The Long Arm by Franz Habl (electronic book reader txt) 📕

"I said it over till I fell into a sort of trance. It wasn't sleep, I tell you. You can't sleep when you are in a state like that. And in my trance, I could feel another arm grow out of my side here and grow longer and longer, and grow out through the window although the window was closed, and grow out across the street and down the street and right through the walls and across the river.

"I had never known where Wolansky lived. But that night I knew. I had never known the street or the house number. I had never been there in my life. But I can tell you just exactly how his bedroom looked. The wash-stand between the two windows, the work-table against the west wall, the wardrobe, the old divan against the north wall. In a corner the blue-gray tiled stove with some of the tile chipped off. And against the south wall--the bed he lay in. I can tell you the color of the blanket he pulled up over his face. It was a dirty brownish red.

"But my hand seemed to go through the blanket and grip Wolansky by the throat. First he sighed and turned his head to one side and tried to wriggle free. Then he raised his arms and tried to get hold of something that wasn't there. His sighs turned into groans, and the groans changed to a death rattle. He threw his arms and legs wildly around in the air, his body bent up like a bow. But my hand held his head down against the pillow. At last he quit struggling and dropped down limp on the bed. Then the arm came crawling back in to my body, and I came out of the trance--and went to sleep--or perhaps I fainted.

"The next morning the director came into our classroom and told us Wolansky had died in the night of some sort of attack. You remember that, I am sure----"

When Banaotovich began to tell me this story, he had looked away from me, and his eyes never met mine during the telling. He had begun with a painful effort, but as he went on he grew more and more excited and more and more inflamed with hatred of the malicious old Greek teacher, till it almost seemed as if he had forgotten me and was living the astounding experience through for himself alone. When he was through, his ecstasy of indignation left him and he sat dejected and apprehensive, studying me pitifully out of the corners of his deep gray eyes.

* * * * *

When he stopped speaking, there was a moment of silence. Then I said something. I think what I said was, "Very extraordinary!"

He smiled, a strained, sarcastic smile. "Extraordinary?" he repeated, with an interrogation point in his voice.

"Your nerves were strained to the breaking-point," I said. "Your trouble with the old rascal had driven you half distracted. Then there was all that occultistic hodgepodge with the old Hindoo. And you were overworked and run down, anyway. No wonder you dreamed dreams and saw visions. And it may have been that there was some telepathic contact between you and Wolansky, and when he had his apoplectic attack----"

The sarcastic smile deepened on Banaotovich's face. "So you have it all explained, and I'm acquitted?" he inquired.

"Acquitted?" I cried. "You were never even accused. If the state were to bring action against every man who had a feeling that he would be happier if someone else were out of the way, the state would have a big job on its hands!"

"Very true," Banaotovich assented icily. "I see I haven't got very far with you yet. You are forcing me to continue my not very edifying autobiography.--Did you know my father?"

I remembered his father, and I remembered that he had not enjoyed the best possible reputation.

"I think I knew him," I said hesitantly. "He was a--a money-lender, wasn't he?"

"Don't spare my feelings," said Banaotovich bitterly. "He was a usurer, and a cruel one. I had a feeling for years that his business was a disgrace to the family, and I made no bones about telling him so. There were ugly scenes. I thought several times of leaving home. Finally, Father told me one day that since I didn't approve of the way he got his money, he was doing me the favor of disinheriting me. I told him that was all right with me, that I'd rather starve than live on money that was stained with the blood of poor debtors.

"I thought at the time that I meant it. But about that time I had become interested in a young woman. I had never had much to do with the girls, and very few of them seemed at all interested in me. But this one appeared to like me, and when I made advances to her, she didn't repel me. I am no connoisseur of female beauty, but I think she was unusually attractive, and at that time I was half mad about her. Still waters run deep, you know.

"Well, she had me under her spell so completely that I changed my mind about Father's money. I began to truckle to him, much as I had truckled to Wolansky. I began to feel him out to find whether he had made a will. He was very cold and non-committal. Finally I asked him outright if he would reconsider his decision to leave me penniless. He told me it was I that had made the decision, not he, and that he had no use for wishy-washy people that changed their minds like weather-cocks. He was very sarcastic. I lost my temper and answered him back. We had a terrible quarrel, and finally he--he struck me. I was twenty years old 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 told 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.

I sank back gasping. "What did you do with your first wife, you dirty hound?" I moaned in helpless indignation.

* * * * *

He closed his eyes, and a wave of bitter triumph played about the muscles of his mouth. "Have I convinced you too, at last?" he said.

Then I realized that I had been an insulting idiot. At worst, the man before me was a pathological case, and he certainly belonged in an asylum rather than in a prison.

"Forgive me, Banaotovich," I panted. "I don't know what made me----"

He looked at me sadly, almost compassionately. "There is nothing to forgive," he said, very quietly. "I am all you called me and a thousand times worse. Now let me finish my story."

"You don't need to," I said hastily. "I know all the rest of it."

All interest, I am afraid nearly all sympathy, had gone out of me. What I wanted most of all was to get away from this melancholy citizen with power and madness in his gray eyes.

"No, you don't know quite all of it yet," he insisted. "Perhaps if I tell you the whole story, even if you can't excuse me--and I don't deserve your excusing, I don't want your excusing--you can understand me a little better, and think of me a little more kindly.

"There was another woman. I couldn't help it, any more than any of us can help anything. A fine, sympathetic young woman, who loved me because she knew I was unhappy. I had been married to the other woman for four years. We were completely estranged. We could scarcely bear to speak to each other. I couldn't be easy one moment in the same house with her. I had a cot in my office out