Part 3

I was almost on the point of making a bolt for it when I heard Elsie call out from the hallway: “Ugh! How dark and poky! For mercy’s sake, come up with me!”

Miss Barry lingered at the dressing-table long enough to ask: “Wouldn’t you rather sleep in mother’s room? That communicates with this, with only a little passage in between. The bed is made up.”

“Oh no,” Elsie’s staccato came back. “I don’t mind being up there, and my things are spread out; only it seems so creepy to climb all those stairs.”

“Wait a minute.”

She sprang up. I breathed freely. My sense of propriety was saved. The voices were receding along the front hall. Once the young ladies had begun to mount the stairs I would slip out by the back hall and get off. Relaxing my hold on the silk hangings I stepped out cautiously.

My first thought was for the objects I had heard thrown down with a rattle on the writing-desk. They proved to be a string of small pearls, a diamond pin, and some rings of which I made no inspection before sweeping them all into my pocket.

I was ready now to steal away, but, to my vexation, the incorrigible maidens had begun to talk love-affairs again at the foot of the staircase leading up to the third floor. They had also turned on the hall light, so that my chances were diminished for getting away unseen.

Knowing, however, that sooner or later they would have to go up the next flight, I stood by the writing-desk and waited. I was not nervous; I was not alarmed. As a matter of fact the success of my undertaking up to the present point, together with the action of food and wine, combined to make me excited and hilarious. I chuckled in advance over the mystification of Miss Regina Barry, who would find on returning to her room that her rings, her necklet, and her gold-mesh purse had melted into the atmosphere.

In sheer recklessness I was now guilty of a bit of deviltry before which I would have hesitated had I had time to give it a second thought. On the desk there was a scrap of blank paper and a pen. Stooping, I printed in the neat block letters I had once been accustomed to inscribe below a plan:

There are men different from those you have seen hitherto. Wait.

This I pinned to the pincushion on the dressing-table, beginning at once to creep toward the door, so as to seize the first opportunity of slipping down the back stairs.

But again I was frustrated.

“I’m all right now,” I heard Elsie say, reassuringly. “Don’t come up. Go back and go to bed.”

Miss Barry spoke as she returned along the hall toward her room: “The cook sleeps in the next room to you, so that if you’re afraid in the night you’ve only to hammer on the wall. But you needn’t be. This house is as safe as a prison.”

I had barely time to get into the bay window again and pull the curtains to.

Some five minutes followed, during which I heard the opening and shutting of drawers and closets and the swish and frou-frou of skirts. I began to curse my idiocy in fastening that silly bit of writing to the pincushion. My only hope lay in the possibility that she would go to bed and to sleep without seeing it.

With hearing grown extraordinarily acute I could trace every movement she made about the room. Presently I knew she had come back to the dressing-table again. Pulling up a chair, she sat down before it, to finish, I suppose, the arranging of her hair.

For a few seconds there was a silence, during which I could hear the thumping of my heart. Then came the faint rattling of paper. I knew when she read the thing by the slight catch in her breath. I expected more than that. I thought she would call out to her friend or otherwise give an alarm. If she went to a telephone to summon the police I decided to make a dash for it. Indeed, I meant to make a dash for it as it was, as soon as I knew her next move.

But of all the next moves, the one she made was the one I had least counted on. With a sudden tug at the hangings she pulled them apart—and I was before her.

I was before her and she was before me. It is this latter detail of which I have the most vivid recollection. In the matter of time all other recollections of the moment seem to come after that and to be subsidiary to it.

My immediate impression was of two enormous, wonderful, burning eyes, full of amazement. Apart from the eyes I hardly saw anything. It was as if the light of a dark lantern had been suddenly turned on me and I was blinded by the blaze. I was blinded by the blaze and shriveled up in it. No words can do justice to my sudden sense of being a contemptible, loathsome reptile.

“’Sh!” was the first sound that came from her. She raised her hand. “Don’t make a noise or you’ll frighten my friend. She’s nervous already.”

Instinctively I pulled off my cap, stepping out of my hiding-place into the middle of the room. As I did so she recoiled, supporting herself by a hand on the writing-desk. Now that the discovery was made, I could see her grow pale, while the hand on the desk trembled.

“You mustn’t be afraid,” I began to whisper.

“I’m not afraid,” she whispered back; “but—but what are you doing here?”

“I’ll show you,” I returned, with shamefaced quietness. “I shall also show you that if you’ll let me go without giving an alarm you won’t be sorry.”

Pulling all the things I had stolen out of my pocket, I showered them on the dressing-table.

“Oh!”

The smothered exclamation made it plain to me that she hadn’t missed the articles.

“May I ask you to verify them?” I went on. “If you should find later that something had disappeared, I shouldn’t like you to think that I had carried it away.”

She made a feint at examining the jewelry, but I could see that she was incapable of making anything like a count. It was I who insisted on going over the objects one by one.

“There’s this,” I said, touching the gold-mesh purse, but not picking it up. “I see there’s money in it; but it has not been opened. Then there’s this,” I added, indicating the pearl necklet; “and this,” which was the brooch. “The rings,” I continued, “I don’t know anything about. There are three here. That’s all I remember seeing; but I didn’t notice in particular.”

She said, in a breathless whisper, “That’s all there were.”

“Then may I ask if you mean to let me go?”

“How can I stop you?”

“Oh, in two or three ways. You could call your servants, or you could ring up the police—”

Her big, burning eyes were fixed on me hypnotically. The color began to come back to her cheeks, but she trembled still.

“How—how did you get in?”

I explained to her.

“And the only thing I’ve taken,” I went on, “is the food I ate and the wine I drank; but if you knew how much I needed them—”

“Were you hungry?”

“I hadn’t eaten anything for two days, and very little for two days before that.”

“Then you’re not—you’re not one of those gentleman burglars who do this sort of thing out of bravado?”

“As we see in novels or plays. I don’t think you’ll find many of them about. I’m a burglar,” I pursued, “or I—I meant to be one—but I’m not a gentleman.”

“You speak like a gentleman.”

“Unfortunately, a gentleman is not made by speech. A gentleman could never be in the predicament in which you’ve caught me.”

“Well, then, you were a gentleman once.”

“My father was a gentleman—and is.”

“English?”

“I’d rather not tell you. Now that I’ve restored the things, if you’ll give me your word that I sha’n’t be molested I shall—”

“You sha’n’t be molested, only—”

As she hesitated I insisted, “Only what, may I ask?”

Her manner was a mixture of embarrassment and pity. She had not hitherto taken her eyes from me since we had begun to speak. Now she let them wander away; or, rather, she let them shift away, to return to me swiftly, as if she couldn’t trust me without watching me. By this time she was trembling so violently, too, that she was obliged to grasp the back of a chair to steady herself. She was too little to be tall, and yet too tall to be considered little. The filmy thing she wore, with its long, loose sleeves, gave her some of the appearance of an angel, only that no angel ever had this bright, almost hectic color in the cheeks, and these scarlet lips.

“Was it,” she asked, speaking, as we both did, in low tones, and rapidly—“was it because you—you had no money that you did this?”

I smiled faintly. “That was it exactly; but now—”

“Then won’t you let me give you some?”

I still had enough of the man about me to straighten myself up and say: “Thanks, no. It’s very kind of you; but—but the reasons which make it impossible for me to—to steal it make it equally impossible for me to take it as a gift.”

“But why—why was it impossible for you to steal it, when you had come here to do it?”

“I suppose it was seeing the owner of it face to face. I’d sunk low enough to steal from some one I couldn’t visualize—but what’s the use? It’s mere hair-splitting. Just let me say that this is my first attempt, and it hasn’t succeeded. I may do better next time if I can get up the nerve.”

“Oh, but there won’t be a next time.”

“That we shall have to see.”

“Suppose”—the mixture of embarrassment and pity made it hard for her to speak—“suppose I said I was sorry for you.”

“You don’t have to say it. I see it. It’s something I shall never forget as long as I live.”

“Well, since I’m sorry for you, won’t you let me—?”

“No,” I interrupted, firmly. “I’m grateful for your pity; I’ll accept that; but I won’t take anything else.” I began moving toward the door. “Since you’re good enough to let me go, I had better be off; but I can’t do it without thanking you.”

For the first time she smiled a little. Even in that dim light I could see it was what in normal conditions would be commonly called a generous smile, full, frank, and kindly. Just now it was little more than a quivering of the long scarlet lips. She glanced toward the little heap of things on the desk.

“If it comes to that, I have to thank you.”

I raised my hand deprecatingly.

“Don’t.”

I had almost reached the threshold when her words made me turn.

“Do you know who I am?”

“I think I do,” was all I could reply.

“Well, then, why shouldn’t you come back later—in some more usual manner—and let me see if there isn’t something I could do for you?”

“Do for me in what way?”

“In the way of getting you work—or something.”

My heart had leaped up for a minute, but now it fell. Why it should have done either I cannot say, since I could be nothing to her but a fool who had tried to be a thief, and couldn’t, as we say in our common idiom, get away with it.

I thanked her again.

“But you’ve done a great deal for me as it is,” I added. “I couldn’t ask for more.” Somewhat disconnectedly I continued, “I think you’re the pluckiest girl I ever saw not to have been afraid of me.”

“Oh, it wasn’t pluck. I saw at once that you wouldn’t do me any harm.”

“How?”

“In general. I was surprised. I was excited. In a way I was overcome. But I wasn’t afraid of you. If you’d been a tramp or a colored man or anything like that it would have been different. But one isn’t afraid of a—of a gentleman.”

“But I’m not a—”

“Well then, a man who has a gentleman’s traditions. You’d better go now,” she whispered, suddenly. “If you want to come back as I’ve suggested—any time to-morrow forenoon—I’d speak to my father—”

“Not about this?” I whispered, hurriedly.

“No, not about this. This had better be just between ourselves. I shall never say anything to any one about it, and I advise you to do the same.” I had made a low bow, preparatory to getting out, when she held up the scrap of paper she had crumpled in her hand. “Why did you write this?”

But I got out of the room without giving a reply.

I was descending the back stairs when I heard a door open on the third floor and Elsie’s voice call out, “Regina, are you talking to anybody down there?”

There was a tremor in the mezzo as it replied: “N-no. I’m just—I’m just moving about.”

“Well, for Heaven’s sake go to bed! It’s after two o’clock. I never was in a house like this in all my life before. It seems to be full of people crawling round everywhere. I think I’ll come down to your mother’s bed, after all.”

“Do,” was the only word I heard as I stole into the servants’ dining-room, then into the closet with shelves, where I shut the door softly. A few seconds later I was out on the cool ground, in the dark, behind the shrub.

I lay there almost breathlessly, not because I was unable to get up, but because I couldn’t drag myself away. I wanted to go over the happenings of the last hour and seal them in my memory. They were both terrible to me and beautiful.

I had been there some fifteen minutes when I heard the open window above me closed gently and the fastening snapped. I knew that again she was near me, though, as before, she didn’t suspect my presence. I wondered if the chances of life would ever bring us so close to each other again.

Above me, where the shrub detached itself a little from the wall of the house, I could see the stars. Lying on my back, with my head pillowed on the crook of my arm, I watched them till it seemed to me they began to pale. At the same time I caught a thinning in the texture of the darkness. I got up with the silence in which I had lain down. Crossing the brick-paved yard and striding over the low wall, I was again in the vacant lot.

It was not yet dawn, but it was the dark-gray hour which tells that dawn is coming. I was obliged to take more accurate precautions than before, as, crushing the tangle of nettle, burdock, fireweed, and blue succory, I crept along in the shadow of the house wall to regain the empty street.

_CHAPTER III_

The city was beginning to wake. Mysterious carts and wagons rumbled along the neighboring avenues. From a parallel street came the buzz and clang of a lonely early-morning electric car. Running footsteps would have startled one if they had not been followed by the clinking of peaceful milk-bottles in back yards. Clanking off into the distance one heard the tread of solitary pedestrians bent on errands that stirred the curiosity. Here and there the lurid flames of torches lit up companies of gnomelike men digging in the roadways.

Going toward Greeley’s Slip, I skirted the Park, though it made the walk longer. Under the dark trees men were lying on benches and on the grass, but for reasons I couldn’t yet analyze I refused to thrust myself among them. A few hours earlier I would have done this without thinking, as without fear; but something had happened to me that now made any such course impossible.

My immediate need was to get back to poor old Lovey and lie down by his side. That again was beyond my power to analyze. I suppose it was something like a homing instinct, and Lovey was all there was to welcome me.

“Is that you, sonny?” he asked, sleepily, as I stooped to creep into the cubby-hole which a chance arrangement of planks made in a pile of lumber.

“Yes, Lovey.”

“Glad ye’ve come.”

When I had stretched myself out I felt him snuggle a little nearer me.

“You don’t mind, sonny, do you?”

“No, Lovey. It’s all right. Go to sleep again.”

For myself, I could do nothing but lie and watch the coming of the dawn. I could see it beating itself into the darkness long before there was anything to which one could give the name of light. It was like a succession of great cosmic throbs, after each of which the veil was a little more translucent.

In my nostrils was the sweet, penetrating smell of lumber, subtly laden with the memories of the days when I was a boy. The Canadian differs from the American largely, I think, in the closeness of his forest-and-farm associations. Not that the American hasn’t the farm and the forest, too, but he has moved farther away from them. The mill, the factory, and the office have supplanted them—in imagination when not in fact, and in fact when not in imagination. If the woods call him he has to go to them—for a week, or two, or three at a time; but he comes back inevitably to a life in which the woods play little part. The Canadian never leaves that life. The primeval still enters into his cities and his thoughts. Some day it may be different; but as yet he is the son of rivers, lakes, and forests. There is always in him a strain of the _voyageur_. The true Canadian never ceases to smell balsam or to hear the lapping of water on wild shores.

It was balsam that I smelled now. The lapping of water soothed me as the river, too, began to wake. It woke with a faint noise of paddle-wheels, followed by a bellow like the call of some sea monster to its mate. Right below me and close to the slip I heard the measured dip of oars. Hoarse calls of men, from deck to deck or from deck to dock, had a weird, watchful sound, as though the darkness were peopled with Flying Dutchmen. Lights glided up and down the river—which itself remained unseen—mostly gold lights, but now and then a colored one. Chains of lights fringed the New Jersey shore, where, far away, sleepless factories threw up dim red flares. A rising southeast wind not only hid the stars under banks of clouds, but went whistling eerily round the corners of the lumber-piles. The scent of pine, and all the pungent, nameless odors of the riverside, began to be infused with the smell—if it is a smell—of coming rain.

I can best describe myself as in a kind of trance in which past and present were merged into one, and in which there seemed to be no period when two wonderful, burning eyes had not been watching me in pity and amazement. As long as I lived I knew they would watch me still. In their light I got my life’s significance. In their light I saw myself as a boy again, with a boy’s vision of the future. The smell of lumber carried me back to our old summer home on the banks of the Ottawa, where I had had my dreams of what I should do when I was big. All boys being patriotic, they were dreams not merely of myself, but of my country. It worried me that it was not sufficiently on the great world map, that apart from its lakes and prairies and cataracts it had no wonders to show mankind. As we were a traveling family, I was accustomed to wonders in other countries, and easily annoyed when one set of cousins in New York and another in England took it for granted that we lived in an Ultima Thule of snow. I meant to show them the contrary.

From the beginning my ardors and indignations translated themselves into stone. I had seen St. Peter’s in one country, St. Paul’s in another, and Chartres and châteaux in a third. I had seen New York transforming itself under my very eyes—the change began when I was in my teens—into a town of prodigious towers which in themselves were symbolical. Then I would go home to a red-gray city, marvelously placed between river and mountain, where any departure from its original French austerity was likely to be in the direction of the exuberant, the unchastened, the fantastic. All new buildings in Canada, as in most of the States, lacked “school.”

“School” was, more or less in secret, the preoccupation of my youth—“school” with some such variation from traditional classic lines as would create or stimulate the indigenous. I had not yet learned what New York was to teach me later—that necessity was the mother of art, and that pure new styles were formed not by any one’s ingenuity or by the caprice of changing taste, but because human needs demanded them. Rejecting the art nouveau, which later made its permanent home in Germany, I combined all the lines in which great buildings had ever been designed, from the Doric to the Georgian, in the hope of evolving a type which the world would recognize as distinctively Canadian, and to which I should give my name. In imagination I built castles, cathedrals and theaters, homes, hotels and offices. They were in the style to be known as Melburyesque, and would draw students from all parts of the architectural earth to Montreal.

It was not an unworthy dream, and even if I could never have worked it out I might have made of it something of which not wholly to be ashamed. But as early as before I went to the Beaux Arts the curse of Canada—the curse, more or less, of all northern peoples—began to be laid upon me. In Paris I had some respite from it, but almost as soon as I had hung out my shingle at home I was suffering again from its cravings. I will not say that I put up no fight, but I put up no fight commensurate with the evil I had to face. The result was what I have told you, and for which I now had to suffer in my soul the most scorching form of recompense.

The point I found it difficult to decide was as to whether or not I ever wanted to see Regina Barry again—or whether I had it in me to go back and show myself to her in the state from which I had fallen more than three years before. In the end it was that possibility alone which enabled me to endure the real coming of the dawn.

For it came—this new day which out of darkness might be bringing me a new life.

As I lay with my face turned toward the west I got none of its first glories. Even on a cloudy morning, with a spattering of rain, I knew there must be splendors in the east, if no more than gray and lusterless splendors. Light to a gray world is as magical as hope to a gray heart; and as I watched the lamps on the New Jersey heights grow wan, while the river unbared its bosom to the day, that thing came to me which makes disgrace and shame and humiliation and every other ingredient of remorse a remedy rather than a poison.

I myself was hardly aware of the fact till Lovey and I had crept out of our cubby-hole, because all round us men were going to work. Sleepers in the open generally rise with daylight, but we had kept longer than usual to our refuge because we didn’t want to fare forth into the rain. As sooner or later it would come to a choice between going out and being kicked out, we decided to move of our own accord.

I must leave to your imagination the curious sensation of the down and out in having nothing to do but to get up, shake themselves, and walk away. On waking after each of these homeless nights it had seemed to me that the necessity for undressing to go to bed and dressing when one got up in the morning was the primary distinction between being a man and being a mere animal. Not to have to undress just to dress again reduced one to the level of the horse. Stray dogs got up and went off to their vague leisure just as Lovey and I were doing. Not to wash, not to go to breakfast, not to have a duty when washing and breakfasting were done—knocked out from under one all the props that civilization had built up and deprived one of the right to call oneself a man.

I think it was this last consideration that had most weight with me as Lovey and I stood gazing at the multifarious activities of the scene. There were men in sight, busy with all kinds of occupations. They were like ants; they were like bees. They came and went and pulled and hauled and hammered and climbed and dug, and every man’s eyes seemed bent on his task as if it were the only one in the world.

“It means two or three dollars a day to ’em if they ain’t,” Lovey grunted, when I had pointed this fact out to him. “Don’t suppose they’d work if they didn’t ’ave to, do ye?”

“I dare say they wouldn’t. But my point is that they do work. It’s Emerson who says that every man is as lazy as he dares to be, isn’t it?”

“Oh, anybody could say that.”

“And in spite of the fact that they’d rather be lazy, they’re all doing something. Look at them. Look at them in every direction to which your eyes can turn—droves of them, swarms of them, armies of them—every one bent on something into which he is putting a piece of himself!”

“Well, they’ve got ’omes or boardin’-’ouses. It’s easy enough to git a job when ye can give an address. But when ye carn’t—”