King Coffin

VIII The Daily Life of the Stranger

The insomnia was not real, was not actual, since there was no real desire to sleep; it was merely the removal, in one dark strip after another, of insulation; the progressive laying bare of the bright nerves of perception; the painless flaying of the dark integument of consciousness. With the turning over, with the listening, now to the murmur of nocturnal water in the pipes, again to the faint tyang of the grandfather clock in the professor’s apartment next door, or again to the intermittent snicker of the little motor in the electric refrigerator; with the lifting of his hand from beneath his head on the pillow, or the sliding of his fingers along the edge of the half-cool sheet; with each separate action of the restlessness which divided, into marked and conscious sections, the time-chasm which would ordinarily have been void and unconscious, it was as if he stepped closer to his own true being and purpose. On the hours, which came softly on soft air from the dark campanile of Saint Paul’s, — the twelve, the one, the two — came also an incandescent indifference to sleep. To these and other sounds he could be as inaccessible as he wished, as little touched as by the diagonal of cold lamp light, from Massachusetts Avenue, which made a pale remoteness of the ceiling and threw into humble relief the little Buddha on its shelf. These immediate things, his room, his window, his bed, the soft sucking sound made by the curtains in the study against the wire screens, the creaking of a ventilator on the roof of the A. D. Club across the street, were in fact as remote as they could be: they stood at an infinite distance; to cross time and space to them would be like crossing the Milky Way. Their remoteness, of course, lay in their comparative unreality. They belonged now to another and dimmer time-space, they seemed so distant and so silent, measured by the nearness and loudness of his own heart, as to be without meaning and without motion.

And not heart so much as vision.

The vision was this little man, who now so obsessed him: this little man, his house, his clothes, his name, his daily orbit. He was here, in this room: walked like a fly across the ceiling, as if the ceiling were the large white map — (now pinned to the wall over the table in the next room) — of Cambridge: on that map, with its concentric circles which marked the distance, in quarter miles, from the City Hall, a whole week of the life of Jones was now over and over again enacted. He opened his door in Reservoir Street, stooped to pick up The Herald, went in again. He opened the door later, and came out. From the little copper letter box — first unlocking it with a key — he extracted letters, glanced over them, selected some, replaced others. He walked to Huron Avenue, crossed it, and proceeded west to a block of one-story dingy shops between Fayerweather Street and Gurney Street; entered a grocer’s and left an order; then came out to wait for a streetcar. At half past five in the afternoon, he reappeared, carrying an evening paper; looked again in the letter box; unlocked the green door. The upper part of the door was of glass, and from across the street he could be seen going up a flight of stairs which turned to the left.…

His life went by the clock. He came out, to go in again; he went in, to come out again. The streets in which he walked were always the same. Perhaps that was why he so seldom lifted his odd, amused eyes or bothered to look left or right. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — on Friday he had left early, at a few minutes after eight, and come back at four. And at the other end of his life, the School Street end, his goings and comings were just as precise, just as methodical. Always the same route, the same apparently meaningless circuit round Pemberton Square, the pause for the reflective cup of coffee, then the accelerated descent of Beacon Street to the office. And at half past twelve, three-quarters of an hour for lunch, sometimes at a sandwich shop in Province Court, sometimes at the Waldorf in Bromfield Street.

He walked on the ceiling like a fly: it was easy to see him there: easy to meet him, at the bottom of those awful little streets: he came quite suddenly around the corner of Vassal Lane, for example, so suddenly that Ammen jumped, and laughed, for a moment forgetting that Jones did not know him by sight. To turn and saunter away, obliquely across the street, with averted face, and taking cover behind a coal truck, had been very simple. Vassal Lane. That had been an exception, too, in the routine, for Jones had gone there, to the house at the corner of Alpine Street, the first thing in the morning, directly after breakfast. Moreover, he had gone there as if with hesitation: to begin with he had passed it, merely pausing to look rather earnestly at the door; and he had then sauntered, rather slowly, all the way to Fresh Pond Avenue. There, standing across the street from the Pumping station, he had waited for fully five minutes, alternately staring at the pond and the row of half-fledged willows by the station. A dark day, with now and then a little spatter of rain. On the way back, he went into the house — a two-family house like his own — and stayed there about five minutes. It was the sudden meeting with him, at the corner of Vassal Lane and Reservoir Street — (he hadn’t thought Jones would have had time to get so far) — that had first suggested the advisability of hiring a drive-yourself car. Sitting in the closed Buick, parked now at one place and now at another, but usually on the south side of Huron Avenue, it had been easy to see without being seen. For the observation of the area immediately round the house, it was in fact ideal: but of course no good for following. For that, it had been necessary either to board Jones’s streetcar at Appleton Street, having seen him get on, or to lie in wait for him at the top of the ramp in Harvard Square.… Thanks to the little man’s regularity, both had been quite simple.

The neighborhood was detestable — it ought to be burned down. With all its inhabitants. A typical suburban swarm of wooden two-family houses, all exactly alike, brown shingles, dirty white-railed porches and balconies, one or two with projecting flagpoles. Here and there an attempt had been made at a clipped privet hedge: but for the most part the little front yards were bare, except for a forsythia bush or two. At exact intervals, for miles, the cement walk branched in toward a porch, from which opened two doors, one for the lower part of the house, one for the upper. On the right of each house another narrower cement path led to the cellar doors, at the rear. It was along this — on Monday evening — that he had seen Jones, with bare pink hands, bareheaded and wearing an old black sweater, trying to roll a heavy ash can on its rim. It was too much for him — it kept sitting down, wrenching itself away from his fingers. But after a deep breath or two, the hands still resting on the rims, the head bowed, he managed to heave it up again and to roll it a little farther toward the street, — toward the grimy border of ringed earth at the curbstone where week after week it waited for the ash man. The entire street was marked in this fashion. In front of each shabby little house was the deep pair of rings, grooved in the earth, where ash can and garbage can rested. And the inevitable residue of onionskin and eggshell and orange peel.… Sickening.

The clock in the professor’s room sounded, through the thin walls, its tyang—half past two.

He thought of the map, with its concentric circles, — Reservoir Street, one and three-quarter miles from City Hall, at its south end, where it joined Highland Street; but where Jones lived, a little farther. By Yellow Taxi, a fifty-cent fare from the Square.

K. N. Jones. 85 Reservoir Street.…

It had turned out to be Karl — not Kenneth, as he had guessed.

But who was the woman who was seen now and then passing the windows, with a white cloth bound over her hair? It had been impossible to make out whether she was old or young, or what she looked like. Once she had come down the outside stairs at the back, to the cement path, but before he could get a good look at her she had rapped her dustpan twice, sharply, on the edge of the ash can, and gone in again. It might be either his wife or his mother. It might be his sister. It was even possible that there were two women, not one; for occasionally she had seemed taller than he expected. But of this it was difficult to judge. Whoever it was, or whoever they were, thus far they had never come out of the house while he was watching. Probably his wife.

The curious thing was the repugnance which the actual scene had aroused in him from the beginning — from the very beginning. There was something really loathsome in it. The paltry houses, the ill-paved street, the ash cans, the litter, the air of furtiveness and meanness and defeat which overhung the whole neighborhood — there had been something in this which seemed a little outside his calculations. Of course, the unexpected was to be expected. Jones, Karl Jones, was not the sort of fellow who would be found living in a huge and grand apartment house — far from it.

The cheap fur collar had not meant that.

Nor the tweed hat.

But to find just this kind of meanness and sordidness, the sight of Jones wheeling an ash can with bare hands, then dusting, with dusty hands, the ash from the knees of worn trousers—

And all with such an air of good cheer and confidence. The cock-sparrowlike sideways tilt of the head, the ridiculous little strut of accomplishment with which he returned along the cement path! This was something to tighten the muscles in one’s arms, to contract the fingers, to narrow the eyes. But just the same—

No, the objection was not real, could not be real, all this was a natural part of the strangeness, it was inevitable; and in its way, also, it was a fine enough sharpening of the whole point that in its discovery it should bring with it a pullulating ant heap of new and all-too-human experience: to have blundered thus into such an unforeseeable quagmire of the deformed and spiritually unvirtuous — horrible though it might be — was of the very essence of the chosen adventure. To think, for instance, only of the names of those streets, as contrasted with their actual nature — Vassal Lane, Alpine Street, Fayerweather, Fresh Pond Avenue — Alpine, of all things, in a district as flat as a dried river bed, and as noisome! And all the shabby purlieus, moreover, of filled-in clay pits and mudholes, acres of festering tomato tins and sardine tins, rusted fragments of cars, old bedsprings, blown paper, greasy rags. When the wind came from the northwest, one smelt a sour and acrid smell of slow burning, the animal odor of smoldering human refuse, worse than the ghats of India: it drifted day-long from the reclaimed quarries by Fresh Pond, covering the entire forlorn suburb of wretched houses in its bitter miasma. To think, in the morning, of opening one’s windows to that! In the evening, if one walked forth toward the pond, in search of the picturesque, perhaps a sunset over Belmont to lift one’s eyes to, one saw also the shadowy and sinister figures which poked, like hobgoblins, at a score of sickly little flames in that waste land, prodding with sticks to see if here or there some object might be salvaged from the heaps of refuse. Only the trees, in that district, had any dignity, the willow-trees;—and especially the one, an old one, with a trunk as massive as an oak, which stood at the junction of Vassal Lane and Reservoir Street. And this had been useful. Its great girth gave excellent cover.

Of course Jones was poor — no one would live in a neighborhood like that if he could help it. If the Acme Advertising Agency did any business at all, it must be infinitesimal. No further proof of this was needed than that he had himself, twice, spent part of a morning in the bare hall outside the office — not a soul had come or gone in the whole time. And of course Mister T. Farrow must be a thing of the past — if he existed, he had at any rate never been seen. Perhaps Jones had just bought the name and good will. Anyway, apparently, Jones just sat there — three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon — without doing a thing. Once or twice, the telephone had rung, but it had been impossible to overhear what Jones was saying — it might even have been his wife.

What did he do there?

Perhaps that was where the whisky came in. Though he never showed any signs of it.

Or perhaps most of his business was mail-order advertising, the preparation of sales-letters — which could be managed largely by correspondence. A typewriter could be heard there intermittently, and used, moreover, with quite respectable speed. But always, then, came the long silence. In fact, it had soon become only too obvious that the fruitful end for observation was not the business, but the domestic, end of Jones’s little life-pattern — the study of the house, although a great deal more difficult, would in time be more rewarding. But how to manage this? To be seen hanging about there day after day, or even sitting in a car, would ultimately attract attention — it might not be Jones, it might be any one, but it would be dangerous. There was the problem of the postman, for instance.…

Toppan! The very thing.

He sat up in bed, switched on the light in the corner, looked at the hexagonal wrist watch — quarter to three.

Why not present the whole business to Toppan as a mere exercise in detection — the latest and best specimen — a particularly attractive problem? It would join on to the previous conversation perfectly: and his pleasure in it, both their pleasures, would be deliciously enhanced by the fact that Toppan wouldn’t quite dare presume that it was a question of the other thing, the pure murder, or in any case that it was for anything but the novel. Why not? And why not now? To rouse Toppan from his sleep, startle him, take him thus off his guard, with all his conscious defenses down, still surrounded, as it were, by all the naïve transparency of sleep — it would be like turning a harsh searchlight on a naked soul. An experience in itself.

In the study, knotting the dressing gown, he paused to look at the map, leaning close to it to familiarize himself once more with the tangle of small streets between Huron and Concord Avenues, and also to observe the column of dates which he had entered in pencil on the upper left-hand margin: ten of them, — the latest this morning’s. It looked formidable enough. Ten days. Possibly a little slow: but certainly there had been no delay? Map of the City of Cambridge. C. Frank Hooker Acting Engineer. 1932.…

From the table beneath it he picked up the small green book which lay open there, with the pages downward, and read again the passage which had caught his attention earlier in the evening. “But there is the dark eye which glances with a certain fire, and has no depth. There is a keen quick vision which watches, which beholds, but which never yields to the object outside: as a cat watching its prey. The dark glancing look which knows the strangeness, the danger of its object, the need to overcome the object. The eye which is not wide open to study, to learn, but which powerfully, proudly or cautiously glances, and knows the terror or the pure desirability of strangeness in the object it beholds.” Extraordinary that Lawrence should have said just that — italicizing the word “strangeness”—but wasn’t he completely mistaken in assuming that there was no desire — in the savage eye — to learn, to study? In any case, what was the savage eye? Who was to say? or who was to say that — finally speaking — it wasn’t the only true eye in the world, the only one which saw virtuously?

The terror, or the desirability of strangeness.

The pure desirability!

That was odd, too. An odd, but perhaps natural, antithesis. Something a little uncomfortable in it, as well. But why? After all, if the prime need was to overcome the object, then the study of it was absolutely indispensable, was simply a means to an end. The cat, in short, understands—in the deepest sense — the mouse: observes it with that sort of pure virtue of love which is the prelude to conquest. It sees, and knows, the mouse—and that is precisely its playing with it. In the savage eye there is therefore not merely the desire to kill, there is also that look which just as coldly embraces a tree, a landscape, a star, an idea. It must purify what it sees, and see what it purifies: the only vision which is noble. There is no compromise with the object, no placid or reasoned acceptance of it. It is seen, understood, and destroyed. The vision is pure.

He said it aloud, as he descended the half-dark stairs—“the vision is pure”—remembered his pipe and tobacco and went back for them, descended again with the pipe in his hand. Toppan’s door was unlocked, he stepped in, switched on the light, his forefinger automatically finding the ebony button in the dark, then for a moment he stood unmoving in the silent room. The bedroom door, in the far right-hand corner, was closed, the green window shade had been pulled down, except for three inches at the bottom, where the night-dark showed, a sheet of music had fallen from the piano and lay open on the bench, a brown felt hat dangled from one corner of the mantel. Taking three steps forward, to the middle of the gray carpet, he listened: he could hear the deep and regular breathing. Toppan had not waked: lay there at his mercy. To read the diary now, with Toppan in the next room—

And there it was, on top of the desk.

It had been closed on a pen, tonight’s entry was still fresh.

He turned the pages.

“May 2. The great Jasper has certainly stirred them up, and no mistake. Saw all of them — Sandbach, Gerta, Mrs. Taber, her husband, and that analyst chap, also a little fellow from Chicago, at the C Bookshop this afternoon, and what they wouldn’t do to him if they could! Sandbach and Mrs. T. in particular. They had a long discussion of the episode at Tremont Temple — I must say I couldn’t help laughing, for Jasper seems to have done a first-rate theatrical job of it: apparently just walked in and dismissed them. Not so bad! Goodness knows there is something rather fine about it, even if one doesn’t feel moved to emulation. Gerta, however, I noticed, didn’t have anything to say: what does she know? I had an impulse to talk with her, but of course, in the circumstances — I decided it could wait, perhaps she doesn’t know what I know, or guess, and there’s plenty of time. Mrs. T. says what he needs is a good spanking, that he’s spoiled. Sandbach rather surprised me by suggesting that he’s definitely insane. The analyst just said ‘Oh, no, perhaps a little paranoid,’ wanted to know what his relations were with his father. Gerta could have told him, of course, and so could I, but neither of us said anything. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure that would account for much, though I daresay an analyst would do him a lot of good. I never knew any one so cut off as he is — but then, you’ve got to admit that he seems entirely and horribly self-sufficient. It seems impossible to get at him, much less to hurt him. Walked back with Gerta, and she asked me in, but I didn’t go.… Squash with Hempel—

“May 3. Law Society—

“May 4, 5, 6, 7—

“May 8.… and had a curious encounter with Sandbach and Gerta outside the Fogg Museum. They looked as if they’d been quarreling, anyway something was up, they were walking along very slowly ahead of me, and just before I caught up with them they turned and came toward me. Their voices were raised a little, they had that fixed and angry look, didn’t see me at first, and then were both embarrassed. Very self-conscious meeting. I thought Gerta looked extremely pale. I asked them to tea, and Gerta came up, S pretending (?) that he had to get back to town to go over a talk he is giving at the Burroughs Foundation. Sounded like an alibi. Gerta was unusually quiet, subdued, didn’t say anything about J till after we had had tea, then asked me if I had seen much of him lately. I said quite truthfully that I hadn’t. She said she hadn’t either, and just wondered whether he was ‘all right’—wanted then to know whether I had seen him at all. As a matter of fact it hadn’t occurred to me before, but when I stopped to think of it, I had been pretty busy, and I don’t believe I have seen him, even a glimpse of him, for over a week. She thought this was a little queer, and asked me if I didn’t agree: as before, I could see she wanted to discuss the question of his sanity, in fact she got as far as saying she was worried about him, but I pooh-poohed it, reminded her that he had always been like that, going in for temporary disappearances and so forth. I don’t think I convinced her, but then I didn’t try very much, for I was uneasy about perhaps getting in too deep. She’s frightfully in love with him. I have a feeling Sandbach is jealous, and that the row was connected with it: of course S has been hanging around her for a hell of a while. She was a little hurt with me, I could see, managed to suggest something like ‘well, if you don’t want to talk I can’t make you’ but just the same was very nice about it, as she always is. A damned fine person, I admire her reticence, why in God’s name must she throw herself away on that incomparable egoist! It certainly is odd that neither of us has seen Jasper all week: I wonder if by any chance he’s gone to work on that fantastic Coffin idea: and I wonder what the analyst would make of that! Lordy, but wouldn’t he get his teeth into it.

“May 9.—Could it possibly be J I saw in a Buick on Concord Avenue? If he’s bought a car, that would account for a great deal — it’ll be a load off Gerta’s mind, anyway. Asked Jack, the janitor, if he knew anything about Jasper’s getting a car but he said d-d-d-didn’t know, M-m-m-mister Ammen hadn’t been around much. What next?”

What next?

Replacing the fountain pen in the loose-leaf diary, he went to the bedroom door, opened it quickly, looked around the edge of it and saw the dark shape on the bed in the corner, waited for it to stir. As it did not move, he said:

— Hi. Are you awake?

Kicking the door so that it swung open widely to the wall, the light falling across the brass bedrail, he returned and unlocked the inlaid tantalus by the piano. He took out the bottle of Haig, and while he was stooping to see if there were any glasses he heard Toppan’s voice, a little curt, behind him.

— Oh, it’s you.

Not turning, he said:

— Yes. I couldn’t sleep.

— What time is it — isn’t it a little late?

— Not three yet. Haven’t you got any glasses?

— You want a drink?

— I want a drink and I want to talk to you.

Toppan’s blue eyes seemed larger than usual, without his spectacles, his red hair stood up straight in a sort of point, he looked gnome-like. He was in pajamas.

— All right. Wait.

He got the glasses, and his dressing-gown, came back a little sheepishly, it was obvious that he was angry but wasn’t going to say so. He put the glasses on the piano-bench, ran his hands through his hair.

— Help yourself, Ammen. I won’t join you.

— You’re angry, aren’t you?

— Not at all.

— But it doesn’t matter — I want your advice.

— Advice? about what.

— That story I was telling you about. The question is — how much can I trust you — how discreet are you?

Toppan, putting on his spectacles, with very carefully raised hands, sat down in the mission rocking chair and smiled uneasily, ingratiatingly. He looked slightly silly, his transparency was too obvious, he had that almost offensive emotional nakedness which often goes with red hair; but also he was intelligent, he must be watched and controlled. He said, looking up obliquely through his spectacles:

— Ask and it shall be given unto you.

— Don’t be an ass. The point is this. For ten days I’ve been watching a man — I won’t mention his name, or say where he lives — just as I planned, it’s a complete stranger, the — as you might say—corpus vile of my experiment. For the sake of convenience, we’ll call him Kazis.

— It’s a good name.

— All right. I’ve learned a lot about him. I know where he lives, what he does, that he is probably married, somewhat hard up. I know a lot of his habits. Technically, too, as you would say yourself — I’m thinking, of course, of your observation of that osteopath in Brookline — it’s been interesting. But now I’ve come to a sort of impasse, don’t know quite what to do next: you can give me some advice.

— Oh, well, I don’t pretend to be an expert — but if you’ll give me an outline of how you’ve gone about it—

— Very simple. I saw him first in the subway, followed him to his office in town. Then perhaps I made a mistake. His office door had two names on it — Kazis and another. I wanted to find out which one was his, so I sent up a Western Union messenger with a message addressed to Kazis: the messenger boy came back and described him to me, and of course it was Kazis.

— I see. I don’t see anything wrong with that. I assume Kazis hadn’t seen you.

— Certainly not.

— And presumably the boy didn’t say who he brought the message from?

— No. You miss the point. It isn’t Kazis I’m thinking of, it’s the messenger. Don’t you see, in this novel, King Coffin, if ultimately my hero kills Kazis that messenger boy might remember the incident, remember the man who gave him the message — remember me. Of course, in the present instance it doesn’t matter, as naturally I don’t intend to commit any murder.

— Naturally!

— Naturally. But for the novel I want a foolproof method — do you understand? Unless you think this might be reasonably safe.

Toppan reflected, a little embarrassed, his eyes downcast.

— But I thought, in your novel, it didn’t matter if the hero was found out — that a part of the virtue of your pure murder would be in the very fact that—

— No. What I said was that in the circumstances it would have to be secret — only ideally could it be done with complete indifference to risks. For the purpose of my story, I want the detection itself completely foolproof.

— I see. Actually, there needn’t as a matter of fact be much risk in the way you did it. I suppose you didn’t sign any name?

— What do you think I am?

— Well then, assuming for the sake of argument that you eventually did kill Kazis, but not, say, for a month or two, the chances of your being found through the messenger boy would be practically nil. He’ll remember the episode of course, and tell about it, and give a fairly good description of you, especially as you happen to be of somewhat striking appearance, owing to your height, but that would hardly be enough to go on. You’d be safe as a church, as long as he didn’t happen to see you again — which you could easily avoid — or unless, of course, some other person or persons happened to have reasons to connect you with the crime: in which case you’d be brought before the messenger for identification. Without that, his mere description of the mysterious person as a tall man who wore a black velours hat would hardly be enough, would it?

— You think not?

— No.

Holding the green glass in his hand, he smiled down at Toppan, who smiled back. Toppan was on his guard: he must be on guard himself. The question about King Coffin’s indifference to discovery, for example, had not been quite ingenuous — or had it? But if Toppan was fascinated by the possibility, clearly he didn’t really believe in it: he speculated, he was a little frightened, but that was all.

You speak of other persons who might have reason to connect him — what do you mean?

Toppan laughed, drawing the dressing gown over his crossed knees.

— Why nothing special — it all depends.

— Depends on what!

— Well, to be frank, in the present case, assuming for the moment that you are King Coffin—

— You can assume as much as you like. It’s your own assumption, isn’t it?

— Of course. I mean, there’s myself. I know about it.

— Do you?

— Don’t I?

— You mean you’re an accessory before the fact?

— Oh, I could wriggle out of that!

— In other words, my hero had better not discuss it — even with those who share his views.

— Perhaps not, — there’s also Gerta.

— No — you can leave her out of it.

— Very well.

He crossed to the mantel, lifted the hat from the corner where it hung, looked inside it to see the maker’s mark, replaced it. Revolving his glass on the varnished ledge, he examined the delicate white flowers in the color-print, the cluster of rose-tinted lychee nuts, the blue-breasted birds. The bird not quite sufficiently stylized. Leaning closer to this, his back still turned to Toppan, he said:

— It’s a useful suggestion.… You know, I actually talked with him for ten minutes.

— Good Lord. How was that?

— Quite simple. In my message I asked him to ring me up — at a certain number — giving no name of course — and talked with him, pretending I wanted some work done. Discussed it with him, and told him I’d ring him again.

— And did you?

— Yes. At his house.

There was a pause, and as Toppan said nothing in reply to this, he turned and looked at him. His hand was over his eyes, his head was bowed a little forward. Perhaps he was tired — perhaps he was playing ’possum. The right foot, slippered, the veined instep showing below the green pajama leg, jigged up and down, mechanically, slightly, with the beating of his heart. Otherwise he was motionless. Looking down on him like this, one could see the white scalp through the disordered red hair: the hand across the forehead, by contrast, looked very living, very vital. Toppan’s consciousness was perhaps in his hand.

— But never mind that. Are you awake?

— Of course.

— What I want to know is, what can I do next.

While Toppan pondered this, kneading his forehead with his fingers, Ammen filled and lit his pipe: he watched Toppan over the flame, began to wonder whether the whole thing wasn’t a mistake, a miscalculation. Toppan was being a little too wary, and, as his diary had made clear, he perhaps now suspected a shade too much for comfort. He had begun to step out of his role as mere satellite, wanted to enjoy detecting the detective. If he and Gerta should now, as seemed not impossible, put their heads together—

— I said, what can I do next.

— It depends on what you want. And of course on how much you’ve already got. I take it you’ve already observed all that can be superficially observed—

— Yes. I know his daily habits, as I’ve told you, his clothes, his shoes, the papers he reads, the day he puts out the ash can, and so on. I know what he’s like. A thoroughly commonplace and somewhat conceited little person, a sort of unconvinced failure. Certainly nobody you’d want to waste five minutes with, otherwise. You ought to see the house, for instance — a dreary two-family thing, one of millions, you know without going into it exactly what it will be like — cheap carpets that look as if they’d been designed in vomit, bead curtains, a wallpaper in the bathroom meant to look like tiles, a mission clock, a gas log fire. But all this is general — I want now the specific. You understand? And of course without meeting him.

— Not so easy. But there might be ways—

— What.

— If you want to go into the house, you could pretend to be canvassing for something. There’d be a risk in it but not much — if you went in the daytime, which you would, you’d see only his wife, or whoever lives there, and even if—

— What.

— Even if in your supposed role as an eventual murderer you later kill her husband she would have, presumably, no special reason for connecting you with it, or even for recalling your visit.

— Not a bad idea. But for one thing, I’m beginning to be uneasy about appearing in that neighborhood too much — as you’ve probably noticed, there is always a postman about, or a policeman. What about that.

— Yes, I know. It’s not too easy. Have you thought of using a car?

— A car?

— Yes, a car. It’s of course one of the recognized devices — you sit in the car a little way off, it prevents your having to dodge about behind telephone poles day after day, and so on. I told you I used one that time in Brookline.

— I hadn’t thought of it — it might be a good idea. You mean, hire one.

— Yes.

— I’ll keep it in mind.

— Or if there happens to be an apartment vacant across the street—

— There isn’t.

— How long do you propose going on with it, anyway? After all, there isn’t much to gain after a certain point—

— My dear Toppan you’re sometimes very stupid. In a pure study of this sort there can be no limit.

— Incidentally, that time you had him call you on the telephone — isn’t there a weakness there?

— You mean he’d have a record of the number? No. The occupant of that apartment has been carefully instructed, if Kazis calls again, to say that the whole project is off, and without mentioning any names. It would be a dead end in any inquiry — completely.

— Do you think it’s quite fair to use Gerta for that?

— Did I say it was Gerta?

— It’s fairly obvious.

— You’re quite mistaken. It isn’t.

— In that case I’m relieved.

— Keep the change.

There was a pause — he walked to the piano, touched one note, felt a little defrauded, the thing was not going exactly as planned, the tone was wrong, as out of key — somehow — as this too-vibrant c-sharp. He said:

— I’m afraid you’re not much help, but thanks just the same. There’s one thing further — I must remind you that I expect you to treat all this in the strictest confidence. And since you mention Gerta, I’ll repeat what I said to you before, I think perhaps you’re forgetting it a little — I don’t want any interference there. I won’t go into details, but there is a very delicate and peculiar situation between Gerta and me, of great importance to both of us, and I don’t want any meddling with it — is that clear?

— Perfectly.

— Then why do you blush?

— As I said once before, that’s my innocence.

— All right. Keep it. And keep out.

— Just as you say, professor!

— If you don’t, I shall know it — I shall make it my business to know it. And I don’t think you’d enjoy the consequences.

— My dear fellow—

— Thanks for the smell of whisky. Good night.

Arrived on the top floor, he felt a little breathless, a little stifled, he suddenly discovered that he was holding his pipe too hard, and with a perspiring hand. The whole thing had been somehow forced—it had not come naturally, was not natural now; the effect was of a slight jangling. The map still hung there, with its marginal notes, the list of dates and scenes, it was all just as clear as before, just as orderly; but there was also a queer something which was changing. For one thing, he had not, as he now saw he had intended, presented Jones to Toppan, and this had seemed important. He had wanted — that was it — to make Toppan vividly aware of him — as vividly as he was aware himself. He had wanted to photograph him for Toppan — tweed hat, fur collar, ash can, and all: the mole, the perpetual smirk, the mustache, the jaunty little vulgarity of bearing. Curious he hadn’t seen that — his purpose had not been so much to ask advice as simply to talk about Jones; and in talking about him — was that it? — to take further possession of him. But for some reason, this project had broken down; Jones seemed if anything farther off than before; the excitement had cooled.

It must be simply that he was tired.

From the window he looked obliquely down at the deserted and lamp-lit stillness of Massachusetts Avenue, then, as always, lifted his eyes to the one mysterious light which always burned nightlong in an upper room of Boylston Hall. What secret was in that room—?

And at once, as always, when he thought of it, the vision returned; dimension after dimension rolled off soundlessly to disclose depth above depth, height below height; where vapor had been, the tree of clouds began once again to thrust upward with swirling boughs.

This was good, he could laugh again, Jones was still there. Let the clocks go as madly as they liked, Jones would still be waiting for him, waiting calmly.