floated higher. Below them stretched the sea, its foam shimmering like stars fallen from a brightening sky. A marvelous sense of exhilaration flooded over me. At last, in very truth, I stood free, alone in the presence of a beauty which through its impersonality, could know no cruelty, could be neither vicious nor false.

And then, in a flash, I saw my loved ones, and they were searching for me. Yet where I had gone, they would not know; where I was, they could not follow, not though they strained their eyes to blindness, and emptied their hearts with grief. From the marvelous glory above me I turned my eyes. I dropped through the waiting air. With infinite anguish I again took possession of my body. It was dead. And then, upon the pane of the window that looked out upon the hills I had seen against the dawn, I watched in bitter sorrow, but not in indecision, the bright bubble of silver that was my chair grow smaller and smaller, until the moments for its recall by the exercise of my will, of my desire, had passed, and it was gone. The scar that it left upon the glass I could see when the light was willing.

V

Because of the indisputable evidence which was accumulating from day to day as to the poisoning of my food, I, of course, found it more and more necessary to refrain from both food and drink. In this, I found my determination lamentably weak. The parched condition of my mouth was so insistently disagreeable, that I yielded too often to the pleading in the sweet blue eyes of my nurse; I permitted myself to be beguiled by the clarity of her arguments. When these failed her, she would turn to me and say very slowly, very distinctly, —

‘If you care for your husband, you will eat.’

This argument unnerved me sometimes, but not always. I grew rather more and more easily to see through its wicked speciousness.

My husband and daughter stood in the door. Striding into the room, my husband gathered me into his arms. They had come to take me home! But my nurse was to go with me. I was in despair. I refused to go, myself. They insisted on dressing me, and she went with me. She did not stay over the night, however. At last they realized the profound antagonism between us, which militated against any hope of my ultimate victory.

The drive home was frightful — not because of physical discomfort, though my bones seemed to puncture my skin as the automobile jounced through the snowdrifts, but rather because of the way in which the inner secrets of men’s minds, the inner significance of nature, wore revealed to me.

We passed some young women at a crossing. I heard the very disparaging remarks which they made as to my nurse’s past, although I could see from the passivity of her face that she remained in agreeable ignorance of them.

‘Hi, there, you’ve done your work well, you have!’ some teamsters yelled.

She ignored their remarks so creditably, that I was again quite sure that she had not heard them.

At the station, we had to wait for the train to pass. This was the most unfortunate incident in an unfortunate ride. It enabled a number of homeless, but pettily malignant spirits from the city to fasten themselves upon our car. I fought against their entrance into my home and into my room, and finally lost them through ignoring them in the stress of more important struggles. As my silver chair had left its impress upon my window, so they left the scars of their presence on the framework of the doors of our car.

At home, I found the field of conflict broadened. The entire daily life of my husband, and more especially of my daughter, centred for good or ill upon the strength of my faith, the power of my will. When, for example, my husband went for the mail, there was a certain shadowy bend in the road where evil spirits lay in wait for him. They hid in the body of a dog, in the trunk of a tree, in the heart of a hillock; and when they felt him coming — but through my courage and the firmness of my faith in denying their power to injure him, he returned to me in safety day after day, his hand at the steeringwheel of his car held true in spite of their malevolence.

The fact that in my constant companionship my family lost the ability to read my thoughts at critical moments, greatly increased the difficulty of my position. My daughter would start down to the barn for her saddle-horse. Of course, I at once took up my station at an open door. With fixed gaze, with set attention, I watched her safely past the swaying forms that lurked among the trees, down to the stable door. Eagerly I looked for the first sight of her horse as she opened the door that led directly into his stall — eagerly but not in doubt. Though he died in the early morning hours, yet, praying for the return of his spirit, I had never failed to be rewarded by those sounds of life which close in so abruptly upon the silence made by death. No, I did not question that the horse was there, that his spirit would not leave him until another morning. But the moment that my daughter entered into the shadowy stall, beside the white figure of her horse I saw her wrapped in a garment of glistening white. I saw it dissolve into waves of light. And I knew that the last wave would sweep her forever beyond my reach.

At the instant of its passing, it was vouchsafed to me, through an agony of willing, to bring her back to the earthly body that rode forth so jauntily, quite as if no miracle of reincarnation had supervened.

‘You cannot sit in that open door. You will get your death of cold.'

My poor, poor husband!

In the evening, and especially during the small hours of the night, my faith was at its lowest ebb, my struggles were sorest because most despairing.

Just before daylight, the air became so crowded with all sorts and conditions of spirits, that the confusion of the conflict was maddening.

But at the moment when I lost all hope of being able to follow the struggle, when the air grew dimmer and thinner, and the spirits began to fade away like ghosts, I would hear my husband walking about the room, would see him flashing his light into its farthest corners, would catch, as from a great distance, the sound of his gentle voice bidding me watch how easily he could make the shadows shift.

But in the end I would feel so sorry for him, so cruel in my forced negligence of his patient effort, that I would open my eyes. Then, because of the look in his eyes, he would seem to me to belong for an appreciable time to the world beyond the barrier, and in his strength to be about to dominate its wickedness. But soon upon my attention would be focused the room in which he moved. It was without substance or depth, flat and empty as a house of cards. Just as my body had no feeling, so it had no meaning. Slowly my husband moved his light about. The queer beings in the room moved, too, flaunting their grotesque shapes quite shamelessly around him. He called them shadows. He said that the chairs and the tables were casting them.

One day, I was lying on my couch, feverishly studying on my wall the diagrams of the world I had known, pondering the full fatality of the interlocking of the two lower spheres. For this partial union, this interaction of planets and of lives, I was responsible. A mortal, I had walked among spirits. My world was trying to cast me forth, in fear of my knowledge. Their world was locked with it in the refusal to receive me. Homeless, a wanderer between worlds for all eternity, I raised my eyes in desperation.

Across my room I suddenly saw wafted the most intricate insignia of the Roman Catholic Church — the replica in silver and gold and age-old ivory of the designs which I had seen on vestment and on altar-cloth, in marble on mosaic floors, in wrought iron on cathedral doors. The breezes that bore them were more exquisitely scented than those which had soothed my doubts, had stimulated my imagination on her feast-days. Closing my eyes, I heard her choirs chant, resistlessly because monotonously, their voices blending and swelling for the drowning of my questionings.

But I was born of Puritan stock; I had been trained in metaphysic. Their subtleties, their crudities, their emotional artistry, their superstitions, made as little fundamental impression upon me as did their flaming gold, their purple that was crimson as their pride. And so, in discouragement, the care of my soul was entrusted to lesser, meaner souls.

Instead of twisted gold and frosted silver, of carved and stained ivory, of leather tooled in gold, the mystic symbols of the Church accepted for their fashioning straw clumsily braided by peasant hands. They came to me, not on clouds of sweet incense, but among the wet clinging fumes of suds which, for spirits of such low estate as these, must serve for godliness. Sometimes the fumes were soggy with the pungent smell of cabbage good for sturdy bodies such as theirs had been. Instead of chanting, I heard voices that were toil-worn and thin, yet honest and earnest withal.

I failed them both. The sadness in the Pope’s voice made me realize the depths of human experience which he must have sounded in his prison of the Vatican, although all that he said was, —

‘We have done what we could.’

The others simply frittered away their lesser powers of concentration, too easily discouraged even to recognize defeat. But I was grateful for their willingness to help me. The road which my soul must travel was not theirs, that was all.

Around me the old legends now began to weave their spells. I was sitting alone in the library. The house was strangely still. In a panic of horror, I realized that I was forever shut off from the living. Perhaps, once in a hundred years, some traveler, sensitive to suggestion, would be permitted to come upon my home and me, sitting, as now I was sitting, gaunt, stiffened into unconsciousness of my body, but not lifeless because living in a world of sinister shades, of menacing shadows.

There was a sudden sharp sound. It was the wind blowing a broken shutter loose from the clutches of overgrown ivy. The house, as a matter of fact, had no shutters. The next day I remarked that, examined with pride my luxuriant but carefully pruned ivy, and welcomed effusively a delivery man whom I chanced to meet coming up our walk.

I smiled when I saw his apparent pleasure. I laughed when I thought that he was the traveler permitted to discover my haunted house at the end of a hundred — or was it a thousand — dead years.

At last, one day, I suddenly found myself standing as it were without the confines of my own mind, and watching in quiet happiness a complete shifting of its scenes. And yet, that is not what I saw. Among the mountains I have watched dark shadows chase across their valleys, and, disappearing, leave them basking in the sunshine. Even so it was with me. I saw the shadows pass.

I turned my face to the wall where had been the diagram of my clashing worlds — for I was lying on my couch. There were only a few imperfections on its surface! Gone from out my life was the bitter tragedy of those vanished spheres. Ah, no, it had never been.

I looked at my hands. They were white and thin; they weren’t disfigured at all. And all that curious pattern that malicious spirits had pricked upon them when I was weak and cowardly — it was absurd. Or, rather, it was pellagra! If only I could have known what, pellagra was! If only I might have had something comfortable and understandable, like typhoid fever!

I ran to a window. In the sunshine the sea was breaking and the wings of white gulls were flashing above its foam. Among the woods that rimmed the blue inlet of its waters, where, in the late winter, on a white glare of snow, the blackened tombstones of the dead of all the ages had mocked me with the mystery of their presence, the shadows of tall trees were lying soft, upon the grass. The dead had been but the deeper shadows that the light had cast.

Beneath my windows, in my garden, the wallflowers had survived the winter, my sturdy pansies were blossoming in the friendly shade of cool gray walls, and tulips were spreading their glowing cups to the sun. The birds were twittering in the lilac hedges. In the stable I heard the impatient whinny of a hungry horse and my daughter’s cheery answering call.

I was home again!