Читать книгу The Blue Wall - Richard Washburn Child - Страница 9

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Some men do not fall in love. I had supposed from the beginning of my interest in such things that I was one of these men. I did not doubt that all of us have an inherent tendency, perhaps based upon our coarser natures, to love this or that woman thrown in our way by a fortunate or unfortunate chance. But the traditions of our family were strong; I had been educated by all those who were near to me in earlier life to look upon marriage, not as a result of natural instinct so much as the result of a careful and diplomatic choice of an alliance. I had been taught—not in so many words, but by the accumulation of impressions received in my home and in my youthful training—that one first scrutinized a woman’s inheritance of character, wealth, and position, and as a second step fell in love with her.

This cannot be called snobbishness. It is prudence. And I followed this course until I was nearly thirty years old. If the test of its success lies in the fact that I had never had more than a temporary affection, sometimes stimulated by the curve of a bare shoulder and sometimes by the angle of a bright mind, then it had successfully kept me from the altar.

And yet you shall see that at last I reversed the order of our traditions; you shall see, too, that it resulted in one of the strangest of courtships and a tangle of mystery of which the rest of the world knows nothing, but which you have adequate proof threatens my happiness and the ghastly end of which may now be skulking within the walls of my house.

The wild weather of this night, with the howl of the wind and the rattle of dead leaves driven against the blinds, is in extraordinary contrast to the day of beautiful spring sunlight when I first set eyes upon her who was Julianna Colfax.

It is not necessary to tell you who her father was, because you have probably many times toasted your feet before the grate in the club with him.

He was a master of human interest, as grizzled as that old Scotch hound which became his constant companion after Mrs. Colfax died, and his contact with all those hosts of men and women, for whom he administered justice so faithfully for more than twenty years, had stamped on his shaven face sad but warm and sympathetic lines. All men liked him and those who knew him best loved him heartily. Under his gruffness there was a lot of sentiment and tenderness. After his reserved moments, when he was silent and cold, he would burst forth into indulgences of fine, dry humor, like an effervescent fluid which gains in sparkling vigor by remaining corked awhile. It was commonly said—and often said by Judge Graver, of the Supreme Court—that old Colfax remained in the comparative obscurity of a probate judgeship simply from an innate modesty and a belief that he had found his work in life in which he might best serve humanity without hope of personal power and glory. Gaunt, tall, stoop-shouldered, gray, walking the same path each day—home, court-house, club, neighbors, home—with a grapevine stick as thick as a fence-post in his hand—such was her father.

Exactly seven years ago the first of last June, on a spring day when I believe every bird that dared came into the city to make his song heard, I came up from downtown and dropped off a surface car before the gleaming white pillars of the new probate court building. My pocket was stuffed with a lot of documents in that Welson vs. Welson litigation, which I had just succeeded in closing.

Behind those swinging green doors which flank the big bench is the judge’s retiring-room; pushing the crack there wider, I was able to peek in, and saw at once that the old atmosphere of Judge Colfax’s study had not remained in the old dingy court-house, where the dismantlers’ picks were already breaking up the ancient mortar, but had followed the personality of the man into these new pretentious quarters. The retiring-room already gave forth an alluring odor of law books and document files, the floor already had been forced into use to bear up little piles of transcripts of evidence, tin document boxes and piles of books, open at reference pages, occupying obscure corners. The Judge’s black silk hat was in its familiar place, resting with the opening upward, on the old black walnut desk which its owner had affectionately brought with him, and which made a strange and cynical contrast with the mahogany woodwork and new rug.

“Come in,” he said, and with one of his long-fingered hands he made a gesture toward the opposite side of the room and spoke my name and that of another.

She was there! I had never seen her before. She was there. I had no thought of her ancestry, her wealth, or her position. She was there, and into my throat came something I had never felt before, into my face a suffusion of hot blood, into my lungs a long-held inhalation of breath.

Sometime you may see her. She has changed a little. But then she was twenty-two, and the simplicity of her attire seemed to be at once the propriety of nature and the infinite skill of art. She wore a black gown, without ornamentation, and a black hat of graceful form. Not a harsh or stiff fol-de-rol was about her anywhere. You will pardon me for this detail. But, oh, she was so different from the others. She was a picture there among the law books.

The most attractive thing there can be in a woman is that combination of youth, innocence, glowing health, modesty. The perfect skin, with its grapelike, dusty bloom which shows where the collar droops at the front of the neck, the even lashes, from under which the deep eyes gaze out at you half timidly, the brave, honest uplifting of a rounded chin, the undulations of fine lungs, the almost imperceptible movement of restrained vigor in a poised, delicate, graceful figure, the gentleness and tenderness of a voice which at the same time suggests refinement and decision and strength, the absence of any effort to make an impression, either in manner or dress—these are rare and beautiful attributes in an age when female children hatch out as artful women without the intervening period of girlhood. After all, the best men of us will not choose one of these modern maidens who imitate the boldness of the character and dress of the adventuress or the stage and opera favorite. It has become a tiresome feature of our modern life with the insidious faculty of corrupting the manners even of families who know better. She was so different! And in that moment I knew her superiority as a woman. I could not speak.

We exchanged no words. Yet as we looked at each other in the manner of children, the Judge, I thought, sensed a significance. When my eye sought his, I found a cloud upon his stern face, but immediately, as if he had tossed a haunting thought aside, he laughed.

“Julianna,” said he, “this is the Mr. Estabrook who is as insane as I. That is, he devotes no end of time and energy and seriousness to the game of chess. We have never yet met each other on the field of battle. Some afternoon, here in this room, however—”

She did not allow him to finish; she said hastily that she must witness the contest.

“Then at my home,” he said, beaming at me. “To-morrow will you come to dinner?”

I remember that Julianna had raised her eyes, that they were smiling, and that I received the definite, convincing impression that I was looking at a girl who never had given her love away. I tell you that one feels a truth like that by instinct, and that a woman wears not only her spotlessness, but also her purity of thought, like a faint halo. Yet at that moment I knew she was glad that I had accepted the invitation: there was a blushing eagerness in her eyes, upon her lips, in the movement of her graceful hands. For the rest of the morning I was half dizzy with the mad sense of triumph, of conquest—that strange onslaught of the emotions which gives no quarter to the disordered phalanx of reason.

I must admit that when I met Judge Colfax on the court-house steps the next afternoon to walk home with him, I had not given a thought to his daughter’s forebears or security of place in the social structure. In fact, the social structure had vanished; an individual had, at least for the time, filled its place.

I even jumped when the first sentence the Judge addressed to me began with her name.

“My daughter plays an excellent game herself,” he said, as if in explanation of her interest. “In fact, I may say, with an old man’s modesty, that there are only two persons in this city who can win from me consistently. She is one.”

“And the other, sir?” I asked as we turned our faces toward the hot stare of the late afternoon sun.

“The other,” he said, “is an automaton. I have named it the Sheik of Baalbec. But I believe he calls himself the Player of the Rolling Eye.”

It is impossible for me to say why the mere mention of the fanciful name of an automatic chessplayer should have caused me to feel a peculiar uneasiness—the sensation of apprehension. I am not susceptible ordinarily to the so-called warnings of voices from within. And yet I suppose the Judge saw a look of inquiry on my face, for he drew out his large, old-fashioned gold watch, which he carried in his trousers pocket, with his keys.

“We will stop there,” said he. “There is time. The automaton has a corner of the lower hallway in the old Natural History Museum. It’s not far out of our way, and if you will start with a problem I will give you and play with him, it will afford me an opportunity to measure you before our game this evening.”

Such were the circumstances which brought me into a mystery not yet solved, the ending of which I fear to guess. In a modern era, when it is commonly supposed that skeletons no longer hang in closets, that day after day brings commonplace occurrences or, at the best, trivial abnormalities to be explained to-morrow, that romance is dead, it is strange that Fate should have picked me, when, by custom and my own desire, I am aloof from all things turbulent, morbid, and uncanny, to play an unwilling part in so extraordinary a drama, or, possibly, a tragedy.

At any rate, that day found me face to face with the half-human personality which the Judge had named the Sheik of Baalbec, and whose eye has cast an evil cloud upon my life.

Of course I do not know whether you are familiar with the old Natural History Society and its musty exhibit. A controversy about a curator in 1873 had caused the formation of the new American Institution of Biology. A few old men continued thereafter to support the ancient Society by annual subscription, and when they died, one or two of them, acting from stubborn partizanship, left the museum tied up with trusts and legacies, preventing the sale of a valuable city property and yet not furnishing enough to keep the building in repair or dust the case containing “Beavers at Work.” Finally the old museum, once the pride of the municipality, had come down to the disgraceful necessity of letting its lower floor to a ten-cent exhibition of respectable waxworks, the principal attraction of which was the automatic chessplayer, which a year before my visit had gained suddenly a reputation for playing at times with the skill of a fiend. I faced the mechanism that afternoon for the first time, little realizing the intimacy, if I may use the word, which was to spring up between it and me.

The representation of a squatting Arab, robed in red Oriental swathes and with a chessboard fastened to its knees, sat cross-legged on a box-like structure. Upon dropping a coin into a slot in the flat top, two folding-doors in front of this box would open for a few moments, showing a glass-covered interior, which, as far as the back of the box, was filled with a tangle of wheels and pulleys, seeming to preclude the possibility that a human being could hide therein. As soon as these doors closed, a flat space in the chest of the Sheik opened, with a faint purr of machinery to expose internal organs of metal levers and gears.

The effect of this last exposure was extraordinary, and in all the time I knew the Sheik, I never got over it. The moment this cavity in his chest opened, he was an impersonal piece of mechanism; the moment it closed, however, the soul, the personality of a living being returned, and it seemed to me that the brown, wax skin of his nodding head, the black hair of his pointed beard, the red of his curved, malicious lips, the whites of his eyes, which showed when he moved with a squeak of unoiled bearings in his neck, and even the jointed fingers of his hand, with which he moved the pawns in short, mechanical jerks about the board, all belonged to a human body, containing an individual intelligence.

This was my feeling as the Judge arranged the chess problem on the board above the gilt-and-red Turkish slippers on the feet of the thing’s shapeless cotton-stuffed legs, and briefly described the point to be gained by the Sheik in the series of moves which he was to begin and the success of which I was to combat. The creature made its first move in its deliberate manner and then I stepped forward.

I ask you to believe me that, as I did so, the whirring of wheels within the contrivance stopped, and at that moment I heard a human throat inhale a long breath with a frightened gasp! It was as if the balanced glass eyes of the figure had recognized me or seen in my coming an event long expected.

For a moment I hesitated, then made my move. The figure hesitated, made another. I studied the situation before my second attempt, and then was surprised at the absurd mistakes made by the automaton, who, in his next moves, was playing in slipshod fashion, as if preoccupied. I now had the advantage, and believed that I should win. My triumph was short-lived, however; my opponent awakened to his danger, and yet perhaps my first warning of the final move came when the Judge laughed heartily, clapped me on the shoulder, and pointed toward the board. Another turn made it plain to me. I had lost.

And at the same moment the infernal Sheik lifted his head with the clicking of gears, stared at me, drew down one papier-maché eyelid in a hideous wink and rolled the other glassy eyeball in a complete orbit of the socket, and as soon as this evil, mechanical grimace had been accomplished, the head fell forward, the door in the being’s chest opened once more, showing the moving wheels, and again the creature seemed to become soulless.

“He always rolls his eye at you when he wins,” explained Judge Colfax as we went out into the sunlit street again, and he patted me on the shoulder in gentle banter.

“I believe I do not like your Sheik machine,” said I, laughing nervously. “I felt all the time as if a hidden pair of human eyes were on me—as if there was a personality behind it all.”

The Judge chuckled.

“But you forget,” said he. “Of course there is a person—some man—or woman. I have often wished to have a look at that person, Estabrook.”

As you will see, I have had cause to feel as he did on that memorable night—memorable because I first sat at table with Julianna—with Julianna, whose magnificence was not boldness, whose spirit was not immodesty, and whose gentleness did not rob her of either her beauty or vivacity.

Though it seems to me that to-night, in the depths of anxiety, I find myself in love with a new and deeper feeling, there can be no doubt that, as I looked at her across the table, I thrilled with the thought that she might one day be my wife, and felt that delicious and painful ecstasy when her deep eyes met mine and her lips smiled back at me the encouragement of a modest woman who does not guard too closely her own first interest in an exchange of ardent glances. I had then forgotten most fully the theories of my training.

I remember now that she wore a gown of soft and ample drapery and of a dark green, suggestive of the colors in the shady recesses of a forest. I was charmed by the shape and subtle motions of her white hands, the quality of the affectionate attitude she maintained toward her father, the refinement of her voice when she answered my comments or addressed the old serving-maid.

About this serving-maid I must speak. On that occasion her ample form moved about in the shifting shadows outside the brilliant glow of the flickering candles, like a noiseless ghost, hovering about a feast of the living. But I liked her, because, when she looked toward Julianna, she wore that expression of loyal affection which perhaps one never sees except upon the faces of mothers or old servants. She had been in the Judge’s family even at the time of the death of his wife years before, and she had looked as old then as she does when I see her in my own home now. The old woman’s name is Margaret Murchie. You will see that she, too, is involved in this affair.

How I noticed her at all that evening, or how I kept up an intelligent conversation with Judge Colfax, I cannot explain. I only know that I finally found myself sitting with my knees under the table with the long thin legs of the Judge, and a set of chessmen, carved exquisitely from amber and ivory, on the board before me, and that when the old man was called to the telephone and announced on his return that he must go out to the bedside of a friend, I was overjoyed that I might have some rare moments in conversation with Julianna.

I observed, however, that this prospect did not please Judge Colfax as much as it did me; there was an awkward moment in which he looked from one to the other of us with the same expression as he had worn when he had observed my interest in his daughter in our first meeting. Then, as on the former occasion, his optimistic good-nature seemed to rise again above whatever apprehensions he may have had. He smiled until all the multitude of wrinkles about his eyes were showing.

“Estabrook,” said he, “we have bad luck, eh? But I can offer a worthy substitute. Unless you find that you must go, you may discover my daughter to be as worthy an opponent as the Sheik of Baalbec.”

Of course I recognized the significance of the words, “unless you find that you must go,” and my first instinct was to offer some lame excuse and take my departure. Immediately I turned toward Julianna, but she, instead of coming forward in the manner of one ready to say good-night, idly turned the pages of a book on the old table, and then, walking across the room, stood near the chessboard with the pink glow of the droplight upon her face, and looked up at me, saying as plainly as words, “Stay.”

From the ordinary woman this would not have affected my intentions; it would have been nothing. From her it was a piece of daring. From her it seemed a sacrifice of dignity for my sake. I met her glance, and then turned politely toward the Judge, who stood in the wide door, his tall hat resting under his arm and his searching eyes looking out from under the bushy brows.

“Thank you for the suggestion,” I said.

“I will be out late,” he answered, his deep rumbling voice directed at me. “ Good-night.”

“Good-night, sir,” I said cheerfully.

Then for the first time I was alone with Julianna, and she was directing at me, as I stood before her, one of those perplexed little smiles—those rare perplexed smiles which indicate, perhaps, that for the first time in a woman’s life she does not understand her inner self, and yet is sure that some joyful thing hangs where she can reach it if she will. It is the last smile drawn from childhood.

“Shall we play?” she said.

“No,” said I.

“I am glad.”

“Then you do not like the game?”

“Yes, when I play it with father, because it interests him. And he prefers to play with me because he says that I am youth.”

“His youth, too,” I suggested.

She nodded seriously. “Yes, I think so,” she said. “We see so many old people, and balls attract me very little. Our companionship is very close even for father and daughter. I surprise myself by talking so to you, but that is it—and we have established a little kingdom of our own—a walled kingdom which no one else can enter or destroy.”

Upon hearing these words, pronounced with that soft ring of determination which gave her the one touch of imperiousness she possessed, my heart fell. It was as if she had warned me that she had dedicated herself to him.

And then suddenly the fact that she had so spoken to me, who had known her so short a time and said nothing but commonplaces to her, seemed to take on new significance. I thought it plain that she was erecting a defense against her own self and was admitting, by her denial, that her fortresses were for the first time in danger. She had had her choice in conversation and she had chosen to speak not of general matters, but of herself. She had done so with charming awkwardness, and I felt as if the world of all my happiness were resting on the bare chessboard between the round and healthy forearms that leaned there, and between her graceful hands, whose intrinsic beauty was not marred by any ring.

“One might well envy the Judge,” said I.

She looked up at me quickly.

“Will you close those long windows for me?” she asked, after a moment, pointing toward the back of the room. “At the front of the house we are level with the street; at the rear, however, the old walled garden is almost another story below us. It is damp, I think, even after a spring day as tender and sunny as this has been.”

I hastened to do her bidding.

“There is a tangle of old-fashioned flowers in our little city inclosure,” she called after me. “The Judge likes it that way—as mother used to like it. There is a balcony with an old wistaria vine just outside the window.”

“And the moon,” said I under my breath.

The pranks that fate plays—or whatever one chooses to call the strange domination of our chance happenings—are wonderful and at times seem malicious. I am certain that it brought me onto the iron-railed balcony just beyond the French windows at the beat of that second.

The old garden, though small and flanked by the ugly backs of city houses, seemed to hold within its brick inclosure a world full of white liquid moonlight. Shrubs, however, which had grown in disorder under the walls, threw dark and steady shadows across the patches of lesser vegetation. The tops of early blossoms and nodding grasses showed beyond these spaces of blackness. Suddenly, as I looked down, I heard a click like that of a gate-latch, and a second later I saw, projecting from one of the fantastic patterns of shade, a round disk of shining surface.

There are moments when the sight is puzzled to determine the character of such an object. I could not make out the nature of this bobbing, moving circle that followed along the irregular line of wall shrubbery. Then, when it was nearer, I saw in a flash that it was the top of a silk hat. I could see, too, the stooping shoulders of the man who wore it, I could see that he was proceeding cautiously as if he feared to attract attention, and at last, when he paused beneath the balcony, I could see a face with an anxious expression that turned upward toward me. I drew back behind the thick-leaved vine; for the man was Judge Colfax.

Of all persons he was the last to act as if he sought concealment in what he did, the last to be guilty or wear the appearance of guilt. Had he been a stranger, I might have assumed that he had come to make a call below stairs, but the fact that it was my host, a judge of probate, with a reputation for lifelong honor and refinement, filled me with the keenest curiosity. I gripped the old iron railing with my hands and leaned over.

The Judge waited for a moment before a door opened slowly somewhere beneath the balcony and a stream of artificial light escaped through the crack and for a brief second lay like a piece of yellow ribbon across the grass. Then he was joined by some one whose voice I recognized as that of Margaret Murchie.

“I came back,” I heard him whisper, “because I saw that you had something to say to me. Julie is observant. I couldn’t speak to you in the hall, Margaret. What is the matter? What did you indicate by the signs?”

“It’s him, sir,” she answered. “This thing we have feared has come.”

“You cannot mean it!” he exclaimed.

“How could we expect different, sir? The heart of her is like that of other healthy young girls. I could tell by the look on her face, sir. The like of it has never been there before. ’T is given to some one to have his way with her, Judge. I think it’s him.”

They were talking of me!

“He would have to be told,” said the old man. I could see the top of the silk hat shaking. “And she would have to be told!”

“It is awful, sir!” she answered, wringing her hands. “But I’d never spoil it that way for anything.”

“You forget the other!” he said sternly.

“Lost,” she argued. “The time has gone by. It was not a human, sir. I could never mention her name—beautiful thing she is!—with that other.”

“I know—I know,” whispered the old man distractedly.

“Well, then, let things run their course. God will not let harm come of it.”

“Blood,” said he.

For a moment there was no sound. The one word seemed to have decided all questions and to have called for silence.

“In case of my death—” the Judge began after a while.

Margaret Murchie uttered a little cry.

“I have left a paper where she will find it,” he finished. “I can do nothing more now. Perhaps—perhaps it will not be a crisis, after all. I think if I had the chance again, I would send him to his doom.”

With these words he raised his clenched fist and walked rapidly across the grass to the arched exit leading to the alley. The click of the latch told me that he had gone.

You may imagine my state of mind. As I endeavored in those seconds to wrest some meaning from the tangle of words I had overheard, my thoughts were tumbling over each other so fast that I had forgotten the doubtful part I had played as an eavesdropper. I had heard a reference made to me as one who had brought some new complication into the affairs of that household which heretofore I had regarded as the most spotless and quiet in the city, but which now I found had some dark and mysterious menace hanging over its peace. Was I the one, after all, to whom they had referred? They had spoken of some one else and whispered strange phrases. It was all a blank puzzle to me.

Perhaps under different circumstances my caution and dislike of all that is unusual or doubtful would have led me away from the house, planning never to return. But there is in me a certain loyalty. I do not quickly cast my lot or my reputation with that of another; when, however, I have done so, I do not quickly withdraw. Extraordinary as it may seem, I felt myself already bound to Julianna. Perhaps I already loved her desperately.

Whatever may have been the case, when I turned back into the room I looked into her gaze with an expression of solemnity which my emotions intended as an outward sign of my continued devotion.

I must have presented then a ridiculous, sentimental appearance. She laughed the moment she saw me.

“You like our balcony,” she said. And then, as if she had discovered the cause of my seriousness, she added, “also our spring moonlight.”

I nodded.

“It is an unusual spot for the middle of a metropolis,” she went on. “It is filled with a tangle from which years ago I used to imagine fairies and gnomes and Arabian marauders might step at any moment.”

“Tell me more,” said I.

“There was a little basin and fountain there when I was a child. But when it did not flow, yellow slime collected at the bottom, and when the water was turned on and trickled from one basin to another, it gave forth a mournful sound that made one think of deserted villages, and moss growing on gravestones, and courtyards where there were moonlight murders.”

“You have a keen imagination.”

“The keenest!” she exclaimed. “Why not? It has grown up with me. And the only trouble is that it causes me the greatest restlessness. My fate is like all others. I am exactly what I would not be. Sometimes I long to enjoy all the wildest of respectable adventures.”

“I should think you would keep that a secret from the Judge. He, above all, is a man of settled habits. His greatest genius has been to make romance out of the commonplace sequences of life.”

She sprang up and walked to the mantel.

“That is true,” she said. “I never show that side of me to him. He would not know what strange spirit moved me. I inherited none of it from him or my mother. I never show that side to anybody.”

“Except to me,” I said mischievously.

“Except to you,” she affirmed without a smile. “But sometimes I feel like a wolf in lamb skin.”

“At those times I take a brisk walk,” I said.

“I do, too. I walk around the Monument nearly every afternoon at five, with father’s dog. Usually at that hour he is at the club.”

“Shall I recognize you then by a shaggy, Scotch hound?” I asked.

“By all means,” she said, laughing wholesomely. “I suppose in the novels they would call that a secret meeting.”

In spite of the light manner in which she had spoken, she had lowered her voice a little when she heard a step in the hall. Margaret entered, as I have seen her so many, many times since, to collect the little coffee-cups.

The old servant, I felt without seeing, did not take her eyes away from me while she was in the room; so conscious was I of being the subject of her observation that I could find but few words to carry on the conversation. The very effect—that of an intimate dialogue interrupted—was produced in spite of my desire to avoid it, and when she left, Julianna had changed her mood. Finding, perhaps, that I was content to listen, she employed a delicate piece of strategy to place me in her father’s lounging-chair where I could watch her as she leaned back among the pillows, and in a voice, more soothing than any I had ever heard, described to me in quaint phrases the character of six imaginary persons who might among themselves make up a world, with all the traits of personality which we find in our own. From this piquant attempt, she emerged to plunge into a light discussion of heredity.

“I can see a trace of the Judge in your belief,” said I.

She admitted that he had been her teacher, that they often discussed such things. It needed no denial from Julianna, however, to know that her convictions about the power of inherited tendencies had come from her own thought. Her mind, unlike her manner, had little submissiveness, and, furthermore, she recited several cases from her own shrewd observation.

Can I attribute my entranced interest on that occasion to her brilliance? To this day I do not know. I would have been content to sit there without my pipe, without a cigarette, listening merely to the brook-like flow of her voice and looking at the play of expression upon her beautiful, sensitive face.

I could feel, I thought, the warmth of her hand still lingering in my own after I had gone down the steps, and I turned my face into the night breeze on the avenue, glad to be alive, conscious of my health, my strength, my youth and my courage, oblivious to the traditions of the Estabrooks and intoxicated with a longing for her personality the moment I had left it.

Not before the next morning did the haunting thought of something queer and strange lurking behind the Colfax home rise to cause me doubt.

“It is nonsense,” I thought. “Chance events, chance words, and my own suspicious mind have united to produce an unreality. The Judge, naturally enough, is jealous of such a daughter. Who would not be under the same circumstances? An old man would be beastly lonely in that comfortable but ancient house, even if they had removed the garden fountain with its mournful trickle. The world has no such picturesque and abnormal situations as those which have come into my mind. And Julianna has all that any one could ask. Above all the vital fact is that she is no other than she!”

Perhaps for the sake of good taste I waited two days in painful restraint before I left my office to walk around the Monument at five; certainly my delay was not because I could pretend to foresee that a ghastly mystery was waiting to seize me and drag me in with its unseen tentacles.