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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sight Unseen, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Sight Unseen
+
+Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+Posting Date: November 7, 2008 [EBook #1960]
+Release Date: November, 1999
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SIGHT UNSEEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+SIGHT UNSEEN
+
+By Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+The rather extraordinary story revealed by the experiments of the
+Neighborhood Club have been until now a matter only of private record.
+But it seems to me, as an active participant in the investigations, that
+they should be given to the public; not so much for what they will add
+to the existing data on psychical research, for from that angle they
+were not unusual, but as yet another exploration into that still
+uncharted territory, the human mind.
+
+The psycho-analysts have taught us something about the individual mind.
+They have their own patter, of complexes and primal instincts, of
+the unconscious, which is a sort of bonded warehouse from which we
+clandestinely withdraw our stored thoughts and impressions. They lay
+to this unconscious mind of ours all phenomena that cannot otherwise
+be labeled, and ascribe such demonstrations of power as cannot thus be
+explained to trickery, to black silk threads and folding rods, to slates
+with false sides and a medium with chalk on his finger nail.
+
+In other words, they give us subjective mind but never objective mind.
+They take the mind and its reactions on itself and on the body. But
+what about objective mind? Does it make its only outward manifestations
+through speech and action? Can we ignore the effect of mind on mind,
+when there are present none of the ordinary media of communication? I
+think not.
+
+In making the following statement concerning our part in the strange
+case of Arthur Wells, a certain allowance must be made for our ignorance
+of so-called psychic phenomena, and also for the fact that since that
+time, just before the war, great advances have been made in scientific
+methods of investigation. For instance, we did not place Miss Jeremy's
+chair on a scale, to measure for any loss of weight. Also the theory
+of rods of invisible matter emanating from the medium's body, to move
+bodies at a distance from her, had only been evolved; and none of the
+methods for calculation of leverages and strains had been formulated, so
+far as I know.
+
+To be frank, I am quite convinced that, even had we known of these
+so-called explanations, which in reality explain nothing, we would
+have ignored them as we became involved in the dramatic movement of
+the revelations and the personal experiences which grew out of them. I
+confess that following the night after the first seance any observations
+of mine would have been of no scientific value whatever, and I believe I
+can speak for the others also.
+
+Of the medium herself I can only say that we have never questioned her
+integrity. The physical phenomena occurred before she went into trance,
+and during that time her forearms were rigid. During the deep trance,
+with which this unusual record deals, she spoke in her own voice, but in
+a querulous tone, and Sperry's examination of her pulse showed that it
+went from eighty normal to a hundred and twenty and very feeble.
+
+With this preface I come to the death of Arthur Wells, our acquaintance
+and neighbor, and the investigation into that death by a group of six
+earnest people who call themselves the Neighborhood Club.
+
+*****
+
+The Neighborhood Club was organized in my house. It was too small really
+to be called a club, but women have a way these days of conferring a
+titular dignity on their activities, and it is not so bad, after all.
+The Neighborhood Club it really was, composed of four of our neighbors,
+my wife, and myself.
+
+We had drifted into the habit of dining together on Monday evenings
+at the different houses. There were Herbert Robinson and his sister
+Alice--not a young woman, but clever, alert, and very alive; Sperry, the
+well-known heart specialist, a bachelor still in spite of much feminine
+activity; and there was old Mrs. Dane, hopelessly crippled as to the
+knees with rheumatism, but one of those glowing and kindly souls that
+have a way of being a neighborhood nucleus. It was around her that we
+first gathered, with an idea of forming for her certain contact points
+with the active life from which she was otherwise cut off. But she gave
+us, I am sure, more than we brought her, and, as will be seen later, her
+shrewdness was an important element in solving our mystery.
+
+In addition to these four there were my wife and myself.
+
+It had been our policy to take up different subjects for these
+neighborhood dinners. Sperry was a reformer in his way, and on his
+nights we generally took up civic questions. He was particularly
+interested in the responsibility of the state to the sick poor. My wife
+and I had "political" evenings. Not really politics, except in their
+relation to life. I am a lawyer by profession, and dabble a bit in city
+government. The Robinsons had literature.
+
+Don't misunderstand me. We had no papers, no set programs. On the
+Robinson evenings we discussed editorials and current periodicals, as
+well as the new books and plays. We were frequently acrimonious, I fear,
+but our small wrangles ended with the evening. Robinson was the literary
+editor of a paper, and his sister read for a large publishing house.
+
+Mrs. Dane was a free-lance. "Give me that privilege," she begged. "At
+least, until you find my evenings dull. It gives me, during all the week
+before you come, a sort of thrilling feeling that the world is mine to
+choose from." The result was never dull. She led us all the way from
+moving-pictures to modern dress. She led us even further, as you will
+see.
+
+On consulting my note-book I find that the first evening which directly
+concerns the Arthur Wells case was Monday, November the second, of last
+year.
+
+It was a curious day, to begin with. There come days, now and then,
+that bring with them a strange sort of mental excitement. I have never
+analyzed them. With me on this occasion it took the form of nervous
+irritability, and something of apprehension. My wife, I remember,
+complained of headache, and one of the stenographers had a fainting
+attack.
+
+I have often wondered for how much of what happened to Arthur Wells the
+day was responsible. There are days when the world is a place for love
+and play and laughter. And then there are sinister days, when the earth
+is a hideous place, when even the thought of immortality is unbearable,
+and life itself a burden; when all that is riotous and unlawful comes
+forth and bares itself to the light.
+
+This was such a day.
+
+I am fond of my friends, but I found no pleasure in the thought of
+meeting them that evening. I remembered the odious squeak in the wheels
+of Mrs. Dane's chair. I resented the way Sperry would clear his throat.
+I read in the morning paper Herbert Robinson's review of a book I had
+liked, and disagreed with him. Disagreed violently. I wanted to call him
+on the telephone and tell him that he was a fool. I felt old, although I
+am only fifty-three, old and bitter, and tired.
+
+With the fall of twilight, things changed somewhat. I was more passive.
+Wretchedness encompassed me, but I was not wretched. There was violence
+in the air, but I was not violent. And with a bath and my dinner clothes
+I put away the horrors of the day.
+
+My wife was better, but the cook had given notice.
+
+"There has been quarreling among the servants all day," my wife said. "I
+wish I could go and live on a desert island."
+
+We have no children, and my wife, for lack of other interests, finds her
+housekeeping an engrossing and serious matter. She is in the habit
+of bringing her domestic difficulties to me when I reach home in the
+evenings, a habit which sometimes renders me unjustly indignant. Most
+unjustly, for she has borne with me for thirty years and is known
+throughout the entire neighborhood as a perfect housekeeper. I can close
+my eyes and find any desired article in my bedroom at any time.
+
+We passed the Wellses' house on our way to Mrs. Dane's that night, and
+my wife commented on the dark condition of the lower floor.
+
+"Even if they are going out," she said, "it would add to the appearance
+of the street to leave a light or two burning. But some people have no
+public feeling."
+
+I made no comment, I believe. The Wellses were a young couple, with
+children, and had been known to observe that they considered the
+neighborhood "stodgy." And we had retaliated, I regret to say, in kind,
+but not with any real unkindness, by regarding them as interlopers. They
+drove too many cars, and drove them too fast; they kept a governess and
+didn't see enough of their children; and their English butler made our
+neat maids look commonplace.
+
+There is generally, in every old neighborhood, some one house on which
+is fixed, so to speak, the community gaze, and in our case it was on
+the Arthur Wellses'. It was a curious, not unfriendly staring, much
+I daresay like that of the old robin who sees two young wild canaries
+building near her.
+
+We passed the house, and went on to Mrs. Dane's.
+
+She had given us no inkling of what we were to have that night, and my
+wife conjectured a conjurer! She gave me rather a triumphant smile when
+we were received in the library and the doors into the drawing-room were
+seen to be tightly closed.
+
+We were early, as my wife is a punctual person, and soon after our
+arrival Sperry came. Mrs. Dane was in her chair as usual, with her
+companion in attendance, and when she heard Sperry's voice outside she
+excused herself and was wheeled out to him, and together we heard them
+go into the drawing-room. When the Robinsons arrived she and Sperry
+reappeared, and we waited for her customary announcement of the
+evening's program. When none came, even during the meal, I confess that
+my curiosity was almost painful.
+
+I think, looking back, that it was Sperry who turned the talk to the
+supernatural, and that, to the accompaniment of considerable gibing by
+the men, he told a ghost story that set the women to looking back over
+their shoulders into the dark corners beyond the zone of candle-light.
+All of us, I remember, except Sperry and Mrs. Dane, were skeptical as
+to the supernatural, and Herbert Robinson believed that while there were
+so-called sensitives who actually went into trance, the controls which
+took possession of them were buried personalities of their own, released
+during trance from the sub-conscious mind.
+
+"If not," he said truculently, "if they are really spirits, why can't
+they tell us what is going on, not in some vague place where they are
+always happy, but here and now, in the next house? I don't ask for
+prophecy, but for some evidence of their knowledge. Are the Germans
+getting ready to fight England? Is Horace here the gay dog some of us
+suspect?"
+
+As I am the Horace in question, I must explain that Herbert was merely
+being facetious. My life is a most orderly and decorous one. But my
+wife, unfortunately, lacks a sense of humor, and I felt that the remark
+might have been more fortunate.
+
+"Physical phenomena!" scoffed the cynic. "I've seen it all--objects
+moving without visible hands, unexplained currents of cold air, voice
+through a trumpet--I know the whole rotten mess, and I've got a book
+which tells how to do all the tricks. I'll bring it along some night."
+
+Mrs. Dane smiled, and the discussion was dropped for a time. It was
+during the coffee and cigars that Mrs. Dane made her announcement. As
+Alice Robinson takes an after-dinner cigarette, a custom my wife greatly
+deplores, the ladies had remained with us at the table.
+
+"As a matter of fact, Herbert," she said, "we intend to put your
+skepticism to the test tonight. Doctor Sperry has found a medium for us,
+a non-professional and a patient of his, and she has kindly consented to
+give us a sitting."
+
+Herbert wheeled and looked at Sperry.
+
+"Hold up your right hand and state by your honor as a member in good
+standing that you have not primed her, Sperry."
+
+Sperry held up his hand.
+
+"Absolutely not," he said, gravely. "She is coming in my car. She
+doesn't know to what house or whose. She knows none of you. She is a
+stranger to the city, and she will not even recognize the neighborhood."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The butler wheeled out Mrs. Dane's chair, as her companion did not dine
+with her on club nights, and led us to the drawing-room doors. There
+Sperry threw them, open, and we saw that the room had been completely
+metamorphosed.
+
+Mrs. Dane's drawing-room is generally rather painful. Kindly soul that
+she is, she has considered it necessary to preserve and exhibit there
+the many gifts of a long lifetime. Photographs long outgrown, onyx
+tables, a clutter of odd chairs and groups of discordant bric-a-brac
+usually make the progress of her chair through it a precarious and
+perilous matter. We paused in the doorway, startled.
+
+The room had been dismantled. It opened before us, walls and
+chimney-piece bare, rugs gone from the floor, even curtains taken from
+the windows. To emphasize the change, in the center stood a common pine
+table, surrounded by seven plain chairs. All the lights were out save
+one, a corner bracket, which was screened with a red-paper shade.
+
+She watched our faces with keen satisfaction. "Such a time I had doing
+it!" she said. "The servants, of course, think I have gone mad. All
+except Clara. I told her. She's a sensible girl."
+
+Herbert chuckled.
+
+"Very neat," he said, "although a chair or two for the spooks would have
+been no more than hospitable. All right. Now bring on your ghosts."
+
+My wife, however, looked slightly displeased. "As a church-woman," she
+said, "I really feel that it is positively impious to bring back the
+souls of the departed, before they are called from on High."
+
+"Oh, rats," Herbert broke in rudely. "They'll not come. Don't worry. And
+if you hear raps, don't worry. It will probably be the medium cracking
+the joint of her big toe."
+
+There was still a half hour until the medium's arrival. At Mrs. Dane's
+direction we employed it in searching the room. It was the ordinary
+rectangular drawing-room, occupying a corner of the house. Two windows
+at the end faced on the street, with a patch of railed-in lawn beneath
+them. A fire-place with a dying fire and flanked by two other windows,
+occupied the long side opposite the door into the hall. These windows,
+opening on a garden, were closed by outside shutters, now bolted. The
+third side was a blank wall, beyond which lay the library. On the fourth
+side were the double doors into the hall.
+
+As, although the results we obtained were far beyond any expectations,
+the purely physical phenomena were relatively insignificant, it is not
+necessary to go further into the detail of the room. Robinson has done
+that, anyhow, for the Society of Psychical Research, a proceeding
+to which I was opposed, as will be understood by the close of the
+narrative.
+
+Further to satisfy Mrs. Dane, we examined the walls and floor-boards
+carefully, and Herbert, armed with a candle, went down to the cellar
+and investigated from below, returning to announce in a loud voice which
+made us all jump that it seemed all clear enough down there. After that
+we sat and waited, and I daresay the bareness and darkness of the
+room put us into excellent receptive condition. I know that I myself,
+probably owing to an astigmatism, once or twice felt that I saw wavering
+shadows in corners, and I felt again some of the strangeness I had felt
+during the day. We spoke in whispers, and Alice Robinson recited the
+history of a haunted house where she had visited in England. But Herbert
+was still cynical. He said, I remember:
+
+"Here we are, six intelligent persons of above the average grade, and in
+a few minutes our hair will be rising and our pulses hammering while a
+Choctaw Indian control, in atrocious English, will tell us she is happy
+and we are happy and so everybody's happy. Hanky panky!"
+
+"You may be as skeptical as you please, if you will only be fair,
+Herbert," Mrs. Dane said.
+
+"And by that you mean--"
+
+"During the sitting keep an open mind and a closed mouth," she replied,
+cheerfully.
+
+As I said at the beginning, this is not a ghost story. Parts of it we
+now understand, other parts we do not. For the physical phenomena we
+have no adequate explanation. They occurred. We saw and heard them. For
+the other part of the seance we have come to a conclusion satisfactory
+to ourselves, a conclusion not reached, however, until some of us had
+gone through some dangerous experiences, and had been brought into
+contact with things hitherto outside the orderly progression of our
+lives.
+
+But at no time, although incredible things happened, did any one of us
+glimpse that strange world of the spirit that seemed so often almost
+within our range of vision.
+
+Miss Jeremy, the medium, was due at 8:30 and at 8:20 my wife assisted
+Mrs. Dane into one of the straight chairs at the table, and Sperry, sent
+out by her, returned with a darkish bundle in his arms, and carrying a
+light bamboo rod.
+
+"Don't ask me what they are for," he said to Herbert's grin of
+amusement. "Every workman has his tools."
+
+Herbert examined the rod, but it was what it appeared to be, and nothing
+else.
+
+Some one had started the phonograph in the library, and it was playing
+gloomily, "Shall we meet beyond the river?" At Sperry's request we
+stopped talking and composed ourselves, and Herbert, I remember, took
+a tablet of some sort, to our intense annoyance, and crunched it in his
+teeth. Then Miss Jeremy came in.
+
+She was not at all what we had expected. Twenty-six, I should say, and
+in a black dinner dress. She seemed like a perfectly normal young
+woman, even attractive in a fragile, delicate way. Not much personality,
+perhaps; the very word "medium" precludes that. A "sensitive," I think
+she called herself. We were presented to her, and but for the stripped
+and bare room, it might have been any evening after any dinner, with
+bridge waiting.
+
+When she shook hands with me she looked at me keenly. "What a strange
+day it has been!" she said. "I have been very nervous. I only hope I can
+do what you want this evening."
+
+"I am not at all sure what we do want, Miss Jeremy," I replied.
+
+She smiled a quick smile that was not without humor. Somehow I had never
+thought of a medium with a sense of humor. I liked her at once. We
+all liked her, and Sperry, Sperry the bachelor, the iconoclast, the
+antifeminist, was staring at her with curiously intent eyes.
+
+Following her entrance Herbert had closed and bolted the drawing-room
+doors, and as an added precaution he now drew Mrs. Dane's empty wheeled
+chair across them.
+
+"Anything that comes in," he boasted, "will come through the keyhole or
+down the chimney."
+
+And then, eying the fireplace, he deliberately took a picture from the
+wall and set it on the fender.
+
+Miss Jeremy gave the room only the most casual of glances.
+
+"Where shall I sit?" she asked.
+
+Mrs. Dane indicated her place, and she asked for a small stand to be
+brought in and placed about two feet behind her chair, and two chairs
+to flank it, and then to take the black cloth from the table and hang it
+over the bamboo rod, which was laid across the backs of the chairs. Thus
+arranged, the curtain formed a low screen behind her, with the stand
+beyond it. On this stand we placed, at her order, various articles from
+our pockets--I a fountain pen, Sperry a knife; and my wife contributed a
+gold bracelet.
+
+We all felt, I fancy, rather absurd. Herbert's smile in the dim light
+became a grin. "The same old thing!" he whispered to me. "Watch her
+closely. They do it with a folding rod."
+
+We arranged between us that we were to sit one on each side of her, and
+Sperry warned me not to let go of her hand for a moment. "They have a
+way of switching hands," he explained in a whisper. "If she wants to
+scratch her nose I'll scratch it."
+
+We were, we discovered, not to touch the table, but to sit around it at
+a distance of a few inches, holding hands and thus forming the circle.
+And for twenty minutes we sat thus, and nothing happened. She was
+fully conscious and even spoke once or twice, and at last she moved
+impatiently and told us to put our hands on the table.
+
+I had put my opened watch on the table before me, a night watch with a
+luminous dial. At five minutes after nine I felt the top of the table
+waver under my fingers, a curious, fluid-like motion.
+
+"The table is going to move," I said.
+
+Herbert laughed, a dry little chuckle. "Sure it is," he said. "When we
+all get to acting together, it will probably do considerable moving. I
+feel what you feel. It's flowing under my fingers."
+
+"Blood," said Sperry. "You fellows feel the blood moving through the
+ends of your fingers. That's all. Don't be impatient."
+
+However, curiously enough, the table did not move. Instead, my watch,
+before my eyes, slid to the edge of the table and dropped to the floor,
+and almost instantly an object, which we recognized later as Sperry's
+knife, was flung over the curtain and struck the wall behind Mrs. Dane
+violently.
+
+One of the women screamed, ending in a hysterical giggle. Then we heard
+rhythmic beating on the top of the stand behind the medium. Startling
+as it was at the beginning, increasing as it did from a slow beat to
+an incredibly rapid drumming, when the initial shock was over Herbert
+commenced to gibe.
+
+"Your fountain pen, Horace," he said to me. "Making out a statement for
+services rendered, by its eagerness."
+
+The answer to that was the pen itself, aimed at him with apparent
+accuracy, and followed by an outcry from him.
+
+"Here, stop it!" he said. "I've got ink all over me!"
+
+We laughed consumedly. The sitting had taken on all the attributes of
+practical joking. The table no longer quivered under my hands.
+
+"Please be sure you are holding my hands tight. Hold them very tight,"
+said Miss Jeremy. Her voice sounded faint and far away. Her head was
+dropped forward on her chest, and she suddenly sagged in her chair.
+Sperry broke the circle and coming to her, took her pulse. It was, he
+reported, very rapid.
+
+"You can move and talk now if you like," he said. "She's in trance, and
+there will be no more physical demonstrations."
+
+Mrs. Dane was the first to speak. I was looking for my fountain pen, and
+Herbert was again examining the stand.
+
+"I believe it now," Mrs. Dane said. "I saw your watch go, Horace, but
+tomorrow I won't believe it at all."
+
+"How about your companion?" I asked. "Can she take shorthand? We ought
+to have a record."
+
+"Probably not in the dark."
+
+"We can have some light now," Sperry said.
+
+There was a sort of restrained movement in the room now. Herbert turned
+on a bracket light, and I moved away the roller chair.
+
+"Go and get Clara, Horace," Mrs. Dane said to me, "and have her bring a
+note-book and pencil." Nothing, I believe, happened during my absence.
+Miss Jeremy was sunk in her chair and breathing heavily when I came back
+with Clara, and Sperry was still watching her pulse. Suddenly my wife
+said:
+
+"Why, look! She's wearing my bracelet!"
+
+This proved to be the case, and was, I regret to say, the cause of
+a most unjust suspicion on my wife's part. Even today, with all the
+knowledge she possesses, I am certain that Mrs. Johnson believes that
+some mysterious power took my watch and dragged it off the table, and
+threw the pen, but that I myself under cover of darkness placed her
+bracelet on Miss Jeremy's arm. I can only reiterate here what I have
+told her many times, that I never touched the bracelet after it was
+placed on the stand.
+
+"Take down everything that happens, Clara, and all we say," Mrs. Dane
+said in a low tone. "Even if it sounds like nonsense, put it down."
+
+It is because Clara took her orders literally that I am making this
+more readable version of her script. There was a certain amount of
+non-pertinent matter which would only cloud the statement if rendered
+word for word, and also certain scattered, unrelated words with which
+many of the statements terminated. For instance, at the end of the
+sentence, "Just above the ear," came a number of rhymes to the final
+word, "dear, near, fear, rear, cheer, three cheers." These I have cut,
+for the sake of clearness.
+
+For some five minutes, perhaps, Miss Jeremy breathed stertorously, and
+it was during that interval that we introduced Clara and took up our
+positions. Sperry sat near the medium now, having changed places with
+Herbert, and the rest of us were as we had been, save that we no longer
+touched hands. Suddenly Miss Jeremy began to breathe more quietly, and
+to move about in her chair. Then she sat upright.
+
+"Good evening, friends," she said. "I am glad to see you all again."
+
+I caught Herbert's eye, and he grinned.
+
+"Good evening, little Bright Eyes," he said. "How's everything in the
+happy hunting ground tonight?"
+
+"Dark and cold," she said. "Dark and cold. And the knee hurts. It's very
+bad. If the key is on the nail--Arnica will take the pain out."
+
+She lapsed into silence. In transcribing Clara's record I shall make no
+reference to these pauses, which were frequent, and occasionally filled
+in with extraneous matter. For instance, once there was what amounted
+to five minutes of Mother Goose jingles. Our method was simply one
+of question, by one of ourselves, and of answer by Miss Jeremy. These
+replies were usually in a querulous tone, and were often apparently
+unwilling. Also occasionally there was a bit of vernacular, as in the
+next reply. Herbert, who was still flippantly amused, said:
+
+"Don't bother about your knee. Give us some local stuff. Gossip. If you
+can."
+
+"Sure I can, and it will make your hair curl." Then suddenly there was a
+sort of dramatic pause and then an outburst.
+
+"He's dead."
+
+"Who is dead?" Sperry asked, with his voice drawn a trifle thin.
+
+"A bullet just above the ear. That's a bad place. Thank goodness there's
+not much blood. Cold water will take it out of the carpet. Not hot. Not
+hot. Do you want to set the stain?"
+
+"Look here," Sperry said, looking around the table. "I don't like this.
+It's darned grisly."
+
+"Oh, fudge!" Herbert put in irreverently. "Let her rave, or it, or
+whatever it is. Do you mean that a man is dead?"--to the medium.
+
+"Yes. She has the revolver. She needn't cry so. He was cruel to her. He
+was a beast. Sullen."
+
+"Can you see the woman?" I asked.
+
+"If it's sent out to be cleaned it will cause trouble. Hang it in the
+closet."
+
+Herbert muttered something about the movies having nothing on us, and
+was angrily hushed. There was something quite outside of Miss Jeremy's
+words that had impressed itself on all of us with a sense of unexpected
+but very real tragedy. As I look back I believe it was a sort of
+desperation in her voice. But then came one of those interruptions which
+were to annoy us considerably during the series of sittings; she began
+to recite Childe Harold.
+
+When that was over,
+
+"Now then," Sperry said in a businesslike voice, "you see a dead man,
+and a young woman with him. Can you describe the room?"
+
+"A small room, his dressing-room. He was shaving. There is still lather
+on his face."
+
+"And the woman killed him?"
+
+"I don't know. Oh, I don't know. No, she didn't. He did it!"
+
+"He did it himself?"
+
+There was no answer to that, but a sort of sulky silence.
+
+"Are you getting this, Clara?" Mrs. Dane asked sharply. "Don't miss a
+word. Who knows what this may develop into?"
+
+I looked at the secretary, and it was clear that she was terrified. I
+got up and took my chair to her. Coming back, I picked up my forgotten
+watch from the floor. It was still going, and the hands marked
+nine-thirty.
+
+"Now," Sperry said in a soothing tone, "you said there was a shot fired
+and a man was killed. Where was this? What house?"
+
+"Two shots. One is in the ceiling of the dressing-room."
+
+"And the other killed him?"
+
+But here, instead of a reply we got the words, "library paste."
+
+Quite without warning the medium groaned, and Sperry believed the trance
+was over.
+
+"She's coming out," he said. "A glass of wine, somebody." But she did
+not come out. Instead, she twisted in the chair.
+
+"He's so heavy to lift," she muttered. Then: "Get the lather off his
+face. The lather. The lather."
+
+She subsided into the chair and began to breathe with difficulty. "I
+want to go out. I want air. If I could only go to sleep and forget it.
+The drawing-room furniture is scattered over the house."
+
+This last sentence she repeated over and over. It got on our nerves,
+ragged already.
+
+"Can you tell us about the house?"
+
+There was a distinct pause. Then: "Certainly. A brick house. The
+servants' entrance is locked, but the key is on a nail, among the vines.
+All the furniture is scattered through the house."
+
+"She must mean the furniture of this room," Mrs. Dane whispered.
+
+The remainder of the sitting was chaotic. The secretary's notes consist
+of unrelated words and often childish verses. On going over the
+notes the next day, when the stenographic record had been copied on a
+typewriter, Sperry and I found that one word recurred frequently.
+The word was "curtain." Of the extraordinary event that followed the
+breaking up of the seance, I have the keenest recollection. Miss Jeremy
+came out of her trance weak and looking extremely ill, and Sperry's
+motor took her home. She knew nothing of what had happened, and hoped
+we had been satisfied. By agreement, we did not tell her what had
+transpired, and she was not curious.
+
+Herbert saw her to the car, and came back, looking grave. We were
+standing together in the center of the dismantled room, with the lights
+going full now.
+
+"Well," he said, "it is one of two things. Either we've been gloriously
+faked, or we've been let in on a very tidy little crime."
+
+It was Mrs. Dane's custom to serve a Southern eggnog as a sort of
+stir-up-cup--nightcap, she calls it--on her evenings, and we found it
+waiting for us in the library. In the warmth of its open fire, and the
+cheer of its lamps, even in the dignity and impassiveness of the butler,
+there was something sane and wholesome. The women of the party reacted
+quickly, but I looked over to see Sperry at a corner desk, intently
+working over a small object in the palm of his hand.
+
+He started when he heard me, then laughed and held out his hand.
+
+"Library paste!" he said. "It rolls into a soft, malleable ball. It
+could quite easily be used to fill a small hole in plaster. The paper
+would paste down over it, too."
+
+"Then you think?"
+
+"I'm not thinking at all. The thing she described may have taken place
+in Timbuctoo. May have happened ten years ago. May be the plot of some
+book she has read."
+
+"On the other hand," I replied, "it is just possible that it was here,
+in this neighborhood, while we were sitting in that room."
+
+"Have you any idea of the time?"
+
+"I know exactly. It was half-past nine."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+At midnight, shortly after we reached home, Sperry called me on the
+phone. "Be careful, Horace," he said. "Don't let Mrs. Horace think
+anything has happened. I want to see you at once. Suppose you say I have
+a patient in a bad way, and a will to be drawn."
+
+I listened to sounds from upstairs. I heard my wife go into her room and
+close the door.
+
+"Tell me something about it," I urged.
+
+"Just this. Arthur Wells killed himself tonight, shot himself in the
+head. I want you to go there with me."
+
+"Arthur Wells!"
+
+"Yes. I say, Horace, did you happen to notice the time the seance began
+tonight?"
+
+"It was five minutes after nine when my watch fell."
+
+"Then it would have been about half past when the trance began?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was a silence at Sperry's end of the wire. Then:
+
+"He was shot about 9:30," he said, and rang off.
+
+I am not ashamed to confess that my hands shook as I hung up the
+receiver. A brick house, she had said; the Wells house was brick. And so
+were all the other houses on the street. Vines in the back? Well, even
+my own house had vines. It was absurd; it was pure coincidence; it
+was--well, I felt it was queer.
+
+Nevertheless, as I stood there, I wondered for the first time in a
+highly material existence, whether there might not be, after all, a
+spirit-world surrounding us, cognizant of all that we did, touching but
+intangible, sentient but tuned above our common senses?
+
+I stood by the prosaic telephone instrument and looked into the darkened
+recesses of the passage. It seemed to my disordered nerves that back of
+the coats and wraps that hung on the rack, beyond the heavy curtains,
+in every corner, there lurked vague and shadowy forms, invisible when I
+stared, but advancing a trifle from their obscurity when, by turning my
+head and looking ahead, they impinged on the extreme right or left of my
+field of vision.
+
+I was shocked by the news, but not greatly grieved. The Wellses had been
+among us but not of us, as I have said. They had come, like gay young
+comets, into our orderly constellation, trailing behind them their cars
+and servants, their children and governesses and rather riotous friends,
+and had flashed on us in a sort of bright impermanence.
+
+Of the two, I myself had preferred Arthur. His faults were on the
+surface. He drank hard, gambled, and could not always pay his gambling
+debts. But underneath it all there had always been something boyishly
+honest about him. He had played, it is true, through most of the thirty
+years that now marked his whole life, but he could have been made a man
+by the right woman. And he had married the wrong one.
+
+Of Elinor Wells I have only my wife's verdict, and I have found that, as
+is the way with many good women, her judgments of her own sex are rather
+merciless. A tall, handsome girl, very dark, my wife has characterized
+her as cold, calculating and ambitious. She has said frequently, too,
+that Elinor Wells was a disappointed woman, that her marriage, while
+giving her social identity, had disappointed her in a monetary way.
+Whether that is true or not, there was no doubt, by the time they had
+lived in our neighborhood for a year, that a complication had arisen in
+the shape of another man.
+
+My wife, on my return from my office in the evening, had been quite
+likely to greet me with:
+
+"Horace, he has been there all afternoon. I really think something
+should be done about it."
+
+"Who has been where?" I would ask, I am afraid not too patiently.
+
+"You know perfectly well. And I think you ought to tell him."
+
+In spite of her vague pronouns, I understood, and in a more masculine
+way I shared her sense of outrage. Our street has never had a scandal
+on it, except the one when the Berringtons' music teacher ran away with
+their coachman, in the days of carriages. And I am glad to say that that
+is almost forgotten.
+
+Nevertheless, we had realized for some time that the dreaded triangle
+was threatening the repute of our quiet neighborhood, and as I stood
+by the telephone that night I saw that it had come. More than that,
+it seemed very probable that into this very triangle our peaceful
+Neighborhood Club had been suddenly thrust.
+
+My wife accepted my excuse coldly. She dislikes intensely the occasional
+outside calls of my profession. She merely observed, however, that she
+would leave all the lights on until my return. "I should think you could
+arrange things better, Horace," she added. "It's perfectly idiotic the
+way people die at night. And tonight, of all nights!"
+
+I shall have to confess that through all of the thirty years of our
+married life my wife has clung to the belief that I am a bit of a dog.
+Thirty years of exemplary living have not affected this conviction, nor
+had Herbert's foolish remark earlier in the evening helped matters. But
+she watched me put on my overcoat without further comment. When I kissed
+her good-night, however, she turned her cheek.
+
+The street, with its open spaces, was a relief after the dark hall. I
+started for Sperry's house, my head bent against the wind, my mind on
+the news I had just heard. Was it, I wondered, just possible that we had
+for some reason been allowed behind the veil which covered poor Wells'
+last moments? And, to admit that for a moment, where would what we had
+heard lead us? Sperry had said he had killed himself. But--suppose he
+had not?
+
+I realize now, looking back, that my recollection of the other man in
+the triangle is largely colored by the fact that he fell in the great
+war. At that time I hardly knew him, except as a wealthy and self-made
+man in his late thirties; I saw him now and then, in the club playing
+billiards or going in and out of the Wells house, a large, fastidiously
+dressed man, strong featured and broad shouldered, with rather too much
+manner. I remember particularly how I hated the light spats he affected,
+and the glaring yellow gloves.
+
+A man who would go straight for the thing he wanted, woman or power or
+money. And get it.
+
+Sperry was waiting on his door-step, and we went on to the Wells house.
+What with the magnitude of the thing that had happened, and our mutual
+feeling that we were somehow involved in it, we were rather silent.
+Sperry asked one question, however, "Are you certain about the time when
+Miss Jeremy saw what looks like this thing?"
+
+"Certainly. My watch fell at five minutes after nine. When it was all
+over, and I picked it up, it was still going, and it was 9:30."
+
+He was silent for a moment. Then:
+
+"The Wellses' nursery governess telephoned for me at 9:35. We keep a
+record of the time of all calls."
+
+Sperry is a heart specialist, I think I have said, with offices in his
+house.
+
+And, a block or so farther on: "I suppose it was bound to come. To tell
+the truth, I didn't think the boy had the courage."
+
+"Then you think he did it?"
+
+"They say so," he said grimly. And added,--irritably: "Good heavens,
+Horace, we must keep that other fool thing out of our minds."
+
+"Yes," I agreed. "We must."
+
+Although the Wells house was brilliantly lighted when we reached it,
+we had difficulty in gaining admission. Whoever were in the house were
+up-stairs, and the bell evidently rang in the deserted kitchen or a
+neighboring pantry.
+
+"We might try the servants' entrance," Sperry said. Then he laughed
+mirthlessly.
+
+"We might see," he said, "if there's a key on the nail among the vines."
+
+I confess to a nervous tightening of my muscles as we made our way
+around the house. If the key was there, we were on the track of a
+revelation that might revolutionize much that we had held fundamental in
+science and in our knowledge of life itself. If, sitting in Mrs. Dane's
+quiet room, a woman could tell us what was happening in a house a mile
+or so away, it opened up a new earth. Almost a new heaven.
+
+I stopped and touched Sperry's arm. "This Miss Jeremy--did she know
+Arthur Wells or Elinor? If she knew the house, and the situation between
+them, isn't it barely possible that she anticipated this thing?"
+
+"We knew them," he said gruffly, "and whatever we anticipated, it wasn't
+this."
+
+Sperry had a pocket flash, and when we found the door locked we
+proceeded with our search for the key. The porch had been covered with
+heavy vines, now dead of the November frosts, and showing, here and
+there, dead and dried leaves that crackled as we touched them. In the
+darkness something leaped against, me, and I almost cried out. It was,
+however, only a collie dog, eager for the warmth of his place by the
+kitchen fire.
+
+"Here's the key," Sperry said, and held it out. The flash wavered in his
+hand, and his voice was strained.
+
+"So far, so good," I replied, and was conscious that my own voice rang
+strange in my ears.
+
+We admitted ourselves, and the dog, bounding past us, gave a sharp yelp
+of gratitude and ran into the kitchen.
+
+"Look here, Sperry," I said, as we stood inside the door, "they don't
+want me here. They've sent for you, but I'm the most casual sort of an
+acquaintance. I haven't any business here."
+
+That struck him, too. We had both been so obsessed with the scene at
+Mrs. Dane's that we had not thought of anything else.
+
+"Suppose you sit down in the library," he said. "The chances are against
+her coming down, and the servants don't matter."
+
+As a matter of fact, we learned later that all the servants were out
+except the nursery governess. There were two small children. There was a
+servants' ball somewhere, and, with the exception of the butler, it was
+after two before they commenced to straggle in. Except two plain-clothes
+men from the central office, a physician who was with Elinor in her
+room, and the governess, there was no one else in the house but the
+children, asleep in the nursery.
+
+As I sat alone in the library, the house was perfectly silent. But in
+some strange fashion it had apparently taken on the attributes of the
+deed that had preceded the silence. It was sinister, mysterious, dark.
+Its immediate effect on my imagination was apprehension--almost terror.
+Murder or suicide, here among the shadows a soul, an indestructible
+thing, had been recently violently wrenched from its body. The body lay
+in the room overhead. But what of the spirit? I shivered as I thought
+that it might even then be watching me with formless eyes from some dark
+corner.
+
+Overwrought as I was, I was forced to bring my common sense to bear on
+the situation. Here was a tragedy, a real and terrible one. Suppose we
+had, in some queer fashion, touched its outer edges that night? Then
+how was it that there had come, mixed up with so much that might be
+pertinent, such extraneous and grotesque things as Childe Harold, a hurt
+knee, and Mother Goose?
+
+I remember moving impatiently, and trying to argue myself into my
+ordinary logical state of mind, but I know now that even then I was
+wondering whether Sperry had found a hole in the ceiling upstairs.
+
+I wandered, I recall, into the realm of the clairvoyant and the
+clairaudient. Under certain conditions, such as trance, I knew that some
+individuals claimed a power of vision that was supernormal, and I had at
+one time lunched at my club with a well-dressed gentleman in a pince
+nez who said the room was full of people I could not see, but who were
+perfectly distinct to him. He claimed, and I certainly could not refute
+him, that he saw further into the violet of the spectrum than the rest
+of us, and seemed to consider it nothing unusual when an elderly woman,
+whose description sounded much like my great-grand-mother, came and
+stood behind my chair.
+
+I recall that he said she was stroking my hair, and that following that
+I had a distinctly creepy sensation along my scalp.
+
+Then there were those who claimed that in trance the spirit of the
+medium, giving place to a control, was free to roam whither it would,
+and, although I am not sure of this, that it wandered in the fourth
+dimension. While I am very vague about the fourth dimension, I did know
+that in it doors and walls were not obstacles. But as they would not
+be obstacles to a spirit, even in the world as we know it, that got me
+nowhere.
+
+Suppose Sperry came down and said Arthur Wells had been shot above the
+ear, and that there was a second bullet hole in the ceiling? Added to
+the key on the nail, a careless custom and surely not common, we would
+have conclusive proof that our medium had been correct. There was
+another point, too. Miss Jeremy had said, "Get the lather off his face."
+
+That brought me up with a turn. Would a man stop shaving to kill
+himself? If he did, why a revolver? Why not the razor in his hand?
+
+I knew from my law experience that suicide is either a desperate impulse
+or a cold-blooded and calculated finality. A man who kills himself while
+dressing comes under the former classification, and will usually seize
+the first method at hand. But there was something else, too. Shaving
+is an automatic process. It completes itself. My wife has an irritated
+conviction that if the house caught fire while I was in the midst of the
+process, I would complete it and rinse the soap from my face before I
+caught up the fire-extinguisher.
+
+Had he killed himself, or had Elinor killed him? Was she the sort to
+sacrifice herself to a violent impulse? Would she choose the hard way,
+when there was the easy one of the divorce court? I thought not. And the
+same was true of Ellingham. Here were two people, both of them careful
+of appearance, if not of fact. There was another possibility, too.
+That he had learned something while he was dressing, had attacked or
+threatened her with a razor, and she had killed him in self-defence.
+
+I had reached that point when Sperry came down the staircase, ushering
+out the detectives and the medical man. He came to the library door and
+stood looking at me, with his face rather paler than usual.
+
+"I'll take you up now," he said. "She's in her room, in bed, and she has
+had an opiate."
+
+"Was he shot above the ear?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+I did not look at him, nor he at me. We climbed the stairs and entered
+the room, where, according to Elinor's story, Arthur Wells had killed
+himself. It was a dressing-room, as Miss Jeremy had described. A
+wardrobe, a table with books and magazines in disorder, two chairs, and
+a couch, constituted the furnishings. Beyond was a bathroom. On a chair
+by a window the dead mans's evening clothes were neatly laid out, his
+shoes beneath. His top hat and folded gloves were on the table.
+
+Arthur Wells lay on the couch. A sheet had been drawn over the body, and
+I did not disturb it. It gave the impression of unusual length that is
+always found, I think, in the dead, and a breath of air from an open
+window, by stirring the sheet, gave a false appearance of life beneath.
+
+The house was absolutely still.
+
+When I glanced at Sperry he was staring at the ceiling, and I followed
+his eyes, but there was no mark on it. Sperry made a little gesture.
+
+"It's queer," he muttered. "It's--"
+
+"The detective and I put him there. He was here." He showed a place on
+the floor midway of the room.
+
+"Where was his head lying?" I asked, cautiously.
+
+"Here."
+
+I stooped and examined the carpet. It was a dark Oriental, with much red
+in it. I touched the place, and then ran my folded handkerchief over it.
+It came up stained with blood.
+
+"There would be no object in using cold water there, so as not to set
+the stain," Sperry said thoughtfully. "Whether he fell there or not,
+that is where she allowed him to be found."
+
+"You don't think he fell there?"
+
+"She dragged him, didn't she?" he demanded. Then the strangeness of what
+he was saying struck him, and he smiled foolishly. "What I mean is, the
+medium said she did. I don't suppose any jury would pass us tonight as
+entirely sane, Horace," he said.
+
+He walked across to the bathroom and surveyed it from the doorway. I
+followed him. It was as orderly as the other room. On a glass shelf
+over the wash-stand were his razors, a safety and, beside it, in a black
+case, an assortment of the long-bladed variety, one for each day of the
+week, and so marked.
+
+Sperry stood thoughtfully in the doorway.
+
+"The servants are out," he said. "According to Elinor's statement he
+was dressing when he did it. And yet some one has had a wild impulse for
+tidiness here, since it happened. Not a towel out of place!"
+
+It was in the bathroom that he told me Elinor's story. According to her,
+it was a simple case of suicide. And she was honest about it, in her
+own way. She was shocked, but she was not pretending any wild grief.
+She hadn't wanted him to die, but she had not felt that they could go on
+much longer together. There had been no quarrel other than their usual
+bickering. They had been going to a dance that night. The servants
+had all gone out immediately after dinner to a servants' ball and the
+governess had gone for a walk. She was to return at nine-thirty to
+fasten Elinor's gown and to be with the children.
+
+Arthur, she said, had been depressed for several days, and at dinner
+had hardly spoken at all. He had not, however, objected to the dance. He
+had, indeed, seemed strangely determined to go, although she had pleaded
+a headache. At nine o'clock he went upstairs, apparently to dress.
+
+She was in her room, with the door shut, when she heard a shot. She
+ran in and found him lying on the floor of his dressing-room with his
+revolver behind him. The governess was still out. The shot had roused
+the children, and they had come down from the nursery above. She was
+frantic, but she had to soothe them. The governess, however, came in
+almost immediately, and she had sent her to the telephone to summon
+help, calling Sperry first of all, and then the police.
+
+"Have you seen the revolver?" I asked.
+
+"Yes. It's all right, apparently. Only one shot had been fired."
+
+"How soon did they get a doctor?"
+
+"It must have been some time. They gave up telephoning, and the
+governess went out, finally, and found one."
+
+"Then, while she was out--?"
+
+"Possibly," Sperry said. "If we start with the hypothesis that she was
+lying."
+
+"If she cleaned up here for any reason," I began, and commenced a
+desultory examination of the room. Just why I looked behind the bathtub
+forces me to an explanation I am somewhat loath to make, but which will
+explain a rather unusual proceeding. For some time my wife has felt that
+I smoked too heavily, and out of her solicitude for me has limited me
+to one cigar after dinner. But as I have been a heavy smoker for years
+I have found this a great hardship, and have therefore kept a reserve
+store, by arrangement with the housemaid, behind my tub. In self-defence
+I must also state that I seldom have recourse to such stealthy measures.
+
+Believing then that something might possibly be hidden there, I made
+an investigation, and could see some small objects lying there. Sperry
+brought me a stick from the dressing-room, and with its aid succeeded in
+bringing out the two articles which were instrumental in starting us on
+our brief but adventurous careers as private investigators. One was a
+leather razor strop, old and stiff from disuse, and the other a wet bath
+sponge, now stained with blood to a yellowish brown.
+
+"She is lying, Sperry," I said. "He fell somewhere else, and she dragged
+him to where he was found."
+
+"But--why?"
+
+"I don't know," I said impatiently. "From some place where a man would
+be unlikely to kill himself, I daresay. No one ever killed himself, for
+instance, in an open hallway. Or stopped shaving to do it."
+
+"We have only Miss Jeremy's word for that," he said, sullenly. "Confound
+it, Horace, don't let's bring in that stuff if we can help it."
+
+We stared at each other, with the strop and the sponge between us.
+Suddenly he turned on his heel and went back into the room, and a moment
+later he called me, quietly.
+
+"You're right," he said. "The poor devil was shaving. He had it half
+done. Come and look."
+
+But I did not go. There was a carafe of water in the bathroom, and I
+took a drink from it. My hands were shaking. When I turned around I
+found Sperry in the hall, examining the carpet with his flash light, and
+now and then stooping to run his hand over the floor.
+
+"Nothing here," he said in a low tone, when I had joined him. "At least
+I haven't found anything."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+How much of Sperry's proceeding with the carpet the governess had seen
+I do not know. I glanced up and she was there, on the staircase to the
+third floor, watching us. I did not know, then, whether she recognized
+me or not, for the Wellses' servants were as oblivious of the families
+on the street as their employers. But she knew Sperry, and was ready
+enough to talk to him.
+
+"How is she now?" she asked.
+
+"She is sleeping, Mademoiselle."
+
+"The children also."
+
+She came down the stairs, a lean young Frenchwoman in a dark dressing
+gown, and Sperry suggested that she too should have an opiate.
+She seized at the idea, but Sperry did not go down at once for his
+professional bag.
+
+"You were not here when it occurred, Mademoiselle?" he inquired.
+
+"No, doctor. I had been out for a walk." She clasped her hands. "When I
+came back--"
+
+"Was he still on the floor of the dressing-room when you came in?"
+
+"But yes. Of course. She was alone. She could not lift him."
+
+"I see," Sperry said thoughtfully. "No, I daresay she couldn't. Was the
+revolver on the floor also?"
+
+"Yes, doctor. I myself picked it up."
+
+To Sperry she showed, I observed, a slight deference, but when she
+glanced at me, as she did after each reply, I thought her expression
+slightly altered. At the time this puzzled me, but it was explained when
+Sperry started down the stairs.
+
+"Monsieur is of the police?" she asked, with a Frenchwoman's timid
+respect for the constabulary.
+
+I hesitated before I answered. I am a truthful man, and I hate
+unnecessary lying. But I ask consideration of the circumstances. Neither
+then nor at any time later was the solving of the Wells mystery the
+prime motive behind the course I laid out and consistently followed. I
+felt that we might be on the verge of some great psychic discovery, one
+which would revolutionize human thought and to a certain extent human
+action. And toward that end I was prepared to go to almost any length.
+
+"I am making a few investigations," I told her. "You say Mrs. Wells was
+alone in the house, except for her husband?"
+
+"The children."
+
+"Mr. Wells was shaving, I believe, when the--er--impulse overtook him?"
+
+There was no doubt as to her surprise. "Shaving? I think not."
+
+"What sort of razor did he ordinarily use?"
+
+"A safety razor always. At least I have never seen any others around."
+
+"There is a case of old-fashioned razors in the bathroom."
+
+She glanced toward the room and shrugged her shoulders. "Possibly he
+used others. I have not seen any."
+
+"It was you, I suppose, who cleaned up afterwards."
+
+"Cleaned up?"
+
+"You who washed up the stains."
+
+"Stains? Oh, no, monsieur. Nothing of the sort has yet been done."
+
+I felt that she was telling the truth, so far as she knew it, and I then
+asked about the revolver.
+
+"Do you know where Mr. Wells kept his revolver?"
+
+"When I first came it was in the drawer of that table. I suggested that
+it be placed beyond the children's reach. I do not know where it was
+put."
+
+"Do you recall how you left the front door when you went out? I mean,
+was it locked?"
+
+"No. The servants were out, and I knew there would be no one to admit
+me. I left it unfastened."
+
+But it was evident that she had broken a rule of the house by doing so,
+for she added: "I am afraid to use the servants' entrance. It is dark
+there."
+
+"The key is always hung on the nail when they are out?"
+
+"Yes. If any one of them is out it is left there. There is only one key.
+The family is out a great deal, and it saves bringing some one down from
+the servants' rooms at the top of the house."
+
+But I think my knowledge of the key bothered her, for some reason. And
+as I read over my questions, certainly they indicated a suspicion that
+the situation was less simple than it appeared. She shot a quick glance
+at me.
+
+"Did you examine the revolver when you picked it up?"
+
+"I, monsieur? Non!" Then her fears, whatever they were, got the best of
+her. "I know nothing but what I tell you. I was out. I can prove that
+that is so. I went to a pharmacy; the clerk will remember. I will go
+with you, monsieur, and he will tell you that I used the telephone
+there."
+
+I daresay my business of cross-examination, of watching evidence helped
+me to my next question.
+
+"You went out to telephone when there is a telephone in the house?"
+
+But here again, as once or twice before, a veil dropped between us.
+She avoided my eyes. "There are things one does not want the family to
+hear," she muttered. Then, having determined on a course of action, she
+followed it. "I am looking for another position. I do not like it here.
+The children are spoiled. I only came for a month's trial."
+
+"And the pharmacy?"
+
+"Elliott's, at the corner of State Avenue and McKee Street."
+
+I told her that it would not be necessary for her to go to the pharmacy,
+and she muttered something about the children and went up the stairs.
+When Sperry came back with the opiate she was nowhere in sight, and he
+was considerably annoyed.
+
+"She knows something," I told him. "She is frightened."
+
+Sperry eyed me with a half frown.
+
+"Now see here, Horace," he said, "suppose we had come in here, without
+the thought of that seance behind us? We'd have accepted the thing as it
+appears to be, wouldn't we? There may be a dozen explanations for that
+sponge, and for the razor strop. What in heaven's name has a razor strop
+to do with it anyhow? One bullet was fired, and the revolver has one
+empty chamber. It may not be the custom to stop shaving in order to
+commit suicide, but that's no argument that it can't be done, and as to
+the key--how do I know that my own back door key isn't hung outside on a
+nail sometimes?"
+
+"We might look again for that hole in the ceiling."
+
+"I won't do it. Miss Jeremy has read of something of that sort, or heard
+of it, and stored it in her subconscious mind."
+
+But he glanced up at the ceiling nevertheless, and a moment later had
+drawn up a chair and stepped onto it, and I did the same thing. We
+presented, I imagine, rather a strange picture, and I know that the
+presence of the rigid figure on the couch gave me a sort of ghoulish
+feeling.
+
+The house was an old one, and in the center of the high ceiling a
+plaster ornament surrounded the chandelier. Our search gradually
+centered on this ornament, but the chairs were low and our long-distance
+examination revealed nothing. It was at that time, too, that we heard
+some one in the lower hall, and we had only a moment to put our chairs
+in place before the butler came in. He showed no surprise, but stood
+looking at the body on the couch, his thin face working.
+
+"I met the detectives outside, doctor," he said. "It's a terrible thing,
+sir, a terrible thing."
+
+"I'd keep the other servants out of this room, Hawkins."
+
+"Yes, sir." He went over to the sheet, lifted the edge slowly, and then
+replaced it, and tip-toed to the door. "The others are not back yet.
+I'll admit them, and get them up quietly. How is Mrs. Wells?"
+
+"Sleeping," Sperry said briefly, and Hawkins went out.
+
+I realize now that Sperry was--I am sure he will forgive this--in a
+state of nerves that night. For example, he returned only an impatient
+silence to my doubt as to whether Hawkins had really only just returned
+and he quite missed something downstairs which I later proved to have
+an important bearing on the case. This was when we were going out, and
+after Hawkins had opened the front door for us. It had been freezing
+hard, and Sperry, who has a bad ankle, looked about for a walking stick.
+He found one, and I saw Hawkins take a swift step forward, and then
+stop, with no expression whatever in his face.
+
+"This will answer, Hawkins."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Hawkins impassively.
+
+And if I realize that Sperry was nervous that night, I also realize that
+he was fighting a battle quite his own, and with its personal problems.
+
+"She's got to quit this sort of thing," he said savagely and apropos of
+nothing, as we walked along. "It's hard on her, and besides--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"She couldn't have learned about it," he said, following his own trail
+of thought. "My car brought her from her home to the house-door. She
+was brought in to us at once. But don't you see that if there are other
+developments, to prove her statements she--well, she's as innocent as a
+child, but take Herbert, for instance. Do you suppose he'll believe she
+had no outside information?"
+
+"But it was happening while we were shut in the drawing-room."
+
+"So Elinor claims. But if there was anything to hide, it would have
+taken time. An hour or so, perhaps. You can see how Herbert would jump
+on that."
+
+We went back, I remember, to speaking of the seance itself, and to the
+safer subject of the physical phenomena. As I have said, we did not
+then know of those experimenters who claim that the medium can evoke
+so-called rods of energy, and that by its means the invisible "controls"
+can perform their strange feats of levitation and the movement of solid
+bodies. Sperry touched very lightly on the spirit side.
+
+"At least it would mean activity," he said. "The thought of an inert
+eternity is not bearable."
+
+He was inclined, however, to believe that there were laws of which we
+were still in ignorance, and that we might some day find and use the
+fourth dimension. He seemed to be able to grasp it quite clearly. "The
+cube of the cube, or hypercube," he explained. "Or get it this way: a
+cone passed apex-downward through a plane."
+
+"I know," I said, "that it is perfectly simple. But somehow it just
+sounds like words to me."
+
+"It's perfectly clear, Horace," he insisted. "But remember this when
+you try to work it out; it is necessary to use motion as a translator of
+time into space, or of space into time."
+
+"I don't intend to work it out," I said irritably. "But I mean to use
+motion as a translator of the time, which is 1:30 in the morning, to
+take me to a certain space, which is where I live."
+
+But as it happened, I did not go into my house when I reached it. I was
+wide awake, and I perceived, on looking up at my wife's windows, that
+the lights were out. As it is her custom to wait up for me on those rare
+occasions when I spend an evening away from home, I surmised that she
+was comfortably asleep, and made my way to the pharmacy to which the
+Wellses' governess had referred.
+
+The night-clerk was in the prescription-room behind the shop. He had
+fixed himself comfortably on two chairs, with an old table-cover over
+his knee and a half-empty bottle of sarsaparilla on a wooden box beside
+him. He did not waken until I spoke to him.
+
+"Sorry to rouse you, Jim," I said.
+
+He flung off the cover and jumped up, upsetting the bottle, which
+trickled a stale stream to the floor. "Oh, that's all right, Mr.
+Johnson, I wasn't asleep, anyhow."
+
+I let that go, and went at once to the object of our visit. Yes, he
+remembered the governess, knew her, as a matter of fact. The Wellses'
+bought a good many things there. Asked as to her telephoning, he thought
+it was about nine o'clock, maybe earlier. But questioned as to what she
+had telephoned about, he drew himself up.
+
+"Oh, see here," he said. "I can't very well tell you that, can I? This
+business has got ethics, all sorts of ethics."
+
+He enlarged on that. The secrets of the city, he maintained loftily,
+were in the hands of the pharmacies. It was a trust that they kept.
+"Every trouble from dope to drink, and then some," he boasted.
+
+When I told him that Arthur Wells was dead his jaw dropped, but there
+was no more argument in him. He knew very well the number the governess
+had called.
+
+"She's done it several times," he said. "I'll be frank with you. I got
+curious after the third evening, and called it myself. You know the
+trick. I found out it was the Ellingham, house, up State Street."
+
+"What was the nature of the conversations?"
+
+"Oh, she was very careful. It's an open phone and any one could hear
+her. Once she said somebody was not to come. Another time she just said,
+'This is Suzanne Gautier. 9:30, please.'"
+
+"And tonight?"
+
+"That the family was going out--not to call."
+
+When I told him it was a case of suicide, his jaw dropped.
+
+"Can you beat it?" he said. "I ask you, can you beat it? A fellow who
+had everything!"
+
+But he was philosophical, too.
+
+"A lot of people get the bug once in a while," he said. "They come
+in here for a dose of sudden death, and it takes watching. You'd be
+surprised the number of things that will do the trick if you take
+enough. I don't know. If things get to breaking wrong--"
+
+His voice trailed off, and he kicked at the old table cover on the
+floor.
+
+"It's a matter of the point of view," he said more cheerfully. "And my
+point of view just now is that this place is darned cold, and so's the
+street. You'd better have a little something to warm you up before you
+go out, Mr. Johnson."
+
+I was chilled through, to tell the truth, and although I rarely drink
+anything I went back with him and took an ounce or two of villainous
+whiskey, poured out of a jug into a graduated glass. It is with deep
+humiliation of spirit I record that a housemaid coming into my library
+at seven o'clock the next morning, found me, in top hat and overcoat,
+asleep on the library couch.
+
+I had, however, removed my collar and tie, and my watch, carefully
+wound, was on the smoking-stand beside me.
+
+The death of Arthur Wells had taken place on Monday evening. Tuesday
+brought nothing new. The coroner was apparently satisfied, and on
+Wednesday the dead man's body was cremated.
+
+"Thus obliterating all evidence," Sperry said, with what I felt was a
+note of relief.
+
+But I think the situation was bothering him, and that he hoped to
+discount in advance the second sitting by Miss Jeremy, which Mrs.
+Dane had already arranged for the following Monday, for on Wednesday
+afternoon, following a conversation over the telephone, Sperry and I had
+a private sitting with Miss Jeremy in Sperry's private office. I took
+my wife into our confidence and invited her to be present, but the
+unfortunate coldness following the housemaid's discovery of me asleep
+in the library on the morning after the murder, was still noticeable and
+she refused.
+
+The sitting, however, was totally without value. There was difficulty
+on the medium's part in securing the trance condition, and she broke out
+once rather petulantly, with the remark that we were interfering with
+her in some way.
+
+I noticed that Sperry had placed Arthur Wells's stick unobtrusively on
+his table, but we secured only rambling and non-pertinent replies to our
+questions, and whether it was because I knew that outside it was broad
+day, or because the Wells matter did not come up at all I found a total
+lack of that sense of the unknown which made all the evening sittings so
+grisly.
+
+I am sure she knew we had wanted something, and that she had failed to
+give it to us, for when she came out she was depressed and in a state of
+lowered vitality.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm not helping you," she said. "I'm a little tired, I
+think."
+
+She was tired. I felt suddenly very sorry for her. She was so pretty and
+so young--only twenty-six or thereabouts--to be in the grip of forces
+so relentless. Sperry sent her home in his car, and took to pacing the
+floor of his office.
+
+"I'm going to give it up, Horace," he said. "Perhaps you are right. We
+may be on the verge of some real discovery. But while I'm interested, so
+interested that it interferes with my work, I'm frankly afraid to go on.
+There are several reasons."
+
+I argued with him. There could be no question that if things were left
+as they were, a number of people would go through life convinced that
+Elinor Wells had murdered her husband. Look at the situation. She had
+sent out all the servants and the governess, surely an unusual thing in
+an establishment of that sort. And Miss Jeremy had been vindicated in
+three points; some stains had certainly been washed up, we had found the
+key where she had stated it to be, and Arthur had certainly been shaving
+himself.
+
+"In other words," I argued, "we can't stop, Sperry. You can't stop. But
+my idea would be that our investigations be purely scientific and not
+criminal."
+
+"Also, in other words," he said, "you think we will discover something,
+so you suggest that we compound a felony and keep it to ourselves!"
+
+"Exactly," I said drily.
+
+It is of course possible that my nerves were somewhat unstrung during
+the days that followed. I wakened one night to a terrific thump which
+shook my bed, and which seemed to be the result of some one having
+struck the foot-board with a plank. Immediately following this came
+a sharp knocking on the antique bed-warmer which hangs beside my
+fireplace. When I had sufficiently recovered my self-control I turned on
+my bedside lamp, but the room was empty.
+
+Again I wakened with a feeling of intense cold. I was frozen with it,
+and curiously enough it was an inner cold. It seemed to have nothing to
+do with the surface of my body. I have no explanation to make of these
+phenomena. Like the occurrences at the seance, they were, and that was
+all.
+
+But on Thursday night of that week my wife came into my bedroom, and
+stated flatly that there were burglars in the house.
+
+Now it has been my contention always that if a burglar gains entrance,
+he should be allowed to take what he wants. Silver can be replaced,
+but as I said to my wife then, Horace Johnson could not. But she had
+recently acquired a tea set formerly belonging to her great-grandmother,
+and apprehension regarding it made her, for the nonce, less solicitous
+for me than usual.
+
+"Either you go or I go," she said. "Where's your revolver?"
+
+I got out of bed at that, and went down the stairs. But I must confess
+that I felt, the moment darkness surrounded me, considerably less
+trepidation concerning the possible burglar than I felt as to the
+darkness itself. Mrs. Johnson had locked herself in my bedroom, and
+there was something horrible in the black depths of the lower hall.
+
+We are old-fashioned people, and have not yet adopted electric light.
+I carried a box of matches, but at the foot of the stairs the one I had
+lighted went out. I was terrified. I tried to light another match, but
+there was a draft from somewhere, and it too was extinguished before I
+had had time to glance about. I was immediately conscious of a sort of
+soft movement around me, as of shadowy shapes that passed and repassed.
+Once it seemed to me that a hand was laid on my shoulder and was not
+lifted, but instead dissolved into the other shadows around. The sudden
+striking of the clock on the stair landing completed my demoralization.
+I turned and fled upstairs, pursued, to my agonized nerves, by ghostly
+hands that came toward me from between the spindles of the stair-rail.
+
+At dawn I went downstairs again, heartily ashamed of myself. I found
+that a door to the basement had been left open, and that the soft
+movement had probably been my overcoat, swaying in the draft.
+
+Probably. I was not certain. Indeed, I was certain of nothing during
+those strange days. I had built up for myself a universe upheld by
+certain laws, of day and night, of food and sleep and movement, of three
+dimensions of space. And now, it seemed to me, I had stood all my life
+but on the threshold, and, for an hour or so, the door had opened.
+
+Sperry had, I believe, told Herbert Robinson of what we had discovered,
+but nothing had been said to the women. I knew through my wife that they
+were wildly curious, and the night of the second seance Mrs. Dane drew
+me aside and I saw that she suspected, without knowing, that we had been
+endeavoring to check up our revelations with the facts.
+
+"I want you to promise me one thing," she said. "I'll not bother you
+now. But I'm an old woman, with not much more of life to be influenced
+by any disclosures. When this thing is over, and you have come to
+a conclusion--I'll not put it that way: you may not come to a
+conclusion--but when it is over, I want you to tell me the whole story.
+Will you?"
+
+I promised that I would.
+
+Miss Jeremy did not come to dinner. She never ate before a seance. 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 seance. The room was arranged as it had been at the first
+sitting, except that a table with a candle and a chair had been placed
+behind a screen 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. She lifted it,
+and struck the table a hard blow with it.
+
+"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 is inarticulate, 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 Charlie Ellingham
+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?"
+
+"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."
+
+From that point, however, the interest lapsed. Either there was no
+answer to questions, or we got the absurdity that we had encountered
+before, about the drawing-room furniture. But, unsatisfactory in many
+ways as the seance 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.
+
+I remember that Mrs. Dane inquired, after she had gone.
+
+"Does any one know the name of the Wellses' butler? Is it Hawkins?"
+
+I said nothing, and as Sperry was the only one likely to know and he had
+gone, the inquiry went no further. Looking back, I realize that
+Herbert, while less cynical, was still skeptical, that his sister was
+non-committal, but for some reason watching me, and that Mrs. Dane was
+in a state of delightful anticipation.
+
+My wife, however, had taken a dislike to Miss Jeremy, and said that the
+whole thing bored her.
+
+"The men like it, of course," she said, "Horace fairly simpers with
+pleasure while he sits and holds her hand. But a woman doesn't impose on
+other women so easily. It's silly."
+
+"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!"
+
+
+VI
+
+
+I find that the solution of the Arthur Wells mystery--for we did solve
+it--takes three divisions in my mind. Each one is a sitting, followed by
+an investigation made by Sperry and myself.
+
+But for some reason, after Miss Jeremy's second sitting, I found that my
+reasoning mind was stronger than my credulity. And as Sperry had at that
+time determined to have nothing more to do with the business, I made
+a resolution to abandon my investigations. Nor have I any reason to
+believe that I would have altered my attitude toward the case, had it
+not been that I saw in the morning paper on the Thursday following
+the second seance, that Elinor Wells had closed her house, and gone to
+Florida.
+
+I tried to put the fact out of my mind that morning. After all, what
+good would it do? No discovery of mine could bring Arthur Wells back
+to his family, to his seat at the bridge table at the club, to his too
+expensive cars and his unpaid bills. Or to his wife who was not grieving
+for him.
+
+On the other hand, I confess to an overwhelming desire to examine again
+the ceiling of the dressing room and thus to check up one degree further
+the accuracy of our revelations. After some debate, therefore, I called
+up Sperry, but he flatly refused to go on any further.
+
+"Miss Jeremy has been ill since Monday," he said. "Mrs. Dane's
+rheumatism is worse, her companion is nervously upset, and your own wife
+called me up an hour ago and says you are sleeping with a light, and she
+thinks you ought to go away. The whole club is shot to pieces."
+
+But, although I am a small and not a courageous man, the desire to
+examine the Wells house clung to me tenaciously. Suppose there were
+cartridges in his table drawer? Suppose I should find the second bullet
+hole in the ceiling? I no longer deceived myself by any argument that
+my interest was purely scientific. There is a point at which curiosity
+becomes unbearable, when it becomes an obsession, like hunger. I had
+reached that point.
+
+Nevertheless, I found it hard to plan the necessary deception to my
+wife. My habits have always been entirely orderly and regular. My
+wildest dissipation was the Neighborhood Club. I could not recall an
+evening away from home in years, except on business. Yet now I must have
+a free evening, possibly an entire night.
+
+In planning for this, I forgot my nervousness for a time. I decided
+finally to tell my wife that an out-of-town client wished to talk
+business with me, and that day, at luncheon--I go home to luncheon--I
+mentioned that such a client was in town.
+
+"It is possible," I said, as easily as I could, "that we may not get
+through this afternoon. If things should run over into the evening, I'll
+telephone."
+
+She took it calmly enough, but later on, as I was taking an electric
+flash from the drawer of the hall table and putting it in my overcoat
+pocket, she came on me, and I thought she looked surprised.
+
+During the afternoon I was beset with doubts and uneasiness. Suppose
+she called up my office and found that the client I had named was not in
+town? It is undoubtedly true that a tangled web we weave when first we
+practise to deceive, for on my return to the office I was at once quite
+certain that Mrs. Johnson would telephone and make the inquiry.
+
+After some debate I called my secretary and told her to say, if such
+a message came in, that Mr. Forbes was in town and that I had an
+appointment with him. As a matter of fact, no such inquiry came in, but
+as Miss Joyce, my secretary, knew that Mr. Forbes was in Europe, I was
+conscious for some months afterwards that Miss Joyce's eyes occasionally
+rested on me in a speculative and suspicious manner.
+
+Other things also increased my uneasiness as the day wore on. There was,
+for instance, the matter of the back door to the Wells house. Nothing
+was more unlikely than that the key would still be hanging there. I
+must, therefore, get a key.
+
+At three o'clock I sent the office-boy out for a back-door key. He
+looked so surprised that I explained that we had lost our key, and that
+I required an assortment of keys of all sizes.
+
+"What sort of key?" he demanded, eyeing me, with his feet apart.
+
+"Just an ordinary key," I said. "Not a Yale key. Nothing fancy. Just
+a plain back-door key." At something after four my wife called up, in
+great excitement. A boy and a man had been to the house and had fitted
+an extra key to the back door, which had two excellent ones already. She
+was quite hysterical, and had sent for the police, but the officer had
+arrived after they had gone.
+
+"They are burglars, of course!" she said. "Burglars often have boys with
+them, to go through the pantry windows. I'm so nervous I could scream."
+
+I tried to tell her that if the door was unlocked there was no need to
+use the pantry window, but she rang off quickly and, I thought, coldly.
+Not, however, before she had said that my plan to spend the evening out
+was evidently known in the underworld!
+
+By going through my desk I found a number of keys, mostly trunk keys
+and one the key to a dog-collar. But late in the afternoon I visited
+a client of mine who is in the hardware business, and secured quite a
+selection. One of them was a skeleton key. He persisted in regarding
+the matter as a joke, and poked me between the shoulder-blades as I went
+out.
+
+"If you're arrested with all that hardware on you," he said, "you'll be
+held as a first-class burglar. You are equipped to open anything from a
+can of tomatoes to the missionary box in church."
+
+But I felt that already, innocent as I was, I was leaving a trail of
+suspicion behind me: Miss Joyce and the office boy, the dealer and my
+wife. And I had not started yet.
+
+I dined in a small chop-house where I occasionally lunch, and took a
+large cup of strong black coffee. When I went out into the night again
+I found that a heavy fog had settled down, and I began to feel again
+something of the strange and disturbing quality of the day which had
+ended in Arthur Wells's death. Already a potential housebreaker, I
+avoided policemen, and the very jingling of the keys in my pocket
+sounded loud and incriminating to my ears.
+
+The Wells house was dark. Even the arc-lamp in the street was shrouded
+in fog. But the darkness, which added to my nervousness, added also to
+my security.
+
+I turned and felt my way cautiously to the rear of the house. Suddenly I
+remembered the dog. But of course he was gone. As I cautiously ascended
+the steps the dead leaves on the vines rattled, as at the light touch of
+a hand, and I was tempted to turn and run.
+
+I do not like deserted houses. Even in daylight they have a sinister
+effect on me. They seem, in their empty spaces, to have held and
+recorded all that has happened in the dusty past. The Wells house that
+night, looming before me, silent and mysterious, seemed the embodiment
+of all the deserted houses I had known. Its empty and unshuttered
+windows were like blind eyes, gazing in, not out.
+
+Nevertheless, now that the time had come a certain amount of courage
+came with it. I am not ashamed to confess that a certain part of it came
+from the anticipation of the Neighborhood Club's plaudits. For Herbert
+to have made such an investigation, or even Sperry, with his height and
+his iron muscles, would not have surprised them. But I was aware that
+while they expected intelligence and even humor, of a sort, from me,
+they did not anticipate any particular bravery.
+
+The flash was working, but rather feebly. I found the nail where the
+door-key had formerly hung, but the key, as I had expected, was gone. I
+was less than five minutes, I fancy, in finding a key from my collection
+that would fit. The bolt slid back with a click, and the door opened.
+
+It was still early in the evening, eight-thirty or thereabouts. I tried
+to think of that; to remember that, only a few blocks away, some of my
+friends were still dining, or making their way into theaters. But the
+silence of the house came out to meet me on the threshold, and its
+blackness enveloped me like a wave. It was unfortunate, too, that I
+remembered just then that it was, or soon would be, the very hour of
+young Wells's death.
+
+Nevertheless, once inside the house, the door to the outside closed and
+facing two alternatives, to go on with it or to cut and run, I found a
+sort of desperate courage, clenched my teeth, and felt for the nearest
+light switch.
+
+The electric light had been cut off!
+
+I should have expected it, but I had not. I remember standing in the
+back hall and debating whether to go on or to get out. I was not only
+in a highly nervous state, but I was also badly handicapped. However,
+as the moments wore on and I stood there, with the quiet unbroken by no
+mysterious sounds, I gained a certain confidence. After a short period
+of readjustment, therefore, I felt my way to the library door, and into
+the room. Once there, I used the flash to discover that the windows were
+shuttered, and proceeded to take off my hat and coat, which I placed on
+a chair near the door. It was at this time that I discovered that the
+battery of my lamp was very weak, and finding a candle in a tall brass
+stick on the mantelpiece, I lighted it.
+
+Then I looked about. The house had evidently been hastily closed.
+Some of the furniture was covered with sheets, while part of it stood
+unprotected. The rug had been folded into the center of the room, and
+covered with heavy brown papers, and I was extremely startled to hear
+the papers rustling. A mouse, however, proved to be the source of the
+sound, and I pulled myself together with a jerk.
+
+It is to be remembered that I had left my hat and overcoat on a chair
+near the door. There could be no mistake, as the chair was a light one,
+and the weight of my overcoat threw it back against the wall.
+
+Candle in hand, I stepped out into the hail, and was immediately met
+by a crash which reverberated through the house. In my alarm my teeth
+closed on the end of my tongue, with agonizing results, but the sound
+died away, and I concluded that an upper window had been left open, and
+that the rising wind had slammed a door. But my morale, as we say since
+the war, had been shaken, and I recklessly lighted a second candle and
+placed it on the table in the hall at the foot of the staircase, to
+facilitate my exit in case I desired to make a hurried one.
+
+Then I climbed slowly. The fog had apparently made its way into the
+house, for when, halfway up, I turned and looked down, the candlelight
+was hardly more than a spark, surrounded by a luminous aura.
+
+I do not know exactly when I began to feel that I was not alone in
+the house. It was, I think, when I was on a chair on top of a table in
+Arthur's room, with my candle upheld to the ceiling. It seemed to me
+that something was moving stealthily in the room overhead. I stood
+there, candle upheld, and every faculty I possessed seemed centered in
+my ears. It was not a footstep. It was a soft and dragging movement. Had
+I not been near the ceiling I should not have heard it. Indeed, a moment
+later I was not certain that I had heard it.
+
+My chair, on top of the table, was none too securely balanced. I had
+found what I was looking for, a part of the plaster ornament broken
+away, and replaced by a whitish substance, not plaster. I got out my
+penknife and cut away the foreign matter, showing a small hole beneath,
+a bullet-hole, if I knew anything about bullet-holes.
+
+Then I heard the dragging movement above, and what with alarm and my
+insecure position, I suddenly overbalanced, chair and all. My head
+must have struck on the corner of the table, for I was dazed for a
+few moments. The candle had gone out, of course. I felt for the chair,
+righted it, and sat down. I was dizzy and I was frightened. I was afraid
+to move, lest the dragging thing above come down and creep over me in
+the darkness and smother me.
+
+And sitting there, I remembered the very things I most wished to
+forget--the black curtain behind Miss Jeremy, the things flung by unseen
+hands into the room, the way my watch had slid over the table and fallen
+to the floor.
+
+Since that time I know there is a madness of courage, born of terror.
+Nothing could be more intolerable than to sit there and wait. It is
+the same insanity that drove men out of the trenches to the charge and
+almost certain death, rather than to sit and wait for what might come.
+
+In a way, I daresay I charged the upper floor of the house. Recalling
+the situation from this safe lapse of time, I think that I was in a
+condition close to frenzy. I know that it did not occur to me to leap
+down the staircase and escape, and I believe now this was due to a
+conviction that I was dealing with the supernatural, and that on no
+account did I dare to turn my back on it. All children and some adults,
+I am sure, have known this feeling.
+
+Whatever drove me, I know that, candle in hand, and hardly sane, I ran
+up the staircase, and into the room overhead. It was empty.
+
+As suddenly as my sanity had gone, it returned to me. The sight of two
+small beds, side by side, a tiny dressing-table, a row of toys on the
+mantelpiece, was calming. Here was the children's night nursery, a white
+and placid room which could house nothing hideous.
+
+I was humiliated and ashamed. I, Horace Johnson, a man of dignity and
+reputation, even in a small way, a successful after-dinner speaker,
+numbering fifty-odd years of logical living to my credit, had been
+running half-maddened toward a mythical danger from which I had been
+afraid to run away!
+
+I sat down and mopped my face with my pocket handkerchief.
+
+After a time I got up, and going to a window looked down at the quiet
+world below. 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.
+
+Somehow that fact reassured me, and I was able to take stock of my
+surroundings. I realized, for instance, that I stood in the room over
+Arthur's dressing room, and that it was into the ceiling under me that
+the second--or probably the first--bullet had penetrated. I know, as
+it happens, very little of firearms, but I did realize that a shot from
+a.45 Colt automatic would have considerable penetrative power. To be
+exact, that the bullet had probably either lodged itself in a joist, or
+had penetrated through the flooring and might be somewhere over my head.
+
+But my candle was inadequate for more than the most superficial
+examination of the ceiling, which presented so far as I could see an
+unbroken surface. I turned my attention, therefore, to the floor. It was
+when I was turning the rug back that I recognized the natural and not
+supernatural origin of the sound which had so startled me. It had been
+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 the window
+I had opened.
+
+My fears, never long in abeyance that night, roused again. I had
+instantly a conviction that some human figure, sinister and dangerous,
+was lurking in the shadows of that empty floor, and I remember backing
+away from the door and standing in the center of the room, prepared for
+some stealthy, murderous assault. When none came 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
+but there was no one hiding in them.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+The extraordinary thing about the Arthur Wells story was not his
+killing. For killing it was. It was the way it was solved.
+
+Here was a young woman, Miss Jeremy, who had not known young Wells, had
+not known his wife, 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, for instance, an example of a
+great mystery, founded on mere absentmindedness.
+
+This is what my wife terms the mystery of the fire-tongs.
+
+I had left the Wells house as soon as I had made the discovery in the
+night nursery. I carried the candle and the fire-tongs downstairs. I
+was, apparently, calm but watchful. I would have said that I had never
+been more calm in my life. I knew quite well that I had the fire-tongs
+in my hand. Just when I ceased to be cognizant of them was probably
+when, on entering the library, I found that my overcoat had disappeared,
+and that my stiff hat, badly broken, lay on the floor. However, as
+I say, I was still extraordinarily composed. I picked up my hat, and
+moving to the rear door, went out and closed it. When I reached the
+street, however, I had only gone a few yards when I discovered that I
+was still carrying the lighted candle, and that a man, passing by, had
+stopped and was staring after me.
+
+My composure is shown by the fact that I dropped the candle down the
+next sewer opening, 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, 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 intends 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--"
+
+"I 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."
+
+However, if things were in a state of armed neutrality at home, I had
+a certain compensation for them when I told my story to Sperry that
+afternoon.
+
+"You see how it is," I finished. "You can stay out of this, or come in,
+Sperry, but I cannot stop now. He was murdered beyond a doubt, and
+there is an intelligent effort being made to eliminate every particle of
+evidence."
+
+He nodded.
+
+"It looks like it. And this man who was there last night--"
+
+"Why a man?"
+
+"He took your overcoat, instead of his own, didn't he? It may have
+been--it's curious, isn't it, that we've had no suggestion of Ellingham
+in all the rest of the material."
+
+Like the other members of the Neighborhood Club, he had a copy of the
+proceedings at the two seances, and now he brought them out and fell to
+studying them.
+
+"She was right about the bullet in the ceiling," he reflected. "I
+suppose you didn't look for the box of shells for the revolver?"
+
+"I meant to, but it slipped my mind."
+
+He shuffled the loose pages of the record. "Cane--washed away by
+the water--a knee that is hurt--the curtain would have been safer
+--Hawkins--the drawing-room furniture is all over the house. That last,
+Horace, isn't pertinent. It refers clearly to the room we were in. Of
+course, the point is, how much of the rest is also extraneous matter?"
+He re-read one of the sheets. "Of course that belongs, about Hawkins.
+And probably this: 'It will be terrible if the letters are found.' They
+were in the pocketbook, presumably."
+
+He folded up the papers and replaced them in a drawer.
+
+"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. Confound
+it, man, if you had thought of that at the time, we would have something
+to go on today."
+
+"If I had thought of a number of things I'd have stayed out of the place
+altogether," I retorted tartly. "I wish you could help me about the
+fire-tongs, Sperry. I don't seem able to think of any explanation that
+Mrs. Johnson would be willing to accept."
+
+"Tell her the truth."
+
+"I don't think you understand," I explained. "She simply wouldn't
+believe it. And if she did I should have to agree to drop the
+investigation. As a matter of fact, Sperry, I had resorted to subterfuge
+in order to remain out last evening, and I am bitterly regretting my
+mendacity."
+
+But Sperry has, I am afraid, rather loose ideas.
+
+"Every man," he said, "would rather tell the truth, but every woman
+makes it necessary to lie to her. Forget the fire-tongs, Horace, and
+forget Mrs. Johnson to-night. He may not have dared to go back in
+day-light for his overcoat."
+
+"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. However, 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, it will be recalled, 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
+seances. 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 Neighborhood 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 pass 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, as I discovered that afternoon.
+
+"Sit down," she said. "You look half sick, Horace."
+
+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 fire-tongs, Horace.
+The fire-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
+the whole story--of the visit Sperry and I had made the night Arthur
+Wells was shot, and of what we discovered; of the clerk at the
+pharmacy and his statement, and even of the whiskey 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.
+
+She 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 I
+think it only fair to record that she was in possession of facts which
+we did not have, and which she did not divulge until the end.
+
+"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 such careless
+abandon, and which, brown in color and indifferently waved, was
+invariably parting from its mooring. 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 handbag and the letters was
+important. More important, 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 try to trace that bag."
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"How does any one trace lost articles?" she demanded. "By advertising,
+of course. Last Wednesday I advertised for the bag."
+
+I was too astonished to speak.
+
+"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 as I inserted it."
+
+She gave me a small newspaper cutting
+
+"Lost, a handbag containing private letters, car-tickets, etc. Liberal
+reward paid for its return. Please write to A 31, the Daily News."
+
+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!
+
+"You are wasted on us, Mrs. Dane," I acknowledged. "Well? I see
+something has come of it."
+
+"Yes, but I'm not ready for it."
+
+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:
+
+"Lost on the night of Monday, November the second, between State Avenue
+and Park Avenue, possibly on an Eastern Line street car, a black handbag
+containing keys, car-tickets, private letters, and a small sum of money.
+Reward and no questions asked if returned to Daily News office."
+
+She passed the clipping to me and I compared the two. It looked strange,
+and 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.
+
+"Coincidence rubbish!" she retorted. "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 found the
+bag had not been turned in, but that there was a letter for A 31." She
+held out the envelope to me.
+
+"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 of the flowing style we used to call
+Spencerian, and if it lacks character I am inclined to believe that its
+weakness is merely the result of infrequent use of a pen.
+
+You know who this is from. I have the bag and the letters. In a safe
+place. If you would treat me like a human being, you could have them. I
+know where the walking-stick is, also. I will tell you this. I have no
+wish to do her any harm. She will have to pay up in the next world, even
+if she gets off in this. The way I reason is this: As long as I have the
+things, I've got the whiphand. I've got you, too, although you may think
+I haven't.
+
+About the other matter I was innocent. I swear it again. I never did it.
+You are the only one in all the world. I would rather be dead than go on
+like this.
+
+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."
+
+But if she had any suspicion then as to the writer, and I think she had
+not, she said nothing, and soon after I started for home. I knew that
+one of two things would have happened there: either my wife would have
+put away the fire-tongs, which would indicate a truce, or they would
+remain as they had been, which would indicate that she still waited
+for the explanation I could not give. It was with a certain tension,
+therefore, that I opened my front door.
+
+The fire-tongs still stood in the stand.
+
+In one way, however, Mrs. Johnson's refusal to speak to me that evening
+had a certain value, for it enabled me to leave the house without
+explanation, and thus to discover that, if an overcoat had been left in
+place of my own, it had been taken away. It also gave me an opportunity
+to return the fire-tongs, a proceeding which I had considered would
+assist in a return of the entente cordiale at home, but which most
+unjustly appeared to have exactly the opposite effect. It has been
+my experience that the most innocent action may, under certain
+circumstances, assume an appearance of extreme guilt.
+
+By Saturday the condition of affairs between my wife and myself remained
+in statu quo, and I had decided on a bold step. This was to call a
+special meeting of the Neighborhood Club, without Miss Jeremy, and
+put before them the situation as it stood at that time, with a view to
+formulating a future course of action, and also of publicly vindicating
+myself before my wife.
+
+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, if not our friends, at least are 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 possible 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 seance.
+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 purely
+physical, the exercise of powers we have either not yet risen high
+enough in our scale of development to recognize generally, or which
+have survived from some early period when our natural gifts had not been
+smothered by civilization."
+
+And, to make our position clear, that is today 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.
+
+(a) 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. (Here he 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, and the blood-stained sponge and
+razorstrop behind the bathtub. We had made a hasty examination of the
+ceiling, but had found no trace of a second shot.)
+
+(d) The governess had come in at 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 Mr.
+Johnson had gone 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 Ellingham house. The message was that Mr.
+Ellingham 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 which we had tacitly avoided 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. I urge that
+the Club jump to no hasty conclusions, and that there shall be no
+interruptions until we have finished with our records."
+
+(e) At a private seance, 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. Horace Johnson to tell what occurred on the night
+before last, Thursday evening."
+
+"I do not think Horace has a very clear recollection of last Thursday
+night," my wife said, coldly. "And I wish to go on record at once that
+if he claims that spirits broke his hat, stole his overcoat, bumped his
+head and sent him home with a pair of fire-tongs for a walking-stick, I
+don't believe him."
+
+Which attitude Herbert, I regret to say, did not help when he said:
+
+"Don't worry, Horace will soon be too old for the gay life. Remember
+your arteries, Horace."
+
+I have quoted this interruption to show how little, outside of Sperry,
+Mrs. Dane and myself, the Neighborhood Club appreciated the seriousness
+of the situation. Herbert, for instance, had been greatly amused when
+Sperry spoke of my finding the razorstrop and had almost chuckled over
+our investigation of the ceiling.
+
+But they were very serious when I had finished my statement.
+
+"Great Scott!" Herbert said. "Then she was right, after all! I say, I
+guess I've been no end of an ass."
+
+I was inclined to agree with him. But the real effect of my brief speech
+was on my wife.
+
+It was a real compensation for that night of terror and for the
+uncomfortable time since 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 whiskey.
+
+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 Charlie
+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. But the fact remained
+that a man, as yet unidentified, was undoubtedly concerned in the case,
+had written the letter, and had probably been in the Wells house the
+night I went there alone.
+
+In the end, we decided to hold one more seance, and then, unless the
+further developments were such that we must go on, 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.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+On Sunday I went to church. I felt, after the strange phenomena in Mrs.
+Dane's drawing-room, and after the contact with tragedy to which they
+had led, that I must hold with a sort of desperation to the traditions
+and beliefs by which I had hitherto regulated my conduct. And the
+church did me good. Between the immortality it taught and the theory of
+spiritualism as we had seen it in action there was a great gulf, and
+I concluded that this gulf was the soul. The conclusion that mind and
+certain properties of mind survived was not enough. The thought of a
+disembodied intelligence was pathetic, depressing. But the thought of a
+glorified soul was the hope of the world.
+
+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 own way, she was making a sort of
+atonement.
+
+Miss Jeremy lived with an elderly spinster cousin, a short distance out
+of town. It was a grim house, coldly and rigidly Calvinistic. 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 a Presbyterian. 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.
+
+"I believe she can do extraordinary things. She saw my father's spirit
+in this very room last night, and described him, although she had never
+seen him."
+
+As she had said that only the eternally damned were doomed to walk
+the earth, 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.
+
+With 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 that unconscious drama which actuates a man at a
+crisis in his affairs, he put a hand on her shoulder. "This young lady
+is going to marry me," he said. "We are very happy today."
+
+But I thought he eyed us anxiously. We were very 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, to my surprise,
+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 immediately, 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
+cannot say that he changed color. He was always a pale, anemic-looking
+individual. 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 Wellses' 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, and I felt that Sperry had been
+indiscreet, to say the least. From the time of Hawkins' service in Miss
+Jeremy's home there would always be the suspicion of collusion between
+them. I did not believe it was so, but Herbert, for instance, would be
+inclined to suspect her. Suppose that Hawkins knew about the crime? Or
+knew something and surmised the rest?
+
+When we rose to go Sperry drew me aside.
+
+"You think I've made a mistake?"
+
+"I do."
+
+He flung away with an impatient gesture, then came back to me.
+
+"Now look here," he said, "I know what you mean, and the whole idea
+is absurd. Of course I never thought about it, but even allowing for
+connivance--which I don't for a moment--the fellow was not in the house
+at the time of the murder."
+
+"I know he says he was not."
+
+"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 Wellses' 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.
+
+Sperry 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.
+She's going to give it up, but the fact remains that she has some power
+we haven't, and now I've discredited her! I see it plainly enough." 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."
+
+He was not sure. He went into 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, and I took it up and
+examined it. It was an English malacca, light and strong, and had seen
+service. It was long, too long for me; it occurred to me that Wells 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.
+
+From that to the memory of Hawkins's face when Sperry took it, the night
+of the murder, in the hall of the Wells house, was only a step. I seemed
+that day to be thinking considerably about Hawkins.
+
+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 ferrule lay on a copy
+of Gibson's "Life Beyond the Grave," which Sperry had evidently been
+reading.
+
+Sperry had found the letter. As I glanced at it I recognized the writing
+at once, thin and rather sexless, Spencerian.
+
+Dear Sir: Since Mr. Wells's death I am out of employment. Before I took
+the position of butler with Mr. Wells I was valet to Mr. Ellingham, and
+before that, in England, to Lord Condray. I have a very good letter of
+recommendation from Lord Condray. If you need a servant at this time I
+would do my best to give satisfaction.
+
+(Signed) ARTHUR HAWKINS.
+
+
+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.
+Mrs. Dane read it to us Saturday night. But compare 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 they were probably in his possession in the Connell house,
+was clear enough. But we had no possible authority for trying to get the
+letters, although Sperry was anxious to make the attempt.
+
+"Although 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 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. Whatever suspicion might be cast on the second
+seance, the first at least remained inexplicable, by any laws we
+recognized. In a way, I felt sorry for Sperry. Here he was, on the first
+day of his engagement, protesting her honesty, her complete ignorance of
+the revelations she had made and his intention to keep her in ignorance,
+and yet betraying his own anxiety and possible doubt in the same breath.
+
+"She did not even know there was a family named Wells. 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 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.
+
+So far as I know, Mrs. Dane was the only one among us who had entirely
+escaped certain strange phenomena during that period, and as I have
+only so far recorded my own experiences, I shall here place in order
+the various manifestations made to the other members of the Neighborhood
+Club during that trying period and in their own words. As none of them
+have suffered since, a certain allowance must be made for our nervous
+strain. As before, I shall offer no explanation.
+
+Alice Robinson: On night following second seance saw a light in room,
+not referable to any outside influence. Was an amorphous body which
+glowed pallidly and moved about wall over fireplace, gradually coming to
+stop in a corner, where it faded and disappeared.
+
+Clara, Mrs. Dane's secretary: Had not slept much since first seance. Was
+frequently conscious that she was not alone in room, but on turning on
+light room was always empty. Wakened twice with sense of extreme cold.
+(I have recorded my own similar experience.)
+
+Sperry has consistently maintained that he had no experiences whatever
+during that period, but admits that he heard various knockings in his
+bedroom at night, which he attributed to the lighting of his furnace,
+and the resulting expansion of the furniture due to heat.
+
+Herbert Robinson: Herbert was the most difficult member of the Club from
+whom to secure data, but he has recently confessed that he was wakened
+one night by the light falling on to his bed from a picture which hung
+on the wall over his mantelpiece, and which stood behind a clock, two
+glass vases and a pair of candlesticks. The door of his room was locked
+at the time.
+
+Mrs. Johnson: Had a great many minor disturbances, so that on rousing
+one night to find me closing a window against a storm she thought I was
+a spectre, and to this day insists that I only entered her room when I
+heard her scream. For this reason I have made no record of her various
+experiences, as I felt that her nervous condition precluded accurate
+observation.
+
+As in all records of psychic phenomena, the human element must be
+considered, and I do not attempt either to analyze these various
+phenomena or to explain them. Herbert, for instance, has been known to
+walk in his sleep. But I respectfully offer, as opposed to this, that
+my watch has never been known to walk at all, and that Mrs. Johnson's
+bracelet could hardly be accused of an attack of nerves.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+The following day was Monday. When I came downstairs 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 hasty, 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?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"Certainly I'm sure."
+
+"You are 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 tonight?"
+
+"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 fire-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.
+
+It was that day that I discovered that I was being watched. Shadowed,
+I believe is the technical word. I daresay 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 downtown 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 downtown 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.
+
+With that tendency of any man who finds himself under suspicion to
+search his past for some dereliction, possibly forgotten, I puzzled over
+the situation for some time that afternoon. I did not connect it with
+the Wells case, for in that matter I was indisputably the hunter, not
+the hunted.
+
+Although I found no explanation for the matter, I did not tell my wife
+that evening. Women are strange and she would, I feared, immediately
+jump to the conclusion that there was something in my private life that
+I was keeping from her.
+
+Almost all women, I have found, although not over-conscious themselves
+of the charm and attraction of their husbands, are of the conviction
+that these husbands exert a dangerous fascination over other women, and
+that this charm, which does not reveal itself in the home circle, is
+used abroad with occasionally disastrous effect.
+
+My preoccupation, however, did not escape my wife, and she commented on
+it at dinner.
+
+"You are generally dull, Horace," she said, "but tonight you are
+deadly."
+
+After dinner I went into our reception room, which is not lighted unless
+we are expecting guests, and peered out of the window. The detective, or
+whoever he might be, was walking negligently up the street.
+
+As that was the night of the third seance, I find that my record covers
+the fact that Mrs. Dane was housecleaning, for which reason we had not
+been asked to dinner, that my wife and I dined early, at six-thirty, and
+that it was seven o'clock when Sperry called me by telephone.
+
+"Can you come to my office at once?" he asked. "I dare say Mrs. Johnson
+won't mind going to the Dane house alone."
+
+"Is there anything new?"
+
+"No. But I want to get into the Wells house again. Bring the keys."
+
+"They were in the overcoat. It came back today, but the keys are
+missing."
+
+"Did you lock the back door?"
+
+"I don't remember. No, of course not. I didn't have the keys."
+
+"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, Sperry."
+
+Fortunately, during this conversation my wife was upstairs dressing.
+I knew quite well that she would violently oppose a second visit on my
+part to the deserted house down the street. I therefore left a message
+for her that I had gone on, and, finding the street clear, met Sperry at
+his door-step.
+
+"This is the last sitting, Horace," he explained, "and I feel we ought
+to have the most complete possible knowledge, beforehand. We will be
+in a better position to understand what comes. There are two or three
+things we haven't checked up on."
+
+He slipped an arm through mine, and we started down the street. "I'm
+going to get to the bottom of this, Horace, old dear," he said.
+
+"Remember, we're pledged to a psychic investigation only."
+
+"Rats!" he said rudely. "We are going to find out who killed Arthur
+Wells, and if he deserves hanging we'll hang him."
+
+"Or her?"
+
+"It wasn't Elinor Wells," he said positively. "Here's the point: if he's
+been afraid to go back for his overcoat it's still there. I don't expect
+that, however. But the thing about the curtain interests me. 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 he is, knows what we know!"
+
+He was considerably startled when I told him I had been shadowed, and
+insisted that it referred directly to the case in hand. "He's got your
+notes," he said, "and he's got to know what your next move is going to
+be."
+
+His intention, I found, was to examine the carpet outside of the
+dressing-room door, and the floor beneath it, to discover if possible
+whether Arthur Wells had fallen there and been moved.
+
+"Because I think you are right," he said. "He wouldn't have been likely
+to shoot himself in a hall, and because the very moving of the body
+would be in itself suspicious. Then I want to look at the curtains. 'The
+curtains would have been safer.' Safer for what? For the bag with the
+letters, probably, for she followed that with the talk about Hawkins.
+He'd got them, and somebody was afraid he had."
+
+"Just where does Hawkins come in, Sperry?" I asked.
+
+"I'm damned if I know," he reflected. "We may learn tonight."
+
+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, I suppose. Poor devil, we'll have to get him into the house."
+
+The lock gave way to manipulation at last, and the door 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 of the beat. He had turned into the paved alley-way, and was
+advancing with measured, ponderous steps. Fortunately I am an agile man,
+and thus I was able to get to the outer door, reverse 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 street again, absently running his
+night-stick along the fence palings, did Sperry or I move.
+
+"A narrow squeak, that," I said, mopping my face.
+
+"A miss is as good as a mile," he observed, and there was a sort of
+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 look for the overcoat, and then we will go upstairs."
+
+"Suppose he wakens and raises an alarm?"
+
+"We'll be out of luck. That's all."
+
+As we had anticipated, there was no overcoat in the library, and after
+listening a moment at the kitchen door, we ascended a rear staircase to
+the upper floor. I had, it will be remembered, fallen from a chair on
+a table in the dressing room, and had left them thus overturned when I
+charged the third floor. The room, however, was now in perfect order,
+and when I held my candle to the ceiling, I perceived that the bullet
+hole had again been repaired, and this time with such skill that I could
+not even locate it.
+
+"We are up against some one cleverer than we are, Sperry," I
+acknowledged.
+
+"And who has more to lose than we have to gain," he added cheerfully.
+"Don't worry about that, Horace. You're a married man and I'm not. If a
+woman wanted to hide some letters from her husband, and chose a
+curtain for a receptacle, what room would hide them in. Not in his
+dressing-room, eh?"
+
+He took the candle and led the way to Elinor Wells's bedroom. Here,
+however, the draperies were down, and we would have been at a loss, had
+I not remembered my wife's custom of folding draperies when we close the
+house, and placing them under the dusting sheets which cover the various
+beds.
+
+Our inspection of the curtains was hurried, and broken by various
+excursions on my part to listen for the watchman. But he remained quiet
+below, and finally we found what we were looking for. 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 Sperry's comment. "Probably
+manicure scissors."
+
+The result was a sort of pocket in the curtain, concealed on the chintz
+side, which was the side which would hang 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."
+
+Before examining the floor in the hall I went downstairs and listened
+outside the kitchen door. The watchman was stirring inside the room, and
+groaning occasionally. Sperry, however, when I told him, remained cool
+and in his exultant mood, and I saw that he meant to vindicate Miss
+Jeremy if he flung me into jail and the newspapers while doing it.
+
+"We'll have a go at the floors under the carpets now," he said. "If he
+gets noisy, you can go down with the fire-tongs. I understand you are an
+expert with them."
+
+The dressing-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 boards for an area of two square
+feet or more 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.
+
+Sperry, kneeling on the floor with the candle held close, examined the
+wood. "Not only scrubbed," he said, "but scraped down, probably with
+a floor-scraper. It's pretty clear, Horace. The poor devil fell here.
+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. The angle of the bullet in the ceiling would probably
+show it came from here, too, and went through the doorway."
+
+We were startled at that moment by a loud banging below. Sperry leaped
+to his feet and caught up his hat.
+
+"The watchman," he said. "We'd better get out. He'll have all the
+neighbors in at that rate."
+
+He was still hammering on the door as we went down the rear stairs, and
+Sperry stood outside the door and to one side.
+
+"Keep out of range, Horace," he cautioned me. And to the watchman:
+
+"Now, George, 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 behind 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.
+
+"No more of that, George," said Sperry calmly and cheerfully. "This is a
+quiet neighborhood, and we don't like shooting. What is more, my friend
+here is very expert with his own particular weapon, and at any moment he
+may go to the fire-place in the library and--"
+
+I have no idea why Sperry chose to be facetious at that time, and my
+resentment rises as I record it. For when we reached the yard we heard
+the officer running along the alley-way, calling as he ran.
+
+"The fence, quick," Sperry 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, for 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, we fell to walking
+sedately.
+
+It was as well that we did, for we had not gone a half block before we
+saw our policeman again, lumbering toward us and blowing a whistle as he
+ran.
+
+"Stop and get this street-car," Sperry directed me. "And don't breathe
+so hard."
+
+The policeman stared at us fixedly, stopping to do so, but all he saw
+was two well-dressed and professional-looking men, one of them rather
+elderly who was hailing a street-car. 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 reached Mrs. Dane's, to find that Miss Jeremy had already arrived,
+looking rather pale, as I had noticed she always did before a seance.
+Her color 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."
+
+"This is the last time. You have promised."
+
+"Yes. The last time."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+It appeared that Herbert Robinson had been reading, during his
+convalescence, a considerable amount of psychic literature, and that
+we were to hold this third and final sitting under test conditions. As
+before, the room had been stripped of furniture, and the cloth and rod
+which formed the low screen behind Miss Jeremy's chair were not of her
+own providing, but Herbert's.
+
+He had also provided, for some reason or other, eight small glass cups,
+into which he placed the legs of the two tables, and in a business-like
+manner he set out on the large stand a piece of white paper, a pencil,
+and a spool of black thread. It is characteristic of Miss Jeremy, and of
+her own ignorance of the methods employed in professional seances, that
+she was as much interested and puzzled as we were.
+
+When he had completed his preparations, Herbert made a brief speech.
+
+"Members 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 seance 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 seance
+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. But with what?"
+
+"With silk thread," Herbert said, smilingly.
+
+She held out her wrists at once, but Herbert placed her in her chair,
+and proceeded to wrap her, chair and all, in a strong network of fine
+threads, drawn sufficiently taut to snap with any movement.
+
+He finished by placing her feet on the sheet of paper, and outlining
+their position there with a pencil line.
+
+The proceedings were saved from absurdity by what we all felt was the
+extreme gravity of the situation. There were present in the room Mrs.
+Dane, the Robinsons, Sperry, my wife and myself. Clara, Mrs. Dane's
+secretary, had begged off on the plea of nervousness from the earlier
+and physical portion of the seance, and was to remain outside in the
+hall until the trance commenced.
+
+Sperry objected to this, as movement in the circle during the trance
+had, in the first seance, induced fretful uneasiness in the medium. But
+Clara, appealed to, begged to be allowed to remain outside until she
+was required, and showed such unmistakable nervousness that we finally
+agreed.
+
+"Would a slight noise disturb her?" Mrs. Dane asked.
+
+Miss Jeremy thought not, if the circle remained unbroken, and Mrs. Dane
+considered.
+
+"Bring me my stick from the hall, Horace," she said. "And tell Clara
+I'll rap on the floor with it when I want her."
+
+I found a stick in the rack outside and brought it in. 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.
+
+Sperry was watching me with a sort of cynical amusement.
+
+"You're an absent-minded beggar, Horace," he said.
+
+"You didn't, by any chance, 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."
+
+I confess to a sort of helpless indignation that was far from the
+composure the occasion required. But the others, I believe, were fully
+convinced that no human agency had operated to bring the stick into Mrs.
+Dane's house, a belief that prepared them for anything that might occur.
+
+A number of things occurred almost as soon as the lights were out,
+interrupting a train of thought in which I saw myself in the first
+stages of mental decay, and carrying about the streets not only
+fire-tongs and walking-sticks, but other portable property belonging to
+my friends.
+
+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
+distinctly fretful. 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 indefinable way, smaller. But there was none of
+the stertorous breathing that preceded trance.
+
+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 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 into the quiet that followed there came a light,
+fine but steady tattoo on the table in our midst. 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 were broken and
+that her evening slippers still fitted into the outline on the paper
+beneath them. Without getting up, Sperry reached to the stand behind
+Miss Jeremy, and brought into view a piece of sculptor's clay he had
+placed there. The handle of the bell was now jammed into the mass. He
+had only time to show it to us when the medium began to speak.
+
+I find, on re-reading the earlier part of this record, that I have
+omitted mention of Miss Jeremy's "control." So suddenly had we jumped,
+that first evening, into the trail that led us to the Wells case, that
+beyond the rather raucous "good-evening," and possibly the extraneous
+matter referring to Mother Goose and so on, we had been saved the usual
+preliminary patter of the average control.
+
+On this night, however, we were obliged to sit impatiently through
+a rambling discourse, given in a half-belligerent manner, on the
+deterioration of moral standards. Re-reading Clara's notes, I find that
+the subject matter is without originality and the diction inferior. But
+the lecture ceased abruptly, and the time for questions had come.
+
+"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 fire-tongs--the fire-tongs--the fire-tongs!"
+
+"Whose cane is this?" Herbert repeated.
+
+"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."
+
+"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 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."
+
+"Where were these letters?"
+
+There was no direct reply to this, but instead:
+
+"He found them when he was looking for his razorstrop. They were in the
+top of a closet. His revolver was there, too. He went back and got it.
+It was terrible."
+
+There was a profound silence, followed by a slight exclamation from
+Sperry as he leaped to his feet. The screen at the end of the room,
+which cut off the light from Clara's candle, was toppling. The next
+instant it fell, and we saw Clara sprawled over her table, in a dead
+faint.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+In this, the final chapter of the record of these seances, I shall
+give, as 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 cannot explain. Do our spirits live on,
+on this earth plane, now and then obedient to the wills of those yet
+living? Is death, then, only a gateway into higher space, from which,
+through the open door of a "sensitive" mind, we may be brought back on
+occasion to commit the inadequate absurdities of the physical seance?
+
+Or is Sperry right, and do certain individuals manifest powers of a
+purely physical nature, but powers which Sperry characterizes as the
+survival of some long-lost development by which at one time we knew how
+to liberate a forgotten form of energy?
+
+Who can say? 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.
+
+But outside of the purely physical phenomena of those seances, we are
+provided with an explanation which satisfies the Neighborhood Club, even
+if it fails to satisfy the convinced spiritist. We have been accused
+merely of substituting one mystery for another, but I reply by saying
+that the mystery we substitute is not a mystery, but an acknowledged
+fact.
+
+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.
+
+But those were immaterial, compared with one outstanding fact. Any
+supernatural solution would imply full knowledge by whatever power had
+controlled the medium. And there was not full knowledge. There was, on
+the contrary, a definite place beyond which the medium could not go.
+
+She did not know who had killed Arthur Wells.
+
+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 Miss Joyce came in. "Take the testimony of the
+man who is coming in, Miss Joyce," I directed. "Take everything we say,
+any of us. Can you tell the different voices?"
+
+She thought she could, and took up her 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. "Miss
+Jeremy sent this, sir," he said.
+
+Then his eyes took in Sperry and Herbert, and he drew himself up.
+
+"I see," he said. "It wasn't the letter, then?"
+
+"Not entirely. We want to have a talk with you, Hawkins."
+
+"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 his death. What time did
+you get in that night?"
+
+"About midnight. I am not certain."
+
+"Who told you of what had happened?"
+
+"I told you that before. I met the detectives going out."
+
+"Exactly. Now, Hawkins, 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. "She's told you enough, I daresay. She
+doesn't know it all, of course. Any more than I do," he added.
+
+"Will you give us the letters?"
+
+"I haven't said I have them. I haven't admitted I wrote that one on the
+desk. Suppose I have them, I'll not give them up except to the District
+Attorney."
+
+"By 'she' do you refer to Miss Jeremy?" I asked.
+
+He stared at me, and then smiled faintly.
+
+"You know who I mean."
+
+We tried to assure him that we were not, in a sense, seeking to involve
+him in the situation, and I even went so far as to state our position,
+briefly:
+
+"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 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 door.
+
+I was in the library, reading, or trying to read, a rather abstruse book
+on 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 Wells 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 considerably upset, some time later.
+
+While I am quite sure that I was not thinking clearly at the opening of
+the interview, I know that I was puzzled at the presence of Mrs. Dane's
+secretary, but I doubtless accepted it as having some connection with
+Clara's notes. And Sperry, at the beginning, made no comment on her at
+all.
+
+"Mrs. Wells suggested that we come here, Horace," he began. "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 corner, grave and white. It was
+fragmentary, inco-ordinate. But I got it all at last.
+
+Charlie 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, had he not been brutal with
+her. He had made her life very wretched.
+
+But on the subject of Charlie Ellingham she was emphatic. She knew that
+there had been talk, but there had been no real basis for it. She had
+turned to him for comfort, and he gave her love. She didn't know where
+he was now, and didn't greatly care, but she would like to recover and
+destroy some letters he had written her.
+
+She was looking crushed and ill, and she told her story incoordinately
+and nervously. Reduced to its elements, it was as follows:
+
+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,
+Suzanne Gautier, out to telephone Ellingham not to come, but he was not
+at his house, and the message was left with his valet. As it turned out,
+he had already started.
+
+Elinor was dressed, all but her ball-gown, and had put on a negligee,
+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.
+
+Charlie 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. Ellingham was for calling the police at once
+and surrendering, but she had kept him away from the telephone. She
+maintained, and I think it very possible, that her whole thought was
+for the children, and the effect on their after lives of such a scandal.
+And, after all, nothing could help the man on the floor.
+
+It was while they were trying to formulate some concerted plan that they
+heard footsteps below, and, thinking it was Mademoiselle Gautier, she
+drove Ellingham into the rear of the house, from which later he managed
+to escape. But it was Clara who was coming up the stairs.
+
+"She had been our first governess for the children," Elinor said, "and
+she often came in. She had made a birthday smock for Buddy, and she had
+it in her hand. She almost fainted. I couldn't tell her about Charlie
+Ellingham. I couldn't. 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. 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--"
+
+The letters, it seems, were all over the place. Elinor thought of the
+curtain, cut a receptacle for them, but she was afraid of the police.
+Finally she gave them to Clara, who was to take them away and burn them.
+
+They did everything they could think of, all the time listening for
+Suzanne Gautier's return; filled the second empty chamber of the
+revolver, dragged the body out of the hall and washed the carpet, and
+called Doctor Sperry, knowing that he was at Mrs. Dane's and could not
+come.
+
+Clara had only a little time, and with the letters in her handbag she
+started down the stairs. There she heard some one, possibly Ellingham,
+on the back stairs, and in her haste, she fell, hurting her knee, and
+she must have dropped the handbag at that time. They knew now that
+Hawkins had found it later on. But for a few days they didn't know, and
+hence the advertisement.
+
+"I think we would better explain Hawkins," Sperry said. "Hawkins was
+married to Miss Clara here, some years ago, while she was with Mrs.
+Wells. They had kept it a secret, and recently she has broken with him."
+
+"He was infatuated with another woman," Clara said briefly. "That's a
+personal matter. It has nothing to do with this case."
+
+"It explains Hawkins's letter."
+
+"It doesn't explain how that medium knew everything that happened,"
+Clara put in, excitedly. "She knew it all, even the library paste! I can
+tell you, Mr. Johnson, I was close to fainting a dozen times before I
+finally did it."
+
+"Did you know of our seances?" I asked Mrs. Wells.
+
+"Yes. I may as well tell you that I haven't been in Florida. How could
+I? The children are there, but I--"
+
+"Did you tell Charlie Ellingham about them?"
+
+"After the second one I warned him, and I think he went to the house.
+One 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.
+I've been afraid to see him."
+
+She 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 cannot 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."
+
+"We'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?"
+
+"Will you tell me how you came to have it, doctor?"
+
+"Yes. I took it from the lower hall the night--the night it happened."
+
+"It was Charlie Ellingham's. He had left it there. We had to have it,
+doctor. Alone it might not mean much, but with the other things you
+knew--tell them, Clara."
+
+"I stole it from your office," 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 intentness 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 downstairs, 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 downstairs.
+That is, unless--" It was clear that, like Elinor, she had a
+supernatural explanation in her mind. She looked gaunt and haggard.
+
+"Mr. Ellingham was anxious to get it," she finished. "He had taken Mr.
+Johnson's overcoat by mistake one night when you were both in the house,
+and the notes were in it. He saw that the stick was important."
+
+"Clara," Sperry asked, "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 seances?"
+
+Elinor rose and drew her veil down. "We must go," she said. "Surely now
+you will cease these terrible investigations. I cannot stand much more.
+I am going mad."
+
+"There will be no more seances," Sperry said gravely.
+
+"What are you going to do?" She turned to me, I daresay 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
+downstairs for me," he said, "I am coming back."
+
+I remained in the library until he returned, uneasily pacing the floor.
+
+For where were we, after all? We had 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 tragedy 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
+loosened 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 still 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."
+
+"Oh, piffle," he said. "Where is it, Horace?"
+
+"I have a little gin."
+
+"Where?"
+
+I drew a chair before the book-shelves, which in our old-fashioned house
+reach almost to the ceiling, and, withdrawing a volume of Josephus, I
+brought down the bottle.
+
+"Now and then, when I have had a bad day," I explained, "I find that it
+makes me sleep."
+
+He poured out some 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 the first sitting.
+
+"'The knee hurts. It is very bad. Arnica will take the pain out.'
+
+"I want to go out. I want air. If I could only go to sleep and forget
+it. The drawing-room furniture is scattered all over the house."
+
+"Now the second sitting:
+
+"'It is writing.' (The stick.) 'It is writing, but the water washed it
+away. All of it, not a trace.' 'If only the pocketbook were not lost.
+Car-tickets and letters. It will be terrible if the letters are found.'
+'Hawkins may have it. The curtain was much safer.' 'That part's safe
+enough, unless it made a hole in the floor above.'"
+
+"Oh, if you're going to read a lot of irrelevant material--"
+
+"Irrelevant nothing! Wake up, Horace! But remember this. I'm not
+explaining the physical phenomena. We'll never do that. It wasn't
+extraordinary, as such things go. Our little medium in a trance
+condition has read poor Clara's mind. It's all here, all that Clara
+knew and nothing that she didn't know. A mind-reader, friend Horace. And
+Heaven help me when I marry her!"
+
+********
+
+As I have said, the Neighborhood Club ended its investigations with
+this conclusion, which I believe is properly reached. It is only fair to
+state that there are those among us who have accepted that theory in the
+Wells case, but who have preferred to consider that behind both it and
+the physical phenomena of the seances there was an intelligence which
+directed both, an intelligence not of this world as we know it. Both
+Herbert and Alice Robinson are now pronounced spiritualists, although
+Miss Jeremy, now Mrs. Sperry, has definitely abandoned all investigative
+work.
+
+Personally, I have evolved no theory. It seems beyond dispute that
+certain individuals can read minds, and that these same, or other
+so-called "sensitives," are capable of liberating a form of invisible
+energy which, however, they turn to no further account than the useless
+ringing of bells, moving of small tables, and flinging about of divers
+objects.
+
+To me, I admit, the solution of the Wells case as one of mind-reading is
+more satisfactory than explanatory. 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 on a
+lecture tour on spirit realism, and Mrs. Dane at a sanatorium for the
+winter, we have now given it up, and my wife and I spend our Monday
+evenings at home.
+
+After dinner 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sight Unseen, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
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