Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 703
She turned to Notterdam her undivided attention.
‘Do you think Mrs. Porter is aware that her husband died because of my letter?’ she asked.
He answered shakily:
‘It’s deadly merely to think of that scene... It’s impossible to know whether she does or does not... I should think not... She tried to brazen it out to me that it was no suicide....’
She asked:
‘Why? How do you know?... It’s essential that she should!’
He said:
‘They would not let me in... I was let in by a fellow coming out... They had been afraid to go to the police.
... But someone had to notify the police... So they had rung me - as Porter’s friend and compatriot... Hang it all! How can you expect any of us to give straight testimony when we’re all the while so canned we can’t tell whether our grandmothers are virtuous or whether the cat has had sixteen kittens in a litter?’
She exclaimed with irritation:
‘You do not expect me to deliver commentaries on the laws of the United States at this moment. The point is: What can Mrs. Porter be relied on to say?’
He saw suddenly, as if in a vision, the sordid apartment occupied by the late Edward Porter... Mrs. Porter, her face pallid with drink and fear, had been stretched along a table with a green cloth: there had been folding doors between the sordid, nasty-smelling room in which he found himself and a sordid, nasty-smelling bedroom with the bedclothes indescribably tumbled... The doors had been apart and from behind them there had stepped a terribly evil-looking tough who held a gun that he proceeded to insert into his hip-pocket. He was in a tuxedo of extremely rakish cut, his hair greased into a divided fringe on his low forehead. Mrs. Porter had been in a black, extremely low-cut dress. She was extraordinarily thin, her backbone shewing all down her very white back in the V of her dress. The most lamentable feelings overwhelmed Notterdam... What sort of a home-life was this for his fellow-villager? Even if Notterdam had not published his books he ought to have seen to it that Porter had not been reduced to this. The man in the tuxedo moved into the room, his gun adjusted. When he stood on his left leg his figure was erect and athletic. When he moved, his right leg let him down so that he performed a most astonishing limp. He said harshly:
‘I told you it couldn’t be the cops... You had phoned fer this guy.’
Mrs. Porter pushed herself erect and said:
‘Aw, Gee, Dot, can your head... I’m not afraid of cops except for you...’ Her voice was extraordinarily soft and stealthy. Notterdam felt himself unable to speak. The smell of gin, tobacco and gas made him almost retch. The man said:
‘Ask that guy if he’s got twenty bucks... I must beat it.’
Notterdam had no money. He had changed into an old golf suit, throwing it on over his dress shirt. He could not imagine why a golf suit!
‘Aw, Gee,’ the man said, ‘get it out of him... I tell you I must beat it....’
Mrs. Porter exclaimed piteously.
‘Kid, you won’t leave me alone with...’ He answered with some kindliness:
‘Shure, you won’t be alone... This guy’s a good guy....’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but what are we to tell him?’
There was about the couple a singular air of guilt and stealthiness that, even when he looked back upon it, he could not fully comprehend - except upon the lines that Mrs. Porter was perhaps afraid for her reputation....
Porter was, dreadfully, in the bathroom, his head reclining on the patience-cards, with which he had occupied himself whilst waiting for death. His hands were stretched out and ice-cold, his thin hair disordered on his white scalp. A deep hollow in the nape of the neck above the coat-collar denoted his extreme emaciation. The cards near-by gave a startlingly bright touch of scarlet and black to the sordid brown room where even the geyser that had killed him was green with verdigris.
Notterdam had had to go to see him alone: the other two were singularly afraid of confronting death - which was strange if they were indeed toughs. But it had been all strange, his fuddled mind seizing on odd details and omitting others....
Apparently the story of those two was that they had been to Harlem in several night-clubs. They had come home with friends to play craps. They said they had been entirely cleaned out by their friends. Porter had been locked in the bathroom. About that there was nothing strange. The bathroom was large and he always worked in it, staying there quite frequently even all night. He always locked himself in. The friends being gone, Mr. McKeown - there present - had stayed for a final drink. There was, Mrs. Porter had said, nothing improper in that. Her husband was in the apartment. The smell of gas which had already been remarked on by their friends and which indeed had driven them away, had become more overpowering. It became so overpowering that, even though they were both, they admitted, more than a little canned, there was no avoiding being alarmed about it. They had then found that it must be seeping from under the bathroom door. The bathroom being across the passage above the stairs, this had at first not seemed obvious. They had hammered on the door and then, overcome with panic, had done several things that did not seem very sensible. They had rung up Notterdam from a drug store round the corner which had then been open. Both went there together. It had appeared to them that Notterdam being Porter’s nearest friend and compatriot would be the best person to deal with the matter... Finally, they had burst in the door. They had found Porter rigid in death and had drunk a great many highballs to nerve themselves for the next step. They had decided that that must be taken by Notterdam.
Notterdam himself had no doubt that the proper thing to do, even at that late hour, was to summon a doctor and the police. They had protested violently, saying why bring in the cops when there was every chance that the doctor might find the death natural. They wanted to avoid scandal.
It had been only at that that Notterdam had found that he too wanted desperately to avoid scandal. And he began to have hope.
For, going again to the bathroom to feel Porter’s wrist once more for his pulse, he had observed on the table the corner of a letter that was nearly hidden by the cards. The letter bore the heading of the House. It had been the rejection signed by Mr. Post....
They had all three gone out into the dawn to find a doctor. McKeown, looking more sinister in the grey light, left them rapidly on the doorstep. He had, partly by threats, partly by entreaties, got out of Mrs. Porter a note. It was apparently of large dimensions. She had secreted it under the half-sole of her shoe. It appeared that he had important business in Jersey City that morning. Notterdam gathered that it was bootlegging.
They began a forlorn and sinister pilgrimage. Hoboken appeared to be dead - a dead space of silent, small roads. Mrs. Porter knew of no doctor, still less did Notterdam. They saw plates on doors, cards in windows, but when they rang bells the bells reverberated hollowly as if in the depths of deserted caves and no doctor came. They might have asked of policemen but this Mrs. Porter would not do. She had fits of dizziness when he must support her really tottering feet; her teeth chattered continually. They achieved a sort of intimacy; he learned so much of her circumstances. The drug store from which she had telephoned earlier was remorselessly closed.
Why, she would ask, should Porter have committed suicide? He had a comfortable home; the neighbours would say that they never quarrelled. Never. They had been passing through a bad time, but Mr. Notterdam knew that that was going to pass. Porter was very uncommunicative about his business but she knew - from having witnessed the signing of Mr. Notterdam’s contract — that he would shortly receive a large sum. Indeed Mr. McKeown and she had rather imagined that he would be receiving a large cheque that day. Why then should he have committed suicide?... She clung to Notterdam’s arm and looked up in his face... She begged him to say that he did not think that Porter had committed suicide - he who knew that her husband expected relative comfort for a long period to come?
He chanced it and asked her whether her husband had received any letter from his firm that day? She said that she did not know. He had been locked in the bathroom, as she thought, working, when she had set out for Harlem with McKeown. Porter did not care for Harlem. He disliked niggers. Violently....
Notterdam suddenly felt warm sympathy for this appealing woman. She was clinging to him and begging and begging and begging him to tell the doctor that he was sure it could not be a case of felo de se... She said:
‘Look here... Suppose we say this... Suppose you do not contradict me... Suppose I say... I had been to Harlem and came home with a gentleman friend...’ Edward had been in his usual spirits and had gone into the bathroom to bathe... He often played a game of solitaire while the bath was running in. Often he went to sleep over it... Those geyser baths are very dangerous.
... They will go out and then come on again unlighted.... I have had ours do that on myself several times...’ she concluded.
By the immense ease of his relief Notterdam had realized how heavy had been his fear. Then the sorrow for Porter descended again in a pall over him. She was going on with the story which she begged him not to contradict. She had directed her steps uphill on to a path that led to an open space... A park with a building like an observatory on top of it... Notterdam did not know Hoboken, at any rate at dawn... The upper lights of New York glimmered above the mist that was on the Hudson, very high in the air. It was cold. She clung to him.
... She said she was going to say that she had gone to bed and slept. She had awakened, dazed and frightened to find him not beside her. She had smelt the gas and had knocked on the closed door, getting no answer... She had rushed out to the drug store to telephone to Notterdam for instructions as to what to do. Then she had thought she ought to burst the door which had a very flimsy lock... When the gas had a little dissipated itself she had run into the room for long enough to break the window... They would see the window was broken. Later she had touched Porter’s face and felt it was quite cold. She had also tried with a mirror. She had thought it best to await Notterdam’s arrival, as there was nothing to be done... Notterdam himself had seen how difficult it had been to find medical assistance....
In the cold of the open space she had clung to him. She begged and begged in her soft, stealthy voice that he would corroborate; that he would not mention that he had seen McKeown... She caught one of his hands and leaning on his breast kissed it continuously as if she had been a slave imploring a boon of a sultan.
He said when he could get words out:
‘Why should any man wish to stain the memory of another with the imputation of suicide? I certainly will corroborate everything you say... I will do everything I can for you in memory of my dead friend....’
She went on kissing his hand and twining herself against him. Suddenly she said:
‘Then let us go and get the doctor....’
It appeared that there was a darky porter in the building on the hill. He had frequently given late calls for her as against a quarter or so.
‘We don’t appear to have a quarter between us,’ she said, her voice louder with relief. ‘But I guess he will check it and give the call.’
She had heated some coffee and had told some really dreadful sob stories as to the privations she and Porter had gone through, even proving, by opening the iceless ice-box, that there was not a crumb of food in the house and next to no clothing except for their dress things. The idea that this beautiful, flashing, little creature was actually starving remained almost his strongest and most shuddering impression of that night. He had actually promised to take her home and have his wife look after her.
The doctor had said there had better be a post-mortem.
PART THREE
CHAPTER I
IT seemed that all affairs connected with the late husband of Lola had to be transacted at four o’clock in the morning and at the expense of excruciatingly disagreeable motor drives. He shouted angrily to the taxi-driver to stop at his front gate, for the fool was sleepily over-shooting it. Notterdam was morally certain that he saw a man with a cap low down over his eyes, leaving that very gate - a man with a singular walk, dot and carry one, as if one leg were considerably shorter than the other. He himself was, however, in so great a temper that the fact impressed him hardly at all. He was in a temper, principally with Giovanni and, as he paid the taxi-man - who too had been exasperating! - he swore like a man from whom devils are being expelled by exorcisms. It was as bad as being mad.
The morning before, it being three weeks to a day after the death of Porter, gently and unemotionally, Henrietta Faukner Felise had consented to become his mistress. That evening at six she had been already installed in their apartment - not at East Fifty-second Street! - and that night should have seen their nuptials. It hadn’t.
The actual public excitement about the death of Porter had been very small. It had not occurred in one of the big uptown hotels to a really swell celebrity. People who live in Hoboken, minor authors - however celebrated they may be destined to become - must expect to have accidents with their gas-fittings.
That it was anything other than an accident was never so much as suggested. There was no reason for suicide and no possibility of a murder. Porter had died falling asleep in a place quite normal over a pastime quite usual with him; a fitting in the geyser which was very old had been defective. He had known that relative success was to come to him almost immediately; he might even be considered to have fallen asleep all the more deeply because he knew of the approach of fortune - which had actually arrived to find his body cold. His funeral was attended by a very considerable number of his colleagues of the Press and the writing machine.
So that Notterdam himself had been very little troubled by pressmen. Henrietta Faukner Felise had been interviewed by half a dozen of them, in Notterdam’s presence. It was taken as creditable that Notterdam should be too much overcome with grief to say much and creditable too that he had not high-hatted the press by refusing to be interviewed. As much headline space had been given to Publisher’s Grief as to English Author’s Last Crossing. The picturesqueness of the circumstances of the death nevertheless made a considerable impression.
The appeal of such things can be judged, not so much by the excitement aroused in the metropolis of the Eastern sea-board as by the long-dropping fire from all the country over - for the New York book-market is by no means the American one. Notterdam was accustomed to having his finger on the pulse of public feeling. But he was astonished not merely at the number of the press-cuttings that came in headed either Publisher’s Grief or the other thing but at the extent of country covered by one or other of the syndicated paragraphs. On the tags of the cuttings he had seen the names of towns through which he had jumped the blind baggage in his youth, or of towns where he had assisted Kratch in brick-laying, or where one or the other of them had owned newspapers.
The name of one where he had fought Kratch for the favours of a particularly abandoned woman — somewhere in Saskatchewan — had filled him with nausea when he thought of his feelings for Henrietta Felise; the name of another in Arizona where he and Kratch had carried out an amazing piece of rush-building - working without stopping for thirty-four hours - on an hotel - had caused him intense regret for the ardour of his early manhood. He did not wish to be reminded of his youth.
He had given up looking at the cuttings, even though it seemed to him to be almost a pious duty to see to what confines of the earth the name of Porter was being spread. For he never knew — and he never could know - to what extent the letter that he had retrieved from under a hand that was like lead and ice, incomparably repulsive — he never could know to what extent that letter was absolutely the cause of Porter’s death.
For some days he had been in a horrible condition. Through a nightmare of unreality his minatory double had stalked, growing daily more and more detestable and older. On the second day Giovanni being stopped in a jam on West Twenty-third Street - though he could not imagine what he was doing in Twenty-third Street! - he had observed the doorway of a branch of the Public Library. He had spent there perhaps an hour searching through encyclopaedias for records of his reputed ancestor, Nostradamus. He had always had the impression that the old man had been a magician: but he found that he had been nothing but a doctor, described as a quack physician by one encyclopaedia - and a soothsayer. He wondered, rather annoyedly, why his ancestor should be called a quack. He appeared undoubtedly to have cured a number of celebrated royalties with names like Amadeus de Savoy. ‘They had resorted to him from long distances.’... Then, why ‘quack’!... Perhaps he had worked by suggestion as is the case with ninety-nine per cent of the cures of to-day. He had uttered many prophecies - notably one of extreme correctness concerning the French Revolution.
Nevertheless Notterdam continued to regard his ancestor as a stage figure in a long furred cloak, one hand extended in a motion of calling on spirits to appear... And this fellow who haunted him, Notterdam, after moments of extreme depression, fatigue or alcoholic indulgence might well be a sort of devil, called up involuntarily by him, Notterdam... People who drank too much got delirium tremens... The horrors!... He said to himself fiercely that he certainly did not drink enough to have delirium tremens... But how could you know? How much did you have to drink to get the horrors? Could you measure it by pints... or by hangovers?... So many hangovers per snake, so many per pink toad... many per doppelgaenger!
He remembered to have read as a boy a story by a German author with a name like Lippschuetz... Of a man who had been haunted by a double of himself called a ‘doppelgaenger.’ The appearance of the double had always presaged disaster of a hideous nature. Finally he had fired a pistol through the double’s heart — to see that he had fractured a mirror and to fall dead... The story had been called, he thought, the Student of Prague — or it might have been Vienna. At any rate it had immensely impressed him as a boy, so that traces of the doppelgaenger legend had fixed themselves on his memory whenever he had come across them. There was a picture by an Italian painter called — he did not remember the name... The picture was called ‘How They Met Themselves!’... It represented a pair of guilty lovers — though there was nothing to shew their guilt — walking in a thin wood... A spinney like Goldencroft Shaw where he had gone wrong with Lottie... The doubles of those two had appeared to them. The man was represented as grasping at the hilt of his sword under his cloak, the woman sinking back with arms outstretched.
