Sight Unseen (Everybody's Magazine)/Part 2



HE death of Arthur Wells had taken place on a 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 cynically.

On Wednesday afternoon Sperry and I had a private sitting with Miss Jeremy. I had invited my wife 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.

Strangely enough, the sitting was without result.

Sperry had brought the stick he had taken from Arthur's room, but any high hopes we might have had were disappointed. The medium's replies to our questions were rambling and disconnected, and when she came out of the trance and looked about at our faces, she knew she had failed.

Neither then, nor at any subsequent time, had she any knowledge of the revelation she had made. She must have known, however, that we were making test sittings, for her first speech was one of regret.

“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 was concerned, too. Through all the sitting he had watched her pulse, and it seemed to me that day that I discerned in him two opposing desires—the ruthless method of the investigator, and some thing entirely different, a softness that was unlike him, a gentleness.

When we left, he was still in the grip of the opposing forces.

“Damnable business for a young woman like that,” he grumbled. “But she has extraordinary powers. Extraordinary. If we never get any further with the thing, what she has given us so far is tremendous.”

REMENDOUS, but unsettling. I found the routine of business that week stale and annoying. I was nervous, excited. On Thursday night of that week my wife was convinced that there were burglars in the house. It was then, for the first time in my life, that I felt the terrors of darkness.

Armed with my revolver, I put up a brave front, and went down-stairs. The silence was horrible. 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.

Complete darkness surrounded me, and there was a sort of soft movement, 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 up-stairs, pursued, to my agonized nerves, by ghostly hands that came toward me from between the spindles of the stair-rail.

At dawn I went down-stairs 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 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.

Although the next Monday was to have been the Robinsons', it was decided to hold it at Mrs. Dane's and to repeat the sitting.

Only Herbert Robinson knew exactly how closely Miss Jeremy had followed the death of Arthur Wells. Among the women speculation was rife, and that Mrs. Dane was suspicious was shown by a speech she made to me at dinner that night.

“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?”

I promised that I would. And it is for Mrs. Dane, primarily, that this narrative is being written.

Miss Jeremy did not come to dinner. She never ate before a séance. And although we tried to keep the conversational ball floating airily, there was not the usual effervescence of the Neighborhood Club dinners. One and all, we were waiting, we knew not for what.

I am sorry to record that there were no physical phenomena of any sort at this second séance. The room was arranged as it had been at the first sitting, except that a table and chair had been placed near the bracket-light for Mrs. Dane's secretary.

There was one other change. Sperry had brought the walking-stick he had taken from Arthur Wells's room, and after the medium was in trance he placed it on the table before her.

The first questions were disappointing in results. Asked about the stick, there was only silence. When, however, Sperry went back to the sitting of the week before, and referred to questions and answers at that time, the medium seemed uneasy. Her hand, held under mine, made an effort to free itself, and, released, touched the cane.

“It is very hard to find places for all the furniture,” she said.

“Do you know to whom that stick belongs?”

A silence. Then: “Yes.”

“Will you tell us what you know about it?”

“It is writing.”

“Writing?”

“It was writing, but the water washed it away.”

Then, instantly and with great rapidity, followed a wild torrent of words and incomplete sentences. It was hardly articulate, and the secretary made no record of it. As I recall, however, it was about water, children, and the words “ten o'clock” repeated several times.

“Do you mean that something happened at ten o'clock?”

“No. Certainly not. No, indeed. The water washed it away. All of it. Not a trace.”

“Where did all this happen?”

She named, without hesitation, a seaside resort about fifty miles from our city. There was not one of us, I dare say, who did not know that the Wellses had spent the preceding summer there, and that young Ellmgham had been there also.

“Do you know that Arthur Wells is dead?”

“Yes. He is dead.”

“Did he kill himself?”

“You can't catch me on that. I don't know.”

Here the medium laughed. It was horrible. And the laughter made the whole thing absurd. But it died away quickly.

“If only the pocketbook was not lost,” she said. “There were so many things in it. Especially car-tickets. Walking is a nuisance.”

Mrs. Dane's secretary suddenly spoke. “Do you want me to take things like that?” she asked.

“Take everything, please,” was the answer.

“Car-tickets and letters. It will be terrible if the letters are found.”

“Where was the pocketbook lost?” Sperry asked.

“If that were known, it could be found,” was the reply, rather sharply given. “Hawkins may have it. He was always hanging around. The curtain was much safer.”

“What curtain?”

“In his room. Nobody would have thought of the curtain. First ideas are best.”

She repeated this, following it, as once before, with rhymes for the final word, best, rest, chest, pest.

“Pest!” she said. “That's Hawkins!” And again the laughter.

“Did one of the bullets strike the ceiling?”

“Yes. But you'll never find it. It is holding well. That part's safe enough—unless it made a hole in the floor above.”

“But there was only one empty chamber in the revolver. How could two shots have been fired?”

There was no answer at all to this. And Sperry, after waiting, went on to his next question: “Who occupied the room overhead?”

But here we received the reply to the previous question: “There was a box of cartridges in the table-drawer. That's easy.”

ROM that point, however, the sitting was a failure. Either there was no answer to questions, or we got the absurdity that we had en countered before, about the drawing-room furniture. But, unsatisfactory in many ways as the séance had been, the effect on Miss Jeremy was profound—she was longer in coming out, and greatly exhausted when it was all over.

She refused to take the supper Mrs. Dane had prepared for her, and at eleven o'clock Sperry took her home in his car.

The Neighborhood Club as a whole was divided between amazement and a sort of shamefaced apology. My wife voiced the sentiment of the women, I fancy, when Miss Jeremy and Sperry had gone, and we had gathered in the library for a few moments before separating.

“It's rather undignified. That's the only thing I resent,” she said. “Instead of Swinburne and Emerson we sit around a table in a dark room, and a young woman makes up a lot of stuff that ought not to impose on a ten-year-old child. Because she is young and pretty the men take her seriously, of course. I consider it all nonsense.”

“My dear,” Mrs. Dane said, reaching over and patting my wife's hand, “people talked that way about Columbus and Galileo. And if it is nonsense, it is such thrilling nonsense!”

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.

The thing interested me, in spite of that better judgment which, in my saner hours, warned me that wiser men than I had been hoodwinked by clever mediums. But after the second sitting, for some reason, I was less credulous. In direct proportion as Sperry's interest in the medium increased, and his judgment was therefore biased, I became, not less interested, but harder to convince. If there was, behind it all, some perfectly natural explanation, I was determined to find it.

In a way, we had changed places. It was now Sperry who jumped to conclusions, resented doubts, and accepted without question Miss Jeremy's statements while in trance.

On the day after the second sitting Sperry came to see me at my office. He was looking tired and rather white.

“Look here, Horace,” he said, “I've about concluded to give this thing up.”

“The Neighborhood Club?”

“Not the Club, of course,” he replied irritably. “That's not the question. The Wells affair.”

“Why?”

He took a turn about the room. “It's like this,” he said, facing me. “Arthur Wells is dead. We can't help him. Even suppose we go on, and prove to our own satisfaction that Elinor killed him. Where are we? The plain fact is that I don't want to see Miss Jeremy mixed up in the affair. She's not a professional.”

“Then you want to stop it all?”

“I do.”

“Even if we stop now, I doubt if Mrs. Dane will be willing. She could carry the thing on, you know. Miss Jeremy knows nothing, you think?”

“Nothing, absolutely. It's her health that worries me. She is going to give it all up.”

I was disappointed. We had got to a point where to go on seemed the only course. To stop now was to leave on Elinor Wells the stigma, in all our minds, of murder. And I was not even partly convinced of her guilt.

“Suppose you allow one more sitting,” I suggested. “The Club can be informed that it is the last. We will agree to let things stand as that finds them.”

He agreed finally, but his interest in the case had clearly switched to Miss Jeremy. Thinking it over after he had gone, I decided to make my own investigations that week. I would have called in Herbert's assistance, but he was down with the influenza. Not for a moment did I doubt Sperry's integrity, but the authenticity of the whole affair was at stake, I felt, and the most discreet man has a way of being indiscreet to the woman he loves. Sperry, it was clear, was rapidly falling in love with Miss Jeremy.

In a way, I feel that this vindication is due Sperry. There has been some talk recently that he knew much that the medium revealed at that final and most amazing séance. This is not true. Sperry knew nothing of what I discovered that week. I pursued my investigations alone. There were times when I would have given a great deal to have him with me.

On Thursday I saw by the morning paper that Elinor Wells had gone to Florida with her children, and that the house was closed.

I am naturally a timid man. I am not large, and I am extremely nervous. Therefore it took me most of the day to make up my mind to a course of action. I was determined to visit the Wells house, to find the patched place in the ceiling, to see if there were really cartridges in the drawer of the table in Arthur Wells's room.

I will own that I was driven more by curiosity than by any desire for scientific knowledge. There is a point at which curiosity becomes unbearable, when it becomes an obsession, like hunger. I had reached that point.

It was exceedingly difficult for me to plan anything, however. 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 lunch—I mentioned that such a client was in town.

“It is possible,” I said, as calmly as I could, “that we may not get through this afternoon. If—if things should run over into the evening. I'll telephone.”

She took it calmly, 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.

S THE day wore on, my uneasiness increased. And my undertaking took on new difficulties. There was, for instance, the matter of the back door to the Wells's house. Nothing was more unlikely than that the key would still be hanging there. I must, therefore, get a key.

At two 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, eying 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 three 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 we live a little ways out, and the officer had arrived too late.

“They were burglars, of course!” she said. “Burglars often have boys with them, to go through 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.”

With the coming of the winter twilight I found my determination unaltered, but my nerves were as tight as piano wires, and my lips were dry.

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.

DO NOT like empty 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 theatres. But the still 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.

But with my first step over the threshold all terror left me. I strode along the passage, seeking with my flash to locate the electric switches. It was no part of my plan to work in darkness.

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 terrified now, but I was handicapped. Then I recall deciding that I was a fool to hesitate, and going on. In the library I took off my hat and coat and placed them on a chair by the door. The flashlight was alarmingly weak and inadequate, but I found a tall candle on the mantelpiece and lighted that, to save the battery of the little lamp.

Then I looked about. The house had been hastily closed. Some of the furniture was covered with sheets. Part of it stood unprotected. The rug had been folded into the center of the room, and covered with heavy brown papers. I had left the rear door standing wide, and somewhere above a window was probably open, for the papers stirred, lifted and subsided again. It gave a ghastly impression of something living and moving beneath.

There can be no mistake as to where I left my overcoat. The chair was a light one, by the door. In throwing my overcoat over the back, it upset and I straightened it. All this, which made little or no impression on me at the time, I recalled vividly later.

I had several things to investigate. The second shot was one. And there was the recurrence of the word “curtain” in Miss Jeremy's statements. Also, she had said that extra cartridges were in a box in the table drawer of Arthur Wells's room, and that one had been taken to fit an empty chamber of the revolver.

As I left the library, candle in hand, the rear door banged shut with a crash. In my alarm my teeth closed on the end of my tongue, with agonizing results, but the immediate effect was to stop the draft and steady the candle flame.

I found a second candle on the table at the foot of the stairs and lighted it, leaving it there. Then I climbed slowly. The fog had apparently made its way into the house, for when, half-way up, I turned and looked down, the candle-light 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 of 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 hit the footboard of the bed, and 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 drives men out of the trenches to the charge and almost certain death, rather than to sit and wait for what may come.

In a way, I charged the upper floor of the house. I lighted my candle. Light seem to be the only weapon against the spirits of darkness that, to my frenzied mind, awaited me. Candle in hand, and hardly sane, I ran up the staircase, and into the room overhead. It was empty. Suddenly I was rational again. 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 ashamed, stricken at my own fear. I, a lawyer, an after-dinner speaker of some small reputation, a man well on in his fifties, had showed the white feather of absolute cowardice.

I went to a window and looked out. The fog was lifting. Automobiles were making cautious progress along the slippery street. A woman with a basket had stopped under the street light and was rearranging her parcels. The clock of the city hall, visible over the opposite roofs, marked only twenty minutes to nine. It was still early evening—not even midnight, the magic hour of the night.

I was thinking clearly now. This was the room above Arthur's. Had there been a murder and not a suicide, if there had been two shots and the hole near the chandelier was a bullet-hole, one of two things had happened. Either the bullet had embedded itself in a joist, or it had penetrated the flooring.

There was a pink-and-gray rug covering the floor, and I examined it as well as the ceiling. There was no mark, no hole, in either. It was when I was turning the rug back that conviction dawned on me. The sound I had heard below had been this sound, the soft movement of the carpet across the floor-boards.

Some one, then, had been there before me—some one who knew what I knew, had reasoned as I reasoned. Some one who, in all probability, still lurked on the upper floor.

Obeying an impulse, I stood erect and called out sharply. “Sperry!” I said. “Sperry!”

There was no answer. I tried again, calling Herbert. But only my own voice came back to me, and the whistling of the wind through a window open in the hall.

I was unarmed, and as surely as I had feared the supernatural before, I now felt that some menacing human figure was hidden by the shadows of that upper floor. I looked about for a weapon, and finally took the only thing in sight, a coal-tongs from the fireplace. Armed with that, I made a cursory round of the near-by rooms. There was no one in sight.

I went back to the rug and examined the floor beneath it. I was right. Some one had been there before me. Bits of splintered wood lay about. The second bullet had been fired, had buried itself in the flooring, and had, some five minutes before, been dug out.

By whom?

HE extraordinary thing about the Arthur Wells's story was not his killing. For killing it was. It is the way it was solved.

Here was a young woman, a Miss Jeremy, who had not known young Wells, had not known Elinor, had, until that first meeting at Mrs. Dane's, never met any member of the Neighborhood Club. Yet, but for her, Arthur Wells would have gone to his grave bearing the stigma of moral cowardice, of suicide.



The solution, when it came, was amazing, but remarkably simple. Like most mysteries. I have, in my own house, an example of a great mystery, for instance, founded on mere absent-mindedness.

This is what my wife terms the mystery of the fire-tongs!

I left the Wells house as soon as I had made the discovery in the night nursery. I carried the candle and the fire-tongs down-stairs. I was, apparently, calm but watchful. I would have said that I had never been more calm in my life.

However, the discovery that my overcoat was gone from the library rather startled me. I knew exactly where I had left it, but it was gone. My hat I found on the floor. It had been stepped on, and was badly broken. I shall have to confess to a certain relief over the broken hat. A very human and tangible and not at all light foot had destroyed it.

As I say, I was apparently calm, in spite of everything. I locked the rear door of the house, and when, on putting the key into my pocket, I found that I had inadvertently put the stump of the candle there, I was careful to throw it away.

But the fact remains that I carried the fire-tongs home. I do not recall doing so. In fact, I knew nothing of the matter until morning. On the way to my house I was elaborating a story to the effect that my overcoat had been stolen from a restaurant where I and my client had dined. The hat offered more serious difficulties. I fancied that, by kissing my wife good-by at the breakfast table, I might be able to get out without her following me to the front door, which is her custom.

But, as a matter of fact, I need not have concerned myself about the hat. When I descended to breakfast the next morning I found her surveying the umbrella-stand in the hall. The fire-tongs were standing there, gleaming brazenly among my sticks and umbrellas.

I lied. I lied shamelessly. She is a nervous woman, and as we have no children, her attitude toward me is one of watchful waiting. Through long years she has expected me to commit some indiscretion—innocent, of course, such as going out without my overcoat on a cool day—and she in tends to be on hand for every emergency. I dared not confess, therefore that on the previous evening I had burglariously entered a closed house, had there surprised another intruder at work, had fallen and bumped my head severely, and had, finally, had my overcoat taken.

“Horace,” she said coldly, “where did you get those fire-tongs?”

“Fire-tongs?” I repeated. “Why, that's so. They are fire-tongs.”

“Where did you get them?”

“My dear,” I expostulated, “I get them!”

“What I would like to ask,” she said, with an icy calmness that I have learned to dread, “is whether you carried them home over your head, under the impression that you had your umbrella.”

“Certainly not,” I said with dignity; “I assure you, my dear”

“1 am not a curious woman,” she put in, incisively, “but when my husband spends an evening out, and returns minus his overcoat, with his hat mashed, a lump the size of an egg over his ear, and puts a pair of fire-tongs in the umbrella-stand under the impression that it is an umbrella, I have a right to ask at least if he intends to continue his life of debauchery.”

I made a mistake then. I should have told her. Instead I took my broken hat and jammed it on my head with a force that made the lump she had noticed jump like a toothache, and went out.

When, at noon and luncheon, I tried to tell her the truth, she listened to the end. Then: “I should think you could have done better than that,” she said. “You have had all morning to think it out.”

That afternoon I saw Sperry and told him. He was rather indignant at my going alone, but he was impressed, too. “You've got more courage than I have,” he said. “Of course, the question is now, who was after the bullet? Not Elinor. She's gone. Not the governess. She went with Elinor. Then who?”

“There was no mention, in the séances, of another person being present,” I reflected.

“No. We've only tapped the top of this thing, Horace. There's this thing that comes so often, about the drawing-room furniture.” He had the transcribed notes made by the secretary on his desk, and he looked them over. “There's the cane writing on the sand, and somebody with a hurt knee. Pocketbook—humph! And curtains and letters.”

“They may not belong. Those idiotic rhymes don't belong.”

“That's different. There's distinct anxiety about the pocketbook and the letters. 'It will be terrible if the letters are found.' 'Hawkins may have it. He was always hanging around. The curtain was much safer.' The 'it' is the pocketbook, of course.”

I glanced over his shoulder. “What curtain?” “In his room,” I read.

Sperry looked up at me. “We'd better go back to the house,” he said. “Whoever took your overcoat by mistake probably left one. The difficulty is, of course, that he probably discovered his error and went back again last night.” He viewed me with what I perceived to be growing disfavor. “Confound it, man,” he said, “if you had thought of that at the time, we would have something to go on to-day.”

“I'm sorry, Sperry,” I observed. “The plain truth is that I had stopped thinking some time before.”

“We'd better go to-night.”

“Very well,” I agreed.

But it was not very well, and I knew it. I felt that, in a way, my whole domestic happiness was at stake. My wife is a difficult person to argue with, and as tenacious of an opinion once formed as are all very amiable people.

Unfortunately for our investigation, but luckily for me, under the circumstances, Sperry was called to another city that afternoon and did not return for two days.

It was on the Thursday night following the second sitting that I had gone alone to the Wells house, and my interview with Sperry was on Friday. It was on Friday afternoon that I received a telephone message from Mrs. Dane.

It was actually from her secretary, the Clara who had recorded the séances. It was Mrs. Dane's misfortune to be almost entirely dependent on the various young women who, one after the other, were employed to look after her. I say “one after the other” advisedly. It had long been a matter of good-natured jesting in the Neighbourhood Club that Mrs. Dane conducted a matrimonial bureau, as one young woman after another was married from her house. It was her kindly habit, on such occasions, to give the bride a wedding, and only a month before it had been my privilege to give away in holy wedlock Miss Clara's predecessor.

“Mrs. Dane would like you to stop in and have a cup of tea with her this afternoon, Mr. Johnson,” said the secretary.

“At what time?”

“At four o'clock.”

I hesitated. I felt that my wife was waiting at home for further explanation of the coal-tongs, and that the sooner we had it out the better. But, on the other hand, Mrs. Dane's invitations, by reason of her infirmity, took on something of the nature of commands.

“Please say that I will be there at four,” I replied.

I bought a new hat that afternoon, and told the clerk to destroy the old one. Then I went to Mrs. Dane's.

She was in the drawing-room, now restored to its usual clutter of furniture and ornaments. I made my way around two tables, stepped over a hassock and under the leaves of an artificial palm, and shook her hand.

She was plainly excited. Never have I known a woman who, confined to a wheel-chair, lived so hard. She did not allow life to (ass her windows, if I may put it that way. She called it in, and set it moving about her chair, herself the nucleus around which were enacted all sorts of small neighborhood dramas and romances. Her secretaries did not marry. She married them.

It is curious to look back and remember how Herbert and Sperry and myself had ignored this quality in her, in the Wells case. She was not to be ignored. I discovered that that afternoon.

“Sit down,” she said. “You look half sick.”

Nothing escapes her eyes, so I was careful to place myself with the lump on my head turned away from her. But I fancy she saw it, for her eyes twinkled.

“Horace! Horace!” she said. “How I have detested you all week!”

“I? You detested me?”

“Loathed you,” she said with unction. “You are cruel and ungrateful. Herbert has influenza, and does not count. And Sperry is in love—oh, yes, I know it. I know a great many things. But you!”

I could only stare at her.

“The strange thing is,” she went on, “that I have known you for years, and never suspected your sense of humor. You'll forgive me, I know, if I tell you that your lack of humor was to my mind the only flaw in an otherwise perfect character.”

“I am not aware—” I began stiffly. “I have always believed that I furnished to the Neighborhood Club its only leaven of humor.”

“Don't spoil it,” she begged. “Don't. If you could know how I have enjoyed it. All afternoon I have been chuckling. The coal-tongs, Horace. The coal-tongs!”

Then I knew that my wife had been to Mrs. Dane and I drew a long breath. “I assure you,” I said gravely, “that while doubtless I carried the wretched things home and—er—placed them where they were found, I have not the slightest recollection of it. And it is hardly amusing, is it?”

“Amusing!” she cried. “It's delicious. It has made me a young woman again. Horace, if I could have seen your wife's face when she found them, I would give cheerfully almost anything I possess.”

But underneath her mirth I knew there was something else. And, after all, she could convince my wife if she were convinced herself. I told her the whole story—of the visit Sperry and I had made the night Arthur Wells was shot, and of what we discovered; of the drug-store whisky, and its unfortunate effect—at which, I regret to say, she was vastly amused; and last of all, of my experience the previous night in the deserted house.

HE was very serious when I finished. Tea came, but we forgot to drink it. Her eyes flashed with excitement, her faded face flushed. And, with it all, as I look back, there was an air of suppressed excitement that seemed to have nothing to do with my narrative. I remembered it, however, when the denouement came the following week.

She was a remarkable woman. Even then she knew, or strongly suspected, the thing that the rest of us had missed, the x of the equation. But she kept it to herself.

“You have been so ungenerous with me,” she said finally, “that I am tempted not to tell you why I sent for you. Of course I know I am only a helpless old woman, and you men are people of affairs. But now and then I have a flash of intelligence. I'm going to tell you, but you don't deserve it.”

She went down into the black silk bag at her side which was as much a part of her attire as the false front she wore with careless abandon, and which, brown in color and indifferently waved, was invariably parted from its moorings. She drew out a newspaper clipping.

“On going over Clara's notes,” she said, “I came to the conclusion, last Tuesday, that the matter of the missing hand-bag and the letters was important. More importantly, probably, than the mere record shows. Do you recall the note of distress in Miss Jeremy's voice? It was almost a wail.”

I had noticed it.

“I have plenty of time to think,” she added, not without pathos. “There is only one Monday night in the week, and—the days are long. It occurred to me to to try to trace that bag.”

“In what way?”

“How does any one trace lost articles?” she demanded. “By advertising, Last Wednesday I advertised for the bag.”

I was too astonished to speak.

{Img float|file=P 070 Sight Unseen--Everybody's 1916-07--fog lifting out the window.png |width=270px |align=left |cap= |capalign=center |alt= }} “I reasoned like this: If there was no such bag, there was no harm done. As a matter of fact, if there was no such bag, the chances were that we were all wrong, anyhow. If there was such a bag, I wanted it. Here is the advertisement.” She gave me a small newspaper cutting:

I sat with it on my palm. It was so simple, so direct. And I, a lawyer, and presumably reasonably acute, had not thought of it!

“And—the result?”

“Just a moment. There is something else.” She dived again into the bag, and brought up another clipping.

“On the day that I had that inserted,” she said impressively, “this also appeared. They were in the same column.” She read the second clipping aloud, slowly, that I might gain all its significance:

She passed the clipping to me, and I compared them. It all looked strange. I confess to a tingling feeling that coincidence, that element so much to be feared in any investigation, was not the solution here. But there was such a chance, and I spoke of it.

“Possibly,” she replied. “But I am not through, my friend.”

She went down into the bag again, and I expected nothing less than the pocketbook, letters and all, to appear. But she dragged up, among a miscellany of handkerchiefs, a bottle of smelling-salts, and a few almonds, of which she was inordinately fond, an envelope.

“Yesterday,” she said, “I took a taxicab ride. You know my chair gets tiresome, occasionally. I stopped at the newspaper office, and got this.”

“This,” was a letter, addressed to A 31, in care of the Daily News.

“Read it,” she observed. “It is a curious human document. You'll probably be no wiser for reading it, but it shows one thing: We are on the track of something.”

I have the letter before me now. It is written on glazed paper, ruled with blue lines. The writing is rather affected, of the flowing style we used to call Spencerian. It is what Sperry terms, rather aptly, of a sexless type. “Copy-book writing,” done with a fine pen. It was, if anything, rather effeminate in character. But the language was forceful enough:

It is unsigned.

I stared from the letter to Mrs. Dane. She was watching me, her face grave and rather sad.

“You and I, Horace,” she said, “live our orderly lives. We eat, and sleep, and talk, and even labor. We think we are living. But for the last day or two I have been seeing visions—you and I and the rest of us, living on the surface, and underneath, carefully kept down so it will not make us uncomfortable, a world of passion and crime and violence and suffering. That letter is a tragedy.”

N SATURDAY evening, Sperry having returned, I called an informal meeting of the Neighborhood Club. In deference to Herbert Robinson's recent attack of influenza, we met at the Robinson house. Sperry himself wheeled Mrs. Dane over, and made a speech.

“We have called this meeting,” he said, “because a rather singular situation has developed. What was commenced purely as an interesting experiment has gone beyond that stage. We find ourselves in the curious position of taking what comes very close to being a part in a domestic tragedy. The affair is made more delicate by the fact that this tragedy involves people who are our friends, or who are at least very well known to us. The purpose of this meeting, to be brief, is to determine whether the Neighborhood Club, as a body, wishes to go on with the investigation, or to stop where we are.”

He paused, but as no one spoke, he went on again. “It is really not as simple as that,” he said. “To stop now, in view of the evidence we intend to place before the Club, is to leave in all our minds certain suspicions that may be entirely unjust. On the other hand, to go on is, very possibly, to place us all in a position where to keep silent is to be an accessory after a crime.”

He then proceeded, in orderly fashion, to review the first sitting and its results. He read from notes, elaborating them as he went along, for the benefit of the women, who had not been fully informed. As all the data of the Club is now in my possession, I copy these notes.

“I shall review briefly the first sitting, and what followed it.” He read the notes of the sitting first. “You will notice that I have made no comment on the physical phenomena which occurred early in the séance. This is for two reasons: first, it has no bearing on the question at issue. Second, it has no quality of novelty. Certain people, under certain conditions, are able to exert powers that we can not explain. I have no belief whatever in their spiritistic quality. They are, probably, what remains in some of us of a dying sixth sense. They are purely physical, the exercise of powers we no longer are able to recognize. That is all.”



And, to make our position clear, that is to-day the attitude of the Neighborhood Club. The supernormal, as I said at the beginning, not the supernatural, is our explanation.

Sperry's notes were alphabetical.

(а) At 9:15 or somewhat earlier, on Monday night a week ago Arthur Wells killed himself, or was killed. At 9:30 on that same evening by Mr. Johnson's watch, consulted at the time. Miss Jeremy had described such a crime. (He here elaborated, repeating the medium's account.)

(b) At midnight, Sperry, reaching home, had found a message summoning him to the Wells house. The message had been left at 9:35. He had telephoned me, and we had gone together, arriving at approximately 12:30. (c) We had been unable to enter, and, recalling the medium's description of a key on a nail among the vines, had searched for and found such a key, and had admitted ourselves. Mrs. Wells, a governess, a doctor, and two policemen were in the house. The dead man lay in the room in which he had died. (Here he went at length into the condition of the room, the revolver with one chamber empty, the moist spot on the carpet, and the sponge and razor-strop behind the bathtub. He offered no opinion, nor did he comment on Elinor Wells's story, which he repeated.)

(d) The governess had come in at 9:15, just after the death. Mr. Horace Johnson had had a talk with her. She had left the front door unfastened when she went out at eight o'clock. She said she had gone out to telephone about another position, as she was dissatisfied. She had phoned from Elliott's pharmacy on State Avenue. Later that night we went to Elliott's.

She had lied about the message. She had really telephoned to a number which the pharmacy clerk had already discovered was that of the Effingham house. The message was that Mr. Effingham was not to come, as Mr. and Mrs. Wells were going out. It was not the first time she had telephoned to that number.

There was a stir in the room. Something that we had all avoided mention of had come suddenly into the open. Sperry raised his hand.

“It is necessary to be explicit,” he said, “that the club may see where it stands. It is, of course, not necessary to remind ourselves that this evening's disclosures are of the most secret nature.

“(e) At a private séance, which Mr. Johnson and I decided was excusable, under the circumstances, the medium was unable to give us anything. This in spite of the fact that we had taken with us a walking-stick belonging to the dead man.

“(f) The second sitting of the Club. I need only refresh your minds as to one or two things: the medium spoke of a lost pocketbook, and of letters. While the point is at least capable of doubt, apparently the letters were in the pocketbook. Also, she said that a curtain would have been better, that Hawkins was a nuisance, and that everything was all right unless the bullet had made a hole in the floor above. You will also recall the mention of a box of cartridges in a table-drawer in Arthur Wells's room.

“I will now ask Mr. Johnson to tell what occurred on the night before last, Thursday evening.”

I am rather an experienced speaker, but the fact that my wife sat back in her chair and watched me with cool incredulity did not add to my ease that night. However, I told, as briefly as I could, how I had effected an entrance to the house, and of examining the house, particularly the ceiling of the room in which Arthur Wells had been found.

“The plaster had been broken, and filled with a white paste, which had hardened. It had been my intention to take the paste away with me, but I heard sounds overhead, and, going to investigate them, I had forgotten it.”

“And these sounds?” Herbert asked, leaning forward.

“I discovered afterward what they were.” I am not without vanity, I fear, and the effect on my audience was most satisfactory. I told of having armed myself with the coal-tongs against what I felt was an enemy, and of finding my overcoat gone.

Then I looked at my wife. It was a complete compensation for that night of terror to find her gaze no longer cold, but sympathetic, and—if I may be allowed to say so—admiring. When at last I sat down beside her, she put her hand on my arm in a way that I had missed since the unfortunate affair of the pharmacy whisky.

Mrs. Dane then read and explained the two clippings and the letter, and the situation, so far as it had developed, was before the Club.

Were we to go on, or to stop?

Put to a vote, the women were for going on. The men were more doubtful, and Herbert voiced what I think we all felt.

“We're getting in pretty deep,” he said. “We have no right to step in where the law has stepped out—no legal right, that is. As to moral right, it depends on what we are holding these sittings for. If we are making what we started out to make, an investigation into psychic matters, then we can go on. But with this proviso, I think: Whatever may come of it, the result is of psychic interest only. We are not trailing a criminal.”

“Crime is the affair of every decent-minded citizen,” his sister put in concisely.

But the general view was that Herbert was right. I am not defending our course. I am recording it. It is, I admit, open to argument.

Having decided on what to do, or not to do, we broke into animated discussion. The letter to A 31 was the rock on which all our theories foundered, that and the message the governess had sent to young Ellingham not to come to the Wells house that night. By no stretch of rather excited imaginations, could we imagine Ellingham writing such a letter. Who had written the letter, then, and for whom was it meant?

As to the telephone message, it seemed to preclude the possibility of Ellingham's having gone to the house that night.

ND there was another point. Miss Jeremy had said that the woman she saw had worn a yellow kimono. Sperry pointed out that the one Elinor had worn was green. It was still stained where she had knelt by her unfortunate husband.

In the end, we decided to hold one more séance, and then to let the affair drop.

It is typical of the strained nervous tension which had developed in all of us during the past twelve days, that that night when, having forgotten to let the dog in, my wife and I were roused from a sound sleep by his howling, she would not allow me to go down and admit him. And Herbert Robinson afterward confessed to me that during the entire period, and for a week after, he had slept with a light.

Sunday was a quiet day. I felt the need of spiritual refreshing, and went to church. I had seen so many things that my earthly philosophy was apparently not able to reach, so many of the laws by which I had been accustomed to order my mind and my conduct had been eclipsed by the amazements of the past two weeks; that I clutched, I fear rather wildly, at those things which I had until now accepted without question.

And the service did me good. My wife, too, was in a penitent and rather exalted mood. During the sermon she sat with her hand in mine, and I was conscious of peace and a deep thankfulness. We had been married for many years, and we had grown very close. Of what importance was the Wells case, or what mattered it that there were strange new-old laws in the universe, so long as we kept together?

That my wife had felt a certain bitterness toward Miss Jeremy, a jealousy of her powers, even of her youth, had not dawned on me. But when, in her new humility, she suggested that we call on the medium that afternoon, I realized that, in her gentle way, she was making a sort of atonement.

Miss Jeremy lived with an elderly spinster cousin, a little way out of town. It was a grim house, coldly and rigidly austere. It gave an unpleasant impression at the start, and our comfort was not increased by the discovery, made early in the call, that the cousin regarded the Neighborhood Club and its members with suspicion.

The cousin—her name was Connell—was small and sharp, and she entered the room followed by a train of cats. All the time she was frigidly greeting us, cats were coming in at the door, one after the other. It fascinated me. I do not like cats. I am, as a matter of confession, afraid of cats. They affect me as do snakes. They trailed in in a seemingly endless procession, and one of them took a fancy to me, and leaped from behind on to my shoulder. The shock set me stammering.

“My cousin is out,” said Miss Connell. “Doctor Sperry has taken her for a ride. She will be back very soon.”

I shook a cat from my trouser-leg, and my wife made an unimportant remark.

“I may as well tell you, I disapprove of what Alice is doing,” said Miss Connell. “She doesn't have to. I've offered her a good home. She was brought up an Episcopalian. I call this sort of thing playing with the powers of darkness. Only the eternally damned are doomed to walk the earth. The blessed are at rest.”

“But you believe in her powers, don't you?” my wife asked, anxiously.

“I believe she can do extraordinary things. She brought me a message from my dead father the other night, and described him, although she had never seen him.”

In view of her previous remark I was tempted to comment on this stricture on her departed parent, but a large cat, much scarred with fighting, and named Violet, insisted at that moment on crawling into my lap, and my attention was distracted.

“But the whole thing is un-Christian and undignified,” Miss Connell proceeded, in her cold voice. “Come, Violet—don't annoy the gentleman. I have other visions of the next life than of rapping on tables and chairs, and throwing small articles about.”

It was an extraordinary visit. Even the arrival of Miss Jeremy herself, flushed with the air and looking singularly normal, was hardly a relief. Sperry, who followed, was clearly pleased to see us, however.

It was not hard to see how things were with him. He helped the girl out of her wraps with a manner that was almost proprietary, and drew a chair for her close to the small fire which hardly affected the chill of the room.

ITH their entrance a spark of hospitality seemed to kindle in the cat lady's breast. It was evident that she liked Sperry. Perhaps she saw in him a method of weaning her cousin from traffic with the powers of darkness. She said something about tea, and went out.

Sperry looked across at the girl and smiled. “Shall I tell them?” he said.

“I want very much to have them know.”

He stood up, and with a touch of the drama that he so loves, he put a hand on her shoulder. “This young lady is going to marry me,” he said. “We are very happy to-day.”

But I thought he eyed us anxiously. We were his close friends, and he wanted our approval. I am not sure if we were wise. I do not yet know. But something of the new understanding between my wife and myself must have found its way to our voices, for he was evidently satisfied.

“Then that's all right,” he said heartily. And my wife, who likes a love-affair, kissed the girl.

Except for the cats, sitting around, the whole thing was strangely normal. And yet, even there, something happened that set me to thinking afterward. Not that it was strange in itself, but that it seemed never possible to get very far away from the Wells' mystery.

Tea was brought in by Hawkins!

I knew him at once, but he did not at once see me. He was evidently accustomed to seeing Sperry there, and he did not recognize my wife. But when he had put down the tray and turned to pick up Sperry's overcoat to carry it into the hall, he saw me. The man actually started. I can not say that he changed color. He was always a pale, anæmic-looking fellow. But it was a perceptible instant before he stooped and gathered up the coat.

Sperry turned to me when he had gone out. “That was Hawkins, Horace,” he said. “You remember, don't you? The Wells' butler.”

“I knew him at once.”

“He wrote to me asking for a position, and I got him this. Looks sick, poor devil. I intend to have a go at his chest.”

“How long has he been here?”

“More than a week, I think.”

As I drank my tea, I pondered. After all, the Neighborhood Club must guard against the possibility of fraud. Sperry had been indiscreet. For a while at least I felt that the value of our researches to that time was invalidated. Here, living in the medium's house, was a man who could very easily have known about the crime, or have known a part and surmised the rest.

When we rose, shortly after, to go, I saw Sperry's eyes on me, with a flash of resentment in them. He had, I saw, fathomed my uneasiness, and he made an excuse of looking at his car to follow us into the open air.

“Now look here,” he said, "I see what you are thinking about, and the whole idea is absurd. Of course, I never even thought about it, but even allowing for connivance—which I don't for a moment—the fellow was not even in the house at the time of the murder.”

“I know he says he was not.”

He turned away angrily, but thought of something, and swung back on his heel.

“Even then,” he said, “how about the first sitting? I'll swear she had never even heard of him then.”

“The fact remains that his presence here makes us all absurd.”

“Do you want me to throw him out?”

“I don't see what possible good that will do now.”

I was uneasy all the way home. The element of doubt, always so imminent in our dealings with psychic phenomena, had me by the throat. How much did Hawkins know? Was there any way, without going to the police, to find if he had really been out of the Wells house that night, now almost two weeks ago, when Arthur Wells had been killed?”

That evening I went to Sperry's house, after telephoning that I was coming. On the way I stopped in at Mrs. Dane's and secured something from her. She was wildly curious, and made me promise to go in on my way back, and explain. I made a compromise.

“I will come in if I have anything to tell you,” I said.

But I knew, by her grim smile, that she would station herself by her window, and that I would stop, unless I made a detour of three blocks to avoid her. she is a very determined woman.

PERRY was waiting for me in his library, a pleasant room which I have often envied him. Even the most happily married man wishes, now and then, for some quiet, dull room which is essentially his own. My own library is really the family sitting-room, and a Christmas or so ago my wife presented me with a very handsome phonograph instrument. My reading, therefore, is done to music, and the necessity for putting my book down to change the record at times interferes somewhat with my train of thought.

So I entered Sperry's library with appreciation. He was standing by the fire, with the grave face and slightly bent head of his professional manner. We say, in the neighborhood, that Sperry uses his professional manner as armor. So I was rather prepared to do battle; but he forestalled me.

“Horace,” he said, “I have been a fool, a driveling idiot. We were getting something at those sittings. Something real. She's wonderful—Miss Jeremy. But no matter what we get now she will be discredited. I see it.” He was rather bitter about it, but not hostile. His fury was at himself. “Of course,” he went on, “I am sure that she got nothing from Hawkins. But the fact remains—” He was hurt in his pride of her.

“I wonder,” I said, “if you kept the letter Hawkins wrote you when he asked for a position.”

E was not sure. He went down to his consulting room and was gone for some time. I took the opportunity to glance over his books and over the room.

Arthur Wells's stick was standing in a corner. I took it up and examined it. It was an English malacca, light and strong, and had seen service. It was a trifle long for me. It occurred to me that Arthur had been about my height, and that it was odd that he should have carried so long a stick. There was no ease in swinging it.

But I dismissed the notion, with the feeling that I was seeing everything those days with a warped and crooked judgment. When Sperry returned I laid the stick on the table. There can be no doubt that I did so, for I had to move a book-rack to place it. One end, the handle, was near the ink-well, and the ferule lay on a copy of Gibson's “Life Beyond the Grave,” which Sperry had evidently been reading.

Sperry had found the letter. I glanced at it. I recognized the writing at once, thin and rather sexless, Spencerian.

I put down the application, and took the anonymous letter about the bag from my pocketbook. “Read this, Sperry,” I said, “You know the letter. Look at the writing.”

He compared the two, with a slight lifting of his eyebrows. Then he put them down. “Hawkins!” he said. “Hawkins has the letters! And the bag!”

“Exactly,” I commented dryly. “In other words, Hawkins was in Miss Jeremy's house when, at the second sitting, she told of the letters.”

I felt rather sorry for Sperry. He paced the room wretchedly, the two letters in his hand.

“But why should he tell her, if he did?” he demanded. “The writer of that anonymous letter was writing for only one person. Every effort is made to conceal his identity.”

I felt that he was right. The point was well taken.

“The question now is, to whom was it written?”



We pondered that, to no effect. That Hawkins had certain letters which touched on the Wells affair, that all the they were probably in the Connell house, was clear enough. We had no possible authority for trying to get the letters, although Sperry was anxious to make the attempt.

“But I feel,” he said, “that it is too late to help her very much. She is innocent. I know that. I think you know that, too, deep in that legal door. I think you know that, too, deep in that legal mind of yours. It is wrong to discredit her because I did a foolish thing.” He warmed to his argument. “Why, think, man,” he said. “The whole first sitting was practically coincident with the crime itself.”

It was true enough. There could be no question that, long before any one could have brought her word of it, she had described Arthur Wells's death, and, with strange exactness, the room, the woman with him, the revolver.

“She made only one error,” Sperry said, in a puzzled tone. “The color of the negligée Elinor was wearing.”