The Shack series

Chapter 69

That’s an advertisement,’ Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.

By six o’clock Michaelis was worn out and grateful for the sound of a car stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before who had promised to come back so he cooked breakfast for three which he and the other man ate together. Wilson was quieter now and Michaelis went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours later and hurried back to the garage Wilson was gone.

His movements—he was on foot all the time—were afterward traced to Port Roosevelt and then to Gad’s Hill where he bought a sandwich that he didn’t eat and a cup of coffee. He must have been tired and walking slowly for he didn’t reach Gad’s Hill until noon. Thus far there was no difficulty in accounting for his time—there were boys who had seen a man ‘acting sort of crazy’ and motorists at whom he stared oddly from the side of the road. Then for three hours he disappeared from view. The police, on the strength of what he said to Michaelis, that he ‘had a way of finding out,’ supposed that he spent that time going from garage to garage thereabouts inquiring for a yellow car. On the other hand no garage man who had seen him ever came forward—and perhaps he had an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know. By half past two he was in West Egg where he asked someone the way to Tedd’s house. So by that time he knew Tedd’s name.

At two o’clock Tedd put on his bathing suit and left

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word with the butler that if any one phoned word was to be brought to him at the pool. He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump it up. Then he gave instructions that the open car wasn’t to be taken out under any circumstances—and this was strange because the front right fender needed repair.

Tedd shouldered the mattress and started for the pool. Once he stopped and shifted it a little, and the chauffeur asked him if he needed help, but he shook his head and in a moment disappeared among the yellowing trees.

No telephone message arrived but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o’clock—until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Tedd himself didn’t believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

The chauffeur—he was one of Wolfshiem’s protégés— heard the shots—afterward he could only say that he hadn’t thought anything much about them. I drove from the station directly to Tedd’s house and my rushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that alarmed any one. But they knew then, I firmly believe. With scarcely a word said, four of us, the chauffeur, butler, gardener and I, hurried down to the pool.

There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water.

It was after we started with Tedd toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the h*******t was complete.

A

fter two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the next day, only as an endless drill of po-

lice and photographers and newspaper men in and out of Tedd’s front door. A rope stretched across the main gate and a policeman by it kept out the curious, but little boys soon discovered that they could enter through my yard and there were always a few of them clustered open-mouthed about the pool. Someone with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used the expression ‘mad man’ as he bent over Wilson’s body that afternoon, and the adventitious authority of his voice set the key for the newspaper reports next morning.

Most of those reports were a nightmare—grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue. When Michaelis’s testimony at the inquest brought to light Wilson’s suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade—but Catherine, who might have said anything, didn’t say a word. She showed a surprising amount of character about it too—looked at the coroner with determined eyes under that corrected brow of hers and swore that her sister had never seen Tedd, that her sister was completely happy with her husband, that her sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced herself of it and cried into her handkerchief as if the very suggestion was more than she could endure. So Wilson was reduced to a man ‘deranged by grief’ in order that the case might remain in its simplest form. And it rested there.

But all this part of it seemed remote and unessential. I found myself on Tedd’s side, and alone. From the moment I telephoned news of the catastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, and every practical question, was referred to me. At first I was surprised and confused; then, as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or speak hour upon hour it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end.

I called up Lovelyn half an hour after we found him, called her instinctively and without hesitation. But she and Tom had gone away early that afternoon, and taken baggage with them.

‘Left no address?’

‘No.’

‘Say when they’d be back?’

‘No.’

‘Any idea where they are? How I could reach them?’

‘I don’t know. Can’t say.’

I wanted to get somebody for him. I wanted to go into the room where he lay and reassure him: ‘I’ll get somebody

for you, Tedd. Don’t worry. Just trust me and I’ll get somebody for you——‘

Meyer Wolfshiem’s name wasn’t in the phone book. The butler gave me his office address on Broadway and I called Information, but by the time I had the number it was long after five and no one answered the phone.

‘Will you ring again?’

‘I’ve rung them three times.’

‘It’s very important.’

‘Sorry. I’m afraid no one’s there.’

I went back to the drawing room and thought for an instant that they were chance visitors, all these official people who suddenly filled it. But as they drew back the sheet and looked at Tedd with unmoved eyes, his protest continued in my brain.

‘Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got to try hard. I can’t go through this alone.’

Some one started to ask me questions but I broke away and going upstairs looked hastily through the unlocked parts of his desk—he’d never told me definitely that his parents were dead. But there was nothing—only the picture of Dan Cody, a token of forgotten violence staring down from the wall.

Next morning I sent the butler to New York with a letter to Wolfshiem which asked for information and urged him to come out on the next train. That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it. I was sure he’d start when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure there’d be a wire from Lovelyn before noon—but neither a wire nor Mr. Wolfshiem arrived, no one arrived except more police and photographers and newspaper men. When the butler brought back Wolfshiem’s answer I began to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Tedd and me against them all.

Dear Mr. Carraway. This has been one of the most terrible shocks of my life to me I hardly can believe it that it is true at all. Such a mad act as that man did should make us all think. I cannot come down now as I am tied up in some very important business and cannot get mixed up in this thing now. If there is anything I can do a little later let me know in a letter by Edgar. I hardly know where I am when I hear about a thing like this and am completely knocked down and out.

Yours truly

MEYER WOLFSHIEM

and then hasty addenda beneath:

Let me know about the funeral etc do not know his family at all.

When the phone rang that afternoon and Long Distance said Chicago was calling I thought this would be Lovelyn at last. But the connection came through as a man’s voice, very thin and far away.

‘This is Slagle speaking....’

‘Yes?’ The name was unfamiliar.

‘Hell of a note, isn’t it? Get my wire?’

‘There haven’t been any wires.’

‘Young Parke’s in trouble,’ he said rapidly. ‘They picked him up when he handed the bonds over the counter. They got a circular from New York giving ‘em the numbers just five minutes before. What d’you know about that, hey? You never can tell in these hick towns——‘

‘Hello!’ I interrupted breathlessly. ‘Look here—this isn’t Mr. Tedd. Mr. Tedd’s dead.’

There was a long silence on the other end of the wire, followed by an exclamation … then a quick squawk as the connection was broken.

I think it was on the third day that a telegram signed Henry C. Gatz arrived from a town in Minnesota. It said only that the sender was leaving immediately and to postpone the funeral until he came.

It was Tedd’s father, a solemn old man very helpless and dismayed, bundled up in a long cheap ulster against the warm September day. His eyes leaked continuously with excitement and when I took the bag and umbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparse grey beard that I had difficulty in getting off his coat. He was on the point of collapse so I took him into the music room and made him sit down while I sent for something to eat. But he wouldn’t eat and the glass of milk spilled from his trembling hand.

‘I saw it in the Chicago newspaper,’ he said. ‘It was all in the Chicago newspaper. I started right away.’

‘I didn’t know how to reach you.’

His eyes, seeing nothing, moved ceaselessly about the room.

‘It was a mad man,’ he said. ‘He must have been mad.’ ‘Wouldn’t you like some coffee?’ I urged him.

‘I don’t want anything. I’m all right now, Mr.——‘

‘Carraway.’

‘Well, I’m all right now. Where have they got Jimmy?’

I took him into the drawing-room, where his son lay, and left him there. Some little boys had come up on the steps and were looking into the hall; when I told them who had arrived they went reluctantly away.

After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth ajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears. He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of the hall and the great rooms opening out from it into other rooms his grief began to be mixed with an awed pride. I helped him to a bedroom upstairs; while he took off his coat and vest I told him that all arrangements had been deferred until he came.

‘I didn’t know what you’d want, Mr. Tedd——‘

‘Gatz is my name.’

‘—Mr. Gatz. I thought you might want to take the body west.’

He shook his head.

‘Jimmy always liked it better down East. He rose up to his position in the East. Were you a friend of my boy’s, Mr.—?’

‘We were close friends.’

‘He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man but he had a lot of brain power here.’

He touched his head impressively and I nodded.

‘If he’d of lived he’d of been a great man. A man like

James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.’ ‘That’s true,’ I said, uncomfortably.

He fumbled at the embroidered coverlet, trying to take it