“Was there anyone else with the man when you saw him in the dining-room?” Vance pursued.
“But I couldn’t see them, because they had their backs to me.”
“Them? Just whom do you mean?”
“Why, the two other men at the same table.”
Vance inhaled deeply on his cigarette.
“Tell me. Miss Allen: what was the man doing when you saw him in Miss Del Marr’s room?”
“Well, let me see. I guess he was a very personal friend of Miss Del Marr’s because he was putting a big notebook away in one of the drawers. And he must have been a very personal friend of Miss Del Marr’s, or he wouldn’t know where the book belonged, would he? And then Miss Del Marr came over to me and put her hand on my arm, and led me out very quick. I guess she was in a hurry. But she was awfully nice…”
“Well, that was a very amusing experience, my dear.”
Shortly after this astounding recital, Miss Allen cheerfully took leave of us, saying, with a comical air of mystery, that she had a lot of very important things to attend to. She intimated that she might even be seeing Mr. Burns.
When she had gone Vance looked across at the Sergeant as if expecting some comment.
Heath sprawled in a chair, apparently stunned. “I got nothin’ to say, Mr. Vance. I’m goin’ nuts!”
“I’m a bit groggy myself,” said Vance. “But now it’s imperative that I see Owen. Frankly, I’ve been only half-hearted about communing with him, and only vaguely believed in my game of charades about Owen and Mirche. Yet Gracie Allen knew of the connection all along. Yes, now it is highly imperative that I tree the ‘Owl.’ Can you help, Sergeant?”
Heath pursed his lips. “I don’t know where the guy’s staying in New York, if that’s what you mean. But one of the federal boys I know might have the dope. Wait a minute…”
He went to the telephone in the hall, while Vance smoked in silent preoccupation.
“At last I got it,” Heath announced as he came back into the room a half-hour later. “None of the federal boys knew Owen was in town, but one of ’em dug up the file and told me that Owen used to live at the St. Carlton during the old investigation. I took a chance and called up the hotel. He’s stopping there, all right—got in Thursday…”
“Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll phone you in the morning. In the meantime, discourage thought.”
The Sergeant departed, and Vance immediately put a call through to Markham.
“You’re breakfasting with me tomorrow,” he told the District Attorney. “This evening I shall endeavour to call on the erudite Mr. Owen. I’ve many things to tell you, and I may have more by morning. Remember, Markham: breakfast tomorrow—it’s a ukase, not a frivolous invitation…”
CHAPTER XIV
A DYING MADMAN
(Monday, May 20; 8 pm.)
At eight o’clock that evening Vance went to the St. Carlton hotel. He did not telephone from the reception desk, but wrote the word “Unprofessionally” across one of his personal cards and sent it to Owen. A few minutes later the bellboy returned and led us upstairs.
Two men were standing by a window when we entered, and Owen himself was seated limply in a low chair against the wall, slowly turning Vance’s card between his slender tapering fingers. He looked at Vance, and tossed the card on the inlaid tabouret beside him. Then he said in a soft, imperious voice, “That’s all tonight.” The two men went out of the room immediately, and closed the door.
“Forgive me,” he said with a wistful, apologetic smile. “Man is a suspicious animal.” He moved his hand in a vague gesture: it was his invitation for us to sit down. “Yes, suspicious. But why should one care?” Owen’s voice was ominously low, but it had a plaintive carrying quality, like a birdcall at dusk. “I know why you came. And I am glad to see you. Something might have intervened.”
With a closer view of the man, I got the impression that grave illness hung over him. An inner lethargy marked him; his eyes were liquid; his face was almost cyanosed; his voice a monotone. He gave me the feeling of a living dead man.
“For several years,” he went on, “there has been the vagrant hope that some day… Need for consciousness of kind, like-mindedness…” His voice drifted off.
“The loneliness of psychic isolation,” murmured Vance. “Quite. Perhaps I was not the one.”
“Nobody is the one, of course. Forgive my conceit.” Owen smiled wanly and lighted a cigarette. “You think that either of us willed this meeting? Man makes no choices. His choice is his temperament. We are sucked into a vortex, and until we escape we struggle to justify or ennoble this ‘choice.’”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” said Vance. “Something vital always evades us, and the mind can never answer the questions it propounds. Saying a thing, or not saying it and thinking it, is no different.”
“Exactly.” The man gave Vance a glance of interrogation. “What thought have you?”
“I was wondering why you were in New York. I saw you at the Domdaniel on Saturday.” Vance’s tone had changed.
“I saw you too, though I was not certain. I thought then you might get in touch with me. Your presence that night was not a coincidence. There are no coincidences. A babu word to cloak our reeking ignorance. There is only one pattern in the entire universe of time.”
“But your visit to the city. Do I intrude on a secret?”
Owen snarled, and I could feel a chill go down my spine. Then his expression changed to one of sadness.
“I came to see a specialist—Enrick Hofmann.”
“Yes. One of the world’s greatest cardiologists. You saw him?”
“Two days ago.” Owen laughed bitterly. “Doomed! Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.”
Vance merely raised his eyebrows slightly, and drew deeply on his cigarette.
“Thank you,” said Owen, “for sparing me the meaningless platitudes.” Then he asked suddenly: “Are you a Daniel?”
“Does Belshazzar need an augur?” Vance looked straight at the man… “No, alas! I am no Daniel. Nor am I a Dominic.”
Owen chuckled diabolically.
“I was sure you knew!” He wagged his head in satisfaction. “Mirche will die without the faintest suspicion of the jest. He’s as ignorant of the Thousand and One Nights as he is of Southey and Carlyle. [Southey used the Domdaniel as the subject of his “Thalaba”; and it was Carlyle who made the Domdaniel of the Arabian Night synonymous with a “den of iniquity.”] An illiterate swine!”
“It was a clever idea,” said Vance.
“Oh, no; not clever. Merely a bit of humour.” Lethargy again seemed to pervade him; his expression became a mask; his hands lay limp on the arms of the chair. He might have been a corpse. There was a long silence; then Vance spoke.
“The handwriting on the wall. Would it comfort you to have me suggest that perhaps all the years throughout infinity are counted and divided?”
“No,” Owen snapped. “‘Comfort’—another babu word.” Then he went on wistfully: “Eternal recurrence—resurgam. The perfect torture.” He began to mutter. “‘The sea will begin to wither.. an extinct planet.. absorbed in the sun.. greater suns.. the ultimate moment.. eternal dispersal of things.. billions of years hence.. this same room…’” He shook himself weakly, and stared at Vance. “Moore was right: it is like madness.”
Vance nodded sympathetically.
“Yes. Madness. Quite. The moment’ry finite is all we dare face. But there is no finite.”
“No, no finite, of course.” Owen spoke sepulchrally. “But those billions of years beyond, when the mind returns to infinity.. like the endless ripples made by a stone cast in the water. Then we must have cleanliness of spirit. Not now. But then. We must cause no endless ripples… Thank God, I can talk to you.”
Again Vance nodded.
“Yes, I quite understand. ‘Cleanliness’—I know what you mean. The finite balances itself—that is, we can balance it, even at the last. We can go back clean to endless time. Yes. ‘C
leanliness of spirit’—an apposite phrase. No ripples. I wholly agree.”
“But not through restitution,” Owen said quickly. “No preposterous confessionals.”
Vance waved his hand in negation.
“I didn’t mean that. Merely a neant—a nothingness—after the finite, when there will be no further struggle, no more trying to eliminate the impulses placed in us by the same agency that puts a taboo on our indulging them…”
“That’s it!” There was a flicker of animation in Owen’s voice; then he lapsed again into languor. The slight gesture of his hand was as graceful as a woman’s. But the steely hardness in his gaze remained. “You will see that I cause no ripples, in case..?”
“Yes,” returned Vance simply. “If the occasion should ever arise, and I am able to help, you may count on me.”
“I trust you… And now, may I speak a moment? I have long wanted to say these things to someone who would understand…”
Vance merely waited, and Owen went on.
“Nothing has the slightest importance—not even life itself. We ourselves can create or smear out human beings—it is all one, whichever we do.” He grinned hopelessly. “The rotten futility of all things—the futility of doing anything, even of thinking. Damn the agonizing succession of days we call Life! My temperament has ever drawn me in many directions at once—always the thumbscrew and the rack. Perhaps, after all, to smear souls out is better.”
He seemed to shrink as from a ghost; and Vance put in: “I know the unrest that comes from too much needless activity, with all its multiplying desires.”
“The aimless struggle! Yes, yes. The struggle to fit oneself into a mould that differs from one’s ancient mould. That is the ultimate curse. The instinct to achieve—faugh! We learn its worthlessness only when it has devoured us. I have been fired by different instincts at different times. They are all lies—cunning, corroding lies. And we think we can subject our instincts to the mind. The mind!” He laughed softly. “The mind’s only value is attained when it teaches us that it is useless.”
He moved a little, as if a slight involuntary spasm had shaken him. “Nor can we attribute our distorted instincts to racial memory. There are no races—only one great filthy stream of life flowing out of the primeval slime. The abortive sensualism of primordial animal life lies dormant within all of us. If we suppress it, it manifests itself in cruelty and sadism; if we unleash it, it produces perversions and insanity. There is no answer.”
“Man sometimes strives to counteract these horrors by releasing an inner ideal from its abstract conception through visual symbols.”
“Symbols themselves are abstractions,” came Owen’s mordant monotone. “Nor can logic help. Logic leads no man to the truth: logic leads only to insane delusions. The apotheosis of logic:—angels dancing on the point of a needle… But why do I even bother, in this shadow between two infinities? I can give only one answer: the obscene urge to eat well and live well—which, in turn, is an instinct and, therefore, a lie.”
“It may go farther back than that instinct,” Vance suggested. “It may be an urge brought here when the shadow of life first fell across the path of infinity—the cosmic urge to play a game with life, in order to escape from the stresses and pressures of the finite.”
(I now knew that Vance had some very definite—but, to me, obscure—purpose in mind as he talked with this strange, unnatural man before him.)
“Here in this dreamed-out world,” said Owen hazily, “one course is no better than another; one person or thing is no more important than any other person or thing. All opposites are interchangeable—creation or slaughter, serenity or torture. Yet vanity seeps through the scabby crust of my congealed metaphysics. Bah!” He hunched himself over and stared At Vance. “There is neither time nor existence here.”
“As you say. Infinity is not relatively divisible.”
“But there is the terrifying possibility that we can add some factor to the time before us. And if we do, that factor will continue eternally… There must be no pebble thrown. We must cut through this shadow clean.”
Owen had closed his eyes, and Vance scrutinized him without expression. Then he said in an almost consoling tone:
“That is wisdom… Yes. Cleanliness of spirit.”
Owen nodded with great languor.
“Tomorrow night I sail for South America. Warmth—the ocean.. nepenthe, perhaps. I’ll be engaged all tomorrow. Things to be done—accounts, a house-cleaning, temporal orderliness. No ripples to follow me for all time. Cleanliness—beyond… You understand?”
“Yes.” Vance did not lower his gaze. “I understand. Cessation here, lest there be a ‘hound of Heaven’…”
The man’s slow eyes opened. He straightened and lighted another cigarette. His strange mood was dissipated, and another look came into his eyes. Throughout this discussion he had not once raised his voice; nor had there been more than the mildest inflection in his words. Yet I felt as if I had been listening to a bitter and passionate tirade.
Owen began speaking now of old books, of his days at Cambridge, of his cultural ambitions as a youth, of his early study of music. He was steeped in the lore of ancient civilizations and, to my astonishment, he dwelt with fanatical passion on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But, strangely enough, he spoke of himself always with a sense of dualism, as if telling of someone else. There was a sensitive courtesy in the man, but somehow he instilled in me a repugnance akin to fear. There was always an invisible aura about him, like that of a primitive, smouldering beast. I was unwholesomely fascinated by the man; and I experienced an unmistakable sensation of relief when Vance stood up to go.
As we parted from him at the door, he said to Vance with seeming irrelevancy:
“Counted, weighed, divided… You have promised me.’
Vance met his gaze directly for a brief moment. “Thank you,” breathed Owen, with a deep bow.
CHAPTER XV
AN APPALLING ACCUSATION
(Tuesday, May 21; 9:30 am.)
“Yes, Markham, quite mad,” Vance summarized, as we were finishing breakfast in his apartment the next morning. “Quite. A poisonous madman, like some foul, crawling creature. His end is rapidly approaching, and a hideous fear has wrecked his brain. The sudden anticipation of death has severed his cord of sanity. He’s seeking a hole in which to hide from the unescapable. But he has nowhere to take cover—only the mephitic charnel house which his warped brain has erected. That is his one remaining reality… A vile creature that should be stamped out as one would destroy a deadly germ. A mental, moral and spiritual leper. Unclean. Polluted. And I—I—am to save him from the horrors infinity holds for him!”
“You must have had a pleasant evening with him,” commented Markham with distaste.
Sergeant Heath, having arrived in answer to an earlier telephone summons from Vance, had listened attentively to the conversation. But he seemed to withdraw into himself when, a few moments later, Gracie Allen came tripping gaily into the library.
She carried a small wooden box, held tightly to her. Behind her was George Burns, diffident and hesitant. Miss Allen explained things buoyantly.
“I just had to come, Mr. Vance, to show you my clues. And George had just come to see me; so I brought him along, too. I think he should know how we’re getting along. Don’t you, Mr. Vance? And mother, she’s coming over too in a little while. She said she wants to see you, though I can’t even imagine why.”
The girl paused long enough for Vance to present Markham. She accepted him without the suspicion she had previously accorded Heath; and Markham was both fascinated and amused by her lively and irrelevant chatter.
“And now, Mr. Vance,” the girl continued, going to the desk and taking the tight cover from the little box she had brought, “I’ve simply got to show you my clues. But I really don’t think they’re any good, because I didn’t know exactly where to look for them. Anyhow…”
She began to display her treasures. Vance humoured h
er and pretended to be greatly interested. Markham, puzzled but smiling, came forward a few steps; and Burns stood, ill at ease, at the other side of the desk. Heath, annoyed by the frivolous interruption, disgustedly lighted a cigar and walked to the window.
“Now here, Mr. Vance, is the exact size of a footprint.” Gracie Allen took out a slip of paper with some figures written on it. “It measures just eleven inches long, and the man at the shoe store said that was the length of a number nine-and-a-half shoe—unless it was an English shoe, and then it might be only a number nine. But I don’t think he was English—I mean the man with the foot. I think he was a Greek, because he was one of the waiters up at the Domdaniel. You see, I went up there because that’s where you said the dead man was found. And I waited a long time for someone to come out of the kitchen to make a footprint; and then, when no one was looking, I measured it…”
She put the paper to one side.
“And now, here’s a piece of blotter that I took from the desk in Mr. Puttie’s office at lunch-time yesterday, when he wasn’t there. And I held it to a mirror, but all it says is ‘4 dz Sw So,’ just like I wrote it out again here. All that means is, ‘four dozen boxes of sandalwood soap.’…”
She brought out two or three other useless odds and ends which she explained in amusing detail, as she placed them beside the others.
Vance did not interrupt her during this diverting, but pathetic, display. But Burns, who was growing nervous and exasperated at the girl’s unnecessary wasting of time, finally seemed to lose his patience and burst out: “Why don’t you show the gentlemen the almonds you have there, and get this silly business over with?”
“I haven’t any almonds, George. There’s only one thing left in the box, and that hasn’t anything to do with it. I was just sort of practising when I got that due—”
“But something smells like bitter almond to me.”
Vance suddenly became seriously interested.
“What else have you in the box, Miss Allen?” he asked.
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