Obelists Fly High

by C. Daly King

  ‘Go ahead, doctor,’ Lord murmured. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t hear much of what you said coming across the field. I was thinking about the messages I had sent off, wondering if I had left anything out of them.’

  ‘Is that so? You didn’t hear what I said about the sister?’

  ‘I really didn’t,’ the detective admitted. ‘I didn’t hear any of it. Which sister do you mean?’

  ‘Anne, the surgeon’s sister.’ Pons twisted his stool more securely beneath his plentiful weight. ‘It doesn’t appear to be a very pleasant family. I had better give you the background, so far as I have been able to piece it together.’

  ‘Have you worked out some theory about the murder? Anything that would point to the murderer?’

  ‘So far as I can see, there is only one person with us who has a serious motive for doing away with Cutter, but I don’t want to begin by telling you who that is. I want to give you a picture of the family relations first.’

  Dr Pons leaned back against the wall behind him, settling himself as comfortably as possible. At Lord’s nod he continued, carefully lowering his voice. ‘I haven’t enough details for much of a history, of course, but plenty to show the general situation between all of them. The two girls feel quite differently about the family problems; by talking with both of them and checking one against the other I have managed to get some idea of what has really happened, irrespective of their personal opinions.

  ‘Anne Cutter, I think, is the keystone piece in the whole puzzle. The family seems always to have revolved around her, around her doings and her problems, while at the same time she appears to be the least positive member of it. From everything I hear she has a weak, vacillating personality; but the others have been concerned about her, have quarrelled and plotted about her affairs for years, apparently, and, of course, that’s not so unnatural. The habit of yielding to advice and conforming to the opinions of others has a way of offering unconscious invitation to more and more interference. Just the same, I should like to meet her; there must be something about her that is extraordinary. She is said to have been a great beauty in her younger days and still to be very handsome. That is probably the magnet. Woman’s beauty, whether she wishes it or not, is a tremendously powerful force and the inevitable centre of other powerful forces.’

  ‘One of her daughters,’ Lord interjected, ‘is not exactly homely.’

  ‘I doubt, though, whether the mother is at all the same type. The girl is actively inducive and captivating; she has an active, vigorous emotional personality. Of course, she has probably inherited her good looks from her mother, but her emotional strength comes from somewhere else; her father, or perhaps her grandparents. Anne Cutter, on the other hand, I should imagine to be a more passive, clinging type. She would be the uncertain, helpless beauty – not a very popular kind of woman nowadays, but one whose appeal to stronger people than herself can be almost irresistible if she possesses sufficient physical loveliness. Incidentally, all the rest of the family are strong personalities, except possibly the brother who is Secretary of State.’

  The detective stroked his forehead gently, where the pain of his injured head still lingered. ‘They are not very likely to work up the protective intensity of a lover about her, however, are they?’

  ‘Why not?’ asked the psychologist. ‘Of course they are. That is just what they have been doing for years.’

  ‘The daughters, too?’

  ‘Certainly the daughters. The whole lot of them. There is a drastic difference between the emotional involvement of the two daughters, which we will come to a little later; but you must try to get these conventionalised notions out of your head, Michael. The love responses, normal or distorted, do not follow the patterns of any temporary convention, nor are they limited or confined in their real operation by any particular kind of social organisation. A monogamous system, for instance, such as we live under, can only change their form of expression, but neither their force nor their direction. It may, of course, distort them. But, despite a puritanical assertion that only some vague thing called mother love or maternal instinct can be recognised, there are actually strong inter-family responses between all the members. Many of them are veritable love responses.’

  ‘I take it you are referring to the underlying basis of incest.’

  Dr Pons shook his head, while a frown gathered on his broad brow. ‘Now Michael, listen to me. Let’s not go off on a long tangent about the misconceptions of psychoanalysis. That deals only with perversions; even its norms are perversions, and psychoanalytic theory itself is based upon a perverted outlook. What you are calling incest is not a love response at all, since its final aim is the self-gratification of the so-called lover; but there are love relations between parents and children, between brothers and sisters, and it’s no good whatever giving them names like incest and homosexuality until they have actually become perverted in these ways. That doesn’t happen nearly as often as a lot of psychoanalysts, on the lookout for new clients, would like everyone to believe.’

  The good doctor sighed a somewhat exasperated sigh, and continued. ‘In the present case I deduce that originally we have two brothers in love, as you would say, with their sister. I am not sure about one of the brothers, but certainly the other one, Amos, was in love with her. It was not an especially normal love, either. While I am confident that it never went to the extent of incest, his objective behaviour pattern for years has evidenced an obvious jealousy of her other lovers; fundamentally it was the appetitive response of a strong appetitive personality. It was the continued and more or less exclusive possession of his sister’s affections that has been his goal over the years.’

  ‘But see here,’ Lord interrupted. ‘Aren’t you taking a good deal for granted? You can’t possibly be acquainted with all these details if you have never known the family before.’

  ‘Oh, come now.’ The psychologist shifted his position, as he felt in his pockets for a smoke. ‘Well, here’s part of the history I’ve dug up. See what you make of it . . . The first affair I have heard of was a boy and girl romance out in Reno long ago. Some young man had paid Anne Cutter attentions since their childhood days; finally it came to be generally recognised that she was his “girl.” They went about together continually, were always asked to parties together. That seems to have been the extent of it and, as they were both still very young, there was probably no immediate question of marriage between them. Nevertheless, Amos Cutter’s jealousy of the young man became more and more extreme, until at length it issued into a physical fight. He gave his sister’s boy-friend a thrashing, during the course of which he inflicted serious injuries. The young man very nearly died, and the affair developed into a scandal of large proportions in the still small home town.

  ‘Probably as a result of this scandal the Cutter family, who seem always to have been well-to-do, sent the two brothers and their sister upon the Grand Tour of Europe. They were gone about a year, I gather, and during this time another suitor became attached to Anne. Amos’ new rival was a young medical student whom they met in Germany. This time the situation was even more romantic. Anne and the German youth fell in love at sight – apparently she has rather a preference for Germans. There is no doubt that it was a serious affair, for the young man gave up his studies at some German university and followed her back to America to complete his education here. His persistence was rewarded, too; on the day he received his medical degree they became formally engaged. I am more or less guessing as to what happened next, because you must remember that my informants are two girls who had not yet been born when these events took place – ’

  ‘Considering that, these seem to be very circumstantial accounts,’ hazarded Lord.

  ‘Not at all. I tell you Anne Cutter’s affairs have been of much importance to the rest of the family. There is no doubt that both the young women with us are well informed about her erotic history and the part played in it by their uncle. In the case I am telling you about the engagement was subseq
uently broken off. Fonda claims that she has it from James Cutter that Amos accomplished this by means of an underhanded manoeuvre that was either blackmail or something closely resembling it. She asserts that the fiancé was too honourable to resist the plot, since some sort of reflection would have been cast upon Anne. Isa does not agree with her; she admits that Amos was responsible for the breaking of the engagement, but says he brought it about simply by persuading his sister that the German was the wrong man for her to marry. I don’t know the details, and it is hard to say which version is correct. On one hand Anne is undoubtedly prone to yield to strong and repeated persuasion. On the other hand the next series of events makes me suspect that there may easily have been some dirty work involved in this one.

  ‘The next suitor was successful where the others had failed. He was a brilliant young lawyer named Hardin Luke, and he married Anne Cutter while Amos was abroad taking a post graduate degree in Vienna. He was probably smart enough to realise that the time to marry her was while her brother was away.’

  The detective had looked up at his companion’s mention of the new name. He said, ‘Hardin Luke? That name is familiar, somehow.’

  Pons’ smile was unpleasant. ‘Yes; you will recognise it better in a moment. Luke married Anne Cutter toward the end of 1903. He took her on an extended wedding trip, not returning until the early summer of 1904. They settled in New York, where Amos Cutter was now practising his profession and already beginning to specialise as a surgeon. Within four months of his return with his new bride, Hardin Luke was dead . . . Do you recall anything now?’

  ‘I should say I do,’ Lord answered slowly. ‘I recall plenty. The Luke case is still on our Unsolved file.’

  ‘I happen to know about it, because I recently did a syndicate article on suspicious deaths. I didn’t know the police were still working on it, however. After thirty years I must give you credit for a good deal of tenacity.’

  ‘The coroner’s verdict was an open one,’ the detective reminded his friend. ‘The jury could not agree, but voted by a majority of one against a finding of murder. The Police Commissioner, nevertheless, was entirely convinced that murder had been done, and when he quitted office he left with the Department a long memoir setting forth the evidence as he saw it, and recommending strongly that the case be kept open in the Detective Division in the hope that some day further light might be thrown on it. His reasoning was so convincing that to this day the Luke case is still a current one so far as the Department is concerned. Naturally I am familiar with it to an extent.’

  ‘Then you will remember the main features. Hardin Luke was found in his own dining-room one morning, stabbed by a knife belonging to the dinner service. The incision was a peculiarly expert one for a layman to have made. It was shown that his wife had gone to bed early, that the servants had retired, that he might easily have admitted someone to the house who later had killed him. All this, however, was merely negative; it was not shown that anyone had been admitted, but the chief point which was held conclusive of suicide, in spite of all lack of motive, was the presence of Luke’s own fingerprints on the knife and the absence of anyone else’s. Fingerprints were a new fad at that time, and criminals were unacquainted with the necessity of leaving none behind. Just the same, it occurs to me now quite forcibly that novel police methods, such as fingerprinting, had been first of all developed and utilised in Vienna, from which city Amos Cutter had recently returned.’

  ‘H’mm,’ Lord considered. ‘You are building up a certain poetic justice in his own stabbing.’

  ‘Let me finish; I have one more affair to relate. Anne seems to have been greatly shocked by her husband’s death. So much so that she virtually went into retirement for a number of years. Eventually, of course, she again began taking part in social life. She was still young; she was still very beautiful, and Amos’ troubles began once more.

  ‘On her reappearance she was at once surrounded by a number of eligibles, but none made much progress until her present husband, Mann, appeared. Evidently he was a dashing young man of means who was leading an (adventurous, cosmopolitan life, accepted socially both in Europe and America as a man of position in his own country, Germany. Even then he was acknowledged to have had many affairs with women, some of them of his own station in life, but never yet had he been intrigued to the point of marriage. Here certainly was a romantic figure, and Anne undoubtedly found herself first flattered by his obvious attentions, and then, as she found them sincere, inevitably responding to them. There was a whirlwind courtship of a few weeks, followed by what Mann’s acquaintances never expected would happen. Early one morning he and Anne were married at City Hall after an all-night ball at which he had told Amos Cutter to his face to go to hell. He swept her off her feet and won his cause by offering her what no other woman had ever been able to bring him to offer – marriage.

  ‘For a time there was a definite estrangement between Anne and her brother. Mann, every bit as strong a personality as Amos, refused to allow the latter in the home which he bought in New York, and his influence over his wife was now stronger than her brother’s. Mann, however, had not changed his nature, and his nature was to be attracted by attractive women.

  ‘In this,’ went on Dr Pons quite seriously, ‘I am not disposed to blame him. Any man who does not respond to actively inducive women who captivate him is in one of several conditions: either he is already so strongly captivated by someone else as to have his responses fully taken up, which is so rare a permanent occurrence that it is almost unheard-of, or else he is physically weak or physically out of kilter, or else one part of him, under the external influence of an artificial and quite unnatural “moral code,” is preventing his normal emotional responses. The final possibility is that he merely appears not to respond because he restrains his actual behaviour toward the woman who captivates him, for her own benefit in a society which is thoroughly perverted in respect of social recognition of the love responses, but in which society, nevertheless, it is necessary that the woman live.’

  The psychologist paused and Lord looked over at him. Like most people, he had been paying an interested attention to the subject of love. He said, ‘That’s an unusual notion about restraint. I doubt if many women would appreciate it. It seems to me that any man strongly enough captivated, as you call it, soon becomes incapable of such restraint. The degree of his lack of control, in fact, is used roughly as a measure of his captivation.’

  Pons shook his head, in the mournful manner of a professor sadly disappointed in the performance of one of his brighter pupils. ‘Michael, Michael, will you never learn about these things? Of course women are miseducated to mistake possessiveness for love; sometimes they even welcome the perversion of jealousy. Nevertheless, they have strong emotions which frequently permit them to recognise a love response without understanding it. The greatest love response, of course, is that which is prepared and able to renounce self-gratification for the benefit of the person toward whom it is directed. That is, really, a final and objective test of love; fortunately it seldom becomes necessary. But a so-called love response, so feeble as to yield to the immediate desire for self-satisfaction, and the devil take the beloved, is not strong; it is weak and it is the response of a weak, undeveloped personality.’

  ‘Well, sorry I interrupted you. You were saying that a man who does not respond to captivation is either already captivated or physically on the rocks, or moralistic, or actually responding but not showing it, at any rate to the public.’

  ‘Right. Of these conditions only the first and the last are normal, but Mann’s responses are obviously much too quick and too general for him to be emotionally monogamous; and as to the last condition, it is plain that a carefree adventurer – they are not a very brilliant type – is unlikely to appreciate the necessity of restraint in a world which he has always treated successfully as his private oyster.

  ‘His alternative is to be tastefully promiscuous, and I should consider that for such a person this
was reasonably normal. He is not clever about it, however; he is too straightforward to take the trouble either to conceal or deny his indiscretions. From this it is again apparent that he may injure a woman with whom he has a real love relationship, not because there is anything wrong about his own emotional responses, but simply because he fails to take account of the social forces against her which he himself is quite strong enough to override. In other words, his lack is intelligence rather than emotion.

  ‘It is plain that a man like that will stray, and he did soon begin to stray. Just the same, his is a type very attractive to almost all women; sometimes even its infidelities add to its charm. I think Anne has been in love with him ever since she met him; the birth of Fonda in 1910 shows that there could have been no serious quarrel at that time, despite the fact that Mann had again become notorious for his affairs with other women. Isa was born in 1912 – more evidence to the same effect.

  ‘Then came the war, and he returned to Germany; he was wise enough to take his family with him. He served in the German Air Force, where he won all kinds of decorations and in general lived up to his reputation as a daredevil and hero. Afterwards he returned to New York and resumed his former life. But you will remember that for some time after the war there was a continued anti-German sentiment here, and no doubt Amos began taking advantage of that. Together with Mann’s mode of life, which will never change until he wears out physically, and with his absences on hunting trips, which he now took up for the excitement he found lacking after his military experiences, some very good opportunities were offered to Amos for interference. He capitalised them shrewdly and well. Once he had his sister’s ear again, quarrels were fomented leading to temporary estrangements, for the brother probably estimated quite correctly the effect of a wife’s tearful reproaches upon a man of his brother-in-law’s temperament. Several years ago he succeeded in bringing about a formal separation, and the divorce action has now been started.’