Sight Unseen (Everybody's Magazine)/Part 3



E TALKED on, but we got nowhere. Sperry told of Miss Jeremy's total ignorance of the revelations she had made while in trance. “She does not know that there ever was a family named Wells,” he observed. “When I said that Hawkins had been employed by the Wells, it meant nothing to her. I was watching.”

So even Sperry was watching! He was in love with her, but his scientific mind, like my legal one, was slow to accept what, during the past two weeks, it had been asked to accept.

I left him at ten o'clock. Mrs. Dane was still at her window, and her far sighted old eyes caught me as I tried to steal past. She rapped on the window, and I was obliged to go in. Obliged, too, to tell her of the discovery and, at last, of Hawkins's being in the Connell house.

“I want those letters, Horace,” she said at last.

“So do I. I'm not going to steal them.”

“The question is, where has he got them?”

“The question is, dear lady, that they are not ours to take.”

“They are not his, either.”

Well, that was true enough. But I had done all the private investigating I cared to. And I told her so. She only smiled cryptically.

The following day was Monday. When I came down-stairs I found a neat bundle lying in the hall, and addressed to me. My wife had followed me down, and we surveyed it together.

I had a curious feeling about the parcel, and was for cutting the cord with my knife. But my wife is careful about string. She has always fancied that the time would come when we would need some badly, and it would not be around. I have an entire drawer of my chiffonier, which I really need for other uses, filled with bundles of twine, pink, white, and brown. I recall, on one occasion, packing a suit-case in the dusk, in great haste, and emptying the drawer containing my undergarments into it, to discover, when I opened it on the train for my pajamas, nothing but rolls of cord and several packages of Christmas ribbons. So I was obliged to wait until she had untied the knots by means of a hairpin.

It was my overcoat! My overcoat, apparently uninjured, but with the collection of keys I had made, missing.

The address was printed, not written, in a large, strong hand, with a stub pen. I did not, at the time, notice the loss of certain papers which had been in the breast pocket. I am rather absent-minded, and it was not until the night after the third sitting that they were recalled to my mind.

At something after eleven Herbert Robinson called me up at my office.

He was at Sperry's house, Sperry having been his physician during his recent illness.

“I say, Horace, this is Herbert.”

“Yes. How are you?”

“Doing well, Sperry says. I'm at his place now. I'm speaking for him. He's got a patient.”

“Yes?”

“You were here last night, he says.” Herbert has a circumlocutory manner over the phone which irritates me. He begins slowly and does not know how to stop. Talk with him drags on endlessly.

“Well, I admit it,” I snapped. “It's not a secret.”

He lowered his voice. “Do you happen to have noticed a walking-stick in the library when you were here?”

“Which walking-stick?”

“You know. The one we”

“Yes. I saw it.”

“You didn't, by any chance, take it home with you?”

“Great Scott, man,” I said furiously, “do I habitually take things home with me when I make an evening call? No!”

“Are you sure?”

“Don't be an idiot!”

“You're an absent-minded beggar, you know,” he explained. “You remember about the fire-tongs. And a stick is like an umbrella. One is likely to pick it up and”

“One is not likely to do anything of the sort. At least, I didn't.”

“Oh, all right. Every one well?”

“Very well, thanks.”

“Suppose we'll see you to-night?”

“Not unless you ring off and let me do some work,” I said irritably.

He rang off. I was ruffled, I admit. But I was uneasy, also. To tell the truth, the affair of the coal-tongs had cost me my self-confidence. I called up my wife, and she said Herbert was a fool and Sperry also. But she made an exhaustive search of the premises, without result. Whoever had taken the stick, I was cleared. Cleared, at least, for a time. There were strange developments coming that threatened my peace of mind.

That day I discovered that I was being watched. Shadowed is the technical word. I dare say I had been followed from my house, but I had not noticed. When I went out to lunch a youngish man in a dark overcoat was waiting for the elevator, and I saw him again when I came out of my house. We went down-town again on the same car.

Perhaps I would have thought nothing of it, had I not been summoned to the suburbs on a piece of business concerning a mortgage. He was at the far end of the platform as I took the train to return to the city, with his back to me. I lost him in the crowd at the down-town station, but he evidently had not lost me, for, stopping to buy a newspaper, I turned, and, as my pause had evidently been unexpected, he almost ran into me.

Even then I was unwilling to believe the fact, and I signed my mail with large and vigorous signatures. It was as if, by my very writing, I intended to show the world that I, Horace Johnson, had done nothing which would justify the presence of a private detective at my heels.

Although I was tempted, that night at dinner, I did not tell my wife. Women are strange. She would, I feared, immediately jump to the conclusion that there was something in my private life that I was keeping from her. She has, I shall have to confess, a certain admiration for me which leads her to think me exceedingly attractive to the other sex—a belief in no way justified by the facts. It is axiomatic in my profession that the more innocent a man is, the guiltier he looks, very often. So I dare say I was an uncomfortable dinner companion. In fact, my wife said so.

FTER dinner I went into the reception-room, which is not lighted, unless we are expecting guests, and peered out of the window. The detective was walking negligently up the street.

Owing to the fact that Mrs. Dane was house-cleaning, we had not been asked to dinner, and the séance was set for 8:30.

We dine at half-past six, and our simple meal was over by seven. Shortly after, Sperry called me up.

“I want you to come up right away,” he said. “Bring those keys with you.”

“They are gone. The overcoat came back by messenger this morning, but the keys are gone.”

“Damn!” he said. “But see here, Horace, did you lock that door behind you when you left?”

“I don't remember. I left hastily. I think not.”

“Then there's a chance,” he observed, after a moment's pause. “Anyhow, it's worth trying. Herbert told you about the stick?”

“Yes. I never had it. I remember that it was icy on the way back, and I wished I had one.”

I explained to my wife, who had been listening. But she grew quite hysterical, and was not for letting me go again to the Wells house.

“I'm afraid of the place,” she said. “Not of human things. But, however brave you are, Horace—and you have shown that you are afraid of nothing—what can you do against the powers of darkness?” She had got the phrase, I knew, from Miss Jeremy's cousin.

I quite believe she would have put a bottle of water from the Jordan, which we had brought from our trip abroad, in my pocket. But I saw her eyeing it, and made a hasty escape.

Even this I should not have effected, had I not remembered the detective. I made an excuse of paying the cook, and went to the kitchen. From there I went out the rear door, cut across a lawn to the next street, and happily found that I was not followed.

My stealthy escape had set my blood to tingling. I confess to a spirit of adventure that night. Even the thought of the empty house did not daunt me. It was, also, a comfort to remember that Sperry was a very strong man. I had, as I have said before, none of my wife's belief in the supernatural.

Sperry was waiting on the door-step, as on that night, now exactly fourteen days ago, when we had taken together the same route.



He confided his plan to me. “There is still a chance,” he said, “that the overcoat which was exchanged for yours is in the house. The owner may have feared to go back. Then I have made up my mind to lift the rug of the dressing-room and the carpet outside the door. If he fell in the hall, and was dragged, it is one more proof of a murder.”

“I thought we were making a psychic, not a criminal, investigation.”

“So we are, as far as prosecution goes. But I've got my mind on this thing now, and I'm going to see it through. There's another point. I want to look at the curtains in that room. I've been reading over my copy of the notes on the sittings. It was said, you remember, that curtains—some curtains—would have been better places to hide the letters than the bag.”

I stopped suddenly. “By Jove, Sperry,” I said. “I remember now. My notes of the sittings were in my overcoat.”

“And they are gone?”

“They are gone.”

He whistled softly. “That's unfortunate,” he said. “Then the other person, whoever it is, knows what we know!”

The Wells house was dark and forbidding. We walked past it once, as an officer was making his rounds in leisurely fashion, swinging his night-stick in circles. But on our return the street was empty, and we turned in at the side entry.

I led the way with comparative familiarity. It was, you will remember, my third similar excursion. With Sperry behind me I felt confident.

“In case the door is locked, I have a few skeleton keys,” said Sperry.

We had reached the end of the narrow passage, and emerged into the square of brick and grass that lay behind the house. While the night was clear, the place lay in comparative darkness. Sperry stumbled over something, and muttered to himself.

The rear porch lay in deep shadow. We went up the steps together. Then Sperry stopped, and I advanced to the doorway. It was locked.

With my hand on the door-knob, I turned to Sperry. He was struggling violently with a dark figure, and even as I turned they went over with a crash and rolled together down the steps. Only one of them rose.

I was terrified. I confess it. It was impossible to see whether it was Sperry or his assailant. If it was Sperry who lay in a heap on the ground, I felt that I was lost. I could not escape. The way was blocked, and behind me the door, to which I now turned frantically, was a barrier I could not move.

Then, out of the darkness behind me, came Sperry's familiar, booming bass. “I've knocked him out, I'm afraid. Got a match, Horace?”

Much shaken, I went down the steps and gave Sperry a wooden toothpick, under the impression that it was a match. That rectified, we bent over the figure on the bricks.

“Knocked out, for sure,” said Sperry, “but I think it's not serious. A watchman, evidently. Pretty courageous, to tackle two of us.”

The man lay there on the bricks, very quiet. Sperry glanced around.

“Too cold to leave him here,” he said. “We'd better see if we can get into the house, and carry him in.”

The lock gave way to manipulation, at last, and swung open. There came to us the heavy odor of all closed houses, a combination of carpets, cooked food, and floor wax. My nerves, now taxed to their utmost, fairly shrank from it, but Sperry was cool.

He bore the brunt of the weight as we carried the watchman in, holding him with his arms dangling, helpless and rather pathetic. Sperry glanced around.

“Into the kitchen,” he said. “We can lock him in.”

We had hardly laid him on the floor when I heard the slow stride of the officer on the beat. Here my lightness came to my aid. I was able to get to the outer door, re verse the key and turn it from the inside, before I heard him hailing the watchman.

“Hello, there!” he called. “George, I say, George!”

He listened for a moment, then came up and tried the door. I crouched inside, as guilty as the veriest house-breaker in the business. But he had no suspicion, clearly, for he turned and went away, whistling as he went.

Not until we heard him going down the alleyway, absently running his night-stick along the fence palings, did Sperry and I move.

“A narrow squeak, that,” I said, mopping my face.

“A miss is as good as a mile,” he observed. There was exultation in his voice. He is a born adventurer.

He came out into the passage and quickly locked the door behind him.

“Now, friend Horace,” he said. “If you have anything but toothpicks for matches, we will go up-stairs.”

It was his idea that we try the servants' staircase, for fear of the light being seen from the street.

The result was a loss of time, as we wandered about. But we brought up, at last, at the head of the main staircase. And the rest was simple enough.

In the haste of closing the house, the upper shutters had been left open.

They were inside the windows, and we closed them at once. The result was to shut off the faint lights of the street, and to leave us in absolute darkness.

Sperry was humming softly to himself.

“First of all, for the curtains,” he said.

We found one of the candles I had left, and lighted it. The table and chair I had placed in the center of the room had been put back to their places.

“To their places,” I said to Sperry. “Then by some one who knew where they belonged.”

He only grunted. He was examining the curtains at the window. Inside the thin lace ones were heavier-figured hangings of what I think my wife calls chintz, with a plain yellow lining. Sperry held the candle close and examined them.

“Come here, Horace,” he said. “Look at this.”

In the lining of one of the curtains, near the bottom, a long, ragged cut had been made.

“Cut in a hurry, with curved scissors,” was his comment. “Probably manicure scissors.”

The result was a sort of pocket in the curtain, concealed on the chintz side, which was toward the room.

“Probably,” he said, “the curtain would have been better. It would have stayed anyhow. Whereas the bag—” He was flushed with triumph. “How in the world would Hawkins know that?” he demanded. “You can talk all you like. She's told us things that no one ever told her.”

The floor came next. The room had a large rug, like the nursery above it, and turning back the carpet was a simple matter. There had been a stain beneath where the dead man's head had lain, but it had been scrubbed and scraped away. The boards were white for an area of a square foot or so.

Sperry eyed the spot with indifference. “Not essential,” he said. “Shows good housekeeping. That's all. The point is, are there other spots?”

And, after a time, we found what we were after. The upper hall was carpeted, and my penknife came into requisition to lift the tacks. They came up rather easily, as if but recently put in. That, indeed, proved to be the case.

Just outside the dressing-room door the gray boards beneath the carpet had been scraped and scrubbed. With the lifting of the carpet came, too, a strong odor, as of ammonia. But the stain of blood had absolutely disappeared.

“The poor devil fell here,” Sperry said. “There was a struggle, and he went down. He lay there for a while, too, until some plan was thought out. A man does not usually kill himself in a hallway. It's a sort of solitary deed. He fell here, and was dragged into the room.”

We replaced the carpet without fastening it, of course. We went back into the room. The hole in the ceiling had not been repaired again. I wondered at that, but Sperry shrugged his shoulders.

“They will have paperers and plasterers here in a day or so, mark my words,” he said. “The room will be done over. Elinor is a clever woman.”

And I may as well mention here that he was right. My wife the next day told me that she had been to a decorator's, and had been shown samples of wall-paper for the Wells house.

“Poor thing!” she said. “No wonder she wants it done over before she gets back.”

We were startled in our investigations by a loud banging below. Sperry seized his hat.

“The watchman,” he said. “We'd better get out.”

Even then we took the time to glance in at the room from which my overcoat had been taken. But there was nothing there. The room was as I had seen it last, brown paper over the rug and all.

We went down the passage to the kitchen, where the watchman had subsided again into sulky silence. Sperry stopped near the door.

“Open the outer door, Horace,” he said. And to the watchman: “We will put the key under the door, and in ten minutes you may come out. Don't come sooner. I've warned you.”

By the faint light from outside I could see him stooping, not in front of the door, but beside it. And it was well he did, for the moment the key was on the other side, a shot zipped through one of the lower panels. I had not expected it, and it set me to shivering.

OW no more of that,” said Sperry calmly. And I wondered again at the foresightedness which had placed him on the side next the entry, where he did not have to pass the zone of fire.

We made a quick escape into the yard, but we were too late for the alley-way. We heard the officer running along it, and Sperry caught my elbow.

“The fence, quick,” he said.

I am not very good at fences, as a rule, but I leaped that one like a cat, and came down in a barrel of waste-paper on the other side. Getting me out was a breathless matter, finally accomplished by turning the barrel over so that I could crawl out. We could hear the excited voices of the two men beyond the fence, and we ran. I was better than Sperry at that. I ran like a rabbit. I never even felt my legs. And Sperry pounded on behind me.

We heard, behind us, one of the men climbing the fence. But in jumping down he seemed to have struck the side of the overturned barrel. Probably it rolled and threw him. That part of my mind which was not intent on flight heard him fall, and curse loudly.

“Go to it,” Sperry panted behind me. “Roll over and break your neck.”

This, I need hardly explain, was meant for our pursuer.

We turned a corner and were out on one of the main thoroughfares. Instantly, so innate is cunning to the human brain, I fell to walking sedately.

“Don't look back,” said Sperry. “Here comes a car.”

It was the policeman who had followed us, and all he saw was two well-dressed and professional-looking men, one of them rather elderly, who were hailing a street-car. He stared at us very hard, and I had the presence of mind to draw my watch and consult it.

“Just in good time,” I said distinctly, and we mounted the car step. Sperry remained on the platform and lighted a cigar. This gave him a chance to look back.

“Rather narrow squeak, that,” he observed, as he came in and sat down beside me. “Your gray hairs probably saved us.”

I was quite numb from the waist down, from my tumble and from running, and it was some time before I could breathe quietly. Suddenly Sperry fell to laughing.

“I wish you could have seen yourself in that barrel, and crawling out,” he said.

We were, as I had said, just in time for the sitting. Miss Jeremy had already arrived, looking rather pale, as I had noticed she always did before a séance. The color of the day before had faded, and her eyes seemed sunken in her head.

“Not ill, are you?” Sperry asked her, as he took her hand.

“Not at all. But I am anxious. I always am. These things do not come for the calling, and—I should hate to disappoint you.”

“This is the last time. You have promised.”

“This is the last time.”

It had been our custom to leave the general arrangements for the sittings to Herbert. He liked to fuss about, preparing what he called “test conditions.” So it was Herbert who brought the meeting to order shortly after our arrival, by clapping his hands.

{{fqm|“}EMBERS of the Neighborhood Club,” he said impressively, “we have agreed among ourselves that this is to be our last meeting for the purpose that is before us. I have felt, therefore, that in justice to the medium this final séance should leave us with every conviction of its genuineness. Whatever phenomena occur, the medium must be, as she has been, above suspicion. For the replies of her 'control,' no particular precaution seems necessary, or possible. But the first séance divided itself into two parts: an early period when, so far as we could observe, the medium was at least partly conscious, possibly fully so, when physical demonstrations occurred. And a second, or trance period, during which we received replies to questions. It is for the physical phenomena that I am about to take certain precautions.”

“Are you going to tie me?” Miss Jeremy asked.

“Do you object?”

“Not at all, if you will be careful. That is, you may tie me as tight as you wish, if only it is with nothing rough. Not rope, if you have anything else.”

But Herbert had been reading a book on the work of a well-known medium, and was prepared with what he said was the best thing known for the purpose. “I propose,” he said, going into his pockets, “to tie Miss Jeremy with silk thread. It can not possibly hurt her, and if we wrap her, chair and all, thoroughly, the slightest movement will snap the thread.”

The medium made no objection. But the process was a lengthy one, and what with the tying, and perhaps a fear of failure at this, the last sitting she was ever to give, the girl was plainly nervous.

Herbert finished by placing a newspaper across Miss Jeremy's knees. “If she should move,” he said, rather brutally, I thought, “the newspaper will give it away at once.”

She had watched his preparations without smiling. Indeed, her grave face and sunken eyes saved the situation from absurdity. We had worked in full light, but at Mrs. Dane's suggestion Clara was not brought in at once.

“Miss Jeremy says the taking of notes worries her,” she said. “Clara can wait in the hall until she is in the trance.”

“How are we to call her?” I asked. For I had the feeling—we were all novices, remember—that to break the circle would be to destroy the séance.

“Does noise disturb her?”

I thought not, and Sperry corroborated me. “It bothers her,” he said. “She speaks fretfully. That is all.”

Mrs. Dane reflected. “Bring me my stick from the hall, Horace,” she said. “And tell Clara I'll rap with it when I want her.”

I found a stick in the rack outside and brought it in. As I have said, the lights were still on in the chandelier overhead, and as I gave the stick to Mrs. Dane, I heard Sperry speaking sharply behind me.

“Where did you get that stick?” he demanded.

“In the hall. I”

“I never saw it before,” said Mrs. Dane. “Perhaps it is Herbert's.”

But I caught Sperry's eye. We had both recognized it. It was Arthur Wells's, the one which Sperry had taken from his room, and which, in turn, had been taken from Sperry's library'.

“You didn't, by any chance,” Sperry asked cynically, “stop here on your way back from my place the other night, did you?”

“I did. But I didn't bring that thing.”

“Look here, Horace,” he said, more gently, “you come in and see me some day soon. You're not as fit as you ought to be.”

Herbert had arranged the others about the table and now called to us sharply. “Come on,” he said. “Get in this, you two. We're late as it is.”

He put the lights out, and we sat as we had on the preceding nights. But I was uneasy and alarmed. Was Sperry right? Had I brought the wretched thing along, as I had brought the coal-tongs? After all my years of clear thinking and clean living, was I now in the first stage of mental decay?

I gave myself a jerk and sat up in my chair. No, I knew better. I had left Arthur Wells's stick on Sperry's table. I had not brought it to Mrs. Dane's. I knew that, as surely as I knew my name, or that my wife sat across from me, tense and rigid with excitement.

Perhaps my excitement had a bad effect on the medium. She was uneasy, and complained that the threads that bound her arms were tight. She was fretful. Sperry's word had been a good one. But after a time she settled down in her chair. Her figure, a deeper shadow in the semi-darkness of the room, seemed sagged—seemed, in some undefinable way, smaller.

Then, suddenly, a bell that Sperry had placed on the stand beyond the black curtain commenced to ring. It rang at first gently, then violently. It made a hideous clamor. I had a curious sense that it was ringing up in the air, near the top of the curtain. It was a relief to have it thrown to the ground, its racket silenced.

Quite without warning, immediately after, my chair twisted under me. “I am being turned around,” I said, in a low tone. “It is as if something has taken hold of the back of the chair, and is twisting it. It has stopped now.” I had been turned fully a quarter round.

For five minutes, by the luminous dial of my watch on the table before me, nothing further occurred, except that the black curtain appeared to swell, as in a wind.

“There is something behind it,” Alice Robinson said, in a terrorized tone. “Something behind it, moving.”

“It is not possible,” Herbert assured her. “Nothing, that is—there is only one door, and it is closed. I have examined the walls and floor carefully.”

At the end of five minutes something soft and fragrant fell on to the table near me. I had not noticed Herbert when he placed the flowers from Mrs. Dane's table on the stand, and I was more startled than the others. Then the glass prisms in the chandelier over our heads clinked together, as if they had been swept by a finger. More of the flowers came. We were pelted with them.

And then, at last, silence, and the medium in deep trance, and Mrs. Dane rapping on the floor for Clara.

When Clara came in, Mrs. Dane told her to switch on the lights. Miss Jeremy had dropped in her chair until the silk across her chest was held taut. But investigation showed that none of the threads was broken. Sperry cut the ones around her arms with his penknife, and Herbert took advantage of the interval to go behind the curtain. He returned with a lump of soft putty, which he had placed there.

It had been perfectly smooth. Now it bore three dents, as if made by the ends of fingers. It was I who, picking up the silver bell, found that they fitted to the handle. The bell, then, had been inverted by whatever force had sent it ringing to the floor, and had been rammed, handle first, into the putty.

The second part of the sitting was conducted with all lights on. For:

“Well, well,” said the deep voice of the 'control,' “here we are again.”

“Here we are indeed,” said Herbert. “We hope for great things from you to-night.”

“I'll do my best. I'll do my damnedest.”

“Are you taking this, Clara?”

“Yes, Mrs. Dane.”

“Now,” Herbert said, “we want you to go back to the house where you saw the dead man on the floor. You know his name, don't you?”

There was a pause. “Yes. Of course I do. A. L. Wells.”

Arthur had been known to most of us by his Christian name, but the initials were correct.

“How do you know it is an L?”

“On letters,” was the laconic answer. Then: “Letters, letters, who has the letters?”

“Do you know whose cane this is?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell us?”

Up to that time the replies had come easily and quickly. But beginning with the cane question, the medium was in difficulties. She moved uneasily and spoke irritably. The replies were slow and grudging. Foreign subjects were introduced, as now.

“Horace's wife certainly bullies him,” said the voice. “He's afraid of her. And the coal-tongs—the coal-tongs—the coal-tongs!”

“I wish,” I said to Herbert, rather sharply, “that you would not ask leading questions. And Miss Clara need not record that last statement. It is absurd.”

“Whose cane is this?” Herbert demanded.

“Mr. Ellingham's.”

This created a profound sensation.

“How do you know that?”

“He carried it at the seashore. He wrote in the sand with it.”

“What did he write?”

“'Ten o'clock.'”

“He wrote 'ten o'clock' in the sand, and the waves came and washed it away?”

“Yes.”



Here an unfortunate incident occurred. Mrs. Dane's cook had cut her hand, and Clara was hurriedly summoned to the kitchen. The distraction evidently fretted the medium, who remained sulkily silent for five minutes. Not until things were going on as before would she reply to any questions, and when she did speak it was to refer to the cook's mishap.

“She was washing a broken glass,” she said. “Old fool!”

“Is that true, Clara?”

“Yes, Mrs. Dane.”

“Horace,” said my wife, leaning forward, “why not ask her about that stock of mine? If it is going down, I ought to sell, oughtn't I?”

Herbert eyed her with some exasperation.

“We are here to make a serious investigation,” he said. “If the members of the Club will keep their attention on what we are doing, we may get somewhere. Now,” to the medium, “the man is dead, and the revolver is beside him. Did he kill himself?”

“No. He attacked her when he found the letters.”

“And she shot him?”

“I can't tell you that.”

“Try very hard. It is important.”

“I don't know,” was the fretful reply. “She may have. She hated him.

I don't know. She says she did.”

“She says she killed him?”

But there was no reply to this, although Herbert repeated it several times. Instead, the medium reverted to the cook's accident.

“Glass makes a deep cut. It's a nuisance, with the house torn up for cleaning.”

Here, the strange deep voice of the “control” began to recite a verse of poetry—a cheap, sentimental bit of trash. It was maddening, under the circumstances.

“Do you know where the letters are?”

“Hawkins has them.”

“They were not hidden in the curtain?” This was Sperry.

“No. The police might have searched the room.”

“What were these letters?”

There was no direct reply to this, but instead: “He found them when he was looking for his razor-strop. They were in the top of a closet. His revolver was there, too. He went back and got it. It was terrible.” She fell to moaning.

It was a dramatic situation. I can still feel the horror that came over me as I saw, through this strange vision of the young woman in the chair, the details of poor Arthur Wells's last moments. He had loved his wife, she had been, if not unfaithful, at least disloyal. Whether, in his despair, he killed himself, or whether there was a struggle and his wife killed him, a pitiful drama lay unveiled before us.

“And then—” Herbert began, his voice rather husky. “Then”

But there was a crash from the end of the room. Clara had fallen in a dead faint.

N THIS, the final chapter of the record of these séances, I shall give, as I briefly as possible, the events of the day following the third sitting. I shall explain the mystery of Arthur Wells's death, and I shall give the solution arrived at by the Neighborhood Club as to the strange communications from the medium, Miss Jeremy, now Sperry's wife.

But there are some things I can not explain.

Do our spirits live on, on this earth plane, now and then obedient to the wills of those yet living? Do they only pass on into higher space, from which, through the open door of a “sensitive” mind, they reach back now and then, to commit the inadequate absurdities of the physical séance?

Or is Sperry right, and do certain individuals manifest powers of a purely physical nature, but powers which Sperry characterizes as the survival of a dying sixth sense in the race?

We do not know. We have had to accept these things as they have been accepted through the ages, and give them either a spiritual or a purely natural explanation, as our minds happen to be adventurous or analytic in type.

On Tuesday morning I wakened after an uneasy night. I knew certain things, knew them definitely in the clear light of morning. Hawkins had the letters that Arthur Wells had found. That was one thing. I had not taken Ellingham's stick to Mrs. Dane's house. That was another. I had not done it. I had placed it on the table and had not touched it again.

The third thing was that the medium's knowledge went to a certain place, and stopped. Whatever her source of information, it had its limitations. She had not been able to tell us who killed Arthur Wells.

Three people might have done it: Elinor, Hawkins, or young Ellingham. The indications pointed to Elinor, acting in self-defense. But Hawkins seemed to be inextricably mixed with the crime. And the presence of Ellingham's stick in the dressing-room looked odd. This last, however, I felt was no more conclusive than if my own umbrella had been found there. The owner might have left it months ago. He was, as we all knew, a frequent visitor to the house.

But the stick bothered me. We had shown it to Miss Jeremy at the private sitting, Sperry and I, and had got nothing. That it bore in some way on the case, however, I felt sure. To suppose it had been taken from Sperry's house and placed openly in Mrs. Dane's hallway by any but purely human methods, was to concede what I would never concede, and do not now—supernatural interference in human affairs.

I was not followed to my office that morning. The detective had disappeared; as a matter of fact, I never saw him again.

To my surprise, Sperry and Herbert Robinson came together to see me that morning at my office. Sperry, like myself, was pale and tired. But Herbert was restless and talkative, for all the world like a terrier on the scent of a rat.

They had brought a newspaper account of an attempt by burglars to rob the Wells house, and the usual police formula that arrests were expected to be made that day. There was a diagram of the house, and a picture of the kitchen door, with an arrow indicating the bullet-hole.

“Hawkins will be here soon,” Sperry said, rather casually, after I had read the clipping.

“Here?”

“Yes. He is bringing a letter from Miss Jeremy. The letter is merely a blind. We want to see him.”

Herbert was examining the door of my office. He set the spring lock. “He may try to bolt,” he explained. “We're in this pretty deep, you know.”

“How about a record of what he says?” Sperry asked.

I pressed a button, and my confidential secretary came in. “Take the testimony of the man who is coming in, Barber,” I directed. “Take every thing we say, any of us. Can you tell the different voices?”

He thought he could, and took up his position in the next room, with the door partly open.

I can still see Hawkins as Sperry let him in—a tall, cadaverous man of good manners and an English accent, a superior servant. He was cool but rather resentful. I judged that he considered carrying letters as in no way a part of his work, and that he was careful of his dignity.

ISS JEREMY sent this, sir,” he said.

“Thank you, Hawkins. I—Hawkins, we would like to have a little talk with you.”

“Very well, sir.” But his eyes went from one to the other of us.

“You were in the employ of Mr. Wells. We know that. Also we saw you there the night he died, but some time after the death. What time did you get in that night?”

“About midnight. I am not certain.”

“Who told you of what had happened?”

“The governess. She came down-stairs to make Mrs. Wells some tea.”

“You had come in, locked the door, and placed the key outside for the other servants?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How do you expect us to believe that?” Sperry demanded irritably. “There was only one key. Could you lock yourself in and then place the key outside?”

“Yes, sir,” he replied impassively. “By opening the kitchen window, I could reach out and hang it on the nail.”

“You were out of the house, then, at the time Mr. Wells died?”

“I can prove it by as many witnesses as you wish to call.”

“Now, about these letters, Hawkins,” Sperry said. “The letters in the bag. Have you still got them?”

He half rose—we had given him a chair facing the light—and then sat down again. “What letters?”

“Don't beat about the bush. We know you have the letters. And we want them.”

“I don't intend to give them up, sir.”

“Will you tell us how you got them?”

He hesitated. “If you do not know already, I do not care to say.”

I placed the letter to A 31 before him. “You wrote this, I think?” I said.

He was genuinely startled. More than that, indeed, for his face twitched. “Suppose I did?” he said. “I'm not admitting it.”

“Will you tell us for whom it was meant?”

“You know a great deal already, gentlemen. Why not find that out from where you learned the rest?”

“You know, then, where we learned what we know?”

“That's easy,” he said bitterly. “I guess I'm all in. I give up.”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“The letters gave me a hold over somebody. At least I thought they did. But since she's been talking”

“Will you tell us who the person is? I'd better explain, Hawkins. We are not doing police work. But, owing to a chain of circumstances, we have learned that Mr. Wells did not kill himself. He was murdered, or at least shot, by some one else. It may not have been deliberate. Owing to what we have learned, certain people are under suspicion. We want to clear things up for our own satisfaction.”

“Then why is some one taking down what I say in the next room?”

He could only have guessed it, but he saw that he was right, by our faces. He smiled, still bitterly. “Go on,” he said. “Take it down. It can't hurt anybody. I don't know who did it, and that's God's truth.”

And, after long wrangling, that was as far as we got. He suspected who had done it, but he did not know. He absolutely refused to surrender the letters in his possession, and a sense of delicacy, I think, kept us all from pressing the question of the A 31 matter.

“That's a personal affair,” he said. “I've had a good bit of trouble. I'm thinking now of going back to England.”

And, as I say, we did not insist.

When he had gone, there seemed to be nothing to say. He had left the same impression on all of us, I think—of trouble, but not of crime. Of a man fairly driven; of wretchedness that was almost despair. He still had the letters. He had, after all, as much right to them as we had, which was, actually, no right at all. And, whatever it was, he still had his secret.

Herbert was almost childishly crestfallen. Sperry's attitude was more philosophical.

“A woman, of course,” he said. “The A 31 letter shows it. He tried to get her back, perhaps, by holding the letters over her head. And it hasn't worked out. Poor devil! Only—who is the woman?”

It was that night, the fifteenth day after the crime, that the solution came. Came, as a matter of fact, to my

I was in the library, reading, or trying to read, a rather abstruse book of psychic phenomena. My wife, I recall, had just asked me to change a banjo record for “The End of a Pleasant Day,” when the bell rang.

In our modest establishment the maids retire early, and it is my custom, on those rare occasions when the bell rings after nine o'clock, to answer the door myself.

To my surprise, it was Sperry, accompanied by two ladies, one of them heavily veiled. It was not until I had ushered them into the reception-room and lighted the gas, that I saw who they were. It was Elinor Wells, in deep mourning, and Clara, Mrs. Dane's companion and secretary.

I am afraid I was rather excited, for I took Sperry's hat from him and placed it on the head of a marble bust which I had given my wife on our last anniversary, and Sperry says that I drew a smoking-stand up beside Elinor with great care.

I do not know. It has, however, passed into history in the Club, where every now and then for some time Herbert offered one of the ladies a cigar, with my compliments.

My wife, I believe, was advancing along the corridor when Sperry closed the door. As she had only had time to see that a woman was in the room, she was naturally resentful, and retired to the upper floor, where I found her, in tears, some time later.

“Elinor wanted you to know, Horace,” Sperry said. “We may need a legal mind on this. I'm not sure, or rather I think it unlikely. But just in case—suppose you tell him, Elinor.”

I have no record of the story Elinor Wells told that night in our little reception-room, with Clara sitting in a comer, grave and white. It was fragmentary, incoordinate. But I got it all at last.

Young Ellingham had killed Arthur Wells, but in a struggle. In parts the story was sordid enough. She did not spare herself, or her motives. She had wanted luxury, and Arthur had not succeeded as he had promised. They were in debt, and living beyond their means. But even that, she hastened to add, would not have mattered. She had thought she cared for young Ellingham, but the affair had not gone as far as we might think. There were letters, the letters that had been lost. She had met him clandestinely several times, both in the city and at the seashore.

“We walked together,” she said, rather pitifully. “I know it was dreadful, but I was not happy, and Arthur—” She almost broke down. She was looking crushed, almost ill.

On the night of Arthur Wells's death they were dressing for a ball. She had made a private arrangement with Ellingham to plead a headache at the last moment and let Arthur go alone. But he had been so insistent that she had been forced to go, after all. She had sent the governess out to telephone Ellingham not to come, but she had missed him. He had al ready started. She had left the message with a servant.

Elinor was dressed, all but her ball-gown, and had put on a negligée, to wait for the governess to return and help her. Arthur was in his dressing-room, and she heard him grumbling about having no blades for his safety razor.

He got out a case of razors and searched for the strop. When she remembered where the strop was, it was too late. The letters had been beside it, and he was coming toward her, with them in his hand.

She was terrified. He had read only one, but that was enough. He muttered something and turned away. She saw his face as he went toward where the revolver had been hidden from the children, and she screamed.

Young Ellingham heard her. The door had been left unlocked by the governess, and he was in the lower hall. He ran up and the two men grappled. The first shot was fired by Arthur. It struck the ceiling. The second she was doubtful about. She thought the revolver was still in Arthur's hand. It was all horrible. He went down like a stone, in the hallway outside the door.

They were nearly mad, the two of them. They had dragged the body in, and then faced each other.

“We'll have to say it was suicide,” Ellingham said, rather dazed. “If I did it, I didn't mean to. He was aiming for me, and I turned his hand.”

They heard some one in the house, and thought it was the governess. Elinor's first thought was of possible scandal. She sent Ellingham back to the rear of the upper floor, from which he made his escape shortly after. But the governess had not yet come. It was Clara who was in the house.

At the mention of her name the girl, sitting in her corner during the recital, stirred uneasily.

“She had gone from me to Mrs. Dane,” Elinor said. “I was fond of her, and I knew I could trust her. She had used the servants' key to come in. Some of her things were still in the house. I told her we had been struggling, and that I was afraid I had shot him. She is quick. She knew just what to do. Clara says you know what we did. We worked fast. She said a suicide would not have fired one shot into the ceiling, and she fixed that. It was terrible. And all the time he lay there, with his eyes half open!”

HE letters, it seems, were all over the place. Elinor thought of the curtain, but she was afraid of the police. Finally she gave them to Clara, who was to take them away and burn them.

But Clara lost them. Poor Clara, hurrying back to Mrs. Dane's and that first séance! She did not know where she had lost them. They had fallen, in her haste. It might have been then, or on the car. But she was afraid she had left them down-stairs, in the hall, where Hawkins would get them. She was not certain, as her advertisement showed. If Hawkins had them, it was serious.

And here comes in poor Hawkins's story. Clara and he were married, had been married while she was a nursery governess for Mrs. Wells. It was a poor match for her. She was studying stenography, was ambitious. And Hawkins was not of the sort to better himself. They kept the marriage secret, but she had suspected him of an affair, more or less innocent, with a pretty parlor-maid. Finally she left the Wells house, estranged from him.

Even to Clara, Elinor had not told of young Ellingham's part in the affair. She said, truthfully enough, that there had been a quarrel over the letters. That was all Clara knew.

The loss of the letters drove Clara almost frantic. She waited for a few days, expecting if Hawkins had them that he would show his hand, but he did not.

She took up Elinor's story here. “When he did not,” she said, “I advertised. But there was no answer. Miss Jeremy had said perhaps he had them. She had been so accurate in the other things that I thought she was right in this too. But since I have not heard from him, I suppose”

Her voice trailed off. Perhaps I am growing sentimental in my old age, but I fancied there was more in Clara's voice than resentment. There was a note that was more like grief. If she still cared for Hawkins, things were not hopeless. For he was eating his heart out, plainly enough.

To a certain point, except for the loss of the letters, things had gone as well as they could go. The police had accepted the suicide without question, and had made no examination of the room.

But the investigations of the Neighborhood Club, commenced that very evening of Arthur Wells's death, had been the beginning of the end.

“I had to take it all down,” poor Clara moaned. “I lived it all over again. And every Monday evening it has been the same. Sometimes I thought I would faint. I tried to think of other things, but the medium—” She covered her eyes.

It was all tragic enough, tragic and terrible.

“Where is Ellingham?”

“In town, I think,” Elinor said. “I have seen him just once. Clara sent for me after the second sitting at Mrs. Dane's house, and said that the medium had described everything, and that you were going on, that you meant to probe the whole thing. I warned him then, and I think he went to the house. The second bullet was somewhere in the ceiling, or in the floor of the nursery. I thought it ought to be found. I don't know whether he found it or not.”

She had sat, clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap. She was a proud woman, and surrender had come hard. The struggle was marked in her face. She looked as though she had not slept for days.

“You think I am frightened,” she said slowly, “And I am, terribly frightened. But not about discovery. That has come, and can not be helped.”

“Then why?”

“How does this woman, this medium, know these things?” Her voice rose, with an unexpected hysterical catch. “It is superhuman. I am almost mad.”

And then I knew. I saw that Sperry knew also. Clara had told Elinor of the sittings, and had shown her notes. One after the other, day after day, things that they had held to be buried with Arthur Wells had come to the light. Small wonder that, to the nerves of the two women, a hand that was not human had unearthed them.

To Elinor Wells the hand was that of her dead husband.

E'RE going to get to the bottom of this,” Sperry said soothingly. “Be sure that it is not what you think it is, Elinor. There's a simple explanation, and I think I've got it. What about the stick that was taken from my library'?”

“How did you get it?”

“I took it out of the room that night.”

“Mr. Ellingham knew he had left it, but I could not find it. Then he found Mr. Johnson's overcoat. You remember, don't you?”

“I'm not likely to forget it.”

“Clara's notes were in it. He called her up and asked her if it was his stick. He described the one he had left in the room. Tell them, Clara.”

“I stole it,” Clara said, looking straight ahead. “We had to have it. I knew at the second sitting that it was his.”

“When did you take it?”

“On Monday morning. I went for Mrs. Dane's medicine, and you had promised her a book. Do you remember? I told your man, and he allowed me to go up to the library. It was there, on the table. I had expected to have to search for it, but it was lying out. I fastened it to my belt, under my long coat.”

“And placed it in the rack at Mrs. Dane's?” Sperry was watching her intently, with the same sort of grim smile he wears when examining a chest.

“I put it in the closet in my room. I meant to get rid of it, when I had a little time. I don't know how it got down-stairs, but I think”

“Yes?”

“We are house-cleaning. A housemaid was washing closets. I suppose she found it and, thinking it was one of Mrs. Dane's, took it down-stairs. That is, unless—” It was clear that, like Elinor, she had a supernatural explanation in her mind. She looked gaunt and haggard.

“Clara,” Sperry said suddenly, “are you color-blind?”

HE flushed, a triangle of purplish color on her pale cheeks. “I am not very good about colors,” she confessed.

“Did you see, the day you advertised for your bag, another similar advertisement?”

“I saw it. It frightened me.”

“You have no idea who inserted it?”

“None whatever.”

“Did you ever see Miss Jeremy before the first sitting? Or hear of her?”

“Never.”

“Or between the séances?”

“No.”

Elinor rose and drew her veil down. “We must go,” she said. “I—surely now you will cease these terrible investigations. I can not stand much more. I am going mad.”

“There will be no more séances,” Sperry said gravely.

“And—what are you going to do?” She turned to me, I dare say because I represented what to her was her supreme dread, the law.

“My dear girl,” I said, “we are not going to do anything. The Neighborhood Club has been doing a little amateur research work, which is now over. That is all.”

Sperry took them away in his car, but he turned on the door-step. “Wait down-stairs for me,” he said. “I am coming back.”

I was uneasy about my wife, and when he had gone I went to the foot of the staircase and called up to her. Although she must have heard me, she did not reply, so I went to the library and waited. I was not very comfortable. Things were all wrong, I felt: my wife indignant and, I may even say, sulking, and our great mystery solved—by another mystery!

For where were we, after all? We had the medium's story elaborated and confirmed. But the fact remained that, step by step, through her unknown “control,” the Neighborhood Club had followed a crime from its beginning, or almost its beginning, to its end.

Was everything on which I had built my life to go? Its philosophy, its science, even its theology? Before the revelations of a young woman who knew hardly the rudiments of the very things she was destroying?

Was death, then, not peace and an awakening to new things, but a wretched and dissociated clutching after the old? A wrench which only lessened but did not break our earthly ties?

It was well that Sperry came back when he did, bringing with him a breath of fresh night air and stalwart sanity. He found me pacing the room.

“The thing I want to know,” I said fretfully, “is where this leaves us? Where are we? For God's sake, where are we?”

“First of all,” he said, “have you anything to drink? Not for me. For yourself. You look sick.”

“We do not keep intoxicants in the house.”

“Where is it, Horace?”

I drew a chair before the book-shelves, which in old-fashioned house reach almost to the ceiling, and, withdrawing a volume of Josephus, I brought down the bottle.

“Gin!” said Sperry. “Which does not leave behind it any telltale aura, eh, Horace?”

“Only now and then, when I have had a bad day,” I explained. “I find that it makes me sleepy.”

He poured some out and I drank it, being careful to rinse the glass afterward.

“Well,” said Sperry, when he had lighted a cigar, “so you want to know where we are?”

“I would like to save something out of the wreck.”

“That's easy. Horace, you should be a heart specialist, and I should have taken the law. It's as plain as the alphabet.” He took his notes of the sittings from his pocket. “I'm going to read a few things. Keep what is left of your mind on them. This is from the first sitting.

“'The knee is very bad. It aches. Knee, knee, knee. A bad knee.'

“'Arnica is a good thing.'

“'I want to go out. I want air. The drawing-room furniture is scattered all over the house.' (That is repeated.)

“Now the second sitting:

“'It is very hard to find places for all the furniture.'

“'Water, children,' and 'ten o'clock' repeated several times.

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

“'It will be terrible if the letters are found!'

“'Hawkins may have it. He was always hanging round.'

“'Pest! That's Hawkins.'

“Now the third sitting:

“'Horace's wife certainly bullies him. He's afraid of her. And the coal-tongs!'”

“Every one who knows us—” I began. But he read on:

“'She was washing a broken glass. Old fool!'

“'Glass makes a deep cut. It's a nuisance, with the house torn up for cleaning.'

“At that point,” he finished, “Clara fainted, you remember.”

“Yes. But what has all this to do with the case?” I demanded. “Every séance has its mass of irrelevant material.”

“Irrelevant nonsense!” he snapped. “Wake up, Horace. First of all, one thing has bothered us. The color of the kimono was given as yellow. We knew it was green. Second, at the last sitting, when Clara was called out, things stopped.”

“I do not believe she was Miss Jeremy's accomplice,” I said firmly.

“Nor do I. Or that she was an ice-water pitcher, or a silk umbrella, or a sow's ear. My dear Horace, did you ever hear of mind-reading?”

“Mind-reading!” I said, almost feebly.

“Remember,” he said, “I’m not explaining the physical phenomena. We'll never do that. It wasn’t extraordinary, as such things go. Our little medium is a clever mind-reader, that‘s all. And Heaven help me when I marry her!”

ND that is, after all, the explanation of the Wells case. Even Clara's color-blindness, which had so bewildered us, now became a deciding factor in the solution. Poor Clara, her mind full of trouble, and each thought, each agony, reproduced on the retina of the medium’s mind, mentally visualized and spoken.

Even her frantic attempts to keep from hysteria by thinking of the drawing-room furniture, her aching knee, when in her haste on the night of the first sitting she had fallen and bruised it, her recollection, when young Ellingham's stick was produced, of having seen him writing in the sand with it—a message to Elinor, no doubt, which the sea promptly erased—her resentful attitude to Hawkins, her terror about the lost letters—everything, dragged to the surface and revealed.

To explain a mystery by a mystery! That is what we have done. For mental waves remain a mystery, acknowledged, as is electricity, but of a nature yet unrevealed. Thoughts are things. That is all we know.

Mrs. Dane, I believe, had suspected the solution from the start.

The Neighborhood Club has recently disbanded. We tried other things, but we had been spoiled. Our Kipling winter was a failure. We read a play or two, with Sperry's wife reading the heroine, and the rest of us taking other parts. She has a lovely voice, has Mrs. Sperry.

But it was all stale and unprofitable, after the Wells affair. With Herbert gone now as a correspondent to the war, and Mrs. Dane at a sanatorium for the winter, we have given it all up.

Clara and Hawkins are living together, but rather stormily, I fear. Alice Robinson took her place with Mrs. Dane.

In the evenings I read, or, as lately, I have been making this record of the Wells case from our notes. My wife is still fond of the phonograph, and even now, as I make this last entry and complete my narrative, she is waiting for me to change the record. I will be frank. I hate the phonograph. I hope it will be destroyed, or stolen. I am thinking very seriously of having it stolen.

“Horace,” says my wife, “whatever would we do without the phonograph? I wish you would put it in the burglar-insurance policy. I am always afraid it will be stolen.”

Even here, you see! Truly, thoughts are things.