The Heart Line 11

The Heart Line 11

He made himself known and then said, "I’ll be round to-night before your

séance. I want to talk something over."

 

 

 

 

*CHAPTER III*

 

*THE SPIDER’S NEST*

 

 

The architecture of San Francisco was, in early days, simple and

unpretentious, befitting the modest aspirations of a trading and mining

town. Builders accepted their constructive limitations and did their

honest best. False fronts, indeed, there were, making one-story houses

appear to be two stories high, but redwood made no attempts in those

days to masquerade as marble or granite.

 

During the sixties, a few French architects imported a taste for classic

art, and for a time, within demure limits, their exotic taste prevailed.

The simple, flat, front wall of houses, now grown to three honest

stories high, they embellished with dentil cornice, egg-and-dart

moldings and chaste consoles; they added to the second story a little

Greek portico with Corinthian columns accurately designed, led up to by

a flight of wooden steps; the façade was broken by a single bay-window,

ornamented with conventional severity. Block after block of such

dwelling-houses were built. They had a sort of restful regularity, they

broke no artistic hearts.

 

In later days, when San Francisco had begun to take its place in the

world, a greater degree of sophistication ensued. Capitals of columns

became more fanciful, ornament more grotesquely original, till ambitious

turners and wood-carvers gave full play to their morbific imagination.

Then was the day of scrolls and finials, bosses, rosettes, brackets,

grille-work and comic balusters. Conical towers became the rage, wild

windows, odd porches and decorations nailed on, regardless of design,

made San Francisco’s nightmare architecture the jest of tourists.

Lastly, after an interregnum of Queen Anne vagaries, came the

Renaissance and the Age of Stone, heralded by concrete imitations and

plaster walls of bogus granite.

 

Madam Spoll’s house was of that commonplace, anemically classic style

which, after all, was then the least offensive type of residence. It

was painted appropriately in lead color—for the house, with the rest of

the block, seemed to have been cast in a mold—a tone which did its best

to make Eddy Street prosaic. It had been long abandoned by fashion and

was now hardly on speaking terms with respectability. It occupied a

place in a row of boarding-houses, cheap millinery establishments and

unpretentious domiciles. There was a dreary little unkempt yard in

front, with a passage leading to an entrance under the front steps;

above, the sign "Madam Spoll, Clairvoyant and Medium," was displayed on

ground glass, and below, hanging on a nail against the wall, was a

transparency. When the lamp was lighted inside this, one read the words:

"Circle To-night. Admittance ten cents."

 

This Thursday the lamp was lighted. It was half-past seven o’clock.

 

Devotees had begun to arrive, and, entering by the lower door, they paid

their dimes to Mr. Spoll, who stood beside the little table at the

entrance, left their "tests"—envelopes, flowers, jewelry or what not—and

passed into the audience-room.

 

This had once been a dining-room and its walls were covered with a

figured paper, above which was a bright red border decorated with

Japanese fans and parasols. A few gaudy paper lanterns hung from the

ceiling, and here and there were hung framed mottoes: "There Is No

Death"—"We Shall Meet Again"—"There Is a Land that is Fairer than Day."

This room was filled with chairs set in rows, and would hold some forty

or fifty persons. It was separated by an arch from a smaller room

beyond, where, upon a platform, stood a table with an open Bible, an

organ, two chairs and a folding screen.

 

Only the front seats were at present occupied, these by habitués of the

place, all firm believers, a picturesque group showing at a glance the

stigmata of eccentricity or mental aberration. For the most part they

were women in black; they bowed to one another as they sat down, then

waited in stolid patience for the séance to open. The others were pale,

blue-eyed men with drooping mustaches and carefully parted hair, and a

whiskered, bald-headed old gentleman or two who sat in silence. The

room was dimly illuminated by side lights.

 

Farther down the hallway, opposite the foot of a flight of stairs

leading upward to her living-rooms, was Madam Spoll’s "study," and here

she was, this evening, preparing for business.

 

This room was small and crowded with furniture. The marble mantel held

an assortment of bisque bric-à-brac, sea-shells, paper knives and cheap

curiosities. The walls were covered with photographs, a placque or two,

fans and picture cards. A huge folding bed, foolishly imitating a

mirrored sideboard, occupied one corner of the room. A couch covered

with fancy cushions and tidies ran beside it. A table, heavily draped,

a three-legged tea-stand, an easel with a satin sash bearing the

portrait, photographically enlarged in crayon, of a bold, smirking,

overdressed little girl, a ragged trunk and several plush-covered chairs

were huddled, higgledy-piggledy, along the other side of the room.

 

Upon the couch Madam Spoll sat, spraying envelopes with alcohol from an

atomizer on a small bamboo stand before her.

 

She was an enormous woman of masculine type, with short, briskly

curling, iron-gray hair and a triple chin. Heavy eyebrows, heavy lips,

heavy ears and cheeks had Madam Spoll, but her forehead was unlined with

wrinkles; her __EXPRESSION__ was serene, and, when she smiled, engaging and

conciliating. She was dressed in black satin with wing-like sleeves,

the front of her waist being covered with a triangular decoration of

bead-work.

 

Watching her with roving, black eyes was Professor Vixley, smoking a

vile cigar. His face was sallow, of a predatory mold with a pointed,

mangy beard, and sharp, yellow teeth. He wore a soft, striped flannel

shirt with a flowing pink tie. From the sleeves of his shiny, cutaway

coat, faded to a purplish hue, his thin, tanned, muscular hands showed

like the claws of a vulture.

 

"You seem to be doin’ a pretty good business," he remarked, dropping his

ashes carelessly upon the floor.

 

"So-so," Madam Spoll answered. "If things go well we hope to get a new

hall up on Post Street, but there ain’t nothing in tests. Straight

clairvoyance is the future of _this_ business. Of course, we have to

give cheap circles to draw the crowd, but it’s a lot of bother and

expense and it does tire me all out. Then there’s always the trouble

from the newspapers likely to come up."

 

"Pshaw! I wouldn’t mind gettin’ into the newspapers occasionally, it’s

good advertisin’. The more you’re exposed the better you get along, I

believe."

 

"’Lay low and set on your eggs’ is my motto," said the Madam. "I don’t

like too much talk. I prefer to work in the dark—there’s more money in

it in the long run. I don’t care if I only have a few customers; if

they’re good and easy I can make all I want."

 

"What do you bother with sealed messages for, Gert?" Professor Vixley

asked.

 

"Oh, I got to fix a lot of skeptics to-night. I can usually open the

ballots right on the table easy enough behind the flowers, but I want to

read a few sealed messages besides. It may help along with Payson,

too." She took up an envelope numbered "275." It was saturated with

alcohol. She held it to the light, and squinting at the transparent

paper, she read: "’When is Susie coming home?’ Now, ain’t that a fool

question? I’ll take a rise out of _her_, see if I don’t! That’s that

woman who got into trouble in that poisoning case."

 

"Say, the alcohol trick’s a pretty good stunt when you get a chance to

use it! But I don’t have time for it in my business."

 

"Yes, it’s easy enough if you use good, grain alcohol, but I wish I had

an egg-tester. They save a lot of time, and you can read through four

or five thicknesses of paper with ’em. Spoll, he has plenty of chance

to hold out the ballots and bring ’em in to me; his coming and going

ain’t noticed, because he has to fetch ’em up to the table, anyway. By

the time I go on, all the smell’s faded out. If it ain’t, my

handkerchief is so full of perfumery that you can’t notice anything

else. I’m going to fit up my table with one o’ them glass plates with

an electric flash-light underneath that I can turn on with a switch.

You can read right through the envelope then. But I don’t often consent

to tests like that. It deteriorates your powers. And my regular

customers are usually contented to send their ballots up open and glad

of the chance to get an answer. _They_ don’t want to give the spirits

no trouble! Lord, I wish I had the power I had when I begun." She

smiled pleasantly at her companion.

 

"I see old Mrs. Purinton on the front row as I come in," Vixley

observed, shifting his cigar labially from one corner of his mouth to

the other.

 

"Say, there’s a grafter for fair!" she exclaimed. "She’s been coming

here to the publics for two years and never once has she gave me a

private setting. That’s what I call close. She’s as near as matches!

And always the same old song—little Willie’s croup or when’s Henry going

to write, and woozly rubbish like that. I got a good mind to hand her a

dig. I could make a laughing-stock out of her, and scare her away easy.

Folks do like a laugh at a public séance; you know that, Professor."

 

"Sure! It don’t do no harm as long as you hit the right one."

 

"Oh, I ain’t out for nothing but paper-sports and grafters. I know a

good thing when I see it. I hope there’ll be something doing worth

while in this Payson business. He may show up to-night. Lulu claims

she conned him good."

 

"I hope I’ll have a slice off him," said Professor Vixley, his beady,

black eyes shining. "We got to get up a new game for him before we pass

him down the line."

 

"Oh, if anybody can I guess we can; there’s more’n one way to kill a

cat, besides a-kissing of it to death."

 

"Yes, smotherin’ it in hot air, for instance!" Vixley grinned.

 

"They’s one thing I wish," said Madam Spoll, "and that is that we had a

regular blue-book like they have in the East. Why, they tell me there’s

six thousand names printed for Boston alone. If we had some way of

getting a lead with this Payson it would be lots easier. But I expect

the San Francisco mediums will get better organized some day and

coöperate more shipshape."

 

Here Mr. Spoll entered, a tall, thin, bony, wild-eyed individual with a

rolling pompadour of red hair, his face spattered with freckles. He

walked on tiptoe, as if at a funeral, bowed to the Professor, coughed

into his hand, and took up the letters Madam Spoll had been

investigating, putting down some new ones.

 

"Oh, here’s that ’S.F.B.’ that Ringa told me about," she said, glancing

at an envelope. "Is Ringa come in yet?"

 

"I ain’t seen him; but it’s early," said Spoll. "He’ll show up all

right. I’ll send him right in."

 

"Is Mr. Perry in front?"

 

"You bet!" Spoll was still tiptoeing about the room on some mysterious

errand. "Perry ain’t likely to lose a chance to make a dollar, not him!"