The Galton Case Read Online Free PDF

had the eyes of a poet.”
    “I see. Were you in love with him?”
    She gave me a startled look. “Surely you don’t expect me to answer that.”
    “You just did. You say he used to talk to you. Did he ever discuss his plans for the future?”
    “Just in general terms. He wanted to go away and write.”
    “Go away where?”
    “Somewhere quiet and peaceful, I suppose.”
    “Out of the country?”
    “I doubt it. Tony disapproved of expatriates. He always said he wanted to get
closer
to America. This was in the depression, remember. He was very strong for the rights of the working class.”
    “Radical?”
    “I guess you’d call him that. But he wasn’t a Communist, if that’s what you mean. He did feel that having money cut him off from life. Tony hated social snobbery—which was one reason he was so unhappy at college. He often said he wanted to live like ordinary people, lose himself in the mass.”
    “It looks as if he succeeded in doing just that. Did he ever talk to you about his wife?”
    “Never. I didn’t even know he was married, or intended to get married.” She was very self-conscious. Not knowing what to do with her face, she tried to smile. The teeth betweenher parted lips were like white bone showing in a wound.
    As if to divert my attention from her, she thrust the other pictures into my hands. Most of them were candid shots of Tony Galton doing various things: riding a horse, sitting on a rock in swimming trunks, holding a tennis racket with a winner’s fixed grin on his face. From the pictures, and from what the people said, I got the impression of a boy going through the motions. He made the gestures of enjoyment; but kept himself hidden, even from the camera. I began to have some glimmering of the psychology that made him want to lose himself.
    “What did he like doing?”
    “Writing. Reading and writing.”
    “Besides that. Tennis? Swimming?”
    “Not really. Tony despised sports. He used to jeer at me for going in for them.”
    “What about wine and women? Dr. Howell said he was quite a playboy.”
    “Dr. Howell never understood him,” she said. “Tony did have relations with women, and I suppose he drank, but he did it on principle.”
    “Is that what he told you?”
    “Yes, and it’s true. He was practicing Rimbaud’s theory of the violation of the senses. He thought that having all sorts of remarkable experiences would make him a good poet, like Rimbaud.” She saw my uncomprehending look, and added: “Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. He and Charles Baudelaire were Tony’s great idols.”
    “I see.” We were getting off the track into territory where I felt lost. “Did you ever meet any of his women?”
    “Oh, no.” She seemed shocked at the idea. “He never brought any of them here.”
    “He brought his wife home.”
    “Yes, I know. I was away at school when it happened.”
    “When what happened?”
    “The big explosion,” she said. “Mr. Galton told him never to darken his door again. It was all very Victorian and heavy-father. And Tony never did darken his door again.”
    “Let’s see, that was in October 1936. Did you ever see Tony after that?”
    “Never. I was at school in the east.”
    “Ever hear from him?”
    Her mouth started to shape the word “no,” then tightened. “I had a little note from him, some time in the course of the winter. It must have been before Christmas, because I got it at school, and I didn’t go back after Christmas. I think it was in the early part of December that it came.”
    “What did it say?”
    “Nothing very definite. Simply that he was doing well, and had broken into print. He’d had a poem accepted by a little magazine in San Francisco. He sent it to me under separate cover. I’ve kept it, if you’d like to look at it.”
    She kept it in a manila envelope on the top shelf of her bookcase. The magazine was a thin little publication smudgily printed on pulp paper; its name was
Chisel.
She opened it to a