<h2 id="c19">XIX</h2>
<p>Blake did not look up as he heard the
door open and the woman step into the
room. There was an echo of his old-time
theatricalism in that dissimulation of stolid indifference.
But the old-time stage-setting,
he knew, was no longer there. Instead of sitting
behind an oak desk at Headquarters, he
was staring down at a beer-stained card-table
in the dingy back room of a dingy downtown
hotel.</p>
<p>He knew the woman had closed the door
and crossed the room to the other side of the
card-table, but still he did not look up at her.
The silence lengthened until it became acute,
epochal, climactic.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_252">[252]</div>
<p>“You sent for me?” his visitor finally said.
And as Elsie Verriner uttered the words he
was teased by a vague sense that the scene had
happened before, that somewhere before in
their lives it had been duplicated, word by
word and move by move.</p>
<p>“Sit down,” he said with an effort at the
gruffness of assured authority. But the
young woman did not do as he commanded.
She remained still standing, and still staring
down at the face of the man in front of her.</p>
<p>So prolonged was this stare that Blake began
to be embarrassingly conscious of it, to
fidget under it. When he looked up he did
so circuitously, pretending to peer beyond the
white face and the staring eyes of the young
woman confronting him. Yet she ultimately
coerced his unsteady gaze, even against his
own will. And as he had expected, he saw
written on her face something akin to horror.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_253">[253]</div>
<p>As he, in turn, stared back at her, and in her
eyes saw first incredulity, and then, what
stung him more, open pity itself, it came home
to him that he must indeed have altered for
the worse, that his face and figure must have
changed. For the first time it flashed over
him: he was only the wreck of the man he had
once been. Yet at the core of that wreck
burned the old passion for power, the ineradicable
appetite for authority. He resented
the fact that she should feel sorry 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 old carcass which she
could so openly sorrow over.</p>
<p>“Well, I’m back,” he announced in his guttural
bass, as though to bridge a silence that
was becoming abysmal.</p>
<p>“Yes, you’re back!” echoed Elsie Verriner.
She spoke absently, as though her mind were
preoccupied with a problem that seemed inexplicable.</p>
<p>“And a little the worse for wear,” he pursued,
with his mirthless croak of a laugh.
Then he flashed up at her a quick look of resentment,
a look which he found himself unable
to repress. “While you’re all dolled
up,” he said with a snort, as though bent on
wounding her, “dolled up like a lobster palace
floater!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_254">[254]</div>
<p>It hurt him more than ever to see that he
could not even dethrone that fixed look of pity
from her face, that even his abuse could not
thrust aside her composure.</p>
<p>“I’m not a lobster palace floater,” she
quietly replied. “And you know it.”</p>
<p>“Then what are you?” he demanded.</p>
<p>“I’m a confidential agent of the Treasury
Department,” was her quiet-toned answer.</p>
<p>“Oho!” cried Blake. “So that’s why we’ve
grown so high and mighty!”</p>
<p>The woman sank into the chair beside which
she had been standing. She seemed impervious
to his mockery.</p>
<p>“What do you want me for?” she asked, and
the quick directness of her question implied
not so much that time was being wasted on side
issues as that he was cruelly and unnecessarily
demeaning himself in her eyes.</p>
<p>It was then that Blake swung about, as
though he, too, were anxious to sweep aside
the trivialities that stood between him and his
end, as though he, too, were conscious of the
ignominy of his own position.</p>
<p>“You know where I’ve been and what I’ve
been doing!” he suddenly cried out.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_255">[255]</div>
<p>“I’m not positive that I do,” was the
woman’s guarded answer.</p>
<p>“That’s a lie!” thundered Blake. “You
know as well as I do!”</p>
<p>“What have you been doing?” asked the
woman, almost indulgently.</p>
<p>“I’ve been trailing Binhart, and you know
it! And what’s more, you know where Binhart
is, now, at this moment!”</p>
<p>“What was it you wanted me for?” reiterated
the white-faced woman, without looking
at him.</p>
<p>Her evasions did more than anger Blake;
they maddened him. For years now he had
been compelled to face her obliquities, to
puzzle over the enigma of her ultimate character,
and he was tired of it all. He made no
effort to hold his feelings in check. Even
into his voice crept that grossness which before
had seemed something of the body alone.</p>
<p>“I want to know where Binhart is!” he
cried, leaning forward so that his head projected
pugnaciously from his shoulders like
the head of a fighting-cock.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_256">[256]</div>
<p>“Then you have only wasted time in sending
for me,” was the woman’s obdurate answer.
Yet beneath her obduracy was some
vague note of commiseration which he could
not understand.</p>
<p>“I want that man, and I’m going to get
him,” was Blake’s impassioned declaration.
“And before you get out of this room you’re
going to tell me where he is!”</p>
<p>She met his eyes, studiously, deliberately, as
though it took a great effort to do so. Their
glances seemed to close in and lock together.</p>
<p>“Jim!” said the woman, and it startled him
to see that there were actual tears in her eyes.
But he was determined to remain superior to
any of her subterfuges. His old habit returned
to him, the old habit of “pounding” a
prisoner. He knew that one way to get at
the meat of a nut was to smash the nut. And
in all his universe there seemed only one 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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_257">[257]</div>
<p>“I’ve got your number, Elsie Verriner,
alias Chaddy Cravath,” he thundered 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 care whether you’re a secret
agent or a Secretary of War. There’s only
one thing that counts with me now. And
I’m going to win out. I’m going to win out,
in the end, no matter what it costs. If you
try to block me in this I’ll put you where you
belong. I’ll drag you down until you squeal
like a cornered rat. I’ll put you so low
you’ll never even stand up again!”</p>
<p>The woman leaned a little forward, staring
into his eyes.</p>
<p>“I didn’t expect this of you, Jim,” she said.
Her voice was tremulous as she spoke, and still
again he could see on her face that odious and
unfathomable pity.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_258">[258]</div>
<p>“There’s lots of things weren’t expected
of me. But I’m going to surprise you all.
I’m going to get what I’m after or I’m
going to put you where I ought to have put
you two years ago!”</p>
<p>“Jim,” said the woman, white-lipped but
compelling herself to calmness, “don’t go on
like this! Don’t! You’re only making it
worse, every minute!”</p>
<p>“Making what worse?” demanded Blake.</p>
<p>“The whole thing. It was a mistake, from
the first. I could have told you that. But
you did then what you’re trying to do now.
And see what you’ve lost by it!”</p>
<p>“What have I lost by it?”</p>
<p>“You’ve lost everything,” she answered,
and her voice was thin with misery. “Everything—just
as they counted on your doing,
just as they expected!”</p>
<p>“As who expected?”</p>
<p>“As Copeland and the others expected when
they sent you out on a blind trail.”</p>
<p>“I wasn’t sent out on a blind trail.”</p>
<p>“But you found nothing when you went
out. Surely you remember that.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_259">[259]</div>
<p>It seemed like going back to another world,
to another life, as he sat there coercing his
memory to meet the past, the abysmal and embittered
past which he had grown to hate.</p>
<p>“Are you trying to say this Binhart case
was a frame up?” he suddenly cried out.</p>
<p>“They wanted you out of the way. It was
the only trick they could think of.”</p>
<p>“That’s a lie!” declared Blake.</p>
<p>“It’s not a lie. They knew you’d never
give up. They even handicapped you—started
you wrong, to be sure it would take
time, to be positive of a clear field.”</p>
<p>Blake stared at her, almost stupidly. His
mind was groping about, trying to find some
adequate motive for this new line of duplicity.
He kept warning himself that she was not to
be trusted. Human beings, all human beings,
he had found, moved only by indirection.
He was too old a bird to have sand thrown in
his eyes.</p>
<p>“Why, you welched on Binhart yourself.
You put me on his track. You sent me up to
Montreal!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_260">[260]</div>
<p>“They made me do that,” confessed the unhappy
woman. “He wasn’t in Montreal.
He never had been there!”</p>
<p>“You had a letter from him there, telling
you to come to 381 King Edward when the
coast was clear.”</p>
<p>“That letter was two years old. It was
sent from a room in the King Edward Hotel.
That was part of their plant.”</p>
<p>He sat for a long time thinking it over,
point by point. He became disturbed by a
sense of instability in the things that had once
seemed most enduring, the sickening cataclysmic
horror of a man who finds the very earth
under his feet shaken by its earthquake. His
sodden face appeared to age even as he sat
there laboriously reliving the past, the past
that seemed suddenly empty and futile.</p>
<p>“So you sold me out!” he finally said,
studying her white face with his haggard
hound’s eyes.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_261">[261]</div>
<p>“I couldn’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 friendship!”</p>
<p>“What do <i>you</i> know about friendship?”
cried the gray-faced man.</p>
<p>“We were friends once,” answered the
woman, ignoring the bitter mockery in his cry.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“So you sold me out!” he said for a third
time. He did not move, but under that lava-like
shell of diffidence were volcanic and
coursing fires which even he himself could not
understand.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_262">[262]</div>
<p>“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!”</p>
<p>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, shining 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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_263">[263]</div>
<p>“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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_264">[264]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>He lurched forward to his feet. His great
crouching body seemed drawn towards her by
some slow current which he could not control.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_265">[265]</div>
<p>“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 passive 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 passion 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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_266">[266]</div>
<p>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. <i>He was killing her!</i></p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_267">[267]</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_268">[268]</div>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />