Early Short Stories Vol. 1

by Edith Wharton

  Mr. Hewson was a slight sallow nondescript man of about fifty—the kind of man of whom one is sure to see a specimen in any crowd. “Just the type of the successful detective,” Granice reflected as he shook hands with his visitor.

  And it was in that character that Mr. Hewson briefly introduced himself. He had been sent by the District Attorney to have “a quiet talk” with Mr. Granice—to ask him to repeat the statement he had made about the Lenman murder.

  His manner was so quiet, so reasonable and receptive, that Granice’s self-confidence returned. Here was a sensible man—a man who knew his business—it would be easy enough to make HIM see through that ridiculous alibi! Granice offered Mr. Hewson a cigar, and lighting one himself—to prove his coolness—began again to tell his story.

  He was conscious, as he proceeded, of telling it better than ever before. Practice helped, no doubt; and his listener’s detached, impartial attitude helped still more. He could see that Hewson, at least, had not decided in advance to disbelieve him, and the sense of being trusted made him more lucid and more consecutive. Yes, this time his words would certainly carry conviction…

  V

  Despairingly, Granice gazed up and down the shabby street. Beside him stood a young man with bright prominent eyes, a smooth but not too smoothly-shaven face, and an Irish smile. The young man’s nimble glance followed Granice’s.

  “Sure of the number, are you?” he asked briskly.

  “Oh, yes—it was 104.”

  “Well, then, the new building has swallowed it up—that’s certain.”

  He tilted his head back and surveyed the half-finished front of a brick and limestone flat-house that reared its flimsy elegance above a row of tottering tenements and stables.

  “Dead sure?” he repeated.

  “Yes,” said Granice, discouraged. “And even if I hadn’t been, I know the garage was just opposite Leffler’s over there.” He pointed across the street to a tumble-down stable with a blotched sign on which the words “Livery and Boarding” were still faintly discernible.

  The young man dashed across to the opposite pavement. “Well, that’s something—may get a clue there. Leffler’s—same name there, anyhow. You remember that name?”

  “Yes—distinctly.”

  Granice had felt a return of confidence since he had enlisted the interest of the Explorer’s “smartest” reporter. If there were moments when he hardly believed his own story, there were others when it seemed impossible that every one should not believe it; and young Peter McCarren, peering, listening, questioning, jotting down notes, inspired him with an exquisite sense of security. McCarren had fastened on the case at once, “like a leech,” as he phrased it—jumped at it, thrilled to it, and settled down to “draw the last drop of fact from it, and had not let go till he had.” No one else had treated Granice in that way—even Allonby’s detective had not taken a single note. And though a week had elapsed since the visit of that authorized official, nothing had been heard from the District Attorney’s office: Allonby had apparently dropped the matter again. But McCarren wasn’t going to drop it—not he! He positively hung on Granice’s footsteps. They had spent the greater part of the previous day together, and now they were off again, running down clues.

  But at Leffler’s they got none, after all. Leffler’s was no longer a stable. It was condemned to demolition, and in the respite between sentence and execution it had become a vague place of storage, a hospital for broken-down carriages and carts, presided over by a blear-eyed old woman who knew nothing of Flood’s garage across the way—did not even remember what had stood there before the new flat-house began to rise.

  “Well—we may run Leffler down somewhere; I’ve seen harder jobs done,” said McCarren, cheerfully noting down the name.

  As they walked back toward Sixth Avenue he added, in a less sanguine tone: “I’d undertake now to put the thing through if you could only put me on the track of that cyanide.”

  Granice’s heart sank. Yes—there was the weak spot; he had felt it from the first! But he still hoped to convince McCarren that his case was strong enough without it; and he urged the reporter to come back to his rooms and sum up the facts with him again.

  “Sorry, Mr. Granice, but I’m due at the office now. Besides, it’d be no use till I get some fresh stuff to work on. Suppose I call you up tomorrow or next day?”

  He plunged into a trolley and left Granice gazing desolately after him.

  Two days later he reappeared at the apartment, a shade less jaunty in demeanor.

  “Well, Mr. Granice, the stars in their courses are against you, as the bard says. Can’t get a trace of Flood, or of Leffler either. And you say you bought the motor through Flood, and sold it through him, too?”

  “Yes,” said Granice wearily.

  “Who bought it, do you know?”

  Granice wrinkled his brows. “Why, Flood—yes, Flood himself. I sold it back to him three months later.”

  “Flood? The devil! And I’ve ransacked the town for Flood. That kind of business disappears as if the earth had swallowed it.”

  Granice, discouraged, kept silence.

  “That brings us back to the poison,” McCarren continued, his notebook out. “Just go over that again, will you?”

  And Granice went over it again. It had all been so simple at the time—and he had been so clever in covering up his traces! As soon as he decided on poison he looked about for an acquaintance who manufactured chemicals; and there was Jim Dawes, a Harvard classmate, in the dyeing business—just the man. But at the last moment it occurred to him that suspicion might turn toward so obvious an opportunity, and he decided on a more tortuous course. Another friend, Carrick Venn, a student of medicine whom irremediable ill-health had kept from the practice of his profession, amused his leisure with experiments in physics, for the exercise of which he had set up a simple laboratory. Granice had the habit of dropping in to smoke a cigar with him on Sunday afternoons, and the friends generally sat in Venn’s work-shop, at the back of the old family house in Stuyvesant Square. Off this work-shop was the cupboard of supplies, with its row of deadly bottles. Carrick Venn was an original, a man of restless curious tastes, and his place, on a Sunday, was often full of visitors: a cheerful crowd of journalists, scribblers, painters, experimenters in divers forms of expression. Coming and going among so many, it was easy enough to pass unperceived; and one afternoon Granice, arriving before Venn had returned home, found himself alone in the work-shop, and quickly slipping into the cupboard, transferred the drug to his pocket.

  But that had happened ten years ago; and Venn, poor fellow, was long since dead of his dragging ailment. His old father was dead, too, the house in Stuyvesant Square had been turned into a boarding-house, and the shifting life of New York had passed its rapid sponge over every trace of their obscure little history. Even the optimistic McCarren seemed to acknowledge the hopelessness of seeking for proof in that direction.

  “And there’s the third door slammed in our faces.” He shut his notebook, and throwing back his head, rested his bright inquisitive eyes on Granice’s furrowed face.

  “Look here, Mr. Granice—you see the weak spot, don’t you?”

  The other made a despairing motion. “I see so many!”

  “Yes: but the one that weakens all the others. Why the deuce do you want this thing known? Why do you want to put your head into the noose?”

  Granice looked at him hopelessly, trying to take the measure of his quick light irreverent mind. No one so full of a cheerful animal life would believe in the craving for death as a sufficient motive; and Granice racked his brain for one more convincing. But suddenly he saw the reporter’s face soften, and melt to a naive sentimentalism.

  “Mr. Granice—has the memory of it always haunted you?”

  Granice stared a moment, and then leapt at the opening. “That’s it—the memory of it… always…”

  McCarren nodded vehemently. “Dogged your steps, eh? Wouldn’t let you sleep? The ti
me came when you HAD to make a clean breast of it?”

  “I had to. Can’t you understand?”

  The reporter struck his fist on the table. “God, sir! I don’t suppose there’s a human being with a drop of warm blood in him that can’t picture the deadly horrors of remorse—”

  The Celtic imagination was aflame, and Granice mutely thanked him for the word. What neither Ascham nor Denver would accept as a conceivable motive the Irish reporter seized on as the most adequate; and, as he said, once one could find a convincing motive, the difficulties of the case became so many incentives to effort.

  “Remorse—REMORSE,” he repeated, rolling the word under his tongue with an accent that was a clue to the psychology of the popular drama; and Granice, perversely, said to himself: “If I could only have struck that note I should have been running in six theatres at once.”

  He saw that from that moment McCarren’s professional zeal would be fanned by emotional curiosity; and he profited by the fact to propose that they should dine together, and go on afterward to some music-hall or theatre. It was becoming necessary to Granice to feel himself an object of pre-occupation, to find himself in another mind. He took a kind of gray penumbral pleasure in riveting McCarren’s attention on his case; and to feign the grimaces of moral anguish became a passionately engrossing game. He had not entered a theatre for months; but he sat out the meaningless performance in rigid tolerance, sustained by the sense of the reporter’s observation.

  Between the acts, McCarren amused him with anecdotes about the audience: he knew every one by sight, and could lift the curtain from every physiognomy. Granice listened indulgently. He had lost all interest in his kind, but he knew that he was himself the real centre of McCarren’s attention, and that every word the latter spoke had an indirect bearing on his own problem.

  “See that fellow over there—the little dried-up man in the third row, pulling his moustache? HIS memoirs would be worth publishing,” McCarren said suddenly in the last entr’acte.

  Granice, following his glance, recognized the detective from Allonby’s office. For a moment he had the thrilling sense that he was being shadowed.

  “Caesar, if HE could talk—!” McCarren continued. “Know who he is, of course? Dr. John B. Stell, the biggest alienist in the country—”

  Granice, with a start, bent again between the heads in front of him. “THAT man—the fourth from the aisle? You’re mistaken. That’s not Dr. Stell.”

  McCarren laughed. “Well, I guess I’ve been in court enough to know Stell when I see him. He testifies in nearly all the big cases where they plead insanity.”

  A cold shiver ran down Granice’s spine, but he repeated obstinately: “That’s not Dr. Stell.”

  “Not Stell? Why, man, I KNOW him. Look—here he comes. If it isn’t Stell, he won’t speak to me.”

  The little dried-up man was moving slowly up the aisle. As he neared McCarren he made a slight gesture of recognition.

  “How’do, Doctor Stell? Pretty slim show, ain’t it?” the reporter cheerfully flung out at him. And Mr. J. B. Hewson, with a nod of amicable assent, passed on.

  Granice sat benumbed. He knew he had not been mistaken—the man who had just passed was the same man whom Allonby had sent to see him: a physician disguised as a detective. Allonby, then, had thought him insane, like the others—had regarded his confession as the maundering of a maniac. The discovery froze Granice with horror—he seemed to see the mad-house gaping for him.

  “Isn’t there a man a good deal like him—a detective named J. B. Hewson?”

  But he knew in advance what McCarren’s answer would be. “Hewson? J. B. Hewson? Never heard of him. But that was J. B. Stell fast enough—I guess he can be trusted to know himself, and you saw he answered to his name.”

  VI

  Some days passed before Granice could obtain a word with the District Attorney: he began to think that Allonby avoided him.

  But when they were face to face Allonby’s jovial countenance showed no sign of embarrassment. He waved his visitor to a chair, and leaned across his desk with the encouraging smile of a consulting physician.

  Granice broke out at once: “That detective you sent me the other day—”

  Allonby raised a deprecating hand.

  “—I know: it was Stell the alienist. Why did you do that, Allonby?”

  The other’s face did not lose its composure. “Because I looked up your story first—and there’s nothing in it.”

  “Nothing in it?” Granice furiously interposed.

  “Absolutely nothing. If there is, why the deuce don’t you bring me proofs? I know you’ve been talking to Peter Ascham, and to Denver, and to that little ferret McCarren of the Explorer. Have any of them been able to make out a case for you? No. Well, what am I to do?”

  Granice’s lips began to tremble. “Why did you play me that trick?”

  “About Stell? I had to, my dear fellow: it’s part of my business. Stell IS a detective, if you come to that—every doctor is.”

  The trembling of Granice’s lips increased, communicating itself in a long quiver to his facial muscles. He forced a laugh through his dry throat. “Well—and what did he detect?”

  “In you? Oh, he thinks it’s overwork—overwork and too much smoking. If you look in on him some day at his office he’ll show you the record of hundreds of cases like yours, and advise you what treatment to follow. It’s one of the commonest forms of hallucination. Have a cigar, all the same.”

  “But, Allonby, I killed that man!”

  The District Attorney’s large hand, outstretched on his desk, had an almost imperceptible gesture, and a moment later, as if an answer to the call of an electric bell, a clerk looked in from the outer office.

  “Sorry, my dear fellow—lot of people waiting. Drop in on Stell some morning,” Allonby said, shaking hands.

  McCarren had to own himself beaten: there was absolutely no flaw in the alibi. And since his duty to his journal obviously forbade his wasting time on insoluble mysteries, he ceased to frequent Granice, who dropped back into a deeper isolation. For a day or two after his visit to Allonby he continued to live in dread of Dr. Stell. Why might not Allonby have deceived him as to the alienist’s diagnosis? What if he were really being shadowed, not by a police agent but by a mad-doctor? To have the truth out, he suddenly determined to call on Dr. Stell.

  The physician received him kindly, and reverted without embarrassment to the conditions of their previous meeting. “We have to do that occasionally, Mr. Granice; it’s one of our methods. And you had given Allonby a fright.”

  Granice was silent. He would have liked to reaffirm his guilt, to produce the fresh arguments which had occurred to him since his last talk with the physician; but he feared his eagerness might be taken for a symptom of derangement, and he affected to smile away Dr. Stell’s allusion.

  “You think, then, it’s a case of brain-fag—nothing more?”

  “Nothing more. And I should advise you to knock off tobacco. You smoke a good deal, don’t you?”

  He developed his treatment, recommending massage, gymnastics, travel, or any form of diversion that did not—that in short—

  Granice interrupted him impatiently. “Oh, I loathe all that—and I’m sick of travelling.”

  “H’m. Then some larger interest—politics, reform, philanthropy? Something to take you out of yourself.”

  “Yes. I understand,” said Granice wearily.

  “Above all, don’t lose heart. I see hundreds of cases like yours,” the doctor added cheerfully from the threshold.

  On the doorstep Granice stood still and laughed. Hundreds of cases like his—the case of a man who had committed a murder, who confessed his guilt, and whom no one would believe! Why, there had never been a case like it in the world. What a good figure Stell would have made in a play: the great alienist who couldn’t read a man’s mind any better than that!

  Granice saw huge comic opportunities in the type.

  But as
he walked away, his fears dispelled, the sense of listlessness returned on him. For the first time since his avowal to Peter Ascham he found himself without an occupation, and understood that he had been carried through the past weeks only by the necessity of constant action. Now his life had once more become a stagnant backwater, and as he stood on the street corner watching the tides of traffic sweep by, he asked himself despairingly how much longer he could endure to float about in the sluggish circle of his consciousness.

  The thought of self-destruction recurred to him; but again his flesh recoiled. He yearned for death from other hands, but he could never take it from his own. And, aside from his insuperable physical reluctance, another motive restrained him. He was possessed by the dogged desire to establish the truth of his story. He refused to be swept aside as an irresponsible dreamer—even if he had to kill himself in the end, he would not do so before proving to society that he had deserved death from it.

  He began to write long letters to the papers; but after the first had been published and commented on, public curiosity was quelled by a brief statement from the District Attorney’s office, and the rest of his communications remained unprinted. Ascham came to see him, and begged him to travel. Robert Denver dropped in, and tried to joke him out of his delusion; till Granice, mistrustful of their motives, began to dread the reappearance of Dr. Stell, and set a guard on his lips. But the words he kept back engendered others and still others in his brain. His inner self became a humming factory of arguments, and he spent long hours reciting and writing down elaborate statements of his crime, which he constantly retouched and developed. Then gradually his activity languished under the lack of an audience, the sense of being buried beneath deepening drifts of indifference. In a passion of resentment he swore that he would prove himself a murderer, even if he had to commit another crime to do it; and for a sleepless night or two the thought flamed red on his darkness. But daylight dispelled it. The determining impulse was lacking and he hated too promiscuously to choose his victim… So he was thrown back on the unavailing struggle to impose the truth of his story. As fast as one channel closed on him he tried to pierce another through the sliding sands of incredulity. But every issue seemed blocked, and the whole human race leagued together to cheat one man of the right to die.