Reply Paid

by H. F. Heard

  “By the way,” I added, “he’s already paid us both handsomely—capital and interest—indeed, one could say damages for our past neglected services. And he’s prepared to come cash in hand—which is better than ‘cap in hand’—for further help.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of the pay,” her voice replied, and I could agree that she certainly was not mercenary. “I was thinking whether I could produce.”

  “Oh, you can; you’ve done it already,” I said encouragingly. She had; and I felt sure, if I gave her the assurance she’d do it again and we’d get the whole tangle clear and beat old Mycroft at his own game, and perhaps, who knows, cash out even more handsomely than our present payment promised.

  “No, it’s not so simple as that. Don’t you see, your man interests me—my surface, Miss Brown self—too much. That interferes. As soon as I try to make any sense of what comes through, or, if it has come in trance, then even if I find I’m feeling a recurrent interest or faint curiosity about what may have come through, I’m just fouling my own deep-sea fishing lines.”

  All I could do was to answer, “Do try; I’m sure you can get it again.”

  “All right,” she said hesitatingly. We settled for three the next afternoon and I went to tell Intil.

  “It’s touch and go,” I said. “Naturally, sensitives don’t like being treated as you have treated Miss Brown.”

  He took my rebuke properly enough, only anxious to know whether I’d any hope for him.

  “But I think I have persuaded her to give you another chance.” He brightened like a child, and I felt quite the wise elder and not at all unfriendly as I added, “Of course, I must impress upon you that nothing can be guaranteed. On the other hand—” I was pleased to see how judicial I was, and it shot through my mind that it would do Mr. Mycroft no harm to see me carrying out so successfully this role. “On the other hand, I am equally convinced, and I speak with no little experience, that it is highly improbable, most highly, that you will find any other combination”—I smiled at my choice of word—“which can hope to unlock your riddle.” He nodded. “I would then further impress on you to be here precisely at two forty-five P.M. tomorrow and to bring with you the necessary remuneration.”

  He rose quickly. “I’ll be here,” he said. “I’ll be here and you’ll have nothing to complain of this time.” At the door he turned round. “You see, you just see, you get the clue clear and I promise you you’ll never have another word, not another word to say again against Thomas Intil.”

  The last words were said with such conviction—how shall I put it?—with such unnecessary conviction, that I remained looking at the door after he had gone through it and it had snapped sharply behind him. I felt, in a way, quite sure I had made an impression, felt that he wasn’t going to try to shake us off again. He evidently had realized that we were quite essential to him. And then some other line of thought, some further hunch was trying to rise up into my mind. I couldn’t think he could be dangerous to us here in a big city, even if he wished—which I didn’t believe he did; why should he? After all, Mr. Mycroft’s mind ran on murders and mysteries. I knew, now professionally, that many people like their little bit of mystification who’d never dream of violence, far less murder.

  All that about old Sanderson was really complete supposition. We really didn’t know even that anyone had shot him, that the withered thing we had seen had really been shot or really been Sanderson. I ran over these points again in my mind and the more I thought of it the more likely it seemed that if a hardy field prospector had met poor little Intil plodding after him in his new stiff cactus boots in that hell of a heat it would have been Intil who would have become pemmican, not Sanderson or any pioneer. “And the clue Mr. Mycroft had found in Sandersons house?” my mind asked me in this final check-up. That, I had to own, was far queerer than coincidence. But even here the simpler hypothesis—the anchor of all scientific deduction—was that both Sanderson and Intil could have come upon some record of a cache in the desert—they’ve often been found and traced before—some deposit left by an old miner, or even a Spaniard’s hoard. All the talk about the new prospecting which Intil had shot at me, that, I now concluded, was simply to save his final disclosure for himself. He had to get our help and so put us off with this fantasy about a new mineralogy. That was it: Sanderson, Intil, and maybe the desiccated unknown (who knows?) were all on a common track and they had all, or at least two of them, kept their clue, naturally, to themselves. Neither, I concluded, had found his objective, and probably, too, neither knew precisely what or where it was. Sanderson was at present out of the running. Mr. Mycroft owned that he was stumped by the clue he had furnished himself with from that source. And how funny it would be if, while he was fumbling at it, Sanderson actually came back! A nice point in morality for my magisterial Mycroft: “Go ahead; use someone else’s information to lay hands on someone else’s property—or own you’ve been housebreaking and have purloined the owner’s title deeds or something near enough to that to make no moral difference.”

  This reverie ran rapidly through my head, and, I’m glad to say, cleared the last misgivings out of it. At the very least, I was going to make a handsome fee; I felt somehow fairly certain that I was going, also, with Miss Brown’s help, to make another spectacular interpretation—I suppose something of the feeling which Joseph must have had when Pharaoh asked him about his cattle dream, or Daniel when he went in to guess the writing on the wall.

  I turned back to my secretary. “A nice little fellow that,” I volunteered. My secretary is one of those competent girls who disguise hard, technical efficiency under a deeply laid bloom of glamour. She replied by tapping with her dictation pencil on her “smile-proof” teeth. It was her dot-and-dash signal for “I do not agree.”

  “He was upset last time,” I continued, for I was wanting to have my revised opinion confirmed.

  “Um … that sort’s better when upset.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I saw him while you were phoning and when you came back. He can switch. He just didn’t think from my appearance I was worth keeping up appearances in front of.”

  That is hardly the kind of English sentence I like. Miss Delamere’s (I have already mentioned my secretary’s unconvincing name) handling of prepositions was as loose, out of verbal carelessness, as her appearance was of deliberate intention. But in both cases—of ear and of eye—she knew quite well the effect she wanted to make.

  “And your verdict?”

  “He hasn’t become any fonder of you during the absence.”

  I felt that this conversation might well destroy all my new initiative if I let it go on.

  “That’s interesting.” I always close by finding Miss Delamere’s last remark interesting. It generally is—quite enough to let the question rest and to let her know that I value and shall turn over her opinion.

  “And here are those inquiries you ought to settle today,” she remarked, knowing the signal and raising from her “To be answered” basket half a dozen letters. “I’ve already answered for you in the polite negative the invitation to the A.B.C.—the Anagram-Bacon Club; two requests to cast babies’ horoscopes; an offer of partnership with a dowser doctor; and a request to speak to the Five Featured Fundamentalists.”

  We settled down to a good afternoon’s work and when it was through Mr. Intil had taken his proper place—a client among clients, all a little odd, rather interesting, fairly remunerative.

  Chapter VI

  The next morning’s work was also equally perspective-giving. So by two-thirty I was feeling no more trepidation about the oncoming appointment than I would at any routine visit of a normal client. Nor, when he entered, did Intil seem in any way abnormal. Even Miss Delamere’s searching look at his back, as she left him with me, only amused me with the reflection that a woman bears a grudge against any man who is absent-minded enough not to notice her.

  “Will you,” I said, “if you have not done so, put your clue or
code or whatever it is, in an opaque envelope?”

  He hadn’t, and I handed him one from my desk. His hand, I noticed, shook as he inserted the thin single slip of paper into the envelope. Then he raised it to his lips to seal it, but paused, looked over the top of it at me, and then, evidently forgetting that he hadn’t sealed it, slipped it into his pocket. It didn’t matter, so long as he kept it there. Miss Brown’s surface mind would catch no clue with which to confuse her deeper consciousness.

  “I’ve brought the cash,” he volunteered.

  “Very well; you can make the payment to Miss Brown at the conclusion of the sitting and I will, at the same time, pay over to her the balance of the joint fee for the last.”

  “Can we start now?” he queried.

  “We have plenty of time,” I answered, determined to keep the initiative. “I have a few things to collect. You should be provided with a firm pad of paper and a pencil so as to take adequate notes and I will have another.” I handed him these items. “If transmission is good, the speed may at times be considerable and much valuable information may be lost. It is often difficult to remember quite outstanding information which comes with much, the relevance of which, at the moment, is to seek.”

  I felt that I was preserving exactly the tone which I wished to impress and that my hearer was, at the least, not unimpressed. In the outer office I paused to give Miss Delamere a number of small instructions and reminders about things which she had pretty certainly not forgotten. She made, though, small pencil notes and I closed the scene by asking her not to wait should I be detained beyond five. It was a thoroughly sound exit. Why couldn’t I have walked straight out? To that Intil-like question I can only answer that I suppose deep in my mind I wanted for some unknown reason the reassurance that I was directing the entire incident in all its details and at precisely the pace I chose. Then, at any moment, should I wish, I could terminate the proceedings.

  It was seventeen minutes to three, exactly the time I had calculated that it would take us to get there, when I stood on Miss Brown’s doorstep. I glanced at my watch and, seeing the hands, into my mind ran that curious beginning of the clue, “When the flyer … stretches his wing to the left.” Well, I reflected, in another swing of his wing we may know more about what that date was meant to specify; we shall perhaps have read the entire message.

  I looked up; Miss Brown was standing in the doorway. She had already stoked up the parlor. It was almost like a tropical hot-house with a big fire burning and the shades and curtains drawn. The fire and the light which came through the shrouded windows made it easy enough to pick our ways to the two chairs she pointed toward. Then, without a word, she took her seat in a chair close to the fire, threw a handkerchief over her face as before, and one saw her form, quite relaxed, sink back into the cushions. For two minutes the breathing grew deeper and quieter; then came those odd little twitches and a whimpering murmur like a dog in its sleep. The breathing became normal again. The far-too-bright voice of the little infantile “control” caroled “Good morning.” It was, of course, well on in the afternoon. But one must be amiable if one is going to be informed.

  “Good morning,” I said, with avuncular benevolence. “Good morning.” I looked across to Intil who was scribbling away, his pad slanted to get the light from the fire.

  “Say ‘Good morning,’” I whispered. He looked up.

  “Oh, he needn’t if he doesn’t want to,” said the spook-child-prodigy. “But you’re nice and friendly, Mr. Sydney. I like you.”

  I didn’t at all want these blarneying compliments and was familiar enough with this sort of exploration to know that if once the silly little “guide” wandered off on my side line of nursery sentiment, we should never get any results.

  “I’ve brought such an interesting man,” I began.

  “Oh, I don’t like him. I like you. He’s that rude stranger. We’re friends, you and I, aren’t we?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Of course.”

  I wondered what the mischief could be … the splinter of intelligence which can actually give a confused but copious mass of otherwise unknown information and yet not know that I doubted even whether it was a person and, if it was, disliked it and its mawkishness intensely. Fortunately, at that point Intil realized what was required of him—that he must blow this odd spark until it shone in the direction in which he needed to see. And he came up to scratch surprisingly.

  “I’m so sorry. Please forgive me, little lady,” he started off in a voice as copiously sentimental as the “control’s.” “I was so busy getting ready, so as not to waste your time if you were able to come along and help us, that I just didn’t realize that you had come.”

  “That was very stupid of you, Mr. Instill. There’s a word like your name but I’m too young to know clever words but it’s like Instill, yes, yes, they say to me it is ‘instill’—you should instill—that’s it—into your mind more readiness. It’s rude not to answer when someone says good morning.”

  This dreadful patter—and now it was started it might run on, a series of self-generating echoes!

  But Intil again surprised me with his readiness. “You’re right, little lady; you’re plumb right, and I wish you a very good morning. I offer you also my apologies and I thank you heartily for turning up.”

  “That’s better,” said the childish martinet.

  “Thank you,” Intil answered immediately, with that effusiveness which evidently warms the cockles of the subconscious. “For that was such a wonderful message you brought last time—”

  “What was it about?” said the voice vaguely.

  “All about the queer birdie sitting in his pretty round cage.”

  “Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes, the round cage with the dots on it and why the birdie could sit in the middle when there wasn’t a perch for it to sit on at all!”

  “That’s it, that’s it, little lady. Well, you knew all about the cage and the birdie.”

  “Did I?” the voice hesitated.

  “Oh, yes, you did. You’re so cute and you made all so plain to us. And you know, of course, it’s just the beginning of a wonderful fairy story—a real fairy story. You see the cage now, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” rather slowly. “Oh, yes. He’s still stretching his wing.”

  “Right you are! And then, beyond his cage, the further side of it as you might say, there’s something else, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, but I can’t see it clear at all. It’s all fuzzy.”

  “Could it be an old hobo in a brown robe?”

  “What you saying, Mr. Insul? No, you’re all wrong. Old man in long frock! No, that’s not it. No, it’s not a thing at all a hobo’d have. It’s a thing kings have—a sort of crown.”

  “A crown, little lady? That’s wonderful.”

  “’Tisn’t very wonderful”—said with a sort of finger-in-the-mouth speculativeness. “Crowns should be ever so bright. This isn’t; but it is a circle with prongs sticking up all round. Now, what would you call that, if you wouldn’t call it a crown, Mr. Sydney?”

  My sudden summons into conclave almost caught me as much off guard as the initial “good morning” had caught Intil. “I think you must be right,” I gagged. “It does sound like a crown, doesn’t it?”

  “It doesn’t sound,” snapped back our little precious. “It looks. I’ve told you what I see. Mr. Intil, Mr. Sydney is just not trying. What do you think it can be?”

  I didn’t demur at the transfer of affection, and sat back content to let Intil spend his breath blowing on the queer little smoldering spark of “vision.”

  “Well, it’s a circle anyway,” he ventured.

  “Yes,” with great child’s play of judiciousness and of viewing the subject from every angle. “Yes, it’s a circle, it is that, you are right, Mr. Instil. You think faster than poor Mr. Sydney. He’s slow and doesn’t want to attend—perhaps he’s getting old.”

  Fortunately, Intil was as unwilling as myself to seek through the
mouth of this suckling further revelations as to my age and “actuarial expectation” of life.

  “Yet,” he tactfully steered back the wandering attention to its first interest and vision, “yet the circle has prongs.”

  “Ah, that’s what I said. That’s why I said it was like a crown. But a dull, gray crown! They’re gold always.”

  “What’s near the crown?” That was really a neat cast by Intil.

  For at once the asinine little angel said, “Why, there’s another prong! They all stand round like candles round a birthday cake. And he stands all by himself.”

  “I see, he stands looking on?” prompted Intil.

  “He stands in the way. Oh, I see now, it’s all level and bright that way and he stands right up in the way of it. Leastways, the bright path is just swinging on to him. You see, don’t you, Mr. Intil?”

  “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” he lied encouragingly. I was sure he was just as lost as I. “And the prong that stands outside is now just getting into the way between the circle and the bright?”

  “That’s it, Mr. Intil, that’s it, and now he’s right in the way … Ooh, something flashes … Ooh!” The medium broke into a regular yelp as though her toe had been stamped on. We all started. She was whimpering now.

  “We’ll have to stop if she gets miserable or frightened. That’s a common ‘fade-out,’” I whispered to Intil.

  “I’ll try now with the next clause,” he shot back. “Little lady, that was fine. You’ve gotten it, there isn’t a doubt, and you’ll get the rest. Do you see anything more?”

  The whimpering stopped. “That was getting horrid,” said the mincing missy voice.

  “Yes,” agreed Intil. “But the next will be fun. If I say slowly to you, ‘AP. 20111318,’ don’t you see something?”

  “Stop,” she squealed. “You mustn’t mix it all up. I’ve got to tell you what I first see and then what comes after. Now first, just the first part, mind you, it’s ever so big and, oh, it goes up.” Miss Brown’s hands rose with a waggling wave like a baby trying to catch an air-balloon. “And everything, every teeny thing is in front of it. That is all. It’s just that.”