Out of the Dark

by Robert W. Chambers

  ‘Hit ain’t no use, suh,’ said the servant respectfully; ‘dey’s mi’ions an’ mi’ions ob gemmen jess a-settin’ roun’ an’ waitin’ foh Mistuh Keen. In dis here perfeshion, suh, de fustest gemman dat has a ’pintment is de fustest gemman dat kin see Mistuh Keen. You is a military gemman yohse’f, Cap’m Harren, an’ you is aware dat precedence am de rigger.’

  The bronzed young man smiled, glanced at the date of appointment written on his card, which also bore his own name followed by the letters U.S.A., then his amused gray eyes darkened and he glanced leisurely around the room, where a dozen or more assorted people sat waiting their turns to interview Mr Keen: all sorts and conditions of people – smartly gowned women, an anxious-browed businessman or two, a fat German truck driver, his greasy cap on his knees, a surly policeman, and an old Irishwoman, wearing a shawl and an ancient straw bonnet. Harren’s eyes reverted to the Negro servant.

  ‘You will explain to Mr Keen,’ he said, ‘that I am an army officer on leave, and that I am obliged to start for Manila tomorrow. This is my excuse for asking an immediate interview; and if it’s not a good enough excuse I must cancel this appointment, that is all.’

  The servant stood, irresolute, inclined to argue, but something in the steel-gray eyes of the man set him in involuntary motion, and he went away once more with the young man’s message. Harren turned and walked back to his seat. The old woman with the faded shawl was explaining volubly to a handsomely gowned woman beside her that she was looking for her boy, Danny; that her name was Mrs Regan, and that she washed for the aristocracy of Hunter’s Point at a liberal price per dozen, using no deleterious substances in the suds as Heaven was her witness.

  The German truck driver, moved by this confidence, was stirred to begin an endless account of his domestic misfortunes, and old Mrs Regan, becoming impatient, had already begun to interrupt with an account of Regan’s recent hoisting on the wings of a premature petard, when the dark servant reappeared.

  ‘Mistuh Keen will receive you, suh,’ he whispered, leading the way into a large room where dozens of attractive young girls sat very busily engaged at typewriting machines. Door after door they passed, all numbered on the ground-glass panes, then swung to the right, where the servant bowed him into a big, handsomely furnished room flooded with the morning sun. A tall, gray man, faultlessly dressed in a gray frock suit and wearing white spats, turned from the breezy, open window to inspect him; the lean, well groomed, rather lank type of gentleman suggesting a retired colonel of cavalry; unmistakably well bred from the ends of his drooping gray mustache to the last button on his immaculate spats.

  ‘Captain Harren?’ he said pleasantly.

  ‘Mr Keen?’

  They bowed. Young Harren drew from his pocket a card. It was the business card of Keen & Co., and, glancing up at Mr Keen, he read it aloud, carefully:

  KEEN & CO.

  TRACERS OF LOST PERSONS

  Keen & Co. are prepared to locate the

  whereabouts of anybody on earth.

  No charges will be made unless

  the person searched for

  is found.

  Blanks on Application.

  WESTREL KEEN, Manager.

  Harren raised his clear, gray eyes. ‘I assume this statement to be correct, Mr Keen?’

  ‘You may safely assume so,’ said Mr Keen, smiling.

  ‘Does this statement include all that you are prepared to undertake?’

  The Tracer of Lost Persons inspected him coolly. ‘What more is there, Captain Harren? I undertake to find lost people. I even undertake to find the undiscovered ideals of young people who have failed to meet them. What further field would you suggest?’ Harren glanced at the card which he held in his gloved hand; then, very slowly, he re-read, ‘the whereabouts of anybody on earth,’ accenting the last two words deliberately as he encountered Keen’s piercing gaze again.

  ‘Well?’ asked Mr Keen laughingly, ‘is not that sufficient? Our clients could scarcely expect us to invade heaven in our search for the vanished.’

  ‘There are other regions,’ said Harren.

  ‘Exactly. Sit down, sir. There is a row of bookcases for your amusement. Please help yourself while I clear decks for action.’

  Harren stood fingering the card, his gray eyes lost in retrospection; then he sauntered over to the bookcases, scanning the titles. The Searcher for Lost Persons studied him for a moment or two, turned, and began to pace the room. After a moment or two he touched a bell. A sweet-faced young girl entered; she was gowned in black and wore a white collar, and cuffs turned back over her hands.

  ‘Take this memorandum,’ he said. The girl picked up a pencil and pad, and Mr Keen, still pacing the room, dictated in a quiet voice as he walked to and fro:

  ‘Mrs Regan’s Danny is doing six months in Butte, Montana. Break it to her as mercifully as possible. He is a bad one. We make no charge. The truck driver, Becker, can find his wife at her mother’s house, Leonia, New Jersey. Tell him to be less pig-headed or she’ll go for good some day. Ten dollars. Mrs M., No. 36001, can find her missing butler in service at 79 Vine Street, Hartford, Connecticut. She may notify the police whenever she wishes. His portrait is No. 170529, Rogues’ Gallery. Five hundred dollars. Miss K. (No. 3679) may send her letter, care of Cisneros & Co., Rio, where the person she is seeking has gone into the coffee business. If she decides that she really does love him, he’ll come back fast enough. Two hundred and fifty dollars. Mr W. (No. 3620) must go to the morgue for further information. His repentance is too late; but he can see that there is a decent burial. The charge: one thousand dollars to the Florence Mission. You may add that we possess his full record.’

  The Tracer paused and waited for the stenographer to finish. When she looked up: ‘Who else is waiting?’ he asked.

  The girl read over the initials and numbers.

  ‘Tell that policeman that Kid Conroy sails on the Carania tomorrow. Fifty dollars. There is nothing definite in the other cases. Report progress and send out a general alarm for the cashier inquired for by No. 3608. You will find details in vol. xxxix under B.’

  ‘Is that all, Mr Keen?’

  ‘Yes. I’m going to be very busy with’ – turning slowly toward Harren – ‘with Captain Harren, of the Philippine Scouts, until tomorrow – a very complicated case, Miss Borrow, involving cipher codes and photography—’

  II

  Harren started, then walked slowly to the center of the room as the pretty stenographer passed out with a curious level glance at him.

  ‘Why do you say that photography plays a part in my case?’ he asked.

  ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. But how—’

  ‘Oh, I only guessed it,’ said Keen with a smile. ‘I made another guess that your case involved a cipher code. Does it?’

  ‘Y-es,’ said the young man, astonished, ‘but I don’t see—’

  ‘It also involves the occult,’ observed Keen calmly. ‘We may need Miss Borrow to help us.’

  Almost staggered, Harren stared at the Tracer out of his astonished gray eyes until that gentleman laughed outright and seated himself, motioning Harren to do likewise.

  ‘Don’t be surprised, Captain Harren,’ he said. ‘I suppose you have no conception of our business, no realization of its scope – its network of information bureaus all over the civilized world, its myriad sources of information, the immensity of its delicate machinery, the endless data and the infinitesimal details we have at our command. You, of course, have no idea of the number of people of every sort and condition who are in our employ, of the ceaseless yet inoffensive surveillance we maintain. For example, when your letter came last week I called up the person who has charge of the army list. There you were, Kenneth Harren, Captain Philippine Scouts, with the date of your graduation from West Point. Then I called up a certain department devoted to personal detail, and in five minutes I knew your entire history. I then touched another electric button, and in a minute I had before me the date o
f your arrival in New York, your present address, and’ – he looked up quizzically at Harren – ‘and several items of general information, such as your peculiar use of your camera, and the list of books on Psychical Phenomena and Cryptograms which you have been buying—’

  Harren flushed up. ‘Do you mean to say that I have been spied upon, Mr Keen?’

  ‘No more than anybody else who comes to us as a client. There was nothing offensive in the surveillance.’ He shrugged his shoulders and made a deprecating gesture. ‘Ours is a business, my dear sir, like any other. We, of course, are obliged to know about people who call on us. Last week you wrote me, and I immediately set every wheel in motion; in other words, I had you under observation from the day I received your letter to this very moment.’

  ‘You learned much concerning me?’ asked Harren quietly.

  ‘Exactly, my dear sir.’

  ‘But,’ continued Harren with a touch of malice, ‘you didn’t learn that my leave is up tomorrow, did you?’

  ‘Yes, I learned that, too.’

  ‘Then why did you give me an appointment for the day after tomorrow?’ demanded the young man bluntly.

  The Tracer looked him squarely in the eye. ‘Your leave is to be extended,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Exactly. It has been extended one week.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘You applied for extension, did you not?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harren, turning red, ‘but I don’t see how you knew that I—’

  ‘By cable?’

  ‘Y-yes.’

  ‘There’s a cablegram in your rooms at this very moment,’ said the Tracer carelessly. ‘You have the extension you desired. And now, Captain Harren,’ with a singularly pleasant smile, ‘what can I do to help you to a pursuit of that true happiness which is guaranteed for all good citizens under our Constitution?’

  Captain Harren crossed his long legs, dropping one knee over the other, and deliberately surveyed his interrogator.

  ‘I really have no right to come to you,’ he said slowly. ‘Your prospectus distinctly states that Keen & Co. undertake to find live people, and I don’t know whether the person I am seeking is alive or – or—’

  His steady voice faltered; the Tracer watched him curiously.

  ‘Of course, that is important,’ he said. ‘If she is dead—’

  ‘She!’

  ‘Didn’t you say “she,” Captain?’

  ‘No, I did not.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, then, for anticipating you,’ said the Tracer carelessly.

  ‘Anticipating? How do you know it is not a man I am in search of?’ demanded Harren.

  ‘Captain Harren, you are unmarried and have no son; you have no father, no brother, no sister. Therefore I infer – several things – for example, that you are in love.’

  ‘I? In love?’

  ‘Desperately, Captain.’

  ‘Your inferences seem to satisfy you, at least,’ said Harren almost sullenly, ‘but they don’t satisfy me – clever as they appear to be.’

  ‘Exactly. Then you are not in love?’

  ‘I don’t know whether I am or not.’

  ‘I do,’ said the Tracer of Lost Persons.

  ‘Then you know more than I,’ retorted Harren sharply.

  ‘But that is my business – to know more than you do,’ returned Mr Keen patiently. ‘Else why are you here to consult me?’ And as Harren made no reply: ‘I have seen thousands and thousands of people in love. I have reduced the superficial muscular phenomena and facial symptomatic aspect of such people to an exact science founded upon a schedule approximating the Bertillon system of records. And,’ he added, smiling, ‘out of the twenty-seven known vocal variations your voice betrays twenty-five unmistakable symptoms; and out of the sixteen reflex muscular symptoms your face has furnished six, your hands three, your limbs and feet six. Then there are other superficial symptoms—’

  ‘Good heavens!’ broke in Harren; ‘how can you prove a man to be in love when he himself doesn’t know whether he is or not? If a man isn’t in love no Bertillon system can make him so; and if a man doesn’t know whether or not he is in love, who can tell him the truth?’

  ‘I can,’ said the Tracer calmly.

  ‘What! When I tell you I myself don’t know?’

  ‘That,’ said the Tracer, smiling, ‘is the final and convincing symptom. You don’t know. I know because you don’t know. That is the easiest way to be sure that you are in love, Captain Harren, because you always are when you are not sure. You’d know if you were not in love. Now, my dear sir, you may lay your case confidently before me.’

  Harren, unconvinced, sat frowning and biting his lip and twisting his short, crisp mustache which the tropical sun had turned straw color and curly.

  ‘I feel like a fool to tell you,’ he said. ‘I’m not an imaginative man, Mr Keen; I’m not fanciful, not sentimental. I’m perfectly healthy, perfectly normal – a very busy man in my profession, with no time and no inclination to fall in love.’

  ‘Just the sort of man who does it,’ commented Keen. ‘Continue.’

  Harren fidgeted about in his chair, looked out of the window, squinted at the ceiling, then straightened up, folding his arms with sudden determination.

  ‘I’d rather be boloed than tell you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps, after all, I am a lunatic; perhaps I’ve had a touch of the Luzon sun and don’t know it.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge,’ said the Tracer, smiling.

  ‘Very well, sir. Then I’ll begin by telling you that I’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘There are such things,’ observed Keen quietly.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean one of those fabled sheeted creatures that float about at night; I mean a phantom – a real phantom – in the sunlight – standing before my very eyes in broad day! … Now do you feel inclined to go on with my case, Mr Keen?’

  ‘Certainly,’ replied the Tracer gravely. ‘Please continue, Captain Harren.’

  ‘All right, then. Here’s the beginning of it: three years ago, here in New York, drifting along Fifth Avenue with the crowd, I looked up to encounter the most wonderful pair of eyes that I ever beheld – that any living man ever beheld! The most – wonderfully – beautiful—’

  He sat so long immersed in retrospection that the Tracer said: ‘I am listening, Captain,’ and the Captain woke up with a start.

  ‘What was I saying? How far had I proceeded?’

  ‘Only to the eyes.’

  ‘Oh, I see! The eyes were dark, sir, dark and lovely beyond any power of description. The hair was also dark – very soft and thick and – er – wavy and dark. The face was extremely youthful, and ornamental to the uttermost verges of a beauty so exquisite that, were I to attempt to formulate for you its individual attractions, I should, I fear, transgress the strictly rigid bounds of that reticence which becomes a gentleman in complete possession of his sense.’

  ‘Exactly,’ mused the Tracer.

  ‘Also,’ continued Captain Harren, with growing animation, ‘to attempt to describe her figure would be utterly useless, because I am a practical man and not a poet, nor do I read poetry or indulge in futile novels or romances of any description. Therefore I can only add that it was a figure, a poise, absolutely faultless, youthful, beautiful, erect, wholesome, gracious, graceful, charmingly buoyant and – well, I cannot describe her figure, and I shall not try.’

  ‘Exactly; don’t try.’

  ‘No,’ said Harren mournfully, ‘it is useless’; and he relapsed into enchanted retrospection.

  ‘Who was she?’ asked Mr Keen softly.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You never again saw her?’

  ‘Mr Keen, I – I am not ill-bred, but I simply could not help following her. She was so b-b-beautiful that it hurt; and I only wanted to look at her; I didn’t mind being hurt. So I walked on and on, and sometimes I’d pass her and sometimes I’d let her pass me, and when she wasn’t looking I’d look �
� not offensively, but just because I couldn’t help it. And all the time my senses were humming like a top and my heart kept jumping to get into my throat, and I hadn’t a notion where I was going or what time it was or what day of the week. She didn’t see me; she didn’t dream that I was looking at her; she didn’t know me from any of the thousand silk-hatted, frock-coated men who passed and repassed her on Fifth Avenue. And when she went into St Berold’s Church, I went, too, and I stood where I could see her and where she couldn’t see me. It was like a touch of the Luzon sun, Mr Keen. And then she came out and got into a Fifth Avenue stage, and I got it, too. And whenever she looked away I looked at her – without the slightest offence, Mr Keen, until, once, she caught my eye—’

  He passed an unsteady hand over his forehead.

  ‘For a moment we looked full at one another,’ he continued. ‘I got red, sir; I felt it, and I couldn’t look away. And when I turned color like a blooming beet, she began to turn pink like a rosebud, and she looked full into my eyes with such a wonderful purity, such exquisite innocence, that I – I never felt so near – er – heaven in my life! No, sir, not even when they ambushed us at Manoa Wells – but that’s another thing – only it is part of this business.’

  He tightened his clasped hands over his knee until the knuckles whitened.

  ‘That’s my story, Mr Keen,’ he said crisply.

  ‘All of it?’

  Harren looked at the floor, then at Keen: ‘No, not all. You’ll think me a lunatic if I tell you all.’

  ‘Oh, you saw her again?’

  ‘N-never! That is—’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Not in – in the flesh.’

  ‘Oh, in dreams?’

  Harren stirred uneasily. ‘I don’t know what you call them. I have seen her since – in the sunlight, in the open, in my quarters in Manila, standing there perfectly distinct, looking at me with such strange, beautiful eyes—’

  ‘Go on,’ said the Tracer, nodding.

  ‘What else is there to say?’ muttered Harren.

  ‘You saw her – or a phantom which resembled her. Did she speak?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you speak to her?’