“The old brute!” said Mordaunt Reeves. “But I suppose he knows what he’s doing.”
XII
A Search with Piano Accompaniment
If Carmichael let his colleagues in for a late sitting, at least he made amends for it himself by unwontedly early rising. Reeves found him fully dressed when, pyjamaed himself, he set out for his morning bath.
“What on earth are you doing,” he asked, “wandering about at this hour?”
“Well, you see,” said Carmichael, “I had to go and clear up your room before the housemaid came in. Housemaids don’t like chewing-gum on their boots.” And with this partial explanation Reeves had to be satisfied till they sat down to smoke a pipe after breakfast in a secluded corner of the lounge.
“For Heaven’s sake let’s have an explanation,” he urged. “There’s a chewing-gum motif running through life at present which is worrying me more than I can say.”
“I don’t mind about that,” said Gordon; “what worries me is Carmichael being up and dressed at half-past seven.”
“Well, if you prefer it, let us put it this way,” said Carmichael. “I had to get up early, Reeves, to unlock your room; otherwise the maid wouldn’t have been able to tidy it for you.”
“To unlock it? When did you lock it, then?”
“When I left it, to be sure, at twelve o’clock last night.”
“What! Do you mean to say that Gordon and I sat there for a solid hour waiting for somebody to go into my room, when the door was locked all the time? Look here, Carmichael, if you’ve simply been pulling our legs—”
“No, I have not been pulling your legs, if I apprehend rightly the meaning of that rather puzzling metaphor. You were waiting for somebody to try to get into your room; if he had tried, he would have found two muscular young men tackling him from behind, and the possibility of getting through the door would have had a merely academic interest.”
“But I thought you said we were to catch him red-handed? Pretty good fools we should have looked if we had found that it was some guest who’d mistaken his room, or somebody who was wanting to borrow a pipe-cleaner!”
“I admit it. But then, you see, I had an intuition, almost amounting to a certainty, that the visitor who intruded upon your room does not come in through the door.”
“Oh, he doesn’t? Then you mean that Gordon and I were merely sacrificed to your peculiar sense of humour—we weren’t really doing any good? My word, Carmichael—”
“You are always too hasty in leaping to conclusions. You were doing a great deal of good by sitting up in the room opposite. You were convincing the mysterious gentleman that I expected him to come through the door. And it was that conviction which emboldened him to pay you a visit last night. I am sorry to have practised any deception on you two, but really it was the only means that occurred to me for inducing the gentleman behind the scenes to act as he did. And after all, I only made you sit up for an hour.”
“An hour,” said Gordon, “cannot be properly measured by the movements of a clock, an inanimate thing which registers time but doesn’t feel it. Many things lengthen time; but three things above all, darkness, silence, and not smoking. The watch we kept last night was a fair equivalent for three hours over a fire with a pipe.”
“Well, I apologize. But you will be glad to hear that the experiment succeeded. Somebody did come into your room last night, Reeves, and wandered all over it, though of course he found nothing that was of the slightest interest to him, because there was nothing to find.”
“And how do you know all this?”
“That is where the chewing-gum comes in. Seccotine would have done: but chewing-gum is more certain. I do not profess to understand why people chew: my impression is that it is merely a kind of fidgeting. Those people who talk about the unconscious would probably tell you that all fidgeting is a form of ‘compensation.’ Observe that word, for it is the great hole in their logic. Their idea is that So-and-so does not murder his grandmother, but he does twiddle his thumbs. They will tell you, consequently, that twiddling your thumbs is a kind of compensation for not murdering your grandmother. But the whole strength of their case should rest on their ability to prove a connection between the two things, and instead of proving it you will find that they steadily assume it. However, as I was saying—the peculiarity of van Beuren’s special chewing-gum is this: that it can be drawn out to an almost indefinite length, and forms a thread of almost invisible fineness. If you stretch such threads, say, between one chair and another all over a room, as I did round your room, Reeves, last night, the great probability is that a casual visitor will walk into it and carry whole strands of it away with him, without noticing anything peculiar.”
“What!” said Reeves, “you mean like Sherlock Holmes and the cigarette-ash on the carpet?”
“It was not one of Holmes’ more original performances. He had been anticipated, in point of fact, by the prophet Daniel. You should read the story of Bel and the Dragon, Reeves.”
“And now,” said Gordon, “I suppose we proceed to the station, and take a good look at the trouser-ends of all our club-fellows as they wait for the London train?”
“Why, no. I do not think that method would be very fruitful. My idea was not to discover who it is that visits Reeves’ room, but to make sure that there is somebody who does so, and that he does not come through the door.”
“In fact, that he comes through the window?”
“No, my dear Gordon, it is not everybody who has your agility in negotiating windows. The windows in question are a good twenty feet from the ground; there is no drainpipe near them;
