THE DEMONIAC
THE rounds in the descending ladder of dissipation are many or few
according to the temperament of the man who makes use of them: the
man, I say, for women rarely descend--they fall. As in a galloping
consumption it is not infrequently the strongest who succumb first, so
in a moral lapse it is often the self-contained who set the pace.
Antrim’s sudden plunge into the stream of excess was fairly
illustrative of this. Beginning with the mild debauch in the company
of Grotter, the division engineer, he went from bad to worse with
such breathtaking celerity that the end of a single week found him
shattered and nerveless, and already dependent upon stimulants for the
inspiration needful to keep him up to his work.
It was in such a plight that he began the day following his adventure
with the “rook.” To be sure, there were, early in the morning, some
feeble and shame-prompted motions toward amendment, but these were soon
swept away by the onrush of appetite, newborn but mighty; and since he
went fasting to his work, he began the earlier to borrow efficiency
from the bottle.
As it is prone to do in time of need, the stimulant played him false at
first, though he gauged the doses with careful accuracy and repeated
them frequently. All through the forenoon he found himself struggling
with a vague sense of uncertainty, a mental obscuration which made
perplexing puzzles out of the well-known details of the office work.
The mail was heavy that day, and in the absence of the superintendent
the chief clerk’s tasks were multiplied. There was an unusual influx of
callers, each with a grievance real or fancied, and a dribbling stream
of telegrams trickled insistently through the clicking relay on his
desk. To make a bad matter worse, his telegraph operator was sick, and
such wire business as came to the office he had to handle himself.
It was some time during this hazy interval that a message, repeated
from some station on the Eastern Division, came from the despatcher’s
office at Lone Pine Junction. It was from the general manager, who,
with the president and his party in the private car Aberystwyth, was
on the line moving westward. Some member of the party was sick, and in
consequence the car was running as a special train, with orders giving
it right of way over all other trains. Similar orders were required for
the Western Division, and Antrim turned to the stenographer:
“Take a message to the general manager, care car Aberystwyth, running
as special train on Eastern Division,” he directed; and when Bertram’s
pencil stopped, he dictated:
“Your message to-day. Car Aberystwyth will be run as special train on
Western Division, Lone Pine Junction to Denver, with right of way over
all trains.”
“Get that off as quick as you can, and when you come back I’ll give you
the letter to the despatcher,” he said, and a few minutes later Bertram
took the message to the telegraph office.
When he came back Antrim had something else for him to do, and in
the rush of the forenoon’s work the stenographer forgot all about
the letter to the train despatcher--the letter without which the
despatcher would know nothing about the arrangement made for the
special. But if Bertram forgot, so did the chief clerk, though the
omission hung over Antrim like a vague threat, which he tried vainly to
define. At noon the threat had become a part of the general obscurity
through which he seemed to be groping his way, and by that time he was
so far behind with the business of the day that he went without dinner
to save the noon hour, substituting yet other potations for the midday
meal.
Such reckless disregardings of the simple necessities speedily brought
their own penalties. By half past one o’clock he was little better
than an automaton, doing whatever came to hand mechanically and by
force of long habit. By three he had fairly entered the drunkard’s
paradise--that exalted frame of mind in which the most abstruse
problems seem to solve themselves of their own motion. After that,
all things were easy of accomplishment, and the chief clerk shut and
locked his office at six o’clock with the comforting conviction that
he was quite himself again; that, notwithstanding the perplexities of
the morning, he had acquitted himself with his old-time vigour and
perspicacity.
Then he went to supper, and when he found that he had overshot the mark
and could eat nothing, he began dimly to realize that he was in a bad
way and forced himself to drink a double allowance of strong coffee.
The slight stimulant began presently to counteract the effect of the
greater, and with the first gleams of returning sobriety the threat of
the forenoon renewed itself with added insistence.
When that happened he went to his room and sat down on the edge of the
bed to reason it out. For an hour or more he wrestled with the thing,
coming no nearer the truth than this: that out of the struggle came
a great and growing conviction that he had left something of critical
moment undone. That was enough. Things left undone in a railway
superintendent’s office may easily mean anything in the category of
disaster, and Antrim groped for his hat and coat and went out, meaning
to borrow yet again of the usurer, and then to go back to his office to
search for the slipped cog.
Fortunately for the latter resolve, the brisk walk in the cool night
air sobered him sufficiently to send him straight to the office without
the preliminary. Letting himself in and leaving the door ajar, he
turned the key of the incandescent lamp over his desk and sat down
to go painfully over the business of the day. It was slow work. His
fingers were clumsy, and there was a curious haze before his eyes which
seemed to befog the mental as well as the physical vision. Under such
conditions it was not wonderful that he overlooked the message relating
to the movements of the president’s special train; and when he had gone
through the day’s correspondence without discovering anything amiss, he
was dismayed afresh to find that the threat of impending disaster was
increased rather than diminished, and his pulse quickened with a rising
fever of apprehension.
“Oh, good Lord,” he groaned, “what has come over me that I can’t
remember? I know I’ve missed something--something that will drive me
crazy if I can’t find out what it is. Let me think: there was the
Rowland excursion to arrange--that’s done; and the holding of Number
Seven for the Western mail--I did that, too.” He went on through the
day’s routine, checking off the items one by one. “No, it’s something
else, and it’s gone from me--gone as though it never were. And whatever
it is, it will ruin me, world without end. God of mercy, why can’t I
remember?”
He leaned back in the swing chair and tortured his brain once
again--cudgelled it until the sweat stood in great drops on his
forehead, but all to no purpose. Once he started up with the thought
that he would try to find Bertram, but he knew not where to look for
the stenographer, and, besides, the nameless terror seemed now to be
so close at hand as to forbid all expedients asking for time. This
menacing phase of the unexplainable thing made him sick with fear, and
the sickness made him sit down and sweat again and fight desperately
for consciousness.
In the midst of this, while he sat staring blankly at the opposite
wall, the end came. Having dwelt overmuch upon the day’s routine,
the events of it now began to chase each other in a round of endless
repetition. In this rhythmic round things tangible were presently
involved, first the walls of the room, then the furniture. He caught
at the arms of his chair to save himself from slipping into the vortex
of the spinning whirlpool: something clicked, in his brain or out of
it, the twirling maelstrom vanished in a puff of darkness that could be
felt, and silence as profound as that in which the deaf live seemed to
kill the sense of hearing.
How long he sat horror-sick in the stifling darkness he knew not; it
might have been minutes or hours. Then a familiar sound broke the
stillness, and he listened with the keen joy of one who hears the
babble of running water in a thirsty desert. It was the clicking of
the telegraph instrument on his desk, and the tiny tapping was his
first assurance that he had not been stricken both deaf and blind in
the same instant. At first the clicking spatter of dots and dashes was
meaningless; then it slipped into coherence, and Antrim listened with
his heart pounding like a trip hammer. The sounder was repeating the
wire business of the day.
Like a flash out of the unseen it came to the prisoner of despair
that the thing forgotten had to do with some telegram mislaid or
overlooked, and here was his opportunity. Sooner or later the tapping
sounder would give him the lost clew, and he would lie in wait and
listen and pounce upon it.
One by one the messages received hours before were ticked off into the
silence, and so single-eyed was the listener that it did not occur to
him to marvel at the miracle. Word for word they came, and he could
even recognise the varying “writing” of the different operators on the
line. At length there was a pause, and then the sounder began again,
tapping out the Denver office call with the signature of Lone Pine
Junction. Antrim pounced upon the key and answered. Without a break the
message followed the closing of the key:
“To CRAIG, Superintendent, Denver:
“Owing to sudden illness of a member of the president’s party, we are
running private car Aberystwyth as special train with right of way
against all other trains. Make same arrangement for Western Division.
Must reach Denver at earliest possible moment. On present schedule,
will arrive Lone Pine Junction between nine and ten this P. M.
“R. F. ANGUS, G. M.”
Antrim heard it through, opened his key and sent the reply:
“To R. F. ANGUS, General Manager, care car Aberystwyth, running as
special train on Eastern Division:
“Your message to-day. Car Aberystwyth will be run as special train
on Western Division, Lone Pine Junction to Denver, with right of way
over all trains.
“CRAIG, Superintendent.”
Then he felt in the darkness for the pad of letter-heads, dipped the
pen, and began the forgotten letter of instructions to the train
despatcher:
“DISBROW, Despatcher, Denver:
“President Carothers, with his party in private car Aberystwyth, is
moving westward on Eastern Division. A member of the party is sick,
and car is running special to Denver with regardless orders. This
special will reach----”
The chief clerk stopped with suspended pen and tried to recall the name
of Lone Pine Junction. Though he had but now repeated it, it was gone,
and, balanced as he was upon the sharp edge of collapse, the effort to
remember the name turned the scale. The pen slipped from his fingers,
his head sank upon his arm, and the swirling whirlpool laid hold of
him, thrusting him down to oblivion in the black throat of its vortex.