The Complete Simon Iff (61 page)

Now Mr. Hobbs was a man of very considerable development in this great art. Shouting in the street--even a shot--would be dismissed automatically from his mind as none of his business; and if questioned subsequently, it would be hard for him to say whether he had heard it at all; much less, just what he had heard.

Events in his own office would affect him more nearly. His two assistants might go in and out all day as part of their regular duty, and he would not raise his head. He would be subconsciously aware of the approach of Mr. Lubeck and adopt instinctively the proper degree of alertness to greet him. The footsteps of a stranger would arouse him completely, provided that the moral attitude of that stranger, as witnessed by the manner of his tread, might suggest some strikingly unusual interview in posse.

Bent over his books, therefore, he did not consciously notice the return of his two assistants from lunch; for that was the daily occurrence. But when, twenty minutes later, they both rose quietly and left the office, his attention was attracted to the unusual character of the event. And somehow, he got the impression that they were both dressed in the deepest mourning--as they certainly had not been before lunch. But why should they be in such a costume? He worked it all out even as he went on with his figures. They must have lost a relative and obtained permission from Mr. Lubeck to attend the funeral that afternoon. Strange, though, that he should not have been notified. At this point his will indignantly protested. It was no business of his, after all: and--well, he couldn't swear that they were in black, now he put the question directly, though reluctantly enough, to himself. With a final effort he put his foot down, and swept the whole matter out of his mind.

At that moment he heard the approaching step of Mr. Lubeck. "Coming to explain" he registered briefly; half annoyed at the additional distraction. Then he noticed, with genuine alarm--that the well-known tread of his superior was slower and more ponderous than its wont. As the door of the private office opened he lifted his head, as was customary with him, and his face went suddenly white. It was not Mr. Lubeck at all but a Police Inspector in uniform. "Nonsense," he cried internally, "I know his step among a million. Are my ears or my eyes at fault?" suddenly clamoured the sentinel of his mind. Testing his eyes by a direct gaze, as he rose to greet the intruder, he was brought up by an 'impossibility' of the most astounding order. Despite the uniform, it was Mr. Lubeck after all!

He growled at himself furiously. He simply could not believe that he was hallucinated about the uniform--and then the memory of his vague impression of seeing the two clerks in mourning unsettled him. Was it then some one with an astonishing resemblance to his chief?

That theory died a sudden death; for the new-comer sat down quietly opposite, and began to speak to him casually in the perfectly unmistakeable tones of Mr. Lubeck.

Before half a dozen sentences had been spoken Hobb's sentinel was, so to speak, shouting and firing off his rifle. He found it utterly impossible to attend to the slow deliberate utterance, as his duty and habit was.

His mind had already been badly distracted, and his senses were storming at him to acount for the appearance of his chief in that absurd uniform. He was so alarmed, psychologically, about his state of mind that he was praeternaturally on the alert for any new deviation from the normal. And what assailed him was so subtle and so abnormal that it preoccupied his mind completely. He did not hear a word of what was being said. What he noticed at first vaguely, then with keen curiosity, and finally with terrifying accuracy of recognition, was a most strange, though negative phenomenon. Outside the clang and hubbub of the street continued as ever. But there was some thing missing. Imagine a man lying awake with nervous insomnia--at an inn by a waterfall. He is unaware of the ticking of his watch under his pillow. But the watch stops. He is instantly alarmed. It is some time before he is able to make out what has disturbed him.

Just so with Mr. Hobbs: he realized slowly--after what seemed to him endless hours--that he was missing the perpetual clack and hum of the outer office. Had work suddenly ceased?--and why? What connection might that not have with the vague vision of the clerks in mourning, and with Mr. Lubeck's incredible masquerade--or his own hallucination?

He dared not make sure of the alternative, by appealing to the sense of touch to confirm his eyesight, or by asking his chief point blank about it? It might be as much as his job was worth; he might be thought to be going insane. And Mr. Hobbs had the very best of reasons for avoiding the slightest word or gesture which might in any manner give him away--might sow in Mr. Lubeck's mind that he was not altogether the steady, sensible, even stolid cashier that he had manifested to enquiring eyes for twenty years with such unvarying success.

At this point in his meditations Mr. Lubeck startled him by a sharp change of tone.

"Hobbs!" The cashier sat up almost as if he had been struck.

"Are you listening to what I have been saying?" asked his employer, severely.

Mechanically, Hobbs repeated the instructions which had just been given. His conscious memory had recorded them perfectly. He was to take certain bonds--he had examined, verified, and entered their numbers in his ledger during the interview--to Mr. Simon Iff's apartment, take his receipt, and any further instructions.

"All right," said Lubeck more gently, as if relieved. "Excuse me, Hobbs, but I actually fancied for a moment" (he gave a little laugh) "that you were actually not paying attention. Of course," the broker assumed a soft, almost pitying tone, "it's only natural if you should be a little distraught--as it were. You saw it at the lunch hour, I suppose?"

Hobbs assented, still mechanically. What was he supposed to have seen? He felt somehow that it would be a dreadful mistake to ask about it.

"Well, then, seal the packet," went on the other. The cashier's fingers were nervously employed in thrusting the bonds into a thick office envelope. Hobbs complied.

"Now then," went on Lubeck with an intensified seriousness, "that is not quite all. Please give me the whole of your attention: every detail of what I am going to say is of vital importance."

The cashier, putting the packet on one side, bent over to catch the low voice. It seemed as if secrecy, even in that empty office--was in some danger. At the same instant he paled once more. A footstep was again approaching: familiar somehow, and yet Hobbs was sure he had never heard it in his life--no, he knew it only too well--no, impossible--Keenly introspective, he evoked the 'sens du déja écouté' to explain.

"Come, come!" said Lubeck reproachfully. "I quite understand. Go home when you are through with Mr. Iff--and take a day off to-morrow. I wouldn't have asked you at all but you're the only man I can trust on a business like this!"

The cashier, by a violent effort of will, fixed his eyes on those of his employer, and put his whole conscious being under control. But do what he might, he could not help hearing the footsteps in the outer office, or feeling in the marrow of his bones that their maker was no other than Stephen Adams.

The door opened. Stephen! No! Of course not, frightfully, ghastly like him, though. But it was a girl? He looked heavily at Lubeck: not a flicker of an eyelid gave any sign that he was aware of the entrance of the new-comer.

The girl took off her overcoat and 'Derby' and hung them on the pegs sacred to his ex-assistant. His eyes started from his head: she was in convict clothes. She sat down calmly at Stephen's old desk, opened the books, and began to write.

Mr. Lubeck gave no sign; instead, he laid his hand, kindly enough, on the cashier's trembling arm. "I don't want to ask you for the third time," he said compassionately, "to give me every last particle of your attention."

But this time Hobbs' whole mind revolted. Come what might, he must clear up this insane mystery.

"The girl in the chair!" he gasped. Mr. Lubeck repeated the words, in blank amazement.

"What girl? What chair?"

"There! there!" cried the cashier, releasing his forearm, and pointing.

"Where? Are you plumb crazy?" answered his chief, with irritation. "Really, Hobbs, this isn't like you."

Hobbs still pointed; the girl quietly rose, put on her hat and coat and left the office.

"My dear man, I don't see any girl!"

No: didn't you see her go?"

"Tut, you must be seriously ill, man," cried Lubeck, with great concern in his voice. "Are you rehearsing the supper scene from Macbeth?"

The unhappy cashier subsided into his chair, and sat, panting, holding with nervous agitation to its arms; and gazing blankly upon the other's wondering face.

There was a long silence. At last. "I was dizzy for a moment," stammered Hobbs. "Headache--couldn't sleep last night--something at lunch..."

"More beauties of prohibition?" laughed Lubeck, as if to reassure him.

"No, no, sir; never a drop!" cried the other, seriously upset at such a suspicion; "Just indigestion--fancied I saw something for a moment--better now--beg your pardon, sir, most sincerely."

"Good man, if you feel all right now, get along. We mustn't keep Mr. Iff waiting."

"No sir," replied Hobbs miserably, and began to undo his waistcoat to put away the packet in the special pocket which he used for such purposes.

With a brief nod, and a cheery word, Mr. Lubeck walked out of the office.

But the cashier, having buttoned up the packet safely sat lost in the deepest thought. Was this fantastic adventure a joke?--unthinkable. A plot of some kind? He could not imagine his employer party to anything of the sort. Hallucination then, after all? The idea worried him very badly. He knew just enough of medicine to think that one sure characteristic of any such delusions would be that the victim could not possibly suspect them to be anything but real. His mind began a zig-zag logical sorites on the problem: every time he came to any conclusion some detail or other would pop up again and reverse the probabilities once more.

"Whew," he muttered, wiping his forehead. "I'll think more clearly in the fresh air." And he flung out of the office: in his state of mental disturbance, he forgot to take his hat and coat.

In the outer room he got a new shock. It was, as his ears had told him, empty. He looked at his watch. "Too absurd," he muttered, in acute annoyance. He walked across; just then he heard the closing of a ledger, in Mr. Lubeck's private office.

"I'll go and see about that uniform and settle that once and for all." He would have been positively relieved to find his chief disguised as a Zulu warrior. No such luck! He was sitting in his ordinary business clothes, very intent on his work. No trace of any masquerade.

"Well, what is it, Hobbs?" the chief did not look up.

"I beg your pardon, sir, did you say I might take to-morrow off?" was the best excuse he could invent.

"I did," replied Lubeck with a peculiar intonation which somehow struck terror into his inmost marrow, though he could not have said why. He went out like a man in a dream.

The elevator, the hallway, the street all reassured him that his senses were intact. But then...? In a way, that made things rather more serious than ever. It was curious, too, the way in which people were looking at him--at least--were they?

"Damn it, I'll square this!" he cried, as he pushed his way into Park Place. "Here's a sane man: I'll test myself by him."

He went up to the traffic cop. "Would you mind telling me what that building is, officer?" he said, pointing to the Woolworth.

The man knew the cashier by sight well enough: he had seen him pass there four times a day for years. Why hadn't he his hat and coat? And why did he look so agitated? And why--of all things--ask such a fool question? He decided that there was a joke or a bet in the background.

"Yes, Sir Ethelred, beg pardon, my lord," he answered saluting. "That there edifice is Grant's Tomb"

In any other circumstances the psychology of the moment would have been clear enough to Hobbs and reassured him finally that he was sane; but as things were, the answer shook him badly. He suppressed an inclination to howl and run off: he stood a moment dazed. The policeman began to suspect something wrong, and would have interfered; but the sense of routine duty came back suddenly to the cashier--in the complete ruin of the superstructure of his mind; he hailed a passing taxi, called out the address of Simon Iff and sank back with a sense of luxurious relief. It seemed to him, though, he had no idea why, that he was safe at last, that he had stumbled out of the nightmare as mysteriously and suddenly as he had stumbled into it.

Every detail of the journey up town, familiar and restful, restored him almost wholly to himself. He was able, by an effort, to distrust the unsolved problem of the past half hour, and was sufficiently himself by the time the car drew up to realize that he was hatless and coatless.

"Why, of course, that explains the whole thing," he murmured joyfully--not seeing in the least any explanation of even any one part of it. It was his sub-conscious self, alarmed for his sanity, that had been subtly reassured by the fact that events, generally speaking, had resumed their normal tone. There had been an accident of some sort, as the lack of hat and coat declared, but it was over now; it had not been serious; and as soon as he learnt the reson for his neglect; the nightmare features of his 'attack'--so he now called it--would become explicable. Amnesia, that's it, he concluded happily, as he paid off the chauffeur with that proud delight that the half-educated experience on finding themselves in bed with a long Greek or Latin word which is often in the newspapers and must be therefore perfectly respectable.

VI

The embarrassment of Mr. Hobbs about the absence of his had and coat completely dominated his mind between the taxi and the door of Simon Iff's apartment. He had quite satisfied himself that whatever had happened at the office was over and done with. It was therefore a terrific shock when the door was opened by that very replica of Sterilized Stephen in feminine flesh and felon attire that had flitted through his office an hour earlier. He was struck speechless. But the girl addressed him without a trace of surprise. "Mr. Hobbs from Lubeck and Lewison," she said; "come right in, Mr. Iff's expecting you."