Sight Unseen | Page 8

about 9:30," he said, and rang
I am not ashamed to confess that my hands shook as I hung up the
receiver. A brick house, she had said; the Wells house was brick. And
so were all the other houses on the street. Vines in the back? Well, even
my own house had vines. It was absurd; it was pure coincidence; it was

- well, I felt it was queer.
Nevertheless, as I stood there, I wondered for the first time in a highly
material existence, whether there might not be, after all, a spirit-world
surrounding us, cognizant of all that we did, touching but intangible,
sentient but tuned above our common senses?
I stood by the prosaic telephone instrument and looked into the
darkened recesses of the passage. It seemed to my disordered nerves
that back of the coats and wraps that hung on the rack, beyond the
heavy curtains, in every corner, there lurked vague and shadowy forms,
invisible when I stared, but advancing a trifle from their obscurity when,
by turning my head and looking ahead, they impinged on the extreme
right or left of my field of vision.
I was shocked by the news, but not greatly grieved. The Wellses had
been among us but not of us, as I have said. They had come, like gay
young comets, into our orderly constellation, trailing behind them their
cars and servants, their children and governesses and rather riotous
friends, and had flashed on us in a sort of bright impermanence.
Of the two, I myself had preferred Arthur. His faults were on the
surface. He drank hard, gambled, and could not always pay his
gambling debts. But underneath it all there had always been something
boyishly honest about him. He had played, it is true, through most of
the thirty years that now marked his whole life, but he could have been
made a man by the right woman. And he had married the wrong one.
Of Elinor Wells I have only my wife's verdict, and I have found that, as
is the way with many good women, her judgments of her own sex are
rather merciless. A tall, handsome girl, very dark, my wife has
characterized her as cold, calculating and ambitious. She has said
frequently, too, that Elinor Wells was a disappointed woman, that her
marriage, while giving her social identity, had disappointed her in a
monetary way. Whether that is true or not, there was no doubt, by the
time they had lived in our neighborhood for a year, that a complication
had arisen in the shape of another man.

My wife, on my return from my office in the evening, had been quite
likely to greet me with:
"Horace, he has been there all afternoon. I really think something
should be done about it."
"Who has been where?" I would ask, I am afraid not too patiently.
"You know perfectly well. And I think you ought to tell him."
In spite of her vague pronouns, I understood, and in a more masculine
way I shared her sense of outrage. Our street has never had a scandal on
it, except the one when the Berringtons' music teacher ran away with
their coachman, in the days of carriages. And I am glad to say that that
is almost forgotten.
Nevertheless, we had realized for some time that the dreaded triangle
was threatening the repute of our quiet neighborhood, and as I stood by
the telephone that night I saw that it had come. More than that, it
seemed very probable that into this very triangle our peaceful
Neighborhood Club had been suddenly thrust.
My wife accepted my excuse coldly. She dislikes intensely the
occasional outside calls of my profession. She merely observed,
however, that she would leave all the lights on until my return. "I
should think you could arrange things better, Horace," she added. "It's
perfectly idiotic the way people die at night. And tonight, of all nights!"
I shall have to confess that through all of the thirty years of our married
life my wife has clung to the belief that I am a bit of a dog. Thirty years
of exemplary living have not affected this conviction, nor had Herbert's
foolish remark earlier in the evening helped matters. But she watched
me put on my overcoat without further comment. When I kissed her
good-night, however, she turned her cheek.
The street, with its open spaces, was a relief after the dark hall. I started
for Sperry's house, my head bent against the wind, my mind on the
news I had just heard. Was it, I wondered, just possible that we had for

some reason been allowed behind the veil which covered poor Wells'
last moments? And, to admit that for a moment, where would what