Out of the Air Part 15

"I thought so," she remarked contemptuously as she turned to go out. For the Carbonado Mining Company had vanished into thin air. She was the only real person who left the theater.

When she came out on the street again, her headache had stopped and the languor was over. There was a beautiful lightness to her whole body.

That lightness impelled her to walk with the crowd. But--she suddenly discovered--she was not walking. She was _floating_. She even flew--only she did not rise very high. She kept an even level, about a foot above the pavement; but at that height she was like a feather. And in a wink--how this extraordinary division happened, she could not guess--she was two people once more.

New York was again blooming; but this time with its transient, vivacious after-the-theater vividness. Crowds were pouring up; pouring down, deflecting into side streets; emerging from side streets. Everywhere was light. Taxicabs and motors raced and spun and backed and turned; they churned, sizzled, spluttered, and foamed--scattering light. Tram-cars, the low-set, armored cruisers of Broadway, flashed smoothly past, overbr.i.m.m.i.n.g with light. The tops of the buildings held great congregations of dancing stars. Light poured down their sides.

Susannah floated with the strong main current of the crowd up Broadway and then, with a side current, a little down Broadway. Eddies took her into Forty-second Street, and whirled her back. And all the time she was in the crowd, but not of it--she was above it. She was looking down on people--she could see the tops of their heads. Susannah kept chuckling over an extraordinary truth she discovered.

"I must remember to tell Glorious Lutie," she said to herself, "how few people ever brush their hats."

While one self was noting this amusing fact, however, the other was listening to conversations; the s.n.a.t.c.hes of talk that drifted up to her.

"Let's go to a midnight show somewhere," a peevish wife-voice suggested.

"No, _sir_!" a gruff husband-voice answered. "Li'l' ole beddo looks pretty good to muh. I can't hit the hay too soon."

"What's Broadway got on Market Street?" a blithe boy's voice demanded.

"Take the view from Twin Peaks at night. Why, it has Broadway beat forty ways from the jack."

"I'll say so!" a girl's voice agreed.

Theaters were empty now, but restaurants were filling. In an incredibly short time, this phantasmagoria of movement, this kaleidoscope of color, this hurly-burly of sound had shattered, melted, fallen to silence.

People disappeared as though by magic from the street; now there were great gaps of sidewalk where n.o.body appeared. Susannah--both of her, because now she seemed to have become two people permanently--felt lonely. She quickened her pace, her floating rather, to catch up with a figure ahead. It was a girl, just an everyday girl, in a white linen suit and a white sailor hat topping a ma.s.s of black hair. She carried a handbag. Susannah found herself following, step by step, behind this girl whose face she had as yet not seen. She was floating; yet every time she tried to see the top of that sailor hat her vision became blurred. It was annoying; but this stealthy pursuit was pleasant, somehow--satisfying.

"They've been shadowing me," said Susannah to herself. "Now I'm shadowing. I've helped the Carbonado Company to rob orphans. I'm going to break my promise to go to Jamaica tomorrow. Isn't it glorious to float and be a criminal!"

So she followed westward on Forty-second Street and reached the Public Library corner of Fifth Avenue, which stretched now deserted except where knots of people awaited the omnibusses. Such a knot had gathered on that corner. Suddenly the girl in white raised her hand, waved; a woman in a light-blue summer evening gown answered her signal from the crowd; they ran toward each other. They were going to have a talk.

Susannah floated toward them. The air-currents made her a little wabbly--but wasn't it fun, eavesdropping and caring not the least bit about manners!

"My train doesn't start until one," said the white linen suit. "It's no use going back to my room--the night is so hot. I've been to the Summer Garden, and I'm killing time."

"Oh," asked blue dress, "did you sublet your room?"

"No," said the white linen suit, "I'll be gone for only a month, and I decided it wasn't worth while. I'll have it all ready when I get back.

I've even left the key under the rug in the hall."

"I wouldn't ever do that!" came the voice of the blue dress.

"Well," said the linen suit, "you know _me_! I always lose keys. I'm convinced that when I get to Boston, I shan't have my trunk key! And there isn't much to steal."

"Still, I'd feel nervous if I were you."

"I don't see why. n.o.body stays up on the top floor, where I am--that is, in the summer. All the other rooms are in one apartment, and the young man who lives there has been away for ages. The people on the ground floor own the house. I get the room for almost nothing by taking care of it and the hall. I haven't seen anyone else on the floor since the man in the apartment went away. That's why I love the place--you feel so independent!"

"I think I know the house," said blue dress. "The old house with the fanlight entrance, isn't it? Mary Merle used to have a ducky little flat on the second floor, didn't she?"

"Yes--Number Fifty-seven and a Half--"

Susannah was floating down the Avenue now. But floating with more difficulty. Why was there effort about floating? And why did she keep repeating, "Number Fifty-seven and a Half, Was.h.i.+ngton Square, top floor, key under the rug?"

She met few people. A policeman stared at her for a moment, then turned indifferently away. How surprising that her floating made no impression upon him! But then, there was no law against floating! Once she drifted past H. Withington Warner, who was staring into a shop window. He did not see her. Susannah had to inhibit her chuckles when, floating a foot above his head, she realized for the first time that he dyed his hair.

Why could she see that? He should have his hat on--or was she seeing through his hat?

She was pa.s.sing under the arch into Was.h.i.+ngton Square. But she wasn't floating any longer. She was dragging weights; she was wading through something like tar, which clung to her feet. She was coughing violently.

She had been coughing for a long time. Night in New York was no longer beautiful; glorious. Tragic horrors were rasping in her head. There was Warner. And there was Byan. She could not snap her fingers at them now.... But she knew how to get away from them ... she must rest....

She cut off a segment of Was.h.i.+ngton Square, looking for a number. There was a fanlight; and, plain in the street lamps, seeming for a moment the only object in the world, the number "Fifty-seven and a Half." The outer door gave to her touch. A dim point of gaslight burned in the hall. She floated again for a minute as she mounted the stairs.... She was before a door.... She was on her hands and knees fumbling under the rug.... She was dragging herself up by the door-k.n.o.b....

The key opened the door.

Light, streaming from somewhere in the backyard areas, illuminated a wide white bed.

"I am sick, Glorious Lutie--I think I am very sick," said Susannah.

"Watch me, won't you? Keep Warner out!" Fumbling in the bag, she drew out the miniature, set it up against the mirror on the bureau beside the bed--just where she could see it plainly in the shaft of light.

She locked the door. She lay down.

IX

Lindsay sat in the big living-room beside the refectory table. Mrs.

Spash moved about the room dusting; setting its scanty furnis.h.i.+ngs to rights. On the long table before him was set out a series of tiny villages, some Chinese, some j.a.panese: little pink or green-edged houses in white porcelain; little thatched-roofed houses in brown adobe; paG.o.das; bridges; pavilions. Dozens of tiny figures, some on mules, others on foot, and many loaded with burdens walked the streets. A bit of looking-gla.s.s, here and there, made ponds. Ducks floated on them, and boats; queer Oriental-looking skiffs, manned by tiny, half-clad sailors; Chinese junks. In neighboring pastures, domestic animals grazed.

Roosters, hens, chickens grouped in back areas.

"That's just what Miss Murray used to do," Mrs. Spash observed. "She'd play with them toys for hours at a time. And of course Cherry loved them more than anything in the house. That's the reason I stole them and buried them."

"How did you manage that exactly?" Lindsay asked.

"Oh, that was easy enough," Mrs. Spash confessed cheerfully. "Between Miss Murray's death and the auction, I was here a lot, fixing up. They all trusted me, of course. Those toys was all set out in little villages by the Dew Pond. n.o.body knew that they were there. So I just did them up in tissue paper and put them in that big tin box and hid them in the bushes. One night late I came back and buried them. Folks didn't think of them for a long time after the auction. You see, n.o.body had touched them during Miss Murray's illness. And when they did remember them, they thought they had disappeared during the sale." Mrs. Spash paused a moment. Her face a.s.sumed an expression of extreme disapproval. "Other things disappeared during the sale," she accused, lowering her voice.

"Who took them?" Lindsay asked.

All the caution of the Yankee appeared in Mrs. Spash's voice. "I don't know as I'd like to say, because it isn't a thing anybody can prove. I have my suspicions though."

Lindsay did not continue these inquiries.

"Where did Miss Murray get all these toys?"

"Well, a lot of 'em came from China. Miss Murray had a great-uncle who was a sea-captain. He used to go on them long whaling voyages. He brought them to her different times. Miss Murray had played with them when she was a child, and so she liked to have little Cherry play with them. Sometimes they'd all go out to the Dew Pond--Miss Murray, Mr.

Monroe, Mr. Gale, Mr. Lewis, and spend a whole afternoon laying them out in little towns--jess about as you've got 'em there. There was two little places on the sh.o.r.e that Miss Murray had all cut down, so's the bushes wouldn't be too tall. They useter call the pond the Pacific Ocean. One of them cleared places was the China coast and the other the j.a.panese coast. They'd stay there for hours, floating little boats back and forth from China to j.a.pan. And how they'd laugh! I useter listen to their voices coming through the window. But then, the house was always full of laughter. It began at seven o'clock in the morning, when they got up, and it never stopped until--after midnight sometimes--when they went to bed. Oh, it was such a gay place in those days."

Lindsay arose and stretched. But the stretching did not seem so much an expression of fatigue or drowsiness as the demand of his spirit for immediate activity of some sort. He sat down again instantly. Under his downcast lids, his eyes were bright. "These walls are soaked with laughter," he remarked.

"Yes," Mrs. Spash seemed to understand. "But there was tears too and plenty of them--in the last years."

"I suppose there were," Lindsay agreed. He did not speak for a moment; nor did Mrs. Spash. There came a silence so concentrated that the sunlight poured into it tangible gold. Then, outside a thick white cloud caught the sun in its woolly net. The world gloomed again.