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THE PROFESSOR'S MYSTERY
[Illustration: No good ever comes of half understandings]
THE PROFESSOR'S
MYSTERY
BY
WELLS HASTINGS
AND
BRIAN HOOKER
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
HANSON BOOTH
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1911
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I IN WHICH THINGS ARE TURNED UPSIDE DOWN 1
II THE MEADOW OF ILLUSION 17
III AN ALARM IN THE NIGHT 26
IV AN INSULT IN THE MORNING 41
V BESIDE THE SUMMER SEA: AN INTERLUDE 51
VI A RETURN TO THE ORIGINAL THEME 65
VII SENTENCE OF BANISHMENT CONFIRMED WITH COSTS 77
VIII HOW WE MADE AN UNCONVENTIONAL JOURNEY TO TOWN 90
IX HOW WE ESCAPED FROM WHAT WE FOUND THERE 104
X AND HOW WE BROUGHT HOME A DIFFICULTY 116
XI EXPRESSIONS OF THE FAMILY AND IMPRESSIONS OF THE PRESS 127
XII AN AMATEUR MAN-HUNT WHEREIN MY OWN POSITION IS SOMEWHAT
ANXIOUS 143
XIII THE PRESENCE IN THE ROOM 161
XIV A DISAPPEARANCE AND AN ENCOUNTER 172
XV MENTAL RESERVATIONS 187
XVI MEAGER REVELATIONS 197
XVII THE BORDERLAND AND A NAME 212
XVIII DOCTOR REID REMOVES A SOURCE OF INFORMATION 223
XIX IN WHICH I CAN NOT BELIEVE HALF I HEAR 235
XX NOR UNDERSTAND ALL I SEE 247
XXI CONCERNING THE IDENTITY OF THE MAN WITH THE HIGH VOICE 258
XXII I LEARN WHAT I HAVE TO DO 271
XXIII I STAND BETWEEN TWO WORLDS 284
XXIV THE CONSULTATION OF AN EXPERT AND A LAYMAN 302
XXV FIGHTING WITH SHADOWS 317
XXVI AND REDISCOVERING REALITIES 332
THE PROFESSOR'S MYSTERY
CHAPTER I
IN WHICH THINGS ARE TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
"Has the two-forty-five for Boston gone yet?"
The train announcer looked at me a long time; then he shifted his plug
of tobacco to the other cheek and drawled:
"Naouw. Reported forty minutes late."
At this point I believe I swore. At least I have no recollection of not
doing so, and I should hardly have forgotten so eminent an act of virtue
under such difficult circumstances. It was not only that I had worked
myself into a heat for nothing. But the train could hardly fail of
losing yet more time on its way to Boston, and my chances of making the
steamer were about one in three. My trunk would go to Liverpool without
me, a prey to the inquisitive alien; and as for me I was at the mercy of
the steamship company. For a moment I wondered how I could possibly
have doubted my desire to go abroad that summer and to go on that boat
though the heavens fell. I thought insanely of automobiles and special
trains. Then came the reaction and I settled back comfortably hopeless
into the hands of fate. After all I did not care an improper fraction
whether I stayed or went: let the gods decide. Only I wished something
would happen. The shining rails reached away to lose themselves in a
haze of heat. Somewhere a switching engine was puffing like a tired dog.
Knots of listless humanity stood about under the dingy roof of the
platform; and the wind across the harbor brought a refreshing aroma of
tidal mud and dead clams. It occurred to me that my collar was rather
sticky on the inside.
I walked the platform fanning myself with my hat. I bought cigarettes,
magazines and a shine. I explored the station, scrutinizing faces and
searching vainly for matters of interest. I exhausted my resources in
filling up fifteen minutes, and the hand of the electric clock seemed as
tremulous with indecision as it had before been jerky with haste.
Nothing happened. Nothing would happen or could happen anywhere. Romance
was dead.
Feet scraped; a bell chattered; then breathing flame and smoke, and
with a shriek that would have put Saint George to utter rout, the down
express rumbled between me and the sky, and ground heavily to a
standstill. And there, framed in the wide Pullman window, was a face
that altered all the colors of the day, and sent me back among
sleigh-bells and holly. Not that I had known her well; but the week of
intimate gaiety at a Christmas house party had shown her so sweetly
merry, so well fashioned in heart and brain and body that the sight of
her renewed pleasant memories, like the reopening of a familiar book.
She was smiling now; not at me, but with the same humorously pensive
little smile that I remembered, that seemed to come wholly from within
and to summarize her outlook upon the world. Her dark brows were lifted
in cool and friendly interest as she glanced over the comfortless crowd;
and although I was now somewhat more at peace with the world, and no
longer hot nor hurried, she seemed to me to sit there in the window of
her sweltering car a thing aloof and apart, the embodiment of all
unruffled daintiness.
Her eyes found me and she nodded, smiling. I went forward eagerly. Here,
at least, in a stuffy and uninteresting world was somebody cool,
somebody amusing, somebody I knew. I picked up my bag and ran up the
steps of her car. As I came down the aisle she half rose and stretched
out a welcoming slim hand. I dropped into the chair beside her.
"Well, this is luck," I said. "But what are you doing here in the world
in July? You belong to Christmas in a setting of frosty white and green.
You're out of season now."
She laughed. "Surely I have as much right in July as you have, Mr.
Crosby. You are only a sort of yule-tide phantom yourself."
"Wasn't it a jolly week?" I asked.
Miss Tabor's smile answered me. Then turning half away with a face grown
suddenly and strangely bleak: "I think it was the best Christmas of my
life," she said mechanically. And then with a sudden return to sunshine:
"I suppose I see the professor starting on his learned pilgrimage. Is it
Europe this summer, or the great libraries of America?"
She had twitted me before upon my lack of scholarly bearing which, as I
had always explained, was but a mask to unsuspected profundity.
"Well,"--I began, deliberately groping for a decision among the tangled
fates of the afternoon, my doubtful steamer and my grudging plans, "to
tell you the truth, Miss Tabor--"
She touched my arm and pointed out of the window. "Look," she said, "you
haven't nearly time enough for that now. Do hurry--you mustn't take
chances."
The platform was slipping by faster and faster, and with it sobriety and
common sense and the wisdom of the beaten path. On the other hand lay
the comedy of the present and that flouting of one's own arrangements
which is the last word of freedom. I glanced down at her ticket, where
it lay face upward on the window-sill.
"To tell you the truth, Miss Tabor," I finished, "I am on my way to
Stamford," and I settled back comfortably into my seat.
Miss Tabor regarded me tolerantly, with the air of a collector examining
a doubtful specimen: one eyebrow a trifle raised, and an adorable twist
at the corners of her mouth. As for me, I tried to look innocently
unconcerned. It may be possible to do this; but no one is ever conscious
of success at the time.
"I'm going there myself," she said suddenly. "Isn't this a
coincidence?"
"Easily that. Let me amend the word and call it a dispensation. But
appearances are against you. You ought to be going to a lawn party--in a
dog-cart."
"I wonder where you ought to be going," she mused. "Probably to the
British museum to dig up a lot of dead authors that everybody ought to
know about and nobody reads."
This was altogether too near the truth. "I didn't know you lived in
Stamford," I said. "You appeared last Christmas in a character of the
daughter of Gotham. Wasn't there an ancestor of yours who went to sea in
a bowl?"
Her smile faded as if a light had gone out in her. After a pause she
answered rather wearily, "We've only been in Stamford a few months. We
had always lived in town before."
We looked out of the window for a few moments in silence, while I
formulated a hasty hypothesis of financial reverses which had driven the
family from their city home, and registered a resolution to avoid the
uncomfortable subject. Still, I reflected, the lower shore of the Sound
is not precisely the resort of impoverished pride. Had I touched upon
some personal sorrow of her own? She was not in mourning. Yet as she
lay back in the green chair, one hand listless in her lap, the other
twisting at the slender chain that ran about her neck and lost itself in
the bosom of her gown, the fringe of her eyelid clear against the soft
shadows of her profile, I imagined in her something of the enchanted
princess bound by evil spells in some dark castle of despair. And
immediately, with a surge of absurd valor, I saw myself striding, sword
in hand, across the drawbridge to blow the brazen horn and do battle
with the enchanter. The next moment she routed my imagination by
returning lightly to the subject.
"It's a lovely place. I'm out of doors the whole time, and I'm so well I
get positively bored trying to work off energy. I can't get tired enough
to sit still and improve my uneducated mind. Ever so many nice people,
too. By the way, whom do you know there?"
I was on the defensive again. "Why--I don't know anybody exactly
there--but there are some friends of mine down at one of those
beach-places in the neighborhood--the Ainslies. Bob was in my class."
She resumed the air of the connoisseur. "Why, I know them. I'm going to
visit Mrs. Ainslie myself over the week-end. Do they know you're
coming?"
"I'm not going to them," I said desperately. "That is, I may while I'm
near by, but I haven't any definite plans. For once in my life I'm not
going to have any definite plans, but just start out and see what
happens to me. For six months I've been telling things I care about to a
lot of kids that aren't old enough to care about anything; and now I
want adventures. I went down to the station to take the first train that
came along, go wherever it took me and let things happen."
"You might have gone to some romantic place," she suggested. "Three
months would hardly be time enough for the Far East, but you might have
tried Russia or the Mediterranean."
"That's just the point," I returned. "Romance and adventure don't depend
on time; they only depend on people. If you're the kind of person things
happen to you can have adventures on Fifth Avenue. If you're not, you
might walk through all the Arabian Nights and only feel bored and
uncomfortable. It all depends upon turning out of your way to pick up
surprises. You're walking in the wood and you see something that looks
like a root peeping out from between the rocks. Well, if you're the
right kind of person you'll catch hold of it and pull. It may be only a
root; or it may be the tail of a dragon. And in that case you ought to
thank Heaven for excitement, even if you're scared to death."
By this time I almost believed in my own explanation. But Miss Tabor did
not seem particularly impressed.
She put on the voice and manner of a child of ten. "You must be awfully
brave to like being afraid of things," she lisped; then with a sudden
change of tone, "Mr. Crosby, suppose--only for the sake of
argument--that you're making this up as you go along and that you did
know perfectly well where you were going, where do you think you would
have gone?"
Then I gave up and explained, "I was going to Europe to study," I said,
"for no better reason than that I had nothing more interesting to do.
Then my train was late and I should have missed my steamer anyway
and--and then you came along and I thought I might just as well make the
most of the situation. Now I can go down and tell the Ainslies they want
to see me and all will be well."
After some meditating she said, "Are you as irresponsible as that about
everything?"
"I don't see where all the irresponsibility comes in," I protested. "It
isn't a sacred and solemn duty to follow out one's own plans, especially
when they were only made to fill up the want of anything more worth
while, and have fallen through already. I didn't care about going to
Europe in the first place; then I couldn't--at least not at once; then I
found something else that I did care about doing."
"Men," said Miss Tabor, "usually find a logical reason for what they do
on impulse, without any reason at all."
"And the proof that women always act reasonably," I retorted, "is that
they never give you the reason."
Instead of taking that for the flippancy it was, she thought about it
for some minutes; or else it reminded her of something.
"Besides," I went on, "this is an adventure, as far as it goes; a little
one, if you like, but still with all the earmarks of romance. It was
unexpected, and it fits into itself perfectly--all the parts of the
scene match like a picture-puzzle--and it happened through a mixture of
chance and the taking of chances. It's just that snatching at casual
excitement that makes things happen to people."
"Don't things enough happen to people without their seeking them out?"
she asked.
"Not to most people; and not nowadays, if they ever did. Do you remember
Humpty Dumpty's objection to Alice's face, that it was just like other
faces--two eyes above, nose in the middle, mouth under? Well, that's the
only objection I have to life; days and doings are too regular, too much
according to schedule. Why is a train less romantic than a stage-coach?
Because it runs on time and on a track; it can't do anything but be
late. But the stage-coach dallies along through the countryside, with
inns and highwaymen, and pretty girls driving geese to market, and all
the chances of the open road. The horse of the knight-errant was better
still, and for the same reason."
"I don't think anything very much has ever happened to you," she said
slowly.
"Well," said I, "I'm not pretending to be Ulysses; and you've reminded
me of my tender age so often that I can hardly forget it in your
presence. But I have had a few exciting moments, and I want more. I
don't care whether they are pleasant or not, so long as I come safe out
of them somehow. They'll pay for themselves with the gold of memory."
"That's just what I mean," she returned. "You talk about things as if
the only question of importance were whether they are exciting. One
looks at books that way, and pictures, and things that are not real. A
moment ago, you put highwaymen in the same class with inns and
goose-girls. Do you suppose any one that was actually held up and robbed
of his fortune would think of the robber as merely a pleasant thrill?"
"I'd rather be robbed by a highwayman than by a railroad, anyway. At the
worst, I'd have had a run for my money."
She went on without smiling: "And even trains run off the track
sometimes. Do you think you would enjoy the memory of a railroad
accident--even if you weren't hurt yourself?"
"Perhaps not. But there's another disadvantage of the train. It's so
regular and mechanical that if anything does go wrong there is an ugly
smash. It's the same way with modern people. Most of us live such an
ordinary habitual life that if we get thrown off the track we're likely
to break up altogether."
I had struck the wrong note again. The light went out in her face, as a
cloud-shadow darkens a sunny field, and she looked away without
answering. Not to make my mistake worse by taking notice of it, I said,
"After all, what should we do if things always went smoothly and there
weren't any adventures?"
She said quietly, "We might be normal and wholesome and comfortable,"
and continued looking out of the window and toying with her chain, while
I cursed myself for a tactless clodhopper without the sense to avoid a
danger sign. Then I found myself wondering what this trouble could be
that by the mere touch of an accidental allusion could strike the joy
out of a creature so naturally radiant. Whatever it was, it had come
upon her within the last six months, or the chances of our Christmas
week had been singularly free from reminders of it. Could there be
possibly any connection between it and that chain with its hidden
pendant? Or was it only by accident that her hand went to it in her
moments of brooding? I seemed to have noticed the chain before, and her
habit of playing with it in idleness, but I could not be sure.
She roused herself presently, and the talk went on, though with an
undercurrent of discomfort. For my part, I was still repenting my
clumsiness; and she, I suppose, felt annoyed at having shown so palpably
an emotion which she had not intended for my eyes. So that, in spite of
regret for the approaching end of the adventure, I was hardly sorry when
our arrival at Stamford supplemented speech with action.
"Are you expecting any one to meet you?" I asked, as the platform
emptied and left us standing alone.
"No, they didn't know what train I was coming on. But there's the
trolley now. And it's your car, too, that is, if you're still going to
the Ainslies'."
A short open car, with an air of putting its wheels close together in
order to buck, squeaked around the curve and took us aboard. When we
were well under way a short, heavy man came around the corner of the
station on an unsteady run and pursued a little distance with
inarticulate shoutings and violent gestures. We were too far off to see
him very distinctly, but I thought he had somehow a foreign look; and
unless my ears were at fault he was cursing us in Italian. We left him
standing in the middle of the road, shaking his fist and mopping his
face with a red handkerchief.
There was only one other passenger on the car, a fattish woman with
blonde hair, who sat at the farther end; but for all that, it could
hardly be called either a private or a comfortable conveyance. There was
a badly flattened wheel forward, which banged and jolted abominably; and
the motorman, instead of running slowly on that account, seemed
possessed of a speed mania induced by artificial happiness. He bumped
over crossings and rocked around curves at an alarming rate,
accompanying the performance with occasional snatches of song; while the
conductor, balanced on the back platform, read a newspaper and chewed a
toothpick without paying the slightest attention. Where we ran for a
long stretch along the highway, an automobile came along and proceeded
to have fun with us after the manner of joyous automobiles. It ran
languidly beside us until we were at our best speed; then with a
derisive toot, buzzed half a mile ahead. Then it waited for us to come
up, and repeated the evolution, "barking" at us with the engine. The
motorman's songs turned to muttered anathemas. And as we turned from the
roadside along a low embankment of sand across the meadows we held to a
rate of speed that was really exciting.
"Are we making up time?" I asked. "Or is it only the festive motorman?"
Miss Tabor shook her head. "I never went so fast before. The man must
be--"
Just then we struck a curve. I had one instant's sickening sense of
danger as the front wheels bumped and thudded over the ties. Miss Tabor
caught at my arm with a smothered cry. Then the car lurched drunkenly to
the edge of the embankment and slowly rolled over.