Louis Bac drifted like a gray shadow through the gray streets of San
Francisco. Even the French colony, one of the most homogeneous units of
the city, knew little more of him than the community at large. He was
the son of one famous restaurateur and the grandson of another; he had
been sent to a Lycée in Paris at the age of twelve, graduated from the
University of Paris at twenty-two, and returned to San Francisco upon
the death of his father a year later. The French colony were surprised
that he did not go back to Paris after selling the restaurant--his
energetic mother had pre-deceased her husband--but buried himself in the
old Bac home behind the eucalyptus-trees on the steepest hillside of the
city; otherwise his return and himself attracted no attention whatever
until he flung his hat into the spaces of the international arena.
Both his father, Henri Bac II, and his shrewd mother, Antoinette, had
been agreed upon giving their studious ascetic little son a true
American’s chance to rise in the world, and, acting on the advice of
their chief patron and the leader of the French colony, M. César Dupont,
who offered his escort, had sent the boy to the Collège Louis le Grand.
They never saw their only child again; but although Louis had been
reticent of speech, he proved a very prodigal with his pen. As the years
passed, it became evident--the entire French colony read these
letters--that his goal was _belles lettres_ and that he was practising
on his family. Finally, after many mutations his style became so formal
and precise that M. Dupont became alarmed and, during his next visit to
Paris, invited the young man to breakfast.
Louis by this time was eighteen, of medium height, as thin as all
overworked, underfed, underoxygenated Lycée boys, with large gray eyes
that were rarely raised, a long pale face, a long thin nose, a small
thin-lipped mouth. The brow was abnormally large, the rest of the head
rather small. It was not an attractive personality, M. Dupont
reflected--he had not seen Louis for several years--but the boy carried
something uncommon in his head-piece, or he, César Dupont, fashionable
merchant and _bon viveur_, had studied the craniums of a thousand San
Francisco geniuses in vain.
He had taken his guest to the Restaurant de la Tour d’Argent, and while
the duck’s frame was being crushed he asked, abruptly:
“Have you given a thought to your future career, Louis? Of course you
know you will not be obliged to drudge, but to be a professor of French
literature is not without its _éclat_, and, I fancy, more in your line
than commerce.”
Louis’s lip curled. “I have no more intention of being a professor than
of being a merchant,” he said in his cold precise voice. “I shall
write.”
“Ah!” M. Dupont drew a sigh of relief. He had feared the boy would be
forbiddingly reticent. “I hoped as much from your letters. Your
refinement of mind and style are remarkable for a man of your years.
Shall you write plays?”
A faint color had invaded the youth’s cheeks under this considered
flattery, and when he lifted his deeply set gray eyes to M. Dupont’s it
was almost with the frankness of man to man. But he was intensely shy,
and although more at his ease with this handsome genial patron of his
family, he made his confidences without warmth.
“No. I shall write the novel. The dramatic form does not appeal to me.”
“Ah! Yes. I am not surprised. Your style is certainly more
narrative--descriptive. But to be a novelist, my son, you must have seen
a good deal of life. You must know the great world--unless--perhaps--you
contemplate writing romance?”
Again the delicate lip opposite curled, and Louis almost choked over his
morsel of duck. “Romance? No, Monsieur. I am a realist by temperament
and mental habit. Nor do I need the great world. Only one thing
interests me--crime.”
“Crime? _Mon Dieu!_” The amiable merchant almost choked in his turn,
although he savored his duck more slowly than his Lycée guest. “Crime!
But you are too young, my son, to be interested in anything so grim.
Life is to enjoy. And how can you enjoy with your mind like a morgue?”
“We are not all made to enjoy in the same fashion. I enjoy intensely
reading through old volumes of criminal records and trials--my master in
psychology has kindly arranged that I shall have access to them. And I
read with the greatest interest the details of current criminology. I
shall never care for society, for I am too timid and dislike women. But
I love the lonely grandeur of nature, and music, and great books and
pictures. Have no fear, Monsieur, my mind is not polluted. It is purely
scientific, this interest; the psychology of crime happens to appeal to
my peculiar gifts.”
“But--that is it--your gifts are literary--but yes! I do not like the
idea of wasting them on that lamentable subdivision of human society
which one ignores save when held up by a footpad. With but few
exceptions it has appealed only to the inferior order of writing talent.
Even in France the masters do not condescend. With them crime is an
incident, not a _motif_.”
“Has it occurred to you, Monsieur, that without the pioneers--”
“Oh, yes, perhaps--but you--”
“I am young and unknown? Of what author has that not at least once been
said? I purpose to write novels--not mere stories--in which character
and life shall be revealed in the light of the boldest and the subtlest
crimes--murder preferably--and executed in a form and style above
cavil--I hope! Oh, I hope! Moreover, I shall write my books in two
languages--I have taken special courses in English. In that, too, I
shall be unique.”
“Be careful of that style of yours, my son. It is growing a little too
academic, and I, a Frenchman, say that! It would do for the essay, and
win the praise of the expiring generation of critics, and the younger
but non-creative formalists, but I infer you wish to be read by the
public. You would also make money as well as achieve fame. Is it not?”
“Quite so. My father wishes that I live until I am thirty in California
and vote--I, _mon Dieu!_ But I shall follow his wishes. Then I shall buy
a château here in France, for our châteaux are incomparable in beauty.
Fame, but yes. It would make my nostrils quiver. But all that is as
nothing to the joy of writing. Then my soul almost sings. I am almost
happy, but not quite.”
He paused and his brow darkened. He raised his eyes and stared past his
anxious host, far into some invisible plane of tormentingly elusive
dreams. M. Dupont wisely remained silent, and Louis resumed, abruptly:
“When I shall write as spontaneously as the spring bubbles or the ice
melts, when my brain hardly knows what my pen is doing, when I
experience that terrific uprush that would drown the more conscious
parts of the intellect were it not for the perfect mastery of
technique--that is it, monsieur! I am still an infant with my tools. Do
not permit my style to cause you anxiety. It is merely in one stage of
experiment. I shall not write a line for publication until I am
four-and-twenty. I shall send forth my first professional novel on the
third of October--my birthday--1900. Meanwhile, I enter the university
this year, and take the course in literature. At twenty-two I shall
graduate and take my Ph.D. Then I shall serve for a year as a reporter
on a London newspaper. So shall I obtain perfect freedom with the
English language and that first-hand contact with life which I realize
is of a certain necessity. But after that no more of the world. I hate
it--realities. I wish to live in my mind, my imagination; to spend every
hour when I do not exercise for my nerves or sleep to refresh my
faculty, in writing, writing--that one day shall be creating.”
* * * * *
Louis carried out his programme to the letter, and published, in
1900--some five years before the terrific episode which it is my
melancholy privilege to chronicle--the first of those novels of crime
that commanded the sedate attention of the intellectual world. Entombed
as it were in the old house under the creaking eucalyptus-trees, with a
padlock on his gate, he had rewritten it six times from the original
draft--which, according to his method, contained nothing but the stark
outline of the plot, every detail of which was thought out during long
hours of exterior immobility. Three successive sets of servants,
mistaking this accomplishment in petrifaction for a form of insanity
which might at any moment express itself in violence, left abruptly.
Finally, old Madame Dupont established in the kitchen wing an elderly
Frenchman and his wife who had once presided over a hotel for artists,
and thereafter Louis had peace and enforced nutrition.
It was during the long months of rewriting, of developing his characters
by a subtle secondary method of his own, of profound analysis, and a
phrasing which drew heavily on the adjectival vocabulary of the critics
later on, that he really enjoyed himself. The last revision was devoted
exclusively to the study and improvement of every sentence in the long
book; and indeed there is no doubt that these months, from skeleton to
trousseau, were, with one tremendous exception, the happiest period of
this unhappy creator’s life.
This book in its cold intellectual remoteness appealed as little to
Louis when he read it in print as it did to the public, and he set
himself grimly to work to pour red blood into the veins of his
characters and give his next book the rhythm of life as well as of
style. Once more he was hailed by the intellectuals, but fell short of
popular recognition, which, belonging himself to the intellectual
democracy, he estimated far above the few who win their little fame by
writing about the creators in art, or even above the artist himself. He
was determined to enthrall, to create the perfect illusion. He scorned
to be a cult, and when he saw himself alluded to as a “high-brow-lit” he
wept. But above all he passionately wished for that intoxication in
creation in which consciousness of self was obliterated, the power, as
he expressed it, to write one book charged with the magnetism of a
burning soul. He always felt, despite his love of his work, as cold and
deliberate as a mathematician. And yet he spun his complicated plots
with the utmost facility. There was no more doubt of his talent, in the
minds of those who wrote essays of him in the reviews, than of his
psychological insight and his impeccable style.
Poor Louis! Spurred on by his anxious and experienced friend, M. César
Dupont, he made a meticulous attempt to adore a little French milliner;
but the young artist, who would have been a monk in the Middle Ages and
left to his monastery a precious heritage of illuminated manuscripts,
returned within the month to his art (with abject apologies), set his
teeth, and dissected the whole affair for his next book; presenting
Céleste, the pivot of a demoniacal crime, in all the phases, common or
uncommon, to a woman of her type. This novel, which he estimated as his
worst, achieved to his disgust a certain measure of popularity, and the
reporters hammered at his gate. San Francisco, which after its first
mild interest, had forgotten him, awoke to a sense of its own
importance, and besieged M. Dupont, whose acquaintance extended far
beyond the French colony, for introductions. But Louis would have none
of them. He went on writing his novels, taking his walks at midnight,
never leaving the house otherwise unless to visit a bookstore or sit in
the back of a box at the play, and literally knew no one in the city of
his birth but old Madame Dupont, her son, and his two old servants,
Philippe and Seraphine. It was after his seventh novel, when he felt
himself growing stale, taking less pleasure in the mere act of writing,
and losing his hold on his good friends, the intellectuals, that he took
his trouble, as was his habit, to M. César.
They dined in the old Dupont mansion on Nob Hill, built, like the
humbler home of the Bacs, in the city’s youth, and alone, as Madame was
in bed with an influenza. M. César as a rule entertained at his club,
and had a luxurious suite for bachelor purposes in a select
apartment-house kept by a compatriot, but, like a dutiful son, he made a
pretense of sharing his mother’s evening meal at six o’clock, no matter
where he might be dining at eight.
For an hour after dinner Louis paced up and down the library and
unburdened himself while M. César smoked in the depths of a chair. This
confidence, which included rage at his own limitations, disgust with the
critics who encouraged such miserable failures as he, and invective
against fate for planting the fiction imp in what should have been a
purely scientific mind and then withholding the power to electrify his
talent with genius, was made about every seven months, and M. César
always listened with deep concern and sympathy. He loved Louis, who was
sweet of nature and the most inoffensive of egoists, but was beginning
to regard him as hopeless. To-night, however, he was admitting a ray of
hope.
“Céleste was a failure,” he said, abruptly. “It is no use for you to try
that sort of thing again. But live you must. I have given up a dinner at
the club to a distinguished guest from abroad to tell you that I insist
you give yourself one more chance.”
“What is that?” Louis was alert and suspicious at once.
“Do you remember Berthe?”
“Berthe--your niece at Neuilly?”
“Ah--you do, although you would go to my brother’s house so seldom.”
“He had grown daughters of whom I was afraid, for their cruel instincts
were excited by my shyness. But Berthe was a little thing then, very
pretty, very sympathetic. I romped with her in the garden sometimes.”
“Just so. Berthe is now twenty, very handsome, very vivacious--a great
admirer of M. Louis Bac, celebrated novelist.”
The young Frenchman stared at the elderly Frenchman. “Do you wish that I
should marry her?”
“For your sake. For hers--to marry a genius whose vampire mistress is
his art--ah, well, it is the fate of woman to be sacrificed when they do
not sacrifice us. And Berthe’s would be no mean destiny. I feel
convinced that she alone could make you fall madly in love--”
“I shall never see her again. I have lost my old longing for Paris. What
difference where a failure exists and plods? Besides, I dreamed once of
returning to Paris a master, not a mere formalist who had won the
approval of antiquarians.”
“You shall meet her here.”
“Here?”
“She arrives to-morrow.”
“You have planned this, then, deliberately?”
“It is only a dream promising to come true. Not until now has my brother
relented and given his consent to Berthe’s taking the long journey. But
friends were coming.--It is fate, my son. Try to fall in love with
her--but madly! I, who have loved many times, assure you that the
intoxication which tempts lesser men to rhyme should stimulate your
great gift to its final expression.”
“But marry!” Louis was quite cold. “A wife in my house! Oh no, M. César;
I should hate it and her.”
“Not if you loved her. And Berthe has subtlety and variety.”
“And is far too good for me. I should make a detestable husband.”
“Let her make the husband.”
Once more Louis turned cold. “You desire that I shall meet her, talk to
her, cultivate her? Oh, God!”
“I mean that you shall go to my tailor to-morrow. My mother will
introduce Berthe to the Colony on Friday night. Its most distinguished
members will be present--bankers, journalists, merchants, professional
men of all sorts; young people will come in for a dance after the dinner
of twenty-four. You may run away from the dance, but at the dinner you
will sit beside Berthe.”
This time Louis was petrified. “But no! No!”
M. César rose and laid his hand solemnly on his young friend’s shoulder.
“For your art, my son, for your divine gift. For both you would lay down
your life. Is it not? Another year of this unnatural existence and you
will go sterile. And what substitute for you in the long years ahead?
Your mind needs a powerful stimulant and at once. The cup approaches
your lip. Will you drink or will you turn it upside down?”
“I’ll drink if I can,” said Louis, through his set teeth, “for what you
say is true. But I’d rather drink hemlock.”
* * * * *
Louis sat at his bedroom window, for the moon was high and the night was
clear. The city that so often was shrouded to its cobblestones in fog,
its muffled ghostly silences broken only by his creaking
eucalyptus-trees, lay below him in all its bleak gray outlines. But he
was not looking at the city, although sensible for the first time of the
vast composite presence under the ugly roofs; nor even at the
high-flung beauty of Twin Peaks; he stared instead at the cross on
Calvary, that gaunt hill that rises above the cemeteries of Lone
Mountain. The cross stood out black and austere save when a fog wraith
from the sea drifted across it. The emblem of the cross was in tune with
his mood to-night, for he felt neither romantic nor imaginative, but
pervaded with fear and melancholy. The faith in which he had been bred
as a child had long since passed, and to him the cross was merely the
symbol of crucifixion.
His eye dropped from the cross to the dark mass of the Catholic cemetery
where his parents slept. If his writing faculty should desert him, as M.
César had ruthlessly predicted, no power in either world should condemn
him to life. He would go out to Lone Mountain, shut himself in the
family vault, lie down on the stones, and either drink poison or cut his
wrists. This morbid vision had appealed to him before, but never so
insidiously as to-night; never before had his spirits remained so
persistently at zero as during the past week; never before had their
melancholy been darkened by fear, rent by panic.
In spite of his shyness and dislike of women, not only had he nerved
himself to the ordeal of meeting Berthe Dupont, but worked himself up to
a real desire to fall in love with her, to experience that tremendous
emotion from inception to crescendo and liberate the deep creative
torrents of his genius. Not for a moment did he hope that she would
marry him. On the contrary, what he particularly desired was that she
should play with him, enthrall him, transform him into a sentimental ass
and a caldron of passion, then flout him, condemn him to the fiendish
tortures of the unsatisfied lover.
Six months at his desk of carefully conserved passion and torments, and
then, immortal fame!
Louis, who was very honest and as little conceited as an author may be,
had for some time believed, with his critics and M. César, that he would
come into the full fruition of his gifts only after some great, possibly
terrific, adventure of the soul had banished forever that curious
lethargy that possessed the unexplored tracts of his genius.
Therefore had poor Louis gone to the tailor of his inexorable mentor,
and crawled up the hill on Friday night, his heart hammering, his knees
trembling, but his teeth set and his whole being a desperate hope. He
was willing to go to the stake. Through his consciousness the outlines
of another plot, subtle, intricate, vital, hinting at characters that
were personalities, but uncommonly misty and slow to cohere, were
wandering. Ordinarily his plots were as sharply outlined as a winter
tree against a frosty sky. But now! He must tear up his soul by the
roots and fill his veins with fire or this new conception would dribble
forth in an image so commonplace that he would take it out to Lone
Mountain and immure it with himself.
The Dupont house was perched high above the cut that had made a rough
hillside into a bland street for the wealthy. The last automobile was
rolling away as Louis reached the long flight of covered outer stairs
that led up from the street to the house. He walked even more slowly up
that tunnel on end, hoping the company would be in the dining-room when
he arrived and he could slink into his seat unnoticed.
The old butler, Jean-Marie, almost shoved him into the drawing-room, and
for a moment his terrors retreated before a wave of artistic pleasure
never before experienced in the house of Dupont. The heavy old mahogany
furniture, the bow-windows, even the clumsy candelabra were completely
obliterated by a thousand American Beauty roses. It was a bower of
surpassing richness and distinction for a group of women as handsome and
exquisitely dressed as Louis had ever seen in the foyer of the
opera-house in Paris.
The moment old Madame Dupont, magnificent in brocade and a new wig,
espied him, she led the way to the dining-room, before M. César could
introduce him to the eager Colony. This relieved Louis almost to the
pitch of elation, and he even exchanged a few words with his partner
after they were seated at the long table--covered with Madame’s historic
silver and crystal--the while he covertly examined the young lady on his
left. Mademoiselle Berthe had been taken in by the host and was chatting
animatedly with M. Jules Constant, a young banker, who sat opposite.
Louis observed with delight that she was more than pretty, and realized
that M. César had with purpose restrained his enthusiasm. Certainly it
gave Louis a distinct throb of satisfaction to discover for himself that
the young girl was beautiful and of no common type. She might be as
practical as most Frenchwomen, but she looked romantic, passionate,
mysterious. The heavy lids of her large brown eyes gave them depths and
smoldering fires. Her soft brown hair, dark but full of light, was
dressed close to her small proud head. She had a haughty little nose and
a red babyish mouth filled with bright even teeth. Her complexion was
olive and claret; her tall form round, flexible, carried with pride and
grace. The contrasts in that seductive face were affecting her
inflammable _vis-à-vis_ profoundly.
It was only when dinner was half over that Louis realized with a shock
which turned him as pale as his rival, M. Constant, that he felt neither
jealousy nor any other of the master passions. He had talked alternately
with Mademoiselle Berthe and the shy damsel on his right, and he found
the one as interesting as the other. He appreciated that the young lady
destined for him was intelligent, and emanated a warm magnetism;
moreover, she had both coquetry and indubitable sincerity. Every man at
the table was craning his neck, and M. Constant looked ready to fight
twelve duels.
And he, Louis Bac, felt nothing!...
* * * * *
Staring at Calvary, his mind drifted over the events of the past week.
He had seen Mademoiselle Berthe every day. On two separate occasions he
had talked with her alone in the Dupont library. He had liked and
admired her increasingly. He found her full of surprises, subtleties; it
seemed to him that just such a young woman had been roaming the dim
corridors of his brain, impatiently awaiting his call; and as a wife she
would be incomparable.
But he did not want a wife. He wanted a _grande passion_. And he
developed not a symptom. He felt not the least desire to impropriate
her. Of course there was but one explanation. He was incapable of those
profound and racking passions experienced once at least by ordinary men.
He was nothing but an intellect with a rotten spot where fiction
generated instead of those abnormal impulses that made of men so
inflicted social outlaws. Otherwise, he should be quite mad over Berthe
Dupont. Her beauty and charm were attracting attention far beyond the
French colony. It was Berthe for him or no one. And alas! it was to be
neither Berthe nor any one....
The moon flooded the sleeping city as the clocks struck one. Out of that
vast composite below, its imagination liberated in dreams, a daring idea
sprang, flew upward, darted into Louis’s relaxed brain. Its point
wedged, quivered like an arrow. Louis himself quivered, but with fright.
Of love and woman he had no personal knowledge save for his brief and
shallow episode with Céleste, but of both he had the accumulated
knowledge of the masters and the insight of genius.
It was night--a beautiful romantic night. Berthe was beautiful,
seductive, at all times; what must she not be in the abandon of sleep?
If he could steal to her chamber, gaze upon her unconscious loveliness,
was it not categorical that he should be overwhelmed like any ordinary
male? To defy her scorn for a few poignant moments, then rush forth
repulsed and quite mad, to weep upon his floor until dawn! He stared at
the boards of his ascetic chamber with fascinated eyes; ... to writhe
there, to beat the floor with his fists, to weep like a good
Frenchman.... And he knew that she had gone to bed early to-night, worn
out with much gaiety.
He ran lightly down the stairs and let himself out of the house as
silently, although his servants slept far in the rear. Even at the top
of the hill not a policeman nor a chance pedestrian was in sight. San
Francisco, he knew, had a roaring night life, but at this hour the
domestic quarters were as silent as a necropolis.
Nor did he meet any one as he walked rapidly along Taylor Street past
the dwellings of the rich to the old-fashioned row of houses perched
high above the “cut.” As he was within a foot of the Dupont mansion he
heard a taxicab in his wake, and darted within the sheltering walls of
the covered stair. The cab came to a halt before the house opposite; a
man with a black bag jumped out, and was immediately admitted.
A doctor, of course; but Louis, to his surprise, discovered that he was
experiencing something like a thrill. If seen, he certainly would be
handed over to the police. It was, therefore, a moment of real danger,
and he almost laughed aloud as he discovered himself enjoying it. Many
times he had described, with the most searching analysis, that sensation
of fear during moments of imminent detection--even that subtle thrill
along the nerves--but he was in search of an emotion that should shake
his passions loose, and he ran lightly up the stairs, dismissing even
the agreeable idea that he was also to experience the sensation of being
his own housebreaker, so to speak. When he reached the upper terrace he
took off his shoes and carried them to a little pagoda behind the house;
it was possible that he would have to make a hasty exit by way of Jones
Street. Before leaving his shelter he looked out warily; but the
neighboring houses were black, and behind the windows of the Dupont
library was a row of tall eucalyptus-trees planted as a wind-break. It
was by one of the library windows that Louis purposed to enter, for he
knew that its catch was broken; Jean-Marie’s memory was old and
intermittent.
He raised the window without difficulty and stepped into the room. It
was impenetrably dark and full of furniture. On a pedestal was a vase
that had belonged to Napoleon, wired and fastened down as an assurance
against earthquake. But Louis knew every detail of that room; he crept
down its length without encountering a chair, and opened the door.
In the hall a dim light burned. He listened intently, still with a
humorous sense that he felt as like a burglar as any he had ever
created. But he experienced no impulse to steal and complete the chain
of his sensations. His brain, which registered impressions
automatically, was quite normal.
He stole up the stair. Not a step creaked. The upper hall also was dimly
lit. He knew that Madame had given the _jeune fille_ the room next to
hers, but the connecting door was sure to be closed, for the old lady
was a light sleeper and minimized disturbance.
There lay the danger. If Madame heard the slightest sound she would ring
the bell connecting with the servants’ rooms in the mansard. He tiptoed
to her door. She was snoring gently. He walked as softly to a door some
ten feet down the hall and turned the knob. It yielded, and he entered
the room where Berthe Dupont slept. The young lady was friendly to
modern hygiene and the window stood wide open. The radiant moonlight
streamed in. Louis, his heart thumping, but his head cool and his hands
quiet, walked over to the bed. Berthe lay with her arms tossed outward,
her head thrown back, as if consciously drawing attention to the classic
outlines under the firm flesh. Her magnificent dark hair streamed over
the pillow.
It should have been an entrancing picture, but for some reason it was
not. In a moment Louis, with his inexorable eye for detail, realized the
peccancy. The young lady’s classic face was slightly swollen from
sleep, and pallid; her lips were puffed, and blew out, albeit
noiselessly, as the regular breath exhaled.
Nevertheless, it was Berthe, and she slept. This was her bedroom, her
maiden bower, inviolate by man. She was at his mercy. Why, then, did he
not feel that intoxication of the senses, that unreckoning fury of the
male, that would have favored any young blood of the French colony? He
did not. He merely gazed resentfully at that diminished beauty. His
artistic soul curled up. Far from feeling the sensations of the
inexorable lover, his mind turned black with anger both at her and at
himself. He hated her unreasonably for disappointing him, for failing to
melt the ice in his blood. Well, he had seen the last of her. To-morrow
he would shut himself up once more and by a supreme effort of will
compel his brain to yield up its skulking treasures.
He turned to leave the room, then shrugged his shoulders and approached
the bed, this time more stealthily. Why not give her a fright? That
would be something to the credit side of this fiasco, which, he
reflected with disgust, involved an insult to the best of his friends.
He would make her believe she was being murdered, then get out while she
was still too terrified and breathless to cry for help.
His first idea was to press his hands about her throat and choke her
gently, not even enough to leave a mark, but quite sufficient to make
her kick and writhe with terror. But in that case she would see him--he
had not even worn his hat. He picked up a pillow she had tossed to the
floor and pressed it against her face. She made a sudden downward
movement, gurgling. He pressed more firmly, his eye measuring the
distance to the door. But the gurgle affected him oddly. He desired to
stop it.
Suddenly he knew that she was awake. She not only attempted to leap
upward, but her strong hands clutched the pillow frantically. He had not
thought of her arms, of those strong shapely hands he had admired. With
a quick catlike leap he was on her chest, his knees hard against her
lungs; he caught her hands in one of his, pressing his other arm along
that portion of the pillow that covered her nose and mouth. The blood
was running swiftly through his veins. His head was light and full of
pleasant noises. Suddenly he realized that the tense strong young body
of the girl was relaxing, and he felt a joy so fierce, so profound, so
complete, that he could have shouted aloud a welcome to his liberated
soul and passions as they tore through those ice barriers at last and
found their transports in this sublime act of taking life.
For Louis had forgotten his original intention merely to terrify. The
literary cultures in his brain had suddenly become personal and
imperative. He was as ruthless as man ever is when supreme desire and
opportunity coincide, whether the lust be for woman or the enemy on the
battle-field. He meant to kill Berthe Dupont and gratify the clamoring
male within him to the full. This was his moment. He was no assassin by
natural inclination, and but for this providential set of conditions
would have gone to his grave a little bourgeois, a literary machine with
as frail a hold on his talents as a singer on a voice that had never
been placed.
The body lay limp and flabby at last. He was about to remove the pillow,
but his artistic soul uncurled itself and made indignant protest. He
lifted the clammy hand and felt the pulse. It was still. So was the
heart to which he laid his ear briefly.
Although there was still that ecstatic riot in his veins, his brain was
by no means confused, and prompted his subsequent acts as coherently as
if he were at his desk, pen in hand. He listened at Madame’s door. She
still slept rhythmically. He opened the drawers of the bureau and
chiffonnier and strewed the contents about the room. In a compartment of
the desk he found a loose pile of gold and notes. He pocketed the gold,
leaving the drawer open. He found Berthe’s jewel-box in another drawer,
wrenched a few diamonds from their setting and threw a brooch out of the
window.
As he was about to leave the room he felt a sudden and different impulse
toward Madame’s door. But he was above all things an artist. Why repeat
a great experience with possibly failing ardors? And in satiety lay the
terrible danger of finding himself at his desk driving a pen heavy with
reaction that should be tipped with fire.
He returned through the silent house and out of it as noiselessly as he
had come. In the pagoda he tied his shoes properly lest the dragging
laces impede his progress or attract attention.
And then he heard some one coming stealthily up the stairs from the
street. A policeman, of course! In an instant he had darted through the
tradesman’s entrance in the back fence, down a narrow alley, and was
peering out into Jones Street. It was deserted.
The fog had rushed in from the Pacific. He encountered no one on his
return home. The windows of his own house were still black. He
stealthily replaced the chain insisted upon by his servants, then lit
the gas in his library and almost flew to his desk. Eight hours later he
was still there, and his old servants, weeping and shaking, gave up
trying to make him listen. During the next three months, indeed, he
might have been isolated on the highest peak of the Sierras.
* * * * *
Louis, after the twenty-four hours of deep recuperative sleep that
always followed the finish of a book, awoke to a familiar chorus: the
creaking of his eucalyptus-trees, the fog-horn of Sausalito, the
measured drip of the fog on his old-fashioned window-panes. But he
returned to his personal life with something more than the usual
reaction after a long period in the world of imagination; his depression
was so great that the divine happiness of the past three months was
blotted from his memory.
Then, not slowly, but with frightful abruptness, he understood. It was
not that he had forgotten the act of smothering Berthe Dupont while
writing under its inspiration, but that realities, himself, were for the
time non-existent. Now, in the deep depression of his nerve centers
following that long orgy of creation, he felt as if he were falling down
through an abyss of horror without hope and without end. And while he
experienced no regret for his act, since it had given the world a
masterpiece, nor any that he never should see the beautiful girl again,
he was filled with an emotional pity for her that surprised himself. But
then he was an artist, and he owed her so much!
A moment later and he nearly shrieked aloud. There was a heavy tread on
the stair. It was portentously slow and deliberate.... Why had he not
been suspected before this?... Had M. César used his influence?... He,
too, was an artist in his way.... He cowered under the bedclothes....
The door opened. He heard the rattle of dishes. Seraphine never allowed
him to sleep more than twenty-four hours without nourishment.
As he sat up in bed he smiled wanly upon his devoted servitor and
smoothed his hair. “Good morning, _ma vieille_. Or is it afternoon? It
is good to return to that rational condition which enables me to
appreciate your excellent cooking.”
Seraphine’s gnarled old face grinned. “Ah, Monsieur, it is good to see
you no worse. But you are very pale and thin, alas! Although how, then,
in the name of all the saints, should you not be?”
Louis poured out the coffee with a steady hand. “Don’t run away,” he
commanded. “Tell me the news. How is M. César? And Madame Dupont? And
the charming Mademoiselle Berthe? Name of a name! but I have not
remembered their existence since the day I began my book.”
“Oh, Monsieur! But O God!” She was about to squeeze a tear from her aged
ducts and rock her body, when the gossip in her lively old mind gave a
sniff of disdain and quenched the attempt at retrospective grief.
“I--I--stupid old woman that I am--I had forgotten that you knew
nothing--”
“Knew nothing?” Louis set down his cup. “Nothing has happened to M.
César? Tell me at once!”
“Oh, not M. César, _grâce à Dieu_! But Mademoiselle! Oh, Monsieur!
_Quelle horreur!_”
“Did she die, that charming young lady? She seemed a marvel of health.”
Louis loosened the soft collar of his night-gown, but his tones merely
betrayed a proper concern.
“_Dieu! Dieu!_ If that were all! She was assassinated, that beautiful
young girl, just from Paris, and of an innocence, an excellence, a
respectability! And by a miserable villain who had seen her take money
from the bank that day and got in by the window that old fool of a
Jean-Marie had dared to neglect. And with a pillow!” The voluble details
convinced Louis that suspicion had not brushed him in passing.
“And the assassin?” he demanded when Seraphine paused for breath. “Whom
do they suspect?”
“Suspect? But they caught him red-handed, the foul fiend. For that we
thank the good God.”
“Caught him! Do you mean as he was in the act of smothering poor
Mademoiselle Berthe?”
“But no, Monsieur. He already had made his way down the stairs and out
of the house, _enfin_! But a policeman was in the garden waiting for
him. He had been told by some one who had seen the wretch sneak up the
covered way. But not too soon, alas! The assassin denied all, of a
certainty. He vowed he had been so terrified at the sight of the young
lady murdered in her bed that he ran away at once. But, oh! of a greater
certainty, no one believed him. No, not one!”
“But it well could have been. Remember that I have written stories to
prove the criminal folly of condemning on circumstantial evidence
alone.”
“Ah, yes, Monsieur, that is all very well in stories. But you see this
was life, and the man was caught by a real policeman.”
“When is the man to be tried?”
“Tried? The man has been tried and hanged, Monsieur.”
“What!”
“But yes, Monsieur. Sometimes a murderer is hanged in San Francisco, and
this was a _misérable_, a tramp, with no money or friends to make
delay--_grâce à Dieu_! But you are white as death, Monsieur. Who am I to
tell you this horrible story when you have just come back from the dead,
as it were--”
“It is true that I am overcome. But arrange my bath. I will dress and go
to M. César. Oh, my God!”
“But yes, Monsieur.”
For a few moments Louis hoped he was dead, that his ice-cold body was
yielding up his agonized spirit. He made a desperate effort to rouse the
sleeping artist and summon him to the rescue, but without avail; the man
was left alone to face the fact that he was a murderer who had taken not
one life, but two. And of the two he regretted the friendless burglar
the more poignantly.
The fundamental moral questions had never held debate in his highly
specialized brain. He had been brought up respectably and had led so
impersonal a life that he had obeyed the laws of society automatically.
But in this hour of awful revelation, while the artist in him slept the
sleep of the dead, he was merely the son of a long line of excellent
bourgeois ancestors and could have spat upon himself as a pariah dog.
But in time he got up, bathed, dressed. He even paid his customary visit
to the barber. Then he turned his steps toward M. César.
Madame Dupont had gone to Santa Barbara to recuperate after the severe
shock to her nerves. M. César, unless dining out, would be at his club.
It was eight o’clock.
“Mr. Dupont,” he was told, was in the dining-room. Louis gave orders
not to disturb him, and was shown into the library. A bright fire
burned. He was very cold. He sank limply into a deep chair beside it and
dropped his chin on his chest. His mind was too dull for thought, but
fully made up.
He was roused by a firm grip on his shoulder, and started up to meet his
old friend’s tired but kindly eyes.
“But how is this?” cried M. Dupont, in genuine surprise. “It cannot be
that you have finished the great work in three months? I did not expect
to see you for another two. But of a certainty you write with more and
more facility--”
“I wish to see you alone. I have something horrible to say.”
“Come up-stairs. My chambers are being done over and I am staying here.”
M. Dupont, who had given the young author a keen, appraising glance,
spoke soothingly and drew a trembling arm through his own. “_Mon Dieu_,
Louis, but you are thin! How long do you fancy you can keep this up? I
feared for your gifts. Now I fear for something more precious still. You
look on the verge of collapse.”
“It does not matter. Take me quickly to your room.”
M. Dupont, who never hurried, and always carried his portly form with a
certain stateliness, led Louis out of the library and up one flight of
the broad staircase to his temporary quarters. Already, Louis
automatically noted, his club bedroom had the intimate and sybaritic
look of his famous apartment. He had brought to it silver and crystal
for his bureau and little buffet, framed photographs of beautiful women,
a Meissonier, and several easy-chairs.
He pushed Louis into the deepest of the chairs, poured out a stiff
whisky-and-soda, and stood over his guest until the glass was empty.
Then he lighted his second after-dinner cigar and settled himself with
the first sensation of anticipatory humor he had felt for many weeks.
Louis always interested him and not infrequently amused him, with no
effort on the part of that most unhumorous mind.
Louis lay back in his chair for a moment, responding to the glow of the
spirits. He was still very cold.
“Now, my son, what is it? You may or may not have heard of the terrible
tragedy that has devastated my home, but that can wait--”
“Oh no, Monsieur, it is not to wait! It is of that I have come to
speak.”
“But, of course, old Seraphine would have told you the moment you would
listen. It is like you to come at once, although God knows I should have
been grateful for your sympathy during that terrible time--”
“Oh, Monsieur! I cannot stand it!” Louis sprang to his feet and strode
about the room. “It is something more awful still that I have come to
tell you. How am I to do it? You, who have always been so kind! My only
friend! My God, what a return! But of that I never thought. I was
obsessed. It was an inhibition.”
“Dear Louis! Come to the point. Are you quoting from your new book--”
“M. César, you do not know what you are dodging! I will try to put my
confession into a few words. It was I--I--Louis Bac, who--who--killed
Mademoiselle Berthe. There! It is said!”
“My poor boy!” M. Dupont rose and poured out another whiskey-and-soda.
“Drink this and I will put you to bed in a room close by--drunk, _hein!_
for the first time in your life.”
But Louis shook his head. Then he turned upon his friend eyes so
beseeching and so abject that the ready tears rose to the eyes of the
elderly Frenchman.
“When did Seraphine tell you this dreadful thing?”
“An hour or two ago.”
“Just after you had awakened from your long sleep?”
Louis nodded.
“No wonder your insatiable faculty immediately began on another! God
knows it is not a subject for jest, but I cannot lose you, too. You will
go to bed now--”
“Oh, Monsieur, you must believe me! I tell you I smothered Mademoiselle
Berthe with a pillow--”
“Tut! tut! That was all in the papers. I can see old Seraphine’s
ghoulish delight in recreating that grisly scene. And she told you, of
course, that the drawers were open, the contents strewn about--”
“No; or if she did I have forgotten. God! how the moonlight streamed
in!”
He flung off M. César’s hand, and almost ran about the room while his
uneasy host felt of his biceps.
“Will you not believe me?” shrieked Louis.
“Perhaps, dear boy, when you have slept on it--”
“Oh, don’t talk as if you thought me insane. If you refuse to believe me
I shall go from here and give myself up. I intend to do that anyhow, but
I wished to confess to you first. That was your right.”
“Do you know what would happen if you went to a police station and
denounced yourself? You would first be laughed at and then, if you
persisted, sent to a lunatic asylum. It is well you came to me first.
Why, the murderer has been hanged. The state would refuse to reopen the
case--”
“Surely not!”
“Surely yes.”
“Then it is between you and me?”
“And a doctor if you do not go to bed at once.”
“Oh, but you must believe in me!” Another memory flashed into his
stimulated mind, and he confronted M. César with an air of triumph. “The
man denied it, did he not? He said he went into the house to steal and
found Berthe murdered, and fled. Is it not so?”
“Naturally.”
“Now attend. How do you account for the fact that they found nothing on
him--neither the missing gold nor the diamonds wrenched from the
bracelet?”
“He had an accomplice, of course. He stood under the window while the
man, after he murdered Berthe, dropped the loot out of the window. A
brooch was found on the grass. The rear gate was open.”
“Ah no, Monsieur. I flung that brooch out of the window. I have that
gold, those diamonds in my desk at home. Come with me.”
For a moment M. César turned gray and the shoulders that had supported a
musket so gallantly in 1870 sagged as if old age had suddenly made them
its perch. But he shook himself angrily erect. Did he not know Louis and
his delusions? Was the poor boy ever actually on the mortal plane? Had
not he himself, twice summoned by Seraphine, poured scalding coffee down
his throat? Undoubtedly he had loved Berthe and been inspired at last,
for during the first hours of his own grief and horror he had dared to
intrude upon the high priest at his altar, and met the unseeing eyes of
a genius in ecstasy. No wonder he was nearly mad with grief now.
There was nothing but to humor him. Once more he took his arm, and led
him out into the street. Slowly the two men climbed the hills through
the fog; for one, though gallant, was no longer young, and the other,
although tragically young, was very weak. When they reached the foot of
the steep incline which led up to the old Bac mansion, M. Dupont
cunningly would have passed on, but Louis swung about peremptorily, and
the philosophical old boulevardier, who cared for no further argument or
confiscation of his precious evening hours, shrugged his shoulders and
followed his erratic young friend up and into the house.
The economical Seraphine never left a light burning in the hall. Louis
struck a match and led the way into the old double parlors he used as
his study, and lit a gas-jet. M. César sat down on one of the horsehair
chairs and opened his cigar-case.
“_Mon Dieu!_” he cried. “What a way to live in this amiable world.
Fireless; dank; chairs stuffed with rocks. No wonder you look as if you
had been in cold storage.”
“Oh, do not trouble yourself to light a cigar, Monsieur. It will go out,
I assure you.”
He pulled open a drawer of his desk and pointed to a pile of loose gold
and half a dozen diamonds of fair size.
“My God!”
M. César experienced an awful feeling of disintegration. The cigar fell
from his relaxed hand and he sagged as far back in the chair as its
uncompromising back would permit. He stared at the contents of the
drawer throughout a long moment while he shivered with the impression
that the waters of death were rising in that bleak and horribly silent
room. But at the end of those sixty indelible seconds he sat very erect
and the angry color rushed to his face.
“No!” he exclaimed. “That is not evidence. I am quite unconvinced. I
have not the least idea how much gold Berthe had in her desk, and one
gold piece is like another. I am a judge of diamonds, for I, alas! have
bought many; but diamonds of the same size and water are as hard to
identify. Those, no doubt, were your mother’s.”
“My mother had no diamonds. And what do you suppose I do with diamonds
in my desk?”
“Properties, no doubt. How do I know that you have not in another drawer
burglars’ kits and tools, and all the other instruments of destruction
with which your characters celebrate themselves? Those diamonds were
larger than any poor Berthe possessed.”
“They may have looked small in the heavy _art nouveau_ setting. I
noticed the bracelet the night of the dinner.”
“I never saw it until I saw it in ruins. Let me see those stones.”
Louis gathered them up and poured them into M. César’s steady hand. The
old Frenchman felt of them, held them up to the light, flung them back
contemptuously into the drawer. “Paste! I thought as much. For why
should you buy real diamonds? As for Berthe--what few stones the poor
child had were genuine. She could neither afford stones of that size nor
would she condescend to wear paste.”
“Do you mean to say you will not believe me?” Louis looked sharply at M.
César.
It was quite natural that this amiable gentleman should not choose to
believe he had blindly nourished a viper. And not, perhaps, motived by
pride and affection alone. He was kind and charitable and a keen man of
business, but pleasure was his god. No man had extracted more juice from
the sweet apple of life than he, tasted less of its ashes. It was quite
in keeping that he should refuse to have his pleasant pastures sown with
horrors a second time.
M. Dupont rose. “I shall send you a sleeping-powder from the chemist’s.
You will wake without delusions. To-morrow you will take the
eleven-thirty train for Santa Barbara, spend a month in my mother’s
charming home at Montecito, and forget that you are a poor genius
subject to plots at the wrong time. That, or a sanatorium. Do you
comprehend, my friend?”
Louis turned away with a hopeless gesture. “Oh, very well. Have your own
way.”
“And you will be ready when I call for you at ten minutes past eleven?”
“If I am awake.”
“I shall go out the back way and tell Seraphine to awaken you. Now I
must leave you, as I have kept a very charming person waiting too long
already.”
“Good night, Monsieur. I can tell Seraphine myself.”
“Very well. I trust you to do so.” Louis accompanied his guest with
extreme courtesy to the door. On the threshold M. César paused and
looked back into the dark house with a shudder. “_Ciel_, but it is a
tomb! I cannot take you with me this evening, but you can go to the club
and sleep there.”
“Many thanks, Monsieur, but this house is not a tomb to me. It is my
home.”
“True. A thousand pardons. _Au revoir, mon fils._”
* * * * *
It was two o’clock in the morning when Louis laid down his pen. He had
confessed in minute detail to the killing of Berthe Dupont, entering
into an elaborate and brilliant analysis of the primary causes, the
successive phases of a more extended psychological process than he had
realized at the time, the final impulse, and, as far as possible, the
pathological condition of his brain during the act and the minor acts
that followed. He added that while he found it impossible to feel
remorse in the common sense, as through this abominable crime he had
achieved the passionate ambition and desire of his life and a period of
indescribable joy, he felt that as a member of society, however
indifferent, it was now his duty to make atonement. As M. Dupont had
convinced him that his story would not be believed, that, in fact, the
authorities would incarcerate him in a lunatic asylum if he persisted in
declaring his guilt, he had determined to act for himself.
He made his confession, he further added, not to clear the name of the
poor derelict who had paid the penalty for a crime of which he was
innocent, but in the interest of science, which would welcome this
voluntary revelation of creative psychology. He believed that other
serious writers of fiction, those illustrious men who had written to him
with a spontaneous sense of brotherhood, would understand and exonerate.
He had cast his soul and his body on the altar of art, and no man had
ever done more.
He had written the confession in French and English. He addressed one
manuscript to the leading morning newspaper of San Francisco, the other
to the literary critic of a great journal in Paris. Then he took a large
key from a drawer of his desk and left the house. He dropped the two
packages in a mail-box at the foot of the hill, and waited long and
wearily for a car. They were infrequent at this hour, but he felt too
tired to walk to the outskirts of the city. The night was chill and the
fog was dense, but when the car finally came along he took a seat on the
front of the dummy, for he dreaded the lights within, or meeting some
one, perhaps, who would recognize and speak to him.
When he reached the end of the line he was shivering, and involuntarily
he pulled his coat-collar about his ears and thrust his hands into his
pockets as he walked rapidly up the hill to the Catholic cemetery.
He knew all the cemeteries on Lone Mountain well, for he often walked
there, reading the names on the shafts and mausoleums and reconstructing
the history of early San Francisco, of which the dust below had been so
fiery an impulse. Henri Bac I. had built a mausoleum here, too, for he
felt that as a pioneer he should have a permanent resting-place among
the dead who had made history. He had, indeed, been a member of the two
great Vigilance Committees, had played his part on more than one
occasion as an active citizen who could do somewhat more for the
swaddling city than teach its adventurous spirits how to distinguish
between appetite and relish.
Louis, who had always been a dutiful son, had come out here every Sunday
in all weathers and placed a wreath on the little altar in the dim
interior of the vault, knelt automatically for a moment beneath the
shelves behind which his parents were sealed.
He unlocked the heavy door; then, as it swung slowly inward, he turned
and glanced down over the sleeping city he had loved in his own
impersonal fashion. The fog moved like the tides of the sea whose boom
came faintly to him. Here and there a shaft from an arc-light shone
faintly through, but for the most part San Francisco was the black
depths of a ghostly inland sea.
Above him the night was clear. The cross on Calvary stood out like ebony
against the glittering sky, a gay and spangled sky as if all the great
planets and all the little courtesan stars up there were ready for a
night of carnival and laughing at gloomy old Earth.
For a moment Louis hesitated. He was a Catholic by training, and to
certain crimes the Church is merciless. But he reasoned that he no more
had the right to call himself a Catholic than to persist as a mortal. He
went into the vault and swung the heavy door behind him. It clanged
faintly, but there was no one to hear.