by Matthew Head
Emmy and I waited outside in the car while Miss Finney went in, but she came out almost immediately. “Funny,” she said, as she climbed back into the car. “He’s already gone to Léopoldville himself—with Morelli. Let’s go gather up our things and get started.”
At our hotel there was a note waiting, written on the hotel notepaper:
Dear Dr. Finney, it said,
After further reflection on our conversation of last night, our friend M. is uneasy and has decided that the affair of the rumor concerning him is urgent. Hence we are leaving this morning in the hope of reaching the lady in question before she hears. We are sorry to miss you here but M. feels we must leave immediately in the hope of avoiding additional unpleasantness in Léopoldville. We will see you there as already arranged, for a more complete examination of the patient. Chaubel.
Just what Miss Finney thought when she got this note would be hard to say. She didn’t change expression when she read it, but I do know this much: we had been very leisurely about our sightseeing and we had been very leisurely about eating a big lunch with a couple of leisurely cigarettes afterward, so that it was getting on toward two in the afternoon when we finally got Chaubel’s note, but there was nothing leisurely at all in the way Miss Finney saw that our things got gathered together and our hotel bill got paid and we got started out on the road.
About getting stuck in the sand I don’t even want to talk. I had become infected with Miss Finney’s feeling of urgency, although she hadn’t said a thing, and I was driving too fast. Also I suppose that the ease of the trip up had made me overconfident of the road. All I know is that I hit a bed of soft dry sand to one side that I would have avoided if I had had my wits about me, and it took us three mortal hours to get out of it. We had to wait until a car passed, and since they didn’t have a rope or chain any more than we did, we had to wait while they went on to Thysville and told a truck to come back and pull us out. I will go into this much detail, though: it was hot. And I’ll say that Miss Finney never gave any indication you could put your finger on that she was about to go wild, but she was, and you could sense it.
So it was well after dark when we finally drove up to the ABC. Without asking myself why, I came on into the lobby with Miss Finney and Emily. Miss Finney went directly to the telephone and called Morelli’s house; she was still waiting for an answer when the desk clerk came across the lobby and handed her a slip of paper. Dr. Chaubel urgently needed Miss Finney at the hospital, it said; he had called her in Thysville and been told she had left for Léopoldville.
Miss Finney said quickly to the clerk, “Know anything more about this?”
“No, Madame. It came in late this afternoon.”
“Call ’em for me, will you? Say I’m on the way out there. Hoopie?”
We went tearing out to the car and nearly bisected little Emily in the door. “I’m not staying behind!” she cried. “Move over.”
They were waiting for us at the hospital entrance, and an attendant began hurrying Miss Finney through the lobby and down a long corridor. Emily and I followed along behind; I had the sensation that we were attached to some fast-moving object so that we streamed out horizontally with our feet fluttering in the air.
“Who’s the patient?” Miss Finney was saying.
“Monsieur Morelli.”
“Bad?”
“Very bad, Dr. Finney. Dr. Chaubel is afraid there’s no—”
“What is it?”
“Strychnine.”
The attendant stopped at a door near the end of the corridor. He put his hand on the lever to open it for Miss Finney, then for the first time seemed really aware of Emily and me.
Miss Finney said briskly to the attendant, “Put ’em somewhere. Hoopie, Emily—wait for me.”
The attendant opened the door and Miss Finney went in. I caught a glimpse of white walls and bright light before the door closed. The attendant looked at us hesitantly, made a decision, and motioned for us to follow. We went back along the hall, at a more reasonable pace now, and about halfway down the corridor the attendant stopped and opened a door for us.
Madame de St. Nicaise glanced up, a Madame de St. Nicaise most bizarrely altered in appearance. In a chair by her side was a stranger, a sturdy woman in her thirties, who looked up from the magazine she was reading and regarded us uncertainly. She almost spoke, but the attendant bowed slightly and closed the door behind Emily and me, leaving us standing there awkwardly. Madame de St. Nicaise might not have known us any more than the strange woman did, and was less interested in us.
“I’m sorry,” this woman said, “I’m afraid the attendant made a mistake. This is a private waiting room.” She indicated Madame de St. Nicaise with a glance of explanation.
“We know Madame de St. Nicaise,” I said, but the sight of Madame de St. Nicaise in this condition was more shocking than the discovery of her corpse would have been. When I had last seen her she had been experimenting with lipstick. Now her whole face was elaborately made up—or recently had been. Her ordinarily dull flesh was like an old rag that had been in the wash with brightly colored garments which had faded on it. Here it had taken on a patch of blue, and there a blear of red. The remains of eye-shadow tinted her lids unevenly, mixed with sooty dark smudges of mascara. A few clots of mascara still adhered to her eyelashes, and her brows had been thickened and shaped inexpertly with mascara and pencil. Tears or perspiration had mixed these tones with the rouge on her cheeks; the rouge had been partially washed or rubbed away, but remained clotted in the wrinkles so that they stood out like nets of small blood vessels. Her mouth presented a disturbing effect of double exposure; without reference to the shape of her own pallid lips, she had designed over them the silly, pursed, rosebud mouth that was fashionable in the twenties, and her entire face, but not her neck, had been dusted with what looked like white talcum. On top of this scarecrow mask her hair, which I had always seen agreeably parted in the center and drawn back into a knot, had been tortured and burnt into uneven waves and kinks. Some strands remained straight, while others were hunched and twisted, and here and there the scorched, dried end of a lock protruded stiffly from the mass.
She made no sign of recognition, although she kept looking at me as if she half-recognized me from time to time in between periods of wandering. I stood it as long as I could, then nodded to her, and she nodded back, with an automatic smile twitching her lips for a moment before they fell lax again.
The stranger beside her said to me, “Then you are a friend of Madame’s, Monsieur?”
“Yes, we are—old acquaintances.”
Emily nudged me and I turned to her stricken face. “I can’t stay here, Hoopie,” she whispered. “I’m going out. I’ll be in the car or somewhere.” I got up and opened the door for her. “Buck up,” I managed to say just as she went out, but she couldn’t answer. She gave me that stricken look again, and then turned and started down the hall. I closed the door and sat down again, opposite Madame de St. Nicaise and her companion.
“I’m not certain you’re supposed to be here,” the woman said, doubtfully. She gave ever so quick and meaningful a glance at Madame de St. Nicaise, and I placed her for the first time as probably someone connected with Dr. Chaubel. She hissed at me suddenly; I realized that she had whispered, “Shock.” She said in a natural tone, “Madame and I are waiting for news of her brother-in-law.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know Monsieur Morelli.”
Madame de St. Nicaise turned her face to me and gazed from it in a way which I can only call slow. Her glance seemed to reach from her eyes to mine at an infinitely slow pace. I thought she might speak then, but soon she drew her eyes away and turned instead to the woman. She said in a very slow voice that I wouldn’t have recognized as hers, “Is...he...dead...yet? I... want...to...say...it.”
“It’s all right, dear,” the woman said professionally. “We mustn’t give up hope.”
She took Madame de St. Nicaise’s hand and patted it, but Madame de St.
Nicaise withdrew it and said, still slowly, “No—he will die. He said to me, I cannot stand it ; that is when he took the poison. If he wants to die—he will die.”
“There, there,” said the woman.
“But I want to say it,” Madame de St. Nicaise insisted. “Hector will die, then I want to say it.”
“I know, dear. You told Dr. Chaubel.”
“No one believes me,” said Madame de St. Nicaise. “It must be taken down. Where is the paper and pencil?” She began twisting her fingers together, and her voice rose. “Where is it?” she wailed. “I will have it! If I don’t say it, I will forget it!”
The woman looked at me a little desperately and said, “There, there, the young man will get it. Could you possibly go to the office and ask for pencil and paper?” She flicked a glance in the direction of Madame de St. Nicaise and pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows at me.
“Glad to,” I said. When I reached the door, Madame de St. Nicaise said anxiously, “Come back! You’ll come back? Because I have it all straight, and they are trying to confuse me. I must, I must say it!”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be back.”
I went on down the hall to the offices, which radiated off the circular lobby, and got a big stack of paper and some pencils. I don’t know at what point I decided I might really be going to use them; I know that I was already excited at the idea when I started back across the lobby and entered the long corridor. At the far end of it I saw a hillocky silhouette that could be only one person. Miss Finney and I advanced toward each other, and when I could distinguish her face I saw it was pretty grim.
We met and I said, “How is it?”
“I was too late. Nothing to do.”
“Then Madame de St. Nicaise wants to make a—”
“Statement. I know. Chaubel told me. Can you really take it down?” she asked, looking at the paper and pencils. “We might be able to find a secretary or something.”
“I do stuff for Tommy Slattery all the time. I can do this.”
“I’ll go in with you. If I seem to disturb her too much I’ll go out.”
“She’s more apt to disturb you,” I said. “Wait till you see her.”
“You should have seen poor Morelli. The way I feel about Madame de St. Nicaise right now, no way she looks could bother me,” Miss Finney said.
“I’m afraid to tell her Morelli’s dead,” I said. “She keeps saying he’s going to die but how do we know she won’t crack when she hears it?”
Miss Finney looked at me hard for a moment. Then she said, “We’ve got to get that statement no matter how we get it. Just go in there and say you’re ready for it. If you have to say he’s dead, take a chance on it. Do you think you can do this alone, Hoop?”
“Why? Aren’t you coming in?”
“Changed my mind. Madame de St. Nicaise didn’t exactly fall for me.”
“She hardly seems to recognize anybody.”
“But she’s in a talking mood. I don’t want to take a chance. That woman in there’s from Dr. Chaubel’s. She and Emmy can witness your report. I hate to miss it.”
“Emmy’s gone.”
“Damn!” said Miss Finney. “Look—I’ll stand outside the door. I’ll keep my foot in it. If you need me, I’ll know it. Go on in, Hoop, before she changes her mind.”
We had been talking very low, a few doors away from the waiting room. Now we went to the door and I went in. The door closed behind me but I saw the open crack. Madame de St. Nicaise fixed her gaze on me and half rose from her chair. She glanced down at the paper and pencils in my hand, and sank back. The two women looked at me, each of them asking with her look the most terrible question of all: life or death?, the stranger with mild curiosity, and Madame de St. Nicaise with hope, but not, I knew, for life.
I said, “You may make your statement now, Madame.” I could as safely have said it flatly, “Morelli is dead,” because Madame de St. Nicaise accepted it, and simply spoke his name three times: “Hector...Hector...Hector...” It is a name with contemporary associations of the vaguely comical, the comically grandiose, but as Madame de St. Nicaise spoke it the first time it was tremendously moving, full of loss and sadness. But when she spoke it the second time, almost immediately, she spoke it in puzzlement and confusion; the third time, she spoke it in dismissal. It was a thumbnail history of a love affair, and then Madame de St. Nicaise began talking without any further preliminaries, so that I had written the first half-dozen words before I had sat down. It was easy enough to get; except for brief passages of nervous uncertainty, and an occasional phrase spoken in excitement, she spoke in the slow, monotonous, inward-looking voice she had used when I first came into the room.
“I am Madame de St. Nicaise, you know,” she began...
“I am Madame de St. Nicaise, you know, Hélène de St. Nicaise. Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman in the world. It is very odd that I have never married. I have been very much loved. But of course I loved my sister very much. My sister Jeanne. She married the man who has just died. You know him. Hector Morelli. Sometimes I think the natives did it—the things that happened to me, to Hector. The way he married that peasant, Liliane. He wanted me. My sister Jeanne died, you know. Then Hector wanted me. That was perfectly natural. But he married Liliane. The natives can do things like that, they can make it happen, they have ways. They do it with—you know. Bad things.”
Her face took on an expression of enormous guile; she turned her head slightly to one side and looked at me from the corners of her eyes. Then quite suddenly she turned straight to me again, and her face relaxed into lines of terrible weariness.
“I have been through so much lately. I want to tell about it. Now that Hector is dead. While Hector was alive, I couldn’t. While he was alive I couldn’t tell about the pillow. But now he is dead, I must tell about it. Otherwise people might think I was bad. But I have always been good.”
She paused and seemed to look to me for corroboration. I managed to smile, but it felt as if my lips were shriveling. She returned the smile, but it faded, and her eyes wandered past me and into the empty corners of the room.
“Even the things I did,” she said, “you know, some of the little things I couldn’t tell people about—those were really good, because they were for Hector. I am sorry that Hector was bad. Toward the end he was very bad, he did a bad thing. Do you think it helps for one person to confess for another? I hope so, because that is what I am doing. I want to confess for Hector. I saw him do it. It was terrible, of course—a terrible thing to do. When I saw him doing it, I said, Oh, it is bad, bad—and yet I knew he was doing it for me, because he wanted me. You know, it is a shame it wasn’t me from the beginning. But I did love my sister. Now it will never be me. Poor Hector.”
She paused now, in concentration, yet she spoke without horror or fear as she said, “I came into the room, and the pillow was still over her face. She was so much better, and he thought I was out of the house for the afternoon and he had told the boys they must leave the house because Liliane was so much worse.” She looked at me again, and said almost gaily for a moment, “I happen to know he told them that. Oh, I have ways!
“The quinine didn’t work. That was Gollmer’s fault. He calls himself a doctor! That was really funny, almost. I used to laugh about it. I would say to myself that Liliane hadn’t had her quinine for so long, not for so very long. It is no wonder that she—you know, malaria. I couldn’t help that. I put it on our daily chart every day. A little mark every day. Oh, I kept a very good house for Hector, nobody ever kept a better, all of us had little marks every day on the chart. For quinine. We wouldn’t want any irregularity in the records so I put down all the marks. But what a fool old Gollmer is. He ruined it all. He was already a murderer, you know; I called him a murderer in public, before everybody, after the concert. Some people laughed at me for that, how silly of them, because he was. You see?
“But Gollmer is really a fool, if he had known how much quinine to give Liliane,
of course it would have been bad, it would really have turned into blackwater. I showed him all the little marks—all that is quinine, I said, ten grains a day, ten grains for each little mark. And he prescribed quinine for the malaria. And she kept getting better. If he had known what he was about she would have grown worse. Do you understand that? I did. It seems very odd now. It works several ways. And he calls himself a doctor.
“But that doesn’t count now. Have I told you about finding him there with the pillow? Pressing it down so hard. Not Gollmer.” She was very quiet for a moment, then she said as if surprised, “Hector! But I said to everyone that Gollmer was a murderer. I have said so, over and over again, I have told everybody. He is no better than a murderer, I have said, over and over again. If it weren’t for him, Liliane would be alive today, I have said. It isn’t true but it pays him back for Mimette so that makes it all right. Don’t you think so? They could have hanged him for Mimette, if the law was what it should be. There ought to be some reform.
“The pillow was still over her face. And I said, Hector, Hector, what what have you done, you have killed Liliane, and he said, Yes, for her adulteries. He said that, not I. I never mentioned her adulteries, not once. Never. And then we did so many things. I was wrong, wasn’t I? To help Hector? But how could I tell. The scandal, he said. Hide it, he said, no one must know. In our family, a family like ours, the scandal. And Liliane, only a peasant, a family like ours, and when Gollmer finally came he was so drunk he was easy to fool, and after two days of not seeing her, only our records to show, and we fixed those up. Burn the bed sheet, it was so black, so discolored, say it was, only say so. Gollmer is drunk, he will never admit. Rigors, too. Say rigors. Hector was so silly, he cried so much. But we fixed it to fool Gollmer. If the law were right they would hang him.
“The pillow was still over her face. It was there for so long. Excuse me, sometimes I have to stop and think; I have to get it straight. Yes, that was it, I came in and he was there, holding the pillow over her face. I think he gave her some sleeping pills with her medicine first. Did he tell me that? I have ways of knowing these things; I don’t know whether I should tell you about them or not. The sleeping pills would have been a good idea. Do you know, I had even thought, myself—but then, that is so difficult, because you don’t know how many, too many and they get sick and lose them, not enough and they don’t die. But a good idea. Of course she had been very sick and she was weak but she was getting better and they struggle when you put the pillow on their face. The pills would help. Did I only wonder about it or did he think of it? No matter now. Hector saved me. That is queer because I wanted to save Hector. That was just this afternoon, before we came here, that I wanted to save Hector. Of course Hector would want me instead of her. So the pillow.