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r - 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. - - '-v, , ft- **» ■JT’ ir, » M ■ * ( V m III SS i “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 muc r-. 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.