One day in August a man disappeared. He had simply set out for the seashore on a holiday, scarcely half a day away by train, and nothing more was ever heard of him. Investigation by the police and inquiries in the newspapers had both proved fruitless.

Of course, missing persons are not really uncommon. According to the statistics, several hundred disappearances are reported every year. Moreover, the proportion of those found again is unexpectedly small. Murders or accidents always leave some clear piece of evidence, and the motives for kidnapping are normally ascertainable. But if the instance does not come under some such heading, clues—and this is especially true in the case of missing persons—are extremely difficult to come by. Many disappearances, for example, may be described as simple escape.

In the case of this man, also, the clues were negligible.

Though his general destination was known, there had been no report from the area that a body had been discovered. By its very nature, it was inconceivable that his work involved some secret for which he might have been abducted. His quite normal behavior had not given the slightest hint that he intended to vanish.

Naturally, everyone at first imagined that a woman was involved. But his wife, or at least the woman he lived with, announced that the object of his trip had been to collect insect specimens. The police investigators and his colleagues felt vaguely disappointed. The insect bottle and net were hardly a feint for a runaway trip with a girl.

Then, too, a station employee at S–– had remembered a man getting off the train who looked like a mountain climber and carried slung across his shoulders a canteen and a wooden box, which he took to be a painting set. The man had been alone, quite alone, the employee said, so speculation about a girl was groundless.

The theory had been advanced that the man, tired of life, had committed suicide. One of his colleagues, who was an amateur psychoanalyst, held to this view. He claimed that in a grown man enthusiasm for such a useless pastime as collecting insects was evidence enough of a mental quirk. Even in children, unusual preoccupation with insect collecting frequently indicates an Oedipus complex. In order to compensate for his unsatisfied desires, the child enjoys sticking pins into insects, which he need never fear will escape. And the fact that he does not leave off once he has grown up is quite definitely a sign that the condition has become worse. Thus it is far from accidental that entomologists frequently have an acute desire for acquisitions and that they are extremely reclusive, kleptomaniac, homosexual. From this point to suicide out of weariness with the world is but a step. As a matter of fact, there are even some collectors who are attracted by the potassium cyanide in their bottles rather than by the collecting itself, and no matter how they try they are quite incapable of washing their hands of the business. Indeed, the man had not once confided his interests to anyone, and this would seem to be proof that he realized they were rather dubious.

Yet, since no body had actually been discovered, all of these ingenious speculations were groundless.

Seven years had passed without anyone learning the truth, and so, in compliance with Section 30 of the civil code, the man had been pronounced dead.