“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 degrâce,’ 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 bythe 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 printme.’ 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 lethim 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 anothercrisewas 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, butthose 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 oncemore. ‘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 monsieurwas 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 libertyof having some masses said for his soul. Everything was said with the most perfect feeling, the utmost sincerity and gravity. What morecoulda 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. Overour 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. Youdomake 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 refuseto 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 thequarters 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}
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
Hang civlization=> Hang civilization {pg 308}