In both, extraordinary interest was stirred by the maniacal savagery unleashed. The settings of the |Androgynes Art Connoisseurs.| crimes were alike bizarre. The characters of both victims were most peculiar, yet alike. And the men had been friends. [Androgynes, in all large cities, form little cliques like the Cercle Hermaphroditos.]
X was a bachelor of fifty-six, an electrical expert, an art connoisseur, and collector of jewels and weapons. Though in more than comfortable financial circumstances, he resided entirely alone, doing his own housework [common manner of life of androgynes] in a 6-room flat on the ground-floor of the Q Apartments. [I know one androgyne who purposely chose a ground-floor apartment in a house without hall-boy so he could go and come in his disguise with less chance of encountering other tenants.] He had made it his home for ten years. [This proves his outward decency, as well, as liberality to blackmailers.] The artistic luxury of its furnishings was striking. The walls were galleries of fine old prints, original oils, and copies of masters, and displayed a strange collection of swords, sabres, and barbarian spears. [Well-to-do androgynes possess the most highly ornamented homes of any class of society. While congenitally too “yellow” themselves to handle the weapons of warfare, such are generally sexual fetishes with them, being symbols of the highest function of the true man.]
Live under Sword of Damocles.
In this handsome, lonely abode, the detectives made a discovery of significance: X had lived in extraordinary fear of the lawless invasion of his rooms. [Cultured androgynes, realizing how bitterly they are hated by prudes, live constantly under the sword of Damocles. Every night they fall asleep in the fear of being murdered. They are uncommonly careful in locking themselves in. The author tries his locks twice before retiring. While a child, he, every night before getting into bed, looked to see whether there was not a murderer under it. Androgynes are extreme cowards.] For he had used his expertness with delicate electrical devices to set his rooms with a maze of traps for any person who might try to enter it by force or stealth. Doors, windows, etc., were invisibly strung with delicate wires. With the controlling alarm device set, scarcely an article might be touched without the ringing of sharp bells of warning.
But that thieves were those of whom he lived in dread was contradicted by other facts. X, far from being a recluse, frequented hotels and cafes and was prone to make chance acquaintances, especially of young men, while going about extravagantly bejewelled and habitually carrying a large roll of bills which it was a pet vanity to display.
His social hours were spent almost entirely with young men. He had been known to comment: “I keep young because I associate with the young.” The Q servants said these young-men callers never behaved boisterously. All were decorous and well dressed. [A small proportion of cultured androgynes who live alone in their own homes entertain there adolescents who bear the earmarks of trustworthy gentlemen. X’s murderer could have been of no other type, but was in addition an extreme prude so far as concerns homosexuality. The cultured enjoin extreme noiselessness so as not to arouse suspicions of co-tenants of the same apartment house. The uncultured commonly receive any adolescent at all in their homes because having no fear of disgrace and blackmail. By “young men” the author of the excerpt evidently means those from eighteen to twenty-five, the age-group preferred, and almost exclusively cultivated, by androgynes.]
Androgyne Stamping Grounds.
The Q servants further said that X frequently started alone on strolls, many times, however, returning with a youthful companion, who would spend an hour or two with the elderly host. [The favorite New York localities for evening “strolls” of cultured androgynes for scraping acquaintance with a strange Hercules or Adonis are, in cold weather, the Broadway and the Fourteenth Street Rialtos and cafes; and in summer, Madison Square, Union Square, the southerly quarter of Central Park (the three park spaces most frequented at night by idle adolescents who would be glad to pick up a few dollars), the Battery (because frequented by common soldiers), and other localities frequented by uncommissioned warriors, the ideal occupation, as I have already said, for a real man in the eyes of androgynes. In the case of X, the Q men-servants probably saw through everything. The servant class often respect a cultured moneyed androgyne who treats them well, and they act only in a protecting capacity.]
Of woman visitors, there could be recalled but one—whitehaired, a few years older than X, said to be an aunt.
Investigators were astonished by the nicety, the fond care, with which X had done his own housekeeping. Floors, rugs, and every article were flawless of dust. In spick and span appearance, thoughtful and orderly arrangement of utensils, neatness of china closets, refrigerator and provision store-room, a feature of which latter were shelves lined with jars of homemade preserves labelled in handwriting, the |Bent for Woman’s Toil.| bachelor’s kitchen was fit to excite a housewife’s envy. [Androgynes take naturally to woman’s tasks.]