Len Haswell carried a stricken face about the clubs where once he had
been the center of jovial gatherings, when he appeared there--which was
not often. Old associates who read the signs avoided him out of
kindliness save those who like Thayre could be with him without
reminding him of his hurt. Thayre, with all his seeming of bluff and
noisy gaiety, had an underlying tenderness of heart and delicacy of
perception which made him a friend for troubled hours. He knew how to
remain silent as well as how to be loquacious and he could radiate an
unspoken sympathy.
One evening the Englishman chanced on Haswell in the otherwise deserted
reading-room of the National Union Club. Because it was a club chiefly
dedicated to the elder generation Thayre came infrequently and it
surprised him to find the other there. The big man was sitting with an
unread paper on his knee and his eyes were brooding as he gazed out
through the Fifth-avenue window on the twilight tide of motors and
'buses and hansoms that passed in an endless and unresting flow.
"I had the idea, Haswell," remarked Thayre as he plumped himself down on
the leather arm of the other's chair and grinned his greeting, "that you
came to this place once a year--when they held the annual meeting."
"And you?" countered Len in a dull voice. "I didn't regard you as an
habitué either."
"Right-o!" The Englishman stretched out one gaitered foot and lighted a
cigarette. "I'll tell you a secret. When I grow savage in mood--" his
clear-eyed smile belied that state of mind--"I just run in here for a
bit of bear-baiting--rather good sport--bear-baiting. This is a den of
bears you know. Oh, yes, rather! They are all elderly bears, very
crabbed and self-absorbed and very smart and immaculate--but bears none
the less. Each has his particular chair, which to his own self-centered
mind is his private pedestal. They sit here with their manicured hands
resting idly on their robust, waistcoated tummies and stare out on the
world like little clay gods." He saw that the other man was following
him with a forced and uninterested attention, yet he went on, not like
Larry Kirk, but because he was leading up to a purpose of friendship.
"Well, old chap, I just pop in here and squat on one of these pedestals,
d'ye see? Presently its proper occupant comes in and glares at me from
the door, puffing with indignation. Inwardly he is saying, 'How dare you
trespass, you bally young cub?' and I pretend to be quite unconscious of
his baleful gaze. I know there's really nothing he can do about it. If
he were in London, I expect he'd write to the _Times_."
Thayre glanced up and started to add: "There's one now glaring at you,"
but he quickly bit off the words, for he recognized the stout
frock-coated figure of old Tom Burton. Old Tom was progressing, for now
before the lights were switched on something in his face told that the
afternoon rubbers had not progressed without their libations.
After a long pause Haswell said in a heavy voice: "I come here because
I don't meet many men who insist on talking to me."
"Oh, I beg pardon, old chap," Thayre hastily rose. "I'm sure I didn't
mean--" But before he could finish the big fellow put out a hand and
gripped his arm until a pain shot to the elbow.
"You are the one man I do want to see, Norvil. Even a miserable devil
like me can talk to you, and there's a thing I want you to do for me, if
you will."
"Name it."
Haswell glanced wearily about the big room and assured himself that no
one was near enough to overhear his unbosoming. He still spoke in the
dulled voice of a dulled heart. His utterance, like his movements, was
slow and labored.
"There are times when you've got to talk--or get to feeling giddy and
wrong in the head. I've about cut most of my clubs, but I can't cut
meeting the men--down-town."
The Englishman nodded, but he said nothing.
"I'm getting rather sick of being asked--" Len halted, then forced the
words doggedly--"how Loraine is and when I expect her back. I--well, I
don't expect her back, and it hurts like hell to say so."
Norvil met the other's eyes and read in them a fulness of dumb
suffering, such as might come into those of a great, faithful dog. His
own question followed with a softness of assured sympathy. "And, of
course, you want her back?"
A paroxysm of pain distorted his companion's face and his head flinched
back as though it had been heavily struck.
"God! yes, like a strangling man wants breath," he said.
It was a misery for which there was no aid, so Thayre satisfied himself
with the inquiry: "What is this thing you want me to do?"
"Just intimate to these men that they stop asking those questions,
that's all."
"Is there any one you particularly blame?"
Haswell shook his head. "No. There was at first, but the principal point
is that she has decided she can't be happy with me. If I try to hold her
after knowing that I become her jailer. I treat her as my property. I
hope I'm not that sort. I had my chance and have failed."
"I say, I don't want to be impertinent, you know." Thayre bent forward
and spoke earnestly. "There are things a man doesn't like to have put up
to him. But you aren't letting this knock you off your line, are you?
You aren't going to let it bowl you over?"
Again the tall man shook his head. "No, I'm quite all right," he said.
"I'm going fairly straight--so far."
Late that night a wet snow was falling and Madison square was almost
deserted. Here and there in the Metropolitan and Flatiron buildings
shone an isolated and belated window light. At the Garden a Wild West
show with rings and side performances had long ago disgorged its crowds
and quieted its pandemonium of brass bands. Len Haswell had been walking
with the aimlessness of insomnia, and asking himself over and over one
question: "What changed it all?" In answer he accused himself and argued
the case for the woman without whom he was too lonely to go home and
face an empty house.
It was after one o'clock and the saloon doors were barred, but as he
passed a small place not far from the square, he saw a side door flap,
and he entered it. It was an unprepossessing door, outwardly labeled,
"ladies' entrance."
Haswell called for whiskey, and was served by a waiter in a spotted
apron, whose dank hair fell over a sallow and oily face. Save for
himself, there were only four other customers. In a corner partition a
slovenly woman in bedraggled finery berated the man who sat with bloated
eyes across from her. The waiter looked on sardonically. At another
table were two derelicts from one of the Garden side shows. A truculent
and beady-eyed dwarf whose face hardly showed above the boards was
brow-beating a cringing giant of unbelievable immensity. "You crabbed my
act, you big stiff," shrilled the midget truculently--and his huge
vis-à-vis fell into a volume of excuse and apology.
Haswell set down his glass half-empty. "No good," he muttered as he rose
and went out again into the streets. "One can't be alone." Yet he felt
very much alone.
* * * * *
In these days Paul Burton found his thoughts turning often to Marcia
Terroll and himself becoming more dependent on her companionship. In her
sunny courage and sparkle of repartee he found a tonic exhilaration for
his own jaded spirits and an antidote for growing morbidness. He knew
that her daily rounds of the managers' offices were fruitless, and that
she walked long distances to save nickels, and in his man's ignorance he
marveled because her white gloves were always spotless and her
appearance unmarked by poverty. With more money than he could use, his
impulse clamored to volunteer assistance--and his judgment forbade the
liberty. These days of growing intimacy were troubled days for him, too.
Loraine Haswell was away and her letters kept him reminded that the
purpose of her exile was ridding herself of those encumbrances which
stood between them. Yet in her absence, there was also the absence of
her personal fascination, the daily renewal of her hold on his senses,
and, strangely enough, he began to feel that instead of having barriers
swept from the path of his love, he was being bound to a future marred
by intervals of clouded misgiving.
The thought of Mary also brought him distress. There was no policy of
ostrich-blind self-comfort by which he could escape from the realization
that he was indirectly a party in responsibility for the destructive
menace that hung over her happiness. His few attempts to discuss the
subject with Hamilton had not been hopeful or pleasant, and he could not
doubt that Edwardes would ultimately be swept into a chaos of ruin
because he had opposed the irresistible onrush of his brother's power.
He sought to persuade himself of Hamilton's infallible wisdom and Mary's
folly of infatuation, but the only certain conviction was that of a
bruised and heavy heart in his own breast. Paul was pitiably weak, but,
also, he was sensitively tender. Love he gave and commanded with the
uncalculating quality of a child.
To Marcia he had not confided any word of his status with Mrs. Haswell,
but her quick intuition told her he was deeply troubled--and her quicker
sympathy responded. Sometimes Paul longed to see Loraine, but after each
visit to the tiny apartment where Marcia Terroll and a girl who drew
fashion illustrations had set up their household gods, the vision of
his far-away Cleopatra grew a shade dimmer and a trifle more
impersonal.
Bit by bit he had pieced together a few sketchy fragments of Miss
Terroll's biography, just enough to make the wish for fuller knowledge
tantalizing. That was her maiden name, also used as a stage name, but
she had been married when just out of Wellesley. She spoke little of
that episode. Her girlhood was a pleasanter theme and its environment
had been that of his own world--full of the gaiety and sunshine that is
girlhood's inalienable right. All these scraps of personal history
filtered into their conversation; rather as incidentals than as direct
information. This young woman was not of the type that gratuitously
relates a life-story. That she had been left resourceless with a young
daughter and had fought the world unaided and unembittered, herself
retaining the seeming of a child, Paul now knew, but he knew all too
little to satisfy his interest. She had been secretary in a business
house and an interpreter of German and Spanish. Now she was the only
actress he knew--untypical and unemployed.
Paul felt that in the presence of her superior mind and larger education
he ought to be abashed, yet he was not, because when she laughed it was
with the merriment of a gay child and when she was serious she was
sweetly grave. Sometimes he played for her and sometimes she sang for
him, and both did what they did so well that the critic in the other
found no disappointment.
Unpremeditatedly and very naturally they had struck the basis of a
dependable comradeship. She saw the occasional flash of genius in his
musical creativeness and his need of practical attributes. To him she
was something of a mystery. To her, save for his well-kept secret of
loving Loraine, he was an easily read human document. She told him of
her broader experiences, always tinging them with a delicious humor in
the recital, which twisted into comedy what might have been related as
little tragedies, and because she had seen so much of life, where he had
seen so little, she was willing to recognize his lovable qualities and
overlook his weaknesses.
But just as Paul did not talk much to her of his own affairs and the
people of his set, so he did not talk with them of her.
At first she had interested him as an experiment; then as affording the
possibility for a new type of adventure in friendship, and when he came
to know her in that degree which represented their present association,
he ceased to ask why she interested him, and only knew that she did.
Of late she had been unusually gay because of revival of hope. A part
which she knew she could play had been half-promised her which would
bring Broadway recognition and the chance to be judged on her merits.
More than that it would mean the possibility of bringing her small
daughter back from the relatives who were playing parents in these days
of uncertainty.