Tales of Men and Ghosts. Edith Wharton
The air was languid, and he felt tired. He walked between the bald grass-plots and the twisted trees, making for an empty seat. Presently he passed a bench on which a girl sat alone, and something as definite as the twitch of a cord made him stop before her. He had never dreamed of telling his story to a girl, had hardly looked at the women’s faces as they passed. His case was man’s work: how could a woman help him? But this girl’s face was extraordinary—quiet and wide as a clear evening sky. It suggested a hundred images of space, distance, mystery, like ships he had seen, as a boy, quietly berthed by a familiar wharf, but with the breath of far seas and strange harbours in their shrouds … Certainly this girl would understand. He went up to her quietly, lifting his hat, observing the forms—wishing her to see at once that he was “a gentleman.”
“I am a stranger to you,” he began, sitting down beside her, “but your face is so extremely intelligent that I feel … I feel it is the face I’ve waited for … looked for everywhere; and I want to tell you—”
The girl’s eyes widened: she rose to her feet. She was escaping him!
In his dismay he ran a few steps after her, and caught her roughly by the arm.
“Here—wait—listen! Oh, don’t scream, you fool!” he shouted out.
He felt a hand on his own arm; turned and confronted a policeman. Instantly he understood that he was being arrested, and something hard within him was loosened and ran to tears.
“Ah, you know—you know I’m guilty!”
He was conscious that a crowd was forming, and that the girl’s frightened face had disappeared. But what did he care about her face? It was the policeman who had really understood him. He turned and followed, the crowd at his heels …
VII
IN the charming place in which he found himself there were so many sympathetic faces that he felt more than ever convinced of the certainty of making himself heard.
It was a bad blow, at first, to find that he had not been arrested for murder; but Ascham, who had come to him at once, explained that he needed rest, and the time to “review” his statements; it appeared that reiteration had made them a little confused and contradictory. To this end he had willingly acquiesced in his removal to a large quiet establishment, with an open space and trees about it, where he had found a number of intelligent companions, some, like himself, engaged in preparing or reviewing statements of their cases, and others ready to lend an interested ear to his own recital.
For a time he was content to let himself go on the tranquil current of this existence; but although his auditors gave him for the most part an encouraging attention, which, in some, went the length of really brilliant and helpful suggestion, he gradually felt a recurrence of his old doubts. Either his hearers were not sincere, or else they had less power to aid him than they boasted. His interminable conferences resulted in nothing, and as the benefit of the long rest made itself felt, it produced an increased mental lucidity which rendered inaction more and more unbearable. At length he discovered that on certain days visitors from the outer world were admitted to his retreat; and he wrote out long and logically constructed relations of his crime, and furtively slipped them into the hands of these messengers of hope.
This occupation gave him a fresh lease of patience, and he now lived only to watch for the visitors’ days, and scan the faces that swept by him like stars seen and lost in the rifts of a hurrying sky.
Mostly, these faces were strange and less intelligent than those of his companions. But they represented his last means of access to the world, a kind of subterranean channel on which he could set his “statements” afloat, like paper boats which the mysterious current might sweep out into the open seas of life.
One day, however, his attention was arrested by a familiar contour, a pair of bright prominent eyes, and a chin insufficiently shaved. He sprang up and stood in the path of Peter McCarren.
The journalist looked at him doubtfully, then held out his hand with a startled deprecating, “Why—?”
“You didn’t know me? I’m so changed?” Granice faltered, feeling the rebound of the other’s wonder.
“Why, no; but you’re looking quieter—smoothed out,” McCarren smiled.
“Yes: that’s what I’m here for—to rest. And I’ve taken the opportunity to write out a clearer statement—”
Granice’s hand shook so that he could hardly draw the folded paper from his pocket. As he did so he noticed that the reporter was accompanied by a tall man with grave compassionate eyes. It came to Granice in a wild thrill of conviction that this was the face he had waited for …
“Perhaps your friend—he is your friend?—would glance over it—or I could put the case in a few words if you have time?” Granice’s voice shook like his hand. If this chance escaped him he felt that his last hope was gone. McCarren and the stranger looked at each other, and the former glanced at his watch.
“I’m sorry we can’t stay and talk it over now, Mr. Granice; but my friend has an engagement, and we’re rather pressed—”
Granice continued to proffer the paper. “I’m sorry—I think I could have explained. But you’ll take this, at any rate?”
The stranger looked at him gently. “Certainly—I’ll take it.” He had his hand out. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” Granice echoed.
He stood watching the two men move away from him through the long light hall; and as he watched them a tear ran down his face. But as soon as they were out of sight he turned and walked hastily toward his room, beginning to hope again, already planning a new statement.
Outside the building the two men stood still, and the journalist’s companion looked up curiously at the long monotonous rows of barred windows.
“So that was Granice?”
“Yes—that was Granice, poor devil,” said McCarren.
“Strange case! I suppose there’s never been one just like it? He’s still absolutely convinced that he committed that murder?”
“Absolutely. Yes.”
The stranger reflected. “And there was no conceivable ground for the idea? No one could make out how it started? A quiet conventional sort of fellow like that—where do you suppose he got such a delusion? Did you ever get the least clue to it?”
McCarren stood still, his hands in his pockets, his head cocked up in contemplation of the barred windows. Then he turned his bright hard gaze on his companion.
“That was the queer part of it. I’ve never spoken of it—but I did get a clue.”
“By Jove! That’s interesting. What was it?”
McCarren formed his red lips into a whistle. “Why—that it wasn’t a delusion.”
He produced his effect—the other turned on him with a pallid stare.
“He murdered the man all right. I tumbled on the truth by the merest accident, when I’d pretty nearly chucked the whole job.”
“He murdered him—murdered his cousin?”
“Sure as you live. Only don’t split on me. It’s about the queerest business I ever ran into … Do about it? Why, what was I to do? I couldn’t hang the poor devil, could I? Lord, but I was glad when they collared him, and had him stowed away safe in there!”
The tall man listened with a grave face, grasping Granice’s statement in his hand.
“Here—take this; it makes me sick,” he said abruptly, thrusting the