The Collection (42 page)

And by the end of three weeks, despite the pain and the
confusion that had filled them, he
^'
d had a chance to think things
over. He'd invented the wall. The amnesia, the convenient amnesia that was so
much more believable than the truth as he knew it.

But
was
the truth as he knew it?

That was the haunting ghost that had ridden him for three
years now, since the very hour when he had awakened to whiteness in a white
room and a stranger, strangely dressed, had been sitting beside a bed the like
of which had been in no field hospital he
^'
d ever heard of or seen. A
bed with an overhead framework. And when he looked from the stranger
^'
s
face down at his own body, he saw that one of his legs and both of his arms
were in casts and that the cast of the leg stuck upward at the angle, a rope
running over a pulley holding it so.

He'd tried to open his mouth to ask where he was, what had
happened to him, and that was when he had discovered the cast on his jaw.

He'd stared at the stranger, hoping the latter would have
sense enough to volunteer the information and the stranger had grinned at him
and said, "Hi, George. Back with us, huh? You'll be all right.
^"

And there was something strange about the language until he
placed what it was. English. Was he in the hands of the English? And it was a
language, too, which he knew little of, yet he understood the stranger perfectly.
And why did the stranger call him George?

Maybe some of the doubt, some of the fierce bewilderment,
showed in his eyes, for the stranger leaned closer to the bed. He said,
"Maybe you're still confused, George. You were in a pretty bad smashup.
You ran that coupe of yours head-on into a gravel truck. That was two days ago,
and you're just coming out of it for the first time. You're all right, but
you'll be in the hospital for a while, till all the bones you busted knit.
Nothing seriously wrong with you."

And then waves of pain had come and swept away the
confusion, and he had closed his eyes.

Another voice in the room said, "We're going to give
you a hypo, Mr. Vine,
^"
but he hadn't dared open his eyes again.
It was easier to fight the pain without seeing.

There had been the prick of a needle in his upper arm. And
pretty soon there
^'
d been nothingness.

***

When he came back again-twelve hours later, he learned
afterwards-it had been to the same white room, the same strange bed, but this
time there was a woman in the room, a woman in a strange white costume standing
at the foot of the bed studying a paper that was fastened on a niece of board.

She had smiled at him when she saw that his eyes were open.
She said, "Good morning, Mr. Vine. Hope you
^'
re feeling better.
I
^'
ll tell Dr. Holt that you're back with us."

She went away and came back with a man who was also
strangely dressed, in roughly the same fashion as had been the stranger who had
called him George.

The doctor looked at him and chuckled. "Got a patient,
for once, who can't talk back to me. Or even write notes.
^"
Then
his face sobered.
^"
Are you in pain, though? Blink once if
you're not, twice if you are."

The pain wasn't really very bad this time, and he blinked
once. The doctor nodded with satisfaction. "That cousin of yours,
^"
he said, "has kept calling up. He'll be glad to know you
^'
re
going to be back in shape to-well, to listen if not to talk. Guess it won't
hurt you to see him a while this evening."

The nurse rearranged his bedclothing and then, mercifully,
both she and the doctor had gone, leaving him alone to straighten out his
chaotic thoughts.

Straighten them out? That had been three years ago, and he
hadn't been able to straighten them out yet:

The startling fact that they'd spoken English and that he
^'
d
understood that barbaric tongue perfectly, despite his slight previous
knowledge of it. How could an accident have made him suddenly fluent in a
language which he had known but slightly?

The startling fact that they'd called him by a different
name.
^"
George
^"
had been the name used by the
man who'd been beside his bed last night. "Mr. Vine,
^"
the
nurse had called him. George Vine, an English name, surely.

But there was one thing a thousand times more startling than
either of those: It was what last night's stranger (Could he be the
^"
cousin"
of whom the doctor had spoken?) had told him about the accident.
^"
You
ran that coupe of yours head-on into a gravel truck."

The amazing thing, the contradictory thing, was that he
knew
what a coupe was and what a truck was. Not that he had any recollection of
having driven either, of the accident itself, or of anything beyond that moment
when he'd been sitting in the tent after Lodi-but-but how could a picture of a
coupe, something driven by a gasoline engine, arise to his mind when such a
concept had never been
in
his mind before.

There was that mad mingling of two worlds-the one sharp and
clear and definite. The world he'd lived his twenty-seven years of life in, in the
world into which he
^'
d been born twenty-seven years ago, on August
15th, 1769, in Corsica. The world in which he'd gone to sleep-it seemed like
last night-in his tent at Lodi, as General of the Army in Italy, after his
first important victory in the field.

And then there was this disturbing world into which he had
awakened, this white world in which people spoke an English-now that he thought
of it-which was different from the English he had heard spoken at Brienne, in
Valence, at Toulon, and yet which he understood perfectly, which he knew
instinctively that he could speak if his jaw were not in a cast. This world in
which people called him George Vine, and in which, strangest of all, people
used words that he did not know, could not conceivably know, and yet which
brought pictures to his mind.

Coupe, truck. They were both forms of-the word came to his
mind unbidden-automobiles. He concentrated on what an automobile was and how
it worked, and the information was there. The cylinder block, the pistons driven
by explosions of gasoline vapor, ignited by a spark of electricity from a
generator.

Electricity. He opened his eyes and looked upward at the
shaded light in the ceiling, and he knew, somehow, that it was an
electric
light,
and in a general way he knew what electricity was.

The Italian Galvani-yes, he'd read of some experiments of
Galvani, but they hadn
^'
t encompassed anything practical such as a
light like that. And staring at the shaded light, he visualized behind it water
power running dynamos, miles of wire, motors running generators. He caught his
breath at the concept that came to him out of his own mind, or part of his own
mind.

The faint, fumbling experiments of Galvani with their weak
currents and kicking frogs' legs had scarcely fore-shadowed the unmysterious
mystery of that light up in the ceiling; and that was the strangest thing yet;
part of his mind found it mysterious and another part took it for granted and
understood in a general sort of way how it all worked.

Let's see, he thought, the electric light was invented by
Thomas Alva Edison somewhere around-Ridiculous; he'd been going to say around
1900, and it was now only 1796!

And then the really horrible thing came to him and he
tried-painfully, in vain-to sit up in bed. It
had
been 1900, his memory
told him, and Edison had died in 1931. And a man named Napoleon Bonaparte had
died a hundred and ten years before that, in 1821.

He
^'
d nearly gone insane then.

And, sane or insane, only the fact that he could not speak
had kept him out of a madhouse; it gave him time to think things out, time to
realize that his only chance lay in pretending amnesia, in pretending that he
remembered nothing of life prior to the accident. They don
^'
t put
you in a madhouse for amnesia. They tell you who you are, let you go back to
what they tell you your former life was. They let you pick up the threads and
weave them, while you try to remember.

Three years ago he'd done that. Now, tomorrow, he was going
to a psychiatrist and say that he was-Napoleon!

The slant of the sun was greater. Overhead a big bird of a
plane droned by and he looked up at it and began laughing, quietly to
himself-not the laughter of madness. True laughter because it sprang from the
conception of Napoleon Bonaparte riding in a plane like that and from the
overwhelming incongruity of that idea.

It came to him then that he
^'
d never ridden in a
plane, that he remembered. Maybe George Vine had; at some time in the
twenty-seven years of life George Vine had spent, he must have. But did that
mean that
he
had ridden in one? That was a question that was part of the
big question.

He got up and started to walk again. It was almost five o
^'
clock;
pretty soon Charlie Doerr would he leaving the paper and going home for dinner.
Maybe he'd better phone Charlie and he sure he'd be home this evening.

He headed for the nearest bar and phoned; he got Charlie
just in time. He said,
^"
This is George. Going to be home this
evening?"

^"
Sure, George. I was going to a poker game,
but I called it off when I learned you
^'
d be around."

^"
When you learned-Oh, Candler talked to you?
^"

^"
Yeah. Say, I didn
^'
t know you'd
phone me or I'd have called Marge, but how about coming out for dinner? It'll
be all right with her; I
^'
ll call her now if you can.
^"

He said, "Thanks, no, Charlie. Got a dinner date. And
say, about that card game; you can go. I can get there about seven and we won
^'
t
have to talk all evening; an hour'll be enough. You wouldn't be leaving before
eight anyway."

Charlie said,
^"
Don't worry about it; I don't
much want to go anyway, and you haven't been out for a while. So I'll see you
at seven, then.
^"

From the phone booth, he walked over to the bar and ordered
a beer. He wondered why he'd turned down the invitation to dinner; probably
because, subconsciously, he wanted another couple of hours by himself before he
talked to anyone, even Charlie and Marge.

He sipped his beer slowly, because he wanted to make it
last; he had to stay sober tonight, plenty sober. There was still time to
change his mind; he'd left himself a loophole, however small. He could still go
to Candler in the morning and say he'd decided not to do it.

Over the rim of his glass he stared at himself in the
back-bar mirror. Small, sandy-haired, with freckles on his nose, stocky. The small
and stocky part fitted all right; but the rest of it! Not the remotest
resemblance.

He drank another beer slowly, and that made it half past
five.

He wandered out again and walked, this time toward town. He
walked past the
Blade
and looked up to the third floor and at the window
he'd been working out of when Candler had sent for him. He wondered if he'd
ever sit by that window again and look out across a sunlit afternoon.

Maybe. Maybe not.

He thought about Clare. Did he want to see her tonight?

Well, no, to be honest about it, he didn
^'
t. But
if he disappeared for two weeks or so without having even said good-bye to her,
then he'd have to write her off his books; she wouldn't like that.

He'd better.

He stopped in at a drug store and called her home. He said,
"This is George, Clare. Listen, I'm being sent out of town tomorrow on an
assignment; don
^'
t know how long I'll be gone. One of those things
that might be a few days or a few weeks. But could I see you late this evening,
to say so-long?
^"

"Why sure, George. What time?"

"It might be after nine, but not much after. That be
okay? I
^'
m seeing Charlie first, on business; may not be able to get
away before nine."

"Of course, George. Any time."

***

He stopped in at a hamburger stand, although he wasn
^'
t
hungry, and managed to eat a sandwich and a piece of pie. That made it a
quarter after six and, if he walked, he'd get to Charlie's at just about the
right time. So he walked.

Charlie met him at the door. With finger on his lips, he
jerked his head backward toward the kitchen where Marge was wiping dishes. He
whispered, "I didn
^'
t tell Marge, George. It
^'
d worry
her."

He wanted to ask Charlie why it would, or should, worry
Marge, but he didn't. Maybe he was a little afraid of the answer. It would have
to mean that Marge was worrying about him already, and that was a bad sign. He
thought he
^'
d been carrying everything off pretty well for three
years now.

Anyway, he couldn
^'
t ask because Charlie was
leading him into the living room and the kitchen was within easy earshot, and
Charlie was saying, "Glad you decided you
^'
d like a game of
chess, George. Marge is going out tonight; movie she wants to sec down at the
neighborhood show. I was going to that card game out of self-defense, but I
didn't want to.
^"