The Wine of Violence
I am an old man now, and, like many other old men, I feel like making confession. Not of my own sins. I have always been called, I am well aware, a dilettante, and I could hardly have sinned in the ways of the particular sinners of whom I am about to speak. But I have the dilettante’s liking for all realities that do not brush him too close. Throughout the case of Filippo and Rachel Upcher, I was always on the safe side of the footlights. I have no excuse for not being honest, and I have at last an excuse for speaking. It is wonderful how the death of acquaintances frees one; and I am discovering, at the end of life, the strange, lonely luxury of being able to tell the truth about nearly every one I used to know. All the prolonged conventional disloyalties are passed away. It is extraordinary how often one is prevented from telling the blessed truth about the familiar dead because of some irrelevant survivor.
I do not know that there was much to choose between Filippo and Rachel Upcher—though the world would not agree with me. Both of them, in Solomon’s words, “drank the wine of violence.” I never really liked either of them, and I have never been caught by the sentimental adage that to understand is to forgive. If we are damned, it is God who damns us, and no one ventures to accuse Him of misunderstanding. It is a little late for a mere acquaintance to hark back to the Upchers, but by accident I, and I only, know the main facts that the world has so long been mistaken about. They were a lurid pair; they were not of my clan. But I cannot resist the wholly pious temptation to set my clan right about them. I should have done it long ago, in years when it would have made “scare-heads” in the same papers that of old had had so many “scare-heads” about the Upchers, but for my dear wife. She simply could not have borne it. To tell the story is part of the melancholy freedom her death has bestowed on me.
By the time you have read my apology, you will have remembered, probably with some disgust, the Upcher “horror.” I am used to it, but I can still wince at it. I have always been pleased to recognize that life, as my friends lived it, was not in the least like the newspapers. Not to be like the newspapers was as good a test of caste as another. Perhaps it is well for a man to realize, once in his time, that at all events the newspapers are a good deal like life. In any case, when you have known fairly well a man sentenced and executed for murder—and on such evidence!—you never feel again like saying that “one doesn’t know” people who sue for breach of promise. After all, every one of us knows people who accept alimony. But I’ve enough grudge against our newspapers to be glad that my true tale comes too late for even the Orb to get an “extra” out of it. The Orb made enough, in its time, out of the Upchers. On the day when the charwoman gave her evidence against Filippo Upcher, the last copies of the evening edition sold in the New York streets for five dollars each. I have said enough to recall the case to you, and enough, I hope, to explain that it’s the kind of thing I am very little used to dealing with. “Oblige me by referring to the files,” if you want the charwoman’s evidence. Now I may as well get to my story. I want it, frankly, off my hands. It has been pushing for a year into my Italian Interludes; thrusts itself in, asking if it isn’t, forsooth, as good, for emotion, as anything in the Cinquecento. And so, God knows, it is... but the Cinquecento charwomen have luckily been obliterated from history.
I knew Filippo Upcher years ago; knew him rather well in a world where the word “friend” is seldom correctly used. We were “pals,” rather, I should think: ate and drank together at Upcher’s extraordinary hours, and didn’t often see each other’s wives. It was Upcher’s big period. London and New York went, docile enough, to see him act Othello. He used to make every one weep over Desdemona, I know, and that is more than Shakespeare unassisted has always managed. Perhaps if he hadn’t done Othello so damnably well, with such a show of barbaric passion—It was my “little” period, if I may say it; when I was having the inevitable try at writing plays. I soon found that I could not write them, but meanwhile I lived for a little in the odd flare of the theatric world. Filippo Upcher—he always stuck, even in playbills, you remember, to the absurd name—I had met in my Harvard days, and I found him again at the very heart of that flare. The fact that his mother was an Italian whose maiden name had been brushed across with a title got him into certain drawing-rooms that his waistcoats would have kept him out of. She helped him out, for example, in Boston—where “baton sinister” is considered, I feel sure, merely an ancient heraldic term. Rachel Upcher, his wife, I used to see occasionally. She had left the stage before she married Upcher, and I fancy her tense renditions of Ibsen were the last thing that ever attracted him. My first recollection of her is in a pose plastique of passionate regret that she had never, in her brief career, had an opportunity to do Ghosts. Rosmersholm, I believe, was as far as she ever went. She had beauty of the incongruous kind that makes you wonder when, where, and how the woman stole the mask. She is absolutely the only person I ever met who gave you the original of the much-imitated “mysterious” type. She was eternally mysterious—and, every day, quite impossible. It wasn’t to be expected that poor Evie should care to see much of her, and I never put the question that Mrs. Upcher seemed to be always wanting to refuse to answer. The fact is that the only time I ever took poor Evie there, Filippo and his wife quarrelled so vulgarly and violently that we came away immediately after dinner. It would have been indecent to stay. You were sure that he would beat her as soon as you left, but also that before he had hurt her much, she would have cut his head open with a plate. Very much, you see, in the style of the newspapers. I saw Filippo at the club we both had the habit of, and, on his Anglo-Saxon days, liked him fairly well. When his Italian blood rose beneath his clear skin, I would have piled up any number of fictitious engagements to avoid him. He was unspeakable then: unappeasable, vitriolic, scarce human. You felt, on such days, that he wanted his entrée smeared with blood, and you lunched at another table so that at least the blood shouldn’t be yours. I used to fancy whimsically that some ancestress of his had been a housemaid to the Borgias, and had got into rather distinguished “trouble.” But she must have been a housemaid. I did not, however, say this to any one during the trial; for I was sure that his passion was perfectly unpractical, and that he took action only in his mild moments.
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.
I did not go to bed at once. How should I have done that? I was still listening for that scream, that pistol-shot. Nothing came. I remember that, after an hour, I found it all receding from me—the Upchers’ crossed emotions and perverted fates. It was like stepping out of a miasmic mist. Filippo Upcher was dead; and on the other side of the grave there had been no such encounter for him as I had imagined. And I had positively seen a demoniac Rachel Upcher waiting for him on that pale verge! I searched the room for books. There was some Ibsen, which at that moment I did not want. I rejected, one after one, nearly all the volumes that the shelves held. It was a stupid collection. I had about made up my mind to the “Idylls of the King” (they were different enough, in all conscience, from the Upcher case) when I saw a pile of magazines on a table in a distant corner. “Something sentimental,” I proposed to myself, as I went over to ravage them. Underneath the magazines—a scattered lot, for the most part, of London Graphics and English Illustrateds—I found a serried pack of newspapers: San Francisco and Denver sheets, running a few months back. I had never seen a Denver newspaper, and I picked one up to read the editorials, out of a desultory curiosity rare with me. On the first page, black head-lines took a familiar contour. I had stumbled on the charwoman’s evidence against Filippo Upcher. Rien que ça!
My first feeling, I remember, was one of impotent anger—the child’s raving at the rain—that I must spend the night in that house. It was preposterous that life should ask it of me. Talk of white nights! What, pray, would be the color of mine? Then I, in my turn, “pulled myself together.” I went back to the newspapers and examined them all. The little file was arranged in chronological order and was coextensive with the Upcher case, from arrest to announcement of the execution. The Orb might have been a little fuller, but not much. The West had not been fickle to Filippo.
I sat staring at the neatly folded papers for a time. They seemed to me monstrous, not fit to touch, as if they were by no means innocent of Filippo Upcher’s fate. By a trick of nerves and weak lamplight, there seemed to be nothing else in the room. I was alone in the world with them. How long I sat there, fixing them with eyes that must have shown clear loathing, I have never known. There are moments like that, which contrive cunningly to exist outside of Time and Space, of which you remember only the quality. But I know that when I heard steps in the corridor, I was sure for an instant that it was Filippo Upcher returning. I was too overwrought to reflect that, whatever the perils of Rachel Upcher’s house might be, the intrusion of the dead Filippo was not one of them: that he would profit resolutely by the last league of those fortunate distances—if so it chanced, by the immunity of very Hell. It could not be Filippo’s hand that knocked so nervously on the door. Nor was it. I opened to Rachel Upcher. The first glance at her face, her eyes, her aimless, feverish, clutching hands, showed that the spell had at last been broken. She had taken off her black dress and was wrapped in loose, floating, waving pink. Have you ever imagined the Erinyes in pink? No other conceivable vision suggests the figure that stood before me. I remember wondering foolishly and irrelevantly why, if she could look like that, she had not done Ibsen better. But she brought me back to fact as she beckoned me out of the room.
“I am sorry—very sorry—but—I was busy with your sister when you came in, and they have given you the wrong room. I will send some one to move your things—I will show you your room. Please come—I am sorry.”
I cannot describe her voice. The words came out with difficult, unnatural haste, like blood from a wound. Between them she clutched at this or that shred of lace. But I could deal better even with frenzy than with the mask that earlier I had so little contrived to disturb. I felt relieved, disburdened. And Filippo was safe—safe. I was free to deal as I would.
I stepped back into the room. The pile of papers no longer controlled my nerves. After all, they had been but the distant reek of the monster. I went over and lifted them, then faced her.
“Is this what you mean by the wrong room?”
She must have seen at once that I had examined them; that I had sounded the whole significance of their presence there. The one on top—I had not disturbed their order—gave in clear print the date fixed for Filippo Upcher’s execution: that date now a fortnight back. And she had played to me, as if I were a gallery god, with her black dress!
“I have looked them through,” I went on; “and though I didn’t need to read those columns, I know just what they contain. You knew it all.” I paused. It would have taken, it seemed to me, the vocabulary of a major prophet to denounce her fitly. I could only leave it at that bald hint of her baseness.
She made no attempt at denial or defence. Something happened in her face—something more like dissolution than like change—as if the elements of her old mask would never reassemble. She stepped forward, still gathering the floating ribands, the loose laces, in her nervous hands. Once she turned as if listening for a sound. Then she sat down beside my fire, her head bent forward toward me; ready, it seemed, to speak. Her fingers moved constantly, pulling, knotting, smoothing the trailing streamers of her gown. The rest of her body was as still as Filippo Upcher’s own. I endured her eyes for a moment. Then I repeated my accusation. “You knew it all.”
“Yes, I knew it all.”
I had not dreamed, in spite of the papers that I clutched in full view of her, that she would confess so simply. But they apparently brought speech to her lips. She did not go on at once, and when she did, she sounded curiously as Filippo Upcher in prison had sounded. Her voice touched him only with disgust. Yet she stinted no detail, and I had to hear of Filippo’s vices: his vanities, his indiscretions, his infidelities, all the seven deadly sins against her pride committed by him daily. He may have been only a bounder, but his punishment had been fit for one heroic in sin. I did my best to keep that discrepancy in mind as she went on vulgarizing him. I am no cross-questioner, and I let her account move, without interruption, to the strange, fluttering tempo of her hands. Occasionally her voice found a vibrant note, but for the most part it was flat, impersonal as a phonograph: the voice of the actress who is not at home in the unstudied rôle. I do not think she gauged her effect; I am sure that she was given wholly to the task of describing her hideous attitude veraciously. There was no hint of appeal in her tone, as to some dim tribunal which I might represent; but she seemed, once started, to like to tell her story. It was not really a story—the patched portrait of a hatred, rather. Once or twice I opened my lips to cry out: “Why not, in Heaven’s name, a divorce rather than this?” I always shut them without asking, and before the end I understood. The two had simply hated each other too much. They could never be adequately divorced while both beheld the sun. To walk the same earth was too oppressive, too intimate a tie. It sounds incredible—even to me, now; but I believed it without difficulty at that moment. I remembered the firmness with which Filippo had declared that, herself poison, she had poisoned him. Well, there were fangs beneath her tongue.
Heaven knows—it’s the one thing I don’t know about it, to this day—if there was any deliberate attempt on Rachel Upcher’s part to give her flight a suspicious look. There were so many ways, when once you knew for a fact that Filippo had not killed her, in which you could account for the details that earlier had seemed to point to foul play. My own notion is that she fled blindly, with no light in her eyes—no ghastly glimmer of catastrophe to come. She had covered her tracks completely because she had wished to be completely lost. She didn’t wish Filippo to have even the satisfaction of knowing whether she was alive or dead. Some of her dust-throwing—the unused ticket, for example—resulted in damning evidence against Filippo. After that, coincidence labored faithfully at his undoing. No one knows, even now, whose body it was that passed for Rachel Upcher’s. All other clues were abandoned at the time for the convincing one that led to her. I have sometimes wondered why I didn’t ask her more questions: to whom she had originally given the marked underclothing, for example. It might have gone far toward identifying what the Country Club grounds had so unluckily given up. But to lead those tortured fragments of bone and flesh into another masquerade would have been too grotesque. And at that moment, in the wavering, unholy lamplight of the half-bare, half-tawdry room—the whole not unlike one of Goya’s foregrounds—justice and the public were to me equally unreal. What I realized absolutely was that so long as Rachel Upcher lived, I might not speak. Horror that she was, she had somehow contrived to be the person who must be saved. I would have dragged her by the hair to the prison gates, had there been any chance of saving Filippo—at least, I hope I should. But Filippo seemed to me at the moment so entirely lucky that to avenge him didn’t matter. I think I felt, sitting opposite that Fury in pink, something of their own emotion. Filippo was happier, tout bonnement, in another world from her; and to do anything to bring them together—to hound her into suicide, for example—would be to play him a low trick. I could have drunk to her long life as she sat there before me. It matters little to most of us what the just ghosts think; how much less must our opinion matter to them! No; Rachel Upcher, even as I counted her spots and circles, was safe from me. I didn’t want to know anything definitely incriminating about her flight, anything that would bring her within the law, or impose on me a citizen’s duties. Citizens had already bungled the situation enough. If she had prepared the trap for Filippo, might that fact be forever unknown! But I really do not believe that she had. What she had done was to profit shamelessly (a weak word!) by coincidence. I have often wondered if Rachel Upcher never wavered, never shuddered, during those months of her wicked silence. That question I even put to her then, after a fashion. “It was long,” she answered; “but I should do it all again. He was horrible.” What can you do with hatred like that? He had been to her, as she to him, actual infection. “Poison... and I am poisoned.” Filippo’s words to me would have served his wife’s turn perfectly. There was, in the conventional sense, for all her specific complaints, no “cause.” She hated him, not for what he did but for what he was. She would have done it all again. The mere irony of her action would have been too much for some women; but Rachel Upcher had no ironic sense—only a natural and Ibsen-enhanced power of living and breathing among unspeakable emotions. And she plucked at those ribands, those laces, with the delicate, hovering fingers of a ghoul.
It is all so long ago that I could not, if I would, give you the exact words in which, at length, she made all this clear. Neither my mind nor my pen took any stenographic report of that conversation. I have given such phrases as I remember. The impression is there for life, however. Besides, there is no man who could not build up for himself any amount of literature out of that one naked fact: that Rachel Upcher knew her husband’s plight, and that she lay, mute, breathless, concealed, in her lair, lest she should, by word or gesture, save him. She took the whole trial, from accusation to sentence, for a piece of sublime, unmitigated luck—a beautiful blunder of Heaven’s in her behalf. That she thought of herself as guilty, I do not believe; only as—at last!—extremely fortunate. At least, as her tale went on, I heard less and less any accent of hesitation. She knew—oh, perfectly—how little any one else would agree with her. She was willing to beg my silence in any attitude of humility I chose to demand. But Rachel Upcher would never accuse herself. I asked no posturing of her. She got my promise easily enough. Can you imagine my going hotfoot to wake Letitia with the story? No more than that could I go to wake New York with it. Rachel Upcher, calmed by my solemn promise (though, if you’ll believe it, her own recital had already greatly calmed her), left me to seek repose. I watched her fluttering, sinister figure down the corridor, then came back to my infected room. She had not touched the pile of newspapers. I spent the night reading Ibsen; and in the morning managed so that we got off early. Mrs. Wace did not come down to breakfast, and I did not see her again. Young Floyd was in the devil of a temper, but his temper served admirably to facilitate our departure. He abandoned ranch affairs entirely to get us safely on our way. Our sick horse was in perfectly good condition, and would have given us no possible excuse for lingering. Letitia, out of sight of the ranch, delivered herself of a hesitating comment.
“Do you know, Richard, I have an idea that Mrs. Wace is not really a nice woman?”
I, too, had broken Mrs. Wace’s bread, but I did not hesitate. “I think you are undoubtedly right, Letitia.”
It was the only thing I have ever, until now, been able to do to avenge Filippo Upcher. Even when I learned (I always had an arrangement by which I should learn, if it occurred) of Mrs. Floyd’s death, I could still do nothing. There was poor Evie, who never knew, and who, as I say, could not have borne it.
I shall be much blamed by many people, no doubt, for having promised Rachel Upcher what she asked. I can only say that any one else, in my place, would have done the same. They were best kept apart: I don’t know how else to put it. I shall be blamed, too, for not seizing my late, my twelfth-hour opportunity to eulogize Filippo Upcher—for not, at least, trying to explain him. There would be no point in trying to account for what happened by characterizing Filippo. Nothing could account for such hatred: it was simply a great natural fact. They combined, like chemical agents, to that monstrous result. Each was, to the other, poison. I tell the truth now because no one has ever doubted Upcher’s guilt, and it is only common fairness that he should be cleared. Why should I, for that reason, weave flatteries about him? He did not murder his wife; but that fact has not made it any easier to call him “Filippo,” which I have faithfully done since I encountered Rachel Upcher in southern California. If truth is the order of the day, let me say the other thing that for years I have not been at liberty to say: he was a frightful bounder.