Читать книгу POSSESSED - Moffett Cleveland - Страница 5
Оглавление(June, 1914)
Scarlet Lights
This story presents the fulfillment of an extraordinary prophecy made one night, suddenly and dramatically, at a gathering of New Yorkers, brought together for hilarious purposes, including a little supper, in the Washington Square apartment of Bobby Vallis—her full name was Roberta. There were soft lights and low divans and the strumming of a painted ukulele that sang its little twisted soul out under the caress of Penelope's white fingers. I can still see the big black opal in its quaint setting that had replaced her wedding ring and the yellow serpent of pliant gold coiled on her thumb with two bright rubies for its eyes. Penelope Wells! How little we realized what sinister forces were playing about her that pleasant evening as we smoked and jested and sipped our glasses, gazing from time to time up the broad vista of Fifth Avenue with its lines of receding lights.
There had been an impromptu session of the Confessional Club during which several men, notably a poet in velveteen jacket, had vouchsafed sentimental or matrimonial revelations in the most approved Greenwich Village style. And the ladies, unabashed, had discussed these things.
But not a word did Penelope Wells speak of her own matrimonial troubles, which were known vaguely to most of us, although we had never met the drunken brute of a husband who had made her life a torment. I can see her now in profile against the open window, her eyes dark with their slumberous fires. I remember the green earrings she wore that night, and how they reached down under her heavy black braids—reached down caressingly over her white neck. She was a strangely, fiercely beautiful creature, made to love and to be loved, fated for tragic happenings. She was twenty-nine.
The discussion waxed warm over the eternal question—how shall a woman satisfy her emotional nature when she has no chance or almost no chance to marry the man she longs to marry?
Roberta Vallis put forth views that would have frozen old-fashioned moralists into speechless disapproval—entire freedom of choice and action for women as well as men, freedom to unite with a mate or separate from a mate—both sexes to have exactly the same responsibilities or lack of responsibilities in these sentimental arrangements.
“No, no! I call that loathsome, abominable,” declared Penelope, and the poet adoringly agreed with her, although his practice had been notoriously at variance with these professions.
“Suppose a woman finds herself married to some beast of a man,” flashed Roberta, “some worthless drunkard, do you mean to tell me it is her duty to stick to such a husband, and spoil her whole life?”
To which Penelope, hiding her agitation, said: “I—I am not discussing that phase of the question. I mean that if a woman is alone in the world, if she longs for the companionship of a man—the intimate companionship—”
“Ha, ha, ha!” snickered the poet. I can see his close cropped yellow beard and his red face wrinkling in merriment at this supposition.
“I hate your Greenwich Village philosophy,” stormed Penelope. “You haven't the courage, the understanding to commit one big splendid sin that even the angels in heaven might approve, but you fritter away your souls and spoil your bodies in cheap little sins that are just—disgusting!”
The poet shrivelled under her scorn.
“But—one splendid sin?” he stammered. “That means a woman must go to her mate, doesn't it?”
“Without marriage? Never! I'll tell you what a woman should do—I'll tell you what I would do, just to prove that I am not conventional, I would act on the principle that there is a sacred right God has given to every woman who is born, a right that not even God Himself can take away from her, I mean the right to—”
A muffled scream interrupted her, a quick catching of the breath by a stout lady, a newcomer, who was seated on a divan, I should have judged this woman to be a rather commonplace person except that her deeply sunken eyes seemed to carry a far away expression as if she saw things that were invisible to others. Now her eyes were fixed on Penelope.
“Oh, the beautiful scarlet light!” she murmured. “There! Don't you see—moving down her arm? And another one—on her shoulder! Scarlet lights! My poor child! My poor child!”
Ordinarily we would have laughed at this, for, of course, we saw no scarlet lights, but somehow now we did not laugh. On the contrary we fell into hushed and wondering attention, and, turning to Roberta, we learned that this was Seraphine, a trance medium who had given séances for years to scientists and occult investigators, and was now assisting Dr. W——, of the American Occult Society.
“A séance! Magnificent! Let us have a séance!” whispered the poet. “Tell us, madam, can you really lift the veil of the future?”
But already Seraphine had settled back on the divan and I saw that her eyes had closed and her breathing was quieter, although her body was shaken from time to time by little tremors as if she were recovering from some great agitation. We watched her wonderingly, and presently she began to speak, at first slowly and painfully, then in her natural tone. Her message was so brief, so startling in its purport that there can be no question of any error in this record.
“Penelope will—cross the ocean,” Seraphine began dreamily. “Her husband will die—very soon. There will be war—soon. She will go to the war and will have honors conferred upon her—on the battlefield. She will—she will,”—the medium's face changed startlingly to a mask of anguish and her bosom heaved. “Oh, my poor child! I see you—I see you going down to—to horror—to terror—Ah!”
She cried out in fright and stopped speaking; then, after a moment of dazed effort, she came back to reality and looked at us as before out of her sunken eyes, a plump little kindly faced woman resting against a blue pillow.
Now, whatever one may think of mediums, the facts are that Penelope's husband died suddenly in an automobile accident within a month of this memorable evening. And within two months the great war burst upon the world. And within a year Penelope did cross the ocean as a Red Cross Nurse, and it is a matter of record that she was decorated for valor under fire of the enemy.
This story has to do with the remainder of Seraphine's prophecy.
