Half an hour later found the atmosphere of the library anything but
comfortable—indeed strained almost to the breaking point. Whittaker’s
slow poison was beginning to take effect. Ignoring the ominous rolling
up of clouds, he had quietly but firmly gone ahead with the plan to read
aloud a few pages of the Diary. With malicious casualness he had
suggested the withdrawal of anyone who felt more in the mood for
billiards or bridge: “You know the billiard room, Blake. Do get up a
game if it suits you. There’s nothing particularly thrilling about an
old man mumbling over his memories of other days. I merely thought one
or two of you might prefer a moment’s pause in the day’s occupation that
I could beguile, even if I put you asleep.” But, aside from Dorn who had
excused himself directly after dinner with, “Doctors, you know,
Whittaker. Frightfully sorry. I’ll try to get back tomorrow,” there was
not one that had had the strength to keep away from the spider’s parlor.
Though for a moment it had appeared that Belknap might follow Dorn’s
example: “Come now, don’t tell me you’re off, too?” Whittaker’s tone
half-mocked, half-threatened him as he stood indecisively in the hall
toying with the door-latch. “Oh no,” Belknap had answered with impatient
asperity. “Hardly that! I have a small contribution to make to the
evening’s pleasure. It’s in the car. I’ll be back.” He was, in a jiffy,
with several bottles of what he said was ’11 champagne, and which, as
Whittaker knew, came from one of the finest cellars in New York.
But no one else turned even an attentive eye to the gift which Belknap
was arranging with exaggerated care on the tray of crystal-bright
decanters and dark-bright bottles. Curiosity, dread, and sheer
hypnotism, combined to magnetize them into a rigid ensemble about
Whittaker’s reading lamp. But it was a brittle, surface rigidity—like
the first thin ice formed over moving water. Beneath it the twisting,
roiling currents of agonized apprehension wore through and disturbed the
dangerous stillness of the room. Nadia Mdevani’s puffs at her cigarette
were too brief, and she flicked unformed ash too often. Blake in the
corner ferociously over-shuffled a pack of cards. At the piano Romany’s
fingers lacked control, and the snatches of song she attempted lost
themselves in broken pitch. But she had at least recovered from her
faintness, which she had apologetically laid to a week’s indulgence in
late hours, and to cocktails for tea at Sands Point. Crawford was
turning the leaves of _The Sportsman_, but with such erratic rapidity
that he must have been unaware of what he saw. Only Julian and Joel,
looking worlds at each other, plus suns and moons and stars, still
seemed a little stupidly blind to what was happening.
As Whittaker arranged his stage setting—chair and lamp just so, and a
pillow at his back—the ritual of after-dinner coffee proceeded with its
usual calm and efficiency. A robot maid, pretty and slim-figured in
black and white, brought the service, and John passed the cups. He then
quietly opened the windows of the terrace to the warm May night, asked
his master was there anything further, and retired.
Whittaker cleared his throat; and the sound startled the room as
thoroughly as though it had been a shot. It drew the line at
conversation and movement. Across the stillness Whittaker’s first words
assumed an enlarged importance.
“As I’ve told you, this is a day to day record of my life for the past
twelve or fifteen years.” By a motion of his hand he indicated to them a
thick, flexible, thin-paper notebook, bound in tooled suède. “Tonight I
am taking a leaf from a day two years ago, June 19, 1929. I recall the
day vividly; and I can quite imagine that Markham does. (We’ll say
Markham—the real name needn’t figure until we go into print.)
“‘Markham called me early this evening to say he must see me
immediately. I was engaged for a theatre party, and did not wish to
disappoint my hostess, but Markham was obstinate and I yielded. He lives
only a matter of minutes from Thorngate. When he appeared it was more
than obvious that something was wrong. He was pale, his eyes bloodshot,
and his voice somewhere in his shoes. It seems he is being blackmailed
on two counts, an old one and a new one; the new one being a mistress,
and therefore dangerous to his family; the old one being a strange case
of murder, and therefore more dangerous to himself. It is the murder
that I consider worth recounting.
“‘Markham is the son, only son, of old Markham who once broke the bank
at Monte Carlo. There is wildness in the family. The boy grew up
higgledy-piggledy in a part of New York that was rapidly changing from
good to bad and bad to worse. Watched with less than half an eye by a
succession of uninvestigated nurses and governesses, when they could be
afforded at all, Markham naturally and easily became a member of a boy’s
gang in the block; and this gang of children grew up to be the real
thing. He was not able to break with them, even if he had cared to do
so. They bled his father by way of him. They led him by gradual stages
into mischief, into badness and into sin. The day came when, owing one
too many grand to some card racketeers working the steamship lines to
Havana, he was ready to accept payment for murder.
“‘A jet-black night in midwinter found him entering an apparently
abandoned shack in a lonely curve of the Hackensack on the barren flats
outside Newark. Nothing for miles but snow-drifted meadows and a black
river turgidly rolling seaward.’”
“A style worthy of the American Institute,” Julian murmured to Joel,
“where vocabulary counts—I mean wordiness.”
“Hush, Julian! Your uncle’s a member.”
“That’s how I know.”
“‘The single room, into which Markham crept upward by way of a loose
floor board, reeked of stale tobacco smoke, soiled clothes, and an odd
sweet odor that he had long ago learned to recognize as opium. Knife in
hand, he settled against the wall near the locked door to await his
victim’s home-coming. There were mice about. He identified mice. And a
branch blowing against the window-pane. That was easy. But there was
another sound, persistent and regular—like, like breathing. Breathing!
Good God, it _was_ breathing. The smuggler wasn’t abroad smuggling,
according to plan. The cold sweat broke out on Markham’s palms and
forehead. Were they each crouching in the dark waiting the other’s move?
The next scuttle of a mouse shattered his flesh and bones like a blow.
He was goose-flesh from head to foot, including his scalp which pained
him with its effort to lift his hair.’”
“You see he thought his goose was cooked,” was Julian’s next aside to
Joel. Something was at last beginning to take place in Julian. Belknap
saw a little sleepy devil waking in him that might not always prove easy
to deal with.
“‘The man on the bed moved; lay still; shifted again. There was nothing
for it but to strike. He sprang and struck: and drove the little knife
up to his hand in something soft. He was saying tonight that a knife
murder is not so good for the murderer whatever it may be to the
murdered. He says the physical sensations will last him for life: the
scraping of the blade on a bone, its spongy sinking home in a vital
part, the sudden sagging of the body under one’s own tensity, and the
last gasping gurgling breath against the face. Markham had never seen
this man’s face, never would see it; but he would remember the feeling
of the unshaven chin and the small, fat body; and the smell of sweated
clothes mingling with the warm smell of fresh blood——’”
“If you don’t mind, Whittaker,” Crawford said in an inhuman voice, “I
should like a glass of water. May I ring?” He tried to rise, staggered,
and said, “Help me, Sydney.”
It seemed that Sydney had not heard him or was unable to move. She
didn’t stir, or move her eyes. But Romany, from a huddled, shivering
figure on the divan, came to life and ran to him.
“Durian, Neil, my beloved, my only love. What is he doing to you? I
can’t bear it. I won’t let him do things like this—I don’t care—”
Romany didn’t finish—Sydney had heard, and had struck Romany a blow that
threw her against the table. Nadia was laughing terribly as Blake came
across toward Whittaker with murder on his face.
“Now by all that’s holy or unholy, you have overstepped the bounds,
Bertrand Whittaker—”
Whether he ever reached Whittaker remained in doubt for at that moment
the room was plunged in total darkness. Someone screamed—a woman. There
was a scuffle and a thud. A man groaned. Belknap cried out: “Stay where
you are as you value your lives.” They heard him feeling the wall for
the switch, and then there was light.
In it Whittaker lay back half conscious in his chair, bleeding at the
forehead. The others stood in oddly arrested positions like the players
of ten-step on the count of ten. And the Diary was gone.