supposed departed. Once agaih we surrendered our dollars to the voracious spirits.
“Some show!” I said sarcastically, when we had reached the fresh air.
I am, you see, trying to tell you this in the rather ribald way it struck me at that time. There is no such ribaldry in me now. But of the change that came over me . . . later . . .
It was at a séance that I met a young man, a friend of Emma’s, by the name of Howard Kane. He was tall, thin, anaemic. And he was vehement in his arguments for spiritualism. He must, he said, convince the sceptics.
“Convince!” I laughed. “That should be an easy task!”
I noted that when my jibes were too deep at Kane, Emma seemed hurt. I grew a trifle jealous, perhaps, at her firm friendship with Kane. They seemed, with their common belief in spiritualism, to share a bond which, despite our love, I did not have with Emma.
Kane was a writer of books. What he wrote concerned itself mainly with the "other life”—as he imagined it must be. There were three or four of his volumes on Emma’s book shelves, and she had long tried to persuade me to read them.
Finally I consented to take The Other Sphere with me on the train home one evening. Two chapters succeeded in boring me so that I threw the book into the rack with my hat. I nearly forgot it on getting out at my station. Then I had to confess to Emma that I couldn’t get through Kane’s frightful balderdash.
“Oh, you scientists think you know everything!” she exclaimed.
“But, my dear, I am behind six months with reading solid, scientific treatises! How can I spend time on this vaporing?”
She grew sad.
“I do wish you believed!” she sighed.
“Why—what différence would it make?”
“James, dear, one of us must die first and leave the other alone. Don’t you think a belief that we must meet again would be a great comfort?”
I admitted that it was so. But how could I work myself into such a belief?
“Howard is writing a new book,” she told me. “I’ve read the first half. It is wonderful, dear. It will give you faith.”
“Don’t try to get me to read it,” I protested.
After our marriage, Kane was a frequent guest over week-ends. But we saw little of him, except at meals, because he secluded himself in his room, where he wrote, hour after hour, on his new book. He would call it, he said, The Irrefutable.
“By George!” I laughed, when I was alone with Emma. “He doesn’t lack conceit, does he?”
She looked reproachful.
“You,” she said quietly, “are working in your laboratory for what you believe to be the good of your fellow-men. Howard is working upstairs—for the same end. Each in his own way, James.”
“But,” I smiled, “‘The Irrefutable’! I don’t say that of my science. Yet it’s something we can see and feel.”
“Howard sees and feels the unknown. He is having a hard struggle. The last half of his book is to be a vision of the hereafter. He has torn up three versions, in despair. He can’t grasp what he needs to”
“Isn’t one version of the hereafter as good as another? We can’t check up on it, can we?”
"What he finally writes,” said Emma, in a low, vibrant voice, "will be the truth.”
“You dear, deluded little”
“Fool, dear? Is that what you meant to say?”
I was considerably annoyed, and there followed our first quarrel.
"I can’t stand it—your belief in such stuff!” I cried. "The truth about the hereafter! The irrefutable!”
And that night, when Emma asked Kane to read us what he had written, I did not try to conceal my contempt.
He painted, surely, a beauteous picture of the promised sphere. His prose was lovely, musical, suave, ingratiating. He was a master of language.
“Words!” I cried. “Words, words, words—nothing but words!"
To my astonishment, Kane sprang from his chair.
“You are right,” he muttered. “I know I hâve failed again. I have missed the . . . the something I have not caught the vibrations. You are right. Words, words, words! But I shall yet find words behind which the truth will blaze! I am determined to find them. You . . . you sceptic, and ail such as you—I shall yet convince!”
I retreated to my laboratory, and until dawn I worked with the soothingly tangible.
"With sudden anger, I cried: "What a hoax!
What a madman's hoax! Don't you see it, Emma?
Don't you see it? His insanity drove him lo
suicide . . .
“She shook her head sadly . . . ‘You see, dear,
I am dead, loo.'
"After one unearthly moment, I screamed.
Then”
A dreadful restlessness, at times a veritable ferocity, came over Howard Kane. His appearance grew unkempt, his eyes were fiery, and I, knowing a little about the mental sciences, feared his mind was teetering toward unbalance. I told Emma that Kane was overworking his brain.
"He is striving,” she answered, “for the irrefutable proof with which to end his book.”
“The dream of a madman,” I scoffed.
Kane, at that moment, burst in on us. In his shaking hand fluttered the sheets of his latest effort to capture a vision of a world to come.
“This is nearer,” he cried. "Nearer, but not yet Will you listen?”
As neither of us answered, being too startled by his sudden outburst, he began to read. Again the smooth-flowing prose, without conviction. I interrupted:
"My dear fellow, ail this is futile—childish. Some day, after you’ve been to this place you speak of”
His stare froze me. Another moment, and he was gone. We saw him through a window, hatless in the sharp November air, stride past the gate and down the snow-patched road.
“Emma,” I said. “He can’t stand it. He’s going mad.”
Emma wept. I could not stop her tears.
“I feel that something awful is going to happen!” she moaned.
“To Kane?”
"I don’t know! Where did he go? Oh, I wish, he were back!”
My wishes were not the same, but I did not tell Emma so. I hoped fervently that we had seen the last of Kane and his The Irrefutable. Then, as I remembered that he must return for his belongings and his precious manuscript, I nearly groaned. I was so sure my wife would be better off without another sight of him. Her words, (Continuai on page 64)
