were wild rumours afloat of the fortunes that could be made in rubber and vanilla out in the Papuan “Back Beyond.” Harber was only half inclined to believe them, perhaps; but half persuaded is well along the way.
He heard his name called, and, turning, he saw a man coming toward him with the rolling gait of the seaman. As he came closer, Harber observed the tawny beard, the sea-blue eyes surrounded by the fine wrinkles of humour, the neat black clothing, the polished boots, and, above all, the gold earrings that marked the man in his mind as Farringdon, the sea-captain who had been anxious to meet him.
Harber answered the captain’s gleam of teeth with one of his own, and they turned their backs upon the water and went to Harber’s room, where they could have their fill of talk undisturbed. Harber says they talked all that afternoon and evening, and well into the next morning, enthusiastically finding one another the veritable salt of the earth, honourable, level-headed, congenial, temperamentally fitted for exactly what they had in mind–partnership.
“How much can you put in?” asked Harber finally.
“Five hundred pounds,” said the captain.
“I can match you,” said Harber.
“Man, but that’s fine!” cried the captain. “I’ve been looking for you–you, you know–_just you_–for the last two years! And when Pierson told me about you … why, it’s luck, I say!”
It was luck for Harber, too. Farringdon, you see, knew precisely where he wanted to go, and he had his schooner, and he knew that part of the world, as we say, like a man knows his own buttons. Harber, then, was to manage the plantation; they were going to set out rubber, both Para and native, and try hemp and maybe coffee while they waited for the Haevia and the Ficus to yield. And Farringdon was ready to put the earnings from his schooner against Harber’s wage as manager. The arrangement, you see, was ideal.
Skip seven years with me, please. Consider the plantation affair launched, carried, and consummated. Farringdon and Harber have sold the rubber-trees as they neared bearing, and have sold them well. They’re out of that now. In all likelihood, Harber thinks, permanently. For that seven years has seen other projects blossom. Harber, says Farringdon, has “the golden touch.” There has been trading in the islands, and a short and fortunate little campaign on the stock-market through Sydney brokers, and there has been, more profitable than anything else, the salvaging of the Brent Interisland Company’s steamer _Pailula_ by Farringdon’s schooner, in which Harber had purchased a half-interest; so the partners are, on the whole, rather well fixed. Harber might be rated at, perhaps, some forty thousand pounds, not counting his interest in the schooner.
One of Janet Spencer’s argosies, then, its cargo laden, is ready to set sail for the hills of home. In short, Harber is now in one of the island ports of call, waiting for the steamer from Fiji. In six weeks he will be in Tawnleytown if all goes well.
It isn’t, and yet it is, the same Harber. He’s thirty now, lean and bronzed and very fit. He can turn a hundred tricks now where then he could turn one. The tropics have agreed with him. There seems to have been some subtle affinity between them, and he almost wishes that he weren’t leaving them. He certainly wouldn’t be, if it were not for Janet.
Yes, that slender thread has held him. Through ten years it has kept him faithful. He has eyed askance, ignored, even rebuffed, women. The letters, that still come, have turned the trick, perhaps, or some clinging to a faith that is inherent in him. Or sheer obstinacy? Forgive the cynicism. A little of each, no doubt. And then he hadn’t often seen the right sort of women. I say that deliberately, because:
The night before the steamer was due there was a ball–yes, poor island exiles, they called it that!–and Harber, one of some thirty “Europeans” there, went to it, and on the very eve of safety …
The glare and the oily smell of the lanterns, the odour of jasmine, frangipanni, vanilla, and human beings sickeningly mingled in the heat, the jangling, out-of-tune music, the wearisome island gossip and chatter, drove him at length out into the night, down a black-shadowed pathway to the sea. The beach lay before him presently, gleaming like silver in the soft blue radiance of the jewelled night. As he stood there, lost in far memories, the mellow, lemon-coloured lights from the commissioner’s residence shone beautifully from the fronded palms and the faint wave of the waltzes of yesteryear became poignant and lovely, and the light trade-wind, clean here from the reek of lamps and clothing and human beings, vaguely tanged with the sea, blew upon him with a light, insistent pressure. Half dreaming, he heard the sharp sputter of a launch–bearing belated comers to the ball, no doubt–but he paid no attention to it. He may have been on the beach an hour before he turned to ascend to the town.
And just at the top of the slope he came upon a girl.
She hadn’t perceived him, and she stood there, slim and graceful, the moonlight bright upon her rapt face, with her arms outstretched and her head flung back, in an attitude of utter abandonment. Harber felt his heart stir swiftly. He knew what she was feeling, as she looked out over the shimmering half-moon of harbour, across the moaning white feather of reef, out to the illimitable sea, and drank in the essence of the beauty of the night. Just so, at first, had it clutched him with the pain of ecstasy, and he had never forgotten it. There would be no voicing that feeling; it must ever remain inarticulate. Nor was the girl trying to voice it. Her exquisite pantomime alone spelled her delight in it and her surrender to it.
He saw at a glance that he didn’t know her. She was “new” to the islands. Her clothes were evidence enough for that. There was a certain verve to them that spoke of a more sophisticated land. She might have been twenty-five though she seemed younger. She was in filmy white from slipper to throat, and over her slender shoulders there drifted a gossamer banner of scarf, fluttering in the soft trade-wind. Harber was very close to see this, and still she hadn’t observed him.
“Don’t let me startle you, please!” he said, as he stepped from the shadow of the trumpet-flower bush that had hitherto concealed him.
Her arms came down slowly, her chin lowered; her pose, if you will, melted away. Her voice when she spoke was low and round and thrilled, and it sent an answering thrill through Harber.
“I’m mad!” she said. “Moon-mad–or tropic-mad. I didn’t hear you. I was worshipping the night!”
“As I have been,” said Harber, feeling a sudden pagan kinship with her mood.
She smiled, and her smile seemed the most precious thing in the world. “You, too? But it isn’t new to you … and when the newness is gone every one–here at least–seems dead to it!”
“Sometimes I think it’s always new,” replied Harber. “And yet I’ve had years of it … but how did you know?”
“You’re Mr. Harber, aren’t you?”
“Yes. But—“
“Only that I knew you were here, having heard of you from the Tretheways, and I’d accounted for every one else. I couldn’t stay inside because it seemed to me that it was wicked when I had come so far for just this, to be inside stuffily dancing. One can dance all the rest of one’s life in Michigan, you know! So—-“
“It’s the better place to be–out here,” said Harber abruptly. “Need we go in?”
“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “Maybe you can tell me. You see, I’ve promised some dances. What’s the usage here? Dare I run away from them?”
“Oh, it might prove a three-day scandal if you did,” said Harber. “But I know a bench off to the right, where it isn’t likely you’ll be found by any questing partner, and you needn’t confess to having had a companion. Will you come and talk to me?”
“I’m a bird of passage,” she answered, smiling, “and I’ve only to unfold my wings and fly away from the smoke of scandal. Yes, I’ll come–if you won’t talk–too much. You see, after all, I won’t flatter you. It’s the night I want, not talk … the wonderful night!”
But, of course, they did talk. She was an American girl, she told him, and had studied art a little, but would never be much of a painter. She had been teaching classes in a city high school in the Middle West, when suddenly life there seemed to have gone humdrum and stale. She had a little money saved, not much, but enough if she managed well, and she’d boldly resigned and determined, once at least before she was too old, to follow spring around the world. She had almost given up the idea of painting now, but thought presently she might go in for writing, where, after all, perhaps, her real talent lay. She had gotten a letter of introduction in Suva to the Tretheways and she would be here until the next steamer after the morrow’s.
These were the bare facts. Harber gave a good many more than he got, he told me, upon the theory that nothing so provoked confidence as giving it. He was a little mad himself that night, he admits, or else very, very sane. As you will about that. But, from the moment she began to talk, the thought started running through his head that there was fate in this meeting.
There was a sort of passionate fineness about her that caught and answered some instinct in Harber … and I’m afraid they talked more warmly than the length of their acquaintance justified, that they made one another half-promises, not definite, perhaps, but implied; promises that….
“I _must_ go in,” she said at last, reluctantly.
He knew that she must, and he made no attempt to gainsay her.
“You are going to America,” she went on. “If you should—-“
And just at that moment, Harber says, anything seemed possible to him, and he said eagerly: “Yes–if you will–I should like—-“
How well they understood one another is evident from that. Neither had said it definitely, but each knew.
“Have you a piece of paper?” she asked.
Harber produced a pencil, and groped for something to write upon. All that his pockets yielded was a sealed envelope. He gave it to her.
She looked at it closely, and saw in the brilliant moonshine that it was sealed and stamped and addressed.
“I’ll spoil it for mailing,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Harber told her ineptly. “Or you can write it lightly, and I’ll erase it later.”
There was a little silence. Then suddenly she laughed softly, and there was a tiny catch in the voice. “So that you can forget?” she said bravely. “No! I’ll write it fast and hard … so that you can … never … forget!”
And she gave him first his pencil and envelope, and afterward her hand, which Harber held for a moment that seemed like an eternity and then let go. She went into the house, but Harber didn’t follow her. He went off to his so-called hotel.
In his room, by the light of the kerosene-lamp, he took out the envelope and reed what she had written. It was:
Vanessa Simola, Claridon, Michigan.
He turned over the envelope and looked at the address on the other side, in his own handwriting:
Miss Janet Spencer, Tawnleytown….
And the envelope dropped from his nerveless fingers to the table.
Who shall say how love goes or comes? Its ways are a sacred, insoluble mystery, no less. But it had gone for Harber: and just as surely, though so suddenly, had it come! Yes, life had bitterly tricked him at last. She had sent him this girl … too late! The letter in the envelope was written to tell Janet Spencer that within six weeks he would be in Tawnleytown to claim her in marriage.
One must be single-minded like Harber to appreciate his terrible distress of mind. The facile infidelity of your ordinary mortal wasn’t for Harber. No, he had sterner stuff in him.
Vanessa! The name seemed so beautiful … like the girl herself, like the things she had said. It was an Italian name. She had told him her people had come from Venice, though she was herself thoroughly a product of America. “So that you can never forget,” she had said. Ah, it was the warm blood of Italy in her veins that had prompted that An American girl wouldn’t have said that!
He slit the envelope, letting the letter fall to the table, and put it in his pocket.
Yet why should he save it? He could never see her again, he knew. Vain had been those half-promises, those wholly lies, that his eyes and lips had given her. For there was Janet, with her prior promises. Ten years Janet had waited for him … ten years … and suddenly, aghast, he realized how long and how terrible the years are, how they can efface memories and hopes and desires, and how cruelly they had dealt with him, though he had not realized it until this moment. Janet … why, actually, Janet was a stranger, he didn’t know Janet any more! She was nothing but a frail phantom of recollection: the years had erased her! But this girl–warm, alluring, immediate….
No–no! It couldn’t be.
So much will the force of an idea do for a man, you see. Because, of course, it could have been. He had only to destroy the letter that lay there before him, to wait on until the next sailing, to make continued love to Vanessa, and never to go to Tawnleytown again. There was little probability that Janet would come here for him. Ten years and ten thousand miles … despite all that he had vowed on Bald Knob that Sunday so long ago, wouldn’t you have said that was barrier enough?
Why, so should I! But it wasn’t.
For Harber took the letter and put it in a fresh envelope, and in the morning he went aboard the steamer without seeing the girl again … unless that bit of white standing near the top of the slope, as the ship churned the green harbour water heading out to sea, were she, waving.
But he kept the address she had written.
Why? He never could use it. Well, perhaps he didn’t want to forget too soon, though it hurt him to remember. How many of us, after all, have some little memory like that, some intimate communion with romance, which we don’t tell, but cling to? And perhaps the memory is better than the reality would have been. We imagine … but that again is cynical. Harber will never be that now. Let me tell you why.
It’s because he hadn’t been aboard ship on his crossing to Victoria twenty-four hours before he met Clay Barton.
Barton was rolled up in rugs, lying in a deck-chair, biting his teeth hard together to keep them from chattering, though the temperature was in the eighties, and most of the passengers in white. Barton appeared to be a man of forty, whereas he turned out to be in his early twenties. He was emaciated to an alarming degree and his complexion was of the pale, yellow-green that spoke of many recurrences of malaria. The signs were familiar to Harber.
He sat down beside Barton, and, as the other looked at him half a dozen times tentatively, he presently spoke to him.
“You’ve had a bad time of it, haven’t you?”
“Terrible,” said Barton frankly. “They say I’m convalescent now. I don’t know. Look at me. What would you say?”
Harber shook his head.
Barton laughed bitterly. “Yes, I’m pretty bad,” he agreed readily. And then, as he talked that day and the two following, he told Harber a good many things.
“I tell you, Harber,” he said, “we’ll do anything for money. Here I am–and I knew damned well it was killing me, too. And yet I stuck it out six months after I’d any earthly business to–just for a few extra hundreds.”
“Where were you? What were you doing?” asked Harber.
“Trading-post up a river in the Straits Settlements,” said Barton. “A crazy business from the beginning–and yet I made money. Made it lots faster than I could have back home. Back there you’re hedged about with too many rules. And competition’s too keen. You go into some big corporation office at seventy-five a month, maybe, and unless you have luck you’re years getting near anything worth having. And you’ve got to play politics, bootlick your boss–all that. So I got out.
“Went to California first, and got a place in an exporting firm in San Francisco. They sent me to Sydney and then to Fiji. After I’d been out for a while and got the hang of things, I cut loose from them.
“Then I got this last chance, and it looked mighty good–and I expect I’ve done for myself by it. Five years or a little better. That’s how long I’ve lasted. Back home I’d have been good for thirty-five. A short life and a merry one, they say. Merry. Good God!”
He shook his head ironically.
“The root of all evil,” he resumed after a little. “Well, but you’ve got to have it–can’t get along without it in _this_ world. You’ve done well, you say?”
Harber nodded.
“Well, so should I have, if the cursed fever had let me alone. In another year or so I’d have been raking in the coin. And now here I am–busted–done–;–_fini_, as the French say. I burned the candle at both ends–and got just what was coming to me, I suppose. But how _could_ I let go, just when everything was coming my way?”
“I know,” said Harber. “But unless you can use it—-“
“You’re right there. Not much in it for me now. Still, the medicos say a cold winter back home will…. I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t think I’ll last to….
“Where’s the use, you ask, Harber? You ask me right now, and I can’t tell you. But if you’d asked me before I got like this, I could have told you quick enough. With some men, I suppose, it’s just an acquisitive nature. With me, that didn’t cut any figure. With me, it was a girl. I wanted to make the most I could for her in the shortest time. A girl … well….”
Harber nodded. “I understand. I came out for precisely the same reason myself,” he remarked.
“You did?” said Barton, looking at him sadly. “Well, luck was with you, then. You look so–so damned fit! You can go back to her … while I … ain’t it hell? Ain’t it?” he demanded fiercely. “Yes,” admitted Harber, “it is. But at the same time, I’m not sure that anything’s ever really lost. If she’s worth while—-“
Barton made a vehement sign of affirmation.
“Why, she’ll be terribly sorry for you, but she won’t _care_,” concluded Harber. “I mean, she’ll be waiting for you, and glad to have you coming home, so glad that….”
“Ah … yes. That’s what … I haven’t mentioned the fever in writing to her, you see. It will be a shock.”
Harber, looking at him, thought that it would, indeed.
“I had a letter from her just before we sailed,” went on the other, more cheerfully. “I’d like awfully, some time, to have you meet her. She’s a wonderful girl–wonderful. She’s clever. She’s much cleverer than I am, really … about most things. When we get to Victoria, you must let me give you my address.”
“Thanks,” said Harber. “I’ll be glad to have it.”
That was the last Harber saw of him for five days. The weather had turned rough, and he supposed the poor fellow was seasick, and thought of him sympathetically, but let it rest there. Then, one evening after dinner, the steward came for him and said that Mr. Clay Barton wanted to see him. Harber followed to Barton’s stateroom, which the sick man was occupying alone. In the passageway near the door, he met the ship’s doctor.
“Mr. Harber?” said the doctor. “Your friend in there–I’m sorry to say–is—-“
“I suspected as much,” said Harber. “He knows it himself, I think.”
“Does he?” said the doctor, obviously relieved. “Well, I hope that he’ll live till we get him ashore. There’s just a chance, of course, though his fever is very high now. He’s quite lucid just now, and has been insisting upon seeing you. Later he mayn’t be conscious. So—-“
Harber nodded. “I’ll go in.”
Barton lay in his berth, still, terribly thin, and there were two pink patches of fever burning upon his cheek-bones. He opened his eyes with an infinite weariness as Harber entered the room, and achieved a smile.
“Hard luck, old fellow,” said Harber, crossing to him. “‘Sall _up_!” said Barton, grinning gamely. “I’m through. Asked ’em to send you in. Do something for me, Harber–tha’s right, ain’t it–Harber’s your name?”
“Yes. What is it, Barton?”
Barton closed his eyes, then opened them again.
“Doggone memory–playin’ tricks,” he apologized faintly. “This, Harber. Black-leather case inside leather grip there–by the wall. Money in it–and letters. Everything goes–to the girl. Nobody else. I know you’re straight. Take ’em to her?”
“Yes,” said Harber.
“Good,” said Barton. “All right, then! Been expecting this. All ready for it. Name–address–papers–all there. She’ll have no trouble–getting money. Thanks, Harber.” And after a pause, he added: “Better take it now–save trouble, you know.”
Harber got the leather case from the grip and took it at once to his own stateroom.
When he returned, Barton seemed for the moment, with the commission off his mind, a little brighter.
“No end obliged, Harber,” he murmured.
“All right,” said Harber, “but ought you to talk?”
“Won’t matter now,” said Barton grimly. “Feel like talking now. To-morrow may be–too late!” And after another pause, he went on: “The fine dreams of youth–odd where they end, isn’t it?
“This–and me–so different. So different! Failure. She was wise–but she didn’t know everything. The world was too big–too hard for me. ‘You can’t fail,’ she said, ‘_I won’t let you fail_!’ But you see—-“
Harber’s mind, slipping back down the years, with Barton, to his own parting, stopped with a jerk.
“What!” he exclaimed.
Barton seemed drifting, half conscious, half unconscious of what he was saying. He did not appear to have heard Harber’s exclamation over the phrase so like that Janet had given him.
“We weren’t like the rest,” droned Barton. “No–we wanted more out of life than they did. We couldn’t be content–with half a loaf. We wanted–the bravest adventures–the yellowest gold–the….”
Picture that scene, if you will. What would _you_ have said? Harber saw leaping up before him, with terrible clarity, as if it were etched upon his mind, that night in Tawnleytown ten years before. It was as if Barton, in his semidelirium, were reading the words from _his_ past!
“I won’t let you fail! … half a loaf … the bravest adventures … the yellowest gold.” Incredible thing! That Barton and _his_ girl should have stumbled upon so many of the phrases, the exact phrases! And suddenly full knowledge blinded Harber…. No! No! He spurned it. It couldn’t be. And yet, he felt that if Barton were to utter one more phrase of those that Janet had said and, many, many times since, written to _him_, the impossible, the unbelievable, would be stark, unassailable fact.
He put his hand upon Barton’s arm and gently pressed it.
“Barton,” he said, “tell me–Janet–Tawnleytown?”
Barton stared with glassy, unseeing eyes for a moment; then his eyelids fell.
“The bravest adventures–the yellowest gold,” he murmured. Then, so faintly as almost to baffle hearing: “Where–all–our–dreams? Gone–aglimmering. Gone.”
That was all.
Impossible? No, just very, very improbable. But how, by its very improbability, it does take on the semblance of design! See how by slender a thread the thing hung, how every corner of the plan fitted. Just one slip Janet Spencer made; she let her thoughts and her words slip into a groove; she repeated herself. And how unerringly life had put her finger upon that clew! So reasoned Harber.
Well, if the indictment were true, there was proof to be had in Barton’s leather case!
Harber, having called the doctor, went to his stateroom.
He opened the leather case. Inside a cover of yellow oiled silk he found first a certificate of deposit for three thousand pounds, and beneath it a packet of letters.
He unwrapped them.
And, though somehow he had known it without the proof, at the sight of them something caught at his heart with a clutch that made it seem to have stopped beating for a long time. For the sprawling script upon the letters was almost as familiar to him as his own. Slowly he reached down and took up the topmost letter, drew the thin shiny sheets from the envelope, fluttered them, dazed, and stared at the signature:
Yours, my dearest lover, JANET.
Just so had she signed _his_ letters. It _was_ Janet Spencer. Two of her argosies, each one laden with gold for her, had met in their courses, had sailed for a little together.
The first reasonable thought that came to Harber, when he was convinced of the authenticity of the miracle, was that he was free–free to go after the girl he loved, after Vanessa Simola. I think that if he could have done it, he’d have turned the steamer back to the Orient in that moment. The thought that the ship was plunging eastward through a waste of smashing heavy seas was maddening, no less!
He didn’t want to see Janet or Tawnleytown, again. He did have, he told me, a fleeting desire to know just how many other ships Janet might have launched, but it wasn’t strong enough to take him to see her. He sent her the papers and letters by registered mail under an assumed name.
And then he went to Claridon, Michigan, to learn of her people when Vanessa might be expected home. They told him she was on her way. So, fearing to miss her if he went seeking, he settled down there and stayed until she came. It was seven months of waiting he had … but it was worth it in the end.
* * * * *
And that was Harber’s romance. Just an incredible coincidence, you say. I know it. I told Harber that. And Mrs. Harber.
And _she_ said nothing at all, but looked at me inscrutably, with a flicker of scorn in her sea-gray eyes.
Harber smiled lazily and serenely, and leaned back in his chair, and replied in a superior tone: “My dear Sterne, things that are made in heaven–like my marriage–don’t just happen. Can’t you see that your stand simply brands you an unbeliever?”
And, of course, I _can_ see it. And Harber may be right. I don’t know. Does any one, I wonder?
ALMA MATER
BY O. F. LEWIS
From _The Red Book_
Professor Horace Irving had taught Latin for nearly forty years at Huntington College. Then he had come back to Stuyvesant Square, in New York. Now he lived in a little hall bedroom, four flights up, overlooking the Square.
Habitually he walked from the Square westward to Fourth Avenue, in the afternoon, when the weather permitted. He had been born only three doors from where he now lived. The house of his birth had gone. It was sixty years since he had been a boy and played in this Square. Now he would pause at the corner of Fourth Avenue in his walks, and remember the Goelet’s cow and the big garden and the high iron fence at Nineteenth Street and Broadway. Great buildings now towered there.
South along Fourth Avenue he would walk, a little man, scarcely five feet four in height, even with the silk hat and the Prince Albert coat. His white hair grew long over his collar, and people would notice that almost more than anything else about him. He may have weighed between ninety and a hundred pounds. The coat was worn and shiny, but immaculate. The tall hat was of a certain type and year, but carefully smoothed and still glossy.
He would pause often, between Nineteenth Street and Eighteenth Street, peopling the skyscrapers with ghosts of a former day, when houses and green gardens lined the streets. The passers-by watched him casually, perhaps as much as any one notices any one else in New York. He was, in the Fourteenth Street district, a rarer specimen than Hindus or Mexican medicine-men. Through the ten years since he had come, pensioned, from Huntington College, he had become a walking landmark in this region.
He always walked down on the east side of the street, crossing at Fourteenth Street. He was carefully piloted, and saluted, by the traffic policeman. It was a bad crossing. Below Fourteenth Street things looked much more as they had looked when he was young.
The bookstores were an unceasing hobby to the old man. The secondhand dealers never made any objection to his reading books upon the shelves. His purchases were perhaps two books a week, at ten or even five cents each. Now and again he would find one of his own “Irving’s Latin Prose Composition” texts in the five-cent pile. Opening the book, he usually would discover strange pencilled pictures drawn scrawlingly over many of the pages. His “Latin Composition” wasn’t published after 1882, the year the firm failed. It might have been different for him, with a different publisher.
Late one afternoon in April, Professor Irving stood in his customary niche at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street, watching the traffic from a sheltered spot against the wall of the building. He was becoming exceedingly anxious about the approaching storm. It had come up since he left Stuyvesant Square, and he had no umbrella. He must not get his silk hat wet. His thin overcoat was protecting him but feebly from the wind, which with the disappearance of the sun had grown sharp and biting. It was rapidly becoming dark. Lights were flashing in the windows up and down the Avenue.
The Professor decided to stand in a doorway till the shower had passed over. The chimes in the Metropolitan Tower struck the first quarter after four, the sounds welling in gusts to the old man’s ears. A little man came to stand in the doorway beside the Professor. The latter saw that the little man had a big umbrella. Silk hats were so fearfully expensive in these days!
The heavy drops beat against the pavement in torrents. The first flash of lightning of the year was followed by a deep roll of thunder.
“I got to go!” said the little man. “Keep the umbrella! I got another where I work. I’m only fifty-five. You’re older than me, a lot. You better start home. You’ll get soaked, standing here!” And the little man was gone before the Professor could reply.
“An exceedingly kindly, simple man,” thought the old Professor. He had planned, while standing with his unknown benefactor, that he would go into some store and wait. But now he would chance it, and cross the street. He saw a lull in the traffic. He started and was nearly swept off his feet. He got to the middle of the street. The umbrella grew unwieldy, swinging this way and that, as if tugged by unseen hands. It turned inside out. Blaring noises from the passing cars confused the Professor.
The shaft of the umbrella swung violently around and knocked the silk hat from Professor Irving’s head. His white hair was caught by the wind. Lashed in another direction, the shaft now struck the Professor’s glasses, and they flew away. Now he could see little or nothing. He became bewildered.
Great glaring headlights broke upon him, passed him, and then immediately other glaring lights flared up toward him out of the sheets of water. He couldn’t see because of his lost glasses and because of the stinging rain. He rushed between two cars. He slipped….
The chimes on the Metropolitan Tower rang out, in wails of wild sound, the half-hour after four.
* * * * *
The attendance that evening at the annual banquet of the New York alumni of Huntington College exceeded all previous records. The drive for two million five hundred thousand dollars was on. It was a small college, but as Daniel Webster said of Dartmouth, there were those who loved it.
The east ballroom of the hotel was well filled with diners. Recollections of college days were shouted across tables and over intervening aisles. There was a million still to raise: but old Huntington would put it across! They’d gotten out more of the older men, the men with money, than had ever been seen before at an alumni dinner.
The income on one million would go into better salaries for the professors and other teachers. They’d been shamefully underpaid–men who’d been on the faculty twenty to thirty years getting two thousand! Well, Huntington College had now a new president, one of the boys of twenty years ago. Yes sir, things were different. It was in the air.
In the midst of the dinner course, the toastmaster rapped loudly with the gavel for attention. It was hard to obtain quiet.
“Men,” said the toastmaster, and there was a curious note in his voice, “I ask your absolute silence. Middleton, whom you all know is one of the editorial staff of the _Sphere_, has just come in. He can stay only a few minutes. He came especially to tell you something.”
A man standing behind the toastmaster stepped into the toastmaster’s place. He was in business clothes, a sharp contrast to the rest of the diners. He was loudly applauded. He raised his right hand and shook his head.
“Boys,” he said, “I’ve got a tragic piece of news for you–for those of you who were in college any time up to ten years ago.” He paused and looked the diners over.
“Four fifths of you men who are here to-night knew old Hoddy Irving, our ‘prof’ in Latin. He served old Huntington College for forty years, the longest term any professor ever served. He made no demands–ever. He took us freshmen under his wing. I used to walk now and then with him, miles around the college, when it wasn’t so built up as it now is. He loved the fields and the animals and the trees. He taught me a lot of things besides Latin. Don’t you remember the funny little walk he had, sort of a hop forward? Don’t you remember the way he’d come up to the college dormitories nights, sometimes, from his house down on the Row, and knock timidly at our doors, and come in and visit? Don’t you remember that we used to clear some of those tables mighty quickly, of the chips and the bottles?”
There were titters, and some one shouted: “You said it!”
“And then, don’t you remember, that some ten years ago they turned the old man off, with a pension–so-called–of half his salary. But what was his salary? Two thousand dollars–two thousand dollars at the end of forty years!! You and I, and old Huntington College, turned old Hoddy out to pasture, this pasture, on a thousand a year! And to-night, right now, he’s lying in Bellevue, both legs broken, skull fractured, and not a damn cent in the world except insurance enough to bury him. And to-morrow he’ll be ours to bury, boys–old Hoddy Irving!”
A confusion of voices rose in the room, and over them all a “No!” from some one who seemed to cry out in pain.
“Yes!” said Middleton as the murmurs ceased. “Our old Hoddy, starving, loaded up with debt, alone, down in a miserable hall bedroom in Stuyvesant Square. How did I come to know about it? One of our reporters, who covers Bellevue, dug up the story in his day’s work. They brought in this old, disheveled, unconscious man–and in his pocket was his name. Kenyon, the reporter, went over to the house on the Square and found there another old fellow that old Hoddy chummed some with, and who knew all the circumstances.
“It seems Hoddy had an invalid old sister–and they hadn’t any money except this pension. How the two old souls got along no one will never know. But she died awhile ago, and that put Hoddy into a lot more debt. And this miserable little eighty dollars a month has had to carry him and his debts. And not a whimper that old man utters. Always kindly, Hoddy was, always telling stories from the forty years at Huntington–and we fellows here, a lot of us rotten with money, and not knowing that the old fellow—“
Middleton’s voice broke. It was some time before he proceeded.
“This afternoon, at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street, just as that tornado broke, he tried to cross the street. He got in a jam of cars, and of course the windshields were all mussed up with rain, and the chauffeurs couldn’t see anything ahead–and they don’t know whose car it was. The police say it was just four thirty-one when they picked him up.
“Well, that’s all, except that–I’m going down to Bellevue, and if one or two of you want to come–perhaps old Hoddy will know us–even this late.”
Middleton had finished. From various parts of the room came the words: “I’ll go! Let me go!” Men were frankly wiping their eyes.
At a distant table arose Martin Delano. He was reputed to be the wealthiest alumnus of Huntington. He was said to have made almost fabulous millions during the war. In the Street he was known as “Merciless Martin.” They were planning to strike him this evening for at least a hundred thousand.
Martin Delano stood holding the edge of the table with one hand, the other fingering a spoon on the table. He stood there long. Several times he opened his lips as though to speak. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his cheeks and forehead. Evidently he was deeply moved.
“Mr. Toastmaster, may I ask the privilege of going down to Bellevue with Mr. Middleton? I would ask that I be allowed to insist on going down. I have sinned, grievously sinned, in forgetting old Hoddy. Now, when it’s too late—-Thirty years ago, and more, when I was a green, frightened freshman from Vermont, he took me to his heart. He was known as the Freshman’s Friend. That’s what Hoddy always did–take the green and frightened freshman to his heart. Probably, if he hadn’t done that to me, I’d have gone back home in my lonesomeness. And then—-
“Yes, I have sinned–and it might have been so different. I want to go down there! And I’m coming back here, before you men are through to-night, and I’ll tell you more.”
At about half-past ten Martin Delano came back. He walked into the room just as one of the speakers had finished. The toastmaster caught his eye and beckoned to him to come to the speaker’s table. Delano stood in front of the crowd. He had walked forward, seeing no one on his way.
“Hoddy–Hoddy has gone, boys!”
Then quickly, silently, the three hundred men arose and stood. After a time they heard Delano say: “Sit down, boys.”
He waited till they were seated. “There’s a lot that I might tell, men–terrible things–that I won’t tell, for it’s all over. Just this–and I suppose you’re about through now and breaking up. It was the poor old Prof. of ours–shattered, deathly white, a lot older. But will you believe it, the same dear old smile, or almost a smile, on his face! Unconscious, but babbling. And about what? The college–Alma Mater! Those were just the words–Alma Mater! The college that gave him the half pay and forgot him on the very night when we are trying to raise a miserable two million, that things like this sha’n’t happen again!”
“And boys, when we bent over him and whispered our names, he seemed after a while to understand that we were there–but in the classroom, the old Number 3 in Holmes Hall! And fellows, he called on–on me to recite—-“
Merciless Martin Delano couldn’t go on. Finally he spoke.
“And so, Mr. President, I wish, sir, as a slight token of my appreciation of what that simple great man has done for Huntington College to give to our Alma Mater–our Alma Mater, sir–the sum of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to be used for the erection of a suitable building, for whatever purpose is most necessary, and that building to be called after Horace Irving.
“And sir, I also desire to give to the fund for properly providing for the salaries of our professors and other teachers, the sum of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars–those men who teach in our Alma Mater.
“And I ask one word more: I have arranged that Professor Irving is to be buried from my house. If you will permit me, I will leave now.”
The alumni of Huntington College were silent. There was no sound, save the occasional pushing of a chair, or the click of a plate or a glass upon the table, as Martin Delano passed from the room.
It was after one o’clock. Martin Delano was in his library, his arms flung across the table, his face between them.
In the opaque blur of swirling rain, his car had passed the corner of Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street at precisely half-past four that afternoon. He had happened to take out his watch at the moment the Metropolitan clock struck the second quarter.
He would never know whether it had been his car or another!
SLOW POISON
BY ALICE DUER MILLER
From _The Saturday Evening Post_
The Chelmsford divorce had been accomplished with the utmost decorum, not only outwardly in the newspapers, but inwardly among a group of intimate friends. They were a homogeneous couple–were liked by the same people, enjoyed the same things, and held many friends in common. These were able to say with some approach to certainty that everyone had behaved splendidly, even the infant of twenty-three with whom Julian had fallen in love.
Of course there will always be the question–and we used to argue it often in those days–how well a man can behave who, after fifteen perfectly satisfactory years of married life, admits that he has fallen in love with another woman. But if you believe in the clap-of-thunder theory, as I do, why, then, for a man nearing forty, taken off his feet by a blond-headed girl, Julian, too, behaved admirably.
As for Mrs. Julian, there was never any doubt as to her conduct. I used to think her–and I was not alone in the opinion–the most perfect combination of gentleness and power, and charity and humour, that I had ever seen. She was a year or so older than Julian–though she did not look it–and a good deal wiser, especially in the ways of the world; and, oddly enough, one of the features that worried us most in the whole situation was how he was ever going to get on, in the worldly sense, without her. He was to suffer not only from the loss of her counsel but from the lack of her indorsement. There are certain women who are a form of insurance to a man; and Anne gave a poise and solidity to Julian’s presentation of himself which his own flibbertigibbet manner made particularly necessary.
I think this view of the matter disturbed Anne herself, though she was too clever to say so; or perhaps too numbed by the utter wreck of her own life to see as clearly as usual the rocks ahead of Julian. It was she, I believe, who first mentioned, who first thought of divorce, and certainly she who arranged the details. Julian, still in the more ideal stage of his emotion, had hardly wakened to the fact that his new love was marriageable. But Mrs. Julian, with the practical eye of her sex, saw in a flash all it might mean to him, at his age, to begin life again with a young beauty who adored him.
She saw this, at least, as soon as she saw anything; for Julian, like most of us when the occasion rises, developed a very pretty power of concealment. He had for a month been seeing Miss Littell every day before any of us knew that he went to see her at all. Certainly Anne, unsuspicious by nature, was unprepared for the revelation.
It took place in the utterly futile, unnecessary way such revelations always do take place. The two poor innocent dears had allowed themselves a single indiscretion; they had gone out together, a few days before Christmas, to buy some small gifts for each other. They had had an adventure with a beggar, an old man wise enough to take advantage of the holiday season, and the no less obvious holiday in the hearts of this pair. He had forced them to listen to some quaint variant of the old story, and they had between them given him all the small change they had left–sixty-seven cents, I think it was.
That evening at dinner Julian, ever so slightly afraid of the long pause, had told Anne the story as if it had happened to him alone. A few days afterward the girl, whom she happened to meet somewhere or other, displaying perhaps a similar nervousness, told the same story. Even the number of cents agreed.
I spoke a moment ago of the extraordinary power of concealment which we all possess; but I should have said the negative power to avoid exciting suspicion. Before that moment, before the finger points at us, the fool can deceive the sage; and afterward not even the sage can deceive the veriest fool.
Julian had no desire to lie to his wife. Indeed, he told me he had felt from the first that she would be his fittest confidante. He immediately told her everything–a dream rather than a narrative.
Nowhere did Anne show her magnanimity more than in accepting the rather extravagant financial arrangements which Julian insisted on making for her. He was not a rich man, and she the better economist of the two. We knew she saw that in popular esteem Julian would pay the price of her pride if she refused, and that in this ticklish moment of his life the least she could do was to let him have the full credit for his generosity.
“And after all,” as she said to me, “young love can afford to go without a good many things necessary to old age.”
It was the nearest I heard her come to a complaint.
As soon as everything was settled she sailed for Florence, where she had friends and where, she intimated, she meant to spend most of her time.
I said good-by to her with real emotion, and the phrase I used as to my wish to serve her was anything but a convention.
Nor did she take it so.
“Help Julian through this next year,” she said. “People will take it harder than he knows. He’ll need you all.” And she was kind enough to add something about my tact. Poor lady! She must have mentally withdrawn her little compliment before we met many times again.
II
Perhaps the only fault in Anne’s education of her husband had been her inability to cling. In his new menage this error was rectified, and the effect on him was conspicuously good; in fact, I think Rose’s confidence in his greatness pulled them through the difficult time.
For there was no denying that it was difficult. Many people looked coldly on them, and I know there was even some talk of asking him to resign from the firm of architects of which he was a member. The other men were all older, and very conservative. Julian represented to them everything that was modern and dangerous. Granger, the leading spirit, was in the habit of describing himself as holding old-fashioned views, by which he meant that he had all the virtues of the Pilgrim Fathers and none of their defects. I never liked him, but I could not help respecting him. The worst you could say of him was that his high standards were always successful.
You felt that so fanatical a sense of duty ought to have required some sacrifices.
To such a man Julian’s conduct appeared not only immoral but inadvisable, and unfitting in a young man, especially without consulting his senior partners.
We used to say among ourselves that Granger’s reason for wanting to get rid of Julian was not any real affection for the dim old moral code, but rather his acute realization that without Anne his junior partner was a less valuable asset.
Things were still hanging fire when I paid her the first of my annual visits. She was dreadfully distressed at my account of the situation. She had the manner one sometimes sees in dismissed nurses who meet their former little charges unwashed or uncared for. She could hardly believe it was no longer her business to put the whole matter right.
“Can’t she do something for him?” she said. “Make her bring him a great building. That would save him.”
It was this message that I carried home to Rose; at least I suggested the idea to her as if it were my own. I had my doubts of her being able to carry it out.
Out of loyalty to Julian, or perhaps I ought to say out of loyalty to Anne, we had all accepted Rose, but we should soon have loved her in any case. She was extraordinarily sweet and docile, and gave us, those at least who were not parents, our first window to the east, our first link with the next generation, just at the moment when we were relinquishing the title ourselves. I am afraid that some of the males among us envied Julian more than perhaps in the old days we had ever envied him Anne.
But we hardly expected her to further his career as Anne had done, and yet, oddly enough, that was exactly what she did. Her methods had all the effectiveness of youth and complete conviction. She forced Julian on her friends and relations, not so much on his account as on theirs. She wanted them to be sure of the best. The result was that orders flowed in. Things took a turn for the better and continued to improve, as I was able to report to Anne when I went to see her at Florence or at Paris. She was always well lodged, well served, and surrounded by the pleasantest people, yet each time I saw her she had a look exiled and circumscribed, a look I can only describe as that of a spirit in reduced circumstances.
She was always avid for details of Julian and all that concerned him, and as times improved I was stupid enough to suppose I pleased her by giving them from the most favourable angle. It seemed to me quite obvious, as I saw how utterly she had ruined her own life, that she ought at least to have the comfort of knowing that she had not sacrificed it in vain. And so I allowed myself, not an exaggeration but a candour more unrestrained than would be usual in the circumstances.
Led on by her burning interest I told her many things I might much better have kept to myself; not only accounts of his work and his household and any new friends in our old circle, but we had all been amazed to see a sense of responsibility develop in Julian in answer to his new wife’s dependence on him. With this had come a certain thoughtfulness in small attentions, which, I saw too late, Anne must always have missed in him. She was so much more competent in the smaller achievements of life than he that it had been wisdom to leave them to her; and Anne had often traveled alone and attended to the luggage, when now Rose was personally conducted like a young empress. The explanation was simple enough: Anne had the ability to do it, and the other had not. Even if I had stopped to think, I might fairly have supposed that Anne would find some flattery in the contrast. I should have been wrong.
Almost the first thing she asked me was whether he came home to luncheon. In old times, though his house was only a few blocks from his office, he had always insisted that it took too much time. Anne had never gained her point with him, though she put some force into the effort. Now I had to confess he did.
“It’s much better for him,” she said with pleasure, and quite deceived me; herself, too, perhaps.
Yet even I, for all my blindness, felt some uneasiness the year Rose’s son was born. I do not think the desire for offspring had ever taken up a great deal of room in Julian’s consciousness, but of course Anne had wanted children, and I felt very cruel, sitting in her little apartment in Paris, describing the baby who ought to have been hers. How different her position would have been now if she had some thin-legged little girl to educate or some raw-boned boy to worry over; and there was that overblessed woman at home, necessary not only to Julian but to Julian’s son.
It was this same year, but at a later visit, that I first became aware of a change in Anne. At first the charm of her surroundings, her pretty clothes, even to the bright little buckles on her shoes, blinded me to the fact that she herself was changed. I do not mean that she was aged. One of the delightful things about her was that she was obviously going to make an admirable old lady; the delicate boniness of her face and the clearness of her skin assured that. This was a change more fundamental. Even in her most distracted days Anne had always maintained a certain steadiness of head. She had trodden thorny paths, but she had always known where she was going. I had seen her eyelids red, but I had never failed to find in the eyes themselves the promise of a purpose. But now it was gone. I felt as if I were looking into a little pool which had been troubled by a stone, and I waiting vainly for the reflection to re-form itself.
So painful was the impression that before I sailed for home I tried to convey to her the dangers of her mood.
“I think you are advising me to be happy,” she said.
“I am advising no such thing,” I answered. “I am merely pointing out that you run the risk of being more unhappy than you are. My visits–or rather the news I bring you–are too important to you. You make me feel as if it were the only event of the year–to you who have always had such an interesting life of your own.”
“I have not had a life of my own since I was twenty,” she returned. It was at twenty she had married.
“Then think of Julian,” I said, annoyed not only at my own clumsiness but at the absence of anything of Anne’s old heroic spirit. “For his sake, at least, you must keep your head. Why, my dear woman, one look at your face, grown as desperate as it sometimes appears now, would ruin Julian with the whole world. Even I, knowing the whole story, would find it hard to forgive him if you should fail to continue to be the splendid triumphant creature whom we know you were designed to be.”
She gave me a long queer look, which meant something tremendous. Evidently my words had made an impression.
They had, but not just the one I intended.
III
One of the first people I always saw on returning was Julian. How often he thought of Anne I do not know, but he spoke of her with the greatest effort. He invariably took care to assure himself that she was physically well, but beyond this it would have been a brave person who dared to go. He did not want to hear the details of her life and appearance.
It was with some trepidation, therefore, that a few months after this I came to tell him that Anne was about to return to America. Why she was coming, or for how long, her letter did not say. I only knew that the second Saturday in December would see her among us again. It seemed fair to assume that her stay would not be long. Julian evidently thought so for he arranged to be in the West for three or four weeks.
I went to meet her. The day was cold and rainy, and as soon as I saw her I made up my mind that the crossing had been a bad one, and I was glad no one else had come to the wharf with me. She was standing by the rail, wrapped in a voluminous fur coat–the fashions were slim in the extreme–and her hat was tied on by a blue veil.
I may as well admit that from the moment I heard of her projected return I feared that her real motive for coming, conscious or unconscious, was to see Julian again. So when I told her of his absence I was immensely relieved that she took it as a matter of course.
“I suppose we might have met,” she observed. “As it is, I can go about without any fear of an awkward encounter.” I say I was relieved, but I was also excessively puzzled. Why had Anne come home?
It was a question I was to hear answered in a variety of ways during the next few months, by many of Anne’s friends and partisans; for, as I think I have said, Anne had inspired great attachment since her earliest days. Why had she come home? they exclaimed. Why not, pray? Had she done anything criminal that she was to be exiled? Did I think it pleasant to live abroad on a small income? Even if she could get on without her friends, could they do without her?
The tone of these questions annoyed me not a little when I heard them, which was not for some time. Soon after Anne’s arrival I, too, was called away, and it was not until February that I returned and was met by the carefully set piece–Anne the Victim.
With that ill-advised self-confidence of which I have already made mention, I at once set about demolishing this picture. I told Anne’s friends, who were also mine, that she would thank them very little for their attitude. I found myself painting her life abroad as a delirium of intellect and luxury. I even found myself betraying professional secrets and arguing with total strangers as to the amount of her income.
Even in Montreal faint echoes of this state of things had reached me, but not until I went to see Anne on my return did I get any idea of their cause. She had taken a furnished apartment from a friend, in a dreary building in one of the West Forties. Only a jutting front of limestone and an elevator man in uniform saved it, or so it seemed to me, from being an old-fashioned boarding house. Its windows, small, as if designed for an African sun, looked northward upon a darkened street. Anne’s apartment was on the second floor, and the requirements of some caryatids on the outside rendered her fenestration particularly meager. Her friend, if indeed it were a friend, had not treated her generously in the matter of furniture. She had left nothing superfluous but two green glass jugs on the mantelpiece, and had covered the chairs with a chintz, the groundwork of which was mustard colour.
Another man who was there when I came in, who evidently had known Anne in different surroundings, expressed the most hopeful view possible when he said that doubtless it would all look charming when she had arranged her own belongings.
Anne made a little gesture. “I haven’t any belongings,” she said.
I didn’t know what she meant, perhaps merely a protest against the tyranny of things, but I saw the effect her speech produced on her auditor. Perhaps she saw it too, for presently she added: “Oh, yes! I have one.”
And she went away, and came back carrying a beautiful old silver loving cup. I knew it well. It came from Julian’s forebears. Anne had always loved it, and I was delighted that she should have it now. She set it on a table before a mirror, and here it did a double share to make the room possible.
When we were alone I expressed my opinion of her choice of lodgings.
“This sunless cavern!” I said. “This parlour-car furniture!”
She looked a little hurt. “You don’t like it?” she said.
“Do you?” I snapped back.
After a time I had recourse to the old argument that it didn’t look well; that it wasn’t fair to Julian. But she had been expecting this.
“My dear Walter,” she answered, “you must try to be more consistent. In Paris you told me that I must cease to regulate my life by Julian. You were quite right. This place pleases me, and I don’t intend to go to a hotel, which I hate, or to take a house, which is a bother, in order to soothe Julian’s feelings. I have begun to lead my life to suit myself.”
The worst of it was, I could think of no answer.
A few evenings afterward we dined at the same house. Anne arrived with a scarf on her head, under the escort of a maid. She had come in a trolley car. Nobody’s business but her own, perhaps, if she would have allowed it to remain so, but when she got up to go, and other people were talking of their motors’ being late, Anne had to say: “Mine is never late; it goes past the corner every minute.”
I could almost hear a sigh, “Poor angel!” go round the room.
The next thing that happened was that Julian sent for me. He was in what we used to call in the nursery “a state.”
“What’s this I hear about Anne’s being hard up?” he said. “Living in a nasty flat, and going out to dinner in the cars?” And he wouldn’t listen to an explanation. “She must take more; she must be made to take more.”
I had one of my most unfortunate inspirations. I thought I saw an opportunity for Julian to make an impression.
“I don’t think she would listen to me,” I said. “Why don’t you get Mr. Granger to speak to her?”
The idea appealed to Julian. He admired Mr. Granger, and remembered that he and Anne had been friends. Whereas I thought, of course, that Mr. Granger would thus be made to see that the fault, if there were a fault, was not of Julian’s generosity. Stupidly enough I failed to see that if Julian’s offer was graceful Anne’s gesture of refusal would be upon a splendid scale.
And it must have been very large, indeed, to stir old Granger as it did. He told me there had been tears in his eyes while she spoke of her husband’s kindness. Kindness! He could not but compare her surroundings with the little house, all geraniums and muslin curtains, in which the new Mrs. Chelmsford was lodged. Anne had refused, of course. In the circumstances she could not accept. She said she had quite enough for a single woman. The phrase struck Granger as almost unbearably pathetic.
One day I noticed the loving cup–which was always on Anne’s table, which was admired by everyone who came to the apartment, and was said to recall her, herself, so pure and graceful and perfect–one day the loving cup was gone.
I was so surprised when my eye fell on its vacant place that I blurted out: “Goodness, Anne, where’s your cup?”
The next moment I could have bitten out my tongue. Anne stood still in the middle of the room, twisting her hands a little, and everyone–there were three or four of us there–stopped talking.
“Oh,” she said, “oh, Walter, I know you’ll scold me for being officious and wrong-headed, but I have sent the cup back to Julian’s son. I think he ought to have it.”
Everyone else thought the deed extremely noble. I took my hat and went to Rose. Rose was not very enthusiastic. A beautiful letter had accompanied the cup. We discussed the advisability of sending it back; but of course that would have done no good. The devilish part of a favour is that to accept or reject it is often equally incriminating. Anne held the situation in the hollow of her hand. Besides, as Rose pointed out, we couldn’t very well return it without asking Julian, and we had both agreed that for the present Julian had better remain in ignorance of the incident. He would have thought it mean-spirited to allow any instance of Anne’s generosity to remain concealed from the public. Rose and I were willing to allow it to drop.
I was sorry, therefore, when I found, soon after, not only that everyone knew of the gift but that phrases of the beautiful letter itself were current, with marks of authenticity upon them. It was not hard to trace them to Anne’s intimates.
I have no idea to this day whether Anne was deliberately trying to ruin the man for whom she had sacrificed so much; or whether one of those large, unconscious, self-indulgent movements of our natures was carrying her along the line of least resistance. There are some people, I know, who can behave well only so long as they have the centre of the stage, and are driven by a necessity almost moral to regain such a place at any cost, so that they may once again begin the exercise of their virtues.
Anne’s performance was too perfect, I thought, for conscious art, and she was not a genius. She was that most dangerous of all engines, a good person behaving wickedly. All her past of high-mindedness and kindness protected her now like an armour from the smallest suspicion. All the grandeur of her conduct at the time of the divorce was remembered as a proof that she at least had a noble soul. Who could doubt that she wished him well?
If so, she soon appeared to be the only person who did. For, as we all know, pity is one of the most dangerous passions to unloose. It demands a victim. We rise to pathos, only over the dead bodies of our nearest and dearest.
Every phrase, every gesture of Anne’s stirred one profoundly, and it was inevitable, I suppose, that Julian should be selected as the sacrifice. I noticed that people began to speak of him in the past, though he was still moving among us–“As Julian used to say.”
He and Anne fortunately never met, but she and the new Mrs. Julian had one encounter in public. If even then Anne would have shown the slightest venom all might still have been well. But, no, the worn, elderly woman, face to face with the young beauty who had possessed herself of everything in the world, showed nothing but a tenderness so perfect that every heart was wrung. I heard Rose criticized for not receiving her in the same spirit.
The next day Julian was blackballed at a philanthropic club at which he had allowed himself to be proposed merely from a sense of civic duty.
Over the incident I know Anne wept. I heard her tears.
“Oh, if I could have spared him that!” she said.
My eyes were cold, but those of Mr. Granger, who came in while her eyelids were still red, were full of fire.
She spent a week with the Grangers that summer. The whole family–wife, sons and daughters–had all yielded to the great illusion.
It must not be supposed that I had failed to warn Julian. The supineness of his attitude was one of the most irritating features of the case. He answered me as if I were violating the dead; asked me if by any chance I didn’t see he deserved all he was getting.
No one was surprised when in the autumn he resigned from his firm. There had been friction between the partners for some time. Soon afterward he and Rose sailed for Italy, where they have lived ever since. He had scarcely any income except that which he made in his profession; his capital had gone to Anne. He probably thought that what he had would go further abroad.
I do not know just how Anne took his departure, except that I am sure she was wonderful about it. I had ceased to see her. She has, however, any number of new friends, whose fresh interest in her story keeps it continually alive. She has given up her ugly flat and taken a nice little house, and in summer I notice she has red geraniums in the window boxes. I often see a nice little motor standing before her door–the result doubtless of a year’s economy.
Whenever her friends congratulate her on the improvement in her finances she says she owes it all to me–I am such an excellent man of business.
“I admire Walter so much,” I am told she says, “though I’m afraid I have lost him as a friend. But then, in the last few years I have lost so much.” And she smiles that brave sad smile of hers.
THE FACE IN THE WINDOW
BY WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY
From _The Red Book_
At nine o’clock this morning Sheriff Crumpett entered our New England town post-office for his mail. From his box he extracted his monthly Grand Army paper and a letter in a long yellow envelope. This envelope bore the return-stamp of a prominent Boston lumber-company. The old man crossed the lobby to the writing-shelf under the Western Union clock, hooked black-rimmed glasses on a big nose and tore a generous inch from the end of the envelope.
The first inclosure which met his eyes was a check. It was heavy and pink and crisp, and was attached to the single sheet of letter-paper with a clip. Impressed into the fabric of the safety-paper were the indelible figures of a protector: _Not over Five Thousand_ ($5000) _Dollars_.
The sheriff read the name of the person to whom it was payable and gulped. His gnarled old hand trembled with excitement as he glanced over the clipped letter and then went through it again.
November 10, 1919.
MY DEAR SHERIFF:
Enclosed please find my personal check for five thousand dollars. It is made out to Mrs. McBride. Never having known the lady personally,
and because you have evidently represented her with the authorities, I am sending it to you for proper delivery. I feel, from your enthusiastic account of her recent experience, that it will give you
pleasure to present it to her.
Under the circumstances I do not begrudge the money. When first advised of Ruggam’s escape, it was hot-headed impulse which prompted
me to offer a reward so large. The old clan-blood of the Wileys must
have made me murder-mad that Ruggam should regain his freedom permanently
after the hellish thing he did to my brother. The newspapers heard of it,
and then I could not retract.
That, however, is a thing of the past. I always did detest a welcher,
and if this money is going to a woman to whom it will be manna from heaven–to use your words–I am satisfied. Convey to her my personal
congratulations, gratitude and best wishes.
Cordially yours,
C. V. D. WILEY.
“Good old Chris!” muttered the sheriff. “He’s rich because he’s white.” He thrust both check and letter back into the long envelope and headed for the office of our local daily paper at a smart pace.
The earning of five thousand dollars reward-money by Cora McBride made an epochal news-item, and in that night’s paper we headlined it accordingly–not omitting proper mention of the sheriff and giving him appropriate credit.
Having so started the announcement permeating through the community, the old man employed the office phone and called the local livery-stable. He ordered a rig in which he might drive at once to the McBride house in the northern part of town.
“But half that money ought to be yourn!” protested the proprietor of the stable as the sheriff helped him “gear up the horse” a few minutes later.
“Under the circumstances, Joseph, can you see me takin’ it? No; it ain’t in me to horn in for no rake-off on one o’ the Lord’s miracles.”
The old man climbed into the sleigh, took the reins from the liveryman and started the horse from the livery yard.
Two weeks ago–on Monday, the twenty-seventh of the past October–the telephone-bell rang sharply in our newspaper-office a few moments before the paper went to press. Now, the telephone-bell often rings in our newspaper-office a few moments before going to press. The confusion on this particular Monday afternoon, however, resulted from Albany calling on the long-distance. Albany–meaning the nearest office of the international press-association of which our paper is a member–called just so, out of a clear sky, on the day McKinley was assassinated, on the day the _Titanic_ foundered and on the day Austria declared war on Serbia.
The connection was made, and over the wire came the voice of young Stewart, crisp as lettuce.
“Special dispatch … Wyndgate, Vermont, October 27th … Ready?” The editor of our paper answered in the affirmative. The rest of us grouped anxiously around his chair. Stewart proceeded:
“‘Hapwell Ruggam, serving a life-sentence for the murder of Deputy Sheriff Martin Wiley at a Lost Nation kitchen-dance two years ago, killed Jacob Lambwell, his guard, and escaped from prison at noon to-day.
“‘Ruggam had been given some repair work to do near the outer prison-gate. It was opened to admit a tradesman’s automobile. As Guard Lambwell turned to close the gate, Ruggam felled him with his shovel. He escaped to the adjacent railroad-yards, stole a corduroy coat and pair of blue overalls hanging in a switchman’s shanty and caught the twelve-forty freight up Green River.'”
Stewart had paused. The editor scribbled frantically. In a few words aside he explained to us what Stewart was sending. Then he ordered the latter to proceed.
“‘Freight Number Eight was stopped by telegraph near Norwall. The fugitive, assuming correctly that it was slowing down for search, was seen by a brakeman fleeing across a pasture between the tracks and the eastern edge of Haystack Mountain. Several posses have already started after him, and sheriffs all through northern New England are being notified.
“‘Christopher Wiley, lumber magnate and brother of Ruggam’s former victim, on being told of the escape, has offered a reward of five thousand dollars for Ruggam’s capture, dead or alive. Guard Lambwell was removed to a hospital, where he died at one-thirty’…. _All right_?”
The connection was broken, and the editor removed the headpiece. He began giving orders. We were twenty minutes behind usual time with the papers, but we made all the trains.
When the big Duplex was grinding out newsprint with a roar that shook the building, the boys and girls gathered around to discuss the thing which had happened.
The Higgins boy, saucer-eyed over the experience of being “on the inside” during the handling of the first sizable news-story since he had become our local reporter, voiced the interrogation on the faces of other office newcomers.
“Ruggam,” the editor explained, “is a poor unfortunate who should have been sent to an asylum instead of the penitentiary. He killed Mart Wiley, a deputy sheriff, at a Lost Nation kitchen-dance two years ago.”
“Where’s the Lost Nation?”
“It’s a term applied to most of the town of Partridgeville in the northern part of the county–an inaccessible district back in the mountains peopled with gone-to-seed stock and half-civilized illiterates who only get into the news when they load up with squirrel whisky and start a programme of progressive hell. Ruggam was the local blacksmith.”
“What’s a kitchen-dance?”
“Ordinarily a kitchen-dance is harmless enough. But the Lost Nation folks use it as an excuse for a debauch. They gather in some sizable shack, set the stove out into the yard, soak themselves in aromatic spirits of deviltry and dance from Saturday night until Monday noon—-“
“And this Ruggam killed a sheriff at one of them?”
“He got into a brawl with another chap about his wife. Someone passing saw the fight and sent for an officer. Mart Wiley was deputy, afraid of neither man, God nor devil. Martin had grown disgusted over the petty crime at these kitchen-dances and started out to clean up this one right. Hap Ruggam killed him. He must have had help, because he first got Mart tied to a tree in the yard. Most of the crowd was pie-eyed by this time, anyhow, and would fight at the drop of a hat. After tying him securely, Ruggam caught up a billet of wood and–and killed him with that.”
“Why didn’t they electrocute him?” demanded young Higgins.
“Well, the murder wasn’t exactly premeditated. Hap wasn’t himself; he was drunk–not even able to run away when Sheriff Crumpett arrived in the neighbourhood to take him into custody. Then there was Hap’s bringing up. All these made extenuating circumstances.”
“There was something about Sheriff Wiley’s pompadour,” suggested our little lady proofreader.
“Yes,” returned the editor. “Mart had a queer head of hair. It was dark and stiff, and he brushed it straight back in a pompadour. When he was angry or excited, it actually rose on his scalp like wire. Hap’s counsel made a great fuss over Mart’s pompadour and the part it sort of played in egging Hap on. The sight of it, stiffening and rising the way it did maddened Ruggam so that he beat it down hysterically in retaliation for the many grudges he fancied he owed the officer. No, it was all right to make the sentence life-imprisonment, only it should have been an asylum. Hap’s not right. You’d know it without being told. I guess it’s his eyes. They aren’t mates. They light up weirdly when he’s drunk or excited, and if you know what’s healthy, you get out of the way.”
By eight o’clock that evening most of the valley’s deer-hunters, all of the local adventurers who could buy, borrow or beg a rifle, and the usual quota of high-school sons of thoughtless parents were off on the man-hunt in the eastern mountains.
Among them was Sheriff Crumpett’s party. On reaching the timberline they separated. It was agreed that if any of them found signs of Ruggam, the signal for assistance was five shots in quick succession “and keep shooting at intervals until the rest come up.”
We newspaper folk awaited the capture with professional interest and pardonable excitement….
In the northern part of our town, a mile out on the Wickford road, is the McBride place. It is a small white house with a red barn in the rear and a neat rail fence inclosing the whole. Six years ago Cora McBride was bookkeeper in the local garage. Her maiden name was Allen. The town called her “Tomboy Allen.” She was the only daughter of old Zeb Allen, for many years our county game-warden. Cora, as we had always known–and called–her, was a full-blown, red-blooded, athletic girl who often drove cars for her employer in the days when steering-wheels manipulated by women were offered as clinching proof that society was headed for the dogs.
Duncan McBride was chief mechanic in the garage repairshop. He was an affable, sober, steady chap, popularly known as “Dunk the Dauntless” because of an uncanny ability to cope successfully with the ailments of 90 per cent, of the internal-combustion hay-balers and refractory tin-Lizzies in the county when other mechanics had given them up in disgust.
When he married his employer’s bookkeeper, Cora’s folks gave her a wedding that carried old Zeb within half an hour of insolvency and ran to four columns in the local daily. Duncan and the Allen girl motored to Washington in a demonstration-car, and while Dunk was absent, the yard of the garage resembled the premises about a junkshop. On their return they bought the Johnson place, and Cora quickly demonstrated the same furious enthusiasm for homemaking and motherhood that she had for athletics and carburetors.
Three years passed, and two small boys crept about the yard behind the white rail fence. Then–when Duncan and his wife were “making a great go of matrimony” in typical Yankee fashion–came the tragedy that took all the vim out of Cora, stole the ruddy glow from her girlish features and made her middle-aged in a twelvemonth. In the infantile-paralysis epidemic which passed over New England three years ago the McBrides suffered the supreme sorrow–twice. Those small boys died within two weeks of each other.
Duncan of course kept on with his work at the garage. He was quieter and steadier than ever. But when we drove into the place to have a carburetor adjusted or a rattle tightened, we saw only too plainly that on his heart was a wound the scars of which would never heal. As for Cora, she was rarely seen in the village.
Troubles rarely come singly. One afternoon this past August, Duncan completed repairs on Doc Potter’s runabout. Cranking the machine to run it from the workshop, the “dog” on the safety-clutch failed to hold. The acceleration of the engine threw the machine into high. Dunk was pinned in front while the roadster leaped ahead and rammed the delivery truck of the Red Front Grocery.
Duncan was taken to our memorial hospital with internal injuries and dislocation of his spine. He remained there many weeks. In fact, he had been home only a couple of days when the evening stage left in the McBride letter-box the daily paper containing the story of Ruggam’s “break” and of the reward offered for his capture.
Cora returned to the kitchen after obtaining the paper and sank wearily into a wooden chair beside the table with the red cloth. Spreading out the paper, she sought the usual mental distraction in the three-and four-line bits which make up our local columns.
As the headlines caught her eye, she picked up the paper and entered the bedroom where Duncan lay. There were telltale traces of tears on his unshaven face, and an ache in his discouraged heart that would not be assuaged, for it was becoming rumoured about the village that Dunk the Dauntless might never operate on the vitals of an ailing tin-Lizzie again.
“Dunnie,” cried his wife, “Hap Ruggam’s escaped!” Sinking down beside the bedroom lamp, she read him the article aloud.
Her husband’s name was mentioned therein; for when the sheriff had commandeered an automobile from the local garage to convey him and his posse to Lost Nation and secure Ruggam, Duncan had been called forth to preside at the steering-wheel. He had thus assisted in the capture and later had been a witness at the trial.
The reading ended, the man rolled his head.
“If I wasn’t held here, I might go!” he said. “I might try for that five thousand myself!”
Cora was sympathetic enough, of course, but she was fast approaching the stage where she needed sympathy herself.
“We caught him over on the Purcell farm,” mused Duncan. “Something ailed Ruggam. He was drunk and couldn’t run. But that wasn’t all. He had had some kind of crazy-spell during or after the killing and wasn’t quite over it. We tied him and lifted him into the auto. His face was a sight. His eyes aren’t mates, anyhow, and they were wild and unnatural. He kept shrieking something about a head of hair–black hair–sticks up like wire. He must have had an awful impression of Mart’s face and that hair of his.”
“I remember about Aunt Mary Crumpett’s telling me of the trouble her husband had with his prisoner in the days before the trial,” his wife replied. “He had those crazy-spells often, nights. He kept yelling that he saw Martin Wiley’s head with its peculiar hair, and his face peering in at him through the cell window. Sometimes he became so bad that Sheriff Crumpett thought he’d have apoplexy Finally he had to call Dr. Johnson to attend him.”
“Five thousand dollars!” muttered Duncan. “Gawd! I’d hunt the devil _for nothing_ if I only had a chance of getting out of this bed.”
Cora smoothed her husband’s rumpled bed, comforted him and laid her own tired head down beside his hand. When he had dozed off, she arose and left the room.
In the kitchen she resumed her former place beside the table with the cheap red cloth; and there, with her face in her hands, she stared into endless distance.
“Five thousand dollars! Five thousand dollars!” Over and over she whispered the words, with no one to hear.
The green-birch fire snapped merrily in the range. The draft sang in the flue. Outside, a soft, feathery snow was falling, for winter came early in the uplands of Vermont this past year. To Cora McBride, however, the winter meant only hardship. Within another week she must go into town and secure work. Not that she minded the labour nor the trips through the vicious weather! The anguish was leaving Duncan through those monotonous days before he should be up and around. Those dreary winter days! What might they not do to him–alone.
Five thousand dollars! Like many others in the valley that night she pictured with fluttering heart what it would mean to possess such a sum of money; but not once in her pitiful flight of fancy did she disregard the task which must be performed to gain that wealth.
It meant traveling upward in the great snowbound reaches of Vermont mountain-country and tracking down a murderer who had killed a second time to gain his freedom and would stop at nothing again.
And yet–_five thousand dollars_!
How much will a person do, how far will a normal human being travel, to earn five thousand dollars–if the need is sufficiently provocative?
As Cora McBride sat there in the homely little farmhouse kitchen and thought of the debts still existent, contracted to save the already stricken lives of two little lads forgotten now by all but herself and Duncan and God, of the chances of losing their home if Duncan could work no more and pay up the balance of their mortgage, of the days when Duncan must lie in the south bedroom alone and count the figures on the wallpaper–as she sat there and contemplated these things, into Cora McBride’s heart crept determination.
At first it was only a faint challenge to her courage. As the minutes passed, however, her imagination ran riot, with five thousand dollars to help them in their predicament. The challenge grew. Multitudes of women down all the years had attempted wilder ventures for those who were dear to them. Legion in number had been those who set their hands and hearts to greater tasks, made more improbable sacrifices, taken greater chances. Multitudes of them, too, had won–on little else than the courage of ignorance and the strength of desperation.
She had no fear of the great outdoors, for she had lived close to the mountains from childhood and much of her old physical resiliency and youthful daredeviltry remained. And the need was terrible; no one anywhere in the valley, not even her own people, knew how terrible.
Cora McBride, alone by her table in the kitchen, that night made her decision.
She took the kitchen lamp and went upstairs. Lifting the top of a leather trunk, she found her husband’s revolver. With it was a belt and holster, the former filled with cartridges. In the storeroom over the back kitchen she unhooked Duncan’s mackinaw and found her own toboggan-cap. From a corner behind some fishing-rods she salvaged a pair of summer-dried snowshoes; they had facilitated many a previous hike in the winter woods with her man of a thousand adventures. She searched until she found the old army-haversack Duncan used as a game-bag. Its shoulder-straps were broken but a length of rope sufficed to bind it about her shoulders, after she had filled it with provisions.
With this equipment she returned below-stairs. She drew on heavy woollen stockings and buckled on arctics. She entered the cold pantry and packed the knapsack with what supplies she could find at the hour. She did not forget a drinking-cup, a hunting-knife or matches. In her blouse she slipped a household flash-lamp.
Dressed finally for the adventure, from the kitchen she called softly to her husband. He did not answer. She was overwhelmed by a desire to go into the south bedroom and kiss him, so much might happen before she saw him again. But she restrained herself. She must not waken him.
She blew out the kerosene lamp, gave a last glance about her familiar kitchen and went out through the shed door, closing it softly behind her.
It was one of those close, quiet nights when the bark of a distant dog or whinny of a horse sounds very near at hand. The snow was falling feathery.
An hour later found her far to the eastward, following an old side road that led up to the Harrison lumber-job. She had meantime paid Dave Sheldon, a neighbour’s boy, encountered by his gate, to stay with Duncan during her absence which she explained with a white lie. But her conscience did not bother. Her conscience might be called upon to smother much more before the adventure was ended.
Off in the depths of the snowing night she strode along, a weird figure against the eerie whiteness that illumined the winter world. She felt a strange wild thrill in the infinite out-of-doors. The woodsman’s blood of her father was having its little hour.
And she knew the woods. Intuitively she felt that if Ruggam was on Haystack Mountain making his way toward Lost Nation, he would strike for the shacks of the Green Mountain Club or the deserted logging-camps along the trail, secreting himself in them during his pauses for rest, for he had no food, and provisions were often left in these structures by hunters and mountain hikers. Her plan was simple. She would investigate each group of buildings. She had the advantage of starting on the northwest side of Haystack. She would be working toward Ruggam, while the rest of the posses were trailing him.
Mile after mile she covered. She decided it must be midnight when she reached the ghostly buildings of the Harrison tract, lying white and silent under the thickening snow. It was useless to search these cabins; they were too near civilization. Besides, if Ruggam had left the freight at Norwall on the eastern side of Haystack at noon, he had thirty miles to travel before reaching the territory from which she was starting. So she skirted the abandoned quiet of the clearing, laid the snowshoes properly down before her and bound the thongs securely about her ankles.
She had plenty of time to think of Ruggam as she padded along. He had no snowshoes to aid him, unless he had managed to secure a pair by burglary, which was improbable. So it was not difficult to calculate about where she should begin watching for him. She believed he would keep just off the main trail to avoid detection, yet take its general direction in order to secure shelter and possible food from the mountain buildings. When she reached the country in which she might hope to encounter him, she would zigzag across that main trail in order to pick up his foot-tracks if he had passed her undetected. In that event she would turn and follow. She knew that the snow was falling too heavily to continue in such volume indefinitely; it would stop as suddenly as it had started.
The hours of the night piled up. The silent, muffling snowfall continued. And Cora McBride began to sense an alarming weariness. It finally dawned upon her that her old-time vigour was missing. The strength of youth was hers no longer. Two experiences of motherhood and no more exercise than was afforded by the tasks of her household, had softened her muscles. Their limitations were now disclosed.
The realization of those limitations was accompanied by panic. She was still many miles even from Blind Brook Cabin, and her limbs were afire from the unaccustomed effort. This would never do. After pauses for breath that were coming closer and closer together, she set her lips each time grimly. “Tomboy Allen” had not counted on succumbing to physical fatigue before she had climbed as far as Blind Brook. If she were weakening already, what of those many miles on the other side?
Tuesday the twenty-eighth of October passed with no tidings of Ruggam’s capture. The Holmes boy was fatally shot by a rattleheaded searcher near Five-Mile Pond, and distraught parents began to take thought of their own lads missing from school. Adam MacQuarry broke his leg near the Hell Hollow schoolhouse and was sent back by friends on a borrowed bobsled. Several ne’er-do-wells, long on impulse and short on stickability, drifted back to more comfortable quarters during the day, contending that if Hap were captured, the officers would claim the reward anyhow–so what was the use bucking the System?
The snowfall stopped in the early morning. Sunrise disclosed the world trimmed from horizon to horizon in fairy fluff. Householders jocosely shoveled their walks; small children resurrected attic sleds; here and there a farmer appeared on Main Street during the forenoon in a pung-sleigh or cutter with jingling bells. The sun soared higher, and the day grew warmer. Eaves began dripping during the noon hour, to stop when the sun sank about four o’clock behind Bancroft’s hill.
After the sunset came a perfect evening. The starlight was magic. Many people called in at the newspaper-office, after the movies, to learn if the man hunt had brought results.
Between ten and eleven o’clock the lights on the valley floor blinked out; the town had gone to bed–that is, the lights blinked out in all homes excepting those on the eastern outskirts, where nervous people worried over the possibilities of a hungry, hunted convict’s burglarizing their premises, or drawn-faced mothers lived mentally through a score of calamities befalling red-blooded sons who had now been absent twenty-four hours.
Sometime between nine o’clock and midnight–she had no way of telling accurately–Cora McBride stumbled into the Lyons clearing. No one would have recognized in the staggering, bedraggled apparition that emerged from the silhouette of the timber the figure that had started so confidently from the Harrison tract the previous evening.
For over an hour she had hobbled blindly. It was wholly by accident that she had stumbled into the clearing. And the capture of Ruggam had diminished in importance. Warm food, water that would not tear her raw throat, a place to lie and recoup her strength after the chilling winter night–these were the only things that counted now. Though she knew it not, in her eyes burned the faint light of fever. When a snag caught her snowshoe and tripped her, there was hysteria in her cry of resentment.
As she moved across from the timber-line her hair was revealed fallen down; she had lost a glove, and one hand and wrist were cruelly red where she had plunged them several times into the snow to save herself from falling upon her face. She made but a few yards before the icy thong of her right snowshoe snapped. She did not bother to repair it. Carrying it beneath her arm, she hobbled brokenly toward the shelter of the buildings.
Her failure at the other cabins, the lack, thus far, of all signs of the fugitive, the vastness of the hunting-ground magnified by the loneliness of winter, had convinced her finally that her quest was futile. It was all a venture of madness. The idea that a woman, alone and single-handed, with no weapon but a revolver, could track down and subdue a desperate murderer in winter mountains where hardly a wild thing stirred, and make him return with her to the certain penalty–this proved how much mental mischief had again been caused by the lure of money. The glittering seduction of gold had deranged her. She realized it now, her mind normal in an exhausted body. So she gained the walls of the buildings and stumbled around them, thoughtless of any possible signs of the fugitive.
The stars were out in myriads. The Milky Way was a spectacle to recall vividly the sentiment of the Nineteenth Psalm. The log-buildings of the clearing, every tree-trunk and bough in the woods beyond, the distant skyline of stump and hollow, all stood out sharply against the peculiar radiance of the snow. The night was as still as the spaces between the planets.
Like some wild creature of those winter woods the woman clumped and stumbled around the main shack, seeking the door.
Finding it, she stopped; the snowshoe slipped from beneath her arm; one numb hand groped for the log door-casing in support; the other fumbled for the revolver.
Tracks led into that cabin!
A paralysis of fright gripped Cora McBride. Something told her intuitively that she stood face to face at last with what she had traveled all this mountain wilderness to find. Yet with sinking heart it also came to her that if Hap Ruggam had made these tracks and were still within, she must face him in her exhausted condition and at once make that tortuous return trip to civilization. There would be no one to help her.
She realized in that moment that she was facing the primal. And she was not primal. She was a normal woman, weakened to near-prostration by the trek of the past twenty-four hours. Was it not better to turn away while there was time?
She stood debating thus, the eternal silence blanketing forest-world and clearing. But she was allowed to make no decision.
A living body sprang suddenly upon her. Before she could cry out, she was borne down precipitously from behind.
She tried to turn the revolver against the Thing upon her, but the gun was twisted from her raw, red fingers. The snow into which she had been precipitated blinded her. She smeared an arm across her eyes, but before clear sight was regained, talon fingers had gripped her shoulders. She was half lifted, half dragged through the doorway, and there she was dropped on the plank flooring. Her assailant, turning, made to close and bar the door.
When she could see clearly, she perceived a weak illumination in the cabin. On the rough bench-table, shaded by two slabs of bark, burned the stub of a tallow candle probably left by some hunting-party.
The windows were curtained with rotting blankets. Some rough furniture lay about; rusted cooking-utensils littered the tables, and at one end was a sheet-iron stove. The place had been equipped after a fashion by deer-hunters or mountain hikers, who brought additional furnishings to the place each year and left mouldy provisions and unconsumed firewood behind.
The man succeeded finally in closing the door. He turned upon her.
He was short and stocky. The stolen corduroy coat covered blacksmith’s muscles now made doubly powerful by dementia. His hair was lifeless black and clipped close, prison-fashion. His low forehead hung over burning, mismated eyes. From her helplessness on the floor Cora McBride stared up at him.
He came closer.