Chapter 8

He gave a soft groan of comfort as he settled in his chair and began pulling at his short black pipe, and she let her eyes dwell on him in a rapture that curiously interested me. People in love are rarely interesting--that is, flesh-and-blood people. Of course I know that lovers are the life of fiction, and that a story of any kind can scarcely hold the reader without them. The love-interest, as they call it, is also supposed to be essential to the drama, and friends of mine who have tried to foist their plays upon managers have been overthrown by the objection that the love-interest is not strong enough in what they have done. Yet lovers in real life are, so far as I have observed them, bores. They are confessed to be disgusting before or after marriage when they let their fondness appear, but even when they try to hide it, they are tiresome. Character goes down before passion in them; nature is reduced to propensity. Then, how is it that the novelist manages to keep these, and to give us nature and character while seeming to offer nothing but propensity and passion? Perhaps he does not give them. Perhaps what he does is to hypnotize us so that we each of us identify ourselves with the lovers, and add our own natures and characters to the single principle that animates them. The reason we like, that we endure, to read about them, may be that they are ourselves rendered objective in an instant of intense vitality, without the least trouble or risk to us. But if we have them there before us in the tiresome reality, they exclude us from their pleasure in each other and stop up the perspective of our happiness with their hulking personalities, bare of all the iridescence of potentiality, which we could have cast about them. Something of this iridescence may cling to unmarried lovers, in spite of themselves, but wedded bliss is a sheer offence.

I do not know why it was not an offence in the case of the Alderlings, unless it was because they both, in their different ways, saw the joke of the thing. At any rate, I found that in their charm for each other they had somehow not ceased to be amusing for me, and I waited confidently for the answer she would make to his whimsically abrupt bidding. But she did not answer very promptly, even when he had added, “Wanhope, here, is scenting something psychological in the reason of my laughing at you, instead of accepting the plain inference in the case.”

“What is the plain inference?” I asked, partly to fill up Mrs. Alderling’s continued silence.

“When a man laughs at a woman for no apparent reason it is because he is amused at her being afraid of him when he is so much more afraid of her, or puzzled by him when she is such an incomparable riddle herself, or caring for him when he knows he is not worth his salt.”

“You don’t expect to put me off with that sort of thing,” I said.

“Well, then, go on Marion,” Alderling repeated.

II.

Mrs. Alderling stood looking at him, not me, with a smile hovering about the corners of her mouth, which, when it decided not to alight anywhere, scarcely left her aspect graver for its flitting. She said at last, in her slow, deep-throated voice, “I guess I will let you tell him.”

“Oh, I’ll tell him fast enough,” said Alderling, nursing his knee, and bringing it well up toward his chin, between his clasped hands. “Marion has always had the notion that I should live again if I believed I should, and that as I don’t believe I shall, I am not going to. The joke of it is,” and he began to splutter laughter round the stem of his pipe, “she’s as much of an agnostic as I am. She doesn’t believe she is going to live again, either.”

Mrs. Alderling said, “I don’t care for it in my case.” That struck me as rather touching, but I had no right to enter uninvited into the intimacy of her meaning, and I said, looking as little at her as I need, “Aren’t you both rather belated?”

“You mean that protoplasm has gone out?” he chuckled.

“Not exactly,” I answered. “But you know that a great many things are allowed now that were once forbidden to the True Disbeliever.”

“You mean that we may trust in the promises, as they used to be called, and still keep the Unfaith?”

“Something like that.”

Alderling took his pipe out, apparently to give his whole face to the pleasure of teasing his wife.

“That’ll be a great comfort to Marion,” he said, and he threw back his head and laughed.

She smiled faintly, vaguely, tolerantly, as if she enjoyed his pleasure in teasing her.

“Where have you been,” I asked, “that you don’t know the changed attitude in these matters?”

“Well, here for the last three years. We tried it the first winter after we came, and found it was not so bad, and we simply stayed on. But I haven’t really looked into the question since I gave the conundrum up twenty years ago, on what was then the best authority. Marion doesn’t complain. She knew what I was when she married me. She was another. We were neither of us very bigoted disbelievers. We should not have burned anybody at the stake for saying that we had souls.”

Alderling put back his pipe and cackled round it, taking his knee between his hands again.

“You know,” she explained, more in my direction than to me, “that I had none to begin with. But Alderling had. His people believed in the future life.”

“That’s what they said,” Alderling crowed. “And Marion has always thought that if she had believed that way, she could have kept me up to it; and so when I died I should have lived again. It is perfectly logical, though it isn’t capable of a practical demonstration. If Marion had come of a believing family, she could have brought me back into the fold. Her great mistake was in being brought up by an uncle who denied that he was living here, even. The poor girl could not do a thing when it came to the life hereafter.”

The smile now came hovering back, and alighted at a corner of Mrs. Alderling’s mouth, making it look, oddly enough, rather rueful. “It didn’t matter about me. I thought it a pity that Alderling’s talent should stop here.”

“Did you ever know anything like that?” he cried. “Perfectly willing to thrust me out into a cold other-world, and leave me to struggle on without her, when I had got used to her looking after me. Now I’m not so selfish as that. I shouldn’t want to have Marion living on through all eternity if I wasn’t with her. It would be too lonely for her.”

He looked up at her, with his dancing eyes, and she put her hand down over his shoulder into the hand that he lifted to meet it, in a way that would have made me sick in some people. But in her the action was so casual, so absent, that it did not affect me disagreeably.

“Do you mean that you haven’t been away since you came here three years ago?” I asked.

“We ran up to the theatre once in Boston last winter, but it bored us to the limit.” Alderling poked his knife-blade into the bowl of his pipe as he spoke, having freed his hand for the purpose, while Mrs. Alderling leaned back against the slim column again. He said gravely: “It was a great thing for Marion, though. In view of the railroad accident that didn’t happen, she convinced herself that her sole ambition was that we should die together. Then, whether we found ourselves alive or not, we should be company for each other. She’s got it arranged with the thunderstorms, so that one bolt will do for us both, and she never lets me go out on the water alone, for fear I shall watch my chance, and get drowned without her.”

I did not trouble myself to make out how much of this was mocking, and as there was no active participation in the joke expected of me, I kept on the safe side of laughing. “No wonder you’ve been able to do such a lot of pictures,” I said. “But I should have thought you might have found it dull--I mean dull together--at odd times.”

“Dull?” he shouted. “It’s stupendously dull! Especially when our country neighbors come in to ‘‘liven us up.’ We’ve got neighbors here that can stay longer in half an hour than most people can in a week. We get tired of each other at times, but after a call from the people in the next house, we return with rapture to our delusion that we are interesting.”

“And you never,” I ventured, making my jocosity as ironical as possible, “wear upon each other?”

“Horribly!” said Alderling, and his wife smiled contentedly, behind him. “We haven’t a whole set of china in the house, from exchanging it across the table, and I haven’t made a study of Marion--you must have noticed how many Marions there were that she hasn’t thrown at my head. Especially the Madonnas. She likes to throw the Madonnas at me.”

I ventured still farther, addressing myself to Mrs. Alderling. “Does he keep it up all the time--this blague?”

“Pretty much,” she answered passively, with entire acquiescence in the fact if it were the fact, or the joke if it were the joke.

“But I didn’t see anything of yours, Mrs. Alderling,” I said. She had had her talent, as a girl, and some people preferred it to her husband’s,--but there was no effect of it anywhere in the house.

“The housekeeping is enough,” she answered, with her tranquil smile.

There was nothing in her smile that was leading, and I did not push my inquiry, especially as Alderling did not seem disposed to assist. “Well,” I said, “I suppose you will forgive to science my feeling that your situation is most suggestive.”

“Oh, don’t mind _us!_” said Alderling.

“I won’t, thank you,” I answered. “Why, it’s equal to being cast away together on an uninhabited island.”

“Quite,” he assented.

“There can’t,” I went on, “be a corner of your minds that you haven’t mutually explored. You must know each other,” I cast about for the word, and added abruptly, “by heart.”

“I don’t suppose he meant anything pretty?” said Alderling, with a look up over his shoulder at his wife; and then he said to me, “We do; and there are some very curious things I could tell you, if Marion would ever let me get in a word.”

“Do let him, Mrs. Alderling,” I entreated, humoring his joke at her silence.

She smiled, and softly shrugged, and then sighed.

“I could make your flesh creep,” he went on, “or I could if you were not a psychologist. I assure you that we are quite weird at times.”

“As how?”

“Oh, just knowing what the other is thinking, at a given moment, and saying it. There are times when Marion’s thinking is such a nuisance to me, that I have to yell down to her from my loft to stop it. The racket it makes breaks me all up. It’s a relief to have her talk, and I try to make her, when she’s posing, just to escape the din of her thinking. Then the willing! We experimented with it, after we had first noticed it, but we don’t any more. It’s too dead easy.”

“What do you mean by the willing?” I asked.

“Oh, just wishing one that the other was there, and there he or she is.”

“Is he trying to work me, Mrs. Alderling?” I appealed to her, and she answered from her calm:

“It is very unaccountable.”

“Then you really mean it! Why can’t you give me an illustration?”

“Why, you know,” said Alderling more seriously than he had yet spoken, “I don’t believe those things, if they are real, can ever be got to show off. That’s the reason why your ‘Quests in the Occult’ are mainly such rubbish, as far as the evidences are concerned. If Marion and I tried to give you an illustration, as you call it, the occult would snub us. But, is there anything so very strange about it? The wonder _is_ that a man and wife ever fail of knowing each what the other is thinking. They pervade each other’s minds, if they are really married, and they are so present with each other that the tacit wish should be the same as a call. Marion and I are only an intensified instance of what may be done by living together. There is something, though, that is rather queer, but it belongs to psychomancy rather than psychology, as I understand it.”

“Ah!” I said. “What is that queer something?”

“Being visibly present when absent. It has not happened often, but it has happened that I have seen Marion in my loft when she was really somewhere else and not when I had willed her or wished her to be there.”

“Now, really,” I said, “I must ask you for an instance.”

“You want to heap up facts, Lombroso fashion? Well, this is as good as most of Lombroso’s facts, or better. I went up one morning, last winter, to work at a study of a Madonna from Marion, directly after breakfast, and left her below in the dining-room, putting away the breakfast things. She has to do that occasionally, between the local helps, who are all we can get in the winter. She professes to like it, but you never can tell, from what a woman says; she has to do it, anyway.” It is hard to convey a notion of the serene, impersonal acquiescence of Mrs. Alderling in taking this talk of her. “I was banging away at it when I knew she was behind me looking over my shoulder rather more stormily than she usually does; usually, she is a dead calm. I glanced up, and saw the calm succeed the storm. I kept on, and after awhile I was aware of hearing her step on the stairs.”

Alderling stopped, and smoked definitively, as if that were the end.

“Well,” I said, after waiting a while, “I don’t exactly get the unique value of the incident.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he had accidentally forgotten the detail, “the steps were coming up?”

“Yes?”

“She opened the door, which she had omitted to do before, and when she came in she denied having been there already. She owned that she had been hurrying through her work, and thinking of mine, so as to make me do something, or undo something, to it; and then all at once she lost her impatience, and came up at her leisure. I don’t exactly like to tell what she wanted.”

He began to laugh provokingly, and she said, tranquilly, “I don’t mind your telling Mr. Wanhope.”

“Well, then, strictly in the interest of psychomancy, I will confide that she had found some traces of a model that I used to paint my Madonnas from, before we were married, in that picture. She had slept on her suspicion, and then when she could not stand it any longer, she had come up in the spirit to say that she was not going to be mixed up in a Madonna with any such minx. The words are mine, but the meaning was Marion’s. When she found me taking the minx out, she went quietly back to washing her dishes, and then returned in the body to give me a sitting.”

III.

We were silent a moment, till I asked, “Is this true, Mrs. Alderling?”

“About,” she said. “I don’t remember the storm, exactly.”

“Well, I don’t see why you bother to remain in the body at all,” I remarked.

“We haven’t arranged just how to leave it together,” said Alderling. “Marion, here, if I managed to get off first, would have no means of knowing whether her theory of the effect of my unbelief on my future was right or not; and if _she_ gave _me_ the slip, she would always be sorry that she had not stayed here to convert me.”

“Why don’t you agree that if either of you lives again, he or she shall make some sign to let the other know?” I suggested. “Well, that has been tried so often, and has it ever worked? It’s open to the question whether the dead do not fail to show up because they are forbidden to communicate with the living; and you are just where you were, as to the main point. No, I don’t see any way out of it.”

Mrs. Alderling went into the house and came out with a book in her hand, and her fingers in it at two places. It was that impressive collection of Christ’s words from the New Testament called “The Great Discourse.” She put the book before me, first at one place and then at another, and I read, “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die,” and then, “Nay, but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” She did not say anything in showing me these passages, and I found something in her action touchingly childlike and elemental, as well as curiously heathenish. It was as if some poor pagan had brought me his fetish to test its effect upon me. “Yes,” I said, “those are things that we hardly know what to do with in our philosophy. They seem to be said as with authority, and yet, somehow, we cannot admit their validity in a philosophical inquiry as to a future life. Aren’t they generally taken to mean that we shall be unhappy or happy hereafter, rather than that we shall be or not be at all? And what is believing? Is it the mere act of acknowledgement, or is it something more vital, which expresses itself in conduct?”

She did not try to say. In fact she did not answer at all. Whatever point was in her mind she did not, or could not, debate it. I perceived, in a manner, that her life was so largely subliminal that if she had tried she could not have met my question any more than if she had not had the gift of speech at all. But, in her inarticulate fashion, she had exposed to me a state of mind which I was hardly withheld by the decencies from exploring. “You know,” I said, “that psychology almost begins by rejecting the authority of these sayings, and that while we no longer deny anything, we cannot allow anything merely because it has been strongly affirmed. Supposing that there is a life after this, how can it be denied to one and bestowed upon another because one has assented to a certain supernatural claim and another has refused to do so? That does not seem reasonable, it does not seem right. Why should you base your conclusion as to that life upon a promise and a menace which may not really refer to it in the sense which they seem to have?”

“Isn’t it all there is?” she asked, and Alderling burst into his laugh.

“I’m afraid she’s got you there, Wanhope. When it comes to polemics there’s nothing like the passive obstruction of Mrs. Alderling. Marion might never have been an early Christian herself--I think she’s an inexpugnable pagan--but she would have gone round making it awfully uncomfortable for the other unbelievers.”

“You know,” she said to him, and I never could decide how much she was in earnest, “that I can’t believe till you do. I couldn’t take the risk of keeping on without you.”

Alderling followed her in-doors, where she now went to put the book away, with the mock addressed to me, “Did you ever know such a stubborn woman?”

IV.

One conclusion from my observation of the Alderlings during the week I spent with them was that it is bad for a husband and wife to be constantly and unreservedly together, not because they grow tired of each other, but because they grow more intensely interested in each other. Children, when they come, serve the purpose of separating the parents; they seem to unite them in one care, but they divide them in their employments, at least in the normally constituted family. If they are rich, and can throw the care of the children upon servants, then they cannot enjoy the relief from each other that children bring to the mother who nurtures and teaches them, and to the father who must work for them harder than before. The Alderlings were not rich enough to have been freed from the wholesome responsibilities of parentage, but they were childless, and so they were not detached from the perpetual thought of each other. If they had only had different tastes, it might have been better, but they were both artists, she not less than he, though she no longer painted. When their common thoughts were not centred upon each other’s being, they were centred on his work, which, viciously enough, was the constant reproduction of her visible personality. I could always see them studying each other, he with an eye to her beauty, she with an eye to his power.

He was every now and then saying to her, “Hold on, Marion,” and staying her in some pose or movement, while he made mental note of it, and I was conscious of her preying upon his inmost thoughts and following him into the recesses of his reveries, where it is best for a man to be alone, even if he is sometimes a beast there. She was not like those wives who ask their husbands, when they do not happen to be talking, “What are you thinking about?” and I put this to her credit, till I realized that she had no need to ask, for she knew already. Now and then I saw him get up and shake himself restively, but I am bound to say in her behalf, that her pursuit of him seemed quite involuntary, and that she enjoyed it no more than he did. Twenty times I was on the point of asking, “Why don’t you people go in for a good long separation? Is there nothing to call you to Europe, Alderling? Haven’t you got a mother, or sister, or some one that you could visit, Mrs. Alderling? It would do you both a world of good.”

But it happened, oddly enough, that the Alderlings were as kinless as they were childless, and if he had gone to Europe he would have taken her with him, and prolonged their seclusion by the isolation in which people necessarily live in a foreign country. I found I was the only acquaintance who had visited them during the years of their retirement on the coast, where they had stayed, partly through his inertia, and partly from his superstition that he could paint better away from the ordinary associations and incentives; and they ceased, before I left, to get the good they might of my visit because they made me a part of their intimacy, instead of making themselves part of my strangeness.

After a day or two, their queer experiences began to resume themselves, unabashed by my presence. These were mostly such as they had already more than hinted to me: the thought-transferences, and the unconscious hypnotic suggestions which they made to each other. There was more novelty in the last than the first. If I could trust them, and they did not seem to wish to exploit their mysteries for the effect on me, they were with each other because one or the other had willed it. She would say, if we were sitting together without him, “I think Rupert wants me; I’ll be back in a moment,” and he, if she were not by, for some time, would get up with, “Excuse me, I must go to Marion; she’s calling me.”