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Destiny, a novel by Charles Neville Buck |
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Part 2. The Book Of Life - It Might Have Been - Chapter 20 |
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_ PART II. THE BOOK OF LIFE - IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN CHAPTER XX Len Haswell carried a stricken face about the clubs where once he had been the center of jovial gatherings, when he appeared there--which was not often. Old associates who read the signs avoided him out of kindliness save those who like Thayre could be with him without reminding him of his hurt. Thayre, with all his seeming of bluff and noisy gaiety, had an underlying tenderness of heart and delicacy of perception which made him a friend for troubled hours. He knew how to remain silent as well as how to be loquacious and he could radiate an unspoken sympathy. One evening the Englishman chanced on Haswell in the otherwise deserted reading-room of the National Union Club. Because it was a club chiefly dedicated to the elder generation Thayre came infrequently and it surprised him to find the other there. The big man was sitting with an unread paper on his knee and his eyes were brooding as he gazed out through the Fifth-avenue window on the twilight tide of motors and 'buses and hansoms that passed in an endless and unresting flow. "I had the idea, Haswell," remarked Thayre as he plumped himself down on the leather arm of the other's chair and grinned his greeting, "that you came to this place once a year--when they held the annual meeting." "And you?" countered Len in a dull voice. "I didn't regard you as an habitue either." "Right-o!" The Englishman stretched out one gaitered foot and lighted a cigarette. "I'll tell you a secret. When I grow savage in mood--" his clear-eyed smile belied that state of mind--"I just run in here for a bit of bear-baiting--rather good sport--bear-baiting. This is a den of bears you know. Oh, yes, rather! They are all elderly bears, very crabbed and self-absorbed and very smart and immaculate--but bears none the less. Each has his particular chair, which to his own self-centered mind is his private pedestal. They sit here with their manicured hands resting idly on their robust, waistcoated tummies and stare out on the world like little clay gods." He saw that the other man was following him with a forced and uninterested attention, yet he went on, not like Larry Kirk, but because he was leading up to a purpose of friendship. "Well, old chap, I just pop in here and squat on one of these pedestals, d'ye see? Presently its proper occupant comes in and glares at me from the door, puffing with indignation. Inwardly he is saying, 'How dare you trespass, you bally young cub?' and I pretend to be quite unconscious of his baleful gaze. I know there's really nothing he can do about it. If he were in London, I expect he'd write to the _Times_." Thayre glanced up and started to add: "There's one now glaring at you," but he quickly bit off the words, for he recognized the stout frock-coated figure of old Tom Burton. Old Tom was progressing, for now before the lights were switched on something in his face told that the afternoon rubbers had not progressed without their libations. After a long pause Haswell said in a heavy voice: "I come here because I don't meet many men who insist on talking to me." "Oh, I beg pardon, old chap," Thayre hastily rose. "I'm sure I didn't mean--" But before he could finish the big fellow put out a hand and gripped his arm until a pain shot to the elbow. "You are the one man I do want to see, Norvil. Even a miserable devil like me can talk to you, and there's a thing I want you to do for me, if you will." "Name it." Haswell glanced wearily about the big room and assured himself that no one was near enough to overhear his unbosoming. He still spoke in the dulled voice of a dulled heart. His utterance, like his movements, was slow and labored. "There are times when you've got to talk--or get to feeling giddy and wrong in the head. I've about cut most of my clubs, but I can't cut meeting the men--down-town." The Englishman nodded, but he said nothing. "I'm getting rather sick of being asked--" Len halted, then forced the words doggedly--"how Loraine is and when I expect her back. I--well, I don't expect her back, and it hurts like hell to say so." Norvil met the other's eyes and read in them a fulness of dumb suffering, such as might come into those of a great, faithful dog. His own question followed with a softness of assured sympathy. "And, of course, you want her back?" A paroxysm of pain distorted his companion's face and his head flinched back as though it had been heavily struck. "God! yes, like a strangling man wants breath," he said. It was a misery for which there was no aid, so Thayre satisfied himself with the inquiry: "What is this thing you want me to do?" "Just intimate to these men that they stop asking those questions, that's all." "Is there any one you particularly blame?" Haswell shook his head. "No. There was at first, but the principal point is that she has decided she can't be happy with me. If I try to hold her after knowing that I become her jailer. I treat her as my property. I hope I'm not that sort. I had my chance and have failed." "I say, I don't want to be impertinent, you know." Thayre bent forward and spoke earnestly. "There are things a man doesn't like to have put up to him. But you aren't letting this knock you off your line, are you? You aren't going to let it bowl you over?" Again the tall man shook his head. "No, I'm quite all right," he said. "I'm going fairly straight--so far." Late that night a wet snow was falling and Madison square was almost deserted. Here and there in the Metropolitan and Flatiron buildings shone an isolated and belated window light. At the Garden a Wild West show with rings and side performances had long ago disgorged its crowds and quieted its pandemonium of brass bands. Len Haswell had been walking with the aimlessness of insomnia, and asking himself over and over one question: "What changed it all?" In answer he accused himself and argued the case for the woman without whom he was too lonely to go home and face an empty house. It was after one o'clock and the saloon doors were barred, but as he passed a small place not far from the square, he saw a side door flap, and he entered it. It was an unprepossessing door, outwardly labeled, "ladies' entrance." Haswell called for whiskey, and was served by a waiter in a spotted apron, whose dank hair fell over a sallow and oily face. Save for himself, there were only four other customers. In a corner partition a slovenly woman in bedraggled finery berated the man who sat with bloated eyes across from her. The waiter looked on sardonically. At another table were two derelicts from one of the Garden side shows. A truculent and beady-eyed dwarf whose face hardly showed above the boards was brow-beating a cringing giant of unbelievable immensity. "You crabbed my act, you big stiff," shrilled the midget truculently--and his huge vis-a-vis fell into a volume of excuse and apology. Haswell set down his glass half-empty. "No good," he muttered as he rose and went out again into the streets. "One can't be alone." Yet he felt very much alone. * * * * * In these days Paul Burton found his thoughts turning often to Marcia Terroll and himself becoming more dependent on her companionship. In her sunny courage and sparkle of repartee he found a tonic exhilaration for his own jaded spirits and an antidote for growing morbidness. He knew that her daily rounds of the managers' offices were fruitless, and that she walked long distances to save nickels, and in his man's ignorance he marveled because her white gloves were always spotless and her appearance unmarked by poverty. With more money than he could use, his impulse clamored to volunteer assistance--and his judgment forbade the liberty. These days of growing intimacy were troubled days for him, too. Loraine Haswell was away and her letters kept him reminded that the purpose of her exile was ridding herself of those encumbrances which stood between them. Yet in her absence, there was also the absence of her personal fascination, the daily renewal of her hold on his senses, and, strangely enough, he began to feel that instead of having barriers swept from the path of his love, he was being bound to a future marred by intervals of clouded misgiving. The thought of Mary also brought him distress. There was no policy of ostrich-blind self-comfort by which he could escape from the realization that he was indirectly a party in responsibility for the destructive menace that hung over her happiness. His few attempts to discuss the subject with Hamilton had not been hopeful or pleasant, and he could not doubt that Edwardes would ultimately be swept into a chaos of ruin because he had opposed the irresistible onrush of his brother's power. He sought to persuade himself of Hamilton's infallible wisdom and Mary's folly of infatuation, but the only certain conviction was that of a bruised and heavy heart in his own breast. Paul was pitiably weak, but, also, he was sensitively tender. Love he gave and commanded with the uncalculating quality of a child. To Marcia he had not confided any word of his status with Mrs. Haswell, but her quick intuition told her he was deeply troubled--and her quicker sympathy responded. Sometimes Paul longed to see Loraine, but after each visit to the tiny apartment where Marcia Terroll and a girl who drew fashion illustrations had set up their household gods, the vision of his far-away Cleopatra grew a shade dimmer and a trifle more impersonal. Bit by bit he had pieced together a few sketchy fragments of Miss Terroll's biography, just enough to make the wish for fuller knowledge tantalizing. That was her maiden name, also used as a stage name, but she had been married when just out of Wellesley. She spoke little of that episode. Her girlhood was a pleasanter theme and its environment had been that of his own world--full of the gaiety and sunshine that is girlhood's inalienable right. All these scraps of personal history filtered into their conversation; rather as incidentals than as direct information. This young woman was not of the type that gratuitously relates a life-story. That she had been left resourceless with a young daughter and had fought the world unaided and unembittered, herself retaining the seeming of a child, Paul now knew, but he knew all too little to satisfy his interest. She had been secretary in a business house and an interpreter of German and Spanish. Now she was the only actress he knew--untypical and unemployed. Paul felt that in the presence of her superior mind and larger education he ought to be abashed, yet he was not, because when she laughed it was with the merriment of a gay child and when she was serious she was sweetly grave. Sometimes he played for her and sometimes she sang for him, and both did what they did so well that the critic in the other found no disappointment. Unpremeditatedly and very naturally they had struck the basis of a dependable comradeship. She saw the occasional flash of genius in his musical creativeness and his need of practical attributes. To him she was something of a mystery. To her, save for his well-kept secret of loving Loraine, he was an easily read human document. She told him of her broader experiences, always tinging them with a delicious humor in the recital, which twisted into comedy what might have been related as little tragedies, and because she had seen so much of life, where he had seen so little, she was willing to recognize his lovable qualities and overlook his weaknesses. But just as Paul did not talk much to her of his own affairs and the people of his set, so he did not talk with them of her. At first she had interested him as an experiment; then as affording the possibility for a new type of adventure in friendship, and when he came to know her in that degree which represented their present association, he ceased to ask why she interested him, and only knew that she did. Of late she had been unusually gay because of revival of hope. A part which she knew she could play had been half-promised her which would bring Broadway recognition and the chance to be judged on her merits. More than that it would mean the possibility of bringing her small daughter back from the relatives who were playing parents in these days of uncertainty. _ |
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