WHO IS ALAN CONRAD?
The recipient of the letter which Benjamin Corvet had written and later
so excitedly attempted to recover, was asking himself a question which
was almost the same as the question which Constance Sherrill had asked.
He was, the second morning later, waiting for the first of the two
daily eastbound trains which stopped at the little Kansas town of Blue
Rapids which he called home. As long as he could look back into his
life, the question, who is this person they call Alan Conrad, and what
am I to the man who writes from Chicago, had been the paramount enigma
of existence for him. Since he was now twenty-three, as nearly as he
had been able to approximate it, and as distinct recollection of
isolated, extraordinary events went back to the time when he was five,
it was quite eighteen years since he had first noticed the question put
to the people who had him in charge: "So this is little Alan Conrad.
Who is he?"
Undoubtedly the question had been asked in his presence before;
certainly it was asked many times afterwards; but it was since that day
when, on his noticing the absence of a birthday of his own, they had
told him he was five, that he connected the evasion of the answer with
the difference between himself and the other children he saw, and
particularly between himself and the boy and girl in the same house
with him. When visitors came from somewhere far off, no one of them
ever looked surprised at seeing the other children or asked about them.
Always, when some one came, it was, "So this is little Jim!" and "This
is Betty; she's more of a Welton every day!" Then, each time with that
change in the voice and in the look of the eyes and in the feel of the
arms about him--for though Alan could not feel how the arms hugged Jim
and Betty, he knew that for him it was quite different--"So this is
Alan Conrad," or, "So this is the child!" or, "This, I suppose, is the
boy I've heard about!"
However, there was a quite definite, if puzzling, advantage at times in
being Alan Conrad. Following the arrival of certain letters, which
were distinguished from most others arriving at the house by having no
ink writing on the envelope but just a sort of purple or black printing
like newspapers, Alan invariably received a dollar to spend just as he
liked. To be sure, unless "papa" took him to town, there was nothing
for him to spend it upon; so, likely enough, it went into the square
iron bank, of which the key was lost; but quite often he did spend it
according to plans agreed upon among all his friends and, in memory of
these occasions and in anticipation of the next, "Alan's dollar" became
a community institution among the children.
But exhilarating and wonderful as it was to be able of one's self to
take three friends to the circus, or to be the purveyor of twenty whole
packages--not sticks--of gum, yet the dollar really made only more
plain the boy's difference. The regularity and certainty of its
arrival as Alan's share of some larger sum of money which came to
"papa" in the letter, never served to make the event ordinary or
accepted.
"Who gives it to you, Alan?" was a question more often asked, as time
went on. The only answer Alan could give was, "It comes from Chicago."
The postmark on the envelope, Alan noticed, was always Chicago; that
was all he ever could find out about his dollar. He was about ten
years old when, for a reason as inexplicable as the dollar's coming,
the letters with the typewritten addresses and the enclosed money
ceased.
Except for the loss of the dollar at the end of every second month--a
loss much discussed by all the children and not accepted as permanent
till more than two years had passed--Alan felt no immediate results
from the cessation of the letters from Chicago; and when the first
effects appeared, Jim and Betty felt them quite as much as he. Papa
and mamma felt them, too, when the farm had to be given up, and the
family moved to the town, and papa went to work in the woolen mill
beside the river.
Papa and mamma, at first surprised and dismayed by the stopping of the
letters, still clung to the hope of the familiar, typewritten addressed
envelope appearing again; but when, after two years, no more money
came, resentment which had been steadily growing against the person who
had sent the money began to turn against Alan; and his "parents" told
him all they knew about him.
In 1896 they had noticed an advertisement for persons to care for a
child; they had answered it to the office of the newspaper which
printed it. In response to their letter a man called upon them and,
after seeing them and going around to see their friends, had made
arrangements with them to take a boy of three, who was in good health
and came of good people. He paid in advance board for a year and
agreed to send a certain amount every two months after that time. The
man brought the boy, whom he called Alan Conrad, and left him. For
seven years the money agreed upon came; now it had ceased, and papa had
no way of finding the man--the name given by him appeared to be
fictitious, and he had left no address except "general delivery,
Chicago"--Papa knew nothing more than that. He had advertised in the
Chicago papers after the money stopped coming, and he had communicated
with every one named Conrad in or near Chicago, but he had learned
nothing. Thus, at the age of thirteen, Alan definitely knew that what
he already had guessed--the fact that he belonged somewhere else than
in the little brown house--was all that any one there could tell him;
and the knowledge gave persistence to many internal questionings.
Where did he belong? Who was he? Who was the man who had brought him
here? Had the money ceased coming because the person who sent it was
dead? In that case, connection of Alan with the place where he
belonged was permanently broken. Or would some other communication
from that source reach him some time--if not money, then something
else? Would he be sent for some day? He did not resent "papa and
mamma's" new attitude of benefactors toward him; instead, loving them
both because he had no one else to love, he sympathized with it. They
had struggled hard to keep the farm. They had ambitions for Jim; they
were scrimping and sparing now so that Jim could go to college, and
whatever was given to Alan was taken away from Jim and diminished by
just that much his opportunity.
But when Alan asked papa to get him a job in the woolen mill at the
other side of town where papa himself worked in some humble and
indefinite capacity, the request was refused. Thus, externally at
least, Alan's learning the little that was known about himself made no
change in his way of living; he went, as did Jim, to the town school,
which combined grammar and high schools under one roof; and, as he grew
older, he clerked--as Jim also did--in one of the town stores during
vacations and in the evenings; the only difference was this: that Jim's
money, so earned, was his own, but Alan carried his home as part
payment of those arrears which had mounted up against him since the
letters ceased coming. At seventeen, having finished high school, he
was clerking officially in Merrill's general store, when the next
letter came.
It was addressed this time not to papa, but to Alan Conrad. He seized
it, tore it open, and a bank draft for fifteen hundred dollars fell
out. There was no letter with the enclosure, no word of communication;
just the draft to the order of Alan Conrad. Alan wrote the Chicago
bank by which the draft had been issued; their reply showed that the
draft had been purchased with currency, so there was no record of the
identity of the person who had sent it. More than that amount was due
for arrears for the seven years during which no money was sent, even
when the total which Alan had earned was deducted. So Alan merely
endorsed the draft over to "father"; and that fall Jim went to college.
But, when Jim discovered that it not only was possible but planned at
the university for a boy to work his way through, Alan went also.
Four wonderful years followed. The family of a professor of physics,
with whom he was brought in contact by his work outside of college,
liked him and "took him up." He lodged finally in their house and
became one of them. In companionship with these educated people, ideas
and manners came to him which he could not have acquired at home;
athletics straightened and added bearing to his muscular, well-formed
body; his pleasant, strong young face acquired self-reliance and
self-control. Life became filled with possibilities for himself which
it had never held before.
But on his day of graduation he had to put away the enterprises he had
planned and the dreams he dreamed and, conscious that his debt to
father and mother still remained unpaid, he had returned to care for
them; for father's health had failed and Jim who had opened a law
office in Kansas City, could do nothing to help.
No more money had followed the draft from Chicago and there had been no
communication of any kind; but the receipt of so considerable a sum had
revived and intensified all Alan's speculations about himself. The
vague expectation of his childhood that sometime, in some way, he would
be "sent for" had grown during the last six years to a definite belief.
And now--on the afternoon before--the summons had come.
This time, as he tore open the envelope, he saw that besides a check,
there was writing within--an uneven and nervous-looking but plainly
legible communication in longhand. The letter made no explanation. It
told him, rather than asked him, to come to Chicago, gave minute
instructions for the journey, and advised him to telegraph when he
started. The check was for a hundred dollars to pay his expenses.
Check and letter were signed by a name completely strange to him.
He was a distinctly attractive looking lad, as he stood now on the
station platform of the little town, while the eastbound train rumbled
in, and he fingered in his pocket the letter from Chicago.
As the train came to a stop, he pushed his suitcase up on to a car
platform and stood on the bottom step, looking back at the little town
standing away from its railroad station among brown, treeless hills,
now scantily snow-covered--the town which was the only home he ever
consciously had known. His eyes dampened and he choked, as he looked
at it and at the people on the station platform--the station-master,
the drayman, the man from the post office who would receive the mail
bag, people who called him by his first name, as he called them by
theirs. He did not doubt at all that he would see the town and them
again. The question was what he would be when he did see them. They
and it would not be changed, but he would. As the train started, he
picked up the suitcase and carried it into the second day-coach.
Finding a seat, at once he took the letter from his pocket and for the
dozenth time reread it. Was Corvet a relative? Was he the man who had
sent the remittances when Alan was a little boy, and the one who later
had sent the fifteen hundred dollars? Or was he merely a go-between,
perhaps a lawyer? There was no letterhead to give aid in these
speculations. The address to which Alan was to come was in Astor
Street. He had never heard the name of the street before. Was it a
business street, Corvet's address in some great office building,
perhaps?
He tried by repeating both names over and over to himself to arouse any
obscure, obliterated childhood memory he might have had of then; but
the repetition brought no result. Memory, when he stretched it back to
its furthest, showed him only the Kansas prairie.
Late that afternoon he reached Kansas City, designated in the letter as
the point where he would change cars. That night saw him in his
train--a transcontinental with berths nearly all made up and people
sleeping behind the curtains. Alan undressed and got into his berth,
but he lay awake most of the night, excited and expectant. The late
February dawn showed him the rolling lands of Iowa which changed, while
he was at breakfast in the dining car, to the snow-covered fields and
farms of northern Illinois. Toward noon, he could see, as the train
rounded curves, that the horizon to the east had taken on a murky look.
Vast, vague, the shadow--the emanation of hundreds of thousands of
chimneys--thickened and grew more definite as the train sped on;
suburban villages began supplanting country towns; stations became more
pretentious. They passed factories; then hundreds of acres of little
houses of the factory workers in long rows; swiftly the buildings
became larger, closer together; he had a vision of miles upon miles of
streets, and the train rolled slowly into a long trainshed and stopped.
Alan, following the porter with his suitcase from the car, stepped down
among the crowds hurrying to and from the trains. He was not confused,
he was only intensely excited. Acting in implicit accord with the
instructions of the letter, which he knew by heart, he went to the
uniformed attendant and engaged a taxicab--itself no small experience;
there would be no one at the station to meet him, the letter had said.
He gave the Astor Street address and got into the cab. Leaning forward
in his seat, looking to the right and then to the left as he was driven
through the city, his first sensation was only disappointment.
Except that it was larger, with more and bigger buildings and with more
people upon its streets, Chicago apparently did not differ from Kansas
City. If it was, in reality, the city of his birth, or if ever he had
seen these streets before, they now aroused no memories in him.
It had begun to snow again. For a few blocks the taxicab drove north
past more or less ordinary buildings, then turned east on a broad
boulevard where tall tile and brick and stone structures towered till
their roofs were hidden in the snowfall. The large, light flakes,
falling lazily, were thick enough so that, when the taxicab swung to
the north again, there seemed to Alan only a great vague void to his
right. For the hundred yards which he could view clearly, the space
appeared to be a park; now a huge granite building, guarded by stone
lions, went by; then more park; but beyond-- A strange stir and
tingle, quite distinct from the excitement of the arrival at the
station, pricked in Alan's veins, and hastily he dropped the window to
his right and gazed out again. The lake, as he had known since his
geography days, lay to the east of Chicago; therefore that void out
there beyond the park was the lake or, at least, the harbor. A
different air seemed to come from it; sounds... Suddenly it all was
shut off; the taxicab, swerving a little, was dashing between business
blocks; a row of buildings had risen again upon the right; they broke
abruptly to show him a wooden-walled chasm in which flowed a river full
of ice with a tug dropping its smokestack as it went below the bridge
which the cab crossed; buildings on both sides again; then, to the
right, a roaring, heaving, crashing expanse.
The sound, Alan knew, had been coming to him as an undertone for many
minutes; now it overwhelmed, swallowed all other sound. It was great,
not loud; all sound which Alan had heard before, except the soughing of
the wind over his prairies, came from one point; even the monstrous
city murmur was centered in comparison with this. Alan could see only
a few hundred yards out over the water as the taxicab ran along the
lake drive, but what was before him was the surf of a sea; that
constant, never diminishing, never increasing roar came from far beyond
the shore; the surge and rise and fall and surge again were of a sea in
motion. Floes floated, tossed up, tumbled, broke, and rose again with
the rush of the surf; spray flew up between the floes; geysers spurted
high into the air as the pressure of the water, bearing up against the
ice, burst between two great ice-cakes before the waves cracked them
and tumbled them over. And all was without wind; over the lake, as
over the land, the soft snowflakes lazily floated down, scarcely
stirred by the slightest breeze; that roar was the voice of the water,
that awful power its own.
Alan choked and gasped for breath, his pulses pounding in his throat;
he had snatched off his hat and, leaning out of the window sucked the
lake air into his lungs. There had been nothing to make him expect
this overwhelming crush of feeling. The lake--he had thought of it, of
course, as a great body of water, an interesting sight for a prairie
boy to see; that was all. No physical experience in all his memory had
affected him like this; and it was without warning; the strange thing
that had stirred within him as the car brought him to the drive
down-town was strengthened now a thousand-fold; it amazed, half
frightened, half dizzied him. Now, as the motor suddenly swung around
a corner and shut the sight of the lake from him, Alan sat back
breathless.
"Astor Street," he read the marker on the corner a block back from the
lake, and he bent quickly forward to look, as the car swung to the
right into Astor Street. It was--as in this neighborhood it must be--a
residence street of handsome mansions built close together. The car
swerved to the east curb about the middle of the block and came to a
stop. The house before which it had halted was a large stone house of
quiet, good design; it was some generation older, apparently, than the
houses on each side of it which were brick and terra cotta of recent,
fashionable architecture; Alan only glanced at them long enough to get
that impression before he opened the cab door and got out; but as the
cab drove away, he stood beside his suitcase looking up at the old
house which bore the number given in Benjamin Corvet's letter, then
around at the other houses and back to that again.
The neighborhood obviously precluded the probability of Corvet's being
merely a lawyer--a go-between. He must be some relative; the question
ever present in Alan's thought since the receipt of the letter, but
held in abeyance, as to the possibility and nearness of Corvet's
relation to him, took sharper and more exact form now than he had dared
to let it take before. Was his relationship to Corvet, perhaps, the
closest of all relationships? Was Corvet his ... father? He checked
the question within himself, for the time had passed for mere
speculation upon it now. Alan was trembling excitedly; for--whoever
Corvet might be--the enigma of Alan's existence was going to be
answered when he had entered that house. He was going to know who he
was. All the possibilities, the responsibilities, the attachments, the
opportunities, perhaps, of that person whom he was--but whom, as yet,
he did not know--were before him.
He half expected the heavy, glassless door at the top of the stone
steps to be opened by some one coming out to greet him, as he took up
his suitcase; but the gray house, like the brighter mansions on both
sides of it, remained impassive. If any one in that house had observed
his coming, no sign was given. He went up the steps and, with fingers
excitedly unsteady, he pushed the bell beside the door.
The door opened almost instantly--so quickly after the ring, indeed,
that Alan, with leaping throb of his heart, knew that some one must
have been awaiting him. But the door opened only halfway, and the man
who stood within, gazing out at Alan questioningly, was obviously a
servant.
"What is it?" he asked, as Alan stood looking at him and past him to
the narrow section of darkened hall which was in sight.
Alan put his hand over the letter in his pocket. "I've come to see Mr.
Corvet," he said--"Mr. Benjamin Corvet."
"What is your name?"
Alan gave his name; the man repeated it after him, in the manner of a
trained servant, quite without inflection. Alan, not familiar with
such tones, waited uncertainly. So far as he could tell, the name was
entirely strange to the servant, awaking neither welcome nor
opposition, but indifference. The man stepped back, but not in such a
manner as to invite Alan in; on the contrary, he half closed the door
as he stepped back, leaving it open only an inch or two; but it was
enough so that Alan heard him say to some one within:
"He says he's him."
"Ask him in; I will speak to him." It was a girl's voice--this second
one, a voice such as Alan never had heard before. It was low and soft
but quite clear and distinct, with youthful, impulsive modulations and
the manner of accent which Alan knew must go with the sort of people
who lived in houses like those on this street.
The servant, obeying the voice, returned and opened wide the door.
"Will you come in, sir?"
Alan put down his suitcase on the stone porch; the man made no move to
pick it up and bring it in. Then Alan stepped into the hall face to
face with the girl who had come from the big room on the right.
She was quite a young girl--not over twenty-one or twenty-two, Alan
judged; like girls brought up in wealthy families, she seemed to Alan
to have gained young womanhood in far greater degree in some respects
than the girls he knew, while, at the same time, in other ways, she
retained more than they some characteristics of a child. Her slender
figure had a woman's assurance and grace; her soft brown hair was
dressed like a woman's; her gray eyes had the open directness of the
girl. Her face--smoothly oval, with straight brows and a skin so
delicate that at the temples the veins showed dimly blue--was at once
womanly and youthful; and there was something altogether likable and
simple about her, as she studied Alan now. She had on a street dress
and hat; whether it was this, or whether it was the contrast of her
youth and vitality with this somber, darkened house that told him, Alan
could not tell, but he felt instinctively that this house was not her
home. More likely, it was some indefinable, yet convincing expression
of her manner that gave him that impression. While he hazarded, with
fast beating heart, what privilege of acquaintance with her Alan Conrad
might have, she moved a little nearer to him. She was slightly pale,
he noticed now, and there were lines of strain and trouble about her
eyes.
"I am Constance Sherrill," she announced. Her tone implied quite
evidently that she expected him to have some knowledge of her, and she
seemed surprised to see that her name did not mean more to him.
"Mr. Corvet is not here this morning," she said.
He hesitated, but persisted: "I was to see him here to-day, Miss
Sherrill. He wrote me, and I telegraphed him I would be here to-day."
"I know," she answered. "We had your telegram. Mr. Corvet was not
here when it came, so my father opened it." Her voice broke oddly, and
he studied her in indecision, wondering who that father might be that
opened Mr. Corvet's telegrams.
"Mr. Corvet went away very suddenly," she explained. She seemed, he
thought, to be trying to make something plain to him which might be a
shock to him; yet herself to be uncertain what the nature of that shock
might be. Her look was scrutinizing, questioning, anxious, but not
unfriendly. "After he had written you and something else had
happened--I think--to alarm my father about him, father came here to
his house to look after him. He thought something might have ...
happened to Mr. Corvet here in his house. But Mr. Corvet was not here."
"You mean he has--disappeared?"
"Yes; he has disappeared."
Alan gazed at her dizzily. Benjamin Corvet--whoever he might be--had
disappeared; he had gone. Did any one else, then, know about Alan
Conrad?
"No one has seen Mr. Corvet," she said, "since the day he wrote to you.
We know that--that he became so disturbed after doing that--writing to
you--that we thought you must bring with you information of him."
"Information!"
"So we have been waiting for you to come here and tell us what you know
about him or--or your connection with him."