The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 47

"And that makes it seem rather silly to you?"

"Yes, it _does_ seem silly," he acknowledged.

Then a sudden idea fell like a hailstone out of the heavens themselves.

"I know what's the matter," I cried. "I know why you're not acting out the part. It's because you're not on the right stage. You know it's an empty rehearsal--you haven't been able to let yourself go!"

"I'm sorry," he said, with the contrition of a child, and with his repeated hand-gesture of helplessness.

I swung about on him, scarcely hearing the words he was uttering.

"We've got to get into that office," I declared. "We've got to get into Lockwood's own office."

He shook his head, without looking up at me.

"I've been over that office, every nook and cranny of it!" he reiterated.

"But what I want to know is, _can_ we get into it?"

"At this time of night?" he asked, apparently a little frightened at the mere idea of it.

"Yes, now," I declared.

"I'd rather not," he finally averred.

"But you still carry those office-keys, don't you?" I asked.

"Yes; I still have my keys. But it wouldn't look right, the way things are. It would be only too easy for them to misinterpret a midnight visit of mine to those offices. And they're watching me, every move I make."

"Then let them know you're going to make the move," I maintained. "And then we'll slip down in my car, with no chance of being followed."

He seemed to be turning the matter over in his mind. Then he looked up, as though a sudden light had clarified the whole situation.

"You know Mary Lockwood, don't you?" he demanded.

"Y-yes," I hesitatingly admitted.

"Then wouldn't it be easier for you to call her up on the telephone and explain just what you propose doing?"

It was my turn to sit in a brown study. It would be no easy matter, I remembered, to make clear to this stranger my reasons for not caring to converse with Mary Lockwood. I also remembered that the situation confronting me was something which should transcend mere personal issues. And I was in a quandary, until I thought of the ever-dependable Benson.

"I'll have my man call up Lockwood's house," I explained as I rose to my feet, "and announce that we're making an informal visit to those offices."

"But what's that visit for?"

"For the purpose of finding out if John Lockwood really taps his thumbs or not!"

The gray-faced youth stared at me.

"But what good will that do?" he demanded.

"Why, it'll give us the right stage-setting, the right 'props'--something to reach out and grope along. It'll mean the same to your imagination as a brick wall to a bit of ivy." And I stopped and turned to give my instructions to Benson.

"Oh, it's no earthly use!" repeated the man who couldn't remember, in his flat and atonic voice. But instead of answering or arguing with him I put his hat in his hand and held the portiere, waiting for him to pa.s.s through.

I have often thought that if the decorous and somewhat ponderous figure of Mr. John Lockwood had invaded his own offices on that particular night, he would have been persuaded of the fact that he was confronting two madmen.

For, once we had gained access to those offices and locked the door behind us, I began over again what I had so inadequately attempted in my own library.

During the earlier part of my effort to Belascoize a slumbering mental idea into some approximation to life, I tried to remember my surroundings and the fact that the hour was the unseemly one of almost two o'clock in the morning. But as I seated Criswell at his own office desk and did my utmost to galvanize his tired brain into some semblance of the role I had laid out for it, I think he rather lost track of time and place. At the end of ten minutes my face was moist with sweat, and a wave of utter exhaustion swept through me as I saw that, after all my struggle, nothing in that minutely enacted little drama had struck a responsive chord in either his imagination or his memory.

"You don't get anything?" I asked as I dropped back into a chair at the end of my pantomime. No stage-manager, trying to project his personality into an unresponding actor, could have struggled more pa.s.sionately, more persuasively, more solicitously. But it had been fruitless.

"No, I can't get anything!" said the white-faced Criswell. And I could see that he had honestly tried, that he had strained his very soul, striving to reach up to the light that was denied him. But the matter was not one of mere volition. It was beyond his power. It depended on something external, on something as much outside his conscious control as though it were an angel that must come and touch him on the brow.

It was simply that the door of Memory remained locked and barred. We had not hit upon the right combination. But I did not give up.

"Now we're going in to try Lockwood's own office," I told him, with a peremptoriness which made him draw away from me.

"I--I don't think I can go through it again," he faltered. And I could see the lines of mental fatigue deepen on his ashen face.

Yet I proffered him no sympathy; I allowed him no escape from those four imprisoning walls. I had already stirred the pool too deeply. I knew that a relapse into the old impa.s.sive hopelessness would now be doubly perilous.

I looked about the room. Three sides of it were lined with book-shelves and every shelf was filled with hundreds of books, thousands of them altogether, from dull and uninteresting-looking treatises on railway building and mining engineering to even more dull-looking consular reports and text-books on matters of finance.

The fourth side of the room held two windows. Between these windows, some six feet from the wall, stood Lockwood's rosewood desk. It was a handsome desk, heavily carved, yet like the rest of the furniture, the acme of simplicity. History, I knew, had been made over that oblong of rosewood. It had been and would again be an arena of Napoleonic contention. Yet it stood before me as bare and bald as a prize fighter's platform.

I sat down in the carved swivel chair beside this desk, drew my chair closer to the rosewood, and looked up at Criswell, who, I believe, would have turned and bolted, had he been given the chance. He was, I fancy, even beginning to have suspicions as to my sanity. But in that I saw no objection. It was, I felt, rather an advantage. It would serve to key his nerves up to a still higher pitch--for I still hoped against hope that I might lash him into some form of mental calenture which would drive him into taking the high jump, which would in some way make him clear the blind wall.

"Now, I'm Lockwood, remember," I cried, fixing my eye on him, "and you're Criswell, my private secretary. Have you got that plain?"

He did not answer me. He was, apparently, looking weakly about for a place to sit down.

"Have you got that plain?" I repeated, this time in a voice that was almost thunderous.

"Yes," he finally said. "I understand."

"Then go back into your room there. From that room I want you to bring me a letter. Not any old letter, but one particular letter. I want you to bring me the Carlton registered letter which you signed for. I want you to see it, and feel it, and bring it here."

I threw all the authority of my being into that command. I had to justify both my course and my intelligence. I had to get my man over the high jump, or crawl away humiliated and defeated.

I stared at the man, for he was not moving. I tried to cow him into obedience by the very anger of my look. But it didn't seem to succeed.

"Don't you understand," I cried. "I want you to bring that registered letter in to me, here, now!"

He looked at me a little blankly. Then he pa.s.sed his hand over his moist forehead.

"But we tried that before," he falteringly complained. "We tried that, and it wouldn't work. I brought the letter in the first time, and you weren't here."

I sat up as though I had been shot. I could feel a tingle of something go up and down my backbone. My G.o.d, I thought, the man's actually stumbling on something. The darkness was delivering itself of an idea.