If you should read these letters all through at one sitting you would get
a very strange impression of the city. You would see a procession of
mysterious figures flitting through the streets, an unending swarm of dim
ones, queer ones. And then as you kept on reading this procession would
gradually focus into a single figure. This is because all the letters are
so nearly alike and because the mysterious ones offered as tips are
described in almost identical terms.
So the dim ones, the queer ones, would become a composite, and you would
have in your thought the image of a single one. A huge, nebulous
caricature--hooded, its head lowered, its eyes peering furtively from
under shaggy brows, its thin fingers fumbling under a great black cloak,
its feet moving in a soundless shuffle over the pavement.
Sometimes I have gone out and found the "woman of mystery" given in a
letter. Usually an embittered creature living in the memory of wrongs that
life has done her. Or a psychopathic case suffering from hallucinations or
at war with its own impulses. And each of them has said, "I hate people. I
don't like this neighborhood. And I keep to myself."
The letters all ask, "Who is this one?"
But that doesn't begin to answer the question the letters ask, "Who is
it?"
* * * * *
The story of the odd ones is perhaps no more interesting than the story
that might be written of the letters that "tip them off.
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