Part 1

Produced by Al Haines and Mark Akrigg

CHANGELING

AND OTHER STORIES

BY

DONN BYRNE

Author of "The Wind Bloweth," "Messer Marco Polo," etc.

_New York & London_

THE CENTURY CO.

Copyright, 1923, by

The Century Co.

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

DEDICATION

So you are going to bring out a book of your stories, said the Old Poet.

I think I am, sir, said I.

I'm sorry for it, said the Old Poet, for it won't have a friend in the world.

When it comes to the publishing of books, people are always pessimistic, and, in my case, always right. Success, I am sufficient of a heretic to believe, matters little, but friendship a great deal. And I could as little think of sending a story friendless into the world as I would of sending a child, or horse, or dog. So "Changeling" itself I will put under the friendly hand of the Right Honorable the Lord Justice O'Connor, who will find law treated in it in a _dégagé_ manner that will surprise even him. And "The Parliament at Thebes" I dedicate to Addison and Josephine Hanan.

For Bulmer and Clare Hobson, near Three-Rock Mountain, is "Delilah, Now It Was Dusk," and for Brinsley MacNamara, that splendid Irish novelist, "Wisdom Buildeth Her House." And "In Praise of Lady Margery Kyteler" for Arthur Somers Roche, in memory of a chivalrous kindness.

"Reynardine" for Miss OEnone Somerville and in memory of Martin Ross--their pens were one of the lost Irish glories. "Irish" for Jeffrey Farnol--none more than he loves and understands the Ring. And I am sorry there is not a story of war and its intricacies in the collection to dedicate to my friend Lieutenant-General J. J. O'Connell.

I have not by hundreds come to the end of those whom I love to think my friends; but so many of them are sportsmen that to dedicate stories to them would be like giving a two-year-old racer to a maiden and church-going lady, loading her with responsibility and embarrassment, so that--

So that the rest of the stories can go out and make friends for themselves, and if they can't, 't was surely a poor hand that wrote them.

Donn Byrne.

By the Cinque Ports, England. 1923.

Contents

Changeling

The Barnacle Goose

Belfasters

The Keeper of the Bridge

In Praise of Lady Margery Kyteler

Reynardine

Dramatis Personæ

Wisdom Buildeth Her House

The Parliament at Thebes

Delilah, Now It Was Dusk

A Quatrain Of Ling Tai Fu's

"Irish"

By Ordeal of Justice

CHANGELING AND OTHER STORIES

CHANGELING

I

To outward appearance the whole of the courtroom scene was drab, ordinary. There was the stuffy rectangle of a room, half dark in the January dusk, for all that the electric lights glowed with meager incandescence. There was the judge, in his robe, at the desk of the court. There were the jurymen, solemn as in church. There the court stenographers, bald, active as ants. There the men of the daily journals, more aloof, more judicial than the judge. There the press of morbid spectators, leaning forward like runners on the mark. There the policemen, court attendants, whatnot, relaxed of body, concentrated of eye, jealous of the dignity of the court as a house-dog of its master's home. Through the windows of the court could be seen the bulk of the Tombs, heavy, hopeless, horrible as the things whence it takes its chilly name.

The case of the people _versus_ Anna Janssen for the murder of Alastair de Vries droned on.

The district attorney, youngish, slim, lithe, a little sinister--the impression of a hunting-dog all over him--was examining a witness, a rat-faced man who had something of the old-time bartender or private detective about him.

"It was your business, as attendant at the Oriental Garden, to see that order was kept?"

"Yes, sir."

"There was no semblance of disorder at all until you heard the shot fired?"

"No, sir."

"Mr. De Vries was at a table with a party?"

"Yes, sir."

"You heard the shot and you saw Mr. De Vries fall forward?"

"Yes, sir. Crumpled up, sort of."

"Then you ran to him?"

"Yes, sir."

"You saw the woman Janssen back of the hall with a revolver?"

"Yes, sir."

"What was she doing?"

"She was laughing."

"Was she drunk?"

"The laugh sounded drunk."

"Was she very much under the influence of liquor?"

"She could n't have been, else she would n't have got away."

"You are certain that it was the prisoner?"

All eyes in the court-room were turned to the prisoner in the dock. And there was in the sordid trial chamber a sense of great disturbance in the air, though, from the minds and personalities of all gathered there, there rose in gray tendrils a haze of doubt, of disbelief, of mystery.

She sat in the dock, in the sordid court-room, among the unseemly officers and the public, as a statue in some public square might stand above the rabble. Mature, magnificent, the prisoner seemed almost like some goddess from a Norse mythology.

First, her strange coloring made all catch their breath. Her face was tanned to an absolutely golden hue, and out of this work of delicate bronze there looked, calm and confident, two eyes that were blue as sea-water. Her eyebrows, her hair, were bleached by the sun until her eyebrows were two half-moons of silver, until her hair was the pale, beautiful gold of honey in dark lights and like vivid strands of live silver when the light fell on it. She had the strange, exotic appearance of the women of Saba Isle, the ancient colony of Holland sailors and Carib Indian belles, a small dot in the West Indies where there is a town on the top of a mountain, and life is as in the garden of the Hesperides.

It was not alone her coloring, her splendid face. From her there came such an aura of health, of spiritual strength, it seemed impossible that this woman was the chorus girl Janssen who had been the cast-off mistress of the rake and spendthrift De Vries, who had been drunk, who attended cabarets with wine-merchants and Broadway belles. This woman! Impossible! In her own calm eyes there seemed also a look that said more: "This is ridiculous. I can't have done this. Why am I here? Why don't they get up and let me go?"

Even the rat-faced witness was perturbed.

"The prisoner in the dock?" he said with a sense of puzzled wonder. "The prisoner in the dock?"

"Well, don't mind the prisoner in the dock, then. It was the woman Janssen you saw."

"I am sure of that."

"You were well acquainted with her appearance. You couldn't have been mistaken?"

"No, sir, I could not have been mistaken. She was often at the Oriental with Mr. De Vries. Sometimes every night for a week. I could not have been mistaken. It was she shot Mr. De Vries."

The district attorney sat down, with a gesture of his hand toward Howard Donegan, the prisoner's counsel. With his massive body, with his massive head, with his cruel jurist's face, Howard Donegan was as much a part of the attraction for the public as was the prisoner, the notoriety of the ten-year-old case, the romantic capture of Annette Janssen. The great Irish-American was the foremost criminal lawyer of his day, all but invincible when defending a man or a woman with the slightest chance of escape, and right on his side. As a cross-examiner he was dreaded as the plague. The public would get the thrill of seeing a superbly cruel and magnificent performance when Donegan arose. Even now the rat-faced witness shook as with ague as Donegan turned casually toward him, with hooded eyes. But Donegan shook his head. He did not wish to cross-examine.

Even the judge was surprised.

"Did I hear aright?" He leaned forward, his fine mystic's face in lines of doubt and worry. "The counsel for the prisoner does not wish to cross-examine?"

"Your Honor heard aright. I will not cross-examine."

Through the big chamber there was a buzz of comment, of doubt, of all but horror. Was there nothing to be done for this woman? Even if she did kill De Vries, give her a sporting chance for her life! "What is Donegan doing?" the public, the attendants, the newspaper reporters asked themselves with mistrust. Was he throwing her down?

There was a tensing in court, a tightening, as of drama. Already there was a sense in every one's chilled veins of the horrible harness of the electric chair. But Donegan only drowsed.

"You can step down," the Court told the witness.

The rat-faced man crept from the witness-box, white, shaking still with the fear of Donegan's eye. He tried to get a seat in the benches, but none would make room for him. And though he had only done his duty, and that at command of the law, there was about him, as he slunk from the room, the look there was about him who was surnamed Iscariot, as he crept from the garden on the Mount of Olives, on the world's most tragic dawn.... Like a story from some old book there unrolled before the public the history of Anna Janssen of ten, or twelve, or fifteen years before, in a New York we know no longer, so changed is it in that brief space. Then it was a riotous spendthrift, a glorious waster, hell-roaring, somehow lovable, and now it is a burgess of standing, with all the burgess virtues.

And the eyes of the court-room glistened as old names appeared like Falstaffian ghosts. The Poodle Dog, the German Village, the Holland House, the Knickerbocker. Gorgeous, blowsy, out of a dim past they rose for an instant. Baron Wilkins's and Nigger Mike's. And there was the thin clink of glasses across forgotten bars. And at three o'clock of a morning the flying wedge at Pat's was hurling some truculent guest to the sidewalk. And gunmen were gunmen then, not strike-breakers.

Old days, great days, and only a dozen years before. And John Barrymore was not _Richard III_ but the comedian of "Are You a Mason?" And Mr. Chambers had written "The Danger Mark," and Lieutenant Becker still patrolled the streets. And Mannie Chappelle and Diamond Jim were still alive and merry, who are now dust, God rest them! And cops grafted and politics were corrupt, after the old and pleasant tradition. And out of the side door of saloons came the old-fashioned drunkard, who with the old-fashioned ghost-story and the old-fashioned Christmas is laid to rest forevermore. And the voice of Dr. Parkhurst was heard through the land.

Ichabod! Gone is glory!

The night life of Paris was hectic, hysterical. The night life of Berlin was heavy, somehow sinister. But, lush, extravagant, now joyous, now _macabre_, the foam of New-World liquor, the night life of New York challenged the heavens with streaming rays, retiring only before the chaste, armored dawn. Like some Thousand and One Nights of some writer of the people, it challenged the imagination, it intrigued, it repelled. Overdone not seldom, often in bad taste, but virile, rude, and unabashed, it claimed recognition with brazen clamor.

And on this stage, and against this background, now leading woman to De Vries, now being supported by a caste of wasters, brokers, men about town, there moved Anna Janssen, the Swedish Beauty. Cast in the form and figure of a Norse goddess, fit for great epics, she was a figurante in a debauched side-show. Her eyes, which were blue as the sea and should have been pure and passionate as the sea, were drenched with wine, and her mouth, with its clear-cut outlines as of a woman of the painter Zorn's, which should have been firm as a budding flower, was relaxed and wet from kissing.

A woman of Broadway, hungered after and yet despised, she might have gone the accustomed path that leads from the chattering magnificence of Broadway to the sinister silence of Potter's Field. Down the old beaten decline toward sordid Death she could have gone, and none would have tried to stay her, none to help. And then the end. And the only result would have been a little chilling in the hearts of the newer Beauties of Broadway, a ghost whispering in their hearts the most terrible of epitaphs: The wages of sin is death. For a moment only. And some celebrity of Broadway might feel sad for an hour, with easy sentiment: "Poor Anna! And I knew her when she wore diamonds, and New York was at her feet!" Or some respectable citizen in his warm home might treasure secret, ashamed memories, and never avow them. And some one might even seek out her grave to say a hurried prayer and make an offering of flowers. And the rest would be silence.

But that, in a mood of drunken pique, she shot and killed Alastair de Vries!

Of her life there is little to be said. It is a life that a thousand girls have lived. Admit the evidence which satisfied a judge in a trial of murder and it boils down to this: The daughter of a Brooklyn mechanic, she got a place in the chorus of a big musical comedy, and was flattered and courted by the blades of Broadway. And the one to whom she fell victim was Alastair de Vries, who had forsaken Fifth Avenue to travel westward to Broadway. Of the old patroon stock which had settled New Amsterdam and been lords of the manor along the Hudson before the English came, bankers and traders, soldiers and explorers, all there remained of them was one moneyed boy who saw adventure only in ruining the daughters of tradesmen where his forebears had seen it in hacking out the destiny of a New World.

Blond, rather chubby, not yet thirty, Alastair de Vries had already had a large biography in the Sunday papers and weeklies of gossip in New York. Annette Janssen was one of perhaps twenty conquests and she was not the last. She was the all but last.

He took her from the chorus, gave her everything she desired, made her for her brief life the semiannual queen of Broadway.

And then a small brunette came along, acclaimed as the Queen of the Ponies, and, turning like a flash, De Vries hurried to conquer the new arrival. And Anna shot him, not because of jealousy, not because she loved him, but just to make trouble.

There's her life for you. There are what the dazzling facts of her queendom of Broadway amount to. There they are, without their glitter and romance. Through the black magic of Sinister Alley they shine like fireflies, but, like fireflies, in the calm sanity of daytime they are nothing but grubby crawling things we flick from our palms with a _moue_ of distaste....

Day followed day, and witness witness, and item by item the sordid chronicle was written. Each fact attested and proved to the satisfaction of the court, to the satisfaction of the public. It was a sort of journey toward a definite objective--a journey on which the public was invited to see Justice hearken to the call of the people of the State of New York.

There was no doubt about it. Coldly, callously, for a whim, in a moment of piqued vanity, a chorus girl had shot a gentleman.

And then in the mind of every one there loomed, as it approached nearer until its horrible lines, its terrifying aura were visible, the objective of the voyage--the dreadful electric chair.

"Why does n't Donegan do something? Why? Why? Why does n't he put up a fight at least?"

But Donegan drowsed on. Only when the prisoner in the dock threw him a swift look of appeal, as she did occasionally when some damning point was raised, did he drop the granite mask. Now and then her face would blanch under the tan, and her mouth quiver. And then would come a miracle in Donegan. Those harsh bulldog features would relax, the glinting eyes open, and over the hated face would play the smile of--oh, forty years ago--when he was just an innocent, likable Irish boy, and not a great jurist, whom communion with the sinister qualities of the law, and battles for life and liberty, and knowledge of strange strata in the minds of men, which is good for none to know, had transformed into a dark angel with a protective and flaming sword.

But the smile did n't reassure the public.

"Yes, he 's smiling. He 's confident, all right. But why does n't he do something?"

Had the people in the court-room read of this trial in their homes--read the bare facts, the testimony of witnesses, there was not one who would have wasted a second thought on Anna Janssen. Perhaps in the hearts of one or two there would have lingered the feeling that it was not right she should be strapped horribly in the chair. But that would have been chivalry, not justice. One and all would have said: "That is what the death penalty is for--to remove from human contact one who has no right to God's sunshine, and who has arrogated to her vile and puny self the right of the Creator, the disposal of human life. Muffle her up. Hustle her away. Throw on the current and hide her in quicklime. Life is not for such as she!"

But between the woman whom the witnesses had drawn in black, sinister colors and the lady in the dock there was a continent of difference. True, she was the same height, the same figure, but for a healthy development of years. True, such marks of identification as Anna Janssen the chorus girl had, might be noted on the body of her who was a prisoner at the bar.

But the body of Anna Janssen the chorus girl was soft and white and made for sinister loving, while that of the woman in the dock was healthy and hard and tanned, after the fashion of Eve, whom the Lord God made in the garden. And Anna Janssen's had swayed alluringly with provocative sophistication, while the carriage of this woman was erect and of great dignity. And the eyes of the chorus girl had been full of evil knowledge and unhealthy flame, but this woman's had wistfulness and a strange mystery.

And in the heart of every one there rose a cry: "This is not the same woman. This is a good woman!"

There is a theory of an old medical school whose name--not that it matters--I regret to have forgotten. And it is this: that every seven years the human body changes. We have not the same bones, nor the same skin, the same muscles at thirty-five that we had at twenty-eight. They are worn out and are eliminated, and new tissue takes their place. It may be wrong, but it is a very taking theory. It explains to us how the track athlete of some years ago becomes the paunchy, bald-headed, repulsive man of to-day. It explains how the well-fed man of the world may turn into a harsh-faced monk. It explains to us how the soft, succubine chorus girl of a dozen years before became the splendid amazon that Anna Janssen is to-day.

And yet this may be wrong about the body. But about the mind (and there you have the inner person) there is one thing certain, not a theory but a fact--that people change completely. Like a child's slate, the mind is, on which a thousand things are written. The young take so much for granted; the old know. And gallantly they write this for a fact, that for a falsehood. But day by day they live and learn, as the old saw goes. And simple equations become quadratic. And the writing on the slate is altered month by month, as new factors of life are realized. All is a correction, a readjustment.

This is gradual, but occasionally, very occasionally, by some mental or spiritual cataclysm all on the slate is sponged clear. And a new and startling departure takes its place. As we see in the inner personality of Anna Janssen the change from the petty arithmetic of Broadway, the venal crooked sums of Sinister Street, to the gigantic calculus of life as the Lord God conceived it, when He formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul....

The district attorney turned from his last witness to the twelve men in the box. "Gentlemen," he said, in the manner of a workman well satisfied with the progress of the job in hand, "I have proved the crime and proved the perpetrator, the circumstances, the setting, the motive. There is but one more thing to be done to clinch this case home like a nail in a horse's shoe. It is now ten years between the time this murder was committed and the bringing of the prisoner to the bar of justice. There is but one more thing to do to remove the smallest iota of doubt that the prisoner at the bar and Anna Janssen, Alastair de Vries's mistress, are one and the same person. And to prove this I shall call to the witness-stand the detective who arrested Anna Janssen in Tahiti, and in whose custody the prisoner has been from that day until she was brought to justice here--a period of nine years and four months in all."

"Officer Thomas McCarthy!"

"Officer Thomas McCarthy to the stand."

The public craned forward, and with that strange shifting sound that betokens an immensity of interest they settled themselves in their seats for the recital of the detective. Here was the great attraction of the trial--the story of McCarthy and Anna Janssen alone on a desert island, a murderess and the officer who arrested her. More than the morbid interest of the killing of De Vries, more than the realistic tale of old New York that was, more than the spectacle of a woman dicing for her life, more than the prospect of watching Donegan, the greatest of criminal lawyers, harass the court, and pound the battered witnesses, and at last possibly and probably carry off the prisoner as in an old-time rescue from Tyburn, was the promised recital of the adventure in the lonely Southern sea. There had been one romantic story of it in one day of the papers, and then no more, for the matter would have called forth intense comment from the papers, arousing sympathy or hatred, and the case was _sub judice_.

But that one story stirred the imagination of the public. And the sordid tale told of a woman killing her fickle lover in an attack of offended vanity faded into a golden haze of romance. The scented smell of the tropics came to their nostrils, and their eyes saw golden sands and phosphorescent seas. And here the palms murmured with a rustle as of exotic silks, and the Bird of Paradise winged its iridescent flight through the opaque Marquesan dusk. And the spirits of strange gods moved upon the face of the waters....

Here was a setting for Scheherazade and here characters for a master writer: a patrolman of New York, young, athletic, unspoiled, canny with the knowledge of his native city, brave as only his kind is brave; and here a woman from the sloughs of the Tenderloin, an admitted beauty, a proven murderess.

What drama had happened in that isle of dreams, in that immense act of nine rolling years? And did she love him, or did she hate him? And had he succumbed to her, as Adam to Lilith in Eden, before Eve was? Or had he resisted her as Anthony of Egypt resisted the succuba in the desert near Fayum? And did she wheedle him with words sweeter than honey? Or did she curse him with strange black blasphemies? Or was it just one long, dumb vigil of hatred? Or had they become friends, hunter and hunted, marooned now on the islands of strange dead gods?

In God's name, what?

At any rate they would soon know.

"Officer Thomas McCarthy, this way!"

Then, of a sudden, up rose Howard Donegan. The judge on his bench, the jurymen, the prosecuting attorney, the court, the prisoner herself, all looked at him with a hesitant surprise. Somehow his action was surprisingly dramatic. He stood up slowly and said nothing, but looked around. Into the drama of crime and romance, there was injected a new element, powerful, sluggish, but immensely sure.

"If it please the Court," went his heavy, significant voice, "may I say a few words?"

"It is hardly regular, at this period, Mr. Donegan," the judge said, puzzled. "Surely you will have an opportunity later on."