“You put that question before, Phil,” Jones answered.
“Again and again I have put it. But, tell me, do you?”
Professionally, if pontifically, Jones took it up.
“The theory of crime is human and relatively modern. Formerly people did as they liked. Subsequently they devised rules for their own behavior. Those who broke the rules were treated as malefactors. The theory of crime is therefore human. As for murder, while usual and legitimate in Neozoic times, today it properly belongs to the domain of mental pathology.”
With deepening gloom Rochester considered it. Then, and rather fiercely, he threw out:
“If you were wholly in love with a girl who was equally in love with you, and you were jockeyed out of it, how would you feel? How would you act? Would you be content to analyze the situation from the standpoint of history and therapeutics?”
Jones glanced at the stiletto.
“Few of us can tell in advance how we should act in any emergency. We may think we know, but that is because we don’t realize that we are apt to change our ideas about everything—except the high opinion which we have of ourselves.”
Rochester, entangled at once in the coils of that aphorism, resigned himself to it.
“Well, in any event, it was haphazard, in a village street, that I met her, and it was Nina who introduced me. The circumstances were such that Nina could not very well do otherwise, but she effected it as if saying:
“ ‘Here, off with your hat, and trot along with you!’
“Nina and I were both visiting at the same house. At the moment we were going on to luncheon at another house, and I thought she was just in a hurry—which she usually was. Then she marched me off. Meanwhile, after thanking Priscilla—a proceeding which Nina characterized as being in very poor taste—I could not but remark the contrast between them. You would have said that they came of alien races, from different zones. Priscilla Mather, with her Puritan face, suggested a church; Nina Varian, with her Fifth Avenue atmosphere, resembled a bazaar. One was all soul, the other all life.”
One was a lily, the other an orchid, thought Jones, who cared no more for orchids than he had for the late Mrs. Rochester.
“Well?” he proddingly threw out.
“Well, there you have the cast of the drama—myself and these two girls. They were the leads. For minor characters throw in a deacon and a plumber.”
“A plumber!” Jones exclaimed.
“Well, why not? Everybody can’t be a bestseller.”
“The Lord forbid!” Jones fervently protested, while mentally foreseeing that in this moving picture the plumber was of course the villain.
“The deacon,” Rochester resumed, “was Priscilla’s father, a thin-lipped psalm-singer in a duster. The plumber—but I will get to him presently. It was from Nina that I learned of him; but not until later. At the time I knew nothing except that I was young, that Priscilla was young, that we were both in the festival of life, and of a life filled to the brim with hosannas. Throughout the green afternoons and sudden dusks that I passed with her I had that sense of exhilaration which no grape has ever produced, and of which only those in love with love are conscious. To employ a homely expression, I felt as if I could jump out of my skin. Perhaps I was a little insane, as a healthy and happy child will sometimes become. I can remember that I would laugh for no reason, and yet what better reason could there be? But the laughter ceased, the exhilaration passed, the hosannas died in my throat. I had thought paradise so neighborly. The bitterest lesson of life is that always it lies just beyond!”
Rochester paused, opened and closed a hand.
“Between us no word had been said. It was her eyes that spoke. Mine had asked and hers had answered. No word had been said, yet our hearts had met. That is the ideal. Ours was the rapture of kisses without the contact of lips. We knew, and that knowledge transcended speech. We knew, and that knowledge exceeded bliss. In silence and the communion of spirit divinely we were betrothed—or at least I thought so. It was then, when happiness had reached its apogee, that, precisely as the lightning strikes and rescales the sky, it was then that happiness blinded and vanished.”
IV
At this point Jones lost the thread for a moment. He was thinking of the eternal story, told first perhaps in Babylon and retold ever since—the story of lovers irreparably parted at the beginning and inevitably united at the end. It is a famous story. However old, it is always new, and Jones wondered if he could not retell it, with Priscilla and Rochester—under other names—for leads.
Yet the manifest bribe to the coroner, and the antecedent object on the floor—these things blocked him. In considering them he must have missed something, for when he caught up with Rochester again the latter was telling of Boston, where he had gone for a ring, and where he had run into Nina.
“When she told me,” he was saying, “I experienced the curious and by no means enviable sensation of falling from an inordinate height. I had a sense of struggle with the intangible, in which my brain seemed to tip.”
“When she told you what?” inquired Jones, getting back at it.
“About Priscilla. It appeared that for a year she had been secretly married. Nina had stood up with her, and she told me of it—only, as she assured me, and as I realized, for my good. Yes, I realized that; but the goodness of it was that of the surgeon’s knife. God, how it hurt!”
“And what,” Jones asked, “did you say to the young woman when you saw her again?”
“I did not see her again—at least, not for a long time. I couldn’t see her. Yet I did, and
