"Yes, when we are ourselves again, you must bring in that manuscript. Yes, yes, he wished it! They were almost the last words I had from him. He was very pleased to get your letter, very pleased. He was talking about it to Stanley, his young brother, and to me; we were all there yesterday—think of it, Mr. Herrick, yesterday!—working out his ideas for our new Weekly. He was always an enthusiast, a keen enthusiast, and the Weekly was his latest enthusiasm. Its politics would have been very different from Mr. Ten Euyck's—"
A friendly visage at another table favored them with a sidelong contortion and a warning wink. Just behind them a shrewd voice ceased abruptly and a metallic tone responded, "Yes, but you—you're a man with a mania!"
The first voice replied, "Well, you're down on criminals and I'm down on crime."
Then Ten Euyck's was again lifted. "You're out after a criminal whom you think corrupting and to wipe him out you'll pass by fifty of the plainest personal guilt! In my view nobody but the corruptible is corrupted. Any person who commits a crime belongs in the criminal class."
"Crime may end in the criminal class," the other voice took up the challenge, "but it begins at home. You can't always pounce upon the decayed core. But if you observe a very little speck on a healthy surface, one of two things—either you can cut it away and save the apple, or your tunneling will lead you farther and farther in, it will open wider and wider and the speck will vanish, automatically, because the whole rotten fruit will fall open in your hand."
"Delightful, when it does! But in this short life I prefer the pounce!"
By this time everybody was harkening and Herrick ventured to turn his chair and look round. He beheld a sallow man, nearer forty than thirty and as tall as himself or taller, but of a straighter and stiffer height; with a long head, a long handsome nose and chin, long hands and long ears. This elongated countenance was not without contradictions. Under the sparse, squarely cut mustache Herrick was surprised to find the lips a little pouting, and the glossily black eyes were prominent and full. Fastidiously as he was dressed there persisted something funereal in the effect; forward of each ear a shadow of clipped whisker leant him the dignity of a daguerreotype. He spoke neatly, distinctly. His excellent, strong voice was dry, cold and inflexible. On the whole Herrick's easy and contemptuous amusement received a slight set-back.
"I prefer the pounce!" To be pounced upon by that bony intensity might not be amusing at all!
Then he discovered what had changed his point of view: it had shifted a trifle toward the criminal's! All very well for Ten Euyck's guest—Herrick had somehow gathered that the other man was a guest—to give up the argument, indifferently refusing to play up to his host! All very well for the free-hearted lunchers to sit, diverted, getting oratorical pointers from the monologue into which Ten Euyck had plunged! It was neither the lunchers nor the guest, but Herrick who must, to-morrow morning, appear as a witness before Ten Euyck! He would have to tell the man something which the Inghams had asked him not to tell because it might prove prejudicial to James Ingham—his admirer—which Hermann Deutch had asked him not to tell because it might prove prejudicial to Christina Hope—she whose face had been his heart's companion through hard and lonely times! The idea of the inquest had become exceedingly disagreeable to Herrick.
And the more he listened to Ten Euyck, the more disagreeable it became; the more he felt that a derisive audience had underestimated its man. Ten Euyck might take himself too seriously; he might show too small a sense of the ridiculous in loudly delivering, at luncheon, a sort of Oration-on-the-Respect-of-Law-in-Great-Cities. But this depended on whether you considered him as a man or a trap. The real quality in a trap is not a sense of the ridiculous nor a delicate repugnance to taking itself seriously. Its real quality is the ability to catch things. And, as a trap, Herrick began to feel that Ten Euyck was made for success.