Tales of Men and Ghosts — 02 - The Bolted Door, part ii

IV

THE perspiration was rolling off Granice’s forehead.

Every few minutes he had to draw out his handkerchief and wipe the moisture from his haggard face.

For an hour and a half he had been talking steadily, putting his case to the District Attorney.

Luckily he had a speaking acquaintance with Allonby, and had obtained, without much difficulty, a private audience on the very day after his talk with Robert Denver.

In the interval between he had hurried home, got out of his evening clothes, and gone forth again at once into the dreary dawn.

His fear of Ascham and the alienist made it impossible for him to remain in his rooms.

And it seemed to him that the only way of averting that hideous peril was by establishing, in some sane impartial mind, the proof of his guilt.

Even if he had not been so incurably sick of life, the electric chair seemed now the only alternative to the strait-jacket.

As he paused to wipe his forehead he saw the District Attorney glance at his watch.

The gesture was significant, and Granice lifted an appealing hand.

“I don’t expect you to believe me now--but can’t you put me under arrest, and have the thing looked into?

” Allonby smiled faintly under his heavy grayish moustache.

He had a ruddy face, full and jovial, in which his keen professional eyes seemed to keep watch over impulses not strictly professional.

“Well, I don’t know that we need lock you up just yet.

But of course I’m bound to look into your statement--” Granice rose with an exquisite sense of relief.

Surely Allonby wouldn’t have said that if he hadn’t believed him!

“That’s all right.

Then I needn’t detain you.

I can be found at any time at my apartment.

” He gave the address.

The District Attorney smiled again, more openly.

“What do you say to leaving it for an hour or two this evening?

I’m giving a little supper at Rector’s--quiet, little affair, you understand: just Miss Melrose--I think you know her--and a friend or two; and if you’ll join us...

” Granice stumbled out of the office without knowing what reply he had made.

He waited for four days--four days of concentrated horror.

During the first twenty-four hours the fear of Ascham’s alienist dogged him; and as that subsided, it was replaced by the exasperating sense that his avowal had made no impression on the District Attorney.

Evidently, if he had been going to look into the case, Allonby would have been heard from before now.

...

And that mocking invitation to supper showed clearly enough how little the story had impressed him!

Granice was overcome by the futility of any farther attempt to inculpate himself.

He was chained to life--a “prisoner of consciousness.

” Where was it he had read the phrase?

Well, he was learning what it meant.

In the glaring night-hours, when his brain seemed ablaze, he was visited by a sense of his fixed identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable _selfness_, keener, more insidious, more unescapable, than any sensation he had ever known.

He had not guessed that the mind was capable of such intricacies of self-realization, of penetrating so deep into its own dark windings.

Often he woke from his brief snatches of sleep with the feeling that something material was clinging to him, was on his hands and face, and in his throat--and as his brain cleared he understood that it was the sense of his own loathed personality that stuck to him like some thick viscous substance.

Then, in the first morning hours, he would rise and look out of his window at the awakening activities of the street--at the street-cleaners, the ash-cart drivers, and the other dingy workers flitting hurriedly by through the sallow winter light.

Oh, to be one of them--any of them--to take his chance in any of their skins!

They were the toilers--the men whose lot was pitied--the victims wept over and ranted about by altruists and economists; and how gladly he would have taken up the load of any one of them, if only he might have shaken off his own!

But, no--the iron circle of consciousness held them too: each one was hand-cuffed to his own hideous ego.

Why wish to be any one man rather than another?

The only absolute good was not to be ...

And Flint, coming in to draw his bath, would ask if he preferred his eggs scrambled or poached that morning?

On the fifth day he wrote a long urgent letter to Allonby; and for the succeeding two days he had the occupation of waiting for an answer.

He hardly stirred from his rooms, in his fear of missing the letter by a moment; but would the District Attorney write, or send a representative: a policeman, a “secret agent,” or some other mysterious emissary of the law?

On the third morning Flint, stepping softly--as if, confound it!

his master were ill--entered the library where Granice sat behind an unread newspaper, and proferred a card on a tray.

Granice read the name--J. B.

Hewson--and underneath, in pencil, “From the District Attorney’s office.

” He started up with a thumping heart, and signed an assent to the servant.

Mr. Hewson was a slight sallow nondescript man of about fifty--the kind of man of whom one is sure to see a specimen in any crowd.

“Just the type of the successful detective,” Granice reflected as he shook hands with his visitor.

And it was in that character that Mr. Hewson briefly introduced himself.

He had been sent by the District Attorney to have “a quiet talk” with Mr. Granice--to ask him to repeat the statement he had made about the Lenman murder.

His manner was so quiet, so reasonable and receptive, that Granice’s self-confidence returned.

Here was a sensible man--a man who knew his business--it would be easy enough to make _him_ see through that ridiculous alibi!

Granice offered Mr. Hewson a cigar, and lighting one himself--to prove his coolness--began again to tell his story.

He was conscious, as he proceeded, of telling it better than ever before.

Practice helped, no doubt; and his listener’s detached, impartial attitude helped still more.

He could see that Hewson, at least, had not decided in advance to disbelieve him, and the sense of being trusted made him more lucid and more consecutive.

Yes, this time his words would certainly carry conviction...

V

DESPAIRINGLY, Granice gazed up and down the shabby street.

Beside him stood a young man with bright prominent eyes, a smooth but not too smoothly-shaven face, and an Irish smile.

The young man’s nimble glance followed Granice’s. “Sure of the number, are you?

” he asked briskly.

“Oh, yes--it was 104. ” “Well, then, the new building has swallowed it up--that’s certain.

” He tilted his head back and surveyed the half-finished front of a brick and limestone flat-house that reared its flimsy elegance above a row of tottering tenements and stables.

“Dead sure?

” he repeated.

“Yes,” said Granice, discouraged.

“And even if I hadn’t been, I know the garage was just opposite Leffler’s over there.

” He pointed across the street to a tumble-down stable with a blotched sign on which the words “Livery and Boarding” were still faintly discernible.

The young man dashed across to the opposite pavement.

“Well, that’s something--may get a clue there.

Leffler’s--same name there, anyhow.

You remember that name?

” “Yes--distinctly.

” Granice had felt a return of confidence since he had enlisted the interest of the _Explorer’s_ “smartest” reporter.

If there were moments when he hardly believed his own story, there were others when it seemed impossible that every one should not believe it; and young Peter McCarren, peering, listening, questioning, jotting down notes, inspired him with an exquisite sense of security.

McCarren had fastened on the case at once, “like a leech,” as he phrased it--jumped at it, thrilled to it, and settled down to “draw the last drop of fact from it, and had not let go till he had.

” No one else had treated Granice in that way--even Allonby’s detective had not taken a single note.

And though a week had elapsed since the visit of that authorized official, nothing had been heard from the District Attorney’s office: Allonby had apparently dropped the matter again.

But McCarren wasn’t going to drop it--not he!

He positively hung on Granice’s footsteps.

They had spent the greater part of the previous day together, and now they were off again, running down clues.

But at Leffler’s they got none, after all.

Leffler’s was no longer a stable.

It was condemned to demolition, and in the respite between sentence and execution it had become a vague place of storage, a hospital for broken-down carriages and carts, presided over by a blear-eyed old woman who knew nothing of Flood’s garage across the way--did not even remember what had stood there before the new flat-house began to rise.

“Well--we may run Leffler down somewhere; I’ve seen harder jobs done,” said McCarren, cheerfully noting down the name.

As they walked back toward Sixth Avenue he added, in a less sanguine tone: “I’d undertake now to put the thing through if you could only put me on the track of that cyanide.

” Granice’s heart sank.

Yes--there was the weak spot; he had felt it from the first!

But he still hoped to convince McCarren that his case was strong enough without it; and he urged the reporter to come back to his rooms and sum up the facts with him again.

“Sorry, Mr. Granice, but I’m due at the office now.

Besides, it’d be no use till I get some fresh stuff to work on.

Suppose I call you up tomorrow or next day?

” He plunged into a trolley and left Granice gazing desolately after him.

Two days later he reappeared at the apartment, a shade less jaunty in demeanor.

“Well, Mr. Granice, the stars in their courses are against you, as the bard says.

Can’t get a trace of Flood, or of Leffler either.

And you say you bought the motor through Flood, and sold it through him, too?

” “Yes,” said Granice wearily.

“Who bought it, do you know?

” Granice wrinkled his brows.

“Why, Flood--yes, Flood himself.

I sold it back to him three months later.

” “Flood?

The devil!

And I’ve ransacked the town for Flood.

That kind of business disappears as if the earth had swallowed it.

” Granice, discouraged, kept silence.

“That brings us back to the poison,” McCarren continued, his note-book out.

“Just go over that again, will you?

” And Granice went over it again.

It had all been so simple at the time--and he had been so clever in covering up his traces!

As soon as he decided on poison he looked about for an acquaintance who manufactured chemicals; and there was Jim Dawes, a Harvard classmate, in the dyeing business--just the man.

But at the last moment it occurred to him that suspicion might turn toward so obvious an opportunity, and he decided on a more tortuous course.

Another friend, Carrick Venn, a student of medicine whom irremediable ill-health had kept from the practice of his profession, amused his leisure with experiments in physics, for the exercise of which he had set up a simple laboratory.

Granice had the habit of dropping in to smoke a cigar with him on Sunday afternoons, and the friends generally sat in Venn’s work-shop, at the back of the old family house in Stuyvesant Square.

Off this work-shop was the cupboard of supplies, with its row of deadly bottles.

Carrick Venn was an original, a man of restless curious tastes, and his place, on a Sunday, was often full of visitors: a cheerful crowd of journalists, scribblers, painters, experimenters in divers forms of expression.

Coming and going among so many, it was easy enough to pass unperceived; and one afternoon Granice, arriving before Venn had returned home, found himself alone in the work-shop, and quickly slipping into the cupboard, transferred the drug to his pocket.

But that had happened ten years ago; and Venn, poor fellow, was long since dead of his dragging ailment.

His old father was dead, too, the house in Stuyvesant Square had been turned into a boarding-house, and the shifting life of New York had passed its rapid sponge over every trace of their obscure little history.

Even the optimistic McCarren seemed to acknowledge the hopelessness of seeking for proof in that direction.

“And there’s the third door slammed in our faces.

” He shut his note-book, and throwing back his head, rested his bright inquisitive eyes on Granice’s furrowed face.

“Look here, Mr. Granice--you see the weak spot, don’t you?

” The other made a despairing motion.

“I see so many!

” “Yes: but the one that weakens all the others.

Why the deuce do you want this thing known?

Why do you want to put your head into the noose?

” Granice looked at him hopelessly, trying to take the measure of his quick light irreverent mind.

No one so full of a cheerful animal life would believe in the craving for death as a sufficient motive; and Granice racked his brain for one more convincing.

But suddenly he saw the reporter’s face soften, and melt to a naive sentimentalism.

“Mr. Granice--has the memory of it always haunted you?

” Granice stared a moment, and then leapt at the opening.

“That’s it--the memory of it ...

always ...

” McCarren nodded vehemently.

“Dogged your steps, eh?

Wouldn’t let you sleep?

The time came when you _had_ to make a clean breast of it?

” “I had to.

Can’t you understand?

” The reporter struck his fist on the table.

“God, sir!

I don’t suppose there’s a human being with a drop of warm blood in him that can’t picture the deadly horrors of remorse--” The Celtic imagination was aflame, and Granice mutely thanked him for the word.

What neither Ascham nor Denver would accept as a conceivable motive the Irish reporter seized on as the most adequate; and, as he said, once one could find a convincing motive, the difficulties of the case became so many incentives to effort.

“Remorse--_remorse_,” he repeated, rolling the word under his tongue with an accent that was a clue to the psychology of the popular drama;

and Granice, perversely, said to himself: “If I could only have struck that note I should have been running in six theatres at once.

” He saw that from that moment McCarren’s professional zeal would be fanned by emotional curiosity; and he profited by the fact to propose that they should dine together, and go on afterward to some music-hall or theatre.

It was becoming necessary to Granice to feel himself an object of pre-occupation, to find himself in another mind.

He took a kind of gray penumbral pleasure in riveting McCarren’s attention on his case; and to feign the grimaces of moral anguish became a passionately engrossing game.

He had not entered a theatre for months; but he sat out the meaningless performance in rigid tolerance, sustained by the sense of the reporter’s observation.

Between the acts, McCarren amused him with anecdotes about the audience: he knew every one by sight, and could lift the curtain from every physiognomy.

Granice listened indulgently.

He had lost all interest in his kind, but he knew that he was himself the real centre of McCarren’s attention, and that every word the latter spoke had an indirect bearing on his own problem.

“See that fellow over there--the little dried-up man in the third row, pulling his moustache?

_His_ memoirs would be worth publishing,” McCarren said suddenly in the last _entr’acte_.

Granice, following his glance, recognized the detective from Allonby’s office.

For a moment he had the thrilling sense that he was being shadowed.

“Caesar, if _he_ could talk--!

” McCarren continued.

“Know who he is, of course?

Dr. John B. Stell, the biggest alienist in the country--” Granice, with a start, bent again between the heads in front of him.

“_That_ man--the fourth from the aisle?

You’re mistaken.

That’s not Dr. Stell.

” McCarren laughed.

“Well, I guess I’ve been in court enough to know Stell when I see him.

He testifies in nearly all the big cases where they plead insanity.

” A cold shiver ran down Granice’s spine, but he repeated obstinately: “That’s not Dr. Stell.

” “Not Stell?

Why, man, I _know_ him.

Look--here he comes.

If it isn’t Stell, he won’t speak to me.

” The little dried-up man was moving slowly up the aisle.

As he neared McCarren he made a slight gesture of recognition.

“How’do, Doctor Stell?

Pretty slim show, ain’t it?

” the reporter cheerfully flung out at him.

And Mr. J.

B.

Hewson, with a nod of amicable assent, passed on.

Granice sat benumbed.

He knew he had not been mistaken--the man who had just passed was the same man whom Allonby had sent to see him: a physician disguised as a detective.

Allonby, then, had thought him insane, like the others--had regarded his confession as the maundering of a maniac.

The discovery froze Granice with horror--he seemed to see the mad-house gaping for him.

“Isn’t there a man a good deal like him--a detective named J. B.

Hewson?

” But he knew in advance what McCarren’s answer would be.

“Hewson?

J.

B.

Hewson?

Never heard of him.

But that was J. B.

Stell fast enough--I guess he can be trusted to know himself, and you saw he answered to his name.

” VI

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!