The Shadow (Stringer)/Chapter 18
XVIII
BLAKE did not look up as he heard the door open and the woman step into the room. There was an echo of his old-time theatricalism in that dissimulation of stolid indifference. But the old-time stage-setting, he knew, was no longer there. Instead of sitting behind an oak desk at Headquarters, he was staring down at a beer-stained card-table in the dingy back room of a dingy downtown hotel.
He knew the woman had closed the door and crossed the room to the other side of the card-table, but still he did not look up at her. The silence lengthened until it became acute, epochal, climactic.
"You sent for me?" his visitor finally said. And as Elsie Verriner uttered the words he was teased by a vague sense that the scene had happened before, that somewhere before in their lives it had been duplicated, word by word and move by move.
"Sit down," he said with an effort at the gruffness of assured authority. But the young woman did not do as he commanded. She remained still standing, and still staring down at the face of the man in front of her.
So prolonged was this stare that Blake began to be embarrassingly conscious of it, to fidget under it. When he looked up he did so circuitously, pretending to peer beyond the white face and the staring eyes of the young woman confronting him. Yet she ultimately coerced his unsteady gaze, even against his own will. And as he had expected, he saw written on her face something akin to horror.
As he, in turn, stared back at her, and in her eyes saw first incredulity, and then, what stung him more, open pity itself, it came home to him that he must indeed have altered for the worse, that his face and figure must have changed. For the first time it flashed over him: he was only the wreck of the man he had once been. Yet at the core of that wreck burned the old passion for power, the ineradicable appetite for authority. He resented the fact that she should feel sorry for him. He inwardly resolved to make her suffer for that pity, to enlighten her as to what life was still left in the battered old carcass which she could so openly sorrow over.
"Well, I 'm back," he announced in his guttural bass, as though to bridge a silence that was becoming abysmal.
"Yes, you 're back!" echoed Elsie Verriner. She spoke absently, as though her mind were preoccupied with a problem that seemed inexplicable.
"And a little the worse for wear," he pursued, with his mirthless croak of a laugh. Then he flashed up at her a quick look of resentment, a look which he found himself unable to repress. "While you 're all dolled up," he said with a snort, as though bent on wounding her, "dolled up like a lobster palace floater!"
It hurt him more than ever to see that he could not even dethrone that fixed look of pity from her face, that even his abuse could not thrust aside her composure.
"I 'm not a lobster palace floater," she quietly replied. "And you know it."
"Then what are you?" he demanded.
"I 'm a confidential agent of the Treasury Department," was her quiet-toned answer.
"Oho!" cried Blake. "So that 's why we 've grown so high and mighty!"
The woman sank into the chair beside which she had been standing. She seemed impervious to his mockery.
"What do you want me for?" she asked, and the quick directness of her question implied not so much that time was being wasted on side, issues as that he was cruelly and unnecessarily demeaning himself in her eyes.
It was then that Blake swung about, as though he, too, were anxious to sweep aside the trivialities that stood between him and his end, as though he, too, were conscious of the ignominy of his own position.
"You know where I 've been and what I 've been doing!" he suddenly cried out.
"I 'm not positive that I do," was the woman's guarded answer.
"That's a lie!" thundered Blake. "You know as well as I do!"
"What have you been doing?" asked the woman, almost indulgently.
"I 've been trailing Binhart, and you know it! And what 's more, you know where Binhart is, now, at this moment!"
"What was it you wanted me for?" reiterated the white-faced woman, without looking at him.
Her evasions did more than anger Blake; they maddened him. For years now he had been compelled to face her obliquities, to puzzle over the enigma of her ultimate character, and he was tired of it all. He made no effort to hold his feelings in check. Even into his voice crept that grossness which before had seemed something of the body alone.
"I want to know where Binhart is!" he cried, leaning forward so that his head projected pugnaciously from his shoulders like the head of a fighting-cock.
"Then you have only wasted time in sending for me," was the woman's obdurate answer. Yet beneath her obduracy was some vague note of commiseration which he could not understand.
"I want that man, and I 'm going to get him," was Blake's impassioned declaration. "And before you get out of this room you 're going to tell me where he is!"
She met his eyes, studiously, deliberately, as though it took a great effort to do so. Their glances seemed to close in and lock together.
"Jim!" said the woman, and it startled him to see that there were actual tears in her eyes. But he was determined to remain superior to any of her subterfuges. His old habit returned to him, the old habit of "pounding" a prisoner. He knew that one way to get at the meat of a nut was to smash the nut. And in all his universe there seemed only one issue and one end, and that was to find his trail and get his man. So he cut her short with his quick volley of abuse.
"I 've got your number, Elsie Verriner, alias Chaddy Cravath," he thundered out, bringing his great withered fist down on the table top. "I 've got every trick you ever turned stowed away in cold storage. I 've got 'em where they 'll keep until the cows come home. I don't care whether you 're a secret agent or a Secretary of War. There 's only one thing that counts with me now. And I 'm going to win out. I 'm going to win out, in the end, no matter what it costs. If you try to block me in this I 'll put you where you belong. I 'll drag you down until you squeal like a cornered rat. I 'll put you so low you 'll never even stand up again!"
The woman leaned a little forward, staring into his eyes.
"I did n't expect this of you, Jim," she said. Her voice was tremulous as she spoke, and still again he could see on her face that odious and unfathomable pity.
"There 's lots of things were n't expected of me. But I 'm going to surprise you all. I 'm going to get what I 'm after or I 'm going to put you where I ought to have put you two years ago!"
"Jim," said the woman, white-lipped but compelling herself to calmness, "don't go on like this! Don't! You're only making it worse, every minute!"
"Making what worse?" demanded Blake.
"The whole thing. It was a mistake, from the first. I could have told you that. But you did then what you 're trying to do now. And see what you 've lost by it!"
"What have I lost by it?"
"You 've lost everything," she answered, and her voice was thin with misery. "Everything—just as they counted on your doing, just as they expected!"
"As who expected?"
"As Copeland and the others expected when they sent you out on a blind trail."
"I was n't sent out on a blind trail."
"But you found nothing when you went out. Surely you remember that."
It seemed like going back to another world, to another life, as he sat there coercing his memory to meet the past, the abysmal and embittered past which he had grown to hate.
"Are you trying to say this Binhart case was a frame up?" he suddenly cried out.
"They wanted you out of the way. It was the only trick they could think of."
"That's a lie!' declared Blake.
"It 's not a lie. They knew you 'd never give up. They even handicapped you—started you wrong, to be sure it would take time, to be positive of a clear field."
Blake stared at her, almost stupidly. His mind was groping about, trying to find some adequate motive for this new line of duplicity. He kept warning himself that she was not to be trusted. Human beings, all human beings, he had found, moved only by indirection. He was too old a bird to have sand thrown in his eyes.
"Why, you welched on Binhart yourself. You put me on his track. You sent me up to Montreal!"
"They made me do that," confessed the unhappy woman. "He was n't in Montreal. He never had been there!"
"You had a letter from him there, telling you to come to 381 King Edward when the coast was clear."
"That letter was two years old. It was sent from a room in the King Edward Hotel. That was part of their plant."
He sat for a long time thinking it over, point by point. He became disturbed by a sense of instability in the things that had once seemed most enduring, the sickening cataclysmic horror of a man who finds the very earth under his feet shaken by its earthquake. His sodden face appeared to age even as he sat there laboriously reliving the past, the past that seemed suddenly empty and futile.
"So you sold me out!" he finally said, studying her white face with his haggard hound's eyes.
"I could n't help it, Jim. You forced it on me. You would n't give me the chance to do anything else. I wanted to help you—but you held me off. You put the other thing before my riendship!"
"What do you know about friendship?" cried the gray-faced man.
"We were friends once," answered the woman, ignoring the bitter mockery in his cry.
He stared at her, untouched by the note of pathos in her voice. There was something abstracted about his stare, as though his mind had not yet adjusted itself to a vast new discovery. His inner vision seemed dazzled, just as the eye itself may be dazzled by unexpected light.
"So you sold me out!" he said for a third time. He did not move, but under that lava-like shell of diffidence were volcanic and coursing fires which even he himself could not understand.
"Jim, I would have done anything for you, once," went on the unhappy woman facing him. "You could have saved me—from him, from myself. But you let the chance slip away. I could n't go on. I saw where it would end. So I had to save myself. I had to save myself—in the only way I could. Oh, Jim, if you 'd only been kinder!"
She sat with her head bowed, ashamed of her tears, the tears which he could not understand. He stared at her great crown of carefully coiled and plaited hair, shining in the light of the unshaded electric-bulb above them. It took him back to other days when he had looked at it with other eyes. And a comprehension of all he had lost crept slowly home to him. Poignant as was the thought that she had seemed beautiful to him and he might have once possessed her, this thought was obliterated by the sudden memory that in her lay centered everything that had caused his failure. She had been the weak link in his life, the life which he had so wanted to crown with success.
"You welcher!" he suddenly gasped, as he continued to stare at her. His very contemplation of her white face seemed to madden him. In it he seemed to find some signal and sign of his own dissolution, of his lost power, of his outlived authority. In her seemed to abide the reason for all that he had endured. To have attained to a comprehension of her own feelings was beyond him. Even the effort to understand them would have been a contradiction of his whole career. She only angered him. And the hot anger that crept through his body seemed to smoke out of some inner recess of his being a hate that was as unreasonable as it was animal-like. All the instincts of existence, in that moment, reverted to life's one primordial problem, the problem of the fighting man to whom every other man must be an opponent, the problem of the feral being, as to whether it should kill or be killed.
Into that unreasoning blind rage flared all the frustration of months, of years, all the disappointments of all his chase, all the defeat of all his career. Even as she sat there in her pink and white frailty she knew and nursed the secret for which he had girdled the world. He felt that he must tear it from her, that he must crush it out of her body as the pit is squeezed from a cherry. And the corroding part of it was that he had been outwitted by a woman, that he was being defied by a physical weakling, a slender-limbed thing of ribbons and laces whose back he could bend and break across his great knee.
He lurched forward to his feet. His great crouching body seemed drawn towards her by some slow current which he could not control.
"Where's Binhart?" he suddenly gasped, and the explosive tensity of that wheezing cry caused her to look up, startled. He swayed toward her as she did so, swept by some power not his own. There was something leonine in his movement, something leonine in his snarl as he fell on her. He caught her body in his great arms and shook it. He moved without any sense of movement, without any memory of it.
"Where 's Binhart?" he repeated, foolishly, for by this time his great hand had closed on her throat and all power of speech was beyond her. He swung her about and bore her back across the table. She did not struggle. She lay there so passive in his clutch that a dull pride came to him at the thought of his own strength. This belated sense of power seemed to intoxicate him. He was swept by a blind passion to crush, to obliterate. It seemed as though the rare and final moment for the righting of vast wrongs, for the ending of great injustices, were at hand. His one surprise was that she did not resist him, that she did not struggle.
From side to side he twisted and flailed her body about, in his madness, gloating over her final subserviency to his will, marveling how well adapted for attack was this soft and slender column of the neck, on which his throttling fingers had fastened themselves. Instinctively they had sought out and closed on that slender column, guided to it by some ancestral propulsion, by some heritage of the brute. It was made to get a grip on, a neck like that! And he grunted aloud, with wheezing and voluptuous grunts of gratification, as he saw the white face alter and the wide eyes darken with terror. He was making her suffer. He was no longer enveloped by that mild and tragically inquiring stare that had so discomforted him. He was no longer stung by the thought that she was good to look on, even with her head pinned down against a beer-stained card-table. He was converting her into something useless and broken, into something that could no longer come between him and his ends. He was completely and finally humiliating her. He was breaking her. He was converting her into something corrupt. . . . Then his pendulous throat choked with a falsetto gasp of wonder. He was killing her!
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the smoke of that mental explosion seemed to clear away. Even as he gaped into the white face so close to his own he awoke to reason. The consciousness of how futile, of how odious, of how maniacal, it all was swept over him. He had fallen low, but he had never dreamed that he could fall so low as this.
A reaction of physical nausea left him weak and dizzy. The flexor muscles of his fingers relaxed. An ague of weakness crept through his limbs. A vertiginous faintness brought him half tumbling and half rolling back into his chair, wheezing and moist with sweat. He sat there looking about him, like a sheep killer looking up from the ewe it has captured.
Then his great chest heaved and shook with hysterical sobbing. When, a little later, he heard the shaken woman's antiphonal sobs, the realization of how low he had fallen kept him from looking at her. A great shame possessed him. He stumbled out of the room. He groped his way down to the open streets, a haggard and broken man from whom life had wrung some final hope of honor.