Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 2

Behind the Curtain-2

“Tell me,” she said, “Why are you a thief? Why do you steal?”

“'Convey, the wise it call,'” I quoted. “Accident, or fate, or destiny, I suppose,” I went on, wondering more than ever at the question, but with a fluttering hope. Perhaps the lady (in spite of Charles—such things have been!) was an amateur sociologist, a crank reformer, or something of that sort. There had been no mockery in her tone when she asked the question; instead, I thought, a kind of pity. “Fate, or destiny,” I went on, “or what you please, 'There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,'” I quoted again, in my best actor manner.

“Why,” she said, “you are a man with some air of better things about you. You quote Shakespeare as if he were an old friend. And yet, you are a thief! Tell me,” she continued, “tell me—I dare say there were many struggles against that destiny?” There was a note almost of eagerness in her voice, as if she were a leniently-inclined judge who would fain search out and put in the mouth of a condemned man some plausible plea for the exercise of clemency. “Come—were there not?—I dare say there were—circumstances of uncommon bitterness that forced you to become what I see you? And even now you hate the thing you are?”

“Why, as to that,” I said, possessed of the sudden whim to be honest with myself for once, “I am afraid that I can complain of no bitterer usage at the hands of the world than can the majority of those who reap where they have not sowed. When I think of it all, I am used to putting it to myself that my life is devoted to a kind of private warfare against the unjust conditions of a hypocritical social order.”

“Warfare!” she flouted, hard and brilliant as one of her own diamonds again. “And you could justify it, too, could you not?”

And then she asked me: “Have you ever killed a man?”

“Why, no,” said I, “but I have tried to.”

“He lived?—and you were sorry that he lived?”

“No,” I said, quite out of my depths in all this moral quibbling, “I was glad he lived.”

“And yet you hated him?”

“I would have taken his life in a rage,” I said. “He had wronged me as greatly as one man can wrong another.”

“And yet you were glad he lived? My dear thief——”

“Higgins is the name,” said I. “You may call me Higgins.”

“My dear Higgins,” she went on, “you are inconsistent. You attempt to slay a man in what I should judge to have been a not ignoble passion. It may have been an anger that did you credit. And yet you are not bold enough to face the thought of killing him. You are glib with justifications of your thievery; and perhaps that is also because you are too much of a coward to look steadily at it. You creep along a mean and despicable path in life, contentedly, it seems to me, with a dead soul. You are what you are because there is nothing positive in you for either good or evil. You are negative; you were better dead. Yes, better dead!”

Why should I have felt as if she were seeking self-justification in advance for some death she planned for me? Certainly, my life, or death, was not hers to give or take; she might give me up, and probably would. But just as certainly she had made me feel, as she passed her judgment upon me, that she was likely to turn executioner as well as judge. My doubts as to her sanity returned.

“Still,” I said, for the sake of saying something, “if I killed a man, I should not like to think about it, even if he deserved death.”

“Even if he deserved death?” she repeated, and sprang up, as if the phrase had touched her. “You make yourself the judge, you do, of when a man 'deserves' to lose his wealth. Come, what is your idea of when he deserves to die?”

Up and down the room she swept; yet still watchful. And the emotion which she had so long suppressed burst out into a poisonous lovely bloom that suffused her being with an awful beauty.

“When does he deserve to die?” she repeated. “Listen to me. I knew a woman once—no matter where—no matter when—who was sold—sold! I say—by the sordid devil she called her father, to the veriest beast that ever trod this earth. Her beauty—for she had beauty—her wit—for wit she had—became this husband's chattels before she turned her twentieth year. She would never have loved him, but she would have been faithful to him—she was faithful to him, in fact, in spite of all his drunkenness and b********y—and a***e! It was not neglect alone that she had to complain of—she had never looked for understanding or sympathy. But she had not looked for a***e. a***e, I say, and worse than a***e. Before she had been married a year she knew what it was, not only to feel the weight of a heavy hand and to hide the bruises from her maid, but to see other women brought into her very house. Pah!—hate? She hated him? Hate is not the word. She became a live coal. But she never cried out; she found strength to smile at him even when he beat her; she was proud enough for that. It pleased him, in his hellish humor, and because she was made to shine, to cage her in a country house, and there to taunt her that although she was sold to him she got little of what money may buy. And still she smiled at him, and still her hatred grew through all the weeks and months until it filled her whole being. And then—love came. For God has ordained that love may enter even Hell. Love, I say; and she loved this lover of hers with a passion that was measured only by the degree in which she hated her husband. And she would have left with him; but on the very night they would have flown together her lord and master——-”

She said the words with an indescribable spluttering sneer, sidewise from her mouth. It is so a lioness may snarl and spit before she leaps.

“Her—lord and master—found it out, and waited up to catch them; and coming upon her alone, taunted her. Taunted her, and struck her——”

“Look!” she cried, and tore the diamonds from her breast, and rent the laces, and wrenched the fastenings apart. A new red weal that seemed to throb and pulse with her respiration stood out from the whiteness of her bosom.

“Tell me,” she whispered hoarsely, “would it have been murder if she had killed that man? Which were the more courageous thing—to kill him, or to step back into her living hell? If she had killed him, would she have regretted it?”

I know not what I might have answered; but at that instant three raps sounded distinctly upon the window-shutter. I leaped to my feet. Then Charles had come!

An instant she stood as if stricken to a statue in mid-rage.

And then she cried out, and there was a furious triumph in her voice—a kind of joy that matched itself to, and blended with, the fierce and reckless beauty of her shaken jewels, possessed her.

“Charles,” she cried, “come in! Come in!”

Slowly the window opened and a man entered. He drew back in amaze at the sight of me, and turned to her with an air that was all one question.

“I thought you would never come,” she said.

He was a big blond man, and as he turned from the one to the other of us, with his helpless, inquiring face, and eyes that blinked from the outer darkness, he looked oddly like a sleepy schoolboy who has been awakened from an afternoon nap by the teacher's ruler.

“Katherine,” he finally stammered, “what is this? Who is this man?” He passed his hand across his forehead as one may do who doubts whether or not he dreams; and walked towards the table.

“Charles,” she said, “I have shot the old man.” I have seen a beef stricken on the head with a mallet look at its executioner with big eyes for an instant before the quivering in its limbs set in and it sank to the ground. So this Charles looked with wide, stupid eyes, and shivered, and dropped the great bulk of him into a chair. His head sank upon his hand. But finally he looked up, and spoke in a confused voice, as if through a mist. “Good God, Katherine, what do you mean?”

“I mean,” she said, framing the words slowly, as one speaks a lesson to a child, “I mean that I have killed the old man.”

And moving swiftly across the room she flung back the heavy red curtain at the end of it; and I saw the answer to my many questionings.

The body lay upon its back, with one arm bent, the hand across the chest, and the fingers spread wide. The face was that of a man of sixty or thereabouts, but, indeed, so deeply lined and wrinkled and pouched with evil living that the age even in life must have been hard to determine. Blood was coagulating about a bullet wound in the temple, and there were powder burns on the forehead. The shot had been fired at close range, evidently from the weapon with which I had been confronted on my entrance; and the sound had been so muffled in the curtain that it was little wonder that the servants in the rooms above, and across the house, had not heard it. He had a monstrous nose, that man upon the floor, and it must have been a red nose in life; but now it was of a bluish-white color, like the skin of an old and scrawny fowl. That, and the thin, drawn-up legs, and the big flabby paunch of the thing, robbed the sight, for me, of all the solemnity which (we are taught) exudes from the presence of death. It made me sick; and yet I cackled with sheer hysteria, too; or rather my strained nerves jarred and laughed, if not myself. It was too damned grotesque.

Herself, she did not look at it. She looked at the man called Charles; and he, with a shudder, lifted his slow gaze from the thing behind the curtain to her face.

She was the first to speak, and the terrible joy with which she had bade Charles to enter still dominated her accents.

“Don't you understand, Charles? This man,” and she indicated me with the pistol, “this man takes the blame of this. He is a thief. He came just after—just afterwards. And I held him for your coming. Don't you see? Don't you see? His presence clears us of this deed!”

“Us?” queried Charles.

“Not us?” she asked.

“My God, Katherine,” he burst forth, “why did you do this thing? And you would heap murder on murder! Why, why, why did you do it? Why splash this blood upon our love? A useless thing to do! We might have—we might have———”

He broke down and sobbed. And then: “God knows the old man never did me any harm,” he said. “And she'd accuse the thief, too!” he cried a moment later, with a kind of wondering horror.

“Listen, Charles,” she said, and moved towards him; and yet with a sidelong glance she still took heed of me. “Listen, and understand me. We must act quickly—but after it happened it was necessary that I should see you before we could act. This man came to rob; here is his pistol, and in that satchel by the window are his tools, no doubt. He may tell what wild tale he will; but who will believe him? You go as you came; I give him up—and we—we wait awhile, and then the rest of life is ours.”

I suppose that it is given to few men to hear their death plotted in their presence. But I had come to the pass by this time where it struck me as an impersonal thing. I listened; but somehow the full sense of what she said, as affecting me, did not then impinge upon my brain with waking force. I stood as if in a trance; I stood and looked on at those two contending personalities, that were concerned just now with the question of my life or death, as if I were a spectator in a theater—as if it were someone else of whom they spoke.

“Go,” she cried to Charles again, “and I will give him up.”

“Katherine,” he said, “and you would do this thing?”

“Why?” she retorted, “what is this man's life beside mine? His soul is dead! I tell you, Charles, that I have come through Hell alive to gain one ray of happiness! But go!—and leave the rest to me.”

And she grasped the bell cord and pulled it. Pulled it again and again. The sound wandered crazily through what remote corridors I know not.

She made a step towards him. He leaped to his feet with an oath, with loathing in his eyes, shrank back from her, and held out a hand as if to ward off some unclean thing.

Bewilderment lined her face. She groped to understand. And then, as the full significance of his gesture came home to her, she winced and swayed as if from a blow; and the pistol dropped from her loosened grasp to the floor.

“You—you abandon me?” she said slowly. “You desert me, then? Love, Love, think how I have loved you that I did this thing! And is what I have suffered—what I have done—still to purchase—nothing?”

She pleaded for my death; but I hope that I shall never again see on any human face the look of despair that was on hers. I pitied her!

Heavy feet on the stairway woke me from my trance. Unregarded of them both I grasped my pistol from the floor and sprang for the window. A door opened somewhere above, and a voice asked:

“You rang, Ma'am?”

From without the window I looked back into the room. She stood with outstretched hands—hands that reached upward from the pit of torment, my fancy told me—and pleaded for a little love. “In all this world is there no little ray of love for me?”—it was so my imagination rather than my hearing translated the slight movement of her lips. And while she and the man called Charles stood thus at gaze with one another, the servant spoke again from the stairway.

“You rang?” he asked.

She slowly straightened. She steadied herself. And with her eyes still fixed upon those of Charles she cried:

“Yes, yes, I rang, Jones! Your master is—dead. Your master's murdered! And there, there,” and she stabbed an accusing finger at her erstwhile lover, “there is the man who murdered him!”

And then I turned from the window and ran from that house; and as I ran I saw the Dawn, like a wild, fair woman, walk up the eastern sky with blood-stained feet.