The Project Gutenberg eBook of Vain oblations
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Vain oblations
Author: Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Release date: May 25, 2024 [eBook #73693]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VAIN OBLATIONS ***
VAIN OBLATIONS
VAIN OBLATIONS
BY
KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1914
_Copyright, 1914, by Charles Scribner’s Sons_
_Published March, 1914_
TO
J. M. F. AND B. M. F.
CONTENTS
PAGE
_Vain Oblations_ 1
_The Mango-Seed_ 43
_The Wine of Violence_ 83
_On the Staircase_ 127
_The Tortoise_ 177
_The Divided Kingdom_ 233
_The Case of Paramore_ 273
VAIN OBLATIONS
As I was with Saxe during the four most desperate weeks of his life, I
think I may say that I knew him better than any one else. Those were
also the four most articulate weeks, for they were a period of terrible
inaction, spent on the decks of ocean steamships. Saxe was not much
given to talking, but there was nothing else to do. No book that has
ever been written could have held his attention for two minutes. I was
with him, for that matter, off and on, until the end. What I have to
tell I got partly from my own observation, partly from a good little
woman at the Mission, partly from Saxe’s letters, largely from his own
lips, and partly from natives. But if I recorded it as it came,
unassimilated, unchronologized--one fact often limping into camp six
months after its own result--the story would be as unintelligible as the
_quipus_ of the Incas. It has taken me three years of steady staring to
see the thing whole. I know more about it now--including Saxe--than
Saxe ever knew. In point of fact, one of the most significant pieces of
evidence did not come in until after his death. (I wish it clearly
understood, by the way, that Saxe did not commit suicide.) But, more
than that, I have been thinking for three years about Mary Bradford. I
could tell you as much about what she suffered--the subtlety and the
brutality of her ordeal--as if she were one of my own heroines. God
forbid that I should ever think of Mary Bradford as “material”: that I
should analyze her, or dramatize her, or look at her with the artist’s
squint. If I tell her story, it is because I think it right that we
should know what things can be. For the most part, we keep to our own
continents: the cruel nations are the insensitive nations, and the
squeamish races are kind. But Mary Bradford was the finest flower of New
England; ten home-keeping generations only lay between her and the Quest
of 1620. It is chronic hyperæsthesia simply to _be_ New English; and the
pure-bred New Englander had best stick to the euphemisms, the
approximations, the reticences, of his own extraordinary villages. But
Mary Bradford encountered all the physical realities of life in their
crudest form, alone, in the obscene heart of Africa, with black faces
thrust always between her and the sky. Some cynic may put in his
belittling word to the effect that the New Englander has always counted
physical suffering less than spiritual discomfort. The mental torture
was not lacking in Mary Bradford’s case. For over a year, the temptation
to suicide must have been like a terrible thirst, death--any
death--luring her like a rippling spring. I told Saxe one night in
mid-Atlantic, to comfort him, that she would of course have killed
herself if she saw no chance of escape.
Saxe laughed dryly. “That’s the most damnable thing about it,” he said.
“Mary would think it mortal sin to kill herself. She would stick on as
long as God chose to keep the breath in her body.”
“Sin?” I queried rather stupidly.
“Yes, sin,” he answered. “You don’t know anything about it: you were
brought up in Europe.”
“But Saxe,” I cried, “rather than--” I did not finish.
“You don’t know anything about New England,” he said. “Damn your books!
Missionaries face everything, and there’s more than one kind of
martyrdom. I hope she’s dead. I rather think she is.”
His voice was uneven, but with a meaningless unevenness like a boy’s
that is changing. There was no emotion in it. A week more of monotonous
ploughing of the waves would just have broken him, I think; but he
pulled himself together when he touched the soil of Africa. Something in
him went out to meet the curse that hung low over the land in the tropic
afternoon; and encountering the Antagonist, his eyes grew sane again.
But with sanity came the reticence of battle. All that I know of Saxe’s
and Mary Bradford’s early lives, I learned in those four weeks. I have
made out some things about her, since then, that probably Saxe never
knew. As I said, I have been thinking about Mary Bradford for three
years, and it is no secret that to contemplate is, in the end, to know.
The stigmata received by certain saints are, I take it, irrefutable
proof of this. I do not pretend to carry upon me Mary Bradford’s wounds;
I do not even canonize her in my heart. But I seriously believe that she
had, on the whole, the most bitter single experience ever undergone by
woman; and much of the extraordinary horror of the adventure came from
the very exquisiteness of the victim. I have often wondered if the Greek
and Italian literatures that she knew so well offered her any mitigating
memory of a woman more luckless than she. Except Jocasta, I positively
cannot think of one; and Jocasta never lived. All of us have dreams of a
market where we could sell our old lamps for new. How must not Mary
Bradford have longed to change her humanities against mere foothold on
the soil of America or Europe! But my preface is too long.
* * * * *
Now and then there is a story where all things work together for evil to
the people involved; and these stories have, even for their
protagonists, a horrible fascination. The story of Saxe and Mary
Bradford is of this nature: a case, as it were, of double chicane.
Everything happened precisely wrong. Almost anything happening
differently would have given them a chance. If Mary Bradford had been
born in Virginia, if her eyes had been blue instead of brown, if Ngawa
had come back three hours sooner--Maupassant would have told it all from
that point of view. But I am not trying to make literature out of it: it
is as history that this story is important to me. Saxe had been engaged
to Mary Bradford since her last year in college. Her mother had died
when Mary was born, and the Reverend James Bradford had sailed, after
his wife’s death, for this little West African mission, leaving his
child with a sister. Mary was brought up in America. When she was ten,
her father came home for a year and took her back with him; but at
twelve she was sent definitely home to be educated. James Bradford could
not have conceived of depriving his child of Greek and trigonometry, and
from school Mary went to college. She never, at any time, had any
inclination to enter upon missionary work, though her religious faith
was never at any moment in the smallest degree shaken. From her
thirteenth year she had been an active and enthusiastic member of her
father’s denomination. She was a bit of a blue-stocking and occasionally
somewhat ironic in speech. When I asked Saxe “if she had _no_ faults,”
these were all he could think of. When she became engaged to Saxe, she
stipulated that she should spend two winters with her father before
marrying. The separation had never really parted Mary and her father;
they had never lost the habit of each other. You see those sympathies
sometimes between father and daughter: inarticulate, usually, like the
speech of rock to rock, but absolutely indestructible. There was no
question--I wish to emphasize this--about her love for Saxe. I had, for
a time, her letters. It was a _grande passion_--to use the unhallowed
historic phrase; twenty love stories of old Louisiana could have been
melted up into it. Saxe, of course, consented to her going. During the
second spring he was to go out, her father was to marry them at the
Mission, and they were to return to America after a honeymoon in Italy.
There is not one detail that does not, in the end, deepen the irony of
it, if you look at it all long enough. Italy! All that romantic shimmer
and tinkle against the savage fact that was. She went, and for six
months seems to have busied herself happily enough with good little Mrs.
Price at the Mission. She picked up a few dialects--she was always
remarkably clever at languages. The Mission hangs above a tiny
seaport--if you can call it a seaport, for there is a great reef a few
miles out, and the infrequent steamships stop outside that and send
passengers and letters in by boat. It is not one of the regular ports of
call, and its chief significance lies in its position at the mouth of a
large-ish river that winds inland for a few hundred miles, finishing no
one knows exactly where. The natives for a hundred miles up-stream are
fairly friendly and come down sometimes in big boats to trade; beyond
that, the country runs into jungle and forest, and grows nastier and
nastier. No one knows precisely about that region, and it lies just
outside every one’s sphere of influence; but there seems to be a network
of unhealthy trails, a constant intertribal warfare, and an occasional
raid by the precocious pupil of an Arab slave-trader. It is too far
south for the big caravans, of course, but there is undoubtedly
slave-stealing--though it is extremely difficult to learn anything
definite about the country, as there are a dozen different tribes
speaking entirely different languages, and each lying tortuously about
all the rest. This is all that Saxe could tell me about that
_hinterland_ which he had never expected to be interested in.
In March, after Mary reached the Mission (she sailed in July,
immediately after graduation), the chief of a small tribe some hundred
miles up-stream descended in pomp to barter ivory for such treasure as
oozes from European ships. Having seldom condescended to trade, he was
disappointed at receiving so little for his ivory--a scanty lot of
female tusks--and sought distraction and consolation within earshot of
the Mission piano. He took especially kindly to the Reverend James
Bradford, gravely inspected the school, and issued an invitation for Mr.
Bradford to come up-stream and Christianize his tribe. The Mission had
worked up and down the coast, as it could, but had never worked
inland--more rumors than boats came down the waterway, which was not
really a highroad and certainly led to nothing good. They lacked money
for such an enterprise, and workers; but, being missionaries, never
forgot that the river, and all who dwelt on its banks, belonged to God.
It did not occur to James Bradford to refuse the call, which he took
quite simply, as from brother to brother; it did not occur to Mary
Bradford to let him go alone, or to her father to protest against her
accompanying him. The patriarchal tinge is still perceptible in the New
English conception of the family. Let me say, here, that there is no
evidence that Ngawa himself ever broke faith with his white protégés. He
was, like them, a victim of circumstances.
They were to go for six months. That would bring them to September. In
September, three new workers were to come out to the Mission, and James
Bradford hoped that two could then be permanently spared for the new
Mission up-stream, which he already foresaw and yearned over. In
September, he and Mary would return to the port; in late April, Saxe was
coming out to marry Mary. They departed under the escort of Ngawa
himself. Mr. Price promised to get a boat up to them in May, or at least
a runner with letters.
Such details of the final catastrophe as Saxe was acquainted with were
brought to the Mission by a native boy in September, just before the
boat was to start up-stream (taking Adams and Jenks, the new recruits)
to bring the Bradfords down. All reports had hitherto been favorable,
if not astonishingly so. Ngawa had listened, and his heart seemed to
incline to Mr. Bradford’s teachings. Mary had started a little school
for the babies. But Ngawa had no intention of compelling his people to
embrace Christianity: he simply courteously permitted it to exist in his
dominion. As talk of war came on, he was preoccupied with the affairs of
his thatched state. The populace--they seem to have been a gentle crowd
enough--grew apathetic to their apostles and deposited the commanded
tribute somewhat listlessly before their huts. The medicine-men, of
course, were hostile from the first, and, as the war drums beat in the
forest and the men of the village gathered to sharpen their tufted
spears, wild talk had undoubtedly not been wanting. The end had really
been a bitter accident. Ngawa absented himself for three days to do some
last exhorting and recruiting in his other villages. The attack that had
not been expected for a week, at least, was made a few hours before his
return. It became a raid rather than a battle; the village resisted the
siege only a short time, and the invaders did what they would in the
monstrous tropic dusk. Many of the native women were stabbed quickly;
but the youngest ones, and Mary Bradford, were dragged off as captives.
Mr. Bradford was killed in the beginning--not by the enemy, who were
busy despatching Ngawa’s subjects, but by Ngawa’s chief medicine-man,
who stole out of the shadows, slit his throat twice across, caught the
blood in a cup, and then slid back into the darkness. The boy who
brought them the story averred that he had seen it all, having been
present, though somehow left out of the _mêlée_. The enemy, afraid of
Ngawa’s return, did not stop for the half-grown children. The white girl
tore away, the boy said, and started back to her father, but the warrior
who held her hit her on the head, so that she dropped, and then carried
her off. Oh yes, he had seen it all quite well: he had climbed into a
tree. The huts were all burning, and it was lighter than day. Ngawa came
back that night, and, later, they destroyed utterly the villages of the
other tribe, but they got back no captives. These had been killed at
once, probably, or sold. Ngawa had gone back to the medicine-men.
Ngawa’s people must have been gentler than most of their color, for the
boy answered all the questions of the stricken missionaries before he
asked to hear the piano.
This was absolutely all that Saxe knew, when he stumbled into my rooms
and asked me to go out to Africa with him. The first cablegrams had
simply announced the massacre, and it was only on receipt of letters
from the Prices that Saxe learned about Mary and her horrible, shadowy
chance of life. The Prices promised to cable any news, but it was
unlikely that they would have any more. The boy who had brought them
this story drifted down the coast, and for some months few boats came
down the stream. Ngawa, they heard vaguely, had died, and his son
reigned in his stead, a bitter disciple of unclean rites. Young Adams,
in the pity of his heart, had gone the hundred miles to the village, but
the people had evidently nothing to tell. The white priest was dead, and
the white girl was gone. Their own captives were gone, too, and if they
had been able to recover them would they not have done it? Undoubtedly,
they were killed, but their enemies had been punished. No: they were
faithful to their own gods. What had the white god done for his priest,
or for Ngawa, who had listened--and died? Doubtless Adams would have
been killed, if they had been defeated in the war, but he profited by
the magnanimity of triumph. It was astonishing how little impression,
except on Ngawa and one old medicine-man, James Bradford had made. Save
that he had achieved martyrdom for himself, he might as well have stayed
peacefully at the Mission. It is all, from first to last, a story of
vain oblations. The people were inclined to forget that he had ever been
there, but they registered their opinion that his white brother had
better go back at once. Saxe’s face, as Adams gave him this last news,
was tense. He gripped the hand of the one white man who had visited that
bitter scene, as if he would never let it go.
If Saxe had been delayed in America, it was only in order to arrange his
affairs so that he could stay away indefinitely. He intended to follow
Mary Bradford down those dim and bloody trails until at least he should
have seen some witness of her death. Saxe was not rich, and his
arrangements took him a certain length of time. We sailed from New York
in March, and caught the African liner at Plymouth.
I will not enter upon the details of Saxe’s activity during the next
months, nor of the results he gained. It was a case where governments
were of no use: the jungle that had swallowed up Mary Bradford
acknowledged no suzerain across the seas. Saxe visited Ngawa’s village,
of course--“I am steel proof,” he said, and I think he believed it. The
story of those months is a senseless story of perishing lights and clues
of twisted sand. We spent three months in rescuing the yellow widow of a
Portuguese pearl-fisher, who had been captured by coast pirates and sold
inland. When Saxe stood face to face with the “white woman” he had
worked blindly to deliver, he reeled before her. “Tell him that I will
marry him,” said the woman with a noble gesture. She was forty, fat, and
hideous. I mention the incident--which turned me quite sick, and in
which, to this day, I can see nothing humorous--simply to show the
maddening nature of our task. Even I had believed that this mysterious
white woman was Mary Bradford. In that land of rumor and superstition
and ignorance and cunning--above all, of savage indifference--anything
might be true, and anything might be false. Three days after we had
started off to find the Portuguese hag, a real clue came into the
Mission. Our three months had been quite lost, for the Prices could get
no word to us on our knight-errant task. Poor Saxe!
In September, Saxe, following this clue, which seemed to bear some real
relation to the events of the year before, travelled solemnly,
accompanied by a few natives only, into the heart of that _hinterland_
which stood, to all the coast above and below the Mission, for
treachery, mystery, and death. In October, he reached the village of the
chief in question--a sun-smitten kraal, caught between high blue
mountains and the nasty bit of jungle that separated them from one of
the big waterways of Africa. Politics are largely a matter of geography,
and his position was one of enviable independence, though he was to the
neighboring kings on the scale of Andorra to France and Spain. He was a
greedy old man, and the sight of several pounds of beads made him very
communicative. Half of his information was bound, by African code, to
be false, and Saxe had no means of knowing which half; but he owned to
having purchased, a few months before, from a wandering trader, a slave
woman of white blood. She had come high, he affirmed, cocking his eye at
Saxe. But she was not Saxe’s slave--Saxe had put it in that way in order
to be remotely intelligible to the savage mind. Oh, no! she was the
daughter of a Mandingo woman and an Arab. The trader had told him that:
he had known the mother. Oh, no! it could not be Saxe’s slave. However,
he was willing, for a really good price, to consider selling her. Saxe
refused to be discouraged. The clue had seemed to him trustworthy; and
the story about the Mandingo woman might be pure invention--bravado, to
raise the price.
He asked to see her. Oh, certainly; before purchasing he should see her.
But meanwhile there was the official cheer to taste--_kava_, above all,
inimitably mixed--and she should be fetched. Where was she? A young
slave girl suggested sardonically that she was probably at her toilet.
Since she had heard of the white man’s coming--Saxe had tactfully sent
a runner ahead of him--she had been smearing herself meticulously with
ochre and other precious pigments. This was said with a sidelong glance
at the chief: obviously, he distributed those precious pigments only to
his favorites. Saxe said that from that moment his heart misgave him. He
had been somehow sure that this woman was Mary. Why his heart should
have misgiven him, I do not know; or what devil of stupidity put it into
his head that this was the trick of a half-breed slave to make herself
irresistible to a white man. It sounded to him, he said, like the
inspiration that would naturally occur to the daughter of an Arab by a
Mandingo woman. It has never sounded to me in the least like that. He
said that he still believed it was Mary; but I fancy he believed it
after the fashion of the doubter who shouts his creed a little louder.
Of course there was something preposterous in the idea of Mary
Bradford’s making herself barbarically _chic_ with ochre to greet the
lover who might be coming to rescue her. But was not the whole thing
preposterous to the point of incredibility? And Mary Bradford was not an
ordinary woman--not the yellow widow of a Portuguese pearl-fisher. It
has always seemed to me that poor Saxe ought to have realized that.
Saxe consumed _kava_ until he could consume no more. Then the slave girl
announced that the woman had been found. Saxe rose to his feet. He was
stifling in the great hut, where all the chief councillors had joined
them at their feast, where the reek from greased bodies seemed to mount
visibly into the twilight of the great conical roof. His head was
reeling, and his heart was beating weakly, crazily, against his
ribs--“as if it wanted to come out,” he said. His hands were ice-cold.
He had just presence of mind enough to drag the black interpreter out
with him, and to leave one of his own men inside to watch the stuff with
which he proposed to pay. The chief and most of his councillors remained
within.
Outside the hut, her back to the setting sun, stood the woman. Saxe had
of course known that Mary would be dressed like a native; but this
figure staggered him. She was half naked, after the fashion of the
tribe, a long petticoat being her only garment. Undoubtedly her skin had
been originally fair, Saxe said; but it was tanned to a deep
brown--virtually bronzed. For that matter, there was hardly an inch of
her that was not tattooed or painted. Some great design, crudely smeared
in with thick strokes of ochre, covered her throat, shoulders, and
breast. Over it were hung rows and rows of shells, the longest rows
reaching to the top of the petticoat. Her face was oddly
marred--uncivilized, you might say--by a large nose-ring, and a metal
disk that was set in the lower lip, distending it. Forehead and cheeks
were streaked with paint, and her straight black hair was dressed after
the tribal fashion: stiffened with grease, braided with shells, puffed
out with wooden rolls to enormous size. Her eyelids were painted red.
That was not a habit of the tribe, and might point to an Arab tradition.
The painted eyelids and the streaks that seemed to elongate the eyes
themselves were Saxe’s despair--he had counted on meeting the eyes of
Mary Bradford. To his consternation, the woman stood absolutely silent,
her eyes bent on the ground, her face in shadow. Even Saxe, who had no
psychology, seems to have seen that Mary Bradford would, in that
plight--if it _was_ she--wait for him to speak first. But I think he
had expected her at least to faint. Saxe looked at her long without
speaking. He was trying, he said, to penetrate her detestable disguise,
to find some vulnerable point where he could strike at her very heart,
and know. In the midst of his bewilderment, he grew cool--cold, even. He
gave himself orders (he told me afterward) as a general might send them
from the rear. His tongue, his hands, his feet were very far off, but
they obeyed punctiliously. My own opinion is that Saxe never, from the
moment when he saw the woman, believed it to be Mary.
Her back, as I have said, was against the light. As the purchaser of a
slave, he might well wish to see her more fully revealed. He gave the
order through the interpreter: “Turn to the light.” As she turned
obediently and stood in profile against the scarlet west, he saw that
her form was unshapely. On her back were a few scars, long since healed.
That moment was undoubtedly Hell for Saxe, in spite of the doubt upon
him. But what must it have been for the impassible creature before him?
Saxe saw that he must play the game alone. “Mary,” he said quietly in
English, “I have come to take you home.” In the circumstances, it was
the stupidest thing he could have said; but the only thing he thought of
was speaking in English. If it was Mary, those words, he thought, would
reach her, would dispel her shame, or, if she were mad, pierce her
madness.
She seemed not to have heard. “Bid her look me in the face,” he said
brutally to the interpreter. The order was repeated. She turned, raised
her painted eyelids, and looked him straight in the eyes, with the
apathetic look of the slave, the world over. “But were they Mary
Bradford’s eyes?” I cried to him, when he told me. “I don’t know, damn
you!” he said. “Mary had never looked at me like that--as if she didn’t
see me, and painted like a devil.”
He seems to have felt--as far as I can define his feeling--that she was
not Mary, but that perhaps he could bully her into being Mary. I do not
know how else to explain his unconvinced but perfectly dogged insistence
on her identity. He had, of course, been greatly shaken by the
extraordinary appearance of the woman. Perhaps he was simply afraid it
was she because it would be so terrible if it were, and was resolved not
to shirk. Saxe, too, was a New Englander. At all events, he shouted his
creed a little louder still. “You are treating me very badly, Mary. I am
going in to buy you from the chief; and then you will listen to me.”
The woman heard Saxe’s voice and looked at the interpreter. Saxe,
stupefied, repeated his speech to the negro, and the latter translated.
At this, she threw up her arms and broke into guttural ejaculations.
That painted form swayed grotesquely from side to side, Saxe said, and
she tore the shells out of her hair, tearing the hair with them. Giving
him one glance of devilish hatred, she ran to the chief’s hut. Saxe
followed. There was nothing else to do.
Then began, Saxe said, what for him was a horrible pantomime. He heard
nothing of what was said, until afterward, for the interpreter could not
keep up with the _prestissimo_ of that scene; but one understood it
without knowing. The woman grovelled at the chief’s feet; she pointed to
Saxe and wrung her hands. She was not Saxe’s slave, and evidently did
not wish to be. The other women drew near to listen, being, clearly,
personally interested in the outcome. The chief was, as I have said,
avaricious. He looked longingly at the shining heaps of beads, the bolts
of scarlet cloth, above all, the Remington rifles. Yet it was clear that
he had not wholly outgrown his sluggish _penchant_ for the woman who
clung to him. It does not often happen, for that matter, that a petty
chief in the remote interior can count a white woman--even a
half-breed--among his slaves; and the male savage has an instinct for
mating above him. The woman saw whither the avaricious eye wandered. She
rose from the ground, she stood between him and the treasures, she bent
over him and murmured to him, she pointed to her own distorted form....
The little slave girl scowled, and the chief’s eye gleamed. What at
first had seemed a possible detriment, now showed as an advantage. “That
was true,” he exclaimed. “Before long she would bring him a warrior son
or a girl he could sell for many cows. Let the white man wait.” Saxe
stamped his foot. Not one day would he wait: the bargain should be
completed then. He told me afterward that, after seeing her with the
chief, he was absolutely convinced that the woman they were cheapening
was the half-breed Arab they said she was; and the general in the rear
of the battle wondered dully what he should do with her. But the woman
had thrust herself cunningly beneath the chief’s very feet, had twined
her arms about his ankles, had welded herself to him like a footstool
that he could not shake off. Over the chief’s thick features, in the
torch light (for night was falling outside), into his avaricious eyes,
crept a swinish gleam. Let the white man wait until to-morrow. Night was
falling; it was time to sleep. By the sunlight they could deal better.
The woman panted heavily beneath his feet, never loosing her hold. The
young slave girl looked down at her with unconcealed malignity. Saxe
found himself forced to retire from the royal hut--sleeping-chamber,
banqueting-hall, audience-room in one. He said that all he thought of,
as he stumbled out, was the idiotic figure he should make at the Mission
as the owner of an Arab-Mandingo woman. It was worse than the yellow
Portuguese.
He was conducted to his tent. The interpreter confirmed there all that
Saxe had divined. Let it be said now that Saxe had one clear
inspiration. Before leaving the hut, he had turned and spoken to the
woman who was fawning on the wretched negro. “Mary,” he said, “if you
ask me to, I will shoot you straight through the heart.” The woman had
snarled unintelligibly at the sound of his voice, and had redoubled her
caresses. Can you blame Saxe for having doubted? Remember that she had
not for one moment given any sign of being Mary Bradford; remember that
he had no proof that it was Mary Bradford. “Had you no intuition of
her?” asked young Adams, later, at the Mission. “Intuition!” cried Saxe.
“There wasn’t a feature of Mary Bradford there: she was a loathsome
horror.” Let those who cannot believe in Saxe’s failure to recognize
her, reflect for an instant on all that is contained in that literal
statement. Have you never failed, after a few years of separation, to
recognize some one: some one whose face had not been subjected to
barbaric decoration and disfigurement, not even to three years of the
African sun; who, living all the while in the same quiet street, had
merely passed for a time under the skilful transforming hands of
sorrow? I have seen Mary Bradford’s photograph, and was told at the same
time that the not very striking face depended for its individuality on
the expression of eyes and mouth. But painted eyes ... and a lip-ring?
She was undoubtedly, as Saxe said, “a loathsome horror”; and a loathsome
horror who gave no sign. I firmly believe that she was not recognizable
to the eye. Saxe’s only chance would have lain in divination; in being
able to say unerringly of the woman he loved: “Thus, or thus, in given
circumstances, would she behave.” Such knowledge of Mary Bradford could
never have been easy to any man. In my opinion, no one can blame him for
doubting. The magnificence of the performance was almost outside the
realm of possibility. I asked Saxe once if Mary Bradford had been good
at acting. He had never seen her do but one part: she had done that
extremely well. And the part? Beatrice, in _Much Ado_. Beatrice!
The strain of it had told on Saxe, and he slept that night. But it is
only fair to say that, before he slept, he had quite made up his mind
that he was as far away from Mary Bradford as he had ever been. It is
not to be wondered at. Only a man who had grasped Mary Bradford’s
idea--it has taken me three years to do that, entirely--could have
believed that she would let Saxe go out baffled from the hut in which
she deliberately chose to stay with her half-drunk, wholly vile captor.
Women who could have done all the rest, would have turned at Saxe’s
offer of a kindly shot through the heart. But Mary Bradford was great.
She was also infinitely wronged by Fate. It is all wanton, wanton--to
the very last: all, that is, except her own part, which was sublimely
reasoned.
Saxe slept, I say; and at dawn woke to his problem. The intelligence
that works for us while we sleep waked him into the conviction that he
must, at any cost, buy the woman. He said that, as he strode over to the
chief’s hut, he was thinking only of what price he ought to put on the
child that would be such a fantastic mixture of breeds. He did not want
the woman, but he felt that the purchase was inevitable. This, I am
convinced, was only the New English leaven working him up to martyrdom.
It would be unmitigatedly dreadful to have the woman on his hands, and
therefore he ought probably to buy her.
The chief greeted him with temper, and soon Saxe learned why. The woman
had left the hut before dawn, taking with her her master’s largest
knife. She was found later in her own little hovel, dead, with a clean
stab to her heart. Suicide is virtually unknown among savages, and the
village was astir. Saxe asked to see the body at once, but that, it
seems, was not etiquette: he had to wait until it was prepared for
burial. For an instant, he said, he thought of bargaining for the body,
but forebore. He had a difficult return journey to make, and the point
was, after all, to see it. When they permitted him to enter the hut, the
face had been piously disfigured beyond recognition. He told me that he
lifted the tattooed hand and kissed it: he did not know why. It was
clear that if the woman had--preposterously--been Mary, she would not
have wished it; and if she were the other, it was almost indecent. But
he could not help it. This impulse of his seems to have been his only
recognition of Mary Bradford. In life and in death, she suppressed
every sign of herself with consummate art.
We were a fevered group that waited for Saxe day after day at the
Mission; and he seemed to have been gone an intolerably long time. The
broken leg that had kept me from going with him was almost well when he
returned. Yet he had taken the shortest way back. It was also the
unhealthiest. He said that he had heard war rumors that made him avoid
the more frequented trail, but I fancy he rather hoped that the swamps
he clung to would give him fever. In that sense--and in that sense
only--Saxe could perhaps be said to have committed suicide. He stumbled
into the Mission dining-room at noon one day. “And Mary?” we all cried,
rising. “Oh, did you expect to see Mary?” he asked politely, but with
evident astonishment.
We got him to bed at once. After the days of delirium were over, he told
his story quite simply. It was pitifully short. The concrete facts
seemed to be perfectly clear in his mind, and he gave them
spontaneously; but what he himself had felt during that dramatic hour, I
learned only by close questioning. He died suddenly, when he was
apparently convalescent. The year he had been through had simply killed
resiliency in him and he went down at the last as stupidly as a ninepin.
I cannot imagine the source of the rumor that he had killed himself,
unless it was some person who thought he ought to have done so. He
started, at the end, to speak to me: “If Mary ever--” He never got
beyond the three words; they showed sufficiently, however, that he was
considering the possibility of Mary Bradford’s being discovered after
his death. He may have been wandering a little at the last; but, in my
opinion, Saxe had never believed, even after the suicide, that the woman
he had seen had been his betrothed.
Some weeks after Saxe’s death, we received incontrovertible proof--if
testimony is ever incontrovertible--that it had indeed been she. We had
been surrounded for a year by a hideous jungle--blind, hostile,
impenetrable. Now out of that jungle stalked a simple fact. One of the
native girls who had been taken captive with Mary Bradford returned at
length to her own tribe. She had shared Mary’s fortunes, as it happened,
almost to the last; then the chief who had bought them both sold her,
and by the successive chances of purchase, raid, and battle she had
reached her own people. It was hardly more than crawling home to die;
but she managed to send word by one of her kinsmen to the white people
down the river. Apparently she and Mary had promised each other to
report if either should ever reach friends again. Her message was
pitifully meagre: Mary had talked little in those wild months; and after
she had seen that they were too well watched to escape, she had talked
not at all. But the two had evidently clung together--an extraordinary
tie, which was the last Mary Bradford was to know of friendship. The
burden of the native’s report was that the white girl was the favorite
of a chief who gave her much finery. The dying woman seems to have
thought it would set Mary Bradford’s friends at rest--her kinsman, I
remember, said that he had good news for us. The news was no news to
me--I had been thinking; but I was glad that Saxe had died before he
could hear it. Even the comfort of knowing that Mary was surely dead
would never have made up to him for the ironic memory of the last hour
he had spent with her. Besides, Saxe would never have understood.
I should probably never have touched this chapter of history with a
public pen, if I had not heard a woman say, a few months since, that she
thought Mary Bradford’s conduct indelicate. Had the woman not said it to
me directly, I should not have believed, even at my cynical age, that
such a thing could be said. I greatly regret, myself, that the facts
were ever told: they should have been buried in Africa with Saxe. But
the Prices returned to America not long after it all happened, and
apparently could not refrain from talking. Even so, I should have let
Mary Bradford’s legend alone, forever, had I not learned that she could
be misjudged.
Consider dispassionately the elements of her situation; and tell me who
has ever been so tortured. Physically unable to escape by flight,
morally incapable, as you might say, of escaping by death--for there can
be no doubt that, difficult as suicide would have been to a guarded
captive, she could have found some poisonous root, courted the bite of
some serpent, snatched for one instant some pointed weapon; and that
she was deterred, as Saxe said, by the simple belief that to take one’s
life was the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost, the Comforter--she
could but take what came. As a high-priced chattel, she was probably
not, for the most part, ill-treated--save for the tattooing, which was
not cruelly intended. The few scars that Saxe noted doubtless bore
witness to her protest against the utmost bitterness of slavery, some
sudden saint-like frenzy with which she opposed profanation. She may
have wondered why God chose so to degrade her: her conduct with Saxe
shows beyond a doubt how she rated her degradation. She made not one
attempt to dignify or to defend her afflicted body. Her soul despised
it: trampled it under foot.
What Mary Bradford suffered before Saxe came we cannot know, but the
measure of it lies, I think, in the resolution she took (if we believe
the jealous slave girl) when she heard of the white man’s approach. She
must have divined Saxe, leagues away, as he was unable to divine her,
face to face. Her one intent was to deceive him, to steep herself in
unrecognizable savagery. If Mary Bradford had conceived of any rôle
possible for herself in her own world, she would not have created her
great part. If she had felt herself fit even to care for lepers at
Molokai, she would have washed away her paint and fallen at his feet. It
is perfectly evident that she considered herself fit for nothing in
life--hardly for death. Her hope was clearly that Saxe should not know
her. I do not believe that it was pride. If there had been any pride
left in Mary Bradford’s heart, she could not have stood quietly
(“apathetically,” was his word!) before Saxe in the flare of the dying
sun. It was not to save anything of hers that she went through her
comedy, but only to save a little merciful blindness for Saxe himself.
He undoubtedly made it as hard as possible for her. I am inclined to
think that if he had gone away at once, she would be living
still--mothering her half-breed child, teaching it secretly the fear of
God. When she saw that all Saxe’s bewilderment still left him with the
firm determination to buy her--to take her away and study her at his
leisure--she conceived her magnificent _chute de rideau_. When she went
into the hut, she had decided, for Saxe’s sake, to die. Mary Bradford
grovelling at the feet of the drunken chief will always seem to me one
of the most remarkable figures in history: I should never have mentioned
Jocasta in the same breath with her. Only Christianity can give us
tragedy like that. How must she not have longed, at Saxe’s offer of a
kindly shot through the heart, to turn, to fling herself at his feet, to
cry out his name, once. She “redoubled her caresses,” Saxe said! Has any
man ever been so loved, do you think? For the sake of bestowing upon him
that healing doubt, she let him go, she put off death, she spent her
last night on earth not fifty yards from him, in the hut of a savage,
that she might have, before dawn, the means of committing the
unpardonable sin. Note that she did not commit suicide until she had
made it perfectly plausible--from the point of view of the Arab-Mandingo
woman. _She proved to him that it was not she._. She gauged Saxe
perfectly. Nothing but some such evidence as later we received--perhaps
not even that--would ever have made Saxe believe that Mary Bradford,
with him by her side, had clung to that vile savage. Even Mary
Bradford--whose soul must have been, by that time, far away from her
body, a mere voice in her own ears, a remote counsellor to hands and
feet--could not have done that, had she not intended to die. But
remember that up to that day she had lived rather than rank herself with
the “violenti contro se stessi.” We can simply say that Mary Bradford
chose the chance of Hell for the sake of sparing Saxe pain. The fact
that you or I--I pass over the lady who thinks her indelicate; does she
think, I wonder, that it would have been delicate for Mary Bradford to
accompany Saxe back to civilization?--may believe her to be one of the
saints, has nothing to do with what she thought. Mary Bradford came of a
race that for many generations believed in predestination; but she
herself believed in free will. Dreadful as it is to be foredamned, it is
worse to have damned yourself. She had not even the cold comfort of
Calvinism. I said that I understood Mary Bradford. I am not sure that it
would not have taken a Spanish saint of the sixteenth century really to
understand her. Sixteenth-century Spain is the only thing I know of
that is in the least like New England.
I am not trying to make out a “case” for Mary Bradford; and I sincerely
hope that the lady who thinks her indelicate will never read these
pages. For most people, the facts will suffice, and I have no desire to
interpret them for the others. You have only to meditate for a little on
the ironic and tragic reflections of a hundred kinds that must have
surged through Mary Bradford’s brain, to be swept away, yourself, on the
horrid current. Do I need, for example, to point out the difficulty--to
use a word that I think the lady I have cited would approve--of merely
meeting the man she adored, face to face? For never doubt that those
souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its
defilement. No, you have only to explore Mary Bradford’s tragedy for
yourself. It will take you three years, perhaps, as it has taken me, to
penetrate the last recesses. And if you are tempted for a moment to
think of her as mad, or _exaltée_, reflect on how completely she
understood Saxe. I am only half a New Englander; and I confess that,
though I reverence her heroism, I am even more humble before her
intelligence. It is no blame to Saxe that he stumbled out of the chief’s
hut, completely her dupe. Poor Saxe! But the vivid vision of that scene
leaves _Phèdre_ tasteless to me. As I say, I am only half a New
Englander....
THE MANGO-SEED
The two young men looked at each other rather helplessly. Then “Marty”
Martin drew a few ragged words over his helplessness. “I’m sorry,
Peter--really, awfully. I’ll be back in an hour. And do buck up. But you
have bucked up, you really have. You look ever so much better than you
did when we went to lunch. And I’ll be back. Oh, you can depend on me.”
He drifted off through the door. His muscles were tense with haste, but
he fingered chairs and tables as he went--as if trying to put clogs of
decency on feet indecorously winged. Even so, he was soon out of sight,
and Peter Wayne was alone.
“There’s no point in saying it isn’t rum, because it is,” he murmured to
himself. “And _here_,” he added, looking about. There was no moral
support in those crimson walls, those great pier-glasses, those
insignificant writing-tables with red-shaded electric lights, those
uncomfortable tapestried armchairs. It wasn’t the setting to help you
through a crisis. He was in the quietest corner of the most essentially
respectable hotel in New York. There were plenty of them--scores--that
were incidentally respectable; but at the St. Justin respectability had
been cherished through years for its own sake, as more important than
the register, the cuisine, or the unimpeachable location that no
metropolitan progress could render inconvenient. As a very young
bachelor with virtually no family ties, he was not familiar with the St.
Justin. It wasn’t a place where you would expect to get the kind of
thing his kind of human being wanted. He couldn’t, for example, have
induced Marty to lunch there. They had lunched at Plon’s. It was a hotel
where you might be perfectly sure your grandparents had stopped. It was
natural that his mother should have selected it for their meeting, as
she hadn’t been in America for well over twenty years. But there was
less backing than he had expected, somehow.
Sitting uncomfortably in one of the corners by a writing-table (his back
to the window so that the familiar streets shouldn’t lure him too much
to flight), he took the privilege of the consciously crucial moment. He
reviewed his life. It was so very short, after all, that it was easily
reviewed. He was only a few months out of the university, and he was
just twenty-two. The insoluble was there to the point of being either
romantic or absurd, he didn’t know which. He had what so many young
people long for in vain, a mystery. He had amused himself occasionally
with monstrous hypotheses. But what real account could he give of
himself? What account, that is, of the sort that Marty Martin and his
like had by heart before they could spell? The most that he knew about
his parents--except that they were alive and in the tropics--was that
they banked in Honolulu and had some natural hold or other on Marty
Martin’s uncle. Marty Martin’s uncle had picked out Peter’s school and
his college for him, and was telegraphed for when Peter had
appendicitis. That was as near the parental relation as anything he had
known from experience. Lonely? Well, any fellow was lonely when the
other fellows all went trooping home for holidays; but loneliness he had
always frankly diagnosed as three-quarters pride. The fellows were
always glad to get back to school or college, he noticed. In any case,
he had stopped thinking about it much--his plight. That saved his
dignity. What he sat now vaguely dreading was the immense, the
cataclysmic downfall of his dignity. He tried to put the facts to
himself so simply that they should be as reassuring as a primer.
Ollendorf, he had once complained to a teacher, would take the zest out
of a murder, the sense out of a scandal. Tragedy was a verbal matter.
Put a crime into any foreign language, and it sounded like a laundry
list. He would try, as it were, to find the French for his situation.
“Oh, rot!” he began, taking his own advice quite seriously. “It isn’t so
Sudermannish as all that. My father and my mother chose to go to the
tropics to live, a year after I was born. They did not take me with
them. They have never sent for me; but they have supported me; they have
written to me occasionally; they have got Marty Martin’s uncle to keep
me out of the hands of the S.P.C.C., and trained me generally to do
without them. I’ve never been invited to go to Tahiti. And Tahiti isn’t
like London--if you know any one there, you can’t go without an
invitation. They can’t have turned against me, when I was eleven months
old, on account of my vices. I’ve kept pretty jolly and managed to
regularize the situation with my friends. Now my mother has written that
she’s coming to America to see me. Indeed, she has actually come. I
wasn’t allowed to meet her at a steamer, decently. I have to meet her
here--here.” (He looked gloomily around at the conventional walls.) “Yet
she doesn’t seem to be staying here. I don’t know whether she will want
tea, or where to take her to dinner. I don’t know her when I see her. I
don’t know--oh, hang it, I don’t know anything! And if I could funk it,
like Marty, I would. But what can you do when a lady takes the trouble
to bring you into the world? If it had been my father, now, I
wouldn’t--I positively wouldn’t--have consented to meet him. It’s--it’s
no way to treat a fellow.”
His vain attempt at Ollendorfian flatness broke down: the mere facts
seemed so very much against him. He had often complained to Marty Martin
that it was dashed awkward, this being the only original changeling;
but, in point of fact, he had never been so uncomfortable in his life as
now, at the prospect of playing the authentic filial rôle. “I’ll make
her dine here,” he muttered. He could think of nothing worse without
being actually disrespectful. An old lady in a gray shawl walked slowly
down the hall past the door, and it suddenly struck him that his mother
would perhaps like to dine at the St. Justin. “I ought to have cabled to
ask what color _her_ shawl would be,” he began, in a flippant whisper,
to himself. The flippant whisper stopped. He was much too genuinely
nervous to be flippant any longer without an audience. At the same time,
he found himself wondering--oh, insincerely, theatrically, rhetorically
wondering--why he had not bought an etiquette book. There was
something--well, to be honest, something like an extra gland in his
throat, something like a knot in his healthy young nerves--that kept him
from putting the question to himself audibly. “If she cries--” he
reflected, with anticipatory vindictiveness. What he really meant was:
“If she makes me so much as sniff.” For your mother was really the one
person in the world who had you necessarily at a disadvantage. Even if
you hadn’t the habit of her, you couldn’t count on yourself for
reticence. You might be as bored as possible, but that wouldn’t save
you. There might be treacheries of the flesh, disloyalties of the
cuticle--all manner of reversions to embryonic helplessness. She somehow
had your nerves, your physical equilibrium, at her mercy. Old Stein,
prodding at you with instruments in the psychological laboratory, was a
mere joke in comparison. Even the most deceived, the most docile and
voluble student ended respectably in a card catalogue. Peter felt
suddenly an immense tenderness for the decencies, the unrealities of
“science.” But to meet your mother in conditions like these was the real
thing: the naked horror of revelation. “It’s literature,” thought Peter
to himself, “and what is literature but just the very worst life can
do?” He came back to his familiar conclusive summary. It _was_ rum.
The next quarter of an hour passed more mercifully. The mere empty lapse
of time helped him, half duped him into thinking that the scene might
not come off at all. It was foolish to be there ahead of time, but what
could a man in his predicament do, or pretend to do, between luncheon
and an interview like that? They had had, he and Marty, a civilized
meal at Plon’s; but he had not been hungry, and to smoke among the
stunted box-trees afterward had been--well, impossible. They had got to
the St. Justin ridiculously early, and then Marty had bolted. Peter
didn’t bear him any grudge for that; of course it was perfectly proper
for Marty to bolt. It would have been worse, he began to think, to face
her first before a witness.
By this time he had accepted the smallest writing-room of the St. Justin
as the predestined scene of the great encounter; accepted it as, perhaps
divinely, perhaps diabolically, but at all events supernaturally,
appointed. These walls had been decorated by dead people to be
unsympathetic and grossly unfit witnesses of Peter Wayne’s
embarrassment. To that extent they belonged to him. The sudden
superstition was genuine; so genuine that he found himself resenting a
bit of chatter that sprang up outside the door and, even more, the
immediate quick entrance into the writing-room of one of the chatterers.
Why hadn’t his mother given him an appointment in her own sitting-room,
at her own hotel--whatever that might be? He didn’t know; he knew
nothing of her since the wireless message that had made the
appointment; and of course since she was managing the thing that way, he
hadn’t even tried to meet her at her steamer, though it had actually
docked at some unearthly hour that morning. But she was likely to pay,
too, for her perversity, since the lady who had just come in and had sat
down rather aimlessly at one of the tables would probably annoy her as
much as she did him. He had owned--or pretended?--to Marty Martin a
furtive curiosity as to this mother of his, whom he had virtually never
seen, of whom he hadn’t so much as a photograph. Now something quite
different stirred within him: the instinct to protect her against
anything she would not like. He suddenly saw her frail and weary and
overwrought and quite old--pathetically, not ironically, like the little
old lady who had hobbled past the door--and he resented any detail that
might crown her long effort at reunion with an extra thorn. He was sure
she would hate this other woman’s being there--the younger woman who had
just come in, and sat down so nonchalantly.
This lady obviously intended to stop long enough for their
discomfiture, since--just here he got up and looked at his watch as he
did so--it lacked scarce two minutes of the appointed hour. He looked at
the intruder a little impatiently. She wasn’t writing. Perhaps he could
suggest, by some flicker of expression, some implication of gesture,
that he wasn’t there in that ridiculous galley for nothing, and still
less there for casual company. She was slim and smartly veiled and
outrageously made up. That was all he saw out of the corner of his eye,
but it was enough to make him feel that she had no such rights at the
St. Justin as a reunited mother and child. She wasn’t waiting for a
parent, he knew; only for some frivolous friend or other. He was so
nervous as to wonder if there were any conceivable way in which one
could ask her to go into one of the other rooms. A depopulated chain of
them stretched down the corridor. He threw another glance at her. She
was well dressed. Peter, though he might know as little as a poodle
about the nature of the current fashion, could, like most men, pounce
unerringly on the unfashionable. Her exuberance wasn’t a matter of
gewgaws; it was all in the meretricious harmonies of her features and
complexion. And yet--Peter caught himself away from staring, as he
passed her, but one glance was enough to show him that--it was a
perfectly honest mask; her paint and powder were as respectable as blue
glasses. Again he knew it unerringly. He was glad to recognize it. For
at that moment he became so nervous that he did, without a qualm, the
most preposterous thing he had ever done, even at two and twenty.
His mother was imminent; he knew it in a hundred ways. The atmosphere
was charged with more than the mere prospect, was charged with the
actual certainty of her. He found that he was going to put it to the
lady who sat there. He stood in the door of the writing-room and looked
down the dark hall. It was empty, save for a woman who sat humbly near,
bonneted, veiled, faithfully clasping some kind of bag--obviously a
servant. Remembering the bit of chatter, he fancied it the maid of the
intruding lady. No one else was in sight. Yet somehow he knew that his
mother would be on time: the crispness of her earlier cablegrams
promised it. The lady really must go elsewhere, and the maid--old and
“colored” and manifestly respectable--must move down the hall and sit
outside another door. He went back, and this time walked straight across
to the stranger.
“Will you pardon me, madam” (“madam” was a deplorable word, but the
powder somehow demanded an extravagant formality), “if I speak to you,
to ask you something very odd?”
She stared at him through her fantastically patterned veil.
“I have been put in the position of having to meet an elderly lady--a
near relative--here for a more or less intimate conversation. I don’t
think she realized, in making the appointment, how little privacy you
have a right to in a hotel. It is very long since she has been in a
great city. Will you pardon the--the really unpardonable--liberty of my
asking if you are likely to be here much longer? I mean--ought I to
arrange to take her elsewhere in the hotel when she comes? She will be
here in a moment.”
It was a dreadful thing to have had to do, and, if he judged by what the
veil showed of the lady’s face, it couldn’t have been worse done. She
looked dismayed. Peter was angry: so angry that he managed to stop just
where he had stationed himself before her; so angry that he didn’t
deprecate, that he simply set his teeth and waited. There was nothing he
could do now, he felt, to convince her that she hadn’t been insulted.
She lifted her veil ever so little, just freeing her lips, slightly
constricted by its tight-drawn mesh. As she did so, she both rose and
spoke.
“Aren’t you Peter Wayne?”
He bowed, relieved. If they had a ground of acquaintance, he could
perhaps cover it all up, make it plausible, get rid of her on some
dishonest, hilarious pretext. “I am.” He waited; there was no use in
pretending that he remembered her.
The veil was lifted farther, then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a
voice sounded in his astonished ears. “Turn to the light, my son, and
let me look at you. I’ve not had a photograph, you remember, since you
were a child.”
Even as he faced the light, he was saying to himself that it was rummer
than ever; but it was rummest when he turned for his legitimate look at
her. She was older than he had assumed the strange lady to be; but she
was a long way from the little old lady in the gray shawl. This was his
mother, and it was over--he felt it as those sinking for the third time
may feel. In another instant he saw his mistake. He had been pulled up
out of the surge into the terrible air--this was his mother, and it had
just begun! He mastered his breath--his breath that under the water had
been playing tricks with him. He looked her over, searching stare for
searching stare. Her fair hair had lost what must once have been a
golden lustre, but it was carefully, elaborately arranged, waved,
curled, braided. It was as fashionable as her clothes. The white mask of
powder left clear the contour of the fine, thin nose but cloaked the
subtler modellings of the face. The blue eyes, idle yet intent, looked
at him from behind it; below them it was rent, once, by the scarlet stab
of the mouth. Peter remembered vaguely having heard that the tropical
sun necessitated such protection. It was the northern dimness and
drizzle that turned make-up into a moral question. Even for the _grands
boulevards_, to be sure, Mrs. Wayne’s make-up would have been overdone.
This was the chief result of his searching stare. She wasn’t like one’s
mother at all, confound it!--not like any one’s mother. He would have
been glad of a little more sophistication than even at wise
two-and-twenty he was conscious of possessing.
“Your maid?” he asked, remembering the figure outside the door.
“Oh, yes; my old Frances. She recalls you as a baby. She’ll want to see
you. You must speak to her before we go.”
“But you’re not going----”
“I find I’d better get off to-night. I’ve learned since landing, that if
I do, I can just get a boat at Vancouver. It’s not as if I had any
business to do. You’ll take me to dinner somewhere--some restaurant. I
don’t like hotels.”
“But--you don’t mean you’ve come for only twenty-four hours--across all
that?”
The straight red mouth elongated itself into a smile. “If there weren’t
so much of it to cross, I could, perhaps, stay longer. I came only to
say one or two things.”
She spoke as if she had run up from her country place for the day. Peter
suddenly revolted against this careless treatment of his plight. He was
glad if his prayers had succeeded in averting tragedy. At the same time,
he didn’t intend to be turned into farce. He hadn’t let himself in for
all this only to be shirked as he had been shirked for more than twenty
years. He meant to know things, hang it! He had been afraid of a scene;
afraid of twenty years’ emotion expressed in an hour; of a creation of
human ties as violent and sudden as the growth of the tree from the
mango-seed in the fakir’s hands. “In ten minutes you eat the ripe
mango,” a globe-trotting friend had told him. If he hadn’t the fakir’s
miracle to fear, well and good; but neither was he going to suffer the
other extreme, the complete dehumanizing of the experience. After all,
she was his mother, hang it! If she wasn’t going to make him pay--well,
he would make her pay. Somebody had to get something out of so
preposterous a situation. He leaned forward.
“Things you couldn’t write? Or have you just funked it, on the way?”
“Funked it?” Her vocabulary apparently did not hold the word.
“I mean--oh, I mean, let us talk straight. You’ve let it all go for more
than twenty years. Now you take it all up again. I’m a gentleman, I
hope. I didn’t bolt, though you can bet I wanted to. It would have been
easier never to have seen you at all.”
“You’ve never wanted to see your mother?”
Peter looked out of the window into the familiar street. If it hadn’t
been for the utter detachment of her tone, he would have felt that she
was hitting below the belt.
“What do you take me for? I’ve nearly died of--well, call it interest,
more times than I can count up. No little boy likes to have no mother;
likes to have his mother care nothing for him. But I’ve grown perfectly
used to it. And I know--I _know_ now, mind you--that you don’t care.
Well, it may not be what I should have chosen, but at least it lets me
out. It’s too late, now, to make me care.”
It was by no means the whole truth. But it was what he had been trying,
and in vain, to say to himself an hour since about it all. There was
some triumph in being able to say it now to her.
Her blue eyes turned on him a stranger’s sudden kindness. “Were those
years bad, Peter? I thought they’d be less bad if you began them very
young. You see, they had to begin some time.”
“Oh, they began--and they lasted. Now, they’re not bad at all. So why
rake it all up now?”
If she had been little and old and shaking, he couldn’t have pressed the
question, he knew. The powdered cheeks, the elaborate hair, the
vermilion lips gave him a kind of sanction. There was a pitiful way of
wearing rouge, no doubt; this wasn’t pitiful in the least. He didn’t
know what she looked like underneath the mask, but he could almost have
sworn she didn’t need it.
“I’m not trying to do that. If I’ve come so late, it’s because I feel
quite sure that it’s too late to undo any of it. I am not trying”--her
brilliant, dyed smile was extraordinarily little in the maternal
tradition--“to get a single claw into you. I’ve come to pay damages,
Peter, not to claim them. But you must be very, very, very polite to me.
I’m not used to anything else. And America rather frightens me.”
“I don’t want to be anything but polite,” murmured Peter, abashed. “And
the freer you really are, the more it’s up to you to play the game,
don’t you think?”
She smiled vaguely, and he saw at once that she belonged to the
generation that preceded slangy paradox. She might almost have worn a
fluffy gray shawl.
“I am sure you don’t wish to be anything but polite,” she brought out,
still vaguely. “But--I’ve odd things to say, and I’ve come a long way to
say them; and you, my son, must listen.”
“It’s what I’m here for.”
“_Evidemment._ How much has Spencer Martin told you?”
“Old Martin? Nothing at all, ever--except the figure of my allowance.”
“Not why we first went to Hawaii?”
“Good Lord, no! I might have been a foundling.”
“You didn’t ask?” She had taken off her gray glove; and pushed her veil
up farther on her forehead, with beautiful white fingers.
“No,” answered Peter curtly. “A fellow wouldn’t ask. You can see that.”
She seemed to muse. “He would have told you that, I think, if you had.
There was no reason why you shouldn’t know.”
“I naturally supposed, if there was no reason why I shouldn’t know,
you’d have seen to it that I was told.”
“So you thought there was something disgraceful--something that drove us
out of America?”
“It has occurred to me. But I never let myself worry about it. And old
Martin himself was a kind of proof that there wasn’t.”
“There wasn’t.” She echoed his words in a disdainful, emphatically
affirmative tone. “No, Peter, not that.” She paused for a moment,
staring out into the gray street. “These women are very ugly, aren’t
they?” she asked irrelevantly. “On the boat, they were horrors. And they
jerked about so--_did_ so many things. Do the men like them that way?”
Her tone was desultory.
“I suppose so.” He felt a mischievous desire to tell her how little the
men he knew would probably like them _her_ way; but, in fact, the slow
conviction was encroaching on his mind--not so much penetrating it as
fluidically enwrapping it--that she was compounded of many graces. Her
gestures, for example: they were all slow, and each showed off
something, if only, for an instant, some lesser, some negligible
contour. She had the air of not having stirred a limb or a feature for
years, except to please, and of being now in the practice infallible.
She was very feminine--no, hang it! that dairymaid word wouldn’t do.
(Peter had been, in college, the proudest product of his several
“theme-courses,” and the quest of the epithet was not unknown to him.)
She was very simple and very sophisticated. He had to leave it at that.
“I’ll tell you about our leaving America. You ought to have known long
since. And yet--perhaps it was better your sympathies shouldn’t have
been touched. If you thought we were brutes, that would leave you free,
wouldn’t it?”
“It did.”
“Ah, yes--exactly!” She seemed to triumph for an instant. Then she
looked out of the window again, and again spoke irrelevantly. “Are you
in love?”
Peter frowned. “No.” He was too young not to be stiff about it.
“That’s rather a pity. I could have explained better.”
“Oh, I know what it stands for.”
She corrected him gently. “It ‘stands for’ nothing whatever. Either
you’ve loved or you haven’t. It might have helped me--that’s all.” Then
she seemed to brace herself for difficult exposition.
“Listen, Peter. You must know this first. In the months just
following your birth, everything changed. Your father developed
tuberculosis--alarmingly, it was then supposed. That meant another
climate. He owned property in Honolulu. It occurred to him to go there.
In not taking you we acted on physicians’ advice. There was no telling
what sort of life we might have to live. You were best off here. You
were under expert care, and in those days we had news of you constantly.
I am quite well aware”--her voice grew surer as she went on; she seemed
less fantastically feminine, more simply human--“that many women would
have chosen differently. For me there could be no question. You had been
brought into the world in the belief that there would be no choice to
make. We never dreamed, when you were born, of anything but the normal
American life. I insist on your realizing that.”
Peter bowed. It already began to change his vision of himself a little,
though he wasn’t sure he liked his mystery to be merely tubercular.
Though if that was all, why in the world--but he saw that he could only
listen and wait.
“Then--Honolulu didn’t serve very long. We had to go farther away from
life. Now we’re in Tahiti. It’s--it’s a very wonderful climate.”
Mrs. Wayne rose, drew the crimson curtain to one side, and looked out.
It was a moment before she spoke, and as she spoke she sat down again
with helpless grace.
“I find it very hard to tell. I don’t think I can tell you it all.”
“I don’t see why you should have come at all, unless you are going to
tell me everything there is to tell. But if you’ve really funked it, I
don’t care, you know.” Thus Peter, maintaining his bravado.
“You don’t help me out.” The blue eyes rested on him critically. “But I
suppose it’s not your fault. Since you don’t know anything about
anything----”
“I can’t give you a leg up. No.”
She frowned a little, as if troubled by his phrasing, but resigned
herself to it. “No; you can’t give me a leg up.”
“I say--” He leaned forward with a sudden impulse. “Why don’t I go back
with you? Or come out later? Lots of people going to Tahiti now, you
know, since they’ve exhausted the Spanish Main. Plenty of attractions:
drives round the island, perfect scenery, native customs on tap--ordeal
by fire and hot stones. It’s in the advertisements along with the rates
and sailings. No reason why I shouldn’t come.”
She had drawn back while he spoke with a perfectly obvious terror. With
parted lips, and coiled hair, and her very blood (it seemed) turned
white, she looked like Greek tragic masks that he had seen in museums.
These he had always thought grinning prevarications; now, he
acknowledged their authenticity. His jauntiness faded into a stare. Then
she pulled herself together, as Peter would have said, by slow,
difficult degrees, like a kaleidoscope turned too slowly--pitiful to
see.
“No, Peter, you must never come to Tahiti. He--he couldn’t bear it.”
“He?”
“Your father.”
“Oh--my father.” His imagination had not yet evoked his father. “I had
forgotten him, for the moment.”
“Forgotten him! What extraordinary things you say!”
“Well, why shouldn’t I forget him? He hasn’t even taken the trouble to
spend twenty-four hours in America to make my acquaintance.” Something
acrid _had_ risen in the cup, and Peter’s lips were bitter.
Her white fingers moved again to the folds of her veil, as if the frail
mesh weighed intolerably upon her brows.
“If you forget him, of course I can never explain. He is all there is.”
She indulged then in an appraising glance. “You look kind and good. I
didn’t think you would be undutiful.”
Undutiful! It was her turn to introduce an unfamiliar vocabulary.
“Undutiful!” Peter repeated. “What do you mean? That I’m expected to be
grateful to him for being my father?”
She smiled. She lifted her hands. She all but applauded him. “Yes, just
that!”
Peter stared. He had two favorite words with which to describe the
legitimately surprising. One of them was “rum.” But such an idea as this
called for the other. It was--positively--“rococo.”
She went on then. Apparently his ironic question had smitten the rock,
for the fluent tale gushed forth, watering all the arid past. But to
Peter it was as if a man blinded and drenched with spray should try to
drink of it. The first sentences came too quickly. In all his two and
twenty years they found no context. He had still to learn the way of
them. He supposed it was because he was finding out at last what it was
to have a real mother.
“It wasn’t always Tahiti,” he heard her saying after a little. “We’ve
tried everything south of the equator, I’ve sometimes thought.
Valparaiso, for a long time. Perhaps you knew? Spencer Martin----”
“Never even told me when you changed your continent.” He was blandly
bitter. Somehow it did hurt, as she went on.
“The climate,” Mrs. Wayne murmured again. And then she named other
stages of their progress--all places, Peter reflected, that were in the
geographies and in Kipling, and nowhere else. It made his parents sound
like vagabonds of fiction. Her trailing narrative did not add to their
reality. The details she mentioned were wildly exotic, and those she
took for granted he could not supply. Her careful English was
interlarded with strange scraps of Spanish and native names for things
which left the objects, for him, unrecognizable. He made nothing out of
it except that it wasn’t what he should call a life at all. He didn’t
even see whether it was whim or necessity that controlled them. As soon
as anything in her story became coherent or comprehensible, she doubled
on her tracks. At first he threw in occasional questions, but the
answers didn’t explain; and soon he stopped asking them. A foreignness
like that left his very curiosities unphraseable. He came to the point
where he didn’t even know what it was that he wanted to know. There was,
to be sure, the irregularly recurrent stress on the hope of health, an
obsession, apparently, under which they had faintly struggled and madly
rambled; but it didn’t make much more sense than what he had learned in
childhood about Ponce de Leon. You might as well ask a firefly to show
you your way. Clearly, she hadn’t the gift of biography. He sat very
still and intent, trying to make a pattern out of it; but she merely
succeeded in dazing him. Then suddenly, when he was most bewildered, it
came to an end, ran out in a mere confession of failure.
“And nowhere, at any time, has the miracle happened. He has never been
well enough to come back. We have always had to stay away.”
“It must have been a strange life,” Peter mused.
“Strange? It may be. Strange for him, no doubt: so fitted for
civilization--for your world.”
“You speak as if it weren’t yours.”
“Oh, mine,” she said simply; “_he_ was mine. I don’t ask for more
civilization than that--than my husband.”
It was the most sentimental speech that Peter had ever heard from human
lips, and he stared incredulously. But incredulity faded. Her tone of
voice worked on him even after she fell silent. He still felt its
vibration in the air while the mask shifted subtly before his eyes.
Somehow, as she sat there, breathing such simple passion from her
intricate adornments, she became at once more astounding and more
intelligible. One saw it all--even Peter, in his young and untutored
heart, knew infallibly. She had loved her husband supremely, and she had
chucked everything for him. She had chucked so much, in fact, that she
had even lost all sense of the worth of what she had cast away. She had
nothing left to measure it by. Peter felt that America itself was a good
deal to have chucked. It soothed his pride a little, to be sure, to have
her treat New York so cavalierly. She hadn’t so much as looked at it;
and she had circumnavigated the globe for him. It was clear, too, that
every moment of the journey was a kind of torture to her. Her very look
round the room divulged an agony of strangeness and suspense. She was
just longing to be back on her island. Peter thrilled a little foolishly
to it. He fancied it was a _grande passion_. The only _grande passion_
Peter had hitherto known had been that of a sophomore friend for his
landlady’s daughter. That, though it had been enhanced by proper detail
of elopement, disinheritance, and threats of suicide, had disappointed
them all in the end. The bride was rather silly and tried to borrow
money; and when Peter and Marty, in their senior year, had re-read
Lawrence’s sonnet-sequence, they had found that it didn’t scan. But
this--this was different. Whatever his mother had undertaken, she had
obviously put it through. After all those years of marriage, to have
your voice vibrate like that! It had never occurred to Peter that a
fellow’s mother could still be in love with his father. Even in novels
mothers weren’t. As for life: he recalled the parents that he knew. He
had never seen another woman with just that look, the look of a
dedicated being, of some one whose bloom had been, first and last, both
jealously hoarded and lavishly spent. She was like a woman out of a
harem: a million graces for one man, but a mere veiled bundle to all the
rest. That was the secret of her uniqueness. She was a charming woman to
whom the notion of charming the world at large would be blasphemous. Her
mood had been slowly orientalized to match her exterior, which had
gradually grown exotic. She would die in suttee. Peter felt her quality
no less poignantly because his words for it were unsure. Of course she
didn’t want to stay in America! Of course she was off to Vancouver at
midnight! And yet--why, why had she come? Would she never explain?
She had been looking out of the window while he soliloquized--it was
part of the whole sub-tropical spectacle of her that she should limit
herself to so few hours, and then be as languid as if she had leased a
suite at the St. Justin for life. She turned just as Peter had made up
his mind to speak.
“There was one summer when you wanted to go to the Caucasus, I
remember--a rather queer trip that was going to cost a great deal. We
were sorry--I was dreadfully sorry--that you couldn’t go.”
Peter frowned. There you were! She crammed the supreme interview of a
lifetime into an hour, and then had the audacity to be irrelevant.
“We couldn’t afford it just then. It--it was a very expensive year. I
had to tell Spencer we couldn’t. I hope you didn’t hate us for it.”
Peter laughed. “I didn’t even know you had anything to do with it. Old
Martin didn’t tell me it was funds. He just wet-blanketed the whole
thing--said it wasn’t safe and he couldn’t hear of it. I didn’t mind
much. I went to Murray Bay to visit another chap. But, I say--do you
mean old Martin asked you?”
“He cabled.”
“And you?”
“I cabled back.”
“Has he been consulting you about me all these years? In cases like
that, when I didn’t dream of it?”
“Oh, only occasionally,” she hastened to say. “We haven’t been spying on
you.”
“No, I should hope not.” Then he called himself a queer duck, aggrieved
for twenty years because he hadn’t been spied on, and now aggrieved at
the thought that he might be.
“Was it you, by the way,” he asked, “who were interested in my affairs,
or my father?” Her pronouns had been a little confusing.
“Your father has had, more and more, to leave all correspondence to me.”
For the first time, her words came glibly. She had evidently packed that
sentence in her trunk before starting.
“Is he so very ill?” Peter had veered at last to an interest in his
other parent; it was clear that his other parent was the real clue to
the mystery.
“Oh, horribly--horribly!” It was almost a cry. She bent forward. “So
ill, Peter, so ill that you mustn’t come now, ever. He loathes it
so--being so ill. And he is so very proud--as why shouldn’t he be? Can’t
you see how he would mind? Do you think I’d have come if it had been
possible to send for you? Do you think I’d have left him if there had
been any other way? I’m not sure, as it is, that I ought to have come.
It has been terrible, to be getting farther away every day; to know that
I’m as far away from him as it is possible to be on this earth. And
think what it must be for him, alone--and _there_!”
Well, she was as pathetic now as any little old lady in a gray shawl
could be; only she was, somehow, tragic too. Her face was like the white
grave of beauty. Peter was stupefied.
“There?” he repeated.
She flung out her hands. “On a savage island. Think of him on a savage
island!”
“I can’t, very well,” murmured Peter inaudibly. Then: “But has he always
been so ill? For twenty years? Or”--he fixed her a little more
directly--“is there something besides illness?”
She did not answer. She rose and looked out of the window, and as Peter
rose and stood beside her, she lifted one hand to his shoulder. There
was something ineffably gracious in the gesture. She seemed to be making
it all up to him. “Such a patched life, Peter,” she murmured. “You can’t
blame him for not having wanted me to come.”
“Oh, he didn’t want you to come?”
She hesitated for an instant. “No. And now I must go.”
“Now?” he asked stupidly.
“Oh, yes, at once. I shan’t have time to dine with you.” She looked
helplessly about for a scarf that she had thrown down.
“But no!” Peter broke out. “It’s preposterous. To come like this and go
like this! Your train doesn’t go for hours--if you will go to-night.”
“But I haven’t arranged for it. I haven’t packed.”
“Why, you haven’t unpacked!” he cried.
“Oh, I think Frances may have. And I mustn’t fail to get off. There are
the tickets to get, too. Peter, I _must_ go.” She spoke as if to delay
were unspeakable treason; and, as she spoke, she turned to cross the
room to the door.
“I say,” said Peter, standing squarely in her way, “why did you come?
You shan’t go without telling me that.” It wasn’t the way to speak to
one’s mother, but she had chosen to discard the maternal code.
She broke off in the act of withdrawal and turned to him. Her blue eyes
were tearless but very sad. “I loved you dearly when you were very
little,” she said simply. “I’ve never quite forgotten that. I suddenly
realized that, if I waited any longer, I could never come. I think it
was a cruel and foolish thing for me to do, and I’m a little ashamed of
it; but--kiss me, Peter.”
Before he obeyed, he clutched at one more straw. “You won’t see old
Martin?”
“I said good-bye to him a great many years ago.” She smiled. “I had no
one to see in America except you. No--there’s a cab waiting. Good-bye.”
He kissed her then. It was clear to him that he might only watch her go.
He saw her stop to rouse the old servant who waited in the hall. Then
she passed, with strange grace, out of his life.
* * * * *
There was only one tone to take with Marty, who arrived, as always, late
and breathless. “She’s the most charming woman I’ve ever met, and it’s
the devil’s own luck that she had to go straight on to Vancouver to get
a steamer back. My father--who is apparently a charmer, by the way--is
very ill. She’s wonderful. It’s the biggest thing that has ever happened
to me. She’s made everything as right as right. But I can’t tell you
about it. After twenty years--you understand, old man----”
It was less the loyal friend than the loyal son; but he was still,
dining that night at Plon’s (he wondered where the deuce she was
dining), very much under her dominion. She had brought with her a rare
illumination. He would never forget her voice and her veiled eyes. He
hadn’t dreamed a woman could suggest her love in so many silent ways.
She just _was_ adoration, implicit and incarnate. It was tremendous to
have seen it. The white light it threw on Lawrence’s bride! The white
light it threw, for that matter, on all the women he knew! He felt
himself bursting with knowledge.
It was not until after dinner, indeed, that he realized just how
wonderful in another way she had been, and with how little knowledge of
another sort she had left him. She had told him absolutely nothing. So
far as he was concerned, her narrative had only concealed events. He
couldn’t remember whether New Zealand had followed or preceded Chile;
and his sincere impression was that it didn’t matter, even to them.
Anything that in all those years _had_ mattered, had been dropped away
out of sight between her sentences. If he had been by his hour both
racked and inebriated (for that was what his state of tension amounted
to), it was not because of any facts she had given him. She had not even
answered his plain questions. She had left him in dismay as soon as he
had begun to ask them. He saw that now, though in his simplicity he
hadn’t seen it before. He had been sacrificed again, as he had always
been sacrificed. His mystery was still his mystery, and he was still
left alone with his monstrous hypotheses. He wouldn’t have missed it for
anything--not even for good old Marty. But he turned to Marty at last
with compunction.
“Marty, old man,” he said, “it _was_ rum.”
THE WINE OF VIOLENCE
I am an old man now, and, like many other old men, I feel like making
confession. Not of my own sins. I have always been called, I am well
aware, a dilettante, and I could hardly have sinned in the ways of the
particular sinners of whom I am about to speak. But I have the
dilettante’s liking for all realities that do not brush him too close.
Throughout the case of Filippo and Rachel Upcher, I was always on the
safe side of the footlights. I have no excuse for not being honest, and
I have at last an excuse for speaking. It is wonderful how the death of
acquaintances frees one; and I am discovering, at the end of life, the
strange, lonely luxury of being able to tell the truth about nearly
every one I used to know. All the prolonged conventional disloyalties
are passed away. It is extraordinary how often one is prevented from
telling the blessed truth about the familiar dead because of some
irrelevant survivor.
I do not know that there was much to choose between Filippo and Rachel
Upcher--though the world would not agree with me. Both of them, in
Solomon’s words, “drank the wine of violence.” I never really liked
either of them, and I have never been caught by the sentimental adage
that to understand is to forgive. If we are damned, it is God who damns
us, and no one ventures to accuse Him of misunderstanding. It is a
little late for a mere acquaintance to hark back to the Upchers, but by
accident I, and I only, know the main facts that the world has so long
been mistaken about. They were a lurid pair; they were not of my clan.
But I cannot resist the wholly pious temptation to set my clan right
about them. I should have done it long ago, in years when it would have
made “scare-heads” in the same papers that of old had had so many
“scare-heads” about the Upchers, but for my dear wife. She simply could
not have borne it. To tell the story is part of the melancholy freedom
her death has bestowed on me.
By the time you have read my apology, you will have remembered, probably
with some disgust, the Upcher “horror.” I am used to it, but I can
still wince at it. I have always been pleased to recognize that life,
as my friends lived it, was not in the least like the newspapers. Not to
be like the newspapers was as good a test of caste as another. Perhaps
it is well for a man to realize, once in his time, that at all events
the newspapers are a good deal like life. In any case, when you have
known fairly well a man sentenced and executed for murder--and on such
evidence!--you never feel again like saying that “one doesn’t know”
people who sue for breach of promise. After all, every one of us knows
people who accept alimony. But I’ve enough grudge against our newspapers
to be glad that my true tale comes too late for even the _Orb_ to get an
“extra” out of it. The _Orb_ made enough, in its time, out of the
Upchers. On the day when the charwoman gave her evidence against Filippo
Upcher, the last copies of the evening edition sold in the New York
streets for five dollars each. I have said enough to recall the case to
you, and enough, I hope, to explain that it’s the kind of thing I am
very little used to dealing with. “Oblige me by referring to the files,”
if you want the charwoman’s evidence. Now I may as well get to my
story. I want it, frankly, off my hands. It has been pushing for a year
into my _Italian Interludes_; thrusts itself in, asking if it isn’t,
forsooth, as good, for emotion, as anything in the Cinquecento. And so,
God knows, it is ... but the Cinquecento charwomen have luckily been
obliterated from history.
I knew Filippo Upcher years ago; knew him rather well in a world where
the word “friend” is seldom correctly used. We were “pals,” rather, I
should think: ate and drank together at Upcher’s extraordinary hours,
and didn’t often see each other’s wives. It was Upcher’s big period.
London and New York went, docile enough, to see him act Othello. He used
to make every one weep over Desdemona, I know, and that is more than
Shakespeare unassisted has always managed. Perhaps if he hadn’t done
Othello so damnably well, with such a show of barbaric passion--It was
my “little” period, if I may say it; when I was having the inevitable
try at writing plays. I soon found that I could not write them, but
meanwhile I lived for a little in the odd flare of the theatric world.
Filippo Upcher--he always stuck, even in playbills, you remember, to
the absurd name--I had met in my Harvard days, and I found him again at
the very heart of that flare. The fact that his mother was an Italian
whose maiden name had been brushed across with a title got him into
certain drawing-rooms that his waistcoats would have kept him out of.
She helped him out, for example, in Boston--where “baton sinister” is
considered, I feel sure, merely an ancient heraldic term. Rachel Upcher,
his wife, I used to see occasionally. She had left the stage before she
married Upcher, and I fancy her tense renditions of Ibsen were the last
thing that ever attracted him. My first recollection of her is in a
_pose plastique_ of passionate regret that she had never, in her brief
career, had an opportunity to do _Ghosts_. _Rosmersholm_, I believe, was
as far as she ever went. She had beauty of the incongruous kind that
makes you wonder when, where, and how the woman stole the mask. She is
absolutely the only person I ever met who gave you the original of the
much-imitated “mysterious” type. She was eternally mysterious--and,
every day, quite impossible. It wasn’t to be expected that poor Evie
should care to see much of her, and I never put the question that Mrs.
Upcher seemed to be always wanting to refuse to answer. The fact is that
the only time I ever took poor Evie there, Filippo and his wife
quarrelled so vulgarly and violently that we came away immediately after
dinner. It would have been indecent to stay. You were sure that he would
beat her as soon as you left, but also that before he had hurt her much,
she would have cut his head open with a plate. Very much, you see, in
the style of the newspapers. I saw Filippo at the club we both had the
habit of, and, on his Anglo-Saxon days, liked him fairly well. When his
Italian blood rose beneath his clear skin, I would have piled up any
number of fictitious engagements to avoid him. He was unspeakable then:
unappeasable, vitriolic, scarce human. You felt, on such days, that he
wanted his _entrée_ smeared with blood, and you lunched at another table
so that at least the blood shouldn’t be yours. I used to fancy
whimsically that some ancestress of his had been a housemaid to the
Borgias, and had got into rather distinguished “trouble.” But she must
have been a housemaid. I did not, however, say this to any one during
the trial; for I was sure that his passion was perfectly unpractical,
and that he took action only in his mild moments.
I found, as I say, that I could not write plays. My wife and I went
abroad for some years. We saw Upcher act once in London, but I didn’t
even look him up. That gives you the measure of our detachment. I had
quite forgotten him in the succeeding years of desultory, delightful
roaming over southern Europe. There are alike so much to remember and so
much to forget, between Pirene and Lourdes! But the first head-lines of
the first newspaper that I bought on the dock, when we disembarked
reluctantly in New York, presented him to me again. It was all there:
the “horror,” the “case,” the vulgar, garish tragedy. We had landed in
the thick of it. It took me some time to grasp the fact that a man whom
I had occasionally called by his first name was being accused of that
kind of thing. I don’t need to dot my i’s. You had all seen Filippo
Upcher act, and you all, during his trial, bought the _Orb_. I read it
myself--every sickening column that had been, with laborious speed,
jotted down in the court-room. The evidence made one feel that, if this
was murder, a man who merely shoots his wife through the heart need not
be considered a criminal at all. It was the very scum of crime. Rachel
Upcher had disappeared after a violent quarrel with her husband, in
which threats--overheard--had been freely uttered. He could give no
plausible account of her. Then the whole rotten mass of evidence--fit
only for a rag-picker to handle--began to come in. The mutilated body
disinterred; the fragments of marked clothing; the unused railway
ticket--but I really cannot go into it. I am not an _Orb_ reporter. The
evidence was only circumstantial, but it was, alack! almost better than
direct testimony. Filippo was perfectly incoherent in defence, though
he, of course, pleaded “not guilty.” He had, for that significant
scene--he, Filippo Upcher!--no stage presence.
The country re-echoed the sentence, as it had re-echoed every shriek of
the evidence, from Atlantic to Pacific. The jury was out five
hours--would have been out only as many minutes if it had not been for
one Campbell, an undertaker, who had some doubts as to the sufficiency
of the “remains” disinterred to make evidence. But the marked
underclothing alone made their fragmentariness negligible. Campbell was
soon convinced of that. It was confused enough, in all conscience--he
told Upcher’s and my friend, Ted Sloan, later--but he guessed the things
the charwoman overheard were enough to convict any man; he’d stick to
that. Of course, the prosecuting attorney hadn’t rested his case on the
imperfect state of the body, anyhow--had just brought it in to show how
nasty it had been all round. It didn’t even look very well for him to
challenge medical experts, though a body that had been buried was a
little more in his line than it was in theirs, perhaps. And any
gentleman in his profession had had, he might say, more practical
experience than people who lectured in colleges. He hadn’t himself,
though, any call from superior technical knowledge to put spokes in the
wheel of justice. He guessed that was what you’d call a quibble. And he
was crazy to get home--Mrs. C. was expecting her first, any time along.
Sloan said the man seemed honest enough; and he was quite right--the
chain of circumstance was, alas! complete. Upcher was convicted of
murder in the first degree, and sentenced to death. He didn’t
appeal--wouldn’t, in spite of his counsel, and Sloan’s impassioned
advice: “Give ’em a run for their money, Filippo. Be a sport, anyhow!”
“Lord, man, all juries are alike,” was the response. “They’ve no brains.
I wouldn’t have the ghost of a show, and I’m not going through that
racket again, and make a worse fool of myself on the stand another
time.”
“But if you don’t, they’ll take it you’ve owned up.”
“Not necessarily, after they’ve read my will. I’ve left Rachel the
‘second best bed.’ There wasn’t much else. She’s got more than I ever
had. No, Sloan, a man must be guilty to want to appeal. No innocent man
would go through that hell twice. I want to get out and be quiet.”
The only appeal he did make was not such as to give Mr. Campbell any
retrospective qualms of conscience. The request was never meant to get
out, but, like so many other things marked “private,” it did. His
petition was for being allowed to act a certain number of nights before
his execution. He owed frightful sums, but, as he said, no sums,
however frightful, could fail to be raised by such a device.
“It would kill your chances of a reprieve, Filippo,” Sloan said he told
him.
“Reprieve?” Filippo had laughed. “Why, it would _prove_ me guilty. It
would turn all the evidence pale. But think of the box-office receipts.
There would have to be a platoon of police deadheading in the front
rows, of course. But even at that----!”
Sloan came away a little firmer for circumstantial evidence than he had
been before. He wouldn’t see Filippo again; wouldn’t admit that it was a
good epigram; wouldn’t even admit that it was rather fine of Filippo to
be making epigrams at all. Most people agreed with him: thought Upcher
shockingly cynical. But of course people never take into account the
difference there is between being convicted and pleading guilty. Is it
not _de rigueur_ that, in those circumstances, a man’s manner should be
that of innocence? Filippo’s flight has always seemed to me a really
fine one. But I do not know of any man one could count on to distil from
it the pure attar of honesty.
We had gone straight to my wife’s family in New England, on arriving.
Until I saw Sloan, I had got my sole information about Upcher from the
newspapers. Sloan’s account of Filippo’s way of taking it roused my
conscience. If a man, after all that, could show _any_ decency, one owed
him something. I decided, without consulting my wife about it, to go
over to New York and see Filippo myself. Evie was so done up by the
thought of having once dined with the Upchers that I could hardly have
broken my intention to her. I told her, of course, after I returned, but
to know beforehand might have meant a real illness for her. I should
have spared her all of it, had it not seemed to me, at the moment, my
duty to go. The interview was not easy to manage, but I used Evie’s
connections shamelessly, and in the end the arrangement was made. I have
always been glad that I went, but I don’t know anything more
nerve-racking than to visit a condemned criminal whose guilt you can not
manage to doubt. Only Filippo’s proposal (of which Sloan had told me) to
act long enough to pay his debts, made me do it. I still persist in
thinking it magnificent of Filippo, though I don’t pretend there wasn’t
in his desire some lingering lust of good report. The best he could hope
for was to be forgotten; but he would naturally rather be forgotten as
Hamlet than as Filippo Upcher.
Upcher was not particularly glad to see me, but he made the situation as
little strained as possible. He did no violent protesting, no arraigning
of law and justice. If he had, perhaps, acted according to the dictates
of his hypothetical ancestress, he at least spoke calmly enough. He
seemed to regard himself less as unjustly accused than as unjustly
executed, if I may say so: he looked on himself as a dead man; his
calamity was irretrievable. The dead may judge, but I fancy they don’t
shriek. At all events, Upcher didn’t. A proof of his having cast hope
carelessly over his shoulder was his way of speaking of his wife. He
didn’t even take the trouble to use the present tense; to stress, as it
were, her flesh-and-blood reality. It was “Rachel was,” never “Rachel
is”--as we sometimes use the past tense to indicate that people have
gone out of our lives by their own fault. The way in which he spoke of
her was not tactful. A franker note of hatred I’ve never--except
perhaps once--heard struck. Occasionally he would pull himself up, as if
he remembered that the dead are our natural creditors for kindly speech.
“She was a devil, and only a devil could live with her. But there’s no
point in going into it now.”
I rather wanted him to go into it: not--might Heaven forbid!--to
confess, but to justify himself, to gild his stained image. I tried
frankness.
“I think I’ll tell you, Upcher, that I never liked her.”
He nodded. “She was poison; and I am poisoned. That’s the whole thing.”
I was silent for a moment. How much might it mean?
“You read the evidence?” he broke out. “Well, it was bad--damned bad and
dirty. I’d rather be hanged straight than hear it all again. But it’s
the kind of thing you get dragged into sooner or later if you link
yourself to a creature like that. I suppose I’m essentially vulgar, but
I’m a better lot than she was--for all her looks.”
“She had looks,” I admitted.
“No one could touch her at her best. But she was an unspeakable cat.”
It had been, all of it, about as much as I could stand, and I prepared
to go. My time, in any case, was about up. I found it--in spite of the
evidence--shockingly hard to say good-bye to Upcher. You know what
farewells by a peaceful death-bed are; and you can imagine this.
There was nothing to do but grip his hand. “Good-bye, Filippo.”
“Good-bye, old man. I’ll see you--” The familiar phrase was extinguished
on his lips. We stared at each other helplessly for an instant. Then the
warder led me out.
The Upcher trial--since Filippo refused to appeal--had blown over a bit
by the time I went West. My widowed sister was ill, and I left Evie and
every one, to take her to southern California. We followed the
conventional route of flight from tuberculosis, and lingered a little in
Arizona, looking down into the unspeakable depths of the Grand Cañon. I
rather hoped Letitia would stay there, for I’ve never seen anything else
so good; but the unspeakable depths spoke to her words of terror. She
wanted southern California: roses, and palms, and more people. It was
before the Santa Fé ran its line up to Bright Angel, and of course El
Tovar wasn’t built. It was rather rough living. Besides, there were
Navajos and Hopis all about, and Letitia came of good Abolitionist stock
and couldn’t stand anything that wasn’t white. So we went on to Santa
Barbara.
There we took a house with a garden; rode daily down to the Pacific, and
watched the great blue horizon waves roll ever westward to the
immemorial East. “China’s just across, and that is why it looks so
different from the Atlantic,” I used to explain to Letitia; but she was
never disloyal to the North Shore of Massachusetts. She liked the
rose-pink mountains, and even the romantic Mission of the Scarlet Woman;
but she liked best her whist with gentle, white-shawled ladies, and the
really intellectual conversations she had with certain college
professors from the East. I could not get her to take ship for Hawaii or
Samoa. She distrusted the Pacific. After all, China _was_ just across.
I grew rather bored, myself, by Santa Barbara, before the winter was
out. Something more exotic, too, would have been good for Letitia. There
was a little colony from my sister’s Holy Land, and in the evenings you
could fancy yourself on Brattle Street. She had managed, even there, to
befog herself in a New England atmosphere. I was sure it was bad for her
throat. I won’t deny, either, that there was more than anxiety at the
heart of my impatience. I could not get Filippo Upcher out of my head.
After all, I had once seen much of him; and, even more than that, I had
seen him act a hundred times. Any one who had seen him do Macbeth would
know that Filippo Upcher could not commit a murder without
afterthoughts, however little forethought there might have been in it.
It was all very well for van Vreck to speculate on Filippo’s ancestry
and suggest that the murder was a pretty case of atavism--holding the
notion up to the light with his claret and smiling æsthetically. Upcher
had had a father of sorts, and he wasn’t all Borgia--or housemaid. Evie
never smirched her charming pages with the name of Upcher, and I was cut
off from the _Orb_; but I felt sure that the San Francisco papers would
announce the date of his execution in good time. I scanned them with
positive fever. Nothing could rid me of the fantastic notion that there
would be a terrible scene for Upcher on the other side of the grave;
that death would but release him to Rachel Upcher’s Stygian fury. It
seemed odd that he should not have preferred a disgusted jury to such a
ghost before its ire was spent. The thought haunted me; and there was no
one in Letitia’s so satisfactory circle to whom I could speak. I began
to want the open; for the first time in my life, to desire the sound of
unmodulated voices. Besides, Letitia’s régime was silly. I took drastic
measures.
It was before the blessed days of limousines, and one had to arrange a
driving trip with care. Letitia behaved very well. She was really
worried about her throat, and absurdly grateful to me for giving up my
winter to it. I planned as comfortably as I could for her--even
suggested that we should ask an acquaintance or two to join us. She
preferred going alone with me, however, and I was glad. Just before we
started, while I was still wrangling with would-be guides and drivers
and sellers of horses, the news of Upcher’s execution came. If I could
have suppressed that day’s newspapers in Santa Barbara, I should have
done so, for, little as I had liked Filippo, I liked less hearing the
comments of Letitia’s friends. They discussed the case,
criminologically, through an interesting evening. It was quite
scientific and intolerably silly. I hurried negotiations for the trip,
and bought a horse or two rather recklessly. Anything, I felt, to get
off. We drove away from the hotel, waving our hands to a trim group
(just photographed) on the porch.
The days that followed soothed me: wild and golden and increasingly
lonely. We had a sort of cooking kit with us, which freed us from too
detailed a schedule, and could have camped, after a fashion; but usually
by sundown we made some rough tavern or other. Letitia looked askance at
these, and I did not blame her. As we struck deeper in toward the
mountains, the taverns disappeared, and we found in their stead lost
ranches--self-sufficing, you would say, until, in the parched faces of
the womenfolk, all pretence of sufficiency broke down. Letitia picked up
geological specimens and was in every way admirable, but I did not wish
to give her an overdose. After a little less than a fortnight, I decided
to start back to Santa Barbara. We were to avoid travelling the same
country twice, and our route, mapped, would eventually be a kind of
rough ellipse. We had just swung round the narrow end, you might say,
when our first real accident occurred. The heat had been very great, and
our driver had, I suspect, drunk too much. At all events, he had not
watched his horses as he should have done, and one of the poor beasts,
in the mid-afternoon, fell into a desperate state with colic. We did
what we could--he nearly as stupid as I over it--but it was clear that
we could not go on that night whither we had intended. It was a question
of finding shelter, and help for the suffering animal. The sky looked
threatening. I despatched the inadequate driver in search of a refuge,
and set myself to impart hope to Letitia. The man returned in a
surprisingly short time, having seen the outbuildings of a ranch-house.
I need not dwell on details. We made shift to get there eventually, poor
collapsed beast and all. A ranchman of sorts met us and conducted
Letitia to the house. The ranch belonged, he said, to a Mrs. Wace, and
to Mrs. Wace, presumably, he gave her in charge. I did not, at the
moment, wish to leave our horse until I saw into what hands I was
resigning him. The hands seemed competent enough, and the men assured me
that the animal could travel the next day. When the young man returned
from the ranch-house, I was quite ready to follow him back thither, and
get news of Letitia. He left me inside a big living-room. A Chinese
servant appeared presently and contrived to make me understand that Mrs.
Wace would come down when she had looked after my sister. I was still
thinking about the horse when I heard the rustle of skirts. Our hostess
had evidently established Letitia. I turned, with I know not what
beginnings of apologetic or humorous explanation on my lips. The
beginning was the end, for I stood face to face with Rachel Upcher.
I have never known just how the next moments went. She recognized me
instantly, and evidently to her dismay. I know that before I could shape
my lips to any words that should be spoken, she had had time to sit down
and to suggest, by some motion of her hand, that I should do the same.
I did not sit; I stood before her. It was only when she began some
phrase of conventional surprise at seeing me in that place of all places
that I found speech. I made nothing of it; I had no solution; yet my
message seemed too urgent for delay. All that I had suffered in my so
faint connection with Filippo Upcher’s tragedy returned to me in one
envenomed pang. I fear that I wanted most, at the moment, to pass that
pang on to the woman before me. My old impatience of her type, her cheap
mysteriousness, her purposeless inscrutability possessed me. I do not
defend my mood; I only give it to you as it was. I have often noticed
that crucial moments are appallingly simple to live through. The brain
constructs the labyrinth afterwards. All perplexities were merged for me
just then in that one desire--to speak, to wound her. But my task was
not easy, and I have never been proud of the fashion of its performance.
“Mrs. Wace” (even the subtle van Vreck could not have explained why I
did not give her her own name), “is it possible--but I pray Heaven it
is--that you don’t know?”
“Know?” It was the voice of a stone sphinx.
“How can I tell you--how can I tell you?”
“What?”
“About Filippo.”
“Filippo?”
“Yes, Filippo! That he is dead.”
“Dead?” The carved monosyllables were maddening.
“Yes--killed. Tried, sentenced, _executed_.”
Her left hand dropped limply from the lace at her throat to a ruffle of
her dress. “For what?” Her voice vibrated for the first time.
“For murdering you.”
“Me?” She seemed unable to take it in.
“You must have seen the papers.”
“I have seen no papers. Does one leave the world as utterly as I have
left it, to read newspapers? On a lonely ranch like this”--she broke
off. “I haven’t so much as seen one for five months. I--I--” Then she
pulled herself together. “Tell me. This is some horrid farce. What do
you mean? For God’s sake, man, tell me!”
She sat back to hear.
I cannot remember the words in which I told her. I sketched the thing
for her--the original mystery, breaking out at last into open scandal
when the dismembered body was found; the evidence (such of it as I could
bring myself to utter in the presence of that so implicated figure); the
course of the trial; Filippo’s wretched defence; the verdict; the
horrid, inevitable result. My bitterness grew with the story, but I held
myself resolutely to a tone of pity. After all--it shot across my
mind--Filippo Upcher had perhaps in the grave found peace.
It must have taken me, for my broken, difficult account, half an hour.
Not once in that time was I interrupted. She seemed hardly to breathe. I
told her to the very date and hour of his execution. I could give her no
comfort; only, at best, bald facts. For what exhibition of self-loathing
or self-pity I had been prepared I do not know; but surely for some. I
had been bracing myself throughout for any kind of scene. No scene of
any kind occurred. She was hard and mute as stone. I could have dealt
better, when at last I stopped, with hysterics than with that figure
before me--tense, exhausted, terrible. I found myself praying for her
tears. But none came.
At last I rose--hoping by the sudden gesture to break her trance. Her
eyes followed me. “Terrible--terrible--beyond anything I ever dreamed.”
I caught the whispered words. I took the chance for pity; found
myself--though I detested the woman as never before--wanting to comfort
her.
“He never appealed,” I reminded her. “Perhaps he was glad to die.” It
sounded weak and strange; but who could tell what words would reach that
weak, strange heart?
I stood before her, more perplexed than at any other moment of my life.
At last she opened her eyes and spoke. “Leave me. And do not tell your
sister who I am. I shall pull myself together by dinnertime. Go!” She
just lifted her hand, then closed her eyes again.
I went out, and, stumbling across a Chinese servant, got him to show me
my room.
Of what use would it be to recall, after all the years, what I felt and
thought during the next hours? I did not try to send Letitia to Mrs.
Upcher. Letitia would have been of no use, even if she had consented to
go. It was sheerest wisdom to obey Rachel Upcher, and not to tell. But I
had a spasm of real terror when I thought of her “pulling herself
together” in her lonely chamber. I listened for a scream, a pistol-shot.
It did not seem to me that a woman could hear news like that which it
had been my tragic luck to give, without some according show of emotion.
Yet a little later I asked myself in good faith what show could ever fit
that situation. What speech, what gesture, in that hour, would have been
adequate? The dangerous days, in point of fact, would probably come
later. I thought more of her, in those two hours, than of Filippo.
Though she might well, from all the evidence, have hated him quite
honestly, hers was the ironic destiny that is harder to bear than mere
martyrdom. No death had ever been more accidental, more irrelevant, more
preventable than Filippo’s. One fortnight sooner, she could have turned
back the wheel that had now come full circle. That was to be her Hell,
and--well, having descended into it in those two hours, I was glad
enough to mount once more into the free air.
Mrs. Upcher kept her promise. She pulled herself together and came to
dinner, in a high black dress without so much as a white ruche to
relieve it. The manager of the ranch, a young Englishman named Floyd,
dined with us. He was handsome in a bloodshot way, and a detrimental, if
ever there has been one. In love with Mrs. Upcher he looked to be; that,
too, in the same bloodshot way. But she clearly had him in perfect
order. The mask, I suppose, had worked. Letitia did her social best, but
her informing talk failed to produce any pleasant effect. It was too
neat and flat. Floyd watched Mrs. Upcher, and she watched the opposite
wall. I did my best to watch no one. We were rather like a fortuitous
group at a provincial _table d’hôte_: dissatisfied with conditions and
determined not to make acquaintance. We were all thankful, I should
think, when the meal was over. Mrs. Upcher made no attempt to amuse us
or make us comfortable. The young manager left for his own quarters
immediately after dinner, and Letitia soon went to her room. I lingered
for a moment, out of decency, thinking Rachel Upcher might want to speak
to me, to ask me something, to cry out to me, to clutch me for some
desperate end. She sat absolutely silent for five minutes; and, seeing
that the spell, whatever it was, was not yet broken, I left her.
I did not go to bed at once. How should I have done that? I was still
listening for that scream, that pistol-shot. Nothing came. I remember
that, after an hour, I found it all receding from me--the Upchers’
crossed emotions and perverted fates. It was like stepping out of a
miasmic mist. Filippo Upcher was dead; and on the other side of the
grave there had been no such encounter for him as I had imagined. And I
had positively seen a demoniac Rachel Upcher waiting for him on that
pale verge! I searched the room for books. There was some Ibsen, which
at that moment I did not want. I rejected, one after one, nearly all the
volumes that the shelves held. It was a stupid collection. I had about
made up my mind to the “Idylls of the King” (they were different enough,
in all conscience, from the Upcher case) when I saw a pile of magazines
on a table in a distant corner. “Something sentimental,” I proposed to
myself, as I went over to ravage them. Underneath the magazines--a
scattered lot, for the most part, of _London Graphics_ and _English
Illustrateds_--I found a serried pack of newspapers: San Francisco and
Denver sheets, running a few months back. I had never seen a Denver
newspaper, and I picked one up to read the editorials, out of a
desultory curiosity rare with me. On the first page, black head-lines
took a familiar contour. I had stumbled on the charwoman’s evidence
against Filippo Upcher. _Rien que ça!_
My first feeling, I remember, was one of impotent anger--the child’s
raving at the rain--that I must spend the night in that house. It was
preposterous that life should ask it of me. Talk of white nights! What,
pray, would be the color of mine? Then I, in my turn, “pulled myself
together.” I went back to the newspapers and examined them all. The
little file was arranged in chronological order and was coextensive with
the Upcher case, from arrest to announcement of the execution. The _Orb_
might have been a little fuller, but not much. The West had not been
fickle to Filippo.
I sat staring at the neatly folded papers for a time. They seemed to me
monstrous, not fit to touch, as if they were by no means innocent of
Filippo Upcher’s fate. By a trick of nerves and weak lamplight, there
seemed to be nothing else in the room. I was alone in the world with
them. How long I sat there, fixing them with eyes that must have shown
clear loathing, I have never known. There are moments like that, which
contrive cunningly to exist outside of Time and Space, of which you
remember only the quality. But I know that when I heard steps in the
corridor, I was sure for an instant that it was Filippo Upcher
returning. I was too overwrought to reflect that, whatever the perils of
Rachel Upcher’s house might be, the intrusion of the dead Filippo was
not one of them: that he would profit resolutely by the last league of
those fortunate distances--if so it chanced, by the immunity of very
Hell. It could not be Filippo’s hand that knocked so nervously on the
door. Nor was it. I opened to Rachel Upcher. The first glance at her
face, her eyes, her aimless, feverish, clutching hands, showed that the
spell had at last been broken. She had taken off her black dress and was
wrapped in loose, floating, waving pink. Have you ever imagined the
Erinyes in pink? No other conceivable vision suggests the figure that
stood before me. I remember wondering foolishly and irrelevantly why, if
she could look like that, she had not done Ibsen better. But she brought
me back to fact as she beckoned me out of the room.
“I am sorry--very sorry--but--I was busy with your sister when you came
in, and they have given you the wrong room. I will send some one to move
your things--I will show you your room. Please come--I am sorry.”
I cannot describe her voice. The words came out with difficult,
unnatural haste, like blood from a wound. Between them she clutched at
this or that shred of lace. But I could deal better even with frenzy
than with the mask that earlier I had so little contrived to disturb. I
felt relieved, disburdened. And Filippo was safe--safe. I was free to
deal as I would.
I stepped back into the room. The pile of papers no longer controlled my
nerves. After all, they had been but the distant reek of the monster. I
went over and lifted them, then faced her.
“Is this what you mean by the wrong room?”
She must have seen at once that I had examined them; that I had sounded
the whole significance of their presence there. The one on top--I had
not disturbed their order--gave in clear print the date fixed for
Filippo Upcher’s execution: that date now a fortnight back. And she had
played to me, as if I were a gallery god, with her black dress!
“I have looked them through,” I went on; “and though I didn’t need to
read those columns, I know just what they contain. You knew it all.” I
paused. It would have taken, it seemed to me, the vocabulary of a major
prophet to denounce her fitly. I could only leave it at that bald hint
of her baseness.
She made no attempt at denial or defence. Something happened in her
face--something more like dissolution than like change--as if the
elements of her old mask would never reassemble. She stepped forward,
still gathering the floating ribands, the loose laces, in her nervous
hands. Once she turned as if listening for a sound. Then she sat down
beside my fire, her head bent forward toward me; ready, it seemed, to
speak. Her fingers moved constantly, pulling, knotting, smoothing the
trailing streamers of her gown. The rest of her body was as still as
Filippo Upcher’s own. I endured her eyes for a moment. Then I repeated
my accusation. “You knew it all.”
“Yes, I knew it all.”
I had not dreamed, in spite of the papers that I clutched in full view
of her, that she would confess so simply. But they apparently brought
speech to her lips. She did not go on at once, and when she did, she
sounded curiously as Filippo Upcher in prison had sounded. Her voice
touched him only with disgust. Yet she stinted no detail, and I had to
hear of Filippo’s vices: his vanities, his indiscretions, his
infidelities, all the seven deadly sins against her pride committed by
him daily. He may have been only a bounder, but his punishment had been
fit for one heroic in sin. I did my best to keep that discrepancy in
mind as she went on vulgarizing him. I am no cross-questioner, and I let
her account move, without interruption, to the strange, fluttering
_tempo_ of her hands. Occasionally her voice found a vibrant note, but
for the most part it was flat, impersonal as a phonograph: the voice of
the actress who is not at home in the unstudied rôle. I do not think
she gauged her effect; I am sure that she was given wholly to the task
of describing her hideous attitude veraciously. There was no hint of
appeal in her tone, as to some dim tribunal which I might represent; but
she seemed, once started, to like to tell her story. It was not really a
story--the patched portrait of a hatred, rather. Once or twice I opened
my lips to cry out: “Why not, in Heaven’s name, a divorce rather than
this?” I always shut them without asking, and before the end I
understood. The two had simply hated each other too much. They could
never be adequately divorced while both beheld the sun. To walk the same
earth was too oppressive, too intimate a tie. It sounds incredible--even
to me, now; but I believed it without difficulty at that moment. I
remembered the firmness with which Filippo had declared that, herself
poison, she had poisoned him. Well, there _were_ fangs beneath her
tongue.
Heaven knows--it’s the one thing I don’t know about it, to this day--if
there was any deliberate attempt on Rachel Upcher’s part to give her
flight a suspicious look. There were so many ways, when once you knew
for a fact that Filippo had not killed her, in which you could account
for the details that earlier had seemed to point to foul play. My own
notion is that she fled blindly, with no light in her eyes--no ghastly
glimmer of catastrophe to come. She had covered her tracks completely
because she had wished to be completely lost. She didn’t wish Filippo to
have even the satisfaction of knowing whether she was alive or dead.
Some of her dust-throwing--the unused ticket, for example--resulted in
damning evidence against Filippo. After that, coincidence labored
faithfully at his undoing. No one knows, even now, whose body it was
that passed for Rachel Upcher’s. All other clues were abandoned at the
time for the convincing one that led to her. I have sometimes wondered
why I didn’t ask her more questions: to whom she had originally given
the marked underclothing, for example. It might have gone far toward
identifying what the Country Club grounds had so unluckily given up. But
to lead those tortured fragments of bone and flesh into another
masquerade would have been too grotesque. And at that moment, in the
wavering, unholy lamplight of the half-bare, half-tawdry room--the
whole not unlike one of Goya’s foregrounds--justice and the public were
to me equally unreal. What I realized absolutely was that so long as
Rachel Upcher lived, I might not speak. Horror that she was, she had
somehow contrived to be the person who must be saved. I would have
dragged her by the hair to the prison gates, had there been any chance
of saving Filippo--at least, I hope I should. But Filippo seemed to me
at the moment so entirely lucky that to avenge him didn’t matter. I
think I felt, sitting opposite that Fury in pink, something of their own
emotion. Filippo was happier, _tout bonnement_, in another world from
her; and to do anything to bring them together--to hound her into
suicide, for example--would be to play him a low trick. I could have
drunk to her long life as she sat there before me. It matters little to
most of us what the just ghosts think; how much less must our opinion
matter to them! No; Rachel Upcher, even as I counted her spots and
circles, was safe from me. I didn’t want to know anything definitely
incriminating about her flight, anything that would bring her within
the law, or impose on me a citizen’s duties. Citizens had already
bungled the situation enough. If she had prepared the trap for Filippo,
might that fact be forever unknown! But I really do not believe that she
had. What she had done was to profit shamelessly (a weak word!) by
coincidence. I have often wondered if Rachel Upcher never wavered, never
shuddered, during those months of her wicked silence. That question I
even put to her then, after a fashion. “It was long,” she answered; “but
I should do it all again. He was horrible.” What can you do with hatred
like that? He had been to her, as she to him, actual infection. “Poison
... and I am poisoned.” Filippo’s words to me would have served his
wife’s turn perfectly. There was, in the conventional sense, for all her
specific complaints, no “cause.” She hated him, not for what he did but
for what he was. She _would_ have done it all again. The mere irony of
her action would have been too much for some women; but Rachel Upcher
had no ironic sense--only a natural and Ibsen-enhanced power of living
and breathing among unspeakable emotions. And she plucked at those
ribands, those laces, with the delicate, hovering fingers of a ghoul.
It is all so long ago that I could not, if I would, give you the exact
words in which, at length, she made all this clear. Neither my mind nor
my pen took any stenographic report of that conversation. I have given
such phrases as I remember. The impression is there for life, however.
Besides, there is no man who could not build up for himself any amount
of literature out of that one naked fact: that Rachel Upcher knew her
husband’s plight, and that she lay, mute, breathless, concealed, in her
lair, lest she should, by word or gesture, save him. She took the whole
trial, from accusation to sentence, for a piece of sublime, unmitigated
luck--a beautiful blunder of Heaven’s in her behalf. That she thought of
herself as guilty, I do not believe; only as--at last!--extremely
fortunate. At least, as her tale went on, I heard less and less any
accent of hesitation. She knew--oh, perfectly--how little any one else
would agree with her. She was willing to beg my silence in any attitude
of humility I chose to demand. But Rachel Upcher would never accuse
herself. I asked no posturing of her. She got my promise easily enough.
Can you imagine my going hotfoot to wake Letitia with the story? No more
than that could I go to wake New York with it. Rachel Upcher, calmed by
my solemn promise (though, if you’ll believe it, her own recital had
already greatly calmed her), left me to seek repose. I watched her
fluttering, sinister figure down the corridor, then came back to my
infected room. She had not touched the pile of newspapers. I spent the
night reading Ibsen; and in the morning managed so that we got off
early. Mrs. Wace did not come down to breakfast, and I did not see her
again. Young Floyd was in the devil of a temper, but his temper served
admirably to facilitate our departure. He abandoned ranch affairs
entirely to get us safely on our way. Our sick horse was in perfectly
good condition, and would have given us no possible excuse for
lingering. Letitia, out of sight of the ranch, delivered herself of a
hesitating comment.
“Do you know, Richard, I have an idea that Mrs. Wace is not really a
nice woman?”
I, too, had broken Mrs. Wace’s bread, but I did not hesitate. “I think
you are undoubtedly right, Letitia.”
It was the only thing I have ever, until now, been able to do to avenge
Filippo Upcher. Even when I learned (I always had an arrangement by
which I should learn, if it occurred) of Mrs. Floyd’s death, I could
still do nothing. There was poor Evie, who never knew, and who, as I
say, could not have borne it.
I shall be much blamed by many people, no doubt, for having promised
Rachel Upcher what she asked. I can only say that any one else, in my
place, would have done the same. They were best kept apart: I don’t know
how else to put it. I shall be blamed, too, for not seizing my late, my
twelfth-hour opportunity to eulogize Filippo Upcher--for not, at least,
trying to explain him. There would be no point in trying to account for
what happened by characterizing Filippo. Nothing could account for such
hatred: it was simply a great natural fact. They combined, like chemical
agents, to that monstrous result. Each was, to the other, poison. I tell
the truth now because no one has ever doubted Upcher’s guilt, and it is
only common fairness that he should be cleared. Why should I, for that
reason, weave flatteries about him? He did not murder his wife; but that
fact has not made it any easier to call him “Filippo,” which I have
faithfully done since I encountered Rachel Upcher in southern
California. If truth is the order of the day, let me say the other thing
that for years I have not been at liberty to say: he was a frightful
bounder.
ON THE STAIRCASE
Probably the least wise way to begin a ghoststory is to say that one
does not believe in ghosts. It suggests that one has never seen the real
article. Perhaps, in one sense, I never have; yet I am tempted to set
down a few facts that I have never turned over to the Society for
Psychical Research or discussed at my club. The fact is that I had
ingeniously forgotten them until I saw Harry Medway, the specialist--my
old classmate--a few years ago. I say “forgotten”; of course, I had not
forgotten them, but, in order to carry on the business of life, I had
managed to record them, as it were, in sympathetic ink. After I heard
what Harry Medway had to say, I took out the loose sheets and turned
them to the fire. Then the writing came out strong and clear
again--letter by letter, line by line, as fatefully as Belshazzar’s
“immortal postscript.” Did I say that I do not believe in ghosts?
Well--I am getting toward the end, and a few inconsistencies may be
forgiven to one who is not far from discoveries that will certainly be
inconsistent with much that we have learned by heart in this interesting
world. Perhaps it will be pardoned me as a last flicker of moribund
pride if I say that in my younger days I was a crack shot, and to the
best of my belief never refused a bet or a drink or an adventure. I do
not remember ever having been afraid of a human being; and yet I have
known fear. There are weeks, still, when I live in a bath of it. I think
I will amend my first statement, and say instead that I do not believe
in any ghosts except my own--oh, and in Wender’s and Lithway’s, of
course.
Some people still remember Lithway for the sake of his charm. He never
achieved anything, so far as I know, except his own delightful
personality. He was a classmate of mine, and we saw a great deal of each
other both in and after college--until he married, indeed. His marriage
coincided with my own appointment to a small diplomatic post in the
East; and by the time that I had served my apprenticeship, come into my
property, resigned from the service, and returned to America, Lithway’s
wife had suddenly and tragically died. I had never seen her but
once--on her wedding-day--but I had reason to believe that Lithway had
every right to be as inconsolable as he was. If he had ever had any
ambition in his own profession, which was law, he lost it all when he
lost her. He retired to the suburban country, where he bought a new
house that had just been put up. He was its first tenant, I remember.
That fact, later, grew to seem important. There he relapsed into a
semi-populated solitude, with a few visitors, a great many books, and an
inordinate amount of tobacco. These details I gathered from Wender in
town, while I was adjusting my affairs.
Never had an inheritance come so pat as mine. There were all sorts of
places I wanted to go to, and now I had money enough to do it. The
_wanderlust_ had nearly eaten my heart out during the years when I had
kicked my heels in that third-rate legation. I wanted to see Lithway,
but a dozen minor catastrophes prevented us from meeting during those
breathless weeks, and as soon as I could I positively had to be off.
Youth is like that. So that, although Lithway’s bereavement had been
very recent, at the time when I was in America settling my affairs and
drawing the first instalment of my beautiful income--there is no beauty
like that of unearned increment--I did not see him until he had been a
widower for more than two years.
The first times I visited Lithway were near together. I had begun what
was to be my almost life-long holiday by spending two months alone--save
for servants--on a house-boat in the Vale of Cashmere; and my next
flights were very short. When I came back from those, I rested on level
wing at Braythe. Lithway was a little bothered, on one of these
occasions, about the will of a cousin who had died in Germany, leaving
an orphan daughter, a child of six or seven. His conscience troubled him
sometimes, and occasionally he said he ought to go over and see that the
child’s inheritance was properly administered. But there was an aunt--a
mother’s sister--to look after the child, and her letters indicated that
there was plenty of money and a good lawyer to look after the
investments. Since his wife’s death, Lithway had sunk into lethargy. He
had enough to live on, and he drew out of business entirely, putting
everything he had into government bonds. When he hadn’t energy enough
left to cut off coupons, he said, he should know that it was time for
him to commit suicide. He really spoke as if he thought that final
indolence might arrive any day. I read the aunt’s letters. She seemed to
be a good sort, and the pages reeked of luxury and the maternal
instinct. I rather thought it would be a good excuse to get Lithway out
of his rut, and advised him to go; but, when he seemed so unwilling, I
couldn’t conscientiously say I thought the duty imperative. I had long
ago exhausted Germany--I had no instinct to accompany him.
Lithway, then, was perfectly idle. His complete lack of the executive
gift made him an incomparable host. He had been in the house three
years, and I was visiting him there for perhaps the third time, when he
told me that it was haunted. He didn’t seem inclined to give details,
and, above all, didn’t seem inclined to be worried. He sat up very late
always, and preferably alone, a fact that in itself proved that he was
not nervous. As I said, I had never been interested in ghosts, and the
newness of the house robbed fear of all seriousness. Ghosts batten on
legend and decay. There wasn’t any legend, and the house was almost
shockingly clean. When he told me of the ghost, then, I forbore to ask
for any more information than he, of his own volition, gave me. If he
had wanted advice or assistance, he would, of course, have said so. The
servants seemed utterly unaware of anything queer, and servants leave a
haunted house as rats a sinking ship. It really did not seem worth
inquiring into. I referred occasionally to Lithway’s ghost as I might
have done to a Syracusan coin which I should know him proud to possess
but loath to show.
On my return from Yucatan, one early spring, Lithway welcomed me as
usual. He seemed lazier than ever, and I noticed that he had moved his
books down from a second-story to a ground-floor room. He slept outdoors
summer and winter, and he had an outside stairway built to lead from his
library up to the sleeping-porch. A door from the sleeping-porch led
straight into his dressing-room. I laughed at his arrangements a
little.
“You live on this side of the house entirely now--cut off, actually,
from the other side. What is the matter with the east?”
He pointed out to me that the dining-room and the billiard-room were on
the eastern side and that he never shunned them. “It’s just a notion,”
he said. “Mrs. Jayne” (the housekeeper) “sleeps on the second floor, and
I don’t like to wake her when I go up at three in the morning. She is a
light sleeper.”
I laughed outright. “Lithway, you’re getting to be an old maid.”
It was natural that I should dispose my effects in the rooms least
likely to be used by Lithway. I took over his discarded up-stairs study,
and, with a bedroom next door, was very comfortable. He assured me that
he had no reason to suppose I should ever be disturbed in either room.
Moving his own things, he said, had been purely a precautionary measure
in behalf of Mrs. Jayne. Curiously enough, I was perfectly sure that his
first statement was absolutely true and his second absolutely false.
Only the first one, however, seemed to be really my affair. I could
hardly complain.
Lithway did seem changed; but I have such an involuntary trick of
comparing my rediscovered friends with the human beings I have most
recently been seeing that I did not take the change too seriously. He
was perfectly unlike the Yucatan Indians; but, on reflection, why
shouldn’t he be, I asked myself. Probably he had always been just like
that. I couldn’t prove that he hadn’t. Yet I did think there was
something back of his listlessness other than mere prolonged grief for
his wife. Occasionally, I confess, I thought about the ghost in this
connection.
One morning I was leaving my sitting-room to go down to Lithway’s
library. The door of the room faced the staircase to the third story,
and as I came out I could always see, directly opposite and above me, a
line of white banisters that ran along the narrow third-story hall.
Mechanically, this time, I looked up and saw--I need not say, to my
surprise--a burly negro leaning over the rail looking down at me. The
servants were all white, and the man had, besides, a very definite look
of not belonging there. He didn’t, in any way, fit into his background.
I ran up the stairs to investigate. When I got just beneath him, he
bent over towards me with a malicious gesture. All I saw, for an
instant, was a naked brown arm holding up a curious jagged knife. The
edge caught the little light there was in the dim hall as he struck at
me. I hit back, but he had gone before I reached him--simply ceased to
be. There was no Cheshire-cat vanishing process. I was staring again
into the dim hall, over the white banisters. There were no rooms on that
side of the hall, and consequently no doors.
A light broke in on me. I went down-stairs to Lithway. “I’ve seen your
ghost,” I said bluntly.
What seemed to be a great relief relaxed his features. “You have! And
isn’t she extraordinary?”
“She?”
“You say you’ve seen her,” he went on hurriedly.
“Her? _Him_, man--black as Tartarus. And he cut me over the head.”
“There?” Lithway drew his finger down the place.
“Yes. How did you know? I don’t feel it now.”
“Look at yourself.”
He handed me a mirror. The slash was indicated clearly by a white line,
but there was no abrasion.
“That is very interesting,” I managed to say; but I really did not half
like it.
Lithway looked at me incredulously. “She has never had a weapon before,”
he murmured.
“She? This was a man.”
“Oh, no!” he contradicted. “That’s impossible.”
“He was a hairy brute and full-bearded besides,” I calmly insisted.
Lithway jumped up. “My God! there’s some one in the house.” He caught up
a revolver. “Let us go and look. He’ll have made off with the silver.”
“Look here, Lithway,” I protested. “I tell you this man wasn’t real. He
vanished into thin air--like any other ghost.”
“But the ghost is a woman.” He was as stupid as a child about it.
“Then there are two.” I didn’t really believe it, but it seemed clear
that we could never settle the dispute. Each at least would have to
pretend to believe the other for the sake of peace.
“Suppose you tell me about your ghost,” I suggested soothingly. But
Lithway was dogged, and we had to spend an hour exploring the house and
counting up Lithway’s valuables. Needless to say, there was no sign of
invasion anywhere. At the end of the hour I repeated my demand. The scar
was beginning to fade, I noted in the mirror, though still clearly
visible.
“Suppose you tell me about _your_ ghost. You never have, you know.”
“I’ve only seen her a few times.”
“Where?”
“Leaning over the banisters in the third-floor hall.”
“What is she like?”
“A slip of a girl. Rather fair and drooping, but a strange look in her
eyes. Dressed in white, with a blue sash. That’s all.”
“Does she speak?”
“No; but she waves a folded paper at me.”
“What time of day have you seen her?”
“About eleven in the morning.”
The clocks were then striking twelve.
“Well,” I ventured, “that’s clearly the ghost’s hour. But the two of
them couldn’t be more different.”
He made me describe the savage again. The extraordinary part of it was
that, in spite of his baffling blackness, I could do so perfectly. He
was as individual to me as a white man--more than that, as a friend. He
had personality, that ghost.
“What race should you say he was?”
I thought. “Some race I don’t know; Zulu, perhaps. A well-built beggar.”
“And you’re perfectly sure he was real--I mean, wasn’t human?”
The distinction made me smile, though the question irritated me. “You
can see that if his object was murder he made a poor job. You found all
your silver, didn’t you?” Then I played my trump-card. “And do you
suppose that a burglar would wander round this countryside in a
nose-ring and a loincloth? Nice disguise!”
Lithway looked disturbed. “But the other one,” he murmured. “I don’t
understand the other.”
“She seems much easier to understand than mine,” I protested.
“Oh, I don’t mean _her_!” he said. “I mean _it_.”
For the first time I began to be afraid that Lithway had left the
straight track of common sense. It was silly enough to have two ghosts
in a new house--but three!
“It?” I asked.
“The one Wender saw.”
“Oh! Wender has seen one?”
“Six months ago. I’ve never been able to get him here since. It _was_
rather nasty, and Wender--well, Wender’s sensitive. And he’s a little
dotty on the occult, in any case.”
“Did he see it at eleven in the morning?”
Lithway seemed irritated. “Of course!” he snapped out. He spoke as if
the idiosyncrasy of his damned house had a dignity that he was bound to
defend.
“And what was it?”
“A big rattlesnake, coiled to strike.”
Even then I could not take it seriously. “That’s not a ghost; it’s a
symptom.”
“It _did_ strike,” Lithway went on.
“Did he have a scar?”
“No. He couldn’t even swear that it quite touched him.”
“Then why did it worry him?”
Lithway hesitated. “I suppose the uncertainty----”
“Uncertainty! If there’s anything less dreadful than an imaginary snake
that has struck, it is an imaginary snake that hasn’t struck. What has
got into Wender?”
“Fear, apparently,” said Lithway shortly. “He won’t come back. Says a
real rattlesnake probably wouldn’t get into a house in Braythe more than
once, but an unreal rattlesnake might get in any day. I don’t blame
him.”
“May I ask,” I said blandly, “if you are so far gone that you think
rattlesnakes have ghosts?”
Lithway lost his temper. “If you want to jeer at the thing, for God’s
sake have the manners not to do it in this house! I tell you we have all
three seen ghosts.”
“The ghost of a rattlesnake,” I murmured to myself. “It beats
everything!” And I looked once more into the mirror. The scar that the
knife had made was still perceptible, but very faint. “Did you hunt the
house over for the snake?”
“Of course we did.”
“Did you find it?”
“Of course we didn’t--any more than we found your Zulu.”
“Then why did you insist so on hunting the Zulu?”
Lithway colored a little. “Well, to tell the truth, I never wholly
believed in that snake. If you or Wender had only seen _her_, now!”
“I don’t see why Wender was so worried,” I said. “After all, a snake
might have got in--and got out.”
“He saw it twice,” explained Lithway.
“Symptoms,” I murmured. “Had he ever had an adventure with a
rattlesnake?”
“No.”
“Then why should it make him nervous?”
“I suppose”--Lithway looked at me a little cautiously, I thought--“just
because he never _had_ seen one. He said, I remember, that that
rattlesnake hadn’t been born yet.”
I laughed. “Wender _is_ sensitive. The ghost of a rattlesnake that has
never lived--well, you can’t be more fantastic than that!”
“Wender has a theory,” Lithway said.
But he seemed actually to want to change the subject. Accordingly, I did
change it--a little. I didn’t really care for Wender’s theories. I had
heard some of them. They included elementals.
“Tell me some more about yours. She’s the most convincing of the three.
Do you recognize her?”
“Never saw any one that looked remotely like her.”
“And you are the first occupant of this house,” I mused. “Was she
dressed in an old-fashioned way?”
Lithway actually blushed. “She is dressed rather oddly--her hair is done
queerly. I’ve hunted the fashion-books through, and I can’t find such a
fashion anywhere in the last century. I’m not in the least afraid, but I
am curious about her, I admit.”
“Was Wender’s rattlesnake old-fashioned?”
Lithway got up. “See here,” he said, “I’m not going to stand jollying.
That’s the one thing I _am_ afraid of. Should you like to hear Wender’s
theory?”
“Not I,” I said firmly. “He believes in two kinds of magic--white and
black--and has eaten the fruit of the mango-tree that a fakir has just
induced to grow out of the seed before his eyes. He told me once that
devils were square. I’m not in the least interested in Wender’s
rattlesnake. The wonder is, with his peculiar twist of mind, that he
doesn’t insist on living in this house.”
“He particularly hates snakes,” answered Lithway. “He was hoping to see
_her_, but he never could. Nor you, apparently.”
“How often do you see her?”
“About once in six months.”
“And you’re not afraid?”
“Well--she doesn’t _do_ anything to me, you know.” He was very serious.
“Probably couldn’t hurt you if she did--a young thing like that. But why
don’t you move out?”
Lithway frankly crimsoned. “I--like her.”
“In spite of her eyes?”
“In spite of her eyes. And--I’ve thought that look in them might be the
cross light on the staircase.”
I burst out laughing. “Lithway, come away with me. Solitude is getting
on your nerves. We’ll go to Germany and look after your little cousin
and the aunt who writes such wonderful letters.”
“No.” Lithway was firm. “It’s too much like work.”
I was serious, for he really seemed to me, at the time of this visit, in
rather a bad way. I urged him with every argument I could think of. He
had no counter-arguments, but finally he broke out: “Well, if you will
have it, I feel safer here.”
“You’ve never seen her anywhere else, have you?”
“No.”
“Then this seems to be the one point of danger.”
“Wender’s theory is that--” he began.
But I persisted in not hearing Wender’s theory. Even when, a week later,
my own experience was exactly duplicated and I had spent another day in
watching a white line fade off my forehead, I still persisted. But, as
Lithway wouldn’t leave the house, I did. I began even to have a sneaking
sympathy for Wender. But I didn’t want to hear his theory. Indeed, to
this day I never have heard it. Oddly enough, though, I should be
willing to wager a good sum that it was accurate.
I was arranging for a considerable flight--something faddier and more
dangerous than I had hitherto attempted--and to a friend as indolent as
Lithway I could only prepare to bid a long farewell. He positively
refused to accompany me even on the earlier and less difficult stages of
my journey. “I’ll stick to my home,” he declared. It was a queer home to
want to stick to, I thought privately, especially as the ghost was
obviously local. He had never seen an apparition except at Braythe--nor
had I, nor had Wender. I worried about leaving him there, for the one
danger I apprehended was the danger of overwrought nerves; but Lithway
refused to budge, and you can’t coerce a sane and able-bodied man with a
private fortune. I did carry my own precautions to the point of looking
up the history of the house. The man from whom Lithway had bought it,
while it was still unfinished, had intended it for his own occupancy;
but a lucrative post in a foreign country had determined him to leave
America. The very architect was a churchwarden, the husband of one wife
and the father of eight children. I even hunted up the contractor: not
one accident had occurred while the house was building, and he had
employed throughout, most amicably, union labor on its own terms. It
was silly of me, if you like, but I had really been shaken by the
unpleasant powers of the place. After my researches it seemed clear that
in objecting to it any further I shouldn’t have a leg to stand on. In
any case, Lithway would probably rather live in a charnel-house than
move. I had to wash my hands of it all.
The last weeks of my visit were perfectly uneventful, both for Lithway
and me--as if the house, too, were on its guard. I came to believe that
there was nothing in it, and if either of us had been given to drinking,
I should have called the eleven-o’clock visitation a new form of
hang-over. I was a little inclined, in defiance of medical authorities,
to consider it an original and interesting form of indigestion. By
degrees I imposed upon myself to that extent. I did not impose on
myself, however, to the extent of wanting to hear Wender talk about it;
and I still blush to think how shallow were the excuses that I mustered
for not meeting him at any of the times that he proposed.
This is a bad narrative, for the reason that it must be so fragmentary.
It is riddled with lapses of time. Ghosts may get in their fine work in
an hour, but they have always been preparing their _coup_ for years.
Every ghost, compared with us, is Methuselah. We have to fight in a
vulnerable and dissolving body; but they aren’t pressed for time.
They’ve only to lie low until the psychologic moment. Oh, I’d undertake
to accomplish almost anything if you’d give me the ghost’s chance. If he
can’t get what he wants out of this generation, he can get it out of the
next. Grand thing, to be a ghost!
It was some years before I went back to Braythe. Wender, I happen to
know, never went back. Lithway used to write me now and then, but seldom
referred to my adventure. He couldn’t very well, since the chief burden
of his letters was always “When are you coming to visit me?” Once, when
I had pressed him to join me for a season in Japan, he virtually
consented, but at the last moment I got a telegram, saying: “I can’t
leave her. _Bon voyage!_” That didn’t make me want to go back to
Braythe. I was worried about him, but his persistent refusal to act on
any one’s advice made it impossible to do anything for him. I thought
once of hiring some one to burn the house down; but Lithway wouldn’t
leave it, and I didn’t want to do anything clumsy that would imperil
him. I was much too far away to arrange it neatly. I suggested it once
to Wender, when we happened to meet in London, and he was exceedingly
taken with the idea. I half hoped, for a moment, that he would do it
himself. But the next afternoon he came back with a lot of reasons why
it wouldn’t do--he had been grubbing in the British Museum all day. I
very nearly heard Wender’s theory that time, but I pleaded a dinner
engagement and got off.
You can imagine that I was delighted when I heard from Lithway, some
years after my own encounter with the savage on the staircase, that he
had decided to pull out and go to Europe. He had the most fantastic
reasons for doing it--this time he wrote me fully. It seems he had
become convinced that his apparition was displeased with him--didn’t
like the look in her eyes, found it critical. As he wasn’t doing
anything in particular except live like a hermit at Braythe, the only
thing he could think of to propitiate her was to leave. Perhaps there
was a sort of withered coquetry in it, too; he may have thought the
lady would miss him if he departed and shut up the house. You see, by
this time she was about the most real thing in his life. I don’t defend
Lithway; but I thought then that, whatever the impelling motive, it
would be an excellent thing for him to leave Braythe for a time.
Perhaps, once free of it, he would develop a normal and effectual
repugnance to going back, and then we should all have our dear,
delightful Lithway again. I wrote triumphantly to Wender, and he replied
hopefully, but on a more subdued note.
Lithway came over to Europe. He wrote to me, making tentative
suggestions that I should join him; but, as he refused to join me and I
didn’t care at all about the sort of thing he was planning, we didn’t
meet. I was all for the Peloponnesus, and he was for a wretched
tourist’s itinerary that I couldn’t stomach. I hoped to get him in the
end to wander about in more interesting places, but as he had announced
that he was going first to Berlin to look up the little cousin and her
maternal aunt, I thought I would wait until he had satisfied his
clannish conscience. Then, one fine day, his old curiosity would waken,
and we should perhaps start out together to get new impressions. That
fine day never dawned, however. He lingered on in Germany, following his
relatives to Marienbad when they left Berlin for the summer. I hoped,
with each mail, that he would announce his arrival in some spot where I
could conceivably meet him; but the particular letter announcing that
never came. He was quite taken up with the cousins. He said nothing
about going home, and I was thoroughly glad of that, at least.
I was not wholly glad, just at the moment, when a letter bounced out at
me one morning, announcing that he was to marry the little cousin--by
this time, as I had understood from earlier correspondence, a lovely
girl of eighteen. I had looked forward to much companionship with the
Lithway I had known of old, when he should be free of his obsession. I
had thought him on the way to freedom; and here he was, caught by a
flesh-and-blood damsel who thrust me out quite as decisively as the
phantasmal lady on the staircase. I had decency enough to be glad for
Lithway, if not for myself; glad that he could strike the old idyllic
note and live again delightfully in the moment. I didn’t go to Berlin to
see them married, but I sent them my blessing and a very curious and
beautiful eighteenth-century clock. I also promised to visit them in
America. I felt that, if necessary, I could face Braythe, now that the
ghost was so sure to be laid. No woman would stay in a house where her
husband was carrying on, however unwillingly, an affair with an
apparition; and, as their address remained the same, I believed that the
ghost had given up the fight.
This story has almost the gait of history. I have to sum up decades in a
phrase. It is really the span of one man’s whole life that I am
covering, you see. But have patience with me while I skim the
intervening voids, and hover meticulously over the vivid patches of
detail.... It was some two years before I reached Braythe. I don’t
remember particularly what went on during those two years; I only know
that I was a happy wanderer. I was always a happy wanderer, it seems to
me as I look back on life, except for the times when I sank by Lithway’s
side into his lethargy--a lucid lethargy, in which unaccountable things
happened very quietly, with an utter stillness of context. I do know
that I was planning a hunting-trip in British Central Africa, and wrote
Lithway that I had better postpone my visit until that was over. He
seemed so hurt to think that I could prefer any place to him that I did
put it off until the next year and made a point of going to the
Lithways.
I had no forebodings when I got out of Lithway’s car at his gate and
faced the second Mrs. Lithway, who had framed her beauty in the
clustering wistaria of the porch. I was immensely glad for Lithway that
he had a creature like that to companion him. Youth and beauty are
wonderful things to keep by one’s fireside. There was more than a touch
of vicarious gratitude in my open admiration of Mrs. Lithway. He was a
person one couldn’t help wanting good things for; and one felt it a
delicate personal attention to oneself when they came to him.
Nothing changes a man, however, after he has once achieved his type:
that was what I felt most keenly, at the end of the evening, as I sat
with Lithway in his library. Mrs. Lithway had trailed her light skirts
up the staircase with incomparable grace, smiling back at us over her
shoulder; and I had gone with Lithway to the library, wondering how long
I could hold him with talk of anything but her. I soon saw that he
didn’t wish to talk of her. That, after all, was comprehensible--you
could take it in so many ways; but it was with real surprise that I saw
him sink almost immediately into gloom. Gloom had never been a gift of
Lithway’s; his indolence had always been shot through with mirth. Even
his absorption in the ghost had been whimsical--almost as if he had
deliberately let himself go, had chosen to be obsessed. I didn’t know
what to make of the gloom, the unresilient heaviness with which he met
my congratulations and my sallies. They had been perfect together at
dinner and through the early evening. Now he fell slack in every muscle
and feature, as if the preceding hours had been a diabolic strain. I
wondered a little if he could be worried about money. I supposed Lithway
had enough--and his bride too, if it came to that--though I didn’t know
how much. But one could not be long in the house without noticing
luxuries that had nothing to do with its original unpretending comfort.
You were met at every turn by some æsthetic refinement as costly as the
lace and jewels in which Mrs. Lithway’s own loveliness was wrapped. It
was evident from all her talk that her standard of civilization was very
high; that she had a natural attachment to shining non-essentials. I was
at a loss; I didn’t know what to say to him, he looked so tired. Such
silence, even between Lithway and me, was awkward.
Finally he spoke: “Do you remember my ghost?”
“I remember your deafening me with talk of her. I never saw her.”
“No, of course you wouldn’t have seen her.”
“I saw one of my own, you remember.”
“Oh, yes! A black man who struck at you. You never have had a black man
strike at you in real life, have you?” He turned to me with a faint
flicker of interest.
“Never. We threshed all that out before, you know. I never even saw that
particular nigger except at Braythe.”
“You will see him, perhaps, if you are fool enough to go to British
Central Africa,” he jerked out.
“Perhaps,” I answered. But I was more interested in Lithway’s adventure.
“Do you see your ghost now?” I had been itching to ask, and it seemed to
me that he had given me a fair opening.
Lithway passed his hand across his brows. “I don’t know. I’m not quite
sure. Sometimes I think so. But I couldn’t swear to it.”
“Has she grown dimmer, then--more hazy? You used to speak of her as if
she were a real woman coming to a tryst: flesh and blood, at the least.”
He looked at me a little oddly. “I’m not awfully well. My eyes play me
tricks sometimes.... When you got off the train to-night, I could have
sworn you had a white scar on your forehead. As soon as we got out here
and I had a good look at you, I saw you hadn’t, of course.” Then he went
back. “I don’t believe I really do see her now. I think it may be an
hallucination when occasionally I think I do. Yes, I’m pretty sure that,
when I think I do, it’s pure hallucination. I don’t like it; I wish
she’d either go or stay.”
“My dear fellow, you speak as if she had ever, in her palmiest days,
been anything but an hallucination. Did you get to the point of
believing that the girl you say used to hang over the staircase was
real?”
“She was more real than the one that sometimes I see there now. Oh, yes,
she was real! What I see now--when I see it at all--is just the ghost of
her.”
“The ghost of a ghost!” I ejaculated. “It’s as bad as Wender’s
rattlesnake.”
Lithway turned to me suddenly. “Where is Wender?”
“Why, don’t you know? Working on American archæology at some
university--I don’t know which. He hadn’t decided on the place, when he
last wrote. I was going to get his address from you.”
“He won’t come here, you know. And Margaret’s feelings are a little
hurt--he has often been quite near. So there’s a kind of official
coolness. She doesn’t know about the ghosts, and therefore I can’t quite
explain Wender’s refusals to her. Of course, I know it’s on that
account; he’s as superstitious as a woman. But poor Margaret, I suppose,
believes he doesn’t approve of my having taken a wife. She’s as sweet as
possible about it, but I can see she’s hurt. And yet I’d rather she
would be hurt than to know about the house.”
“Why, in Heaven’s name, don’t you sell it and move, Lithway?” I cried.
He colored faintly. “Margaret is very fond of the place. I couldn’t,
considering its idiosyncrasy, sell with a good conscience, and if I
didn’t sell, it would mean losing a pretty penny--more, certainly, than
Margaret and I can afford to. She lost most of her own money, you know,
a few years ago.”
“The aunt?”
“Oh, dear, no!” He said it rather hastily. “But you were quite right at
the time. I ought to have gone out there ten years ago. Women never know
how to manage money.”
I looked him in the eyes. “Lithway, anything in the world is better than
staying in this house. You’re in a bad way. You admit, yourself, you’re
not well. And Mrs. Lithway would rather cut out the motor and live
anywhere than have you go to pieces.”
He laughed. “Tell Margaret that I’m going to pieces--if you dare!”
“I’m not afraid of you, even if I should.”
“No; but wouldn’t you be afraid of her?”
I thought of the utter youth of Mrs. Lithway; the little white teeth
that showed so childishly when she laughed; her small white hands that
had seemed so weighed down with a heavy piece of embroidery; her tiny
feet that slipped along the polished floors--a girl that you could pick
up and throw out of the window.
“Certainly not. Would you?”
“I should think so!” He smiled. “We’ve been very happy here. I don’t
think she would like to move. I shan’t suggest it to her. And mind”--he
turned to me rather sharply--“don’t you hint to her that the house is
the uncanny thing you and that fool Wender seem to think it is.”
I saw that there was no going ahead on that tack. Beyond a certain
point, you can’t interfere with mature human beings. But certainly
Lithway looked ill; and if he admitted ill health, there must be
something in it. It was extraordinary that Mrs. Lithway saw nothing. I
was almost sorry--in spite of the remembered radiance of the vision on
the porch--that Lithway had chosen to fall in love with a young fool. I
rose.
“Love must be blind, if your wife doesn’t see you’re pulled down.”
“Oh, love--it’s the blindest thing going, thank God!” He was silent for
a moment. “There are a great many things I can’t explain,” he said. “But
you can be sure that everything’s all right.”
I was quite sure, though I couldn’t wholly have told why, that
everything was at least moderately wrong. But I decided to say nothing
more that night. I went to bed.
Lithway _was_ ill; only so could I account for his nervousness, which
sometimes, in the next days, mounted to irritability. He was never
irritable with his wife; when the tenser moods were on, he simply ceased
to address her, and turned his attention to me. We motored a good deal;
that seemed to agree with him. But one morning he failed to appear at
breakfast, and Mrs. Lithway seemed surprised that I had heard nothing
during the night. He had had an attack of acuter pain--the doctor had
been sent for. There had been telephoning, running to and fro, and talk
in the corridors that no one had thought of keying down on my account. I
was a little ashamed of not having waked, and more than a little cross
at not having been called. She assured me that I could have done
nothing, and apologized as prettily as possible for having to leave me
to myself during the day. Lithway was suffering less, but, of course,
she would be at his bedside. Naturally, I made no objections to her
wifely solicitude. I was allowed to see Lithway for a few minutes; but
the pain was severe, and I cut my conversation short. The doctor
suspected the necessity for an operation, and they sent to New York for
a consulting specialist. I determined to wait until they should have
reached their gruesome decision, on the off chance that I might, in the
event of his being moved, be of service to Mrs. Lithway. In spite of her
calm and sweetness, and the perfect working of the household
mechanism--no flurry, no fright, no delays or hitches--I thought her,
still, a young fool. Any woman, of any age, was a fool if she had not
seen Lithway withering under her very eyes.
It was a dreary day during which we waited for the New York physician;
one of those days when sunlight seems drearier than mist--a monotonous
and hostile glare. I tried reading Lithway’s books, but the mere fact
that they were his got on my nerves. I decided to go to my room and
throw myself on the resources of my own luggage. There would be
something there to read, I knew. I closed the library door quietly and
went up-stairs. Outside my own door I stopped and looked--involuntarily,
with no conscious curiosity--up to the third-story hall. There, in the
dim corridor, leaning over the balustrade in a thin shaft of sunlight
that struck up from the big window on the landing, stood Mrs. Lithway,
with a folded paper in her hand, looking down at me. I did not wish to
raise my voice--Lithway, I thought, might be sleeping--so did not speak
to her. I don’t think, in any case, I should have wanted to speak to
her. The look in her eyes was distinctly unpleasant--the kind of look
people don’t usually face you with. I remember wondering, as our
surprised glances met, why the deuce she should hate me like that--how
the deuce a nice young thing could hate any one like that. It must be
personal to me, I thought--no nice young thing would envisage the world
at large with such venom. I turned away; and as I turned, I saw her, out
of the tail of my eye, walk, with her peculiar lightness of step, along
the upper corridor to the trunk-loft. She had the air of being caught,
of not having wished to be seen. I opened my bedroom door immediately,
but as I opened it I heard a sound behind me. Margaret Lithway stood on
the threshold of her husband’s room, with an empty bottle.
“Would you mind taking the car into the village and getting this filled
again?” she asked. Her eyes had dark shadows beneath them; she had
evidently not slept, the night before.
I flatter myself that I did not betray to her in any way my
perturbation. Indeed, the event had fallen on a mind so ripe for
solutions that, in the very instant of my facing her, I realized that
what I had just seen above-stairs (and seen by mistake, I can assure
you; she had fled from me) was Lithway’s old ghost--no less. I took the
bottle, read the label, and assured Mrs. Lithway that I would go at
once. Mrs. Lithway was wrapped in a darkish house-gown of some sort.
The lady in the upper hall had been in white, with a blue sash.... I was
very glad when I saw Mrs. Lithway go into her husband’s room and shut
the door. I was having hard work to keep my expression where it
belonged. For five minutes I stood in the hall; five minutes of unbroken
stillness. Then I went to the garage, ordered out the car, and ran into
the village, where I presented the bottle to the apothecary. He filled
it immediately. As I re-entered the house, the great hall clock struck;
it was half past eleven. I sent the stuff--lime-water, I believe--up to
Mrs. Lithway by a servant, went into my room, and locked the door.
I cannot say that I solved the whole enigma of Braythe in the hour
before luncheon; but I faced for the first time the seriousness of a
situation that had always seemed to me, save for Lithway’s curious
reactions upon it, more than half fantastic, if not imaginary. I had
seen, actually seen, Lithway’s ghost. I had not been meant to see her;
and I was inclined to regret the sudden impulse that had led me to leave
Lithway’s library and go to my own room. The identity of the “ghost”
with Mrs. Lithway was appalling to me--the more so, that there could
have been no mistake about the nature of the personality that had
reluctantly presented itself to my vision. I found myself saying: “Could
that look in her eyes be the cross light on the stairs?” and then
suddenly remembered that I was only echoing the Lithway of years ago. It
was incredible that any man should have liked the creature I had seen;
and I could account for Lithway’s long and sentimental relation with the
apparition only by supposing that he had never seen her, as I had, quite
off her guard. But if, according to his hint of the night before, he had
come to confound the ghost with the real woman--what sort of marriage
was _that_? I asked myself. The ghost was a bad lot, straight through.
It brought me into the realm of pure horror. The event explained--oh, I
raised my hands to wave away the throng of things it explained! Indeed,
until I could talk once more with Lithway, I didn’t want to face them; I
didn’t want to see clear. I had a horrid sense of being left alone with
the phantoms that infested the house: alone, with a helpless, bedridden
friend to protect. Mrs. Lithway didn’t need protection--that was clearer
than anything else. Mrs. Lithway was safe.
Before night, the consultation had been held, and it was decided that
Lithway should be rushed straight to town for an operation. The pain was
not absolutely constant; he had tranquil moments; but the symptoms were
alarming enough to make them afraid of even a brief delay. We were to
take him up the next morning. To all my offers of help, Mrs. Lithway
gave a smiling refusal. She could manage perfectly, she said. I am bound
to say that she did manage perfectly, thinking of everything, never
losing her head, unfailingly adequate, though the shadows under her eyes
seemed to grow darker hour by hour. A nurse had come down from town, but
I could hardly see what tasks Mrs. Lithway left to the nurse. I did my
best, out of loyalty to the loyal Lithway, to subdue my aversion to his
wife. I hoped that my aversion was quite unreasonable and that, safe in
Europe, I should feel it so. I ventured to say, after dinner, that I
hoped she would try to get some sleep.
“Oh, yes, I shall!” She smiled. “There will be a great deal to do
to-morrow; and the day after, when they operate, will be a strain.
There’s nothing harder than waiting outside. I know.” Her eyes filled,
but she went on very calmly. “I am so grateful to you for being here and
for going up with us. I have no people of my own, you know, to call on.
You have been the greatest comfort.” She gave me a cool hand, said “good
night,” and left me.
I do not know whether or not Mrs. Lithway slept, but I certainly did
not, save in fitful dozes. I was troubled about Lithway: I thought him
in very bad shape for an operation; and I had, besides, nameless
forebodings of every sort. It was a comfort, the next morning, to hear
him, through an open door, giving practical suggestions to his wife and
the nurse about packing his things. I went in to see him before we
started off. The doctor was down-stairs with Mrs. Lithway.
“Sorry to let you in for this, my boy. But you are a great help.”
“Mrs. Lithway is wonderful,” I said. “I congratulate you.”
His sombre eyes held me. “Ah, you will never know how
wonderful--never!” He said it with a kind of brooding triumph, which, at
the moment, I did not wholly understand. Now, long afterwards, I think I
do.
I left him, and crossed the corridor to my own room. A slight rustle
made me turn. Mrs. Lithway stood in the upper hall, looking down at
me--the same creature, to every detail of dress, even to the folded
paper in her hand, that I had seen the previous morning. This time I
braced myself to face the ghost, to examine her with a passionate
keenness. I hoped to find her a less appalling creature. But, at once,
Mrs. Lithway leaned over the rail and spoke to me--a little sharply, I
remember.
“Would you please telephone to the garage and say that the doctor thinks
we ought to start ten minutes earlier than we had planned? I shall be
down directly.”
The hand that held the paper was by this time hidden in the folds of her
skirt. She turned and sped lightly along the corridor to the trunk-loft.
Save for the voice, it was a precise repetition of what had happened the
day before.
“Certainly,” I said; but I did not turn away until she had disappeared
into the trunk-loft. I went to the telephone and gave the message; it
took only a few seconds. Then I went to my own room, leaving the door
open so that I commanded the hall. In a few minutes Mrs. Lithway came
down the stairs from the third story. “Did you telephone?” she asked
accusingly, as she caught my eye. I bowed. She passed on into Lithway’s
room. There was no paper in her hand. I knew that this time there had
been no ghost.
Well.... Lithway, as every one knows, died under the ether. His heart
suddenly and unaccountably went back on him. He left no will; and, as he
had no relations except the cousin whom he had married, everything went
to her. I had once, before his second marriage, seen a will of
Lithway’s, myself; but I didn’t care to go into court with that
information, especially as in that will he had left me his library. I
should have liked, for old sake’s sake, to have Lithway’s library. His
widow sold it, and it is by now dispersed about the land. She told me,
after the funeral, that she should go on at Braythe, that she never
wanted to leave it; but, for whatever reason, she did, after a few
years, sell the place suddenly and go to Europe. I have never happened
to see her since she sold it, and I did not know the people she sold it
to. The house was burned many years ago, I believe, and an elaborate
golf-course now covers the place where it stood. I have not been to
Braythe since poor Lithway was buried.
I took the hunting-trip that Lithway had been so violently and
inexplicably opposed to. I think I was rather a fool to do it, for I
ought to have realized, after Lithway’s death, the secret of the house,
its absolutely unique specialty. But such is the peacock heart of man
that I still, for myself, trusted in “common sense”--in my personal
immunity, at least, from every supernatural law. Indeed, it was not
until I had actually encountered my savage, and got the wound I bear the
scar of, that I gave entire credence to Lithway’s tragedy. I put some
time into recovering from the effect of that midnight skirmish in the
jungle, and during my recovery I had full opportunity to pity Lithway.
It became quite clear to me that the presences at Braythe concerned
themselves only with major dooms. If Lithway’s ghost had been his wife,
his wife must have been a bad lot. I am as certain as I can be of
anything that he was exceedingly unhappy with her. It was a thousand
pities that, for so many years, he had misunderstood the vision; that he
had permitted himself--for that was what it amounted to--to fall in love
with her in advance. She was, quite literally, his “fate.” Of course, by
this time, I feel sure that he couldn’t have escaped her. I don’t
believe the house went in for kindly warnings; I think it merely, with
the utmost insolence, foretold the inevitable and dared you to escape
it. If I hadn’t gone out for big game in Africa, I am quite sure that my
nigger would have got at me somewhere else--even if he had to be a
cannibal out of a circus running amuck down Broadway. That was the trick
of the house: the worst thing that was going to happen to you leered at
you authentically over that staircase. I have never understood why I saw
Lithway’s apparition; but I can bear witness to the fact that she was
furious at my having seen her--as furious as Mrs. Lithway was, the next
day, if it comes to that. It was a mistake. My step may have sounded
like Lithway’s. Who knows? At least it should be clear what Lithway
meant when he said that he didn’t always know whether he saw her or not.
The two were pin for pin alike. The apparition, of course, had, from the
beginning, worn the dress that Mrs. Lithway was to wear on the day that
Lithway was taken to the hospital. I have never liked to penetrate
further into the Lithways’ intimate history. I am quite sure that the
folded paper was the old will, but I have always endeavored, in my own
mind, not to implicate Margaret Lithway more than that. Of course, there
could never have been any question of implicating her before the public.
I never had a chance, after my own accident, to consult Wender. I stuck
to Europe unbrokenly for many years, as he stuck to America. Both Wender
and I, I fancy, were chary of writing what might have been written. Some
day, I thought, we would meet and have the whole thing out; but that day
never came. Suddenly, one autumn, I had news of his death. He was a
member of a summer expedition in Utah and northern Arizona--I think I
mentioned that he had gone in for American ethnology. There are, as
every one knows, rich finds in our western States for any one who will
dig long enough; and they were hoping to get aboriginal skulls and
mummies. All this his sister referred to when she wrote me the
particulars of his death. She dwelt with forgivable bitterness on the
fact of Wender’s having been told beforehand that the particular section
he was assigned to was free from rattlesnakes. “Perhaps you know,” she
wrote, “that my brother had had, since childhood, a morbid horror of
reptiles.” I did know it--Lithway had told me. Wender’s death from the
bite of a rattlesnake was perhaps the most ironic of the three
adventures; for Wender was the one of us who put most faith in the
scenes produced on the stage of Braythe. I never heard Wender’s theory;
but I fancy he realized, as Lithway and I did not, that since the
“ghosts” we saw were not of the past they must be of the future--a most
logical step, which I am surprised none of us should have taken until
after the event.
Wender’s catastrophe killed in me much of my love of wandering. At
least, it drove me to Harry Medway; and Harry Medway did the rest. I am
not afraid of another warrior’s cutting at me with his assegai; but I do
not like to be too far from specialists. I have already been warned that
I may sometime go blind; and I know that other complications may be
expected. Pathology and surgery are sealed books to me; but I still hold
so far to logic that I fully expect to die some time as an indirect
result of that wound. The scar reminds me daily that its last word has
not been said.
I am a fairly old man--the older that I no longer wander, and that I
cling so weakly to the great capitals which hold the great physicians.
The only thing that I was ever good at I can no longer do. Curiosity has
died in me, for the most part; one or two such mighty curiosities have
been, you see, already so terribly appeased. But I think I would rise
from my death-bed, and wipe away with my own hand the mortal sweat from
my face, for the chance of learning what it was that drove Mrs. Lithway,
in midwinter, from Braythe. If I could once know what she saw on the
staircase, I think I should ask no more respite. The scar might fulfil
its mission.
THE TORTOISE
“There are only three things worth while--fighting, drinking, and making
love.” It was Chalmers who said it to me as we came out of the theatre,
and were idling along towards the club. We had been seeing a very
handsome--almost elegant--melodrama. Very impressionable chap, Chalmers,
I thought, for I was quite sure that he had never done any fighting; he
was apparently a total abstainer; and he positively ran--as
whole-heartedly as a frightened cow--from a petticoat.
“What about work?” I asked, as we turned into the club. Chalmers is a
fiend for work: always shut up in his laboratory, dry-nursing an
experiment.
“Work is an anodyne--a blooming anodyne.” He hunched his shoulders, and
his brown coat--the coat of a toilsome recluse, if ever there was one;
there’s something peculiarly unworldly about brown tweed for a man’s
wear--creased into lumpier curves than ever.
“It’s a mighty slow one. If I wanted a quick effect, I think I’d take to
cocaine. Must be exciting, slewing round the corners of Montmartre,
dropping your francs into a basket that swings down from God knows
where, with the blessed stuff all in it waiting to be inhaled. And all
over inside of a year.” Thus I to Chalmers, knowing that we were very
far from Montmartre. Chalmers, I should say, was magnificently
dependable; you were as safe in dropping a lurid suggestion on him as on
the shell of an ancient turtle. I rather liked that idea, which struck
me just then; in fact, his clothes were much the color of
tortoise-shell.
“But I don’t want it over. You see ... I’ve agreed to hang on.” His keen
glance at me, more than his words, savored of explanation.
“Oh!” I made the syllable as non-committal as possible. The lips at one
moment so fluent in confession will grow stiff with resentment after the
hour of confidence is over. For that reason, I dislike to have people
tell me things: I always expect that they will some day hate me, merely
because they told.
We sat down at a table, and I ordered a high-ball. Chalmers fussed for a
moment, and then committed himself to a _pâté_ sandwich with
apollinaris. I didn’t think of asking him to join me. We had been trying
for five years to get Chalmers to take a drink. For a year, there were
always bets going on it; but it had been a long time now since any of us
had made or lost anything on the chance of Chalmers’s potations.
At the same time, my curiosity was aroused. There had never been any
mystery about Chalmers. There isn’t any about a tortoise, if it comes to
that. The beast has been made much of mythologically, I believe; but
even in India they only accuse him of holding up the world. No one
pretends, so far as I know, that he keeps anything under his shell
except himself. But Chalmers didn’t seem to be even bearing a burden. He
was simply Chalmers. He had come among us, an accredited student of
physics, with letters of introduction from German professors and
Colonial Dames; he had performed the absolutely necessary conventional
duties; he was vaguely related to people that every one knew; he was so
obviously a gentleman that no one would ever have thought of affirming
it. His holidays were all accounted for--in fact, he usually spent them
with one or another of our own group. There wasn’t--there isn’t now--a
single thing about Chalmers that any one could have the instinct to
investigate. It had never occurred to any of us that we didn’t know as
much about Chalmers as we did about the people we had been brought up
with. We happened not to have been brought up with him, because he had
happened to be brought up abroad. His father had been a consul
somewhere.
On this occasion, anyhow, my curiosity got the better of my fixed rule.
I decided to lead Chalmers on.
“Do you mean to say that your noble industry is nothing but a poor
substitute for a drug?”
He smiled quaintly. His green eyes shone under his dark eyelashes. Very
taking eyes they were: well set in his head and pleasantly intimate,
with a near-sighted brilliancy.
“I didn’t say it was a poor substitute. And, anyhow, cocaine might
charm away the hours, but only work can charm away the years. I’ve got
into my stride--for eternity, it would seem. And some day, you know, I
may, quite incidentally, do something in spectrum analysis that will be
significant. I’ve got all the time in the world.”
“Are you so sure?”
“Well--it looks as if I were in for a long wait.”
He spoke as unconcernedly as if he had his lease of life locked up in
his safe-deposit drawer.
I drank some whiskey and waited a minute, wondering whether to push his
confidence over the edge, send it spinning into an abyss of revelation.
Finally, I decided.
“I didn’t know that anything but a contract with the devil could make
you so sure.”
“Oh, it doesn’t have to be with the devil.” He sipped his virtuous
apollinaris. “Did you notice the heroine’s sister?” he went on.
I hadn’t noticed her much. I had been paying my money to see Maude
Lansing act, and my frugal eyes had attached themselves to her
exclusively, from the first act to the last.
“A vague little blonde thing, wasn’t she?”
“Blonde, but not so vague as you’d think. At least, I don’t think she’d
be vague if you gave her anything to do. She had to be vague to-night,
of course. But didn’t you see her deliberately subduing herself to the
part--holding herself in, so as not to be too pretty, too angry, too
subtle, too much in love? She did everything vaguely, I imagine, so as
not to hog the stage. But give her a chance, and she’d play up. I was
always expecting, you know, that she _would_ hog the stage. She could
have done it.... It quite got me going.”
“Did you think her better than Maude Lansing?” It was something new, at
least, to have him notice a woman so closely.
Chalmers tasted his _pâté_ and half-nodded approvingly at it.
“Oh, I don’t know anything about that. She is the only woman I have ever
seen who looked like the girl I married.”
I set down my glass quickly. I had drunk most of the whiskey, and
therefore none of it was spilled. Chalmers married! Why--why--we knew
all about him, from cradle to laboratory; or, at least, as much as men
do know of other men who have no scrapes to be got out of. I looked
narrowly at Chalmers. Was it possible that he had been lying low all
these years, with the single intention of perpetrating eventually the
supreme joke? And if he was merely a humorist of parts, why had he not
assembled the crowd? Why had he selected only one of his intimates? His
intimates! That was precisely what we were. Yet none of us knew that he
had been married. Chalmers himself might easily not have mentioned a
dead wife, but no end of people, first and last, had turned up and
contributed to Chalmers’s biography, and it was odd that none of them
should have mentioned his bereavement. Unless----
“No one knows I am married. No one has ever known. If I told you all
about it, you’d see why. And I think I shall. That girl started it all
up again.”
He leaned across the table and laid his hand on my arm. His eyes glinted
encouragingly at me. “Cheer up, old man! You’re not in for anything
sordid. But curious--oh, very, very curious! Yes, I think, without
vanity, I may say _very_ curious.... I meant what I said just now,
coming out of the theatre. There aren’t but three things worth
while--and I mayn’t have them. I mayn’t fight, because I might get
killed before I’ve a right to; I don’t drink, for the sake of the paltry
hours that might be subtracted from the sum of my years if I did; and,
being married, I naturally can’t very well make love. Can I?” He turned
on me with such a tone of ingenuous query that I wondered if it was a
joke, after all.
I tried to be cynical. “That depends....”
“Oh, no, it doesn’t!” It was the old Chalmers who smiled at
me--ingratiating, youthful, adventurous, gay. I had often wondered why
Chalmers looked adventurous, his habits being, if ever any man’s were,
regular to the point of monotony. It occurred to me now that perhaps he
looked adventurous because he had had his adventure already. In any
case, it was very satisfactory to find at last something in his life
that matched with the look in his eyes--something that would take the
curse off his even temperament and equable ways.
“Very, very curious,” he repeated. “And all these years I’ve wanted to
tell somebody, just in case I should drop out suddenly. I’ve left
written instructions, but I should really like some one to understand.
It’s all rather preposterous.”
“It’s preposterous that you should suddenly be married.”
“Yes--of course. Well--I’ve got on pretty well, and I’d rather you
didn’t mention it to any of the others. But if anything should turn up,
you can say you knew it all along.”
“Fire ahead.”
On the strength of the narrative about to come, I ordered another
high-ball. Sometimes you want something to fiddle with, something to
intervene between you and your friend when it is hard for eyes to meet.
But he had promised me that it should be nothing sordid, and when the
drink came I set it trustfully to one side--in reserve, as it were.
“Time was, when I knocked about the world a bit. My parents were dead, I
had no close kin, and there was money enough to do what I wanted to,
provided I wanted something modest. I had a great notion, when I came
out of Göttingen, of a _wanderjahr_. Only I was determined it shouldn’t
be hackneyed. There was a good deal of Wilhelm Meister in it, all the
same, with a strong dash of Heine. I fancied myself, rather, at that
time; wanted to be different--like every other young pilgrim. I didn’t
want the common fate--not I. I hadn’t any grievance against the world,
because I had a complete faith in the world’s giving me what I wanted,
in the end. But I distinctly remember promising myself to be remarkable.
I shan’t, of course, unless there is something in spectrum analysis. I
used to quote Heine to myself:
‘Du stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt!
Du wolltest glücklich sein, unendlich glücklich,
Oder unendlich elend, stolzes Herz,
Und jetzo bist du elend.’
Of course, I never believed that I should be ‘unendlich elend,’ but I
should have preferred that to anything mediocre. At that age--you know
what we’re like. The man who would look at the stars by daylight and
tumbled into the well. That’s us, to the life.
“I met her in a villa above Ravello. Some charming French people--or,
at least, Monsieur was French, though Madame and the money were
American--were keeping guard over her. The American wife had known her
somewhere, and was being good to her in her great misfortune. I won’t go
into explanations of how I came to frequent their villa. They were among
the scores of people I had met and known in this or that pleasant,
casual way. I used to go up and dine with them; I prolonged the Italian
interlude in my _wanderjahr_, more or less for the sake of doing so. I
had notions of going on to Egypt, but there was time enough for that. I
stayed on even more because I liked the villa--an old Saracen stronghold
on the edge of the Mediterranean, modernized into comfort--than because
I liked them, though they were pleasant enough.
“At first I wished the girl were not there. She never talked; she was
just a stiff figure, swathed in black up to her throat, sitting day by
day almost motionless on a parapet. She was a harsh note. Wherever you
were, she was in the middle distance, a black figure looking out to sea.
It didn’t take many days for her to get on my nerves. She was like a
portent. I fancy she got on theirs, too, but they were helpless. I
gathered that Madame C. had a good deal of talk with her daily, in hours
when they were alone; and before very long she permitted me to share her
perplexities. She didn’t want to desert her young friend; but the girl
seemed to have sunk into a kind of apathy. She thought, perhaps, a
specialist ought to see her. A very American touch, that! Unluckily, the
girl had no close kin; there was no one to turn her over to officially.
“Before long, I knew the whole story. The young lady’s fiancé was a
civil engineer, and had been employed by Portuguese interests in East
Africa. He had gone into the interior--more or less--on a job for the
Nyassa Company: headquarters, Mozambique. There was supposed to be money
in it, because the Portuguese had been growing ashamed of their colonial
reputation, and had been bucking up to some extent. Hence the job with
the Nyassa Company. She had wanted to go out with him, but he would not
permit it. Quite right, too. Mozambique’s no place for a woman--or
Lourenço Marques, either. _I_ know. Damn their yellow, half-breed
souls!... She had been waiting for him to finish his job in the
interior, and come home to marry her. The date of their marriage, I
imagine, had not been very far off.
“Suddenly, letters had ceased to come. There had been a horrid interval
of months when there was no word out of Africa for her. Cablegrams were
unanswered. The people at the other end must have been very
unbusinesslike not to give her some inkling of the reason why they
couldn’t deliver them. I suppose it was the uncertainty. There he was,
up on the verge of Rhodesia or beyond, prospecting, surveying,
exploring: it was quite on the cards that he should lose his way, or be
infinitely delayed, or fail somehow of his communications with
headquarters on the coast. Beastly months for her, anyhow! Then letters
did come. I never saw any of them, but I can imagine just the awkward
vocabulary of them: a Portuguese head clerk in Mozambique trying to
break it to her ornately that her man had died of fever up-country.
Can’t you imagine those letters--in quaint, bad English, on thin paper,
worn to utter limpness and poverty with being clutched and carried and
cried over? I never saw them, but I can.
“Well--I don’t need to go into it all. Indeed, there were many details
that Madame C. had forgotten, and that she naturally couldn’t ask the
girl to refresh her memory of for my benefit. What was troubling Madame
was the girl’s condition. Apparently, she had loved the man consumingly,
and considered herself virtually dead--entirely negligible at least, as
pitiful and worthless a thing as a child-widow in India. But you’ve
noticed, perhaps, that the very humble are sometimes positively
overweening about some special thing. The damned worms _won’t_ turn--any
more than if they were elephants in the path! And so it was with her.
“She was determined to go out and fetch his body home. The people in
Mozambique had to confess that they didn’t know where those sacred
remains were. The epidemic had run through the little camp, and, by the
time the man himself had keeled over, the few natives that were left
hadn’t nerve enough to do anything for him. They remembered him, raving
with fever and dropping among the corpses. A few, who were not already
stricken, got away--probably considering that there was a lively curse
on his immediate neighborhood. There had been complete demoralization. A
few of them had eventually strayed back, as I said, joining any one who
would take them home. Their casual employments delayed them a good deal,
and by the time they turned in a report--to use formal language in a
case where it is a sore misfit--there was nothing to be done. I didn’t
get this from Madame C.; I got it from her, later, when she told me
everything she knew about it. But I put it in here, which is, after all,
where it belongs.”
Chalmers stopped--he had been talking steadily--and lighted a cigarette.
I took the opportunity to sip a little whiskey. Through his
introduction, I had been staring at him fixedly. My own cigarette had
burned to ashes in my fingers; when I felt the spark touch them, I
dropped the thing, still without looking at it, into the tray. He
hunched his shoulders in the speckled brown coat and bent forward, his
arms folded on the table. The little movement of his head from side to
side was very like a tortoise.
“Well, you see ... of course she couldn’t go alone, and of course there
was no one to see her through a thing like that. I am sure she hadn’t
money enough to pay any one for going with her. If she had tried to go,
she wouldn’t have succeeded in doing much except get into the
newspapers. She had sense enough to realize it, or the C.’s had sense
enough to make her. But if she couldn’t do that, she wouldn’t do
anything else. She simply sat and brooded, looking seaward. She
apparently intended, at least, not to let go of her idea. She may have
had some notion of mesmerizing the universe with her obsession--just by
sitting tight and never, for a moment, thinking of anything else. There
she sat, anyhow, and Madame C. sent out her doves in vain. They all came
back from the parapet, drenched with Mediterranean spray. So it went on.
The girl might have been watching for some fabulous creature to rise up
from the waves and take her to her goal. She would cheerfully have
embarked for East Africa on a dolphin, I think. At all events, she
wouldn’t leave her parapet, she wouldn’t leave the villa, she wouldn’t
descend to the conventional plane. I don’t mean that she didn’t talk
like a sane woman; I mean only that she sat at the heart of her
obsession, and that when you came within a few feet of her you knocked
up against it, almost tangibly. A queer thing to meet, day after day....
It ended by my being distinctly impressed.
“Very like the girl in the play! Just the same blonde vagueness, just
the same effect of being cast inevitably for an unimportant, a merely
supplementary part. But one is never fooled twice by that sort of thing.
I tell you Maude Lansing will find herself some day doing chambermaid to
that girl’s heroine! If I was impressed, it was by the _cul-de-sac_ she
had got herself into. She couldn’t go forward, and she wouldn’t go back.
She sat there, waiting for the world to change. In the end--after Madame
C. had wrung her hands for your benefit a few hundred times--you began
to damn the world for not changing. It seemed to be up to the perverse
elements to stop the regular business of the cosmos and waft her to her
goal.
“I could hardly have talked to her about anything but her plight. It was
a week or two before I talked to her at all; but, in the end, I found
that if I wanted to continue to come to the villa, I should have to
brave that presence on the parapet--domesticate myself in that pervasive
and most logical gloom. So I did. She was a positive creature; there
wasn’t the faintest hint of apology or deprecation in her manner. She
would see you on business, and only on business--the business being her
tragedy. Don’t misunderstand--” (Chalmers frowned a little as he looked
at me.) “She was neither lachrymose nor hard; she was just infinitely
and quite decently preoccupied with her one desire and her helplessness
to achieve it. She didn’t magnify herself. It isn’t magnifying yourself
to want a proper funeral for the person you love, is it? She was even
grateful for sympathy, though she didn’t want a stream of words poured
out over her. She--she was an awfully good sort.”
Chalmers dug his cigarette-end almost viciously into the tray, and
watched the smoke go out. We both watched the smoke go out....
“Before long, we had talked together a good deal, especially during the
hour before dinner, when the sun and the sea were so miraculous that
any other miracle seemed possible. Such easy waters to cross, they
looked, in the sunset light! You forgot the blistering leagues beyond;
you forgot that it took money and men and courage and endurance, and all
kinds of things that are hard to come by, to get to the goal she was
straining for. I suppose it wouldn’t be honest to say that she ever
passed her personal fervor on to me--I couldn’t, in the nature of
things, care so much about recovering that poor chap’s bones as she
did--but I did end by wishing with all my heart that I could help.
Little by little it seemed a romantic thing to do--to go out searching
for the spot where he had died. Of course, getting the bones themselves,
except for extraordinary luck, was all moonshine; but she didn’t see
that, and her blindness affected me. Finally, my _wanderjahr_ began to
shape itself to new horizons. Why shouldn’t I have a try?... I dare say
I posed a little as a paladin, though not, I hope, to her. Anyhow, I
decided to broach it.
“I don’t suppose you can understand it--any of it--for the simple reason
that I can’t describe her. She was the kind of person who sees very
clearly the difference between the possible and the impossible; who
never attempts anything but the possible; yet who sets every one about
her itching to attain the impossible. Not ‘for her sake,’ in the
conventional sense; no, not that at all. Simply, she set before you so
clearly the reason why a thing couldn’t be done that you longed to
confute her, just as you sometimes long to confute fate. She was as
convincing and as maddening as a natural law. Each of us, sooner or
later, has tried to get the better of some little habit of the universe.
You felt like saying: ‘Stop looking like that; I’ll do it--see if I
don’t.’
“That was the spirit in which I went to her, late one afternoon, on her
parapet. The C.’s had been away all day and were not to return until
evening. Madame C. had exasperated me the night before by proposing,
quite baldly and kindly, that the girl be decoyed into a sanatorium. The
C.’s couldn’t keep her much longer--they were off for Biskra--and it was
up to me. I had lain awake half the night, exploring the last recesses
of disaster into which my idea might lead me; I had sailed far out on
the bright waters all day, perfecting my courage. I could have written
as bitter a little allegory about it all as Heine himself. Secretly, in
a tawdry corner of my mind, I thought Wilhelm Meister was a poor stick
compared with me. But it was honest romance; I was willing to pay.”
I finished my whiskey as Chalmers’s voice dropped and died down, and he
busied himself a little nervously with lighting a pipe. His green eyes
had flecks of brown in them. Once more, in the speckled brown figure
opposite me, I saw the tortoise beyond the reach of biology, which
upholds the world, which carries the burden of all human flesh and
spirit.
“I told her that I was ready to go; that I could scrape together enough
money for the expedition without entirely impoverishing myself. My
figures hadn’t been quite so reassuring as that when I totted them up on
a piece of hotel paper at dawn, but at least I had left magnificent
margins for everything.
“She smiled--I had never seen her smile before, and at the moment it
made her thanks seem profuse--but she shook her head. She was
beautifully simple about it. I liked her for that.
“‘It wouldn’t do. Not that it isn’t divinely good of you! But, you see,
the point is that--’ she stopped.
“‘Well?’ My heart was beating hard. I had become enamored of my idea. I
no more wanted to be baulked than she did.
“‘The point has always been that I should go myself.’
“‘Then go yourself!’
“‘Carrying off all your money? I can’t--Don Quixote.’ There was nothing
playful in her tone; and she had me all the more because there wasn’t.
She was merely registering facts. Even the ‘Don Quixote’ was, to her
mind, a fact that she was registering. She was splendidly literal.
“‘Come with me. I don’t propose that you should go alone.’
“She frowned a little; and in that frown I read all the weariness of the
hours of past talk with Madame C. Presently she looked up at me, very
kindly, a little questioningly, as if for the first time my personality
in itself interested her.
“‘You know that--even for me--that is impossible.’
“I knew what she meant: that she would have been ready for any
abnegation, being, herself, as I have said, negligible; but that the
world must be able to pick no flaw in the rites paid to the shade.
“‘If you will many me, it is not impossible.’
“That is what I said--just like that. I had determined that nothing
should be an obstacle. She didn’t change her posture or her expression
by the fraction of a millimetre. She looked silently past me at the
ilexes as if she had not heard. But she had heard. I think that at that
moment--no, I don’t except all that came after--I touched the highest
point of my romance.... She thought for a moment or two while I waited.
I suppose she was considering what the world would say to that, and
deciding that the world would have no right to say anything; that it
would be, and legitimately so, between her and me. The dead themselves,
of course, can be trusted to understand. It didn’t take her long--you
see she was a girl of one idea, and of one idea only.
“‘Very well, I will marry you.’ The words came as simply from her lips
as any others. We didn’t at that time, or at any time before our
marriage, have any discussion of the extremely--shall I
say?--individual nature of our relation. That was the one thing we
couldn’t have talked of. It would have been--you see?--quite impossible
for either to imply, by approaching the subject, that the other perhaps
didn’t understand. I couldn’t even be so crass as to say: ‘Look here, my
dear girl, of course I quite recognize that you don’t in any sense
belong to me’; or she be so crass as to say in turn: ‘I know it.’ No: I
suppose I have never been so near the summit as I was that evening after
she had ‘accepted’ me, and we had both silently laid our freedom on the
altar of that dead man. Neither of us realized all the inevitable
practical results of such a compact. We simply thought we had thrown the
ultimate sufficing sop to Cerberus, and that all our lives we should
hear him contentedly crunching it. I am quite sure that her mind turned
as blank a face to the future as mine. Quite.”
His voice rang authoritatively across the table. I said nothing. What
could I say? What is the proper greeting when you cross the threshold of
such a habitation? I offered him a silence that was at least
respectful.
“Well, I won’t bore you with too many details. She pulled herself
together and said her visit must end. We did not tell the C.’s. We
merely let them get off to Tunis. It would not have been easy for her to
explain to Madame C. all the things that we had never condescended to
explain to each other. She was a Catholic, by the way. We were married
by a parish priest in--no, on second thoughts, I won’t even tell you
where. The place has kept the secret hitherto. It is better so. I left
her at once to make arrangements for the quest. It took some time and a
good deal of frenzied journeying to realize on my securities. I gave her
a letter of credit, so that she could be in all incidental ways
independent of me. That was necessary, because I was to go out to
Mozambique first, and she was to follow only when I sent for her. Very
soon, you see, I began to realize the practical inconveniences of
travelling with a woman who bears your name and who is a total stranger
to you. It’s damned expensive, for one thing.” Chalmers’s smile was
nearer the authentic gleam of irony than anything I had seen before
during the evening.
“Well, I went. I interviewed the proper people; I saw one of the
creatures who knew the spot where our man had died. Eventually I
arranged the expedition. Then I cabled for her. She took the _Dunvegan
Castle_ at Naples. By the time I met her at the steamer, she had grown
incredible to me. I could more easily have believed her a sharer in some
half-forgotten light adventure than my duly registered wife. She was
unreal to me, a figure recurring inexplicably in a dream, a memory--of
exactly what sort I was not quite sure. My feet lagged along the
pier.... She soon set all that straight. I had wondered if the sop to
Cerberus would require our seeming to kiss. She managed it somehow so
that no stage kiss was necessary. She dissipated the funk into which I
had fallen, by practical questions and preoccupations; she came upon my
fever like a cool breeze off the sea. She had made her point; she had
achieved her miracle; and in every incidental way, little and big, she
could afford to show what a serviceable soul she was. She was a good
thing to have about. There were times when the situation got on my
nerves, in Mozambique, before we started. It’s such a small hole that we
seemed always to be bumping into each other. I couldn’t make out her
private attitude towards me; I used to wonder if she had any, or if she
simply thought of me as a courier in her own class. I was so endlessly
occupied with engaging men and beasts and camping kit and supplies--what
was I but a courier? The paladin idea was fading a little; though now
and then, at night, I’d look up at the Southern Cross and let the
strangeness of the thing convince me all over again. I don’t think I
wanted anything so commonplace as gratitude from her; but I did want in
her some sense of the strangeness of our alliance, with all the things
it left unsaid. Perhaps I wanted her to realize that not every man would
have responded so quickly to the call of impersonal romance. I can look
back on all that egotism of youth and despise it; but there’s something
not wholly ignoble in an egotism that wants only good fame with one’s
self and one’s secret collaborator. Anyhow, there were moments when my
dedication seemed solemn; just as there were other moments when I seemed
like an inadequate tenor in a comic opera. I never knew just how she
hovered between those two conceptions. We were destined to see each
other only by lightning-flashes--never once in the clear light of day.
“I can’t tell you how I came to hate the Portuguese before we left that
mean little hole. You laughed at me once for rending Blakely to shreds
over Camoëns. I’ve read Camoëns in my day and hated him, as if something
in me had known beforehand that I was eventually to have good reason to
loathe every syllable of that damned language. My stock is Southern,
too--South Carolina--and you can imagine how I enjoyed seeing, at every
turn, the nigger the better man. Portugal ought to be wiped off the map
of Africa.
“Well--I got our arrangements made as well as I could. It was lucky I
had left handsome margins for everything, because the graft was
sickening. They wouldn’t let your own approved consignments leave the
dock without your handing out cash to at least three yellow dogs that
called themselves officials. I had hoped to find some sort of female
servant for her--I shook at the thought of having her go off on a trip
like that without another woman to do things for her that I, in the
circumstances, couldn’t very well do. But there wasn’t a wench of
either color or any of the intervening shades that a nice woman could
have had about her. She was very plucky about it all. As I say, she had
made her great point, and didn’t care. The morning we started, she stuck
a gentian in my buttonhole and another in hers--and she smiled. A smile
of hers carried very far. And so we started.
“I needn’t give you the details of our trip. People write books about
that sort of thing; keep diaries of their mishaps, and how Umgalooloo or
Ishbosheth or some other valuable assistant stole a bandanna
handkerchief and had to be mulcted of a day’s pay--all very interesting
to somebody, no doubt. To tell the truth, the concrete details maddened
me; and we seemed to live wholly in concrete terms of the smallest. I,
who had planned for my _wanderjahr_ a colossal, an almost forbidden
intimacy with Platonic abstractions! I had always rather meant to go in
for biology eventually, but I got over that in Africa; we were much too
near the lower forms of life. And to this day, as you well know, I can’t
bear hearing Harry Dawes talk about folk-lore. He’s driven me home from
the club a good many nights.”
I caught my breath. It was almost uncanny, the way Chalmers’s little
idiosyncrasies were explaining themselves, bit by bit. I felt the cold
wind of a deterministic law blowing over my shoulder--as cold as
Calvinism. I had always loved temperament and its vagaries. Now I wasn’t
sure I wanted the light in Chalmers’s eyes explained, to the last gleam.
Mightn’t any of us ever be inexplicable and irresponsible and
delightful?
“Of course they had given us maps in Mozambique--not official ones, oh,
no! Those would have come too high. The Nyassa Company had to pretend to
be amiable, but they didn’t fork out anything they didn’t have to. Small
loss the official maps were, I fancy; but those we had weren’t much
good. It wasn’t, however, a difficult journey to make, from that point
of view, and the cheerful savage who had abandoned our hero swore he
knew where to take us. In eight weeks, we reached the spot that he
declared to be the scene of the death from fever. I dare say he was
right; he knew the villages along the way; he had described the
topography, more or less, before we started, and it tallied. We pitched
camp and spent three horrible days there. It is needless to say that we
might as well have hunted for the poor fellow’s bones under the parapet
at Ravello. I saw--and if you’ll believe me, I positively hadn’t seen
before--what moonshine it all was. She ought to have been put to bed and
made to pray God to make her a good girl, before she dragged
anybody--even me--out on such a wild-goose chase as that. There wasn’t a
relic--except certain signs of some one’s having cleared ground there
before, and one or two indescribable fragments, picked up within a
five-hundred-yard radius, that might have been parts of tin cans. Why
should there have been? If there had been any plunder, natives would
have found and taken it, as they would inevitably have removed and
destroyed any corporal vestiges out of sheer superstition and hostility.
I had learned their little ways, since Ravello. The rank soil in the wet
season would have done the rest. I wondered--cruelly, no doubt--whether
she had expected him to bury himself with a cairn atop and a few
note-books (locked up in a despatch-box) decorously waiting for her in
his grave. On the strength of the savage’s positive declaration that at
such a distance--two days--from the last village, beyond such a stream,
beneath such and such a clump of trees, he had seen the white man fall
in the last delirium, she searched the place, as you might say, with a
microscope. I thought it extremely likely that the fellow was lying for
the sake of our pay, but I had to admit that I couldn’t prove it.
Certainly, his information was the only thing we could reasonably go on;
we couldn’t invest all Portuguese East Africa with an army and set them
to digging up every square inch of soil in that God-forsaken country. If
this clue failed, we could only return. But there was a moment when, in
her baffled anguish, I think she could have taken a good close-range
shot at the inscrutable nigger who had been with him, and had left him,
and could not even bring us to his body. The girl on the stage to-night
was like that, though you don’t believe it. Vague, indeed! Maude
Lansing’s a fool if she keeps her on.
“You see”--Chalmers shifted his position and, ever so little, his tone
of voice. It was extraordinary how straight he went with his story,
considering that he had never told it before. He seemed to have dragged
it out from some receptacle, intact, not a thread frayed, in perfect
order, ready to spread before me. The pattern was as clear as if it were
just off the torturesome loom. He seemed to know it by heart.
“You see”--he went on--“she had been changing steadily, all through that
march of ours. You would have said that the tropical sun had forced her
growth. She had been a cold, immature thing in Italy--passions dormant
and sealed. Now they had worked their way up to the surface and were
just beneath the skin. She _would_ have shot the nigger. Before, I
suppose, she had lived with ideas only; even _he_ must have been chiefly
an idea, though a tremendous one. The daily contact with all sorts of
unsuspected facts, the hopeless crudeness of the hinterlands most of us
never get into, had worked on her. There may be something subtle in the
tropics--people talk as if there were. I should say they were no more
subtle than the slums. The body demands a hundred things, and it becomes
a matter of the utmost moment whether you get them for it or not. You
can’t achieve subtlety until the body is lulled. That life has
complications of its own; but I shouldn’t call it subtle. Very far from
it. And savages make you feel that it’s subtlety enough merely to have a
white skin; there’s something irrelevant and ignoble in pushing subtlety
further. In the end the sun wears you out, I suppose, and makes you want
nothing very much; but at first it merely makes it intolerable not to
have everything on the very instant.... I merely meant to explain that
she was a changed creature--a good sport always, but inclined to
impatiences, angers, delights, and fervors that I fancy she had never
felt before. Her tongue was loosed; she was lyric about cool water,
violent about native trickeries. I don’t mean--Heaven forbid!--that she
was vulgar. She had a sweet distinction all her own. She was merely real
and varied and vital. And I dare say the fundamental formality of our
relation was all the subtlety we could stand. It put an edge on
everything.
“We were very near the line of Rhodesia, and for various reasons we
decided to cross over and come down far enough south through British
territory to strike the Zambesi and its boats. If there was any
information to be picked up, we should be more likely to find it in that
direction than by going back the way we had come, which was utterly
barren of clues. I had reason to suppose that the others who had
survived the fever had gone on to the Rhodesian villages. We started in
the cool of dawn, and I ought to say that there were no backward glances
on her part. She was convinced that there was nothing in that precise
spot for her; and I think she had hope of finding something in the miles
just beyond. I could see that she did not more than half believe the
identifications of the negro who had been on the earlier expedition.
True, his guttural gibberish did not sound like information; but, after
all, he was the only link we had with that supreme and sordid adventure.
We pushed on.”
Chalmers threw back his head and stretched his arms, but went on
presently in a more vibrant, a more intimately reminiscent tone. The
club was nearly empty--it was getting on for midnight. I seemed to
myself to be quite alone with the tortoise that upheld the world.
“I suppose this is the point in the narrative to say a rather difficult
thing--though it ought to be clear that I’ve no cause or wish to paint
myself anything but the mottled color most of us are. I spoke of what
the tropics had done to her: fulfilled her in all kinds of ways. We had
strange talks by the fire at night, moving on, after the necessary
practical discussions, into regions of pure emotion. The emotion was all
over the incidents we encountered; we marshalled our facts and made our
decisions, and then leaned back and generalized with passion. Whatever
Africa had done to her inwardly, it had at least taught her to talk. I
had never had any particular sense of her being on guard--there _was_,
from the very first, something strange and delicate in the flavor of our
understanding--but now I had the sense of her being specifically and
gloriously off her guard. We seemed to know each other awfully well.”
Chalmers’s face, as he looked down at his pipe-bowl, was curiously
boyish for an instant. He might have been speaking of a childhood
playmate.
“Put it that I fell in love with her. I don’t choose to analyze my
feeling more than that. There was everything in it to make me the prey
of a passion for her--so long as we hadn’t begun, in Mozambique, by
hating each other. She was straight, she was fine, she was thoroughly
good; she was also, in her unfailing freshness and her astonishing
health, infinitely desirable. By the law of every land she was my wife.
There wasn’t a barrier between us except the frail one built of things
that had never been said. Of course, I knew that, to her, the barrier
doubtless looked insuperable. She considered herself the inalienable
property of the man whose bones we were fantastically hunting for. Well:
can’t you see that that very fact was peculiarly constructed to whet my
hunger? It was maddening to know that shadows could effectually keep two
strong, sinewy creatures apart. Our utter isolation in our adventure
flung us upon each other.
“‘Doch es tritt ein styg’scher Schatten
Nächtlich zwischen mich und ihn.’
“One night she had a bad dream; she moaned and cried out in her sleep,
and I had to stand outside her tent and listen, while she woke and wept
and finally quieted down with little sobs like a child’s. I couldn’t
even go in and lay my hand on her forehead to soothe her.”
He shook his head, and over his face crept the shadow of the burdened.
“Well, that was what I was in for, and I knew I was in for it as long as
I should desire her. Finally, I only prayed that we might get safely
back to Mozambique, where I could leave her forever. I knew that before
my fever ebbed, it would rise in a horrid flood. I wanted her
desperately; I should want her more desperately before I got through
with it; and I had, for my honor’s sake, not to let her know. It’s odd
how many situations there are in life that make it an insult to tell a
woman you love her. But I think you’ll agree with me that this is rather
an extraordinary case of it.
“All this time, I hadn’t the faintest inkling of what she felt: whether
she knew, or what she would have thought of me if she had known. There’s
something tremendous in the power of ideas. Think of how easy it would
have been for me--I won’t say to take what I wanted, though against that
background it wouldn’t have seemed such a preposterous thing to do--to
insist on her talking it out with me, some night by the fire; how little
she could have turned her back on me if I had wanted to ask her a
question. But I was as tongue-tied as if we had been in a drawing-room,
surrounded with all the paraphernalia of chaperonage. And yet sometimes
it didn’t seem possible, with her face and her speech changing like
that, week by week, that there shouldn’t be some change in it for me.
“I often wondered if she ever had moments, as I did, of thinking that
that man had never lived. But I could only go on assuming that she gave
him every thought she had. I never knew, by the way, what she felt--she
never told me. I said, a little while back, that we never saw each other
in the clear light of day--only in lightning-flashes. In spite of our
semblance of intimacy, that was true. For when a man is obsessed with
the notion of wanting to make very definite love to a woman, her
impersonal conversation is a kind of haze at best. I know that we
talked; but I know that, after the fiasco, when we ate our meals, when
we rode side by side along those unspeakable trails, when we sat by the
fire in the evening, I hardly knew or cared what we talked of. I kept a
kind of office in my brain quite tidy for the transaction of business;
the rest was just a sort of House of Usher where I wandered, wanting
her. By the time we struck the first Rhodesian village, I didn’t even
feel sure I could hold my tongue all the way south and east again. I
only prayed to God to deliver me from being an utter and unspeakable
brute. That was what my romance had led me to--that I was hanging on to
common decency by the eyelids!
“You see, there was added to my most inconvenient and unfitting passion
for the girl all the psychology of return from a lost battle-field--if
you could in name so dignify that pitiful clearing which was our
frustration. Everything was over, and why the devil shouldn’t something
else begin? That was the refrain my blood kept pounding out. I dare say
you don’t understand--you live among the civilized, and are used to
reckoning with shadows. It’s different out there on the well-nigh
uninhabited veldt. A platitude, I know. Funny how people despise
platitudes, when they’re usually the truest things going! A thing has
to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude at all. Humph!
“We struck into northeastern Rhodesia--days and days over the veldt; and
after the rains it was blooming like the rose. Gladiolus
everywhere--‘white man’s country, past disputing.’ No ‘baked karroo’
there. Pretty starkly uninhabited, though. Of course, we were hundreds
of miles north of the mines and the other activities on the edge of the
Transvaal. Mashonaland, it would really be more properly called; and it
describes it better, sounds wilder--as it was. We were heading west
across the tail of Nyassa, and then south--to the Zambesi or the
railroad, it didn’t much matter which. That man was as lost to us, every
corporal vestige of him, as if his ashes had been scattered like
Wycliffe’s. But there on the rampart above Ravello both she and I had
felt that the search was imperative: I no less than she. We were both
pretty young.”
His head dropped on his breast for a moment. He looked as if he felt his
burden. I suppose the tortoise sometimes wonders why....
“Then, one afternoon, we dropped into the heart of a storm--tropical
thunder, tropical lightning, skies blacker than you’ve ever seen, a wind
that churned the heavens into a pot of inky broth. I had been wondering,
for days, what we should do when we struck something besides the eternal
huddled villages of the natives, with their tobacco-plots and
mealie-fields, their stupid curiosities, their impudent demands for
gifts--something more like a house, people you could count people, with
a touch of white in their complexions. Strange coincidence, that it was
by the real lightning-flash that, for the only time in my life, I saw
her clear; strange, too, that the revelation should have come on the
heels of our first approach to anything like civilization. It was only
the plantation of a man who had made his little pile by trading in
Kimberley, and had trekked up to the edge of the wilderness to live
there in peace with his aged wife, and his cattle, and the things that
without too much trouble he could coax out of the good-humored soil. His
establishment was the first earnest of European activities seething
somewhat to the southward; the first reminder of Europe that we had had
since leaving the last Portuguese outpost on the way to the Nyassa. The
trip had not been hard, as such trips go: we had run into no wars; no
famine or drought or disease had visited us. We had been in luck; for I
was a shocking amateur, and anything like a real expedition I could not
have managed, of course. Yet, even so, I had been straining my eyes for
the sight of a white man; for some form of life that more nearly suited
my definition of ‘colonial.’
“And so we stumbled into his compound at eight in the evening, after
endless floundering about in the storm. We had had to dismount from our
donkeys and lead the frightened beasts by the bridle. Eventually we
could discard them for horses or oxcarts, but for a little while still
we might need them, and we clung to them, though the temptation was to
let them go--with a kick.”
Chalmers hesitated. “Why do I find it so confoundedly hard to come at?
I’m not writing a diary of accidents and self-congratulations like the
explorer fellows. The only point in the whole thing is just what I can’t
manage to bring out!” He mused for a moment. “The whole place white with
hail after the storm ... thick on the thatch of the big, rambling house
... the verandah eaves dripping ... then the rain stopping, and a
miraculous silence after the tumult ... no light anywhere except long,
low, continual flashes on the horizon at the edge of the veldt--and then
she came out, dressed in something of the poor old vrouw’s that hung
about her lovely, slim figure like a carnival joke. I was wondering
thickly where I should spend the night. I had introduced her as my wife,
of course ... and they had muttered something about the other room’s
being in use. The good old souls had gone off to bed with the ceasing of
the storm, after our little caravan was housed down in the farm niggers’
quarters. But naturally I couldn’t have explained to them, anyhow....
The lightning was about as regular as a guttering candle set in a
draught--but about a thousand candle-power when it did come. And, by one
apocalyptic flash, I saw her face. She didn’t say anything; she merely
laid her hand on my shoulder. And I, who had been bursting with the wish
to talk, to tell her, to lay my head on her knees and weep, out of pure
self-pity and desire--all those cub-like emotions--didn’t say anything
either. I only saw--in that one flash--the working of her lips, the
prophetic brilliancy of her eyes. We turned and went into the house
without a word. She wanted me, too; that was what it came to. Other
things being equal, the utter isolation of a man and a woman must do one
of two things--must put a burning fire or the polar ice between them. I
knew what it had done to me; I hadn’t been able to guess what it had
done to her. I had rather been betting on the polar ice.”
Chalmers ruffled both hands through his hair and leaned back from the
table. His mouth took on a legal twist. “It’s the only thing I blame
myself for--bar all the egotism that youth has to slough, and that I
think I sloughed forever before I reached the damned coast. I ought to
have known that half her impulse was the mere clinging of the frightened
child, and the other half the strangeness of our journey, which made us
both feel that all laws had ceased to work and that all signs had
failed. I ought to have reflected, to have put her off, to have made
sure, before I ever took her into my arms. And yet I’m glad I
didn’t--though I’m ashamed of being glad. Even then, you know, I didn’t
envisage the rest of life. I still thought, as for months I had thought,
that there could be no conventional future for that adventure. When my
curious _wanderjahr_ was over, I expected to die. And I wanted to have
some other face than the barren visage of Romance--the painted
hussy!--press itself to mine before I went out. I got it; and I’m not
yet over being glad, though it has made a coil that grows tighter rather
than looser with the years.”
I made no answer. There was nothing to say. He had not got to the end,
and until the end what was there for me to do but light another weary
cigarette, and summon all the sympathy I could to my non-committal eyes?
On the face of it, it was merely an extraordinary situation in which, if
a man were once caught, he could do little--a new and singular kind of
hard-luck story. But, as he told it, with those tones, those
inflections, those stresses, he certainly did not seem to be painting
himself _en beau_. I looked at the patient figure opposite me--Chalmers
always seemed pre-eminently patient--and, for very perplexity, held my
tongue.
“The next morning, I got breakfast early and went to see about my men
and beasts. I was a little afraid of finding the men drunk, but they
weren’t--only full-fed and lazy and half mutinous. The guide who had led
us to the historic spot had vanished--deserted in the night, with half
his pay owing him. No one in that black crew could explain. We had had
desertions before, and I should have considered us well enough off
simply with one coast nigger the less, if he hadn’t been my interpreter
as well. There were very few things I could say to the others without
him, and, though we were out of the woods, we were by no means done with
our retinue. I strode back to the house in a fine rage. I think I minded
the inconvenience most, since it would be the inconvenience that would
most affect her. Frankly, you see, I couldn’t suppose she felt, any
longer, a special concern with that particular black sample of human
disloyalty.
“When I entered the house, I saw her at once. Her back was turned to me,
and she was talking with a man I had not hitherto seen--evidently some
inmate of the house whom we had not encountered the previous evening.
The other room had been in use, I reflected, in a flash. He was
stretched on a ramshackle sofa with some sort of animal skin thrown over
him. He--but I won’t describe him. I know every feature of his face,
though I saw him, all told, not more than five minutes, and have never
seen him since. I have a notion”--Chalmers’s voice grew very precise,
and his mouth looked more legal than ever--“that, when he wasn’t pulled
down with a long illness and protracted suffering, he would be very
good-looking. As it was, he was unhealthy white, like the wrong kind of
ghost. One arm was quite limp.
“At the instant I didn’t place him--naturally! But as soon as she turned
her face to me, I did. Only one thing could have induced that look of
horror--horror in every strained feature, like the mask of some one who
has seen the Medusa. I started to her, but stopped almost before I
started; for I saw immediately that I was the Gorgon. It was for me that
her face had changed. God knows what, two minutes before, her face had
been saying to that half-lifeless form. It was about _me_ that she felt
like that. Since, with all the years to work it out in, I’ve seen why;
but just at the moment I was overwhelmed. She sat down in a chair and
covered her face with her hands. I heard the man babbling tragic and
insignificant details. I can’t say I listened, but before I could pull
myself together and leave, I caught mention of fever, accident, loss of
memory, broken limbs, miraculous co-operation of fate for good and evil
alike--the whole mad history, I suppose, from his side, of the past
year. I have sometimes wished I had caught it more clearly, but just
then I could take in nothing except the insulting fact that this was the
man whose grave we had not found. That was what her face had told me in
that horrid instant. I never saw her face again. It was still bowed on
her hands when I went out of the door.
“I don’t know how I got off--I don’t remember. I suppose I had the
maniac’s speed. If I hadn’t been beside myself, I think I could recall
more of what I did. The patriarchal creature under whose roof it had all
happened helped me. I think I gave him a good many directions about the
negroes and the kit. Or I may have paid them off, myself. I honestly
don’t know. I know that I left nearly all of my money with him, and
started off on horseback alone. I had a dull sense that I was causing
her some practical difficulties, but I also had a very vivid sense that
she would kill herself if she had to encounter me again. She had looked
at me as if I were a monster from the mud. And the night before, on the
verandah, in the lightning....”
Chalmers stopped and looked at me. The brilliancy had gone out of his
eyes. He said nothing more.
“Well?” I asked finally.
“Well?” There came a wide shrug of the shoulders, a loosening of the
lips. “I got back somehow. I seemed to be riding, day and night,
straight to Hell. But eventually I got to Salisbury and took a train to
Beira. It was immensely steadying to take a train. I think any more of
the veldt would have driven me quite definitely mad.” He stopped; then,
in a moment, jerked out: “That’s all.”
“Do you mean that you’ve never heard anything more?”
“Never a word. But I know that, eventually, she drew out every penny of
her letter of credit. She had hardly dipped into it when we left
Europe.”
“Good God!” I don’t know why I should have sat stolidly through the rest
and have been bowled over by that one detail, but I was. It made the
woman extraordinarily real.
“And of course she knows several places where a letter would reach me,
if she ever had reason to write,” he went on. “Perhaps you see now why I
have to hang on. By holding my tongue, I’ve been grub-staking them in
Arcadia, you might say--but, damn it, I know so little about it! The
time might come....”
“Why haven’t you divorced her long since?”
His face hardened. “Didn’t I mention that she was a Catholic? We were
married by the most orthodox _padre_ imaginable. There’s no divorce for
her. She’s the kind to chuck Heaven, perhaps, but not her church. And,
unfortunately”--he spoke very slowly and meditatively--“our marriage,
you see, just missed being the kind that can be annulled.
‘Unfortunately,’ I say, but, even now, I’m glad--damned glad. It’s
quite on the cards, you know, that some day some priest may send her
back to me. I might divorce; she couldn’t. So it seems decent for me not
to.”
“Well, of all the--” I got no further. The whole Laokoönesque group had
now completed itself before me.
Chalmers leaned back and whistled a bar or two from _Rigoletto_. Then:
“Never marry a Catholic, old man!” he said in his lightest voice. But
immediately he bent forward and laid his hand on mine. “You do see why I
have to hang on, don’t you?”
I merely compressed my lips tightly, that no word should come.
“After all,” he said, turning his head away, “I should like a chance to
get back at Romance, some day. And the time may come--what with spectrum
analysis and all.”
I shook my head. “You love the woman still, Chalmers.”
“Not I.” His head-shake was more vehement than mine. “But I want to be
on deck if anything should turn up. I want to see it through. At
least--I can’t quite see that I’ve the right to go out.”
I sighed. Chalmers had always gone his own way; and certainly in this
greatest matter he would be tenacious, if ever. He seemed for the moment
to have forgotten me, and sat once more, his arms folded on the table,
his shoulders hunched, as beneath a burden, in the speckled brown coat,
his head moving slightly from side to side--again fantastically like the
tortoise that bears up the world. I didn’t quite know what to do with
him.
Then a charitable impulse came to me. The bar, I knew, didn’t close
until one. I ordered up a bottle of brandy. When it came I poured out
enough to set the brain of any abstemious man humming. Chalmers was
still staring in front of him at the table. I wanted him to sleep that
night at any cost. Pursuing my impulse, I pushed the glass across to
him. “Here; you’d better take this,” I said. He reached out his hand
mechanically, and mechanically drank. I waited. The stuff had no visible
effect on him. Five minutes later, I repeated the dose. As before, he
obeyed me with a mechanical, an almost mesmerized implicitness. Then I
took him home in a cab and put him to bed. I never told, myself, but it
leaked out--he had such a bad hang-over--and I was much and enviously
congratulated. You see, we had all tried, for five years, to get
Chalmers to take a drink.
THE DIVIDED KINGDOM
It was like Hoyting to be lying up for repairs in Soerabaya when the
Dorriens drifted by; like him to be there at the psychologic moment;
like him, above all, not to follow up their trail for a solution, but to
tack off into the China Sea to renew his acquaintance with belligerent
Mongols. It was I, years later, at Marseilles, who supplied Hoyting with
the last act of the play; and I can see his gray eyes narrowing above
his glass of vermouth as, for once, he listened. I shall have to put it
together as best I can, though I shall, as best I can, put Hoyting’s
part of it in his own mouth. I’ve learned a kind of mental stenography
by dint of listening to him; and though it’s unfair to quote a man
inexactly, I’m not sure it isn’t less unfair than inditing Hoyting’s
jerks and pauses, his zigzag structure. Some of the story, as I say, he
got from me. That part--most of it--I’ll give you in the beginning.
After that, if only for the sake of one or two of his own phrases, I
shall make shift to let him talk as he talked to me. If I could
reproduce for you that evening at Marseilles--Hoyting, his arms folded
on the café table, paying out his story unevenly, as if in response to
unseen strains and unseen relaxations at the other end--oh, as if
Dorrien himself had been fitfully pulling and letting go; and then the
sharpening of the eyes, the shrug of the great shoulders, when I told
him the end--if I could, I might let it go at that. But you who know
Hoyting will know that I had to shape it; and you who don’t might loathe
the imperfectly visualized scene.
Science moves at an extraordinarily uneven gait. We laymen follow as
best we can. I don’t pretend to make a history of medical discoveries,
and poor Dorrien’s theories may have been exploded long since. The
public knows only vain gossip of the laboratory’s “expectations” until
the serum is born. I don’t even know how much he contributed, but I do
know that at one moment terror-stricken multitudes were looking to him
for help. He had been the last man, in college days, who seemed marked
out for the work of discovery: easy-going, delighting in musical comedy,
to which he listened with the least subtle laugh in the world. He
married, at about thirty, the very worldly daughter of a public-spirited
American family. There wasn’t anything for two centuries, from
witch-burning to slave-rescuing, the Hewells hadn’t had their fingers
in. The Hewell spinsters have always headed intense and short-lived
leagues for the suppression of unsuspected evils or the maintenance of
out-dated ideals. The Hewell men are bred to reform as the English
race-horse is bred to the turf. Their marriages are apt to be
bloodlessly tragic.
Agatha Hewell--that is, Agatha Dorrien--was a special case, very
worldly, as I’ve said. She didn’t care for money, but she cared for
fame, which meant, she had the sense to see, marrying a clever man. She
made herself rather absurd, when she came out, by dashing at
celebrities; but she also made herself popular with her contemporaries
by letting the dancing men alone. When she married Dorrien, she seemed
likely to eat her cake and have it, too; for he was young and
good-looking, and there could be by that time no question about his
ability. She and Dorrien both danced a good deal in the earlier years of
their marriage. The serious Hewells approved of him none the less, for
he had interested himself pretty constantly, since his Johns Hopkins
days, in tuberculosis, which suited their public spirit admirably. The
Hewells found campaigns rather nasty work, but they loved legislation,
and Dorrien was always appearing passionately before boards and
commissions, and getting “machine” mayors to lift the submerged tenth
into so many cubic feet of air. He had always a natural leaning, though,
it was interesting to recall later, to the maladies of immigrants; and
Ellis Island had more than once summoned him. He chafed a little, in the
end, under the vocabularies of boards and commissions, and I once heard
him say that he’d be damned if he’d lecture again to any woman’s club,
no matter if they built a sanatorium the next minute. He was flat
against woman suffrage, and said so, but the Hewell aunts forgave him on
account of his tuberculosis activity. They called it a crusade. Agatha
said nothing.
Mrs. Dorrien was inexhaustibly pretty in a white and gold type, all
purity and lustre; and she wore endless French tea-gowns, each lovelier
than the last. They doubtless explained Dorrien’s sticking to his fat
and fashionable practice when his desire was to this or that new disease
out of Italy. Yet I’ve heard her take him lightly to task for letting
the dust grow thick in his laboratory. She certainly didn’t think she
wanted money. Nor, I fancy, in any bloated and disproportionate way did
she. She was, as I say, ambitious--muddle-headedly, sentimentally, but
incurably ambitious; and she seemed always, I’ve been told, to be
watching his career in the hope of its suddenly flaring into the
spectacular. It was she, I’ve also been told, who defended Dorrien from
outraged Hewells when he broke entirely with official tuberculosis and
turned his attention publicly to leprosy. There had been one of the
periodic “scares”; some respectable artisan in Kansas City had developed
it quite unaccountably. There was a good deal of the yellow peril in the
yellow journals. They sent for Dr. Dorrien. I’ve a notion that the
Misses Hewell were almost reconciled to him in that moment. Mrs.
Dorrien did not go to Kansas City with her husband. She stayed at home,
and explained to every one that leprosy was really becoming a public
menace, that the danger should be considered, that steps should be
taken, especially that research should be subsidized.
It had been a chance current that had swept me for a little into the
Dorriens’ world, and my main stream of life soon swept me out of it. At
the moment of my departure from America, the Kansas City scare was over,
and Dr. Dorrien had still done nothing that one could legitimately
present to one’s wife as spectacular. That was all I knew of them for
years--until I knew the last. The last set us all to wondering, and by
an odd chance I once wondered aloud before Hoyting. “Oh, the Dorriens?
Yes, of course, the Dorriens. I knew them.”
That was all, and it sufficed. Whatever Hoyting knew was sure to be the
right answer. It would take too long to expound Hoyting to those of you
who don’t know him. Those of you who do will understand my faith. He’s
like nothing so much, I’ve sometimes thought, as a badly tinkered craft
plying between obscure and unsafe ports. Sometimes he carries junk, and
sometimes treasure; you never know beforehand. But I always bargain for
the cargo. Hoyting has wandered so much: the mere dust on the crazy
little capstan may have blown from some unpronounceable paradise. He
doesn’t always know, himself; he “steams for steaming’s sake,” Hoyting
does. Somewhere inside his lurching bulk is an inexhaustible hunger for
life, which has made of two hemispheres an insufficient meal. For some
of us he’s an unfailing cache in the desert. Provided he has had life at
first hand, the jackals are welcome to do the rest. So I had only to
wait my moment. In Marseilles, that haven of ships, Hoyting’s tongue
would be loosed. I should not have to wait long.
* * * * *
“Vermouth,” said Hoyting; “yes, just vermouth. I always did like
Marseilles. Full of people who really want to get somewhere, and know
how to go, and don’t talk more than is necessary. Brindisi’s disgusting.
I never touch Brindisi if I can help it.”
“The Dorriens.” I held him to his promise.
“Oh, the Dorriens. Yes. Funny, the kind of thing a woman who looks like
that is sometimes willing to muck about in. She seemed like a good
sport, too. Ever been in Turkestan? I suppose not. If you go to places
in this world, you haven’t time left for anything else. So very likely
you never saw a Kirghiz nomad hunting on horseback with a golden eagle
on his wrist. Using it like a falcon, you know. They go after wildish
game--wolves and such. Ripping. But not very practical, after all. Mrs.
Dorrien was a little like that. She was ripping, too. But I’ve always
had a notion that Dorrien might have had better hunting with almost any
other kind of woman.
“I don’t understand modern medical science--scrapping with ultravisible
germs that good may come. Blood is different: when you see that, it’s
your business to stop it anyhow. A flow of blood is the devil at war
with man. You know it instinctively. I myself don’t hold much with
anything that doesn’t come by instinct. And as for deciding things by
theory! There wasn’t a mouldering idea any one had held since the
Christian era that Mrs. Dorrien didn’t drag out of its grave to get help
from. That was the trouble: all the mouldering ideas were knocking
about together in her mind. And therefore, exit Dorrien.
“Do you know Soerabaya? No? It was there I saw them. I had known Dorrien
long ago somewhere. There wasn’t much of any one else in that crazy
thing that called itself a hotel--kept by a Portuguese Jew named
D’Acunha. It was in the town, mind you, not in the suburbs, and the
guests ran accordingly. Very good drinks, and plenty of
mosquito-netting, but everything else in the place that mosquito-netting
wouldn’t keep out. Mrs. Dorrien always dressed for dinner, I remember.
Dorrien wasn’t happy. She had come to please him, though just why to
Soerabaya I never made out, and was always reminding him of it, and he
wasn’t pleased. They had left the little girl at home, and I dare say
the mother wanted to get back to her. She kept saying she was afraid
Aunt Emma wouldn’t have Virginia’s teeth properly straightened.
Wonderful thing a woman is! Lizards climbing all round over the walls,
and the eternal promise of a snake coiling up on the tail of her dress,
and she’ll look past it all with her far-sighted eyes and say she is
afraid a safe little kid at home with steam-heat and a governess isn’t
having her teeth straightened.
“I didn’t come in on the Dorriens’ affairs at all at first, you
understand. I was there on my own business, and I supposed they were. At
least I supposed he was. I never could see what she got out of it: I’ll
swear she never looked at scenery, and there wasn’t anything in the
mucky little bazaars she wanted. Apparently they had no letters to
European residents; or if they had, they didn’t use them. If ever a
woman wasn’t meant for the tropics--” His voice trailed off for a
little, then boomed out again, softly resonant, like a ship’s gong going
intermittently somewhere beyond in the offing. “I admired her more than
a little. But I saw that Dorrien had no show. Women are apt to shout
with the majority. How is a husband going to be a majority, if he takes
a line of his own? Oh, Dorrien was down and out from the start.
“They must have been worrying along in Soerabaya for two weeks. I think
Dorrien stayed on like a cross child who knows he’s got to go home. He
drags at his nurse’s hand, and asks questions about every object they
pass. He wasn’t interested in the place, but at least it wasn’t a P. &
O. port. He saw perfectly that the next stop would be. If I had had him
alone, I could have amused him. Dorrien was the sort that finds an
absorbing interest in native--eh--customs, and that sort of thing. But
his wife naturally didn’t care about--sociology. She wandered around
under the teaks and tamarinds, waiting for his last shadow of an excuse
to fade out utterly. When he couldn’t chuck the bluff any more, she’d
have him, and she knew it. She’d march him home.
“I myself didn’t quite know at first why Dorrien wanted to stay out
there. One would have to have more general curiosity than the Dorriens
appeared to, in order to find Soerabaya interesting. I knew that if his
wife weren’t along, he’d drag me into every kind of native dive; but I
knew, too, that he hadn’t come for the dives. He didn’t seem to be very
much in love with the place. Who could be? He swore at everything,
beginning with the monkeys and ending with the prices. He just didn’t
want to go home--as if he knew he’d be put to bed in the dark and have
to go to sleep, when he got there. Queer guy! You remember how big he
was? He had a trick of looking round any room as if it were too small
for him. And that voice of his, with never a modulation, and those
red-brown eyes that seemed to take in everything and give back no
comment? Then, one night, I thought I had struck it. He came across to
my corner of porch about midnight.
“‘My wife’s gone to bed, and I think she’s gone to sleep,’ he said.
‘There’s no sleep in me, and I shall swear at the lizards if I turn in.
I should wake her. You know what these fool partitions are. Let’s talk.
You never have anything to do.’ It wasn’t very polite, but it was quite
true. I haven’t anything to do except see what things are like. When
I’ve made an exhaustive study of all the degrees of civilization, I’m
going home to vote. I don’t see that, until then, I’m equipped to.
“‘All right,’ I said. ‘I never sleep, I never write letters, and I never
criticize. Go ahead.’
“Odd thing: that happened to be just what he wanted--to ‘go ahead’
indefinitely. I learned a lot of things about Dorrien that night. I
made out from his talk that he must have mucked around a good deal with
tuberculosis at home, but he’d dropped it. He told me some queer things
about tuberculosis germs, but he had got tired of it. Exotic diseases
were more in his line. He asked the most extraordinary number of
questions about beri-beri and things like that. I never quite understood
it all; but I think the commonness of tuberculosis bored him. The
antipodes take men’s imaginations in different ways--who should know if
I don’t?--and they had simply taken his, across all the world, by their
physical malignancies. He didn’t give a copper cash for what you folk
call psychology, but his brown eyes used to rake the meanest little
streets in Soerabaya for any sign of disease. It might have been
unpleasant if he hadn’t been such a loud-voiced, businesslike chap. If
you ask me, I should say he had come to the East just as a sportsman
goes to Africa for big game. There’s good hunting in Canada, I’m told,
but some people want to hunt hippopotami just because hippopotami have
such queer complexions. Dorrien could get interested in what the human
body is capable of, regardless of unpleasantness. But he could as well
have stayed at home and stuck to cancer, if he had wanted mere
unpleasantness.
“‘The only thing I know anything about is leprosy,’ he said, that night,
after a lot of queer talk. I very seldom argue; I just smoke and wait.
You’ve _got_ to assume that people know their own business best. Dorrien
had run down to Molokai while his wife stayed in Honolulu. I’ve never
been there myself. He told me a lot about it that same night. He wasn’t
romantic _pour deux sous_, Dorrien wasn’t; but he talked about it as if
his heart were in it. I remember an old missionary chap who went on in
the same way about the Fijis. Not that Dorrien held with the
missionaries; but they both spoke with passion--as if sin and disease
could draw men like lovers, panting with blind desire, sheer across the
planet, just to help, and then die. Men will go out and overturn the
stew-pots, and preach vegetarianism to cannibals, and go into the
stew-pot themselves in the end, who couldn’t stand a week of Salvation
Army slum-work. Dorrien was something like that, only with the idealism
left out. He seemed all passionate perception, like a child. Yet
somewhere in him was that thin little adamantine streak of pure
intellectualism. If it hadn’t been there, he’d never have held together
at all: there _must_ have been something inflexible for all that clay to
mass itself upon. And so he somehow cared, when it came to leprosy. I
suppose, some time or other, the thing had baffled him--tantalized him
like an unscrupulous woman.
“It’s no use saying, ‘Why didn’t he love elsewhere?’ He happened not to.
Meanwhile his wife was taking him home to a fashionable practice which
he was sadly endangering by absence. And there were the little girl’s
teeth, you see. There had been some excuse of a holiday combined with
study of special conditions in the Orient, but all excuses had expired.
He was facing a P. & O. boat, and he was just sparring for time. It was
all rather a mess, as I had learned by three in the morning. But it
distinctly wasn’t a mess that an outsider had anything to do with. To
tell the truth, if Mrs. Dorrien hadn’t seemed such a good sport, I’d
have had more faith in him; but who can ever tell? He left me finally
and went to bed, and the next day Mrs. Dorrien went into the town to
look up steamer connections while he made up sleep. At least, that was
the account she gave.
“I went off into the interior for a few days; pretended I was going to
look up a lot of ruins that, of course, I’d seen before--tombs of Arab
priests and such. The hotel had got on my nerves, and the suburbs, full
of Europeans, were even less what I was looking for. Besides, the
Dorriens weren’t my affair; yet Dorrien was beginning to clutch me as if
they were. I wouldn’t run away from any solitary creature, either man or
woman--and I’ve been in some strange galleys, too--but when it comes to
man and wife, ‘_ruf’ nicht die Polizei_,’ as the Germans have it. The
Dorriens looked to me pretty near the breaking-point. I hoped they would
either leave or have it out before I got back. When I got away, I forgot
about it. I’m foot-loose, and nobody’s business is really mine. Fancy
being responsible to and for a white-and-gold creature like Mrs.
Dorrien! The very thought of it makes you want to take ship.
“That particular interior wasn’t much good--eternal rice-fields, and
little villages, one just like another, full of little people. The
vegetation was something you couldn’t dream, even on hashish, but I’m
dead used to vegetation. I nosed around for a few days, and then decided
to quit the island entirely. I had engagements elsewhere, if I chose to
think so. Anyhow, I wanted something doing. So I went back to Soerabaya.
You get boats from there all over.
“They said at the hotel that the Dorriens were leaving the next day. I
didn’t look them up; but when I came down to dinner, Mrs. Dorrien was in
her place, waiting for her husband. She beckoned to me and smiled, and I
had to go over, though she looked more like a Frenchwoman than ever, and
I was more a sweep than usual. I had to go; but I went thinking what a
damn subtle thing marriage is at home, and how glad I was to be single.
There are other sides to it, of course; but that’s the permanent one.
Think of being married to a woman who would dress like that for an
undercooked, half-caste dinner in a steaming Soerabaya hotel! Think,
that is, of what she must be like at close range. She made me sit down.
“‘We are leaving to-morrow, Mr. Hoyting.’
“‘Sorry.’ I couldn’t screw out more.
“‘Yes. We’ve had our mail. We have to go.’ She straightened her
shoulders and swept the room with a bored look, as if it were a ballroom
full of men who danced badly. I didn’t know whether she was lying about
the mail or not. I never get letters, thank God! I haven’t any address.
What was certain was that I did not want her to tell me what was in
their mail. I sidestepped.
“‘I don’t suppose Soerabaya will soon see the like of that dress again,
Mrs. Dorrien.’ It _was_ the most civilized thing I’d seen in a long
time, though of course I don’t frequent table d’hôtes in most places.
Anyhow, you know how colonial Dutch women get themselves up. ‘Aren’t you
afraid the lizards will spoil it?’
“‘This rag?’ The ‘rag’ was gold-colored, as she was, and her laugh
clinked like gold. ‘I shall give it to the stewardess if she is half
decent to me. We shall have to stop in Paris on the way back. I haven’t
had so much as a new _sarong_ since we left America. My clothes are
faded, tattered, fly-blown, tarnished with the sea.’ She shrugged her
shoulders. ‘Is it really so long since you’ve seen a well-dressed woman?
Surely in India--’ That was the best she could do for badinage, and she
looked uneasily towards the door as she spoke.
“Suddenly Dorrien appeared in the door. She was silent through our
greetings, though I thought she watched him. Whatever it was would break
before morning, if it wasn’t already at that instant giving way. They
hadn’t many hours’ grace, those two. Why the devil hadn’t I stayed in
some undiscoverable, soaking little basket-hovel in the nearest village
until the next morning? I didn’t know the people, I didn’t like them;
but both of them would cling to me because I was white and because they
couldn’t agree about anything in the world. I’ve always wished I had
stayed away twenty-four hours more, that time--always. There was no
reason under high heaven why I should be in it. And they were nice
people, mind you; and neither one of them meant to be a cad. Why, there
was nothing either one of them wanted that wasn’t perfectly decent and
desirable in itself. They only wanted different things for each other,
with the best conscience in the world. And people go on marrying, every
day!
“‘I hear you’re going, Dorrien.’ There was no use in trying to be
irrelevant. They would have turned any remark into a comment on
themselves.
“‘Did Agatha tell you so?’
“‘Yes. And D’Acunha mentioned it when I got in.’
“‘There’s a P. & O. boat from Singapore next week Thursday.’ She looked
straight at him.
“‘There’s a Royal Dutch Mail from Batavia next week Saturday,’ he flung
back.
“She drew a scarf round her shoulders, despite the steaming heat. ‘Who
wants to go to Rotterdam? If we’re going, let’s go sanely.’
“‘We can’t go sanely.’ And Dorrien was white beneath his sunburn as he
said it.
“Some other people came in, and I didn’t scruple to talk to them. If the
Dorriens were going to break, I, out of sheer patriotism, didn’t want
them to break before a public like that. Perhaps I still had some hope
of getting away. I’ve forgotten about that, but it seems reasonable. I
do remember that I staved it off until after dinner. But they didn’t let
me alone. They wanted a referee, I imagine; some one who would keep them
from screaming insults at each other, or decide between them when they
did.
“There’s something morally disintegrating about heat. I fancy that’s
been said before, but _I_ know how true it is. My own nerves were on
edge with it. Why didn’t they go up into the mountains somewhere and
dance with Dutch residents, instead of sticking to ports? But I suppose
that would only have postponed the catastrophe. Anyhow, it couldn’t hurt
either of them to get out of that rotten temperature, no matter where
they went. She was whiter than chalk, and Dorrien was nervous as a cat.
Her voice jangled, and he twitched all over when she spoke. I didn’t see
that there was a penny to choose between them for merit, except that she
was stronger than he. They’d both break, but he’d break half a minute
sooner. Ugh! it was bad!”
Hoyting breathed in the wind that blew gently against us off the
Mediterranean waves. “You don’t know anything about heat. Dry heat
doesn’t matter. When there’s nothing but steam to breathe--everything
hot and vaporous and reeking--temperate people lose their poise.
Soerabaya was like holding your head over a teakettle. Yes, I was
sorriest for Dorrien. But why didn’t they go to the mountains and have
it out, if they had to, in paradise?”
He was silent for some moments over his vermouth. I didn’t interrupt. I
knew the rest would come. Uneasy reminiscence of the kind then wrinkling
his face would only expedite his narrative. When he began again, it was
abruptly, with a change of tone; but his eyes had never moved from the
harbor lights.
“I was sorriest for Dorrien. I asked him over to smoke on my porch. Your
porch is your sitting-room, you know, and you don’t go inside until you
have to. I said, ‘Let’s throw bananas to the monkeys.’ The heat had gone
to my head a little, too--heat and annoyance. He moved off at once. ‘All
right,’ he said. ‘Can’t I come and throw bananas to the monkeys?’ said
Mrs. Dorrien. ‘Of course.’ We were all unnaturally serious, you see--a
bad sign. I was in it, then, for as long as they chose to stay. What
fool invented hospitality, I wonder?
“Dorrien had a little sense left. He began at once. ‘I’ve got a case of
conscience to put to you, Hoyting.’ Even then I hoped I could stave it
off.
“‘Conscience is a local matter,’ I answered; ‘territoriality of law.
Don’t appeal to me. I’m an outsider.’
“‘Aren’t we all in Soerabaya together?’ Her voice rasped its way in.
“‘Yes; but I hope you don’t mean to decide anything according to
Soerabaya.’
“‘Do you really think at the moment we’re capable of doing otherwise?’
She had me there: it was the mean truth. We weren’t. That reeking heat
would decide for us. I don’t think she had meant him to appeal to me,
but I fancy she didn’t mind. If he hadn’t done it, she would have. It
was inevitable.
“Dorrien went on: ‘I had a letter when the mails came in two days ago,
offering me a big post. Agatha and I don’t agree about it.’
“‘You don’t think it big enough?’ I was so relieved that I thought I
could speak lightly--Heaven forgive my folly! If it was just some little
feud of their ambitions, they’d be all right as soon as they were off
the land. But her face didn’t relax.
“‘He has been offered the chance of exiling himself on Molokai with
eight hundred lepers.’ She had brought the jangling tones into a kind of
ironic gamut. ‘_That_ is the kingdom he is offered. And he thinks--my
God! he wants to go!’ She broke down utterly and wept, great sobs, like
a man’s, coming up from her chest and shaking her frail body. Women
don’t usually cry that way; there’s trouble in it when they do.
“‘But he isn’t going.’ It was only decent to comfort her. ‘You say you
are sailing for Europe.’
“Dorrien did not speak. Her sobs slowed gradually. She was making a
terrible effort for the power to speak coherently, to get in her
arguments, her pleas, her threats. I suppose I was her last dim
substitute for public opinion. She was trying to bring the world to bear
on him in Soerabaya, and there was only I to be the world.
“Now, how could I have known I was going to run into a thing like that,
out there on the other edge of Java? Do I look like Mrs. Grundy? She
hated me, mind you; she was terribly afraid of me; she couldn’t a bit
trust me to see the thing her way; but there was no one else. I was an
American, and I had had the bad luck to know Dorrien long before. She
wasn’t trying any feminine wiles; she was just pleading for
civilization, as she understood it, against mad and monstrous ideas that
she hadn’t dreamed existed, except inaccessibly. Caste goes deeper than
sex--among us, anyhow. I don’t know what she thought about Dorrien,
really. Probably he merely seemed to her, for the moment, to have
obliterated deliberately all his caste-marks. I’ve always held that, if
a man did the work, it wasn’t up to the woman to tell him how to do it;
and I remembered how Dorrien had felt about leprosy. Probably he could
do good work there. I fancied he knew what he wanted. Some one had to be
at Molokai; why, or why not, Dorrien?
“I looked at him. He was sitting perfectly straight and uncomfortable,
his mad eyes fixed, as if they were glass, on the palm-boughs out beyond
the smoky porch-lamp. Nothing to be done there. And when I turned back
to her, I simply--oh, abominably, I grant you--laughed aloud. The
notion of expecting a woman like that to live on a leper island! It had
been bad enough to see her in Soerabaya. I was sorry, fundamentally and
genuinely sorry, for Dorrien; but it ought to have been patent even to
him that Mrs. Dorrien couldn’t go to Molokai. Nothing but an exclusive
love, the kind we’ve all heard about and never experienced, would have
made her do it. She and Dorrien had nothing of that sort to go upon, I
was absolutely sure.
“‘But you’re sailing.’ I clung to Dorrien’s explicit words.
“‘By Heaven, I’m not!’ His lips just moved. He looked like a statue
conceived in madness, carved with scorn.
“‘I grant some one has to go’--she was apparently trying to be
extraordinarily generous--‘but why he? It’s not his place or his life.
It’s not what he’s fit for. It’s not asked of him. He has me; he has
Virginia. Virginia!’ She had turned to me, her shoulder blotting out
Dorrien. It seemed that they had to communicate through me; they had
ceased to address each other. ‘Has he a right,’ she went on, ‘to take
us to a place like that? Has a husband, a father, no responsibilities?
Even if I don’t matter, must Virginia live and die among those
monsters?’
“How could I say, I ask you, that Virginia must? I had never seen
Virginia. I had nothing to do with these people. Why didn’t they see
that? I don’t believe, you know, that they ever saw it. I might have
been Rhadamanthus in a poor disguise.
“Mrs. Dorrien stopped, and cried quietly into her handkerchief. Her
husband took up the talk.
“‘God knows I’ve wasted life long enough. It’s a chance in a million,
man--the one chance in the whole world. Give me ten years there, and
I’ll know, I tell you. I’ll find a cure. I’ll track the filthy germ.
I’ve never had half a show, pulling old ladies through bronchitis. It’s
no work for a man. I’ve been ashamed to look at myself in a glass for
two years. I’ve gone a little way; I swear I’m on the right track. It’s
the kind of thing I can do. I haven’t a bedside manner; Agatha has that.
Those poor wretches don’t need a bedside manner. They need some one to
avenge them. She’s ambitious. Well, let her give me my head for ten
years, and she can cover herself with my medals. We’ll come back, when
I’ve done my work, and she can queen it all over Europe.’
“He was incoherent, overweening, inconsequent, but terrifyingly in
earnest. More probably than not, she would have a suicide on her hands,
I thought, if she did take him home. It didn’t look as if she would get
him past Suez.
“Mrs. Dorrien sat with her hands folded in her lap, breathing hard, but
quite silent. They were appalling, that pair. I’d have given a good deal
to hear a little repartee just then. But the mortal insult would have
been to suggest that either one should speak to the other. The queerest
night I ever spent, and I’ve been through some I didn’t believe in,
myself, the next day. Well, all I wanted was to have it over; I didn’t
care how brutally I hastened it.
“‘Why don’t you go alone?’
“He looked at me then; he had only spoken to me before. Dominated by
that look, I began to piece together my own scraps of traveller’s
knowledge. Then I kicked myself. I didn’t need all the unphraseable
explanations that gathered silently in his eyes. I knew, of course, what
he just refrained from replying. It was the last leash on him--the
thinnest thread of control. If that snapped, if I jerked it, we should
be saying, all three of us together, monstrous things. I held hard on
the leash.
“‘He can’t go alone.’ Her voice was just a whisper. She was shocked to
the core of her, and I saw that, to that extent at least, they had had
it out. I was sorry for her then--sorry without regard to my fast-ebbing
admiration. She had been flung on the horns of a dilemma, and they were
goring her cruelly. They couldn’t, poor devils, get peace with honor.”
Hoyting ordered more vermouth, and lighted the next of the undiminishing
procession of cigarettes. He wandered away from the actual story for a
little, and I let him, knowing that in the end he would get his fox and
goose and bag of corn all safe across, like the man in the riddle.
“Dorrien wasn’t the sort of man you’d expect to find in scientific
research. He was too human, too impressionable. A scientist oughtn’t to
notice Javanese singing girls. They ought to be to him as the female of
the flounder. I don’t mean for a minute that Dorrien was a cad, that he
was anything but--complete. He was a scientist of sorts, at least by
predilection; but he was also healthy and immensely masculine. He
couldn’t personify Science and then treat her as if she were really a
woman. He knew the difference. I’ve seen men who didn’t. They are the
lucky ones. Dorrien was unlucky: he had no end of conflicting desires.
He wanted abnormal conditions _plus_ a normal life; and he wanted a
little fame thrown in. I dare say he also wanted Mrs. Dorrien and the
little girl whose teeth had to be straightened. Just at that moment, he
thought he wanted more than all the rest a chance to do his appointed
work. But he was honest, damn him! honest. He knew that Science could
never, for him, be a mistress, and he wasn’t a man to exist on merely
Platonic relations. I’ve always admired him for not blinking facts when
he must have been sorely tempted to. But what they must have gone
through, of bitter exposition, those two, in the days of my absence! I
didn’t see any way out of it. He wanted incompatible goods. And so, by
heavens! did she.”
Hoyting dropped his chin on his chest and closed his eyes wearily for a
moment.
“If she had been a different sort, even, they might have pulled through.
But look at it. She was ambitious and sentimental. She wanted his
success. She’d have been willing enough to send him out alone if he had
lied to her about possibilities. He had had the honesty to realize them,
and the utter brutality to tell her--that was perfectly clear from the
state of both of them. Probably he didn’t think he had a right to
withhold the information from her; or he might have thought it would be
a clinching argument for her going with him. If you ask me, I think she
was very near hating him for having enlightened her as to the dangers.
Women of her kind don’t like such assumptions. And it didn’t give her a
_beau rôle_. There wasn’t anything, and wouldn’t be, God knows, for her
to be jealous of. But there was everything prospectively, if he went, to
pity him for. A wife couldn’t fling him into that; not when he wouldn’t
even pose, not when he didn’t scruple to say what she was flinging him
into. However much she may have wanted to say ‘Go,’ she couldn’t. If he
had only pretended to be other than he was, she could have made it out
to herself that both of them were martyrs, he to his work, she to--oh,
well, to the little girl. She was the kind of woman who could condone an
infidelity, I imagine, in a cold, superior way; but her principles would
hardly permit her to face it beforehand. And that wasn’t all--that
wasn’t all. Of course she had asked him first of all--she would
have--about the danger of infection; and it was evident from every
suffering line in both their faces that he hadn’t hesitated to dot his
i’s. She knew what was dangerous and what was not, and she knew that if
Dorrien went alone he was lost. I pitied her. She had hunted, during two
days, for a _beau rôle_, and she couldn’t find one. Her only hope was to
get him home and trust that he would get over it, like some kind of fit.
And he wouldn’t; that was clear. The only suggestion I could think of
was that they should divorce, and that he should proceed to find another
woman who adored him, and take her out there. That isn’t the kind of
suggestion you make to people; it doesn’t sound sympathetic. It isn’t
practical, either; it leaves too much to be done too quickly. Moreover,
it had almost certainly never occurred to either of them that they
didn’t love each other as much as any other two people did.
“And they expected me to say something! They had spent forty-eight hours
trying, quite in vain, to find a way out, and then had the appalling
cheek and the pathetic confidence to bring it to me!
“‘I can’t argue this matter,’ I said finally. ‘You must see that.’
“They didn’t see it. It was a perfectly impersonal clutch they were
strangling me with. They hadn’t any notion of their own dismaying breach
of reticence. We were all in Soerabaya--which was hell--together; and
conventions didn’t exist. Also, I couldn’t any more get out of it than
if we had been more literally in Hell and they ineluctable and
imperishable shades. I had to go on.
“‘She won’t go,’ I said at last to Dorrien. ‘And you absolutely can’t go
alone?’
“He didn’t speak, but he turned his eyes on me again. I seemed to read
in them that the question had been put to him before, and that he would
not again go through the agony of answering. Not that the answer in
those silent eyes wasn’t clear. Then, after a little, he did speak. ‘Ask
her if she counsels me to go alone.’
“My very spirit revolted at the way they had laid hands on me. Anything
I said was bound to be damnable for one or the other of them. I swore
I’d get out of the thing non-partisan if I insulted them both.
“‘I won’t ask her,’ I said. ‘I won’t have anything more to do with it.
It’s a devilish mess, and one of you has to go under. But I won’t lift a
finger to determine which one. You may take that from me straight, both
of you.’
“We ought by rights to have been tearing about that porch dramatically;
but we all sat perfectly still in sheer exhaustion, dripping with sweat
and breathing in quiet, regular pants. I wish--I wish it had never been.
“‘You won’t even tell him that he can’t go at all? Such a simple thing
as that?’ She flung out her hands in a queer, uncertain way. She was
very far gone.
“‘I won’t tell him anything. Good night.’ I pulled myself out of my
chair and leaned over the railing. I don’t know how long I looked down
into the hot little garden. I didn’t mean to be a beast. Were you ever
in a place where you couldn’t stir a muscle without committing murder?
No, I suppose not. Well, that’s what I felt like. It seemed inevitable
that pretty soon they’d trap me into saying something that sounded like
advice; and it looked to me as if any advice, once followed, would be
fatal. There wasn’t any right way out, they being what they were. It was
up to whatever Power had made them. It was absolutely _not_ up to me. I
began counting lizards on the railing. Every bone in my body ached with
stiffness when I finally turned round. They had gone.”
Hoyting lighted a cigarette. He had finished it, and lighted another,
before he spoke again.
“The next morning I got off on a filthy little tramp steamer at four
o’clock. It wasn’t a steamer the Dorriens could possibly take. I don’t
think they would even have known about it. Then I made straight for
China; I was pretty sure neither one of them would think of China. And
by that time I had got back nerve enough to be quite sure that I had
done right in keeping my hands off. But--I never asked any one what
became of them. Now you say you know.”
“Oh, yes, I know. Dorrien’s dead.”
“They went back?”
“Yes, they went back. That was eight years ago?”
Hoyting began to count up the continents on his fingers. “Australia last
year--South America--Siberia--the Transvaal, before that. Yes, it would
have been eight years ago.”
To my surprise, I found myself reluctant to bring out the truth.
Hoyting, as he talked, had been so vividly aware of the Dorriens, had
made it so evident how real to him and repellent was that remembered
scene, that my hesitation was not unnatural.
“He practised at home for a number of years, doing some research when he
had time. He went back into public work to some extent--boards and
commissions again. Her family seemed to manage him entirely.” Then I
stopped.
Hoyting waited. The lights in the harbor began to lessen, great patches
of shadow spacing them. I waited, too, to gather strength. It had all
become horrible to me now, and permeated with the sordidness that spoils
tragedy.
“He shot himself.”
“He cared so much as that?” Hoyting’s huge finger flicked off the
cigarette ash before there was need.
“He had--oh, I only heard it, Hoyting!” I cried. “I don’t know the whole
of it. Who does? But those damned Hewells took it up--I suppose by way
of condoning the suicide--and made a martyr of him.”
“Go on.”
“He had somehow in the laboratory--you know the danger; and Dorrien was
a reckless chap, those last years, not like himself, his friends said.
They all used to worry over his riding, his shooting, his
yachting--everything.”
I broke off. It was extremely hard to tell the man who apparently knew
most about Dorrien, even though he had never called Dorrien friend. “He
had somehow, through a cut, the slip of an instrument--I don’t know the
sickening scientific detail of it--inoculated himself with a disease he
was working with. He made nothing of it at the time, I’m told. Everybody
had forgotten it. Suddenly--when he found out what he was in for, I
suppose--he shot himself. After what you’ve told me, I should say it was
probably from disgust. Why blame him?”
“What was it?” Hoyting had not stirred, but his voice had changed
immeasurably.
“Tuberculosis.”
The great shoulders shrugged once. I felt impelled to explain--a
miserable little feverish strut. And before Hoyting, of all men!
“It gives the measure of his revolt--a man who had cured so many, and
could have cured himself mechanically, you might say; a man whose
special business in life had been to snap his fingers at that particular
plague. That’s why, until you told me all this, I never understood. Now
it’s clear enough.”
I shut my eyes, glad to put the ironic thing away, glad to be at peace,
with no further need to speak of it. When I opened them again, I was
alone. Hoyting, the foot-loose, was gone.
THE CASE OF PARAMORE
For the sake of moral values I ought to wish, I suppose, that Paramore
had been a more conspicuous figure. There is moral significance in the
true tale of Paramore--the tale which has been left to me in trust by
Hoyting. I cursed Hoyting when he did it; for Paramore’s reputation was
nothing to me, and what Paramore knew or didn’t know was in my eyes
unspeakably unimportant. I wish it clearly understood, you see, that if
Paramore deliberately confused exogamy and endogamy in the Australian
bush, it doesn’t in the least matter to me. Paramore is only a symbol.
As a symbol, I am compelled to feel him important. That is why I wish
that his name were ringing in the ears and vibrating on the lips of all
of you. His bad anthropology doesn’t matter--a dozen big people are
delightedly setting that straight--but the adventure of his soul
immensely does. Rightly read, it’s as sound as a homily and as dramatic
as Euripides. The commonest field may be chosen by opposing generals to
be decisive; and in a day history is born where before only the quiet
wheat has sprung. Paramore is like that. The hostile forces converged by
chance upon his breast.
I have implied that Paramore was never conspicuous. That is to be more
merciful than just. The general public cares no more, I suppose, than I
do about the marriage customs of Australian aborigines. But nowadays the
general public has in pay, as it were, an army of scientists in every
field. We all expect to be told in our daily papers of their most
important victories, and have a comfortable feeling that we, as the age,
are subsidizing research. By the same token, if they deceive us, we--the
age--are personally injured and fall to “muck-raking.” It is typical
that no one had been much interested in Paramore until he was
discredited, and that then, quite without intelligible documents, we all
began to despise him. The situation, for that matter, was not without
elements of humor. The facts, as I and the general public knew them,
were these--before Hoyting, with his damnable inside information, came
into it.
Paramore sprang one day, full-armed, from some special academic
obscurity. He had scraped together enough money to bury himself in the
Australian bush and grapple face to face with primitive religion in its
most concrete form. Each to his taste; and I dare say some casual
newspaper readers wished him godspeed. There followed the proper
interval of time; then an emaciated Paramore suddenly emerging, laden
with note-books; then the published volume, very striking and
revolutionary, a treasure-house of authentic and indecent anecdote. He
could write, too, which was part of his evil fate; so that a great many
people read him. That, however, was not Paramore’s fault. His heart, I
believe, was in Great Russell Street, where the Royal Anthropologists
have power to accept or reject. He probably wanted the alphabet
picturesquely arranged after his name. At all events, he got it in large
measure. You see, his evidence completely upset a lot of hard-won
theories about mother-right and group-marriage; and he didn’t hesitate
to contradict the very greatest. He actually made a few people speak
lightly of _The Golden Bough_. No scientist had ever spent so long at
primitive man’s very hearth as Paramore had. It was a tremendous
achievement. He had data that must have been more dangerous to collect
than the official conversation of nihilists. It was his daring that won
him the momentary admiration of the public to which exogamy is a
ludicrously unimportant noun. Very soon, of course, every one forgot.
It was not more than two years after his book was printed that the
newspapers took him up again. Most of them appended to the despatch a
brief biography of Paramore. No biographies were needed in Great Russell
Street. This was the point where the comic spirit decided to meddle. A
few Germans had always been protesting at inconsistencies in Paramore’s
book, and no one had paid any attention to them. There is always a
learned German protesting somewhere. The general attitude among the
great was: any one may challenge or improve Paramore’s conclusions--in
fact, it’s going to be our delightful task for ten years to get more
out of Paramore than he can get out of himself--but do get down on your
knees before the immense amount of material he has taken the almost
fatal trouble to collect for us. No other European was in a position to
discredit Paramore. It took an Australian planter to do that. Whitaker
was his quite accidentally notorious name. The comic spirit pushed him
on a North German Lloyder at Melbourne, to spend a few happy months in
London. It was perfectly natural that people who talked to him at all
should mention Paramore. The unnatural thing was that he knew all about
Paramore. He didn’t tell all he knew--as I learned afterward--but he
told at least enough to prove that Paramore hadn’t spent so much time in
the bush as would have been absolutely necessary to compile one-quarter
of his note-books. Whitaker was sufficiently reticent about what
Paramore had been doing most of the time; but he knew for a fact, and
took a sporting interest in proving it, that Paramore had never been
west of the Musgrave Range. That in itself sufficed to ruin Paramore. It
was perfectly easy, then, for the little chorus from Bonn, Heidelberg,
etc., to prove in their meticulous way that both his cribbing and lying
(his whole treatment of Spencer and Gillen was positively artistic) had
all been mere dust-throwing. Of course, what Paramore really had
achieved ceased from that moment to count. He had blasphemed; and the
holy inquisition of science would do the rest. It all took a certain
amount of time, but that was the net result.
Paramore made no defence, oddly enough. Some kind people arranged an
accidental encounter between him and Whitaker. The comic spirit was
hostess, and the newspapers described it. It gave the cartoonists a
happy week. Then an international complication intervened, and the next
thing the newspapers found time to say about him was that he had gone to
the Upper Niger, still on folk-lore bent. That fact would have been
stupendous if it hadn’t been so unimportant. Two years later, the fickle
press returned to him just long enough to say that he had died. I
certainly thought then that we had heard the last of him. But the comic
spirit had laid her inexorable finger on Hoyting. And suddenly, as if
in retribution for my spasmodic interest in Paramore’s beautiful fraud,
Hoyting sent for me.
I went to one of the rue de Rivoli hotels and met him by appointment. Of
course, he hadn’t told me what it was about. Hoyting never writes; and
he puts as little into a telegram as a frugal old maid. Any sign from
Hoyting, however, would have sufficed to bring me to Paris; and I stayed
in my hotel, never budging even for the Salon, so close at hand, until
Hoyting appeared in my sitting-room.
I asked Hoyting no questions. I hadn’t an idea of what he
wanted. It might, given Hoyting, be anything. He began without
preliminaries--except looking frightfully tired. That, for Hoyting, was
a rather appalling preliminary.
“Three months ago I was in Dakar. I don’t know just why I had drifted to
Sénégal, except that I’ve come to feel that if there must be colonial
governments they had better be French. If there was any special thing
that pushed me, I’ve forgotten it.
“They were decentish people, those French officers and their wives. A
little stiff always, never expatriated, never quite at ease in their
African inn, but not half so likely to go _fantee_ as the romantic
Briton. And once a fortnight the little boats from Bordeaux would come
in, bringing more of them. I rather liked them; but, even so, there
wasn’t any particular reason for my staying so long in Dakar. I hung on
like an alarm that has been set. I couldn’t go off--or on--until the
moment I was set for. I don’t suppose the alarm-clock knows until the
vibration begins within it. Something kept me there in that dull,
glaring, little official town, with its dry dock and torpedo basin,
which, of course, they had managed to endow with the flavor of
provincial France. They do that everywhere--you’ll have noticed?
“I used to go up sometimes in the comparative cool of the evening to
dine with the Fathers. It isn’t that I hold with them much--Rome was
introduced to me in my childhood as the Scarlet Woman--but all
travellers have the same tale to tell. They are incomparable
missionaries. And it stands to reason that they can get on better with
savages than the rest of you. You can meet magic only with magic. It was
they who introduced me to Paramore.”
“Oh, it’s Paramore!” I exclaimed. “Heaven, forgive you, Hoyting, you are
always in at the death. How do you manage it? But fancy being in at
Paramore’s! By the way, I suppose you know that no one knows anything
except that he’s dead.”
“Umph! Well, I do,” returned Hoyting. “That’s what I was set for--like
the clock: to turn up at the Mission House just when he was brought in
there with fever. I don’t go hunting for things like that, you
understand. I’d as soon have thought of staying on for Madame Pothier’s
_beaux yeux_.”
“I didn’t know you knew whether eyes were fine or not.”
“I suppose I don’t. But I can guess. There are always other people to
tell you. Anyhow, her fine eyes were all for _le bon Dieu_ and Pothier.
She was a good sort--married out of a little provincial convent-school
to a man twice her age, and taking ship within a month for Sénégal. She
loved him--for his scars, probably, Desdemona-fashion. Have you ever
noticed that a woman often likes a man better for a crooked white seam
across his face that spoils all the modelling? Naïve notions women have
about war! They tiptoe round the carnage, making eyes at the slayers.
Oh, in imagination, of course. And if they once appreciate how they
really feel about it, they begin to gabble about disarmament.”
Hoyting fingered the dingy little packet that he had taken out of his
pocket and laid on my table. He looked far away out of the window for a
moment, narrowing his eyes as if trying to focus them on another
hemisphere.
“So he was taken to the Pothiers’.”
“You’re leaving out a lot,” I interrupted. “Why ‘so,’ and why to the
Pothiers? You said to the Mission.”
“Oh”--His brows knitted. He didn’t like filling up his own gaps. The
things Hoyting takes it for granted one will know about his exotic
context! “The Mission was full of patients--an epidemic had been running
through the converts, and it was up to them to prove that the sacrament
of baptism wasn’t some deadly process of inoculation. As I say, it’s all
magic, white or black. Poor Paramore wasn’t a convert--he was by way of
being an agnostic, I imagine--and the Fathers weren’t, in a sense,
responsible for him. Yet one must do them the justice to say that
they’d never have sent him away if they hadn’t had a better place to
send him to. The Mission was no place at the moment for a man with
fever--sweating infection as it was, and full of frightened patients who
were hiding _gri-gris_ under their armpits and looking more than askance
at the crucifixes over the doors. The Pothiers had known Paramore two
years before, when he had stopped in Dakar on his way into the interior.
They took him in quite naturally and simply. Paramore had noticed her
fine eyes, I believe--oh, in all honor and loyalty. There were lots of
ways in which he wasn’t a rotter. He was merely the finest liar in the
world--and a bit of a Puritan to boot.
“Is there any combination life hasn’t exhausted, I wonder?” Hoyting
walked to the window, his hands in his pockets, looking down at the
eternal race of the taxicabs below. “Think of what may be going by in
any one of those taxis. And Paramore _was_ a bit of a Puritan, for all
his years of fake anthropology.”
His face was heavily weary as presently he turned it to me.
“I was involved in Paramore’s case. I’ve been to the bottom of this
thing, I tell you. Paramore overflowed--emptied himself like a well; and
at the end there was absolutely nothing left in his mind; it was void,
up to the black brim. Then he died--quite vacuous. He had simply poured
out his inner life around me. I was left alone in Dakar, swimming in the
infernal pool of Paramore’s cerebrations. You can’t, on the banks of the
Sénégal, refer a man to his solicitors. If Paramore had been a Catholic,
I could have turned his case over to the Bishop. But bishops had nothing
to do with Paramore. And that’s where you come in.”
“Oh, I come in, do I?” I asked a little fearfully. No one wants to come
in where Hoyting leaves off.
“Of course. Why else did I make an appointment with you? You’ll take
this packet when you leave. You don’t suppose I’m going to London!”
“I didn’t know Paramore.”
“No; but I did. And when I’ve told you, you’ll see. I don’t take a trip
like this for nothing. I hate the very smell of the asphalt.”
“Go on.” It’s what one always says to Hoyting.
“I can’t tell it coherently--though I can tell it, I suppose, more
coherently than he did. In the first place, what do you know about him?”
The question sent a flood of dingy reminiscence welling slowly and
muddily up through my consciousness. I thought for a moment. What, after
all, was there to tell about Paramore except that he had lied, and that
in the end he had been discredited as lavishly as for a time he had been
believed? For any one else I might have made a sprightly little story
out of the elliptical narrative of the newspapers; but no one that I
know of has ever tried to be a _raconteur_ for Hoyting. He has use only
for the raw material; art disgusts him. I gave him as rapid a _précis_
as I could, suppressing all instinct to embroider it.
When I had finished: “He’s completely discredited, then?”
I waved my hands. “My dear Hoyting, no one would take Paramore’s word
about the manners and customs of his own household.”
“It’s a pity,” said Hoyting simply. “It makes it harder for you.”
“I’ve nothing to do with Paramore. If there’s one thing that interests
me less than his disaster, it’s his rehabilitation.” I didn’t mean to be
flippant, but Hoyting’s ominousness invited it.
“Oh, rehabilitation--no; I dare say, between us, we couldn’t manage
that. I merely want to get the truth off my hands.”
Hoyting lighted another cigarette. The atmosphere of my room was already
densely blue, and I opened the window. His hand shot up. “Shut that,
please. I can’t be interrupted by all those savage noises. God! for a
breath of sea air!”
I sat down and faced him. After all, the man has never lived who could
stage-manage Hoyting.
“Did you ever meet the Australian?” he asked.
“Whitaker? No.”
“A pretty bad lot, I gather.”
“Do you mean that he lied?”
“Oh, no. From what Paramore said, I should think that was just the one
thing he didn’t do.”
Hoyting dropped his chin on his breast and narrowed his eyes. Then he
shook his head very slowly. “At my time of life it’s silly to be always
saying how strange things are, and how clever life is, and all that
literary nonsense; but, on my word, if ever a scene was arranged to make
a man a protagonist in spite of himself, this was it. Every element in
that Dakar situation was contrived to bring Paramore out. He had fever
and the prescience of death--which is often mistaken, but works just as
well notwithstanding; he had performed his extraordinary task; he was in
love with Madame Pothier. The cup was spilling over, and I was there to
wipe up the overflow.”
Hoyting was silent for a moment. Then he spoke irritably.
“I don’t know where to begin. There isn’t any beginning to this story.
It hasn’t any climax--or else it’s all climax. It’s just a mess. Well, I
shall have to begin, I suppose, if Paramore didn’t. Perhaps the first
thing was his sitting up in bed one morning and peering out at me
through his mosquito-netting. It gave him a queer, caged look. His voice
went with it--that cracked and throaty voice they have, you know. ‘Do
you know Whitaker?’ he asked.
“‘No, indeed,’ I said. ‘You’d better lie down.’
“If you could have seen him then, you’d have felt, as I did, that he’d
better not talk; that he wouldn’t say anything one wanted to hear.
“‘It was Whitaker that finished me.’ Still he peered out at me.
“‘You’re not finished.’ I remember lying quite peevishly about it. He so
obviously _was_ finished.
“‘Yes, I am. And Whitaker did it. Oh, I mean I really did it.’
“I give you my word that he was startling, with that unnatural voice,
that cunning look in his eyes the sick often get, and those little white
cross-bars pressed against his face.
“‘Lie down,’ I said again. ‘What did Whitaker do?’
“He shook his head a little, and the netting moved on his face. It was
horrid.
“‘He told them I couldn’t have done the stuff I’d brought back.’
“‘Did he know?’
“‘He didn’t know anything about folk-lore, but he did know where I’d
been.’
“He spoke so impersonally that it led me on to ask questions. After all,
I had told Madame Pothier I would stay with him through the morning,
and I had to make the time go somehow for both of us. It was remittent
fever without the chills, and there were fairish mornings at first. The
afternoons and nights, when the malady rose like a wave and broke
horribly after midnight--oh, those were bad. Madame Pothier and the
regimental doctor took care of those. It looked fairly hopeful when he
arrived, but finally all the worst symptoms came out, and before the end
it was very bad. It was one of those cases that might, at the last, be
yellow fever and just technically isn’t. Poor Paramore! Did I say that
his face looked as old as all time under that shock of sun-bleached
hair? It did.
“That questioning was the first of it. It fixed the name of Whitaker in
my mind. I thought I’d find out something about him. You never can tell
what will comfort a man in that state. But the Pothiers had never heard
of him, or the Fathers at the Mission. I only mention those first
remarks of Paramore’s to show you how I came into it. I had never heard
of Paramore himself until that time in Dakar. I never read newspapers.
All those good people said Paramore was a ‘grand savant,’ but they
seemed a little vague, themselves. The only person who wasn’t vague was
a lean, old, parchment-colored Father who was waiting for the next boat
to take him home. He had been twenty years in the interior, and he was
worn out--all except his voice, which was startlingly deep. He said no
one could afford to study fetich but a priest. Père Bernard had no
respect for anthropologists--thought they took a collector’s interest in
preserving various primeval forms of sin, I suppose. I didn’t care for
his mediæval manners, and I went back to Paramore with more sympathy.
What a world! I always wondered if Paramore had some time, somewhere at
the back of beyond, got him on the raw. Well, we shall never know. And
yet I dare say the reverend old gentleman is here in Paris at this very
moment. What a world! Nothing in it, according to Père Bernard, that
isn’t magic--either white or black.
“I can’t tell you by what steps Paramore led me to his tragedy. I don’t
remember those days separately at all. They went in jagged ups and
downs--times when he talked, times when he was dumb, times when he
might be said to rave. Then, too, he brought things out in no order at
all. It was as if he lay in a world beyond perspective and expected you
to sit outside of Space and Time, too, and see it all whole, as he did.
That was rather unpleasant--he had so the manner of being dead and
seeing his life from so far off that one thing in it was as near and as
real as another. There was absolutely no selection. It was only by
recurrence of certain things that you got any stress. And out of it all
I managed to get the three main facts: the Royal Anthropological
Institute, Whitaker, and the soul of Paramore. Madame Pothier was a
close fourth, but she was only an accessory after the fact. That I
swear. You believe it?”
I jerked my head up. “Good Heavens, Hoyting, how do I know? You haven’t
told me anything yet.”
He rubbed his hands over his brows and frowned with closed eyes. “No; I
beg your pardon. But, as I say, I see the whole thing. It’s hard to
tell. It never was told to me. And I didn’t want you to think it was one
of those silly tales of a man’s turning hero because he’s in love with a
woman. If Paramore had asked me to tell Madame Pothier the story I’m
telling you, I’d have turned on my heel and left him, if he’d been at
the death gasp. I swear I would.”
Hoyting lighted another cigarette--the world’s supply must be
inexhaustible!--and seemed to brace his huge body for concentrated
effort.
“Well, here it is. Paramore had one passion in life--one
double-distilled, quintessentially pure passion--and that passion was
anthropology. There never was a stiffer, straighter, more Puritanical
devotion to an idea than his. Get that into your head first, if you want
to understand.”
I could be forgiven, it strikes me, for being sceptical, in the light of
that neat _précis_ I had compiled from the newspapers. “Oh, come,
Hoyting,” I said, “science doesn’t recruit from liars--not even when
they’ve got Paramore’s deuced cheek. You are upset.”
One look at Hoyting’s gigantic lassitude put me in the wrong. It would
take more than Paramore to upset Hoyting. He was perfectly firm, though
very much bored. Imagine neurasthenia and Hoyting bunking together! One
can’t. Hoyting smiled.
“No, it’s not nerves. Only you people who want everything all of a
piece--you irritate me. The point about Paramore is that he combined
contradictions. He was magnificently human. And as I am in possession of
facts, I ask you to suspend your silly judgment until I’ve done. If you
know anything about me, you know that I don’t go in for theories.”
I was silent.
“It was the only thing he cared about, I tell you. Nature implants
something in every man that kills him in the end. Paramore wanted
recognition from a very small, almost undiscernible, group of people
whom neither you nor I nor any one else gives a damn for--a few old
gentlemen in frock coats and gold eye-glasses who raise their poor, thin
old eyebrows over the sins of Paris, but feel a tremulous pleasure in
the nastiness of Melanesia. Why did he? Just because he believed they
are a sacred sect. He honestly believed that anthropology was important.
He thought it was big and real and vital and solemn. He had supreme
respect for facts. He put every penny he had or ever hoped to have into
going out to acquire them in the bush. The bush isn’t nice. The climate
distressed him, the natives shocked him, the solitudes terrified him.
Why did he go? Because he held, quite austerely, the scientific attitude
towards data, evidence, material. Those old gentlemen needed more facts
to feed their theories with, and Paramore was the boy to get them. When
there’s neither health nor wealth nor pleasure to be got from doing a
thing, a man doesn’t do it except for an idea.”
“Fame?” I suggested.
“Fame? Well, even if Paramore had told the truth, he wouldn’t have had
any fame that you’d notice. It was just a pathetic belief in the
sanctity of those few old gentlemen who potter round among unclean
visions of primitive man. They can’t, in the nature of the case, be very
numerous. If you want fame, you go for the crowd. He could have done a
little fancy exploring if he’d wanted fame. No! Paramore had the
superstition.”
“What really happened in Australia?”
“The only interesting thing happened inside Paramore. He decided to
lie.”
“He must have been a bit of a coward. If he wanted so desperately to
collect those filthy facts, why didn’t he collect them?”
“Bad luck--nothing else. He went as far as he could. But he was no
seasoned traveller, you know. He just came to grief, as any man might,
there in the wilderness. The stars in their courses--and so forth. He
didn’t get so far west as he had meant to. Men went back on him, maps
turned out incorrect, supplies failed awkwardly, everything happened
that can happen. Then his interpreter died--his one absolutely
trustworthy man--and the whole game was up. He lost his head; he
believed his eyes; he believed lying natives. They made game of him, I
dare say, in some grim, neolithic way. They said anything and everything
about marriage customs--quite different things from group to group. He
had bad luck with his own men--half a dozen of them died of dysentery or
something--and he had to recruit on the spot. Why on earth should they
tell him the truth? It was more fun not to. And, of course, now and then
he pushed into some corner where the only use they had for him was to
eat him. From those places he had to withdraw speedily. It’s not an
anthropologist’s business to get killed unless he can be sure of
getting his note-books home. He’s more like a spy, apparently, than a
soldier.
“After eight or ten beastly months, despair was reeking round him like a
mist. I think he said that, himself. His mind tried to peer out through
it. He got nothing but a jumble of reports from those aborigines. Time
after time they’d promise to let him in on some rite, and then their
faces would be shamelessly blank when he kept his appointment. They said
nothing that wasn’t carefully contradicted. Certain things he did get
hold of, of course. Paramore swore to me that a good bit of his book was
true as truth--but not enough to prove anything, to found theories on.
About three of the note-books were genuine, but they made nothing
coherent, he said. He put everything down, always intending to check and
sift later.”
I may have looked a little bored, for Hoyting suddenly interrupted his
narrative. “I’m telling you all this,” he said, “because it’s essential
that you should know everything you can know about it. The thing’s going
to be in your hands, and the more information you have the better. I’m
not dragging you through this biography because I think it’s beautiful.
I can see you loathe it all. Well ... if only you stay-at-home people
would realize how much luck counts! You don’t dream of the mad dance of
incalculable forces. What you really hate Paramore for is his having
luck against him.”
“No,” I protested stiffly; “for lying.”
“If he had had luck, he wouldn’t have lied. He would have been prettier
if he had been incapable of lying; but if he hadn’t needed to lie, you
never would have known that he wasn’t as pretty as any one else. You’re
quite right, of course. I’m not asking you to love Paramore, but I
advise you to understand him as well as you can. You’ll find the whole
business easier.”
“Say what you have made up your mind to say.” I couldn’t, at the moment,
go further than that.
Hoyting swung back, as if there had been no interruption, as if I had
been pleading with him not to stop.
“One day, when the despair was thickest, he had an idea. He may have
been a little off his head, you know.... He wouldn’t confess his
failure at all. He would let his imagination play over those note-books;
he would supply from his generous brain everything that was needed. A
good deal of it was new country, quite aboriginal and nasty, and his
learning was sufficient to warn him off ground that had been
authentically covered. It was also sufficient to keep him magnificently
plausible. He would take his meagre gleanings to some secluded spot, and
he would return to England with the completed sheaf. He would squeeze
the last drop of significance out of every detail he had learned; and if
he were put to it, he would invent. ‘No, not invent, exactly,’ he
corrected himself when he told me. ‘I would draw conclusions and
parallels; I would state probabilities as facts; and I would put in
some--a very few--of the things I suspected but had no proof of. And
then I would contradict a few things.’
“Those were his words, describing that ancient intention of his. ‘My pen
got away with me,’ he confessed; ‘and the lust of making a beautiful
book. There were things that occurred to me--I put them in. Any one who
knows any folk-lore can make up customs with his eyes shut. After a
little, you get to feel that if the beastly creatures didn’t do it that
way they must be awful fools. And then you get to believe that they did.
But I marked everything on the margin of my own manuscript as I wrote
it, true or not true, inferred or just invented. That was later--much
later--at Whitaker’s place.’
“I give you some of his words that I remember, you see. I don’t remember
much. But that was the gist of his great confession. He had the
idea--his one way to snap his fingers at luck. Until he got into the
work, he didn’t know how his idea would dominate him. He first had the
notion of putting just enough alloy into his book to give it body. In
the end his idea rode him--and damned him. I’m leaving out a lot, but
you can work that out for yourself--how his inspiration would have come,
and what would have happened.”
“But what about his scientific passion? That has nothing to do with the
‘lust of making a beautiful book’--quite the contrary.”
“Wait till I’ve finished. Now comes Eve. _Place aux dames!_ ...
“Before he had struck out into the fatal west for himself, he had
stopped with a planter. The planter’s name, of course, was Whitaker.
There was a man who had isolated himself, and worked like a navvy, and
made good. His history, I suppose, was much like all other local
histories. His place, on one of the rivers that flow into Lake Eyre, was
a kind of outpost. He was very glad to let Paramore sit on his verandah
and talk to him in the evenings. Paramore must have been there six weeks
before he finally started on his expedition--if you can call an
unsuccessful, hand-made thing that leaked at every pore an expedition.
The daughter, Joan Whitaker, was back from school in Melbourne. There
was a fiancé of sorts about the place. I don’t remember much about him,
least of all his name. He was approved by Whitaker. Paramore seems not
to have noticed the girl--rather deliberately not to have noticed her,
she being another man’s property. So Whitaker had no objection to
prolonging Paramore’s stay. Paramore talked, I feel convinced, as well
as he wrote. I saw of him only dregs and delirium, but I made that out.
The love affair went on all over the plantation, while Whitaker and
Paramore sat on the verandah and constituted society. They got on well
enough, apparently. Paramore certainly liked Joan Whitaker, but he kept
out of the way of the fortunate affair. Remember that; there’s no reason
to doubt his word. It all came out, bit by bit, in troubled
references--mixed up with his symptoms and medicines, and the ebb and
flow of the fever.
“But out in the bush, later, the memory of her had grown upon him; I
suppose, simply because, though so far away, she was the nearest
feminine thing. At the heart of all that despair over the frustrated
research, was an irrelevant sentimental regret that he shouldn’t be able
to make love to her if he ever saw her again. In her flittings about,
she had pricked his imagination once or twice--this bright creature that
flitted at another man’s behest. You can see how it might be; and
Paramore up to that time had been heart-whole. Moreover, his exploration
was shocking and disgusting to him, as I’ve said--it was aimless
nastiness without even the grace of bolstering up a theory. He didn’t
love the work for itself, remember; only for its results and what he
believed its sacred importance. He hated the technique of it. And Joan
Whitaker was as different as a Melbourne schooling, and a fair
complexion, and the awkwardness of innocence, could make her. She was
all the things those unsatisfactory aborigines weren’t. I don’t think it
went deeper than that. She merely served the moment. Any other girl
would have done as well. Or, at least, that’s my notion.
“Well--you can see the rest from here. He went back with his big, insane
idea, leaving despair farther behind him at every step. He struck
straight back again to Whitaker’s place, and after nuisances and delays
and impossible absurd misadventures, he got there. All the time, he
carried his idea carefully intact, like a cup filled with precious
liquid. He was most anxious to get to some place where he could sit down
with pens and ink. He didn’t doubt Whitaker would take him in.
Everything was to be completed before he sailed for England. The story
would have been very different, I’m inclined to think, and Paramore
might have been living to this day if the fiancé hadn’t turned out a bad
lot and been shipped--or if Paramore himself hadn’t been a bit of a
Puritan.
“He found Whitaker very much surprised to see him back so long before
the date he had set, but only too glad to have him stay; and he also
found the girl, no longer flitting about, but brooding on the bough. The
rest was inevitable....
“Paramore got to work at once--making love to Joan Whitaker in the
intervals, almost from the beginning. Then--mark the nature of the
man--he found that the two things he was doing were incompatible.
There’s no telling whether Joan Whitaker would have objected to his
idea, but he seems to have been sure that she would if she knew. His
idea rode him--the idea of getting the better of his bad luck. He didn’t
want to cheat his fellow scientists, who had done him no harm, but he
did want to cheat his mean destiny. He personified it like an enemy, I
fancy. It must have been an obsession with him. Day by day, he saw
better what the book--his revenge--was becoming; and in the end there
was no mistaking it for a monstrous, magnificent lie, out of all
proportion to what he had first intended. Some men might have managed
even so--the men who keep life in water-tight compartments. Not
Paramore. He didn’t see his way to offering Joan Whitaker a liar for a
husband. It apparently never occurred to him to put the case before her.
There are very few cases you can put to a girl of eighteen. And, as I’ve
said, his feeling for her was all reverence and illusion and reversion
to type. Any niceish girl would have done the trick for him; and any man
would have looked eligible to her smarting conceit. But it was no
marriage of true minds--just an affair of circumstance and of innocent
senses, riotously collaborating. Madame Pothier--a finished
creature--would have been a very different matter. But he had never seen
her then....
“Oh, well; you see how it went. He was virtually staking everything on
that book, which was virtually writing itself, ‘like a damned
planchette,’ he told me. But he couldn’t let her stake anything on it;
he couldn’t even ask her to. Moreover, it was one of those inconvenient
situations where no explanation except the right one is of the slightest
use. So he packed up his manuscript and left for some address, that he
didn’t give, in New South Wales.”
“Like that?” I asked. The sudden turns of the thing were beginning to
interest me, in spite of my Pharisaism.
“Oh, there were alarums and excursions, of course. But I had to guess
them myself. Paramore’s mind had other things to dwell on. You can see
it all, though: the girl, who had thought he was drifting towards a
proposal; the man, Whitaker, who wanted his daughter settled and happy,
and thought Paramore would do--oh, a lot of primitive instincts that we
don’t recognize until they’re baffled; Paramore behaving as well as he
knew how, granted his obsession; and they choosing to consider him a
blackguard. Nothing violent happened, apparently, but you can understand
the zest with which Whitaker probably spoke in London. There was black
hate in his truth-telling. I fancy what Paramore had done wouldn’t in
the least have shocked Whitaker if it had been done by his son-in-law.
He didn’t mention the girl in that famous interview, and Paramore never
knew what had become of her. I don’t think he cared. He never saw
Whitaker again.”
Hoyting rose and walked to the window. The gray eyes looked curiously
down on the rue de Rivoli, as if, for charity, he had taken a box at a
pageant that bored him.
“This isn’t in my line, you know,” he said finally, turning back--“any
of it. Paramore reeked of civilization--Great Russell Street, if you
like. Hang civilization! Yet he went down with fever like a sick Kruboy.
Well, I must get on with this. I wouldn’t stop in Paris another night
for anything you could offer me.”
He sat down, his big frame shaking the little gilded armchair. But he
seemed loath to begin. His gray eyes were closed.
“How did he get to Dakar?”
Hoyting’s eyes were still closed as he answered. “That was Paramore
trying to wash himself white again. He was discredited, deservedly. He
had lied, deliberately and rather long-windedly. No loophole anywhere
for excuse. Paramore himself was the last man to find any excuse for it.
He never carried a devil’s advocate about with him. Doubtless, at home,
his own conscience had returned to him, in place of the changeling
conscience that had dwelt with him in the wilderness. He knew his
reputation was dead and buried with a stake through its heart. But he
set himself to atone. Some men, feeling as he did, would have shaved
their heads and put on a hair shirt. Not Paramore--though he would have
saved me a lot of nuisance if he had. No; he wanted to retrieve himself
in kind, as you might say. He would spend his life and his few crumbling
bits of fortune in _doing_ the thing he had pretended to do. He
would go to an utterly new field and stay till he’d amassed a
treasure--priceless, authentic facts, each an unflawed pearl. That’s why
he went to the Upper Niger--and here is his treasure.”
Hoyting opened his eyes suddenly, bent forward, and tossed the packet
across to me.
“There you have it all. He went, he did the incredible thing, and then,
quite properly, he died. The rest--the rest is mere drama.” He sat back.
I put the packet down. “Do you mean that these are his documents, and
that you believe in them? Have you read them?”
“Have I read them? Do I look as if I would read an anthropologist’s
note-books? Of course, I can see the humor of throwing over
Christianity, lock, stock, and barrel, only to spend your life studying
totemism--and on top of that, calling it a ‘career.’ If you think the
absurdity of it is lost on me, you’re quite mistaken. But I would be
willing to take my oath before the Last Tribunal that there isn’t a
false word in that whole pile. Paramore did it--the more honor to him.
When it comes to expecting any one else to believe it--I’m not such a
fool. But I should think my word might suffice for you.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
Hoyting lighted another cigarette, folded his arms on the table, and
looked at me. “I knew everything there was to know about Paramore before
he died,” he affirmed. “I didn’t in the least want to know any of it,
but it was inevitable. He had no control over his mental
muscles--complete paralysis of the reticent nerve, you might say. I
know, I tell you. If you don’t choose to believe it--you’ll have doubted
my word, that’s all. I have all the evidence there is; and why should I
lie about it?”
“Oh, I believe it--but it’s extraordinary.”
“Should I be here if it weren’t extraordinary? It’s preposterous. But
there it is.”
“And the rest, you said, was drama?”
Hoyting looked out. “Let’s go to a café,” he said; “I want a rest.”
I assented. There is something in the transitoriness of a café crowd
that quiets Hoyting. No one can be expected to stay overnight in a café.
He likes the restlessness, the ridiculous suggestion that every one else
may be as foot-loose as he. Besides, Hoyting is always restive under the
strain of a story; he chafes at the bounds and limits of any rounded
episode. He needs to draw breath and come back to it, as it were, from
very far. So we ordered things; sitting on the very edge of the
boulevard, we sipped and watched for an hour. In the end I saw signs of
his return to the matter in hand.
“Beauty--” he began suddenly, pushing his glass aside, “it’s something I
never see. But now and then a man or a woman delights me curiously.
Madame Pothier was like that. She showed you what civilization of the
older sort can do when it likes. And Paramore saw it, too. He was clean
gone on her. He would have told her everything if he had had any right
to. I said it wasn’t a silly tale of woman’s ennobling influence, didn’t
I? No more it was. Yet he saw her as soon as he reached Africa, and I am
sure he carried her image into the interior with him--as he once did
Joan Whitaker’s, only with an immense difference, after all. This time
he brought back truth instead of lies. So at least it couldn’t have been
a bad image to live with.
“I got all this that I’ve been telling you, in bits and snatches, while
I sat with him. The fever didn’t seem so bad at first--the doctor
thought we could pull him through. You absolutely never know. I never
thought he would pull through. Those very first questions of his, when
he sat peering out at me through the mosquito-netting of his bed, didn’t
seem to come from a man who had life before him. And when I had got
those early details out of him, I somehow felt sure he’d go. I’m no
pessimist; but I didn’t see life giving him a second chance. It was too
much to hope that life would let him make good after all. And yet--he so
nearly did. Damn fever!...
“Madame Pothier did everything she could. She was a good sort. I’ve
always wondered, as much as it is permitted to wonder, whether she felt
anything for Paramore. If she did, I am sure that she never knew it.
There are women like that, you know. I don’t mean the women who gaze out
of cold, sexless depths at the fires burning above, and wonder
pruriently why the fires burn. She wasn’t that kind. I mean the women
who, when they become wives, remain women only for their husbands. I
don’t believe it would ever have occurred to her that any man save
Marcel Pothier could look upon her with romantic interest. I don’t
pretend to understand the phenomenon, but I know that it exists. A woman
like that simply assumes that she is no longer a wandering lure
constantly crossing the path of the male. She thinks all men’s eyes are
veiled because hers are. A very pretty, pathetic ostrich trick.
Sometimes it doesn’t work, but astonishingly often it does. With
Paramore it did. All I mean is that she hadn’t dreamed Paramore
worshipped her. She remembered him as a friend they had made two years
before, and of course he was to come to them out of that pitiful Mission
Hospital. No one in Dakar knew anything about Paramore’s fiasco. He
wasn’t precisely famous, you see. Dakar was perfectly provincial. And
Paramore was hoping, I dare say, that he could stave off the tale of his
lie until he could lay before her the news of his atonement as well. The
hardest thing he had to bear, probably, was dying and leaving his story
to the telling of chance tongues, not knowing in what form it would
eventually come to her. That, I am convinced, is why he told me so
much--let his parched lips articulate those memories for me. But not
once did he break down and ask me to tell her. Oh, I’ve good reason for
respecting Paramore--a second-rate respect it must always be, I dare
say, granted that extraordinary crumpling-up in Australia. But he never
crumpled up again.
“For a day or two he hung in the balance. Then, after one exceedingly
bad night, which left Madame Pothier blue under her fine eyes and white
round her carved lips, he had his last coherent hours on earth....
“I shall never forget that morning. Pothier was away on duty. There were
only the doctor, Madame Pothier, and I, and one or two frightened
servants who wouldn’t come near. They thought it was yellow fever. Old
Séraphine, Madame Pothier’s Auvergnat maid, hovered round in the
corridors with a rosary. You could hear the click and shake of it in the
still intervals. Once a ‘Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce,’ cut
across a delirious whispered oath. The pitiful part of it was that there
was nothing to do. We just had to lift him through the agony and
weakness as best we could until the coma should set in. There is nothing
romantic about coast fever. It attacks you in the most sordid
ways--deprives you first of dignity and then of life. Yet poor
Paramore’s death-bed had a kind of nobility; perhaps because Madame
Pothier was there. She was dressed in white and looked as wan and
distant and compassionate as a nun. The straight black masses of her
hair, arranged in an odd, angular way, looked like some kind of
conventual cap. Paramore’s eyes followed her about....
“It was that morning he gave me the packet--told me where it was, made
me get it out and take formal possession of it before him. Once, when
the demon was leaving him a little quiet, he lifted his right hand. ‘I
swear by--by all I hold sacred’ (his eyes were fixed on her, though he
was speaking to me) ‘that I have told nothing there that is not true.
All secondhand reports are in a note-book by themselves. It is labelled.
Tell Beckwith especially about the Sabbath. Beckwith ought to follow it
up. I sat in the hut by the sorcerer in his trance and waited for his
spirit to come back. When he waked, he said he had delivered my message.
He had delivered it. Three days later, the man I had sent for came
running into the village. The sorcerer had told him, as he said he
would, on the way to the Sabbath. I depose solemnly that the man came.
His village was three days away. He had heard a voice at his door the
night of the Sabbath--a voice that gave my message, that said it was in
haste and could not stay. Very curious. Beckwith ought to know. It’s all
there; but tell him. Of course, I never could get anything out of the
sorcerer about the Sabbath. But Beckwith might put it in a foot-note, if
they won’t print _me_.’ Then the sordid agony again.... Madame Pothier
and the doctor didn’t understand English, by the way, and of course
didn’t, in any case, understand the situation. They hadn’t listened to
what I had listened to, all those earlier days. So when the doctor told
me fussily that Paramore oughtn’t to talk and that death was only a few
hours off, I paid no attention. Why shouldn’t he talk if death was so
near? The only thing I could do for Paramore was to let him talk when
he had strength. I sat tight and listened.”
Hoyting stopped. The lights winked out along the boulevard. Night had
fallen with capricious suddenness. I ordered more drinks quietly.
Hoyting was breathing hard; tired out, and, as I thought, very weary of
it all, longing to slip the leash and be off. The air was cool and soft,
and the crowd was thinning a little. People were dining and making ready
to “go on.” I couldn’t have stirred, but that worn packet suddenly felt
very heavy in my pocket.
Hoyting began sipping vermouth again. Finally he spoke. “He didn’t say a
great deal more. The end was too near. But he spoke very clearly when he
did speak; and whenever his eyes were open, they were fixed on Madame
Pothier. Towards the last he put out his hand to me. I was holding the
note-books--I shouldn’t have dared put them down so long as he was
conscious. ‘There is only one woman in the world,’ he said, ‘and she
belongs to Pothier. Look at her.’ I didn’t look at her, and he went on:
‘There may be other women alive, but I can’t believe it. Do you believe
it?’
“He wasn’t wandering, you know. His mind had merely stripped his
situation to its essentials; he was quite alone with the only facts that
counted. He had summed life up, and didn’t have to keep truce any longer
with mortal perspectives. He drew the real things round him like a
cloak.... Absurd to talk of inconsequence; there was no inconsequence.
“I bent over him. ‘I’m not blind, Paramore.’
“‘No, but I am--blessedly blind.... And some day she’ll hate me, you
think?’
“His lips were straining to ask me to see to it that she didn’t, but he
controlled them. That--as much as anything--is why I’m here with you
now. It was more than decent of him; it was fine. But, by the same token
that he couldn’t ask, I couldn’t promise--though I saw that another
_crise_ was near and the doctor was crossing over to the bed.
“‘I don’t believe she ever will,’ I said. ‘There’s so much she’ll never
know.’
“I was thinking of his forlorn and beautiful passion for her, which she
would have hated him for, because she would always have been afraid it
was somehow her fault. Not quite fair when you work it out, but those
women are like that. I saw in a flash, though--he took his eyes off her
and looked at me, just once--that he thought I meant his miserable,
discredited past. Then the doctor thrust me aside. The matter was never
explained between us.
“There were only one or two more speeches of Paramore’s to record. The
monosyllables wrung out of his weakness didn’t count--except, immensely,
for pity. Very likely you know what the fatal fever symptoms are--ugly
beyond compare. I won’t go into that. We were all pretty nearly done by
the time the blessed coma settled over him. He opened his eyes just once
more and fixed them on Madame Pothier, who stood at the foot of the bed.
All his strength was in his poor eyes: his body was a corpse already. It
was to me he spoke, but he looked at her until the lids fell. ‘Damn
Whitaker! He’s a worm; but not such a worm as I.’
“A strange little blur came over his eyes. I turned my head for one
instant. Madame Pothier, weeping, was holding up a crucifix. ‘I don’t
believe God knows,’ he said. The words came very slowly from far down in
his throat. We heard the voice just once more. ‘Madame!’ Then the eyes
shut, and the scheduled number of hours followed, during which he was
completely unconscious, until he died officially.”
Hoyting smoked quietly for a moment. Then he spoke hurriedly, as if he
had to complete a report. “We buried him out there. The Pothiers were
perfect. She was worn out by the strain of the illness and the nursing,
but not more than any one would have been after such an experience. To
the last I searched her face to see if she knew. It interested me
curiously. I gave her a dozen chances to question me about Paramore. She
behaved throughout as one who had no suspicion. She was polite about the
note-books, and asked if they were to be edited, but she evidently
didn’t in the least understand what he’d been up to. He was a ‘grand
savant,’ she was sure, though Père Bernard thought, perhaps, his powers
could have been more fortunately employed. Of course, _ce pauvre
monsieur_ was not religious, which must be a great regret to his
Catholic friends. She believed firmly, however, that the Divine Mercy
was infinite and that there were more ways than one of making a good
death. They were taking the liberty of having some masses said for his
soul. Everything was said with the most perfect feeling, the utmost
sincerity and gravity. What more _could_ a blind woman have said? I
haven’t a shadow of doubt that, if ever the whole story were forced upon
Thérèse Pothier, she would summon her intelligence gallantly and
understand it all. Only, what on the face of it was there for her to
understand?... I rather wish she were dead.”
“You wish--” I didn’t follow him.
“I’d like to be sure that, since she’ll never know the whole truth,
she’ll never know more than she knew in Dakar. I was sorry for Paramore.
He was tempted, and he fell, and he struggled up again and damned
temptation to its face. Not a hero, oh, no. But there is something
exhilarating in seeing the elements of heroism assemble in a man who is
supposed to be a putty of cowardice.”
It was late, and, though Hoyting had not yet informed me of what he
intended me to do with the packet, I suggested dining. We made our way
to a very secluded and unfashionable restaurant, and ate, surrounded by
French commercial types. Over our liqueurs, I asked him why he had
given me the note-books.
“Why did you give me this stuff?”
Hoyting looked surprised. “I can’t do anything with it. I don’t know
that sort of person. Can’t you look up the man Beckwith? I never heard
of him, but he ought to be easy to find. I could tell all this to you,
but I couldn’t go over to London and tell it to a court of inquiry. I
don’t hold you responsible in any way, of course, but something ought to
be done. I’m taking the night express to Genoa.”
“If you imagine I’m going to drop down from the blue on Sir James
Beckwith--” I began.
Hoyting shrugged his shoulders. “You at least know who he is,
apparently. That in itself is a sign.”
“But no one will read the tragic stuff,” I cried. “And yet you place
Paramore’s reputation in my hands. You _do_ make me responsible.”
Hoyting looked at me across the table, smiling faintly and shaking his
head.
“Didn’t I tell you that I don’t believe we can rehabilitate him? But we
owe it to him to put his papers in the right hands. Beckwith couldn’t
refuse to take them, at least; and then our duty would be done.”
I took the “our” without flinching. The tale of Paramore had weighed on
me. “I’ll do it,” I said at last--“but never again, Hoyting.”
“Have I ever made such a request before?” he interrupted sharply.
“No, never.”
“Then, in God’s name, take it!” With his strong hand he made a gesture
as if to sweep it all away from him. The liqueur glasses fell with a
broken tinkle to the floor. Hoyting bit his lip. “I wouldn’t have the
things back in my fingers again for anything under heaven. Good-bye.”
I started to my feet, but he had reached the door. He had the luck to
step into a taxi the next instant with an indescribable farewell
gesture.
It was part of Paramore’s persistent bad luck--the devil that pursued
him was not put off by change of scene--that Sir James Beckwith died
before I could make an appointment with him. From all I have heard of
him, he certainly was the man to go to. Paramore’s note-books were
coldly accepted in the quarters to which I finally took them; and I
have always suspected that if my mien had been less desperate, they
would have been politely handed back to me. No faintest echo of their
reception has ever come to me, though I have, entirely on their account,
subscribed to a dozen learned journals. I do not expect anything to
happen, at this late date, in Paramore’s favor.
There is little reason to believe that the packet Hoyting cherished will
be piously guarded by the hands to which I committed it. And, even if it
were, no minor corroborations drifting in after many years could ever
reconstitute for Paramore such a fame as he once lost. When I think of
the matter at all, it is, curiously enough, to echo Hoyting’s wish that
Madame Pothier would die. The best thing Paramore’s restless ghost can
hope for, it seems to me, is that she may never know the very little the
public knows about him. Sometimes that silence seems to me more
desirable for him than rehabilitation itself. But then, I have never
been interested in anthropology.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
Hang civlization=> Hang civilization {pg 308}
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VAIN OBLATIONS ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
