Part 63

“Enough of that sort of thing,” said Weltmann. “Now, if you will allow me, we will have some examples of transference of will. I should like one of the gentlemen to come up here.”

Someone stepped on to the stage.

“Do you know this gentleman, Princess?”

“Yes, it is Baron Prewitz!”

“Is the Baron’s being known to the Princess sufficient for the company to rule out the idea of any private understanding between him and myself?”

There were cries of “Certainly!”

Meanwhile Weltmann was writing on a table something which it was impossible for the Baron to read. Then he threw the small writing-block down to the company below. He looked at Prewitz, quite quietly, for a short time. Then Prewitz, with stealthy movements, left the platform and went slowly and cautiously from chair to chair, looking everyone in the face. Weltmann called out, “I should like four ladies or gentlemen to come up here quickly. Be quick, please!”

Several started up. Three gentlemen and one lady remained on the platform, the others returning to their seats. Weltmann placed them round the table, pointing at a pack of cards lying there.

“Are this lady and these gentlemen known to the company?”

The Princess nodded, and there was a chorus of “Yes!” Meanwhile Prewitz was advancing towards Wenk. Again Weltmann wrote for some time upon a memorandum, casting from time to time his glance upon the four sitting at the table. Suddenly one of them said, “Shall it be vingt-et-un or poker?” Weltmann went on writing.

They decided upon vingt-et-un, and at once began to play.

“We want one more,” said the lady.

“I am just coming, dear lady,” said Weltmann. “You take the bank!”

By this time Prewitz had come to Wenk. He looked at him steadfastly for a while, then suddenly seized his left breast-pocket and drew out the revolver, placing himself at Wenk’s side, the weapon in his hand.

Weltmann said from the stage, “That is because you are so incautious as to carry a loaded revolver in your pocket! Please”--he turned to the audience--“be so good as to read what I have written there!”

Someone read out: “The Baron is to go along the first row, chair by chair, and where he finds someone with a loaded revolver in his pocket, he is to take it out and sit beside him with it.”

They all clapped their hands, a proceeding which Weltmann, by a brief gesture, stopped. He left off writing, handed the block down to the Princess, and sat down with the card-players.

“Page one!” he said to his hostess. She read it to herself, then handed it to her right-hand neighbour and looked anxiously towards the stage, where the following incidents were taking place. Weltmann won game after game. Sometimes he looked away from the table, and then it seemed to Wenk as if he were beckoning him to come up. Wenk knew it must be a delusion, due to some effect of the light striking Weltmann’s eye, but none the less he felt uneasy. The idea occurred to him to yield, and go up so that he might face this man at close quarters and make sure that those lightning glances had no reference to him. “Yet that would be very foolish!” he said to himself, striving to get rid of the impulse.

Suddenly, without a single word having been spoken, one of the players leaned back, saying in a clear ringing voice, as if speaking aloud in a dream, “What have I just done? I had twenty-one, and then someone spoke with my voice, and said, ‘I have lost again.’”

He seized the cards he had thrown aside, and showed an ace, a knave and a ten.

“Too late!” said Weltmann, who was holding the bank. Wenk put his hands to his head. He had already lived through such a scene once before. When was it, where, and to whom did it occur? He cudgelled his brains to remember. The image of it stood out distinctly, but it stood apart from any suggestion of the time and place and person.

From the recesses of his mind a form seemed to emerge simultaneously with his groping efforts to recover the recollections he sought. A form--was it a human being, a lifeless column, a monster? He could not say which ... but then the form was bleeding somewhere, and now Wenk saw, through the misty phantasies of these recent occurrences, that it had a mouth, and that this mouth suddenly uttered, in clear staccato tones, the name “Tsi--nan--fu!”

Wenk now distinctly recollected having heard this name from the lips of the old Professor who was none other than the Dr. Mabuse on whose account he had come to Berlin. “Dr. Mab ..., Dr. Mab ...,” whispered the secret voices. Wenk tried to call to mind the features of the old Professor, but he could not recollect them clearly. Only the mouth which had uttered the name of the Chinese town with such strange impressiveness was distinct to his vision.

“Now why,” said Wenk to himself in the midst of the images raised in him by these recollections, “why should I think at this moment of the pseudo-Professor? Why do I think of the Professor, and not of Mabuse under another form, his real form, such as I saw him that evening in reality in the Four Seasons Hall? Mabuse as a hypnotist? What audacity! As a hypnotist appearing in public? Had Mabuse the same disconcerting capability as Weltmann, and had Weltmann the same dark background of crime as Mabuse?” he asked himself. His thoughts grew ever more remote, more indistinct and unreal. They were no longer thoughts--they were misty images which had arisen in his phantasy under the compelling power of those eyes yonder. He sought to fix his eyes on Weltmann, striving to picture him with a reddish beard, such as Mabuse had appeared possessed of when he first encountered him.

And then suddenly Wenk realized how it was he felt some unmistakable connection with the player there who threw away his cards although he held twenty-one and must undoubtedly have won the game. These words were familiar to him from the story told by the murdered Hull. They were written upon the first page of the notebook stolen from him by Mabuse’s chauffeur when he left him that night in the Schleissheim Park, and he had copied them down word for word after his first talk with Hull. Yes, the bleeding form was that of Hull, and it drooped like a weeping-willow over Wenk’s spirit. The blood-besprinkled leaves whispered ever “It is I, Hull! It is I, Hull!”

Then it seemed as if in the mists which continued to gather in ever-varying shapes in Wenk’s brain there grew and stood out, as the bone stands out from its tissues in the Röntgen-ray photographs, a dark nucleus, a central, death-endowed essence, something stony ... something black ... a man.

The Princess handed him Weltmann’s block, and he thrust these ideas away somewhat, though he had to struggle to see the words. Then he read: “The banker wins every game. If one of the players has a better card than he who holds the bank, he is incapable of holding them against him.”

He had hardly read this when Weltmann, speaking from the midst of his game in a voice which seemed to strike Wenk to earth, said, “Read the second page!” Wenk turned the page in affright. He read, “Under the hypnotist’s influence one of the players tries to cheat, by dealing himself an ace. He is caught in the act!”