The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  “His morbid obsession with death. His fantastic notion that he can prove immortality by making an instrument to talk to the souls of the dead. His conviction of the importance of his work, his absorption in it to the exclusion of everything else. His coming here, burying himself from his friends and his proper world.”

  She nodded. “I see. On your own premise, you are quite correct, Mr. Sayles.”

  “My premise?”

  “That Julian’s project is impossible.”

  “No normal person would consider that it was possible.”

  Speaking in a soft voice, but with the most complete conviction she answered me. “Julian’s mind transcends the normal. And the thing he is trying to do is possible.”

  I tried to put the contempt I felt into my look. “See here,” I turned and told her, “I’m not nervous, overwrought, broken, like Julian. You don’t need to give me any of that.”

  She flushed and the darkness behind her eyes seemed momentarily to dilate. The blade of the kitchen knife in her hands trembled slightly, and for a second I was afraid of her and alert. Then her face changed to amusement and she looked at me as if I were a refractory child. “Professor Sayles, you are an ignorant man, but you seem to be intelligent, so perhaps I can say this without hurting your feelings. When you come to appraise Julian Blair and what he is doing, don’t forget that you are doing so wholly from your own point of view. You are still a young man, in some ways I think a very young man, and there are a good many experiences still ahead of you.”

  Her manner and what she said were difficult to tolerate. “Thank you,” I told her. “I shall remember what you say.”

  “That’s wise of you,” she said as if she had not heard the sharpness in my tone. “There are a good many things you and your science have left out of account, Mr. Sayles. Julian is tackling one of them now. If he succeeds, you admit he will be the greatest man in all human history.”

  “If,” I said and then changed my mind. “Will he? I wonder.”

  She turned away and began to watch the white ridges of cloud piled along the southwestern horizon. “All of us are too much concerned with this life,” she remarked; she spoke as if what she were saying was an obvious fact instead of a philosophic platitude. “It is time that a man like Julian turned to the truly important problems.” After that she was silent for a while, but I knew she had not finished and decided not to interrupt. When she went on again, her tone was more personal and definite. “I have devoted my whole life to the thing to which Julian is now devoting his, Mr. Sayles. You cannot ask me to consider him insane.”

  That turned me round again in my seat and I stared at her to see if her look gave any clue to the meaning of that cryptic statement. But her large, heavy face was without any expression and she was watching the horizon again. “You . . . what?” I said at last.

  “I thought you knew that,” she answered and there was something like regret in her voice, as if she were sorry she had told me anything that I had not heard before. “I was certain Julian would tell you. I am what you would call a medium.”

  That was it, of course! That explained everything . . . Why she was with Julian, and what there was about her that made me uncomfortable. A sense of relief went through me with the insight. It seemed to me that now it would be easier to help Julian. I had only to deal with a woman who was, after all, simply a member of a group of fakers. Every sensible person knew that mediums were cheats and frauds. I told myself triumphantly that however skillful and deep-seated her influence with Julian might be, it was still vulnerable.

  “Yes,” she went on quietly, “I am what we sometimes think of as a station. A person who lives mostly in this world but occasionally, in a limited way, and very partially, in the other.” She smiled again, almost maternally. “I suppose you are one of the skeptics who does not believe there is another world.”

  “I am a real skeptic and I don’t know whether there is another world—or not,” I corrected her. “If there is, it must be one which is fundamentally unknowable in terms of human cognition.”

  “Cognition!” There was an edge of mockery in her voice. “You have a fine set of words to express your own prejudices.” Then she sighed. “Well, I won’t argue with you, Professor. Perhaps I’ll have an opportunity some time to show you how limited your knowledge is.”

  “My vocabulary is probably no better than it should be,” I said. “And I agree that there is no point in argument. But I want to tell you that I think you are doing a very dangerous thing, Mrs. Walters, one that you should stop at once.”

  “What do you mean?” Her voice was harder.

  “I mean leading Julian deeper into this morass of his obsession with the loss of his wife,” I said. “You are giving him hope and encouragement. Did you ever stop to think that he is, fundamentally, a scientist? That this pseudo truth you are giving him will be at war with the whole pattern of his mind, even if he seems consciously to welcome it? That you will ultimately produce a breakdown there—if it hasn’t happened already?”

  She stood up abruptly. “You are insulting,” she said scornfully. “Insulting and ignorant. Julian would have had a breakdown, as you put it, if he had not found me. I gave him the hope he needed to go on living. Which is more than your wonderful science did for him. It was his science that almost destroyed him, not me.”

  She had her hand on the knob of the kitchen door. The blazing anger that looked out of her eyes made me afraid. But we had gone too far to withhold any trust. “Very altruistic of you,” I remarked, looking her full in the face. “All of Julian’s friends ought to be deeply grateful to you, Mrs. Walters. I wonder how you have been able to afford this generosity of yours?”

  My meaning did not escape her. I watched the barb sink in and saw that she smarted under it, but I had expected it to produce an instantaneous retort that would show her in the true colors of the game she was playing. Instead, she was silent. She gave me a slow glance of smoldering anger and contempt, turned on her heel, and went through the door without a backward glance. She did not even slam it behind her, but closed it quietly and firmly. I was left to stand there and inspect its panels, bleached by the sun and weathered to a neutral silver-gray.

  When I turned and began to walk along the road away from the house, it came over me that I had played my cards foolishly and that she had trumped every trick but one. She had given one point away—that she was a medium—but only because she was certain that I would find it out anyhow. For some obscure reason I felt ashamed. I had been rude, even if calculatingly and for good reason. But the anger with which she had met my final sneer was not, I felt convinced, a theatrical performance. She meant it. Whatever she was, she was not a pure and simple cheat. Much as I wanted to discount her, I had to admit to myself that when she spoke of her calling she had sounded genuine, in spite of her magniloquent words. And though I was convinced that mediums were never genuine, the deception in this case plainly included herself as well. She believed in her own power.

  That fact made me pause in my thinking. I wondered whether I was competent to form such a judgment. Everything I had ever heard about mediums had convinced me that nine out of ten of them were charlatans. The tenth was a victim of self delusion; if you were willing to admit that clairvoyance and telepathy were possible, the results which that tenth psychic could sometimes obtain were explicable in terms of those powers. And impressive though it might be to admit that one person could read another’s mind or perceive objects with an inner eye which could penetrate walls and mock at distance, it was still as far as ever from accepting the notion that anything human survived the phenomenon of death. Or, if survival were a fact, that anyone could communicate with the other side of the barrier.

  Despite Mrs. Walters’ faith in herself that she could actually bridge that gap—if it was a gap and not the ultimate abyss—I never for a moment believed it. I do not believe it now, though it is less easy to dismiss the hypothesis. But what was fatally wrong in my thinking, the
re on that empty road, was that since she was not what she claimed to be, she was not, therefore dangerous . . .

  It should have occurred to me that, even in despair, Julian would be a hard man to fool and that Mrs. Walters must have shown him evidence of something more important than occasional flashes of telepathy. If I had thought about that for a while, tried to imagine what she had been able to do which would interest him, I might have caught a glimpse of what was likely to happen. Instead, the problem presented itself to me in a completely irrelevant light—the question of what I ought to do about Julian.

  The answer was certainly not obvious. I mulled it over in my mind for a good while, but in the end came back to the only real idea I had, which was to wait a while, see more plainly what was going on, and try to persuade Julian to let me examine his work. Once I reached that point I counted on being able to see the flaw in it—the reason why it wouldn’t do what he claimed. I never doubted that such a flaw existed. Perhaps I might be able to break him of this delusion at once, but if not, the entering wedge would have been driven. He had suggested that he’d achieved some partial success. (How partial they both were, I thought—Julian with his invention, Mrs. Walters with her contact in the “other” world.) Very well, then. I would persuade Julian to demonstrate to me how far he had got. He would have to talk to me as one scientist to another. That in itself would help. He would be reminded of his own innate standards and see that he was being false to them.

  The plan was naïve, of course. I see that now. But it might have worked. Even now I can’t say positively that it wouldn’t have done what I hoped. But there was never an opportunity to test it. And when Julian unwittingly gave us a demonstration what he had accomplished, I did not know it for what it was.

  11.

  THAT PROOF did not come till later in an endless day. Meanwhile, the hours dragged along one after the other. By noon the weather had grown sultry and the bank of clouds across the bay was higher and darker. The air was without motion and full of an impending violence that made the hairs at the back of my neck prickle. There was certainly going to be a thunderstorm later.

  By the time I had finished thinking out what I was going to do it was almost noon and I turned my steps back along the road to the house. As I walked toward it, the sun-heated air from the road made its image waver and tremble before me. It stood up at the end of the Point almost as naked as a lighthouse; there were no trees around it, and the three cubes in its composition—barn, ell, and house—were related to each other as arbitrarily as boulders on a beach.

  Lunch, like breakfast, was in the kitchen; apparently it had “not seemed worthwhile to Julian and Mrs. Walters to clean out the junk in the other front room and eat there. It was typical of the whole ascetic and yet slovenly way in which they seemed to be living. The meal was desultory. Mrs. Marcy cooked well, but the dishes she set before us were all hot and there was too much of them. We were not harvest hands. Julian barely picked at his food, swallowing a mouthful now and then more out of deference to Anne’s insistence that he eat something than out of any appetite. She hardly ate more herself and spoke scarcely at all. I felt that she did not know just what the status quo was and thought it better to take no chances. She kept one eye on Mrs. Walters most of the time, with now and then a grin in my direction. It was pleasant to see her across the table from me.

  The only one who enjoyed that meal was Mrs. Walters, who sat on my left. She was as silent as the rest of us, but this time she ate steadily and with a heartiness that was faintly revolting to me.

  None of our few and unimportant remarks is worth reporting. Twenty minutes after we sat down we had all left the table and gone our separate ways. Julian retired upstairs, presumably to continue his work though Mrs. Walters reminded him that he would have only an hour or two before it was time to clean what she called “our room,” which I understood to mean the laboratory. He nodded and said that he would be through in plenty of time. Mrs. Walters stayed in the kitchen talking to Mrs. Marcy about supper and instructing her to fix a bed for me somewhere upstairs. I didn’t pay any attention to what it was all about, but I am positive that it was mere household routine.

  Anne and I wandered outdoors. Somehow I was beginning to feel that the less time I spent inside the walls of that house the better. Each time I stepped out one of its doors I felt indefinably relieved, freer. We wandered across the meadow again and lay down in the grass under the big maple tree near the edge of the river bay. It was peaceful there and I felt relaxed. My pipe, when I got together the energy to light it, tasted good. Anne lay beside me looking comfortable and intermittently braiding grass stems into some sort of bracelet. I knew she wanted to talk to me after a while, but that she was waiting, as I was, for the heavy mood of lunch to lift.

  “Well,” she said finally, “what do you think of our happy home, God bless it?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Were you shocked by Uncle Julian? He looks so old and sick to me.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and I’ve been wondering whether to tell you what he had to say. Maybe I’m doing you a rotten trick, Anne, but I think you’d better know about it.” And I told her what he was doing. She listened to me without interrupting once; the only way I could judge the effect of what I was saying lay in observing the steady drain of the color out of her face.

  “He’s really sick, then,” she said when I finished speaking, “in his mind, too.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “And where does she come into all this? Or didn’t he tell you that?”

  “No, but she did. We sat on the back steps and had a chat.” I told her about that, too.

  “So that’s it,” she said, still weaving the stems of grass together. “What do you think we ought to do?”

  “In a minute,” I said. “Meantime, there’s one more thing. Mrs. Marcy came in after I’d talked to Julian. She chattered away for twenty minutes or so. And she told me something odd . . .” I was conscious that my voice gave away some of the disquietude which the remembrance of that bustling little woman brought me.

  “Don’t tell me,” Anne said, rolling over and sitting up in the grass, “that there’s something queer about Elora, too? Elora—isn’t that a sweet name? She must have been adorable ten or twelve years ago.” Her voice sounded as if that was almost before the dawn of recorded time.

  “Ages ago,” I agreed drily. “The point that seems odd to me is that Julian and Mrs. Walters keep the thing covered when Mrs. Marcy’s in the room. Or so she says.”

  Anne frowned thoughtfully and thrust a stem of grass between teeth that were white in her brown face. She sat so long without answering that I almost forgot what I had said in watching the leaf shadows brush to and fro across her forehead. Then she shook her head. “They’re both taking no chances on letting the great secret escape them, Dick. But I don’t see anything curious about covering the thing up. If only to keep the dust of sweeping off whatever it is.”

  “Well,” I said slowly, “maybe there isn’t. Probably it’s just my imagination working overtime. There’s something about this place that makes you do more wondering than thinking, anyhow. But if I were making a complicated piece of electrical machinery, I don’t think I’d bother to shroud it over so even a Maine farmer’s wife couldn’t look at it. It’s a stupid sort of precaution. A bit of dust wouldn’t matter enough to go to all that trouble, and Mrs. Marcy couldn’t grasp the least thing about it by looking at it. And Mrs. Walters is right there, she says, all the time she’s sweeping.”

  “Yes . . .” Anne agreed without conviction. “Maybe they’re afraid it would scare her.”

  If there were any truth at all in the superstition that coming events are foreshadowed, then was the moment for it to have been revealed. But I heard those casual words of Anne’s with no reaction, no feeling of prescience. I laughed—and I should like to be able to call back that laughter now—without bothering to retort. The idea was so simple that it could not be true. Only l
ater, when I saw the figures which are now nothing but puddled lumps of melted wire, did I think of Anne’s remark again. A great many more important things than the first sight of those seven . . . things . . . happened to me before I saw the last of the house on Setauket Point, but none that come up more easily against the dark side of my lids when my eyes are closed.

  Anne herself attached no importance to her suggestion. She grinned at my laughter and went on, “Anyhow, it doesn’t seem to me to matter. The problem is what we’re going to do.”

  “What I thought of this morning was trying to get into Julian’s confidence to the point where he’d let me see this mechanical marvel of his. Perhaps he’d be willing to let me work with him and help him on it. I once had a laboratory job under him, you know. Little by little I might be able to prove to him that the thing won’t and can’t work, all the time pretending to believe in it myself.”

  It was Anne’s turn to laugh. “Boring from within. You talk like the new Communist party line. But it might work, at that.” Something must have occurred to her, because after a moment her voice took on assurance and lost most of its underlying amusement. “You’ve got something there, I think. It’s the best suggestion I can think of. Provided you have the time?”

  “I’ve got ten free days.”

  “That ought to be enough,” she said, and though her face and tone were both sober, I had an idea she was smiling to herself about something. “Only look out for that woman. If she gets an idea what you’re trying to do, or if you get her jealous of her standing with Julian . . .” She bit through the grass stem with an audible crunch.

  That consideration gave me no pleasure. “She’s going to be awkward,” I admitted.

  We had been talking earnestly but not, I think, with particularly heavy hearts. There was something exciting in the situation for both of us. I knew that no matter what happened I should enjoy the next few days because I could spend part of them with Anne. She must have been glad of any company in that lonely house and relieved because I had showed up. But simultaneously we realized what a tragic and pathetic sort of conspiracy we were cooking up. We each loved Julian, in my case remotely but genuinely for all that, and we had been forgetting him.