The Paliser case Part 45

x.x.xII

In a dirty cell Lennox sat on a dirty cot. Through a door, dirty too, but barred, came a shuffle of feet, the sound of the caged at bay and that odour, perhaps unique, which prisons share, the smell of dry-rot, perspiration, disinfectants and poisoned teeth. In addition to the odour there was light, not much, but some. Nearby was a sink. Altogether it was a very nice cell, fit for the Kaiser. Lennox took no pleasure in it.

Rage enveloped him. The rage was caused not by the cell but by his opinion of it. That was only human.

Events in themselves are empty. It is we who fill them. They become important or negligible, according to the point of view. We give them the colours, violent, agreeable, or merely neutral, that they obtain. It is the point of view that fills and affects them. The point of view can turn three walls and a door into a madhouse. It can convert them into an ivory tower. To Lennox they were merely revolting.

That morning he had laughed. His arrest amused him. He laughed at it, laughed at the police. They took no offence. Instead they took the cigars that he offered and a few accessories which they grabbed. It is a way the police have. Still Lennox laughed. He knew of course that at Headquarters he would be at once released, the entire incident properly regretted. When he found himself not only elaborately wrong but in court, laughter ceased. Anger replaced it. He had been first amused, then surprised, afterwards exasperated, emotions that finally addled into rage, not at others but at himself, which was rather decent. In any of the defeats of life, the simple blame others; the wise blame themselves; the evolved blame n.o.body. Lennox had not reached that high plane then but in directing his anger at himself he showed the advantages of civilisation which the war has put in such admirable relief.

Now, on that cot, in that cell, ragingly he retraced his steps. He saw himself loving Margaret Austen as though he were to love her forever. A hero can do no more. He saw her loving him with a love so light that a breath had blown it away. A nymph in the brake could do no worse. Yet whether on her part it were perversity or mere shallowness, the result was the same. It had landed him in jail. For that he acquitted her completely. What he could not forgive was his own stupidity in persisting in loving her after she had turned away.

The night before, while, at the opera, the _Terra Addio_ was being sung, he had been writing her one of the endless letters that only those vomiting in an attack of indignation morbus ever produce. In the relief of getting it in black and white, the nausea abated. Then judging it all very idle, he tore the letter in two. It was a gesture made before relapsing into a silence which he had intended should be eternal. At the very moment when Paliser was being run through the gizzards, he, turning a page of life, had scrawled on it Hic jacet.

Now, on that cot, Paliser recurring, he thought of him with so little animosity that he judged his spectacular death inadequate. But who, he wondered, had staged it? Not Ca.s.sy. Ca.s.sy took things with too high a hand and reasonably perhaps, since she took them from where her temperament had placed her. Then, without further effort at the riddle, his thoughts drifted back to that afternoon when, from his rooms, the sunlight had followed her out like a dog.

He had been looking at the floor, but without seeing it. Then at once, without seeing it either, he saw something else, something which for a long time must have been there, something that had been acting on him and in him without his knowledge. It was the key to another prison, the key to the prison that life often is and which, in the great defeats, every man who is a man finds at his feet and usually without looking for it either.

"But I love her!" he suddenly exclaimed.

There is a magic in those words. No sooner were they uttered than his mind became a rendezvous of apparitions. He saw Ca.s.sy as he had seen her first, as he had seen her last, as he had seen her through all the changes and mutations of their acquaintance, saw her eyes lifted to his, saw her face turned from him.

The crystallisation which, operating in the myriad cells of the brain, creates our tastes, our temptations, our desires; creates them unknown to us, creates them even against our will, and which without his will or knowledge, had, like a chemical precipitate, been acting on him, then was complete.

"I love her!" he repeated.

The dirty cot, the dirty cell, the dirty floor, a point of view was transforming. At the moment they ceased to be revolting. Then immediately another view restored their charm.

"She won't have me!"

The dirty cell reshaped itself and he thought of life, a blind fate treacherous always.

"Good Lord, how I envy you!"

Lennox turned. Wriggling through the bars a hand which a keeper checked, stood Jones.

"When Cervantes enjoyed the advantages that you possess, the walls parted and through them cavalcaded the strumpet whose name is Fame. In circ.u.mstances equally inspiring Bunyan entertained that hussy. Verlaine too. From a dungeon she lifted him to Parna.s.sus, lifted him to the top.

If I only had their luck--and yours! It is too good for you. You don't appreciate it. Besides you will be out to-morrow."

"I ought not to be here at all," Lennox indignantly retorted.

"No, you are most undeserving. Mais ecoute. C'est le pere de la pet.i.te qui a fait le coup. Il me l'a avoue, ensuite il a claque et depuis j'ai vu ton avocat. C'est une brute mais----"

"Can that," put in the keeper, a huge creature with a cauliflower face, dingy and gnarled. "You guys got to cough English."

Ingratiatingly Jones turned to him. "I mistook you for a distinguished foreigner. Dear me, my life is too full of pleasure!"

He turned to Lennox. "That's it. You are here to-day and gone to-morrow.

Now that I have envied you insufficiently I'll go too. While I am about it I'll go to Park Avenue. Any message?"

"None."

"Make it briefer. Besides, look here. I'll wager a wilderness of pippins that Park Avenue was not and never thought of being engaged to what's his name. I'll wager because it is not in the picture. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you."

"You are very gifted. Nothing wrong with your tongue, though, is there?"

"Nothing whatever."

"Behold then the messenger awaiting the message."

"Very good. I'm through. Absolutely, completely, entirely. If you must be a busybody say that. I'm through."

But that was not Jones' idea of the game and he out with it. "I'll do nothing of the kind."

"Won't you?" Lennox retorted. He had remained seated. But rising then, he looked at the keeper, motioned at Jones.

"If that man asks for me again, say I'm out."

Jones laughed. "Wow-wow, old c.o.c.k! I wish I could have said that but I probably shall. Meanwhile book this: Dinner to-morrow, Athenaeum at eight. By-bye. Remember Cervantes. Don't forget Verlaine. Sweet dreams."

Lennox sat down, looked at the key, tried to turn it. That door too was barred.

x.x.xIII

The offices of Dunwoodie, Bramwell, Strawbridge and Cohen were supplied with a rotunda in which Jones sat waiting, and Jones loved to sit and wait.

Since the musician's tenement had crumbled and the soul of the violinist had gone forth, gone to the unseen a.s.sessors who pityingly, with indulgent hands, weigh our stupid sins, since then a week had pa.s.sed.

During it, a paper signed by the dead had been admitted by the living, a prisoner had been discharged and for no other imaginable reason than because he had killed n.o.body, Lennox became a hero.

New York is very forgetful. Lennox sank back into the blank anonymity to which humanity in the aggregate is eternally condemned and from which, at a bound, he had leaped. The papers were to tell of him again, but casually, without scareheads, among the yesterdays and aviators in France. That though was later.

Meanwhile an enigma remained. Very heroically a young man had done nothing. Hurrah and good-bye! The calciums of curiosity turned on an obscure fiddler who, after murdering another young man, had succeeded in bilking the chair.

But why had he killed him? That was the enigma, one which would have been exciting, if the solution had not been so prompt and so tame. At the proceedings which resulted in Lennox' discharge, it was testified that Angelo Cara had been temporarily deranged.

The testimony, expertly advanced by a novelist who was not an expert, the reporters grabbed before the court could rule it out. The grabbing was natural. The decedent's declaration had been made to Jones who, though not an alienist, was the teller of tales that have been translated into every polite language, including the j.a.panese, which is the politest of all. Moreover, have not the mendacious been properly subdivided into liars, d.a.m.ned liars and expert witnesses? To Verdun with the lot! Mr. Ten Eyck Jones was certainly not an expert, but certainly too he was somebody, he was a best-seller and in the way we live now, the testimony of the best-seller is ent.i.tled to every editorial respect.

The court might rule his testimony out, city editors saluted it.

Jones' little invention did wash therefore and, in the washing, poured balm by the bucket over the father of the murdered man.

Then, gradually, like everything else, except war and the taxes, both murderer and murdered were dropped in the great dust-bin of oblivion that awaits us all.

In the rotunda, meanwhile, Jones sat kicking his heels. It was in the morning, and always in the morning Jones was invisibly at work. Now, his routine upset, loathingly he kicked his heels. But Jones had ways of consoling himself that were very commonplace.