Reply Paid

by H. F. Heard

  But nothing came through to me—not a hint. To stop strain and keep fresh I raised my eyes. My visitor was looking to and from the paper, glancing at it and then at me.

  “Haven’t you gotten a clue?” he questioned.

  I said nothing, but again gave that quick total glance. Then I was sure. Of one thing there could be no further question.

  “Mr. Intil, this is no word code.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Why do you come to me unless you think I know?”

  “But you haven’t tried!”

  “That’s just what I have done.”

  “You haven’t worked at it!”

  “How do you work to find if a bell is sound? Ring it. I’ve rung this. There’s no letter code here.”

  Before I could say more he’d reached over and pocketed his precious paper. “Then you’re just a fraud,” he snapped, “Mr. Sydney Silchester!”

  Yes, I’m Mr. Sydney Silchester, whose sole distinctions were that he liked honey and being left alone, and so, quietly living on the rim of life, was nearly pushed over the edge by his honey dealer. How, then, did I get into the position where Mr. Intil thought it worth while to call on me, and I to receive him? I suppose that concerted bee-drive must have roused me. They say ordinary bee stings are good for rheumatism. All I know is that after that escape I’d had from being stung to death, I found myself unable to settle down again.

  Not that I moved at once. Like those prickly sea-urchins, I’d not only kept people at bay, I’d actually sunk right in and become embedded. But though my daily round went on outwardly undisturbed, my mind was steadily dragging its anchors. The first sign was that I began quite methodically to do puzzles. Indeed, I’ve several times since noted, that may be the first symptom that a mind is going to come out of its shell. It’s a sort of attempt, I believe, still to keep asleep. We feel that if we thought about anything real it would be too hard and sharp. So when our minds want to think on anything for long and tire of being distracted, we try to put them off with artificial problems. We give them knots which people have tied on purpose for them to untie—for fear they might otherwise start untying the knots which would let the cat out of the bag. Then, of course, as all puzzles go according to plan, it gets more amusing to be the knottier. That leads straight on to teaching knot-tiers, to writing guides to disguises. When you reach that point, you begin to look about for more material to work on. You want a lock meant to resist any but the secret key. You become a decoder.

  So, by steps almost unnoticed by myself, I found that my mind had bored its way out of the shell I had built for myself. I was still careful enough not to make actual local acquaintances, but I did enter into correspondence on my special subject and became, in that special world, fairly well known. Much of my work began to lie across the Atlantic. Finally there came a conference in the States which I was asked to attend. There I should meet several experts in this queer little field in which my mind seemed determined to stay and feed, and, maybe, grow. The long and the short of it was that I crossed the Atlantic and, as one might say, while my back was turned Europe blew up.

  Several riddle-colleagues pointed out that as money could no longer reach me I had better make some; what is more, that I could quite easily. So, with a little good-will, or interest, or whatever one calls it, I found myself with a small office and quite a considerable and growing mail-and-personal-visit business. I had been advised to settle in some place where money was freely made, where odd fancies could be cultivated and odd interests congregated. Those three requirements are not frequently found combined. Maybe no place in the world combines them to quite the degree to which they may be found in the wide district called Los Angeles—“‘The largest city limits in the world,’ and certainly an urbanity which tolerates more variety than any other town,” I was told. So to “L.A.” I went and found the forecast accurate. I became quite a busy man, seeing sometimes as many as a dozen or even a score of clients a day and keeping an amanuensis who was mistress of my mails and helped me with postal inquiries and the placing of my interviews, and so on.

  Perhaps some people will say that this sort of work not only improved my prospects but also mended my manners. I don’t know about that. All I know is that, if a client interested me, I would stand a great deal more from him (both for the fee and also for the interest) than I’d ever have stood from anyone before. That is why I stood Mr. Intil’s onrushes. Why I did more is perhaps harder to explain. In itself, maybe, it was a hunch. Perhaps it was being rapped on my professional knuckles—perhaps the fact that we who use both hunch and analysis are always a little ashamed of our “starter,” prevented me from bowing my rude intruder out. He was pretty certainly a bit crazy, but then what about many of one’s clients, what about my own profession and the way my gift works? And he certainly somehow held my attention.

  “No,” I said, “not a fraud. For, first, you have been asked no fee and, secondly, instead of disguising from you my primary method and wasting your time, I told you straight away I couldn’t help.”

  His reply was odd: “But who else can I go to—I must—”

  “All right,” I said. “You’ve seen my method. I tell you there’s no code here that a word-decoder could unravel. But I’ll tell you something positive as well, which you’ll believe because you already believe it. Though there is no regular code here, I am equally sure, as sure as you are, that there is a real meaning and message in this. It’s not a cipher but it is a cryptic communication.” I didn’t add, “And something which I believe is a bit uncanny,” but that was the reason for my next remark—that, and the equally queer feeling that having shown that my method was, at least to start with, un-rational—a hunch—I must justify the hunch method.

  My visitor was standing up already, uneasily eyeing me.

  “Mr. Intil, if you are as anxious about this as you appear, I will give you one more piece of advice. I’ve let you see my main method—hunch or ‘integral thought’ or what you will. That’s the way, after all, any artist immediately estimates whether a picture is really a work of art. First he gives a look, and knows if it is a masterpiece, in a split second. Then, if it is, he settles down and gets the reasons.”

  His only reply to this very reasonable approach was, “Can you, then, tell me someone who can see what this is?” He held his precious slip of paper up in his thumb and finger.

  “That was precisely what I was going to offer.”

  “Well, you’re honest, in a way,” he ruminated. “All right.”

  So in ten minutes we found ourselves walking together.

  “I’m taking you,” I said, “to a friend who goes one step further than I along the ‘traceless track’ of detection.”

  I’d first met Miss Brown at the Decoders’ Conference when I had first come to the country. We included there a pretty wide spectrum—from the infrared of the physicists and the chemists with their X-rays and their reactions and their analyses, right up to the ultraviolet of dowsers, psychometrists, and the like. Miss Brown was well up in the “u.v.” But she was uncommonly sane in spite of it and I’d seen her do some decoding which went far beyond my gift. It was chancy, her work, of course—all hunch and no deduction. But it was, after all, only an extension or extravagance of mine. And, as I couldn’t help feeling there was something in Intil’s scrap of paper, I wanted to see whether her queer gift would confirm my suspicion.

  “If there is something in your find, the person I’m taking you to will scent it, if anyone can,” I told Intil as we went along. For I have found that if you can build up confidence you often get results you never would otherwise. A discouraged detector, I believe, couldn’t see a haystack. Mr. Intil, however, made no answer to my attempt to excite his interest but scanned with some doubt the small front of Cortegna Cottage, when we stood waiting in front of its door.

  “Miss Brown,” I said, when the owner had answered the bell, “you told me last week to come along this afternoon. I’ve brought a visitor
who, I think, will interest you.”

  Miss Brown, like most experts, was as noncommittal, as “out of character,” as one could wish. I saw Intil look at her and I saw that he saw exactly nothing. “Medium height, eyes light, hair brown, complexion fair, age—youngish.” Yes, she was the living image of those descriptions which the poor police have to issue but which of course never lead to an identification—or worse, can lead to almost anyone being identified.

  Miss Brown, intelligent, healthy, no doubt “compos” in every way, nevertheless was one of those creations which leave no clear impression—perhaps because she looked in every respect so normal that you couldn’t recall her. There was no apparently outstanding feature, still less abnormality, by which to catch hold of her and pin her to your memory. Hers was one of those nice, accentless faces no cartoonist can caricature. That, I need hardly say, was her crowning equipment.

  “Come in,” she said. And, of course, the voice was as clear, kindly, and commonplace as her looks and was equally hard to “place” and memorize. You couldn’t have mimicked her. Her tone woke no reaction. I led Mr. Intil into her sitting room. She followed, and kept going that pointless conversation which is so much more noncommittal, so much more silent than silence. For, after all those gentle cliches—not only is not a single phrase of them recollectable, it is even hard to remember that they filled any time or what one did as the soothing sound went on. Perhaps it is all part of that mysterious by-play which conjurors, I believe, call “patter”—a kind of verbal massage under which stroking and patting our suspicions lie down and our clenched minds open up. So she settled us in, and when we were seated, in order to inform Mr. Intil what she was, I began to inform her of what he had told me.

  “My visitor here brought me an interesting specimen to classify.…”

  “He failed outright. Now, can you make anything of it?” Mr. Intil had hopped up and, while still poking in his pocket for his precious scrap of paper, advanced on Miss Brown.

  “No,” she said, laughing, getting up, too, but moving away from him. “No, Mr. Silchester can’t have told you anything about my method if you think my looking at your evidence would help to find out its secret.”

  “Are you collaborating lunatics?” he exclaimed. “One says, ‘There’s no code, but come along and we’ll show it to my female colleague’; and she remarks ‘No, please don’t show me anything!’”

  Quite unruffled, Miss Brown continued, “If you will sit down and keep whatever is your clue in your pocket for the present, I’ll explain, or perhaps it would be better if Mr. Silchester did.”

  Mr. Intil didn’t sit down, but he did take his finger from his vest pocket and turn on me.

  “Miss Brown,” I said, “goes beyond me. I confess I have to use hunch to start me, but I then, as I’ve told you, have to work out the sequel by sheer searching, going up every likely turning. I make a first glance and then know if there’s a case for further searching—a sort of grand jury stunt. Miss Brown doesn’t glance and then gets the picture.”

  “You’ve brought me to a medium, then!”

  “Oh, labels are libels! A medium’s only someone who has a gift he doesn’t understand. Miss Brown is as much a medium as a water-diviner is.”

  “Um, I’ve seen them work. Yes, and saw one who could spot metals—saw him do it. Yes, that’s within the range of the new prospecting, I guess.”

  “All right, then,” I said, for the little fool was exasperating me, all the more as I couldn’t get out of my head that he had hold of a secret something that could be highly interesting—otherwise I’d have turned him out before this. “All right, then don’t be a fool. Did you ever see a dowser who could work and find water if you kept on cutting capers round him and flipping his rod out of his hands?”

  He didn’t answer, but went back to his chair.

  Miss Brown looked across to me. “Shall we now begin?”

  “I think we can get going now,” I answered.

  I drew down the shades while she turned her chair to the fire. It was a warm day but she added a few small logs to what had been a low smolder and in a few minutes the hearth blazed. The room quickly became uncomfortably hot. Mr. Intil panted and started to mop himself with his handkerchief, but, thank heaven, kept quiet. Miss Brown, however, her chair drawn up to the fire, spread a handkerchief over her face. And in this attitude, beloved of old gentlemen on winter afternoons, brisk Miss Brown, on this hot, bright day, fell into stertorous slumber. I don’t like the adjective—it’s journalistic, alliterative, and unladylike—utterly unsuited to be applied to a neat young female. But this is reporting—not an essay on style and in taste or vice versa. Miss Brown went heavily to sleep. She breathed to the very limit of not-snoring, and then, as do heavy sleepers, she twitched and jerked her body, muttered a little, gave a small gasp or two and stirred, rousing herself. The handkerchief fell off her face. She was in trance. She was, evidently, already carrying on a rapid, affable conversation but not troubling to enunciate her words—it was a sort of impressionist sound-picture of a conversation. The tone was clear enough now but the sense was sadly to seek. And then, as in those old days, when we used to develop our own negatives, the photo in the red light used to begin to emerge and finally, out of the yellow fog, there was visible unmistakable detail, so in her “blur” of patter clear sentences began to emerge.

  It was, of course, the usual stuff. “Oh, there are such a lot of people here” (grammar is seldom a prophetess’ strong point). “Oh, there are so many persons who are just longing to say something. There’s an old man, such a lovely beard, he says his name is—oh, it’s something that has to do with something you put round the cord that brings the electric light, something black and sticky, a kind of tape.”

  “Yes,” I interrupted, for I knew from past experience that this “fishing” and splashing in the telepathic shallows could be abbreviated, “Yes, that’s very good, very good, and you see, don’t you, as well as the insulation tape—for that’s not quite right, but you’re getting warmer—another object? Don’t you see a cash-register and something being put into it?”

  “What are you doing?” almost hissed our clue-seeker. “Are you trying to spoil everything?”

  His whisper was drowned in the trance-personality’s gleeful cackle. “Why, if that isn’t it, just as you say, Mr. Sydney!”

  “Good again, Elsie, you’ve got our visitor’s name and he’s ever so grateful for your bringing his dear old father along.”

  “My father!” came a sotto voce snort. “With a beard! Here, stop this fooling!”

  But now, of course the sitting was hatching out.

  “Mr. Intil, Elsie, has in his pocket, you know, a weeny piece of writing. He is so puzzled what it means.”

  Like a shot the mawkish voice answered, “It’s a cage. I see a cage.”

  “It’s a frame-up!” I heard Intil snort.

  “But what an odd cage. It’s round—quite round—and where’s the bird? Oh, I see, but he’s so thin I nearly missed him.”

  I could hear Intil draw himself up out of slumped contempt to attention.

  “So thin?” I queried. “A queer bird, then?”

  “Oh, so queer, I don’t think, Mr. Sydney, I’d very much like to have him for a pet. His beak, it’s so very sharp, and he has it right against the bar of the cage, this side.” The medium waved her right hand. “He could peck.”

  “Is he pecking?”

  “No, he’s not pecking, leastways not now. He’s sitting right in the middle of his cage.”

  “Yet his beak is touching the bars—is he trying to get out?”

  “No, no, his beak and head are out that way ’cos that’s the way he goes—all pollies do—when they want to stretch their wing in a cage. He’s sort of yawning with his wing—he’s stretching it.”

  Intil was completely quiet now.

  “Elsie, can you tell us anything more about this bird? It interests us quite a great deal.”

  “Well, I’ve t
old you, he’s so thin he’s all point,” the “control” giggled childishly.

  “All point?”

  “Thin as a rail, thin as a pointer.”

  “Pointers aren’t very thin, Elsie. They aren’t birds. They point at birds—they’re dogs.”

  “Oh, don’t be so stupid, Mr. Sydney.”

  “Oh, you mean a pointing rod,” I remedied my false cast.

  “Of course I do. Well, I don’t think there’s much more about him. He’s so thin.…”

  The voice began to trail off. This was bad. If the “secondary personality” lost interest and dropped the thread, it would probably never catch on again, and here we were right on our clue if only it could be held. The next remark confirmed my fears.

  “Oh, the dear old gentleman does so want to speak. He wants me to stop looking at that silly polly.”

  I heard Intil breathe a devout “damn.”

  “Oh, it’s naughty to swear!” said our exasperatingly infantile informant.

  “Yes, dear Elsie,” I hurried into the gap. “Of course it is, and of course if we swear the pretty polly might pick up the naughty words.”

  That served its turn: it revived the interest of the imbecile but gifted layer of Miss Brown’s mind in the subject we needed its odd gift to be turned on. “I wonder,” said Elsie with provoking slowness, “I wonder whether that polly could learn to speak? I rather think not, Mr. Sydney. It has such a tiny head and such an unparroty beak. It just pushes it on one side as far as it can to let its wing stretch just as far as it can the other way.”

  Well, here we were back again at our caged bird, though we didn’t know anything more, really, than we knew when we started.

  “Will he let you scratch his head?” I volunteered in desperation to keep “Elsie’s” idiotic interest on the clue. Again the cast got a rise.

  “If I thought he wouldn’t peck—perhaps, perhaps—it would be easy.” Evidently the dream mind was seeing some sort of cage and bird. “It would be easy ’cos the cage—what a queer cage. Why does he stay in it?”