Early Short Stories Vol. 1

by Edith Wharton

  “Do you mind if I open the window?”

  “No. It IS stuffy in here. Wait—I’ll do it myself.” Denver pushed down the upper sash, and returned to his chair. “Well—go on,” he said, filling another pipe. His composure exasperated Granice.

  “There’s no use in my going on if you don’t believe me.”

  The editor remained unmoved. “Who says I don’t believe you? And how can I tell till you’ve finished?”

  Granice went on, ashamed of his outburst. “It was simple enough, as you’ll see. From the day the old man said to me, ‘Those Italians would murder you for a quarter,’ I dropped everything and just worked at my scheme. It struck me at once that I must find a way of getting to Wrenfield and back in a night—and that led to the idea of a motor. A motor—that never occurred to you? You wonder where I got the money, I suppose. Well, I had a thousand or so put by, and I nosed around till I found what I wanted—a second-hand racer. I knew how to drive a car, and I tried the thing and found it was all right. Times were bad, and I bought it for my price, and stored it away. Where? Why, in one of those no-questions-asked garages where they keep motors that are not for family use. I had a lively cousin who had put me up to that dodge, and I looked about till I found a queer hole where they took in my car like a baby in a foundling asylum… Then I practiced running to Wrenfield and back in a night. I knew the way pretty well, for I’d done it often with the same lively cousin—and in the small hours, too. The distance is over ninety miles, and on the third trial I did it under two hours. But my arms were so lame that I could hardly get dressed the next morning…

  “Well, then came the report about the Italian’s threats, and I saw I must act at once… I meant to break into the old man’s room, shoot him, and get away again. It was a big risk, but I thought I could manage it. Then we heard that he was ill—that there’d been a consultation. Perhaps the fates were going to do it for me! Good Lord, if that could only be!…”

  Granice stopped and wiped his forehead: the open window did not seem to have cooled the room.

  “Then came word that he was better; and the day after, when I came up from my office, I found Kate laughing over the news that he was to try a bit of melon. The housekeeper had just telephoned her—all Wrenfield was in a flutter. The doctor himself had picked out the melon, one of the little French ones that are hardly bigger than a large tomato—and the patient was to eat it at his breakfast the next morning.

  “In a flash I saw my chance. It was a bare chance, no more. But I knew the ways of the house—I was sure the melon would be brought in over night and put in the pantry ice-box. If there were only one melon in the ice-box I could be fairly sure it was the one I wanted. Melons didn’t lie around loose in that house—every one was known, numbered, catalogued. The old man was beset by the dread that the servants would eat them, and he took a hundred mean precautions to prevent it. Yes, I felt pretty sure of my melon… and poisoning was much safer than shooting. It would have been the devil and all to get into the old man’s bedroom without his rousing the house; but I ought to be able to break into the pantry without much trouble.

  “It was a cloudy night, too—everything served me. I dined quietly, and sat down at my desk. Kate had one of her usual headaches, and went to bed early. As soon as she was gone I slipped out. I had got together a sort of disguise—red beard and queer-looking ulster. I shoved them into a bag, and went round to the garage. There was no one there but a half-drunken machinist whom I’d never seen before. That served me, too. They were always changing machinists, and this new fellow didn’t even bother to ask if the car belonged to me. It was a very easy-going place…

  “Well, I jumped in, ran up Broadway, and let the car go as soon as I was out of Harlem. Dark as it was, I could trust myself to strike a sharp pace. In the shadow of a wood I stopped a second and got into the beard and ulster. Then away again—it was just eleven-thirty when I got to Wrenfield.

  “I left the car in a dark lane behind the Lenman place, and slipped through the kitchen-garden. The melon-houses winked at me through the dark—I remember thinking that they knew what I wanted to know…. By the stable a dog came out growling—but he nosed me out, jumped on me, and went back… The house was as dark as the grave. I knew everybody went to bed by ten. But there might be a prowling servant—the kitchen-maid might have come down to let in her Italian. I had to risk that, of course. I crept around by the back door and hid in the shrubbery. Then I listened. It was all as silent as death. I crossed over to the house, pried open the pantry window and climbed in. I had a little electric lamp in my pocket, and shielding it with my cap I groped my way to the ice-box, opened it—and there was the little French melon… only one.

  “I stopped to listen—I was quite cool. Then I pulled out my bottle of stuff and my syringe, and gave each section of the melon a hypodermic. It was all done inside of three minutes—at ten minutes to twelve I was back in the car. I got out of the lane as quietly as I could, struck a back road that skirted the village, and let the car out as soon as I was beyond the last houses. I only stopped once on the way in, to drop the beard and ulster into a pond. I had a big stone ready to weight them with and they went down plump, like a dead body—and at two o’clock I was back at my desk.”

  Granice stopped speaking and looked across the smoke-fumes at his listener; but Denver’s face remained inscrutable.

  At length he said: “Why did you want to tell me this?”

  The question startled Granice. He was about to explain, as he had explained to Ascham; but suddenly it occurred to him that if his motive had not seemed convincing to the lawyer it would carry much less weight with Denver. Both were successful men, and success does not understand the subtle agony of failure. Granice cast about for another reason.

  “Why, I—the thing haunts me… remorse, I suppose you’d call it…”

  Denver struck the ashes from his empty pipe.

  “Remorse? Bosh!” he said energetically.

  Granice’s heart sank. “You don’t believe in—REMORSE?”

  “Not an atom: in the man of action. The mere fact of your talking of remorse proves to me that you’re not the man to have planned and put through such a job.”

  Granice groaned. “Well—I lied to you about remorse. I’ve never felt any.”

  Denver’s lips tightened sceptically about his freshly-filled pipe. “What was your motive, then? You must have had one.”

  “I’ll tell you—” And Granice began again to rehearse the story of his failure, of his loathing for life. “Don’t say you don’t believe me this time… that this isn’t a real reason!” he stammered out piteously as he ended.

  Denver meditated. “No, I won’t say that. I’ve seen too many queer things. There’s always a reason for wanting to get out of life—the wonder is that we find so many for staying in!” Granice’s heart grew light. “Then you DO believe me?” he faltered.

  “Believe that you’re sick of the job? Yes. And that you haven’t the nerve to pull the trigger? Oh, yes—that’s easy enough, too. But all that doesn’t make you a murderer—though I don’t say it proves you could never have been one.”

  “I HAVE been one, Denver—I swear to you.”

  “Perhaps.” He meditated. “Just tell me one or two things.”

  “Oh, go ahead. You won’t stump me!” Granice heard himself say with a laugh.

  “Well—how did you make all those trial trips without exciting your sister’s curiosity? I knew your night habits pretty well at that time, remember. You were very seldom out late. Didn’t the change in your ways surprise her?”

  “No; because she was away at the time. She went to pay several visits in the country soon after we came back from Wrenfield, and was only in town for a night or two before—before I did the job.”

  “And that night she went to bed early with a headache?”

  “Yes—blinding. She didn’t know anything when she had that kind. And her room was at the back of the flat.”

 
Denver again meditated. “And when you got back—she didn’t hear you? You got in without her knowing it?”

  “Yes. I went straight to my work—took it up at the word where I’d left off—WHY, DENVER, DON’T YOU REMEMBER?” Granice suddenly, passionately interjected.

  “Remember—?”

  “Yes; how you found me—when you looked in that morning, between two and three… your usual hour…?”

  “Yes,” the editor nodded.

  Granice gave a short laugh. “In my old coat—with my pipe: looked as if I’d been working all night, didn’t I? Well, I hadn’t been in my chair ten minutes!”

  Denver uncrossed his legs and then crossed them again. “I didn’t know whether YOU remembered that.”

  “What?”

  “My coming in that particular night—or morning.”

  Granice swung round in his chair. “Why, man alive! That’s why I’m here now. Because it was you who spoke for me at the inquest, when they looked round to see what all the old man’s heirs had been doing that night—you who testified to having dropped in and found me at my desk as usual…. I thought THAT would appeal to your journalistic sense if nothing else would!”

  Denver smiled. “Oh, my journalistic sense is still susceptible enough—and the idea’s picturesque, I grant you: asking the man who proved your alibi to establish your guilt.”

  “That’s it—that’s it!” Granice’s laugh had a ring of triumph.

  “Well, but how about the other chap’s testimony—I mean that young doctor: what was his name? Ned Ranney. Don’t you remember my testifying that I’d met him at the elevated station, and told him I was on my way to smoke a pipe with you, and his saying: ‘All right; you’ll find him in. I passed the house two hours ago, and saw his shadow against the blind, as usual.’ And the lady with the toothache in the flat across the way: she corroborated his statement, you remember.”

  “Yes; I remember.”

  “Well, then?”

  “Simple enough. Before starting I rigged up a kind of mannikin with old coats and a cushion—something to cast a shadow on the blind. All you fellows were used to seeing my shadow there in the small hours—I counted on that, and knew you’d take any vague outline as mine.”

  “Simple enough, as you say. But the woman with the toothache saw the shadow move—you remember she said she saw you sink forward, as if you’d fallen asleep.”

  “Yes; and she was right. It DID move. I suppose some extra-heavy dray must have jolted by the flimsy building—at any rate, something gave my mannikin a jar, and when I came back he had sunk forward, half over the table.”

  There was a long silence between the two men. Granice, with a throbbing heart, watched Denver refill his pipe. The editor, at any rate, did not sneer and flout him. After all, journalism gave a deeper insight than the law into the fantastic possibilities of life, prepared one better to allow for the incalculableness of human impulses.

  “Well?” Granice faltered out.

  Denver stood up with a shrug. “Look here, man—what’s wrong with you? Make a clean breast of it! Nerves gone to smash? I’d like to take you to see a chap I know—an ex-prize-fighter—who’s a wonder at pulling fellows in your state out of their hole—”

  “Oh, oh—” Granice broke in. He stood up also, and the two men eyed each other. “You don’t believe me, then?”

  “This yarn—how can I? There wasn’t a flaw in your alibi.”

  “But haven’t I filled it full of them now?”

  Denver shook his head. “I might think so if I hadn’t happened to know that you WANTED to. There’s the hitch, don’t you see?”

  Granice groaned. “No, I didn’t. You mean my wanting to be found guilty—?”

  “Of course! If somebody else had accused you, the story might have been worth looking into. As it is, a child could have invented it. It doesn’t do much credit to your ingenuity.”

  Granice turned sullenly toward the door. What was the use of arguing? But on the threshold a sudden impulse drew him back. “Look here, Denver—I daresay you’re right. But will you do just one thing to prove it? Put my statement in the Investigator, just as I’ve made it. Ridicule it as much as you like. Only give the other fellows a chance at it—men who don’t know anything about me. Set them talking and looking about. I don’t care a damn whether YOU believe me—what I want is to convince the Grand Jury! I oughtn’t to have come to a man who knows me—your cursed incredulity is infectious. I don’t put my case well, because I know in advance it’s discredited, and I almost end by not believing it myself. That’s why I can’t convince YOU. It’s a vicious circle.” He laid a hand on Denver’s arm. “Send a stenographer, and put my statement in the paper.”

  But Denver did not warm to the idea. “My dear fellow, you seem to forget that all the evidence was pretty thoroughly sifted at the time, every possible clue followed up. The public would have been ready enough then to believe that you murdered old Lenman—you or anybody else. All they wanted was a murderer—the most improbable would have served. But your alibi was too confoundedly complete. And nothing you’ve told me has shaken it.” Denver laid his cool hand over the other’s burning fingers. “Look here, old fellow, go home and work up a better case—then come in and submit it to the Investigator.”

  IV

  The perspiration was rolling off Granice’s forehead. Every few minutes he had to draw out his handkerchief and wipe the moisture from his haggard face.

  For an hour and a half he had been talking steadily, putting his case to the District Attorney. Luckily he had a speaking acquaintance with Allonby, and had obtained, without much difficulty, a private audience on the very day after his talk with Robert Denver. In the interval between he had hurried home, got out of his evening clothes, and gone forth again at once into the dreary dawn. His fear of Ascham and the alienist made it impossible for him to remain in his rooms. And it seemed to him that the only way of averting that hideous peril was by establishing, in some sane impartial mind, the proof of his guilt. Even if he had not been so incurably sick of life, the electric chair seemed now the only alternative to the strait-jacket.

  As he paused to wipe his forehead he saw the District Attorney glance at his watch. The gesture was significant, and Granice lifted an appealing hand. “I don’t expect you to believe me now—but can’t you put me under arrest, and have the thing looked into?”

  Allonby smiled faintly under his heavy grayish moustache. He had a ruddy face, full and jovial, in which his keen professional eyes seemed to keep watch over impulses not strictly professional.

  “Well, I don’t know that we need lock you up just yet. But of course I’m bound to look into your statement—”

  Granice rose with an exquisite sense of relief. Surely Allonby wouldn’t have said that if he hadn’t believed him!

  “That’s all right. Then I needn’t detain you. I can be found at any time at my apartment.” He gave the address.

  The District Attorney smiled again, more openly. “What do you say to leaving it for an hour or two this evening? I’m giving a little supper at Rector’s—quiet, little affair, you understand: just Miss Melrose—I think you know her—and a friend or two; and if you’ll join us…”

  Granice stumbled out of the office without knowing what reply he had made.

  He waited for four days—four days of concentrated horror. During the first twenty-four hours the fear of Ascham’s alienist dogged him; and as that subsided, it was replaced by the exasperating sense that his avowal had made no impression on the District Attorney. Evidently, if he had been going to look into the case, Allonby would have been heard from before now…. And that mocking invitation to supper showed clearly enough how little the story had impressed him!

  Granice was overcome by the futility of any farther attempt to inculpate himself. He was chained to life—a “prisoner of consciousness.” Where was it he had read the phrase? Well, he was learning what it meant. In the glaring night-hours, when his brain seemed ablaze, he
was visited by a sense of his fixed identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable SELFNESS, keener, more insidious, more unescapable, than any sensation he had ever known. He had not guessed that the mind was capable of such intricacies of self-realization, of penetrating so deep into its own dark windings. Often he woke from his brief snatches of sleep with the feeling that something material was clinging to him, was on his hands and face, and in his throat—and as his brain cleared he understood that it was the sense of his own loathed personality that stuck to him like some thick viscous substance.

  Then, in the first morning hours, he would rise and look out of his window at the awakening activities of the street—at the street-cleaners, the ash-cart drivers, and the other dingy workers flitting hurriedly by through the sallow winter light. Oh, to be one of them—any of them—to take his chance in any of their skins! They were the toilers—the men whose lot was pitied—the victims wept over and ranted about by altruists and economists; and how gladly he would have taken up the load of any one of them, if only he might have shaken off his own! But, no—the iron circle of consciousness held them too: each one was hand-cuffed to his own hideous ego. Why wish to be any one man rather than another? The only absolute good was not to be… And Flint, coming in to draw his bath, would ask if he preferred his eggs scrambled or poached that morning?

  On the fifth day he wrote a long urgent letter to Allonby; and for the succeeding two days he had the occupation of waiting for an answer. He hardly stirred from his rooms, in his fear of missing the letter by a moment; but would the District Attorney write, or send a representative: a policeman, a “secret agent,” or some other mysterious emissary of the law?

  On the third morning Flint, stepping softly—as if, confound it! his master were ill—entered the library where Granice sat behind an unread newspaper, and proferred a card on a tray.

  Granice read the name—J. B. Hewson—and underneath, in pencil, “From the District Attorney’s office.” He started up with a thumping heart, and signed an assent to the servant.