“Of course not,” I said.
“I know you wouldn’t think it when I’m myself; 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; you 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 possible, 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 myself; 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 command 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 station 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.