EXPERT CONSIDERATION
I was afraid after they’d gone that old Mr. Smith would begin asking
embarrassing questions, but his curiosity, if he had any, was under
perfect control.
He launched as a topic of conversation the modern young person, and at
just that moment I was grateful to him, although it is a subject which,
as far as I am concerned, has been thoroughly talked out. Ordinarily
I find myself desperately bored with the solemn and terrified
generalities one hears. I like the young people of to-day, but as for
the modern young person, considered as something essentially new, a
product of post-war conditions or a judgment upon our sins, I simply
don’t believe the little monster exists.
I didn’t, however, express myself in this destructive manner to Mr.
Smith. I coddled the topic along. Anything was welcome that would keep
us away from the tangled skein of fact that Judy seemed involved in.
“Manners change, I admit,” I said, “but manners are by definition
conventional conduct, conduct which has no significance one way or
the other. Think of this wedding. Judy’s going to be married in the
garden, and her bridesmaids, from what I hear of the costumes, are
going to look more or less like a chorus in a light opera. It will be
an amazingly pretty picture, no doubt. But Victoria in her day would
as soon have thought of being married in a bathing suit. Victoria
would have been horrified at the idea of sleeping the night before
her wedding under the same roof with the man she was going to marry.
Victoria was supposed to be shy, so she acted as if she were. But that
doesn’t mean that she was any finer or cleaner-minded than Judy is. No,
the younger generation....”
My argument was interrupted.
“Here comes a sample of it now,” said Mr. Smith, who was gazing down
the path. “Heavens, that’s not Punch, is it?”
It was though, and he was a good sight; hatless as always, and clad in
khaki shirt and trousers which went well with his brown skin. He was
carrying his little target rifle.
There was no doubt that he was coming to make me a visit, for he waved
gaily toward the summer-house as he came along. He and I both got a
surprise, though, out of his meeting with Mr. Smith; Punch because
he hadn’t had the least idea he’d find him with me, and I over the
discovery that they were old friends. They greeted each other with
enthusiasm.
“I hadn’t realized you were so well acquainted,” said I.
“Oh, yes,” Punch told me; “we’re very old friends. Mr. Smith was the
nicest man in Paris that winter we lived there. He used to take me
around and show me things.
“My, but I’m glad you’re here,” he went on, turning back to the old
gentleman. “It comes out just right. But why aren’t you over at our
house?”
“Your mother asked me to take him in,” I explained. “She thought you’d
be too wild for him over there; too much row, late hours and so on.”
“Ho!” said Punch derisively to his very old friend, “there couldn’t be
too much row for you, could there?”
I thought I saw a troubled look coming into the boy’s eyes, so I
changed the subject.
“You out shooting rabbits?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I haven’t shot anything yet.”
“After bigger game perhaps,” Mr. Smith suggested. “Lions, or
hippopotamuses.”
“No,” said Punch, “I’m not hunting _anything_, really.”
“You aren’t _being_ hunted, are you?” Mr. Smith wanted to know.
I thought the boy flushed a little.
“No, I guess not,” he said.
“I suppose,” the old man suggested, “if they’re keeping such late hours
over at The Oaks, the mornings must be pretty slow.”
“Yes,” Punch admitted, “they are, rather. Oh, everybody’s up but
nobody’s doing anything. Nobody but Bruce Applebury. He went off to
town on the morning train, with Judy.”
I don’t know what happened to my face at that, but I can answer for Mr.
Smith’s. There wasn’t a flicker of an eyelid to betray anything.
Punch was looking at him just as I was, and he went on, “He’s the man
who’s going to marry Judy, you know. He was afraid he wouldn’t get
the sort of wedding ring she liked, so he took her in to-day to pick
it out.” He sighed and added, “I’ll be glad when this business is all
over.”
“How’s your grandmother?” Mr. Smith asked.
“Oh, she’s better this morning, now that she knows the necklace has
come back,” the boy said. “Of course it was an awful shock to her last
night when she found it had been stolen.”
I’d been holding my breath waiting for this to happen, from the moment
I had seen how friendly was the relation between the old gentleman and
the boy, but I hadn’t expected it to come out with a plop like that.
I felt rather embarrassed over my own reticence, but Mr. Smith didn’t
even indirectly reproach me with it.
“I didn’t know the necklace had been stolen,” he said. “I’ve only just
got here, you see. Tell me about it.”
“There’s Donovan,” I pointed out. “He’s coming up to tell us lunch
is ready, I expect. You’ll stay, won’t you, Punch? And then you can
tell Mr. Smith the whole story of how the necklace was stolen.--And
perhaps,” I added, “you’ll tell me, too, the details of how it came
back.”
For I didn’t see any point, now that the cat had got out, in trying to
make a mystery of the empty bag.
I was relieved, though, that Punch’s story, which he told with
admirable lucidity at lunch time, was considerably abridged where it
touched Judy. Of course at that time I knew nothing of the letter that
had been pushed through the narrow neck of the Chinese vase, nor of her
nocturnal excursion for its recovery. Punch’s account of his adventures
that night left this episode out.
He told us how, when he couldn’t sleep in his room on the top floor,
he’d come down to the davenport in the hall below; how he’d seen a man
in pajamas going up-stairs; how the mystery had completely baffled him
at the time; how Miss Digby had told him of the fright she’d had, and
how, between sleep and waking he’d figured out what had happened.
“Good work, Punch,” Mr. Smith said, when the tale was told. “I’m proud
of you.” His tone, though, wasn’t as enthusiastic as his words. He’d
spoken with only half his mind, as if out of some deep preoccupation.
“Well, that’s more than anybody else is,” the boy answered. “You see
they all think--mother and Miss Digby and Uncle Alec--that I took the
necklace myself, for a joke or something, and then brought it back in
the middle of the night. It’s what anybody would think if they didn’t
believe the story of the man in the pajamas. And it _is_ sort of a
funny story. Only, you see, I _saw_ him.”
“Yes,” Mr. Smith said thoughtfully, “it is a funny story, sure enough.”
The boy looked from one of us to the other, possibly to satisfy himself
that we ourselves believed it. He must have done so, for presently he
went on.
“It gets even funnier than that. Because, you see, as long as they
thought I’d done it, I wanted to know whose pajamas I’d seen, and
who it probably was who wore them. So after they’d all gone down to
breakfast, I went around and saw all the pajamas there were--all that
had been slept in, I mean--and I couldn’t find the pair I’d seen last
night. They weren’t on the top floor, so I went down to the second
floor, and they weren’t there either.”
“Are you sure you saw them all?” Mr. Smith asked.
“I counted,” said Punch. “I found a pair for everybody.”
“Servants too?” Mr. Smith asked.
“No,” said Punch. “But you see there isn’t any third floor to the
servants’ wing. The door to it opens into the second-floor hall where
the davenport is. If it had been one of the servants he wouldn’t have
gone up-stairs.”
“How well did you see the pajamas when the man was wearing them?” I
asked.
“Pretty well,” Punch said. “I saw the legs of them awfully well,
because they walked right through the moonlight and it was about as
bright as day. They were plain pajamas, gray, or some color like that,
and one of the legs was torn, a little square tear as if it had been
caught on a nail. Well, the only person in the house whose pajamas are
plain gray is Uncle Alec, and they weren’t torn. Besides he’s about
twice as big as the man I saw. Everybody else’s pajamas are fancy;
because of the wedding, I suppose. Anyhow, it’s a puzzle.”
“Well, the pearls are brought back, that’s one thing,” Mr. Smith
observed. “To your grandmother’s room, you say? Where are they now?”
Punch’s eye gleamed with a sudden pleasure. “That’s supposed to be a
great secret,” he said.
“Don’t tell any secrets,” Mr. Smith warned him quickly.
“Well, it isn’t a secret from you--from either of you,” Punch
explained. “And Donovan isn’t around, is he, nor any one else who’d
hear?”
“No,” I said, “you won’t be overheard. But how do you know we’re not to
be kept out of the secret?”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “and then you’ll see. It’s a secret from
mother, all right, and Judy and Uncle Alec, but not from you.
“It was when I was going around on the second floor, looking at the
pajamas, that grandmother heard me and called me into her room. She
said I’d been right about the safe not being a safe place for the
necklace, so she was going to give it to me to hide. Only I was to
promise not to tell any one in the house that she’d done it, nor where
the necklace was, of course. But you see, you aren’t in the house, so
the secret doesn’t include you.”
I won’t pretend to have been satisfied that this bit of casuistry was
strong enough to bear, but my curiosity was much wider awake, just
then, than my conscience. I made no protest, and neither did Mr. Smith.
The boy went on:
“Mother came in just after Gran had given it to me and asked her where
it was, and Gran told her it was in the safe. She’d had me put the box
back in the safe and lock the safe up, but of course the box was empty.
Mother asked her when she was going to give the necklace to Judy, and
Gran said she would when she got ready. She always gets kind of cross
when you ask her a lot of questions. So mother saw it was no good
asking more and went away. And there I had it all the time.”
“Where did you hide it?” Mr. Smith asked.
Punch was thoroughly enjoying himself now, there could be no doubt of
that. The unjust accusations of his mother and Uncle Alec and old Digs
he could afford to ignore in the face of this magnificent compensation.
“Why, I thought of lots of places,” he said, “that would probably have
been all right, but I didn’t like them somehow, and then I thought
about _The Purloined Letter_--you know, that story of Poe’s. How the
safest hiding-place for anything is the last place where any one
would think of looking for it. So I just wrapped the necklace up in a
handkerchief and stuck it in my pocket.”
“Good lord!” I cried. “Is that where it is now?”
“Surely it is,” old Mr. Smith remarked calmly. “Hence the rifle.”
Punch flushed a little. “Of course it’s only a twenty-two,” he said,
“but it’s got a long cartridge in it.”
At first blush the idea of entrusting a famous jewel like the Corbin
necklace to the trousers pocket of a thirteen-year-old boy armed with
a little target rifle seemed wild enough, and when one added that
an inexplicable attempt had just been made to steal it, an attempt
that might be repeated at any hour, day or night, it became perfectly
frantic. I didn’t care much about the necklace, but I cared immensely
about the boy.
He was looking eagerly into my face, and must have read the
consternation that was printed plain upon it. “Can you think of a safer
place?” he asked. “Of course I suppose I could give it to you to keep
for me.”
“Heaven forbid!” I cried. “But there must be some other....”
I let the sentence fade out unfinished, and lapsed into a thoughtful
silence. I couldn’t think of anything better, and that was the truth.
“It’s years since I’ve seen that string of pearls,” Mr. Smith said
presently. “Let’s have a look at them, Punch.”
The boy plunged a hand deep into his pocket and pulled out a wadded and
rather grimy handkerchief which he spread open on the table. There the
thing was, all right. I stared at it fascinated.
It was beautiful, of course, that perfectly graded series of shining
globes, but I was moved by the sight of it to reflect how ridiculously
artificial our values are. That thing would buy leisure for a man’s
lifetime. Comparatively few men from the cradle to the grave are
able by their labors to earn as much as would be needed to buy it.
Numberless men alive in the world to-day would commit any crime up to
murder to possess it. It seemed absurd when one thought of it like that.
Possibly to carry out the illusion the thing wanted a better
background. Perhaps it suffered from the indignity of contact with a
small boy’s pocket handkerchief.
Old Mr. Smith took the thing in his fingers--unusually intelligent-looking
old fingers they were, as if habituated to handling pearls. Then I
glanced up at his face, and was struck by a conviction which for the
moment put the necklace clean out of my mind.
He had stuck a monocle into one eye. The gleam may have come merely
from the lens, but from wherever it came, there was so piercing a
brilliancy in his gaze that I almost shouted, “Old Eagle-Eye!” aloud.
I didn’t, of course. He went on studying the necklace, and Punch sat
gazing from his face to mine. Of course--of course! Why hadn’t I
identified him at once? He was the man Judy was to prevent, at all
costs, from getting a chance at something--the necklace, beyond a
doubt. That was why Victoria hadn’t wanted to keep him in the house.
Well, the best laid plans go wrong sometimes. Victoria had overdone it.
There sat old Eagle-Eye with the necklace in his hands.
What was he going to do with it? I’ll admit that in my confounded state
of mind I’d hardly have been surprised at anything. I didn’t really
expect him to perpetrate a robbery with violence then and there, but
I was vividly conscious, for a fleeting instant, that Punch’s little
rifle was leaning up in the corner of the room, far out of reach. It
only shows what an atmosphere of persistent mystery will do to the
ordinarily well-behaved mind.
Mr. Smith, however, remained calm, and when he had done examining
the necklace, folded it up again in Punch’s handkerchief, rather
negligently I thought, and handed it over to the boy.
“Put it back in your pocket, Punch,” he said. “I can’t think of a safer
place for it.--But now that you’ve gratified our curiosity,” he went
on, “I think you’d better stretch the promise you gave your grandmother
to include everybody, out of the house as well as in it. Who are in the
house, anyway? Do you know them all?”
“Oh, hardly any of them, if you mean do I _really_ know, not just
who they’re supposed to be. I don’t think mother does, even; not the
Applebury crowd.”
“And the Appleburys,” commented Mr. Smith, “don’t know Judy’s crowd any
better. It’s a perfect situation, in a way.”
We weren’t very talkative during the rest of the lunch. The thoughts of
old Eagle-Eye seemed to be running mostly on the man in pajamas.
“You said he wasn’t near as big as your Uncle Alec. Was he noticeably
small; smaller, say, than any of the men in the party?”
“No,” Punch said, “I don’t think he was. He just looked about ordinary.
Of course, I didn’t see him very well, except his legs, and I didn’t
look at him very hard. I just thought he was somebody going to the
bathroom, until he started up-stairs. I think he looked sort of stout
and clumsy, as if he filled his pajamas rather full.”
“Are you sure it _was_ a man. I know you didn’t think of it at the
time, but mayn’t it have been a woman? I believe they wear pajamas
sometimes. And in any sort of men’s clothes they’re likely to look
heavy.”
I could see that the idea attracted Punch. It seemed to offer a
loophole of escape from his mystery. But he was too honest a witness to
avail himself of it.
“No,” he said, “I don’t think it was. I don’t think a woman would have
walked along like that.”
“You’re probably right,” the old man agreed. “Most women would look
like women even if they had on a man’s pajamas. We’ll stick to the men
for the present. Stout and stocky, medium height; does that describe
anybody in the party?”
Punch laughed. “The only one it describes is Bruce Applebury himself,”
he said.
Mr. Smith didn’t laugh. “What are _his_ pajamas like?” he asked.
“Sort of tan color,” said Punch, “with red stripes.”
I spoke up in the interests of common sense. “Surely you couldn’t
suspect....”
“I’d suspect anybody,” the old man asserted, “when we’re concerned
with a thing like that necklace. Oh, not suspect if you dislike the
word--but consider as possibly involved. I admit my point of view is
rather specialized.”
“He played tennis and swam practically from the time he came to the
house until he dressed for dinner,” I pointed out, “and the loss of the
necklace was discovered before he’d finished dressing.”
“Probably, then, he didn’t take it,” Mr. Smith conceded. “But he may
have brought it back, and that’s just as important a part of the
mystery.”
Without waiting to allow time for that to sink in, he turned to Punch.
“When is he--when are he and Judy expected back from town?” he asked.
“There’s a train about three. I think they’ll surely come on that,
because they’re going to rehearse the wedding this afternoon. You’ll
come over for that, won’t you?”
Eagle-Eye took this invitation with a twinkle. “Old men are supposed
to take naps after lunch,” he said. “Still, I may turn up. If I do,
suppose, since we’re already in mystery up to the neck, that you greet
me as if we were meeting for the first time since Paris. Can we get
away with it? Did anybody know you were coming here to lunch?”
“No,” said Punch. “I just sort of disappeared. I suppose I’d better
be going back now, though, or they may begin wondering where I am. I
_could_ eat another lunch, of course.”
We both laughed over that as we bade him farewell. But we turned
pretty serious as we watched him walk away with his little rifle.
“Do you think he’s safe going around with a hundred-thousand-dollar
necklace in his pocket?” I asked.
“Yes, I think so,” Mr. Smith answered reflectively. “For one thing, he
hasn’t got it in his pocket.”
I must have gaped at him like a goggle-eyed fish. My mind once more had
gone to pieces. Had the old gentleman done a sleight of hand trick when
he returned that handkerchief?
“Oh, he’s got just what he brought over here with him,” he added.
“Undoubtedly the same thing his grandmother gave him this morning to
hide for her. It’s not the necklace. It’s a very fair imitation of it,
however.”
“You’re perfectly sure of that, I suppose?” I asked weakly.
He nodded.
“You’d better go back to your couch where you’ll be comfortable,” he
suggested. “We’ve got some thinking to do.”
I agreed, and rang for Donovan. When he’d made me comfortable and gone
away, Mr. Smith pulled up an easy chair for himself and lighted a cigar.
“I know that necklace intimately,” he began. “I sold it to Punch’s
grandfather in Paris, ’way back in the days of the Second Empire. Lord,
what a while ago! A man shouldn’t be allowed to live as long as that.
Eighteen hundred seventy it must have been, or thereabouts.
“I’m a jeweler by profession, and I was managing director over there
for Paulding and Revere. I’ve seen the necklace a number of times
since. Mrs. Corbin always gave me a look at it whenever she came to
Paris. So I can say with certainty that the thing Punch has in his
pocket is not merely a necklace of imitation pearls; it’s an imitation,
pearl for pearl, of that necklace. In fact, we can go a little further
than that, if you don’t mind my prosing a bit.”
“I don’t,” I assured him.
“Both the French and the Japanese make imitation pearls,” he went on.
“Serious imitations, I mean. Merely for purposes of wear, the French
pearls are better. Their luster’s more like the real thing. On a
pretty woman’s neck in a ballroom they wouldn’t be detected as not
the real thing. But the moment you pick them up, they give themselves
away. They’re much too light and much too translucent. Japanese pearls,
on the other hand, are the right weight, or very near it, and they
don’t betray themselves when you hold them against the light. But they
haven’t the luster, not even the best of them.
“Well, these are Japanese pearls. Whoever had the string made of them,
it’s fair to assume, wanted them for some other purpose than wearing to
parties. The French pearls would have been better for that, and cheaper
too. But they wouldn’t serve if they had to deceive some one who had
opportunities to handle them.”
“In other words they were made to deceive old Mrs. Corbin,” I broke in.
“Her eyesight has been failing for years.”
“That’s very likely a good guess,” he said mildly. “But let’s not begin
guessing just yet.
“She may have ordered the imitation made herself. She’s as likely to
have wanted to deceive Victoria, let us say, as Victoria is to have
wanted to deceive her. And with her poor vision she may have deceived
herself. The real string may have been knocking about, unregarded for
months, in some drawer of her dressing-table, while the imitation was
lying in the safe.
“All we know is that there are two strings, and that a person who
couldn’t see very well, either because his eyes were bad, or because
he was working in the dark, might easily mistake one for the other. We
know that the imitation string is now in Punch’s pocket. But where the
real string is we don’t know.”
“It’s reasonably probable, isn’t it,” I asked, “that the necklace
in Punch’s pocket is the same one that his grandmother showed him
Wednesday afternoon, when she told him she meant to give it to Judy for
a wedding present? It was taken from the safe, it was brought back, and
it was handed by his grandmother straight to Punch.”
“That’s as good a possibility as any,” said the old man. “The thief
takes it in a hurry and more or less in the dark, discovers at his
first good look at it that it’s an imitation, and brings it back. But
there are other hypotheses just as good.
“He may have seen a chance to take the real one at a time when he
hadn’t the imitation at hand to replace it with, and then brought the
imitation back in the hope that the loss hadn’t yet been discovered.
It wasn’t made public, I understand. Or some one may have borrowed the
real one and returned the imitation by mistake. Or one person may have
stolen the real one, and some one else, who later discovered the theft
and wished to shield the thief, may have brought back the imitation,
thinking he was making restitution. You see, it’s endless. The most
serious mistake we can make will be to begin thinking we know too much.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “One could easily do a cruel injustice to an
innocent person by jumping at conclusions.”
“That’s not just what I mean,” he said gently. “Perhaps I should have
said dangerous instead of serious. I’m more concerned over what may
happen in the next twenty-four hours than I am over what may have
happened--oh, any time within the last five years.”
He gave me half a moment of silence to digest that in.
“I’ll run the risk of speaking with the utmost plainness,” he then
went on. “I think I can guess how this thing looks to you. You believe
Victoria had that imitation string made for the purpose of imposing
upon her mother-in-law and getting possession of the real one. You
think she took alarm over Mrs. Corbin’s decision to give it to Judy,
because she thought that such a gift would lead to the discovery of the
substitution and that she’d be charged with it. You think that’s why
she didn’t want me stopping in the house.
“That’s all plausible enough. It may all be true. It would account,
after a fashion, for the disappearance of the imitation necklace from
the safe. She might have taken it herself; she might have persuaded
Judy to take it.
“But into that picture you can not fit the return of the necklace. You
can’t fit the man in pajamas, whom Punch saw. I have no intelligible
picture, yet, into which that man will fit. But the return, I tell
you frankly, seems to me to be sinister. It suggests strongly the
presence somewhere, as an active possibility, of the real necklace--not
stolen yet, but waiting to be. And accompanying that theft we may have
anything, up to murder. That’s why I say it’s dangerous to feel too
sure.”
With great deliberation, he extinguished his cigar in the ash tray and
rose to his full height.
“Invited or not,” he said, “I’m going to that house this afternoon. I
want to see the people in it. There aren’t a great many first-class
jewel thieves in the world, and I know the faces of a pretty fair
proportion of them. Of course people who aren’t jewel thieves sometimes
attempt to steal jewels--a covetous girl, a boy desperately in debt,
might make a frantic clutch, with no forethought, no preparation, and
of course, no possibility of ultimate success.
“If that’s the case here, I’m as helpless as any of you, for I can’t
read thoughts or intentions from people’s faces.
“But somehow to me the thing hasn’t quite that look. So I’m going
over to see whether I know any of Victoria’s guests better than
she does.--How about you? Will you come along? Can you manage in a
comfortable motor, if you’ve lots of room?”
I could manage it, all right, and my first impulse was to say I’d go.
Then I thought of something and changed my mind.
“I think I’ll stay at home this afternoon,” I told him, “and rest up
for that dinner.”