.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 45898
   :PG.Title: The Thread of Flame
   :PG.Released: 2014-06-06
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: Basil King
   :DC.Title: The Thread of Flame
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1920
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

===================
THE THREAD OF FLAME
===================

.. clearpage::

.. pgheader::

.. container:: frontispiece

   .. vspace:: 4

   .. _`"Oh, as for cheering people up—I don't know....`:

   .. figure:: images/img-front.jpg
      :align: center
      :alt: "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—"

      "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—"

   .. vspace:: 4

.. container:: titlepage center white-space-pre-line

   .. class:: x-large

      THE
      THREAD OF FLAME

   .. vspace:: 2

   .. class:: large

      By BASIL KING

   .. class:: small

      Author of
      "THE CITY OF COMRADES" "GOING WEST"
      "THE INNER SHRINE" ETC.

   .. vspace:: 3

   .. class:: medium

      Illustrated

   .. vspace:: 3

   .. class:: medium

      Harper & Brothers
      *Publishers*
      New York and London

   .. vspace:: 4

.. container:: verso center white-space-pre-line

   .. class:: small

      THE THREAD OF FLAME

   .. class:: small

      Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers
      Printed in the United States of America
      Published August, 1920

   .. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   ILLUSTRATIONS

.. vspace:: 2


`"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*

.. vspace:: 1

`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"

.. vspace:: 1

`All these minutes she had been observing me,`_
with that queer, half-choked cry as the
result: "Oh, Billy, is this you?"

.. vspace:: 1

`I had begun on collars and neckties`_ when Vio
said, "What kind of a girl was that who
was here this afternoon?"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER I`:

.. class:: center large bold

   PART I

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center x-large bold

   THE THREAD OF FLAME

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER I

.. vspace:: 2

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."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER II`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER II

.. vspace:: 2

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
Marché, 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 Marché 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 rôle
that was not my own, and with a name I was
sure I had never borne, was at once terrifying
and grotesque.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER III`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER III

.. vspace:: 2

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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER IV`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IV

.. vspace:: 2

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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER V`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER V

.. vspace:: 2

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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VI`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VI

.. vspace:: 2

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
rôle 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 cafés 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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VII

.. vspace:: 2

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 *à 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 *à 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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VIII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VIII

.. vspace:: 2

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 *flâneur*, 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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER IX`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IX

.. vspace:: 2

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 traînante* 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 hörest 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 Sèvres 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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER X`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER X

.. vspace:: 2

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 rôle 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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XI`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XI

.. vspace:: 2

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?"

.. _`She turned on me with a new flash in her blue eyes.`:

.. figure:: images/img-120.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: 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.

   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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER XII`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER XII

.. vspace:: 2

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.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER I02`:

.. class:: center large bold

   PART II

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER I

.. vspace:: 2

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

.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER II02`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER II

.. vspace:: 2

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, *à fluer de fête*, 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 was
ushered into a large prow-shaped room immediately
over the provision dealer, and smelling faintly
of raw meat.  I could have borne the odor if
the rent had not been six a week.

"We've another room just over this," the
spokeswoman informed me, "but it's only half
this size."

"If it's only half this rent—"

"It's just half this rent."

So, marshaled as before, I mounted another
stairway in cocoanut matting to a slit of a room
shaped like half a ship's prow, with its single
window placed squintwise.  As the smell of raw
meat was less noticeable here, the squint of the
window out into Meeting-House Green, and the
rent so low, I made my bargain promptly.

In the days of the famous oculist the room
must have been a maid's.  It was still furnished
like a maid's in a house of the second order.  A
rickety iron bedstead supported a sagging
mattress covered with a cotton counterpane in
imitated crochet-work.  A table, a washstand, a
chair, and a chest of drawers were perhaps
drearier than they might have been, because of
the sick light of the gas-jet.  On a drab wooden
mantelpiece, which enshrined a board covered
with a piece of cretonne where once had been a
fireplace, stood the only decoration in the room,
three large fungi, painted with landscapes.  The
fungi were of the triangular sort which grow
about the trunks of trees.  There was a big one
in the middle of the mantelpiece, and smaller
ones at each end, giving glimpses of rivers and
bays, with castles on headlands, to one tired of
the prospect of Meeting-House Green.  Taking
the initiatory three dollars from my purse, I
bent to study these objects of art.

Once more the act was ingratiating to my
hostesses.

"That's my work," said the little woman who
had admitted me to the house.  Her tone was
one of shy pride, of a kind of fluttered boastfulness.

"My sister's an artist," the elder explained,
taking my three one-dollar bills as if their number
didn't matter, but making conversation in order
to count them surreptitiously.  "She's a widow,
too, Mrs. Leeming.  I'm Miss Smith.  We've
had great sorrows.  We try not to complain too
much, but—"

A long-drawn sigh with a quiver in it said the
rest, while Mrs. Leeming's eyes spilled tears
with the readiness of a pair of fountain cups.

To escape the emotional I returned to my
inspection of the landscapes, at which I was
destined to gaze for another two years.

"Are these studies of—of Italy?" I asked, for
the sake of showing appreciation.

Mrs. Leeming recovered herself sufficiently
to be faintly indignant.

"Oh no!  I never copy.  I work only from
imagination.  Landscapes just come to
me—and all different."

Before they left me Miss Smith managed to
convey a few of the principles on which they
conducted their house.

"We've three very refined gentlemen at
present, two salesmen and a Turkish-bath attendant.
One has to be so careful.  We almost never take
gentlemen who don't bring reference; but in
your case, Mr. Soames—well, one can see."  Her
wan, suffering smile flickered up for a minute
and died down.  "There's a sort of free-masonry,
isn't there?  We *have* taken gentlemen on that,
and they've never disappointed us."

I hoped I should not disappoint them, either.

"Now, some young men—well, to put it
plainly, if there's liquor we just have to ask them
to look for another room.  Tobacco, with gentlemen,
one can't be too severe on.  We overlook
it, and try not to complain too much.  And,
of course, only gentlemen visitors—"

With my assurance that I should do my utmost
to live within their regulations, they were
good enough to leave me to my single chair and
the fungi.  Dropping into the one and staring
at the other, it seemed to me that I had reached
the uttermost edge of the forlorn.  I could bear
the extreme modesty of this lodging, seeing that
it gave me a shelter from the storm; I could bear
being hungry, cold, and wet; I could bear the
wall of darkness and blankness that hemmed in
not only my future, but my past; what I found
intolerable was the sense of being useless.  The
blows of Fate I could take with some equanimity,
but, not to be able to "make good" or to earn a
living cut me to the quick in my self-esteem.

And yet it was not that which in the end beat
me to my knees beside the bed, to bury my head
against the counterpane of imitation crochet-work.
That was a more primal craving, a need
as primal as thirst or the desire for sleep.  It
was the longing for some sort of human
companionship—for the gay toleration of Lydia
Blair, or Drinkwater's cheerfulness, or Mildred
Averill's....





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER III02`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER III

.. vspace:: 2

But in the end I found work, so why tell of
the paroxysm of loneliness which shook me
that night like a madness?  Never before had
I known anything like it, and nothing like it has
seized me since.  I must have remained on my
knees for an hour or more, largely for the reason
that there was nothing to get up for.  Though I
had had no dinner, I didn't want to eat, and what
else was there to do?  To eat and sleep, to sleep
and eat, that apparently would be my fate till
my seventeen dollars gave out.  If the miracle
didn't happen before then—but the miracle
began to happen not long after that, and this is
how it came to pass:

I got up and crept supperless to bed.  There
I slept with the merciful soundness of fatigue,
wakened by the crashing past my window of
an Elevated train to a keen sunny morning,
with snow on the ground and the zest of new life.

As I washed, I could hear my neighbor washing
on the other side of the partition.  The partition
was, in fact, so thin that I had heard all his
movements since he got out of bed.  The making of
one man's toilet taking about the same amount
of time as that of another man in similar
conditions, we met at the doors of our respective
rooms as we emerged to go down-stairs.

I looked at him; he looked at me.  With
what he saw I am concerned; I saw a stocky,
broad-shouldered individual, with smooth black
hair, solemn black eyes, bushy black eyebrows,
a clean-shaven skin so dark that shaving could
not obliterate the trace of hair, and a general
air of friendliness.  Putting on the good-mixer
voice, which was not natural to me but which
I could assume for a brief spurt, I said:

"Say, I wonder it you could advise a fellow
where to get a breakfast?  Only breezed in last
night—"

Between working-people there is always that
camaraderie I had already noticed in Drinkwater
and Lydia Blair, and which springs from the
knowledge that where there is nothing to lose
there is nothing to be afraid of.  While I cannot
say that my companion viewed me with the
spontaneous recognition he would have accorded to
a man of his own class, he saw enough to warrant
him in giving me his sympathy.  The man of
superior station down on his luck is not granted
the full rights of the stratum to which he has
descended; but even when an object of suspicion
he is not one of hostility.  Between moral bad
luck and sheer fortuitous calamity the line is
not strictly drawn; and wherever there is need
there is a free inclination to meet it.

"I'm on my way to my breakfast now," my
neighbor said, after sizing me up with a second
glance.  "Why don't you come along?  It's not
much of a place to look at," he continued, as I
followed him down-stairs, "but the grub isn't bad.
Most of the places round here is punk."

Within ten minutes' time I found myself in
a little eating-place that must once have been the
cellar kitchen of a dwelling-house, sitting at a
bare deal table, opposite a man I had never seen
till that morning.

"Don't take bacon," he advised, when I had
ordered bacon and eggs; "it 'll be punk.  Take
ham.  Coffee 'll be punk, too.  Better stick to tea."

Having given me these counsels, he proceeded
with those short and simple annals of his history
which I had already found to be the usual form
of self-introduction.  An Englishman, a
Cornishman, he had been twenty years in America.
He was married and had a family, but preferred
to live in New York while he maintained his
household in Chicago.

"Married life is punk," was his summing up.
"Got the best little wife in the state of Illinois,
and three fine kids, a boy and two girls—but I
couldn't come it."

"Couldn't come what?"

"Oh, the whole bloomin' business—toein' the
line like, bein' home at night, and the least little
smell of anythink on your breath—"

A wave of his fork sketched a world of
domestic embarrassment from which he had freed
himself only by a somber insouciance.  A somber
insouciance might be called his key-note.
Outwardly serious, ponderous, hard-working, and
responsible, he was actually light-hearted and
inconsequent.  During the progress of the meal
he recited the escapades of a Don Juan with the
gravity of a Bunyan.

Still with my good-mixer air I asked:

"How does a guy like me get a job in New York?"

"Ever work in a Turkish bath?"  He answered
this question before I could do it myself.  "Sure
you didn't—not a chap of your cut.  It isn't
a bad sort of thing for a"—he hesitated, but
decided to use the epithet—"for a—gentleman.
Only a good class of people take Turkish baths.
Hardly ever get in with a rough lot.  A few
drunks, but what of that?  Could have got you
a place at the Gramercy if you'd ha' turned up
last week; but a Swede has it now and it's too late."

By the end of breakfast, however, he had made
a suggestion.

"Why don't you try the Intelligence?  They'll
often get you a berth when everything else has
stumped you."

I said I was willing to try the Intelligence if
I knew what it was, discovering it to be the
Bureau of Domestic and Business Intelligence
conducted by Miss Bryne.  You presented yourself,
gave your name and address, indicated your
choice of work, told your qualifications for the
job, and Miss Bryne did the rest, taking as her
commission a percentage of your first week's pay.

"But I don't know any qualifications," I
declared, with some confusion.

"Oh, that's nothing.  Say clerical work.
That covers a lot.  Somethink 'll turn up."

"But if they ask me if I can do certain
things—?"

"Say you can do 'em.  That's the way to pull
it off.  Look at me.  Never was in a Turkish
bath in my life till I went to an employment-office
in Chicago.  When the old girl in charge
asked me if I had been, I said I'd been born in
one.  Got the job right off, and watched what
the other guys did till I'd learned the trick.
There's always some nice chap that 'll show you
the ropes.  Gee!  The worst they can do is to
bounce you.  All employers is punk.  Treat 'em
like punk and you'll get on."

With a view to this procedure I was at the
Bureau of Domestic and Business Intelligence
by half past nine, entering, unfortunately, with
the downcast air of the employer who is punk,
instead of the perky self-assertion which I soon
began to notice as the proper attitude of those
in search of work.  Miss Bryne's establishment
occupied a floor in one of the older office-buildings
a little to the south of Washington Square.
Having ascended in the lift, you found yourself,
just inside the narrow doorway, face to face with
a young lady seated at a desk, whose duty it
was to ask the first questions and take the first
notes.  She was a pretty young lady, bright-eyed,
blond, with a habit of cocking her head in
a birdlike way as she composed her lips to a
receptive smile.

She so composed them, and so cocked her
head, as I appeared on the threshold, awkward
and terrified.

"Such as—?"

I knew what she meant by the questioning
look and the encouraging smile of the bright
eyes.

"I'm—I'm hoping to find a job," I stammered
to her obvious astonishment.

"Oh!"  It was a surprised little crow.  "To
find one!"

"Yes, miss; to find one."

"Of—of what sort?"

"Clerical work," I said, boldly.

She bent her head over her note-book.  "Your name?"

"Jasper Soames."

"Age?"

"Thirty-one."

"Occupation?"

"I've told you.  Any kind of clerical work.
I suppose that that means writing—and—and
copying—and that sort of thing, doesn't it?"

She glanced up from her writing.  "Is that
what you've done?"

I nodded.

"Where?  Have you any references?"

I confessed my lack of references, stating that
I had just come over from France, where I had
worked with a firm whose name would not carry
weight in America.

"What did they do—the firm?"

I answered, wildly, "Carpets."

Another young lady was passing, tall, graceful,
distinguished, *air de duchesse*, carrying a
notebook and pencil.

"Miss Gladfoot," my interlocutrice murmured,
"won't you ask Miss Bryne to step here?"

Miss Bryne having stepped there, I found
myself face to face with a competent woman of
fifty or so, short, square, square-faced, and astute.
She also had a pencil and note-book in her hand,
and, seeing me, looked receptive, too, though
remaining practical and business-like.

While the young lady at the desk explained
me as far as she had been able to understand my
object, delicacy urged me out of earshot.  I had,
therefore, not heard what passed when Miss
Bryne came forward to take charge of the situation.

"What you are is a kind of educated
handyman.  Wouldn't that be it?"

Delighted at this discriminating view of my
capacities, I faltered that it would be.

"Well, we don't often have a call for your kind
of specialty, and yet we do have them
sometimes.  There might be one to-day, and then
again there mightn't be for another six months.
Now you can either go in and wait on the chance,
or you can leave your address and we'll 'phone
you if anything should turn up that we think
would suit."

Encouraged by this kindly treatment and the
possibility of a call that day, I opted for going in
to wait.

"Then come this way."

Following the Napoleonic figure down the
narrow passageway, I was shown into a little room,
where five other men sat with the dismayed,
melancholy faces of dogs at a dog-show at
minutes when they are not barking.  Dismayed and
melancholy on my side, I took the seat nearest
the door, feeling like a prisoner in the dock or the
cell, and wondering what would happen next.

Nothing happened next so far as I was concerned,
but I had a gratifying leisure in which
to look about me.

I was obliged to note at once that the Bureau
of Domestic and Business Intelligence was chiefly
of Domestic.  Women crowded the hall, the two
large rooms across the way, and the three small
ones on our side, except the coop in which we six
men were segregated from the gay and chatty
throng.  Gay and chatty were the words.  The
tone was that of what French people call a *feeve
o'clock*.  Girls, for the most part pretty and
stylishly dressed, sat in the chairs, perched on the
arms of them, grouped themselves in corners, in
seeming disregard of the purpose that had brought
them there.  Unable at first to differentiate
between mistresses and maids, I soon learned to
detect the former by their careworn faces,
shabbier clothes, apologetic arrival, and crestfallen
departure.  Now and then I caught a few broken
phrases, of which the context and significance
eluded me.

"I told her that before I'd be after washin' all
thim dishes I'd—"

"Ah, thin, ye'll not shtay long in that plaace—"

"Says I, 'You've got a crust, Mrs. Johnson, to
ask me to shtay in when it's me night—'"

"With that I ups and walks away—"

All this animation and repartee contrasted
oddly with the low, cowed remarks of my
companions in the coop, who ventured to exchange
observations only at intervals.

Where was your last?  What did you get?
How did you like your boss?  Did you leave or
was you fired?  Are you a single fella or a
married fella?  Did you have long hours?  Wouldn't
he give you your raise?  Did he kick against the
booze?  These were mere starters of talk that
invariably died like seedlings in a wrong climate.
Getting used to my mates, I made them out to be
a gardener, a chauffeur, a teamster, a decayed
English butler, and a negro boy who called
himself a waiter.  Talking about their bosses, their
tone on the whole was hostile without personal
malevolence.  That is to say, there was little
or no enmity to individuals, though the tendency
to curse the systems of civilized life was general.
I think they would have agreed with my Cornish
friend that "all employers is punk," and considered
their feelings sufficiently expressed at that.

But as I sat among them, day after day, I
began, oddly enough, to orientate my vision to
their point of view.  They were, of course, not
always the same men.  The original five melted
away into jobs within three or four days; but
five or six or seven was about the daily average
in our little pen.  They came, were cowed, were
selected, and went off.  Twice during the first
week I was called out in response to applicants
for unusual grades of help, but my manner and
speech seemed to overawe the ladies who wanted
to hire, and I was remanded to my cell.  "She
said she didn't want that *kind* of a man."  "He
wouldn't want to eat in the kitchen," were the
explanations given me by Miss Bryne.  In vain
I protested that I would eat anywhere, so long
as I ate.  The other servants wouldn't get used
to me, and so no more was to be said.

But I was getting used to the other servants.
That is my point.  Insensibly I was changing my
whole social attitude.  It was like the difference
in looking at the Grand Cañon of Arizona—downward
from El Tovar, or upward from the
brink of the Colorado.  Little by little I found
myself staring upward from the bottom, through
all sorts of ranks above me.  I didn't notice the
change at once.  For a time I thought I still
retained my sense of obscured superiority.  I
arrived in the morning, heard from the lips of the
birdlike young lady at the desk the familiar
"Nothing yet," passed on to the pen, nodded to
those who were assembled, some of whom I would
have seen the day before, listened to their timid
scraps of talk, which hardly ever varied from a
few worn notes.

At first I felt apart from them, above them,
disdainful of their limitations.  My impulse was
to get away from them, as it had been to cut
loose from Lydia Blair and Drinkwater.  It
was only on seeing them one by one called out
of the pen, not to come back again, that I began to
envy them.  Sooner or later, every one went but
me.  I became a kind of friendly joke with them.
"Some little sticker," was the phrase commonly
applied to me.  It was used in a double sense,
one of which was not without commendation.
"Ye carn't stick like wot you're doin', old son,"
a footman said to me one day, "without somethin'
turnin' up, wot?" and from this I took a grim
sort of encouragement.

But all I mean is that by imperceptible degrees
I felt myself one of them.  After the first lady
had turned me down, I began to adapt myself
to their views of the employer.  After the second
lady had repeated the action of the first, I began
to experience that feeling of dull hostility toward
the class in which I had been born that marked
all my companions in the coop.  It was what I
have already called it, hostility without personal
malevolence—hostility to a system rather than
to individuals.  For a pittance barely sufficient
to keep body and soul together, leaving no
margin for the higher or more beautiful things in life,
we were expected to drudge like Roman slaves,
and not only feel no resentment, but be
contented with the lot to which we were ordained.
The clearest thing in the world to all of us was
that between us and those who would have us
work for them some great humanizing element
was lacking—an element which would have made
life acceptable—and that so long as it was not
there each one of us would, as a revolutionary
bookkeeper put it, "go to bed with a grouch."  To
me, as to them, the grouch was growing
intimate—and so was hunger.

By the end of a fortnight I was down to one
meal a day, the breakfast I continued to take
with Pelly, my Cornish friend, and over which
he told me his most intimate experiences, with
an absence of reserve to which conversation in the
pen had accustomed me.  Looking for some such
return on my part, he was not only disappointed,
but a little mystified.  I got his mental drift,
however, when he asked me on one occasion if I
had ever "hit the pipe," and on another if I had
ever been "sent away."  Had these misfortunes
happened to himself he would have told me
frankly, and it would have made no difference in
his sympathy for me had I confessed to them or
to any other delinquency.  What puzzled him was
that I should confess to nothing, a form of reserve
which to him was not only novel, but abnormal.

Nevertheless, when through the thin partition
I announced one morning that I wasn't going
to breakfast, giving lack of appetite as a plea,
he came solemnly into my room.

"See here, Soames; if a fiver'd be of any use
to you—or ten—or any think—"

When I declined he did not insist further;
but on my return that evening I found a five-dollar
bill thrust under my door in an envelope.

I didn't thank him when I heard him come in;
I pretended to be asleep.  As a matter of fact,
I thought it hardly worth while to say anything.
It was highly possible that the next day would
say all, for I had reached the point where it
seemed to me the Gordian knot must be cut.
One quick stroke of some sort—and Pelly would
get his five dollars back untouched.

A cup of chocolate had been all my food that
day.  Though I had still a few pennies, less than
a dollar, it would probably be all my food on the
next day.  On the day after that my rent would
be due, and I couldn't ask the two good women
who had been kind to me for credit.  What would
be the use?  A new week would bring me no
more than the past weeks, so why not end it once
and for all?

Next morning, therefore, I gave Pelly back
his bill, bluffing him by going out to our usual
breakfast, on which I spent all I had in the world
but a nickel and a dime.  I must get something
to do that day, or else—

Left alone, I tossed one of the two coins to
decide whether or not I should go back to "the
Intelligence."  Going back had not been easy
for the last few days, for I had noticed cold looks
on the part of Miss Bryne and Miss Gladfoot,
with a tendency to take me for a hoodoo.  Even
the young lady at the desk had ceased to say
"Nothing yet," as I passed by, or as much as to
glance at me.  But as this was to be the last
time, I obeyed the falling of the coin and went.

I went—to receive a little shock.  Miss Bryne
was waiting for me near the door, with a bit of
paper in her hand.

"You must remember, Soames," she said, in
her business-like way, "that this is not the only
employment-office in New York.  Here's a list
of addresses, at any of which you may find what
we haven't been able to secure for you."

I took the paper, thanked her, and went on
into the coop before the significance of this act
came to me.  It was dismissal.  It was not
merely dismissal from a place, it was dismissal
from the possibility of a dismissal.  To have a
place, even if only, as Pelly put it, to be bounced
from it, was something; but to be denied the
chance of being bounced...

I ought to have got up there and then and
walked out; but I think I was too stunned.  The
chatty groups were forming all over the place, and
early matrons looking for maids were being refused
first by one spirited damsel and then by another.
In the coop there was the usual low, intermittent
murmur, accentuated now and then by ugly
words, and now and then by oaths.  To me it
was no more than the hum of activity in the
streets in the ears of a man who is dying.

Recovering from this state, which was almost
that of coma, I began feeling for my hat.  I had
to go out.  I had to find a way to do the only
thing left for me to do.  I had no idea of the
means, and so must think them over.

And just then I heard a young fellow speaking,
with low gurgles of fun.  He was at the end of
the pen and was narrating an experience of the
afternoon before.

"It was a whale of a rolled-up rug that must
have weighed five hunderd pounds.  'Carry that
up-stairs,' says the Floater.  'Like hell I will,'
says I.  He says, 'You'll carry that up or you'll
get out o' here.' I says, 'Well, Creed and Creed
ain't the only house to work for in New York.'  'You
was damn glad to get here,' he says, madder
'n blazes.  I says, 'Not half so damn glad as
I'll be to get somewhere else,' says I.  'You've
had five men on this job in less than four weeks,'
says I, 'and now you'll have to get a sixth,' says
I, 'if there's any one in the city fool enough to
take it.  Carryin' rugs that 'd break a man's
back,' I says, 'is bad enough; but before I'd go
on workin' under a blitherin' old son of a gun
like you—'"

I didn't wait to hear more.  I knew the
establishment of Creed & Creed, not far away, in
the lower part of Fifth Avenue.  Many a time
I had stopped to admire the great rugs hung in
its windows as a bait to people living in palaces.
Not twenty-four hours earlier a place had been
vacated there, a hard place, a humble place, and
it was possible, barely possible...

Up the street that led to Washington Square
I ran; I ran through Washington Square itself;
for the two or three blocks of Fifth Avenue I
slackened my pace only in order not to arrive
breathless.

There it was on a corner, the huge gray pile,
with its huge bright windows—and my heart
almost stopped beating.  Breathless now from
another cause than speed, I paused, nominally
to gaze at an immense Chinese rug, but really
to compose my mind to what might easily prove
the last effort of my life.  This rug, too, hanging
with a graceful curve in which yellow deepened
to orange and orange to glints of acorn-brown,
might easily prove the last beautiful thing my eyes
would ever rest upon.  I remembered saying to
myself that beauty was the thread of flame that
would lead me home; but the thread of flame
had been treacherous.  I could have given an
expert's opinion on a work of art like this; and
yet I was begging for the privilege of handling
it in the most laborious manner possible, just
that I might eat.

And as I stared at the thing, forming the words
in which I should frame my request for work, a
soft voice, close beside me, said:

"Surely it must be possible for me to be of use
to you!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER IV02`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IV

.. vspace:: 2

As I recall the minute now my first thought
was of my appearance.  I had noticed for
some time past that it was running down, and
had regarded the change almost with satisfaction.
The more out at elbow I became the less would
be the difference between me and any other
young fellow looking for employment.  It hadn't
escaped me that I grew shabby less with the
honorable rough-and-tumble of a working-man
than with the threadbare, poignant poverty of
broken-down gentility; but I hoped that no one
but myself would perceive that.  I had thus
grown careless of appearances, and during the
past forty-eight hours more careless than I had
been hitherto.  Feeling myself a lamentable
object, I had more or less dressed to suit the part.

I knew instantly that it was this that had
inspired the words I had just listened to.  I knew,
too, that I must bluff.  Wretched as I looked, I
must carry the situation off, with however pitiful
a bit of comedy.

Turning, I lifted my hat, with what I could
command of the old dignity of bearing.

"How early you are!" I smiled bravely.  "I
didn't know young ladies were ever down-town
by a little after ten."

She nodded toward the neighboring bookshop.
"I've been in there buying something for Lulu
to read.  She's bored."  She threw these explanations
aside as irrelevant to anything we had to say,
now that we had met.  "Where have you been all
these weeks?  Why didn't you let me know—?"

"How could I let you know?  I called at your
old house, and you were gone."

"You could have easily found out.  If you'd
merely called up Central she would have told
you the new address of our number.  It wasn't
kind of you."

"Sometimes we have things to do more pressing
than just being kind."

"There's never anything more pressing than that."

"Not for people like you."

"Not for people like any one.  Listen!" she
hurried on, as if there was not a minute to spare.
"One of my trustees came to me yesterday.  He
said I had nearly thirty thousand dollars of
accumulated income that there's nothing to do
with but invest."

"Well?  Don't you like to see your money invested?"

"I like it well enough when there's nothing else
to do with it."

"Which you say that in this case there isn't."

"Oh, but there is—if you look at it in the right way."

"I don't have to look at it any way."

"Yes, you do, when it's—when it's only
common sense."

"What's only common sense?"

"My being—being useful to you."

"Oh, but you're useful to me through—through
your very kindness."

"That's not enough.  Surely you—you see!"

I could say quite truthfully that I didn't see.
"But suppose," I continued, "that we don't talk
of it."

"Yes," she answered, fiercely, "and leave
everything where we left it the last time.  You
see what's come of that."

"I see what's come, of course; but I don't
know that it's come of that."

There were so few people in the neighborhood,
and we were so plainly examining the Chinese
rug, that we could talk together without
attracting attention.

"Oh, what kind of people are we?" she
exclaimed, tapping with one hand the book she held
in the other.  "Here I am with more money than
I know what to do with; and here are you—"

"With all the money I want."

Her brown eyes swept me from head to foot.
"That's not true," she insisted.  "When I first
knew you I thought—I thought you were just
experimenting—"

"And how do you know I'm not?"

"I know it from what you said yourself—that
last time."

"What did I say?"'

"That if it wasn't trouble it was misfortune."

"Oh, that!"

"Yes, that.  Isn't it enough?  And then I
know it—  Well, can't I see?"

I tried to laugh this off.  "Oh, I know I'm
rather seedy-looking, but then—"

"You're worse than seedy-looking;
you're—you're—tragic—to me.  Oh, I know I haven't
any right to say so; but that's what I complain
of, that's what I rebel against, that we've got
our conventions so stupidly organized that just
because you're a man and I'm a woman I
shouldn't be allowed to help you when I can."

"You do help me, with your great sympathy."

She brushed this aside.  "That's no help.  It
doesn't feed and clothe you."

I endeavored to smile.  "That's very plain
talk, isn't it?"

"Of course it's plain talk, because it's a
perfectly plain situation.  It isn't a new thing to me
to see people who've been going without food.
At the Settlement—"

I still kept up the effort to smile.  "If I'd been
going without food there are a dozen places—"

"Where they'd give you a meal, after they'd
satisfied themselves that you hadn't been
drinking.  I know all about that.  But would you
go?  Would you rather drop dead of starvation
first?  And what good would it do you in the end,
just one meal, or two meals, when everything else
is lacking?  It's the whole thing—"

"But how would you tackle that, the whole
thing?  It seems to me that if I can't do it
myself no one else—"

"I'll tell you as straightforwardly as you ask
the question.  I should give you, lend you, as
much money as you wanted, so that you should
have time to reorganize your life."

"And suppose I couldn't, that I spent your
money and was just where I was before?"

"Then my conscience would be clear."

"But your conscience must be clear in any case."

"It isn't.  When all you ask for is to help—"

"But you can help other people—who need it more."

"Oh, don't keep that up.  I *know* what you
need.  I've told you already I've seen starvation
before.  Don't be offended!  And when it's you,
some one we've all known, and liked—  Boyd
liked you from the first."

"But not from the last."

"He thinks you're—you're strange, naturally.
We all think so.  I think so.  But that doesn't
make any difference when you don't get enough
to eat."

"And suppose I turned out to be only an adventurer?"

She shrugged her shoulders, after a habit
she had.  "That would be your responsibility.
Don't you see?  I'm not thinking so much about
you as I am about myself.  It's nothing to me
what you are, not any more than what Lydia is,
or a dozen others I could name to you.  I think
it highly probable that Lydia Blair will take the
road we call going to the bad—"

"Oh, surely not!"

This invitation to digression she also swept
aside.  "She won't do it with her eyes shut,
never fear!  She'll know all about it, and take
her own way because it's hers.  Don't pity her.
If I were half so free—"

"Well?"

"Well, for one thing, you'd have another
chance.  If you didn't use it that would be your
own affair."

"Why do you speak of another chance?  Do
you think—?"

"Oh, don't ask me what I think.  I take it
for granted that—"

"Yes?  Please tell me.  What is it that you
take for granted?"

"What good would it do for me to tell you?"

"It would do the good that I should know."

"Well, then, I take it for granted, since you
insist, that you've done something, somewhere—"

"And still you'd lend me as much money as I
asked for?"

"What difference does it make to me?  I want
you to have another chance.  I shouldn't want
it if you didn't need it; and you wouldn't need
it unless there was something wrong with you.
There!  Is that plain enough?  But because
there is something wrong with you I want to
come in and help you put it right.  I don't care
who you are or what you've done, so long as those
are the facts."

"But I'm obliged to care, don't you see?  If
I were to take advantage of your generosity—"

"Tell me truthfully now.  Would you do it
if I were a man, a friend, who insisted on helping
you to start again?"

I tried to gain time.  "It would depend on the
motive."

"We'll assume the motive to be nothing but
pure friendship, just the desire that you should
have every opportunity to make good again,
and nothing else.  *Absolutely nothing else*!  Do
you understand?  Would you take it from him
then?  Please tell me as frankly as if—"

"I—I might."

"And because I'm not a man but a woman, you can't."

"It isn't the same thing."

"Which is just what we women complain of,
just what we fight against, the stupid conventions
that force us into being useless in a world—"

"Oh, but there are other ways of being useful."

"No other way of being useful compensates
for the one which seems to you paramount, above
all others, and from which you are debarred."

"But why should it?  You and I never met till—"

"You can't argue that way.  You can't reason
about the thing at all.  I'm not reasoning,
further than to say that—that I believe in you, in
your power of—of coming back.  That's the
phrase, isn't it?  And as, apparently, I'm the
only one in a position to go to your aid—"

She threw out her hands with a gesture she
sometimes used which implied that all had been
said.

And in the end we compromised.  That is, I
told her I had one more possibility.  If that
failed, I would let her know.  This she informed
me I could do by telephone, as Boyd's name was
in the book.  If it didn't fail ... But as to
that she forgot to exact a promise, just as she
forgot to tell me her new address.  Like most
shy people who dash out of their shyness for some
adventure too bold for the audacious, she
retreated as suddenly.  Springing into her motor
as soon as we had arrived at a temporary decision,
she drove away, leaving me still at a loss as to
whether or not I was Malvolio.

Dumfounded and distressed by this unexpected
meeting, and the still more unexpected
offer made in it, my thoughts began to run wild.
It was in my power to live, to eat, to pay my
way for a little longer.  Of the money at her
disposal I need accept no more than a few hundred
dollars, a trifle to her, but to me everything
in the world.  Even if it did me no more than a
passing good, it would do me that.  If I had
in the end to "get out," as I phrased it, I would
rather get out in a month's time than do it that
very day.  In the mean while there might
be—the miracle.

It was the mad prospect of all this that sent
me out of Fifth Avenue to crawl along the side
of Creed & Creed's establishment, which flanked
the cross-street, without noticing the way I took.
For the minute I had forgotten the errand that
brought me to this particular spot in New York.
It had been crowded out of my memory by the
fact that, after all, it might not matter whether
I found work or not.  I could live, anyhow.  All
I had to do was to take a telephone list, call up
Boyd Averill's number, say that I had changed
my mind....

It was a temptation.  For you to understand
how fierce a temptation it was you would have
to remember that for a month I had been insufficiently
fed, and that for a week I had not really
been fed at all.  Moreover, I could see before me
no hope of being fed in the immediate future.
I was asking myself whether it would be common
sense on the part of a drowning man to refuse
a rope because a woman in whom there might
be a whole confusion of complex motives had
thrown it, when I suddenly found my passage
along the pavement blocked.

It was blocked by what appeared to be a long
cylindrical bar, some two or three feet in diameter.
Covered with burlap, it ran from a motor truck,
in which one end still rested, toward the entrance
to that part of Creed & Creed's establishment
that lay slightly lower than the pavement.  It
was a wide entrance, after which came two or
three broad, shallow steps, and then a cavern
which was evidently a storehouse.  Two men
were tugging at the long object, the one big, dark,
brawny, clad in overalls, and equal to the work,
the other a little elf of an old man, nattily dressed
for the street, wearing a high soft felt hat,
possibly in the hope of making himself look taller.  A
gray mustache that sprang outward in a semi-circle
did not conceal a truculent mouth, though
it smothered his wrathful expletives.  That he
had once been agile I could easily guess, but now
his poor old joints were stiff from age or disuse.
It was also clear that he was lending a hand to an
irksome task because of a shortage of labor.

While the younger man—he was about my own
age—could manage his end easily enough, the old
one tugged desperately at his, finally letting it
drop.

"Gr-r-r-r!"

The growl was that of an irascible man too
angry to be articulate.  If the thread of flame
ever led me, it was then.  Without a minute's
hesitation, I picked up the dropped end of the
cylinder, with no explanation beyond the words,
"Let me have a try," and presently I was finding
my way down the steps and into the cavern.

"Chuck it there, on top o' thim," my companion
ordered, and our cylinder lay as one of
a pile of similar cylinders, which I could see from
the labels to have been shipped from India.

"There's eight or tin more of thim things,"
the big fellow was beginning.

"Is that the Floater?" I asked in a hurried
undertone, as the little man hobbled down the
steps and made his way toward us in the
semi-darkness.

"He sure is, and some damn light floater at that."

Before I could analyze this reply the Floater
himself stood in front of me.

"Who are you?" he demanded, sharply.

"Do you mean my name?"

"I don't care a damn about your name.  What
business had you to pick up that rug?"

"Only the business of wanting to help.  I
could see it wasn't a gentleman's job—and—and
I—I thought you might take me on."

He danced with indignation.

"Take you on?  Take you on?  What do you
mean by that?"

"You see, sir, it was this way.  I've just run
up from the Intelligence where I heard a fellow
gassing about"—I varied the story from that
which I had heard at Miss Bryne's—"about being
kicked out of here."

"Was he a gabby sort of a guy?" my big colleague
inquired.

"That would describe him exactly; and so I
thought if I could reach here in time, before you'd
had a chance to get any one else—"

"Chance to get any one else?" the little man
snarled.  "I can go out into the street and shovel
'em in by the cartload.  Dirt, I call 'em!"

"Yes, sir; but you haven't done it.  That's
all I mean.  I thought if I got here first—"

It was easy to size him up as a vain little terrier,
and my respectful manner softened him.  He
stood back for a minute to examine me.

"You don't look like a fellow that 'd be after
this sort of a job.  Does he, Bridget?"

Bridget's answer, though non-committal, was
in my favor:

"Sure I've seen ivery kind o' man lookin' for
a job at one time or another.  It's not his looks
that 'll tell in handling rugs; it's his boiceps."

He tapped his own strong biceps to emphasize
his observation, while I endeavored to explain.

"You're quite right, sir.  You'd see that when
lots of other men wouldn't.  As a matter of tact,
this job or any other job would be new to me.  I
had some money—but the war's got me stone-broke.
I lived in France till just lately.

"If you lived in France, why ain't you fightin'?"

Not having the same dread of inventing a tale
as with Boyd Averill, I said, boldly:

"I did fight, till they discharged me.  Got
a blow on the head, and wasn't any good after
that.  I was with the French army because my
people lived over there.  When I got out of it,
there was no provision made for me, of course.
My father and mother had died, my father's
business had been smashed to pieces—"

"What was he?"

Luckily my imagination didn't fail me.

"An artist.  He was just beginning to make
a hit.  I was to have been"—I sought for the
most credible possibility—"an architect.  I was
to have studied at the Beaux Arts, that's the big
school for architects in Paris; but of course all
that was knocked on the head when my father
died, and so I sailed for New York."

"Haven't you got no relations here?"

I remembered that Lydia Blair thought she
might have seen me in Salt Lake City, but I was
afraid of the Mormon connotation.  "My family
used to live in—in California; but they're all
scattered, and we'd been in Europe for so many
years—"

"Amur'cans should live in God's country—"

"Yes, sir; so I've found out.  If we had, I
shouldn't be asking for a job in order to get a
meal.  I'm down to that," I confessed, showing
him the nickel and the dime.

He took a minute or two to reflect on the situation,
saying, finally, with a little relenting in his
tone:

"There's nine more rugs out in that lorry.
If you help this man to lug them in you'll get
fifty cents."

If it was not the miracle, it was a sign and a
wonder none the less.  Fifty cents would tide
me over the night.  I should have sixty-five cents
in all, and it would be my own.  I should not
have cadged it from a woman, whatever the
motive of her generosity.  It was that motive
which made me tremble.  If it was what it might
have been, if I was not a mere fatuous fool, then
there was no hole so deep that I had better not
hide in it, no distance so great that I had better
not put it between her and me.  It would wound
her if I did, but on every count that would be
preferable....

The Floater went off to regions where I couldn't
follow him, and Bridget spoke in non-committal
but not unkindly tone.

"Better take off that topcoat and hang it in
Clancy's locker.  Clancy was the gabby chap
you heard at Lizzie's.  That's Lizzie Bryne.
Sure I moind her when her mother kep' a little
notion store down by Grime Street, and now the
airs she gives herself!  Ah, well, there's no law
ag'in' it!  Come awn now.  We'll get these other
bits in, because Daly, that's the driver, 'll have
to be after goin' back to the station for the
Bokharas."

"Will that be more to unload?" I asked, eagerly.

"Sure it 'll be more to unload.  Dee ye think
they'll walk off the truck by theirselves?"

Vaguely afraid of something hostile or
supercilious on Bridget's part, I was pleasantly
surprised to find him not merely good-natured, but
helpful and patient, showing me the small tricks
of unloading long burlap cylinders from a motor
lorry, which proved to be as much an art in its
simple way as anything else, and enlivening the
work by anecdote.  All that he knew of Creed
& Creed I learned in the course of that half-hour,
though it turned out to be little more than
I knew myself, except as it concerned the minor
personnel.  Of the heads of the firm and the
managers he could tell me only as much as the
peasants in the vale of Olympus could have
recounted of the gods on the mountain-top.  To
Bridget they were celestial, shadowy beings, seen
as they passed in and out of the office, or stopped
to look at some new consignment from the Far
East; but he barely knew their names.

The highest flight of his information was up to
the Floater; beyond him he seemed to consider
it useless to ascend.  Of the gods on the summit,
the Floater was the high priest, and in that
capacity he, alone, was of moment to those on the
lower plane.  He administered the favors and
meted out the punishments.  "He's It," was
Bridget's laconic phrase, and in the sentence, as
far as he was concerned, or I was concerned, or
any salesman or porter was concerned, Creed &
Creed's was summed up.

Of the Floater's anomalous position in the
establishment, the explanation commonly accepted
by the porters, the "luggers" they called
themselves, was that he was in possession of dark
secrets, which it would have been perilous to
tempt him to divulge, concerning the firm's
prosperity.  A mysterious blood-relationship with
"Old Man Creed," who had founded the house
some sixty years before, was also a current
speculation.  Certain it was that his connection with
the business antedated that of any one among
either partners or employees, a fact that gave
him an authority which no one disputed and all
subordinates feared.

The job finished, Bridget and I sat on the pile,
while he shared his lunch with me, and I waited
for the Floater to bring me my fifty cents.  When
he appeared at last, I stood to attention, though
Bridget nonchalantly kept his seat.  I learned
that if the little man was treated as an equal
in the office he was treated as an equal in the
basement.  This circumstance gave to my politeness
in standing up and saying "sir" a value to
which he was susceptible, though too crusty to
admit it.

"There's another load coming, sir, isn't there?"
I asked, humbly, after I had been paid.

"What's it to you if there is?"

"Only that I might earn another fifty cents."

"Earn another fifty cents!  Why, fifty cents
would pay you for two such jobs as the one you've
done."

"Then I'd like to work off what you've paid
me by unloading the other lot for nothing."

He lifted a warning finger as he turned to go
up-stairs.  "See here, young feller!  You beat
it.  If I find you here when I come down again—"

"You stay jist where y'are," Bridget warned
me.  "They're awful short-handed above, and
customers comin' in by the shovelful.  They've
got to have four luggers to pull the stuff out for
the salesmen to show, and there's only six of us
in all.  When Clancy put the skids under hisself
last night I could see how it 'd be to-day.  It was
a godsend to the little ould man when you blew in;
but he always wants ye to think he can beat the
game right out of his own hand."

Thus encouraged I stood my ground, and when
the next load came I had the privilege of helping
Bridget to handle it.  By the end of the day I
had not only earned a dollar and a half but had
been ordered by the Floater to turn up again next
morning.

"Ye're all right now," Bridget said, complacently.
"Ye've got the job so long as ye can
hould it down.  I'll give ye the dope about that,
and wan thing is always to trate him the way
ye've trated him to-day.  It's what he wants
of us other guys, and we've not got the trick o'
handin' it out.  Men like us, that's used to a
free country, don't pass up no soft talk to no one.
What's your name?"

I said it was Jasper Soames.

"Sure that's a hell of a name," he commented,
simply.  "The byes 'd never get round the like
o' that.  Yer name 'll be Brogan.  Brogan was
what we called the guy that was here before
Clancy, and it done very well.  All right, then,
Brogan.  Ye'll have Clancy's locker; and moind
ye don't punch the clock a minute later than
siven in the mornin', or that little ould divil 'll
be dancin' round to fire ye."

So Brogan I was at Messrs. Creed & Creed's
all through the next two years.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER V02`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER V

.. vspace:: 2

No lighter-hearted man than I trod the streets
of New York that evening.  I had breakfasted
in the morning; I had shared Bridget's
cold meat and bread at midday; I could "blow
myself in" to something to eat now, and then go
happily to bed.

There was but one flaw in this bliss, and that
was the thought of Mildred Averill.  Whether
she would be glad or sorry that for the minute
I was landing on my feet, I could not forecast.
And yet when I called her up she pretended to
be glad.  I say she pretended, only because in
her first words there was a note of disappointment,
perhaps of dismay, though she recovered
herself quickly.

"But I can be easy in my mind about you?"
she asked, after I had declined to tell her what
my new occupation was.

"Quite easy; only I want you to know how
grateful I am."

"Oh, please don't.  If I could have done more!"

"Fortunately that wasn't needed."

"But if it should be needed in the future—"

"I hope it won't be."

"But if it should be?"

"Oh, then we'd—we'd see."

"So that for now it's—" that note stole into
her voice again, and with a wistful question in
the intonation—"for now it's—it's good-by?"

"Only for now."

She seemed to grasp at something.  "What
do you mean by that?"

"Oh, just that—that the future—"

"I hate the future."

It was one of her sudden outbursts, and the
receiver was hung up.

After all, this abrupt termination to an
unsatisfactory mode of speech was the wisest method
for us both.  We couldn't go on sparring and
there was nothing to do but spar.  Knowing that
I couldn't speak plainly she had ceased to expect
me to do so, and yet...

When I say that this was a relief to me, you
must understand it only in the sense that my
situation was too difficult to allow of my inviting
further complications.  Had I been free—but
I wasn't free.  The conviction that somewhere
in the world I had permanent ties began to be as
strong as the belief that at some time in my life
love had been the dominating factor.  There had
been a woman.  Lydia Blair had seen her.  Her
flaming eyes haunted me from a darkness in
which they were the only thing living.  The fact
that I couldn't construct the rest of the portrait
no more permitted me to doubt the original than
you can doubt the existence of a plant after you
have seen a leaf from it.  The best I could hope
for now was the privilege of living and working
in some simple, elemental way that would give
me the atmosphere in which to re-collect myself,
*recueillement*, the French graphically name the
process, and grow unconsciously back into the
facts that effort would not restore to me.

For that simple, elemental work and life the
opportunity came to me at last.  I see now that
it was opportunity, though I should not have
said so at the time.  At the time it was only hard
necessity, though hard necessity with those
products of shelter and food which in themselves
meant peace.  I had peace, therefore, of a kind,
and to it I am able now to attribute that growth
and progress backward, if I may so express myself,
which led to the miracle.

My work next day lay in peeling off the
burlap from the newly arrived consignment,
stripping the rolls of the sheepskins in which they
were wrapped inside, spreading the rugs flat, and
sweeping them with a stiff, strong broom.  After
that we laid them in assorted piles, preparatory
to carrying them up-stairs.  They were
Khorassans, Kirmanshahs, Bokharas, and Sarouks, with
a superb lot of blue and gold Chinese reproduced
on the company's looms in India.

The good-natured Peter Bridget taking his
turn up-stairs, my colleague that day was an
American of Finnish extraction, whose natural
sunniness of disposition had been soured by the
thwarting of a strong ambition to "get
on."  Combining the broad features of the Lapp with
Scandinavian hair and complexion, his expression
reminded you of a bright summer day over
which a storm was beginning to lower.  The son
of one large family and the father of another, he
was at war with the world in which his earning
capacity had come to have its limitations fixed
at eighteen dollars a week.

He was not conversational; he only grunted
remarks out of a slow-moving bitterness of spirit.

"What's the good of always layin' the pipe and
never gettin' no oil along it?  That's what I want
to know.  Went to work when I was fourteen,
and now I'm forty-two, and in exactly the same spot."

"You're not in exactly the same spot," I said,
"because you've got your wife and children."

"And the money I've spent on that woman
and them kids!"

"But you're fond of them, aren't you?"

"No better wife no guy never had, and no nicer
little fam'ly."

"Well, then, that's so much to the good.
Those are assets, aren't they?  They'll mean
more to you than if you had money in the savings
bank and didn't have *them*."

"I can't eddicate 'em proper, or send 'em to
high-school, let alone college, or give 'em nothin'
like what they ought to have.  All I can leave
'em when I die is what my father left me, the
right not to be able to get nowhere—and yet
you'll hear a lot of gabbers jazzin' away about
this bein' the best country for a working-man."

During the lunch-hour we drifted into Fifth
Avenue, joining the throng of those who for sixty
minutes were like souls enjoying a respite from
limbo.  Limbo, I ask you to notice, is not hell;
but it is far from paradise.  The dictionary
defines the word as a borderland, a place of restraint,
and it was in both those senses, I think, that the
shop and the factory struck the imaginations of
these churning minds.  The shop and the factory
formed a borderland, neither one thing nor
another, a nowhere; but a place of restraint none
the less.  More than the physical restraint
involved in the necessity for working was implied
by this; it was restraint of the spirit, restraint of
the part of a man that soars, restraint of the
impulse to seize the good things of life in a world
where they seemed to be free.

Though I could understand little of the
conversation around me—Yiddish, Polish, Armenian,
Czech—I knew they were talking of jobs and
bosses in relation to politics and the big things
of life.

"What's the matter with them guys at Albany
and Washington that they don't come across
with laws—?"

That was the question and that was the
complaint.  It was one of the two main blends in the
current of dissatisfaction.  The other blend was
the conviction that if those who had the power
didn't right self-evident wrongs, the wronged
would somehow have to right themselves.  There
was no speechmaking, no stump oratory, after
the manner of a Celtic or Anglo-Saxon crowd; all
was smothered, sullen, burning, secretive, and
intense.

On our way back to the cavern the Finn remarked:

"No man doesn't mind work.  He'd rather
work than loaf, even if he was paid for loafin'.
What he can't stick is not havin' room to grow
in, bein' squeezed into undersize, like a Chinese
woman's foot."

After all, I reflected, this might be the real
limbo, not only of the working-man, but of all the
dissatisfied in all ranks throughout the world—the
denials of the liberty to expand.  Mildred
Averill was rebelling against it in her way as
much as the Finn in his, as much as any Jew or
Pole or Italian in all the crowd surging back at
that minute to the dens from which they had
come out.  Discontent was not confined to any
one class or to any one set of needs.  Custom,
convention, and greed had clamped our energies
round and round as with iron hoops, till all but
the few among us had lost the right to grow.  It
wasn't a question of pay; it wasn't primarily a
question of money at all, though the question of
money was involved in it.  More than anything
else, it was one of a new orientation toward
everything, with a shifting of basic principles.  The
first must become last and the last must become
first—not in the detail of precedence but in that
of the laws by which we live—before men, as
men, could get out of the prison-houses, into
which civilization had thrust them, to the broad,
free air to which they were born.  The struggle
between labor and capital was a mere duel
between blind men.  It was bluff on the surface
by those on both sides who were afraid to put
the ax to the root of the tree.  No symbol was
so eloquent to me of the bondage into which the
human elements in Church and State had chained
the spirit of man as the Finn's comparison of the
Chinese woman's foot.

When the Floater paid me another dollar and
a half that night he told me that if I worked like
a dog, was as meek as a mouse, and "didn't get
no labor rot into my nut" I could have Clancy's
job as a regular thing.  But by this time I was
beginning to understand him.  I have already
called him a terrier, and a terrier he was, with a
terrier's bark, but with a terrier's fundamental
friendliness.  If you patted him, he wagged his
tail.  True, he wagged it unwillingly,
ungraciously, and with a fond belief that you didn't
know he was wagging it at all; but the fact that
he did wag it was enough for me.

It was enough for us all.  There was not a
man among the "luggers" who didn't understand
him, nor among the salesmen either, as I
came to understand.

"Dee ye know how to take that little scalpeen?
He's like wan of thim Graaks or Eytalians that's
got a quare talk of their own, but you know you
can put it into our talk and make it mane
somethin'.  Wance I was at a circus where a monkey
what looked like a little ould man talked his kind
o' talk, and it made sinse.  Well, that's like the
Floater.  He's like the monkey what can't talk
nothin' but monkey-talk; but glory be to God! he
manes the same thing as a man.  Don't ye
moind him, Brogan.  When he talks his talk, you
talk it to yerself in yer own talk, and ye'll kape
yer timper and get everything straight."

This kindly advice was given me by Denis Gallivan,
the oldest of the porters, and a sort of dean
of our corps.  Small, wiry, as strong as a horse,
with a wizened, leathery face that looked as if
it had been dried and tanned in a hot sunshine,
there was a yearning in his blue-black eyes like
that which some of the old Italian masters put
into the eyes of saints.  Denis, Bridget, and the
Finn composed what I may call the permanent
staff, the two others, excluding myself, being
invariably restless chaps who, like Clancy, came
for a few weeks and went off again.  With the
three workers named I made a fourth, henceforth
helping to carry the responsibility of the house
on my shoulders.

It was a good place, with pleasant work.  Two
or three times I could have had promotion and
a raise in pay, but I had reasons of my own for
staying where I was.

My duties being simple, I enjoyed the sheer
physical exertion I was obliged to make.  Arriving
about seven in the morning I helped to sweep
the floors, with a special sweeping of the rugs,
druggets, and mattings that had lain out
overnight.  If there was anything to be carried from
the basement to the upper floor I helped in that.
Then, having "cleaned" myself, as the phrase
went, I took my place in the shop, ready to pull
out the goods which the salesmen panted to
display to customers, and to put them back again.

For this there were always four of us in the
spacious, well-lighted shop, which must have been
sixty feet long by thirty wide, and I liked the
dignity and quiet of all the regulation tasks.  As a
rule, we were on the floor by nine, though it was
generally after ten before we saw a customer.
During that hour of spare time we porters hung
together at the farther end, exchanging in low
tones the gossip of the day, confiding personal
experiences, or discussing the war and the
reconstruction of society.  Now and then one of
the four or five salesmen would condescendingly
join with us, but for the most part the salesmen
kept to themselves, treating the same topics from
a higher point of view.  The gods of Olympus did
little more than enter by the main door from
Fifth Avenue, cross to their offices, after which
we scarcely saw them.  Only the Floater moved
at will between us and them, with a little dog's
freedom to be equally at home in the stable and
the drawing-room.

A flicker of interest always woke with the
arrival of customers.  They entered with diffidence,
confused by the subdued brilliance of the Persian
and Chinese colors hanging on our walls, by the
wide empty spaces, and their own ignorance of
what they came in search of.

"There's not tin women in New York 'll know
the difference betwane a Kirmanshah and an
Anatolia," Denis said to me one day, "and it'd
make ye sorry for thim when they comes to
furnishin'.  Glory be to God, they'll walk in here
knowin' no more than that they want rugs, and
it's all wan to thim what ye puts before thim so
long as it's the color they like and it lays on the
ground.  If this wasn't the honestest house that
the Lord ever made there'd be chatin' till we was
all in danger o' hell fire."

But in spite of this ignorance, we received our
visitors courteously, a salesman going forward
to meet all newcomers and conducting them to
the row of reproduced Louis Seize cane-bottomed
chairs placed for their convenience.  Then it
would be, "Bridget, bring that Khorassan—3246,
you know, that fine specimen."  And Bridget
would know, and call the Finn to help him lay
it out.  Or it would be, "Brogan, can you find
the Meshed that came in yesterday—2947?  I
think madam would like to see it."  On this
Denis and I would haul out the big carpet, stretch
it at the lady's feet, listen to comments which,
as Denis put it, had the value of a milliner's
criticism of the make of a "floyin'-machine," and
eventually carry it back to the pile whence we had
taken it.  I may say here that for customers we
had little respect, except from the point of view
of their purchasing power.

"Did ye ever see wan o' thim that could tell a
Sehna knot from a Giordes?" Denis asked,
scornfully.  "Did ye ever see wan o' thim that knowed
which rug had a woolen warp and which a cotton,
or which rug 'd wear, or which 'd all go up in flock?
If a woman was to boy a shimmy that 'll be in rags
before it's been six toimes to the wash with as
little sinse as she'll boy a rug that ought to last
for a hunderd years her husband 'd be in jail for dit."

But for me, customers had one predominant
interest.  Among them there might be some one
I could recognize, or some one who would
recognize me.  As to the last, I had one fear and many
hopes.  My one fear was that Mildred Averill
or Lulu Averill might one day wander in; but
as time went on and they didn't, I ceased to dread
the mischance.  As it also proved in the end it
was the same way with my hopes.  No one
turned up whom I could hail as an acquaintance;
no one ever glanced at me with an old friend's
curiosity.

So I settled down to the routine which, though
I didn't know it then, was the mental rest that,
according to Doctor Scattlethwaite, I needed for
my recovery.  The days were so much alike that
I could no more differentiate between them than
can a man in prison.  On eighteen dollars a week
I contrived to live with that humble satisfaction
of humble needs which I learned to be all that a
man requires.  Little by little I accommodated
myself to the outlook of my surroundings, and
if I never thought exactly like my companions
I found myself able to listen to their views
complacently.  With all three of my more
important co-workers—Denis, Bridget, and the
Finn—my relations were cordial, a fact due largely to
their courteous respect for my private history,
into which none of them ever pried.  Like Lydia,
Drinkwater, and every one else, they took it for
granted that there was something I wanted to
hide, and allowed me to hide it.

In this way I passed the end of the year 1916,
the whole of 1917, and all of 1918 up to the
beginning of December.  Though the country had in
the mean time gone to war it made little
difference to us.  Denis was too old to be drafted;
Bridget and the Finn were exempted as fathers
of large families; I was examined, and, for reasons
I do not yet understand, rejected.  I should have
made a very good fighting man; but I think I
was looked upon as of weak or uncertain mentality.

During all those months I courted the obscurity
so easy to find.  Between Creed & Creed's and
my squint-eyed room with the fungi on the
mantelpiece I went by what you might call the back
ways, in order to risk no meeting with Mildred
Averill or her family.  Since they frequented the
neighboring book store, one of the best known
in New York, they might at some time see me
going in or out, and so I kept to the direction of
Sixth Avenue.  Though I often drifted out into
the midday throng of which I have spoken
already there was little danger in that, because I
was swallowed in the crowd.  In company for
the most part with Sam Pelly, I took my meals
in places so modest that Lydia Blair was unlikely
to run across me; and I had no one else to be
afraid of.

Peace therefore stole into my racked soul,
though it was the peace of death.  While I had
recurrences of the hope that my lost sense of
identity would one day be restored to me, I
dropped into the habit of not thinking much
about it.  I ate and drank; I had shelter and
clothes.  The narrow margin on which other
working-people lived came to seem enough for me.
Toward the great accidents of life, illness or
incapacity, I learned to take the same philosophic
attitude as they, trusting to luck, or to something
too subtle and spiritual to put easily into words,
to take care of me.  If I developed any deep,
strong principle of living it was along the lines
of the wish that on a snowy December afternoon
had led me to Meeting-House Green.  I knew
that the universe was filled with a great Will and
tried to let myself glide along on it in simplicity,
and harmony.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VI06`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VI

.. vspace:: 2

On the morning of the eleventh of December,
1918, I had been in the basement helping
to unpack a consignment just come in from India,
as I had first done two years before.  I had,
therefore, not known what passed on the floor above
during the forenoon, and should have been little
interested had I been there.  What I needed to
know the Floater told me when I appeared after
lunch to take my shift on the main floor with
Bridget and the Finn.

"You're to go with the two lads down-stairs"—the
two of our six porters who were always
transient—"to this number in East Seventy-sixth
Street, and show the big Chinee antique, 4792,
and the modern Chinee, 3628, to a lady that's
stayin' there, and explain to her the difference
between them.  She'll take the new one if she
thinks it's just as good, and you're to show her
that it isn't.  She's not the lady of the house.
Her name is Mrs. Mountney, and she comes from
Boston.  She saw them both this morning, but
said she couldn't judge till she'd viewed 'em
private."

It was not an unusual expedition, though it
was new to me.  For special customers, or in
cases of big bits of business, we sent out rugs on
approval or for private view, though I had never
before been intrusted with the mission.  I didn't
wholly like the job; but we were accustomed to
take both things we didn't like and things we
did as all in the day's work.

At the house in East Seventy-sixth Street we
found ourselves expected, the footman explaining
that we were to carry our wares to the music-room
and lay them out.  The ladies were resting
after lunch, but Mrs. Mountney would come to
us as soon as she left her room.  With the
pleasant free-masonry of caste he confided to me, as
with our burdens we made our way into the hall,
that Mrs. Mountney was a nice little bit of fluff,
though not so tony as he had looked for in an old
girl out of Boston.  When it came to class, the
lady of the house, whom I thought he spoke of as
Luke, could hang it all over her.

It was so long since I had been in a house of
the kind that I took notes more acutely than was
my habit, though my habit was always to be
observant.  What struck me chiefly was its
resemblance on a larger scale to the last of its type I
had visited.  Perhaps the name Lulie had turned
my thoughts backward; but there was certainly
the same square hall, containing a few monumental
bits of furniture because they were monumental,
the same dining-room opening out of it,
full of high-backed and Italian ... And then,
across a corridor that ran to some region behind
the dining-room, I thought I saw a stocky figure
grope its way with the kind of movement I had
not seen since the last time I had met Drinkwater.
A door opened and closed somewhere, and before
we reached the music-room I heard the distant
click of a typewriter.

That I was nervous goes without saying, but
there were so many chances of my fear being
groundless that I did my best to dismiss it.  The
music-room was simple, spacious, white-and-gold,
admirably adapted not only to the purpose it
served but to that which had brought us there.
When our carpets were spread they made a
magnificent gold spot in the center of a sumptuous
emptiness.

A few minutes later the nice little bit of fluff
tripped in, justifying the description.  She was
one of those instances, of which we saw a good
many among our customers, where a merciful
providence had given a great deal of money to
some one who would have been quite too insignificant
without it.  A worn fairness of complexion
was supplemented by cosmetics, and an inadequate
stock of very blond hair arranged in artistic
disarray in order to make the most of it.  To
offset the laces and pearls of an elaborate
negligée by a "democratic" manner, and so put poor
working-men at their ease, she nodded to us in
a friendly, offhand way, saying, briskly:

"Now then!  Let's see!  Which is the modern
one and which is the antique?  I can't tell; can
you?"  Looking at me archly, she changed her
tone to the chaffing one which the French describe
as *blagueur*.  "But of course you'll say you can,
because that's your business.  You've got them
marked with some sort of secret sign, like a
conjurer with coins, so as to tell one from the other,
without my knowing it."

Having said this, she began to march round
the two great gold-covered oblongs with the
movement of a prowling little animal.  Keeping
my eye on the main doorway, I pointed out that
while the modern piece would please the ordinary
eye only the antique would satisfy the elect.
There was no question but that the Indian
reproduction was good.  Any one who took it
would do more than get his money's worth, since
it would tone down with the years, while the
hard wool of which it was woven would make it
stand comparatively rough usage.  But—didn't
madam see?—the antique, made on the old
Chinese looms, was of the softer, richer sheen
imparted by the softer, richer wool; and wasn't the
heavenly turquoise-blue of the ornaments and
border of a beauty which the modern dyes had
not begun to reproduce?

As I explained this and some other characteristics
of rugs, I was more or less talking against
time.  The suspicion that had seized me on
entering the house began to deepen, without my
knowing why.

"Y-yes; y-yes," the little lady agreed; "it
*is* lovely, isn't it?  And I suppose that if you're
buying a good thing it's better to get the—"

She paused, looking out through the great
doorway into the hall.  I, too, looked out, to
see Mrs. Averill in a tea-gown, gazing in at us
distraitly.

"Oh, Lulu, do come here.  This man, this
gentleman, has just been telling me the most
interesting things—"

She trailed into the music-room with the same
graceful languor with which she had trailed into
the drawing-room on the occasion when we had
last met.  The two other porters and myself
being negligible figures in the room, her almond
eyes rested listlessly on the rugs, which she
studied without remark.

"Lulu," Mrs. Mountney began again, with
animation, "did you know that in Persian rugs
the designs are outlined in rows of knots, and in
Chinese by clipping with the scissors? *ciselé*,
this ma—this gentleman calls it, and you can
feel a little line!  Do put your hand down."

"Oh, I'm too tired," Mrs. Averill protested,
in her sweet drawling voice, "and this room's so
stuffy.  Mildred said she'd have it aired; but
I don't know what she's mooning over half her
time.  She's so dreamy.  I often think she ought
to be in a convent, or something like that."

The little bit of fluff was more interested in
rugs than in Mildred.

"Do tell Mrs. Averill—I'm staying with her—what
you've just been saying about the wool.
Did you know, Lulu, that Indian wool is hard and
Chinese soft?"  She looked again toward the
hallway, where a second figure had come into
view.  "Mildred, do come here.  There's the
most interesting things—I'm so glad I went to
that place this morning—and they've sent me
the most interesting man—Lulu's like ice, but
you're artistic."

Miss Averill, too, advanced into the room; but
though I was in full view she paid me and my
comrades no particular attention.  It was the
easier for me not to speak, or to draw any one's
glance to myself, for the reason that
Mrs. Mountney chattered on, repeating for Mildred's
benefit the facts I had just been giving her.

"Just think of having the patience to clip with
the scissors round all these designs, and it's the
same in the modern rug as in the antique.  Do
stoop down, Mildred, and let your fingers run
along the ciseling; that's what this—this
gentleman calls it."

As the girl stooped to satisfy Mrs. Mountney,
I ventured to look at her more closely.  She was
perhaps not older than when I had last seen her
two years before, but her face had undergone a
change.  It made you think of faces chastened,
possibly purified, by suffering.  Where there had
been chiefly a sympathetic common sense there
was now the beauty that comes of elevation.

Luckily for me Mrs. Mountney ran on, while
we three men, with the lack of individuality of
employees before customers, remained
indistinguishable objects in the background.

"That's the modern and that's the antique;
and I'm sure no one but a rug-man could tell the
difference between them.  This man—this
gentleman—says they can, but that's only business.
Hundreds of dollars difference in the price, almost
as much as between a pair of real pearl ear-rings
and imitation ones.  What do you say, Mildred?
Would anybody ever notice—?"

"I suppose you'd be buying the best because
it's the best, and not because any one would
notice—"

"I should be buying it for what every one
would see.  What's the good of having a thing
if it doesn't show what it is?  I hate the way
some people have of calling your attention to
every fine thing they've got in the house, as if you
weren't used to fine things of your own.  If I've
got to tell every one that that's a genuine old
Chinese masterpiece before they notice it—well,
it isn't worth it.  But at the same time the effect
is richer; and some people do know, and talk
about it to other people who know—there's that
to consider."

By this time I was conscious of something else.

Having got through so many minutes without
recognition I was beginning to hope that, by
blotting myself out, as it were, between my
fellow-workmen I might finally escape detection.  No
one had as yet dissociated any of us from another,
the very absence of personality on our part
reducing us to the place of mere machines.  As
a mere machine Mrs. Averill and Mildred might
continue to overlook me, passing out of the room
as unobservant as they had come in.

But Lulu had begun a curious movement round
the square of the carpets.  She seemed to be
studying them; though with the long slits of her
Mongolian eyes her glance might be traveling
anywhere.  Having had the opportunity to look
me in the face, she moved to where she got me
in profile, afterward passing behind me and
returning to her original standpoint beside her
sister and her friend.  Without further reference
to Mrs. Mountney, she slipped her arm through
Mildred's, leading her toward the grand piano,
against which they leaned.

For me there was nothing to do but to stand
still.  A word, a sign, might easily betray me, if
I had not been betrayed already.  As the
conversation went on, Mildred kept her back to me,
but Mrs. Averill stood sidewise, so as to be able
to throw me an occasional appraising glance.
Apparently she was in some doubt, my position
and my clothes rendering absolute certainty difficult.

But Mildred turned away from the piano at
last, and without examining me directly came
slowly down the long room.  Entirely mistress
of herself she walked with sedateness and
composure.  The shyness and brusqueness which
had given her a kind of aura in my thoughts
during the past two years seemed to have been
overcome by experience.  In this self-command more
than in any other detail I observed a change in her.

Not till she reached the corner of the long
carpet did she give me the first clear,
straightforward look.  That recognition did not come
instantly told me that I, too, must have changed.
Laborious work and a rough way of living had
doubtless aged and probably hardened me.  I
was dressed, too, like any other working-man,
though with the tidiness which our position on
the selling floor exacted.  A working-man in his
Sunday clothes would perhaps have described me,
while my features must have adapted themselves
to altered inward conditions with the facility
which features possess.

"Is it really you?"

She was standing in front of me now, singling
me out from the two boys who had fallen a little
back.  She didn't offer to shake hands; perhaps
she wasn't sure enough of my identity; but that
the circumstances in which she found me made
no difference to her was the one fact apparent.
Any emotion she may have felt was expressed in
the quiver of a faint smile.

"I hoped you wouldn't recognize me," was all
I found to say.

"Why?"

"Oh, for all the reasons that—that almost
anybody would see at a glance."

"Perhaps I'm not—not almost anybody."

"No; you're not."

"Have you been doing this ever since—?"

I nodded.  "It's the job I told you I might
get.  I did get it; and so—"

"Have you liked it?"

"Extremely."

"Is that true, or is it just—?

"No; it's true.  I could have had better jobs.
They offered two or three times to make me a
salesman; you may remember that I knew a good
deal about rugs already—; but I preferred to
stay where I am."

"For what reason?"

"I hardly know that I can tell you, unless it
was to—to—"

"To find your soul?"

"Possibly."

"And have you found it?"

"I've found—something.  I'm not sure whether
it's my soul or not."

All this was said within the space of perhaps
two minutes, during which I watched Mrs. Averill
and Mrs. Mountney, toward whom Mildred
turned her back, putting their head together on
a whispered conversation.  That it was about
me I could have gathered from their glances; but
a little crow on the part of Mrs. Mountney left
me no doubt about it.

"Jasper Soames!  Why, that's the name—"

It was all I caught; but it was enough to put
even Mildred Averill on a secondary plane.

"If you've found your soul—" she was saying.

"Oh, I'm not sure of that.  I only feel that I've
found—something.  I mean that something has
come, or gone, I'm not sure of which; only that—"

Mrs. Mountney wheeled suddenly from the
piano, trotting back to the edge of the carpet,
across which she spoke to me.

"Did you ever hear of Copley's great portrait
of Jasper Soames?"

I nodded, speechlessly.  I had heard of it.  In
my mind's eye I saw it, at the head of a great
staircase, a full-length figure, wearing
knee-breeches of bottle-green satin, a gold-embroidered
waistcoat, and a long coat of ruby velvet with
a Russian sable collar falling back almost to the
shoulders.  A plate let into the foot of the frame
bore the name *Jasper Soames*, with the dates of
a birth and a death.  Somewhere in my life the
picture had been a familiar object.

I had no time to follow up this discovery before
Mrs. Mountney began again:

"Are you one of his descendants?"

"No; but my wife is."

The reply came out before I realized its significance.
I hardly knew what I had said till I heard
Lulu Averill exclaim with as much indignation as
her indolent tones could carry:

"But you told my husband that you were not
a married man!  Didn't he, Mildred?"

The situation was so unexpected that I felt
myself like a bird swinging in a cage.  Nothing was
steady; everything around me seemed to whirl.
Then I heard Mildred speaking as if her voice
reached me through a poor connection on a telephone.

"Oh, that didn't matter.  I knew he was
married all along—at least I was pretty sure of it.
What difference could it make to us?

"It made the difference," Mrs. Averill drawled,
peevishly, "that we believed him."

But Mrs. Mountney intervened, waving the
others aside with a motion of the arm.

"Wait!"  She looked at me again across the
carpet.  "If you married a descendant of Jasper
Soames then it was Violet Torrance."

The mist that had hitherto enshrined two
flaming eyes seemed to part as if torn by-lightning.
The figure disclosed was not static like that of
Jasper Soames, but alive as the sky is a ive in a
storm.  It was that of my wife as I had last seen
her.  My mind resumed its action at the point
where its memory of Vio had been shut ott.

"And," Mrs. Mountney went on, pressing her
facts, "you're Billy Harrowby."

I could only bend my head in assent.

"That's my name."

"Then why—why—?"

She flung her hands apart, unable to continue.
Lulu Averill, moving with the tread of a tigress
stalking silently, stole down from the piano to the
edge of the carpet.  Mildred's eyes as she still
faced me were all amber-colored fire.  I was like
a man waking in the morning from a night of
troubled dreams.

Little Mrs. Mountney dragged her laces across
both the rugs to confront me face to face,
standing beside Mildred.

"Do you know who I am?"

I shook my head.

"I'm Alice Tarporley."

"Oh yes!  You were a friend of Vio's before
we were married.  I've heard her speak of you;
but you lived in Denver."

"I went back to Boston only two years ago,
when poor Vio was in such trouble because you
were—"  She cried out, with another wide motion
of the arms: "In the name of God, man, what
does it all mean?"

But I couldn't go into explanations.  I didn't
know where to begin.

"Tell me first how Vio is—where she is."

"She was perfectly well the day before yesterday,
and at your own house in Boston.  But
don't you know, don't you know—?  Why, this
is too awful!  The more I think of it the more
awful it becomes.  Don't you know—?"

"I—I don't know anything."

She got it out at last.

"Don't you know—Vio thinks you're—you're *dead*?"

Iron clampings seemed to press me round the ribs.

"No; I didn't know that.  What made her think so?"

"Who wouldn't think so?  You were reported
missing—and when weeks went by—and no news
of you—and then, when your uniform was found
on the bank of that river, near Tours, wasn't
it? and your papers in the pockets—and your letter
of credit, and everything—  And here you are
in New York, going under another name, working
like a stevedore, and looking like a tramp!  Why,
it's enough to drive anybody crazy!"

I could only stammer: "I shall explain everything,
after I've seen Vio."

"You can't explain in such a way that—"  She
swung toward her hostess.  "Lulu, I must
go straight back to Boston to-night.  There's
a train that gets you there in the morning, isn't
there?  I hate night traveling.  I never sleep,
and I have a headache all the next day—but
what's that when—?  If Vio hears this from any
one but—"  She turned to me again.  "Then
it *was* true that you'd been seen in New York
hotels?"

"Possibly; I don't know what you're referring to."

"Oh, every now and then some report went
round in Boston that So-and-so had seen you in
this hotel or that; but nothing of the sort has
been said for a year or two, and we thought that
it was just the kind of fake story that gets about.
But now!  Well, I must break the news to Vio—"

"Why shouldn't I break it myself?  I could
call her up by long distance."

"Man, if she heard your voice like that it
would kill her.  You don't *know*.  No, I must
go; there's no help for it, headache or no
headache.  Mildred dear, won't you call Annette?
I told her she could go to the theater to-night,
but now she'll have to get our tickets, and pack!"
She wrung her hands.  "Oh, dear!  When a
man's dead, he'd better stay dead!"

Mildred slipped from the room.  A suspicion
began to creep over me.

"Is there any special reason for my staying dead?"

"How *can* you when you're alive?  That's the
important point.  Vio will never forgive you for
being alive—and not telling her."

"She will when she's heard."

"She's got to hear right away, and I'm going
to take charge of it.  You may say it's none of
my business, but I'm making it mine.  I've
known Vio Torrance since we were tots together."

I ventured to remind her that Vio might be
her friend, but that she was my wife.

"Wife!" she crowed, scornfully.  "Have you
treated her like a wife—to be alive all this time
and never let her know!  When I tell you that
she's been in mourning for you and out
again—positively out again—  Well, you can imagine!"

"I can imagine so many things—"

But she jerked her little person away from me
toward the two fellows who were trying dully to
follow the scene they were witnessing without
being able to seize its drift.

"Take all this stuff back again to where you
brought it from.  I'm not going to buy any of it.
The idea of Billy Harrowby—"  She repeated
the name with a squeal, "Billy *Harrowby!* of all
people in the world!  Why, it's enough to drive
me out of my senses.  I suppose you don't know,"
she continued, switching back to me again, "that
they've put a new man in your place at the
Museum, over a year ago, a Frenchman; and that
Vio has given them all your prints and etchings
for a William Harrowby Memorial—that's what
she called it—she had to do something of the sort
after your tragic end, in common decency; and
you considered a hero, something like Rupert
Brooke and Alan Seeger, and now what's it to
be—and you alive?"  A dramatic gesture seemed
to claim this confusion as something for which
Fate had made her specially responsible.  "Lulu,
take me away, for Heaven's sake!  I shall never
look at a Chinese rug again without thinking—"

When the two ladies, with arms around each
other's waist, had passed into the hallway, and
out of sight, I turned to my colleagues, saying
merely:

"I think we'd better roll these up and beat it."

Neither made any comment till we were in the
lorry on our way back to Creed & Creed's, when
one of them said in an awe-stricken tone:

"For the love o' Mike, Brogan, ain't your
name—*Brogan*?"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VII02`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VII

.. vspace:: 2

Two mornings later I was in Boston, sitting
in the lobby of one of the great hotels.  I
had come by order of a telegram from my
brother-in-law, Wolf Torrance.  A note handed me on my
arrival, late the previous evening, requested me
to wait for him before attempting to see Violet.
From her I had had nothing.

I had come as I was, with the hundred and
thirty dollars of my savings in my pocket, but
without taking the time to dress otherwise than
in my working-man's best.  Examining myself
closely, now that I was face to face with my old
life again, I could see that by imperceptible
degrees my whole appearance had taken on those
shades which distinguish the working-man from
men in more sophisticated walks in life.  Vio
Harrowby as the wife of a working-man, or of
any one looking like a working-man, was an
inconceivable image.

My leaving New York had been made simpler
for me than I could have ventured to hope.
Whatever the tale told by the lads who had
accompanied me to East Seventy-sixth Street, it
had awed the luggers, impressed the salesmen,
and reached the ears of the Olympian gods.  It
was not often, I fancy, that Creed & Creed's
was the scene of mystery.  That there was a
secret about me every one knew, of course; but
it had been connected with vague romantic tales
of squandering the family estate, of cheating at
cards, or of other forms of aristocratic misdoings.
So long as I didn't put on airs, and answered
submissively to the name of Brogan, this was not
laid up against me or treated otherwise than as
a misfortune.  Now that an explanation seemed
to be coming to the light the effect, for that
morning at least, was to strike my comrades dumb.
They stared at me, but kept at a respectful
distance, somewhat like school-boys with one of
their number smitten by domestic calamity.
Salesmen who, except for an order to pull out or
put back a rug, had never taken the trouble to
notice me, came and engaged me in polite
conversation, while one or two of the partners made
errands into the shop on purpose, as I surmised,
to get a look at me.  The single moment that
could have been called dramatic fell to the Floater,
who came in, during the forenoon, with a telegram
and a special-delivery letter in his hand.  They
had been sent to Creed & Creed's, since that was
my only known address.

"I suppose these wouldn't be for you," was
the Floater's choice of words, as he offered them
for my inspection.

The telegram was for William Harrowby, the
letter to William Harrowby, Esquire.

"That's my name, my real name," I admitted, humbly.

It was natural for him to hide his curiosity
under a veil of sputtering disdain.

"Thought it'd be.  Never did take stock in
that damfool name you give when you first come
here.  'Twa'n't fit for a dog or a horse—and you
goin' just as easy by the name o' Brogan.
Couldn't any one *see*?"

As to what any one could see I didn't inquire,
being too eager to open my telegram.  Though
I scarcely hoped that it could be from Vio my
heart sank a little when I saw that it was not.

.. vspace:: 2

"Come at once.  Stay at the Normandy.
Wait for me before seeing Violet.  Explanations
expected.  J. DEWOLFE TORRANCE."

.. vspace:: 2

The spirit of the letter was different.  Bearing
neither formal beginning nor signature, it was
dated from the house in East Seventy-sixth Street.

.. vspace:: 2

"I am so glad for your sake.  Though I do not
understand, I have confidence.  I have always
had confidence—without understanding.  Some
day, perhaps, you will tell me; but that shall be
as you please.  Just now I only want you to know
that almost from the beginning of our acquaintance
I thought you had a wife.  I can't tell you
how or why the conviction was borne in on me;
but it was.  Possibly I was interested in you for
her sake a little, with that kind of secret
sisterhood which more or less binds all women together,
and which is not inconsistent with the small
mutual irritations we classify as feline.  In any case
I knew it—or I so nearly knew it as to be able to
take it for granted.  If you go back to your home,
then, you will have more than my good wishes,
you will both have them.  Should there be
anything to keep you apart you will have more than
my good wishes still.  Don't ask me why I say
these things, because I scarcely know.  Don't try
to interpret me, either, for you are extremely
likely to be wrong.  In our talks together you
must have seen that I am in rebellion against
being bound by other people's rules of conduct,
and as far as I have the courage I brave the
inferences drawn from what I do.  My weakness
is that I have not much courage.  All the same,
as I want to give you a kind of blessing in this
new turn in your life, I keep repeating of you
some words which I think must come from Tennyson:

   |      "'Go forth, and break through all,
   |  Till one shall crown thee, far in the spiritual city.'"

.. vspace:: 2

This letter, too, made my leaving New York
easier.  Possibly it was written with that intent.
"Don't try to interpret me," she had said, and
I saw the wisdom of following the counsel.  As
a matter of fact the new turn to the wheel taxed
my mental resources to the utmost.

As nearly as I could judge, those mental
resources were normal again.  My return to the
old conditions I can only compare to waking
from a drugged unconsciousness.  The repair
of a broken telegraphic or telephonic connection
might also give an idea of what had taken place
in me.  Re-establishment effected, messages went
simply; that was all I could say.  The mental
rest induced by two years of physical exertion,
with little or no thought for the morrow from any
point of view, had apparently given the
ruptured brain cells the time to reconstruct
themselves.  Physiologically I may be expressing
myself inexactly; but that is of no moment.  What
is important is the fact that from the instant
when Alice Mountney said, "You're Billy
Harrowby," the complete function of the brain
seemed to be resumed.  There was no more in
the nature of a shock than there is in
remembering anything else forgotten.

More difficult to become accustomed to were
the outward conditions.  Having accepted the
habits of poverty, those of financial ease seemed
alien.  They were uncomfortable, too, like an
outlandish style of dress.  To sleep in a luxurious
bed, to order whatever I chose for breakfast, was
as odd for me as a reversion to laces and ruffles
in my costume.  There was a marvelous thrill
in it, however, with a sense of trembling
anticipation.  A soul on the outer edge of paradise,
after a life of vicissitude and stint, would
doubtless have some such vision of abundance and
peace as that which filled my horizon.

But before Christian arrives at the Celestial
City which is in sight he is reminded that a few
difficulties remain to be faced, and in some such
light I regarded the interview with Wolf.  He
came at last, pushing round the revolving door,
and standing on the threshold with a searching
look in his silly, hungry eyes.  Hatted and
fur-coated, he had that air of divine right to all that
was best on earth which was one of the qualities
that, to me at least, had always made him
unbearable.  Perhaps because I had had the same
conviction about myself I could tolerate it less
in him.

Every one called him Wolf, partly because of
his name, but more because he looked like the
animal.  With a jaw extraordinarily long and
narrow, emphasized rather than concealed by a
beard trimmed carefully to a point, his smile lit
up a row of gleaming upper teeth best described
as fangs.  His small eyes were at once eager,
greedy, and fatuous; and yet there was that in
his personality which stamped him as of
recognized social superiority.  In the same way that
a picture can be spoken of as a poor example of a
good school, Wolf might have been reckoned
as a second-rate specimen of a thoroughbred
stock.  Even as he stood you would have put
him down as belonging to the higher strata in any
community, and in sheer right of his forebears a
member of the best among its clubs.

Instead of going forward and making myself
known I allowed him to discover me.  It was one
more proof of my having changed that more than
once his eye traveled over me without
recognition.  It must be remembered that I was no
longer seedy; I was only different.  It was not
the degree but the kind that put him out of his
reckoning.

When in the end he selected me from the crowd
it was rather as a possibility than as his very man.
Coming forward with that inquiring, and yet
doubtful, air which people take on when scarcely
able to believe what they see, he halted with a
bland, incredulous smile.

"Well!"

With feelings in no wise different from those
of a man charged with a crime of which he knows
himself guilty, I struggled to my feet:

"Hello, Wolf!"

Wolfs small eyes roamed from my head to my
feet and from my feet to my head before he spoke
again:

"So you've decided to come back."

The grin that accompanied these words was
partly nervous, but partly due to his pose of
taking life as the kind of joke which he was
man-of-the-world enough to appreciate.

"As you see," I responded, with a sickly grin
on my own part.

In some lifeless manner we shook hands, after
which I asked him to be seated.

On his taking off his hat I observed that during
the three years and more since I had seen him
last he had grown bald, while, with something of
a pang, I wondered for the first time if I should
find a change in Vio.

"Why didn't you come before?"

"I should have come if I could.  As a matter
of fact, I couldn't."

"Couldn't—why?"

"Didn't know where to go."

"What's that mean?"

"Exactly what it says."

"That you didn't know where to—?"

I tapped my forehead.  "Had a—had
a—shock—or something."

His gleaming smile was saved from ferocity
only by being inane.

"Went dotty?"

"If you like."

"Great Scott!  But why—why didn't some
one let us know?"

"They couldn't.  I—I seem to have taken
care of that.  Perhaps I'd better—better tell you
all about it, that is, as far as I know."

He nodded, taking out his cigar-case and offering
me a cigar.  When I declined it he took one
himself, bit off the end, lighted it, and in general
carried himself as if my approaching confidences
wouldn't matter much.  I resented this the less,
knowing it to be his attitude toward every one
and everything.  All that I cared for was that
he should be in a position to give a correct account
to Violet, in case she insisted on hearing his
report before seeing me.

"You remember how I came to go over and
join the American Ambulance Corps in France?"

He said he did not remember it.

"Well, I didn't do it of my own accord.  I—I
loathed the idea.  If we'd been in the war at the
time of course I should have done anything I
could; but we were not in the war.  As a
matter of fact, if Vio had only let me wait I
could have been of more use in my own particular line."

"You mean what we used to call the old-woman line."

"If you choose to put it that way."

"Didn't you put it in that way yourself?"

"As a feeble joke, yes.  But we'll let that pass.
All I mean is that as head of the Department of
Textiles in the Museum of Fine Arts I knew a lot
of a subject that became of great importance when
we went into the war; so that, if Vio had waited—"

"Vio," he grinned, "was like a bunch of other
women who'd caught the fever of sacrifice, what?
When all their swell lady friends in England and
France were giving up their dear ones, they didn't
want not to be in the swim.  Don't think I didn't
go through it, old chap.  Vio was simply crazy
to give up a dear one.  Before she'd got you she'd
been after me.  When Hilda Swain drove her
two sons into being stokers in the navy, and
killed one of them with the unaccustomed work,
I thought Vio would go off her chump with a sense
of her uselessness to a great cause.  Those were
days when to be Vio's dear one meant to go in
danger of your life."

A hundred memories crowded in on me.

"Do you think that was it?  It wasn't that—that
she wanted to get rid of me?"

His answer struck me oddly.

"Not a bit of it, not then.  Lord, no!"

I repressed the questions these words called
up, taking a minute to think the situation over.

"At any rate, I went," I continued, with
outward calm.  "It was after a rather stormy scene
with Vio, in which she said she thought she had
married a man and not a nervous old lady."

"Oh, she said worse than that to me, lots cf
times, what?"

"Yes, but you weren't her husband; and you
were not desperately in love with her."

"Often thought Vio was like one of those
queer-mixed cocktails that 'll set chaps off their nuts
who'll take a tumbler of whisky neat and never
turn a hair."

"There's something in that," I agreed; "but
it makes the kind of woman whose contempt is
the harder to put up with.  When she began
handing it out to me—well, I went.  That's all
there is to be said about it.  You tell me that
Vio wanted to sacrifice a dear one; and she did.
I was no more fit for the job I undertook
than—than little Bobby would have been if he'd lived
till then."

"That's another thing.  Vio should have had
more children, what?"

"Ah, well!  She didn't want them.  When
little Bobby went she said she couldn't go through
it all a second time, and so—  But I'm trying to
tell you what happened."

"Well, go on."

I narrated my experiences in the Ambulance
Corps in words that have been so often given in
print that it is not worth while to repeat them.
What has not so frequently been recorded,
because not every one has felt it to the same degree,
is the racking of spirit, soul, and body by the
unrelieved horror of the days and nights.  I
suppose I must own to being in regard to all this more
delicately constituted than the majority of men.
There were others like me, but they were
relatively not numerous.  Of them, too, we hear
little, partly because not all of those who survived
like to confess the weakness, and few survived.
If it were possible to get at the facts I think it
would be found that among those who sickened
and died a large proportion were predisposed
by sheer inability to go on living any longer
in this world of men.  I could give you the
names of not a few in whom the soul was
stricken before the body was.  They were for
the most part sensitively organized fellows,
lovers of the beautiful, and they simply couldn't
live.  Officially their deaths are ascribed to
pneumonia or to something else; but the real
cause, while right on the surface, was beyond
the doctor's diagnosis.

I didn't sicken; and I didn't die; I wasn't even
wounded.  What happened was that at
Bourg-la-Comtesse a shell came down in the midst of a
bunch of us who were stretching our limbs and
washing up after a night in a stifling dugout
... and some time during the following twenty-four
hours I recovered consciousness, lying on my
belly in the darkness, with my face buried in the
damp grass of a meadow, like a dead man.

I lay for ten or fifteen minutes trying to
reconstruct the happenings that had put me there,
and to convince myself that I was unhurt.
Except for a beast munching not far away, no living
thing seemed to be near me.  On the left the
ruined walls of Bourg-la-Comtesse were barely
visible through the starlight, while to my right
a jagged row of tree-tops fringed the sky-line.
In the velvety blackness in front of me the stars
were dimmed by shells hanging over No Man's
Land, Verey lights, darting upward, and radiant
bursts of shrapnel.  I remembered that our
section had halted at an *abri* a little to the west of
the village, and dragging myself from the ground
forced my chilled limbs to carry me toward the
spot where some of my comrades might be left alive.

But whether I mistook the way, or whether
they had gone off leaving me for dead, I was
unable to explain to Wolf.  I only know that I
walked and walked, and found no one.  The
world had been suddenly deserted.  Except for
an occasional horse or cow, that paused in its
grazing to watch me pass, or the scurrying of
some small wild thing through a hedge, I seemed
the only creature astir.  Dead villages, dead
châteaux, dead farms, dead gardens, dead forests,
dead lorries, dead tanks, dead horses, dead men,
and a dead self, or a self that had only partially
come back to life, were the features of that lonely
tramp through the darkness.

With no other aim than a vague hope of
joining up again with my section I plodded on till
dawn.  Though my watch had run down, and
there was no change as yet in the light, I knew
when dawn was approaching by a sleepy twitter
in a hedge.  Another twitter awoke a few yards
farther on, and then another and another.
Presently the whole countryside was alive, not with
song, but with that chirrupy hymn to Light which
always precedes the sunrise, and ceases before the
sun has risen.  Wandering away from the front,
by instinct, not on purpose, I was now in a region
relatively untouched by calamity, with grapes
hard and green in the vineyards and poppies in
the ripening wheat-fields.

Between eight and nine I reached a village,
where I breakfasted at a wine-shop, explaining
myself as an American charged with a mission
that was taking me across country.  Stray
soldiers being common, I had no harder task than
to profit by the sympathy accorded to my
British-seeming uniform.  So I tramped on again,
and on, always with a stupefied half-idea of
finding my section, but with no real motive in my
mind.  If I had a real motive it was in a dull,
blind, animal instinct to get away from the
brutality in which I had been living for the past six
months, even though I knew I should be headed
off and turned back again.

But I wasn't.  In that land of agony I went
my way unheeded.  I also went my way unheeding.
It was the beginning of the more or less
pointless pilgrimages I made later in New York.
To my anguished nervous system there was a
soothing quality in being on the move.  So on
the move I kept, hardly knowing why, except
that it was to get away from what was right
behind me.

And yet I had clearly the impression that I was
merely enjoying a breathing spell.  I didn't mean
to run away.  I knew I was Billy Harrowby, and
that for my very name's sake I must return to my
task at the first minute possible.  It was only not
possible, because as I continued my aimless
drifting along the roads I got farther away from my
starting-point.

Absolute mental confusion must have come by
such gradual transitions that I have no memory
of the stages of the change.  I do recall that at
a certain time and place I came to an
understanding with myself that Billy Harrowby had
been blown to bits by a shell near Bourg-la-Comtesse,
and that I, who wore his uniform and carried
his letter of credit in my pocket, was no more
than his astral shape stalking through a world
from which he had departed.  To get rid of this
astral shape, to get rid of everything that
pertained to the man who had passed through horrors
that would turn all future living into nightmare,
began to seem to me a necessary task.  Only by
doing this could Billy Harrowby's ghost be laid,
and the phantasms that walked with it dispelled.
By the time I reached Tours the hallucination
had assumed the form of a consecrated duty, and
to it I applied myself as to some holy ceremonial rite.

In narrating this to Wolf some of the old
vividness came back to me.  I saw myself again
inspecting all the environs of Tours—Plessis-lès-Tours,
Marmoutiers, Laroche-sur-Loire, and as
far away as the junction at St.-Pierre—for
suitable spots in which to lay Billy Harrowby down
and become my real self.  In the end I selected
a small stream, the Padrille I think it is called,
which flows into the Loire a mile or two beyond
Plessis.  There is a spot there where the stream
flows through a wood, and there is a spot on the
stream's bank where wood is denser than it is
elsewhere.

Having selected this as the scene of Billy
Harrowby's exit, the rest of my plans became easy.
For two or three days I busied myself with
discreetly purchasing a new outfit.  I remember
that it was a point of honor with me not to be too
spendthrift with Billy Harrowby's cash, seeing
that for the man who was to survive, anything,
however modest, would be enough.  Further than
separating myself from the unhappy ambulance-driver
who had seen such dreadful things since
arriving in France I had no ambitions.

The purchases made, it was a simple matter to
carry them to the bank of the Padrille and change
completely.  A soldier entered on one side of the
Bois de Guènes, a civilian came out on the other.
Neither soldier nor civilian was of interest to a
people rejoicing in the news that the French had
captured that morning the whole line of the Dent
de la Ponselle.

From the Bois de Guènes I walked to the junction
with the main line at St.-Pierre, and there
the trail of my memories is lost.  I have no
recollection of taking the name of Jasper Soames,
though I can see easily enough why I should have
done it.  When it became necessary to call
myself something I seized the first bit of wreckage
from the past that my mind could catch hold of.
The name was there as a name, even when all its
associations had disappeared beneath the waves
that had swept over me.

Of the interval between taking the train at
St.-Pierre, probably to go southward toward
Bordeaux, and my waking on board the *Auvergne*
I have as yet only such fragments of memory as
one retains of dreams.  Even that which stands
out is shadowy, uncertain, evanescent.  It is
without context.  No one fragment is substantial
enough for me to be sure of it as pertaining
to a fact.

Facts began for me anew at the instant when
I opened my eyes in the cabin and saw Drinkwater
shaving.

"Funny, isn't it?"

Wolf did not make this observation till some
minutes after I had ceased.  During the interval
of silence, as during the half-hour of my narrative,
his grin played on me like a searchlight.  As I
have already said, I didn't resent this because of
knowing his smile to be a kind of nervous rictus of
the lips which he was no longer able to control;
and yet the silly comment nettled me.

"What's funny about it?" I asked, coldly.

"Oh, nothing!  Just—just the whole thing."

"If you think the whole thing's funny—"

"Oh no, not in that sense, not comic."

"What is it then?"

"Nothing—nothing!  I was only wondering—"

But I didn't find out what Wolf was wondering
till later.  In the mean while I gave him a brief
account of my doings in New York, leading up
to the day when Alice Mountney had "discovered"
me.  When I came to that he rose, eying
me all over as he had done at first.

"That's a queer kind of rig—" he began, with
his everlasting jocularity.

"It's the kind of rig I've been wearing," I
replied, sharply.  "Good enough for its purpose.
I shall get something else as soon as I've had time
to go to the tailor."

"I'd go soon," was his only remark, as he left
me to repeat to Vio what he could remember of
my tale.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER VIII02`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VIII

.. vspace:: 2

It was after lunch before I was summoned to
the telephone, to hear Wolf's voice at the
other end.  Vio would see me at three.  I was
to understand that my being alive had been a
shock to her, and therefore all this ceremonial!

At a quarter to three I started to walk across
the Common to the old Soames house on Beacon
Hill.  It occurred to me then that if for the living
it is a strange sensation when the dead come back,
for the dead it is a stranger sensation still.  Not
till I set out on this errand had I understood how
dead I had been.  I had been dead and buried;
I had been mourned for and forgotten; Vio had
finished her grieving and returned to every-day
life.  For anything I knew, she might be
contemplating remarriage.  Alice Mountney had
said that when people were dead it was better for
them to stay dead; and I began to fear it was.

Beacon Hill, as I drew near it, struck me as an
illustration of that changing of the old order of
which all the inner springs seemed to be within
myself.  It was no longer the Beacon Hill of my
boyhood.  It was not even the Beacon Hill of the
year when I went away.  To those who had
stayed on the spot and watched the transformation
taking place little difference might be apparent;
but to me, with my newly awakened faculties,
it was like coming back in autumn to a
garden visited in spring.  The historic State House
had deployed a pair of huge white wings, to make
room for which familiar landmarks round about
it had for the most part disappeared.  All down
the slope toward the level land the Georgian and
Early Victorian mansions were turning into shops
and clubs.  The old Soames house, with occasional
panes of purple glass in otherwise normal
windows, was flanked on one side by a bachelors'
chambers and on the other by an antique-shop.
One of the few old houses in Boston still in the
hands of people connected with the original
owners, it had been purchased by Vio's father
from the heirs of his mother's family, while Vio's
trustees had in their turn bought out Wolf's
share in it.  Four-square, red, with a fine white
Doric portico over which a luxuriant wistaria
trained, it suggested, as I approached it now, old
furniture, old books, old pictures, old wines, old
friendships, and all the easy, well-ordered life
out of which we were called by the pistol-shot
of Sarajevo.

My nervousness in crossing the street and
ringing the door-bell was augmented by that sense,
from which I was never free, of being guilty of a
stupidity so glaring as almost to amount to crime.
No ex-convict returning from the penitentiary
could have had a more hangdog conviction of
coming back to where he was no longer wanted
than I in wiping my cheap boots on Vio's
handsome door-mat.  If I found any solace in the
moments of waiting for an answer to my ring it
was in noticing that the doorway needed paint
and that nothing in the approach to the house
was quite so spick and span as formerly.  I call
this a solace only because it helped to bring Vio
nearer me by making her less supremely mistress
than she used to be of everything best in the world.
I noticed the same thing when the door was
opened by a cheery English man-servant of sixty-odd,
who was too gaily captain of his soul to be
the perfect butler of the old regime.

"Couldn't see you," was his offhand response,
when I had asked for Mrs. Harrowby.

"I think she'll see *me*."

"No, myte, and I'll tell you why.  She's kind
o' expectin' of 'er 'usband like.  Excuse me."

The politeness was called forth by his shutting
the door in my face, compelling me to speak
plainly.

"I'm Mrs. Harrowby's husband."

The absurdities in my situation were dramatized
in the expressions that ran successively over
the man's face.  Amazement having followed
on incredulity, apology followed on amazement.
As I was still too near to Pelly, Bridget, and the
Finn to separate myself from the servants hall,
my sympathy was with him.

"That's all right, old chap," I found myself
saying, with a hand on the astonished henchman's
shoulder.  "Just tell Mrs. Harrowby I'm here.
She'll find me in the library."

It was purely to convince Boosey, that was his
name, of my right to enter that I tossed my hat
on the hat-rack peg and walked to the coat-closet
with my overcoat.  With the same air of authority
I marched into the long, dim library, where my
legs began to tremble under me and my head to swim.

Perhaps because I had not yet had time to
think of this room in particular, I experienced
my first sensation of difficulty or unreality in
getting back the old conceptions.  It was not alone
my head that swam, but the room.  If you imagine
yourself sailing through a fog and drawing an
approaching ship out of the bank by sheer mental
effort of your own, you will understand what I
mean.  In ordinary conditions you have only to
watch the ship making itself more and more
distinct; in my case the ship did nothing.  It was
as if I had to build it plank by plank and sail by
sail in order to see it at all.

I could do this, even if I did it painfully.  The
room came into being, mistily, tremblingly, while
my head ached with the effort.  Taking a few
steps here, there, gazing about me at haphazard,
the remembered objects appeared one by one—the
desks, the arm-chairs, the rows of books, the
portraits, the fireplace, in which there was a
slumbering fire.  Over the mantelpiece hung Zuloaga's
portrait of Vio, which always raised discussion
wherever it was exhibited.

I had reached this point at the end of the room
when a low stifled cry came from the corner by
the fire.

"Oh, Billy, is this you?"

.. _`All these minutes she had been observing me,`:

.. figure:: images/img-242.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: All these minutes she had been observing me, with that queer, half-choked cry as the result: "Oh, Billy, is this you?"

   All these minutes she had been observing me, with that queer, half-choked cry as the result: "Oh, Billy, is this you?"

Vio had been sitting there watching me.  Had
I been able instantly to reconstruct the room I
should have seen her instantly; but all these
minutes she had been observing me, with that queer,
half-choked cry as the result.

I cannot tell you now how long we stared at
each other, she in the arm-chair, I on the
hearth-rug; but once more the new brain-cells acted
sluggishly I knew that this slender, picturesque
creature, swathed in soft black satin, with a little
white about the open throat line, was Vio, and
that Vio was my wife.  But I knew it as something
remembered, not as an existing fact.  I knew it as
a ghost might know that another ghost had married
him, and that they had once lived intimately
side by side.

You must not think from this that there was no
emotion.  There was tremendous emotion, only
it was not the emotion of love after long separation.
If it was that there were too many elements
in it to allow pent-up passion the immediate right
of way.  Pent-up passion was stemmed by the
realization of what my coming back must mean
to the woman before me.  For her I had been
three years in my grave.  As Alice Mountney
had put it, she had been in mourning for me—and
out again.  It was the out again that created
this thickened atmosphere between her and me.
What had been all over, finished and done with
she had to begin again.

And I had not come back to her as I had gone
away.  I had come back—entirely to the
outward eye and somewhat in my heart—not as the
smart young fellow of Lydia Blair's recollection,
but as a working-man.  The metamorphosis
rendered me in some ways more akin to Boosey the
butler than to my former self.  I had acquired
an art that made it possible for me to go into the
servants' sitting-room and be at home in the
company I should find there.  The people in the
front of the house had to some extent become to
me as the Olympian gods at Creed & Creed's,
exalted beings with whom I had little to do
outside the necessities of work and pay.  This change
in me was more than superficial; and whatever
it was Vio saw it.  For her the meeting was
harder than for me; and for me it was like a
backward revolution of the years.

But after she had clung to me and cried a little,
the tensity was broken.  As I analyze now, I see
the impulse that urged us into each other's arms
as one of memory.  For her, I was the man who
had been, as she was the woman who had been,
for me.  She, however, had the help of pity,
while I was humble and overawed.

It was one of those moments when so many
things begin again that it is hard to seize on any.
The simplest being the easiest, she said, after
having detached herself from me and got back some
measure of her self-control:

"What about your things?  Have you brought them?"

"The little I have is at the hotel."

Both question and answer came out absently
while we looked at each other with a new kind of
inspection.  The first had been of the self within;
now it was of the outer self.  I should have
shrunk from the way in which her eyes traveled
over me had not my whole mind gone into the
examination I was making.

Yes; she had changed, though I cannot say
that it was in the way of looking older.  Rather
she had grown to resemble Zuloaga's portrait of
her, which we had always considered too theatrical.
Zuloaga had emphasized all her most startling
traits—her slenderness, sinuousity, and
fantastic grace—her immense black eyes, of which
he alone of all the men who had painted her had
caught the fire that had been compared to that
of the black opal—the long, narrow face that was
like Wolf's, except for being mysterious and
baffling—the mouth, haunted by memories that
might have survived from another incarnation,
since there had been nothing in her present life
to correspond to them.  You could speak of her
as being beautiful only in the sense of being
strange, with an appeal less to the eye than to the
imagination.  More akin to fire than to flesh, she
was closer to spirit than to fire.  It might have
been a perverse, tortured spirit, but it was far
from the merely animal.  Discriminating people
called it her salvation to have married a humdrum
chap like me, since, with a man of more temperament,
she would have clashed too outrageously.
High-handed and intense, she needed some one
seemingly to yield to her caprices, correcting
them under the guise of giving in.

Like others of tempestuous nature, when she
was gentle her gentleness was heavenly.  She
was gentle in that way now.

"Sit down, Billy, and let me look at you.
Why didn't you bring your things?"

"I didn't know that you wanted me to do that,
or that—that we were to—to begin again."

"Of course we shall begin again.  What made
you think we shouldn't?"

"I didn't think so.  I simply didn't know."

"Did Alice Mountney, or Wolf, tell you anything?"

There was a curious significance in the tone,
but I let it pass.

"Only that you'd—you'd given me up."

"What else could I do?"

We were sitting half turned toward each other
on one of the library sofas, and I seized both her
hands.

"But now that I'm back, Vio, are you—are you—glad?"

Though she allowed her hands to remain in
mine there was a flash of the black-opal fire.

"It's not so simple as being glad, Billy.  The
word isn't relevant."

"Relevant to what?"

"I mean that you can't sum up such a situation
as this by being either glad or sorry.  We've other
things to consider."

"But surely that comes first.

"Neither first nor second.  The only question
we've got to ask for the minute is what we're to do."

"But I thought that was settled—that you
wanted me to come back."

"It's settled in the way that getting up in the
morning is settled; but that doesn't tell you the
duties of the day."

"I suppose one can only meet the duties of the
day by going on and seeing what they are."

"Exactly; and isn't that our first consideration—the
going on?  It doesn't matter whether
we're glad or sorry, since we mean to go on, or
try to go on—anyhow."

Releasing her hands I dropped back into my
own corner of the sofa, scanning the refined
features more at my ease, for the reason that her
face was slightly averted and her eyes turned to
the floor.

"I don't want you to go on, Vio, if—"

"I've thought everything over," she declared
in her imperious way, "and made up my mind
that it was the only thing for me to do."

"Then you had thought that—that perhaps
you—you couldn't."

She nodded slowly, without looking up.

"You'd made other—plans."

"It wasn't that so much; it was—it was
thinking of you."

"Thinking of me—from what point of view?"

"From the point of view of—of what you've
done."  She glanced at me now, quickly,
furtively, as if trying to spare me the pain of
scrutiny.  "Oh, Billy, I'm so sorry for—for my share
in it."

"And what do you take your share to be?"

"The share of responsibility.  When I urged
you to go—"

"As it happened, I should have gone anyhow.
When this country had entered the war I should
have been under the same obligation as any other man."

"That would have been different.  When our
men were taken there was discrimination.  Each
was selected for what he was best fitted to do.
A great deal of pains was given to that, and I
can't tell you how I suffered when I saw that if
I'd only left you alone you could have contributed
the thing you knew most about.  That's why I
feel so strongly that, now you've come back—even
in this sort of disguise—"

"I'm not in disguise, Vio.  The way you see me—"

The motion of her long, slender hand was partly
of appeal and partly of dismissal.

"I don't want to hear about that, Billy.  If
we're to begin again there are things we mustn't
talk about.  Since you've done this extraordinary
thing, and I may be said to have driven you
into it, I want to stand by you.  Isn't that
enough?"

There was so much in this little speech that I
couldn't do it justice at once.  All I found
myself able to say was:

"Tell me, Vio: Is the extraordinary thing my
staying away—or my coming back?"

Again there was that pleading, commanding
gesture.

"Oh, Billy, don't.  I'm willing to try to pick
up the past; but it must be the past, not what's
happened in the mean time."  She rose with that
supple grace which suggested the Zuloaga pose.
"Go back to the hotel and get your things.  I—I
can't bear to see you looking as you are.  When
you're more like yourself—"

I tried to smile, but I know the effort was no
more than a twisted quivering.

"You'll have to see me looking as I am for a
few days yet, Vio.  My kit doesn't offer me much
variety."

"Oh, well—!"

She accepted this as part of the inevitable
strangeness in which she had become enveloped,
making silent, desperate concessions.  Because
of this mood I was tempted to ask for five
minutes' grace in order to look over the old house.

"You'll find things rather run down," she said,
indifferently.  "I've no good servants any more.
They said that when the war was over it would
be easier to get them; but it's a month now since
the armistice was signed, and it's just as bad as ever."

"From that point of view, it will probably be
worse," I remarked, when about to pass from the
library into the hall.  "The world isn't going
back to what it was before the war.  You can't
stop an avalanche once it has begun to slide."

She watched me from where she stood before
the fire, reproducing almost exactly the attitude
of the fascinating woman overhead.

"Does that mean that you've come back a
revolutionist, Billy? as well as everything else?"

"N-no; I haven't come back anything in particular.
I'm just like you and all the rest of the
world, a snowflake in the avalanche.  I suppose
I shall go tumbling with the mass."

A sense of something outlived came to me as
I roamed through the house which Vio allowed
me to visit by myself.  After two years spent in
a squint-eyed room of which the only decoration
was three painted fungi this mellow beauty stirred
me to a vague irritation.  It was not a real
dwelling for real people in the real world as the real
world had become.  It was too rich and soft and
long established in its place.  Three or four
generations of Soameses and Torrances had stored
its rooms with tapestries, portraits, old
porcelains, and mahoganies; and for America that is
much.

Over the landing where the stairway turned
hung the famous Copley of Jasper Soames.  For
a good two minutes he and I faced each other in
unspeakable communion.  There was nothing
between us but this stairway acquaintance, formed
during the three years Vio and I had lived
together; and yet somehow his being had stamped
itself into mine.

On the floors above there was the same
well-chosen abundance of everything, sufficiently
toned down by use and time to merit the word
shabby.  That was the note that struck me first,
and surprised me.  Vio had never been what is
commonly known as a good housekeeper; but
she had commanded and been obeyed.  What
the house betrayed now was a diminution of the
power of command.  Doubtless money didn't go
as far as it used to; and there was a new spirit in
the world as to taking orders.  I thought again
of the garden revisited in autumn.  The old house
might be said to have fulfilled its long mission,
and to be ready to pass away with the age of
which it was a type.

To go into my own room and find it empty
and swept of every trace of my habitation would
have been a stranger experience than it was if
every experience that day had not been strange.
I looked into the wardrobes; I pulled open the
drawers.  There was not a garment, not a scrap
of paper to indicate that I had ever been alive.
Not till I saw this did I realize the completeness
with which Vio had buried me.

And not till I saw this did I realize that Vio
herself was up against the first big struggle of her
life.  She had never hitherto faced what might
be called a moral situation.  Her history had
been that of any other well-off girl in a city like
Boston, where money and position entitled her
to whatever was best in the small realm.  American
civilization, like that of the Italy of the
Middle Ages, being civic and not national, the
boundaries of Boston, with its suburbs and seaside
resorts, had formed the limits of Vio's horizon.
True, she had spent a good deal of time in
Europe—but always as a Bostonian.  She had made
periodical visits to Newport, Bar Harbor, Palm
Beach, and White Sulphur Springs—but always
as a Bostonian.  Once she had traveled as far on
the American continent as California—but still
as a Bostonian.

Boston sufficed for Vio, seeing that it was
big enough to give her variety, and swell enough
to permit her to shine with little competition.
Competition irked her, for the reason that she
despised taking trouble.  With the exception of
a toilet exact to the last detail of refinement,
her life was always at loose ends.  She rarely
answered letters; she rarely returned calls; she
never kept accounts; if she began a book she
didn't finish it.  Adoring little Bobby during the
months of his brief life, she found the necessities
of motherhood unbearable.  That she was as a
rule picturesquely unhappy was due to the fact
of having nothing on which to whet her spiritual
mettle.  Like a motor working while the motor-car
stands still, she churned herself into action
that got nowhere as a result.

But now for the first time in her life she was
face to face with a great, big personal problem.
How big and great the problem was I didn't at
the time understand.  All I could see was that
she was meeting her baptism of fire, and that I
was the means of the ministration.

Pushing open the door between her room and
mine I received again the impression of almost
awesome privilege I had got on our return from
our honeymoon.  I had never been at my ease
in this room; it was Vio's sanctuary, her fastness.
It was a Soames and Torrance sanctuary and
fastness, and to it I had only been admitted, not
given its freedom as a right.  Possibly the feeling
that always came to me on crossing its threshold,
that I stepped out of my own domain, betokened
the missing strand in the tie that had bound Vio
and me together.

It had been a trial to me that she should be so
much better off than I.  Not only did it leave
the less for me to do for her, but it created in her
a spirit of detachment against which I chafed in
vain.  Out of the common fund of our marriage
she made large reserves of herself, as she might
have made reserves—which she did not—of her
income.  Our beings were allied, but they were
not fused.  For fusion she had too much that she
prized to give away.  In such quantity as I could
give she made return to me; but having so much
more than I to give, her reserves became
conspicuous.  Of what she withheld this room was the
symbol.  It was never my room.  My comings
and goings there had been made with a kind of
reverence, as if the place were a shrine.

The only abiding note of my personality had
been my photograph at the head of Vio's bed.
There was a photograph there now, but I saw that
the frame was different.  Mine had been in a
silver frame; this was in red-brown leather.  If
it was still mine...

But it was not mine.  It was that of a colonel
in an American uniform, wearing British and
French decorations.  Big, portly, handsome,
bluff, with an empty left sleeve, he revealed
himself as a hero.  He was a hero, while I ... It
occurred to me that death was not the only means
of giving Vio her freedom, and that I ought to
tell her so.

To do that I was making my way down-stairs
with the words framing themselves on my lips.

"Vio," I meant to say, "if you don't want me
back, if anything has happened to make it best
for me to go away again forever, you've only to
say the word and I'll do it."

But while I was still descending she swept into
the hall.  Her movements were always rapid,
with a careless, commanding ease.  She was once
more the Zuloaga woman all on fire within.

"How long do you think it will be, Billy, before
your tailor can make you look as you ought to?"

I paused where I was, some three steps above
her.  "It may hardly be worth while to consider
that, Vio—"

"Oh, but it is," she interrupted.  "If we're
going to put this thing through we must do it with
some dash.  That's essential."

"Why—why the dash?"

"Because there's no other way of doing it.
Don't you see?  If you just come in by the
back door—"  She left this sentiment to
continue in her own way.  "Alice Mountney is
going to give a big dinner and invite all your
old friends."

My heart sank.

"Is that necessary?"

"Of course it's necessary.  It isn't a matter of
preference.  As far as that goes it will be as hard
for me as for you.  If I took my own way I should
never—"  Once more she left me to divine her
thought while she added, firmly: "It has simply
got to be done.  We must make people think—"

"What?" I challenged, when she paused, not
apparently from lack of words but from fear of
using them.  A suspicion impelled me to say in
addition, "How much did Wolf repeat to you of
the story I told him?"

Her answer was made with the storm in the
eyes that was always my warning of danger.

"As much as I'd let him.  I didn't want to
hear any more.  I never shall.  That part of it
is closed.  I've told you already that I accept the
responsibility, and I do.  You mayn't think it,
but I have a conscience of a kind; and I know
that if it hadn't been for me you wouldn't have
done this thing; and so—  But there we are again.
There we shall always be if we allow ourselves to
discuss it.  You're my husband, Billy; I'm your
wife.  We can't get away from that, whatever
has happened—"

"We could get away from it, if you preferred."

"What I prefer," she declared, with her
old-time hauteur, "is what I'm asking you to do.
If I didn't prefer it I shouldn't ask for it.  Go
back to the hotel and get your things.  Go to
the tailor and get more.  Your room is waiting
for you.  It will be the next room to mine, just
as before with only the door—"

"The closed door, Vio?"

"Between us," she finished, ignoring my
question.  "If other things arrange themselves we
can—we can reopen it—in time."

So we left it, since it was useless to go on.  That
she should consider my mental lapse so terrible
a disgrace was a surprise to me; but as I so
considered it myself I could not blame another for
taking the same point of view.  After all, a man
should show a man's nerve.  Thousands, millions
of men, had shown it to the limit and beyond.
I hadn't; that was all that could be said
about it.  How could Vio, how could any one
else, regard me as other than abnormal?

As she was making so brave an attempt to put
all this behind her, it became my duty to help
her.  This I could do most easily by deflecting
the conversation to the large family connection,
as to which I was without news.  She gave me
this news as we stood at the foot of the stairway,
or while I got ready to go out again.

It was a relief to learn that none of my brothers
or sisters was in Boston.  George, who was older
than myself, was on General Pershing's staff, and
had just been heard of from Luxembourg.  Dan,
my junior, had the rank of lieutenant-commander
and was somewhere in European waters.  Tom
Cantley, who had married my sister Minna, was
working on the War Trade Board in Washington,
and he and Minna had a house there.  Their eldest
boy, Harrowby, had been killed at Château-Thierry,
but as far as any one ever saw Minna
hadn't shed a tear.  Ernestine, my unmarried
sister, being one of the founders of the Flag
Raising League, had patriotic duties which took her
all over the United States.  Her last letter had
been from Oklahoma or Spokane, Vio was not
sure which, but it was "one of those places out
there."  At any rate, they were all a credit to a
name the traditions of which I alone hadn't had
the spirit to live up to.  Vio didn't say this, of
course; but it was the inference.

It was the inference, too, with regard to a host
of cousins of the first, second, and third degrees,
by blood and by marriage, who would have made
a small army in themselves.  Some were Vio's
kin, and some were mine; some by the chances of
Boston intermarriage were related to us both.
Not one of them but had been modestly heroic,
the women not less than the men.  Some had
given their lives, some their limbs or eyesight; all,
their time and money.  Even Wolf and Vio had
subscribed to funds till reduced to what they
considered indigence.  It was a distinguished clan;
and I its one pitiable member.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER IX02`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IX

.. vspace:: 2

Going back to the hotel, I had my first pang
of regret for having waked up on that
midnight at Bourg-la-Comtesse.  It was the same
reflection; the dead were so much wiser in
staying dead.  I guessed that during the weeks when
I was missing Vio had mourned for me with a
grief into which a new element had come when my
clothes were found on the bank of the Padrille.
That was a mistake, that my clothes should be
found there.  A missing man should be traced
to a prison or a hospital, or remain gloriously
missing.  He should have no interval of safety
in which to go in bathing, a hundred miles from
the spot on which he had last been seen alive, not
even to be drowned.  There was a mystery in
that which might easily become a flaw in a
soldier's record, and which to a woman as proud as
Vio would be equivalent to dishonor.  That there
should be a question of the kind with regard to
her own husband...

So I began to do justice to the courage she
displayed.  Rising to the occasion in a way I could
only call magnificent, she sank herself, her
opinions, and her plans—I called them plans to
avoid a more definite word—to meet the
imperative in the situation.  What lay in the back of
her mind I didn't dare inquire, notwithstanding
the signs that betrayed her.

And yet the more splendid her gesture the
deeper my humility at having to call it forth.  It
made me like a man, once strong and active,
reduced to living on the doles of the compassionate.
I could never be independent again; I could never
again have the mental freedom of one as to whom
there is nothing unexplained.  By a process of
bluff I might carry the thing off; but to that I
felt an unspeakable aversion.  It was not that I
was unwilling to second Vio; it was incapacity.
Having been guilty of the indiscretion of waking
at Bourg-la-Comtesse, I began to regret the long,
dull, peaceful routine of Creed & Creed's.

I do not assert that these things were as clear
in my mind on that day as they are on this; but
they were there confusedly.  Every impression
I received that afternoon was either confused and
painful or strikingly vivid, as to one waking from
an anesthetic.

Of those more vivid one in particular stands
out in my recollection.

Returning from the hotel with my suit-case
and bag—the same with which I had landed
from the *Auvergne*—I heard a man's voice in the
drawing-room up-stairs.  The deep, soft tones
told me it was not Wolf's.

"Mrs. 'Arrowby said as you was to go right up,
sir," Boosey informed me, relieving me of my
bags.  "I 'ear as you was a prisoner in Germany,
sir," he continued, while making his way to the
coat-closet with my coat.  "That's why I didn't
know as it 'd be you when you come this afternoon.
Might I ask, sir, if they throwed beer in your face,
or anything like that?"

With one foot on the stairs I looked after the
waddling figure retreating down the hall.

"Who told you that I was a prisoner?"

"Mr. Wolf's man, sir; but"—I am sure there
was a veiled taunt in what followed—-"but if you
wasn't, sir, or if it's a secret—"

I lost the rest as he became engulfed in the
closet, but I had heard enough.  Wolf had taken
his own way to protect the honor of the family.

It was not easy to enter the drawing-room and
face one of Vio's friends; but it was the sort of
thing to which I must learn to steel myself.
Moreover, it might be one of my own friends
come to welcome me back.  Vio had informed
me that Wolf had taken steps to keep any
mention of my "discovery" and return out of the
papers; but we were too well known in Boston
not to have the word passed privately.  To any
friend's welcome there would be unspoken
reserves; but that I must take for granted and
become accustomed to.

But, as it happened, it was not a friend of mine;
it was the colonel of the photograph, who had
apparently dropped in for a cup of tea—and
something more.  What that something more
might be I could only surmise from Vio's way of
saying, "Here's Mr. Harrowby now."  They
had seemingly discussed me, it had seemingly
been necessary for them to discuss me, and taken
a definite attitude toward me.  That my wife
should do this with a man who was a stranger to
me, that the circumstances should be such that
it was a duty for them to do it, was the extraordinary
cup of gall given me to drain.  I drained it
while Vio went on, with that ease which no one
knew better than I to be sustained on nerve:

"Billy, I want you to know Colonel Stroud.
He's just got back from France, and has been
explaining to me how the Allies are to occupy the
Rhineland.  Our men are already reaching
Mayence and Coblenz, and he has heard, too, that
the President arrived this morning at Brest.  I
suppose it will be in the evening papers."

So we were launched in talk that couldn't hurt
any one; and if my feelings were wounded it was
only by drawing conclusions.  They were the
easier to draw from the fact, as I guessed, that
Vio directed the talk in such a way that I could
read between the lines.

What I gleaned from the give and take of
banalities that dealt on the surface with the current
gossip of the armistice was that Vio and her
colonel had been intimate before he went to
France, and now that he was back with medals
and only a right arm, the friendship had taken
the turn to which such friendships are liable.
That he was one of the Strouds of the famous
Stroud Valley in northern New York put him into
the class with which people like ourselves made
social alliances.  When Vio, in the early days of
her supposed widowhood, had met him at Palm
Beach there was nothing to prevent their being
sympathetic to each other.  How far that sympathy
had gone I could only conjecture; but it was
easy to see it had gone pretty far.

As to what did not come so directly to the
surface, vague recollections began to form themselves
in my mind.  I seemed to remember the Stroud
Valley Strouds as a family with a record.  Of the
type which in America most nearly resembles the
English or Irish country gentleman, they made
the marrying of heiresses and the spending of the
money thus acquired almost a profession.  Horsy,
convivial, and good-looking, they carried
themselves with the cheery liveliness that
acknowledges no account to be given to any one; and
when they got into the divorce court, as they did
somewhat often, women as well as men, they
came out of it with aplomb.  I seemed to recall
a scandal that a few years before had diverted
all the clubs....

But I couldn't be sure that this was the man,
or of anything beyond the fact that the central
figure of that romance had been a Stroud Valley
Stroud.  That this particular instance of the
race had had a history was stamped all over him;
but it was the kind of history which to a man of
the world imparts fascination.  It was easy to
see that he had "done things" in many lines of
life.  A little the *beau mâle* of the French lady
novelist, and a little the Irish sporting squire, he
was possibly too conscious of his looks and his
power of killing ladies.  A bronzed floridness,
due partly to the open air and partly to good
living, was thrown into striking relief by the
silver hair and mustache not incompatible
with relative youth.  He couldn't have been
much over forty.

His reception to me was as perfect as if
regulated by a protocol and rehearsed to the last
shade.  There was nothing in it I could complain
of—and yet there was everything.  A gentleman
ignoring a disgraceful situation of which every
one is conscious would have carried himself with
just this air of bland and courteous contempt.

Perhaps it was to react against this and to
assert myself a little that I ventured once to cross
swords with him.  We had exhausted the movements
of troops on the Rhine, the possible
reception of the President in Pans, and he had
given the Peace Conference six months in which
to prepare the treaty for signature.

"Then we shall see," he laughed, in his rich,
velvety bass.

He brought out the statement so emphatically
that I was moved to ask:

"What shall we see?"

"What Mrs. Harrowby and I have been talking
about, the end of all this rot as to the war having
created a new world."

"That's putting the cart before the horse, isn't
it?" I asked, maliciously.  "The war didn't
create the new world; the new world created
the war."

Vio's exquisite eyebrows went up a shade.

"Does that mean anything?"

"Only that the volcano creates the explosion;
not the explosion the volcano.  Given all the
repressions and suppressions and injustices, the
eruption had to come."

"The eruption had to come," the colonel
declared, hotly, "because the Germans planned it."

"Oh, that was only a detail."

"You might call the whole war only a detail—"

"I do."

"I don't get you," he said, stiffly, leaning
forward to place an empty cup on the table in front
of Vio.

In her I read something surprised that didn't,
however, disapprove of me.  Thus encouraged,
I went on.  If I hadn't thought these things out
in the monotonous, unoccupied hours at Creed
& Creed's, my stunned brain would not have
been master of them now.

"I only meant that the war was but one of the
forces, one of the innumerable forces, which the
new world in the making—it isn't made yet by
any means—has put into operation.  If a house
collapses it shatters all the windows; but you
can't say that the shattering of the windows made
the house collapse."

I could see by his stare he was literally minded.

"But what—what house is collapsing?"

"The house all round us, the house of this
particular form of civilization.  It's sliding down.
It's been sliding down for years.  You might say
that it began to slide down as soon as it was put
up, because it was wrongly constructed.  A building
full of flaws begins to settle before they get
the roof on, and though it may stand for years
the ultimate crash is only a question of time.
War came as soon as our building began to split;
the building didn't begin to split because the war
came.  It was splitting anyhow."

"That seems to me—" he sought for a sufficiently
condemnatory word—"that seems to me
sheer socialism."

"Oh, I don't think it is.  The Socialists
wouldn't say so.  It isn't anything in particular.
It's just—just fact."

"Only?" Vio smiled, with her delicate,
penetrating sarcasm.

"Only," I echoed.  "But as we belong to a
world that doesn't like fact it isn't of much
importance."

Bewilderment brought a pained expression to
the handsome, rather stupid, countenance.

"What the—what on earth do you mean by that?"

"Only that we've a genius for dodging issues
and shutting our eyes to what's straight before us."

"Do you mean the ruin straight before us?"

"Not necessarily, Vio.  The collapse of this
particular form of civilization wouldn't mean ruin,
because we'd get a better form.  I suppose it's
coming into existence now."

"I don't know about that," the colonel objected.
"As far as I see, things are pretty much
the same as they've always been, and they're
getting more so."

"I suppose none of us sees more than we have
our eyes open to.  Things of the greatest
importance to us happen, and we don't know that
they're going on."

"I hope that that kind of song and dance isn't
going on—the breakdown of our civilization.  It
wasn't for that we gave 'em hell at Château-Thierry."

"Oh, none of us knows what anything is for,
except in the vaguest way.  All we can do is to
plod ahead and follow the thread of flame."

"Follow the thread of what?"

I was sufficiently master of myself to indulge
in a mild laugh.

"That's just an expression that's been in my
mind during the time when I've been—been
floundering about.  Name I invented for—for
a principle."

In this, however, he was not interested.

"Yes, but your collapsing house—"

"It may not come down altogether.  I'm
neither a prophet nor a prophet's son.  All I can
see is what I suppose everybody sees, that our
civilization has been rotten.  It couldn't hold
together.  It hadn't the cohesive strength.
Perhaps I was wrong in saying that it was falling
down; it's more as if we were pulling it down,
to build up something better.  It's our blind
instinct toward perfection—"

But refusing to listen to any more, he got up
to go.  A brave man in the presence of enemies
of flesh and blood, intellectual foes frightened
him.  At the first sound of their shells he rushed
for his mental dugout which he burrowed in the
ground of denial.  "I don't believe that" and
"All tommyrot" seemed to him shelters from
any kind of danger.

But the main point to me was that I had in a
measure not only held my own but got on to
superior ground.  I had been able to talk; in
doing so I had got him at a slight disadvantage.
The bit of self-respect inspired by this achievement
enabled me to play the host and accompany
him to the door with the kind of informal
formality to which I had been so long unaccustomed.

And in performing this small duty I made a
discovery.  As he preceded me down-stairs I
remembered seeing the back of his head once
before.  It was the kind of head not easily
forgotten.  Moreover, I had seen it in circumstances
that had caused me to note it in particular.
Where and when and how were details that did
not at once return to me; but I knew that the
association was sinister.

As I returned from my mission in showing him
to the door I heard Vio speaking.

"Come in here, Billy.  There's something I
want to say."

She was still behind the tea-table, pensive
rather than subdued, resolute rather than unhappy.

"I liked your talking like that," she began at
once, without looking up at me.  "It's—it's the
way we shall have to play the game."

A box of cigarettes stood on the tea-table.  I
took one and struck a match, the usual
stage-trick for gaining a little time.

"What game do you mean?" I asked, when I
had carefully blown out the match and deposited
it in an ash-tray.

"What game can I mean but—but that of
your coming back?"

"Oh, is that a game?"

"Only in the sense of giving us something to
play.  We can't just—just live it."

"Why can't we?"

With a quick movement she was on her feet,
flinging out her hands.

"For all the reasons that I should think you'd
see."  She came and stood on the hearth-rug,
confronting me.  "Billy, I wonder if you have
the faintest idea of what I'm doing for your sake?"

"I've more than the faintest idea, Vio.  Some
day, when we're able to talk more easily than we
are as yet, I shall tell you how grateful I am.
Just now I'm—I'm rather dazed.  I have to get
my bearings—"

She, too, had taken a cigarette, lighting it
nervously, carelessly, puffing rapidly at the thing
and moving about the room.

"And there's another thing," she began,
taking no notice of what I was trying to say; "I
don't mind your talking as you did just now, so
long as it's—as it's through your hat; but if it
isn't—"

"I can't say that it is."

"That's just what I was afraid of.  In the
places where you've been—I don't want to know
anything about them," she interjected, with a
passionate gesture of the hand that held the
cigarette, "but in such places men do pick up
revolutionary ideas, just as they do in prisons!"

"I don't know that it's a question of getting
revolutionary ideas, Vio, so much as it's one of
living in a revolutionary world."

"And that's what I want to warn you against.
It won't go down, Billy, not from you."

"Why not from me, in particular?"

"Oh, why do you make me explain things?
Isn't it perfectly clear?  If you're coming back
among your old friends you'll have to be, after
what's happened, more—how shall I put it?—more
conservative, more like everybody else—than
any one.  *You* can't afford to have wild
ideas, because people will only say that you re
trying to drag us along the way you went
yourself."

I renounced this discussion to ask the question
that was chiefly on my mind.

"Vio, who's that man that just went out?"

She threw me a look from the other side of the room.

"You heard.  He's—where can you catch on?
He's Emmy Fairborough's brother."

"Wasn't there—wasn't there a divorce?"

"Emmy's?  Yes; Lord Fairborough and she
are divorced, but what difference does that
make?"

"I wasn't thinking of Lady Fairborough.  I
forgot she had been a Stroud.  I meant—I meant
him."

"Oh, he?  Yes, I think he was."

"Divorced?"

"Yes, divorced.  What of it?"

"To whom had he been married?"

"How should I know?  It was to—to some
low creature, an actress or something, the sort
of thing men do when they're young and—and—"

"And wild?"

"Wild, if you like.  Why are you asking?"

But I was not sure of being ready to tell her,
so many things had to be formulated first.  To
gain more time I lighted another cigarette, and
she spoke while I was doing it.  Holding her own
cigarette delicately, as if examining its spark,
she said, with a staccato intonation that
emphasized each word:

"Billy, you remember what I said earlier this
afternoon?  I can go back to our past and try to
pick it up.  I can't go back to anything that
comes after that past and—and before to-day.
Do you understand?  It's more than three years
since they told me your section was blown to
pieces at Bourg-la-Comtesse.  Most of your
comrades were found—-and buried.  You were
missing; but missing with very little hope.  As the
weeks went by that little hope dwindled till there
was none.  Then came the news that—that all
that time you had been—alive."

"And I suppose that Wolf told you..."

"He told me a story, or as much of it as I could
listen to.  But that's not what I meant to speak
about now.  I want to say that—that I bury all
that, deep, deep; only that I can't do it unless
you consent to bury—"

"Everything there's been on your side.  Is
that it, Vio?"

"I shall ask no questions."

"Not even if I'm ready to answer them?"

"Not even if you're ready to answer them; but
I shall expect you not to ask questions of me."

"So that between us there will be a gulf of
silence."

She inclined her head without speaking.

"But why, Vio?  Why?"

She swept up to me, throwing away her cigarette,
and laying both her hands on my shoulders.

"Because, old boy, I'm your wife, and I'm
trying to help you.  I'm trying to help you
because—because—"

Her nearness, the scent of her person, the
black-opal mystery and fire were like hypnotic
enchantment.

"Because you used to—to care for me a little,
Vio?  Is it possible that—that I can think that?"

She nodded.

"That's part of it, of course.  I don't forget
it.  But what I remember more is what I've told
you already, that, whatever you did, I sent you
to do it.  Now, if there's expiation to be made, I
come in for that as well as you."

"So that we make it together?"

"So that we make it together."

Having already been bold I grew bolder.
Lifting my hands to my shoulders I laid them on
hers.

"And will you—will you let me kiss you on
that, Vio?"

"Once," she consented; "but—but don't—don't
touch me."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER I03`:

.. class:: center large bold

   PART III

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER I

.. vspace:: 2

So we began what Vio called the expiation, and
what to me was no more than the attempt
to persuade our friends that they didn't know
what they knew.  This, according to Vio's
calculations, could be best achieved by never for an
instant showing the white feather of an
uncomfortable conscience.  Our assurance was to be
something like the Stroud aplomb on emerging
from the courts of bankruptcy or divorce.  To
be unaware of anything odd in one's conduct
helped others to be unaware of it, too.  A high
spirit, a high head, a high hand carried one
through difficult situations regardless of the
strife of tongues.

I didn't think it necessary to remind Vio that
the strife of tongues could go on even if we didn't
hear it.  Nothing else was possible when Wolf's
fatuity blew the trumpet and beat the drum if
the clamor showed signs of dying down.  It
wasn't that he told the truth, but that he told
lies so easy of detection.  Alice Mountney did
tell the truth as far as she knew it; but where she
didn't know it she supplied the deficiency by
invention.  That those so near us should be in
conflict naturally called for comment, especially
when Vio refused to let me speak.

For the first few weeks I was too busily
occupied to think of what any one was saying,
seeing that the details I had to arrange were so
unusual.  Of the steps taken to become a living
citizen again, and get back my property from my
heirs, I give no account further than to say that
they absorbed my attention.  My standing in the
community I was thus unable to compute till
we were into the new year.

By this time I had taken part in a number of
family events on which I shall touch briefly.  At
Christmas we had gone to Washington to spend
the festival with Minna and Tom Cantley.
There we had met Ernestine, in one of the
intervals of her flag-raising, and on the way back to
Boston my brother Dan's ship had unexpectedly
arrived in New York.  A series of domestic
gatherings had therefore taken place, at all of
which Vio had worked heroically.  As she had
generally hitherto ignored my family's existence
this graciousness was not without its effect.
Where she did so much for my rehabilitation,
those close to me in blood could hardly do less
than follow her example.

They followed it almost to the letter.  That
is to say, none of them asked me any questions,
presumably wishing to spare both themselves
and me embarrassment.  Once or twice, when I
attempted to speak of my experiences, the
readiest plunged in with some topic that would lead
us away from dangerous ground.  If I yielded
to this it was because speaking of myself at all
was the deliberate exposure of nerves still raw
and quivering.  I could do it, but I couldn't
do it willingly.

Between Minna and myself there had never
been much sympathy, largely because I was of the
dreamy temperament and she of the sharp and
practical.  That I should make beauty a career
in life, and take advantage of the fact that our
father had left me a modest sufficiency to give
my services to a museum of fine arts, shocked
her to the heart.  A man should do a man's
work, she said, not that of an old Miss Nancy.
When I pointed out that many of the manufacturers
in New England, whose work had to do
with textiles, came to me for advice, she replied
that she didn't believe it.  Her attitude now was
that I had done no worse than she had always
foretold and any one might have expected.

Ernestine, to do her justice, was as tolerant of
me as she was of any one who wasn't a flag.  The
Flag having become her idol and she its
high-priestess, she could talk of nothing else.  The
nation had apparently gone to war in order that
the cult of the Flag should be the more firmly
established; and all other matters passed
outside the circle of her consideration.  She knew
I had been dead and had somehow become alive
again; but as the detail didn't call for the
raising of a flag she couldn't give her mind to it.  As
she could give her mind in no greater measure
to Minna's canteen-work or Vio's clothes, I
profited by the generous nature of her exclusions.

For Dan, when I met him, I hardly existed,
but that might have been so in any case, as we
had never been really intimate.  Recently he
had been working with English naval officers
and had taken on their manners and form of
speech.

"Hello, old dear.  Top-hole to see you looking
so fit.  I say, where can I find a barber?
Got a mane on me like a lion."

That was our greeting, and the extent to which
our confidences went.  He sailed for Hampton
Roads without a word as to my adventures.

This he did, I am sure, in a spirit of kindness.
They were all moved by the spirit of kindness, and
the axiom of the less said the better.  I confess
that I was mystified by this forbearance, and a
little hurt.  Though I had been a fool, I had not
been a traitor; yet every one treated me as one.
I should never have spoken of my two years of
aberration of my own accord; yet when all
avoided the subject, as if it opened the
cupboard of the family dishonor, I resented the
implication.

It was Tom Cantley with whom I was most at
ease, perhaps because he was not a blood relation.
A big, genial, boresome fellow, he found me
useful as a listener.  His rambling accounts of the
doings and shortcomings of the War Trade
Board, and what he would have accomplished
there if given a free hand, I pretended to follow,
because it left me free to pursue my own thoughts.
As he never asked for comments on my part,
being content when he could dribble out his own,
the plan worked well.

And yet it was Tom who awakened me to the
true meaning of my situation.  That was on the
day we left Washington, in the station, as Vio
and I were about to take our train.  Vio was
ahead with Minna, when Tom suddenly clutched
me by the arm.

"Say, old sport; what about clubs?  Boston
clubs I mean.  I suppose you're a member of the
Shawmut and the Beacon Hill just as before you
went away.  No action has ever been taken in
the matter as far as I've heard.  But I wouldn't
press the point, if I were you, not for a while yet.
Later ... when everything blows over ... we
can ... we can see."

I nodded speechlessly.  It was the most
significant thing that had been said to me yet.

"Yes," I assented, weakly.  "When everything
blows over we can see."

What I saw at the minute was that if I
attempted to resume my membership in either of
my clubs there would be opposition.  My case
was as grave as that; though why it should be
I hadn't an adequate idea.  Annoyed hitherto,
I became deeply troubled and perplexed.

Nevertheless, when we arrived in Boston
again it was to experience nothing but the same
widespread kindness.  True, it was largely from
relatives or from friends of Vio's as admired her
pluck.  The tragedy of her life being plain, those
who appreciated it were eager to stand by her;
and to stand by her meant courtesy to me.  I
could be invited to a dinner to which I went under
my wife's banner; but I couldn't be admitted
to a club where I should stand on my merit as a
man.  The distinction was galling.

Equally so I found my position with regard
to Colonel Stroud.  He made himself our social
protector, filling in what might be considered
unoccupied ground and defending anything open
to attack.  He did this even in our house.
Without usurping my place as host, he fulfilled those
duties which a companion performs for an invalid
lady, passing the cigars and cigarettes after
dinner, and seeing that our guests had their
favorite liqueurs.  Though our friends came
nominally to lunch or dine with Vio and me, it seemed
in effect to be with Vio and him.  Every one
knew, apparently, that he and she had been on
the eve of a romantic act, which my coming back
had frustrated.  Something was due them,
therefore, in the way of compensation; and
considering what I had done they had the public
sympathy.

That my mind was chiefly on this situation,
however, I cannot truthfully say.  I thought of
it more than incidentally, and yet not so much as
to make it a sole preoccupation.  More engrossing
than anything personal to myself was the
plight of the world and the future immediately
before us.  With the gathering of the Conference
round the table of the Quai d'Orsay, the new
world, of which one of the phases had been war,
was entering on still another phase even more
momentous.  To the mere onlooker, supposing
oneself to be an onlooker and no more, it would
be an exhibition of the grandeur and impotence
of man on a scale of spectacular magnificence.
The January of the armistice will be
remembered as a month of dramatic occurrences
illustrating the yearnings, passions, and fatalities of
the human race with an almost theatrical vividness.
In its very first days the old era sighed
itself out in the death of Theodore Roosevelt,
while on the soil over which the Cæsars had ridden
in their Triumphs, a New World citizen and
President was hailed as the herald of an epoch
altogether new.  Almost at the same moment, blood
was flowing in the streets of Berlin, working up
about the middle of the month to the assassination
of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg.  The
Americans in Paris, having secured on one day
the right of way for their League of Nations, the
antiphon of opposition burst forth from
Washington on the next.

Events like these, and they were many, were
as geysers springing from a caldron in which
the passions and ideals of mankind were seething
incoherently.  The geysers naturally caught the
eye, but if there had been no boiling sea they
would not have spouted up.  More than the
geysers I watched the boiling sea, and that I saw
all around me.

That others didn't see it, or saw it as less
ebullient, made no difference to me, for the reason
that I had been in its depths.  Vio didn't see it;
Wolf didn't see it; Stroud didn't see it.  Of my
family, only Tom Cantley had vague apprehensions
of what he called "labor unrest"; but this
he regarded as no more than a whirlpool in an
ocean relatively smooth.  In Boston generally,
as probably throughout the Union, the issue was
definite and concrete, expressing itself in the
question as to whether America would back a
league of nations or would not.  That was the
burning topic of debate; but to me it seemed like
concentrating on the relative merits of a raft or
a lifeboat when the ship is drifting on the rocks.
That our whole system of labor, pleasure, religion,
finance, and government was in process of
transformation I had many reasons for believing; but
I couldn't speak of that without being scouted
as a Bolshevist, or laughed down as pessimistic.

I mention these circumstances in order that
you may see that nothing personal could be
wholly absorbing.  His exact social status means
little to a man on the deck of a ship that any
minute may go down.  His chief concern is to
save himself and his fellow-passengers, with
natural speculation as to the haven they will find
when the rescued have scrambled to the shore.

Thus, during that month of January, I saw myself
as the victim of circumstances that mattered
less than they might have done had we not been
on the eve of well-nigh universal change.  The
life I was leading with Vio was not satisfactory,
but even that was not permanent.  The thread
of flame, I was convinced, had not led thus far
without meaning to lead me farther still, and I
counted on that to show me the way.  I counted
on that not merely in my own affairs, but in those
of our disintegrating world.  We should not be
impelled to pull down our present house till the
materials were at hand for building up a better
one.  Vio, Wolf, Stroud, and the bulk of the
American people were right in not fearing
disaster, though wrong in not anticipating a radical
shifting of bases.  Their desperate clinging to
worn-out phases of existence might be futile;
but the futility would become apparent in the
ripeness of time.  It was not an aspect of the
case that troubled me.

What did trouble me was Vio's relation to
Stroud.  It troubled me the more for the reason
that in proportion as the vapors cleared from my
intelligence I saw myself with my old rights as
her husband.  The old passion was back with me,
with the old longings and claims, even though she
disregarded them.  According to the judgment
I was beginning to form, she disregarded them
the more for seeing that her efforts to re-establish
me in Boston hadn't been successful.  As
far as she could positively carry me, I went; but
I could cover no ground by myself.  The minute
I was alone, I was let alone, simply, courteously,
but unanimously dropped.  It was the sort of
general action it is useless to reason with or fight
against; and Vio saw it.  There came a day
when I drew the conclusion that she was giving
up the struggle, and that the offer I had meant
to make on the first afternoon of my return would
be accepted if renewed.  I was not sure; she was
not communicative, and the signs were all too
obscure to give me more than a vacillating sense
of guidance.  My general impression was that she
didn't know the way she was taking, while Stroud
was sure of it.  As an adroit player of a game of
which she didn't know the elementary principles,
he was leading her on to a point at which she
would have to acknowledge herself beaten.

This, in the main, I could only stand by and
watch, because I was under a cloud.  It was a
cloud that settled on me heavier and blacker as
January passed and February came in.  The
world-seething had its counterpart in the
seething within myself.  There were days when my
inner anguish was not less frenzied than that of
Germany or Russia, in spite of my outward calm.
I was still following Vio from house to house, with
Stroud as our guide or showman; but the
conviction was growing that I must soon have done
with it.  Not a day nor an hour but seared my
consciousness with the fact that he was the man
whom Vio loved.

"This is not a life," I began to tell myself,
bitterly.  It became my favorite comment.  I made
it when I got up in the morning, and when I went
to bed at night.  I made it when Vio and I
engaged in polite conversation, and when she
informed me of our engagements for the day.  I
made it when I entered other people's drawing-rooms,
and when other people entered ours.  A
life was a reality; a life was work; a life involved
above all what Mildred Averill called production.
When one didn't produce there was no place for
one.  There was no place for me here.  With
Pelly, Bridget, and the Finn I had touched the
genuine, the foundational; in lugging carpets I
had done work of which the usefulness was in no
wise diminished by the fact that any other man
could have done it just as well.  In my room with
the fungi, on my eighteen dollars a week, I had
slept soundly and lived complacently, in harmony
with whatever was basic and elemental.  It began
to dawn in me as a hope that perhaps the windings
of the thread of flame would lead me back to what
was a life, with a new appreciation of its value.

And then one day, when I was on the stairs of
our own house, coming down from the third to the
second story, I saw Lydia Blair standing on the
landing, outside of Vio's door.  Boosey was beside
her, and she was taking a parcel from his hands.

"Hello, kid," she said, nodding in my direction.
"Thought I should see you round here some
day.  Wonder I didn't do it before."  She
addressed Boosey, with another nod toward me.
"He and me were at school together.  Weren't
we?" she continued, with her enchanting smile,
as I reached the lowest step.

"Yes," I managed to gasp, "the school of adversity."

"And a mighty good school, too, for a sport.
Do you know it?"

"But, Lydia," I began, "what in the name of—?"

"Sh-h!  Don't swear," was all she said, as
taking Boosey's parcel she opened Vio's door.
Going in softly she closed it behind her.

Once more Boosey's expression dramatized my
situation.  That the master of the house in which
he exercised his functions—even such a master
as I—should be called "kid" by a girl like Lydia
created a social topsyturvydom defying all his
principles.  For perceptible seconds he stared
in an astonishment mingled with disdain, after
which he turned on his heel to tell the news in the
kitchen.

But I was too puzzled by Lydia's reappearance
to tear myself away.  What had she to do with
Vio?  How did she get the right to go in and
out of Vio's room with this matter-of-course
authority?

In a corner of the hall, beside the window
looking over the Common, was an armchair in which
Vio often sat when taking her breakfast up-stairs
and glancing over her correspondence.  I sank
into it now, and waited.  Sooner or later Lydia
must come out again.

This she did, some twenty minutes later, dainty
and nonchalant.

"Lydia," I cried, springing to my feet, "what
in the name of Heaven are you doing here?"

"You see."

The parcel she had taken from Boosey was now
undone, revealing some three or four pairs of
corsets.  Laying the bundle on the table Vio used
for her breakfast-tray the girl began to roll the
corsets neatly.

There were so many questions I wanted to ask
that I hardly knew where to begin.

"How long have you been coming to—to see my wife?"

"Oh, not so very long, a month perhaps."

"Did you know I was here?"

"Why, sure."

"Is that what brought you?"

She glanced up sidewise from her work, with
one of those glances she alone could fling.

"Well, you *have* got a nerve.  Suppose I said yes?"

"Who—who told you where to find me?"

"Who do you think?"

"Miss Averill?"

"No; it wasn't Miss Averill.  As far as I can
make out little old Milly doesn't give you a second
thought, now that she knows you're in the bosom
of your family."

"Is that true?"

"Why, of course it's true.  Did you want to
think she was pining away?"

"Well, who did tell you?"

"Why should I want any one to tell me?  Ever
since I've been with Clotilde I'm always on the
lookout for new customers.  I get a commission
on every pair."

"But it wasn't for the commission you came to
see Mrs. Harrowby."

"Well, what was it for then?"

"That's what I want you to tell me."

"How much did you tell me when you disappeared
from the Barcelona over two years ago?"

"I told you as much as I could tell any one."

"You didn't tell me your name was Harrowby."

"I didn't know it."

She swung round from her work with the
parcel.  "You didn't—what?"

I tapped my forehead.  "Shell-shock.  I'd—I'd
forgotten who I was."

A flip of her slender hand dismissed this
explanation, as she resumed her task.

"Ah, go on!"  And yet she veered back again,
with a dash of tears in her blue eyes.  "Say, kid,
I know all about it.  You needn't try to put
anything over on me.  I know all about it, and
I'm sorry for you.  That's what I want to say.
Do you remember how I used to tell you I was
your friend, and that Harry Drinkwater was
your friend, too?  Well, we are—even now.
There's something about you we both—we both
kind o' took to.  I don't know what it is, but
it's there.  It was there when I thought you
might be a swell crook; and if I didn't mind
that I don't mind—this.  The only thing I'm
thinking is that you're up against it awful thick;
and so I told Dick Stroud that whoever shook
you the sad hand of farewell I'd be on the spot
as the ministering angel."

There were so many points here that I could
only seize the one lying, as it were, on top.

"So you—you know Dick Stroud?"

She had gone on with her work again.

"*Know* him?  Well, I should say!"

"Have you known him long?"

"Known him ever since ... Say, I'll tell
you when it was.  It was after we all came back
on that ship together, and I was still doing the
stenog act for Boydie Averill, before I got Harry
back on the job again.  Well, one day *that* guy
floated in, towed by little Lulu.  He sure is her
style for fair, or he used to be before he went to
France."

"Did—did Mrs. Averill introduce him to you?"

"He didn't wait for that.  He introduced
himself with a look.  I didn't need a second one
before I'd read him like a headline.  When I
started to go home that evening he was waiting
at the corner to take me in a taxi."

"Did you let him?"

"Sure I let him.  It was a ride.  When he
asked me to dinner at the Blitz I let him do that,
too.  You saw us.  Don't you remember that
nut? that's what you called him afterward."

It came to me, that sleek mass of silver,
distinguished and sinister at once.

"So that was he!"

"That was Dick, sure thing!"

"You call him Dick?"

"What else would I call him when he wants
me to?  But that's giving him away."

"Giving whom away?"

Vio had come out of her room without our
having heard her.  In a tea-gown of black and
gold she stood before us in an almost terrifying
dignity.

That is, it was almost terrifying to me, though
Lydia was equal to the situation.

"Oh, madam, I didn't know you heard.  Mr. Harrowby
was just kidding me about Colonel Stroud."

"Indeed!"  Moving forward with the air of an
astonished queen, Vio seated herself in the
armchair.  "But why should Mr. Harrowby be—what
was the word?—kidding you about anything?"

"Oh, we're old friends.  Ain't we?"  She
turned to me for corroboration.

"Very good old friends," I said, with some warmth.

"Really!  And you never told me."

"Madam never asked me.  She never asked
me if I knew Colonel Stroud, either.  How could
I tell that she wanted to know?"

"Oh, but I don't want to know.  I'm only
interested—" she looked toward me—"that you
and—and this young lady should be so—so
intimate."

"I hope madam doesn't mind."

"Let me see," Vio began to calculate.  "It's
about four or five weeks since Mrs. Mountney
sent you to me."

"And Mrs. Averill had sent me to her.  You
see, madam, I get a commission on every pair,
and so—"

"And so it was a good opportunity to—"

"To improve myself.  Yes, madam."

Vio's brows came together in a frown.  "To
... what?  I don't understand you."

"You see, madam, it's this way.  I've only
taken this corset job to—to get an insight.
I'm not really a saleswoman at all.  I'm an
adventuress."

It was the only moment at which I ever saw
Vio nonplussed.

"Oh, you are!" was all she could find to say.

"Well, not exactly yet; but I'm going to be.
Only, if you're an adventuress you've got to be
a swell adventuress.  There's only one kind, and
it's that.  But you see, madam, I've never had
enough to do with ladies to be the real thing; and
so when Clotilde put me on to this corset stunt,
I thought it 'd give me a chance to study them."

"To study—ladies?"

"Yes, madam.  An adventuress has got to be
that much of a lady that she can put it over on
a duchess or she might just as well stay out of
the business.  Any boob in the movie line would
tell you that."

"You interest me," Vio said, almost beneath
her breath.

"I generally interest people, madam, when I
get a-going.  Colonel Stroud says that if I was
to go in for—"

"That's not what I want to hear.  Tell me if—if
your studies have taught you what you wanted
to know."

Having completed her package, Lydia stood
in the attitude of a neat French maid in a play.

"It's the model, madam.  That's where the
trouble is.  An adventuress has got to be
... well, just so.  Did madam ever see Agnes Dunham
as the Russian Countess in 'The Scarlet Sin'?
Well, she's it, only she's too old.  She must be
thirty-five if she's a day.  I don't know how
many times I didn't go see her; but I couldn't
be that old, and then she talked with a French
accent, so that settled it.  Colonel Stroud said
that if I was ever going to do the thing there was
only one woman in the world—"

"He took a professional interest in you, then?"

"Oh, my, yes; professional and every other
way.  Still does.  Awful kind he can be when
he likes; but when he doesn't like!  My!"

I was sorry for Vio.  With bloodless lips and
strained eyes she sat grasping the arms of her
chair in the effort to keep her self-mastery.  Had
I loved her less I could have been glad of this
minute, because it was giving me what might be
called my revenge.  But I loved her too much.
It was clear to me, too, that I loved her more than
I ever did.  My return had been a shock to her,
and she had made a strenuous effort to be game.
She *was* game.  She had not fallen short of the
most sporting standard, except in matters over
which she had no control.

"Stroud is always like that," I endeavored to
smile, "giving every one a helping hand.  He
mayn't be the wisest old dog in the world, but
no one can say that he isn't kind and faithful."

As it happened I had better have kept quiet.
Vio sat upright, all the force of her anger turned
upon me.

"Has this girl been anything to you?"

"Yes, madam; a mother."

In her endeavor to control herself Vio uttered
a hard pant, eying the girl up and down.

"Oh?  Indeed?  You're young to be ... a mother!"

"Only a little younger than you, madam; and
not half so beautiful.  Madam knows that any
woman worth her salt is mother to any man down
on his luck.  I don't care who he is, or who she is."

"Thank you for the information.  I hope
Mr. Harrowby has appreciated your maternal care."

"Well, he did and he didn't, madam.  Just
when I thought he was going to buck up he—he
cleared out, and I thought he must be dead.
Now, I find that—"

"That he's alive.  If you had come to me I
could have told you that—that clearing out was
his specialty.  You might say he had a genius
for it, if you weren't compelled to call it by
another name."

I took a long stride toward her.

"Vio, do you mean anything by that?"

"What should I mean but—but the fact?
You're a mystery to me, Billy, just as you've
evidently been to—to this young lady.  At the
very minute when we hope, as she so picturesquely
puts it, that you're going to buck up,
you—you clear out.  You must have a marvelous
eye for your opportunities in that respect.
That's why I say it is like genius.  No one who
didn't have a genius for clearing out, still to call
it that, could so neatly have seen his chance at
Bourg-la-Comtesse!"

"Vio!"

I don't know what I was about to do, because
with my own shout ringing in my ears I became
aware that Lydia had caught me by the arm.

"Oh, kid, please don't!"

"Yes; let him."  Vio's face was strained
upward toward me, but otherwise she hadn't moved.
"Men who run away from other men are always
quick to strike women."

My arm fell.  I bent till my face was close to hers.

"When did I ever run away?"

Her hand was thrown out in the imperious
gesture of dismissal I had seen two or three times
already.

"Please, Billy!  We won't go into that.
You'll—you'll spare me."

"Vio, you believe *that*?"

She inclined her head slowly.

"That I was a—a coward—a deserter?"

She inclined her head again.

"And that I—" the whole plan spread itself
out before me—"that I pretended to commit
suicide in order to cover up my tracks?"

Once more she bowed her head relentlessly.

"You *believe* that?"

"Billy, I know it.  Every one knows it.  I've
stood by you right up to now.  But now—" she
rose with a kind of majesty from which I backed
away—"now that you've brought this woman
here, into my house, where I've been fighting
your battles—  Oh, Billy, what kind of a man
are you to have—to have a wife like me?"

I made no attempt to respond to this.  I could
only stand amazed and speechless.  Perhaps a
minute had gone by, perhaps two or three before
I found myself able to say:

"All right, Vio.  Since it's—since it's that way,
and with all the other things—"

But I couldn't go any farther.  There was
another speechless passage of time, during which
we could only stare at each other, regardless of
the white and wide-eyed spectator of the scene.
Turning abruptly, I walked down the long hall
toward the door of my own room.  As I did so
Vio said nothing, but Lydia uttered a little broken
cry.

"Oh, kid, *I* don't believe it; Harry Drinkwater
doesn't believe it either.  Nobody will believe
it when they've had a word with me."

But I didn't thank her.  I didn't so much as
look back.  It was only by degrees that I learned,
too, what the two women said to each other when
I left them alone together.

I was packing in my room when Boosey
brought me a letter.  As letters had for so long
been to me a thing of the past I took it with some
curiosity, recognizing at once the hand of my
friend Pelly.

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: small

DEAR SOAMES,—I suppose I ought to call you Mr. Harrowby
now, but it don't somehow come natural.  Soames
you were to me and Soames you will be till I get used to
the other thing, which I don't think I shall.  I write you
these few lines to let you know that I am well and going
just the same as ever, though I miss our old times together
something fierce.  Would like to know how you are, if you
ever get time to write.  Expect you are having a swell time
with all the gay guys in Boston.  Friends say that Boston
is some sporty town when you get with the inside gang,
which I don't suppose you have any trouble in getting.
Miss Smith has no one yet for your old room, which is all
repapered and fine with a brand-new set of toadstools, real
showy ones.  Mrs. Leeming is sure some artist, and a nice
old girl besides, when she doesn't cry.  Had a very nice
time at Jim's the other night; just a quart between him and
Bridget and me; nothing rough-house, but all as a
gentleman should.  Bridget could come, as his wife was away
burying an uncle at Bing Hampton.  Hope you found your
wife going strong as this leaves mine at present.  Had a
very nice letter from her the other day, and answered it on
the spot telling her to be true to me and may God bring her
and me together again after this long parting.  Now no
more from

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent small white-space-pre-line

   your friend,
      S. PELLY.  Write soon.

.. vspace:: 2

It is impossible to tell you of the glow that
warmed and lighted me on reading these friendly
lines.  They were all the more grateful owing to
the fact that if Pelly believed of me what Vio and
every one else believed, as quite possibly he did,
it would have made no difference.  Of the things
taught me in my contact with the less sophisticated
walks in life, the beauty of a world in which
there is comparatively little judging was the most
comforting.  There were all kinds of jealousies
there, bickerings, sulkings, puerilities, and now
and then a glorious free fight; but condemnation
was rare.  The bruised spirit could be at peace
in this large charity, and in the spaciousness of
its tolerance the humiliated soul could walk with
head erect.  Its ideals and pleasures might be
crude; but they were not pharisaical.

If I had any doubt as to my plans I had none
any longer.  The instinct that urged me back
to the room with the new set of toadstools was
like that of the poor bull baited in the ring to
take refuge amid the dumb, sympathetic herd
of its own kind.  I asked only to be hidden
there, to live and work, or, if necessary, die
obscurely.

Not that I hadn't had a first impulse to try and
clear my name; but the futility of attempting
that was soon apparent.  I had nothing to offer
but my word, and my word had been rejected.
In the course of the two or three hours since the
scene with Vio and Lydia, while I had gone to
the station to secure a berth on a night train for
New York and dined at a hotel, I had come to
the conclusion that the effort to explain would
be folly.  The mere fact that my doings between
Bourg-la-Comtesse and the *Auvergne* were still
blurred in my memory would make any tale I
told incoherent and open to suspicion.  In
addition to that Vio knew, Wolf knew, and others
knew that I had not offered my services to the
Ambulance Corps of my own free will, while my
letters had painted my horror of the sights I
witnessed with no thought of reserve.  My supposed
suicide being ascribed to remorse, the discovery
that I was alive and well and in hiding in New York—

No; the evidence against me was too strong.
The one witness who might say something in my
favor, Doctor Scattlethwaite, had himself not
believed me.  He could say that the claim I was
putting forth now I had put forth two years
previously; but there would be nothing convincing
in that.

Besides, and there was much in the fact, I
wanted to get away, to get back among those who
trusted me, and to whom I felt I belonged.  If
the thread of flame had led me to my old life it
was only to show me once for all that there was
no place for me in it.  Knowing that, I could take
hold of the new life more whole-heartedly and
probably do better work there.  Already new
plans were springing to my mind, plans which I
could the more easily put into operation because
of having some money at my disposal.  Mildred
Averill would help me in that and perhaps I could
help her.  If Vio secured a divorce, and I should
put no obstruction in the way of that—

But Vio herself came into my room with the
calm manner and easy movement which in no
wise surprised me, as she was subject to such
reactions after moments of excitement.

"What are you doing, Billy?"

She seated herself quietly.

A coat being spread before me on the bed, I
folded the sleeves, and doubled the breasts backward.

"I'm packing."

"What for?"

"Because I'm going away."

"When?"

"To-night; in an hour or so."

"Where to?"

"New York first."

"And then?"

"I don't know yet.  Possibly nowhere.  I may
stay in New York.  Probably I shall."

"And not come back here any more?"

"That's my intention."

"What are you doing it for?"

Taking the coat I had folded I laid it in my
suit-case.

"I should think you'd see."

"Is it—is it because of—of what was said this
afternoon?"

"Partly."

"Not altogether?"

Pulling another coat from the closet I spread
it on the bed.

"No; not altogether."

"What else is there?"

"Oh, nothing that you'd be interested in.  I—I
just want to get away."

"From me?"

"Only in the sense that—that you're part of
the whole."

"The whole what?"

"The whole life.  It's not a life for me any more."

She did not deny this or protest against it.
For a minute or more she said nothing, though as
I crossed the room from the bed to the closet for
more clothes I saw in the glass that she furtively
dashed away a tear.  Yesterday I would have
been touched by that; but now that I knew what
she believed of me, what she had been believing
of me during all the weeks since I had come home,
my heart was benumbed.  Besides, if she was
in love with Dick Stroud there was no reason for
my feeling pity.

I had begun on collars and neckties when she said:

"What kind of a girl was that who was here
this afternoon?"

.. _`I had begun on collars and neckties`:

.. figure:: images/img-298.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: I had begun on collars and neckties when Vio said, "What kind of a girl was that who was here this afternoon?"

   I had begun on collars and neckties when Vio said, "What kind of a girl was that who was here this afternoon?"

"You must have seen something of her for
yourself.  I understood from her that she'd been
coming to see you."

"She's been here three times.  Alice Mountney
sent her, and I believe Lulu Averill sent her
to her.  I had no idea that she had anything in
her mind than just to sell this new kind of corset."

"And had she?"

"Didn't she tell you?"

"She didn't tell me.  If she's said anything
to you, I don't know what it can be."

"She's not—she's not crazy, is she?"

"I shouldn't think so.  Why do you ask?"

"Then she's extremely peculiar."

"We're all that in our different ways, aren't we?"

"I don't know now whether to take her seriously
or not."

"What about?"

"About—about—Dick."

I went on with my packing without answering.

"What do *you* think?" she asked, at last.  "I
suppose you have an opinion."

"On what point?"

"The point she brought up ... as to her
knowing him ... so well."

"I've no opinion about that.  I know she
knows him ... very well indeed.  At least,
I take it for granted."

"What makes you do that?"

"Oh, just having seen them together."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Why should I have done that?  Men don't—don't
give each other away."

"Then in his knowing her there was something
to—to give away."

"Evidently."

"Then what about your knowing her yourself?"

"That was different."

"Different?  How?"

Since she was pressing the question I decided
not to spare her.

"I didn't wait for her at a street corner as a
form of introduction."

Expecting the question, "And did he?" I was
surprised that she should make it.  "And would
it be discreet to inquire what your form of
introduction was?"

"I was presented to her in all propriety by a
blind boy named Drinkwater, you heard her
mention him, who was my cabin-mate on the
*Auvergne*.  He and Miss Blair and I, with some
other people, happened to sit at the same table."

"And have you no interest in her besides that?"

"Yes: she's been a very good friend to me.  I
haven't seen her for two years and more; but
that was my fault."

"So I understand."

"What do you mean by that?'

"That if you had no interest in her she had an
interest in you, strong enough to—to impel her
to make my acquaintance."

"With some good end in view, presumably."

"With the end in view of giving me the
information that—that she knew Dick."

"And do you call that taking an interest in me?"

"What do you think yourself?"

Once more I declined to give my impressions.
Where Stroud was concerned I had nothing to
say.  Now that Vio knew something of the truth
concerning him I wished not to influence her in
any way.  The matter seemed oddly far away
from me.  The tie between Vio and myself being
broken in fact, as it soon would be in law, I
preferred to leave the subject of my successor where
it was.

"Why do you say," she began after a brief
pause, "that this is not a life for you any more?"

"Because it isn't."

"But why isn't it?"

"For one reason, because I don't like it."

"Oh!"  She was not expecting this reply and
it displeased her.  "What's the matter with it?"

"For me, everything.  But it's nothing that
you would understand."

"I suppose I could understand if you explained
to me."

"No, you couldn't.  Or, rather, I couldn't.
The language isn't coined that would give me the
words to tell you.  It's not the facts of the life I
dislike; it's the spirit of it."

"Is there anything wrong with the spirit of it?"

"I'm not saying so.  I merely dislike it for
myself.  For me it's not a real life any more.  I
belong to—to simpler people with less complex
ideas."

"Less complex ideas about what?'

"About honor for one thing."  In my goings
and comings round the room I paused in front of
her.  "Among my friends, my real friends, you
can be a coward or a deserter, just as you could
be a murderer or a thief, and no one would pass
judgment upon you."

"And is that ... a virtue?"

"I don't know anything about its being a
virtue; but it is a consolation."

As I stood looking down on her she said, softly:

"Have I passed judgment upon you?"

"You've been a brick, Vio: you've been a
heroine.  The only difference I should note between
you and the people to whom I'm going back is
that you've suppressed your condemnation, and
they didn't feel it."

"Did they ... *know*?"

"I can't tell you what they knew, for the reason
that it wouldn't have mattered.  They knew
there was something wrong with me, that I was
hiding something, that I was probably an outcast
of good family; but they gave me a great, big
affection to live in, and thought no more about
it.  You've given me—"

There was an extraordinarily brilliant flash of
her dark eyes as she lifted them to mine.

"What?" she interjected.  "Have you any
idea of what I've given you?"

"You've given me," I repeated, "the great, big
affection to live in, but with something in it that
poisoned the air.  I'm grateful to you, Vio, more
grateful than I can begin to tell you, especially
as I know now what you've been thinking all the
time; but you can easily understand that I prefer
not to live in an atmosphere laden with—"

"If we purified that, the atmosphere?  What then?"

"It still wouldn't be everything.  When I say
I don't like the life, it isn't just because it's cast
me out; it's because for me—mind you, I'm not
speaking of any one else—it's become vapid and—and
foolish, and—and a throwing away of time."

"And what do you find among the people you—you
call your friends that's more worth while?"

"That's what it's hard to tell you.  I find the
simple and elemental, something basic and fundamental
that the new crisis in existence is telling
us to discover and—and rectify.  You remember
what I said a month or more ago to Stroud, that
our building was collapsing?"

"Yes; and I hoped you were, as people say,
talking through your hat."

"Well, I wasn't.  The building is coming
down, right to the foundations.  Only the
foundations will remain."

"They're awfully crude foundations, aren't they?"

"Exactly.  That's just where the trouble is.
The bases of our life are ugly and unclean, and
so we've turned away and refused to look at them.
I'm going back, Vio, to see what I can do to make
them less ugly, less unclean, and more secure to
build on.  How *can* we erect a society on
foundations that already have the element of decay
in them before we've added the first layer of our
superstructure?"

Rising, she went to a window, leaning against
it as if tired, and looking out into the darkness.

"But what can you do, all by yourself?"

"Very little; but a little is something.  It
isn't altogether the success or the failure that I'm
thinking about; it's the principle."

"Oh, if you're going to live by principles—"

"We've got to live by something.  When the
world is coming down about our heads."

"If it's doing that, one man can't hold it up."

"No; but a good many men may.  I'm not
the only one who's trying."

"I never heard of any one trying it like that
... by going back to the foundational, as you
call it."

"Oh, I think you have.  The Man who more
than any other has helped the human race did
just that thing.  You're strict about going to
church on Sunday."

She was slightly shocked.  "I presume you're
not going to try to be like Him."

"Perhaps not.  I may not aim so high.  I'm
only pointing out the fact that going back to the
foundational and beginning there again was His
method.  Others have followed it, a good many.
All the work connected with what we call Settlements—"

"I never could bear them."

"Possibly; but that isn't the point.  I'm only
saying that in their way settlement workers have
been feeling out the special weakness of our
civilization, and doing their best to meet it.  I
suppose our politicians and clergymen and
economists have been doing the same.  The trouble
with them is that they so generally nip the
symptom while leaving the root of the disease that
they don't accomplish much."

"Did you accomplish much yourself when you were—?"

"I didn't try.  I didn't see what I was there
for.  It's only since coming back here that I've
begun to understand why I was led the way I was."

Half turning round, she said over her shoulder:

"Do you call that being led?"

I replied with a distinctness which I tried to
make significant:

"Yes, Vio; I call it being led.  I didn't see
it till I got back here; and even here I didn't see
it till—till this afternoon.  And now—now I've
done with all this.  I've done with the easy,
gentlemanly life of spending money and being
waited on.  I'm not saying it isn't all right; it's
only not all right for me.  I've got something
else to do.  There was a time, you know it as
well as I do, when a poor man was an offense to
me, and an uncultivated person an abhorrence.
I was a snob from every point of view, and I was
proud of being one.  And now—"

Pulling down the shade and turning completely
round, she stood with her back to the window.

"Yes, Billy?  And now?"

"It's no use.  I can't tell you.  I couldn't
explain if I used up all the words in the dictionary.
It's just a tugging in my heart to get back
where—"  I had a sudden inspiration.  "Read
that," I said, taking Pelly's letter from my pocket.

She stood under the central bunch of electrics
while I closed the suit-case and fastened the
straps.  Having finished the letter, she handed
it back to me.

"Well?" I asked.

"It's just—just a common person's letter, as
far as I see, and rather coarse.  Boosey might
have written it, or Miles, the chauffeur."

"And that's all you see in it?"

"What more is there to see?"

"That's just it.  That's just where the
inexplicable thing lies.  I see, or rather I feel, a
tenderness in it that probably no one could detect
but myself.  Even the reference to drinking—"

"The quart."

"Yes; the quart.  You've got to remember
how small the margin for pleasure is in a life like
Sam's, and how innocently he and Bridget and
Jim can do what they had much better let alone.
They're not vicious; they're only—how shall I
say?—they're only undeveloped.  We're not such
saints ourselves, even with our development; and
when all civilization has bent its efforts, church
and state together, to keep their minds as
primitive as possible so that they'll do the most
primitive kinds of work, you can't blame them if they
take their pleasures and everything else primitively.
We've got to have another educational system."

"But they say our educational system is very
good as it is."

"As far as it goes; but we still have one system
for the rich and another for the poor, and we
shall never get equality of mind till we have
equality of educational opportunity.  But that's
only a detail.  It all hangs together.  As far as
I'm concerned, it sums itself up in the urging that
takes me back among simple people because—because
I love them, Vio; that's the only word
for it, and in their way they've loved me."

She crossed the room aimlessly.

"Other—other people have—have loved you, as
you call it, who—who mayn't have been simple."

"Y-yes.  But—but in the cup they handed to
me there were bitter ingredients.  In the cup
I'm talking of there was only ... love.  It
was a blind, stumbling, awkward, mannish love,
if you like; but it was ... love.  It was the
pure, unadulterated thing, as unconscious of
itself as the air is.  The girl who was here this
afternoon is an example of it.  For anything I
know, she was an idiot to have come; but she
came, poor soul, because she thought—"

"Well, what did she think?"

"That if Dick Stroud were out of the way I
should have a better chance with you."

She was still moving aimlessly about the room,
picking up small objects and putting them down
again.

"She said—she said he'd been tagging around
after her, it's her expression, for nearly three
years."

"To my practically certain knowledge that is so."

"She said, too, that she could marry him if
she liked, but that she didn't want to."

"I don't know anything about that."

"If she went with him at all, she said, it would
probably be ... without marriage, as she
didn't wish to be bound to him."

I looked up in curiosity.

"And did she say there was any possibility of
her going with him at all?"

"I think she did.  That's what made me think
her touched in her mind or crazy.  She said she
hadn't decided, or something like that; but as
she was going to be an adventuress she had to
begin some time, and perhaps it might as well be
with him as with any one else.  She spoke as if
it rested entirely with her to take him or throw
him away."

Again I decided to be cruel.

"It very likely does."

She was standing now by my dressing-table,
and as if my words had meant nothing to her
she said:

"Aren't you going to take your hair-brush?"

"Oh, I was forgetting to put it in.  Thanks."

When I went for it she was holding it in her hand.

"What a queer, cheap-looking thing!  Where
on earth did you get it?"

"I suppose it was at Tours, with the other
things, when—"

"Oh yes!  I remember."  She moved toward
the door.  "Your other brushes, the ebony ones
with the silver initials, that I gave you
before—before we were married, are here.  They were
with the things found on the bank of that—  They
forwarded them to me.  Shouldn't
you—shouldn't you like them?"

"Thanks, no.  This sort of common thing
suits me better."

I was doing the last things about the room.
She was standing with her hand on the knob of
the door, which was half open.

"And when you're back in New York, Billy,
doing that kind of thing you talk about, shall you
be all alone?"

A second's reflection convinced me that it was
best to be clear about everything.

"At first."

"And later?"

I pulled open a drawer from which I knew I
had taken all the contents.

"You mean when we're both ... free?"

"Suppose I put it ... when *you're* free?"

"Oh, then there may be ... some one else."

"Some one ... I know?"

I delved into another drawer, hiding my face.
"Some one you may have heard of; but I don't—I
don't think you know her."

When I had pushed in the drawer I raised
myself; but I was alone in the room.  Ten minutes
later I had left the house without a good-by on
either side.

On the door-step, in my working-man's costume,
and with the everlasting bag and suit-case
in my hands, I looked up at a starry, windy sky,
with the trees of the Common tossing beneath it.

"My God, what an end!" I cried, inwardly.

But, as far as my knowledge or purpose went,
an end it was.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER II03`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER II

.. vspace:: 2

Noble intentions being easier to conceive
than to carry out, it is hardly surprising
that on settling again in New York I found myself
"let down."  The sense of adventure was out of
it, while that of the mission had crept in.  The
old friends were still the old friends; but if my
intercourse with them was not less spontaneous
it was certainly more self-conscious.  Back in my
squint-eyed room, with the new paper and the
more showy set of fungi, the knowledge that I was
there because I chose to be there, and not because
I couldn't help it, marked all my goings and
comings with a point of interrogation.

In some measure, too, it was a point of
disapproval.  That is to say, those who welcomed
me back took me somewhat in the spirit of a
"returned empty."

"Why, yes, of course, if you want it," was Miss
Smith's reply to my request to have my old room
back again; but her intonation was not wholly
that of pleasure.  "We thought, my sister and I,
that your social duties in Boston would restrict
your movements for the future."

I had pricked their little bubble of romance,
and they were disappointed.  That one who had
been their lodger was now with the Olympian
gods was a tale to be told as long as they had a
room to let, and to every one who rented one.
I saw at once that I couldn't ask them to believe
that I had come back of my own free will.  The
very magnitude of my hopes compelled me to be
silent with regard to them.

"Punk!" was Pelly's comment, when I braced
myself to tell him I had found home life
disillusioning.

That was across the table of the familiar eating-house,
as we took our first meal together.  I was
obliged to explain myself for the reason that in
the back of his mind, also, I read the conviction
that I hadn't "made good."  Compelled to be
more primitive than I should have liked, I had to
base my dissatisfaction on the grounds of
physical restriction rather than on those of divine
discontent.

"Some of them Boston women will put the lid
on a man and lock it down," he observed further.
"Punk, I call it.  Well, now that you've broken
loose, and with your wad, I suppose you'll be
givin' yourself a little run."

I allowed him to make this assumption, thankful
that he should understand me from any point
of view; but it was not the point of view of our
former connection.  That a man should be down
on his luck was one thing; but that, having got
on his feet, he should deliberately become a waster
was another.  In any light but that of a reversion
to low tastes I could never have made Sam see my
return to the house in Meeting-House Green.
For low tastes he had the same toleration as for
misdemeanors; but he did not disguise the fact
that for a man who had got his chance he
considered them low tastes.

At Creed & Creed's I received a similar
tempered welcome.

"Sure here's Brogan," Bridget called out to
the other men, on seeing me enter the cavern
where four of them were at the accustomed work
of sweeping a consignment that had just been
unpacked.  Burlap and sheepskins were still
strewn about the floor, so that I had to restrain
the impulse to pick things up and stack them.

Perhaps I can best compare my return to that
of a spirit which has passed to a higher sphere
and chooses to be for a short time re-embodied.
Denis, the Finn, and a small wiry man, a stranger
to me, all drew near to stare solemnly.  My visit
could only be taken as a condescension, not as a
renewed incorporation into the old life.  From
that I had been projected forever by the sheer
fact of not having to earn a living in this humble way.

"Aw, but it's well you're lookin'," Gallivan
said, awesomely.

"And why shouldn't he be lookin' well,"
Bridget demanded, "and him with more butter
than he's got bread to spread it on?"

"It's different with us," the Finn said, bitterly,
"with no butter and not enough bread, and more
mouths to feed than can ever be filled.  I'll bet
you Brogan doesn't think of them, now that he's
got his own belly full."

It seemed to me an opening.

"Well, suppose I did?  Suppose I'd come back
to hand down some of the butter?"

"Aw, cut it out, Brogan," the Finn laughed,
joylessly.  "I was only kiddin' you.  We don't
pass the buck, none of us don't.  What you
got, keep; and if you don't, then the more
fool you."

In Denis's yearning eyes were the only signs
of remote comprehension in the company.

"Sure ye don't have to pass the buck just
because y' ask the saints to pray for ye, do ye?
Pray for us, Brogan.  Ye've got nothing else to do."

It was another opening.

"I wish I had, Denis.  I've found that I don't
know how to loaf.  If you hear of anything—"

He nodded, with beatified aspiration in his
leathery old face.

"Aw, then, if it's that way you feel, the Holy
Mother 'll find ye something, Protestant though
y' are, just as sure as she showed ould Biddy
Murphy, and her a Protestant too, that me
mother knew in Ireland where there was
two-and-sixpence lyin' in the mud, and she with the
rent comin' due the next mornin': This is the
new Brogan," he continued, with a wave of his
hand toward the dark, wiry man, who responded
with a grin.  "He can't talk our talk hardly not at
all, not no more than the monkey I used to tell
you about.  A Pole he calls hisself; but I nivver
heard of no such nation as that till I come to this
country.  We nivver had them in Ireland at
all—at all.  There was Ulster men, and Munster men,
and men from the County Monaghan; but I nivver
heard tell of no Poles.  Do you think they's
have sowls like us?  Or would they be like them
Chinees and Japansey men?"

"For Gawd's sake, here's the Floater," Bridget
warned, softly, and every man got back to his work.

Back at their work they had no time for further
conversation; and in some way, impossible for me
to tell you in words, I felt myself eliminated from
their fellowship.  They would always be friendly;
but the knowledge that I was bone of their bone
and flesh of their flesh, which had once been the
outcome of a common need, was no longer theirs
nor mine.  I could look in at them in this
non-committal way as often as I chose; but I should
never get any farther.

Something of the sort was manifest when I next
met Lydia Blair.  Our standing toward each
other was different.  Little as she had understood
me before, she understood me less in this new rôle
than in any other.

"You sure are the queerest guy I ever met,"
she said, at one time in the course of the evening.
"I sometimes wonder if you're all there."

But that was after I had been foolish enough
to try to make her see my point of view toward
life, and failed.  Before that she had been sympathetic.

Our first conversation had been over the telephone,
when I had called up Clotilde's to ask if
Miss Blair had returned from Boston.

"Miss Blair at the 'phone," was the reply.
"Who's this?"

Somewhat timidly I said I was Mr. Harrowby,
repeating the name twice before she recognized
it as mine.  Having invited her to dine with me
and go to the theater I got a quavering, "Sure!"
which lacked her usual spontaneity.

"You don't seem pleased," I said.

"Oh, I'm pleased enough.  I'm only wondering
if—if you are."

"Why shouldn't I be, when I've asked you?"

"Well, I put my foot in it for fair, didn't I?"

"You mean in Boston?  Oh, that was all right.
I know you meant to do me a good turn; and
perhaps you've done it."

"Oh, I *meant* to; but I sure did get a lesson.
My mother used to tell me to keep my fingers out
of other people's pies; and I'm going to from this
time on."

In the evening, seated opposite me at the little
table at Josephine's, with the din of a hundred
diners giving us a sort of privacy, she told me
more about it.

"You see, it was this way: He'd always been
talking to me about this rich young Boston
widow he'd met at Palm Beach, trying to get my
mad up."

"What did he say of her?"

"Well, the sort of thing he *would* say.  He's
a good judge of a woman, you must admit; and
he thought she was about the classiest.  It was
when I began to tell him what I wanted to be that
he sprang that on me, said she was the model for
me to study, and that when it came to the dressy
vampire Agnes Dunham wasn't in it.

"Did he call this—this Boston lady a dressy
vampire?"

"Oh, he didn't mean that.  It was only that
for any one who wanted to be a dressy vampire
she was a smart style.  A vampire mustn't look
a vampire, or she might as well go out of business.
The one thing I criticized in Agnes Dunham in
'The Scarlet Sin' was that a woman who advertised
herself so much as an adventuress wouldn't
get very far with her adventuring."

"I see.  You'd go in for a finer art."

"I'd go in for pulling the thing off, whatever
it was; but that's not what I want to tell you.
To go back to what he was always saying about
this Boston lady, it made me crazy to see her.
In the corset business I'd got intimate with a good
many society women, and most of them were
gumps.  For one good vampire there were a
hundred with the kick of a boiled potato.  That
made me all the crazier to see, and I thought
about it and thought about it.  Then, one day,
Harry called me on the 'phone to say—  fxsYou see,
he's living with the Averills, and when that
Mrs. Mountney—  Well, when he told me who you
were, and that the lady wasn't a widow any more
than I am, well, I simply laid down and passed
away.  To think that *you*, the fellow we'd been
putting down as a mystery and a swell crook—"

"What did you put me down for then when
you found out?"

"We didn't get a line on it all at once.  That
was later.  Mrs. Mountney told Lulu, and Dick
Stroud told me, and so—"

"Did you all believe what you heard?"

"It was pretty hard not to, wasn't it? after the
queer things you'd been doing.  There was just
one person who stuck it out that it wasn't true;
and that was little Milly.  She didn't say much
to the family; but to me she declared that if all
the armies in France were to swear to it, she'd
still know there was some mistake.  She's another
one I can't make out."

"What can't you make out about her?"

"Whether she's got a heart in her body, or
only a hard-boiled egg."

"Oh, I fancy she has a heart all right."

"I used to fancy the same thing, or rather I
took it for granted; but ever since—  Well, she
just stumps me."

She reverted to her errand in Boston and what
came of it.

"It wasn't till I began to hear of what was
going on there that it seemed to me—" the veil
of tears to which her eyes were liable descended
like a distant mist—"that it seemed to me a
darned shame."

"What seemed to you a darned shame in particular?"

"Well, first that Dick Stroud should be pulling
the wool over any other woman's eyes, especially
a rich one, and then that he should be upsettin'
your apple-cart when you'd had so much trouble
already.  After that it all came easy."

"What came easy?"

"Getting to know Mrs. Harrowby, and all the
rest of it.  The first once or twice I didn't see how
to bring in Dick Stroud's name without seeming
to do it on purpose; but after I met you in the
up-stairs hall, why it was just natural.  Say,
you copped a peach when you got married; do
you know it?"

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I've got eyes in my head; and, say,
she's the one I saw you with that time I told you
about, ever so long ago, and it must have been
in New York.  I suppose some guy had taken
me to a swell restaurant to blow me in for a
dinner; but anyhow she was the one.  The minute
I saw her back I knew there were not two such
*speaking* backs in the world.  As for me modeling
myself on her, well, an old hour-glass pair of stays
might as well try to be Clotilde's Number Three
Coar Pearl.  And, say, she's some sport, isn't
she?  When I told her more about Dick Stroud
and me, after you'd gone away that afternoon,
she never turned a hair.  Mrs. Mountney says
she was going to marry him if you hadn't turned
up, and even now he's hoping to marry her; but
when I let her have the whole bunch of truth, she
took it like a rag doll will take a pin-prick.  Never
moved a muscle, or showed that it wasn't just my
story, and not a bit her own.  Of course I took
my cue from that—it was my line all along—and
was just the poor working-girl telling her life
history to a sympathetic lady, just as they hand it
out in books; but she carried the thing off
something swell.  In fact, she made me more than
half think—"

"What?" I questioned, when she held her idea
suspended there.

"I don't believe I'll tell you.  There are things
a man had better find out for himself; do you
know it?"

"I sha'n't find out anything for myself," I
said, "because—because I've given up the fight."

She stared at me with eyes wide open in
incredulous horror.

"You've given up the fight for a peach like
that!  Well, of all the poor boobs!"  Leaning
back in her chair she scanned my appearance.
"I thought there was something wrong when I
saw you got up like that.  You can beat Walter
Haines, the quick-change man, when it comes to
clothes, believe *me*.  What have you got on now?"

I explained that it had been my Sunday suit
during the time I had been working at Creed &
Creed's.

"Then for Gawd's sake go and take it off, before
we start for the theater.  I'll wait for you
here.  You can go and come in a taxi.  I've been
looking at you all along, and thinking it must be
the latest wrinkle from Boston.  Boston *has*
funny ways, now hasn't it?  And so—"

It was here that I ventured on the exposition
of my new scheme of life, getting no appreciation
beyond the question as to my sanity quoted
above.  Later in the evening as, after the theater,
I drove her back to Miss Flowerdew's in a taxi,
she summed up the situation thus:

"Look-a-here!  I never did take stock in that
bum story of your being a quitter on the
battlefield; but now I sure will if you walk out and
hand the show over to Dick Stroud.  Why, he's
worth two of you!  Look how he sticks!  He'll
get *me* one of these days, just by his sticking, if
I'm not careful; and when it comes to a woman
like that—  Why, I'm ashamed to go round with
such a guy.  And say, the next time you ask me
to dinner, you'll not be got up like the bogie-man
dressed for his wife's funeral.  You'll look like
you did the other day in Boston, or the first time
I saw you, or it will be nix on little Lydia."

Drinkwater's tone was similar and yet different.
It was different in that while his premises
as to "sticking" coincided with Lydia's, his
conclusions were not the same.

Perhaps he was not the same Drinkwater.
More than two years having passed since I had
seen him, I found in him more than two years of
development.  A crude boy when last we had
met, association with a man like Averill,
combined with his own instinct for growth, had made
him something of a man of the world not the less
sympathetic for his honest pug-face and his
blindness.  The fact that he asked me to dine with
him at his university club was an indication of
progress in itself.

He gave me his confidences before I offered
mine, sketching a career in which stenography
figured as no more than the handmaid to a
passion for biological research.  From many of the
details of research he was, of course, precluded by
his blindness; but his methodical habits, his
memory, and his faculty for induction had more than
once put Averill on the track of one thing when
looking for another.  It was thus that they had
discovered the *ophida parotidea* while experimenting
for the germ of the Spanish influenza.
Incidentally, his salary had been creeping upward
in proportion as he made himself more useful.

"And Lydia's been a wonder," he declared,
his face shining.  "Talk about sticking!  The
way that girl's stuck to me in every kind of tight
place!  Always thinking of other people and how
to pull them out of the holes they get into!  In
the Middle Ages she'd have been a saint.  Now
she's just an up-to-date New York girl."

By the time he had finished this rhapsody I
was ready to tell him a part of my own life tale,
on which I found him more responsive than any
one I had met.  As to my mental misfortunes in
France he accepted the narrative without
questioning.  When I came to what I painted as
domestic conditions outlived on both sides he
passed the topic over with the lightness born of
tact.  You see it was an altogether older and
more serious Drinkwater with whom I had to
deal; and yet one not less enthusiastic.

I discovered this when, with much misgiving,
I hinted at the task to which I wished to dedicate
anything left in my life.

"You've got it, old boy," he half shouted,
slapping his leg.  "There are three or four big jobs
through which we white Americans have got to
save our country, and among them the free play
of class-contribution is almost the first.  Say,
these fellows that go jazzing about class welfare
get my goat.  Class co-operation is what we
want; and it's what classes come into existence
to give.  You can't suppress classes, not yet
awhile at any rate, in a country full of inequalities;
but what we can do is to get the classes that
form themselves spontaneously to take their gifts
and pass 'em on to each other.  Each works out
something that another doesn't, and so can
benefit the bunch all round.  Say, Jasper, you'll hit
the nail of one of our biggest national weaknesses
right on the head as soon as you've learned how
to do it."

"Yes, but the learning how to do it is just where
the hitch seems to come in.  I've been in New
York three weeks and I'm just where I was when
I came."

"Say, I'll give you a line on that.  Do you
know how a young fellow in a country town—I
don't know anything about swell places like New
York—becomes a barber?"

I said I didn't, that I had never given a thought
to the subject.

"Well, he doesn't learn, and nobody ever
teaches him.  He just sits round in the barber
shop, brushing hats and hanging up overcoats,
and wishing to the Lord he *was* a barber, and all
of a sudden he *is* one.  He's watched the shaves
and hair-clips, hardly knowing he's been doing it,
but wishing like blazes all the while, and at last
it comes to him like song to a young bird.  Now
you've got to sit round.  Sit tight and sit round.
Wish and watch, and watch and wish, and the
divine urge that turns a youngster into a barber,
because that's what he's got his heart on, will
steer you into the right way.  This isn't going
to be anything you can learn, as you'd learn to
drive a motor or dissect a dead body.  It won't
be a profession, it'll be a *life*, that'll show you the
trick.  Don't try to hurry things, Jasper; and
don't expect that three weeks or three months
or three years are going to make this mum old
world fork you out its secrets.  Just stick, and
if you don't do the thing you're aiming at you'll
do another just as useful.  Why, the doctor was
going to chuck all his experiments on the
influenza bug when I persuaded him to keep at it; and
so he discovered the thing that scientists have
been after since Dockendorff thought he'd tracked
it down as long ago as 1893.  All *sticking*!"





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER III03`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER III

.. vspace:: 2

I confess that I was comforted by these
hearty words, and braced in a determination
that was beginning to splutter out.  Drinkwater's
divine urge was not unlike my own thread of flame
and Denis's Holy Mother, who was a light even
to the feet of Protestants.  It was the same
principle—that of a guide, an impulse, an
illumination, which our own powers could generate when
lifted up to, and associated with, the universal
beneficence.  I decided to take to formula,
"Wish and watch, and watch and wish," as the
device of my knight-errantry.  As a matter of fact,
by the sheer process of wishing I secured a
secondary position for myself in the textile department
of the Metropolitan Museum, while by that of
watching I found that one of Bridget's boys and
two of the Finn's had aptitudes highly worth
developing right along this line.  It wasn't much;
but it was a beginning in the way in which I
hoped to go, and might lead to something more.

In all this time, as you can imagine, Vio was
my ruling thought, and guessing her intentions
my daily occupation.  Since she presumably
wanted a divorce, there were doubtless grounds
on which she could secure one by going the right
way to work; but as to whether she was doing
this or not nothing had yet been said to me.
Nothing was said to me of any kind.  I had not
written to her, nor had she to me; and my other
communication with Boston was only through
my bankers.  Even that was growing more
irregular since I had changed my business address
to Meeting-House Green.

What I was chiefly seeking was forgetfulness.
Lydia had reproached me with being a "poor
boob" in giving up the struggle for Vio's love;
but Lydia hadn't known the wound Vio had
inflicted.  The more I thought of that the more
I felt it due to the dignity of love to attempt
neither explanation nor defense.  On mere
circumstantial evidence Vio had believed me guilty
of the crime she would probably have rated as the
blackest in the calendar.  I couldn't forgive that.
I had no intention of forgiving it.  The more I
loved her the less I could forget that she had
returned my love in this way.  The most
chivalrous thing I could do, the most merciful toward
her, and the most tender was what I was doing.  I
could leave her without a contradiction, so
justifying tacitly whatever she may have thought,
and putting no restraint on her future liberty of
action.

I said so to Mildred Averill when we talked it
over about the middle of March.  I had not
intended to renew this connection unless a sign was
made from the other side; but it was given in the
form of a line from Miss Averill begging me to
come and see her in the apartment she had taken
for herself in Park Avenue, where at last she had
a little home.  Knowing that my duties kept me
at the Museum on week-days she had fixed the
time for a Sunday afternoon.

It will be remembered that we had met in the
previous December, so that I found little change
in her now.  As I had noticed then, she had
grown more spiritual, with an expression of
restfulness and peace.

"That's because I don't struggle so much,"
she explained, in answer to my remark on this
change; "I don't fight so much.  I'm not nearly
the rebel I used to be."

"Does that mean that you've made up your
mind to let things go?"

"No; to let things come.  That's what I
wouldn't do before.  I wanted to hurry them, to
force them, to drag them along.  I begin to see
that life has its own current upward, and that
we succeed best by getting into it and letting
it carry us onward."

"But doesn't that theory tend to take away
one's own initiative?"

"I don't know that initiative is any good if it's
directed the wrong way.  Did you ever watch a
leaf being carried down-stream?  As long as it's
in the current it goes swiftly and safely.  Then
something catches it and throws it into some little
side-pool or backwater, where it goes fretting and
swirling and tearing itself to pieces and never
getting anywhere.  Well, it's something like that.
I was in a side-pool, lashing round and round and
churning my spirit, such as it is, into nervous
irritations of every kind, making myself the more
furious because my efforts were to no purpose."

"And how did you get out into the current again?"

"By wishing, in the first place.  It began to
seem to me such a foolish thing that, being given
all the advantages in the world, I could do
nothing but frustrate them.  I was like a person with
a pack of cards in his hand, not knowing how to
play any game.  I longed to learn one, even the
simplest; and I think it was the idea of the
simplest that saved me."

"I'm not sure that I get that, the simplest."

"Oh, it's nothing abstruse or original.  I
suppose it's no more than the accepted principle of
doing the duty that's nearest.  Hitherto, I'd
felt that nothing was a real duty but what was
far away.  Then I began to see that right under
our own roof—  You see, Boyd and Lulu weren't
very happy, and I'd been leaving them to shift
for themselves while I tried to do things for
people like Lydia Blair and Harry Drinkwater,
and a lot of others who were perfectly well able
to take care of themselves.  So I began to
wonder if I couldn't ... and to wish....  And it's
so curious!  The minute I did that the things I
could do were right there just as if they'd been
staring me in the face for years, and I hadn't had
the eyes to see them."

"What sort of things?"

"Oh, hardly worth naming when it comes to
words.  Not big things, little things.  If Lulu
wanted something she couldn't find in New York,
a particular sort of scarf or piece of music, no
matter what, I'd tell Boyd and he'd send for it;
and, of course, you see!  Or if Lulu said anything
nice about Boyd, which she did now and then, I'd
make it a point of telling him.  That's the sort
of thing, nothing when you come to talk about it,
and yet in practice—  That's what I mean by the
simplest, the easiest, and most natural; and so
I formed a kind of principle."

"Do you mind telling me what it is?"

"Only that, whoever you are, your work is
given you; you don't have to go into the
highways and hedges to look for it.  That queer
boy, Harry Drinkwater, gave me the secret of
it first.  I asked him one day how it was that,
in spite of all his handicaps, he managed to get on
so well.  He said he had only one recipe for
success, which was wishing and watching, and
watching and wishing.  He said there was no
door that wouldn't open to you of its own accord
if you stood before it long enough with that
Sesame in your heart.  I remember his saying, too,
that in the matter of work, desire—desire that's
not wrong, of course—was our first point of
contact with the divine, since the thing that we
urgently wish to do is the thing by which we
re-express the God who has first expressed Himself
in us.  The most important duty, then, is to find
out what we really want, and then to wish and
watch.  Most of us don't know what we want,
or, if we do, we're not clear enough about it, and
so we get lost in confusion, like travelers in a
swamp.  Of course he said it all much more
quaintly than I'm doing it; but that was the gist,
and it helped to put me into the line of thought
in which I've—I've found content."

"That is, you analyzed first what it was you
really wanted to do."

"Exactly; and I discovered two things: first,
that I didn't want anything half so much as to
help—I've told you that before—unless it was
the happiness of the people to whom I was nearest.
I found, too, that if I began at the beginning
and followed the line of least resistance I'd get
farther in the end.  Up to that time I'd begun
in the middle, and so could get neither backward
nor forward, as I used to complain to you."

Having thought this over, I said:

"You're fortunate in having the people to
whom you're nearest close enough to you
for—for daily intercourse and influence."

There was distinct significance in her response.

"Perhaps I'm fortunate in never having turned
my back on them as long as they were in need of
me.  Do you remember how I used to want a
home of my own?  Well, something kept me at
least from *that*.  Whenever I came face to face
with doing what I've felt free to do at last, there
was always a second thought that held me back.
If Boyd and Lulu had had children it would have
been different.  But Lulu didn't want any till—till
lately, and so I felt that something was needed
to ease the grinding of the wheels between them.
I did recognize that.  But now that they've got
the little boy—"

"Got a little boy?" I said, in astonishment.

"Why, yes.  Didn't any one tell you?  Two
weeks old to-day, and such a darling!  One day
he looks like Lulu, and the next like Boyd, and
they're both as happy as two children.  That's
why I've felt free to be my own mistress, to this
extent, at least.  Things do work out, you know,
if you'll only give them half a chance, and stop
fretting.  That's another thing," she smiled; "it
came to me one day in church when they were
reading the Psalms, though I'd often heard the
words before without paying them attention.
'*Fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do
evil*.'  I suppose people worried three thousand years
ago just as we do to-day; and had to be told not
to.  Well, I've tried not to *fret myself*, and I've
got on, oh, so much better."

She was so serene that as I passed my cup for
more tea I ventured on something from which
otherwise I should have shrunk:

"I'm a little surprised that in your analysis of
the things you really wanted you've forgotten
the one most people crave for first."

She took this with her customary simple directness.

"Oh no, I haven't.  It's only that something
seems to have been left out of me that—that I
don't demand it as much as many other women;
and then—it's hard to put into words—the
conviction has come to me that—that whenever I'm
ready for it I shall get it.  I'm not ready for it,
yet."  Her amber eyes rested on me with the
utmost truthfulness.  "It's odd; but I'm not.
The very fact that I don't demand it yet, some
women, you know, are like that, and I suppose
some men, but that very fact shows that it's
wiser not to congest one's life by tackling too
many things at a time.  The one thing I'm growing
certain of is that it all depends on oneself as
to whether or not the windows of heaven are open
to pour us out blessings, and that whatever I
want, within reason, I shall get in the long run."

It was partly this theory of life, and partly
a sense of assurance and relief, that led me on
to talk of my personal situation.  As Drinkwater
had done, she dismissed my mental misfortunes
as incidental, interesting pathologically, but not
morally decisive.  As to my return to New York
after having actually found my way home I felt
obliged to give her some explanation.  It was
while I was doing this that she asked, as if
casually:

"Do you like Colonel Stroud?"

"No," I said, bluntly.  "Do you?"

"I can see that he has a sort of fascination
... for other women."  She nodded, more
thoughtfully, "I don't trust him."

"Neither do I."

"I thought not.  That's what makes me wonder—"

She hesitated so long that I was compelled
to say:

"Wonder, what?"

"Perhaps I had better not go on."

"Please do."

"I only will on condition that you authorize me."

"I authorize you to say anything you choose."

"Well, then, since you *don't* trust him, I
wonder how you could expose any woman to—to his
influence."

"Oh, but I don't.  The—the events all took
place while I was away, and I've no control
over them."

"No control, perhaps; but there are other
things in life besides control."

"I know that; but what things, for instance,
do you mean?"

"Oh, lots of things."  She looked about the
room as if not attaching much importance to
her words.  "Love, for one."

"But in this case love has to be counted out."

"Can you ever count out love?  I thought
that was the one permanent factor in existence,
though the skies were to fall."

"It may be a permanent factor, and yet have
to remain in abeyance."

She laughed.

"Nonsense!  Who ever heard of love remaining
in abeyance?  You might as well talk of fire
remaining in abeyance when it's raging, or water
when it's bursting a dam, or any other element
in active operation.  If I loved any one, no
matter how little, I should want to save them
from a man like Colonel Stroud."

"In spite of the fact that you'd been considered
guilty of—"

"Oh, what does it matter what any one thinks
of so poor a thing as oneself?  I mean that
oneself *to* oneself is so very unimportant."

"Oh, do you think so?"

"Of course I know that there are other points
of view, and that from some of them oneself *to*
oneself is the most vital of all considerations.
But in the detail of what other people think of
one—"

"Even when the other people are those of
whom you think most in all the world?"

"Let us think most of them then.  Don't let
us think most about ourselves."

"Do you suppose I'm thinking most about
myself now?  I assure you I'm not."

She laughed again, not lightly, but rather
pitifully.

"I must leave you to judge of that."





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`CHAPTER IV03`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IV

.. vspace:: 2

I did judge of it, all through that spring,
coming more and more to the conclusion that I
was right.  It was not the only occasion on which
Mildred Averill and I talked the matter over;
but it became at last a subject on which agreeing
to differ seemed our only course.  The time came
when I remembered with an inward blush that
I had once feared that this clear-eyed, well-poised
girl, who had really found herself, might be in love
with me.  What her exact sentiment toward me
was I have never been able to name further than
to put it under the head of a "deep interest."  Had
circumstances been in our favor that interest
might at one time have ripened into something
more; but from that she was saved by the
instinct which told her that, in spite of my
assertions, as to which she nevertheless didn't charge
me with untruth, I was a married man.

One more detail I must add concerning her.

On a Saturday afternoon in early May I had
gone to her to talk over the great news of the day,
that the peace terms had been handed to the
enemy at Versailles.  It must be remembered
that she was the one person, outside my colleagues
in the Museum, with whom I could discuss the
topics nearest to my heart.  With Pelly, Bridget,
the Finn, and even with Miss Smith, I had
friendly arguments as to the League of Nations
and similar matters of public concern; but they
rarely went beyond the catchwords of the newspapers.

"My dear father," Miss Smith would say,
gently, "who was an eminent oculist in his time,
Doctor Smith, you may have heard of him, used
to say that his policy was to keep this country
out of entangling alliances.  That was his
expression, entangling alliances.  I always think of it
when I see foreigners."

"From awl I hear," Bridget informed me, "this
here League o' Nations they make so much talk
about is on'y to help the English to oppress Ireland."

"Will it bring down prices?" the Finn demanded,
if ever I spoke of it with him, and when I
confessed that I couldn't be sure that it would,
he dismissed the theme with, "Then that's all
I want to know."

"Punk, I call it," was Pelly's verdict, "unless
Lloyd George is for it; and whatever he says
goes with me."

This being the scope of my conversations on
the subject it became a special pleasure to air my
opinions with one who, while not always agreeing
with me, took in such matters the same kind of
interest as myself.

We were, therefore, in what is called the thick
of it when a shuffling and laughing were heard
from the hall.  Suspending our remarks to look
up in curiosity we saw Lydia come in leading
Drinkwater.  From the festive note in their
costumes Miss Averill leaped to a conclusion.

"*No!*" she cried, as the two stood giggling
sheepishly before her tea-table.  "You *haven't*?"

"We *have*."

The statement was his.

"I talked him into it," Lydia declared, laughingly.
"He didn't want to, but I was afraid that
if I didn't tie him by the leg he'd fly the coop."

"But," I asked, "what about your great career?"

"Oh, well, I've put that off a bit.  I can always
take it up again.  Anyhow, you never heard
of an adventuress who wasn't married.  She
doesn't have to stay married; but a single woman
who's an adventuress gets nowhere.  The
Russian countess in 'The Scarlet Sin' had been
married twice, first to a professor—that 'd be
Harry—and then to a count.  I can begin looking
forward to the count right now, because Harry
is what you may call a thing of the past."

When they giggled themselves out again, to
go and give the news to some one else, Miss
Averill said, whole-heartedly:

"Well, I'm glad!"

Thinking of Vio and Stroud I asked why.

"Because Lydia is safe for a while anyhow."

"Didn't you think she was safe already?"

"Not wholly.  There was *some one*."

"Some one she liked?"

"No, some one she didn't like.  That was the
funny part of it.  But about four or five months
ago she came to me with so incoherent a tale that
I couldn't make anything out of it.  There was
a man, a gentleman she said he was, who wanted
her to go off with him; and to save some one else
she began to think she ought to do it.  I really
can't tell you what it was, because I couldn't get
it straight; only there was a wild, foolish, lovely
idea of self-sacrifice in it, and now it's over.  *He*
won't get her; and if ever any one deserved an
exquisite thing like her it's Harry Drinkwater.
He can't see how pretty she is, of course; but he
gets the essence of beauty that is more than
physical."

We dropped the terms of peace and the League
of Nations and frankly discussed love.  I had
already told her that for me, notwithstanding all
the conditions, there was no woman in the world
but Vio.

"And for me," she laughed, "there's—there's
Lohengrin."  My expression must have betrayed
my curiosity, because she went on: "Haven't I
told you that it's all a matter for ourselves
whether the blessings of existence are ours or not;
and what blessing is greater than a good husband
when one wants one?  When Elsa was in need
of a defender she went down on her knees, a
method of expressing her point of view, and he
came right out of the clouds.  There's always a
Lohengrin for every woman born, and there's
always an Elsa for every man, and whether or
not they find each other largely rests on their
understanding of the source from which Elsas
and Lohengrins come."

"And you're sure of your own Lohengrin?"

She answered with a laughing air of challenge:

"Perfectly.  Whenever I give the right call
I know he'll be on the way."

But this optimism didn't weigh with me.
Knowing all I did of love and life, the simple
performance of simple tasks began to seem to me
the most satisfying food for men.  From nearly
all of those whom I have quoted I made the
synthetic gleaning of bees in a garden of flowers,
building my own little cell for my soul and storing it.

I needed such a cell.  As May passed and June
came in there was much in the trend of public
life to make those, who had yearned and hoped
and looked forward, cynical.  The splendid
spiritual freedom for which people had given their
efforts and their sons was plainly not to be
achieved.  If the human race had moved higher
it was not directly apparent at Versailles or
anywhere else in the world; while in America, the
home of the ideal, the land in which so many of
the heart-stirring watchwords had been coined,
passion, selfishness, distortion, extortion, and
contortion were the chief signs of the new times.
North of us Canada, hitherto so tranquilly
industrious, was threatened with internal
convulsion; south of us Mexico, which some of us
had hoped was pacified, was prey to new distress.
For me, to keep my sanity amid all this conflict
of forces, a little secret temple of my own became
a necessity, and to it I retired.

It wasn't much.  Having built my shrine with
what I had harvested from Drinkwater, Lydia,
Mildred Averill, and the rest, I hid myself
there with some half-dozen disciples.  They
were Bridget's boy, the Finn's two sons, and
three or four of their chums whom they had
brought in.  Not only did their young affection
give me something I sorely needed in my inner
life, but I had the hope that, building on them,
I was doing something for the future.  Grown
men and women were beyond my endeavors.
These fresh souls, with their nearness to God,
understood my faltering speech, which fell so
far short of the ideas I was trying to interpret.

They were simple ideas, connected with
practical beauty.  That is, with the Museum as what
we called our clubhouse, all man's treasures of
material creative art were ours.  These we were
taking in their order, beginning with my own
specialty of all things woven, from the crudest
specimens of ancient linens up to the splendors
of the tapestries, and going on to kindred and
allied crafts.  Not only art was involved in this,
but history, biography, travel, romance, and
everything else that adds drama to human
accomplishment.  To me, with the big void in my
life, it was the most nearly satisfying thing I knew
to reveal to these eager little minds something of
the wonders with which the world was full; to
them, with their ugly homes, cramped outlooks,
and misshapen hopes, it was, I fancy, much what
the marvels of the next world will be to those
accustomed to the dwarfed conceptions of this.

Saturday afternoons were the days of our
reunions, and we came to the last in June.  It was
a fatal day, the 28th, marking the fifth
anniversary of the tragedy through which the new
world began to dissociate itself forever from the
old.  As contemporary history was a large part
of our interest, with the development of man's
efforts stage by stage, the occasion naturally
came in for comment.

On that particular day we were in the great
room, which, as far as I know, has no rival in any
other museum in the world, where the whole
history of ceramic art is visually unfolded in order
from the crude, strong products of the Han, Tang,
and Sung dynasties in China, up through the
manifold efflorescence of European art to such
American works as that of Bennington, Cincinnati,
and Dedham, which may be the forerunner
of a new departure.

We had come to that section of the room where
were displayed the first representative pieces
brought back from the East by merchants and
ambassadors, and so voyages of discovery were
in order.  Marco Polo, Vasco da Gama and the
Dutch, English, and Portuguese explorers had
been discussed, and I was in the act of giving to
my boys the story of the origin of delftware as
an attempt to reproduce in abundance what the
Oriental traders brought over only in small
quantities.  The specimens of delft being on shelves
but little above the floor, I was crouched in a
half-sitting position, with the lads hanging over my
shoulders.  Not till I had finished this part of my
exposition did I rise, to find on turning that a lady
was looking on.

Recognition on my part lagged behind amazement.
Tall, slender, distinguished, dressed in
black, and somewhat thickly veiled for a day in
June, it was the sort of apparition to make a man
doubt the accuracy of his senses.  Before my
lips could frame a word she held out something
toward me, saying simply:

"Billy, I came to bring you this."

The boys fell back, knowing by instinct that
the moment was one of dramatic significance to
me and looking on overawed.

What I had in my hand I saw at once to be
nothing but a copy of one of the New York papers
that appear in the afternoon.  That it contained
some announcement affecting me went without
saying, and a half-dozen terrors crowded into my
mind at once.  Without my knowing it she might
have got a divorce; she might have got a divorce
and remarried; she might have lost her money;
I might have lost mine; some one near to us
might be dead.

I held the paper stupidly, staring at her through
the veil, and opening the journal without seeing
it.  When my eyes fell on the first page it was
entirely a white blankness, except for a single
word in enormous letters:

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: center large bold

   PEACE!

.. vspace:: 2

My eyes lifted themselves to hers; fell to that
one word again; lifted themselves to hers once
more.  She stood impassive, motionless, waiting.

"So—so they've signed it," was all I could find
to stammer out.

"Yes; they've signed it.  I—I thought you
might like to know."

"Of course."  Further than this superficial
fact, I was too dazed to go; but I knew I must get
rid of the boys.  Turning to Patsy Bridget, I
said, "Patsy, could you take the other boys home
and see them safely to their doors?"

"Sure!" Patsy answered, with the confidence
of fifteen.

"Aw, we don't want no one to take us home,"
the elder of the Finn's boys protested.  "Me and
me kid bruvver go all over N'York.  Don't we,
Broncho?"

Another lad spoke up.

"I come from me aunt's house in Harlem right
down to East Thirty-fourth Street all by meself
and me little sister."

It was Vio who arranged the matter to every
one's satisfaction.  With her right hand on one
boy's shoulder and her left on another's she said,
in a tone of quiet authority:

"You see, this is the way it is: The war is over
at last.  They've just signed the peace treaty,
and I've come to tell Mr. Harrowby.  But now
that we've got peace we've got to go on fighting,
only fighting in a better way and for better things.
Now, you're a little army, with Mr. Harrowby as
your commander-in-chief, like Marshal Foch.
But under him you're all officers, according to
your ages.  Patsy is the general, and you're the
colonel," she continued to the elder Finn boy.

"Aw, no, he's not, miss," one of the other lads
declared, tearfully.  "I'm older'n him.  He's only
twelve goin' on thirteen, and I'm thirteen goin'
on fourteen."

This, too, was adjusted, and with a dollar from
Vio for ice-cream sodas, the general traped out,
followed by colonel, major, captain, and
lieutenants, each keeping to his rank by marching in
Indian file.  I had never before seen Vio in this
light, and something new and human that had
not entered into our previous relations suddenly
was there.

Left alone with her, I was in too great a tumult
of excitement to find words for the opportunity.

"How did you know where to find me?" was
the question I asked, stupidly.

"Miss Averill told me.  She said you'd be here
with your boys, and she thought you'd told her
you'd be doing this particular subject.  I went
through some of the other rooms first."

"I didn't know you knew her."

"I didn't till—till lately.  I was interested
in making her acquaintance because of things
Alice Mountney said, and you said."

"What did I say?"

"Oh, nothing of much importance, except for
showing me that—that—she was the one."

"What one?"

"The one you spoke of ... the ... the last
evening.  That's ... that's what made me come
to New York, Billy, to see if I could do anything
... to ... to help out."

"To help out how?"

"Oh, Billy, don't make yourself dull.  You
know that nothing can be done unless I, or you,
or one of us, should take the first step."

I asked, with a casual intonation:

"How's Stroud?"

Fire flashed right through the thickness of
the veil, but she answered in the tone I had
taken:

"I don't know.  I haven't seen him since—since
that girl—"

"She's married."

"Oh, is she?  I hope it's to some one—"

"It's to some one as true-blue as she."

"She is true-blue, Billy.  I see that now.
She—she must be to have wanted to do what she
did for ... a woman like me, who—"

She took a step or two toward one of the cases,
where she pretended to examine the luster of a
great Moorish plaque.

"She's an erratic little thing," I said, finding
it easier to talk of a third person rather than of
ourselves, "all pluck, and high spirit, and good
heart, harum-scarum, and yet a great deal wiser
than you'd think."

She turned round from the plaque without
coming nearer to me.

"I just want to say that the things she told me,
the things she pretended to betray, were things
I knew more or less already.  I'd been coming
to the same conclusions for myself, only I hadn't
quite reached them....  And then you came
back, and everything was so strange ... after
I'd been in mourning for you ... and given
those prints as a memorial in your name!  I
wish—"  I detected something like a sob—"I
wish you could make some allowances for me, Billy."

The minute was a hard one for me, but I stood
my ground:

"I make all allowances, Vio; I've no hard
feelings whatever."

She advanced toward me by a pace.

"Then will you do this for me?  If I can find
a way to—to give you your liberty will you—will
you marry Mildred Averill, and—and be happy?"

Though my heart was going wild I know my
eyes must have been cold as I said:

"I can't promise you that, Vio, for a double
reason.  First, I'm not in love with her; and
then she's not in love with me."

"Oh, but I thought she was.  Everybody says so."

"Who's everybody?"

"Well—well, Alice Mountney."

"I can see how Alice Mountney might make
that mistake; but it is a mistake, Vio, and please
let my saying so convince you.  I'll be quite
frank with you and say that I thought so once
myself.  I'll even go so far as to say that at one
time, if everything had been different, it might
have happened.  But—but everything was as
it was, and so—  Well, the long and short of it is
that there's nothing in it, and I must beg you to
take that as decisive."

"Then—then, who is it?"

"No one.  I've found my work, a very
humble work, as you've just seen."

"A very fine and useful work."

"I hope so; and I'm not—not unhappy,
specially."

She moved along the line of cases, as if
carelessly examining the contents.

"What's that?" she asked, coming to a pause.

Obliged to go close to her, I was careful not
to touch so much as the surface of her clothes.

"It's just a cup and saucer, Ludwigsburg, an
old Rhine valley factory now extinct.  They
liked those little fancy scenes."

"It seems to be a woman pleading with a man,
doesn't it?"

"It looks like that.  It probably means nothing
beyond a bit of decoration."

"And he seems so implacable, while she's down
on her knees, poor thing!"  She looked round at
me.  "Are you busy here still?"

"Oh, there are always things to do.  Why?"

"I thought you might walk back to—to the
hotel with me."

I took out my watch, though unable to read
the time even when I looked at it.

"I'm so sorry, but I'm afraid—"

"Oh no, you're not."  There was a repetition
of the catch in the tone that suggested a sob.
"Billy, aren't we—aren't we going to be friends?"

I couldn't soften toward her.  I felt no springs
of forgiveness.

"Why should you want to be friends with me?"

"Because I can't help it, for one thing," she
cried; "and for another—"  Turning away
wearily she began to move toward the door.
"Of course if you don't want to, I can't urge it,
and so must learn to get along by myself."

Something in the last phrase prompted me to say:

"Is there anything specially wrong?"

"No; only everything specially wrong.  If
you had come back to the hotel with me I could
have told you."

"Can't you tell me now?  Is it about—about Stroud?"

"Oh no, Billy.  Can't you forget about that?
I have.  He's dropped out of my existence.
That was all a mistake, like the other things."

"What other things?"

"All the other things."  She pointed to the
big word "PEACE" staring at us from a chair
to which I had thrown the newspaper.  "Look at
that.  Doesn't it make all the last five years seem
unreal, like a nightmare after you've got up?
Well, that's the way I feel now ... about
... about—"

"About me?"

"Of course.  I never should have thought it
at all, only that Wolf and Dick Stroud, and even
the military authorities—  But at heart I *didn't*
believe them—"

"Do you mean that—?"

She nodded without waiting for me to finish
the question.

"But I want it very plainly, Vio."

"I'll tell you as plainly as you like, Billy,
but—but not now.  I'm too worried."

"But what about?  Is it—?"

"Oh, everything!" she burst out, desperately.
"Money for one thing.  Didn't you see how
shabby the house was, and run down?"  The
sobs began to come freely now, and without
restraint.  "And—and Lulu Averill has a little
boy, a perfect darling, and our little Bobby—"

"I'll go back with you to the hotel," I said,
quietly, "only, don't—don't cry here, with people
coming in and out."

She dried her eyes, drew down her veil, and
took her sunshade from a corner.  Picking up
the paper she had brought, I folded it and slipped
it into my pocket.  I began to wonder if it might
not prove a souvenir.

On the way to the main exit we passed through
a corridor lined with cases of old silver.

"Do you think your boys would like a day
with those things?" she asked, with the slight
convulsion of her throat that a child has after tears.

"I'm sure they would."

"I could—I could take them, some day, when
you didn't want to go, if you'd let me.  It's one
of the few things I know something about."

"I'm afraid it would bore you."

She paused for just an instant.  "Bore me?
Billy, nothing will ever bore me again so long as
you—you let me—"

As she could say no more we resumed our walk.

Out in the open a boy rushed up to us, a Slavic
creature with huge questioning eyes.

"Peace, mister!  Peace, miss!  Buy one!  Great
historic 'casion!"

They were like doves, all up and down the
avenue, white, fluttering, bearing the one blessed,
magical word.  They were in motor-cars,
carriages, and on the tops of omnibuses—all white,
all fluttering, all blessed, and all magical.  Up
and down and everywhere the cry burst from
hundreds of raucous little throats:

"Peace!  *Peace*!  PEACE!"

"It's like coming out into a new world, isn't
it?" I said.

"It *is* a new world, for me.  Do you remember
saying that day when you first came home
that the new world made the war?  Now it's
made something else, in which it seems to me
there'll be just as much struggle called for, only
with a difference.  Then the hard things were
done to break us down; now they may be just
as hard, only they'll be to build us up.  The
East isn't farther from the West, is it, than these
two motives?  I've never wanted to build up
anything in my life; but now I feel as if—"

Once more we walked silently among the doves,
listening to that throaty, lusty cry that was sheer
music:

"Peace!  *Peace*!  PEACE!"

We had come to that avenue in the park sacred
to little boys and girls, when she said:

"He's a darling, Lulu Averill's baby; and
they—quite understand each other—now."

This second reference prompted me to give
her a long sidewise look, but she did not return it.

"Perhaps—" I ventured.

"Oh, Billy!"

It was barely a sigh, but for the minute it was
enough for me, as she pressed forward, with
veiled profile set, like one gazing into the future.

.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center medium

   THE END

.. vspace:: 6

.. pgfooter::