“Well, boys, I guess that’s all you can do for us at present. Your stories are consistent, and I can’t find a reason for holding you. If you move or anything, keep in touch with us.”
We promised to do so.
“And one more thing. If I was you I wouldn’t talk about this to anybody. See a lawyer if you want to, but don’t talk to the papers.”
“For the protection of the University’s good name,” Prexy said to Parsons but with a weather eye on us, “I am quite sure they will be discreet.”
Again we promised to be good boys.
Parsons stood up and shook hands with us. “You can go now. Thanks for helping us out all you could.”
My own idea was that he was putting on an act for Prexy’s benefit, but it was all to the good so far as we were concerned. The thing could have been much more unpleasant, and certainly we were treated with every consideration. Lightheartedly we left the room and the building. On the sidewalk in front we paused for a moment to discuss our next move, and I felt a hand on my arm. To my surprise it was Prexy.
“Let’s walk down the street a little way,” he said. “There is something I want to ask of both of you.”
A little mystified, we turned and started toward the campus. “If we can do anything more—” Jerry began.
“I know”—Prexy’s voice was very careful—“how horrible this has been for both of you. Doubtless you both wish to wash your hands of the whole matter, but I am compelled to ask you to assist me in one more way.” He paused. “By the way, you handled yourselves, in your relations with the police, like gentlemen and University men.” That was, for Prexy, equivalent to giving us the accolade.
“Thank you,” Jerry said. “Of course, if there is anything we can do, we’ll be only too glad.”
“Good,” said Prexy. He swung us right, down Santvoord Street. “Last night, and again this morning, when I talked with Mrs. LeNormand”—he paused to give us the picture of a strong man noble in the accomplishment of even the most heartbreaking of duties— “she expressed a strong desire to see you. Naturally, she wishes to thank you for your courage and intelligence last night.”
Nothing in this world appealed to me less at the moment than the idea of talking to LeNormand’s widow. To me it seemed desirable not to bring the full horror of the tragedy home to her in any concrete, immediate way, such as meeting us and talking with us. No good could come of it, and probably there would be a painful scene. Still, there is an obligation to see a thing through, to do anything requested in a time of disaster.
Apparently Prexy guessed what was going on in my mind. He went on: “I urged her not to harrow herself in this way, and assured her that you would both understand it if she did not see you. But she was very insistent that I should bring you. I consented. You will find her a quiet woman, not prone to hysterics.”
“All right,” said Jerry after a while, “I don’t see how we can refuse, in any case.”
“Thank you,” Prexy said, and the three of us walked along in silence. After a time we turned into Camden Place, and up the walk of the shabby white house where LeNormand had lived. Prexy lifted the brass replica of the Lincoln imp and knocked on the door firmly, three times.
5. BEAUTY FOR ASHES
JERRY told me afterward that LeNormand’s living room, into which we were shown by a red-eyed domestic, had not changed in a single detail from his recollection of it. The room was square, with two windows on the street and another on a side yard; you entered it from the central hall through a wide double doorway. There were two Morris chairs with faded upholstery. A lumpy-looking sofa with a cretonne cover, several bridge lamps of the sort sold at the co-op for students’ rooms. A small, rather ugly mahogany bookcase with glass doors, and on the walls three or four pictures obviously not selected by the University Art Department. On the center table was a litter of magazines and two untidy ash trays. In short, it was a bachelor’s room and plainly the habitation of a man who did not care much how things looked.
What astonished me was the complete absence of the feminine touch. Brides, particularly those of recent standing, generally make an immediate, if superficial, attack upon the bachelor dowdiness of their husbands’ quarters. They run to new curtains and vases of flowers, and what they often call “touches of color to brighten the place up a bit.” But there was nothing of that nature here. The room was exactly as it must have been before LeNormand married. The air smelled faintly of tobacco smoke, and I noticed in one of the ash trays a black, battered pipe with the marks of his teeth on the bit. The sight of it irritated me; I felt it would have been more decent to put it out of sight.
Prexy, Jerry, and I stood around in the room, not quite knowing what to do with ourselves. I wanted to smoke but wondered if it was the proper thing, and decided not. Jerry’s look was fixed almost apprehensively on the open doorway; once he put his hands in his pockets and then took them out again immediately. For no good reason the tune of “Mademoiselle from Armentières” began running in my head. I wanted to whistle it and just caught myself with my lips already puckered. Prexy was studying a mezzotint of an old mill by moonlight as though the thing were the work of a master.
When we heard the sound of steps on the stairs we knew she was coming. It was a slow, uneven tread, with something apathetic in it. Most of all, it seemed to me heavy and slipshod, as though she did not care how clumsily she placed her feet. Then she came into the room.
The human imagination is an odd thing. Prexy had said that some people might consider Mrs. LeNormand the most beautiful woman in the world, and my mind had been busy creating an image of the woman to whom, had I been Paris, I should have awarded the golden apple. She did not look anything like the figure I had constructed in my mind. The first thing I saw about her was that she was atrociously badly dressed. Dowdy was the only word I could think of to describe her appearance.
She had on a dark, rough tweed skirt, badly cut, so that the hem line was uneven. Above it was a neutral-color knitted sweater with unbecoming half-length sleeves. Her stockings were the wrong shade for the skirt and her shoes a pair of new Oxfords, badly scuffed at the toes. The whole effect was precisely what I should have looked for from LeNormand’s wife, but I had been waiting to see a beautiful woman. My first sensation was one of relief. I am afraid of beautiful women, and Prexy’s characterization of her had thrown me off my mental stride. But it would not be difficult to utter a few banal and sympathetic remarks to this creature and then make a swift, decent exit. She was just a person, nothing more.
As I looked at her a second time I saw with a rush of astonishment that I was wholly wrong. The clothes did not belong to her. It was as impossible to imagine her in modern dress as to think of the Winged Victory in tennis shorts. She was tall, almost six feet, and neither slender nor in any place too full. Her hair, untidily collected at the nape of her neck, was the color of winter sunlight, and her eyes, set wide apart below level eyebrows, were a dark, violet blue. Underneath the incongruity of her clothes was a body perfectly integrated, part with part, so that it had the unity of construction and harmony of relationship that great sculptors have now and again succeeded in capturing. In her body, in her hands with their strong, round fingers, in her face, there was strength, beauty, unity.
So far I have not mentioned her face. At the time, except in one particular, it did not appear to me as beautiful as I learned later, through seeing her often, that it was. Her features were strongly modeled and spaced so superbly from the wide, even forehead to the clean, springing line of the jaw that I had an impression of an abstraction or a conscious work of art which expressed not the beauty of a single woman but the essence of all women’s faces. She wore no make-up at all and her skin was so white that it seemed to shine like silver in the shadow of the doorway. Her lips were pale, if anything, but against the clear pallor of her skin they were almost startling. It was almost the face of Pallas Athene, if you like, and yet there was nothing of the goddess about her. Something was
missing.
Looking at her as she came toward us, I wondered what it was. I could see no grief or shock in her expression, and not much of anything else. There seemed to be no life in her. As she walked I half expected she would drag her feet with each step. Her face was simply vacant. She hardly looked at us as she came into the living room, and her eyes were withdrawn, as if there was nothing on which it was worth their while to focus. The nearest I can come to a description of her is to say that she was like one of the beggars on a city street whose faces are indifferent to life because they no longer have anything to hope for from it. She was not tragic, or sorrowful, or frightened. She was simply indifferent.
The three of us had unconsciously lined up in an awkward row to meet her. She walked toward us and came to a halt, and I thought for a moment that she was hardly aware of our presence. Her eyes, at any rate, were not fixed on any one of us.
Prexy cleared his throat, bowed, and said, “Mrs. LeNormand, may I present Mr. Lister and Mr. Jones?”
We bowed too, and murmured sounds without meaning under our breaths.
She looked at each of us in turn but did not offer to shake hands or invite us to sit down. Indeed, throughout the whole short, incredible interview—I thought of it as an interview, and not a call or visit—she did nothing that an ordinary woman would do. The glance she gave me when Prexy introduced me was blank, devoid of any expression. I might as well have been a piece of furniture. When she spoke her voice was consistent with the rest of her. It had inflection and beautiful clarity and control, but there was something not in it that I missed. Some color. A small imperfection of tone or accent that would have made it the voice of a person.
She said, “I want to thank you for what you did for my husband.” There was no obvious emotion behind those twelve short words.
Even then, the words themselves were something of a surprise to me. I felt they composed a statement, that they were her idea of the proper, appropriate thing to say. And “my husband!” Why had she not said “for what you did for Walter”—surely it was more natural to use the name she must have called him by? There was in the whole speech a quality I definitely did not like. Perhaps the two first-person pronouns. I looked quickly at Jerry to see what he might be thinking about this woman and what she had just said.
He was muttering something like “sorry we could not have come sooner; been of some real use,” but his expression, the tone of his voice startled me. I had lived too long with him not to know when he was being natural and when not. Decidedly, this was not any side of his character that I knew. He was on the defensive, and not because of the awkwardness of the situation. And it was more than defensiveness, it was an awareness of danger. At the time I could not have put it so precisely, but he was like a man who, dining with the Borgias, has just felt the harsh rasp of the poison in the wine but seeks to conceal what he is feeling.
She noticed it, I am positive of that, and for an instant she hesitated, looking at him. Then she said, “It is very good of you to come to see me. President Murray has told me of your bravery.”
She kept on looking at him until Jerry began to flush. And as I watched her I saw something happen to her face. The vacancy of her look began to disappear. Interest came into her eyes. She seemed to collect herself, to shake off some stupor which had been on her, and to return to the present world. It was astonishing, and I did not entirely like it. There was a dispassionate quality to her inspection of Jerry that was far from complimentary. Whatever it was that was waking in her, it had an unusual effect on me. I wanted to take a step backward, to keep it at more than arm’s length until I understood it better. But after all, it was not directed at me. Jerry appeared ill at ease but plainly he did not resent her look as much as I did. He returned it, in fact.
“Yes,” she said again, “you were brave. Both of you.” The second sentence sounded like an afterthought.
We deprecated her praise, told her it was nothing. There was really no bravery in what we had done, or at least it did not seem so to me at the time. Perhaps I was wrong about that, and she was wise. To her the whole thing may have worn a different aspect.
She turned to me and said directly, “He was dead when you found him?”
The entire interview seemed so strange that her question caught me napping. The picture of LeNormand’s eyes moving leaped to my mind, and I must have hesitated a fraction of a second.
“Yes.” Jerry spoke swiftly, emphatically. “I want to tell you, Mrs. LeNormand, that when we first saw him his face was very calm. I am sure he suffered no agony at all. The—the details are horrible, I know, but I have the feeling that he must have died without pain.”
“It helps to know that,” she said carefully. After a moment, still looking at Jerry, she went on. “I cannot understand his death. There is no reason for it.”
Prexy said, “You mustn’t think about it.” “I know,” she replied, “I know. You must not think me strange for asking these questions. The answers to them may help me to stop going over and over it in my mind.”
“If there’s anything more we can tell you—” Jerry said.
She turned to him again with a curious intensity. “It will seem a foolish woman’s question to you, Mr. Lister, but he didn’t leave any message, any note, anything to explain what happened to him?”
Jerry shook his head. “There was nothing, Mrs. LeNormand. I am sure he did not know he was going to die.”
“No,” she said. “Of course not. But sometimes, when he was staying all night with his telescope, working, he sent me notes to say that he would not be home. If there was such a note as that, I should like to know of it.”
A little wind had sprung up from the Sound and the trees were whispering in the dark. Under the starshine the water of the bay was moving, the ripples coming faintly toward us and making the Sound seem like a river, flowing out of invisibility and pouring itself on the shore. As I watched it, the illusion of a current was so perfect that I had to remind myself there was no flow, no current there, but only the eternal, unchanging reservoir of the sea.
“Of course,” I said to Dr. Lister, “I can repeat the words we said, or something like them, but I cannot reproduce a conversation. Expression, the posture of bodies, the pitch and timbre of voices, the gestures, are all lost in the retelling.”
He had been listening to me with the most extraordinary attention. “I understand that, naturally. . . . Neither of you ever told me what was said when you first met her.”
“It’s odd,” I went on, “how quick one is, at moments like that, to take things at their surface value. When she said to Jerry, ‘It will seem like a foolish woman’s question to you, Mr. Lister,’ I think we both accepted her estimate of what she was saying. Now it does not seem at all like a normal question to me. And her story about notes LeNormand used to send to her. Does that sound credible to you?”
“No,” he answered.
“You see, these are things that I have been fitting together in my mind. They are all small things, but they add up to something.”
He nodded. “You think she knew all along . . .?” His question did not finish itself; none of the questions I had asked myself over and over ever quite completed themselves.
“When LeNormand died,” I reminded him, “she was at home. The cook was still there, washing dishes. She saw her there, sitting in the living room, three times in that half hour. She could not have done it—physically impossible.”
For several moments he was silent, thinking. “Perhaps there was a plot. Some accomplice.” His voice sounded as if he could think of the answers to that as easily as I.
“She gained nothing by LeNormand’s death. What sort of plot could there have been?”
He nodded. He was beginning to lose some of his confidence in his own power of intellectual analysis, I think.
Her question about a note from LeNormand had astonished me. Never once in Jerry’s picture to me of the man had I got the idea that he was capable of thinking
of anything or anyone else after he once started to work. It was impossible to think of him writing: “Darling—can’t make it home for supper. Don’t wait up for me; I’ll be here late.”
“There wasn’t any note,” I blurted out. “We looked at his papers. They were just some equations.”
“Ah,” she said quickly, and her tone did not quite convey disappointment. “Equations.” And then, after a moment, “You mean, just notes about his work?”
“Yes,” Prexy said gently. “Mathematical symbols that he used to express the relationships of things.”
“Thank you.” Her voice was still perfectly level. “I should like to have the last things he used and wrote.” It was a natural sort of request, but somehow it surprised me a little.
“I’m afraid the police will have to keep them, for a time at least.” Prexy sounded almost as though he were explaining something to a child.
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
Jerry said quietly, “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry Bark and I feel about this, Mrs. LeNormand. Your husband and I were friends. If there is anything at all we can do for you, please feel that we’ll be only too glad to do it.”
She looked gravely at him for several seconds. “Thank you. It is very kind. If there is anything, I shall most surely call upon you.”
In the awkward pause that followed, Prexy cleared his throat. “Mrs. LeNormand,” he said, “if you would like me to get in touch with any members of your family, or his, make any—er—travel arrangements, I shall be only too happy.”
She seemed for the first time at a loss. “I do not know anything about Mr. LeNormand’s family. . . . He never spoke of a family . . . I don’t know what is the right thing to do.”
We were all deeply surprised, I think, but Prexy recovered himself quickly. “I understand,” he said soothingly. “I shall see what I can find out. Doubtless in England . . . And what about your own family?”
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