The Weak-Eyed Bat

“By honestly, you mean by sending some poor millionaire to an insane asylum so his relatives can spend his money? All right. I know how I stand. You are to be refused admittance to this house from now on. You have no official standing which gives you the right to spy on my household and entrap my nephew into making dangerous admissions.”

Prye got to his feet. “It wasn’t a millionaire. He isn’t in an asylum. Ralph made no dangerous admission that I didn’t already know. And I’ll have my official standing by tomorrow morning. But by that time you’ll have changed your mind again.”

“Very likely,” Emily said wearily. “Good night.”

It was eight o’clock and nearly dark when Prye left Miss Bonner’s house. The sky growled, and in the west an army of clouds was mobilizing, and suddenly they began to march across the sky. Their guns flashed, and soft little bullets of rain pelted the lake and the earth.

Nora was waiting for him at his cottage, huddled beside the window watching the storm.

“Hello,” she said. “I’ve come to sit out the storm with you.”

Prye took off his wet coat and she hung it up for him.

“Scared?” he said. “I thought it took a lot to scare the Irish.”

“It does. This is it. The storms up here are too primitive for my taste.” She curled up in a chair beside the fireplace and lit a cigarette. “In the city you simply draw the curtains and read a book. But in the country you review your past, ask humbly for pardon, and wait for the end.”

She paused.

“Well, do I continue this soliloquy or would you like to chime in?”

“I’m thinking,” Prye said.

Ten minutes later he was still thinking and ten minutes after that Nora announced that she might as well go home.

“No. Stay a while,” Prye said. “I like having you around. It helps me think.”

“That’s practically a proposal.” Nora sighed, and relapsed once more into a short silence.

“Damn it all,” she said in a shaky voice. “I don’t want you to think. I need cheering. I wish that lightning would either strike me or go away. It’s like walking in front of a gang of small boys with snowballs in their hands. I bet you’re not thinking anyway.”

“You’re a nasty little cynic,” Prye said. “Just to prove that I’m thinking I’ll do it out loud. There are two things I’d like to know: first, why did the murderer choose that particular time and place?”

“Because if he hadn’t chosen that particular time and place he would have had to choose some other particular time and place. What next?”

“What happened to Joan’s engagement ring?”

“She flung it at Ralph’s head. Anything else?”

“Have you ever seen the ring?”

“Certainly. So have you. She was wearing it when she was tossing herself around in here yesterday. It’s a square-cut emerald with four diamonds, and Miss Bonner told Mary who told Susan who told me that it cost two thousand dollars. Like the nasty little cynic I am, I deduct twenty-five percent for feminine inaccuracy and that leaves fifteen hundred dollars. Which is not enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Reward for murder,” Nora said. “Unless some tramp killed her. But so many of us had motives that it seems redundant to consider outsiders.”

“Quite redundant,” Prye said gravely. “There are no tramps around here and tramps don’t often kill. Besides, no average-sized man would have stood a chance of overpowering Joan.”

“She was very strong,” Nora said, nodding.

“Most of them are.” He was quiet a moment and Nora looked up, puzzled.

“What do you mean?”

“An uninhibited person has much more strength and energy than a conventional and sane person of the same stature.”

“Are you really telling me that strength, ordinary physical strength, is partly mental?” she asked.

“I believe so,” Prye said, smiling. “You are holding to the layman’s rigid distinctions between mind and body. The distinction is fine for philosophers, but it’s anathema for psychologists. I consider the mind and the body so much of a unit that I believe the muscles themselves have the power to remember, to think, if you will. But to go back to the strength exhibited by a manic-depressive, for instance, in his manic phase.

“His activity is superhuman, and if you have never seen it, unbelievable. He moves constantly, tearing his clothes or his mattress, talking or swearing or singing at the top of his lungs, not taking time off even to eat, and sleeping almost not at all. It is violent and undirected activity. He performs the first thing that comes into his mind, heedless of the consequences to himself, to others, or to the objects he handles. In a word, he is thoroughly uninhibited.