_A Study in Temperament_
It was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh
High School to account for his various misdemeanors. 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 outgrown, 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 buttonhole. 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 rancor and
aggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case, Disorder and
impertinence were among the offenses 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 intention.
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 baptism of fire, 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 that 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 have made 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, who was a sympathetic man, 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 but 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. I happen to know that he
was born in Colorado, only a few months before his mother died out there
of a long illness. 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, and stiff with a nervous tension that drew them back from
his teeth.
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
gruesome game of intemperate reproach. Some 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 writhe under 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 and, as it was
chilly outside, 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 one corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patch
over one eye and the other closed. Paul possessed himself of the peace
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, peering out from
the cast room, and an evil gesture at the Venus de 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 that the tight, straight coat accentuated his
narrow chest, about which he was exceedingly sensitive. He was always
considerably 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
color 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 colors? 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 and
potent spirit within him; something that struggled there like the genie
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 splendor. When the soprano soloist came on Paul forgot even
the nastiness of his teacher's being there and gave himself up to
the peculiar stimulus 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 an elaborate gown and a tiara, and
above all she had that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine
upon her, which, in Paul's eyes, made her a veritable queen of Romance.
After a concert was over Paul was always 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 soprano'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 cardboard house under a Christmas tree. All the
actors and singers of the better class 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 schoolmasters and dull care
behind him forever.
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 that 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, 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 World_ 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--but mocking spirits stood guard at the doors, and, 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 nightclothes 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 collarbox, 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.
Half an hour later Paul alighted from his 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 businessmen 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 to 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
penetrated by kitchen odors; a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless,
colorless mass of everyday 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
bathroom 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 carfare 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 soapbox, 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 always sat out on their front stoops and
talked to their neighbors on the next stoop, or called to those across
the street in neighborly fashion. The men usually sat 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 shirtwaists they had made in the last week, and how many waffles
someone 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 neighbors always joked about the suspicious color of
the pitcher.
Today Paul's father sat on the top step, 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, nearsighted
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 schoolmistress, much older than he, who also wore thick
glasses, and who had now borne him four children, all nearsighted, 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 in 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 these
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 carfare. 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 schoolwork 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 odor of the dishwater 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 theaters 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 theater 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 odor behind the scenes, he breathed
like a prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing
or saying splendid, brilliant, poetic 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 inescapable odors
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 limelight.
It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly
the stage entrance of that theater 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 there,
with palms, and fountains, and soft lamps and richly appareled women
who never saw the disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of
that smoke-palled city, enamored 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 that 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 stagestruck--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 schoolroom 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 jest,
anyway. He had autographed 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 became desperate and would bid all the boys
good-by, announcing that he was going to travel for a while; going to
Naples, to Venice, to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back,
conscious and nervously smiling; his sister was ill, and he should 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 their homilies, 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 theater 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 hardworking women,
most of them supporting indigent 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 eastbound train was plowing through a January snowstorm; the dull
dawn was beginning to show gray 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 laborers 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, partly because he was
ashamed, dressed as he was, to go into a Pullman, and partly because he
was afraid of being seen there by some Pittsburgh businessman, who might
have noticed him in Denny & Carson's office. When the whistle awoke 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-furnishings establishment that 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 linen. Then he drove to a hatter's and a shoe
house. His next errand was at Tiffany's, where he selected his silver
and a new 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 traveling 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 volunteered 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 scrapbook 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 bellboy 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 bathroom, 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 taboret 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
theater 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 the 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 bankbook, 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. It was
not the first time Paul had steered through treacherous waters.
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 snowflakes whirling by his window until he fell
asleep.
When he awoke, it was three o'clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with
a start; half of one of his precious days gone already! He spent more
than 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 woolen mufflers were shoveling off the doorsteps; the avenue stages
made fine spots of color against the white street. Here and there on
the corners were stands, with whole flower gardens blooming under glass
cases, against the sides of which the snowflakes 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 winterpiece.
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 dozen 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 nerve-stuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the
snowflakes. He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.
When Paul went down to dinner the music of the orchestra came floating
up the elevator shaft to greet him. His head whirled as he stepped into
the thronged corridor, and 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 color--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-colored wineglasses, 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 businessmen got on 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 lodge at the Metropolitan. He was now 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 attire 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 wallpaper, or of Washington and Calvin
above his bed.
Sunday morning the city was practically snowbound. 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 out 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 icewater, 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. Even under the glow of his wine he was
never boisterous, though he found the stuff like a magician's wand for
wonder-building. His chief greediness lay in his ears and eyes, and his
excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures were the
gray 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 be 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 the 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 his Sabbath-school
teacher declared that she would spare no effort to that end. The rumor
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
to 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 gray monotony stretched before him in
hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath school, Young People's Meeting, the
yellow-papered room, the damp dishtowels; it all rushed back upon him
with a 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 old 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 those fortunate
beings born to the purple, was he not still himself and in his own
place? He drummed a nervous accompaniment to the Pagliacci music and
looked about him, telling himself over and over that it had paid.
He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the music 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 and burnt. There came upon him one of
those fateful attacks of clearheadedness that never occurred except when
he was physically exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay still,
closed his eyes, and let the tide of things 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 looks of
it.
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 in 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, of 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,
their red glory all over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had
seen in the glass cases 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; and 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 awhile, from his weak condition, seemingly insensible to the cold.
The sound of an approaching train awoke 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, and that his body was being thrown
swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his
limbs were 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.