29 September.—After I had tidied myself,
I went down to Dr. Seward’s study. At
the door I paused a moment, for I thought I heard him
talking with some one. As, however, he had pressed
me to be quick, I knocked at the door, and on his
calling out, “Come in,” I entered.
To my intense surprise, there was no one with him.
He was quite alone, and on the table opposite him
was what I knew at once from the description to be
a phonograph. I had never seen one, and was much
interested.
“I hope I did not keep you waiting,” I
said, “but I stayed at the door as I heard you
talking, and thought there was someone with you.”
“Oh,” he replied with a smile, “I
was only entering my diary.”
“Your diary?” I asked him in surprise.
“Yes,” he answered. “I keep
it in this.” As he spoke he laid his hand
on the phonograph. I felt quite excited over
it, and blurted out, “Why, this beats even shorthand!
May I hear it say something?”
“Certainly,” he replied with alacrity,
and stood up to put it in train for speaking.
Then he paused, and a troubled look overspread his
face.
“The fact is,” he began awkwardly, “I
only keep my diary in it, and as it is entirely, almost
entirely, about my cases it may be awkward, that is,
I mean . . .” He stopped, and I tried to
help him out of his embarrassment.
“You helped to attend dear Lucy at the end.
Let me hear how she died, for all that I know of
her, I shall be very grateful. She was very,
very dear to me.”
To my surprise, he answered, with a horrorstruck look
in his face, “Tell you of her death? Not
for the wide world!”
“Why not?” I asked, for some grave, terrible
feeling was coming over me.
Again he paused, and I could see that he was trying
to invent an excuse. At length, he stammered
out, “You see, I do not know how to pick out
any particular part of the diary.”
Even while he was speaking an idea dawned upon him,
and he said with unconscious simplicity, in a different
voice, and with the naivete of a child, “that’s
quite true, upon my honour. Honest Indian!”
I could not but smile, at which he grimaced.
“I gave myself away that time!” he said.
“But do you know that, although I have kept
the diary for months past, it never once struck me
how I was going to find any particular part of it
in case I wanted to look it up?”
By this time my mind was made up that the diary of
a doctor who attended Lucy might have something to
add to the sum of our knowledge of that terrible Being,
and I said boldly, “Then, Dr. Seward, you had
better let me copy it out for you on my typewriter.”
He grew to a positively deathly pallor as he said,
“No! No! No! For all the world.
I wouldn’t let you know that terrible story!”
Then it was terrible. My intuition was right!
For a moment, I thought, and as my eyes ranged the
room, unconsciously looking for something or some
opportunity to aid me, they lit on a great batch of
typewriting on the table. His eyes caught the
look in mine, and without his thinking, followed their
direction. As they saw the parcel he realized
my meaning.
