Rouletabille and the Mystery of the Yellow Room

by Gaston Leroux

  The Investigating Magistrate

  Questions Mademoiselle Stangerson

  Five minutes later, Rouletabille was bending over the footprints discovered in the grass under the window of the vestibule. Suddenly, we saw a man—obviously a servant from the Chateau—running towards us and calling out to Monsieur Darzac, who was just coming out of the pavilion:

  “Monsieur Robert, the Magistrate is questioning Mademoiselle!”

  Darzac muttered a quick apology to us and rushed off towards the Chateau; the servant followed him.

  “If the poor girl can speak,” I said, “it might be interesting to hear what she has to say.”

  “I agree,” said my friend. “Let’s return to the Chateau.”

  We rushed over, but, unfortunately, a gendarme stationed in the vestibule denied us admission to the first floor, where the interrogation was taking place and we were therefore forced to wait downstairs.

  From what I learned later, this is what took place in Mademoiselle Stangerson’s bedroom, while we were waiting below. The family doctor, finding that his patient had been doing better, but also concerned about a relapse which might further delay the possibility of her being interviewed, thought it was his duty to inform the Investigating Magistrate. Monsieur de Marquet then decided to proceed immediately with the interview. It was attended by his clerk, Professor Stangerson, and the doctor.

  Later, during the trial, I managed to obtain a transcript of this interview, which I reproduce below in all its legal dryness:

  “Question. Mademoiselle, without exhausting yourself, are you capable of giving us some details about the frightful attack of which you were the victim?

  “Answer. Thank you, I feel much better, Monsieur. I will tell you all that I know. When I entered my room, I didn’t notice anything unusual there…

  “Q. Excuse me, Mademoiselle, if you will allow me, I will ask the questions and you will answer them. That will be less tiring for you than making a long recital.

  “A. As you please, Monsieur.

  “Q. What did you do on that day? I want you to be as detailed and precise as possible. I wish to know everything that happened on that very day—if it’s not too much to ask.

  “A. I got up at 10 a.m. because my father and I had come home late the night before, having been invited to a banquet given by the French President to honor the Academy of Sciences of Philadelphia. When I left my room at 10:30 a.m., my father was already working in the laboratory. We worked together till noon. We then took a half-hour’s walk in the grounds, as we often do, before having breakfast at the Chateau. After breakfast, we took another half-hour’s walk, and then returned to the laboratory at 1:30 p.m. There, we found my chambermaid, who had come to clean my room. I went into the Yellow Room to give her some orders. Then, she left the pavilion and I resumed my work with my father. At 5 p.m., we went out again for another walk in the grounds and, after that, we had tea.

  “Q. Before leaving the pavilion at 5 p.m., did you go into the Yellow Room?

  “A. No, Monsieur, but my father did, at my request, to bring me my hat.

  “Q. And he found nothing suspicious there?

  “Professor Stangerson. Obviously not, Monsieur.

  “Q. It is, therefore, almost certain that the murderer wasn’t yet hiding under the bed. When you went out, was the door of theYellow Room locked?

  “A. No, there was no reason to lock it.

  “Q. How long were you and your father away from the pavilion?

  “A. About an hour.

  “Q. It was likely during that hour that the perpetrator got inside the pavilion. But how? Nobody yet knows. We did find some footprints in the grounds, but leading away from the vestibule window. We’ve found none going towards it. Did you notice whether the vestibule window was open when you went out with your father?

  “A. I don’t remember.

  “Professor Stangerson. It was closed.

  “Q. And when you returned?

  “A. I didn’t notice.

  “Professor Stangerson. It was still closed. I remember it very well because I remarked aloud: ‘Père Jacques could have opened the window while we were out.’

  “Q. Very strange! You might recall, Professor, that Père Jacques, in his testimony, claimed to have opened that window during your absence, before he went out… So you returned to the laboratory at 6 p.m. and resumed work?

  “A. Yes, Monsieur.

  “Q. And you didn’t leave the laboratory from that hour up to the moment when you went into the Yellow Room?

  “Professor Stangerson. Neither my daughter nor I left the laboratory, Monsieur. We were engaged on work that was so pressing that we didn’t dare waste a minute, and neglected everything else because of it.

  “Q. Did you dine in the laboratory?

  “A. Yes, for the same reason.

  “Q. Are you accustomed to dining in the laboratory?

  “A. No, we rarely eat there.

  “Q. Could the perpetrator have known that you would be dining there that evening?

  “Professor Stangerson. Good Heavens! I don’t think so, Monsieur. It was only when we returned to the pavilion at 6 p.m. that I decided that my daughter and I would be dining there. At that moment, our gamekeeper came and detained me for a few minutes. He wanted me to go with him to look at a section of the grounds which I’ve decided to thin. I told him I didn’t have the time to do it then and put it off until the next day. But since he was going by the Chateau, I asked him to tell our butler that we would be dining in the laboratory. After the gamekeeper left to deliver my message, I rejoined my daughter. I had given her my key to the pavilion, and she’d gone inside, leaving the key in the lock outside. When I walked into the laboratory, she was already at work.

  “Q. Mademoiselle, at what hour did you go into the Yellow Room while your father continued to work?

  “A. At midnight.

  “Q. Did Père Jacques enter the Yellow Room during the evening?

  “A. Yes, once. To close the shutters and light the lamp, as he did every night.

  “Q. He saw nothing suspicious?

  “A. He would have told us if he did. Père Jacques is a good man who’s very attached to me.

  “Q. Professor, do you confirm that Père Jacques didn’t leave the laboratory? That he remained with you at all times?

  “Professor Stangerson. I’m sure of it. I have no doubt about it.

  “Q. Mademoiselle, when you entered the Yellow Room, you immediately locked and bolted the door… Why those precautions when you knew that your father and your servant were just outside? Were you afraid of something?

  “A. My father would be returning to the Chateau and Père Jacques would be going to bed in the atyic. But, as a matter of fact, yes, I was afraid of something.

  “Q. You were so afraid that you borrowed Père Jacques’s revolver without telling him?

  “A. That’s correct. I didn’t want to alarm anyone, especially since my fears might have been foolish ones.

  “Q. What was it that you feared?

  “A. I’m not sure how to explain it. For several nights, I thought I’d heard unusual sounds around the pavilion, sometimes footsteps, at other times, the cracking of branches, coming from both inside and outside the grounds. The night before the attack, when I didn’t go to bed until 3 a.m. because of the banquet at the Elysée palace, I stood for a moment before my window, and I’m sure I saw shadows.

  “Q. How many?

  “A. Two. They were moving around the pond. Then, the Moon clouded over and they vanished. Normally, at this time of the year, I’ve moved back into my apartment at the Chateau for the winter; but this year, I decided that I wouldn’t leave the pavilion until my father had finished his paper on the Dissociation of Matter for the Academy of Sciences. I didn’t want that important work, which only required a few more days to be completed, to be delayed by a change in our daily habits. So you will understand that I didn’t want to share my childish fears with my father, nor d
id I say a word to Père Jacques whom, I knew, wouldn’t have been able to hold his tongue. Knowing that he had a revolver in his room, I took advantage of his absence and borrowed it, placing it in the drawer of my nightstand.

  “Q. Do you know of any enemies you might have?

  “A. None.

  “Q. You understand, Mademoiselle, that this revelation, at this stage of the investigation, is rather suprising?

  “Professor Stangerson. I must say, my child, I, too, find such precautions astonishing.

  “A. I understand, but as I’ve just told you, I had been uneasy for two nights...

  “Professor Stangerson. You should have told me, Mathilde! It’s unforgivable! We could have avoided this horrible misfortune...

  “Q. After you locked the door of the Yellow Room, did you go to bed?

  “A. Yes. I was very tired, I fell asleep at once.

  “Q. The lamp was still burning?

  “A. Yes, but it gave very little light.

  “Q. Tell us what happened next, Mademoiselle.

  “A. I don’t know how long I’d been asleep, but, suddenly, I awoke and cried out...

  “Professor Stangerson. Yes, a horrible cry. ‘Murder!’ It still rings in my ears.

  “Q. You screamed?

  “A. Yes. A man was in my room. He sprang at me and tried to strangle me. I was about to pass out when I was able to reach into the drawer of my night table and grasp the revolver which I had loaded and placed there. At that moment, the man pushed me off the bed and brandished some kind of bludgeon over my head. I fired. But he still had time to strike a blow, a terrible blow. All that, Monsieur, happened in the blink of an eye. I’m afraid I don’t remember anything else.

  “Q. Nothing else? Do you have any idea how your attacker might have escaped from the Yellow Room?

  “A. None whatsoever. I don’t remember anything else. Generally, one doesn’t notice what’s going on when one is almost dying.

  “Q. Was your attacker tall or short?

  “A. I only saw a shadow, which seemed formidable.

  “Q. You don’t have any idea who it might have been?

  “A. As I said, Monsieur, I don’t know anything other than that a man threw himself upon me and I shot him. Nothing else.”

  That was the end of Mademoiselle Stangerson’s interview. While it took place, Rouletabille and I waited patiently for Monsieur Darzac to return.

  The Sorbonne Professor had followed the interview from a room next to Mademoiselle Stangerson’s, and eventually came to recount it to my friend with great accuracy, an excellent memory, and a docile compliance which, frankly, surprised me. Thanks to some notes which he had hastily jotted down, he was able to quote, almost word for word, the questions and the answers.

  It looked as if Darzac had become Rouletabille’s personal secretary and he certainly behaved as if there was nothing he wouldn’t do for him, acting virtually as his proxy.

  The fact of the closed vestibule window struck Rouletabille just as it had Monsieur de Marquet. My friend asked Darzac to repeat carefully Mademoiselle Stangerson’s account of how she and her father had spent their time on the day of the tragedy, just as she had recounted it to the Magistrate. The circumstance of the dinner in the laboratory seemed to interest him in the highest degree, and he had Darzac repeat it to him twice. He wanted to be sure that only the gamekeeper knew that the Professor and his daughter were going to be dining in the laboratory, and how he had come to learn of it.

  When Darzac had finished, I said:

  “That interview doesn’t seem to bring us closer to a solution.”

  “I think it’s even put us back,” said Darzac.

  “And yet it has shined a light upon the whole case,” said Rouletabille, thoughtfully.

  Chapter Nine

  A Journalist and a Detective

  The three of us returned to the pavilion. As we were about 100 meters away from the building, Rouletabille stopped and, pointing at a small clump of trees to our right, said:

  “That’s where the perpetrator hid before he entered the pavilion.”

  As there were other, nearly identical patches of trees between the great oaks, I asked Rouletabille why he had picked that one, rather than any of the others. He responded by pointing to the path, which ran close to that thicket, all the way to the door of the pavilion.

  “As you can see, this path is topped with gravel,” he said. “Our man had to take it, since we haven’t found any footprints going towards the pavilion elsewhere on the soft ground. Our man didn’t have wings. He had to walk, but he did so on gravel in order to leave no footmarks. This gravel path has, in fact, been trodden by many other feet, since it’s the most direct route between the pavilion and the Chateau. As for this clump of trees, it’s the sort of vegetation that remains leafy during the winter—laurels and fuchsias—and it provided the perpetrator with a good hiding place until it was time for him to make his way to the pavilion. It was while hiding in this thicket that he saw Professor Stangerson and his daughter, and later Père Jacques, leave the pavilion. Note that the gravel path extends almost to the vestibule window. Earlier, we saw a single footprint of our man running parallel to the wall. That proves that he only needed one stride from the path to reach the vestibule window, left open by Père Jacques. Then, he drew himself up by his hands and entered the vestibule.”

  “I suppose that’s possible,” I said.

  “Suppose? Suppose?” cried Rouletabille, suddenly angry at my innocent observation. “Why do you say, ‘I suppose’?”

  I begged him not to be mad at me, but he was too upset to listen and said sarcastically that he admired the cautious skepticism with which some people—he meant me!—approach even the simplest problems, never risking anything by saying things like “I agree,” or ‘”I disagree,” but instead only “I suppose.” He added that ‘those people’ could reach the same conclusion if God had forgotten to place a brain in their heads.

  As I was clearly vexed, my young friend took me by the arm and told me that he hadn’t meant for me to take his last comment personally, because he had a much higher opinion of me than that.

  “But, Sainclair, you must admit that it’s almost criminal to not reach a certainty, when the facts leave you no alternative. If I didn’t reason as I did with respect to this gravel path,” he went on, “I would have to postulate that our perpetrator used some kind of flying device! My dear fellow, the science of balloons and dirigibles isn’t advanced enough for me to entertain the supposition that a murderer might drop from the clouds! So don’t say that you ‘suppose’ that a thing is possible, when it can’t be otherwise!”

  Then, he continued:

  “We know now how our man entered by the window, and when—during the five o’clock walk of the Professor and his daughter. Further, the presence in the laboratory of the chambermaid, who had just cleaned the Yellow Room, at 1:30 p.m., when the Professor and his daughter returned from their walk, enables us to determine that the perpetrator wasn’t yet in the Yellow Room under the bed at that time, unless he was working in collusion with the chambermaid. What do you think, Monsieur Darzac?”

  Darzac shook his head and assured us of the chambermaid’s fidelity, stating that she was a thoroughly honest and devoted servant.

  “Besides,” he added, “at 5 p.m., Professor Stangerson went into the Yellow Room to fetch his daughter’s hat.”

  “There is that, too,” said Rouletabille.

  “I admit that our man entered by the vestibule window at the time you say,” I said, “but why did he shut it afterward? It was an act which would necessarily draw the attention of those who had left it open”

  “It may be the window was not shut at once,” replied the young reporter. “But if he did shut it, it was because of the bend in the gravel path, 25 yards from the pavilion, and the three oaks that grow on that spot.”

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Darzac, who had followed us and was hanging on Rouletabille’s every word wi
th almost breathless attention.

  “I’ll explain it all to you later, Monsieur, when I think the time is right to do so, but this might well be the most important thing I’ve said so far about this affair, at least if my theory is correct.”

  “And what is your theory?”

  “I’ll never tell you if it turns out to be false. It’s much too serious to speak of it lightly, as long as it’s only a theory.”

  “Do you have, at least, an idea as to who Mathilde’s attacker might be?”

  “No, Monsieur Darzac, I don’t know who he is, but don’t be concerned, I will find out the truth.”

  I observed that Darzac was deeply stirred by Rouletabille’s confident statement, but in a way that caused me to suspect that he wasn’t pleased by it. I wondered—assuming of course that I had read his thoughts correctly—if he was worried about discovering the identity of the man who had attacked his fiancée, why was he helping my friend to catch him? Rouletabille seemed to have come to the same conclusion, for he said, rather bluntly:

  “Monsieur Darzac, you do want me to find out who the attacker was, don’t you?”

  “Oh! I’d like to kill that man with my own hands!” cried Mademoiselle Stangerson’s fiancé, with a vehemence that surprised me.

  “I believe you,” said Rouletabille gravely, “but you haven’t answered my question.”

  We were walking by the thicket which the young reporter had mentioned a minute earlier. I stepped inside and, at once, noticed footprints indicating that a man had been hiding there. Rouletabille had again been proven right.

  “Of course!” he said, when I pointed the footmarks out. “We’re dealing with an ordinary man, made of flesh and blood, with the same resources as we. It’ll get sorted out eventually.”

  Having said this, he asked me for the paper pattern of the footprint which he had entrusted to me earlier and applied it to one of the footmarks in the thicket.

  “There we go!” he said, rising.

  I thought that he was now going to follow the perpetrator’s trail after he escaped through the vestibule window, but instead, he took us far to the left, saying that it was useless to trample in the mud, since he was now sure of the direction taken by the criminal.