Short Stories

by Agatha Christie

  According to you, it came from without, impressed by some outside source upon your mentality. But nowadays we find that nearly everything comes from within - from our subconscious self.

  "I suggest that by some glance or look this Arab had betrayed himself.

  Your conscious self did not notice or remember, but with your subconscious self it was otherwise. The subconscious never forgets.

  We believe, too, that it can reason and deduce quite independently of the higher or conscious will. Your subconscious self, then, believed that an attempt might be made to assassinate you, and succeeded in forcing its fear upon your conscious realization."

  "That sounds very convincing, I admit," said Dermot, smiling.

  "But not nearly so exciting," pouted Mrs Eversleigh.

  "It is also possible that you may have been subconsciously aware of the hate felt by the man towards you. What in old days used to be called telepathy certainly exists, though the conditions governing it are very little understood."

  "Have there been any other instances?" asked Claire of Dermot.

  "Oh yes, but nothing very pictorial - and I suppose they could all be explained under the heading of coincidence. I refused an invitation to a country house once, for no other reason than the 'red signal.' The place was burned out during the week. By the way, Uncle Alington, where does the subconscious come in there?"

  "I'm afraid it doesn't," said Sir Alington, smiling.

  "But you've got an equally good explanation. Come, now. No need to be tactful with near relatives."

  "Well, then, nephew, I venture to suggest that you refused the invitation for the ordinary reason that you didn't much want to go, and that after the fire, you suggested to yourself that you had had a warning of danger, which explanation you now believe implicitly."

  "It's hopeless," laughed Dermot. "It's heads you win, tails I lose."

  "Never mind, Mr West," cried Violet Eversleigh. "I believe in your Red Signal. Is the time in Mesopotamia the last time you had it?"

  "Yes - until -"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Nothing."

  Dermot sat silent. The words which had nearly left his lips were: "Yes, until tonight." They had come quite unbidden to his lips, voicing a thought which had as yet not been consciously realized, but he was aware at once that they were true. The Red Signal was looming up out of the darkness. Danger! Danger close at hand!

  But why? What conceivable danger could there be here? Here in the house of his friends? At least - well, yes, there was that kind of danger.

  He looked at Claire Trent - her whiteness, her slenderness, the exquisite droop of her golden head. But that danger had been there for some time - it was never likely to get acute. For Jack Trent was his best friend, and more than his best friend, the man who had saved his life in Flanders and been recommended for the V.C. for doing so. A good fellow, Jack, one of the best. Damned bad luck that he should have fallen in love with Jack's wife. He'd get over it some day, he supposed.

  A thing couldn't go on hurting like this forever. One could starve it out that was it, starve it out. It was not as though she would ever guess and if she did guess, there was no danger of her caring. A statue, a beautiful statue, a thing of gold and ivory and pale pink coral... a toy for a king, not a real woman...

  Claire... the very thought of her name, uttered silently, hurt him... He must get over it. He'd cared for women before... "But not like this!" said something. "Not like this." Well, there it was. No danger there heartache, yes, but not danger. Not the danger of the Red Signal. That was for something else.

  He looked round the table and it struck him for the first time that it was rather an unusual little gathering. His uncle, for instance, seldom dined out in this small, informal way. It was not as though the Trents were old friends; until this evening Dermot had not been aware that he knew them at all.

  To be sure, there was an excuse. A rather notorious medium was coming after dinner to give a séance. Sir Alington professed to be mildly interested in spiritualism. Yes, that was an excuse, certainly.

  The word forced itself on his notice. An excuse. Was the séance just an excuse to make the specialist's presence at dinner natural? If so, what was the real object of his being here? A host of details came rushing into Dermot's mind, trifles unnoticed at the time, or, as his uncle would have said, unnoticed by the conscious mind.

  The great physician had looked oddly, very oddly, at Claire more than once. He seemed to be watching her. She was uneasy under his scrutiny. She made little twitching motions with her hands. She was nervous, horribly nervous, and was it, could it be, frightened? Why was she frightened?

  With a jerk he came back to the conversation round the table. Mrs Eversleigh had got the great man talking upon his own subject.

  "My dear lady," he was saying, "what is madness? I can assure you that the more we study the subject, the more difficult we find it to pronounce.

  We all practice a certain amount of self-deception, and when we carry it so far as to believe we are the Czar of Russia, we are shut up or restrained. But there is a long road before we reach that point. At what particular spot on it shall we erect a post and say, 'On this side sanity, on the other madness'? It can't be done, you know. And I will tell you this: if the man suffering from a delusion happened to hold his tongue about it, in all probability we should never be able to distinguish him from a normal individual. The extraordinary sanity of the insane is an interesting subject."

  Sir Alington sipped his wine with appreciation and beamed upon the company.

  "I've always heard they are very cunning," remarked Mrs Eversleigh.

  "Loonies, I mean."

  "Remarkably so. And suppression of one's particular delusion has a disastrous effect very often. All suppressions are dangerous, as psychoanalysis has taught us. The man who has a harmless eccentricity, and can indulge it as such, seldom goes over the borderline. But the man -" he paused - "or woman who is to all appearance perfectly normal, may be in reality a poignant source of danger to the community."

  His gaze traveled gently down the table to Claire and then back again.

  A horrible fear shook Dermot. Was that what he meant? Was that what he was driving at? Impossible, but -

  "And all from suppressing oneself," sighed Mrs Eversleigh. "I quite see that one should be very careful always to - to express one's personality.

  The dangers of the other are frightful."

  "My dear Mrs Eversleigh," expostulated the physician, "you have quite misunderstood me. The cause of the mischief is in the physical matter of the brain - sometimes arising from some outward agency such as a blow; sometimes, alas, congenital."

  "Heredity is so sad," sighed the lady vaguely. "Consumption and all that."

  "Tuberculosis is not hereditary," said Sir Alington drily.

  "Isn't it? I always thought it was. But madness is! How dreadful. What else?"

  "Gout," said Sir Alington, smiling. "And color blindness - the latter is rather interesting. It is transmitted direct to males, but is latent in females. So, while there are many color blind men, for a woman to be color blind, it must have been latent in her mother as well as present in her father - rather an unusual state of things to occur. That is what is called sex limited heredity."

  "How interesting. But madness is not like that, is it?"

  "Madness can be handed down to men or women equally," said the physician gravely.

  Claire rose suddenly, pushing back her chair so abruptly that it overturned and fell to the ground. She was very pale and the nervous motions of her fingers were very apparent.

  "You - you will not be long, will you?" she begged. "Mrs Thompson will be here in a few minutes now."

  "One glass of port, and I will be with you," declared Sir Alington. "To see this wonderful Mrs Thompson's performance is what I have come for, is it not? Ha, ha! Not that I needed any inducement." He bowed.

  Claire gave a faint smile of acknowledgment and passed out of the r
oom with Mrs Eversleigh.

  "Afraid I've been talking shop," remarked the physician as he resumed his seat. "Forgive me, my dear fellow."

  "Not at all," said Trent perfunctorily.

  He looked strained and worried. For the first time Dermot felt an outsider in the company of his friend. Between these two was a secret that even an old friend might not share. And yet the whole thing was fantastic and incredible. What had he to go upon? Nothing but a couple of glances and a woman's nervousness.

  They lingered over their wine but a very short time, and arrived up in the drawing room just as Mrs Thompson was announced.

  The medium was a plump middle-aged woman, atrociously dressed in magenta velvet, with a loud, rather common voice.

  "Hope I'm not late, Mrs Trent," she said cheerily. "You did say nine o'clock, didn't you?"

  "You are quite punctual, Mrs Thompson," said Claire in her sweet, slightly husky voice. "This is our little circle."

  No further introductions were made, as was evidently the custom. The medium swept them all with a shrewd, penetrating eye.

  "I hope we shall get some good results," she remarked briskly. "I can't tell you how I hate it when I go out and I can't give satisfaction, so to speak. It just makes me mad. But I think Shiromako (my Japanese control, you know) will be able to get through all right tonight. I'm feeling ever so fit, and I refused the welsh rarebit, fond of cheese though I am."

  Dermot listened, half-amused, half-disgusted. How prosaic the whole thing was! And yet, was he not judging foolishly? Everything, after all, was natural - the powers claimed by mediums were natural powers, as yet imperfectly understood. A great surgeon might be wary of indigestion on the eve of a delicate operation. Why not Mrs Thompson?

  Chairs were arranged in a circle, lights so that they could conveniently be raised and lowered. Dermot noticed that there was no question of tests, or of Sir Alington satisfying himself as to the conditions of the séance. No, this business of Mrs Thompson was only a blind. Sir Alington was here for quite another purpose. Claire's mother, Dermot remembered, had died abroad. There had been some mystery about her... Hereditary...

  With a jerk he forced his mind back to the surroundings of the moment.

  Everyone took their places, and the lights were turned out, all but a small red-shaded one on a far table.

  For a while nothing was heard but the low, even breathing of the medium. Gradually it grew more and more stertorous. Then, with a suddenness that made Dermot jump, a loud rap came from the far end of the room. It was repeated from the other side. Then a perfect crescendo of raps was heard. They died away, and a sudden high peal of mocking laughter rang through the room.

  Then silence, broken by a voice utterly unlike that of Mrs Thompson, a high-pitched, quaintly inflected voice.

  "I am here, gentlemen," it said. "Yess, I am here. You wish ask me things?"

  "Who are you? Shiromako?"

  "Yess. I Shiromako. I pass over long ago. I work. I very happy."

  Further details of Shiromako's life followed. It was all very flat and uninteresting, and Dermot had heard it often before. Everyone was happy, very happy. Messages were given from vaguely described relatives, the description being so loosely worded as to fit almost any contingency. An elderly lady, the mother of someone present, held the floor for some time, imparting copybook maxims with an air of refreshing novelty hardly borne out by her subject matter.

  "Someone else want to get through now," announced Shiromako. "Got a very important message for one of the gentlemen."

  There was a pause, and then a new voice spoke, prefacing its remarks with an evil demoniacal chuckle.

  "Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! Better not go home. Take my advice."

  "Who are you speaking to?" asked Trent.

  "One of you three. I shouldn't go home if I were him. Danger! Blood! Not very much blood - quite enough. No, don't go home." The voice grew fainter. "Don't go home!"

  It died away completely. Dermot felt his blood tingling. He was convinced that the warning was meant for him. Somehow or other, there was danger abroad tonight.

  There was a sigh from the medium, and then a groan. She was coming round. The lights were turned on, and presently she sat upright, her eyes blinking a little.

  "Go off well, my dear? I hope so."

  "Very good indeed, thank you, Mrs Thompson."

  "Shiromako, I suppose?"

  "Yes, and others."

  Mrs Thompson yawned.

  "I'm dead beat. Absolutely down and out. Does fairly take it out of you.

  Well, I'm glad it was a success. I was a bit afraid something disagreeable might happen. There's a queer feel about this room tonight."

  She glanced over each ample shoulder in turn, and then shrugged them uncomfortably.

  "I don't like it," she said. "Any sudden deaths among any of you people lately?"

  "What do you mean - among us?"

  "Near relatives - dear friends? No? Well, if I wanted to be melodramatic, I'd say that there was death in the air tonight. There, it's only my nonsense. Good-bye, Mrs Trent. I'm glad you've been satisfied."

  Mrs Thompson in her magenta velvet gown went out.

  "I hope you've been interested, Sir Alington," murmured Claire.

  "A most interesting evening, my dear lady. Many thanks for the opportunity. Let me wish you good night. You are all going on to a dance, are you not?"

  "Won't you come with us?"

  "No, no. I make it a rule to be in bed by half-past eleven. Good night.

  Good night, Mrs Eversleigh. Ah, Dermot, I rather want to have a word with you. Can you come with me now? You can rejoin the others at the Grafton Galleries."

  "Certainly, Uncle. I'll meet you there then, Trent."

  Very few words were exchanged between uncle and nephew during the short drive to Harley Street. Sir Alington made a semi-apology for dragging Dermot away, and assured him that he would only detain him a few minutes.

  "Shall I keep the car for you, my boy?" he asked, as they alighted.

  "Oh, don't bother, Uncle. I'll pick up a taxi."

  "Very good. I don't like to keep Charlson up later than I can help. Good night, Charlson. Now where the devil did I put my key?"

  The car glided away as Sir Alington stood on the steps searching his pockets.

  "Must have left it in my other coat," he said at length. "Ring the bell, will you? Johnson is still up, I dare say."

  The imperturbable Johnson did indeed open the door within sixty seconds.

  "Mislaid my key, Johnson," explained Sir Alington. "Bring a couple of whiskies and sodas into the library."

  "Very good, Sir Alington."

  The physician strode on into the library and turned on the lights. He motioned to Dermot to close the door.

  "I won't keep you long, Dermot, but there's just something I want to say to you. Is it my fancy, or have you a certain - tendresse, shall we say, for Mrs Jack Trent?"

  The blood rushed to Dermot's face.

  "Jack Trent is my best friend."

  "Pardon me, but that is hardly answering my question. I dare say that you consider my views on divorce and such matters highly puritanical, but I must remind you that you are my only near relative and my heir."

  "There is no question of a divorce," said Dermot angrily.

  "There certainly is not, for a reason which I understand perhaps better than you do. That particular reason I cannot give you now, but I do wish to warn you. She is not for you."

  The young man faced his uncle's gaze steadily.

  "I do understand - and permit me to say, perhaps better than you think.

  I know the reason for your presence at dinner tonight."

  "Eh?" The physician was clearly startled. "How did you know that?"

  "Call it a guess, sir. I am right, am I not, when I say that you were there in your - professional capacity."

  Sir Alington strode up and down.

  "You are quite right, Dermot. I could not, of course, have told you
so myself, though I am afraid it will soon be common property."

  Dermot's heart contracted.

  "You mean that you have - made up your mind?"

  "Yes, there is insanity in the family - on the mother's side. A sad case - a very sad case."

  "I can't believe it, sir."

  "I dare say not. To the layman there are few if any signs apparent."

  "And to the expert?"

  "The evidence is conclusive. In such a case the patient must be placed under restraint as soon as possible."

  "My God!" breathed Dermot. "But you can't shut anyone up for nothing at all."

  "My dear Dermot! Cases are only placed under restraint when their being at large would result in danger to the community."

  "Danger?"

  "Very grave danger. In all probability a peculiar form of homicidal mania. It was so in the mother's case."

  Dermot turned away with a groan, burying his face in his hands. Claire white and golden Claire!

  "In the circumstances," continued the physician comfortably, "I felt it incumbent on me to warn you."

  "Claire," murmured Dermot. "My poor Claire."

  "Yes, indeed, we must all pity her."

  Suddenly Dermot raised his head.

  "I say I don't believe it. Doctors make mistakes. Everyone knows that.

  And they're always keen on their own specialty."

  "My dear Dermot," cried Sir Alington angrily.

  "I tell you I don't believe it - and anyway, even if it is so, I don't care. I love Claire. If she will come with me, I shall take her away - far away out of the reach of meddling physicians. I shall guard her, care for her, shelter her with my love."

  "You will do nothing of the sort. Are you mad?"

  Dermot laughed scornfully.

  "You would say so."

  "Understand me, Dermot." Sir Alington's face was red with suppressed passion. "If you do this thing - this shameful thing - I shall withdraw the allowance I am now making you, and I shall make a new will leaving all I possess to various hospitals."

  "Do as you please with your damned money," said Dermot in a low voice. "I shall have the woman I love."

  "A woman who -"

  "Say a word against her and, by God, I'll kill you!" cried Dermot.