Part 7

For a few hours that danger did not suggest itself. That is, I was so busy speculating as to Mildred Averill's meaning that I had no time to analyze the way I was taking it. Weighing her words, her impulses, her impatiences, I saw no more than that she might be offering her treasures at the feet of a wooden man, a carved and painted figment, without history or soul.

That is, unless I mistook her meanings as Malvolio mistook Viola's!

There was that side to it, too. It was the aspect of the case on which I dwelt all through my lonely dinner. I had not forgotten Boyd Averill's reception of me on the Sunday of the luncheon; I never should forget it. There is something in being in the house of a man who is anxious to get you out of it unlike any other form of humiliation. The very fact that he refrains from pointedly showing you the door only gives time for the ignominy to sink in. Nothing but the habit of doing certain things in a certain way carried me through those two hours and enabled me to take my departure without incivility. On going down the steps the sense that I had been kicked out was far more keen than if Averill had given way to the actual physical grossness.

Some of this feeling, I admit, was fanciful. It was due to the disturbed imagination natural to a man whose mental equipment has been put awry. Averill had been courteous throughout my visit. More than that, he was by nature kindly. Anywhere but in his own house his attitude to me would have been cordial, and for anything I needed he would have backed me with more than his good-will.

Nevertheless, that Sunday rankled as a poisoned memory, and one from which I found it impossible wholly to dissociate any member of his family. Though I could blame Mrs. Averill a little, I could blame Miss Averill not at all; and yet she belonged to the household in which I had been made to feel an unwelcome guest. That in itself might give me a clue to her sentiment toward me.

As I went on with my dinner I came to the conclusion that it did give me such a clue. I was the idiot Malvolio thinking himself beloved of Viola. Where there was nothing but a balked philanthropy I was looking for the tender heart. The dictionary teemed with terms that applied to such a situation, and I began to heap them on myself.

I heaped them on myself with a sense not of relief, but of disappointment. That was the odd discovery I made, as much to my surprise as my chagrin. Falling in love with anybody was no part of my program. It was out of the question for obvious reasons. In addition to these I was in love with some one else.

That is to say, I knew I had been in love; I knew that in the portion of my life that had become obscured there had been an emotional drama of which the consciousness remained. It remained as a dream remains when we remember the vividness and forget the facts--but it remained. I could view my personality somewhat as you view a countryside after a storm has passed over it. Without having witnessed the storm you can tell what it was from the havoc left behind. There was some such havoc in myself.

Just as I could look into the glass and see a face young, haggard, handsome, if I may use the word without vanity, that seemed not to be mine, so I could look into my heart and read the suffering of which I no longer perceived the causes. It was like looking at the scar of a wound received before you can remember. Your body must have bled from it, your nerves must have ached; even now it is numb or sensitive; but its history is lost to you. It was once the outstanding fact of your childish existence; and now all of which you are aware is something atrophied, lacking, or that shrinks at a touch.

In just that way I knew that passion had once flashed through my life, but had left me nothing but the memory of a memory. I could trace its path almost as easily as you can follow the track of a tornado through a town--by the wreckage. I mean by the wreckage an emotional weariness, an emotional distress, an emotional distaste for emotion; but above everything else I mean a craving to begin the emotion all over again.

I often wondered if some passional experience hadn't caused the shattering of the brain cells. I often wondered if the woman I had loved was not dead. I wondered if I might not even have killed her. Was that the crime from which I was running away? Were the Furies pursuing me? Was it to be my punishment to fall in love with another woman and suffer the second time because the first suffering had defeated its own ends in making me insensible?

All through the evening thoughts of this kind, now and then with a half-feverish turn, ran through my mind, till by the time I went to bed love no longer seemed impossible. It was appalling; and yet it had a fascination.

So for the next few days I walked with a vision pure, unobtrusive, subdued, holy in its way, which nevertheless broke into light and passion and flame that nobody but myself was probably aware of. I also gleaned from Lydia Blair, who had a journalistic facility in gathering personal facts, that Mildred Averill's place in New York life was not equal to her opportunities.

"There are always girls like that," Miss Blair commented. "They've got all the chances in the world, and don't know how to make use of them. She's not a bad looker, not when you come to study her; and yet you couldn't show her off with the dressiest models in New York."

I ventured to suggest that showing off might not be Miss Averill's ambition.

"And a good thing too, poor dear. If it was it would be the limit. She sure has the sense to know what she can't do. That's something. Look here, Harry," she continued, sharply, "I told you before that if you're going to take letters down from the dictaphone you've got to read them through to the end before you begin to transcribe. Then you'll know where the corrections come in. Now you've got to go back and begin all over again. See here, my dear. If you think I'm going to waste my perfectly good time giving you lessons that you don't listen to you've got your nerve with you."

It was one of my rare visits to Miss Flowerdew's dark front parlor, of which Drinkwater had the use, and I was making the call for a purpose. I knew there were certain afternoons when Miss Blair "breezed in," as she expressed it, to give some special lesson to her pupil; and I had heard once or twice that on such occasions Miss Averill, too, had come to lend him her encouragement. Nominally she brought a cylinder from which Drinkwater was to copy the letters her brother had dictated; but really her mission was one of sympathy. Seeing the boy in such good hands, and happy in his lot, I had the less compunction in leaving him alone. I left him alone, as I have said, in order not to be identified more than I could help with two stenographers.

My visit of this day was notably successful in that I obtained from Miss Blair her own summing up of the social position of the Averill family.

As far as they carried a fashionable tag it was musical. Mrs. Averill had a box at the opera, and was seen at all the great concerts. She entertained all the great singers and all wandering celebrities of the piano and violin. Before she went to Europe she had begun to make a place for herself with her Sunday afternoons, at which one heard the most renowned artists of the world singing or playing for friendship's sake. In her own special line she might by now have been one of the most important hostesses in New York had it not been for her constitutional weakness in "chucking things."

She had always chucked things just when beginning to make a success of them. She had chucked her career as a girl in good society in order to work for the concert stage. She had chucked the concert stage in order to marry a rich man. She had chucked the advantages of being a rich man's wife while in the full tide of social recognition. With immense ambitions, she lacked steadiness of purpose, and so, according to Miss Blair, she was always "getting left." Getting left implied that as far as New York was concerned Lulu Averill was nowhere when she might easily have been somewhere, with a consequent feeling on her part of boredom and disappointment.

It reacted on her husband in compelling him to work in unsettled conditions and without the leisure and continuity so essential to research. Miss Blair's expression was that the poor man never knew where he was at. Adoring his wife, he was the more helplessly at her beck and call, for the reason that he had long ago come to the knowledge that his wife didn't adore him. Holding her only by humoring her whims, he was just now struggling with her caprice to go back to the concert stage again.

To Mildred Averill all this made little difference because she had none of the aims commonly grouped as social. Miss Blair understood that from her childhood she had been studious, serious, living quietly with her elderly parents at Mornstown, and acquiring their elderly tastes. "Its fierce the way old people hamper a girl," Lydia commented. "Just because they're your father or mother they think they've a right to suck your life-blood like a leech. My mother died when I was sixteen," she added, in a tone of commendation. "Of course you're lonely-like at times--but then you're free." Freedom to Mildred Averill, however, was all the same as being bound. She didn't know how to make use of liberty or give herself a good time. When her father died she stayed on with her mother at Morristown, and when the mother "punched the clock for the next life"--the figure was Miss Blair's--she simply joined her brother and sister-in-law in New York. After she went out of mourning she was sometimes seen at a concert or the opera with Mrs. Averill. There was no more to her social life than that and an occasional dinner. "Gray-blooded, I call it," Miss Blair threw in again, "and a sinful waste of good chances. My! if I had them!"

"Perhaps you can have them," I suggested, Harry Drinkwater having gone for a minute to his room. "Miss Averill told me one day that she thought of taking a house and asking you to live with her."

"Me? Do you see me playing second fiddle to a girl as sure bound to be an old maid as I'm bound to be--"

"An adventuress."

"I'm bound to be an adventuress--if I like."

"Oh, then there's a modification to your program. The last time we talked about it you were going to do it. Now it's only--if you like."

Her lovely blue eyes shot me a look of protest. "You wouldn't want me to do it--if I didn't like. The worst of being an adventuress is the kind of guys you must adventure with. You don't mean to thrust them down my throat."

"Oh, I'm not urging you at all. I did happen to see you one evening at the restaurant Blitz--"

She nodded. "I saw you. What were you doing there? You don't feed at places like that."

"How do you know I don't?"

"Well, I don't know. That's just the trouble. Sometimes I think you're a--"

"I'm a--what?"

"See here! You give me the creeps. Do you know it?"

"How?"

"Well, you saw that guy I was with at the Blitz."

"Looked like a rich fathead."

"Yes; but you know he's a rich fathead. He's as clear as a glass of water. You're like"--she paused for a simile--"you're like something that might be a cocktail--and might be a dose of poison." 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?" She threw her hands apart, palms outward. "Well, if you're not a swell crook I can't make you out."

"But as a swell crook you could. Is that it?"

"Why do you keep hanging round Miss Averill?" she asked, bluntly. "What do you expect to get by that?"

"What do you expect to get by asking me?"

Her reply was a kind of challenge. "The truth. Do you know it?"

I felt uncomfortable. It was one of the rare occasions on which I had seen this flower-like face drop its bantering mask and grow serious. The _voix de Montmartre_ had deepened in tone and put me on the defensive.

"I thought you told me on board ship that you looked on all people of Miss Averill's class as the prey of those in--in ours."

"I don't care what I told you on board ship. You're to keep where you belong as far as she's concerned--or I'll give the whole bloomin' show away, as they say in English vawdville."

"There again; it's what you said you wouldn't do. You said you'd be my friend--"

"I'll be your friend right up to there--but that's the high-water mark."

I thought it permissible to change my front. "If it comes to that, I've done no hanging round Miss Averill on my own account. It's you who've come for me to the Hotel Barcelona every time--"

"Harry made me do that; but even so--well, you don't have to fall in the water just because you're standing on a wharf."

"It doesn't hurt the water if you do. You can get soaked, and make yourself look ridiculous, but the beautiful blue sea doesn't mind."

"You can make it splash something awful, and send ripples all over the lot. Don't you be too sure of not being dangerous. You wouldn't be everybody's choice--but you have that romantic way--like a prince-guy off the level--and she not used to men--or having a lot of them around her all the time, like--"

"Like you."

"Like me," she accepted, composedly; "and so if I see anything that's not on the square I'll--I'll hand out the right dope about you without the least pity."

"And when you hand out the right dope about me what will it be?"

"You poor old kid, what do you think it will be? If you make people think you're a swell crook it's almost the same as being one."

"But do I make people think I'm a swell crook?"

"You make me."

"What do I do to--"

"It's not what you do, it's what you don't do--or what you don't say. Why don't you tell people who you are, or what your business is, or where you come from? Everybody can hitch on to something in a world, but you don't seem to belong anywhere. If any one asks you a question it's always No! No! No! till you can tell what your answer will be beforehand. Surely there's a Yes somewhere in your life! If you always hide it you can't blame people for thinking there's something to be hidden."

"And yet you'd be my friend."

"Oh, I've been friends to worse than that. I wasn't born yesterday--not by a lot. All I say is, 'Hands off little old Milly Averill!' but for the rest you can squeak along in your own way. I'm a good sort. I don't interfere with any one."

Drinkwater being on the threshold and the conversation having yielded me all I hoped to get, I made an excuse for going. Miss Averill had not appeared, and now I was glad of it. Had she come I could not have met her under Lydia's cold eye without self-consciousness. It began to strike me, too, that the best thing I could do was to step out from the circle of all their lives and leave no clue behind me.

*CHAPTER XII*

It was not a new reflection, as you know; and of late it had been growing more insistent. The truth is that I needed to find work. My nearly one hundred dollars was melting away with unbelievable rapidity. Expenses being reduced to a rule of thumb, I could count the days after which I shouldn't have a cent. Winter was coming. Already there were mornings with the nip of frost in them. I should require boots, clothes, warm things of all sorts. Food and shelter I couldn't do without.

It was the incredible, the impossible. Nebuchadnezzar driven from men and eating grass like an ox couldn't have been more surprised to see himself in such a state of want. Somewhere, out of the memories that had not disappeared, I drew the recollection that to need boots and not be able to afford them had been my summary of an almost inhuman degree of poverty. I could remember trying to picture what it would be like to find myself in such a situation and not being able to do so. I had bought a new pair since coming to New York, and they were already wearing thin.

It came to me again--it came to me constantly, of course--that I could save myself by going to some sympathetic person and telling him my tale. I rejected now the idea of making Boyd Averill my confidant; but there were other possibilities. There were doctors, clergymen, policemen. As a matter of fact, people who suffered from amnesia, and who didn't know their names, generally applied to the police.

In the end I opted for a clergyman as being the most human of these agencies. Vaguely I was aware that vaguely I belonged to a certain church. I had tested myself along the line of religion as well as along other lines, with the discovery that the services of one church were familiar, while those of others were not.

From the press I learned that the Rev. Dr. Scattlethwaite, the head of a large and wealthy congregation, was perhaps the best known exponent in New York of modern scientific beneficence, and by attendance at one of his services I got the information that at fixed hours of every day he was in his office at his parish house for the purpose of meeting those in trouble. It was a simple matter, therefore, to present myself, and be met on the threshold of his waiting-room by the young lady who acted as his secretary.

She was a portly young lady, light on her feet, quick in her movements, dressed in black, with blond fluffy hair, and a great big welcoming smile. The reception was much the same as in any doctor's office, and I think she diagnosed my complaint as the drug habit. Asking me to take a seat she assured me that Doctor Scattlethwaite would see me as soon as he was disengaged. When she had returned to her desk, where she seemed to make endless notes, I had leisure to look about me.

Except for a large white wooden cross between two doors, it might have been a waiting-room in a hospital. Something in the atmosphere suggested people meeting agonies--or perhaps it was something in myself. As far as that went, there were no particular agonies in the long table strewn with illustrated papers and magazines, nor in the bookrack containing eight or ten well-thumbed novels. Neither were agonies suggested by the Arundel print of the Resurrection on one bit of wall-space, nor by the large framed photograph of the Arch of Constantine on another. All the same there was that in the air which told one that no human being in the world would ever come into this room otherwise than against his will.

And yet in that I may be wrong, considering how many people there are who enjoy the luxury of sorrow. I guessed, for example, that the well-dressed woman in mourning who sat diagonally opposite me was carrying her grief to every pastor in New York and refusing to be comforted by any. Another woman in mourning, rusty and cheap in her case, flanked by two vacant-eyed children, had evidently come to collect a portion of the huge financial bill she was able to present against fate. An extremely thin lady, with eyes preternaturally wide open, was perhaps a sufferer from insomnia, while the little old man with broken boots and a long red nose was plainly an ordinary "bum." These were my companions except that a beaming lady of fifty or so, dressed partly like a Salvation Army lassie and partly like a nun, and whom I took to be Doctor Scattlethwaite's deaconess _en litre_, bustled in and out for conferences with the fluffy-haired girl at the desk.

I beguiled the waiting, which was long and tedious, by co-ordinating my tale so as to get the main points into salience. It was about ten in the morning when I arrived, and around half past ten the lady who had first claim on Doctor Scattlethwaite came out from her audience. She was young and might have been pretty if she hadn't been so hollow-eyed and walked with her handkerchief pressed closely to her lips. I put her down as a case of nervous prostration.

The lady with the inconsolable sorrow was next summoned by the secretary, and so one after another those who had preceded me went in to take their turns. Mine came after the old "bum," when it was nearly twelve o'clock.

The room was a kind of library. I retain an impression of books lining the walls, a leather-covered lounge, one or two leather-covered easy-chairs, and a large flat-topped desk in the center of the floor-space. Behind the desk stood a short, square-shouldered man in a dark-gray clerical attire, with a squarish, benevolent, clean-shaven face, and sharp, small eyes which studied me as I crossed the floor. His aspect and attitude were business-like, and business-like was his manner of shaking hands as he asked me to sit down. An upright arm-chair stood at the corner of the desk, and as I took it he resumed his seat in his own revolving-chair which he tilted slightly backward. With his elbows on the arms and fitting the tips of his fingers together, he waited for me to state my errand, eying me all the while.

Relieved and yet slightly disconcerted by this non-committal bearing, I stumbled through my story less coherently than I had meant to tell it. Badly narrated, it was preposterous, especially as coming from a man in seemingly full possession of his faculties. All that enabled me to continue was that my hearer listened attentively, with no outward appearance of disbelieving me.

"And you've come to me for advice as to the wise thing for you to do," he said, not unsympathetically, when I had brought my lame story to a close.

"That's about it," I agreed, though conscious of a regret at having come at all.

"Then the first thing I should suggest," he continued, never taking his penetrating eyes from my face, "is that you should see a doctor--a specialist--a neurologist. I'll give you a line to Doctor Glegg--"

"What would he do?" I ventured to question.

"That would depend on whether or not you could pay for treatment. I presume, from what you've said of your funds giving out, that you couldn't."

"No, I couldn't," I assented, reddening.

"Then he'd probably put you for observation into the free psychopathic ward at Mount Olivet--"

"Is that an insane-asylum?"

"We don't have insane-asylums nowadays; but in any case it isn't what you mean. It's a sanitarium for brain diseases--"

"I shouldn't want to go to a place like that."

"Then what would you suggest doing?"

"I thought--" But I was not sure as to what I had thought. Hazily I had imagined some Christian detective agency hunting up my family, restoring my name, and giving me back my check-book. It was probably on the last detail that unconsciously to myself I was laying the most emphasis. "I thought," I stammered, after a slight pause, "that--that you might be inclined to--to help me."

"With money?"

The question was so direct as to take me by surprise.

"I didn't know exactly how--"

"An average of about fifteen people come to see me every day," he said, in his calm, business-like voice, "and of the fifteen about five are men. And of the five men an average of four come, with one plausible tale or other, to get money out of me under false pretenses."

I shot out of my seat. The anger choking me was hardly allayed by the raising of his hand and his suave, "Sit down again." He went on quietly, as I sank back into my chair: "I only want you to see that with all men who come telling me strange tales my first impulse must be suspicion."

Indignation almost strangled me. "And--and--am I to understand that--that it's suspicion--now?"