"Persons Unknown". Virginia Tracy
Herrick started and looked at the two men with quick eagerness. "You don't mean—"
"Precisely! The mighty in high places—Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck! No less!"
Wheeler broke into a curse and then into his deep laugh, and said Miss Hope's manager would do well to clear out before any Sherlock Holmes with wings got to throwing his mouth around here. "I can stand his always bringing down a curtain with 'Seventy times a millionaire—the world is at my feet!' A man has to believe in something! But it's his taking himself for a tin District-Attorney-on-wheels that'll get his poor jaw broken one of these days!"
Herrick's curiosity was roused to certain reminiscences and he went on putting them together even while he followed Corey downstairs and out onto an open gallery whose tables overlooked a little garden. As soon as the waiter left them he asked Corey, "But—I've been so long away—this coroner can't be the same Ten Euyck—"
"Can you think there are two?"
Well, the world is certainly full of entertainment! A man born to one of the proudest names and greatest fortunes of his time serving as coroner—coroner! That was what certain references of McGarrigle's meant, certain newspaper flippancies. "Mr. Ten Euyck!" Herrick's extreme youth had witnessed the historic thrill that shook society when the full significance of the great creature's visiting-cards first burst upon a startled and ingenuous nation! But even then Mr. Ten Euyck must have aspired beyond social thrills and seen himself as a man of parts and public conscience. It was not so much later that Herrick remembered him as a literary dabbler, an amateur statesman, endeavoring by means of elegant Ciceronics to waken his class to its duty as leader of the people! He had then seemed merely a solemn ass who, having learned during a long residence abroad an aristocratic notion of government, took his caste and its duties much too seriously.—"But why coroner?"
Despair, apparently, over that caste's lack of seriousness! There had been talk of abolishing the coronership, Corey said, and Ten Euyck had run for it. If irresponsible idlers dared to slight even the presidency in their choice of careers let them see what could be done with the least considerable of offices! If younger sons dared lessen class-power by neglecting government, let them see to what Mr. Ten Euyck could condescend in the public service! It was an old-fashioned, an old-world ambition; the man, essentially stiff-necked, essentially egotistical, was in no sense a reformer. "He pushes his office, upon my word, to the diversion of the whole town; holding court, if you please, as if he were launching a thunderbolt, making speeches and denunciations, and taking himself for a kind of District Attorney.—I may as well say, Mr. Herrick, that it's a black bitterness to me that that pretentious puppy should have authority in—in dealing with Mr. James. There was never anything cordial between them; in fact, quite the contrary. We refused a book of his once!"
"But, great heavens—"
"It was a book of plays, Mr. Herrick; blank verse and Roman soldiery—with orations! I don't deny Mr. James's letter was a trifle saucy; he was often not conciliating; no, not conciliating! Well, now, it's Ten Euyck's turn. If he can soil Mr. James's memory in Miss Hope's eyes, why, that will be just to his taste, believe me. Now I come to think of it, I believe Miss Hope herself is rather in his black books! It seems to me she once took part in one of the plays, and it failed. I tell you all this, Mr. Herrick, because James Ingham had the highest admiration for you, and had great pleasure in the hope of bringing out your novel."
Herrick gaped at him in an astonishment which had not so much as become articulate before—such is our mortal frailty—his slight, but hitherto persistent, repulsion from the dead man was shaken to its foundation and moldered in dust away.
"Yes, when we are ourselves again, you must bring in that manuscript. Yes, yes, he wished it! They were almost the last words I had from him. He was very pleased to get your letter, very pleased. He was talking about it to Stanley, his young brother, and to me; we were all there yesterday—think of it, Mr. Herrick, yesterday!—working out his ideas for our new Weekly. He was always an enthusiast, a keen enthusiast, and the Weekly was his latest enthusiasm. Its politics would have been very different from Mr. Ten Euyck's—"
A friendly visage at another table favored them with a sidelong contortion and a warning wink. Just behind them a shrewd voice ceased abruptly and a metallic tone responded, "Yes, but you—you're a man with a mania!"
The first voice replied, "Well, you're down on criminals and I'm down on crime."
Then Ten Euyck's was again lifted. "You're out after a criminal whom you think corrupting and to wipe him out you'll pass by fifty of the plainest personal guilt! In my view nobody but the corruptible is corrupted. Any person who commits a crime belongs in the criminal class."
"Crime may end in the criminal class," the other voice took up the challenge, "but it begins at home. You can't always pounce upon the decayed core. But if you observe a very little speck on a healthy surface, one of two things—either you can cut it away and save the apple, or your tunneling will lead you farther and farther in, it will open wider and wider and the speck will vanish, automatically, because the whole rotten fruit will fall open in your hand."
"Delightful, when it does! But in this short life I prefer the pounce!"
By this time everybody was harkening and Herrick ventured to turn his chair and look round. He beheld a sallow man, nearer forty than thirty and as tall as himself or taller, but of a straighter and stiffer height; with a long head, a long handsome nose and chin, long hands and long ears. This elongated countenance was not without contradictions. Under the sparse, squarely cut mustache Herrick was surprised to find the lips a little pouting, and the glossily black eyes were prominent and full. Fastidiously as he was dressed there persisted something funereal in the effect; forward of each ear a shadow of clipped whisker leant him the dignity of a daguerreotype. He spoke neatly, distinctly. His excellent, strong voice was dry, cold and inflexible. On the whole Herrick's easy and contemptuous amusement received a slight set-back.
"I prefer the pounce!" To be pounced upon by that bony intensity might not be amusing at all!
Then he discovered what had changed his point of view: it had shifted a trifle toward the criminal's! All very well for Ten Euyck's guest—Herrick had somehow gathered that the other man was a guest—to give up the argument, indifferently refusing to play up to his host! All very well for the free-hearted lunchers to sit, diverted, getting oratorical pointers from the monologue into which Ten Euyck had plunged! It was neither the lunchers nor the guest, but Herrick who must, to-morrow morning, appear as a witness before Ten Euyck! He would have to tell the man something which the Inghams had asked him not to tell because it might prove prejudicial to James Ingham—his admirer—which Hermann Deutch had asked him not to tell because it might prove prejudicial to Christina Hope—she whose face had been his heart's companion through hard and lonely times! The idea of the inquest had become exceedingly disagreeable to Herrick.
And the more he listened to Ten Euyck, the more disagreeable it became; the more he felt that a derisive audience had underestimated its man. Ten Euyck might take himself too seriously; he might show too small a sense of the ridiculous in loudly delivering, at luncheon, a sort of Oration-on-the-Respect-of-Law-in-Great-Cities. But this depended on whether you considered him as a man or a trap. The real quality in a trap is not a sense of the ridiculous nor a delicate repugnance to taking itself seriously. Its real quality is the ability to catch things. And, as a trap, Herrick began to feel that Ten Euyck was made for success.
The new-born criminal actually felt an impulse to warn his unknown accomplice how trivial gossip had been, how blind the public gaze. Platitudes about law, yes. But, when the orator came to dealing with the lawless, the whole man awoke. Those who broke the rules of the world's game and yet struggled not to lose it were to him mere despicable impertinents whose existence at large was an outrage to self-respecting players and for what he despised he found excellent cold thrusts and even a kind of homely and savage humor. Then, indeed, "it was not blood which ran in his veins, but iced wine." Why, he was right to think of himself as a prosecutor—he was born a prosecutor! In unconsciously assuming the robes of justice he had simply found himself. To him justice meant punishment, punishment an ideal vocation for the