Part 1

Chapter 14,312 wordsPublic domain

Produced by Al Haines.

THE THREAD OF FLAME

By BASIL KING

Author of "THE CITY OF COMRADES" "GOING WEST" "THE INNER SHRINE" ETC.

Illustrated

Harper & Brothers _Publishers_ New York and London

THE THREAD OF FLAME

*ILLUSTRATIONS*

"Oh, as for cheering people up--I don't know.... A woman wants more than anything else in the world to feel that she's needed; and when she discovers she isn't--" . . . _Frontispiece_

She turned on me with a new flash in her blue eyes. "Look here! Tell me honest, now. Are you a swell crook--or ain't you?" "Suppose I say that--that I ain't." "Say, kid!" she responded, coldly, "talk like yourself, will you? ... If you're not a swell crook I can't make you out"

All these minutes she had been observing me, with that queer, half-choked cry as the result: "Oh, Billy, is this you?"

I had begun on collars and neckties when Vio said, "What kind of a girl was that who was here this afternoon?"

*PART I*

*THE THREAD OF FLAME*

*CHAPTER I*

Without opening my eyes I guessed that it must be between five and six in the morning.

I was snuggled into something narrow. On moving my knee abruptly it came into contact with an upright board. At the same time the end of my bed rose upward, so that my feet were higher than my head. Then the other end rose, and my head was higher than my feet. A slow, gentle roll threw my knee once more against the board, though another slow, gentle roll swung me back to my former position. Far away there was a rhythmic throbbing, like the beating of a pulse. I knew I was on shipboard, and for the moment it was all I knew.

Not quite awake and not quite asleep, I waited as one waits in any strange bed, in any strange place, for the waking mind to reconnect itself with the happenings overnight. Sure of this speedy re-establishment, I dozed again.

On awaking the second time I was still at a loss for the reason for my being at sea. I had left a port; I was going to a port; and I didn't know the name of either. I might have been on any ocean, sailing to any quarter of the globe. How long I had been on the way, and how far I had still to go, were details that danced away from me whenever I tried to seize them. I retained a knowledge of continents and countries; but as soon as I made the attempt to see myself in any of them my mind recoiled from the effort with a kind of sick dislike.

Nothing but a dull hint came to me on actually opening my eyes. An infiltration of gray light through the door, which was hooked ajar, revealed a mere slit in space, with every peg and corner utilized. A quiet breathing from the berth above my head told me that I shared the cabin with some one else. On the wall opposite, above a flat red couch piled with small articles of travel, two complete sets of clothing swung outward, or from side to side like pendulums, according to the movement of the ship.

I closed my eyes again. It was clearly a cabin of the cheaper and less comfortable order, calling up a faintly disagreeable surprise. It was from that that I drew my inference. I judged that whoever I was I had traveled before, and in more luxurious conditions.

Through the partly open door, beyond which there must have been an open porthole, came puffs of salt wind and the swish and roar of the ocean. Vainly I sought indications as to the point of the compass toward which we were headed. Imagination adapted itself instantly to any direction it was asked to take. In this inside cabin there was no suggestion from sun or cloud to show the difference between east and west.

Because I was not specially alarmed I did my best to doze again. Dozing seemed to me, indeed, the wisest course, for the reason that during the freedom of subconsciousness in sleep the missing connection was the more likely to be restored. It would be restored of course. I was physically well. I knew that by my general sensations. Young, vigorous, and with plenty of money, a mere lapse of memory was a joke.

Of being young and vigorous a touch on my body was enough to give me the assurance. The assumption of having plenty of money was more subtle. It was a habit of mind rather than anything more convincing. Certainly there was nothing to prove it in this cabin, which might easily have been second-class, nor yet in the stuff of my pajamas, which was thick and coarse. I noticed now, as I turned in my bunk, that it rasped my skin unpleasantly. With no effort of the memory I could see myself elegantly clad in silk night-clothing fastened with silk frogs; and yet when I asked myself when and where that had been no answer was accorded me.

I may have slept an hour when I waked again. From the sounds in the cabin I drew the conclusion that my overhead companion had got up.

Before looking at him I tested my memory for some such recollection as men sharing the same cabin have of their first meeting. But I had none. Farther back than that waking between five and six o'clock I couldn't think. It was like trying to think back to the years preceding one's birth; one's personality dissolved into darkness.

When I opened my eyes there was a man standing in the dim gray light with his back to me. Broad, muscular shoulders showed through the undershirt which was all he wore in addition to his trousers, of which the braces hung down the back. The dark hair was the hair of youth, and in a corner of the glass I caught the reflection of a chin which in spite of the lather I also knew to be young. Waiting till he had finished shaving and had splashed his face in the basin, I said, with a questioning intonation:

"Hello?"

Turning slowly, he lowered the towel from his dripping face, holding it out like a propitiatory offering. He responded then with the slow emphasis of surprise.

"Hel-lo, old scout! So you've waked up at last! Thought you meant to sleep the trip out."

"Have I been asleep long?"

"Only since you came on aboard."

It was on my tongue to ask, When was that? but a sudden prompting of discretion bade me seek another way.

"You don't mean to say I've slept more than--more than"--I drew a bow at a venture--"more than twenty-four hours?"

He made the reckoning as he rubbed his shining face with the towel.

"Let me see! This is Friday. We came on board late Tuesday night. When John-M'rie, our bedroom steward, brought me down to the cabin about half past nine you were already in your bunk doing the opium act. John-M'rie passed it up that you were a Frenchman, because you'd spoken French to him; but now I see you're just an American like myself."

So! I was an American but I could speak French. I could speak French sufficiently well for one Frenchman to mistake me for another. I stowed this data away, noting that if I had lost some of the power of memory the faculty of reasoning was unimpaired.

Weighing my questions so as to get the maximum of information with the minimum of betrayal, I waited before hazarding anything else till he had finished polishing a face which had the handsome ugliness of a pug.

"When do you think," was my next diplomatic venture, "that we shall get in?"

"Oh, hang!" The exclamation was caused by finding himself pawing at the foot of my berth in his search for the towel-rack. "Wednesday morning with good luck," he went on, feeling along the wall till he touched a kind of rod, behind which he tucked the towel. "With bad weather we'll not pick up the Nantucket Lightship before Thursday night. The old bucket's supposed to do it in eight days; but you know what that means these times."

I didn't know, since these times did not distinguish themselves in my mind from any other times. But the Nantucket Lightship was a reference I understood. We were sailing for New York. As an American I was therefore on my way home, though no spot on the continent put forth a special claim on me. I made brief experiments in various directions: New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Denver, Seattle. Nothing responded. The hills of New England, the mountains of California, the levees of Louisiana were alike easy for me to recall; but I was as detached from them as a spirit from another world.

These ideas floated--I choose the phrase as expressive of something more nebulous than active thinking--these ideas floated across my brain as I watched the boy rinse his tooth-brush, replace the tumbler, and feel along the wall for the flannel shirt hanging on a peg. He turned to me then with the twinkling, doggy look I was beginning to notice as a trait.

"Say, you'd eat a whale, wouldn't you? Haven't had a meal since Tuesday night, and now it's Friday. Any one would think you were up in the Ypres region before the eats got on to the time-table. Pretty good grub on board this old French tub, if you holler loud enough."

While he went on to suggest a menu for my breakfast I endeavored to deal with the new hints he had thrown out. He had spoken of Ypres. He had referred to short rations. I remembered that there was a war. Whether it was over, or whether it was going on, or whether I had taken part in it or not, I couldn't say; but I knew there had been, and perhaps that there still was, a war.

I tested myself as to that while I watched him button his collar and put on his tie; but all I drew forth was a sickening sense of noise, mutilation, and dirt, which might have been no more than the reaction from things I had read. Nothing personal to myself entered into these associations; no scene of horror that I could construct took me in as an actor.

My light-hearted companion would not, however, allow me to follow my own train of thought.

"Say," he laughed, "I know your name, but I don't believe you know mine." The laugh grew forced and embarrassed. "I've got the darnedest name for kidding a guy ever got stuck on him. Sometimes it makes me mad, and I think I'll go to law and change it; and more times I get used to it, till some smart Aleck breezes in and begins to hang it all over me again. What do you think it is? Give a guess now."

He said he knew my name--and I didn't know it myself! That was the first of my queer discoveries that appalled me. If I didn't know my own name ... But the boy laughed on.

"Give a guess now," he coaxed, buttoning up his waistcoat. "I'll give you two; but they must be awful funny ones."

Nothing funnier than Smith and Jones having occurred to me, he burst out with:

"Drinkwater! Isn't that the darnedest? I can't look sidewise at anything that isn't water before the other guys begin to kid me all over the lot. Many a time I _would_ drink water--and don't want anything but water to drink--and I'll be hanged if I don't feel ashamed to have them see me doing it--and me with that name! What do you know about that?"

As I was too gravely preoccupied to tell him what I knew about that, he began once more his curious pawing along the wall, till he seized a cap which he pulled down on his head.

"Oh, hang!" he muttered then. "That's yours."

This, too, was information, enabling me to assume that the clothing which hung on the same hook was mine also. I looked at it with some interest, but also with a renewed feeling of discomfort. It was the sort of suit in which I found it difficult to see myself. Of a smooth gray twill, sleek and provincial, there was that about it which suggested the rural beau.

Having momentarily lost his orientation, the boy clawed in the air again, touching first this object and then that, fingering it, considering it, locating it, till once more he got his bearings. All this he did with a slowness and caution that forced on me the recognition of the fact, which I might have perceived before, that he was blind.

Nothing betrayed it but his motions. The starry eyes were apparently uninjured. Only, when you knew his infirmity, you noticed that the starriness was like that of an electric lamp, bright, but with a brightness not connected with intelligence. It was an aimless brightness, directed at nothing. The blaze of the quick pupils was like that which a window flashes back to the sunset, all from outside, and due to nothing in the house.

Dressed now for leaving the cabin, he still had something to tell me.

"Say, there's one man on board who'll be glad to hear you've waked up. That's the doctor. Not the ship's doctor," he hastened to explain, "but my doctor. Say, he's about the whitest!"

My questions were inspired not so much by sympathy with him, though that affected me, as by the hope of getting sidelights on myself.

"Do you travel with a doctor?"

"Came over with him just before the war. I was his stenog. Name of Averill. Been in and out to see you five and six times a day ever since we sailed. Tell you all about him after I've had my breakfast. Off now to send in John-M'rie. Don't forget what I said about the griddle-cakes. They can give 'em to you good and greasy if you kick; but if you don't they'll just hand you out a pile of asbestos table-mats."

*CHAPTER II*

Before getting up to make the investigations on which I was so keen I waited to be rid of Jean-Marie. He came in presently--small, black, wiry, not particularly clean, and with an oily smell, but full of an ingratiating kindness. When I had trumped up an explanation of my abnormally long sleep I set him to separating my hand-luggage from my cabin-mate's, nominally for the sake of convenience, but really that I might know which was mine.

The minute he had left with my order for breakfast I sprang from my bunk. I searched first the pockets of my clothes. There was nothing in them but a handkerchief, a few French coins, and a card giving the number of a cabin, the number of a seat at a table in the dining-saloon, and the name of Mr. Jasper Soames. It was a name that to me meant nothing. Referring it to my inner self, nothing vibrated, nothing rang. It was like trying to clink a piece of money on wool or cork or some other unresponsive material.

My clothing itself was what I had guessed from the inspection made from my berth. It suggested having been bought ready to wear, a suggestion borne out by the label of what was apparently a big department store, the Bon Marche, at Tours. My cap had the same label, and my hard felt hat no maker's name at all.

I began on the bags which Jean-Marie had segregated as my property. There were two, a hand-bag and a suit-case, neither of them tagged with a name. The hand-bag contained bottles, brushes, handkerchiefs, all of the cheaper varieties. Where there was anything to indicate the place at which they had been purchased it was always the Bon Marche at Tours.

In the suit-case, which was unlocked, and which I opened feverishly, there was a suit almost identical with that hanging on the hook, a little linen, a few changes of underclothing, a small supply of socks, collars, and other such necessities, all more or less new, some of them still unworn, but with not so much as an initial to give a clue to the owner. It struck me--and I made the observation with a frightened inward laugh--that a man running away from detection for a crime would fit himself out in just this way.

Having repacked the bags, I stood at a loss, in the sense that for the first time I felt stunned. The position was promising to be more serious than I had thought it possible for it to become. There were so many things to think of that I couldn't see them all before me at a glance.

Standing in the middle of the narrow floor, steadying myself by a hand on the edge of Drinkwater's bunk, I suddenly caught my reflection in the glass. It was a new line to follow up. A look into my own eyes would reforge those links with myself that had trembled away. I went closer, staring at the man who now confronted me.

It is an odd experience to gaze at yourself and see a stranger; but that is what happened to me now. The face that gazed back at me was one which, as far as I could tell, I had never seen in my life. I had seen faces like it, hundreds of them, but never precisely this face. It was the typical face of the brown-eyed, brown-haired Anglo-Saxon, lean, leathery, and tanned; but I could no more connect it with my intimate self than I could Drinkwater's face, or Jean-Marie's.

It was that of a man who might have been thirty-two, but who possibly looked older. I mean by that that there was a haggardness in it which seemed to come of experience rather than from time. Had you passed this face in the street you would have said that it was that of a tall, good-looking young fellow with a brown mustache, but you would have added that the eyes had the queer, far-away luminosity of eyes that have "seen things." They would have reminded you of Drinkwater's eyes--not that they were like them, but only because of their fixed retention of images that have passed away from the brain.

My next thought was of money. So far I had found nothing but the few odd coins in my pockets; but that I had plenty of it somewhere I took as a matter of course. I know now by experience that people in the habit of having money and people in the habit of not having it are led by different "senses." In the one case it is a sense of limitation; in the other of liberty. It is like the difference between the movements of a blind man and those of one who can see--a tactful feeling of every step in contrast with the ease to come and go. Of all the distractions induced by poverty and wealth it is one that appeals to me now as the most significant. Merely to do without things, or merely to possess things, is matter of little importance. A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth, we are told on high authority; but it does consist in his state of mind. To be always in a state of mind in which restriction is instinctive is like always creeping as a baby and never learning to walk.

But as far as money went I was free. I had never been without it. I had no conception of a life in which I couldn't spend as much as I reasonably wished. As I had been in Europe, I probably had a letter of credit somewhere, if I could only put my hand on it. On arriving in New York I should of course have access to my bank-account.

It occurred to me to look under my pillow, and there, sure enough, was a little leather purse. That it was a common little purse was secondary to the fact that it was filled. Sitting on the edge of the couch, I opened it with fingers that shook with my excitement. It contained three five-hundred-franc notes, two for a hundred, some hundred and fifty in gold, and a little silver, nearly four hundred dollars in all. I seemed to know that roughly it was the kind of sum I generally carried on my person when abroad.

After a hasty scrubbing up I crept back into bed, and waited for Jean-Marie to bring my breakfast.

It was my first thought that I must not let him see that anything was wrong. I must let no one see that. The reason I had given him for my extraordinary sleep, that of having long suffered from insomnia and being relieved by the sea air, would have to pass, too, with Drinkwater's friend the doctor, should he come to see me. No one, no one, must suspect that for so much as an hour the sense of my identity had escaped me. The shame I felt at that--a shame I have since learned to be common to most victims of the same mishap--was overwhelming. Rather than confess it I could own to nearly anything in the nature of a crime.

But it was no one's business but my own. I comforted myself with that reflection amid much that I found disturbing.

What I chiefly found disturbing was my general environment. I couldn't understand this narrow cabin, these provincial foreign clothes. While I was sorry for Drinkwater's blindness, I disliked the closeness of contact with one I regarded as my inferior. I am not saying that I took this situation seriously. I knew I could extricate myself from it on arriving in New York. The element in it that troubled me was my inability to account for it. What had I been doing that I should find myself in conditions so distasteful? Why should I have wanted to obliterate my traces? It was obvious that I had done it, and that I had done it with deliberation. Being Somebody in the world, I had made myself Nobody, and for that I must have had a motive. Was it a motive that would confront me as soon as I had become Somebody again? That I should have lost the sense of my identity was bad enough in itself; but that I should reappear in a role that was not my own, and with a name I was sure I had never borne, was at once terrifying and grotesque.

*CHAPTER III*

It occurred to me that I could escape some of my embarrassment by asking Drinkwater to stop his friend the doctor from looking in on me; but before I had time to formulate this plan, and while I was sitting up crosslegged in my berth, eating from the tray which Jean-Marie had laid on my knees, there was a sharp rap on the door. As I could do nothing but say, "Come in," the doctor was before me.

"Good!" he said, quietly, without greeting or self-introduction. "Best thing you could be doing."

The lack of formality nettled me. I objected to his assumption of a right to force himself in uninvited.

I said, frigidly: "I shall be out on deck presently. If you want to see me, perhaps it would be easier there."

"Oh, this is all right." He made himself comfortable in a corner of the couch, propping his body against the rolling of the ship with a fortification of bags. "Glad you're able to get up and dress. I'm Doctor Averill."

To give him to understand that I was not communicative I took this information in silence. My coldness apparently did not impress him, and, sitting in the corner diagonally opposite to mine, he watched me eat.

He was one of those men in whom personality disappears in the scientific observer. His features, manners, clothing, were mere accidents.

He struck you as being wise, though with a measure of sympathy in his wisdom. Small in build, the dome of his forehead would have covered a man of twice his stature. A small, dark mustache was no more consciously a point of personal adornment than a patch of stonecrop to a rock. When he took off his cap his baldness, though more extensive than you would have expected in a man who couldn't have been older than forty-five, was the finishing-touch of the staid.

"You've been having a long sleep."

"Yes."

"Making up for lost time?"

"Exactly."

"Been at the front?"

It was the kind of a question I was afraid of. I knew that if I said, "Yes," I should have to give details, and so I said, "No."

"Look as if you had been."

"Do I?"

"Often leaves some sort of hang-over--"

"It couldn't do that in my case, because I wasn't there."

He tried another avenue of approach. "Drinkwater told me you were a Frenchman."

"That seems to have been a mistake of our steward."

"But you speak the language."

"Yes, I speak it."

"You must speak it very well."

"Probably."

"Have you lived much in France?"

"Oh, on and off."

"Had a position over there?"

It seemed to be my turn to ask a question. I shot him a quick glance. "What sort of position do you mean?"

"Oh, I didn't know but what you might have been in a shop or an office--"