THE I O U OF SLIPPY MCGEE
The wind that precedes the dawn was blowing, a freakish and impish
wind though not a vicious one. One might imagine it animated by those
sportive and capricious nature-spirits an old Father of the church
used to call the monkeys of God. Every now and then a great deluge of
piled-up clouds broke into tossing billows and went rolling and
tumbling across the face of the sky, and in and out of these swirling
masses the high moon played hide-and-seek and the stars showed like
pin-points. Such street lights as we have being extinguished at
midnight, the tree-shaded sidewalks were in impenetrable shadow, the
gardens that edged them were debatable ground, full of grotesque
silhouettes, backgrounded by black bulks of silent houses all
profoundly asleep. As for us, we also were shadows, whose feet were
soundless on the sandy sidewalks. We moved in the dark like travelers
in the City of Dreadful Night.
And so we came at last to the red-brick bank, approaching it by the
long stretch of the McCall garden which adjoins it. For years there
have been battered "For Sale" signs tacked onto its trees and fences,
but no one ever came nearer purchasing the McCall property than asking
the price. Folks say the McCalls believe that Appleboro is going to
rival New York some of these days, and are holding their garden for
sky-scraper sites.
I was very grateful to the McCall estimate of Appleboro's future, for
the long stretch shadowed by their overgrown shrubbery brought us to
the door leading to the upstair offices, without any possible danger
of detection.
The bank had been a stately old home before business seized upon it,
tore out its whole lower floors, and converted it into a strong and
commodious bank. It is the one building in all Appleboro that keeps a
light burning all night, a proceeding some citizens regard as
unnecessary and extravagant; for is not Old Man Jackson there employed
as night watchman? Old Man Jackson lost a finger and a piece of an ear
before Appomattox, and the surrender deprived him of all opportunity
to repay in kind. It was his cherished hope that "some smartybus
crooks 'd try to git in my bank some uh these hyuh nights--an' I
cert'nly hope to God they'll be Yankees, that's all."
Somehow, they hadn't tried. Perhaps they had heard of Old Man
Jackson's watchful waiting and knew he wasn't at all too proud to
fight. His quarters was a small room in the rear of the building,
which he shared with a huge gray tomcat named Mosby. With those two on
guard, Appleboro knew its bank was as impregnable as Gibraltar. But as
nobody could possibly gain entrance to the vaults from above, the
upper portion of the building, given over to offices, was of course
quite unguarded.
One reached these upper offices by a long walled passageway to the
left, where the sidewall of the bank adjoins the McCall garden. The
door leading to this stairway is not flush with the street, but is set
back some feet; this forms a small alcove, which the light flickering
through the bank's barred windows does not quite reach.
John Flint stepped into this small cavern and I after him. As if by
magic the locked door opened, and we moved noiselessly up the narrow
stairs with tin signs tacked on them. At the head of the flight we
paused while the flashlight gave us our bearings. Here a short passage
opens into the wide central hall. Inglesby's offices are to the left,
with the windows opening upon the tangled wilderness of the McCall
place.
Right in front of us half a dozen sets of false teeth, arranged in a
horrid circle around a cigar-box full of extracted molars such as made
one cringe, grinned bitingly out of a glass case before the dentist's
office door. The effect was of a lipless and ghastly laugh.
Before the next door a fatuously smiling pink-and-white bust simpered
out of the Beauty Parlor's display-case, a bust elaborately coiffured
with pounds of yellow hair in which glittered rhinestone buckles. Hair
of every sort and shade and length was clustered about her, as if she
were the presiding genius of some barbarian scalping-cult. Seen at
that hour, in the pale luster of the flashlight, this sorry plunder of
lost teeth and dead hair made upon one a melancholy impression,
disparaging to humanity. I had scant time to moralize on hair and
teeth, however, for Flint was stopping before a door the neat brass
plate of which bore upon it:
_Mr. Inglesby_.
Mr. Inglesby had a desk downstairs in the bank, in the little pompous
room marked "President's Office," where at stated hours and times he
presided grandly; just as he had a big bare office at the mills, where
he was rather easy of access, willing to receive any one who might
chance to catch him in. But these rooms we were entering without
permission were the sanctum sanctorum, the center of that wide web
whose filaments embraced and ensnared the state. It would be about as
easy to stroll casually into the Vatican for an informal chat with the
Holy Father, to walk unannounced into the presence of the Dalai Lama,
or to drop in neighborly on the Tsar of all the Russias, as to
penetrate unasked into these offices during the day.
We stepped upon the velvet square of carpet covering the floor of what
must have once been a very handsome guest chamber and was now a very
handsome private office. One had to respect the simple and solid
magnificence of the mahogany furnishings, the leather-covered chairs,
the big purposeful desk. Above the old-fashioned marble mantel hung a
life-sized portrait in oils of Inglesby himself. The artist had done
his sitter stern justice--one might call the result retribution; and
one wondered if Inglesby realized how immensely revealing it was.
There he sat, solid, successful, informed with a sort of brutal
egotism that never gives quarter. In despite of a malevolent
determination to look pleasant, his smile was so much more of a threat
than a promise that one could wish for his own sake he had scowled
instead. He is a throaty man, is Inglesby; and this, with an
uncompromising squareness of forehead, a stiffness of hair, and a
hard hint of white in the eyes, lent him a lowering likeness to an
unpedigreed bull.
John Flint cast upon this charming likeness one brief and pregnant
glance.
"Regular old Durham shorthorn, isn't he?" he commented in a low voice.
"Wants to charge right out of his frame and trample. Take a look at
that nose, parson--like a double-barreled shotgun, for all the world!
Beautiful brute, Inglesby. Makes you think of that minotaur sideshow
they used to put over on the Greeks."
In view of Laurence and of Mary Virginia, I saw the resemblance.
Mr. Hunter's office was less formal than Mr. Inglesby's, and furnished
with an exact and critical taste alien to Appleboro, where many a
worthy citizen's office trappings consist of an alpaca coat, a chair
and a pine table, three or four fly-specked calendars and shabby
ledgers, and a box of sawdust. To these may sometimes be added a pot
of paste with a dead cockroach in it, or a hound dog either scratching
fleas or snapping at flies.
Here the square of carpet was brown as fallen pine-needles in October,
the walls were a soft tan, the ceiling and woodwork ivory-toned. One
saw between the windows a bookcase filled with handsomely bound books,
and on top of it a few pieces of such old china as would enrapture my
mother. The white marble mantel held one or two signed photographs in
silver frames, a pair of old candlesticks of quaint and pleasing
design, and a dull red pottery vase full of Japanese quince. There
were a few good pictures on the walls--a gay impudent Detaille Lancer
whose hardy face of a fighting Frenchman warmed one's heart; some
sketches signed with notable American names; and above the mantel a
female form clothed only in the ambient air, her long hair swept back
from her shoulders, and a pearl-colored dove alighting upon her
outstretched finger.
I suppose one might call the whole room beautiful, for even the desk
was of that perfection of simplicity whose cost is as rubies. It was
not, however, a womanish room; there was no slightest hint of
femininity in its uncluttered, sane, forceful orderliness. It was
rather like Hunter himself--polished, perfect, with a note of finality
and of fitness upon it like a hall-mark. Nothing out of keeping,
nothing overdone. Even the red petal fallen from the pottery vase on
the white marble mantel was a last note of perfection.
Flint glanced about him with the falcon-glance that nothing escapes.
For a moment the light stayed upon the nude figure over the
mantel--the one real nude in all Appleboro, which cherishes family
portraits of rakehelly old colonials in wigs, chokers, and
tight-fitting smalls, and lolloping ladies with very low necks and
sixteen petticoats, but where scandalized church-goers have been known
to truss up a little plaster copy of the inane Greek Slave in a
pocket-handkerchief, by way of needful drapery.
"What I want to know is, _why_ a lady should have to strip to the buff
just to play with a pigeon?" breathed John Flint, and his tone was
captious.
It did not strike me as being to the last degree whimsical,
improbable, altogether absurd, that such a man should pause at such a
time to comment upon art as he thinks it isn't. On the contrary it was
a consistent and coherent feature of that astounding nightmare in
which we figured. The absurd and the impossible always happen in
dreams. I am sure that if the dove on the woman's finger had opened
its painted bill and spoken, say about the binomial theorem, or the
Effect of Too Much Culture upon Women's Clubs, I should have listened
with equal gravity and the same abysmal absence of surprise. I
pattered platitudinously:
"The greatest of the Greeks considered the body divine in itself, my
son, and so their noblest art was nude. Some moderns have thought
there is no real art that is not nude. Truth itself is naked."
"Aha!" said my son, darkly. "I see! You take off your pants when you
go out to feed your chickens, say, and you're not bughouse. You're
art. Well, if Truth is naked, thank God the rest of us are liars!"
What I have here set down was but the matter of a moment. Flint
brushed it aside like a cobweb and set briskly about his real
business. Over in the recess next to the fireplace was the safe, and
before this he knelt.
"Hold the light!" he ordered in a curt whisper. "There--like that.
Steady now." My hand closed as well upon the rosary I carried, and I
clung to the beads as the shipwrecked cling to a spar. The familiar
feel of them comforted me.
I do not know to this day the make of that safe, nor its actual
strength, and I have always avoided questioning John Flint about it. I
do know it seemed incredibly strong, big, heavy, ungetatable. There
was a dark-colored linen cover on top of it, embroidered with yellow
marguerites and their stiff green leaves. And there was a brass
fern-jar with claw feet, and rings on the sides that somehow made me
think of fetters upon men's wrists.
"A little lower--to the left. So!" he ordered, and with steady fingers
I obeyed. He stood out sharply in the clear oval--the "cleverest crook
in all America" at work again, absorbed in his task, expert, a
mind-force pitting itself against inanimate opposition. He was
smiling.
The tools lay beside him and quite by instinct his hand reached out
for anything it needed. I think he could have done his work
blindfolded. Once I saw him lay his ear against the door, and I
thought I heard a faint click. A gnawing rat might have made something
like the noise of the drill biting its way. With this exception an
appalling silence hung over the room. I could hardly breathe in it. I
gripped the rosary and told it, bead after bead.
_"Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death--"_
There are moments when time loses its power and ceases to be; before
our hour we seem to have stepped out of it and into eternity, in which
time does not exist, and wherein there can be no relation of time
between events. They stand still, or they stretch to indefinite and
incredible lengths--all, all outside of time, which has no power upon
them. So it was now. Every fraction of every second of every minute
lengthened into centuries, eternities passed between minutes. The
hashish-eater knows something of this terror of time, and I seemed to
have eaten hashish that night.
I could still see him crouching before the safe; and all the while the
eternities stretched and stretched on either side of us, infinities I
could only partly bridge over with Hailmarys and Ourfathers.
_"And lead us not into temptation ... but deliver us from evil ..."_
Although I watched him attentively, being indeed unable to tear my
eyes away from him, and although I held the light for him with such a
steady hand, I really do not know what he did, nor how he forced that
safe. I understand it took him a fraction over fourteen minutes.
"Here she comes!" he breathed, and the heavy door was open, revealing
the usual interior, with ledgers, and a fairsized steel money-vault,
which also came open a moment later. Flint glanced over the contents,
and singled out from other papers two packages of letters held
together by stout elastic bands, and with pencil notations on the
corner of each envelope, showing the dates. He ran over both, held up
the smaller of the two, and I saw, with a grasp of inexpressible
relief, the handwriting of Mary Virginia.
He locked the vault, shut the heavy door of the rifled safe, and began
to gather his tools together.
"You have forgotten to put the other packages back," I reminded him. I
was in a raging fever of impatience to be gone, to fly with the
priceless packet in my hand.
"No, I'm not forgetting. I saw a couple of the names on the envelopes
and I rather think these letters will be a whole heap interesting to
look over," said he, imperturbably. "It's a hunch, parson, and I've
gotten in the habit of paying attention to hunches. I'll risk it on
these, anyhow. They're in suspicious company and I'd like to know
why." And he thrust the package into the crook of his arm, along with
the tools.
The light was carefully flashed over every inch of the space we had
traversed, to make sure that no slightest trace of our presence was
left. As we walked through Inglesby's office John Flint ironically
saluted the life-like portrait:
"You've had a ring twisted in your nose for once, old sport!" said he,
and led me into the dark hall. We moved and the same exquisite caution
we had exercised upon entering, for we couldn't afford to have Dan
Jackson's keen old ears detect footfalls overhead at that hour of the
morning. Now we were at the foot of the long stairs, and Flint had
soundlessly opened and closed the last door between us and freedom.
And now we were once more in the open air, under the blessed shadow of
the McCall trees, and walking close to their old weather-beaten fence.
The light was still shining in the bank, and I knew that that
redoubtable old rebel of a watchman was peacefully sleeping with his
gray guerilla of a marauding cat beside him. He could afford to sleep
in peace. He had not failed in his trust, for the intruders had no
designs upon the bank's gold. Questioned, he could stoutly swear that
nobody had entered the building. In proof, were not all doors locked?
Who should break into a man's office and rob his safe just to get a
package of love-letters--if Inglesby made complaint?
I remember we stood leaning against the McCall fence for a few
minutes, for my strength had of a sudden failed, my head spun like a
top, and my legs wavered under me.
"Buck up!" said Flint's voice in my ear. "It's all over, and the
baby's named for his Poppa!" His arm went about me, an arm like a
steel bar. Half led, half carried, I went staggering on beside him
like a drunken man, clutching a rosary and a packet of love-letters.
The streets were still dark and deserted, the whole town slept. But
over in the east, when one glimpsed the skies above the trees, a
nebulous gray was stealing upon the darkness; and the morning star
blazed magnificently, in a space that seemed to have been cleared for
it. Somewhere, far off, an ambitious rooster crowed to make the sun
rise.
It took us a long time to reach home. It was all of a quarter past
four when we turned into the Parish House gate, cut across the garden,
and reached Flint's rooms. Faint, trembling in every limb, I fell into
a chair, and through a mist saw him kneel and blow upon the coals of
the expiring fire, upon which he dropped a lightwood knot. A ruddy
glow went dancing up the chimney. Then he was beside me again. Very
gently he removed hat and overcoat. And then I was sitting peacefully
in the Morris chair, in my old cassock, and with my own old biretta on
my head; and there was no longer that thin buzzing, shrill and
torturing as a mosquito's, singing in my ears. At my knee stood Kerry,
with his beautiful hazel eyes full of a grave concern; and beside him,
calm and kind and matter-of-fact, the Butterfly Man himself stood
watching me with an equal regard. I rubbed my forehead. The incredible
had happened, and like all incredible things it had been almost
ridiculously simple and easy of accomplishment. Here we were, we two,
priest and naturalist, in our own workroom, with an old dog wagging
his tail beside us. Could anything be more commonplace? The last trace
of nightmare vanished, as smoke dispelled by the wind. If Mary
Virginia's letters had not been within reach of my hand I would have
sworn I was just awake out of a dream of that past hour.
"She has escaped from them, they cannot touch her, she is free!" I
exulted. "John, John, you have saved our girl! No matter what they do
to Eustis they can't drag her into the quicksands _now_."
But he went walking up and down, shoulders squared, face uplifted. One
might think that after such a night he would have been humanly tired,
but he had clean forgotten his body. His eyes shone as with a flame
lit from inward, and I think there was on him what the Irish people
call the _Aisling_, the waking vision. For presently he began to
speak, as to Somebody very near him.
"Oh, Lord God!" said the Butterfly Man, with a reverent and fierce
joy, "she's going to have her happiness now, and it wasn't holy priest
nor fine gentleman you picked out to help her toward it--it was me,
Slippy McGee, born in the streets and bred in the gutter, with the
devil knows who for his daddy and a name that's none of his own! For
that I'm Yours for keeps: _You've got me_.
"You've done all even God Almighty can do, given me more than I ever
could have asked You for--and now it's up to me to make good--and I'll
do it!"
There came to listening me something of the emotion I experienced when
I said my first Mass--as if I had been brought so close to our Father
that I could have put out my hand and touched Him. Ah! I had had a
very small part to play in this man's redemption. I knew it now, and
felt humbled and abashed, and yet grateful that even so much had been
allowed me. Not I, but Love, had transformed a sinner and an outlaw
into a great scientist and a greater lover. And I remembered Mary
Virginia's childish hand putting into his the gray-winged Catocala,
and how the little moth, raising the sad-colored wings worn to suit
his surroundings, revealed beneath that disfiguring and disguising
cloak the exquisite and flower-like loveliness of the underwings.
He paused in his swinging stride, and looked down at me a bit shyly.
"Parson--you see how it is with me?"
"I see. And I think she is the greater lady for it and you the finer
gentleman," said I stoutly. "It would honor her, if she were ten times
what she is--and she is Mary Virginia."
"She is Mary Virginia," said the Butterfly Man, "and I am--what I am.
Yet somehow I feel sure I can care for her, that I can go right on
caring for her to the end of time, without hurt to her or sorrow to
me." And after a pause, he added, deliberately:
"I found something better than a package of letters to-night, parson.
I found--_Me_."
For awhile neither of us spoke. Then he said, speculatively:
"Folks give all sorts of things to the church--dedicate them in
gratitude for favors they fancy they've received, don't they? Lamps,
and models of ships, and glass eyes and wax toes and leather hands,
and crutches and braces, and that sort of plunder? Well, I'm moved to
make a free-will offering myself. I'm going to give the church my
kit, and you can take it from me the old Lady will never get her
clamps on another set like that until Gabriel blows his trumpet in the
morning. Parson, I want you to put those tools back where you had
them, for I shall never touch them again. I couldn't. They--well,
they're sort of holy from now on. They're my IOU. Will you do it for
me?"
"Yes!" said I.
"I might have known you would!" said he, smiling. "Just one more
favor, parson--may I put her letters in her hands, myself?"
"My son, my son, who but you should do that?" I pushed the package
across the table.
"Great Scott, parson, here it is striking five o'clock, and you've
been up all night!" he exclaimed, anxiously. "Here--no more gassing.
You come lie down on my bed and snooze a bit. I'll call you in plenty
of time for mass."
I was far too spent and tired to move across the garden to the Parish
House. I suffered myself to be put to bed like a child, and had my
reward by falling almost immediately into a dreamless sleep, nor did I
stir until he called me, a couple of hours later. He himself had not
slept, but had employed the time in going through the letters open on
his table. He pointed to them now, with a grim smile.
"Parson!" said he, and his eyes glittered. "Do you know what we've
stumbled upon? Dynamite! Man, anybody holding that bunch of mail could
blow this state wide open! So much for a hunch, you see!"
"You mean--"
"I mean I've got the cream off Inglesby's most private deals, that's
what I mean! I mean I could send him and plenty of his pals to the
pen. Everybody's been saying for years that there hasn't been a rotten
deal pulled off that he didn't boss and get away with it. But nobody
could prove it. He's had the men higher-up eating out of his
hand--sort of you pat my head and I'll pat yours arrangement--and
here's the proof, in black and white. Don't you understand? Here's the
proof: these get him with the goods!
"These," he slapped a letter, "would make any Grand Jury throw fits,
make every newspaper in the state break out into headlines like a kid
with measles, and blow the lid off things in general--if they got out.
"Inglesby's going to shove Eustis under, is he? Not by a jugfull. He's
going to play he's a patent life-preserver. He's going to _be_ that
good Samaritan he's been shamming. Talk about poetic justice--this
will be like wearing shoes three sizes too small for him, with a
bunion on every toe!" And when I looked at him doubtfully, he laughed.
"You can't see how it's going to be managed? Didn't you ever hear of
the grapevine telegraph? Well then, dear George receives a grapevine
wireless bright and early to-morrow morning. A word to the wise is
sufficient."
"He will employ detectives," said I, uneasily.
The Butterfly Man looked at me quizzically.
"_With_ an eagle eye and a walrus mustache," said he, grinning. "Sure.
But if the plainclothes nose around, are they going to sherlock the
parish priest and the town bughunter? _We_ haven't got any interest in
Mr. Inglesby's private correspondence, have we? Suppose Miss Eustis's
letters are returned to her, what does that prove? Why, nothing at
all,--except that it wasn't her correspondence the fellows that
cracked that safe were after. We should worry!
"Say, though, don't you wish you could see them when they stroll down
to those beautiful offices and go for to open that nice burglar-proof
safe with the little brass flower-pot on top of it? What a joke! Holy
whiskered black cats, what a joke!"
"I'm afraid Mr. Inglesby's sense of humor isn't his strong point,"
said I. "Not that I have any sympathy for him. I think he is getting
only what he deserves."
"_Alexander the coppersmith wrought me much evil. May God requite him
according to his works!_" murmured the Butterfly Man, piously, and
chuckled. "Don't worry, parson--Alexander's due to fall sick with the
pip to-day or to-morrow. What do you bet he don't get it so bad he'll
have to pull up all his pretty plans by the roots, leave Mr. Hunter in
charge, and go off somewhere to take mudbaths for his liver? Believe
me, he'll need them! Why, the man won't be able to breathe easy any
more--he'll be expecting one in the solar plexus any minute, not
knowing any more than Adam's cat who's to hand it to him. He can't
tell who to trust and who to suspect. If you want to know just how
hard Alexander's going to be requited according to his works, take a
look at these." He pointed to the letters.
I did take a look, and I admit I was frightened. It seemed to me
highly unsafe for plain folks like us to know such things about such
people. I was amazed to the point of stupefaction at the corruption
those communications betrayed, the shameless and sordid disregard of
law and decency, the brutal and cynical indifference to public
welfare. At sight of some of the signatures my head swam--I felt
saddened, disillusioned, almost in despair for humanity. I suppose
Inglesby had thought it wiser to preserve these letters--possibly for
his own safety; but no wonder he had locked them up! I looked at the
Butterfly Man openmouthed.
"You wouldn't think folks wearing such names could be that rotten,
would you? Some of them pillars of the church, too, and married to
good women, and the fathers of nice kids! Why, I have known crooks
that the police of a dozen states were after, that wouldn't have been
caught dead on jobs like some of these. Inglesby won't know it, but he
ought to thank his stars _we've_ got his letters instead of the State
Attorney, for I shan't use them unless I have to.... Parson, you
remember a bluejay breaking up a nest on me once, and what Laurence
said when I wanted to wring the little crook's neck? That the thing
isn't to reform the jay but to keep him from doing it again? That's
the cue."
He gathered up the scattered letters, made a neat package of them, and
put it in a table drawer behind a stack of note-books. And then he
reached over and touched the other package, the letters written in
Mary Virginia's girlish hand.
"Here's her happiness--long, long years of it ahead of her," he said
soberly. "As for you, you take back those tools, and go say mass."
Outside it was broad bright day, a new beautiful day, and the breath
of the morning blew sweetly over the world. The Church was full of a
clear and early light, the young pale gold of the new Spring sun.
None of the congregation had as yet arrived. Before I went into the
sacristy to put on my vestments, I gave back into St. Stanislaus'
hands the IOU of Slippy McGee.