Edwin Balmer

“ I walked straight into the bean business and he into blowing safes. Was that all there was to it—the angle our feet took across the grass in the park? What do you think, Steve?”
I shook my head.
“A man likes to think with Shakespeare that he is master of his fate,” Jerry went on, “and that fault or strength is in himself, not in his stars. There is no bunch of bunk I hate worse than that environment is to blame for crime and the individual has almost nothing to do with it.” ”

“ I said, my own voice cracking a little, excited from him.
"At the door of the Sparlings at ten minutes after twelve, Steve?" he begged of me.
"Why, yes, Jerry."
"I, Steve? You saw me there?"
"Why not? What is it, Jerry? I've told you I did."
"You know me; or you ought to know me, if any one in the world does. And you wouldn't joke about it with me, would you, Steve? If all the rest of them were doing it, if they'd sworn you in, too, in the hoax, you'd tell me the truth now, wouldn't you? For you see Dot's taken! If she's not really taken, I believe she is; that's the same to me! ”

“ Jerry looked up at the house.
"Why, that's too bad, Steve!" he said. "That" was so plain to him that it didn't occur to him that he needed to explain when he finished. "I thought Janet and Hollings were getting along all right."
"They are," I said. "They're perfectly happy. What gave you the sudden idea they're not?"
"Oh, closed doors on a night when it's eighty-eight and no breeze, Steve. Neither has a door open, even to the dressing room; they don't know the lights on. They've each shut themselves in one room without opening a door even for a current of air to-night." ”

“ I said.
“I know you wouldn’t think it when I’m myself; but do you think there’s a chance that sometimes I’m not myself and I go queer—like that fight with Jim Townsend a few weeks ago; and borrowing a hundred dollars from Davis in New York last Saturday. I swear to you, Steve, I haven’t the slightest remembrance of even seeing Fred or any of the fellows with him who saw me and saw him hand me the hundred.”
“They must have gone queer themselves,” I said.
“No,” said Jerry. “What they say is true. I don’t remember seeing them; but I feel it.” ”

“ Shirley carried on. “Jerry and I met him and he got the money. Ten thousand in cash, wasn’t it?” she examined me. “If he denies it, Fred, ask the teller in his bank—last week Thursday he got it.”
“Did you?” asked Fred.
“I did,” I said.
He nodded to Shirley. “Go on.”
“He gave it to Jerry to go away.”
“That’s right?” Fred asked me.
“That’s right,” I had to admit.
Shirley continued, “Then Jerry wanted me. He’s crazy, you see. Sometimes he’s all right, like anybody else; then he’s like when he took that necklace from Dorothy Crewe and tossed her into the street. ”

“ Wouldn't everybody be a bit ahead if these people, who haven't the slightest fear of any "long house," had stayed out of the coal business and simply printed their own money for their profits and shoved it into circulation without harming anybody?
You see, as I thought it over, it didn't seem strange to me that Doris Wellington could smile and smile at me and not feel herself a villainess at all.
I wondered, from time to time, exactly what was in that nice, new suit case under my feet. A few hundred thousand in neat, new bills, I thought; or possibly plates. Maybe both. ”

“ So much I had gathered from Jerry during the afternoon. The actual go-getter in any society is in the small minority; he, or she, supports a host of hangers-on; it is only the armchair dreamer who flatters himself that he who holds him up, who blows his safe, who forges his name, must be a fugitive, hiding and cowering between his sallies forth with gat, with "soup" or with pen. ”

“ My brother," said Jerry, avoiding his previous euphonism of "friend" and speaking with a queer timbre of pride, "had a leadership to maintain and improve, a certain record of success to conserve. A man in his position must, above every one else, save his face; he can let no one smile at him. Here he had let his girl go to old Win Scofield to make him some money and Win's sons had made it impossible, unless somebody croaked Win; so Win had to be croaked; not merely for the money, but to save 'my friend's' face. ”

“ This was what Jerry meant I should see; this was the vengeance of Shirley. Not vengeance alone; also an attempt at self-protection. She knew, going back to a “gorilla”, that sooner or later he would kill her. Perhaps she expected death from him only a little later that night. So she had struck there before them all and, failing, made her life surely forfeit. Now, without doubt, Keeban—Harry Vine—would kill her.
Not there, surrounded by that circle, as she would have slain him, had her thrust gone home. A girl kills a man that way; but not a man his woman. This rapiered Raleigh knew that. ”

“ The doctor tried to calm her; the big men dragged Jerry away. He was making no resistance, God knows; he was limp. Could a man go against a thing more awful than he'd just met? Here was the girl he loved; she'd trusted herself to him and she believed that, for the diamonds about her neck, he'd attacked her!
She told something more in that scream of a laugh; she told a little, at least, of how she had struggled before she'd been strangled and knocked senseless and thrown into the street. And she had thought Jerry did it!
I stepped along beside him. "Keeban," he whispered desperately to me. ”

“ Some ordinary, dull dub takes a camera and photographs a government bill, makes a half-tone and smears it with green ink and runs off a batch of bills so coarse and blurred, compared to engraving from a cut-steel plate, that a child can spot it. That's the modern way; easy enough, but they're lucky to get a thousand dollars into circulation before the secret service has them behind bars. But here comes back a regular 'old master,' I say; looks like he's a quarter million passed already; and he's Janvier, if he did lose his sight two years ago. ”

“ Nobody could beat that boy; if they tried to, the sod for them.
It looked like madness for them to be here tonight; but madness marks the big job.
Here was Keeban, Harry Vine. He had boasted that he would bring his woman, whom some thought had gone away from him. Surely he had arranged his get-away with her; but before he used it, here he was proving that she was his.
But she wasn't his! At least, so Jerry had told me. She'd come with him, but she was, in fact, no longer his. Something more was on tonight than that rapiered and daggered Raleigh expected. ”

“ There was no possibility of my convincing him of the existence of Keeban; and the impossibility of it only made me surer of Keeban, just as it always did when I argued with father, You see at that time, it was a matter of faith with me; and nothing feeds up faith like antagonism. I was slow but also stubborn, as perhaps you've perceived. These men were here because they were sure Jerry had shot down Winton Scofield; Jerry'd been seen doing it. I wouldn't believe that; therefore I had to believe in Keeban. ”

“ The land is so low that the street rises almost even with the second floors; one has to descend rickety steps to reach the doors of gray, ill-lit emporiums of every sort which witness, by their very being, to the amazing force of the proclivity to patronize a neighbor. Half a league from Marshall Field's, preposterous, mediæval peddlers whined under windows shut to the chill smokiness of December city haze; women raised the sash and, after bargaining, bought. Half a block from a motor factory, a blacksmith hand-pumped his bellows to blow coals into heat for shoeing a huckster's horse ”

“ Occasionally a floor committeeman pried a couple a few inches farther apart; but surely it is better to see that done than to observe the need ignored.
Jerry, unless he returned in some new costume, remained away from the floor; and I gave up momentarily expecting him. I got to having a good time on my own account, especially with Cleopatra.
I could not see her face between her brow and lips. Through her mask, I got glimpse enough of her irises to see that they were blue. Her forehead was smooth and white and pretty; intelligent looking, too. ”

“ Who is the friend of society, Steve—he who confesses to increasing the staggering sum of degenerative diseases brought on by overeating which he encourages for his own profit, or he who, at tremendous risk to himself, and with no hope of public favor when he succeeds, yet sets himself to strike and strike again and again at the very source of danger and decay? ”

“ I said. ‘Julius Cæsar’ always was a favorite of mine and one thing I knew. “He said, ‘Men at some time are masters of their fates: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.’”
Jerry nodded. “That’s right. My friend’s clever; he can see now, if he couldn’t when he was younger. Then there’s something else—a twist in his brain that’s not in mine? Yet I don’t know: maybe we’re identical, inwardly as well as outside. Maybe the difference is that I never knew what it was to want without being able, lawfully, to get. ”

“ I decided to include nobody else just then, though there were police enough everywhere and all keen to listen. Fred and I went into her room and closed the door. She motioned us to seats beside the bed as though she might be Madame Récamier on her couch receiving a couple of her lesser courtiers.
"Fred, I can tell more about the shooting last night; I'm going to do it," she said, looking at Fred, not at me. "You can decide how much to give out to the police—to the 'bulls,'" she added, deliberately blunting her speech and gazing at me. She swung back to Fred. ”

“ When Fred was a boy, Winton Scofield had been a good father; no one called him a fool then. Every one knows the thousand touches of memories of fondness from a father; and Fred was thinking of them.
He went on telling: "Shirley ran down to him as soon as he fell; she must have been nearly behind him when he got the second bullet. She wasn't hurt but she certainly took a big chance to help father. Rowan reached him maybe a minute later." ”

“ I didn't want Dibley to have any chance to oversee the fact that this trip was a last inspiration of mine. I immersed myself, ostensibly, in cost estimates of our new can and bottling plant which I happened to have in my pocket, while I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into this game I'd entered with Cleopatra Doris Janvier. ”

“ Fred talked on; but I didn't pay much attention for a few minutes; for now I could see through the rest of Keeban's scheme; I could see not only why he had shot Win Scofield, but why he had done it himself and why he had shown himself in the doing, making no attempt to hide.
For he wanted to be seen; he wanted to be identified, particularly by Rowan. For Rowan would identify him, as Rowan did, for Jerry Fanneal; and, so identified, no one would connect Shirley with the murder. ”

“ Poor fellow, if he really feels as he writes, what a world he lives in! I imagine him riding through lovely country like this with shades drawn or else emitting low, melancholy moans as each habitation heaves in sight. Now I like to think of Willa Cather's people when we're whistling through tank towns."
"So do I," I said, agreeing again. "They're there; they're hearing the whistle. You meet 'em. You ever been in a tank town?"
"When I was a child, I lived in one," she told me; "when father was serving his second term in the 'long house' at Leavenworth." ”

“ A crook can’t be crooking all the time; she’s at the normal round most of it. But I’d never realized that till I took a little leisure to think it over. Now when you say a person’s a counterfeiter, for instance, naturally you think of him or her, or both of them, crouching somewhere covertly together, printing off their money and then slipping out, with many glances around, to convert it into groceries and some of our ordinary authorized currency. But actually, very little of their time may be spent so. Most of it goes into just living,—maybe looking at movies, at dance halls or driving around ”

“ I slumped down again on the edge of the desk.
There was an average of eight of the normals about us in that big office; some kept sifting in and out, from and to a farther room, where there appeared to be somebody or something particularly important.
Doris glanced that way several times and they watched her; I watched her, too. She appeared alert and on edge with eyes bright and with lips thin and tight; but she didn't show fright.
I'm not sure what I showed but I know what I felt. I was dull, not alert like her. One sort of nature seems to dull itself when in for what it can't prevent ”

“ It was perfectly plain to me, of course, that my partner Cleopatra—Doris Wellington, with maid, from Denver—was this daughter of Janvier, engraver of government notes without the government's coöperation. Her bit in the business was—to employ the convenient phrase of the Flamingo Feather—to blow out the bad dough, to shove "the queer." ”

“ That suit case kept bothering my bean-business conscience. It was decidedly one matter to like Doris Wellington and wish her to stay out of the clutches of old "Iron Age"; but it was something quite up another street to take charge of that handbag full of cash and plates and deliver them at destination for her. ”

“ I know now he must be one of two things—either another personality living in me which turns Jerry Fanneal off, sometimes, and turns on—Keeban, Steve, like the dual personality cases in the psychology books; or he must be a real, physical duplicate of me—Keeban; that's possible, too, of course. But the way I feel him usually is another way; and the one way he can't possibly be; he seems to be me going on and growing up and living my life, as it would have been, if I'd never come to you, Steve. So, that way, sometimes he seems more me than myself ”

“ Things only happen to other people—things like what may be happening to Dorothy, Steve! Of course I couldn't make myself awfully clear; all they feel what has happened is that Dorothy, probably for good reasons of her own, dropped me and went off from the Sparlings' with somebody else and I'm overexcited about it. They don't think it's time yet to call in the police. You know them; I worried them but not to the point of having in the police and the newspapers on an affair of their own. But I called headquarters on my way out of their building, from the porter's room under their apartment. ”

“ We heard men downstairs now. “Who’s that?” I said.
“Must be the bulls; his gang,” Jerry glanced at Keeban again, “got out; all that will ever get. Well, come on, bulls; a lot you can hurt me now!”
He looked up from his brother and straightened; and I felt for him perhaps one thousandth of his relief from what had been on him since that night he came into my room, after the Sparlings’ dance, and said Keeban had come and gone with Dorothy Crewe.
I put my hand on him while we waited, Doris and he and I, for the approaching steps of the bulls. ”

“ A hand touched my side and I seized it,—a small, firm hand mighty like Doris's.
"Hello; who're you?" I asked.
"Hello, Steve," she said. Doris! By Christopher, Doris!
"Anybody else in here?" I asked. That sounds stupider now than at the time; for after this, I was ready for anything.
"No," she said.
"What're you doing here?" I asked her; and she said, "What d'you suppose?"
That was it; what did I suppose? Here she was with me. I was there because I'd run down and showed Teverson those slotted pipes and spoiled the best of Keeban's schemes. ”

“ I could see nothing; smell nothing; sense nothing going on in that cabinet; but neither had I when the rabbits had died.
My plan depended entirely upon time. There must be gas in the cabinet, but not too much gas,—not enough to kill my girl in there.
She breathed more slowly, I thought; I stared and seemed sure of it. At the same time, Keeban began looking at me. He suspected I was about to act; and I did it. I lifted that heavy chair behind me and, spinning, I swung it against the glass side of the cabinet and smashed it through. ”

“ But you don't think out affairs like that; when there is only one thing to do, you have to take a chance on whatever it is. So I stood, with Keeban beside me and Christina a few feet away and the eleven normals beyond us and between and I watched the girl on the table breathing.
They watched her, too. Christina, Shirley Scofield,—with what sort of feelings? And the normals about us, what were they thinking, too? I didn't even try to wonder about Jerry who had become Keeban and who was doing this thing. ”

“ And as I sat there staring and wondering why and how, suddenly I ceased to have difficulty in thinking red hair, instead of yellow, upon Christina, the riverside companion of Keeban. I “placed” her and knew her name and her association and where I had met her; for she was Winton Scofield’s wife. Of course she was; that was it! What an extension of the underworld into the polite world of my own!
Of course I realized that, as Jerry had said, I was thinking like a child; for the underworld’s not a compact, separate region; its territory is wherever its citizens set foot ”

“ Teverson. But for Doris and me, I mean; for I knew—and Keeban and his normals knew—that if I had failed to warn Teverson, Doris was there to do it. Consequently, we were to get the gas now; and we were not to get it simply, but impressively as a part of a ceremony of punishment and discipline.
For Doris had done the double cross; she had “speiled” and “spouted”; and not only had she spoiled the biggest job this crowd ever had “on” but by her squeal or her willingness to squeal had made every man here a candidate for the electric chair. ”

“ For I knew than that Keeban had me. He had not shown himself in that circle of reception in the alley. No; every face there had been unknown to me, unless one was the dyke-keeper of Klangenberg’s delicatessen. They were normal-appearing, good-looking youths who made the majority in that circle. ”

“ The number ended; now clapping; now encore. My arms circled Cleopatra; I clasped her. Keeban clasped Christina.
As I watched his arm go around her, so exactly as Jerry's clasped his partner in the dance, I got another jerk. Maybe he was Jerry! Maybe what was to happen between Jerry and his "friend", his brother, had happened outside. I sent that thought out of my head and watched them.
What a pair they made, she young, lithe, full of life, perfect in her soft proportions. ”

“ Was Doris going back to Chicago, now that her father was taken; or would she stick to her plan to come on?
Vine—Keeban—was here, she said; Christina was here. So, if Jerry was anywhere, probably he also was here; and, if any of his old habits clung to him, he'd know I'd arrived, too. There is a column printed every day, you know, giving the news of arrivals of out-of-town buyers in every line of trade. ”