The Widening Stain

by W. Bolingbroke Johnson

  Francis and Gilda settled in their seats, nodded to friends, and opened their programs.

  “I see that Giulia Thalmann is going to demonstrate this evening that she can pronounce five languages,” said Francis.

  “I’m glad we’re early. I always enjoy reading over the English translations of the songs. Here’s a pretty bit, for instance. S. Rachmaninoff: ‘Sorrow in Springtime.’

  In the springtime when joy’s in the air

  And the brightness of hope fills the land,

  How my spirit in anguish doth moan,

  And my soul is bowed down with its pain!”

  “Sad. My spirit moans with sympathetic anguish. And here’s more woe, if you can stand it. Respighi’s ‘Nebbie’:

  I suffer far, far away,

  The creeping, dreamy mist

  Rises from the silent plain.

  From the air to the crude gnawing

  The suffering bodies

  Offer, praying, their naked breasts.

  How cold I am! I am alone;

  To the gray, limitless skies

  The dying groan ascends.”

  “A bleak picture indeed,” said Gilda. “How these singers do suffer!”

  “It’s the contraltos who suffer. A soprano is relatively bright and gay, but a contralto never has any fun. They’re nothing but human cellos.”

  Francis and Gilda sniggered together, drawing some reproving glances from music-lovers who took their music as a sacrament.

  “Here’s a tasty bit, too,” said Francis. “ ‘Cäcilie,’ music by Richard Strauss, words by Heinrich Hart:

  If you but knew, sweet, what living is,

  In the creative breath of God, Lord and Maker,

  To hover, upborne on dove-like pinions

  To regions of light—if you but knew it,

  Could I but tell you, you’d dwell, sweet, with me.

  If I understand that, Herr Heinrich Hart is trying to tell his girl friend that if she will move into his apartment she will have the happy experience of living in the creative breath of God, Lord and Maker. Heinrich Hart must be quite distinguished in his way. But he finds it impossible to tell her so. Why can’t he tell her, since he seems to make it clear to the casual reader?”

  “Probably she is too dumb. Or maybe her mother has told her to look out for Herr Heinrich and his dove-like pinions. ‘Very pretty, Herr Heinrich,’ she says, ‘but by me it is Äpfelbrei.’ ”

  “What is Äpfelbrei?”

  “Applesauce.”

  Bells rang in the corridors. The student ushers closed the auditorium doors. The lights dimmed. The velvet curtains of the stage parted, and Giulia Thalmann appeared.

  She was a queenly woman, in the great tradition of the opera. Tall and massive, she posed in a circle of light. Her low-cut evening gown, with sweeping train, was white and bespangled, sparkling like a stop-sign. Her eyes and teeth sparkled also, as she greeted her audience with what seemed an enormous collective kiss. Her great bosom, mat white in the midst of the sparkle, rose and fell gently like a sea of milk.

  “She certainly has a great pair of lungs,” whispered Francis to Gilda.

  Gilda slapped his hand.

  Giulia Thalmann gleamed at every quarter of the auditorium, and glanced at her accompanist, who had furtively slipped in to the piano. Her tongue made the circuit of her lips. The accompanist brought down his hands. The upper part of the singer’s face assumed an archly infantile air, while her mouth followed the rules of efficient voice-production. She sang a song of Ad. Jensen’s, words by Heyse:

  As so oft before I’ve listen’d,

  I shall hear him tell his yearning,

  Tell his love so hotly burning

  For my eyes that starlike glisten’d,

  As his “little snake” I’m christen’d;

  Yet he slumbers, breathing low,

  Yet he slumbers, breathing low.

  Shall I wake him now?

  Shall I wake him now?

  Ah no! Ah no!

  As she questioned whether or not she should wake the hotly burning lover, she seemed to plead with the audience for an answer. Her voice assumed a thrilling, penetrating quality that would have roused anyone else, though he were dozing in the lobby. “Ach nein! Ach nein!” she boomed, and the packed auditorium breathed with relief that the loved one could continue in his sodden slumber.

  Six thousand palms smacked their approval. Francis and Gilda joined in. There are few who dare to refrain when the world is applauding, thought Gilda. Hence the universality of the Nazi salute, in the Dark Continent. Anyway, Giulia Thalmann was really a very fine singer.

  “Why do you suppose that sleepy lover called her his little snake?” Gilda whispered. “ ‘Little hippopotamus’ would have been more appropriate.”

  Francis smiled. But he seemed abstracted. Gilda noticed that his lips were moving, in a barely perceptible way.

  The concert continued. Giulia Thalmann proclaimed, in English, French, German, Italian, and Swedish, that she would fain be a lark, a dove, a storm, a dew-drop, even an apple blossom. She dealt mostly with love, in its aspects of unsatisfied longing and despair. After each revelation of her woe she turned her glittering smile and her heaving breast to the audience and dropped little coquettish curtsies, to the multitudinous patter of the palms.

  Francis was still abstracted. He drew a pencil from the pocket of his dinner coat and wrote with it in a blank space of his program. Giulia Thalmann was thundering, with a dreadful grimace of the upper face, while the mouth went steadily about its business:

  Joyful and grieving, or buried in thought,

  Longing and fearing, with agony taut. . . .

  (Words by Goethe, music by Schubert.)

  Francis passed the program to Gilda. She read:

  There’s a singer in Long Island City

  Whose form is impressively pretty;

  She is often addressed

  By the name of “Beau Chest,”

  Which is thought to be tasteful and witty.

  Gilda snorted, tried to bury the snort in a cough, and produced a horrible strangling noise. People for several rows around turned to her, frowning, their lips pursed in reproof. Gilda turned red and redder, and strangled again. Even the singer contrived to dart a fierce glance in her direction, without altering her facial mask of sweet despair. Francis, beaming, pretended to be totally occupied with drinking in the music.

  In the intermission half of the three thousand auditors tried to crowd into the lobby, to smoke a cigarette. Francis and Gilda, rammed against a pillar, exchanged greetings and commentaries with their friends and breathed the mingled incense of innumerable cigarettes. Dr. Fox, head of the Department of Music, worked his way to and fro, picking out a few of the musically minded to be honored with an invitation to drop in at his house after the concert and meet the singer. He had noticed Gilda’s misbehavior; he passed her with an unseeing eye.

  The learned criticized Giulia Thalmann’s breathing, voice-control, and tone-production. Nearly everyone else talked about the murder.

  Dr. Sandys forced a determined way toward the pair.

  “Good evening, Miss Gorham. Good evening, Parry. Wonderful, isn’t it?”

  “Wonderful,” said Parry. “Wonderful. Is there any news?”

  “If there is anything important, I haven’t heard it. They haven’t learned, apparently, that anyone profits especially by the death of poor Hyett. His property goes to some female relatives in Cincinnati.”

  “I wonder what they will do with his art works. Have them framed for the parlor?”

  Dr. Sandys frowned and glanced at Gilda. “I’m sure I have no idea. You’ve heard that they have identified the typewriter that wrote: ‘Thou shalt do no murder’?”

  “Yes. Miss Gorham points out that evidently Hyett was warning somebody. Maybe you or me. Or Miss Gorham herself.”

  Dr. Sandys frowned again.

  Gilda decided to try once more the method of the direct question.
/>   “Dr. Sandys,” she said, “who do you think did it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Who might have stolen the manuscript?”

  “I don’t know. But I think it will come back of its own accord.”

  “Why?”

  “They usually do. The thief finds out that a unique treasure of that sort is practically unsalable. And it is too dangerous to keep, with the police searching everywhere. And if the—ah—culprit is an academic person, he will hardly be able to bring himself to destroy the only known text of a medieval miracle play.”

  “Well, I hope you’re right. There’s the bell.”

  The bell rang, the lights winked. The smokers did their best to find, amid the flicker of silken legs and billowing gowns, a patch of floor on which to crush out their cigarettes. They filed back to their seats, while a blue cloud of smoke gushed into the auditorium.

  The lights dimmed. Giulia Thalmann again made her majestic entrance. She beamed at the applauding audience, now old acquaintances. With a condescending gesture, she drew the audience’s attention to the accompanist, as if he were an imbecile cousin whom one has to have around.

  She launched into the aria from Thaïs: “Qui te fait si sévère?” She was Thai’s, blasting Athanaël with her violent reproach. One of the dimmed electric-light bulbs in the ceiling shivered and burned out. Through the whole tirade she managed to preserve something of her smile.

  Gilda let her thoughts stray a little. And suddenly she knew something. She knew the meaning of “papoose.”

  She knew who had been in the Occulta section of the Wilmerding with Lucie Coindreau, on the morning before she died. She knew how and why Lucie had died.

  And as she pondered, she knew why Hyett had died.

  She knew everything.

  Chapter XVII

  GILDA DID not get to sleep till late that night. On Saturday morning she woke, to the alarm-clock’s snarl, feeling drugged and unsteady. She put on the coffee, mixed a hasty potion of orange-juice, and began to resume human shape.

  She took in the college daily from her door. She liked the college paper, for its information about campus activities and for the appealing youthfulness with which the news was misunderstood and misrepresented.

  The front page was plastered with news of the murder. Well, she knew all about that. That was not the mild digestive she needed with her breakfast. This was more the idea: a description of the new insect exhibit at the College of Agriculture. The housefly shown in all stages from the egg onward. Microscopic views of bedbugs and other vermin. Examples of various bugs, spiders, lice, borers, weevils, and worms. A demonstration that the common click beetle, or elater, and the wire worm are the same thing at different ages. That was the sort of thing she liked with her coffee. Or this paragraph, summarizing a lecture on Goethe:

  “Goethe, who died just a century before March 22, 1932, was the author of Iphigenia on Tauris and of Faust, his greatest poem. While living he was the associate and close friend of Karl August, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, at whose court he did a large part of his best work.”

  She smiled, thinking of the student mind, desperately grasping at tangible facts, unable to order the facts or to find value and significance in them. She liked also to think of the lecturer, reading this report of his lecture, in which presumably he had presented and argued to a brilliant conclusion some thesis on the life, work, and meaning of Goethe.

  Thus breakfast passed pleasantly. Gilda folded the paper and rose. But as she was turning away, her eye caught a large box on the first page. It was an appeal to the students and faculty. Every person who had left the Library between ten and ten thirty p.m. Thursday was asked to report to the Librarian’s office immediately.

  This was the police, clearly. Lieutenant Kennedy or one of his men would be in the Librarian’s office, examining the students, trying to find out when Hyett had entered the Library, and whether any of the logical suspects had been seen going in or coming out.

  Well, good luck to the investigators. In the meantime she had a call to make.

  She took a bus to a section of town, on the fringe of the University, that had gradually slipped down from residential to rooming. Student supply stores, candy stores, restaurants, groceries, and barber shops stood eagerly by the sidewalks. Daintily withdrawn were the homes of the nineties, their lines strangely altered with bulges, tumors, and excrescences, which showed where a bathroom had been added or an attic enlarged to make two rooms and a kitchenette.

  Gilda turned in at one of these houses, crossed a strip of gray lawn, and climbed a creaking veranda. She looked at the name-plates above the bells. Yes; one of them bore the name of Mlle Lucie Coindreau. Lucie had economized on lodgings in order to spend, in better times, her summers in France, departing on the first French liner sailing after June exams, and returning on the last one docking before registration.

  Gilda rang the bell of the ground-floor apartment: Mr. and Mrs. Herbert G. Burns.

  A tall, gaunt, elderly woman with an early-American face opened the door. Gilda recognized her. She had been Martha Edgcumbe, one of the Edgcumbes who had first settled the city. She had married, against her family’s opposition, Herbert Burns, a handsome clerk in her father’s dry-goods store, an intoxicating dancer. At her father’s death she had put her husband in charge of the store. By easy stages the couple had lost everything except the family mansion, which they had transformed into a set of apartments.

  “Mrs. Burns!” said Gilda brightly. “I’m Gilda Gorham, from the University Library. I’ve heard about you. You gave a talk to the D.A.R. about the early history of the city, didn’t you?”

  Mrs. Burns’s suspicious face relaxed. “Yes, Miss Gorham. I’ve heard about you, too. You’re in the paper this morning.”

  “I wanted to know if I could see Miss Coindreau’s apartment.”

  “What for?”

  “Why, she had some Library books out that are wanted urgently. And I wanted to see if by chance she had them here.”

  “Come in, Miss Gorham.”

  The two entered the ground-floor apartment. A fat, bristle-chinned man in shirt-sleeves, reading a newspaper and rocking in a rocking-chair, rose without a word and went into the kitchen.

  “What I want to know, Miss Gorham, is who is going to pay for Miss Coindreau’s apartment? Here it is the beginning of school with everybody established for the year, and who is going to rent an apartment now? Miss Coindreau hadn’t paid me a cent, but I have her lease all signed. That’s legal, and I expect to get my money!”

  “I’ll ask the University’s legal expert about it, Mrs. Burns, if you will just let me look around a little.”

  “Will you? That’s very kind.”

  Mrs. Burns took a key from an ancient desk and led the way to Mademoiselle Coindreau’s apartment.

  “I don’t know if I really should let you in here. The police told me not to let anyone in. But I don’t know how I’m ever going to rent the apartment if I can’t show it.”

  “The police? Did they take anything?”

  “Took all her letters and papers.”

  “Oh.” This was too bad. Gilda had hoped to do a little prying, which she would justify as “investigation.”

  “You didn’t happen to see around a French toy I have a sort of sentimental interest in? Just a little silvered ball on a string?”

  “No. I don’t know what I’m going to do with all Miss Coindreau’s stuff. It ought to come to me in place of rent. But it don’t amount to much. Mostly books. French books. I don’t know who’d buy a lot of French books.”

  Gilda was swiftly appraising the book-shelves. A section devoted to French classics. A long row of poets, mostly the Romantics, Musset, Lamartine, Vigny. And a large collection of modern novels, paper-backed, well worn. The great men of the last generation: Barrès, Loti, Anatole France, Bourget. And the contemporaries: Gide, Montherlant, Lacretelle, Chardonne, and the rest. Reference books, and volumes obviously presented by her coll
eagues, and certainly containing inscriptions expressing the respectful homage of the authors.

  Not a remarkable library in any way. But Gilda was satisfied. She had found out what she wanted to know.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t find the library books I was looking for. Thank you for letting me in.”

  “If you know anybody that wants a nice apartment. . .” said Mrs. Burns. Accompanying Gilda to the door, she praised the bathroom, the outlook, and the lavish warmth supplied to her tenants.

  As Gilda took her leave, at the door of Mrs. Burns’s apartment, she saw the fat man enter cautiously with his newspaper and prepare to settle down in the rocking-chair.

  She arrived at the Library half an hour late. As she entered she surprised some shrieks and giggles at the circular desk. Probably Miss Loring was pinching again. The girls were getting badly out of control. And her proper work was not getting done. Well, let it go. She had other things to do before her proper work.

  When the emotional atmosphere of the catalogue room had been dissipated, Gilda descended to the French Seminary. She unlocked the door. She started with surprise.

  In Lucie Coindreau’s favorite chair, before her drawer in the long table, Professor Casti was seated. He slouched deep in the chair. No book lay open before him. A dark scowl was on his face.

  “Why, good morning, Mr. Casti! What are you doing here at this time in the morning?”

  “I—oh—I just came in to look something up. An etymology. In Wartburg. What are you doing here, Miss Gorham?”

  “I’m looking something up, too.”

  She passed along the shelves. The reference works; the dictionaries and the big Larousse; the imposing files of Romania, the Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, the Revue d’Histoire Littéraire, the Romanic Review, and the rest; the publications of the Société d’Anciens Textes and other sets; the shelves filled with books reserved for the use of the seminaries. The portraits of dead professors of the romance languages, masterly studies in boredom by a bored Professor of Fine Arts, watched her, bored.