Gerry stood in the hall outside Alix’s room for a moment, hoping to
hear a sob, a cry, anything for an excuse to go back. Instead he heard
the scratch of a pen; but he was too troubled to deduce anything from
that. He went slowly down the stairs and out into the street. The
biting winter air braced him. He started to walk rapidly. At the end of
an hour he found himself standing on a deserted pier. He took off his
hat and let the wind cool his head.
“I have been a brute,” he said to himself. “I have made a woman
cry--Alix!” He turned and walked slowly back to the avenue and into
his club, but he still felt uneasy. A waiter brought a whisky and soda
and put it at his elbow. Gerry turned on him.
“Who told you to bring that?” Then he felt ashamed of his petulance.
“It’s all right, George,” he said more genially than he had spoken for
many a day; “but I don’t want it. Take it away.”
He sat for a long time, and at last came to a resolution. Alix loved
roses. He would send her enough to bank her room, and he would follow
them home. He went up the avenue to his florist’s, and stood outside
trying to decide whether it should be one mass of blood red or a color
scheme. Suddenly the plate glass caught a reflection and threw it in
his face. Gerry turned. A four-wheeler was passing. He could not see
the occupant, but on top was a large, familiar trunk marked with a
yellow girdle. On the trunk was a familiar label. He stared at it, and
the label stared back at him, and finally danced before his mazed eyes
as the cab disappeared into the traffic.
Gerry stood for a long while, stunned. He saw a lady bow to him from
a carriage, and afterward he remembered that he had not bowed back.
Somebody ran into him. He looked back at the flowers massed in the
window, remembered that he did not need them now, and drew slowly
away. Two men hailed him from the other side of the street. Gerry
braced himself, nodded to them, and hailed a passing hansom. From the
direction Alix’s cab had taken he knew the station for which she was
bound. As he arrived on the platform they were giving the last call
for the Montreal express. He caught sight of Alix hurrying through
the gates, and followed. As she reached the first Pullman, somebody
rapped on the window of the drawing-room. Gerry saw Alan’s face pressed
against the pane. He watched Alix stop, turn, and climb the steps of
the car, and then he wheeled and hurried from the station.
Where could he go? Not to his club and Alan’s. His face would betray
the scandal with which the club would be buzzing to-morrow. Not to his
big, comfortable house. It would be too gloomy. Even in disaccord, Alix
had imparted to its somber oak and deep shadows the glow of buoyant
life. When she was there, one felt as though there were flowers in the
house. Gerry was seized with a great desire to hide from his world, his
mother, himself. He pictured the scare-heads in the papers. That the
name of Lansing should be found in that galley! It was too much. He
could not face it.
He bought a morning paper, full of shipping news, and, getting into a
taxi, gave the address of his bank. On the way he studied the sailings’
column. He found what he wanted--the _Gunter_, due to sail that
afternoon for Brazil, Pernambuco the first stop.
At the bank Gerry drew out the balance of his current account. It
amounted to something over two thousand dollars. He took most of it
in Bank of England notes. Then he started home to pack, but before he
reached the house a vision of the servants, flurried after helping
their mistress off, commiserating him to one another, pitying him
to his face perhaps, or, in the case of the old butler, suppressing
a great emotion, was too much for him. He drove instead to a big
department store, and in an hour had bought a complete outfit. He
lunched at one of the quiet restaurants that divide down-town from
up-town.
He had avoided buying a ticket. As the _Gunter_ warped out, the purser
came to him.
“I understand you have no ticket.”
“No,” said Gerry, drawing a roll of bills. “How much is the passage to
Pernambuco?”
The purser fidgeted.
“This is irregular, sir,” he said.
“Is it?” said Gerry, indifferently.
“I have no ticket-forms,” said the purser, weakening.
“I don’t want a ticket,” said Gerry. “I want a good room and three
square meals a day.”
Long, quiet days on a quiet sea are a master sedative to a troubled
mind. Gerry had a great deal to think through. He sat by the hour
with hands loosely clasped, his eyes far out on the ocean, tracing
the course of his married life, and measuring the grounds for Alix’s
arraignment. Gerry was just and generous to others’ faults, but not
to his own. He had forgotten the sting of Alix’s words, and, to his
growing amazement, saw in himself their justification. A time-server he
certainly had been.
The landfall of Pernambuco awoke him from reveries and introspection.
He did not look upon this palm-strewn coast as a land of new
beginnings; he sought merely a Lethean shore.
The ship crawled in from an oily sea to the long strip of harbor behind
the reef. Above, the sun blazed from a bowl of unbroken blue; on land,
the multicolored houses spread like a rainbow under a dark cloud of
brown-tiled roofs. Beyond the trees was a line of high, stuccoed
houses, each painted a different color, all weather-stained, and some
with rusted balconies that threatened to topple on to the passer-by.
One bore the legend, “Hôtel d’Europe.” There Gerry installed himself.