Rouletabille and the Mystery of the Yellow Room

by Gaston Leroux

  Both the Professor and his daughter were now in tears… I caught myself thinking with deep emotion: “You must save her! From herself and from that mysterious man! But without compromising her, without making him talk!” Who was he, our elusive perpetrator? How could I capture him and yet force him to remain silent? That’s what Darzac must have meant: in order to for the perpetrator to remain silent, he must be killed. That was the only logical conclusion based on what he’d said. Did I have the right to kill Mademoiselle Stangerson’s persecutor? No, I did not. But if he only gave me an opportunity, how I would seize it! Let me find out whether he really was a creature of flesh and blood! Let me see his dead body, since we weren’t able to take him alive!

  If only I could make this woman, who didn’t even look at us, who was so overcome by her fears and her father’s distress, understand that I was capable of anything to save her! Yes, I would grab logic by the right end again and perform miracles for her!

  I moved towards Mademoiselle Stangerson. I wanted to talk to her, to beg her to trust me… I would have liked to convince her, with but a few words that only she and I alone would have understood, that I knew how her enemy had escaped from the Yellow Room, that I had guessed half of her secret, and that I felt sorry for her with all my heart. But her gestures begged us to leave her alone, expressing her weariness and exhaustion.

  Professor Stangerson asked us to go back to our respective rooms and thanked us. Larsan and I bowed and, followed by Père Jacques, we went out in the corridor.

  There, I heard Larsan murmur: “Strange! Strange!”

  He gestured me to come to his room. On the threshold, he turned towards Père Jacques and asked:

  “Did you see him?”

  “Who?”

  “The perpetrator.”

  “Did I see him? He had a big red beard and red hair.”

  “That’s how he appeared to me,” I said.

  “And to me too,” said the detective.

  After that, Larsan and I spent some time alone in his room, discussing the case. We talked for an hour, turning the matter over and looking at it from every angle. From his questions, and his explanations, it was clear that, despite the evidence of our senses, he was convinced that our man vanished by some secret passage known to him alone.

  “He knows the Chateau,” he said. “He knows it very well.”

  “He was rather tall and well-built,” I said, returning to the topic of the perpetrator’s identity.

  “He’s as tall as he wants to be,” said Larsan.

  “I understand what you mean,” I said, “but how do you account for his red hair and beard?”

  “Too much beard, too much hair… They must be false.”

  “That’s too easy. You’re still thinking of Robert Darzac, aren’t you? Can’t you get rid of that notion? I’m telling you, I’m certain that he is innocent.”

  “Bully for him then! I hope so for his sake. But everything condemns him. Did you notice the footprints on the carpet? Come and look at them.”

  “I’ve seen them already. They’re the same prints as those left by the expensive boots, which we saw near the pond.”

  “Can you deny that they belong to Darzac?”

  “Of course, I can! There’s always room for error.”

  “But have you noticed that the footprints only go in one direction? That there are no outgoing prints? When the man came out of Mademoiselle Stangerson’s bedroom, chased by all of us, he left no traces behind him.”

  “He might have been in her room for hours. The mud on his boots had dried. Plus, he ran with such speed that only his toes touched the floor. We saw him running, but we didn’t hear his steps.”

  I decided to put an end to this idle chatter, devoid of any logic, unworthy of men like us, and gestured to Larsan to be quiet and listen.

  “Downstairs! Someone has just shut a door.”

  I stood up. Larsan followed me. We walked down to the ground floor of the Chateau. I took him to the small oval room located under the terrace beneath the window of the corner corridor. I pointed at the door, which had been opened a while ago, but was now closed. Under it, a shaft of light was visible.

  “The gamekeeper!” said Larsan.

  “Let’s go!” I whispered.

  Prepared—I don’t know why—I wouldn’t even have admitted it—to believe that the gamekeeper might have been our perpetrator after all, I walked to the door and knocked loudly on it.

  Some might think that we were rather late in thinking of the gamekeeper, since our first business, after the perpetrator had escaped us upstairs, should have been to search for him everywhere, inside and outside the Chateau, on the grounds, etc.

  Had this criticism been made at the time, I could only have answered that the perpetrator had vanished in such a way that we thought he was no longer anywhere! He had escaped us when we all had our hands stretched out, ready to grab him, when we were almost touching him. We no longer had any reasonable hopes of finding him during that mysterious night in or out of the Chateau.

  After I had knocked, the door opened and the gamekeeper asked us calmly what we wanted. He was undressed and preparing to go to bed. His bed hadn’t yet been turned down.

  We entered and I affected surprise.

  “Not gone to bed yet?”

  “No,” he replied roughly. “I’ve been making the rounds of the grounds and in the woods. I’ve just come back—and I feel sleepy. So a good night to you!”

  “Listen,” I said. “About an hour or so ago, there was a ladder next to your window...”

  “Really? I didn’t see any ladder. Good night, I said!”

  And he put us out. Once outside, I looked at Larsan. His face was impenetrable.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Well?” he repeated.

  “Does that give you any new ideas?”

  There was no mistaking Larsan’s bad temper. On returning to the Chateau, I heard him mutter: “It would be strange, very strange, if I had made such a mistake!” And it seemed to me that he had said this more for my benefit than his. Then he added: “In any event, we shall soon find out what’s what. It will be light tomorrow.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Rouletabille Draws a Circle Between

  the Two Bumps on His Forehead

  Excerpts from Joseph Rouletabille’s notebook (con’td.):

  Larsan and I separated on the thresholds of our rooms with a melancholy handshake. I was glad to at least have sown some doubt in his mind. His was an original brain, very intelligent but without logic.

  After our conversation, I didn’t go to bed. I waited for the first light of dawn and went down to the front of the Chateau. I then made a complete tour of it, examining every footstep coming towards or going away from it. These, however, were so mixed and confusing that I could make nothing of them. I might as well note here that normally I don’t attach too much importance to the physical clues left in the wake of a crime. The method which consists in identifying a criminal by his footprints is altogether too primitive for my taste. Too many footprints are identical, and clues like these should, in no instance, be considered sufficient to convict someone.

  However, in my disturbed state of mind, I had gone to the deserted courtyard and had examined all the footprints I could find, seeking some indication that could have been the basis for a theory to solve the mystery of the unfathomable corridor. But I found nothing! Nothing!

  If only I could find the right end of logic! I thought. In despair, I sat on a stone. I reflected that, for the last hour, I had busied myself like a common, ordinary policeman. Like the least intelligent of detectives, I had gone blindly looking for footprints to tell me either something I already knew or anything I wanted them to say!

  I came to the conclusion that I was a fool, lower on the scale of intelligence than the many Sûreté inspectors who prided themselves in applying the methods of Lecoq or followed in the footsteps of Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. Those policemen would erect moun
tains of stupidity out of the simple molehills of a footprint in the sand or the impression of a hand on a wall. I recognized all too well Frederic Larsan’s method. Trying to imitate Sherlock Holmes would cause Frederic the Great to make mistakes bigger than any recorded in the great British detective’s casebooks, blunders that would send an innocent to prison, or to the scaffold... Playing Sherlock Holmes had served Larsan well so far. He had succeeded in convincing the Investigating Magistrate and the Chief of the Sûreté of the validity of his theory. Now, he said he was waiting only for the last piece of evidence before arresting Darzac… The last piece! The fool! He didn’t even have the first piece to begin with! All his mountain of clues didn’t offer a single, real piece of hard evidence. I, too, had looked at the handprint on the wall of the Yellow Room, and examined the footprints left by the expensive boots, but only to ask them to enter into a circle of logic which I had drawn in my mind!

  Yes, that circle might seem small at first, too small sometimes—and yet, it was immense, because it contained only the truth! The footprints left by the expensive boots and all the other physical clues we had gathered had to be the slaves of logic, not its masters! They hadn’t been allowed to turn me into the one thing that’s worse than a blind man: a man who sees falsely. And that’s why I thought I would triumph over Frederic Larsan’s blunders born from his unreasoning and illogical mind.

  Take heart, Rouletabille, I said to myself. It’s not because, for the first time, last night, in that unfathomable corridor, a strange and extraordinary incident occurred that didn’t fit within your circle of logic that you should lose all confidence in yourself and start behaving like a pig, its snout in the mud, looking for truffles. Come on, Rouletabille, get your head up. It was impossible for the incident of the unfathomable corridor to be outside my circle of logic. I knew that! Then lift your head high, I said, put your hands on those two bumps on your forehead, and start thinking! Remember that when you drew that circle of logic in your mind, like with a compass on a piece of paper, you did it by grabbing logic by its right end!

  Well, now, continue to do so! Go back to the unfathomable corridor and use the right end of logic for support, just as Frederic Larsan uses his cane, to figure out the answer.

  And if I know you, Rouletabille, it won’t be long before you prove that Frederic the Great is nothing but a fool!

  Joseph Rouletabille

  October 30, Noon

  Excerpts from Joseph Rouletabille’s notebook (con’td.):

  That was what I thought then, and that was what I did. With my brain on fire, I returned to the unfathomable corridor, and, without finding anything more than I had already seen on the previous night, the right end of logic showed me something so momentous that I was forced to cling to it to prevent myself from falling.

  Now, I was going to need great strength and patience to find the physical clues that would fit—nay, that must fit—within the circle of logic that I drew there, in my mind, beneath the two bumps on my forehead!

  Joseph Rouletabille

  October 30, Midnight

  Chapter Nineteen

  Rouletabille Invites Me to Lunch

  at the Auberge du Donjon

  It was not until later that Rouletabille sent me the notebook in which, the following day, he had written down in great detail the story of the unfathomable corridor.

  When I arrived at Glandier and joined him in his room, he told me everything which I have now related, plus how he had spent several hours back in Paris where he had learned nothing that could be of any help.

  The events of the unfathomable corridor had occurred on the night between October 29 and October 30, three days before my return to the Chateau. It was now November 2, the day I had been summoned back by my friend’s telegram, asking me to bring a couple of guns with me.

  I sat quietly in Rouletabille’s room while he finished his story.

  While he had been talking, I had noticed that he was continually fingering the lenses of the spectacles he had found on his night stand. From the obvious pleasure he was taking in handling these farsighted glasses, I understood that they must have been one of the clues he intended to place inside the circle of logic which he had drawn in his mind.

  That strange and unique way he had of expressing himself, using terms that perfectly described his thoughts, no longer surprised me. However, it was often necessary to know what his thoughts were in order to understand the terms he used—and it was never easy to divine Rouletabille’s thoughts.

  This young man’s mind was one of the most curious things I had ever observed. Rouletabille went along, never suspecting the astonishment and bewilderment that his way of thinking caused in others. People were so much in awe of his mind that they turned around after he’d gone and looked at him as if they’d just crossed paths with some kind of colorful character on the road. And, just as one might say, “Who is he? Where does he come from? Where is he going?”, they would say, “What is Rouletabille thinking? What is he going to do next?” Since he was entirely unaware of the unique nature of his mind, he wasn’t in the least concerned by his public behavior, going around just like everyone else, a little like the way someone who doesn’t realize that he’s dressed eccentrically feels no embarrassment no matter where he is. This young man, gifted with such an extraordinary brain, was, in a similar fashion, expressing naturally the most amazing ideas born out of his prodigious leaps of logic, so prodigious, in fact, that most us couldn’t follow them until he took the time to reduce them into a series of smaller, more easily graspable, increments before our astonished eyes.

  When Rouletabille had finished his story, he asked me what I thought. I replied that I was completely mystified by what had happened in the unfathomable corridor. Then he begged me to try to grasp logic by its right end, just as he had done.

  “Very well,” I said. “It seems to me that the starting point of trying to explain what happened should be this: there can be no doubt that the perpetrator you were pursuing was, in fact, in the corridor.”

  I paused.

  “After making such good a start,” said Rouletabille, “it would be a shame to stop so soon. Come on, continue with your reasoning.”

  “I’ll try. Since he vanished from the corridor without passing through any known doors or windows, then he must have escaped through some other, as yet unknown, opening.”

  My friend looked at me with pity, sighed wistfully and remarked that I was dumb as a doorknob.

  “What am I saying, a doorknob! You’re dumber than Larsan himself!” he added.

  Rouletabille seemed to alternate between fits of admiration and contempt for Frederic the Great. Sometimes, he exclaimed, “He’s really brilliant!” while at others, he complained, “He’s such an idiot!”, depending or not on whether the detective’s discoveries tallied with Rouletabille’s own theories. It was a small, petty side of his otherwise noble character.

  We finally got up and left his room. Rouletabille led me back outside. As we crossed the courtyard, and were proceeding towards the main gate, we heard the sound of shutters being thrown back against the wall. We turned around and saw, at a window on the first floor of the left wing of the Chateau, the ruddy and clean shaven face of a person whom I did not recognize.

  “Hello!” muttered Rouletabille. “That’s Arthur Rance!”

  He lowered his head, quickened his pace, and I heard him mutter to himself between his teeth:

  “So he was at the Chateau last night? What is he doing here?”

  When we had gone some distance from the Chateau, I asked him who this Arthur Rance was, and how he knew him. He reminded me of the story he had told me of his evening at the Elysée Palace. Arthur W. Rance was the American from Philadelphia with whom he had had so many drinks.

  “But wasn’t he about to return home?” I asked.

  “Indeed! That’s why I’m surprised to find him not only still in France, but at Glandier. He didn’t arrive this morning or last night. He must have gotten he
re before dinner then, and I missed him. Why didn’t the caretakers tell me?”

  Speaking of the Berniers, I reminded Rouletabille that he hadn’t yet told me what he had done to get them released.

  We were close to the caretakers’ lodge. Monsieur and Madame Bernier saw us coming. A frank smile lit up their happy faces. They seemed to harbor no ill-feeling over their preventive detention. My friend asked them at what time had Mr. Rance arrived. They replied that they didn’t know that he was staying at the Chateau. They said that he must have come during the evening of the previous night, but they didn’t have to open the gate for him, because, being a great walker, and not wishing that a carriage be sent to meet him at the station, he was accustomed to getting off at the hamlet of Saint-Michel, from which he came to the Chateau through the woods. He got into the estate by going through the grotto of Sainte Genevieve, and there, climbed over a low gate which separated Glandier from the neighboring countryside.

  As the caretakers explained all this, I saw Rouletabille’s face cloud over and exhibit disappointment—no doubt, with himself. Obviously, he was a little upset that, after having spent so much time at Glandier, and having conducted such a thorough investigation of its people and events, he hadn’t discovered until now that Arthur Rance was a regular visitor to the Chateau.

  “You say that Monsieur Rance is a regular visitor,” he asked somberly, trying to clarify what the caretakers had said. “When did he come here last?”

  “I can’t tell you exactly,” replied Monsieur Bernier. “Because of our having been locked up. Besides, when the gentleman comes, he doesn’t use the main gate, so we don’t see him arrive or leave.”