by Algernon Blackwood (1934)

Alexander's experience with the blackmailer was unique—it happened once only.

He had been happily married for some years, with two children, and was doing well enough in his insurance business. Life, indeed, was quite rosy, when one day a stranger called at the office and asked to see him alone. This stranger was an elderly man of perhaps rather shabby appearance, but his face and manner were quite engaging, and he had a really pleasant smile. His voice was cultured. He was obviously a gentleman, a university man probably. At the same time, there was something about him that hesitated; he seemed shy, a trifle nervous even. In spite of the worn, cheap clothing, however, he made the best impression, and Alexander believed that a bit of good business was coming his way.

They went into the inner private room. The interview began in the bluntest possible way. Something very determined had come into the stranger's manner, almost as though he had screwed himself to say what he came to say and meant to see it through.

"My name is Lawson," he announced, "and I need money badly."

He spoke rapidly, yet with a curious reluctance, as though he said something he had learned by heart and rather hated saying. "Some letters of yours," he went on—"it doesn't matter how— have come into my possession. If you will give me £20, they're yours." And he drew from his pocket a small packet, fluttering them before the other's eyes so that the handwriting was plainly visible. The hand that held the letters shook.

The shock to Alexander, instead of the pleasant surprise he had rather expected, was overwhelming. With one look he had recognized the paper and the handwriting. He blenched. A cold sweat broke out on him. He was not naturally a man of much nerve and he realized that a bluff of any sort was useless. He had written those letters. He was frightened to the bone. All he could do in that first instant was to stagger to a chair, for his legs were too weak to support him. He just sat down. The other man remained standing, keeping a certain distance.

"T-twenty pounds," stammered Alexander, half to himself, trying vainly to collect his thoughts. He was shivering visibly. Hot and cold he was. He knew he was quite helpless. This was blackmail.

"And I'll hand them over," Lawson was saying. Then he added, as though relieved to say it: "And you'll never set eyes on me again."

"But—I—I haven't got it," went on Alexander in a panic, his mind flooding with pictures of his wife, his children, his happy home. "It's impossible— utterly impossible."

"But you can get it," suggested Lawson quietly. And though his voice sounded determined, merciless even, there was that odd touch of reluctance again in his manner, as though he was ashamed to say the words. He stood there on the office carpet, watching his victim's face, giving him time apparently. Putting the letters back into his pocket, he waited in silence. A hint of contempt, it may be, lay in this silence, contempt for the other's craven attitude and lack of fight. And Alexander somehow was aware of this, even while he tried frantically to think out ways and means. He would have paid £1,000, let alone £20, to have those letters back and see them burn. But where could he find £20 at a moment's notice? Though recovering a little from the first awful shock, his mind worked badly. He did think once of the Law which allowed a plaintiff in a blackmail case to conceal his name. He also thought of threatening to go to the police at once. Only the pluck to carry the bluff through failed him—and he knew it. He was so terrified, so painfully anxious to get those letters back that he kept his mind chiefly on the £20 and where in the devil he could find it. The name of a pal who might lend it crossed his bewildered mind at last.

"If you will come back in an hour, in half an hour even," he said at last in a low, stammering voice, "I—I think I can have it for you." Without knowing exactly why, he suddenly added then: "You're a—gentleman, I see." The words came on their own accord. Lawson lowered his eyes. He didn't answer. "If you go out," he said then quietly, "I'm afraid I must come with you. I'm sorry—but —you understand."

"Oh, yes, I understand—of course," said the other.

In the end this is what happened. They went out together. Alexander, greatly to his surprise, got his £20. They came back together, always side by side. Alexander handed over the money and took the letters in his hand. He counted them. He was shaking so violently that he had to count them a second time. One, two, three! The cold sweat broke out on him afresh.

"Three," he whispered. "Is that all you've got?"

Lawson, he saw, actually blushed. He was already at the door on his way out. "I think so," he replied, forcing the pleasant smile on to his face as he told the deliberate lie. "I'll look again when I get home, and if there is another you shall have it."

The expression on the face startled Alexander, for behind the forced smile, behind the sudden blush, was misery—abject misery. The hideous shame was clear to see, but the grim determination too.

"Another … ?" repeated Alexander." But you've got a lot more—a dozen at least … " he cried.

---

But Lawson was gone.

Alexander sat motionless for some minutes, clutching the letters feverishly as though they might be snatched away. He had gone to pieces badly. How the man had come into possession of the horrible letters puzzled him utterly. But that did not matter: he had got them, and he, Alexander, had written them—oh, a dozen at least, perhaps two dozen. Twenty pounds for three! With more to follow! He thought of his wife, his children, his happy home. … He thought of Lawson—his voice, his manner, his whole attitude. A gentleman, yes, a man of education and refinement. That sudden blush, the nervous, deprecating air, the reluctance, the look of shame. A man ashamed of yielding to the temptation chance has put in his way, eager to get away the moment the hideous deal was over and the money in his pocket. Yet a man, Alexander now began too late to realize, he might have bargained and pleaded with. The fellow's better nature was plain to see—underneath.

Alexander cursed himself for his collapse and lack of pluck. A bold front, a threat of the police, and Lawson in his turn would have weakened, possibly collapsed himself. A good bluff and Alexander might have got those letters—all of them, not merely three—for nothing.

The telephone rang. He realized he still sat clutching his three letters, and that it was office hours and he had much to do. But the instant he was free again, he quickly locked the door and lit a match. He burnt the letters—without reading them—and smudged the black ashes into dust in his waste-paper basket.

Still trembling with the shock and horror of it all, he could not work. He took the afternoon off, walking feverishly round and round the parks, thinking feverishly, but without result. The night at home was the most miserable he had ever known, the children on his knee, the wife he loved beside him. If he slept at all, he hardly knew it. He had come, however, to a decision—to two in fact. And next day he went to a solicitor, putting a hypothetical case before him. But the strong advice to go straight to the police was beyond his powers. Even as "Mr. X," he could not face a trial. His second decision was to plead with Lawson, plead for time at any rate. The man had a better nature he felt he could appeal to. He would do this—the next time. For he knew, of course, there would be a next time. Lawson before long would call again.

But Lawson did not call again. After weeks of unspeakable terror and anguish, a letter came, to his home address this time. It was very brief, the handwriting rather suggesting the scholar.

I have come across another letter. Perhaps you would prefer to call for it yourself. A fiver would meet the case. I do not wish to cause unnecessary pain. It is, apparently, the only one.

The address was in Kilburn, and Alexander took five Treasury notes and went, one thing comforting him a little—the obvious fact, namely that Lawson was not a thoroughgoing and experienced blackmailer, or he would never have taken risks and laid himself open to such an easy trap. In his mind he had already rehearsed what he meant to say. His plea would be as moving as only truth could make it. But he planned a threat as well, a bluff of course, but a bluff that would sound genuine—that if driven to kill himself, he would leave the evidence behind him and Lawson would be at once arrested.

He could be firm this time, with the firmness of a desperate man. Desperate indeed he was, but firmness did not belong to his weak, impulsive, rather nerveless type.

Expecting a block of cheap flats, or a single room in a mean lodging-house, he found instead a small detached building, quite a decent little place, and a deaf old woman admitted him, announcing him by name, into a room that looked half study, half library. For it held numerous books, and a writing-table was covered with papers. Lawson, at the far end of it, stood to receive him. But the interview hardly went according to plan, for as Alexander handed over the Treasury notes and received the letter in exchange, the other again took the cash as with a kind of shrinking, horrible reluctance. He was trembling, his face was very white, his voice, as he said "Thank you," trembled too. And before Alexander could recover from his moment's surprise and bring out either his plea or his threat, Lawson was speaking.

"I'm in a terrible position myself," he said in a very low voice, "Terrible." His face expressed real anguish. "With any luck," he went on in a whisper, his eyes on the floor, "I would repay you—one day."

He placed the notes in a drawer of his desk, while Alexander's eye, watching the movement, read the titles of some books above: a volume of Matthew Arnold's poems, a Greek lexicon, Gibbon's Decline and Fall. But it was Lawson's sign of weakness that then helped the other to find some, at least, of the words he had meant to use. It was the bluff that rose first to the surface of his bewildered mind.

"You know—that I can go to the police," he heard himself saying.

The other looked sideways towards the window, so that Alexander caught the face at a new angle. He noticed the ravaged expression. Lawson was suffering intensely.

"I know," came the reply calmly, without turning the head. "But you wouldn't—any more than I would."

The conviction in the words, their truth as well, confused and bewildered the wretched victim still more. His thoughts scattered hopelessly. He said the first thing that came into his head. All idea of a plea for mercy had vanished.

"If you drive me to kill myself—and I'm near it now—you'd be arrested at once. I could leave the proofs."

---

It was the way Lawson shrugged his shoulders that completed his feeling of utter hopelessness. It had dawned upon him suddenly that Lawson's position was somehow similar to his own, his desperation as dreadful. Lawson himself was at the last gasp.

"You've got a lot more, of course?" he heard himself asking in a faint voice.

Lawson now turned and faced him. His expression was awful, if pitiful at the same time.

"I'm afraid so," he whispered, and his manner again showed that deep reluctance, with a sort of shame and horror against himself. "One or two— I'm afraid," he repeated. He drew a heavy sigh and put up his hand to hide his eyes. "I'm frightfully sorry," he muttered, half to himself. He was trembling from head to foot.

The interview was over. Alexander left the house an utterly hopeless man. The situation was now clear to him, of course. Lawson, normally a decent fellow probably, was being blackmailed himself. Alexander understood, he even sympathized, but with this understanding vanished the last vestige also of any hope. He realized now precisely how desperate Lawson was.

The ghastly suffering and anguish of the weeks and months that followed need no description—his sleeplessness, his frantic resorts to finding cash, the moneylenders, his wife's discovery that something very serious was wrong, the way he fobbed her off with a story of bad business. The visits to Kilburn were repeated and repeated, though the interview usually took place in silence now. Money was paid, letters were handed over—without a word, both men, indeed, seemed approaching the last gasp. As for Alexander, he found it difficult to believe that he had written so many letters. But he had.

The cumulative effect at last broke his life to pieces. His health was gone, his mind became queer. Turning frantically to one desperate plan after another, all of them useless, he was driven finally into that dreadful, final corner where an Emergency Exit seemed inevitable. And this was not nerve, it was merely the ultimate decision of an utterly ruined, ordinary man. He bought a pistol. In his mind came the mad suggestion that it was as easy to end two lives as one. He went to the little Kilburn house for the last time. This was definitely to be his last visit. He took no money with him, but in his hip-pocket lay the Browning with three cartridges in the chamber—the third in case of mischance.

Exactly how he intended to act was far from clear to him. He had rehearsed no plan. That time was past. The loaded pistol lay in his pocket. He left the rest to impulse.

It was an evening in late October, summertime now over, and dusk spread over the dreary Kilburn streets. He came straight from the office by Tube. After leaving the train he walked very rapidly. Then he broke into a run, with the feeling that the faster he went the sooner the awful thing would be over. He arrived panting, reaching the house almost before he knew it. He was utterly distraught, his mind, even his senses, behaving wildly, inaccurately.

There was no answer to the violent pull he gave the bell, the deaf old woman did not appear, and then he noticed for the first time that the front door stood ajar. And he just walked in. The tiny hall was empty too. He closed the door behind him and walked across to the library. Only too well he knew it. There was no need to be shown in. He was expected. And he was punctual. Six was striking.

The house, it then occurred to him, was exceptionally quiet. There was an extraordinary stillness about it—a stillness he didn't like. There was also—though he only recalled this afterwards—a faint odour of a peculiar kind. Giving a loud knock without waiting for an answer, he opened it the same instant and walked straight in without further ado.

He saw Lawson at once. He was not standing as usual, but sitting facing him in the leather armchair with its patches of untidy horsehair sticking out. And he declares that the moment his eyes rested on him a disagreeable shudder ran down his spine. It was not the shudder of loathsome anxiety he knew so well, but something he had never felt before. Distracted, half crazy though his mind undoubtedly was at the time, it took in one thing at least quite clearly. Lawson looked different. He had changed. Wherein this alteration lay exactly Alexander could not say. He only knew that it frightened him in a new way and that his back had goose-flesh. An awful fear crawled over him.

Lawson not only looked different—he behaved differently. He did not get up, but sat in the chair staring into his visitor's face. There was something wrong, not merely different. And Alexander stopped dead just inside the door, forgetting even to close it behind him. He stood there spellbound, returning the stare. His first instinct was to turn tail and run, only his legs felt suddenly weak, his control of the muscles gone. He held his breath. What amazed him more than anything else was the expression on his enemy's face. For it wore a happy, kindly smile; the ravaged, suffering look had left it, there lay a curious soft pity on it. Unaccountably, he felt his heart beginning to swell. He could not take his eyes from that happy, pitiful face, that motionless figure in the chair. It was perhaps two minutes, perhaps only two seconds, before he heard the voice.

For Lawson spoke—in a scarcely audible whisper. There was obviously a tremendous strain and effort behind the whisper, as though he could only just manage it: yet Alexander heard every syllable distinctly.

"You won't need that pistol, either for me or for yourself. I have posted the others to you—with what —money I had. …" and the whisper died away into silence. The lips still moved, but no sound came from them. Lawson himself had not moved at all— he had not made even the smallest movement— once.

There was a sound in the hall, and Alexander involuntarily turned his head an instant. He recognized the deaf woman's shuffling tread. Turning back to the room again almost the same moment, Lawson the blackmailer was no longer staring at him from the leather chair. He was not in the chair at all. He was not even in the room. The room was empty. The only visible living person in it was himself, Alexander.

It flashed across him, as the deaf servant came stumbling through the door behind him, that he had gone crazy, that his mind was gone. There was icy perspiration all over him. He was shaking violently. He heard the old woman's words in a confused jumble only, but their meaning was plain enough. Lawson, she was trying to tell him, had shot himself several hours ago … but had not killed himself … the police … doctors had come … there had been an anaesthetic … he had been taken away … but had died in the ambulance.

Alexander does not remember how he got out of the house. All he remembers is walking the streets furiously, for hours even, and somewhere or other telephoning to his wife that he was detained and would not be home till after dinner. He knows he did that. He knows also that on reaching the house very late, he talked incoherently to his frightened wife, that the children were long since in bed and asleep, and that his wife put a registered packet into his trembling hands in due course. He knows too that it contained several letters he had written years before to another woman—dreadful, damaging letters—that a couple of twenty-pound notes fell at his feet, and that the postmark on the label was 11.30 Kilburn that very morning.