He had to repeat it before she understood; she was numb with terror.
She rose with difficulty to her feet, clasping the child, whose wail
was now weak with exhaustion. The peering crowd made a ring of brute
faces about them, full of menace and mystery, but the new power in
him moved them to right and left at his gesture, and they gave him
passage, with the woman behind him, across the road. The stupefied
policeman watched them go, and then ran off to place the matter in
the hands of his superior.
Lucas was at his door when the officer whom the policeman had fetched
touched him on the elbow. He was a young man; if he had been older
Lucas's difficulties might have been increased. He peered in the
darkness, and was visible as a narrow, black-moustached face, with
heavy eyebrows and a brutal mouth. The one thing that deterred him
from brisk action was the fact that Lucas was a foreigner, whose
rights and liabilities were therefore uncertain.
"This woman," he said, "is arrested."
Lucas was unlocking the door. He turned with his hand on the key, and
the woman touched his arm. Perhaps that touch aided him to use big
words. As a resident in Tambov he knew the officer by sight, and had
always been a little daunted by his manner of power. In Russia one
comes easily to fear the police. But now he was free of fear.
"You be careful," he said. "I saw what was being done."
With his left hand he pushed the door, and it swung open. He motioned
the woman to enter, and nodded as he saw her cross the threshold.
The officer vented a click of impatience.
"I tell you----" he began, and moved forward a step. Lucas extended
an arm and the hand that held the flute across his chest.
"Back!" he said. "You mustn't enter this house--you know that! You
can go to the Governor, if you like, and I will go over his head. But
you shall not touch that woman."
"She is arrested," said the officer obstinately, still studying his
antagonist. "If you wish to aid her, you must go to the Bureau; but
you cannot take her away like this."
"Eh?" Lucas swung round on him; the time was fertile in inspirations.
"Can't I?!" he demanded threateningly. "But I have taken her, man. If
you seize her now you must arrest me, too, and then--we shall see!"
"I must do my duty," persisted the other.
"Do it, then," said Lucas, standing square across the door. "Do it,
and see if you can explain afterwards how you did it. I am not a
woman who can be insulted with safety; my arrest will have to be
explained to St. Petersburg, and you will have to pay for it. I saw
how she was being handled, and how your duty was being done. I tell
you, you're in danger. Be careful!"
"So?" replied the officer slowly. He turned to the folk who were the
absorbed audience of this conference. "Move away, there," he
commanded harshly. "This is none of your business. Off with you!"
They shifted back reluctantly, and he waited till he could speak
unheard by them. Then he turned to Lucas again with a touch of the
confidential in his manner.
"What do you want with her?" he asked.
"Want with her?" repeated Lucas, not immediately comprehending. Then,
as the man's meaning reached him he trembled. "I don't want her," he
cried. "I don't want her. You want her, not I; and you shan't have
her. Do you understand? You shan't have her!"
"Shan't I?" retorted the officer, but there was indecision in his
voice.
"No!" said Lucas.
There was a pause. Neither of them was sure of himself. The officer
found himself in face of a situation which he could not gauge; and
it would never do for a provincial police official to attract notice
in remote St. Petersburg. For all he knew, this flimsy little man,
who had snatched his Jewess from him, might be able to set in motion
those mills which grind erring servants of the State into disgrace
and ruin. He certainly had a large and authoritative way with him.
"Will you come to the Bureau, then, and speak with the chief?" he
suggested. "You see, your action causes a difficulty."
"No, I won't," said Lucas flatly.
He also was in doubt. It seemed to him that he stood in a
considerable peril, and he was aware that his mood of high temper was
failing him. It needed an effort to maintain an assured and
uncompromising front. Behind him, on the unlighted stairs, the woman
breathed heavily. He summoned what he had of stubbornness to uphold
him. The affair so far had gone valiantly; he meant that it should
continue on the same plane.
He saw the officer hesitate frowningly, and quaked. In a moment the
man might make up his mind and seize him; there was an urgent
necessity for some action that should quell him. Like all weak men,
he saw a resource in violence, and as the officer opened his lips to
speak again he interrupted.
"No more!" he shouted. "You have heard what I had to say; that is
enough. Now go!"
He pointed frantically with his flute, and the officer, at the sudden
lifting of his arm, made a surprised movement, which Lucas
misunderstood.
With a cry that was half terror and half ecstasy he smote, and the
flute beat the officer's cap down over his eyes.
"Yei Bohu!" ejaculated the officer, falling back,
Lucas did not wait for him to thrust the cap away and recover
himself. He had done his utmost, and the next step must rest with
Providence. It was but two paces to the doorway. The officer was not
quick enough to see his panic-stricken retirement. He recovered his
sight only to see the slam of the door, which seemed to close in his
face with a contemptuous and defiant emphasis. It was like a final
fist shaken at him to drive home a warning. He shook his head
despondently.
On the other side of the door Lucas, fighting with his loud breath,
heard his slow footsteps on the cobbles as he departed. He waited,
hardly daring to relax his mind to hope, till he heard the party of
them drawing off. He was weak with unaccustomed emotions.
What struck him as marvelous was that the woman, whose face he had
last seen as a writhen mask of fear, should appear in the light of
his room with her calm restored, with nothing but some disorder of
her hair and dress to betoken her troubles. Even the child in her
arms, worn out with weeping perhaps, had fallen asleep. He stared at
the pair of them vacantly. His lamp, his music, all the apparatus of
his gentle and decorous existence were as he had left them; their
familiar and prosaic quality made his adventure appear by contrast
monstrous.
The Jewess was watching him. In her dark, serious way she had a
certain striking beauty. Her grave eyes waited for him to look at
her.
"What is it?" he said at last.
"If I might put the child down," she suggested timidly.
Lucas pointed to the double-doors of his bedroom. "My bed is in
there," he answered. She lowered her head, as though in obedience to
a command he had given, and carried the child out. Lucas watched her
go, and then crossed the room to a cupboard which contained, among
other things, a bottle of brandy.
While he was drinking she returned, pausing in the door to look back
at the child. He noticed that she left the door partly open to hear
it if it should wake, and somehow this struck him as particularly
moving.
She came across the room to him, with her steadfast eyes on his face,
and, without speaking, fell on her knees before him and put the edge
of his coat to her lips.
Lucas stood while she did it; he hardly dared to move and interrupt
that reverent and symbolic act of gratitude. But once again, as when
on the pavement she had held the child to him in frantic appeal, the
simple soul within him flamed into splendor, and he was in touch with
great passions and mighty emotions. It is the mood of martyrs and
heroes. He looked down to her dark eyes, bright with swimming tears,
and helped her to her feet.
"You shall be safe here," he told her. "Nobody shall touch you here."
She believed it utterly; he was a champion sent straight from God;
she had seen him conquering and irresistible. To fear now would be a
blasphemy.
"I am quite safe," she agreed. "I am not afraid. To-morrow some of my
people will come for me."
He nodded. "There is some food in the cupboard there," he told her.
"Milk, too, if the child wants it. And nobody can come up the stairs
without meeting me; and if they try, God help them!"
She half smiled at the idea. "They would never dare," she agreed
confidently.
He would have been glad of his overcoat, but that was in his bedroom,
and he dreaded the indelicacy of going there while she was present.
So in the event he bade her a brief good-night, and found himself on
the dark and chilly stairs without so much as a pillow or a blanket
to make sleep possible. For lack of anything else in the shape of a
weapon, he had brought his silver-keyed flute with him; if he were
invaded in the small hours it might serve him again; it seemed to
have a virtue for quelling police officials.
About three o'clock in the morning he awoke from an uneasy doze,
chilled to the marrow, and was prompted to try if the flute would
still make music. It would not. It is too much to ask of any
instrument that has been used as an instrument of war. It had saved a
Jewess and her child, magnified its owner into a man of action, and
was thenceforth silent for ever.
"I must have hit that officer pretty hard," was the reflection of
Robert Lucas.
The episode closed shortly before noon next day, when two elderly men
of affairs came to fetch his guests away. They entered the room while
he was entertaining the baby with a whistled selection from his
repertoire of flute music, and he broke off short as they regarded
him from the doorway. The Jewess looked up alertly as they entered.
They bowed to Lucas with a manner of servility in which there was an
ironic suggestion, while their eyes examined him shrewdly. They were
bearded, aquiline persons, soft-spoken and withal formidable. He had
a notion that they found him amusing, but suppressed their amusement.
"Then it is you we have to thank," said the elder of them, when
formal greetings had been exchanged, "for the safety of this girl and
her child."
"I don't want any thanks," protested Lucas.
He could not tell them how the thanks he had already received
transcended any words they could speak.
"It was a villainous thing," he went on. "I'm glad I could help. Er--
is the silversmith all, right?"
"Money was paid," answered the grey-haired Jew; "he is safe,
therefore. But he spent the night in chains, while his wife was here
with you."
He spoke with a pregnant gravity. The Jewess started up and addressed
him in a tongue Lucas could not understand. He saw that she pointed
to him and to the bedroom and to the stairs, and that she spoke with
heat. The old Jew heard her intently.
"So!" he said, in his deep voice. "Then we have more to thank you for
than we thought. You gave up your rooms, it seems?"
"It is nothing," said Lucas. "You see, a lady--well, I could hardly--"
"Yes, I see," agreed the old Jew. "I have to do with a noble spirit.
And you do not want any thanks? So? But we Jews, we have more things
to give than thanks, and better things."
"I don't want anything," Lucas answered him. "I'm glad everything's
all right."
"You are very good," said the old man, "very good and generous. But
some day, perhaps, you will have a need--and then you will find that
our people do not forget."
The Jewess had nothing to take with her but her child. She bowed her
head and murmured something as she passed out, and the baby laughed
at him.
"Our people do not forget," repeated the old Jew, as he bowed himself
forth.
"Well," said Lucas, half aloud, when he was once more alone in his
room, "that's finished, anyhow."
It was the knell of his greater self, of the man he had contrived to
be for a few hours. He sat in his chair, dimly realizing it, with
vague and wordless regrets. Then, upon the table, he saw the flute,
and rose to put it in the cupboard. It would never be useful again,
but he did not want to throw it away.
The old dramas, which somehow came so close to reality with so little
art--or because of so little art--had a way of straddling time like
life itself. "Twenty years elapse between Acts II and III," the
playbills said unblushingly, and the fact is that what most men sow
at twenty they reap at forty; the twenty years do elapse between the
acts. The curtain that goes down on Robert Lucas in his room at
Tambov rises on Robert H. Lucas in New York, with the passage of time
marked on him as clearly as on a clock. With grey in his beard and
patches on his boots, and quarters in a boarding-house in Long Island
City, he is still concerned with leather, but no longer prosperous.
His work involves much calling on dealers and manufacturers, and
their manner of receiving him has done nothing to harden his manner
of diffidence and incompetence. His linen strives to be
inconspicuous; his clothes do not inspire respect; the total effect
of him is that of a man who has been at great pains to plant himself
in a wrong environment. Tambov now is no more than a memory; it is
less than an experience, for it has left the man unchanged. It is a
thing he has seen--not a thing he has lived.
The accident that gave his name and the address of his boarding-house
a place in the papers has no part in his story; he was an unimportant
witness in the trial of a man whom he had seen in the street cutting
blood-spots out of his clothing. He had bought a paper which
mentioned him to read on the ferry as he returned home, and had been
mildly thrilled to find that an artist had sketched him and
immortalized him in his columns. And next morning came the letter.
"Guelder and Zorn" was the name engraved across the head of it, in a
slender Italian script; it conveyed nothing to him. The body of the
communication was typewritten, and stated that if Mr. Robert H. Lucas
would present himself at the above address, the firm would be glad to
serve him. Nothing more.
"Mean to say you haven't heard of Guelder and Zorn?" demanded the
young man whose place at breakfast in the boarding-house was opposite
to him, when he asked a question. "Say--d'you know what money is?
Hard, round flat stuff--money? You do know that, eh? Well, Guelder
and Zorn is the same thing."
Somebody laughed. Lucas looked round rather helplessly.
"They say," he explained, referring to the letter, "that they'll be
glad to serve me."
"Then you might lend me a couple of million," suggested the young man
opposite, with entire disbelief. "Them Jews would never miss it."
Lucas had the sense to drop the matter there. He put the letter in
his pocket and went on with his breakfast, and listened with
incredulous interest to the talk that went on about the wealth, the
greatness, the magnificence and power of the financial house which
professed itself anxious to be of use to him. He was sorry to have to
leave the table before it came to an end.
It is characteristic of him that the letter aroused no wild hopes,
nor even an acute curiosity. He came, in the course of the morning,
to the offices of Messrs. Guelder and Zorn in much the same frame of
mind he brought to his business efforts. They were near, but not in,
Wall Street--a fact of some symbolic quality which he, of course,
could not appreciate. He stood on the edge of the side-walk for some
moments, looking up at the solid, responsible block of building which
anchored their fortunes to earth, till some one jostled him into the
gutter. Then he recollected himself and prepared to enter the money-
mill.
A hall porter like a comic German heard his inquiry, scrutinized him
with a withering glare, and jerked a thumb towards a door. He found
himself in such an office as may have seen the first Rothschild make
his first profits--a room austere as a chapel, rigidly confined to
the needs of business. A screen, pierced by pigeon-holes, cut it in
half. Experience has proved that no sum of money is too large to
pass through a pigeon-hole.
"Veil?"
A whiskered, spectacled face, framed in the central pigeon-hole, with
eyes magnified by the spectacles, regarded him sharply.
"Oh!" He recalled himself to his concerns with a jerk, and fumbled in
his pockets. "I had a letter," he explained.
"Vere is de letter?"
He found it, after an exciting search, and passed it over. The
whiskered face developed a hand to receive it.
"I don't know what it's about," explained Lucas.
"Perhaps your people have made a mistake in the name, or something."
"Our beoble," said the face in the pigeon-hole, with malignant
emphasis, "do nod make mistagues!"
There was an interval while the letter was read, and Lucas stood and
fidgeted, with a sense that he was intrusive and petty and undesired.
"Yes," said the owner of the spectacles, at length. "You vait. I vill
enguire."
He left his pigeon-hole unshuttered, and to Lucas, while he waited,
it seemed that several men came to it and glanced at him
forbiddingly. None spoke; they just looked as though in righteous
indignation at his presence, with seventy-five cents in his pocket,
in that high temple of finance. Then the whiskered and spectacled
face fitted itself again into the aperture.
"So you are Mr. Robert H. Lugas, are you?" it inquired. "Den vere vas
you in de year 1886?"
"Where was I?" repeated Lucas vaguely. "Let me see! 1886--yes! I was
in Russia then--in Tambov."
"Yes." The other's regard was keen. "An' now tell me aboud de man dat
lived obbosite to you in Tambov?"
"Do you mean the silversmith?" said Lucas. The other nodded. "Oh,
him! He was a Jew. They expelled him."
"And his vife?"
"His wife! They expelled her too," he answered. "I never heard of her
again."
"Vot vas de last you heard of her?"
"Oh, that!"
Lucas was staring at him vacantly. It did not occur to him that, by
not answering promptly, he might give ground for doubt and suspicion.
The question had re-illuminated in his mind--perhaps for the first
time since the event which it touched--that night of twenty years
before. He flavored again the heady and effervescent vintage of
strong action, of crowded happenings and poignant emotions.
"Veil?" demanded the other.
"There was a police officer," began Lucas obediently; "his name was
Semianoff;" and in bald, halting words he told the story. He told it
absently, languidly, for no words within his reach could convey the
thing as it dwelt in his memory, the warmth and color of it, its
uplifting and transfiguring quality.
The man behind the pigeon-hole heard him intently.
"Yes," he said again, as Lucas finished. "You are de man. Ve do not
reguire further broof, Mr. Lugas."
He produced a slip of paper and a pen which he laid on the ledge
before his pigeon-hole.
"I am instrugted to say dat if you vill fill in and sign dis cheque,
ve vill cash it."
"Eh?" Lucas was slow to understand.
"Ve vill cash it," repeated the other. "You fill it in--and sign it--
and I vill cash it now."
"But"--Lucas took the pen from him in mere obedience to his gesture--
"but--what for?"
"My instrugtions are to cash it--no more!"
Lucas stared at the tight-lipped, elderly face, like the face of a
wise and distrustful gnome, and held the pen uncertainly above the
cheque form.
"How much am I to write?" he asked.
"I haf no instrugtions about de amount," was the reply.
"But," cried Lucas, "I might write fifty thousand dollars!"
"My instrugtions are to cash de cheque ven you haf written it."
"Oh!" said Lucas.
He stared incredulously at the face for some moments and then wrote a
cheque for the sum he had named--fifty thousand dollars. He was about
to add his signature when something occurred to him.
"Is it because I went across the road to that little woman in
Tambov?" he asked suddenly.
The whiskered face answered composedly: "No. It is because you went
out of your rooms and slept on de stairs."
"Because"--he seemed puzzled--"but that is a thing--why, any
gentleman would do it."
"Dose are my instrugtions," said the man behind the pigeon-hole.
"I see."
Lucas stood upright, the uncompleted cheque in his fingers. All
surprise and excitement had vanished from his regard; he seemed
taller and stronger than he had been a minute before. He had yet many
calls to make, and, in the nature of things, many rebuffs to receive,
before he went home to supper; and the money in his pocket totaled
seventy-five cents. He needed new boots, new clothes, leisure,
consideration, and a sight of his native land; in short, he needed
fifty thousand dollars.
"You will cash this because I didn't fail to respect a helpless
woman?" he asked, in level tones.
The whiskered cashier replied: "Yes. Because you gave up your room
and kept watch on de stairs."
Lucas laughed gently. "That is not the way to deal with a gentleman,"
he said. "I will make your firm a present of fifty thousand dollars."
He showed the cheque he had written, with the figures clear and
large. And then, with leisurely motions, he tore it across and again
across.
"Much obliged," said Robert H. Lucas, and made for the door.