The Bottle with the Green Wax Seal by Harry Stephen Keeler

Author:Harry Stephen Keeler [Keeler, Harry Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery;detective;sheriff;murder;flood
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXIV

“ETERNAL RECURRENCE—‘REPETITION ETERNAL’!”

Situations in which a man finds himself are frequently—so it is said—almost identical repetitions of earlier situations in his life—but on a smaller or larger scale. And by thus repeating, manifest some mystical aspect of Life itself!

Which phenomenon might be said to be closely related to what was, meanwhile, transpiring on Bleeker’s Island.

And the demand which the Sheriff had just made upon one, “Gilbert Blake,” to remove his glass eye—and prove himself.

No mystic was the Sheriff; he had never in his life even gazed between the covers of a book on esotericism; he would not, indeed, have known the commonest term used in discussion occult. But he was conscious, at this moment, as he made his grim demand on the man in the lineman’s habiliments, that this very identical situation had occurred once before in his life—on a small, much smaller, much less important scale—yet curiously similar, almost—almost identical. And in being thus conscious of the fact, he was confronting, for the first time, the principle of the Law of Eternal Recurrence and Repetition of Everything!

Indeed, at the very moment of his demand, his mind was comparing the elements of that other situation—with the elements of this one—element by element—and marveling as he did so.

That other incident had been the occasion of the first arrest he had ever made. Years back, of course; and one week, to be exact, after 1431 voters, to all of whom his entire life had been virtually an open book, had almost unanimously decreed that he should represent them as their symbol of the Law.

And that other incident had even involved an actor!

Except that it had been a child actor.

It was odd, passing odd, the Sheriff marveled, how the elements of that affair were actually reappearing—even though on another scale—in this. And had he been a student of the occult, instead of a practical man accustomed to deal with hard practical matters, he would have attempted to utilize that amazingly homologous situation not merely to illumine this puzzling one—but to predict this one’s entire outcome!

If, that is, this were that one—but returned again. Or—was it?

He had been walking that day in the country—reflecting on the fact that though he was now a sheriff he had yet not made his first arrest—walking along a road which had been temporarily blocked by a stalled train of freight cars. And while waiting for the train to pull on, the Sheriff had seen, peeping from one of the open doors of a box car, the head of a boy of about 12 years of age. The Sheriff had always resented boys riding freight trains. He did not know why, exactly; but it was because of a trauma of his own childhood: a boy riding a fast-moving train had once spit in his face. But, quite aside from any resentment he had about boys riding freight trains—there was a boy missing from New York—a child actor—by name Chauncy Lynn—and for whom a $500 reward had been offered in all the newspapers of America.

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