Part 4

Without a word but with a deliberation which awed even the watching officers by its inflexible though mysterious purpose, he turned to her once more, and, with the gently firm touch of a medical man, posed her head so that she looked straight before her. Paralyzed under his masterful dominance, she submitted plastically. She was too frightened to utter a sound. Only her eyes widened as she saw him produce a heavy revolver.

“Now, _gnädige Frau_!” he said, and his voice, though passionless, was intense in its expression of level will-power, “do not move your head! Look up--under your eyebrows. You see that clock? Look at it--continue to look at it!--If you take your eyes off it for one fraction of a second I shall shoot you dead! You are looking at it? It marks a quarter to eight. When it strikes eight you will tell me quite truthfully how you came by it!”

He ceased. The young woman, her face white with terror, her mouth twitching, her nostrils distended, sat motionless, staring up under her eyebrows at the face of the clock.

There was a dead silence in the room. The minutes passed. The young woman did not move a muscle. Her wide-open eyes fixed on the clock, she seemed to stiffen into a cataleptic rigidity.

The doctor put aside his revolver. He approached her, took one of her wrists and lifted her hand from her lap. It lay limply in his.

“You are feeling sleepy,” he said in his level, positive voice. “You are going to sleep. My voice is sounding muffled and far away--but you will still hear it. You are losing the sense of your surroundings--but you still see that clock face. You cannot help but see it. And when it strikes eight you are going to tell the truth.” He dropped the hand which fell lifelessly again upon her lap.

The young woman sat motionless as a statue. Her breathing changed to the deep respirations of sleep, although her eyes remained wide open.

The clock struck eight. At the last of its thin, silvery notes the young woman shuddered. Her lips moved.

“My husband sent it to me,” she said in a toneless, dreamy voice.

“When?” asked the doctor.

“In 1915.”

“From whence?”

“From the front.”

“Do you know the place?”

“No.”

“You are quite sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“And all these other things?”

“My husband sent them to me.”

“From France?”

“Yes.”

“How did he become possessed of them?”

“He took them out of houses.”

There was a pause in which the young woman did not move in the slightest. She appeared like some oracular statue waiting for the next question.

“Why did you lie to me?” asked the doctor in his level voice.

“Because you would have thought my husband a thief, and I am so proud of him.”

“Can you be proud of him, knowing that he was a thief?”

“Yes,” came the dreamy answer. “It was not his crime. He sent these things to me because I asked him for them and he loved me.”

“You asked him to send you these things? Why?”

“Because all the other officers’ wives were having things sent to them.”

“_So!_ Your husband would not have taken them if you had not asked for them?”

“No. He only took them to give me pleasure. He never thought of anybody but me. That is why I love him so--why I shall always love him.”

The doctor bit his lip, and hesitated for a moment.

“You do not think your husband would have offered violence to a woman in the house where he got this clock?”

“No. He loved me too much. He never thought of any woman but me. I am sure of it. He was an ideal man, my Heinrich--always gentle, always loving, always faithful.” She paused a moment before continuing. “It is cruel of you to make me realize how much I love him!”

The doctor stood over her, contemplating her, his brows wrinkled in a puzzled frown. His comrades looked at him enquiringly. He ignored them. The young woman, having ceased to speak, remained motionless and upright on her chair. The only sound in the room was the ticking of the clock.

Suddenly the doctor’s brows cleared in an evident decision. He lifted the young woman’s hand again as he spoke in his level, positive voice. His face was very grave.

“You are asleep. But you are going into a very much deeper sleep--a sleep so profound that it takes you far out of this time and place. Nevertheless you will remain in touch with me and you will hear my voice. But everything else is going from you. You are now released from the limitations of this body. You are on a plane from which you can enter into any time and place that I shall command.”

He dropped her hand and, with his finger-tips, closed the lids over her eyes. Her body still remained upright in its trancelike rigidity.

“What do you see?” he asked.

“Nothing,” came the dreamy answer.

“Where are you?”

“I do not know--I--I am nowhere, I think,” she said with hesitation. “I--I--oh, do not keep me like this!” There was a new note of anxiety in her voice.

“Wait a moment,” said the doctor. He turned to the mantelpiece, took down the clock, placed it on her lap, and clasped her hands about it.

“Now,” he said in his quiet, tense tones, “you are in touch with that clock. I want you to go into the time and place when that clock had another owner--before your husband had it. Focus yourself upon it. Go into the room where it stands.”

The young woman’s eyelids twitched flickeringly but otherwise her rigid attitude was unmodified.

“Yes,” she said, in a slow and doubtful tone, “yes----”

“What do you see?” asked the doctor. His lips compressed themselves firmly after the words, the muscles of his lean jaw stood out, in the intense effort of his will to keep emotion under control, to avoid an unconscious suggestion of ideas.

“I see a _salon_,” said the young woman dreamily, “a _salon_ with French windows opening on to a lawn. There is a grand piano in it--and a young woman seated at the piano. She is dark--young--oh, she is very beautiful! She keeps on looking at the clock--the clock is on the mantelpiece between two bronze statuettes. She is expecting somebody----”

“Yes?” said the doctor, crouching over her, his fists clenched in a spasm of supremely willed self-control, his breath coming in the quick gasps enforced by that tumultuous beating of the heart he could not command.

“Yes?--Go on!”

“She hears a footstep--she jumps up from the piano. A man comes into the room--a civilian. She throws her arms about him and kisses him. She leads him across to the mantelpiece and takes up the clock. She puts it into his hands--she is showing him something on the back of it, something written! They kiss again. They are in love these two--how she loves him! I can feel that--I can feel her love vibrating in me!” She paused dreamily. “I know what real love is--and she loves him like that----”

“The man?” asked the doctor, his eyes wild. “The man?--describe him!”

“His back is turned to me--I cannot see his face. Ah, he turns round. The man is--_you!_”

The doctor looked as though he were going to collapse. His companions watched him, fascinated, completely mystified, trying to guess at the drama their ignorance of the language hid from them. He mastered himself with a mighty effort.

“Yes,” he said. “You have the place right--but not the time. Go on a year--more than a year! Go on to the time when this clock passed out of that woman’s possession!”

“More than a year!” she repeated dreamily. “I--I must sleep--I cannot----” She was silent for a few moments. “Yes--yes--I see the room again. The young woman is in it. She is seated at a little table--writing. She looks up--Oh, how sad and pale she is!--but she is still very beautiful. I am so sorry for her--she is so unhappy--and she is still in love, I can still feel it vibrating in me. She is picking up a photograph--she kisses it--it is yours!--she kisses it again and again. Why are you not with her? I feel that you are a great distance off--she does not know where you are. That worries her, because she loves you so.” She stopped.

“Go on,” said the doctor sternly. “What do you see next?”

“She puts away her writing hurriedly. She is frightened of something--someone is coming, I think--yes! The door opens--a soldier--no, a German officer! Oh, she is frightened of him, but she is brave! She stands up as he comes toward her. She draws back from him--he is between her and the door. He puts out his hands, tries to hold her--_Ach!_” her voice rose to a scream, “_it is Heinrich!_”

“Go on!” commanded the doctor. “_Go on!_ What do you see?” His voice was terrible in its inexorability.

“Oh no, no!” she whispered. “No! Don’t make me see! don’t make me see! I don’t want to--I don’t want to--_Ach, Heinrich, Heinrich!_” Her voice came on a note of anguish. “I cannot bear it!”

The doctor frowned at the rigid figure with closed eyes that began to sway slightly to and fro upon its chair. Her face was drawn with a suffering beyond expression.

“See!” he commanded. “And tell me what you see!”

“Oh!” she moaned, “you are cruel--cruel! I do not want to see! I do not want to look!”

“You must!”

“Oh!” Evidently she surrendered helplessly. She commenced in a fatigued, dreary voice: “They are there together--the two of them! That beautiful woman--oh, I hate her now, I hate her!--_Ach, Heinrich, have you forgotten me?_” It was as if she called to him. “He does not hear me. His eyes are fixed on the woman.” She continued in short panting sentences uttered with increasing horror. “She is retreating from him--further and further back. He is following her. Oh, something terrible is going to happen--it is in the air--I feel it--something horrible!--What?--Ah, _he is trying to kiss her!_ My Heinrich! Oh, how dreadful, how dreadful!--Oh, don’t make me see any more--don’t make me see any more!--He has got her in his arms--she is struggling. Oh, I can’t look--I will not look!--Oh, Heinrich, and I loved you so!” Her voice fell from the scream of a nightmare to a plaintive moaning. “Oh, no more--no more! I can bear no more!”

“Look!--Look to the very end!”

The doctor’s comrades shuddered at his aspect as he crouched over her, seeming as though he were trying to peer with her eyes into some scene of horror they could not even imagine.

The young woman’s face was a mask of agony.

“Oh, you torture me,” she moaned, “you torture me--I see, and I do not want to see--oh, I do not want to see----”

“What do you see?”

“They are struggling together!--She fights desperately--what a wild cat she is! He is pinning her arms to her sides with his embrace--she throws her head back, back, to escape him. Ah! She has broken away! She runs to the table. _What is she going to do?_” The seer’s voice rose in acute alarm. “_Ach_, a revolver! Oh, no, no!” The ejaculation was a vehement and agonized protest. “_Heinrich!_ Oh, leave her--leave her!--No, he laughs at her as he follows--and she is so desperate. Ah, he has got her up in a corner--he has seized her again--she is crying out--it is a name--she cries it again and again----”

“What name?”

“I hear it! _Jules!_--_Jules!_--that is it--_Jules!_ Oh, what a tone of despair!”

The doctor closed his eyes and swayed. Then, mastering himself with a superhuman effort, he said hoarsely:

“Go on!--To the end!”

“I cannot see plainly--they are struggling still. _Ach!_ the revolver! _She has fired!_ I see the thin smoke in the air.--What has happened? He has her in his arms--he stumbles with her.--_Ach, she is dead!_ She has shot herself. He stretches her out on the floor--he is bending over her--Ach, _Heinrich_, _Heinrich_, you have broken my heart!” She wailed as if from the depths of a wretchedness beyond all solace. “You have killed my love for ever! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you as long as I live--I hate myself for having loved you! _Faithless, despicable brute!_”

She finished in a tone of fierce vindictiveness, a resentment, at once horrified and implacable, of unforgivable wrong.

But the doctor no longer heeded her. Hands to his brow, eyes closed, he reeled away from her.

“_Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!_” he groaned. “Marcelle, Marcelle! How shall I avenge you?”

He glanced at the now silent and still rigid figure of the young woman. Tears were trickling down her cheeks from the closed eyes. Her trance was unbroken. She sat still nursing the clock.

Then, with a deep breath, he drew himself erect. The jaw that expressed his powerful will set hard again. His two companions looked with horror upon the dreadful pallor of that face from which two fierce eyes blazed. A little laugh from him. It was a sickening mockery of mirth.

“_Mes amis!_” he said. “You asked me a little time ago what I thought of the policy of reprisals. I ask you that question now. That young woman, in a hypnotic trance, has just described to me, as though she had seen it acted before her eyes, the suicide of my wife. She killed herself rather than be outraged by that woman’s husband. In her waking life the young woman is, of course, totally ignorant of the event. In her waking life she adores the memory of her dead husband as of a perfect and faithful lover. Now, in her hypnotic state, she loathes him--her love has turned to bitter jealous hatred. She despises him. In fact, she feels toward him just as she would have felt had she witnessed the scene that destroyed my life’s happiness. It rests with me to call her back to waking life, totally ignorant of her husband’s crime, adoring him as before--or to leave her in an agony of shattered love. Virtually, her husband murdered my wife. Her memory of him is the only thing that I can touch. Shall I leave it sacred? Or shall I, justly, kill it?--What do you say?--It is a pretty little problem in reprisals for you!”

His comrades stared at him in horrified astonishment.

“But,” cried the battalion-commander, “are you sure----”

“Look at her!” replied the doctor.

The young woman still sat rigidly upright. Her face was drawn with anguish. Heavy tears rolled ceaselessly from under the closed eyelids. She sobbed quietly in a far-off kind of way that was nevertheless eloquent of an immense despair.

“She sees what happened----?” queried the captain in an incredulous and puzzled tone.

“Three years ago. She is looking at it now,” asserted the doctor. “She sees her husband bending over my dead wife.--Come, _messieurs_, let me have your verdict!” He seemed to be experiencing a grim, unhuman enjoyment at their evident recoil from the terrible problem he offered them. “I must wake her soon!”

“And if she wakes--knowing----?” faltered the captain.

“She will probably kill herself. She has been living in an intense love for the idealized memory of her husband. The revulsion will be overwhelming.”

The battalion-commander interposed.

“But, _mon cher_--a suicide--that goes beyond----”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders.

“Her husband drove _my_ wife to suicide----”

“It is terribly logical,” murmured the young captain, “but,” he glanced at the unconscious figure in its mysterious and awful grief, “one needs to be God to indulge in logic to that point.”

“And yet we are but men,” said the doctor, “and the problem is there before us--must be solved at once! In my place, what would you do?”

The battalion-commander rose. He went up to his comrade and looked him in the eyes.

“_Mon cher_,” he said solemnly, “God forbid that I should ever be in your place! I do not know.”

The doctor turned to the young man. There was a terrible smile on his lips.

“And you, _mon cher Jordan_?”

The captain rose also. He also read the hell in the doctor’s eyes. He shook his head and shuddered.

“_Mon ami_,” he replied, “I should go mad.”

The doctor nodded grimly.

“The terrible thing is that I cannot go mad,” he said. “I am still sane.--So you both decline the problem?”

The two officers shook their heads, not trusting themselves to speech.

The doctor turned away from them and covered his face with both hands. He reeled to the mantelpiece, leaned against it. They saw his body shake in the intensity of the nervous crisis which swept over him.

“Marcelle!” he cried. “Marcelle!--if you are a living spirit, counsel me! Shall I avenge?”

The watchers turned to the entranced woman as though involuntarily expecting a reply through her from that mysterious region where her soul was in touch with the long-past tragedy she had revealed. She still wept silently in that awful sleep which was no sleep. But no word passed her lips. Only the clock she held upon her lap struck one silvery note, marking the half-hour.

At the sound the doctor turned from the fireplace and took up the clock. He gazed, with a passionate intensity, upon the inscription on the back.

“Marcelle!” he murmured. “Our love ceases not when time itself shall cease! Though you are dead, that still lives--_that_ was not murdered!--I understand, _ma bien-aimée_, I understand!”

He put the clock gently upon the mantelpiece and turned once more to the rigid, waiting figure. His comrades watched him, spell-bound, keying themselves to deduce his decision from the tone of his voice when he should speak. His stern face was set in an unfaltering resolve they could not penetrate. He lifted her hand.

“_Gnädige Frau_,” he said, and the level, passionless voice gave no hint to those ignorant of the language of the purport of the German words which followed, “when you wake from this sleep you will entirely forget the hideous dream through which you have passed. You will never remember it, waking or asleep. You will think of your husband as you have always thought of him--faithful and loving. You will completely resume your normal life. You will not even be aware that you have slept. It will seem to you as if you had only just sat down in this chair. But when you wake you will present me with the clock upon the mantelpiece. You will feel an overmastering impulse to do this, and you will obey it.--Now,” he wiped the tears from her face and blew sharply upon her closed eyelids, “_wake!_”

The two officers watched her, fascinated. Would she shriek? What terrible paroxysm would be the expression of a heart-broken despair? Or had he----? They held their breath.

Her eyelids flickered for a moment, and then, with one deep sigh, her eyes opened. She smiled round on them.

“_Meine Herren?_” she said in her voice of timid enquiry. Then, fixing her eyes on the doctor, “You sent for me?”

The doctor looked at her gravely.

“The Commandant desired me to assure you, _gnädige Frau_, that you need be under no apprehensions during our stay here. We consider ourselves the guests of a charming lady and we hope to leave only a pleasant memory behind us.”

His companions marvelled at the strength of will which could enforce so complete a normality of voice and feature.

The German woman smiled up at him, a pathetic little smile.

“You are very kind, Herr Doctor--please convey my thanks to the Commandant.” She made a little movement which drew attention to her black dress. “My--my husband in heaven, if he can see you, will--will bless you.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Please excuse me!” she said with a pretty little gesture of apology, “his memory is all I have--I cannot help bringing him into every act of my life.”

“Love need not cease with death, _gnädige Frau_,” replied the doctor. “One hopes that those we loved still watch over us--though we cannot see them.”

She smiled again.

“He had no thought but of me, Herr Doctor, and I have none but of him.--I see you understand,” she finished in a tone of involuntary sympathy. “You also have loved?”

“_Ja, gnädige Frau_,” he replied with a grave and enigmatic smile. “I also.”

Her eyes went past him to the mantelpiece, rested with a curiously fixed expression on the clock. Suddenly, as though moved by an uncontrollable impulse, she jumped up, took the clock from the mantelpiece and thrust it into the doctor’s hands.

“Please accept this!” she said appealingly.

The doctor fixed his grave eyes upon her.

“Why?” he asked.

She stammered, evidently at a loss for her reason.

“Because--because I want you to have it--because I feel, I do not know why, that you have protected me from something----” She stopped, puzzled by her own words. “That is absurd, I know!” she exclaimed. “But it belonged to two lovers, Herr Doctor--you, who understand love, will value it, I know. I--I feel you _ought_ to have it!”

She left him standing with it. Then she turned to the other officers with her appealing little smile and bowed slightly in farewell.

“_Gute Nacht, meine Herren!_” she said, and went out of the room.

The doctor stared after her, his face deathly white. Suddenly his body broke and crumpled. He sank down to his knees by one of the chairs, still clasping the clock in his hands.

“Marcelle!” he cried, his head bowed over his recovered love-token, his body shaking, “Marcelle! have I done right?--have I done right?”

The battalion-commander touched his subordinate on the shoulder. Both tip-toed silently out of the room.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] “To Jules, to mark the hours of a love which will not cease when Time itself shall cease, from his Marcelle.”

SECRET SERVICE

“But, _Excellenz_----!” The entreaty, from such a man, was oddly and strikingly sincere. About forty years of age, sprucely dressed in a well-cut lounge suit, spats over patent boots, he was the type to be seen any day gazing rather aimlessly into the shop-windows of Piccadilly or the Rue de la Paix, the type that haunts the hotels frequented by the best society and yet is not of that society, the type that drifts behind the chairs of every gambling casino in the world. A dark moustache, carefully trimmed, curled over lips whose fine curves were unpleasantly thin and clear-cut. His complexion was sallow; his dark eyes, fixed on his companion in an accentuation of his entreaty, implored now with an expression of genuine truthfulness which was certainly not habitual to them. He gesticulated with a white and exquisitely manicured hand.

“But rubbish!” The speaker was an oldish, thick-set man in evening dress. His round red face, barred with a clipped white moustache, with a pair of small gray eyes vivacious behind pince-nez, was set upon a short apoplectic neck which rucked into folds above his collar. The scalp showed pink through close-cropped white hair. He stood warming himself with his back to the fire--a very large fire for Berlin in the winter of early 1918--and glared angrily at the young man. He spoke with the irascibility of a brutal superior whose impunity is of long date and unquestioned.

“Are you mad, Kranz? Do you take me for an imbecile old woman? Am I feeble-minded--do I _look_ feeble-minded--that you should dare to--to play such a trick upon me?” He was obviously working himself up into one of his official rages. “You--you tell me that you have an infallible means for obtaining secret information, no matter how hidden. You persuade me to come and test it--_me!_ I give you credit for your impudence!--and this is what it is!” He almost choked with offended dignity. “Be careful, Kranz! You have traded this once upon your record with us--you will never do it again! To bring me--_me!_--to this absurdity!--to expect me to listen to the hypnotic ravings of that idiot girl! I wonder you didn’t offer me crystal-gazing!”

“But, _Excellenz_----!”

The old man waved a hand at him.

“My dear Kranz,” he said, dropping suddenly into a tone of tolerant contempt. “I forgive you this once. I daresay you have been the victim of a genuine hallucination. You would not have dared else.--You don’t drug, do you?” The question was asked with a disconcertingly sudden sharpness. The younger man made a gesture of emphatic denial, defying the piercing gray eyes that probed him. The old man grunted. “Keep your sanity, Kranz--or the Bureau will lose a valued servant. Drop this nonsense. I know what I am talking about--I studied psychology under Wundt of Jena. The whole thing is a hallucination--the raving of the dream-self released from control--_dummes Zeug!_--Give me my coat!”

“_Excellenz_, I implore you!”