Spurred by irrational fear lest Bellamy wake up, discover her flight,
and give chase, Lucinda made in haste for Fifth avenue; but had not
taken half a dozen steps when a cab slid up to the curb by her side, its
driver with two fingers to his cap soliciting a fare. He seemed
Heaven-sent. Lucinda breathed the first address that came to
mind--"Grand Central, please"--hopped in, and shrank fearfully away from
the windows.
On second thought, the destination she had named seemed a sensible
choice. Any one of the several hotels which tapped the railroad terminal
by subway would take her in for the night. In the morning she would be
better able to debate her next step. At present she felt hopelessly
incapable of consecutive thought.
At the station a negro porter with a red cap opened the cab door and
took possession of her single piece of luggage, and when she had paid
off the taxi and looked to him in indecision, prompted her with: "What
train was yo' wishin' to tek, ma'm?"
An instant later Lucinda was wondering why she had replied: "The first
train for Chicago, please." She knew no reason why she should have named
Chicago rather than any other city where she was unknown and where,
consequently, she might count on being free to think things out in her
own time and fashion.
"Ain't no Chicago train befo' eight-fo'ty-five tomorrow mawnin', ma'm."
"Very well. I'll go to a hotel for tonight."
"Yes'm. W'ich hotel, Commodo', Biltmo', Belmont?"
Lucinda settled on the Commodore, because it was the largest of the
three and she would be lost in the multitude of its patrons.
She registered as _Mrs. L. Druce_, _Chicago_, and, before proceeding to
her room, arranged to have the head porter purchase her ticket and
reservation the first thing in the morning.
Some hours later she was awakened by a cramp in one of her arms and
found that she had fallen asleep while sitting on the edge of her bed.
In a daze she finished undressing, and sleep again overwhelmed her like
a dense, warm, obliterating cloud.
It seemed but a minute or two before she was being scolded awake by the
shrewish tongue of the telephone by the head of the bed, to hear a
dispassionate voice recite the information that it was seven o'clock,
the hour at which she had asked to be called.
She felt as if she had not slept at all.
Again, in the train, the aching misery of heart and mind could not
prevent her nodding and drowsing all morning long; and after a meal of
railroad food by way of luncheon, she gave up trying to stave off the
needs of a highly organized nature fatigued by inordinate strains,
called the porter, had him make up the lower berth in her drawing-room,
and went to bed.
In the neighborhood of midnight she woke up to discover, first by
peering out under the edge of the window-shade at concrete platforms
bleakly blue and bare in the glare of unseen lamps, then by consulting a
timetable, that the train was in Cleveland.
As it pulled out again, she resigned herself to the inescapable. Rested,
her mind clear and active, and with nothing to do but think for eight
hours more, she must go down into the hell appointed.
Nor was she spared any portion of its torments. Successively and in
concert, vanity wounded to the quick, sickening self-pity, and
implacable, grinding regret laid hold on her heart and soul and worried
them till she had to bury her face in the pillow and sink her teeth
into it to keep from screaming.
It was cruel enough to have loved and lost, but to have lost and still
to love seemed punishment intolerable. The shameful knowledge that body
and spirit still hungered for the man who had served both so shabbily
ate into her amour-propre like a corrosive acid.
To her agonized imagination she figured in the semblance of a leaf
harassed by that high wind of fatality which latterly had swept into and
through her life with Bel, driving them asunder; a leaf torn from the
homely branch that had given it life and nurtured it, a leaf hunted
helplessly into strange ways and corners, even now being hounded on and
on.... And to what end?...
She burned with resentment of her persecution by those unknown powers
whose ill-will she had not wittingly done anything to invite, she
writhed in the exasperation bred of her impotence to placate them or
withstand their oppression.
A lull fell at last in the transports of her passion, she lay quite
still, and her mind too grew calm in awareness of the quiet, resolute
mustering of all her forces to wrest from malicious chance and
circumstance the right to live a life of her own choosing; as if her
soul, drawing strength from new-found knowledge of its indestructible
integrity, lifted up its head and with calm eyes challenged Fate.
Her paroxysms were now spent and ended, the past had been put definitely
behind her, it was with the future alone that she had need to be
concerned.
She addressed herself to the task of taking stock of Lucinda Druce, the
woman all alone, her condition and resources, and of trying to map out
for her a new and independent existence that would prove somehow
livable.
If she had not succeeded in this undertaking when the train breathed its
last weary puffs under the echoing glass canopy of the La Salle Street
station, success was not forfeited, it was but deferred. There was so
much to be taken into consideration, she could not yet see further than
tomorrow, if so far. Certain immediate steps were indicated to her
intelligence as requisite and reasonable; whither they would lead she
could by no means guess.
Bred on the Atlantic seaboard, she knew more of Europe than of the
United States west of the Alleghenies. Chicago to her was a city that
once had burned to the ground because a cow kicked over a lighted lamp;
a city famous for great winds, something known as "the Loop," something
hardly less problematic called "stock-yards." The name of a hotel, too,
the Blackstone, had found lodgment in her memory.
The short drive in a yellow taxicab from the station to the hotel
through a labyrinth of back streets a-brawl with traffic, failed to
register any impressions other than of cobblestones, blasphemous truck
drivers, street-cars pounding and clanging, begrimed buildings, endless
columns of self-absorbed footfarers. The hotel itself seemed in grateful
contrast, it might have been one of her own New York. Only the view from
her rooms, many stories above the street, of a public park bleached,
frost-bitten, desolate, and slashed by a black railroad cutting, and
beyond this a vast expanse of tumbled waters, slate-grey flecked with
white, blending with a grim grey sky, drove home the fact that her first
uncertain gropings toward a new life were to be framed in a foreign, and
to her perceptions an unfriendly, environment.
But she turned from the window with the light of battle in her eyes.
Nature was wasting its effects, she was not to be disheartened by an
ill-dispositioned day.
After breakfast she went out to do a little necessary shopping, and
spent the morning and most of her cash in hand as well in department
stores which she was unreasonably surprised to find differed not
materially from establishments of the same character in the East, save
in the crowds that thronged them, drab rivers of people persistently
strange in her sight.
But the experience served to remind her that she had more material
problems to solve than those provided by her inner life. She found
herself running short of ready money and with a checque-book valueless
unless she were willing to prove her identity as the wife of Bellamy
Druce.
She thought of telegraphing old Harford Willis, who had been her
father's close friend, legal adviser, and executor of his estate, as he
was today steward of Lucinda's. But he could not be expected to
understand a peremptory demand for money in Lucinda's name, from a city
which he had no reason to believe she had ever even thought of visiting,
without explanations too lengthy and intimate for transmission by
telegraph. The alternative was to write him, and that meant a long, full
letter, for (Lucinda suddenly discovered) Willis was the one man in the
world whom she could safely and freely confide in, consult and trust.
She did not even remember Dobbin's pretensions to such standing with
her. In the first twenty-four hours of her flight from Bellamy she had
not thought of Daubeney once. Now, when she thought of him at all, it
was as of some revenant of kindly countenance from a half-forgotten
dream.
She spent most of the afternoon composing her letter and despatched it
after dinner, a rather formidable manuscript under a special delivery
stamp.
After that there was nothing to do but fold her hands and commend her
soul to patience.
Three eventless days dropped out of her history. The dreary weather
held, there was rain and snow, gales like famished banshees pounded and
yammered at the hotel windows. She seldom ventured into the streets,
even for exercise. She read a great many novels purchased at the hotel
news-stand, or pretended to, for her mind refused as a general thing to
travel with the lines of print. Her most exciting diversion lay in
reviewing and enlarging the list of things she meant to buy as soon as
she was able. And one afternoon she went to see Alma Daley in her latest
production (not "The Girl in the Dark," of course, it was too soon for
that) at a motion-picture theatre near the hotel.
She came away confirmed in her belief that Miss Daley was an unusually
attractive and capable young mistress of pantomime. But the picture-play
itself had seemed frightfully dull stuff. Indeed, Lucinda had
experienced considerable difficulty in following its thread of plot, and
sat it out only because of her personal interest in the actress.
Returning to her rooms possessed by memories of that afternoon she had
spent at the studios of Culp Cinemas Inc., the last afternoon of her
life as Bellamy's wife, she wondered, not with any great interest, how
her tests had turned out, what the others, Dobbin and Jean and Nelly,
and Fanny Lontaine and her husband, had thought of them; whether any one
had known or guessed the reason for her absence, when they had gathered
in Culp's projection-room for the showing; whether any one had cared.
Dobbin had cared, of course. At least, Dobbin had believed he cared. So
had Lucinda, then....
How long ago it seemed!