Part 12

HE joy that had sung through Anthony shrunk into an intolerable pain like an icicle thrust into his heart; he swallowed convulsively a spoonful of soup, tasteless, scalding hot, and put the spoon down with a clatter. He half rose from the chair, with his arms extended, as if by that means he could ward off the terrible misfortune that had befallen him. Thomas Meredith, unaware of Anthony's drawn face, his staring gaze, continued to eat with gusto the unspeakable liquid, and the waiter uncorked the champagne with a soft explosion. The wine flowed bubbling into their glasses, and Tom held his aloft. “To your good luck,” he proclaimed, but set it down untouched at Anthony's pallor.

“What's the matter--sick? It's the beer and cocktail, it always does it.”

“It's not that,” Anthony said very distinctly.

His voice sounded to him like that of a third person. He was laboring to adjust the tumult within him to the fact of Eliza's death; he repeated half aloud the term “dead” and its whispered syllable seemed to fill the entire world, the sky, to echo ceaselessly in space. From the stringed instruments above came the refrain of a popular song; and, subconsciously, mechanically, he repeated the words aloud; when he heard his own voice he stopped as though a palm had been clapped upon his mouth.

“What is it?” Tom persisted; “don't discompose this historical banquet.” The waiter replaced the soup with fish, over which he spread a thick, yellow sauce. “Go on,” Anthony articulated, “go on--” he emptied his champagne glass at a gulp, and then a second. “Certainly a fresh quart,” his companion directed the waiter.

Eliza was dead! pneumonia. That, he told himself, was why she had not answered his letter, why, on the steps at Hydrangea House, Mrs. Dreen--hell! how could he think of such things? Eliza... dead, cold who warm had kissed him; Eliza, for whom all had been dreamed, planned, undertaken, dead; Eliza gone from him, gone out of the sun into the damned and horrible dirt. Tom, explaining him satisfactorily, devoted himself to the succession of dishes that flowed through the waiter's skillful hands, dishes that Anthony dimly recognized having ordered--surely years before. “You're drunk,” Thomas declared.

He drank inordinately: gradually a haze enveloped him, separating him from the world, from his companion, a shadowy shape performing strange antics at a distance. Sounds, voices, penetrated to his isolation, rent thinly the veil that held at its center the sharp pain dulled, expanded, into a leaden, sickening ache. He placed the yellow bank note on a silver platter that swayed before him, and in return received a crisp pile, which, with numb fingers, he crowded into a pocket. He would have fallen as he rose from his chair if Tom had not caught him, leading him stumbling but safely to the street.

“Don't start an ugly drunk,” Thomas Meredith begged. Without a word, Anthony turned and, with stiff legs, strode into the night. Eliza was dead; he had had something to give her, a surprise, but it was too late. A great piece of good fortune had overtaken him, he wanted to tell Eliza, but... he collided with a pedestrian, and continued at a tangent like a mechanical toy turned from its course. His companion swung him from under the wheels of a truck. “Wait,” he panted, “I'm no Marathon runner, it's hotter'n Egypt.”

The perspiration dripped from Anthony's countenance, wet the clenched palms of his hands. He walked on and on, through streets brilliantly lighted and streets dark; streets crowded with men in evening clothes, loafing with cigarettes by illuminated playbills, streets empty, silent save for the echo of his hurried, shambling footsteps. Eliza was lost, out there somewhere in the night; he must find her, bring her back: but he couldn't find her, nor bring her back--she was dead. He stopped to reconsider dully that idea. A row of surprisingly white marble steps, of closed doors, blank windows, confronted him. “This is where I retire,” Thomas Meredith declared. Anthony wondered what the fellow was buzzing about? why should he wait for him, Anthony Ball, at “McCanns”?

He considered with a troubled brow a world empty of Eliza; it wasn't possible, no such foolish world could exist for a moment. Who had dared to rob him? In a methodical voice he cursed all the holy, all the august, all the reverent names he could call to mind. Then again he hurried on, leaving standing a ridiculous figure who shouted an incomprehensible sentence.

He passed through an unsubstantial city of shadows, of sudden, clangoring sounds, of the blur of lights swaying in strings above his head, of unsteady luminous bubbles floating before him through ravines of gloom; bells rang loud and threatening, throats of brass bellowed. His head began to throb with a sudden pain, and the pain printed clearly on the bright suffering of his mind a stooping, dusty figure; leaden eyes, a grey face, peered into his own; slack lips mumbled the story of a boy dead long ago--Eliza, Eliza was dead--and of a red necktie, a Sunday suit; a fearful figure, a fearful story, from the low mutter of which he precipitantly fled. Other faces crowded his brain--Ellie with her cool, understanding look, his mother, his father frowning at him in assumed severity; he saw Mrs. Dreen, palely sweet in a starlit gloom. Then panic swept over him as he realized that he was unable, in a sudden freak of memory, to summon into that intimate gallery the countenance of Eliza. It was as though in disappearing from the corporeal world she had also vanished from the realm of his thoughts, of his longing. He paused, driving his nails into his palms, knotting his brow, in an agony of effort to visualize her. In vain. “I can't remember her,” he told an indistinct human form before him. “I can't remember her.”

A voice answered him, thin and surprisingly bitter. “When you are sober you will stop trying.”

And then he saw her once more, so vivid, so near, that he gave a sobbing exclamation of relief. “Don't,” he whispered, “not... lose again--” He forgot for the moment that she was dead, and put out a hand to touch her. Thin air. Then he recalled. He commenced his direct, aimless course, but a staggering weariness overcame him, the toylike progress grew slower, there were interruptions, convulsive starts.

LIII

AT the same time the haze lightened about him: he saw clearly his surroundings, the black, glittering windows of stores, the gleaming rails which bound the stone street. His hat was gone and he had long before lost the bundle that contained his linen. But the loss was of small moment now--he had money, a pocketful of it, and forty-seven thousand dollars waiting in Ellerton: his father was a scrupulous, truthful and exact man.

Eliza and he would have been immediately married, gone to a little green village, under a red mountain; Eliza would have worn the most beautiful dresses made by a parrot; but that, he recognized shrewdly, was an idiotic fancy--birds didn't make dresses. And now she was dead.

He entered a place of multitudinous mirrors reflecting a woman's flickering limbs, sly and bearded masculine faces, that somehow were vaguely familiar.

“Champagne!” he cried, against the bar.

“Your champagne'll come across in a schooner.”

But, impatiently, he shoved a handful of money into the zinc gutter. “Champagne!” he reiterated thickly. The barkeeper deduced four dollars and returned the balance. “Sink it,” he advised, “or you'll get it lifted on you.”

With the wine, the mist deepened once more about him; the ache--was it in his head or his heart?--grew duller. He had poured out a third glass when a hand was laid upon his shoulder, and whirling suspiciously, he saw a uniform cap, a man's gaunt face and burning eyes.

“Brother,” the latter said, “brother, shall we leave this reeking sink, and go out together into God's night?”

Blinking, Anthony recognized the livery, the accents, of the Salvation Army. A sullen anger burned within him--this man was a sort of official connection of God's, who had killed Eliza. He smoothed out his face cunningly, moved obediently toward the other, and struck him viciously across the face. Pandemonium rose instantly about him, an incredible number of men appeared shouting, gesticulating, and formed in a ring of blurred, grinning faces. The jaw of the Salvation Army man was bright with blood, dark drops fell on his threadbare coat. His hand closed again on Anthony's shoulder.

“Strive, brother,” he cried. “The Mansion door is open.”

Anthony regarded him with insolent disdain. “Ought to be exposed,” he articulated, “whole thing... humbug. Isn't any such--such... Eliza's dead, ain't she?”

A ripple of merriment ran about the circle of loose, stained lips; the curious, ribald eyes glittered with cold mirth; the circle flattened with the pressure of those without, impatient for a better view. Anthony surveyed them with impotent fury, loathing, and they met his passionate anger with faces as stony, as inhuman, as cruel, carved masks. He heard _her_ name, the name of the gracious and beautiful vision of his adoration, repeated in hoarse, in maculate, in gibing tones.

“She's dead,” he repeated sharply, as though that fact should impose silence on them; “you filthy curs!” But their approbation of the spectacle became only the more marked.

The Salvation Army man fastened his hectic gaze upon Anthony; he was, it was evident, unaware of the blood drying upon his face, of the throng about them. “There is no death,” he proclaimed. “There is no death!”

“But she _is_ dead,” Anthony insisted; “pneumonia... with green eyes and foggy hands.” They began an insane argument: Eliza was gone, Anthony reiterated, the other could not deny that she was lost to life, to the sun. He recalled statements of Rufus Hardinge's, crisp iconoclasms of Annot's, and fitted them into the patchwork of his labored speech. Texts were flung aloft like flags by the other; ringing sentences in the incomparable English of King James echoed about the walls, the bottles of the saloon and beat upon the throng, the blank hearts, the beery brains, of the spectators. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” he orated, “for they... for they...”

LIV

THAT word--purity, rang like a gong in Anthony's thoughts: Eliza had emphasized it, questioning him. The term became inexplicably merged with Eliza into one shining whole--Eliza, purity; purity, Eliza. A swift impression of massed, white flowers swept before him, leaving a delicate and trailing fragrance. He had a vision of purity as something concrete, something which, like a priceless and fragile vase, he guarded in his hands. It had been a charge from her, a trust that he must keep unspotted, inviolable, that she would require--but she was gone, she was dead.

“... through the valley of the shadow,” the other cried.

She had left him; he stood alone, guarding a meaningless thing, useless as the money in his pocket.

A man with bare, corded arms and an apron, broke roughly through the circle; and with a hand on Anthony's back, a hand on the back of his opponent, urged them toward the door. “You'll have to take this outside,” he pronounced, “you're blocking the bar.”

An arm linked within Anthony's, and swung him aside. “Unavoidably detained by merest 'quaintance,” Thomas Meredith explained with ponderous exactitude. Unobserved, they found a place at the table they had occupied earlier in the evening. The latter ordered a fresh bottle, but was persuaded by Anthony to surrender the check which accompanied it.

A sudden hatred for the money that had come too late possessed him: if he had had the whole forty-seven thousand dollars there he would have torn it up, trampled upon it, flung it to the noisome corners of the saloon. It seemed to have become his for the express purpose of mocking at his sorrow, his loss. His hatred spread to include that purity, that virtue, which he had conceived of as something material, an actual possession.... That, at any rate, he might trample under foot, destroy, when and as it pleased him. Eliza was gone and all that was left was valueless. It had been, all unconsciously, dedicated to her; and now he desired to cast it into the mold that held her.

He fingered with a new care the sum in his pocket, an admirably comprehensive plan had occurred to him--he would bury them both, the money and purity, beneath the same indignity. Tom Meredith, he was certain, could direct his purpose to its fulfillment. Nor was he mistaken. The conversation almost immediately swung to the subject of girls, girls gracious, prodigal of their charms. They would sally forth presently and “see the town.” Tom loudly asseverated his knowledge of all the inmates of all the complacent quarters under the gas light. Before a cab was summoned Anthony stumbled mysteriously to the bar, returning with a square, paper-wrapped parcel.

“Port wine,” he ejaculated, “must have it... for a good time.”

LV

A SEEMINGLY interminable ride followed, they rattled over rough stones, rolled with a clacking tire over asphalt. A smell unnamable, fulsome, corrupt, hung in Anthony's nostrils; the driver objurgated his horse in a desperate whisper; Tom's head fell from side to side on his breast. The mists surged about Anthony, veiling, obscuring all but the sullen purpose compressing his heart, throbbing in his brain.

There was a halt, a rocking pavement and unctuous tones. Then a hall, a room, and the tinny racket of a piano, feminine voices that, at the same time, were hoarsely sexless, empty, like harsh echoes flung from a rocky void. A form in red silk took possession of Anthony's hand, sat by his side; a hot breath, a whisper, flattened against his ear. At times he could distinguish Tom's accents; he seemed to be arguing masterfully, but a shrill, voluble stream kept pace with him, silenced him in the end.

Anthony strove against great, inimical forces to maintain his sanity of action, ensure his purpose: he sat with a grim, haggard face as rigid as wood, as tense as metal. The cloudy darkness swept over him, impenetrable, appalling; through it he seemed to drop for miles, for years, for centuries; it lightened, and he found himself clutching the sides of his chair, shuddering over the space which, he had felt, gaped beneath him.

In moments of respite he saw, gliding through the heated glare, gaily-clad forms; they danced; yet for all the dancing, for all the colors, they were more sinister than merry, they were incomparably more grievous than gay. A tray of beer glasses was held before him, but he waved it aside. “Champagne,” he muttered. The husky voices commended him; a bare arm crept around his neck, soft, stifling; the red silk form was like a blot of blood on the gloom; it spread over his arm like a tide of blood welling from his torn heart.

He thought at intervals, when the piano was silent, that he could distinguish the sound of low, continuous sobbing; and the futility of grief afforded a contemptuous amusement. “It's fierce,” a shrill voice pronounced. “They ought to have took her somewhere else; this is a decent place.” A second hotly silenced this declaration. In the jumble of talk which followed he heard the title “captain” pronounced authoritatively, conclusively imposing an abrupt lull. Men entered. With an effort which taxed his every resource of concentration he saw that there were two; he distinguished two tones--one deliberate, coldly arrogant, the other explosive, iterating noisy assertions. Peering through the film before his eyes, Anthony saw that the first, insignificant in stature, exactly and fashionably dressed, had a countenance flat and dark, like a Chinaman's; the other was a fleshy young man in an electric blue suit, his neck swelling in a crimson fold above his collar, who gesticulated with a fat, white hand.

Anthony felt the attention of the room centered upon himself, he heard disconnected periods; “... to the eyes. Good fellow... threw friend out--one of them lawyer jags, too dam' smart.” A voice flowed, thick and gummy like molasses, from the redness at his side, “He's my fellow; ain't you, Raymond?”

A wave of deathly sickness swept up from the shuddering void and enveloped him. He summoned his dissipated faculties, formed his cold lips in readiness to pronounce fateful words, when he was diverted by the sharp impact of a shutting door, he heard with preternatural clearness a bolt slip in its channel. The young man in the blue suit had disappeared. Again the sobbing, low and distinct, rose and fell upon his hearing.

There was a general stir in the room; the form beside him rose; and he was lunging to his feet when, in the act of moving, he became immovable; he stood bent, with his hands extended, listening; he turned his head slowly, he turned his dull, straining gaze from side to side. Then he straightened up as though he had been opened by a spring.

“Who--who called?” he demanded. “Who called me--Anthony?”

In the short, startled silence which followed the room grew suddenly clear before him, the mist dissolved before a garish flood of gaslight that fell upon a grotesque circle of women in shapeless, bright apparel; he saw haggard, youthful countenances on which streaks of paint burned like flames; he saw eyes shining and dead like glass marbles; mouths drawn and twisted as though by torture. He saw the fragile, fashionably dressed youth with the flat face. No one of them could have called him in the clear tone that had swept like a silver stream through the miasma of his consciousness.

Again he heard it. “Anthony!” Its echo ran from his brain in thrills of wonder, of response, to the tips of his fingers. “Anthony!” Oh, God! he knew now, beyond all question, all doubt, that it was the voice of Eliza. But Eliza was dead. It was an inexplicable, a cunning and merciless jest, at the expense of his love, his longing.... “Anthony!” it came from above, from within.

A double, sliding door filled the middle of the wall, and, starting forward, he fumbled with its small, brass handles. A sudden, subdued commotion of curses, commands, arose behind him; hands dragged at his shoulders; an arm as thin and hard as steel wire closed about his throat. He broke its strangling hold, brushed the others aside. The door was bolted. Yes, it came from beyond; and from within came the sobbing that had hovered continuously at the back of his perception.

He shook the door viciously; then, disregarding the hands tearing at him from the rear, burst it open with his shoulder. He staggered in, looking wildly about.... It had, after all, been only a freak of his disordered mind, an hallucination of his pain. The room was empty but for the young man in electric blue, now with his coat over the back of a chair, and a girl with a torn waist, where her thin, white shoulder showed dark, regular prints, and a tangle of hair across her immature face.

The man in shirt sleeves rose from the couch, on which he had been sitting, with a stream of sudden, surprised oaths. The girl who stood gazing with distended eyes at Anthony turned and flashed through the broken door. “Stop her!” was urgently cried; “the hall door--” Anthony heard a chair fall in the room beyond, shrill cries that sank, muffled in a further space.

The two men faced him in the silent room: the larger, with an empurpled visage, bloodshot eyes, shook with enraged concern; the other was as motionless as a piece of furniture, in his wooden countenance his gaze glittered like a snake's, glittered as icily as the diamond that sparkled in his crimson tie folded exactly beneath an immaculate collar. Only, at intervals, his fingers twitched like jointed and animated straws.

An excited voice cried from the distance: “She's gone! Alice's face is tore open... out the door like a devil, and up the street in her petticoat.”

The man with the flushed face wilted. “This is as bad as hell,” he whimpered. “It will come out, sure. You--” he particularized Anthony with a corroding epithet. “The captain is in it deep... this will do for him, we'll all go up--”

“Why?” the other demanded. He indicated Anthony with his left hand, while the other stole into his pocket. “He brought her here... you heard the girl and broke into the room; there was a fight--a fight.” He drew nearer to Anthony by a step.

LVI

ANTHONY gazed above their heads. There, again, clear and sweet, his name shaped like a bell-note. The familiar scent of a springtide of lilacs swept about him; the placid murmur of water slipping between sodded banks, tumbling over a fall; the querulous hunting cry of owls hovered in his hearing, singing in the undertone of that pronouncement of his name out of the magic region of his joy.

“No good,” a voice buzzed, indistinct, immaterial. “Who'll shut this--? who'll get the girl?”

“The girl can't reach us alone....”

An intolerable scarlet hurt stabbed at Anthony out of a pungent, whitish cloud. There was a fretful report. A flat, dark face without expression, without the blink of an eyelid, a twitch of the mouth, loomed before him and then shot up into darkness. The hurt multiplied a thousand fold, it poured through him like molten metal, lay in a flashing pool upon his heart, filled his brain. He opened his lips for a protest, put out his hands appealingly. But he uttered no sound, his arms sank, grew stiff... the light faded from his eyes.... imponderable silence. Frigid night....

Far off he heard _her_ calling him, imperative, confident, glad. Her crystal tones descended into the abyss whose black and eternal walls towered above him. He must rise and bear to her that gift like a precious and fragile vase which he held unbroken in his hands. An ineffable fragrance deepened about him from the massed blooms rosy in the glow where she waited, drawing him up to her out of the chaotic wash beyond the worlds where the vapors of corrupted matter sank and sank in slow coils, falling endlessly, forever.

THE END