Part 5

I found, as I say, that I could not write plays. My wife and I went abroad for some years. We saw Upcher act once in London, but I didn’t even look him up. That gives you the measure of our detachment. I had quite forgotten him in the succeeding years of desultory, delightful roaming over southern Europe. There are alike so much to remember and so much to forget, between Pirene and Lourdes! But the first head-lines of the first newspaper that I bought on the dock, when we disembarked reluctantly in New York, presented him to me again. It was all there: the “horror,” the “case,” the vulgar, garish tragedy. We had landed in the thick of it. It took me some time to grasp the fact that a man whom I had occasionally called by his first name was being accused of that kind of thing. I don’t need to dot my i’s. You had all seen Filippo Upcher act, and you all, during his trial, bought the _Orb_. I read it myself--every sickening column that had been, with laborious speed, jotted down in the court-room. The evidence made one feel that, if this was murder, a man who merely shoots his wife through the heart need not be considered a criminal at all. It was the very scum of crime. Rachel Upcher had disappeared after a violent quarrel with her husband, in which threats--overheard--had been freely uttered. He could give no plausible account of her. Then the whole rotten mass of evidence--fit only for a rag-picker to handle--began to come in. The mutilated body disinterred; the fragments of marked clothing; the unused railway ticket--but I really cannot go into it. I am not an _Orb_ reporter. The evidence was only circumstantial, but it was, alack! almost better than direct testimony. Filippo was perfectly incoherent in defence, though he, of course, pleaded “not guilty.” He had, for that significant scene--he, Filippo Upcher!--no stage presence.

The country re-echoed the sentence, as it had re-echoed every shriek of the evidence, from Atlantic to Pacific. The jury was out five hours--would have been out only as many minutes if it had not been for one Campbell, an undertaker, who had some doubts as to the sufficiency of the “remains” disinterred to make evidence. But the marked underclothing alone made their fragmentariness negligible. Campbell was soon convinced of that. It was confused enough, in all conscience--he told Upcher’s and my friend, Ted Sloan, later--but he guessed the things the charwoman overheard were enough to convict any man; he’d stick to that. Of course, the prosecuting attorney hadn’t rested his case on the imperfect state of the body, anyhow--had just brought it in to show how nasty it had been all round. It didn’t even look very well for him to challenge medical experts, though a body that had been buried was a little more in his line than it was in theirs, perhaps. And any gentleman in his profession had had, he might say, more practical experience than people who lectured in colleges. He hadn’t himself, though, any call from superior technical knowledge to put spokes in the wheel of justice. He guessed that was what you’d call a quibble. And he was crazy to get home--Mrs. C. was expecting her first, any time along. Sloan said the man seemed honest enough; and he was quite right--the chain of circumstance was, alas! complete. Upcher was convicted of murder in the first degree, and sentenced to death. He didn’t appeal--wouldn’t, in spite of his counsel, and Sloan’s impassioned advice: “Give ’em a run for their money, Filippo. Be a sport, anyhow!”

“Lord, man, all juries are alike,” was the response. “They’ve no brains. I wouldn’t have the ghost of a show, and I’m not going through that racket again, and make a worse fool of myself on the stand another time.”

“But if you don’t, they’ll take it you’ve owned up.”

“Not necessarily, after they’ve read my will. I’ve left Rachel the ‘second best bed.’ There wasn’t much else. She’s got more than I ever had. No, Sloan, a man must be guilty to want to appeal. No innocent man would go through that hell twice. I want to get out and be quiet.”

The only appeal he did make was not such as to give Mr. Campbell any retrospective qualms of conscience. The request was never meant to get out, but, like so many other things marked “private,” it did. His petition was for being allowed to act a certain number of nights before his execution. He owed frightful sums, but, as he said, no sums, however frightful, could fail to be raised by such a device.

“It would kill your chances of a reprieve, Filippo,” Sloan said he told him.

“Reprieve?” Filippo had laughed. “Why, it would _prove_ me guilty. It would turn all the evidence pale. But think of the box-office receipts. There would have to be a platoon of police deadheading in the front rows, of course. But even at that----!”

Sloan came away a little firmer for circumstantial evidence than he had been before. He wouldn’t see Filippo again; wouldn’t admit that it was a good epigram; wouldn’t even admit that it was rather fine of Filippo to be making epigrams at all. Most people agreed with him: thought Upcher shockingly cynical. But of course people never take into account the difference there is between being convicted and pleading guilty. Is it not _de rigueur_ that, in those circumstances, a man’s manner should be that of innocence? Filippo’s flight has always seemed to me a really fine one. But I do not know of any man one could count on to distil from it the pure attar of honesty.

We had gone straight to my wife’s family in New England, on arriving. Until I saw Sloan, I had got my sole information about Upcher from the newspapers. Sloan’s account of Filippo’s way of taking it roused my conscience. If a man, after all that, could show _any_ decency, one owed him something. I decided, without consulting my wife about it, to go over to New York and see Filippo myself. Evie was so done up by the thought of having once dined with the Upchers that I could hardly have broken my intention to her. I told her, of course, after I returned, but to know beforehand might have meant a real illness for her. I should have spared her all of it, had it not seemed to me, at the moment, my duty to go. The interview was not easy to manage, but I used Evie’s connections shamelessly, and in the end the arrangement was made. I have always been glad that I went, but I don’t know anything more nerve-racking than to visit a condemned criminal whose guilt you can not manage to doubt. Only Filippo’s proposal (of which Sloan had told me) to act long enough to pay his debts, made me do it. I still persist in thinking it magnificent of Filippo, though I don’t pretend there wasn’t in his desire some lingering lust of good report. The best he could hope for was to be forgotten; but he would naturally rather be forgotten as Hamlet than as Filippo Upcher.

Upcher was not particularly glad to see me, but he made the situation as little strained as possible. He did no violent protesting, no arraigning of law and justice. If he had, perhaps, acted according to the dictates of his hypothetical ancestress, he at least spoke calmly enough. He seemed to regard himself less as unjustly accused than as unjustly executed, if I may say so: he looked on himself as a dead man; his calamity was irretrievable. The dead may judge, but I fancy they don’t shriek. At all events, Upcher didn’t. A proof of his having cast hope carelessly over his shoulder was his way of speaking of his wife. He didn’t even take the trouble to use the present tense; to stress, as it were, her flesh-and-blood reality. It was “Rachel was,” never “Rachel is”--as we sometimes use the past tense to indicate that people have gone out of our lives by their own fault. The way in which he spoke of her was not tactful. A franker note of hatred I’ve never--except perhaps once--heard struck. Occasionally he would pull himself up, as if he remembered that the dead are our natural creditors for kindly speech.

“She was a devil, and only a devil could live with her. But there’s no point in going into it now.”

I rather wanted him to go into it: not--might Heaven forbid!--to confess, but to justify himself, to gild his stained image. I tried frankness.

“I think I’ll tell you, Upcher, that I never liked her.”

He nodded. “She was poison; and I am poisoned. That’s the whole thing.”

I was silent for a moment. How much might it mean?

“You read the evidence?” he broke out. “Well, it was bad--damned bad and dirty. I’d rather be hanged straight than hear it all again. But it’s the kind of thing you get dragged into sooner or later if you link yourself to a creature like that. I suppose I’m essentially vulgar, but I’m a better lot than she was--for all her looks.”

“She had looks,” I admitted.

“No one could touch her at her best. But she was an unspeakable cat.”

It had been, all of it, about as much as I could stand, and I prepared to go. My time, in any case, was about up. I found it--in spite of the evidence--shockingly hard to say good-bye to Upcher. You know what farewells by a peaceful death-bed are; and you can imagine this.

There was nothing to do but grip his hand. “Good-bye, Filippo.”

“Good-bye, old man. I’ll see you--” The familiar phrase was extinguished on his lips. We stared at each other helplessly for an instant. Then the warder led me out.

The Upcher trial--since Filippo refused to appeal--had blown over a bit by the time I went West. My widowed sister was ill, and I left Evie and every one, to take her to southern California. We followed the conventional route of flight from tuberculosis, and lingered a little in Arizona, looking down into the unspeakable depths of the Grand Cañon. I rather hoped Letitia would stay there, for I’ve never seen anything else so good; but the unspeakable depths spoke to her words of terror. She wanted southern California: roses, and palms, and more people. It was before the Santa Fé ran its line up to Bright Angel, and of course El Tovar wasn’t built. It was rather rough living. Besides, there were Navajos and Hopis all about, and Letitia came of good Abolitionist stock and couldn’t stand anything that wasn’t white. So we went on to Santa Barbara.

There we took a house with a garden; rode daily down to the Pacific, and watched the great blue horizon waves roll ever westward to the immemorial East. “China’s just across, and that is why it looks so different from the Atlantic,” I used to explain to Letitia; but she was never disloyal to the North Shore of Massachusetts. She liked the rose-pink mountains, and even the romantic Mission of the Scarlet Woman; but she liked best her whist with gentle, white-shawled ladies, and the really intellectual conversations she had with certain college professors from the East. I could not get her to take ship for Hawaii or Samoa. She distrusted the Pacific. After all, China _was_ just across.

I grew rather bored, myself, by Santa Barbara, before the winter was out. Something more exotic, too, would have been good for Letitia. There was a little colony from my sister’s Holy Land, and in the evenings you could fancy yourself on Brattle Street. She had managed, even there, to befog herself in a New England atmosphere. I was sure it was bad for her throat. I won’t deny, either, that there was more than anxiety at the heart of my impatience. I could not get Filippo Upcher out of my head. After all, I had once seen much of him; and, even more than that, I had seen him act a hundred times. Any one who had seen him do Macbeth would know that Filippo Upcher could not commit a murder without afterthoughts, however little forethought there might have been in it. It was all very well for van Vreck to speculate on Filippo’s ancestry and suggest that the murder was a pretty case of atavism--holding the notion up to the light with his claret and smiling æsthetically. Upcher had had a father of sorts, and he wasn’t all Borgia--or housemaid. Evie never smirched her charming pages with the name of Upcher, and I was cut off from the _Orb_; but I felt sure that the San Francisco papers would announce the date of his execution in good time. I scanned them with positive fever. Nothing could rid me of the fantastic notion that there would be a terrible scene for Upcher on the other side of the grave; that death would but release him to Rachel Upcher’s Stygian fury. It seemed odd that he should not have preferred a disgusted jury to such a ghost before its ire was spent. The thought haunted me; and there was no one in Letitia’s so satisfactory circle to whom I could speak. I began to want the open; for the first time in my life, to desire the sound of unmodulated voices. Besides, Letitia’s régime was silly. I took drastic measures.

It was before the blessed days of limousines, and one had to arrange a driving trip with care. Letitia behaved very well. She was really worried about her throat, and absurdly grateful to me for giving up my winter to it. I planned as comfortably as I could for her--even suggested that we should ask an acquaintance or two to join us. She preferred going alone with me, however, and I was glad. Just before we started, while I was still wrangling with would-be guides and drivers and sellers of horses, the news of Upcher’s execution came. If I could have suppressed that day’s newspapers in Santa Barbara, I should have done so, for, little as I had liked Filippo, I liked less hearing the comments of Letitia’s friends. They discussed the case, criminologically, through an interesting evening. It was quite scientific and intolerably silly. I hurried negotiations for the trip, and bought a horse or two rather recklessly. Anything, I felt, to get off. We drove away from the hotel, waving our hands to a trim group (just photographed) on the porch.

The days that followed soothed me: wild and golden and increasingly lonely. We had a sort of cooking kit with us, which freed us from too detailed a schedule, and could have camped, after a fashion; but usually by sundown we made some rough tavern or other. Letitia looked askance at these, and I did not blame her. As we struck deeper in toward the mountains, the taverns disappeared, and we found in their stead lost ranches--self-sufficing, you would say, until, in the parched faces of the womenfolk, all pretence of sufficiency broke down. Letitia picked up geological specimens and was in every way admirable, but I did not wish to give her an overdose. After a little less than a fortnight, I decided to start back to Santa Barbara. We were to avoid travelling the same country twice, and our route, mapped, would eventually be a kind of rough ellipse. We had just swung round the narrow end, you might say, when our first real accident occurred. The heat had been very great, and our driver had, I suspect, drunk too much. At all events, he had not watched his horses as he should have done, and one of the poor beasts, in the mid-afternoon, fell into a desperate state with colic. We did what we could--he nearly as stupid as I over it--but it was clear that we could not go on that night whither we had intended. It was a question of finding shelter, and help for the suffering animal. The sky looked threatening. I despatched the inadequate driver in search of a refuge, and set myself to impart hope to Letitia. The man returned in a surprisingly short time, having seen the outbuildings of a ranch-house. I need not dwell on details. We made shift to get there eventually, poor collapsed beast and all. A ranchman of sorts met us and conducted Letitia to the house. The ranch belonged, he said, to a Mrs. Wace, and to Mrs. Wace, presumably, he gave her in charge. I did not, at the moment, wish to leave our horse until I saw into what hands I was resigning him. The hands seemed competent enough, and the men assured me that the animal could travel the next day. When the young man returned from the ranch-house, I was quite ready to follow him back thither, and get news of Letitia. He left me inside a big living-room. A Chinese servant appeared presently and contrived to make me understand that Mrs. Wace would come down when she had looked after my sister. I was still thinking about the horse when I heard the rustle of skirts. Our hostess had evidently established Letitia. I turned, with I know not what beginnings of apologetic or humorous explanation on my lips. The beginning was the end, for I stood face to face with Rachel Upcher.

I have never known just how the next moments went. She recognized me instantly, and evidently to her dismay. I know that before I could shape my lips to any words that should be spoken, she had had time to sit down and to suggest, by some motion of her hand, that I should do the same. I did not sit; I stood before her. It was only when she began some phrase of conventional surprise at seeing me in that place of all places that I found speech. I made nothing of it; I had no solution; yet my message seemed too urgent for delay. All that I had suffered in my so faint connection with Filippo Upcher’s tragedy returned to me in one envenomed pang. I fear that I wanted most, at the moment, to pass that pang on to the woman before me. My old impatience of her type, her cheap mysteriousness, her purposeless inscrutability possessed me. I do not defend my mood; I only give it to you as it was. I have often noticed that crucial moments are appallingly simple to live through. The brain constructs the labyrinth afterwards. All perplexities were merged for me just then in that one desire--to speak, to wound her. But my task was not easy, and I have never been proud of the fashion of its performance.

“Mrs. Wace” (even the subtle van Vreck could not have explained why I did not give her her own name), “is it possible--but I pray Heaven it is--that you don’t know?”

“Know?” It was the voice of a stone sphinx.

“How can I tell you--how can I tell you?”

“What?”

“About Filippo.”

“Filippo?”

“Yes, Filippo! That he is dead.”

“Dead?” The carved monosyllables were maddening.

“Yes--killed. Tried, sentenced, _executed_.”

Her left hand dropped limply from the lace at her throat to a ruffle of her dress. “For what?” Her voice vibrated for the first time.

“For murdering you.”

“Me?” She seemed unable to take it in.

“You must have seen the papers.”

“I have seen no papers. Does one leave the world as utterly as I have left it, to read newspapers? On a lonely ranch like this”--she broke off. “I haven’t so much as seen one for five months. I--I--” Then she pulled herself together. “Tell me. This is some horrid farce. What do you mean? For God’s sake, man, tell me!”

She sat back to hear.

I cannot remember the words in which I told her. I sketched the thing for her--the original mystery, breaking out at last into open scandal when the dismembered body was found; the evidence (such of it as I could bring myself to utter in the presence of that so implicated figure); the course of the trial; Filippo’s wretched defence; the verdict; the horrid, inevitable result. My bitterness grew with the story, but I held myself resolutely to a tone of pity. After all--it shot across my mind--Filippo Upcher had perhaps in the grave found peace.

It must have taken me, for my broken, difficult account, half an hour. Not once in that time was I interrupted. She seemed hardly to breathe. I told her to the very date and hour of his execution. I could give her no comfort; only, at best, bald facts. For what exhibition of self-loathing or self-pity I had been prepared I do not know; but surely for some. I had been bracing myself throughout for any kind of scene. No scene of any kind occurred. She was hard and mute as stone. I could have dealt better, when at last I stopped, with hysterics than with that figure before me--tense, exhausted, terrible. I found myself praying for her tears. But none came.

At last I rose--hoping by the sudden gesture to break her trance. Her eyes followed me. “Terrible--terrible--beyond anything I ever dreamed.” I caught the whispered words. I took the chance for pity; found myself--though I detested the woman as never before--wanting to comfort her.

“He never appealed,” I reminded her. “Perhaps he was glad to die.” It sounded weak and strange; but who could tell what words would reach that weak, strange heart?

I stood before her, more perplexed than at any other moment of my life. At last she opened her eyes and spoke. “Leave me. And do not tell your sister who I am. I shall pull myself together by dinnertime. Go!” She just lifted her hand, then closed her eyes again.

I went out, and, stumbling across a Chinese servant, got him to show me my room.

Of what use would it be to recall, after all the years, what I felt and thought during the next hours? I did not try to send Letitia to Mrs. Upcher. Letitia would have been of no use, even if she had consented to go. It was sheerest wisdom to obey Rachel Upcher, and not to tell. But I had a spasm of real terror when I thought of her “pulling herself together” in her lonely chamber. I listened for a scream, a pistol-shot. It did not seem to me that a woman could hear news like that which it had been my tragic luck to give, without some according show of emotion. Yet a little later I asked myself in good faith what show could ever fit that situation. What speech, what gesture, in that hour, would have been adequate? The dangerous days, in point of fact, would probably come later. I thought more of her, in those two hours, than of Filippo. Though she might well, from all the evidence, have hated him quite honestly, hers was the ironic destiny that is harder to bear than mere martyrdom. No death had ever been more accidental, more irrelevant, more preventable than Filippo’s. One fortnight sooner, she could have turned back the wheel that had now come full circle. That was to be her Hell, and--well, having descended into it in those two hours, I was glad enough to mount once more into the free air.

Mrs. Upcher kept her promise. She pulled herself together and came to dinner, in a high black dress without so much as a white ruche to relieve it. The manager of the ranch, a young Englishman named Floyd, dined with us. He was handsome in a bloodshot way, and a detrimental, if ever there has been one. In love with Mrs. Upcher he looked to be; that, too, in the same bloodshot way. But she clearly had him in perfect order. The mask, I suppose, had worked. Letitia did her social best, but her informing talk failed to produce any pleasant effect. It was too neat and flat. Floyd watched Mrs. Upcher, and she watched the opposite wall. I did my best to watch no one. We were rather like a fortuitous group at a provincial _table d’hôte_: dissatisfied with conditions and determined not to make acquaintance. We were all thankful, I should think, when the meal was over. Mrs. Upcher made no attempt to amuse us or make us comfortable. The young manager left for his own quarters immediately after dinner, and Letitia soon went to her room. I lingered for a moment, out of decency, thinking Rachel Upcher might want to speak to me, to ask me something, to cry out to me, to clutch me for some desperate end. She sat absolutely silent for five minutes; and, seeing that the spell, whatever it was, was not yet broken, I left her.