It would be Romany who took things the hardest.
VI
Half an hour later found the atmosphere of the library anything but comfortable—indeed strained almost to the breaking point. Whittaker’s slow poison was beginning to take effect. Ignoring the ominous rolling up of clouds, he had quietly but firmly gone ahead with the plan to read aloud a few pages of the Diary. With malicious casualness he had suggested the withdrawal of anyone who felt more in the mood for billiards or bridge: “You know the billiard room, Blake. Do get up a game if it suits you. There’s nothing particularly thrilling about an old man mumbling over his memories of other days. I merely thought one or two of you might prefer a moment’s pause in the day’s occupation that I could beguile, even if I put you asleep.” But, aside from Dorn who had excused himself directly after dinner with, “Doctors, you know, Whittaker. Frightfully sorry. I’ll try to get back tomorrow,” there was not one that had had the strength to keep away from the spider’s parlor. Though for a moment it had appeared that Belknap might follow Dorn’s example: “Come now, don’t tell me you’re off, too?” Whittaker’s tone half-mocked, half-threatened him as he stood indecisively in the hall toying with the door-latch. “Oh no,” Belknap had answered with impatient asperity. “Hardly that! I have a small contribution to make to the evening’s pleasure. It’s in the car. I’ll be back.” He was, in a jiffy, with several bottles of what he said was ’11 champagne, and which, as Whittaker knew, came from one of the finest cellars in New York.
But no one else turned even an attentive eye to the gift which Belknap was arranging with exaggerated care on the tray of crystal-bright decanters and dark-bright bottles. Curiosity, dread, and sheer hypnotism, combined to magnetize them into a rigid ensemble about Whittaker’s reading lamp. But it was a brittle, surface rigidity—like the first thin ice formed over moving water. Beneath it the twisting, roiling currents of agonized apprehension wore through and disturbed the dangerous stillness of the room. Nadia Mdevani’s puffs at her cigarette were too brief, and she flicked unformed ash too often. Blake in the corner ferociously over-shuffled a pack of cards. At the piano Romany’s fingers lacked control, and the snatches of song she attempted lost themselves in broken pitch. But she had at least recovered from her faintness, which she had apologetically laid to a week’s indulgence in late hours, and to cocktails for tea at Sands Point. Crawford was turning the leaves of The Sportsman, but with such erratic rapidity that he must have been unaware of what he saw. Only Julian and Joel, looking worlds at each other, plus suns and moons and stars, still seemed a little stupidly blind to what was happening.
As Whittaker arranged his stage setting—chair and lamp just so, and a pillow at his back—the ritual of after-dinner coffee proceeded with its usual calm and efficiency. A robot maid, pretty and slim-figured in black and white, brought the service, and John passed the cups. He then quietly opened the windows of the terrace to the warm May night, asked his master was there anything further, and retired.
Whittaker cleared his throat; and the sound startled the room as thoroughly as though it had been a shot. It drew the line at conversation and movement. Across the stillness Whittaker’s first words assumed an enlarged importance.
“As I’ve told you, this is a day to day record of my life for the past twelve or fifteen years.” By a motion of his hand he indicated to them a thick, flexible, thin-paper notebook, bound in tooled suède. “Tonight I am taking a leaf from a day two years ago, June 19, 1929. I recall the day vividly; and I can quite imagine that Markham does. (We’ll say Markham—the real name needn’t figure until we go into print.)
“‘Markham called me early this evening to say he must see me immediately. I was engaged for a theatre party, and did not wish to disappoint my hostess, but Markham was obstinate and I yielded. He lives only a matter of minutes from Thorngate. When he appeared it was more than obvious that something was wrong. He was pale, his eyes bloodshot, and his voice somewhere in his shoes. It seems he is being blackmailed on two counts, an old one and a new one; the new one being a mistress, and therefore dangerous to his family; the old one being a strange case of murder, and therefore more dangerous to himself. It is the murder that I consider worth recounting.
“‘Markham is the son, only son, of old Markham who once broke the bank at Monte Carlo. There is wildness in the family. The boy grew up higgledy-piggledy in a part of New York that was rapidly changing from good to bad and bad to worse. Watched with less than half an eye by a succession of uninvestigated nurses and governesses, when they could be afforded at all, Markham naturally and easily became a member of a boy’s gang in the block; and this gang of children grew up to be the real thing. He was not able to break with them, even if he had cared to do so. They bled his father by way of him. They led him by gradual stages into mischief, into badness and into sin. The day came when, owing one too many grand to some card racketeers working the steamship lines to Havana, he was ready to accept payment for murder.
“‘A jet-black night in midwinter found him entering an apparently abandoned shack in a lonely curve of the Hackensack on the barren flats outside Newark. Nothing for miles but snow-drifted meadows and a black river turgidly rolling seaward.’”