THE emotions that grew upon me, as I read my father’s message, need not be detailed. How, as I painfully deciphered it, word following upon word added steadily to the weight of those emotions, until at length it seemed as though the burden was greater than I could bear, I need not tell. Indeed, so engrossed had I become by what had gone before, that the sense of the last line did not penetrate my mind. I leaned back in my chair and drew a long breath like one exhausted by an effort beyond his strength. I waited for the commotion of thought and feeling to quiet a little. I was completely horror-stricken and tired out and bewildered.
But by and by it occurred to me, “What did he say the man’s name was?” And languidly I picked up the paper and read the postscript for a second time. The next instant I was on my feet, rigid, aghast, for consternation. What!
Pathzuol! The name of Veronika! My head swam. It was as if I had sustained a terrific blow between the eyes. Could it be that this Pathzuol, the man who had dishonored my mother, the man whom my father had commissioned me to murder, was her father? the father of her who had indeed been murdered, and of whose murder I had been accused? The mere possibility stunned and sickened me. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had been under a pretty tense nervous strain ever since the reception of Tikulski’s letter in the afternoon. This last utterly undid me. My muscles relaxed, my knees knocked together, the perspiration trickled down my forehead. I went off into a regular fit of weeping, like a woman.
It was not long before Merivale entered. I looked up and saw him standing over me, with a physiognomy divided between astonishment and contempt.
“Ah, Lexow,” he said, shaking his head, “I am surprised at you.” Then his eyes grew stern, and he continued sharply, “Stop! Stop your crying. You ought to be ashamed. Whatever new misfortune has befallen you, you have no right to act like this. It is a man’s part to bear misfortune silently. It is a school-girl’s or a baby’s to take on in this fashion. Stop your crying, dry your eyes, and show what you are made of. Grit your teeth and clench your fists and don’t open your mouth till you are ready to behave like a reasonable being.”
His words sobered me to some extent.
“Well,” I said, “I am calm now. What do you want?”
“If I should do what I want,” he answered, “you would not speedily forget it. I should—but never mind that. What I want you to do is to speak up like a man and explain the occasion of this rumpus, if you can.”
“Here, read this,” I said, offering him the paper.
He took it, glanced at it, turned it this way and that, handed it back. “How can I read it?” he said. “It’s German. Read it to me.—Come, read it to me,” he repeated, as I hesitated.
I gulped down my reluctance and read the whole thing through as rapidly as I could in English. He sat across the table, smoking and drawing figures in the ash-pan with the ashes of his cigarette. Once in a while I heard him whistle softly to himself. He had thrown his last cigarette aside and was biting his fingernails when the reading drew to a close.
“No more?” he asked.
“Isn’t that enough?” I rejoined.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that. Oh, yes; that’s enough; and it’s pretty bad too. But I expected something worse from the rough way you cut up.”
“Worse? In heaven’s name what could be worse? My mother dishonored, my father broken hearted, and I marked out for a murderer, even from my cradle? And then—”
“I say it’s hard, deucedly hard. But inasmuch as you’re not a murderer, you know, I wouldn’t let that side of the matter bother me, if I were you. The bad part of the business is to think of how your father’s happiness, your mother’s innocence, were destroyed. Think how he must have suffered!”
“But you haven’t listened, you haven’t understood the worst, yet. Here, see his name—Pathzuol.”
“Well, what of it?”
“Why, don’t you remember? It is the same name as hers—Veronika’s—my sweetheart’s.”
“Decidedly!” exclaimed Merivale. “That is a startling coincidence, I admit.”
“Couple that with—with the rest of my father’s story and with—with the—well, with all the facts—and I think you’ll confess that it was sufficient to shake me up a bit. To come upon that name at the end of such a letter, it was like being knocked down. I lost my self-possession. Think! if he was her father! But, oh no; it isn’t credible. It’s sheer accident, of course.”
“Of course it is. The letter doesn’t say that he was even married. I suppose there’s more than one Pathzuol in the world as well as more than one Merivale. But all the same, it’s a coincidence of a sort to stir a fellow up. I don’t wonder you lost your balance. Only, the idea of boohooing like a woman! That’s inexcusable. Mercy! what a good hater your father was! And what an unspeakable wretch, Nicholas!”
“Yes,” I went on, “it gave me a pretty severe jolt, the sight of that name; and I can’t seem to get over it. I don’t know why, but I can’t help feeling as though there were more in this than either you or I perceive, as though there were some deduction or other to be drawn from it which is right within arm’s reach and yet which I can’t grasp—some horrible corollary, you know. My brain is in a whirl, I—I—”
“You are quite unstrung, as it is natural you should be. But you must exert your reason and put the stopper upon your imagination. Let deductions and corollaries take care of themselves. Confine yourself to the facts, and you’ll see that they’re not as bad as they might be, after all. For example—”
“But it is just the facts that perplex and horrify me. My father destines me to be the murderer of Nicholas Pathzuol or of his next of kin. All ignorant of this destiny, I meet and love a lady whose name is Pathzuol—a name so rare that I had never heard it before, and have not since, except in this writing to-day. My lady is murdered; and I, though innocent, am suspected and accused of the crime. Add to this my father’s threat to come back from the grave and use me as his instrument, in case I hesitate or in case I never receive his letter; and—well, it is like a problem in mathematics—given this and that, to determine so and so. No, no, there’s no use denying it, this strange combination of facts must have some awful meaning. It seems as though each minute I was just on the point of catching it, and then as I tighten my fingers around it, it escapes again and eludes me.”
“Nonsense, man. You are yielding to your fancy, like a child who, because he feels oppressed in the dark, conjures up ghosts and goblins, and can not be persuaded that there are none about, till you light the gas and show him that the room is empty. Come, light the gas of your common sense! Recognize that your problem has no solution, none because it is not a true problem, but merely a fortuitous arrangement of circumstances which chances to bear a superficial resemblance to one. Reduce your quasi problem to its simplest terms: thus, given x and y and z, to find the value of b. Don’t you see that there’s no connection?”
“Oh, of course, I acknowledge that I can’t see any connection. That’s just the trouble. I feel that there must be a connection—one that I can’t see. If I could only see it, it wouldn’t be so bad. But this perplexity, this——”
“This fiddle-stick! You are resolved to distress yourself, and I suppose it’s useless for me to labor with you. Only this much I will say, that if you should bestow a little of the energy you are expending in the effort to catch hold of a non-existent inference, upon sympathy with your father’s unhappiness, I should have more respect for you. They talk about suffering ennobling and chastening men, forsooth! So far as you are concerned, suffering has done nothing but intensify your natural egotism. For instance, after reading that letter of your father’s, the first idea that strikes you is, ‘How does it affect me, how am I concerned by it?’ whereas the spectacle of your father s immense grief ought to have absorbed you to the exclusion of every thing else, ought to have left no room in your mind for any other thought.”
But for all Merivale could say by way either of appeal or of reprimand, I was powerless to subdue that feeling which had begun to stir in my breast. I recognized that I was unreasonable and selfish, but I was also helpless. I could not get over the shock I had sustained when Pathzuol’s name first took shape before my eyes. Every time I remembered that moment—and it kept recurring to me in spite of myself—my heart sank and my breath became spasmodic, as if I had been confronted by a ghost. And then ensued that sensation of groping in the dark after something invisible, unknown, yet surely there, hovering within arm’s reach, but as elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp. I struggled with this sensation, tried my utmost to shake it off, but it sat like a monster on my heart. Its weight was deadly, its touch was icy; it would not be dislodged.
“It is true, all that you say, Merivale,” I returned at length. “But the question is not one of what I ought to do; it is one of what I can do. I know I ought to regard this matter in the same collected spirit that you display; but it concerns me so intimately, you see, that I can’t resist being somewhat perturbed. My wits, so to speak, have been scattered by an unexpected blow. I shan’t be able to emulate your sang-froid until they have got back to their proper places. I’m so heated and upset that I don’t really know what I think or what I feel. I guess perhaps I’d better go for a walk and cool off, and arrive at an understanding with myself.”
“The very worst thing you could possibly do—go away by yourself and brood and get more and more morbid every minute. What you want is to think of something else for a while, and then when you come back to this subject you’ll be in a condition to regard it in its correct light. Let’s—let’s play a game of cribbage, or read some Rossetti; or suppose you fiddle a little?”
“No, I feel the need of air and exercise. I’ll go out and take a walk. I sha’n’. brood, I’ll reflect on the sensible things you’ve said. Good-by.”
I walked briskly through the streets, striving to collect my faculties, striving to regain sufficient mental tranquillity to comprehend exactly what the long and short of the whole business was. But the feeling that there was something more in it than I could make out, intensified. It would not be dispelled. The oftener I went over the circumstances, the more significant they seemed.—Significant of what? Precisely the question that I could not answer. The longer I allowed my mind to dwell upon them, the more acute became that sensation of wrestling with a problem, of groping for a something suspended near to me in the dark. My father had destined me to be a murderer; the name of my intended victim was Pathzuol; I had been engaged to a young lady of the same name, very possibly the daughter of my father’s foe; she had indeed been murdered, though not by my hand; and yet I, despite my innocence, had been deemed guilty of the crime: this chain of facts kept passing over and over before me. I felt that it must mean something; it could not be purely fortuitous; there was a break, a missing link, which, if I could but supply it, would make the hidden meaning clear. I walked the streets all night, unable to fix my thoughts on any thing else. I said, “You are merely wearing yourself out and getting your brains into a tangle: try to divert your attention. Count up to a thousand. See how much you can remember of the Moonlight Sonata. Conjugate a Hebrew verb. Do what you will, only stop puzzling over this matter. As Merivale says, when you have thought of something else for a while, you will be in a condition to return to it with refreshed intelligence, and view it in the right light.” But the next moment I was at it again, in greater perplexity than ever. Of course, I succeeded in working myself up to a high degree of nervousness: was as exhausted and as exasperated as though I had spent an hour in futile attempts to thread a needle.
But now it began to get light. The stillness of the night was broken, my solitude was disturbed.
Hosts of sparrows began to congregate upon the window sills, and their busy twittering filled the air. First one steam-whistle blew in the distance, then another nearer by, then another, and finally a chorus of them: bells began to ring, wagons rattled over the pavement, the shrill whoo-hoop of the milk-man resounded through the streets. The clatter of footsteps became audible upon the sidewalk.
People began to walk abroad. The sky turned from black to gray, from gray to blue. Shutters were banged, doors slammed, windows thrown open: housemaids with brooms and buckets appeared upon the stoops. Dawn had arrived from across the Ocean with the smell of the sea-breeze still clinging to her skirts. The city was waking to its feverish multifarious life.—And the result was that I forgot myself—was penetrated and exalted by that vague tremulous exhilaration which always accompanies the first breath of morning. I expanded my lungs and inhaled the fresh air and felt a glow of warmth and animation shoot through my limbs.
“Ah,” I cried, “a truce to the blue devils! I will go home and take up my regular life again, just as though this interruption had not occurred.”
I hurried back to our lodgings. Merivale was already up and dressed, smoking a cigarette over the newspaper.
“Hail!” I exclaimed. “I am glad to see you out of bed so early!”
“I have not been abed since you left,” he answered.
“Why not? What have you been doing?”
“Thinking about you—about what can be done to make a man of you.”
“Oh, you needn’t worry about that. I’m all right now. I sha’n’. play the fool again, I promise you. I propose that we sink the last four-and-twenty hours into eternal oblivion. What do you say?”
“Nothing would more delight me.”
“Good! Let’s begin at the first cause. Where’s the manuscript? We’ll set fire to it, and agree to believe that it never really existed.”
“No,” said Merivale, “I wouldn’t set fire to it—at least not till it is manifest whether your present mood is merely a reaction from your late one, or whether it is going to last. I will dispose of the manuscript—see.”
He found it on the table, opened the double cover of the box, restored the papers to the place they had occupied formerly, and locked the box up in the closet of his writing-desk.
“There,” he said, “that’s the best thing to do. I’ll take care of it. Some day you may have a little sympathy to waste on your father, and then you’ll be glad this writing was not destroyed.”
We had breakfast, and after the cups and saucers were cleared away, applied ourselves to our ordinary forenoon occupation. It turned out indeed that my good spirits were, as Merivale had suspected, to some extent reactionary: but they left me sober rather than sad. I was absent-minded and committed numberless blunders while my friend dictated his poems: but I did not let my thoughts settle down again upon the matters that had engaged them during the night. They simply wandered about in a random way from one indifferent topic to another, as it is the habit of thoughts to do when the thinker has not had his customary allotment of sleep. Presently Merivale suspended his dictation, and I waited passively for him to resume, supposing that he had reached a point where reflection was necessary to further progress. His silence continued. Pretty soon my eyelids dropped like leaden curtains over my eyes, and my chin sank upon my breast. I was actually nodding. I started up and pinched myself, ashamed of appearing drowsy.
Lo! I perceived that my friend had met with the same mishap. He too was nodding in his chair. For a moment we eyed each other sheepishly, each endeavoring to feign wide wakefulness. Then Merivale rose and stretched himself and laughed.
“For my part I cast off the mask,” he cried. “I am sleepy and I am going to bed. You’d better follow suit.”
I needed no urging. We retired to our dormitory, and as speedily as was practicable one of us at least fell into an unfathomable slumber.