Chapter 2

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.