The only appeal he did make was not such as to give Mr. Campbell any retrospective qualms of conscience. The request was never meant to get out, but, like so many other things marked “private,” it did. His petition was for being allowed to act a certain number of nights before his execution. He owed frightful sums, but, as he said, no sums, however frightful, could fail to be raised by such a device.
“It would kill your chances of a reprieve, Filippo,” Sloan said he told him.
“Reprieve?” Filippo had laughed. “Why, it would prove me guilty. It would turn all the evidence pale. But think of the box-office receipts. There would have to be a platoon of police deadheading in the front rows, of course. But even at that——!”
Sloan came away a little firmer for circumstantial evidence than he had been before. He wouldn’t see Filippo again; wouldn’t admit that it was a good epigram; wouldn’t even admit that it was rather fine of Filippo to be making epigrams at all. Most people agreed with him: thought Upcher shockingly cynical. But of course people never take into account the difference there is between being convicted and pleading guilty. Is it not de rigueur that, in those circumstances, a man’s manner should be that of innocence? Filippo’s flight has always seemed to me a really fine one. But I do not know of any man one could count on to distil from it the pure attar of honesty.
We had gone straight to my wife’s family in New England, on arriving. Until I saw Sloan, I had got my sole information about Upcher from the newspapers. Sloan’s account of Filippo’s way of taking it roused my conscience. If a man, after all that, could show any decency, one owed him something. I decided, without consulting my wife about it, to go over to New York and see Filippo myself. Evie was so done up by the thought of having once dined with the Upchers that I could hardly have broken my intention to her. I told her, of course, after I returned, but to know beforehand might have meant a real illness for her. I should have spared her all of it, had it not seemed to me, at the moment, my duty to go. The interview was not easy to manage, but I used Evie’s connections shamelessly, and in the end the arrangement was made. I have always been glad that I went, but I don’t know anything more nerve-racking than to visit a condemned criminal whose guilt you can not manage to doubt. Only Filippo’s proposal (of which Sloan had told me) to act long enough to pay his debts, made me do it. I still persist in thinking it magnificent of Filippo, though I don’t pretend there wasn’t in his desire some lingering lust of good report. The best he could hope for was to be forgotten; but he would naturally rather be forgotten as Hamlet than as Filippo Upcher.
Upcher was not particularly glad to see me, but he made the situation as little strained as possible. He did no violent protesting, no arraigning of law and justice. If he had, perhaps, acted according to the dictates of his hypothetical ancestress, he at least spoke calmly enough. He seemed to regard himself less as unjustly accused than as unjustly executed, if I may say so: he looked on himself as a dead man; his calamity was irretrievable. The dead may judge, but I fancy they don’t shriek. At all events, Upcher didn’t. A proof of his having cast hope carelessly over his shoulder was his way of speaking of his wife. He didn’t even take the trouble to use the present tense; to stress, as it were, her flesh-and-blood reality. It was “Rachel was,” never “Rachel is”—as we sometimes use the past tense to indicate that people have gone out of our lives by their own fault. The way in which he spoke of her was not tactful. A franker note of hatred I’ve never—except perhaps once—heard struck. Occasionally he would pull himself up, as if he remembered that the dead are our natural creditors for kindly speech.
“She was a devil, and only a devil could live with her. But there’s no point in going into it now.”
I rather wanted him to go into it: not—might Heaven forbid!—to confess, but to justify himself, to gild his stained image. I tried frankness.
“I think I’ll tell you, Upcher, that I never liked her.”
He nodded. “She was poison; and I am poisoned. That’s the whole thing.”