After
By Denis Francis Hannigan
It was the morning after my execution, I had been clumsily electrocuted. But in America such things are only too frequent. However, I cared little now for the malpractises of judges, juries, or executioners.
It was all over. I found myself waking out of a deep sleep. The first thing I saw was the face of the man whom I had murdered. It did not scowl at me. On the contrary, it smiled benevolently.
"Jack, old top, you did me a real good turn when you shot me,” said Harold Ingersoll.
I had fallen madly in love with his wife, and she reciprocated my passion, for she had grown tired of the strange, detached, unworldly man she had married. Harold Ingersoll was a writer, a philosopher, a dreamer of dreams, who had inherited about ten thousand dollars from his father and a visionary’s soul from his mother. While he worked hard at his legal profession, which he found only moderately profitable, his wife read Paracelsus and Swedenborg. The unhappily assorted pair never agreed, and I, as a friend of the family, had no difficulty in winning the affections of the woman who had married the offspring of an unimaginative lawyer and a petticoated spiritualist.
Harold had published six "impossible" novels. By the publication of every one of them he lost money, and when, at last, the reviewers began to take notice of his latest and most extravagant book, he was almost penniless.
Laura, who loved life, was disgusted with her husband’s indifference to practical considerations. I interested her by continually talking about the rise and fall of the stock market. Her husband despised sport, speculation, and the movies. Laura worshiped all three. She played tennis and hockey, and went regularly to baseball matches. I accompanied her, while Harold stayed at home reading or writing. The affair went on pleasantly for five years when suddenly Harold, no longer able to bear the irritation caused by Laura’s sneers and reproaches, began to turn on her, and sometimes abused her.
One night, Laura and I were cut late and came back to her husband’s house shortly before daybreak. Harold came to meet us at the hall door, and sarcastically quoted a well known passage in Byron’s "Don Juan." This made me feel ridiculous, and, under an impulse of uncontrollable anger, I drew my automatic revolver and shot him dead.
Laura fainted. I was arrested, tried, and found guilty.
Before the day fixed for my execution, I made a will, leaving all I had in the world to Laura.
My last moments were by no means painless. Those who pretend that the electric shock which kills the convicted criminal is not terrible are liars or ignorant fools.
2
But here I was in "the next world" and the man I had killed had assured me I had done him a service by shooting him.
No words can describe the place where I and my victim met. It was not so much a place as an atmosphere.106
