BY LESLEY FROST

Editor of
“COME CHRISTMAS”

MURDER
AT
LARGE

PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BY
COWARD-McCANN, INC.

COPYRIGHT, 1932, BY COWARD-McCANN, INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY THE VAN REES PRESS

MURDER
AT
LARGE

I

Ordway Belknap, ex-Judge of the Magistrate’s Courts, and for the present a detective of amateur standing, and a semi-professional criminologist, on call at the Homicide Department, leaned comfortably back in an arm-chair in the den of his spacious penthouse apartment on the East River—in Gracie Square to be exact. James, the perfect ‘man’ that confirmed bachelors dream of one day possessing, entered soundlessly on the deep-napped carpet, and, in a cotton-wool voice, announced Judge Whittaker on the wire.

“Thank you, James,” murmured Belknap in a tone modulated to the atmosphere of the room; while James, with the smooth precision of the Roxy Orchestra being lowered, sank from view, the den being a floor to itself.

Belknap slowly ground out a freshly lit cigarette and meditatively examined the telephone at his elbow. His face gathered seriousness as a window gathers steam. He recalled Whittaker’s remark of a week ago, made as they passed at the Club: “I will give you a ring soon on a matter of life and death. No, I can’t go into it now—I’m running.” And though in the meanwhile the matter had slipped his mind he now unaccountably, even to himself, hesitated to remove the receiver.

Belknap was a man of fifty-odd, but didn’t look it; tall, handsome, with a firm mouth, burning brown eyes, and thick, lustrous black hair. His muscles were steel-hard; and his skin always deeply bronzed, winter and summer alike, for he was one of those elusive and self-styled members of the Long Beach nature club. He enjoyed motoring down on brilliant days even in January to nurse a driftwood fire in the shelter of a shallow dune, basking himself in fire heat and violet ray.

Sun-bathing is the habit of a solitary; but then, Belknap was a solitary in more ways than one. He loved the slow, indolent afternoons, apparently wasted, and with no words spoken. He relished the mingled smell of olive oil, wood smoke and salt; and the sight, through more than half-shut eyes, of gulls, and a ship moving up the horizon like the large hand of a clock, invisibly moving yet seen to have moved. Rodney Drake would periodically rise like an elongated Pict out of the waste of sand and gesticulate against the sky. On the open beach the hardy little Egyptian, name unknown, would squat motionless on his heels over a tin firebox.

So it may well have been these lonely watches that fostered the thing in Belknap that his acquaintances, even friends, called ‘queer.’ The world in general certainly considered him puzzling, enigmatic. It found him definitely uncommunicative, or, when communicative, ironic, which is a turn of speech that leaves the hearer not much the wiser. His friends claimed for him a sensitive, reserved nature that shed humankind with reluctant cynicism for lack of a better method, a cynicism sharpened and brought to a point through years of close association with the evils and corruption, hypocrisy and injustice of the courts. He had a way of never overlooking an opportunity to be bitter at the expense of law and order as practiced in this enlightened twentieth century.

And it was the hopelessness of the struggle to keep a modicum of honesty in the legal system that, Belknap said, had driven him out to play a lone wolf game tracking the criminal. Too frequently, he claimed, the innocent paid, or no one paid, while the guilty sat in full view of the Bench. He was at least determined to give the eager public a few real captures, if not convictions. In his two most famous cases he had managed the convictions as well.

His first, that of Maria Monroe, strangled in her closed Riverside Drive apartment when it was supposed she herself was in Honolulu, followed immediately on his resignation from office. In fact what he considered the bungling of this case had been the last straw that made him yield to a temptation of long standing. And he was miraculously successful. With every investigating agency in the City against him, and with an apparently impregnable alibi to break down, he saw his man through to the chair.

But it was the Stanton-Mowbray affair the next winter that saw Belknap’s amazing and unreasonable technique developed to its greatest power. Stanton was shot at the Villa Bella Night Club in Forty-eighth Street, West, toward the daybreak closing of an exceptionally wild night. No gun was found, although the few remaining guests were searched within a few moments by the police; and even the general direction from which the shot was fired could not be determined. Some said it had come through a window, others from close range. The case had lain dormant for months when Belknap took an interest in it. The chief suspect had been a certain Colonel Blake, a man of great personal magnetism, strong political associations and influential friends. The feeling had become current that he was guilty and that it was being ‘hushed up,’ that the law was once more proving inadequate. But in this instance Belknap was able to give the law a clean slate. Jumping to insane conclusions in the intuitive manner that was his strongest claim to distinction, he put his finger on little Violet Mowbray, a musical comedy dancer, who had had a last-minute invitation as an ‘extra’ for Stanton’s party. Although it was believed that she and Stanton had thereby met for the first time, Belknap discovered a weird series of events that put Stanton in the most blasting light and gave poor Violet a dozen motives for murder. Violet took her sentence of from ten to twenty years with a quiet protestation of innocence that moved the courtroom to tears and hysteria. No one seeing her frail figure led away that dull December day would have said she could live to see a year of it served.

Since the weeks when he had kept his name and face headlined, together with Stanton’s and Violet Mowbray’s, Belknap had had several months of comparative quiet. He had given the police some assistance in a few minor matters, but had really fastened his teeth into nothing worth the candle. And at the moment he felt particularly in need of violent distraction. He was surfeited with a week of burning sun; weary of women; stale with an overdose of detective fiction; and disturbed by a tendency on the part of his thoughts to take a gloomier turn than usual.

Yet for some odd reason Whittaker’s ring, following the words of their last meeting, gave him pause. He knew Whittaker as a dangerous person, friend or enemy, often even more dangerous as the former. Their relationship had of late been strained. Belknap had all but come to the conclusion that any intercourse between them, kindly or unkindly, had been dropped. Then why this matter of life and death? Oh well, curiosity had killed more than cats. He reached for the receiver.

“Yes? Oh, Whittaker? Good to hear your voice.” (a little overdone that. Rang false) “Of course, old boy.” (Now why was he calling him ‘old boy’?) “I’d be delighted, more than delighted.” (Good God, I don’t even mean delighted) “Something thrilling for me to do? You’re going to put me wise? Oh, I see: give me an opportunity to get wise. Of course. Any old thing for a change.... No, I don’t exactly catch your meaning. You’re pleasantly mysterious as usual.” (Diabolically so, is what I want to say, and I will say it one of these days.) “A house full of criminals? Since when have you been on week-end terms with Sing Sing? They’ve never been in Sing Sing? You want me to help you put them there, is that it? You bet your sweet life. Anything to do with what you let fall to my ear last week? It has? When do you want me? Dinner tonight. Thanks most awfully. I’ll be there.”

He hung up; but failed to return to the Audubon which lay open on his knees, an original Folio, given him with relief and gratitude by Colonel Blake. Instead he relapsed into a brown study and considered a rather sinister possibility from several angles and in varied lights.

II

Belknap made the distance to Whittaker’s Long Island mansion at Blue Acres in something under an hour. His Dusenberg, long and low-slung, colored to please his own eye, and fitted with special gadgets for defence and utility, was also a demon for speed, and even in traffic had broken many records, largely its own to be sure. He had always driven himself, and he had often reflected that if he had not been a lawyer or a sleuth he would have been ticking off mileage at Daytona. Such was his love of the power and beauty of line of a splendid machine. And he admired as much as he admired any work of art his brown, thin, muscular hand on the wheel, one mahogany, the other coffee.

As he turned into the wide, sweeping drive of Thorngate, he slowed the car to a crawl, and savored for a moment the view of the Sound, the lemon and orange sunset beyond it, the peace of the trees and shrubs and flowers on either side. He listened with one ear to the swish of the tires in the traprock gravel roadbed, and with the other to the cicadas making the mad sound of a semi-anæsthetized brain among the oaks.

Black John, alert and loquacious, opened the door to him, and showed him immediately to a large, luxurious room on the second floor. Belknap stood at the long windows, looking down, and shedding, with the deafness characteristic of his general indifference, John’s flow of well-intentioned chatter as he unpacked and laid out Belknap’s week-end wardrobe. Belknap was so far removed from it as to be unaware of John’s withdrawal. Unaware also of Bertrand Whittaker’s entrance.

“You made the trip in short order, I imagine. How are you, Belknap?”

“Splendid, thanks. Yes, I came down fast enough. There is nothing to warrant a leisurely drive on Long Island—until after Shinnecock Hills perhaps. Before that the sooner it’s over the better. You know I am still forever being surprised that there can be such charming and secluded spots as this within a stone’s throw of these atrocious main highways. And yours is one of the best, Bertrand.”

“Isn’t it, Belknap!” Whittaker’s face lighted with pleased vanity. But it died on the instant. “I shall hate to leave it. More than I shall hate to leave anything else, I assure you.”

Belknap paused with their lighted cigarette match arrested between them, and quickly met the eyes he had been studiously avoiding.

“Leave? Why, when, and where for? Going abroad?”

Whittaker’s immediate answer was a cold smile. He accepted his light and crossed to a chair. Belknap regarded him intently through puffs of his own smoke, and being a keen student of men when he cared to be, or found it necessary, he remarked a new hardness in the hard grey face. Whittaker was a grey man: iron-grey hair, granite skin, grey-blue eyes, gun-metal suits, and plenty of grey matter. He was a man too able, too willfully brilliant, for the cramped position in which he had to work. So he put the extra energy into deviltry. “That’s just what he is doing now,” thought Belknap, “and God help somebody. Somehow I think it’s God help him for a change.” But he wasn’t prepared for being quite as right as he proved to be.

“Not exactly abroad. Though perhaps yes, in a very broad sense. Sit down, Belknap, and we’ll talk, if you don’t mind being serious on an empty stomach. The drinks will be up shortly.”

“Fire away, man, by all means. You are now making things sound, not only mysterious, but rather important. What’s it to you?”

“It’s a great deal to me, I’m afraid. It seems I have short shrift, Belknap. I’m sentenced to death. The doctors have given me six months—or ‘with luck,’ as they put it, an extra one or two.”

“Good Lord! Why I’ve always thought you one of the fittest. What is wrong? Whittaker, I’m sorry—too terribly sorry. Is there a thing I can do?”

“Yes, there is.” A flare of wicked humor came and went in Whittaker’s eyes. “But we’ll come to that in a moment. I’m dying of cancer. In a bad spot. I’m in for pain and a great deal of it; more than I can quite bear to put up with, I guess. ‘Six months to live.’ It may sound short enough to you, but to me it sounds an eternity. Six weeks, yes; I might have kept a stiff upper lip for six weeks. But that’s about my limit.”

“You mean—it’s suicide?” Belknap asked, and did his level best, in respect to the situation, not to show a fierce impatience that he should have been asked in at the death.

“No-o, not strictly speaking. Though I’ve always contended suicide is justifiable in such circumstances. And I purchased a very pretty little Colt last week for the purpose. But I reconsidered. I’ve been a man who made himself felt going and coming; you can testify to that, Belknap. Then why make this particular exit dull and unromantic, with nothing more said of it than, ‘Mr. Bertrand Whittaker had been suffering from ill health, and it is thought—etc., etc.’ You know the line. So, as I’ve said, I didn’t shoot. For here was the perfect opportunity to go the limit with life and death, nothing to lose that wouldn’t be gain. In other words I could leave a bit of a pother behind me—in commemoration. And, my dear fellow, I’ve hit on an idea that I doubt even you could match.”

Belknap’s face was a mosaic of varying expression: sympathy of a kind, eager curiosity, distrust and threatening disapprobation. A man of Whittaker’s evil propensities could do considerable damage if he was driven, as now, to turn at bay.

“Think twice, Whittaker,” Belknap warned him quietly, “before you mention your idea even to me. We can drop it here and now. I promise to ask no questions. Remember a doctor’s judgement has been as often reversed as a judge’s! Don’t be rash under the first shock.”

“I’m not being rash. This is a certainty, born witness to by my flesh and bones. The doctors didn’t surprise me, to tell you the truth. But I had rather banked on being tabled, so to speak, and dying under the knife. No such luck. So it’s my six months or my week-end, and I’m going to make it the week-end. If that fails me I can always fall back on the pistol. Putting two and two together, do you begin to get my drift?”

“I can’t say I do in the least. I suppose I’m stupid.”

“For a detective I think you are. Well, to call a spade a spade, I intend to be murdered—with you in attendance to get the murderer. Is that clear enough?” Belknap, without the flicker of an eye-lash, darkly concentrated on a point somewhere between himself and the ceiling. Whittaker examined him secretly and furtively from under overhanging brows. The atmosphere had a tendency to thicken before Belknap drew himself back to the necessities of speech.

“Thanks most awfully,” he said with a hard, ironic twist of the lips, “for this amazing opportunity. It quite takes my breath away. Undoubtedly I should make a drastic effort to turn your intention, as one is expected to withhold a man about to leap from the Brooklyn Bridge. But I admit I’m frankly curious as to details. So before I seize you around the neck, metaphorically speaking, let’s hear more.”

Whittaker’s body, from a slight stiffening, yielded to the shape of his chair.

“I’m delighted that your first reaction is curiosity, Belknap; for in that case I feel sure I can eventually enlist your interest in the bizarre and dramatic elements of the situation. I feared you’d mount the pulpit, or the bench, or the stand of mere friendship, deliver me a moral lecture, and ring up your pet specialist for an appointment. In which event,” he added with faint mockery, “I should have resorted to your rival, Silas Berry. So you see I am determined. And so far so good. I swear it’s been good fun making arrangements.”

“Such as?”

“Well, for one thing, putting in what I call my supply of ammunition. Although I have a fair handful of erstwhile, and therefore potential, murderers on my visiting list, it was another matter to bring enough of the right sort together to insure a pleasant week-end, and a week-end that, as you can see for yourself, may be indefinitely prolonged—for them! Several of my favorite respectable killers are in foreign parts. But I’ve managed at least eight. Do you want a brief synopsis? Of course certain of them are familiar to you.”

Belknap tried matching casualness with casualness. He leaned over and lit a table lamp.

“May I enquire how many of them are in the house? And how soon we may expect action? There may easily be a brace of us, Whittaker, before we’re through. A more or less famous detective left floating around on the scene of the crime might be considered rather a serious handicap.”

And at that moment John, entering with a tray, was responsible for the startled movement of both men. Whittaker remarked on it as he poured them each a highball.

“Apparently certain death hasn’t yet quenched my instinct of self-preservation. Naturally one can’t destroy in a week fifty years of vital energy and will to live.”

“Listen, old timer, are you sure even now that this is the best way out for you? What about repentance and the Church? Go in for it thoroughly, I mean, and try for the Heavenly Choir. You’re too good a tenor to waste.”

Whittaker laughed.

“Too good a devil to waste, Belknap. Better devil than tenor I think. No, I’m going out in a sputter of fire and brimstone—no candles for me.... Aha! I hear someone arriving. Possibly Blake. He was motoring in from Southampton.”

III

Standing at the windows, Belknap looking over Whittaker’s shoulder, they saw Blake spring lightly from the seat of his Ford convertible, throw out his bags from the rumble, spring back, and “zoom” around the corner to the garage.

Putting a hand on Whittaker’s arm, Belknap brought him roughly about.

“Why ring Blake in on this?” he asked, and his voice took a deadly level. His lips also leveled to a straight line, and his teeth showed white in the slit between. “After all he’s too good a friend, isn’t he, of yours, and mine? What’s the big idea?”

“He is a friend, old man, true enough.” Whittaker quietly brushed Belknap’s hand from his sleeve, and turned away. “But what are friends, true or false, to me now? ‘Less than the dust.’ Besides, Blake is a crack shot—and a sportsman to boot. Even though you proved so brilliantly that he didn’t shoot Stanton, it was just the kind of shooting he might have done, you know that. He gives no quarter to men who run out on debts, or dishonor women. Sort of a knight errant—goes about saving situations in the nick of time. That he finds it convenient to use a gun in most cases is not his fault. I can even see him doing me what he would call ‘a good turn,’ taking me out after a whiskey and soda, and putting a hole through me against the garden wall with a Sorrell-and-Son generosity, ‘We mustn’t let the poor devil suffer.’ Yes, Belknap, you must admit he’s a splendid prospect from my point of view. I can’t help it that you have scruples against sleuthing him.”

“By all that’s holy, you are beyond me, Whittaker.”

“If you mean by that that I am beyond the pale, I am. And beyond caring. There may or may not be a life in death, but that there is death in life I’m finding out. So what the Hell!”

“Enough said, Whittaker. We’ll leave it at that. I begin to see that it is ‘what the Hell’ and then some.” Belknap was pacing the floor, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He stopped before Whittaker to ask, “I have a question before we go further. What’s the match, that lights the fuse, that blows up the house that Bertrand built?”

“A good match, Ordway, soaked in tar, pitch, and turpentine. I publish my Diary. It’s a substantial, well-filled, truthful Diary, packed with sensations. In a period when confessions and revelations are in such demand, it seemed a pity not to keep abreast of the times. Hearst gives me a small fortune for mine, sight unseen, and it goes, in my will, with whatever else I possess, to my niece Joel—unless, of course, this week-end makes it useless to her; in which case—”

“Joel Lacey! See here, Whittaker, you’re insane! I’ve cared for Joel, and you know it, since she was too young to know the meaning of the word love. She is incapable of murder. But if she had committed a crime, and you were letting her down, you would have me to reckon with.”

“Hear, hear! The first threat, and that from my bodyguard. Check it for Berry’s benefit. It happens, my dear fellow, that your estimate of Joel’s character, like that of all true lovers, is mistaken. Joel is a murderess. Her husband wasn’t a suicide. Oh, she had incentive enough, I guess. And it was hardly a murder in one sense: she challenged him to a duel but he scoffed at the very idea. So she fired anyway, and came to me to give herself up. I silenced her. As for letting her in for all this—well, I needed her. I was short of women for the dinner table. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered with her, for my hopes don’t lean very heavily on her, I can assure you.”

“I should have thought you might be short of women. Who are the others, by the way?”

“Romany Monte Video for one. The accident in The Renegade Lover, in which she killed her husband (who was not her husband in private) with a folding dagger which didn’t collapse was not an accident. The dagger that night was not intended to fold.”

“Bertrand, you’re a cad. When did you desert Romany?”

“Years ago. I didn’t desert her. She left me for— Oh, I can’t even remember, there have been so many.”

“That’s no excuse for such betrayal as this. Who else?”

“Nadia Mdevani. You’ve met her here once or twice, I think; and of course know of her in a professional way. Not that there has ever been anything proved against her, quite the contrary, and yet where there has been a political murder, here or abroad, during the past ten years, she has almost invariably been questioned. I should say offhand that she is probably the tool of a powerful international ring of Governmental murderers. But her social distinction is unquestioned, her culture and wit are superlative, and her beauty is a thing to be dreamed of. I can say to you now, what I would not have said under any other circumstances, that she and I have been—call it friends, yet I have not breathed a word to her of what I instinctively know to be true: that she is a murderer twenty times over.”

Belknap shrugged to cover a strong, irrepressible shudder.

“You are a braver man than I am, Gunga Din. But then, in a pinch, I’ve always known you were. Is that the toll of women?”

“There’s one other. She is not a murderess, but she is a potential one, for I think she knows that her husband killed a man years ago. Until lately, when, I am sorry to say, Romany has been having her innings with him, Neil and Sydney Crawford were hand and glove in a marriage that I liked to call a marriage. He is a banker;—lives out here at Blue Acres; respected, indeed loved, by everyone who knows him; and the same can be said of Sydney. He got inadvertently mixed up with a gang of boys on the streets of New York, when he was a youngster, and they later proved to be a gang in good earnest. So when Crawford was sowing his wild oats, and had run up a card debt far beyond anything he knew his father could pay, he accepted an honorarium for cutting short the career of a drug smuggler. It was his wildest oat. He turned over to a very clean leaf; but I think he would go to any lengths now to save his name for Sydney and the children. And she would do the same by him.”

“Splendid! Go on. This is too good to be true. It is really such a sweet reversal of form—expecting the bad eggs to hatch. Isn’t that Julian Prentice out there with Joel? Who did he kill—his crippled grandmother or something?”

“Not so bad as that—or I wouldn’t have let him engage himself to Joel. No, he merely drowned a boy who was all but drowning him during the hazing of freshmen at the University. He pretended cramp to do it. Everything appeared accidental, and of course sympathy was with Julian anyway. There is one other, who makes the fourth man—irrespective of ourselves, and we don’t count. Milton Dorn I doubt whether you know. He is an able surgeon; but he also has a secret laboratory, or operating room, where he experiments on the conscious flesh to the point, but not beyond the point, where life still lingers. I should imagine that would be all you need know about him.”

“Absolutely! My only wonder is that you didn’t apply directly to him for release.”

“I thought of that. But then, as I’ve said, it’s a long row he hoes and I’m looking for a short one. There, Belknap, I guess that tells the tale in brief, doesn’t it?”

“No, not altogether, Judge. There is a point on which I need to be enlightened, with a bright, bright light. Where do I come in?”

“I thought I had made that clear. You are here to find good sport, but to be a spoil-sport.”

“I don’t mean that, Whittaker.”

“You mean the Diary—why, man alive, it makes something like a hero of you. My admiration is written all over it. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. Have you committed murder?”

Belknap laughed. “It’s not the time to admit it exactly, is it?”

A silence fell between them. Belknap broke it with another question.

“When do you spring it?”

“I thought I might bring it up at dinner. Unobtrusively. Casualness will at first bewilder them. The horror of the situation will dawn on them gradually.”

“Has anyone an inkling?”

“No one. Except perhaps Nadia. I mentioned to her the other day that it would be fun to publish my Diary verbatim seeing what a number of things it contains. Her answer was, that if I proposed doing so I would probably never live to see it in print. That sounds hopeful. Oh, of course nothing at all may happen. They may decide to take their medicine for the old rather than be on with the new. I think that would be my solution provided I was in their shoes. And then again anything may happen. Psychologically it’s a pretty how-de-do. To throw half a dozen killers together, even civilized ones (in fact the more civilized the more interesting), makes for a strange medley.”

“Stranger than you know, I’m afraid. There is an interrelation of secret currents between your protagonists that is likely to be devastating. You may not even be the only casualty. What about the police?”

“Call them in at the drop of the hat of course. The Homicide Department would be delighted to send Berry along to help you if you suggested it, I’m sure. Well—what about dressing for dinner?”

“Suits me.” Belknap put a hand on Whittaker’s shoulder as they parted at the door.

“Whittaker,” he said gently, “I don’t know what to say exactly. I’ll have to reserve my judgement until later. But again let me say I sincerely regret the circumstances that have brought us to the present precarious position. For even I can’t see my way to withdrawing now. I can’t forego the chance of so much excitement, if nothing else,” he added, with the flicker of a smile.

“Thought ye couldn’t, boy.” Whittaker stressed the shrewd, cunning accents of his Yankee ancestors.

IV

The luxurious ease, and quiet, well-oiled machinery of service at Thorngate gave no slightest indication of the worm at its heart. Up the long, winding, carpeted stairs the servants glided on their errands, and, in turn, the guests themselves came softly down by ones and twos, with a gleam of jewels, of colored silk, of white shirt-fronts in the halls dimly lit with candles.

Belknap had hastened his dressing in order to be first in the drawing-room. He felt that at any moment he might be needed in the front line, and that no time should be wasted under a shower or before a mirror. His trust in Whittaker was not so perfect as to assure him that he had been honest in saying no one was in the least aware of impending trouble. And there was just the chance that someone, being forehanded, would get away with murder!

Although he had been in the receiving room, which was also library and den, fifty times over, Belknap looked it over with awakened interest. Whittaker, it was apparent, had a leaning toward panelings and oil portraits, medieval tapestries and deep-napped carpets. Here tapestries formed the wall covering from floor to ceiling: none of exceptional value except the Gobelin over the mantel, but all equally lovely in colors and texture. An impulse, not so odd perhaps under the circumstances, prompted Belknap to test what lay immediately behind the surface of woven cloth and, as far as its stretching would yield to his hand, he found space. He tried it at various points and discovered it everywhere the same; and he recalled having heard that it was the safest way to hang tapestries against the rear attack of insects and dampness. Convenient to know, he thought. He was engaged in trying to locate the servants’ entrance to this interstitial passage when he became gradually aware that someone else had come into the room.

He turned about with elaborate sang-froid and met the gaze of a tall, strikingly handsome woman, who stood quizzically regarding him. She wore a black sheath gown with crimson accessories that included the oval nails of tapering fingers and the clear-cut lips of a willful mouth. The crimson handkerchief tied to her garnet bracelets floated lightly up and back at every slightest movement of her arm. The cigarette case of scarlet enamel which she opened with a deft flick of one hand to help herself with the other, gleamed like smoldering coal.

He had met Nadia Mdevani several times with Whittaker; and he had vaguely realized the relationship between them, but had given it little consideration; except that once he had instinctively withdrawn from a case in which her name had figured more or less conspicuously. The sense of her guilt had been conveyed to him on the wings of one of what he called his wild guesses, and he paid Whittaker the courtesy of letting well enough alone. As it happened, she had cleared herself easily.

Looking at her now he realized that she was inwardly disturbed at sight of him. Perhaps she saw in his mere presence a confirmation of the faint doubts she might be entertaining with respect to the week-end. But her poise held perfectly—in fact it was by a shade of its over-emphasis that he caught the inner tremor at all.

“Ah, Mr. Belknap!” she exclaimed, in her slow, husky contralto. “How ni-ice to see you here. Or should I call you Judge Belknap—or Detective Ordway Belknap? I am never sure of the term to your face. Behind your back I call you Belknap for short.”

“Let’s discard them, all four, and make it simply Ordway, to my face, as you put it, and behind my back. And may I make it Nadia? Remember Bertrand is an equally dear friend to us both. You are looking divinely, Miss Nadia. Black is your color. Although I have seen you when I should have said the same of red, or white for the matter of that. Red and white are your contrasts. Tonight you are fused into a single vivid figure of black. Whistler would have liked you. You have a way, which most women have not, of lending distinction to a color instead of letting it create you. You have a like faculty with situations I am told.”

“I am not quite certain what you may mean by that, or whether it should entirely please me. But I have sufficient vanity to be flattered by your recollection of my gowns in view of how little attention you seemed to give them. Will you have one?”

She proffered her exquisite box and on his “Thank you, no,” crossed to the hearth where she lifted a crimson-slippered foot to the side bar of the fender, and for graceful balance (pose, Belknap thought it) laid a hand against the tapestried wall. It yielded enough to mar her picture.

“I had forgotten these tapestries are but the semblance of walls,” she murmured. “What a cosy place for rats. Although I suppose it was for the very purpose of perpetrating the Hamlet act against rats that the space was originally reserved.”

Belknap was pouring himself a thimbleful of Scotch at the tray standing in readiness on the divan table. He tossed it off, and turned over the after flavor on his tongue, as his mind turned over the possible subtleties of Nadia’s remark. She had made it piquant by a twist of inflection. A Polonius as well as a rat—or so the tone implied.

“We were speaking of Bertrand,” she continued abruptly. “Do you not consider him a little secretive about the week-end, conveying that there is a reason why we are here? Why should there need be a reason?”

“There should be none, Nadia, except our enjoyment of his unbounded hospitality. But I feel myself, now that you mention it,” Belknap pursued, willing to test where her guards were raised, “that Bertrand has something up his sleeve. Possibly an announcement; he likes to make any news impressive. He may have lost his shirt in the Market, or been left a fortune by his great-aunt Emma in Vermont. You know Bertrand well enough to know he’d celebrate either with equal pomp.”

He heard the little whispering sigh that Nadia suddenly drew.

“I hope it’s nothing serious,” she said, more to herself than Belknap. Then, quickly: “Is it the Diary?” she asked.

Belknap hesitated by the fraction of a second. By all accounts Nadia Mdevani was dangerous. Her intelligence, fearlessness and beauty were things that might throw dust in any man’s eyes. Her ability to ‘clinch,’ as she was doing now, with a power greater than her own, and cut her way free from within, had won her many a hand-to-hand encounter that if taken blow for blow would have seen her downed long ago. However, Belknap could see no better way at the moment than to close with her.

“Yes, it is the Diary,” he said quietly; and stood spellbound by the extreme beauty of her face as the color mounted under the ivory skin, accentuating the high, molded contours of the bones beneath it. He could not have said whether she were more angered or hurt.

“When?” Her low voice held its ground; not by a shade did it show disquiet. “How much time is granted us to deal with it?”

He was smitten with admiration at the serenity and ease of her apparent candor. With veteran coolness she took him on. He could do no less than to match her play for play.

“He intends letting the cat out of the bag tonight. But there will be nothing published for several days.”

“Thank you. I don’t know why, Mr. Detective, you are being so kind and telling me tales out of school.” She turned fully toward him and gave him one of her rare smiles, lifting her drooped eyelids enough to show two burning high-lights, like two stars under an edge of cloud. “I had to know how swift the sands were running away. Even you can’t speed them or retard them. And you wouldn’t if you could—for you have really seen me tonight for the first time,” she said, with the faint irony he was beginning to adore because in a more subtle and whimsical way, it counterbalanced his own. “May I?” She took a flower from a bowl on the table and broke it short for his buttonhole. At that moment he had regretfully to turn from her. Whittaker, at his elbow, was presenting the Crawfords.

V

was the way they sat at dinner.

Belknap regretted Miss Video on his left. He was one of the few who had never been properly infatuated with the Romany patteran, as he privately named her for her continuous flow of inconsequential chatter, and had therefore never liked her. It was one thing or the other with Romany. She was a sylph-like creature with enormous eyes, an auburn Viennese bob, and a disingenuous manner. She ‘needed’ them, was the way men put it, first their friendship, then their protection, finally their passion. You couldn’t somehow let her down by disappointing her. They said she was weak and easily swayed, and each in turn flattered himself he could strengthen her philosophy against a bitter world (a world he helped to embitter, if he could but see it that way), and help her get on her feet. Yet somehow she had never mastered this art of walking alone!

Belknap, always irritated by willowy natures, now wished her in Kingdom Come. He wanted to renew the dangerous but charming intimacies that had swiftly and strangely sprung up between himself and Nadia Mdevani; and here would have been his opportunity, with Nadia beside him sending odd disturbing currents up the arm that almost brushed hers. He felt her mind being restive and wild, puzzled and angry, and above all keenly intent on a loophole of escape. If anyone else should succeed in silencing Whittaker forever it would not be because Nadia had yielded her designs but because she had delayed long enough to be cunning and intricate in their workmanship. She even seemed, now that the die was cast, rather to relish the added risk of having Belknap in the arena with her. Whittaker, asked for a description of Nadia, would have said the obvious things about raven locks and snowdrift skin, with eyes too revealing to go revealed. Belknap, after this evening, would have spoken of her in terms of a banked fire with a scent of brimstone. With less than half his exasperated attention given to Romany’s innumerable reasons, centering in jealousy, why she had not been assigned to lead in After Midnight, he glanced surreptitiously at Nadia. Her face, ivory white and immobile, signified nothing. He wondered whether he might be mistaken in thinking the atmosphere so heavily charged between them. His appraising eye passed down the table, appreciating beauty and distinction where he found it, and paused at Joel—dear Joel, not beautiful perhaps, but dear looking. Belknap, in his fashion, had loved her; but for his own bachelor’s sake (he was not an unselfish man), as well as for her youth’s sake, he had never spoken of it to her. Looking unwaveringly ahead into a night that might well be terrible for them all, he felt a particular pang for her. She was talking sotto voce with Julian:

“Hush, dear, people are listening.”

“Then darling, more darling, most darling.”

“Don’t, please!”

“I want to see your amber eyes, not the back of a leaf-brown head.”

“Don’t say things like that at the table. Speak when you are spoken to.”

“Can’t you say something nice to me?”

She looked around at him, half tearful, half laughing, under her lashes.

“Oh, my dearest one, is it as bad as all that?”

“Worse, Joel, much worse.”

Of course it must be a dream, and a very bad one, that Whittaker had been saying things about cancer and murder and murderers. The more so when one looked at Whittaker himself, sitting genially, though perhaps with an extra dash of grey pallor, at the head of his board, lifting his champagne to touch glasses with Sydney Crawford: “To the lips, to the eyes.” The Stein song again! Would its revival never die? Yet it quite applied at Whittaker’s table tonight. Every woman in her way was as fair, as vital, as more than willing to play up, as any man could ask. Even Sydney, with a flash of challenging laughter at her husband, was returning Hartley Blake’s sallies in kind. Sydney was obviously fey tonight, with a heightened color, brighter eyes, and a recklessness of sentiment that might mean trouble. Had Neil and Romany failed in discretion?

Blake was in his usual excellent form; and it was plain to see thought his wit of too good a flavor to be entirely spent on a woman, even the excited Sydney. So he was tossing it by means of a slightly lifted voice up over his right shoulder at Dorn. Dorn however looked darkly unresponsive, and, being a man of few words, it seemed probable Blake would never know whether his delightful flippancies and exaggerations were being appreciated. Then, suddenly, he knew:

“As for myself,” Dorn remarked to his side-partners in particular, and to the table tangentially, “I have recently resolved to remain silent unless I feel that I can definitely contribute something worth while to the conversation. Time and energy are indiscriminately wasted in the futile, the repetitive, and the platitudinous. If we could hold our tongues until they were loosed by the real idea, the absolute necessity of speech, there would at least be a deal less noise, and quite possibly a return to the art of thinking which at present is a lost one.”

It was an insulting and uncalled for remark under the circumstances. Romany, who looked positively crestfallen for a change, perhaps needed a blunt rebuke (she wasn’t suppressed in a day), but Blake, though an inveterate talker, was a brilliant one. His high color showed such anger that the control of his first words was surprising.

“I should not only hold it, Dorn, I should bite it if I were you.”

The silence that fell in the room was deep and ominous. But in it was Whittaker’s opportunity, not only to distract Dorn and Blake, but to call attention to himself. Here, like Jason, he could cast his stone among the dragon’s teeth.

“I believe I have a contribution to make to the conversation, to the evening’s pastime, and I hope to posterity.”

Belknap, without looking her way, knew that Nadia stiffened and straightened at the words. As for the others, their eyes turned to Whittaker expectantly, but with no premonitory awakening.

“I had planned letting you learn of what I intend when it had ceased to be an intention and become an actuality. In other words, you were only to know of the publication of my memoirs when you saw them in print. But I really can’t resist a little boasting in advance, and I thought I might read scraps of them after dinner to the assembled gathering, before we get down to bridge.”

“Oh, how wonderful of you, Uncle Bertrand,” Joel exclaimed, eager to help him, as she thought, tide over the embarrassing moment. “I didn’t know you were writing. You have so many irons in the fire, how did you find time to do a book? But it must have been pretty good fun, so much has happened to you.”

“It isn’t recent, Joel; it’s been written at odd moments over a period of twenty years. In other words, it’s my Diary. But it is packed full of material, and all sorts of things. Everybody’s in it. Oh yes, you are all there, my dears.”

“You talk like Red Riding Hood’s wolf, Bertrand,” Nadia said with cold acidity, and at her tone the first chill, like the first autumn frost, fell on them all. “Just what do you mean when you say we are in it?”

“Exactly that, Nadia darling. I hope you are in it to the life, as I’m sure I am.”

“You mean it is a character portrayal of your friends and foes as well as a revelation of your own nature—you sinner,” she added with bitter lightness.

“You express it in a nutshell.”

Blake spoke.

“By what right does one betray one’s friends—even in the cause of literature; and you will excuse me, Whittaker, if I doubt the literary merits of your pen.”

“By the modern right of giving the public what it craves and pays for: the revelation of evil, the worse the merrier. It used to be how I found the true light; now it is how I went plumb to Hell.”

“How you did perhaps, but not how I did.”

“In most instances one touches close upon the other, I’m afraid. It is a platitude of course (I ask your pardon, Dorn) to remark that we none of us can sin alone, but it is true nevertheless. Even the person that hears the tale of a crime is somehow affected. I feel the need of clearing my decks, of things heard and committed.”

“I doubt it would earn you a free pass through the pearly gates, supposing your proposed act comes off. Mark I say proposed.”

“Is that your glove, Blake? You must be able to get gloves at a discount.”

“My glove, yes, but not concealing the dagger beneath.”

“I’ll meet you where and when you please.”

“With Ordway Belknap as your second, I suppose? No, thank you; there are safer ways.”

“Then make it fast, man,” Whittaker cried in a suddenly broken voice as the dew of intense pain stood out on his forehead and he drooped a little forward over the table. “The time is short for both of us.”

“Quick, Mr. Belknap,” Nadia exclaimed, “Romany is fainting.”

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.’”

“A style worthy of the American Institute,” Julian murmured to Joel, “where vocabulary counts—I mean wordiness.”

“Hush, Julian! Your uncle’s a member.”

“That’s how I know.”

“‘The single room, into which Markham crept upward by way of a loose floor board, reeked of stale tobacco smoke, soiled clothes, and an odd sweet odor that he had long ago learned to recognize as opium. Knife in hand, he settled against the wall near the locked door to await his victim’s home-coming. There were mice about. He identified mice. And a branch blowing against the window-pane. That was easy. But there was another sound, persistent and regular—like, like breathing. Breathing! Good God, it was breathing. The smuggler wasn’t abroad smuggling, according to plan. The cold sweat broke out on Markham’s palms and forehead. Were they each crouching in the dark waiting the other’s move? The next scuttle of a mouse shattered his flesh and bones like a blow. He was goose-flesh from head to foot, including his scalp which pained him with its effort to lift his hair.’”

“You see he thought his goose was cooked,” was Julian’s next aside to Joel. Something was at last beginning to take place in Julian. Belknap saw a little sleepy devil waking in him that might not always prove easy to deal with.

“‘The man on the bed moved; lay still; shifted again. There was nothing for it but to strike. He sprang and struck: and drove the little knife up to his hand in something soft. He was saying tonight that a knife murder is not so good for the murderer whatever it may be to the murdered. He says the physical sensations will last him for life: the scraping of the blade on a bone, its spongy sinking home in a vital part, the sudden sagging of the body under one’s own tensity, and the last gasping gurgling breath against the face. Markham had never seen this man’s face, never would see it; but he would remember the feeling of the unshaven chin and the small, fat body; and the smell of sweated clothes mingling with the warm smell of fresh blood——’”

“If you don’t mind, Whittaker,” Crawford said in an inhuman voice, “I should like a glass of water. May I ring?” He tried to rise, staggered, and said, “Help me, Sydney.”

It seemed that Sydney had not heard him or was unable to move. She didn’t stir, or move her eyes. But Romany, from a huddled, shivering figure on the divan, came to life and ran to him.

“Durian, Neil, my beloved, my only love. What is he doing to you? I can’t bear it. I won’t let him do things like this—I don’t care—”

Romany didn’t finish—Sydney had heard, and had struck Romany a blow that threw her against the table. Nadia was laughing terribly as Blake came across toward Whittaker with murder on his face.

“Now by all that’s holy or unholy, you have overstepped the bounds, Bertrand Whittaker—”

Whether he ever reached Whittaker remained in doubt for at that moment the room was plunged in total darkness. Someone screamed—a woman. There was a scuffle and a thud. A man groaned. Belknap cried out: “Stay where you are as you value your lives.” They heard him feeling the wall for the switch, and then there was light.

In it Whittaker lay back half conscious in his chair, bleeding at the forehead. The others stood in oddly arrested positions like the players of ten-step on the count of ten. And the Diary was gone.

VII

As a ditch drains at the opening of a sluice, leaves and twigs sucked one by one, slow at first then rapidly, down the outward current, the library drained of guests, silently, furtively, slow almost to the door, swift as the need to escape the room, the others, and their own astounding collapse under sudden stress, dragged them away. When the last of them had disappeared, Belknap, with John’s aid, helped Bertrand Whittaker to his room. They paused at his threshold. For the moment there seemed nothing to say. Both perhaps felt the effects of a certain, for them, anti-climax to the evening’s events—something rather hollow, almost something ridiculous, in the situation. Whittaker felt let down. Belknap ugly and impatient.

“How’s the head?” Belknap asked stiffly.

“Quite all right, thanks,” Whittaker answered with equal stiffness. “Won’t you come in?”

“No. Not now. There’s too much in the affrighted air. Get some sleep if you can. Though perhaps you think you’ll get plenty of that soon enough. Well, you’ve started the ball rolling with a vengeance, haven’t you? Satisfied? God, Whittaker, hadn’t you better cry quits? It isn’t too late. Tell ’em it was a practical joke; and ask Crawford’s pardon on the side. You see for yourself it isn’t going to be so daisy simple. A murder! We’ll be lucky if it’s only half a dozen. There was no lovelight in any one’s eyes this evening, except in that poor little goose of a Joel’s. And she went upstairs looking withered. Slice this house from garret to cellar right now and it would make as pretty a Desire Under the Elms cross-section as you could find in a day’s journey.”

“The desire being to get me, huh?” Whittaker asked grimly.

“Exactly. If only whoever gets you would just please make a thorough job of it. Who do you think tried it?”

“Haven’t a ghost; have you? Thought it was going to be the Colonel somehow. But the blow didn’t quite come from his direction. Still, he may have swung around me in the dark. It was a nasty knock, I think with metal, but glancing. That’s what saved me.”

“Whittaker, you are a cool one. Wish I could match you tonight. But there are moments when I don’t like it. Change your mind?”

“Never! No, as I said before, if you don’t like the game, get out. I’ll find a detective to whom it will be a challenge to the best work that’s in him.”

“And I will never get out. You know that; you know it only too well, you old reprobate. Filthy as the weather looks ahead, catch me refusing to go through it, if it’s there to go through. Well, while we linger here the plot undoubtedly thickens. I’d best get a move-on. Good-by—for the moment.”

“Good-by, and good-hunting,” Whittaker said as he turned away, leaning more heavily on John’s arm. Closing his door he murmured “Ah!” on a breath, meaning, if he had troubled to say all he meant, “Well, well, see what we have here.”

Romany Video, in a great fluff of feathery negligee, lay face downward, a vibrant, hysterical puff-ball, on the bed. She was a mere speck of worried humanity troubling the white waste spaces of Whittaker’s four-poster; but an insistent speck, like a mosquito at a screen. Whittaker regarded her for a moment with an expression of mingled amusement, pity, contempt, and the faintly suggestive what-can-I-do-for-you look certain men always have for a fair damsel in distress. Thoroughly as Whittaker knew this particular damsel, no distress of hers would quite leave him indifferent.

But he took his time. There was no harm ever came in letting a woman wait—or weep. He said nothing. Sitting on the edge of the bed, as though Romany were not there, he let John help him exchange his pair of patent-leather for a pair of pigskin slippers, remove his dinner-coat and stiff shirt, and slip his green silk dressing-gown over his shoulders. Romany, properly responsive to the delayed attention, redoubled her sobbing.

“Thank you, John. That’ll do for now. No, don’t bother about my head. It’s hardly more than a mean bruise. I’ll call you later if I want you. Good-night.”

Whittaker, allowing John to depart, silently studied the trembling, haired-up curls of Romany’s dishevelled head. Then, on the click of the latch, he leaned across and touched her arm.

“Come, come, little one. What’s it all about? You’re taking it too hard. I’m sorry it had to be Crawford to begin with—for your sake. But you’ll get over him, if you have time, as you got over me. As you got over Blake. How did Blake let you get over him?”

“Oh, go away, you horrid, mean thing. I can’t bear you. Don’t talk to me. Don’t you dare touch me.”

“As bad as all that? Dear, dear! You’re taking him harder than you took most of us. You like them good, is that it? Gives you something to do making them over.”

“You bad man! How can you say such things to me? How can you, after all we’ve been to each other? You used never to do anything to hurt me. And look at you now. What has happened, Bertrand dear? It’s such a cruel world. I can’t bear it. I tell you, I can’t. I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to die, Bertrand.”

“My dear, for the first time of the hundred and one you’ve made that threat, there’s a chance of it’s coming off,” Whittaker said, and said the one thing in creation that, instead of aggravating them, could have stopped Romany’s hysterics dead in their tracks. Romany was quiet; desperately quiet. She lifted her head from the foam of maribou and looked at Whittaker with wide, distraught eyes, and parted lips.

“What do you mean?” she whispered.

“What I say,” he mocked her whisper by imitating it. “Even if you escape tonight, Romany (for death, whose name you so often take in vain, is on the qui vive in the house tonight), you have Durian’s death to answer for.”

Romany screamed, and throttled the scream with her hand across her mouth.

“Bertrand! You are going—to tell—that? You’ve written it down as you wrote about Neil?”

“I have.”

“Oh, no-no-no-no. Please, no. I don’t believe it.”

“Then wait and see. But hope isn’t dead yet, Freckles. (Let me see; yes, there’s your one freckle that made me call you Freckles. Remember?) I’ll have to find the Diary, or rewrite it,—unless, of course, I—”

“Oh, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” Romany bounced back into her hair, her maribou, and the rumpled pillows.

“Don’t say that!” he cried dramatically. And Romany caught at a straw. She sat up again.

“You care?” she said. “You do care. Oh, Bertrand, why are you making me suffer so? I don’t understand. Darling, is it because you’re jealous?” She threw both arms recklessly around his neck and clung to him with the wild strength of a drowning person. “Did he think his little Romany had really gone away and left him? Did he think she cared about all the other mans? Why, his poor little girl only thought the big man had got tired of her. She did, darling. Truly, she did.”

Whittaker slowly and carefully, with all the force of his hands, disengaged her arms, but, once disengaged, he found his own of necessity engaged in holding her.

“Brat!” he said, on a low, half-laugh, and kissed her lightly.

“Oh,” she breathed with a relieved sigh that rose, softly, from the bottom of her heart. “It’s so long since you called me that. I love it. How silly of us to quarrel, Bertrand. And be jealous! After all these years. To think you could ever have been so cruel as to pretend to tell about Durian to bring me back. Couldn’t you have found a pleasanter way, darling?”

Whittaker regarded her obliquely through half-shut eyes.

“What about Crawford?” he asked.

She had the grace to color.

“Poor Neil,” she murmured. “But that’s for him to take care of, isn’t it?”

“I see it is.” She felt him shiver, but misinterpreted it.

“Happy?” she asked.

“The Devil has that reputation.”

He felt her take alarm again, with a defensive stiffening. She laughed shakily.

“Naughty boy! You’re being sarcastic.”

“Am I?”

Suddenly, Romany sprang away from him and stood trembling from head to foot, and chattering with uncontrolled and unexpected rage.

“You are go-go-going to tell.” She stuttered feverishly. “You are going to tell on all of us. You r-really mean it. Don’t you? D-don’t you?”

“Ah, you’ve figured it out, have you? Yes, I’m telling. How often must I say it to get it through your pretty head?”

“You brute! You beast! You—,” like a spoilt child Romany stamped. “You’re a hateful, cruel, wicked man. You can’t do it. Just you try. No one will let you. You’ll be killed first. You can’t do it to me, do you hear. I’ll kill you myself. You’ve got to leave me alone. Leave me alone. What do you think I killed him for? Because he betrayed me, didn’t I? And what are you doing to me? Betraying me, too. You look out, Bertrand Whittaker. There’s nothing I’ll stop at if I’m roused. No, not even murder.”

Whittaker shed Romany’s tantrum as a duck sheds water.

“Histrionics, baby,” he said. “You never can get far away from them, can you? Fifth-rate quotations from sixth-rate melodrama. Not that I don’t wish you meant your big threat. I do. But if you really mean to kill me, don’t shout about it. The house is listening, if I know the house. Do it on the quiet. Now run away home to your room, child, and think it over. I’ll drop in later, if I may, and get the results. Pity I haven’t the poor old diary by me and I’d mark you the passages about yourself. They’re quite thrilling. Make you out a sort of Medici, of the willow-wand variety. You should be honored.” Romany swayed. “Don’t faint, my dear, again. You do it too often. It’s becoming a vicious habit. The thing for you to do is to get to bed.” Whittaker worked her gently toward the door. “Goodnight—sleep tight—wake up—”

Romany drew away from him with a shudder. Wrapping her gown tightly about her with a pathetic little gesture of pride and courage, she flung a parting shot from the doorway.

“And don’t think you’re the only one that can tell tales out of school, Bertrand Whittaker. I’ll match you revelation for revelation if it comes to the book of revelations. You’ll have a tall lot of explaining to do to the law if I let—.”

She was in the hall, and had dropped her voice. Whittaker failed to catch a name she gave.

“Who’s that you’ll let the world know about?” he shouted.

Romany put her dust-mop head back into the room.

“Just you guess! And I hope you die of fright,” she hissed, and, turtle-wise, withdrew the head.

VIII

Julian, in dressing gown and slippers, sank back in the deep arm-chair before the fire burning in his room, and gave himself up to being downright worried. The situation at Thorngate seemed to him bewildering, terrifying, and positively insane, by turns. Obviously there was far more real trouble in the wind than the immediate problem of his own predicament, though heaven knew that was bad enough, largely because of Joel. However he was in a sense relieved and glad that Joel was to know. He had never yet been able to figure out a way to tell her about himself, but now this came along to settle the matter for him: she was bound to know, willy-nilly.

Why, why had he ever told Bertrand Whittaker of all people? No one would have ever been any the wiser if he had kept his mouth shut that warm evening last summer when his conscience was eating him alive, together with the mosquitoes, and he had asked Whittaker what to do about it. Whittaker had said, “Oh, forget it, boy. It won’t do you, or Roger Dane, or Roger’s family any good to come out with it.” Then why was Whittaker so thoroughly airing it now? Or was he? Perhaps he considered Julian’s hot-headed crime of too light a weight to bother with in his gruesome Diary. But Julian felt that it was playing ostrich on his part to rely on such a hope. For a man is known by the company he keeps. And it began to be desperately certain that the house was full to the gables of murderers in one degree or another. Both Blake and Dorn had been too quick on the rise to speak well for themselves. Romany Monte Video and Neil Crawford had blown to bits under a little pressure. And the Diary had been of sufficient importance for someone to have already attempted murder for its sake. Murder to cover murder. What a weird and preposterous household it was proving to be. What was Bertrand Whittaker’s motive in assembling it unless he was playing a losing game with death? If Crawford were not so chicken-hearted he would have avenged tonight’s dreadful betrayal before now. He might get around to it yet. Some of the rankest cowards in an open fight have been known to be excellent stabbers-in-the-back. And if everyone else had a secret murder in his past, whoever got away with the Diary was getting a wonderful thrill—probably reading it now by flashlight in a cupboard or under the shrubbery (one of Julian’s most persistent fears was that Dorn, instead of having gone straight up to town, was haunting the grounds with murder in his heart), trembling at every creak of the floor or rustle of leaves.

Whittaker’s chances of seeing his scheme through appeared slim enough to Julian: but even should he fail to see a rewritten version of his Diary in print, he had already, by one evening’s work, made a rotten mess of at least six lives. Neil and Sydney and Romany could no longer ignore their situation; whatever was between them would from now on be an open wound. Belknap would have definite proof of at least one crime and the criminal behind it. Whether, in view of the preposterous and unfair circumstances, he would decently ignore Crawford’s guilt was a doubtful question. Romany had fainted dead away when the Diary was first mentioned, and later had lost her head and confused the names of Neil Crawford and that lover of hers, with the crazy name of Durian, who had been accidently killed in one of her plays—why, of course, he hadn’t been accidentally killed, that was just it. What a fool he was not to have thought of it before? So now he had three murderers accounted for: Crawford, Romany, and himself. As for Nadia, she looked the part of a poisoner to the letter. Dorn had clearly run away from something. With Blake it probably all depended on your definition of a duel.

But then there was Joel! Something must be wrong with his whole figuring, or Joel wouldn’t be where she was. Surely Whittaker wouldn’t include an innocent niece in a crime wave unless there were others as innocent to make it proper. Julian smiled at his own charming conceit. But it might be that Whittaker was so intent on crushing the alliance between himself and Joel that he was taking drastic measures to acquaint Joel with her lover’s villainy. He must see Joel. He must see her before things developed beyond anyone’s control, as they were rapidly doing.

He jumped to his feet and almost out of his skin at a tapping on an inner door of his room that led God knew where. Should he lie low and gaze hypnotized at the door knob, or shout boldly “Come in,” or open the door suddenly and take the intruder off his guard? Julian had by now strung himself up to such a pitch that his own murder wouldn’t in the least have surprised him. Before he could decide on a course of action the door quietly opened and Joel appeared in a flowing blue robe. All his breath deserted him at the vision of her in his room.

“Joel!” he whispered.

“Yes, dear, I’m on the other side of the door, with the key on my side. Must be more plot in that, don’t you think? If we fall any deeper into trouble than we have fallen already—I mean if it comes to calling the police or something—there’ll be a scandal about the connecting door between the rooms of Mr. Julian Prentice and his fiancée. Fiancée my eye, it will suggest! And if, hearing a shot, we should dash into the hall, it would add that we were seen emerging from the young gentleman’s room, in negligee, at—” she glanced at her wrist watch—“at 12:30 A.M. The fact that I am marking the time, with you as witness, may prove frightfully important. It is late, isn’t it?”

“Very, yes.” Julian’s over-emotion at Joel’s nearness showed itself in understatement and a boyish stiffness that made Joel love him beyond anything. “Come and sit here, won’t you? While I stir this fire. What are you doing out so late, dear heart?”

“I did a little listening and snooping in the halls and found everybody else doing likewise. So I naturally can’t sleep. The house is fairly creeping, Julian. I wish it would get to its feet and walk off. Perhaps in the sense of very strong cheese, it will eventually. Oh dear, I’m so tired, and therefore a little silly, as you see, darling.”

“I don’t wonder—that you’re tired I mean. Here, put your feet on this cushion and let me warm your hands that are so cold. Tell me, Joel, what do you think your uncle is up to; what is he doing to everybody, including himself?”

“I don’t know; truly, Julian, I don’t know, and I don’t care what he is doing to himself and all the others but us. But I do care dreadfully what he does to you and me, and I have come to see whether we can’t, you and I, pass a magic wand over ourselves to keep out his evil genius and whatever it’s leading to. That we may even begin to do it, I realize I must be very brave and tell you about myself. We can’t in the face of things leave any stone unturned between us.”

Julian looked up at her with a swift, tender smile.

“Now you are going to tell me you have committed murder, too,” he said.

“Julian, be still; don’t be amused. Yes, I am going to tell you that I have committed murder. I have. But listen, please; don’t laugh that way. I can’t bear it.”

“Darling, I can’t help it. Oh my God, I was just coming to tell you about my murder before you should hear about it from another, or read of it in a tabloid, or have it sprung upon you when I am cross-examined. Joel, we are in for a very great deal of horridness—worse than we realize.”

“Not worse than I realize,” she said, with inexpressible weariness. “Julian dearest, you must listen to me; and then,” she smiled faintly, “I will hear about your murder.”

He put her hands to his lips.

“Don’t,” she said, drawing back. “Perhaps you won’t feel that way when I’ve told you. After all if you have killed one—husband—.” She found it almost beyond her to say the word.

“Joel, you didn’t kill Jerry. You didn’t, you didn’t. Say it, I tell you. Say you didn’t.”

“I did. But it wasn’t quite a murder, really it wasn’t. Listen, Julian, stop crying. I swear to you it wasn’t altogether a murder.”

“I don’t know what you mean ‘not altogether a murder.’ Murder is murder, you can’t get away from that.” Julian’s tone was low and dull. “Joel, I can’t bear it.”

“I should have thought being in a glass house you wouldn’t throw stones,” bitterness had crept into her voice.

“Mine was self-defense—in a way it was.”

“And mine was an affair of honor—in a way it was. I am going to tell you the whole story. It’s our only hope, Julian—for us both to tell everything.

“Jerry and I had been in love, really and terribly in love, for several years. It was after we knew Junior was on his way that we married. Oh, not because we had to. It was Jerry’s idea that we’d call that our own private marriage, if we found that we could have one, and then accept the necessary legalities for its sake. You see what I mean. I thought it a sort of romantic super-modernism, a beautiful way of counting out the world. Don’t laugh at me, Julian; for the laugh was on me. The first shock came when we knew. He said, ‘I wonder whether we really need to go through the outward form!’ Puzzled, but no more, I said, ‘Of course, don’t you think so?’ and his answer was, ‘Just as you say, of course.’ ‘As you say,’ note that. It took me months of increasing pain to realize that it wasn’t romance for him, but a way of keeping free himself while achieving a son.

“Well, I thought it all out; and it seemed to me I had been deceived as surely as any girl in melodrama. After all it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, the old Tess of the D’Urberville way and the modern, talking-it-all-out way, isn’t it? Instead of the enraged father and brother going on the warpath (fathers and brothers have been made to feel gun-shy these days) the woman herself, whose boast is that she can take care of herself, should have more than the theoretical right to do it. She should be able to fight it out to the death. Call it a new form of dueling if you like. So I went to work to clear my honor. That’s what it amounted to. I had ceased to care, to love him, of course, or I suppose I couldn’t have done it. I took shooting lessons at the 79th St. Armory. He had been a good shot since the War. Then I challenged him, coolly and seriously. I meant it. I named the hour, and the spot (in Central Park), and said he could name the day.”

“Joel, what did he say!”

“He laughed. I suppose I should have known he would. But I was made blind angry by it. So I went for a gun and—ended it all.”

“How did you get away with it?”

“I didn’t intend to. But I had taken his pistol from the drawer—and that, with the position in which he lay, pointed to suicide. It was never finger printed. Our friends claimed we were the most devoted couple they knew. I went to Uncle Bertrand immediately (he was Judge in our Precinct at the time), but he persuaded me, wrongly I know now, to keep silent; he said Jerry had it coming to him. But I wish I’d just run away from him instead.” Joel was crying with eyes wide open.

“Oh, Joel dear, you poor extraordinary child. I would have killed him for you.”

“Perhaps, but you weren’t around in those days; and besides, it was the feeling of defending my own name that made me do it. I wouldn’t have brooked a man’s defending me.”

“Now that I’ve got to do something about your uncle, what would an extra murder more or less have mattered?”

“Julian,” she said quickly, “you can’t stop my uncle if he is bound and determined, even by killing him. He would have a way of getting around his own murder, if it took his ghost to do it.”

“I won’t try murder, sweetheart. But I am going to have a talk with him—tonight.”

Julian stood up and bent over to kiss her.

“I’ll be back soon, I promise. Don’t you move.”

“Julian, please stay. I don’t want to be left alone in this awful house.”

But the door had closed behind him.

IX

And down the corridor Neil Crawford closed another door behind himself and Sydney. Their eyes met with a bleak and hopeless questioning.

“Oh, Neil,” she breathed. “What are we going to do?”

“What am I going to, you must say, Sydney. Remember, my dear, you are not in this. And remember that whatever I do or don’t do will be entirely governed by my love for you and my desire to keep you and the children out of it.”

“You can’t keep me out of it, Neil, even if you wanted to. That is the way, with things relating to one or other of two people who are closely united, both are in them for good or bad. So I’m in this with you to the very last—that is, if—if—”

“If I want you?” He took her shoulders in either hand. “Is that what you are trying to say? You know I want you. You know I love you, that I never have loved, never will love, anyone but you. I can’t help myself. We were made in patterns that match, like a jig-saw puzzle. We wouldn’t match anyone else, no one else would match us.”

She did her best to control the wave of feeling that made her draw free of him.

“She doesn’t feel so, Neil, or think you do. She loves you; and said it tonight too definitely to make me feel you have not returned in kind. Neil, where are our promises?”

“My God, Sydney, since when were you such an innocent as to think promises were anything more than baubles, pretty but—but vain. The promises to love forever until death do us part—”

“Keep still, Neil! You know as well as I do that those aren’t the promises I am thinking of. Besides, we never made those particular promises. But we did promise we weren’t going to go living around with other people unless we meant it—meant it down to the ground, do you hear me?” She was trying to keep her voice under control, but it would rise spasmodically. “And here you seem to have done just that.”

“I wasn’t just living around, Sydney. You know me well enough to know I’d be fastidious about such things. Romany and I got into it somehow, quite naturally. Why can’t women realize how little such things mean to a man, and to some women. She’s one of them. We’ve never spoken of love; do you hear that?”

“Neil, how silly to say such a thing, when by its very nature love is somehow involved. In the very essence of it—your winnowing of the physical from the spiritual—it is the ruin of all idealism. Someone we know, who was it, was saying the other day that the trouble with the younger generation is that it lacks guts. You are exactly what he meant, Neil.”

“Don’t be vulgar about it, Sydney. Vulgarity doesn’t suit you. Only the sophisticated can get away with it. Your delicacy is one of the reasons I care for you. And I do care. You can’t say I don’t love you, or you me. Can you say it?”

“Which only makes it frightfully much worse. And don’t lie to me. She couldn’t have written you a letter like that if you hadn’t used love, in one form or another, toward her. Don’t quibble about the meaning of the word love.”

“What do you mean ‘such a letter’?”

“I saw a letter on your desk, Neil. I had to read it, you can see that.”

“Then you got just what was coming to you, Sydney. Even a wife, a wife least of all, doesn’t read a man’s private correspondence unless she wants to get hurt.”

“All right! Say it if you will. It can’t make matters any more terrible than they are. I saw the address on the envelope (I knew she had been in Hollywood this spring), and in a flash I remembered that—that night. It’s asking too much of human nature to ask it to turn its back on the truth at such a moment. And you can’t say it isn’t better to know the truth at whatever cost to us both.”

“If you think so, yes.” Crawford’s anger died as he saw her face change. “Oh, Sydney, don’t look at me like that. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He tried to take her hands and failed. “And now this other thing to hurt you. I can’t endure it.”

“This other is bad, yes. But not really bad, my dear, as compared to my trust and respect, trust in you and self-respect, splintered to atoms overnight. Bertrand Whittaker can do his worst, can put you behind bars, and me talking to you through bars, but it won’t be a patch on the edge taken off what we have been years in building. Marriages aren’t built in a day. There must be something wrong with me and my dreams, I suppose. Before we left home tonight I happened to pick up a picture of Bunny, and realized it was the one that had been in the town house all winter, watching you—watching you—,” she trailed off helplessly. “I seem so to confuse illusions and realities.”

“Don’t confuse them. Don’t have illusions. Yet that’s why I love you, for the image you make of a perfect life. But it can’t be lived, Sydney. It can’t.”