“That isn’t all: I’d hardly been out of the hospital a month when one day I found myself in Rodenberg’s department store in the act of shoving a piece of Chantilly lace under the jumper of my dress. I can’t explain it. I didn’t realize I was doing it—truly I didn’t—till all of a sudden I seemed to wake up and catch myself in the act of shoplifting. ‘Virginia Bushrod, what are you doing?’ I asked myself, then held the lace out to the sales girl and told her I would take it. I didn’t really want it, had no earthly use for it; but I knew instinctively that if I didn’t buy it I would steal it.”
Abruptly she demanded: “Do you approve of brightly colored nails?”
“Tenez, Mademoiselle, that depends upon the time and place and personality of the wearer,” he responded with a smile.
“That’s it, the personality,” she answered. “Bright carmine nails may be all right for some; they’re not becoming to my type. Yet I’ve had an urge, almost in irresistible desire, from time to time to have my nails dyed scarlet. Last week I stopped in Madame Toussaint’s for a manicure and pedicure. When I got home I found the nails of both my hands and feet were varnished brilliant red. I never use a deeper shade than rose, and was horrified to find my nails all daubed that way; yet, somehow, there was a feeling of secret elation, too. I called the salon and asked for Héloise, who’d done my nails, and she said, ‘I thought it strange when you insisted on that vivid shade of red, Miss Bushrod. I didn’t like to put it on, but you declared you wanted it.’
“Perhaps I did; but I don’t remember anything about it.”
De Grandin eyed her thoughtfully a moment; then:
“You have spoken of an accident you had, Mademoiselle. Tell me of it, if you please.”
“It was a little more than a year ago,” she answered. “I’d been over to the country club by Morristown, and was hurrying back to keep a date with Phil when my car blew out a tire. At least, I think that’s what happened. I remember a sharp, crackling pop, like the discharge of a small rifle, and next instant the roadster fairly somersaulted from the road. I saw the earth rush up at me; then”—she spread her shapely hands in a gesture of finality—“there I was, pinned beneath the wreckage, with both hands crushed to jelly.”
“Yet you recovered wholly, thanks to Doctor Augensburg, I understand?”
“Yes, it wasn’t till every surgeon we had seen had said he’d have to amputate that Father called in Doctor Augensburg, and he proved they all were wrong. I was in the hospital two months, most of the time completely or partly unconscious from drugs, but”—her delicate, long-fingered hands spread once again with graceful eloquence—“here I am, and I’m not the helpless cripple they all said I’d be.”
“Not physically, at any rate,” de Grandin murmured softly; then, aloud:
“Mademoiselle, take off your bracelets!” he commanded sharply.
Had he hurled an insult in her face, the girl could not have looked more shocked. Surprise, anger, sudden fear showed in her countenance as she repeated: “Take—off—”
“Précisément,” the little Frenchman answered almost harshly. “Take them off, tout promptement. I have the intuition; what you call the hunch.”
Slowly, reluctantly, as though she were disrobing in the presence of a stranger, Miss Bushrod snapped the clasps of the wide bands of gold which spanned her slender wrists. A line of untanned skin, standing out in contrast to her sun-kissed arms, encircled each slim wrist, testifying that the bracelets had been worn on beach and tennis court, as well as in her leisure moments, but whiter still, livid, eldritch as the mocking grin of broken teeth within the gaping mouth-hole of a skull, there ran around each wrist a ring of cicatrice an inch or so above the styloid process’ protuberance. Running up and down a half an inch or so from the encircling band of white were vertical scar-lines, interweaving, overlapping, as though the flesh had once been cut apart, then sewn together in a dove-tailed jointure.
Involuntarily I shrank from looking on the girl’s deformity, but de Grandin scrutinized it closely. At length:
“Mademoiselle, please believe I do not act from idle curiosity,” he begged, “but I must use the fluoroscope in my examination. Will you come with me?”
He led her to the surgery, and a moment later we could hear the crackling of the Crookes’ tube as he turned the X-ray on.
MISS BUSHROD’S BRACELETS WERE replaced when they returned some fifteen minutes later, and de Grandin wore a strangely puzzled look. His lips were pursed, as though he were about to whistle, and his eyes were blazing with the hard, cold light they showed when he was on a man-hunt.
“Now, my friends,” he told the lovers as he glanced at them in turn, “I have seen enough to make me think that what this lady says is no mere idle vagary. These strange influences she feels, these surprising lapses from normal, they do not mean she suffers from a dual personality, at least as the term is generally used. But unless I am more mistaken than I think, we are confronted by a situation so bizarre that just to outline it would cast a doubt upon our sanity. Alors, we must build our case up from the ground.
“Tell me,” he shot the question at young Connor, “was there anything unusual—anything at all, no matter how trivial, which occurred to Mademoiselle Bushrod a month—two months—before the accident which crushed her hands?”
The young man knit his brow in concentration. “No-o,” he replied at length. “I can’t remember anything.”
“No altercation, no unpleasantness which might have led to vengeful thoughts, perhaps?” the Frenchman prompted.
“Why, now you speak of it,” young Connor answered with a grin, “I did have a run-in with a chap at Coney Island.”
“Ah? Describe it, if you please.”
“It really wasn’t anything. Ginnie and I had gone down to the Island for a spree. We think the summer’s not complete without at least one day at Coney—shooting the chutes, riding the steeplechase and roller coasters, then taking in the side shows. This afternoon we’d just about completed the rounds when we noticed a new side show with a Professor Mysterioso or Mefisto, or something of the sort, listed as the chief attraction. He was a hypnotist.”
“Ah?” de Grandin murmured softly, “and—”
“The professor was just beginning his act when we went in. He was extraordinarily good, too. Uncannily good, I thought. All dressed in red tights, like Mefistofeles, he was, and his partner—‘subject’ you call it, don’t you?—was a girl dressed in a white gown with a blond wig, simulating Marguerite, you know. He did the darndest things with her—put her in a trance and made her lie stretched between two chairs, with neck on one and heels on the other, no support beneath her body, while men stood on her; told her to rise, rose up three feet in the air, as drawn by invisible wires; finally, he took half a dozen long, sharp knitting-needles and thrust them through her hands, her forearms, even through her cheeks. Then he withdrew them and invited us to search her for signs of scars. It was morbid, I suppose, but we looked, and there wasn’t the faintest trace of wounds where he had pierced her with the needles, nor any sign of blood.
“Then he called for volunteers to come up and be hypnotized, and when no one answered, he came down among the audience. ‘You, Madame?’ he asked Ginnie, stopping in front of her and grinning in her face.
“When she refused he persisted; told her that it wouldn’t hurt, and all that sort of thing; finally began glaring into her eyes and making passes before her.
“That was a little bit too much. I let him have it.”
“Bravo!” de Grandin murmured softly. “And then?”
“I expected he’d come back at me, for he picked himself up and came across the floor with his shoulders hunched in a sort of boxer’s crouch, but when he almost reached me he stopped short, raised his hands above his head and muttered something indistinctly. He wasn’t swearing, at least not in English, but I felt that he was calling down a curse on us. I got Virginia out before we had more trouble with him.”
“And that wa
s all?” de Grandin asked.
“That was all.”
“Parbleu, my friend, I think it is enough to be significant.” Then, abruptly: “This feminine assistant. Did you notice her?”
“Not particularly. She had a pretty, common sort of face, and long, slim graceful hands with very brightly painted nails.”
De Grandin pinched his pointed chin between a thoughtful thumb and finger. “Where did Doctor Augensburg repair your injured hands, Mademoiselle?” he asked.
“At the Ellis Sanitarium, out by Hackensack,” she answered. “I was in Mercy Hospital at first, but the staff and Doctor Augensburg had some misunderstanding, so he took me out to Ellis Clinic for the operation.
The little Frenchman smiled benignly on the visitors. “I can understand your self-concern, Mademoiselle,” he told Miss Bushrod. “This feeling of otherhood, this impression that a trespasser-in-possession is inside of you, displacing your personality, making you do things you do not wish to do, is disconcerting, but it is not cause for great alarm. You were greatly hurt, you underwent a trying operation. Those things shock the nervous system. I have seen other instances of it. In the war I saw men make what seemed complete recovery, only to give way to strange irregularities months afterward. Eventually they regained normality; so should you, within, let us say”—he paused as though to make a mental calculation—“within a month or so.”
“You really think so, Doctor?” she asked, pathos looking from her amber eyes.
“But yes, I am all confident of it.”
“NAME OF A MOST unpleasant small blue devil!” he swore as our visitors’ footsteps faded on the cement walk outside. “I must make good my promise to her, but how—death of a dyspeptic hippopotamus!—how?”
“What?” I demanded.
“You know how dreams reflect the outside world in symbolic images. By example, you have kicked the covers off the bed, you are cold. But you are, still asleep. How does the dream convert the true facts into images? By making you to think that you are in the Arctic and a polar storm is raging, or, perhaps, that you have fallen in the river, and are chilled by the cold water. So it was with Mademoiselle Bushrod. She dreams she stands upon a mountain top, that is when she leaves her chamber. She dreams that she descends the mountain; that is when she walks downstairs. She hears a tune, of course she does, her hands, those hands which can not play a single note when she is waking, produce it. She dreams she re-ascends the mountain—climbs the stairs. Ha, then she sees before her traducer, sleeping, helpless. She reaches forth her hands, and—
“What then, my friend? Are we to trust the symbolism of the dream still farther?”
“But,” I began, and—
“But be damned and stewed in hell eternally!” he cut in. “Attendez-moi: Those hands, those lovely, graceful hands of hers, are not her own!”
“Eh?” I shot back. “Not—good Lord, man, you’re raving! What d’ye mean?”
“Precisely what I say,” he answered in a level, toneless voice. “Those hands were grafted on her wrists, as the rose is grafted on the dogwood tree. Her radii and ulnæ have been sawn across transversely; then other bones, processing with the wrist-joints of a pair of hands, were firmly fastened on by silver plates and rivets, the flexor muscles spliced with silver wire, the arteries and veins and nerves attached with an uncanny skill. It is bizarre, incredible, impossible; but it is so. I saw it with my own two eyes when I examined her beneath the fluoroscope.”
HE LEFT THE HOUSE directly after breakfast the next morning, and did not reappear till dinner had been waiting half an hour.
“Sacré nom,” he greeted me across his cocktail glass, “what a day I had, my friend! I have been busy as a flea upon a dog, but what I have accomplished! Parbleu, he is a clever fellow, this de Grandin!
“I took down copious mental notes while Mademoiselle Bushrod talked last night, and so this morning I set out for Coney Island. Grand Dieu des rats, what a place!
“From one small show-place to another I progressed, and in between times I engaged in conversation with the hangers-on. At last I found a prize, a jewel, a paragon. He rejoices in the name of Snead—Bill Snead, to give him his full title—and when he is not occupied with drinking he proclaims the virtues of a small display of freaks. Eh bien, by the expenditure of a small amount of money for food, and something more for drink, I learned from him enough to put me on the trail I sought.
“Professor Mysterioso de Diablo was a hypnotist of no mean parts, I learned. He had ‘played big time’ for years, but by a most unfortunate combination of events he was sent to prison in the State of Michigan, The lady’s husband secured a divorce, Monsieur le Professeur a rigidly enforced vacation from the stage.
“After that his popularity declined until finally he was forced to show his art at Coney Island side shows. He was a most unpleasant person, I was told, principally noted for the way he let his fancies for the fair sex wander. This caused his partner much annoyance, and she often reproached him bitterly and publicly.
“Now, attend me carefully. It is of this partner I would speak particularly. Her name was Agnes Fagan. She was born to the theatrical profession, for her father, Michael Fagan, had been a thrower-out of undesired patrons in a burlesque theater when he was not appearing as a strong man on the stage or lying deplorably drunk in bed. The daughter was ‘educated something elegant,’ my informant told me. She was especially adept at the piano, and for a time entertained ambitions to perform in concert work. However, she inherited one talent, if no other, from her estimable parent: she was astonishingly strong. Monsieur Snead had often seen her amuse her intimates by bending tableware in knots, to the great annoyance of the restaurant proprietor where she happened to perform. She could, he told me solemnly, take a heavy table fork and twist it in a corkscrew.
“Eh bien, the lure of the footlights was stronger than her love of music, it appears, for we next behold her as the strong woman in an acrobatic troupe. Perhaps it was another heritage from her many-sided sire, perhaps it was her own idea; at any rate, one day while playing in the city of Detroit, she appropriated certain merchandise without the formality of paying for it. Two police officers were seriously injured in the subsequent proceedings, but eventually she went to prison, was released at the same time that the professor received liberty, and became his partner, the subject of his hypnotism during his performances, and, according to the evil-minded Monsieur Snead, his mistress, as well.
“She possessed four major vanities: her musical ability, her skill at billiards, her strong, white, even teeth and the really unusual beauty of her hands. She was wont to show her strength on all occasions. Her dental vanity led her to suffer the discomfort of having a sound tooth drilled, gold-filled and set with a small diamond. She spent hours in the care of her extremities, and often bought a manicure when it was a choice of pampering her vanity or going without food.
“Now listen carefully, my friend: About a year ago she had a quarrel with her partner, the professor. I recite the facts as Monsieur Snead related them to me. It seems that the professor let his errant fancies wander, and was wont to invite ladies from the audience to join him in his acts. Usually he succeeded, for he had a way with women, Monsieur Snead assured me. But eventually he met rebuff. He also met the fist of the young lady’s escort. He was, to use your quaint American expression, ‘knocked for a row of ash-cans’ by the gentleman.
“La Fagan chided him in no uncertain terms. They had a fearful fight in which she would have been the victor, had he not resorted to hypnotism for defense. ‘She wuz about to tear him into little bits, when he put ’is hand up and said, “Rigid”,’ Monsieur Snead related. ‘An’ there she was, stiff as a frozen statoo, wid ’er hand up in th’ air, an’ her fist all doubled up, not able to so much as bat a eye. She stood that way about a hour, I expect; then suddenly she fell down flat, and slept like nobody’s business. I reckon th’ professor gave her th’ sleepin’ order from wherever he had beat it to. He had got so used to ord
erin’ her about that he could control her at a distance ‘most as well as when he looked into her eyes.’
“Thereafter he was often absent from the show where he performed. Eventually he quit it altogether, and within a month his strong and pretty-handed partner vanished. Like pouf! she was suddenly nowhere at all.
“By the time the estimable Monsieur Snead had finished telling me these things he could impart no further information. He was, as I have heard it described, ‘stewed like a dish of prunes,’ for all the while he talked I kept his tongue well oiled with whisky. Accordingly I bid him farewell and pushed my research elsewhere. I searched the files of the journals diligently, endeavoring to find some clue to the vanishment of Mademoiselle Fagan. Cordieu, I think I found it! Read this, if you will be so good.”
Adjusting my pince-nez I scanned the clipping which he handed me:
GIRL FALLS UNCONSCIOUS WITH
STRANGE MALADY
Collapses on Roadway Near Hackensack—
Absence of Disease Symptoms
Puzzles Doctors
Hackensack, N.J., Sept. 17—Police and doctors today are endeavoring to solve the mystery of the identity and illness of an attractive young woman who collapsed on the roadway near here shortly after noon today, and has lain unconscious in the Ellis Clinic ever since.
She is described as about 30 years old, five feet two inches tall, and with fair complexion and red hair. Her hands and feet showed evidences of unusual care, and both finger- and toe-nails were dyed a brilliant scarlet. In her upper left eye-tooth was a small diamond set in a gold inlay.
She wore a ring with an oval setting of green stone, gold earrings in her pierced ears, and an imitation pearl necklace. Her costume consisted of a blue and white polka-dot dress, white fabric gloves, a black sailor hat with a small feather, and black patent leather pumps. She wore no stockings.
Alec Carter and James Heilmann, proprietors of an antique shop facing on the road, saw the young woman walking slowly toward Hackensack, staggering slightly from side to side. She fell in the roadway across from their store, and when they reached her she was unconscious. Failing to revive her by ordinary first aid methods, they placed her in an automobile and took her to the Ellis Clinic, which was the nearest point where medical aid could be secured.
A Rival from the Grave Page 28