The Confession Read online

some unknown source, hadengulfed her.

  Indeed, looking back over the two months I spent in the Benton house, Iam inclined to go even further. If thoughts carry, as I am sure they do,then emotions carry. Fear, hope, courage, despair--if the intention ofwriting a letter to an absent friend can spread itself half-way acrossthe earth, so that as you write the friend writes also, and your letterscross, how much more should big emotions carry? I have had sweep overme such waves of gladness, such gusts of despair, as have shaken me.Yet with no cause for either. They are gone in a moment. Just for aninstant, I have caught and made my own another's joy or grief.

  The only inexplicable part of this narrative is that Maggie, neither apsychic nor a sensitive type, caught the terror, as I came to call it,before I did. Perhaps it may be explainable by the fact that her mentalprocesses are comparatively simple, her mind an empty slate that showsevery mark made on it.

  In a way, this is a study in fear.

  Maggie's resentment continued through my decision to use the house,through the packing, through the very moving itself. It took the formof a sort of watchful waiting, although at the time we neither ofus realized it, and of dislike of the house and its surroundings. Itextended itself to the very garden, where she gathered flowers for thetable with a ruthlessness that was almost vicious. And, as July wenton, and Miss Emily made her occasional visits, as tiny, as delicate asherself, I had a curious conclusion forced on me. Miss Emily returnedher antagonism. I was slow to credit it. What secret and evenunacknowledged opposition could there be between my downright Maggie andthis little old aristocrat with her frail hands and the soft rustle ofsilk about her?

  In Miss Emily, it took the form of--how strange a word to use inconnection with her!--of furtive watchfulness. I felt that Maggie'sentrance, with nothing more momentous than the tea-tray, set her uprightin her chair, put an edge to her soft voice, and absorbed her. She wasstill attentive to what I said. She agreed or dissented. But back of itall, with her eyes on me, she was watching Maggie.

  With Maggie the antagonism took no such subtle form. It showed itself inthe second best instead of the best china, and a tendency to weak tea,when Miss Emily took hers very strong. And such was the effect of theirmutual watchfulness and suspicion, such perhaps was the influence of thestaid old house on me, after a time even that fact, of the strong tea,began to strike me as incongruous. Miss Emily was so consistent, soconsistently frail and dainty and so--well, unspotted seems to be theword--and so gentle, yet as time went on I began to feel that she hatedMaggie with a real hatred. And there was the strong tea!

  Indeed, it was not quite normal, nor was I. For by that time--the middleof July it was before I figured out as much as I have set down infive minutes--by that time I was not certain about the house. It wasdifficult to say just what I felt about the house. Willie, who came downover a Sunday early in the summer, possibly voiced it when he came downto his breakfast there.

  "How did you sleep?" I asked.

  "Not very well." He picked up his coffee-cup, and smiled over it rathersheepishly. "To tell the truth, I got to thinking about things--thefurniture and all that," he said vaguely. "How many people have sat inthe chairs and seen themselves in the mirror and died in the bed, and soon."

  Maggie, who was bringing in the toast, gave a sort of low moan, whichshe turned into a cough.

  "There have been twenty-three deaths in it in the last forty years, Mr.Willie," she volunteered. "That's according to the gardener. And morethan half died in that room of yours."

  "Put down that toast before you drop it, Maggie," I said. "You'reshaking all over. And go out and shut the door."

  "Very well," she said, with a meekness behind which she was bothindignant and frightened. "But there is one word I might mention beforeI go, and that is--cats!"

  "Cats!" said Willie, as she slammed the door.

  "I think it is only one cat," I observed mildly. "It belongs toMiss Emily, I fancy. It manages to be in a lot of places nearlysimultaneously, and Maggie swears it is a dozen."

  Willie is not subtle. He is a practical young man with a growing family,and a tendency the last year or two to flesh. But he ate his breakfastthoughtfully.

  "Don't you think it's rather isolated?" he asked finally. "Just youthree women here?" I had taken Delia, the cook, along.

  "We have a telephone," I said, rather loftily. "Although--" I checkedmyself. Maggie, I felt sure, was listening in the pantry, and I intendedto give her wild fancies no encouragement. To utter a thing is, toMaggie, to give it life. By the mere use of the spoken word it ceases tobe supposition and becomes fact.

  As a matter of fact, my uneasiness about the house resolved itself intoan uneasiness about the telephone. It seems less absurd now than it didthen. But I remember what Willie said about it that morning on our wayto the church.

  "It rings at night, Willie," I said. "And when I go there is no onethere."

  "So do all telephones," he replied briskly. "It's their greatestweakness."

  "Once or twice we have found the thing on the floor in the morning. Itcouldn't blow over or knock itself down."

  "Probably the cat," he said, with the patient air of a man arguingwith an unreasonable woman. "Of course," he added--we were passingthe churchyard then, dominated by what the village called the Benton"mosolem"--"there's a chance that those dead-and-gone Bentons resentanything as modern as a telephone. It might be interesting to see whatthey would do to a victrola."

  "I'm going to tell you something, Willie," I said. "I am afraid of thetelephone."

  He was completely incredulous. I felt rather ridiculous, standing therein the sunlight of that summer Sabbath and making my confession. But Idid it.

  "I am afraid of it," I repeated. "I'm desperately sure you will neverunderstand. Because I don't. I can hardly force myself to go to it. Ihate the very back corner of the hall where it stands, I--"

  I saw his expression then, and I stopped, furious with myself. Why hadI said it? But more important still, why did I feel it? I had not put itinto words before, I had not expected to say it then. But the moment Isaid it I knew it was true. I had developed an idee fixe.

  "I have to go downstairs at night and answer it," I added, ratherfeebly. "It's on my nerves, I think."

  "I should think it is," he said, with a note of wonder in his voice."It doesn't sound like you. A telephone!" But just at the church door hestopped me, a hand on my arm.

  "Look here," he said, "don't you suppose it's because you're sodependent on the telephone? You know that if anything goes wrong withit, you're cut off, in a way. And there's another point--you get allyour news over it, good and bad." He had difficulty, I think, in findingthe words he wanted. "It's--it's vital," he said. "So you attach toomuch importance to it, and it gets to be an obsession."

  "Very likely," I assented. "The whole thing is idiotic, anyhow."

  But--was it idiotic?

  I am endeavoring to set things down as they seemed to me at the time,not in the light of subsequent events. For, if this narrative has anyinterest at all, it is a psychological one. I have said that it is astudy in fear, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it isa study of the mental reaction of crime, of its effects on differentminds, more or less remotely connected with it.

  That my analysis of my impressions in the church that morning are notcolored by subsequent events is proved by the fact that under cover ofthat date, July 16th, I made the following entry:

  "Why do Maggie and Miss Benton distrust each other?"

  I realized it even then, although I did not consider it serious, as isevidenced by the fact that I follow it with a recipe for fruit gelatin,copied from the newspaper.

  It was a calm and sunny Sunday morning. The church windows were wideopen, and a butterfly came in and set the choir boys to giggling. At theend of my pew a stained-glass window to Carlo Benton--the name came likean echo from the forgotten past--sent a shower of colored light overWillie, turned my blue silk to most unspinsterly hues, and threw a sortof summ
er radiance over Miss Emily herself, in the seat ahead.

  She sat quite alone, impeccably neat, even to her profile. She was soorderly, so well balanced, one stitch of her hand-sewed organdy collarwas so clearly identical with every other, her very seams, if you canunderstand it, ran so exactly where they should, that she set me topulling myself straight. I am rather casual as to seams.

  After a time I began to have a curious feeling about her. Her head wastoward the rector, standing in a sort of white nimbus of sunlight, butI felt that Miss Emily's entire attention was on our pew, immediatelybehind her. I find I can not put it into words, unless it was that herback