There seemed to be nothing more sensible to do, so I went back to the living room and sat down to put my thoughts into some kind of order. I tried to imagine what I ought to do next. Julian had pumped out of me everything he wanted to know and I did not believe that he would have any further interest in me. Probably Mrs. Walters would not be distressed, either, if I were to catch the evening train for New York. It was clearly the sensible thing to do.
On the other hand there was Anne. To leave her alone in this house seemed like an act of desertion, illogical as that feeling was on close examination. I told myself that Helen would have wanted me to stay and keep an eye on her, but that was an evasion. Whatever I did or did not do about Anne would not be for the sake of a woman five years dead whose image in my mind was now as evanescent as the smell of lavender in an old drawer. It would be for myself. I admitted that to myself, but left its implications alone.
The notion of two nights in a row on the train was repellent. I might as well stay, now that I was here, at least for another day. It was a part of the world new to me, and I ought to see something of it. Swimming with Anne had been fun and I wanted to do it again. Maybe some sensible way in which I could deal with Julian would present itself. There were still ten clear days before I had to be back at the university and I saw no reason to put too abrupt a termination to this visit.
While I was still engaged in this childish form of self-deception Mrs. Marcy came into the room, complete with broom, dustpan, and cloth. She seemed surprised and put out to find me.
“Oh, Professor Sayles! I didn’t know you were in here.”
“I’m just going. I won’t be in your way.”
“Lands! It wouldn’t be a disturbance. It’s nice to see a new face in the house.” She leaned her broom against the end of the sofa. “Seems like a crime, this big house and only two people in it till Miss Conner came. I like folks, Professor Sayles, and there’s plenty of room. I hope you’re goin’ to stay a while.”
Her hospitable offer amused me, particularly since it was not her house, but it warmed me, too. It was pleasant to find that I was wanted, at least by one person—two, I corrected myself. “Thank you,” I answered. “I am not sure how long I can stay, but overnight, at least. I’ve never been in Maine before and I want to see something of it. I never dreamed there were places like this up here.”
She grinned. “We say ‘down’,” she corrected me. “Yes, it’s a beautiful house. My own folks built it.”
I was surprised. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yep. The Talcotts. We lived here more’n a hundred years, I reckon. My great-great-uncle Amos, he bought this land and put the place up. Used to be a sea captain.” She looked out the window thoughtfully. “They say the river was full of ships in them days. Uncle Amos went to India and China and South America and I don’t know where-all.” Her face lost its brightness. “I’m the last of ’em. And times ain’t what they was, around here at least.”
“It’s still a beautiful old house.”
“It is, isn’t it? Wherever you look, practically, your eye finds water. Feels almost like you’re in a boat right on the river. That’s why Uncle Amos got it, I reckon. He called it ‘The Anchorage,’ but it’s been the Talcott place so long people don’t call it anythin’ else.” She paused. There was something old and proud in her thin face and I knew that no matter what happened to her, she had this memory of her ancestors to make her seem important to herself. “Uncle Amos died right in that room above here.” She gestured toward the ceiling. “He used to lie in his bed by the window with a spyglass, they say, lookin’ down the river fer the ships comin’ in.”
“It must have hurt to see the place go out of the family.”
She shrugged. “You got to take things as they come. Seth was put out more’n I was, I expect. I kinda wish we could have got somethin’ out of it, but the bank had the mortgage and they sold it fer that. That and the back taxes . . . Seth claims it’s a mortal shame to see farm land like this goin’ back to goldenrod and scrub pine, but I tell him he ought to be thankful these folks have money to pay fer cleanin’ and cookin’. I don’t know where we’d be without it, the way times have been this year.” She took up the broom and began to sweep. “I expect it’s a blessing in disguise, Professor Sayles. And I aim to do what I can. She don’t know nothin’ about keeping a house, that’s sure.”
I sat there for a while watching her tidying the room and wondering how she could be so cheerful. It must have been a bitter experience to come back as hired girl to the house that her own family had built and inhabited, but she gave no sign of it. She was humming as she worked, and the tune was “Someday My Prince Will Come,” from Snow White. Listening to her, a lump came into my throat.
“Can’t give this room more’n a lick and a promise today,” she remarked finally. “It’s a right big house and today I’m supposed to clean out that room of his after lunch.”
“Mr. Blair’s room you mean?” I asked in surprise.
“Yes. Uncle Amos’s room.”
“I didn’t suppose he’d allow anyone in there.”
She stooped and began collecting the cigarette stubs from the empty fireplace. “You’re right about that, mostly. But once a week they let me in to sweep the floor.”
As casually as I could I put the question that was engrossing me. “What’s he got in there?”
She turned round to face me and leaned back against the channeled pilaster which supported the mantel. “That’s the question folks around here keep askin’ me over and over. Seth fair devils me to find out an’ that cousin of his, Harry, that drove you out here. All I know fer sure is that there’s somethin’ in the middle of that room as big as a grand piano, only more square-like. Before they let me in she always covers it with a lot of blankets an’ sheets, so I can’t tell you just what it’s like under ’em. An’ I don’t get much chance to look. I can tell you that . . . All the time I’m sweepin’ an’ dustin’ the window sills that woman stands right in the door, watchin’ me, an’ I have to keep humpin’.” She shook her head. “But I don’t reely care if I don’t find out. There’s a slew of wires snakin’ in an’ around that thing, whatever it is, an’ I don’t aim to get mixed up in them.”
“Naturally not.”
She turned back to her cleaning, crouched beside the fireplace like a sparrow, with her voice half muffled in it. “He does make a mess in there, though. The floor’s a sight. Little pieces of wire and a lot of stuff that looks like gray sawdust, an’ bits of copper an’ hunks of glass, an’ papers all over the place. You never saw such a mess of torn-up paper. In little tiny pieces, too, like he didn’t want anybody to read what was written on ’em. She makes me burn it—all the stuff that will burn—once a week. Stands right over me while I put it in the stove. They ain’t lettin’ a soul in on that thing of theirs, Professor Sayles, I tell you.”
“Inventors are likely to be that way.”
She straightened up with the dustpan in her hand. “I guess you’re right, though he’s the only one I’ve ever seen.” She collected her broom and dustcloth. “I’ll tell you something, Professor Sayles. The folks around here don’t understand a man like Mr. Blair.”
“I suppose they don’t.”
“It’s a fact. Even with us needin’ the money like we do, I have to argue it all over again with Seth every week. You know,” she laughed apologetically, “some of them thinks he’s makin’ one of these death rays like you read about in the papers. It was Cy Williams at the express office put that idea into their empty heads, if you ask me. Spreadin’ all them stories about Mr. Blair getting this shipment from one electric company an’ that from another. I didn’t hardly know how to answer ’em till I got some idea what Mr. Blair reely was doing.”
Momentarily her final sentence slipped past me as if it were nothing more important than the rest of what she had been saying. Then it struck home so abruptly that I came close to gasping. She was so calm about it that I looked at her inc
redulously. There was no sign in her expression that she considered Julian’s invention anything but the most natural in the world.
“Oh,” I said lamely. “I didn’t know you knew what it was.”
She smiled pleasantly. “I didn’t have an idea, first off. But I kinda put two an’ two together. Not that I’m one for poking my nose into other people’s business.”
“Of course not. I didn’t mean that.”
“No offense taken. You see, with them tubes an’ things he ordered, an’ with all the wire on the floor, an’ all that, I just had a feeling what it was. Mr. Blair’s shy an’ quiet—he don’t look well at all to me—an’ I figured he wasn’t the sort to be makin’ a death ray. Though if he was to do it, I could suggest a few folks he could try it on.” She compressed her lips and nodded defiantly. “Then one time I heard the noise of the thing an’ I said to myself, ‘Well, if it ain’t some new kind of a radio he’s got in there.’ ” She stopped and looked at me to see how I was reacting, and there was the look of a child that thinks it has been clever on her face.
“Noise?” I was trying to keep something horrible from coming into my mind. “What kind of noise?”
“You know. First that kind of humming, like when the set’s first warming up. An’ then a lot of sounds. Mostly static, it seemed like to me.”
A curious wave of coldness was sliding down my spine. She wouldn’t be so calm if she knew where that noise came from. I checked myself at that point. Where Julian would claim it came from, I made a mental correction. There was something I had to know immediately. “Tell me,” I said and the words almost stuck in my throat, “does his radio ever get any voices? Talking or singing?”
She hesitated. “I expect it ain’t that far along. It doesn’t reely work right yet, but it’s only the last week or so I’ve heard it at all. I guess he’ll have it goin’ better directly; about all you can tell now is it’s goin’ to be some special kind of radio. I haven’t heard any voices, exactly. All I could tell was that it was one of them shortwave things.”
“How did you know that?”
“Well, they say those things will get broadcasts from all over the world, though most of the time they don’t sound so good to me. But this one of his has got the same kind of faraway note to it.”
The breath seemed to be coming into my lungs with less effort. “But you never heard anything you could recognize?”
She reflected a minute, leaning on her broom and staring at the ceiling. “Well,” this came slowly, “ ’bout a week ago he had it turned on one evening when I was washin’ the supper dishes. I could hear it plain enough, even clear down in the kitchen. An’ it sounded then like it might have been voices. Only there was too many of them at once to make out anything separate. If you’ve heard the people cheerin’ at a football broadcast, you’ll get the general idea of what I mean.”
“I see.” It was absurd how hard my heart was still hammering. For a moment I had been imagining something ridiculous and outside the bounds of sense. I felt ashamed of having given credence, even for an instant, to the thought that Julian might, indeed, have done what he claimed to be on the point of accomplishing. Even that instant’s belief had showed me how frightening it would be to believe that he was not deluded. To let the world of the dead back in upon the living was a conception so horrible that I was shaken—a blasphemy more frightening than anything the theologians had ever conceived . . . And then I was smiling to myself as I understood what it was she had really heard.
That humming, that confused murmur—it was obviously nothing but tubes heterodyning in some way. Perhaps there had been an aurora borealis that night—it seemed to me that I’d heard it did funny things to all sorts of electric apparatus. If the thing made a noise, as Mrs. Marcy said, it was a noise which it induced itself. Yes, I told myself, there was no doubt that was what she had heard.
I felt weak and happy with relief.
When I could trust my voice again, I said, “Well, Mrs. Marcy, it’s too fine a day to waste indoors. I’m going out and enjoy some of your famous Maine air and scenery.”
She nodded with the birdlike jerk of her head that I already thought of as characteristic. “It’s a beautiful state, the state of Maine. In summer, that is. Winter is something else again.”
We left the living room together and, as we turned down the hall toward the kitchen, a thought occurred to me. “By the way, Mrs. Marcy, I wouldn’t say anything about hearing the set working to anybody. Especially to Mrs. Walters and Mr. Blair.”
She gave me a dry grin. “Don’t worry. We scarcely so much as pass the time of day. She ain’t exactly sociable.”
I grinned back at her. “Poison ivy?”
She shrugged. “If you stay away from it, you never need worry,” she remarked.
I thought of that afterward. It was the soundest sort of common sense and yet, it failed her. It wasn’t a weed that she needed to beware, but an avalanche.
10.
MRS. WALTERS was sitting on the edge of the back steps when I came out the kitchen door, in the shadow made by the wall of the ell that ran out toward the barn. To my momentary astonishment, she was stringing beans. Little as I had seen of her, it startled me to find her at a natural household task; I had the instantaneous feeling she had been expecting me and that the beans had been pressed into service to complete a picture of herself which she was trying to draw for my benefit. Nothing in her face betrayed any surprise when I came in sight; she barely glanced up and promptly returned her gaze to the level meadow and the bay beyond it. The slow, even movements of her fingers were uninterrupted: pick up a bean with the left hand, snip off the tips with the knife in her right, two precise motions to strip off the strings, and a third to deposit the finished bean in the enameled cook pot in her broad lap . . . She was the quintessence of naturalness.
In saying that she was expecting me, I am merely guessing. Mrs. Walters was too clever a woman to make even the smallest slip; I never found out just how her intelligence worked. Even Julian, I think, never understood all that was in her mind, though he must have had one appalling glimpse, at least, of what she was capable of doing if she had to.
Anyhow, she was waiting for me on those steps and my instinct told me so at once. I debated going past her and on up the road with merely a casual word. If she wanted anything of me, that would force her hand, make her at least call after me. But I dismissed the idea instantly. She might see just why I had done so; the less she realized her effect on me the easier things were going to be—and the more likely I was to be of help to Julian. I sauntered calmly down the steps and sat on the bottom one.
“Gorgeous day.”
“Yes.” I thought again that there was some kind of music in her voice. “Those clouds mean rain, though. Perhaps this afternoon or tonight.”
They were piling up over the far shore of the bay, only a low line of them, but they had not been there at all a few hours before.
“This is beautiful country,” I said. “It’s the first time I’ve been in Maine.”
“Really. I suppose it is handsome. I never notice the places where I find myself.”
“Oh, come now. Don’t tell me you’d as soon be in Boston or New York as here?”
That experimental cast failed to produce a rise. If she had lived in either place, her reply gave no inkling of it. “There is no difference of importance,” she declared. “My life is turned inward, Professor Sayles. I live in my mind and the surroundings of my body don’t make a bit of difference.”
This curious speech was delivered with a calmness that left me no loophole for further attack. Whether she actually meant what she said or not, the subject was closed. But I did not have quite wit enough to understand that; after I had seen more of her I should not have mistaken the note of finality in her voice. I tried again and, because I was challenged by her attitude, led a stronger card than I should have. “All that surprises me, then,” I said, “is that Julian should come to a place like this.
He’s as indifferent to his environment as you are to yours. I suppose you were the one who had an enthusiasm for Maine.”
I could not see her face without craning around, but I knew there was a smile on it. “Oh, no,” she said. “Julian came here, I guess, to find privacy and freedom from interruption.”
“He seems to have found the ideal place for that.”
Her silence was so negative that it made me uncomfortable. I turned round and saw that she had withdrawn her scrutiny from the meadow and the clouds and was watching me, not narrowly or critically, but with an incurious steadiness that made me feel awkward and out of place. “You have talked to Julian already,” she said, and it was a statement, not a question. She was perfectly well aware that I had done so, and there was a suspicion in my mind that she had also managed to overhear most of what we had said.
“Yes,” I admitted. “We had a talk. I’m afraid I was not able to help him much.”
Even through the back of my head I could feel her eyes continuing to regard me with the same persistence. “What do you think of what he is doing?” she inquired as if it were the most ordinary question imaginable.
“What can I think?” I retorted. She had taken me off my guard. “I’m not competent to judge, of course. But I think the same thing that every sane person would. I think it’s mad.” Then I began to regret the impetuosity of my reply. “Of course, it means only that Julian has never got over the shock of losing his wife. He loved her with his whole heart and her loss was a disaster for him. This idea of his is a compensation mechanism. He is not necessarily mad, but the idea is. That’s what I think.”
She smiled slightly. “I can see you’re pretty strong-minded about it. What makes you believe that on the subject of this . . . what did you call it—‘compensation mechanism’—he is insane? If that’s what you meant.” Her tone was not at all combative; it was neutral and reserved.
The Rim of Morning Page 32
