Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Then you have no personal knowledge of the patient?”

  “None whatever…. What did you say his name is?”

  “McKay.”

  For a moment the name sounded oddly familiar but meaningless in her ears. Then, with a thrill of sudden recollection, she asked again for the man’s name.

  “The name written in his cheque-book is McKay.”

  “McKay!” she repeated incredulously. “What else?”

  “Kay.”

  “WHAT!!”

  “That is the name in the cheque-book — Kay McKay.”

  Dumb, astounded, she could not utter a word.

  “Do you know anything about him, Miss Erith?” inquired the distant voice.

  “Yes — yes!… I don’t know whether I do…. I have heard the — that name — a similar name—” Her mind was in a tumult now. Could such a thing happen? It was utterly impossible!

  The voice on the wire continued:

  “The police have been here but they are not interested in the case, as no robbery occurred. The young man is still unconscious, suffering from the chloral. If you are interested, Miss Erith, would you kindly call at the hospital to-morrow?”

  “Yes…. Did you say that there was FOREIGN money in his pockets?”

  “Dutch and Danish silver and English gold.”

  “Thank you…. I shall call to-morrow. Don’t let him leave before I arrive.”

  “What?”

  “I wish to see him. Please do not permit him to leave before I get there. It — it is very important — vital — in case he is the man — the Kay McKay in question.”

  “Very well. Good-night.”

  Miss Erith sank back in her armchair, shivering even in the warm glow from the hearth.

  “Such things can NOT happen!” she said aloud. “Such things do not happen in life!”

  And she told herself that even in stories no author would dare — not even the veriest amateur scribbler — would presume to affront intelligent readers by introducing such a coincidence as this appeared to be.

  “Such things do NOT happen!” repeated Miss Erith firmly.

  Such things, however, DO occur.

  Was it possible that the Great Secret, of which the Lauffer cipher letter spoke, was locked within the breast of this young fellow who now lay unconscious in the Samaritan Hospital?

  Was this actually the escaped prisoner? Was this the man who, according to instructions in the cipher, was to be marked for death at the hands of the German Government’s secret agents in America?

  And, if this truly were the same man, was he safe, at least for the present, now that the cipher letter had been intercepted before it had reached Herman Lauffer?

  Hour after hour, lying deep in her armchair before the fire, Miss Erith crouched a prey to excited conjectures, not one of which could be answered until the man in the Samaritan Hospital had recovered consciousness.

  Suppose he never recovered consciousness. Suppose he should die —

  At the thought Miss Erith sprang from her chair and picked up the telephone.

  With fast-beating heart she waited for the connection. Finally she got it and asked the question.

  “The man is dying,” came the calm answer. A pause, then: “I understand the patient has just died.”

  Miss Erith strove to speak but her voice died in her throat. Trembling from head to foot, she placed the telephone on the table, turned uncertainly, fell into the armchair, huddled there, and covered her face with both hands.

  For it was proving worse — a little worse than the loss of the Great Secret — worse than the mere disappointment in losing it — worse even than a natural sorrow in the defeat of an effort to save life.

  For in all her own life Miss Erith had never until that evening experienced the slightest emotion when looking into the face of any man.

  But from the moment when her brown eyes fell upon the pallid, dissipated, marred young face turned upward on her knees in the car — in that instant she had known for the first time a new and indefinable emotion — vague in her mind, vaguer in her heart — yet delicately apparent.

  But what this unfamiliar emotion might be, so faint, so vague, she had made no effort to analyse…. It had been there; she had experienced it; that was all she knew.

  It was almost morning before she rose, stiff with cold, and moved slowly toward her bedroom.

  Among the whitening ashes on her hearth only a single coal remained alive.

  CHAPTER III

  TO A FINISH

  The hospital called her on the telephone about eight o’clock in the morning:

  “Miss Evelyn Erith, please?”

  “Yes,” she said in a tired voice, “who is it?”

  “Is this Miss Erith?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the Superintendent’s office, Samaritan, Hospital, Miss

  Dalton speaking.”

  The girl’s heart contracted with a pang of sheer pain. She closed her eyes and waited. The voice came over the wire again:

  “A wreath of Easter lilies with your card came early — this morning.

  I’m very sure there is a mistake—”

  “No,” she whispered, “the flowers are for a patient who died in the hospital last night — a young man whom I brought there in my car — Kay McKay.”

  “I was afraid so—”

  “What!”

  “McKay isn’t dead! It’s another patient. I was sure somebody here had made a mistake.”

  Miss Erith swayed slightly, steadied herself with a desperate effort to comprehend what the voice was telling her.

  “There was a mistake made last night,” continued Miss Dalton. “Another patient died — a similar case. When I came on duty a few moments ago I learned what had occurred. The young man in whom you are interested is conscious this morning. Would you care to see him before he is discharged?”

  Miss Erith said, unsteadily, that she would.

  She had recovered her self-command but her knees remained weak and her lips tremulous, and she rested her forehead on both hands which had fallen, tightly clasped, on the table in front of her. After a few moments she felt better and she rang up her D. C., Mr. Vaux, and explained that she expected to be late at the office. After that she got the garage on the wire, ordered her car, and stood by the window watching the heavily falling snow until her butler announced the car’s arrival.

  The shock of the message informing her that this man was still alive now rapidly absorbed itself in her reviving excitement at the prospect of an approaching interview with him. Her car ran cautiously along Park Avenue through the driving snow, but the distance was not far and in a few minutes the great red quadrangle of the Samaritan Hospital loomed up on her right. And even before she was ready, before she quite had time to compose her mind in preparation for the questions she had begun to formulate, she was ushered into a private room by a nurse on duty who detained her a moment at the door:

  “The patient is ready to be discharged,” she whispered, “but we have detained him at your request. We are so sorry about the mistake.”

  “Is he quite conscious?”

  “Entirely. He’s somewhat shaken, that is all. Otherwise he shows no ill effects.”

  “Does he know how he came here?”

  “Oh, yes. He questioned us this morning and we told him the circumstances.”

  “Does he know I have arrived?”

  “Yes, I told him.”

  “He did not object to seeing me?” inquired Miss Erith. A slight colour dyed her face.

  “No, he made no objection. In fact, he seemed interested. He expects you. You may go in.”

  Miss Erith stepped into the room. Perhaps the patient had heard the low murmur of voices in the corridor, for he lay on his side in bed gazing attentively toward the door. Miss Erith walked straight to the bedside; he looked up at her in silence.

  “I am so glad that you are better,” she said with an effort made doubly difficult in the conscious
ness of the bright blush on her cheeks. Without moving he replied in what must have once been an agreeable voice: “Thank you. I suppose you are Miss Erith.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then — I am very grateful for what you have done.”

  “It was so fortunate—”

  “Would you be seated if you please?”

  She took the chair beside his bed.

  “It was nice of you,” he said, almost sullenly. “Few women of your sort would bother with a drunken man.”

  They both flushed. She said calmly: “It is women of my sort who DO exactly that kind of thing.”

  He gave her a dark and sulky look: “Not often,” he retorted: “there are few of your sort from Samaria.”

  There was a silence, then he went on in a hard voice:

  “I’d been drinking a lot… as usual…. But it isn’t an excuse when I say that my beastly condition was not due to a drunken stupor. It just didn’t happen to be that time.”

  She shivered slightly. “It happened to be due to chloral,” he added, reddening painfully again. “I merely wished you to know.”

  “Yes, they told me,” she murmured.

  After another silence, during which he had been watching her askance, he said: “Did you think I had taken that chloral voluntarily?”

  She made no reply. She sat very still, conscious of vague pain somewhere in her breast, acquiescent in the consciousness, dumb, and now incurious concerning further details of this man’s tragedy.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “the poor devil who, in chloral, seeks a-refuge from intolerable pain becomes an addict to the drug…. I do not happen to be an addict. I want you to understand that.”

  The painful colour came and went in the girl’s face; he was now watching her intently.

  “As a matter of fact, but probably of no interest to you,” he continued, “I did not voluntarily take that chloral. It was administered to me without my knowledge — when I was more or less stupid with liquor…. It is what is known as knockout drops, and is employed by crooks to stupefy men who are more or less intoxicated so that they may be easily robbed.”

  He spoke now so calmly and impersonally that the girl had turned to look at him again as she listened. And now she said: “Were you robbed?”

  “They took my hotel key: nothing else.”

  “Was that a serious matter, Mr. McKay?”

  He studied her with narrowing brown eyes.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I had nothing of value in my room at the Astor except a few necessaries in a steamer-trunk…. Thank you so much for all your kindness to me, Miss Erith,” he added, as though relieving her of the initiative in terminating the interview.

  As he spoke he caught her eye and divined somehow that she did not mean to go just yet. Instantly he was on his guard, lying there with partly closed lids, awaiting events, though not yet really suspicious. But at her next question he rose abruptly, supported on one elbow, his whole frame tense and alert under the bed-coverings as though gathered for a spring.

  “What did you say?” he demanded.

  “I asked you how long ago you escaped from Holzminden camp?” repeated the girl, very pale.

  “Who told you I had ever been there? — wherever that is!”

  “You were there as a prisoner, were you not, Mr. McKay?”

  “Where is that place?”

  “In Germany on the River Weser. You were detained there under pretence of being an Englishman before we declared war on Germany. After we declared war they held you as a matter of course.”

  There was an ugly look in his eyes, now: “You seem to know a great deal about a drunkard you picked up in the snow near the Plaza fountain last night.”

  “Please don’t speak so bitterly.”

  Quite unconsciously her gloved hand crept up on her fur coat until it rested over her heart, pressing slightly against her breast. Neither spoke for a few moments. Then:

  “I do know something about you, Mr. McKay,” she said. “Among other things I know that — that if you have become — become intemperate — it is not your fault…. That was vile of them-unutterably wicked-to do what they did to you—”

  “Who are you?” he burst out. “Where have you learned-heard such things? Did I babble all this?”

  “You did not utter a sound!”

  “Then — in God’s name—”

  “Oh, yes, yes!” she murmured, “in God’s name. That is why you and I are here together — in God’s name and by His grace. Do you know He wrought a miracle for you and me — here in New York, in these last hours of this dreadful year that is dying very fast now?

  “Do you know what that miracle is? Yes, it’s partly the fact that you did not die last night out there on the street. Thirteen degrees below zero! … And you did not die…. And the other part of the miracle is that I of all people in the world should have found you!… That is our miracle.”

  Somehow he divined that the girl did not mean the mere saving of his life had been part of this miracle. But she had meant that, too, without realising she meant it.

  “Who are you?” he asked very quietly.

  “I’ll tell you: I am Evelyn Erith, a volunteer in the C. E. D.

  Service of the United States.”

  He drew a deep breath, sank down on his elbow, and rested his head on the pillow.

  “Still I don’t see how you know,” he said. “I mean — the beastly details—”

  “I’ll tell you some time. I read the history of your case in an intercepted cipher letter. Before the German agent here had received and decoded it he was arrested by an agent of another Service. If there is anything more to be learned from him it will be extracted.

  “But of all men on earth you are the one man I wanted to find. There is the miracle: I found you! Even now I can scarcely force myself to believe it is really you.”

  The faintest flicker touched his eyes.

  “What did you want of me?” he inquired.

  “Help.”

  “Help? From such a man as I? What sort of help do you expect from a drunkard?”

  “Every sort. All you can give. All you can give.”

  He looked at her wearily; his face had become pallid again; the dark hollows of dissipation showed like bruises.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “I’m no good, you know that. I’m done in, finished. I couldn’t help you with your work if I wanted to. There’s nothing left of me. I am not to be depended on.”

  And suddenly, in his eyes of a boy, his self-hatred was revealed to her in one savage gleam.

  “No good,” he muttered feverishly, “not to be trusted — no will-power left…. It was in me, I suppose, to become the drunkard I am—”

  “You are NOT!” cried the girl fiercely. “Don’t say it!”

  “Why not? I am!”

  “You can fight your way free!” His laugh frightened her.

  “Fight? I’ve done that. They tried to pump me that way, too — tried to break me — break my brain to pieces — by stopping my liquor…. I suppose they thought I might really go insane, as they gave it back after a while — after a few centuries in hell — and tried to make me talk by other methods —

  “Don’t, please.” She turned her head swiftly, unable to control her quivering face.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t bear it.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shock you.”

  “I know.” She sat for a while with head averted; and presently spoke, sitting so:

  “We’ll fight it, anyway,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you’ll let me—”

  After a silence she turned and looked at him. He stammered, very red:

  “I don’t quite know why you speak to me so.”

  She herself was not entirely clear on that point, either. After all, her business with this man was to use him in the service of her Government.”

  “What is THE GREAT SECRET?” she asked calmly
.

  After a long while he said, lying there very still: “So you have even heard about that.”

  “I have heard about it; that is all.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “All I know about it is that there is such a thing — something known to certain Germans, and by them spoken of as THE GREAT SECRET. I imagine, of course, that it is some vital military secret which they desire to guard.”

  “Is that all you know about it?”

  “No, not all.” She looked at him gravely out of very clear, honest eyes:

  “I know, also, that the Berlin Government has ordered its agents to discover your whereabouts, and to’silence’ you.”

  He gazed at her quite blandly for a moment, then, to her amazement, he laughed — such a clear, untroubled, boyish laugh that her constrained expression softened in sympathy.

  “Do you think that Berlin doesn’t mean it?” she asked, brightening a little.

  “Mean it? Oh, I’m jolly sure Berlin means it!”

  “Then why—”

  “Why do I laugh?”

  “Well — yes. Why do you? It does not strike me as very humorous.”

  At that he laughed again — laughed so whole-heartedly, so delightfully, that the winning smile curved her own lips once more.

  “Would you tell me why you laugh?” she inquired.

  “I don’t know. It seems so funny — those Huns, those Boches, already smeared from hair to feet with blood — pausing in their wholesale butchery to devise a plan to murder ME!”

  His face altered; he raised himself on one elbow:

  “The swine have turned all Europe into a bloody wallow. They’re belly-deep in it — Kaiser and knecht! But that’s only part of it. They’re destroying souls by millions!… Mine is already damned.”

  Miss Erith sprang to her feet: “I tell you not to say such a thing!” she cried, exasperated. “You’re as young as I am! Besides, souls are not slain by murder. If they perish it’s suicide, ALWAYS!”

  She began to pace the white room nervously, flinging open her fur coat as she turned and came straight back to his bed again. Standing there and looking down at him she said:

  “We’ve got to fight it out. The country needs you. It’s your bit and you’ve got to do it. There’s a cure for alcoholism — Dr. Langford’s cure. Are you afraid because you think it may hurt?”