by Michael Sims
The look which I received from the policeman convinced me that my ears had not played me false.
“The lady’s right,” he declared; and pushing by me quite disrespectfully, he led the way to the basement door, into which he and the so-called cleaner presently disappeared.
I waited in front. I felt it to be my duty to do so. The various passers-by stopped an instant to stare at me before proceeding on their way, but I did not flinch from my post. Not till I had heard that the young woman whom I had seen enter these doors at midnight was well, and that her delay in opening the windows was entirely due to fashionable laziness, would I feel justified in returning to my own home and its affairs. But it took patience and some courage to remain there. Several minutes elapsed before I perceived the shutters in the third story open, and a still longer time before a window on the second floor flew up and the policeman looked out, only to meet my inquiring gaze and rapidly disappear again.
Meantime three or four persons had stopped on the walk near me, the nucleus of a crowd which would not be long in collecting, and I was beginning to feel I was paying dearly for my virtuous resolution, when the front door burst violently open and we caught sight of the trembling form and shocked face of the scrub-woman.
“She’s dead!” she cried, “she’s dead! Murder!” and would have said more had not the policeman pulled her back, with a growl which sounded very much like a suppressed oath.
He would have shut the door upon me had I not been quicker than lightning. As it was, I got in before it slammed, and happily too; for just at that moment the house-cleaner, who had grown paler every instant, fell in a heap in the entry, and the policeman, who was not the man I would want about me in any trouble, seemed somewhat embarrassed by this new emergency, and let me lift the poor thing up and drag her farther into the hall.
She had fainted, and should have had something done for her, but anxious though I always am to be of help where help is needed, I had no sooner got within range of the parlor door with my burden, than I beheld a sight so terrifying that I involuntarily let the poor woman slip from my arms to the floor.
In the darkness of a dim corner (for the room had no light save that which came through the doorway where I stood) lay the form of a woman under a fallen piece of furniture. Her skirts and distended arms alone were visible; but no one who saw the rigid outlines of her limbs could doubt for a moment that she was dead.
At a sight so dreadful, and, in spite of all my apprehensions, so unexpected, I felt a sensation of sickness which in another moment might have ended in my fainting also, if I had not realized that it would never do for me to lose my wits in the presence of a man who had none too many of his own. So I shook off my momentary weakness, and turning to the policeman, who was hesitating between the unconscious figure of the woman outside the door and the dead form of the one within I cried sharply:
“Come, man, to business! The woman inside there is dead, but this one is living. Fetch me a pitcher of water from below if you can, and then go for whatever assistance you need. I’ll wait here and bring this woman to. She is a strong one, and it won’t take long.”
“You’ll stay here alone with that—” he began.
But I stopped him with a look of disdain.
“Of course I will stay here; why not? Is there anything in the dead to be afraid of? Save me from the living, and I undertake to save myself from the dead.”
But his face had grown very suspicious.
“You go for the water,” he cried. “And see here! Just call out for some one to telephone to Police Headquarters for the Coroner and a detective. I don’t quit this room till one or the other of them comes.”
Smiling at a caution so very ill-timed, but abiding by my invariable rule of never arguing with a man unless I see some way of getting the better of him, I did what he bade me, though I hated dreadfully to leave the spot and its woful mystery, even for so short a time as was required.
“Run up to the second story,” he called out, as I passed by the prostrate figure of the cleaner. “Tell them what you want from the window, or we will have the whole street in here.”
So I ran up-stairs,—I had always wished to visit this house, but had never been encouraged to do so by the Misses Van Burnam,—and making my way into the front room, the door of which stood wide open, I rushed to the window and hailed the crowd, which by this time extended far out beyond the curb-stone.
“An officer!” I called out, “a police officer! An accident has occurred and the man in charge here wants the Coroner and a detective from Police Headquarters.”
“Who’s hurt?” “Is it a man?” “Is it a woman?” shouted up one or two; and “Let us in!” shouted others; but the sight of a boy rushing off to meet an advancing policeman satisfied me that help would soon be forthcoming, so I drew in my head and looked about me for the next necessity—water.
I was in a lady’s bed-chamber, probably that of the eldest Miss Van Burnam; but it was a bed-chamber which had not been occupied for some months, and naturally it lacked the very articles which would have been of assistance to me in the present emergency. No eau de Cologne on the bureau, no camphor on the mantel-shelf. But there was water in the pipes (something I had hardly hoped for), and a mug on the wash-stand; so I filled the mug and ran with it to the door, stumbling, as I did so, over some small object which I presently perceived to be a little round pin-cushion. Picking it up, for I hate anything like disorder, I placed it on a table near by, and continued on my way.
The woman was still lying at the foot of the stairs. I dashed the water in her face and she immediately came to.
Sitting up, she was about to open her lips when she checked herself; a fact which struck me as odd, though I did not allow my surprise to become apparent.
Meantime I stole a glance into the parlor. The officer was standing where I had left him, looking down on the prostrate figure before him.
There was no sign of feeling in his heavy countenance, and he had not opened a shutter, nor, so far as I could see, disarranged an object in the room.
The mysterious character of the whole affair fascinated me in spite of myself, and leaving the now fully aroused woman in the hall, I was half-way across the parlor floor when the latter stopped me with a shrill cry:
“Don’t leave me! I have never seen anything before so horrible. The poor dear! The poor dear! Why don’t he take those dreadful things off her?”
She alluded not only to the piece of furniture which had fallen upon the prostrate woman, and which can best be described as a cabinet with closets below and shelves above, but to the various articles of bric-à-brac which had tumbled from the shelves, and which now lay in broken pieces about her.
“He will do so; they will do so very soon,” I replied. “He is waiting for some one with more authority than himself; for the Coroner, if you know what that means.”
“But what if she’s alive! Those things will crush her. Let us take them off. I’ll help. I’m not too weak to help.”
“Do you know who this person is?” I asked, for her voice had more feeling in it than I thought natural to the occasion, dreadful as it was.
“I?” she repeated, her weak eyelids quivering for a moment as she tried to sustain my scrutiny. “How should I know? I came in with the policeman and haven’t been any nearer than I now be. What makes you think I know anything about her? I’m only the scrub-woman, and don’t even know the names of the family.”
“I thought you seemed so very anxious,” I explained, suspicious of her suspiciousness, which was of so sly and emphatic a character that it changed her whole bearing from one of fear to one of cunning in a moment.
“And who wouldn’t feel the like of that for a poor creature lying crushed under a heap of broken crockery!”
Crockery! those Japanese vases worth hundreds of dollars! that ormulu clock and those Dresden figures which must have been more than a couple of centuries old!
“It’s a poor sense of duty that keeps
a man standing dumb and staring like that, when with a lift of his hand he could show us the like of her pretty face, and if it’s dead she be or alive.”
As this burst of indignation was natural enough and not altogether uncalled for from the standpoint of humanity, I gave the woman a nod of approval, and wished I were a man myself that I might lift the heavy cabinet or whatever it was that lay upon the poor creature before us. But not being a man, and not judging it wise to irritate the one representative of that sex then present, I made no remark, but only took a few steps farther into the room, followed, as it afterwards appeared, by the scrub-woman.
The Van Burnam parlors are separated by an open arch. It was to the right of this arch and in the corner opposite the doorway that the dead woman lay. Using my eyes, now that I was somewhat accustomed to the semi-darkness enveloping us, I noticed two or three facts which had hitherto escaped me. One was, that she lay on her back with her feet pointing towards the hall door, and another, that nowhere in the room, save in her immediate vicinity, were there to be seen any signs of struggle or disorder. All was as set and proper as in my own parlor when it has been undisturbed for any length of time by guests; and though I could not see far into the rooms beyond, they were to all appearance in an equally orderly condition.
Meanwhile the cleaner was trying to account for the overturned cabinet.
“Poor dear! poor dear! she must have pulled it over on herself! But however did she get into the house? And what was she doing in this great empty place?”
The policeman, to whom these remarks had evidently been addressed, growled out some unintelligible reply, and in her perplexity the woman turned towards me.
But what could I say to her? I had my own private knowledge of the matter, but she was not one to confide in, so I stoically shook my head. Doubly disappointed, the poor thing shrank back, after looking first at the policeman and then at me in an odd, appealing way, difficult to understand. Then her eyes fell again on the dead girl at her feet, and being nearer now than before, she evidently saw something that startled her, for she sank on her knees with a little cry and began examining the girl’s skirts.
“What are you looking at there?” growled the policeman. “Get up, can’t you! No one but the Coroner has right to lay hand on anything here.”
“I’m doing no harm,” the woman protested, in an odd, shaking voice. “I only wanted to see what the poor thing had on. Some blue stuff, isn’t it?” she asked me.
“Blue serge,” I answered; “store-made, but very good; must have come from Altman’s or Stern’s.”
“I—I’m not used to sights like this,” stammered the scrub-woman, stumbling awkwardly to her feet, and looking as if her few remaining wits had followed the rest on an endless vacation. “I—I think I shall have to go home.” But she did not move.
“The poor dear’s young, isn’t she?” she presently insinuated, with an odd catch in her voice that gave to the question an air of hesitation and doubt.
“I think she is younger than either you or myself,” I deigned to reply. “Her narrow pointed shoes show she has not reached the years of discretion.”
“Yes, yes, so they do!” ejaculated the cleaner, eagerly—too eagerly for perfect ingenuousness. “That’s why I said ‘Poor dear!’ and spoke of her pretty face. I am sorry for young folks when they get into trouble, aint you? You and me might lie here and no one be much the worse for it, but a sweet lady like this—”
This was not very flattering to me, but I was prevented from rebuking her by a prolonged shout from the stoop without, as a rush was made against the front door, followed by a shrill peal of the bell.
“Man from Headquarters,” stolidly announced the policeman. “Open the door, ma’am; or step back into the further hall if you want me to do it.”
Such rudeness was uncalled for; but considering myself too important a witness to show feeling, I swallowed my indignation and proceeded with all my native dignity to the front door.
GEORGE R. SIMS
(1847-1922)
In 1922, when George Robert Sims died in London two days after his seventy-fifth birthday, the Times declaimed that “no other journalist has ever occupied quite the same place in the affections not only of the great public but also of people of more discriminating taste.” Discounted for hyperbole, this remark still testifies to the high profile of this versatile and prolific writer. He was born in 1847 in London, on almost the same day as the future outlaw Jesse James was born in Missouri—a reminder of the panoply of characters untidily crammed into the mental folder we label “the Victorian era.” He grew up to become a quotable bon vivant, a bestselling novelist and popular playwright, and a crusader against social ills.
Sims was a lively and memorable fellow, as one would expect from his noble surname. Photographs of him in midlife show an elegantly waistcoated man-about-town with a Prince Albert beard and a corsage in his lapel. The author of numerous successful books, Sims earned a lot of royalties in his lifetime and didn’t salt them away in a bank. When he wasn’t boxing or playing badminton, he was frittering away his money on horse races.
Yet Sims also donated considerable sums to charity. The eldest of six children, he was named after his socially progressive father, an affluent businessman, but he acquired many of his interests in life from his mother, Louisa Amelia Ann Stevenson. As president of the organization that would evolve into the Women’s Trade Union League, she introduced young George to suffragettes, actors, and musicians. His awareness of feminist and other social issues shows up throughout his writings. Like Arthur Conan Doyle, who interfered in real-world criminal cases now and then—most famously in his defense of wrongly accused George Edalji—Sims even left his mark on legal history. He fought to secure the pardon of Adolph Beck, a mistakenly jailed Norwegian immigrant. Together, Sims and Conan Doyle greatly influenced the movement that culminated in the establishment of the English Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.
Sims began his career with satirical jibes for the Victorian weekly Fun, a cheaper rival of the omnipresent Punch. He was in good company. Fun’s contributions to history range from serving as the cradle of William S. Gilbert’s nonsensical verse—the ancestors of his comic operas—to publishing the now famous cartoon of Darwin as a long-tailed monkey studiously examining a woman’s bustle for clues to her evolutionary ancestry. Sims loved the theater. Most of his thirty-plus plays he adapted from French farces and other European sources. His autobiography dwells on his theatrical and journalistic work rather than on his novels and other fiction; crime fiction was such a small percentage of his literary output that he barely mentioned it.
However, he made a notable contribution to the field. In 1897 he published Dorcas Dene, Detective: Her Life and Adventures. She proved popular enough for Sims to write a second collection the next year, and several silent film adaptations appeared during his lifetime. “The Man with the Wild Eyes” comprised chapters 3 and 4 of the original volume. The first story, “The Council of Four,” is not the strongest in the series, but it opens with a lively account of how Dorcas Dene became a detective. In the following version of “The Man with the Wild Eyes,” this background material appears as an overture; the story actually begins at the first break.
Dorcas Dene may remind you of Sherlock Holmes. Like Conan Doyle, Sims tended to start a story with an outrageous situation, the cause of which shows up only after both ratiocination and legwork. In her talent for impersonation and tireless pursuit of an antagonist, her attention to footprints and inconsistencies, Dene is reminiscent of the great man himself; she even grants her doting Watson permission to chronicle their adventures. Again like Conan Doyle, Sims didn’t hesitate to stack the deck in favor of his protagonist, enabling her to overhear muttered words and glimpse telling details.
Dene first appeared three years after a bored Arthur Conan Doyle sent his famous brainchild to grapple with Moriarty above the Reichenbach Falls and tumble to his death. (Badgered by fans and journalists, Conan Doyle
finally surrendered to fate in 1903 and revealed that Holmes hadn’t died during his fall.) Dene begins her career of impersonation, not surprisingly, as an actress; her Watson is a dramatist named Saxon, who knew Miss Lester the actress before she became Mrs. Dean the detective. Like Holmes, Dene is a professional detective and also a passionate vigilante in the cause of justice. Her world is one of tragedy and misfortune, drunken violence and family betrayal. In one story, she rescues a millionaire’s caged and drugged first wife from the hideaway in which she is slowly dying of poison. Other than occasionally ignoring the letter of the law, Dene herself commits only one crime. She names her bulldog Toddlekins.
THE MAN WITH THE WILD EYES
(1897)
When I first knew Dorcas Dene she was Dorcas Lester. She came to me with a letter from a theatrical agent, and wanted one of the small parts in a play we were then rehearsing at a West End Theatre.
She was quite unknown in the profession. She told me that she wanted to act, and would I give her a chance? She was engaged for a maid-servant who had about two lines to speak. She spoke them exceedingly well, and remained at the theatre for nearly twelve months, never getting beyond “small parts,” but always playing them exceedingly well.
The last part she had played was that of an old hag. We were all astonished when she asked to be allowed to play it, as she was a young and handsome woman, and handsome young women on the stage generally like to make the most of their appearance.
As the hag, Dorcas Lester was a distinct success. Although she was only on the stage for about ten minutes in one act and five minutes in another, everybody talked about her realistic and well-studied impersonation.
In the middle of the run of the play she left, and I understood that she had married and quitted the profession.
It was eight years before I met her again. I had business with a well-known West End solicitor. The clerk, thinking his employer was alone, ushered me at once into his room. Mr.——was engaged in earnest conversation with a lady. I apologised. “It’s all right,” said Mr.——, “the lady is just going.” The lady, taking the hint, rose, and went out.
