Persons Unknown Part 2

Now that the interest of rescue had failed, he wanted to get away from that place. He wanted to dress and go down to the river and think the whole thing over alone. He had now heard the doctor's verdict of instant death; and McGarrigle, again reminding him that he would be wanted at the inquest, made no objection to his withdrawal.

On his own curb stood a line of men, staring at the windows of 4-B as if they expected the tragedy to be reenacted for their benefit. They all turned their attention greedily to Herrick as he came up, and the nearest man said, "Have they got him?"

"Him?"

"Why, the murderer!"

"Oh!" Herrick said. Even in the crude excitement of the question the man's voice was so pleasant and his enunciation so agreeably clear that Herrick, const.i.tutionally sensitive to voices and rather weary for the sound of cultivated speech, replied familiarly, "I'm afraid, strictly speaking, that there isn't any murderer. It's supposed to be a woman."

"Indeed! Well, have they caught her?"

"They've caught no one. And, after all, there seems to be some hope that it's a suicide."

"Oh!" said the other, with a smile. "Then you found him in evening dress! I've noticed that bodies found in evening dress are always supposed to be suicides!"

The note of laughter jarred. "I see nothing remarkable," Herrick rebuked him, with considerable state, "in his having on dinner clothes."

"Nothing whatever! 'Dinner clothes'--I accept the correction. Any poor fellow having them on, a night like this, might well commit suicide!--I'm obliged to you," he nodded. And, humming, went slowly down the street.

Herrick suddenly hated him; and then he saw how sore and savage he was from the whole affair. The same automobile still waited, not far from his own door, and he longed to leap into it and send it rapid as fury through the night, leaving all this doubt and horror behind him in the cramped town. His troubled apprehension did not believe in that suicide.--What sort of a woman was she? And what deviltry or what despair had driven her to a deed like that? Where and how--in G.o.d's name, how!--had she fled? He, too, looked up at that window where he had seen the lights go out. It was brightly enough lighted, now. But this time there was no blind drawn and no shadow. The bare front of the house baulked the curiosity on fire in him. "How the devil and all did she get out?" It was more than curiosity; it was interest, a kind of personal excitement. That strange, imperial, and pa.s.sionate gesture! The woman who made it had killed that man. Of one thing he was sure. "If ever I see it again, I shall know her," he said, "among ten thousand!"

CHAPTER V

HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER

Late the next morning Herrick struggled through successive layers of consciousness to the full remembrance of last night. But now, with to-morrow's changed prospective, those events which had been his own life-and-death business, had, as it were, become historic and pa.s.sed out of his sphere; they were no longer of the first importance to him.

Inestimably more important was his appointment with Ingham. Herrick had pa.s.sed such a lonely summer that the prospect of a civilized luncheon with an eminent publisher was a very exciting business. Moreover, this was a critical period in his fortunes.

At twenty-eight years of age Bryce Herrick knew what it was to live a singularly baffled life--a life of artificial stagnation. His first twenty-two years, indeed, had been filled with an extraordinary popularity and success. In the ancient and beloved town of Brainerd, Connecticut, where he was born, it had been enough for him to be known as the son of Professor Herrick. The family had never been rich, but for generations it had been an honored part of the life of the town. It was Bryce's mother who, marrying in her girlhood a spouse of forty already largely wedded to his History of the Ancient Chaldeans and Their Relation to the Babylonians and the Ka.s.sites, brought him a little fortune; she brought, as well, the warm rich strain of mingled Irish and Southern blood which still touched the shrewdness of her son's clear glance and his boyish simplicity of manner, with something at once peppery and romantic. It was a popular combination. He grew into a tall youth with a square chin, with square white teeth and rather an aggressive nose, but, in his crinkly blue eyes, humor and kindness; with a kind of happy glow pervading all his thought and all his dealings--just as it pervaded his fresh color, his look of gay hardihood and enduring power, the ruddiness of his brown hair and his tanned skin, and of his sensitive and sanguine blood. At college he had appeared very much more than the son of an eminent man. Of that fortunate physical type which is at once large and slender--broad shouldered and deep chested, but narrow hipped, long of limb and strong and light of flank--it had surprised n.o.body when he became, as if naturally, spontaneously, a figure in athletics. What surprised people was the craftmans.h.i.+p in those articles of travel and adventure which sprang from his vacations. At twenty-two he was a reporter on the New York _Record_; soon other reporters were prophesying that rockets come down like sticks, and he was not yet twenty-three when the blow fell. Mrs. Herrick died, and it was presently found that her money had been a long time gone; mismanaged utterly by a hopeful husband. This amiable and innocent creature had been bitten, in his old age, by the madness and the vanity of speculation; he had made a score of ventures, not one of which had come to port. His health being now quite shattered, Switzerland was prescribed; there, for five years, in the country housekeeping of their straitened circ.u.mstances, his son and daughter tended him. There, during the first two years of exile, Herrick had written those short stories which had won him a distinguished reputation. No predictions had been thought too high for him; but he had never got anything together in book form, and bye-and-bye he had become altogether silent. It was all too painful, too futile, too m.u.f.fling! He seemed to be meant for but two uses: to struggle with the knotted strains of Herrick senior's business affairs and to a.s.sist with that History of the Ancient Chaldeans and Their Relation to the Babylonians and the Ka.s.sites, which was his father's engrossing, and now sole and senile, mania. His father suffered, so that the young man was the more enslaved; and made him suffer, so that he was the more anxious his sister should do no secretary work for the Chaldeans. But it was his mother's suffering he thought of now; the years in which she had put up with all this, uncomforted, and struggled to save something out of the wreck for Marion and for him, struggled to keep the shadow of it from their youth--and he had not known! In so much solitude and so much distasteful occupation, this idea flourished and struck deep. He saw his sister's life sacrificed, too; given up to household work and nursing, to exile and poverty, with lack of tenderness and with continual ailing pick-thanks; and there grew up in him a pa.s.sionate consideration for women, a romantic faith in their essential n.o.bility, a romantic devotion to their right to happiness. s.n.a.t.c.hed from all the populous clamor and dazzle of his boyhood and set down by this backwater, alone with a young girl and the Ancient Chaldeans, he grew into a very simple, lonely fellow; sometimes irascible but most profoundly gentle; a little old-fas.h.i.+oned; perhaps something of the pack-horse in his daily round; but living, mentally, in a very rosy, memory-colored vision of the great, strenuous, lost, world.

Death gave him back his life; Professor Herrick followed the Chaldeans, the Babylonians, and the Ka.s.sites; within a few months Marion was married; and Herrick, with something like Whittington's sixpence in his pocket, famished for adventure and companions.h.i.+p, with the appet.i.te of a man and the experience of a boy, started for the rainbow metropolis of his five-years' dream. In this mood he had rushed into the hot stone desert of New York in summer--a New York already changed, and which seemed to have dropped him out!

But he brought, like other young desperadoes, his first novel with him; and he had approached the junior partner of the famous old house of Ingham and Son with letters from mutual friends in Brainerd. Now, at last, within twenty-four hours after his own return from abroad, Ingham--himself scarcely a decade older than Herrick, preceding him at the same university, and with a Brainerd man for a brother-in-law,--had responded with the invitation to lunch. Yes, it was exciting enough!

Herrick looked at his watch. It was barely ten. And then he took time to remember when he had last looked at his watch in that room.

Certainly, it was rather grim! And yet, said the desperado, it wasn't going to be such a bad thing with which to command Ingham's interest at lunch and get him into a confidential humor that wouldn't be too superior. While he was attempting to inspire Ingham with a craving for his complete works, this thrilling topic would be just the thing to do away with self-consciousness. He mustn't lose faith in himself. And, before all things, he mustn't, as he had done last night, lose faith in his Heroine!

He looked across the room at her picture; got out of bed; walked over to her, and humbly saluted. Lose faith in her? "Evadne," he said, "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous--You darling!" Lose faith in _her_!

The photograph, which looked like an enlargement of a kodak, represented a very young girl, standing on a strip of beach with her back to the sea. Her sailor tie, her white dress, and the ends of her uncovered hair all seemed to flutter in the wind. Slim and tall as Diana she showed, in her whole light poise, like a daughter of the winds, and Herrick was sure that she was of a fresh loveliness, a fair skin and brown hair, with eyes cool as gray water. It was the eyes, after all, which had wholly captured his imagination. They were extraordinarily candid and wide-set; in a s.h.i.+fting world they were entirely brave. This was what touched him as dramatic in her face; she was probably in the new dignity of her first long skirts, so that all that candor and courage, all the alert quiet of those intelligent eyes were only the candor and courage of a kind of royal child. She wanted to find out about life; she longed to try everything and to face everything; but she was only a tall little girl! That was the look his Heroine must have! Thus had she come adventuring to New York with him, to seek their fortunes, and all during those dreary months of heat and dust she had borne him happy company; in the Park or in the Bowery, at Coney Island or along Fifth Avenue's deserted pomp, he had always tried to see, for the novel, how things would look to that young eagerness--no more ardent, had he but realized it, than his own!--"Evadne," said he, now, "if things look promising with Ingham this afternoon we'll take a taxi, to-night, and see the moon rise up the river." He called her Evadne when he was talking about the moon; when he required her pity because the laundress had faded his best s.h.i.+rt, he called her Sal.

A sound as of the Grubey children snuffling round his door recalled him to the ill.u.s.trious circ.u.mstance that he was by way of being a hero of a murder story. But, if he was nursing pride in that direction, it was destined to a fall. Johnnie Grubey thrust under the door something which, as he had brought it up from the mail-box in the vestibule, Johnnie announced as mail. But it was only a large, rough sc.r.a.p of paper, which astonished Herrick by turning out to be wall-paper--a ragged sample of the pale green "cartridge" variety that so largely symbolizes apartment-house refinement--and which confronted him from its smoother side with the lines, penciled in a long, pointed, graceful hand,

For the Apollo in the bath-robe! Or was it a raincoat?

But should not Apollos stay in when it rains?

It was many a day since Herrick had received a comic valentine, but all the appropriate sensations returned to him then. The hand of this neighborly jest was plainly a woman's and its slap brought a blush. He was forced to grin; but he longed to evade the solemn questioning of the Grubeys through whose domain he must presently venture to his bath and it occurred to him that the most peaceful method of clearing a road was to send out the younger generation for a plentiful supply of newspapers.

Besides, he wished very much to see the papers himself.

He distributed them freely and escaped back to his room still carrying three. When he had closed his door, the first paragraph which met his eyes was on the lower part of the sheet which he held folded in half. It began--"The body of Mr. Ingham was not found in the living-room, but--"

He flapped it over, agog for the headlines. They read:

DEATH BAFFLES POLICE.

James R. Ingham, Noted Publisher, Found Shot in Apartment--

Herrick was still standing with the paper in his hand when the second Grubey boy brought him a visiting-card. It bore the name of Hermann E.

Deutch; and scribbled beneath this in pencil was the explanatory phrase, "Superintendent, Van Dam Apartment House."

CHAPTER VI

HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR

Hermann Deutch was a shortish, middle-aged Jew, belonging to the humbler cla.s.ses and of a perfectly cheap and cheerful type. But at the present moment he was not cheerful. He showed his hara.s.sment in the drawn diffidence of his sympathetic, emotional face, and in every line of what, ten or fifteen years ago, must have been a handsome little person.

Since that period his tight black curls, receding further and further from his naturally high forehead, had grown decidedly thin, and exactly the reverse of this had happened to his figure. But he had still a pair of femininely liquid and large black eyes, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with the romance which does not characterize the cheap and cheerful of other races, and Herrick remembered him last night as very impressionably, but not basely, nervous.

He now fixed his liquid eyes upon Herrick with an anxiety which took humble but minute notes. Since the young fellow was at least half-dressed in very well-cut and well-cared-for, if not specially new, garments, it was clear to Mr. Deutch's reluctant admiration that he was thoroughly "_high-cla.s.s_!" Whatever was Mr. Deutch's apprehension, it shrank weakly back upon itself. Then he simply took his life in his hands and plunged.

"I won't keep you a minute, Mr. Herrick. But I've got a little favor I want to ask you.--You behaved simply splendid last night, Mr.

Herrick.--Well, I will, thanks,"--as he dropped into a chair. "I--I won't keep you a minute--"

"I'll be glad to do anything I can," Herrick interrupted.

The news in his paper had made him feel as if he had just been disinherited and, now that the dead man was a personality so much nearer home, his brain rang with a hundred impressions of pity and wonder and excitement. But he sympathized with poor Mr. Deutch; it could be no sinecure to be the superintendent of a murder! Then, recollecting, "What made you so certain it was suicide?" he asked suddenly.

"What else could it be? There wasn't anybody but him there."

"There was a woman there," Herrick said, "when the shot was fired."

The superintendent took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. "Well, now, Mr. Herrick, that's just what I wanted to see you about. Now please, Mr. Herrick, don't get excited and mad! All I want to say is, if there _was_ a lady there last night--but there _couldn't_ have been--well, of course, Mr. Herrick, if you say so! Why, you couldn't have seen her so very plain, now could you?"

"What are you driving at?" Herrick asked.

"Couldn't it have been a gentleman's shadow you saw, Mr. Herrick? Mr.

Ingham's shadow? Raising his pistol, maybe, with one hand--"

"While he played the piano with the other?"

"Mr. Herrick, there couldn't have been any lady there!" He bridled.

"It's against the rules--that time o' night! I wouldn't ever allow such a thing. There's never been a word against the Van Dam since I been running it. Why, Mr. Herrick, if there was to be that kind of talk, especially if she was to murder the gentleman and all like that, I'd be ruined. And so'd the house. It ain't one o' these cheap flat buildings.