“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.