AT the same time the haze lightened about him: he saw clearly his
surroundings, the black, glittering windows of stores, the gleaming
rails which bound the stone street. His hat was gone and he had long
before lost the bundle that contained his linen. But the loss was of
small moment now--he had money, a pocketful of it, and forty-seven
thousand dollars waiting in Ellerton: his father was a scrupulous,
truthful and exact man.
Eliza and he would have been immediately married, gone to a little green
village, under a red mountain; Eliza would have worn the most beautiful
dresses made by a parrot; but that, he recognized shrewdly, was an
idiotic fancy--birds didn't make dresses. And now she was dead.
He entered a place of multitudinous mirrors reflecting a woman's
flickering limbs, sly and bearded masculine faces, that somehow were
vaguely familiar.
“Champagne!” he cried, against the bar.
“Your champagne'll come across in a schooner.”
But, impatiently, he shoved a handful of money into the zinc gutter.
“Champagne!” he reiterated thickly. The barkeeper deduced four dollars
and returned the balance. “Sink it,” he advised, “or you'll get it
lifted on you.”
With the wine, the mist deepened once more about him; the ache--was it
in his head or his heart?--grew duller. He had poured out a third glass
when a hand was laid upon his shoulder, and whirling suspiciously, he
saw a uniform cap, a man's gaunt face and burning eyes.
“Brother,” the latter said, “brother, shall we leave this reeking sink,
and go out together into God's night?”
Blinking, Anthony recognized the livery, the accents, of the Salvation
Army. A sullen anger burned within him--this man was a sort of official
connection of God's, who had killed Eliza. He smoothed out his face
cunningly, moved obediently toward the other, and struck him viciously
across the face. Pandemonium rose instantly about him, an incredible
number of men appeared shouting, gesticulating, and formed in a ring of
blurred, grinning faces. The jaw of the Salvation Army man was bright
with blood, dark drops fell on his threadbare coat. His hand closed
again on Anthony's shoulder.
“Strive, brother,” he cried. “The Mansion door is open.”
Anthony regarded him with insolent disdain. “Ought to be exposed,” he
articulated, “whole thing... humbug. Isn't any such--such... Eliza's
dead, ain't she?”
A ripple of merriment ran about the circle of loose, stained lips; the
curious, ribald eyes glittered with cold mirth; the circle flattened
with the pressure of those without, impatient for a better view. Anthony
surveyed them with impotent fury, loathing, and they met his passionate
anger with faces as stony, as inhuman, as cruel, carved masks. He
heard _her_ name, the name of the gracious and beautiful vision of his
adoration, repeated in hoarse, in maculate, in gibing tones.
“She's dead,” he repeated sharply, as though that fact should impose
silence on them; “you filthy curs!” But their approbation of the
spectacle became only the more marked.
The Salvation Army man fastened his hectic gaze upon Anthony; he was,
it was evident, unaware of the blood drying upon his face, of the throng
about them. “There is no death,” he proclaimed. “There is no death!”
“But she _is_ dead,” Anthony insisted; “pneumonia... with green eyes
and foggy hands.” They began an insane argument: Eliza was gone, Anthony
reiterated, the other could not deny that she was lost to life, to the
sun. He recalled statements of Rufus Hardinge's, crisp iconoclasms of
Annot's, and fitted them into the patchwork of his labored speech.
Texts were flung aloft like flags by the other; ringing sentences in the
incomparable English of King James echoed about the walls, the bottles
of the saloon and beat upon the throng, the blank hearts, the beery
brains, of the spectators. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” he orated,
“for they... for they...”