by H. F. Heard
“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 visito
r’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 told 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?”
“What’s queer about it?”
“Why it’s a sort of circle thing with no bars, only this hoop thing.”
“Well, many ponies are sometimes kept in cages like that. It gives them more freedom.”
“Yes, but they have a perch, don’t they?”
“Of course; hasn’t this polly?”
“I can’t see what he’s sitting on. Now, isn’t that queer!” (Thank heaven, the infantile curiosity of the subconscious was now roused.) “But I can see one sort of thing—a number of them. Round the hoop of his cage are little knots.” The medium’s hand rose. “There’s one, quite bunchy, at the top.” Her finger pointed up. “And another, not so bunchy, right under the polly.” She pointed down. “And just under the point of his bill is another, rather a squiggle than a bunch, that one. Oh, I can see them so clearly. There are twelve of them.” Then, with a sudden failing of interest: “But I don’t know what they are. And it’s such a silly bird sitting there yawning on and on, with his wing. Oh, it makes me yawn. Oh, I’m so tired and sleepy. No, I don’t want you; go away.”
And, suiting the deed to the word, the medium yawned widely and then began to breathe deeply once more. She settled back in her chair. Her head fell to one side. It wasn’t much that she had brought through, but it was something definite. I felt pretty certain that as far as it went I had caught an answer. Intil stirred; I waved him back to his chair.
“But—” he began.
“Be silent,” I hissed, so successfully that he was.
Miss Brown began to stir. She muttered, almost whimpered. A questioning note came into this low whinny. Her body again jerked once or twice. She cleared her throat, sighed and sat up.
“Well,” she said, “how long was I away?”
“A short spell.”
“Did anything worth having come through?”
“Yes, quite enough.”
“What!” interrupted Intil.” You give her a lot of hints and helps and then she rambles on, romancing all about birds all made up.…”
“Mr. Intil!” I shot in. “If you’re as stupid as you’re ill-mannered you’ll never find anything.”
“Oh, it’s easy to be abusive when you want to cover up failure,” he sneered, and so got right under my skin. I hadn’t intended to tell the boorish fool anything. But the sitting had been a good one, and I had got from it my clue, I felt sure.
“There you’re wrong, as usual. How you can be a prospector and so blind beats me!”
“Oh, so you, who couldn’t discover anything yourself, you’re going to flatter yourself now by pretending that you understand this mummery!”
I rose and opened the door. “Please leave the house! And let me tell you that the answer to your question was given! The initial passage of your message really runs: ‘When the hands of the clock stand at twenty minutes to three!”
I meant to surprise him but never expected quite such a success. He looked at me for a moment, then turned and literally ran through the door, through the hallway, plucked open the hall door, and slammed it behind him. And we heard his feet as he scampered off down the road.
Chapter II
I went back to Miss Brown.
“Don’t tell me what happened,” were her first words. “That little fellow interested me. There’s more in this, I fancy, than my ‘control’ gets at. If we find ourselves back on this trail again it will be all the better for me to know as little as possible, or my surface mind will interfere.”
I knew her method—the rule of all authentic “mediums.” Otherwise the surface mind interferes, tries to make premature sense of what has come through from deeper levels and all’s spoilt.
“Well, you know,” I answered, “that you did get onto the question which was bothering our queer client; you know that you gave me the answer which earlier, on my own, I failed to give him and that he was—well, one can’t say content, but obviously struck with our joint effort.”
She smiled, “You’ll let me know, then, if he turns up again. There’s certainly some very odd business he’s mixed in.”
My own hunch told me with just as much emphasis that this was so. I took leave of Miss Brown, telling her I’d certainly call her should our queer little whale that had just sounded, spout again in our waters.
Several months passed, however, and I recalled Mr. Intil only
when on my half-yearly check-up of my case-file I saw the one-line entry under the INs—“Intil: by self, no result: collab: Miss Brown. Clue found. n.f.” The case had evidently closed itself and when n.f. comes at the end it is usually a signal of finality. For n.f. means “no fee.”
My work all that time was routine stuff. Once or twice my mind did go back to the man but mainly because I was still feeling a distinct pleasure at the way that I had caught hold of the clue which Miss Brown threw out in trance. And soon that little success was buried under others. I enjoyed my life in my quiet way. Puzzles that pay—it was a lucky stroke that put me where I could still amuse myself and at the same time earn a living.
Then one day I was going down the street with my mind, I believe, actually turning over the solution of a set riddle when automatically I stepped aside, not looking up, so as not to disturb my train of thought. Someone was in my path, I was vaguely aware. But when I shifted, the figure I wasn’t looking at, by trying to avoid, shifted too. I looked up pettishly. It was one of those silly little subconscious duels in courtesy—each of us was giving way so spontaneously to the other that we managed to keep in each other’s way. That pedestrian double-stutter has always seemed to me the best demonstration, of the need for intelligent selfishness. Then I saw that I was mistaken. My vis-à-vis was not trying to get out of my way but into it. He was a man, distinguished I am sure he knew himself to be. He was old: white but very—not erect, there was nothing military about him—but limber, I think, is the word, lithely loose—odd, I thought, in an old man. He had heightened his remarkable appearance by a short, sharp white beard. I looked then at his eyes. They were on mine. He was blocking my path deliberately. But where had I seen those eyes? Surely one knew them, and surely, as he was not a hold-up man, surely he must think he knew me, too?
“Mr. Silchester,” he said.
“Mr. Mycroft!” I exclaimed. “Where did you drop from?”
“As you see—” what a familiar opening, always asking me to see what was of course obvious and of course overlooked by me—“I am on your track.”
