The room into which he led me resembled an auctioneer’s establishment just before the sale — or maybe one of these alley tea-rooms. Fat blue vases, crooked red vases, lanky yellow vases, vases of various shapes and colors; marble statuettes, ebony statuettes, statuettes of any material; lanterns, lamps and candlesticks; draperies, hangings and rugs of all sorts; odds and ends of furniture that were all somehow queerly designed; peculiar pictures hung here and there in unexpected places. A hard room to feel comfortable in.
“My fiancée,” he began immediately in a high-pitched voice that was within a notch of hysteria, “has disappeared! Something has happened to her! Foul play of some horrible sort! I want you to find her — to save her from this terrible thing that...”
I followed him this far and then gave it up. A jumble of words came out of his mouth — “spirited away... mysterious something... lured into a trap” — but they were too disconnected for me to make anything out of them. So I stopped trying to understand him, and waited for him to babble himself empty of words.
I have heard ordinarily reasonable men, under stress of excitement, run on even more crazily than this wild-eyed youth; but his dress — the parroted robe and gay pajamas — and his surroundings — this deliriously furnished room — gave him too theatrical a setting; made his words sound utterly unreal.
He himself, when normal, should have been a rather nice-looking lad: his features were well spaced and, though his mouth and chin were a little uncertain, his broad forehead was good. But standing there listening to the occasional melodramatic phrase that I could pick out of the jumbled noises he was throwing at me, I thought that instead of parrots on his robe he should have had cuckoos.
Presently he ran out of language and was holding his long, thin hands out to me in an appealing gesture, saying,
“Will you?” over and over. “Will you? Will you?”
I nodded soothingly, and noticed that tears were on his thin cheeks.
“Suppose we begin at the beginning,” I suggested, sitting down carefully on a carved bench affair that didn’t look any too strong.
“Yes! Yes!” He was standing legs apart in front of me, running his fingers through his hair. “The beginning. I had a letter from her every day until—”
“That’s not the beginning,” I objected. “Who is she? What is she?”
“She’s Jeanne Delano!” he exclaimed in surprise at my ignorance. “And she is my fiancée. And now she is gone, and I know that—”
The phrases “victim of foul play,” “into a trap” and so on began to flow hysterically out again.
Finally I got him quieted down and, sandwiched in between occasional emotional outbursts, got a story out of him that amounted to this:
This Burke Pangburn was a poet. About two months before, he had received a note from a Jeanne Delano — forwarded from his publishers — praising his latest book of rhymes. Jeanne Delano happened to live in San Francisco, too, though she hadn’t known that he did. He had answered her note, and had received another. After a little of this they met. If she really was as beautiful as he claimed, then he wasn’t to be blamed for falling in love with her. But whether or not she was really beautiful, he thought she was, and he had fallen hard.
This Delano girl had been living in San Francisco for only a little while, and when the poet met her she was living alone in an Ashbury Avenue apartment. He did not know where she came from or anything about her former life. He suspected — from certain indefinite suggestions and peculiarities of conduct which he couldn’t put in words — that there was a cloud of some sort hanging over the girl; that neither her past nor her present were free from difficulties. But he hadn’t the least idea what those difficulties might be. He hadn’t cared. He knew absolutely nothing about her, except that she was beautiful, and he loved her, and she had promised to marry him.
Then, on the third of the month — exactly twenty-one days before this Sunday morning — the girl had suddenly left San Francisco. He had received a note from her, by messenger.
This note, which he showed me after I had insisted point blank on seeing it, read:
Burkelove:
Have just received a wire, and must go East on next train. Tried to get you on the phone, but couldn’t. Will write you as soon as I know what my address will be. If anything. (These two words were erased and could be read only with great difficulty.) Love me until I’m back with you forever.
Nine days later he had received another letter from her, from Baltimore, Maryland. This one, which I had a still harder time getting a look at, read:
Dearest Poet:
It seems like two years since I have seen you, and I have a fear that it’s going to be between one and two months before I see you again.
I can’t tell you now, beloved, about what brought me here. There are things that can’t be written. But as soon as I’m back with you, I shall tell you the whole wretched story.
If anything should happen — I mean to me — you’ll go on loving me forever, won’t you, beloved? But that’s foolish. Nothing is going to happen. I’m just off the train, and tired from traveling.
Tomorrow I shall write you a long, long letter to make up for this.
My address here is 215 N. Stricker St. Please, Mister, at least one letter a day! Your own
For nine days he had had a letter from her each day — with two on Monday to make up for the none on Sunday — and then her letters had stopped. And the daily letters he had sent to the address she gave — 215 N. Stricker Street — had begun to come back to him, marked “Not known.”
He had sent a telegram, and the telegraph company had informed him that its Baltimore office had been unable to find a Jeanne Delano at the North Stricker Street address.
For three days he had waited, expecting hourly to hear from the girl, and no word had come. Then he had bought a ticket for Baltimore.
“But,” he wound up, “I was afraid to go. I know she’s in some sort of trouble — I can feel that — but I’m a silly poet. I can’t deal with mysteries. Either I would find nothing at all or, if by luck I did stumble on the right track, the probabilities are that I would only muddle things; add fresh complications, perhaps endanger her life still further. I can’t go blundering at it in that fashion, without knowing whether I am helping or harming her. It’s a task for an expert in that sort of thing. So I thought of your agency. You’ll be careful, won’t you? It may be — I don’t know — that she won’t want assistance. It may be that you can help her without her knowing anything about it. You are accustomed to that sort of thing; you can do it, can’t you?”
II
I turned the job over and over in my mind before answering him. The two great bugaboos of a reputable detective agency are the persons who bring in a crooked plan or a piece of divorce work all dressed up in the garb of a legitimate operation, and the irresponsible person who is laboring under wild and fanciful delusions — who wants a dream run out.
This poet — sitting opposite me now twining his long, white fingers nervously together — was, I thought, sincere; but I wasn’t so sure of his sanity.