Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: I could feel the sting of the powder smoke on my
up-thrust wrist.]
The Man
Who Couldn't Sleep
By ARTHUR STRINGER
AUTHOR OF
"The Prairie Wife," Etc.
With Frontispiece
By FRANK SNAPP
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers -------- New York
Published by arrangement with BOBBS MERRILL COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1919
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
_Printed in the United States of America_
To Harvey, of the dome-like pate,
The dreamy eye, the Celtic wit
And kindly heart, I dedicate
This blithe romance conceived and writ
By one of that triumvirate
Who knew Defeat, yet conquered it.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I Running Out of Pay-Dirt
II The Ox-Blood Vase
III The Stolen Wheel-Code
IV The Open Door
V The Man from Medicine Hat
VI The Irreproachable Butler
VII The Panama Gold Chests
VIII The Dummy-Chucker
IX A Rialto Rain-Storm
X The Thumb-Tap Clue
XI The Nile-Green Roadster
The Man Who Couldn't Sleep
CHAPTER I
RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT
To begin with, I am a Canadian by birth, and thirty-three years old.
For nine of those years I have lived in New York. And by my friends in
that city I am regarded as a successful author.
There was a time when I even regarded myself in much the same light.
But that period is past. I now have to face the fact that I am a
failure. For when a man is no longer able to write he naturally can no
longer be reckoned as an author.
I have made the name of Witter Kerfoot too well known, I think, to
explain that practically all of my stories have been written about
Alaska. Just why I resorted to that far-off country for my settings is
still more or less a mystery to me. Perhaps it was merely because of
its far-offness. Perhaps it was because the editors remembered that I
came from the land of the beaver and sagely concluded that a Canadian
would be most at home in writing about the Frozen North. At any rate,
when I romanced about the Yukon and its ice-bound trails they bought my
stories, and asked for more.
And I gave them more. I gave them blood-red fiction about gun-men and
claim-jumpers and Siwash queens and salmon fisheries. I gave them
supermen of iron, fighting against cold and hunger, and snarling,
always snarling, at their foes. I gave them oratorical young engineers
with clear-cut features and sinews of steel, battling against the
forces of hyperborean evil. I gave them fist-fights that caused my
books to be discreetly shut out of school-libraries yet brought in
telegrams from motion-picture directors for first rights. I gave them
enough gun-play to shoot Chilcoot Pass into the middle of the Pacific,
and was publicly denominated as the apostle of the Eye-Socket School,
and during the three-hundred-night run of my melodrama, _The Pole
Raiders_, even beheld on the Broadway sign-boards an extraordinarily
stalwart picture of myself in a rakish Stetson and a flannel shirt very
much open at the throat, with a cow-hide holster depending from my
Herculean waist-line and a very dreadful-looking six-shooter protruding
from the open top of that belted holster. My publishers spoke of me,
for business reasons, as the Interpreter of the Great Northwest. And I
exploited that territory with the industry of a badger. In my own way,
I mined Alaska. And it brought me in a very respectable amount of
pay-dirt.
But I knew nothing about Alaska, I had never even seen the country. I
"crammed up" on it, of course, the same as we used to cram up for a
third-form examination in Latin grammar. I perused the atlases and
sent for governmental reports, and pored over the R.N.W.M.P. Blue
Books, and gleaned a hundred or so French-Canadian names for half-breed
villains from a telephone-directory for the city of Montreal. But I
knew no more about Alaska than a Fiji Islander knows about the New York
Stock Exchange. And that was why I could romance so freely, so
magnificently, about it!
I was equally prodigal of blood, I suppose, because I had never seen
the real thing flow--except in the case of my little niece, when her
tonsils had been removed and a very soft-spoken nurse had helped me out
of the surgery and given me a drink of ice-water, after telling me it
would be best to keep my head as low as possible until I was feeling
better. As for firearms, I abhorred them. I never shot off an
air-rifle without first shutting my eyes. I never picked up a duck-gun
without a wince of aversion. So I was able to do wonderful things with
firearms, on paper. And with the Frozen Yukon and firearms combined, I
was able to work miracles. I gave a whole continent goose-flesh, so
many times a season. And the continent seemed to enjoy it, for those
airy essays in iron and gore were always paid for, and paid for at
higher and higher rates.
While this was taking place, something even more important was taking
place, something which finally brought me in touch with Mary Lockwood
herself. It was accident more than anything else, I think, that first
launched me in what is so indefinitely and often so disparagingly known
as society. Society, as a rule, admits only the lions of my calling
across its sacred portals. And even these lions, I found, were
accepted under protest or the wing of some commendable effort for
charity, and having roared their little hour, were let pass quietly out
to oblivion again. But I had been lucky enough to bring letters to the
Peytons and to the Gruger-Philmores, and these old families, I will be
honest enough to confess, had been foolish enough to like me.
So from the first I did my best to live up to those earlier
affiliations. I found myself passed on, from one mysteriously
barricaded seclusion to the other. The tea-hour visit merged into the
formal dinner, and the formal dinner into the even more formal box at
the Horse-Show, and then a call to fill up a niche at the Metropolitan
on a Caruso-night, or a vacancy for an Assembly Dance at Sherry's, or a
week at Tuxedo, in winter, when the skating was good.
I worked hard to keep up my end of the game. But I was an impostor, of
course, all along the line. I soon saw that I had to prove more than
acceptable; I had also to prove _dependable_. That I was a writer
meant nothing whatever to those people. They had scant patience with
the long-haired genius type. That went down only with musicians. So I
soon learned to keep my bangs clipped, my trousers creased, and my
necktie inside my coat-lapels. I also learned to use my wits, and how
to key my talk up to dowager or down to debutante, and how to be
passably amusing even before the champagne course had arrived. I made
it a point to remember engagements and anniversaries, and more than
once sent flowers and Millairds, which I went hungry to pay for. Even
my _pourboires_ to butlers and footmen and maids stood a matter, in
those earlier days, for much secret and sedulous consideration.
But, as I have said, I tried to keep up my end. I _liked_ those large
and orderly houses. I liked the quiet-mannered people who lived in
them. I liked looking at life with their hill-top unconcern for
trivialities. I grew rather contemptuous of my humbler fellow-workers
who haunted the neighborhood theaters and the red-inkeries of Greenwich
Village, and orated Socialism and blank-verse poems to garret
audiences, and wore window-curtain cravats and celluloid blinkers with
big round lenses, and went in joyous and caramel-eating groups to the
"rush" seats at _Rigoletto_. I was accepted, as I have already tried
to explain, as an impecunious but dependable young bachelor. And I
suppose I could have kept on at that role, year after year, until I
developed into a foppish and somewhat threadbare old _beau_. But about
this time I was giving North America its first spasms of goose-flesh
with my demigod type of Gibsonian engineer who fought the villain until
his flannel shirt was in rags and then shook his fist in Nature's face
when she dogged him with the Eternal Cold. And there was money in
writing for flat-dwellers about that Eternal Cold, and about battling
claw to claw and fang to fang, and about eye-sockets without any eyes
in them. My income gathered like a snow-ball. And as it gathered I
began to feel that I ought to have an establishment--not a back-room
studio in Washington Square, nor a garret in the Village of the
Free-Versers, nor a mere apartment in the West Sixties, nor even a
duplex overlooking Central Park South. I wanted to be something more
than a number. I wanted a house, a house of my own, and a cat-footed
butler to put a hickory-log on the fire, and a full set of _Sevres_ on
my mahogany sideboard, and something to stretch a strip of red carpet
across when the landaulets and the limousines rolled up to my door.
So I took a nine-year lease of the Whighams' house in Gramercy Square.
It was old-fashioned and sedate and unpretentious to the passing eye,
but beneath that somewhat somber shell nested an amazingly rich kernel
of luxuriousness. It was good form; it was unbelievably comfortable,
and it was not what the climber clutches for. The cost of even a
nine-year claim on it rather took my breath away, but the thought of
Alaska always served to stiffen up my courage.
It was necessary to think a good deal about Alaska in those days, for
after I had acquired my house I also had to acquire a man to run it,
and then a couple of other people to help the man who helped me, and
then a town car to take me back and forth from it, and then a chauffeur
to take care of the car, and then the service-clothes for the
chauffeur, and the thousand and one unlooked for things, in short,
which confront the pin-feather householder and keep him from feeling
too much a lord of creation.
Yet in Benson, my butler, I undoubtedly found a gem of the first water.
He moved about as silent as a panther, yet as watchful as an eagle. He
could be ubiquitous and self-obliterating at one and the same time. He
was meekness incarnate, and yet he could coerce me into a predetermined
line of conduct as inexorably as steel rails lead a street-car along
its predestined line of traffic. He was, in fact, much more than a
butler. He was a valet and a _chef de cuisine_ and a
lord-high-chamberlain and a purchasing-agent and a body-guard and a
benignant-eyed old godfather all in one. The man _babied_ me. I could
see that all along. But I was already an overworked and slightly
neurasthenic specimen, even in those days, and I was glad enough to
have that masked and silent Efficiency always at my elbow. There were
times, too, when his activities merged into those of a trained nurse,
for when I smoked too much he hid away my cigars, and when I worked too
hard he impersonally remembered what morning horseback riding in the
park had done for a former master of his. And when I drifted into the
use of chloral hydrate, to make me sleep, that dangerous little bottle
had the habit of disappearing, mysteriously and inexplicably
disappearing, from its allotted place in my bathroom cabinet.
There was just one thing in which Benson disappointed me. That was in
his stubborn and unreasonable aversion to Latreille, my French
chauffeur. For Latreille was as efficient, in his way, as Benson
himself. He understood his car, he understood the traffic rules, and
he understood what I wanted of him. Latreille was, after a manner of
speaking, a find of my own. Dining one night at the Peytons', I had
met the Commissioner of Police, who had given me a card to stroll
through Headquarters and inspect the machinery of the law. I had
happened on Latreille as he was being measured and "mugged" in the
Identification Bureau, with those odd-looking Bertillon forceps taking
his cranial measurements. The intelligence of the man interested me;
the inalienable look of respectability in his face convinced me, as a
student of human nature, that he was not meant for any such fate or any
such environment. And when I looked into his case I found that
instinct had not been amiss. The unfortunate fellow had been "framed"
for a car-theft of which he was entirely innocent. He explained all
this to me, in fact, with tears in his eyes. And circumstances, when I
looked into them, bore out his statements. So I visited the
Commissioner, and was passed on to the Probation Officers, from whom I
caromed off to the Assistant District-Attorney, who in turn delegated
me to another official, who was cynical enough to suggest that the
prisoner might possibly be released if I was willing to go to the
extent of bonding him. This I very promptly did, for I was now
determined to see poor Latreille once more a free man.
Latreille showed his appreciation of my efforts by saving me seven
hundred dollars when I bought my town car--though candor compels me to
admit that I later discovered it to be a used car rehabilitated, and
not a product fresh from the factory, as I had anticipated. But
Latreille was proud of that car, and proud of his position, and I was
proud of having a French chauffeur, though my ardor was dampened a
little later on, when I discovered that Latreille, instead of hailing
from the _Bois de Boulogne_ and the _Avenue de la Paix_, originated in
the slightly less splendid suburbs of Three Rivers, up on the St.
Lawrence.
But my interest in Latreille about this time became quite subsidiary,
for something much more important than cars happened to me. I fell in
love. I fell in love with Mary Lockwood, head-over-heels in love with
a girl who could have thrown a town car into the Hudson every other
week and never have missed it. She was beautiful; she was wonderful;
but she was dishearteningly wealthy. With all those odious riches of
hers, however, she was a terribly honest and above-board girl, a
healthy-bodied, clear-eyed, practical-minded, normal-living New York
girl who in her twenty-two active years of existence had seen enough of
the world to know what was veneer and what was solid, and had seen
enough of men to demand mental camaraderie and not "squaw-talk" from
them.
I first saw her at the Volpi sale, in the American Art Galleries, where
we chanced to bid against each other for an old Italian table-cover, a
sixteenth-century blue velvet embroidered with gold galloon. Mary bid
me down, of course. I lost my table-cover, and with it I lost my
heart. When I met her at the Obden-Belponts, a week later, she
confessed that I'd rather been on her conscience. She generously
offered to hand over that oblong of old velvet, if I still happened to
be grieving over its loss. But I told her that all I asked for was a
chance to see it occasionally. And occasionally I went to see it. I
also saw its owner, who became more wonderful to me, week by week.
Then I lost my head over her. That _apheresis_ was so complete that I
told Mary what had happened, and asked her to marry me.
Mary was very practical about it all. She said she liked me, liked me
a lot. But there were other things to be considered. We would have to
wait. I had my work to do--and she wanted it to be _big_ work,
gloriously big work. She wouldn't even consent to a formal engagement.
But we had an "understanding." I was sent back to my work, drunk with
the memory of her surrendering lips warm on mine, of her wistfully
entreating eyes searching my face for something which she seemed unable
to find there.
That work of mine which I went back to, however, seemed something very
flat and meager and trivial. And this, I realized, was a condition
which would never do. The pot had to be kept boiling, and boiling now
more briskly than ever. I had lapsed into more or less luxurious ways
of living; I had formed expensive tastes, and had developed a fondness
for antiques and Chinese bronzes and those _objets d'art_ which are
never found on the bargain-counter. I had outgrown the Spartan ways of
my youth when I could lunch contentedly at Child's and sleep soundly on
a studio-couch in a top-floor room. And more and more that rapacious
ogre known as Social Obligation had forged his links and fetters about
my movements. More than ever, I saw, I had my end to keep up. What
should have been a recreation had become almost a treadmill. I was a
pretender, and had my pretense to sustain. I couldn't afford to be
"dropped." I had my frontiers to protect, and my powers to placate. I
couldn't ask Mary to throw herself away on a nobody. So instead of
trying to keep up one end, I tried to keep up two. I continued to bob
about the fringes of the Four Hundred. And I continued to cling
hungrily to Mary's hint about doing work, gloriously big work.
But gloriously big work, I discovered, was usually done by lonely men,
living simply and quietly, and dwelling aloof from the frivolous
side-issues of life, divorced from the distractions of a city which
seemed organized for only the idler and the lotos-eater. And I could
see that the pay-dirt coming out of Alaska was running thinner and
thinner.
It was to remedy this, I suppose, that I dined with my old friend Pip
Conners, just back to civilization after fourteen long years up in the
Yukon. That dinner of ours together was memorable. It was one of the
mile-stones of my life. I wanted to furbish up my information on that
remote corner of the world, which, in a way, I had preempted as my own.
I wanted fresh information, first-hand data, renewed inspiration. And
I was glad to feel Pip's horny hand close fraternally about mine.
"Witter," he said, staring at me with open admiration, "you're a
wonder."
I liked Pip's praise, even though I stood a little at a loss to discern
its inspiration.
"You mean--this?" I asked, with a casual hand-wave about that Gramercy
Square abode of mine.
"No, sir," was Pip's prompt retort. "I mean those stories of yours.
I've read 'em all."
I blushed at this, blushed openly. For such commendation from a man
who knew life as it was, who knew life in the raw, was as honey to my
ears.
"Do you mean to say you could get them, up _there_?" I asked, more for
something to dissemble my embarrassment than to acquire actual
information.
"Yes," acknowledged Pip with a rather foolish-sounding laugh, "they
come through the mails about the same as they'd come through the mails
down here. And folks even read them, now and then, when the gun-smoke
blows out of the valley!"
"Then what struck you as wonderful about them?" I inquired, a little at
sea as to his line of thought.
"It's not _them_ that's wonderful, Witter. It's you. I said you were
a wonder. And you are."
"And why am I a wonder?" I asked, with the drip of the honey no longer
embarrassing my modesty.
"Witter, _you're a wonder to get away with it_!" was Pip's solemnly
intoned reply.
"To get away with it?" I repeated.
"Yes; to make it go down! To get 'em trussed and gagged and hog-tied!
To make 'em come and eat out of your hand and then holler for more!
For I've been up there in the British Yukon for fourteen nice
comfortable years, Witter, and I've kind o' got to know the country. I
know how folks live up there, and what the laws are. And it may strike
you as queer, friend-author, but folks up in that district are
uncommonly like folks down here in the States. And in the Klondike and
this same British Yukon there is a Firearms Act which makes it against
the law for any civilian to tote a gun. And that law is sure carried
out. Fact is, there's no _need_ for a gun. And even if you did
smuggle one in, the Mounted Police would darned soon take it away from
you!"
I sat staring at him.
"But all those motion-pictures," I gasped. "And all those novels
about--"
"That's why I say you're a wonder," broke in the genial-eyed Pip. "You
can fool _all_ the people _all_ the time! You've done it. And you
keep on doing it. You can put 'em to sleep and take it out of their
pants pocket before they know they've gone by-by. Why, you've even got
'em tranced off in the matter of everyday school-geography. You've had
some of those hero-guys o' yours mush seven or eight hundred miles, and
on a birch-bark toboggan, between dinner and supper. And if that ain't
genius, I ain't ever seen it bound up in a reading-book!"
That dinner was a mile-stone in my life, all right, but not after the
manner I had expected. For as I sat there in a cold sweat of
apprehension crowned with shame, Pip Conners told me many things about
Alaska and the Klondike. He told me many things that were new to me,
dishearteningly, discouragingly, devitalizingly new to me. Without
knowing it, he poignarded me, knifed me through and through. Without
dreaming what he was doing, he eviscerated me. He left me a hollow and
empty mask of an author. He left me a homeless exile, with the iron
gates of Fact swung sternly shut on what had been a Fairy Land of
Romance, a Promised Land of untrammelled and care-free imaginings.
That was my first sleepless night.
I said nothing to Pip. I said nothing to any one. I held that vulture
of shame close in my arms and felt its unclean beak awling into my
vitals. I tried to go back to my work, next day, to lose myself in
creation. But it was like seeking consolation beside a corpse. For
me, Alaska was killed, killed forever. And blight had fallen on more
than my work. It had crept over my very world, the world which only
the labor of my pen could keep orderly and organized. The city in
which I had seemed to sit a conqueror suddenly lay about me a flat and
monotonous tableland of ennui, as empty and stale as a circus-lot after
the last canvas-wagon has rumbled away.
I have no intention of making this recountal the confessions of a
neurasthenic. Nothing is further from my aims than the inditing of a
second City of Dreadful Night. But I began to worry. And later on I
began to magnify my troubles. I even stuck to New York that summer,
for the simple reason that I couldn't afford to go away. And it was an
unspeakably hot summer. I did my best to work, sitting for hours at a
time staring at a blank sheet of paper, set out like tangle-foot to
catch a passing idea. But not an idea alighted on that square of
spotless white. When I tried new fields, knowing Alaska was dead, the
editors solemnly shook their heads and announced that this new offering
of mine didn't seem to have the snap and go of my older manner. Then
panic overtook me, and after yet another white night I went straight to
Sanson, the nerve specialist, and told him I was going crazy.
He laughed at me. Then he offhandedly tapped me over and tried my
reflexes and took my blood pressure and even more diffidently asked me
a question or two. He ended up by announcing that I was as sound as a
dollar, whatever that may have meant, and suggested as an afterthought
that I drop tobacco and go in more for golf.
That buoyed me up for a week or two. But Mary, when she came in to
town radiant and cool for three days' shopping, seemed to detect in me
a change which first surprised and then troubled her. I was bitterly
conscious of being a disappointment to somebody who expected great
things of me. And to escape that double-edged sword of mortification,
I once again tried to bury myself in my work. But I just as well might
have tried to bury myself in a butter-dish, for there was no effort and
no activity there to envelope me. I was coerced into idleness, without
ever having acquired the art of doing nothing. For life with me had
been a good deal like boiling rice: it had to be kept galloping to save
it from going mushy. Yet now the fire itself seemed out. And that
prompted me to sit and listen to my works, as the French idiom
expresses it, which is never a profitable calling for a naturally
nervous man.
The lee and the long of it was, as the Irish say, that I went back to
Doctor Sanson and demanded something, in the name of God, that would
give me a good night's sleep. He was less jocular, this time. He told
me to forget my troubles and go fishing for a couple of weeks.
I _did_ go fishing, but I fished for ideas. And I got scarcely a
strike. To leave the city was now more than ever out of the question.
So for recreation I had Latreille take me out in the car, when a
feverish thirst for speed, which I found it hard to account for, drove
me into daily violations of the traffic laws. Twice, in fact, I was
fined for this, with a curtly warning talk from the presiding
magistrate on the second occasion, since the offense, in this case, was
complicated by collision with an empty baby-carriage. Latreille, about
this time, seemed uncannily conscious of my condition. More and more
he seemed to rasp me on the raw, until irritation deepened into
positive dislike for the man.
When Mary came back to the city for a few days, before going to the
Virginia hills for the autumn, I looked so wretched and felt so
wretched that I decided not to see her. I was taking veronal now, to
make me sleep, and with cooler weather I looked for better rest and a
return to work. But my hopes were ill-founded. I came to dread the
night, and the night's ever-recurring battle for sleep. I lost my
perspective on things. And then came the crowning catastrophe, the
catastrophe which turned me into a sort of twentieth-century Macbeth.
The details of that catastrophe were ludicrous enough, and it had no
definite and clear-cut outcome, but its effect on my over-tensioned
nerves was sufficiently calamitous. It occurred, oddly enough, on
Hallow-e'en night, when the world is supposed to be given over to
festivity. Latreille had motored me out to a small dinner-dance at
Washburn's, on Long Island, but I had left early in the evening,
perversely depressed by a hilarity in which I had not the heart to
join. Twice, on the way back to the city, I had called out to
Latreille for more speed. We had just taken a turn in the outskirts of
Brooklyn when my swinging headlights disclosed the figure of a man, an
unstable and wavering man, obviously drunk, totter and fall directly in
front of my car.
I heard the squeal of the brakes and the high-pitched shouts from a
crowd of youths along the sidewalk. But it was too late. I could feel
the impact as we struck. I could feel the sickening thud and jolt as
the wheels pounded over that fallen body.
I stood up, without quite knowing what I was doing, and screamed like a
woman. Then I dropped weakly back in my seat. I think I was sobbing.
I scarcely noticed that Latreille had failed to stop the car. He spoke
to me twice, in fact, before I knew it.
"Shall we go on, sir?" he asked, glancing back at me over his shoulder.
"_Go on!_" I shouted, knowing well enough by this time what I said,
surrendering merely to that blind and cowardly panic for
self-preservation which marks man at his lowest.
We thumped and swerved and speeded away on the wings of cowardice. I
sat there gasping and clutching my moist fingers together, as I've seen
hysterical women do, calling on Latreille for speed, and still more
speed.
I don't know where he took me. But I became conscious of the consoling
blackness of the night about us. And I thanked God, as Cain must have
done when he found himself alone with his shame.
"Latreille," I said, breathing brokenly as we slowed up, "did we--_did
we kill him_?"
My chauffeur turned in his seat and studied my face. Then he looked
carefully back, to make sure we were not being followed.
"This is a heavy car, sir," he finally admitted. He said it coolly,
and almost impersonally. But the words fell like a sledge-hammer on my
heart.
"But we couldn't have killed a man," I clamored insanely, weakly, as we
came to a dead stop at the roadside.
"Forty-two hundred pounds--and he got both wheels!" calmly protested my
enemy, for I felt now that he was in some way my enemy.
"What in heaven's name are you going to do?" I gasped, for I noticed
that he was getting down from his seat.
"Hadn't I better get the blood off the running-gear, before we turn
back into town?"
"Blood?" I quavered as I clutched at the robe-rail in front of me. And
that one word brought the horror of the thing home to me in all its
ghastliness. I could see axles and running-board and brake-bar
dripping with red, festooned with shreds of flesh, maculated with
blackening gore. And I covered my face with my hands, and groaned
aloud in my misery of soul.
But Latreille did not wait for me. He lifted the seat-cushion, took
rubbing-cloths from the tool-box and crawled out of sight beneath the
car. I could feel the occasional tremors that went through the
frame-work as he busied himself at that grisly task. I could hear his
grunt of satisfaction when he had finished. And I watched him with
stricken eyes as he stepped through the vague darkness and tossed his
telltale cloths far over the roadside fence.
"It's all right," he companionably announced as he stepped back into
the car. But there was a new note in the man's demeanor, a note which
even through that black fog of terror reached me and awakened my
resentment. We were partners in crime. We were fellow-actors in a
drama of indescribable cowardice, and I was in the man's power, to the
end of time.
The outcome of that catastrophe, as I have already said, was
indefinite, torturingly indefinite. I was too shaken and sick to
ferret out its consequences. I left that to Latreille, who seemed to
understand well enough what I expected of him.
That first night wore by, and nothing came of it all. The morning
dragged away, and my fellow-criminal seemingly encountered nothing
worthy of rehearsal to me. Then still another night came and went. I
went through the published hospital reports, and the police records,
with my heart in my mouth. But I could unearth no official account of
the tragedy. I even encountered my good friend Patrolman McCooey,
apparently by accident, and held him up on his beat about Gramercy Park
to make casual inquiries as to street-accidents, and if such things
were increasing of late. But nothing of moment, apparently, had come
to McCooey's ears. And I stood watching him as he flatfooted his way
placidly on from my house-front, with one of my best cigars tucked
under his tunic, wondering what the world would say if it knew that
Witter Kerfoot, the intrepid creator of sinewy supermen who snarl and
fight and shake iron fists in the teeth of Extremity, had run like a
rabbit from a human being he had bowled over and killed?
I still hoped against hope, however, trying to tell myself that it is
no easy thing to knock the life out of a man, passionately upbraiding
myself for not doing what I should have done to succor the injured,
then sinkingly remembering what Latreille had mentioned about the
weight of my car. Yet it wasn't until the next night, as I ventured
out to step into that odiously ponderous engine of destruction, that
uncertainty solidified into fact.
"_You got him_," announced my chauffeur out of one side of his mouth,
so that Benson, who stood on the house-steps, might not overhear those
fateful words.
"Got him?" I echoed, vaguely resenting the man's use of that personal
pronoun singular.
"Killed!" was Latreille's monosyllabic explanation. And my heart
stopped beating.
"How do you know that?" I demanded in whispering horror. For I
understood enough of the law of the land to know that a speeder who
flees from the victim of his carelessness is technically guilty of
manslaughter.
"A man I know, named Crotty, helped carry the body back to his house.
Crotty's just told me about it."
My face must have frightened Latreille, for he covered his movement of
catching hold of my arm by ceremoniously opening the car door for me.
"Sit tight, man!" he ordered in his curt and conspiratorial undertone.
"Sit tight--for it's all that's left to do!"
I sat tight. It was all there was to do. I endured Latreille's
accession of self-importance without comment. There promptly grew up
between us a tacit understanding of silence. Yet I had reason to feel
that this silence wasn't always as profound as it seemed. For at the
end of my third day of self-torturing solitude I went to my club to
dine. I went with set teeth. I went in the hope of ridding my system
of self-fear, very much as an alcoholic goes to a Turkish-bath. I went
to mix once more with my fellows, to prove that I stood on common
ground with them.
But the mixing was not a success. I stepped across that familiar
portal in quavering dread of hostility. And I found what I was looking
for. I detected myself being eyed coldly by men who had once posed as
my friends. I dined alone, oppressed by the discovery that I was being
deliberately avoided by the fellow-members of what should have been an
organized companionability. Then I took a grip on myself, and
forlornly argued that it was all mere imagination, the vaporings of a
morbid and chlorotic mind. Yet the next moment a counter-shock
confronted me. For as I stared desolately out of that club window I
caught sight of Latreille himself. He stood there at the curb, talking
confidently to three other chauffeurs clustered about him between their
cars. Nothing, I suddenly remembered, could keep the man from
gossiping. And a word dropped in one servant's ear would soon pass on
to another. And that other would carry the whisper still wider, until
it spread like an infection from below-stairs to above-stairs, and from
private homes to the very housetops. And already I was a marked man, a
pariah, an outcast with no friendly wilderness to swallow me up.
I slunk home that night with a plumb-bob of lead swinging under my ribs
where my heart should have been. I tried to sleep and could not sleep.
So I took a double dose of chloral hydrate, and was rewarded with a few
hours of nightmare wherein I was a twentieth-century Attila driving a
racing-car over an endless avenue of denuded infants. It was all so
horrible that it left me limp and quailing before the lash of daylight.
Then, out of a blank desolation that became more and more unendurable,
I clutched feverishly at the thought of Mary Lockwood and the
autumn-tinted hills of Virginia. I felt the need of getting away from
that city of lost sleep. I felt the need of "exteriorating" what was
corroding my in-most soul. I was seized with a sudden and febrile ache
for companionship. So I sent a forty-word wire to the only woman in
the world I could look to in my extremity. And the next morning
brought me a reply.
It merely said, "Don't come."
The bottom seemed to fall out of the world, with that curt message, and
I groped forlornly, frantically, for something stable to sustain me.
But there was nothing. Bad news, I bitterly reminded myself, had the
habit of traveling fast. _Mary knew_. The endless chain had widened,
like a wireless-wave. It had rolled on, like war-gas, until it had
blighted even the slopes beyond the Potomac. For Mary _knew_!
It was two days later that a note, in her picket-fence script that was
as sharp-pointed as arrow-heads, followed after the telegram.
"There are certain things," wrote Mary, "which I can scarcely talk
about on paper. At least, not as I should prefer talking about them.
But these things must necessarily make a change in your life, and in
mine. I don't want to seem harsh, Witter, but we can't go on as we
have been doing. We'll both have to get used to the idea of trudging
along in single harness. And I think you will understand why. I'm not
exacting explanations, remember. I'm merely requesting an armistice.
If you intend to let me, I still want to be your friend, and I trust no
perceptible gulf will yarn [Transcriber's note: yawn?] between us, when
we chance to dine at the same table or step through the same
_cotillion_. But I must bow to those newer circumstances which seem to
have confronted you even before they presented themselves to me. So
when I say good-by, it is more to the Past, I think, than to You."
That was the first night, I remember, when sleeping-powders proved of
no earthly use to me. And this would not be an honest record of events
if I neglected to state that the next day I shut myself up in my study
and drank much more _Pommery-Greno_ than was good for me. I got drunk,
in fact, blindly, stupidly, senselessly drunk. But it seemed to drape
a veil between me and the past. It made a bonfire of my body to burn
up the debris of my mind. And when poor old patient-eyed Benson mixed
me a bromide and put me to bed I felt like a patient coming out of
ether after a major operation. I was tired, and I wanted to lie there
and rest for a long time.