by Otto Penzler
“Please give the titles.” Mr. Lemoine, who had always been so effaced and who looked so incompetent, was proving himself cool and skilful at this question-and-answer with the voice.
“There are too many.”
“You had pupils?”
“Many famous men.”
“Will you give the names?”
“You continually ask me to break your rules,” scolded the voice.
“What rules?”
“The rules spirits have to obey.”
“You are a Christian?”
“I have never been ashamed to call myself so.”
“Where—in the Gospels—is the rule of which you speak?” asked Mr. Lemoine sharply. “There are special rules for spirits?”
“Yes.”
So the dialogue went on, more or less on orthodox lines, but Ada Trimble was held and fascinated by the quality and accent of the voice. It was rough, harsh, intensely masculine, with a definite foreign accent. The tone was boastful and arrogant to an insufferable extent. Ada Trimble detested this pompous, insistent personality; she felt odd, a little dazed, a little confused; the orange glow of the gas fire, the red glow of the lamp, the metallic gleams on the horn fused into a fiery pattern before her eyes. She felt as if she were being drawn into a void in which nothing existed but the voice.
Even Mr. Lemoine’s thin tones, faintly questioning, seemed a long way off, a thread of sound compared to the deep boom of the voice. The conversation was like a ball being deftly thrown to and fro. Mr. Lemoine asked: “What do you understand by faith?” And the voice, steadily rising to a roar, replied: “The Faith as taught by the Gospel.”
“Does not the Gospel contain moral precepts rather than dogma?”
“Why that remark?”
“Because narrow or puerile practices have been built on this basis.”
“A clear conscience sees further than practices.”
“I see that you are a believer,” said Mr. Lemoine placidly. “What is your present situation?”
“Explain!” shouted the voice. “Are you in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory?” rapped out Mr. Lemoine. “I am in Heaven!”
“How is it that you are in Heaven and here at the same time?”
“You are a fool,” said the voice stridently. “Visit my grave and you will understand more about me.”
“Once more, where is your grave?”
The horn gave a groan of derision and was silent; Mr. Lemoine repeated his question, there was no answer; he then wiped his forehead and turned to his wife who was heaving back to consciousness.
“That is all for today,” he smiled round the little circle; no one save Ada and Helen seemed affected by the experience; Mr. Maple made some gloomy sceptical remarks; Mrs. Penfleet complained because Arthur had not spoken, and Essie Clark indifferently and efficiently put away the gramophone and the records.
When the red lamp was extinguished and the light switched on, Ada looked at Madame Destiny who was rubbing her eyes and smiling with an exasperating shrewd blandness.
“It was Gabriel Letourneau,” her husband told her mildly. “You remember I told you he came some months ago?” He glanced at Ada. “The medium never knows what spirit speaks.”
Ada glanced at Helen who sat quiet and downcast, then mechanically gathered up her gloves and handbag.
“Did you find this person in Larousse?” she asked.
“No. We tried other sources too, but never could discover anything. Very likely he is a liar; quite a number of them are, you know. I always ask him the same questions, but as you heard, there is no satisfaction to be got.”
“He always boasts so,” complained Mr. Maple, “and particularly about his grave.”
“Oh,” smiled Mr. Lemoine, rising to indicate that the sitting was at an end. “He is a common type, a snob. When he was alive he boasted about his distinctions, visits to court, and so on; now he is dead he boasts of having seen God, being in Heaven, and the marvels of his grave.”
When they were out in the wind-swept evening Helen clasped Ada’s arm.
“Now, what do you make of that? Ventriloquism? It is a personality.”
“It is odd, certainly. I was watching the woman. Her lips didn’t move—save just for snorting or groaning now and then.”
“Oh, I dare say it could be done,” said Helen impatiently. “But I don’t think it is a trick. I can’t feel that it is. Can you? That is what I wanted you to hear. There have been other queer things, but this is the queerest. What do you think?”
“Oh, Helen dear, I don’t know!” Ada was slightly trembling. “I never thought that I could be moved by anything like this.”
“That is it, isn’t it?” interrupted Helen, clinging to her as they passed along the cold street. “Moved—and what by?”
“Intense dislike—the man is loathsome!”
“There! You said man. It was a voice only!”
“Oh, Helen!”
They walked in silence to the waiting car and when inside began to talk again in low tones, pressed together. No, there was no explanation possible; any attempt at one landed you in a bog of difficulties.
“He spoke to me,” sighed Ada Trimble, “and, you know that I forgot he wasn’t there—I wish that I could have gone on talking to him, I feel that I should have been sufficiently insistent—”
“To—what, Ada?”
“To make him say something definite about himself—”
“It’s crazy, Ada! It lets loose all kinds of dreadful thoughts. He might be here, now, riding with us.”
“Well, he can’t talk without the trumpet.” Then both women laughed uneasily.
“My dear, we are getting foolish!” said Helen, and Ada answered: “Yes. Foolish either way—to talk of it at all if we think it was a fraud—and not be more serious if we don’t think it a fraud.”
But as people usually will when in this kind of a dilemma, they compromised; they discussed the thing and decided to put it to the test once again.
They became frequent visitors to the Bloomsbury Temple, and began to pay to have private sittings with the direct voice.
Busy as they were, Madame Destiny and Mr.Lemoine “fitted in” a good number of these, and the harsh voice that called itself Gabriel Letourneau usually spoke, though there were annoying occasions when Persian sages, Polish revolutionaries, and feeble-minded girls of unknown nationality insisted on expounding colourless views.
By the spring the personality of Gabriel Letourneau was complete to Ada and Helen. They had been able to build him up, partly from details he had supplied himself and partly out of their own uneasy imaginations. He had been—or was now, but they dared not speculate upon his present shape—a tall, dark, gaunt Frenchman, with side whiskers and a blue chin, the kind of brown eyes known as “piercing,” and a fanatical, grim expression.
Ada had often spoken to him in French, but she could never penetrate his identity. A professor, a peer in the reign of Louis Philippe? It was impossible for her to attempt to trace so elusive a person. At first she did not try; she told herself that she had other things to do and she tried to keep the thing out of her mind, or at least to keep it reduced to proper proportions. But this soon proved impossible, and sensible, charming, broad-minded Ada Trimble at length found herself in the grip of an obsession.
The voice and her hatred of the voice. It was useless for her to tell herself, as she frequently did, that the voice was only that of the woman who called herself Astra Destiny and not a personality at all. This was hopeless; she believed in Gabriel Letourneau. He had, she was sure, a bad effect on her character and on that of Helen. But opposite effects. Whereas Helen became limp, distracted, nervous, and talked vaguely of being “haunted,” Ada felt as if active evil was clouding her soul.
Why should she hate the voice? She had always been afraid of hatred. She knew that the person who hates, not the person who is hated, is the one who is destroyed. When she disliked a person or a thing she had always avoided it, making exc
eptions only in the cases of cruelty and fanaticism. There she had allowed hate to impel her to exertions foreign to her reserved nature. And now there was hatred of Gabriel Letourneau possessing her like a poison. He hated her, too. When she spoke to him he told her in his rapid French that Helen could not follow, his scornful opinion of her; he called her an “aging woman”; he said she was pretentious, facile, a silly little atheist, while “I am in Heaven.”
He made acid comments on her carefully-chosen clothes, on her charmingly-arranged hair, her little armory of wit and culture, on her delicate illusions and vague, romantic hopes. She felt stripped and defaced after one of the dialogues in which she could not hold her own. Sometimes she tried to shake herself out of “this nonsense.” She would look sharply at the entranced medium; Ada had never made the mistake of undervaluing the intelligence of Astra Destiny, and surely the conversation of Gabriel Letourneau was flavoured with feminine malice?
Out in the street with Helen she would say, “We really are fools! It is only an out-of-date gramophone.”
“Is it?” asked Helen bleakly. “And ventriloquism?” Then she added: “Where does she—that awful woman—get that fluent French?”
“Oh, when you begin asking questions!” cried Ada.
She examined the subject from all angles, she went to people who, she thought, “ought to know,” but she could get no satisfaction; it was a matter on which the wisest said the least.
“If only he wouldn’t keep boasting!” she complained to Helen. “His grave—that now—he says it is a marvellous monument and that people keep putting wreaths on it, that they make pilgrimages to it—and Helen, why should I mind? I ought to be pleased that he has that satisfaction or—at least be indifferent—but I’m not.”
“He’s been hateful to you, to us,” said Helen simply. “I loathe him, too—let us try to get away from him.”
“I can’t.”
Helen went; she drifted out of Ada’s life with a shivering reluctance to leave her, but with a definite inability to face the situation created by Gabriel Letourneau. She wrote from Cairo, and presently did not write at all. Ada, left alone with her obsession, no longer struggled against it; she pitted herself deliberately against the voice. Sometimes, as she came and went in the Bloomsbury Temple, she would catch a glint in the dull eyes of Mr. Lemoine or the flinty eyes of Madame Destiny that made her reflect on how many guineas she had paid them. But even these flashes of conviction that she was being the worst type of fool did not save her; she had reached the point where she had to give rein to her fortune.
In September she went to France; countless friends helped her to search archives; there was no member of the Chamber of Peers under Louis Philippe named Letourneau. She wrote to the keepers of the famous cemeteries, she visited these repulsive places herself; there were Letourneaus, not a few, but none with pre-name Gabriel, or with the inscription quoted by the voice. Nor was there anywhere an imposing monument, covered with wreaths and visited by pilgrims, to a professor-peer who had died in 1837.
“Fraud,” she kept telling herself, “that wretched couple just practised a very clever fraud on me. But why? What an odd personality for people like that to invent! And the deep masculine voice and the idiomatic French—clever is hardly the word. I suppose they got the data from Larousse.” The courteous friends helped her to make enquiries at the Sorbonne. No professors of that name there, or at any of the other big universities.
Ada Trimble believed that she was relieved from her burden of credulity and hate; perhaps if she kept away from the Bloomsbury Temple the thing would pass out of her mind. She was in this mood when she received an answer to a letter she had written to the keeper of the cemetery at Sceaux. She had written to so many officials, and it had been so long since she had written to Sceaux, and she had such little expectation of any result from her enquiries, that she scarcely took much interest in opening the letter. It read thus:
Madame, in reply to your letter of November 30th, I have the honour to inform you that I have made a search for the Letourneau tomb, which fortunately I found, and I have copied the epitaph cut on the tomb.
Gabriel Letourneau
Man of Letters
Died at Sceaux June 10th, 1858
Beatus qui intelligit
Super egenum et pauperem.
This neglected grave was in a miserable condition covered by weeds; in order to send you the above information it was necessary to undertake cleaning that occupied an hour, and this merely on the portion that bears the inscription. According to the register, this Letourneau was a poor tutor; his eccentric habits are still remembered in the quarter where he lived. He has become a legend—and “he boasts like a Gabriel Letourneau” is often said of a braggart. He has left no descendants and no one has visited his grave. He left a small sum of money to pay for the epitaph.
(signed) Robert, Keeper of the Cemetery
at Sceaux, 231 Rue Louis le Grand,
Sceaux (Seine)
Ada Trimble went at once to Sceaux. She arrived there on a day of chill, small rain, similar to that on which she had first heard the voice in the Bloomsbury Temple. There was a large, black cemetery, a row of bare chestnut-trees overlooking the walls, an ornate gate. The conscientious keeper, M. Robert, conducted her to the abandoned grave in the corner of the large graveyard; the rotting, dank rubbish of last year’s weeds had been cut away above the inscription that Ada had first heard in the Bloomsbury Temple a year ago.
She gazed and went away, full of strange terror. What was the solution of the miserable problem? There were many ways in which the Lemoine couple might have chanced to hear of the poor tutor of Sceaux, but how had they come to know of the epitaph for years concealed behind ivy, bramble, and moss? M. Robert, who was so evidently honest, declared that he never remembered anyone making enquiries about the Letourneau grave, and he had been years in this post. He doubted, he said, whether even the people to whom the name of the eccentric was a proverb knew of the existence of his grave. Then, the shuffling of the dates, 1858 instead of 1837, the lies about the state of the grave and the position that Letourneau had held while in life.
Ada had a sickly qualm when she reflected how this fitted in with the character she had been given of a slightly unhinged braggart with egomania. A peerage, the Sorbonne, the monument—all lies?
Ada returned to England and asked Madame Destiny to arrange another sitting for her with the direct voice. She also asked for as large a circle as possible to be invited, all the people who had ever heard Gabriel Letourneau.
“Oh, that will be a large number,” said Madame Destiny quickly; “he is one of the spirits who visits us most frequently.”
“Never mind, the large room, please, and I will pay all expenses. I think I have found out something about that gentleman.”
“How interesting,” said Madame Destiny, with civil blankness.
“Can she possibly know where I have been?” thought Ada Trimble, but it seemed absurd to suppose that this hard-up couple, existing by shifts, should have the means to employ spies and detectives. The meeting was arranged, and as all the seats were free, the room was full.
The gramophone was on a raised platform; it was placed on a table beside which sat Madame Destiny to the right and her husband to the left. The red lamp was in place. A dark curtain, badly pinned up, formed the back cloth. Save for the gas fire, the room—a large Victorian salon—was in darkness. Ada Trimble sat on one of the Bentwood chairs in the front row. “He won’t come,” she thought. “I shall never hear the voice again. And the whole absurdity will be over.”
But the medium was no sooner twitching in a trance than the voice came rushing from the tin horn. It spoke directly to Ada Trimble, and she felt her heart cleave with horror as she heard the cringing tone.
“Good evening, madame, and how charming you are tonight! Your travels have improved you—you recall my little jokes, my quips? Only to test your wit, dear lady, I have always admired you so much—”
The voice’s opening remarks had been in French and for this Mr. Lemoine called him to order; the usual verbal duel followed, Lemoine pressing the spirit to give proof of his identity, the spirit arrogantly defending his secrets. The audience that had heard this parrying between Lemoine and Letourneau before so often was not interested, and Ada Trimble did not hear anything; she was fiercely concerned with her own terror and bewilderment. Then the voice, impatiently breaking off the bitter sparring, addressed her directly in oily, flattering accents.
“What a pleasure that we meet again; how charming to see you here! The time has been very long since I saw you last.”
Ada roused herself; she began to speak in a thick voice that she could scarcely have recognised as her own.
“Yes, one is drawn to what one dislikes as surely as towards what one hates. I have been too much concerned with you, I hope now that I shall be free.”
“Miss Trimble,” protested Mr. Lemoine, “there are others present; pray speak in English. I think you said you had been able to identify this spirit quite precisely.”
In French the gramophone harshly whispered, “Take care.”
“Well,” said Mr. Lemoine briskly, “this lady says she found your grave; what have you to say to that?”
“I beg the lady not to talk of my private affairs”; voice and accent were alike thick, with agitation, perhaps despair.
“But you have often spoken of your tomb, the wreaths, the pilgrimages; you have talked of your peerage, your professorship, your pupils. As you would never give us corroborative details, this lady took the trouble to find them out.”
“Let her give them,” said the voice, “when we are alone—she and I.”
“What would be the sense of that?” demanded Mr. Lemoine. “All these people know you well, they are interested—now, Miss Trimble.”
“I found the grave in Sceaux cemetery,” began Ada.
