Keeban

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I My Brother Finds Himself in Two Places

at Once . i

II And Escapes From Both

I GOT into my clothes in a minute; Jerry hadn’t been able to remain in the house, but I found him walking up and down beside the cab which he had kept.

“ Chicago Avenue police station,” he said to the driver, and he was in ahead of me. “ They took her there,” he told me, “ from where they found her — on West Division Street near the river.”

He had no doubt whatever that she was Doro¬ thy Crewe — his Dot whom he had loved; and, for what had come to her, he was holding him¬ self guilty.

“ Steve, she thought she was going with me! ” he cried out. “ It was my Keeban! There is a Keeban, you see; my Keeban took her away and killed her! ”

I jerked in spite of myself. You, of course, cannot understand why without this word of explanation. Jerry and I, as most of our acquaintances know — and the Chicago papers, in their occasional discussions of the Fanneals, always veiledly refer to the fact — are not blood brothers. It is a perfectly evident fact to any one who has seen both of us; for I am the Fanneal type, — tall and with big bones, strong and spare in flesh but slow moving; my features are Rhode Island Yankee transplanted to Illinois, regular enough but too angular; too much nose, a bit too much chin, also. My hair is sandy brown; my eyes blue. Jerry’s eyes are blue but mine have no quality of the living color of his; when I set the word down, it suggests that our eyes, at least, are alike, whereas we are no¬ where more different. Mine are merchants’ eyes, come down from ten recorded generations of cautious traders; Jerry’s are — who knows? Jerry’s long, graceful body is not so strong but twice as quick as mine; Jerry’s clear, dark skin and his soft, black hair on his daredevil head; his small-boned but strong hands; the laugh and the lilt of him and his elan are — French, per¬ haps? Or Spanish, or Italian? All three to¬ gether or none, but some other marvellous blend of energetic, passionate people? No one can say, least of all, Jerry himself. For one day, when I was about two years old and my nurse i6 had me playing carefully by myself in a selected and remote spot in Lincoln Park, Jerry ap¬ peared under the trees and ran across the grass to play with me. Of course my nurse immedi¬ ately jumped to protect me from contamination from a dark stranger, though it is remembered that he was clean and nicely clothed; she tried to send him away and, when he wouldn’t go but eluded her and hugged me — and I hugged him — she parted us and tried to take him back to his mother. But she couldn’t find his mother or any one else who claimed him; she couldn’t find even a policeman. (Obviously I had no mem¬ ory of my own about this but was told it long afterwards.) Then my mother was driven by that way and found Jerry and me together.

It seemed that mother considered my nurse to blame for Jerry becoming detached from his own party; my mother always fixed blame for occurrences; also, she always felt responsibility. She felt that now for Jerry and took him in her carriage and brought him home where she kept him isolated in a guest room while she had the police notified and advertisements put in the papers. She said she would persist in efforts to return Jerry to his parents until she got results; the authorities — she thought — were too careless about such matters and too soon gave up, and merely sent a child to an institution. Ac¬ cordingly, Jerry remained at our house; and then, when my mother’s efforts brought no re¬ sult, she still kept him. A child’s specialist examined him and found him reassuringly sound, with excellent development, no ascer¬ tainable defects or hereditary taints, all senses acute, and decidedly “ bright.” Apparently, he was about two years old; “ of European parent¬ age ” was as far as the doctor would commit himself.

“ French,” my mother decided. “ He says his name is ‘Jerry.’ I don’t think that it is his name; it probably represents 4 mon cheri.’ ”

“ Spanish,” my father always said, for no reason, I believe, other than he thought my mother was too positive and also he particularly liked the Spanish. They couldn’t help liking Jerry, who knew, besides his name, only the usual hundred or so ordinary words which a child picks up first; English words, they were, at first spoken with a marked French accent, my mother said.

So they let Jerry and me play together; I was an only child. A companion, therefore, was “good for me”; and we have been together ever since. I cannot remember a time when there was not Jerry; he cannot consciously re¬ call any home previous to ours or any one pre¬ vious to us, — besides the nameless “ mama ” and “ papa ” whom he asked for, at first, and “ Keeban.”

Keeban, apparently, was another child; a brother or sister; or perhaps only a playmate. Jerry could not describe him, of course; he could only go about looking for and asking for Keeban. Naturally, as time went on, my mother and father replaced Jerry’s own nameless mama and papa; but I never replaced Keeban; and Jerry never forgot him. As we became older, Jerry’s idea of Keeban became at the same time more imaginary and more definite; for Keeban changed from some one for whom Jerry searched to some one always with us, — an im¬ aginary companion, a third to us two, interesting, always up to something and most convenient to accuse when we were caught in heinous wrong.

I can remember, when we were about seven, asking Jerry what Keeban was like. I did not consider that Keeban represented a real person; he was, to me, merely one of Jerry’s interesting imaginations.

“ Keeban,” said Jerry, “ is another me. Don’t you never have a Keeban, too? ”

“ No,” I said; but I had Jerry’s — that other imaginary boy, the duplicate of Jerry, who came to see us, whom we played with, who did extra¬ ordinary things and went away. Then, gradu¬ ally, we dropped him; that is, Jerry ceased to mention him and we stopped having him “ come.” I think I forgot him until we were in Princeton University together; a lot of us had been to New York over the week-end and after we’d been back a few days, Jim Townsend dropped into Jerry’s and my room, when Jerry was out, and said:

“ Steve, I wouldn’t say a word against Jerry to anybody but you; but you ought to know how queer he is sometimes.”

“ When?” I said.

“ Last Saturday in New York; I was down on the east side with a bunch of our class, just knocking about the ordinary way, when we ran on Jerry in a rum lot, I tell you. He pretended not to recognize any of us; in fact, he was in a bunch that tried to rough us; we had rather a go. When it was over, I got at Jerry, he made me so damn mad going in with that lot of muck¬ ers against us. I told him what I thought and he looked at me as cool as could be. ‘ Who do you think I am?’ he asked me, as though I didn’t know him in Bowery ‘suitings’; for he had on the whole get-up of his friends, Steve. I gave him up, I tell you; and he wasn’t drunk, either. Since he didn’t know me, I decided I wouldn’t know him, next time I saw him here; so I passed him outside just now without speak¬ ing. He came after me and asked why. I told him; and what do you suppose he did? Denied he’d even been on the east side Saturday; he said I hadn’t seen him; that wasn’t he.”

“ It wasn’t, Jim,” I said. “ Jerry was with me all Saturday on Broadway. We never got east of Fifth Avenue at all.”

“That’s right, Steve. Stand up for him; I would, too,” Jim said; and nothing I could say would shake him that he’d seen Jerry. He was so sure about it, and so were the rest of the bunch who’d been with him, that it got me wondering, particularly when I remembered later that Jerry hadn’t stayed with me all Saturday; we were separated for a couple of hours.

I said nothing to him about it; and it soon blew over until, a couple of months later, an¬ other bunch of fellows from the college ran into Jerry on the same side of town, but peacefully, this time; so peacefully, in fact, that he bor¬ rowed a hundred dollars from them. Said he would be in trouble down there unless he had the money. I heard about this from several men and then from Jerry.

“ Tell me straight, Steve; do you believe I do queer things? ” he asked me suddenly one night.

“ Of course not,” I said.

“ I know you wouldn’t think it when I’m my¬ self; but do you think there’s a chance that sometimes I’m not myself and I go queer — like that fight with Jim Townsend a few weeks ago; and borrowing a hundred dollars from Davis in New York last Saturday. I swear to you, Steve, I haven’t the slightest remembrance of even seeing Fred or any of the fellows with him who saw me and saw him hand me the hundred.”

“ They must have gone queer themselves,” I said.

“ No,” said Jerry. “ What they say is true. I don’t remember seeing them; but I feel it.”

“ Feel what? ” I said.

“ That they did meet me; for there’s another me about, Steve; yt>u know I’ve felt that. I know now he must be one of two things — either another personality living in me which turns Jerry Fanneal off, sometimes, and turns on —

Keeban, Steve, like the dual personality cases in the psychology books; or he must be a real, physical duplicate of me — Keeban; that’s pos¬ sible, too, of course. But the way ’I feel him usually is another way; and the one way he can’t possibly be; he seems to be me going on and growing up and living my life, as it would have been, if I’d never come to you, Steve. So, that way, sometimes he seems more me than my¬ self; for I seem to be somebody else and he, when I think of him that way, seems to be me.”

We couldn’t get any further than that; Jerry and I went to New York the next day and poked about the district where Davis claimed to have met Jerry, but we couldn’t find trace of anybody like him. Jerry paid the hundred to Davis, I remember; he considered himself in some way responsible and soon the incident passed off as the fight had; Jerry lived it down and nothing like it occurred again for years, until this night when Jerry, at the Drake, talked to himself at the Sparlings and he went back to the Sparlings to learn that he had just that moment gone out with Dorothy Crewe.

If what Jerry had just told me was exactly true, there was — of course — no explanation of it but one; there existed, physically, another

Jerry. I could not say to myself that Jerry had not told me the truth as he knew it; but I could not help wondering how much of it he knew. Was he actually at the Drake at the same time “ he ” also was at the Sparlings’; could he have talked to “ himself ”; and done the other things he related? Or was there, living outside of him most of the time, Keeban — the man he would have become had he never come to us — who occasionally, at long intervals, could take com¬ mand of Jerry’s body? That idea had never seized me until to-night as I sat beside him in the cab which was hurrying us to the police sta¬ tion where Dorothy Crewe lay; for now I no longer doubted, either, that she was Dot.

Ahead on the dark and still street showed lighted windows and a police ambulance stood end to the curb; we saw it was empty and so we went at once into the station.

In a little, dingy room a girl lay on the stretcher by which she had been carried; an ambulance doctor and two police detectives bent over her. The police turned to us when we entered.

Jerry stepped ahead of me but over his shoul¬ der I saw Dorothy Crewe. She lay almost as if she were asleep in her pale blue dress in which she had danced that night; her hair was beauti¬ ful as ever — corn-color hair, little disarranged; her face and neck and arms were white and run with red where cuts and scratches showed. There were signs of street soil on her dress but none on her body; some one had washed them away.

“She’s not dead!” Jerry cried; then, in a whisper, “ How is she? ”

Said the ambulance surgeon, “ We don’t know.”

“ But she’s not dead! ”

“No; not yet, anyway.”

Jerry’s face hovered over hers as he searched hers; then, very softly, he kissed her. “You’ll not die! ” he whispered to her; then, to the sur¬ geon, “ Don’t let her die, doctor,” he said.

“What’s happened here?” I asked the offi¬ cers.

It seemed that she’d been found in the street by a patrolman walking his beat; he thought she was dead so he sent her to the station. Now, having found life in her, the doctor was for tak¬ ing her to a hospital; but he honestly thought it no use at all.

“ What do you know? ” the police came back at us.

“ She’s Dorothy Crewe,” Jerry told them, and added her father’s name and number of his home. “ To-night I took her to a dance at the Sparlings’. She had a necklace — here.”

Gently he touched her throat where were marks made by him who had snatched at her necklace and torn it away.

“Diamonds and sapphires,” Jerry went on and seemed to forget what he said.

A police captain named Mullaney kept at me. “When did she leave Mr. Sparling’s? ”

“ About half-past twelve,” I said. “ She was going from there to a dance at the Drake hotel given by Mr. Casoway. She never arrived there.”

“ Go on,” said the captain.

Jerry went on. “ She left the Sparlings’ wearing, besides what she has on, a blue silk cloak and a necklace of diamonds and sapphires on a platinum chain, which her father brought her from Paris.”

“ Perhaps you’ve read about it,” I put in. “ They were supposed to be worth a quarter million.”

“I suppose,” said Jerry, “they were gone when you found her.”

“ She had on her a quarter million in stones! ”

the captain repeated. “ Well, that makes it some plainer, sir. They was off her when we found her. Now go right on, Mr. Fanneal. She left Mr. Sparling’s big house on the Drive to go to the Drake hotel at half-past twelve, you say? She didn’t go off, at that hour, alone? ”

Jerry swung quickly and looked at me. “ I’ll tell ’em, Steve! ”

“ Go ahead,” I said. God knows, I didn’t want to. I had no idea how to tell it; my thoughts, on the subject of Keeban, were abso¬ lutely a blob, just then.

“ She did not leave alone, Captain,” Jerry told. “ There is some confusion over who she went with. That was why, when she did not come to the Drake or return home, we became alarmed and I telephoned to you. Some people thought she went away with me; but she did not.”

“ Go on,” said Mullaney again.

“ You’ll find a good many that say she went with me, Captain; Gibson, the doorman, and probably Mrs. Sparling and some of the guests. But it wasn’t me, Captain.”

Mullaney squinted his eyes as he looked at Jerry and then he looked at me.

“ Where was you, Mr. Steve Fanneal?” he challenged.

“ I’d gone home, then.”

“Then where was you?” he swung back to Jerry.

“ I’d gone to the Drake.”

“ Leavin’ your partner at Mr. Sparling’s? I thought you said you took her there.”

“ I did.”

“ Then why didn’t you take her away? ”

“ I’ll tell him, Jerry,” I said; for I felt the sudden strength of his suspicion. At first, he had spoken alike to Jerry and to me; but now he treated me and my word in one way and Jerry and his word in another. I was the known, ac¬ tual son of Austin Fanneal; Jerry, as everybody knew, was the waif of any blood from anywhere.'

“ You can’t, Steve,” Jerry warned.

But there, like the fool I was, I started to tell.

Two big men in uniform came in and each took an arm of Jerry.

The doctor was doing things during most of this time; now and then I noticed a hypodermic needle.

Dorothy Crewe breathed and her eyelids flut¬ tered ; she opened her eyes.

Only the grimy ceiling was in her sight; she stared at this and then saw a blue coat, and some realization and remembrance began to reach her; and she jerked and shivered violently.

Jerry started to her, pulling the two big men with him. The motion made her turn her eyes and she saw Jerry; and she screamed!

It sent me shaking; it dropped Jerry down, hiding his face. She was convulsing in a spasm

of hysteria. “He! He! He! He!-” She

seemed to try to cry “ He did it ” but she could only scream “ he, he,” until it went into a crazy laugh.

The doctor tried to calm her; the big men dragged Jerry away. He was making no resist¬ ance, God knows; he was limp. Could a man go against a thing more awful than he’d just met? Here was the girl he loved; she’d trusted herself to him and she believed that, for the dia¬ monds about her neck, he’d attacked her!

She told something more in that scream of a laugh; she told a little, at least, of how she had struggled before she’d been strangled and knocked senseless and thrown into the street. And she had thought Jerry did it!

I stepped along beside him. “ Keeban,” he whispered desperately to me. “ You see there’s Keeban.”

It meant nothing at all to the police. To me? What did I know?

“ Go back to her, Steve,” Jerry begged. “ But, old fellow! ” he held me.

“ What? ”

“ You’ll believe there’s Keeban? Think, Steve! If you don’t, you’ll believe I did that! ”

“No! I know you couldn’t.”

“ And you’ll keep on knowing? You’ll al¬ ways know? ”

“ Jerry! ” I cried.

“ Your word, Steve? ”

“ Of course.”

“ Go back, now, to her.”

I left him to be dragged, limp, down the cor¬ ridor between the big, uniformed men.

In the grimy room, Dorothy Crewe had lost consciousness again; she was quiet; there was nothing I could do for her.

A pair of shots sounded; a couple more, almost together; and yells.

I knew the trouble before they shouted it to us; Jerry had got away. Instantly, without a jerk of warning, he had sprung from their hands as they dragged him, all limp the second before; he was out of a door and gone; and their loud bullets bagged them nothing.

They were all about the streets and alleys searching for him when I came out to the ambu¬ lance beside the stretcher on which was Dorothy Crewe.

“Til not go with you to the hospital,” I told the surgeon. “I’ll go to her people; don’t ’phone them.” And so, while the police looked for Jerry, I went to Dorothy’s people and tried to tell them — Keeban.

Keeban? Of course they did not believe. Stunned themselves, they thought me mildly maddened by what had happened. Keeban! What did I truthfully know of him? I got back home at last and stopped at Jerry’s room, which had always been next to mine; I opened the door and in the dark looked in. “ Keeban! ” I said to myself. “By God, there’s a Keeban; there has to be! ”

And, careful not to wake my own people, I went into my room.

Ill

I HAVE ENCOUNTER BY THE RIVER.

As long as I stayed by myself, I had some luck at believing; but there was morning and the newspapers and telephone calls. I had to tell my father then, and mother; and they talked with the police. They talked with Mrs. Spar¬ ling and Gibson and fifty others who were at the dance. And also they talked with Dorothy.

She was conscious now but in complete col¬ lapse, and her prostration, added to what she said, gave the final proof against Jerry. She’d loved him, too, it seemed; and he’d attacked and robbed her.

There’s no sense in stringing here the sensa¬ tions the papers spread; they were perfectly plain and obvious. “ Foster Son of Millionaire Attacks and Robs Society Girl ”; and “ Found¬ ling of Fanneals Turns Brute”; and “Waif Reared to Riches Reverts to Original Savagery ” and all that tosh. They dogged my people and me, the servants and even our office force. They ran articles by “ professors,” cheap alienists, psy¬ choanalysts and the rest of the ruck running after sensation.

Jerry had “ reverted”; that was the seed of their stuff. He carried in his blood a “ com¬ plex ” which suddenly caused him to cast off all the restraints and habits of thought and conduct which our family had drilled into him and to plan and effect the robbery of the jewels about Dorothy Crewe’s neck. The dance and drink that night had inflamed him, they said; then something flared up inside him and he forgot all that we had grafted into him, forgot even his own obvious advantage in remaining the son of Austin Fanneal, for the “ primordial, overpow¬ ering instinct for violence.”

I found nothing to put against all this. I talked to the people whom Jerry had told me he’d seen at the Drake at the time when Gibson and the rest said he was at the Sparlings’. Town¬ send and Sally Westman and Downs admitted they’d seen Jerry at the Drake but they all be¬ lieved they’d become confused in guessing at the time. It was earlier that he was over there, they thought; then he must have gone back to the Sparlings’ and taken Dorothy away. I got no help from them.

How could I tell them of Keeban? My own mother was sorry for me when I told her. She took the strong line she always does; she considered herself to blame for having taken in Jerry, twenty-eight years ago, and with no knowledge of his blood, rearing a child with un¬ known capacities for crime and putting him into a position to harm others.

Dorothy’s people that day proclaimed a re¬ ward of ten thousand dollars for the taking of Jerry Fanneal, dead or alive; and my father, on that same day, put up ten more. He sent pic¬ tures of Jerry to all the papers and himself sup¬ plied the minute descriptions telegraphed to St. Louis, Cleveland, Denver, Philadelphia, New York, everywhere.

They set the whole world after Jerry while I — I, in those days, went down to business and tried to do it, there in my office with my name on the door, next to the door which had borne Jerry’s name.

But now his name was gone. They dissolved it with acid, so that no one could see that the gold leaf on the glass had ever formed his initial; and they burned every sheet of paper with his name on it. So there by day, beside his empty office, I tried to do business and, when the day was over, I walked by the river.

The Chicago River, as many may know, cuts the city like a great, wide Y with long, narrow, irregular arms, one reaching northwest and the other southwest from the top of the short, straight shank which is the east-and-west chan¬ nel from Lake Michigan. Not to the lake, re¬ member, for the Chicago River flows in the opposite direction from the natural current, since men have turned it around to carry water from the lake up the shank of the Y and then up the southwest branch to the drainage canal and to the Illinois and the Mississippi rivers. It is a useful, but not the most fervent Chicagoan can call it a pleasing stream, even in its valuable reaches on the main channel east and west, and where the south branch turns past the most pre¬ cious property of the city.

Here and there are modern warehouses with a hundred yards or so of decent, new dock be¬ tween the bridges which cross the channel every block or so, but most of the buildings forming the river bank show straight up-and-down walls of narrow, tall, none-too-clean windows and cheap brick, badly painted. At the bottom of the wall, there may be only a pile strip to support the structure, but more frequently the but¬ tress before the slow flow of the water is a couple of yards wide, offering a loading platform for ships which may tie up alongside or for the flat steam scows of the Merchants Lighterage Com¬ pany which ply up and down the river.

Our building backs on the river, not far from its bend to the south and frequently, at the end of the day’s work, Jerry and I would go out by the river way and along on the strip of platform beside the water. Instantly it took us from the world of streets and dust and carts and trucks and taxicabs, from the traffic pound and clatter; there a five-thousand-ton steamer, deep-laden, slips up beside one so silently that you hardly hear the plash of the bow wave washing before it and the lap of the eddies on the timber under your feet; you hear the sudden, clear voices of seamen; bells sounding from engine-room depths; now the whole air rumbles with a tre¬ mendous, unlandlike blast as the vessel blows for the opening of the bridge, under which scur¬ ries a black tug, lake bound, dipping her banded funnel for clearance. Watermen scull an open boat across the oily current on river business of their own. Before you and above reach the bridges bearing the streets; but they seem now concerned with affairs of another world.

No one else ever took that walk with Jerry and me; we had idled along the river hours on end together, following the black band of the narrow timber causeway above the water to which, here and there, elusive, unidentified doors would open. Somewhere along there, if anywhere, Jerry was likely to look for me, I thought, if he wanted me alone and unwitnessed. So, after Jerry was gone, I kept up by myself the habit we had formed together; and on the sev¬ enth night I came this way — it was Monday evening and the ninth day after Jerry disap¬ peared — one of those doors to the water sud¬ denly opened beside me.

The hour, which was half-past five, was more afternoon than evening, but the darkness was almost of night; for the month had turned to November, and between the brick walls of the canyon where the black river flowed there was less light from the sky than from the few win¬ dows where yellow bulbs glowed. It was so cool as to feel frosty as I walked against the fresh breeze blowing in from the lake.

“ Steve! ” said a girl’s voice, hailing me.

I turned, and, in the light which came through the doorway, I found a trim young person gaz¬ ing at me. As the illumination which came from a single, unshaded electric bulb set on a blank wall opposite the door was behind her, I could see at first only that she wore a dark, tail¬ ored suit and a small, dark hat over hair which was unbobbed, abundant and light in color — almost as light as Dorothy Crewe’s had been.

“ Steve, do you want to talk with Jerry? ” she asked me calmly. “ Come in, then.”

She stepped back, and I stepped after her. As soon as I was in, she closed the door; and there was Jerry standing in the corner back of the door.

“ Hello, Steve,” he greeted me without emo¬ tion.

“ Hello, Jerry,” I said, and tried to show as little, but I was feeling more than ever before in my life. For here we were, Jerry and I, who’d spent all our lives together; here we were alone with that girl, who’d evidently come with him. I looked at her again and made sure I didn’t know her.