Storytelling. The adventure of the creeping man and other stories. Сборник
Читать онлайн книгу.
Army captain might conceivably have made – and I made it. The circumstantial evidence connecting the Salvationist with the crime was overwhelmingly convincing, and I had inextricably identified myself with the Salvationist. And thus it comes to pass that in ten minutes’ time I shall be hanged by the neck until I am dead in expiation of the murder of myself, which murder never took place, and of which, in any case, I am innocent.”
When the Chaplain returned to his quarters some fifteen minutes later, the black flag was floating over the prison tower. Breakfast was waiting for him in the dining-room, but he first passed into his library, and, taking up the Times Atlas, consulted a map of the Balkan Peninsula. “A thing like that,” he observed, closing the volume with a snap, “might happen to any one.”
The man who sought
One of Taverner’s cases will always stand out in my mind – the case of Black, the airman. The ordinary doctor would have bromided Black into an asylum, but Taverner staked the sanity of two people upon a theory, and saved them both.
Early in May I was sitting with him in his Harley Street consulting-room, taking down case notes while he examined his patients. We had dispatched various hysterics and neurotics to other specialists for treatment, when a man of an entirely different type was ushered in by the butler. He looked absolutely healthy, his face was tanned with the open air and had no sign of nervous tension; but when I met his eyes I noticed something unusual about them. The expression was peculiar.
They did not hold the haunting fear one so often sees in the eyes of the mentally sick; he reminded me of nothing in the world but a running hound that has sighted its prey.
“I think I am going off my head,” announced our visitor. “What form does your trouble take?” inquired Taverner. “Can’t do my work. Can’t sit still. Can’t do a thing except tear all over the country in my car as hard as ever I can lick. Look at my endorsements.” He held out a driving license filled with writing. “Next time they’ll quod me, and that will finish me off altogether. If they shut me up inside four walls I’ll buzz around like a cockchafer in a bottle till I knock myself to pieces. I’d go clean mad if I couldn’t move about. The only relief I get is speed, to feel that I am going somewhere. I drive and drive and drive till I’m clean tuckered out, and then I roll into the nearest wayside pub and sleep; but it doesn’t do me any good, because I only dream, and that seems to make things more real, and I wake up madder than ever and go on driving again.”
“What is your work?” said Taverner.
“Motor-racing and flying.”
“Are you Arnold Black, by any chance?” asked Taverner.
“That’s me,” said our patient. “Praise the Lord I haven’t lost my nerve yet.”
“You had a crash a little while ago, did you not?” inquired my colleague.
“That was what started the trouble,” said Black. “I was all right till then.
Banged my head, I suppose. I was unconscious three days, and when I came round I was seedy, and have been so ever since.”
I thought Taverner would refuse the case, for an ordinary head injury could have little interest for him, but instead he asked: “What made you come to me?”
“I was on my beam ends,” said Black. “I’d been to two or three old ducks, but could get no sense out of them; in fact I’ve just come on from the blankest geyser of the lot.” He named a name of eminence. “Told me to stop in bed a month and feed up. I wandered down the road and liked the look of your brass plate, so I came in. Why? Aren’t I in your line?
What do you go in for? Babies or senile decay?”
“If a chance like that brought you to me, you probably are in my line,” said Taverner. “Now tell me the physical side of your case. What do you feel like in yourself?”
Our patient wriggled uneasily in his chair.
“I dunno,” he said. “I feel more of a fool than anything else.”
“That,” said Taverner, “is often the beginning of wisdom.”
Black half turned away from us. His painfully assumed jauntiness fell from him. There was a long pause, and then he blurted out:
“I feel as if I were in love.”
“And you’ve been hard hit?” suggested Taverner.
“No, I’ve not,” said the patient. “I’m not in love, I only feel as if I were.
There isn’t a girl in the case – not that I know of, anyway and yet I’m in love – horribly in love – with a woman who doesn’t exist. And it’s not the tomcat side of me, but the biggest and best that there is in me. If I can’t get someone to love me back in the same way that I am loving, then I’ll go off my head. All the time I feel that there must be someone somewhere, and that she’ll suddenly turn up. She must turn up.” His jaw set in a savage line. “That’s why I drive so much, because I feel that round the next bend I’ll find her.”
The man’s face was quivering, and I saw that his hands were wet with sweat.
“Have you any mental picture of the woman you are seeking?” asked Taverner.
“Nothing definite,” said Black. “I only get the feel of her. But I shall know her when I see her; I am certain of that. Do you think such a woman exists? Do you think it is possible I shall ever meet her?” He appealed to us with a child’s pathetic eagerness.
“Whether she is in the flesh or not I cannot say at the present moment,” said Taverner, “but of her existence I have no doubt. Now tell me, when did you first notice this sensation?”
“The very first twinge I had of it,” explained Black, “was we got into the nose dive that put me to bed. We went down, down, down, faster and faster, and just as we were going to crash I felt something. I can’t say I saw anything, but I got the feel of a pair of eyes. Can you realize what I mean? And when I came round from my three days’ down-and-out I was in love.”
“What do you dream about?” asked Taverner.
“All sorts of things; nothing especially nightmary.”
“Do you notice any kind of family likeness in your dreams?”
“Now you come to mention it, I do. They all take place in brilliant sunshine. They aren’t exactly Oriental, but that way inclined.”
Taverner laid before him a book of Egyptian travel illustrated in watercolours.
“Anything like that?” he inquired.
“My hat!” exclaimed the man. “That’s the very thing.” He gazed eagerly at the pictures, and then suddenly thrust the book away from him. “I can’t look at them,” he said; “It makes me feel – ” he laid his hand on his solar plexus, hunting for a simile – “as if my tummy had dropped out.”
Taverner asked our patient a few more questions, and then dismissed him with instructions to report himself if any further developments took place, saying that it was impossible to treat his trouble in its present phase. From my knowledge of Taverner’s ways I knew that this meant that he required time to carry out a psychic examination of the case, which was his peculiar art, for he used his trained intuition to explore the minds of his patients as another man might use a microscope to examine the tissues of their bodies.
As it was a Friday afternoon, and Black was our last patient, I found myself free after his departure, and was walking down Harley Street wondering how I should dispose of my weekend, for an invitation I had counted upon had unexpectedly failed me. As I took a short cut through a mews lying behind the house I saw Black manoeuvring a car out of a garage. He saw me, too, and hailed me as a friend.
“You wouldn’t care for a joy ride, I suppose? I am off on the trail again.
Like to join me in running down the fair unknown?”
He spoke lightly, but I had had a glimpse of his soul, and knew what lay beneath. I accepted