Between his leather easy-chair at one end of his drawing-room and the
wall with his wife's portrait at the other, Henry Montagu was pacing in
a state of agitation such as he had never experienced in his fifty years
of life. The drawing-room was no longer "theirs." It was his--and the
portrait's. The painting was of a girl who was not more beautiful in
radiance of feature and lovable contour of body than the woman a
generation older who had died two months ago.
Suddenly he stopped short in the middle of the room, his hands in his
pockets. "My God!" he cried.
Then he shut his teeth on the words as sharply and passionately as he
had uttered them, and raised one of his hands to his brow. There were
drops of cold sweat upon it.
Mr. Montagu was a simple, selfish, good-natured business-man, never
given to imaginative thoughts or to greater extremes of mood than the
heights and depths of rising and falling stocks. Yet his experience of
the last two hours had shown him to himself as a creature wretchedly
inadequate to face the problem that confronted him--the simple problem
of widowerhood.
He was not bitter at his wife's death. Not only did he consider himself
too sensible for that, but he _was_ too sensible. Death is an inevitable
thing. And the one fact involving the simplicity of the problem was no
more than many another man had borne without a thought--his
childlessness.
Yet as if the whole two months in their strangeness their sad novelty,
had been concentrating their loneliness for an accumulated spring at
him, the last two hours had driven home to him that this secondary fact
had _not_ been inevitable, that what he was suffering to-night could
have been avoided.
He had not wished to have children, and neither had the beautiful woman
whose painted spirit smiled down so pitilessly now on his tragedy of
jangled nerves and intolerable solitude. Deliberately and quite frankly,
without even hiding behind the cowardly excuse of the tacit, they had
outspokenly chosen not to.
After his desperate exclamation, he had laughed and thrown himself into
his chair. He had forced the laugh, seeking to batter down with it a
thrill that was akin to fright at an abrupt realization that in those
two dreadful hours he had done three unprecedented things. He had spoken
aloud there by himself, an action he had always ascribed exclusively to
children and maniacs; he had harbored absurd temptations; and finally he
had ejaculated "My God!" which he had thought appropriate to a man only
in the distresses of fiction or after complete ruin on the Stock
Exchange.
That exclamation had sprung from him when he had caught himself thinking
how gladly he would give half his fortune if he could have a companion,
even his butler, for the rest of the evening, his whole fortune, exactly
as if he had died, if he could but have a son to give it to.
That freedom from care, which they had chosen to call freedom from
responsibility, had been their mutual property, but to-night, in his
hopeless solitude, it seemed that he was paying the whole price for it.
She had met the unknown, but with the known--himself, her whole
life--beside her, and her ordeal was over. His, he felt now, was worse,
and already beginning. After all, he reflected, there was a certain
rough justice in it; the one spared longer in the world of bodily people
bore, in consequence, the reverting brunt of their double selfishness.
But the remnant of life seemed a poor thing to-night. The further it
stretched, in his suddenly stirred imagination, the poorer, the emptier,
it seemed.
And having stirred, after a whole lifetime of healthy sleep, his
imagination gripped him in a strong and merciless embrace. It seemed to
twist him about and force him to look down the vista of the coming years
and at all their possibilities, even the desecrational one of marrying
again and calling into life the son that he had never wanted before. At
the thought, he flushed with the idea that the portrait's eyes were
reading his face, and compelled himself to look bravely at it; but as he
met the lovely eyes strange questions darted into his brain: whether he
would not rather have been solely to blame; whether his all-possessive
love of her would not be more flawless now if she had been a flawless
eternal-feminine type, longing for motherhood, but denying it for his
sake; whether he would not be happier now in looking at her portrait if
some warm tint from a Renaissance Madonna had mellowed the radiant
Medici Venus who smiled from the frame. He was seized by a desire to
turn the gazing picture to the wall.
Half-way across the room, he checked the impulse with a gasp of
self-disgust, but with hands raised involuntarily toward it he cried:
"_Oh, why didn't we?_"
As he stood trembling with his back to it, the second absurd temptation
of the night assailed him--to dash on his hat and go to Maurice's, a
restaurant of oblique reputation to which his wife had once accompanied
him out of curiosity, and which, in a surprising outburst of almost
pious prudery, she had refused to visit again. Nor had she ever allowed
him to go thereafter himself, and though she had made no dying request
of him, he knew that, if she had, that would have been it.
In his shaken state the thought of his one club, the Business Men's, was
repugnant. Maurice's, expansive, insinuating and brilliant, called to
his loneliness arbitrarily, persistently. But with a glance over his
shoulder at the portrait, he put the thought away. Then, straightening
up, he walked to his chair again, sat tensely down, and faced the long
room and his childish terror at its emptiness.
Innocent as had been his impulse toward Maurice's and full as was
Broadway with places as glittering and noisy, his morbid duty to debar
that one resort seemed to him to condemn him to the house for the night.
Why was it the butler's night out? Even to know that he was below
stairs--Would other nights be like this? _Every_ night--The possibility
turned him cold. His thoughts were racing now, and even as he gripped
the arms of the chair a still worse terror gripped his mind. His
loneliness seemed to have become an actual thing, real as a person, a
spirit haunting the luxurious, silent house. He was facing the door, and
its heavy mahogany, fixing his attention through his staring gaze,
seemed to be shutting him alone with the dead. Save for his trembling
self and his wife's painted eyes, the big room was lifeless. It was
beyond the closed door that his imagination, now running beyond control,
pictured the presence of his frightful guest--his own solitude, coming
in ironical answer to his craving for companionship.
Were those live eyes of the dead creating his sense of an impending life
in the house? Was it his wife, who, never having created a child for
him, was forcing on him now a horrible companion? Again he started
desperately toward the picture, again he caught himself, again he cried,
"My God!" and faced his terror passionately, facing too, this time, the
closed door.
"You fool! You fool!"
His voice sounded weak and strange to him as if indeed some one else had
spoken. The paralyzing thought that such a mood of panic could be the
beginning of real madness had shaken his voice and his whole body, and
again Maurice's, now as a positive savior, rushed into his mind. But he
threw the idea of refuge contemptuously away. He would stand his ground
and not leave the house that night; yet even as he stood, he asked
himself if this was not because he feared to open the door.
With a gasp, he drew himself up in the center of the room, and in a
surge of determined anger, with his eyes on the door, facing it as he
would have faced an enemy before he attacked, he deliberately gave his
mind to his fear, letting it sweep through him, trying to magnify it,
reading every horror that he could into the imagined presence that he
intended to dispel, and then, tormenting himself with slow steps, he
walked to the door, reached his hand to the knob, and opened it.
Though his mouth opened for a cry of terror, no sound came from him as
he staggered back, and a waiting figure pitched into the room, rushed
wildly past him with a whimper like that of a wounded animal, and flung
itself, face forward, into the empty chair.
As if through the same doorway that had given entrance to the desperate
wretch, his terror seemed to leave him. While he stood gasping, with
pounding heart, staring at the limp, shuddering manhood that had hurled
itself into his home, Henry Montagu suddenly felt himself a man again.
With the cold plunge of his senses into rationality, they told him that
he was in the presence of some fatal and soul-sickening tragedy, yet
this horror that had dashed into the hollow privacy of his house was at
least real to him. Overwhelmed as he was by the frightful appearance of
the young man, who was now weeping abandonedly, he had no fear of him,
and his first act was a practical one--he swiftly, quietly closed the
door. It was done in an instinct of protection. It would be useless to
question him yet, but that he was a fugitive, and from something
hideous, Montagu took for granted.
He stood looking across the room at his outlandish guest, trying to
docket the kaleidoscopic flock of impressions that had flown into his
mind from the instant he swung back the door. Though noble, even
splendid in its slender lines, the youth's figure had half-fallen,
half-sprung through the doorway, animal-like. There had not been even a
ghost of sound in the hallway, yet it was as if he had been in the act
of hurtling himself against the closed door, hammering at it with
upraised hands. Mr. Montagu had been horrified by it instantaneously, as
by a thing of violence with every suggestion of the sordid, but the poor
sobbing fellow who now lay in the chair with his arms and head drooping
over the big leather arm seemed to him as immaculately dressed as
himself. Remembering the fleeting posture at the door, his eyes went
involuntarily to the hanging, graphic hands. In the light of his
reading-lamp they gleamed white, and as he watched, his heart sinking
with pity at their thinness, two slow red drops rolled from under the
cuffs down the palms, and fell to the floor.
"Good God!" breathed Henry Montagu.
He had never doubted for the fraction of a second that his guest was a
criminal, and in every sense a desperate one, but, just as
instinctively, he felt certain that no matter what the horror he had run
from, he was more sinned against than sinning. Every line in the boy's
fragile, pathetic figure went straight to the older man's heart. It came
to him, almost joyously, that there had been premonition in his strange
mood of longing for a son. As an end to this nerve-racking night, there
was work to do--for the remainder of it, at least for a brief moment, he
had a companion in his grim, empty house.
"Thank God!" he exclaimed aloud.
"Thank God! Thank God!"
The young man had spoken, and Mr. Montagu, as he heard the words,
remembered that between the sobs there had been, in faint, broken
syllables, "My God! My God!" again and again, and that he had understood
at last what it was to hear that from a man who was neither ruined by
the Stock Exchange nor the weak victim of childish terror. But now, this
repetition of his varied expression startled him. It was like an echo of
himself.
Again he shook himself together. If the boy could speak, it was time to
question him. He had not yet seen his face, beyond a flashing imprint on
his brain of a look of terrific fear and terrific exultation as it had
dashed past him, but he was prepared to like it. He braced himself,
walked over and stood in front of the chair. With an object--even this
object--to justify it, he gladly surrendered himself now to the fatherly
instinct he had so bitterly struggled against, and he felt that he would
like, with his first words, to put his hand reassuringly on the crumpled
shoulder. But the night had left his nerves still raw--in his
sensitivity he could not bear the thought that the trembling figure
would shrink from his touch, and he kept his hand firmly at his side.
"My boy," he said gently, "you mustn't be afraid of me. Tell me what
you've done."
The young man raised his head, sank back in the chair, and looked at
him.
Not once in the long evening of lonely terror, not when he had first
heard himself talking aloud, not when he had dashed at his wife's
portrait, not when he had faced the thought of madness, had Mr. Montagu
had such a shock. An eternally lost soul, a damned thing staring at
paradise, seemed to gaze at him out of the boy's eyes. He thought he was
seeing all the sins of the world in them, yet the look was appallingly
innocent. He seemed to be discovering those sins in the dark, ravening
eyes, but to be feeling them in himself as if the forgotten, ignored
innermost of his own life were quaking with guilt under the spell of
this staring presence. In the state of horrified sympathy to which it
had precipitated him, he morbidly felt almost responsible for the
brooding evil in the boy as well as aghast at it. But even this sense of
sin, implying as it did a skeleton of naked, primal right and wrong
seemed of small import to his astounded mind beside the nameless,
unmentionable sorrow that pervaded the face and stabbed at Henry
Montagu's heart. He knew without question that he was looking at
tragedy--worse than he had supposed the world could hold or any human
thing, in any world, be subject to. It was a man's face in every line
and poise and suggestion, but for all its frightful knowledge he had to
call it beautiful--the clear-cut word "handsome" ran away from it like a
mouse into a hole, leaving it a superb horror that, as soon as his
paralyzed muscles could respond to his instinct, drove his hand to his
face to shut away the deliberate, searching gaze.
"Done?" answered the young fellow at last. "What have I done? _Good
God!_"
For the third time, it was one of his own three exclamations totally new
to him that night, and the coincidence drove home to him, this time,
with a sense of omen. But his guest was speaking again, and, forcing
himself to look calmly at the tragic face he listened breathlessly.
"I've done a thing never accomplished in human life before, a thing
more terrific than the world's entire history, from the moment of the
first atom crawling on it has ever known!"
He could not have spoken more solemnly and convincingly if he had
reverently murdered, one by one, a whole nation of people, and it was
some such picture that came into Henry Montagu's mind as, shivering and
fascinated, he watched him and listened.
But the young man said no more.
"If--if you will tell me what you've done," said Mr. Montagu haltingly,
his pity sweeping every caution away, "or simply what you want of me, I
will do anything for you that I possibly can."
"There is nothing in this world," answered the boy wearily, "that
anybody can do for me." But suddenly, impulsively, he added: "There is
just one thing, that you can do--not for me, but for yourself. Don't ask
me questions. For your own sake don't!"
"But--" began Mr. Montagu.
"If you knew who I am or what I am, and what I've deliberately done,"
cried the boy, "you'd curse this night, and curse me, the longest day
you lived! What--what is _your_ name?"
"Henry Montagu," said his host simply.
He pondered it. "That has a nice sound. I like it. And I--I like you. So
don't ask me questions!"
The elder man was looking down at the thin white hands again, and the
_naive_ comment brought a sudden contraction to his throat. "Poor little
boy!" was on his lips, but an intuition like a woman's warned him that
the words would make the desolate figure weep again, and his utmost
strength quailed from the thought of seeing it, now that he had seen the
face. As the white hands clasped themselves together, he had seen that
the under sides of the wrists were bruised and dark. Facially, nothing
could have been more unlike than this youth to the paint and plaster
symbols that crowded before him from his memory, yet the red drops that
he had seen drip to the floor, the wickedness and waste that he seemed
to expiate and represent, the whole obvious torment of his being, had
forced a simile upon him which he now blurted out.
"Whoever and whatever you are, whatever terrible thing you've done, I
only know that you make me think of--of--Oh, the crown of thorns, the
cross--you know what I mean!"
"Some one with a crown of thorns?" said the young man wonderingly. "Who
was that?"
Mr. Montagu stared at him incredulously. That any man, no matter how
base a criminal, and one, indeed, who had cried out again and again the
name of God, should not know the story and the name of God's son,
astonished him, for the moment, more than anything yet had done.
"Oh, yes, yes, I remember now," continued the boy. "Yes, that was very,
very sad. But I'm selfish and preoccupied with my own dreadful trouble,
and that whole history, tragic as it was, was a very happy one compared
with mine!"
With a cold shudder, Henry Montagu believed him. He realized that as yet
he had done nothing for him. Food and drink had occurred to him, but in
the minutes that they had passed together the stranger had grown more
virile. He was no longer the incredible figure of wretchedness that had
dashed into the room. He was sitting forward in the chair now, his eyes
on the portrait.
"Is that your wife?" he asked.
"My--my dead wife," answered Mr. Montagu.
His own eyes reverting again and again to the lacerated wrists, he did
not see the changing expressions in his visitor's as they studied the
eyes of the portrait; but as the boy now leaped impulsively to his feet
he saw in them a fierce gleam that was like the hatred of a maniac. He
thrilled with renewed terror as the boy once more sprang to him like an
animal, and with a growl in his throat rushed toward the portrait.
"Stop!" he shouted, and the boy almost cringed to a halt in the middle
of the floor.
When, after his first chill of horror at the act itself, Henry Montagu
realized that the desecration was his own thought, his own impulse
carried into fierce determination, he sank weak and dizzy into the chair
that the boy had left. But again he mastered his frightened mind and
thrust away from it the sinister oppression of omen and coincidence.
Unwillingly but helplessly, he was letting into his thoughts the theory
that, after he had opened the door instead of before he had opened it,
the room had been harboring a maniac. And the theory stabbed him. A
mushroom growth of tenderness had germinated in his pity and was growing
nearer and nearer to a personal liking for the beautiful, pathetic
figure of youth that stood before him, wilted and helpless again, in the
center of the room.
"My boy," he said quietly, "I ought to resent that but strangely enough
I don't find myself resenting the idea of your taking strange liberties
in my house. In fact, I--I had that same impulse. I nearly did that
myself, just before you burst in here."
The young man looked at him in amazement.
"_You_ were going to turn--Mrs. Montagu's picture to the wall? Wh--why,
you old dirty beast!"
To Henry Montagu there was no vulgarity in the words. Their huge
reproach of him drove every other quality out of them and a deep color
into his face.
"But I--I quelled the impulse. And y--you would actually have done it!"
he stammered.
"I had a reason and a right to!" cried the young man. "I'd never seen it
before and if it repelled me I had a right never to look at it again!
But she was _your wife_!"
Once more he stood, his eyes avoiding the portrait and wandering
hungrily about the rest of the beautiful room.
"Well," he said, after a few moments, "good-by!" And he walked toward
the door.
"Stop!" cried Mr. Montagu again. He sat forward on the edge of the
chair, trembling. After hours of successive surprises, the simple
announcement of his visitor's departure had struck him cold with the
accumulated force of his past lonely terror and his present intense
curiosity. Again the boy had obeyed his command with a visible shiver,
and it hurt the older man by recalling to him the suggestion of crime,
of the place and the tragedy he must have escaped from, the unknown
cloud he was under. But however involved in the horrible he might become
by detaining him, shaken and filled with inexplicable grief as he was by
his presence, worst of all was the fear of being alone again after a
frightful, brief adventure in his life, vanished and unexplained. He
wanted to reassure and comfort the wavering, sorrowful boy, but all he
could stammer in apology for his shout was: "Wh--where are you going?"
"What difference does it make to _you_ where I go?" asked the boy
drearily. "If you must know, I'm going to Maurice's."
Mr. Montagu sprang to his feet. With bitten lips he kept himself silent
at this final thrust of the hypernatural, but the damp beads had
returned to his brow. His terror lasted only a moment, and in his
resurging desire to hold back the boy, he demanded both curiously and
assertively:
"What are you going to _Maurice's_ for?"
He had not supposed that there was a particle of color in the pitiful
face, but as the boy answered, a delicate flesh-tint seemed to leave it,
turning him deathly white.
"I--I want to look at the women," he said.
At his agitation and pallor, the hectic whisper of his voice, above all,
the light of fiendish hate that leapt into his beautiful eyes and
ravaged their look, a physical sensation crept through the older man
from head to foot and held him motionless.
But it was not horror at the boy himself. As he stood there wan and
shivering before him, every best instinct in Henry Montagu rushed
uppermost, and he felt that he would give anything in his life, gladly
devote, if not actually give, that life itself, to set the boy right
with the world. And with his terror gone and his horror going, he
impulsively walked across the room and stood between him and the door.
"Why do you leave me this way? You mustn't mind what I say to you or how
I say it, for it can't be any more abrupt or strange than the way you
came here. I don't want you to go to Maurice's. And if you do, I'm going
with you."
"No! No!" cried the boy fearfully.
"I don't want you to leave me. I want you to confide in me. I want you
to trust me, and to tell me, without fear, what it is you've done."
"No, no, no, no! Don't ask me to!" cried the boy.
"I do ask you to. I have some right to know. I'd be justified in
detaining you if I wanted to--"
"You couldn't!" cried the trembling youth passionately.
"I said I'd be _justified_. Are _you_, in dashing like a shot into my
life and then leaving me without a word to explain it? I've played host
to you gladly, though you've torn my nerves to pieces. Remember how you
came here!"
"Yes! Yes!" ejaculated the boy bitterly. "I'm an intruder! I forced
myself on you and I know it! God knows I know it!"
"I didn't mean it unkindly. I tell you, I want you to _stay_! I want you
to, no matter what you are or what you've done. You've admitted that
you've done something--something terrific--"
"And I have!" cried the boy, his eyes lighting wildly. "At last, at
last! I've done it, I've _done_ it!"
"And in spite of it, I want you to stay! Whatever it is, I want to
protect you from the consequences of it!"
"Look to yourself!" cried the boy. "You'll curse me yet for coming here!
Let me go, and protect _yourself_!"
"I am no longer considering myself, I've done that too much in my life,
and to-night I'm reckless. No matter _what_ the crime you've done--"
"Crime?" His visitor flashed wondering eyes upon him. "You fool! You
fool!" Again, the exclamation was like an echo of himself, but Mr.
Montagu had no time to entertain the thought, for the boy was stammering
out his astonishment in hysterical syllables. "I--a criminal!
_I_--I--Oh, I might have _known_ it would seem that way to you! But
_I_--"
Again under the penetrating gaze his host felt himself morbidly guilty,
but there was a thrill of gladness in his heart that now welcomed the
grim alternative of the boy's simple madness.
"Stay with me!" he cried. "Sleep here, and rest, and then--"
"Let me go to Maurice's!" cried the boy desperately. "You'll regret it
if you don't! Oh, for the pity of God, for pity of _yourself_, let me
leave you while I still _offer_ to leave you!"
Mr. Montagu backed himself against the door.
"Why do you want to go there?" he demanded. "What is it you want to look
at the women in Maurice's for?"
The boy hung fire under the determined voice.
"The--the women who go to Maurice's are--are--of a--certain _kind_,
aren't they?"
"Some of them--most of them," said Mr. Montagu. "If you've never been
there, why do you want so to go? They're not unusual; simply--painted
women."
"Painted?" repeated the boy in astonishment. He turned to the portrait.
"_That's_ a painted woman, too. Aren't they _alive_ at Maurice's?"
In his marvel at the enormous innocence of it, Mr. Montagu wondered, for
the first time, what the young man's age could definitely be, but in a
moment he remembered the one pitiful way to account for the pathetic
question, and his voice was very gentle as he said:
"My boy, if you have your heart set on going to Maurice's, you shall go.
But surely, after this mysterious time together in my house, and knowing
that whatever you may be I welcome your companionship, you won't refuse
my request to let me go with you? To say that I've enjoyed it would be
to put a queer word to a terrible business that I have no way of
understanding. But until you came I was bitterly, hungrily lonely--"
"Don't! Don't!" cried the boy. He had begun to tremble at the earnest
tenderness of the voice. "I can't bear it! You don't know what you're
talking about! Oh! let me go to Maurice's, and let me go alone! If you
insist on going with me I can't stop you--"
"I do insist," said Mr. Montagu.
"But I can plead with you not to! And I can warn you what the price will
be! Oh--" and he stretched out his hands in so imploring a gesture that
his host could see the dull, dried blood of his cruelly injured
wrists--"for God's sake, for _God's_ sake, believe what I tell you! _If
you leave this house with me to-night, you're lost!_ Oh, God, God, I see
you don't believe me! Tell me this, I beg of you, I demand of you--did
you _feel_ that I was in the hall to-night, before you opened the door?"
"Yes," said Mr. Montagu.
"Had I made any noise?"
"No."
"Then I can prove to you that I know what I'm saying! I _did_ that! I
_made_ you feel me! Till after you let me in, I wasn't strong enough to
make a sound! Yet I made you know I was there! Am I telling the truth,
then? When I started to leave you, and now, even now, in warning you I
was doing, I _am_ doing, a more unselfish thing, a decenter thing, than
any you've ever done in all your years of life! It's because I like you
more than I want to! I'm unselfish, I tell you! I _wanted_ you to go to
Maurice's with me! I intended to make you, as I made you let me in! But
if you do, you'll find me out! I'll tell you! I won't be able to conceal
it! You'll know the truth about me! You've said all this was
mysterious--for your own sake, let it stay so! You needn't think all
truths are beautiful, and the truth about me is the most ghastly in the
universe!"
"I _want_ to find you out," said Mr. Montagu, steadying his voice. "I
want to know the truth."
"By that cross and crown of thorns that mean so much to you and nothing
at all to me," implored the boy, "_don't go!_ I swear to you, _mine is a
more terrible secret than any living heart has ever held!_ You'll hate
me, and I don't want you to! Oh, _while_ I don't, while I'm _merciful_
to you, believe me, and let me go alone! No loneliness that _you_ could
ever suffer would equal the price that you will pay if you go with me!"
Though the sense of horror sweeping indomitably through him was worse
than any he had felt before, Mr. Montagu's answer was deliberate and
resolute:
"I told myself only a few minutes ago that I would sacrifice anything in
my life, almost my life itself, to--well, to this. Do you mean that the
price would be--my--death?"
He threw every possible significance demandingly into the word, and the
boy's voice was suddenly quiet in its tensity as he gazed back at him.
"It would be worse than death," he said solemnly. "If you let me go, and
face your loneliness here, there's a chance for you, though I've warned
you as it is. If you leave the house with me to-night, you're as lost as
I am, and I am irretrievably damned and always have been damned. As
truly as you see me standing before you now, the price is--madness."
"Come," said Mr. Montagu, and without another word he opened the door.
At Maurice's, Mr. Montagu led the way to the far side of the big room,
threading in a zigzag through the gleam of bright silver, the glitter of
white linen, the crimson of deep carnations. Maurice's in its own way
was admirably tasteful; as distinctively quiet and smooth in its manners
and rich hangings as it was distinctly loud in its lights and ragged in
its music. No after-theatre corner of Broadway had a crisper American
accent of vice, or displayed vice itself more delicately lacquered. The
place was as openly innocent as a street, with a street's sightless and
irresponsible gaze for what occurred in it. And nothing remarkable
occurred, save the fungus growth of what was to occur elsewhere.
Mr. Montagu, on the way to the table, looked several times over his
shoulder, ostensibly to speak to his companion, but in reality to see
whether the extraordinary boy was running the gantlet of eyes he had
presupposed he would. And each time he met inquisitive faces that were
not only staring but listening.
His own conspicuousness was grilling, but it was part and parcel of his
insistent bargain; he could understand, quite sympathetically, how the
youth's appearance, as awful as it was immaculate, should pound open the
heart of any woman alive; and his suppressed excitement was too powerful
for him to resent even the obvious repugnance in the faces of the men
until he imagined an intentional discourtesy to the boy on the part of
the waiter.
To himself, the man was over-servile, and elaborately cautious in
pulling out his chair, but he stood, with his face quite white, and his
back to the boy, and pulled out none for him. Henry Montagu had never
yet bullied a waiter, and he did not bully now. But with an icy glare
of reproof at the man, he rose and set the chair for his guest himself.
"Shall I order for you?" he asked gently as the boy sat quietly down;
and made irritably incisive by the tendency of near-by men and women to
listen as well as watch, he emphasized his expensive order of foods and
wines, repeated each item loudly to cheapen the listeners, and sent the
man scuttling.
In his intense desire to see the effect of the queerly chosen place on
his queerly chosen companion, he now turned to him. And as he saw the
effect, every shock of the night seemed to recoil upon him. The feeling
of mystery; the foreboding, despite his courage and his conviction that
the boy was mad, of the imminent unknown; his recurrent and absorbing
curiosity to learn the gruesome secret that he had declared; all rushed
one by one back upon him, and then as swiftly left him to the simple
grip of horror at his face. It was gazing at woman after woman, here,
there and yonder, throughout the large room, deliberately, searchingly,
venomously, its great eyes and set lips and every tense haggard line
fuller and fuller of an undying hate that eclipsed even that which had
shaken Henry Montagu before they came. Appalled and fascinated, he
looked with him, and back at him, and with him again, to the next and
the next. There were women there, and ladies of every sort, good, bad
and indecipherable; yet in every instance the childlike, horribly
sophisticated eyes had picked their victim unerringly, deterred by
neither clothes, veneer, nor manner.
As he stared with him from frightened female face to frightened female
face, Mr. Montagu realized shamefully that his own features were
helplessly mirroring the detestation of the boy's, and he changed from
very pale to very red himself as woman after woman flushed crimson under
his gaze. Yet the boy's face grew calm and his voice was perfectly so as
he turned at last from his horrid review and met the eyes of his host.
"I see what you meant, now, by 'painted' women. Well, they'd much
_better_ be dead!"
At the tone, cruelly cool as if he planned to see that they were, Mr.
Montagu shivered. "Why, _why_ do you hate them like that?" he
whispered.
The fierce anger flickered dangerously in the great eyes again.
"Because they're my enemy! Because they and the wicked thing they mean
are my prowling, triumphant enemy, and the enemy of all others like me!"
"Oh, my boy, my boy!" pleaded the man of the world, sickly. "You don't
realize it, but I can tell you from appearances--some of those women you
stared at are here with their _husbands_!"
"So was _your_ wife when she came here," said the boy.
Mr. Montagu fell back in his chair with a gasp. As swiftly as it had
leapt into his mind, the frightful implication of the words leapt out
again in his amazement at the boy's knowledge of the incident.
But the waiter stepped between them with the order, and in obvious
terror now instead of simple aversion, clattered it down with trembling
hands.
"Go away! Go away!" commanded Mr. Montagu angrily. "_I'll_ arrange it!
Go!" And the waiter escaped.
"How did you know?" he asked; but without waiting for a reply he poured
out the boy's wine and his own, and took a long hasty draft.
"Now, how did you?"
"Oh!" cried the boy piteously. "Don't ask me! I shouldn't have said it!
I knew I'd let it out if you came here with me! I'll be telling you
everything in a minute, and you'll go stark mad when you know!"
The inference rushed again upon Henry Montagu, a worse vague horror than
any yet, and he almost sprang from his chair.
"Are you going to tell me my wife was unfaithful to me, and
with--with--"
"Fool! Fool!" cried the boy. "I wish to God she _had_ been unfaithful to
you! I tried to make her, I can tell you that! Then there'd have been at
least half a chance for _me_! But now that she's dead, there's no chance
for either of us, even you! Unless--O God!--unless you'll control
yourself and think! I beg you again, I beg of you, _think_ again! Go
away from here, go now, without asking me anything more, and there's
just a shade of a chance for you! I told you there was none if you left
the house, but there may be, there may be! Go home, and forget this, and
be satisfied your wife loved you, for she did. She kept herself for you
_at my expense_! Go now, and they'll let you go. But if you stay here
and talk to me, you'll leave this place in manacles! I'm here, _among
those women_, and I'm with you! My secret will come out and drag you
down, as I planned it should before I began to like you! And you like
me, too--I feel it. For _my_ sake, then, for God's sake and for your
sake, _won't you go_?"
"No!" cried Mr. Montagu, almost roughly in his eagerness. "I don't judge
you, but it's your duty, and in your power, to put me where I can! I
harbored you, thinking you were a frightened fugitive, and you weren't.
I'm your voluntary host in circumstances of mysterious horror and you
ask me to quit you in ignorance! I won't! You sicken me with a doubt
about the wife I loved--Who are you? What are you?"
"If you believed I knew as much of her as I said I did," cried the boy,
"why don't you believe me when I assure you that she loved you? What
more should _you_ demand? I meant everything I said, and more--your wife
was nothing but a licensed wanton, _and you knew it_! You ask me who and
what I am--so long as she loved you, who are _you_, and what are _you_,
to point a finger at her?"
A rush of instinctive fury filled the man, but he felt as dazed at
finding himself angry at the beautiful unhappy youth, as if he had known
him for years, and he only gasped and stared.
"If you think I'm crazy," cried the boy, "I'll show you, as I showed you
once before, that I know what I'm talking about! I'll tell you something
that was a secret between you two, and your wife didn't tell me, either!
The night you'd been here, after you'd gone home, _after you were locked
in your room_, you disputed about this place! She refused to come here
again, and she refused to tell you why! But I know why!"
Once more Mr. Montagu gasped and with a thrill of wondering terror.
"Who are you and what are you?" he demanded. "I command you to solve
this mystery and solve it now!"
His voice had risen to a shout, but a sudden lump in his throat silenced
it, for the boy was weeping again.
"Oh," wept the boy, "if you've liked me at _all_, put it off as long as
you can, for you'll make me tell you I hate you, and _why_ I hate you!"
"_Hate_ me?"
It had struck Henry Montagu like a flail in the face, wiping away his
anger, his astonishment at the boy's uncanny knowledge, even his
astonishment that the word was able to strike him so.
"I--I've suffered enough through you!" he stammered painfully. "And if
I've got to suffer more, I insist on doing it now and getting it over
with!"
"Don't! don't! It will _never_ be over with!" gulped the boy.
"I'm _through_!" cried Mr. Montagu. "_Who_ are you? _What_ are you?"
At the determined finality of the voice the boy quivered like a helpless
thing, and his stuttering ejaculations came as if shaken out of him by
the shivering of his body.
"Wh--_who_ am I?"
"_Yes!_"
"Wh--_what_ am I?"
"_Yes!_"
Never yet had he been so awful as in the torment and majesty that gazed
like fate at Henry Montagu now, and the frightful fire of the eyes
seemed to dry up the tears on his cheeks at its first flare of accusing
righteousness.
"_I'm the child that you and your wife refused to have!_"
As the aghast man shrank back before his blighting fury, he leaned
farther and farther toward him.
"_Now_ do you know why I hate you as no human thing can hate? _Your
wilful waste has made my hideous want!_ Now do you know why I said I'd
done a more terrific thing than had ever been done in the world's
history before? _I've gotten in!_ At last, at last, I've gotten in, in
spite of you, and after she was dead! I've done a greater and more
impossible thing than that great Mystery the world adores! I've gotten
in despite you, and without even a _woman's_ help! When we spoke of
_that_ life once before to-night, I shocked you! Do you believe _now_
that my history is more terrible, or not? He suffered, and suffered, and
He died. But He'd _lived_! His torture was a few hours--for mine
to-night, I've waited almost as many years as He did, and to what end?
_To nothing!_ God, God, do you see _that_?"
He twisted open his hands and held out his bruised wrists before the
trembling man's eyes. "For all those years--"
He suddenly drew himself to his full height and threw them passionately
above his head in the posture that had haunted Henry Montagu from the
first instant's glimpse of him.
"For all those endless years, ever since your marriage-night, I've stood
beating, beating, beating at the door of life until my wrists have bled!
And you didn't hear me! You couldn't and she wouldn't! You didn't want
to! You wouldn't listen! And you--you never have heard that desperate
pounding and calling, not even to-night, though even so, with that woman
out of the way, I made you _feel_ me! But _she'd_ heard me, the ghoul!
She heard me again and again! I made her! I told her what she was, and
that you knew it, and I meant it! Her marriage certificate was her
license! She gave you a wanton's love, and you gave her just what you
got! And I made her understand that! I made her understand it right here
in this place! That's why I wanted to come here--I could see only her
picture, and I wanted to see a _real_ one of them! Until to-night, I
could never see either of you, but I always knew where you were!
"And when you brought her here, I made her look at that enemy of me and
my kind that I could always _feel_--those women that she was one of and
that she _knew_ she was one of when I screamed it at her in this place!
For _I was with you two that night! I was with you till after you'd gone
home, you demons!_ That's why she'd never come near the place again, the
coward, the miserable coward! That's why I hate her worse than I hate
you! There's a pitiful little excuse for the men, because they're
_stupider_.
"For the hideous doom of all our hopeless millions, the women are more
wickedly to blame, because they must face the fact that we are waiting
to get in. God, God, I'd gladly be even a woman, if I could! But you're
bad enough--bad enough--bad enough to deserve the fate you face
to-night! And now, God help you, you're facing it, just as I said you
would! You deserve it because you were put here with a purpose and you
flatly wouldn't fulfil it! God only demands that mankind should be made
in His image. In a wisdom that you have no right to question. He lets
the images go their own way, as you've gone yours. Yet you, and all
others like you, the simple, humble image-workers, instead of rejoicing
that you have work to do, set your little selves up far greater than
Great God, and actually decide whether men shall even _be_!
"You have a lot of hypercritical, self-justifying theories about
it--that it's better for them not to live at all than to suffer some of
the things that life, even birth itself, can wither them with. But there
never yet was any living creature, no matter how smeared and smitten,
that told the truth when he said he wished he'd never been born, while
we, the countless millions of the lost, pound and shriek for
life--forever shriek and hope! That's the worst anguish of the
lost--they hope! I've shown what can be done through that anguish, as
it's never been shown before. Even the terrible night that woman died, I
hoped! I hoped more than ever, for knowing then that for all eternity it
was too late, I hoped for _revenge_! And revenge was my right! Yes,
every solitary soul has a right to _live_, even if it lives to wreck,
kill, madden its parents! And now, oh, God, I've got my revenge when I
no longer want it! The way you took me in, the way you wanted me to stay
when I'd almost frightened you to death, made me want to spare you! It
was my fate that I--I liked you--I--_more_ than liked you. And I tried
to save you! Oh, God, God, _how_ I've tried!"
As he stood with his hands thrown forth again and his wretched eyes
staring into those of the white-faced man, Henry Montagu met the wild
gaze unflinchingly. He had sat dumbstruck and shuddering, but the
spasmodic quivering of his body had lessened into calmness, and his
whispered, slow words gained in steadiness as they came: "My boy, I
admit you've nearly driven me to madness just now. I was close to the
border! I can't dispute one shred of reproach, of accusation, of
contempt. Your fearful explanation of this night, the awful import of
your visit and yourself have shaken me to the center of my being. But
its huge consistency is that of a madman. You poor, you pitiful, deluded
boy, you tell me to believe you are an unborn soul, while you stand
there and exist before my eyes!"
The boy gave a cry of agony--agony so immortal that as he sank into his
chair and clutched the table, an echoing moan of it wrenched from the
older man.
"I _don't_ exist! Didn't I tell you my secret was more terrible than any
living heart had ever held? I'm real to you since I made you let me into
your thoughts to-night. I'm real to you, and through your last moment of
consciousness through eternity I always will be! But I won't be with
you! You don't believe me yet, but the moment you do, I won't be here!
And I never can be real to any other creature in the universe--_not even
that prostitute who refused to be my mother_! I don't exist, and never
can exist!"
"But you do! You do! You do! You're there before me now!" gasped Mr.
Montagu through chattering teeth. "How can you deny that you're sitting
here with me in this restaurant? I forgive you--I love you, and I
forgive you, but, thank God, _I see through you at last_! You're a
fanatic, a poor, frenzied maniac on this subject, and you've morbidly
spied on and studied me as a typical case of it; through your devilish
understanding and divination you've guessed at that conversation between
me and my wife, and like the creature I pictured you in my house, a
ravening, devouring thing, you've sought to drag me into your hell of
madness! But you shan't! I tell you I see through you at last, you
pitiful mad creature! You know you're there before my eyes, and just so
truly as you are, not one syllable do I believe of what you've told me!"
As the boy sprang with a venomous shout to his feet, all the hate in
his terrible being sprang tenfold into his eyes.
"Do you call me 'mad,' and 'creature'? Do you dare deny me, now, after
all I've told you? You coward, you _coward_! You've denied me life, but
you can't deny this night! The people in this place will let you know
presently! I tried to spare you. Though I'd thirsted for my revenge I
pleaded with you, _prayed_ to you to spare yourself! If you'd stayed in
the house, you might have come to your senses and forgotten me! But what
hope for you is there _now_? Do you still believe I exist? Look back at
the night! Do you remember the portrait? You commanded me to
stop--commanded, as you've always commanded my fate, and I was
powerless. To me, that was a parental command--from _you_, you who
deliberately _wouldn't_ be my parent! Did you see me wince under it? If
you hadn't done it, you'd have found me out right then! I'm not a
physical thing, and I couldn't have moved it! I only _said_ I was going
to Maurice's! I couldn't have come here if you hadn't brought me! When
you wondered, as we were starting out, whether I had a hat, I stooped
down in the hall. But you only thought I picked one up! As we came in
here, you only _thought_ I checked it! Did you see the man stare as you
reached out to take my check away from me? Have I eaten or drunk
to-night? I've not, for I'm not a _creature_! And mad, I? Look to
yourself, as I told you to look before it was too late! You fool, you've
been staring inoffensive women out of countenance, with all the hate
from my face printed on yours, and in the eyes of all these people
you've been sitting here for half an hour talking to yourself, and
ordering wine and food for an empty chair! _You_ won't ever believe
you're mad, but every one else will!"
"So help me God," cried Henry Montagu, white and trembling, "you're
there! I swear you're there!"
"So help you God, I'm _there_!" cried the boy frightfully, pointing
straight at him.
"Right there, in your brain, there, there, and _only_ there! I'm no more
flesh and blood than--than I _ever_ was, _because, you murderer, you and
your damned wife never would let me be_! Well, do you see through me
_now_?"
"No! No!" screamed Mr. Montagu. "I _don't_ see through you! I don't!"
But as he leaned forward to clutch at him in his terror, all that he
could see before him was a closed door beyond a dozen tables, a disused
entranceway diagonally opposite the one that had let them in. "I _don't_
believe you!" he wailed. "Oh, my God, my God, my God, _where are you_?"
He turned frantically to the men and women nearest him. "You saw him!
There _was_ a boy with me, wasn't there? Wasn't there? Yes, see, there,
isn't he going for that door? Oh, my boy, my boy!" And he dashed toward
it. He heard the terrible screams of women, and chairs and a table
crashed in his wake. He reached it. It was locked.
Desperately sobbing, he hurled himself against it.
It seemed to him as if all the men in the restaurant fell upon him.
Strong, merciless hands dragged down and pinioned the wrists with which
he had beaten against the door.
"GOVERNMENT GOAT"[11]
[Note 11: Copyright, 1919, by The Pictorial Review Company.
Copyright, 1920, by Susan Glaspell Cook.]