"Then do so." Fumbling in her bag, she found a card and pencil. "Take
that," she commanded, when she had finished scribbling, "and ask for Mr.
Jewsbury. If he isn't in, show it to the room clerk, but keep it for
Mr. Jewsbury to-morrow. I've told them you must have a room and bath,
not over two-fifty a day--and clean. Tell them I said so."
"Is Mr. Jewsbury a friend of yours?" I asked, inanely, after I had
thanked her.
"He used to be my husband---the one before Mr. Crockett. I could be
Mrs. Jewsbury again, if I so chose; but I do not so choose."
With this astonishing hint of the possibilities in Miss Goldie
Flowerdew's biography I saw the value of discretion, and as soon as
courtesy permitted took my leave to visit the Hotel Barcelona.
*CHAPTER VIII*
After a delicious night I woke in a room which gave the same shock to my
fastidiousness as the first glimpse of my cabin on board ship. I woke
cheerfully, however, knowing that I was in New York and that not many
days could pass before some happy chance encounter would give me the
clue of which I was in search. Cheerfully I dressed and breakfasted;
cheerfully I sat down in the dingy hall to scan the morning's news.
It was the first paper I had opened since landing. It was the first I
had looked at since...
I had no recollection of when I had read a newspaper last. It must have
been long ago; so long ago that the history of my immediate time had
lapsed into formlessness, like that of the ancient world. I knew there
was a world; I knew there were countries and governments; I knew, as I
have said, that there was a war. Of the causes of that war I retained
about the same degree of information as of the origin of the Wars of the
Roses.
Bewilderment was my first reaction now; the second was amazement.
Reading the papers with no preparation from the day before, or from the
day before that--with no preparation at all but the vague memory of
horrors from which my mind retreated the minute they were
suggested--reading the papers thus, the world seemed to me to have been
turned upside down. Hindus were in France, Canadians in Belgium, the
French in the Dobrudja, the Australians in Turkey, the British and
Germans in East Africa, and New-Zealanders on the peninsula of Sinai.
What madness was this? How had the race of men got into such a
tragi-comic topsy-turvydom? A long crooked line slashed all across
Europe showed the main body of the opponents locked in a mutual death
embrace.
I had hardly grasped the meaning of it when, looking up, I saw a figure
of light standing in the lobby before me. It was all in white serge,
with a green sash about the waist, and the head wreathed in a white
motor veil.
"Hello, kid!" The husky, comic, Third Avenue laugh was Lydia Blair's.
I had just time to rehearse the series of irritations I knew I should
feel at being tracked down, and to regret my folly for having gone back
to Drinkwater on the previous evening. Then I saw the heavenly eyes
surveying me with an air of approval. "Well, you look like a nice
tailor's dummy at last. Takes me back to Seattle or Boston or Salt Lake
City--and the lady." As she rattled on, a pair of dark eyes began to
flash on me from the air. "We haven't got _her_ to-day, but there's
some one else who perhaps will fill the bill. Come on out."
Wondering what she could mean, and whether or not the longed-for clue
might not be at hand, I suffered myself to be led by the arm to the door
of the hotel.
At first I saw nothing but a large and handsome touring-car drawn up
against the curb. Then I saw Drinkwater snuggled in a corner--and then a
brown veil. I couldn't help crossing the pavement, since Lydia did the
same, and the brown veil seemed to expect me.
"Miss Blair thought you might like a drive, Mr. Soames, so we came round
to see if we could find you."
"Come on in, Jasper," Drinkwater urged; "the water's fine."
"Come on. Don't be silly," Miss Blair insisted, as I began to make
excuses.
Before I knew what I was doing I had stumbled into the seat opposite
Miss Averill. She sat in the right-hand corner, Drinkwater in the left,
Miss Blair between the two. I occupied one of the small folding
armchairs, going backward. In another minute we were on our way through
one of the cross-streets to Fifth Avenue.
Having grasped the situation, I was annoyed. Miss Averill was taking the
less fortunate of her acquaintance for an airing. Though I could do
justice to her kindliness, I resented being forced again into a position
from which I was trying to struggle out.
Then I saw something that diverted my attention even from my wrongs.
The pavements in Fifth Avenue were thronged with a slowly moving crowd
of men and women, but mostly men, that made progress up or down
impossible. Looking closely, I saw that they were all of the nations
which people like myself are apt to consider most alien to the average
American. Of true Caucasian blood there was hardly a streak among them.
Dark, stunted, oddly hatted, oddly dressed, abject and yet eager,
submissive and yet hostile, they poured up and up and up from all the
side-streets, as runlets from a mountain-side into a great stream. For
the pedestrian, the shopper, the _flaneur_, there was not an inch of
foot room. These surging multitudes monopolized everything. From
Fourteenth Street to Forty-second Street, a distance of more than a mile
along the most extravagantly showy thoroughfare in the world, these two
dense lines of humanity took absolute possession, driving clerks back
into their shops and customers from trade by the sheer weight of
numbers.
"Good heavens! What's up?" I cried, in amazement.
Miss Averill, who was doubtless used to the phenomenon, looked mildly
surprised.
"Why, it's always this way!" she smiled. "It's their lunch-hour. They
come from shops and workshops in the side-streets to see the sights and
get the air."
"But is it like this every day?"
"Sure it is!" laughed Miss Blair. "Did you never see the Avenue
before?"
"I've never seen this before. I'm sure they didn't do it a few years
ago."
Miss Averill agreed to this. It was a new manifestation, due to the
changes this part of New York had undergone in recent years.
"But how do the people get in and out of the shops?"
Miss Blair explained that they couldn't, which was the reason why so
many businesses were being driven up-town. There was an hour in the day
when everything was at a standstill.
"And if during that hour this inflammable stuff were to be set ablaze--"
Miss Averill's comment did not make the situation better. "Oh, the same
thing goes on in every city in the country, only you don't see it. New
York is unfortunate in having only one street. Any other street is just
a byway. Here the whole city, for every purpose of its life, has to
pour itself into Fifth Avenue, so that if anything is going on you get
it there."
We did not continue the subject, for none of us really wanted to talk of
it. In its way it went beyond whatever we were prepared to say. It was
disquieting; it might be menacing. We preferred to watch, to study, to
wonder, as, in the press of vehicles, we slowly made our way between
these banks of outlandish faces, every one of which was like a
slumbering fire. If our American civilization were ever to be blown
violently from one basis to another, as I had sometimes thought might
happen, the social TNT was concentrated here.
But we were soon in the Park. Soon after that we were running along the
river-bank. Soon after that we came to an inn by a stream in a dimple
of a dell, and here Miss Averill had ordered lunch by telephone. It was
a nice little lunch, in a sort of rude pavilion that simulated eating in
the open air. I noticed that all the arrangements had been made with as
much foresight as if we had been people of distinction.
So I began to examine my hostess with more attention than I had ever
given her, coming to the conclusion that she belonged to the new variety
of rich American whom I had somewhere had occasion to observe.
Sensible and sympathetic were the first words you applied to her, and
you could see she was of the type to seek nothing for herself. Brown
was her color, as it so often is that of self-renouncing characters--the
brown of woodland brooks in her eyes, the brown of nuts in her hair, and
all about her an air of conscientiousness that left no place for
coquetry.
Conscientiousness was her aura, and among the shades of
conscientiousness that in spending money easily came first. I was sure
she had studied the whole question of financial inequality from books,
and as much as she could from observation. Zeal to make the best use of
her income had probably held her back from marriage and dictated her
occupations. It had drawn her to working-girls like Lydia Blair, to
struggling men like Harry Drinkwater, and now indirectly to me. It had
suggested the drive of this morning, and had bidden her gather us round
her table as if we were her equals. She knew we were not her equals,
but she was doing her best to forget the fact, and to have us forget it,
too. With Harry and Lydia I think she was successful. But with me...
She herself knew she was not successful with me, and when, after the
coffee, the working-girl had taken the blind man and strayed with him
for a few hundred yards into the woods, Miss Averill grew embarrassed.
The more she tried to keep me from seeing it the more she betrayed
it--not in words, or glances, or any trick of color, but in inner
hesitations which only mind-reading could detect.
As we still sat at the table, but each a little away from it, she
gathered all her resources together to be the lady in authority.
"I'm glad of a word alone with you because--" Apparently she could get
no farther in this direction, and so took another line. "I think you
said your business was with carpets, didn't you?"
"Somebody may have said it for me--especially after our little talk
about the rug--but it didn't come from me."