The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Long Arm, by Franz Habl

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Title: The Long Arm

Author: Franz Habl

Release Date: May 30, 2010 [EBook #32610]

Language: English


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                            The Long Arm

                          By FRANZ HABL[1]

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales October
1937. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.]


[Sidenote: _Creeping, writhing, insidiously crawling and groping, the
long arm reached out in its ghastly errand of death_]


I had been out of Germany for thirty-five years, drawn hither and
thither by various glittering of will-of-the-wisps. When I returned to
my native country, I was as poor in pocket as when I left, and much
poorer in illusions.

The Berlin insurance company which I had represented with such mediocre
success in Switzerland, Austria and Belgium agreed to let me sell for
them at home, and by a curious coincidence there was an opening in the
quaint old Bavarian city in which I had been born and bred.

I will pass over the strangely mingled feelings with which I rode in a
Twentieth Century railroad train past the thousand-year-old walls of one
of the most curious ancient cities in Europe, a town moreover whose
every winding narrow street and sharp-gabled building had been the
companion of my infancy and childhood. No one seemed to know me, and I
recognized no one. For several days I made no attempt to sell life
insurance, but wandered in a dream, the bewildered ghost of my former
self, about the spots which I had known in happier days.

One dull rainy afternoon I took refuge from the weather in a dingy
little coffee-house in which, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I along
with certain boon companions, had learned the gentle art of billiards.
It seemed as if every article of furniture was just as I had walked away
from them, well toward half a century before. It was raining outside,
and I sat alone in the gloomy, smoky old place, pondering the sweet and
bitter mysteries of life.

While I sat thus, staring out with unseeing eyes at the rain which was
by this time beating down smartly on the pavement, I became conscious
that someone in the room was staring at me. I had not noticed that there
was anyone else in the dark, low-ceilinged place except the obsequious
proprietor who had served me my cigar and coffee. Now I realized that a
man who sat in the corner diagonally across from me was studying me
curiously from over his newspaper. His face was one that I had seen
before. Suddenly, across all the years, I remembered him. And in that
same moment he rose and came toward me with his hand held out.

We had been in school together, in the Gymnasium. He had been a strange
fellow with few friends, but had enjoyed the reputation of being the
best student in his class. But in his last year in the Gymnasium he had,
for what reason I never knew, excited the animosity of a cantankerous
old professor who had publicly declared that Gustav was not the kind of
boy who should have a Gymnasium diploma and that he, the professor, was
determined never to give him a passing grade. My father had admired the
boy very much, and at one juncture when my marks looked perilously low,
he had employed Gustav to tutor me. Gustav had been so successful that
Father was delighted and made him a present of a silver cigarette case
with Gustav's initials and mine engraved on it. I remembered all this
very distinctly as we shook hands, but I was doing fast thinking,
because for the life of me I couldn't remember his strange last name. I
had a feeling that it was a very foreign name, Polish or Croatian or
something of the sort. As he mentioned this and that, I fear I answered
him a little absently and incoherently. The name was almost there. The
syllables flitted tantalizingly just out of my reach. But I was sure the
name began with a B. Wasn't it a Bam- or a Ban-something? Ah! I had it.
Banaotovich!

From that moment the conversation went more easily. I was surprized and
pleased when Banaotovich drew his silver cigarette-case out of his
pocket to prove to me how highly he thought of my poor deceased father.
We were soon launched on a cordial exchange of childhood memories.
Banaotovich seemed a good-hearted fellow after all, and I wondered why
in my childhood I had never been quite comfortable in his company. I
remembered that other boys of the group had admitted to me
confidentially that they were more than a little afraid of him.

       *       *       *       *       *

The longer we talked the more intimate, the more in the nature of a
mutual confession, our conversation became. I admitted to Banaotovich
that the hifalutin fashion in which I had left the town to win fame and
fortune years before, had been asinine in the extreme, and that it
served me just right to have to sneak back unknown and penniless.
Banaotovich rejoined that for all his pride in his school marks he had
remained a person of no importance, and that the pot had not the
slightest intention of making itself ridiculous by calling the kettle
black. He seemed almost painfully inclined to run himself down. I could
feel in his manner a sort of pathetic reaching out for sympathy and
consideration. And it began to seem as if he were about to tell me
something or ask me for something. But whatever he had to tell seemed
hard to say, and it was slow in coming over his lips.

Banaotovich ordered two bottles of the heavy native wine. I drank
sparingly of it, because it goes to my head. But Banaotovich swallowed
two or three glassfuls in hasty succession, and his cheeks grew flushed.
There was a pause. Suddenly he leaned across the table toward me and
spoke in a hoarse, excited whisper.

"Modersohn," he said anxiously, "I want to make a confession to you--a
terrible confession. It may turn you against me completely. Maybe you
don't want to hear it. If you don't, say so, and I'll go home. But it
seems as if I've got to tell somebody about it. It seems as if I've got
to find somebody who understands me and can excuse me, or it will kill
me. Shall I tell you? Shall I?"

I was startled. I was reasonably sure that Banaotovich was no criminal,
since he had lived half a century in his native city, undisturbed and
from all he had told me solvent and respected. I had always known that
he was a queer fish, a brooding, solitary sort of person, and I settled
myself to listen to some harmless bit of psychopathy which meant nothing
except to the unfortunate subject.

"My dear fellow," I said, no doubt a little patronizingly, "I am sure
you haven't anything to confess that will make you out an outrageous
rascal, but if it will do you any good to tell me your troubles, I am
ready to listen to them."

"Thank you," said Banaotovich in a trembling voice. "I've done nothing
that they can put me behind the bars for. But I--I----"

He stared at me sternly.

"But I've done worse things," he said solemnly, "than some poor fellows
that have been strung up by the neck and choked to death!"

I laughed, a little nervously. "Tell me your story, if you like," I
said, "and let me decide just how black you are. But I haven't a great
deal of apprehension. We're all of us poor miserable sinners, as far as
that's concerned. I could tell you things about myself----"

Banaotovich was not listening to me at all. He had fallen suddenly into
a fit of black brooding. After a minute or two, he looked up and asked
sharply:

"Do you remember Wolansky?"

Wolansky was the Greek professor who had threatened to vote against
Banaotovich when he was finishing his course at the Gymnasium.

"Of course," said I. "And I remember well how he abused you that last
year. If there ever was a cantankerous old scoundrel, Wolansky was just
that identical individual!"

"Maybe," he said absently; then after another pause:

"Do you remember that Wolansky died suddenly, just a little while before
the end of the school year?"

I nodded. "I imagine that was a great piece of good luck for you," I
said.

"Yes," said Banaotovich. "If he had lived, I should never have had my
diploma. As it was, I finished with honors. If Wolansky hadn't died when
he did, I'd have been ruined. Don't forget that--ruined!"

I was puzzled at his insistence. "Yes, you would have been seriously
handicapped," I agreed. "Ruined is the word, perhaps."

Banaotovich's face was purple with wine and some strange kind of
suffering. "Do you remember another thing?" he said thickly. "Do you
remember an old Hindoo who had a dark little hole away back of the shops
and the beer depot and the livery stables between the Old Market and the
river?"

"The old fellow that had love charms and told fortunes and helped people
to health and wealth and happiness?" I said in a tone of slightly forced
cheerfulness. It was hard to be cheerful with those somber eyes boring
into you. "Yes, I remember him, all right. I wanted to go and see him
once, when I was about fifteen or sixteen, but Father told me that
meddling with the black art had sent more people to hell than it had
helped. And Father was so terribly earnest about it that he frightened
me. I never went. As a matter of fact it was only a passing fancy, and I
soon forgot all about him."

"That Hindoo," said my old school-fellow thoughtfully, "knew things
about the secret forces in the universe that made him almost a god. And
he taught me things that the wisest philosopher in the world doesn't
suspect. Still, your father may have been right. I think it very likely
that what he taught me may send me to hell!"

I shivered. I looked up nervously to make sure that the way was clear to
the door. I began to suspect that my friend Banaotovich, though he was
certainly not a criminal, might be a dangerous lunatic.

My _vis-à-vis_ rubbed absently at a protuberance on his left side. I had
noticed it when he first came across the room to speak to me. A
deformity--I was sure it had not been there when he was a boy--or
perhaps a tumor or some such thing as that.

"I kept very quiet about what the Hindoo taught me, because I knew most
people felt about such things much as you say your father did. And I
wanted to get on in the world. But I had an idea the Hindoo could help
me get on. Perhaps he _has_----"

And he stared gloomily at space.

"Perhaps he has. And perhaps he hasn't."

He brooded. Then he took up the thread of his story.

"Wolansky nearly drove me to suicide. I read and studied and crammed,
day and night. I tried everything I could think of to overcome the man's
antagonism. I crawled in the dust before him like a whipped cur! Nothing
did any good. And when I saw he hated me and was determined to smash me,
I began to hate _him_, too. I came to hate him worse than I hated the
devils in hell. There was a time when I had to hold myself back with all
my strength to keep from sticking a knife into him or braining him with
a chair. But the Hindoo and I made some experiments with telepathy, and
I discovered that there are other ways of killing a man besides stabbing
him or giving him poison.

"I learned how to make a man in front of me on the street turn around
and look at me. I learned how to make _you_ dream about me and come and
tell me the dream the next morning," (when he said that, I jumped, for I
remembered having done exactly that thing!). "I learned how to bring out
a bruise on Wolansky's face although he lived on the other side of town;
so that he went around asking people how he could have bumped his
forehead without knowing it. And at last I went to bed one night, set my
mind on Wolansky, and said over and over to myself a thousand times:
Die, you dog! You've _got_ to die! I _order_ you to die!

"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.