The Millionth Chance/Chapter 1
I
THE subway express in which I rode slowed down as it rounded the curve at Times Square. It stopped. It lurched forward, stopped again, then went ahead at a jerky crawl. Swinging from a strap, the uneven pace of the train jolted me against a pliant figure hanging beside me.
“B—beg pardon,” I said.
She inclined her head slightly. Then, as she lifted her free hand to straighten the hat which my clumsiness had knocked askew—my elbow had jarred its wide brim—her eyes opened widely as she looked at me. I read surprise, mingled with a sort of pitying contempt in them.
I let go of my strap and pushed madly toward the door of the car. It was bad enough to be the victim of a non-explainable fear without having a slip of a girl notice it.
Muttered oaths, and some not muttered, followed in my wake. But I did not care that I trod on pet corns, or jolted protuberant stomachs. I only wanted to get near the exit, and I did so. There, finally, with no one between myself and the door, I waited for the train to slow down at the Grand Central. I had intended to ride to Brooklyn Bridge. Down in Park Row the city editor of a morning paper awaited me. He had made me a most flattering offer—an offer that contained not merely an assurance of considerable money in return for scant labor, but a promise of advertising to which no author should have been averse.
Yet, as I swayed before the door, with a cold sweat standing out on my forehead, and my teeth chattering, and my whole body so limp that it was only by a mighty effort of will that I kept from collapsing, I thought not at all of the waiting city editor; I thought only of the snail-like progress of the train, and wondered if I could keep from screaming if it should, as it so many times threatened, come to a full stop.
Once I glanced over my shoulder, with an affectation of unconcern that pride compelled—I did not want the passengers to guess at my terror—and met again, far down the aisle, the eyes of the slim girl against whom I had swayed. She looked immediately away, but not before I imagined I read again an expression of scorn upon her face.
It was a face, too, that a week ago, before dread had possessed me, I should have liked to see light up with friendliness at sight of me. Oval of shape, with a firm chin, a not-too-small, curving-lipped mouth, at whose corners twin dimples lurked, a strong nose, straight save for a slightly impudent, slightly inquiring tilt at the end, large brown eyes that, I thought, could be filled with fun, a broad, low forehead be neath masses of brown hair, her face was lovely enough to make any man not an anchoret want to be friends with her. And as she looked away from me, and bent over the elderly man seated before her, I remembered her, and him.
They were the couple who had sat next me at the theater last night, and past whom, in the very middle of an act, I had been compelled, by my driving fear, to climb.
Probably the girl recognized me, too. She must have seen my face when they entered the theater, before the lights were dimmed. This made the second time, then, that she had seen me acting in a fashion that I knew was not normal and that she must have considered strange. For with out a word of warning I had risen from my theater seat and forced my way by them without giving them a chance to rise and make my passage less inconvenient to them. And just now she had seen the panic in my face and had watched me, probably, imitate my performance of last night, and crash past people in a fashion that would be employed only by a boor or by a maniac.
A boor or a maniac! The first, I think, I was justified in not considering myself. But the second—I forgot about the girl down the aisle. A fear even greater than the nameless panic which mastered me gripped me now. A maniac! I felt my lips move in unaccustomed prayer. Not that, not that!
Then the train ground to a halt. Whatever had impeded its progress below Forty-second Street, it had reached the Grand Central at last. I plunged through the door and almost staggered up the steps to the kiosk that gave to the open air. Through a swirl of snow I crossed the street and descended into the café of the Belmont.
“Whisky,” I said to the bartender.
“Want it hot? Look like you’ve got a chill. Cold out, eh?”
I gripped the rail. I did my best to master myself and tried a smile.
“J—just give me a drink. Never mind making a hot one.”
“Better take a big one,” he counseled. “A man can get pneumony awful easy this weather.”
He slid bottle and glass toward me and I took his advice. I poured myself a big drink and gulped it down. A moment later I felt my nervousness subside, my teeth ceased chattering. I poured myself a second drink. I swallowed it. Not being much of a drinker, the liquor had swift effect. I addressed some mental remarks to myself.
“Now, look here, Sid Wrenham, this simply must stop! You’re a grown man, thirty-two years of age, five-feet-ten, weight, a hundred and sixty-eight, not a sickly infant or an hysterical woman. Now, then, the Star has made you a bully offer. You’d be insane not to go right down there and take it up. It’s a snowy, blowy day; the subway is the only proper method for getting down-town. You aren’t a bit afraid of riding in the subway. You’ve ridden in it thousands of times and never been hurt. Well, what’s the matter with you? You aren’t crazy! Go on down-town!”
I BUTTONED my great-coat tightly about me, paid my check at the cashier’s desk and darted up the stairs. I entered the subway and bought my ticket. I advanced across the platform. A train came in; I took one look at the crowd already aboard it and another at the snow-dusted throng waiting to pile aboard. I turned abruptly away.
Not for the annual royalties of Rudyard Kipling would I have boarded that train! And with the shame and fear that possessed me came another thought to harass me: not even the potency of liquor would longer avail to banish my fear. Unless I wished to become intoxicated—I turned back from the Belmont. I had some pride and some common sense. If two drinks of raw whisky were of no help, then two dozen would do no real good. The reaction would be worse than the abnormal condition that had begun to seem normal. I stepped into a taxi drawn up on the Park Avenue side of the hotel. At least, and I crimsoned at the thought, I was not afraid to ride in that.
“The Star office,” I told the chauffeur.
I leaned back in my seat. The commission which the Star had offered meant attending court. I had not considered that. But I did so now as we rolled slowly down-town, impeded by snow-drifts. And court meant throngs of people, meant physical contact with crowds; meant locked doors! Again, despite the cold, I felt sweat on my forehead.
I threw my arms out convulsively, as if those crowds were pressing upon me now. My hands struck the walls of the taxi. I was confined in a space not much larger than a cupboard. Suppose the thing should tip over. Suppose
I lifted the speaking-tube to my lips.
“Let me out,” I called. “I—I’ve forgotten something. Let me out here!”
Before my surprised chauffeur could alight from his seat, I had opened the rear door and sprung out upon the sidewalk. I handed him a bill that covered the full fare to Park Row and dashed down a side street. I had walked clear to Fifth Avenue before I was able to compose my fevered brain. I heard myself saying,
“My God, Sid, this’ll never do, this will never do! You can’t keep this up! Take a brace, old man, take a brace! You’ll be in a strait-jacket if this keeps up. Get a grip, Sid, get a grip!”
I stopped on the corner of the Avenue and leaned against the iron fence that bordered the patch of lawn belonging to some plutocrat. First the theater, then the subway, now a taxi! What next? And whisky was of no avail. Not unless I wished to stupefy myself with it. But some sedative—of course. My stomach was bad. A little medicine for that and I’d be all right in a couple of weeks; a couple of days more likely. And in the mean time some mild drug that would settle my nerves so that I could get rid of this hysteria.
Billy Odlin, college class-mate who had taken up the study of medicine when I went to work on a newspaper, had his office on Madison Avenue. I hadn’t seen Billy for a couple of years, but Billy had known me well, had been my chum in the old days. Billy would know how to straighten me out.
I retraced my steps along the cross-town street and looked at the numbers of the houses on Madison Avenue. Billy’s office was only two blocks away. Head bowed against the storm I made my way to his place.
A neat maid admitted me. There happened to be no patients ahead of me, and I was admitted at once to Billy’s presence.
“Well, how’s the famous author, Sid?” he greeted me. “Look as husky as ever, don’t you? No use looking for business from you. Some of the cranks that inveigh against the deadly fourth mile ought to take a look at you. You’re a living example of the fact that a man can sit in three varsity crews without ill after-effects. Smoke?”
I shook my head and sank into a chair. It was a relief to be with Billy. Big, brawny, too heavy for the crew, he had captained the college football team and starred in the weight events. He was just the sort of man to inspire confidence in a nervous person. And aside from his physical presence, Billy had brains. Though I hadn’t seen him in so long, I’d heard about his wonderful success as a nerve specialist. If any one could fix me up, Billy could. But pshaw! All I needed was a nice little dose of something or other and I’d be right as a trivet.
“Billy,” I said, “I may look well, but I feel like the very devil. Nerves. I want you to give me a shot of something that’ll quiet me.”
His eyes narrowed slightly.
“Morning after, Sid?”
I shook my head and essayed a laugh that sounded feeble.
“Oh, no, just a little touch of nervousness.” Even to Billy Odlin, pal and physician, I was ashamed to confess the truth.
“I see,” he said slowly. “Let’s feel your pulse.”
He stood over me while he held my wrist. Suddenly he pushed my head back and looked keenly into my eyes. I heard him sniff slightly. He released my head and wrist and walked back to his seat behind a flat-topped desk.
“Murdered anybody, Sid?” he asked quietly. “No? Robbed a bank? No? Committed plagiarism? No? Then what the devil are you so frightened about? And if it isn’t a case of morning after, what do you mean by drinking whisky before luncheon? How many drinks have you had today, anyway?” he demanded peremptorily.
“Three,” I replied shamefacedly.
“How many yesterday?”
“Six or seven, I guess,” I answered.
“Been doing that long?”
“Only a couple of weeks.”
“What started you?”
“Why—er—I don’t know that anything started me. I don’t think half a dozen drinks a day are criminal, are they?”
“Depends on whether or not you consider suicide a crime.”
“Oh, look here, Billy,” I protested, “I’m not a drunkard, and you know it. I have a little touch of nerves.”
“A little touch of fright, you mean, don’t you, Sid? Been running amuck today?”
I gasped.
“How did you know?” I asked.
He smiled gently.
“The pulse tells a lot and the eyes tell more. You’ve been drinking this morning. Your breath announces that fact. But you haven’t been drinking heavily—to intoxication, I mean, at any time. Nor have you been using drugs. Your eyes tell me that. Yet you come to me and want some sort of drug. You say that you’re nervous. I’ve seen a lot of your kind of nervousness in the past few years. Now, then, suppose you tell me the whole business. What are you afraid of?”
“God knows, Billy,” I groaned.
I hadn’t meant to tell him, but I felt that I must. I drew my hand across my forehead. Suddenly the fear that had possessed me in the subway train, the fear of insanity, came back to me. My whole body shook. I buried my face in my hands; I heard him move about; in a moment he held something to my lips. I drank and the nervous chill left me. He placed the empty glass on his desk and sat down again behind it.
“Now, then, Sid, fire away. When did this fright first come on? How does it affect you?”
I wet my lips.
“Tell me this, first, Billy. Am I going crazy?”
He laughed loudly and his merriment was not forced.
“Not yet a bit, Sid.” Then his voice grew grave. “I’m not saying what may happen if you don’t obey orders, but—tell me.”
So I told him the miserable story, inexplicable even to myself. I told him how, within the past month, I’d found myself always choosing a table near the door of the restaurant where I happened to be dining. I told him how crowded elevators had begun insidiously to affect me. until I found myself unable to enter one that held more than two or three people; how I dreaded visiting editors whose offices were more than four or five stories above ground; how, last night, sudden panic, fear of what I knew not, had assailed me in the theater, so that I was compelled to flee from it immediately; how this morning I had entered the subway express at Seventy-second Street, felt all right until the thing began to slow down, and then became afflicted with panic.
“H’m,” he said at this, “subconscious fear of what the slowing-down portended. Accident might come. Affected conscious actions. Yes, what else?”
I told him of the taxicab incident.
“And now, Billy, for Heaven’s sake do something for me. The Star wants me to write the Lublin trial. Wants me to write it from the standpoint of my fiction detective, Weatherbee Jones. To have my character weigh the evidence, draw conclusions —you know. Balderdash, but—two hundred a day and unlimited advertising for me—and my character. Give me some dope or other that will enable me to stand the crowded court-room and”
He looked at me almost sternly. He picked up the telephone on his desk.
“With whom are you doing business on the Star? City editor? What’s the phone number?”
Compelled by his manner, I told him. A minute later he spoke into the receiver.
“City editor of the Star? This is Dr. William Odlin. One of my patients, Mr. Sidney Wrenham, wishes me to phone you. He is unable to do the Lublin trial for you.... No, not seriously ill, but he has to get out of town.”
He hung up the receiver and asked me—
“Any other contracts with publishers?”
I shook my head.
“All right, then. Now don’t put up a roar, Sid,” he went on, as he noted my anger-flushed face. “You came to me for treatment. I’m not giving you the kind you want, but I’m giving you the kind you need. Tell me, any financial troubles? Any troubles of any sort?”
“No,” I said shortly.
“Been worried much about money ever?”
“Two years ago, when I quit the Planet to do magazine work,” I answered, “I fretted quite a bit.”
“Do you still fret over your work? And do you worry about the Great War, as too many Americans are doing?”
“Some,” I admitted reluctantly.
“Quit it!” he ordered. “Quit everything. Sid, you’re leaving for Maine tonight.”
“Oh, come off, Billy,” I protested. “I’m just a little nervous.”
“You have psycho-neurosis,” he said. “If you don’t leave town—and work—you’ll end by being afraid of everything. You’ll fear your own shadow.”
He smiled gravely at my incredulity.
“Sid, you’ve made Weatherbee Jones the realest character in detective fiction. That’s because you put yourself into his creation—too much of yourself for your own good. You’ve made money and fame at nervous cost. You’ve got to forget Weatherbee Jones. You’ve got to forget your work; you’ve got to forget yourself.
“If you don’t—Sid, psycho-neurosis is as real a disease as any ailment doctors know of. You’ve got it. Not so bad as some, but worse than others. It’s the disease of fear. It grows on the victim. By and by, in sheer fear of living, you’ll—well, you’ll hurt yourself. You’ll keep on imagining terrors that don’t exist until you can’t stand it any longer. Unless you go away.
“You must go where there are some people—loneliness would prove as bad as a crowded city. But to a place where there are only a few people. Where there is absolutely no excitement. Not even the excitement of cards, automobiling, any of the sort of thing you’d find down South or abroad. Where there’s plenty of fresh air, a chance for long walks, maybe some fishing through the ice, and long evenings built for sleep.
“I know the place. Folly Cove, an hour from Portland, where I sometimes go in the Summer. There’s a big hotel there, practically empty in the Winter, save for a few guests who fish through the ice. I want you to go down there, leaving your typewriter behind you, and forgetting that Weatherbee Jones ever existed in your fertile imagination.
“You’re not to take a drink and you’re to smoke not over three times a day. You’re to go to bed at nine and stay there until seven. You’re to walk at least five miles a day at first and ten or fifteen later on. Now, then, go home and pack a suit-case or two and catch that eight-o’clock train for Portland tonight.”
“But look here, Billy,” I protested. “It’s absurd. I’m just nervous.”
“You’re psycho-neurotic,” he snapped. “You have the disease of fear. Why, Sid, I doubt if you can ride on a sleeper tonight! Can you? Think—the train going hell-bent through the darkness, through tunnels, in the storm.”
I felt myself go white.
“My God, Billy!” I gasped. “I—I don’t believe I can.”
“That’s what worry does for a man, months after he’s able to quit worrying,” said Billy. “Well, if you’re as bad as that, Sid, don’t you think you need what I prescribe?”
I could only nod my head, dumb.
“Buck up,” he said. “You needn’t be ashamed. You’re no coward, Sid. If a crisis came you’d meet it. Indeed, it would probably cure you. But crises can’t be obtained in a physician’s office. You must go to Maine. At least, I say Folly Cove. If you’ve got any better place?”
But I shook my miserable head. I hadn’t.
“Then Folly Cove it is—and tonight, just before you climb into your bunk, take this. It’s the only drug you’ll ever get from me, Sid. It will make you sleep on the train. Now, then—” and he gave me the little envelope containing a morphine pellet—“go home and pack your things and write whatever letters you must. And let me hear from you. Let me know how you progress. In six months”
“So long?” I gasped.
“You’re lucky if it isn’t six years,” he said. “Of course, if you got some great shock—well, by-by, Sid. Write to me. And don’t think of work, and don’t fret! And don’t talk about the Great War too much; don’t think about it. It’s making nervous wrecks of lots of people. Forget about it!”
With which last injunction he ushered me out of his office.