by Whit Burnett
•
ward high older houses with the jigsaw ornamentation filled
with people who day by day, set one foot before the other
along the knife-edge narrow path that ran-for the Warders
across a treacherous black bog, for the Tuttles along the face
of a cliff with crashing breakers below, for the others here and
there, high and low, as Fate decreed. Nothing happened. Mrs.
Benson was the only one who had lost the path. And she sank
but slowly towards here final fall. Three years went by. Her
daughter was a Senior, getting high marks; unnoticed by the
boys. Bert Warder had held his job, not yet realizing that he
would never do more than hold it, would never get any higher;
only beginning to feel aggrieved because other men were
stepped up over his bead. He had also, with what sweating pains
and secret study nobody would know, learned to play tennis
without betraying that he had never before held a racket in his
hand. Imogene Warder had passed her examinations-well,
nearly all-and was, with some conditions, a Senior in the
high school, intensively noticed by a certain kind of boy.
Francis Tuttle bad not only held his job and had had two raises
in salary, but had learned to grow roses. His June garden now
made him catch his breath. And he had written a little shy and
beautiful poetry. Poetry not verse. "Give me three years more,"
cried Mary his wife to Fate. "Give me only two more, and he'll
be safe." The exquisite happiness Francis gave her and gave
their children even softened her heart towards his mother.
Once she thought-just once!- "Why, perhaps she was a victim too. Some one may have hurt her in childhood as she hurt Francis, hurt her desperately, so that her will to live was all
warped into the impulse to hurt back."
Yes, just once, Mary had a moment of divination and
guessed that the will to hurt comes by subterranean ways
from pain and fear not from malignancy.
It was but a flash. A partial guess, so weak and new-born a
beginning of understanding, that it had no more than an instant's universal life before Mary, frightened by a glimpse at the vicious circle of the human generations, seized it and made
it personal, "Oh yes-horrors!--of course if Francis were still
sick with that self-hating Roger-obsession, he couldn't help
making the children wretched with it, one way or another. And
when they grew up, they would pass it on to their children . . . . "
She looked across the room at Francis and the twins, wrestling together on the couch, wildly, happily, breathlessly laughing, and thought contentedly, "Well, there's one misery that won't be handed on. His hurt is all but healed."
Leaning on her sword she stood, negligently smiling, at the
gate of the garden where Francis grew poetry and roses, from
which she had walled his demon out.
1'11e Murder oa JeHerson Street • 159
II
And then, one day four years after the Warders had moved
to Jefferson Street, Fate unheeding Mary's appeal for only a
little longer respite, rode in on the bicyle of the evening newspaper boy, flinging up on each front porch the usual hardtwisted roll of trivial and ugly news. But this time, among the ugly items was a headlined statement about the arrest of one
Donald Warder in Huntsville. He had been stealing from the
bank he worked for, it seemed; had been playing the races;
spending money on fancy women; he would probably get a
long term in the penitentiary.
When Bert Warder walked across his front porch on his
way home from the office that April afternoon, he was wondering resentfully why dumb-bells like Frankie Tuttle got one raise after another, while he with three times Frankie's pep
just barely held his own, with frequent callings-down. "But I
can beat hell out of him at tennis, anyhow." He applied his
tried-and-true old remedy to his soreness and felt the pain
abating. The evening paper was still lying in front of the screen
door. He stooped, picked it up, glanced at the headlines.
Although the news took him so by surprise as to leave him
stunned, his body acted as bodies do when left to themselves,
in obedience to the nature of the soul dwelling in them. He
rushed into the house, shut the front door, locked it and jerked
down the shades of the front windows. His wife and daughter
stared at him surprised. "Look here! Look here !" he said in a
strangled voice, and beckoned them to read the headlines.
They read the news together, dropped the paper, looked at
each other in despair. The same thought was in them all-if
only they need never open that door, if only they could leave
town that night, never again be seen by anybody on Jefferson
Street. For they knew that as they stood there, all their neighbors up and down the street were opening screen doors, taking in the paper. And, knowing what their own exclamations would
have been, had those headlines referred to some one's else
brother, they cowered before the gloating, zestful comments
they could almost literally hear, "Say, that must be Bert Warder's brother, Don. What-do-you-know-about-that? Well, well
-maybe we'll have a little less kidding from Bert about our
Harvey's being suspended from high school." "Why, look here,
I see in the paper where Bert Warder's brother is jailed for
stealing. What kind of low-down folks are they anyhow? And
Bert so high and mighty about your mother's being divorced."
Imogene drowned out the twanging of these poisoned arrows by a sudden outcry, "I can't ever go back to school.
Those mean kids'll just razz me to death. Helen Benson's so
160
Nineteen Tales ol Terror
•
jealous of me about the boys, she'll be tickled pink to have
something terrible like this on me. Oh, I think Uncle Don ought
to be shot!"
Her father and mother too had been thinking that Don d�
served to be shot for wrecking their lives. For of course they
could not run away from this disgrace. Of course they must,
and the very next morning, appear before their neighbors with
a break in their armor far worse than anybody's. Harvey
Starr's suspension from high school, Joe Crosby's not getting
his raise, Mary Seabury's divorced mother, Frankie Tuttle's
weak tennis, Helen Benson's unattractiveness to boys-they
had been held up by the Warders as shields against possible
criticism of slips in their manners. But against the positive disgrace of a brother in the penitentiary! And of course, now everybody would find out about their folks-the aunt who was
somebody's hired girl, the old grandmother who couldn't write
her name. All that would be in the newspapers, now. "If I bad
Don Warder here, I'd . . .
" thought his sister-in-law vindictively. But Don of course was in jail. "Safe in jail!" thought his brother bitterly. "He won't have to walk into an office tomorrow morning, and all the mornings, and face a bunch of guys that'll . . . " Like his wife, his mind was full of foreseen descriptions by newspaper reporters of his illiterate tenement-house relatives. He held the newspaper up to go on reading it. It
rattled in his shaking hands. Imogene flung herself on her
mother's shoulder, sobbing, "Mamma, you got to send me to
boarding s
chool. Every kid in school will be picking on me."
Behind the newspaper her father gave a choked roar of
rage. Lowering the sheet, he showed a congested face. His jaws
were set. "Boarding school! More likely you'll have to get out
of high school and go to work." They looked at him, too
stunned to ask what he meant. Still speaking between clenched
teeth he told them, "Our savings were in Don's bank and I see
in the paper here where it says the bank's on the rocks because
of the money he stole."
With a wringing motion of his hands as if they had a neck
between them, he crushed the paper, flung it to the floor, and
turned on his weeping wife and daughter as if he would like
to wring their necks too. "What's the good of standing there
hollering?" he shouted at them. "Haven't you got any guts?
Don't take it lying down like that! Stand up to them! Get back
at them before they begin!"
He tramped into the next room and they heard him locking
doors and windows.
It was true, just as the Warders thought, that the neighbors
began to talk about them as soon as the headlines were read.
Tile Murder on Jefferson Street
1 8 1
•
Helen Benson had taken her mother over to the Tuttle's garden
to look at the newly opened tulips. Mrs. Tuttle, newspaper in
hand, came out of their shabby tall old house, read out the
news to them and they all said how hard it was on the Warders.
"Oh, I bet there's some mistake," said Francis Tuttle. "The
paper just says he's accused of it. There's no proof he's done it,
you notice. I remember Don Warder very well, the time he
came to visit Bert, last summer. He's not that kind at all. I bet
":hen they get to the bottom of it that they'll find somebody's
double-crossed him. Maybe one of the other men in the bank.
I'm going to tell Bert Warder I bet that's what happened, the
first time I see him." Thinking intently of the accused man's
probable innocence, he was absent-mindedly fingering his sandy
hair which, he had noticed for the first time that morning, had
begun to thin a little.
Mrs. Benson said, "It'll be a terrible blow to the Warders. We
must be sure to show our sympathy for them. Helen, it'd be
nice if you could think of something specially nice to do for
Imogene." She had by now slipped so far from the narrow path
trod by those who still cared what happened, that this like all
news was no more than a murmur in her ears. But, that Helen
might learn what is correct, she brought out the right formula
in the right voice.
"Yes, indeed," said Mary Tuttle, in her warm eager way.
"People's friends ought to stand close around them when
trouble comes."
Mrs. Murray across the street, seeing the four of them standing close together, not looking at the flowers, knew what they were talking about and came over to say compassionately, "I
could cry when I think of poor Emma Warder! She'll take this
hard."
Helen Benson was awed by her first contact with drama.
"Myl Imogene must be feeling simply terrible," she said. "I
wonder if she wouldn't like to be Vice President of our class.
I'd just as soon resign. Mother, how would it be if I went right
up now to the Warders and told Imogene . . . "
But Helen's mother said, her sorrow salt in her heart, "No,
when people have had a blow it's better to leave them to themselves a little, at first. Don't you think so, Mrs. Tuttle?"
Mary, annoyed to see Francis once more passed over as if he
were not present, said resolutely in a formula she often used,
"Yes, that is what my husband always advises in such cases, and
I have great confidence in his judgment."
But Francis had turned away. How like Mary it was to try
even in little things to make it up to him for being a nonentity!
But sometimes he thought she but pointed out the fact that he
was. A little nettled, as any man might be (no, considerably
162 • Nineteen Tales of Terror
more than a man who had had in his past no nightmare nervous
collapse) , he walked along in the twilight towards the house.
On the other side of Mary's wall his exiled demon kept pace
with him, trying hard to reach him with old dark associations
of ideas, thinking longingly how easy it would be to tear open
that nearly healed wound if only these passing relapses could
be prolonged. He succeeded in starting a familiar train of
thought in Francis' mind, like a brackish taste in his mouth .
.. And now to grow bald!" he meditated moodily. "What Bert
Warder calls my 'moth-eaten' look will be complete." His fingers strayed up to his head again to explore the thinning hair.
Deep under the healthy scar-tissue forming over his inner
wound, an old pulse of pain began to throb. Roger was getting
bald too, he remembered, but of course baldness gave Roger
dignity and authority, would actually add to his prestige. Francis, bald, would drop to a lower significance. "To him that hath, and from him that hath not-the motto of my life," thought
Francis. His demon's eyes glittered redly in hope.
But Mary had built her wall high and strong. And inside its
safe protection Francis' roses had struck down deep roots. The
gardener came to himself with a smile at his absurdity that sent
his demon scurrying away into outer darkness.
"Good gosh, only a thin place in my hair, and seeing myself
bald a'ready!" he thought, amused. It had been through that
mental habit as through a secret back door, he reflected, that
many a dose of poison had been smuggled into his life. He
stooped to straighten a drooping tulip. As he stood up, the evening star shone brightly pale in the eastern sky. The inner eye of his intelligence focussed itself to a finer accuracy: the
world stood before him in its true, reassuring proportions.
"Suppose I do get bald-bald as an egg-what of it!" he
thought; and, loose, at ease, forgot himself to admire a young
pear tree, its myriad swelling buds proclaiming with pride that,
mere humble living cellulose that it was, its roots had found
the universal source of growth. "And all amid them stood The
Tree of Life," thought Francis, his eyes deeply on the miracle.
"Da-d-d-dy," came cautiously from the sleeping porch. The
bars of the railing there were high and set close together because of the dangerous three-story drop to the cement-floored basement entrance below, but Francis could make out the
twins in their pajamas like little bears in a cage. "How about a
sto-o-ory?" they called down.
"With you in a sec," called Francis, running into the house.
The twins rushed out on the landing to meet him, hopping,
twittering, and as he snatched the� up, planting loud kisses on
his cheeks, his ears, his nose. "Praise be to God who gave me
life!" sang Francis' heart as he had never dreamed it could. On
The Murder on Jefferson Street • 163
the swelling tide of this joy, this thankfulness, he rode up with
a surge to the highest point-but one--of his long struggle with
himself. Quite effortlessly, quite naturally, he thought
, "Too
bad that Roger's wife can never give him children," and went
warm with delight that he had wished his brother well.
III
Francis had meant to tell B"ert Warder when he next saw him
that he was sure Don had never stolen a cent, that somebody
had double-crossed him. But the next time he saw Warder, he
did not tell him that or anything else.
The morning after the newspapers had announced the arrest
of Bert's brother, Francis stepped out to the border along his
front-yard path to get some tulips for Mary to take to Emma
Warder, Bert's wife. But there was something so beautiful on the
first one he cut that he stood still to look at it, marvelling, forgetting the errand his sympathy had sent him on. Dew-drops clung to the flower, every tiny globe a magic mirror reflecting
all the visible universe. Francis smiled dreamilv down on the
extravagance of this beauty. At first he remembered with
amusement that he was the man who only last night had
thought life hard to bear because his hair was getting thin.
Then he forgot himself in contemplation of the divine playfulness that shrinks the great far blueness of the sky, the nearby intricacy of trees, immeasurable space itself, to ornament the white perfection of a flower. The doors of his heart swung
softly open, as they do when a poem knocks and asks to be
written.
Another door opened, the door of the next house. Through it
-because he must-Bert Warder came resolutely out from the
safety of his home to face the ;;trena full of enemies waiting to
spring upon him. The odds were against him now. He knew
that. But he was no coward. He was no man to take things
lying down. He was worn with sleeplessness, and half sick with
dread of this first impact with a world echoing to his disgrace.
But he did not lose his head. He remembered the plan for defense he had worked out in the long dark; he tried to keep clearly in mind the old rule of warfare that the way to head off
attack is to attack first. But would he be able to carry out this
plan? Cornered by Fate as he was, how could he reach anyone with a first thrust? He had no hope that he could, no hope at all; but he bared his teeth savagely with the desperation of
the trapped, and would not give up. The instinct of self-preservation, feeling him appeal as if for his very life, responded with a wild rush of its inordinate stimulants to action. His eyes fell