The Strand Magazine/Volume 4/Issue 24/The Queer Side of Things
The Queer Side of Things.
ROFESSOR" WILLETT was my uncle. We saw very little of him, for he practically lived in a laboratory which he had fitted up for himself, and was devoted to some mysterious experiments which were to bring him fame and fortune at the hands of the Government. He allowed no one to enter his laboratory except a confidential assistant, who was supposed to share many of his secrets. For some time my uncle had been giving us to understand that he was perfecting an invention which he intended to offer to the Government for an enormous sum—an incredible sum, which varied on different occasions from half a million to five millions. He did not enlighten us as to the nature of the invention; and, as we had not much belief in the results which he anticipated, we were not sufficiently curious to ask about it; nay, if we had, he, being a very uncommunicative man, would probably not have told us.
Besides, we had our own affairs to attend to. Old Willett's daughter, Phoebe, and my brother John had a love affair to attend to; and it required a good deal of attention by reason of its not running smoothly; for the Professor did not like John, and was violently opposed to a marriage between Phoebe and him; and so, the matter needed much secrecy, and smuggling of love-letters, and so forth. The case seemed hopeless, however; for Phoebe was firm in her refusal to marry John in the face of her father's strong disapproval, and the father was a hale man, not likely to remove the difficulty by dying.
Amy and I had our affair, which was untroubled by the difficulty which lay upon the other, and Amy and I had been engaged for nearly a year. Amy was old Willett's other daughter—was! That terrible word "was"—it is the keynote of my whole story; there's no present tense to it.
One of the Professor's crazes was dress-sanitation: he would have none of the all-wool system, nor any other system save his own pet particular system. This system consisted of a mixture of Vicuña wool and the fibre of some South American trailing plant; and the Professor was so persuaded of its being the only material in which man could dress himself and live, that he went to a great expense in importing the materials and having them woven into stuffs of various thicknesses and textures for family use. He had a stock of this stuff: most of his own clothes were made of it, as well as such of those worn by his wife and daughters as he could persuade them to have fashioned from it. To tell the truth, these latter articles were not very numerous, as the stuffs were necessarily rather "dowdy" for overwear; while, as underwear, they became impossible, except to cover the toughest and most callous skin—a skin more correctly described as a hide. These stuffs of his, for all that, permeated the house, and cropped up everywhere; they were of a peculiarly glistening grey colour, and had a very curious odour—another objection to them for clothing in the eyes of the ladies.
Among the few articles of clothing, made of the stuff, which the two girls could be persuaded to wear were hats and long cloaks for wet weather, and for this purpose the material was suitable enough; but when he suggested ball dresses of it, the girls just shuddered and became stonily obdurate. The old gentleman prevailed upon my brother and me to adopt the material for our overcoats and lounge caps, and such-like.
One evening my uncle was in high spirits—quite feverishly jubilant. He had perfected his invention and thoroughly tested it, and the morrow he intended opening communications with a Government department on the subject. I had never seen him in such high spirits; with a heightened colour, he talked incessantly and at random. He launched into the delights and potentialities of fame and affluence, prattled about the mansion which his daughters should live in and the carriages they should ride in, assured Phoebe (in jest, which was surely not all jest) that she should marry an earl, and much more in the same strain.
"Jubilant."
While the earl talk was going on, I glanced at John. He did not try to conceal the fact that this talk was distasteful to him, and I contrived to divert him, and the conversation; but the Professor would return to it; and at length John suddenly rose and, excusing himself, left the circle. I soon followed him home with an idea of cheering him up, but the trial was a complete failure. I fancied I had never seen John in so gloomy a mood before; and, when we had parted for the night, I heard him descend the stairs and go out—an unusual thing for him to do so late at night. Next day my uncle the Professor could not be found. He had come down to breakfast as usual, and then, as usual, had retired to his laboratory; his lunch was placed on a table outside the door, according to custom; the dinner hour came, and my uncle did not go down to the dining-room; but, this being no uncommon thing, his dinner had been kept warm for him.
But when it came to 9 p.m., my aunt went to the laboratory door and knocked. She was answered by the assistant, who said that the Professor was not there; nor had the assistant seen him on arriving at one o'clock that afternoon, nor subsequently. He was under the impression that the Professor had gone, according to his intention, to Pall Mall in connection with his invention.
They sat up for his return; but 2 o'clock. a.m. struck, and he had not returned. Then they sent the boy to call me up; and I did what I could, but failed to find him. He never found.
There certainly could be no reason for his either committing suicide, or leaving his home; on inquiry at the Government offices, we found that no one answering to his description had been there; advertisements and inquiries had no fruit whatever. It looked as if he had been made away with; and the question was, "by whom?"
Looking dispassionately at the situation, one could think of but two persons who could possibly have any interest in the removal of my uncle; and these were the assistant and my brother. Now, the assistant, being presumably a sharer of a secret which might be worth many thousands of pounds, would certainly have an incentive to make away with the only person who stood between himself and the reward. No one but my uncle and his assistant knew of this great secret, that was quite certain. But this mere fact of an incentive was hardly sufficient, when unsupported by any kind of evidence, to warrant a reasonable person in forming suspicions against the man.
My brother—still arguing by cold, stony logic—had an interest in my uncle's removal, inasmuch as the wealth which the Professor felt so confident of attaining could not fail to place an impassable gulf between John and Phoebe; but to suspect my brother of murder on such wildly insufficient grounds as that!
The contents of the laboratory revealed nothing, only a few letters of no importance being found in an old desk which stood in the corner; and the room was locked up and left as it stood.
My brother and I had had some notion of arranging with the assistant on a plan for carrying out our uncle's designs in connection with his invention, the Professor's family and the assistant to divide any profits between them; but to our surprise the assistant denied all knowledge of the nature of the invention, stating that my uncle, although communicating to him many smaller secrets of little value, had always kept him in entire ignorance of this particular invention, and had never made any experiment in connection with it in his presence.
This surprised us, and we decided to speak to him again on the subject; but the next week, when we called at his lodgings, he had disappeared.
"He had disappeared."
The search for him was as fruitless as that for my uncle had been. He had gone out after breakfast—the landlady was certain of that, as she had noticed the peculiar texture of the overcoat he was wearing, made of my uncle's pet health-material. The assistant had never returned; and his property was in his room as he had left it. He had gone off, then! This circumstance seemed to give a shadow of plausibility to the unsupported theory of his having made away with the Professor. We made every effort to find him, in vain; and we came to the conclusion that he had resolved to carry the invention to some foreign Government, and secure the entire reward to himself.
The mysterious disappearance of my uncle was a terrible shock to his family. Phoebe in particular appeared to be affected by it, for she wrote to John a most unhappy letter, in which she said she felt so keenly her disobedience to her father in connection with her engagement that she could not bear to see my brother for a while, if ever again. We decided that it was hysteria caused by the shock; but, nevertheless, John could not get to see her, although he repeatedly called and wrote. She would see no one but her mother and sister.
John grew gloomy and moped, which was not unnatural, perhaps. He took to mooning about by himself—just wandering out for solitary walks until he was obviously losing flesh and colour; but he would do it.
One morning he came home with wild, haggard look, and sank into a chair. I had never seen him like that before, and I asked him what had happened.
"I have seen her—her—"
"Yes," I said, "I am glad of that, but———"
"Glad?" he echoed, dreamily. "Glad! I have seen her ghost!"
"I have seen her ghost."
"Pooh, man—don't be foolish!" I said. "Come—you must make an effort, and throw off this childishness. You're getting positively hysterical, too!"
"I have seen her ghost," he repeated, slowly. "I am not hysterical. I was crossing the common, in the bright sunshine, and I saw her in the distance; she was coming towards me; she was wearing that grey health-waterproof and hat of hers. She continued to advance until she was as near to me as that table in the next room—and then she was gone!"
"Gone?"
"Vanished—disappeared—gone! Harry, she did not fall down a pit (she was on the hard road), nor jump behind a tree. There was no object larger than a tussock of grass within fifty feet of her, all round. She vanished!"
"I shall get the doctor to come and see you," I said, putting on my boots.
"Go to him, if you like," said my brother. "On the way you will pass her house. Go in and ask after her."
I went. Amy told me that Phoebe had gone by herself for a walk on the common, and was not in yet, although it was past lunch-time.
Phoebe was never seen again. We searched for her for five months, and then I insisted on my aunt's shutting up the house and going, with Amy, to Switzerland. I took them to Lugano, settled them in a villa with a lovely view over the town and the valley and lake, and away to Monte Caprino and Monte Boglia; and then I returned to my brother.
"I ran to the spot."
His mind was unhinged, and I was forced to place him under the care of a doctor. I constantly went to see him, and we would take long walks together in all weathers. One day we were returning from a long tramp, and were hurrying home to avoid a thunderstorm which was imminent, when I stopped a moment to light my pipe, and he, walking on, got some twenty yards ahead of me. The light was perfectly clear yet, and I was starting again with my eyes fixed upon his back, when—he was not there! I stopped with a jerk and rubbed my eyes; then I ran to the spot where he had been walking a moment ago. There was no cover; there was only a wide road bordered by short turf; there was no hole in the earth; but John had gone, and I never saw him again.
For days I sat in my room, or paced about it, waiting for the moment when my brain should give way and leave me a muttering idiot; but I must have a strong brain, or a lethargic one, for I retained my reason. Then I determined to fathom this horrible mystery; and until that moment I had never known the real meaning of the word "determination."
I went straight to my uncle's house and let myself in; and I went straight to the laboratory and unlocked the door. Dust was upon everything, and I shuddered so as I looked round the place that I had to go away into the dining-room and sit down for a time. Then I returned to the laboratory.
I had come examine that old desk; for I felt a conviction that it contained a secret drawer, and that this secret drawer contained the clue to the mystery. I may have heard of a secret drawer in the desk in my boyhood; that is quite possible, although I did not remember the circumstance.
Anyhow, I took up that desk and moved its cover, made of a piece of my uncle's craze—the grey cloth—and I pushed and pulled at it on every side, until a faint recollection seemed to come to me, and I pulled out and forcibly depressed the sliding stamp-box in the corner of the desk; and the secret drawer flew open. There was a sheet of foolscap in it, covered with writing in my uncle's hand.
"A sheet of foolscap covered with writing."
It described the composition of an explosive (many times more potent than dynamite), the rapidity of whose action caused it to be, firstly, inaudible to the human ear by reason of the number of the resultant air-waves; and, secondly, to be extremely local in its action. Another peculiarity was the centripetal direction of its lines of energy, by means of which the violence of its particles would be exerted towards a common centre. Thus, if an object should be surrounded with a layer of the explosive, the object would be wholly destroyed, while objects in actual contact with the outside of the layer would remain absolutely unaffected. Further, the violence of the inaudible explosion was so intense as to reduce the object surrounded to a gaseous state, and its action caused no visible flash. The process would, therefore, in any place sufficiently open to allow of the free expansion of the destroyed object into a gaseous state, be absolutely undetectable by the senses of a person a little distance away.
Then were jotted down some convenient methods of using the stuff; and one of these was to saturate any material partly woollen with the explosive in solution, and, having wrapped the material round the object to be destroyed, to explode the substance either by friction, or concussion, or electricity. The writing went on to say that for some weeks, or even months, after being applied to the material, the explosive might be handled, or subjected to shocks, with impunity, its explosive qualities being slowly developed by exposure to the air.
In certain cases, after a lapse of time, the composition might become so sensitive as to be exploded by an electric condition of the atmosphere, or by a touch even. The solution would in no way affect the colour of a material chemically adapted to receive it, provided that material were frequently exposed to the light; but that, if kept in the dark, the material would soon become yellowish and acquire a pungent odour.
I ran upstairs to the press where, as I knew, a stock of the "health-material" used to be kept, and threw open the door. A strong pungent odour came out; and there lav the remains of a roll of the cloth, quite yellow. Then I went down again to a cupboard in the laboratory where I remembered to have seen some of the cloth; and there was the greater part of a roll, retaining the original grey colour as fresh as ever. My uncle had given out the wrong roll for family use—the roll which he had prepared for his expermments!
I think I must have shrieked as I bounded to the street door, tore it open, and, leaving it so, rushed out towards my own house. I ran all the way hard as I could go, wild-eyed and hatless; and, bounding up to my room, snatched up a few bank-notes that were in my desk; and then, still running, made for Victoria Station. Such was my state of mind that I had run nearly a mile before it occurred to me that such things as cabs existed: then I hailed one and shouted to him to drive—drive—drive like mad!
As I might have known, there was no Continental train for nearly two hours; and I paced round and round Victoria Station like a caged beast, gnawing at my nails. Amy had taken that grey waterproof and hat of hers with her to Lugano!
"Several times I half opened the door."
I was fairly on the way at last; but, from the moment of the train's steaming out of Victoria Station a strange change came over me; I was no longer mad to get forward—I was mad to get back—back to my house, and to the cupboard where my clothes were hanging, and to the grey overcoat which hung among them. Several times I half opened the door of the flying railway carriage, in a mad impulse to jump out and run back; but I clenched my teeth and forced myself back mto my seat.
All the rest of the journey my thoughts were fixed upon London, and my house, and the grey overcoat hanging in the cupboard; at times I was seized with an insane dread that my housekeeper was at that very moment selling the coat—making away with it in some way or other—and at those times I would find mysell in a cold perspiration.
I reached Lugano and dashed down the steep grassy bank where the fireflies gather on warm evenings, and through the open gate of the villa garden. My aunt was sitting on a seat by the house. I stood before her, but she never changed her stare into space; she looked through me and made no sign. Whether she knew I was there or not I cannot say; I knew she was there—and alone!
I left her there without a word, and came back here to my own house; I had no mad longing or uneasiness on the return journey—I knew my grey coat was here, and ready for me; and here it is, hanging as I left it. Yes, it fits me as comfortably as ever—as comfortably as ever. "Either by friction, or concussion, or electricity." I wonder at what hour Amy
HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS.
Preparing for the Pantomime at Drury Lane.
From a Photograph from Life by Gordon & Co., Allerton Road, N.
Club Types.
