Page:Weird Tales volume 30 number 04.djvu/72

456 and a bigger man than he. And I think no man ever had more stubborn pride, at bottom, than I have.

"It was the Wolansky thing all over again. The humiliation, the effort at ingratiation, the failure, the long, eating, gnawing, growing hatred. And it—it ended the same way. The night of brooding that hardened into a devilish decision, the vision of the long arm, growing, stretching, crawling—but not so far this time, only through two walls and across our own house. You remember that Father died of an apoplectic stroke, just as Wolansky had done a year or two before."

"Yes, I think I remember," I said in considerable embarrassment. The thing did begin to look uncanny. I was thoroughly sorry for the poor, cracked fellow, but I would just as soon not have been alone with him in that solitary drinking-place in the twilight.

"Well?" he said, almost sharply.

"Well, Banaotovich," I answered with a show of confidence, "you have had a great deal of unhappiness, and you have my sympathy. This strange faculty you have of anticipating deaths, like the night-owls and the death-watch that ticks in the walls, has made these bereavements an occasion of self-torment for you. I think you should see a psychiatrist."

"Anticipating—anticipating?" Banaotovich had gone back and was repeating a word I had used, and as he repeated it he drummed madly on the table with his fingers. "It's a curious coincidence that 'anticipating' is just the word my wife used when I told her about it."

"You—told—your wife—what you have just tojd me?" I stammered. "Do you think that was wise?"

"I couldn't help it," he said with a catch in his throat. "I thought I loved her, and I had to talk to somebody. I was miserable, and I had a feeling that she might understand and be brought closer to me by sympathy. Now that I think of it, I can see that I was an egregious idiot, but I discovered long ago that we aren't rational beings after all. We are driven or drawn by mysterious forces, and we go to our destination because we can't help it.

"My wife had always seemed a little timid with me. I never seemed to have the gift of attracting people. And I don't know whether she would ever have been interested in me at all if I hadn't used a little—a little charm the Hindoo taught me. Perhaps that didn't have much to do with it—but I had never been happy with her. However that may be, one evening when she seemed unusually approachable, I had just the same impulse that I had when I met you here tonight, and I told her about Wolansky and Father. She pooh-poohed it all just as you did. But she was afraid. I could see that. She was more and more afraid of me as the days went by. For a long time she tried to be cordial and natural in my presence, but it was a sham and the poor thing couldn't keep it up. Each of us knew as well what was in the mind of the other as if we had talked the situation over frankly for hours. We reached the point where we couldn't look each other in the face. No solitude could have been as ghastly as that solitude of two people who shared a revolting secret. For I had convinced her that I was guilty. I had succeeded in doing what I had set out to do, and I had ruined two lives in doing it. I have the faculty, it seems, of poisoning whatever I touch. Only today, my wife said to me——"

I started to my feet with a great rush of relief and thankfulness. "Ah, your wife is alive, then?" I cried.

"My wife is alive. That is—my second wife is alive," he said, with a horrible! forced smile.