It was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh
High School to account for his various misdemeanours. He had been
suspended a week ago, and his father had called at the Principal's office
and confessed his perplexity about his son. Paul entered the faculty room
suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle out-grown, and the tan
velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but for
all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal
pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his
button-hole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was not
properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban
of suspension.
Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and
a narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical
brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort
of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large,
as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter
about them which that drug does not produce.
When questioned by the Principal as to why he was there, Paul stated,
politely enough, that he wanted to come back to school. This was a lie,
but Paul was quite accustomed to lying; found it, indeed, indispensable
for overcoming friction. His teachers were asked to state their
respective charges against him, which they did with such a rancour and
aggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case. Disorder and
impertinence were among the offences named, yet each of his instructors
felt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of
the trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the
boy's; in the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and which he
seemingly made not the least effort to conceal. Once, when he had been
making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his English teacher
had stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand. Paul had started
back with a shudder and thrust his hands violently behind him. The
astonished woman could scarcely have been more hurt and embarrassed had
he struck at her. The insult was so involuntary and definitely personal
as to be unforgettable. In one way and another, he had made all his
teachers, men and women alike, conscious of the same feeling of physical
aversion. In one class he habitually sat with his hand shading his eyes;
in another he always looked out of the window during the recitation; in
another he made a running commentary on the lecture, with humorous
intent.
His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was symbolized
by his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower, and they fell upon
him without mercy, his English teacher leading the pack. He stood through
it smiling, his pale lips parted over his white teeth. (His lips were
continually twitching, and he had a habit of raising his eyebrows that
was contemptuous and irritating to the last degree.) Older boys than
Paul had broken down and shed tears under that ordeal, but his set smile
did not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort was the nervous
trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of his overcoat, and
an occasional jerking of the other hand which held his hat. Paul was
always smiling, always glancing about him, seeming to feel that people
might be watching him and trying to detect something. This conscious
expression, since it was as far as possible from boyish mirthfulness, was
usually attributed to insolence or "smartness."
As the inquisition proceeded, one of his instructors repeated an
impertinent remark of the boy's, and the Principal asked him whether he
thought that a courteous speech to make to a woman. Paul shrugged his
shoulders slightly and his eyebrows twitched.
"I don't know," he replied. "I didn't mean to be polite or impolite,
either. I guess it's a sort of way I have, of saying things regardless."
The Principal asked him whether he didn't think that a way it would be
well to get rid of. Paul grinned and said he guessed so. When he was told
that he could go, he bowed gracefully and went out. His bow was like a
repetition of the scandalous red carnation.
His teachers were in despair, and his drawing master voiced the feeling
of them all when he declared there was something about the boy which
none of them understood. He added: "I don't really believe that smile of
his comes altogether from insolence; there's something sort of haunted
about it. The boy is not strong, for one thing. There is something wrong
about the fellow."
The drawing master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one saw
only his white teeth and the forced animation of his eyes. One warm
afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing-board, and his master
had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn and
wrinkled like an old man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even in his
sleep.
His teachers left the building dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated to
have felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have uttered this feeling
in cutting terms, and to have set each other on, as it were, in the
grewsome game of intemperate reproach. One of them remembered having seen
a miserable street cat set at bay by a ring of tormentors.
As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the Soldiers' Chorus from
_Faust_, looking wildly behind him now and then to see whether some of
his teachers were not there to witness his lightheartedness. As it was
now late in the afternoon and Paul was on duty that evening as usher at
Carnegie Hall, he decided that he would not go home to supper.
When he reached the concert hall the doors were not yet open. It was
chilly outside, and he decided to go up into the picture gallery--always
deserted at this hour--where there were some of Raffelli's gay studies of
Paris streets and an airy blue Venetian scene or two that always
exhilarated him. He was delighted to find no one in the gallery but the
old guard, who sat in the corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patch
over one eye and the other closed. Paul possessed himself of the place
and walked confidently up and down, whistling under his breath. After a
while he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself. When he bethought
him to look at his watch, it was after seven o'clock, and he rose with a
start and ran downstairs, making a face at Augustus Caesar, peering out
from the cast-room, and an evil gesture at the Venus of Milo as he passed
her on the stairway.
When Paul reached the ushers' dressing-room half-a-dozen boys were there
already, and he began excitedly to tumble into his uniform. It was one of
the few that at all approached fitting, and Paul thought it very
becoming--though he knew the tight, straight coat accentuated his narrow
chest, about which he was exceedingly sensitive. He was always excited
while he dressed, twanging all over to the tuning of the strings and the
preliminary flourishes of the horns in the music-room; but tonight he
seemed quite beside himself, and he teased and plagued the boys until,
telling him that he was crazy, they put him down on the floor and sat on
him.
Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the front of the
house to seat the early comers. He was a model usher. Gracious and
smiling he ran up and down the aisles. Nothing was too much trouble for
him; he carried messages and brought programs as though it were his
greatest pleasure in life, and all the people in his section thought him
a charming boy, feeling that he remembered and admired them. As the house
filled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the colour came
to his cheeks and lips. It was very much as though this were a great
reception and Paul were the host. Just as the musicians came out to take
their places, his English teacher arrived with checks for the seats which
a prominent manufacturer had taken for the season. She betrayed some
embarrassment when she handed Paul the tickets, and a _hauteur_ which
subsequently made her feel very foolish. Paul was startled for a moment,
and had the feeling of wanting to put her out; what business had she here
among all these fine people and gay colours? He looked her over and
decided that she was not appropriately dressed and must be a fool to sit
downstairs in such togs. The tickets had probably been sent her out of
kindness, he reflected, as he put down a seat for her, and she had about
as much right to sit there as he had.
When the symphony began Paul sank into one of the rear seats with a long
sigh of relief, and lost himself as he had done before the Rico. It was
not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul, but
the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious spirit
within him; something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle
found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights
danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable
splendour. When the soprano soloist came on, Paul forgot even the
nastiness of his teacher's being there, and gave himself up to the
peculiar intoxication such personages always had for him. The soloist
chanced to be a German woman, by no means in her first youth, and the
mother of many children; but she wore a satin gown and a tiara, and she
had that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine upon her, which
always blinded Paul to any possible defects.
After a concert was over, Paul was often irritable and wretched until he
got to sleep,--and tonight he was even more than usually restless. He had
the feeling of not being able to let down; of its being impossible to
give up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that could
be called living at all. During the last number he withdrew and, after
hastily changing his clothes in the dressing-room, slipped out to the
side door where the singer's carriage stood. Here he began pacing rapidly
up and down the walk, waiting to see her come out.
Over yonder the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and square
through the fine rain, the windows of its twelve stories glowing like
those of a lighted card-board house under a Christmas tree. All the
actors and singers of any importance stayed there when they were in the
city, and a number of the big manufacturers of the place lived there in
the winter. Paul had often hung about the hotel, watching the people go
in and out, longing to enter and leave school-masters and dull care
behind him for ever.
At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor, who helped
her into her carriage and closed the door with a cordial _auf
wiedersehen_,--which set Paul to wondering whether she were
not an old sweetheart of his. Paul followed the carriage over to the
hotel, walking so rapidly as not to be far from the entrance when the
singer alighted and disappeared behind the swinging glass doors which
were opened by a negro in a tall hat and a long coat. In the moment that
the door was ajar, it seemed to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed to
feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building,
into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and
basking ease. He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought
into the dining-room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seen
them in the supper party pictures of the Sunday supplement. A quick gust
of wind brought the rain down with sudden vehemence, and Paul was
startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the gravel
driveway; that his boots were letting in the water and his scanty
overcoat was clinging wet about him; that the lights in front of the
concert hall were out, and that the rain was driving in sheets between
him and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what he
wanted--tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas
pantomime; as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were
destined always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.
He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to
come sometime; his father in his night-clothes at the top of the stairs,
explanations that did not explain, hastily improvised fictions that were
forever tripping him up, his upstairs room and its horrible yellow
wallpaper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collar-box, and over
his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin,
and the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in red
worsted by his mother, whom Paul could not remember.
Half an hour later, Paul alighted from the Negley Avenue car and went
slowly down one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare. It was a
highly respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, and
where business men of moderate means begot and reared large families
of children, all of whom went to Sabbath-school and learned the shorter
catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly
alike as their homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which they
lived. Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing.
His home was next the house of the Cumberland minister. He approached it
tonight with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling of
sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always had
when he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the
waters close above his head. After each of these orgies of living, he
experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the
loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house permeated by
kitchen odours; a shuddering repulsion for the flavourless, colourless
mass of every-day existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft
lights and fresh flowers.
The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul felt
to the sight of it all; his ugly sleeping chamber; the cold bath-room
with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping spiggots; his
father, at the top of the stairs, his hairy legs sticking out from his
nightshirt, his feet thrust into carpet slippers. He was so much later
than usual that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches. Paul
stopped short before the door. He felt that he could not be accosted by
his father tonight; that he could not toss again on that miserable bed.
He would not go in. He would tell his father that he had no car fare, and
it was raining so hard he had gone home with one of the boys and stayed
all night.
Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back of the house
and tried one of the basement windows, found it open, raised it
cautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to the floor. There he
stood, holding his breath, terrified by the noise he had made; but the
floor above him was silent, and there was no creak on the stairs. He
found a soap-box, and carried it over to the soft ring of light that
streamed from the furnace door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid of
rats, so he did not try to sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at the
dark, still terrified lest he might have awakened his father. In such
reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and nights out of
the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses were deadened, Paul's
head was always singularly clear. Suppose his father had heard him
getting in at the window and had come down and shot him for a burglar?
Then, again, suppose his father had come down, pistol in hand, and he had
cried out in time to save himself, and his father had been horrified to
think how nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose a day should
come when his father would remember that night, and wish there had been
no warning cry to stay his hand? With this last supposition Paul
entertained himself until daybreak.
The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken by
the last flash of autumnal summer. In the morning Paul had to go to
church and Sabbath-school, as always. On seasonable Sunday afternoons the
burghers of Cordelia Street usually sat out on their front "stoops," and
talked to their neighbours on the next stoop, or called to those across
the street in neighbourly fashion. The men sat placidly on gay cushions
placed upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in
their Sunday "waists," sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending
to be greatly at their ease. The children played in the streets; there
were so many of them that the place resembled the recreation grounds of a
kindergarten. The men on the steps--all in their shirt sleeves, their
vests unbuttoned--sat with their legs well apart, their stomachs
comfortably protruding, and talked of the prices of things, or told
anecdotes of the sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords. They
occasionally looked over the multitude of squabbling children, listened
affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to see their
own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and interspersed their
legends of the iron kings with remarks about their sons' progress at
school, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had saved in
their toy banks.
On this last Sunday of November, Paul sat all the afternoon on the lowest
step of his "stoop," staring into the street, while his sisters, in their
rockers, were talking to the minister's daughters next door about how
many shirt-waists they had made in the last week, and how many waffles
some one had eaten at the last church supper. When the weather was warm,
and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls made
lemonade, which was always brought out in a red-glass pitcher, ornamented
with forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought very fine, and
the neighbours joked about the suspicious colour of the pitcher.
Today Paul's father, on the top step, was talking to a young man who
shifted a restless baby from knee to knee. He happened to be the young
man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and after whom it was his
father's dearest hope that he would pattern. This young man was of a
ruddy complexion, with a compressed, red mouth, and faded, near-sighted
eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curved
about his ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel
corporation, and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young
man with a future. There was a story that, some five years ago--he was
now barely twenty-six--he had been a trifle 'dissipated,' but in order to
curb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing
of wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his chief's advice, oft
reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one had married the first
woman whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to be an
angular school-mistress, much older than he, who also wore thick glasses,
and who had now borne him four children, all near-sighted, like herself.
The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the
Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business,
arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were at home,
and "knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy." His father
told, in turn, the plan his corporation was considering, of putting in an
electric railway plant at Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth; he had an awful
apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got there. Yet he
rather liked to hear these legends of the iron kings, that were told and
retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of palaces in Venice,
yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo appealed to his
fancy, and he was interested in the triumphs of cash boys who had become
famous, though he had no mind for the cash-boy stage.
After supper was over, and he had helped to dry the dishes, Paul
nervously asked his father whether he could go to George's to get some
help in his geometry, and still more nervously asked for car-fare. This
latter request he had to repeat, as his father, on principle, did not
like to hear requests for money, whether much or little. He asked Paul
whether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told him that
he ought not to leave his school work until Sunday; but he gave him the
dime. He was not a poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up in
the world. His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was that he thought
a boy ought to be earning a little.
Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odour of the dish-water from
his hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and then shook over
his fingers a few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden in
his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his
arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown
car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days, and began to live
again.
The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one
of the downtown theatres was an acquaintance of Paul's, and the
boy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals whenever
he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every available moment
loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing-room. He had won a place among
Edwards's following not only because the young actor, who could not
afford to employ a dresser, often found him useful, but because he
recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term "vocation."
It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the
rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul's fairy tale, and
it had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he inhaled
the gassy, painty, dusty odour behind the scenes, he breathed like a
prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying
splendid, brilliant things. The moment the cracked orchestra beat out the
overture from _Martha_, or jerked at the serenade from _Rigoletto_, all
stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his senses were deliciously,
yet delicately fired.
Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore
the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to
him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of life
elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies,
wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the unescapable odours
of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly-clad
men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple
orchards that bloomed perennially under the lime-light.
It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the
stage entrance of that theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance.
Certainly none of the company ever suspected it, least of all Charley
Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float about London
of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls, with palms, and
fountains, and soft lamps and richly apparelled women who never saw the
disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palled
city, enamoured of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple,
his wishing-carpet, his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean shore bathed
in perpetual sunshine.
Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been
perverted by garish fiction; but the truth was, he scarcely ever read at
all. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or corrupt a
youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his friends
urged upon him--well, he got what he wanted much more quickly from music;
any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel organ. He needed only
the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of
his senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own. It
was equally true that he was not stage-struck--not, at any rate, in the
usual acceptation of that expression. He had no desire to become an
actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He felt no necessity to
do any of these things; what he wanted was to see, to be in the
atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after
blue league, away from everything.
After a night behind the scenes, Paul found the school-room more than
ever repulsive; the bare floors and naked walls; the prosy men who never
wore frock coats, or violets in their buttonholes; the women with their
dull gowns, shrill voices, and pitiful seriousness about prepositions
that govern the dative. He could not bear to have the other pupils think,
for a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey to
them that he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a
joke, anyway. He had autograph pictures of all the members of the stock
company which he showed his classmates, telling them the most incredible
stories of his familiarity with these people, of his acquaintance with
the soloists who came to Carnegie Hall, his suppers with them and the
flowers he sent them. When these stories lost their effect, and his
audience grew listless, he would bid all the boys good-bye, announcing
that he was going to travel for awhile; going to Naples, to California,
to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back, conscious and nervously
smiling; his sister was ill, and he would have to defer his voyage until
spring.
Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let his
instructors know how heartily he despised them, and how thoroughly he was
appreciated elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice that he had no time to
fool with theorems; adding--with a twitch of the eyebrows and a touch of
that nervous bravado which so perplexed them--that he was helping the
people down at the stock company; they were old friends of his.
The upshot of the matter was, that the Principal went to Paul's father,
and Paul was taken out of school and put to work. The manager at Carnegie
Hall was told to get another usher in his stead; the doorkeeper at the
theatre was warned not to admit him to the house; and Charley Edwards
remorsefully promised the boy's father not to see him again.
The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul's
stories reached them--especially the women. They were hard-working women,
most of them supporting indolent husbands or brothers, and they laughed
rather bitterly at having stirred the boy to such fervid and florid
inventions. They agreed with the faculty and with his father, that Paul's
was a bad case.
The east-bound train was ploughing through a January snow-storm; the dull
dawn was beginning to show grey when the engine whistled a mile out of
Newark. Paul started up from the seat where he had lain curled in uneasy
slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window glass with his hand, and peered
out. The snow was whirling in curling eddies above the white bottom
lands, and the drifts lay already deep in the fields and along the
fences, while here and there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks
protruded black above it. Lights shone from the scattered houses, and
a gang of labourers who stood beside the track waved their lanterns.
Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He had
made the all-night journey in a day coach because he was afraid if he
took a Pullman he might be seen by some Pittsburgh business man who had
noticed him in Denny & Carson's office. When the whistle woke him, he
clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with an
uncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still
sleeping, the slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed
oblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled.
Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.
When he arrived at the Jersey City station, he hurried through his
breakfast, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about him.
After he reached the Twenty-third Street station, he consulted a cabman,
and had himself driven to a men's furnishing establishment which was just
opening for the day. He spent upward of two hours there, buying with
endless reconsidering and great care. His new street suit he put on in
the fitting-room; the frock coat and dress clothes he had bundled into
the cab with his new shirts. Then he drove to a hatter's and a shoe
house. His next errand was at Tiffany's, where he selected silver mounted
brushes and a scarf-pin. He would not wait to have his silver marked, he
said. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway, and had his
purchases packed into various travelling bags.
It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and,
after settling with the cabman, went into the office. He registered from
Washington; said his mother and father had been abroad, and that he had
come down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his story
plausibly and had no trouble, since he offered to pay for them in
advance, in engaging his rooms; a sleeping-room, sitting-room and bath.
Not once, but a hundred times Paul had planned this entry into New York.
He had gone over every detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in his
scrap book at home there were pages of description about New York hotels,
cut from the Sunday papers.
When he was shown to his sitting-room on the eighth floor, he saw at a
glance that everything was as it should be; there was but one detail in
his mental picture that the place did not realize, so he rang for the
bell boy and sent him down for flowers. He moved about nervously until
the boy returned, putting away his new linen and fingering it delightedly
as he did so. When the flowers came, he put them hastily into water, and
then tumbled into a hot bath. Presently he came out of his white
bath-room, resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with the
tassels of his red robe. The snow was whirling so fiercely outside his
windows that he could scarcely see across the street; but within, the air
was deliciously soft and fragrant. He put the violets and jonquils on the
tabouret beside the couch, and threw himself down with a long sigh,
covering himself with a Roman blanket. He was thoroughly tired; he
had been in such haste, he had stood up to such a strain, covered so much
ground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had
all come about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the
cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.
It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theatre
and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was
virtually determined. The rest was a mere matter of opportunity. The only
thing that at all surprised him was his own courage--for he realized well
enough that he had always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive
dread that, of late years, as the meshes of the lies he had told closed
about him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and tighter.
Until now, he could not remember a time when he had not been dreading
something. Even when he was a little boy, it was always there--behind
him, or before, or on either side. There had always been the shadowed
corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but from which
something seemed always to be watching him--and Paul had done things that
were not pretty to watch, he knew.
But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last thrown
down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner.
Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but
yesterday afternoon that he had been sent to the bank with Denny &
Carson's deposit, as usual--but this time he was instructed to leave the
book to be balanced. There was above two thousand dollars in checks, and
nearly a thousand in the bank notes which he had taken from the book and
quietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made out a new
deposit slip. His nerves had been steady enough to permit of his
returning to the office, where he had finished his work and asked for a
full day's holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonable
pretext. The bank book, he knew, would not be returned before Monday or
Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the next week. From the
time he slipped the bank notes into his pocket until he boarded the night
train for New York, he had not known a moment's hesitation.
How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done; and
this time there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the
stairs. He watched the snow flakes whirling by his window until he fell
asleep.
When he awoke, it was four o'clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with a
start; one of his precious days gone already! He spent nearly an hour in
dressing, watching every stage of his toilet carefully in the mirror.
Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had
always wanted to be.
When he went downstairs, Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth avenue
toward the Park. The snow had somewhat abated; carriages and tradesmen's
wagons were hurrying soundlessly to and fro in the winter twilight; boys
in woollen mufflers were shovelling off the doorsteps; the avenue stages
made fine spots of colour against the white street. Here and there on the
corners whole flower gardens blooming behind glass windows, against which
the snow flakes stuck and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of
the valley--somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed
thus unnaturally in the snow. The Park itself was a wonderful stage
winter-piece.
When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased, and the tune of
the streets had changed. The snow was falling faster, lights streamed
from the hotels that reared their many stories fearlessly up into the
storm, defying the raging Atlantic winds. A long, black stream of
carriages poured down the avenue, intersected here and there by other
streams, tending horizontally. There were a score of cabs about the
entrance of his hotel, and his driver had to wait. Boys in livery were
running in and out of the awning stretched across the sidewalk, up and
down the red velvet carpet laid from the door to the street. Above,
about, within it all, was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss of
thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself, and on every
side of him towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth.
The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm of
realization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances, the
nervestuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the snow flakes.
He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.
When Paul came down to dinner, the music of the orchestra floated up the
elevator shaft to greet him. As he stepped into the thronged corridor, he
sank back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. The
lights, the chatter, the perfumes, the bewildering medley of colour--he
had, for a moment, the feeling of not being able to stand it. But only
for a moment; these were his own people, he told himself. He went slowly
about the corridors, through the writing-rooms, smoking-rooms,
reception-rooms, as though he were exploring the chambers of an enchanted
palace, built and peopled for him alone.
When he reached the dining-room he sat down at a table near a window. The
flowers, the white linen, the many-coloured wine glasses, the gay
toilettes of the women, the low popping of corks, the undulating
repetitions of the _Blue Danube_ from the orchestra, all flooded Paul's
dream with bewildering radiance. When the roseate tinge of his champagne
was added--that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed in
his glass--Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all.
This was what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this was
what all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of his past. Had
he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where fagged
looking business men boarded the early car? Mere rivets in a machine they
seemed to Paul,--sickening men, with combings of children's hair always
hanging to their coats, and the smell of cooking in their clothes.
Cordelia Street--Ah, that belonged to another time and country! Had
he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as
far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just such
shimmering textures, and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this
one between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.
He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to
meet or to know any of these people; all he demanded was the right to
look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant. The mere stage properties
were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in
his loge at the Opera. He was entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of
his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself
different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings
explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear it
passively. He had only to glance down at his dress coat to reassure
himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.
He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting-room to go to bed that
night, and sat long watching the raging storm from his turret window.
When he went to sleep, it was with the lights turned on in his bedroom;
partly because of his old timidity, and partly so that, if he should
wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt, no
horrible suspicion of yellow wall-paper, or of Washington and Calvin
above his bed.
On Sunday morning the city was practically snow-bound. Paul breakfasted
late, and in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy,
a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a "little flyer" over
Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town,
and the two boys went off together after dinner, not returning to the
hotel until seven o'clock the next morning. They had started out in the
confiding warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in the
elevator was singularly cool. The freshman pulled himself together to
make his train, and Paul went to bed. He awoke at two o'clock in the
afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for ice-water, coffee, and
the Pittsburgh papers.
On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There was
this to be said for him, that he wore his spoils with dignity and in
no way made himself conspicuous. His chief greediness lay in his ears and
eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures
were the grey winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment
of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette and his sense
of power. He could not remember a time when he had felt so at peace with
himself. The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every
day and every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied for
pleasure, even at school; but to make himself noticed and admired, to
assert his difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good
deal more manly, more honest, even, now that he had no need for boastful
pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used to say, "dress
the part." It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to him. His
golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he
could.
On the eighth day after his arrival in New York, he found the whole
affair exploited in the Pittsburgh papers, exploited with a wealth of
detail which indicated that local news of a sensational nature was at a
low ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson announced that the boy's father
had refunded the full amount of his theft, and that they had no intention
of prosecuting. The Cumberland minister had been interviewed, and
expressed his hope of yet reclaiming the motherless lad, and Paul's
Sabbath-school teacher declared that she would spare no effort to that
end. The rumour had reached Pittsburgh that the boy had been seen in a
New York hotel, and his father had gone East to find him and bring
him home.
Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair,
weak in the knees, and clasped his head in his hands. It was to be worse
than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over
him finally and forever. The grey monotony stretched before him in
hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, the
yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon him
with sickening vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra had
suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over. The sweat
broke out on his face, and he sprang to his feet, looked about him with
his white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in the mirror. With
something of the childish belief in miracles with which he had so often
gone to class, all his lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and dashed
whistling down the corridor to the elevator.
He had no sooner entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the
music, than his remembrance was lightened by his old elastic power of
claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all sufficient. The
glare and glitter about him, the mere scenic accessories had again, and
for the last time, their old potency. He would show himself that he was
game, he would finish the thing splendidly. He doubted, more than ever,
the existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank his
wine recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of these fortunate beings?
Was he not still himself, and in his own place? He drummed a nervous
accompaniment to the music and looked about him, telling himself over and
over that it had paid.
He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the violin and the chill sweetness
of his wine, that he might have done it more wisely. He might have caught
an outbound steamer and been well out of their clutches before now. But
the other side of the world had seemed too far away and too uncertain
then; he could not have waited for it; his need had been too sharp. If he
had to choose over again, he would do the same thing tomorrow. He looked
affectionately about the dining-room, now gilded with a soft mist. Ah, it
had paid indeed!
Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head and
feet. He had thrown himself across the bed without undressing, and had
slept with his shoes on. His limbs and hands were lead heavy, and his
tongue and throat were parched. There came upon him one of those fateful
attacks of clear-headedness that never occurred except when he was
physically exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay still and closed
his eyes and let the tide of realities wash over him.
His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or other," he told
himself. The memory of successive summers on the front stoop fell upon
him like a weight of black water. He had not a hundred dollars left; and
he knew now, more than ever, that money was everything, the wall that
stood between all he loathed and all he wanted. The thing was winding
itself up; he had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York,
and had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on his
dressing-table now; he had got it out last night when he came blindly up
from dinner,--but the shiny metal hurt his eyes, and he disliked the look
of it, anyway.
He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again
to attacks of nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all the
world had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow he was not afraid of
anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked into the
dark corner at last, and knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there; but
somehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been. He saw everything
clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he
had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for half an hour he
sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way, so
he went downstairs and took a cab to the ferry.
When Paul arrived at Newark, he got off the train and took another cab,
directing the driver to follow the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town.
The snow lay heavy on the roadways and had drifted deep in the open
fields. Only here and there the dead grass or dried weed stalks
projected, singularly black, above it. Once well into the country, Paul
dismissed the carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his mind
a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actual
picture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered every
feature of both his drivers, the toothless old woman from whom he had
bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got his
ticket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable
to cope with vital matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftly
at sorting and grouping these images. They made for him a part of the
ugliness of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter burning on
his tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into his mouth as he
walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a little hillside,
where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below him, he stopped
and sat down.
The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed; all
their red glory over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen
in the show windows that first night must have gone the same way, long
before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their
brave mockery at the winter outside the glass. It was a losing game in
the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world
is run. Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat and scooped
a little hole in the snow, where he covered it up. Then he dozed a
while, from his weak condition, seeming insensible to the cold.
The sound of an approaching train woke him, and he started to his feet,
remembering only his resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late.
He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, his
lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced
nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right
moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to
him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone.
There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of
Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.
He felt something strike his chest,--his body was being thrown swiftly
through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs
gently relaxed. Then, because the picture making mechanism was crushed,
the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the
immense design of things.