SUSPICION
Shipman, after the conclusion of the trial of Terry O'Brien, spent
most of the time chopping wood. Trees that had been felled during the
spring he sawed into lengths. Splitting and piling into neat kindling
not only kept his muscles elastic, but somehow, as the wood piles
mounted, gave him a primal sense of the old pioneers' fight against the
cold and winter. That this wood found its way to the house of a needy
widow with a little peaked boy about Pudge's age was one of Shipman's
satisfactions. Long afterward, in the winter, the lawyer would wake
of cold nights and think of the wind howling around the little valley
house and of the center of heat that fed by his hands made it possible
for two helpless people to escape that other awful Hand of Cold.
To souls like Watts, intent upon some high conception of honor and
goodness, bent upon making themselves into a fit home for the Spirit or
some part of Spirit that possesses them, there come moments of awful
despair and groping. The lawyer, sawing until his back burned with
sore muscles, was knowing this despair to its utmost, for the golden
currents, the flowered tides of the Hudson River summer had nearly
swamped him. The last weeks on the mountain top had been as those of a
starving man surrounded with fruits and delicious spicy drinks--the
bleak sense of failure, of dusty loneliness, of hurrying years and
barren paths--his dry desert had opened out before him!
The man, with unutterable sense of hungry flesh and spirit, knew
himself as one who inevitably had gotten into a barren trail. His
inner eyes, panic stricken, got the strange vision of an ending--a
going-out-of-the-world with no continuing strain of him left behind.
No eyes that should be torched from his eyes; no lips that should turn
his stuff of life into better words; no hand that like his should seek
in darkness to find the keys to human breasts; no wife-comrade to speak
comrade-words in the dark of loneliness and bafflement; no home that
should make the abiding spot in a shifting world; no child; no race; no
blood sent forward; no continuing city.
Shipman, halting with the perspiration streaming down his bare back,
drew on a sweater. "Dear old Bowwow"--the lawyer sat down on his usual
log. He pulled the dog over to him. "Tuck, let me pour this last howl
into your comfortable and safe ear, and then I'm done. I'm haunted, old
chap, haunted with a horrible feeling of ending--and--and--I want to go
on----
"You see, Tuck, old beggar, I'm getting old, and when I die there will
be no little chap or little sister Shipman to carry on the soul of
me, yes, even the foolishnesses of me; I suppose," Watts inquired of
his dog, "I suppose you have lots of little puppies somewhere, some
blue-ribboned and with kennel degrees that make you pretty proud? But
me, Tuck, I don't leave anything, not even a little adopted puppy.
Nothing can laugh and say, 'My father was an awful duffer, but he made
good salad dressing,' or 'My father licked me once, but we used to go
fishing together.' Tuck," whispered the man fiercely, "I want a son, a
little young 'un to keep alive the things I dream and hope and believe.
I want another me."
The strong fingers in the dog's shaggy hair gripped upon the hateful
idea of utter cessation of being, as many another has gripped. Let
those who rage against Birth Control face rather this mystery of the
man or woman who because of an ideal in the matter of human love
dies without issue! Here is a Birth Control of much larger and more
significant reach.
"The strange part of it is, Tuck, it's easy enough to get children, but
to get children who shall, no matter what befalls them, be parented by
high human love and faith, that is another thing." The deep eyes stared
into the shallow dog eyes. "Well," sighed Shipman, "it's very seldom
that I care like this. It's the beginning of autumn, that's all. You
don't suppose, Tuck, that I really care?"
Yet the man knew remorselessly that in the past week things had
happened about which he unutterably cared. The chance mingling with
the young life of the Willow Roads had shown him to himself in a way
that he could not ignore or brush aside. He was a human man, a soul
and body undeveloped, unrealized, inorientate in the great human plan.
He had blown, like life seed, down the dry roads of philosophy and
introspection, and had lain for a while by the springs of youth and
action until some hidden principle within him had germinated. Now he
craved direction, fruition!
There floated through the mind of the lawyer the pictures of Minga,
with her vivid capricious demands on him, her unwitting tempting
of him; what would another man have done? Of what worth were his
hesitations and restraints, Sard, with her high compulsions and
swift fires? Why should he, Shipman, have let these fresh wonders of
womanhood flit by like shadows? He groaned, knowing why--because do
what he would, think what he would, Eleanor Ledyard held him. The woman
of ice, the enshrined mystery of woman whom another man had called
"wife," but who, Shipman believed, had never been true soul-wife,
controlled his, Shipman's, deepest, most inaccessible self.
Of course, what had come to him was his own choice. There were many
ways a man might take to come to grips with active life. Cowardly men,
sly men or men who had not thought the thing out had taken these ways.
Cynical men took them and then wondered why their lives were forever
hurt by smirched and bleared life pictures, pictures that stayed in
their minds. The ways of such men were not for him. Passion in its
highest, most superb moments, Shipman knew himself to be capable of,
but devotion, tenderness, the fair way of the approach of men and
women to each other's mystery was what his nature craved. His love
principle was not that of a hot moment of gratification. It was of the
long, slow endeared proving of devotion. Plunged in thought, driven
to his body's uttermost endurance with the sense of stirred, hungry,
unsatisfied, uncompleted things, the lawyer at a footfall angrily
raised his head.
"Curse it, can't I be alone?" demanded Watts unreasonably. "Get out,
will you?" He did not turn his head. "Get out," he called curtly. "This
is private property; can't you read the signs?"
The footfall paused and a voice came quietly, "I am Colter, Judge
Bogart's man. Could you see me a few moments?"
With a smothered word the lawyer turned, smiling at his own rudeness,
and held out his hand.
"I thought it was some Curiosity Bump climbing up here. I'm not at all
sure this sort of life is good for one. It makes one want to hog the
very air." Watts, still smiling, looked keenly into the eyes of his
visitor. Suddenly he glanced about him for Friar Tuck. "Well, by all
pedigreed pups," he breathed, "Tuck viséd you, did he? Let you pass? If
he barked, I didn't hear him."
Colter, taking the cigarette from the case held out to him, returned
the searching gaze straightly. It was Shipman's method to put any
who sought him out instantly on a harmonious social ground. This was
Judge Bogart's hired man. It was also Sard's protégé, but more than
that it was Shipman's private enigma. The situation was tense with
possibilities for both men. Colter answered without self-consciousness.
"Dogs don't always bark at everyone." He was thoughtful for a moment.
Lighting the cigarette and pushing the match end under his worn canvas
shoe, he remarked simply, "The only dogs I can remember barking at me
are the shepherd dogs of Greece. And," laughingly indicating the little
village up the river, "the dogs of Morris when I was tramping it."
Watts, rolling his own cigarette, looked up idly.
"You've been in Greece?" As he asked the question, the lawyer, by what
process of intuition he himself could not understand, anticipated the
answer. "Excavating?"
Colter nodded. "I think I was with the American School at Athens for
a year or two. It would seem that I had some little knowledge about
soils." He hesitated in the curious way with which all who had known
him had grown familiar. The intense fire-blue eyes concentrated on the
placid river as on some clouded crystal of his opaque past. He seemed
curiously like a fisherman watching for some bite of memory on his
tremulous reaching line, lifting the empty hook time and again.
"Soils," remarked the regardful lawyer, "must have their own poetry."
The other hesitated, then as if quite forgetful where he was or on what
errand he had come, Colter responded evenly, "They have an interest
like that of a profound book, quite outside of what one assays or digs
for. There are enough adventures in soils right around this Hudson
River section back through the states of New York and New Jersey to
make an Iliad."
"Hum." Shipman inhaled his cigarette smoke, which flowed through
his deep nostrils; with a curious lowering of the eyelids over the
profound dark of his eyes, he let one hand drop loosely over his knee.
It was the lawyer's instinctive relaxed indifferent pose of listening
and watching; listening for false voice tones, watching for shifting
glimmers and lights of evasion and deceit, for the curious betrayal in
eyelids and lip muscles.
"Soils, however, would hardly recommend themselves as exciting to the
average man."
The other man smiled for a second and glanced at the lawyer with a
free relish of the subject. "They say young men need occasional wars
to stimulate their sense of adventure." The quiet voice was ironical,
and Colter waved a disparaging hand. "This river," he said; "think of
the poetry and adventure of the great minds born on its banks. Think
of the poetry and adventure for science and enterprise still to come
along its banks as a great Water Road," he indicated a slow train of
freight cars on the opposite shore, "and as one of the great verses in
the Odyssey of Trade. Why, leaving out the Poem of Hauling, I suspect
that back of these hills there are important contributions to history
and geology and art. There must be Indian burying grounds filled with
the half ossified Indian chiefs, their pottery and tribal implements."
Colter, leaning on his arms, apparently lost in some pleasant fancy of
his own, smoked dreamily. "To find these things is better adventure
than plunging a bayonet into another man's stomach," he smiled.
Shipman's eyes, however, remained half closed. This was all very
pretty. The chap had perhaps been a soldier, and attended a military
school. He might have taken courses as a war engineer. Yet a clever
cracksman or modern safe technician would get up a long lingo like
this, especially if he wanted to "put something over," to sound the
mental habits, resources and association of the other man, catalogue
them for some confidence scheme of his own. Watts crossed one leg over
the other and smoked at the sky. His back was to the river which the
other man sat facing. His frequent sharp looks were swift and incisive.
So far the lawyer had made no effort to find out Colter's errand. There
was all the time in the world; meanwhile there was a girl down there
with a girl's romantic sense of faith and belief in this man, probably
a farceur and trickster. It might be his, Shipman's, bitter job to have
to go to this girl as her friend and tell her the truth.
"I can see that you take a good deal of interest in such things."
Then, not without some marveling on the part of the lawyer, the two
plunged into an absorbed discussion of seeps and sheds, of green marl
and sandstone, of clay gravel and sand, of mineral waters and sources
of potash and phosphates, the problems of tunneling and boring, the
opening up of this and that manufacture and industry, the prophecies of
latent oils and resins and cements.
The lawyer, thoroughly enjoying it, yet obstinately fancied that he
sensed some insecurity, some too-varied mingling of knowledge back of
it. So, he told himself, might any high-powered confidence man give
the right answers and take the right cues. There were books nowadays,
compendiums of knowledge. Just reading modern advertisements made a
man's mind agile and slick.
"So you've been in Greece." Shipman was watchful, at the same time
smoothly disarming. He gently flicked the ashes from his cigarette.
"You must know Gnossus, Crete, Andritsena, and, let's see," warily,
"the name of that mountain temple that the French-man discovered."
Colter's face lightened enthusiastically. "Bassae." He looked
interestedly into the lawyer's face. The other paused a few moments.
"You remember such things?" remarked the lawyer significantly.
"Yes," with eagerness, "I do. The Greek hasn't gotten away from me."
Colter looked almost happily into Shipman's face. "A great deal comes
back along academic lines," he faltered.
"Um!" Shipman tossed away his cigarette. He did not light another.
He loafed against the back of the tree, his fingers lightly and
speculatively tapping on his little silver match-box, his lips half
whistling while his mind ran over possible and probable things. He
reviewed everything he had ever seen of Colter, particularly the man's
eyes that day on the Hackensack, looking into his own with their look
of appeal, "Who am I?" Very gently, without turning his head, with
voice unemotional, undramatic, the lawyer now asked his own question.
"Who are you? Why do you conceal who you are?"
Colter, who had as he talked been dreamily staring at the river, sprang
quickly back to an attitude of attention. Every motion he made, every
slightest movement of hand or eyelash or the corners of lips, was under
a remorseless observation, that of a genius for reading human beings.
"Who are you?" The question was repeated very quietly, but now it had
the note of inexorable authority. It was asked on behalf of Sard,
whose trusting face and figure made it on Shipman's lips, stern,
uncompromising.
Colter, his face flushing, rose. The man had changed in a deadly sort
of way. His head from which he had removed the cap sunk suddenly
forward as if his face could not look into that old enigma "Who am I?"
The hair, swept back in its curious boy-like wave, was of vital copper
under which Shipman noted a very few gray hairs which seemed curiously
premature for the face opposite. The white skin, slightly freckled,
had a youthful, good modeling; the face bones made it of pure English
build. Shipman, puzzled, tried to analyze the curious look of sorrow
and patient suffering on it. His gaze went to one or two very small
scars as of smallpox.
_One or two very small scars, as of smallpox!_ The lawyer stared at
the white teeth showing under a mustached lip set to a gaunt look of
bravery and mental struggle.
"I beg your pardon," said the other, "I had forgotten--forgotten
myself. You treated me like a friend, and I went along easily. Things
came easily--I was remembering," Colter sat up, his hands working at
his belt. "Things came to me, but," he shook his head, "you ask who I
am."
The man turned the old mask of suffering on his interlocutor and shook
his head. If the thing was acting, it was prodigious acting. Shipman
told himself that such acting had gotten Sard's soul away from her. It
should not, however, have her entire! That face with its strange look
of sorrow suddenly maddened the lawyer. He straightened. This mask must
be torn off. This charlatan must be shown up. Now an old vulpine habit
of the court-room came on the legal face.
"Who are you?" Shipman thrust his chin forward in a curious wolfish
way; his mouth grinned while his eyes stared implacably. It was the old
terrorizing third degree method. The method of which the lawyer in his
better moments was secretly ashamed, but on which he knew any human
reserve could be broken. Watts Shipman, with a kind of battle scent,
felt himself to be pitted against something too shrewd, too delicately
perceptive and elusive, to respond to other methods. And, well, the
lawyer was not accustomed to being beaten at his own game! His glance,
like a look of dreadful night, a look of knowledge of all human hiding,
turned on the man. It was as if with incandescent power he would trace
the very vitals, sift the fugitive thought and judgment, drive to the
wall all subterfuges, snap handcuffs on the very shadow in the eyes,
see the very juices and chemistry of the living, breathing soul and
body before him.
"_Who are you?_"
The other man, with a man's defiance, some dignity and assurance as of
bygone things, had risen. "Of course, you had a right to ask that," he
said slowly. "But I wish you had not because--because----" He passed
his hand wearily over his forehead. "It is hard for me to keep things
clear, to go straight ahead. I came up to you here to ask for work."
"To ask for work?"
"I hoped," said Colter simply, "that you could give me some suggestion.
Judge Bogart has asked me to leave."
In the silence that followed the lawyer tried to keep intense curiosity
and anxiety from his eyes. Involuntarily Sard's name came to his lips.
Stealing a look at the other man, he felt that Colter would also lock
his uncertain lips on that name.
On the pause the flood of intelligence that swept through the lawyer
brought obstinate anger and resentment. "Hog," he breathed as once
before, "hog!" He could see Sard's wild dismay, her sense of shame as
of someone who had been untrustworthy, the poor child's friendlessness.
"Hog," said the lawyer in the bitter back room of his mind, "animal!"
Yet was not the Judge, the father of the girl, right? Could a man who
knew the world allow a thing so radiantly impulsive her instinctive
freedoms with an interloper, a rapscallion, someone who dodged on his
tracks, played a worn-out game of ignorance as to his own identity,
the responsibility he had in the world?
"Who are you?" repeated Shipman steadily. Then as a thought struck him,
"Why did Judge Bogart ask you to leave?" The lawyer bethought himself
of the "word test" in psycho-analysis. What word would make this fellow
change, cringe, become maudlin, explanatory?
There was a short silence until the other man replied calmly, "I should
prefer not going into that."
Suddenly, to the lawyer's enormous surprise, a curious thing happened.
Colter, after taking a few nervous steps back and forth, came up to
him, holding out his hand, and with an air almost winning in its
friendliness, said, "Good-bye, I'm sorry I bothered. You see, I hoped
you could help me to get work. If not, I must go."
The lawyer studied him. "What kind of work?" he asked curtly.
"Any kind to get food and lodging while I wait."
"Wait for what?"
"For things to come back to me," said Colter simply. "I think things
are beginning to get clearer. Just now when we talked," he waved his
hand, "doors opened all around me. I felt myself back in myself. The
true me--I--you see, I am in much better health."
The man stood there irresolute, the eyes wavering in their intensity
of attempted remembrance, some look of assurance and confidence
alternating with the old shifting look of dread and dismay that at
moments still swept the fine drawn face. It was this look of shifting
dread that had always kept the lawyer suspicious. What had this man
done that could give to strong eyes like that the averted haunted look
they sometimes held? His manner changing with a half apologetic smile,
he turned to his visitor.
"I take it you've been a scientific man, college-bred. Have you by any
chance a degree?" Shipman almost laughed as he asked it.
The other knit his brows, and returned the look earnestly.
"Would you believe me if--if I tell you what I have come to believe,
what I think is possible, would you think me crazy?"
Then a slow sense of what had been of the man's horror dawned on the
lawyer. "If amnesia were true, if one were dimly conscious of one's
life paths and had somehow, somewhere been swept out of these paths,
and there were no landmark to help one go back, why then," the grim
mouth shut on the doubts. Shipman nodded. There was something in the
nod that the other man in his helpless gentleness comprehended. The
nod said, "I don't believe you. I don't trust you, but I won't take
advantage of you." It was hardly akin to Sard's whole-souled trust.
One arm crossed behind him, Colter began pacing restlessly up and
down the small space where the tree-chopping and wood-sawing had made
a little theatre. He spoke rapidly, disconnectedly. "I have come to
believe that I have been a college man. I even believe that I have had
certain honors. There have been achievements along scientific lines. I
can so far remember nothing in sequence back of the day Miss Bogart
found me. Since that I have a perfect power of memory." The man halted
and seemed to wait with a strained patience for things to pour in on
the open sensitive plate of his healing memory. At last, fishing in an
inner pocket, he held out a little book bound in green vellum. It was
very worn and had evidently been constantly read. "I have always had
this book, wherever I have been. For months it was the one real thing.
It was here, tucked back in a sort of envelope in the cover, that a
week ago I found an old letter from a man I once knew. When I try to
connect my memories with this man something profoundly horrible sweeps
me, and--and I grow full of panic."
Watts, with suspicions he could not control, reached out for the book.
At the same time he looked for anything that might further identify
this mysterious Colter. He peered almost with anger into a face so fine
and tempered in its sad look of opaque visions. Turning the opening
leaves, Shipman read in the little book, "Oxford, December 25, 19--to
M. L. from his fellow gypsy, Tarrant."
"Tarrant. Tarrant," the name arrested the lawyer. He turned sobered
eyes upon Colter. "Who is Tarrant?" he asked. Watts, with an annoyed
expression, wrinkled his brows. Where in thunder had he heard that name
Tarrant?
"I do not know," said Colter, "yet somehow, I believe it is someone I
have known."
Suddenly, as in a lovely picture, the man saw a June garden with the
Ramapo Mountains back of it. He saw distant daisy fields, a little
white gate, the tall wands of purple and blue canterbury bells; a
little boy sat cutting out paper dolls and a woman, whose dark blue
eyes were shy with him and whose voice had faltered as she had told him
a story and who had shown him a picture in a locket that she had drawn
up warm from her white breast. The woman's voice was always dreamily in
Shipman's memory. Now it told him a story.
The story of a West African expedition that had ended fatally,
disastrously, where the men died like sheep of smallpox, where George
Ledyard's brother, the famous biologist, Martin Ledyard, had striven
for the lives of the men, but had only been able to save three. Then
Dr. Ledyard had rowed down the tropical river with the body of his
dearest friend, the surgeon, Tarrant, in a canoe made from a hollow
tree. The natives, having deserted them, had left the scientific
party without canoes. Tarrant, Martin Ledyard's dearest friend, his
brother-in-science!
There was a long silence before the lawyer looked up into the face of
that man who walked up and down, his russet head erect, one arm crossed
behind him on his back. Colter's face, absorbed, earnest, rational, had
yet that curious look of hesitancy and bafflement that the lawyer began
to know was the thing in which he had always disbelieved, the thing he
had scouted, amnesia. The lawyer's knowledge of shell-shock, of trance,
of the results of profound and tragic sorrow, served him now. He could
no longer repudiate this evident spiritual and mental submersion.
But what would cause amnesia, apart from trying physical conditions?
Not even horrible experiences in West African jungles with one's
friends dying consecutively of smallpox. The loss of a man's friend?
Not altogether. Illness, exposure? Not altogether. Shock? _Shock?_
Watts Shipman, plunged in thought, searched in his imagination for the
one shock that might have shut the doors of memory. Colter, looking
patiently at him, hazarded a suggestion.
"That book," motioning to it, "that book is a sort of talisman.
Sometimes it brings back whole sequences of memory, and then that
letter that you see speaks of men of science, who are living to-day, as
if I and the writer had known them together."
Watts laughed, and turned away with something like a sneer.
"Awfully clever, old chap. I've no doubt you've done this successfully
many times, but," the lawyer turned abruptly, "I have seen a good
deal, you know." Sharply, "Now drop all this memory-camouflage. Tell
me who you are, why you're here, what knocked you out, and I'll give
you any old job you want--come," said Watts authoritatively. "You've
been a cultivated man, no doubt about that. You've traveled; you're a
'has-been'! You've come a cropper some way--drink, dope, women," he
looked narrowly into the still white face. "Some disgrace, perhaps some
tragedy--you're ashamed of something."
It was so brutal, so abrupt, that it had its immediate result. There
was a long and very curious silence. It was as if the two men staring
at each other had been fighting a secret fight under the open one of
incredulity and effort to reveal. Both of them under the threshold of
intelligence knew what that secret fight was. It was Sard! All harmony
had vanished. Something hard and unlovely had taken its place. It was
as if the two worked desperately to create a wall between them and the
wall was now finished. It was an inevitable wall of a girl's fresh
vibrant personality.
But Colter, without emotion, with a murmured apology for having
intruded, turned to go. "Perhaps I was mistaken," he said, his face
and voice controlled as usual. He had the usual and somewhat helpless
courtesy of one unable to fight with another man's weapons of prestige
and tradition. But on the riven, sorrow-lined face was an expression
of forbearance and pure masculine sweetness such as only fine habits
and lofty associations can create. He held out his hand. "Thank you for
giving me your time," he said gravely.
Friar Tuck came nosing along the ground, following up some poem of
scent of which he had begun the first verse at five A. M. Shipman,
his hand reaching out for the dog's devoted head, dug deep into the
heavy neck fur. Something on the lawyer's face was torn and of queer
struggle. He stood there tousling the dog, letting his own body be
half swayed this way and that by the slight playful fracas. Suddenly
the dark-browed lawyer looked up at the retreating figure. He scowled
horribly. "Damn it!" he called out explosively, "damn it! Stay where
you are!"
At the other's surprised pause, his look of inquiry, Shipman strode
forward. He held out his own hand. "Shake." He made the strange awkward
picture of ultimate manhood, of the true warrior type who vanquishes
himself before any other enemy. The man who will not stand out against
the assault of a finer soul. "Colter," said the lawyer sharply, "I'm an
ass, a cad, and you are a gentleman."
At the slight quick color on the other's face, Shipman stumbled
doggedly on. "Yes, sir, I'll be hanged if I can believe that about the
amnesia. I never saw any and I never had any, and I haven't got in all
the evidence yet, but I know one thing. You are a gentleman--curse
it!" said the lawyer standing there. "If you mustn't think me a yellow
dog--now," said Shipman, standing straight, his professional manner
returning, his hands on Tuck's neck, "I've been observing something and
remembering some things and I can't help wondering----"
There was very little answering interest in the other's face. The wall
was still between them, and Colter, some idea driving him, was for
getting away. Seeing this, the lawyer, with an inevitable boyish sense
of coup, hastily pulled a wallet from the pocket of his coat lying on a
log. Taking a long newspaper clipping from it, he placed it before the
other's eyes. "Do you know that face?" he asked eagerly. There was a
cut of a man's head in the article.
Colter gravely took the clipping. Then, as he read the headline,
he seemed to shrink. His intense blue eyes in awful inquiry went to
Shipman's.
"_George Ledyard Forges and Embezzles._" The man stood there a long
while, the paper dropping in his hand. He read no more; his dry lips
worked; once or twice he passed his hand over his face. At last, "That
is what I saw on the steamer," he muttered slowly. "I saw this heading
on the wireless bulletin on the steamer in which I was coming home. It
made me ill. I was already weak, had fever. I went to my cabin and can
remember no more." Suddenly Colter looked at the lawyer. "You will have
to help me," he began in a firm voice; "things are rushing in on me.
Tarrant; my brother's death, dishonor, the hospital. I got away from
the hospital--I--I--help me," beseeched Colter thickly. He staggered,
both hands out toward the lawyer. "I must keep my head clear. I can't
let things sweep in too fast. I must keep my head clear," groaned the
man. "Oh, for her sake, for her sake," he muttered. "Don't you see--for
her sake!"
The man stared with silent appeal. The strong tides of memory poured
through his eyes. With hands desperately tossed up, with a body that
seemed to snap under one groan, he fell unconscious at Shipman's feet.