FullReads

“Quite,” he assented.

“There can’t,” I went on, “be a corner of your minds that you haven’t mutually explored. You must know each other,” I cast about for the word, and added abruptly, “by heart.”

“I don’t suppose he meant anything pretty?” said Alderling, with a look up over his shoulder at his wife; and then he said to me, “We do; and there are some very curious things I could tell you, if Marion would ever let me get in a word.”

“Do let him, Mrs. Alderling,” I entreated, humoring his joke at her silence.

She smiled, and softly shrugged, and then sighed.

“I could make your flesh creep,” he went on, “or I could if you were not a psychologist. I assure you that we are quite weird at times.”

“As how?”

“Oh, just knowing what the other is thinking, at a given moment, and saying it. There are times when Marion’s thinking is such a nuisance to me, that I have to yell down to her from my loft to stop it. The racket it makes breaks me all up. It’s a relief to have her talk, and I try to make her, when she’s posing, just to escape the din of her thinking. Then the willing! We experimented with it, after we had first noticed it, but we don’t any more. It’s too dead easy.”

“What do you mean by the willing?” I asked.

“Oh, just wishing one that the other was there, and there he or she is.”

“Is he trying to work me, Mrs. Alderling?” I appealed to her, and she answered from her calm:

“It is very unaccountable.”

“Then you really mean it! Why can’t you give me an illustration?”

“Why, you know,” said Alderling more seriously than he had yet spoken, “I don’t believe those things, if they are real, can ever be got to show off. That’s the reason why your ‘Quests in the Occult’ are mainly such rubbish, as far as the evidences are concerned. If Marion and I tried to give you an illustration, as you call it, the occult would snub us. But, is there anything so very strange about it? The wonder is that a man and wife ever fail of knowing each what the other is thinking. They pervade each other’s minds, if they are really married, and they are so present with each other that the tacit wish should be the same as a call. Marion and I are only an intensified instance of what may be done by living together. There is something, though, that is rather queer, but it belongs to psychomancy rather than psychology, as I understand it.”

“Ah!” I said. “What is that queer something?”

“Being visibly present when absent. It has not happened often, but it has happened that I have seen Marion in my loft when she was really somewhere else and not when I had willed her or wished her to be there.”

“Now, really,” I said, “I must ask you for an instance.”

“You want to heap up facts, Lombroso fashion? Well, this is as good as most of Lombroso’s facts, or better. I went up one morning, last winter, to work at a study of a Madonna from Marion, directly after breakfast, and left her below in the dining-room, putting away the breakfast things. She has to do that occasionally, between the local helps, who are all we can get in the winter. She professes to like it, but you never can tell, from what a woman says; she has to do it, anyway.” It is hard to convey a notion of the serene, impersonal acquiescence of Mrs. Alderling in taking this talk of her. “I was banging away at it when I knew she was behind me looking over my shoulder rather more stormily than she usually does; usually, she is a dead calm. I glanced up, and saw the calm succeed the storm. I kept on, and after awhile I was aware of hearing her step on the stairs.”