Katharine Fullerton Gerould

“ 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. ”

“ THE CASE OF PARAMORE For the sake of moral values I ought to wish, I suppose, that Paramore had been a more conspicuous figure. There is moral significance in the true tale of Paramore—the tale which has been left to me in trust by Hoyting. I cursed Hoyting when he did it; for Paramore’s reputation was nothing to me, and what Paramore knew or didn’t know was in my eyes unspeakably unimportant. I wish it clearly understood, you see, that if Paramore deliberately confused exogamy and endogamy in the Australian bush, it doesn’t in the least matter to me. Paramore is only a symbol. ”

“ Her fair hair had lost what must once have been a golden lustre, but it was carefully, elaborately arranged, waved, curled, braided. It was as fashionable as her clothes. The white mask of powder left clear the contour of the fine, thin nose but cloaked the subtler modellings of the face. The blue eyes, idle yet intent, looked at him from behind it; below them it was rent, once, by the scarlet stab of the mouth. Peter remembered vaguely having heard that the tropical sun necessitated such protection. It was the northern dimness and drizzle that turned make-up into a moral question. ”

“ But Mary Bradford was great. She was also infinitely wronged by Fate. It is all wanton, wanton—to the very last: all, that is, except her own part, which was sublimely reasoned.
Saxe slept, I say; and at dawn woke to his problem. The intelligence that works for us while we sleep waked him into the conviction that he must, at any cost, buy the woman. He said that, as he strode over to the chief’s hut, he was thinking only of what price he ought to put on the child that would be such a fantastic mixture of breeds. He did not want the woman, but he felt that the purchase was inevitable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And, even if it were, no minor corroborations drifting in after many years could ever reconstitute for Paramore such a fame as he once lost. When I think of the matter at all, it is, curiously enough, to echo Hoyting’s wish that Madame Pothier would die. The best thing Paramore’s restless ghost can hope for, it seems to me, is that she may never know the very little the public knows about him. Sometimes that silence seems to me more desirable for him than rehabilitation itself. But then, I have never been interested in anthropology. ”

“ You can imagine that I was delighted when I heard from Lithway, some years after my own encounter with the savage on the staircase, that he had decided to pull out and go to Europe. He had the most fantastic reasons for doing it—this time he wrote me fully. It seems he had become convinced that his apparition was displeased with him—didn’t like the look in her eyes, found it critical. As he wasn’t doing anything in particular except live like a hermit at Braythe, the only thing he could think of to propitiate her was to leave. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Paramore had noticed her fine eyes, I believe—oh, in all honor and loyalty. There were lots of ways in which he wasn’t a rotter. He was merely the finest liar in the world—and a bit of a Puritan to boot.
“Is there any combination life hasn’t exhausted, I wonder?” Hoyting walked to the window, his hands in his pockets, looking down at the eternal race of the taxicabs below. “Think of what may be going by in any one of those taxis. And Paramore was a bit of a Puritan, for all his years of fake anthropology.” ”

“ He married, at about thirty, the very worldly daughter of a public-spirited American family. There wasn’t anything for two centuries, from witch-burning to slave-rescuing, the Hewells hadn’t had their fingers in. The Hewell spinsters have always headed intense and short-lived leagues for the suppression of unsuspected evils or the maintenance of out-dated ideals. The Hewell men are bred to reform as the English race-horse is bred to the turf. Their marriages are apt to be bloodlessly tragic.
Agatha Hewell—that is, Agatha Dorrien—was a special case, very worldly, as I’ve said. ”

“ We just had to lift him through the agony and weakness as best we could until the coma should set in. There is nothing romantic about coast fever. It attacks you in the most sordid ways—deprives you first of dignity and then of life. Yet poor Paramore’s death-bed had a kind of nobility; perhaps because Madame Pothier was there. ”

“ I have not been to Braythe since poor Lithway was buried.
I took the hunting-trip that Lithway had been so violently and inexplicably opposed to. I think I was rather a fool to do it, for I ought to have realized, after Lithway’s death, the secret of the house, its absolutely unique specialty. But such is the peacock heart of man that I still, for myself, trusted in “common sense”—in my personal immunity, at least, from every supernatural law. ”

“ Paramore had one passion in life—one double-distilled, quintessentially pure passion—and that passion was anthropology. There never was a stiffer, straighter, more Puritanical devotion to an idea than his. Get that into your head first, if you want to understand.”
I could be forgiven, it strikes me, for being sceptical, in the light of that neat précis I had compiled from the newspapers. “Oh, come, Hoyting,” I said, “science doesn’t recruit from liars—not even when they’ve got Paramore’s deuced cheek. You are upset.” ”

“ For never doubt that those souls who live least by the flesh feel themselves most defiled by its defilement. No, you have only to explore Mary Bradford’s tragedy for yourself. It will take you three years, perhaps, as it has taken me, to penetrate the last recesses. And if you are tempted for a moment to think of her as mad, or exaltée, reflect on how completely she understood Saxe. ”

“ Hoyting’s eyes were still closed as he answered. “That was Paramore trying to wash himself white again. He was discredited, deservedly. He had lied, deliberately and rather long-windedly. No loophole anywhere for excuse. Paramore himself was the last man to find any excuse for it. He never carried a devil’s advocate about with him. Doubtless, at home, his own conscience had returned to him, in place of the changeling conscience that had dwelt with him in the wilderness. He knew his reputation was dead and buried with a stake through its heart. ”

“ Some cynic may put in his belittling word to the effect that the New Englander has always counted physical suffering less than spiritual discomfort. The mental torture was not lacking in Mary Bradford’s case. For over a year, the temptation to suicide must have been like a terrible thirst, death—any death—luring her like a rippling spring. I told Saxe one night in mid-Atlantic, to comfort him, that she would of course have killed herself if she saw no chance of escape. ”

“ Nature implants something in every man that kills him in the end. Paramore wanted recognition from a very small, almost undiscernible, group of people whom neither you nor I nor any one else gives a damn for—a few old gentlemen in frock coats and gold eye-glasses who raise their poor, thin old eyebrows over the sins of Paris, but feel a tremulous pleasure in the nastiness of Melanesia. Why did he? Just because he believed they are a sacred sect. He honestly believed that anthropology was important. ”

“ If ever a woman wasn’t meant for the tropics—” His voice trailed off for a little, then boomed out again, softly resonant, like a ship’s gong going intermittently somewhere beyond in the offing. “I admired her more than a little. But I saw that Dorrien had no show. Women are apt to shout with the majority. How is a husband going to be a majority, if he takes a line of his own? Oh, Dorrien was down and out from the start. ”

“ It was incredible that any man should have liked the creature I had seen; and I could account for Lithway’s long and sentimental relation with the apparition only by supposing that he had never seen her, as I had, quite off her guard. But if, according to his hint of the night before, he had come to confound the ghost with the real woman—what sort of marriage was that? I asked myself. The ghost was a bad lot, straight through. ”

“ In September, Saxe, following this clue, which seemed to bear some real relation to the events of the year before, travelled solemnly, accompanied by a few natives only, into the heart of that hinterland which stood, to all the coast above and below the Mission, for treachery, mystery, and death. In October, he reached the village of the chief in question—a sun-smitten kraal, caught between high blue mountains and the nasty bit of jungle that separated them from one of the big waterways of Africa. ”

“ What, after all, was there to tell about Paramore except that he had lied, and that in the end he had been discredited as lavishly as for a time he had been believed? For any one else I might have made a sprightly little story out of the elliptical narrative of the newspapers; but no one that I know of has ever tried to be a raconteur for Hoyting. He has use only for the raw material; art disgusts him. ”

“ It was a queer home to want to stick to, I thought privately, especially as the ghost was obviously local. He had never seen an apparition except at Braythe—nor had I, nor had Wender. I worried about leaving him there, for the one danger I apprehended was the danger of overwrought nerves; but Lithway refused to budge, and you can’t coerce a sane and able-bodied man with a private fortune. ”

“ Except Jocasta, I positively cannot think of one; and Jocasta never lived. All of us have dreams of a market where we could sell our old lamps for new. How must not Mary Bradford have longed to change her humanities against mere foothold on the soil of America or Europe! But my preface is too long.
Now and then there is a story where all things work together for evil to the people involved; and these stories have, even for their protagonists, a horrible fascination. The story of Saxe and Mary Bradford is of this nature: a case, as it were, of double chicane. ”

“ She would have shot the nigger. Before, I suppose, she had lived with ideas only; even he must have been chiefly an idea, though a tremendous one. The daily contact with all sorts of unsuspected facts, the hopeless crudeness of the hinterlands most of us never get into, had worked on her. There may be something subtle in the tropics—people talk as if there were. I should say they were no more subtle than the slums. The body demands a hundred things, and it becomes a matter of the utmost moment whether you get them for it or not.{212} You can’t achieve subtlety until the body is lulled. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Well, even if Paramore had told the truth, he wouldn’t have had any fame that you’d notice. It was just a pathetic belief in the sanctity of those few old gentlemen who potter round among unclean visions of primitive man. They can’t, in the nature of the case, be very numerous. If you want fame, you go for the crowd. He could have done a little fancy exploring if he’d wanted fame. No! Paramore had the superstition. ”

“ Lithway. In spite of her calm and sweetness, and the perfect working of the household mechanism—no flurry, no fright, no delays or hitches—I thought her, still, a young fool. Any woman, of any age, was a fool if she had not seen Lithway withering under her very eyes.
It was a dreary day during which we waited for{163} the New York physician; one of those days when sunlight seems drearier than mist—a monotonous and hostile glare. I tried reading Lithway’s books, but the mere fact that they were his got on my nerves. ”

“ Only a man who had grasped Mary Bradford’s idea—it has taken me three years to do that, entirely—could have believed that she would let Saxe go out baffled from the hut in which she deliberately chose to stay with her half-drunk, wholly vile captor. Women who could have done all the rest, would have turned at Saxe’s offer of a kindly shot through the heart. ”

“ I may have looked a little bored, for Hoyting suddenly interrupted his narrative. “I’m telling you all this,” he said, “because it’s essential that you should know everything you can know about it. The thing’s going to be in your hands, and the more information{299} you have the better. I’m not dragging you through this biography because I think it’s beautiful. I can see you loathe it all. Well ... if only you stay-at-home people would realize how much luck counts! You don’t dream of the mad dance of incalculable forces. What you really hate Paramore for is his having luck against him.” ”