Never-Fail Blake

  XVIII

  Blake did not look up as he heard the door open and the woman step intothe room. There was an echo of his old-time theatricalism in thatdissimulation of stolid indifference. But the old-time stage-setting,he knew, was no longer there. Instead of sitting behind an oak desk atHeadquarters, he was staring down at a beer-stained card-table in thedingy back room of a dingy downtown hotel.

  He knew the woman had closed the door and crossed the room to the otherside of the card-table, but still he did not look up at her. Thesilence 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 sensethat the scene had happened before, that somewhere before in theirlives it had been duplicated, word by word and move by move.

  "Sit down," he said with an effort at the gruffness of assuredauthority. But the young woman did not do as he commanded. Sheremained still standing, and still staring down at the face of the manin front of her.

  So prolonged was this stare that Blake began to be embarrassinglyconscious of it, to fidget under it. When he looked up he did socircuitously, pretending to peer beyond the white face and the staringeyes of the young woman confronting him. Yet she ultimately coercedhis 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 firstincredulity, and then, what stung him more, open pity itself, it camehome to him that he must indeed have altered for the worse, that hisface and figure must have changed. For the first time it flashed overhim: he was only the wreck of the man he had once been. Yet at thecore of that wreck burned the old passion for power, the ineradicableappetite for authority. He resented the fact that she should feelsorry 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 oldcarcass which she could so openly sorrow over.

  "Well, I 'm back," he announced in his guttural bass, as though tobridge a silence that was becoming abysmal.

  "Yes, you 're back!" echoed Elsie Verriner. She spoke absently, asthough her mind were preoccupied with a problem that seemedinexplicable.

  "And a little the worse for wear," he pursued, with his mirthless croakof a laugh. Then he flashed up at her a quick look of resentment, alook which he found himself unable to repress. "While you're alldolled 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 thatfixed look of pity from her face, that even his abuse could not thrustaside her composure.

  "I 'm not a lobster palace floater," she quietly replied. "And youknow it."

  "Then what are you?" he demanded.

  "I 'm a confidential agent of the Treasury Department," was herquiet-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. Sheseemed impervious to his mockery.

  "What do you want me for?" she asked, and the quick directness of herquestion implied not so much that time was being wasted on side issuesas that he was cruelly and unnecessarily demeaning himself in her eyes.

  It was then that Blake swung about, as though he, too, were anxious tosweep aside the trivialities that stood between him and his end, asthough he, too, were conscious of the ignominy of his own position.

  "You know where I 've been and what I 've been doing!" he suddenlycried 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, youknow 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 yearsnow he had been compelled to face her obliquities, to puzzle over theenigma of her ultimate character, and he was tired of it all. He madeno effort to hold his feelings in check. Even into his voice creptthat grossness which before had seemed something of the body alone.

  "I want to know where Binhart is!" he cried, leaning forward so thathis head projected pugnaciously from his shoulders like the head of afighting-cock.

  "Then you have only wasted time in sending for me," was the woman'sobdurate answer. Yet beneath her obduracy was some vague note ofcommiseration which he could not understand.

  "I want that man, and I 'm going to get him," was Blake's impassioneddeclaration. "And before you get out of this room you 're going totell me where he is!"

  She met his eyes, studiously, deliberately, as though it took a greateffort to do so. Their glances seemed to close in and lock together.

  "Jim!" said the woman, and it startled him to see that there wereactual tears in her eyes. But he was determined to remain superior toany of her subterfuges. His old habit returned to him, the old habitof "pounding" a prisoner. He knew that one way to get at the meat of anut was to smash the nut. And in all his universe there seemed onlyone 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," hethundered 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 carewhether you 're a secret agent or a Secretary of War. There 's onlyone thing that counts with me now. And I 'm going to win out. I 'mgoing to win out, in the end, no matter what it costs. If you try toblock me in this I 'll put you where you belong. I 'll drag you downuntil you squeal like a cornered rat. I 'll put you so low you 'llnever 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 tremulousas she spoke, and still again he could see on her face that odious andunfathomable pity.

  "There 's lots of things were n't expected of me. But I 'm going tosurprise you all. I 'm going to get what I 'm after or I 'm going toput you where I ought to have put you two years ago!"

  "Jim," said the woman, white-lipped hut compelling herself to calmness,"don't go on like this! Don't! You're only making it worse, everyminute!"

  "Making what worse?" demanded Blake.

  "The whole thing. It was a mistake, from the first. I could have toldyou that. But you did then what you 're trying to do now. And seewhat you 've lost by it!"

  "What have I lost by it?"

  "You 've lost everything," she answered, and her voice was thin withmisery. "Everything--just as they counted on your doing, just as theyexpected!"

  "As who expected?"

  "As Copeland and the others expected when they sent you out on a blindtrail."

  "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 satthere coercing his memory to meet the past, the abysmal and embitteredpast which he had grown to hate.

  "Are you trying to say this Binhart case was a frame up?" he suddenlycried out.

  "They wanted you out of the way. It was the only trick they couldthink of."

  "That's a lie!" declared Blake.

  "It's not a lie. They knew you 'd never give up. They evenhandicapped you--started you wrong, to be sure it would take time, tobe 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. Hekept warning himself that she was not to be trusted. Human beings, allhuman beings, he had found, move
d only by indirection. He was too olda bird to have sand thrown in his eyes.

  "Why, you welched on Binhart yourself. You put me on his track. Yousent me up to Montreal!"

  "They made me do that," confessed the unhappy woman. "He was n't inMontreal. He never had been there!"

  "You had a letter from him there, telling you to come to 881 KingEdward when the coast was clear."

  "That letter was two years old. It was sent from a room in the KingEdward Hotel. That was part of their plant."

  He sat for a long time thinking it over, point by point. He becamedisturbed by a sense of instability in the things that had once seemedmost enduring, the sickening cataclysmic horror of a man who finds thevery earth under his feet shaken by its earthquake. His sodden faceappeared to age even as he sat there laboriously reliving the past, thepast that seemed suddenly empty and futile.

  "So you sold me out!" he finally said, studying her white face with hishaggard hound's eyes.

  "I could n't help it, Jim. You forced it on me. You wouldn't give methe chance to do anything else. I wanted to help you--but you held meoff. You put the other thing before my friendship!"

  "What do _you_ know about friendship?" cried the gray-faced man.

  "We were friends once," answered the woman, ignoring the bitter mockeryin his cry.

  He stared at her, untouched by the note of pathos in her voice. Therewas something abstracted about his stare, as though his mind had notyet adjusted itself to a vast new discovery. His inner vision seemeddazzled, 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, butunder that lava-like shell of diffidence were volcanic and coursingfires which even he himself could not understand.

  "Jim, I would have done anything for you, once," went on the unhappywoman facing him. "You could have saved me--from him, from myself.But you let the chance slip away. I couldn't go on. I saw where itwould end. So I had to save myself. I had to save myself--in the onlyway I could. Oh, Jim, if you 'd only been kinder!"

  She sat with her head bowed, ashamed of her tears, the tears which hecould not understand. He stared at her great crown of carefully coiledand plaited hair, shining in the light of the unshaded electric-bulbabove them. It took him back to other days when he had looked at itwith other eyes. And a comprehension of all he had lost crept slowlyhome to him. Poignant as was the thought that she had seemed beautifulto him and he might have once possessed her, this thought wasobliterated by the sudden memory that in her lay centered everythingthat 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 ithe seemed to find some signal and sign of his own dissolution, of hislost power, of his outlived authority. In her seemed to abide thereason for all that he had endured. To have attained to acomprehension of her own feelings was beyond him. Even the effort tounderstand them would have been a contradiction of his whole career.She only angered him. And the hot anger that crept through his bodyseemed to smoke out of some inner recess of his being a hate that wasas unreasonable as it was animal-like. All the instincts of existence,in that moment, reverted to life's one primordial problem, the problemof the fighting man to whom every other man must be an opponent, theproblem 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 ofall his career. Even as she sat there in her pink and white frailtyshe knew and nursed the secret for which he had girdled the world. Hefelt that he must tear it from her, that he must crush it out of herbody as the pit is squeezed from a cherry. And the corroding part ofit was that he had been outwitted by a woman, that he was being defiedby a physical weakling, a slender-limbed thing of ribbons and laceswhose back he could bend and break across his great knee.

  He lurched forward to his feet. His great crouching body seemed drawntowards her by some slow current which he could not control.

  "Where's Binhart?" he suddenly gasped, and the explosive tensity ofthat wheezing cry caused her to look up, startled. He swayed towardher as she did so, swept by some power not his own. There wassomething leonine in his movement, something leonine in his snarl as hefell on her. He caught her body in his great arms and shook it. Hemoved without any sense of movement, without any memory of it.

  "Where 's Binhart?" he repeated, foolishly, for by this time his greathand 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 notstruggle. She lay there so passive in his clutch that a dull pridecame to him at the thought of his own strength. This belated sense ofpower seemed to intoxicate him. He was swept by a blind passion tocrush, to obliterate. It seemed as though the rare and final momentfor the righting of vast wrongs, for the ending of great injustices,were at hand. His one surprise was that she did not resist him, thatshe did not struggle.

  From side to side he twisted and flailed her body about, in hismadness, gloating over her final subserviency to his will, marvelinghow well adapted for attack was this soft and slender column of theneck, 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 thebrute. It was made to get a grip on, a neck like that! And he gruntedaloud, with wheezing and voluptuous grunts of gratification, as he sawthe white face alter and the wide eyes darken with terror. He wasmaking her suffer. He was no longer enveloped by that mild andtragically inquiring stare that had so discomforted him. He was nolonger stung by the thought that she was good to look on, even with herhead pinned down against a beer-stained card-table. He was convertingher into something useless and broken, into something that could nolonger come between him and his ends. He was completely and finallyhumiliating her. He was breaking her. He was converting her intosomething corrupt. . . . Then his pendulous throat choked with afalsetto gasp of wonder. _He was killing her_!

  Then, as suddenly as it had come, the smoke of that mental explosionseemed to clear away. Even as he gaped into the white face so close tohis own he awoke to reason. The consciousness of how futile, of howodious, 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 flexormuscles of his fingers relaxed. An ague of weakness crept through hislimbs. A vertiginous faintness brought him half tumbling and halfrolling back into his chair, wheezing and moist with sweat. He satthere looking about him, like a sheep killer looking up from the ewe ithas captured.

  Then his great chest heaved and shook with hysterical sobbing. When, alittle later, he heard the shaken woman's antiphonal sobs, therealization of how low he had fallen kept him from looking at her. Agreat shame possessed him. He stumbled out of the room. He groped hisway down to the open streets, a haggard and broken man from whom lifehad wrung some final hope of honor.