CARNAGE: A COMIC OPERA CLIMAX
The door from the hall opened, letting in a flood of light. At the same time a man stepped through one of the windows. He was the first of a number whom the halls and staircases instantly absorbed. Out of Herrick's very hold Christina slipped and caught this man by the arm and hung away from him as she was wont to hang upon the arm of Hermann Deutch. "Oh, heaven and our fathers!" cried she in a faint wail. "But you were a little late!"
The man, standing tense in the shadow, was examining the room with appraising eyes. Christina, blind to something rigid in him, hurried on. "And I did so depend on a quick curtain! But all's well that ends well—I've got it! Mr. District-Attorney, your mail!"
"Who's that with you?" said the voice of Henry Kane.
As he took, from the hand that had never once resigned them, the scorched and torn sheets and buttoned them beneath his coat he glanced over his shoulder, expectantly.
"You'll go to the Governor, yourself, to-morrow? To-morrow!"
"Please God! Ah, Herrick, you make one more! Hear anything, Sheriff?" he called into the hall.
Kane had turned to close the shutters at his back but Christina, blind with triumph, continued to Herrick: "He saw my shadow at Riley's. I told him all that I suspected and he believed me. He spoke to the Governor. They promised me if I could give Mr. Kane that man and the headquarters of the others I should have Will's life in exchange. I knew from Nancy's holding that letter and it's being addressed in Allegra's hand that it must be the story which caused his feeling against Ingham—that Nancy, as well as I, must have hoped it might even set him free. Mr. Kane got me a doctor and as soon as I had my voice he sent me to a little hotel up the river here, kept by Ten Euyck's old servants whom he would know must recognize him, and there I sent for him. He was afraid to come there, of course, into my disreputable company. But he was fine and eager to meet me somewhere. We hoped he would name that stronghold of Allegra's where he would feel safe and when he named this house our hopes leaped.—Oh, I'm so tired!" cried Christina, sitting down on the floor like a worn-out child and snuggling her head forward in her lap.
"Are those doors fast?" called Kane from his second window. "That shutter's loose! What's that balcony? This room won't stand a siege! You, Herrick, the sheriff and I and five men—can we hold this house?"
Sheriff Buckley had just limped in with his bruised, cut face further discolored by the blood from a scalp-wound which he was binding with a handkerchief. Herrick had already noticed that Kane's arm was tied tight, just above the elbow, with a gaily flaunting necktie and around this necktie the torn sleeve was soaked and stained.—"Against how many?" he replied.
It was not till then that, lifting a face of weary dismay, "Are we still fighting?" Christina almost sobbingly demanded.
"Now, don't frighten the lady!" The sheriff turned to Kane. "We just got into a mix-up at the gate with the whole Dago gang. They'll never come up here after us."
All three men, none the less, were busy latching shutters, locking, barricading. They were not interrupted and no alarm but their own seemed in the air. As they worked Kane said, "There's something up we don't understand. This is something more than any bunch of Pascoes. We expected a fight. We had over a dozen men. We were attacked by a hundred. They had made an obstacle race for the motors. One they put out for good. But the sheriff got this one through."
"We've left 'em a mile behind!" said the sheriff. "Before they can get here the river police'll have taken the yacht. They'll be up here before long. We're safe here awhile, all to ourselves, and they can't get within a hundred feet of the house without being picked off by our boys upstairs!"
As he spoke the pane above Herrick's head, where he struggled with the loose shutter, cracked into flying splinters. A small hard object had hurtled into the room and thumped at Kane's feet. A bewilderment ludicrous as hysteria came over Herrick. For the object that carried a bit of paper rolled in its mouth was a little golden pistol—which though sufficiently valued to carry on its handle a monogram of three capital A's, picked out in jewels, was yet no pistol at all. It was a dummy made all in one piece!
"So!" said the District-Attorney. "Now we know!"
"What?"
"I asked you, Herrick, if we could hold this house. And you asked me against how many. I can't tell you against how many but I can now tell you against what. Against an army of which you have read, not so long since, a considerable deal in the papers. Against the Camorra."
"Here!"
"After us?"
"The Italian Camorra!"
"In America!"
"Yes," Kane insisted, "and under those trees."
"In costume!" cried Christina, with rising spirits and flitting to the window.
"A skeleton pistol is its badge. The owner of this trinket is a member. Please, Miss Hope, translate us this paper."
She read aloud, "Alieni the infamous and all his house die here to-night the death of traitors."
"Well, the information's dear, but we're getting plenty of it! There's an advance guard, evidently, set hereabouts!—Alieni! And capital A's! It's their traitor's badge they've stolen to threaten him. If we only knew who Alieni is? And where he is! And what they think he has to do with us!"
Herrick told them where he had seen the pistol before. To no one did this, at that time, bring any light. Kane's mind was busy with the fortunes of the police-boat. "The Camorra easily swarms thick enough to overpower that!" He paused, surveying their fortress. If they had needed anything to tell them they were doomed they might have found it in the colloquial, dry calm of Kane's voice as he said, "We should, perhaps, have sent Miss Hope upstairs."
"Oh, I beseech you—anything but a trap. Let me stay where I can run!"
"The more as they may try to smoke us out!"
Silence grew up in their midst.
The great front doors were barred and chained; through the house five men were on watch; the door into the hall was barricaded with the gilt piano, whence still the Cupids smiled, stacked above and below with the little table and the chairs; down the room's long front the five great windows, three more crossing at the farther end, were dark with the latched shutters of which the second on the front was the suspected. So frail were the defenses! So short a time from the first blow must the slats give and the glass crash in!
"I think you'd best take the end, Mr. Kane; me and Mr. Herrick the front windows—Lord, who's this?"
The black figure with gleaming shirt-front was seated in a little gilt chair in the wall's darkest angle; with outstretched legs and tilted head it confronted them from very glassy eyes. But it was only the dead body of Ten Euyck, who must have reared up thus with his last breath and joined their council.
"Well," cried the sheriff, gaily, "you make another—if they think so!" Seizing the chair he trundled it across the room; on the floor he found Ten Euyck's gun and propped it into the passive fingers. "There! If this blind falls down, you'll be better 'n the piano—they'll waste a lot of attention on you! Now, if they only make noise enough, down by the river—Oh, you mustn't let him make you whimper, miss!"
Herrick was mainly aware of a terrible impatience. The surprise and confusion of their peril made its expectation a raging fever, as if only a horrible scarecrow in a mirror waited to be smashed. Despite the whole week's frenzied pulse, despite the happenings of the last four hours, Herrick could not believe in what lay before and all about them. These were men he knew, with whom he had put through other adventures; the girl beside him had never seemed so much a girl as in this failure of her hardihood—he saw her for the first time with loosened hair that touched her face with a childish softness, made for cherishing—it tightened something in his heart as though to crack it, but it was absurd to suppose that in half an hour, in ten or twenty minutes, they would be there on the floor, unconscious of each other, ended, wiped out! Christina lifted her arms in a gesture instinctive with all womankind and gathering up this tumble of hair her dear, quick fingers twined and thrust till it was heaped into its place—why, of course not! This strange night camp amid broken furniture, the spreading pool of oil, the jewels lying mixed with the supper's wreckage, Christina silent again and holding his hand tight, the two wounded, haggard men, all these his mind admitted, all these were conceivable. But what was soon to come was not conceivable! Yet—hark! Was that—No, only some creak of the old house! What sound would be the last before the deluge? How long must they wait? Already the air seemed thick and hard to breathe, the twilight of the room hung on them like a solid weight and the one candle Christina had lighted made scarce a twinkle of sane, human comfort in the vast yellowish gloom.—
"If you please, miss, put out that light!"
"Oh!"
"We can't afford to advertise!"
The light was gone.
In the pitch-black airlessness Herrick could feel Christina kneeling against him, quiet but for the broken breathing that told him she was still afraid of the dark. As he put his left arm round her shoulders she pressed her cold cheek to his hand.
"It's funny, isn't it? We never even had time to get an engagement-ring!—Here they come!"
A sound as of excited animals plunged through the groves about the house; with tramplings and scufflings a great herd seemed to surge out upon the vacant drive. As it confronted the empty automobile, the tranquil terraces and the blank front of the locked house it paused, uncertainly; then a high, prolonged whistle sounded, shorter whistles responded from every stretch and nook of woodland and there fell again, to the stupefaction of those within, a perfect silence.
This continued unbroken, baffling, interminable, inscrutable, and solid as the walls of a cell. Christina in her endeavor for control gave a slight, nervous cough, no more than a rough catch of the breath, such as Herrick had heard her give many a time when their taxi skimmed too close to a trolley in the safe, crowded, far-off streets. And with this familiar little sound apprehension awoke in him, full-armed. The merciful veil was torn from his imagination, his soul gaped to the knowledge of death and of direr things that precede death. On the instant all he had ever known of struggle changed; chivalry, civilization, restraint, vanished like things that never were; if, at that moment, the bodies of a hundred other women as sweet, as defenseless, as tender as his love's had stood in her way he could have set his heel upon them all to save her. Then, close at hand, as if from somewhere within the wall, came the imperative, prolonged tingle of a telephone!
They turned, dumbfounded, shaken with incredulous, mad hope. But whence came it? Where was it? Christina stirred and slid to her feet; her dress went whispering across the room; the men, not daring to leave their posts, knew she must be feeling along the rear wall and still through the darkness the telephone rang. Then she gave a low cry—a narrow door in the glass paneling had slipped sideways so that she stretched her hands into a kind of pantry; the instrument's shrill call was now directly in her ears—"It's Nicola!"
The three questioning whispers sprang at her at once.
"He wants to speak to Mr. Ten Euyck."
Blankness answered. The ringing became more impatient.
"Take the message."
But no message was to be had. Nicola's party was at the boathouse, in great trouble, in danger—never mind what! He wanted to speak to Mr. Ten Euyck. "He says, 'Get him to pass me his word to shelter us or what will you give—what will you give for news of Nancy Cornish?'"
"Tell him I, Kane, 'll buy his news."
Christina dropped back against the wall. "When he has spoken to Mr. Ten Euyck."
Perhaps, in the helpless pause, the glassy face taking aim behind the shutter smiled to itself in the dark. Before they had time to try if the wire connected only with the boathouse, a single shot sprang from across the drive.
There was a sharp crack and splintering, a hot puff on Christina's cheek, and the shattered telephone hung crazily on the wall. The besieging force had misinterpreted what seemed the reinforcement of the world and used its best marksman. Having done so it was content and reassumed its patient crouching. "Rifles!" cried the sheriff. "And yet they don't attack!"
Kane peered through the broken slat and with a very grim expression drew back for the others. "Look under the trees, there. Is it just dark? Or is it dark with men?"
"Looks like Birnam Wood!" said Herrick.
It was that blackest hour before the morning when darkness takes on weight and bulk so that the eye must carve a way through. But the blazing dazzle of the entrance porch broke and distorted the besieging dark, exaggerating, multiplying the forces that it held. Beyond the brightness of the steps the stone and then the grassy terraces fell indistinct and shallow to the lawns, beyond which, perhaps a hundred feet away, the drive was rather known than discerned; twenty feet or so farther still the wood lay shapeless and invisible but filled by the monstrous darkness as close as with a great tide. There the most straining eye could see nothing whatever; now and again the night came alive with snapping twigs, every grove would wake and rustle; then not a leaf would stir. But through all the intermediate borderland shadows seemed to loom, to creep, dissolve and disappear; then to their more accustomed eyes these shadows began to take on form—they were the shadows of softly moving men, individuals and small groups, unknown persons on unknown errands which carried them here and there but closer and closer about the house. "Queer the boys upstairs don't spot them!" One group passed so close to the end windows that Kane fired at it and produced a commotion which he followed by another shot. There was no response, but from all directions the fringe of figures drew nearer, a crouching, irregular line behind its faggot-like shields of broken boughs. The defenders spent their shots recklessly, now, for the same thought was in all their minds; it seemed to take form from its own apprehension when, as the invaders drew back their wounded, those within became aware of something across the tree-tops, down toward the river; a ruddier dusk, a glow that was not morning, far against the sky.
Close at their backs Christina's voice murmured with an icy softness, "The boathouse! It's afire!" Her tone told Herrick that the telephone had stolen all her weakness, she was strung like a bow; side by side with his her glance strained out and forward as the knots of men continued to advance with velvet stealth. The fire of the defenders ceased. Automatically, for they had nothing left to fire with. "What's become of my fellows?" Sheriff Buckley wondered. The first foam of the tide began to lap the terraces. Christina looked beyond it toward the flames that flared on the horizon. And from that way Herrick, too, heard a new sound, the thudding of a horse galloping clumsily on soft turf. The shadows blotted themselves to the ground. The hoofbeats began to run amuck as though the horse had lost its rider. Hither and yon round the corners of the house shapeless movements hurried, there came the step of a heavy runner and the cursing of a deep voice in some Italian patois. The long, single whistle darted out again and once more there fell that motionless waiting of the profoundly brooding night. It was Christina who first said, "Some one else is in this room!"
As they listened they, too, could hear the sound of crawling. Something was creeping into the room. It was coming through the pantry door which Christina had left open and it advanced with a dragging sound as a wounded beast drags on its stomach. Kane, dropping on it, found his hands in a man's hair. The man sank under him with a deathly groan and now it was Kane who called for a candle. "Nicola!" Christina breathed.
He was making horrible motions with his mouth; Christina found some unspilled wine and thrust the edge of the glass between his lips. "Tell me! Nancy—?"
Kane held up his hand. Beyond, in the pantry, a step sounded—backing from Nicola's trail. Herrick and the sheriff dragged in between them a tall Sicilian whose triangular knife was still wet. The embroidered table-cloth with which they bound him to the piano strained under his renewed efforts to attack the dying man whom Christina still entreated, "Is she with my sister? Is she?"
A hoarse sob raged through Nicola and gasped past his last grin of pride and hate. "You fool of hers! Fool of us all! Your sister? My sister, mine! You think you ever have a sister like that?"
The girl stood above him, tranced and wide-eyed, with distended nostrils; as she turned to Herrick a face which release and knowledge were even then palely lighting the figure of a man darted into the gallery where Herrick had lain; a slim, soft man whose pretty little face was all flecked and sweated with the insane hate and courage which come of insane fear. The Sicilian greeted what he took for reinforcement with a cry of triumph and encouragement; but it was not Nicola, it was Herrick at whom this tremulous assassin, yelling "Spy! Spy! Will you show me again to the Camorra?" extended his revolver. At the same moment, Nicola, turning on his side and aiming upward, shot him dead. The slim, soft figure doubled over the rail and the refined, pretty, convulsed face swung there with open mouth. At this Nicola spat the wine which he had sucked as he lay: "Thus my sister salutes thee!" Then his head knocked back upon the floor and he lay still.
The tall Sicilian, who had watched the action without fully understanding the quick English words, now strained forward, peering with a kind of gratified thirst into Christina's face. He said to her in Italian that was almost a whisper, "You are very fair!"
"Do you think that is news to me?" asked the girl, with a kind of fury. "But my fairness has done all it can! What's to do, now?"
"You are fair. But you are the devil. You brought police to the river, who will return with more. You have plunged this night in the blood of your brothers. There was one who was like a little sister. Where is she?"
Christina started; half in appeal, half in defense against the omen of his tones, she stretched out her hands. The Sicilian lowered his mouth to the bosom of his shirt and brought forth in his teeth a little hoop of silver which he shook before Christina's eyes. "Where is she now? Of her tokens she has lost the third!" It was Nancy's bracelet that he dropped at Christina's feet.
"Devil of fine fairness," he said, "I shall pick it up again, when you are lying low! When not one shot is left for our hurt we there, without, will come quietly in! Then shall I bear this to my chief. I took it from the hand of Beppo, who lay bleeding in the grass. Were Chigi and Pepe caught in the fire? They reached her late, for they had rowed their boat back, to escape those policemen on the river. Only when Alieni jumped and swam they must follow him and tramp to the house for boats along the shore. But they reached her! I was against it always—she was not of our nation. Ah, she was pretty! Had you not let her know too much she need not have been put to sleep!"
Christina made no outcry. If his attack on herself bewildered her, her imagination caught the significance of the Camorrist phrase. "Where," asked she slowly, "does she sleep?"
"In the dead ashes of the house of boats." His malignant sneer took in the stricken, threatened group, as well as his own bondage. And turning once more to Christina he smilingly informed her, "I seek in the house for boats Nicola Pascoe. I hear him talking as at a telephone. They have brought a lamp and in the window I see a pretty girl, young and not so tall, with a face very sweet but sick and the hair falls curling and red. She has in her hands a tiny bottle filled with a dark liquid. She throws it from the window where it fills the air with laudanum smell. And at that up runs to her Nicola—and she, away! They must have knocked over the lamp, for next the house for boats is blazing high. And, as the smoke comes in the window, there she runs again—just as I see the woman's figure and in the fiery smoke one light of her red hair at that out from the bushes a bullet springs. She clasps her hands over her breast with a small cry and down she sinks. And Alieni flies out of the bushes with Beppo and Chigi and Pepe at his back and he races into the flaming house. It is after that down plunges Nicola, down and past us, running here to this place, and I follow him, sure that past him I shall come, too, upon his sister. Before we reach here, through the dark, comes a horse with two men on its back—one is yelling 'I have killed her! I have killed her!' and he passes. The other falls off. It is Beppo, who dies at my feet, giving me the bracelet. He had it from Pepe, the Parmesan, whom he saw meet with Alieni in the doorway of the house for boats. By this time all, everywhere, is fighting and the house for boats blows up in a puff and falls in upon itself in crumbling fire."
Christina had never taken her eyes from his face and in those eyes alone there now seemed any life to hold her body upright. "It's not true!" said she, gently and at length. "Life's not so silly!" But she stretched out a blind hand to Herrick and leaned on him a little.
"Ah!" mocked the Sicilian, "it made a beautiful grave! You will not have so fine! But yours gapes for you now as well as for your lover, and for your husband, who caused all the death! Do not pity the girl who died. Exult not over Giuseppe Gumama. Read, instead, the writing in your golden pistol—of Alieni—and the Signora Alieni—" He stopped with a gratified gasp. The handle of the door into the hall had been softly turned from the outside.
No one moved. In a strange voice the sheriff called to know if this were one of his men. There was no answer. "Where are they? Why don't they—"
Gumama the Sicilian laughed aloud. "The long cellar-way, where by night we carried out to the river our broken press—It has let us in—so quietly—Many went upstairs—"
Herrick translated. With one impulse the three men turned toward the slide in the paneling. It was closed. But their intent listening made sure of more than one soft touch, straying in search of the mechanism. Of crowding whispers they could not be so sure. Herrick reached for Nicola's gun. But it had only one charge and then, indeed, though without turning her head, Christina closed her hand on his and took it from him. "That's mine, you know!" No man gainsaid her and she put it in her breast. Undisguised, unhurried footsteps sounded overhead. An alien presence pervaded all that house. Caged in their shelter, they drew together, close under the balcony. Christina suffered herself to be drawn with them, but she was considering aloud the Sicilian's words.
"My golden pistol!" Christina looked from the little femininely jeweled dummy to the script, "'Filippi Alieni and all his house'—And all his house! 'The death of traitors'—My husband, you say? The Signora Alieni—A. A. A. Alieni, of course! But—Allegra?—Allegra?—Alieni?"
"Signora Alieni!" Gumama smilingly repeated.
The girl gave him one glance, sprang past him and flung herself against the shuttered windows. "Whom do you mean by traitors?" she called. "For whom do you take us? Answer! Answer!"
At the sound of her voice a deep-bayed, many-throated yell roared out derision and victory. As the men dragged Christina back a coarse laugh mocked loudly from across the road. "Signora Alieni, we rejoice at the last to salute you!" And the whole woodland took up his phrase in chorus, "Buona sera, Signora Alieni!"
Then, uncontrollably, at length the darkness volleyed, the earth was rived with sound and fire, the flashes of it scorching their skin while glass, plaster, woodwork, split and spattered round them as through the windows the hail beat.