Love Story

The cops broke into the gas-filled Manhattan basement with a sense of dreary familiarity--spectators at a sad and sordid drama which had been enacted a thousand times before in a thousand other cheap rooms. There was the battered stove with its jets silently exhaling death. There were the whisky bottle and the two unwashed glasses. There was the rumpled bed. There were two figures, a man and a woman--motionless, voiceless, impersonal as dummies.

The woman, Mrs. Virginia Morton, 42, was dead. But the man, a wiry, sandy-haired fellow of 39, was alive. Presently he moaned, sat up and became a suffering human again. In pain, in fear, in sorrow, he told a story the cops had already guessed. His name was Noble--Francis R. Noble--and he had lived with the woman for years. He loved her, he said. But they had been beaten by the huge and faceless city.

They had lost their jobs, had got behind in the rent, had come to fear they were "sliding to the gutter." He was a photographer; to buy whisky, he got a job as a restaurant counterman. The pair drank . . . and drank . . . and finally made a suicide pact. He remembered saying: "I'm going to strangle you." He remembered her answering, "O.K., honey, get it over with." When he awakened, he found the woman dead. He had turned on the gas--he hadn't wanted to live. Gently enough, the cops led him away.

That was six weeks ago. Last week, after the slow machinery of the law had ground away at his case, he was brought to court, haggard and unshaven, to hear the verdict of the grand jury. But this time the dreary old tale had a fresh and unexpected ending.

An autopsy had revealed that Virginia Morton had died in the night of a heart attack and that her body bore no signs of strangulation. It was the opinion of the examiner that the defendant had never brought himself to commit the deed he thought he remembered. Said the judge: "You are free to go."

Noble wept. "My God," he said in a dazed voice. "My conscience is clear." He was repeating, "Thankful ... so thankful," as he walked outside and vanished in the hurrying and irascible throng on the sidewalk.

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