Donovan's Brain (Jerry eBooks) by Curt Siodmak

Author:Curt Siodmak [Siodmak, Curt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2016-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

November 29th.

ANTON STERNLI visited me. He rang up from the reception desk first. Janice answered the phone and stepped out to meet him at the elevator.

She kept him in the corridor nearly an hour, talking to him before she let him see me.

When we lived on the desert, Janice limited her activities to running our house. Now, taking advantage of my helplessness, she has extended her field to the people connected with me. She has always had Schratt in the palm of her hand, and Sternli has been easy.

Sternli looked more like a Swiss professor than ever, when he came into the room, peering at me through heavy glasses that made his eyes look the size of hazelnuts. That suit could never have been made for him; the trousers bagged over his knees. He carried a white cane like a blind man’s.

Sternli had seen about my accident in the papers and would have come before, but he only got his glasses yesterday. He wanted to tell me how terribly sorry he was.

He talked about insignificant things until Janice left us. She had seen in his eager face that he wanted to be alone with me.

“You startled me with that memorandum, in Donovan’s handwriting,” Sternli began. “You see, before he left for Florida he gave me the key and wrote down a number. All his life he was overcautious about everything. Even when he signed his name, he would shield his left hand with his right so no one could see what he wrote until he had finished. I am astonished he should have thought of me at the hour of his death. And why did he have my name on an envelope with money in it in his pocket? He was never generous unless there was advantage to himself! It makes me uneasy, Dr. Cory!”

“You Judge him too harshly,” I said. I saw complications ahead.

“Oh, no.”

Sternli took off his glasses and cleaned them studiously with a small piece of chamois, holding them near his eyes.

“W.H. was my whole life. How can I hate what I was a part of? When W.H. dismissed me, there was nothing left to live for. I have no family, not even a friend. To make friends, one must be tolerant and interested, and with advancing age we become less and less adaptable. One has to give to keep friends, and my larder was empty. There are two species of man, the creative and the imitative. I am the latter. And those people are very barren if no inspiration comes from

He spoke quietly. This was his philosophy, expressed without bitterness.

“I have been approached by a publishing house to write a book about W.H. They offer me a great sum of money, and I need it for the future; my salary was too small for me to save.”

Sternli was eager to talk. He sensed that my relation to Donovan was closer than just that of the one disastrous meeting. He could not define the bond between me and his former master, but he felt Impelled to talk with me to free many unspoken words.

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