Part 4

He smiled at her and laid his hand over the ring, which outglittered even the most newly nickeled of Piazza's cutlery.

“Yes, honey,” he said. “I admit it. And I knew that Jessie's letter was genuine, because I wrote it myself.”

THE CURIOUS CASE OF KENELM DIGBY

WE HAD been dining together at the Hotel Ansonia, and as we walked up the shining breezy channel of Broadwhat is the commonest phrase of the detectives? To put two and two together. What else, I ask you, is the poet doing all the time but putting two and two together--two rhymes, and then two rhymes more, and making a quatrain.

He swung his stick, puffed strongly at his cigar, and amorously surveyed the deep blue of the night, against which the huge blocks of apartment houses spread their random patterns of lighted windows. Between these granolithic cliffs flowed a racing stream of bright motors, like the rapids of a river of light hurrying downward to the whirlpool of Times Square.

My friend Dove Dulcet (the well-known poet and literary agent) vigorously expounded a theorem which I afterward had occasion to remember.

“There is every reason,” he cried, “why a poet should be the best of detectives! My boy, there is a rhyme in events as well as in words. When you see two separate and apparently unconnected happenings that seem (as one might say) to rhyme together, you begin to suspect one author behind them both. It is the function of the poet to have a quick and tender apprehension of similarities. The root of poetry is nothing else than describing things as being like other apparently quite different things. The lady who compared herself to a bird in a gilded cage was chaffed for her opulent and spendthrift imagination; but in that lively simile she showed an understanding of the poetic principle. Look here:

“Either for a poet or for a detective,” he said, gaily, “this seems to me the ideal region. I tell you, I walk about here suspecting the most glorious crimes. When I see the number of banana splits that are consumed in these glittering drugstores, I feel sure that somewhere, in the purple silences of the night, hideous consequences must follow. Those who feed so violently on that brutalizing mixture of banana, chocolate ice cream, cherry syrup, and whipped marshmallow, must certainly be gruesome at heart. I look out of my window late at night toward the scattered lights of that vast pile of apartments, always thinking to see them blaze some great golden symbol or letter into the darkness, some terrible or obscene code that means death and terror.”

“Your analogy seems to have some sense,” I said. “Certainly the minor poet, like the law breaker, loves to linger about the scene of his rhyme, or crime.”

“You are an amateur of puns,” he replied. “Then let me tell you the motto I have coined to express the spirit of this Little White Way--_Ein feste bourgeois ist unser Gott_. This is the proud kingdom of the triumphant middle class. It is a perilous country for a poet. If he were found out, he would be martyred at the nearest subway station. But how I love it! See how the quiet side streets cut across highways so richly contrasting: West End Avenue, leafy, expensive, and genteel; Broadway, so gloriously cruel and artificial; Amsterdam Avenue, so honestly and poignantly real. My club is the Hartford Lunch Room, where they call an omelet an _omulet_, and where the mystic word _Combo_ resounds through the hatchway to the fat man in the kitchen. My church is the St. Agnes branch of the Public Library, over on Amsterdam Avenue. In those cool, quiet rooms, when I watch the pensive readers, I have a sense of treading near an artery of fine human idealism. In all this various neighbourhood I have a cheerful conviction that almost anything might happen. In the late afternoons, when the crosswise streets end on a glimpse of the Jersey bluffs that glow like smoky blue opals, and smell like rotten apples, I feel myself on the very doorsill of the most stunning outrages.”

We both laughed, and turned off on Seventy-seventh Street to the small apartment house where Dulcet had a comfortable suite of two rooms and bath. In his book-lined sitting room we lit our pipes and sat down for a gossip.

We had been talking at dinner of the extraordinary number of grievous deaths of well-known authors that had happened that year. As it is almost unnecessary to remind you, there was Dunraven Bleak, the humorous essayist, who was found stark (in both senses) in his bathtub; and Cynthia Carboy, the famous writer of bedtime stories, who fell down the elevator shaft. In the case of Mrs. Carboy, the police were distracted because her body was found at the top of the building, and the detective bureau insisted that in some unexplainable manner she must have fallen _up_ the shaft; but as Dulcet pointed out at the time of the Authors' League inquiry, the body might have been carried upstairs after the accident. Then there was Andrew Baffle, the psychological novelist, whose end was peculiarly atrocious and miserable, because it seemed that he had contracted tetanus from handling a typewriter ribbon that showed signs of having been poisoned. Frank Lebanon, the brilliant short-story writer, was stabbed in the fulness of his powers; and there were others whom I do not recall at the moment. Mr. Dulcet had suffered severely by these sad occurrences, for a number of these authors were his clients, and the loss of the commissions on the sale of their works was a serious item. The secret of these tragedies had never been discovered, and there had been something of a panic among members of the Authors' League. The rumour of a pogrom among bestselling writers was tactfully hushed.

“What is your friend Kenelm Digby writing nowadays?” I asked, as I looked along Dulcet's shelves. Digby, the brilliant novelist, was probably Dulcet's most distinguished client, an eccentric fellow who, in spite of his excellent royalties, lived a solitary and modest existence in a boardinghouse somewhere in that part of the West Side. Outside his own circle of intimates Dulcet was almost the only man whom Digby saw much of, and many of us, who admired the novelist's work, had our only knowledge of his person from hearing the agent talk of him.

“By George, I'm glad you reminded me,” said Dulcet. “Why, he has just finished a story, and he telephoned me this afternoon asking me to stop over at his house this evening to get the manuscript. He never has any dealings with the editors on his own hook--likes me to attend to all his business arrangements for him. I said I'd run over there about ten o'clock.”

“That last book of his was a great piece of work,” I said. “I've been following his stuff for over ten years, and he looks to me about the most promising fellow we've got. He has something of the Barrie touch, it seems to me.”

“Yes, he's the real thing,” said Dulcet, blowing a blue cloud of his Cartesian Mixture. “I only wish he were not quite so eccentric. He lives like a hermit-crab, over in a lodging-house near the Park. Even I, who know him as well as most people, never feel like intruding on him except when he asks me to. I can't help thinking it would be good for him to get out more and see something of other men in his line of work. I tried to get him to join The Snails, but he says that Amsterdam Avenue is his only amusement. And Central Park seems to be his country club. I wonder if you've noticed that in his tales whenever he wants to describe a bit of country he takes it right out of the Park. I sometimes suspect that's the only scenery he knows.”

“He has attained a very unusual status among writers,” I said. “In my rambles among bookshops I have noticed that his first editions bring quite a good price. It's very seldom that a writer--at any rate an American--gets 'collected' during his lifetime.”

“Did you ever see any of his manuscript?” asked Dulcet; and on my shaking my head, he took out a thick packet of foolscap from a cabinet.

“This is the original of 'Girlhood',” he explained. “Digby gave it to me. It'll be worth a lot some day.”

I looked with interest at the neatly written sheets, thickly covered with a small, beautiful, and rather crabbed penmanship.

“Worth a lot!” I exclaimed. “Well, I should say so! Why the other day I was browsing round in a bookshop and I found a lot of his first editions marked at $15 each. It struck me as a very high price for I know I have seen them listed for three or four dollars in catalogues.”

“Exorbitantly high,” Dulcet said. “I'm afraid your bookseller is profiteering. I admire Digby as much as any one, but that is an artificial price. The firsts aren't rare enough to warrant any such price as that. Still, I'm glad to know about it as it's a sign of growing recognition. I remember the time when it was all I could do to get any editors to look at his things. I'll have to tell him about that, it will please him mightily.”

We sat for a while chatting about this and that and then Dulcet got up and put on his hat.

“Look here, old man,” he said. “You squat here and be comfortable while I run round to Digby. It won't take me more than a few minutes--he lives on Eighty-second Street. I'll be back right speedily, and we can go on with our talk.” I heard him go down in the elevator, and then I refit my pipe, and picked out a book from one of his shelves. I remember that it was Brillat-Savarin's amusing “Gastronomy as a Fine Art”. I smiled at finding this in Dulcet's library, for I knew that the agent rather prided himself on being something of a gourmet, and I was reading the essays of the jovial French epicure with a good deal of relish when the telephone rang. I went to it with that slight feeling of embarrassment one always has in answering someone else's phone.

To my surprise, it was Dulcet's voice.

“Hullo?” he said. “That you, Ben? Listen, I want you to come round to Digby's right away,” and he gave the address.

Thinking he had arranged a chance for me to meet Digby (I had long wanted to do so), I felt hesitant about intruding; but he repeated his message rather sharply. “Please come at once,” he said. “It's important.” Again he gave the street number, made me promise to come immediately, and rang off.

It was nearly half-past ten, and the streets were fairly quiet as I walked briskly along. The house was one of a row of old cocoa-coloured stone dwellings, and evidently someone was watching for me, for while I was trying to read the numbers a door opened and from a dark hall an arm beckoned to me. I went up the tall steps and a stout woman, who seemed to be in some agitation, whispered my name interrogatively. “Is this Mr. Trovato?” she murmured.

“Yes,” I said, puzzled.

“Third floor front,” she said, and I creaked quietly up the stairs.

I tapped at the front room on the top floor, and Dulcet opened.

“Thank goodness you're here, Ben,” he said. “Something has happened.”

It was a large, comfortable room, crowded with books on three walls, furnished with easy chairs and a couch in one corner. A brilliant blaze of light from several bulbs under a frosted hood poured upon a reading table in the middle of the room. Sitting at this table, in a Windsor chair, slumped down into the seat, was a short stout man whose head lolled sideways over his chest. He was wearing a tweed suit and a soft shirt, and looked as though he had fallen asleep at his work. In front of him were some books and a can of tobacco. I recognized him, of course, from the photographs I had often seen. It was Digby.

I looked at Dulcet, aghast. But, as always at such moments, what was uppermost in my mind was something trivial and irrelevant. I had an intense desire to open a window. The air in that room was thick and foggy, a sort of close, strangling frowst of venomously strong tobacco and furnace gas. After the clear elixir of the wintry night it was loathsome. It was the typical smell that hangs about the rooms of literary bachelors, who work all day long in a room without ever thinking of airing it.

“Yes,” he said. “He's dead. Pretty awful, isn't it? I found him like this when I got here. No sign of injury as far as I can see.”

There was something profoundly dreadful in this first sight, as mere sagging clay, of the brilliant and powerful writer whose books I had so long admired, and whom I had thought of as one of the strong and fortunate few who shape human perplexities to their own ends. I looked down at him with a miserable blackness in my spirit, and laid a hand on Dulcet's shoulder in sympathy.

“I've sent for a doctor,” he said. “Before he comes I want to get all the information I can from the landlady. I wanted to have you here as a witness. I haven't touched anything.”

The woman had followed me upstairs, and stood crying quietly in the doorway.

“Come in, Mrs. Barlow,” said Dulcet. “Now please tell us everything you can about where Mr. Digby went this evening, and anything that has happened.”

Mrs. Barlow, who seemed to be a good-hearted, simple-minded creature, snuffled wretchedly. “Oh, dear, oh dear,” she said. “He was such a nice gentleman, too. Let me see, he went out about seven, I suppose for his supper, but he was always irregular about his meals, you never could tell, sometimes he would eat in the middle of the afternoon, and sometimes not till late at night. I always would urge him that he would die of indigestion, but he was so kind-hearted.”

“You don't know where he went?” said Dulcet. “Perhaps he went round to the laundry,” she said, “for he had a parcel with him, which I took to be his laundry because he usually took it out on Monday evenings because by that time the clean shirt he put on on Sunday was ready to go to the wash. I hate to think that in all the years he lived in this house his laundry was the only thing we ever had a difference about, because I used to have it done in the house for him but he said my washwoman tore the buttons off his shirts or collars or something, so a little while ago he started taking his things out to be done, but I don't know where because he used to call for them himself.”

“You haven't any idea where he used to eat?” insisted Dulcet.

“Oh, no, sir, he liked to go different places, you know yourself how he was always a bit queer and concentric and he never talked much about where he went, but always so nice and considerate. Oh, he _was_ a fine gentleman.”

Mrs. Barlow, plainly much grieved, wept anew. “Please try to tell us everything you can think of,” said Dulcet, gently. “What time did he come in, and did you notice anything unusual?”

“Nothing out of the way that I can think of, but then I was down in the basement most of the evening, for I let my maid go to the movies and I had a deal to do. I suppose he went along Amsterdam Avenue, he was always strolling up and down Amsterdam or Columbus, poor man, getting ideas for his literature I guess. He came back about nine o'clock I should say, because I heard the door about then. Just a few minutes before he came in there was a man came to the door with a tin of tobacco for him, which he said Mr. Digby had ordered sent around, and I took it up and put it on his table, there it is now, poor man, Carter's Mixture.”

Mrs. Barlow pointed to the tin of Cartesian Mixture that stood on the table. Evidently it had only just been opened, for it was practically full.

“Yes,” said Dulcet. “Here's his pipe lying on the floor under his chair.” He picked up the briar and glanced at it. “Only just begun to smoke it, for the tobacco is hardly burned. He must have been smoking when he.... There wasn't anything else you can think of?”

The woman dried her eyes with her apron. “There was just one other thing I noticed, but I suppose it's silly. But I took note of it special, because I thought I had heard it before, lately. While he was out, and a little before the man brought the tin of tobacco, I heard a sharp tapping out on the street in front of the house. I noticed it special, because I thought at first it was someone rapping on the door, and I wondered if the bell was out of order again, but when I went I couldn't see any one. But I wondered about it because I heard it two or three times, a sharp kind of tapping, it sounded some way like hitting on stone with a stick of some sort.”

Dulcet and I looked at each other rather blankly.

“And after that,” she went on, “I didn't think about anything one way or another till you came in and I told you to go right up.”

There was a clear peal from the front door bell. “That's the doctor,” said Dulcet, and Mrs. Barlow hurried downstairs.

I have never seen any one so brisk and matter of fact as that physician, and after his arrival the affair seemed to pass out of Dulcet's hands into the painful official machinery that takes charge in such events. Dulcet, acting as the dead writer's literary representative, went into the adjoining room, which was Digby's study, to look over the papers in the desk for any manuscripts that he ought to take care of. He wrote out a list of friends and relatives for me to send telegrams to and I went out to attend to this. I don't know how they get wind of these affairs, but the reporters were already beginning to arrive when I left.

The next day, and for several days afterward, the papers all carried long stories about poor Digby's brilliant career. Then the literary weeklies took it up. At the libraries and bookshops everyone was asking for his books, and I have never seen a more depressing illustration of the familiar fact that a writer's real fame never comes until it is too late to do him any good. Editors and people who had hardly been aware of Digby's genius while he was alive now praised him fluently, speaking of him as “America's most honest realist,” and all that sort of thing. Moving-picture people began inquiring about the film rights of his novels. Some of the sensational newspapers tried to play up his death as a mystery story, but the physicians asserted heart failure as the cause, and this aspect of the matter soon subsided.

Except at the funeral, which was attended by a great many literary people, I did not see Dulcet for some days. I gathered from what I read in the news that Digby's will had appointed him executor of his literary property, and I knew that he must have much to attend to. But one afternoon the telephone rang, and Dulcet asked me if I could knock off work and come round to see him. As I was living up town at that time, it only took me a few minutes to go round to his apartment. I found him smoking a pipe as usual, and looking pale and fagged. He welcomed me with his affectionate cordiality, and I sat down to hear what was on his mind.

“You must excuse me if I'm a little upset,” he said. “I've just had an interview with a ghoul. A fellow came in to see me who had heard that I have a number of poor Digby's books and manuscripts. He wanted to buy them from me, offered big prices for them. He said that since Digby's death all his first editions and so on have gone up enormously in value. Apparently he expected me to do trading over the dead body of a friend.”

He smoked awhile in silence, and then said: “Sorry not to have seen you sooner, but to tell the truth I've had my hands full. His brother, who was the nearest kin, couldn't come from Ohio on account of serious illness, and everything fell on me. I had to pack up all his things and ship them, all that sort of business. But I've been wanting to talk to you about it, because I'm convinced there was something queer about the whole affair. I'm not satisfied with that heart-failure verdict. That's absurd. There was nothing wrong with his heart that I ever heard of. It's very unfortunate that for the first few days I was too occupied with urgent matters to be able to follow up the various angles of the affair. But I've been turning it over in my mind, and I've got some ideas I'd like to share with you. You remember what I told you, with unfortunate levity, about the secret of detective work being ability to notice the unsuspected rhymes in events? Well, there are one or two features of this affair that seem to me to rhyme together in a very sinister fashion. Wait a minute until I put on my other coat, and we'll go out.”

He went into his bedroom. I had not liked to interrupt him, but I was yearning for a smoke, for leaving my rooms in a hurry I had forgotten to bring my pouch with me. On his mantelpiece I saw a tin of tobacco, and began to fill my pipe. To my surprise, just as I was taking out a match he darted out of the bedroom, uttered an exclamation, and snatched the briar from my hand.

“Sorry,” he said, bluntly, “but you mustn't smoke that. It's something very special.” He opened his penknife, scraped out the weed I had put in the bowl, and carefully put it back in the tin. He took the tin and locked it in his desk.

“Try some of this,” he said, handing his pouch. I concluded that the tension of the past days had troubled his nerves. This rudeness was so unlike him that I knew there must be some explanation, but he offered none. As we went down in the elevator he said: “The question is, can you make a rhyme out of tobacco and collar buttons?”

“No,” I said, a little peevishly. “And I don't believe any one could, except Edward Lear.”

“Well,” he continued, “that's what we've got to do. And don't imagine that it's merely a nonsense rhyme, any more than Lear's were. Edward Lear was as great as King Lear, in his own way.” He led me to Eighty-second Street. The December afternoon was already dark as we approached Mrs. Barlow's house. At the foot of her front steps he halted and turned to me.

“Is your pipe going?” he said.

“No,” I said, irritably. “It's out. And I haven't any tobacco.”

“Don't be surly, old chap; I'll give you some if you'll tell me what you do when your pipe goes out.”

“Why, you idiot,” I cried, “I do this.” And I knocked out the ashes by striking the bowl smartly against the palm of my hand.

“Ah,” he said. “But some people do this.”

He bent down and rapped his pipe against the stone ramp of the steps, with a clear, sharp, hollow sound.

“Yes, a good way to break a nice pipe,” I was remarking, when the basement door of the house flew open, and Mrs. Barlow darted out into the sunken area just below the pavement level. In the pale lemon-coloured glare of a near-by street lamp we could see that she was strongly excited.

“Good gracious,” she panted. “Is it Mr. Dulcet? Oh, sir, you did give me a turn. Oh, dear, that was just the tapping sound I heard the night poor Mr. Digby died. What was it? Did you hear it?”

“Like this?” said Dulcet, knocking his pipe again on the stone step.

“That was it, exactly,” she said. “What a fright, to be sure! Was it only someone knocking his pipe like that? Oh, dear, it did bring back that horrid evening, just as plain.”

“So much for the mysterious death rap,” said Dulcet as we walked back toward Amsterdam Avenue. “I can't claim much ingenuity for that, however. You see, the morning after Digby's death I went round to Mrs. Barlow's early, before she had been out to sweep her pavement. The first thing I noticed, by the lowest step, was a little dottle of tobacco such as falls from a halfsmoked pipe when it is knocked out. That seemed to me to make a perfect couplet with Mrs. Barlow's tale of the tapping she had heard. She heard it several times, you remember, in a short space of time. That suggests to me someone standing on the street, or walking up and down, in a state of nervousness, because he didn't smoke any of his pipes through. When they were only half smoked he knocked them out, in sheer impatience. Was he waiting for someone?”