There Was an Old Woman [= The Quick And the Dead]

Horatio... Horatio fascinates Ellery Queen. Horatio is a phenomenon to Ellery, a mythological figure. Ellery was unceasingly astonished to see Horatio caper about the Potts estate in the quivering flesh. It was like seeing Silenus on Times Square grinning down from the moving news sign on the Times Building. It was like having Vulcan change your tire at Ye Olde Garage.

Horatio and Death have no simpatico. Horatio is above Death. Horatio is Youth, when Death is inconceivable, even the death of the old.

Informed by Ellery and Charley Paxton of his mother’s death, Horatio scarcely turned a hair. “Come, come, gentlemen. Death is an illusion. My mother is still in that house, in her bed, being crotchety about something.” Horatio tossed a bean-bag frog into the air and caught it clumsily in its descent. “Always being crotchety about something, Mother,” he boomed. “Good scout at heart, though.”

“For heaven’s sake, Horatio,” cried Charley, “will you try to realize that she isn’t in the house any more? That she’s lying on a slab in the Morgue and that she’ll be buried six feet deep in a couple of days?”

Horatio chuckled indulgently. “My dear Charley. Death is an illusion. We’re all dead, and we’re all living. We die when we grow up, we live when we’re children. You’re dead right now, only you haven’t sense enough to lie down and be shoveled under. Same with you, sir,” said Horatio, winking at Ellery. “Lie down, sir, and be shoveled under!”

“Aren’t you even going to the funeral?” choked Charley.

“Gosh, no,” said Horatio. “I’ve got a swell new kite to fly. It’s simply super!” And he seized a large red apple and ran munching out into the gardens, joyously.

When the cortege passed, Horatio saw it. He must have seen it, for he was perched on the outer wall disentangling the cord of his swell new kite from the branches of an overhanging maple. He must have seen it, because instantly he turned his meaty back and jumped off the wall, abandoning his kite. He capered off towards his sugarloaf house, whistling Little Boy Blue Come Blow Your Horn bravely. Horatio didn’t believe in Death, you see.

Thurlow... Thurlow, the Terror of the Plains, is a bold bad man this day. His not to display unmanly grief before the vulgar. His to mourn in the solitude of his apartment, hugging a bottle of cognac to his plump bosom. This is the way of men who are masculine. The mother is dead — God rest her, gentlemen. But let the son alone; he mourns.

Ellery suspected other Thurlovian thoughts, in the light of subsequent events. Ellery suspected that among Thurlow’s thoughts ran one like a Wagnerian leitmotif: The Queen is dead; long live the King. Ellery suspected royalist thoughts because it was evident shortly after the funeral that Thurlow had planned — during his manly, solitary session with the cognac — to seize his mother’s ermine and seat himself upon her throne instanter.

No, Thurlow the Killer did not attend his mother’s funeral. He had too many affairs of state to think through.

So, Old Woman, this is your final bitterness, that the children you loved turned their backs on you, and the child you hated came to weep at your grave.

Sheila wept without explanation, with Charley Paxton supporting her on one side and Stephen Brent on the other. Sheila wept, and Stephen Brent did not. He followed the coffin with his eyes into the grave, whiskey-reddened eyes without expression.

Major Gotch wore an old jacket of Horatio’s, the only member of the household with a commensurate girth. The Major sneezed frequently and carried himself with great dignity. He seemed to regret the Old Woman’s passing in a bibulous sort of way. As the earth clumped on the coffin, he was actually seen to shed a tear, at which he swiped surreptitiously with the back of Horatio’s sleeve. But then a reporter was so unwise as to ask the Major what he was Major of, and where he had been honored with his Majority. Whereupon Major Gotch did an unmilitary thing: he kicked the press. There were some moments of confusion.

Another was there, a stranger both to Ellery Queen and to his father. He was an elderly gentleman with a pointed Yankee face and mild, observing eyes, dressed plainly but correctly, whom Sheila addressed as “Mr. Underhill.” Mr. Underhill had the hands of a workman. Charley Paxton presented him to the Queens as the man who managed the Potts factories.

“Knew Cornelia when she was a young woman, Inspector,” Mr. Underhill said, shaking his head. “She was always one to stand on her own two feet. I’m not saying she didn’t have faults, but she always treated me fine, and I’m darned sorry to see her go.” And he blew his nose exaggeratedly in the way men do at funerals.

No photographers allowed. No windy eulogy. Just a funeral with a handful of curious passers-by and, beyond, the police cordon.

“So that’s how the Old Woman got home,” mumbled Mr. Queen as the last shovelful of earth was patted into place by the gravedigger’s spade.