The Outsider (53 page)

Cross grasped the foot of the bed with his hand to steady his trembling legs. Eva turned over and mumbled something in her sleep and he could see the faint, crystalline sheen of her soft white cheeks glowing like a half-perceived image in the dark. His breath went from his lungs in a long, despairing suspire; he reached out his hand, the fingers still shaking from the throes of indecision, touched her shoulder tenderly, and whispered:

“Eva, darling…”

He felt her warm body give a slight start, and then her face turned toward him.

“Yes, Lionel.”

“Listen, darling. I've something to tell you…”

“Yes?”

“I was listening to the radio and some news about Hilton just came over.”

“What is it?”

“He's been killed, shot in his hotel room,” he said quietly.

Eva was still as stone for a moment, then she stared at him with a look of wildness in her eyes. Was she considering him guilty? He held his breath and waited. Was
she linking up his gibberish with what he was now telling her? She gasped and her hand went to her mouth.

“Oh, God…
Why
? Who did it?”

“I don't know,” he whispered.

She was silent. Did she know? Why didn't she speak? What was the meaning of that fixed, bleak stare? Yes; her hand was moving now; he could hear the whispering rustle of the bedcovers. Then he felt as though he would fall to the floor as her fingers touched his hand.

“I feel awful,” she whispered in horror. “
Only
today I said he should be killed…” Her wide eyes glistened in the shadows. Her lips hung speechless; she looked at the faint outlines of the walls of the room, then turned again to him. “Do you think it's the Party? Has he disobeyed them?”

His forehead rested on the edge of the bed and he knelt to her, as though mutely appealing against her judgment.

“I don't know,” he breathed.

Couldn't she tell? He heard her breath catching in her throat, then the sound of soft crying came to him.

“Why, why, Lionel, is life like this?” she begged of him. “I feel darkness closing in all around me…I'm afraid…Hold me…”

Her trembling arms groped for him and he held her.

“I'm sorry,” he mumbled.

“Hilton always frightened me,” Eva whispered. “I never liked him. Why, I don't know. And he had just turned poor Bob over to the authorities…It's
wrong
to kill like that, Lionel…”

Cross bowed his head; he knew that those words, though she did not know it, were really directed at him…

“I'm sorry I had to tell you like this. But try to sleep now,” he said. “Try and forget it…”

He still held her. Her sobs grew less and finally, as though overwhelmed by too much horror, she slept once more. Cross rose and went into the living room and stood at the front window. Eva's own sense of guilt had protected her from suspecting him; she had recoiled because she too had had the impulse to kill Hilton. Eva was
too
good, believed
too
strongly in life. Maybe this belief in goodness was her life, and once it was gone, what then?

Ought he vanish into the winter night and leave her forever? He had a chance to make a clean run for it before suspicion pointed in his direction. In his deserting her like this she would not know what he had done; there would be a hurt in her heart for awhile, but in the end she would get over it and there would always remain a spot of tenderness in her memory for him. And if he stayed, he would surely have to face the shock of her learning of his monstrous deeds. Was there the remotest hope of her still loving him after she had discovered the reaches and depths of his problem? Again the pages of her diary stood before his eyes and his question answered itself. But where could he run to? And what was he running from? He knew that in any hiding place, under whatever guise he chose to conceal himself, he would be alone with himself to meditate in dismay upon the ungovernable compulsiveness of himself and the loss of his sense of direction in life.

No…He had to remain. And if he ran off, would not Houston then be certain of his guilt? He cocked his head, listening; from far off came the wail of a siren so faint that it seemed that he was imagining it. Would those sirens sound for him soon? And if they caught him, what would he do? Questions like that agitated him more than the recollection of his crimes. The shame of having to tell, to explain to strangers was overpower
ing. That could not happen; he would make use of his gun on himself first…

It was only in relation to Eva that his thoughts could shape themselves with any meaning. Was not there some way of telling her and stealing the horror from it as he did so? Nervously, he rubbed his forehead. He was only fretting himself into a state of jitters by forever juggling farfetched possibilities like this. He would go to bed. Half an hour later he lay down by the sleeping form of Eva, but he did not close his eyes. He knew her hurt, but could she ever know his? Was there really no direct bridge between the subjective worlds of people? Was the possibility of communication only a kind of pretense, an arrangement assumed to exist but which really did not? Was the core of the subjective life of each person sealed off absolutely from that of another and one could tell what transpired in another heart only when the contents of that heart were projected outwardly in some objective form? He recalled that Eva had not responded to him as he really was; his life had somehow represented for her something which she had yearned to embrace; and he lay here now knowing from having stolen a lawless glimpse into her diary what she felt, her deception, her shame, but unable really to touch her heart, feeling that she was forever beyond his reach. A dizzy terror came over him. Were we really that much alone in this life? Were all human hearts encased in this irredeemable isolation and we only had the satisfaction of fooling ourselves that we were together? He groaned softly and did not close his eyes in sleep until dawn crept into the room.

 

A little after eight o'clock he was awakened by the ringing of the doorbell. Eva was still sleeping. He put
on his robe and went to the door. It was Sarah, ashen of face and shaking with fear.

“Good morning, Sarah,” Cross said casually, braced to hear her tell of what experience she had had with the police.

“God, Lionel, did you know that Hilton's dead?”

“Yes; I heard about it on the radio.”

“Do you know where I slept last night?”

“No. What do you mean?”

“In the police station,” Sarah explained with indignation. “I've been in jail, you hear? When I got home last night, the cops were waiting for me at the door of my apartment…They hauled me to jail and grilled me for four hours…I'm so glad Bob's in Ellis Island, or they'd have him now, for sure.”

“But why did they take you to jail?” Cross asked.

“They had the idea that I killed Hilton because Hilton told on Bob—”

“But how did they find out about that?”

“I don't know. Lionel, what's
happening
?”

“God only knows, Sarah.”

Sarah was hanging up her overcoat in the hallway.

“You think it was the Party?” she asked in a whisper.

“Who knows—” Cross knew now that she did not suspect him. “When I came in last night, Eva told me the cops had been here asking for you.”

“Here?” Sarah echoed.

“Yes.”

“How's Eva?”

“She's sleeping,” Cross told her.

He told Sarah to wait while he dressed, and then he brewed a pot of coffee.

“I know it's wrong,” Sarah began, drinking her coffee, “but I can't say I'm sorry about Hilton…But
that can't help poor Bob now. He's gone.” She sat down her cup and wept. “Lionel, I still hate Hilton. He's dead and I still hate 'im…” She shook her head. “There was something cold about Hilton.”

“I daresay Hilton would have agreed with you,” Cross said.

“Lionel, what do you suppose Hilton got out of sending Bob to his death?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why did he take such drastic action for Bob's little offense against the Party?”

“Hilton was obeying orders, and he believed in the orders.”

“But Bob's
human
,” Sarah protested.

“To Hilton, Bob was only something to be sacrificed in the interests of a vast design,” Cross explained.

“To make a better world?” Sarah asked; her voice was strangely hopeful.

Cross knew that she was now seeking for something to redeem the suffering and death that Bob would inherit.

“No, Sarah. To Hilton and men like him the world is perfect just like it is. They just want a chance to rule that world.”

“I don't understand,” Sarah sighed.

“It's better maybe not to understand,” Cross told her.

They fell silent. An idea came to Cross. Eva was deeply attached to Sarah, and would not his case be stronger if he threw the two women together? His position was so weak that he felt he needed the strength and help of a woman whose reactions were as straightforward as those of Sarah.

“What are you going to do now, Sarah?” he asked her. “Bob's gone and you're alone.”

“I don't know,” she mumbled.

“Look, after the hearing with the Medical Examiner, suppose Eva and I moved up to Harlem with you for awhile?”

Sarah's eyes brightened.

“Oh, I'd like that—I'm so alone up there…But what would Eva think of it?”

“I don't know. I haven't asked her yet, but I will.”

Sarah's feminine instinct for matchmaking came to the fore in her.

“Eva likes you,” she said in a tone of voice that indicated that she approved. “What's she going to do now that Gil's dead?”

“She wants to be with me—”

“Oh!” Sarah pondered a moment, then she smiled. “Old Funny Face—” She was moody again, thinking of her own lonely life. “Some people have all the luck.”

The official aspects of the Medical Examiner's hearing, which was a kind of inquest, did not prove to be as much of an ordeal as either Cross or Eva had feared. It fell to Cross to bear the burden of giving the longest and most detailed testimony of all the witnesses, for the Communist Party's able and noisy lawyer strove tenaciously to obtain a verdict branding Langley Herndon as the murderer of Gil. Cross, knowing that the Party, in its own interests, would leap to protect him if the police turned on him, answered repeatedly and emphatically that he had seen Herndon beating Gil with the fire poker and he even went so far in his lies as to testify that Gil had not seemed to be in a condition to defend himself.

Eva testified of having seen Herndon with his gun on the stairs; she told of her running back into the apartment and of Lionel Lane's bolting the door against him. But Eva's and Cross's testimony was not strong enough to influence the studied, scientific opinion of the cool
Medical Examiner who contended that both men died in point of time so close together that he could not honorably or justifiably entertain any verdict save that of double manslaughter. In so far as Cross was personally concerned, the hearing was a success; he had managed to deflect all thoughts of guilt from himself.

The most frightening phase of the hearing came after the verdict had been rendered, for newsmen crowded around to get photographs of Eva. Cross was glad that he was forgotten, for he dreaded having his face appear in the press under the false name of Lionel Lane. Sarah hurried Eva to a waiting car provided by the Party and they managed to get away with but a few flashbulbs exploding in Eva's anxious, drawn, and veiled face. Menti had been assigned by the Party to accompany them, and he drove the car. Back in Charles Street, in the lower hallway of the building, they had run into another battery of newsmen and Cross's admiration for Menti rose as he watched the man unhesitatingly and ruthlessly dispatch the reporters and photographers. At last they were in the shelter of the apartment and Cross fastened the night-chain on the door. Sarah took Eva to her room and Cross paced to and fro, preoccupied, conscious of Menti hanging on for no apparent reason. Menti's presence irked Cross; he had nothing in common with this lackey and wished that he would make himself absent. Menti was a hireling, an errand boy, a white-collar by-product of the American industrial world who had offered his meaningless, self-despised existence to the Party to be used, ravaged, dominated, and filled with a purpose, any purpose as long as the burden of the responsibility of his own life was lifted from his quaking shoulders.

“You seem nervous, Lane,” Menti commented, smiling and sucking at his cigarette. “What's the matter?”

“Just restless,” Cross answered.

“You know, the Party's interested in you,” Menti said in a voice that carried a multiplicity of meanings: ironical, teasing, threatening, warning…

Cross paused and studied the servile mask of geniality that always served to hide Menti's real motives. Was Menti spying on him for the Party? Cross felt that it was safe to assume that he was…

“Why?” Cross asked.

“The Party's interested in intelligent men, and you are intelligent,” Menti said in tones of flattery, as though bound to give even Cross, an outsider, his due.

“But I know so little about these matters, Menti,” Cross protested, knowing that he knew more than Menti would believe.

“Too bad Gil couldn't've lived to coach you until you were seasoned,” Menti said in a tone of wistful regret. “Gil told Hilton before he died that you had the makings of a real Bolshevik: outlook, temperament, and all…You liked Gil, didn't you?”

“Of course, Menti,” Cross lied in a full-bodied tone. “Gil was my friend.”

“And I reckon you liked Hilton too, didn't you?” Menti asked slowly, watching Cross's face.

“Of course,” Cross lied. “But I didn't know poor Hilton very well…”