The Confession | Page 7

knew it was true. I had developed an idee fixe.
"I have to go downstairs at night and answer it," I added, rather feebly.
"It's on my nerves, I think."
"I should think it is," he said, with a note of wonder in his voice. "It
doesn't sound like you. A telephone!" But just at the church door he
stopped me, a hand on my arm.
"Look here," he said, "don't you suppose it's because you're so
dependent on the telephone? You know that if anything goes wrong
with it, you're cut off, in a way. And there's another point--you get all
your news over it, good and bad." He had difficulty, I think, in finding
the words he wanted. "It's--it's vital," he said. "So you attach too much
importance to it, and it gets to be an obsession."
"Very likely," I assented. "The whole thing is idiotic, anyhow."
But--was it idiotic?
I am endeavoring to set things down as they seemed to me at the time,
not in the light of subsequent events. For, if this narrative has any
interest at all, it is a psychological one. I have said that it is a study in
fear, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is a study of

the mental reaction of crime, of its effects on different minds, more or
less remotely connected with it.
That my analysis of my impressions in the church that morning are not
colored by subsequent events is proved by the fact that under cover of
that date, July 16th, I made the following entry:
"Why do Maggie and Miss Benton distrust each other?"
I realized it even then, although I did not consider it serious, as is
evidenced by the fact that I follow it with a recipe for fruit gelatin,
copied from the newspaper.
It was a calm and sunny Sunday morning. The church windows were
wide open, and a butterfly came in and set the choir boys to giggling.
At the end of my pew a stained-glass window to Carlo Benton--the
name came like an echo from the forgotten past--sent a shower of
colored light over Willie, turned my blue silk to most unspinsterly hues,
and threw a sort of summer radiance over Miss Emily herself, in the
seat ahead.
She sat quite alone, impeccably neat, even to her profile. She was so
orderly, so well balanced, one stitch of her hand-sewed organdy collar
was so clearly identical with every other, her very seams, if you can
understand it, ran so exactly where they should, that she set me to
pulling myself straight. I am rather casual as to seams.
After a time I began to have a curious feeling about her. Her head was
toward the rector, standing in a sort of white nimbus of sunlight, but I
felt that Miss Emily's entire attention was on our pew, immediately
behind her. I find I can not put it into words, unless it was that her back
settled into more rigid lines. I glanced along the pew. Willie's face wore
a calm and slightly somnolent expression. But Maggie, in her far
end--she is very high church and always attends--Maggie's eyes were
glued almost fiercely to Miss Emily's back. And just then Miss Emily
herself stirred, glanced up at the window, and turning slightly, returned
Maggie's glance with one almost as malevolent. I have hesitated over
that word. It seems strong now, but at the time it was the one that came

into my mind.
When it was over, it was hard to believe that it had happened. And even
now, with everything else clear, I do not pretend to explain Maggie's
attitude. She knew, in some strange way. But she did not know that she
knew--which sounds like nonsense and is as near as I can come to
getting it down in words.
Willie left that night, the 16th, and we settled down to quiet days, and,
for a time, to undisturbed nights. But on the following Wednesday, by
my journal, the telephone commenced to bother me again. Generally
speaking, it rang rather early, between eleven o'clock and midnight. But
on the following Saturday night I find I have recorded the hour as 2 a.
m.
In every instance the experience was identical. The telephone never
rang the second time. When I went downstairs to answer it--I did not
always go--there was the buzzing of the wire, and there was nothing
else. It was on the twenty-fourth that I had the telephone inspected and
reported in normal condition, and it is possibly significant that for three
days afterward my record shows not a single disturbance.
But I do not regard the strange calls over the telephone as so important
as my attitude to them. The plain truth is