“What are you going to do?” She turned to me, I daresay because I represented what to her was her supreme dread, the law.
“My dear girl,” I said, “we are not going to do anything. The Neighborhood Club has been doing a little amateur research work, which is now over. That is all.”
Sperry took them away in his car, but he turned on the door-step, “Wait downstairs for me,” he said, “I am coming back.”
I remained in the library until he returned, uneasily pacing the floor.
For where were we, after all? We had had the medium’s story elaborated and confirmed, but the fact remained that, step by step, through her unknown “control” the Neighborhood Club had followed a tragedy from its beginning, or almost its beginning, to its end.
Was everything on which I had built my life to go? Its philosophy, its science, even its theology, before the revelations of a young woman who knew hardly the rudiments of the very things she was destroying?
Was death, then, not peace and an awakening to new things, but a wretched and dissociated clutching after the old? A wrench which only loosened but did not break our earthly ties?
It was well that Sperry came back when he did, bringing with him a breath of fresh night air and stalwart sanity. He found me still pacing the room.
“The thing I want to know,” I said fretfully, “is where this leaves us? Where are we? For God’s sake, where are we?”
“First of all,” he said, “have you anything to drink? Not for me. For yourself. You look sick.”
“We do not keep intoxicants in the house.”
“Oh, piffle,” he said. “Where is it, Horace?”
I drew a chair before the book-shelves, which in our old-fashioned house reach almost to the ceiling, and, withdrawing a volume of Josephus, I brought down the bottle.
“Now and then, when I have had a bad day,” I explained, “I find that it makes me sleep.”
He poured out some and I drank it, being careful to rinse the glass afterward.
“Well,” said Sperry, when he had lighted a cigar. “So you want to know where we are.”
“I would like to save something out of the wreck.”
“That’s easy. Horace, you should be a heart specialist, and I should have taken the law. It’s as plain as the alphabet.” He took his notes of the sittings from his pocket. “I’m going to read a few things. Keep what is left of your mind on them. This is the first sitting.