The Bradmoor Murder

by Melville Davisson Post

  I made a point of this because it had a bearing on the essentials of the story.

  It puzzled Letington, and it puzzled me when Sir Godfrey Simon got a little farther on with his narrative. It puzzled me because in this extraordinary story we came continually, it seemed, in contact with things that were what one would call out of reason or out of the usual experience of men. This was one of the features of it.

  The whole story is out of reason.

  It is out of the common experience of men. I suppose the profound impression it made on me was merely the cumulative effect of all these details bearing the same aspect. One does not get a great impression of wonder or unreality out of the influence of a single event. It is built up. It is made of a variety of smaller events. It is the converging point of a great mass of trivialities.

  I don’t give you that as my conclusion.

  It was Sir Godfrey Simon’s conclusion, and if you want to value the weight of it, think for a moment who he was, who he is to-day; the greatest alienist in England: that is to say, the greatest authority on the orderly procedure of the human mind, or would I better say the greatest authority on the disorderly procedure of the human mind?

  At any rate, you understand what I mean.

  I mean it was his business, his profession, to discriminate between the normal activities of the mind and those that were not normal. And he stood above every man in his profession. He has not an equal in the world. Anybody who knows anything about that profession knows that Sir Godfrey Simon is at the head of it.

  I think I told you all this in the beginning; that it was some time before I recognized the man when I came into that Dumas Inn with the Garden in Asia behind me. I did not know him for a while. I had a haunting memory of a face. And then, when he told me who he was, I remembered. I think I said that. Here before me at the table was Sir Godfrey Simon, the greatest alienist in England.

  This digression is not a matter of inadvertence.

  I put it here for a purpose: with a profound purpose, as you will realize in a moment. Carry it in your mind when you note the next thing that happened.

  I pass over the long labor of driving a heading into the tunnel. But the point I wish to consider is that when the heading was finally driven, the engine was not in the tunnel!

  I leave you to realize what Letington thought when he crawled through the opening of the heading and went with a torch to the other end. The whole tunnel was clear. The headings were driven in practically at the same time. There was nothing in the tunnel!

  The thing was absurd, incredible. It was fantastic. It was anything you wish to say. There is no language, in fact, to express the incredibility of such an event.

  But there it was.

  An immense passenger engine, weighing five hundred thousand pounds, and as big as a peasant’s house, had simply disappeared, vanished!

  The thing was a vast preposterous impossibility.

  You cannot imagine what Letington’s impressions were. He was like one before a reversal of the order of nature: trees that moved; animals that uttered words, or anything you like. There was no explanation! You can see that. What explanation could one give? Suppose you had been with him; suppose you had been, in fact, the man himself when you had crawled through the hole of one heading and gone with a torch along that single track, and crawled out into the air through the hole of the other heading, and found nothing in the tunnel. What would you have thought about it?

  But, as I have said, there it was!

  A huge piece of machinery weighing five hundred thousand pounds had vanished at the will of a peasant woman burning a ball of aromatic grass!

  Letington went back to the office of the company in the little village and sat down.

  He did not know what to do.

  He did not even know what to say to his English company; what to say to anybody. Who would believe this extraordinary thing? Heatherstone and his board of directors would come to one of two conclusions: that the man was as mad as a March hare or that he was in collusion with the Italians. One could not blame them. This is exactly what you would have thought. You might have thought, of course, that a simple-minded person had been tricked. But Letington was not a simpleminded person.

  I have told you precisely what happened.

  Now comprehend it in every detail, and see what you would have done in his place; where your intelligence would have been superior to his, or where any trick about it could have come in. Sir Godfrey Simon shot that query at me, and I considered it pretty carefully. I considered it for a good while, sitting there in the Dumas Inn, drying my riding clothes before the peat fire. I could not see anything, any precaution, any effort that I could have made that Letington had not as well or as adequately also made.

  That is how I ask you to think about it.

  And think about another thing. What would you have done when you came to meet the problem of giving these facts to the English company; to the sane world? I think any of us would have been in precisely the position Letington was. We would not have known what to do. I am going to tell you what he did do.

  It was not a sudden determination. He thought about the thing a while. He thought about it while the work of clearing up the tunnel went forward. They got all the earth out of the way, the stone arches up, the track cleared.

  The man could not keep away from the work.

  He kept walking through that tunnel. He could not believe what had happened, and it was time, it was delay that built up the state of mind to the point where he was receptive of the measure which he finally undertook.

  He called in the sturdy peasant woman.

  Now, that sounds like absurdity!

  She repeated her preposterous offer. She would cause the engine to materialize again, provided Letington would agree not to evict the Italians. She would make the engine appear—re-appear, to be more accurate—perfect as it was on the night that it had vanished out of sight and hearing; not a scratch on the paint.

  Letington did not say anything at the time. But the pressure on him increased, and finally he agreed to the terms. And almost immediately the engine appeared, precisely at the place on the track where it had vanished, in perfect condition, under full steam.

  He did, as a matter of fact, make a pretty full explanation of the matter to the English company, and it was received precisely as he foresaw. They did think he was insane.

  But that is not a point in the story I wish you to consider here. It comes in a little later. Letington was haunted by that wonderful singing voice. He wanted to hear it again. And, having packed his luggage—prepared himself, as one would say, to escape out of this land of unreality—he determined to have a further experience of it.

  He sent for the peasant woman.

  He asked to see the ancient singer; to hear her again. He put the profound problem that disturbed him, the problem that could have no adequate explanation. How could this singer be old, senile, feeble, at the end of life, and still possess this heavenly, sensuous voice of adolescence?

  The peasant woman made a gesture.

  It was all the business of magic. The form was nothing; youth and age were alike merely manifestations of the spirit! The formula that caused the spirit to take on a physical aspect could produce it as easily in one aspect as in another. That physical aspect could not be changed, but the thing at any period in its former existence could be reproduced.

  Let me give an illustration out of the one book with which everybody is familiar.

  When the Witch of Endor called up Samuel she could have called him up at any age of his life period: when he was a youth serving in the temple, at mid-life or at the end of it.

  That’s the explanation the Italian woman gave Letington.

  She did not give him this illustration of it. I put that in here. She was trying to make Letington understand that the form of this mysterious singing woman that she had called up was merely an incident. She could call her up at any period: in youth as well as at the very end
of her life. Letington had been permitted to hear the voice, but not to see the singer.

  And then she uttered a significant sentence: “You can be made to see her, but the agencies behind the world sell their gifts: to gain great treasure one must suffer great sacrifice.”

  Then she gave him a Delphic promise:

  “You may win your way to this woman—young, perfect, as beautiful as a dream—if you should lose the sun.”

  Letington did not understand what she meant.

  He understood later on, but that is going ahead of the story. He did understand that the woman was repeating in a vague way those esoteric expressions which the performers of magic have brought forward from the day of Pharaoh. The physical thing visible to our eye, audible to our ear, is merely an illusion.

  The human spirit alone is a reality!

  At its will and according to formula, carefully worked in the morning of the world, all physical manifestations presented themselves. At any rate, she promised Letington that he should hear the voice again and that he should see the singer.

  She took him to one of the remote Italian villages, adjacent to the mountains. It was an empty village. The Italian workmen had removed to the line of the railway. There were only abandoned houses here, as though some plague, or some fear, had removed the inhabitants. Beyond this village a narrow path led into the forest.

  Letington and the woman were alone.

  She strode along in front of him, a big, sturdy peasant. And he followed. They entered the forest, traversed it for some time, and finally came out into a little meadow where some pioneer had once cleared a farm.

  Across the meadow beyond them at the edge of the forest was a cottage.

  The afternoon sun had removed the snow from the meadow, and the cottage lay naked against the bosom of the forest toward the south.

  It was a scene from a fairy story—the tiny meadow in the heart of the forest, with the sun on it, and the little cottage with the blue wood smoke ascending from its chimney. Two hundred paces from the door of the cottage the peasant woman stopped.

  She turned about to Letington.

  Would he promise to remain where he stood until this singing was ended and then go to his ship? He gave the promise. Then she repeated the former details of her magic. She took a ball—the ball of grasses and resin—out of the bosom of her dress, lighted and burned it. The aromatic odor appeared, extended itself.

  There was silence.

  There was not even, as it appeared, motion in the world. The tiny thread of smoke from the aromatic grasses ascended and assumed the fantastic shape of a flower, as it had assumed in the office that day before him. The haze appeared.

  Then the woman cried out that same harsh, shattering formula, extending her hand.

  It seemed again to Letington to be the precise form of magic used by those magicians in the Hebrew Scriptures who undertook to control spirits—to call them up out of the underworld or to materialize them out of the air—the extended arm, the crooked fingers and the loud cry.

  And immediately a figure appeared in the door of the cottage, but it was not the aged figure that had appeared before him at the first manifestation. It was a slender figure in its glorious youth.

  He was too far away to get details of it.

  The face was indistinct, but the hair was golden, and the image had the figure of a dryad. Other details the distance blurred. But the one immense fact was youth. This woman was young, like the daughters of faërie in the morning of the world!

  And again that heavenly voice reached him; that wonderful, haunting voice in its incomparable music. The man was transported into fairyland, as through a door in the hill, beyond time, beyond space.

  He was in a world of wonder.

  And the young, alluring fairy figure was singing to him. It was to him that the voice called. It brought a message of wonder to him; a longing to him, as though the singer had waited through an interminable age for him to arrive; had been seeking him through the world. Time was nothing; distance was nothing; age was nothing!

  These things were all illusions.

  The reality was the longing for him; the search for him. And now that he was found, the joy of that final ending of the search could not be concealed.

  It ran a subdued note through the music.

  The man stood in some land of unending summer, of undying youthfulness, seized with all the longings of all the lovers that had ever lived. Here was something mysteriously synchronized, divinely, to his own spirit.

  Then it ceased.

  The figure entered the cottage, the door closed, and the peasant woman took him back, as in a dream, to the world of reality.

  He went to his ship and to England.

  Letington took up the old life with his sister, the Countess of Heatherstone. He hunted that winter in the Midlands. There was not, perhaps, a great change to be noted in the man. He was never a voluble person. But he seemed more reticent, and perhaps more interested in the hunt. He was out nearly every day with some master of the hounds. He rode hard, and he was less careful either of himself or his horse. There was little change, as I have said, to be observed in the man.

  Perhaps when one knows that one has been connected with an extraordinary event, or is under the shadow of some mental illusion, one marks details as signboards on the way. But if one does not have this knowledge about him, no notice will be taken.

  The spring came, and Letington took up polo. One day at Roehampton, in a scrimmage, he was by accident struck on the temple with a mallet. The injury at the time did not seem to be important. He did not get down from the pony, and the game went on.

  But the injury was, in fact, serious.

  The optic nerve congested, and his sight began to fail. He went to all the experts in England. They were all quite agreed about it. There was an obscure injury of some character to the optic nerve. They could do nothing. And the appalling thing about it was that the failing sight was not confined to the eye on the side of the temple injured. It appeared in both eyes. In plain truth, the man was going blind.

  And then he got a mysterious message:

  “Come to me if you lose the sun!”

  He did not know where the message came from nor how it happened to arrive. He said that he was in Piccadilly Circus one afternoon in London. He had been up to see one of the experts. He was getting into a taxicab. There was a crowd at this point, held up by the traffic and someone whispered the words to him.

  He could not see who it was.

  He was pretty blind by now. The world was passing. He got no idea who had been near him. He was facing the door of the taxicab at the moment. It was not certain that he could have seen the speaker if his eyes had been all right. In the condition they were in he did not know who had spoken to him. But he heard the message precisely, and he knew whence it came.

  It was the Delphic promise of the peasant woman. He knew now what she meant by that oracular expression:

  “You may win your way … if you should lose the sun!”

  Well, he was on the road to losing the sun. That was one way to put the case. As this blindness went on the sun would disappear.

  But the thing cheered him like a bugle.

  If the way to this heavenly creature lay through the dark only, then he was glad of the dark. He welcomed it. It was the thing he wished above all other things, and his manner changed. He no longer complained against his blindness. He no longer cared.

  He welcomed it!

  The only thing that concerned him in the message was the uncertainty of it. How could he go to her when he had no knowledge of where she was? How could one reach a fairy creature, a dryad singing in a sacred grove?

  Where was the door in the hill through which one entered into this magic country? He was on the way to lose the sun; that was certain. That way was clear enough. But how was he to get his feet on the other way? It was all a mystery.

  But he had an incredible uplifting of the spirit. The way in the end would be m
ade clear to him. But did it mean that he was to go out of life? Did it mean that to come to this heavenly creature he must go out of the world of consciousness, of sight, of hearing? Was it the door of death that he was called to go through?

  That was the only thing that disturbed him.

  He wished to find that heavenly creature in this life, while his strength and his youth were with him. He was in every way strong and in vigor, with the exception of this blindness, and he did not care for that. He recalled what the peasant woman had said: the agencies behind the world sold their gifts; sold them at a price. And for a gift so excellent this price was not excessive.

  He did not haggle about the price.

  He was willing to pay it, glad to pay it, anxious to pay, if he could win his way to this woman of dreams!

  And so it came about, as I said a moment ago, that the man’s attitude toward things changed. He seemed pleased with the disaster that was overtaking him. And this manner, the incredible events that he had reported to the English company, and his now marked unconcern in the face of an appalling disaster, convinced everyone about him that he was insane; that, on the way to loss of vision, he was also on the way to a loss of sanity.

  They called in Sir Godfrey Simon.

  Everybody believed Letington on the way to madness; that is to say, everybody about him but the one person who was an authority on that subject.

  Sir Godfrey Simon did not believe it.

  He knew the man was not insane. He knew it for several reasons, complete and satisfactory in themselves. You see, there was a series of coincidents in this thing.

  Sir Godfrey Simon, as it happened, had a knowledge of these events. He had a larger knowledge of them than this actor in them. He knew the extent of them, their ramifications and whither they led, while Letington knew only the result of them. He had a larger knowledge of the whole business than Letington; and that, for one reason, convinced him that the man was not insane.