The Mystery of the Yellow Room
of the furious attempts of Monsieur Stangerson and Bernier to burst it
open, was still holding firm; but at length, it gave way before our
united efforts,—and then what a sight met our eyes! I should tell you
that, behind us, the concierge held the laboratory lamp—a powerful
lamp, that lit the whole chamber.
“‘I must also tell you, monsieur, that The Yellow Room is a very small
room. Mademoiselle had furnished it with a fairly large iron bedstead,
a small table, a night-commode, a dressing-table, and two chairs. By
the light of the big lamp we saw all at a glance. Mademoiselle, in
her night-dress, was lying on the floor in the midst of the greatest
disorder. Tables and chairs had been overthrown, showing that there
had been a violent struggle. Mademoiselle had certainly been dragged
from her bed. She was covered with blood and had terrible marks of
finger-nails on her throat,—the flesh of her neck having been almost
torn by the nails. From a wound on the right temple a stream of blood
had run down and made a little pool on the floor. When Monsieur
Stangerson saw his daughter in that state, he threw himself on his
knees beside her, uttering a cry of despair. He ascertained that she
still breathed. As to us, we searched for the wretch who had tried to
kill our mistress, and I swear to you, monsieur, that, if we had found
him, it would have gone hard with him!
“‘But how to explain that he was not there, that he had already
escaped? It passes all imagination!—Nobody under the bed, nobody behind
the furniture!—All that we discovered were traces, blood-stained marks
of a man’s large hand on the walls and on the door; a big handkerchief
red with blood, without any initials, an old cap, and many fresh
footmarks of a man on the floor,—footmarks of a man with large feet
whose boot-soles had left a sort of sooty impression. How had this man
got away? How had he vanished? Don’t forget, monsieur, that there is
no chimney in The Yellow Room. He could not have escaped by the door,
which is narrow, and on the threshold of which the concierge stood with
the lamp, while her husband and I searched for him in every corner of
the little room, where it is impossible for anyone to hide himself. The
door, which had been forced open against the wall, could not conceal
anything behind it, as we assured ourselves. By the window, still in
every way secured, no flight had been possible. What then?—I began to
believe in the Devil.
“‘But we discovered my revolver on the floor!—Yes, _my_ revolver! Oh!
that brought me back to the reality! The Devil would not have needed to
steal my revolver to kill Mademoiselle. The man who had been there had
first gone up to my attic and taken my revolver from the drawer where
I kept it. We then ascertained, by counting the cartridges, that the
assassin had fired two shots. Ah! it was fortunate for me that Monsieur
Stangerson was in the laboratory when the affair took place and had
seen with his own eyes that I was there with him; for otherwise,
with this business of my revolver, I don’t know where we should have
been,—_I_ should now be under lock and bar. Justice wants no more to
send a man to the scaffold!’”
The editor of the “Matin” added to this interview the following lines:—
“We have, without interrupting him, allowed Daddy Jacques to recount
to us roughly all he knows about the crime of The Yellow Room. We have
reproduced it in his own words, only sparing the reader the continual
lamentations with which he garnished his narrative. It is quite
understood, Daddy Jacques, quite understood, that you are very fond of
your masters; and you want them to know it, and never cease repeating
it—especially since the discovery of your revolver. It is your right,
and we see no harm in it. We should have liked to put some further
questions to Daddy Jacques—Jacques—Louis Moustier—but the inquiry of
the examining magistrate, which is being carried on at the château,
makes it impossible for us to gain admission at the Glandier; and, as
to the oak wood, it is guarded by a wide circle of policemen, who are
jealously watching all traces that can lead to the pavilion, and that
may perhaps lead to the discovery of the assassin.
“We have also wished to question the concierges, but they are
invisible. Finally, we have waited in a roadside inn, not far from the
gate of the château, for the departure of Monsieur de Marquet, the
magistrate of Corbeil. At half-past five we saw him and his clerk and,
before he was able to enter his carriage, had an opportunity to ask him
the following question:—
“‘Can you, Monsieur de Marquet, give us any information as to this
affair, without inconvenience to the course of your inquiry?’
“‘It is impossible for us to do it,’ replied Monsieur de Marquet.
‘I can only say that it is the strangest affair I have ever known.
The more we think we know something, the further we are from knowing
anything!’
“We asked Monsieur de Marquet to be good enough to explain his last
words; and this is what he said,—the importance of which no one will
fail to recognise:—
“‘If nothing is added to the material facts so far established, I
fear that the mystery which surrounds the abominable crime of which
Mademoiselle Stangerson has been the victim will never be brought
to light; but it is to be hoped, for the sake of our human reason,
that the examination of the walls, and of the ceiling of The Yellow
Room—an examination which I shall to-morrow intrust to the builder who
constructed the pavilion four years ago—will afford us the proof that
may not discourage us. For the problem is this: we know by what way the
assassin gained admission,—he entered by the door and hid himself under
the bed, awaiting Mademoiselle Stangerson. But how did he leave? How
did he escape? If no trap, no secret door, no hiding-place, no opening
of any sort is found; if the examination of the walls—even to the
demolition of the pavilion—does not reveal any passage practicable—not
only for a human being, but for any being whatsoever—if the ceiling
shows no crack, if the floor hides no underground passage, one must
really believe in the Devil, as Daddy Jacques says!’”
And the anonymous writer in the “Matin” added in this article—which I
have selected as the most interesting of all those that were published
on the subject of this affair—that the examining magistrate appeared to
place a peculiar significance to the last sentence: “One must really
believe in the Devil, as Jacques says.”
The article concluded with these lines: “We wanted to know what Daddy
Jacques meant by the cry of the Bête du Bon Dieu. The landlord of the
Donjon Inn explained to us that it is the particularly sinister cry
which is uttered sometimes at night by the cat of an old woman,—Mother
Angenoux, as she is called in the country. Mother Angenoux is a sort of
saint, who lives in a hut in the heart of the forest, not far from the
grotto of Sainte-Geneviève.
“The Yellow Room, the Bête du Bon Dieu, Mother Angenoux, the Devil,
Sainte-Geneviève, Daddy Jacques,—here is a well entangled crime which
the stroke of a pickaxe in the wall may disentangle for us to-morrow.
Let us at least hope that, for the sake of our human reason, as the
examining magistrate says. Meanwhile, it is expected that Mademoiselle
Stangerson—who has not ceased to be delirious and only pronounces one
word distinctly, ‘Murderer! Murderer!’—will not live through the night.”
In conclusion, and at a late hour, the same journal announced that the
Chief of the Sûreté had telegraphed to the famous detective, Frédéric
Larsan, who had been sent to London for an affair of stolen securities,
to return immediately to Paris.
Chapter II
In Which Joseph Rouletabille Appears for the First Time
I remember as well as if it had occurred yesterday, the entry of young
Rouletabille into my bedroom that morning. It was about eight o’clock
and I was still in bed reading the article in the “Matin” relative to
the Glandier crime.
But, before going further, it is time that I present my friend to the
reader.
I first knew Joseph Rouletabille when he was a young reporter. At that
time I was a beginner at the Bar and often met him in the corridors of
examining magistrates, when I had gone to get a “permit to communicate”
for the prison of Mazas, or for Saint-Lazare. He had, as they say, “a
good nut.” He seemed to have taken his head—round as a bullet—out of
a box of marbles, and it is from that, I think, that his comrades of
the press—all determined billiard-players—had given him that nickname,
which was to stick to him and be made illustrious by him. He was always
as red as a tomato, now gay as a lark, now grave as a judge. How, while
still so young—he was only sixteen and a half years old when I saw him
for the first time—had he already won his way on the press? That was
what everybody who came into contact with him might have asked, if they
had not known his history. At the time of the affair of the woman cut
in pieces in the Rue Oberskampf—another forgotten story—he had taken to
one of the editors of the “Epoque,”—a paper then rivalling the “Matin”
for information,—the left foot, which was missing from the basket in
which the gruesome remains were discovered. For this left foot the
police had been vainly searching for a week, and young Rouletabille
had found it in a drain where nobody had thought of looking for it.
To do that he had dressed himself as an extra sewer-man, one of a
number engaged by the administration of the city of Paris, owing to an
overflow of the Seine.
When the editor-in-chief was in possession of the precious foot and
informed as to the train of intelligent deductions the boy had been
led to make, he was divided between the admiration he felt for such
detective cunning in a brain of a lad of sixteen years, and delight at
being able to exhibit, in the “morgue window” of his paper, the left
foot of the Rue Oberkampf.
“This foot,” he cried, “will make a great headline.”
Then, when he had confided the gruesome packet to the medical lawyer
attached to the journal, he asked the lad, who was shortly to become
famous as Rouletabille, what he would expect to earn as a general
reporter on the “Epoque”?
“Two hundred francs a month,” the youngster replied modestly, hardly
able to breathe from surprise at the proposal.
“You shall have two hundred and fifty,” said the editor-in-chief; “only
you must tell everybody that you have been engaged on the paper for a
month. Let it be quite understood that it was not you but the ‘Epoque’
that discovered the left foot of the Rue Oberkampf. Here, my young
friend, the man is nothing, the paper everything.”
Having said this, he begged the new reporter to retire, but before the
youth had reached the door he called him back to ask his name. The
other replied:—
“Joseph Josephine.”
“That’s not a name,” said the editor-in-chief, “but since you will not
be required to sign what you write it is of no consequence.”
The boy-faced reporter speedily made himself many friends, for he was
serviceable and gifted with a good humour that enchanted the most
severe-tempered and disarmed the most zealous of his companions. At
the Bar café, where the reporters assembled before going to any of
the courts, or to the Prefecture, in search of their news of crime,
he began to win a reputation as an unraveller of intricate and
obscure affairs which found its way to the office of the Chief of the
Sûreté. When a case was worth the trouble and Rouletabille—he had
already been given his nickname—had been started on the scent by his
editor-in-chief, he often got the better of the most famous detective.
It was at the Bar café that I became intimately acquainted with him.
Criminal lawyers and journalists are not enemies, the former need