Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 1
I
SOMETHING of the Boston fog, that S February evening, seemed to have penetrated the blue-painted hall with the cracked ceiling, on Washington Street, where Professor Maximilian Veazie was giving messages from the Great Beyond. The audience—mostly women, as usual—remained foggily unresponsive. What could have been more depressing?
Ah me, those audiences in low-grade spiritualistic meetings! Spinsters, widows, sad and disappointed women, for the most part elderly, unlovely, and frumpily dressed; women who, bereft of much or all in this sorry world, seek contacts with another, where their chances may be better.
Not even the few vague men scattered among the present audience, on the hard, shiny folding chairs, could at all balance that mass of life-worn and sidetracked women. Fear, hope, and disappointment, which sum up all of life, stood written in their faces.
Rodman Wyatt, privily taking notes for an article on “Fakes and Fakers,” surveyed the place with disesteem.
“Punk-looking bunch,” thought he. “Cracked as the ceiling! Be a pretty poor come-on artist that couldn't put it over on these morons!”
The professor was putting it over, but none too well. His blindfold test—answering sealed notes with his eyes shielded by wire gauze goggles that seemed to cut off all sight—had been only moderately satisfactory. Not even the lilies in jars, the solo by his paid assistant, Miss McAvoy—a stout, florid woman with rhinestones in her comb and a string of near-pearls—and the answers from his three cappers in the audience, had seemed to establish just the correct rapports. Prospects for the silver offering at the door looked dubious.
“There is no death!” he was now proclaiming in his usual semiscientific farrago.
As he stood at the pulpit on the narrow platform, where a Bible and a pitcher of water helped to give him somewhat a clerical tone, he was revealed to Wyatt as a short, soft-bodied, sandy-haired man of perhaps fifty, with a red mustache, a network of alcoholic veins in cheek and nose, hirsute hands, and a ministerial voice. That voice had served him well in half a score of “lines” that he had worked under various aliases, until—seriously reduced in circumstances—he had drifted into spiritualism as an easy graft with always the possibility of a big strike.
“There is no death,” he repeated, “but only a species of moratic change. The spirit of returnity keeps our dear ones ever present!”
“Moratic” and “returnity” you will not find in any dictionary; but Veazie, having coined the words, loved them.
“More bunk!” smiled Wyatt, making record of them. His eyes noted the American flag draped over the platform, the lodge room charters, the fire escape sign. “This is certainly one grand place for spirits to come back to!” he thought.
“A few songs,” directed the professor, “to get harmony for this meeting!”
A woman with chemicalized hair braided around her head, with a soiled green dress worked in gold thread, and with tight patent leather shoes, dealt out songbooks as if dealing cards. Then she returned to the piano that stood in a corner of the hall, and her numerous cheap rings and bracelets flashed as she butchered hymns, wherein the audience faintly joined.
“That finishes the spirits!” Wyatt smiled. But Wyatt was wrong. The music brought them, a plenty.
“Rest easy!” directed the professor. “Breathe deep! Let the chairs hold you up! Relax, and concentrate! Ah, now the dear ones are coming! Now I begin to see them, to hear their loved voices!”
He pointed at a corner where one of his cappers lurked.
“Now I see a spirit shining over there. I call him uncle, uncle! He presses his hand to his side. Such a pain in the side! He says: 'Tell Blanche it was not as she thought, but far better, and all is well.' Does anybody recognize this spirit?”
A thin, veined hand projected above the dowdy bonnets.
“I do!” quavered a colorless voice. “It's my Uncle Elwin—Elwin Cobb!”
“Your Uncle Elwin says,” proclaimed Veazie, “you must not worry. That affair—you will understand—now looks doubtful, but will eventuate to your entire satisfaction. He says good-by, and be of good cheer. He is so happy over there! He is watching over you. And now, now I see another spirit hovering at the back of the hall, and I call her name Henrietta. She says—”
“Bunk!” muttered Wyatt, writing it down.
So the meeting dragged to a close, and the professor announced, as usual, that he would give private readings at his apartment on Huntington Avenue. Then followed the benediction and the shuffling out of the audience—also the taking of the silver offering by Miss McAvoy, with a calculant eye.
Lingering at the door, Wyatt saw a scant half dozen gathered around the professor where he had descended from the platform, making appointments. Only one of them bore signs of distinction. Wyatt marveled that a man of such a type should ever come to such a meeting, and wondered still more that he now sought speech with so obvious a fraud as Veazie.
The trained eye of the observer swept over the salient details. An old gentleman it was, very much a gentleman and exceedingly Bostonian, who now was speaking with the professor. Wyatt noted his thin white hair, carefully brushed; his eyeglasses with a black silk cord; his high-arched and thin-winged nose; his bushy gray brows over keen, sunken eyes that seemed ever searching, searching; his smooth-shaven lip and chin. As for his garb, that was dark, neat, impeccable.
“If the prof lands that fish,” thought Wyatt, “he's hooked a good one!”
The old gentleman was saying:
“I have greatly enjoyed this demonstration, Professor Veazie.”
“Indeed? I am very happy to hear that!”
“Yes, sir—it has been quite conclusive. I feel that perhaps you can help me.”
“Ah, what a pleasure that would be!” Veazie smiled, discovering a gold tooth. “And in what way?”
“In the finding of something that is lost.”
“Something lost?”
“Some one, I should say.”
“Ah, indeed!” The professor's glance was cannily appraising this prospective client. 'I shall be happy to try. Guided by my controls, it is only simple truth to say that I have enjoyed remarkable success along that line. You wish a private sitting, of course?”
The old gentleman nodded.
“When,” he queried, “would it be most convenient?”
Veazie made great show of consulting a notebook that seemed to be crowded with appointments.
“Friday afternoon—say four o'clock?”
“Very well. I will come to you then.”
“That gives me three days,” the professor was thinking. “If I can't dig up something on this old bird in three days—” But his words were: “That is very satisfactory.” He noted it in the book. “Name, please?” he asked.
“No, no!” murmured the old gentleman. “I prefer not to give my name. If you have no clew to my identity, I shall feel more confidence in anything you may reveal.”
“Quite so,” the professor agreed. “I myself prefer not to know anything about my clients.” He cast an oblique, covert glance at one of his cappers, a widowy-looking, oldish creature who stood among the truth seekers about him. The woman lowered her lids, in token of comprehension. 'Then I shall see you, quite incognito, Friday afternoon?”
The aristocrat smiled affirmation and moved away. At the door he left a dollar in silver, then departed down the dingy, echoing stair. The professional widow followed, not too closely. Rodman Wyatt, scenting a story, smiled a little cynically to himself, lighted a pipe, and followed her—also not too closely.
Washington Street was ugly with the last mucky snows of winter, and raw with a misty chill; but the old gentleman did not hail a taxi. He seemed vigorous for his age, and a good walker. Trailed by the two watchers, he proceeded rather briskly to Boylston Street, up it to the Common, and across that in the direction of Beacon Hill.
The sacred Common glimmered with snow patches. All around, street lights gleamed, fog-haloed; and from the circumjacent city murmured a dull, continuous rumor. Only a few pedestrians, with collars turned up, were abroad. The widowish woman kept a safe distance behind her quarry. Wyatt, pipe in jaw, dogged them both.
The old gentleman cut past one end of the Frog Pond and issued out into Beacon Street, about halfway up the sacrosanct hill. There, presently, a dwelling not far from Walnut Street engulfed him.
“Big game!” thought Wyatt, watching from a gate in the tall iron fence that bounds the inviolable Common.
He saw the woman walk past the house and glance at the number, then continue on down the hill and vanish in the mist. Then he moved forward, likewise noting the house number.
“Big game!” he mentally repeated.
The house, he saw, was one of those imposing relics of a vanished age before an upstart Commonwealth Avenue had drained away any of Boston's patricians from the precincts of the Gilded Dome. Four stories it arose spaciously, with huge and almost semicircular bay windows right up to its mansard. The windows themselves, many-paned, showed here or there a few pale violet-tinted glasses. Massive granite steps led up to a brass-knockered door with side lights and a fanlight of prerevolutionary pattern.
“If the professor hooks this fish—” mused Rodman Wyatt, as he walked on up Beacon Street. “I've got one big story here, by gad!”