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.”
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.
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.