The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 48

"Yes, we tried that before," I wheedled. "And what happened?"

"You weren't here," he repeated, in tones of such languid detachment that one might have thought of him as under the influence of a hypnotist.

"But I'm here now, so bring me the letter!"

I tried to speak quietly, but I noticed that my voice shook with suppressed excitement. Whether or not the contagion of my hysteria went out to him I can not say. But he suddenly walked out of the room, with the utmost solemnity.

The moment I was alone I did a thing that was both ridiculous and audacious. Jerking open Lockwood's private drawer, I caught up a perfecto from a cigar-box I found there. This perfecto I impertinently and promptly lighted, puffing its aroma about, for it had suddenly come home to me how powerful an aid to memory certain odors may be, how, for instance, the mere smell of a Noah's Ark will carry a man forty years back to a childhood Christmas.

I sat there busily and abstractedly smoking as Criswell came into the room and quietly stepped up to my desk. In his hand he carried a letter. He was solemn enough about it, only his eyes, I noticed, were as empty as though he were giving an exhibition of sleep-walking. He reminded me of a hungry actor trying to look happy over a _papier-mache_ turkey.

"Here's a letter for Carlton, sir," he said to me. "Had I better send it on, or will you look after it?"

I pretended to be preoccupied. Lockwood, I felt, would have been that way, if the scene had indeed ever occurred. Lockwood's own mind must have been busy, otherwise he would have carried away some definite memory of what had happened.

I looked up, quickly and irritably. I took the letter from Criswell's hand, glanced at it, and began absently tapping my left thumb-tip with it as I peered at the secretarial figure before me.

Criswell's face went blank as he saw the movement. It was now not even somnambulistic in intelligence. It maddened me to think he was going to fail me at such a critical moment.

"What are you breaking down for?" I cried. "Why don't you go on?"

He was silent, looking ahead of him.

"I--_I see blue_," he finally said, as though to himself. His face was clammy with sweat.

"What sort of blue?" I prompted. "Blue cloth? Blue sky? Blue ink?

Blue _what_?"

"_It's blue_," he repeated, ignoring my interruption. And all his soul seemed writhing and twisting in some terrible travail of mental childbirth.

"I see blue. And you're making it white. You're covering it up.

You're turning over white--white--white! Oh, what in G.o.d's name is it?"

My spine was again tingling with a thousand electric needles as I watched him. He turned to me with a gesture of piteous appeal.

"What was it?" he implored. "Can't you help me get it--get it before it goes! What was it?"

"It was blue, blue and white," I told him, and as I said it I realized what madhouse jargon it would have sounded to any outsider.

He sank into a chair, and let his head fall forward on his hands. He did not speak for several seconds.

"And there are two hills covered with snow," he slowly intoned.

My heart sank a little as I heard him. I knew I had overtaxed his strength. He was wandering off again into irrelevancies. He had missed the high jump.

"That's all right, old man," I tried to console him. "There's no use overdoing this. You sit there for a while and calm down."

As I sank into a chair on the other side of the desk, defeated, staring wearily about that book-lined room that was housing so indeterminate a tragedy, the door on my left was thrown open. Through it stepped a woman in an ivory-tinted dinner gown over which was thrown a cloth-of-gold cloak.

I sat there blinking up at her, for it was Mary Lockwood herself. It was not so much her sudden appearance as the words she spoke to the huddled figure on the other side of the desk that startled me.

"You were right," she said, with a self-obliterating intensity of purpose. "Father taps his thumbs. I saw him do it an hour ago!"

I sat staring at her as she stood in the center of the room, a tower of ivory and gold against the dull and mottled colors of the book-lined wall. I waited for her to speak. Then out of the mottled colors that confronted my eye, out of the faded yellows and rusty browns, the dull greens and brighter reds, and the gilt of countless t.i.tles, my gaze rested on a near-by oblong of blue.

I looked at it without quite seeing it. Then it came capriciously home to me that blue had been the color that Criswell had mentioned.

But after all blue is only blue, I vacuously told myself as I got up and crossed the room. Then I saw the white streak at the top of the book, and for no adequate reason my heart suddenly leaped up into my throat.

I s.n.a.t.c.hed at that thing of blue and white, like a man overboard s.n.a.t.c.hing at a life-line. I jerked it from its resting-place and crossed to the desk-top with it.

On its blue t.i.tle page I read: "Report of the Commissioner of the North West Mounted Police, 1898."

The volume, I could see at a glance, was a Canadian Government Blue Book. It was a volume which I myself had exploited, in my own time, and for my own ends. But those ends, I remembered as I took up the book and shook it, belonged now to a world that seemed very foolish and very far-away. Then, having shaken the volume as a terrier shakes a rat, I turned it over and looked through it. This I did with a slowly sinking heart.

It held nothing of significance. Yet I took it up and shook it and riffled through its leaves once more, to make sure. Then between what I saw to be the eighteenth and nineteenth pages of that section which bore the t.i.tle "The Report of Inspector Moodie," I came upon a photographic insert, a tint-block photo-engraving. It carried the inscription: "The Summit of Laurier Pa.s.s Looking Westward." What made me suddenly stop breathing was the fact that this photograph showed two hills covered with snow.

"Criswell!" I called out, so sharply that it must have sounded like a scream to the bewildered woman in the cloth-of-gold cloak.

"Yes," he answered in his far-away voice.

"Was John Lockwood ever interested in Northern British Columbia? Did he happen to have any claims or interests or plans that would make him look up trails in a Police Patrol report?"

"I don't know," was the wearily indifferent answer.

"Think, man!" I called out at him. "_Think!_"

"I can't think," he complained.

"Wouldn't he have to look up roads to a new mining-camp in that district?" I persisted.

"Yes, I think he did," was the slow response. Then the speaker looked up at me. His stupor was almost that of intoxication. His wandering eye peered unsteadily down at the Blue Book as I once more riffled through its pages, from back to front. I saw his wavering glance grow steady, his whole face change. I put the book down on the desk-top, with the picture of Laurier Pa.s.s uppermost under the flat white light.

I saw the man's eyes gradually dilate, and his body rise, as though some unseen hydraulic machinery were slowly and evenly elevating it.

"Why, there's the blue! There's the white!" he gasped.

"Go on!" I cried. "Go on!"

"And those are the two hills covered with snow! That's it! I see it!

I see it, now! That's the book John Lockwood was going through _when I handed him the letter_!"

"What letter?" I insisted.

"Carlton's letter," he proclaimed.

"Then where is it?" I asked, sick at heart. I looked from Criswell to the girl in the gold cloak as she crossed the room to the book-shelf and stooped over the s.p.a.ce from which I had so feverishly s.n.a.t.c.hed the Blue Book. I saw her brush the dust from her fingertips, stoop lower, and again reach in between the shelves. Then I looked back at Criswell, for I could hear his voice rise almost to a scream.

"_I remember! I see it now! And he's got to remember! He's got to remember!_"