# The Gamut

Extracted from Smart Set magazine, Dec 1917, pp. 53–62.
THE GAMUT
By Achmed Abdullah
I
TODAY, descending haltingly, protestingly, to the close of his life, he was Angus W. Kerr, multimillionaire.
All his life, from the drowsy spring days up the State when he swapped marbles and penknives and occasional beetles with the other boys of the village school to the autumn of his years, when he traded in railways and timber lands, in Legislatures and the destinies of his fellow-men, he had never touched any question without a whole-hearted and sweeping reference to the particular benefit he himself would derive from it, and he had made money with a selfishness that was entirely and sublimely shameless. His was a name to conjure with—and he was old beyond his years, osseous, purse-mouthed, crane-necked, gray-faced.
Today he was cursed and clouded with that profound and brooding melancholia which dwells at the heart of success and festers and gangrenes its core.
“I am bored,” he said, half an hour after he had dropped from his private Pullman at the Grand Central Depot to the old doctor who sat facing him in his wainscoted, cigar-flavored, red-plushed library. “I am tired with life, with people, with myself—with everything and everybody, Macdonald. I have”—he had an epic, slashing, exaggerated manner of choosing words when the mood took him—“I have tasted the honey of virtue and the gall of vice, and—”
“Aye!” interrupted Doctor James Macdonald, who was a Scot and, by the same token, a sardonic searcher after philosophical truths, “and I take it ye found both virtue and sin useless—toys for pap-fed weaklings. Did ye not, Mr. Kerr?”
“I did.”
“And now ye come to me because, though ye believe in neither God nor the Devil, ye have a certain belief in the man who raised himself from the guinea fees of Glasgow to five-hundred-dollar consultations with the very rich …”
“Yes.”
“And what do ye want me to do?”
“I want you to help me—No!” as the doctor drew out fountain pen and prescription pad. “Never mind your bromides. Give me something for …” he paused, “for my soul.”
“Ye are thinking that ye have a soul?”
“I guess so.”
“And ye want me to help ye?”
“Yes.”
“I am not a priest, Mr. Kerr,” said Doctor Macdonald with a twinkle in his grey eyes.
“But I'll pay you like a Cardinal.”
“Perhaps it’s religion ye need,” said the doctor. “It helped John Knox to combat the Devil. It even helped Charles the Fifth—and he was a rank Papist—”
“But it won’t help me! I’m not the sort to chew a theological cud. I’m not the sort to meditate about some damned self-perfecting regenesis, and forget this world’s bully chaos. I am red-blooded.”
The other considered.
“Have ye ever tried giving to charity?” he asked after a pause, “giving largely, constructively, as ye would handle a railroad?”
Angus Kerr shook his head.
“Charity,” he said, “a million here, a million there? Free baths, a fund for tuberculosis research, a new university endowed, an old one propped up and buttressed? Clout it together from the ground up? Put my heart into it, and my brain, and my money? Handle it all myself?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t see it. Charity is only a sniffing thing—a weakly, selfish thing—a maudlin attempt to wheedle a discount from the Recording Angel who writes down our good deeds and our bad. Charity is a form of selfishness—and selfishness, to be worth while, must be big—” He thumped the table with his clenched fist. “Such selfishness—such charity—must be massive—gigantic!”
“And ye have never come upon a thing that demanded such charity—such selfishness, as ye are pleased to miscall it? Ye have never come upon a thing that cried out to ye in the wilderness, as it were—that made it incumbent on ye to right the cursed wrong of it with every ounce of your dour grey matter, with every last dollar of your worldly goods?”
“No.”
“Then,” continued the doctor, “it’s maybe that ye are one of those supermen—and it’s more power you want. Political success!”
“Don’t mention that word to me.”
“Which?”
“Success!” He gave a curious, flat laugh. “Why, man, success is at the very root of the thing which I’m asking you to cure. I am sick of success—sick of luck. Everything happens just as I wish it—often even before I have had a chance to formulate the wish. I miss the spice of effort, of surprise, of expectation. Whatever I touch succeeds—inevitably, logically, mathematically.”
“Then what do ye want?”
“I want what the others have—what all the world has, neither more nor less. My friends have unlucky love affairs, business troubles, family quarrels. They have fights and rows and failures. People hurt them and attack them and cheat them. They live, and I—” he made a sweeping gesture, “I watch the hours pass and the days and the weeks and the months and | know everything that is going to happen to me as if it had happened before, in a former life. Would you believe that I have never had as much as an automobile accident, that I have never missed a train, that I have never trumped my partner’s ace? Success comes. In big things and in small. Always! But it comes with the bloom rubbed off—flat, stinking, sickening, like dregs. Why, Macdonald, I have even lost the faculty of desiring!”
The doctor rose.
“Angus Kerr,” he said solemnly, “I have it. I can cure ye.”
“How?”
“Ye need fear.”
“Nonsense. I need hope.”
“Hope is only the result of fear—and fear is the most humanizing thing in the world. It’s fear ye need, man. Go out and hunt it. Rather, let it come to ye. Don’t sidestep it. Help it along if ye can.” He passed him his fountain pen. “My fee is the usual—five hundred.”
Angus Kerr smiled.
“I’ll give it to you—if I should get cured,” he said as he left the room.
“Perhaps,” he added, from the door, “it’s going to be the one debt that I’ll never pay.”
“Ye'll pay—somehow,” mumbled the doctor.
II
All his life, Angus Kerr had had the trick of being able to separate interest from inclination and emotions from business; he had decomposed success into a few simple elements as he would decompose a force in a question of abstract dynamics; and so when, brooding, melancholy, he found on his return to his office that his presence in Paris was needed to wind up an important financial deal, he took ship.
Eight days later he was in Paris. The magic of his luck held true; it took him but a few hours to finish the deal; and now, in the evening, he found himself in Dijon. He had te change cars there for the Puy de Dôme where he was going to visit his widowed sister who had taken an old chateau for the season.
Since early morning it had been snowing. The platform was cold and draughty, and he was glad when shortly before midnight the Southbound train pulled into the station.
Ever since he had left New York he had been in a blacker, more hopeless mood than usual. Never had he been more bored with life. Thinking back, he considered Doctor Macdonald’s advice inane—it had been very much like telling a man dying with thirst in a waterless desert to go out and help himself to a river. His life stretched on as it had in the past—a gray pattern, flat and dull, without dazzling highlights, without blotchy shadows, without contrasts of any sort, and he had the curious sensation that his continuous success, his lack of fear and hope and expectation and surprise, was sucking the identity of separate existence out of his life, was disintegrating and breaking the structure of his being and kneading it into a whole with the stony, swinging, eternal cosmos.
He entered a compartment and sat down on the narrow plush bench. Across from him another man was sitting, half recumbent, one leg straight out, the other crooked, the head at a grotesque angle supported by the hard, bolster-like pillow that divided the back of the bench down the middle—evidently in a doze.
The green baize curtain was slid across the flickering gas lamp and plunged the compartment in half light. Outside, as the train creaked away toward the barren Puy de Dôme, the landscape was snow white, slashed with yellow and lack-lustre black. A solid head of heat zummed in the old-fashioned pipes that ran beneath the seats, and Angus Kerr slipped off his fur coat with a faint sigh of satisfaction. He curled himself up on the long, narrow bench and closed his eyes. Sleep would not come, so he sat up again and took a book from his grip.
But he could not read. The light was too bad, and he did not like to disturb the other man.
He looked at him. He considered, with a faint gnawing of envy, that it took a European to be able to sleep in these narrow, ramshackle, comfortless boxes of compartment cars.
Funny way of sleeping, too, he thought the next moment—why, the man would get a crick in his neck with his head at that ridiculous angle, touching the bolster. …
Quite suddenly Angus Kerr gave a little start. For he had the sensation that somebody was looking at him, and, a moment later, when his eyes got more used to the half light, he knew that it was the man opposite—whom he had thought asleep.
The man was staring at him fixedly, with eyes wide open, round, stupid, unwinking.
He seemed to be watching the American as a bird watches a snake, and Angus Kerr smiled at the thought that the stranger was perhaps afraid of him, possessed perhaps that power, quality rather, of fear—and hope—for prescribing which the old Scotch doctor had tried to charge him five hundred dollars.
At all events the man was wide awake, and he would have a chance now to read.
“Pardon me, Monsieur,” he said in his exact, heartily Anglo-Saxon French. “Would you mind if I pull up the lamp curtains? I would like to read.”
The other did not reply. He kept on staring fixedly at the American.
The latter shrugged his shoulders. He was used to the sudden boorish moods of the most polite nation in the world.
“All right,” he said gruffly. “Don’t talk if it hurts you,” and he rose, reached up, and slid the lamp shade to one side. Flickering, greenish, unhealthy light rays stabbed through the brown gloom of the compartment.
He sat down again, lit a cigar, and opened his book.
But, somehow, his eyes wandered away from the printed page and back to the stranger who sat there, immobile, still staring out of his round, stupid, unwinking eyes, and Angus Kerr found a certain pleasure in returning the stare. It seemed like a battle of patience as to who would look away first—and he had always been blessed with a full working measure of stubborn obstinacy.
He stared till his head swam and his eyes smarted and burned.
Presently he had a curious impression as if the other’s eyes were filling the compartment, were enveloping him as with a moist, woolen blanket.
He seemed to breathe those eyes—to taste them with the tip of his tongue. …
Then an idea wedged itself into his consciousness—sudden though half expected, even half hoped, with a faint undertow of uneasiness. It seemed unreal and disjointed, and he thought that, perhaps, it had nothing to do with the actual situation by which he was confronted, but was only a mental result of Doctor Macdonald’s advice.
But he acted on it.
“Monsieur!” he called.
There was no answer. The round eyes did not wink.
“Monsieur! Monsieur!” Kerr raised his voice.
Then, as the eyes stared as before, he leaned forward in his seat and touched the stranger on the knee. At that very instant—he had not noticed it before, not consciously noted it—he thought it odd that the other, in spite of the heat, was wrapped in his heavy fur coat.
The man’s knees jerked grotesquely, woodenly, under Kerr’s fingers. Something dropped on the floor with a dry, metallic click.
“Monsieur!” Kerr called again, quite loud this time. “Are you sick?”
Still there was no answer, no change in the expression of those flat, stony eyes, and Kerr rose.
He stepped across, bent, and slipped his right hand between the man’s neck and fur collar to lift his head to a more comfortable position.
At once he withdrew his fingers. Something cold and sodden had touched them.
He looked.
A little ball of blood, already turning black, was sticking to the nail of his right index.
He looked more closely.
Then he saw that the man was dead, that his throat was cut across the jugular vein-—evidently a case of suicide, since there was no indication of struggle—and, quite mechanically, he wiped his fingers on the plush bench.
Angus Kerr was not afraid. He was fully aware of that. But the air about him seemed to have turned icy cold, and the compartment seemed to be freighted with a certain creeping uneasiness that had not as yet fully revealed itself. He knew that, for full revelation, it needed the lever of his own mind.
Even at this moment he remembered Doctor Macdonald’s advice—he wondered if the Scotchman had meant it mockingly: “Don’t sidestep it. Help it along if ye can,” and then he saw that, in rubbing against the dead man’s fur coat, which had caught the blood like a sponge, he had smeared his light gray trousers. Blood, too, stained his shirt cuffs.
He knew that he looked like a murderer, and he thought of the fly-specked glass slab above the bench which topped the wall that divided his compartment from the next.
Suppose somebody was watching?
The thought came to him. Still, he was not conscious of fear. Looking down at the corpse, he was not even aware of any stirring of pity or compassion.
He only felt envy.
For, studying once more the round, unwinking eyes, he read there an expression of sharp despair, and he said to himself that, at least in dying, this stranger had lived through a moment of supreme emotion.
Angus Kerr raised his hand to pull the alarm cord, but he dropped it again. It would mean a delay of from fifteen to twenty minutes, the train would arrive at its destination correspondingly late, and his sister had wired him that she would meet him with the motor car. She was given to worrying.
Too, the train had five minutes’ stop at Lapalisse: time enough to call the station officials and explain. There would be no trouble about that. After all, he was Angus W. Kerr, multimillionaire.
He consulted his watch and the time-table. The train was due to arrive at Lapalisse in thirty-three minutes.
So he sat down and lit another cigar. He watched his hand. It was perfectly steady, and, reading the sign, he suddenly thought that this apathy was abnormal, given the tragic, inert mass across from him, given the glass which connected with the next compartment, and given the treacherous, accusing blood splotches—he noticed that the floor, too, was covered with them and that there was one rather large pool of blood into which he had stepped. His shoes, typically American, were sharply outlined; there was no mistaking the keen curve from just below the arch to the square-cut toe.
Doubtless, success had atrophied his emotions; and he tried to force his nerves to tingle, and the only result was a yet greater calm.
He actually enjoyed his cigar.
Then, again, imperceptibly at first, there slipped into his consciousness the thought of the doctor’s advice and of the fact that anybody entering the compartment just now would have good reason to take him for the murderer.
Gradually, the thought grew into a wish and—since, all his life, his success had been so great that he had never considered the possibility of a wish being thwarted—inside of five minutes it had changed into an obsession, into a perverted desire to be taken for the murderer and to feel as the murderer would under the hypothetical circumstances.
Dangerous? Of course.
But let happen what may as long as it gave back to him his faculty of fearing and hoping, of being like other people; and already Angus Kerr’s massive, crunching brain was busily at work considering how he might help and further the hoped-for result.
He remembered that something had dropped on the ground with a little metallic click when he had touched the dead man’s knee.
He looked, and found! He picked it up. It was a razor spotted with darkening blood, doubtless the instrument with which the man had cut his throat.
He balanced it on his palm for a moment, then he raised the window and threw it far out into the night. It would never be found again. The land was lonely, and the snow deep. Thus he had got rid of a silent witness which might have pointed at suicide.
Again he consulted his watch, and he saw that in nine minutes the train would pull into Lapalisse.
He would have to hurry a little and, calmly, methodically, with hands that were perfectly steady, he went through the dead man’s pockets and emptied them of their contents: a few illegible pencil scrawls on scraps of paper, a railway ticket, three visiting cards, each with a different name and doubtless the cards of business or social acquaintances, a purse well filled with money, and a Swiss half-hunter gold watch initialed M. H. D.
He tore up the scraps of paper, the visiting cards, and the railway ticket and threw the pieces out of the window where the wind sucked them into the dark.
He was about to do likewise with the purse and the watch when he reconsidered. After all, his mind worked on a logical basis, even in a hypothetical and imagined situation. If murder had happened, since he had not known the dead man personally and could not have been influenced by reasons of vengeance, he must have committed it for motives of robbery.
So he dropped the valuables into his trousers pocket.
Then, obeying an impulse which he did not have to time to dissect—an impulse closely resembling his sudden, instinctive decisions in business conferences—he dipped his right hand in the pool of blood and pressed his fingers against the walls and the window.
The very next moment the whistle blew. There was a thundering rush as the train pulled into Lapalisse station—and, at exactly the same infinitesimal fraction of a second, Angus Kerr became aware of four distinct emotions:
There was, first, a gush of uncontrollable elation; there was, second, a sudden sense of ultimate horror, starkly revealed, that seemed to choke the pulse beats in his heart and touch his spine with clay-cold hands; there was, furthermore, a dull and hopeless regret that he had done this mad thing; and there was, finally, his calm, deliberate decision that he must see the thing through—that he must save himself.
It had come to that. He knew it.
Momentarily he thought of telling the station master exactly what had happened—that he had acted under the whip of a crazy impulse. But nobody would believe him, though he was Angus Kerr. This was not America. This was a foreign land, France. Too, he had been overthorough. There were his red finger prints on the walls and the window, and the very fact that he had no weapon, that he had even thrown away the razor, would go far toward convicting him. For, basing his opinion on indirect logic, any detective worth his salt would conclude that he had thrown away the weapon on purpose so that it could not be identified as his property.
Perhaps, after all, it would be better to get rid of the purse and the watch. They seemed to burn the skin of his thigh. But it was too late. The train had come to a halt. He could not drop them in the compartment. They, too, bore his finger prints.
Five minutes’ stop!
Angus Kerr, master of his nerves—but master with an effort, not through instinct—stood in front of the compartment door, shielding the body that sprawled grotesquely on the bench.
He waited a minute—two—three—four—five—and he opened the door and jumped on the platform just as the station master blew the whistle for departure.
III
Grip in hand, he hurried to the gate.
“Votre billet, Monsieur!” demanded the gate keeper; and Kerr gave him his ticket which read: “Paris—Clermont, Puy de Dôme.”
“You have made a mistake, Monsieur,” said the gate keeper, “you are bound for Clermont. This is Lapalisse.”
“I know. I have decided to stop off here.”
“But this is a through ticket. It carries no stop-over privilege.”
“I know that. But I'll stop over just the same.”
“But, Monsieur,” exclaimed the official, “you will be out of pocket nearly ten francs by stopping over and surrendering your ticket!”
“I guess I can afford it;” and even as he passed through the wicket Kerr realized that to the frugal French mind the calmly accepted loss of ten francs would appear a suspicious circumstance, would cause the gate keeper to take a good look at him and to remember him—in case …
Kerr felt again a gush of elation that seemed to touch a certain spring deep within him and that brought a burst of uncontrollable laughter up in his throat. It blew from his lips before he could get his hand to his mouth.
“Monsieur, Monsieur—what …” the gate keeper voiced his astonishment.
But already Kerr was out on the deserted streets of Lapalisse.
The snow came down like hissing spears, and he breathed in the crisp air with satisfaction as he turned toward the hotel which advertised its presence with deep-set windows blinking against the white night and with the snug flames of open hearths reddening the tiny panes.
Then a reaction set in, a sudden disillusionment. For, again watching his hand, he saw that while it trembled it did so through cold, not through nerve shock, and he felt like an actor who is rehearsing his role in front of the mirror and who, without the footlights, the audience, the humming, the applause, sees in his gestures nothing except wooden and ridiculous incoherency.
He criticized himself. He was convinced that he had failed.
He tried to argue with himself, to tell himself that it was the inner conviction of his innocence which was shielding him against surrender to fear, with the unlooked for result that even his last, faintly fluttering nerve steadied.
He had been a fool. All he had accomplished was to have missed his train. His sister would worry, and he would spend a miserable night in a draughty, dirty, provincial hotel.
He would make the best of it.
He entered the lobby of the hotel.
“A room, please,” he demanded of the sleepy, frowzy woman behind the counter.
She pushed the register toward him. He signed, and she gave him a key.
“Room 49. Monsieur will be able to find it alone? It is just behind the coffee room.”
“Thank you. When does the first train leave?”
“For Paris?”
“No. For Clermont in the Puy de Dôme.”
She consulted the time-table.
“At seven in the morning, Monsieur.”
“All right. Please have me called in time.”
“Good, Monsieur. Good night.”
“Good night, Madame.”
He found his room, washed the blood from his trousers and his cuffs as well as he could, and went to bed. His last thoughts, just before he fell asleep, were not of the experience through which he had lived and which he had helped along, but of the business deal which he had successfully wound up in Paris. He had no dreams, and it seemed only a few minutes later that a dull, hollow sound waked him and brought him up sitting.
Ban-ng—ban-ng—
He rubbed his eyes. The first things he saw were his trousers with the washed-out blood spots still showing moist and brown, the shirt cuffs limp and sodden and grayish, the dead man’s purse and watch which had tumbled from his pocket on the floor. …
Ban-ng!—and a high-pitched, metallic French voice which seemed excited:
“Monsieur! Monsieur! O, the Monsieur of Number 49!”
And right then, with an amazing and, somehow, blundering swiftness, fear rushed upon Angus Kerr full-armed. Fear positively swallowed him, and, with stricken heart and parched tongue, he listened to the knocking at the door and the excited call:
“Monsieur! Monsieur! O, the Monsieur of Number 49!”
The police—already—was his first thought. His second was to curse the old Scotch doctor. His third to search his heart for a fluttering of elation, of satisfaction. There was none. There was only fear, dry, sharp, yellow as a dead man’s bones.
He asked himself what the real murderer would do, found the answer, and suited his action to it. He tumbled out of bed, picked up the watch and the purse and dropped the two bits of incriminating evidence into the hearth, deep in the bed of gray, curly wood cinders.
“Monsieur!” called the voice again, and, a little apologetically: “It is half-past six. The train for Clermont leaves at seven sharp!”
And Kerr laughed—a laugh strangely blending relief and satisfaction: relief at the thought that his early caller was not a detective, but the “Boots”—satisfaction at the conviction that he had really experienced the complicated emotion called fear.
“All right. Thanks,” he replied, steadying his voice with an effort, and he dressed, paid his bill, and hurried to the station.
The night gate keeper was still at the wicket. He recognized the American.
“So Monsieur has decided to continue his trip?” he asked.
It was the most natural thing in the world to say, and the man said it without the slightest noticeable inflection of his voice; but it happened to give the counter signal to Kerr’s emotions at the moment, with an utterance that seemed to him mercilessly sardonic and cruel.
For a second, he was in a state of amazement and stupid terror that left him the helpless prey of his own surging sensations. Had a policeman just then touched him on the shoulder, he would most likely have collapsed without more ado and fainted.
Then his terror gave way to rage—a natural reaction since he was a strong man—and, passing through the wicket, he told the gate keeper to keep his d——d mouth shut—an injunction which caused the latter, sublimely ignorant of the fact that England and America are two separate nations, to mumble something decidedly uncomplimentary about “sal Anglais” and to turn to a nearby porter with an audible aside that these “so-and-so specimens of foreigners” bore watching.
Kerr heard, but his burst of rage had helped him to collect his scattered will power into a more definite attitude of fighting self-control—which disappeared like chaff in the meeting of winds when he entered his compartment.
For, facing each other in the corner seats, sat two men: one with the spade-shaped beard, the narrow crimson button ribbon, the immaculate high hat, the tightly buttoned frock coat, the pompously pinchbeck manner, and the black-gloved hands of an official of the French Department of Justice, the other a police agent in blue and brass and tricolor sash; and the first thing Kerr heard were the words, pronounced by the gentleman from the Judiciary:
“Dead—the jugular vein cut—poor devil …“
Then the two, seeing Angus Kerr, lowered their voices to a confidential purr.
IV
Kerr’s throat felt dry. His Adam’s-apple worked up and down like a mercury ball in a storm. Catching sight of his face in the window glass, he saw that it was deathly pale.
Then his inner resistance tautened. He decided that the best thing for him to do would be to get off this train at the first station, to catch a Northbound train back to Paris, and to seek legal aid before his case became complicated beyond hope of disentanglement.
He lit a cigar. But this time he did not enjoy it. He was smoking against time. He was smoking against despair, against the invasion of panic, against the thought reflection might bring that he was in a helpless situation—against anything, in fact, rather than allow his inmost fear to assume control.
When, a few minutes later, the train stopped at Vichy, he jumped out and caught by mere luck a train which just then was leaving the same platform bound for Paris.
It was a corridor train, filled with Parisians and a few Englishmen returning from Vichy for the beginning of the season, and the first thing that happened to him was a discussion with the conductor.
“Your ticket, Monsieur, if you please.”
“I didn’t have time to buy one.”
“It is against the regulations to purchase a ticket on board a train. You must get out.”
“Ventrebleu!” laughed a plump, comfortable bourgeois who was listening, “but Monsieur cannot get out. There is no stop before we reach Paris. This is the through express.”
Came a lengthy wrangle between Kerr and the conductor, interrupted by jocular bits of advice from the bourgeois and finally settled by Kerr paying the full fare and giving his name and the Paris address where he might be found—“in case,” said the conductor ominously, “that the railway company should decide to make further and detailed investigation of so irregular a happening.”
“Monsieur,” he added, out of pure Gallic malice, promptly misinterpreted by the American, “you seemed in a most singular—I might say, suspicious hurry to board the express at Vichy!”
During the rest of the trip Kerr was busy avoiding the conversational advances made to him by the bourgeois:
“Monsieur is an American, I take it?”
“Yes.”
“This is your first visit to France?”
“No.”
“New Orleans is in America, is it not?” The man beamed, proud of his geographical knowledge; “also Chicago and San Francisco, hein?”
“Yes.”
“Monsieur”—with a glance at Kerr’s ashen features—“does not appear to be feeling well?”
“Yes—no—yes. …”
Finally:
“Monsieur has a spot on his trousers. …”
And Angus Kerr, looking down at his trousers and seeing the washed-out blood still showing faintly brown, felt a touch of horror—a horror of fate, an outer horror this time, not an inner horror artificially stimulated by his perverted desire to be able to fear and hope like other people.
The train roared into the station and slid to a stop. Kerr was the first to alight. Evading the bourgeois’ hearty adieux and the conductor’s growling admonition that “the affair of the non-purchased ticket was very irregular and would have to be looked into,” he picked up his grip and ran, impatiently waving aside the beckoning red hands of porters and taxicab drivers. He hurried down the maze of ancient streets that debouch toward the Inner Boulevards. People turned around and looked at him curiously. He noticed it, and shivered.
He wondered whom he should consult.
There was Kelly, the leading American lawyer of Paris, who had put the legal seal on many of his European ventures in the past. It would be unwise to approach him. Unwise from a business point of view.
He might telegraph to his sister. Her late husband had been a Frenchman high in office, and she had influential connections. But he did not want to worry her. Doubtless she was worrying enough now over his non-arrival at Clermont.
Or should he go to Carter Vanbrugh of Morgan Harjes, his Paris bankers? No. Vanbrugh would gossip at the clubs. …
What should he do?
He stopped for a moment. Then he felt a human eye stab him straight between the shoulder blades. He turned and looked. Directly behind him walked the plump, jovial bourgeois who had tried to engage him in conversation aboard the train.
The man raised his hat when he recognized Kerr. He bowed. He smiled.
“Ah, Monsieur—we meet again—” he began as he hastened to catch up with the American.
And the latter, the sweat pouring down his face, his heart as if squeezed between steel clamps, a hammer beating at the base of his skull with a dull, staccato rhythm, ran down the street, anywhere, slipping, bumping against people, while the Frenchman called after him:
“But—Monsieur! Monsieur!”
At that moment all seemed terribly clear to Kerr. He had been shadowed ever since he had left the train at Lapalisse. The gate keeper there—the hotel porter—the gentleman from the Judiciary and the police agent—the conductor—and now this man who was following him! It dovetailed completely.
He had played with the gamut of human emotions. He had played a ghoulish comedy.
But had he? Had he really only played?
Gradually surging from the secret recesses of his being, then coming to the top of his greater subliminal consciousness, there came the haunting, dark obsession that he had not played at killing, but that he had really taken a human life, that he was a fugitive from his own conscience and from avenging justice.
He tried to combat the thought, the conviction, but it burned deeper and deeper into his soul, tracing a painful, bleeding pattern—and he ran on, panting, cursing, stumbling, until somehow—and afterwards he could never explain if chance had guided his feet or if his subconscious intelligence had kept on thinking logically and sanely—he found himself in front of the American Consulate General.
IV
He saw the flag and the great gilt bronze eagle, and he rushed up the stairs, two steps at a time, past the wondering, protesting clerk in the outer room and straight into the private office of the Consul.
“Spencer—for God’s sake!”
“What’s the matter, Mr. Kerr?”
Kerr’s words came in a mad torrent, jumbled, hashed, bitten off, but the Consul understood enough to draw a newspaper from his pocket.
“Are you speaking about that railway tragedy, Mr. Kerr?”
“Yes. The murder. Between Dijon and Lapalisse.”
“It wasn’t a murder. It was suicide. Was the man a friend of yours?”
But Kerr had only heard the first half of the Consul’s reply: “It wasn’t murder. It was suicide.” For a few seconds he stood quite still. His soul emptied itself of all feeling whatsoever as if by a sudden draught.
Then he asked, very slowly—fearing that he had heard wrong, hoping that he had heard right:
“You are sure it was a suicide?”
“Yes. There was never a question in the mind of the authorities that it had been anything else. Here”—he pointed at the newspaper—“read for yourself. They found the body when the train arrived at Clermont. Half an hour later, the Paris police long-distanced down there that the man had written them a letter telling them of his intention—time and place and method and everything. The paper speaks of another letter which the poor beggar wrote to his mother before he boarded the train. Asking her forgiveness—ill health … what are you looking for?” he continued as he saw Kerr’s eyes roam over the desk.
“Pen and ink. Got to write a cheque.”
“Here you are. Going to send a cheque to the man’s family? Knew him, I suppose?”
“No. This is for my doctor in New York. I owe him five hundred dollars. Just thought of it”—and he signed the little pink slip.
He had passed through the gamut of human emotions—the elation of fear and—yes! a hope. And already his great, cold, slow-grinding brain was at work. Already he was wondering how he could change this precious gift into codified laws and principles to be used at will, when the mood was upon him.
He was sure he would find a way. He had always succeeded.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1945, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 78 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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