In the Shadow of Agatha Christie

by Leslie S. Klinger

  “And you know,” says he, “I’ve come to a conclusion. The thing that killed Alice Merrion didn’t go through the skylight, it came through it.”

  “What makes you think that?” I asked.

  “The way the iron stanchions were bent. They say the weight of the man hanging to them and pulling himself up bowed them down. Now, I say that’s a mistake. To bend those rods that way a man would have to be a giant—a second Sandow.* It was the weight of something that struck them from above—a tremendous weight—that bent and almost broke them.”

  “What could strike down from there?” I asked. “There’s nothing between the roof of the Fremont and Heaven.”

  “That’s the trick,” said he. “You tell me what could, and I’ll tell you what killed Alice Merrion.”

  It seemed to me all idle talk, but I couldn’t help saying:

  “I don’t see how you make that out. Alice was struck on the back of the head. If a thing fell on her it would have caught her on the top of her head. She must have been standing right under the skylight.”

  He leaned forward and put his fingers on my arm, his eyes shining like jewels.

  “Johnson,” says he, “you’re an honest man, I’ve no doubt, but you’ve not got much sense. Don’t you remember that she was putting on her shoes? Did you ever see a woman put on her shoes? She leans over so that her head’s bent forward this way—” and he bent his head far down till the back of his neck was stretched out beyond his collar.

  “I guess you and the doctor have got the same idea,” said I. “There is nothing that could come down on her from above and strike her dead with one blow but a madman who had been creeping about on the roofs.”

  “I worked over that theory for some time,” says he, “but I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s nothing in it. Between the breaking of the glass and the falling of the blow she could have got to the door. No—she was surprised as she was putting on her shoes—surprised and killed in the same instant.”

  I thought of the expression of her face that morning when we found her dead and stiff, and I looked at John Paul Hayne and nodded without speaking.

  After this I saw him every few days. He asked me lots of questions and I got to answering him pretty freely, for I saw that he didn’t publish what I said, and I got a great liking for him. He was forever starting theories, but I didn’t see that they came to anything.

  It was just about this time that the second cold snap struck the city. It was precious cold in my cell and I thought of the old Fremont and Rosy’s sitting room with a fire shining through the bars of the grate. Lord! but those times seemed a long way off!

  Rosy came to see me with her ears tied up in a worsted scarf. She said it was not as cold as the first snap, but, none the less, the Octagon pipes had frozen and burst again. Some of the Octagon people had come over to the Fremont to ask for rooms. They said the Octagon was a sham, run up by contract and badly built from the curbstone to the chimneys.

  Because of these applications the owners of the Fremont were thinking of tearing out the inside of the studio and fitting it up for offices. But, so far, it stood just as it did the morning Alice Merrion’s body was found there. The detectives working on the case wouldn’t have it touched.

  The cold spell was a short one. The back of the winter was broken and it gave way in three days with a big thaw. The sun beat down like Spring and everything ran water.

  My trial was going on daily. The evidence for the defense was nearly all in. I was in a strange state of mind—sometimes I felt wild as if I was being smothered; then again I’d be dull and dead-like, not caring what happened.

  People kept on saying “They can’t convict you on the evidence they’ve got.” But I didn’t care much for that. Even if the jury disagreed I was ruined. I’d have to go back to the world and for the rest of my life be pointed out as the man who had brutally murdered a poor, sick, defenseless girl. I’d rather have died, only for Rosy.

  It was the afternoon of the third warm day. I’ll never forget that day if I live to be two hundred. The window of the cell was open and every now and then a little breath of soft air came in—air full of Spring.

  I was alone, sick at heart and dead beat. I’d been in the courtroom since morning. They’d had Rosy on the stand, and the poor girl had got mixed up and made things between us look as bad as could be. Then, seeing what she had done, and being weak and frightened, she’d gone off into hysterics, and they could not get her into any sort of condition to go on. So the case had been called off until Monday and I’d seen Rosy taken out sobbing and half dead, and been brought back to my cell.

  I was sitting on the edge of the bed when I heard the rattling of bolts and voices at the door, and in came Hayne. The light from the window fell full on his face and it shone as if there was a lamp lit inside it. The look of him brought me on to my feet as if I’d been yanked up by a derrick. I said something, I don’t know what. Maybe I didn’t speak at all, but I know I tried to.

  Without saying a word he took off his hat and held it out to me. I looked at it stupidly. It was a brown derby, the top broken and split.

  “Look at that, Johnson,” he said, shaking it under my eyes—“look at it well. It’s saved you. Do you understand me? It’s saved your life.”

  I stared at him and tried to say something but my tongue wouldn’t work.

  He pushed me back on the bed and, holding the hat in front of me, began to talk quick with his breath catching in between like a man who’s been running.

  “My hat’s been ruined in that studio of yours—the studio of the Fremont. Fortunately, Raymond and his assistant stenographer were there and saw the catastrophe. See,” he said, thrusting his hand through the hole in the crown. “What a blow!”

  “A blow!” I said. “Who struck it?”

  “The same person who struck Alice Merrion.”

  We were silent for a second, staring at each other. I could hear my heart beating like a hammer. Then he began:

  “I’ve been in the studio a good deal lately, studying the place. Today I stopped there at about mid-day, to have another look at those bent rods we’ve so often spoken of. On the landing I met Raymond and his assistant, and they went in with me, as I wanted to explain to them my idea about the rods. I got on a chair under the broken skylight and they stood below, listening to my explanation. As I stood that way the sun beat down on my head almost as hot as summer and I could hear the dripping of the water from the icicles on the Octagon pipes.

  “All of a sudden, without warning, I heard a sharp, snapping sound, there was a crashing noise, and something struck me on the head a stultifying blow. I shouted and struck up, and Raymond and the stenographer caught me as I fell, for I was stunned for a moment. When I pulled myself together I saw that the floor was covered with icicles and chunks of solid ice. Looking up we could see that the great bunch which had been hanging to the pipes had broken off, snapped by its own weight in the thaw.”

  I fell back on the bed, holding his hand, and stammering something—Heaven knows what.

  “Brace up, old man,” says he. “You can see daylight now all right. Raymond says that the icicles on the pipes in the last frost were triple that size and weight. They bent the iron rods and tore the skylight out. They murdered Alice Merrion. All you can say is that they killed her quickly. They must have fallen in two detachments, the vibration of the first break dislodging the second mass, which came almost in the same instant. The glass was broken and the huge, jagged iceberg with its pointed daggers, must have plunged through the opening and in one breath struck the girl senseless and lifeless. Why, pull yourself together old man—you’re as white as chalk.”

  Well, that’s all.

  The rest of the story is too well known through the papers for me to tell it. The case of the State against Jared Johnson was dismissed. There was a great day when I said good-bye to them all and came out into the daylight again—an innocent man.

  But I’m not going to stay h
ere. No. Too many people know me by sight and stare at me, and I can’t bear to pass the old Fremont. Rosy and I are going back to Ohio; my brother has a farm there and I’m to help work it with him.

  As for John Paul Hayne, I’m glad to say they’ve raised his salary on The Scoop. One of those sensational papers offered him a hundred dollars a week, but he wouldn’t take it. He’s a fine boy. He’s promised to write to me every two weeks.

  * Eugen Sandow (1867–1925), a famous German strongman, known as the “father” of bodybuilding.

  The American novelist Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) was primarily known for her writings about the South. Her 1942 novel In This Our Life, about the contemporary South, won the Pulitzer Prize. She became involved in the women’s suffrage movement in the United States in the early twentieth century but dropped out, the activism having come at what she described as the “wrong moment” in her life. Nonetheless, her later work reflects many heroines whose lives embody the virtues of the leaders of the movement. She also published a dozen short stories over her career, and the following, which first appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for May 1899, considers the ethical responsibilities of the discoverer of a criminal.

  POINT IN MORALS

  ELLEN GLASGOW

  The question seems to be—” began the Englishman. He looked up and bowed to a girl in a yachting cap who had just come in from deck and was taking the seat beside him. The question seems to be—” The girl was having some difficulty in removing her coat, and he turned to assist her.

  “In my opinion,” broke in a well-known alienist on his way to a convention in Vienna, “the question is simply whether or not civilization, in placing an exorbitant value upon human life, is defeating its own aims.” He leaned forward authoritatively, and spoke with a half-foreign precision of accent.”

  “You mean that the survival of the fittest is checkmated,” remarked a young journalist travelling in the interest of a New York daily, “that civilization should practice artificial selection, as it were?”

  The alienist shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly. “My dear sir,” he protested, “I don’t mean anything. It is the question that means something.”

  “Well, as I was saying,” began the Englishman again, reaching for the salt and upsetting a spoonful, “the question seems to be whether or not, under any circumstances, the saving of a human life may become positively immoral.”

  “Upon that point—” began the alienist: but a young lady in a pink blouse who was seated on the Captain’s right interrupted him.

  “How could it?” she asked. “At least I don’t see how it could; do you, Captain?”

  “There is no doubt,” remarked the journalist, looking up from a conversation he had drifted into with a lawyer from one of the Western States, “that the more humane spirit pervading modern civilization has not worked wholly for good in the development of the species. Probably, for instance, if we had followed the Spartan practice of exposing unhealthy infants, we should have retained something of the Spartan hardihood. Certainly if we had been content to remain barbarians both our digestions and our nerves would have been the better for it, and melancholia would perhaps have been unknown. But, at the same time, the loss of a number of the more heroic virtues is overbalanced by an increase of the softer ones. Notably, human life has never before been regarded so sacredly.”

  “On the other side,” observed the lawyer, lifting his hand to adjust his eye-glasses, and pausing to brush a crumb from his coat, “though it may all be very well to be philanthropic to the point of pauperizing half a community and of growing squeamish about capital punishment, the whole thing sometimes takes a disgustingly morbid turn. Why, it seems as if criminals were the real American heroes! Only last week I visited a man sentenced to death for the murder of his two wives, and, by Jove, the jailer was literally besieged by women sympathizers. I counted six bunches of heliotrope in his cell, and at least fifty notes.”

  “Oh, but that is a form of nervous hysteria!” said the girl in the yachting cap, “and must be considered separately. Every sentiment has its fanatics—philanthropy as well as religion. But we don’t judge a movement by a few overwrought disciples.”

  “That is true,” said the Englishman, quietly. He was a middle-aged man, with an insistently optimistic countenance, and a build suggestive of general solidity. “But to return to the original proposition. I suppose we will all accept as a fundamental postulate the statement that the highest civilization is the one in which the highest value is placed upon individual life—”

  “And happiness,” added the girl in the yachting cap.

  “And happiness,” assented the Englishman.

  “And yet,” commented the lawyer, “I think that most of us will admit that such a society, where life is regarded as sacred because it is valuable to the individual, and not because it is valuable to the state, tends to the non-production of heroes—”

  “That the average will be higher and the exception lower,” observed the journalist. “In other words, that there will be a general elevation of the mass, accompanied by a corresponding lowering of the few.”

  “On the whole, I think our system does very well,” said the Englishman, carefully measuring the horseradish he was placing upon his oysters. “A mean between two extremes is apt to be satisfactory in results. If we don’t produce a Marcus Aurelius or a Seneca, neither do we produce a Nero or a Phocas.* We may have lost patriotism, but we have gained cosmopolitanism, which is better. If we have lost chivalry, we have acquired decency; and if we have ceased to be picturesque, we have become cleanly, which is considerably more to be desired.”

  “I have never felt the romanticism of the Middle Ages,” remarked the girl in the yachting cap. “When I read of the glories of the Crusaders, I can’t help remembering that a knight wore a single garment for a lifetime, and hacked his horse to pieces for a whim. Just as I never think of that chivalrous brute, Richard the Lion-Hearted, that I don’t see him chopping off the heads of his three thousand prisoners.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that any of us are sighing for a revival of the Middle Ages, returned the journalist. “The worship of the past has usually for its devotees people who have only known the present—”

  “Which is as it should be,” commented the lawyer. “If man was confined to the worship of the knowable, all the world would lapse into atheism.”

  “Just as the great lovers of humanity were generally hermits,” added the girl in the yachting cap. “I had an uncle who used to say that he never really loved mankind until he went to live in the wilderness.”

  “I think we are drifting from the point,” said the alienist, helping himself to potatoes. “Was it not—can the saving of a human life ever prove to be an immoral act? I once held that it could.”

  “Did you act upon it?” asked the lawyer, with rising interest. “I maintain that no proposition can be said to exist until it is acted upon. Otherwise it is in merely an embryonic state—”

  The alienist laid down his fork and leaned forward. He was a notable-looking man of some thirty-odd years, who had made a sudden leap into popularity through several successful cases. He had a nervous, muscular face, with singularly penetrating eyes, and hair of a light sandy color. His hands were white and well shaped.

  “It was some years ago,” he said, bending a scintillant† glance around the table. “If you will listen—”

  There followed a stir of assent, accompanied by a nod from the young lady upon the Captain’s right. “I feel as if it would be a ghost story,” she declared.

  “It is not a story at all,” returned the alienist, lifting his wineglass and holding it against the light. “It is merely a fact.”

  Then he glanced swiftly around the table as if challenging attention.

  “As I said,” he began, slowly, “it was some few years ago. Just what year does not matter, but at that time I had completed a course at Heidelberg, and expected shortly to set out with an exploring party fo
r South Africa. It turned out afterwards that I did not go, but for the purpose of the present story it is sufficient that I intended to do so, and had made my preparations accordingly. At Heidelberg I had lived among a set of German students who were permeated with the metaphysics of Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and the rest, and I was pretty well saturated myself. At that age I was an ardent disciple of pessimism. I am still a disciple, but my ardor has abated which is not the fault of pessimism, but the virtue of middle age—”

  “A man is usually called conservative when he has passed the twenties,” interrupted the journalist, “yet it is not that he grows more conservative, but that he grows less radical.”

  “Rather that he grows less in every direction,” added the Englishman, “except in physical bulk.”

  The alienist accepted the suggestions with an inclination, and continued. “One of my most cherished convictions,” he said, “was to the effect that every man is the sole arbiter of his fate. As Schopenhauer has it, ‘that there is nothing to which a man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.’ Indeed, that particular sentence had become a kind of motto with our set, and some of my companions even went so far as to preach the proper ending of life with the ending of the power of individual usefulness.”

  He paused to help himself to salad.

  “I was in Scotland at the time, where I had spent a fortnight with my parents, in a small village on the Kyles of Bute. While there I had been treating an invalid cousin who had acquired the morphine habit, and who, under my care, had determined to uproot it. Before leaving I had secured from her the amount of the drug which she had in her possession—some thirty grains—done up in a sealed package, and labelled by a London chemist. As I was in haste, I put it in my bag, thinking that I would add it to my case of medicines when I reached Leicester, where I was to spend the night with an old schoolmate. I took the boat at Tighnabruaich, the small village, found a local train at Gourock to reach Glasgow with one minute in which to catch the first express to London. I made the change and secured a first-class smoking compartment, which I at first thought to be vacant, but when the train had started a man came from the dressing room and took the seat across from me. At first I paid no heed to him, but upon looking up once or twice and finding his eyes upon me, I became unpleasantly conscious of his presence. He was thin almost to emaciation, and yet there was a muscular suggestion of physical force about him which it was difficult to account for, since he was both short and slight. His clothes were shabby, but well made, and his cravat had the appearance of having been tied in haste or by nervous fingers. There was a trace of sensuality about the mouth, over which he wore a drooping yellow mustache tinged with gray, and he was somewhat bald upon the crown of his head, which lent a deceptive hint of intellectuality to his uncovered forehead. As he crossed his legs I saw that his boots were carefully blacked, and that they were long and slender, tapering to a decided point.”