ds of Nebraska, or
whitened with Canadian snows near the eternal noise of Niagara. And
before touching on this solid and simple pattern itself, I may remark
that the same system of symmetry runs through all the details of the
interior. As one hotel is like another hotel, so one hotel floor is like
another hotel floor. If the passage outside your bedroom door, or
hallway as it is called, contains, let us say, a small table with a
green vase and a stuffed flamingo, or some trifle of the sort, you may
be perfectly certain that there is exactly the same table, vase, and
flamingo on every one of the thirty-two landings of that towering
habitation. This is where it differs most perhaps from the crooked
landings and unexpected levels of the old English inns, even when they
call themselves hotels. To me there was something weird, like a magic
multiplication, in the exquisite sameness of these suites. It seemed to
suggest the still atmosphere of some eerie psychological story. I once
myself entertained the notion of a story, in which a man was to be
prevented from entering his house (the scene of some crime or calamity)
by people who painted and furnished the next house to look exactly like
it; the assimilation going to the most fantastic lengths, such as
altering the numbering of houses in the street. I came to America and
found an hotel fitted and upholstered throughout for the enactment of my
phantasmal fraud. I offer the skeleton of my story with all humility to
some of the admirable lady writers of detective stories in America, to
Miss Carolyn Wells, or Miss Mary Roberts Rhinehart, or Mrs. A. K. Green
of the unforgotten Leavenworth Case. Surely it might be possible for the
unsophisticated Nimrod K. Moose, of Yellow Dog Flat, to come to New York
and be entangled somehow in this net of repetitions or recurrences.
Surely something tells me that his beautiful daughter, the Rose of Red
Murder Gulch, might seek for him in vain amid the apparently
unmistakable surroundings of the thirty-second floor, while he was being
quietly butchered by the floor-clerk on the thirty-third floor, an agent
of the Green Claw (that formidable organisation); and all because the
two floors looked exactly alike to the virginal Western eye. The
original point of my own story was that the man to be entrapped walked
into his own house after all, in spite of it being differently painted
and numbered, simply because he was absent-minded and used to taking a