Vain oblations

by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

THE WINE OF VIOLENCE

I am an old man now, and, like many other old men, I feel like making confession. Not of my own sins. I have always been called, I am well aware, a dilettante, and I could hardly have sinned in the ways of the particular sinners of whom I am about to speak. But I have the dilettante’s liking for all realities that do not brush him too close. Throughout the case of Filippo and Rachel Upcher, I was always on the safe side of the footlights. I have no excuse for not being honest, and I have at last an excuse for speaking. It is wonderful how the death of acquaintances frees one; and I am discovering, at the end of life, the strange, lonely luxury of being able to tell the truth about nearly every one I used to know. All the prolonged conventional disloyalties are passed away. It is extraordinary how often one is prevented from telling the blessed truth about the familiar dead because of some irrelevant survivor.

I do not know that there was much to choose between Filippo and Rachel Upcher—though the world would not agree with me. Both of them, in Solomon’s words, “drank the wine of violence.” I never really liked either of them, and I have never been caught by the sentimental adage that to understand is to forgive. If we are damned, it is God who damns us, and no one ventures to accuse Him of misunderstanding. It is a little late for a mere acquaintance to hark back to the Upchers, but by accident I, and I only, know the main facts that the world has so long been mistaken about. They were a lurid pair; they were not of my clan. But I cannot resist the wholly pious temptation to set my clan right about them. I should have done it long ago, in years when it would have made “scare-heads” in the same papers that of old had had so many “scare-heads” about the Upchers, but for my dear wife. She simply could not have borne it. To tell the story is part of the melancholy freedom her death has bestowed on me.

By the time you have read my apology, you will have remembered, probably with some disgust, the Upcher “horror.” I am used to it, but I can still wince at it. I have always been pleased to recognize that life, as my friends lived it, was not in the least like the newspapers. Not to be like the newspapers was as good a test of caste as another. Perhaps it is well for a man to realize, once in his time, that at all events the newspapers are a good deal like life. In any case, when you have known fairly well a man sentenced and executed for murder—and on such evidence!—you never feel again like saying that “one doesn’t know” people who sue for breach of promise. After all, every one of us knows people who accept alimony. But I’ve enough grudge against our newspapers to be glad that my true tale comes too late for even the Orb to get an “extra” out of it. The Orb made enough, in its time, out of the Upchers. On the day when the charwoman gave her evidence against Filippo Upcher, the last copies of the evening edition sold in the New York streets for five dollars each. I have said enough to recall the case to you, and enough, I hope, to explain that it’s the kind of thing I am very little used to dealing with. “Oblige me by referring to the files,” if you want the charwoman’s evidence. Now I may as well get to my story. I want it, frankly, off my hands. It has been pushing for a year into my Italian Interludes; thrusts itself in, asking if it isn’t, forsooth, as good, for emotion, as anything in the Cinquecento. And so, God knows, it is ... but the Cinquecento charwomen have luckily been obliterated from history.

I knew Filippo Upcher years ago; knew him rather well in a world where the word “friend” is seldom correctly used. We were “pals,” rather, I should think: ate and drank together at Upcher’s extraordinary hours, and didn’t often see each other’s wives. It was Upcher’s big period. London and New York went, docile enough, to see him act Othello. He used to make every one weep over Desdemona, I know, and that is more than Shakespeare unassisted has always managed. Perhaps if he hadn’t done Othello so damnably well, with such a show of barbaric passion—It was my “little” period, if I may say it; when I was having the inevitable try at writing plays. I soon found that I could not write them, but meanwhile I lived for a little in the odd flare of the theatric world. Filippo Upcher—he always stuck, even in playbills, you remember, to the absurd name—I had met in my Harvard days, and I found him again at the very heart of that flare. The fact that his mother was an Italian whose maiden name had been brushed across with a title got him into certain drawing-rooms that his waistcoats would have kept him out of. She helped him out, for example, in Boston—where “baton sinister” is considered, I feel sure, merely an ancient heraldic term. Rachel Upcher, his wife, I used to see occasionally. She had left the stage before she married Upcher, and I fancy her tense renditions of Ibsen were the last thing that ever attracted him. My first recollection of her is in a pose plastique of passionate regret that she had never, in her brief career, had an opportunity to do Ghosts. Rosmersholm, I believe, was as far as she ever went. She had beauty of the incongruous kind that makes you wonder when, where, and how the woman stole the mask. She is absolutely the only person I ever met who gave you the original of the much-imitated “mysterious” type. She was eternally mysterious—and, every day, quite impossible. It wasn’t to be expected that poor Evie should care to see much of her, and I never put the question that Mrs. Upcher seemed to be always wanting to refuse to answer. The fact is that the only time I ever took poor Evie there, Filippo and his wife quarrelled so vulgarly and violently that we came away immediately after dinner. It would have been indecent to stay. You were sure that he would beat her as soon as you left, but also that before he had hurt her much, she would have cut his head open with a plate. Very much, you see, in the style of the newspapers. I saw Filippo at the club we both had the habit of, and, on his Anglo-Saxon days, liked him fairly well. When his Italian blood rose beneath his clear skin, I would have piled up any number of fictitious engagements to avoid him. He was unspeakable then: unappeasable, vitriolic, scarce human. You felt, on such days, that he wanted his entrée smeared with blood, and you lunched at another table so that at least the blood shouldn’t be yours. I used to fancy whimsically that some ancestress of his had been a housemaid to the Borgias, and had got into rather distinguished “trouble.” But she must have been a housemaid. I did not, however, say this to any one during the trial; for I was sure that his passion was perfectly unpractical, and that he took action only in his mild moments.

I found, as I say, that I could not write plays. My wife and I went abroad for some years. We saw Upcher act once in London, but I didn’t even look him up. That gives you the measure of our detachment. I had quite forgotten him in the succeeding years of desultory, delightful roaming over southern Europe. There are alike so much to remember and so much to forget, between Pirene and Lourdes! But the first head-lines of the first newspaper that I bought on the dock, when we disembarked reluctantly in New York, presented him to me again. It was all there: the “horror,” the “case,” the vulgar, garish tragedy. We had landed in the thick of it. It took me some time to grasp the fact that a man whom I had occasionally called by his first name was being accused of that kind of thing. I don’t need to dot my i’s. You had all seen Filippo Upcher act, and you all, during his trial, bought the Orb. I read it myself—every sickening column that had been, with laborious speed, jotted down in the court-room. The evidence made one feel that, if this was murder, a man who merely shoots his wife through the heart need not be considered a criminal at all. It was the very scum of crime. Rachel Upcher had disappeared after a violent quarrel with her husband, in which threats—overheard—had been freely uttered. He could give no plausible account of her. Then the whole rotten mass of evidence—fit only for a rag-picker to handle—began to come in. The mutilated body disinterred; the fragments of marked clothing; the unused railway ticket—but I really cannot go into it. I am not an Orb reporter. The evidence was only circumstantial, but it was, alack! almost better than direct testimony. Filippo was perfectly incoherent in defence, though he, of course, pleaded “not guilty.” He had, for that significant scene—he, Filippo Upcher!—no stage presence.

The country re-echoed the sentence, as it had re-echoed every shriek of the evidence, from Atlantic to Pacific. The jury was out five hours—would have been out only as many minutes if it had not been for one Campbell, an undertaker, who had some doubts as to the sufficiency of the “remains” disinterred to make evidence. But the marked underclothing alone made their fragmentariness negligible. Campbell was soon convinced of that. It was confused enough, in all conscience—he told Upcher’s and my friend, Ted Sloan, later—but he guessed the things the charwoman overheard were enough to convict any man; he’d stick to that. Of course, the prosecuting attorney hadn’t rested his case on the imperfect state of the body, anyhow—had just brought it in to show how nasty it had been all round. It didn’t even look very well for him to challenge medical experts, though a body that had been buried was a little more in his line than it was in theirs, perhaps. And any gentleman in his profession had had, he might say, more practical experience than people who lectured in colleges. He hadn’t himself, though, any call from superior technical knowledge to put spokes in the wheel of justice. He guessed that was what you’d call a quibble. And he was crazy to get home—Mrs. C. was expecting her first, any time along. Sloan said the man seemed honest enough; and he was quite right—the chain of circumstance was, alas! complete. Upcher was convicted of murder in the first degree, and sentenced to death. He didn’t appeal—wouldn’t, in spite of his counsel, and Sloan’s impassioned advice: “Give ’em a run for their money, Filippo. Be a sport, anyhow!”

“Lord, man, all juries are alike,” was the response. “They’ve no brains. I wouldn’t have the ghost of a show, and I’m not going through that racket again, and make a worse fool of myself on the stand another time.”

“But if you don’t, they’ll take it you’ve owned up.”

“Not necessarily, after they’ve read my will. I’ve left Rachel the ‘second best bed.’ There wasn’t much else. She’s got more than I ever had. No, Sloan, a man must be guilty to want to appeal. No innocent man would go through that hell twice. I want to get out and be quiet.”