Part 12

“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.”