a murder, and all murderers have to confess, so he wrote the book, changing the characters and circumstances, as a meansy of confessing without putting himself in jeopardy. The judge was witty and sarcastic. He said that even if the guy was an inventor of stories and was in a court, he needn't try for the job of court jester. I'll bet the lawyers had a good hearty laugh at that one. Huh? But the author said it was no joke, that was why he wrote the book and any obscenity in it was only incidental, he really had croaked a guy. So the judge soaked him fifty bucks for contempt of court and chased him off the stand. I guess he's a nut? You .tell me.'
Wolfe's great chest went up and out in a sigh; he put a marker in the book and closed it and laid it on the desk, and leaned himself back, gently ponderous, in his chair. iy He blinked twice. 'Well?'
I went across to my desk and got the paper and opened it out to the page.
'Nothing maybe. I guess he's a nut. His name is Paul Chapin and he's written several books. The title of this one is Devil Take the Hindmost. He graduated from Harvard in 1912. He's a lop; it mentions here about his getting up to the stand with his crippled leg but it doesn't say which one.'
Wolfe compressed his lips. 'Is it possible,' he demanded, 'that lop is an abbreviation of lopsided, and that you use it as a metaphor for cripple?' ‹I wouldn't know about the metaphor, but lop means cripple in my circle.'
Wolfe sighed again, and set about the process of rising from his chair. 'Thank God,' he said, 'the hour saves me from further analogies and colloquialisms.' The clock on the wall said one minute till four – time for him to go up to the plant-rooms. He made it to his feet, pulled the points of his vest down but failed as usual to cover with it the fold of bright yellow shirt that had puffed out, and moved across to the door.
At the threshold he paused. 'Archie.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Phone Murger's to send over at once a copy of Devil Take the Hindmost, by Paul Chapin.'
'Maybe they won't. It's suppressed pending the court decision.'
'Nonsense. Speak to Murger or Ballard. What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?'
He went on towards the elevator, and I sat down at my desk and reached for the telephone.
2
After breakfast the next morning, Saturday, I fooled with the plant records a while and then went to the kitchen to annoy Fritz.
Wolfe, of course, wouldn't be down until eleven o'clock. The roof of the old brownstone house on West Thirty-fifth Street where he had lived for twenty years, and me with him for the last seven of them, was glassed in and partitioned into rooms where varying conditions of temperature and humidity were maintained – by the vigilance of Theodore Horstmann – for the ten thousand orchids that lined the benches and shelves.
Wolfe had once remarked to me that the orchids were his concubines: insipid, expensive, parasitic and temperamental.
He brought them, in their diverse forms and colors, to the limits of their perfection, and then gave them away; he had never sold one. His patience and ingenuity, supported by Horstmann's fidelity, had produced remarkable results and gained for the roof a reputation in quite different circles from those whose interest centered in the downstairs office. In all weathers and under any circumstances whatever, his four hours a day on the roof with Horstmann – from nine to eleven in the morning and from four to six in the afternoon – were inviolable. 4 Ђ This Saturday morning I finally had to admit that Fritz's good humor was too much for me. By eleven o'clock I was back in the office trying to pretend there might be something to do if I looked for it, but I'm not much good at pretending. I was thinking, ladies and gentlemen, my friends and customers, I won't hold out for a real case with worry and action and profit in it, just give us any old kind of a break. I'll even tail a chorus-girl for you, or hide in the bathroom for the guy that's stealing the toothpaste, anything this side of industrial espionage. Anything…
Wolfe came in and said good morning.
The mail didn't take long. He signed a couple of checks I had made out for bills he had gone over the day before, and asked me with a sigh what the bank balance was, and gave me a few short letters. I tapped them off and went out with them to the mailbox. When I got back Wolfe was starting on a second bottle of beer, leaning back in his chair, and I thought I saw a look in his half-closed eyes. At least, I thought, he's not back on the pretty snowf lakes again. I sat at my desk and let the typewriter down.
Wolfe said, 'Archie. One would know everything in the world there is to know, if one waited long enough. The one fault in the passivity of Buddha as a technique for the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom is the miserably brief span of human life. He sat through the first stanza of the first canto of the preamble, and then left for an appointment with… let us say, with a certain chemist.'
'Yes sir. You mean, we just go on sitting here and we learn a lot.'
'Not a lot. But more, a little more each century.'
'You maybe. Not me. If I sit here about two more days I'll be so damn goofy I won't know anything.'
Wolfe's eyes flickered faintly. 'I would not care to seem mystic, but might not that, in your case, mean an increase?'
'Sure.' I grunted. 'If you had not once instructed me never again to tell you to go to hell, I would tell you to go to hell.'
