Weird and Witty Tales of Mystery

The Editor desires especially to acknowledge assistance in granting
the use of original material, and for helpful advice and suggestion,
to Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia University, to Mrs. Anna
Katherine Green Rohlfs, to Cleveland Moffett, to Arthur Reeve, creator
of "Craig Kennedy," to Wilbur Daniel Steele, to Ralph Adams Cram, to
Chester Bailey Fernando, to Brian Brown, to Mrs. Lillian M. Robins of
the publisher's office, and to Charles E. Farrington of the Brooklyn
Public Library.

There is an intermediate ground between our knowledge of life and the
unknown which is readily conceived as covered by the term
mysticism
.
Mystery stories of high rank often fall under this general classification.
They are neither of earth, heaven nor Hades, but may partake of either.
In the hands of a master they present at times a rare, if even upon
occasion, unduly thrilling—aesthetic charm. The examples which it has
been possible to gather within the space of this volume are offered as
the best of their type.

The humorist, thank heaven, we have always with us. Spectres cannot
afright him, nor mundane terrors deflect him from his path. He takes
nothing either in earth or heaven seriously, as is his God-given right.
Some of the best examples of what he has done in the general field of
mystery are presented here for the first time in any collection.

JOSEPH LEWIS FRENCH.

It was in the spring when I at last found time from the hospital work
to visit my friend, the old folk-lorist, in his country isolation, and
I rather chuckled to myself, because in my bag I was taking down a book
that utterly refuted all his tiresome pet theories of magic and the
powers of the soul.

These theories were many and various, and had often troubled me. In the
first place, I scorned them for professional reasons, and, in the
second, because I had never been able to argue quite well enough to
convince or to shake his faith, in even the smallest details, and any
scientific knowledge I brought to bear only fed him with confirmatory
data. To find such a book, therefore, and to know that it was safely in
my bag, wrapped up in brown paper and addressed to him, was a deep and
satisfactory joy, and I speculated a good deal during the journey how
he would deal with the overwhelming arguments it contained against the
existence of any important region outside the world of sensory
perceptions.

Speculative, too, I was whether his visionary habits and absorbing
experiments would permit him to remember my arrival at all, and I was
accordingly relieved to hear from the solitary porter that the
"professor" had sent a "veeckle" to meet me, and that I was thus free
to send my bag and walk the four miles to the house across the hills.

It was a calm, windless evening, just after sunset, the air warm and
scented, and delightfully still. The train, already sinking into
distance, carried away with it the noise of crowds and cities and the
last suggestions of the stressful life behind me, and from the little
station on the moorland I stepped at once into the world of silent,
growing things, tinkling sheep-bells, shepherds, and wild, desolate
spaces.

My path lay diagonally across the turfy hills. It slanted a mile or so
to the summit, wandered vaguely another two miles among gorse-bushes
along the crest, passed Tom Bassett's cottage by the pines, and then
dropped sharply down on the other side through rather thin woods to the
ancient house where the old folk-lorist lived and dreamed himself into
his impossible world of theory and fantasy. I fell to thinking busily
about him during the first part of the ascent, and convinced myself, as
usual, that, but for his generosity to the poor, and his benign aspect,
the peasantry must undoubtedly have regarded him as a wizard who
speculated in souls and had dark dealings with the world of faery.

The path I knew tolerably well. I had already walked it once before—a
winter's day some years ago—and from the cottage onward felt sure of
my way; but for the first mile or so there were so many cross
cattle-tracks, and the light had become so dim that I felt it wise to
inquire more particularly. And this I was fortunately able to do of a
man who with astonishing suddenness rose from the grass where he had
been lying behind a clump of bushes, and passed a few yards in front of
me at a high pace downhill toward the darkening valley.

He was in such a state of hurry that I called out loudly to him,
fearing to be too late, but on hearing my voice he turned sharply, and
seemed to arrive almost at once beside me. In a single instant he was
standing there, quite close, looking, with a smile and a certain
expression of curiosity, I thought, into my face. I remember thinking
that his features, pale and wholly untanned, were rather wonderful for
a countryman, and that the eyes were those of a foreigner; his great
swiftness, too, gave me a distinct sensation—something almost of a
start—though I knew my vision was at fault at the best of times, and
of course especially so in the deceptive twilight of the open hillside.

Moreover—as the way often is with such instructions—the words did not
stay in my mind very clearly after he had uttered them, and the rapid,
panther-like movements of the man as he quickly vanished down the hill
again left me with little more than a sweeping gesture indicating the
line I was to follow. No doubt his sudden rising from behind the
gorse-bush, his curious swiftness, and the way he peered into my face,
and even touched me on the shoulder, all combined to distract my
attention somewhat from the actual words he used; and the fact that I
was travelling at a wrong angle, and should have come out a mile too
far to the right, helped to complete my feeling that his gesture,
pointing the way, was sufficient.

On the crest of the ridge, panting a little with the unwonted exertion,
I lay down to rest a moment on the grass beside a flaming yellow
gorse-bush. There was still a good hour before I should be looked for
at the house; the grass was very soft, the peace and silence soothing.
I lingered, and lit a cigarette. And it was just then, I think, that my
subconscious memory gave back the words, the actual words, the man had
spoken, and the heavy significance of the personal pronoun, as he had
emphasised it in his odd foreign voice, touched me with a sense of
vague amusement: "The safest way
for you
now," he had said, as though
I was so obviously a townsman and might be in danger on the lonely
hills after dark. And the quick way he had reached my side, and then
slipped off again like a shadow down the steep slope, completed a
definite little picture in my mind. Then other thoughts and memories
rose up and formed a series of pictures, following each other in rapid
succession, and forming a chain of reflections undirected by the will
and without purpose or meaning. I fell, that is, into a pleasant
reverie.

Below me, and infinitely far away, it seemed, the valley lay silent
under a veil of blue evening haze, the lower end losing itself among
darkening hills whose peaks rose here and there like giant plumes that
would surely nod their great heads and call to one another once the
final shadows were down. The village lay, a misty patch, in which
lights already twinkled. A sound of rooks faintly cawing, of sea-gulls
crying far up in the sky, and of dogs barking at a great distance rose
up out of the general murmur of evening voices. Odours of farm and
field and open spaces stole to my nostrils, and everything contributed
to the feeling that I lay on the top of the world, nothing between me
and the stars, and that all the huge, free things of the earth—hills,
valleys, woods, and sloping fields—lay breathing deeply about me.

A few sea-gulls—in daytime hereabouts they fill the air—still circled
and wheeled within range of sight, uttering from time to time sharp,
petulant cries; and far in the distance there was just visible a
shadowy line that showed where the sea lay.

Then, as I lay gazing dreamily into this still pool of shadows at my
feet, something rose up, something sheet-like, vast, imponderable, off
the whole surface of the mapped-out country, moved with incredible
swiftness down the valley, and in a single instant climbed the hill
where I lay and swept by me, yet without hurry, and in a sense without
speed. Veils in this way rose one after another, filling the cups
between the hills, shrouding alike fields, village, and hillside as
they passed, and settled down somewhere into the gloom behind me over
the ridge, or slipped off like vapour into the sky.

Whether it was actually mist rising from the surface of the
fast-cooling ground, or merely the earth giving up her heat to the
night, I could not determine. The coming of the darkness is ever a
series of mysteries. I only know that this indescribable vast stirring
of the landscape seemed to me as though the earth were unfolding
immense sable wings from her sides, and lifting them for silent,
gigantic strokes so that she might fly more swiftly from the sun into
the night. The darkness, at any rate, did drop down over everything
very soon afterward, and I rose up hastily to follow my pathway,
realising with a degree of wonder strangely new to me the magic of
twilight, the blue open depths into the valley below, and the pale
yellow heights of the watery sky above.

I walked rapidly, a sense of chilliness about me, and soon lost sight
of the valley altogether as I got upon the ridge proper of these lonely
and desolate hills.

It could not have been more than fifteen minutes that I lay there in
reverie, yet the weather, I at once noticed, had changed very abruptly,
for mist was seething here and there about me, rising somewhere from
smaller valleys in the hills beyond, and obscuring the path, while
overhead there was plainly a sound of wind tearing past, far up, with a
sound of high shouting. A moment before it had been the stillness of a
warm spring night, yet now everything had changed; wet mist coated me,
raindrops smartly stung my face, and a gusty wind, descending out of
cool heights, began to strike and buffet me, so that I buttoned my coat
and pressed my hat more firmly upon my head.

The change was really this—and it came to me for the first time in my
life with the power of a real conviction—that everything about me
seemed to have become suddenly
alive
.

It came oddly upon me—prosaic, matter-of-fact, materialistic doctor
that I was—this realisation that the world about me had somehow
stirred into life; oddly, I say, because Nature to me had always been
merely a more or less definite arrangement of measurement, weight, and
colour, and this new presentation of it was utterly foreign to my
temperament. A valley to me was always a valley; a hill, merely a hill;
a field, so many acres of flat surface, grass or ploughed, drained well
or drained ill; whereas now, with startling vividness, came the
strange, haunting idea that after all they could be something more than
valley, hill, and field; that what I had hitherto perceived by these
names were only the veils of something that lay concealed within,
something alive. In a word, that the poetic sense I had always rather
sneered at, in others, or explained away with some shallow
physiological label, had apparently suddenly opened up in myself
without any obvious cause.