The Thread of Flame
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Title: The Thread of Flame
Creator: Basil King
Release date: June 6, 2014 [eBook #45898]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45898
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE THREAD OF FLAME ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: "Oh, as for cheering people up--I don't know ... A woman
wants more than anything else in the world to feel that she's needed;
and when she discovers she isn't--"]
THE
THREAD OF FLAME
By BASIL KING
Author of
"THE CITY OF COMRADES" "GOING WEST"
"THE INNER SHRINE" ETC.
Illustrated
Harper & Brothers
_Publishers_
New York and London
THE THREAD OF FLAME
Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published August, 1920
*ILLUSTRATIONS*
"Oh, as for cheering people up--I don't know.... A woman wants more than
anything else in the world to feel that she's needed; and when she
discovers she isn't--" . . . _Frontispiece_
She turned on me with a new flash in her blue eyes. "Look here! Tell me
honest, now. Are you a swell crook--or ain't you?" "Suppose I say
that--that I ain't." "Say, kid!" she responded, coldly, "talk like
yourself, will you? ... If you're not a swell crook I can't make you
out"
All these minutes she had been observing me, with that queer,
half-choked cry as the result: "Oh, Billy, is this you?"
I had begun on collars and neckties when Vio said, "What kind of a girl
was that who was here this afternoon?"
*PART I*
*THE THREAD OF FLAME*
*CHAPTER I*
Without opening my eyes I guessed that it must be between five and six
in the morning.
I was snuggled into something narrow. On moving my knee abruptly it
came into contact with an upright board. At the same time the end of my
bed rose upward, so that my feet were higher than my head. Then the
other end rose, and my head was higher than my feet. A slow, gentle
roll threw my knee once more against the board, though another slow,
gentle roll swung me back to my former position. Far away there was a
rhythmic throbbing, like the beating of a pulse. I knew I was on
shipboard, and for the moment it was all I knew.
Not quite awake and not quite asleep, I waited as one waits in any
strange bed, in any strange place, for the waking mind to reconnect
itself with the happenings overnight. Sure of this speedy
re-establishment, I dozed again.
On awaking the second time I was still at a loss for the reason for my
being at sea. I had left a port; I was going to a port; and I didn't
know the name of either. I might have been on any ocean, sailing to any
quarter of the globe. How long I had been on the way, and how far I had
still to go, were details that danced away from me whenever I tried to
seize them. I retained a knowledge of continents and countries; but as
soon as I made the attempt to see myself in any of them my mind recoiled
from the effort with a kind of sick dislike.
Nothing but a dull hint came to me on actually opening my eyes. An
infiltration of gray light through the door, which was hooked ajar,
revealed a mere slit in space, with every peg and corner utilized. A
quiet breathing from the berth above my head told me that I shared the
cabin with some one else. On the wall opposite, above a flat red couch
piled with small articles of travel, two complete sets of clothing swung
outward, or from side to side like pendulums, according to the movement
of the ship.
I closed my eyes again. It was clearly a cabin of the cheaper and less
comfortable order, calling up a faintly disagreeable surprise. It was
from that that I drew my inference. I judged that whoever I was I had
traveled before, and in more luxurious conditions.
Through the partly open door, beyond which there must have been an open
porthole, came puffs of salt wind and the swish and roar of the ocean.
Vainly I sought indications as to the point of the compass toward which
we were headed. Imagination adapted itself instantly to any direction it
was asked to take. In this inside cabin there was no suggestion from
sun or cloud to show the difference between east and west.
Because I was not specially alarmed I did my best to doze again. Dozing
seemed to me, indeed, the wisest course, for the reason that during the
freedom of subconsciousness in sleep the missing connection was the more
likely to be restored. It would be restored of course. I was
physically well. I knew that by my general sensations. Young, vigorous,
and with plenty of money, a mere lapse of memory was a joke.
Of being young and vigorous a touch on my body was enough to give me the
assurance. The assumption of having plenty of money was more subtle.
It was a habit of mind rather than anything more convincing. Certainly
there was nothing to prove it in this cabin, which might easily have
been second-class, nor yet in the stuff of my pajamas, which was thick
and coarse. I noticed now, as I turned in my bunk, that it rasped my
skin unpleasantly. With no effort of the memory I could see myself
elegantly clad in silk night-clothing fastened with silk frogs; and yet
when I asked myself when and where that had been no answer was accorded
me.
I may have slept an hour when I waked again. From the sounds in the
cabin I drew the conclusion that my overhead companion had got up.
Before looking at him I tested my memory for some such recollection as
men sharing the same cabin have of their first meeting. But I had none.
Farther back than that waking between five and six o'clock I couldn't
think. It was like trying to think back to the years preceding one's
birth; one's personality dissolved into darkness.
When I opened my eyes there was a man standing in the dim gray light
with his back to me. Broad, muscular shoulders showed through the
undershirt which was all he wore in addition to his trousers, of which
the braces hung down the back. The dark hair was the hair of youth, and
in a corner of the glass I caught the reflection of a chin which in
spite of the lather I also knew to be young. Waiting till he had
finished shaving and had splashed his face in the basin, I said, with a
questioning intonation:
"Hello?"
Turning slowly, he lowered the towel from his dripping face, holding it
out like a propitiatory offering. He responded then with the slow
emphasis of surprise.
"Hel-lo, old scout! So you've waked up at last! Thought you meant to
sleep the trip out."
"Have I been asleep long?"
"Only since you came on aboard."
It was on my tongue to ask, When was that? but a sudden prompting of
discretion bade me seek another way.
"You don't mean to say I've slept more than--more than"--I drew a bow at
a venture--"more than twenty-four hours?"
He made the reckoning as he rubbed his shining face with the towel.
"Let me see! This is Friday. We came on board late Tuesday night.
When John-M'rie, our bedroom steward, brought me down to the cabin about
half past nine you were already in your bunk doing the opium act.
John-M'rie passed it up that you were a Frenchman, because you'd spoken
French to him; but now I see you're just an American like myself."
So! I was an American but I could speak French. I could speak French
sufficiently well for one Frenchman to mistake me for another. I stowed
this data away, noting that if I had lost some of the power of memory
the faculty of reasoning was unimpaired.
Weighing my questions so as to get the maximum of information with the
minimum of betrayal, I waited before hazarding anything else till he had
finished polishing a face which had the handsome ugliness of a pug.
"When do you think," was my next diplomatic venture, "that we shall get
in?"
"Oh, hang!" The exclamation was caused by finding himself pawing at the
foot of my berth in his search for the towel-rack. "Wednesday morning
with good luck," he went on, feeling along the wall till he touched a
kind of rod, behind which he tucked the towel. "With bad weather we'll
not pick up the Nantucket Lightship before Thursday night. The old
bucket's supposed to do it in eight days; but you know what that means
these times."
I didn't know, since these times did not distinguish themselves in my
mind from any other times. But the Nantucket Lightship was a reference
I understood. We were sailing for New York. As an American I was
therefore on my way home, though no spot on the continent put forth a
special claim on me. I made brief experiments in various directions:
New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Denver, Seattle.
Nothing responded. The hills of New England, the mountains of
California, the levees of Louisiana were alike easy for me to recall;
but I was as detached from them as a spirit from another world.
These ideas floated--I choose the phrase as expressive of something more
nebulous than active thinking--these ideas floated across my brain as I
watched the boy rinse his tooth-brush, replace the tumbler, and feel
along the wall for the flannel shirt hanging on a peg. He turned to me
then with the twinkling, doggy look I was beginning to notice as a
trait.
"Say, you'd eat a whale, wouldn't you? Haven't had a meal since Tuesday
night, and now it's Friday. Any one would think you were up in the
Ypres region before the eats got on to the time-table. Pretty good grub
on board this old French tub, if you holler loud enough."
While he went on to suggest a menu for my breakfast I endeavored to deal
with the new hints he had thrown out. He had spoken of Ypres. He had
referred to short rations. I remembered that there was a war. Whether
it was over, or whether it was going on, or whether I had taken part in
it or not, I couldn't say; but I knew there had been, and perhaps that
there still was, a war.
I tested myself as to that while I watched him button his collar and put
on his tie; but all I drew forth was a sickening sense of noise,
mutilation, and dirt, which might have been no more than the reaction
from things I had read. Nothing personal to myself entered into these
associations; no scene of horror that I could construct took me in as an
actor.
My light-hearted companion would not, however, allow me to follow my own
train of thought.
"Say," he laughed, "I know your name, but I don't believe you know
mine." The laugh grew forced and embarrassed. "I've got the darnedest
name for kidding a guy ever got stuck on him. Sometimes it makes me mad,
and I think I'll go to law and change it; and more times I get used to
it, till some smart Aleck breezes in and begins to hang it all over me
again. What do you think it is? Give a guess now."
He said he knew my name--and I didn't know it myself! That was the
first of my queer discoveries that appalled me. If I didn't know my own
name ... But the boy laughed on.
"Give a guess now," he coaxed, buttoning up his waistcoat. "I'll give
you two; but they must be awful funny ones."
Nothing funnier than Smith and Jones having occurred to me, he burst out
with:
"Drinkwater! Isn't that the darnedest? I can't look sidewise at
anything that isn't water before the other guys begin to kid me all over
the lot. Many a time I _would_ drink water--and don't want anything but
water to drink--and I'll be hanged if I don't feel ashamed to have them
see me doing it--and me with that name! What do you know about that?"
As I was too gravely preoccupied to tell him what I knew about that, he
began once more his curious pawing along the wall, till he seized a cap
which he pulled down on his head.
"Oh, hang!" he muttered then. "That's yours."
This, too, was information, enabling me to assume that the clothing
which hung on the same hook was mine also. I looked at it with some
interest, but also with a renewed feeling of discomfort. It was the
sort of suit in which I found it difficult to see myself. Of a smooth
gray twill, sleek and provincial, there was that about it which
suggested the rural beau.
Having momentarily lost his orientation, the boy clawed in the air
again, touching first this object and then that, fingering it,
considering it, locating it, till once more he got his bearings. All
this he did with a slowness and caution that forced on me the
recognition of the fact, which I might have perceived before, that he
was blind.
Nothing betrayed it but his motions. The starry eyes were apparently
uninjured. Only, when you knew his infirmity, you noticed that the
starriness was like that of an electric lamp, bright, but with a
brightness not connected with intelligence. It was an aimless
brightness, directed at nothing. The blaze of the quick pupils was like
that which a window flashes back to the sunset, all from outside, and
due to nothing in the house.
Dressed now for leaving the cabin, he still had something to tell me.
"Say, there's one man on board who'll be glad to hear you've waked up.
That's the doctor. Not the ship's doctor," he hastened to explain, "but
my doctor. Say, he's about the whitest!"
My questions were inspired not so much by sympathy with him, though that
affected me, as by the hope of getting sidelights on myself.
"Do you travel with a doctor?"
"Came over with him just before the war. I was his stenog. Name of
Averill. Been in and out to see you five and six times a day ever since
we sailed. Tell you all about him after I've had my breakfast. Off now
to send in John-M'rie. Don't forget what I said about the griddle-cakes.
They can give 'em to you good and greasy if you kick; but if you don't
they'll just hand you out a pile of asbestos table-mats."
*CHAPTER II*
Before getting up to make the investigations on which I was so keen I
waited to be rid of Jean-Marie. He came in presently--small, black,
wiry, not particularly clean, and with an oily smell, but full of an
ingratiating kindness. When I had trumped up an explanation of my
abnormally long sleep I set him to separating my hand-luggage from my
cabin-mate's, nominally for the sake of convenience, but really that I
might know which was mine.
The minute he had left with my order for breakfast I sprang from my
bunk. I searched first the pockets of my clothes. There was nothing in
them but a handkerchief, a few French coins, and a card giving the
number of a cabin, the number of a seat at a table in the dining-saloon,
and the name of Mr. Jasper Soames. It was a name that to me meant
nothing. Referring it to my inner self, nothing vibrated, nothing rang.
It was like trying to clink a piece of money on wool or cork or some
other unresponsive material.
My clothing itself was what I had guessed from the inspection made from
my berth. It suggested having been bought ready to wear, a suggestion
borne out by the label of what was apparently a big department store,
the Bon Marche, at Tours. My cap had the same label, and my hard felt
hat no maker's name at all.
I began on the bags which Jean-Marie had segregated as my property.
There were two, a hand-bag and a suit-case, neither of them tagged with
a name. The hand-bag contained bottles, brushes, handkerchiefs, all of
the cheaper varieties. Where there was anything to indicate the place
at which they had been purchased it was always the Bon Marche at Tours.
In the suit-case, which was unlocked, and which I opened feverishly,
there was a suit almost identical with that hanging on the hook, a
little linen, a few changes of underclothing, a small supply of socks,
collars, and other such necessities, all more or less new, some of them
still unworn, but with not so much as an initial to give a clue to the
owner. It struck me--and I made the observation with a frightened
inward laugh--that a man running away from detection for a crime would
fit himself out in just this way.
Having repacked the bags, I stood at a loss, in the sense that for the
first time I felt stunned. The position was promising to be more serious
than I had thought it possible for it to become. There were so many
things to think of that I couldn't see them all before me at a glance.
Standing in the middle of the narrow floor, steadying myself by a hand
on the edge of Drinkwater's bunk, I suddenly caught my reflection in the
glass. It was a new line to follow up. A look into my own eyes would
reforge those links with myself that had trembled away. I went closer,
staring at the man who now confronted me.
It is an odd experience to gaze at yourself and see a stranger; but that
is what happened to me now. The face that gazed back at me was one
which, as far as I could tell, I had never seen in my life. I had seen
faces like it, hundreds of them, but never precisely this face. It was
the typical face of the brown-eyed, brown-haired Anglo-Saxon, lean,
leathery, and tanned; but I could no more connect it with my intimate
self than I could Drinkwater's face, or Jean-Marie's.
It was that of a man who might have been thirty-two, but who possibly
looked older. I mean by that that there was a haggardness in it which
seemed to come of experience rather than from time. Had you passed this
face in the street you would have said that it was that of a tall,
good-looking young fellow with a brown mustache, but you would have
added that the eyes had the queer, far-away luminosity of eyes that have
"seen things." They would have reminded you of Drinkwater's eyes--not
that they were like them, but only because of their fixed retention of
images that have passed away from the brain.
My next thought was of money. So far I had found nothing but the few
odd coins in my pockets; but that I had plenty of it somewhere I took as
a matter of course. I know now by experience that people in the habit
of having money and people in the habit of not having it are led by
different "senses." In the one case it is a sense of limitation; in the
other of liberty. It is like the difference between the movements of a
blind man and those of one who can see--a tactful feeling of every step
in contrast with the ease to come and go. Of all the distractions
induced by poverty and wealth it is one that appeals to me now as the
most significant. Merely to do without things, or merely to possess
things, is matter of little importance. A man's life consisteth not in
the abundance of the things which he possesseth, we are told on high
authority; but it does consist in his state of mind. To be always in a
state of mind in which restriction is instinctive is like always
creeping as a baby and never learning to walk.
But as far as money went I was free. I had never been without it. I
had no conception of a life in which I couldn't spend as much as I
reasonably wished. As I had been in Europe, I probably had a letter of
credit somewhere, if I could only put my hand on it. On arriving in New
York I should of course have access to my bank-account.
It occurred to me to look under my pillow, and there, sure enough, was a
little leather purse. That it was a common little purse was secondary to
the fact that it was filled. Sitting on the edge of the couch, I opened
it with fingers that shook with my excitement. It contained three
five-hundred-franc notes, two for a hundred, some hundred and fifty in
gold, and a little silver, nearly four hundred dollars in all. I seemed
to know that roughly it was the kind of sum I generally carried on my
person when abroad.
After a hasty scrubbing up I crept back into bed, and waited for
Jean-Marie to bring my breakfast.
It was my first thought that I must not let him see that anything was
wrong. I must let no one see that. The reason I had given him for my
extraordinary sleep, that of having long suffered from insomnia and
being relieved by the sea air, would have to pass, too, with
Drinkwater's friend the doctor, should he come to see me. No one, no
one, must suspect that for so much as an hour the sense of my identity
had escaped me. The shame I felt at that--a shame I have since learned
to be common to most victims of the same mishap--was overwhelming.
Rather than confess it I could own to nearly anything in the nature of a
crime.
But it was no one's business but my own. I comforted myself with that
reflection amid much that I found disturbing.
What I chiefly found disturbing was my general environment. I couldn't
understand this narrow cabin, these provincial foreign clothes. While I
was sorry for Drinkwater's blindness, I disliked the closeness of
contact with one I regarded as my inferior. I am not saying that I took
this situation seriously. I knew I could extricate myself from it on
arriving in New York. The element in it that troubled me was my
inability to account for it. What had I been doing that I should find
myself in conditions so distasteful? Why should I have wanted to
obliterate my traces? It was obvious that I had done it, and that I had
done it with deliberation. Being Somebody in the world, I had made
myself Nobody, and for that I must have had a motive. Was it a motive
that would confront me as soon as I had become Somebody again? That I
should have lost the sense of my identity was bad enough in itself; but
that I should reappear in a role that was not my own, and with a name I
was sure I had never borne, was at once terrifying and grotesque.
*CHAPTER III*
It occurred to me that I could escape some of my embarrassment by asking
Drinkwater to stop his friend the doctor from looking in on me; but
before I had time to formulate this plan, and while I was sitting up
crosslegged in my berth, eating from the tray which Jean-Marie had laid
on my knees, there was a sharp rap on the door. As I could do nothing
but say, "Come in," the doctor was before me.
"Good!" he said, quietly, without greeting or self-introduction. "Best
thing you could be doing."
The lack of formality nettled me. I objected to his assumption of a
right to force himself in uninvited.
I said, frigidly: "I shall be out on deck presently. If you want to see
me, perhaps it would be easier there."
"Oh, this is all right." He made himself comfortable in a corner of the
couch, propping his body against the rolling of the ship with a
fortification of bags. "Glad you're able to get up and dress. I'm
Doctor Averill."
To give him to understand that I was not communicative I took this
information in silence. My coldness apparently did not impress him, and,
sitting in the corner diagonally opposite to mine, he watched me eat.
He was one of those men in whom personality disappears in the scientific
observer. His features, manners, clothing, were mere accidents.
He struck you as being wise, though with a measure of sympathy in his
wisdom. Small in build, the dome of his forehead would have covered a
man of twice his stature. A small, dark mustache was no more
consciously a point of personal adornment than a patch of stonecrop to a
rock. When he took off his cap his baldness, though more extensive than
you would have expected in a man who couldn't have been older than
forty-five, was the finishing-touch of the staid.
"You've been having a long sleep."
"Yes."
"Making up for lost time?"
"Exactly."
"Been at the front?"
It was the kind of a question I was afraid of. I knew that if I said,
"Yes," I should have to give details, and so I said, "No."
"Look as if you had been."
"Do I?"
"Often leaves some sort of hang-over--"
"It couldn't do that in my case, because I wasn't there."
He tried another avenue of approach. "Drinkwater told me you were a
Frenchman."
"That seems to have been a mistake of our steward."
"But you speak the language."
"Yes, I speak it."
"You must speak it very well."
"Probably."
"Have you lived much in France?"
"Oh, on and off."
"Had a position over there?"
It seemed to be my turn to ask a question. I shot him a quick glance.
"What sort of position do you mean?"
"Oh, I didn't know but what you might have been in a shop or an
office--"
So I looked like that! It was a surprise to me. I had thought he might
mention the Embassy. My sense of superior standing was so strong that I
expected another man of superior standing to see it at a glance.
Contenting myself with a shake of the heads I felt his eyes on me with a
graver stare.
"Must have found it useful to speak French so well, especially at a time
like this."
I allowed that to pass without challenge.
"If we should ever go into the war a fellow like you could make himself
handy in a lot of ways."
We were therefore not in the war. I was glad to add that to my list of
facts. "I should try," I assented, feeling that the words committed me
to nothing.
"Wonder you weren't tempted to pitch in as it was. A lot of our young
Americans did--chaps who found themselves over there."
"I wasn't one of them."
"Poor Drinkwater, now--he went over with me as my stenographer in the
spring of that year; and when the thing broke out--"
"He went?"
"Yes, he went."
"And didn't get much good from it."
"Oh, I don't know about that. Depends--doesn't it?--on what we mean by
good. You fellows--"
I shot him another glance, but I don't think he noticed that I objected
to being classed with Drinkwater.
"You fellows--" he began again.
I never knew how he meant to continue, for a shuffling and pawing
outside the door warned us that Drinkwater, having finished his
breakfast, was feeling his way in.
The doctor spoke as the boy pushed the door open and stumbled across the
threshold.
"Morning, Harry! Your friend here seems to have waked up in pretty good
condition. Look at the breakfast he's been making away with." He rose
to leave, since the cabin had not room enough for two men on foot at the
same time. "See you on deck by and by," he added, with a nod to me;
"then we can have a more satisfactory talk."
I waited till he was out of earshot. "Who is he, anyhow?"
In giving me a summary of Averill's history Drinkwater couldn't help
weaving in a partial one of his own. It was in fact most of his own,
except that it included no reference to his birth and parentage.
Drinkwater had worked his way through one of the great universities,
when laboratory research threw him in contact with Boyd Averill. The
latter was not a practising physician, but a student of biology. He was
the more at liberty to follow one of the less lucrative lines of
scientific work because of being a man of large means. Sketching the
origin of this fortune, my companion informed me that from his patron's
democratic ways no one would ever suppose him the only son, and except
for a sister the only heir, of the biggest banker in the state of New
Jersey. By one of those odd freaks of heredity which neither Sir
Francis Galton nor the great Plockendorff had been able to explain, Boyd
Averill had shown a distaste for banking from his cradle, and yet with
an interest equally difficult to account for in bacteria.
On the subject of Averill's more personal life all my friend could tell
me was that he had married Miss Lulu Winfield, once well known on the
concert stage.
"And, say," he went on, enthusiastically, "she's about the prettiest.
You'll see for yourself when you come up on deck. She'll speak to you.
Oh yes, she will," he hastened to assure me, when I began to demur.
"She won't mind. She's not a bit aristocratic, and Miss Blair says the
same."
To make conversation I asked him who was Miss Blair, learning that she
was the young lady whom Miss Averill had brought over to Europe to act
as stenographer to her brother when Drinkwater had gone to the war.
"You see," he continued to explain, "Averill's been white with me from
the start. When I left him in the lurch--after he'd paid my expenses
over to Europe and all that--because the war broke out, he didn't kick
any more than a straw dummy. When I told him I felt mean, but that this
war couldn't be going on and me not in it, he said that at my age he'd
have felt the same. One of these days I've got to pay him back that
fare. I'll do that when I've got to work in New York and saved a bit of
dough."
I asked him what he meant to work at.
"Oh, there'll be things. There always are. Miss Blair wants me to
learn the touch system and go in for big stenography. Says she'll teach
me. Say, she's some girl. I want you to know her." He reverted to the
principal theme. "Big money in piano-tuning, too, though what I'm
really out for is biology. But after all what's biology but the science
of life?--and you can pick that up anywhere. Oh, I'm all right. I've
had the darnedest good luck, when I've seen my pals--" He left this
sentence unfinished, going on to say: "That was the way when I got mine
at Bois Robert. Shell came down--and, gee whizz! Nothing left of a
bunch of six or eight of us but me--and I only got this."
A toss of his hand was meant to indicate his eyes, after which he went
on to tell how marvelously he had been taken care of, with the
additional good luck of running across Boyd Averill in hospital. Best
luck of all was, now that he was able to go home, the Averills were
coming, too, and had been willing to have him sail by their boat and
keep an eye on him. He spoke as if they were his intimate friends,
while I had only to appear on deck to have them become mine.
"In the jewelry business?" he asked me, suddenly.
I stared in an amazement of which he must have recognized the tones in
my voice. "What made you ask me that?"
"Oh, I don't know. Speak like it. Thought you might have been in
that--or gents' furnishings."
After he had gone on deck, and Jean-Marie had taken away the tray, I got
up and dressed. I did it slowly, with a hatred to my clothes that grew
as I put them on. How I had dressed in the previous portion of my life
I couldn't, of course, tell; but now I was something between a country
barber and a cheap Latin Quarter Bohemian. In conjunction with my
patently Anglo-Saxon face nothing could have been more grotesque.
I thought of trunks. I must have some in the hold. Ringing for
Jean-Marie, I asked if it would be possible to have one or two of them
brought up. If so, I could go back to bed again till I found something
more presentable. The steward, with comic compassion stealing into his
eye as he studied me, said that of course it was possible to have
monsieur's trunks brought up if monsieur would give him the checks or
receipts, which would doubtless be in monsieur's pockets. But a search
revealed nothing. The bags and my purse revealed nothing. My dismay at
the fact that I had come on board without other belongings than those on
the couch almost betrayed me to the little man watching me so wistfully.
I was obliged to invent a story of hurried war-time traveling in order
to get him out.
My predicament was growing more absurd. I sat down on the couch and
considered it. It would have been easy to become excited, frantic,
frenzied, with my ridiculous inability. Putting my hands to my head, I
could have torn it asunder to wrest from my atrophied brain the secret
it guarded so maliciously. "None of that!" I warned myself; and my
hands came down. Whatever I did I must do coolly. So not long after the
eight bells of noon I dragged myself to the deck.
All at once I began to find something like consolation. The wild beauty
of sky and water beat in on me like love. I must have traveled often
enough before, so that it was not new to me; but it was all the more
comforting for that. I had come back to an old, old friendship--the
friendship of wind and color and scudding clouds and glinting horizons
and the mad squadrons of the horses of Neptune shaking their foamy
manes. Amid the raging tempests of cloud there were tranquil islands of
a blue such as was never unfolded by a flower. In the long, sweeping
hollows of the waves one's eye could catch all the hues in pigeons'
necks. Before a billow broke it climbed to a tip of that sea-water
green more ineffable than any of the greens of grass, jades, or
emeralds. From every crest, and in widening lines from the ship's sides
as we plowed along, the foam trailed into shreds that seemed to have
been torn from the looms of a race more deft and exquisite than ours.
Not many men and women love beauty for its own sake. Not many see it.
To most of us it is only an adjunct to comfort or pride. It springs
from the purse, or at best from the intellect; but the hidden man of the
heart doesn't care for it. The hidden man of the heart has no capacity
to value the cloud or the bit of jewel-weed. These things meet no need
in him; they inspire no ecstasy. The cloud dissolves and the bit of
jewel-weed goes back to earth; and the chances are that no human eye has
noted the fact that each has externalized God in one of the myriad forms
of His appeal to us. Only here and there, at long intervals, is there
one to whom line and color and invisible forces like the wind are
significant and sacred, and as essential as food and drink. It came to
me now that, somewhere in my past, beauty had been the dominating
energy--that beauty was the thread of flame which, if I kept steadily
hold of it, would lead me back whence I came.
*CHAPTER IV*
From the spectacle of sea and sky I turned away at last, only because my
senses could take in no more. Then I saw beauty in another form.
A girl was advancing down the deck who embodied the evanescence of the
cloud and the grace of the bit of jewel-weed in a way I could never
convey to you. You must see me as standing near the stern of the boat,
and the long, clean line of the deck, with an irregular fringe of people
in deck-chairs, as empty except for this slender, solitary figure. The
rise and fall of the ship were a little like those of a bough in the
wind, while she was the bird on it. She advanced serenely, sedately,
her hands jauntily in the pockets of an ulster, which was gray, with
cuffs and collar of sage-green. A sage-green tam-o'-shanter was
fastened to a mass of the living fair hair which, for want of a better
term, we call golden. Her awareness of herself almost amounted to
inference; and as she passed under the row of onlookers' eyes she seemed
to fling out a challenge which was not defiant, but good-natured,
defiant but good-natured was the gaze she fixed on me, a gaze as lacking
in self-consciousness as it was in hesitation. A child might have
looked at you in this way, or a dog, or any other being not afraid of
you. Of a blue which could only be compared to that in the rifts in the
cloud overhead, her eyes never wavered in their long, calm regard till
they were turned on me obliquely as she passed by. She did not,
however, look back; and reaching the end of the promenade, she rounded
the corner and went up the other way.
Thinking of her merely as a vision seen by chance, I was the more
surprised when she entered the dining-saloon, helping my friend
Drinkwater. I had purposely got to my place before any one else, so as
to avoid the awkwardness of arriving unknown among people who already
have made one another's acquaintance. Moreover, the table being near to
one of the main entrances, my corner allowed me to take notes on all who
came in. Not that I was interested in my fellow-passengers otherwise
than as part of my self-defense. Self-defense, the keeping any one from
suspecting the mischance that had befallen me, seemed to me, for the
moment, even more important than finding out who I was.
Transatlantic travel having already become difficult, those who entered
were few in number; and as people are always at their worst at sea, they
struck me as mere bundles of humanity. Among the first to pass my table
was Boyd Averill, who gave me a friendly nod. After him came a girl of
perhaps twenty-five, grave, sensible, and so indifferent to appearances
that I put her down as his sister. Last of all was she whom Drinkwater
had summed up as "one of the prettiest." She was; yet not in the way in
which the vision on the deck had been the same. The vision on the deck
had had no more self-consciousness than the bit of jewel-weed. This
richly colored beauty, with eyes so long and almond-shaped that they
were almost Mongolian, was self-conscious in the grain--luxurious,
expensive, and languorous.
My table companions began to gather, turning my attention chiefly on
myself. I had traveled enough to know the chief steward as a
discriminating judge of human nature. Those who came asking for seats
at table he sized up in a flash, associating like with like, and rarely
making a mistake. On journeys of which no record remained with me I had
often admired this classifying instinct, doubtless because any
discrimination it may have contained was complimentary to myself.
To-day I had occasion to find it otherwise.
On coming on board I must have followed the routine of other voyages.
Before turning into my bunk for my long sleep I had apparently asked to
be assigned a seat at table, and given the name of Jasper Soames.
Guided by his intuitive social _flair_, the chief steward had
adjudicated me to a side table in a corner, where to-day my first
companion was a lady's maid. The second was a young man whom I had no
difficulty in diagnosing as a chauffeur, after whom Drinkwater and the
vision of the deck came gaily along together. She probably informed him
that I was already in my place, for as he passed me to reach his chair
at the head of the table, he clapped me on the shoulder with a glad
salute.
"So, old scout, you've got ahead of us! Bully for you! Knew you'd eat
a whale when once you got started. Say, what we'd all like to sit down
to now is a good old-fashioned dinner of corned beef and cabbage instead
of all this French stuff." He had not, however, forgotten the
courtesies of the occasion. "Miss Blair, let me make you acquainted
with Mr. Soames. Mr. Soames, Miss Mulberry; Mr. Finnegan, Mr. Soames."
For the ladies I half rose, with a bow; for Mr. Finnegan I made a nod
suffice. Mr. Finnegan seemed scarcely to think I merited a nod in
return. Miss Mulberry acknowledged me coldly. As for Miss Blair, she
inclined her head with the grace of the _lilium canadense_ or the
nodding trinity-flower. In the act there was that shade of negligence
which tells the worldly wise that friendliness is not refused, but
postponed.
We three formed a group at one end of the table--Drinkwater having Miss
Blair on his right and myself on his left--while Mr. Finnegan and Miss
Mulberry forgathered at the other. The table being set for eight, there
was a vacant seat between Miss Mulberry and Miss Blair, and two between
myself and Mr. Finnegan. This breaking into sets was due, therefore, to
the chief steward, and not to any sense of affinity or rejection among
ourselves.
After a few polite generalities as to the run and other sea-going topics
the conversation broke into dialogues--Mr. Finnegan and Miss Mulberry,
Mr. Drinkwater and Miss Blair. This seeming to be the established
procedure, it remained for me to take it as a relief.
For again it gave me time to ask why I was graded as I found myself. A
man who knows he is a general and wakes up to see himself a private,
with every one taking it for granted that he is a private and no more,
would experience the same bewilderment. What had I done that such a
situation could have come about? What had I been? How long was my
knowledge of myself to depend on a group of shattered brain cells?
I had not followed the conversation of Mr. Drinkwater and Miss Blair,
even though I might have overheard it; but suddenly the lady glanced up
with a clear, straightforward look from her myosotis eyes.
"Mr. Soames, have you ever lived in Boston?"
The husky, veiled voice was of that bantering quality for which the
French word _gouailleur_ is the only descriptive term. In Paris it
would have been called _une voix de Montmartre_, and as an expression of
New York it might best be ascribed to Third Avenue. It was jolly,
free-and-easy, common, and sympathetic, all at once.
My instinct for self-defense urged me to say, "No," and I said it
promptly.
"Or Denver?"
I said, "No," again, and for the same reason. I couldn't be pinned down
to details. If I said, "Yes," I should be asked when and where and how,
and be driven to invention.
"Were you ever in Salt Lake City?"
A memory of a big gray building, with the Angel Moroni on the top of it,
of broad, straight streets, of distant mountains, of a desert twisted
and suffering, of a lake that at sunset glowed with the colors old
artists burned into enamels--a memory of all this came to me, and I
said, "Yes," I said it falteringly, wondering if it would commit me to
anything. It committed me to nothing, so far as I could see, but a
glance of Miss Blair's heaven-colored eyes toward her friend, as though
I had corroborated something she had said. She had forgotten for the
moment that Drinkwater was blind, so that of this significant look I
alone got the benefit. What it meant I, of course, didn't know; I could
only see it meant something.
The obvious thing for it to mean was that Miss Blair knew more about me
than I knew myself. While it was difficult to believe that, it
nevertheless remained as part of the general experience of life which
had not escaped me, that one rarely went among any large number of
people without finding some one who knew who one was. That had happened
to me many a time, especially on steamers, though I could no longer fix
the occasions. I decided to cultivate Miss Blair and, if possible, get
a clue from her.
*CHAPTER V*
That which, in my condition, irked me more than anything was the
impossibility of being by myself. The steamer was a small one, with all
the passengers of one class. Those who now crossed the Atlantic were
doing it as best they could; and to be thrown pell-mell into a
second-rate ship like the _Auvergne_ was better, in the opinion of most
people, than not to cross at all. It was a matter of eight or ten days
of physical discomfort, with home at the other end.
I knew now that the month was September, and the equinox not far away.
It was mild for the time of year, and, though the weather was rough, it
was not dirty. With the winds shifting quickly from west to northwest
and back again, the clouds were distant and dry, lifting from time to
time for bursts of stormy sunshine. For me it was a pageant. I could
forget myself in its contemplation. It was the vast, and I was only the
infinitesimal; it was the ever-varying eternal, and I was the sheerest
offspring of time, whose affairs were of no moment.
Nevertheless, I had pressing instant needs, or needs that would become
pressing as soon as we reached New York. Between now and then there
were five or six days during which I might recover the knowledge that
had escaped me; but if I didn't I should be in a difficult situation. I
should be unable to get money; I should be unable to go home. I should
be lost. Unless some one found me I should have to earn a living. To
earn a living there must be something I could do, and I didn't know that
I could do anything.
Of all forms of exasperation, this began to be the most maddening. I
must have had a profession; and yet there was no profession I could
think of from which I didn't draw back with the peculiar sick recoil I
felt the minute I approached whatever was personal to myself. In this
there were elements contradictory to each other. I wanted to know--and
yet I shrank from knowing. If I could have had access to what money I
needed I should have been content to drift into the unknown without
regret.
But there was a reserve even here. It attached to the word home. On
that word the door had not been so completely shut that a glimmer didn't
leak through. I knew I had a home. I longed for it without knowing
what I longed for. I could see myself arriving in New York, fulfilling
the regular dock routine--and going somewhere. But I didn't know where.
Of some ruptured brain cell enough remained to tell me that on the
American continent a spot belonged to me; but it told me no more than
the fact that the spot had love in it. I could feel the love and not
discern the object. As to whether I had father or mother or wife or
child I knew no more than I knew the same facts of the captain of the
ship. Out of this darkness there came only a vision of flaming eyes
which might mean anything or nothing.
I was unable to pursue this line of thought because Miss Blair came
strolling by with the same nonchalant air with which she had passed me
before lunch. I can hardly say she stopped; rather she commanded, and
swept me along.
"Don't you want to take a walk, Mr. Soames? You'd better do it now,
because we'll be rolling scuppers under by and by."
For making her acquaintance it was too good an opportunity to miss. In
spite of my inability to play up to her gay cheerfulness I found myself
strolling along beside her.
I may say at once that I never met a human being with whom I was more
instantly on terms of confidence. The sketch of her life which she gave
me without a second's hesitation came in response to my remark that from
her questions to me at table I judged her to have traveled.
"I was born on the road, and I suppose I shall never get off it. My
father and mother had got hitched to a theatrical troupe on tour."
A distaste acquired as a little girl on tour had kept her from trying
her fortunes on the boards. She had an idea that her father was acting
still, though after his divorce from her mother they had lost sight of
him. Her mother had died six years previously, since which time she had
looked after herself, with some ups and downs of experience. She had
been a dressmaker, a milliner, and a model, with no more liking for any
of these professions than she had for the theatrical. In winding up
this brief narrative she astounded me with the statement:
"And now I'm going to be an adventuress."
"A what?" I stopped in the middle of the deck to stare at her.
She repeated the obnoxious noun, continuing to walk on.
"But I thought you were a stenographer."
"That's part of it. I'm deceiving poor Miss Averill. She's my dupe. I
make use of people in that way--and throw them aside."
"But doing the work for Doctor Averill in the mean time."
"Oh, that's just a pretext."
"A pretext for what?"
"For being an adventuress. Goodness knows what evil I shall do in that
family before I get out of it."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Oh, well, you'll see. If you're born baleful--well, you've just got to
be baleful; that's all. Did you ever hear of an adventuress who didn't
wreck homes?"
I said I had not much experience with adventuresses, and didn't quite
know the point of their occupation.
"Well, you stay around where I am and you'll see."
"Have you wrecked many homes up to the present?" I ventured to inquire.
"This is the first one I ever had a chance at. I only decided to be an
adventuress about the time when Miss Averill came along."
That, it seemed, had been at the Settlement, to which Miss Blair had
retired after some trying situations as a model. Stenography being
taught at the Settlement, she had taken it up on hearing of several
authenticated cases of girls who had gone into offices and married
millionaires. The discouraging side presented itself later in the many
more cases of girls who had not been so successful. It was in this
interval of depression on the part of Miss Blair that Mildred Averill
had appeared at the Settlement with all sorts of anxious plans about
doing good, "If she wants to do good to any one, let her do it to me,"
Miss Blair had said to her intimates. "I'm all ready to be adopted by
any old maid that's got the wad." That, she explained to me, was not
the language she habitually used. It was mere pleasantry between girls,
and not up to the standard of a really high-class adventuress.
Moreover, Miss Averill was not an old maid, seeing she was but
twenty-five, though she got herself up like forty.
All the same, Miss Averill having come on the scene and having taken a
fancy to Miss Blair, Miss Blair had decided to use Miss Averill for her
own malignant purposes.
For by this time the seeming stenographer had chosen her career. A
sufficient course of reading had made it clear that of all the women in
the world the adventuress had the best of it. She went to the smartest
dressmakers; she stayed at the dearest hotels; her jewels and furs
rivaled those of duchesses; her life was the perpetual third act of a
play. Furthermore, Miss Blair had yet to hear of an adventuress who
didn't end in money, marriage, and respectability.
Having been so frank about herself, I could hardly be surprised when she
became equally so about me. As the wind rose she slipped into a
protected angle, where I had no choice but to follow her. She began her
attack after propping herself in the corner, her hands deep in her
pockets, and her pretty shoulders hunched.
"You're a funny man. Do you know it?"
Though inwardly aghast, I strove to conceal my agitation. "Funny in
what way?"
"Oh, every way. Any one would think--"
"What would any one think?" I insisted, nervously, when she paused.
"Oh, well! I sha'n't say."
"Because you're afraid to hurt my feelings?"
"I'm a good sort--especially among people of our own class. For the
others"--she shrugged her shoulders charmingly--"I'm an anarchist and a
socialist and all that. I don't care who I bring down, if they're up.
But when people are down already--I'm--I'm a friend."
As there was a measure of invitation in these words I nerved myself to
approach the personal.
"Are you friend enough to tell me why you thought you had seen me in
Salt Lake City?"
She nodded. "Sure; because I did think so--there--or somewhere."
"Then you couldn't swear to the place?"
"I couldn't swear to the place; but I could to you. I never forget a
face if I give it the twice-over. The once-over--well, then I may. But
if I've studied a man--the least little bit--I've got him for the rest
of my life."
"But why should you have studied me--assuming that it was me?"
"Assuming that that water's the ocean, I study it because there's
nothing else to look at. We were opposite each other at two tables in a
restaurant."
"Was there nobody there but just you and me?"
"Yes, there was a lady."
My heart gave a thump. "At your table or at mine?"
"At yours."
"Did she"--I was aware of the foolish wording of the question without
being able to put it in any other way--"did she have large dark eyes?"
"Not in the back of her head, which was all I saw of her."
Once more I expressed myself stupidly. "Did you--did you think it
was--my wife--or just a friend?"
She burst out laughing. "How could I tell? You speak as if you didn't
know. You're certainly the queerest kid--"
I tried to recover my lost ground. "I do know, but--"
"Then what are you asking me for?"
"Because you seem to have watched me--"
"I didn't watch you," she denied, indignantly. "The idea! You sure have
your nerve with you. I couldn't help seeing a guy that was right under
my eyes, could I? Besides which--"
"Yes? Besides which--?" I insisted.
She brought the words out with an air of chaffing embarrassment. "Well,
you weren't got up as you are now. Do you know it?"
As I reddened and stammered something about the war, she laid her hand
on my arm soothingly.
"There now! There now! That's all right. I never give any one away.
You can see for yourself that I can't have knocked about the world like
I've done without running up against this sort of thing a good many
times--"
"What sort of thing?"
"Oh, well, if you don't know I needn't tell you. But I'm your friend,
kid. That's all I want you to know. It's why I told you about myself.
I wanted you to see that we're all in the same boat. Harry Drinkwater's
your friend, too. He likes you. You stick by us and we'll stick by you
and see the thing through."
It was on my lips to say, "What thing?" but she rattled on again.
"Only you can't wear that sort of clothes and get away with it, kid. Do
you know it? Another fellow might, but you simply can't. It shows you
up at the first glance. The night you came on board you might just as
well have marched in carrying a blue silk banner. For Heaven's sake, if
you've got anything else in your kit go and put it on."
"I haven't."
"Haven't? What on earth have you done with all the swell things you
must have had? Burned 'em?"
The question was so direct, and the good-will behind it so evident, that
I felt I must give an answer. "Sold them."
"Got down to that, did you? What do you know? Poor little kid! Funny,
isn't it? A woman can carry that sort of thing off nine times out
often; but a fat-head of a man--"
She kept the sentence suspended while gazing over my shoulder. The lips
remained parted as in uttering the last word. I was about to turn to
see what so entranced her, when she said, in a tone of awe or joy, I was
not sure which:
"There's that poor little blind boy coming down the deck all by himself.
You'll excuse me, won't you, if I run and help him?"
So she ran.
*CHAPTER VI*
Beyond this point I had made no progress when we landed in New York. I
still knew myself as Jasper Soames. Miss Blair still suspected that I
was running away from justice. That I was running away from justice I
suspected myself, since how could I do otherwise? All the way up the
Bay I waited for that tap on my shoulder which I could almost have
welcomed for the reason that it would relieve me of some of my
embarrassments.
Those embarrassments had grown more entangling throughout the last days
of the voyage. The very good-will of the people about me increased the
complications in which I was finding myself involved. Every one asked a
different set of questions, the answers I gave being not always
compatible with each other. I didn't exactly lie; I only replied
wildly--trying to guard my secret till I could walk off the boat and
disappear from the ken of these kindly folk who did nothing but wish me
well.
I accomplished this feat, I am bound to confess, with little credit; but
credit was not my object. All I asked was the privilege of being alone,
with leisure to take stock of my small assets and reckon up the
possibilities before me. As it was incredible that a man such as I was
could be lost on the threshold of his home I needed all the faculties
that remained to me in order to think out the ways and means by which I
could be found.
So alone I found myself, though not without resorting to ruses of which
I was even then ashamed.
It was Miss Blair who scared me into them. Coming up to me on deck,
during the last afternoon on board, she said, casually:
"Going to stay awhile in New York?"
It was a renewal of the everlasting catechism, so I said, curtly:
"I dare say."
"Oh, don't be huffy! Looking for a job?"
"Later, perhaps; not at once."
In her smile, as her eye caught mine, there was a visible significance.
"You'll be a good kid, wont you? You'll--you'll keep on the level?"
I made a big effort on my own part, so as to see how she would take it.
"If I'm not nabbed going up the Bay."
"Oh, you won't be. It can't be as--as bad as all that. Even if it
was--" She left this sentiment for me to guess at while she went on.
"Where do you expect to stay?"
I was about to name one of New York's expensive hotels when it occurred
to me that she would burst out laughing at the announcement, she would
take it as a joke. I realized then that it struck me also as a joke.
It was incongruous not only with my appearance, but with my entire role
throughout the trip. I ended by replying that I hadn't made up my mind.
"Well, then, if you're looking for a place--"
"I can't say that I'm that."
"Or if you should be, I've given Harry Drinkwater a very good address."
It was only a rooming-house, she explained to me, but for active people
the more convenient for that, and with lots of good cafes in the
neighborhood. She told me of one in particular--Alfonso was the name of
the restaurateur--where one could get a very good dinner, with wine, for
seventy-five cents, and an adequate breakfast for forty. Moreover, Miss
Blair had long known the lady who kept the rooming-house in question, a
friend of her mother's she happened to be, and any one whom she, Lydia
Blair, sent with her recommendation would find the place O.K.
I was terrified. I didn't mean to go to this well-situated dwelling,
"rather far west" in Thirty-fifth Street; I only had visions of being
wafted there against my will. So much had happened in which my will had
not been consulted that I was afraid of the kindliest of intentions.
When at dinner that evening Miss Mulberry apologized across the table
for her coldness toward me during the trip, ascribing it to a
peculiarity of hers in never making gentlemen friends till sure they
were gentlemen, and offering me her permanent address, I resolved that
after that meal none of the whole group should catch another glimpse of
me.
For this reason I escaped to my cabin directly after dinner, packed my
humble belongings, and went to bed. When, toward eleven, Drinkwater
came down, putting the question, as he stumbled in, "'Sleep, Jasper?" I
replied with a faint snore. For the last two or three days he had been
scattering Jaspers throughout his sentences, and I only didn't ask him
to give up the practice because of knowing that with men of his class
familiarity is a habit. Besides, it would be all over in a few days, so
that I might as well take it patiently.
And yet I was sorry that it had to be so, for something had made me like
him. During the days of the equinoctial bad weather it had fallen to me
to steer him about the staggering ship, and one is naturally drawn to
anything helpless. Then, too, of all the men to whom I ever lent a hand
he was the most demonstrative. He had a boy's way of pawing you, of
sprawling over you, of giving your hand little twitches, or affectionate
squeezes to your arm. There was no liberty he wouldn't take; but when
he took them they didn't seem to be liberties. If I betrayed a hint of
annoyance he would pat me on any part of my person he happened to touch,
with some such soothing words as:
"There, there, poor 'ittle Jasper! Let him come to his muvverums and
have his 'ittle cry."
But I had to turn my back on him. There was no help for it. I
understood, however, that people in his class were less sensitive to
discourtesy than those in mine. They were used to it. True, he was
blind; but then it was not to be expected that I should look after every
blind man I happened to run against in traveling. Besides all this, I
had made up my mind what I meant to do, and refused to discuss it
further even with myself.
He was hoisting himself to the upper bunk when he made a second attempt
to draw me.
"You'll have people to meet you to-morrow morning?"
"Oh, I suppose so," I grunted, sleepily. "Some of 'em will be there." A
second or two having passed, I felt it necessary to add, "Same with you,
I suppose?"
He replied from overhead. "Sure! Two or three of the guys 'll be
jazzing round the dock. There'll be--a--Jack--and--a--Jim--and--a--well,
a pile of 'em." He was snuggling down into his pillow as he wound up
with a hearty, "Say, Jasper, I'll be--I'll be all right--I'll be
_fine_."
Deciding that I wouldn't call this bluff, I turned and went to sleep.
Up with dawn, I slipped out of the cabin before the blind man had
stirred. Early rising got its reward in a morning of silver tissue.
Silver tissue was flung over the Bay, woven into the air, and formed all
we could see of the sky. Taking my place as far toward the bow as I
could get, I watched till two straight lines forming a right angle
appeared against the mist, after which, magical, pearly, spiritual,
white in whiteness, tower in cloud, the great city began to show itself
through the haze, like something born of the Holy Ghost.
Having nothing to carry but my bag and suitcase, I was almost the first
on shore. So, too, I must have been the first of the passengers ready
to leave the dock. But two things detained me, just as I was going to
take my departure.
The first was fear. It came without warning--a fear of solitude, of the
city, of the danger of arrest, of the first steps to be taken. I was
like a sick man who hasn't realized how weak he is till getting out of
bed. I had picked up my bags after the custom-house officer had passed
them, to walk out of the pen under the letter S, when the thought of
what I was facing suddenly appalled me. Dropping my load to the dusty
floor, I sank on the nearest trunk.
I have read in some English book of reminiscences the confession of
dread on the part of a man released after fifteen years' imprisonment on
first going into the streets. The crowds, the horses, the drays, the
motors, the clamor and gang, struck him as horrific. For joining the
blatant, hideous procession already moving from the dock I was no more
equipped than Minerva would have been on the day when she sprang,
full-grown and fully armed, from her father's head.
Looking up the long lines of pens, I could see Miss Blair steering
Drinkwater from the gangway toward the letter D. I noticed his
movements as reluctant and terrified. The din I found appalling even
with the faculty of sight must have been menacing to him in his
darkness. He was still trying to take it with a laugh, but the merriment
had become frozen.
Seizing my two bags again, I ran up the line.
"Oh, you dear old kid!" Miss Blair exclaimed, as I came within speaking
distance, "I'm sure glad to see you. I was afraid you'd been--"
Knowing her suspicion, I cut in on her fear. "No; it didn't happen.
I--got off the boat all right. I--I've just been looking after my
things and ran back to see if there was anything I could do--"
"Bless you! There's everything you can do. Harry's been crying for you
like a baby for its nurse."
"Where is he?"
The words were his. Confused by the hub-bub, he was clawing in the
wrong direction, so that the grab with which he seized me was like that
of a strayed child on clutching a friendly hand.
In the end I was in a taxicab, bound for the rooming-house "rather far
west" in Thirty-fifth Street, with my charge by my side.
"Say, isn't this the grandest!"
The accent was so sincere that I laughed. We were out in the sunlight
by this time, plowing our way through the squalor.
"What's grand about it?"
"Oh, well, Miss Blair finding me that house to go to--and you going
along with me--and the doctor coming to see me to-morrow to talk about a
job--"
"What job?"
"Oh, some job. There'll be one. You'll see. I've got the darnedest
good luck a guy was ever born with--all except my name."
"What about the fellows you said would be jazzing around the dock to
meet you?"
I was sorry for that bit of cruelty before it had got into words. It
was one of the rare occasions on which I ever saw his honest pug-face
fall.
"Say, you didn't believe that, did you?"
"You said it."
"Oh, well, I say lots of things. Have to."
We jolted on till a block in the traffic enabled him to continue without
the difficulty of speaking against noise. "Look here! I'm going to
tell you something. It's--it's a secret."
"Then for Heaven's sake keep it."
"I want you to know it. I don't want to be your friend under false
pretenses."
It seemed to me an opportunity to clarify the situation. We were on
land. We were in New York. It was hardly fair to these good people to
let them think that our association could continue on the same terms as
at sea. Somewhere in the back of my strained mind was the fact that I
had formerly classed myself as a snob and had been proud of the
appellation. That is, I had been fastidious as to whom I should know
and whom I should not know. I had been an adept in the art of cutting
those who had been forced or had forced themselves upon me, and had
regarded this skill as an accomplishment. Finding myself on board ship,
and in a peculiar situation, I had carried myself as a gentleman should,
even toward Mr. Finnegan and Miss Mulberry.
That part had been relatively easy. It was more difficult to dispose of
the kindly interest of the Averills. He had made more than one approach
which I parried tactfully. Mrs. Averill had contented herself with
disquieting looks from her almond eyes, though one day she had stopped
me on deck with the condescending inquiries as to my health that one
puts to a friend's butler. Miss Averill had been more direct--sensible,
solicitous, and rich in a shy sympathy. One day, on entering the
saloon, I found her examining some rugs which a Persian passenger was
displaying in the interests of trade. Being called by her into council,
I helped her to choose between a Herati and a Sarouk, the very names of
which she had never heard. My connoisseurship impressed her. After that
she spoke to me frequently, and once recommended the employment bureau
of her Settlement, in case I were looking for work.
All this I had struggled with, sometimes irritated, sometimes grimly
amused, but always ill at ease. Now it was over. I should never see
the Averills again, and Drinkwater must be given to understand that he,
too, was an incident.
"My dear fellow, there are no pretenses. We simply met on board ship,
and because of your--your accident I'm seeing you to your door. That's
all. It doesn't constitute friendship."
"You bet it does," was his unexpected rejoinder. "I'm not that kind at
all. When a fellow's white with me, he's white. I'm not going to be
ashamed of him. If you ever want any one to hold the sponge for you,
Jasper--"
I repeated stupidly, "Hold the sponge?"
"Go bail for you--do anything. I couldn't go bail for you on my own, of
course; but I could hustle round and get some one to do it. Lydia Blair
knows a lot of people--and there's the doctor. Say, Jasper, I'm your
friend, and I'm going to stand by the contract."
The taxi lumbered on again, while I was debating with myself as to what
to say next, or whether or not to say anything. One thing was clear,
that no matter what fate awaited me I couldn't have Drinkwater holding
the sponge for me, nor could I appear in court, or anywhere else, with a
man of his class as my backer.
We were lurching into Broadway when he grasped me suddenly by the arm,
to say:
"Look here, Jasper! To show what I think of you I'm going to make you
listen to that secret. I--I wasn't expecting any one to meet me.
There's no one _to_ meet me. Do you get that?"
I said that I got it, but found nothing peculiar in the situation.
"Oh, but there is, though. I've got--I've got no friends--not so much
as a father or a mother. I never did have. I was--I was left in a
basket on a door-step---twenty-three years ago--and brought up in an
orphans' home in Texas. There, you've got it straight! I've passed you
up the one and only dope on Harry Drinkwater, and any guy that's afraid
he can't be my friend without wearing a dress-suit to breakfast--"
It was so delicate a method of telling me that I was as good as he was
that it seemed best to let the subject of our future relations drop.
They would settle themselves when I had carried out the plan that had
already begun to dawn in me.
*CHAPTER VII*
Miss Goldie Flowerdew, for that was the name on our note of
introduction, was at home, but kept us waiting in a room where I made my
first study of a rooming-house. It was another indication of what I had
_not_ been in my past life that a rooming-house was new to me.
This particular room must in the 'sixties have been the parlor of some
prim and prosperous family. It was long, narrow, dark, with dark
carpets, and dark coverings to the chairs. Dark pictures hung on dark
walls, and dark _objets d'art_ adorned a terrifying chimneypiece in
black marble. Folding-doors shut us off from a back room that was
probably darker still; and through the interstices of the shrunken
woodwork we could hear a vague rustling.
The rustling gave place to a measured step, which finally proceeded from
the room and sounded along the hall, as if taken to the rhythm of a
stone march like that in "Don Giovanni," when the statue of the
Commander comes down from its pedestal. My companion and I
instinctively stood up, divining the approach of a Presence.
The Presence was soon on the threshold, doing justice to the epithet.
The statue of the Commander, dressed in the twentieth-century style of
sweet sixteen and crowned by a shock of bleached hair of tempestuous
wave, would have looked like Miss Goldie Flowerdew as she stood before
us majestically, fingering our note of introduction.
"So she's not coming," was her only observation, delivered in a voice so
deep that, like Mrs. Siddons's "Will it wash?" it startled.
"Did you expect her?" I ventured to say.
The sepulchral voice spoke again. "Which is the blind one?"
Drinkwater moved forward. She, too, moved forward, coming into the room
and scanning him face to face.
"You don't look so awful blind."
"No, but I am--for the present."
"For the present? Does that mean that you expect to regain your sight?"
"The doctors say that it may come back suddenly as it went."
"And suppose it don't?"
"Oh, well, I've got along without it for the past six months, so I
suppose I can do it for the next sixty years. I've given it a good try,
and in some ways I like it."
"You do, do you?"
"Yes, lady."
"Then," she declared, in her tragic voice, "I like you."
He flushed like a girl flushes, though his grin was his own specialty.
"Say," he began, in confidential glee, "Miss Blair said you would--"
"Tell Lydia Blair that she's at liberty to bestow her affections when
and as she chooses; but beg her to be kind enough to allow me to dispose
of mine. You'd like to see her room."
She was turning to begin her stone march toward the stairs, but
Drinkwater held her back.
"Say, lady, is it--is it her room?"
"Certainly; it's the one she's always had when she's been with me, and
which she reserved by letter four weeks ago. I was to expect her as
soon as the steamer docked."
"Oh, then--" the boy began to stammer.
"Nonsense, my good man! Don't be foolish. She's gone elsewhere and the
room is to let. If she hadn't sent me some one I would have charged her
a week's rent; but now that she's got me a tenant she's at liberty to go
where she likes. She knows I'd rather have men than women at any time
of day."
"Oh, but if it's her room, and she's given it up for me--"
"It isn't her room; it's mine. I can let it to any one I please. She
knows of a dozen places in the city that she'll like just as well as
this, so don't think she'll be on the street. Come along; I've no time
to waste."
"Better go," I whispered, taking him by the arm, so that the procession
started.
The hall was papered in deep crimson, against which a monumental
black-walnut hat-and-umbrella stand was visible chiefly because of the
gleam of an inset mirror. The floors were painted in the darkest shade
of brown, in keeping with the massive body of the staircase. Up the
staircase, as along the hall, ran a strip of deep crimson carpet,
exposing the warp on the edge of each step.
A hush of solemnity lay over everything. Clearly Miss Flowerdew's
roomers were off for the day, and the place left to her and the little
colored maid who had admitted us. Drinkwater and I made our way upward
in a kind of awe, he clinging to my arm, frightened and yet adventurous.
The long, steep stairs curved toward the top to an upper hall darker
than that below, because the one window was in ground glass with a
border of red and blue. Deep crimson was again the dominating color,
broken only by the doors which may have been mahogany. All doors were
closed except the one nearest the top of the stairs, which stood ajar.
Miss Flowerdew pushed it open, bidding us follow her.
We were on the spot which above all others in the world Lydia Blair
called home. When the exquisite bit of jewel-weed drifted past me on
the deck of the _Auvergne_ this haven was in the background of her
memory.
Through the gloom two iron beds, covered with coarse white counterpanes,
sagged in the outlines of their mattresses, as beds do after a great
many people have slept in them. A low wicker armchair sagged in the
seat as armchairs do after a great many people have sat in them. A
great many people had passed through this room, wearing it down, wearing
it out; and yet there was a woman in the world whose soul leaped toward
it as the hearth of her affections. Because it was architecturally dark
a paper of olive-green arabesques on an olive-green background had been
glued on the walls to make it darker still; and because it was now as
dark as it could be made, the table, the chest of drawers, the
washstand, like the doors, were all of the darkest brown. Miss
Flowerdew pointed to their bare tops to say:
"Lydia has her own covers, and when she puts her photographs and
knickknacks round it makes a home for her."
"Say, isn't it grand!" Drinkwater cried, looking round with his
sightless eyes.
"It's grand for the money," Miss Flowerdew corrected. "It's not the
Waldorf-Astoria, nor yet is it what I was used to when on the stage; but
it's clean"--which it was--"and only respectable people have roomed
here. Come, young man, and I'll show you how to find your way."
Miss Flowerdew may have been on the stage, but she ought to have been a
nurse. Not even Lydia Blair could take hold of a helpless man with such
tenderness of strength. Holding Drinkwater by the hand, she showed him
how to find the conveniences of this nest, pointing out the fact that
the bath-room was the first door on the right as you went into the hall,
and only a step away.
"I hope I sha'n't give you any more trouble, lady, after this," the
blind boy breathed, gratefully.
"Trouble! Of course you'll give me trouble! The man who doesn't give a
woman trouble is not a man. I've had male roomers so neat and natty
you'd have sworn they were female ones--and I got rid of 'em. When a
man doesn't know whether to put his boots on the mantelpiece or in the
wash-basin when he takes them off, I can see I've got something to take
care of. I guess I may as well cart these away."
The reference was to two photographs that stood on the ledges of the
huge black-walnut mirror.
"I put 'em out to give Lydia a home feeling as soon as she arrived.
That's her father, Byron Blair," she continued, handing me the picture
of an extremely good-looking, weak-faced man of the Dundreary type, "and
that's her mother, Tillie Lightwood, as she was when she and I starred
in 'The Wages of Sin.'" I examined the charming head, with profile
overweighted by a chignon, while Miss Flowerdew continued her
reminiscences. "I played Lady Somberly to Tillie's Lottie Gwynne for
nearly three years on end, first here, on Broadway, and then on the
road. Don't do you any good, playing the same part so long. Easy work
and money, but you get the mannerisms fixed on you. I was a good
utility woman up to that time; but when I came back to Broadway I was
Lady Somberly. I never could get rid of her, and so ... I'll show you
some of my notices and photographs--no, not to-day; but when you come
round to see your friend--that is"--she looked inquiringly--"that is, if
you don't mean to use the other bed."
This being the hint I needed, I took it. With the briefest of farewells
I was out on the pavement with my bags in my hands, walking eastward
without a goal.
Once more I had to stifle my concern as to Drinkwater. I saw him, when
Miss Flowerdew would have gone down-stairs, sitting alone in his
darkness, with nothing to do. His trunk, the unpacking of which would
give him some occupation, would not arrive until evening; and in the
mean time he would have no one but himself for company. He couldn't go
out; it would be all he could do to feel his way to the bathroom and
back, though even that small excursion would be a break in his
monotony....
But I took these thoughts and choked them. It was preposterous that I
should hold myself responsible for the comfort of a boy met by chance on
a steamer. Had I taken him in charge from affection or philanthropy it
would have been all very well; but I had no philanthropic promptings,
and, while I liked him, I was far from taking this wavering sympathy as
affection. I was sorry for him, of course; but others must take care of
him. I should have all I could do in taking care of myself.
So I wandered on, hardly noticing at first the way I took, and then
consciously looking for a hotel. As to that, I had definitely made up
my mind not to go to any of those better known, though the names of
several remained in my memory, till I had properly clothed myself.
Though in a measure I had grown used to my appearance, I caught the
occasional turning of a head to look at me, and once the eyebrows of a
passer-by went up in amused surprise.
I discovered quickly enough that I knew New York and that I knew it
tolerably well; and almost as quickly I learned that I knew it not as a
resident, but from the point of view of the visitor. Now that I was
there, I could see myself always coming and always going. From what
direction I had come and in what direction I turned on leaving still
were mysteries. But the conviction of having no abiding tie with this
city was as strong as that of the spectator in a theater of having no
permanent connection with the play.
Coming on a modest hotel at last, I made bold to go in, finding myself
in a lobby of imitation onyx and an atmosphere heavy with tobacco. I
crossed to the desk, under the eyes of some three or four colored boys
who didn't offer to assist me with my bags, and applied for a room. A
courteous young man of Slavic nationality regretted that they were "full
up." I marched out again.
Repeating this experience at another and another, I was saved from doing
it at a fourth by a uniformed darky porter, who, as I was about to go up
the steps, shook his head, at the same time sketching in the air an oval
which I took to be a zero. I didn't go in, but I was oddly
disconcerted. It had never occurred to me till then that hotels had a
choice in guests, just as guests had a choice in hotels. I had always
supposed that a man who could pay could command a welcome anywhere; but
here I was, with nearly four hundred dollars in my pockets, unable to
find a lodging because something strange in my clothes, or my eyes, or
in my general demeanor, or in all together, stamped me as unusual.
"Who's that freak?" I heard one bell-boy ask another, and the term
seemed to brand me.
The day was muggy. After the keen sea air it was breathless. When I
could walk no longer I staggered into a humble eating-house that seemed
to be half underground. There was no one there but two waitresses, one
of whom, wearing her hair _a la madone_, came forward as I closed the
door. She did not, however, come forward so quickly but that I heard
her say to her companion, "Well, of all the nuts--!" The observation,
though breathlessly suspended there, made me shy about ordering my
repast.
And when it came I couldn't eat it. It was good enough, doubtless, but
coarse and ill served. I think the young lady who found me a nut was
sorry for me when it came to close quarters, for she did her best to
coax my appetite with other kind suggestions. All I could do in
response was to flourish the roll of notes into which I had changed my
French money on board and give her an amazing tip.
But a new decision had come to me while I strove to eat, and on making
my way up to daylight again I set out to put it into operation. Reaching
Broadway, I drifted southward till I came on one of the large
establishments for ready-to-wear clothing which I knew were to be found
in the neighborhood. On entering the vast emporium I adopted a new
manner. No longer shrinking as I had shrunk since waking to the fact of
my misfortune, I walked briskly up to the first man whom I saw at a
distance eying me haughtily.
"See here," I said, in a good-mixer voice, "I've just got back from
France, and look at the way they've rigged me out. Was in hospital
there, after I'd got all kinds of shock, and this is the best I could do
without coming back to God's country in a French uniform. Now I want to
see the best you can do and how pretty you can make me look."
On emerging I was, therefore, passable to glance at, and after a
hair-cut and a shave I was no longer afraid to see my reflection in a
glass. I had, too, another inspiration. It occurred to me that I might
startle myself into finding the way home. Calling a taxi, I drove
boldly with my bags to the Grand Central Terminal, trusting to the inner
voice to tell me the place for which to buy my ticket. With half the
instinct of a horse my feet might take the road to the stable of their
own accord.
I recognized the station and all its ways--the red-capped colored men,
the white-capped white ones, the subterranean shops, the gaunt marble
spaces. I recognized the windows at which I must have taken tickets
hundreds of times, and played my comedy by walking up first to one and
then to another, waiting for the inner voice to give me a tip. I found
nothing but blank silence. The world was all before me where to
choose--only Providence was not my guide. Or if Providence was my
guide, His thread of flame was not visible.
I suppose that in that station that afternoon I was like any other man
intending to take a train. At least I could say that. So pleased was I
with myself that more than once during the two hours of my test I went
into the station lavatory just for the sake of seeing myself in the
glass. It was a long glass, capable of reflecting some dozen men at a
time, and I was as like the rest as one elephant is like another. Oh,
that relief! Oh, that joy! Not to be a freak or a nut made up for the
moment for my sense of homelessness.
When tired of listening for a call that didn't come, I went into the
waiting-room and sat down. Again I was like all the other people doing
the same thing. Propped up by a bag on each side, I might have been
waiting for a train to any of the suburbs. I might have had a family
expecting me to supper. The obvious reflection came to me. To all
whose glances happened to fall on me I was no more than an unstoried
human spot; and yet behind me was a history that would have startled any
one of them. So they were unstoried human spots to me; and yet behind
each of them there lay a drama of which I could read no more than I
could see of the world of light beyond the speck I called a star. Was
there a Providence for me, or them, or any other strayed, homeless dog?
As I glanced at the faces before me, faces of tired women, faces of
despondent men, young faces hardened, old faces stupefied, all faces
stamped with the age-long soddenness of man, I asked if anywhere in the
universe love could be holding up the lamps to them.
Like millions of others who have asked this question, I felt that I had
my trouble for my pains; but I got another inspiration. As it was now
the middle of the afternoon, the folly of expecting help from the inner
voice became apparent. I must resort to some other expedient, and the
new suggestion was a simple one.
Checking my bags in the parcel-office, I made for the nearest great
hotel. The hall with its colossal furnishings was familiar from the
moment of my entry. The same ever so slightly overdressed ladies might
have been mincing up and down as on the occasion of my last visit there;
the same knots of men might have begun to gather; the same orchestra
might have been jigging the same tunes; if only the same men were at the
office desk I might find my ingenuity rewarded.
"I wonder if there are any letters for me here? I'm not staying in the
house; but I thought--"
"Name?"
No one said, as I hoped, "I'll see, Mr. Smith," or, "I'll find out, Mr.
Jones," as often happens when a man has been a well-known guest.
Nevertheless, it was a spot where strangers from other places
congregated, and I knew that in the lobbies of hotels one often met old
friends. I might meet one of mine. Better still, one of mine might
meet me. At any minute I might feel a clap on the shoulder, while some
one shouted, "Hello, old Brown!" or, "Why, here's Billy Robinson!
What'll we have to drink?" These had been familiar salutations and
might become so again.
So I walked up and down. I was sorry I had neither stick nor gloves,
but promised to supply the lack at once. In the mean time I could
thrust my hands into my pockets and look like a gentleman at ease
because he is at home. Having enjoyed this sport for an hour or more, I
went out to make my purchases.
Fortified with these, I repeated my comedy in another hotel, and
presently in a third. In each I began with the same formula of asking
for letters; and in each I got the same response, "Name?" In each I
receded with a polite, "Never mind. I don't think there can be any,
after all." In each I paraded up and down and in and out, courting the
glances of head waiters, bell-hops, and lift-men, always in the hope of
a recognition and a "How do, Mr. So-and-so?" that never came.
But by six o'clock the game had played itself out for the day and I was
not only tired, but depressed. I was not discouraged, for the reason
that New York was full of big hotels, and I meant to begin my tramp on
the morrow. There were clubs, too, into which on one pretext or another
I could force my way, and there were also the great thoroughfares. Some
hundreds of people in New York at that moment would probably have
recognized me at a glance--if I could only come face to face with them.
All my efforts for the next few weeks must be bent on doing that.
But in the mean time I was tired and lonely. There were two or three
things I might do, each of which I had promised to myself with some
anticipation. I could go to a good restaurant and order a good feed; I
could go to a good hotel and sleep in a good bed; I could buy the
evening papers and find out what kind of world I was living in.
As to carrying out this program, I had but one prudential misgiving. It
might cost more money than it would be wise for me to spend. My visit
to the purveyor of clothing in the afternoon had not only lightened my
purse, but considerably opened my eyes. Where I had had nearly four
hundred dollars I had now nearly three. With very slight extravagance,
according to the standards of New York, it would come down to nearly two
and then to nearly one, and then to ... But I shuddered at that, and
stopped thinking.
Having stopped thinking along one set of lines, I presently found myself
off on another. I saw Harry Drinkwater sitting in the dark as I was
sitting in the hall of a hotel. That is, he was idle and I was idle.
He was eating his heart out as I was eating out mine.
It occurred to me that I might go back to Thirty-fifth Street and take
him out to dinner. Alfonso, recommended by Miss Blair, might be no more
successful as a host than the lady with tresses _a la madone_ who had
given me my lunch; but we could try. At any rate, the boy wouldn't be
alone on this first evening in New York, and would feel that some one
cared for him.
And then something else in me revolted. No! No! A thousand times no!
I had cut loose from these people and should stay loose. On saying
good-by to Drinkwater that morning I had disappeared without a trace.
For any one who tried to follow me now I should be the needle in a
haystack. What good could come of my going back of my own accord and
putting myself on a level to which I did not belong?
Like many Americans, I was no believer in the equality of men. For men
as a whole I had no respect, and in none but the smallest group had I
any confidence. Looking at the faces as they passed me in the hall, I
saw only those of brutes--and these were mostly people who had had what
we call advantages. As for those who had not had advantages I disliked
them in contact and distrusted them in principle. I described myself
not only as a snob, but as an aristocrat. I had worked it out that to
be well educated and well-to-do was the normal. To be poor and ill
educated was abnormal. Those who suffered from lack of means or
refinement did so because of some flaw in themselves or their
inheritance. They were the plague of the world. They created all the
world's problems and bred most of its diseases. From the beginning of
time they had been a source of disturbance to better men, and would be
to the end of it.
It was the irony of ironies, then, that I should have become a member of
a group that included a lady's maid, a chauffeur, and two stenographers,
and been hailed as one of them. The lady's maid and the chauffeur I
could, of course, dismiss from my mind; but the two stenographers had
seemingly sworn such a friendship for me that nothing but force would
cut me free from it. Very well, then; I should use force if it was
needed; but it wouldn't be needed. All I had to do was to refrain from
going to take Drinkwater out to dinner, and they would never know where
I was.
And yet, if you would believe it, I went. Within half an hour I was
knocking at his bedroom door and hearing his cheery "Come in."
Why I did this I cannot tell you. It was neither from loneliness, nor
kind-heartedness, nor a sense of duty. The feet that wouldn't take the
horse to the stable took him back to that crimson rooming-house, and
that is all I can say.
Drinkwater was sitting in the dark, which was no darker to him than
daylight; but when I switched on the light his pug grin gave an added
illumination to the room.
"Say, that's the darnedest! I knew you'd come in spite of the old lady
swearing you wouldn't. I'd given you half an hour yet; and here you
are, twenty-five minutes ahead of time."
The reception annoyed me. It was bad enough to have come; but it was
worse to have been expected.
"How have you been getting on?" I asked, in order to relieve my first
anxiety.
"Oh, fine!"
"Haven't you been--dull?"
"Lord, no!"
"What have you had to do?"
"Oh, enjoy myself--feeling my way about the house. I can go all round
the room, and out into the hall, and up and down stairs just as easily
as you can. It's a cinch."
"Have you heard anything of Miss Flair?"
"Sure! Called up about an hour ago to say she'd found the swellest
place--in Forty-first Street. But, say, Jasper, what do you think of a
girl who gives up the room she's reserved for a month and more, just
to--"
I broke in on this to ask where he'd had his lunch.
"Oh, the old girl made me go down and have it with her. She's not half
a bad sort, when you come to know her. I've asked her to come out to
dinner with me at Alfonso's. Lydia Blair says it's a dandy place--and
now you can join the party."
"No; I've come to take you out."
"Say, Jasper! Do you think I'm always going to pass the buck, just
because ... You and little Goldie are coming to dinner with me."
Not to dispute the point, I yielded it, asking only:
"What made you think I was coming this evening?--because, you know, I
didn't mean to."
"Oh, I dunno. Like you to do it. You're the sort. That's all."
So within another half-hour I found myself at Alfonso's, on Drinkwater's
left, with little Goldie opposite. Little Goldie seemed somehow the
right name for the Statue of the Commander, now that she wore a lingerie
hat and a blouse of the kind which I believe is called peek-a-boo. She
was well known at Alfonso's, however, her authority securing us a table
in a corner, with special attentions from head and subordinate
waitresses.
How shall I tell you of Alfonso's? Like the rooming-house, it was for
me a new social manifestation. It was what you might call the home of
the homeless, and the homeless were numerous and noisy. They were very
noisy, they were very hot. The odor of food struck upon the nostrils
like the smell of a whole burnt sacrifice when they offered up an ox.
The perfume of wine swam on top of that food, and over and above both
the smell of a healthy, promiscuous, perspiring humanity, washed and
unwashed, in a festive hurtling together, hilarious and hungry.
The food was excellent; the wine as good as any _vin ordinaire_ in
France; the service rapid; and the whole a masterpiece of organization.
I had eaten many a dinner for which I paid ten times as much which
wouldn't have compared with it.
During the progress of the meal it was natural that Miss Flowerdew,
whose eye commended the change in my appearance, should ask me what I
had been doing through the day. I didn't, as you will understand, find
it necessary to go into details; but I told her of my unsuccessful
attempts to find a room.
"Did you try the Hotel Barcelona, in Fourth Avenue?"
I told her I had not.
"Then do so." Fumbling in her bag, she found a card and pencil. "Take
that," she commanded, when she had finished scribbling, "and ask for Mr.
Jewsbury. If he isn't in, show it to the room clerk, but keep it for
Mr. Jewsbury to-morrow. I've told them you must have a room and bath,
not over two-fifty a day--and clean. Tell them I said so."
"Is Mr. Jewsbury a friend of yours?" I asked, inanely, after I had
thanked her.
"He used to be my husband---the one before Mr. Crockett. I could be
Mrs. Jewsbury again, if I so chose; but I do not so choose."
With this astonishing hint of the possibilities in Miss Goldie
Flowerdew's biography I saw the value of discretion, and as soon as
courtesy permitted took my leave to visit the Hotel Barcelona.
*CHAPTER VIII*
After a delicious night I woke in a room which gave the same shock to my
fastidiousness as the first glimpse of my cabin on board ship. I woke
cheerfully, however, knowing that I was in New York and that not many
days could pass before some happy chance encounter would give me the
clue of which I was in search. Cheerfully I dressed and breakfasted;
cheerfully I sat down in the dingy hall to scan the morning's news.
It was the first paper I had opened since landing. It was the first I
had looked at since...
I had no recollection of when I had read a newspaper last. It must have
been long ago; so long ago that the history of my immediate time had
lapsed into formlessness, like that of the ancient world. I knew there
was a world; I knew there were countries and governments; I knew, as I
have said, that there was a war. Of the causes of that war I retained
about the same degree of information as of the origin of the Wars of the
Roses.
Bewilderment was my first reaction now; the second was amazement.
Reading the papers with no preparation from the day before, or from the
day before that--with no preparation at all but the vague memory of
horrors from which my mind retreated the minute they were
suggested--reading the papers thus, the world seemed to me to have been
turned upside down. Hindus were in France, Canadians in Belgium, the
French in the Dobrudja, the Australians in Turkey, the British and
Germans in East Africa, and New-Zealanders on the peninsula of Sinai.
What madness was this? How had the race of men got into such a
tragi-comic topsy-turvydom? A long crooked line slashed all across
Europe showed the main body of the opponents locked in a mutual death
embrace.
I had hardly grasped the meaning of it when, looking up, I saw a figure
of light standing in the lobby before me. It was all in white serge,
with a green sash about the waist, and the head wreathed in a white
motor veil.
"Hello, kid!" The husky, comic, Third Avenue laugh was Lydia Blair's.
I had just time to rehearse the series of irritations I knew I should
feel at being tracked down, and to regret my folly for having gone back
to Drinkwater on the previous evening. Then I saw the heavenly eyes
surveying me with an air of approval. "Well, you look like a nice
tailor's dummy at last. Takes me back to Seattle or Boston or Salt Lake
City--and the lady." As she rattled on, a pair of dark eyes began to
flash on me from the air. "We haven't got _her_ to-day, but there's
some one else who perhaps will fill the bill. Come on out."
Wondering what she could mean, and whether or not the longed-for clue
might not be at hand, I suffered myself to be led by the arm to the door
of the hotel.
At first I saw nothing but a large and handsome touring-car drawn up
against the curb. Then I saw Drinkwater snuggled in a corner--and then a
brown veil. I couldn't help crossing the pavement, since Lydia did the
same, and the brown veil seemed to expect me.
"Miss Blair thought you might like a drive, Mr. Soames, so we came round
to see if we could find you."
"Come on in, Jasper," Drinkwater urged; "the water's fine."
"Come on. Don't be silly," Miss Blair insisted, as I began to make
excuses.
Before I knew what I was doing I had stumbled into the seat opposite
Miss Averill. She sat in the right-hand corner, Drinkwater in the left,
Miss Blair between the two. I occupied one of the small folding
armchairs, going backward. In another minute we were on our way through
one of the cross-streets to Fifth Avenue.
Having grasped the situation, I was annoyed. Miss Averill was taking the
less fortunate of her acquaintance for an airing. Though I could do
justice to her kindliness, I resented being forced again into a position
from which I was trying to struggle out.
Then I saw something that diverted my attention even from my wrongs.
The pavements in Fifth Avenue were thronged with a slowly moving crowd
of men and women, but mostly men, that made progress up or down
impossible. Looking closely, I saw that they were all of the nations
which people like myself are apt to consider most alien to the average
American. Of true Caucasian blood there was hardly a streak among them.
Dark, stunted, oddly hatted, oddly dressed, abject and yet eager,
submissive and yet hostile, they poured up and up and up from all the
side-streets, as runlets from a mountain-side into a great stream. For
the pedestrian, the shopper, the _flaneur_, there was not an inch of
foot room. These surging multitudes monopolized everything. From
Fourteenth Street to Forty-second Street, a distance of more than a mile
along the most extravagantly showy thoroughfare in the world, these two
dense lines of humanity took absolute possession, driving clerks back
into their shops and customers from trade by the sheer weight of
numbers.
"Good heavens! What's up?" I cried, in amazement.
Miss Averill, who was doubtless used to the phenomenon, looked mildly
surprised.
"Why, it's always this way!" she smiled. "It's their lunch-hour. They
come from shops and workshops in the side-streets to see the sights and
get the air."
"But is it like this every day?"
"Sure it is!" laughed Miss Blair. "Did you never see the Avenue
before?"
"I've never seen this before. I'm sure they didn't do it a few years
ago."
Miss Averill agreed to this. It was a new manifestation, due to the
changes this part of New York had undergone in recent years.
"But how do the people get in and out of the shops?"
Miss Blair explained that they couldn't, which was the reason why so
many businesses were being driven up-town. There was an hour in the day
when everything was at a standstill.
"And if during that hour this inflammable stuff were to be set ablaze--"
Miss Averill's comment did not make the situation better. "Oh, the same
thing goes on in every city in the country, only you don't see it. New
York is unfortunate in having only one street. Any other street is just
a byway. Here the whole city, for every purpose of its life, has to
pour itself into Fifth Avenue, so that if anything is going on you get
it there."
We did not continue the subject, for none of us really wanted to talk of
it. In its way it went beyond whatever we were prepared to say. It was
disquieting; it might be menacing. We preferred to watch, to study, to
wonder, as, in the press of vehicles, we slowly made our way between
these banks of outlandish faces, every one of which was like a
slumbering fire. If our American civilization were ever to be blown
violently from one basis to another, as I had sometimes thought might
happen, the social TNT was concentrated here.
But we were soon in the Park. Soon after that we were running along the
river-bank. Soon after that we came to an inn by a stream in a dimple
of a dell, and here Miss Averill had ordered lunch by telephone. It was
a nice little lunch, in a sort of rude pavilion that simulated eating in
the open air. I noticed that all the arrangements had been made with as
much foresight as if we had been people of distinction.
So I began to examine my hostess with more attention than I had ever
given her, coming to the conclusion that she belonged to the new variety
of rich American whom I had somewhere had occasion to observe.
Sensible and sympathetic were the first words you applied to her, and
you could see she was of the type to seek nothing for herself. Brown
was her color, as it so often is that of self-renouncing characters--the
brown of woodland brooks in her eyes, the brown of nuts in her hair, and
all about her an air of conscientiousness that left no place for
coquetry.
Conscientiousness was her aura, and among the shades of
conscientiousness that in spending money easily came first. I was sure
she had studied the whole question of financial inequality from books,
and as much as she could from observation. Zeal to make the best use of
her income had probably held her back from marriage and dictated her
occupations. It had drawn her to working-girls like Lydia Blair, to
struggling men like Harry Drinkwater, and now indirectly to me. It had
suggested the drive of this morning, and had bidden her gather us round
her table as if we were her equals. She knew we were not her equals,
but she was doing her best to forget the fact, and to have us forget it,
too. With Harry and Lydia I think she was successful. But with me...
She herself knew she was not successful with me, and when, after the
coffee, the working-girl had taken the blind man and strayed with him
for a few hundred yards into the woods, Miss Averill grew embarrassed.
The more she tried to keep me from seeing it the more she betrayed
it--not in words, or glances, or any trick of color, but in inner
hesitations which only mind-reading could detect.
As we still sat at the table, but each a little away from it, she
gathered all her resources together to be the lady in authority.
"I'm glad of a word alone with you because--" Apparently she could get
no farther in this direction, and so took another line. "I think you
said your business was with carpets, didn't you?"
"Somebody may have said it for me--especially after our little talk
about the rug--but it didn't come from me."
Her hazel eyes rested on me frankly. "And it's not?"
"No, it's not."
"Oh, then--" Her tone was slightly that of disappointment.
"Did you want it to be?" I smiled.
"It isn't that; but my brother thought it was--"
"I'm sure I don't know why--except for the rug. But one can know about
rugs and not have to sell them, can't one?"
"It's not a usual branch of knowledge, except among connoisseurs and
artists--"
"Oh, well!"
"So my brother thought if you were in that kind of work he'd give you a
note to a friend of his---at the head of one of the big carpet
establishments in New York--"
"It's awfully kind of him," I broke in, as she drew a letter from the
bag she carried, "and if I needed it I'd take it; but--but I don't need
it. It--it wouldn't be any good to me. I thank him none the less
sincerely--and you, too, Miss Averill--"
She looked at the ground, her long black lashes almost resting on her
cheek.
"I must seem to you very officious, but--"
"Not in the slightest. I'm extremely grateful. If I required help
there's nobody--"
"You don't live in New York?"
"I'm going to stay here for--for the present."
"But not--not to work?"
"That I shall have to see."
"I suppose you're a--a writer--or one of those things."
"No, I'm not any of those things," I said, gravely; and at that we
laughed.
*CHAPTER IX*
We got back to New York in time for me to begin the parade of the
hotels. Taking this task seriously, I selected the biggest and made
myself conspicuous by keeping on my feet.
For three days nothing happened except within myself. This focusing of
men and women into vast assemblies from four to seven every afternoon
began to strike me as the counterpart of the gatherings I was watching
each day between twelve and one on the pavements of Fifth Avenue. Though
the activities were different, the same obscure set of motives seemed to
lie behind both. In both there was the impulse to crowd densely
together, as if promiscuity was a source of excitement. In both there
was a vacuity that was not purposeless. In both there was a suggestion
of the sleeping wild beast. While in the one case the accompaniment was
the inchoate uproar of the streets, in the other it was an orchestra
that jazzed with the monotonous incitement of Oriental tom-toms,
nagging, teasing, tormenting the wild beast to get up and show his
wildness. Across tea-rooms or between arcades one could see couples
dancing in a languorous semi-paralysis of which the fascination lay in a
hint of barbaric shamelessness. Barbaric shamelessness marked the huge
shaven faces of most of the men and the kilts of most of the women. I
mention these details only to point out that to me, after my mysterious
absence, they indicated a socially new America.
It was the fourth afternoon when, drifting with the crowd through a
corridor lined with tables at which small parties were having tea, I
felt the long-expected tap on my shoulder.
In the interval too brief to reckon before turning round two
possibilities were clear in my mind. The unknown crime from which I was
running away might have found me out--or some friend had come to my
deliverance. Either event would be welcome, for even if it were arrest
I should learn my name and history.
"Hello, old chap! Come and have some tea."
I was disappointed. It was only Boyd Averill. Behind him his wife and
sister were seated at one of the little tables. It was the sort of
invitation one couldn't refuse, especially as they saw I was strolling
without purpose.
It was Mrs. Averill who talked, in the bored _voix trainante_ of one who
has everything the world can give, except what she wants most. I had
seen before that she was a beautiful woman, but never so plainly as
now--a woman all softness and dimpling curves, with the same suggestions
of the honeyed and melting and fatigued in her glances that you got from
the inflection of her sentences.
She explained that they had come from a song recital in the great hall
up-stairs. It was given at this unusual time of the year by a
well-known singer who was passing through New York on her way to
Australia. With this interruption she continued the criticism she had
been making when I sat down, and which dealt with certain phrases in a
song--Goethe's "_Ueber allen Gipfeln_."
"The Schubert setting?" I asked, after informing Miss Averill as to how
I should have my tea.
"No, the Hugo Wolff."
I began to hum in an undertone: "'_Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh; in allem
Wipfeln hoerest du kaum einen Hauch_.' Is that the one?"
The ladies exchanged glances; Averill kept his eyes on my face.
"Yes, that's the one," Mrs. Averill said, as if nothing unusual had
happened. "So you sing."
"No; I--I just know the song. I've--I've heard a good deal of music at
one time and another."
"Abroad?"
"Yes--abroad--and here."
"Where especially here?"
"Oh, New York--Boston--Chicago--different places." I did my best to be
vague.
I noticed for the first time then a shade of wistfulness in Mildred
Averill's brown eyes as she said:
"You seem to have moved about a good deal."
"Oh yes. I wanted--I wanted to see what was happening."
"And you saw it?"
Averill asked me that, his gaze still fixed on me thoughtfully.
"Enough for the present."
There was a pause of some seconds during which I could hear the
unuttered question of all three, "Why don't you tell us who you are?"
It was a kindly question, with nothing but sympathy behind it. It was,
in fact, a tacit offer of friendship, if I would only take it up. More
plainly than they could have expressed themselves in words, it said: "We
like you. We are ready to be your friends. Only give us the least
little bit of encouragement. Link yourself up with something we know.
Don't be such a mystery, because mystery breeds suspicion."
When I let it go by Mildred Averill began to talk somewhat at random.
She didn't want that significant silence to be repeated. I had had my
chance and I hadn't taken it. Very well, my reasons would be respected,
but I couldn't keep people from wondering. That was what I knew she was
saying, though her actual words referred to our expedition of a few days
previously.
And of that she spoke with an intonation that associated me with
herself. She and I had taken two nice young people of the
working-classes for an outing. Let me hasten to say that there was no
condescension in what she said; condescension wasn't in her; there was
only the implication that whatever the ground she stood on, I stood on
that ground, too. She threw out a hint that as New York in these
September days was barely waking from its summer lethargy, and there was
little to fill time, we might all four do the same again.
In this she was reserved, nunlike, yet--what shall I say? What is there
to say when a woman betrays what very few people perceive and one isn't
supposed to know to be there? There is a decoration on certain old
Chinese porcelains which you can only see in special lights. A vase or
a bowl may be of, let us say, a rich green monochrome. You may look at
the thing a thousand times and nothing but the monochrome will be
visible. Then one day the sun will strike it at a special angle, or the
light may otherwise be what the artist did his work for, and beneath the
green you will discern dragons or chrysanthemums in gold. Somewhat in
that way the real Mildred Averill came out and withdrew, withdrew and
came out, not so much according to changes in her as according to
changes in the person observing her. When you saw her from one point of
view she was diffident, demure, not colorless, but all of one color like
a rare piece of monochrome. When you looked at her from another you saw
the golden dragons and chrysanthemums. You might not have understood
what they symbolized, but this much at least you would have known--that
the gold was the gold of fire, all the more dangerous, perhaps, because
it was banked down.
That in this company, with its batteries of tacit inquiry turned on me
all the while I took my tea, I was uneasy will go without saying, and so
I took the earliest possible opportunity to get up and slip away. I did
not slip away, however, before Mrs. Averill had asked me to lunch on the
following Sunday, and I had been forced into accepting the invitation.
I had been forced because she wouldn't take no for an answer. She
wanted to talk about music; she wanted to sing to me; in reality, as I
guessed then, and soon came to know, she was determined to wring from
me, out of sheer curiosity, the facts I wouldn't confide of my own
accord.
But having accepted the invitation, I saw that there were advantages in
doing so. Once back in the current to which I belonged, I should have
more chances of the recognition for which I was working. The social
life of any country runs in streams like those we see pictured on
isothermal charts. The same kind of people move in the same kind of
medium from north to south, and from east to west. If you know one man
there you will soon know another, till you have a chain of
acquaintances, all socially similar, right across the continent. That I
had such a chain I didn't doubt for an instant; my only difficulty was
to get in touch with it. As soon as I did that each name would bring up
a kindred name, till I found myself swimming in my native channel,
wherever it was, like a fish in the Gulf Stream, whether off the coast
of Norway or off that of Mexico.
So I came to the conclusion that I had done right in ceding to Mrs.
Averill's insistence, though it occurred to me on second thoughts that I
should need another suit of clothes. That I had was well enough for
knockabout purposes, especially when carried off with some amount of
bluff; but the poverty of its origin would become too evident if worn on
all occasions. I had seen at the emporium that by spending more money
and putting on only a slightly enhanced swagger I could make a much
better appearance in the eyes of those who didn't examine me too
closely. I decided that the gain would warrant the extravagance.
Within ten days of my landing, therefore, my nearly four hundred dollars
had come down to nearly two, though I had the consolation of knowing
that my chances of soon getting at my bank-account were better. At any
minute now my promenades in the hotels might be rewarded, while
conversation with the Averills would sooner or later bring up names with
which I should have associations.
It was disconcerting then, on the following Sunday, to be received with
some constraint. It was the more disconcerting in that the coldness
came from Averill himself. He strolled into the hall while I was
putting down my hat and stick, shaking hands with the peculiar
listlessness of a man who disapproves of what is happening. As hitherto
I had found him interested and cordial, I couldn't help being struck by
the change.
"You see how we are," he observed, pointing to an open packing-case.
"Not up to the point of having guests; but Mrs. Averill--"
"Mrs. Averill was too kind to me to think of inconveniences to herself."
"Just come up to the library, will you, and I'll tell her you're here."
It was a way of getting rid of me till his wife could come and assume
her own responsibilities.
So long a time had passed since I had seen the interior of an American
house of this order that I took notes as I made my way up-stairs. Out
of the unsuspected resources of my being came the capacity to do it.
Most people on entering a house see nothing but its size. A background
more or less elaborately furnished may be in their minds, but they have
not the knowledge to enable them to seize details. The careful
arrangement of taste is all one to them with some nondescript, haphazard
jumble.
In this dwelling, in one of the streets off Fifth Avenue, on the eastern
side of Central Park, I found the typical home of the average wealthy
American. Money had been spent on it, but with a kind of helplessness.
Helplessness had designed the house, as it had planned, or hadn't
planned, the street outside.
A square hall contained a few monumental pieces of furniture because
they were monumental. A dining-room behind it was full of high-backed
Italian chairs because they were high-backed and Italian. The stairs
were built as they were because the architect had not been able to avoid
a dark spot in the middle of the house and the stairs filled it. On the
floor above a glacial drawing-room in white and gold, with the furniture
still in bags, ran the width of the back of the house, while across the
front was the library into which I was shown, spacious, cheerful, with
plenty of books, magazines, and easy-chairs. In the way of pictures
there were but two--modern portraits of a man and a woman, whom I had no
difficulty in setting down as the father and mother of Averill. Of the
mother I knew nothing except that she had been a school-teacher; of the
father Miss Blair had given me the detailed history as told in _Men Who
Have Made New Jersey_.
Hubbard Averill was the son of a shoemaker in Elizabeth. On leaving
school at fifteen he had the choice of going into a grocery store as
clerk or as office-boy into a bank. He chose the bank. Ten years later
he was teller. Five years after that he was cashier. Five years after
that he had the same position in a bank of importance in Jersey City.
Five years after that he was recognized as one of the able young
financiers in the neighborhood of New York. Before he was fifty his name
was honored by those who count in Wall Street. It was the history of
most of the successful American bankers I had ever heard of.
There was no packing-case in the library, but a number of objects
recently unpacked stood round about on tables, waiting to be disposed
of. There was a little Irish glass, with much old porcelain and pottery,
both Chinese and European. I had not the time to appraise the things
with the eye before Miss Averill slipped in.
She wore a hat, and, dressed in what I suppose was tan-colored linens,
she seemed just to have come in from the street.
"My sister will be down in a minute. She's generally late on Sunday.
I've been good and have been to church."
We sat down together on a window-seat, with some self-consciousness on
both sides. I noticed again that, though her hair was brown, her
eyebrows and long curving lashes were black, striking the same discreet
yet obscurely dangerous note as the rest of her personality. In the
topaz of her eyes there were little specks of gold like those in her
chain of amber beads.
After a little introductory talk she began telling me of the help Miss
Blair was giving Drinkwater. She had begun to teach him what she called
"big stenography." Shorthand and the touch system were included in it,
as well as the knack of transcribing from the dictaphone. Boyd had
bought a machine on purpose for them to practise with, looking forward
to the day when Harry should resume his old job connected with
laboratory work.
"And what's to become of Miss Blair?"
My companion lowered her fine lashes, speaking with the seeming shyness
that was her charm.
"I'm thinking of asking her to come and live with me. You see, if I
take a house of my own I shall need some one; and she suits me. She
understands the kind of people I like to work among--"
"Oh, then you're not going to keep on living here."
"I've lived with my brother and sister ever since my father died; but
one comes to a time when one needs a home of one's own. Don't you think
so?"
"Oh, of course!"
"A man--like you, for instance--can be so free; but a woman has to live
within exact limitations. The only way she can get any liberty at all
is within her own home. Not that my brother and sister aren't angelic
to me. They are, of course; but you know what I mean." The glance that
stole under her lashes was half daring and half apologetic. "It must be
wonderful to do as one likes--to experiment with different sorts of
life--and get to know things at first hand."
So that was her summing up concerning me. I was one of those moderns
with so keen a thirst for life that I was testing it at all its springs.
She didn't know my ultimate intention, but she could sympathize with my
methods and admire my courage and thoroughness. Almost in so many words
she said if she had not been timid and hedged in by conventions it was
what she would have liked herself.
Before any one came to disturb us there seeped through her conversation,
too, the reason of Averill's coldness. They had discussed me a good
deal, and while he had nothing to accuse me of, he considered that the
burden of the proof of my innocence lay with me. I might be all
right--and then I might not be. So long as there was any question as to
my probity I was a person to watch with readiness to help, but not one
to ask to luncheon. He would not have invited me to tea a few days
before, and had allowed me to pass and repass before ceding to his
wife's persistence. He had consequently been the more annoyed when she
carried her curiosity to the point of bringing me there that day.
Miss Averill did not, of course, say these things; she would have been
amazed to know that I inferred them. I shouldn't have inferred them had
I not seen her brother and partially read his mind.
But my hostess came trailing in--the verb is the only one I can find to
express her gracefully lymphatic movements--and I was obliged to submit
to a welcome which was overemphasized for the benefit of the husband who
entered behind her.
"We're really not equipped for having any one come to us," she
apologized. "We're scarcely unpacked. We're going to move from this
house anyhow when we can find another. It's so poky. If we're to
entertain again--" She turned to her sister: "Mildred dear, _couldn't_
some one have cleared these things away?" Waving her hand toward the
array of potteries and porcelains, she continued to me: "One buys such a
lot during two or three years abroad, doesn't one? I'm sure Mrs. Soames
must feel the way I do, that she doesn't know where to put the things
when she's got them home."
I knew the reason for the reference which others were as quick to catch
as I, and, in the idiom of the moment, tried to "side-step" it by
saying:
"That's a good thing--that Rouen _saladier_. You don't often pick up one
of that shape nowadays."
"I saw it in an old shop at Dreux," Mrs. Averill informed me, in her
melting tone. "I got this pair of Ming vases there, too. At least,
they said they were Ming; but I don't suppose they are. One is so taken
in. But I liked them, whatever they are, and so--"
She lifted one up and brought it to me--a dead-white jar, decorated with
green foliage, violet-blue flowers, and tiny specks of red fruit.
Something in me leaped. I took the vase in my hand as if it had been a
child of my flesh and blood. I was far from thinking of my hearers as I
said:
"It's not Ming; but it's very good K'ang-hsi.'"
I had thrown another little bomb into their camp, but it surprised them
no more than it did me. A trance medium who hears himself speaking in a
hitherto unknown tongue could not have been more amazed at his own
utterance. I went on talking, not to give them information, but to
listen for what I should say next.
They had all three drawn near me. "How can you tell?" Miss Averill
asked, partly in awe at my knowledge, and partly to give me the chance
to display it.
"Oh, very much as you can tell the difference between a hat you wear
this year and one you wore five years ago. The styles are quite
different. Ming corresponds roughly to the Tudor period in English
history, and K'ang-hsi to the earlier Stuarts--with much the same
distinction as we get between the output of those two epochs. Ming is
older, bolder, stronger, rougher, with a kind of primitive force in it;
K'ang-hsi is the product of a more refined civilization. It has less of
the instinctive and more deliberate selection. It is more
finished--more self-conscious." I picked up the Rouen salad-dish and a
Sevres cup and saucer, putting them side by side. "It's something like
the difference between these--strength and color and dash in the one,
and in the other a more elaborately perfected art. You couldn't be in
any doubt, once you'd been in the habit of seeing them."
Mrs. Averill's question was as natural and spontaneous as laughter.
"Where have you seen them so much, Mr. Soames?"
"Oh, a little everywhere," I managed to reply, just as we were summoned
to luncheon.
At table we talked of the pleasures of making "finds" in old European
cities. I had evidently done a lot of it, for I could deal with it in
general quite fluently. When they pinned me down with a question as to
details I was obliged to hedge. I could talk of The Hague and Florence
and Strasbourg and Madrid as backgrounds, but I could never picture
myself to myself as walking in their streets.
That, however, was not evident to my companions, and as Mrs. Averill's
interests lay along the line of ceramic art I was able to bring out much
in the way of connoisseurship which did not betray me. With Averill
himself I scored a point; with Mildred Averill I scored many. With Mrs.
Averill, beneath a seeming ennui that grew more languorous, I quickened
curiosity to the fever-point.
"What a lot of things you must have, Mr. Soames."
My refuge being always in the negative, I said, casually: "Oh no! One
doesn't have to own things just because one admires them."
"But you say yourself that you've picked them up--"
As she had nearly caught me here I was obliged to wriggle out. "Oh, to
give away--and that kind of thing."
Averill's eyes were resting on me thoughtfully. "Sell?"
"No; I've never sold anything like that."
"But what's the use," Mrs. Averill asked, "of caring about things when
you can't have them? I should hate it."
"Only that there's nothing you can't have."
"Do you hear that, Boyd?" I caught the impulse of the purring, velvety
thing to vary the monotony of life by scratching. "Mr. Soames says
there's nothing I can't have. Much he knows, doesn't he?"
"There's nothing you can't have--within reason, dear."
"Ah, but I don't want things within reason. I want them out of reason.
I want to be like Mr. Soames--free--free--"
"You can't be free and be a married woman."
"You can when you have a vocation, can't you, Mr. Soames? I suppose Mr.
Soames is a married man--and look at him." She hurried beyond this
point, to add: "And look at Sydna, whom we heard the other afternoon!
She's a married woman and her husband lives in London. He lets her sing.
He lets her travel. He leads his life and lets her ... Mr. Soames, what
do you think?"
I said, tactfully, "I shall be able to judge better when you've sung to
me."
Miss Averill, taking up the thread of the conversation here, we got
through the rest of the luncheon without treading in difficult places,
and presently I was alone with Averill, who was passing the cigars.
The constraint which had partially lifted during the conversation at
luncheon fell again with the departure of the ladies. I had mystified
them more than ever; and mystery does not make for easy give and take in
hospitality. To Averill himself his hospitality was sacred. To
entertain at his own board a man with no credentials but those which an
adventurer might present was the source of a discomfort that amounted to
unhappiness. He couldn't conceal it; he didn't care to conceal it.
While fulfilling all that courtesy required of a host, he was willing to
let me see it. I saw it, and could say nothing, since he might easily
be right; and an adventurer I might be.
As, with his back to the open doorway into the hall, he sat down with
his own cigar, I felt that he was saying to himself, "I wish to God you
were not in this house!" I myself was responding silently by wishing
the same thing.
It was the obvious minute at which to tell him everything. I saw that
as plainly as you do. Had I made a clean breast of it I should have
become one of the most interesting cases of his experience. Such
instances of shell-shock were just beginning to be talked about. The
term was finding its way into the newspapers and garnishing common
speech. Though I knew of no connection between my misfortunes and the
Great War, I could have made shift to furnish an illustration of this
new phase among its tragedies.
During a pause in our stilted speech I screwed myself up to the point.
"There's something--" But his attention was distracted for the moment,
and when it came back to me I couldn't begin again. No! I could fight
the thing through on my own; but that would be my utmost. A confession
of breakdown was impossible.
Then, all at once, I got a glimpse of what was in the back of his mind,
though something else happened simultaneously, of which I must tell you
first. Into the open space between the portieres behind him there
glided a little figure clad in amber-colored linen, the monochrome with
the sun-spots beneath it. She didn't speak, for the reason that Averill
spoke first.
"You're--" He struck a match nervously to relight his cigar--"you're
a--a married man?"
Once more negation had to be my refuge. If I admitted that I was he
might ask me whom I had married, and when, and where. I spoke with an
emphasis that sprang not from eagerness of denial, but from anxiety that
the topic shouldn't be discussed.
"No."
The question and answer followed so swiftly on Mildred Averill's arrival
on the threshold that she caught them both. Little sparks of gold shone
in the brown pools of her eyes, and her smile took on a new shade of
vitality.
"Boyd, Lulu wants you to bring your cigars up-stairs. The coffee is
there, and she'd like to talk to Mr. Soames about the old Chinese things
before she begins to sing."
He jumped to his feet. He was not less constrained, but some of his
uneasiness had passed. I could read what was in his mind. If the worst
came to the worst I was at least a single man; and the worst might not
come to the worst. There might be ways of getting rid of me before his
sister...
He led the way up-stairs. I followed with Miss Averill, saying I have
forgotten what. I have forgotten it because, as we crossed the
low-ceiled hall with its monumental bits of furniture, two gleaming eyes
stood over me like sentinels in the air.
*CHAPTER X*
Within a fortnight my nearly two hundred dollars had come down to nearly
one, and this in spite of my self-denials.
Self-denials were new to me. I knew that by my difficulties in
beginning to practise them. Such economics as staying at the Barcelona
instead of a more luxurious hotel, or as buying ready-made clothes
instead of waiting for the custom-made, I do not speak of as
self-denials, since they were no more than concessions to a temporary
lack of cash. But the first time I made my breakfast on one egg instead
of two; the first time I suppressed the eggs altogether; the first time
I lunched on a cup of chocolate taken at a counter; the first time I
went without a midday meal of any kind--these were occasions when the
saving of pennies struck me as akin to humiliation. I had formed no
habits to prepare me for it. The possibility that it might continue
began at last to frighten me.
For none of my artful methods had been successful. I frequented the
hotels; I hung about the entrances to theaters; I tramped the streets
till a new pair of boots became a necessity; but no one ever hailed me
as an old acquaintance. Once only, standing in the doorway of a great
restaurant, did I recognize a face; but it was that of Lydia Blair,
dining with a man. He was a big, round-backed, silver-haired man, with
an air of opulence which suggested that Miss Blair might be taking the
career of adventuress more seriously than I had supposed. Whether or
not she saw me I couldn't tell, for, to avoid embarrassment both for
herself and me, I withdrew to another stamping-ground. What the young
lady chose to do with herself was no affair of mine. Since a pretty
girl of facile temperament would have evident opportunities, it was not
for me to interfere with her. Had she belonged to my own rank in life I
might have been shocked or sorry; but every one knew that a beautiful
working-girl...
As to my own rank in life a sense of going under false pretenses added
to my anxieties, though it was through no fault of my own. Miss Averill
persisted in giving me the role of romantic seeker for the hard facts of
existence. She did it only by assumption; but she did it.
"There's nothing like seeing for oneself, is there? It's feeling for
oneself, too, which is more important. I'm so terribly cut off from it
all. I'm like a bird in a cage trying to help those whose nests are
being robbed."
This was said during the second of the excursions for which Miss Blair
captured me from the lobby of the Barcelona. Her procedure was exactly
the same as on the first occasion, except that she came about the middle
of the afternoon. Nothing but an unusual chance found me sitting there,
idle but preoccupied, as I meditated on my situation while smoking a
cigar. My first impulse to refuse Miss Averill's invitation point-blank
was counteracted by the thought of escape from that daily promenade up
and down the halls of hotels which had begun to be disheartening and
irksome.
Of this the novelty had passed. The expectations that during the first
week or two had made each minute a living thing had simmered away in a
sense of futility. No old friend having recognized me yet, I was
working round to the conviction that no old friend ever would. If I
kept up the tramp it was because I could see nothing else to do.
But on this particular afternoon for the first time I revolted. The
effect was physical, in that my feet seemed to be too heavy to be
dragged along. They were refusing their job, while my mind was planning
it.
Thus in the end I found myself sharing the outing given nominally for
the blind boy, but really planned from a complication of motives which
to Miss Averill were obscure. It did not help to make them clearer that
her wistful, unuttered appeals to me to solve the mystery surrounding my
personality passed by without result.
The high bank of an autumn wood, the Hudson with a steamer headed
southward, more autumn woods covering the hills beyond, a tea-basket,
tea--this was the decoration. We had alighted from the motor somewhere
in the neighborhood of Tarrytown. Tea being over, Miss Blair and
Drinkwater, with chaff and laughter, were clearing up the things and
fitting them back into the basket.
"She's very clever with him," Miss Averill explained, as she led the way
to a fallen log, on which she seated herself, indicating that I might
sit beside her. "She seizes on anything that will teach him the use of
his fingers, and makes a game of it. He's very quick, too. The next
time he'll be able to take the things out of the tea-basket and put them
back all by himself."
So we had dropped into her favorite theme, the duty of helping the
helpless.
She was in brown, as usual, a brown-green, that might have been a Scotch
or Irish homespun, which blended with the wine shades and russets all
about us with the effect of protective coloration. The day was as still
as death, so breathless that the leaves had scarcely the energy to fall.
In the heavy, too-sweet scents there was suggestion and
incitement--suggestion that chances were passing and incitement to seize
them before they were gone.
I wish there were words in which to convey the peculiar overtones in
Miss Averill's comparison of herself with a bird in a cage. There was
goodness in them, and amusement, as well as something baffled and
enraged. She had been so subdued when I had seen her hitherto that I
was hardly prepared for this half-smothered outburst of fierceness.
"If you're like a bird in a cage," I said, "you're like the one that
sings to the worker and cheers him up."
Her pleasure was expressed not in a change of color or a drooping of the
lids, but in a quiet suffusion that might most easily be described as
atmospheric.
"Oh, as for cheering people up--I don't know. I've tried such a lot of
it, only to find that they got along well enough without me. A woman
wants more than anything else in the world to feel that she's needed;
and when she discovers she isn't--"
The sense of my own apparent superfluity in life prompted me to say:
"Oh, it isn't only women who discover that."
Her glance traveled down the steep wooded bank and over the river, to
rest on the wine-colored hills on the other side.
"Did you--did you ever?"--she corrected herself quickly--"I mean--do
men?"
"Some men do. It's--it's possible."
"Isn't it," she asked, tackling the subject in her sensible way,
"primarily a question of money? If you have enough of it not to have to
earn a living--and no particular duties--don't you find yourself edged
out of the current of life? After all, what the world wants is
producers; and the minute one doesn't produce--"
"What do you mean by producers?"
She reflected. "I suppose I mean all who contribute, either directly or
indirectly, either mentally or physically, to the sum total of our needs
in living. Wouldn't that cover it?"
I admitted that it might.
"And those who don't do that, who merely live on what others produce,
seem to be excluded from the privilege of helpfulness."
"I can't see that. They help with their money."
"Money can't help, except indirectly. It's the great mistake of our
philanthropies to think it can. We make a great many mistakes; but we
can make more in our philanthropies than anywhere else. We've never
taken the pains to study the psychology of help. We think money the
panacea for every kind of need, when as a matter of fact it's only the
outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. If you
haven't got the grace the sign rings false, like an imitation coin."
"Well, what is the grace?"
"Oh, it's a good many things--a blend--of which, I suppose, the main
ingredient is love." She gave me a wistful half-smile, as she added:
"Love is a very queer thing--I mean this kind of big love for--just for
people. You can always tell whether it's true or false; and the less
sophisticated the people the more instinctively they know. If it's true
they'll accept you; if it's only pumped up, they'll shut you out."
"I'm sure you ought to know."
"I do know. I've had a lot of experience--in being shut out."
"You?"
She nodded toward Drinkwater and Miss Blair. "They don't let me in. In
spite of all I try to do for them, they're only polite to me. They'll
accept this kind of thing; but I'm as far outside their
confidence--outside their hearts--as a bird in a cage, as I've called
myself, is outside a flock of nest-builders."
"And assuming that that is so--though I do not assume it--how do you
account for it?
"Oh, easily enough! I'm not the real thing. I never was--not at the
Settlement--not now--not anywhere or at any time."
"But how would you describe the real thing?"
"I can't describe it. All I know is that I'm not it. I'm not working
for them, but for myself."
"For yourself--how?"
"To fill in an empty life. When you've no real life you seek an
artificial one. As every one rejects the artificial, you get rejected.
That's all."
"What would you call a real life--for yourself?"
The fierceness with which she had been speaking became intensified, even
when tempered with her diffident half-smile.
"A life in which there was something I was absolutely obliged to do. I
begin to wonder if parents know how much of the zest of living they're
taking away from their children by leaving them, as we say, well
provided for. When there's nothing within reason you can't have and
nothing within reason you can't do--well, then, you're out of the
running."
"Is that the way you look at yourself--as out of the running?"
"That's the way I _am_."
"And is there no means of getting into the running?"
"There might be if I wasn't such a coward."
"If you weren't such a coward what would you do?"
"Oh, there are things. You've--you've found them. I would do like
you."
"And do you know what I'm doing?"
"I can guess."
"And you guess--what?"
"It's only a guess--of course."
"But what is it?"
She rose with a weary gesture. "What's the good of talking about it? A
knight in disguise remains in disguise till he chooses to throw off his
incognito."
"And when he has thrown it off--what does he become then?"
"He may become something else--but he's--he's none the less--a knight."
We stood looking at each other, in one of those impulses of mutual
frankness that are not without danger.
"And if there was a knight who--who couldn't throw off his incognito?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "Then I suppose he'd always be a knight in
disguise--something like Lohengrin."
"And what would Elsa think of that?"
Seeing the implication in this indiscreet question even before she did,
I felt myself flush hotly.
I admired the more, therefore, the ease with which she carried the
difficult moment off. Moving a few steps toward Drinkwater and Miss
Blair, who were shutting up the tea-basket, she threw over her shoulder:
"If there was an Elsa I suppose she'd make up her mind when the time
came."
She was still moving forward when I overtook her to say:
"I wish I could speak plainly."
She stopped to glance up at me. "And can't you?"
"Were you ever in a situation which you felt you had to swing alone?
You know you could get help; you know you could count on sympathy; but
whenever you're impelled to appeal for either something holds you back."
"I never was in such a situation, but I can imagine what it's like. May
I ask one question?"
I felt obliged to grant the permission.
"Is it of the nature of what is generally called trouble?"
"It's of the nature of what is generally called misfortune."
"And I suppose I mustn't say so much as that I'm sorry."
"You could say that much," I smiled, "if you didn't say any more."
She repeated the weary gesture of a few minutes earlier, a slight
tossing outward of both hands, with a heavy drop against the sides.
"What a life!"
As she began to move on once more I spoke as I walked beside her.
"What's the matter with life?"
Again she paused to confront me. In her eyes gold lights gleamed in the
brown depths of the irises.
"What sense is there in a civilization that cuts us all off from each
other? We're like prisoners in solitary confinement--you in one cell
and Boyd in another and Lulu in another and I in another, and everybody
else in his own or her own and no communication or exchange of help
between us. It's--it's monstrous."
The half-choked passion of her words took me the more by surprise for
the reason that she treated me as if the defects of our civilization
were my fault. Joining Lydia Blair and taking her by the arm, she led
the way back to the motor, while I was left to pilot Drinkwater, who
carried the tea-basket. During the drive back to town our hostess
scarcely spoke, and not once to me directly.
*CHAPTER XI*
But I was troubled by all this, and puzzled. That I couldn't afford the
complication of a love-affair will be evident to any one; but that a
love-affair threatened was by no means clear. As far as that went it was
as fatuous on my part to think of it as it would have been for
Drinkwater, except in so far as it involved danger to myself.
For a few hours that danger did not suggest itself. That is, I was so
busy speculating as to Mildred Averill's meaning that I had no time to
analyze the way I was taking it. Weighing her words, her impulses, her
impatiences, I saw no more than that she might be offering her treasures
at the feet of a wooden man, a carved and painted figment, without
history or soul.
That is, unless I mistook her meanings as Malvolio mistook Viola's!
There was that side to it, too. It was the aspect of the case on which
I dwelt all through my lonely dinner. I had not forgotten Boyd
Averill's reception of me on the Sunday of the luncheon; I never should
forget it. There is something in being in the house of a man who is
anxious to get you out of it unlike any other form of humiliation. The
very fact that he refrains from pointedly showing you the door only
gives time for the ignominy to sink in. Nothing but the habit of doing
certain things in a certain way carried me through those two hours and
enabled me to take my departure without incivility. On going down the
steps the sense that I had been kicked out was far more keen than if
Averill had given way to the actual physical grossness.
Some of this feeling, I admit, was fanciful. It was due to the
disturbed imagination natural to a man whose mental equipment has been
put awry. Averill had been courteous throughout my visit. More than
that, he was by nature kindly. Anywhere but in his own house his
attitude to me would have been cordial, and for anything I needed he
would have backed me with more than his good-will.
Nevertheless, that Sunday rankled as a poisoned memory, and one from
which I found it impossible wholly to dissociate any member of his
family. Though I could blame Mrs. Averill a little, I could blame Miss
Averill not at all; and yet she belonged to the household in which I had
been made to feel an unwelcome guest. That in itself might give me a
clue to her sentiment toward me.
As I went on with my dinner I came to the conclusion that it did give me
such a clue. I was the idiot Malvolio thinking himself beloved of
Viola. Where there was nothing but a balked philanthropy I was looking
for the tender heart. The dictionary teemed with terms that applied to
such a situation, and I began to heap them on myself.
I heaped them on myself with a sense not of relief, but of
disappointment. That was the odd discovery I made, as much to my
surprise as my chagrin. Falling in love with anybody was no part of my
program. It was out of the question for obvious reasons. In addition
to these I was in love with some one else.
That is to say, I knew I had been in love; I knew that in the portion of
my life that had become obscured there had been an emotional drama of
which the consciousness remained. It remained as a dream remains when
we remember the vividness and forget the facts--but it remained. I
could view my personality somewhat as you view a countryside after a
storm has passed over it. Without having witnessed the storm you can
tell what it was from the havoc left behind. There was some such havoc
in myself.
Just as I could look into the glass and see a face young, haggard,
handsome, if I may use the word without vanity, that seemed not to be
mine, so I could look into my heart and read the suffering of which I no
longer perceived the causes. It was like looking at the scar of a wound
received before you can remember. Your body must have bled from it,
your nerves must have ached; even now it is numb or sensitive; but its
history is lost to you. It was once the outstanding fact of your
childish existence; and now all of which you are aware is something
atrophied, lacking, or that shrinks at a touch.
In just that way I knew that passion had once flashed through my life,
but had left me nothing but the memory of a memory. I could trace its
path almost as easily as you can follow the track of a tornado through a
town--by the wreckage. I mean by the wreckage an emotional weariness, an
emotional distress, an emotional distaste for emotion; but above
everything else I mean a craving to begin the emotion all over again.
I often wondered if some passional experience hadn't caused the
shattering of the brain cells. I often wondered if the woman I had loved
was not dead. I wondered if I might not even have killed her. Was that
the crime from which I was running away? Were the Furies pursuing me?
Was it to be my punishment to fall in love with another woman and suffer
the second time because the first suffering had defeated its own ends in
making me insensible?
All through the evening thoughts of this kind, now and then with a
half-feverish turn, ran through my mind, till by the time I went to bed
love no longer seemed impossible. It was appalling; and yet it had a
fascination.
So for the next few days I walked with a vision pure, unobtrusive,
subdued, holy in its way, which nevertheless broke into light and
passion and flame that nobody but myself was probably aware of. I also
gleaned from Lydia Blair, who had a journalistic facility in gathering
personal facts, that Mildred Averill's place in New York life was not
equal to her opportunities.
"There are always girls like that," Miss Blair commented. "They've got
all the chances in the world, and don't know how to make use of them.
She's not a bad looker, not when you come to study her; and yet you
couldn't show her off with the dressiest models in New York."
I ventured to suggest that showing off might not be Miss Averill's
ambition.
"And a good thing too, poor dear. If it was it would be the limit. She
sure has the sense to know what she can't do. That's something. Look
here, Harry," she continued, sharply, "I told you before that if you're
going to take letters down from the dictaphone you've got to read them
through to the end before you begin to transcribe. Then you'll know
where the corrections come in. Now you've got to go back and begin all
over again. See here, my dear. If you think I'm going to waste my
perfectly good time giving you lessons that you don't listen to you've
got your nerve with you."
It was one of my rare visits to Miss Flowerdew's dark front parlor, of
which Drinkwater had the use, and I was making the call for a purpose. I
knew there were certain afternoons when Miss Blair "breezed in," as she
expressed it, to give some special lesson to her pupil; and I had heard
once or twice that on such occasions Miss Averill, too, had come to lend
him her encouragement. Nominally she brought a cylinder from which
Drinkwater was to copy the letters her brother had dictated; but really
her mission was one of sympathy. Seeing the boy in such good hands, and
happy in his lot, I had the less compunction in leaving him alone. I
left him alone, as I have said, in order not to be identified more than
I could help with two stenographers.
My visit of this day was notably successful in that I obtained from Miss
Blair her own summing up of the social position of the Averill family.
As far as they carried a fashionable tag it was musical. Mrs. Averill
had a box at the opera, and was seen at all the great concerts. She
entertained all the great singers and all wandering celebrities of the
piano and violin. Before she went to Europe she had begun to make a
place for herself with her Sunday afternoons, at which one heard the
most renowned artists of the world singing or playing for friendship's
sake. In her own special line she might by now have been one of the
most important hostesses in New York had it not been for her
constitutional weakness in "chucking things."
She had always chucked things just when beginning to make a success of
them. She had chucked her career as a girl in good society in order to
work for the concert stage. She had chucked the concert stage in order
to marry a rich man. She had chucked the advantages of being a rich
man's wife while in the full tide of social recognition. With immense
ambitions, she lacked steadiness of purpose, and so, according to Miss
Blair, she was always "getting left." Getting left implied that as far
as New York was concerned Lulu Averill was nowhere when she might easily
have been somewhere, with a consequent feeling on her part of boredom
and disappointment.
It reacted on her husband in compelling him to work in unsettled
conditions and without the leisure and continuity so essential to
research. Miss Blair's expression was that the poor man never knew where
he was at. Adoring his wife, he was the more helplessly at her beck and
call, for the reason that he had long ago come to the knowledge that his
wife didn't adore him. Holding her only by humoring her whims, he was
just now struggling with her caprice to go back to the concert stage
again.
To Mildred Averill all this made little difference because she had none
of the aims commonly grouped as social. Miss Blair understood that from
her childhood she had been studious, serious, living quietly with her
elderly parents at Mornstown, and acquiring their elderly tastes. "Its
fierce the way old people hamper a girl," Lydia commented. "Just
because they're your father or mother they think they've a right to suck
your life-blood like a leech. My mother died when I was sixteen," she
added, in a tone of commendation. "Of course you're lonely-like at
times--but then you're free." Freedom to Mildred Averill, however, was
all the same as being bound. She didn't know how to make use of liberty
or give herself a good time. When her father died she stayed on with
her mother at Morristown, and when the mother "punched the clock for the
next life"--the figure was Miss Blair's--she simply joined her brother
and sister-in-law in New York. After she went out of mourning she was
sometimes seen at a concert or the opera with Mrs. Averill. There was
no more to her social life than that and an occasional dinner.
"Gray-blooded, I call it," Miss Blair threw in again, "and a sinful
waste of good chances. My! if I had them!"
"Perhaps you can have them," I suggested, Harry Drinkwater having gone
for a minute to his room. "Miss Averill told me one day that she
thought of taking a house and asking you to live with her."
"Me? Do you see me playing second fiddle to a girl as sure bound to be
an old maid as I'm bound to be--"
"An adventuress."
"I'm bound to be an adventuress--if I like."
"Oh, then there's a modification to your program. The last time we
talked about it you were going to do it. Now it's only--if you like."
Her lovely blue eyes shot me a look of protest. "You wouldn't want me to
do it--if I didn't like. The worst of being an adventuress is the kind
of guys you must adventure with. You don't mean to thrust them down my
throat."
"Oh, I'm not urging you at all. I did happen to see you one evening at
the restaurant Blitz--"
She nodded. "I saw you. What were you doing there? You don't feed at
places like that."
"How do you know I don't?"
"Well, I don't know. That's just the trouble. Sometimes I think you're
a--"
"I'm a--what?"
"See here! You give me the creeps. Do you know it?"
"How?"
"Well, you saw that guy I was with at the Blitz."
"Looked like a rich fathead."
"Yes; but you know he's a rich fathead. He's as clear as a glass of
water. You're like"--she paused for a simile--"you're like something
that might be a cocktail--and might be a dose of poison." She turned on
me with a new flash in her blue eyes. "Look here! Tell me honest, now.
Are you a swell crook--or ain't you?"
[Illustration: She turned on me with a new flash in her blue eyes.
"Look here! Tell me honest, now. Are you a swell crook--or ain't you?"
"Suppose I say that--that I ain't." "Say, kid!" she responded, coldly,
"talk like yourself, will you? ... If you're not a swell crook I can't
make you out.]
"Suppose I say that--that I ain't."
"Say, kid!" she responded, coldly, "talk like yourself, will you?" She
threw her hands apart, palms outward. "Well, if you're not a swell
crook I can't make you out."
"But as a swell crook you could. Is that it?"
"Why do you keep hanging round Miss Averill?" she asked, bluntly. "What
do you expect to get by that?"
"What do you expect to get by asking me?"
Her reply was a kind of challenge. "The truth. Do you know it?"
I felt uncomfortable. It was one of the rare occasions on which I had
seen this flower-like face drop its bantering mask and grow serious.
The _voix de Montmartre_ had deepened in tone and put me on the
defensive.
"I thought you told me on board ship that you looked on all people of
Miss Averill's class as the prey of those in--in ours."
"I don't care what I told you on board ship. You're to keep where you
belong as far as she's concerned--or I'll give the whole bloomin' show
away, as they say in English vawdville."
"There again; it's what you said you wouldn't do. You said you'd be my
friend--"
"I'll be your friend right up to there--but that's the high-water mark."
I thought it permissible to change my front. "If it comes to that, I've
done no hanging round Miss Averill on my own account. It's you who've
come for me to the Hotel Barcelona every time--"
"Harry made me do that; but even so--well, you don't have to fall in the
water just because you're standing on a wharf."
"It doesn't hurt the water if you do. You can get soaked, and make
yourself look ridiculous, but the beautiful blue sea doesn't mind."
"You can make it splash something awful, and send ripples all over the
lot. Don't you be too sure of not being dangerous. You wouldn't be
everybody's choice--but you have that romantic way--like a prince-guy
off the level--and she not used to men--or having a lot of them around
her all the time, like--"
"Like you."
"Like me," she accepted, composedly; "and so if I see anything that's
not on the square I'll--I'll hand out the right dope about you without
the least pity."
"And when you hand out the right dope about me what will it be?"
"You poor old kid, what do you think it will be? If you make people
think you're a swell crook it's almost the same as being one."
"But do I make people think I'm a swell crook?"
"You make me."
"What do I do to--"
"It's not what you do, it's what you don't do--or what you don't say.
Why don't you tell people who you are, or what your business is, or
where you come from? Everybody can hitch on to something in a world,
but you don't seem to belong anywhere. If any one asks you a question
it's always No! No! No! till you can tell what your answer will be
beforehand. Surely there's a Yes somewhere in your life! If you always
hide it you can't blame people for thinking there's something to be
hidden."
"And yet you'd be my friend."
"Oh, I've been friends to worse than that. I wasn't born yesterday--not
by a lot. All I say is, 'Hands off little old Milly Averill!' but for
the rest you can squeak along in your own way. I'm a good sort. I
don't interfere with any one."
Drinkwater being on the threshold and the conversation having yielded me
all I hoped to get, I made an excuse for going. Miss Averill had not
appeared, and now I was glad of it. Had she come I could not have met
her under Lydia's cold eye without self-consciousness. It began to
strike me, too, that the best thing I could do was to step out from the
circle of all their lives and leave no clue behind me.
*CHAPTER XII*
It was not a new reflection, as you know; and of late it had been
growing more insistent. The truth is that I needed to find work. My
nearly one hundred dollars was melting away with unbelievable rapidity.
Expenses being reduced to a rule of thumb, I could count the days after
which I shouldn't have a cent. Winter was coming. Already there were
mornings with the nip of frost in them. I should require boots,
clothes, warm things of all sorts. Food and shelter I couldn't do
without.
It was the incredible, the impossible. Nebuchadnezzar driven from men
and eating grass like an ox couldn't have been more surprised to see
himself in such a state of want. Somewhere, out of the memories that had
not disappeared, I drew the recollection that to need boots and not be
able to afford them had been my summary of an almost inhuman degree of
poverty. I could remember trying to picture what it would be like to
find myself in such a situation and not being able to do so. I had
bought a new pair since coming to New York, and they were already
wearing thin.
It came to me again--it came to me constantly, of course--that I could
save myself by going to some sympathetic person and telling him my tale.
I rejected now the idea of making Boyd Averill my confidant; but there
were other possibilities. There were doctors, clergymen, policemen. As
a matter of fact, people who suffered from amnesia, and who didn't know
their names, generally applied to the police.
In the end I opted for a clergyman as being the most human of these
agencies. Vaguely I was aware that vaguely I belonged to a certain
church. I had tested myself along the line of religion as well as along
other lines, with the discovery that the services of one church were
familiar, while those of others were not.
From the press I learned that the Rev. Dr. Scattlethwaite, the head of a
large and wealthy congregation, was perhaps the best known exponent in
New York of modern scientific beneficence, and by attendance at one of
his services I got the information that at fixed hours of every day he
was in his office at his parish house for the purpose of meeting those
in trouble. It was a simple matter, therefore, to present myself, and
be met on the threshold of his waiting-room by the young lady who acted
as his secretary.
She was a portly young lady, light on her feet, quick in her movements,
dressed in black, with blond fluffy hair, and a great big welcoming
smile. The reception was much the same as in any doctor's office, and I
think she diagnosed my complaint as the drug habit. Asking me to take a
seat she assured me that Doctor Scattlethwaite would see me as soon as
he was disengaged. When she had returned to her desk, where she seemed
to make endless notes, I had leisure to look about me.
Except for a large white wooden cross between two doors, it might have
been a waiting-room in a hospital. Something in the atmosphere
suggested people meeting agonies--or perhaps it was something in myself.
As far as that went, there were no particular agonies in the long table
strewn with illustrated papers and magazines, nor in the bookrack
containing eight or ten well-thumbed novels. Neither were agonies
suggested by the Arundel print of the Resurrection on one bit of
wall-space, nor by the large framed photograph of the Arch of
Constantine on another. All the same there was that in the air which
told one that no human being in the world would ever come into this room
otherwise than against his will.
And yet in that I may be wrong, considering how many people there are
who enjoy the luxury of sorrow. I guessed, for example, that the
well-dressed woman in mourning who sat diagonally opposite me was
carrying her grief to every pastor in New York and refusing to be
comforted by any. Another woman in mourning, rusty and cheap in her
case, flanked by two vacant-eyed children, had evidently come to collect
a portion of the huge financial bill she was able to present against
fate. An extremely thin lady, with eyes preternaturally wide open, was
perhaps a sufferer from insomnia, while the little old man with broken
boots and a long red nose was plainly an ordinary "bum." These were my
companions except that a beaming lady of fifty or so, dressed partly
like a Salvation Army lassie and partly like a nun, and whom I took to
be Doctor Scattlethwaite's deaconess _en litre_, bustled in and out for
conferences with the fluffy-haired girl at the desk.
I beguiled the waiting, which was long and tedious, by co-ordinating my
tale so as to get the main points into salience. It was about ten in
the morning when I arrived, and around half past ten the lady who had
first claim on Doctor Scattlethwaite came out from her audience. She was
young and might have been pretty if she hadn't been so hollow-eyed and
walked with her handkerchief pressed closely to her lips. I put her
down as a case of nervous prostration.
The lady with the inconsolable sorrow was next summoned by the
secretary, and so one after another those who had preceded me went in to
take their turns. Mine came after the old "bum," when it was nearly
twelve o'clock.
The room was a kind of library. I retain an impression of books lining
the walls, a leather-covered lounge, one or two leather-covered
easy-chairs, and a large flat-topped desk in the center of the
floor-space. Behind the desk stood a short, square-shouldered man in a
dark-gray clerical attire, with a squarish, benevolent, clean-shaven
face, and sharp, small eyes which studied me as I crossed the floor.
His aspect and attitude were business-like, and business-like was his
manner of shaking hands as he asked me to sit down. An upright
arm-chair stood at the corner of the desk, and as I took it he resumed
his seat in his own revolving-chair which he tilted slightly backward.
With his elbows on the arms and fitting the tips of his fingers
together, he waited for me to state my errand, eying me all the while.
Relieved and yet slightly disconcerted by this non-committal bearing, I
stumbled through my story less coherently than I had meant to tell it.
Badly narrated, it was preposterous, especially as coming from a man in
seemingly full possession of his faculties. All that enabled me to
continue was that my hearer listened attentively, with no outward
appearance of disbelieving me.
"And you've come to me for advice as to the wise thing for you to do,"
he said, not unsympathetically, when I had brought my lame story to a
close.
"That's about it," I agreed, though conscious of a regret at having come
at all.
"Then the first thing I should suggest," he continued, never taking his
penetrating eyes from my face, "is that you should see a doctor--a
specialist--a neurologist. I'll give you a line to Doctor Glegg--"
"What would he do?" I ventured to question.
"That would depend on whether or not you could pay for treatment. I
presume, from what you've said of your funds giving out, that you
couldn't."
"No, I couldn't," I assented, reddening.
"Then he'd probably put you for observation into the free psychopathic
ward at Mount Olivet--"
"Is that an insane-asylum?"
"We don't have insane-asylums nowadays; but in any case it isn't what
you mean. It's a sanitarium for brain diseases--"
"I shouldn't want to go to a place like that."
"Then what would you suggest doing?"
"I thought--" But I was not sure as to what I had thought. Hazily I
had imagined some Christian detective agency hunting up my family,
restoring my name, and giving me back my check-book. It was probably on
the last detail that unconsciously to myself I was laying the most
emphasis. "I thought," I stammered, after a slight pause, "that--that
you might be inclined to--to help me."
"With money?"
The question was so direct as to take me by surprise.
"I didn't know exactly how--"
"An average of about fifteen people come to see me every day," he said,
in his calm, business-like voice, "and of the fifteen about five are
men. And of the five men an average of four come, with one plausible
tale or other, to get money out of me under false pretenses."
I shot out of my seat. The anger choking me was hardly allayed by the
raising of his hand and his suave, "Sit down again." He went on
quietly, as I sank back into my chair: "I only want you to see that with
all men who come telling me strange tales my first impulse must be
suspicion."
Indignation almost strangled me. "And--and--am I to understand
that--that it's suspicion--now?"
"So long as money is a factor in the case it must be--till everything is
explained."
"But everything _is_ explained."
"To your satisfaction--possibly; but hardly to mine."
"Then what explanation would be satisfactory to you?"
"Oh, any of two or three. Since you decline to put yourself under
Doctor Glegg, you might be able to offer some corroboration.
"But I can't. I've kept my secret so closely that no one has heard it
but myself. The few people I know would be as incredulous as you are."
"I don't say that I'm incredulous; I'm only on my guard. Don't you see?
I have to be."
"But surely when a man is speaking the truth his manner must carry some
conviction."
"I wish I could think so; but I've believed so many false yarns on the
strength of a man's manner, and disbelieved so many true ones on the
same evidence, that I no longer trust my own judgment. But please don't
be annoyed. If your mental condition is such as you describe, I'm
proposing the most scientific treatment you can get in New York. In
addition to that, I know that Doctor Glegg has had a number of such
cases and has cured them."
"You know that?"
"Perhaps I ought to say that they've been cured while under his care. I
think I've heard him say that as a matter of fact they've cured
themselves. Without knowing much of the malady, I rather think it's one
of those in which time restores the ruptured tissues, with the aid of
mental rest."
"If that's all--"
"Oh, I don't say that it's all; but as far as I understand it's a large
part of it. But then I don't understand very much. That's why I'm
suggesting--"
"I could get mental rest of my own accord if--"
"Yes? If--what?"
"If I could find out who--who I am."
"And you've no clues at all?"
I shook my head.
"Have you heard no names that were familiar to you--?"
"Scores of them; but none with which I could connect myself."
"And did you think I could find out for you what you yourself have not
been able to discover?"
"I didn't know but what you might have means."
"What means could I have? As far as I've ever heard, the only way of
tracing a lost man is through the police--with detectives--and
publicity--descriptions in the papers--photographs thrown on
screens--that sort of thing. I don't think there's any other way."
I took perhaps two minutes, perhaps three, to ponder these
possibilities. In the end they seemed to magnify my misfortune.
"Then, sir, that's all you can do for me?"
"Remember that I should be doing a great deal if I got you to put
yourself under Doctor Glegg."
"In the free psychopathic ward of a sanitarium for diseases of the
brain--to be watched."
"To be under observation. There's a difference."
"All the observation in the world wouldn't tell Doctor Glegg more than
I'm telling you now."
"Oh yes, it would. It would tell him--it would tell me--you must excuse
me, you know--but the situation obliges me to speak frankly--it would
tell him--it would tell me--whether or not your story is a true one."
"So you don't believe me?"
"How can I believe you on the strength of this one interview?"
"But how could I convince you in a dozen interviews?"
"You couldn't. Nothing would convince me but something in the way of
outside proof--or Doctor Glegg's report."
I rose, not as I did before, but slowly, and I hoped with dignity.
"Then I see no reason, sir, for taking your time any longer--"
He too rose, business-like, imperturbable.
"My dear young man, I must leave that to you. My time is entirely at
your disposal and all my good-will."
"Thanks."
"And I'll go as far as to say this, that I think the probabilities are
in your favor. I will even add that if I hadn't thought so in a hundred
other cases, in which men whom I pitied--trusted--and aided--were making
me a dupe-- You see, I've been at this thing a good many years--"
Managing somehow to bow myself out, I got into the air again. I
attributed my wrath to the circumstances of not being taken at my word;
but the real pang lay in the thought of being watched, as a type of mild
lunatic and a pauper.
*PART II*
*CHAPTER I*
I had made this experiment as a concession to what you will consider
common sense. Ever since landing in New York the idea that the natural
thing to do was to make my situation known had haunted me. Well, I had
made it known, much against the grain, with results such as I had partly
expected. I had laid myself open to the semi-accusation of trumping up
a cock-and-bull story to get money under false pretenses.
So no one could help me but myself! I had felt that from the first, and
now I was confirmed in the conviction. It was useless either to
complain or to rebel. Certain things were to be done, and no choice
remained with me but to do them in the heartiest way possible. I had
the wit to see that the heartier the way the more likely I was to attain
to the mental rest which was apparently a condition of my recovery.
From this point of view work became even more pressing than before, and
I searched myself for things that I could do.
Of all my experiences this was the most baffling. In the same way that I
knew I had enjoyed a generous income I knew I had never been an idler.
That is, I knew it by the habit of a habit. I had the habit of a habit
of occupation. I got up each morning with a sense of things to do.
Finding nothing to be done, I felt thwarted, irritated, uneasy in the
conscience. I must always have worked, even if pay had not been a
matter of importance.
But what had I worked at? I had not been a doctor, nor a lawyer, nor a
clergyman, nor a banker, nor a merchant, nor a manufacturer, nor a
teacher, nor a journalist, nor a writer, nor a painter, nor an actor,
nor a sculptor, nor a civil engineer. All this was easy to test by the
things I didn't know and couldn't do. I could ride and drive and run a
motor-car. I had played tennis and golf and taken an interest in
yachting and aviation. I could not say that I had played polo, but I
had looked on at matches, and had also frequented horse-races. These
facts came to me not so much as memories, but as part of a general
equipment. But I could find no sense of a profession.
Thrown back on the occupations I can only class as nondescript, I began
looking for a job. That is, I began to study the advertised lists of
"Wants" in the hope of finding some one in search of the special line of
aptitude implied by cultivation. I had some knowledge of books, of
pictures, of tapestries, of prints. Music was as familiar to me as to
most people who have sat through a great many concerts, and I had
followed such experiments as those of the Abbey Theater in Dublin and
Miss Horniman's Manchester Players in connection with the stage.
Unfortunately, there was no clamor for these accomplishments in the
press of New York and the neighboring cities, the end of a week's study
finding me just where I began. For chauffeurs and salesmen there were
chances; but for people of my order of attainment there were none. I
thought of what Mildred Averill had said during our last conversation:
"After all, what the world wants is producers; and the moment one
doesn't produce--"
She left her sentence there because all had been said. The world wanted
producers and was ready to give them work. It would also give them pay,
after a fashion. One producer might get much and another little, but
every one would get something. The secret of getting most evidently lay
in producing the thing most required.
I remembered, too, that Mildred Averill had defined the producer as he
seemed to her: I suppose I mean all who contribute, either directly or
indirectly, either mentally or physically, to the sum total of our needs
in living.
There again, the more vital the need, the greater the contribution, and
needs when you analyzed them were mostly elementary. The more elemental
you were, the closer you lived to the stratum the world couldn't do
without. That stratum was basic; it was bedrock. Wherever you went you
had to walk on it, and not on mountain-peaks or in the air.
I was not pleased with these deductions. It seemed to me a gross thing
in life that salesmen and chauffeurs should be more in demand than men
who could tell you at a glance the difference between a Henri Deux and a
Jacobean piece of furniture, or explain the weaves and designs of a
Flemish tapestry as distinguished from a Gobelin or an Aubusson. I was
eager to prove my qualifications for a place in life to be not without
value. To have nothing to do was bad enough, but to be unfit to do
anything was to be in a state of imbecility.
So I made several attempts, of which one will serve as an instance of
all.
Walking in Fifth Avenue and attracted by the shop windows, I couldn't
help being struck by New York's love of the antique. To me the antique
was familiar. Boyd Averill had asked me if I hadn't sold it. I had
said I hadn't--but why not? Beauty surely entered into the sum total of
needs in living, and I had, moreover, often named it to myself as the
thread of flame by which I should find my way.
All the same, it required some effort to walk into any of these
storehouses of the loot of castles and cathedrals and offer my services
as judge and connoisseur. On the threshold of three I lost my courage
and stepped back. It was only after stopping before a fourth, the
window severely simple with three ineffable moon-white jars set against
a background of violet shot with black, that I reasoned myself into
taking the step. It was a case of _de l'audace, de l'audace, et encore
de l'audace_. By audacity alone were high things accomplished and great
fortunes won. Before I could recoil from this commendable reflection I
opened the door and went in.
I found myself in a gallery resembling certain venerable sacristies.
The floor was carpeted in red, the walls lined with cabinets paneled in
ebony, their doors discreetly closed on the treasures inside. In a
corner an easel supported a black-framed flower-piece, probably by
Huysmans. On a well-preserved Elizabethan table partly covered with a
square of filet lace was a tea-service of Nantgarw or Rockingham.
Nothing could have been more in accordance with my own ideas of
conducting a business than this absence of crude display.
I had leisure to make these observations, because the only other visible
occupant of the shop, if I may use the word of a shrine so dignified,
was a young lady who moved slowly toward me down the gallery. She was
in the neatest black, with only a string of pearls for ornament.
Healthily pale, with fair hair carefully "marcelled," her hands resting
on each other in front of her, she approached me with a faint smile that
emphasized her composure.
"You wish--?"
I had not considered the words in which I should frame my application,
so I stammered:
"I--I thought I--I might be of--of some use here."
The faint smile faded, but the composure remained as before.
"Some--what?"
"Use. I--I understand these things. That tea-service, now, it's
Rockingham or Nantgarw, possibly Chelsea. The three moon-white jars in
the window, two of them gourd-shaped--"
"Did you want to look at them?"
"No," I blurted out, "to--to sell them."
"Sell them? How do you mean? We mean to sell them ourselves."
"But don't you ever--ever need--what shall I call it--an extra hand?
Don't you ever have a place for that?"
She grew nervous, and yet not so nervous as to lose the power of keeping
me in play.
"Oh yes! Certainly! An--an extra hand! I'll call Mr. Chessland. Mr.
Chessland! Please--_please_--come here. Lovely day, isn't it?" she
continued, as a short, thick-set figure came waddling from the back of
the premises. "We don't often have such lovely weather at this time of
year, though sometimes we do--we do very often, don't we? You never can
tell about weather, can you?"
Mr. Chessland, who was more Armenian than his name, having come near
enough to keep an eye on me, she fell back toward him, whispering
something to which he replied only in pantomime. Only in pantomime he
replied to me, pursing his rosy, thick lips, and lifting his hands,
palms outward, as in some form of Oriental supplication, pushing me with
repeated gestures back toward the door. I went back toward the door in
obedience to the frightened little fat man's urge, since I was as
terrified as he. Though I was out on the pavement again the door didn't
close till I heard the girl ask, in an outburst of relief:
"Do you think he was nervy, or only off his nut?"
It came to me slowly that a man in search of work is somehow the object
of suspicion. The whole world being so highly mechanized, it admits of
no loose screw. The loose screw obviously hasn't fitted; and if it
hasn't fitted in the place for which it was made it is unlikely to fit
in another.
Furthermore, a man is so impressionable that he quickly adopts of
himself the view that others take of him. Going about from shop to
shop, bringing my simple guile to bear first on one smooth-spoken
individual and then another, only in the end, in the phrase once used to
me, "to get the gate," I shrank in my own estimation. The gate seemed
all I was fit for. I began to see myself as going out through an
endless succession of gates, expelled by hands like Mr. Chessland's, but
never welcomed within one. For a man who had instinctively the habit of
rating himself with the best, of picking and choosing his own company,
of ignoring those who didn't suit him as if they had never existed, the
revolution of feeling was curious.
Then I discovered that one point of contact with organized society had
been also removed.
Early in December I went to look up Drinkwater, whom I hadn't seen for a
month. It was not friendliness that sent me; it was loneliness. Day
after day had gone by, and except for the people to whom I applied for
work I hadn't spoken to any one.
True, I had been busy. In addition to looking for a job I had written
articles for the press and had made strenuous efforts to secure a place
as French teacher in a boys' school. This I think I should have got had
I been actually French; but when the decision was made a native
Frenchman had turned up and been given the preference. As for my
articles, some of them were sent back to me, and of the rest I never
heard. So I had been less lonely than I might have been, even if my
occupations had brought me no success.
In addition to that I had refrained from visiting the blind boy from a
double motive: there was first the motive that was always present, that
of not wishing to continue the acquaintance of people outside my class
in life; then there was the reason that I was anxious now to avoid a
possible chance meeting with Miss Averill.
I could easily have been in love with her. There was no longer a
question about that. It must be remembered that I was appallingly
adrift--and she had been kind to me. I had been grotesque, suspected,
despised--and she had been kind to me. She had gone out of her way to
be kind to me; she had been sisterly; she had been tender. Something
that was of value in me which no one else had seen, she had seen and
done justice to. In circumstances that made me a mystery to every one,
myself included, she had had the courage to believe me a gentleman and
to put me on a level with herself. As the days went by, and this
recognition remained the sole mitigation of a lot that had grown
infinitely bitterer than I ever supposed it could become, I felt that if
I didn't love her I adored her.
For this reason I had to avoid her; I had to take pains that she should
not see me. Even if other circumstances had not made friendship between
us hopeless, my impending social collapse must have had that effect. No
good could ensue from our meeting again; and so I kept away from places
where a meeting could occur.
But an afternoon came when some sort of human intercourse became
necessary to keep me from despair. It was the day when I lost my chance
at the boys' school. It was also a day when three of my articles had
fluttered back to me. It was also a day when I had made two gentlemanly
appeals for employment, losing one because I couldn't write shorthand,
and the other because the man in need of a secretary didn't want a
high-brow.
Drinkwater was, then, a last resort. He would welcome me; he would tell
me of his good luck; he would call me Jasper; he would make a fuss over
me that would have the warmth of a lighted fire.
But at the door I was met by Miss Flowerdew's little colored maid with
the information, given with darky idioms that I cannot reproduce, that
Mr. Drinkwater had gone to take his old position with Doctor Averill,
and was living in his house. Miss Blair had also found a job, though
the little maid couldn't tell me where. Miss Flowerdew knew, but,
unfortunately, she was spending a week in Philadelphia, "where her folks
was."
It was a shock, but a shock with a thrill in it. If Drinkwater had gone
to Boyd Averill's, to Boyd Averill's I ought to follow him. That which
I had denied myself for one reason might, therefore, become unavoidable
for another. I forgot that I had been planning to drop Drinkwater from
the list of my acquaintances, for Drinkwater in Boyd Averill's house had
another value.
He stood for a temptation. It was like wrestling with a taste for drink
or opium. At one minute I said I wouldn't go; at another I admitted
that I couldn't help myself. In the end I went. As I turned from Fifth
Avenue my heart pounded and my legs shook. I knew I was doing wrong. I
said I would do it just this once, and never any more.
But I sinned in vain. The house was empty. In the window beside the
door hung a black-and-white sign, "To Let."
CHAPTER II
It would have been easy enough to find out where the Averills had moved
to, but I didn't make the attempt. It was best for me to lose sight of
them; it was best for them to lose sight of me. Now that the process
had begun I decided to carry it to the utmost.
Nothing is simpler than being lost in a city like New York, so long as
it is to nobody's interest to find you. You have only to move round a
corner, and it is as if you had gone a thousand miles. The minute I
carried my bags away from the Barcelona without leaving an address I was
beyond the ken of any one inclined to follow me.
I did this not of choice, but of necessity. In the matter of choice I
should have preferred staying where I was. Though it was a modest,
uncleanly place, I had grown used to it; and I dreaded another
expedition into the unknown. But I had come down to my last ten dollars,
with no relief in sight. A humbler abode was imperative even to tide me
over a few days.
On the Odyssey of that afternoon I could write a good-sized volume.
Steps that would have been simple to a working-man were difficult
*CHAPTER II*
It would have been easy enough to find out where the Averills had moved
to, but I didn't make the attempt. It was best for me to lose sight of
them; it was best for them to lose sight of me. Now that the process
had begun I decided to carry it to the utmost.
Nothing is simpler than being lost in a city like New York, so long as
it is to nobody's interest to find you. You have only to move round a
corner, and it is as if you had gone a thousand miles. The minute I
carried my bags away from the Barcelona without leaving an address I was
beyond the ken of any one inclined to follow me.
I did this not of choice, but of necessity. In the matter of choice I
should have preferred staying where I was. Though it was a modest,
uncleanly place, I had grown used to it; and I dreaded another
expedition into the unknown. But I had come down to my last ten dollars,
with no relief in sight. A humbler abode was imperative even to tide me
over a few days.
On the Odyssey of that afternoon I could write a good-sized volume.
Steps that would have been simple to a working-man were difficult to me,
because I had never had to take them. Moreover, because the business was
new to me I went at it in the least practical way. Instead of securing
a bed in one place before giving it up in another, I followed the
opposite method. Paying my bill at the Barcelona, I went out in the
street with no definite direction before me.
Rather, I had one definite direction, but that was only a first stage.
I had spotted on my walks a dealer in old clothes to whom I carried the
ridiculous suits I had brought with me from France. He was a little old
Polish Jew, dressed in queer, antiquated broadcloth, whose beard and
tousled gray hair proclaimed him a sort of Nazarite.
When I mentioned my errand he shook his head with an air of despair,
lifting his hands to heaven somewhat in the manner of Mr. Chessland.
"No, no! Open not," he exclaimed, as I laid the suit-case on the
counter in order to display my wares. "Will the high-born gentleman but
look at all the good moneys spent on these beautiful garments, and no
one buys my merchandise? Of what use more to purchase?"
When I had opened the suit-case he cast one look at the contents,
turning away dramatically to the other side of the reeking little shop.
A backward gesture of the hand cast my offerings behind him.
"Pah! Those can I not sell. Take 'em away." He came back, however,
fingering first one suit and then the other, appraising them rapidly.
"One dollar!" he cried, lifting a bony forefinger and defying me to ask
more. "One! One! One! No more but one!"
I raised him to two, to three, and finally to five for each suit. In
spite of his tragic appeals to Ruin not to overtake him, he seized my
hand and kissed it.
Thus I was out on the pavement, with twenty dollars in my pocket, and so
much liberty of action that I didn't know what to do. It was about
three in the afternoon of a sullen December day, and big flakes of snow
had begun to fall softly. It was cold only in the sense that my suit
had been bought for hot weather, and the light French box-coat, which
was all I had besides, added little in the way of warmth. Unable to
stand with my two bags in the doorway of a shop for second-hand clothes,
I moved on more or less at random.
But one thought was clearly in my mind. I must find a house where the
sign "Rooms" was displayed in a window, and there I must go in.
For the first half-hour I kept this purpose in view, walking slowly and
turning my head now to one side of the street, now to the other, so as
to miss no promising haven. A room being all I needed, any room within
my price would do. Having no experience, I could have no choice. If I
had choice, it would have been for Miss Flowerdew's; but that would have
brought me back into the circle from which I was trying to slip out.
Miss Flowerdew's setting my only standard as to "Rooms," I had imagined
myself as walking into something of the kind, though possibly more
cheerful. It is hardly necessary to say that in this I was
disappointed. Drifting in and out of houses through most of that
afternoon, I saw women and conditions that almost shattered such faith
as I had left in human nature. The first to answer my ring at a doorbell
was a virago. An enormous creature, bigger if not taller than myself,
and clad in a loose pink-flannel wrapper that added to her bulk, she
challenged me to find a fault with the room I declined after having seen
it. "Better men than you have slept in that bed," she called after me
as I clattered down the stairs, "and any one who says different 'll
lie." The next was a poor, leering thing who smiled in a way that would
have been horrible if it had not been so sickeningly imbecile. The next
was a slattern, pawing her face and wiping it with her apron while she
showed me the doghole for which I was to pay seven dollars a week.
There were others of whom it is useless to attempt a catalogue further
than to say that they left me appalled. When the lights were being lit
I was still in the streets with my two bags, and the snow falling
faster.
I was about to go back to the Barcelona for the night when something
happened which I tell to you just as it occurred.
That morning I had read in a paper the account given by a young Canadian
officer of his escape from a German prison, of his beating his way to
the Rhine, and of his final swim across the river to Switzerland. But
the point that remained in my memory was his picture of himself as he
lay like a lizard with his nose to the stream and his feet in the
underbrush as the bank rose behind him. Listening to the current, he
could guess how strong it was; putting his hand in the water, he could
feel it cold. For over two hours he lay there in the darkness, resting,
wondering, and thinking of a little cemetery not far from Basel where
lay the bodies of the prisoners who had tried to make this swim.
Then, as the minute approached at which he must give himself to these
difficult waters, he prayed. His account of the act was simple and
straightforward. He asked God to have him in His keeping while he made
this attempt, and to comfort those at home if he failed. With that he
slipped into the stream and struck outward.
Well, standing somewhere in the neighborhood of Eighth Street and Sixth
Avenue I turned this over in my mind, considering its advisability. I
was not what would be called a praying man. As to that, I had not prayed
in years. I had sometimes told myself that I didn't know what prayer
was, that its appeal seemed to me illogical. Illogical it seemed to me
now, in the sense of imploring God to do what He wouldn't do of His own
accord.
So, although I didn't pray, something passed through my mind that might
have been prayer's equivalent. As far as I can transcribe it into the
words which I did not use at the time it ran like this:
"I know there is a God. I know that His will is the supreme law for all
of us. I know that that law is just and beneficent. It is not just and
beneficent for me to be standing here in the snow and the slush,
chilled, hungry, with wet feet, workless, and homeless. Consequently,
this is not His will. Consequently, I must give myself to discovering
that will as the first principle of safety. When I have got into touch
with that first principle of safety I shall find a home and work."
Of this the immediate result was that I did not return to the Barcelona.
Something like a voice, the voice of another, told me that the thread of
flame led onward. Onward I drifted, then, hardly noticing the way I
went, hypnotized by the physical process of being on the move. It was
just on and on, through the slanting snowfall, through the patches of
blurred light, with feet soggy and heart soggier, a derelict amid these
hundreds of vehicles, these thousands of pedestrians, all bound from
somewhere to somewhere, and knowing the road they were taking. I didn't
know the road I was taking and in a sense I didn't care. Having given
up from sheer impotence the attempt to steer my ship, I was being borne
along blindly.
When I lifted my head to look about me again I was in a part of New York
not only new to me, but almost refreshing to the eye. I mean that it
was one of those old-fashioned down-town regions where the streets
hadn't yet learned the short and easy cut to beauty of running only at
right angles. Two or three thoroughfares focused in an irregular open
space, which I saw by the signboard to bear the name of Meeting-House
Green. There was no meeting-house in the neighborhood now, and probably
nothing green even in spring. If it was like the rest of New York it
would be dirty in winter and fetid in summer, but after the monotonous
ground plan of the uptown regions its quaintness relieved the
perceptions to a degree which the thunder of the near-by Elevated
couldn't do away with. Just now all was blanketed in white, through
which drays plunged heavily and pedestrians slipped like ghosts.
As I stared about me my eye was once more arrested by the magic notice
"Rooms," though this time with the qualifying phrase, "for gentlemen."
Rooms for gentlemen! The limitation seemed to fit my needs. It implied
selection and a social standard.
The house, too, was that oasis in New York, an old-time dwelling in
gray-painted brick which progress has not yet swept away. Standing
where Wapping Street and Theodora Place ran together at a sharp angle,
it was shaped like a sadiron or a ship's prow. The tip of the ground
floor was given over to a provision dealer, while a barber occupied the
long slit in the rear. Between the two shops a door on the level of the
pavement of Theodora Place gave on a little inset flight of steps which
led up to the actual entrance. The vestibule was shabby, but, moved by
my experience in the early part of the afternoon, I observed that it was
clean.
The woman who answered my ring was not only clean, but neatly dressed in
what I suppose was a print stuff, and not only neatly dressed, but
marked with a faded prettiness. What I chiefly noticed for the minute
was a pair of those enormous doll-blue eyes on a level with the face, as
the French say, _a fluer de fete_, which make the expression sweet and
vacuous. In her case it was resignedly mournful, as if mournfulness was
a part of her aim in life. A single gas-jet flickered behind her,
showing part of a hallway in which the same walnut furniture must have
stood for so many years that it was now groggy on its feet. To my
question about a room she replied with a sweet, sad, "Won't you step
in?" which was tantamount to a welcome.
The floor of the hallway was covered with an oilcloth or linoleum which
had once simulated a terra-cotta tiling, and was now but one remove from
dust. On a mud-brown wall a steel-engraving of a scow, with Age at the
helm, and Youth peering off at the bow, sagged at an angle which
produced a cubist effect in its relation to the groggy-footed hat-rack.
The doors on the left of the hall were closed; on the right a graceful
stairway, lighted by a tall window looking out on Theodora Place, curved
upward to the floor above.
At the sound of voices in the hall one of the closed doors opened, and a
second woman, a replica of the first, except for being older, came out
and looked inquiringly. She, too, was fadedly pretty; she, too, was
mournful; she, too, was saucer-eyed; she, too, was neatly dressed in a
print stuff.
"This gentleman is looking for a room," was the explanation, sadly
given, of my presence.
The ladies withdrew to the foot of the stairway for a whispered
conference. This finished, the elder came back to where I stood on the
door-mat.
"We generally ask for references--" she began, with a glance at my
sodden appearance.
"If that's essential," I broke in, "I'm afraid it must end matters.
I've only recently come over from France, and I'm a total stranger in
New York. I rang the bell because I saw the notice and I liked the look
of the house."
As it happened, the last was the most tactful thing I could have said,
going to the hearts of my hostesses. Something, too, in my voice and
choice of words must have appealed to their sense of gentility.
"It's a nice old house," the elder lady smiled, with her brave air of
having to overcome agony before being able to speak at all. "It's
old-fashioned, of course, and horribly in the wrong part of the city
nowadays; but my sister and I love it. We've always lived here, and our
dear father before us. He was Doctor Smith, quite a famous oculist in
his day; you may have heard of him?"
"I've heard the name," I admitted, politely.
"We've two good rooms vacant at present; but if you can't give
references"--a wan smile deprecated the unladylike suggestion--"I'm
afraid we should have to ask you for a week's rent in advance. I
shouldn't speak of it if it was not our rule."
When I had agreed to this she led the way over the frayed cocoanut
matting of the staircase to an upper hallway, also carpeted in
pulverized oilcloth. With one sister ahead of me, and the other
shepherding me behind, I
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