“And always when they’re crossing a clothes-line?” This in Lupin’s most sarcastic vein.
“Naturally,” said Holmes, with a taciturnine frown. “The footprint clearly denotes a lady of wealth and fashion, somewhat short of stature, and weighing about one hundred and sixty. She was of an animated nature—”
“Suspended animation,” put in Luther Trant,†† wittily, and Scientific Sprague‡‡ added, “Like the Coffin of Damocles, or whoever it was.”
But Holmes frowned on their light-headedness.
“We must find out what it all means,” he said in his gloomiest way. “I have a tracing of the footprint.”
“I wonder if my seismospygmograph would work on it,” mused Trant.
“I am the Prince of Footprints,” declared Lecoq, pompously. “I will solve the mystery.”
“Do your best, all of you,” said their illustrious president. “I fear you can do little; these things are unintelligible to the unintelligent. But study on it, and meet here again one week from tonight, with your answers neatly typewritten on one side of the paper.”
The Infallible Detectives started off, each affecting a jaunty sanguineness of demeanor, which did not in the least impress their president, who was used to sanguinary impressions.
They spent their allotted seven days in the study of the problem; and a lot of the seven nights, too, for they wanted to delve into the baffling secret by sun or candlelight, as dear Mrs. Browning so poetically puts it.
And when the week had fled, the Infallibles again gathered in the Fakir Street sanctum, each face wearing the smug smirk and smile of one who had quested a successful quest and was about to accept his just reward.
“And now,” said President Holmes, “as nothing can be hid from the Infallible Detectives, I assume we have all discovered why the lady hung from the clothes-line above that deep and dangerous chasm of a tenement courtyard.”
“We have,” replied his colleagues, in varying tones of pride, conceit, and mock modesty.
“I cannot think,” went on the hawk-like voice, “that you have, any of you, stumbled upon the real solution of the mystery; but I will listen to your amateur attempts.”
“As the oldest member of our organization, I will tell my solution first,” said Vidocq, calmly. “I have not been able to find the lady, but I am convinced that she was merely an expert trapezist or tight-rope walker, practising a new trick to amaze her Coney Island audiences.”
“Nonsense!” cried Holmes. “In that case the lady would have worn tights or fleshings. We are told she was in full evening dress of the smartest set.”
Arsène Lupin spoke next.
“It’s too easy,” he said boredly; “she was a typist or stenographer who had been annoyed by attentions from her employer, and was trying to escape from the brute.”
“Again I call your attention to her costume,” said Holmes, with a look of intolerance on his finely cold-chiseled face.
“That’s all right,” returned Lupin, easily. “Those girls dress every old way! I’ve seen ’em. They don’t think anything of evening clothes at their work.”
“Humph!” said the Thinking Machine, and the others all agreed with him.
“Next,” said Holmes, sternly.
“I’m next,” said Lecoq. “I submit that the lady escaped from a nearby lunatic asylum. She had the illusion that she was an old overcoat and the moths had got at her. So of course she hung herself on the clothes-line. This theory of lunacy also accounts for the fact that the lady’s hair was down—like Ophelia’s, you know.”
“It would have been easier for her to swallow a few good moth balls,” said Holmes, looking at Lecoq in stormy silence. “Mr. Gryce,§§ you are an experienced deducer; what did you conclude?”
Mr. Gryce glued his eyes to his right boot toe, after his celebrated habit. “I make out she was a-slumming. You know, all the best ladies are keen about it. And I feel that she belonged to the Cult for the Betterment of Clothes-lines. She was by way of being a tester. She had to go across them hand over hand, and if they bore her weight, they were passed by the censor.”
“And if they didn’t?”
“Apparently that predicament had not occurred at the time of our problem, and so cannot be considered.”
“I think Gryce is right about the slumming,” remarked Luther Trant, “but the reason for the lady hanging from the clothes-line is the imperative necessity she felt for a thorough airing, after her tenemental visitations; there is a certain tenement scent, if I may express it, that requires ozone in quantities.”
“You’re too material,” said the Thinking Machine, with a faraway look in his weak, blue eyes. “This lady was a disciple of New Thought. She had to go into the silence, or concentrate, or whatever they call it. And they always choose strange places for these thinking spells. They have to have solitude, and, as I understand it, the clothes-line was not crowded?”
Rouletabille¶¶ laughed right out.
“You’re way off, Thinky,” he said. “What ailed that dame was just that she wanted to reduce. I’ve read about it in the women’s journals. They all want to reduce. They take all sorts of crazy exercises, and this crossing clothes-lines hand over hand is the latest. I’ll bet it took off twenty of those avoirdupois with which old Sherly credited her.”
“Pish and a few tushes!” remarked Raffles, in his smart society jargon. “You don’t fool me. That clever little bear was making up a new dance to thrill society next winter. You’ll see. Sunday-paper headlines: ‘Stunning New Dance! The Clothes-Line Cling! Caught on Like Wildfire!’ That’s what it’s all about. What do you know, eh?”
“Go take a walk, Raffles,” said Holmes, not unkindly; “you’re sleepy yet. Scientific Sprague, you sometimes put over an abstruse theory, what do you say?”
“I didn’t need science,” said Sprague, carelessly. “As soon as I heard she had her hair down, I jumped to the correct conclusion. She had been washing her hair, and was drying it. My sister always sticks her head out of the skylight; but this lady’s plan is, I should judge, a more all-round success.”
As they had now all voiced their theories, President Holmes rose to give them the inestimable benefit of his own views.
“Your ideas are not without some merit,” he conceded, “but you have overlooked the eternal-feminine element in the problem. As soon as I tell you the real solution, you will each wonder why it escaped your notice. The lady thought she heard a mouse, so she scrambled out of the window, preferring to risk her life on the perilous clothes-line rather than stay in the dwelling where the mouse was also. It is all very simple. She was doing her hair, threw her head over forward to twist it, as they always do, and so espied the mouse sitting in the corner.”
“Marvelous! Holmes, marvelous!” exclaimed Watson, who had just come back from his errand.
Even as they were all pondering on Holmes’s superior wisdom, the telephone bell rang.
“Are you there?” said President Holmes, for he was ever English of speech.
“Yes, yes,” returned the impatient voice of the chief of police. “Call off your detective workers. We have discovered who the lady was who crossed the clothes-line and why she did it.”
“I can’t imagine you really know,” said Holmes into the transmitter; “but tell me what you think.”
“A-r-r-rh! Of course I know! It was just one of those confounded moving-picture stunts!”
“Indeed! And why did the lady kick off her slipper?”
“A-r-r-r-h! It was part of the fool plot. She’s Miss Flossy Flicker of the Flim-Flam Film Company, doin’ the six-reel thriller, At the End of Her Rope.”
“Ah,” said Holmes suavely, “my compliments to Miss Flicker on her good work.”
“Marvelous, Holmes, marvelous!” said Watson.
* Wells was undoubtedly aware of the work of the humorist John Kendrick Bangs, in whose House-Boat on the Styx: Being Some Account of the Divers Doings of the Associated Shades (1896) a group of the
deceased engage the services of Sherlock Holmes, as well as its sequel, Pursuit of the House-Boat: Being Some Further Account of the Divers Doings of the Associated Shades, Under the Leadership of Sherlock Holmes, Esq. (1897), in which Holmes has become the president of the “Associated Shades.” But Bangs was under the false assumption that Holmes had died at the Reichenbach Falls; by 1915, Wells knew full well that he had not.
† Jacque Futrelle recorded this detective’s tales, in The Thinking Machine (1907).
‡ The stories of A. J. Raffles, the gentleman thief, and his companion Bunny Manders were told by E. W. Hornung, the brother-in-law ofArthur Conan Doyle, between 1898 and 1909.
§ The biographer of the thief Arsène Lupin is Maurice LeBlanc.
¶ Edgar Allan Poe wrote three stories about the amateur detective, the Chevalier Auguste Dupin, whom Holmes regards as a “very inferior fellow.”
# Eugène Vidocq was a thief-taker and head of the Sûreté in Paris. His memoirs, published in 1828, were extremely popular and led the way for the growth of detective fiction.
** Monsieur Lecoq was a police detective whose cases were written up by Émile Gaboriau. Lecoq first appeared in 1866. Holmes called him a “miserable bungler.”
†† The Achievements of Luther Trant by Edwin Ballmer and William MacHarg appeared in 1910.
‡‡ A detective whose adventures are recorded by Francis Lynde in an eponymous 1912 book.
§§ Ebenezer Gryce, the hero of a series of stories by Anna Katharine Green. See page 247, above.
¶¶ Joseph Rouletabille was a reporter-detective whose adventures were recorded by Gaston Leroux, beginning in 1908.
Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) was an American writer of note, who produced nine novels, fourteen plays, more than fifty short stories, and a biography. Hailed by British critics as a “genius” for her work in the theater, she discovered the plays of Eugene O’Neill and became associated with Edna St. Vincent Millay and Theodore Dreiser. Her 1931 play Alison’s House won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Today she is regarded as a pioneer of feminist writing and the first important American female playwright. In 1916, after co-writing a play with her husband George Cram Cook, Glaspell wrote a searing one-act drama titled Trifles based on a murder trial she had covered in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1900. The play was highly successful (Glaspell played the character of Mrs. Hale in the first performance), and it has been regularly anthologized as one of the great American dramas. Glaspell subsequently turned the play into the powerful story, first published in Every Week magazine for March 5, 1917, that follows.
JURY OF HER PEERS
SUSAN GLASPELL
When Martha Hale opened the storm door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away—it was probably farther from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County. But what her eye took in was that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving; her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted.
She hated to see things half done; but she had been at that when the team from town stopped to get Mr. Hale, and then the sheriff came running in to say his wife wished Mrs. Hale would come too—adding, with a grin, that he guessed she was getting scary and wanted another woman along. So she had dropped everything right where it was.
“Martha!” now came her husband’s impatient voice. “Don’t keep folks waiting out here in the cold.”
She again opened the storm-door, and this time joined the three men and the one woman waiting for her in the big two-seated buggy.
After she had the robes tucked around her she took another look at the woman who sat beside her on the back seat. She had met Mrs. Peters the year before at the county fair, and the thing she remembered about her was that she didn’t seem like a sheriff’s wife. She was small and thin and didn’t have a strong voice. Mrs. Gorman, sheriff’s wife before Gorman went out and Peters came in, had a voice that somehow seemed to be backing up the law with every word. But if Mrs. Peters didn’t look like a sheriff’s wife, Peters made it up in looking like a sheriff. He was to a dot the kind of man who could get himself elected sheriff—a heavy man with a big voice, who was particularly genial with the law-abiding, as if to make it plain that he knew the difference between criminals and non-criminals. And right there it came into Mrs. Hale’s mind, with a stab, that this man who was so pleasant and lively with all of them was going to the Wrights’ now as a sheriff.
“The country’s not very pleasant this time of year,” Mrs. Peters at last ventured, as if she felt they ought to be talking as well as the men.
Mrs. Hale scarcely finished her reply, for they had gone up a little hill and could see the Wright place now, and seeing it did not make her feel like talking. It looked very lonesome this cold March morning. It had always been a lonesome-looking place. It was down in a hollow, and the poplar trees around it were lonesome-looking trees. The men were looking at it and talking about what had happened. The county attorney was bending to one side of the buggy, and kept looking steadily at the place as they drew up to it.
“I’m glad you came with me,” Mrs. Peters said nervously, as the two women were about to follow the men in through the kitchen door.
Even after she had her foot on the door-step, her hand on the knob, Martha Hale had a moment of feeling she could not cross that threshold. And the reason it seemed she couldn’t cross it now was simply because she hadn’t crossed it before. Time and time again it had been in her mind, “I ought to go over and see Minnie Foster”—she still thought of her as Minnie Foster, though for twenty years she had been Mrs. Wright. And then there was always something to do and Minnie Foster would go from her mind. But now she could come.
The men went over to the stove. The women stood close together by the door. Young Henderson, the county attorney, turned around and said, “Come up to the fire, ladies.”
Mrs. Peters took a step forward, then stopped. “I’m not—cold,” she said.
And so the two women stood by the door, at first not even so much as looking around the kitchen.
The men talked for a minute about what a good thing it was the sheriff had sent his deputy out that morning to make a fire for them, and then Sheriff Peters stepped back from the stove, unbuttoned his outer coat, and leaned his hands on the kitchen table in a way that seemed to mark the beginning of official business. “Now, Mr. Hale,” he said in a sort of semi-official voice, “before we move things about, you tell Mr. Henderson just what it was you saw when you came here yesterday morning.”
The county attorney was looking around the kitchen.
“By the way,” he said, “has anything been moved?” He turned to the sheriff. “Are things just as you left them yesterday?”
Peters looked from cupboard to sink; from that to a small worn rocker a little to one side of the kitchen table.
“It’s just the same.”
“Somebody should have been left here yesterday,” said the county attorney.
“Oh—yesterday,” returned the sheriff, with a little gesture as of yesterday having been more than he could bear to think of. “When I had to send Frank to Morris Center for that man who went crazy—let me tell you, I had my hands full yesterday. I knew you could get back from Omaha by today, George, and as long as I went over everything here myself—”
“Well, Mr. Hale,” said the county attorney, in a way of letting what was past and gone go, “tell just what happened when you came here yesterday morning.”
Mrs. Hale, still leaning against the door, had that sinking feeling of the mother whose child is about to speak a piece. Lewis often wandered along and got things mixed up in a story. She hoped he would tell this straight and plain, and not say unnecessary things that would just make things harder for Minnie Foster. He didn’t begin at once, and she noticed that he looked queer—as if standing in that kitchen and having to tell what he had s
een there yesterday morning made him almost sick.
“Yes, Mr. Hale?” the county attorney reminded.
“Harry and I had started to town with a load of potatoes,” Mrs. Hale’s husband began.
Harry was Mrs. Hale’s oldest boy. He wasn’t with them now, for the very good reason that those potatoes never got to town yesterday and he was taking them this morning, so he hadn’t been home when the sheriff stopped to say he wanted Mr. Hale to come over to the Wright place and tell the county attorney his story there, where he could point it all out. With all Mrs. Hale’s other emotions came the fear now that maybe Harry wasn’t dressed warm enough—they hadn’t any of them realized how that north wind did bite.
“We come along this road,” Hale was going on, with a motion of his hand to the road over which they had just come, “and as we got in sight of the house I says to Harry, ‘I’m goin’ to see if I can’t get John Wright to take a telephone.’ You see, he explained to Henderson, unless I can get somebody to go in with me they won’t come out this branch road except for a price I can’t pay. I’d spoke to Wright about it once before; but he put me off, saying folks talked too much anyway, and all he asked was peace and quiet—guess you know about how much he talked himself. But I thought maybe if I went to the house and talked about it before his wife, and said all the women-folks liked the telephones, and that in this lonesome stretch of road it would be a good thing—well, I said to Harry that that was what I was going to say—though I said at the same time that I didn’t know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John—”
Now, there he was!—saying things he didn’t need to say. Mrs. Hale tried to catch her husband’s eye, but fortunately the county attorney interrupted with:
“Let’s talk about that a little later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk about that, but I’m anxious now to get along to just what happened when you got here.
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