The Sleuth of St. James Street | Page 3

in the lapse of which something awful was sure to happen.
Giovanni wrote a letter to the State Department when he learned what
had happened to Rodman. The State Department turned it over to the
court at the trial. I think it was one of the things that influenced the
judge in his decision. Still, at the time, there seemed no other
reasonable decision to make. The testimony must have appeared
incredible; it must have appeared fantastic. No man reading the record
could have come to any other conclusion about it. Yet it seemed
impossible - at least, it seemed impossible for me - to consider this
great vital bulk of a man as a monk of one of the oldest religious orders
in the world. Every common, academic conception of such a monk he
distinctly negatived. He impressed me, instead, as possessing the
ultimate qualities of clever diplomacy - the subtle ambassador of some
new Oriental power, shrewd, suave, accomplished.
When one read the yellow-backed court-record, the sense of old,

obscure, mysterious agencies moving in sinister menace, invisibly,
around Rodman could not be escaped from. You believed it. Against
your reason, against all modern experience of life, you believed it.
And yet it could not be true! One had to find that verdict or topple over
all human knowledge - that is, all human knowledge as we understand
it. The judge, cutting short the criminal trial, took the only way out of
the thing.
There was one man in the world that everybody wished could have
been present at the time. That was Sir Henry Marquis. Marquis was
chief of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. He
had been in charge of the English secret service on the frontier of the
Shan states, and at the time he was in Asia.
As soon as Scotland Yard could release Sir Henry, it sent him.
Rodman's genius was the common property of the world. The
American Government could not, even with the verdict of a trial court,
let Rodman's death go by under the smoke-screen of such a weird,
inscrutable mystery.
I was to meet Sir Henry and come here with him. But my train into
New England was delayed, and when I arrived at the station, I found
that Marquis had gone down to have a look at Rodman's country-house,
where the thing had happened.
It was on an isolated forest ridge of the Berkshires, no human soul
within a dozen miles of it - a comfortable stone house in the English
fashion. There was a big drawing-room across one end of it, with an
immense fireplace framed in black marble under a great white panel to
the ceiling. It had a wide black-marble hearth. There is an excellent
photograph of it in the record, showing the single andiron, that
mysterious andiron upon which the whole tragedy seemed to turn as on
a hinge.
Rodman used this drawing-room for a workshop. He kept it
close-shuttered and locked. Not even this big, yellow, servile creature
who took exclusive care of him in the house was allowed to enter,

except under Rodman's eye. What he saw in the final scenes of the
tragedy, he saw looking in through a crack under the door. The earlier
things he noticed when he put logs on the fire at dark.
Time is hardly a measure for the activities of the mind. These
reflections winged by in a scarcely perceptible interval of it. They have
taken me some time to write out here, but they crowded past while the
big Oriental was speaking - in the pause between his words.
"The print," he continued, "was the first confirmation of evidence, but
it was not the first indicatory sign. I doubt if the Master himself noticed
the thing at the beginning. The seductions of this disaster could not
have come quickly; and besides that, Excellency, the agencies behind
the material world get a footing in it only with continuous pressure. Do
not receive a wrong impression, Excellency; to the eye a thing will
suddenly appear, but the invisible pressure will have been for some
time behind that materialization."
He paused.
"The Master was sunk in his labor, and while that enveloped him, the
first advances of the lure would have gone by unnoticed - and the
tension of the pressure. But the day was at hand when the Master was
receptive. He had got his work completed; the formula, penciled out,
were on his table. I knew by the relaxation. Of all periods this is the
one most dangerous to the human spirit."
He sat silent for a moment, his big fingers moving on the arms of the
chair.
"I knew," he added. Then he went on: "But it was the one thing against
which I could not