CHAPTER I
THROUGH MY NEIGHBOUR’S WINDOWS
What I am about to relate occurred but a few years ago—in the summer of ’99, in fact. You may remember that the heat that year was something fearful. Even old New Yorkers, inured by the sufferings of many summers, were overcome by it, and everyone who could, fled from the city. On the particular August day when this story begins, the temperature had been even more unbearable than usual, and approaching night brought no perceptible relief. After dining with Burton (a young doctor like myself), we spent the evening wandering about town trying to discover a cool spot.
At last, thoroughly exhausted by our vain search, I decided to turn in, hoping to sleep from sheer fatigue; but one glance at my stuffy little bedroom discouraged me. Dragging a divan before the window of the front room, I composed myself for the night with what resignation I could muster.
I found, however, that the light and noise from the street kept me awake; so, giving up sleep as a bad job, I decided to try my luck on the roof. Arming myself with a rug and a pipe, I stole softly upstairs. It was a beautiful starlight night, and after spreading my rug against a chimney and lighting my pipe I concluded that things really might be worse.
Across the street loomed the great Rosemere apartment-house, and I noted with surprise that, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour and of the season, several lights were still burning there. From two windows directly opposite, and on a level with me, light filtered dimly through lowered shades, and I wondered what possible motive people could have for shutting out the little air there was on such a night. My neighbours must be uncommonly suspicious, I thought, to fear observation from so unlikely a place as my roof; and yet that was the only spot from which they could by any chance be overlooked.
The only other light in the building shone clear and unobstructed through the open windows of the corresponding room two floors higher up. I was too far below to be able to look into this room, but I caught a suggestion of sumptuous satin hangings and could distinguish the tops of heavy gilt frames and of some flowering plants and palms.
As I sat idly looking upwards at these latter windows, my attention was suddenly arrested by the violent movement of one of the lace curtains. It was rolled into a cord by some unseen person who was presumably on the floor, and then dragged across the window. A dark object, which I took to be a human head, moved up and down among the palms, one of which fell with an audible crash. At the same moment I heard a woman’s voice raised in a cry of terror. I leaped to my feet in great excitement, but nothing further occurred.
After a minute or so the curtain fell back into its accustomed folds, and I distinctly saw a man moving swiftly away from the window supporting on his shoulder a fair-haired woman. Soon afterwards the lights in this room were extinguished, to be followed almost immediately by the illumination of the floor above.
What I had just seen and heard would not have surprised me in a tenement, but that such scenes could take place in a respectable house like the Rosemere, inhabited largely by fashionable people, was indeed startling. Who could the couple be? And what could have happened? Had the man, coming home drunk, proceeded to beat the woman and been partially sobered by her cry; or was the woman subject to hysteria, or even insane? I remembered that the apartments were what are commonly known as double-deckers. That is to say: each one contained two floors, connected by a private staircase—the living rooms below, the bedrooms above. So I concluded, from seeing a light in what was in all probability a bedroom, that the struggle, or whatever the commotion had been, was over, and that the victim and her assailant, or perhaps the patient and her nurse, had gone quietly, and I trusted amicably, to bed.