Sight Unseen (Everybody's Magazine)/Part 1
THIS is the first instalment of a three-part mystery serial by one of the best-known writers in America, who “needs no introduction” to EVERYBODY'S audience. It is a mystery story—as tense in interest as “The Case of Jennie Brice.” And we'll tell you this one thing about the solution—it's very hard to guess!—The Editor.
THE rather extraordinary story of the experiments made by the Neighborhood Club is not yet a matter of any but private record. But it seems to me, as an active participant in these experiments, that they should be given to the public, not only as adding to the existing data of psychical research, but as another exploration into that uncharted territory, the mind.
For, after long debate and much tension, the Club came to the conclusion that its dealings had been with the mind, not the soul. They were a matter of the supernormal, rather than the supernatural. We had discovered no new laws, but had delved into laws as old as the inhabited world. And perhaps Sperry is right. There may be a dying sixth sense in the race. Frankly, I do not know.
This is a record of the strange case of Arthur Wells, as investigated by six earnest people who called themselves the Neighborhood Club.
The Club was organized in my house. It was too small really to be called a club, but women have a way these days of conferring a titular dignity on their activities, and it is not so bad, after all. The Neighborhood Club it really was, composed of four of our neighbors, my wife, and myself.
We had drifted into the habit of dining together on Monday evenings, at the different houses. There were Herbert Robinson and his sister Alice—not a young woman, as such things go, but clever, alert, and very alive. There was Sperry, the well-known heart specialist, a bachelor still in spite of much feminine activity. And there was old Mrs. Dane, hopelessly crippled as to the knees with rheumatism, but one of those glowing and kindly souls that have a way of being a neighborhood nucleus. It was around her that we first gathered. Sympathy, I dare say. But she did not want our sympathy. We were her contact-points with life, she always declared. And she gave us more than we gave her.
AFTER a year or two we had a runway made for her wheel-chair at the side entrance of the house, and the rumble of the chair wheels, followed by the ring of her attendant, was one of our most welcome sounds.
It was our policy to take up different subjects for these neighborhood dinners. Sperry was a reformer in his way, and on his nights we generally took up civic questions. He was particularly interested in the responsibility of the state to the sick poor. My wife and I had “political” evenings. Not really politics, except in their relation to life. I am a lawyer by profession, and dabble a bit in city government. The Robinsons had literature.
Don't misunderstand me. We had no papers, no set programs. On the Robinson evenings we discussed editorials, current periodicals. We were frequently acrimonious, I fear, but our small wrangles ended with the evening. We talked about books and writers. Robinson was the literary editor of a paper, and his sister read for a large publishing house.
Mrs. Dane had no set subject.
She was a free-lance. “Give me that privilege,” she begged. “At least, until you find my evenings dull. It gives me, during all the week before you come, a sort of thrilling feeling that the world is mine to choose from.” The result was never dull. She led us all the way from moving-pictures to modern dress. She led us even further, as you will see.
On consulting my note-book I find that the first evening which directly concerns the Arthur Wells case was Monday, November the second of last year.
It was a curious day, to begin with. There come days, now and then, that bring with them a strange sort of mental excitement. I have never analyzed them. With me on this occasion it took the form of nervous irritability, and something of apprehension. My wife, I remember, complained of headache, and one of the stenographers had a fainting attack.
I have often wondered since how much of what happened to Arthur Wells the day was responsible for. There are days when the world is a place for love and play and laughter. And then there are sinister days, when the earth is a hideous place, when immortality becomes a dream and life itself a burden, when all that is riotous and unlawful comes forth and bares itself to the light.
This was such a day.
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 even decided that he had been subsidized by the publishers, and that I would tell him so.
I felt old, although I am only fifty-three, old and bitter, and tired.
I was not alone in my mood. There was bitterness and hatred and unbridled violence in the air. I can see it all, looking back.
MISS JEREMY CAME OUT OF HER TRANCE WEAK AND LOOKING EXTREMELY ILL.
With the fall 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 evening clothes I put away the horrors of the day.
My wife was better, but the cook had given notice.
“There has been quarreling in the house 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.
The oasis of calmness in the sea of distraction that evening was Mrs. Dane. It struck me as unusual that she received us in the library. It was her custom to have her chair wheeled into the drawing-room, and to surround her evenings with some of the formalities that ours, for instance, and the Robinsons' lacked. The door into the drawing-room was closed, however, and over the entire house hung an air of mystery. Afterward my wife suggested that it was probably because all the lights were lowered.
It was Mrs. Dane's custom to announce during dinner the subject for the evening. I recall that one evening she chose “peanuts,” and as most of the women were quite certain that they grew on bushes, and Herbert Robinson asserted with equal firmness that they grew in paper bags, the argument was heated.
On this particular evening, however, she announced no subject for discussion, and dinner passed with only desultory small talk. She sat in her chair at the head of the table, and watched us all with keen, half-closed eyes.
Looking back, I can not recall how the conversation turned to the supernatural. I am sure she had nothing to do with it. Sperry told a ghost-story—a fearful thing that set the women to looking over their shoulders into the darkened room beyond the zone of candle-light. I myself dropped into line with a confession that I hated the dark.
I FELT OLD AND BITTER AND TIRED.
But Herbert Robinson remained the cynic. “Show me something that I can not explain,” he said, “and you will convince me.”
“You are of the type that can not be convinced,” Sperry retorted. “You would forswear the evidence of your own senses.”
“Physical phenomena!” scoffed the cynic. “I've seen it all—objects moving without visible hands, unexplained currents of cold air, voices through a trumpet—I know the whole rotten mess.”
Mrs. Dane only smiled. “I wonder!” she said quietly. “Friends, I am going to make an experiment to-night. Herbert may be right. I'm sure I hope not. But here are six of us, intelligent and mentally well-poised. One way and another, during the past year, we have touched on many things and I explained them. It occurred to me that it would be a novelty to try something we could not explain, or, at least, not explain easily.”
The general move from the dining-room prevented further explanation. We grouped around her chair as she was wheeled out, but once in the corridor beyond the butler's ears, she went on.
“Servants are curious,” she said, with her twinkling eyes snapping. “They would desert in a body if they knew. To the drawing-room, Clara.”
Outside the drawing-room door she dismissed the companion who was always at her elbow. “Go for a walk, Clara,” she said kindly. “In an hour I may need you.” And, as the girl departed, “Now, doctor, will you take me into the drawing-room?”
Mrs. Dane's drawing-room is generally rather painful. Kindly soul that she is, she has considered it necessary to preserve and exhibit there the many gifts of a long lifetime. Photographs long outgrown, onyx tables, a clutter of odd chairs and groups of discordant bric-à-brac usually make the progress of her chair through it a precarious and perilous matter. We paused in the doorway, startled.
The room had been dismantled. It opened before us, walls and chimney-piece bare, rugs gone from the floor, even curtains taken from the windows. To emphasize the change, in the center stood a common pine table, surrounded by seven plain chairs. All the lights were out save one, a corner bracket, which was screened with a red-paper shade.
She watched our faces with keen satisfaction. “Such a time I had doing it!” she said. “The servants again, of course. They think I have gone mad. All except Clara. I told her. She's a sensible girl.”
“I see,” Herbert said. “A séance. Well, bring on your ghosts.”
I eyed my wife. She is a nervous woman, and I remembered her headache. But her eyes were shining. “How lovely!” she said gaily. “Are we to move the table, or what? I've always wanted to try moving a table.”
It is strange to remember the gay little party that stood just inside the door of Mrs. Dane's drawing-room and viewed almost hilariously the red-covered light, the table and chairs that constituted its entire furnishing. Strange, in view of what followed.
MRS. DANE—CRIPPLED, BUT A GLOWING, KINDLY SOUL.
This is not a ghost-story. It is, as I said at the beginning, a story of the supernormal, not the supernatural. It took us, before a week was over, through some bad hours, and brought us in contact with things which our ordered lives had so far chosen to ignore. But at no time, although incredible things happened, did any one of us glimpse that strange world of the spirit that seemed so often almost within our range of vision.
Of the physical phenomena we have had no adequate explanation. They occurred. We saw and heard them. Of what transpired regarding the death of Arthur Wells, we have solved the mystery. We know now why and when. We know the method by which it was solved. To say that we know how it was solved is only partially accurate.
It was I who suggested keeping a record of what happened. If anything, I am a methodical person, and although, as it developed, I did not keep the record myself, I have every reason to believe that it is entirely accurate. It has, as a matter of fact, been read and passed on by the Neighborhood Club, and such parts of it as I have chosen for publication are exactly as recorded. The only eliminations, in fact, are the various oaths which were scattered through the replies to our questions, and which could have no bearing on the evidence. These, and the scattered, unrelated words with which many of the statements terminated. I have cut. For instance, at the end of the sentence, “Just above the ear,” came a number of rhymes to the final word, “dear, near, fear, rear, cheer, three cheers.” These I cut, naturally.
“The medium is to be here at eight-thirty,” our hostess explained. “She is not a professional, and I am asked to say that she promises nothing.”
“A medium, of course!” Herbert scoffed. “Here we are, six intelligent people, ready to sit down and prepare ourselves for anything that may come, our minds receptive and keen. But no, we must have all the hanky-panky. A woman, I dare say, with an Indian control, who will go through the usual contortions. I warn you, Mrs. Dane, I am a skeptic.”
“You may be as skeptical as you please, if you will only be fair, Herbert.”
“And by that you mean”
EXCEPT FOR A NERVOUS TRICK OF PUTTING HER HAND TO HER FOREHEAD, THE MEDIUM SEEMED LIKE A PERFECTLY NORMAL YOUNG WOMAN.
“During the sitting keep as open mind and a closed mouth,” she replied cheerfully.
There was still a half hour until the medium's arrival. At Mrs. Dane's direction we employed it in searching the room. It was the ordinary rectangular drawing-room, occupying a comer of the house. Two windows at the end faced on the street, with a patch of railed-in lawn beneath them. A fire place with a dying fire and flanked by two other windows, occupied the long side opposite the door into the hall. These windows, opening on a garden, were closed by outside shutters, now bolted. The third side was a blank wall, beyond which lay the library. On the fourth side were the double doors into the hall.
As, although the results we obtained were far beyond any expectations, the purely physical phenomena were relatively insignificant, it is not necessary to go further into the detail of the room. Robinson has done that, anyhow, for the Society for Psychical Research, and I am told they intend to publish the entire case soon in pamphlet form.
To satisfy Mrs. Dane we examined the walls and floor-boards carefully, and Sperry, armed with a candle, went down to the cellar and investigate from below. There was no paneling on the walls of the room, which was smoothly papered, and the baseboard was firm and unbroken.
Whether the weather had changed again, or the situation was responsible, I can not tell. But when the examination was over, and we consulted our watches by the red-shaded light, I was conscious of a return of the afternoon's wild impulses. The feeling came over me like a wave, and, looking up as I put away my watch, I met Sperry's eye. It seemed to echo all that I was struggling with. But all he said was:
“Nice lot of fools we must look.” It seemed to me that his eyes were almost furtive.
It was eight-twenty.
My wife assisted Mrs. Dane into one of the straight chairs at the table, and Robinson, sent out by her, returned with a darkish bundle in his arms, and carrying a light bamboo rod. Mrs. Dane eyed them whimsically.
“Don't ask me what they are for,” she said. “Miss Jeremy sent them up. Properties, I suppose. And now suppose we sit down and compose ourselves. She is very anxious that we be composed.”
In the next ten minutes I dare say I thought over the surface of many things. I can not recall. I knew I should be mentally calm, almost inert. But I had never been more alive. And suddenly Arthur Wells came into my mind. I had not thought of him for weeks. Perhaps it was because he fitted into the day, a sullen man, given to strange outbursts of rage, and frantically jealous of his young wife.
I remember that, and that Sperry took a digestive tablet, to my serious annoyance. He even passed the box containing them around the table, with a jocular remark about the salad. Then the medium came in.
She was not at all what we had expected. Twenty-six, I should say, and in a black dinner dress. The women took to her at once. She seemed like a perfectly normal young woman, attractive in a fragile, delicate way. Not much personality, perhaps. The very word “medium” precludes that. A “sensitive,” I think she called herself. We were presented to her, and but for the stripped and bare room, it might have been any evening after any dinner, with bridge waiting instead of—what?
When she shook hands with me she looked at me keenly. “What a strange day it has been!” she said. “I have been very nervous. I only hope I can do what you want this evening.”
“I am not at all sure what we do want, Miss Jeremy,”
She smiled, a quick smile that was not without humor. Somehow I had never thought of a medium with a sense of humor. I liked her at once. We all liked her, and Sperry, Sperry, the bachelor, the iconoclast, the anti-feminist, was staring at her with curious, intent eyes.
Now, for a part of what follows I have an explanation, although both Sperry and Herbert disagree. Herbert, by the way, has gone over to the camp of the believers. But for a part I have no explanation, no theory. It happened, I will swear to that, happened in Mrs. Dane's drawing-room, with all the windows closed and shuttered, and with Mrs. Dane's wheeled chair set across the bolted door.
SPERRY, THE BACHELOR, THE ANTI-FEMINIST, STARED AT HER WITH CURIOUS, INTENT EYES.
Miss Jeremy asked for a small table and two extra chairs. These were brought in. “Where do you wish me to sit?” she asked. Except that she had a nervous trick of putting her hand to her forehead, again we might have been arranging chairs for bridge.
“Suppose you take the end of the table, my dear,” said Mrs. Dane. “And would you like cushions?”
She did not wish cushions. She directed Sperry and myself to place the extra stand and two chairs behind her, some two feet away, and then to take the black cloth from the table and hang it over the bamboo rod, which was laid across the backs of the chairs. Thus arranged, the curtain formed a screen behind her, with the small table beyond it. On this table we placed, at her order, various articles from our pockets—a fountain-pen, Sperry a knife; and my wife contributed a gold bracelet.
We all felt, I fancy, rather absurd. Herbert's smile in the dim light became a grin. “The same old thing!” he whispered to me. “Watch her closely. They're tricky, these people.”
It roused in me a fierce resentment that even now I do not understand.
But it was, at the beginning, the usual thing after all. For twenty minutes we sat around the table, fingers touching. Sperry was at the medium's right, Herbert at her left. We were not silent. She had said that it was not necessary. We talked quietly, but the general theme was the thing we were testing. I had put my opened watch on the table before me, a night watch with a luminous dial. At five minutes after nine I felt the top of the table waver under my fingers, a curious, fluid-like motion.
“The table is going to move,” I said quietly.
Herbert laughed, a dry little chuckle. “Sure it is,” he said. “When we all get to acting together, it will probably do considerable moving. I feel what you feel. It's flowing under my fingers.”
“Blood,” said Sperry. “You fellows feel the blood moving through the ends of your fingers. That's all.”
However, curiously enough, the table did not move. Instead, my watch, before my eyes, slid to the edge of the table and dropped to the floor, and almost instantly an object, which we recognized later as the knife, was flung over the curtain and struck the wall behind Mrs. Dane violently.
“HOLD MY HANDS VERY TIGHT.” HER VOICE SOUNDED FAINT AND FAR AWAY.
ONE of the women screamed, ending in a hysterical giggle. Then we heard rhythmic beating on the top of the stand behind the medium. Startling as it was at the beginning, increasing as it did from a slow beat to an incredibly rapid drumming, when the initial shock was over Herbert commenced to gibe.
“Your fountain-pen, Horace,” he said to me. “Making out a statement for services rendered, by its eagerness!”
The answer to that was the cap of the pen, aimed at him with apparent accuracy, and followed by an outcry for him.
“Here, stop it!” he said. “I've got ink all over me!”
We laughed consumedly. The sitting had taken on all the attributes of practical joking. The table no longer quivered under my hands.
“Please be sure you are holding my hands tight. Hold them very tight,” said Miss Jeremy. Her voice sounded faint and far away. Her head was drooped forward on her chest.
“We ought to have a record of all this,” Mrs. Dane said eagerly. “We believe it now, but to-morrow—suppose I send for Clara.”
There was some demur to this. Things were happening, and breaking the circle might be serious. Miss Jeremy, appealed to, did not reply. She had sagged down in her chair, and her hands, Sperry and Herbert reported, were very cold. Sperry felt her pulse and pronounced it slow.
There were no further demonstrations from behind the low black curtain. I remember how silent everything was for a moment, and how the lights of an automobile, turning on the street, threw bars of slatted white through the shutters and sent them moving along the walls.
“Now, while everything is quiet, will some one please call Clara?” Mrs. Dane asked. “You do it, Horace. And ask her to bring her letter-book.”
“HE WAS CRUEL TO HER. SULLEN.”
The butler was in the hall, and a few moments after Mrs. Dane's companion-secretary came in. She showed no surprise, but went quietly to a position near the shaded light, and stood waiting,
“Take down every thing that happens, Clara, and all we say.” Mrs. Dane's voice was low but very distinct. “In case you can not see how we are sitting—” She pointed us out with quick jerks of her head. Her hands were still on the table.
I had taken up my position again, and the circle was unbroken.
The medium was in a trance. It dawned on us rather slowly. We were all pure novices, and my wife suggested a cup of hot tea for her. “I'm afraid she's ill, poor thing!” she said.
Then, suddenly, somebody spoke. It was not Miss Jeremy's voice. It was a deep tone, almost a bass, but it came from the medium.
“Great Scott, it's a dark night,” said the voice.
Mrs. Dane eyed us with a triumph that even the twilight did not conceal. “That's her control,” she said. “Please be careful of this, Clara. If you need more light, turn it up. She says light does not bother her under these conditions.”
“The knee is very bad. It aches,” said the voice, with sudden sharpness. “Knee-knee-knee. A bad knee.”
“Horace!” my wife cried. “I'm frightened! Whatever it is knows about my knee.” She had slipped the winter before, and her knee had given her considerable trouble.
“Perhaps you mean my wife,” I said, feeling rather idiotic.
“Arnica is a good thing. It's only a knock. It doesn't matter.” My wife threw her chin up. Her knee is considered rather a serious matter at home.
Then, suddenly, what had been burlesque became drama. “If the key is on the nail”
“Dead! Good God!”
There was a sort of horror-struck pause. Then:
“Who is dead?” Sperry asked, his voice drawn a little thin.
“Just above the ear—a bullet. There is very little blood. Almost none. Only that one spot on the carpet. Water will take that out—not hot water. Cold. Hot sets the stain.”
“Look here,” Herbert said, looking around the table, “I don't like this. It's darned grisly.”
“Oh, fudge!” Sperry put in irreverently. “Let her rave, or it, or whatever it is. Do you mean that a man is dead?”—to the medium.
“Very dead. The woman has the revolver. She needn't cry so. He was cruel to her. He was a beast. Sullen.”
“Can you see the woman?” I asked.
“Certainly. Very pretty and young. She's wearing a yellow kimono.”
“Are you getting this, Clara?” Mrs. Dane asked sharply. “Don't miss a word. Who knows what this may develop into?”
I looked at the secretary. Her pencil was flying, but I saw that she was terrified. I got up and took my chair to her. Coming back, I picked up my watch. It was still going, and the hands marked nine-thirty.
“Now then,” Sperry said in a businesslike voice, “you see a dead man, and a young woman with him. Can you describe the room?”
“A small room, his dressing-room. He was shaving. There is still lather on his face.”
“And the woman killed him?”
“She has the revolver. They were always quarreling, always”
“The woman fired a shot while he was shaving?”
“Two. One is in the ceiling, beside the chandelier.” Then—“library paste.”
“What has library-paste to do with it?”
“The hole in the ceiling is filled with library paste.”
“Who did that?”
But instead of replying the medium fell to groaning. “He is so heavy,” she muttered, and writhed in the chair. Then: “I want to go out,” she said. “I want air. If I could only go to sleep and forget it. The drawing-room furniture is scattered over the house.”
This last sentence she repeated over and over. It got on our nerves, ragged already.
“Can you tell us about the house?”
There was a distinct pause. Then: “Certainly. A brick house. There is a garden around it. The servants' entrance is locked, but the key is on a nail, among the vines. All the drawing-room furniture is scattered through the house.”
“She must mean the furniture of this room,” Mrs. Dane whispered.
The remainder of the sitting was chaotic. The secretary's notes consist of unrelated words and much profanity. On going over the notes the next day, when the stenographic record had been copied on a typewriter, Sperry and I found that one word recurred frequently. The word was “curtain.”
“JUST ABOVE THE EAR.”
Of the extraordinary event that followed the breaking up of the séance, I have the keenest recollection. Miss Jeremy came out of her trance weak and looking extremely ill, and Sperry's motor took her home. She knew nothing of what had happened, and hoped we had been satisfied. By agreement, we did not tell her what had transpired, and she was not curious.
Herbert saw her to the car, and came back, looking grave. We were standing together in the center of the dismantled room, with the lights going full now.
“Well,” he said, “it is one of two things. Either we've been gloriously faked, or we've been let in on a very tidy little crime.”
It was Mrs. Dane's custom to serve a Southern egg-nog as a sort of stirrup-cup—nightcap, she calls it—on her evenings, and we found it waiting for us in the library. In the warmth of its open fire, and the cheer of its lamps, even in the dignity and impassiveness of the butler, there was something sane and wholesome. The women of the party reacted quickly, but I looked over to see Sperry at a corner desk, intently working over a small object in the palm of his hand.
He started when he heard me, then laughed and held out his hand.
“Library paste!” he said. “It rolls into a soft, malleable ball. It could quite easily be used to fill a small hole in plaster. The paper would paste down over it, too.”
“Then you think?”
“I'm not thinking at all. The thing she described may have taken place in Timbuctoo. May have happened ten years ago. May be the plot of some book she has read.”
“On the other hand,” I replied, “it is just possible that it was here, in this neighborhood, while we were sitting in that room.”
“Have you any idea of the time?”
“I know exactly. It was half-past nine.”
CHAPTER TWO
AT MIDNIGHT, shortly after we reached home, Sperry called me on the 'phone. “Be careful, Horace,” he said. “Don't let Mrs. Horace think anything has happened. I want to see you at once. Suppose you say I have a patient in a bad way, and a will to be drawn.”
I listened to sounds from up-stairs. I heard my wife go into her room and close the door.
“Tell me something about it,” I urged.
“Just this. Arthur Wells killed himself to-night, shot himself in the head. I want you to go there with me.”
“At what time?”
“At nine-thirty.”
As I hung up the receiver I was conscious that my hand shook. What if there was something in that evening's events after all? What if, around that table in Mrs. Dane's quiet house, we had yet been present, through the medium, at Arthur Wells's death? The house the medium had described was the Wells' house. But it was, also, a thousand other houses in the city. A sullen man, she had said, given to brooding. That would be Arthur.
What was the significance of it all? Was there, after all, a spirit-world that surrounded us, cognizant of all that we did, touching but intangible, sentient but tuned above our common senses?
I stood by the prosaic telephone instrument and looked into the darkened recesses of the passage. It seemed to my disordered nerves that back of the coats and wraps that hung on the rack, beyond the heavy curtains, in every corner, there lurked vague and shadowy forms, invisible when I stared, but advancing a trifle from their obscurity when, by turning my head and looking ahead, they impinged on the extreme right or left of my field of vision.
My wife accepted my excuse coldly. She dislikes intensely the occasional outside calls of my profession. She merely observed, however, that she would leave all the lights on until my return. “I should think you could arrange things better, Horace,” she added. “It's perfectly idiotic the way people die at night. And to-night, of all nights!”
I shall have to confess that through all of the thirty years of our married life my wife has clung to the belief that I am a bit of a dog. Thirty years of exemplary living has not affected this conviction. She watched me put on my overcoat without further comment. When I kissed her good night, however, she turned her cheek.
The street, with its open spaces, was a relief after the dark hall. I started for Sperry's house, my head bent against the wind, my mind on the news I had just heard.
We had known the Wells' very well. Not intimately. They belonged to the young married set, while ours was the older, more settled crowd. At large functions, of course, we ran into them frequently, but my wife had not exactly approved of them. They were of the cigarette-smoking, dancing, skating, high-ball-drinking crowd. Supposed to be living beyond their means, too.
Of the two, I myself had preferred Arthur. His faults were on the surface. He drank hard, gambled, and could not always pay his gambling debts. But underneath it all there had always been something boyish about him. He had played rather sullenly, it is true, through most of the thirty years that now marked his whole life.
AT MIDNIGHT SPERRY CALLED ME. “ARTHUR WELLS KILLED HIMSELF TO-NIGHT.”
Elinor Wells was different. Tall, blonde, with pale-blue eyes and masses of yellow hair, she was of a type that I detest. Calculating, ambitious, even avaricious, her marriage, while bringing her into prominence with the “smart” younger set, had disappointed her in a monetary way. Wells, with every opportunity to succeed, had lived beyond his means, had golfed and motored while business appointments hung fire. The end of their third year had found them quarreling bitterly, and a new complication, in the shape of another man, had arisen.
Into this triangle it was that the peaceful Neighborhood Club found itself so suddenly thrust.
It was of the other man that I thought as I walked toward Sperry's house that cold night in November of last year. I knew him slightly. An older man than Arthur, but at that probably less than thirty-five, his infatuation for Elinor Wells had long passed the stage of precaution and become reckless. He had a great deal of money, too. The women of the Neighborhood Club, discussing the affair that very evening while taking off their wraps at Mrs. Dane's had, my wife informed me later, concluded that it was Elinor's plan to divorce Arthur and to marry the other man. In the meantime, the verdict was that Elinor was too clever and too cold to let the affair pass certain bounds.
And now, I reflected, poor Arthur Wells was dead. All Elinor's calculations had failed to keep the mantle of decency over the wreck she had made of his life. It occurred to me that perhaps she had told him that night that she was leaving him. There was even a chance that she had told him of the other man. She was cold enough. And instead of his taking himself out of the way, as she may have hoped, he had killed himself.
In my regret, and my attempt to solve the psychology of the woman who had caused the tragedy, I forgot for a time the strange part we ourselves had taken, not in it, but in its revelation, that evening.
For as I went along, I knew, with one of those intuitive flashes that are supposed to be purely feminine, that the house the medium had described that night was the Wells house; that the woman she had seen had been Elinor Wells; that the dead man was Arthur. To accept that was to accept the rest, the revolver, the yellow kimono, the lathered face of the man on the floor.
That brought me up with a turn. Would a man stop shaving to kill himself? If he did, why a revolver? Why not the razor in his hand? But there was something else. Shaving is an automatic process. It completes itself. My wife has an irritated conviction that if the house caught fire while I was in the midst of the process, I would complete it and rinse the soap from my face before I caught up the fire-extinguisher.
Had he killed himself, or had Elinor killed him? Before me rose a picture of Elinor as I had seen her so often, cold, inscrutable, very well dressed. There are women whose coldness covers depths of unfathomed and hidden passion. Was she one of those? I thought not. She was too selfish, too calculating. Her pale eyes showed no flashes. Even her rage would be cold. She was incapable of an impassioned crime.
Sperry was waiting on his door-step, and we went on to the Wells house. What with the magnitude of the thing that had happened, and our own in voluntary share in it, we were rather silent. Sperry asked one question, however. “Are you certain about the time when Miss Jeremy saw what looks like this thing?”
“Certainly. My watch had been knocked off the table. I picked it up. It was still going. It was nine-thirty.”
“At nine-thirty-five the Wells' nursery governess telephoned for me. As you know, my man keeps a record of the time of all calls.”
Sperry is a heart specialist, I think I have said, with offices in his house.
And, a block or so farther on: “I suppose it was bound to come. To tell the truth, I didn't think the boy had the courage.”
Although the Wells house was brilliantly lighted when we reached it, we had difficulty in gaining admission. Whoever were in the house were up-stairs, and the bell evidently rang in the deserted kitchen or a neighboring pantry.
“We might try the servants' entrance,” Sperry said. “If—perhaps the key is on a nail among the vines!”
I confess to a nervous tightening of my muscles as we made our way around the house. If the key was there, we were on the track of a revelation that might revolutionize much that we had held fundamental in science and in our knowledge of life itself. If, sitting in Mrs. Dane's quiet room, a woman could tell us what was happening in a house a mile or so away, it opened up a new earth. Almost a new heaven.
I STOPPED and touched Sperry's arm. “This Miss Jeremy—did she know Arthur, or Elinor? If she knew the house, and the situation between them, isn't it barely possible that she anticipated this thing?”
“I think not. Mrs. Dane said she was a newcomer. But it's a good point. We can take it up later.”
Sperry had a pocket flash, and when we found the door locked, we proceeded with our search for the key. The porch had been covered with heavy vines, now dead of the November frosts, and showing, here and there, dead and dried leaves that crackled as we touched them. In the darkness some thing leaped against me, and I almost cried out. It was, however, only a collie dog, eager for the warmth of his place by the kitchen fire.
“Here's the key,” Sperry said, and held it out. The flash wavered in his hand, and his voice was strained.
“So far, so good,” I replied, and was conscious that my own voice rang strange in my ears.
We admitted ourselves, and the dog, bounding past us, gave a sharp yelp of gratitude and ran into the kitchen.
“Look here, Sperry,” I said, as we stood inside the door, “they don't want me here. You're a friend of Elinor's people, but I'm the most casual sort of an acquaintance. I feel like an intruder.”
That struck him too. We had both been so obsessed with the scene at Mrs. Dane's that we had not thought of anything else.
“Suppose you sit down in the library,” he said. “The chances are against Elinor's coming down, and the servants don't matter.”
As a matter of fact, we learned later that all the servants were out, except the nursery governess. There were two small children. There was a servants' ball somewhere, and with the exception of the butler, it was after two before they commenced to straggle in. Also, I need not have been disturbed about the family. Arthur Wells' home was in the South and Elinor's people were abroad. Except two plain-clothes men from the central office, a physician who was with Elinor in her room, and the governess, there was no one else in the house but the children, asleep in the nursery.
The men from the office left shortly after we got there. Sperry came down with them. They walked on their toes, with their shoes creaking and their voices lowered, and one of them said: “Bad business, doctor.”
“Very sad indeed,” was Sperry's comment, as he let them out.
“Now come up here, Horace,” he said from the doorway. “The room is empty.”
The house was perfectly silent. But in some strange fashion it had apparently taken on the attributes of the deed that had preceded the silence. It was sinister, mysterious, dark. Its immediate effect on my active imagination was apprehension—almost terror. Murder or suicide, here among the shadows a soul, an indestructible thing, had been recently violently wrenched from its body. The body lay in the room overhead. But what of the spirit? Did it watch our slow progress with formless eyes from some black corner? Unable to speak, did it cry for vengeance through the lips of the “sensitive” in Mrs. Dane's drawing-room?
Then why, if these thoughts of mine, not formulated at the time, were true, should this spirit, in its most terrible hour, insist that it had hurt its knee, and observed that Mrs. Dane's overfilled drawing-room had had its furniture scattered over the house? Why, in every contact the material world apparently achieved with the spiritual, should there be these absurd incongruities?
Sperry opened a door, and we were in the room where the death had occurred. He stood aside, and together we surveyed it. It was a dressing-room, as Miss Jeremy had described. A wardrobe, a table with books and magazines in disorder, two chairs, and a single mahogany bed, constituted the furnishing. Beyond was a bathroom. On a chair by a window the dead man's evening clothes were neatly laid out, his shoes beneath. His top hat and folded gloves were on the table.
Arthur Wells lay on the bed. A sheet had been drawn over his body, and above it his face showed, in every peaceful line, the restfulness of the long sleep.
“The detective and I put him on the bed. He was here,” said Sperry. And showed a place on the floor midway of the room.
I roused myself to my customary manner. “Where was his head lying?” I asked.
“Here.”
I stooped and examined the carpet. It was a dark Oriental, with much red in it. I touched it. It was wet under my fingers, but not with blood. I took a clean folded handkerchief and rubbed it over the spot. It came up moist but not colored.
“Cold water,” Sperry said laconically. “Hot would set the stain. Who do you suppose said that, Horace? And to whom?”
“Elinor says she was alone with him?”
“Yes.”
“Leaving all that aside,” I said, almost irritably, “why wash up the stain? I don't understand. It's—it's idiotic.”
“Certainly,” said Sperry. “But there's a lot about the whole thing that isn't quite sane, you know. Our being here, for instance, under these circumstance.”
He walked across to the bathroom and surveyed it from the doorway. I followed him. It was as orderly as the other room. On a glass shelf over the wash-stand were his razors, a safety and, beside it, in a black case, an assortment of the other sort, long bladed and gleaming. The towels were folded and in place. If the dead man had been shaving there was nothing but the orderly array of razors to show it.
Sperry gave an exclamation of disgust. “Everything cleared up, of course!” he said. “It's rather extraordinary, if Elinor's story is true, that a wild impulse toward tidiness should seize her at such a time.”
He had got Elinor's story from the policeman. It was a connected and reasonable account of her husband's suicide. They had been going to a ball that night. The servants had all gone out immediately after dinner, and the governess had gone for a walk. She was to return at nine-thirty to fasten Elinor's gown and to be with the children.
Arthur, she said, had been depressed for several days, and at dinner had hardly spoken at all. He had not, however, objected to the ball. He had indeed, seemed strangely determined to go, although she had pled a headache. At nine o'clock he went up-stairs, apparently to dress.
She was in her room, with the door shut, when she heard a shot. She ran in and found him lying on the floor, with his revolver behind him. The governess was still out. The shot had roused the children, and they had come down from the nursery above. She was frantic, but she had to soothe them. The governess, however, came in almost immediately, and she had sent her to the telephone to summon help,
I listened carefully. It sounded rather forlorn. His own recital had impressed Sperry with the pathos of the situation.
“Poor girl,” he said. “Alone with all that!”
But I was hardly listening, just then. I had caught a glimpse of something behind the bathtub. It was beyond my reach, and I got a walking-stick from a corner of the dressing-room and ran it down behind the tub. I fished out a leather razor-strop, dry and cracked from disuse, and a bath-sponge, stained with blood to a yellowish-brown.
“A very pathetic story,” I said to Sperry, “if it happened to be true. It is not true, Sperry. I'm sorry for Elinor, but—she's lying. The boy was shaving when it happened, as certainly as we found the key among the vines. I don't believe he fell where you found him.”
“Why?”
“Look at the sponge. There were stains elsewhere, stains that would in validate the suicide story, or why were they washed up?”
“I see. But why wash up the one here, where I found the body?”
“Excitement. Some one was over-zealous. He may have fallen there. I rather think not. A head wound doesn't bleed much, does it?”
“Not rapidly. It oozes.”
“Then he fell somewhere else,” I said, with conviction. “In the bathroom, possibly. Even probably, if he killed himself. But if, for instance, he fell outside the door there, in the hallway, it would show clearly enough that it was not suicide.”
Sperry went out, and with his flash examined the carpet in the hall. He even stooped, and ran his hand over it here and there.
“Nothing there,” he said, when he returned. “At least, nothing to see.”
I RUBBED A CLEAN HANDKERCHIEF OVER THE SPOT. IT CAME UP MOIST BUT NOT COLORED.
In looking back I realize how much of what looked like clear reasoning at the time was dependent on what the medium had said. “He is so heavy,” she had muttered. Who was so heavy? If it was Arthur Wells, who was it had found him heavy?
“He fell somewhere else, Sperry,” I said. “And he was dragged to where the police found him.”
“Who moved him? Elinor could not have done it.”
“I am not sure, if she was desperate. But how do we know she was alone?”
With the speech I felt a sudden conviction. There had been somebody else in the house. Possibly the governess. But in that case what was the necessity for secrecy? The truth was that there was too much plausibility about the whole story Elinor told. It was too simple, too uninvolved—though it would have imposed on us both, as it had on the police, but for Miss Jeremy. And there was too much caution. People neither think nor act quite rationally in great crises. They overact, overdo. The very fact that whoever had washed up the incriminating blood-stains had been over-zealous, also hidden the sponge, was irrational and suspicious.
Sperry and I stared at each other. The strop and the sponge lay between us, on the floor. Suddenly he turned on his heel and went back into the room, and a moment later he called me, quietly.
“You're right,” he said. “The poor devil was shaving. He had it half done. Come and look.”
But I did not go. There was a carafe of water in the bathroom, and I took a drink from it. My hands were shaking.
CHAPTER THREE
THE governess came into the room. I was glad of it. It distracted Sperry's attention from me. I have a totally unearned reputation for calmness and poise, and I was just then neither calm nor poised.
She knew Sperry, but the glance she threw me was one of suspicion. I learned afterward that she thought I belonged to the police.
“This is very terrible. Miss Reiff!” Sperry said.
“Very terrible.” She spoke excellent English, with a slight German accent. She was very pale, and had evidently been crying.
“You were not in the house when—it happened?”
“No, doctor. I had gone out for a walk.” But she was watching me while she answered him.
“What time did you come in?”
“At something after nine—perhaps a quarter past.”
“Would you mind telling us how things were when you came?”
“He was on the floor there. The revolver was beside him.”
“And Mrs. Wells was with him?”
“Yes. At least I suppose so. She heard me and called down to me to telephone for you, that Mr. Wells had shot himself.”
“I came as soon as I got the message. You might tell her that I am here.”
She went out at once, and came back with word that Elinor would see him. When Sperry had gone to Elinor's room, however, she remained with me. She was on guard, I thought. On guard and antagonistic.
“I should think this is a case for the coroner, not for the police,” she said, as Sperry closed the door behind him.
I saw then that she thought I was of the police, and took my cue. “It is a coroner's case, certainly,” I said. “But I would like to ask you a few questions.”
She did not dare to refuse, but she eyed me distrustfully. “Well?”
“You are sure there was no one in the house but Mrs. Wells and her husband?”
“The children.”
“Mr. Wells was shaving, I believe, when the—er—impulse overtook him?”
There was no doubt as to her surprise. “Shaving? I think not.”
“What sort of a razor did he ordinarily use?”
“A safety razor always. At least I have never seen any others around.”
“There is a case of old-fashioned razors in the bathroom.”
She glanced toward the room and shrugged her shoulders. “Possibly he used others. I have not seen any.”
“Did you wash any stain from the carpet?”
“No. I do not think there was much blood. I do not know. The sight of blood makes me sick.”
“Do you know where Mr. Wells kept his revolver?”
“When I first came it was in the drawer of that table. I suggested that it be placed beyond the children's reach. I do not know where it was put.”
“Do you recall how you left the front door when you went out? I mean, was it locked?”
“No. The servants were out, and I knew there would be no one to admit me. I left it unfastened.”
But it was evident that she had broken a rule of the house by doing so, for she added: “I am afraid to use the servants' entrance. It is dark there.”
“The key is always hung on the nail when they are out?”
“Yes. If any one of them is out it is left there. There is only one key. The family is out a great deal, and it saves bringing some one down from the servants' room at the top of the house.”
But she distrusted my knowledge of the key as she distrusted everything about me. And I was less confident than I had been. If it was a common practise to leave the key there, Miss Jeremy might have happened on the knowledge in some perfectly natural manner. Herbert Robinson's words came back to me—that mediums were tricky.
For instance, it was 9:30 when we learned of Arthur Wells's death in Mrs. Dane's drawing room. The governess said it had been before she came in, at 9:15. Was it then possible that the crime or suicide or whatever it was, had taken place earlier than we knew, that the governess had known it, and had gone out on some secret errand; that, on her way, she had encountered Miss Jeremy, and told her?
Absurd as it seemed, it was barely possible. To admit the possibility was to admit the whole séance a sham and a fraud. The only thing was to show it impossible. Miss Jeremy had arrived at Mrs. Dane's house at half-past eight.
THE BUTLER'S FACE WAS GRAVE AS HE TURNED TOWARD US.
“What time did you leave the house?”
“At eight o'clock.”
“You are sure of the time?”
“It was five minutes after eight.”
“Do you mind telling me where you went when you were out?”
It did not occur to me until later that I was being impertinent without any license to be. By profession I am a lawyer, and long years of cross-examining witnesses has cured me of squeamishness. But her expression rather brought me to my senses, and in a moment, I dare say, I would have apologized. However, she did not give me time. She had accepted my authority without question, and I believe there was another element. She was beginning to feel that the situation was more complicated than she had thought, and was anxious to clear her own skirts.
“I can prove where I was,” she said with a touch of excitement in her voice. “I went to a pharmacy and telephoned. The clerk will remember, I am sure.”
My old habit of examining testimony asserted itself. “You went out to telephone when there is a telephone in the house?”
But here again, as once or twice before, a veil dropped between us. She avoided my eyes. “There are things one does not want the family to hear,” she muttered. Then, having determined on a course of action, she followed it. “I am looking for another position. I do not like it here. The children are spoiled. I only came for a month's trial.”
“And the pharmacy?”
“Elliott's, at the corner of State Avenue and McKee Street.”
SPERRY and the doctor who had been called in, had left Elinor's room, and were talking at the head of the stairs. She muttered something about not learning Mrs. Wells alone, and went out.
She knew something or suspected something. She was frightened. She had proved, or left us to prove, that she had not been in the house when Arthur Wells shot himself, or was shot. But she had done it reluctantly, as a choice between two evils.
I made a mental note to follow up the telephone call.
Sperry's first move on returning to the room was to examine the revolver. Only one chamber was empty. “She says positively that only one shot was fired.” he said. “This looks like it. But if our friend at Mrs. Dane's was right, as she seems to have been so far, there's the ceiling to investigate.”
“I have looked. There is nothing there.”
It was covered with a ceiling paper of small design, and search as we would, we could find no trace of a bullet-hole. It was difficult, of course. The house was an old one, and in the center of the high ceiling a plaster ornament surrounded the chandelier.
Sperry drew a chair beneath it and examined it carefully, without result.
“With a ladder we might find something,” he said at last. “But that's out of the question to-night. Do you recall what color Miss Jeremy said the kimono of the woman was?”
“Yellow.”
“That's another mistake,” he said, with a worried air. “It is a sort of bluish-green. She's still wearing it.” And later, as we went out into the hall and closed the door into the room where the dead man lay: “It's odd, the whole thing. Damned odd. A pretty girl like Miss Jeremy to see a horror like this and describe it! She ought to stop it. It's wearing her out. If I had my way—why, her pulse was only about forty and thin.”
It seemed to me that his interest was not entirely professional.
The butler had returned, and was closing the door after letting the other doctor out. His face was grave as he turned toward us. Sperry knew him. “I'm sorry you were out, Hawkins,” he said.
“I am sorry, doctor. I was uneasy—I don't know why. I came back before the others.”
“When did you get in?”
“I met the detectives going out. They told me.”
BUT I saw that his eyes were on something Sperry held. His white face seemed to go even whiter, and he recoiled a step or two.
“I'm taking this walking-stick, Hawkins. It has been freezing hard, and I'm not very sure-footed.”
“Yes, sir,” said the butler impassively. But I fancied that he took a step after us as we started off, and that he only restrained himself from speech by a violent effort.
“I wonder just what that man has stumbled on,” I observed, as we reached a corner and stood waiting for a street-car.
“Stumbled on?”
“He gave me the impression of holding back. He spoke too carefully. And he is frightened.”
“You'd be scared of your life under the same circumstances; and the fellow is out of a job. He knows that,” Sperry observed. “We've got to face a situation, Horace, and face it squarely. This is either a murder or a suicide. Elinor is bound to suffer, in any case. She has never been really popular, and the affair with young Ellingham will hurt a lot. Whether poor Arthur Wells put himself out of the way, or whether she did it, in a struggle or cold-bloodedly, a certain number of people will always think that she killed him. She knows that, too. Socially, she's dead. She'll close the house and go away. She'll have to.”
It seemed to me that Elinor's social death was a minor consideration. Living quietly, as my wife and I did, on the borderland of society, we had never felt the urge of social ambition. But, of course, Elinor was different.
Once on the street-car, the murder or suicide, whichever it was, gave way in importance in our minds to the strange fact that at the time it was occurring, or a few minutes later. Miss Jeremy had described it.
Sperry, I could see, was much impressed. “We have been going along,” be said, “all smug and contented—three meals a day and a bed at night, a few friends, a business or a profession. Then, now and then something like this crops up, and destroys in a moment the illusion that we have fathomed the secrets of the universe.”
“THIS 'control' business, Sperry,” I said, “somehow I dislike it. It's a sort of Aladdin and the Spirit of the Lamp affair. I can not imagine anything more terrible than dying—'going over,' as our friends the spiritualists term it—and then being obliged to fetch and carry for all the Miss Jeremys of the earth.”
“Miss Jeremy is a very fine girl. And an honorable one,” he said. “There might be worse things. At least it spells activity. The thought of an inert eternity is much worse.”
The physical force which had thrown the objects over the screen also came up for discussion. I mentioned a theory, Lombroso's, I believe—at least, I claimed it as his—by which the medium in a trance state develops an aura with certain physical qualities, so clearly defined that a scale shows a loss of weight.
“Such an aura,” I said, “could doubtless, at the volition of the person in trance, produce phenomena of the sort we saw.”
But Sperry was off on the fourth dimension by that time. He said he could visualize it quite clearly as the hyper-cube, and talked learnedly of a cone passed apex downward through a plane.
“It's perfectly clear,” he said. “It is necessary, of course, to use motion as a translator of time into space or space into time.”
AS IN the days that followed there were many such discussions among the members of the Neighborhood Club, and I have gone into it at some length, I shall not again find it necessary. This narrative will limit itself to the two sittings which followed the initial one. to the independent investigations made by Sperry and myself in the intervals, and to the solution of the mystery, which we finally achieved.
The streets were dark and deserted. But as the car stopped at a corner I saw the lighted windows of a pharmacy, and signaled the conductor.
“Elliott's,” I explained to Sperry. “At least we can find if the governess telephoned from here, and when.”
So far Sperry had taken the initiative. It was now my turn. With what I now feel was an entirely childish sense of importance—the whole evening had been one of distorted values—I led the way into the pharmacy.
The night-clerk was in the prescription-room behind the shop. He had fixed himself comfortably on two chairs, with an old table-cover over his knee and a half-empty bottle of beer on a wooden box beside him. He did not waken until I spoke to him.
“Sorry, to rouse you, old man,” I said.
He flung off the cover and jumped up, upsetting the beer, which trickled in a stale stream to the floor. “Oh, that's all right. I wasn't asleep, anyhow.”
We let that go, and I went at once to the object of our visit. Yes, he remembered the governess, knew her, as a matter of fact. The Wells' bought a good many things there, Asked as to her telephoning, he thought it was about nine o'clock, maybe earlier. But questioned as to what she had telephoned about, he drew himself up.
“Oh, see here.” he said. “I can't very well tell you that, can I? This business has got ethics, all sorts of ethics.”
He enlarged on that. The secrets of the city, he maintained loftily, were in the hands of the pharmacies. It was a trust that they kept. “Every trouble from dope to drink, and then some,” he boasted.
BUT he knew Sperry, and was divided between fear of antagonizing the city's leading specialist and anxiety. When I told him that Arthur Wells was dead his jaw dropped, but there was no more argument in him. He knew very well the number the governess had called.
“She's done it several times.” he said. “I'll be frank with you. I got curious after the third evening, and called it myself. You know the trick. I found out it was the Ellingham house, up State Street.”
“What was the nature of the conversations?”
“Oh, she was very careful. It's an open phone and any one could hear her. Once she said somebody was not to come. Another time she just said, “This is Julia. Nine-thirty, please.”
“And to-night?”
“That the family was going out—not to call.”
He was full of curiosity, and Sperry told him something. Very little, however.
“Suicide!” he said. “Well, we've all got our downhearted times. It's pretty cold to-night. You gentlemen'd better have something to warm you up before you go out.”
I WAS chilled through, to tell the truth, and although I rarely drink anything, I went back with him and took an ounce or so of villainous whisky, poured out of a jug. When I went back to him he was making notes in his professional memorandum-book.
“The thing to be careful of,” he commented, as we started home, “is not to confuse the essentials with the inessentials. The governess lied; but, after all, what has that to do with poor Arthur Wells?”
But the rot-gut I had taken on an empty and chilled stomach, following the nervous strain of the day and evening, was already having its effect on me. Sperry was obliged to give me an arm home.
This is a truthful narrative, but it is with deep humiliation of spirit I record that a housemaid, coming into my library at seven o'clock the next morning, found me, in top hat and overcoat, asleep on the library couch.
I had, however, removed my collar and tie, and my watch, carefully wound, was on the smoking-stand beside me.
“SORRY TO ROUSE YOU, OLD MAN,” I SAID.
The investigation of the Neighborhood Club into the strange death of Arthur Wells and the medium's stranger knowledge of it will be continued in the July number.