Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood

by Algernon Blackwood

  And he did know his business! No man, in these days of inquests and post-mortem examination, would inject poisons that might be found weeks afterwards in the viscera of the victim. No man who knew his business!

  “What is more easy,” he said, holding the bars with his long white fingers and gazing into the reporter’s eyes, “than to take a disease germ [‘cherm’ he pronounced it] of typhus, plague, or any cherm you blease, and make so virulent a culture that no medicine in the vorld could counteract it; a really powerful microbe — and then scratch the skin of your victim with a pin? And who could drace it to you, or accuse you of murder?”

  Williams, as he watched and heard, was glad the bars were between them; but, even so, something invisible seemed to pass from the prisoner’s atmosphere and lay an icy finger on his heart. He had come into contact with every possible kind of crime and criminal, and had interviewed scores of men who, for jealousy, greed, passion or other comprehensible emotion, had killed and paid the penalty of killing. He understood that. Any man with strong passions was a potential killer. But never before had he met a man who in cold blood, deliberately, under no emotion greater than boredom, would destroy a human life and then boast of his ability to do it.

  Yet this, he felt sure, was what Hensig had done, and what his vile words shadowed forth and betrayed. Here was something outside humanity, something terrible, monstrous; and it made him shudder. This young doctor, he felt, was a fiend incarnate, a man who thought less of human life than the lives of flies in summer, and who would kill with as steady a hand and cool a brain as though he were performing a common operation in the hospital.

  Thus the reporter left the prison gates with a vivid impression in his mind, though exactly how his conclusion was reached was more than he could tell. This time the mental brooms failed to act. The horror of it remained.

  On the way out into the street he ran against Policeman Dowling of the ninth precinct, with whom he had been fast friends since the day he wrote a glowing account of Dowling’s capture of a “greengoods-man”, when Dowling had been so drunk that he nearly lost his prisoner altogether. The policeman had never forgotten the good turn; it had promoted him to plain clothes; and he was always ready to give the reporter any news he had.

  “Know of anything good to-day?” he asked by way of habit.

  “Bet your bottom dollar I do,” replied the coarse-faced Irish policeman; “one of the best, too. I’ve got Hensig!”

  Dowling spoke with pride and affection. He was mighty pleased, too, because his name would be in the paper every day for a week or more, and a big case helped the chances of promotion.

  Williams cursed inwardly. Apparently there was no escape from this man Hensig.

  “Not much of a case, is it?” he asked.

  “It’s a jim dandy, that’s what it is,” replied the other, a little offended. “Hensig may miss the Chair because the evidence is weak, but he’s the worst I’ve ever met. Why, he’d poison you as soon as spit in your eye, and if he’s got a heart at all he keeps it on ice.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Oh, they talk pretty freely to us sometimes,” the policeman said, with a significant wink.

  “Can’t be used against them at the trial, and it kind o’ relieves their mind, I guess. But I’d just as soon not have heard most of what that guy told me — see? Come in,” he added, looking round cautiously; “I’ll set ’em up and tell you a bit.”

  Williams entered the side-door of a saloon with him, but not too willingly.

  “A glarss of Scotch for the Englishman,” ordered the officer facetiously, “and I’ll take a horse’s collar with a dash of peach bitters in it — just what you’d notice, no more.” He flung down a half-dollar, and the bar-tender winked and pushed it back to him across the counter.

  “What’s yours, Mike?” he asked him.

  “I’ll take a cigar,” said the bar-tender, pocketing the proffered dime and putting a cheap cigar in his waistcoat pocket, and then moving off to allow the two men elbowroom to talk in.

  They talked in low voices with heads close together for fifteen minutes, and then the reporter set up another round of drinks. The bar-tender took his money. Then they talked a bit longer, Williams rather white about the gills and the policeman very much in earnest.

  “The boys are waiting for me up at Brodie’s,” said Williams at length. “I must be off.”

  “That’s so,” said Dowling, straightening up. “We’ll just liquor up again to show there’s no ill-feeling. And mind you see me every morning before the case is called. Trial begins to-morrow.”

  They swallowed their drinks, and again the bar-tender took a ten-cent piece and pocketed a cheap cigar.

  “Don’t print what I’ve told you, and don’t give it up to the other reporters,” said Dowling as they separated. “And if you want confirmation jest take the cars and run down to Amityville, Long Island, and you’ll find what I’ve said is O.K. every time.”

  Williams went back to Steve Brodie’s, his thoughts whizzing about him like bees in a swarm. What he had heard increased tenfold his horror of the man. Of course, Dowling may have lied or exaggerated, but he thought not. It was probably all true, and the newspaper offices knew something about it when they sent good men to cover the case. Williams wished to Heaven he had nothing to do with the thing; but meanwhile he could not write what he had heard, and all the other reporters wanted was the result of his interview. That was good for half a column, even expurgated.

  He found the Senator in the middle of a story to Galusha, while Whitey Fife was knocking cocktail glasses off the edge of the table and catching them just before they reached the floor, pretending they were Steve Brodie jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge. He had promised to set up the drinks for the whole bar if he missed, and just as Williams entered a glass smashed to atoms on the stones, and a roar of laughter went up from the room. Five or six men moved up to the bar and took their liquor, Williams included, and soon after Whitey and Galusha went off to get some lunch and sober up, having first arranged to meet Williams later in the evening and get the “story” from him.

  “Get much?” asked the Senator.

  “More than I care about,” replied the other, and then told his friend the story.

  The Senator listened with intense interest, making occasional notes from time to time, and asking a few questions. Then, when Williams had finished, he said quietly:

  “I guess Dowling’s right. Let’s jump on a car and go down to — ille, and see what they think about him down there.”

  Amityville was a scattered village some twenty miles away on Long Island, where Dr. Hensig had lived and practised for the last year or two, and where Mrs. Hensig No. 2 had come to her suspicious death. The neighbours would be sure to have plenty to say, and though it might not prove of great value, it would be certainly interesting. So the two reporters went down there, and interviewed anyone and everyone they could find, from the man in the drug-store to the parson and the undertaker, and the stories they heard would fill a book.

  “Good stuff,” said the Senator, as they journeyed back to New York on the steamer, “but nothing we can use, I guess.” His face was very grave, and he seemed troubled in his mind.

  “Nothing the District Attorney can use either at the trial,” observed Williams.

  “It’s simply a devil — not a man at all,” the other continued, as if talking to himself. “Utterly unmoral! I swear I’ll make MacSweater put me to another job.”

  For the stories they had heard showed Dr. Hensig as a man who openly boasted that he could kill without detection; that no enemy of his lived long; that, as a doctor, he had, or ought to have, the right over life and death; and that if a person was a nuisance, or a trouble to him, there was no reason he should not put them away, provided he did it without rousing suspicion. Of course he had not shouted these views aloud in the market-place, but he had let people know that he held them, and held them seriously. They had fallen from him
in conversation, in unguarded moments, and were clearly the natural expression of his mind and views. And many people in the village evidently had no doubt that he had put them into practice more than once.

  “There’s nothing to give up to Whitey or Galusha, though,” said the Senator decisively, “and there’s hardly anything we can use in our story.”

  “I don’t think I should care to use it anyhow,” Williams said, with rather a forced laugh.

  The Senator looked round sharply by way of question.

  “Hensig may be acquitted and get out,” added Williams. “Same here. I guess you’re dead right,” he said slowly, and then added more cheerfully, “Let’s go and have dinner in Chinatown, and write our copy together.” So they went down Pell Street, and turned up some dark wooden stairs into a Chinese restaurant, smelling strongly of opium and of cooking not Western. Here at a little table on the sanded floor they ordered chou chop suey and chou om dong in brown bowls, and washed it down with frequent doses of the fiery white whisky, and then moved into a corner and began to cover their paper with pencil writing for the consumption of the great American public in the morning.

  “There’s not much to choose between Hensig and that,” said the Senator, as one of the degraded white women who frequent Chinatown entered the room and sat down at an empty table to order whisky. For, with four thousand Chinamen in the quarter, there is not a single Chinese woman.

  “All the difference in the world,” replied Williams, following his glance across the smoky room. “She’s been decent once, and may be again some day, but that damned doctor has never been anything but what he is — a soulless, intellectual devil. He doesn’t belong to humanity at all. I’ve got a horrid idea that—”

  “How do you spell ‘bacteriology,’ two r’s or one?” asked the Senator, going on with his scrawly writing of a story that would be read with interest by thousands next day.

  “Two r’s and one k,” laughed the other. And they wrote on for another hour, and then went to turn it into their respective offices in Park Row.

  The trial of Max Hensig lasted two weeks, for his relations supplied money, and he got good lawyers and all manner of delays. From a newspaper point of view it fell utterly flat, and before the end of the fourth day most of the papers had shunted their big men on to other jobs more worthy of their powers.

  From Williams’s point of view, however, it did not fall flat, and he was kept on it till the end.

  A reporter, of course, has no right to indulge in editorial remarks, especially when a case is still sub judice, but in New York journalism and the dignity of the law have a standard all their own, and into his daily reports there crept the distinct flavour of his own conclusions. Now that new men, with whom he had no agreement to “give up”, were covering the story for the other papers, he felt free to use any special knowledge in his possession, and a good deal of what he had heard at Amityville and from officer Dowling somehow managed to creep into his writing. Something of the horror and loathing he felt for this doctor also betrayed itself, more by inference than actual statement, and no one who read his daily column could come to any other conclusion than that Hensig was a calculating, cool-headed murderer of the most dangerous type.

  This was a little awkward for the reporter, because it was his duty every morning to interview the prisoner in his cell, and get his views on the conduct of the case in general and on his chances of escaping the Chair in particular.

  Yet Hensig showed no embarrassment. All the newspapers were supplied to him, and he evidently read every word that Williams wrote. He must have known what the reporter thought about him, at least so far as his guilt or innocence was concerned, but he expressed no opinion as to the fairness of the articles, and talked freely of his chances of ultimate escape. The very way in which he glorified in being the central figure of a matter that bulked so large in the public eye seemed to the reporter an additional proof of the man’s perversity. His vanity was immense. He made most careful toilets, appearing every day in a clean shirt and a new tie, and never wearing the same suit on two consecutive days. He noted the descriptions of his personal appearance in the Press, and was quite offended if his clothes and bearing in court were not referred to in detail...And he was unusually delighted and pleased when any of the papers stated that he looked smart and self-possessed, or showed great self-control — which some of them did.

  “They make a hero of me,” he said one morning when Williams went to see him as usual before court opened, “and if I go to the Chair — which I tink I not do, you know — you shall see something fine. Berhaps they electrocute a corpse only!”

  And then, with dreadful callousness, he began to chaff the reporter about the tone of his articles — for the first time.

  “I only report what is said and done in court,” stammered Williams, horribly uncomfortable, “and I am always ready to write anything you care to say—”

  “I haf no fault to find,” answered Hensig, his cold blue eyes fixed on the reporter’s face through the bars, “none at all. You tink I haf killed, and you show it in all your sendences. Haf you ever seen a man in the Chair, I ask you?”

  Williams was obliged to say he had.

  “Ach was! You haf indeed!” said the doctor coolly.

  “It’s instantaneous, though,” the other added quickly, “and must be quite painless” This was not exactly what he thought, but what else could he say to the poor devil who might presently be strapped down into it with that horrid band across his shaved head!

  Hensig laughed, and turned away to walk up and down the narrow cell. Suddenly he made a quick movement and sprang like a panther close up to the bars, pressing his face between them with an expression that was entirely new. Williams started back a pace in spite of himself.

  “There are worse ways of dying than that,” he said in a low voice, with a diabolical look in his eyes: “slower ways that are bainful much more. I shall get oudt. I shall not be conficted. I shall get oudt, and then perhaps I come and tell you apout them.”

  The hatred in his voice and expression was unmistakable, but almost at once the face changed back to the cold pallor it usually wore, and the extraordinary doctor was laughing again and quietly discussing his lawyers and their good or bad points.

  After all, then, that skin of indifference was only assumed, and the man really resented bitterly the tone of his articles. He liked the publicity, but was furious with Williams for having come to a conclusion and for letting that conclusion show through his reports.

  The reporter was relieved to get out into the fresh air. He walked briskly up the stone steps to the court-room, still haunted by the memory of that odious white face pressing between the bars and the dreadful look in the eyes that had come and gone so swiftly. And what did those words mean exactly? Had he heard them right? Were they a threat?

  “There are slower and more painful ways of dying, and if I get out I shall perhaps come and tell you about them.”

  The work of reporting the evidence helped to chase the disagreeable vision, and the compliments of the city editor on the excellence of his “story”, with its suggestion of a possible increase of salary, gave his mind quite a different turn; yet always at the back of his consciousness there remained the vague, unpleasant memory that he had roused the bitter hatred of this man, and, as he thought, of a man who was a veritable monster.

  There may have been something hypnotic, a little perhaps, in this obsessing and haunting idea of the man’s steely wickedness, intellectual and horribly skilful, moving freely through life with something like a god’s power and with a list of unproved and unprovable murders behind him. Certainly it impressed his imagination with very vivid force, and he could not think of this doctor, young, with unusual knowledge and out-of-the-way skill, yet utterly unmoral, free to work his will on men and women who displeased him, and almost safe from detection — he could not think of it all without a shudder and a crawling of the skin. He was exceedingly glad when the last day of t
he trial was reached and he no longer was obliged to seek the daily interview in the cell, or to sit all day in the crowded court watching the detestable white face of the prisoner in the dock and listening to the web of evidence closing round him, but just failing to hold him tight enough for the Chair. For Hensig was acquitted, though the jury sat up all night to come to a decision, and the final interview Williams had with the man immediately before his release into the street was the pleasantest and yet the most disagreeable of all.

  “I knew I get oudt all right,” said Hensig with a slight laugh, but without showing the real relief he must have felt. “No one peliefed me guilty but my vife’s family and yourself, Mr. Vulture reporter. I read efery day your repordts. You chumped to a conglusion too quickly, I tink”

  “Oh, we write what we’re told to write—”

  “Berhaps some day you write anozzer story, or berhaps you read the story someone else write of your own trial. Then you understand better what you make me feel.”

  Williams hurried on to ask the doctor for his opinion of the conduct of the trial, and then inquired what his plans were for the future. The answer to the question caused him genuine relief.

  “Ach! I return of course to Chermany,” he said. “People here are now afraid of me a liddle. The newspapers haf killed me instead of the Chair. Goot-bye, Mr. Vulture reporter, goot-bye!”

  And Williams wrote out his last interview with as great a relief, probably, as Hensig felt when he heard the foreman of the jury utter the words “Not guilty”; but the line that gave him most pleasure was the one announcing the intended departure of the acquitted man for Germany.

  The New York public want sensational reading in their daily life, and they get it, for the newspaper that refused to furnish it would fail in a week, and New York newspaper proprietors do not pose as philanthropists. Horror succeeds horror, and the public interest is never for one instant allowed to faint by the way.