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THE MYSTERY OF THE OTHER HOUSE- -By James Hopper
This Tale, from the Current Issue of
HEARST’S MAGAZINE, Contrast-
ing the Red Life with the Gray, Is
Said to Be the Most Vividly Written
of the Year.
mt
Story
<PubN»hed by Permission of, and Copyrighted,
1913, by HEARST'S MAGAZINE.)
W E who live reasonably and calmly, a
little torpid as it from birth the law
had marked us for its own by the
Bimple. expedient of rapping with a club the
tops of our soft skulls, are apt to slip Into
the assurance that, about us, all are like us.
Yet at our sides, brushing our elbows, though
Invisible as if under an enchanter's wand,
other men and women live lives that are
strange, violent and red. A film like a per
pendicular curtain is between us and them;
sometimes, by chance, we break through it,
gain an instant’s lurid visioning—and forever
after remain astounded and troubled.
We pierced this film once, Ruth and I; a
wonder since then lingers in our souls.
It happened one Summer; we had taken, on
an island off the eastern coast of the country,
a cottage on a bluff, well above the decayed
fishing port and the camp of a religious sect,
in circle about its ugly ‘'tabernacle.''
But still farther above us, on a higher rise,
was the other house. It stood in the centre
of vast grounds, a large and beautiful house,
given Bomehow an expression of drowsy aloof
ness by the hypnotizing pantomime of many
lawn sprinklers, eternally turning and turning
in silence above the sloping reaches of be
dewed and sunlit grass. From our windows
the building Itself was hidden; only the frail
pinnacles of its Victorian Gothic showed above
tall trees massed blackly. Crows cawed in
these trees, and at times clouds of them
whirred suddenly out of the tops, like hand
fuls of black confetti hurled by a child-giant
at play below under the foliage.
A man and a woman lived in this house
Down the white, hard way, across the slop
ing greens, swinging roundly first to the
left in the first loop of the great S then
swinging to the right into the lower loop,
with Che slowly increasing heaviness of a pen
making its black stroke, a powerful automobile
would slide smoothly, pass the gates, and dis
appear down the highway in a golden whirl
of dust. The man and fihe woman sat side
by side on the hack seat. Her garments her
alded a certain magnificence; her purple veils
in the wind were like banners; and the gentle
droop of her head, inclined slightly forward,
promised grace and beauty. The man was
slight and tall; he seemed young. Woman's
beauty; man’s youth; splendor of wealth; we
saw them in a haze of romance.
Sometimes they came back during the day.
The machine assaulted the slope, rolled the
road up within itself as if it were a ribbon,
came to a smootih halt, and the two descended,
slowly, in ceremony, between two liveries; the
portals crashed shut. Sometimes the return
was late—simply a honking in the dark, and
a rapid curving aBcent of a large moon of light
whidh slipped swiftly along the grasses,
marked luminously trees, flower-beds and
shrubs, and let them slip aback, one by one,
into the maws of the night, patient but ctose
behind.
Then again for days, not a sally, not a move
ment gave sign of life. The blinds were
down; the crows in the trees cawed more
loudly; a spell crept about the house, behind
the ceaseless turning of the sprinklers on the
lawn; tihe portals were hermetic.
A swarm of servants moved about the two.
insulating them from the rough details of
living. These were all blacks, nut blacks such
as we had never seen. They came from Brit
ish islands; their speech was liquid and pure.
And in the large silence of noon some of their
voices came to us at times. In caressing notes;
from their unexpected intonations, we drew
an added sense of strangeness and of dream.
Upon the house and ltB inhabitants our timid
attention centred itself little by little
We would watch them out of_ the windows
more than we realized; unconsciously we am
bushed them along the roads, to have the whir
of their machine go by, and gaze a bit stupe
fied at her veils disappearing swiftly in tihe
distance, guidons of a fancied cavalcade. Shyly
our imaginations settled upon them and built
about them airy castles of romance. Of pure,
naive, and respectable romance; I remember
that once, when we sought to give the situa
tion a spice of diabolism, our invention went
no further than to suggest a defiance in love
of some crusty old father, or despotic uncle!
So that the sudden revelation of what really
was came down on us like a tou breaker upon
an Idle Ewtmmer’s head.
The house had gone through another of Its
periodB of Immobility and silence. Its doors
closed, Its blinds lowered; It had stood there,
behind the ceaseless and hypnotizing gestures
of Its hundred lawn sprinklers, as with droop
ing lids, dizzied, in the thrall of an enchant
ment. Then one morning, there was a disor
der, a hushed tumult In our kitchen beneath
our room, and up the stairs came a black girl,
followed closely by our servant.
The black girl’s eyes were dilated; she
seemed at the fag end of a worry beyond her
solving; she broke out immediately In excited
speech.
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“She lay there utterly abandoned. I remember a black stocking incongruously drawn, trim and
tight—and in her posture, in the condition of the bed, of everything about it, lay an eloquence of
disorder symbolic of death—of her death and of her life.”
‘He wore a chocked waistcoat of bad taste. His forehead was low,
and made still lower by plastered bangs, beneath his hat. Walk
ing at my side, up and down, he began suddenly to tell me all
about himself—an extraordinary story. He was not the dead
woman’s husband. He had never been that. But he had been
her chauffer!”
It took us some time to catch a half under
standing. She was from the big house.
Everything was in disorder over there. No one
knew what to do. There was some telegraph
ing to be done; a certain man must he found
right away; a Mr. Mortimer. For the mistress
of the house was dead.
“Dead! Good God!" We saw abruptly the
automobile, the purple veil In the wind; the
gentle droop of her head. “Dead; that gra
cious being dead!”
“She has been dead thirty-six hours.” The
black girl wrung her hands. “We’ve wired and
wired; we can’t reach Mr. Mortimer. Oh. can’t
you help?"
“Mr. Mortimer? But what is the matter
with her husband? What is he doing, where
is he; yes. the husband?”
Te girl gave us a look which had in it al
most a pity. "Mr. Grant.” she said, “oh, he
Isn’t her husband. He’s called her cousin.
He’s—oh, he’s useless! Please come and help
us.”
i put on my hat and went out behind the
black girl, toward the house, now the house
of death. Upon the sunlit lawns the sprinklers
still turned, Impassively, in a stupid and cir
cular benediction.
As we walked I was questioning her, In an
effort to get a new vision out of the wreck
of the old. But from her running stream of
talk, facts same not very clear, or too singular.
Several facts ap
peared. That man
whom we had
taken for the
young husband,
and about whom
we had woven
a fabric of idyll,
the “Mr. Grant"
was not a hus
band. He was
known as a
cousin. There
was something
about him which
made him useless
at this crisis. And
It was a matter
of extreme urgen
cy that the dis
tant "Mr. Morti
mer” be reached.
Again and again
she came back to
this. Mr. Morti
mer would see
to everything if
only he could be
found, . he would
* see to everything
—that mysterious
and efficient Mr, Mortimer.
For a moment I was in the house, with Its
disorder, its idle servants standing about. Its
hint of unmade beds and pillaged pantries;
behind the impassive facade, the sprinklers,
geometrically spaced, turning above the im
peccable law-ns, this demoralization suddenly
became a symbol; a symbol of the more sub
tle and dreadful disorder of souls which had
been here all of the time, hidden from our
eyes behind a curtain of rigid formalism
“Where Is Mr. Grant?” I asked.
They were searching for him through many
apartments. Finally an answer was given to
the black girl. She passes it on to me. "Tie’s
gone back down there," she said with a ges
ture toward the fishing port below.
“But where?” .
“You must find him," she said urgently.
“He has addresses.”
"But where will I find him?’’
Then she said: "In a drinking-shop. Go
through the public houses, and you will find
him, sir.”
So 1 went through the drinking-shops of
the little port; and at last found him—in a
condition which, under the circumstances, was,
to say the least, highly—Indecent. I placed
him in a carriage, drove to the cottage, de
posited him there like a sack, and spent the
morning and part of the afternoon trying to
accelerate the sobering process so that I could
get something intelligent out of him. It was
past noon before I obtained what I wanted,
and again I went down to the port to wire.
I was there three hours, using telephone
and telegram. The address I had was of a
business office In New York. A certain num
ber on Broadway, which, from the first, puz
zled me as something fatidlc, significant of
some immense power, and which I should have
known but did not know. I got the telephone
—only to be led on from voice to voice, there,
at the other end. each reticent, full of canny
precautions and evasions. It was only by the
word death that finally I seemed to move all
that ponderous discretion; I was given the
address of some secretary, labelled private.
And then he was not at home but at some
restaurant. A feminine voice, expressive at
once of curiosity, concern, and a sort of pas
sive humiliation, gave me the name of twelve
possible restaurants. It was at the eleventh
that finally I found the private secretary’s
voice. His enunciation was full of shocked
warning hisses; behind It I could hear the
silken shimmer of a festive orchestra. At first
he refused all information, nearly hung up at
once. At last the word death on him also
made its Impression. He became immediately
immensely anxious to help me. But the best
he could do was somewhat indefinite: I must
reach a yacht, the Natoma. It was cruising
along the coast, no one knew lust, where.
I hung up, and getting a map and a telegraph
directory, with the aid of the operator sent
wired messages to every pert from Florida to
Halifax addressed to the Natoma and that
Mortimer who, if he came, would "arrange
everything," and who, all-powerful, seemed so
Ititle anxious to exercise his powers.
The sun was near Its setting before, toll
ing up the S. I arrived at the big house Grant
w-as there, walking to and fro before the steps
with a timid, uncertain air. "Let us go in,"
I said. But he grasped my arm; “Stay out
with me awhile, will you!" he begged, like a
child, and led me away from the house, behind
a screen of shrubs. Looking sideways at him
in the twilight, I w-as astonished to see him,
now, so different from what I had imagined
him. He was smaller. His eyes were close
set. He wore a checked waistcoat of bad
taste. His forehead w-as low and made still
lower by plastered bangs beneath his bowler
hat.
Walking at my side up and down, he began
suddenly to tell me all about himself—an ex
traordinary story. Cheap. I suppose, but still
with a wonder to it. He was not the dead
woman’s husband. He had never been that
But he had been he. - chauffeur!
“I came to them, she and Mortimer, five
years ago. They lived up on Fifth avenue—a
grand place they had!”
He went on with a description of the house
and its treasures, and then abruptly said:
“And she fell in love with me!” 1 started at
the intolerable caddishness of this: hut look
ing down at him, through the gloaming, I found
on his face an expression of stupefaction.
"She fell in love with me,” he repeated again
with a sort of dazed passivity—and l knew
that this man, this little man, had never gotten
the essence of what had happened to him,
that his soul had not been of a fabnc to draw
up level with it—and that some one had been
cheated—dreadfully cheated.
He continued his story; “We ran away. He
came after us. He caught us.”
Having caught them, Mortimer had acted—
well, with originality. The storm of wrath,
the revenge they had dreaded, had not come.
He had merely built them a house.
“This place.” Grant’s hand ran over the
gables, the trees, the wide lawns. Mortimer
had bought them this place, had furnished it,
had given them servants, horses, automobiles;
had assured them an allowance (Grant told
me the amount; I will not repeat it for fear
of not being believed), and then he had left
them—to their passion—if such it was.
“So we lived here,” said Grant, “like princes;
just life princes."
He stopped, faced me with legs apart. "Why
did he do it?" he asked with anew and sudden
directness. “Why, why? Why did he do it?
What do you think?’i
I shrugged my shoulders. “Perhaps,” I haz
arded, “it was the fine thing to do."
He resumed walking. His hands wefe be
hind his hack; his head bent forward; he
stepped with a moodiness that gave illusion,
almost, of profound intelligence. “I have been
looking for a trap,” he declared. “You don’t
know Mortimer. I’ve been looking for ome
trap In it.”
I became curious and cunning. “You were
happy, then, you two?” He did not answer
right away, but slowed up a moment in his
walking.
“It was fine," he said at length, but without
animation. "Fine!” Then, after a moment,
as If speaking to himself: “The house was
too big."
“Too big!” I exclaimed questioningly.
“You see I had no cronies.”
The tone was wistful. Suddenly I had the
feeling of that house—that great house with
so many, many rooms; with so many, many
servants; and in that great house, these two
alone with their idleness and their love, their
physical passion, their caprice—their slowly
curdling caprice.
“I drank,” he murmured. “Drank, drank.
She drank.” His thumb jerked back in a
gesture toward the house, and within it, the
dead woman. “That’s what killed her. Drink,
drink, drink. Also morphine!”
So this was the story—the simple, sordid
story! Again I had the rapid vision of cu>-
two, alone In that immense house, alone with
their wealth, their idleness and their curdling
love. And suddenly I wanted immensely to
know Mortimer, that Mr. Mortimer who "saw
to everything," who played at being God, that
large philanthropist who so generously, so
dexterously, and so invisibly catered to others’
bliss.
But I came down now to practical details.
I told Grant what I had done, to the stream
of his hurried, over-easy acquiescences. Then
I left him there, still hesitant before the steps,
and returned to the cottage.
That night a storm broke upon the Island.
It came from the sea. We had seen it In the
twilight, the sea, opaque, dull-hued and pern
fectly Immobile; yet from it now, not on the
wind, unheralded by the slightest stirring of
the air, merely upon a mysterious displace
ment, storm after storm moved over and broke
upon the knoll. We could divine the heavy
vapor, swirling with a slow, vicious movement,
settle above us like a lid; and then clap upon
clap of thunder, like the mad, Insistent beating
of a bass drum by some dervish god. The
tenth detonation brought with it a soft wailing
and groaning as of hurt spirits in the earth
beneath. The black servants of the big house
had avalanched down the hill and were press
ing, frightened, Into our kitchen. It seemed
that- Grant had gone again to the village, and
they had been afraid to remain alone in the
big house with its still presence. We were
at the window, Ruth and I, our brows on the
cold panes. And now we saw, to the violet
flashes of light, more than the mass of the
trees up there, the pinnacles of the other
house. We saw through the trees, through
the walls. We saw- hallways and rooms, count
less apartments, and in the centre of it, as if
in state, the kernel of all that empty magnifi
cence, the dead woman. She lay there, high,
as if on an altar, that woman once so precious,
so treasured, that clay once so delicately
fashioned, animated so exquisitely; she lay
there alone and abandoned, In a huge fracas
of thunder and swaying of storm. She lay
there—we could see her well—her delicate
nostrils, once so eagerly dilated to all the
promises of life, for which toil of thousands
had distilled perfume, now pinched and dis
dainful; her eyes, for the fugitive alightings
of w-hich all beauty had been unrolled, now
sealed, the haughtiness of eternal sleep oozing
out of their long shadows; and her bosom
marble cold.
With the morning the storm disappeared;
the little band of West Indians stopped their
murmuring and swaying; in straggling groups
they went up the hill. We prepared to get a
little rest—and then, within an hour, the black
girl who first had come was back again.
Again there was trouble. The undertakers
had arrived. They were waiting. And they
couldn’t get the body, because of the dog.
I put on my hat and went up the hill again.
The girl was explaining. It seemed that the
dead woman had not been alone In the house
that night after all. The dog had had- the
decencies which man had forgotten. He had
been there with her, her guardian all night.
Only now he wasn’t going to quit. Now that
man claimed once more responsibility as his.
the dog refused to pass it over; he failed to
understand this sudden zeal.
So I went up to the room with one of the
undertakers. This was a weird, little man.
He had a long, white, slovenly beard, alto
gether out of proportion to his stature. One
of his legs was shorter than the other, and be
cause of his profession he had caught a trick
of bow-ing constantly. Whenever he bowed,
his unclean heard spread fanwise upon his
greasy frock, and his shorter leg, suspended,
swung to and fro, with small scrapings of the
floor.
With him I entered the room—and hesitated,
appalled.
She lay there—but why describe it? It was
a vision that utterly belied that whP h w-e had
had in the night. She lay there, utterly aban
doned. I remember a black stocking, incon
gruously drawn trim and tight—and In her
posture, in the condition of the bed. of every
thing about It, lay an eloquence of disorder
symbolic of her death. Of her death and of
her life. I moved forward with an impulse
to draw over her a sheet—and sprang back
swiftly. From beneath the bed, a flash of
yellow teeth had darted out like a flame
The dog was there, a miserable, hairless
Mexican. But the timidity of his race had
melted in a sort of silent, automatic fury.
Whenever w-e approached, the teeth flashed
out, noiselessly, with the furtive violence of
the hyena. We could not approach. Some
one from behind the door passed us a broom,
two brooms. For a half hour, that weird clod
hopping little undertaker and I, we tried to
dislodge the dog with our absurd instruments.
(This Story will be found in complete form in
the July issue of HEARST’S MAGAZINE).
ciutf
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the stairs creak and the furniture
YY/ gives out mysterious cracking sounds
▼ » at night we sometimes sit up In bed
nnd wonder if there Is a burglar about, but
It doesn’t occur to us that what we hear is
really an earthquake on a small scale. The
night air has caused the wood to contract
with a snap and this is exactly w'hat the earth
is doing periodically. To a microbe reposing
on the surface of the table this contraction
Is perhaps as violent «■» the disturbance of
an earthquake to a human being.
An earthquake is a terrible thing, it comes
without warning. It Is over before one knows
which wav to fly. Its fury none can abate.
Yet to the geologist earthquakes are only
symptoms. They are not causes so much as
remits—results of great stresses and strains
within the earth that cause little sllppings
from time to time. If the rocks of the earth’s
(inter shell slip and grate o’j each other so
much as one inch along a fissure ten miles In
length a shiver is felt. A slip of fifteen feet
long a course of two hundred miles suffices
^destroy San Francisco
hes* * strains and stresses accumula^.
steadily within the earth. The reasons for
this will appear later. The point at which
they have once found relief is weaker to re
sist the next strain. It slips again presently.
By successive movements its sides become
more and more displaced. Rock layers, min
eral veins, coal seams that cross the line of
displacement, are jogged out of their course.
So are roads, fence-lines, brooks, that run
across it on the surface. In the San Francisco
quake one man’s front yard was moved
twenty feet to one side of his house. At an
other point the slip-line ran so close to a
man’s barn as to carry away the manure
piles heaped out from the windows, in Japan
a cliff twelve feet high interrupted a roadway.
Thousands of similar cases might be cited.
These were primary movements along the
actual line of the slip which caused the earth
quakes. Yawning fissures at the surface are
secondary and superficial phenomena which
may occur distant from the actual slip, In rare
cases.
When the geologist or the miner finds the
strata thus displaced, the vein or the coal bed
interrupted, he calls it a “fault.” Incidentally
he knows, though it seldom interests him
much, that an earthquake or quakes accom
panied the fnaktng of that fault. That was all
too long ago to be really exciting. What does
concern him, generally, is to find the con
tinuation of the vein or seam beyond the fault.
And so he studies it to determine the direc
tion and amount of displacement. Out of
such inquiries has grown much of our knowl
edge of geology. The fossils proved helpful,
and thus paleontology arose. All rock struc
tures proved suggestive of clues, and so
stratigraphy grew into an exact science. A
knowledge of reasons and causes seemed im
perative, to furnish working theories, and
dynamic geology and geophysics came into be
ing. With all its faults, the geologist loves
his science still. Sometimes he loves It more
because of them.
The faults actually found in the rocks run
all sizes. An inch is nothing; some are vis
ible only with the microscope. A mile or two
is nothing; in the Smoky Mountains of Tenn
essee and North Carolina Dr. Keith has
measured displacements of thirty-five miles!
We will return to that presently. It is impor
tant here to note that such a movement must
have required thousands of centuries for its
consummation. It probatfly went on as slowly,
as deliberately, as that of the Pacific Coast
to-day—a little slip of an inch, a foot, a rod
maybe, each year, or decade, or century. A
rod a century takes />ver a million years to
make thirty-five miles. A million years of
earthquakes in North Carolina!
Earthquakes of this type, resulting from the
jarring movements of rocks over each other
within the crust, are called tectonic earth
quakes. There is another class of earth
quakes, the volcanic, accompanying eruptions,
but they are much less important.
The great displacements found by Keith in
the Smokies are part of a belt of rock-faulting
which margins the entire Appalachian system
on the east. Up in the low’er Saint Lawrence
Valley, William' Logan, founder of the Cana
dian Geological Survey, traced it skillfully
when geology was yet an infant. Afterward
he followed it also into the Champlain Valley.
Logan was a man of unbending perseverance.
"When he began his geological work in Can
ada a large portion of the country was a wil
derness, without roads, and there were no
maps. ‘Little was known of the. (lower Saint
Lawrence) region beside the coast line. Set
tlements were few. There’ were no roads
through the interior, most of which was
inhabited by bears or other wild beasts, or at
best only penetrated in certain regjons by a
few Indians or lumbermen. The courses of
most of the streams were unknown and the
mountains untraversed. Living the' life of a
savage, sleeping on the beach in a blanket
sack, with my feet to the fire, seldom taking
my clothes off, eating salt pork and ship's
biscuit, occasionally tormented by mosquitoes,’
such is the record Logan has left us of his
Gaspe experience. From early dawn to dusk
he paced or paddled, and yet his work was not
finished, for while his Indians—often his sole
companions—smoked their pipes around the
evening fire he wrote his notes and platted
the day's measurements.'’—George P. Merrill:
History of American Geology, page 519. Lo
gan’s splendid work as director of the Domin
ion Survey from 1842 to 1870 received royal
recognition and he died “Sir William” in Cas
tle Malgwyn, Wales, five years after its close
It is appropriate that the great earth rupture
which he explored should bear his name and
commemorate his services, in popular speech.
At Quebec the St. Lawrence lies in a “rift
valley" or zone of shattering by fault move
ments along many parallel" fractures. This is
the usual character of “Logan’s line”—not one
fault but many, often ragged and interlacing.
Frequently, as at Quebec and in the Cham
plain Valley, the middle of the zone has been
dropped down between these parallel faults,
just as has the vale of the Jordan and Dead
Sea. The Germans call such a tectonic de
pression a “graben.” Name of gruesome sug
gestion.
The east side of this valley shows an enor
mous overthrust, conspicuous at St. Albans
Bay and Burlington. Snake Mountain and
Shoreham, Vermont, at Bald Mountain, near
Fort Ann, and through the eastern skirts of
Troy to the Hudson below Schodack Landing,
where It is visible from passing trains. A still
greater movement Is represented on the west
side of the Hudson at Saratoga and Albany,
by which the rocks have been shoved many
miles westward, and the deposits of the "Levis
Channel" confused and even interfolded with
those of the “Scijenectady Basin,” while the
entire Intervening deposit of the "Chazy
Trough” has been covered or obliterated.
(State Museum Bulletin 162, page 69.)
From Rhinebeck, the rifted belt follows the
Wallkill Valley, crosses the Delaware above
Easton and swings west to Harrisburg, in
monotonous shales through which the indi
vidual faults are not easily traced, though
numerous instances are known, as at Lehigh
Water Gap. Stose’s careful work in the Cham-
bersburg region, southwest of Harrisburg,
shows how numerous they may be.’ Passing
Harper’s Ferry and up the Shenandoah Valley
into the “Camel's Head” of Virginia it has its
most varied development in Eastern Tennes-
iee, finally disappearing under the coastal
plain deposits in Central Alabama.
All movement on Logan’s line was supposed
to have ceased somewhere in the remote past.
Like Vesuvius in the palmy days of Pompeii,
it has come to be looked upon as an interest
ing fossil, a stuffed monkey in a cage—noth
ing more. But Vesuvius had a day of awak
ening. And digging Into mouldering archives
of the early Canadian settlement, our own
State Geologist. Dr. John M Clarke, finds rec
ords of a great shake two centuries and a half
ago that he Inclines to attribute to Logan's
line. Let me quote him: “The Canadian
earthquake of 1663 appears from the records
preserved In contemporary documents to be
the severest disturbance this continent has
ever suffered from terrestirlal dislocations.