She came on into the room, reaching her hands out toward me. She seemed
actually weak, trembling.
“Oh--Anthony!” she breathed, staring at me with something that was
almost fascination in her eyes, as if she were now seeing me for the
first time.
I could not trust myself at all. I hurried out, closing the door behind
me. I ran down the stairs.
It was the thought of the telephone that had come to me with such force
on the preceding evening. I knew now that it was not necessary to keep
up this terrible waiting for him. It would be easy enough to call him
up; then I could go to him and still feel that I was not leaving Heloise
at the mercy of a chance visit from him while I was away.
It took a long time for them to get him to the telephone, over there at
the _Wagon-lits_--fifteen or twenty minutes, I should say.
Finally I heard his voice.
“How are you, Eckhart?” he said, in the easy, offhand way that men
employ one with another. “How have you been?”
I thanked God, under my breath, that he was in condition to talk. I
simply could not have endured further delay.
“I've been all right,” said I. “I want to see you, Crocker, in regard to
a very important matter.”
“Surely. Any time you say.”
“Suppose I come right over there to the Wagon-lits.”
“All right. I'll wait for you in my room. Good-by.”
“Good-by, Crocker.”
Then I went out into the little Chinese street, and once again headed
toward the big hotel in the Legation Quarter.
April 14, (continued).
|CROCKER opened his door at my knock.
He was half dressed, with a quilted gown drawn about his big frame.
He gripped my hand. I permitted this, which was perhaps an odd thing to
do; but it came about so easily and swiftly that I could not think how
to prevent it without appearing merely childish.
Then I went on into the room, and stood, with some sense of inner
tension, while he drew an easy chair to the table and with a paper
cutter pried open a box of cigars.
He has changed, even in the fortnight since our parting in the railway
station at Yokohama. He is putting on weight pretty rapidly, and his
face distinctly exhibits the ravages of drink. It was pale this
morning. His eyeballs were crisscrossed with red veins, and there was
an incipient puffiness under them. His hands were unsteady, too; I noted
that fact when he opened the cigars. And afterward, when he dropped on
the sofa and settled back against the cushions, he extended his right
hand as I had seen him do once or twice before, back at Yokohama, and
make an unsuccessful effort to hold it still. Then he let it fall across
his knee, and for a moment stared gloomily at the carpet.
I observed, too, that he was more nervous. He moved with a jerky
abruptness. And when he glanced up at me, it was suddenly, with a
perceptible start, as if I had spoken sharply, though in reality I had
not spoken at all. It made me think of the torturing confusion of moods
that was racking his nervous system, and of the merciless voices of
unrest that were so evidently whispering every moment at his inner
ear. A few days ago I would not have observed his condition with any
sympathetic understanding; but now that I, too, have been torn between
the exaltation of love and the degradation of jealousy, I can only shake
my head in a sad sort of wonder at the mysterious strength of these
forces that drive men and women together, and apart, and that linger
even after a mismating and a subsequent separation to stir and bewilder
the spirit.... Yes, I can, in a way, feel with Crocker now. To live
with memories of magical hours passed with a woman one has since
lost--elusive, poignant memories, that come in the still hours of night
to triumph over the brutal facts of the day that is gone and the day
that is to come--this is the stuff of tragedy.
My feelings soared far, as I sat there--all in a moment. I was thinking
of strong passions and of elemental things. It came to me, oddly, that
I had never really understood certain of the great poems and the greater
music dramas. I told myself that I must seize the first opportunity to
hear “Tristan” again. I would understand if now. Yes, surely...
there was the surging, heartbreaking climax of the “Liebestod,” for
example--it was surging in my feelings now, and in my brain. I could
hear the swelling of the violins. And I knew all at once that it was not
the mere heartbreak of Isolde and her Tristan that surged and swelled
with them, I knew that it was the universal story of man and woman
everywhere. Underneath the trivial vulgarity of the daily newspaper,
with its commonplace recital of petty dramas and pettier tragedies, I
suddenly knew, surge and swell the hopes and dreams and casual disasters
of a million Tristans and a million Isoldes. It is men like Crocker and
myself, I thought, and women like Heloise, who enact, all unconsciously,
tossed helplessly about on great billows of feeling, the heroic drama of
life.
It was the inner man that dwelt on these stirring things. The outer
me was declining a cigar, and taking the easy chair, and for a moment
letting my eyes w ander about the room. It was going to be pretty
difficult to broach the subject. I could see that. Yet it had somehow to
be done.
There was a bottle half full of whisky on the table, and glasses.
Evidently the embargo had been raised. I could not help staring at that
bottle for a moment. And, though he did not raise his eyes, I felt that
Crocker knew what was in my thoughts.
His suit-case, with the cover thrown back, rested on a chair by the
wall. The contents were rumpled about; but among them, right on top,
I saw a knife-handle of Japanese lacquer and silver projecting from a
lacquered sheath with a silver tip.
He caught me looking at it, sprang up--with an abruptness that made me
jump--and slammed down the cover of the suit-case.
Then he came back to the sofa with a short laugh that was plainly
designed to cover inner embarrassment, and poured out a good three
fingers of the whisky. He drank it neat.
“Have some?” he said.