He was still, his body rigid. Then he felt his lips forming sounds, heard words issuing from his mouth.
“Eva, I killed Hilton—”
“What?”
“I killed Hilton…”
“Lionel, get to bed,” she said sternly. “You’ve got a fever.”
“No; listen—” He still did not turn around. “My name’s not Lionel Lane. It’s Cross Damon. Oh, God, what have I done? I’ve killed and killed and killed…Eva, save me; help to save me—”
He felt her arms about him, tugging at him.
“Get in bed, darling,” she begged. “You’re sick.”
She pushed him back to the bed and held him again in her arms.
“Eva, you must hear—”
“No; don’t think, don’t talk,” she cautioned. “Lie still! Be quiet, honey.”
“I must talk,” he said. “I must tell you—Darling, I killed your husband—It was I who struck both Gil and Herndon down—”
“Oh, God, Lionel,” she cried. “You’re delirious!”
“No, no; I’m not,” he cried to her. “I killed Gil—I, I killed him, Eva. And Herndon, too. And Hilton—Just now, I did. And in Chicago, I killed a man—Oh, God—Eva, don’t leave me now. I need you, I need somebody—”
He clutched at her arms and she held him tightly, like one holding a child.
“Don’t leave me, Eva—Never leave me—Promise me you won’t—Promise me,” he begged.
“I promise,” she whispered.
“If you leave me, it’s all over,”
“I’ll never leave you, Lionel.”
What was this? She was not listening to what he was telling her. She thought him delirious. Mad. Wild.
“Eva, don’t you realize what I’ve been telling you? I, I killed Gil, Herndon, Hilton, and another man…My hands are wet with blood…”
She stopped his mouth with her hand, and then he felt tears, hot and copious, falling on to his face.
“Hush, darling,” she said. “You’re sick.”
She pulled away from him and he lay there, his eyes closed, trying to realize that she did not believe him. He heard her moving softly about behind him, and then he was paralyzed with surprise when he felt her soft, naked body coming into bed and nestling close to him. Her warm arms went about his neck and she pulled his face to hers and he felt her lips clinging to his. Good God, he had told her his horror and had expected to hear her scream and run from him; and now she was surrendering herself, giving her gift to the man she loved, hoping to cure the distraction of his mind by placing a benediction upon his senses. For a moment he was rigid, not knowing what to do. Then the warmth of her reached him, stole into his blood; and he was still, tasting the sweet pull of her clinging lips on his. He sighed, lay still for a moment, then caught her face in his hands and kissed her while there whirled above his head a knowledge of what was happening. She had thought his confession was an eruption of delirium; she had been moved to pity by his state of wild anxiousness. What he had tried to tell her had sounded so fantastic that she had with swift instinct rejected it as unreal, as a figment of a fevered imagination, the irresponsible babblings of a sick man. She would never be able to comprehend that he was a lost soul, spinning like a stray atom far beyond the ken of her mind to conceive. The extremity of his state had unveiled Eva, had made hope and trust rise in her for the first time since her deception. She was with him, close to him, mingling the warmth of her flesh with his, but she did not understand who or what he was or what he had done, could not believe it when she heard it. Yet he needed her. And then he turned to her and took her in his arms and had her so slowly and so intensely and with such a mounting frenzy of sensual greed that they both died the little death together and he lay staring into the dark with wide, vacant eyes, afraid even to think. And then, quietly, as his sense of reality returned, as he felt himself again in the room on the bed with her, something close to a prayer rose up from his heart…Show me a way not to hurt her…Not to let her know…I don’t want to kill this sweet girl clinging to me…I should not have let it happen…And his despair seeped from his hot and tired eyes in large, salty tears…
Cross now groped his way through uneasy hours under the protection of the fragile shadow of Eva’s colossal illusion. This girl was loving him not for his crimes but for virtues that he did not and could not possess. His happiness was now a kind of terror and he strove in vain to banish from his consciousness the realization that he epitomized the quintessence of all that which Eva most deeply loathed and would flee to avoid. He would clamp his teeth in sterile fury when he saw that though Eva was his kind of woman, he was not her kind of man nor would he ever be. But he begged the grace of nameless powers to let him linger with her for yet awhile before he went to grapple with the dark tides of his destiny. During the next few hours they moved around each other with slow and muted tenderness. He knew that she was unaware that he was cringing in anxiety lest she ask the meaning of those horrible syllables that had been on his confessionally loosened tongue, and he knew that when she did ask him, he would have to push his words past a choking throat and tell her. He ached with anxiety as he watched the flame of love and trust glowing in her eyes, for it was he who had lit that fire with his unintentional deception, and he knew that when she finally gained a knowledge of what he was, it would be snuffed out; and his heart shuddered in fear of her going back into her feminine house and slamming the door on life forever.
Early that evening a bailiff showed up with a summons demanding their presence the following morning at the hearing to be held over the bodies of Gil and Herndon at the office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
“Will it be awful, Lionel?” she asked.
“I’m afraid so, darling. But you must brace yourself for it.”
“Lionel,” she called.
Tenderly she caught hold of his hand, turned his face to her, smiled faintly, then let her lashes rest upon her wan cheeks.
“Yes, Eva,” he prompted her; yet quailing for fear that she would ask him about his confessional eruption.
“Tell me, darling,” she inquired in a whisper, “is it wrong to love so soon like this?”
Dismay made his lips tremble. “Trust is the heart of life,” he whispered and felt he wanted something to strike him dead. “How can one’s trusting another be bad?”
She opened her hazel eyes full on him. “I trust you,” she said simply. “I wanted to help you and I saw a way to do it…”
“Bless you, Eva,” he said, averting his face, feeling a constriction in his throat.
“Sarah’ll be here in the morning to help me. I must find a black dress—”
“Will you need to buy any clothes?”
“No, honey. I’ve plenty. Look, you must rest. I’ll handle this,” she smiled.
How wrapped up she was in her love! How demurely happy! He wandered into the living room, his hands trembling. Could he let her go on like that? But how could he undo it? He sat, his mind roving back over the deaths of Gil and Herndon and Hilton, his feelings protesting against the whole, wild nightmare; but he could think of no concrete move to make. He recalled having bought a newspaper. Had there been anything in it about the deaths of Gil and Herndon? He found the folded copy of the newspaper jammed into his overcoat pocket. When he had bought it in the lobby of the Hotel Albert right after leaving Hilton sprawled and bloody on the bed, he had been too harassed and frightened to read it. He opened it and was amazed to see an artist’s pen-and-ink drawing covering the entire front page under a tall, black headline:
DOUBLE TOTALITARIAN MURDER
The picture showed two tall, popeyed, hawk-faced young men in their shirt sleeves—in truth, both men had worn coats and Herndon had been fifty-eight years of age and Gil had been thirty-six—lamming each other in a savage rage; one was flaying a fire poker and the other was wielding a huge table leg which he held high in the air and was about to crash it down upon the head of the other. Cross’s lips twitched in a smile at t
he expressions of exaggerated hatred which the artist had injected into the facial features of both men; their long, unruly hair was matted and falling almost into their eyes; they were unshaven and their skins were pimply; their teeth were bared, long, and pointed, resembling the fangs of wolves or dogs; and the fingers of their hands were gnarled, lumpy, with long, curving nails suggestive of animal claws. The background depicted by the artist was not the fascist Herndon’s chastely furnished study, but a filthy den whose ceiling was cracking and peeling, showing the laths. The corners of the room revealed dense spiderwebs; several empty whiskey bottles lay on the floor. Tacked to the torn wallpaper were several photographs of nude women in various erotic postures, each carrying at the bottom legends such as: FREE LOVE—JOY AND MADNESS—NIGHT OF ABANDON, etc.
Cross blinked in disbelief, not knowing whether to laugh or curse. He lowered the paper and sat in deep reflection. Then he muttered out loud:
“But this is a kind of inverted pro-communist and pro-nazi propaganda. They’ve so distorted these men that no one could ever recognize their psychological types…A Gil or a Herndon might be working at the City Desk of the Daily News this very moment…What kind of people make up these papers? There couldn’t be a better way of disguising totalitarian aims than this.”
He lifted the paper again and read the long caption running beneath the drawing:
Hardened Metropolitan police circles were rocked and stunned late yesterday by the Greenwich Village sensationally freakish double murder of a Communist by a Fascist and of a Fascist by a Communist. Though the Medical Examiner has technically dubbed the double crime as double manslaughter, it was learned through unusually reliable sources that these men’s diseased brains had been poisoned by the dangerously esoteric doctrines of communal property advocated in the decadent writings of the notorious German author Karl Marx, and the Superman ideas sponsored by the syphilis-infected German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who died in an insane asylum. These two rowdy agitators, Gilbert Blount and Langley Herndon, clashed bloodily in a quarrel regarding racial amalgamation theories and both died of their mutually inflicted wounds.
Cross tossed the paper aside in disgust; then he remembered that Eva might get hold of it and become upset. He took it into the kitchen and dropped it into the incinerator. He paused; oh, God, that goddamned handkerchief that had brought so much trouble! It was still in his pocket! He looked around; he was alone in the kitchen. He took the balled, reddish handkerchief from his pocket and stared at the burns, then once again he dropped it into the incinerator, hoping that this would be the last time he had to get rid of it.
Still brooding over the garbled newspaper story, he went back into the living room. What protection did men have against the Blounts and the Herndons of this world if newspapers could give no better interpretation of what they were after than what he had read? Was it that you could not understand the totalitarians unless you partook of their malady? He understood them; but, of course, he was akin to them, differing from them only in that he did not have a party, the sanction of ideas, a gang to aid him and to abet his actions by the threat of force. Both Gil and Herndon were so much more intelligent than the men who had written the news story that it was pathetic. Did that mean that the future was in the hands of men suffering from this terrible sickness? And that the shape of that future would be determined by which of these monsters would be triumphant…? Did the arrogant confidence of these two monsters stem from their secret knowledge that they knew that those who sought to defeat them would have to become like them, have to turn into the very kind of monsters they wanted to destroy? Was it that the totalitarians knew that, historically, no matter if they won or lost battles, that the war against individuality and for the subjugation of freedom was bound to be won by their side? Cross shook his head in wonder.
Could they eventually trace Hilton’s death to him? Now that he longed to plot out a future with Eva, he could not let his mind stray too far into the realms of hope; he might be accused at any time…
He sighed, rose, strode restlessly about. Eva came in and looked anxiously at him.
“How are you, darling?”
“I’m fine,” he lied.
She sat at Gil’s desk and began sorting papers.
“You have no more fever?”
“None at all. I’m all right.”
She rose and went to him; he knew that she had not come into the room to look for papers, but to be near him, to see that he was not fretting.
“Why don’t you relax. It’s better for you.”
“I’ll try, Eva,” he said and stretched out on the sofa.
He lay with closed eyes, but relaxation was impossible. Eva knelt at the side of the sofa.
“Come to bed, darling. You need sleep…”
“Let me just lie here and think a little—”
“You’re not worrying? Tell me the truth.”
“I’m not worrying, Eva,” he lied despairingly.
She kissed him, gazed long into his dark, brooding eyes.
“Everything’ll be all right,” she said cheerfully. “You’ll see.”
“As long as you are there, I’ll be all right,” he told her.
“I’m all in; I’m going to bed.”
“Do that, Eva. I’ll be along in a little while—”
“And don’t go out into that cold again. We’ll soon be free from all this terror…We’ll be where a big, blue sky stretches over our heads, with the wind blowing through the high pine trees…They tell me that the lakes in the Gatineau are blue and deep and clear…”
“Yes.”
“And all this deception’ll be at an end,” she murmured hopefully. “Things’ll be as clear, as sharp as mountains on the horizon…” She sighed. “I want to paint again…This time I want to create images common to everybody, symbols that can link men together…Rest now, Lionel.”
She was gone. He closed his eyes. Despair was in him so sharply that he was not aware of the room’s four walls about him. What could he do for Eva…? His obsession was with him again. How much time did he have before his foolish world caved in?
Oh, yes; the radio…What time did the evening news come on? He turned the dial on the radio, keeping the tone barely audible, and listened to the impish notes of blue-jazz leap and cavort in freedom…At ten-thirty there was a pause in the outpouring of jazz and a sonorously masculine voice recited a medley of political news items, and then:
The second Communist leader in twenty-four hours has been found shot to death by a .32, calibre revolver under baffling circumstances in a Greenwich Village hotel room late today. The body, that of John Hilton, 32, ex-school teacher, a militant Communist leader and a recently elected member of the powerful Central Committee of the Communist Party, was discovered by a colored cleaning maid as she was making her rounds early this evening.
John Hilton died as a result of a fatal bullet wound in his left temple. Death, according to the Medical Examiner, was instantaneous. The death scene showed no signs of violence or physical struggle save for a slight abrasion on the forehead of Hilton.
Though all present indications point to suicide, police are continuing their investigation. Murder has not been ruled out.
Hilton’s death comes a few hours after that of Gilbert Blount, another member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, whose place on the Central Committee had already been taken by John Hilton. In labor circles spec ulation is rife as to whether Hilton was killed by some recently expelled member of the Communist Party.
That was all; Cross switched off the radio and stood up. He had not been mentioned, and whether the police would find some trail leading to him was problematical. He went to the window and stared into the winter night; traces of snow and ice showed on the pavements and sidewalks. A heavy mist hung over the city and the houses on the opposite side of the street were dim and ghostly. Occasionally a man or a woman hurried past.
Now that the news of Hilton’s death was public, what would
Eva think when she heard it? Would she still believe that he had been babbling senselessly when he had come in earlier that evening? Or would the news of Hilton’s death plant a tiny seed of doubt in her mind, a doubt that would grow until she regarded him with fearfully questioning eyes? Though Eva was sleeping, he felt driven to know what she would say; it was much better to learn her reaction now than later. The anxious tension of waiting to see if she would suspect him without his telling her was greater than the dread of what she would say when she knew that at least some part of his incoherent outpourings was true.
As though being guided by some imperious influence, he walked slowly toward Eva’s bedroom and stood hesitantly in the partially opened doorway, listening to her quiet, regular breathing in the dark. Would it not be better for her to die now and be spared the pain and shock which he knew he had to bring yet to her? Had he not told Hilton that death was better than prolonged and inflamed suffering? Did he not owe it to her to kill her and thereby guard her from the monstrousness of himself? He advanced to the bed and his right hand lifted itself above her head and hovered there. God, no; no more of this killing whose logic led on and on into the grey, deadening reaches of inhuman meaning…! His damned habit of relentless thinking was mangling the very tendons and nerves of the flesh of life! Eva stirred uneasily on the bed and gave forth a profound sigh, a sigh that told him that the destiny of the soul from which it came could not be encompassed by his churning mental processes alone. As he stood there in the dark straining at a decision, he could see that the grinding mechanisms of man’s thought could destroy all of life on earth and leave this watery globe bare of the human beings who had produced the thinking…
Living thus tensely in his thoughts, Cross knew that this executing of the sentences of thought on life was a kind of continuous madness whose logical end was suicide. No matter how hot and furious the degree of his thinking, he could not convince himself that to kill Eva to ward off the suffering that the future would bring into the world for her was right. By snatching her life he could stave off the suffering, the pain that he thought would be hers, but did his insight into what the future held justify his killing her on that basis? The answer to that question was beyond his reach. To slay Gil and Herndon and Hilton in a fit of cold rage because they had outraged his sense of existence was one thing; but only if he were outside of life itself, beyond existence, could he make such a judgment about Eva whom he loved. How could he ever be able to tell, after killing Eva, that his judgment had been a correct one? Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively toward days that had yet to come. If he killed himself, his processes of thought stopped. Or did they? How could he ever tell after having killed himself that his judgment-act had been the right one…?