The Nameless Shame

“It is most unusual!” said the Duchess of Kincardine. “Most!” she added. Then, rallying, she exclaimed: “What is the world coming to?”

There had been a stupid discussion that had arisen, how, the Lord only knows, apropos of the tea things, perhaps, on the subject of poached eggs. I had ventured to state that it was sinful to poach them in water, that no one with any sense of self-respect would touch an egg that had not been cooked in milk and mushrooms.

“Why not in champagne and pineapples?” Agatha, the duchess’ daughter, had suggested. “Yes, why not?”

But here solemnities were interrupted. Yorke⁠—the Honorable Eric⁠—a beautifully preserved young man of forty, glided in.

“Ferrol is dead,” he soothingly announced. “Howdy do? He was found on the floor. Good afternoon. Thanks, very much. No sugar.”

“Dead!” cried a fat, rancid-faced woman, known as Lady Massingbird. “How shocking! And his engagement to Miss Rivers off only yesterday! But what was it? A fit?”

“No,” Yorke replied, in the same soothing way. “No. It appears that somebody strangled him.”

It was at this juncture that the Duchess of Kincardine made her notable exclamation.

The duchess, it is hardly more than worth while to relate, was née, as you may remember, not merely retroussé, but Genevieve Bridgewater, of Washington Square. The story of her marriage to a Scotch bankrupt is common property. It is also ancient history. So ancient that long since she found time to develop the Kincardine burr, and therewith a perfection of dowdiness which even in London was considered successful. Yet these laurels must have been insufficient. Whether because of her nose, or the immaculate atmosphere of lower Fifth Avenue, in which she had been brought up, or both, or something else, natural ambition, perhaps, she had also succeeded in being talked about. But that, too, is ancient history.

I had known her when she was a little thing in short skirts, and I remember still the spindle legs which she then exhibited. That rather intimate reminiscence constituted my passport to her very dingy house in Hill Street, where, of a June afternoon, she was inquiring what the world was coming to.

In London, anything that has not occurred every day since the memory of man runs not to the contrary is always unusual, unless it happens to be most so. The remark of the duchess was, therefore, in accordance with precedent. But in this instance it was justified.

The death of Ferrol⁠—Lord Henry Grafton Ferrol⁠—was, when you got at the facts, not merely unusual and most unusual, but altogether extraordinary. It was the curious circumstance that his engagement should have been broken one day and he should have been killed the next which astounded the duchess and, for that matter, the rest of us who were with her. But that circumstance, however astounding, was tame beside the surprises which followed.

With Ferrol I had had a slight acquaintance, one which had begun in Hill Street and had continued⁠—of all places in the world⁠—in the British Museum. Incidentally, I was also acquainted with Miss Rivers. Like the duchess, she, too, was a New Yorker, a millionairess to boot, and a tip top sample of what our commerce in beauty can exhibit. Joined to her looks and her dollars she had an air of dauntlessness which, to me, was very fetching, but which, in London, I had heard catalogued as “so American,” a phrase which, being interpreted, means, I believe, very vulgar.

Of the breaking of her engagement to Lord Ferrol I was aware, but not of the reason. On that subject no one in Hill Street could, I found, enlighten me. It was known merely that the day previous the girl had gone to Paris. But with conjectures I was presently supplied.

Into the room there had erupted a compatriot, Lady Silverstairs, a delightful little woman, who knew pretty much all that was going and a good deal that was not. She, too, had heard of Ferrol’s death and also of the broken engagement. Concerning the latter, Lady Massingbird was at the moment holding forth.

“It must be, don’t you think?” she indulgently put it, “that either she found out something awful about him or else that he found out something still more awful about her?”

“May not the discoveries have been mutual?” Lady Silverstairs suggested.

“Yes,” said the duchess; “but, then, you see even that does not explain how he got strangled.”

The word seemed to stir my delightful compatriot voluptuously. “Strangled?” she repeated. “I thought it was a rupture of a⁠—of a thingumagig.”

“Oh, no,” Yorke consolingly corrected. “Howdy do? No. Ferrol’s man ran out and saw Simpson in a hansom. Simpson, you know, is the chap who looks after⁠—what? Yes, physician in ordinary. Well, from what I heard this afternoon at the Bachelors’, Simpson said that it was due to compression of the carotid artery.”

“Where is that?” asked the Lady Agatha, who, with affected precipitance, added, “Don’t tell me, though, if⁠—if⁠—”

“Oh, no,” Yorke reassuringly answered, fumbling as he spoke at his neck, “it is here.”

“But who did it? They don’t suspect Miss Rivers, do they? Or did he do it himself?”

“No one knows who did it. But, of course he did not do it. Simpson, don’t you see, says that that isn’t possible. I dare say⁠—”

Yorke proceeded to lose himself in amiable hypotheses. But presently whipped in by the duchess, he got back again to what he had heard. What he had heard was to this effect:

Ferrol, the evening previous, on returning to chambers which he occupied at the corner of Piccadilly and St. James Street, had dismissed his man for the night. This servant, who had been with him forever, had then gone to his quarters below stairs, and had remained there until the next morning, when, in fetching up Ferrol’s breakfast, he found him flat on the floor, the mouth and eyes wide open. Then Simpson had been called in and he, deciding that it was a case for the police, had notified Scotland Yard. The latter had been stumped at once. In the dead man’s chambers nothing relative to the crime or to the presence of a criminal had been found, though, from the housekeeper, a hint had been pulled. This woman, the night previous, had been to a music hall. She had returned about one o’clock. In proceeding to her room, which was at the top of the house, she had, in passing Ferrol’s door, noticed that it was open. Then, on reaching the floor above she had heard a lady going down. She had not seen her. She had but heard the rustle of her skirt.

Yes, but whose skirt? Murder is painful, but a skirt is demulcent. Whose skirt was it? The question, ping-ponged over the tea things, finally lost itself among them. No one knew anything about Ferrol’s clandestine affairs; but then, of a man’s surreptitious amours, no one does know anything unless they get in the papers, where they are so generally befuddled that the culprit himself would not recognize them.

Then, too, it may be that Ferrol was hardly the kind of a chap to go in for the illicit. To me he had represented a reunion of attributes which I have never found out of England, and not often there⁠—that of smartness and scholarship combined. He knew the world, possibly the devil, but certainly the literature of India which he read, not in the Clarendon Press translations, but in the original. His scholarship did not stop there. He had produced a work which had gained for him the respect of European Orientalists. It was a commentary on the sutras of Patanjali.

To a man of that caliber the clandestine and the surreptitious are usually vulgar, and always inane. Yet, then, in the hearts of the best what abysses there may be! There are men, as there are women, dwelling on the uplands of life who, in spite of the contrast, perhaps because of the contrast, are seized by absolute nostalgias for mud.

Even so, concerning that skirt I had my doubts. Besides, it was yet to be shown that it had rustled from Ferrol’s rooms. Of one thing, of course, I was certain. It did not belong to Miss Rivers.

That certainty, however, was not shared by Lady Massingbird. On the contrary. It was a visible enjoyment to her to assume that it could belong to no one else. But with these views only Lady Silverstairs agreed.

“There is no doubt of it,” declared that delightful little woman. “It must have been hers, unless, indeed”⁠—and here she smiled, and, smiling, disclosed a glimpse of teeth as pretty and as keen as a kitten’s⁠—“unless she happened to be flaunting it in a cancan at the Moulin Rouge. That would be so like her. Yes, wouldn’t it?”

In the ripple of laughter that ensued I got up to go. It did not seem that anything further could be added. Nor was there for a while. At the inquest nothing not already known was developed except that Simpson was an ass, and one equally meager item. This item was produced by Ferrol’s servant, who testified that for several days prior to the murder his master had seemed not quite easy. Asked how this condition had manifested itself, the man made the remarkable statement that Lord Ferrol had instructed him to pitch downstairs anyone that he saw trying to get in.

The item, if meager, was suggestive. Taken in connection with the main episode, it became dramatic. It showed, or seemed to show, that Ferrol was anticipating, if not what actually occurred, at any rate, something sinister. Then, suddenly that something had come, and as suddenly had gone, leaving not a clue behind, leaving not even a trace, leaving no sign of its presence, no indication of a struggle, leaving nothing but a corpse on the floor, the eyes open, the mouth distorted, a human being choked out of life in a jiffy.

Scotland Yard had become very active. So, too, had the press. The latter dripped with the mystery. Everybody was bewitched by it. It had even the merit of interesting an exalted personage. Meanwhile, no suspicion of any kind rested on Miss Rivers, who, on the evening of the murder, had, with her retinue, descended on Paris at the Hôtel du Rhin. But though no suspicion attached to her, it was felt in Scotland Yard, and more agreeably still in exalted circles, that, because of the unexplained rupture of her engagement, she might, if she chose, possibly provide a clue.

But the matter was very delicate. For here was a young person, the Stars and Stripes wrapped all about her, who had done nothing save cease to be affianced to a man that was subsequently killed. The police could not approach her. Only diplomacy might. And then only diplomacy of a kind which British embassies lack; for where among them is the Metternich who, without violating every canon of decency, could presume to question the girl?

Nevertheless, it was felt that an effort should be made. That feeling, naturally enough, was induced, less by a desire for justice in the abstract, than by the hope that the damnable and haunting enigma of the mystery would be explained. In this, the exalted personage to whom I have referred was, as I afterward learned, as keen for a scent as the police.

Of that, at the time, I was ignorant, and so remained until there came a note from the duchess bidding me again to Hill Street, where I learned, not merely what had been going on, but of a triumph of diplomacy that had resulted.

The diplomat who had effected it was, together with a lot of other people, in Hill Street when I got there. He had, it then appeared, been chosen not by reason of any particular astuteness, but simply because he knew Miss Rivers rather well. This diplomat, whom I had met before, and originally in the arms of his nurse, was Lord Nevis, a son of the duchess, and as nice a looking boy as you ever saw.

At the moment he was gorging himself with sandwiches. But, presently, prodded by his mother, the fruits of his mission⁠—already, as I discovered, displayed in high quarters⁠—were produced.

“Well, you know,” he at last began, “Miss Rivers said that the reason⁠—er⁠—the reason why she broke with Ferrol was⁠—er⁠—that he was crazy, don’t you know. Yes. That’s what she told me. She said that he saw things.”

“Fancy that!” murmured the endearing Lady Massingbird.

“Well, not things, perhaps,” the young lord resumed; “but people; or, rather, a person. Ferrol, you know, had written a book about⁠—about⁠—”

“The sutras,” I suggested.

“Yes. Quite so. And this book made the people who believed in them rather nasty, or he said it did. Then he got from Benares a letter⁠—where the dickens is that thing gone now?” the diplomat interrupted himself to ask, and, asking, burrowed in several pockets. “Oh, yes, here it is,” he added, extracting a bit of paper on which, seemingly, he had jotted hard words. “Yes, Ferrol got a letter from a yogi who signed himself Anagarika, saying that if, within a certain specified time, he did not make public retraction of the lies which he had printed concerning this⁠—er⁠—this system of philosophy I believe it is, if he did not do that he would be visited by the”⁠—here the lad examined his notes again⁠—“he would be visited by the parapoutra.”

“The what?” Lady Massingbird exclaimed.

“The parapoutra.”

“What is that?”

“Blessed if I know. But that is what would happen if he didn’t.”

“Do you know what it is?” Lady Silverstairs inquired of me.

I had not an idea. But though I am an ignorant brute, I saw no use in admitting it.

“Yes,” I modestly answered. “The parapoutra is the nameless shame.”

“What sort of a shame is that?”

“Oh,” I replied, “it is hardly a subject for the drawing room.”

“It must be very chaste, then,” Lady Silverstairs joyously concluded, while the young lord ran on:

“Yes, that is what was to happen if he didn’t retract. Whether he got in a funk over it or not I don’t know, but shortly he began to see things. He told Miss Rivers that one night, on entering his library, he saw a man whose back was turned toward him seated at the table. The man was writing. Ferrol said that he could hear the quill squeak on the paper. He went forward to find out who he was, but when he got to him there was nobody.”

“What!” we all exclaimed.

“Yes, that is what he told Miss Rivers. He told her that when he got to the table the man broke like a bubble. That was his expression.”

“It is most unusual,” said the dear duchess, though whether she referred to the incident or to the simile or to both, she omitted to state.

“Ferrol told Miss Rivers,” Lord Nevis continued, “that of course he was rather rattled, but that he was absolutely flabbergasted when, on looking down on the paper which was there, he found written the name Anagarika.”

“Then he had written it himself,” the Lady Agatha indignantly interjected.

“I dare say. But he did not believe it. What he did believe was that it was written by that yogi and that he had seen him there and seen him vanish. When he told that to Miss Rivers and she saw that he was telling it in dead earnest she broke the engagement, and if I had been her I’ll be shot if I would not have done the same.”

“Is that all?” Mr. Yorke, who had been ambling about, soothingly inquired.

“What more would you have?” Lord Nevis retorted.

“You see,” Mr. Yorke answered, in his consoling way, “it doesn’t quite explain⁠—now, does it?⁠—how Ferrol came to be strangled.”

Lord Nevis helped himself to a liquor. “No, it doesn’t. And when I told them at Sandringham about it he said that he didn’t like the looks of it all.”

“It is most unusual!” the duchess repeated. “Most!”

On this occasion I quite agreed with her, and presently in the general conversation which ensued, after telling her so, I got away.

But the mystery accompanied me. It followed me through Berkeley Square, through the lovely quiet of the spacious street. Then, unconsciously, such knowledge as I had once had of the Patandjali sutras emerged from some one of memory’s ablated cells. I recalled that these sutras taught of union with the supersensible, and of the supernatural powers which that union confer. I remembered that among other things they taught how the devout may exteriorize themselves from the body, project themselves through space, materialize partially or wholly, appear and disappear at will.

Tenets such as these are to the Occidental just so much nonsense. But is it not, I reflected, a beneficent Providence that has enabled us to despise whatever we do not understand? Then, too, may it not be that there are possibilities to which we are blind? May it not be that there are forces of which we know nothing, but which subtler intellects have grasped? May it not be that with those forces there are powers of which we know less, but of which acuter minds make use? May it not be as we learned⁠—or should have learned at school⁠—that everything is possible? And granting these forces and powers and the possibilities of them, might it not be that, among the apes and the peacocks in a grove of the sacred temple at Benares, a yogi was now, perhaps, recovering from a catalepsy, self-induced, during which his entity, exteriorized, had crossed the seas, crouched in that room of Ferrol’s, waited for him and strangled him there?

If everything be possible, that is possible, also. If not, then there is, I concluded, but one other solution. The threat of the parapoutra, the meaning of which Ferrol necessarily knew, may have so affected him that he imagined the presence of the yogi, really believed that he had seen him, and then, still more affected by the hallucination and affected more greatly yet by the rupture of his engagement, had, in an access of desperation, throttled himself.

At the inquest Simpson had denied that such a thing was feasible. But it is feasible. It is a form of suicide of which the old galley slaves and a few modern actors know the art. Histrionically, it is utilized to cause the appearance of suffocation which it produces and which is effected by swallowing the tip of the tongue.

It is that, perhaps, which Ferrol had done. Simpson had testified that death was due to heart failure, superinduced by compression of the carotid artery. Even so, the diagnosis would be the same. But where is the physician, in or out the witness box, who does not like to air a phrase, particularly when there is no one to refute him?

In this instance a layman could have refuted that ass. Heart failure is not induced by compression of the carotid artery. Only narcosis is. Heart failure may of course occur, but, in that event, it is merely coincidental. Yet, assuming that in Ferrol’s case it had occurred, what could have caused it? What but fright? What but the sinister and sudden return of the intangible something which he had once seen break like a bubble before his eyes⁠—what but Anagarika abruptly clutching and gibbering at his throat?

Such an adventure might, I thought, induce heart failure in me, and, if in me, why not in Ferrol? The hypothesis was so spacious that I luxuriated in it. It was also so picturesque that I at once gave it preference over the alternate theory of suicide. It was so unusual, too, that I determined, when I got the chance, to set it before the duchess and, while I was at it, to suggest to her that the rustle of the skirt on the stair had come from the robe of a priest of Siva.

But, when at last the opportunity arrived, the duchess rather took the wind out of my sails by announcing her son’s engagement to Miss Rivers and declining to discuss the death of Ferrol any more.

Fortunately, or, more exactly, as luck would have it, unfortunately for me, Lady Silverstairs was less reluctant. Sometime later I found myself next to her at dinner. During the initial courses I unfolded the beauties of my hypothesis which, in the interim, I had had the leisure to elaborate and to which she was good enough to listen. But when I got into occultism and pictured Anagarika floating over the seas, filtering into Ferrol’s rooms and finishing him there, she smiled, providing as she did so, glimpses of teeth perfect enough to make a saint envious, not of her husband, but, on the contrary, of any remplaçant the poor devil might have.

“Perhaps you don’t believe in yogis,” I remarked, in answer to that smile.

“I believe that two and two make four,” the delightful woman replied. “I believe that if one yogi could do all that, it would not require more than a rabble of them to take British rule by the ear and conduct it out of India. Did that ever occur to you? No. Did it?”

“It occurs to me,” I answered, “that argument is agreeable, but futile, with a woman who talks like Solomon and looks like a seraph. But,” I added, “if my explanation explains nothing, Ferrol must have killed himself. In which case, whose was the skirt?”

Lady Silverstairs nibbled at a strawberry and shook her pretty head. “Ferrol did not kill himself,” she presently announced. “The skirt, I am told, belonged to a woman who was in his rooms that night.”

“A demirep?”

“Oh, dear me, no. A woman like the rest of us.”

“But,” I objected, “surely it is not supposed that a woman of that kind would act like a wildcat? Such things are not done in Mayfair.”

Again there were glimpses of those teeth. But this time my delightful compatriot laughed.

“What isn’t done?” she asked. “Or, rather, tell me what is not done? Half the peerage is on the way to the divorce court and the other half ought to be.”

To this I hastened to agree. “Of course, there are everywhere⁠—breaches of decorum, shall I say? But between bagatelles of that kind, and doing people up, there is a margin, don’t you think?”

But here Lady Silverstairs’ attention was claimed by a neighbor. When at last she got back at me it was with the same angelic smile.

“From what I hear,” she resumed, “I fancy that the woman in the case had expected to be Lady Ferrol. I fancy, too, that she first frightened Miss Rivers into breaking the engagement and then, disappointed in an effort to get Ferrol to renew an anterior pledge, lost her temper and he his life. That is the idea, though as yet the proofs are not in. But meanwhile⁠—entre nous n’est ce-pas?⁠—the lady is under surveillance. Tomorrow, the day after, tonight, it may be, she will be arrested and we will all assist at the trial.”

“How disgusting!” I exclaimed.

“Why disgusting? Don’t you care for trials?”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” I answered. “But all this eliminates my hypotheses, exiles the occult and dismisses the picturesque. It is that which is disgusting. But permit me. You forget, do you not, that Miss Rivers gave as her reason for breaking the engagement that Ferrol saw things and⁠—”

“Precisely,” my fair compatriot interrupted. “And so does she. And knows a good one, too, when she is about it. She did not dillydally much, now, did she, about snapping Nevis up?”

“After all,” I rejoined, “it is nobody’s business but her own why she broke with Ferrol. But if she invented that beautiful story about Anagarika she has an imagination to beat the band. Though, on the other hand,” I added, “Ferrol, on receipt of some letter from Benares, may have told her what those chaps out there are able to do, and what he advanced theoretically she may have accepted as fact.”

“Oh, as for that, she is great at accepting. It has been one man after the other ever since she got here. But, now that you remind me, that is pretty much the idea that they have at Sandringham.”

“Well, then,” I replied, “if that is the inside of it I do wish you would tell the duchess. It would seem to her so unusual.”

“But I have told her.”

“And what did she say?”

“Nothing. She had heard it before and looked upon it as the most natural in the world.”

“There is nothing commonplace about her, is there?” I exclaimed.

But immediately there was a move. Our hostess was rising. As I got from my chair I was conscious of a sense of loss. Under the table Anagarika lay, pitched there by inside information. In lieu of the splendid possibilities he had evoked I had an inkling of a stupid crime. The exchange was not compensatory. I regarded it as a swindle⁠—as worse yet, a nameless shame.