The next evening Alexander dined alone at a club, and at about nine
o’clock he dropped in at the Duke of York’s. The house was sold out and
he stood through the second act. When he returned to his hotel he
examined the new directory, and found Miss Burgoyne’s address still
given as off Bedford Square, though at a new number. He remembered
that, in so far as she had been brought up at all, she had been brought
up in Bloomsbury. Her father and mother played in the provinces most of
the year, and she was left a great deal in the care of an old aunt who
was crippled by rheumatism and who had had to leave the stage
altogether. In the days when Alexander knew her, Hilda always managed
to have a lodging of some sort about Bedford Square, because she clung
tenaciously to such scraps and shreds of memories as were connected
with it. The mummy room of the British Museum had been one of the chief
delights of her childhood. That forbidding pile was the goal of her
truant fancy, and she was sometimes taken there for a treat, as other
children are taken to the theatre. It was long since Alexander had
thought of any of these things, but now they came back to him quite
fresh, and had a significance they did not have when they were first
told him in his restless twenties. So she was still in the old
neighborhood, near Bedford Square. The new number probably meant
increased prosperity. He hoped so. He would like to know that she was
snugly settled. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter past ten; she
would not be home for a good two hours yet, and he might as well walk
over and have a look at the place. He remembered the shortest way.
It was a warm, smoky evening, and there was a grimy moon. He went
through Covent Garden to Oxford Street, and as he turned into Museum
Street he walked more slowly, smiling at his own nervousness as he
approached the sullen gray mass at the end. He had not been inside the
Museum, actually, since he and Hilda used to meet there; sometimes to
set out for gay adventures at Twickenham or Richmond, sometimes to
linger about the place for a while and to ponder by Lord Elgin’s
marbles upon the lastingness of some things, or, in the mummy room,
upon the awful brevity of others. Since then Bartley had always thought
of the British Museum as the ultimate repository of mortality, where
all the dead things in the world were assembled to make one’s hour of
youth the more precious. One trembled lest before he got out it might
somehow escape him, lest he might drop the glass from over-eagerness
and see it shivered on the stone floor at his feet. How one hid his
youth under his coat and hugged it! And how good it was to turn one’s
back upon all that vaulted cold, to take Hilda’s arm and hurry out of
the great door and down the steps into the sunlight among the
pigeons—to know that the warm and vital thing within him was still
there and had not been snatched away to flush Cæsar’s lean cheek or to
feed the veins of some bearded Assyrian king. They in their day had
carried the flaming liquor, but to-day was his! So the song used to run
in his head those summer mornings a dozen years ago. Alexander walked
by the place very quietly, as if he were afraid of waking some one.
He crossed Bedford Square and found the number he was looking for. The
house, a comfortable, well-kept place enough, was dark except for the
four front windows on the second floor, where a low, even light was
burning behind the white muslin sash curtains. Outside there were
window boxes, painted white and full of flowers. Bartley was making a
third round of the Square when he heard the far-flung hoof-beats of a
hansom-cab horse, driven rapidly. He looked at his watch, and was
astonished to find that it was a few minutes after twelve. He turned
and walked back along the iron railing as the cab came up to Hilda’s
number and stopped. The hansom must have been one that she employed
regularly, for she did not stop to pay the driver. She stepped out
quickly and lightly. He heard her cheerful “Good-night, cabby,” as she
ran up the steps and opened the door with a latchkey. In a few moments
the lights flared up brightly behind the white curtains, and as he
walked away he heard a window raised. But he had gone too far to look
up without turning round. He went back to his hotel, feeling that he
had had a good evening, and he slept well.
For the next few days Alexander was very busy. He took a desk in the
office of a Scotch engineering firm on Henrietta Street, and was at
work almost constantly. He avoided the clubs and usually dined alone at
his hotel. One afternoon, after he had tea, he started for a walk down
the Embankment toward Westminster, intending to end his stroll at
Bedford Square and to ask whether Miss Burgoyne would let him take her
to the theatre. But he did not go so far. When he reached the Abbey, he
turned back and crossed Westminster Bridge and sat down to watch the
trails of smoke behind the Houses of Parliament catch fire with the
sunset. The slender towers were washed by a rain of golden light and
licked by little flickering flames; Somerset House and the bleached
gray pinnacles about Whitehall were floated in a luminous haze. The
yellow light poured through the trees and the leaves seemed to burn
with soft fires. There was a smell of acacias in the air everywhere,
and the laburnums were dripping gold over the walls of the gardens. It
was a sweet, lonely kind of summer evening. Remembering Hilda as she
used to be, was doubtless more satisfactory than seeing her as she must
be now—and, after all, Alexander asked himself, what was it but his own
young years that he was remembering?
He crossed back to Westminster, went up to the Temple, and sat down to
smoke in the Middle Temple gardens, listening to the thin voice of the
fountain and smelling the spice of the sycamores that came out heavily
in the damp evening air. He thought, as he sat there, about a great
many things: about his own youth and Hilda’s; above all, he thought of
how glorious it had been, and how quickly it had passed; and, when it
had passed, how little worth while anything was. None of the things he
had gained in the least compensated. In the last six years his
reputation had become, as the saying is, popular. Four years ago he had
been called to Japan to deliver, at the Emperor’s request, a course of
lectures at the Imperial University, and had instituted reforms
throughout the islands, not only in the practice of bridge-building but
in drainage and road-making. On his return he had undertaken the bridge
at Moorlock, in Canada, the most important piece of bridge-building
going on in the world,—a test, indeed, of how far the latest practice
in bridge structure could be carried. It was a spectacular undertaking
by reason of its very size, and Bartley realized that, whatever else he
might do, he would probably always be known as the engineer who
designed the great Moorlock Bridge, the longest cantilever in
existence. Yet it was to him the least satisfactory thing he had ever
done. He was cramped in every way by a niggardly commission, and was
using lighter structural material than he thought proper. He had
vexations enough, too, with his work at home. He had several bridges
under way in the United States, and they were always being held up by
strikes and delays resulting from a general industrial unrest.
Though Alexander often told himself he had never put more into his work
than he had done in the last few years, he had to admit that he had
never got so little out of it. He was paying for success, too, in the
demands made on his time by boards of civic enterprise and committees
of public welfare. The obligations imposed by his wife’s fortune and
position were sometimes distracting to a man who followed his
profession, and he was expected to be interested in a great many worthy
endeavors on her account as well as on his own. His existence was
becoming a network of great and little details. He had expected that
success would bring him freedom and power; but it had brought only
power that was in itself another kind of restraint. He had always meant
to keep his personal liberty at all costs, as old MacKeller, his first
chief, had done, and not, like so many American engineers, to become a
part of a professional movement, a cautious board member, a Nestor _de
pontibus_. He happened to be engaged in work of public utility, but he
was not willing to become what is called a public man. He found himself
living exactly the kind of life he had determined to escape. What, he
asked himself, did he want with these genial honors and substantial
comforts? Hardships and difficulties he had carried lightly; overwork
had not exhausted him; but this dead calm of middle life which
confronted him,—of that he was afraid. He was not ready for it. It was
like being buried alive. In his youth he would not have believed such a
thing possible. The one thing he had really wanted all his life was to
be free; and there was still something unconquered in him, something
besides the strong work-horse that his profession had made of him. He
felt rich to-night in the possession of that unstultified survival; in
the light of his experience, it was more precious than honors or
achievement. In all those busy, successful years there had been nothing
so good as this hour of wild light-heartedness. This feeling was the
only happiness that was real to him, and such hours were the only ones
in which he could feel his own continuous identity—feel the boy he had
been in the rough days of the old West, feel the youth who had worked
his way across the ocean on a cattle-ship and gone to study in Paris
without a dollar in his pocket. The man who sat in his offices in
Boston was only a powerful machine. Under the activities of that
machine the person who, in such moments as this, he felt to be himself,
was fading and dying. He remembered how, when he was a little boy and
his father called him in the morning, he used to leap from his bed into
the full consciousness of himself. That consciousness was Life itself.
Whatever took its place, action, reflection, the power of concentrated
thought, were only functions of a mechanism useful to society; things
that could be bought in the market. There was only one thing that had
an absolute value for each individual, and it was just that original
impulse, that internal heat, that feeling of one’s self in one’s own
breast.
When Alexander walked back to his hotel, the red and green lights were
blinking along the docks on the farther shore, and the soft white stars
were shining in the wide sky above the river.
The next night, and the next, Alexander repeated this same foolish
performance. It was always Miss Burgoyne whom he started out to find,
and he got no farther than the Temple gardens and the Embankment. It
was a pleasant kind of loneliness. To a man who was so little given to
reflection, whose dreams always took the form of definite ideas,
reaching into the future, there was a seductive excitement in renewing
old experiences in imagination. He started out upon these walks half
guiltily, with a curious longing and expectancy which were wholly
gratified by solitude. Solitude, but not solitariness; for he walked
shoulder to shoulder with a shadowy companion—not little Hilda
Burgoyne, by any means, but some one vastly dearer to him than she had
ever been—his own young self, the youth who had waited for him upon the
steps of the British Museum that night, and who, though he had tried to
pass so quietly, had known him and come down and linked an arm in his.
It was not until long afterward that Alexander learned that for him
this youth was the most dangerous of companions.
One Sunday evening, at Lady Walford’s, Alexander did at last meet Hilda
Burgoyne. Mainhall had told him that she would probably be there. He
looked about for her rather nervously, and finally found her at the
farther end of the large drawing-room, the centre of a circle of men,
young and old. She was apparently telling them a story. They were all
laughing and bending toward her. When she saw Alexander, she rose
quickly and put out her hand. The other men drew back a little to let
him approach.
“Mr. Alexander! I am delighted. Have you been in London long?”
Bartley bowed, somewhat laboriously, over her hand. “Long enough to
have seen you more than once. How fine it all is!”
She laughed as if she were pleased. “I’m glad you think so. I like it.
Won’t you join us here?”
“Miss Burgoyne was just telling us about a donkey-boy she had in Galway
last summer,” Sir Harry Towne explained as the circle closed up again.
Lord Westmere stroked his long white mustache with his bloodless hand
and looked at Alexander blankly. Hilda was a good story-teller. She was
sitting on the edge of her chair, as if she had alighted there for a
moment only. Her primrose satin gown seemed like a soft sheath for her
slender, supple figure, and its delicate color suited her white Irish
skin and brown hair. Whatever she wore, people felt the charm of her
active, girlish body with its slender hips and quick, eager shoulders.
Alexander heard little of the story, but he watched Hilda intently. She
must certainly, he reflected, be thirty, and he was honestly delighted
to see that the years had treated her so indulgently. If her face had
changed at all, it was in a slight hardening of the mouth—still eager
enough to be very disconcerting at times, he felt—and in an added air
of self-possession and self-reliance. She carried her head, too, a
little more resolutely.
When the story was finished, Miss Burgoyne turned pointedly to
Alexander, and the other men drifted away.
“I thought I saw you in MacConnell’s box with Mainhall one evening, but
I supposed you had left town before this.”
She looked at him frankly and cordially, as if he were indeed merely an
old friend whom she was glad to meet again.
“No, I’ve been mooning about here.”
Hilda laughed gayly. “Mooning! I see you mooning! You must be the
busiest man in the world. Time and success have done well by you, you
know. You’re handsomer than ever and you’ve gained a grand manner.”
Alexander blushed and bowed. “Time and success have been good friends
to both of us. Aren’t you tremendously pleased with yourself?”
She laughed again and shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, so-so. But I want to
hear about you. Several years ago I read such a lot in the papers about
the wonderful things you did in Japan, and how the Emperor decorated
you. What was it, Commander of the Order of the Rising Sun? That sounds
like ‘The Mikado.’ And what about your new bridge—in Canada, isn’t it,
and it’s to be the longest one in the world and has some queer name I
can’t remember.”
Bartley shook his head and smiled drolly. “Since when have you been
interested in bridges? Or have you learned to be interested in
everything? And is that a part of success?”
“Why, how absurd! As if I were not always interested!” Hilda exclaimed.
“Well, I think we won’t talk about bridges here, at any rate.” Bartley
looked down at the toe of her yellow slipper which was tapping the rug
impatiently under the hem of her gown. “But I wonder whether you’d
think me impertinent if I asked you to let me come to see you sometime
and tell you about them?”
“Why should I? Ever so many people come on Sunday afternoons.”
“I know. Mainhall offered to take me. But you must know that I’ve been
in London several times within the last few years, and you might very
well think that just now is a rather inopportune time—”
She cut him short. “Nonsense. One of the pleasantest things about
success is that it makes people want to look one up, if that’s what you
mean. I’m like every one else—more agreeable to meet when things are
going well with me. Don’t you suppose it gives me any pleasure to do
something that people like?”
“Does it? Oh, how fine it all is, your coming on like this! But I
didn’t want you to think it was because of that I wanted to see you.”
He spoke very seriously and looked down at the floor.
Hilda studied him in wide-eyed astonishment for a moment, and then
broke into a low, amused laugh. “My dear Mr. Alexander, you have
strange delicacies. If you please, that is exactly why you wish to see
me. We understand that, do we not?”
Bartley looked ruffled and turned the seal ring on his little finger
about awkwardly.
Hilda leaned back in her chair, watching him indulgently out of her
shrewd eyes. “Come, don’t be angry, but don’t try to pose for me, or to
be anything but what you are. If you care to come, it’s yourself I’ll
be glad to see, and you thinking well of yourself. Don’t try to wear a
cloak of humility; it doesn’t become you. Stalk in as you are and don’t
make excuses. I’m not accustomed to inquiring into the motives of my
guests. That would hardly be safe, even for Lady Walford, in a great
house like this.”
“Sunday afternoon, then,” said Alexander, as she rose to join her
hostess. “How early may I come?”
She gave him her hand and flushed and laughed. He bent over it a little
stiffly. She went away on Lady Walford’s arm, and as he stood watching
her yellow train glide down the long floor he looked rather sullen. He
felt that he had not come out of it very brilliantly.