How much of Sperry’s proceeding with the carpet the governess had seen
I do not know. I glanced up and she was there, on the staircase to the
third floor, watching us. I did not know, then, whether she recognized
me or not, for the Wellses’ servants were as oblivious of the families
on the street as their employers. But she knew Sperry, and was ready
enough to talk to him.
“How is she now?” she asked.
“She is sleeping, Mademoiselle.”
“The children also.”
She came down the stairs, a lean young Frenchwoman in a dark dressing
gown, and Sperry suggested that she too should have an opiate.
She seized at the idea, but Sperry did not go down at once for his
professional bag.
“You were not here when it occurred, Mademoiselle?” he inquired.
“No, doctor. I had been out for a walk.” She clasped her hands. “When I
came back--”
“Was he still on the floor of the dressing-room when you came in?”
“But yes. Of course. She was alone. She could not lift him.”
“I see,” Sperry said thoughtfully. “No, I daresay she couldn’t. Was the
revolver on the floor also?”
“Yes, doctor. I myself picked it up.”
To Sperry she showed, I observed, a slight deference, but when she
glanced at me, as she did after each reply, I thought her expression
slightly altered. At the time this puzzled me, but it was explained when
Sperry started down the stairs.
“Monsieur is of the police?” she asked, with a Frenchwoman’s timid
respect for the constabulary.
I hesitated before I answered. I am a truthful man, and I hate
unnecessary lying. But I ask consideration of the circumstances. Neither
then nor at any time later was the solving of the Wells mystery the
prime motive behind the course I laid out and consistently followed. I
felt that we might be on the verge of some great psychic discovery, one
which would revolutionize human thought and to a certain extent human
action. And toward that end I was prepared to go to almost any length.
“I am making a few investigations,” I told her. “You say Mrs. Wells was
alone in the house, except for her husband?”
“The children.”
“Mr. Wells was shaving, I believe, when the--er--impulse overtook him?”
There was no doubt as to her surprise. “Shaving? I think not.”
“What sort of razor did he ordinarily use?”
“A safety razor always. At least I have never seen any others around.”
“There is a case of old-fashioned razors in the bathroom.”
She glanced toward the room and shrugged her shoulders. “Possibly he
used others. I have not seen any.”
“It was you, I suppose, who cleaned up afterwards.”
“Cleaned up?”
“You who washed up the stains.”
“Stains? Oh, no, monsieur. Nothing of the sort has yet been done.”
I felt that she was telling the truth, so far as she knew it, and I then
asked about the revolver.
“Do you know where Mr. Wells kept his revolver?”
“When I first came it was in the drawer of that table. I suggested that
it be placed beyond the children’s reach. I do not know where it was
put.”
“Do you recall how you left the front door when you went out? I mean,
was it locked?”
“No. The servants were out, and I knew there would be no one to admit
me. I left it unfastened.”
But it was evident that she had broken a rule of the house by doing so,
for she added: “I am afraid to use the servants’ entrance. It is dark
there.”
“The key is always hung on the nail when they are out?”
“Yes. If any one of them is out it is left there. There is only one key.
The family is out a great deal, and it saves bringing some one down from
the servants’ rooms at the top of the house.”
But I think my knowledge of the key bothered her, for some reason. And
as I read over my questions, certainly they indicated a suspicion that
the situation was less simple than it appeared. She shot a quick glance
at me.
“Did you examine the revolver when you picked it up?”
“I, monsieur? Non!” Then her fears, whatever they were, got the best of
her. “I know nothing but what I tell you. I was out. I can prove that
that is so. I went to a pharmacy; the clerk will remember. I will go
with you, monsieur, and he will tell you that I used the telephone
there.”
I daresay my business of cross-examination, of watching evidence helped
me to my next question.
“You went out to telephone when there is a telephone in the house?”
But here again, as once or twice before, a veil dropped between us.
She avoided my eyes. “There are things one does not want the family to
hear,” she muttered. Then, having determined on a course of action, she
followed it. “I am looking for another position. I do not like it here.
The children are spoiled. I only came for a month’s trial.”
“And the pharmacy?”
“Elliott’s, at the corner of State Avenue and McKee Street.”
I told her that it would not be necessary for her to go to the pharmacy,
and she muttered something about the children and went up the stairs.
When Sperry came back with the opiate she was nowhere in sight, and he
was considerably annoyed.
“She knows something,” I told him. “She is frightened.”
Sperry eyed me with a half frown.
“Now see here, Horace,” he said, “suppose we had come in here, without
the thought of that seance behind us? We’d have accepted the thing as it
appears to be, wouldn’t we? There may be a dozen explanations for that
sponge, and for the razor strop. What in heaven’s name has a razor strop
to do with it anyhow? One bullet was fired, and the revolver has one
empty chamber. It may not be the custom to stop shaving in order to
commit suicide, but that’s no argument that it can’t be done, and as to
the key--how do I know that my own back door key isn’t hung outside on a
nail sometimes?”
“We might look again for that hole in the ceiling.”
“I won’t do it. Miss Jeremy has read of something of that sort, or heard
of it, and stored it in her subconscious mind.”
But he glanced up at the ceiling nevertheless, and a moment later had
drawn up a chair and stepped onto it, and I did the same thing. We
presented, I imagine, rather a strange picture, and I know that the
presence of the rigid figure on the couch gave me a sort of ghoulish
feeling.
The house was an old one, and in the center of the high ceiling a
plaster ornament surrounded the chandelier. Our search gradually
centered on this ornament, but the chairs were low and our long-distance
examination revealed nothing. It was at that time, too, that we heard
some one in the lower hall, and we had only a moment to put our chairs
in place before the butler came in. He showed no surprise, but stood
looking at the body on the couch, his thin face working.
“I met the detectives outside, doctor,” he said. “It’s a terrible thing,
sir, a terrible thing.”
“I’d keep the other servants out of this room, Hawkins.”
“Yes, sir.” He went over to the sheet, lifted the edge slowly, and then
replaced it, and tip-toed to the door. “The others are not back yet.
I’ll admit them, and get them up quietly. How is Mrs. Wells?”
“Sleeping,” Sperry said briefly, and Hawkins went out.
I realize now that Sperry was--I am sure he will forgive this--in a
state of nerves that night. For example, he returned only an impatient
silence to my doubt as to whether Hawkins had really only just returned
and he quite missed something downstairs which I later proved to have
an important bearing on the case. This was when we were going out, and
after Hawkins had opened the front door for us. It had been freezing
hard, and Sperry, who has a bad ankle, looked about for a walking stick.
He found one, and I saw Hawkins take a swift step forward, and then
stop, with no expression whatever in his face.
“This will answer, Hawkins.”
“Yes, sir,” said Hawkins impassively.
And if I realize that Sperry was nervous that night, I also realize that
he was fighting a battle quite his own, and with its personal problems.
“She’s got to quit this sort of thing,” he said savagely and apropos of
nothing, as we walked along. “It’s hard on her, and besides--”
“Yes?”
“She couldn’t have learned about it,” he said, following his own trail
of thought. “My car brought her from her home to the house-door. She
was brought in to us at once. But don’t you see that if there are other
developments, to prove her statements she--well, she’s as innocent as a
child, but take Herbert, for instance. Do you suppose he’ll believe she
had no outside information?”
“But it was happening while we were shut in the drawing-room.”
“So Elinor claims. But if there was anything to hide, it would have
taken time. An hour or so, perhaps. You can see how Herbert would jump
on that.”
We went back, I remember, to speaking of the seance itself, and to the
safer subject of the physical phenomena. As I have said, we did not
then know of those experimenters who claim that the medium can evoke
so-called rods of energy, and that by its means the invisible “controls”
can perform their strange feats of levitation and the movement of solid
bodies. Sperry touched very lightly on the spirit side.
“At least it would mean activity,” he said. “The thought of an inert
eternity is not bearable.”
He was inclined, however, to believe that there were laws of which we
were still in ignorance, and that we might some day find and use the
fourth dimension. He seemed to be able to grasp it quite clearly. “The
cube of the cube, or hypercube,” he explained. “Or get it this way: a
cone passed apex-downward through a plane.”
“I know,” I said, “that it is perfectly simple. But somehow it just
sounds like words to me.”
“It’s perfectly clear, Horace,” he insisted. “But remember this when
you try to work it out; it is necessary to use motion as a translator of
time into space, or of space into time.”
“I don’t intend to work it out,” I said irritably. “But I mean to use
motion as a translator of the time, which is 1:30 in the morning, to
take me to a certain space, which is where I live.”
But as it happened, I did not go into my house when I reached it. I was
wide awake, and I perceived, on looking up at my wife’s windows, that
the lights were out. As it is her custom to wait up for me on those rare
occasions when I spend an evening away from home, I surmised that she
was comfortably asleep, and made my way to the pharmacy to which the
Wellses’ governess had referred.
The night-clerk was in the prescription-room behind the shop. He had
fixed himself comfortably on two chairs, with an old table-cover over
his knee and a half-empty bottle of sarsaparilla on a wooden box beside
him. He did not waken until I spoke to him.
“Sorry to rouse you, Jim,” I said.
He flung off the cover and jumped up, upsetting the bottle, which
trickled a stale stream to the floor. “Oh, that’s all right, Mr.
Johnson, I wasn’t asleep, anyhow.”
I let that go, and went at once to the object of our visit. Yes, he
remembered the governess, knew her, as a matter of fact. The Wellses’
bought a good many things there. Asked as to her telephoning, he thought
it was about nine o’clock, maybe earlier. But questioned as to what she
had telephoned about, he drew himself up.
“Oh, see here,” he said. “I can’t very well tell you that, can I? This
business has got ethics, all sorts of ethics.”
He enlarged on that. The secrets of the city, he maintained loftily,
were in the hands of the pharmacies. It was a trust that they kept.
“Every trouble from dope to drink, and then some,” he boasted.
When I told him that Arthur Wells was dead his jaw dropped, but there
was no more argument in him. He knew very well the number the governess
had called.
“She’s done it several times,” he said. “I’ll be frank with you. I got
curious after the third evening, and called it myself. You know the
trick. I found out it was the Ellingham, house, up State Street.”
“What was the nature of the conversations?”
“Oh, she was very careful. It’s an open phone and any one could hear
her. Once she said somebody was not to come. Another time she just said,
‘This is Suzanne Gautier. 9:30, please.’”
“And tonight?”
“That the family was going out--not to call.”
When I told him it was a case of suicide, his jaw dropped.
“Can you beat it?” he said. “I ask you, can you beat it? A fellow who
had everything!”
But he was philosophical, too.
“A lot of people get the bug once in a while,” he said. “They come
in here for a dose of sudden death, and it takes watching. You’d be
surprised the number of things that will do the trick if you take
enough. I don’t know. If things get to breaking wrong--”
His voice trailed off, and he kicked at the old table cover on the
floor.
“It’s a matter of the point of view,” he said more cheerfully. “And my
point of view just now is that this place is darned cold, and so’s the
street. You’d better have a little something to warm you up before you
go out, Mr. Johnson.”
I was chilled through, to tell the truth, and although I rarely drink
anything I went back with him and took an ounce or two of villainous
whiskey, poured out of a jug into a graduated glass. It is with deep
humiliation of spirit I record that a housemaid coming into my library
at seven o’clock the next morning, found me, in top hat and overcoat,
asleep on the library couch.
I had, however, removed my collar and tie, and my watch, carefully
wound, was on the smoking-stand beside me.
The death of Arthur Wells had taken place on Monday evening. Tuesday
brought nothing new. The coroner was apparently satisfied, and on
Wednesday the dead man’s body was cremated.
“Thus obliterating all evidence,” Sperry said, with what I felt was a
note of relief.
But I think the situation was bothering him, and that he hoped to
discount in advance the second sitting by Miss Jeremy, which Mrs.
Dane had already arranged for the following Monday, for on Wednesday
afternoon, following a conversation over the telephone, Sperry and I had
a private sitting with Miss Jeremy in Sperry’s private office. I took
my wife into our confidence and invited her to be present, but the
unfortunate coldness following the housemaid’s discovery of me asleep
in the library on the morning after the murder, was still noticeable and
she refused.
The sitting, however, was totally without value. There was difficulty
on the medium’s part in securing the trance condition, and she broke out
once rather petulantly, with the remark that we were interfering with
her in some way.
I noticed that Sperry had placed Arthur Wells’s stick unobtrusively on
his table, but we secured only rambling and non-pertinent replies to our
questions, and whether it was because I knew that outside it was broad
day, or because the Wells matter did not come up at all I found a total
lack of that sense of the unknown which made all the evening sittings so
grisly.
I am sure she knew we had wanted something, and that she had failed to
give it to us, for when she came out she was depressed and in a state of
lowered vitality.
“I’m afraid I’m not helping you,” she said. “I’m a little tired, I
think.”
She was tired. I felt suddenly very sorry for her. She was so pretty and
so young--only twenty-six or thereabouts--to be in the grip of forces
so relentless. Sperry sent her home in his car, and took to pacing the
floor of his office.
“I’m going to give it up, Horace,” he said. “Perhaps you are right. We
may be on the verge of some real discovery. But while I’m interested, so
interested that it interferes with my work, I’m frankly afraid to go on.
There are several reasons.”
I argued with him. There could be no question that if things were left
as they were, a number of people would go through life convinced that
Elinor Wells had murdered her husband. Look at the situation. She had
sent out all the servants and the governess, surely an unusual thing in
an establishment of that sort. And Miss Jeremy had been vindicated in
three points; some stains had certainly been washed up, we had found the
key where she had stated it to be, and Arthur had certainly been shaving
himself.
“In other words,” I argued, “we can’t stop, Sperry. You can’t stop. But
my idea would be that our investigations be purely scientific and not
criminal.”
“Also, in other words,” he said, “you think we will discover something,
so you suggest that we compound a felony and keep it to ourselves!”
“Exactly,” I said drily.
It is of course possible that my nerves were somewhat unstrung during
the days that followed. I wakened one night to a terrific thump which
shook my bed, and which seemed to be the result of some one having
struck the foot-board with a plank. Immediately following this came
a sharp knocking on the antique bed-warmer which hangs beside my
fireplace. When I had sufficiently recovered my self-control I turned on
my bedside lamp, but the room was empty.
Again I wakened with a feeling of intense cold. I was frozen with it,
and curiously enough it was an inner cold. It seemed to have nothing to
do with the surface of my body. I have no explanation to make of these
phenomena. Like the occurrences at the seance, they were, and that was
all.
But on Thursday night of that week my wife came into my bedroom, and
stated flatly that there were burglars in the house.
Now it has been my contention always that if a burglar gains entrance,
he should be allowed to take what he wants. Silver can be replaced,
but as I said to my wife then, Horace Johnson could not. But she had
recently acquired a tea set formerly belonging to her great-grandmother,
and apprehension regarding it made her, for the nonce, less solicitous
for me than usual.
“Either you go or I go,” she said. “Where’s your revolver?”
I got out of bed at that, and went down the stairs. But I must confess
that I felt, the moment darkness surrounded me, considerably less
trepidation concerning the possible burglar than I felt as to the
darkness itself. Mrs. Johnson had locked herself in my bedroom, and
there was something horrible in the black depths of the lower hall.
We are old-fashioned people, and have not yet adopted electric light.
I carried a box of matches, but at the foot of the stairs the one I had
lighted went out. I was terrified. I tried to light another match, but
there was a draft from somewhere, and it too was extinguished before I
had had time to glance about. I was immediately conscious of a sort of
soft movement around me, as of shadowy shapes that passed and repassed.
Once it seemed to me that a hand was laid on my shoulder and was not
lifted, but instead dissolved into the other shadows around. The sudden
striking of the clock on the stair landing completed my demoralization.
I turned and fled upstairs, pursued, to my agonized nerves, by ghostly
hands that came toward me from between the spindles of the stair-rail.
At dawn I went downstairs again, heartily ashamed of myself. I found
that a door to the basement had been left open, and that the soft
movement had probably been my overcoat, swaying in the draft.
Probably. I was not certain. Indeed, I was certain of nothing during
those strange days. I had built up for myself a universe upheld by
certain laws, of day and night, of food and sleep and movement, of three
dimensions of space. And now, it seemed to me, I had stood all my life
but on the threshold, and, for an hour or so, the door had opened.
Sperry had, I believe, told Herbert Robinson of what we had discovered,
but nothing had been said to the women. I knew through my wife that they
were wildly curious, and the night of the second seance Mrs. Dane drew
me aside and I saw that she suspected, without knowing, that we had been
endeavoring to check up our revelations with the facts.
“I want you to promise me one thing,” she said. “I’ll not bother you
now. But I’m an old woman, with not much more of life to be influenced
by any disclosures. When this thing is over, and you have come to
a conclusion--I’ll not put it that way: you may not come to a
conclusion--but when it is over, I want you to tell me the whole story.
Will you?”