CHAPTER I.
AT thirty-six years of age, Claudius Hanson, M.A., was offered the position of chief chemist in the Perkins Manufacturing Company, at a salary of ten thousand dollars a year. Everybody who has ever bathed and shaved and brushed his hair and teeth and polished his nails and powdered and perfumed and cold-creamed must be familiar with the Perkins Company, which makes these routine processes so pleasant and expensive. Since graduating from Sheff as an analytical chemist, my friend Claudius' duties had been to discover synthetic compounds that would render them even more so. His profession was, in fact, a highly æsthetic one—the creation of sweet smells,
Living constantly in the atmosphere of these extracts, which were often highly concentrated and powerfully adhesive, Claudius carried about with him a circumambient smell combination, which, at a distance, evoked elusive memories of the greenroom, the tango tea, the boudoir, and baby's bath. At close range, one was reminded rather of a midwinter, Seventh Avenue, Pullman-porters' benefit hop, with the ballroom windows hermetically sealed and the radiators at fifty calories per square inch.
Yet nobody ever associated the cause and effect of this olfactory riot. Claudius looked like anything but the basis of voluptuous scents, especially at this time, when he was perfecting his famous “gage d'amour”—“love token” literally, but more widely known as “Perkins' Love Gag”—of which one drop was enough to throttle all competing piker perfumes in the Metropolitan Opera House, and cost about one hundred dollars to produce. Deodorizers had about as much effect on this aroma as would a cluster of wild flowers on an asphyxiating-gas attack. Yet, unlike many powerful bases for olfactory products, it was not offensive in its undiluted form—merely intense.
But even while working at this, Claudius could move through society unsuspected; he was so square and rugged and wholesome looking, and, though well dressed as a rule, nevertheless gave a certain impression of careless negligee in the matter of brushing and pressing and final touches of toilet, such as perfume. Also, his strong, well-shaped fingers were habitually stained from chemical reagents, and in cars and ferryboats he was usually reading a book. So the dilating nostrils of the traveling public swept past him to twitch accusingly at some powdered lady or dapper gentleman with a plum-colored handkerchief in his breast pocket. Had they known that they were getting about a hundred dollars' worth of smell for a five-cent fare, they might have felt less sore about it.
[Illustration: Had they known that they were getting about a hundred dollars' worth of smell for a five cent fare, they might have felt less sore about it. ]
Shortly after clinching his ten-thousand-dollar job, Claudius came to see me about a house he wished to build. He had bought a little piece of shore property and desired me to get him out some plans for a concrete bungalow to cost about seven thousand five hundred dollars. We had been rather intimate at college, so I asked him if he contemplated matrimony.
“No,” he answered. “I shall never marry. I want the house for my library, more than for anything else.” He tapped a plate among those I was showing him. “I want a big room like that, with bookshelves built into the walls on three sides. You see, Bill, I'm a great reader. It's about all I do outside of working hours.”
“What do you read?” I asked.
“Fiction mostly. Only the best. Then I read memoirs a good deal and a certain amount of philosophic essay stuff. But I like fiction best. Good fiction is life, and my own way of living is so routine that I have to get my thrills vicariously.”
“Do you find that it satisfies?” I asked curiously,
“Yes—if I supplement it now and then by a little experience of the real thing. I find that I have to do that after reading certain books. For instance, after a ripping good sea story, I like to sit in some sailors' joint and listen to the talk, or stroll along the quays, or charter a boat and sail around the bay. Or, if I've been reading society stories, I like to do a few teas or dinners or opera. Or if it happens to be some yarn about studios and models and things, it's fun to look up some of our painter friends.”
“I see the point,” I answered. “After a baseball story, you want a game, and after nature stories, a camping trip, and after girl stories a girl.”
“Oh, there's always the girl,” he said, with a flash of his strong white teeth. “If she's not actually in the story, she's pretty apt to be the reason for it. No doubt, story reading affects everybody that way to some extent, but it seems to take more hold with me. My mind gets working on what I've just read until I'm driven to go and do something of the same sort for the sake of peace.
“It's been that way with me since I was a kid. But sometimes the insistent idea, as you might call it, is more imperative. This house I'm going to build, for instance.”
“Have you just read a story about somebody who built a house?” I asked.
“Yes—in a monthly magazine. There really wasn't much of a story to it. Just about a man that built a house and lived in it”
“Alone?” I interrupted.
“Yes. At first. Eventually, he fell in love and got his mate, of course, but it wasn't that part that hypnotized me. It was the house itself, and the way he had everything as he wanted it; and all the his-ness of it. By the time I'd finished it, I just had to have a house.”
“Well,” said I thoughtfully, “if all your insistent ideas from fiction reading prove as reasonable as this, keep at it. Now's the time to buy and build, and what you're getting will never be worth any less. Only, after you get into your house, be careful not to read a story about a man who decided that his life was too empty, and got tired of living alone in his new house with no company but his books, and, being unable to endure it for another day, leaped into a taxi and ordered the driver to rush to Herald Square”
“Where he hopped down and started up Broadway, swearing to ask the first tall brunette in a short skirt and a sailor hat to share his shore lot? No danger, Billy. If that were to happen, I'd stop at a downtown bookshop and buy a novel of purely ascetic character and tear through it en route for the Great White Way.” Claudius laughed, and we got back to plans again.
It may be seen from this that Claudius was neither reckless nor a crank, which, in the light of what happened to him later, may seem hard to believe. We all of us, even the most stubborn and bigoted, react readily to the influence of some peculiar factor. It may be avarice or ambition or spite or revenge or love or religion or an appeal to the senses or to the soul. Friendly counsel might even have its effect. But that to which Claudius reacted most readily was the printed page. Books, especially well-written fiction, appealed through his plastic imagination to his personal conduct with a force that at rare intervals proved irresistible. The chances are that the same author, attempting to influence Claudius' train of thought and action by word of mouth, might have talked himself black in the face and not kept so much as his listener's polite attention. But the same ideas in the guise of fiction—interesting, exciting, romantic situations experienced by fascinating book folk—aroused in him the powerful desire of emulation; this even when his perfectly sound sense and moral balance—which was that of most decent chaps of the American upper class—told him that in real life such behavior would not wash at all.
Claudius' modest residence consisted of a one-plan, flat-roofed, concrete house, of the general arrangement of a Pompeian dwelling, though naturally without the tabernæ, or small front chambers that were used as shops. The atrium and peristylum formed one central court like a Spanish patio, onto which gave the library and dining room in front, the kitchen and pantry on one side, the bath on the other, and four bedrooms in the rear. All of the chambers opened on the court and, by long French windows with iron shutters, on the surrounding garden. At one corner, outside the library, there was a tiled veranda with concrete columns.
The plot in which the house stood ran to the water's edge, where it had a front of a hundred feet, and the whole was inclosed by what would soon become a dense arbor-vitæ hedge. One entered by an iron gate between concrete posts and descended four broad steps to a sunken garden, which surrounded the house. There were two small outbuildings—a garage which Claudius had equipped as an experimental laboratory and a concrete boathouse with a tiled roof, where he kept his motor launch.
The place as a whole was a quaint, distinguished little toy and aroused considerable interest. Claudius himself was tremendously pleased with it. Here he took up his peaceful life, with his sweet smells and storybooks and a household that consisted of a cocker spaniel, a large black cat, a green parrot, and a Chinaman. These familiars were named respectively Cocky, Pussy, Polly, and Cholly, betraying no violent originality of nomenclature on the patron's part. There was some slight bickering at times among these inmates of the Casa Pompeiana, but all were devoted to the master, and that, after all, was the main thing.
Several times, in crossing the ferry on his way home from the plant, Claudius had observed a young man of about his own age who reminded him strongly of a fascinating character in a book he had recently read. It is probable that a good twenty-five per cent of the young men darting martinlike in and out of their holes in the skyscrapers of the Wall Street district would have borne an equal resemblance. But one martin perched on the rim of one's boat may arouse an attention not bestowed on many buzzing about.
This young man was of medium height, with cleanly cut and rather classic features, and of a complexion about as dark as it is permissible for a white man to be. His hair was black and lustrous, closely trimmed, but with the “wave” so envied of the sweeter sex. He had dark, brooding eyes, a good chin, to balance up any suggestion of softness, and a general expression of self-contained alertness. There was the least hint of superiority about the lines of a very noble mouth, which yet had nothing of the snobbish sneer of the social poseur.
[Illustration: There was a glow in the chocolate eyes of Madame Suzanne that was not entirely fiscal, as they rested on Claudius in his faded blue bathing suit.]
“Interesting-looking chap,” thought Claudius, thinking of the hero in his latest book. You or I would not have found him as interesting to look at as Claudius' stained and scented little finger. But to Claudius he was the frontispiece illustration, which depicted a character of profound subtlety and tremendous latent possibilities. And this is precisely what the object of his scrutiny liked to imagine himself and tried to appear.
A bump in the fog with a coal barge introduced them. There was no damage worth mentioning, but something of a crash, and the ensuing loosening of tongues on the part of passengers who had been in the habit of seeing each other off and on for months. Thereafter, Claudius, from nodding a pleasant good evening, came gradually to chatting with his dark acquaintance, whom he learned to be a Mr. Sydney Arthur and by profession a “general agent.” Claudius' ideas were rather vague as to just what a general agent might be, but it sounded important and latent with secret possibilities—quite the profession that one would have expected of a quietly knowing and experienced-looking chap like Arthur. Learning that his new acquaintance was spending the summer at a beach boarding house not far from the Casa Pompeiana, Claudius asked him over for dinner one night.
Arthur was impressed by Claudius' elegance, but did not show it. Claudius had told him that he worked in the laboratories of the Perkins Manufacturing Company, neglecting, however, to mention that he was at their head. But it did not take the astute Arthur long to discover that he had to do with an able chemist who was earning a good salary, at least half of which he saved. This much determined, Arthur set himself to work to make his society not only agreeable, but necessary, to Claudius, and the success with which he met astonished him. He would have been even more astonished could he have guessed that it was due to Claudius' growing conviction that Arthur, beneath his modest reserve, possessed all of the requirements for a writer of strong fiction. He confided this opinion of Arthur to me one night when I was spending the week-end with him, and his saturnine friend had left.
“That man Arthur ought to write,” said Claudius. “What he don't know about human nature ain't worth knowing. He was quiet to-night. Reserved sort of chap, but once in a while he loosens up.”
“What about?” I asked.
“Oh, life in general—people and things. He's traveled a lot in out-of-the-way places and rubbed shoulders with all sorts and kinds. I guess he's been in some pretty tight places at different times.”
“Such as”
“Oh—with police grafters and conmen and crooks and politicians—all that kind of thing,” said Claudius, rather vaguely. “He's been a ward heeler and a private detective, and was in the secret service for a while.”
“Did he tell you so?” I asked incredulously.
“Not for a second! Catch him giving anything away! But he don't need to. You can sort of feel it, and he drops things now and then”
I could quite picture Arthur's method with Claudius, who, when not concentrating on his work or reading, was a free talker and brought to his conversation the frank enthusiasm of a small boy. There was, in fact, a good deal of the small boy about him. The dialogue of these two would be something like this:
[Illustration: “Bless my soul,” said he, “it's a little girl!”
“What did you think it was—an Angora cat?” came the tart reply. ]
Claudius: Gad, what would a fellow do in a case like that? Just the three of them on the island—he knowing perfectly well that this skunk was only watching for a chance to croak him and take the girl. He couldn't drive the brute away—no place for him to go—and he couldn't kill him in cold blood.
Arthur (darkly): H'm. (Slight shrug expressive of “Oh, I don't know!”)
Claudius: But how could he? Here he was, a chap just like you and me. It's not as if he'd been a doctor or a butcher or a cop or somebody used to bloodshed. We couldn't bring ourselves to settle a fellow's hash just because we knew that sooner or later he meant to settle ours. We'd have to wait until he tried it on—wouldn't we?
Arthur (puffing one of Claudius' excellent cigars with a dark, inscrutable air, his pale, handsome face sphinx-like and his vision focused afar): It's happened, though.
Claudius (eagerly): To you?
Arthur (turning slightly and drawing down one corner of his mouth in a twisted smile as if at some bitter-sweet memory): Oh—no—not quite that, but something not unlike it. He wasn't killed, though. It's a long story. I'll tell you about it some day.
Claudius (protestingly): Oh, come, Arthur, let's have it now!
Arthur (shaking his head with a smile of regret): Better to wait until a certain party is dead. I'll tell you one thing, though—never you count on a girl to see you through any such business.
And thence a debate on the relative trustworthiness of the two sexes, Claudius chivalrous and championing the fair, of course, and Arthur belittling girls as a class, but grudgingly admitting certain desirable qualities to the prime of womanhood. He not infrequently directed the conversation into this channel, I fancy. Arthur had a sister two years Claudius' senior—a widow, beautiful in a dark, Levantine way, penniless and ambitious. She was a stenographer in the bucket shop in which he was himself employed, but she did not mean to continue as such any longer than it would take her to find a husband to her taste.
When Arthur judged that the time had come, he arranged to have her spend her fortnight's vacation at his bench boarding house. Arthur was by now quite indispensable to Claudius, whom he served as a sort of mental punching bag. By a subtle combination of belittling shrugs, interjections, and facial expressions, and a kind of grudging approval of Claudius' fervent theses that was infinitely clever, he kept the poor, simple-hearted scientist cavorting like a bull stuck full of banderillas, but, unlike the bull, rather enjoying the stimulation. Claudius' system seemed to require it. But those of his friends like myself did not, and when things got so that one could scarcely snap away a cigarette stub at the Casa Pompeiana without danger of hitting Arthur, we stopped going there.
Arthur was only waiting for the cue to shove his sister onto the stage. First Claudius took them for a picnic in his launch; then he had them over for luncheon at the Casa Pompeiana; then for bathing from his little beach, with tea on the terrace afterward. I assisted at one of these parties and, on leaving, wrung poor Claudius' hand as that of one soon to explore the terra incognita whence it were idle to expect his return.
Arthur's sister Suzanne—Mrs, Bates—was really so pretty that it seemed as if she ought to be kept covered up—dark, luxuriant, voluptuous, with a ripe-lipped Italian face, her brother's straight, classic nose, and long, languishing eyes. They had, however, nothing dreamy about them just then, but seemed to me to be making a swift, skilled inventory of Claudius' lares et penates and other more practical appointments of the Casa Pompeiana. For all of her seductiveness, I thought that her mouth and chin showed too great decision for such a harem type, and that she had temper as well as temperament. It seemed possible that, if crossed, she might maltreat the goldfish and bite chunks out of the marble rim of the fishpool. I was glad to see that Cocky, Pussy, Polly, and Cholly appeared to share my distrust, and did not try to tempt her caress.
Poor old kind-hearted, easy-going Claudius! It was plain enough, for all her subtlety, that she had marked him for her own. There was no question, I most honestly believe, but that his personality appealed to her quite as much as his position and estate. It was just the sort that would. Fair, rugged, clear-skinned, strong, with his frosty blue eyes twinkling from under his bushy yellow eyebrows and a wide smile on his boyish face, he was quite the type to fill the amorous eye of any lady from the Levant. There was a glow in the chocolate eyes of Madame Suzanne that was not entirely fiscal, as they rested on Claudius in his faded blue bathing suit. I turned sadly away, wondering if the next generation of Claudii would be as fair to gaze upon.
He gave her his frank, boyish confidence—she a lovely, palpitating widow, two years his senior and with a violent mash. Then he gave her a large canteen of Perkins' Love Gag—would that it had gagged her!—and then he kept on giving her things—good times mostly, shows and shore dinners and the like. But it was all so perfectly friendly. This unalloyed friendship must have made her want to bite. I doubt if Suzanne knew how to flirt. For one thing, she had probably never needed to, the other fellow having always pushed the fighting, and, besides, she took life too seriously and had too much sense. Neither was she common, any more than her brother. She was “ladylike.” She was always ladylike. Ladies, unfortunately, are not always ladylike. There are many cats which at times have better manners.
Claudius kept on giving Suzanne things until Arthur began to get worried. There was too much of the small boy and not enough of the dominant male about Claudius for Arthur's taste. He and Suzanne must have had puzzled and anxious debates over what could possibly be wrong with Claudius' sex—how I hate that word!—centers.
Meanwhile, Claudius was thoroughly enjoying his life, what with his work, his books, and his congenial new friends. And then one day—a hot Sunday in August, when the three were having supper on the terrace of the Casa Pompeiana, and Suzanne was sighing for a thunderstorm to cool her stifling room under the roof of the Fairview Hotel—Claudius came to the Pass of the False Step and put his foot through it.
“T should be very glad if you and Sydney”—it had become “Sydney” and “Claudius” soon after Suzanne's advent—“would stop the night here,” said he. “If this thunderstorm materializes, you'll get wet on your way back, and if it doesn't, you're apt to cook in the night. It's always cool here.”
There was a moment of hesitation on Suzanne's part—not affected, but sincere. Then the invitation was accepted. The following day, Claudius, elated with the pride and pleasure it gave him to act as host, invited them to remain his guests “for the rest of the season,” as he put it, with the vagueness characteristic of his social sense. He balked a little at Suzanne's telling him how delighted she and Sydney would be to do so, but only on condition that he permit them to defray their share of the actual provisions and laundry bills. In the end, Claudius agreed to this, to the infinite disgust of Cocky, Pussy, Polly, Cholly, and myself.