The villain in melodrama is as likely as not to be as decent a fellow as
any. When he slinks from the stage in his final hissed exit he goes to
his dressing-room, scours off his grease-paint, and probably returns to
his devoted family or seats himself before a bowl of milk-and-crackers
in his club.
Gilfoyle was as decent a fellow as ever villain was. Circumstances
and not himself cast him in an evil role, and as actors know, once so
established, it is almost impossible to return to heroic parts. Gilfoyle
could not even remove his grease-paint. He could not go back to his
dressing-room, for his landlady had told him that the only key to her
front door was cash. He had gone out to bring home a millionaire, and he
had achieved nothing but a headache and a moral cataclysm.
He hardly knew how he escaped from the apartment-house. The dark cool of
the street brought him into the night of things. It came upon him like a
black fog what he had tried to do. The bitter disgrace of a man who has
been whipped in a fight was his, but other disgraces were heaped upon
it. For the first time he saw himself as Kedzie saw him.
He had neglected his wife till she grew famous in spite of him. He
had gone back to her to share her bounty. When she repulsed him he had
entered into a conspiracy to spy on her. He had waited impatiently for a
rich man to compromise her, so that he could surprise them in guilt and
extort money from them.
He had not warned the girl of her danger from the other man or from
himself. He had not pleaded with her to be good, had not asked her to
come back to honeymoon again in poverty with him; he had preferred to
live on borrowed money and on unpaid board while he fooled with verses
and refused the manual tasks that waited everywhere about the busy city.
He might have cleaned the streets or earned a decent living handling
garbage in the city scows. But he had preferred to speculate in
blackmail and play the badger-game with his wife as an unwitting
accomplice. He had hated millionaires, and counted them all criminals
deserving spoliation, but he felt that he had sunk lower than the
millionaires.
The remembrance of Kedzie haunted him. She had been supremely beautiful
to-night, frightened into greater beauty than ever. She was afraid of
him who should have been her refuge, and she hid for protection behind
the man who should have seemed her enemy.
He recalled her as she was when he first loved her, the pretty little
candy-store clerk, the lissome, living marble in her Greek tunic,
the quaint, sweet girl who came to him in the Grand Central Terminal,
lugging her suit-case, the shy thing at the License Bureau, the
ineffably exquisite bride he had made his wife. He saw her at the
gas-stove and loved her very petulance and the pretty way she banged the
oven door and pouted at fate.
The lyrics he had written to her sang through his aching head. He was
wrung to anguish between the lover and the poet he had meant to be, and
the spurned and hated cur he had become. He stumbled along the street
at Connery's side, whispering to himself, while his earliest verses to
Kedzie ran in and out through his thoughts like a catchy tune:
Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you Anita?
Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter.
He recalled the sonnets he had begun which were to make them both
immortal. He regretted the spitefulness that had led him to write in
another name than hers because she had refused to support him. He had
been a viler beast than the cutpurse poet of old France, without the
lilies of verse that bloom pure white above the dunghill of Villon's
life.
Gilfoyle's soul went down into a hell of regret and wriggled in the
flames of self-condemnation. He grew maudlin with repentance and clung
to his friend Connery with odious garrulity. Connery was disgusted with
him, but he was afraid to leave him because he kept sighing:
“I guess the river's the only place for me now.”
At length Connery steered him into a saloon for medicine and bought him
a stiff bracer of whisky and vermouth. But it only threw Gilfoyle into
deeper befuddlement. He was like Charles Lamb, in that a thimbleful of
alcohol affected him as much as a tumbler another. He wanted to tell his
troubles to the barkeeper, and Connery had to drag him away.
In the hope that a walk in the air might help to steady him, Connery set
out toward his own boarding-house. They started across Columbus Avenue
under the pillars of the Elevated tracks.
Habituated to the traffic customs, the New-Yorker crossing a street
looks to the left for traffic till he gets half-way across, then looks
to the right for traffic bound in the opposite direction. Connery
led Gilfoyle to the middle of the avenue, paused for a south-bound
street-car to go banging by them, darted back of it and looked to the
right for a north-bound car or motor. But a taxicab trying to pass the
south-bound car was shooting south along the north-bound tracks.
Connery saw it barely in time to jump back. He yanked Gilfoyle's arm,
but Gilfoyle had plunged forward. He might have escaped if Connery had
let him go. But the cab struck him, hurled him in air against an iron
pillar, caught him on the rebound and ran him down. Kedzie Thropp was a
widow.