Born to be Hanged, But—/Chapter 9
IX
I SHALL say nothing of the political campaign, beyond the fact that it was unusually hot and bitter; and that Bryan spoke night after night and seemed to have aroused the State as it had never been aroused before against the old gang; and the old gang viciously distorted his record and attacked him.
For some weeks my life went on about the same as usual. I read the papers and played cards and people let me alone. I went every time Bryan spoke in San Franciso, and I liked him. He was a fighter—inspired by something more than the hankering for a governorship.
I looked him over carefully and felt that there was a man who could not be broken and would not bend; a man whose word and honor could be trusted. And though I knew very well that he would keep that word and run the gambling-joints out of the State—I told whoever took the trouble to inquire that I should vote for him.
"You're crazy," said Delaney.
"I'd rather have him for an enemy than Thrope for a friend."
"He'll ruin our business," said Delaney.
"Thrope's ruined our conscience," I said.
And Delaney blinked once or twice and opened his mouth like a fish; and at last he said incredulously that he believed I meant it!
"How far would you trust Thrope?" I asked.
"No farther 'an a .45 'll carry."
"There you are. Bryan keeps his word. I've never broken mine. I shall vote for him. Australia's wide open—I'll go there and play cards."
The conversation was longer but as trivial and only confirmed Delaney in the opinion that I was crazy.
It was about ten days before election that Delaney gleefully told me my friend Bryan was a goner; Thrope had an ace up his sleeve and it was going to be published in his paper the next Sunday—"a letter of some kind."
I was a little jumpy every time "letter" was mentioned.
I wanted to find out definitely; but there was no way I knew of that I could. Thrope was out of the city—or was supposed to be. Bryan was also out of the city. I found other people living in Mrs. Curwen's house. She had sold it.
They did not know where she was. Helen had gone to sea with her husband, Captain Whibley—a real honeymoon this time. I went to Bryan's headquarters, but there was nobody around there I would trust, so I came away. Then I went in search of a newspaper man whom I knew and rather liked.
He was an alert young fellow, full of ideas and rather flattered by being the friend of so notorious a figure as myself; besides he had once been fired from—I shall call it the Tribune, as it has changed hands since then and is now a decent paper—the Tribune, Thrope's paper.
"Supposing," I said to him, for I knew no more about the workings of a newspaper than the average editor does of poker, however much editors play at it. "Supposing the editor of the Tribune had something I wanted. That he intended to put it in the paper—a picture, or a letter? How would I go about getting it?"
"Best way 'd be to blow up the building," he said. As I did not seem to appreciate the joke, he added soberly:
"A picture—maybe they've taken a copy and the original is stowed some place. Letter—anything like that, they photograph it. Nobody may know where the original is."
"How can I get in to the editor?"
I had heard that editors were as unapproachable as kings and things.
"Tell 'em you got a story—tell 'em who you are, and that you've got a story you won't turn loose to nobody but Old Man Blake himself."
I did. At eleven-thirty Friday night I was shown into the anteroom of Mr. Blake's private office and told to wait. I was left alone. I noticed that the ante-room door locked from the inside, though the lock did not appear ever to have been used.
I listened at the door marked Private.
Blake was not alone.
I gently tried the door. It was unlocked. I crossed the room and locked the ante-room door, then stepped through the one marked Private, saying as I came in—
"Just the very man I wanted to see, Mr. Thrope!"
Thrope started to roar, but perceived that it was I, and his glance apprehensively searched out my hands. He seemed to think that I went around ready to shoot.
Blake was a fat man, bald-headed, with protruding side-whiskers; and he drew in his breath with toad-like pomposity to order me out of the room, but he looked at Thrope and asked—
"Do you know him?"
"You do, too," said Thrope. "It's" he mentioned my name with a peculiar falling inflection, muttering it as though unwilling to speak it aloud.
I suppose that it was unpleasant on his tongue.
"Well, what'd you want?" said Thrope, trying not to be more unpleasant than he could help, for he knew by this time by something more than hearsay that I would—well, he remembered Smith, Swanson and certain other men on board the Jessie Darling. And though he wished me well out of his sight he did not make that wish too apparent.
"Bryan's letter," I told him briefly.
"Trapped, by !" said Blake apoplectically, and his hand reached toward a button at the end of his desk.
"Supposing you put your hands in your pockets, Mr. Blake!" I told him pointedly.
His puffed eyes bulged a little; but he followed my suggestion, ramming his hands into his pockets as if defying me instead of complying with my gentle request.
"She sent you here!" Thrope accused. " her!"
"Naturally," I said. "Why else do you suppose I happened to come—at this psychological moment?" I asked, not knowing what it was all about.
But I never hesitate to take any advantage that Fortune hands to me, and I have found Fortune a most generous mistress.
"The letter isn't here," said Blake, advancing some information in a manner that impressed me as too considerate.
"No?" I asked.
"No!" said Thrope.
"No!" echoed Blake emphatically.
"Then why do you lie to each other?" I demanded, stressing the words just as much as I thought was needed to make them uncomfortable.
Both men gave a slight start. I doubt if they did realize what I meant, but they did not feel comfortable.
"I had my ear to the keyhole there for some moments—before I came in. The letter is in that safe, or you are a liar!" I addressed the last to Blake.
He started to bound up, with something like—
"No man can call me that!"
But he sat down and finished his sentence in an inarticulate mumble.
I had made no move, no gesture. But he understood.
"You talk too much!" Thrope exclaimed accusingly at the editor.
Since I had heard Thrope ask him if the letter was in the safe, and Blake had only answered, I felt the accusation a little unjust; but I made no comment.
"I don't suppose she'll telephone now," said Thrope, looking at me inquiringly.
"Oh, my presence here will make no difference. She will telephone, I suppose." I assured him.
"It's time then," said Blake staring up at the clock.
"But the letter—first. Now," I said.
THEN I learned something of what it was all about. Mrs. Curwen was trying to get Thrope to give up the letter. He would not meet her, but he had made a telephone appointment. She had assured him that she could give reasons why he should return the letter to her, why he would be glad to return it.
Thrope was naturally incredulous. It seemed that he and Mrs. Curwen had known each other for many many years; and Thrope—though he did not say this—appeared to have taken a sort of pleasure all those years in keeping her afraid of him. He knew that she was afraid of him, and he had enjoyed the bullying pleasure of keeping her frightened.
By chance I had stepped into the game and demanded cards at the crucial moment. Let me pause a minute to remark that nobody will be likely to convince me that I am religious; and yet anybody will have a hard time convincing me that there is not something—something sentient in Destiny that rules with an inexorable hand this thing we carelessly call "chance" and "luck."
In my own life—and I believe other men can look into their own lives and find the same—it has happened too often that by so-called chance I have made such entrances, and by chance played such part in the lives of men and women, as if my rôle were directed by a great and watchful dramatist.
This thing we call "luck" and "chance" is too pertinent, too advertent, too much the fabric of design, to be merely accidental. I know many lips will trace skeptical smiles upon themselves at such a statement; but let the more thoughtful reflect that every situation begins and develops from something—some meeting, word, introduction, from something, that can properly be called chance.
This is so true that it can not be denied once any one recognizes the viewpoint from which I make the statement. And I never, before or since, felt myself so much the pawn of some inscrutable chance as in the affair of Thrope and Mrs. Curwen.
The whole thing moved to its inexorable end, its inexorable and tragic end, too inevitably to have been mere happen-chance. But, of course, I am telling a story—not offering a contribution to metaphysics.
Mrs. Curwen telephoned.
Naturally, with all the honesty of her nature, she denied that I had had anything to do with the plan to get in touch with Thrope; she denied that I had found from her where he could be located at that hour.
And I fancy that she was surprized at the sudden change in Thrope's manner over the telephone; for when he had said some fifty words in his characteristic manner—or at least the manner that he seemed to employ toward women whom he did not care to flatter—he abruptly became polite and almost gracious. The suggestion that he do so, of course, came from me, and came in such a way that he did not care to refuse.
I could make nothing of the conversation over the phone because I heard very little of it after Thrope quieted down. Mrs. Curwen seemed to be doing all of the talking; and it seemed to me that Thrope was strangely impressed and by something more than I had said.
1 noticed him biting his knuckles as if to restrain his emotion. But, I reflected, that might have been from suppressed anger. But his whole manner disclosed a nervousness that was remarkable. He glanced almost furtively from me to Blake as though fearful that we, too, were hearing.
The conversation lasted for some minutes. It ended with Thrope agreeing to make an appointment to meet her alone in his own office the following night.
I found out afterward—from her—that she had summoned one of the specters that haunted her past and set it on to Thrope. Mrs. Curwen in her younger days had been reckless, rash, even more so than Helen. She too had loved Thrope. He had murdered a man before her eyes. She had had no part in the crime but the love she then bore him, which constrained her to secrecy.
Always she had been afraid that the story would come out, and that Thrope would—as he threatened—make it appear that she had killed the man herself. At last, desperate, she had reversed the situation and declared that whatever the shame might be to her, she was going to force the story out and blast him, though it blasted her too! As a coward always is when the victim turns, Thrope was frightened.
But by the following night Thrope had summoned his ingenuity. He had made deductions and arrived at what seemed satisfactory conclusions for bullying the woman further: let her force the story out into the public. He ended by hoping she would do it, for he—he could make political capital of it. Besides, what is money for if not to prove alibis, even in a murder of twenty years ago!
I am getting a little ahead of my narrative. The letter was yet to be disposed of.
That, however, did not take long. When the telephone conversation was over I merely repeated that I wanted it, and at once; and Blake unlocked the little office safe and gave it to me. Then I struck a match and burned it and ground the ashes into the carpet with my heel.
I faced them and said:
"Something unpleasant will happen to somebody if the attempt is made to arrest me on the charge of robbing a girl, or fleecing a miner, or violating the ordinance about obstructing the traffic, or on any other of the trumped-up charges which you fellows usually make to get a man into jail. Think up something original, very original, if you want me to pay attention to it—then send a detective you don't care much about to serve it!"
I was young, and of course talked a little more than I would under similar circumstances now. About the last thing that a young man learns is that no words, or at most two or three, will usually be more impressive than a speech—such as playwrights like to give heroes.
But what I did say was brief enough to carry weight with Thrope and Blake—largely because they knew that Spike Delaney had, so to speak, put his sheltering wing over me and would, as the phrase goes, "start something" if another frame-up was pulled on me.