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.”