SOME days passed before Granice could obtain a word with the District
Attorney: he began to think that Allonby avoided him.
But when they were face to face Allonby’s jovial countenance showed
no sign of embarrassment. He waved his visitor to a chair, and leaned
across his desk with the encouraging smile of a consulting physician.
Granice broke out at once: “That detective you sent me the other day--”
Allonby raised a deprecating hand.
“--I know: it was Stell the alienist. Why did you do that, Allonby?”
The other’s face did not lose its composure. “Because I looked up your
story first--and there’s nothing in it.”
“Nothing in it?” Granice furiously interposed.
“Absolutely nothing. If there is, why the deuce don’t you bring me
proofs? I know you’ve been talking to Peter Ascham, and to Denver, and
to that little ferret McCarren of the _Explorer_. Have any of them been
able to make out a case for you? No. Well, what am I to do?”
Granice’s lips began to tremble. “Why did you play me that trick?”
“About Stell? I had to, my dear fellow: it’s part of my business. Stell
_is_ a detective, if you come to that--every doctor is.”
The trembling of Granice’s lips increased, communicating itself in a
long quiver to his facial muscles. He forced a laugh through his dry
throat. “Well--and what did he detect?”
“In you? Oh, he thinks it’s overwork--overwork and too much smoking. If
you look in on him some day at his office he’ll show you the record of
hundreds of cases like yours, and advise you what treatment to follow.
It’s one of the commonest forms of hallucination. Have a cigar, all the
same.”
“But, Allonby, I killed that man!”
The District Attorney’s large hand, outstretched on his desk, had an
almost imperceptible gesture, and a moment later, as if an answer to the
call of an electric bell, a clerk looked in from the outer office.
“Sorry, my dear fellow--lot of people waiting. Drop in on Stell some
morning,” Allonby said, shaking hands.
McCarren had to own himself beaten: there was absolutely no flaw in the
alibi. And since his duty to his journal obviously forbade his wasting
time on insoluble mysteries, he ceased to frequent Granice, who dropped
back into a deeper isolation. For a day or two after his visit to
Allonby he continued to live in dread of Dr. Stell. Why might not
Allonby have deceived him as to the alienist’s diagnosis? What if he
were really being shadowed, not by a police agent but by a mad-doctor?
To have the truth out, he suddenly determined to call on Dr. Stell.
The physician received him kindly, and reverted without embarrassment
to the conditions of their previous meeting. “We have to do that
occasionally, Mr. Granice; it’s one of our methods. And you had given
Allonby a fright.”
Granice was silent. He would have liked to reaffirm his guilt, to
produce the fresh arguments which had occurred to him since his last
talk with the physician; but he feared his eagerness might be taken
for a symptom of derangement, and he affected to smile away Dr. Stell’s
allusion.
“You think, then, it’s a case of brain-fag--nothing more?”
“Nothing more. And I should advise you to knock off tobacco. You smoke a
good deal, don’t you?”
He developed his treatment, recommending massage, gymnastics, travel, or
any form of diversion that did not--that in short--
Granice interrupted him impatiently. “Oh, I loathe all that--and I’m
sick of travelling.”
“H’m. Then some larger interest--politics, reform, philanthropy?
Something to take you out of yourself.”
“Yes. I understand,” said Granice wearily.
“Above all, don’t lose heart. I see hundreds of cases like yours,” the
doctor added cheerfully from the threshold.
On the doorstep Granice stood still and laughed. Hundreds of cases like
his--the case of a man who had committed a murder, who confessed his
guilt, and whom no one would believe! Why, there had never been a case
like it in the world. What a good figure Stell would have made in a
play: the great alienist who couldn’t read a man’s mind any better than
that!
Granice saw huge comic opportunities in the type.
But as he walked away, his fears dispelled, the sense of listlessness
returned on him. For the first time since his avowal to Peter Ascham
he found himself without an occupation, and understood that he had been
carried through the past weeks only by the necessity of constant action.
Now his life had once more become a stagnant backwater, and as he stood
on the street corner watching the tides of traffic sweep by, he asked
himself despairingly how much longer he could endure to float about in
the sluggish circle of his consciousness.
The thought of self-destruction recurred to him; but again his flesh
recoiled. He yearned for death from other hands, but he could never take
it from his own. And, aside from his insuperable physical reluctance,
another motive restrained him. He was possessed by the dogged desire
to establish the truth of his story. He refused to be swept aside as
an irresponsible dreamer--even if he had to kill himself in the end,
he would not do so before proving to society that he had deserved death
from it.
He began to write long letters to the papers; but after the first had
been published and commented on, public curiosity was quelled by a
brief statement from the District Attorney’s office, and the rest of his
communications remained unprinted. Ascham came to see him, and begged
him to travel. Robert Denver dropped in, and tried to joke him out of
his delusion; till Granice, mistrustful of their motives, began to dread
the reappearance of Dr. Stell, and set a guard on his lips. But the
words he kept back engendered others and still others in his brain.
His inner self became a humming factory of arguments, and he spent long
hours reciting and writing down elaborate statements of his crime,
which he constantly retouched and developed. Then gradually his activity
languished under the lack of an audience, the sense of being buried
beneath deepening drifts of indifference. In a passion of resentment he
swore that he would prove himself a murderer, even if he had to commit
another crime to do it; and for a sleepless night or two the thought
flamed red on his darkness. But daylight dispelled it. The determining
impulse was lacking and he hated too promiscuously to choose his
victim... So he was thrown back on the unavailing struggle to impose
the truth of his story. As fast as one channel closed on him he tried to
pierce another through the sliding sands of incredulity. But every issue
seemed blocked, and the whole human race leagued together to cheat one
man of the right to die.
Thus viewed, the situation became so monstrous that he lost his last
shred of self-restraint in contemplating it. What if he were really
the victim of some mocking experiment, the centre of a ring of
holiday-makers jeering at a poor creature in its blind dashes against
the solid walls of consciousness? But, no--men were not so uniformly
cruel: there were flaws in the close surface of their indifference,
cracks of weakness and pity here and there...
Granice began to think that his mistake lay in having appealed to
persons more or less familiar with his past, and to whom the visible
conformities of his life seemed a final disproof of its one fierce
secret deviation. The general tendency was to take for the whole of life
the slit seen between the blinders of habit: and in his walk down that
narrow vista Granice cut a correct enough figure. To a vision free to
follow his whole orbit his story would be more intelligible: it would
be easier to convince a chance idler in the street than the trained
intelligence hampered by a sense of his antecedents. This idea shot up
in him with the tropic luxuriance of each new seed of thought, and he
began to walk the streets, and to frequent out-of-the-way chop-houses
and bars in his search for the impartial stranger to whom he should
disclose himself.
At first every face looked encouragement; but at the crucial moment he
always held back. So much was at stake, and it was so essential that
his first choice should be decisive. He dreaded stupidity, timidity,
intolerance. The imaginative eye, the furrowed brow, were what he
sought. He must reveal himself only to a heart versed in the tortuous
motions of the human will; and he began to hate the dull benevolence
of the average face. Once or twice, obscurely, allusively, he made a
beginning--once sitting down at a man’s side in a basement chop-house,
another day approaching a lounger on an east-side wharf. But in both
cases the premonition of failure checked him on the brink of avowal. His
dread of being taken for a man in the clutch of a fixed idea gave him an
unnatural keenness in reading the expression of his interlocutors, and
he had provided himself in advance with a series of verbal alternatives,
trap-doors of evasion from the first dart of ridicule or suspicion.
He passed the greater part of the day in the streets, coming home at
irregular hours, dreading the silence and orderliness of his apartment,
and the critical scrutiny of Flint. His real life was spent in a
world so remote from this familiar setting that he sometimes had the
mysterious sense of a living metempsychosis, a furtive passage from one
identity to another--yet the other as unescapably himself!
One humiliation he was spared: the desire to live never revived in
him. Not for a moment was he tempted to a shabby pact with existing
conditions. He wanted to die, wanted it with the fixed unwavering desire
which alone attains its end. And still the end eluded him! It would not
always, of course--he had full faith in the dark star of his destiny.
And he could prove it best by repeating his story, persistently and
indefatigably, pouring it into indifferent ears, hammering it into dull
brains, till at last it kindled a spark, and some one of the careless
millions paused, listened, believed...
It was a mild March day, and he had been loitering on the west-side
docks, looking at faces. He was becoming an expert in physiognomies: his
eagerness no longer made rash darts and awkward recoils. He knew now the
face he needed, as clearly as if it had come to him in a vision; and
not till he found it would he speak. As he walked eastward through the
shabby reeking streets he had a premonition that he should find it that
morning. Perhaps it was the promise of spring in the air--certainly he
felt calmer than for many days...
He turned into Washington Square, struck across it obliquely, and walked
up University Place. Its heterogeneous passers always allured him--they
were less hurried than in Broadway, less enclosed and classified than in
Fifth Avenue. He walked slowly, watching for his face.
At Union Square he felt a sudden relapse into discouragement, like a
votary who has watched too long for a sign from the altar. Perhaps,
after all, he should never find his face... The air was languid, and
he felt tired. He walked between the bald grass-plots and the twisted
trees, making for an empty seat. Presently he passed a bench on which a
girl sat alone, and something as definite as the twitch of a cord made
him stop before her. He had never dreamed of telling his story to a
girl, had hardly looked at the women’s faces as they passed. His case
was man’s work: how could a woman help him? But this girl’s face was
extraordinary--quiet and wide as a clear evening sky. It suggested a
hundred images of space, distance, mystery, like ships he had seen, as
a boy, quietly berthed by a familiar wharf, but with the breath of far
seas and strange harbours in their shrouds... Certainly this girl would
understand. He went up to her quietly, lifting his hat, observing the
forms--wishing her to see at once that he was “a gentleman.”
“I am a stranger to you,” he began, sitting down beside her, “but your
face is so extremely intelligent that I feel... I feel it is the face
I’ve waited for ... looked for everywhere; and I want to tell you--”
The girl’s eyes widened: she rose to her feet. She was escaping him!
In his dismay he ran a few steps after her, and caught her roughly by
the arm.
“Here--wait--listen! Oh, don’t scream, you fool!” he shouted out.
He felt a hand on his own arm; turned and confronted a policeman.
Instantly he understood that he was being arrested, and something hard
within him was loosened and ran to tears.
“Ah, you know--you _know_ I’m guilty!”
He was conscious that a crowd was forming, and that the girl’s
frightened face had disappeared. But what did he care about her face? It
was the policeman who had really understood him. He turned and followed,
the crowd at his heels...