Next followed the Bergner kidnapping case, which gave Madelyn her first big advertising broadside, and which brought the beginning of the steady stream of business that resulted, after three years, in her Fifth Avenue suite in the Maddox Building, where I found her on that – to me – memorable afternoon when a sapient Sunday editor dispatched me for an interview with the woman who had made so conspicuous a success in a man’s profession.
I can see Madelyn now, as I saw her then – my first close-range view of her. She had just returned from Omaha that morning, and was planning to leave for Boston on the midnight express. A suitcase and a fat portfolio of papers lay on a chair in a corner. A young woman stenographer was taking a number of letters at an almost incredible rate of dictation. Miss Mack finished the last paragraph as she rose from a flat-top desk to greet me.
I had vaguely imagined a masculine-appearing woman, curt of voice, sharp of feature, perhaps dressed in a severe, tailor-made gown. I saw a young woman of maybe twenty-five, with red and white cheeks, crowned by a softly waved mass of dull gold hair, and a pair of vivacious, grey-blue eyes that at once made one forget every other detail of her appearance. There was a quality in the eyes which for a long time I could not define. Gradually I came to know that it was the spirit of optimism, of joy in herself, and in her life, and in her work, the exhilaration of doing things. And there was something contagious in it. Almost unconsciously you found yourself believing in her and in her sincerity.
Nor was there a suggestion foreign to her sex in my appraisal. She was dressed in a simply embroidered white shirt-waist and white broadcloth skirt. One of Madelyn’s few peculiarities is that she always dresses either in complete white or complete black. On her desk was a jar of white chrysanthemums.
‘How do I do it?’ she repeated, in answer to my question, in a tone that was almost a laugh.
‘Why – just by hard work, I suppose. Oh, there isn’t anything wonderful about it! You can do almost anything, you know, if you make yourself really think you can! I am not at all unusual or abnormal. I work out my problems just as I would work out a problem in mathematics, only instead of figures I deal with human motives. A detective is always given certain known factors, and I keep building them up, or subtracting them, as the case may be, until I know that the answer must be correct.
‘There are only two real rules for a successful detective, hard work and common sense – not uncommon sense such as we associate with our old friend, Sherlock Holmes, but common, business sense. And, of course, imagination! That may be one reason why I have made what you call a success. A woman, I think, always has a more acute imagination than a man!’
‘Do you then prefer women operatives on your staff?’ I asked.
She glanced up with something like a twinkle from the jade paper-knife in her hands.
‘Shall I let you into a secret? All of my staff, with the exception of my stenographer, are men. But I do most of my work in person. The factor of imagination can’t very well be used second, or third, or fourth handed. And then, if I fail, I can only blame Madelyn Mack! Someday,’ – the gleam in her grey-blue eyes deepened – ‘someday I hope to reach a point where I can afford to do only consulting work or personal investigation. The business details of an office staff, I am afraid, are a bit too much of routine for me!’
The telephone jingled. She spoke a few crisp sentences into the receiver, and turned. The interview was over.
When I next saw her, three months later, we met across the body of Morris Anthony, the murdered bibliophile. It was a chance discovery of mine which Madelyn was good enough to say suggested to her the solution of the affair, and which brought us together in the final melodramatic climax in the grim mansion on Washington Square, when I presume my hysterical warning saved her from the fangs of Dr Lester Randolph’s hidden cobra. In any event, our acquaintanceship crystallised gradually into a comradeship, which revolutionised two angles of my life.
Not only did it bring to me the stimulus of Madelyn Mack’s personality, but it gave me exclusive access to a fund of newspaper ‘copy’ that took me from scant-paid Sunday ‘features’ to a ‘space’ arrangement in the city room, with an income double that which I had been earning. I have always maintained that in our relationship Madelyn gave all, and I contributed nothing. Although she invariably made instant disclaimer, and generally ended by carrying me up to the ‘Rosary’, her chalet on the Hudson, as a cure for what she termed my attack of the ‘blues’, she was never able to convince me that my protest was not justified!
It was at the ‘Rosary’ where Miss Mack found haven from the stress of business. She had copied its design from an ivy-tangled Swiss chalet that had attracted her fancy during a summer vacation ramble through the Alps, and had built it on a jagged bluff of the river at a point near enough to the city to permit of fairly convenient motoring, although, during the first years of our friendship, when she was held close to the commercial grindstone, weeks often passed without her being able to snatch a day there. In the end, it was the gratitude of Chalmers Walker for her remarkable work which cleared his chorus-girl wife from the seemingly unbreakable coil of circumstantial evidence in the murder of Dempster, the theatrical broker, that enabled
