Already over the picked-up codfish, flapjacks, Hamburg steaks and
cognate enticements on which the Bronx and Harlem breakfasts, the news
of it had buttered the toast, flavoured the coffee, added a sweetness to
this April day and provided a cocktail to people who did not know
Paliser from the Pierrot in the moon. That he was spectacularly wealthy
was a tid-bit, that he had been killed at the Metropolitan was a
delight, the war news was nothing to the fact that the party with the
stiletto had escaped "unbeknownst." These people were unacquainted with
Paliser. But here was a young man with an opera-box of his own, and
think of that! Here was the mythological monster that the Knickerbocker
has become. Here was the heir to unearned and untold increments. These
attributes made him as delectable to the majority who did not know him,
as he had become to the privileged few who did.
Elsewhere, and particularly in and about fashion's final citadel which
the Plaza is, solemn imbeciles viewed the matter vehemently. "Young
Paliser! Why, there is no better blood in town! By Jove, I believe we
are related!"
Or else: "That's M. P.'s son, isn't it? Yes, here it is. I never met the
old cock but I heard of him long before we came East. A damned outrage,
that's what I call it."
Or again: "Dear me, what is the world coming to? What a blessing it is
we were not there. They might have come and murdered us all!"
Adjacently, in clubland, old men with one foot in the grave and the
other on Broadway, exchanged reminiscences of the nights when social New
York was a small and early family party and M. P. led the ball, and at a
pace so klinking that he danced beyond the favours of the cotillon--the
german as it, the cotillon, was then lovingly called--into assemblies,
certainly less select, but certainly, too, more gay, and had horrified
scrumptious sedateness with the uproar of his orgies.
The indicated obituaries followed. "Well, at any rate, they didn't
murder him for it." "The son now, a chip of the old block, eh?" "Nothing
of the kind, a quiet young prig." "The papers say----" "Damn the papers,
they never know anything." "You mean they don't print what they do
know." "I mean they don't give us the woman. For it was a woman. I'll
eat my hat it was a woman." "Let's have lunch instead."
Generally, for the moment, that was the verdict, one in which the police
had already collaborated. But what woman? And, assuming the woman,
whence had she come? Where had she gone?--problems, momentarily
insoluble but which investigations, then in progress, would probably
decide.
At the great white house on upper Fifth Avenue, the servants knew only
that they knew nothing. Nothing at all. Already coached, they were sure
and unshakable in their knowledge of that. A Mr. Harvey--from
Headquarters--could not budge them an inch. Not one!
The night before, at the first intelligence of it, M. P. came nearer to
giving up the ghost than is commonly advisable. Suffocation seized him.
An incubus within was pushing his life-springs out. So can emotion and
an impaired digestion affect a father. The emotion was not caused by
grief. It was fear. For weeks, for months, during the tedium and terror
of the trial, his name, Paliser, would top the page! It had topped it
before, very often, but that was years ago. Then he had not cared. Then
the wine of youth still bubbled. No, he had not cared. But that was long
ago. Since then the wine of youth had gone, spilled in those orgies
which he had survived, yet, in the survival, abandoned more and more to
solitude and making him seek, what the solitary ever do seek,
inconspicuousness. For years he had courted obscurity as imbeciles court
fame. And now!
If only the boy had had the decency to die of pneumonia!
It was then the incubus gripped him. For a second he saw the visage,
infinitely consoling, that Death can display and possibly, but for an
immediate drug, there too would have echoed the _Terra addio_!
He was then in white velvet. A preparation of menthe, dripping from a
phial, spotted it green. He did not notice. At the moment the spasm had
him. Then as that clicked and passed, he looked in the expressionless
face of the butler who had told him.
The spasm had shaken him into a chair.
The room, an oblong, was furnished after a fashion of long ago. The
daised bed was ascended by low, wide steps. Beyond stood a table of
lapis-lazuli. A mantel of the same material was surmounted by a mirror
framed in jasper. Beneath the mirror, a fire burned dimly. The lights
too were dim. They were diffused by tall wax candles that stood shaded
in high gold sticks. On the table there were three of them.
The chair was near this table, at which M. P. had been occupied very
laboriously, in doing nothing, a task that he performed in preparation
for the bed, which was always ready for him, and for sleep, which seldom
was. There he had been told. It had shaken him to his feet, shaken
apoplexy at him and shaken him back in the chair.
Now, as he looked at the servant's wooden mask, for a moment he relived
an age, not a pleasant one either and of which this blow, had he known
it, was perhaps the karma. He did not know it. He knew nothing of karma.
None the less, with that curious intuition which the great crises
induce, he too divined the woman and wished to God that he had kept his
hands off, wished that he had not interfered and told Monty to put her
in a flat and be damned to her! It was she, he could have sworn it. At
once, precisely as he wished he had let her alone, he hoped and quite as
fervently that she had covered her tracks, that there would be no trial,
nothing but inept conjectures and that forgetfulness in which all
things, good and bad, lose their way.
The futility of wishing passed. The time for action had come. He
motioned. "Is Benny here?"
"He left this noon, sir."
"Did he say anything?"
The butler did not know whether to lie or not, but seeing no personal
advantage in either course, he hedged. "Very little, sir."
That little, the old man weighed. A little is often enough. It may be
too much.
"He spoke about a girl, eh?"
"He said a lady was stopping there. Yes, sir."
"What else?"