You might as well.
Raving imbecile.
Calmly, calmly. You were quite calm three nights ago when you told her that it was intolerable, you could stand it no longer, you were being pushed into insanity, and the only way out was to kill either her or yourself or both. The words were violent enough, but you were quite calm. It didn’t faze her; nothing would, except this. What did she say? something about your being excited over nothing!
That’s one thing to consider: has she told anyone of that threat? There’s no one she would be likely to tell; anyway she doesn’t talk. You were an ass to threaten her, but she doesn’t talk. If she has mentioned it to anyone that would be fatal. Do you see what thin ice you’re skating on—if she has happened to breathe a word of it, to anyone, no matter who, your goose is cooked. Anyone, the woman at the corner delicatessen, for instance. She might, at that. Or there’s Grace. No, its not possible. There’s no danger there.
They say there are a thousand ways that things like this are traced. That’s because the people who do them are either too smart or not smart enough. To do it just right you’d have to know who the man was that was going after you. If you knew it was going to be Schwartz, for instance, or even Dick, you would know just what to do to fool him. It would be easy to be slick enough if you knew who it was going to be. Of course, it isn’t any one man, it’s the whole damn pack.…Why not think of it? You’re not going into this with your eyes shut, like a fool, ready to give up—there’ll be no sitting around crying on culverts this trip. They’d have a fine time trying to trace the revolver in case you were suspected. Over four years now it’s been in that old bag; you had even forgotten about it yourself.
“Take it along,” Larry said, when you were starting out for a day’s fishing, one morning on his ranch, the summer you went to Idaho. “You might have some fun popping at jackrabbits or a coyote.”
You tried it a few times, but never hit anything. No wonder, the trigger pulled so hard and you’d never had any practice. Not even that porcupine, the night you heard him fooling around the saddles and Larry ran over and pointed a flashlight at him. You didn’t get close enough. Larry finally finished him, and Erma pulled out a lot of quills and stuck them in her hat. You wouldn’t touch him, on account of the smell.
You chucked the revolver away and forgot all about it; discovered it, to your surprise, when you were unpacking after your return to New York. You meant to write Larry about it, but never did. For four years it has been in that old bag in the closet; certainly no one knew of it, not even Erma.
There’s no use worrying about the cartridges; there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be as good as new. Just three left in it. You turned it carefully so that a loaded chamber would be in the right place; not understanding it, you experimented to make sure and damn near shot the thing off there in your bedroom. Is there any chance of its turning in your pocket? If you pulled the trigger and it didn’t go off.…
Dick will presumably know. Of course he’ll be suspicious, and probably he’ll know. But he’ll keep his mouth shut. You’re surer of that than anything else; He won’t care, he doesn’t care, but he’ll keep his mouth shut. Is that a weakness or a strength in him, that you can say, if this happens he’ll do that, and be as sure of it as of tomorrow’s light? If he were here now—he wouldn’t be here. It would be done, and he would be gone. Where did he get that swift and unalterable conviction that the thing he is doing is the thing to do? Like an oyster, Erma says. Yes, or like the ocean the oyster lives in.
He will say, “You were a damn fool, she wasn’t worth it.” That’s all he’ll say, and nothing to anyone else, no matter what happens.
They’ll try to get you a thousand different ways if they suspect you. They’ll question everybody. They’ll ask Erma how you’ve been acting recently, what you’ve been doing, whether you’ve said anything. Erma will be all right; they wouldn’t get anything out of her even if she knew all about it, not even after she learns about this place, for of course that will all come out, there’ll be no concealing it. They may question people at the office; they’ll snoop around everywhere, they always do in a case of murder. The papers tell how witnesses and suspects are taken to the district attorney’s office, and they try to trap them.
They’ll question you. That’s bound to happen whether they suspect you or not, for this place will all come out. You’ll have to make up every single answer, you can’t tell them the truth about anything, except, of course, when did you first meet her and when did you rent the apartment and what is your name and how old are you. You’ll have to make up thousands of answers and make them all sound like the truth. They’ll try to trip you up, they’ll get you balled up somehow, but if you tried to tell them the real truth about everything it wouldn’t be any easier, for you don’t know what it is any more than they do. “You were living happily with your wife, were you not, Mr. Sidney?” Oh god yes. “And you took great pains to prevent her learning of this illicit relationship?” Yes, great pains. No, that didn’t matter. Whatever you say they’ll hitch their chairs a little closer and lick their lips and think they’re digging something out of you. The damn bloodhounds, the damn fools, as if Erma had anything to do with it. You could rent all the apartments from Washington Square to Van Cortland Park and fill them up with virgins and bawds three in a room and a lot she’d care, as long as you didn’t stay away from Thursday bridge.
They’ll want to know everywhere you went and everything you did. “Tell me, Mr. Sidney, for, of course, you realize that in an affair as serious as this, it is my duty to exhaust every source of information, please tell me what you were doing on the evening of November twenty-first?” He’ll talk friendly and smile at you, the way Dick smiles when he’s at a meeting and putting something over. Or he’ll be the other kind, he’ll come up close to you and stare in your face and yell, “Where were you between ten and twelve Thursday night?”
Dare you ask Jane to do that? “I was at my sister’s house on Tenth Street; I spent the entire evening with her.” By god, that would fix them. “She was alone, and I spent the entire evening with her.” Probably there are people there; maybe not though; Victor’s out of town. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to go out and telephone her now, at the drug store, and then come back. She would do it if she could. Of course you’d have to give her a reason. No you wouldn’t either; she’d do it if you asked her to. If you did that it would be grand to hear them question Jane. Yes, she’d say, or no—and they might as well try to confuse an oak tree.
As a matter of fact, it might work. You didn’t show any signs of anything at the office; you didn’t see Dick after all; you stayed a little later than usual with those fellows from Chicago. If only you had taken them to dinner—but that doesn’t matter, you ate at your usual table at the club, everybody saw you, and Hendricks came over and asked you to play poker. What did you say to him? If only you had thought of it before and told him you were going to spend the evening with your sister! That would cinch it. What did you tell him? He probably won’t remember anyway. You didn’t get a taxi at the door; you walked off down the avenue a few blocks, then took a taxi home to get the revolver.
Two or three of the servants saw you, but that’s all right, it was still early then, not yet nine o’clock. But you’ve got to remember that they’ll ask about every little thing. All right, after dinner you took a little walk, then you went home, then you went to see your sister. You were only at home a minute or two, just long enough to get the revolver out of the drawer where you had locked it the night before, and the servants saw you enter and leave. “What did you go home for?” What did you go home for. The whole thing may hang on that, that shows how ticklish it is. You went home to change your clothes, but then you didn’t change them. You went home to stay and went out again because Jane phoned you—but there wasn’t any phone call. You went home to get something for Jane, something you wanted to take to her—any little thing, like a book for instance. “What was the name of the book?” You’ll have to talk it all over very carefully with Jane, and get every point decided so you won’t contradict each other.
Then you walked away from the house. It will seem odd you didn’t have the doorman get a taxi if you were in such a hurry to get downtown. The doorman saw you walk away. It’s a good thing you happened to turn south. Well you weren’t necessarily in a hurry. You just walked a few blocks and then picked up a taxi on the avenue.
It is vital to remember exactly where you actually did go and whether anyone saw you. You didn’t walk on Park Avenue very far; you turned at one of the side streets somewhere in the Forties, and went over to Broadway where you turned uptown again. You stayed on Broadway quite a distance, maybe Seventieth Street, then went to Central Park West, and turned west again on Eighty-fifth.
Then you were here, in front of the house, across the street. You couldn’t come in, you couldn’t make up your mind to it. You felt that if you once came in, that would settle it. The next thing you knew you were on Riverside Drive, walking fast to keep warm, and talking aloud to yourself so that passers-by turned to look at you. That frightened you, but you kept on walking fast, though you stopped talking. You got warm and unbuttoned your overcoat, but the weight of the revolver in the pocket made it hang open so you fastened it up again. Somewhere you got over onto Columbus Avenue, and then straight back here and to the door and in.
Almost certainly no one saw you. From the time you left Park Avenue you haven’t spoken to a soul. That’s a chance you have to take, you don’t pretend there isn’t any risk. How are you going to get out? You’ll just have to stay until you’re sure no one heard the shot, and then come downstairs and beat it. Go to Jane’s house. You mustn’t take a taxi; you’ll have to use the subway. That’s what Gordon said at the club not long ago, talking about the Farwell case, nobody ever pays any attention to a revolver shot nowadays, they always think it’s a backfire from a car. Anyway, you wrap your scarf around it and they won’t even hear it. That’s what that woman did who shot that dentist in his office with people outside in the hall not thirty feet away. Of course they caught her, but not for a long time. They wouldn’t have got her at all if she’d kept her nerve.
What if they do hear it and come in before you can get away? There’s no fire escape, there’s no other stairs. You can go to the roof. You can’t take care of everything; you have to leave something to luck and act when the time comes.
If you do get away, if you really do get clean away, get to Jane’s house and later go home, it’s even possible that you’ll never be connected with this place at all. Nobody around here knows you except as Mr. Lewis. They don’t know a thing about you, who you are or where you work or anything else. You’ve always been careful about that. Why couldn’t Mr. Lewis just disappear and let them hunt their heads off? They’ll hunt all right, but it’s quite possible they’ll never connect it up. There’s nothing with your name on it anywhere here, no photographs, no letters—
There’s that goddam statue!
William the Conqueror. The masterful man, your true character. The artist revealing what everyone else is too blind to see. Erma would enjoy this. Trapped by that piece of junk! Oh no, not on your life. You can take a hammer and knock it to pieces. Knock off the nose and ears and smash the face, smash the whole thing. You should have done it long ago. You should have done it the evening you went home and found Erma decorating it.
They’ll hunt, they’ll look everywhere.
There’s a lot of numbers on the back of that phone book; they’ll jump on that: Chelsea four three four three. Maybe your own too; you’ve never noticed. That one would be enough—straight to Jane! Tear off the cover and burn it; or erase that number. Then they examine the spot with a microscope, and you might as well have left your card. All right, take the book away; take it home and hide it somewhere.
Would it be possible, even remotely possible, to get away with this? It’s a temptation, but you want to be careful. There are lots of people around here that know you by sight as Mr. Lewis. Mrs. Jordan and the newsdealer and the two art students—lots of them. And Grace! If one of them ever happened to see you anywhere, at a theatre, for instance, it would be all up. You could go away somewhere; you could go out to Larry’s ranch and stay a long time and maybe grow a moustache, or even a beard. But that would finish you if they ever did find out. Better just to stay here and go on as usual and keep out of it and if someone does happen to see you, it wouldn’t be so hard to explain; naturally you would keep quiet, a man of your position wouldn’t get mixed up publicly with such a thing if he could help it.
But it would be bad, mighty dangerous. Whereas it would be all in your favor if, as soon as it comes out in the papers you go to the district attorney and tell him all about it and request him to keep your name out of it, if possible. You’ve only met him once or twice and he won’t care a hang about you, but Dick knows him well and you could get Dick to go with you. But probably it would get to the papers somehow, there’d be a leak somewhere and how they’d eat it up. A regular hell of a mess. The family, Erma, the fellows at the club, everybody at the office, everybody everywhere—you might have to resign your job. It might be too much for you. Erma would stick if only because she’d enjoy telling them to go soak their head. That would be fat too. “Mrs. Sidney, Loyal to Husband in Spite of Grisly Love Nest, Tells World to Soak Its Head.” Oh it would be a mess, but it would probably be the safest way. If Erma held out you might be able to keep your job.
If she didn’t you might as well kill yourself too. Ah, that’s what you’re afraid to think about! Looking at it honestly, though, that’s what it amounts to. Your job gone, the whole ugly mess opened up, Erma and Dick cut loose, you’d be sorry you hadn’t. It wouldn’t be too late, you could do that any time, if only you could trust yourself. This would be the time, this way it would be simple and complete. Only you wouldn’t like to do it here; you wouldn’t like to be found lying in the same room with her, beside her; maybe even you would fall so you would be touching her. Not ever to touch her again, not ever to have her touch you, how good, how sweet it would be to say that and know it was true! Not to lie against her, dead, either, nor near her, nor anywhere within reach of her. In another room you could do it if you could do it at all. There isn’t anything so terrible about it. It might be simple and easy—just put the barrel against your temple or in your mouth pointing upwards and pull the trigger. Maybe that’s why you’ve avoided thinking about it, because it would be simple and easy. Then no one would ask you any questions, no one would bother you, there’d be no decisions to make, you wouldn’t have to try to figure it all out and bellyache around, you’d be afraid of nothing.
You’ve thought of it before, several times, but not like this. Once years ago when you lost Jane—what a funny way to put it.
What are you going to do with the gun? If you could just leave it there, put it down and leave it there—but of course you can’t. They have a number on them somewhere, it would be traced. It will be a problem to get rid of it. You wouldn’t dare take it home and put it back in the bag, that would be stupid. If only you had time, you could go on a ferryboat and throw it in the river. Or you could throw it in from a pier. But you want to get to Jane’s house as quick as you can, and anyway, someone might see you. It’s incredible how difficult it is to do a simple thing like that without someone seeing you. You might hide it somewhere in Jane’s house; there’s no danger of their searching there, no matter what happens. Why couldn’t you wrap it in a newspaper and leave it on the subway train? Good lord no. You’ve got to decide it now, definitely. Throw it in the river. When you get off the subway at Fourteenth Street go straight to a pier and throw it in. It won’t take more than ten minutes.
Why don’t people do that with revolvers? It would be pretty hard to convict a man of shooting someone if you couldn’t show he’d ever had a gun or what he did with it or anything about it. Probably because they lose their heads.
What if they arrest you, how are you going to act? The thing to do is send for a lawyer and not say anything till he comes, not a single word, no matter how harmless it seems. Send for Dick and tell him to bring a lawyer, ask him to bring Stetson, he’s the best of that bunch. What will you tell Stetson? You won’t dare tell him anything; all about the last two years, yes, but not that there’s been any difficulty. Shall you tell him about Grace? What if you don’t, and he finds out and questions her? How much does she know? Then he’ll suspect everything you tell him. That’s a fine how-do-you-do, you’ve got to be as careful what you say to your own lawyer as if he were after you too. For the Dick part of it, you’ll have to leave it to Dick; you’ll have to see Dick alone first and put it up to him. Maybe it would be best to tell Stetson everything, the whole works. Impossible. You couldn’t do it. Even if you desperately tried there’d be no words for it, you’d sound like a crazy man. You can see Stetson sitting there as if he were doing the chair a favor, his glasses a little crooked, his nostrils wriggling nervously, the corner of a pale blue handkerchief peeping just so from his breast pocket—“Yes. Yes. Yes. What did you do that for?”
You’ve never shot any kind of firearm to amount to anything, except that little twenty-two rifle you used to hunt rabbits with. It was never much fun; you couldn’t bear to get your hands bloody. Red Adams used to string them on his belt by the hind legs, so that his overalls had a ring of sticky blood around the knees. Jane would always help you skin them and hang them up on the back porch to freeze. She’s never been squeamish about anything. If only there’s nobody there with her! If once you get it over, and get out, and get to her house and find her there sitting in the back room reading, as she often is, you’ll be safe. What about the maid? Leave it to her, she’ll attend to it somehow. She’ll talk of it as calmly as if you had come to ask her to help you skin rabbits.
Suicide’s a funny thing. You’re afraid to think of it, but once you do think of it there’s nothing to be afraid of. It would be different if you thought of yourself as lying there dead and still had to be there, a part of you still alive, and look at yourself, with blood on you, and realize you were no longer breathing and that you would never again walk or talk or put on your clothes or take a drink of water or in any way move. That would be horrible. If it were like that nobody could stand it; you’d have to pretend you were never going to die, and everybody would really begin to believe it instead of just playing at it, the way they do now. As it is, they lie about it, but it isn’t hard to see they’re lying, and they know it too. The way it works, there’s nothing to be afraid of. You stand there in the bedroom, in the middle of the room, and put the barrel in your mouth and point it up towards the top of your head, and there’s nothing wrong with you; you can do whatever you damn please, you can take it out again and go and eat your supper, or you can just stand there and watch yourself and see how you feel, you can do anything you want to. Or you can pull the trigger, just simply press your finger down, that’s all, finish. Ha, nothing matters then! Right from that instant, which never really comes, because as far as you are concerned it’s over before it begins. You could even hit against the bed as you fell, and bust your nose or knock your teeth out, and you’d never know it. There’s nothing in that to be scared of; you pass, instantly, from complete freedom to complete oblivion. It’s not so easy to think of yourself lying there afterwards, but it isn’t easy to think of her lying there either, or anyone else.
You haven’t seen many dead people: your father and mother and two or three others. There wasn’t much to it, but then they were all dressed up and fixed in the coffin and naturally you’d expect to see a dead body in a coffin, it would shock you more if you saw a live one. You’ve never seen a dead person just lying anywhere, bent or twisted, with ordinary clothes on, bruised or with a wound, maybe with blood on her. You’ve never seen anyone die, even peacefully in bed. Except the man who fainted and was carried out one day in the grandstand at the ball park; but that was nothing, you didn’t know until you saw it in the paper, the next morning, that he had died of heart failure. When Larry used to tell about the war, you would feel a little sick and wonder how any man could live through it and not go insane.
That’s what you were afraid of yourself last summer when you tried to break it off and went up to Maine alone. Especially the night you sat on the boat by the edge of the lake—that was another time you thought of suicide. When you came back Dick said you looked like a dope fiend; Erma thought you ought to go abroad for a year and Jane wanted you to get psychoanalyzed. Yes, or do morning exercises or take an aspirin, you said; and came here the first night and found her sewing on buttons and drinking lemonade. It was a hot night and she was sitting there with both windows wide open and nothing on but that purple negligee she bought at Macy’s, with feathers on it. She looked up and said, “Hello, you should have sent me a telegram, I might not have been home.” That hard, hateful assurance, like a slow disease that knows there’s no medicine.
She’ll be sitting in the same chair, now, when you go in. She’ll look up the same way, nothing will ever make her look any different. You will close the door behind you, and deliberately take the revolver from your pocket and take off your scarf and wrap around it. What will she do? She’ll sit and watch you. Will she be startled or frightened; will she cry out or plead with you or otherwise finally admit your existence as a force, needing to be considered and allowed for? She won’t believe in it. At the end you cannot taunt her, you cannot make her tremble, you cannot see the health of fear in her eyes. Useless to fling any more words into that ditch.
She might, though, she might scream. You don’t know what’s in your face; you are doing something she thinks is not in you, and if your face gives it away she might scream and shout for help. Ah, if she does! You’d like to hear that once. But then you might fail. It would be better to show nothing, just go in as usual and say you’re tired, cross over with your coat still on and say it’s too warm, you want to open the window a little. Then, when you’re back of her chair where she can’t see you, you can turn suddenly and shoot her from behind, quite close. But don’t forget the scarf, and don’t forget to pull the shade down if it happens to be up. You ought to cross the windows first anyway, to make sure they’re closed tight and the shades are down. She’ll never know what happened. She’ll just fall over in her chair, crumple up, slide down onto the floor maybe.…
Don’t do that, you fool! God oh god! Don’t do that! You pitiful sneaking coward, she’s right, she knows you, she’s safe.
You’ve figured it all out, haven’t you? You’re insane well enough. Calm and cool and clever you calculate your chances. Battling Bill. Oh no, you won’t lose your head; you’re going to handle this thing right. You’re going to bust statues and throw the revolver in the river, and fix an alibi by going to Jane’s house, and ring the bell, and give the maid your coat and hat—really you’re magnificent, it’s a masterpiece. You’re going to Idaho and grow a beard so no one will ever know who Mr. Lewis is. You’re going to get Richard M. Carr to be an accomplice to a murder, just as a little personal favor. Come, come, come fool, can’t you do better than that? These are all pretty good, but come now, you must have something really fine, of the very best, artfully concealed. Oh yes, you’re going to kill yourself. First you’re going to kill yourself and then you’re going to Jane’s house and send for a lawyer and grow a beard, and live happily forever after.
Leave here. Go back home. Go back home and go to bed. Like last night, when Erma came and knocked at your door, for the first time in months. If she does it again, kill her. Why not kill everybody? Erma and Dick and Larry and Victor and—
Easy, easy. Do you know what you were about to say?
Anyway, you might as well get out of here. You almost pushed yourself into it, but a miss is as good as a mile. And there’s no use starting on a new lie, you know you won’t leave without seeing her, if only to make sure she’s there and see how easy it would have been. Tell it to her all over again; it really does make her a little bit uncomfortable, though she pretends not to notice it. After all she’s not made of iron. No; rubber, smelly like rubber; not the same smell, but makes you think of it. She ought to use more perfume or bathe oftener or something—though the lord knows she spends enough time splashing around in the bathroom.
All right. Go on up. Go on and get it over with and go home and go to bed.
You might have known you’d knock that damn lamp off.