He wasn’t, though. Nearly an hour passed before an attendant brought Magistrate Voris word that Officer Schwartzmann craved the privilege of seeing His Honour alone for a minute or two in His Honour’s private chamber. The magistrate left the bench, suspending the business of the night temporarily, and went; on the way he was mentally fortifying himself to be severe enough if he caught a plain-clothes man trying to trifle with him.
“Well, Schwartzmann?” he said shortly as he entered the room.
“Judge,” said the detective, “the woman wasn’t lyin’. She told me her sister was sick alone in their flat without nobody to look after her and that her brother was dead. I don’t know about the brother—at least I ain’t sure about him—but the sister was sick. Only she ain’t sick no more—she’s dead.”
“Dead? What did she die of?”
[86]
“She didn’t die of nothin’—she killed herself with gas. She turned the gas on in the room where she was sick in bed. The body was still warm when I got there. I gave her first aid, but she was gone all right. She wasn’t nothin’ more than a shell anyhow—had some wastin’ disease from the looks of her; and I judge it didn’t take but a few whiffs to finish her off. I called in the officer on post, name of Riordan, and I notified the coroner’s office myself over the telephone, and they’re goin’ to send a man up there inside of an hour or so to take charge of the case.
“And so, after that, feelin’ a sort of personal interest in the whole thing, as you might say, I broke the rules some more. When I found this here girl dead she had two pieces of paper in her hand; she’d died holdin’ to ’em. One of ’em was a letter that she’d wrote herself, I guess, and the other must ’a’ been a letter from somebody else—kind of an official-lookin’ letter. Both of ’em was in French. I don’t know exactly why I done it, unless it was I wanted to prove somethin’ to myself, but I brought off them two letters with me and here they are, sir. I’m hopin’ to get your court interpreter to translate ’em for me, and then I aim to rush ’em back over there before the coroner’s physician gets in, and put ’em back on that bed where I found ’em.”
“I read French—a little,” said the young [87] magistrate. “Suppose you let me have a look at them first.”
Schwartzmann surrendered them and the magistrate read them through. First he read the pitiably short, pitiably direct farewell lines the suicide had written to her half-sister before she turned on the gas, and then he read the briefly regretful letter of set terms of condolence, which a clerk in a consular office had in duty bound transcribed. Having read them through, this magistrate, who had read in the newspapers of Liège and Louvain, of Mons and Charlevois, of Ypres and Rheims, of the Masurien Lakes and Poland and Eastern Prussia and Western Flanders and Northern France; who had read also the casualty reports emanating at frequent intervals from half a dozen war offices, reading the one as matters of news and the other, until now, as lists of steadily mounting figures—he raised his head and in his heart he silently cursed war and all its fruits. And next day he went and joined a league for national preparedness.
“Schwartzmann,” he said as he laid the papers on his desk, “I guess probably your prisoner was telling the whole truth. She did have a brother and he is dead. He was a French soldier and he died about a month or six weeks ago—on the Field of Honour, the letter says. And this note that the girl left, I’ll tell you what it says. It says that she heard what the doctor said about her—there must have been [88] a doctor in to see her some time this evening—and that she knows she can never get well, and that they are about out of money, and that she is afraid Marie—Marie is the sister who’s in yonder now, I suppose—will do something desperate to get money, so rather than be a burden on her sister she is going to commit a mortal sin. So she asks God to forgive her and let her be with her brother Paul—he’s the dead brother, no doubt—when she has paid for her sin. And that is all she says except good-bye.”
He paused a moment, clearing his throat, and when he went on he spoke aloud, but it was to himself that he spoke rather than to the detective: “Field of Honour? Not one but two out of that family dead on the Field of Honour, by my way of thinking. Yes, and though it’s a new name for it, I guess you might call Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue a Field of Honour, too, and not be so very far wrong for this once. What a hellish thing it all is!”