The Bradmoor Murder (19 page)

Something in a fairy story was the idea I got; the kind of extreme gesture of the Foreign Envoy at the Court of the King of the Golden Mountains! I can only present the thing by this indirection. You know what I mean.

Letington said another thing about it that makes the illustration I suggest a bit more apt.
He said it was ironical, as though it were made before a mock authority; as though superior persons presented themselves before a pretender. It would be the way a jinni would bow before a mortal king in an Arabian story before he produced his magic city or his winged horse.

After that curtsy, the woman took out of the bosom of her dress what appeared to be a ball of grass made up with resin. She held it in the palm of her hand. One of the Italian workmen ran forward, got a coal from the fire, and touched it to the ball of resin.

The thing began to smoke.

It smoked feebly at first, after the manner of a wet wisp of hay, scarcely afire. The smoke arose like a fantastic flower, a thin stem curling and expanding at the summit. Then it extended itself. It extended itself vaguely until the whole room was filled with an aromatic odor, a sort of haze. Letington said the thing went on until the ball of resin in the woman's hand was consumed, and the result was that strange aromatic odor filling the whole space and a haze as though one had caught and confined here the sort of blue-gray
haze observed on our mountains in the autumn, in what we call Indian summer.

There had been no sound.

There was absolute silence in the room. Letington said he did not move. He looked on as if at some extravaganza, but he was impressed. The thing got him, as we might say, into a sort of atmosphere. The strange thing was that it did not seem to be absurd. It seemed to be a sort of phenomenon of some character appearing with a certain aspect of dignity.

We cannot understand, I fear, precisely how he thought about it. At any rate, the peasant woman standing thus, surrounded with this impalpable smoke haze, as of something arising from the earth about her, suddenly cried out, extending her hand.

Letington said it was a harsh cry. He often thought about it afterward. It was not in any language that he knew. He did not think the words the woman uttered were of the Italian language. He thought it was an older, harsher language. And it was a sort of formula. It was a cry that seemed to shatter or, as one would say, break down a barrier already
thinned or weakened. That is an inadequate explanation of the effect. But Letington said he had some sort of vague conception of that character. He had no idea of what would happen, but the thing that did happen was beyond any conception that he could have had.

I have said that the Italian laborers brought in an old woman and put her in a chair in the corner of the room. Now, at this cry, the feeble figure in the chair rose. It came up stiffly to its feet like an image of wood, and then it began to sing.

Letington said that he remained immovable with wonder.

The singing was something heavenly. The rich, deep, beautiful voice filled the room: extended itself; seemed to fill the world.

He said the thing was incredible beyond any winging of the fancy.

He had never heard such a voice. It was not the volume of it, for it lacked great volume; it was not the vigor of it nor any unusual note. There was a haunting music in it, an appealing sweetness—something that got into one's spirit and there awakened every romantic fancy.

It was incredible. It belonged in a fairy story; in the properties of romance. It seemed to the man that he was hearing something that he had read about in the poets of old time, in ancient romances, as though the practical world had turned backward—revolved backward—into a world of wonder.

It was the golden-snooded muse, singing in the Seven-Gated City of Thebis! He could see the fairy city in the air—a mirage of gilded towers and veiled brazen gates on a cloud island; and the voice coming from an interminable distance, but losing nothing, neither its vigor nor any tone!

It had that marvelous quality.

It was far away, and it was not far away. He said he could not differentiate the singing from the conceptions of romance that arrived with it. It was something singing behind the horns of Elfland in some kingdom of faërie: singing among the stars in unending summer, in undying youthfulness! He said every extravagant expression that he could think of paled before the wonder of that heavenly reality.

Then the figure collapsed. The big peasant
woman caught it. They wrapped it up in a shawl and carried it out.

Letington did not move. He remained in his chair behind his table, that plain oak table, with the records of the company littering it before him. He sat there for a long time without thought, as he used to try to express it, and without motion, as one recovering from a drug or a hypnotic envelopment. He did not know what had happened to him. The thing was too unreal; it was too improbable; it was too utterly beyond all human sense.

The footsteps of the Italians carrying out the ancient, feeble woman grew vague, and ceased. There was again silence; the haze in the room disappeared. The aromatic odor thinned out, ceased to exist. But the man remained in his chair. Finally he put his hand up and passed it over his face, as though by that gesture to remove an illusion.

That, of course, was the only explanation he had. That was the only explanation anyone could have. Of course there wasn't any explanation. What sane person could believe in witches or in a magic that transported one from a modern, workaday world to a land of
fairies; that took an ancient, feeble crone, so old that she had to be carried about, and forced her by a harsh cry to sing like a fabled siren in faërie lands forlorn!

Of course there wasn't any explanation.

The man went out after a while, but he said that he did a thing that any one of us would have done. He said that he went about the room touching objects in it, replacing chairs, adjusting the table, trying the door latch.

You see what he was after!

He was trying to convince himself that he was in a world of reality—just what any of us would have done—that he was, in fact, here in this place; that the place had not changed; that it was the same place.

After that he went out.

There was only one explanation of it that didn't overturn every landmark of our common reason. He believed himself to be a victim of some hypnotic influence, as the traveler in some city of the East, in an enclosed courtyard, sees a rope thrown into the air by a juggler, and a lad climb it into the sky, disappearing, a tiny figure in some cloud haze.

That was the explanation Letington finally
got about it. He had to take that or go adrift. But it seemed neither an adequate nor a true explanation of the phenomenon.

It was the voice that he could not escape from. That voice was real. The singing was real. He could differentiate the effects from the voice. The effects were illusions, but that haunting, heavenly voice was a reality! He could no more doubt the reality of it than he could doubt the reality of the sunlight, or the outline of the forest in the distance, or his hand. The voice was real, and it affected him as had no other singing in the world.

He never heard a voice like it.

He could not escape from the lure of that voice. It seemed to have entered into every fiber of his body: something he had long sought; something he had hungered for; something he had waited for from the time he was born—and from beyond that—from the beginning of the world.

I am taking a lot of pains to try to make these impressions clear to you, for they are a vital part of this extraordinary thing. Perhaps you can, in some manner, realize how the thing impressed this man. I suppose one would
have to call it an exclusive personal element. There was a feeling that the voice had something to do with himself, as differentiated from other persons; as though no one but himself could have heard it, or as though it could have been intended for no other person. It was his due: belonged to him out of some other existence.

That is as near as I can get it out of the elaboration that Sir Godfrey Simon gave me. At any rate, that was the end of it. Things went on. Letington imagined himself to have been present at an inexplicable phenomenon, a sort of hypnotic phenomenon. It had put his reason out of dominance. He had a feeling of anxiety about events now that he could neither define nor control.

And it was a correct premonition.

He went ahead endeavoring to put into effect the policy of eviction that he had been sent here to accomplish. The Italian colony made no further protest. It carried out the preliminaries of his direction. The notices posted were not disturbed. The orders for inventories on materials and tools were carried out. The first preliminaries of the eviction went
forward, and there was no disorder. There was not even discourtesy.

Everywhere he was received with the same deference; his directions were received with the same silent acquiescence. But it was a calm that had too much serenity in it. He did not like it. He would have felt safer if he had found groups of men talking together; evidences of violence here and there; protests, or ugly threats echoed after him as he passed: that is to say, the usual thing that one expects and can understand. But he did not find it. The whole colony was composed, silent and obsequious. It got on the man's nerves.

And then suddenly the thing happened.

Winter was beginning to arrive. At twilight one evening the great transcontinental was stopped by an emergency signal. Snow was beginning to fall. It was on a slight grade beyond the Italian village. When the train stopped there was an insistent call for the fireman and engineer to come to the rear of the train. They got down and went back along the coaches. It was now coming on to snow heavily. They passed down on either side of the coaches to the end of the train. But they
could find no reason for the emergency signal. No official in the coaches knew anything about it, and no one could be found who had called. The conductor joined them. They went to the extreme end of the train, but they could find nothing to indicate why such a signal should have been given.

And when they returned the engine was gone!

It had disappeared. The train officials released the brakes and ran the passenger coaches back into the village. Letington, awakened at one o'clock in the morning, was told of this mysterious event.

Don't forget where I was when I got this story. Keep that in your mind. I was before a peat fire in an inn in Belgium, as I told you in the beginning. I had turned about from the table. I was wet, and my clothes steamed, but I was comfortable with an excellent dinner. There was a bottle of wine on the table, and Sir Godfrey Simon on the other side of it. You will remember what I said about him. A big, old man with a perfectly bald head—a head as bald as an ivory door handle—a crooked nose; a wide, narrow-lipped mouth; little, sharp eyes
under craggy eye pits; shaggy, arched brows over them.

It is his story that I am trying to tell you—not mine.

I know nothing about it, except what the man said. That I precisely know. I remember every detail. No word of it escaped me. It was the most extraordinary tale I had ever heard, in the most extraordinary setting, surrounded by the most extraordinary suggestions.

I was lost, and I had turned up as by the directions of the fairies at this inn, by this Garden in Asia and the long, iron-spiked fence that seemed, as I have said, to stretch across Belgium, across Europe, across the world.

That was the hard background behind all this extravaganza. It was the thing at my back. That is a pretty good expression. It was the Garden in Asia at my back that made the whole of this story such a wonder.

I go back to Letington and the disaster he was awakened out of sleep to meet. Of course there could, in fact, be no mystery to speak of about the matter. A great passenger engine could not disappear. Stop a moment and realize
it: a thing of complicated machinery weighing five hundred thousand pounds. It was a late model of the American passenger engine, one of these huge monsters built to haul a long train over mountains across a continent.

Such engines are unknown in any European country.

It would weigh, as I have said, some two hundred and fifty tons. Try to get a conception of such a mass of metal. And it was valuable. It was worth a hundred thousand dollars. It could not be made to disappear at the will of a peasant woman burning a ball of aromatic grass and uttering a verbal formula.

Of course it had been cut off from the train and run forward in the absence of the engineer and fireman, who had been drawn back to the rear of the passenger coaches by what they took to be the call of the conductor.

It was a clever trick in a snowstorm.

But where could the engine have been taken? It was a single-track road, and short, connecting the two branches of the transcontinental line. As it passed through the valley one saw from it only the little mills that dotted the lumber yards; the great sheds under which the
hemlock bark was stored for shipment to the tanneries, looking like immense hillocks covered with roofs of bark; the scattered villages of the lumbermen; the narrow river; and beyond the vast mountains that seemed to extend into the sky.

The engine could not have gone back, because the passenger coaches were behind it. These coaches had been released and run down the grade to the Italian village. The engine had to go forward.

As I have said, there could not be very much of a mystery about it, and, in fact, there was not any mystery about it.

There was a tunnel through a shoulder of the mountain just beyond where the engine had been cut off. Letington and his track crew, going over the line in the morning, found the entrances to this tunnel shot down.

It was clear now what had occurred.

The engine had been run into the tunnel and the ends of the tunnel shot down with explosives to prevent it from being taken out. The whole thing had been done cleverly and with Italian cunning.

But there was no mystery about it.