Читать книгу Decidedly Odd - MacHarg William - Страница 5

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One rainy morning in April, Luther Trant sat alone in his office. On his wrist as he bent closely over a heap of typewritten pages spread before him on his desk, a small instrument in continual motion ticked like a watch. It was for him an hour of idleness; he was reading fiction. And, with his passion for making visible and recording the workings of the mind, he was taking a permanent record of his feelings as he read.

The instrument strapped on Trant’s arm was called a sphygmograph. It carried a small steel rod which pressed tightly on his wrist artery. This rod, rising and falling with each rush of the blood wave through the artery, transmitted its motion to a system of small levers. These levers operated a pencil point, which touched the surface of a revolving drum. Trant had adjusted around this drum a strip of smoked paper, the pencil point traced on its sooty surface, and a continuous wavy line which rose and fell with each beat of the psychologist’s pulse.

As the interest of the story gripped Trant, this wavy line grew flatter, with elevations farther apart. When the interest flagged, his pulse returned to its normal heat and the line became regular in its undulations. At an exciting incident, the elevations swelled to greater height. And the psychologist was noting with satisfaction how the continual variations of the line gave definite record of the story’s sustained power, when he was interrupted by the sharp ring of his telephone.

An excited, choleric voice came over the wire:

“Mr. Trant? ... This is Cuthbert Edwards, of Cuthbert Edwards & Co., Michigan Avenue. You have received a communication from my son Winton this morning? Is he there now? ... No? Then he will reach your office in a very few minutes. I want nothing done in the matter! You understand! I will reach your office myself as soon as possible—probably within fifteen minutes—and explain.”

The sentence ended with a bump, as Cuthbert Edwards slammed his receiver back upon its hook. The psychologist, who would have recognized the name—even if not forewarned by the communication he had received that morning—as the conservative head of one of the oldest and most “exclusive” families of New England Puritan extraction, detached the sphygmograph from his wrist and drew toward him and reread the fantastic advertisement that had come to him inclosed in Winton Edwards’ letter. Apparently it had been cut from the classified columns of one of the big dailies:

Eva: The seventeenth of the tenth! Since you and your own are safe, do you become insensible that others now again wait in your place? And those that swing in the wind! Have you forgot? If you remember and are true, communicate. And you can help save them all! N. M. 15, 45, 11, 31; 7, 13, 32, 45; 13, 36.

The letter, to the first page of which the advertisement had been pinned, was dated the same day he had received it, postmarked three o’clock that morning, and written in the scrawling hand of a young man under strong emotion:

Dear Sir: Before coming to consult you, I send for your consideration the advertisement you will find inclosed. This advertisement is the one tangible piece of evidence of the amazing and inexplicable influence possessed by the “hammering man” over my fiancee, Miss Eva Silber. This influence has forced her to refuse to marry me, to tell me that I must think of her only as if she were dead.

This advertisement appeared first on last Monday morning in the classified columns of three Chicago papers published in English, and in the German S——. On Tuesday, it appeared in the same morning papers and in four evening papers and the German A——. It was submitted to each newspaper by mail, with no address or information other than the text as here printed, with three dollars in currency inclosed in each case to pay for its insertion. For Heaven’s sake help me, Mr. Trant! I will call on you this morning, as soon as I think you are at your office. Winton Edwards.

The psychologist had hardly finished this letter, when rapid footsteps in the corridor outside stopped at his office door. Never had there been a more striking entrance into Trant’s office than that of the young man who now burst in—disheveled, wet with the rain, his eyes red for want of sleep.

“She has left me, Mr. Trant!” he cried, with no prelude. “She has gone!”

As he sank dazedly into a chair, he pulled from his pocket a small leather case and handed it to the psychologist. Within was the photograph of a remarkably handsome girl in her early twenties—a girl sobered by some unusual experience, as showed most plainly in the poise of her little round head wrapped with its braid of lustrous hair, and the shadow that lurked in the steadfast eyes, though they were smiling, and the full lips were smiling, too.

“You are, I suppose, Mr. Winton Edwards,” said Trant, picking up the letter on his desk. “Now, if you have come to me for help, Mr. Edwards, you must first give me all the information of the case that you have.”

“That is Eva Silber,” young Edwards replied. “Miss Silber had been employed by us a little over a year. She came to us in answer to an advertisement. She gave us no information in regard to herself when she came, and she has given none since. Because of her marked ability my father put her in complete charge of the house’s correspondence with our foreign agents; for in addition to English, she speaks and writes fluently German, French, the Magyar dialect of Hungary, Russian, and Spanish.

“I was in love with her almost from the first,” he went on, “in spite of my father’s objection to the attachment. The first Edwards of our family, Mr. Trant, came to Massachusetts in 1660. So my father has the idea that anybody who came later cannot possibly be our equal; and Miss Silber, who came to America to work—the women of our family have stayed idly at home—did not get here until a short time ago.”

“Coming from where?” asked the psychologist.

“I don’t know,” the young man answered simply. “I think she is an Austrian, for the Magyar dialect she speaks is the least likely of the languages she knows to have been learned by choice. I spoke of this to her once, and she did not contradict me.” He paused to control his agitation, and then went on: “She had, so far as I know, no friends. So you see, Mr. Trant, that all that makes my father’s consent to my marrying her only a greater proof of her evident goodness and charm!”

“Then he did consent to your marrying her?” Trant interjected.

“Yes; two weeks ago. I had begged and begged her, but she never had been willing to give me her promise. A week ago last Wednesday, after she had known for more than a week that father had agreed to it, she finally consented—but only conditionally. I was going away for a short business trip, and Eva told me that she wanted that much time to think it over, but that when I came back she would tell me all about herself and, if I still wanted to marry her after hearing it, she would marry me. I never imagined that any one could force her to change her mind!”

“Yet she did change her mind, you think?” put in Trant.

“Without question, Mr. Trant!” was the emphatic reply. “And it seems to have been wholly because of the visit of the ‘hammering man,’ who came to see her at the office the day after I left Chicago. It sounds queer to call him that, but I do not know his name, nor anything about him, except the fact of his hammering.”

“But if the people in the office saw him, you have at least his description,” said Trant.

“They say he was unusually large, gross, almost bestial in appearance, and red headed. He was plainly dressed. He asked to see Eva. When she caught sight of him she turned back and refused to speak with him.”

“How did the man take her refusal?” was the next question.

“He seemed very angry for a moment, and then went out into the public corridor,” replied Edwards. “For a long time he walked back and forth in the corridor, muttering to himself. The people in the office had practically forgotten him when they were startled by a noise of hammering or pounding in the corridor. One wall of the inner office where Eva had her desk is formed by the wall of the corridor, and the man was beating upon it with his fists.”

“Hammering excitedly?” asked Trant.

“No; in a rather deliberate and measured manner. My father, who heard the sound, says it was so very distinctive as to be recognizable if heard again.”

“Odd!” said Trant. “And what effect did this have on Miss Silber?” “That is the strangest part of it. Eva had seemed worried and troubled ever since she learned the man was there, but this hammering seemed to agitate and disturb her out of all reason. At the end of the day’s business she went to my father and abruptly resigned the position of trust she held with us. My father, surprised and angry at her refusal to give a reason for this action, accepted her resignation.”

“You do not happen to know whether, before this visit, Miss Silber had received any letter which troubled her,” said Trant.

“She may have received a message at her house, but not at the office,” admitted the young man. “However, there is something still more mysterious. On Sunday, my father, sorry that he had accepted her resignation so promptly, in view of our relationship, ordered the motor and went out to see her. But—good heavens!”