“You could have heard the argument as far away as the Place D’Anvers.
“Result? They decided that my meter was faulty, took it away, and replaced it with a new one. A devil of a meter, as large and as red as an omnibus, with a mechanism that made a noise like a lady in a car changing gear.
“A week later they came again, again found all the gas lights burning and a room like an oven. It took them about three-quarters of an hour to open the meter, they had locked it up so tight. And what did they find? Empty space!” roared Karmesin, with a shout of laughter, that made the water jug dance in its basin and the window panes vibrate.
“But, Karmesin,” I asked,
“How
did you manage it?”
“Wait,” said Karmesin. “That is exactly what the gas people asked me. I simply smiled a mysterious smile and said nothing. And then one day, as I expected, I was politely invited to interview one of the directors of the company, and he said something to this effect: —‘Monsieur Lavoisier, I don’t know what you’re up to but it certainly can’t be legal. What tricks have you been playing with our meter?’
“I merely smiled. ‘Come, Monsieur,’ said this gas man, ‘we wish to be lenient. We do not wish to prosecute. Tell us exactly how you cause these meters to function without putting any money in, and we will let the matter rest—we might even forget about the small item of gas you have consumed without paying for it!’
“I said: ‘If I tell you, Monsieur, you will not only refrain from prosecuting but you will also pay me 20,000 francs. If you do not do this then I shall discreetly make public a perfectly simple method whereby the consumers of your gas can get it free of charge. It really is just as well for you to know these things. It would be worth more than 20,000 to you.’
‘This is preposterous!’ he shouted.
“‘You would have to modify all your meters,’ I insinuated.
“We compromised at 10,000, and he went with me back to my room.”
“Well?” I asked.
“The whole thing was so simple. I pointed to the bottom of the meter and showed him a tiny hole, no larger than a pinhole. That was number one, then I showed him my cake of soap; apparatus No. 2. ‘Well?’ asked the gas director. I took him to the window and opened it. Lying in the window sill were two or three cakes of soap; in each cake an indentation of the size of a silver franc.
“It was so childishly simple. Into my little soap moulds I had poured water; the night frost turned the water to ice; the one-franc piece of ice was just hard enough to operate the mechanism of the meter; the gas thus obtained heated the room, the heat turned the ice back to water which dripped out at my little pin hole. Result? Invisibility!”
“That’s extraordinarily clever,” I said. “And did you get your 10,000 francs?”
“Yes,” said Karmesin. “But what the devil was 10,000 francs? £500? £500! Chicken feed!—”
Karmesin rolled some of his twice-used cigarette tobacco into a kind of mahorka-cigarette, in a bit of newspaper, and fumigated his gigantic moustache with a puff of frightfully acrid smoke.
ONE HUNDRED IN THE DARK
O
WEN
J
OHNSON
In the early part of the twentieth century, few writers had greater success in depicting the college student than Owen Johnson (1878–1952). His stories and novels, known collectively as the “Lawrenceville Stories,” catalogued the personal and educational experiences of Dink Stover. Johnson founded and edited the
Lawrenceville Literary Magazine
and made his school famous by publishing
The Eternal Boy
(1909), which was set there.
While at Yale, he was chairman of the
Yale Literary Review
and, a decade after his graduation, shocked the school by publishing the best-selling
Dover at Yale
(1911), which is still in print, though inevitably dated. He had previously published such best-sellers as
The Prodigious Hickey
(1908),
The Varmint
(1910), and
The Tennessee Shad
(1911), which remained popular for decades and was on the curriculum of many schools.
He had few contributions to the mystery genre, though his story collection
Murder in Any Degree
(1913) received excellent reviews upon publication; the
New York Times
called it “immensely diverting and entertaining.”
Apart from the title story, the only other mystery contribution to the book was “One Hundred in the Dark,” which shows what a great member of the crime fiction community Johnson could have been had he kept his hand in it.
ONE HUNDRED IN THE DARK
BY
O
WEN
J
OHNSON
T
HEY WERE DISCUSSING
languidly, as such groups do, seeking from each topic a peg on which to hang a few epigrams that might be retold in the lip currency of the club—Steingall, the painter, florid of gesture, and effete, foreign in type, with black-rimmed glasses and trailing ribbon of black silk that cut across his cropped beard and cavalry mustaches; De Gollyer, a critic, who preferred to be known as a man about town, short, feverish, incisive, who slew platitudes with one adjective and tagged a reputation with three; Rankin, the architect, always in a defensive, explanatory attitude, who held his elbows on the table, his hands before his long sliding nose, and gestured with his fingers; Quinny, the illustrator, long and gaunt, with a predatory eloquence that charged irresistibly down on any subject, cut it off, surrounded it, and raked it with enfilading wit and satire; and Peters, whose methods of existence were a mystery, a young man of fifty, who had done nothing and who knew every one by his first name, the club postman, who carried the tittle-tattle, the
bon mots
and the news of the day, who drew up a petition a week and pursued the house committee with a daily grievance.
About the latticed porch, which ran around the sanded yard with its feeble fountain and futile evergreens, other groups were eying one another or engaging in desultory conversation, oppressed with the heaviness of the night.
At the round table, Quinny alone, absorbing energy as he devoured the conversation, having routed Steingall on the Germans and archaeology and Rankin on the origins of the Lord’s Prayer, had seized a chance remark of De Gollyer’s to say:
“There are only half a dozen stories in the world. Like everything that’s true it isn’t true.” He waved his long gouty fingers in the direction of Steingall, who, having been silenced, was regarding him with a look of sleepy indifference. “What is more to the point, is the small number of human relations that are so simple and yet so fundamental that they can be eternally played upon, redressed, and reinterpreted in every language, in every age, and yet remain inexhaustible in the possibility of variations.”
“By George, that is so,” said Steingall, waking up. “Every art does go back to three or four notes. In composition it is the same thing. Nothing new—nothing new since a thousand years. By George, that is true! We invent nothing, nothing!”
“Take the eternal triangle,” said Quinny hurriedly, not to surrender his advantage, while Rankin and De Gollyer in a bored way continued to gaze dreamily at a vagrant star or two. “Two men and a woman, or two women and a man. Obviously it should be classified as the first of the great original parent themes. Its variations extend into the thousands. By the way, Rankin, excellent opportunity, eh, for some of our modern, painstaking, unemployed jackasses to analyze and classify.”
“Quite right,” said Rankin without perceiving the satirical note. “Now there’s De Maupassant’s
Fort comme la Mort—
quite the most interesting variation—shows the turn a genius can give. There the triangle is the man of middle age, the mother he has loved in his youth and the daughter he comes to love. It forms, you might say, the head of a whole subdivision of modern Continental literature.”
“Quite wrong, Rankin, quite wrong,” said Quinny, who would have stated the other side quite as imperiously. “What you cite is a variation of quite another theme, the Faust theme—old age longing for youth, the man who has loved longing for the love of his youth, which is youth itself. The triangle is the theme of jealousy, the most destructive and therefore, the most dramatic of human passions. The Faust theme is the most fundamental and inevitable of all human experiences, the tragedy of life itself. Quite a different thing.”
Rankin, who never agreed with Quinny unless Quinny maliciously took advantage of his prior announcement to agree with him continued to combat this idea.
“You believe then,” said De Gollyer after a certain moment had been consumed in hair splitting, “that the origin of all dramatic themes is simply the expression of some human emotion. In other words, there can exist no more parent themes than there are human emotions.”
“I thank you, sir, very well put,” said Quinny with a generous wave of his hand, “Why is the
Three Musketeers
a basic theme? Simply the interpretation of comradeship, the emotion one man feels for another, vital because it is the one peculiarly masculine emotion. Look at Du Maurier and
Trilby
, Kipling in
Soldiers
Three—simply the
Three Musketeers.”
“The
Vie de Bohème?”
suggested Steingall. “In the real Vie de Bohème yes,” said Quinny viciously. “Not in the concocted sentimentalities that we now have served up to us by athletic tenors and consumptive elephants!”
Rankin, who had been silently deliberating on what had been left behind, now said cunningly and with evident purpose:
“All the same. I don’t agree with you men at all. I believe there are situations, original situations, that are independent of your human emotions, that exist just because they are situations, accidental and nothing else.”
“As for instance?” said Quinny, preparing to attack. “Well. I’ll just cite an ordinary one that happens to come to my mind,” said Rankin, who had carefully selected his test. “In a group of seven or eight, such as we are here, a theft takes place; one man is the thief—which one? I’d like to know what emotion that interprets, and yet it certainly is an original theme, at the bottom of a whole literature.”
This challenge was like a bomb.
“Not the same thing.”
“Detective stories, hah!”
“Oh, I say, Rankin, that’s literary melodrama.”
Rankin, satisfied, smiled and winked victoriously over to Tommers, who was listening from an adjacent table.
“Of course your suggestion is out of order, my dear man, to this extent,” said Quinny, who never surrendered, “in that I am talking of fundamentals and you are citing details. Nevertheless, I could answer that the situation you give, as well as the whole school it belongs to, can be traced back to the commonest of human emotion’s, curiosity; and that the story of
Bluebeard
and
The Moonstone
are to all purpose identically the same.”
At this Steingall, who had waited hopefully, gasped and made as though to leave the table.
“I shall take up your contention,” said Quinny without pause for breath, “first, because you have opened up one of my pet topics, and second, because it gives me a chance to talk.” He gave a sidelong glance at Steingall and winked at De Gollyer. “What is the peculiar fascination that the detective problem exercises over the human mind? You will say curiosity. Yes and no. Admit at once that the whole art of a detective story consists in the statement of the problem. Any one can do it. I can do it. Steingall even can do it. The solution doesn’t count. It is usually banal; it should be prohibited. What interests us is, can we guess it? Just as an able-minded man will sit down for hours and fiddle over the puzzle column in a Sunday balderdash. Same idea. There you have it, the problem—the detective story. Now why the fascination? I’ll tell you. It appeals to our curiosity, yes—but deeper to a sort of intellectual vanity. Here are six matches, arrange them to make four squares, five men present, a theft takes place—who’s the thief? Who will guess it first? Whose brain will show its superior cleverness—see? That’s all—that’s all there is to it.”
“Out of all of which,” said De Gollyer, “the interesting thing is that Rankin has supplied the reason why the supply of detective fiction is inexhaustible. It is a formula ludicrously simple, mechanical, and yet we will always pursue it to the end. The marvel is that writers should seek for any other formula when here is one so safe, that can never fail. By George I could start up a factory on it.”
“The reason is,” said Rankin, “that the situation does constantly occur. It’s a situation that any of us might get into any time. As a matter of fact, now, I personally know two such occasions when I was of the party; and very uncomfortable it was too.”
“What happened?” said Steingall.
“Why, there is no story to it particularly. Once a mistake had been made, and the other time the real thief was detected by accident a year later. In both cases only one or two of us knew what had happened.”
De Gollyer had a similar incident to recall. Steingall, after a reflection, related another that had happened to a friend.
“Of course, of course, my dear gentlemen,” said Quinny impatiently, for he had been silent, too long, “you are glorifying commonplaces. Every crime, I tell you, expresses itself in the terms of the picture puzzle that you feed to your six-year-old. It’s only the variation that is interesting. Now quite the most remarkable turn of the complexities that can be developed is, of course, the well-known instance of the visitor at a club and the rare coin. Of course every one knows that? What?”
Rankin smiled in a bored, superior way, but the others protested their ignorance.
“Why, it’s very well known,” said Quinny lightly. “A distinguished visitor is brought into a club—dozen men, say, present, at dinner, long table. Conversation finally veers around to curiosities and relics. One of the members present then takes from his pocket what he announces as one of the rarest coins in existence—passes it around the table. Coin travels back and forth, every one examining it, and the conversation goes to another topic, say the influence of the auto mobile on domestic infelicity, or some other such asininely intellectual club topic—you know? All at once the owner calls for his coin.