Read Ebook: The sane men of Satan by Merwin Sam

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Ebook has 660 lines and 26872 words, and 14 pages

Release date: January 4, 2024

Original publication: New York, NY: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1953

the sane men of satan

Does the past still live and not in dreams alone? Justin thought not till a strange decision took him back to days he knew as dead.

Charles Justin paused briefly in the encroaching darkness to look at the north front of the Old State House in Boston. He was engaged in the process of walking home from his office on State Street to his house in Louisburg Square.

The ancient building, he thought, with its palladian windows and gilded lion and unicorn, still looked much as it must have when Paul Revere engraved his crude but effective print of the Boston Massacre, back in 1773.

One of the things Justin loved most about Boston was the fact that so much of the old town still breathed. Faneuil Hall, a few blocks behind him, where James Otis and Sam Adams had roused the Commonwealth against the crown, still did duty as a major market. Worshippers still paraded on Sunday mornings to King's Chapel, Christ Church, the Old North Church. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of twentieth-century Bostonians still lived and worked upon the same broad planks of old T-Wharf that had felt the measured tread of Gage's grenadiers.

The sense of the past was strong upon him this evening--perhaps, he thought wryly, more strong than was proper for an executive vice-president of the Ninth National Bank. As he scaled the slope of Park Street on Beacon Hill he felt like a man born out of his proper time.

Life and color and revolt had been strong in the little city of two centuries ago. Men had thought and dreamed--and then had talked and acted. Unlike their descendants, who seemed to have relapsed into an everlasting featherbed of trustfundism.

Passing the gold-domed balustraded beauty of Bullfinch's classic New State House, he wondered how the crest of the hill had looked when John Hancock had lived there, in his magnificent Georgian mansion, with its landscaped gardens and carriage house containing the merchant-governor's gilded English coach.

Old Boston held Justin tightly in its grip even after he turned the key in his own lock and entered his house on Louisburg Square. For the house, if not quite Federalist, dated back to the early era of Clipper Ship affluence. Fine white paneling, graceful mahogany banisters, blue-and-gold silk wall covering of heavy Chinese silk, Sheraton furniture, Revere silverware--all combined to retain illusion of a past still alive.

Not until he walked upstairs was the illusion shattered. And again it was not the room that shattered it--for graceful mantel above gently roaring fire, fine old furniture and a pair of glowing Copley portraits on the west wall maintained the dream.

It was the two persons awaiting him there that spoiled Justin's vision of time past relived. Jack Fellowes joggled cubed ice in a broad-beamed highball glass in front of the fire--as modern in his midnight-blue dinner jacket and soft white shirt as the post-Freudian psychiatry he practiced.

He said, "Ah, there, Charley, have a drink on you." Then, with a rueful half-smile at Justin's wife, Marie, "You seem to have married the only banker in history who works overtime."

In an ice-blue satin dinner gown Marie Chandler Justin was as brilliant as a candle's white flame--and even less warm. She stirred faintly in greeting to her husband, said, "You're late, Charles--you'll barely have time to dress."

Justin reached for a drink that stood ready atop the red-lacquer Chinese cabinet some ancestor of his wife's had brought from Canton. He said, "Sorry, I forgot about the Iveson party. I don't think I'm up to it tonight. You two will have more fun without me."

Marie pouted prettily, said, "But, darling, I'll have to explain to everybody--and they'll all think the most horrible things."

"These things take time," said Fellowes.

"So I understand," said Justin. Some devil prompted him to add, "I've heard that some women wear out two or three psychoanalysts in a single lifetime."

"Charles!" Marie looked warningly up from the pleats in her skirt.

"Really, Charles." Fellowes sounded hurt.

"Sorry," said Justin. He decided to jump the conversational track before there was a wreck. "Henri Dubois visited me this afternoon."

"You mean the Golden Rule fellow?" the psychiatrist inquired. "Interesting phenomenon of our times. What sort of chap is he?"

Justin thought back to the soft-spoken man who had sat in the white leather armchair on the far side of his desk, the man who had asked him for two million dollars to support his Missionist movement. He thought back to the meeting in the Garden he had attended the night before--a meeting attended by twenty thousand quiet intent hopeful people, by many thousands more who had listened via loud-speakers outside in the streets.

Henri Dubois did preach the Golden Rule, the ideals of cooperation and humanity toward one's fellows, as the world's only salvation. It wasn't quite that simple, of course--but the Golden Rule was its essence, a Golden Rule to be practiced not merely in church on Sundays but seven days a week.

And Missionism, as preached by Henri Dubois, was sweeping the country. Dubois had received more than fifty thousand dollars in spontaneous gifts from the lecture the night before--and before noon that day. Yet he felt unable to spend it in support of his movement lest such spending should lend aid to possible smears of fraud and graft later. And Dubois needed two millions. He wanted the bank to use his huge backlog of contributions as collateral on a loan.

"It will save you many times that sum," he had said, leaning forward and resting a forearm on Justin's desk. "Consider--Missionism's widespread adoption will mean cooperation rather than competition. It will mean that, instead of wasteful conflict between selfishly warring groups--say of contractors versus unions--you'll have voluntary union. It will mean, to take a specific instance...."

Justin had been, was still, of more than half a mind to grant the evangelist what he asked. For Missionism was catching on, would soon be sweeping not the country but the world. Yet Corinne Forrester, Dubois' woman, had come back later to ask Justin to refuse the loan.

Dark, slimly flamboyant, a smoker of dark Cuban cigarettes, Mrs. Forrester was a factor to be reckoned with. She had left her gloves--deliberately, he suspected--had returned for them and said, "Mr. Justin, I have loved Henri Dubois for more years than I intend to admit. Until recently he has loved me as well.

"Now, thanks to Missionism, I am losing him. I gave up a perfectly good family and home and husband for Henri--but I cannot compete with millions of rivals. I'm not an ingenue any longer and I am not the sort of woman who can exist for long without a man."

"This hardly seems to concern--" he had begun.

And, dark eyes disturbingly fixed on his, she had said, "Mr. Justin--you're not the sort of man who should live long without a woman. There are a hundred little signs--restlessness, too-rigid control, vast energy uncompensated." Then, rising, "I shall call you tomorrow at five. And perhaps...."

Justin had been in a foul mood since. He came out of abstraction to realise that Jack Fellowes had repeated his question about the evangelist, said, "What sort of fellow is he? I'd say the oddest thing about him is his very lack of oddities."

"Hmmm." Fellowes was definitely interested. "Did you get much impression of repressive influences, Charley?"

"I'm no psychiatrist, Jack," said Justin, "but I'd say no. He was quiet--yes. But he didn't have any trouble expressing himself. More intellect than emotion-dominated."

"And you say you're no psychiatrist," said Fellowes. "Charley, if you weren't a damned good one you'd never be able to hold down the job you do at the bank."

"Can't you two talk anything but shop?" Marie asked irritably. She stood up, added, "This dreadful Dubois man--I don't see why we have to have reformers anyway. The world would be all right if some people weren't always trying to change it."

"Change is the natural order," Justin said mildly.

"Only because men like this Dubois make it so," said Marie sharply. And, to Jack Fellowes, "I'll be ready in five minutes."

Justin waited till she had left, then said, "You know, Jack, this is charmingly old-fashioned. You and I having a drink together while the woman who has us both in her clutches prepares for the evening."

The psychiatrist winced. "You know, Charley, you can be alarmingly frank at times," he said. "That wasn't funny."

"Let's just say I guessed." Justin reached for the bottle to refill his glass, added, "I know Marie. Since she has no intention of facing facts you'll never get out of the batter's box professionally. Personally? Well, she has no intention of giving me any grounds for divorce. Not that I wouldn't appreciate some, Jack."

The psychiatrist said, "Charley, there's just one sort of human that absolutely baffles a man in my profession--that's an absolutely sane man."

"Oh, come, Jack," said Justin. "All sanity is relative."

"That's why it's so damned baffling when we find it." Fellowes lifted his glass. "Here's to the one and only sane man I ever met."

Marie, coldly magnificent in ermine, with bits of silver-leaf glittering in her blond hair, appeared in the doorway. She said, "Jack, I'm ready." She didn't seem to mind at all that Justin wasn't going.

Charles dined alone on a pickup meal and went to bed early. Undressed, in his third-floor bedroom, he scratched a naked stomach that, at forty-one, was beginning to show a faint bulge, noted a more marked bulge in a side pocket of the jacket he had just removed and hung up.

He dug out its source--an odd little gadget, nicknamed the "spider," which he had shown to Henri Dubois and Corinne Forrester that afternoon when they were in his office. It had happened to be on his desk. Supposed to spray a transparent waterproof film over any surface, its backers were seeking money to promote it as a substitute for raincoats and umbrellas.

There was a hitch, of course--it clung abominably to human hair and for this reason, since it was chiefly intended for women, its financing was still highly problematical. But it had certain other uses, according to the testing laboratories, which its inventor seemed to have missed. Justin must, he decided, have stuck it into his pocket instead of back on his desk. He wondered what it would be like to plaster himself with a form-fitting suit of invisible pajamas.

Again Old Boston came to life. Church bells pealed, small colored sweeps carried their brooms through the cobbled streets, fish vendors shouted the merits of their wares.

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