The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 46

"You say you did things to show you weren't coordinating properly," I went on. "Now, going back to possibilities, mightn't there have been a touch of aphasia? Mightn't you have done something with that letter and had no memory of what it was?"

"It's not aphasia--it never was that," calmly retorted the unhappy-eyed young man. "You couldn't dignify it with a name like that. And it never amounted to anything serious. I carried on all my office work without a hitch, without one mistake. But, as I told you before, I was working under pressure, and I hadn't been sleeping well. I did the bigger things without a mistake, but I often found I was doing them automatically."

"Then let's go back once more to those possibilities. Could the letter have been misdirected, absent-mindedly? Could it have gone to one of Carlton's addresses?"

"Every address has been canva.s.sed. The thing's been verified through the local post-office, and through the Montreal office. That part of it's as clear as daylight. A letter came to this office of Lockwood's addressed to Carlton. It held six thousand dollars in cash. I received it and signed for it. The man to whom it was addressed never received it. Neither the money nor the letter was ever seen again.

And the last record of it ends with _me_. Is it any wonder they've got that gum-shoe man trailing me about every move I make?"

"Wait," I cried, still conjecturing along the field of possibilities.

"Why mightn't that letter have come in a second envelope which you removed after its receipt? Why mightn't it have come addressed to Lockwood or the firm?"

"The post-office records show differently. It came to Carlton. I signed for it as an agent of Carlton's. Oh, there's no use going over all that old ground. I've been over it until I thought I was going crazy. I've raked and dug through it, these past three weeks, and nothing's come of it. Nothing _can_ come of it, until Lockwood gets tired of waiting for me to prove what I _can't_ prove!"

"But, out of all the affair as it happened, out of that whole day when the letter came, isn't there one shred or tatter of memory on which you can try to hang something? Isn't there one thing, no matter how small or how misty, from which you can begin?"

"Not one rational thing! I've tried to build a bridge out into that empty s.p.a.ce--that day always seems like empty s.p.a.ce to me--I've tried to build it out like a cantilever, but I can't bolt two ideas together.

I've tried to picture it; I've tried to visualize it; I've tried to imagine it as I must have lived it. But all I've left is the fool idea of a man hitting his thumb."

"What do you mean by that?" I demanded, sitting up with a jolt.

"I keep seeing somebody, somebody sitting in front of me, holding a letter in his right hand and tapping the thumb of his left hand with it as he talked."

"But who is it? Or who was it?"

"I've tried to imagine it was Lockwood."

"Why, you've something right there!" I exultantly cried out. "That's valuable. It's something definite, something concrete, something personal. Let's begin on that."

"It's no use," remarked my companion. His voice, as he spoke, was one of weary unconcern. "I thought the way you do, at first. I felt sure it would lead to something. I kept watching Lockwood, trying to catch him at the trick."

"And?" I prompted.

"I had no chance of making sure. So I went up to his home, and asked for Miss Lockwood herself. I tried to explain how much the whole thing meant to me. I asked her if she's ever noticed her father in the act of tapping his thumbs."

"And had she?"

"She was very patient. She thought it over, and tried to remember, but she decided that I was mistaken. His own daughter, she explained, would have noticed any such mannerism as that. In fact, she ventured to mention the matter to her father. And when John Lockwood found I'd been up to his house, that way, he--well, he rather lost his temper about it all. He accused me of trying to play on his daughter's sympathy, of trying to hide behind a petticoat. Miss Lockwood herself came and saw me again, though, and was fine enough to say that she still believed in me, that she still had faith in me. She said I could always count on her help. But everything she did only seemed to push me further back into the dark, the dark that's worse than h.e.l.l to me!"

He leaned far forward in the chair, covering his face with his unsteady hands. I had no help to give him.

But as I sat there staring at him I began to see what he had gone through. Yet more disturbing than the consciousness of this was the thought of what it would eventually lead to, of what it was already leading to, in that broken wreck of a walking ghost, in that terror-hounded neurasthenic who had found a hole in his memory and had kept exploring it, feeling about it as one's tongue-tip keeps fathoming the cave of a lost tooth.

"I went to a doctor, after she left me," the man in the chair was saying through his gaunt fingers as their tips pressed against his eye sockets. "He told me I had to sleep. He gave me trional and bromides and things, but I didn't seem able to a.s.similate them. Then he told me it was all in my own mind, that I only had to let myself relax. He told me to lie with my hands down at my sides, and sigh, to sigh just once. I lay all night as though I was in a coffin waiting for that sigh, fighting for it, praying for it. But it didn't come."

"Of course it didn't," I told him, for I knew the feeling. "It never does, that way. You ought to have taken a couple of weeks in the Maine woods, or tried fis.h.i.+ng up in Temagami, or gone off pounding a golf ball fifteen miles a day."

Then I stopped and looked at him, for some subsidiary part of my brain must have been working even while I was talking.

"By heaven, I believe that girl was mistaken!"

"Mistaken?" he asked.

"Yes, I don't believe any girl really knows her father's little tricks.

I'd like to wager that Lockwood has the habit of tapping his thumb nail, sometimes, with what he may be holding in his other hand!"

My dispirited friend looked up at me, a little disturbed by the vehemence of my outburst.

"But what's that to me now? What good does it do me, even though he does tap his thumb?"

"Can't you see that this is exploration work, like digging up a lost city? Can't you see that we've got to get down to at least one stone, and follow where that first sign leads?"

I did my best to infect him with some trace of my sudden enthusiasm. I wanted to emotionalize him out of that dead flat monotone of indifference. I jumped to my feet and brought a declamative hand down on the corner of my library table.

"I tell you it does you a lot of good. It's your life-buoy. It's the thing that's got to keep you afloat until your feet are on solid ground again."

"I tried to feel that way about it once," was his listless response.

"But it doesn't lead to anything. It only makes me decide I dreamed the whole thing."

I stared down at him as he leaned wearily back in the heavy chair.

"Look here," I said. "I know you're pretty well done up. I know you're sick and tired of the whole hopeless situation, that you've given up trying to think about it. But I want you to act this thing out for me to-night. I want to try to dramatize that situation down in Lockwood's office when you signed for the Carlton letter. I want you to do everything you can to visualize that moment. I want you to get that cantilever bridge stuck out across the gulf, across the gulf from each side, until you touch the middle and give us a chance to bolt 'em together."

I pushed back the chairs, cleared the s.p.a.ce on the reading-table, swung the youth about so that he faced this table, and then took one of my own letters from the heavy bra.s.s stand beside him. My one object now was to make him "go Berserk."

"This is your room," I told him. "And this is your desk. Remember, you're in your office, hard at work. Be so good, please, as to keep busy."

I crossed the room to the door as I spoke, intent on my impersonation.

But I could hear him as he laughed his indulgent and mirthless laugh.

"Now, I'm bringing you this mail matter. And here I have a registered letter addressed to one Carlton. You see it, there? This letter?

It's for Carlton, remember. I want you to take it. And sign for it, here. Yes, write down your name--actually write it. Now take the letter. And now think, man, _think_. What do you do after that? What is the next thing? What do you feel is the right thing? The only thing?"

He looked up at me, wonderingly. Then he looked about the room. Then he slowly shook his bead from side to side. I had not succeeded in communicating to him any jot of my own mental energy.

"I can't do it," he said, "I can't remember. It doesn't seem to suggest a thing."

"But think, man, think!" I cried out at him. "Use your imagination!

Get into the part! Act it! The thing's there in your head, I tell you. It's shut up somewhere there, only you haven't hit the right combination to throw the door open. You can't do a thing in this life, you've never lived an active moment of this life, without a record of it being left there. It may be buried, it may be buried so deep you'll die without digging it up, but it's there, I tell you, if you only go after it!"

"If I was only sure it was there," hesitated the man at the table. "If I only knew just what direction to go! But this doesn't mean anything; it doesn't _get_ me anywhere."

"You're not in the part," I cried, with what was almost an ecstasy of impatience. "What you've got to do is live, over that day. If you can't do that you've got to _live over_ at least one part of it. No; don't think this is all foolishness. It's only going back to a very old law of a.s.sociation. I'm only trying to do something to bring up sight, touch, sound. We both know those are things that act quickest in reviving memory. Can't you see--out of similar conditions I want to catch at something that will suggest the similar action! There's no need telling you that my mind and your mind each has a permanent disposition to do again what it has once done under the same circ.u.mstances. There's no use delving into psychology. It's all such ordinary every-day common sense."

He sat looking at me a little blankly as I pounded this out at him.

His pallid face, twitching in the light from the fire, was studious, but only pa.s.sively so. The infection of my rhapsodic effort had not reached him. I knew that, even before he spoke.

"I can see what you're aiming at," he explained. "But no matter how hard I think, I can't get beyond the blank wall. I'm still in this library of yours. And this is still a table and nothing like Lockwood's office desk."