THE STRANGER
To
Adrian L. Burns
WHEN my friend Trevor Hempel disappeared from among all his friends, he left me the following letter:
I am off to Australia to-morrow, and I’m going without saying farewell to any one. It is a choice between my committing murder and leaving Europe for ever. Nature has played me false—has tricked me. Between my wife and me she has placed something monstrous: a “sport” so hideous that to live any longer as a husband would mean a swift corrosion of anything good that is left of me.
I felt, my dear old friend, that I must speak out my mind to some one. It is a selfish feeling. I want to rid myself of the obsession of this wickedness. I want you to share its knowledge with me. The thing is of such a kind that it ought not to have happened. Nature ought not to lie in wait for us and spring out like a baboon from behind a tree. We know Nature is cruel, but not until lately did I know she could be malignant, damnably malignant, looking years ahead, calculating craftily all the time....
It is nine years since I met the woman who afterwards became my wife. I was in Salonika on one of my quarterly business visits. At the house of Madame Leconte de Stran it was that I met Judith for the first time. Her husband was with her: a dark evil man, short, with a great head and depth of chest and long, deformed arms. She was as spiritual as he was gross: very quiet, but full of character, and with a mind both strong and active.
I remember going up to Madame de Stran.
“Who is that woman standing against the piano?” I asked.