The Girl with the Silver Eyes
I
A bell jangled me into wakefulness. I rolled to the edge of my bed and reached for the telephone. The neat voice of the Old Man—the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco manager—came to my ears:
“Sorry to disturb you, but you’ll have to go up to the Glenton Apartments on Leavenworth Street. A man named Burke Pangburn, who lives there, phoned me a few minutes ago asking to have someone sent up to see him at once. He seemed rather excited. Will you take care of it? See what he wants.”
I said I would and, yawning, stretching and cursing Pangburn—whoever he was—got my fat body out of pajamas and into street clothes.
The man who had disturbed my Sunday morning sleep—I found when I reached the Glenton—was a slim, white-faced person of about twenty-five, with big brown eyes that were red-rimmed just now from either sleeplessness or crying, or both. His long brown hair was rumpled when he opened the door to admit me; and he wore a mauve dressing-robe spotted with big jade parrots over wine-colored silk pajamas.
The room into which he led me resembled an auctioneer’s establishment just before the sale—or maybe one of these alley tearooms. Fat blue vases, crooked red vases, lanky yellow vases, vases of various shapes and colors; marble statuettes, ebony statuettes, statuettes of any material; lanterns, lamps and candlesticks; draperies, hangings and rugs of all sorts; odds and ends of furniture that were all somehow queerly designed; peculiar pictures hung here and there in unexpected places. A hard room to feel comfortable in.
“My fiancée,” he began immediately in a high-pitched voice that was within a notch of hysteria, “has disappeared! Something has happened to her! Foul play of some horrible sort! I want you to find her—to save her from this terrible thing that. …”
I followed him this far and then gave it up. A jumble of words came out of his mouth—“spirited away … mysterious something … lured into a trap”—but they were too disconnected for me to make anything out of them. So I stopped trying to understand him, and waited for him to babble himself empty of words.
I have heard ordinarily reasonable men, under stress of excitement, run on even more crazily than this wild-eyed youth; but his dress—the parroted robe and gay pajamas—and his surroundings—this deliriously furnished room—gave him too theatrical a setting; made his words sound utterly unreal.
He himself, when normal, should have been a rather nice-looking lad: his features were well spaced and, though his mouth and chin were a little uncertain, his broad forehead was good. But standing there listening to the occasional melodramatic phrase that I could pick out of the jumbled noises he was throwing at me, I thought that instead of parrots on his robe he should have had cuckoos.
Presently he ran out of language and was holding his long, thin hands out to me in an appealing gesture, saying,
“Will you?” over and over. “Will you? Will you?”
I nodded soothingly, and noticed that tears were on his thin cheeks.
“Suppose we begin at the beginning,” I suggested, sitting down carefully on a carved bench affair that didn’t look any too strong.
“Yes! Yes!” He was standing legs apart in front of me, running his fingers through his hair. “The beginning. I had a letter from her every day until—”
“That’s not the beginning,” I objected. “Who is she? What is she?”
“She’s Jeanne Delano!” he exclaimed in surprise at my ignorance. “And she is my fiancée. And now she is gone, and I know that—”
The phrases “victim of foul play,” “into a trap” and so on began to flow hysterically out again.
Finally I got him quieted down and, sandwiched in between occasional emotional outbursts, got a story out of him that amounted to this:
This Burke Pangburn was a poet. About two months before, he had received a note from a Jeanne Delano—forwarded from his publishers—praising his latest book of rhymes. Jeanne Delano happened to live in San Francisco, too, though she hadn’t known that he did. He had answered her note, and had received another. After a little of this they met. If she really was as beautiful as he claimed, then he wasn’t to be blamed for falling in love with her. But whether or not she was really beautiful, he thought she was, and he had fallen hard.
This Delano girl had been living in San Francisco for only a little while, and when the poet met her she was living alone in an Ashbury Avenue apartment. He did not know where she came from or anything about her former life. He suspected—from certain indefinite suggestions and peculiarities of conduct which he couldn’t put in words—that there was a cloud of some sort hanging over the girl; that neither her past nor her present were free from difficulties. But he hadn’t the least idea what
