Donaldson toiled up the dark staircase
leading to Barstow’s laboratory. To him
it was as though he were fighting his way through deep
water reaching twenty fathoms above his head.
The air was just as cold as green water; it contained
scarcely more life. He felt the same sense of
clammy, lurking things, unknown things, such as crawl
along the slimy bottoms where rotting hulks lie.
He was impelled here by the same sort of fascination
which is said to lead murderers back to their victims,
yet it seemed to be the only place where he would be
able to think at all. It was getting back to
the beginning to the source where
he could start fresh. It was here, and here alone,
that he could write his letter to her. Perhaps
here he could make something out of the chaos of his
thoughts.
When he reached the top of the stairs,
he paused before the closed door. He did not
expect Barstow to be in. He hoped that he was
not. He did not wish to face him to-day.
To-morrow perhaps but he realized that
if Barstow had gone on his proposed vacation he would
not be back even then. That did not matter either.
The single thing remaining for him to do was to make
Elaine understand something of what his life had meant,
what she had meant in it, what he hoped to mean to
her in the silent future. That must be done
alone, and this of all places was where he could best
do it. The mere thought of his room at the hotel
was repulsive to him.
He listened at the door. There
was no sound no sound save the interminable
“tick-tock, tick-tock” which still haunted
him through the pulse beats in his wrists. He
reached forward and touched the knob; listened again,
and then turned it and pressed. The door was
locked. But it was a feeble affair. Barstow
had made his experimental laboratory in this old building
to get away from the inquisitive, and half of the
time did not take the trouble to turn the key when
he left, for there was little of value here.
He knocked on the chance that Barstow
might have lain down upon the sofa for a nap.
Again he waited until he heard the “tick-tock,
tick-tock” at his wrists. Then, pressing
his body close to the lock, he turned the knob and
pushed steadily. It weakened. He drew back
a little and threw his weight more heavily against
it. The lock gave and the door swung open.
The sight of the threadbare sofa was
as reassuring as the face of an old friend.
Yet what an eternity it seemed since he had sat there
and discussed his barren life with Barstow.
The phrases he had used came back to mock him.
He had talked of the things that lay beyond his reach,
while even then they were at his hand, had he been
but hardy enough to seize them; he had spoken of what
money could buy for him, with love eagerly pressing
greater gifts upon him without price; he had hungered
for freedom with freedom his for the taking.
Sailors have died of thirst at the broad mouth of
the Amazon, thinking it to be the open salt sea; so
he was dying in the midst of clean, sweet life.
He sat down on the sofa, with his
head between his hands and stared at the glittering
rows of bottles which caught the sun. Each one
of them was a laughing demon. They danced and
winked their eyes yellow, blue, and blood-red.
There were a hundred of them keeping step to the
bobbing shadows upon the floor. Row upon row
of them purple, brown, and blood-red all
dancing, all laughing.
“You come out wrong every time,” Barstow
had said.
And he he had laughed back even as the
bottles were doing.
He was not cringing even now.
He was asking no pity, no mercy. When he had
stepped across the room and had taken down that bottle,
he had been clear-headed; he had been clear-headed
when he had swallowed its contents. The only
relief he craved for himself was to be allowed to
remain clear-headed until he should have written his
letter. Coming up the stairs he feared lest
this might not be. Now he seemed to be steadying
once more.
He thought of Sandy. Poor pup,
he had gone out easily enough. He had curled
up on a friendly knee and gone to sleep. That
was all there had been to it. It would be an
odd thing, he mused, if the dog was where he could
look down on this man-struggle. This braced him
up; he would not have even this dog see him die other
than bravely.
As far as he himself was concerned,
he knew that he would go unflinchingly to meet his
final creditor, but there were the Others with
Sandy there had been no Others. It was easy enough
to die alone, but when in addition to one’s
own death throes one had to bear those of others, that
was harder. When he died, it would be as when
several died. There would be that mother in Vermont part
of her would die with him; there would be Saul even
part of him would die with him; there was Ben some
of him would die, too; and there was Elaine good
God, how much of her would die with him?
He sprang to his feet and began to
pace the stained wooden floor. As he did so,
a shadow crawled, from beneath the sofa and stole across
the room like a rat. But unlike a rat, it did
not disappear into a hole; it came back again towards
Donaldson. He stopped. Close to the ground
the shadow crept nearer until he saw that it was a
dog. Then he saw that it was a black terrier.
Then he saw that in size, color, and general appearance
it was the living double of Sandy.
He stooped and extended his hand.
He tried to pronounce the name, but his lips were
too dry. The dog crouched, frightened, some three
feet distant. Donaldson, squatting there, watched
him with straining eyes. Once again he tried
to utter the name. It stuck in his throat, but
at the inarticulate cry he made, the dog wagged his
tail so feebly that it scarcely moved its shadow.
Donaldson ventured nearer. The dog rolled over
to its back and held up its trembling forefeet on guard,
studying Donaldson through half closed eyes with its
head turned sideways.
Donaldson put forward his trembling
fingers and touched its side. The dog was warm,
even as Sandy had been when he first picked him up.
The dog feebly waved his padded paws and finally
rested them upon Donaldson’s hand.
“Sandy! Sandy!”
he murmured, his voice scarcely above a whisper.
The dumb mouth moved nearer to lick
the man’s fingers, but his movements were negative
as far as any recognition of the name went. It
was just the friendly overture of any dog to any man.
If he could get him to answer to the
name! It meant life a chance for
life! It meant, perhaps, that there had been
some mistake that, perhaps, after all,
the poison was not so deadly as Barstow had thought
it.
He threw himself upon the floor beside
the dog. In the body of this black terrier centred
everything in life that a man holds most dear.
If he could speak if the dumb tongue could
wag an answer to that one question!
The dog turned over and crawled nearer.
Donaldson fixed his burning eyes upon the blinking
brute.
“Sandy,” he cried, “is this you,
Sandy?”
The moist tongue reached for his fingers.
He took a deep breath. He said,
“Dick is this you, Dick?”
Again the moist tongue reached for his fingers.
Donaldson picked him up.
“Sandy,” he cried, “answer me.”
The dog closed his eyes as though expecting a blow.
Donaldson dropped him. The animal
crawled away beneath the sofa. Donaldson felt
more alone that minute than he had ever felt in all
his life. It was as though he sat there, the
sole living thing in the broad universe. There
was nothing left but the blinking eyes of the bottles
dancing in still brisker joy. He could not endure
it.
Moving across the room he knelt by
the sofa and tried to coax the frightened animal out
again.
“Sandy. Come, Sandy,” he called.
There was no show of life. He
snapped his fingers. He groped beneath the old
lounge. Then, in a frenzy of fear, lest it had
all been an apparition, he swung the sofa into the
middle of the room. The dog followed beneath
it, but he caught a glimpse of him. He pushed
the sofa back to the wall and began to coax again.
“Come out, Sandy. I ’ll not hurt
you. Come, Sandy.”
There was a scratching movement and
then the tip of a hot, dry nose appeared.
“Come. That ’s a good dog.
Come.”
He could hear the tail vigorously
thumping the floor, but the head appeared only inch
by inch. Donaldson held his breath.
“Come,” he whispered.
Slowly, with the sly pretension that
it demanded a tremendous physical effort, the dog
emerged and stood shivering beneath the big hand which
smoothed its back with cooing words of assurance.
“Why, I was n’t going
to hurt you, Sandy,” whispered Donaldson, finding
comfort in pronouncing the name. “I was
n’t going to hurt you. We ’re old
friends. Don’t you remember, Sandy?
Don’t you remember the night I held you?
Don’t you remember that, Sandy?”
The dog looked up at him moistening
its own dry mouth. In every detail this was
the same dog he had held upon his knee while arguing
with Barstow. He made another test.
“Mike,” he called.
In response the pup wagged his tail
good naturedly and with more confidence now.
Donaldson caught his breath.
Locked within that tiny brute brain was the secret
of what waited for him on the morrow: love and
the glories of a big life, or death and oblivion.
The answer was there behind those moist eyes.
But if he could reach Barstow
Here was a new hope. He could
ask him if this was Sandy, and so spare himself the
terrors of the night to come. He had the right
to do that as long as he abided by the decision.
There was a telephone here, and he knew that Barstow
lived in an up-town apartment house, so that some
one was sure to be in. He found the number in
the battered, chemical-stained directory, and put
in his call. It seemed an hour before he received
his reply.
“No, sir, Mr. Barstow is away. Any message?”
“Where has he gone?” asked Donaldson dully.
“He’s off on a yachting cruise, sir.”
It would have been impossible for
him to withdraw more completely out of reach.
“When do you expect him back?”
“I don’t know, sir.
He said he might be gone a day or two or perhaps a
week.”
“And he left?”
“Last Friday very unexpectedly.”
Donaldson hung up the receiver, which
had grown in his hand as heavy as lead. He turned
back to the dog, who had jumped upon the sofa and was
now cuddled into a corner. He lifted his head
and began to tremble again as Donaldson came nearer.
“Still afraid of me?”
he asked with a sad smile. “Why, there
is n’t enough of me left to be afraid of, pup.
There ’s only about a day of me left and we
ought to be friends during that time.”
He nestled his head down upon the
warm body. The dog licked his hair affectionately.
The kindness went to his heart. The attention
was soothing, restful. He responded to it the
more, because this dog was to him the one thing left
in the world alive. He snuggled closer to the
silky hide and continued to talk, finding comfort in
the sound of his own voice and the insensate response
of the warm head.
“We ought to be good comrades you
and I Sandy, because we ’re all alone
here in this old rat trap. When a man’s
alone, Sandy, anything else in the world that’s
alive is his brother. The only thing that counts
is being alive. Why, a fly is a better thing
than the dead man he crawls over. And if there
be a live man, a dead man, and a fly, then the fly
and the live man are brothers. So you and I are
brothers, and we must fight the devil-eyes in those
bottles together.”
They danced before him now yellow,
blue, and blood-red. A more perfect semblance
of an evil gnome could not be made than the flickering
reflection of the sunlight in the bottle of blood-red
liquid. It was never still. It skipped
from the bottom of the bottle to the top and from
one side to the other, as though in drunken ecstasy.
It fascinated Donaldson with the allurement
of the gruesome. It was such a restless, scarlet
thing! It looked as though it were trying to
get out of its prison and in baffled rage was shooting
its fangs at the sides, like a bottled viper.
“See it, Sandy? It’s
trying to get at us. But it can’t, if we
keep together. It’s only when a man’s
alone that those things have any power. And
the little devil knows it. If it were not for
you, Sandy, the thing might drive me mad might
make me mad before I had written my letter!”
He sprang to his feet in sudden passion,
and the dog with all four feet planted stiffly on
the sofa gave a sharp bark. This broke the tension
at once.
“That’s the dog,”
Donaldson praised him. “When the shadows
get too close bark at ’em like that!”
The bellicose attitude of the tiny
body brought a smile to Donaldson’s mouth.
This, too, was like a bromide to shaking nerves.
But in this position the dog did not
so closely resemble that other dog which he had held
upon his knee. He looked thinner, more angular.
His ears were cocked like two stiff v-shaped funnels.
Now he looked like an older dog. It was more
reasonable to suppose, Donaldson realized, that Barstow
had two dogs of this same breed than that a dead dog
had come to life.
“Sandy!” he called sharply.
The dog wagged his stub-tail with vigor.
“Spike!” he called again.
The tail wagged on with undiminished enthusiasm.
Donaldson passed his hand over his forehead.
This was as useless as to try to solve
the enigma of the Sphinx. The dog’s lips
were sealed as tightly as the stone lips; the barrier
between his brain and Donaldson’s brain was as
high as that between the man-chiseled image and the
man who chiseled. He was only wasting his time
on such a task, time that he should use in the framing
of his letter.
He sat down again upon the sofa, took
the dog upon his knee, and tried to think. Before
him the bottles danced purple, brown, and
blood-red. He closed his eyes. He would
begin his letter like this:
“To the most wonderful woman in all the world.”
He would do this because it was true.
There was no other woman like her. No other
woman would have so helped an old man in his battle
with himself; no other woman would have stayed on
there alone in that house and would have helped the
son in his battle with himself; no other woman would
have followed him as she had wished to do and help
him fight his battle with himself. But she was
the most wonderful woman in the world because of the
white courage she had shown in standing before him
and telling of her love. The eyes of her the
glory in her hair the marvel in her cheeks the
smile of her!
He opened his eyes. The devil
in the bottle directly in front of him was more impish
than it had been at all. Donaldson rose.
The pup rolled to the floor. Donaldson crossed
the room, picked out the bottle, drew back his arm,
and hurled it against the wall, where it broke into
a thousand pieces. It left a gory-looking blotch
where it struck. He went back to the sofa.
The dog crept to his side again. Before him
a devil danced in a purple bottle. He closed
his eyes.
He would begin his letter, then, like
that. He would go on to tell her that he was
unable to compute his life save in terms of her, that
it had its beginning in her, grew to its fulness through
her, and now had reached its zenith in her.
At the brook when he had clasped her in his arms,
he had drunk one deep draught of her.
He lost himself in one hot love phrase
after another. He poured out his soul in words
he had left unspoken to her. He was back again
before the fire, telling her all that he did not tell
her then. One gorgeous image after another swarmed
to his brain. He was like a poet gone mad.
He crowded sentence upon sentence, superlative upon
superlative, until he found himself upon his feet,
his cheeks hot, and his breath coming short.
Then he caught sight of the crimson stain upon the
wall and felt himself a murderer. He staggered
back and threw himself full-length upon the couch,
panting like one at the end of a long run. He
lay here very quietly.
The dog crawled to his side and licked
the hair at his hot temple.