"'I reckon 'twas my afternoon out, doctor!' she said softly, and that was all. But it was enough. It wouldn't have made any difference what she said, anyhow--the look was enough. It wasn't the look of our shy little Mynie; her eyes had never gone any farther than my breakfast table and the office door. But these eyes were slanting, curious, audacious--conscious. That's what it was, they were conscious of something--something I didn't know. And for a quick moment I remembered, with no connection, apparently, that queer look in the eyes of the parson's wife--the one that had the house before. I didn't know why, and I dismissed it as irrelevant, for that poor creature had been frightened to death, and Mynie was more self-confident than I had ever seen her and not at all pleasant with it. I've never been of a temper to stand any nonsense from servants, and the cla.s.s of Northern darky that was growing up in that city wasn't always easy to deal with. But I remembered what a sterling creature the mother was, and I tried to be gentle with the girl.

"'You understand, Mynie,' I said temperately, 'I only speak for your good. I know the world better than you can and I don't want to see you get into bad ways. Do you want to lose George his place? You've got a good home, and you're with your mother, and there's no excuse for you if you slip up, you see. Understand me?'

"'Yes, doctor, I understand you,' she said, and walked out of the room with her head high and her hips swinging. Something in her carriage--so different from the way she used to slip in and out--struck me all of a sudden, and there flashed into my mind an old story about Althea's being the direct descendant of one of the oldest African kings and a princess in her own right. Absurd, of course, but it makes a lot of difference whether you regard those people as creeping up to our democracy or sliding down from their royalty, you see. And with Mynie the scale had shifted suddenly, and it was the last of an old line that swung by me, not the first of a new one. Straight across the commonplace air of my office a wind out of the jungle had blown, a whiff of something old and unmanageable, and beyond rules, or beneath 'em, perhaps; something there wasn't any prescription for; something not to be weighed and measured by any of the new methods, because it antedated method.

"Yes, it was all that. I don't know if I make myself clear at all....

You may think I was working up a fanciful theory just because a pert servant maid was getting a little wayward, but it wasn't only that--Lord, no! It was a great deal more than that, and it was just beginning; just beginning."

There was no doubt that he had the strained attention of all of them: their hands held the gla.s.ses, but they did not drink, looking mostly at the wet rings on the polished table, or the little heaps of white ashes. A servant pa.s.sing through scratched a match with a rasping splutter, and they twitched angrily at the interruption, fearing it would throw him off the track--he was so easily quieted, and when once one of his great gulfs of silence received him, it was hopeless.

But this time he went on.

"After that the house got very still, by degrees. Althea sang less and less and by and by not at all. There seemed to be no clatter, no bustle, no homely, chattering machinery of life. Sometimes I would step out through the dining-room and listen, purposely, to see where they were. And it was always the same thing: Althea sitting in her clean kitchen, by her clean table, with a bowl or a pan or what not in her lap, her yellowish hands lax, her knees as still as marble, her eyes set ahead of her, thinking, thinking, thinking. Her brows would be knit and her face all drawn. She had the look of a fighter, a struggler with something--but there was nothing there. And out on the side porch Mynie would be sitting, her head thrown back against the wooden column of the porch, her hands clasped about her knees, smiling, smiling, always smiling. Sometimes she would hum a sort of low tuneless chant--it sounded like a pagan ritual of some sort, all repet.i.tions, rising and falling in a monotonous, haunting drone. And once, as I stood watching her curiously, the word for that noise flashed suddenly into my mind--incantation. That was it, incantation.

"Well! All this sounds very feeble, doesn't it? The truth is, I haven't got the right vocabulary--as a matter of fact, I don't think anybody has. When you can describe a thing, a sensation, perfectly, I doubt if it's very important anyhow. It's always so. The big things simply elude description. And yet we all know them. Falling in love, for instance: G.o.d knows it's as definite as measles, but who ever described it? The most these writing fellows can manage is to tell you what a lot of people did who happened to be in that way, and sometimes they catch a lot of the tricks, but that's all. Then there's dying.

There's a specific atmosphere about that--everybody knows it. The people know it mostly, themselves. I mean, if any one ever had occasion to die twice, he'd recognise the symptoms immediately. But n.o.body can describe it, though plenty of us know what it is.

"So with that house and the atmosphere in it. Something was happening there. Something so strong and so actual that it defied all appearances, all the ordinary influences that might be supposed to act on the imagination of, say, a sensitive, hysterical, under-occupied woman. For as a matter of fact there was nothing morbid in the look of the house--nothing at all. It was sunny and fresh and painted. It was clean and dry. But it ought not to have been. No ... I've sat there, late afternoons, when it seemed to me if I touched the walls they'd be damp and the woodwork rotted and mouldy. The boards should have creaked there and the stair-rails ought to have given under the hand--but they didn't. I had them all repaired, you see! But there were a few things I hadn't had the chance to repair and they ... oh, well, they were there, that was all.

"There? You'd have said so, any of you, if you'd seen Althea as I saw her one morning. I stepped into the kitchen suddenly, to give an order for some beef-tea I wanted to take away with me, and there she sat, cross-legged on the clean floor, a red silk scarf twined around her shoulders and--of all things--a red and blue kerchief twisted into a turban on her head. She was rocking back and forth and singing, and I give you my word, I was as shocked as if I'd seen my own mother in that rig, swaying there!

"She turned her head as I came in and I saw that she had big blue gla.s.s earrings in her ears.

"And all of a sudden it came to me--what was happening there: I felt very queer for a moment, I tell you! Everything seemed to be rolling backward, like one of those cinematograph things, reversed. Not I--I swear nothing touched me. I was the same. _So was the jeweller. So was the parson. So was the man before that..._

"'Althea,' I said roughly, 'what are you doing there? Take those rags off you! Get up immediately! I am ashamed of you.'

"Her eyes met mine for a moment, glittering like a savage's--it was nip and tuck between us there: she might have thrown a plate at me. But she didn't; I won. You see, she was not a young woman, and unusually controlled for one of her race, and she owed me a good deal, besides.

"'I'm thoroughly ashamed of you,' I repeated.

"She staggered up and burst into hoa.r.s.e, frightened sobbing.

"''Fore G.o.d, I am, too, doctor!' she cried and stumbled into her pantry, shaking and muttering. I waited till she came back, and she was quiet and trim again--herself. She stuffed a bundle into the stove before my eyes, and I don't think she ever met my look again. She was a good woman, Althea was.

"But the other--Mynie--well, the game was up with her. Heavens, the change in that girl's eyes! It wasn't that they were bold, it wasn't that they were beautiful, nor even that they were conscious of it. No, it was more than that--more and worse and deeper and older-- Oh, as old as h.e.l.l! That look unsettled ... disorganized ... how shall I put it? The flimsiness of civilisation, the essential bedrock of animalism--the big, ceaseless undertow of things ... anyway, it was all in that girl's eyes and it touched that spring in poor George that Nature has coiled in every one of us. The Old Lady wound us up with that spring and she daren't let it run down, you see."

The room was absolutely empty but for the four of them; they stared at him steadily, his rumbling, husky voice held them like a vise; they could not miss a word.

"She got fat on it. She bloomed in that infernal house like some tropical bog-flower; she expanded, she shot up.

"Once, at twilight, I peeped out and saw her sitting on the side porch, her chin in her hand, staring and staring, and laughing, now and then, and shutting her eyes. It made me shiver.

"That warm, damp dusk was like a Florida swamp; the air seemed to thicken, thicken, as I looked. A quick instinct warned me to look for George in the shadow: it seemed to me that he stood there, in ... glue ... like a caught fly. To let go--to drift in a warm, relaxing current ... I had to shake my shoulders, actually, as if there had been a net ... I felt for him so.

"I went to her mother.

"'Call that girl in!' I said roughly. 'What's the matter with her?'

"She wouldn't look at me.

"'Come, what's all this? Out with it!' I said. But she stood there, obstinate as a mule, and perfectly silent. You can't do anything with them, then.

"Well, it was like fighting filthy cobwebs: walking through them, breathing them, pulling them off from your mouth, your wrists, your ankles! Not that I felt anything directly, mind you--I could have lived there for years--alone. But it was all up with Mynie and George, they were done for, like the others ... like the others.

"What worked there, rotting like some infernal yeast? What terrible energy, what malignant, vindictive l.u.s.t infected that place? What distorted, unhappy soul first sickened there? How long ago? _How long ago?_ Are there centres of negation? Oh, I tell you, the table-tippers are harmless beside the sickening truths, the simply incredible possibilities of this little crevice we walk along!

"Was it like a grain of that nasty musk that gets into a woman's drawer and taints endlessly?

"I tell you, I saw that girl disintegrate, decay, turn fungoid under my eyes--ugh!

"There had to be an end, of course. I asked where she was going one afternoon, and then she smiled and looked up at me sidewise.

"'You needn't come back,' I said abruptly. 'I'll settle with your mother. Do you understand?'

"She arched her shoulder and flashed a glance straight above me, out of the open window.

"'I'm sorry you don't want me, doctor,' she said softly. I could see poor George tremble--the porch vines shook.

"Then I took her by the shoulders and shook her.

"'Get out of my house, you black s.l.u.t!' I said--but I didn't say 's.l.u.t.' And she went. It was the only time I was ever brutal to a woman."

He gulped the rest of his tumbler.

"The next day I moved my office stuff back, and that d.a.m.ned house was empty.

"'I'm sorry about Mynie, Althea,' I said to the mother, the day afterward. 'If you ever need any money----'

"'Thank you, Dr. Stanchon, thank you, seh. You couldn't help it. But I guess she'll never need money, seh,' she said quietly. And she was right enough, of course.

"She knew. They're not far from the apes, and they know a lot we've forgotten, I believe. Perhaps forgetting it is what civilised us.

"I never saw Mynie again. She went off East, and George with her.

They're both dead, now. His wife stayed on in the cottage.

"I gave her all the help I could ... it was my fault, I suppose. And yet, G.o.d knows, I meant nothing. I thought _I_ was undertaking that d.a.m.ned house, you see--how could I tell how the thing worked?"

They watched him eagerly: his face showed that he had more to tell.

Not a man moved, unless it were to knock the ash from his cigar or to light a fresh one.

"There was a Catholic priest there, then," he said slowly. "He's been moved higher up, since, and you'd all know his name, if I gave it.

We'll call him Father Kelly--though that wasn't it, of course. He and I were great friends--he was a little older than I was--and we used to have many a good talk together, meeting on our rounds, you see. Often I'd take him miles on his way, and drop my driver out on the road, just for the pleasure of his company. Of course we disagreed entirely on what he considered the most important points, but leaving them out, we were thoroughly congenial, and we were often glad of each other's opinion, I can tell you, for we often had the same patients.

"Well, a day or two after I'd moved my stuff out of that cursed house, he came to the office with a drug case he was trying to reform: he'd persuaded the fellow as far as the pledge went, and I was to talk to him about diet and exercise and all the rest. After the man left, Father Kelly looked at me once or twice, talked a bit about the weather, and finally pulled out his old blackened pipe and looked around the office.

"'Have ye a bit of tobacco about ye, doctor?' says he. 'If so, and you're not too busy, I could do with a little rest--I was up all night.'