Sight Unseen — Key Ideas to Explore

I am fond of my friends, but I found no pleasure in the thought of meeting them that evening. I remembered the odious squeak in the wheels of Mrs. Dane’s chair. I resented the way Sperry would clear his throat. I read in the morning paper Herbert Robinson’s review of a book I had liked, and disagreed with him. Disagreed violently. I wanted to call him on the telephone and tell him that he was a fool. I felt old, although I am only fifty-three, old and bitter, and tired.

With the fall of twilight, things changed somewhat. I was more passive. Wretchedness encompassed me, but I was not wretched. There was violence in the air, but I was not violent. And with a bath and my dinner clothes I put away the horrors of the day.

My wife was better, but the cook had given notice.

“There has been quarreling among the servants all day,” my wife said. “I wish I could go and live on a desert island.”

We have no children, and my wife, for lack of other interests, finds her housekeeping an engrossing and serious matter. She is in the habit of bringing her domestic difficulties to me when I reach home in the evenings, a habit which sometimes renders me unjustly indignant. Most unjustly, for she has borne with me for thirty years and is known throughout the entire neighborhood as a perfect housekeeper. I can close my eyes and find any desired article in my bedroom at any time.

We passed the Wellses’ house on our way to Mrs. Dane’s that night, and my wife commented on the dark condition of the lower floor.

“Even if they are going out,” she said, “it would add to the appearance of the street to leave a light or two burning. But some people have no public feeling.”

I made no comment, I believe. The Wellses were a young couple, with children, and had been known to observe that they considered the neighborhood “stodgy.” And we had retaliated, I regret to say, in kind, but not with any real unkindness, by regarding them as interlopers. They drove too many cars, and drove them too fast; they kept a governess and didn’t see enough of their children; and their English butler made our neat maids look commonplace.

There is generally, in every old neighborhood, some one house on which is fixed, so to speak, the community gaze, and in our case it was on the Arthur Wellses’. It was a curious, not unfriendly staring, much I daresay like that of the old robin who sees two young wild canaries building near her.

We passed the house, and went on to Mrs. Dane’s.

She had given us no inkling of what we were to have that night, and my wife conjectured a conjurer! She gave me rather a triumphant smile when we were received in the library and the doors into the drawing-room were seen to be tightly closed.

We were early, as my wife is a punctual person, and soon after our arrival Sperry came. Mrs. Dane was in her chair as usual, with her companion in attendance, and when she heard Sperry’s voice outside she excused herself and was wheeled out to him, and together we heard them go into the drawing-room. When the Robinsons arrived she and Sperry reappeared, and we waited for her customary announcement of the evening’s program. When none came, even during the meal, I confess that my curiosity was almost painful.

I think, looking back, that it was Sperry who turned the talk to the supernatural, and that, to the accompaniment of considerable gibing by the men, he told a ghost story that set the women to looking back over their shoulders into the dark corners beyond the zone of candle-light. All of us, I remember, except Sperry and Mrs. Dane, were skeptical as to the supernatural, and Herbert Robinson believed that while there were so-called sensitives who actually went into trance, the controls which took possession of them were buried personalities of their own, released during trance from the sub-conscious mind.

“If not,” he said truculently, “if they are really spirits, why can’t they tell us what is going on, not in some vague place where they are always happy, but here and now, in the next house? I don’t ask for prophecy, but for some evidence of their knowledge. Are the Germans getting ready to fight England? Is Horace here the gay dog some of us suspect?”