Detection by Gaslight Read online

  “We shall get along better on foot; Draycott Street is only a stone’s throw from here,” said Loveday; “there’s a turning on the north side of Western Road that will bring us straight into it.”

  So they dismissed their trap, and Loveday, acting as cicerone still, led the way through narrow turnings into the district, half town, half country, that skirts the road leading to the Dyke.

  Draycott Street was not difficult to find. It consisted of two rows of newly-built houses of the eight-roomed, lodging-letting order. A dim light shone from the first-floor windows of number fifteen, but the lower window was dark and uncurtained, and a board hanging from its balcony rails proclaimed that it was “to let unfurnished.” The door of the house stood slightly ajar, and pushing it open, Loveday led the way up a flight of stairs—lighted halfway up with a paraffin lamp—to the first floor.

  “I know the way. I was here this afternoon,” she whispered to her companion. “This is the last lecture he will give before he starts for Judæa; or, in other words, bolts with the money he has managed to conjure from other people’s purses into his own.”

  The door of the room for which they were making, on the first floor, stood open, possibly on account of the heat. It laid bare to view a double row of forms, on which were seated some eight or ten persons in the attitude of all-absorbed listeners. Their faces were upturned, as if fixed on a preacher at the farther end of the room, and wore that expression of rapt, painful interest that is sometimes seen on the faces of a congregation of revivalists before the smouldering excitement bursts into flame.

  As Loveday and her companion mounted the last of the flight of stairs the voice of the preacher—full, arrestive, resonant—fell upon their ear; and, standing on the small outside landing, it was possible to catch a glimpse of that preacher through the crack of the half-opened door.

  He was a tall, dignified-looking man, of about five-and-forty, with a close crop of white hair, black eye-brows and remarkably luminous and expressive eyes. Altogether his appearance matched his voice: it was emphatically that of a man born to sway, lead, govern the multitude.

  A boy came out of an adjoining room and asked Loveday respectfully if she would not like to go in and hear the lecture. She shook her head.

  “I could not stand the heat,” she said. “Kindly bring us chairs here.”

  The lecture was evidently drawing to a close now, and Loveday and Mr. Clampe, as they sat outside listening, could not resist an occasional thrill of admiration at the skilful manner in which the preacher led his hearers from one figure of rhetoric to another, until the oratorical climax was reached.

  “That man is a born orator,” whispered Loveday; “and in addition to the power of the voice has the power of the eye. That audience is as completely hypnotised by him as if they had surrendered themselves to a professional mesmerist.”

  To judge from the portion of the discourse that fell upon their ear, the preacher was a member of one of the many sects known under the generic name, “Millenarian.” His topic was Apollyon and the great battle of Armageddon. This he described as vividly as if it were being fought out under his very eye, and it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that he made the cannon roar in the ears of his listeners and the tortured cries of the wounded wail in them. He drew an appalling picture of the carnage of that battlefield, of the blood flowing like a river across the plain, of the mangled men and horses, with the birds of prey swooping down from all quarters, and the stealthy tigers and leopards creeping out from their mountain lairs. “And all this time,” he said, suddenly raising his voice from a whisper to a full, thrilling tone, “gazing calmly down upon the field of slaughter, with bent brows and folded arms, stands the imperial Apollyon. Apollyon did I say? No, I will give him his right name, the name in which he will stand revealed in that dread day, Napoleon! A Napoleon it will be who, in that day, will stand as the embodiment of Satanic majesty. Out of the mists suddenly he will walk, a tall, dark figure, with frowning brows and firm-set lips, a man to rule, a man to drive, a man to kill! Apollyon the mighty, Napoleon the imperial, they are one and the same——”

  Here a sob and a choking cry from one of the women in the front seats interrupted the discourse and sent the small boy who acted as verger into the room with a glass of water.

  “That sermon has been preached before,” said Loveday. “Now can you not understand the origin of the ghost in Fountain Lane?”

  “Hysterics are catching, there’s another woman off now,” said Mr. Clampe; “it’s high time this sort of thing was put a stop to. Pearson ought to be here in another minute with his warrant.”

  The words had scarcely passed his lips before heavy steps mounting the stairs announced that Pearson and his warrant were at hand.

  “I don’t think I can be of any further use,” said Loveday, rising to depart. “If you like to come to me to-morrow morning at my hotel at ten o‘clock I will tell you, step by step, how I came to connect a stolen cheque with a ‘ridiculous ghost.’”

  “We had a tussle—he showed fight at first,” said Mr. Clampe, when, precisely at ten o‘clock the next morning, he called upon Miss Brooke at the Métropole. “If he had had time to get his wits together and had called some of the men in that room to the rescue, I verily believe we should have been roughly handled and he might have slipped through our fingers after all. It’s wonderful what power these ‘born orators,’ as you call them, have over minds of a certain order.”

  “Ah, yes,” answered Loveday thoughtfully; “we talk glibly enough about ‘magnetic influence,’ but scarcely realise how literally true the phrase is. It is my firm opinion that the ‘leaders of men,’ as they are called, have as absolute and genuine hypnotic power as any modern French expert, although perhaps it may be less consciously exercised. Now tell me about Rogers and Maria Lisle.”

  “Rogers had bolted, as you expected he would have done, with the six hundred pounds he had been good enough to cash for his reverend colleague. Ostensibly he had started for Judæa to collect the elect, as he phrased it, under one banner. In reality, he has sailed for New York, where, thanks to the cable, he will be arrested on his arrival and sent back by return packet. Maria Lisle was arrested this morning on a charge of having stolen the cheque from Mrs. Turner. By the way, Miss Brooke, I think it is almost a pity you didn’t take possession of her diary when you had the chance. It would have been invaluable evidence against her and her rascally colleagues.”

  “I did not see the slightest necessity for so doing. Remember, she is not one of the criminal classes, but a religious enthusiast, and when put upon her defence will at once confess and plead religious conviction as an extenuating circumstance—at least, if she is well advised she will do so. I never read anything that laid bare more frankly than did this diary the mischief that the sensational teaching of these millenarians is doing at the present moment. But I must not take up your time with moralising. I know you are anxious to learn what, in the first instance, led me to identify a millenarian preacher with a receiver of stolen property.

  “Yes, that’s it; I want to know about the ghost: that’s the point that interests me.”

  “Very well. As I told you yesterday afternoon, the first thing that struck me as remarkable in this ghost story was the soldierly character of the ghost. One expects emotionally religious people like Freer and his wife to see visions, but one also expects those visions to partake of the nature of those emotions, and to be somewhat shadowy and ecstatic. It seemed to me certain that this Napoleonic ghost must have some sort of religious significance to these people. This conviction it was that set my thoughts running in the direction of the millenarians, who have attached a religious significance (although not a polite one) to the name of Napoleon by embodying the evil Apollyon in the person of a descendant of the great Emperor, and endowing him with all the qualities of his illustrious ancestor. I called upon the Freers, ordered a pair of boots, and while the man was taking my measure, I asked him a few very pointed ques
tions on these millenarian notions. The man prevaricated a good deal at first, but at length was driven to admit that he and his wife were millenarians at heart, that, in fact, the prayer meeting at which the Napoleonic ghost had made its first appearance was a millenarian one, held by a man who had at one time been a Wesleyan preacher in the chapel in Gordon Street, but who had been dismissed from his charge there because his teaching had been held to be unsound. Freer further stated that this man had been so much liked that many members of the congregation seized every opportunity that presented itself of attending his ministrations, some openly, others, like himself and his wife, secretly, lest they might give offence to the elders and ministers of their chapel.”

  “And the bootmaking connection suffer proportionately,” laughed Mr. Clampe.

  “Precisely. A visit to the Wesleyan chapel in Gordon Street and a talk with the chapel attendant enabled me to complete the history of this inhibited preacher, the Rev. Richard Steele. From this attendant I ascertained that a certain elder of their chapel, John Rogers by name, had seceded from their communion, thrown in his lot with Richard Steele, and that the two together were now going about the country preaching that the world would come to an end on Thursday, April 11th, 1901, and that five years before this event, viz., on the 5th of March, 1896, one hundred and forty-four thousand living saints would be caught up to heaven. They furthermore announced that this translation would take place in the land of Judæa, that, shortly, saints from all parts of the world would be hastening thither, and that in view of this event a society had been formed to provide homes—a series, I suppose—for the multitudes who would otherwise be homeless. Also (a very vital point this), that subscriptions to this society would be gladly received by either gentleman. I had arrived so far in my ghost enquiry when you came to me, bringing the stolen cheque with its pencilled figures, 144,000.”

  “Ah, I begin to see!” murmured Mr. Clampe.

  “It immediately occurred to me that the man who could make persons see an embodiment of his thought at will, would have very little difficulty in influencing other equally receptive minds to a breach of the ten commandments. The world, it seems to me, abounds in people who are little more than blank sheets of paper, on which a strong hand may transcribe what it will—hysteric subjects, the doctors would call them; hypnotic subjects others would say; really the line that divides the hysteric condition from the hypnotic is a very hazy one. So now, when I saw your stolen cheque, I said to myself, ‘there is a sheet of blank paper somewhere in that country vicarage, the thing is to find it out.’”

  “Ah, good Mrs. Brown’s gossip made your work easy to you there.”

  “It did. She not only gave me a complete summary of the history of the people within the vicarage walls, but she put so many graphic touches to that history that they lived and moved before me. For instance, she told me that Maria Lisle was in the habit of speaking of Mrs. Turner as a ‘Child of the Scarlet Woman,’ a ‘Daughter of Babylon,’ and gave me various other minute particulars, which enabled me, so to speak, to see Maria Lisle going about her daily duties, rendering her mistress reluctant service, hating her in her heart as a member of a corrupt faith, and thinking she was doing God service by despoiling her of some of her wealth, in order to devote it to what seemed to her a holy cause. I would like here to read to you two entries which I copied from her diary under dates respectively, August 3rd (the day the cheque was lost), and August 7th (the following Sunday), when Maria no doubt found opportunity to meet Steele at some prayer-meeting in Brighton.”

  Here Loveday produced her note-book and read from it as follows:

  “‘To-day I have spoiled the Egyptians! Taken from a Daughter of Babylon that which would go to increase the power of the Beast!’

  “And again, under date August 7th, she writes:

  “‘I have handed to-day to my beloved pastor that of which I despoiled a Daughter of Babylon. It was blank, but he told me he would fill it in so that 144,000 of the elect would be each the richer by one penny. Blessed thought! this is the doing of my most unworthy hand.’

  “A wonderful farrago, that diary of distorted Scriptural phraseology—wild eulogies on the beloved pastor, and morbid ecstatics, such as one would think could be the outcome only of a diseased brain. It seems to me that Portland or Broadmoor, and the ministrations of a sober-minded chaplain, may be about the happiest thing that could befall Maria Lisle at this period of her career. I think I ought to mention in this connection that when at the religious service yesterday afternoon (to attend which I slightly postponed my drive to East Downes), I heard Steele pronounce a fervid eulogy on those who had strengthened his hands for the fight which he knew it would shortly fall to his lot to wage against Apollyon, I did not wonder at weak-minded persons like Maria Lisle, swayed by such eloquence, setting up new standards of right and wrong for themselves.”

  “Miss Brooke, another question or two. Can you in any way account for the sudden payment of Mrs. Turner’s debts—a circumstance that led me a little astray in the first instance?”

  “Mrs. Brown explained the matter easily enough. She said that a day or two back, when she was walking on the other side of the vicarage hedge, and the husband and wife in the garden were squabbling as usual over money-matters, she heard Mr. Turner say indignantly, ‘only a week or two ago I gave you nearly £500 to pay your debts in Brighton, and now there comes another bill.’”

  “Ah, that makes it plain enough. One more question and I have done. I have no doubt there’s something in your theory of the hypnotic power (unconsciously exercised) of such men as Richard Steele, although, at the same time, it seems to me a trifle far-fetched and fanciful. But even admitting it, I don’t see how you account for the girl, Martha Watts, seeing the ghost. She was not present at the prayer-meeting which called the ghost into being, nor does she appear in any way to have come into contact with the Rev. Richard Steele.”

  “Don’t you think that ghost-seeing is quite as catching as scarlet-fever or measles?” answered Loveday, with a little smile. “Let one member of a family see a much individualized and easily described ghost, such as the one these good people saw, and ten to one others in the same house will see it before the week is over. We are all in the habit of asserting that ‘seeing is believing.’ Don’t you think the converse of the saying is true also, and that ‘believing is seeing?’”

  Rudyard Kipling

  (1865–1936)

  JOSEPH RUDYARD KIPLING, the chronicler from the British viewpoint of the pageant of India, the creator of Just So Stories, the balladeer who wrote about the “better man than I am, Gunga Din,” and one of the most popular writers of his age, was born in Bombay in 1865. The son of a Methodist minister, he was educated in England but returned to India in 1882, where he remained until 1889. Between 1892 and 1896, he lived in Vermont. In 1907, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, and at his death he was honored with a burial at Westminster Abbey. It is odd to think that one of the most celebrated writers and one who is still well-known is no longer widely read, but tastes change, and Kipling’s defense of the empire and his invention of the phrase “the white man’s burden” have made his works uncomfortable to many contemporary readers. In fact, however, he was far more sympathetic to Indian culture than many of his contemporaries, and as the following story shows, he was a master of the short tale.

  Kipling was interested in crime and, occasionally, in investigation. He wrote five stories about “E. Strickland of the Police,” three of which have no detection (but one of those, “The Mark of the Beast,” is a splendid horror story). “The Return of Imray” was first published in Kipling’s collection Life’s Handicaps: Stories of Mine Own People in 1891. Kipling also wrote “The House Surgeon” (1909), an occult detective story about investigating a ghost, and, fairly late in his life, a full-fledged detective story called “Fairy-Kist” (1927).

  The Return of Imray

  The doors were wide, the story saith,

  Out of the nig
ht came the patient wraith,

  He might not speak, and he could not stir

  A hair of the Baron’s minniver—

  Speechless and strengthless, a shadow thin,

  He roved the castle to seek his kin.

  And oh, ’twas a piteous thing to see

  The dumb ghost follow his enemy!

  The Baron

  IMRAY ACHIEVED the impossible. Without warning, for no conceivable motive, in his youth, at the threshold of his career he chose to disappear from the world—which is to say, the little Indian station where he lived.

  Upon a day he was alive, well, happy, and in great evidence among the billiard-tables at his Club. Upon a morning, he was not, and no manner of search could make sure where he might be. He had stepped out of his place; he had not appeared at his office at the proper time, and his dogcart was not upon the public roads. For these reasons, and because he was hampering, in a microscopical degree, the administration of the Indian Empire, that Empire paused for one microscopical moment to make inquiry into the fate of Imray. Ponds were dragged, wells were plumbed, telegrams were despatched down the lines of railways and to the nearest seaport town—twelve hundred miles away; but Imray was not at the end of the drag-ropes nor the telegraph wires. He was gone, and his place knew him no more. Then the work of the great Indian Empire swept forward, because it could not be delayed, and Imray from being a man became a mystery—such a thing as men talk over at their tables in the Club for a month, and then forget utterly. His guns, horses, and carts were sold to the highest bidder. His superior officer wrote an altogether absurd letter to his mother, saying that Imray had unaccountably disappeared, and his bungalow stood empty.