The Complete Simon Iff (63 page)

"Is that possible?" asked Lubeck.

"Well, you ought to know," retorted the magician. "You've had the case of this wretched invertebrate here and a much more striking example under your very nose."

"Yes," said Lubeck; "of course. Do you know, I've never really understood how you got away with that absurd business of Hobbs. He wasn't at all the nervous hysterical type and he hadn't been freshly wounded."

"Fishing for compliments," laughed Simon. "I've already congratulated you on the goodness of heart which inhibits so effectively the operation of your cerebral cortex. Hobbs had lived for years with the worst kind of fear: that of being found out. It wasn't pathological in the sense of being irrational, but on the other hand, he had no protection whatever against it. He couldn't fly to antiseptics whenever it became acute. He couldn't even relieve his mind by talking about it. He had to be perpetually sitting on the safety valve; and any form of suppression always tends to turn normal instinct into pathological channels. I didn't expect to break him down by the scene in the office. I saw to it that he was freshly wounded.

"I staged the comedy to prepare him for the wound. I wanted to evoke his fear from the hell of the unconscious self in order that it might shake his confidence in his own critical judgement; in his sense of reality."

"But no one would really believe that his eyes and ears had gone wrong so suddenly and to that extent. He must have suspected that we were laying a fantastic trap for him and that should have put him on his guard rather than induced him to betray himself."

"True enough," admitted Simon. "But the things he saw were, so to speak, phantasms of his hidden fear, connected vaguely with Stephen through Violet's likeness to him, and the circumstances of the plot, assuming it to be one, were all so wildly improbable. The result was that a mere trifle of absolutely genuine evidence, as he supposed, believing (as people of his class do) in the newspapers, was enough to wound his guilty conscience. It never occurred to him that I had had that paragraph specially printed in my copy of the Mercury, especially as we had both prepared him for it by attributing his experiences, which we both assumed to be hallucinations, to something which we pretended to suppose that he must have seen during the lunch hour."

"Yes," said Mr. Lubeck thoughtfully, "but Hobbs was hardened by years of crime and utterly callous of the consequences to others."

Simon looked at him very sadly. "Surely you understand," he said slowly, "that such callousness is the very measure of the intensity of his own fear. The thought of prison was so intolerable to him that he did not dare to allow himself the luxury of the faintest human sympathy for his victims. But he had not contemplated death. He saw in an instant, taking him at his worst, that to be found out might drive him to kill himself. As a matter of fact, he was not as mad as that; he suffered genuine remorse. The psychological resultant was however the same. What he lost on the swings, he made up on the roundabouts. In any case we were sure of the main object: to render him incapable, at the critical moment, of the normal reaction. He saw himself caught in the identical trap which he had sprung on Stephen. He saw instantly, with every particle of his instinct of self-preservation, that this fact proved his innocence; that he was the victim of a clever scheme, so that in his anxiety to prove his innocence, he exclaimed jubilantly that he knew exactly how the trick was turned. In his normal state he would have perceived the implications of the statement. Suppose a man has been swindled by the three card trick; he could not have been swindled if he knew exactly how the trick was done. His explanation proved previous knowledge. We cannot be sure of the deep workings of his mind at this point but this at least is evident; that the series of shocks had quite abrogated his conscious control. He probably recognized his blunder in some stratum beneath clear consciousness; for he instantly completed it by the appeal to Stephen to clear him, very much as a man in certain conditions will run his bicycle into the very object which he is trying to avoid. The realization that Stephen was dead crowned the edifice with ills, as Euripides says. His unconscious stood before us all, stark in its horror of malignity and fear. The one relief which he had so long denied himself--confession--became the over mastering passion and he reeled off the list of his iniquities with something really not far from gusto. He had to get rid of 20 years of silence in a single outburst."

"Well, I must say," remarked Mr. Lubeck, "it has been a most masterly demonstration of psychology."

"I'm not very proud of it," replied Simple Simon. "The method was far too elaborate and complex to please me. It ought to have been managed in a quiet conversation. My excuse is that I had really no access even to the person of Hobbs. He was guarded in every way but one; and I had to arrange a scenario which would cut short all ways of escape. It was necessary that all explanations of events were equally untenable. However, enough of the past. Our business is to unsterilize Stephen. The bacillus of self-esteem finds him a most favourable medium. I doubt if he understands even now how I despise and loathe him. My chief satisfaction in getting him out of gaol is that I have saved his fellow criminals from the contamination of his example. I cannot even make him angry," growled the mystic. "If he had any self respect, instead of self-esteem, he would have walked out of the house an hour ago."

The outraged youth began a homily on gratitude.

"I don't want your gratitude," howled Iff. "That's only another clean collar, and what you need is to play in the mud. You were brought up with a host of virtues, so called; so many painted masks to hide the face of a coward. You even despised your sister, and where would you be now without her? You've got to chuck all that. It's all a mass of iniquity, a monstrous growth in a thousand hideous forms of the original fear which was drilled into you by that accursed old hag, Aunt Dorcas, who, I hope, is roasting in hell at this minute. However, you've had your medicine; and I'm going to give you a chance."

His hand went back to his pocket and he produced a letter which he handed to Lubeck. The good old man's eyes grew dim as he read it. He went over to Stephen and laid his hand on the boy's shoulder.

"I am glad I prosecuted," he said with humourous brusqueness, "I couldn't have done as much for you as this if you had stayed with me for ten years."

"Dear Mr. Iff," he read aloud, "I think this is about what you want. Send Adams to me at four o'clock next Monday. He can manage our new branch at Fu Ling above Hankow."

Stephen only understood that he was appointed to a position of great and absolute responsibility carrying a very great increase on any salary he might have hoped for for many years to come. He sprang to his feet. But Iff checked him with a gesture.

"Fu Ling is a glorious place," said he. "I was there a few years back. The only European in the place was the Custom's collector. He was just getting over a couple of bullet wounds in the riot when the missionary was killed, thank God. That's why he wasn't there. It's a delightful old town--on the top of a mound about 70 feet above the plain; not a natural mound, of course; the solidified refuse of centuries. There is no sanitation as we understand it, not even in a European's house, and I hope you will notice that every one is healthy as anywhere else. The death rate is about the same as in this country.

"Of course," he said as if by an after thought, "there are lepers."

Stephen's hair had not yet grown long enough to stand any straighter than it did.

"I shouldn't worry," went on Iff remorselessly, "there's no influenza, no cerebro-spinal meningitis, no sleeping sickness, no consumption, no cancer, no rickets, and better still, none of those hydra-headed imaginary diseases which afflict us weekly in the Sunday Newspapers. The risk of being murdered is a good deal less one half percent of what it is in Memphis, Tennessee. The risk of Hobbs is nil.

"You have to learn courage and self-respect out there," he went on, "and you will also lose your self-esteem, for you have to face reality every hour of the day--and night, and in reality," he concluded, on a full diaphragm, "every man is a hero and every man is a god."

Something broke in the brain of Sterilized Stephen. He strode forward impulsively, head erect and sparkling eyes, to clasp the outstretched hand of the magician but all he said was "I'll go," though his lips were as white as his cheeks.

Simon Iff collected Violet with his free hand.

"Observe, my child," he said. "He says he will go. And is not going the sure sign of godhead? Old artists represented the Egyptian gods as bearing a sandal strap in token that their function was to go, to go through every phase of existence untouched by anything they chanced to meet. Did you never hear the saying 'Every man and every woman is a star?' And what does a star do but go and give light in its going."

The eyes of the girl were fixed upon him with the soft yearning look of a dog for its master.

"Yes, my dear," he smiled, "you're going too. Your job in life is to look after your brother. You've seen all the worst side of life. Your experience is just what he needs."

He sat down in a big arm chair and lighted a proportionate cigar.

"The trouble with respectability," he said, "is this: that for the most part it doesn't exist at all. It's a fantasm created by fear. For this reason, every cunning scoundrel can use it to cloak his misdeeds. But when you've got rid of the sham, the genuine good of humanity comes and Violet here knows how much lovelier were the lives of the harlots and criminals with whom she has lived for years than those of people like Aunt Dorcas, who practically condemned her to starve to death for following a natural impulse, or the boy who persuaded her to it and left her to sink. Which is the better man, the thief who stands you a meal and a drink out of coarse comradeship or the cop who blackmails you out of half your earnings on Broadway? You'll find an honest set of values at Fu Ling. You have never done anything in your life that wasn't perfectly decent and straightforward--in itself, I mean, dear girl--apart from the artificial restrictions of society. You failed financially through ignorance of the low cunning and the hypocritical tricks of your neighbours, and the poison of their vileness is so strong that they actually persuaded you that they were right to despise you. That's why you're going to Fu Ling with Stephen. For another thing, you would never recover in this mephitic atmosphere. Out there, you will be a royal personage by right of race, and they will all look up to you because you won't look down on them as missionaries do, God burn their rotten souls in hell, that the smoke may be for a sign."

The essence of Violet's nature was to love and trust, to protect when she felt strong, to appeal when she felt weak. At the moment it was as if she had been suddenly hoisted on to a throne and a moment's fear passed over her face, the noble fear that she might not live up to her task. She murmured something about the strange ways of those strange people.

"They won't be strange to you," the mystic said, "mankind is just the same all over the world. The differences between civilizations are the differences between shams, for the most part. The primal needs of all men are alike and those needs form the basis of all their funny little ways. You have been at grips with them all your life and you will make no mistake in dealing with people as long as you love and understand."

There was dead silence in the room. Simon Iff suddenly discarded his prophetic manner and became the conventional guest.

"Good-night and good-bye for a while," he said; "I must return to my sheep."

When he had gone, the silence lasted for a long while. Each of the three were lost in his own thoughts. When Violet thought it time to retire, Lubeck took them to the door himself and as he shook hands, jerked his head over his shoulder towards the number on the door.

"Good-night, my children, remember your father's address."

VIII

Fifteen months later a serious riot in Fu Ling was aborted by the moral and physical courage of Violet and Stephen. He had learnt that the only germ he had to fear was the germ of fear in himself. And to that, a year in China had made him immune.