IV

The sharp-pointed willow leaves had twisted and fallen, after the dreary

rains of October. Bark had peeled from the willow trunks, leaving gashes

of bare wood that was a wet and sickly yellow. Through the denuded trees

bulked the solid stone back of John Holt’s house. The patches of earth

were greasy between the tawny knots of grass stems. The bricks of the

walk were always damp now. The world was hunched up in this pervading

chill.

As melancholy as the sick earth seemed the man who in a slaty twilight

paced the willow walk. His step was slack, his lips moved with the

intensity of his meditation. Over his wrinkled black suit and bleak

shirt bosom was a worn overcoat, the velvet collar turned green. He was

considering.

“There’s something to all this. I begin to see—I don’t know what it is I

do see! But there’s lights—supernatural world that makes food and bed

seem ridiculous. I am—I really am beyond the law! I made my own law! Why

shouldn’t I go beyond the law of vision and see the secrets of life? But

I sinned, and I must repent—some day. I need not return the money. I see

now that it was given me so that I could lead this life of

contemplation. But the ingratitude to the president, to the people who

trusted me! Am I but the most miserable of sinners, and as the blind?

Voices—I hear conflicting voices—some praising me for my courage, some

rebuking—”

He knelt on the slimy black surface of a wooden bench beneath the

willows, and as dusk clothed him round about he prayed. It seemed to him

that he prayed not in words but in vast confusing dreams—the words of a

language larger than human tongues. When he had exhausted himself he

slowly entered the house. He locked the door. There was nothing definite

of which he was afraid, but he was never comfortable with the door

unlocked.

By candle light he prepared his austere supper—dry toast, an egg, cheap

green tea with thin milk. As always—as it had happened after every meal,

now, for eighteen months—he wanted a cigarette when he had eaten, but

did not take one. He paced into the living room and through the long

still hours of the evening he read an ancient book, all footnotes and

cross references, about The Numerology of the Prophetic Books, and the

Number of the Beast. He tried to make notes for his own book on

Revelation—that scant pile of sheets covered with writing in a small

finicky hand. Thousands of other sheets he had covered; through whole

nights he had written; but always he seemed with tardy pen to be racing

after thoughts that he could never quite catch, and most of what he had

written he had savagely burned.

But some day he would make a masterpiece! He was feeling toward the

greatest discovery that mortal men had encountered. Everything, he had

determined, was a symbol—not just this holy sign and that, but all

physical manifestations. With frightened exultation he tried his new

power of divination. The hanging lamp swung tinily. He ventured: “If the

arc of that moving radiance touches the edge of the bookcase, then it

will be a sign that I am to go to South America, under an entirely new

disguise, and spend my money.”

He shuddered. He watched the lamp’s unbearably slow swing. The moving

light almost touched the bookcase. He gasped. Then it receded.

It was a warning; he quaked. Would he never leave this place of brooding

and of fear—which he had thought so clever a refuge? He suddenly saw it

all.

“I ran away and hid in a prison! Man isn’t caught by justice—he catches

himself!”

Again he tried. He speculated as to whether the number of pencils on the

table was greater or less than five. If greater, then he had sinned; if

less, then he was veritably beyond the law. He began to lift books and

papers, looking for pencils. He was coldly sweating with the suspense of

the test.

Suddenly he cried “Am I going crazy?”

He fled to his prosaic bedroom. He could not sleep. His brain was

smoldering with confused inklings of mystic numbers and hidden warnings.

He woke from a half sleep more vision haunted than any waking thought,

and cried: “I must go back and confess! But I can’t! I can’t, when I was

too clever for them! I can’t go back and let them win. I won’t let those

fools just sit tight and still catch me!”

It was a year and a half since Jasper had disappeared. Sometimes it

seemed a month and a half; sometimes gray centuries. John’s will power

had been shrouded with curious puttering studies; long heavy-breathing

sittings with the ouija board on his lap, midnight hours when he had

fancied that tables had tapped and crackling coals had spoken. Now that

the second autumn of his seclusion was creeping into winter he was

conscious that he had not enough initiative to carry out his plans for

going to South America. The summer before he had boasted to himself that

he would come out of hiding and go south, leaving such a twisty trail as

only he could make. But—oh, it was too much trouble. He hadn’t the joy

in play-acting which had carried his brother Jasper through his

preparations for flight.

He had killed Jasper Holt, and for a miserable little pile of paper

money he had become a moldy recluse!

He hated his loneliness, but still more did he hate his only companions,

the members of the Soul Hope Fraternity—that pious shrill seamstress,

that surly carpenter, that tight-lipped housekeeper, that old shouting

man with the unseemly frieze of whiskers. They were so unimaginative.

Their meetings were all the same; the same persons rose in the same

order and made the same intimate announcements to the Deity that they

alone were his elect.

At first it had been an amusing triumph to be accepted as the most

eloquent among them, but that had become commonplace, and he resented

their daring to be familiar with him, who was, he felt, the only man of

all men living who beyond the illusions of the world saw the strange

beatitude of higher souls.

It was at the end of November, during a Wednesday meeting at which a

red-faced man had for a half hour maintained that he couldn’t possibly

sin, that the cumulative ennui burst in John Holt’s brain. He sprang up.

He snarled: “You make me sick, all of you! You think you’re so certain

of sanctification that you can’t do wrong. So did I, once! Now I know

that we are all miserable sinners—really are! You all say you are, but

you don’t believe it. I tell you that you there, that have just been

yammering, and you, Brother Judkins, with the long twitching nose, and

I—I—I, most unhappy of men, we must repent, confess, expiate our sins!

And I will confess right now. I st-stole—”

Terrified he darted out of the hall, and hatless, coatless, tumbled

through the main street of Rosebank, nor ceased till he had locked

himself in his house. He was frightened because he had almost betrayed

his secret, yet agonized because he had not gone on, really confessed,

and gained the only peace he could ever know now—the peace of

punishment.

He never returned to Soul Hope Hall. Indeed for a week he did not leave

his house, save for midnight prowling in the willow walk. Quite suddenly

he became desperate with the silence. He flung out of the house, not

stopping to lock or even close the front door. He raced uptown, no

topcoat over his rotting garments, only an old gardener’s cap on his

thick brown hair. People stared at him. He bore it with a resigned fury.

He entered a lunch room, hoping to sit inconspicuously and hear men

talking normally about him. The attendant at the counter gaped. John

heard a mutter from the cashier’s desk: “There’s that crazy hermit!”

All of the half dozen young men loafing in the place were looking at

him. He was so uncomfortable that he could not eat even the milk and

sandwich he had ordered. He pushed them away and fled, a failure in the

first attempt to dine out that he had made in eighteen months; a

lamentable failure to revive that Jasper Holt whom he had coldly killed.

He entered a cigar store and bought a box of cigarettes. He took joy out

of throwing away his asceticism. But when, on the street, he lighted a

cigarette it made him so dizzy that he was afraid he was going to fall.

He had to sit down on the curb. People gathered. He staggered to his

feet and up an alley.

For hours he walked, making and discarding the most contradictory

plans—to go to the bank and confess; to spend the money riotously and

never confess.

It was midnight when he returned to his house.

Before it he gasped. The front door was open. He chuckled with relief as

he remembered that he had not closed it. He sauntered in. He was passing

the door of the living room, going directly up to his bedroom, when his

foot struck an object the size of a book, but hollow sounding. He picked

it up. It was one of the booklike candy boxes. And it was quite empty.

Frightened he listened. There was no sound. He crept into the living

room and lighted the lamp.

The doors of the bookcase had been wrenched open. Every book had been

pulled out on the floor. All of the candy boxes, which that evening had

contained almost ninety-six thousand dollars, were in a pile; and all of

them were empty. He searched for ten minutes, but the only money he

found was one five-dollar bill, which had fluttered under the table. In

his pocket he had one dollar and sixteen cents. John Holt had six

dollars and sixteen cents, no job, no friends—and no identity.

V

When the president of the Lumber National Bank was informed that John

Holt was waiting to see him he scowled.

“Lord, I’d forgotten that minor plague! Must be a year since he’s been

here. Oh, let him— No, hanged if I will! Tell him I’m too busy to see

him. That is, unless he’s got some news about Jasper. Pump him, and find

out.”

The president’s secretary sweetly confided to John:

“I’m so sorry, but the president is in conference just now. What was it

you wanted to see him about? Is there any news about—uh—about your

brother?”

“There is not, miss. I am here to see the president on the business of

the Lord.”

“Oh! If that’s all I’m afraid I can’t disturb him.”

“I will wait.”

Wait he did, through all the morning, through the lunch hour—when the

president hastened out past him—then into the afternoon, till the

president was unable to work with the thought of that scarecrow out

there, and sent for him.

“Well, well! What is it this time, John? I’m pretty busy. No news about

Jasper, eh?”

“No news, sir, but—Jasper himself! I am Jasper Holt! His sin is my sin.”

“Yes, yes, I know all that stuff—twin brothers, twin souls, share

responsibility—”

“You don’t understand. There isn’t any twin brother. There isn’t any

John Holt. I am Jasper. I invented an imaginary brother, and disguised

myself— Why, don’t you recognize my voice?”

While John leaned over the desk, his two hands upon it, and smiled

wistfully, the president shook his head and soothed: “No, I’m afraid I

don’t. Sounds like good old religious John to me! Jasper was a cheerful,

efficient sort of crook. Why, his laugh—”

“But I can laugh!” The dreadful croak which John uttered was the cry of

an evil bird of the swamps. The president shuddered. Under the edge of

the desk his fingers crept toward the buzzer by which he summoned his

secretary.

They stopped as John urged: “Look—this wig—it’s a wig. See, I am

Jasper!”

He had snatched off the brown thatch. He stood expectant, a little

afraid.

The president was startled, but he shook his head and sighed.

“You poor devil! Wig, all right. But I wouldn’t say that hair was much

like Jasper’s!”

He motioned toward the mirror in the corner of the room.

John wavered to it. And indeed he saw that day by slow day his hair had

turned from Jasper’s thin sleek blackness to a straggle of damp gray

locks writhing over a yellow skull.

He begged pitifully: “Oh, can’t you see I am Jasper? I stole

ninety-seven thousand dollars from the bank. I want to be punished! I

want to do anything to prove— Why, I’ve been at your house. Your wife’s

name is Evelyn. My salary here was—”

“My dear boy, don’t you suppose that Jasper might have told you all

these interesting facts? I’m afraid the worry of this has—pardon me if

I’m frank, but I’m afraid it’s turned your head a little, John.”

“There isn’t any John! There isn’t! There isn’t!”

“I’d believe that a little more easily if I hadn’t met you before Jasper

disappeared.”

“Give me a piece of paper. You know my writing—”

With clutching claws John seized a sheet of bank stationery and tried to

write in the round script of Jasper. During the past year and a half he

had filled thousands of pages with the small finicky hand of John. Now,

though he tried to prevent it, after he had traced two or three words in

large but shaky letters the writing became smaller, more pinched, less

legible.

Even while John wrote the president looked at the sheet and said easily:

“Afraid it’s no use. That isn’t Jasper’s fist. See here, I want you to

get away from Rosebank—go to some farm—work outdoors—cut out this fuming

and fussing—get some fresh air in your lungs.” The president rose and

purred: “Now, I’m afraid I have some work to do.”

He paused, waiting for John to go.

John fiercely crumpled the sheet and hurled it away. Tears were in his

weary eyes.

He wailed: “Is there nothing I can do to prove I am Jasper?”

“Why, certainly! You can produce what’s left of the ninety-seven

thousand!”

John took from his ragged waistcoat pocket a five-dollar bill and some

change. “Here’s all there is. Ninety-six thousand of it was stolen from

my house last night.”

Sorry though he was for the madman the president could not help

laughing. Then he tried to look sympathetic, and he comforted: “Well,

that’s hard luck, old man. Uh, let’s see. You might produce some parents

or relatives or somebody to prove that Jasper never did have a twin

brother.”

“My parents are dead, and I’ve lost track of their kin—I was born in

England—father came over when I was six. There might be some cousins or

some old neighbors, but I don’t know. Probably impossible to find out,

in these wartimes, without going over there.”

“Well, I guess we’ll have to let it go, old man.” The president was

pressing the buzzer for his secretary and gently bidding her: “Show Mr.

Holt out, please.”

From the door John desperately tried to add: “You will find my car

sunk—”

The door had closed behind him. The president had not listened.

The president gave orders that never, for any reason, was John Holt to

be admitted to his office again. He telephoned to the bonding company

that John Holt had now gone crazy; that they would save trouble by

refusing to admit him.

John did not try to see them. He went to the county jail. He entered the

keeper’s office and said quietly: “I have stolen a lot of money, but I

can’t prove it. Will you put me in jail?”

The keeper shouted: “Get out of here! You hoboes always spring that when

you want a good warm lodging for the winter! Why the devil don’t you go

to work with a shovel in the sand pits? They’re paying two-seventy-five

a day.”

“Yes, sir,” said John timorously. “Where are they?”