The Saturday Evening Post/The Buckled Bag/Part 1
It Was the End of One Mystery—the Beginning of Another
I
I HAVE broken down in health lately—nothing serious; but a nurse lasts only so long, and during the last five years I have been under a double strain. Caring for for the sick has been only a part of it The other?
Well, put it like this: The world's pretty crowded after all. We are always touching elbows, and there's never a deviation from the usual, the normal, that is not felt all the way down the line. Stand a row of dominoes on edge and knock down the end one. Do you see? And generally somebody goes down for fair. We do not know much about it among the poor; they have to manage the best way they can, and maybe they are blunted—some of them. They have not the time for mental agony. And the thing works both ways. Their lapses are generally obvious—cause and result; motive and crime.
In the lower walks of life people are more elemental. But get up higher. Crime exists there; but, instead of a passion, it Is a craft. In its detection it is brain, not intellect against brute force or instinct. If anything gives, it is the body.
Illness follows crime—it does not always follow the criminal; but somebody goes down for fair. There is a breach in the wall. The doctor and the clergyman come in then. One way and another they get the story. There is nothing hidden from them. They get it but they do not want it. They cannot use it. The clergyman's vows and the medical man's legal status forbid their using their knowledge; but, where a few years ago there were only two, now each crisis, mental or physical, finds three—the trained nurse.
Do you see what I mean? The thing is thrust at her. She does not want the story either. Her business is bodies, doctors' orders, nourishments; but unless she's a fool she ends by holding the family secret in the hollow of her hand. It worries her. She needs her hands. She gets rid of it as soon as she can and forgets it. She is safe; the secret is safe. Without the clergyman's vows or the doctor's legal status, she is as silent as either.
That is the ethical side. That is what the nurse does. There is another side, which is mine. The criminal uses every means against society. Why not society against against the criminal? And this is my defense. Every trained nurse plays a game, a sort of sporting proposition—her wits against wretchedness. I play a double game—the fight against misery and the fight against crime—like a man running two chessboards at once.
I hated it in the beginning. It has me by the throat now. It is the criminal I find absorbing. And I have learned some things—not new, of course—that to be honest because one is untempted is to be strong with the strength of a child; that the great virtues often link arms with the great vices; that the big criminal thinks big thoughts.
I have had my chance to learn and I know. A nurse gets under the very skin of the soul. She finds a mind surrendered, all the crooked little motives that have fired the guns of life revealed in their pitifulness. Even now, sometimes, it hurts me to look back.
It is five years since George L. Patton was shot in the leg during a raid on the Hengst Place, in Cherry run. He is at the head of one of the big private agencies now, but he was a county detective then; and Hengst shot him from a cupboard. Well, that does not matter particularly, except that Mr. Patton was brought to the hospital that night and I was given the case.
He took it very calmly—said he guessed he would rest a while, now he had the chance, and slept eighteen hours without moving. I made caps, I remember, and tried to plan what I would do when I left the house. My time was about up and I dreaded private duty. I had been accustomed to the excitement of a hospital, and there was something horrible to me in the idea of spending the rest of my life in darkened rooms, with the doctor's daily visit for excitement and a walk round the block for recreation.
I gave Mr. Patton his dinner that night and we had our first clash. He looked at the soup and toast, and demanded steak and onions.
“I'm sorry,” I said. “You're to have light diet for a day or two. We don't want fever from that leg.”
“”Leg! What has my leg to do with my stomach? I want a medium steak. I'll do without the onions if I have to.”
“Doctor's orders,” I said firmly. “You may have an egg custard if you want it, or some cornstarch.”
We had a downright argument and he took the soup. When he had finished he looked up at me and smiled.
“I don't like you,” he said, “but darned if I don't respect you, young woman. Absolute obedience to orders is about the hardest thing in the world to get. And now send for that fool interne and we'll have a steak for breakfast.”
We he did; and pretty soon he was getting about everything the hospital could give him. He was a politician, of course, and we depended on our state appropriation for support; but he got nothing from me without an order. He always said he did not like me, but I think he did after a while. I could beat him at chess, for one thing.
“You have a good head, Miss Adams,” he said to me one day when he was almost well. “Are you going to spend the rest of your life changing pillowslips and shaking down a thermometer?”
“I've thought of institutional work; I dare say I'd be changing nurses and shaking down internes,” I said with some bitterness.
“How old you?—not, of course, for publication.”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Any family?”
“The nearest relatives I have are two old aunts in the country.”
He was silent for a minute or two. Then: “I've been thinking of something: I may take it up with you later. There's only one objection—you're rather too good-looking.”
“I'm not really good-looking at all,” I admitted frankly. “I have too high a forehead. It's the cap.”
“Like 'em high!” said Mr. Patton.
I made an eggnog and brought it into him. He was sitting propped in a chair, and when I gave him the glass he smiled up at me. He had never attempted any sentimentalities with me, which is more than can be said of the usual convalescent male over forty.
“It isn't all the cap,” he said.
That afternoon he tried to learn from me something about the other patients on the floor; but of course I would tell him nothing. He seemed rather irritated and tried to bully me, but was firm.
“Don't be childish, Mr. Patton!” I said at last. “We don't tell about other patients. If you want to find out get one of your men in here.”
To my surprise he laughed.
“Good girl!” he said. You've stood a cracking test and come through A1. You've got silence and obedience to orders, and you have a brain. I've mentioned the forehead. Now I'm going to make my proposition. Has it ever occurred to you that every crisis, practically among the better classes, finds a trained nurse on hand?”
“Cause or result?”
“Result, of course. Upset the ordinary routine of a family, have a robbery, an elopement or a murder, and somebody goes to bed, with a hired nurse in attendance. Fact isn't it?” I admitted it. “It's a fault of the tension people live under,” he went on. “Any extra strain and something snaps. And who is it who is in the very bosom of the family? You know it and I know. The nurse gets it all—the intimate details that the police miss; the family disputes; the inner motives; the—you go to your room and think it over. And when you decide I have a case for you.”
I tried to object, but he cut me short: so put the thermometer in his mouth and managed to tell him how I felt.
“It just doesn't seem honest,” I finished. “I'm in a position of confidence and I violate it. That's the truth. A nurse is supposed to work for good; if she has any place its an uplift place—if you can see what I mean. And to go to a house and pry out its secrets”
He jerked the thermometer out wrathfully.
“Uplift!” he said. “Isn't it uplifting to place a criminal where he won't injure society? If you don't see it that way, we don't want you. Now go away and think about it.”
I went up to my room and stood in front of the mirror, which is where I do most of my thinking. I talk things over with myself, I suppose. And I saw the lines behind my ears that said: “Twenty-nine, almost thirty!”—and the rows of caps ready for private duty, with only the doctor's visits for excitement and a walk round the block for recreation. And I thought of institutional work, with its daily round of small worries, its monotonous years, with my soul shrinking and shaping itself to fit a set of rules. And over against it all I put Mr. Patton's offer.
I recall it all—the color that came to my face at the chance to use my head instead of only a trained obedience to orders; the prospect of adventure; the chance to pit my wits against other wits and perhaps win out. I put on one of my new caps and went down to Mr. Patton's room
“I'll do it!” I said calmly.
My time was up two days later. Mr. Patton was practically well and gave me my instructions while I helped pack his bag.
“Do the things other nurses do,” he advised. “Go to the Nurse's Home, but don't register for cases right away. Make an excuse that you're tired and need a few days' rest. When I telephone you I shall call myself Doctor Patton—not that I pretend to do any medical work, but for extra caution.”
“You said you had a case for me.”
“I had, but it's not big enough. I want you for something worth while, and it will be along soon. It's about due.”
“And—just one thing, Mr. Patton: I will take my first case on trial. If I find that I am doing harm and not good by revealing the secrets of a family I shall give it up. A doctor would be answerable to the law for doing the thing I am about to do.”
“You have no legal status.”
“I have a moral status,” I replied grimly, and he found no answer to that.
Before he left, however, he said something that rather cheered me.
“You will never be required to tell anything you learn, except what is directly pertinent to the matter in hand,” “I would not give such latitude to any other woman I know—but you have brains and you will know what we want.”
“I cannot work in the dark—I must know what you are after.”
“We will lay all our cards on your table face up. I wouldn't insult you by asking you to play blindfolded. And remember this, Miss Adams—it's as high a duty to explore and heal the moral sores of a community as it is to probe and dress, for instance, the wound of a man who has been shot in the leg.”
Two days later I left the hospital and took a room at the Nurses' Home he had recommended. He would arrange with the secretary, he said, that I should be called for any case on which he wished me placed.
I put in a bad week. One of the staff of the hospital located me and called me to a case. I got out of it by saying I needed a few days' rest, and he rang off irritably. Then, on the third day, I had my handbag cut off my arm in a department store, and went home depressed and ill-humored.
“I—I Thought She Was Happy in Our Engagement; But as I Look Back There are Things”
“You're a fine detective!” I said to myself in the mirror. “You're not so clever as Mr. Patton thinks, and if you're honest you'll go and tell him so.”
I think I should have done so—I was so abased; but our arrangement was that I should not try to see him under any circumstances. There was to be no suspicion of me in any way. He would see me when necessary. I still had the strap of my bag, which had been left hanging to my arm; and, as a constant reminder, I fastened it to the frame of my mirror. Even now, when the department gives me its best cases, and when I have been successful enough to justify a little pride, I look at that bit of leather and become meek and normal again.
II
IN SPITE of Mr. Patton's promise I went on my first case for him without any preparation. Miss Shinn, the secretary, asked me if I would take a case that evening.
“For whom?”
She was turning over the pages of her ledger in the parlor-office of the Home and she did not look up.
“A Doctor Patton telephoned,” she said. “I believe he had spoken to you of the case.”
My throat tightened, but, after all, this was what I had been waiting for.
“Do you know what sort of case it is?” I asked. “I'm not doing obstetrics, you know.”
“It is not an obstetric case. You are to take a taxicab at eight o'clock tonight.”
Miss Shinn was a heavy, rather bilious brunette, who rarely smiled; but I caught an amused twinkle as she glanced up. Quite suddenly I liked her. Clearly she knew what I was about to do and she did not disapprove; and yet she was a very ethical person. I gathered that she would be very hard on a nurse who wore frivolous uni- forms, or gossiped about her patients, or went to the theater with a doctor, or cut rates. And yet she was indulgent to me—she was more than indulgent. I was certain, somehow, from the very quiver of her wide back as she marked me “Engaged” on her register, that she was wildly interested and curious. It gave me confidence.
At eight o'clock that evening I went downstairs with my suitcase and ordered a taxicab. No word had come from Mr. Patton and I had nothing but a name and address to go by. The name—we will call it G. W. March. It was not, of course. You would know the name at once if I told it. The address was a street fronting one of the parks—a good neighborhood, I knew—old families, substantial properties, traditions, all that sort of thing. Certainly not a place to look for crime.
As I waited for the cab I searched the newspapers for something to throw light on my new enterprise. There was nothing at all except a notice that Mr. and Mrs. George W. March had returned from their summer home on the Maine coast a few days before and had opened their city home.
It looked like a robbery. I was vaguely disappointed. I had it all worked out in five minutes—Mrs. March in bed, collapsed; missing pictures or jewels; house full of trusted servants; and myself trying to solve the mystery between an alcohol rub and a dose of bromide. I hated to go on with it, but I was ashamed not to. I said to myself savagely that I not a quitter, and got into the taxicab.
The March case was not a robbery, however. It was not a criminal case, strictly speaking, at all. It was the disappearance of a girl and and in some ways it was a remarkable mystery—particularly baffling because for so long it seemed to be a result without a cause. How we found the cause at last; how we located the family in Brickyard Road and solved the puzzle of the buckled bag; how we learned the identity of the little old woman with the jet bonnet, and her connection with the garden door—all this makes up the record of my first case.
The buckled bag is lying on my desk now. It is a shabby, quaint old bag, about eight inches long, round-bellied, brown with wear. It still contains what was in it when Mr. Patton found it—a cotton handkerchief, marked with a J; two keys—one a house-door key, the other a flat one; a scrawled note in a soiled lavender envelope; a newspaper clipping of a sale of blankets.
It is one of my most painful memories that for a month I examined that newspaper cutting frequently and that I failed entirely to grasp the significance of the reverse side. We all have a mental blind spot. That was mine.
Clare March was missing. That was my case; to find her, or to help to find her, that was my task at first. Later it grew more complicated. I had not thought Mr. Patton would violate our agreement about working in the dark and my confidence was justified. At the first corner he hailed the machine and got in.
“Fine work!” he said. “You're a dependable person, Miss Adams.”
“I'm rather a scared person.”
“Nonsense! And don't take yourself or this affair too seriously. Do your durnedest—'Angels could no more.'”
“Is it something stolen?”
“A small matter of a daughter. It's a queer thing, Miss Adams. I'll tell you about it.” He leaned out and asked the driver to go slowly. “Time us to get there at eight-thirty. Now, Miss Adams, here are the facts: You are going to the home of George March, the banker—you know the name probably—Mrs. March is your patient. She's not ill; she's hysterical and frightened—that's all. It's not a hard case.”
“It's the hardest sort of a case.”
“Well, you like work,” he replied cheerfully. “The family has been away for four months. Until a month ago Clare, the daughter, was with them. One month ago, on the third of September, Clare, who is an only child, twenty years old, left the country place in Maine for home. She traveled alone, leaving her maid in the country. The city house had not been closed; a housekeeper and two maids were there through the summer. She was expected at the house for breakfast on the morning of the fourth. She did not arrive—or, rather, she did not go home. She reached the city safely. We have traced her into the railroad station and out again—and that has been about all. She's not been seen since.”
“Perhaps she has eloped.”
“Possibly; but the man she is engaged to is in the city, almost frantic. Besides, there is more than I have told you. We know that she took a taxicab at the station; that before she got in she met and accepted a small parcel from a blond young man, rather shabbily dressed; and that they seemed to be having an argument, though a quiet one. We have found the taxicab she took, and a shop where she bought a couple of books—a Browning and a recent novel. From the bookshop she went to a department store. There she dismissed the taxicab. We have traced her in the store to the department where she bought a pair of blankets. a large parcel, but she took it with her. From that time we have lost her absolutely.”
“The third of September, and this is the fifth of October—almost five weeks!”
“Tell her that I Believe There is Another Man”
“Exactly,” he said dryly. “That's why I've sent for you. We have tried all the usual things; we've combed the city fine—and we are just where we started. If we could make a noise about it we should have some chance. Set the general public looking—that's the way to get information. You get a million clews worth nothing, and out of the lot one that helps. But you know these people. They won't listen to any publicity. They have only one argument—if she is dead publicity won't help her, and if she is alive it will hurt her.”
I was conscious of a vague disappointment. In the last half-hour I had keyed myself to the highest pitch. I was seeing red, really nothing but the bloodiest sort of crime would have come up to my expectation. Certainly nothing less than a murder had been in my thoughts
“I don't see how I can help,” I said, a bit resentfully. “You've had five weeks and got nowhere,” I continued; “and if you are going to ask me to put myself in her place, and try to imagine what could have happened, and to follow her mental processes, myself, I can't do it. I can't imagine myself idle and rich and twenty. I can't imagine taking a taxicab when a street car would do, or having a lady's maid”
Mr. Patton laid a hand on my arm.
“Did you ever hear Lincoln's story of the little Mississippi steamboat with a whistle so large that every time they blew it the boat stopped? No? Well, no matter. I don't want you to put yourself in her place; I want a little inside help—that's all. There's a curious story behind this case, Miss Adams. Get in there and get their confidence. They won't talk to me—too much family pride. Get the mother to talk. That's part of her trouble—family pride and bottling up her emotions. I can't get close to any of them. After five weeks Mrs. March still calls me Mr. Peyton.” He smiled ruefully.
“She bought blankets! That's curious, isn't it?”
“It's almost ridiculous under the circumstances. You may not be able to imagine yourself twenty, and so on, but you can certainly get your wits to work on those blankets. If she had bought a revolver now—but blankets!”
“She was engaged, you say? Were there any other men who—who liked her?”
“Half a dozen, I believe—all accounted for.”
“Any neurasthenic tendency?”
“In the half-dozen? I dare say yes, when she announced her engagement; in the girl—I think not. She was temperamental rather. The picture I get of her is of an attractive and indulged young woman, engaged to a man she seems to have cared about. And yet, with all the gods smiling, she disappears.”
I sat thoughtful. The cab was moving along beside the park now. We were almost there.
“She may be dead,” I said at last.
“She may indeed.”
He rapped on the window, and when the driver stopped he got out, with a quick handshake.
“Send for That Fool Interne and We'll Have a Steak for Breakfast”
“Now go to it!” he said. “Go out for a breath of air between seven and eight each evening, and—keep your eyes open. I have a hunch that you'll get this thing—beginner's luck.”
The March house was an old-fashioned, rather stately residence. Instead of going upstairs to the drawing room there was a reception room opening into the lower hall. Behind that was a music room and, still farther back, a library.
At the very rear of the lower floor was a dining room, quite the largest in the house, extending as did the entire width of the building. In this room was a large bay window extending out into a city garden, and in the bay, shut off by tall plants, was a small table, where the family breakfasted and even, when alone, sometimes dined.
A long flight of stairs, uncarpeted, led to the second floor. On that first evening I got merely the vaguest outlines of the house, of course. It was silent, immaculate, rather heavy. I had a glimpse of two men in the library, talking—one middle-aged, rather stout; the other much younger. Over everything hung the hush of suspense—that hush which accompanies birth and death and great trouble.
A parlor maid admitted me and led me upstairs to my room.
“Mr. March would like to see you in the library when you have taken off your things.”
I changed quickly into my uniform—all white, of course, with rubber-soled white shoes. With the familiar garb I was myself again. I could face anything, do anything. Clothes are queer things.
Mr. Mare turned when he he heard me at the door and rose.
“I am Mis Adams, the nurse,” I said. “Do you wish to see me?”
“Will you come in, Miss Adams? This Mr. Plummer. Have you seen Mrs. March?”
“No; I thought it best to see you first.”
“I am glad of that. Perhaps I ought to tell you—we are in great trouble, Miss Adams. Our—our only daughter had gone away, disappeared. It is over a month since” He stopped.
“That is very terrible,” I said. I liked his face.
“We wish absolute secrecy—of course I need hardly say that; but you understand Mrs. March is highly nervous. I—I hope you can quiet her. What we want you to do is to be as cheerful and optimistic as possible. You know what I mean. She will talk to you about Clare—about Miss March. Reassure her if you can. Be certain that Miss March will be found soon.”
“I will do what I can. Has the doctor left any orders?”
“Very few. She is to be soothed. There's a bromide, I believe. Her maid has the instructions.”
There was nothing for me in that glimpse of the two men most nearly concerned—two gentlemen unaffectedly distressed and under great strain in a quiet, well-ordered house. It looked like poor material, from Mr. Patton's point of view. Mr. March followed me into the hall. “If you need anything, let me know, Miss Adams. Or will you speak to the servants?”
“I can tell better later on. If I am going to be up tonight—and I think I'd better be, this first night anyhow—I should like a lunch; something cold on a tray.”
“Do you wish it upstairs?” I hesitated. There was a picture in a silver frame on the library table—I thought it probably one of the missing girl. I wanted to see it.
“It will be a change to come down.”
“Very well,” he said. “There will be a supper left in the dining room. There is a small table there in the bay window. It will be more comfortable—not quite so lonely.”
“Thank you,” I replied and started upstairs. Opposite the library door I glanced in. I had been right about the picture. Mr. Plummer had picked it up and was looking at it. I felt certain that he was the fiancé—a manly-looking fellow; not very tall, but solid and dependable-looking, with a good head and earnest eyes.
My patient was in bed—a pretty little woman in a frilly bed jacket, with a pink light beside her. She held out a nervous hand.
“How big and strong and competent you look!” she said, and quite unexpectedly fell to crying. I had a difficult evening. She was entirely unstrung—must have me sit down by the bed at once and listen to the trouble, as she called it—and as it was, indeed.
“She wouldn't go away and leave me like this!” she said more than once. “If you only knew her, Miss Adams—so full of character, so determined, so gifted! And beautiful—haven't you seen her picture in the newspapers?”
I evaded that—I never read society news.
“And happy, too?” I said. “She must have been very happy.”
I saw a change in Mrs. March's rather childish face.
“We thought she was, of course; but lately—I've remembered so many things while I've been lying here. She was very strange all summer—moody sometimes, and again so gay that she frightened me.”
“Perhaps she was gay when Mr. Plummer was there and moody when he was away.”
“But he wasn't there at all. That's another thing, Miss Adams. She would not let me ask Walter up. She—she really kept him away all summer. I don't believe Mr. March told the detective that—he forgot so many things.”
She wanted me to telephone this piece of information to the police at once, but I persuaded her to wait. I gave her an alcohol rub and a cup of hot milk; and, finding them without effect, I took a massage vibrator I found on her dressing table and ran it up and down her spine. She finally relaxed with the treatment and even asked me to use it on her face.
“I'm an old woman with all the worry,” she said apologetically. “It will tone up the facial muscles, won't it? And would you mind putting some cold cream on first?”
I did not mind; and after a time she fell asleep. I was glad of a respite. In my two hours over the bed I had accumulated many ill-assorted bits of information. I wanted time to catalogue them in my mind. I have the notes I made that night on one of my records:
“C. has been missing since September third; today is October fifth—a total of thirty-two days.
“Was moody all summer—would not see Mr. Plummer, but wrote him daily.
“She had been engaged once before, to a Wilson Page, but broke engagement. Cause of trouble not known. C. suffered much at the time. Note—Have Mr. P. look up Wilson Page.
“C. usually undemonstrative, but rather affected when she said goodbye to her mother. Was she planning something, unknown to them?
“But if she was planning an elopement, why did she make careful appointments with her dressmakers and milliners? Is she more crafty than they think, or was her decision made unexpectedly?
“She forgot her jewel case, which she always carried with her. An inventory reveals only a part of her jewelry. She wore, when she left, only the sapphire ring Mr. Plummer gave her. She had less than a hundred dollars in cash.
“Wilson Page is dark. The man who met her in the station was thin and fair.
“Her picture is on her mother's dressing table—an attractive face: dark-eyed, full of character, but rather wistful. A thoughtful face. Is she living or dead? Did she go voluntarily or was she lured away? If she went voluntarily—why?”
I looked round the handsome room where my patient slept calmly, her petulant features relaxed and peaceful. I glanced across the hall to Miss Clare's room, where a light burned every evening; where an ivory dressing set, with carved monogram, was spread on the toilet table; where every luxury a young woman could demand had been gathered together for her use. And I recalled the look in the face of the man downstairs as he gazed at her picture—the tragedy in the eyes of her father. How had she gone, and why? How and why?
III
MY first night at the March house was marked by a disagreeable and rather mystifying occurrence. I had got my patient quiet and asleep and had had a telephone talk with the doctor by eleven.
“There is very little to do,” the doctor said. “I'll come in in the morning. Just keep her comfortable and cheerful. She needs someone to talk to. Let her talk all she wants.”
I darkened the room where she lay and placed a screen in the hall outside the door, with a comfortable chair beside it and a shaded lamp. I had made up my mind to sit up for that one night at least. I had had nervous cases before; and I knew that sometime between then and morning she would waken, and that the sight of someone alert and watchful would be a comfort.
At midnight I took off my cap, eased my hair and loosened my uniform collar. With the neck of my dress turned in, I was fairly comfortable. Also I was hungry. I had eaten almost no dinner. It was too early to eat. I got a book from the library and read.
At two o'clock Mrs. March was still sleeping quietly and I decided to get my night supper, I slipped as noiselessly as possible down the stairs . An English hall lamp was turned on in the lower hall near the music-room door, and far back in the dining room a candlelight in a wall bracket showed me where to go.
My progress in my rubber-soled shoes was practically noiseless. I made my way along the hall back to the dining room. The room was very large, as I have said before, paneled in oak, with a heavy fireplace and a tapestry in an overmantel above. At one corner, beside the deep bay window, were French doors, hung with casement cloths, evidently leading out into the garden.
I was deliberate in all my movements, I remember. I went to the fireplace and stood looking up at the overmantel; I found the switch that would throw the light over my small table and thus give me a more cheerful place to eat. The bay, walled off by palms and flowering oleanders in tubs, was dark and rather uninviting at that hour. I made no particular attempt to be silent, but I dare say it is a result of my training that I make no unnecessary noise.
One of the older nurses said to me once:
“When you go out on private duty, you'll have to fuss about your night supper generally. An orange and a glass of milk is about what most cooks set out. Keep them up to the mark. Insist on cold meat or sandwiches; and if there's an alcohol coffee pot, have them leave it ready. Coffee is your best friend at three in the morning, and your next best is a shawl to lay over your knees.”
I was thinking of that and rather smiling when I entered the recess and sat down at the small table. I was absolutely calm and beginning to be mightily interested in my case. The tray was ready; and there was a small alcohol coffee pot ready, with a box of matches beside it.
I lit the lamp and inspected the tray. The cook seemed to have been trained by some predecessor. There was chicken, a bit of salad, brown bread and fruit. I ate slowly while my coffee cooked—ate with an ear toward the staircase for a sound from my patient above, and with an occasional eye toward the garden below. A late moon showed a brick terrace under the windows, and three steps lower was a formal design of flower-bed and path, with a small cement circle, evidently a pool in summer. Somehow the garden looked uncanny—bushes became figures, moving about, waving arms in the breeze. I was a distinct object from outside as I sat in my nook; and, having eaten and waiting only for the coffee, I stood up and extinguished the light over my head.
It was then, still standing, that I saw the hand. It was coming down the staircase rail, moving slowly and grasping tight. It was near the music room when I saw it first and therefore going away from me, but descending. There was something terribly stealthy about it. It must have been that quality in it which made me shrink back behind an oleander. Surely there was nothing unusual in people being about in a house where there was both illness and trouble, and yet
At the foot of the stairs the hand, still on the rail, hesitated, disappeared. A moment later there rounded the newel post a little old woman dressed in black. She limped slightly, but for all that she came swiftly. Every detail is stamped on my mind. I can see her now, bent forward, something that was probably jet on her old-fashioned bonnet catching the faint light as she came. She had on a quaint loose black wrap—a dolman, I think they used to call them—and hanging to her arm a shabby leather handbag.
Stealthy as her movements were, they were extremely natural. Just inside the door she stopped, took off her spectacles and put them in a case, which she put in her bag, and then extracted from it another pair, which she put on. The bag was a quaint one, fastened with two straps and steel buckles. The buckles were troublesome and she was in a hurry. More than once she turned and looked back.
I waited for her to see me. It was an old servant, of course, come to tell me I was wanted upstairs. I was so sure of it that I bent down and put out my alcohol lamp. When I straightened up, she had passed the bay and was at the French door leading to the garden. She opened the door, went out, closed it noiselessly behind her, and was gone. I tried to see her in the garden, but if she went that way, she was lost in the shadows.
Even then I was rather amused than puzzled. I went over to the door and tried it. There was a lock on it. Unless she had a key, she had locked herself out.
I drank my coffee and went upstairs. My patient was still asleep. From Mr. March's room came heavy, deep breathing, telling that he was forgetting his anxieties, for a time at least. But my book—the book I had left on my chair in the hall—was gone!
It seemed rather absurd. I thought I might have taken it with me; and I searched the dining room, without result. It was not to be found. I thought of the little old housekeeper, or whatever she was—but that was ridiculous. Besides, she had carried no book. She had a black leather handbag over her arm. She might, of course, have put the book—what idiocy was I thinking! The book must be somewhere about. Every one has laid things down and had them disappear. Sometimes they turn up and sometimes they do not—the fourth dimension, perhaps.
I met Mr. Patton the next evening as he had arranged. He fell into step beside me.
“How's it going?” he asked.
“I'm learning to be a first-rate lady's maid,” I said, rather peevishly I am afraid. “I massage, manicure and give scalp treatments, and I've got a smirk from trying to look cheerful. The experiment is a failure, Mr. Patton. I'm not nursing, for there's no real illness; and I'm not helping you any. And the dreadful decorum of the house gets me. If I were twenty, I'd run away, too. Nothing ever gets dusty or out of place. No door ever slams. When I raise a window for air, I put in a gauze-filled frame to keep the dirt out!”
“Has the mother talked at all?”
“All the time—about herself. I've learned a little, of course. The girl has been moody—would not let Mr. Plummer, her fiancé, visit her this summer. Seemed to be in trouble; but confided in no one. The family relationships seem to have been all right. They adore her.”
“Have you seen many of the people who come and go about the house—intimate friends and relatives?”
“Nearly all, I think.”
“Any one who could answer the description of the man she met at the station—the light-haired chap?”
I considered.
“None, I am sure.”
“She and her mother got along well?”
“I think so. They were always together.”
“Is there any trace of another love affair?”
“Yes, she was engaged once before. To a Mr. Wilson Page. She broke the engagement herself.”
That interested him. He said he would look up Mr. Page.
“And don't be impatient,” he advised me. We had made our circuit of the block and were in sight of the house again. “These are long cases sometimes—but the longer the time the more sure I am that the girl is alive. Murder will out; it's self-limiting, like a case of measles. But take a girl who wants to stay hidden, and if she's intelligent, there's hardly any way to locate her. How many servants in the house?”
“Seven, I believe.”
“Keep an eye on them. If one of them is garrulous, let her talk. They know more of the family than any member of it.”
This brought to my mind the curious episode of the old woman, and I told him about it. He listened without interruption.
“When you say old, how old?”
“Seventy, I should say. She was stooped—and rather lame, but very active.”
“You are sure you saw her? You could not possibly have been dozing?”
“I was making coffee; I don't customarily do that in my sleep. I think it must have been the cook. She is the only servant I have not seen. And, as to dozing, does anybody dream a handbag with straps and buckles?”
He put a hand on my arm impressively.
“It may interest you to know,” he said, “that the cook is a young woman; I interviewed her myself. There is no person such as you describe in the house!”
“But why—at three in the morning”
“Exactly,” he said dryly. “Why? That's for us to find out.”
He got a careful description of the old woman from me, and an account of her exit by the French door from the dining room into the garden. He was excited, for him, and rather triumphant.
“Now was it a mistake to put you there?” he demanded. “Of course not! And the next thing is to find the old lady. You can help there. Tell your story to the family. Set them to wondering and guessing. They may place her for us at once. In this business, try direct methods whenever you can. They save time.”
He left me at the corner and I went on alone. Just before I reached the house, a man ran down the steps and went away rapidly. The parlor maid was just closing the door.
“Did that gentleman inquire for me, Mimi?” I asked. “I am expecting my brother.” I was learning!
“No, miss. He asked for Miss March.” Her eyes were wide and excited. “When I said she was not here, he ran down the steps in a hurry.”
“My brother,” I persisted, “is short and dark. Perhaps you”
“He asked for Miss March,” she repeated. “And, anyhow, he was thin and lightish.” She turned to see whether any of the family might overhear. “He's been here before, Miss,” she confided, lowering her voice—“twice, in the last week. He—he isn't one of Miss March's friends—I know that. And tonight he left this.”
She showed me her tray on the hall table. There was a note on it addressed: “Miss Clare March. Important.”
“I'll take this up to Mrs. March, Mimi,” I said. “And if he comes again, ask him in and call me.”
“Call you, miss?”
“Call me,” I said quietly. “When he asks for Miss March, merely ask him to come in. Then call me. Mrs. March has requested me to see him.”
I took the letter and went upstairs, but I did not give it to Mrs. March at once. That night, while I made my coffee, I steamed open the envelope and read the contents. It was on pale lavender paper and was as follows:
“I implore you to see me as soon as posible. Come to the old place. I am up against it for sure. Don't let this go any longer! It's life or death with me!”
I made a careful copy of the note, even to the misspelled word, and sealed it again. Mr. March was out that night—a girl had been found in a hospital. He was always following some such forlorn hope, returning each time a little sadder, a little grayer.
Mrs. March was unusually exacting the next morning. She wakened at dawn with a cry and I went to her. I was sleeping on the couch at the foot of the bed. She was sitting up, terrified, in the gray dawn. She wailed that Clare needed her, was calling for her. She had heard her distinctly.
“Surely you do not believe in dreams!” I said sternly.
“Not in dreams, perhaps,” she replied. She was still pallid. “But don't you think, Miss Adams, that people hear things in sleep that waking ears do not catch? You know what I mean. It's subconscious, or something.”
“It's subnormal,” I commented, and brought her back to earth with a cup of hot tea.
That morning I gave Mr. March the note. We were at breakfast and Mr. Plummer had dropped in, as he usually did, on his way to his downtown office. Mr. March read it without comment and passed it to the other man. He was younger, less poised. I saw him change color.
“Who brought this?” he demanded.
“Mimi got it. It was left by a thin, fair-haired young man.”
They called Mimi, but she knew no more than I had told them, except for one fact: She said the man had tried to push by her into the house and that he had insisted that Miss March was at home. They sent the girl out. They seemed to have no scruple about talking before me.
“It is mystifying enough,” Mr. Plummer said. “Patton ought to see it. But it doesn't help much. Whoever wrote that did not know that Clare was—not at home.”
“Thin and fair-haired!” repeated Mr. March. “That's what Patton said, Walter—about the man at the railroad station, isn't it?”
“Patton is a fool!”
I gathered that the idea of the fair-haired man was extremely distasteful to him. He was almost surly.
We were sitting at the small breakfast table in the bay. I thought it a good time to speak about the little old woman. Any lingering doubt I may have had as to her right to be where I had seen her was dispelled by their manner. They were abstracted at first, then interested, then astounded.
“But, my dear young woman,” Mr. March exclaimed, “why did you not rouse the house? And why did you wait for thirty hours before telling us?”
“It would be necessary for you to have seen her in order to understand. It never occurred to me that she was not a member of the household—she was so respectable. Only now, when I have seen all the servants, I begin to realize—she went out through that door.”
“Is anything missing?” Mr. Plummer asked. “Mrs. March's jewels?”
“Still in the safe-deposit vault. We have had no heart to think of them.”
Nevertheless a search of the house was made that day. Nothing was missing. Under Mrs. March's flushed directions, as she sat up in bed, I went round with great bunches of keys, verifying lists, looking up laces, locating furs. Such jewelry as she had about was safe.
As for the old lady with the jet on her bonnet, with the dolman and the buckled handbag—none of the family had ever known such a person. She answered no description, fitted into no place. Family and servants alike disclaimed her.
Life has a curious way of picking up threads and dropping them. The romantic young man with the blond hair, the little old lady with the limp, came and went; and for two weeks there was nothing more. Clare March remained missing. Mrs. March spoke of her in the past tense. Mr. Plummer grew thinner and took to coming into Mrs. March's room and sitting for long stretches without speech, his hands hanging listlessly between his knees.
I had my first real talk with Mr. Plummer late one afternoon while the invalid dozed in her chair. He was a good-looking man, something over thirty and already growing gray. He had sat for some time, apparently busy with his own thoughts—in reality watching me as I put away Mrs. March's various pretty trifles—she was always littered—ribbon bows, a nail file, a magazine, letters.
“Do you never make an unnecessary movement?” he asked at last.
“Frequently, I'm afraid.”
“Must you put all those things away? Or will you sit down and talk for five minutes?”
I sat down near him. Mrs. March was now sound asleep.
“Do you want me to sit down and talk, or to sit down and listen?”
“To listen, and to answer some questions. Just a minute.” He went quietly to the dressing table, returning with the photograph of Clare that stood there.
“You nurses know a lot about people,” he said. “That's your business. You're a psychologist even if you don't realize it. I've watched you with Mrs. March. Now what do you read in that picture?”
“It is a lovely face,” I replied, doing my best, but feeling utterly inadequate. Womanlike, I dare say I was anxious to say the thing he wanted to hear. “A—a pleasant face, I should say, but with character and temperament.”
“What about the eyes?”
“They are well apart—that's a good sign, though cows are that way, aren't they! They are very direct and honest, too. Really, Mr. Plummer”
“Here is a later picture, taken this summer. Now, what do you see?”
I was puzzled and uncomfortable.
“She looks older, more serious.”
“Look at the eyes.”
Well, there was a difference. I could not say where it lay. The effect was curious. In the early picture she was looking at the camera, and the eyes were limpid and clear. In the picture he had taken from his pocketbook she gazed into the camera also; but there was a sort of elusiveness about the eyes. It gave me a strange feeling of indirectness, evasion—I hardly know what. They might have been the eyes of a woman who had lived hard and suffered. And yet this girl of twenty had hardly lived as yet. It was almost a tragic face. I have seen the same drooping lines in eye cases, where vision is faulty and seeing an effort. What was this, then—astigmatism or evasion?
“You see it, don't you? Miss Adams, she has had some real trouble to make a change of that sort. I—I thought she was happy in our engagement; but as I look back, there are things”
Mrs. March stirred and opened her eyes.
“I hate to waken,” she said querulously. “It is only when I am asleep that I can forget, and even then I dream. Go out now, please, Walter; Miss Adams is going to use the vibrator.”
That afternoon at five o'clock Mr. Patton called me on the telephone for the first time.
“I think we have something,” he said. “When you go out for your walk tonight, dress for the street. There will be a taxicab at the corner and I shall be inside.”
“At what time?”
“Seven thirty.”
“Will an hour be enough?”
“Ask for two hours.”
Mrs. March was rather peevish about my going out.
“I dare say you need air,” she said, “but you could get it by opening a window. And what about my hot milk?”
“I'll ask Hortense to sit with you and she will heat the milk. I do not need air, of course. But I do need some exercise.”
She let me go grudgingly. Mr. Patton would not tell me where we were going, but insisted on talking of indifferent things. As it turned out, we were headed for a police station; and at last he voiced his errand.
“We are going to show you a lot of handbags,” he said. “A woman pickpocket was brought in here yesterday with four in a pocket under a skirt. I was looking over them today and it occurred to me that you might recognize one of them.”
“Mine! I hope you send her up for a year!”
“Not yours. And do not jump to conclusions; it is fatal in this business.”
I knew the bag at once when I saw it. Surely no other bag of that size in the city had two straps fastened with steel buckles. The handles of two of the other bags had been cut off, but the heavy leather handle of this one was entire.
“This is the one you mean, of course. Yes, it looks like the one the old lady carried; but there may be others. It is foreign, isn't it?”
“What was she doing that night when you noticed the bag?”
“She opened it and put in a pair of spectacles in a case.”
He unfastened the bag and emptied onto a table a tin spectacle case, as quaint as the bag; two keys, one for a patent lock, the other an ordinary house key. Last of all he drew from a pocket inside the bag a soiled and creased lavender envelope, stamped and ready for mailing. It was addressed in pencil to Mrs. March and had been opened. Mr. Patton drew out the communication inside and watched me as I read it. It was hardly decipherable and was written on a piece of wrapping paper:
“Am all right. Clare.”
I stared at it.
“Interesting, isn't it?” commented Mr. Patton. “Did she write it or didn't she? If she's all right, why isn't she home? Why do all our little communications arrive in lavender envelopes? Who's the old lady? What was she doing in the house that night? What's the answer?”
“That could be the key to the garden door,” I said dully.
IV
THE doctor made a late call that night and dismissed Mrs. March as a patient.
“I'll drop in now and then to learn what the news is,” he said as he prepared to leave. “You don't need me professionally. Just keep cheerful. It will all come out right.”
I followed him into the hall. It seemed to me that if anyone knew the inside history I had failed to secure, it was he. And up to that time I had failed with him.
“I hope you will stay on, Miss Adams. I am leaving her in your hands—remember, no drugs so long as she is normal; at any symptoms of nervousness again, start them early.”
“It's a trying case,” I said slowly. “It takes it out of me, doctor. She asks me for theories, and—of course I didn't know the girl or her life—I cannot give her what she wants.”
He hesitated. We were in the lower hall by that time.
“Just what does she want?”
“Encouragement.”
“That Clare is living, of course. Well, tell her this the next time she is down. It is true enough. Tell her Clare was unhappy in her engagement and that I believe there is another man; that she has eloped with him; and that her message to the family has miscarried.”
“Wilson Page?”
He eyed me. For the first time it occurred to me that he suspected my business in the house and that he was giving me information that ethically he would have refused.
“No; a blond fellow, rather thin. I have seen her meeting him in the park, and once I believe she met him in my reception room.”
He seemed to regret this information the moment I had it and left immediately.
That night, after I had rubbed Mrs. March with cocoanut oil, used the vibrator, given her hot milk and finally read her to sleep, I slipped into my room and sat down by the window. The autumn garden lay beneath, with no moon to bring out its geometrical desolation. And there, elbows on the sill, the chill air blowing about me, I tried to piece together the scraps I held—the little old lady; the blond man and his frantic note; the letter in the buckled bag. And again I recalled the conversation Mr. Patton and I had had in the taxicab on our way back that evening.
“She's alive,” he had said; “and she is in the city—if that note is hers, and I think it is. I'll show it to the father and the other chap in the morning. Then she is in hiding. Why?”
I lay down on a couch at the foot of Mrs. March's bed, but did not get to sleep, for some reason. The slightest movement of my patient found me wide-eyed and alert. Small sounds were exaggerated. A regular footstep that seemed to ascend the stairs for hours turned out to be a drip from a bathroom tap. The slow chiming of the hall clock set me crazy.
At two o'clock I got up and went downstairs. In the waitress's pantry, off the dining room, there were beef cubes. It seemed to me that if I drank a cup of bouillon I might sleep. As usual the light was burning in the lower hall. The dining room was dark—I no longer required a night supper—and the little table in the bay window was bare. A street light beyond the garden showed the window and the longer rectangle of the garden door. I was not nervous.
I made my way through the unlighted dining room to the pantry, a small room, painted white, with a butler's slide to the basement kitchen, and a small white glass and silver refrigerator built into the wall, where the waitress kept the dining room butter and cream. The electric light was out of order there; I pressed the switch, but there was no answering flood of light. I had matches with me for the alcohol lamp, however, and found my bouillon cubes easily. Thus I was still in darkness when I opened the swinging door into the dining room.
Some one was trying the lock of the garden door! I do not mind saying I was terrified. The door was glass. To cross the room to the lighted hall would throw my whole figure into relief. I shrank back, breathing with difficulty, into my corner. Beyond the thin casement cloth of the door I could see a moving shadow.
The lock did not give. It seemed to me, all at once, that I knew the silhouette—that here again was the little old lady, but now without her key. My heart ceased pounding; I was able to think, to calculate. I wondered whether she would break the glass. I planned to let her get in if she could and then to cut off her retreat by advancing on her from behind. I was very calm by that time—rather exalted, I dare say, at my own bravery. I put the packet of beef cubes into my pocket in order to have both hands free.
I do not know just when I realized that it was not the little old lady—I believe it was after one of the panes had been broken and had fallen with a soft crash onto the rug inside. The figure straightened; it was much taller than I had expected. I recall that my heart almost stopped and then raced on at a mad pace; I saw what I knew was a hand put through the opening; I heard the lock turn and the cautious opening of the door. The intruder was in the room with me.
Panic possessed me then. I turned wildly and threw myself headlong against the swinging pantry door. It was madness, of course. There was no exit from the little room, no way to fasten the door. I was in a cul-de-sac and in the black dark. I believe I opened a drawer and got a cake knife; at least, eons after, I found myself clutching one. I do not remember how I got it.
The swinging door remained undisturbed. When I could hear—above the pounding in my ears—there was no sound anywhere except the hall clock's slow chiming.
Many things I have never recalled clearly about that hideous night. I do not know, for instance, how long I stood at bay in the pantry; or how my courage rose from my knees, which ceased trembling, to my spinal cord, to my pulse, which went down from about a hundred and eighty, thin and stringy, to what I judged was almost normal, still irregular, but stronger. When my courage reached my brain, which was in perhaps fifteen minutes, though I would have sworn it was daylight by that time and I had stood there most of the night, I put my ear against the door and listened. There was no sound.
The instinct of my training asserted itself. Whatever was happening, my patient must not be alone. I must get up to the sick-room. In a few moments it was an obsession. I must get back. My sense of duty was stronger than my terror.
I made the break at last, opening the door an inch or so. The room was quiet. With infinite caution I pushed the door farther open. I could see the room, solidly handsome, rather heavy, empty! I made my first few steps of progress with deliberate slowness. I knew that if I ran, panic would follow at my heels. I dared not look over my shoulder. Even the lighted hall brought small comfort, with the dark rooms opening off it, sheltering I knew not what; but I reached the foot of the stairs in safety. There I stopped.
A woman, dressed in rags, lay huddled on the bottom steps in a faint. She lay face down. Even when I had turned her over and had recognized the features of the photographs in the house, I was still incredulous. Nevertheless it was true. Bruised and torn, clad in rags, gaunt to the point of emaciation, Clare March had come home again.
It was the end of one mystery—the beginning of another.
TO BE CONCLUDED