The Shadow

by Arthur Stringer

  XX

  No catastrophe that was mental in its origin could oppress for long a manso essentially physical as Blake. For two desolate hours, it is true, hewandered about the streets of the city, struggling to medicine hisdepression of the mind by sheer weariness of the body. Then the habit ofa lifetime of activity reasserted itself. He felt the need of focusinghis resentment on something tangible and material. And as a comparativeclarity of vision returned to him there also came back those tendenciesof the instinctive fighter, the innate protest against injustice, therevolt against final surrender, the forlorn claim for at least a fightingchance. And with the thought of his official downfall came the thought ofCopeland and what Copeland had done to him.

  Out of that ferment of futile protest arose one sudden decision. Evenbefore he articulated the decision he found it unconsciously swaying hismovements and directing his steps. He would go and see Copeland! He wouldfind that bloodless little shrimp and put him face to face with a fewplain truths. He would confront that anemic Deputy-Commissioner and atleast let him know what one honest man thought of him.

  Even when Blake stood before Copeland's brownstone-fronted house, thehouse that seemed to wear a mask of staid discretion in every drawn blindand gloomy story, no hesitation came to him. His naturally primitive mindforesaw no difficulties in that possible encounter. He knew it was late,that it was nearly midnight, but even that did not deter him. Therecklessness of utter desperation was on him. His purpose was somethingthat transcended the mere trivialities of every-day intercourse. And hemust see him. To confront Copeland became essential to his scheme ofthings.

  He went ponderously up the brownstone steps and rang the bell. He waitedpatiently until his ring was answered. It was some time before the doorswung open. Inside that door Blake saw a solemn-eyed servant in a blackspiked-tailed service-coat and gray trousers.

  "I want to see Mr. Copeland," was Blake's calmly assured announcement.

  "Mr. Copeland is not at home," answered the man in the service-coat. Histone was politely impersonal. His face, too, was impassive. But one quickglance seemed to have appraised the man on the doorstep, to have judgedhim, and in some way to have found him undesirable.

  "But this is important," said Blake.

  "I'm sorry, sir," answered the impersonal-eyed servant. Blake made aneffort to keep himself in perfect control. He knew that his unkemptfigure had not won the good-will of that autocratic hireling.

  "I'm from Police Headquarters," the man on the doorstep explained, withthe easy mendacity that was a heritage of his older days. He produced theone official card that remained with him, the one worn and dog-eared andonce water-soaked Deputy-Commissioner's card which still remained in hisdog-eared wallet. "I've got to see him on business, Departmentalbusiness!"

  "Mr. and Mrs. Copeland are at the Metropolitan, sir," explained theservant. "At the Opera. And they are not back yet."

  "Then I'll wait for him," announced Blake, placated by the humbler notein the voice of the man in the service-coat.

  "Very good, sir," announced the servant. And he led the way upstairs,switching on the electrics as he went.

  Blake found himself in what seemed to be a library. About this softlyhung room he peered with an acute yet heavy disdain, with anindeterminate envy which he could not control. It struck him as beingfeminine and over fine, that shadowy room with all its warm hangings andpolished wood. It stood for a phase of life with which he had nopatience. And he kept telling himself that it had not been come byhonestly, that on everything about him, from the silver desk ornaments tothe marble bust glimmering out of its shadowy background, he himself hadsome secret claim. He scowled up at a number of signed etchings and a rowof diminutive and heavily framed canvases, scowled up at them with quickcontempt. Then he peered uncomfortably about at the shelves of books,mottled streaks of vellum and morocco stippled with gold, crowded picketsof soft-lettered color which seemed to stand between him and a worldwhich he had never cared to enter. It was a foolish world, that world ofbook reading, a lackadaisical region of unreality, a place for women andchildren, but never meant for a man with a man's work to do.

  His stolidly contemptuous eyes were still peering about the room when thedoor opened and closed again. There was something so characteristicallyguarded and secretive in the movement that Blake knew it was Copelandeven before he let his gaze wheel around to the newcomer. About theentire figure, in fact, he could detect that familiar veiled wariness,that enigmatic and self-concealing cautiousness which had always had thepower to touch him into a quick irritation.

  "Mr. Blake, I believe," said Copeland, very quietly. He was in fullevening dress. In one hand he held a silk hat and over one arm hung ablack top-coat. He held himself in perfect control, in too perfectcontrol, yet his thin face was almost ashen in color, almost theneutral-tinted gray of a battle-ship's side-plates. And when he spoke itwas with the impersonal polite unction with which he might have addressedan utter stranger.

  "You wished to see me!" he said, as his gaze fastened itself on Blake'sfigure. The fact that he remained standing imparted a tentativeness tothe situation. Yet his eyes remained on Blake, studying him with the coldand mildly abstracted curiosity with which he might view a mummy in itscase.

  "I do!" said Blake, without rising from his chair.

  "About what?" asked Copeland. There was an acidulated crispness in hisvoice which hinted that time might be a matter of importance to him.

  "You know what it's about, all right," was Blake's heavy retort.

  "On the contrary," said Copeland, putting down his hat and coat, "I'mquite in the dark as to how I can be of service to you."

  Both his tone and his words angered Blake, angered him unreasonably. Buthe kept warning himself to wait, to hold himself in until the propermoment arrived.

  "I expect no service from you," was Blake's curtly guttural response. Hecroaked out his mirthless ghost of a laugh. "You've taught me better thanthat!"

  Copeland, for all his iciness, seemed to resent the thrust.

  "We have always something to learn," he retorted, meeting Blake's stolidstare of enmity.

  "I guess I've learned enough!" said Blake.

  "Then I hope it has brought you what you are looking for!" Copeland, ashe spoke, stepped over to a chair, but he still remained on his feet.

  "No, it hasn't brought me what I'm after," said the other man. "Not yet!But it's going to, in the end, Mr. Copeland, or I'm going to know thereason why!"

  He kept warning himself to be calm, yet he found his voice shaking alittle as he spoke. The time was not yet ripe for his outbreak. Theclimactic moment was still some distance away. But he could feel itemerging from the mist just as a pilot sights the bell-buoy that markshis changing channel.

  "Then might I ask what you are after?" inquired Copeland. He folded hisarms, as though to fortify himself behind a pretense of indifferency.

  "You know what I've been after, just as I know what you've been after,"cried Blake. "You set out to get my berth, and you got it. And I set outto get Binhart, to get the man your whole push couldn't round up--and I'mgoing to get him!"

  "Blake," said Copeland, very quietly, "you are wrong in both instances."

  "Am I!"

  "You are," was Copeland's answer, and he spoke with a studious patiencewhich his rival resented even more than his open enmity. "In the firstplace, this Binhart case is a closed issue."

  "Not with me!" cried Blake, feeling himself surrendering to the tide thathad been tugging at him so long. "They may be able to buy off youcuff-shooters down at Headquarters. They may grease your palm down there,until you see it pays to keep your hands off. They may pull a rope or twoand make you back down. But nothing this side o' the gates o' hell isgoing to make _me_ back down. I began this man-hunt, and _I'm going toend it_!"

  He took on a dignity in his own eyes. He felt that in the face of everyobstacle he was still the instrument of an ineluctable and incorruptibleJustice. Uncouth and buf
feted as his withered figure may have been, itstill represented the relentlessness of the Law.

  "That man-hunt is out of our hands," he heard Copeland saying.

  "But it's not out of _my_ hands!" reiterated the detective.

  "Yes, it's out of your hands, too," answered Copeland. He spoke with acalm authority, with a finality, that nettled the other man.

  "What are you driving at?" he cried out.

  "This Binhart hunt is ended," repeated Copeland, and in the eyes lookingdown at him Blake saw that same vague pity which had rested in the gazeof Elsie Verriner.

  "By God, it's not ended!" Blake thundered back at him.

  "It _is_ ended," quietly contended the other. "And precisely as you haveput it--Ended by God!"

  "It's what?" cried Blake.

  "You don't seem to be aware of the fact, Blake, that Binhart isdead--dead and buried!"

  Blake stared up at him.

  "Is what?" his lips automatically inquired.

  "Binhart died seven weeks ago. He died in the town of Toluca, out inArizona. He's buried there."

  "That's a lie!" cried Blake, sagging forward in his chair.

  "We had the Phoenix authorities verify the report in every detail. Thereis no shadow of doubt about it."

  Still Blake stared up at the other man.

  "I don't believe it," he wheezed.

  Copeland did not answer him. He stepped to the end of the desk and withhis scholarly white finger touched a mother-of-pearl bell button. Uttersilence reigned in the room until the servant answered his summons.

  "Bridley, go to my secretary and bring me the portfolio in the seconddrawer."

  Blake heard and yet did not hear the message. A fog-like sense ofunreality seemed to drape everything about him. The earth itself seemedto crumble away and leave him poised alone in the very emptiness ofspace. Binhart was dead!

  He could hear Copeland's voice far away. He could see the returningfigure of the servant, but it seemed as gray and ghostlike as the entireroom about him. In his shaking fingers he took the official papers whichCopeland handed over to him. He could read the words, he could see thesignatures, but they seemed unable to impart any clear-cut message to hisbrain. His dazed eyes wandered over the newspaper clippings whichCopeland thrust into his unsteady fingers. There, too, was the samecalamitous proclamation, as final as though he had been reading it on atombstone. Binhart was dead! Here were the proofs of it; here was anauthentic copy of the death certificate, the reports of the policeverification; here in his hands were the final and indisputable proofs.

  But he could not quite comprehend it. He tried to tell himself it wasonly that his old-time enemy was playing some new trick on him, a trickwhich he could not quite fathom. Then the totality of it all swept hometo him, swept through his entire startled being as a tidal-wave sweepsover a coast-shoal.

  Blake, in his day, had known desolation, but it had seldom beendesolation of spirit. It had never been desolation like this. He tried toplumb it, to its deepest meaning, but consciousness seemed to have noline long enough. He only knew that his world had ended. He saw himselfas the thing that life had at last left him--a solitary and unsatisfiedman, a man without an aim, without a calling, without companionship.

  "So this ends the music!" he muttered, as he rose weakly to his feet. Andyet it was more than the end of the music, he had to confess to himself.It was the collapse of the instruments, the snapping of the last string.It was the ultimate end, the end that proclaimed itself as final as thestabbing thought of his own death itself.

  He heard Copeland asking if he would care for a glass of sherry. Whetherhe answered that query or not he never knew. He only knew that Binhartwas dead, and that he himself was groping his way out into the night, abroken and desolate man.