V A I N O B L A T I O N S

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

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.”