in the room, besides the people, there was a coffin and a black flag decorated with the skull and crossbones of buccaneers—or fictioneers. every once in a while persons went down a ladder to a dim, smoky room where heads bumped the ceiling and where casks and kegs and straw-covered wine bottles stood and hung about in an ornamental sort of way. mediterranean-looking servitors went to and fro in the subterranean crypt or chamber with great mugs of ginger ale. visitors usually bent over the large, dark table in the centre whereon lay a carefully executed map—the map of “treasure island.” the men wore their hair long, the women wore theirs bobbed. candles, the only light, threw grotesque shadows. occasionally a waiter sang, “pour, oh, pour the pirate sherry” from “the pirates of penzance” or “yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum.” somewhere in obscure darkness a parrot squawked. the sounds were favourably construed into cries of “pieces of eight! pieces of eight!”
mermaid, otherwise mary smiley, wore coiled upon her head such a magnificence of dark, red-gold hair as to[170] make her the target of envious glances from cropped young women all about her. of these looks she seemed completely unaware, but they excited the amusement of her companion. dick hand did not fit in with the general bohemian scheme of the place. he was in greenwich village but not of it. his proper environment was a certain office much farther down town in new york, on broadway a little above bowling green. there, in the region of tall buildings at once rigid and supple and perfectly self-possessed as only skyscrapers can be, dick worked by day. by night he pleasured about town. he was by no means addicted to the pirates’ den, nor to the purple pup, nor polly’s, but mermaid, in her last year of special study at columbia, had expressed a desire to visit—or, rather, revisit—the village. so they had come down on a bus to washington square and then fared along afoot. mermaid had been expressing her satisfaction with the evening.
“how badly they do this sort of thing here,” she said, glancing again about her. “you and i, dickie, wouldn’t be so unoriginal, i hope!”
dickie, who had no instinct in these matters, asked, “are they unoriginal?”
“of course.” she smiled at him and two tiny shadows marked the dimples in her cheeks. “they have simply no ideas. don’t you see how religiously they have copied all the traditional stuff and accepted all the traditional ideas of what a pirates’ den ought to be?[171] a real pirates’ den was never like this. pirates lived in a ship’s fo’c’s’le or, on occasion, in a cave; or they went glitteringly along a white beach such as we have at home across the bay from blue port. they did not live in a litter of empty casks; an empty bottle was only good to heave overboard unless you had occasion to break it over a comrade’s head. pirates never had a skillfully executed chart. usually they had no chart at all; only certain sailing directions and a cross bearing. robert louis stevenson, writing ‘treasure island,’ burlesqued an ancient, if not very honourable, profession.”
“never thought about it,” responded dick, carelessly. “you may be right. but what do you know about pirates, anyway. where do you get all this stuff?”
“there are just as many pirates as ever there were,” asserted the young woman. “there’s captain vanton out home. he is a typical pirate. the pirates who visited the great south beach at one time or another are still there, off and on.”
“oh, say, mermaid. you don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?”
“i don’t have to believe in them, dickie, i have seen them.”
“on the beach, home?”
“on the beach, home, and here in new york, too.”
“what were they?”
[172]“just people, dickie. i don’t pretend they were flesh and blood. i don’t pretend they ever spoke to me or looked at me. they looked through me, sometimes.”
“but, mermaid, you know it’s silly.”
“but, dickie, i know it’s not.”
young hand finished his ginger ale and made a face at the mug. then he asked: “well, how do you account for ’em?”
“have i got to account for them, dickie?”
“i mean, why can’t i see them?”
“how do you know you can’t?”
“i never have.”
“that doesn’t prove anything—it doesn’t prove you never will. dick, see here, go back to your mathematics. there’s the fourth dimension. all we can see and feel has only three dimensions—length, breadth, and thickness or height—but mathematics tells you things may exist which measure four ways instead of three.”
“but i can’t see ’em; neither can you or anybody else.”
“of course. but you can see representations of them. a house on paper is not a house, but a picture of one. a ghost may only be a representation, a sort of picture, a projection of something or somebody that measures four ways. a house measures three ways and you can put it, after a fashion, on a sheet of paper[173] where it measures only two ways. why can’t a ghost be a three-dimensional——”
“tommy lupton never saw a ghost,” interrupted dick, with a smile. “can you picture tommy patrolling the beach at night as a dutiful coast guard and coming upon a projection of captain kidd?”
“certainly. tommy is extremely likely to meet captain vanton,” said mermaid, promptly.
“you mean that captain vanton is captain kidd living on earth again?” jested the young man.
“a reincarnation? no. he might be the shadow of captain kidd, though. he might be the three-dimensional shadow of a four-dimensional creature.”
“come off! you said awhile ago that you didn’t pretend the ghosts you saw were flesh and blood.”
“is captain vanton flesh and blood?” asked mermaid. “did you ever pinch him or see him bleed?”
dick stared at her with pain and disapproval.
“mermaid, what a crazy thing to suggest! and how—how confoundedly gruesome! sounds like poe. we’ve been living with a spectre all these years out in blue port. a spectre with an invalid wife nobody ever sees. seems to me mrs. vanton is more likely to be the ghost. and a spectre with a son. he’s flesh and blood, for tommy lupton once punched his head. guy’s flesh and blood, mermaid.”
a colour overspread the young woman’s check. “i know that,” she said.
[174]then with a triumphant thought hand exclaimed: “besides, lots of people have heard captain vanton talk. what do you say to that? you said ghosts didn’t talk.”
“i said i had never had them speak to me,” she corrected him. “i said they looked through you, and not at you. captain vanton does not look at you.”
dick felt aggrieved. “i didn’t think you’d quibble, mermaid,” he said. “it isn’t like you.”
mermaid reached up and patted a coil of her hair. then she rested her cheek on that hand and, reaching across the table, closed the other gently over dick’s.
“i’m not quibbling, dickie,” she declared. “i mean just what i say. captain vanton is a ghost to me and that’s all about it. i don’t have to pretend. once, years ago, he came to see aunt keturah and i answered the door. i don’t remember whether he looked at me then or not. it doesn’t matter. if we can see ghosts, ghosts can certainly see us. they can certainly speak to us, too, if they wish; though whether we can speak to them i’m not so sure. you’ve got the wrong idea entirely.
“a ghost is simply a person or thing that joins you with the past, the unremembered or unrecorded or unknown past. somewhere, sometime, at some place, and in some manner, captain vanton and i have met. i don’t know it; i feel it. you’re a chemical engineer[175] and i’m a chemist, too, of a sort. i’m getting into chemico-therapy, the chemistry of the body, and chemical agencies in healing. now chemistry is all right, in fact, it’s wonderful, but it doesn’t explain everything and it never will. you may say that’s because there’s a lot yet to be explored. there is, but when it has all been dug up and tested, something will still remain in the dark. the world will always have its ghosts.”
dick looked at her sympathetically. “if you were any one else, mermaid, i’d say you were nutty,” he vouchsafed. “i’ll admit this place is enough to make a person go plumb insane. look at that coffin! and look at these freaks about us!”
mermaid smiled. by the flickering of the candles he could see three freckles, the three he always remembered, about her nose, rather high up, a decorative arrangement to call attention, perhaps, to the brilliant blue of her eyes. he was struck again with the sense of her charm and unusualness. he had never met another girl like her, and he knew he never would. there couldn’t be, anywhere. what other girl, versed in exact science, would argue earnestly for the existence of ghosts? dick knew that she meant what she was saying. he thought to himself: “it’s only the difficulty of getting it over to me. there aren’t the words, i suppose. she’d always be two jumps ahead of you!” aloud he said: “then your ghost may be someone[176] else’s flesh and blood. ghost—flesh—blood—coffin—skull and crossbones—nightmare people. this is the life!”
mermaid laughed. there was a ring in her laugh of complete surrender to mirth. a joyful surrender. she said: “i am worried about aunt keturah. she hasn’t been well. i’m going home as soon as college closes. i don’t suppose i’ll see you again soon, dickie.”
“why not?” said her companion. “come west with me—you and she—to san francisco this summer. i’ve a water purification job across the bay in marin county. it would do your aunt a lot of good to see california. there’ll be days when i’ll have nothing to do—waiting around while tests are going on and contracts are being drawn. we could go to palo alto and monterey and lake tahoe. perhaps farther.”
mermaid considered.
“i have a particular wish to visit san francisco,” she said. “it has to do with ghosts. i’ll try to persuade her, dickie.”
mr. hand was elated. they rose and went out into the coolness of the springtime night. they walked, and found themselves presently in washington square. something in the moment took dick hand by the throat. in a shadowy lane, a little apart from the benches of people, his words dulled by the rumble of the fifth avenue omnibuses, he took mermaid’s hand, his fingers closing over it with intensity.
[177]“can’t we—can’t we make it a honeymoon trip, mermaid?” he asked.
he could just see the slight movement of her silhouetted head. she murmured: “i’m afraid not, dickie. i—i want to be very sure.”
he unclasped her hand slowly and they walked to one of the green monsters, vain of their size and path and importance, which take people uptown.
