The talkers

When Stuart Sutton told Gilda Greenway that he intended to keep an eye on her, he meant it.

Her own account of her behaviour surprised and disconcerted him. He hadn’t supposed she was likely to do that sort of thing; yet, after all there was no reason for him to think otherwise.

Somehow, his boyish egotism persuaded him that he had become a factor in Gilda’s career. He had airily taken it for granted that, since their encounter at Derring’s, the girl had lost interest in other parties and other men.

Her description of her conduct had jarred, disappointed, even irritated him, although he realised it was none of his business.

However, all that was one thing; and her amazing belief in her spiritual peril was another.

Undoubtedly the girl’s dread was genuine. There could be no question that she believed herself to be threatened by what she called the Other One.

Sutton had heard The Talkers talk about “possession”—the temporary but repeated seizure of the human body by mischievous disincarnate intelligences, when that human body was in a defenceless state due to physical insensibility, either healthy or morbid.

Science recognised the phenomenon, examples of which varied. The personalities of the subjects “possessed” were as far apart as Mr. Hyde and Sir William Crooke’s pretty little helpmeet in her teens.

Hypnotic and psychic phenomena, in their sensational aspects, interest everybody.

Stuart Sutton had read a little—and superficially—concerning the latter subject. He had heard The Talkers arguing about it. It was the fashion to take it seriously. Stuart so took it.

Like the majority of people, he also concluded that individual survival after death, even if not scientifically proven, was safely to be assumed as a fact. He had really never doubted anything about it except its orthodoxy. The indestructibility of that living, individual intelligence we call the soul is a belief necessary to the world’s moral health.

But to Stuart, as to the majority, the soul is a widely different thing from the physically living being which harbours it.

Modern scientific investigators, however, seem to think otherwise. Among these were Sidney Pockman and Casimir Sadoul.

Stuart came into the Fireside Club for dinner one wet, windy night, tired from a bad day down town, where the banks cared to lend little money and everybody wore long faces and stocks had tumbled from seven to ten points at closing.

The boy was nervous, depressed, needed a cheerful face and voice, and found neither. He had called Gilda on the telephone but her maid said she was dining out—another disconcerting item in the long day’s list.

His father and mother had gone to California; he dreaded a solitary dinner alone; the dull, pompous atmosphere of the Province Club repelled him; it lay between the Harvard and the Fireside; and he chose the latter.

He noticed Sadoul and Pockman dining together at a small table, and it relieved him to know that Gilda was dining with neither.

He exchanged nods with them. Pockman looked as unhealthy as usual. Sadoul’s long, dark visage seemed thinner and more shadowy, and his eyes smouldered like a man’s sick with fever.

Derring was there in evening dress with Julian Fairless; Lyken wore a dressing gown and slippers, and was talking animatedly to Harry Stayr over a chafing-dish full of shrimps and whitebait.

“There’s no doubt,” he was saying, “that consciousness remains in the brain for an appreciable time after death. A swiftly severed head is perfectly conscious of its own ghastly predicament—the guillotine experiments have suggested that—and now it has been proven in our research laboratories.”

“Well,” said Stayr, busy with his food, as always, “what happens to the wretched boob in the chair at Sing Sing when the State Electrician pulls the lever? Does he know he’s dead?”

“The mind knows.”

“What? With all those volts tearing tissues to pulp and vapour?”

“You can’t kill the indestructible,” insisted Lyken. “You can kill the body, all right; but it takes time for the ‘soul’ to leave it.... Sometimes quite a long time even when bodily death is instantaneous.”

Stuart, listening to the cheerless conversation, finished his dinner gloomily and went into the great main room to smoke.

Here, by the fire, The Talkers, as usual, had gathered to “tell the world.”

There seemed to be nothing they did not know. And there was nothing anybody else knew. They were there to persuade, to explain, to controvert. They were The Talkers, and they were there to talk.

Yet, before these men joined the Ancient and Unmitigated Order of Talkers, many among them had promised brilliancy in their several professions—science, art, literature, medicine, the law.

But talk is a stealthy and subtle malady which, discounting initiative, infects talent and ability, gradually renders them sterile, paralyses action, and ultimately atrophies all functions except the vocal.

Stuart listened to The Talkers for a while; but action down town had already satiated him. He got up and went slowly into another room, where a cannel-coal fire burned in a smoke-blackened grate. Nobody else was there. He dropped into a deep leather armchair, as though very tired.

He may have fallen into a light sleep. Something caused him to open his eyes. A cake of fat coal had crumbled, blazing with a sort of frying-crackle as the flames set shadows dancing on the wall.

One of these shadows seemed to detach itself—a shape seated in sombre silhouette before the fire. And, as Sutton looked, he saw it was Sadoul’s dark head resting against his hand, redly edged with firelight.

Stuart broke the silence: “I’ve been asleep, I think. When did you come in?”

“Not long ago.”

Neither spoke for some minutes. Then Sadoul turned slightly in his armchair:

“Do you want to talk, Sutton?”

“All right.”

“There’s a person who seems to cause some little feeling between you and me. I suppose you guess who I mean.”

“Little Miss Greenway?”

“Yes. I thought I’d speak of her——” Sadoul half rose from the depths of his chair and turned full on Stuart: “I thought I’d be circumspect—beat about the bush—convey, intimate—as well bred men handle such matters—that possibly you are seeing Gilda Greenway oftener than might be good for her.”

Stuart bade him go to the devil in a low voice.

Sadoul slowly shook his head.

“No,” he said, “that gets us nowhere. And I’m not going about the matter politely, either: I’m going to speak quite plainly if you’ll listen. Will you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try. It’s better to understand each other. May I speak?”

“Go on.”

“Then, there’s no use in telling you that I’ve been in love with Gilda Greenway from the moment I laid eyes on her——”

“You left her lying alone in Derring’s bed when you thought she was dead.”

“I know what you think——”

“You went downstairs to dance!”

“I went downstairs to—kill myself.”

Sutton sat up and shot an incredulous look at Sadoul.

“I went into the wash-room,” said the latter quietly. “I had a gun—and there was a convenient mirror there.... Pockman stopped me and tried to take my gun. We discussed the chances of gland grafting. I’d seen him resurrect dead rats. So I thought I’d wait and see.... After the operation Pockman discovered my gun in my overcoat pocket, and he took it and drove to his laboratory.

“When I found the gun was missing, I suspected Pockman and I took a taxi after him. All I wanted was the gun. I was willing to go back to Gilda and wait the limit before killing myself. I didn’t want to die if she was coming back. But Pockman tricked me into his dark room and turned the key on me.... That’s the story. Ask Pockman if you care to.”

Sutton listened sullenly, not doubting the explanation, and not much pleased with it, either.

“Well, what else?” he asked bluntly. “I’m not concerned with your morbid emotions, Sadoul.”

“I suppose not. It was merely to make the case clearer. I want to clarify it still more. You speak of morbid emotions. My emotions are normal. I’m terribly in love.

“And I want to tell you a little about Gilda——”

“I don’t want to hear anything that does not concern me——”

“It does concern you——”

“Or anything of a private nature in any way reflecting on her——”

“I don’t lie about women. I don’t even tell the truth if it’s unsavory,” said Sadoul coolly.

That was his reputation.

Sutton shrugged acquiescence, muttering something about lack of interest. But his boy’s mind was flaming with interest if not with a curiosity more vulgar.

Sadoul said: “The instant I set eyes on her I was in love. I couldn’t help it. I wanted her or I didn’t want to live.

“I couldn’t help the nature of my passion. It suffocated me. I strove to involve her, to envelop her in it—not conscious, so help me God, that it was hypnosis, mostly, that caught and held her.

“Only by degrees did I realise it was mostly hypnosis that made her so exquisitely pliant, so docile. I tell you I had not consciously exercised any such power, in the beginning.

“The awakening was for me. It was not—pleasant.... It was less agreeable when I did use that force to awake the child to normal life.... My God, Sutton, when I discovered that the real Gilda cared nothing for me——”

He sat twisting his lank limbs and bony fingers like some living gargoyle in torment.

“My God,” he said, “my God!... Well—I used the hypnotic force that was in me. I sent her back into the negative state.... And she was pliant again—in a way.... We were together.... I know she likes my mind. I’m intelligent. We went about together all the time.... She was amused.

“Then came a time when she had to go to England. A matter of property—attorneys to consult.... And I meant to tell you, every day or so there were terrible scenes if I let her slip back to normal even for a minute....

“After she returned from England I did everything desperation suggested to an unscrupulous man crazed with passion. I threw the hypnotic switch wide open. I gave her every volt I could control.... Because there is no other woman for me. Never will be. It’s Gilda or none.”

He sat in silence for a very long time. Then he rose stiffly, his shoulders sagging.

“Sometimes,” he said, “it does not take long to die. But it always takes time for the indestructible life-principle to disengage itself from the body. If you think I speak at random, I can show you photographs of the process. It’s a curious affair—not resembling the escape of the moth from its chrysalis—not a metamorphosis——”

“Are you trying to make me understand that the soul has been photographed while leaving the body?” demanded Sutton.

“Many times, recently; photographed, and also seen.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“Several times.”

“You talk very carelessly about seeing that which the world is longing to believe exists.”

“If the world saw it the world would not believe it.... I showed you something, once. Today you do not believe you saw it.”

Sutton flushed: “I don’t understand such things.”

“Nor does the world.”

“Didn’t you suggest to me what I saw?”

“No. But it became visible to you through both hypnosis and suggestion.”

“Well, what I saw—thought I saw—was not Gilda Greenway.”

“Not—yet.” Sadoul seated himself. Suddenly he swung his long, dark head toward Sutton with a movement noticeable in powerful animals turning ugly. His eyes were wells of depthless shadow.

“The bond between a corpse and its leisurely escaping soul,” he said, “is not more essential than the occult bond which knots my being to Gilda Greenway.

“Do you know that a faintly luminous umbilical cord unites the escaping soul to the body? When it is finally severed the body really dies—that is, the brain becomes empty of its deathless principle, though the various organs of the body continue living for a day or so....

“That is what will happen to me if Gilda goes out of my life completely. The tenuous bond will dissolve. I shall be dead—here!——” He covered his forehead with his hand.... “Sutton, is it worth while for a casual young man to interfere, wantonly?”

He sat with his hand still covering his forehead, gazing vacantly in front of him. After a moment the stare faded to a darker glimmer, and he looked directly at Sutton.

“I’ve told you as much as suits me—not all. I’ll tell you one thing more: When Gilda’s body was dead, I tried to hold back her escaping soul-principle long enough for Pockman to operate. But it got clear of her body except for the umbilical cord. And, no sooner was the new nymphalic gland in place, than another disincarnate intelligence drew near and stood watching us.

“I recognised it, yet never before had seen it. Astronomers know that unseen stars exist. I knew this Other One existed. And now I encouraged it to seize Gilda’s body for its habitation. That was the figure you saw seated on the lounge near me. That’s what I wanted. And I aided it—tried to.... I wanted it to possess Gilda’s body, and drive out the tenant that stood near her head, vaguely luminous, still attached by the umbilical cord to the corpse.... Do you think I have encouraged that Other One for the pleasure of any man except myself?... Do you think I have started a spiritual conflict in Gilda Greenway for your ultimate gratification, damn you?”

Sadoul’s voice had become a whisper; his hand fell from his forehead. He got to his feet again, a bent, grotesque phantom against the drifting glare of flame-tinged dusk.

“I—thought I’d say this,” he muttered in an odd, querulous voice not like his own, but older, and with a sort of senile quaver.

Sutton got up, too:

“I don’t quite see your object in telling me these things, Sadoul.”

“I think you’ll see it when you reflect.... There are other women, Sutton.... I mean for you. I hope you’ll see it that way.... There are so many other women to play with. There are some even to fall in love with.... I hope you’ll see it that way, Sutton.... So—good-night to you.”

Sadoul went out through the ruddy shadows, passed without a sound across the velvet carpet, loomed for an instant, a wavering shape framed by the doorway, and was lost somewhere in the vista of uncertain light beyond.