Part 2

It was a disadvantage to me that I was not like my cronies. I couldn’t open my lips without betraying the fact that I belonged to another sphere. Though the broken-down man of education is not unknown in the underworld, he is comparatively rare. He is comparatively rare and under suspicion, like a white swan in a flock of black ones. I might be open-handed, ingratiating, and absurdly fellow-well-met, but I was always an outsider. They would take my drinks, they would return me drinks, we would swap stories and experiences with all outward show of equality; but no one knew better than myself that I was not on a footing with the rest of them. Women took to me readily enough, but men were always on their guard. Try as I would I never found a mate among them, I never made a friend. Therefore, now that I was down and out, I had no one of whom to ask a good turn, no one who would have done me a good turn, but poor, useless old Lovey sneaking in the shade.

I was in a measure between two worlds. I had been ejected from one without having forced a way into the other. When I say ejected I mean the word. The bitterest moment in my life was on that night when my eldest brother came to his door in Montreal and gave me fifty dollars, with the words:

“And now get out! Don’t let any of us ever see your face or hear your name again.”

As I stumbled down the steps he gave me a kick that didn’t reach me and which I had lost the right to resent. He himself went back to the dinner-party his wife was entertaining inside, and of which the talk and laughter reached me as I stood humbly on the door-step. From the other side of the street I looked back at the lighted windows. It was the last touch of connection with my family.

But it had been a kindly, patient family. My father was one of the best known and most highly honored among Canadian public men. As he had married an American, I had a good many cousins in New York, though I had not made myself known to any of them since coming there to live. I didn’t want them. Had I met one of them in the street, I should have passed without speaking; but, as it happened, I never met one. I saw their names in the papers, and that was all.

My father and mother had had five children, of whom I was the fourth. My two brothers were married, prosperous and respected—one a lawyer in Montreal, the other a banker in Toronto. My elder sister was married to a colonel in the British army; the younger one—the only member of the family younger than myself—still lived at home.

We three sons were all graduates of McGill, in addition to which I had been sent to the Beaux Arts in Paris. Out of that I had come with some degree of credit; and there had been a year in which I was in sight—oh, very distant sight!—of the beginning of the fulfilment of my childhood’s ambition to revolutionize the art of architecture in Canada. But in the second year that vision went out; and in the third came the night on my brother Jerry’s door-step.

I had nothing to complain of. The family had borne with me—and borne with me. When we reached the time when I was supposed to be earning my own living and my father’s allowance came to an end, my mother, who had some money of her own, kept it up. She would be keeping it up still if she knew where I was—but she didn’t know. From the moment of leaving Montreal I decided to carry out Jerry’s injunction. They should neither see my face nor hear my name again. I didn’t stop to consider how cruel this would be to the best mother a man ever had—to say nothing of the best father—or rather, when I did stop to consider it it seemed to me that I was taking the kindest course. I had no confidence in myself or in the future. New surroundings and associations would not give me a new heart, whatever hopes those who wished me well might be building on the change. For a new heart I needed something which I hadn’t got and saw no means of getting.

_CHAPTER II_

Somewhere about dusk I fell asleep. It was dark when I woke up. It was dark and still and sultry, as it often is in New York in the middle of June.

The lamps were lit in the Park, and in their glow shadowy forms moved stealthily. When they went in twos I took them to be lovers; when they went alone I put them down as prowlers of the night. I didn’t know what they were after, but whatever it might be I was sure it was no good.

Not that that mattered to me! I had long been in a situation where I couldn’t be particular. When I had risen and stretched myself I, too, moved stealthily, dogged by a crime I hadn’t yet committed, but of which the guilt was already in the air.

As I had nothing by which to tell the time, I was obliged to wait till a clock struck. I hoped it was eleven at least, but when the sound came over the trees it was only nine. Only nine, and I could do nothing before one! Nothing before one, and nowhere to go! Nowhere to go, and no food to eat, and not a drop to drink! Doubtless I could have found water; but water made me sick. With four hours to wait, I thought again of the dark river with its velvety current, running below Greeley’s Slip.

Aimlessly I drifted toward it—that is, I drifted toward Columbus Circle, whence I could drift farther still through squalid, fetid, dimly lighted streets down to the water’s edge. The night was so hot that the thought of the plunge began to appeal to me. After all, it would be an easy, pleasant way of stepping out.

But I didn’t do it. The unknown beyond the river once more drove me back. Besides, the adventure I had planned was not without its fascination. I wanted to see what it held in store. If it held nothing—well, then, Greeley’s Slip would still be accessible in the morning.

So I skulked back into the depths of the Park again. Those who went as twos began to disappear, and the lonely shadows to steal along more furtively. Now and then one of them approached me or hung in the distance suggestively. It was not like any of the encounters that take place in daylight. It was more as if these dark ghosts had floated up from some evil spirit land, into which before morning they would float down again.

But twelve o’clock struck at last, and I took midnight as a call. It was a call to leave the great human division in which I had hitherto been classed, and become a criminal. Once I had done this thing, I should never be able to go back. The angel with the flaming sword would guard that way, and I could never regain even such status as that which I was abandoning.

If my head had not been swimming I might at the last minute have felt a qualm at that, but my mind had lost the faculty of deconcentration. It was fixed on the thing before me in such a way that I couldn’t get it off. For this reason I went, on leaving the Park, directly to the street and number where my thoughts were.

I was surprised by the emptiness and silence of the thoroughfares. Not till then had I remembered that at this season of the year most of the houses would be closed. Closed they were, looking dark and blank and forbidding. I happened to know that the house to which I was bound was not closed; and though the fact that there were so few to pass in the streets rendered me more conspicuous, it also made me the less subject to observation.

Indeed, there were no observers at all when I approached the black spot made by the vacant lot. There was nothing but myself and the blackness. Not a light in the house! Hardly a light in any of the houses roundabout! Not a footfall on the pavements! If ever there was a good opportunity to do what I had come for, it was mine.

But I passed. The black spot frightened me. It was like a black gulf into which I might sink down. I re-passed.

I went farther up the street and took myself to task. It was a repetition of my recoil from the children in the afternoon. I must have the nerve—or I must own to myself that I hadn’t. If I hadn’t it, then I had no alternative but Greeley’s Slip.

I turned in my steps and passed the house again. If from the blank windows any one had been looking out my actions would have been suspicious. I went far down the street, and came back again far up it. Then when I had no more power of arguing with myself I suddenly found my footsteps crushing the dusty, sun-dried shoots of nettle and blue succory. I was in the vacant lot.

All at once fear left me. As well as any old hand in the business I seemed to know what lay before me. At every second some low-down prompting, sprung from nameless depths in my nature, told me what to do.

I noted in the first place how accurate the experts had been as to light and shade. The house stood so far up on one of the long avenues that the buildings were thinning out. So, too, the street lamps. They were no more than in the proportion of two to three as compared to their numbers half a mile lower down. Just here they were so placed that not a ray fell into the three or four thousand square feet which had probably never been built upon since Manhattan was inhabited. Even the wall of the house was windowless on this side, for the reason that within a few months some new building would probably block the outlook.

Once I had crept close to the wall, I knew I presented neither silhouette nor shade to any chance passer-by. I could feel my way at leisure, cautiously treading burdock and fireweed underfoot. I came to the low wooden fence, in which there was a gate for tradesmen, which was possibly unlocked; but I didn’t run the risk of a click. With my long legs a stride took me over into a small brick-paved court.

I paused to reconnoiter. The obscurity here was so dense that only my architect’s instincts told me where the doors and windows would probably be. I located them by degrees. The doors I let alone. The windows I tried, first one and then another, but with no success. There was probably some simple fastening that I could have dealt with had I had a pocket-knife, but the one I had carried for years had long since been lying in a pawnshop. To reflect I sat down on the cover of a bin that was doubtless used for refuse.

A footstep alarmed me. It was heavy, measured, slow. With the ease of a snake I was down on my belly, crawling toward cover. Cover offered itself in the form of the single shrub that the court contained—lilac or syringa—growing close against the kitchen wall. Lovey would have commended the silence and swiftness with which I slipped behind it.

The footstep receded, slow, measured, heavy. Coming to the conclusion that it was a policeman in the Avenue, I raised my head. I had no sense of queerness in my situation. It seemed as much a matter of course as if I had been doing the same sort of thing ever since I was born.

There was apparently a providence in all this, for, looking up, I spied a window I had not seen before, because it was hidden by the shrub. This, if any, would have been neglected by the servants when they went to bed.

With scarcely the stirring of a leaf I got on my feet again—and, lo! the miracle. The window was actually open. I had nothing to do but push it a few inches higher, drag myself up and wriggle in. I accomplished this without a sound that could be detected twenty feet away.

Coming down on my hands and knees, I found myself amid the odor of eatables, chiefly that of fruit. I rested a minute to get my bearings, which I did by the sense of smell. I knew I must be in a sort of pantry. By putting out my hands carefully, so as to knock nothing over, I perceived that it was little more than a closet with shelves. A thrill of excitement passed through me from head to foot when my hand rested on an apple.

I ate the apple there and then, kneeling upright, my toes bent under me. I ate another and another. Feeling cautiously, I discovered a tin box in which there were bread and cake. I ate of both. Getting softly on my feet, I groped for other things, which proved in the main to be no more than tea, coffee, spices, and starch. Then my fingers ran over a strawlike surface, and I knew I had hold of a demijohn.

Smell told me that it contained sherry, and such knowledge of housekeeping as I possessed suggested that it was cooking-sherry. I took a long swig of it. Two long swigs were enough. It burnt me, and yet it braced me. With the food I had eaten I felt literally like a giant refreshed with wine.

It occurred to me that this was a point at which I might draw back. But the spell of the unknown was upon me, and I determined to go at least a little farther. Very, very stealthily I opened the door.

I was not in a kitchen, as I expected to find myself, but in a servants’ dining-room. I got the dim outlines of chairs and what I took to be a dresser or a bookcase. Another open door led into a hall.

My knowledge of the planning of houses aided me at each step I took. From the hallway I could place the kitchen, the laundry, and the back staircase. I knew the front hall lay beyond a door which was closed. At the foot of the back staircase I stood for some minutes and listened. Not a sound came from anywhere in the house. The kitchen clock ticked loudly, and presently startled me with a gurgle and a chuckle before it struck one. After this manifestation I had to wait till my heart stopped thumping and my nerves were quieted before venturing on the stairs. As the first step creaked, I kept close to the wall to get a firmer support for my tread. On reaching a landing I could see up into another hall. Here I perceived the glimmer or reflection of a light. It was a very dim or distant light—but it was a light.

I stood on the landing and waited. If there were people moving about I should hear them soon. But all I did hear was the heavy breathing of the servants, who were sleeping on the topmost floor.

Creeping a little farther up, I discovered that the light was in a bedroom—the first to open from the front hall up-stairs. Between the front hall and the back hall the door was ajar. That would make things easier for me, and I dragged myself noiselessly to the top. I was now at the head of the first flight of back stairs, and looking into the master’s section of the house. Except for that one dim light the house was dark. It was not, however, so dark that my architect’s eye couldn’t make a mental map quite sufficient for my guidance.

It was clearly a dwelling that had been added to, with some rambling characteristics. The first few feet of the front hall were on a level with the back hall, after which came a flight of three or four steps to a higher plane, which ran the rest of the depth of the building to the window over the front door. In the faint radiance through this window I could discern a high-boy, a bureau, and some chairs against the wall. I could see, too, that from this higher level one staircase ran down to the front door and another up to a third story. What was chiefly of moment to me was the fact that the bedroom with the light was lower than the rest of this part of the house, and somewhat cut off from it.

With movements as quiet as a cat’s I got myself where I could peep into the bedroom where the lamp burned. It proved to be a small electric lamp with a rose-colored shade, standing beside a bed. It was a rose-colored room, evidently that of a young lady. But there was no young lady there. There was no one.

The fact that surprises me as I record all this is that I was so extraordinarily cool. I was cooler in the act than I am in the memory of it. I walked into that bedroom as calmly as if it had been my own.

It was a pretty room, with the usual notes of photographs, bibelots, and flowered cretonne which young women like. The walls were in a light, cool green set off by a few colored reproductions of old Italian masters. Over the small white virginal bed was a copy of Fra Angelico’s “Annunciation.” Two windows, one of which was a bay, were shaded by loosely hanging rose-colored silk, and before the bay window the curtains were drawn. Diagonally across the corner of this window, but within the actual room, stood a simple white writing-desk, with a white dressing-table near it, but against the wall. On the table lay a gold-mesh purse, in which there was money. I slipped it into my pocket, with some satisfaction in securing the first fruits of my adventure.

With such booty as this it again occurred to me to be on the safe side and to go back by the way I came. I was, in fact, looking round me to see if there was any other small valuable object I could lift before departing when I heard a door open in some distant part of the house—and voices.

They were women’s voices, or, rather, as I speedily inferred, girls’ voices. By listening intently I drew the conclusion that two girls had come out of a room on the third floor and were coming down the stairs.

It was the minute to make off, and I tried to do so. I might have effected my escape had I not been checked by the figure of a man looming up suddenly before me. He sprang out of nowhere—a tall, slender man, in a dark-blue suit, with trousers baggy at the knees, and wearing an old golfing-cap. I jumped back from him in terror, only to find that it was my own reflection in the pier-glass. But the few seconds’ delay lost me my chance to get away.

By the time I had tiptoed to the door the voices were on the same floor as myself. Two girls were advancing along the hall, evidently making their way to this chamber. My retreat being cut off, I looked wildly about for a place in which to hide myself. In the instants at my disposal I could discover nothing more remote than the bay window, screened by its loose rose-colored hangings. By the time the young ladies were on the threshold I was established there, with the silk sections pulled together and held tightly in my hand.

The first words I heard were: “But it will seem so like a habit. Men will be afraid of you.”

This voice was light, silvery, and staccato. That which replied had a deep mezzo quality, without being quite contralto.

“They won’t be nearly so much afraid of me,” it said, fretfully, “as I am of them. I wish—I wish they’d let me alone!”

“Oh, well, they won’t do that—not yet awhile; unless, as I say, they see you’re hopeless. Really, dear, when a girl breaks a third engagement—”

“They must see that she wouldn’t do it if she didn’t have to. Here—this is the hook that always bothers me.”

There were tears in the mezzo voice now, with a hint of exasperation that might have been due to the lover or the hook, I couldn’t be sure which.

“But that’s what I don’t see—”

“You don’t see it because you don’t know Stephen—that is, you don’t know him well.”

“But from what I do know of him—”

“He seems very nice. Yes, of course! But, good Heavens! Elsie, I want a husband who’s something more than very nice!”

“And yet that’s pretty good, as husbands go.”

“If I can’t reach a higher standard than as husbands go I sha’n’t marry any one.”

“Which seems to me what’s very likely to happen.”

“So it seems to me.”

The silence that followed was full of soft, swishing sounds, which I judged to come from the taking off of a dress and the putting on of some sort of negligée. From my experience of the habits of girls, as illustrated by my sisters and their friends, I supposed that they were lending each other services in the processes of undoing. The girl with the mezzo voice had gone up to Elsie’s room to undo her; Elsie had come down to render similar assistance. There is probably a psychological connection between this intimate act and confidence, since girls most truly bare their hearts to each other when they ought to be going to bed.

The mezzo young lady was moving about the room when the conversation was taken up again.

“I don’t understand,” Elsie complained, “why you should have got engaged to Stephen in the first place.”

“I don’t, either”—she was quite near me now, and threw something that might have been a brooch or a chain on the little white desk—“except on the ground that I wanted to try him.”

“Try him? What do you mean?”

“Well, what’s an engagement? Isn’t it a kind of experiment? You get as near to marriage as you can, while still keeping free to draw back. To me it’s been like going down to the edge of the water in which you can commit suicide, and finding it so cold that you go home again.”

“Don’t you ever mean to be married at all?” Elsie demanded, impatiently.

“I don’t mean to be married till I’m sure.”

Elsie burst out indignantly: “Regina Barry, that’s the most pusillanimous thing I ever heard. You might as well say you’d never cross the Atlantic unless you were sure the ship would reach the other side.”

“My trouble about crossing the Atlantic is in making up my mind whether or not I want to go on board. One might be willing to risk the second step, but one can’t risk the first. Even the hymn that says ‘One step enough for me’ implies that at least you know what that’s to be.”

“You mean that you balk at marriage in any case.”

“I mean that I balk at marriage with any of the men I’ve been engaged to. I must say that; and I can’t say more.”

During another brief silence I surmised that Regina Barry had seated herself before the dressing-table and was probably doing something to her hair. I wish I could say here that in my eavesdropping I experienced a sense of shame; but I can’t. Whatever creates a sense of shame had been warped in me. The moral transitions that had turned me into a burglar had been gradual but sure. With the gold-mesh purse in my pocket a burglar I had become, and I felt no more repugnance to the business than I did to that of the architect. Notwithstanding the natural masculine interest these young ladies stirred in me, I meant to wait till they had separated—gone to bed—and fallen asleep. Then I would slip out from my hiding-place, swipe the brooch or the chain that had been thrown on the desk, and go.

“What was the matter with the first man?” Elsie began again.

“I don’t know whether it was the matter with him or with me. I didn’t trust him.”

“I should say that was the matter with him. And the next man?”

“Nothing. I simply couldn’t have lived with him.”

“And what’s wrong with Stephen is that he’s no more than very nice. I see.”

“Oh no, you don’t see, dear! There’s a lot more to it than all that, only I can’t explain it.” I fancied that she wheeled round in her chair and faced her companion. “The long and short of it is that I’ve never met the man with whom I could keep house. I can fall in love with them for a while—I can have them going and coming—I can welcome them and say good-by to them—but when it’s a question of all welcome and no good-by—well, the man’s got to be different from any I’ve seen yet.”

“You’ll end by not getting any one at all.”

“Which, from my point of view, don’t you see, won’t be an unmixed evil. Having lived happily for twenty-three years without a husband, I don’t see why I should throw away a perfectly good bone for the most enticing shadow that ever was.”

“I don’t believe you’re human.” Before there could be a retort to this Elsie went on to ask, “How did poor Stephen take it?”

“Well, he didn’t go into fits of laughter. He took it more or less lying down. If he hadn’t—”

“If he hadn’t—what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The least little bit of fight on his part—or even contempt—”

As this sentence remained unfinished I could hear Elsie rise.

“Well, I’m off to bed,” she yawned. “What time do you have breakfast?”

There was some little discussion of household arrangements, after which they said their good nights.

With Elsie’s departure I began for the first time to be uncomfortable. I can’t express myself otherwise than to say that as long as she was there I felt I had a chaperon. In spite of the fact that I had become a professional burglar the idea of being left alone with an innocent young lady in her bedroom filled me with dismay.