evident a most unnatural sort of strain. She may well have been excited;
that was only to be expected in the circumstances. But the repressed
excitement in this woman's manner was not that of a woman who is forcing
herself to keep her courage up; not that of a woman who would like to
scream; but a steadier nervous energy which seemed to burn in her like a
fire, to escape from her finger tips, and almost to crackle in her
hair; an intensity that was vibrant. I marveled. Most women would have
screamed at the advent of a man in the dead of night; screamed and
fainted. Or the ones who would not, and who were armed as she, would
ordinarily have been inclined to shoot, and at once; or immediately to
have given the alarm. She had done none of these things. She had merely
taken me captive. She had set me down in a chair at the center of the
room. She had not roused the house. And now she stood looking at me with
a trace of abstraction in her manner; looking at me, for the moment,
less as if I were a human being than as if I were a factor in some
mathematical problem which it was the immediate task of that active,
high-keyed brain of hers to solve. And there was a measure of irony in
her glance, as if she alone tasted and enjoyed some ulterior jest.
“I am wondering,” I repeated, “what you are going to do with me.”
She sat down at the opposite side of the table before she replied.
“I believe,” she said slowly, “that I have nearly made up my mind what
to do with you.”
“Well?” I asked.
But she said nothing, and continued to say nothing. I looked at her and
her diamonds--the diamonds I had come after!--and wondered again why she
was wearing them; wondered why she had tricked herself out as for
some grand entertainment. And as the ignominious result of my night's
expedition pressed more sharply against my pride I could have strangled
her through sheer disappointment and mortification. The pistol she held
was the answer to that impulse. But what was the answer to her hesitancy
in alarming the house? Why did she not give me up and be done with me?
At the farther end of the room was a long red curtain, which covered the
entrance to a sitting-room or parlor, as I guessed; and by the side
of the curtain hung an old-fashioned bell cord, also of red, which
I supposed to communicate with the servants' quarters. It were easy
enough, now that she had taken the whip hand of me so cleverly, to pull
that rope, to set the bell jangling, to rouse the house. Why did she not
do so?
Was she a mad woman? There was that in her inexplicable conduct, and in
her highly-wrought, yet governed, mood, as she sat in brooding silence
across the table from me, to make the theory plausible. Brooding she
was, and studying me, I thought; yet watchful, too. For at any least
motion of mine her hand tightened slightly upon the pistol. We sat
thus while the slow seconds lengthened into intolerable minutes; and I
steamed with sweat, and fidgeted. Nor was I set more at my ease by her
long searching glances. In fact, my overthrow had been so instant and
so complete that my scattered wits had never drawn themselves together
again; I continued as one in a haze; as a person half under the power
of the hypnotist; as a mouse must feel after the first blow of the cat's
paw. And yet one idea began to loom clearly out of that haze and possess
me--the idea that she desired the alarm to be given as little as I did
myself.
But there was no light in that. It was easy to understand why she
did not wish the house aroused while she still believed me to be
Charles--whoever Charles might be. But now?--it was too much for me.
I could not find a justification in reason for my belief; and yet the
conviction grew.
She broke the silence with a question that might have been put with full
knowledge of my thought.
“You are still wondering why I do not give you up?” she said.
I nodded. She leaned towards me across the table, and if ever the demons
of mockery danced through a woman's eyes it was then; and her lips
parted in a kind of silent laughter.
She touched the diamonds about her throat.
“It was these you came after?”
I nodded again. Evidently speech was of no avail with this lady. She
asked questions at her will, and reserved the right of answering none.
“Tell me,” she said, “Why are you a thief? Why do you steal?”
“'Convey, the wise it call,'” I quoted. “Accident, or fate, or destiny,
I suppose,” I went on, wondering more than ever at the question, but
with a fluttering hope. Perhaps the lady (in spite of Charles--such
things have been!) was an amateur sociologist, a crank reformer, or
something of that sort. There had been no mockery in her tone when
she asked the question; instead, I thought, a kind of pity. “Fate,
or destiny,” I went on, “or what you please, 'There is a destiny that
shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,'” I quoted again, in my
best actor manner.
“Why,” she said, “you are a man with some air of better things about
you. You quote Shakespeare as if he were an old friend. And yet, you are
a thief! Tell me,” she continued, “tell me--I dare say there were many
struggles against that destiny?” There was a note almost of eagerness
in her voice, as if she were a leniently-inclined judge who would fain
search out and put in the mouth of a condemned man some plausible plea
for the exercise of clemency. “Come--were there not?--I dare say there
were--circumstances of uncommon bitterness that forced you to become
what I see you? And even now you hate the thing you are?”
“Why, as to that,” I said, possessed of the sudden whim to be honest
with myself for once, “I am afraid that I can complain of no bitterer
usage at the hands of the world than can the majority of those who reap
where they have not sowed. When I think of it all, I am used to putting
it to myself that my life is devoted to a kind of private warfare
against the unjust conditions of a hypocritical social order.”
“Warfare!” she flouted, hard and brilliant as one of her own diamonds
again. “And you could justify it, too, could you not?”
And then she asked me: “Have you ever killed a man?”
“Why, no,” said I, “but I have tried to.”
“He lived?--and you were sorry that he lived?”
“No,” I said, quite out of my depths in all this moral quibbling, “I was
glad he lived.”
“And yet you hated him?”
“I would have taken his life in a rage,” I said. “He had wronged me as
greatly as one man can wrong another.”
“And yet you were glad he lived? My dear thief----”
“Higgins is the name,” said I. “You may call me Higgins.”
“My dear Higgins,” she went on, “you are inconsistent. You attempt to
slay a man in what I should judge to have been a not ignoble passion.
It may have been an anger that did you credit. And yet you are not
bold enough to face the thought of killing him. You are glib with
justifications of your thievery; and perhaps that is also because you
are too much of a coward to look steadily at it. You creep along a mean
and despicable path in life, contentedly, it seems to me, with a dead
soul. You are what you are because there is nothing positive in you for
either good or evil. You are negative; you were better dead. Yes, better
dead!”
Why should I have felt as if she were seeking self-justification in
advance for some death she planned for me? Certainly, my life, or death,
was not hers to give or take; she might give me up, and probably would.
But just as certainly she had made me feel, as she passed her judgment
upon me, that she was likely to turn executioner as well as judge. My
doubts as to her sanity returned.
“Still,” I said, for the sake of saying something, “if I killed a man, I
should not like to think about it, even if he deserved death.”
“Even if he deserved death?” she repeated, and sprang up, as if the
phrase had touched her. “You make yourself the judge, you do, of when
a man 'deserves' to lose his wealth. Come, what is your idea of when he
deserves to die?”
Up and down the room she swept; yet still watchful. And the emotion
which she had so long suppressed burst out into a poisonous lovely bloom
that suffused her being with an awful beauty.
“When does he deserve to die?” she repeated. “Listen to me. I knew
a woman once--no matter where--no matter when--who was sold--sold! I
say--by the sordid devil she called her father, to the veriest beast
that ever trod this earth. Her beauty--for she had beauty--her wit--for
wit she had--became this husband's chattels before she turned her
twentieth year. She would never have loved him, but she would have been
faithful to him--she was faithful to him, in fact, in spite of all his
drunkenness and bestiality--and abuse! It was not neglect alone that she
had to complain of--she had never looked for understanding or sympathy.
But she had not looked for abuse. Abuse, I say, and worse than abuse.
Before she had been married a year she knew what it was, not only to
feel the weight of a heavy hand and to hide the bruises from her maid,
but to see other women brought into her very house. Pah!--hate? She
hated him? Hate is not the word. She became a live coal. But she never
cried out; she found strength to smile at him even when he beat her; she
was proud enough for that. It pleased him, in his hellish humor, and
because she was made to shine, to cage her in a country house, and there
to taunt her that although she was sold to him she got little of what
money may buy. And still she smiled at him, and still her hatred grew
through all the weeks and months until it filled her whole being. And
then--love came. For God has ordained that love may enter even Hell.
Love, I say; and she loved this lover of hers with a passion that was
measured only by the degree in which she hated her husband. And she
would have left with him; but on the very night they would have flown
together her lord and master-----”
She said the words with an indescribable spluttering sneer, sidewise
from her mouth. It is so a lioness may snarl and spit before she leaps.
“Her--lord and master--found it out, and waited up to catch them; and
coming upon her alone, taunted her. Taunted her, and struck her----”
“Look!” she cried, and tore the diamonds from her breast, and rent the
laces, and wrenched the fastenings apart. A new red weal that seemed to
throb and pulse with her respiration stood out from the whiteness of her
bosom.
“Tell me,” she whispered hoarsely, “would it have been murder if she had
killed that man? Which were the more courageous thing--to kill him, or
to step back into her living hell? If she had killed him, would she have
regretted it?”
I know not what I might have answered; but at that instant three raps
sounded distinctly upon the window-shutter. I leaped to my feet. Then
Charles had come!
An instant she stood as if stricken to a statue in mid-rage.
And then she cried out, and there was a furious triumph in her voice--a
kind of joy that matched itself to, and blended with, the fierce and
reckless beauty of her shaken jewels, possessed her.
“Charles,” she cried, “come in! Come in!”
Slowly the window opened and a man entered. He drew back in amaze at the
sight of me, and turned to her with an air that was all one question.
“I thought you would never come,” she said.
He was a big blond man, and as he turned from the one to the other of
us, with his helpless, inquiring face, and eyes that blinked from the
outer darkness, he looked oddly like a sleepy schoolboy who has been
awakened from an afternoon nap by the teacher's ruler.
“Katherine,” he finally stammered, “what is this? Who is this man?” He
passed his hand across his forehead as one may do who doubts whether or
not he dreams; and walked towards the table.
“Charles,” she said, “I have shot the old man.” I have seen a beef
stricken on the head with a mallet look at its executioner with big eyes
for an instant before the quivering in its limbs set in and it sank to
the ground. So this Charles looked with wide, stupid eyes, and shivered,
and dropped the great bulk of him into a chair. His head sank upon his
hand. But finally he looked up, and spoke in a confused voice, as if
through a mist. “Good God, Katherine, what do you mean?”
“I mean,” she said, framing the words slowly, as one speaks a lesson to
a child, “I mean that I have killed the old man.”
And moving swiftly across the room she flung back the heavy red curtain
at the end of it; and I saw the answer to my many questionings.
The body lay upon its back, with one arm bent, the hand across the
chest, and the fingers spread wide. The face was that of a man of sixty
or thereabouts, but, indeed, so deeply lined and wrinkled and pouched
with evil living that the age even in life must have been hard to
determine. Blood was coagulating about a bullet wound in the temple,
and there were powder burns on the forehead. The shot had been fired at
close range, evidently from the weapon with which I had been confronted
on my entrance; and the sound had been so muffled in the curtain that it
was little wonder that the servants in the rooms above, and across the
house, had not heard it. He had a monstrous nose, that man upon the
floor, and it must have been a red nose in life; but now it was of a
bluish-white color, like the skin of an old and scrawny fowl. That, and
the thin, drawn-up legs, and the big flabby paunch of the thing, robbed
the sight, for me, of all the solemnity which (we are taught) exudes
from the presence of death. It made me sick; and yet I cackled with
sheer hysteria, too; or rather my strained nerves jarred and laughed, if
not myself. It was too damned grotesque.
Herself, she did not look at it. She looked at the man called Charles;
and he, with a shudder, lifted his slow gaze from the thing behind the
curtain to her face.
She was the first to speak, and the terrible joy with which she had bade
Charles to enter still dominated her accents.
“Don't you understand, Charles? This man,” and she indicated me with the
pistol, “this man takes the blame of this. He is a thief. He came just
after--just afterwards. And I held him for your coming. Don't you see?
Don't you see? His presence clears us of this deed!”
“_Us?_” queried Charles.
“Not _us?_” she asked.
“My God, Katherine,” he burst forth, “why did you do this thing? And
you would heap murder on murder! Why, why, why did you do it? Why splash
this blood upon our love? A useless thing to do! We might have--we might
have------”
He broke down and sobbed. And then: “God knows the old man never did me
any harm,” he said. “And she'd accuse the thief, too!” he cried a moment
later, with a kind of wondering horror.
“Listen, Charles,” she said, and moved towards him; and yet with a
sidelong glance she still took heed of me. “Listen, and understand
me. We must act quickly--but after it happened it was necessary that I
should see you before we could act. This man came to rob; here is his
pistol, and in that satchel by the window are his tools, no doubt. He
may tell what wild tale he will; but who will believe him? You go as you
came; I give him up--and we--we wait awhile, and then the rest of life
is ours.”
I suppose that it is given to few men to hear their death plotted in
their presence. But I had come to the pass by this time where it struck
me as an impersonal thing. I listened; but somehow the full sense of
what she said, as affecting me, did not then impinge upon my brain with
waking force. I stood as if in a trance; I stood and looked on at those
two contending personalities, that were concerned just now with the
question of my life or death, as if I were a spectator in a theater--as
if it were someone else of whom they spoke.
“Go,” she cried to Charles again, “and I will give him up.”
“Katherine,” he said, “and you would do this thing?”
“Why?” she retorted, “what is this man's life beside mine? His soul is
dead! I tell you, Charles, that I have come through Hell alive to gain
one ray of happiness! But go!--and leave the rest to me.”
And she grasped the bell cord and pulled it. Pulled it again and again.
The sound wandered crazily through what remote corridors I know not.
She made a step towards him. He leaped to his feet with an oath, with
loathing in his eyes, shrank back from her, and held out a hand as if to
ward off some unclean thing.
Bewilderment lined her face. She groped to understand. And then, as the
full significance of his gesture came home to her, she winced and swayed
as if from a blow; and the pistol dropped from her loosened grasp to the
floor.
“You--you abandon me?” she said slowly. “You desert me, then? Love,
Love, think how I have loved you that I did this thing! And is what I
have suffered--what I have done--still to purchase--nothing?”
She pleaded for my death; but I hope that I shall never again see on any
human face the look of despair that was on hers. I pitied her!
Heavy feet on the stairway woke me from my trance. Unregarded of them
both I grasped my pistol from the floor and sprang for the window. A
door opened somewhere above, and a voice asked:
“You rang, Ma'am?”
From without the window I looked back into the room. She stood with
outstretched hands--hands that reached upward from the pit of torment,
my fancy told me--and pleaded for a little love. “In all this world is
there no little ray of love for me?”--it was so my imagination rather
than my hearing translated the slight movement of her lips. And while
she and the man called Charles stood thus at gaze with one another, the
servant spoke again from the stairway.
“You rang?” he asked.
She slowly straightened. She steadied herself. And with her eyes still
fixed upon those of Charles she cried:
“Yes, yes, I rang, Jones! Your master is--dead. Your master's murdered!
And there, there,” and she stabbed an accusing finger at her erstwhile
lover, “there is the man who murdered him!”
And then I turned from the window and ran from that house; and as I ran
I saw the Dawn, like a wild, fair woman, walk up the eastern sky with
blood-stained feet.
XIII.--Words and Thoughts
[A Play in One Act]
Characters:
Cousin Fanny Hemlock
John Speaker
Mary Speaker
John Thinker
Mary Thinker
Maid
Period, the present. Place, any American city.
The Scene _represents two drawing rooms, exact duplicates, furnished
alike to the smallest detail. Either room might be the reflection of the
other in a mirror. Each occupies half of the stage. The division line
between them is indicated, towards the hack of the stage, by two pianos,
which sit hack to back at the center of the hack drop. This division
is carried by the pianos a quarter or a third of the way towards the
footlights. The division is further suggested, towards the front of the
stage, hy a couple of settees or couches, which also sit back to back._
John Speaker and Mary Speaker _remain all the time in the room at the
right of the stage. They are not aware of_ John Thinker _and_ Mary
Thinker, _who are, throughout the play, in the room at the left. The_
Thinkers, _however, are aware of the_ Speakers.
_In make-up, looks, dress, etc., the two_Johns _are precisely alike.
The same is true of_ Mary Speaker and Mary Thinker. _The_ Johns _are
conventional-looking, prosperous Americans of from 38 to 40 years of
age. The two_ Marys _are a few years younger._
Cousin Fanny Hemlock _is a dried-up, querulous old woman of seventy._
_The Curtain, on rising, discovers the two_ Johns _and the two_ Marys.
_It is between 7 and 8 in the evening; they are all in evening dress,
and are preparing to go out, putting on their gloves, etc., etc._
John Speaker [_Picking up over coat._]
Are you ready, Mary dear?
Mary Speaker [_Holding out a gloved hand._]
Quite, John dear. Button this for me, won't you, love?
John Speaker [_Busy with glove._]
It's been nearly a year, hasn't it, since we've been out together of
an evening? I'm afraid Cousin Fanny is terribly trying on you at times,
Mary.
Mary Speaker
You know, John, I don't consider her a trial. I _love_ Cousin Fanny.
John Thinker
[_Busy with Mary Thinker's glove._]
The old cat's letting us off to-night, for a wonder, Mary. She's a
horrible affliction!
Mary Thinker [_Passionately._]
Affliction is no word. She makes my life a living hell! I hate her!
John Speaker
[_Helping Mary Speaker on with coat, which action is simultaneously
imitated hy John and Mary Thinker._]
Well, we must bear with her gently, Mary. I am afraid poor Cousin Fanny
will not be with us many more years.
John Thinker [_To Mary Thinker._]
One comfort is she'll die before long!
Mary Speaker [_To John Speaker._]
Oh, John, you don't think Cousin Fanny's going to die, do you?
Mary Thinker [_To John Thinker._]
Don't fool yourself about her dying soon, John. There's no such luck!
[_Enter Maid through door in right back to John and Mary Speaker,
who look up. John and Mary Thinker also notice entrance of Maid and
listen._]
Maid
[_To Mary Speaker._]
Miss Hemlock sent me to inquire whether you were going out to-night.
Mary Thinker [_To John Thinker, quickly._]
The old cat's up to something!
Mary Speaker [_To Maid_.]
Yes. We were just starting. Does Miss Hemlock want anything? I will go
to her if she wishes to speak with me.
Maid
She said, in case you were going out, that I was to tell you _not_ to do
so.
Mary Speaker
_Not_ to do so?
Maid
Yes, ma'am; that's what she said. She said in case you were getting
ready to go out, you were to change your plans and stop at home.
John Speaker [_To Maid._]
Not to do so? But, surely, there must be some mistake!
[_Maid shakes her head slowly, deliberately, looking fixedly at John
Speaker; and while she is doing so John Thinker says to Mary Thinker_:]
John Thinker
Some malicious idea is working in her head tonight!
Maid
[_To John Speaker._]
No, sir, no mistake. She said very plainly and distinctly that you were
not to go out tonight.
[_Maid bows and exits._]
John Speaker
Cousin Fanny is not so well to-night, I'm afraid, dear, or she would
certainly have put her request in some other way.
Mary Speaker
If I didn't love Cousin Fanny, John, I would be tempted to believe that
she deliberately tries at times to annoy us.
John Speaker
Cousin Fanny is old, and we must remember that she is very fond of us.
We will have to bear with her.
[_John Speaker takes his top coat and his wife's coat> and lays them on
a chair, while John Thinker, who has been frowning and brooding, flings
himself into chair and says to Mary Thinker_:]
John Thinker
For cold-blooded, devilish nerve in a man's own house, Cousin Fanny
certainly takes the cake, Mary!
Mary Thinker
She gets more spiteful every day. She knows her power, and the more
childish she gets the more delight she takes in playing tyrant.
John Thinker
Cheer up, it isn't forever! If she doesn't change her will before she
dies, it means fifteen thousand dollars a year. That's worth a little
trouble!
Mary Thinker
You're away at your office all day. I'm here at home with her. It is I
who catch all the trouble!
John Thinker
Well, after all, she's more nearly related to you, Mary, than she is to
me.
Mary Thinker
She's my mother's third cousin, if you call _that_ near!
John Thinker
Well, then, she's my father's fifth cousin, if you call _that_ near!
Mary Speaker
What were you thinking of, John, dear?
John Speaker
Nothing... nothing, Mary... except that
Cousin Fanny is a poor, lonely old soul, after all.
Mary Speaker
Poor, lonely old woman, indeed--it's odd, isn't it, that she is related
to both you and me, John?
John Speaker
She's closer to you than to me, Mary.
Mary Speaker
You couldn't call a fourth or fifth cousin very near, John.
John Speaker
It almost seems as if you were trying to deny the blood tie, Mary!
Mary Speaker
No, John, dear, blood is thicker than water.
John Speaker Thicker than water!
John Thinker
Relations are the most unpleasant persons on earth. I hate cousins.
Mary Thinker
Especially cousins who are also cousins-in-law! John Speaker
But even if she were only _my_ relation, Mary, and not related to _you_
at all, I know enough of your sweet nature to know that she would always
be welcome in our home in spite of her little idiosyncrasies.
[_Enter Cousin Fanny, to John and Mary Speaker, through door right hack.
She coughs as she steps forward, leaning on a cane, and puts her hand to
her chest, stop-ping. Then as she comes forward, she stumbles. John and
Mary Speaker leap forward, put their arms behind her, and, supporting
and leading her, conduct her tenderly down stage to chair at center of
room they are in. John and Mary Thinker, near together at table in their
room, lean forward eagerly and watch this entrance, and when the old
woman stumbles, John Thinker says to Mary Thinker, nudging her:_]
John Thinker
You see?
Mary Thinker
See what?
John Thinker
She totters!
Mary Thinker
She stumbled.
John Thinker
She's getting weaker.
[_Mary Speaker tenderly kisses Cousin Fanny, as Mary Thinker says_:]
Mary Thinker