Weird Tales volume 24 number 03 (17 page)

"No doubt you will call to mind how severe the weather was in the winter of '16-' 17. It was by far the worst winter in the war. The ponds and wells were frozen solid, and the very earth seemed blighted with the intense cold. Toward evening, on one of the bitterest days, I was working in the laboratory when there came a light, timid tap on the front door. The sound was so unusual in that desolate region that for a moment I attributed it to a fall of half-melted snow from the roof; but presently there came another tap, this time accompanied by a low, half-articulate moan. I caught up the nearest weapon handy—which happened to be a short iron bar which I had been using as a poker for my furnace—and made my way to the door. Outside was a man dressed in a ragged and mud-plastered khaki uniform. The badges and buttons had been roughly torn off, so that the tunic was open, showing the gray shirt beneath. He wore no cap, and his hands and face were blue with the cold.

" 'Hullo!' I said, staring at him.

"He was leaning against the door-post, as though for support, and at the sound of my voice he raised two deeply sunken, lack-luster eyes to mine.

" 'Hullo, matey,' he responded weakly.

' 'What are you doing here?' I demanded. 'You'll catch your death of cold if you go about half dressed in this weather.'

" 'I'm half dead already, matey;' and as though to prove his words, he stag-

gered forward and would have fallen if I had not caught him in time.

"When I put my arms round him I got a shock. The man was nothing but skin and bone, and when I lifted him he weighed no heavier than a large child. He was starved—not 'starved with the cold,' as they say hereabouts, but literally starved with hunger. I got him into the living-room, pulled him round with a stiff glass of brandy, then ransacked the larder and watched him eat. Eat!—I thought he would never stop eating, and as he wolfed the platefuls I took a good look at him.

is age could not have been more than eighteen or twenty, but he was tall and big-made and when in his usual health he must have been unusually strong. His hair was fair and inclined to be curly, and I judged by its length that some considerable time had elapsed since it had last received the attentions of a military barber. His features were prominent, but not unpleasing—indeed, had it not been for the curious expression in his eyes he might have been considered handsome. I find it difficult to convey that expression in w T ords. It was at once wary, alert, shifting, and restless. But the only way in which I can make my meaning clear is to describe it as an animal look—not that which one sees in the eyes of an intelligent dog, or even a cat, or any domesticated animal; rather was it the look of instinctive hostility and distrust which one may see in die eyes of a wild beast, untamed and untamable, as it roams its native wilds. I took but little heed of this strange trait at the time, naturally attributing it to the hardships which he had obviously undergone. Later on I had good reason to recall it to mind.

"When he had cleared his plate for

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367

the third time, I began to put a few questions :

" "What's your name?'

" 'Jake.'

" 'Jake what?' The length of the pause which followed my question warned me that the answer was likely to be a lie.

" 'Jake Thomas Smith.'

" 'Have you any more names?' I queried sarcastically, and to my surprize he nodded.

" 'The blokes in my platoon call me "Crazy Jake",' he informed me solemnly.

"I looked hard at him, suspecting that I was being paid back in my own coin. But he went on unconcernedly finishing up the remaining scraps of food, cracking the bones with his strong teeth, the canines of which were unusually long and pointed. When he licked up every scrap of gravy off his plate, just like a dog, I began to glimpse something of the truth. He was one of those rare examples of extreme atavism, a throw-back to primitive types, an unlucky being who had been cursed with more than his fair share of the thin streak of animalism which is the compulsory legacy of the human race. Later on, when I had the opportunity of examining him more closely, I found that he was able to exercise those muscles (represented in the normal man as mere rudimentary survivals) which move the ears; his sense of smell was unusually keen; his eyes possessed the power of reflecting the light in exactly the same manner as the eyes of certain species of carnivores. It came as something of a shock to think that such a man had been accepted for military service, but, after all, there was nothing wrong with him in a physical sense. On the contrary, as is so often the case with these reversions, the man was exceptionally strong and active, and his peculiar mental traits might well have

passed unnoticed in the perfunctory examination to which recruits were subjected in the latter days of the war.

"By degrees I got his story from him. Of course he was a deserter, though to do him bare justice he seemed quite unconscious of the gravity of his offense—or, indeed, that he had committed any offense at all. He had simply got tired of his surroundings, and the irksome restraints on his liberty, and had wandered off, his instinct drawing him to the great open moors, living on herbs and roots, and scraps that he could find or steal, until the intense cold had beaten him.

" 'And what do you intend to do?' I asked him when he had finished his vague and rambling tale.

"He gave me a vacant stare. 'I dun-no,' was the extent of his future plans.

" 'Do you know what they'll do to you if they catch you, Jake?'

" 'Make me slope arms by numbers?' His accompanying grimace was eloquent of his distaste for that form of exercise.

" 'They'll do more than that, my poor lad. They will shoot you.'

" 'Me?' he cried with a sort of simple wonder. 'Shoot me dead?'

" 'Dead as mutton,' I had to tell him.

" 'Why?' he demanded in an aggrieved tone. 'I never hurt 'em—I never hurt a fly.'

" 'That's just the trouble, Jake. You became a soldier in order to hurt people. That's what a soldier is for in time of war—to hurt soldiers wearing another sort of uniform—or to get hurt by them.' I tried to explain the matter as best I could, but after I had finished I very much doubted whether the enormity of his offense had penetrated his intelligence. Not that he was an idiot in the ordinary sense of the word; I classed him as a 'mattoid,' a man whose brain could not be gaged by comparison with ordinary

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standards. He might be trained, and taught to perform certain tasks, much in the same manner as an intelligent dog goes through certain tricks. More than that, he might be capable of having certain fixed and elementary ideas instilled into him by simple repetition; for later on I had good reason to know that he possessed an unusually retentive memory. But beyond that, and as far as original and self-conscious thought and reasoning were concerned, his mind was an absolute blank. And as I realized the fact, I knew that here was the very sen-ant I had been praying for—strong, willing, docile, and no more capable of understanding the work on which I was engaged than was a horse or a dog.

SAT up late that night, watching Jake sleeping curled up on the floor in front of the fire, debating with myself whether I should turn him over to the military authorities or keep him myself. In the end I decided that he would be serving his country more effectively by doing the menial work of Moor Lodge than by endangering his own life, and the lives of all around him, by handling a loaded rifla and experimenting with Mills's bombs. In the morning I put the matter to him, and he was only too glad to stay with me. He soon picked up the routine of his simple duties, and for a time all went well. My experiments proceeded apace. I succeeded in isolating the missing element and gasefying it in a form that could not be detected when mingled with the ordinary atmosphere. Complete success was within my very grasp when I was brought up short by an unexpected and disquieting discovery.

"You must understand that I had never attempted to keep Jake confined to the house—indeed, I doubt whether he would have obeyed me had I forbidden him to

leave it. I had provided him with a suit of clothes such as might be worn by a lad working on a farm, and he was accustomed to spend his hours off duty roaming freely about the Moor. One evening he came home at dusk, after having been absent most of the day, took off his coat, and began to sweep out the laboratory where I was still working. At first I took no notice of him, but presently I began to see that he was not giving much attention to what he was doing. Every now and then he would stop sweeping and furtively take something from his trousers pocket, glance at it, polish it on his sleeve, examine it again, and then transfer it to his pocket and go on sweeping. Secretly amused, I watched his antics for a while out of the corner of my eye, and when he was admiring the thing for the umteenth time, I purposely made a sudden movement. Jake tried to conceal his treasure, but in his hurry to replace it in his pocket the thing slipped out of his hand, falling on the stone floor with a jingle that was unmistakable. It was a brightly polished five-shilling piece.

" 'Hullo, Jake,' I laughed. 'I didn't know you were a moneyed man. Where did you get that from? Have you been robbing a bank or something?' For I knew well enough that he had not had any money when he arrived.

"Instead of saying that he'd found it— which I quite thought he had—he jibbed at my question and stood silent, his hands fumbling with the broom-handle while he shifted his feet uneasily, the very picture of conscious guilt.

' 'Where did you get that money from?' I repeated more sternly. 'Did you steal it?'

"He bridled up at that. 'Jake is not a thief!' he declared, looking me full in the face.

" 'Then where did you get it from?'

W. T.—6

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369

" 'Some one give it me,' he said at length.

" 'Who's the some one?'

" 'A man.'

" "What man?'

" "The man that lives in the big house.'

"His evident reluctance to answer only increased my suspicions that something was wrong. I kept questioning him until I learnt that 'the big house' was the place which is now known as 'The Torside Private Sanatorium.' Turning this piece of information over in my mind, I handed him back his coin, and as he dropped it into his pocket I heard it jingle against other money.

" 'Ah, have you got many of those pretty bits of silver, Jake?' I asked carelessly, pretending to resume my work as though the matter were of no importance.

"He fell into the trap at once. He was unable to count, but he proudly held up the outstretched fingers of one hand.

' 'Five, eh?' I commented with forced geniality. 'He must be a nice, kind man to give away all that money. Do you think he might give me some?'

" 'Not all at once,' Jake explained in-jaocently. 'He only gives me one at a time.'

"Oh-ho! thought I, so he has been at the 'big house' four times before today. The mystery was deepening!

" 'I think I'll have to pay a visit to this kind gentleman who gives money away,' I smiled. 'I've been wanting to meet some one like that all my life.'

' 'You'll have to sing first,' said Jake, eyeing me as though doubtful as to my vocal abilities.

" 'What?' I cried.

: ' 'I always have to sing before he gives me anything.'

: " 'And what on earth do you sing?' I asked, utterly bewildered.

" 'Songs,' grunted Jake. W. T.—7

:< 'Sing one to me,' I said, struck by a sudden idea, 'and I'll give you another five shillings.'

"He needed no further inducement, but immediately put down the broom and struck up one of the very unofficial marching tunes that he'd learnt in camp. But it wasn't the tune that caused the color to drain away from my face and my heart to be filled with a sickening horror —it was the doggerel words which he had adopted in place of the quasi-French of the original. They were a crude but recognizable parody of the chemical equation which represented the composition of my secret explosive!

"In a flash I realized what had happened. Underrating the creature's intelligence and forgetting his marvelously retentive memory, I had not troubled to keep my notes out of sight. Somebody had got hold of him and bribed him to learn them off by heart—and who was likely to do such a thing except a secret enemy agent? Cold sweat broke out on my forehead as I saw how narrowly irretrievable disaster had been averted. Once the secret of the gas was in the hands of the enemy, it would be a mere matter of days—perhaps only hours—before their immense and well-equipped system of gas-producing factories would enable them to wipe out the Allied Armies en masse. At that time it was known in official circles that the German guns were firing more than fifty per cent of gas and war-chemical shells, besides using their apparatus for cloud attacks and batteries of short-range Liven's projectors. Was it likely they would refuse to use this new and terrible weapon when once it lay ready to their hands?

"Steadying myself with an effort, I turned to the innocent cause of all the trouble:

' 'So that was the song you sang to the

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nice gentleman at the big house, eh? Did he seem to think that it was worth the money?'

"Jake shook his head. 'No, he was angry and said I must have learnt it wrong. He said he wanted to hear the last song that was in that book,' and he pointed to the large note-book in which I entered the results of my experiments.

"A wave of relief swept over me as I -i\ realized that the fool had not yet betrayed the secret; yet he must now know the final and ultimate formula, for he had just repeated it to me. But the explanation was not far to seek: he had taken another look at the book and memorized the last formula since he had returned that evening. So far, my secret was safe; but how long would it remain so after Jake had paid another visit to the "big house'?

"That visit must be prevented at all_ costs. But how? If he chose to quit the house that minute, I had no power to stop him, How could I ensure the silence of a creature of such mentality unless I silenced him for ever? For ever! I felt myself trembling as a thought flashed through my mind as a blinding electric flash traverses a vacuum tube. Within the reach of my arm was a phial containing a liquid preparation of the deadly formula. So far it had never been tried on a living organism, but here — forced on me by circumstances over which I had had no control—was the opportunity to test its efficiency in a practical manner and at the same time ensure the silence of the only man likely to betray it to the enemy.