Sundry Accounts

An instant later the cape had been replaced upon her shoulders, hiding her state from curious eyes, but in that same brief space of time she must have seen leaning from the train, which now again was in motion, the shape of her unknown champion, for she nodded her head as though in gratitude and good-by and her white face suddenly was lighted with what the passenger upon the car platform, seeing this through a sudden mist of tears, thought to be the bravest, most pitiable smile that ever she had seen.

The train doubled round an abrupt curve, in the sharpness of its swing almost throwing her off her feet, and when she had regained her balance and looked again the station was furlongs behind her, hidden from sight by intervening buildings.

It was that smile of farewell which acted as a flux to carry into the recipient's mind a resolution already forming. Into things her emotions were likely to lead her headlong and impetuously, but for a way out of them this somewhat unusual young woman named Smith generally had for her guide a certain clear quality of reasoning, backed by an intuition which helped her frequently to achieve satisfactory results. So it was with her in this instance.

Her share of the business in Troy completed, as speedily it was, she stayed in Albany for half a day on her way back and called upon the governor. At first sight he liked her, for her good looks, for her trigness, her directness and more than any of these for the excellent mental poise which so patently was a part of her. The outcome of her visit to him and his enthusiastic admiration for her was that the district attorney of Westchester County shortly thereafter instituted an investigation, the chief fruitage of that investigation being embodied in a somewhat longish letter from him, which Miss Smith read in her studio apartment one afternoon perhaps three weeks after the date of her meeting on trainboard with that adjudged maniac, the girl Margaret Vinsolving.

To the letter was a polite preamble. She skipped it. We may do well to follow her lead and come to the body of it, which ran like this:

"Mrs. Janet Vinsolving is the widow of a colonel in our Regular Army. My information is that she is a woman of culture and refinement. Since the death of her husband some eight years ago she has been residing in a small home which she owns in the outskirts of Pleasantdale village in this county. From the fact that she keeps no servants and from other facts brought to me I gather that she is in very modest circumstances. She has been living quite alone except for the daughter, Margaret, who is her only child. The daughter was educated in the public schools of the county. Lately she has been studying applied designing with a view to becoming an interior decorator."

"Ah, now I know another reason why I was drawn to her!" interpolated the reader, speaking to herself. With heightened interest she read on:

"On inquiry it appears that among her former schoolmates and teachers she was popular, though not inclined to make intimates. She is reputed to have been rather high-tempered, but seemingly throughout her childhood and young girlhood there was nothing about her conduct or appearance to indicate a disordered mind. Indeed there was no suggestion of mental aberration on her part from any source until within the past month. However, I should add that it is rather hard to arrive at any accurate estimate of her general behavior by reason of the fact that mother and daughter led so secluded a life. They had acquaintances in the community, but apparently no close friends there or elsewhere.

"About four weeks ago, on the twenty-eighth of last month to be exact, the mother, described to me as being in a state of great distress, visited Justice Cannavan, then sitting in chambers at White Plains, and asking for a private interview with him, requested an inquiry into the sanity of the girl Margaret, with a view, as she explained, of protecting her own life. Her daughter, she alleged, had without warning developed a homicidal tendency aimed at the applicant.

"According to Mrs. Vinsolving, the girl, who always theretofore had been a devoted and affectionate child, had made at least five separate and distinct attempts to kill her, first by putting poison into her food and later by attempting to strangle her at night in her bed. Next only to a natural desire to have her own physical safety insured, the mother was apparently inspired by a wish to surround the truth regarding her beloved child's aberration with as much secrecy as possible. At the same time she realized that a certain amount of publicity was inevitable.

"Acting under the statutes, the justice appointed two reputable practicing physicians of the county, namely Dr. Ernest Malt, of Wincorah, and Dr. James P. McGlore, of Pleasantdale, to sit as a commission for the purpose of inquiring into Miss Vinsolving's mental state. The mother, still exhibiting every evidence of maternal grief, appeared before these gentlemen and repeated in detail the account of the attacks made upon her, as previously described to His Honor.

"The girl was then brought before the commission. It was explained to her that under the law she had the right to demand a hearing in open court before a jury chosen to pass upon her sanity. This she waived, but from this point on throughout the inquiry she steadfastly declined to make answers to the questions propounded to her by the members of the commission in an effort to ascertain her mental status, but on the contrary persistently maintained a silence which they interpreted as a phase of insane cunning characteristic of a type of abnormality not often encountered, but in their opinion the more sinister and significant because of its rarity.

"They accordingly drew up a finding setting forth that in their opinion and deliberate judgment the unfortunate young woman was suffering from a progressive and therefore probably incurable form of dementia. The justice immediately signed the necessary orders for her detention and commitment. To save the daughter from being sent to a state institution the mother provided funds sufficient for her care at Doctor Shorter's sanitarium, an establishment of unimpeachable reputation, and she accordingly was taken there in proper custody, as you yourself are aware.

"My information from the sanitarium, which I procured in response to your request, and the governor's instructions to me for a full inquiry into all the circumstances is that since her confinement Miss Vinsolving has been under constant observation. She has been orderly and obedient and except for slightly melancholic tendencies, which might easily be provoked by the nature of her environment, is quite natural in her behavior. I draw the inference, however, that this docility may be merely the forerunner of an outburst at any time.

"Altogether my investigation convinces me that no miscarriage of the law could possibly have occurred in this instance. There is certainly no ground for suspecting that the mother had any ulterior or improper motive in seeking to have her daughter and sole companion deprived of liberty. Neither the mother nor any other person alive can hope to profit in a financial sense by reason of the girl's temporary or permanent detention.

"The girl herself is without means of her own. The mother for her maintenance is largely dependent upon the pension she receives from the United States Government. The girl had no income or estate of her own and no expectancy of any inheritance from any imaginable source other than the small estate she will legally inherit at the death of her mother. Finally I may add that nowhere in the case has there developed any suggestion of a scandal in the life of mother or daughter or of any clandestine love affair on the part of either.

"These briefly are the available facts as compiled by a trustworthy member of my staff, Assistant District Attorney Horace Wilkes, to whom I detailed the duty of making a painstaking inquiry. If I may hereafter be of service to you in this matter or any other matter, kindly command me. I have the honor to be,

"Yours etc., etc."

With a little gesture of despairful resignation Miss Smith laid the letter down. Well, there was nothing more she could do; nothing more to be done. She had come to a blind end. The proof was conclusive of the worst. But in her thoughts, waking and sleeping, persisted the image of that gallant, pathetic little figure which she had seen last at the Peekskill station, bound, helpless, alone and all so courageously facing what to most of us would be worse than death itself. Awake or in sleep she could not get it out of her mind.

At length one night following on a day which for the greater part she had spent in a study of the somewhat curious laws that in New York State – as well as in divers other states of the Union – govern the procedure touching certain classes coming within purview of the code, she awoke in the little hours preceding the dawn to find herself saying aloud: "There's something wrong – there must be – there has to be!"

Until daylight and after she lay there planning a course of action until finally she had it completed. True, it was a grasping at feeble straws, but even so she meant to follow along the only course which seemed open to her.

First she did some long-distance telephoning. Then immediately after breakfast she sent to the garage round the corner for her runabout and in it she rode up through the city and on into Westchester, now beginning to flaunt the circus colors of a gorgeous Indian summer. An hour and a half of steady driving brought her to the village of Pleasantdale. She found it a place well named, seeing that it was tucked down in a cove among the hills between the Hudson on the one side and the Sound on the other.

Following the directions given her by a lone policeman on duty in the tiny public square, she ran two blocks along the main street and drew up where a window sign giving name and hours advertised that James P. McGlore, M.D., here professionally received patients in his office on the lower floor of his place of residence. A maidservant answered the caller's knock, and showing her into a chamber furnished like a parlor which had started out to be a reception room and then had tried – too late – to change back again into a parlor, bade her wait. She did not have long to wait. Almost immediately an inner door opened and in the opening appeared the short and blocky figure of a somewhat elderly, old-fashioned-looking man with a square homely face – a face which instantly she classified as belonging to a rather stupid, very dogmatic and utterly honest man. He had outjutting, belligerent eyebrows and a stubborn underjaw that was badly undershot. He spoke as he entered and his tone was noticeably not cordial.

"The girl tells me your name is Smith. I suppose from that you're the young person that the district attorney telephoned me about an hour or so ago. Well, how can I serve you?"

"Perhaps, doctor, the district attorney told you I had interested myself in the case of the Vinsolving girl – Margaret Vinsolving," she began. "I had intended to call also upon your associate, Doctor Malt, over at Wincorah, but I learn he is away."

"Yes, yes," he said with a sort of hurried petulance. "Know all about that. Malt's like a lot of these young new physicians – always running off on vacations. Mustn't hold me responsible for his absences. Got no time to think about the other fellow. Own affairs are enough – keep me busy. Well, go on, why don't you? You were speaking of the Vinsolving girl. Well, what of her?"

"I was saying that I had interested myself in her case and – "

He snapped in: "One moment. Let's get this all straightened out before we start. May I inquire if you are closely related to the young person in question?"

"I am not. I never saw her but once."

"Are you by any chance a close friend of the young woman?"

He towered over her, for she was seated and he had not offered to sit down. Indeed throughout the interview he remained standing.

Looking up at him, where he glowered above her, she answered back promptly:

"As I was saying, I never saw her but once – that was on the day she was carried away to be placed in confinement. So I cannot call myself her friend exactly, though I would like to be her friend. It was because of the sympathy which her position – and I might add, her personality – roused in me that I have taken the liberty of coming here to see you about her."

Under his breath he growled and grunted and puffed certain sounds. She caught the purport of at least two of the words.

"Pardon me, doctor," she said briskly, "but I am not an amateur philanthropist. I trust I'm not an amateur anything. I am a business woman earning my own living by my own labors and I pay taxes and for the past year or so I have been a citizen and a voter. Please do not regard me merely as an officious meddler – a busybody with nothing to do except to mind other people's affairs. It was quite by chance that I came upon this poor child and learned something of her unhappy state."

The choleric brows went up like twin stress marks accenting unspoken skepticism.

"A child – of twenty-four?" he commented ironically.

"A child, measured by my age or yours. As I told you, I met her quite accidentally. She appealed to me so – such a plucky, helpless, friendless little thing she seemed with those hideous leather straps binding her."

"Do you mean to imply that she was being mistreated by those who had her in charge?"

"No, her escorts – or attendants or warders or guards or whatever one might call them – seemed kindly enough, according to their lights. But she was so quiet, so passive that I – "

"Well, would you expect anyone who felt a proper sense of responsibility to suffer dangerous maniacs to run at large without restraint or control of any sort upon their limbs and their actions?"

"But, doctor, that is just the point – are you so entirely sure that she is a dangerous maniac? That is what I want to ask you – whether there isn't a possibility, however remote, that a mistake may conceivably have been made? Please don't misunderstand me," she interjected quickly, seeing how he – already stiff and bristly – had at her words stiffened and bristled still more. "I do not mean to intimate that anything unethical has been done. In fact I am quite sure that everything has been quite ethical. And I am not questioning your professional standing or decrying your abilities.

"But as I understand it, neither you nor Doctor Malt is avowedly an alienist. I assume that neither of you has ever specialized in nervous or mental disorders. Such being the case, don't you agree with me – this idea has just occurred to me – that if an alienist, a man especially versed in these things rather than a general practitioner, however experienced and competent, were called in even now – "

"And you just said you were not reflecting upon my professional abilities!"

His tone was heavily sarcastic.

"Of course I am not! I beg your pardon if my poor choice of language has conveyed any such impression. What I am trying to get at, doctor, in my inexpert way, is that I talked with this girl, and while I exchanged only a few words with her, nevertheless what she said – yes, and her bearing as well, her look, everything about her – impressed me as being entirely rational."

He fixed her with a hostile glare and at her he aimed a blunt gimlet of a forefinger.

"Are you quite sure you are entirely sane yourself?"

"I trust I am fairly normal."

"Got any little funny quirks in your brain? Any little temperamental crotchets in which you differ from the run of people round you? Think now!"

"Well," she confessed, "I don't like cats – I hate cats. And I don't like figured wall paper. And I don't like – "

"That will be sufficient. Take the first point: You hate cats. On that count alone any confirmed cat lover would regard you as being as crazy as a March hare. But until you start going round trying to kill other people's cats or trying to kill other people who own cats there's probably no danger that anyone will prefer charges of lunacy against you and have you locked up."

She smiled a little in spite of her earnestness.

"Perhaps it is symptomatic of a lesion in my brain that I should be concerning myself in the case of a strange girl whom I have seen but once – is that also in your thoughts, Doctor McGlore?"

"We'll waive that," he said. "For the sake of argument we'll concede that your indicative peculiarities assume a harmless phase at present. But this Vinsolving girl's case is different – hers were not harmless. Her acts were amply conclusive to establish proof of her mental condition."

"From the district attorney's statement to me I rather got the impression that she did not indulge in any abnormal conduct while before you for examination."

"Did he tell you of her blank refusal to answer the simplest of the questions my associate and I put to her?"

"Doctor," she countered, seeking to woo him into a better humor, "would you construe silence on a woman's part as necessarily a mark of insanity? It is a rare thing, I concede. But might it not sometimes be an admirable thing as well?"

But this gruff old man was not to be cajoled into pleasanter channels than the course his mood steered for him.

"We'll waive that too. Anyhow, the mother's evidence was enough."

"But was there anything else other than the mother's unsupported story for you to go on and be guided by?"

"What else was needed?" he retorted angrily. "What motive could the mother have except the motives that were prompted by mother love? That was a devoted, desolated woman if ever I saw one. Look here! A daughter without cause suddenly turns upon her mother and tries to kill her. Well, then, either she's turned criminal or she has gone crazy!

"But why should I go on debating with you a matter which you don't know anything about in the first place and in which you have no call to interfere in the second place?

"I don't want to be sharp with you, young woman, but that's the plain fact. The duty which I undertook under the law and as a reputable physician was not a pleasant one, and it becomes all the less pleasant when an unqualified layman – laywoman if you prefer to phrase it that way – cross-examines me on my judgment."

"Doctor, let me repeat again I have not sought to cross-question you or belittle your knowledge. But you speak of the law. Do you not think it a monstrous thing that two men even though they be of high standing in their profession as general practitioners, but without special acquaintance with mental derangements – I am not speaking of this particular case now but of hundreds of other cases – do you not think it a wrong thing that two such persons may pass upon a third person's sanity and upon the uncorroborated testimony of some fourth person recommend the confinement of the accused third person in an asylum for the insane?"

"I suppose you know a person so complained of – or accused, as you put it – has the right to a jury trial in open court. This girl that you're so worked up about had that right. She waived it."

"But is a presumably demented person a fit judge of his or her own best course of conduct? In your opinion shouldn't there be other safeguards in their interests to insure against what conceivably might be a terrible error or a terrible injustice?"

He didn't exactly sneer, but he indulged himself in the first cousin of a sneer.

"You've evidently been fortifying yourself to give me a battle – reading up on the subject, eh?"

"I've been reading up on the subject – not, though, for the purpose of entering into a joint debate on the subject with anyone. But, doctor, I have read enough to startle me. I never knew before there were such laws on the statute books. And I have learned about another case, the case of that rich man – a multimillionaire the papers called him, which means I suppose that at least he was well-to-do. You remember about him, I am sure? A commission declared him of unsound mind. He got away to another state where the legal processes of this state could not reach him. The courts of that other state declared him mentally competent and capable of managing his own affairs – and for a period of years he did manage them. Here the other month, under a pledge of safe conduct, he returned to New York on legal business and while he was here he carried his cause to a higher court and that court ruled him to be sane and entitled to his complete freedom of body and action. But for years he had been a pseudofugitive in enforced exile and for years he had carried the stigma of having been adjudged insane. This thing happened, incredible as it sounds. It might happen again to-day or to-morrow. It – "

"Excuse me for interrupting your flow of eloquence," he said with a labored politeness, "but I thought you came here to discuss the case of a girl named Vinsolving, not the case of a man I never heard of before. Now, at least I'm not going to discuss generalities with you and I'm not going to sit here and join with you in questioning the workings of the law either. The laws are good enough for me as they stand. I'm a law-abiding citizen, not one of these red-eyed socialistic Bolsheviks that are forever trying to tear down things. I believe in taking the laws as I find them. Let well enough alone – that's my motto, young woman. And there are a whole lot more like me in this country."

"Pardon me for breaking in on you, sir," she said, fighting hard to keep her temper, "but neither am I a socialist or a Bolshevik."

"Then I reckon probably you're one of these rampant suffragists. Anyhow, what's the use of discussing abstracts? If you don't like the law why don't you have it changed?"

"That's one of the very things I hope before long to try to do," she replied.

"It'll keep you pretty busy," he responded with a sniff of profound disapproval. "But then you seem to have a lot of spare time on your hands to spend in crusading round. Well, I haven't. I've got my patients to see to. One of 'em is waiting for me now – if you'll kindly excuse me?"

She rose.

"I'm sorry," she said sincerely, "if either my mission or my language has irritated you. I seem somehow to have defeated the purpose that brought me – I mean a faint hope that perhaps somehow I might help that girl. Something tells me – call it intuition or sentimentality or what you will – but something tells me I must keep on trying to help her. I only wish I could make you share my point of view."

"Well, you can't. Say, see here, why don't you go to see the mother? I judge she might convince you that you are on the wrong tack, even if I can't."

"That's exactly what I mean to do," she declared.

Something inside her brain gave a little jump. It was curious that she had not thought of it before; even more curious that his labored sarcasms had been required to set her on this new trail.

"Well, at that, you'd better think twice before you go," he retorted. "She was a mighty badly broken-up woman the last time I saw her, but even so I judge she's still got spunk enough left in her to resent having an unauthorized and uninvited stranger coming about, seeking to pry into her own private sorrow. But it's your affair, not mine. Besides, judging by everything, you probably don't think my advice is worth much anyhow."

"Oh, yes, but I do – I do indeed! And I thank you for it."

"Don't mention it! And good day!"

The slamming of the inner door behind him made an appropriate exclamation point to punctuate the brevity of his offended and indignant departure. For a moment she felt like laughing outright. Then she felt like crying. Then she did neither. She left.

"Poor, old opinionated, stupid old, conscientious old thing!" she was saying to herself as she let herself, unattended, out of the front door. "And yet I'll wager he would sit up all night and work his fingers to the bone trying to save a life. And when it comes to serving poor people without expecting payment or even asking for it, I know he is a perfect dear. Besides, I should be grateful to him – he gave me an idea. I don't know where he got it from either – I don't believe he ever had so very many of his own."

Again the handy cop in the communal center set her upon her way. But when she came to the destination she sought – a small, rather shabby cottage standing a mile or so westward from the middle of things communal, out in the fringes of the village where outlying homesteads tailed away into avowed farmsteads – the house itself was closed up fast and tight. The shutters all were closely drawn and against the gatepost was fastened a newly painted sign reading: "For Sale or Rent. Apply to Searle, the Up-to-Date Real Estate Man, Next Door to Pythian Hall."