Death Takes a Bow

Death Takes a Bow

A Mr. and Mrs. North Mystery

Frances and Richard Lockridge

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

1

Thursday, October 8, 7:30
P
.
M
. to 8:45
P
.
M
.

Mrs. North was consoling. It wasn't, she pointed out, as if he really had to make a speech. Not a real speech. There was no sense in his carrying on so, and not eating any dinner.

“Actually,” she explained with the air of one who has often explained, “actually all you do is tag Mr. Sproul. Then he's it and you just sit down and look interested and try not to wriggle. And don't pull at your hair.”

Mr. North felt in his jacket pocket. The notes—notes which now represented, he dimly felt, all that he knew or would ever know about anything—were still there. This was reassuring, but it also reinforced his horrid conviction that this was real. In—Mr. North looked at his watch—in fifty-seven minutes he would have to stand up before five hundred people and open his mouth while five hundred mouths remained closed. He shuddered and took his hand away from the notes.

“Michaels should have done it,” he said, angrily. “Why me, for God's sake?”

“Five minutes,” Mrs. North said. “Or ten at the outside. You could do it standing on your head.”

That, Mr. North assured her, would give just the touch. That would make it lovely.

“Mr. Gerald North,” he said, “of the firm of Townsend Brothers, introduced Mr. Victor Leeds Sproul, noted author of
That Was Paris
, while standing on his head.”

“There, dear,” Mrs. North said. “What's five minutes?” She paused. “He didn't go to Paris while standing on his head,” she added, reflectively. “That came afterward. Is he really good, Jerry?”

“He's wonderful,” Jerry told her. “He's immense. Five big printings. Total sales ninety-three thousand as of yesterday. He's colossal. Townsend Brothers loves him. Fifty-three minutes.”

Mrs. North told him to try not to think of it. Or to think that, in an hour, it would all be over. Except, of course, Mr. Sproul, who would be beginning.

“Think how good you'll feel then,” she said. “Duty done, audience contented, Mr. Sproul in full flight.”

“And,” Mr. North said harshly, “the platform covered with old vegetables. Thrown at me. Or me still standing there with my mouth open, trying to think of something to say. Or forgetting Spread's name—Victor Leeds Sproul. Victor Leeds Sproul. Leeds Sproul Victor. Oh, God!”

“Five minutes,” Mrs. North said, looking worriedly at her husband. “Only five minutes, Jerry. Not as long as we've been talking about it.” She sighed. “Not nearly as long,” she added. “And it isn't as if you hadn't done it before. You're a very good speaker, really. Once you get started.”

Gerald North put out a cigarette, reached for another, fingered his notes instead. He held his hand out and watched it tremble. He besought Pamela North to look and she looked and said, “Poor dear.”

“Once I get started,” he repeated. “But you can't get started in five minutes. I'd rather talk half an hour. An hour, even. I'd rather be Sproul.”

“No,” Mrs. North said firmly. “Over my dead body.”

For now, Mr. North pointed out. Not permanently. He would rather be Sproul making a speech of an hour than North introducing for five minutes. Because five minutes was too long or not long enough; in five minutes you could only talk at an audience, and nothing came back, because the audience hadn't the faintest idea who you were or what you wanted it to do; because in five minutes you could not catch your second fluency and had only to rely, frantically, on what you had written down. And because you were too scared to see what you had written down.

“Even fifteen minutes is better,” Mr. North said. “Oh, God!”

He stood up and looked around the living room. Toughy raised an inquiring head from the chair cushion on which he had, no doubt only momentarily, allowed it to relax. He made the interested sound of a loquacious cat which observes things in progress.

“Look at him!” Mr. North commanded. “Does he have to make a speech before five hundred people, introducing Victor Leeds Sproul? He just
lies
there!”

Mr. North glared at Toughy, who repeated his earlier remark.

“I'd like to be a cat,” Mr. North said. “Just sleep and play and be fed. Where's Ruffy?” He looked around. “Off sleeping somewhere,” he answered himself, bitterly. “Does she have to make a speech?” He looked at Mrs. North. “Do you have to make a speech?” he demanded. “Does anybody else in the world have to make a speech except me?” He stared around wildly. “Why me?” he demanded of the world and, it seemed probable, its Creator.

“There, dear,” Mrs. North said. “It's only five minutes.”

Mr. North glared at her.

“Five minutes!” he repeated. “Is that all you can say? Five minutes?”

“Ten at the most,” Mrs. North said, serenely. “After all, you've done it before.” She paused. “And always made just the same fuss about it,” she added. “And afterward never could understand why you were so worried. I'd think you'd learn.”

“So help me,” Mr. North told her, “this is the last time. After this it's Michaels or nobody. Or all the Townsends—or—or anybody. But never me. So help me.”

“You know there aren't any Townsends,” Mrs. North told him. “Since 1873.”

“Eighteen seventy-four,” Mr. North told her. “Old Silas.”

“And Michaels would have, only he's in the army,” she pointed out. “He's being a captain.”

“And if,” Mr. North said, “he can see one bit better than I can I'll—”

“Jerry!” Mrs. North said. Mrs. North was firm. “There's no use going over that again, darling. It's just one of those things. You can't help it, and they can't help it and so you buy bonds and—and introduce Victor Leeds Sproul, so he can tell people about how lovely Paris used to be and make them want to make it that way again and—” She broke off.

“All right, baby,” Mr. North said. “I'm sorry. I'll go make my little speech.”

Mrs. North smiled at him.

“After all—” she began. Mr. North held up his hand.

“Don't go on,” he warned. “Don't say—‘after all, it's only five minutes.' Just don't.”

Mrs. North smiled again. She said, all right, she wouldn't.

“And don't come,” Mr. North said. “Don't get a taxicab after I leave and show up at the Today's Topics Club and think I won't see you in the audience. Because I will. And forget everything I was going to say. If anything.” He looked at her. “Promise, Pam?” he said. There was a note of entreaty in his voice.

“Jerry!” Pam said. As she said it she looked, with sudden anxiety, at the little ball watch which hung around her neck. “Jerry, you've got to
go!
It's—it's after
eight
!”

There was no difficulty in distracting Jerry. He looked at the watch on his wrist and shook the wrist and looked at it again. “Ten of,” he said. “That's what mine says. Do you suppose—?”

“You mustn't take the chance,” Pam told him. “Maybe it stopped. Jerry—you'll have to run! Have you got your notes?”

He felt again, although the touch of the folded sheets of paper was still reminiscent on his fingers. The notes were there. He picked up his top coat, spread on the sofa beside him, and Ruffy tumbled off, landing on her feet and making cat comments. But she saw her brother in his chair and went over quickly. She jumped up beside him and fell to washing his face. He closed his eyes in ecstasy.

“Ruffy,” Pam North said. “You
are
a fool. Make him wash himself!”

Ruffy did not pause. Toughy opened one eye partially and looked at Pamela North and there seemed to be a kind of amusement in the amber eye. He closed it again and Ruffy washed behind his ears.

“I've got to go,” Gerald North said. “I've got to go and make a speech.”

The horror of the situation, now all at once so immediate, overwhelmed him. “I've got to go
now
!” he repeated, in a kind of horrified disbelief. “It's almost
now
!”

That, he thought as he went down the stairs to the street door, and out into the street, was the thing about agreeing to make speeches. You agreed absently in August, when it was suggested to you—when it was only suggested, and yours to take or leave, when you could get out of it easily. You said, perhaps, “Sure, I'll introduce the bloke. Now, Miss Casey, if you're ready—” And then, instantly, it was October and the speech was now. Because time before speeches—even speeches of only five minutes—did not flow smoothly and evenly along, as time sometimes did. Time tricked you, giving no warning. A week before the speech, the speech was still almost as remote as it had been in August; even on Thursday a speech to be given on Friday was comfortably distant. It was not until Friday morning that you discovered you could eat no breakfast. And then it was Friday evening and you were on the sidewalk of Greenwich Place, alone in a hostile world, in which no one of all you saw bore your dreadful, immediate burden; a world divided between people who did not have to make a speech in half an hour—less, maybe—and you.

Gerald North caught a glimpse of the Jefferson Market Clock between two buildings. It said five of eight. Sometimes, he had heard, they let the condemned man give the signal to the fire squad. Or was it the headsman? The condemned man lifted his hand—and what whirling anguish went on in the still living brain as it commanded the hand to rise was something it was not comfortable to imagine. Gerald North imagined it. He lifted his hand and a taxi in the stand at the corner came to life. It leaped the intervening quarter block and engulfed Gerald North. Clutching the sheaf of notes in his inner pocket, his mind a cloudy swirl, the man who was about to make a little introductory speech rode northward along Fifth Avenue, toward his doom.

Normally traffic would have held them up, but that night there was no traffic. The cab dashed through the half-lighted streets like a meteor. It whirled east at Fifty-seventh, and up Madison, and the lights were all green before it. It did not break down. It did not careen into another car, wrecking itself and providing Mr. North with welcome lacerations and contusions which would make the giving of speeches impossible. The driver did not get arrested for exceeding the speed limit, nor was he held up by altercations with a traffic policeman until it was too late to reach the Today's Topics Club—why, Mr. North wondered dimly, not Today's Topics Clubs? Or even Klubs? The cab swirled up to the club's dignified four-story building, which looked so oddly as if it must house some lesser department of the government, and stopped. Mr. North, dazed now, got out and paid. He saw people going into the main entrance—people who were going to hear a lecturer, and the introducer of a lecturer, and had bitter, rapacious faces—and shuddered. He went into the smaller, narrow door reserved, on such nights as these, for the condemned. He entered the small elevator and was jerked to the third floor. He turned right down a cold, white corridor and came to a door marked: “Speakers' Room.” With a shudder, Mr. North opened the door.