Book: Murder in Any Degree

O >> Owen Johnson >> Murder in Any Degree



[Illustration: "I'll come here, I'll be your model, I'll sit for you by
the hour"]




MURDER IN ANY DEGREE: ONE HUNDRED IN THE DARK: A COMEDY FOR WIVES:
THE LIE: EVEN THREES: A MAN OF NO IMAGINATION: LARRY MOORE:
MY WIFE'S WEDDING PRESENTS: THE SURPRISES OF THE LOTTERY


BY OWEN JOHNSON Author of "Stover at Yale," "The Varmint," etc., etc.


WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY F.R. GRUGER AND LEON GUIPON


NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1913

1907, 1912, 1913, THE CENTURY CO.

1911, THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

1911, THE NATIONAL POST CO.

1912, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING MAGAZINE

1908, THE RIDGWAY COMPANY

1906, ASSOCIATED SUNDAY MAGAZINES, INCORPORATED

1910, THE PEARSON PUBLISHING COMPANY

_Published, August, 1913_




CONTENTS


MURDER IN ANY DEGREE

ONE HUNDRED IN THE DARK

A COMEDY FOR WIVES

THE LIE

EVEN THREES

A MAN OF NO IMAGINATION

LARRY MOORE

MY WIFE'S WEDDING PRESENTS

THE SURPRISES OF THE LOTTERY




ILLUSTRATIONS


"I'll come here, I'll be your model, I'll sit for you by the hour"

From his tone the group perceived that the hazards had brought to him
some abrupt coincidence

Rantoul, ... decorating his ankles with lavender and black

Our Lady of the Sparrows

"Oh, tell me, little ball, is it ta-ta or good-by?"

Wild-eyed and hilarious they descended on the clubhouse with the
miraculous news

A committee carefully examined the books of the club

"You gave him--the tickets! The Lottery Tickets!"




MURDER IN ANY DEGREE




I


One Sunday in March they had been marooned at the club, Steingall the
painter and Quinny the illustrator, and, having lunched late, had bored
themselves separately to their limits over the periodicals until,
preferring to bore each other, they had gravitated together in easy
arm-chairs before the big Renaissance fireplace.

Steingall, sunk in his collar, from behind the black-rimmed spectacles,
which, with their trailing ribbon of black, gave a touch of Continental
elegance to his cropped beard and colonel's mustaches, watched without
enthusiasm the three mammoth logs, where occasional tiny flames gave
forth an illusion of heat.

Quinny, as gaunt as a militant friar of the Middle Ages, aware of
Steingall's protective reverie, spoke in desultory periods, addressing
himself questions and supplying the answers, reserving his epigrams for
a larger audience.

At three o'clock De Gollyer entered from a heavy social performance,
raising his eyebrows in salute as others raise their hats, and slightly
dragging one leg behind. He was an American critic who was busily
engaged in discovering the talents of unrecognized geniuses of the
European provinces. When reproached with his migratory enthusiasm, he
would reply, with that quick, stiffening military click with which he
always delivered his _bons mots_:

"My boy, I never criticize American art. I can't afford to. I have too
many charming friends."

At four o'clock, which is the hour for the entree of those who escape
from their homes to fling themselves on the sanctuary of the club,
Rankin, the architect, arrived with Stibo, the fashionable painter of
fashionable women, who brought with him the atmosphere of pleasant soap
and an exclusive, smiling languor. A moment later a voice was heard from
the anteroom, saying:

"If any one telephones, I'm not in the club--any one at all. Do you
hear?"

Then Towsey, the decorator, appeared at the letterboxes in spats,
militant checks, high collar and a choker tie, which, yearning toward
his ears, gave him the appearance of one who had floundered up out of
his clothes for the third and last time. He came forward, frowned at the
group, scowled at the negative distractions of the reading-room, and
finally dragged over his chair just as Quinny was saying:

"Queer thing--ever notice it?--two artists sit down together, each
begins talking of what he's doing--to avoid complimenting the other,
naturally. As soon as the third arrives they begin carving up another;
only thing they can agree on, see? Soon as you get four or more of the
species together, conversation always comes around to marriage. Ever
notice that, eh?"

"My dear fellow," said De Gollyer, from the intolerant point of view of
a bachelor, "that is because marriage is your one common affliction.
Artists, musicians, all the lower order of the intellect, marry. They
must. They can't help it. It's the one thing you can't resist. You begin
it when you're poor to save the expense of a servant, and you keep it up
when you succeed to have some one over you to make you work. You belong
psychologically to the intellectually dependent classes, the
clinging-vine family, the masculine parasites; and as you can't help
being married, you are always damning it, holding it responsible for all
your failures."

At this characteristic speech, the five artists shifted slightly, and
looked at De Gollyer over their mustaches with a lingering appetite,
much as a group of terriers respect the family cat.

"My dear chaps, speaking as a critic," continued De Gollyer, pleasantly
aware of the antagonism he had exploded, "you remain children afraid of
the dark--afraid of being alone. Solitude frightens you. You lack the
quality of self-sufficiency that is the characteristic of the higher
critical faculties. You marry because you need a nurse."

He ceased, thoroughly satisfied with the prospect of having brought on
a quarrel, raised thumb and first finger in a gingerly loop, ordered a
dash of sherry and winked across the group to Tommers, who was listening
around his paper from the reading-room.

"De Gollyer, you are only a 'who's who' of art," said Quinny, with,
however, a hungry gratitude for a topic of such possibilities. "You
understand nothing of psychology. An artist is a multiple personality;
with each picture he paints he seeks a new inspiration. What is
inspiration?"

"Ah, that's the point--inspiration," said Steingall, waking up.

"Inspiration," said Quinny, eliminating Steingall from his preserves
with the gesture of brushing away a fly--"inspiration is only a form of
hypnosis, under the spell of which a man is capable of rising outside of
and beyond himself, as a horse, under extraordinary stress, exerts a
muscular force far beyond his accredited strength. The race of geniuses,
little and big, are constantly seeking this outward force to hypnotize
them into a supreme intellectual effort. Talent does not understand such
a process; it is mechanical, unvarying, chop-chop, day in and day out.
Now, what you call inspiration may be communicated in many ways--by the
spectacle of a mob, by a panorama of nature, by sudden and violent
contrasts of points of view; but, above all, as a continual stimulus,
it comes from that state of mental madness which is produced by love."

"Huh?" said Stibo.

"Anything that produces a mental obsession, _une idee fixe_, is a form
of madness," said Quinny, rapidly. "A person in love sees only one face,
hears only one voice; at the base of the brain only one thought is
constantly drumming. Physically such a condition is a narcotic; mentally
it is a form of madness that in the beneficent state is powerfully
hypnotic."

At this deft disentanglement of a complicated idea, Rankin, who, like
the professional juryman, wagged his head in agreement with each speaker
and was convinced by the most violent, gazed upon Quinny with absolute
adoration.

"We were speaking of woman," said Towsey, gruffly, who pronounced the
sex with a peculiar staccato sound.

"This little ABC introduction," said Quinny, pleasantly, "is necessary
to understand the relation a woman plays to the artist. It is not the
woman he seeks, but the hypnotic influence which the woman can exert on
his faculties if she is able to inspire him with a passion."

"Precisely why he marries," said De Gollyer.

"Precisely," said Quinny, who, having seized the argument by chance, was
pleasantly surprised to find that he was going to convince himself. "But
here is the great distinction: to be an inspiration, a woman should
always represent to the artist a form of the unattainable. It is the
search for something beyond him that makes him challenge the stars, and
all that sort of rot, you know."

"The tragedy of life," said Rankin, sententiously, "is that one woman
cannot mean all things to one man all the time."

It was a phrase which he had heard the night before, and which he flung
off casually with an air of spontaneity, twisting the old Spanish ring
on his bony, white fingers, which he held invariably in front of his
long, sliding nose.

"Thank you, I said that about the year 1907," said Quinny, while
Steingall gasped and nudged Towsey. "That is the tragedy of life, not
the tragedy of art, two very different things. An artist has need of
ten, fifteen, twenty women, according to the multiplicity of his ideas.
He should be always violently in love or violently reacting."

"And the wife?" said De Gollyer. "Has she any influence?"

"My dear fellow, the greatest. Without a wife, an artist falls a prey to
the inspiration of the moment--condemned to it; and as he is not an
analyst, he ends by imagining he really is in love. Take
portrait-painting. Charming lady sits for portrait, painter takes up his
brushes, arranges his palette, seeks inspiration,--what is below the
surface?--something intangible to divine, seize, and affix to his
canvas. He seeks to know the soul; he seeks how? As a man in love seeks,
naturally. The more he imagines himself in love, the more completely
does the idea obsess him from morning to night--plain as the nose on
your face. Only there are other portraits to paint. Enter the wife."

"Charming," said Stibo, who had not ceased twining his mustaches in his
pink fingers.

"Ah, that's the point. What of the wife?" said Steingall, violently.

"The wife--the ideal wife, mind you--is then the weapon, the refuge. To
escape from the entanglement of his momentary inspiration, the artist
becomes a man: my wife and _bonjour_. He returns home, takes off the
duster of his illusion, cleans the palette of old memories, washes away
his vows, protestations, and all that rot, you know, lies down on the
sofa, and gives his head to his wife to be rubbed. Curtain. The comedy
is over."

"But that's what they don't understand," said Steingall, with
enthusiasm. "That's what they will _never_ understand."

"Such miracles exist?" said Towsey with a short, disagreeable laugh.

"I know the wife of an artist," said Quinny, "whom I consider the most
remarkable woman I know--who sits and knits and smiles. She is one who
understands. Her husband adores her, and he is in love with a woman a
month. When he gets in too deep, ready for another inspiration, you
know, she calls up the old love on the telephone and asks her to stop
annoying her husband."

"Marvelous!" said Steingall, dropping his glasses.

"No, really?" said Rankin.

"Has she a sister?" said Towsey.

Stibo raised his eyes slowly to Quinny's but veiled as was the look, De
Gollyer perceived it, and smilingly registered the knowledge on the
ledger of his social secrets.

"That's it, by George! that is it," said Steingall, who hurled the
enthusiasm of a reformer into his pessimism. "It's all so simple; but
they won't understand. And why--do you know why? Because a woman is
jealous. It isn't simply of other women. No, no, that's not it; it's
worse than that, ten thousand times worse. She's jealous of your _art_!
That's it! There you have it! She's jealous because she can't understand
it, because it takes you away from her, because she can't _share_ it.
That's what's terrible about marriage--no liberty, no individualism, no
seclusion, having to account every night for your actions, for your
thoughts, for the things you dream--ah, the dreams! The Chinese are
right, the Japanese are right. It's we Westerners who are all wrong.
It's the creative only that counts. The woman should be subordinated,
should be kept down, taught the voluptuousness of obedience. By Jove!
that's it. We don't assert ourselves. It's this confounded Anglo-Saxon
sentimentality that's choking art--that's what it is."

At the familiar phrases of Steingall's outburst, Rankin wagged his head
in unequivocal assent, Stibo smiled so as to show his fine upper teeth,
and Towsey flung away his cigar, saying:

"Words, words."

At this moment when Quinny, who had digested Steingall's argument, was
preparing to devour the whole topic, Britt Herkimer, the sculptor,
joined them. He was a guest, just in from Paris, where he had been
established twenty years, one of the five men in art whom one counted on
the fingers when the word genius was pronounced. Mentally and physically
a German, he spoke English with a French accent. His hair was cropped
_en brosse_, and in his brown Japanese face only the eyes, staccato,
furtive, and drunk with curiosity, could be seen. He was direct,
opinionated, bristling with energy, one of those tireless workers who
disdain their youth and treat it as a disease. His entry into the group
of his more socially domesticated confreres was like the return of a
wolf-hound among the housedogs.

"Still smashing idols?" he said, slapping the shoulder of Steingall,
with whom and Quinny he had passed his student days, "Well, what's the
row?"

"My dear Britt, we are reforming matrimony. Steingall is for the
importation of Mongolian wives," said De Gollyer, who had written two
favorable articles on Herkimer, "while Quinny is for founding a school
for wives on most novel and interesting lines."

"That's odd," said Herkimer, with a slight frown.

"On the contrary, no," said De Gollyer; "we always abolish matrimony
from four to six."

"You didn't understand me," said Herkimer, with the sharpness he used in
his classes.

From his tone the group perceived that the hazards had brought to him
some abrupt coincidence. They waited with an involuntary silence, which
in itself was a rare tribute.

"Remember Rantoul?" said Herkimer, rolling a cigarette and using a jerky
diction.

"Clyde Rantoul?" said Stibo.

"Don Furioso Barebones Rantoul, who was in the Quarter with us?" said
Quinny.

"Don Furioso, yes," said Rankin. "Ever see him?"

"Never."

"He's married," said Quinny; "dropped out."

"Yes, he married," said Herkimer, lighting his cigarette. "Well, I've
just seen him."

"He's a plutocrat or something," said Towsey, reflectively.

"He's rich--ended," said Steingall as he slapped the table. "By Jove! I
remember now."

"Wait," said Quinny, interposing.

[Illustration: From his tone the group perceived that the hazards had
brought to him some abrupt coincidences]

"I went up to see him yesterday--just back now," said Herkimer.
"Rantoul was the biggest man of us all. It's a funny tale. You're
discussing matrimony; here it is."




II


In the early nineties, when Quinny, Steingall, Herkimer, little Bennett,
who afterward roamed down into the Transvaal and fell in with the
Foreign Legion, Jacobus and Chatterton, the architects, were living
through that fine, rebellious state of overweening youth, Rantoul was
the undisputed leader, the arch-rebel, the master-demolisher of the
group.

Every afternoon at five his Gargantuan figure came thrashing through the
crowds of the boulevard, as an omnibus on its way scatters the fragile
fiacres. He arrived, radiating electricity, tirades on his tongue, to
his chair among the table-pounders of the Cafe des Lilacs, and his first
words were like the fanfare of trumpets. He had been christened, in the
felicitous language of the Quarter, Don Furioso Barebones Rantoul, and
for cause. He shared a garret with his chum, Britt Herkimer, in the Rue
de l'Ombre, a sort of manhole lit by the stars,--when there were any
stars, and he never failed to come springing up the six rickety flights
with a song on his lips.

An old woman who kept a fruit store gave him implicit credit; a much
younger member of the sex at the corner creamery trusted him for eggs
and fresh milk, and leaned toward him over the counter, laughing into
his eyes as he exclaimed:

"Ma belle, when I am famous, I will buy you a silk gown, and a pair of
earrings that will reach to your shoulders, and it won't be long. You'll
see."

He adored being poor. When his canvas gave out, he painted his ankles to
caricature the violent creations that were the pride of Chatterton, who
was a nabob. When his credit at one restaurant expired, he strode
confidently up to another proprietor, and announced with the air of one
bestowing a favor:

"I am Rantoul, the portrait-painter. In five years my portraits will
sell for five thousand francs, in ten for twenty thousand. I will eat
one meal a day at your distinguished establishment, and paint your
portrait to make your walls famous. At the end of the month I will
immortalize your wife; on the same terms, your sister, your father, your
mother, and all the little children. Besides, every Saturday night I
will bring here a band of my comrades who pay in good hard silver.
Remember that if you had bought a Corot for twenty francs in 1870, you
could have sold it for five thousand francs in 1880, fifty thousand in
1890. Does the idea appeal to you?"

But as most keepers of restaurants are practical and unimaginative, and
withal close bargainers, at the end of a week Rantoul generally was
forced to seek a new sitter.

"What a privilege it is to be poor!" he would then exclaim
enthusiastically to Herkimer. "It awakens all the perceptions; hunger
makes the eye keener. I can see colors to-day that I never saw before.
And to think that if Sherman had never gotten it in his head to march to
the sea I should never have experienced this inspiration! But, old
fellow, we have so short a time to be poor. We must exhibit nothing yet.
We are lucky. We are poor. We can feel."

On the subject of traditions he was at his best.

"Shakspere is the curse of the English drama," he would declare, with a
descending gesture which caused all the little glasses to rattle their
alarm. "Nothing will ever come out of England until his influence is
discounted. He was a primitive, a Preraphaelite. He understood nothing of
form, of composition. He was a poet who wandered into the drama as a
sheep strays into the pasture of the bulls, a colorist who imagines he
can be a sculptor. The influence of Victoria sentimentalized the whole
artistic movement in England, made it bourgeois, and flavored it with
mint sauce. Modern portraiture has turned the galleries into an
exhibition of wax works. What is wrong with painting to-day--do you
know?"

"_Allons_, tell us!" cried two or three, while others, availing
themselves of the breathing space, filled the air with their orders:

"Paul, another bock."

"Two hard-boiled eggs."

"And pretzels; don't forget the pretzels."

"The trouble with painting to-day is that it has no point of view,"
cried Rantoul, swallowing an egg in the anaconda fashion. "We are
interpreting life in the manner of the Middle Ages. We forget art should
be historical. We forget that we are now in our century. Ugliness, not
beauty, is the note of our century; turbulence, strife, materialism, the
mob, machinery, masses, not units. Why paint a captain of industry
against a Francois I tapestry? Paint him at his desk. The desk is a
throne; interpret it. We are ruled by mobs. Who paints mobs? What is
wrong is this, that art is in the bondage of literature--sentimentality.
We must record what we experience. Ugliness has its utility, its
magnetism; the ugliness of abject misery moves you to think, to readjust
ideas. We must be rebels, we young men. Ah, if we could only burn the
galleries, we should be forced to return to life."

"Bravo, Rantoul!"

"Right, old chap."

"Smash the statues!"

"Burn the galleries!"

"Down with tradition!"

"Eggs and more bock!"

But where Rantoul differed from the revolutionary regiment was that he
was not simply a painter who delivered orations; he could paint. His
tirades were not a furore of denunciation so much as they were the
impulsive chafing of the creative energy within him. In the school he
was already a marked man to set the prophets prophesying. He had a style
of his own, biting, incisive, overloaded and excessive, but with
something to say. He was after something. He was original.

"Rebel! Let us rebel!" he would cry to Herkimer from his agitated
bedquilt in the last hour of discussion. "The artist must always
rebel--accept nothing, question everything, denounce conventions and
traditions."

"Above all, work," said Herkimer in his laconic way.

"What? Don't I work?"

"Work more."

Rantoul, however, was not vulnerable on that score. He was not, it is
true, the drag-horse that Herkimer was, who lived like a recluse,
shunning the cafes and the dance-halls, eating up the last gray hours of
the day over his statues and his clays. But Rantoul, while living life
to its fullest, haunting the wharves and the markets with avid eyes,
roaming the woods and trudging the banks of the Seine, mingling in the
crowds that flashed under the flare of arc-lights, with a thousand
mysteries of mass and movement, never relaxed a moment the savage attack
his leaping nature made upon the drudgeries and routine of technic.

With the coveted admittance into the Salon, recognition came speedily
to the two chums. They made a triumphal entry into a real studio in the
Montparnasse Quarter, clients came, and the room became a station of
honor among the young and enthusiastic of the Quarter.

Rantoul began to appear in society, besieged with the invitations that
his Southern aristocracy and the romance of his success procured him.

"You go out too much," said Herkimer to him, with a fearful growl. "What
the deuce do you want with society, anyhow? Keep away from it. You've
nothing to do with it."

"What do I do? I go out once a week," said Rantoul, whistling
pleasantly.

"Once is too often. What do you want to become, a parlor celebrity?
Society _c'est l'ennemie_. You ought to hate it."

"I do."

"Humph!" said Herkimer, eying him across his sputtering clay pipe. "Get
this idea of people out of your head. Shut yourself up in a hole, work.
What's society, anyhow? A lot of bored people who want you to amuse
them. I don't approve. Better marry that pretty girl in the creamery.
She'll worship you as a god, make you comfortable. That's all you need
from the world."

"Marry her yourself; she'll sew and cook for you," said Rantoul, with
perfect good humor.

"I'm in no danger," said Herkimer, curtly; "you are."

"What!"

"You'll see."

"Listen, you old grumbler," said Rantoul, seriously. "If I go into
society, it is to see the hollowness of it all--"

"Yes, yes."

"To know what I rebel against--"

"Of course."

"To appreciate the freedom of the life I have--"

"Faker!"

"To have the benefit of contrasts, light and shade. You think I am not a
rebel. My dear boy, I am ten times as big a rebel as I was. Do you know
what I'd do with society?"

He began a tirade in the famous muscular Rantoul style, overturning
creeds and castes, reorganizing republics and empires, while Herkimer,
grumbling to himself, began to scold the model, who sleepily received
the brunt of his ill humor.

In the second year of his success Rantoul, quite by accident, met a girl
in her teens named Tina Glover, only daughter of Cyrus Glover, a man of
millions, self-made. The first time their eyes met and lingered, by the
mysterious chemistry of the passions Rantoul fell desperately in love
with this little slip of a girl, who scarcely reached to his shoulder;
who, on her part, instantly made up her mind that she had found the
husband she intended to have. Two weeks later they were engaged.

She was seventeen, scarcely more than a child, with clear, blue eyes
that seemed too large for her body, very timid and appealing. It is true
she seldom expressed an opinion, but she listened to every one with a
flattering smile, and the reputations of brilliant talkers have been
built on less. She had a way of passing her two arms about Rantoul's
great one and clinging to him in a weak, dependent way that was quite
charming.

When Cyrus Glover was informed that his daughter intended to marry a
dauber in paints, he started for Paris on ten hours' notice. But Mrs.
Glover who was just as resolved on social conquests as Glover was in
controlling the plate-glass field, went down to meet him at the boat,
and by the time the train entered the St. Lazare Station, he had been
completely disciplined and brought to understand that a painter was one
thing and that a Rantoul, who happened to paint, was quite another. When
he had known Rantoul a week; and listened open-mouthed to his eloquent
schemes for reordering the universe, and the arts in particular, he was
willing to swear that he was one of the geniuses of the world.

The wedding took place shortly, and Cyrus Glover gave the bridegroom a
check for $100,000, "so that he wouldn't have to be bothering his wife
for pocketmoney." Herkimer was the best man, and the Quarter attended
in force, with much outward enthusiasm. The bride and groom departed for
a two-year's trip around the world, that Rantoul might inspire himself
with the treasures of Italy, Greece, India, and Japan.

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