Behind the Curtain

By Don Marquis

It was as dark as the belly of the fish that swallowed Jonah. A drizzling rain blanketed the earth in chill discomfort. As I splashed and struggled along the country road, now in the beaten path, and now among the wet weeds by its side, I had never more heartily yearned for the dullness and comforts of respectability. Here was I with more talents in my quiver, it pleased me to think, than nine out of ten of the burghers I had left sleeping snug and smug in the town a few miles behind; with as much real love of humanity as the next man, too; and yet shivering and cursing my way into another situation that might well mean my death. And all for what? For fame or riches? No, for little more than a mere existence, albeit free from responsibility. Indeed, I was all but ready to become an honest man then and there, to turn back and give up the night’s adventure, had but my imagination furnished me with the picture of some occupation whereby I might gain the same leisure and independence as by what your precisians call thieving.

With the thought I stumbled off the road again, and into a narrow gully that splashed me to the knees with muddy water. Out of that, I walked plump into a hedge, and when I sought to turn from it at right angles, I found myself still following its line. This circumstance showed me that I was come unaware upon the sharp turn of the road which marked the whereabouts of the house that was my object. Following the hedge, I found the entrance to the graveled driveway within a hundred yards of my last misstep, and entered the grounds. I groped about me for a space, not daring to show a light, until presently a blacker bulk, lifting itself out of the night’s comprehensive blackness, indicated the house itself, to my left and a bit in front of me. I left the moist gravel—for there is nothing to be gained on an expedition of this sort by advertising the size and shape of your boots to a morbidly inquisitive public—and reached the shelter of the veranda by walking across the lawn.

There, being out of eyeshot from the upper windows, I risked a gleam from my pocket lantern, one of those little electric affairs that are occasionally useful to others than night watchmen. Two long French windows gave on the veranda; and, as I knew, both of them opened from the reception hall. A bit of a way with the women is not amiss in my profession; and the little grayeyed Irish maid, who had told me three weeks before of old man Rolfe’s stinginess and brutality towards the young wife whom he had cooped up here for the past four years, had also given me, bit by bit, other information more valuable than she could guess. So, thanks to the maid, I was aware that the safe where the Rolfe jewels were kept—and often a substantial bit of money as well—was situated in the library; which was just beyond the hall and connected with it by a flight of four or five steps. This safe was my objective point.

The wooden window shutters were but the work of a moment; and the window fastenings themselves of only a few minutes more. (I flatter myself that I have a very coaxing way with window fasteners.) The safe itself would give me the devil’s own trouble, I knew. It was really a job for two men, and I ached all over to be at it, to be safely through with it, and away, a good hour before sunrise.

The window opened noiselessly enough, and I stepped within and set my little satchel full of necessary tools upon the floor. But the damp weather had swelled the woodwork, and as I closed the window again, though I pushed it ever so gently, it gave forth a noise something between a grunt and a squeak.

And as pat as the report of a pistol to the pressure of the trigger came the answer—a sound of a quickly-caught breath from the warm dimness of the room. I made no motion; though the blood drummed desperately through my brain and my scalp tingled with apprehension and excitement.

For ten, for twenty, for thirty seconds I stood so; and then the silence was broken by the unmistakable rustle of a woman’s skirts. The sound came softly towards me through the darkness. It was my turn to let loose my held breath with a gasp, and in another moment I should have been through the window and running for it; when a woman’s whisper halted me.

“Is that you, Charles? And why did you not rap upon the shutter?”

So some one called Charles was expected? Then, ticked off my thoughts almost automatically, the lady somewhere near me in the dark might have her own reasons for not caring to alarm the house just then! The thought steadied me to action.

“Shh,” I whispered, feeling behind me for the window, and gradually opening it again. “S-h-h! No, it is not Charles”—and I put one foot backward across the sill. “It is not Charles, but Charles has sent me to say——”

Click!—went something by the window, and the room was flooded with sudden brilliance from a dozen electric globes. And again, click!—and I looked with blinking eyes at the muzzle of a cocked pistol held by the most beautiful, the most be-jeweled, the most determined-looking young woman it has ever been my lot to meet.

“Who are you?” she asked in a voice that was at once hoarse and sweet. “Who are you? And what do you want? And where is Charles?”

As I stood there dripping moisture upon the oiled floor, with my hands in the air—they had gone up quite involuntarily—I must have been the very picture of idiocy and discomfiture. I wondered if Charles, whoever the devil Charles might be, was always welcomed with a cocked pistol. Probably not; but, I wondered, how did she happen to have a pistol with her? I wondered why neck, breast, hair, arms, and hands should be ablaze with the diamonds that accentuated her lithe and vivid loveliness. I wondered why, now that she saw I was not Charles, she did not alarm the house. I wondered everything; but nothing to the point. And as I stood wondering she repeated:

“Who are you? And what do you want?”

“Madame,” I stammered, my jarred brain fastening upon the sentence she had interrupted, “Charles sent me to—to say to you——”

“Charles who?” she asked. And as tense as was her face, a gleam of merriment shot through her eyes. “Charles who?” she repeated.

Charles was not one of the points upon which the Irish maid had given me information.

The lady with the pistol considered for a moment. “You are not very clever, are you?” she said.

“If you will pardon me,” I said, “I think I had better be going. I seem to have mistaken the house.”

“You at least seem to have mistaken the proper manner in which to enter it,” she returned.

“Why, as to the mode of entrance,” I said, “I might plead that the mistake appears to have been less in that than in the person who employed it.”

I could not resist the retort. A dull red crept slowly up her neck and face; a pallid, olive-tinted face, beautiful in itself, beautiful for its oval contour and broad brow, and frame of black hair; beautiful in itself, and yet dominated and outdone by the lustrous, restless beauty of the dark eyes wherewith she held me more surely captive than by virtue of the pistol.

“You will come in,” she said, “and sit there.” She indicated a seat beside a central table. “But first you will kindly let me have whatever weapons you may possess.” She took my revolver, examined it, and put her own in the breast of her gown. “Now you may put your hands down,” she said, “your arms must ache by now. Sit down.”

I sat. She stood and looked at me for a moment.

“I am wondering what you are going to do with me,” I ventured.

In all of her quick actions, and in the tones of her voice, there was evident a most unnatural sort of strain. She may well have been excited; that was only to be expected in the circumstances. But the repressed excitement in this woman’s manner was not that of a woman who is forcing herself to keep her courage up; not that of a woman who would like to scream; but a steadier nervous energy which seemed to burn in her like a fire, to escape from her finger tips, and almost to crackle in her hair; an intensity that was vibrant. I marveled. Most women would have screamed at the advent of a man in the dead of night; screamed and fainted. Or the ones who would not, and who were armed as she, would ordinarily have been inclined to shoot, and at once; or immediately to have given the alarm. She had done none of these things. She had merely taken me captive. She had set me down in a chair at the center of the room. She had not roused the house. And now she stood looking at me with a trace of abstraction in her manner; looking at me, for the moment, less as if I were a human being than as if I were a factor in some mathematical problem which it was the immediate task of that active, high-keyed brain of hers to solve. And there was a measure of irony in her glance, as if she alone tasted and enjoyed some ulterior jest.

“I am wondering,” I repeated, “what you are going to do with me.”

She sat down at the opposite side of the table before she replied.

“I believe,” she said slowly, “that I have nearly made up my mind what to do with you.”

“Well?” I asked.

But she said nothing, and continued to say nothing. I looked at her and her diamonds—the diamonds I had come after!—and wondered again why she was wearing them; wondered why she had tricked herself out as for some grand entertainment. And as the ignominious result of my night’s expedition pressed more sharply against my pride I could have strangled her through sheer disappointment and mortification. The pistol she held was the answer to that impulse. But what was the answer to her hesitancy in alarming the house? Why did she not give me up and be done with me?

At the farther end of the room was a long red curtain, which covered the entrance to a sitting-room or parlor, as I guessed; and by the side of the curtain hung an old-fashioned bell cord, also of red, which I supposed to communicate with the servants’ quarters. It were easy enough, now that she had taken the whip hand of me so cleverly, to pull that rope, to set the bell jangling, to rouse the house. Why did she not do so?

Was she a mad woman? There was that in her inexplicable conduct, and in her highly-wrought, yet governed, mood, as she sat in brooding silence across the table from me, to make the theory plausible. Brooding she was, and studying me, I thought; yet watchful, too. For at any least motion of mine her hand tightened slightly upon the pistol. We sat thus while the slow seconds lengthened into intolerable minutes; and I steamed with sweat, and fidgeted. Nor was I set more at my ease by her long searching glances. In fact, my overthrow had been so instant and so complete that my scattered wits had never drawn themselves together again; I continued as one in a haze; as a person half under the power of the hypnotist; as a mouse must feel after the first blow of the cat’s paw. And yet one idea began to loom clearly out of that haze and possess me—the idea that she desired the alarm to be given as little as I did myself.

But there was no light in that. It was easy to understand why she did not wish the house aroused while she still believed me to be Charles—whoever Charles might be. But now?—it was too much for me. I could not find a justification in reason for my belief; and yet the conviction grew.

She broke the silence with a question that might have been put with full knowledge of my thought.

“You are still wondering why I do not give you up?” she said.

I nodded. She leaned towards me across the table, and if ever the demons of mockery danced through a woman’s eyes it was then; and her lips parted in a kind of silent laughter.

She touched the diamonds about her throat.

“It was these you came after?”

I nodded again. Evidently speech was of no avail with this lady. She asked questions at her will, and reserved the right of answering none.

“Tell me,” she said, “Why are you a thief? Why do you steal?”

“‘Convey, the wise it call,’” I quoted. “Accident, or fate, or destiny, I suppose,” I went on, wondering more than ever at the question, but with a fluttering hope. Perhaps the lady (in spite of Charles—such things have been!) was an amateur sociologist, a crank reformer, or something of that sort. There had been no mockery in her tone when she asked the question; instead, I thought, a kind of pity. “Fate, or destiny,” I went on, “or what you please, ‘There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,’” I quoted again, in my best actor manner.

“Why,” she said, “you are a man with some air of better things about you. You quote Shakespeare as if he were an old friend. And yet, you are a thief! Tell me,” she continued, “tell me—I dare say there were many struggles against that destiny?” There was a note almost of eagerness in her voice, as if she were a leniently-inclined judge who would fain search out and put in the mouth of a condemned man some plausible plea for the exercise of clemency. “Come—were there not?—I dare say there were—circumstances of uncommon bitterness that forced you to become what I see you? And even now you hate the thing you are?”

“Why, as to that,” I said, possessed of the sudden whim to be honest with myself for once, “I am afraid that I can complain of no bitterer usage at the hands of the world than can the majority of those who reap where they have not sowed. When I think of it all, I am used to putting it to myself that my life is devoted to a kind of private warfare against the unjust conditions of a hypocritical social order.”

“Warfare!” she flouted, hard and brilliant as one of her own diamonds again. “And you could justify it, too, could you not?”

And then she asked me: “Have you ever killed a man?”

“Why, no,” said I, “but I have tried to.”

“He lived?—and you were sorry that he lived?”

“No,” I said, quite out of my depths in all this moral quibbling, “I was glad he lived.”

“And yet you hated him?”

“I would have taken his life in a rage,” I said. “He had wronged me as greatly as one man can wrong another.”

“And yet you were glad he lived? My dear thief——”

“Higgins is the name,” said I. “You may call me Higgins.”

“My dear Higgins,” she went on, “you are inconsistent. You attempt to slay a man in what I should judge to have been a not ignoble passion. It may have been an anger that did you credit. And yet you are not bold enough to face the thought of killing him. You are glib with justifications of your thievery; and perhaps that is also because you are too much of a coward to look steadily at it. You creep along a mean and despicable path in life, contentedly, it seems to me, with a dead soul. You are what you are because there is nothing positive in you for either good or evil. You are negative; you were better dead. Yes, better dead!”

Why should I have felt as if she were seeking self-justification in advance for some death she planned for me? Certainly, my life, or death, was not hers to give or take; she might give me up, and probably would. But just as certainly she had made me feel, as she passed her judgment upon me, that she was likely to turn executioner as well as judge. My doubts as to her sanity returned.

“Still,” I said, for the sake of saying something, “if I killed a man, I should not like to think about it, even if he deserved death.”

“Even if he deserved death?” she repeated, and sprang up, as if the phrase had touched her. “You make yourself the judge, you do, of when a man ‘deserves’ to lose his wealth. Come, what is your idea of when he deserves to die?”

Up and down the room she swept; yet still watchful. And the emotion which she had so long suppressed burst out into a poisonous lovely bloom that suffused her being with an awful beauty.

“When does he deserve to die?” she repeated. “Listen to me. I knew a woman once—no matter where—no matter when—who was sold—sold! I say—by the sordid devil she called her father, to the veriest beast that ever trod this earth. Her beauty—for she had beauty—her wit—for wit she had—became this husband’s chattels before she turned her twentieth year. She would never have loved him, but she would have been faithful to him—she was faithful to him, in fact, in spite of all his drunkenness and bestiality—and abuse! It was not neglect alone that she had to complain of—she had never looked for understanding or sympathy. But she had not looked for abuse. Abuse, I say, and worse than abuse. Before she had been married a year she knew what it was, not only to feel the weight of a heavy hand and to hide the bruises from her maid, but to see other women brought into her very house. Pah!—hate? She hated him? Hate is not the word. She became a live coal. But she never cried out; she found strength to smile at him even when he beat her; she was proud enough for that. It pleased him, in his hellish humor, and because she was made to shine, to cage her in a country house, and there to taunt her that although she was sold to him she got little of what money may buy. And still she smiled at him, and still her hatred grew through all the weeks and months until it filled her whole being. And then—love came. For God has ordained that love may enter even Hell. Love, I say; and she loved this lover of hers with a passion that was measured only by the degree in which she hated her husband. And she would have left with him; but on the very night they would have flown together her lord and master——-”

She said the words with an indescribable spluttering sneer, sidewise from her mouth. It is so a lioness may snarl and spit before she leaps.

“Her—lord and master—found it out, and waited up to catch them; and coming upon her alone, taunted her. Taunted her, and struck her——”

“Look!” she cried, and tore the diamonds from her breast, and rent the laces, and wrenched the fastenings apart. A new red weal that seemed to throb and pulse with her respiration stood out from the whiteness of her bosom.

“Tell me,” she whispered hoarsely, “would it have been murder if she had killed that man? Which were the more courageous thing—to kill him, or to step back into her living hell? If she had killed him, would she have regretted it?”

I know not what I might have answered; but at that instant three raps sounded distinctly upon the window-shutter. I leaped to my feet. Then Charles had come!

An instant she stood as if stricken to a statue in mid-rage.

And then she cried out, and there was a furious triumph in her voice—a kind of joy that matched itself to, and blended with, the fierce and reckless beauty of her shaken jewels, possessed her.

“Charles,” she cried, “come in! Come in!”

Slowly the window opened and a man entered. He drew back in amaze at the sight of me, and turned to her with an air that was all one question.

“I thought you would never come,” she said.

He was a big blond man, and as he turned from the one to the other of us, with his helpless, inquiring face, and eyes that blinked from the outer darkness, he looked oddly like a sleepy schoolboy who has been awakened from an afternoon nap by the teacher’s ruler.

“Katherine,” he finally stammered, “what is this? Who is this man?” He passed his hand across his forehead as one may do who doubts whether or not he dreams; and walked towards the table.

“Charles,” she said, “I have shot the old man.” I have seen a beef stricken on the head with a mallet look at its executioner with big eyes for an instant before the quivering in its limbs set in and it sank to the ground. So this Charles looked with wide, stupid eyes, and shivered, and dropped the great bulk of him into a chair. His head sank upon his hand. But finally he looked up, and spoke in a confused voice, as if through a mist. “Good God, Katherine, what do you mean?”

“I mean,” she said, framing the words slowly, as one speaks a lesson to a child, “I mean that I have killed the old man.”

And moving swiftly across the room she flung back the heavy red curtain at the end of it; and I saw the answer to my many questionings.

The body lay upon its back, with one arm bent, the hand across the chest, and the fingers spread wide. The face was that of a man of sixty or thereabouts, but, indeed, so deeply lined and wrinkled and pouched with evil living that the age even in life must have been hard to determine. Blood was coagulating about a bullet wound in the temple, and there were powder burns on the forehead. The shot had been fired at close range, evidently from the weapon with which I had been confronted on my entrance; and the sound had been so muffled in the curtain that it was little wonder that the servants in the rooms above, and across the house, had not heard it. He had a monstrous nose, that man upon the floor, and it must have been a red nose in life; but now it was of a bluish-white color, like the skin of an old and scrawny fowl. That, and the thin, drawn-up legs, and the big flabby paunch of the thing, robbed the sight, for me, of all the solemnity which (we are taught) exudes from the presence of death. It made me sick; and yet I cackled with sheer hysteria, too; or rather my strained nerves jarred and laughed, if not myself. It was too damned grotesque.

Herself, she did not look at it. She looked at the man called Charles; and he, with a shudder, lifted his slow gaze from the thing behind the curtain to her face.

She was the first to speak, and the terrible joy with which she had bade Charles to enter still dominated her accents.

“Don’t you understand, Charles? This man,” and she indicated me with the pistol, “this man takes the blame of this. He is a thief. He came just after—just afterwards. And I held him for your coming. Don’t you see? Don’t you see? His presence clears us of this deed!”

“Us?” queried Charles.

“Not us?” she asked.

“My God, Katherine,” he burst forth, “why did you do this thing? And you would heap murder on murder! Why, why, why did you do it? Why splash this blood upon our love? A useless thing to do! We might have—we might have———”

He broke down and sobbed. And then: “God knows the old man never did me any harm,” he said. “And she’d accuse the thief, too!” he cried a moment later, with a kind of wondering horror.

“Listen, Charles,” she said, and moved towards him; and yet with a sidelong glance she still took heed of me. “Listen, and understand me. We must act quickly—but after it happened it was necessary that I should see you before we could act. This man came to rob; here is his pistol, and in that satchel by the window are his tools, no doubt. He may tell what wild tale he will; but who will believe him? You go as you came; I give him up—and we—we wait awhile, and then the rest of life is ours.”

I suppose that it is given to few men to hear their death plotted in their presence. But I had come to the pass by this time where it struck me as an impersonal thing. I listened; but somehow the full sense of what she said, as affecting me, did not then impinge upon my brain with waking force. I stood as if in a trance; I stood and looked on at those two contending personalities, that were concerned just now with the question of my life or death, as if I were a spectator in a theater—as if it were someone else of whom they spoke.

“Go,” she cried to Charles again, “and I will give him up.”

“Katherine,” he said, “and you would do this thing?”

“Why?” she retorted, “what is this man’s life beside mine? His soul is dead! I tell you, Charles, that I have come through Hell alive to gain one ray of happiness! But go!—and leave the rest to me.”

And she grasped the bell cord and pulled it. Pulled it again and again. The sound wandered crazily through what remote corridors I know not.

She made a step towards him. He leaped to his feet with an oath, with loathing in his eyes, shrank back from her, and held out a hand as if to ward off some unclean thing.

Bewilderment lined her face. She groped to understand. And then, as the full significance of his gesture came home to her, she winced and swayed as if from a blow; and the pistol dropped from her loosened grasp to the floor.

“You—you abandon me?” she said slowly. “You desert me, then? Love, Love, think how I have loved you that I did this thing! And is what I have suffered—what I have done—still to purchase—nothing?”

She pleaded for my death; but I hope that I shall never again see on any human face the look of despair that was on hers. I pitied her!

Heavy feet on the stairway woke me from my trance. Unregarded of them both I grasped my pistol from the floor and sprang for the window. A door opened somewhere above, and a voice asked:

“You rang, Ma’am?”

From without the window I looked back into the room. She stood with outstretched hands—hands that reached upward from the pit of torment, my fancy told me—and pleaded for a little love. “In all this world is there no little ray of love for me?”—it was so my imagination rather than my hearing translated the slight movement of her lips. And while she and the man called Charles stood thus at gaze with one another, the servant spoke again from the stairway.

“You rang?” he asked.

She slowly straightened. She steadied herself. And with her eyes still fixed upon those of Charles she cried:

“Yes, yes, I rang, Jones! Your master is—dead. Your master’s murdered! And there, there,” and she stabbed an accusing finger at her erstwhile lover, “there is the man who murdered him!”

And then I turned from the window and ran from that house; and as I ran I saw the Dawn, like a wild, fair woman, walk up the eastern sky with blood-stained feet.