CHAPTER V
HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER
Late the next morning Herrick struggled through successive layers ofconsciousness to the full remembrance of last night. But now, withto-morrow's changed prospective, those events which had been his ownlife-and-death business, had, as it were, become historic and passed outof his sphere; they were no longer of the first importance to him.
Inestimably more important was his appointment with Ingham. Herrick hadpassed such a lonely summer that the prospect of a civilized luncheonwith an eminent publisher was a very exciting business. Moreover, thiswas a critical period in his fortunes.
At twenty-eight years of age Bryce Herrick knew what it was to live asingularly baffled life--a life of artificial stagnation. His firsttwenty-two years, indeed, had been filled with an extraordinarypopularity and success. In the ancient and beloved town of Brainerd,Connecticut, where he was born, it had been enough for him to be knownas the son of Professor Herrick. The family had never been rich, but forgenerations it had been an honored part of the life of the town. It wasBryce's mother who, marrying in her girlhood a spouse of forty alreadylargely wedded to his History of the Ancient Chaldeans and TheirRelation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, brought him a littlefortune; she brought, as well, the warm rich strain of mingled Irish andSouthern blood which still touched the shrewdness of her son's clearglance and his boyish simplicity of manner, with something at oncepeppery and romantic. It was a popular combination. He grew into a tallyouth with a square chin, with square white teeth and rather anaggressive nose, but, in his crinkly blue eyes, humor and kindness; witha kind of happy glow pervading all his thought and all hisdealings--just as it pervaded his fresh color, his look of gay hardihoodand enduring power, the ruddiness of his brown hair and his tanned skin,and of his sensitive and sanguine blood. At college he had appeared verymuch more than the son of an eminent man. Of that fortunate physicaltype which is at once large and slender--broad shouldered and deepchested, but narrow hipped, long of limb and strong and light offlank--it had surprised nobody when he became, as if naturally,spontaneously, a figure in athletics. What surprised people was thecraftmanship in those articles of travel and adventure which sprang fromhis vacations. At twenty-two he was a reporter on the New York _Record_;soon other reporters were prophesying that rockets come down likesticks, and he was not yet twenty-three when the blow fell. Mrs. Herrickdied, and it was presently found that her money had been a long timegone; mismanaged utterly by a hopeful husband. This amiable and innocentcreature had been bitten, in his old age, by the madness and the vanityof speculation; he had made a score of ventures, not one of which hadcome to port. His health being now quite shattered, Switzerland wasprescribed; there, for five years, in the country housekeeping of theirstraitened circumstances, his son and daughter tended him. There, duringthe first two years of exile, Herrick had written those short storieswhich had won him a distinguished reputation. No predictions had beenthought too high for him; but he had never got anything together in bookform, and bye-and-bye he had become altogether silent. It was all toopainful, too futile, too muffling! He seemed to be meant for but twouses: to struggle with the knotted strains of Herrick senior's businessaffairs and to assist with that History of the Ancient Chaldeans andTheir Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, which was hisfather's engrossing, and now sole and senile, mania. His fathersuffered, so that the young man was the more enslaved; and made himsuffer, so that he was the more anxious his sister should do nosecretary work for the Chaldeans. But it was his mother's suffering hethought of now; the years in which she had put up with all this,uncomforted, and struggled to save something out of the wreck for Marionand for him, struggled to keep the shadow of it from their youth--and hehad not known! In so much solitude and so much distasteful occupation,this idea flourished and struck deep. He saw his sister's lifesacrificed, too; given up to household work and nursing, to exile andpoverty, with lack of tenderness and with continual ailing pick-thanks;and there grew up in him a passionate consideration for women, aromantic faith in their essential nobility, a romantic devotion to theirright to happiness. Snatched from all the populous clamor and dazzle ofhis boyhood and set down by this backwater, alone with a young girl andthe Ancient Chaldeans, he grew into a very simple, lonely fellow;sometimes irascible but most profoundly gentle; a little old-fashioned;perhaps something of the pack-horse in his daily round; but living,mentally, in a very rosy, memory-colored vision of the great, strenuous,lost, world.
Death gave him back his life; Professor Herrick followed the Chaldeans,the Babylonians, and the Kassites; within a few months Marion wasmarried; and Herrick, with something like Whittington's sixpence in hispocket, famished for adventure and companionship, with the appetite of aman and the experience of a boy, started for the rainbow metropolis ofhis five-years' dream. In this mood he had rushed into the hot stonedesert of New York in summer--a New York already changed, and whichseemed to have dropped him out!
But he brought, like other young desperadoes, his first novel with him;and he had approached the junior partner of the famous old house ofIngham and Son with letters from mutual friends in Brainerd. Now, atlast, within twenty-four hours after his own return from abroad,Ingham--himself scarcely a decade older than Herrick, preceding him atthe same university, and with a Brainerd man for a brother-in-law,--hadresponded with the invitation to lunch. Yes, it was exciting enough!Herrick looked at his watch. It was barely ten. And then he took time toremember when he had last looked at his watch in that room.
Certainly, it was rather grim! And yet, said the desperado, it wasn'tgoing to be such a bad thing with which to command Ingham's interest atlunch and get him into a confidential humor that wouldn't be toosuperior. While he was attempting to inspire Ingham with a craving forhis complete works, this thrilling topic would be just the thing to doaway with self-consciousness. He mustn't lose faith in himself. And,before all things, he mustn't, as he had done last night, lose faith inhis Heroine!
He looked across the room at her picture; got out of bed; walked over toher, and humbly saluted. Lose faith in her? "Evadne," he said, "throughmy fault, through my fault, through my most grievous--You darling!" Losefaith in _her_!
The photograph, which looked like an enlargement of a kodak, representeda very young girl, standing on a strip of beach with her back to thesea. Her sailor tie, her white dress, and the ends of her uncovered hairall seemed to flutter in the wind. Slim and tall as Diana she showed, inher whole light poise, like a daughter of the winds, and Herrick wassure that she was of a fresh loveliness, a fair skin and brown hair,with eyes cool as gray water. It was the eyes, after all, which hadwholly captured his imagination. They were extraordinarily candid andwide-set; in a shifting world they were entirely brave. This was whattouched him as dramatic in her face; she was probably in the new dignityof her first long skirts, so that all that candor and courage, all thealert quiet of those intelligent eyes were only the candor and courageof a kind of royal child. She wanted to find out about life; she longedto try everything and to face everything; but she was only a tall littlegirl! That was the look his Heroine must have! Thus had she comeadventuring to New York with him, to seek their fortunes, and all duringthose dreary months of heat and dust she had borne him happy company; inthe Park or in the Bowery, at Coney Island or along Fifth Avenue'sdeserted pomp, he had always tried to see, for the novel, how thingswould look to that young eagerness--no more ardent, had he but realizedit, than his own!--"Evadne," said he, now, "if things look promisingwith Ingham this afternoon we'll take a taxi, to-night, and see the moonrise up the river." He called her Evadne when he was talking about themoon; when he required her pity because the laundress had faded his bestshirt, he called her Sal.
A sound as of the Grubey children snuffling round his door recalled himto the illustrious circumstance that he was by way of being a hero of amurder story. But, if he was nursing pride in that direction, it wasdestined to a fall. Johnnie Grubey thrust under the door somethingwhich, a
s he had brought it up from the mail-box in the vestibule,Johnnie announced as mail. But it was only a large, rough scrap ofpaper, which astonished Herrick by turning out to be wall-paper--aragged sample of the pale green "cartridge" variety that so largelysymbolizes apartment-house refinement--and which confronted him from itssmoother side with the lines, penciled in a long, pointed, gracefulhand,
For the Apollo in the bath-robe! Or was it a raincoat? But should not Apollos stay in when it rains?
It was many a day since Herrick had received a comic valentine, but allthe appropriate sensations returned to him then. The hand of thisneighborly jest was plainly a woman's and its slap brought a blush. Hewas forced to grin; but he longed to evade the solemn questioning of theGrubeys through whose domain he must presently venture to his bath andit occurred to him that the most peaceful method of clearing a road wasto send out the younger generation for a plentiful supply of newspapers.Besides, he wished very much to see the papers himself.
He distributed them freely and escaped back to his room still carryingthree. When he had closed his door, the first paragraph which met hiseyes was on the lower part of the sheet which he held folded in half. Itbegan--"The body of Mr. Ingham was not found in the living-room, but--"He flapped it over, agog for the headlines. They read:
DEATH BAFFLES POLICE.
James R. Ingham, Noted Publisher, Found Shot in Apartment--
Herrick was still standing with the paper in his hand when the secondGrubey boy brought him a visiting-card. It bore the name of Hermann E.Deutch; and scribbled beneath this in pencil was the explanatory phrase,"Superintendent, Van Dam Apartment House."