THE eleven-o’clock is a good train. It makes the run to Collegeville in under two hours. I sat in the smoking car, watched the miles pour past the window, and tried to figure out something that had happened the night before.
After I’d got Parsons’ letter I’d asked my employers if I could have leave of absence for the ninth. They gave it without any questions. Then the idea came to me that since I wouldn’t have to work on the ninth, the evening of the eighth would be a good time for a party. So I asked Jerry and Selena and Grace if they wanted to go out on a binge. I owed Grace something, in an indirect way, and I wanted to show Jerry that there were no hard feelings and be the first to celebrate his and Selena’s setting a date for their marriage. All three of them liked the idea, and we arranged to meet at the apartment at seven.
While dressing, Jerry and I had one or two cocktails just to make sure there was no poison in them. After a while Grace came in, wearing a dull-red dress with swirling skirts and gold sandals. She had her hair done a new way and looked entrancing. As soon as I saw her I knew she’d firmly decided to look like nobody’s mother. Competition with Selena may have been in her mind too; and if it was, she’d struck just the right note to get away with it. They were so utterly different that no one would think of comparing them.
I was suddenly delighted with her and glad to see her and felt very unfilial indeed. When I kissed her I noticed that she had on a new perfume.
“Well, darling,” I said. “You’re enough to start an Oedipus complex!”
She laughed and remarked, “Fred thinks you’re mean not to have invited him.”
“This is his night for the club, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but tonight he didn’t want to go especially.”
“I bet that was after he saw you in this outfit.”
She went over to the tray and picked up a cocktail, tossing me an impudent grin over her shoulder. “What an imagination you have!”
I told her it didn’t take any imagination, and we had a quick cocktail together. It was Jerry’s week in the kitchen and he was out there fixing a few hors d’oeuvres. What with my previous drinks and Grace looking so attractive and the conviction that in throwing this party I was doing something really nice for a change I began to feel extremely good.
“By the way,” I asked her, “what’s that perfume you’re wearing? I like it.”
“Gracious but you’re gallant tonight, my pet. It’s called Adieu Sagesse.”
“You ought to give a bottle to Selena.”
She stuck out the tip of her tongue and said “Miaouw” at me and we both laughed.
Jerry came with a plate of stuff that he’d made to go with the cocktails, and told Grace she looked stunning. We all had another drink. Then he told her that he and Selena were to be married the twelfth of January.
Grace shook her head at him in admiration. “As a child, Jeremiah, I remember you were the shyest little boy I ever knew. And here you are, positively bursting into matrimony. Are you going to marry her in the ordinary way or come riding up on a big white horse and sweep her into your arms and dash off?”
He blushed. “Grace, it’s not so bad as that, surely.”
“No,” she said, “I know it. I’m really delighted, of course. Selena’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen, and you’re lucky. And so is she.”
He blushed again. “Please. Spare my blushes.”
“You do it so nicely.”
He laughed and said, “You’re hopeless, Grace.”
“Not entirely, my lamb. But pretty old to change. You must allow an old woman her peculiarities.” Then her manner changed, and she stopped Smiling. “I’m just foolish enough to rush in where angels would fear to tread, Jerry. Have you told your father?”
He nodded. “Yes. I called him up last night.”
“And what did he say?”
Jerry looked a little uncomfortable. “He said he’d talk to us both about it when we go out there this weekend.”
Grace laughed. “The famous Lister reticence extending to the telephone, I see. Well, as for that, don’t worry. Just let Selena handle him.”
The doorbell rang, and she came in. A pleased smile came over Grace’s face, and I suspected she was complimenting herself on Selena’s dress. And well she might; it was a masterpiece. Silver green the color of aspen leaves and cut so simply and severely as to be very nearly ostentatious. Jerry’s heart went into his eyes, and I could not blame him.
After the greetings were over I proposed a toast to the wedding and the three of us drank it. Selena, as usual, drank nothing, and watched the rest of us with a faint smile as we clinked our glasses together. But it was all very gay—gayer than any time I spent with Selena either before or afterward.
She was wearing a ring, a square-cut emerald with a deep, burning green heart to it that was the sort of thing you see displayed in Tiffany’s window all by itself. We exclaimed over it.
“Goodness, darling,” said Grace. “If any of my men had ever offered me an engagement ring like that, I’d have insisted on marrying him right then and there for fear he might escape me.”
Selena looked pleased. “Jerry must have been extravagant,” she said.
“Yes,” he told her, “and gosh how I loved it!”
But I stared at the emerald without being able to think of a word to say. It struck a note of finality that took some of the bloom off the evening for me.
After one more cocktail apiece we sallied forth to do the town. Walking toward the avenue and a taxi, Selena and I dropped a few steps behind Grace and Jerry. After a few yards she turned to me and said, without preamble:
“You are unhappy about Jerry and me.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Please, Bark. Tell me the truth.”
“Well, then, I think you’re rushing things a little.”
“You mean that we ought not to be married so soon?”
“Exactly.”
“Jerry said some people might think that. But why do they?”
I turned to look at her in the dusk of the street. Perhaps she was making fun of me. But apparently she was serious. Her lips were level and her eyes direct.
“Well,” I told her, “it’s customary to wait a little longer.”
She was insistent. “Yes. I know that. But why?”
I referred her to Hamlet, Act I, but she did not know, or pretended she didn’t, what I meant. In desperation I explained that the popular view was that it took more than a month or two to forget a first husband and turn to a second love.
“Oh,” she said. “I wondered. Sometimes it is hard to understand just what is behind your ideas.”
It was an extraordinary remark, and I did not know how to take it. Before I could ask her, she went on. “But I think it is all right for Jerry and me to be married, even so soon. You see, I never loved LeNormand.”
This was getting beyond me. I told her that whatever she and Jerry did was their affair.
“Yes,” she said, “but I want you to understand it. You are Jerry’s best friend.”
“And as such,” I told her, “the only thing I want is to see him happy.”
Mercifully a cab drew up at the curb beside us before this insane conversation could continue. I was angry at Selena for simply tramping into the middle of a complicated situation and talking bluntly about it. I resented the fact that she had put me so thoroughly on the defensive, and concluded finally that the less I had to do with her direct interrogations, the better the evening would go for me.
It was after a good dinner over which we sat until past ten o’clock that the incredible part of the performance took place. The three of us, at least, had drunk enough not to want to end the evening there and then. It was too late for the theater, and we decided that the thing to do was to dance. After a lot of argument between Grace and me we took a cab to Barney’s. It’s a small place, east, in the middle Fifties, but the thing I liked about it was that the music was never too loud and somewhere Barney had picked up the idea that people can be amused in other ways than by bawdy jokes and undressing girls. Not that I have any objection to either of those forms of entertainment. But some instinct in me rejected the notion of celebrating our particular occasion in other than the nicest way I could think of. And I counted on Barney to provide as much nice-ness as was consistent with having a good time.
The music was really good. I had not danced with Selena before, and the moment I began I knew it was going to be an experience. My expectation had been that we’d have a difficult time together on a dance floor. There was too much constraint between us and an antagonism of character we both recognized. In addition, she was very tall. And yet, she danced as no woman I have ever met. I forgot myself completely, and I could not think of her any longer as a woman. Instead, it seemed to me that my arm was round the moving shape of the music itself. The low, insistent beat of the rhythm was in every muscle of her body and she was completely weightless. We moved round the floor like a part of the melody. I remember thinking that this was the first time dancing had ever seemed to me an art. The people sitting at tables on the edge of the floor followed us with their eyes. I am not an exceptional dancer—scarcely even average—yet when the music stopped there were scattering handclaps from the spectators and I discovered that we had been left almost alone on the floor. Also, it occurred to me with surprise that we had not exchanged a word in the entire dance. I took her back to the table. Jerry and Grace were sitting there talking together.
“Fella,” I told him, “this girl of yours can dance.”
He was pleased. “It’s an experience, isn’t it?”
Selena smiled and said, “This is easy music.”
I sat down at the table and picked up my highball. The way Selena danced did not at the time seem to me to belong in her character. I thought of her awkward clothes when I had first seen her, of the stiffness and coldness of most of the things she said. The contrast with the fluid rhythm of her body in my arms a moment ago was puzzling. I told Grace about it later, when Jerry and Selena were on the floor. She watched them awhile with her eyes partly closed, smiling to herself.
“You never know,” she said.
After Grace and I had trod a couple of measures it was midnight. Most of the lights went out, and Barney himself pattered out into the middle of the dance floor and held up his hand. He had a spotlight trained on the bald spot at the back of his head, and with his round, pink face he looked like an Old Testament cherub.
“Ladies, gentlemen, and visitors from out of town,” he began, and went on to tell us that he had a special attraction to offer this evening. It turned out to be an Egyptian “prestidigitator and magician,” who, at least for business purposes, called himself Galli-Galli. After some inevitable puns on the fellow’s name, Barney announced that following his performance Galli-Galli would circulate among us and perform sleight-of-hand tricks at the tables. We were welcome to figure out how he did it if we could.
Barney retired and was followed by a long roll on the orchestra drums and a flood of light from the spots. Into the middle of the noise and brightness leaped a little brown man with a wizened face. He wore a turban and a green-and-white striped robe with long, flowing sleeves.
His first concern was to bow elaborately in all directions and look us over with a pair of large, melancholy black eyes. Then he exclaimed “Galli-Galli!” in a high, pleased voice and began throwing colored balls into the air. There was an astonishing number of them, taken, I suppose, from his sleeves, and his juggling was beautiful to watch. He wove patterns and figures with the arcs of the balls in the air, and at the end made them disappear as surprisingly as he had produced them. There was a burst of applause, and he smiled delightedly at us. His own skill, in the acts which followed, seemed to delight him, and he was constantly saying “Galli-Galli!” with a sort of childlike enthusiasm.
Selena was watching him without expression. Once or twice, at some particularly dexterous or mystifying bit of business, she smiled slightly, but that was all. After the first few tricks, she seemed bored and paid no further attention to him. Grace, on the other hand, was fascinated. She had her mouth open in an “oh!” of surprise most of the time. When the lights came up, Jerry and I clapped loudly and shouted “Encore!” The little man bowed to us several times and finally made his way di-rectly to our table.
On closer inspection he was even older than he had looked under the spotlight, and I don’t think there was much doubt that he was an Egyptian. I liked him at once.
“Galli-Galli do card tricks,” he said, producing a deck. “You like?”
We told him we would and he asked us to inspect the cards, which were in a sealed deck. We broke the paper and looked carefully at them, front and back. There were the conventional fifty-two and everything seemed to be in order, so we told him to go ahead.
He made cards appear and disappear in one way and another, but most of the tricks I had seen before. Perhaps he knew others even better, but we never got a chance to see them because the most inexplicable of the things Selena ever did in my presence intervened. It happened in the middle of one of his tricks. He had handed the deck to me and told me to shuffle it. I did so, thoroughly. Then he told me to pick out a card, in my mind, but not to separate it from the pack. Mentally I selected the four of clubs. Still following instructions, I asked Grace to cut the pack, which she did, and handed the cards to Jerry. He spread them out in a fan across the tablecloth, back up.
“Now,” said Galli-Galli to me, his black eyes smiling, “you know which card is yours?”
I hadn’t the faintest idea. “No.”
“You know?” he asked Grace.
“My dear man . . .” said Grace.
“And you?” Selena was apparently startled at the question.
“Certainly,” she said, reached out one white hand, and turned over the four of clubs.
For one instant a look of incredulous surprise stamped itself on Galli-Galli’s face. My own jaw must have been sagging. Then the little Egyptian rallied himself.
“That right?” he said to me.
“It certainly is,” I told him.
He bowed very low, more to Selena, I thought, than to the rest of us, scooped up the cards, bowed again, and left the table. The three of us watched him go and then turned with one accord upon Selena.
She was looking distressed.
“Darling,” said Jerry, “would you mind telling us how you did that?”
“Goodness, Selena,” said Grace, “we ought to form a bridge partnership at once, my dear.”
She shook her head
“Listen,” I said. “You can’t just do a thing like that and leave us all in the dark. How is it done?”
But she wouldn’t tell. At first she refused to say anything about the trick and then she insisted that it had been simply luck.
At the time I didn’t wholly believe her, and sitting in the Collegeville train the next day the thing seemed fantastic. Not once had she touched the cards, and I had told no one which card I had picked. I went over and over the scene at Barney’s in my mind, and the answer eluded me. If it was luck, it was one chance in fifty-two, and there had been nothing uncertain about the way she turned that card over. More than anything else, her calm, almost disinterested manner had impressed me. She seemed to view it as a trick to amuse children.
Familiar landscapes and towns began to flash past the window. I saw that we were only a few miles out of Collegeville, and my thoughts turned to Parsons and his reason for sending for me. Perhaps he had made some progress on the LeNormand business, though there was nothing in the papers to suggest it. In any case, it must be more or less unofficial, or his summons to me would have been of a different sort. On the whole, I decided, the indications were that he had discovered nothing definite.
My anxiety about Jerry’s marriage, my instinct that it was in some way wrong and undesirable, had preoccupied my mind. For a week I had hardly thought about the murder of LeNormand except casually. I was convinced that it was insoluble, and my memories of it were so appalling that I had walled it off in a corner of my mind and tried to forget about it. And yet it was a part of the fiber of every day I lived and of most things I did. Only last night I had been sitting in a night club with LeNormand’s widow, almost without realizing how short a time had elapsed since her husband’s death. So much had happened in the intervening weeks that the night when we had found his burning body seemed a year, instead of a month ago.
Jerry, I reflected, had not put the thing out of his mind to the same extent that I had. Several times I had come home to find him at the desk, surrounded with crumpled sheets of paper on which were marks that looked to me like the figures and symbols on LeNormand’s observatory table. Once I had found in the wastebasket a floor plan of the observatory, apparently drawn from memory, and he had even used the University Directory for some purpose, for I found it on the table one morning. I wondered why he was so eager to get to the bottom of the thing. The obvious suggestion was that because it concerned Selena it was important to him. But I rejected that idea. Psychologically, I should have said the normal thing for him to do was to think as little of the past as possible, to seek to put as much distance, mentally, between it and his present as possible.
The sight of Armitage Tower coming up above the trees ahead of the train heightened the feeling of tension that had been growing in me. Whatever was to happen in the next few hours, I was afraid of them. As the train pulled into the station and I started down the car steps I was aware of a dryness in my mouth and an uncertainty in my knees that were symptoms of a nervousness that was first cousin to fear.