VI

I find that the solution of the Arthur Wells mystery--for we did solve

it--takes three divisions in my mind. Each one is a sitting, followed by

an investigation made by Sperry and myself.

But for some reason, after Miss Jeremy’s second sitting, I found that my

reasoning mind was stronger than my credulity. And as Sperry had at that

time determined to have nothing more to do with the business, I made

a resolution to abandon my investigations. Nor have I any reason to

believe that I would have altered my attitude toward the case, had it

not been that I saw in the morning paper on the Thursday following

the second seance, that Elinor Wells had closed her house, and gone to

Florida.

I tried to put the fact out of my mind that morning. After all, what

good would it do? No discovery of mine could bring Arthur Wells back

to his family, to his seat at the bridge table at the club, to his too

expensive cars and his unpaid bills. Or to his wife who was not grieving

for him.

On the other hand, I confess to an overwhelming desire to examine again

the ceiling of the dressing room and thus to check up one degree further

the accuracy of our revelations. After some debate, therefore, I called

up Sperry, but he flatly refused to go on any further.

“Miss Jeremy has been ill since Monday,” he said. “Mrs. Dane’s

rheumatism is worse, her companion is nervously upset, and your own wife

called me up an hour ago and says you are sleeping with a light, and she

thinks you ought to go away. The whole club is shot to pieces.”

But, although I am a small and not a courageous man, the desire to

examine the Wells house clung to me tenaciously. Suppose there were

cartridges in his table drawer? Suppose I should find the second bullet

hole in the ceiling? I no longer deceived myself by any argument that

my interest was purely scientific. There is a point at which curiosity

becomes unbearable, when it becomes an obsession, like hunger. I had

reached that point.

Nevertheless, I found it hard to plan the necessary deception to my

wife. My habits have always been entirely orderly and regular. My

wildest dissipation was the Neighborhood Club. I could not recall an

evening away from home in years, except on business. Yet now I must have

a free evening, possibly an entire night.

In planning for this, I forgot my nervousness for a time. I decided

finally to tell my wife that an out-of-town client wished to talk

business with me, and that day, at luncheon--I go home to luncheon--I

mentioned that such a client was in town.

“It is possible,” I said, as easily as I could, “that we may not get

through this afternoon. If things should run over into the evening, I’ll

telephone.”

She took it calmly enough, but later on, as I was taking an electric

flash from the drawer of the hall table and putting it in my overcoat

pocket, she came on me, and I thought she looked surprised.

During the afternoon I was beset with doubts and uneasiness. Suppose

she called up my office and found that the client I had named was not in

town? It is undoubtedly true that a tangled web we weave when first we

practise to deceive, for on my return to the office I was at once quite

certain that Mrs. Johnson would telephone and make the inquiry.

After some debate I called my secretary and told her to say, if such

a message came in, that Mr. Forbes was in town and that I had an

appointment with him. As a matter of fact, no such inquiry came in, but

as Miss Joyce, my secretary, knew that Mr. Forbes was in Europe, I was

conscious for some months afterwards that Miss Joyce’s eyes occasionally

rested on me in a speculative and suspicious manner.

Other things also increased my uneasiness as the day wore on. There was,

for instance, the matter of the back door to the Wells house. Nothing

was more unlikely than that the key would still be hanging there. I

must, therefore, get a key.

At three o’clock I sent the office-boy out for a back-door key. He

looked so surprised that I explained that we had lost our key, and that

I required an assortment of keys of all sizes.

“What sort of key?” he demanded, eyeing me, with his feet apart.

“Just an ordinary key,” I said. “Not a Yale key. Nothing fancy. Just

a plain back-door key.” At something after four my wife called up, in

great excitement. A boy and a man had been to the house and had fitted

an extra key to the back door, which had two excellent ones already. She

was quite hysterical, and had sent for the police, but the officer had

arrived after they had gone.

“They are burglars, of course!” she said. “Burglars often have boys with

them, to go through the pantry windows. I’m so nervous I could scream.”

I tried to tell her that if the door was unlocked there was no need to

use the pantry window, but she rang off quickly and, I thought, coldly.

Not, however, before she had said that my plan to spend the evening out

was evidently known in the underworld!

By going through my desk I found a number of keys, mostly trunk keys

and one the key to a dog-collar. But late in the afternoon I visited

a client of mine who is in the hardware business, and secured quite a

selection. One of them was a skeleton key. He persisted in regarding

the matter as a joke, and poked me between the shoulder-blades as I went

out.

“If you’re arrested with all that hardware on you,” he said, “you’ll be

held as a first-class burglar. You are equipped to open anything from a

can of tomatoes to the missionary box in church.”

But I felt that already, innocent as I was, I was leaving a trail of

suspicion behind me: Miss Joyce and the office boy, the dealer and my

wife. And I had not started yet.

I dined in a small chop-house where I occasionally lunch, and took a

large cup of strong black coffee. When I went out into the night again

I found that a heavy fog had settled down, and I began to feel again

something of the strange and disturbing quality of the day which had

ended in Arthur Wells’s death. Already a potential housebreaker, I

avoided policemen, and the very jingling of the keys in my pocket

sounded loud and incriminating to my ears.

The Wells house was dark. Even the arc-lamp in the street was shrouded

in fog. But the darkness, which added to my nervousness, added also to

my security.

I turned and felt my way cautiously to the rear of the house. Suddenly I

remembered the dog. But of course he was gone. As I cautiously ascended

the steps the dead leaves on the vines rattled, as at the light touch of

a hand, and I was tempted to turn and run.

I do not like deserted houses. Even in daylight they have a sinister

effect on me. They seem, in their empty spaces, to have held and

recorded all that has happened in the dusty past. The Wells house that

night, looming before me, silent and mysterious, seemed the embodiment

of all the deserted houses I had known. Its empty and unshuttered

windows were like blind eyes, gazing in, not out.

Nevertheless, now that the time had come a certain amount of courage

came with it. I am not ashamed to confess that a certain part of it came

from the anticipation of the Neighborhood Club’s plaudits. For Herbert

to have made such an investigation, or even Sperry, with his height and

his iron muscles, would not have surprised them. But I was aware that

while they expected intelligence and even humor, of a sort, from me,

they did not anticipate any particular bravery.

The flash was working, but rather feebly. I found the nail where the

door-key had formerly hung, but the key, as I had expected, was gone. I

was less than five minutes, I fancy, in finding a key from my collection

that would fit. The bolt slid back with a click, and the door opened.

It was still early in the evening, eight-thirty or thereabouts. I tried

to think of that; to remember that, only a few blocks away, some of my

friends were still dining, or making their way into theaters. But the

silence of the house came out to meet me on the threshold, and its

blackness enveloped me like a wave. It was unfortunate, too, that I

remembered just then that it was, or soon would be, the very hour of

young Wells’s death.

Nevertheless, once inside the house, the door to the outside closed and

facing two alternatives, to go on with it or to cut and run, I found a

sort of desperate courage, clenched my teeth, and felt for the nearest

light switch.

The electric light had been cut off!

I should have expected it, but I had not. I remember standing in the

back hall and debating whether to go on or to get out. I was not only

in a highly nervous state, but I was also badly handicapped. However,

as the moments wore on and I stood there, with the quiet unbroken by no

mysterious sounds, I gained a certain confidence. After a short period

of readjustment, therefore, I felt my way to the library door, and into

the room. Once there, I used the flash to discover that the windows were

shuttered, and proceeded to take off my hat and coat, which I placed on

a chair near the door. It was at this time that I discovered that the

battery of my lamp was very weak, and finding a candle in a tall brass

stick on the mantelpiece, I lighted it.

Then I looked about. The house had evidently been hastily closed.

Some of the furniture was covered with sheets, while part of it stood

unprotected. The rug had been folded into the center of the room, and

covered with heavy brown papers, and I was extremely startled to hear

the papers rustling. A mouse, however, proved to be the source of the

sound, and I pulled myself together with a jerk.

It is to be remembered that I had left my hat and overcoat on a chair

near the door. There could be no mistake, as the chair was a light one,

and the weight of my overcoat threw it back against the wall.

Candle in hand, I stepped out into the hail, and was immediately met

by a crash which reverberated through the house. In my alarm my teeth

closed on the end of my tongue, with agonizing results, but the sound

died away, and I concluded that an upper window had been left open, and

that the rising wind had slammed a door. But my morale, as we say since

the war, had been shaken, and I recklessly lighted a second candle and

placed it on the table in the hall at the foot of the staircase, to

facilitate my exit in case I desired to make a hurried one.

Then I climbed slowly. The fog had apparently made its way into the

house, for when, halfway up, I turned and looked down, the candlelight

was hardly more than a spark, surrounded by a luminous aura.

I do not know exactly when I began to feel that I was not alone in

the house. It was, I think, when I was on a chair on top of a table in

Arthur’s room, with my candle upheld to the ceiling. It seemed to me

that something was moving stealthily in the room overhead. I stood

there, candle upheld, and every faculty I possessed seemed centered in

my ears. It was not a footstep. It was a soft and dragging movement. Had

I not been near the ceiling I should not have heard it. Indeed, a moment

later I was not certain that I had heard it.

My chair, on top of the table, was none too securely balanced. I had

found what I was looking for, a part of the plaster ornament broken

away, and replaced by a whitish substance, not plaster. I got out my

penknife and cut away the foreign matter, showing a small hole beneath,

a bullet-hole, if I knew anything about bullet-holes.

Then I heard the dragging movement above, and what with alarm and my

insecure position, I suddenly overbalanced, chair and all. My head

must have struck on the corner of the table, for I was dazed for a

few moments. The candle had gone out, of course. I felt for the chair,

righted it, and sat down. I was dizzy and I was frightened. I was afraid

to move, lest the dragging thing above come down and creep over me in

the darkness and smother me.

And sitting there, I remembered the very things I most wished to

forget--the black curtain behind Miss Jeremy, the things flung by unseen

hands into the room, the way my watch had slid over the table and fallen

to the floor.

Since that time I know there is a madness of courage, born of terror.

Nothing could be more intolerable than to sit there and wait. It is

the same insanity that drove men out of the trenches to the charge and

almost certain death, rather than to sit and wait for what might come.

In a way, I daresay I charged the upper floor of the house. Recalling

the situation from this safe lapse of time, I think that I was in a

condition close to frenzy. I know that it did not occur to me to leap

down the staircase and escape, and I believe now this was due to a

conviction that I was dealing with the supernatural, and that on no

account did I dare to turn my back on it. All children and some adults,

I am sure, have known this feeling.

Whatever drove me, I know that, candle in hand, and hardly sane, I ran

up the staircase, and into the room overhead. It was empty.

As suddenly as my sanity had gone, it returned to me. The sight of two

small beds, side by side, a tiny dressing-table, a row of toys on the

mantelpiece, was calming. Here was the children’s night nursery, a white

and placid room which could house nothing hideous.

I was humiliated and ashamed. I, Horace Johnson, a man of dignity and

reputation, even in a small way, a successful after-dinner speaker,

numbering fifty-odd years of logical living to my credit, had been

running half-maddened toward a mythical danger from which I had been

afraid to run away!