“My glove, yes, but not concealing the dagger beneath.”
“I’ll meet you where and when you please.”
“With Ordway Belknap as your second, I suppose? No, thank you; there are safer ways.”
“Then make it fast, man,” Whittaker cried in a suddenly broken voice as the dew of intense pain stood out on his forehead and he drooped a little forward over the table. “The time is short for both of us.”
“Quick, Mr. Belknap,” Nadia exclaimed, “Romany is fainting.”
Itwouldbe Romany who took things the hardest.
Half an hour later found the atmosphere of the library anything but comfortable—indeed strained almost to the breaking point. Whittaker’s slow poison was beginning to take effect. Ignoring the ominous rolling up of clouds, he had quietly but firmly gone ahead with the plan to read aloud a few pages of the Diary. With malicious casualness he had suggested the withdrawal of anyone who felt more in the mood for billiards or bridge: “You know the billiard room, Blake. Do get up a game if it suits you. There’s nothing particularly thrilling about an old man mumbling over his memories of other days. I merely thought one or two of you might prefer a moment’s pause in the day’s occupation that I could beguile, even if I put you asleep.” But, aside from Dorn who had excused himself directly after dinner with, “Doctors,you know, Whittaker. Frightfully sorry. I’ll try to get back tomorrow,” there was not one that had had the strength to keep away from the spider’s parlor. Though for a moment it had appeared that Belknap might follow Dorn’s example: “Come now, don’t tell me you’re off, too?” Whittaker’s tone half-mocked, half-threatened him as he stood indecisively in the hall toying with the door-latch. “Oh no,” Belknap had answered with impatient asperity. “Hardly that! I have a small contribution to make to the evening’s pleasure. It’s in the car. I’ll be back.” He was, in a jiffy, with several bottles of what he said was ’11 champagne, and which, as Whittaker knew, came from one of the finest cellars in New York.
But no one else turned even an attentive eye to the gift which Belknap was arranging with exaggerated care on the tray of crystal-bright decanters and dark-bright bottles. Curiosity, dread, and sheer hypnotism, combined to magnetize them into a rigid ensemble about Whittaker’s reading lamp. But it was a brittle, surface rigidity—like the first thin ice formed over moving water. Beneath it the twisting, roiling currents of agonized apprehensionwore through and disturbed the dangerous stillness of the room. Nadia Mdevani’s puffs at her cigarette were too brief, and she flicked unformed ash too often. Blake in the corner ferociously over-shuffled a pack of cards. At the piano Romany’s fingers lacked control, and the snatches of song she attempted lost themselves in broken pitch. But she had at least recovered from her faintness, which she had apologetically laid to a week’s indulgence in late hours, and to cocktails for tea at Sands Point. Crawford was turning the leaves ofThe Sportsman, but with such erratic rapidity that he must have been unaware of what he saw. Only Julian and Joel, looking worlds at each other, plus suns and moons and stars, still seemed a little stupidly blind to what was happening.
As Whittaker arranged his stage setting—chair and lamp just so, and a pillow at his back—the ritual of after-dinner coffee proceeded with its usual calm and efficiency. A robot maid, pretty and slim-figured in black and white, brought the service, and John passed the cups. He then quietly opened the windows of the terrace to the warm May night, asked his master was there anything further, and retired.
Whittaker cleared his throat; and the sound startled the room as thoroughly as though it had been a shot. It drew the line at conversation and movement. Across the stillness Whittaker’s first words assumed an enlarged importance.
“As I’ve told you, this is a day to day record of my life for the past twelve or fifteen years.” By a motion of his hand he indicated to them a thick, flexible, thin-paper notebook, bound in tooled suède. “Tonight I am taking a leaf from a day two years ago, June 19, 1929. I recall the day vividly; and I can quite imagine that Markham does. (We’ll say Markham—the real name needn’t figure until we go into print.)
“‘Markham called me early this evening to say he must see me immediately. I was engaged for a theatre party, and did not wish to disappoint my hostess, but Markham was obstinate and I yielded. He lives only a matter of minutes from Thorngate. When he appeared it was more than obvious that something was wrong. He was pale, his eyes bloodshot, and his voice somewhere in his shoes. It seems he is being blackmailed on two counts, an old one and a new one; the new one being a mistress, and therefore dangerous to his family; the old one beinga strange case of murder, and therefore more dangerous to himself. It is the murder that I consider worth recounting.
“‘Markham is the son, only son, of old Markham who once broke the bank at Monte Carlo. There is wildness in the family. The boy grew up higgledy-piggledy in a part of New York that was rapidly changing from good to bad and bad to worse. Watched with less than half an eye by a succession of uninvestigated nurses and governesses, when they could be afforded at all, Markham naturally and easily became a member of a boy’s gang in the block; and this gang of children grew up to be the real thing. He was not able to break with them, even if he had cared to do so. They bled his father by way of him. They led him by gradual stages into mischief, into badness and into sin. The day came when, owing one too many grand to some card racketeers working the steamship lines to Havana, he was ready to accept payment for murder.
“‘A jet-black night in midwinter found him entering an apparently abandoned shack in a lonely curve of the Hackensack on the barren flats outside Newark. Nothing for miles but snow-driftedmeadows and a black river turgidly rolling seaward.’”
“A style worthy of the American Institute,” Julian murmured to Joel, “where vocabulary counts—I mean wordiness.”
“Hush, Julian! Your uncle’s a member.”
“That’s how I know.”
“‘The single room, into which Markham crept upward by way of a loose floor board, reeked of stale tobacco smoke, soiled clothes, and an odd sweet odor that he had long ago learned to recognize as opium. Knife in hand, he settled against the wall near the locked door to await his victim’s home-coming. There were mice about. He identified mice. And a branch blowing against the window-pane. That was easy. But there was another sound, persistent and regular—like, like breathing. Breathing! Good God, itwasbreathing. The smuggler wasn’t abroad smuggling, according to plan. The cold sweat broke out on Markham’s palms and forehead. Were they each crouching in the dark waiting the other’s move? The next scuttle of a mouse shattered his flesh and bones like a blow. He was goose-flesh from head to foot,including his scalp which pained him with its effort to lift his hair.’”
“You see he thought his goose was cooked,” was Julian’s next aside to Joel. Something was at last beginning to take place in Julian. Belknap saw a little sleepy devil waking in him that might not always prove easy to deal with.
“‘The man on the bed moved; lay still; shifted again. There was nothing for it but to strike. He sprang and struck: and drove the little knife up to his hand in something soft. He was saying tonight that a knife murder is not so good for the murderer whatever it may be to the murdered. He says the physical sensations will last him for life: the scraping of the blade on a bone, its spongy sinking home in a vital part, the sudden sagging of the body under one’s own tensity, and the last gasping gurgling breath against the face. Markham had never seen this man’s face, never would see it; but he would remember the feeling of the unshaven chin and the small, fat body; and the smell of sweated clothes mingling with the warm smell of fresh blood——’”
“If you don’t mind, Whittaker,” Crawford saidin an inhuman voice, “I should like a glass of water. May I ring?” He tried to rise, staggered, and said, “Help me, Sydney.”
It seemed that Sydney had not heard him or was unable to move. She didn’t stir, or move her eyes. But Romany, from a huddled, shivering figure on the divan, came to life and ran to him.
“Durian, Neil, my beloved, my only love. What is he doing to you? I can’t bear it. I won’t let him do things like this—I don’t care—”
Romany didn’t finish—Sydney had heard, and had struck Romany a blow that threw her against the table. Nadia was laughing terribly as Blake came across toward Whittaker with murder on his face.
“Now by all that’s holy or unholy, you have overstepped the bounds, Bertrand Whittaker—”
Whether he ever reached Whittaker remained in doubt for at that moment the room was plunged in total darkness. Someone screamed—a woman. There was a scuffle and a thud. A man groaned. Belknap cried out: “Stay where you are as you value your lives.” They heard him feeling the wall for the switch, and then there was light.
In it Whittaker lay back half conscious in his chair, bleeding at the forehead. The others stood in oddly arrested positions like the players of ten-step on the count of ten. And the Diary was gone.
As a ditch drains at the opening of a sluice, leaves and twigs sucked one by one, slow at first then rapidly, down the outward current, the library drained of guests, silently, furtively, slow almost to the door, swift as the need to escape the room, the others, and their own astounding collapse under sudden stress, dragged them away. When the last of them had disappeared, Belknap, with John’s aid, helped Bertrand Whittaker to his room. They paused at his threshold. For the moment there seemed nothing to say. Both perhaps felt the effects of a certain, for them, anti-climax to the evening’s events—something rather hollow, almost something ridiculous, in the situation. Whittaker felt let down. Belknap ugly and impatient.
“How’s the head?” Belknap asked stiffly.
“Quite all right, thanks,” Whittaker answered with equal stiffness. “Won’t you come in?”
“No. Not now. There’s too much in the affrighted air. Get some sleep if you can. Though perhaps you think you’ll get plenty of that soon enough. Well, you’ve started the ball rolling with a vengeance, haven’t you? Satisfied? God, Whittaker, hadn’t you better cry quits? It isn’t too late. Tell ’em it was a practical joke; and ask Crawford’s pardon on the side. You see for yourself it isn’t going to be so daisy simple.Amurder! We’ll be lucky if it’s only half a dozen. There was no lovelight in any one’s eyes this evening, except in that poor little goose of a Joel’s. And she went upstairs looking withered. Slice this house from garret to cellar right now and it would make as pretty a Desire Under the Elms cross-section as you could find in a day’s journey.”
“The desire being to get me, huh?” Whittaker asked grimly.
“Exactly. If only whoever gets you would just please make a thorough job of it. Who do you think tried it?”
“Haven’t a ghost; have you? Thought it was going to be the Colonel somehow. But the blowdidn’t quite come from his direction. Still, he may have swung around me in the dark. It was a nasty knock, I think with metal, but glancing. That’s what saved me.”
“Whittaker, youarea cool one. Wish I could match you tonight. But there are moments when I don’t like it. Change your mind?”
“Never!No, as I said before, if you don’t like the game, get out. I’ll find a detective to whom itwillbe a challenge to the best work that’s in him.”
“AndIwill never get out. You know that; you know it only too well, you old reprobate. Filthy as the weather looks ahead, catch me refusing to go through it, if it’s there to go through. Well, while we linger here the plot undoubtedly thickens. I’d best get a move-on. Good-by—for the moment.”
“Good-by, and good-hunting,” Whittaker said as he turned away, leaning more heavily on John’s arm. Closing his door he murmured “Ah!” on a breath, meaning, if he had troubled to say all he meant, “Well, well, see what we have here.”
Romany Video, in a great fluff of feathery negligee, lay face downward, a vibrant, hystericalpuff-ball, on the bed. She was a mere speck of worried humanity troubling the white waste spaces of Whittaker’s four-poster; but an insistent speck, like a mosquito at a screen. Whittaker regarded her for a moment with an expression of mingled amusement, pity, contempt, and the faintly suggestive what-can-I-do-for-you look certain men always have for a fair damsel in distress. Thoroughly as Whittaker knew this particular damsel, no distress of hers would quite leave him indifferent.
But he took his time. There was no harm ever came in letting a woman wait—or weep. He said nothing. Sitting on the edge of the bed, as though Romany were not there, he let John help him exchange his pair of patent-leather for a pair of pigskin slippers, remove his dinner-coat and stiff shirt, and slip his green silk dressing-gown over his shoulders. Romany, properly responsive to the delayed attention, redoubled her sobbing.
“Thank you, John. That’ll do for now. No, don’t bother about my head. It’s hardly more than a mean bruise. I’ll call you later if I want you. Good-night.”
Whittaker, allowing John to depart, silentlystudied the trembling, haired-up curls of Romany’s dishevelled head. Then, on the click of the latch, he leaned across and touched her arm.
“Come, come, little one. What’s it all about? You’re taking it too hard. I’m sorry it had to be Crawford to begin with—for your sake. But you’ll get over him, if you have time, as you got over me. As you got over Blake. How did Blake let you get over him?”
“Oh, go away, you horrid, mean thing. I can’t bear you. Don’ttalkto me. Don’t youdaretouch me.”
“As bad as all that? Dear, dear! You’re taking him harder than you took most of us. You like them good, is that it? Gives you something to do making them over.”
“You bad man! How can you say such things to me? Howcanyou, after all we’ve been to each other? You used never to do anything to hurt me. And look at you now. Whathashappened, Bertrand dear? It’s such a cruel world. I can’t bear it. I tell you, I can’t. I’m going to kill myself. I’m going todie, Bertrand.”
“My dear, for the first time of the hundred and one you’ve made that threat, there’s a chance ofit’s coming off,” Whittaker said, and said the one thing in creation that, instead of aggravating them, could have stopped Romany’s hysterics dead in their tracks. Romany was quiet; desperately quiet. She lifted her head from the foam of maribou and looked at Whittaker with wide, distraught eyes, and parted lips.
“What do you mean?” she whispered.
“What I say,” he mocked her whisper by imitating it. “Even if you escape tonight, Romany (for death, whose name you so often take in vain, is on thequi vivein the house tonight), you have Durian’s death to answer for.”
Romany screamed, and throttled the scream with her hand across her mouth.
“Bertrand! You are going—to tell—that? You’ve written it down as you wrote about Neil?”
“I have.”
“Oh, no-no-no-no. Please, no. I don’t believe it.”
“Then wait and see. But hope isn’t dead yet, Freckles. (Let me see; yes, there’s your one freckle that made me call you Freckles. Remember?) I’ll have to find the Diary, or rewrite it,—unless, of course, I—”
“Oh, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” Romany bounced back into her hair, her maribou, and the rumpled pillows.
“Don’tsay that!” he cried dramatically. And Romany caught at a straw. She sat up again.
“You care?” she said. “Youdocare. Oh, Bertrand,whyare you making me suffer so? I don’t understand.Darling, is it because you’re jealous?” She threw both arms recklessly around his neck and clung to him with the wild strength of a drowning person. “Did he think his little Romany had really gone away and left him? Did he think she cared about all the other mans? Why, his poor little girl only thought the big man had got tired of her. She did, darling. Truly, she did.”
Whittaker slowly and carefully, with all the force of his hands, disengaged her arms, but, once disengaged, he found his own of necessity engaged in holding her.
“Brat!” he said, on a low, half-laugh, and kissed her lightly.
“Oh,” she breathed with a relieved sigh that rose, softly, from the bottom of her heart. “It’s so long since you called me that. I love it. Howsillyof us to quarrel, Bertrand. And be jealous! After all these years. To think you could ever have been so cruel as to pretend to tell about Durian to bring me back. Couldn’t you have found a pleasanter way, darling?”
Whittaker regarded her obliquely through half-shut eyes.
“What about Crawford?” he asked.
She had the grace to color.
“Poor Neil,” she murmured. “But that’s for him to take care of, isn’t it?”
“I see it is.” She felt him shiver, but misinterpreted it.
“Happy?” she asked.
“The Devil has that reputation.”
He felt her take alarm again, with a defensive stiffening. She laughed shakily.
“Naughty boy! You’re being sarcastic.”
“Am I?”
Suddenly, Romany sprang away from him and stood trembling from head to foot, and chattering with uncontrolled and unexpected rage.
“You are go-go-goingto tell.” She stuttered feverishly. “You are going to tell on all of us.You r-really mean it. Don’t you? D-don’t you?”
“Ah, you’ve figured it out, have you? Yes, I’m telling. How often must I say it to get it through your pretty head?”
“You brute! You beast! You—,” like a spoilt child Romany stamped. “You’re a hateful, cruel, wicked man. You can’t do it. Just you try. No one will let you. You’ll be killed first. You can’t do it to me, do you hear. I’ll kill you myself. You’ve got to leave me alone. Leave mealone. What do you think I killed him for? Because he betrayed me, didn’t I? And what are you doing to me? Betraying me, too. You look out, Bertrand Whittaker. There’s nothing I’ll stop at if I’m roused. No, not even murder.”
Whittaker shed Romany’s tantrum as a duck sheds water.
“Histrionics, baby,” he said. “You never can get far away from them, can you? Fifth-rate quotations from sixth-rate melodrama. Not that I don’t wish you meant your big threat. I do. But if you really mean to kill me, don’t shout about it. The house is listening, if I know the house. Do it on the quiet. Now run away hometo your room, child, and think it over. I’ll drop in later, if I may, and get the results. Pity I haven’t the poor old diary by me and I’d mark you the passages about yourself. They’re quite thrilling. Make you out a sort of Medici, of the willow-wand variety. You should be honored.” Romany swayed. “Don’t faint, my dear,again. You do it too often. It’s becoming a vicious habit. The thing for you to do is to get to bed.” Whittaker worked her gently toward the door. “Goodnight—sleep tight—wake up—”
Romany drew away from him with a shudder. Wrapping her gown tightly about her with a pathetic little gesture of pride and courage, she flung a parting shot from the doorway.
“And don’t think you’re the only one that can tell tales out of school, Bertrand Whittaker. I’ll match you revelation for revelation if it comes to the book of revelations. You’ll have a tall lot of explaining to do to the law if I let—.”
She was in the hall, and had dropped her voice. Whittaker failed to catch a name she gave.
“Who’s that you’ll let the world know about?” he shouted.
Romany put her dust-mop head back into the room.
“Just you guess!And I hope you die of fright,” she hissed, and, turtle-wise, withdrew the head.
Julian, in dressing gown and slippers, sank back in the deep arm-chair before the fire burning in his room, and gave himself up to being downright worried. The situation at Thorngate seemed to him bewildering, terrifying, and positively insane, by turns. Obviously there was far more real trouble in the wind than the immediate problem of his own predicament, though heaven knew that was bad enough, largely because of Joel. However he was in a sense relieved and glad that Joel was to know. He had never yet been able to figure out a way to tell her about himself, but now this came along to settle the matter for him: she was bound to know, willy-nilly.
Why,whyhad he ever told Bertrand Whittaker of all people? No one would have ever been any the wiser if he had kept his mouth shut that warmevening last summer when his conscience was eating him alive, together with the mosquitoes, and he had asked Whittaker what to do about it. Whittaker had said, “Oh, forget it, boy. It won’t do you, or Roger Dane, or Roger’s family any good to come out with it.” Then why was Whittaker so thoroughly airing it now? Or was he? Perhaps he considered Julian’s hot-headed crime of too light a weight to bother with in his gruesome Diary. But Julian felt that it was playing ostrich on his part to rely on such a hope. For a man is known by the company he keeps. And it began to be desperately certain that the house was full to the gables of murderers in one degree or another. Both Blake and Dorn had been too quick on the rise to speak well for themselves. Romany Monte Video and Neil Crawford had blown to bits under a little pressure. And the Diary had been of sufficient importance for someone to have already attempted murder for its sake. Murder to cover murder. What a weird and preposterous household it was proving to be. What was Bertrand Whittaker’s motive in assembling it unless he was playing a losing game with death? If Crawford were not so chicken-hearted he would have avenged tonight’sdreadful betrayal before now. He might get around to it yet. Some of the rankest cowards in an open fight have been known to be excellent stabbers-in-the-back. And if everyone else had a secret murder in his past, whoever got away with the Diary was getting a wonderful thrill—probably reading it now by flashlight in a cupboard or under the shrubbery (one of Julian’s most persistent fears was that Dorn, instead of having gone straight up to town, was haunting the grounds with murder in his heart), trembling at every creak of the floor or rustle of leaves.
Whittaker’s chances of seeing his scheme through appeared slim enough to Julian: but even should he fail to see a rewritten version of his Diary in print, he had already, by one evening’s work, made a rotten mess of at least six lives. Neil and Sydney and Romany could no longer ignore their situation; whatever was between them would from now on be an open wound. Belknap would have definite proof of at least one crime and the criminal behind it. Whether, in view of the preposterous and unfair circumstances, he would decently ignore Crawford’s guilt was a doubtful question. Romany had fainted dead away when the Diary was first mentioned,and later had lost her head and confused the names of Neil Crawford and that lover of hers, with the crazy name of Durian, who had been accidently killed in one of her plays—why, ofcourse, hehadn’tbeen accidentally killed, that was just it. What a fool he was not to have thought of it before? So now he had three murderers accounted for: Crawford, Romany, and himself. As for Nadia, she looked the part of a poisoner to the letter. Dorn had clearly run away from something. With Blake it probably all depended on your definition of a duel.
But then there was Joel! Something must be wrong with his whole figuring, or Joel wouldn’t be where she was. Surely Whittaker wouldn’t include an innocent niece in a crime wave unless there were others as innocent to make it proper. Julian smiled at his own charming conceit. But it might be that Whittaker was so intent on crushing the alliance between himself and Joel that he was taking drastic measures to acquaint Joel with her lover’s villainy. Hemustsee Joel. He must see her before things developed beyond anyone’s control, as they were rapidly doing.
He jumped to his feet and almost out of his skinat a tapping on an inner door of his room that led God knew where. Should he lie low and gaze hypnotized at the door knob, or shout boldly “Come in,” or open the door suddenly and take the intruder off his guard? Julian had by now strung himself up to such a pitch that his own murder wouldn’t in the least have surprised him. Before he could decide on a course of action the door quietly opened and Joel appeared in a flowing blue robe. All his breath deserted him at the vision of her in his room.
“Joel!” he whispered.
“Yes, dear, I’m on the other side of the door, with the key on my side. Must be more plot in that, don’t you think? If we fall any deeper into trouble than we have fallen already—I mean if it comes to calling the police or something—there’ll be a scandal about the connecting door between the rooms of Mr. Julian Prentice and his fiancée. Fiancée my eye, it will suggest! And if, hearing a shot, we should dash into the hall, it would add that we were seen emerging from the young gentleman’s room, in negligee, at—” she glanced at her wrist watch—“at 12:30A.M.The fact that I am marking the time, with you as witness, mayprove frightfully important. Itislate, isn’t it?”
“Very, yes.” Julian’s over-emotion at Joel’s nearness showed itself in understatement and a boyish stiffness that made Joel love him beyond anything. “Come and sit here, won’t you? While I stir this fire. Whatareyou doing out so late, dear heart?”
“I did a little listening and snooping in the halls and found everybody else doing likewise. So I naturally can’t sleep. The house is fairly creeping, Julian. I wish it would get to its feet and walk off. Perhaps in the sense of very strong cheese, it will eventually. Oh dear, I’m so tired, and therefore a little silly, as you see, darling.”
“I don’t wonder—that you’re tired I mean. Here, put your feet on this cushion and let me warm your hands that are so cold. Tell me, Joel, what do you think your uncle is up to; what is he doing to everybody, including himself?”
“I don’t know; truly, Julian, I don’t know, and I don’t care what he is doing to himself and all the others but us. But I do care dreadfully what he does to you and me, and I have come to see whether we can’t, you and I, pass a magic wand over ourselves to keep out his evil genius and whatever it’sleading to. That we may even begin to do it, I realize I must be very brave and tell you about myself. We can’t in the face of things leave any stone unturned between us.”
Julian looked up at her with a swift, tender smile.
“Now you are going to tell meyouhave committed murder, too,” he said.
“Julian, be still; don’t be amused. Yes, I am going to tell you that I have committed murder. I have. But listen, please; don’t laugh that way. I can’t bear it.”
“Darling, I can’t help it. Oh my God, I was just coming to tell you about my murder before you should hear about it from another, or read of it in a tabloid, or have it sprung upon you when I am cross-examined. Joel, we are in for a very great deal of horridness—worse than we realize.”
“Not worse thanIrealize,” she said, with inexpressible weariness. “Julian dearest, you must listen to me; and then,” she smiled faintly, “I will hear about your murder.”
He put her hands to his lips.
“Don’t,” she said, drawing back. “Perhaps you won’t feel that way when I’ve told you. Afterall if you have killed one—husband—.” She found it almost beyond her to say the word.
“Joel, you didn’t kill Jerry. You didn’t, you didn’t. Say it, I tell you. Say you didn’t.”
“I did. But it wasn’t quite a murder, really it wasn’t. Listen, Julian, stop crying. I swear to you it wasn’t altogether a murder.”
“I don’t know what you mean ‘not altogether a murder.’ Murder is murder, you can’t get away from that.” Julian’s tone was low and dull. “Joel, I can’t bear it.”
“I should have thought being in a glass house you wouldn’t throw stones,” bitterness had crept into her voice.
“Mine was self-defense—in a way it was.”
“And mine was an affair of honor—in a way it was. I am going to tell you the whole story. It’s our only hope, Julian—for us both to tell everything.
“Jerry and I had been in love, really and terribly in love, for several years. It was after we knew Junior was on his way that we married. Oh, not because wehadto. It was Jerry’s idea that we’d call that our own private marriage, if we found that we could have one, and then accept the necessarylegalities for its sake. You see what I mean. I thought it a sort of romantic super-modernism, a beautiful way of counting out the world. Don’t laugh at me, Julian; for the laughwason me. The first shock came when we knew. He said, ‘I wonder whether we reallyneedto go through the outward form!’ Puzzled, but no more, I said, ‘Of course, don’t you think so?’ and his answer was, ‘Just as you say, of course.’ ‘Asyousay,’ note that. It took me months of increasing pain to realize that it wasn’t romance for him, but a way of keeping free himself while achieving a son.
“Well, I thought it all out; and it seemed to me I had been deceived as surely as any girl in melodrama. After all it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, the old Tess of the D’Urberville way and the modern, talking-it-all-out way, isn’t it? Instead of the enraged father and brother going on the warpath (fathers and brothers have been made to feel gun-shy these days) the woman herself, whose boast is that she can take care of herself, should have more than the theoretical right to do it. She should be able to fight it out to the death. Call it a new form of dueling if you like. So I went to work to clear my honor. That’s what it amountedto. I had ceased to care, to love him, of course, or I suppose I couldn’t have done it. I took shooting lessons at the 79th St. Armory.Hehad been a good shot since the War. Then I challenged him, coolly and seriously. I meant it. I named the hour, and the spot (in Central Park), and said he could name the day.”
“Joel, what did he say!”
“He laughed. I suppose I should have known he would. But I was made blind angry by it. So I went for a gun and—ended it all.”
“How did you get away with it?”
“I didn’t intend to. But I had taken his pistol from the drawer—and that, with the position in which he lay, pointed to suicide. It was never finger printed. Our friends claimed we were the most devoted couple they knew. I went to Uncle Bertrand immediately (he was Judge in our Precinct at the time), but he persuaded me, wrongly I know now, to keep silent; he said Jerry had it coming to him. But I wish I’d just run away from him instead.” Joel was crying with eyes wide open.
“Oh, Joel dear, you poor extraordinary child. I would have killed him for you.”
“Perhaps, but you weren’t around in those days; and besides, it was the feeling of defending my own name that made me do it. I wouldn’t have brooked aman’sdefending me.”
“Now that I’ve got to do something about your uncle, what would an extra murder more or less have mattered?”
“Julian,” she said quickly, “you can’t stop my uncle if he is bound and determined, even by killing him. He would have a way of getting around his own murder, if it took his ghost to do it.”
“I won’t try murder, sweetheart. But I am going to have a talk with him—tonight.”
Julian stood up and bent over to kiss her.
“I’ll be back soon, I promise. Don’t you move.”
“Julian, please stay. I don’t want to be left alone in this awful house.”
But the door had closed behind him.
And down the corridor Neil Crawford closed another door behind himself and Sydney. Their eyes met with a bleak and hopeless questioning.
“Oh, Neil,” she breathed. “What are we going to do?”
“What amIgoing to, you must say, Sydney. Remember, my dear, you are not in this. And remember that whatever I do or don’t do will be entirely governed by my love for you and my desire tokeepyou and the children out of it.”
“Youcan’tkeep me out of it, Neil, even if you wanted to. That is the way, with things relating to one or other of two people who are closely united, both are in them for good or bad. So I’m in this with you to the very last—that is, if—if—”
“If I want you?” He took her shoulders ineither hand. “Is that what you are trying to say? You know I want you. You know I love you, that I never have loved, never will love, anyone but you. I can’t help myself. We were made in patterns that match, like a jig-saw puzzle. We wouldn’t match anyone else, no one else would match us.”
She did her best to control the wave of feeling that made her draw free of him.
“She doesn’t feel so, Neil, or think you do. She loves you; and said it tonight too definitely to make me feel you have not returned in kind. Neil, where are our promises?”
“My God, Sydney, since when were you such an innocent as to think promises were anything more than baubles, pretty but—but vain. The promises to love forever until death do us part—”
“Keep still, Neil! You know as well as I do that those aren’t the promises I am thinking of. Besides, we never made those particular promises. But we did promise we weren’t going to go living around with other people unless wemeantit—meant it down to the ground, do you hear me?” She was trying to keep her voice under control, but it would rise spasmodically. “And here you seem to have done just that.”
“I wasn’t just living around, Sydney. You know me well enough to know I’d be fastidious about such things. Romany and I got into it somehow, quite naturally. Why can’t women realize how little such things mean to a man, and to some women. She’s one of them. We’ve never spoken of love; do you hear that?”
“Neil, how silly to say such a thing, when by its very nature love is somehow involved. In the very essence of it—your winnowing of the physical from the spiritual—it is the ruin of all idealism. Someone we know, who was it, was saying the other day that the trouble with the younger generation is that it lacks guts. You are exactly what he meant, Neil.”
“Don’t be vulgar about it, Sydney. Vulgarity doesn’t suit you. Only the sophisticated can get away with it. Your delicacy is one of the reasons I care for you. And Idocare. You can’t say I don’t love you, or you me. Can you say it?”
“Which only makes it frightfully much worse. And don’t lie to me. She couldn’t have written you a letter like that if you hadn’t used love, in one form or another, toward her. Don’t quibble about the meaning of the word love.”
“What do you mean ‘such a letter’?”
“I saw a letter on your desk, Neil. I had to read it, you can see that.”
“Then you got just what was coming to you, Sydney. Even a wife, a wife least of all, doesn’t read a man’s private correspondence unless she wants to get hurt.”
“All right! Say it if you will. It can’t make matters any more terrible than they are. I saw the address on the envelope (I knew she had been in Hollywood this spring), and in a flash I remembered that—that night. It’s asking too much of human nature to ask it to turn its back on the truth at such a moment. And you can’t say it isn’t better to know the truth at whatever cost to us both.”
“If you think so, yes.” Crawford’s anger died as he saw her face change. “Oh, Sydney, don’t look at me like that. I’m sorry. I’msosorry.” He tried to take her hands and failed. “And now this other thing to hurt you. I can’t endure it.”
“This other is bad, yes. But not really bad, my dear, as compared to my trust and respect, trust in you and self-respect, splintered to atoms overnight. Bertrand Whittaker can do his worst, can put you behind bars, and me talking to you through bars,but it won’t be a patch on the edge taken off what we have been years in building. Marriages aren’t built in a day. There must be something wrong with me and my dreams, I suppose. Before we left home tonight I happened to pick up a picture of Bunny, and realized it was the one that had been in the town house all winter, watching you—watching you—,” she trailed off helplessly. “I seem so to confuse illusions and realities.”
“Don’t confuse them. Don’t have illusions. Yet that’s why I love you, for the image you make of a perfect life. But it can’t be lived, Sydney. It can’t.”
“Ourchance is gone, if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t see how it affects us in the least if our love remains to us. I have never told her I loved her.”
“How charming for her!”
“That wasn’t what she wanted. She understands. I’m not the only one for her. It isn’t as if she were— She can take care of herself.” He paused. “Oh, I wouldn’t mind if she were dead if it would do us any good.”
“Neil, hush! Nothing, not even our owndeaths, could do us any real good again. How can you think wrong will right wrong?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how I think a lot of things I’m thinking. For instance, Bertrand Whittaker must be stopped dead in his tracks. He can’t be allowed to do this to Bunny’s life, or yours, or mine either. I’ll kill him first. The past is over and done with and he has no right to revive it.”
“The past is over; yes, the past is done with. She said she had your picture and Bunny’s on the dresser before her. Listen to that—Bunny’spicture. What’s Bunny to her under the circumstances, I’d like to know, that she should be able to make free with her picture: stepchild, love child or godchild? I don’t suppose any of them fit, but they sound so refreshingly shocking it’s fun to use them.”
“Stopmaking a scene, Sydney! I didn’t think you had it in you to make scenes and say such wild, bitter things. I can’ttendto a scene now. Can’t youseeI can’t?”
“When did it all begin, Neil? Don’t say it began in the common old-fashioned way at the commonold-fashioned time. Don’t say it began when Bunny was coming.”
“Of course it did. When did you think it would have begun? You didn’t expect me to be a monk, did you? Sydney, let’s stop talking, please; and think about what’s got to be done. What do you say we clear out of the country and make a fresh start. Australia or somewhere.”
“A fresh start! How devastating it sounds—to start over after eight years. It can’t be done, and the soul still live. As if one were told, after a terrible day of sled-pulling in an Arctic storm, that one had to retrace one’s steps without rest or food. It couldn’t be done, and the body live. That’s how I feel.”
“Sydney, quiet. Quiet, dear, you must stop. And help me plan. I must find Giordano. I see it clearly. I must find him tonight. He will deal with Whittaker.”
“Oh no, no, no, no. You mustn’t get in touch with those men again. You are finished forever if you try that. Neil, don’t do anything rash. I’ll talk to Bertrand the minute I have a chance. He will listen to reason. You know we have alwayssaid the day might come, and we promised to keep our heads. Our promises again! She said the rain where she was made her remember your night rains. Neil, Neil! what does that do to our rains, our trains, our meteorites, our—our—.” She was sobbing now with a desperate tearless exhaustion.
“Nothing. Nothing. It doesn’t do anything to them, dearest one. We have our love. With Romany, as we agreed, it was all just a symbol. Do you hear me, Sydney? Stop crying. Stop it. I have something that has to be done.Stop it.”
He went to the telephone on the stand between the beds. She screamed.
“Keep away from that telephone, Neil. Can’t you see what frightful things may be going to happen in this house tonight. A call can be traced—you mustn’ttoucha telephone.”
She sprang toward him; but he had lifted the receiver and she couldn’t struggle or argue with him against the ear of the operator. The number he gave was AUdubon 2-1801. It answered.
“Hello. Crawford speaking.” Then he neverhadbeen out of touch with them. “Pick up Disuno if you can find him. If not, one of theothers. The address is Bertrand Whittaker’s, Blue Acres. Outside the park gates at three.”
Neil hung up.
“You have made the mistake of your life, Neil Crawford. If a breath of what you have just done reaches the police it’s all over but the shouting, Bertrand or no Bertrand.”
“And it’s certainly all over if I do nothing. No, this is going to be Whittaker’s life or mine.”
“Ordway Belknap may be here for a purpose.”
“They have foiled better men than Belknap.”
“You have been with them ever since?”
“You didn’t for a minute imagine I could have been anywhere else did you? Once with them always with them as far as the underworld is concerned. They never release us.”
“And you never told me how it has been with you!”
“You couldn’t have helped in the least. I’ve saved Giordano from the chair twice over. And Disuno hasn’t hide nor hair that he doesn’t owe to me. Now I need them, that’s all. And you, my dear. And always you.”
He took her in his arms now, but she wasstrangely unresponsive. For her the living spark of whatever it was that had existed between them, whether love is the word to call it or not she had never known anyway, was as snuffed out as though it had never been.