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pubOne.info present you this new edition. "THE first confirmatory evidence of the thing, Excellency, was the print of a woman's bare foot.

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819943808
Langue	English

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THE SLEUTH OF ST. JAMES'S SQUARE
By Melville Davisson Post
The SLEUTH of St. JAMES'S SQUARE
I. The Thing on the Hearth
“THE first confirmatory evidence of the thing,Excellency, was the print of a woman's bare foot. ”
He was an immense creature. He sat in an uprightchair that seemed to have been provided especially for him. Thegreat bulk of him flowed out and filled the chair. It did not seemto be fat that enveloped him. It seemed rather to be some soft,tough fiber, like the pudgy mass making up the body of a deep-seathing. One got an impression of strength.
The country was before the open window; the clustersof cultivated shrub on the sweep of velvet lawn extending to thegreat wall that inclosed the place, then the bend of the river andbeyond the distant mountains, blue and mysterious, blendingindiscernibly into the sky. A soft sun, clouded with the haze ofautumn, shone over it.
“You know how the faint moisture in the bare footwill make an impression. ”
He paused as though there was some compelling forcein the reflection. It was impossible to say, with accuracy, to whatrace the man belonged. He came from some queer blend of Easternpeoples. His body and the cast of his features were Mongolian. Butone got always, before him, a feeling of the hot East lying lowdown against the stagnant Suez. One felt that he had risen slowlyinto our world of hard air and sun out of the vast sweltering oozeof it.
He spoke English with a certain care in theselection of the words, but with ease and an absence of effort, asthough languages were instinctive to him— as though he could speakany language. And he impressed one with this same effortlessfacility in all the things he did.
It is necessary to try to understand this, becauseit explains the conception everybody got of the creature, when theysaw him in charge of Rodman. I am using precisely the descriptivewords; he was exclusively in charge of Rodman, as a jinn in anArabian tale might have been in charge of a king's son.
The creature was servile— with almost a grovelingservility. But one felt that this servility resulted from somethingpotent and secret. One looked to see Rodman take Solomon's ring outof his waistcoat pocket.
I suppose there is no longer any doubt about thefact that Rodman was one of those gigantic human intelligences whosometimes appear in the world, and by their immense conceptionsdwarf all human knowledge— a sort of mental monster that we feelnature has no right to produce. Lord Bayless Truxley said thatRodman was some generations in advance of the time; and LordBayless Truxley was, beyond question, the greatest authority onsynthetic chemistry in the world.
Rodman was rich and, everybody supposed, indolent;no one ever thought very much about him until he published hisbrochure on the scientific manufacture of precious stones. Theninstantly everybody with any pretension to a knowledge of syntheticchemistry turned toward him.
The brochure startled the world.
It proposed to adapt the luster and beauty of jewelsto commercial uses. We were being content with crude imitationcolors in our commercial glass, when we could quite as easily havethe actual structure and the actual luster of the jewel in it. Wewere painfully hunting over the earth, and in its bowels, for a fewcrystals and prettily colored stones which we hoarded andtreasured, when in a manufacturing laboratory we could easilyproduce them, more perfect than nature, and in unlimitedquantity.
Now, if you want to understand what I am printinghere about Rodman, you must think about this thing as a scientificpossibility and not as a fantastic notion. Take, for example,Rodman's address before the Sorbonne, or his report to theInternational Congress of Science in Edinburgh, and you will beginto see what I mean. The Marchese Giovanni, who was a delegate tothat congress, and Pastreaux, said that the something in the way ofan actual practical realization of what Rodman outlined was theformulae. If Rodman could work out the formulae, jewel-stuff couldbe produced as cheaply as glass, and in any quantity— by thecarload. Imagine it; sheet ruby, sheet emerald, all the beauty andluster of jewels in the windows of the corner drugstore!
And there is another thing that I want you to thinkabout. Think about the immense destruction of value— not to us, sogreatly, for our stocks of precious stones are not large; but thething meant, practically, wiping out all the assembled wealth ofAsia except the actual earth and its structures.
The destruction of value was incredible.
Put the thing some other way and consider it.Suppose we should suddenly discover that pure gold could beproduced by treating common yellow clay with sulphuric acid, orthat some genius should set up a machine on the border of theSahara that received sand at one end and turned out sacked wheat atthe other! What, then, would our hoarded gold be worth, or thewheat-lands of Australia, Canada or our Northwest?
The illustrations are fantastic. But the thingRodman was after was a practical fact. He had it on the way.Giovanni and Lord Bayless Truxley were convinced that the man wouldwork out the formulae. They tried, over their signatures, toprepare the world for it.
The whole of Asia was appalled. The rajahs of thenative states in India prepared a memorial and sent it to theBritish Government.
The thing came out after the mysterious, incredibletragedy. I should not have written that final sentence. I want youto think, just now, about the great hulk of a man that sat in hisbig chair beyond me at the window.
It was like Rodman to turn up with an outlandishhuman creature attending him hand and foot. How the thing cameabout reads like a lie; it reads like a lie; the wildest lie thatanybody ever put forward to explain a big yellow Oriental followingone about.
But it was no lie. You could not think up a lie toequal the actual things that happened to Rodman. Take the way hedied! . . . .
The thing began in India. Rodman had gone there toconsult with the Marchese Giovanni concerning some molecular theorythat was involved in his formulas. Giovanni was digging up a buriedtemple on the northern border of the Punjab. One night, in theexplorer's tent, near the excavations, this inscrutable creaturewalked in on Rodman. No one knew how he got into the tent or wherehe came from.
Giovanni told about it. The tent-flap simply opened,and the big Oriental appeared. He had something under his armrolled up in a prayer-carpet. He gave no attention to Giovanni, buthe salaamed like a coolie to the little American.
“Master, ” he said, “you were hard to find. I havelooked over the world for you. ”
And he squatted down on the dirty floor by Rodman'scamp stool.
Now, that's precisely the truth. I suppose anyordinary person would have started no end of fuss. But not Rodman,and not, I think, Giovanni. There's the attitude that we can'tunderstand in a genius— did you ever know a man with an inventivemind who doubted a miracle? A thing like that did not seemunreasonable to Rodman.
The two men spent the remainder of the night lookingat the present that the creature brought Rodman in hisprayer-carpet. They wanted to know where the Oriental got it, andthat's how his story came out.
He was something— searcher, seems our nearestEnglish word to it— in the great Shan Monastery on the southeasternplateau of the Gobi. He was looking for Rodman because he had thelight— here was another word that the two men could find no term inany modern language to translate; a little flame, was the literalmeaning.
The present was from the treasure-room of themonastery; the very carpet around it, Giovanni said, was worthtwenty thousand lire. There was another thing that came out in thetalk that Giovanni afterward recalled. Rodman was to accept thepresent and the man who brought it to him. The Oriental wouldprotect him, in every way, in every direction, from things visibleand invisible. He made quite a speech about it. But, there was onething from which he could not protect him.
The Oriental used a lot of his ancient words toexplain, and he did not get it very clear. He seemed to mean thatthe creative Forces of the spirit would not tolerate a division ofworship with the creative forces of the body— the celibate notionin the monastic idea.
Giovanni thought Rodman did not understand it; hethought he himself understood it better. The monk was pledgingRodman to a high virtue, in the lapse of which something awful wassure to happen.
Giovanni wrote a letter to the State Department whenhe learned what had happened to Rodman. The State Department turnedit over to the court at the trial. I think it was one of the thingsthat influenced the judge in his decision. Still, at the time,there seemed no other reasonable decision to make. The testimonymust have appeared incredible; it must have appeared fantastic. Noman reading the record could have come to any other conclusionabout it. Yet it seemed impossible— at least, it seemed impossiblefor me— to consider this great vital bulk of a man as a monk of oneof the oldest religious orders in the world. Every common, academicconception of such a monk he distinctly negatived. He impressed me,instead, as possessing the ultimate qualities of clever diplomacy—the subtle ambassador of some new Oriental power, shrewd, suave,accomplished.
When one read the yellow-backed court-record, thesense of old, obscure, mysterious agencies moving in sinistermenace, invisibly, around Rodman could not be escaped from. Youbelieved it. Against your reason, against all modern experience oflife, you believed it.
And yet it could not be true! One had to find thatverdict or topple over all human knowledge— that is, all humanknowledge as we understand it. The judge, cutting short thecriminal trial, took the only way out of the thing.
There was one man in the world that everybody wishedcould have been present at the time. That was Sir Henry Marquis.Marquis was