Never-Fail Blake Part 21

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

"I could n't help it, Jim. You forced it on me. You wouldn't give me the chance to do anything else. I wanted to help you--but you held me off. You put the other thing before my friends.h.i.+p!"

"What do _you_ know about friends.h.i.+p?" cried the gray-faced man.

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

He stared at her, untouched by the note of pathos in her voice. There was something abstracted about his stare, as though his mind had not yet adjusted itself to a vast new discovery. His inner vision seemed dazzled, 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, but under that lava-like sh.e.l.l of diffidence were volcanic and coursing fires which even he himself could not understand.

"Jim, I would have done anything for you, once," went on the unhappy woman 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 it would end. So I had to save myself. I had to save myself--in the only way I could. Oh, Jim, if you 'd only been kinder!"

She sat with her head bowed, ashamed of her tears, the tears which he could not understand. He stared at her great crown of carefully coiled and plaited hair, s.h.i.+ning in the light of the unshaded electric-bulb above them. It took him back to other days when he had looked at it with other eyes. And a comprehension of all he had lost crept slowly home to him. Poignant as was the thought that she had seemed beautiful to him and he might have once possessed her, this thought was obliterated by the sudden memory that in her lay centered everything that 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 it he seemed to find some signal and sign of his own dissolution, of his lost power, of his outlived authority. In her seemed to abide the reason for all that he had endured. To have attained to a comprehension of her own feelings was beyond him. Even the effort to understand them would have been a contradiction of his whole career.

She only angered him. And the hot anger that crept through his body seemed to smoke out of some inner recess of his being a hate that was as unreasonable as it was animal-like. All the instincts of existence, in that moment, reverted to life's one primordial problem, the problem of the fighting man to whom every other man must be an opponent, the problem 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 of all his career. Even as she sat there in her pink and white frailty she knew and nursed the secret for which he had girdled the world. He felt that he must tear it from her, that he must crush it out of her body as the pit is squeezed from a cherry. And the corroding part of it was that he had been outwitted by a woman, that he was being defied by a physical weakling, a slender-limbed thing of ribbons and laces whose back he could bend and break across his great knee.

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

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

"Where 's Binhart?" he repeated, foolishly, for by this time his great hand 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 not struggle. She lay there so pa.s.sive in his clutch that a dull pride came to him at the thought of his own strength. This belated sense of power seemed to intoxicate him. He was swept by a blind pa.s.sion to crush, to obliterate. It seemed as though the rare and final moment for the righting of vast wrongs, for the ending of great injustices, were at hand. His one surprise was that she did not resist him, that she did not struggle.

From side to side he twisted and flailed her body about, in his madness, gloating over her final subserviency to his will, marveling how well adapted for attack was this soft and slender column of the neck, 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 the brute. It was made to get a grip on, a neck like that! And he grunted aloud, with wheezing and voluptuous grunts of gratification, as he saw the white face alter and the wide eyes darken with terror. He was making her suffer. He was no longer enveloped by that mild and tragically inquiring stare that had so discomforted him. He was no longer stung by the thought that she was good to look on, even with her head pinned down against a beer-stained card-table. He was converting her into something useless and broken, into something that could no longer come between him and his ends. He was completely and finally humiliating her. He was breaking her. He was converting her into something corrupt. . . . Then his pendulous throat choked with a falsetto gasp of wonder. _He was killing her_!

Then, as suddenly as it had come, the smoke of that mental explosion seemed to clear away. Even as he gaped into the white face so close to his own he awoke to reason. The consciousness of how futile, of how odious, 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 flexor muscles of his fingers relaxed. An ague of weakness crept through his limbs. A vertiginous faintness brought him half tumbling and half rolling back into his chair, wheezing and moist with sweat. He sat there looking about him, like a sheep killer looking up from the ewe it has captured.

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

XIX

No catastrophe that was mental in its origin could oppress for long a man so essentially physical as Blake. For two desolate hours, it is true, he wandered about the streets of the city, struggling to medicine his depression of the mind by sheer weariness of the body. Then the habit of a lifetime of activity rea.s.serted itself. He felt the need of focusing his resentment on something tangible and material. And as a comparative clarity of vision returned to him there also came back those tendencies of the instinctive fighter, the innate protest against injustice, the revolt against final surrender, the forlorn claim for at least a fighting chance. And with the thought of his official downfall came the thought of Copeland and what Copeland had done to him.

Out of that ferment of futile protest arose one sudden decision. Even before he articulated the decision he found it unconsciously swaying his movements and directing his steps. He would go and see Copeland!

He would find that bloodless little shrimp and put him face to face with a few plain truths. He would confront that anemic Deputy-Commissioner and at least let him know what one honest man thought of him.

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

He went ponderously up the brown stone steps and rang the bell. He waited patiently until his ring was answered. It was some time before the door swung open. Inside that door Blake saw a solemn-eyed servant in a black spiked-tailed service-coat and gray trousers.

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

"Mr. Copeland is not at home," answered the man in the service-coat.

His tone was politely impersonal. His face, too, was impa.s.sive. But one quick glance seemed to have appraised the man on the doorstep, to have judged him, 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 an effort to keep himself in perfect control. He knew that his unkempt figure had not won the good-will of that autocratic hireling.

"I 'm from Police Headquarters," the man on the doorstep explained, with the easy mendacity that was a heritage of his older days.

He produced the one official card that remained with him, the one worn and dog-eared and once water-soaked Deputy-Commissioner's card which still remained in his dog-eared wallet. "I 've got to see him on business, Departmental business!"

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

"Then I 'll wait for him," announced Blake, placated by the humbler note in 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 softly hung room he peered with an acute yet heavy disdain, with an indeterminate envy which he could not control. It struck him as being feminine and over fine, that shadowy room with all its warm hangings and polished wood. It stood for a phase of life with which he had no patience. And he kept telling himself that it had not been come by honestly, that on everything about him, from the silver desk ornaments to the marble bust glimmering out of its shadowy background, he himself had some secret claim. He scowled up at a number of signed etchings and a row of diminutive and heavily framed canvases, scowled up at them with quick contempt. Then he peered uncomfortably about at the shelves of books, mottled streaks of vellum and morocco stippled with gold, crowded pickets of soft-lettered color which seemed to stand between him and a world which he had never cared to enter. It was a foolish world, that world of book reading, a lackadaisical region of unreality, a place for women and children, but never meant for a man with a man's work to do.

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

"Mr. Blake, I believe," said Copeland, very quietly. He was in full evening dress. In one hand he held a silk hat and over one arm hung a black top-coat. He held himself in perfect control, in too perfect control, yet his thin face was almost ashen in color, almost the neutral-tinted gray of a battle-s.h.i.+p's side-plates. And when he spoke it was with the impersonal polite unction with which he might have addressed an utter stranger.

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

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

"About what?" asked Copeland. There was an acidulated crispness in his voice 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 'm quite in the dark as to how I can be of service to you."

Both his tone and his words angered Blake, angered him unreasonably.

But he kept warning himself to wait, to hold himself in until the proper moment arrived.

"I expect no service from you," was Blake's curtly guttural response.

He croaked out his mirthless ghost of a laugh. "You 've taught me better than that!"

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

"We have always something to learn," retorted, meeting Blake's stolid stare enmity.

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