“Something so terrible, so new,” he murmured drily. “The boy and the girl; so different from the boy I was, the girl your mother was, not too many years ago. The same sobs and the same soft hair against my hand and the same bobbing head — and the same words that were said a thousand years ago. ‘Don’t cry any more’ — but of course so different, so utterly different, from the boy I once was and the girl your mother once was.” And in tender irony he touched his lips to the top of her head.
“Well, what is it, did he drink?”
“No. I’ve never seen him drunk. Never yet.”
“Well, was it another woman, other women?”
“No, no. He never looked at another woman. He never looked at anyone but me.”
His caressing hand stopped, as a pendulum stops, as a clock stops, bated.
“Instead of reassuring me,” he said slowly, “you’ve made me doubly anxious. I know you too well, it’s more than just a trifle. In other words, instead of being something less serious than those things I’ve suggested, it must be something even more serious. But what can be, what is?”
She tried to escape from his arms now, in realization that her last defense was down; threshing a little, trying to turn away.
“I had someplace to go. I think I was to meet Caroline—”
He held her insistently. “Marjorie, you’re not leaving this room until you tell me why you left your husband like this.”
She crumpled in his arms, as though all worn out suddenly, with the effort she had made trying not to tell him; went limp. Her voice was low, now, when it came, suffocating with its own horror.
“Father, he’s a murderer. He killed a woman, right here in New York, the very day we were married. Less than... less than an hour before the ceremony. Father, for almost two years now I’ve been living with a man who’s — wanted by the police. Who’s a hunted criminal, in every sense of the word. I only found out the day before I came away...”
He’d drawn a single sharp breath, a breath that he never seemed to release again; no sound of its issuing from him, after the icy rustle of its taking in.
“You’re sure?” he said batedly. “You’re sure of what you’re saying?”
“He told me so himself, in the dark, in our bedroom, that last night before I left him. He forced himself to gulp down some whiskey, and then he told me. He wouldn’t have the light on, he wouldn’t let me look at him. What else could it have been but the truth?”
“And they know?”
“Not his name, no. They know it was done.”
“God of Heaven,” he said bitterly. “And if you’d had a child by him—”
“He stopped that,” she said exhaustedly, shoulders limp against him. “It nearly happened. But he stopped that. He took me to a—”
“Marjorie, don’t!” He was holding his own head now. “I can’t stand much more. Not all at one time. The little girl that I wanted so to be happy. The shining, clean little girl. It’s like seeing you crawl out of a sewer, before my eyes, and stand up all covered with filth...”
“What’s to become of me?” she moaned. “Oh, Father, please, you’ve always been so wise, you’ve always known more than I ever could; what’s to become of me?”
“I could have forgiven—” he said bleakly, “no, not forgiven; I could have tried to understand, if it had happened after: once you were already his wife. Such a tragedy does strike occasionally, and when it does there’s no foreseeing it, it’s the will of Providence. But it happened before; he’d already committed it, and he knew he had, he must have. There was blood on his hands, and yet he cold-bloodedly, criminally, bestially, went to you, and stood beside you, and took you in marriage; less than an hour afterwards.”
She sought to cover her ears with her own hands.
“Ah, no, my dear, the murder was not of this other unknown woman; the murder was of you, all your hopes and all your happiness. You’re the one he killed. You.”
“Help me. Help me.”
“No, you were right, before. I can’t help him. But I can help you. It’s still not too late. I can help you. He must pay. For his two murders. The murder of an unknown young woman, and the murder of my daughter’s whole life.”
And stifling her sobs against his breast, and stroking her throbbing head with one hand while he held her thus, with the other he reached for the telephone and drew it toward him and said with a stony, inflexible determination:
“Give me the police, please... This is Barclay Worth, Nineteen East Seventy-ninth Street. Yes, yes, that Mr. Worth. I have a confidential matter to impart. Will you send someone here to my house, please?... Nature? Homicide—”
“No!” Marshall yelled wildly. “Marjorie, stop him! Don’t you hear what he’s doing? Don’t let him! No! — NO!”
And rising full-height, he flung the entire bottle across the room at his father-in-law, trying to stun him, so that he would drop the telephone. Trying to reach him — from that faraway town to New York.
The bottle smashed, and like corrosive acid, its contents seemed to wash away, to eat away, the whole fabric of the scene before his eyes. The canvas it had been on peeled back on all sides, in a great spreading circle, into its implicit frame. And behind it was revealed another, waiting there all the while and only coming to life now, at his signal. Just as one fresco covers up another. But in this case of fresco with movement, that suddenly begins to quicken with latent motion, held arrested until now, only after its full surface-area has been revealed, and not while the exposure was still going on. A still life suddenly thawing, fluxing at every line.
“That’s enough of that, now!” a barman shouted, and came running toward him full tilt, sawdust spraying at his feet, apron flapping at his thighs.
A man jumped up from the table, and came for him from the other side. “Give you a hand here, with this,” he panted. Another man sprang up somewhere in back of him, and closed in on him from there.
He was manhandled, violently flung this way and that, in a sort of rolling casklike progress toward the door.
A man was standing there, erect in his seat, against the opposite wall, still shaken and white in the face, eyes popping, crusts of broken glass glinting on both his shoulders, like a sort of crystallized dandruff. Up the wall a space, not too high aloft over his shoulder, a dark stain was sweating downward-trickling tendrils of varying lengths. Like a huge spider crushed and oozing against the plaster.
There was a hubbub of excited voices on all sides.
“Did you see that? Barely missed him!”
“And for no reason at all. Out of a clear blue sky.”
“Go on, get him out of here, bartender. That’s the idea. There’s his hat, too.”
The two wings of a milkily opaque glass door slapped together, cutting the noise off short. There was sudden silence, and his chin struck the ground.
Just over his shoulder a dreary array of bulbs, some of them showing gaps like missing teeth, spelled out the letters “The Rocky Mountain Café.”
And prone there in the gutter, in the muck and in the rainpocked swill of the street, he still kept crying out “No! Marjorie, stop him! No! No!” and beating time to it with his hand against the ground.
2
On the intimate little dance floor at Churchill’s, a trifle below street level at Broadway and Forty-ninth, the undulating grass-skirted line of “Hawaiian” hula girls wriggled slowly off into the wings, describing imaginary loops with their limp wrists held aloft before their faces.