Part 13

"Man, if she heard your voice like that it would kill her. You don't _know_. No, I must go; there's no help for it, headache or no headache. Mildred dear, won't you call Annette? I told her she could go to the theater to-night, but now she'll have to get our tickets, and pack!" She wrung her hands. "Oh, dear! When a man's dead, he'd better stay dead!"

Mildred slipped from the room. A suspicion began to creep over me.

"Is there any special reason for my staying dead?"

"How _can_ you when you're alive? That's the important point. Vio will never forgive you for being alive--and not telling her."

"She will when she's heard."

"She's got to hear right away, and I'm going to take charge of it. You may say it's none of my business, but I'm making it mine. I've known Vio Torrance since we were tots together."

I ventured to remind her that Vio might be her friend, but that she was my wife.

"Wife!" she crowed, scornfully. "Have you treated her like a wife--to be alive all this time and never let her know! When I tell you that she's been in mourning for you and out again--positively out again-- Well, you can imagine!"

"I can imagine so many things--"

But she jerked her little person away from me toward the two fellows who were trying dully to follow the scene they were witnessing without being able to seize its drift.

"Take all this stuff back again to where you brought it from. I'm not going to buy any of it. The idea of Billy Harrowby--" She repeated the name with a squeal, "Billy _Harrowby!_ of all people in the world! Why, it's enough to drive me out of my senses. I suppose you don't know," she continued, switching back to me again, "that they've put a new man in your place at the Museum, over a year ago, a Frenchman; and that Vio has given them all your prints and etchings for a William Harrowby Memorial--that's what she called it--she had to do something of the sort after your tragic end, in common decency; and you considered a hero, something like Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger, and now what's it to be--and you alive?" A dramatic gesture seemed to claim this confusion as something for which Fate had made her specially responsible. "Lulu, take me away, for Heaven's sake! I shall never look at a Chinese rug again without thinking--"

When the two ladies, with arms around each other's waist, had passed into the hallway, and out of sight, I turned to my colleagues, saying merely:

"I think we'd better roll these up and beat it."

Neither made any comment till we were in the lorry on our way back to Creed & Creed's, when one of them said in an awe-stricken tone:

"For the love o' Mike, Brogan, ain't your name--_Brogan_?"

*CHAPTER VII*

Two mornings later I was in Boston, sitting in the lobby of one of the great hotels. I had come by order of a telegram from my brother-in-law, Wolf Torrance. A note handed me on my arrival, late the previous evening, requested me to wait for him before attempting to see Violet. From her I had had nothing.

I had come as I was, with the hundred and thirty dollars of my savings in my pocket, but without taking the time to dress otherwise than in my working-man's best. Examining myself closely, now that I was face to face with my old life again, I could see that by imperceptible degrees my whole appearance had taken on those shades which distinguish the working-man from men in more sophisticated walks in life. Vio Harrowby as the wife of a working-man, or of any one looking like a working-man, was an inconceivable image.

My leaving New York had been made simpler for me than I could have ventured to hope. Whatever the tale told by the lads who had accompanied me to East Seventy-sixth Street, it had awed the luggers, impressed the salesmen, and reached the ears of the Olympian gods. It was not often, I fancy, that Creed & Creed's was the scene of mystery. That there was a secret about me every one knew, of course; but it had been connected with vague romantic tales of squandering the family estate, of cheating at cards, or of other forms of aristocratic misdoings. So long as I didn't put on airs, and answered submissively to the name of Brogan, this was not laid up against me or treated otherwise than as a misfortune. Now that an explanation seemed to be coming to the light the effect, for that morning at least, was to strike my comrades dumb. They stared at me, but kept at a respectful distance, somewhat like school-boys with one of their number smitten by domestic calamity. Salesmen who, except for an order to pull out or put back a rug, had never taken the trouble to notice me, came and engaged me in polite conversation, while one or two of the partners made errands into the shop on purpose, as I surmised, to get a look at me. The single moment that could have been called dramatic fell to the Floater, who came in, during the forenoon, with a telegram and a special-delivery letter in his hand. They had been sent to Creed & Creed's, since that was my only known address.

"I suppose these wouldn't be for you," was the Floater's choice of words, as he offered them for my inspection.

The telegram was for William Harrowby, the letter to William Harrowby, Esquire.

"That's my name, my real name," I admitted, humbly.

It was natural for him to hide his curiosity under a veil of sputtering disdain.

"Thought it'd be. Never did take stock in that damfool name you give when you first come here. 'Twa'n't fit for a dog or a horse--and you goin' just as easy by the name o' Brogan. Couldn't any one _see_?"

As to what any one could see I didn't inquire, being too eager to open my telegram. Though I scarcely hoped that it could be from Vio my heart sank a little when I saw that it was not.

"Come at once. Stay at the Normandy. Wait for me before seeing Violet. Explanations expected. J. DEWOLFE TORRANCE."

The spirit of the letter was different. Bearing neither formal beginning nor signature, it was dated from the house in East Seventy-sixth Street.

"I am so glad for your sake. Though I do not understand, I have confidence. I have always had confidence--without understanding. Some day, perhaps, you will tell me; but that shall be as you please. Just now I only want you to know that almost from the beginning of our acquaintance I thought you had a wife. I can't tell you how or why the conviction was borne in on me; but it was. Possibly I was interested in you for her sake a little, with that kind of secret sisterhood which more or less binds all women together, and which is not inconsistent with the small mutual irritations we classify as feline. In any case I knew it--or I so nearly knew it as to be able to take it for granted. If you go back to your home, then, you will have more than my good wishes, you will both have them. Should there be anything to keep you apart you will have more than my good wishes still. Don't ask me why I say these things, because I scarcely know. Don't try to interpret me, either, for you are extremely likely to be wrong. In our talks together you must have seen that I am in rebellion against being bound by other people's rules of conduct, and as far as I have the courage I brave the inferences drawn from what I do. My weakness is that I have not much courage. All the same, as I want to give you a kind of blessing in this new turn in your life, I keep repeating of you some words which I think must come from Tennyson:

"'Go forth, and break through all, Till one shall crown thee, far in the spiritual city.'"

This letter, too, made my leaving New York easier. Possibly it was written with that intent. "Don't try to interpret me," she had said, and I saw the wisdom of following the counsel. As a matter of fact the new turn to the wheel taxed my mental resources to the utmost.

As nearly as I could judge, those mental resources were normal again. My return to the old conditions I can only compare to waking from a drugged unconsciousness. The repair of a broken telegraphic or telephonic connection might also give an idea of what had taken place in me. Re-establishment effected, messages went simply; that was all I could say. The mental rest induced by two years of physical exertion, with little or no thought for the morrow from any point of view, had apparently given the ruptured brain cells the time to reconstruct themselves. Physiologically I may be expressing myself inexactly; but that is of no moment. What is important is the fact that from the instant when Alice Mountney said, "You're Billy Harrowby," the complete function of the brain seemed to be resumed. There was no more in the nature of a shock than there is in remembering anything else forgotten.

More difficult to become accustomed to were the outward conditions. Having accepted the habits of poverty, those of financial ease seemed alien. They were uncomfortable, too, like an outlandish style of dress. To sleep in a luxurious bed, to order whatever I chose for breakfast, was as odd for me as a reversion to laces and ruffles in my costume. There was a marvelous thrill in it, however, with a sense of trembling anticipation. A soul on the outer edge of paradise, after a life of vicissitude and stint, would doubtless have some such vision of abundance and peace as that which filled my horizon.

But before Christian arrives at the Celestial City which is in sight he is reminded that a few difficulties remain to be faced, and in some such light I regarded the interview with Wolf. He came at last, pushing round the revolving door, and standing on the threshold with a searching look in his silly, hungry eyes. Hatted and fur-coated, he had that air of divine right to all that was best on earth which was one of the qualities that, to me at least, had always made him unbearable. Perhaps because I had had the same conviction about myself I could tolerate it less in him.

Every one called him Wolf, partly because of his name, but more because he looked like the animal. With a jaw extraordinarily long and narrow, emphasized rather than concealed by a beard trimmed carefully to a point, his smile lit up a row of gleaming upper teeth best described as fangs. His small eyes were at once eager, greedy, and fatuous; and yet there was that in his personality which stamped him as of recognized social superiority. In the same way that a picture can be spoken of as a poor example of a good school, Wolf might have been reckoned as a second-rate specimen of a thoroughbred stock. Even as he stood you would have put him down as belonging to the higher strata in any community, and in sheer right of his forebears a member of the best among its clubs.

Instead of going forward and making myself known I allowed him to discover me. It was one more proof of my having changed that more than once his eye traveled over me without recognition. It must be remembered that I was no longer seedy; I was only different. It was not the degree but the kind that put him out of his reckoning.

When in the end he selected me from the crowd it was rather as a possibility than as his very man. Coming forward with that inquiring, and yet doubtful, air which people take on when scarcely able to believe what they see, he halted with a bland, incredulous smile.

"Well!"

With feelings in no wise different from those of a man charged with a crime of which he knows himself guilty, I struggled to my feet:

"Hello, Wolf!"

Wolfs small eyes roamed from my head to my feet and from my feet to my head before he spoke again:

"So you've decided to come back."

The grin that accompanied these words was partly nervous, but partly due to his pose of taking life as the kind of joke which he was man-of-the-world enough to appreciate.

"As you see," I responded, with a sickly grin on my own part.

In some lifeless manner we shook hands, after which I asked him to be seated.

On his taking off his hat I observed that during the three years and more since I had seen him last he had grown bald, while, with something of a pang, I wondered for the first time if I should find a change in Vio.

"Why didn't you come before?"

"I should have come if I could. As a matter of fact, I couldn't."

"Couldn't--why?"

"Didn't know where to go."

"What's that mean?"

"Exactly what it says."

"That you didn't know where to--?"

I tapped my forehead. "Had a--had a--shock--or something."

His gleaming smile was saved from ferocity only by being inane.

"Went dotty?"

"If you like."

"Great Scott! But why--why didn't some one let us know?"

"They couldn't. I--I seem to have taken care of that. Perhaps I'd better--better tell you all about it, that is, as far as I know."

He nodded, taking out his cigar-case and offering me a cigar. When I declined it he took one himself, bit off the end, lighted it, and in general carried himself as if my approaching confidences wouldn't matter much. I resented this the less, knowing it to be his attitude toward every one and everything. All that I cared for was that he should be in a position to give a correct account to Violet, in case she insisted on hearing his report before seeing me.

"You remember how I came to go over and join the American Ambulance Corps in France?"

He said he did not remember it.

"Well, I didn't do it of my own accord. I--I loathed the idea. If we'd been in the war at the time of course I should have done anything I could; but we were not in the war. As a matter of fact, if Vio had only let me wait I could have been of more use in my own particular line."

"You mean what we used to call the old-woman line."

"If you choose to put it that way."

"Didn't you put it in that way yourself?"

"As a feeble joke, yes. But we'll let that pass. All I mean is that as head of the Department of Textiles in the Museum of Fine Arts I knew a lot of a subject that became of great importance when we went into the war; so that, if Vio had waited--"

"Vio," he grinned, "was like a bunch of other women who'd caught the fever of sacrifice, what? When all their swell lady friends in England and France were giving up their dear ones, they didn't want not to be in the swim. Don't think I didn't go through it, old chap. Vio was simply crazy to give up a dear one. Before she'd got you she'd been after me. When Hilda Swain drove her two sons into being stokers in the navy, and killed one of them with the unaccustomed work, I thought Vio would go off her chump with a sense of her uselessness to a great cause. Those were days when to be Vio's dear one meant to go in danger of your life."

A hundred memories crowded in on me.

"Do you think that was it? It wasn't that--that she wanted to get rid of me?"

His answer struck me oddly.

"Not a bit of it, not then. Lord, no!"

I repressed the questions these words called up, taking a minute to think the situation over.

"At any rate, I went," I continued, with outward calm. "It was after a rather stormy scene with Vio, in which she said she thought she had married a man and not a nervous old lady."

"Oh, she said worse than that to me, lots cf times, what?"

"Yes, but you weren't her husband; and you were not desperately in love with her."

"Often thought Vio was like one of those queer-mixed cocktails that 'll set chaps off their nuts who'll take a tumbler of whisky neat and never turn a hair."

"There's something in that," I agreed; "but it makes the kind of woman whose contempt is the harder to put up with. When she began handing it out to me--well, I went. That's all there is to be said about it. You tell me that Vio wanted to sacrifice a dear one; and she did. I was no more fit for the job I undertook than--than little Bobby would have been if he'd lived till then."

"That's another thing. Vio should have had more children, what?"

"Ah, well! She didn't want them. When little Bobby went she said she couldn't go through it all a second time, and so-- But I'm trying to tell you what happened."

"Well, go on."

I narrated my experiences in the Ambulance Corps in words that have been so often given in print that it is not worth while to repeat them. What has not so frequently been recorded, because not every one has felt it to the same degree, is the racking of spirit, soul, and body by the unrelieved horror of the days and nights. I suppose I must own to being in regard to all this more delicately constituted than the majority of men. There were others like me, but they were relatively not numerous. Of them, too, we hear little, partly because not all of those who survived like to confess the weakness, and few survived. If it were possible to get at the facts I think it would be found that among those who sickened and died a large proportion were predisposed by sheer inability to go on living any longer in this world of men. I could give you the names of not a few in whom the soul was stricken before the body was. They were for the most part sensitively organized fellows, lovers of the beautiful, and they simply couldn't live. Officially their deaths are ascribed to pneumonia or to something else; but the real cause, while right on the surface, was beyond the doctor's diagnosis.

I didn't sicken; and I didn't die; I wasn't even wounded. What happened was that at Bourg-la-Comtesse a shell came down in the midst of a bunch of us who were stretching our limbs and washing up after a night in a stifling dugout ... and some time during the following twenty-four hours I recovered consciousness, lying on my belly in the darkness, with my face buried in the damp grass of a meadow, like a dead man.

I lay for ten or fifteen minutes trying to reconstruct the happenings that had put me there, and to convince myself that I was unhurt. Except for a beast munching not far away, no living thing seemed to be near me. On the left the ruined walls of Bourg-la-Comtesse were barely visible through the starlight, while to my right a jagged row of tree-tops fringed the sky-line. In the velvety blackness in front of me the stars were dimmed by shells hanging over No Man's Land, Verey lights, darting upward, and radiant bursts of shrapnel. I remembered that our section had halted at an _abri_ a little to the west of the village, and dragging myself from the ground forced my chilled limbs to carry me toward the spot where some of my comrades might be left alive.

But whether I mistook the way, or whether they had gone off leaving me for dead, I was unable to explain to Wolf. I only know that I walked and walked, and found no one. The world had been suddenly deserted. Except for an occasional horse or cow, that paused in its grazing to watch me pass, or the scurrying of some small wild thing through a hedge, I seemed the only creature astir. Dead villages, dead chateaux, dead farms, dead gardens, dead forests, dead lorries, dead tanks, dead horses, dead men, and a dead self, or a self that had only partially come back to life, were the features of that lonely tramp through the darkness.

With no other aim than a vague hope of joining up again with my section I plodded on till dawn. Though my watch had run down, and there was no change as yet in the light, I knew when dawn was approaching by a sleepy twitter in a hedge. Another twitter awoke a few yards farther on, and then another and another. Presently the whole countryside was alive, not with song, but with that chirrupy hymn to Light which always precedes the sunrise, and ceases before the sun has risen. Wandering away from the front, by instinct, not on purpose, I was now in a region relatively untouched by calamity, with grapes hard and green in the vineyards and poppies in the ripening wheat-fields.

Between eight and nine I reached a village, where I breakfasted at a wine-shop, explaining myself as an American charged with a mission that was taking me across country. Stray soldiers being common, I had no harder task than to profit by the sympathy accorded to my British-seeming uniform. So I tramped on again, and on, always with a stupefied half-idea of finding my section, but with no real motive in my mind. If I had a real motive it was in a dull, blind, animal instinct to get away from the brutality in which I had been living for the past six months, even though I knew I should be headed off and turned back again.

But I wasn't. In that land of agony I went my way unheeded. I also went my way unheeding. It was the beginning of the more or less pointless pilgrimages I made later in New York. To my anguished nervous system there was a soothing quality in being on the move. So on the move I kept, hardly knowing why, except that it was to get away from what was right behind me.

And yet I had clearly the impression that I was merely enjoying a breathing spell. I didn't mean to run away. I knew I was Billy Harrowby, and that for my very name's sake I must return to my task at the first minute possible. It was only not possible, because as I continued my aimless drifting along the roads I got farther away from my starting-point.

Absolute mental confusion must have come by such gradual transitions that I have no memory of the stages of the change. I do recall that at a certain time and place I came to an understanding with myself that Billy Harrowby had been blown to bits by a shell near Bourg-la-Comtesse, and that I, who wore his uniform and carried his letter of credit in my pocket, was no more than his astral shape stalking through a world from which he had departed. To get rid of this astral shape, to get rid of everything that pertained to the man who had passed through horrors that would turn all future living into nightmare, began to seem to me a necessary task. Only by doing this could Billy Harrowby's ghost be laid, and the phantasms that walked with it dispelled. By the time I reached Tours the hallucination had assumed the form of a consecrated duty, and to it I applied myself as to some holy ceremonial rite.

In narrating this to Wolf some of the old vividness came back to me. I saw myself again inspecting all the environs of Tours--Plessis-les-Tours, Marmoutiers, Laroche-sur-Loire, and as far away as the junction at St.-Pierre--for suitable spots in which to lay Billy Harrowby down and become my real self. In the end I selected a small stream, the Padrille I think it is called, which flows into the Loire a mile or two beyond Plessis. There is a spot there where the stream flows through a wood, and there is a spot on the stream's bank where wood is denser than it is elsewhere.

Having selected this as the scene of Billy Harrowby's exit, the rest of my plans became easy. For two or three days I busied myself with discreetly purchasing a new outfit. I remember that it was a point of honor with me not to be too spendthrift with Billy Harrowby's cash, seeing that for the man who was to survive, anything, however modest, would be enough. Further than separating myself from the unhappy ambulance-driver who had seen such dreadful things since arriving in France I had no ambitions.

The purchases made, it was a simple matter to carry them to the bank of the Padrille and change completely. A soldier entered on one side of the Bois de Guenes, a civilian came out on the other. Neither soldier nor civilian was of interest to a people rejoicing in the news that the French had captured that morning the whole line of the Dent de la Ponselle.

From the Bois de Guenes I walked to the junction with the main line at St.-Pierre, and there the trail of my memories is lost. I have no recollection of taking the name of Jasper Soames, though I can see easily enough why I should have done it. When it became necessary to call myself something I seized the first bit of wreckage from the past that my mind could catch hold of. The name was there as a name, even when all its associations had disappeared beneath the waves that had swept over me.