“Why should you ask me that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. See you talkin’ to one of those fellas oncet. Chap
named Pyncheon. Worse than missions and ’vangelists, they are.”
“Did you ever think of going there yourself?”
“Oh, Lord love ye! I’ve thought of it, yes. But I’ve fought it off. Once
ye do that ye’re done for.”
“Well, I don’t believe I’m done for—” I began; but he interrupted me
coaxingly.
“I say, sonny. I’ll go to Greeley’s Slip. Then if you’ve nothin’
else on ’and, you come there, too—and we’ll be fellas together. But
don’t—don’t—go to the Down and Out!”
As I walked away from him I had his “fellas together” amusingly, and
also pathetically, in my heart. Lovey was little better than an outcast.
I knew him by no name but that which some pothouse wag had fixed on
him derisively. From hints he had dropped I gathered that he had had a
wife and daughters somewhere in the world, and intuitively I got the
impression that without being a criminal he had been connected with a
crime. As to his personal history he had never confided to me any of the
details beyond the fact that in his palmy days he had been in a ’at-shop
in the Edgware Road. I fancied that at some time or another in his career
his relatives in London—like my own in Canada—had made up a lump sum and
bidden him begone to the land of reconstruction. There he had become
what he was—an outcast. There I was becoming an outcast likewise. We were
“fellas together.” I was thirty-one and he was fifty-two. My comparative
youth helped me, in that I didn’t look older than my age; but he might
easily have been seventy.
Having got rid of him, I drifted diagonally across the Park, but with
a certain method in the seeming lack of method in taking my direction.
Though I had an objective point, I didn’t dare to approach it otherwise
than by a roundabout route. It is probable that no gaze but that of the
angels was upon me; but to me it seemed as if every glance that roved up
and down the Park must spot my aim.
For this reason I assumed a manner meant to throw observation off the
scent. I loitered to look at young people on horseback or to stare at
some specially dashing motor-car. I strolled into by-paths and out of
them. I passed under the noses of policemen in gray-blue uniforms and
tried to infuse my carriage with the fact which Lovey had emphasized,
that I had never yet been pinched. I had never yet, so far as I knew,
done anything to warrant pinching; and that I had no intentions beyond
those of the ordinary law-abiding citizen was what I hoped my swagger
would convey.
Though I was shabby, I was not sufficiently so to be unworthy to take
the air. The worst that could be said of me was that I was not shabby as
the working-man is at liberty to be. Mine was the suspicious, telltale
shabbiness of the gentleman—far more damning than the grime and sweat of
a chimney-sweep.
Now that I was alone again, I had a return of the sensation that had been
on me since waking in the morning—that I was walking in the air. I felt
that I bounced like a bubble every time I stepped. The day before I had
been giddy; now I was only light. It was as if at any minute I might go
up. Unconsciously I ground my footsteps into the gravel or the grass to
keep myself on the solid earth.
It was not the first time I had gone without food for twenty-four hours,
but it was the first time I had done it for forty-eight. Moreover, it was
the first time I had ever been without some prospect of food ahead of me.
With a meal surely in sight on the following day I could have waited for
it. More easily I could have waited for a drink or two. Drink kept me
going longer than food, for in spite of the reaction after it the need of
it had grown more insistent. Had I been offered my choice between food
and life, on the one hand, and drink and death, on the other, I think I
should have chosen drink and death.
But now there was no likelihood of either. I had husbanded my last
pennies after my last meal, to make them spin out to as many drinks as
possible. I had begged a few more drinks, and cadged a few more. But I
had come to my limit in all these directions. Before I sought the shelter
of Greeley’s Slip a hint had been given me at Stinson’s that I might come
in for the compliments showered on Lovey ten days previously. Now as I
walked in the Park the craving inside me was not because I hadn’t eaten,
but because I hadn’t drunk that day.
Two or three bitter temptations assailed me before I reached Fifth
Avenue. One was in the form of a pretty girl of eight or ten, who came
mincing down a flowery path, holding a quarter between the thumb and
forefinger of her left hand. Satan must have sent her. I could have
snatched the quarter and made my escape, only that I lacked the nerve.
Then there was a newsboy counting his gains on a bench. They were laid
out in rows before him—pennies, nickels, and dimes. I stood for a minute
and looked down at him, estimating the ease with which I could have
stooped and swept them all into my palm. He looked up and smiled. The
smile didn’t disarm me; I was beyond the reach of any such appeal. It was
again that I didn’t have the nerve. Lastly an old woman, a nurse, was
dealing out coins to three small children that they might make purchases
of a blind man selling bootlaces and pencils. I could have swiped them
all as neatly as a croupier pulls in louis d’or with his rake—but I was
afraid.
These were real temptations, as fierce as any I ever faced. By the time I
had reached the Avenue I was in a cold perspiration, as much from a sense
of failure as from the effort at resistance. I wondered how I should ever
carry out the plans I had in mind if I was to balk at such little things
as this.
The plans I had in mind still kept me from making headway as the crow
flies. I went far up the Avenue; I crossed into Madison Avenue; I went
up that again; I crossed into Park Avenue. I crossed and recrossed and
crisscrossed and descended, and at last found myself strolling by a house
toward which I scarcely dared to turn my eyes, feeling that even for
looking at it I might be arrested.
I slackened my pace so as to verify all the points which experts had
underscored in my hearing. There was the vacant lot which the surrounding
buildings rendered so dark at night. There was the low, red-brown fence
inclosing the back premises, over which a limber, long-legged fellow
like me could leap in a second. There were the usual numerous windows—to
kitchen, scullery, pantry, laundry—of any good-sized American house,
some one of which was pretty sure to be left unguarded on a summer
night. There were the neighboring yards, with more low fences, offering
excellent cover in a get-away, with another vacant lot leading out on
another street a little farther down.
I had so many times strolled by the house as I was doing now, and had so
many times rehearsed its characteristics, that I made the final review
with some exactitude before passing on my way.
My way was not far. There was nothing to do but to go back into the Park.
As it was nearly six o’clock, it was too late to search for a job that
day, and I should have had no heart for doing so in any case. I had found
a job that morning—that of handling big packing-cases in a warehouse—but
I was too exhausted for the work. When in the effort to lift one onto a
truck I collapsed and nearly fainted, I was told in a choice selection of
oaths to beat it as no good.
I sat on a bench, therefore, waiting for the dark and thinking of the
house of which I had just inspected the outside. It was not a house
picked at random. It was one that had possessed an interest for me during
all the three years I had been in New York. I had, in fact, brought a
letter of introduction to its owner from the man under whom I had worked
in Montreal. Chiefly through my own carelessness, nothing came of that,
but I never failed, when I passed this way, to stare at the dwelling as
one in which I might have had a footing.
The occupant was also a well-known architect in New York. In the
architects’ offices in which I found employment I heard him praised,
criticized, condemned. His work was good or bad according to the
speaker’s point of view. I thought it tolerably good, with an
over-emphasis on ornament.
It was an odd fact that, in starting out on what was clear in my mind
as a new phase in my career, no other house suggested itself as a field
of operations. As to this one I felt documented, and that was all. I
had no sense of horror at what I was about to do; no remorse from the
position from which I had fallen. I suppose my mind was too sick for
that, and my body too imperatively clamorous. I had said to Lovey that I
didn’t have to live—but I did. I had seen that very morning that I did.
I had stood at the edge of Greeley’s Slip and watched the swirling of
the brown-green water with a view to making an end of it. One step and I
should be out of all this misery and disgrace! The world would be rid of
me; my family would be rid of me; I should be rid of myself, which would
be best of all. Had I been quite sure as to the last point, I think I
could have done it. But I wasn’t quite sure. I was far from quite sure.
I could imagine the step over the edge of Greeley’s Slip as a step into
conditions worse than those I was enduring now; and so I had drawn back.
I had drawn back and wandered up-town, in the hope of securing a job that
would give me a breakfast.
I wonder if you have ever done that? I wonder if you have ever gone from
dock to station and from station to shop and from shop to warehouse,
wherever heavy, unskilled labor may be in demand, and extra hands are
treated with a brutality that slaves would kick against, in the hope of
earning fifty cents? I wonder if in your grown-up life you have ever
known a minute when fifty cents stood for your salvation? I wonder if
with fifty cents standing for your salvation you ever saw the day when
you couldn’t get it? No? Then you will hardly understand how natural, how
much a matter of course, the thing had become which I was resolved to do.
It was no sudden idea. I had been living in the company of men who took
such feats for granted. Their talk had amazed me at first, but I had
grown used to it. I had grown used to the thing. I had come to find a
piquancy in the thought of it.
Then Lovey’s suggestions had not been thrown away on me. True, he was out
for small game, while I, if I went in for it, would want something bigger
and more exciting; but the basic idea was the same. Lovey could make a
haul and live for weeks on the fruit of it; I might do the same and live
for months. And if I didn’t pull it off successfully, if I was nabbed
and sent away—why, then there would be some let-up in the struggle which
had become so infernal. Even if I got a shot through the heart—and the
tales I heard were full of such accidents—the tragedy would not lack its
element of relief. It might be out of one hell into another—but it would
at least be out of one.
Not that I hadn’t found a bitter pleasure in the life! I had. I found
it still. In one of Dostoyevsky’s novels an old rake talks of the joys
of being in the gutter. Well, there are such joys. They are not joys
that civilization knows or that aspiration would find legitimate; but
one reaches a point at which it is a satisfaction to be oneself at one’s
worst. Where all the pretenses with which poor human nature covers itself
up are cast aside the soul can stalk forth nakedly, hideously, and be
unashamed. In the presence of each other we were always unashamed. We
could kick over all standards, we could drop all poses, we could flout
all duties, we could own to all crimes, and be “fellas together.” As I
went lower and lower down it became to me a kind of acrid delight, of
positively intellectual delight, to know that I was herding with the most
degraded, and that there was no baseness or bestiality to which I was not
at liberty to submit myself.
If there had never been any reactions from this state of mind!—but God!
It was a disadvantage to me that I was not like my cronies. I couldn’t
open my lips without betraying the fact that I belonged to another
sphere. Though the broken-down man of education is not unknown in the
underworld, he is comparatively rare. He is comparatively rare and
under suspicion, like a white swan in a flock of black ones. I might be
open-handed, ingratiating, and absurdly fellow-well-met, but I was always
an outsider. They would take my drinks, they would return me drinks, we
would swap stories and experiences with all outward show of equality; but
no one knew better than myself that I was not on a footing with the rest
of them. Women took to me readily enough, but men were always on their
guard. Try as I would I never found a mate among them, I never made a
friend. Therefore, now that I was down and out, I had no one of whom to
ask a good turn, no one who would have done me a good turn, but poor,
useless old Lovey sneaking in the shade.
I was in a measure between two worlds. I had been ejected from one
without having forced a way into the other. When I say ejected I mean the
word. The bitterest moment in my life was on that night when my eldest
brother came to his door in Montreal and gave me fifty dollars, with the
words:
“And now get out! Don’t let any of us ever see your face or hear your
name again.”
As I stumbled down the steps he gave me a kick that didn’t reach me
and which I had lost the right to resent. He himself went back to the
dinner-party his wife was entertaining inside, and of which the talk and
laughter reached me as I stood humbly on the door-step. From the other
side of the street I looked back at the lighted windows. It was the last
touch of connection with my family.
But it had been a kindly, patient family. My father was one of the best
known and most highly honored among Canadian public men. As he had
married an American, I had a good many cousins in New York, though I had
not made myself known to any of them since coming there to live. I didn’t
want them. Had I met one of them in the street, I should have passed
without speaking; but, as it happened, I never met one. I saw their names
in the papers, and that was all.
My father and mother had had five children, of whom I was the fourth.
My two brothers were married, prosperous and respected—one a lawyer in
Montreal, the other a banker in Toronto. My elder sister was married to
a colonel in the British army; the younger one—the only member of the
family younger than myself—still lived at home.
We three sons were all graduates of McGill, in addition to which I had
been sent to the Beaux Arts in Paris. Out of that I had come with some
degree of credit; and there had been a year in which I was in sight—oh,
very distant sight!—of the beginning of the fulfilment of my childhood’s
ambition to revolutionize the art of architecture in Canada. But in the
second year that vision went out; and in the third came the night on my
brother Jerry’s door-step.
I had nothing to complain of. The family had borne with me—and borne with
me. When we reached the time when I was supposed to be earning my own
living and my father’s allowance came to an end, my mother, who had some
money of her own, kept it up. She would be keeping it up still if she
knew where I was—but she didn’t know. From the moment of leaving Montreal
I decided to carry out Jerry’s injunction. They should neither see my
face nor hear my name again. I didn’t stop to consider how cruel this
would be to the best mother a man ever had—to say nothing of the best
father—or rather, when I did stop to consider it it seemed to me that I
was taking the kindest course. I had no confidence in myself or in the
future. New surroundings and associations would not give me a new heart,
whatever hopes those who wished me well might be building on the change.
For a new heart I needed something which I hadn’t got and saw no means of
getting.
_CHAPTER II_
Somewhere about dusk I fell asleep. It was dark when I woke up. It was
dark and still and sultry, as it often is in New York in the middle of
June.
The lamps were lit in the Park, and in their glow shadowy forms moved
stealthily. When they went in twos I took them to be lovers; when they
went alone I put them down as prowlers of the night. I didn’t know what
they were after, but whatever it might be I was sure it was no good.
Not that that mattered to me! I had long been in a situation where I
couldn’t be particular. When I had risen and stretched myself I, too,
moved stealthily, dogged by a crime I hadn’t yet committed, but of which
the guilt was already in the air.
As I had nothing by which to tell the time, I was obliged to wait till
a clock struck. I hoped it was eleven at least, but when the sound came
over the trees it was only nine. Only nine, and I could do nothing before
one! Nothing before one, and nowhere to go! Nowhere to go, and no food
to eat, and not a drop to drink! Doubtless I could have found water; but
water made me sick. With four hours to wait, I thought again of the dark
river with its velvety current, running below Greeley’s Slip.
Aimlessly I drifted toward it—that is, I drifted toward Columbus Circle,
whence I could drift farther still through squalid, fetid, dimly lighted
streets down to the water’s edge. The night was so hot that the thought
of the plunge began to appeal to me. After all, it would be an easy,
pleasant way of stepping out.
But I didn’t do it. The unknown beyond the river once more drove me back.
Besides, the adventure I had planned was not without its fascination.
I wanted to see what it held in store. If it held nothing—well, then,
Greeley’s Slip would still be accessible in the morning.
So I skulked back into the depths of the Park again. Those who went as
twos began to disappear, and the lonely shadows to steal along more
furtively. Now and then one of them approached me or hung in the distance
suggestively. It was not like any of the encounters that take place in
daylight. It was more as if these dark ghosts had floated up from some
evil spirit land, into which before morning they would float down again.
But twelve o’clock struck at last, and I took midnight as a call. It was
a call to leave the great human division in which I had hitherto been
classed, and become a criminal. Once I had done this thing, I should
never be able to go back. The angel with the flaming sword would guard
that way, and I could never regain even such status as that which I was
abandoning.
If my head had not been swimming I might at the last minute have felt a
qualm at that, but my mind had lost the faculty of deconcentration. It
was fixed on the thing before me in such a way that I couldn’t get it
off. For this reason I went, on leaving the Park, directly to the street
and number where my thoughts were.
I was surprised by the emptiness and silence of the thoroughfares. Not
till then had I remembered that at this season of the year most of the
houses would be closed. Closed they were, looking dark and blank and
forbidding. I happened to know that the house to which I was bound was
not closed; and though the fact that there were so few to pass in the
streets rendered me more conspicuous, it also made me the less subject to
observation.
Indeed, there were no observers at all when I approached the black spot
made by the vacant lot. There was nothing but myself and the blackness.
Not a light in the house! Hardly a light in any of the houses roundabout!
Not a footfall on the pavements! If ever there was a good opportunity to
do what I had come for, it was mine.
But I passed. The black spot frightened me. It was like a black gulf into
which I might sink down. I re-passed.
I went farther up the street and took myself to task. It was a repetition
of my recoil from the children in the afternoon. I must have the nerve—or
I must own to myself that I hadn’t. If I hadn’t it, then I had no
alternative but Greeley’s Slip.
I turned in my steps and passed the house again. If from the blank
windows any one had been looking out my actions would have been
suspicious. I went far down the street, and came back again far up it.
Then when I had no more power of arguing with myself I suddenly found
my footsteps crushing the dusty, sun-dried shoots of nettle and blue
succory. I was in the vacant lot.
All at once fear left me. As well as any old hand in the business
I seemed to know what lay before me. At every second some low-down
prompting, sprung from nameless depths in my nature, told me what to do.
I noted in the first place how accurate the experts had been as to light
and shade. The house stood so far up on one of the long avenues that the
buildings were thinning out. So, too, the street lamps. They were no
more than in the proportion of two to three as compared to their numbers
half a mile lower down. Just here they were so placed that not a ray fell
into the three or four thousand square feet which had probably never been
built upon since Manhattan was inhabited. Even the wall of the house was
windowless on this side, for the reason that within a few months some new
building would probably block the outlook.
Once I had crept close to the wall, I knew I presented neither silhouette
nor shade to any chance passer-by. I could feel my way at leisure,
cautiously treading burdock and fireweed underfoot. I came to the low
wooden fence, in which there was a gate for tradesmen, which was possibly
unlocked; but I didn’t run the risk of a click. With my long legs a
stride took me over into a small brick-paved court.
I paused to reconnoiter. The obscurity here was so dense that only my
architect’s instincts told me where the doors and windows would probably
be. I located them by degrees. The doors I let alone. The windows I
tried, first one and then another, but with no success. There was
probably some simple fastening that I could have dealt with had I had a
pocket-knife, but the one I had carried for years had long since been
lying in a pawnshop. To reflect I sat down on the cover of a bin that was
doubtless used for refuse.
A footstep alarmed me. It was heavy, measured, slow. With the ease of
a snake I was down on my belly, crawling toward cover. Cover offered
itself in the form of the single shrub that the court contained—lilac
or syringa—growing close against the kitchen wall. Lovey would have
commended the silence and swiftness with which I slipped behind it.
The footstep receded, slow, measured, heavy. Coming to the conclusion
that it was a policeman in the Avenue, I raised my head. I had no sense
of queerness in my situation. It seemed as much a matter of course as if
I had been doing the same sort of thing ever since I was born.
There was apparently a providence in all this, for, looking up, I spied a
window I had not seen before, because it was hidden by the shrub. This,
if any, would have been neglected by the servants when they went to bed.
With scarcely the stirring of a leaf I got on my feet again—and, lo! the
miracle. The window was actually open. I had nothing to do but push it
a few inches higher, drag myself up and wriggle in. I accomplished this
without a sound that could be detected twenty feet away.
Coming down on my hands and knees, I found myself amid the odor of
eatables, chiefly that of fruit. I rested a minute to get my bearings,
which I did by the sense of smell. I knew I must be in a sort of pantry.
By putting out my hands carefully, so as to knock nothing over, I
perceived that it was little more than a closet with shelves. A thrill of
excitement passed through me from head to foot when my hand rested on an
apple.
I ate the apple there and then, kneeling upright, my toes bent under me.
I ate another and another. Feeling cautiously, I discovered a tin box
in which there were bread and cake. I ate of both. Getting softly on
my feet, I groped for other things, which proved in the main to be no
more than tea, coffee, spices, and starch. Then my fingers ran over a
strawlike surface, and I knew I had hold of a demijohn.
Smell told me that it contained sherry, and such knowledge of
housekeeping as I possessed suggested that it was cooking-sherry. I took
a long swig of it. Two long swigs were enough. It burnt me, and yet
it braced me. With the food I had eaten I felt literally like a giant
refreshed with wine.
It occurred to me that this was a point at which I might draw back. But
the spell of the unknown was upon me, and I determined to go at least a
little farther. Very, very stealthily I opened the door.
I was not in a kitchen, as I expected to find myself, but in a servants’
dining-room. I got the dim outlines of chairs and what I took to be a
dresser or a bookcase. Another open door led into a hall.
My knowledge of the planning of houses aided me at each step I took.
From the hallway I could place the kitchen, the laundry, and the back
staircase. I knew the front hall lay beyond a door which was closed. At
the foot of the back staircase I stood for some minutes and listened.
Not a sound came from anywhere in the house. The kitchen clock ticked
loudly, and presently startled me with a gurgle and a chuckle before it
struck one. After this manifestation I had to wait till my heart stopped
thumping and my nerves were quieted before venturing on the stairs. As
the first step creaked, I kept close to the wall to get a firmer support
for my tread. On reaching a landing I could see up into another hall.
Here I perceived the glimmer or reflection of a light. It was a very dim
or distant light—but it was a light.
I stood on the landing and waited. If there were people moving about I
should hear them soon. But all I did hear was the heavy breathing of the
servants, who were sleeping on the topmost floor.
Creeping a little farther up, I discovered that the light was in a
bedroom—the first to open from the front hall up-stairs. Between the
front hall and the back hall the door was ajar. That would make things
easier for me, and I dragged myself noiselessly to the top. I was now
at the head of the first flight of back stairs, and looking into the
master’s section of the house. Except for that one dim light the house
was dark. It was not, however, so dark that my architect’s eye couldn’t
make a mental map quite sufficient for my guidance.
It was clearly a dwelling that had been added to, with some rambling
characteristics. The first few feet of the front hall were on a level
with the back hall, after which came a flight of three or four steps to
a higher plane, which ran the rest of the depth of the building to the
window over the front door. In the faint radiance through this window I
could discern a high-boy, a bureau, and some chairs against the wall. I
could see, too, that from this higher level one staircase ran down to the
front door and another up to a third story. What was chiefly of moment to
me was the fact that the bedroom with the light was lower than the rest
of this part of the house, and somewhat cut off from it.
With movements as quiet as a cat’s I got myself where I could peep into
the bedroom where the lamp burned. It proved to be a small electric lamp
with a rose-colored shade, standing beside a bed. It was a rose-colored
room, evidently that of a young lady. But there was no young lady there.
There was no one.
The fact that surprises me as I record all this is that I was so
extraordinarily cool. I was cooler in the act than I am in the memory of
it. I walked into that bedroom as calmly as if it had been my own.
It was a pretty room, with the usual notes of photographs, bibelots, and
flowered cretonne which young women like. The walls were in a light, cool
green set off by a few colored reproductions of old Italian masters. Over
the small white virginal bed was a copy of Fra Angelico’s “Annunciation.”
Two windows, one of which was a bay, were shaded by loosely hanging
rose-colored silk, and before the bay window the curtains were drawn.
Diagonally across the corner of this window, but within the actual room,
stood a simple white writing-desk, with a white dressing-table near
it, but against the wall. On the table lay a gold-mesh purse, in which
there was money. I slipped it into my pocket, with some satisfaction in
securing the first fruits of my adventure.
With such booty as this it again occurred to me to be on the safe side
and to go back by the way I came. I was, in fact, looking round me to
see if there was any other small valuable object I could lift before
departing when I heard a door open in some distant part of the house—and
voices.
They were women’s voices, or, rather, as I speedily inferred, girls’
voices. By listening intently I drew the conclusion that two girls had
come out of a room on the third floor and were coming down the stairs.
It was the minute to make off, and I tried to do so. I might have
effected my escape had I not been checked by the figure of a man looming
up suddenly before me. He sprang out of nowhere—a tall, slender man, in
a dark-blue suit, with trousers baggy at the knees, and wearing an old
golfing-cap. I jumped back from him in terror, only to find that it was
my own reflection in the pier-glass. But the few seconds’ delay lost me
my chance to get away.
By the time I had tiptoed to the door the voices were on the same floor
as myself. Two girls were advancing along the hall, evidently making
their way to this chamber. My retreat being cut off, I looked wildly
about for a place in which to hide myself. In the instants at my disposal
I could discover nothing more remote than the bay window, screened by its
loose rose-colored hangings. By the time the young ladies were on the
threshold I was established there, with the silk sections pulled together
and held tightly in my hand.
The first words I heard were: “But it will seem so like a habit. Men will
be afraid of you.”
This voice was light, silvery, and staccato. That which replied had a
deep mezzo quality, without being quite contralto.
“They won’t be nearly so much afraid of me,” it said, fretfully, “as I am
of them. I wish—I wish they’d let me alone!”
“Oh, well, they won’t do that—not yet awhile; unless, as I say, they see
you’re hopeless. Really, dear, when a girl breaks a third engagement—”
“They must see that she wouldn’t do it if she didn’t have to. Here—this
is the hook that always bothers me.”
There were tears in the mezzo voice now, with a hint of exasperation that
might have been due to the lover or the hook, I couldn’t be sure which.
“But that’s what I don’t see—”
“You don’t see it because you don’t know Stephen—that is, you don’t know
him well.”
“But from what I do know of him—”
“He seems very nice. Yes, of course! But, good Heavens! Elsie, I want a
husband who’s something more than very nice!”
“And yet that’s pretty good, as husbands go.”
“If I can’t reach a higher standard than as husbands go I sha’n’t marry
any one.”
“Which seems to me what’s very likely to happen.”
“So it seems to me.”
The silence that followed was full of soft, swishing sounds, which I
judged to come from the taking off of a dress and the putting on of
some sort of negligée. From my experience of the habits of girls, as
illustrated by my sisters and their friends, I supposed that they were
lending each other services in the processes of undoing. The girl with
the mezzo voice had gone up to Elsie’s room to undo her; Elsie had come
down to render similar assistance. There is probably a psychological
connection between this intimate act and confidence, since girls most
truly bare their hearts to each other when they ought to be going to bed.
The mezzo young lady was moving about the room when the conversation was
taken up again.
“I don’t understand,” Elsie complained, “why you should have got engaged
to Stephen in the first place.”
“I don’t, either”—she was quite near me now, and threw something that
might have been a brooch or a chain on the little white desk—“except on
the ground that I wanted to try him.”
“Try him? What do you mean?”
“Well, what’s an engagement? Isn’t it a kind of experiment? You get as
near to marriage as you can, while still keeping free to draw back. To
me it’s been like going down to the edge of the water in which you can
commit suicide, and finding it so cold that you go home again.”
“Don’t you ever mean to be married at all?” Elsie demanded, impatiently.
“I don’t mean to be married till I’m sure.”
Elsie burst out indignantly: “Regina Barry, that’s the most pusillanimous
thing I ever heard. You might as well say you’d never cross the Atlantic
unless you were sure the ship would reach the other side.”
“My trouble about crossing the Atlantic is in making up my mind whether
or not I want to go on board. One might be willing to risk the second
step, but one can’t risk the first. Even the hymn that says ‘One step
enough for me’ implies that at least you know what that’s to be.”
“You mean that you balk at marriage in any case.”
“I mean that I balk at marriage with any of the men I’ve been engaged to.
I must say that; and I can’t say more.”
During another brief silence I surmised that Regina Barry had seated
herself before the dressing-table and was probably doing something to her
hair. I wish I could say here that in my eavesdropping I experienced a
sense of shame; but I can’t. Whatever creates a sense of shame had been
warped in me. The moral transitions that had turned me into a burglar
had been gradual but sure. With the gold-mesh purse in my pocket a
burglar I had become, and I felt no more repugnance to the business than
I did to that of the architect. Notwithstanding the natural masculine
interest these young ladies stirred in me, I meant to wait till they had
separated—gone to bed—and fallen asleep. Then I would slip out from my
hiding-place, swipe the brooch or the chain that had been thrown on the
desk, and go.
“What was the matter with the first man?” Elsie began again.
“I don’t know whether it was the matter with him or with me. I didn’t
trust him.”
“I should say that was the matter with him. And the next man?”
“Nothing. I simply couldn’t have lived with him.”
“And what’s wrong with Stephen is that he’s no more than very nice. I
see.”
“Oh no, you don’t see, dear! There’s a lot more to it than all that, only
I can’t explain it.” I fancied that she wheeled round in her chair and
faced her companion. “The long and short of it is that I’ve never met
the man with whom I could keep house. I can fall in love with them for a
while—I can have them going and coming—I can welcome them and say good-by
to them—but when it’s a question of all welcome and no good-by—well, the
man’s got to be different from any I’ve seen yet.”
“You’ll end by not getting any one at all.”
“Which, from my point of view, don’t you see, won’t be an unmixed evil.
Having lived happily for twenty-three years without a husband, I don’t
see why I should throw away a perfectly good bone for the most enticing
shadow that ever was.”
“I don’t believe you’re human.” Before there could be a retort to this
Elsie went on to ask, “How did poor Stephen take it?”
“Well, he didn’t go into fits of laughter. He took it more or less lying
down. If he hadn’t—”
“If he hadn’t—what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The least little bit of fight on his part—or even
contempt—”
As this sentence remained unfinished I could hear Elsie rise.
“Well, I’m off to bed,” she yawned. “What time do you have breakfast?”
There was some little discussion of household arrangements, after which
they said their good nights.
With Elsie’s departure I began for the first time to be uncomfortable.
I can’t express myself otherwise than to say that as long as she was
there I felt I had a chaperon. In spite of the fact that I had become a
professional burglar the idea of being left alone with an innocent young
lady in her bedroom filled me with dismay.
I was almost on the point of making a bolt for it when I heard Elsie call
out from the hallway: “Ugh! How dark and poky! For mercy’s sake, come up
with me!”
Miss Barry lingered at the dressing-table long enough to ask: “Wouldn’t
you rather sleep in mother’s room? That communicates with this, with only
a little passage in between. The bed is made up.”
“Oh no,” Elsie’s staccato came back. “I don’t mind being up there, and my
things are spread out; only it seems so creepy to climb all those stairs.”
“Wait a minute.”
She sprang up. I breathed freely. My sense of propriety was saved. The
voices were receding along the front hall. Once the young ladies had
begun to mount the stairs I would slip out by the back hall and get off.
Relaxing my hold on the silk hangings I stepped out cautiously.
My first thought was for the objects I had heard thrown down with a
rattle on the writing-desk. They proved to be a string of small pearls, a
diamond pin, and some rings of which I made no inspection before sweeping
them all into my pocket.
I was ready now to steal away, but, to my vexation, the incorrigible
maidens had begun to talk love-affairs again at the foot of the staircase
leading up to the third floor. They had also turned on the hall light,
so that my chances were diminished for getting away unseen.
Knowing, however, that sooner or later they would have to go up the
next flight, I stood by the writing-desk and waited. I was not nervous;
I was not alarmed. As a matter of fact the success of my undertaking
up to the present point, together with the action of food and wine,
combined to make me excited and hilarious. I chuckled in advance over the
mystification of Miss Regina Barry, who would find on returning to her
room that her rings, her necklet, and her gold-mesh purse had melted into
the atmosphere.
In sheer recklessness I was now guilty of a bit of deviltry before which
I would have hesitated had I had time to give it a second thought. On
the desk there was a scrap of blank paper and a pen. Stooping, I printed
in the neat block letters I had once been accustomed to inscribe below a
plan:
There are men different from those you have seen hitherto. Wait.
This I pinned to the pincushion on the dressing-table, beginning at
once to creep toward the door, so as to seize the first opportunity of
slipping down the back stairs.
But again I was frustrated.
“I’m all right now,” I heard Elsie say, reassuringly. “Don’t come up. Go
back and go to bed.”
Miss Barry spoke as she returned along the hall toward her room: “The
cook sleeps in the next room to you, so that if you’re afraid in the
night you’ve only to hammer on the wall. But you needn’t be. This house
is as safe as a prison.”
I had barely time to get into the bay window again and pull the curtains
to.
Some five minutes followed, during which I heard the opening and shutting
of drawers and closets and the swish and frou-frou of skirts. I began to
curse my idiocy in fastening that silly bit of writing to the pincushion.
My only hope lay in the possibility that she would go to bed and to sleep
without seeing it.
With hearing grown extraordinarily acute I could trace every movement
she made about the room. Presently I knew she had come back to the
dressing-table again. Pulling up a chair, she sat down before it, to
finish, I suppose, the arranging of her hair.
For a few seconds there was a silence, during which I could hear the
thumping of my heart. Then came the faint rattling of paper. I knew when
she read the thing by the slight catch in her breath. I expected more
than that. I thought she would call out to her friend or otherwise give
an alarm. If she went to a telephone to summon the police I decided to
make a dash for it. Indeed, I meant to make a dash for it as it was, as
soon as I knew her next move.
But of all the next moves, the one she made was the one I had least
counted on. With a sudden tug at the hangings she pulled them apart—and I
was before her.
I was before her and she was before me. It is this latter detail of which
I have the most vivid recollection. In the matter of time all other
recollections of the moment seem to come after that and to be subsidiary
to it.
My immediate impression was of two enormous, wonderful, burning eyes,
full of amazement. Apart from the eyes I hardly saw anything. It was as
if the light of a dark lantern had been suddenly turned on me and I was
blinded by the blaze. I was blinded by the blaze and shriveled up in
it. No words can do justice to my sudden sense of being a contemptible,
loathsome reptile.
“’Sh!” was the first sound that came from her. She raised her hand.
“Don’t make a noise or you’ll frighten my friend. She’s nervous already.”
Instinctively I pulled off my cap, stepping out of my hiding-place into
the middle of the room. As I did so she recoiled, supporting herself by
a hand on the writing-desk. Now that the discovery was made, I could see
her grow pale, while the hand on the desk trembled.
“You mustn’t be afraid,” I began to whisper.
“I’m not afraid,” she whispered back; “but—but what are you doing here?”
“I’ll show you,” I returned, with shamefaced quietness. “I shall also
show you that if you’ll let me go without giving an alarm you won’t be
sorry.”
Pulling all the things I had stolen out of my pocket, I showered them on
the dressing-table.
“Oh!”
The smothered exclamation made it plain to me that she hadn’t missed the
articles.
“May I ask you to verify them?” I went on. “If you should find later
that something had disappeared, I shouldn’t like you to think that I had
carried it away.”
She made a feint at examining the jewelry, but I could see that she was
incapable of making anything like a count. It was I who insisted on going
over the objects one by one.
“There’s this,” I said, touching the gold-mesh purse, but not picking it
up. “I see there’s money in it; but it has not been opened. Then there’s
this,” I added, indicating the pearl necklet; “and this,” which was the
brooch. “The rings,” I continued, “I don’t know anything about. There
are three here. That’s all I remember seeing; but I didn’t notice in
particular.”
She said, in a breathless whisper, “That’s all there were.”
“Then may I ask if you mean to let me go?”
“How can I stop you?”
“Oh, in two or three ways. You could call your servants, or you could
ring up the police—”
Her big, burning eyes were fixed on me hypnotically. The color began to
come back to her cheeks, but she trembled still.
“How—how did you get in?”