Part 11

Mary Blake was an overgrown girl in the school downstairs. She was a most pervasive lass--“a perfect romp.” We all knew her well. She belonged to a family prominent in our growing town, and although my family and hers were not intimate they no doubt would have thought they were had they unexpectedly met for instance on the spiral stairway of 7 Rue Scribe. There were two sons and four daughters in Mary’s family and none of them was named Jane. This is important. Years elapsed. I had spent considerable time abroad, I had been occupied in growing up, in going to school, in preparing for college. There were still four Blake girls, but my interest in them was vague, collective. Then one day I heard of the marriage of Jane Blake, which surprised me somewhat as there had never been a Jane Blake. This led a short time later to my expressing to Mrs. Blake a belated interest in Mary, at which Mrs. Blake looked mystified for a moment and then said, “I think you must mean Susan.” I didn’t mean Susan but I refrained from saying so, and since then I have been haunted by the mystery of Mary Blake. Apparently there is no Mary Blake and never was one, although in answer to my feverish questionings several persons who were at Mrs. White’s with her have assured me that they remember her perfectly. Every now and then I meet Jane Blake and talk to her, wondering the while if she can be Mary. That she is dark and Mary was blonde is perhaps negligible. Once I sat next to Jane at dinner and when, after a pause in our conversation, I said, “Come, now--aren’t you really your sister who died?” She answered coldly that none of her sisters had ever died and immediately afterward refused to let the servant help her to any more champagne.

The mystery of the White Maria I have never tried to solve. It is enough to know that it was and to wonder if I shall ever again see anything so lovely. The White Maria, as has been mentioned, was a large, square box of black oilcloth. It’s inner surface, however, was white, soiled to a neutral gray. On our outward journeys when I noticed this at all it was only to feel the tragedy of life with a greater intensity. But on the return.... To state in words what we saw when returning gives but little idea of it. We were always tired, silent and a trifle sleepy when we started for home, and we at once leaned back and quietly watched for It. It often appeared but sometimes it refused to show itself for days, and I then used to wonder if I had ever really seen it. The perpetual fascination it had for us was a most complicated one, consisting as it did of the mystery, the beauty, the unreality and the reality of the thing itself, together with the fact that Mrs. White was somehow being thwarted. The black canopy of the White Maria, in a word, sought to imprison us, to impose an impenetrable barrier between us and the outside world, but as we jogged along, the houses, the trees, the horses, the wagons and the people we passed were reproduced in miniature on one of the inside walls. The details were always clear enough to let us know where we were; frequently they were perfect. The little panorama, furthermore, was without color, which gave it an additional, ghostly charm. I have never been hypnotized, but I think in staring at this dreamlike, dissolving procession I used to be very near the hypnotic state. At times when the White Maria drew up at our front door I was asleep and it would take me half an hour or more to get back again into my body--I can remember the sensation even if I can’t describe it. The moving-picture shows of to-day seem to me like a crude and vulgar attempt to recall and commercialize the age when we were mystics and had visions.

THE END