Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: I could feel the sting of the powder smoke on myup-thrust wrist.]
The Man
Who Couldn't Sleep
By ARTHUR STRINGER
AUTHOR OF
"The Prairie Wife," Etc.
With Frontispiece
By FRANK SNAPP
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers -------- New York
Published by arrangement with BOBBS MERRILL COMPANY
COPYRIGHT 1919
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
_Printed in the United States of America_
To Harvey, of the dome-like pate, The dreamy eye, the Celtic wit And kindly heart, I dedicate This blithe romance conceived and writ By one of that triumvirate Who knew Defeat, yet conquered it.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I Running Out of Pay-Dirt II The Ox-Blood Vase III The Stolen Wheel-Code IV The Open Door V The Man from Medicine Hat VI The Irreproachable Butler VII The Panama Gold Chests VIII The Dummy-Chucker IX A Rialto Rain-Storm X The Thumb-Tap Clue XI The Nile-Green Roadster
The Man Who Couldn't Sleep
CHAPTER I
RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT
To begin with, I am a Canadian by birth, and thirty-three years old.For nine of those years I have lived in New York. And by my friends inthat city I am regarded as a successful author.
There was a time when I even regarded myself in much the same light.But that period is past. I now have to face the fact that I am afailure. For when a man is no longer able to write he naturally can nolonger be reckoned as an author.
I have made the name of Witter Kerfoot too well known, I think, toexplain that practically all of my stories have been written aboutAlaska. Just why I resorted to that far-off country for my settings isstill more or less a mystery to me. Perhaps it was merely because ofits far-offness. Perhaps it was because the editors remembered that Icame from the land of the beaver and sagely concluded that a Canadianwould be most at home in writing about the Frozen North. At any rate,when I romanced about the Yukon and its ice-bound trails they bought mystories, and asked for more.
And I gave them more. I gave them blood-red fiction about gun-men andclaim-jumpers and Siwash queens and salmon fisheries. I gave themsupermen of iron, fighting against cold and hunger, and snarling,always snarling, at their foes. I gave them oratorical young engineerswith clear-cut features and sinews of steel, battling against theforces of hyperborean evil. I gave them fist-fights that caused mybooks to be discreetly shut out of school-libraries yet brought intelegrams from motion-picture directors for first rights. I gave themenough gun-play to shoot Chilcoot Pass into the middle of the Pacific,and was publicly denominated as the apostle of the Eye-Socket School,and during the three-hundred-night run of my melodrama, _The PoleRaiders_, even beheld on the Broadway sign-boards an extraordinarilystalwart picture of myself in a rakish Stetson and a flannel shirt verymuch open at the throat, with a cow-hide holster depending from myHerculean waist-line and a very dreadful-looking six-shooter protrudingfrom the open top of that belted holster. My publishers spoke of me,for business reasons, as the Interpreter of the Great Northwest. And Iexploited that territory with the industry of a badger. In my own way,I mined Alaska. And it brought me in a very respectable amount ofpay-dirt.
But I knew nothing about Alaska, I had never even seen the country. I"crammed up" on it, of course, the same as we used to cram up for athird-form examination in Latin grammar. I perused the atlases andsent for governmental reports, and pored over the R.N.W.M.P. BlueBooks, and gleaned a hundred or so French-Canadian names for half-breedvillains from a telephone-directory for the city of Montreal. But Iknew no more about Alaska than a Fiji Islander knows about the New YorkStock Exchange. And that was why I could romance so freely, somagnificently, about it!
I was equally prodigal of blood, I suppose, because I had never seenthe real thing flow--except in the case of my little niece, when hertonsils had been removed and a very soft-spoken nurse had helped me outof the surgery and given me a drink of ice-water, after telling me itwould be best to keep my head as low as possible until I was feelingbetter. As for firearms, I abhorred them. I never shot off anair-rifle without first shutting my eyes. I never picked up a duck-gunwithout a wince of aversion. So I was able to do wonderful things withfirearms, on paper. And with the Frozen Yukon and firearms combined, Iwas able to work miracles. I gave a whole continent goose-flesh, somany times a season. And the continent seemed to enjoy it, for thoseairy essays in iron and gore were always paid for, and paid for athigher and higher rates.
While this was taking place, something even more important was takingplace, something which finally brought me in touch with Mary Lockwoodherself. It was accident more than anything else, I think, that firstlaunched me in what is so indefinitely and often so disparagingly knownas society. Society, as a rule, admits only the lions of my callingacross its sacred portals. And even these lions, I found, wereaccepted under protest or the wing of some commendable effort forcharity, and having roared their little hour, were let pass quietly outto oblivion again. But I had been lucky enough to bring letters to thePeytons and to the Gruger-Philmores, and these old families, I will behonest enough to confess, had been foolish enough to like me.
So from the first I did my best to live up to those earlieraffiliations. I found myself passed on, from one mysteriouslybarricaded seclusion to the other. The tea-hour visit merged into theformal dinner, and the formal dinner into the even more formal box atthe Horse-Show, and then a call to fill up a niche at the Metropolitanon a Caruso-night, or a vacancy for an Assembly Dance at Sherry's, or aweek at Tuxedo, in winter, when the skating was good.
I worked hard to keep up my end of the game. But I was an impostor, ofcourse, all along the line. I soon saw that I had to prove more thanacceptable; I had also to prove _dependable_. That I was a writermeant nothing whatever to those people. They had scant patience withthe long-haired genius type. That went down only with musicians. So Isoon learned to keep my bangs clipped, my trousers creased, and mynecktie inside my coat-lapels. I also learned to use my wits, and howto key my talk up to dowager or down to debutante, and how to bepassably amusing even before the champagne course had arrived. I madeit a point to remember engagements and anniversaries, and more thanonce sent flowers and Millairds, which I went hungry to pay for. Evenmy _pourboires_ to butlers and footmen and maids stood a matter, inthose earlier days, for much secret and sedulous consideration.
But, as I have said, I tried to keep up my end. I _liked_ those largeand orderly houses. I liked the quiet-mannered people who lived inthem. I liked looking at life with their hill-top unconcern fortrivialities. I grew rather contemptuous of my humbler fellow-workerswho haunted the neighborhood theaters and the red-inkeries of GreenwichVillage, and orated Socialism and blank-verse poems to garretaudiences, and wore window-curtain cravats and celluloid blinkers withbig round lenses, and went in joyous and caramel-eating groups to the"rush" seats at _Rigoletto_. I was accepted, as I have already triedto explain, as an impecunious but dependable young bachelor. And Isuppose I could have kept on at that role, year after year, until Ideveloped into a foppish and somewhat threadbare old _beau_. But aboutthis time I was giving North America its first spasms of goose-fleshwith my demigod type of Gibsonian engineer who fought the villain untilhis flannel shirt was in rags and then shook his fist in Nature's facewhen she dogged him with the Eternal Cold. And there was money inwriting for flat-dwellers about that Eternal Cold, and about battlingclaw to claw and fang to fang, and about eye-sockets without any eyesin them. My income gathered like a snow-ball. And as it gath
ered Ibegan to feel that I ought to have an establishment--not a back-roomstudio in Washington Square, nor a garret in the Village of theFree-Versers, nor a mere apartment in the West Sixties, nor even aduplex overlooking Central Park South. I wanted to be something morethan a number. I wanted a house, a house of my own, and a cat-footedbutler to put a hickory-log on the fire, and a full set of _Sevres_ onmy mahogany sideboard, and something to stretch a strip of red carpetacross when the landaulets and the limousines rolled up to my door.
So I took a nine-year lease of the Whighams' house in Gramercy Square.It was old-fashioned and sedate and unpretentious to the passing eye,but beneath that somewhat somber shell nested an amazingly rich kernelof luxuriousness. It was good form; it was unbelievably comfortable,and it was not what the climber clutches for. The cost of even anine-year claim on it rather took my breath away, but the thought ofAlaska always served to stiffen up my courage.
It was necessary to think a good deal about Alaska in those days, forafter I had acquired my house I also had to acquire a man to run it,and then a couple of other people to help the man who helped me, andthen a town car to take me back and forth from it, and then a chauffeurto take care of the car, and then the service-clothes for thechauffeur, and the thousand and one unlooked for things, in short,which confront the pin-feather householder and keep him from feelingtoo much a lord of creation.
Yet in Benson, my butler, I undoubtedly found a gem of the first water.He moved about as silent as a panther, yet as watchful as an eagle. Hecould be ubiquitous and self-obliterating at one and the same time. Hewas meekness incarnate, and yet he could coerce me into a predeterminedline of conduct as inexorably as steel rails lead a street-car alongits predestined line of traffic. He was, in fact, much more than abutler. He was a valet and a _chef de cuisine_ and alord-high-chamberlain and a purchasing-agent and a body-guard and abenignant-eyed old godfather all in one. The man _babied_ me. I couldsee that all along. But I was already an overworked and slightlyneurasthenic specimen, even in those days, and I was glad enough tohave that masked and silent Efficiency always at my elbow. There weretimes, too, when his activities merged into those of a trained nurse,for when I smoked too much he hid away my cigars, and when I worked toohard he impersonally remembered what morning horseback riding in thepark had done for a former master of his. And when I drifted into theuse of chloral hydrate, to make me sleep, that dangerous little bottlehad the habit of disappearing, mysteriously and inexplicablydisappearing, from its allotted place in my bathroom cabinet.
There was just one thing in which Benson disappointed me. That was inhis stubborn and unreasonable aversion to Latreille, my Frenchchauffeur. For Latreille was as efficient, in his way, as Bensonhimself. He understood his car, he understood the traffic rules, andhe understood what I wanted of him. Latreille was, after a manner ofspeaking, a find of my own. Dining one night at the Peytons', I hadmet the Commissioner of Police, who had given me a card to strollthrough Headquarters and inspect the machinery of the law. I hadhappened on Latreille as he was being measured and "mugged" in theIdentification Bureau, with those odd-looking Bertillon forceps takinghis cranial measurements. The intelligence of the man interested me;the inalienable look of respectability in his face convinced me, as astudent of human nature, that he was not meant for any such fate or anysuch environment. And when I looked into his case I found thatinstinct had not been amiss. The unfortunate fellow had been "framed"for a car-theft of which he was entirely innocent. He explained allthis to me, in fact, with tears in his eyes. And circumstances, when Ilooked into them, bore out his statements. So I visited theCommissioner, and was passed on to the Probation Officers, from whom Icaromed off to the Assistant District-Attorney, who in turn delegatedme to another official, who was cynical enough to suggest that theprisoner might possibly be released if I was willing to go to theextent of bonding him. This I very promptly did, for I was nowdetermined to see poor Latreille once more a free man.
Latreille showed his appreciation of my efforts by saving me sevenhundred dollars when I bought my town car--though candor compels me toadmit that I later discovered it to be a used car rehabilitated, andnot a product fresh from the factory, as I had anticipated. ButLatreille was proud of that car, and proud of his position, and I wasproud of having a French chauffeur, though my ardor was dampened alittle later on, when I discovered that Latreille, instead of hailingfrom the _Bois de Boulogne_ and the _Avenue de la Paix_, originated inthe slightly less splendid suburbs of Three Rivers, up on the St.Lawrence.
But my interest in Latreille about this time became quite subsidiary,for something much more important than cars happened to me. I fell inlove. I fell in love with Mary Lockwood, head-over-heels in love witha girl who could have thrown a town car into the Hudson every otherweek and never have missed it. She was beautiful; she was wonderful;but she was dishearteningly wealthy. With all those odious riches ofhers, however, she was a terribly honest and above-board girl, ahealthy-bodied, clear-eyed, practical-minded, normal-living New Yorkgirl who in her twenty-two active years of existence had seen enough ofthe world to know what was veneer and what was solid, and had seenenough of men to demand mental camaraderie and not "squaw-talk" fromthem.
I first saw her at the Volpi sale, in the American Art Galleries, wherewe chanced to bid against each other for an old Italian table-cover, asixteenth-century blue velvet embroidered with gold galloon. Mary bidme down, of course. I lost my table-cover, and with it I lost myheart. When I met her at the Obden-Belponts, a week later, sheconfessed that I'd rather been on her conscience. She generouslyoffered to hand over that oblong of old velvet, if I still happened tobe grieving over its loss. But I told her that all I asked for was achance to see it occasionally. And occasionally I went to see it. Ialso saw its owner, who became more wonderful to me, week by week.Then I lost my head over her. That _apheresis_ was so complete that Itold Mary what had happened, and asked her to marry me.
Mary was very practical about it all. She said she liked me, liked mea lot. But there were other things to be considered. We would have towait. I had my work to do--and she wanted it to be _big_ work,gloriously big work. She wouldn't even consent to a formal engagement.But we had an "understanding." I was sent back to my work, drunk withthe memory of her surrendering lips warm on mine, of her wistfullyentreating eyes searching my face for something which she seemed unableto find there.
That work of mine which I went back to, however, seemed something veryflat and meager and trivial. And this, I realized, was a conditionwhich would never do. The pot had to be kept boiling, and boiling nowmore briskly than ever. I had lapsed into more or less luxurious waysof living; I had formed expensive tastes, and had developed a fondnessfor antiques and Chinese bronzes and those _objets d'art_ which arenever found on the bargain-counter. I had outgrown the Spartan ways ofmy youth when I could lunch contentedly at Child's and sleep soundly ona studio-couch in a top-floor room. And more and more that rapaciousogre known as Social Obligation had forged his links and fetters aboutmy movements. More than ever, I saw, I had my end to keep up. Whatshould have been a recreation had become almost a treadmill. I was apretender, and had my pretense to sustain. I couldn't afford to be"dropped." I had my frontiers to protect, and my powers to placate. Icouldn't ask Mary to throw herself away on a nobody. So instead oftrying to keep up one end, I tried to keep up two. I continued to bobabout the fringes of the Four Hundred. And I continued to clinghungrily to Mary's hint about doing work, gloriously big work.
But gloriously big work, I discovered, was usually done by lonely men,living simply and quietly, and dwelling aloof from the frivolousside-issues of life, divorced from the distractions of a city whichseemed organized for only the idler and the lotos-eater. And I couldsee that the pay-dirt coming out of Alaska was running thinner andthinner.
It was to remedy this, I suppose, that I dined with my old friend PipConners, just back to civilization after fourteen long years up in theYukon. That
dinner of ours together was memorable. It was one of themile-stones of my life. I wanted to furbish up my information on thatremote corner of the world, which, in a way, I had preempted as my own.I wanted fresh information, first-hand data, renewed inspiration. AndI was glad to feel Pip's horny hand close fraternally about mine.
"Witter," he said, staring at me with open admiration, "you're awonder."
I liked Pip's praise, even though I stood a little at a loss to discernits inspiration.
"You mean--this?" I asked, with a casual hand-wave about that GramercySquare abode of mine.
"No, sir," was Pip's prompt retort. "I mean those stories of yours.I've read 'em all."
I blushed at this, blushed openly. For such commendation from a manwho knew life as it was, who knew life in the raw, was as honey to myears.
"Do you mean to say you could get them, up _there_?" I asked, more forsomething to dissemble my embarrassment than to acquire actualinformation.
"Yes," acknowledged Pip with a rather foolish-sounding laugh, "theycome through the mails about the same as they'd come through the mailsdown here. And folks even read them, now and then, when the gun-smokeblows out of the valley!"
"Then what struck you as wonderful about them?" I inquired, a little atsea as to his line of thought.
"It's not _them_ that's wonderful, Witter. It's you. I said you werea wonder. And you are."
"And why am I a wonder?" I asked, with the drip of the honey no longerembarrassing my modesty.
"Witter, _you're a wonder to get away with it_!" was Pip's solemnlyintoned reply.
"To get away with it?" I repeated.
"Yes; to make it go down! To get 'em trussed and gagged and hog-tied!To make 'em come and eat out of your hand and then holler for more!For I've been up there in the British Yukon for fourteen nicecomfortable years, Witter, and I've kind o' got to know the country. Iknow how folks live up there, and what the laws are. And it may strikeyou as queer, friend-author, but folks up in that district areuncommonly like folks down here in the States. And in the Klondike andthis same British Yukon there is a Firearms Act which makes it againstthe law for any civilian to tote a gun. And that law is sure carriedout. Fact is, there's no _need_ for a gun. And even if you didsmuggle one in, the Mounted Police would darned soon take it away fromyou!"
I sat staring at him.
"But all those motion-pictures," I gasped. "And all those novelsabout--"
"That's why I say you're a wonder," broke in the genial-eyed Pip. "Youcan fool _all_ the people _all_ the time! You've done it. And youkeep on doing it. You can put 'em to sleep and take it out of theirpants pocket before they know they've gone by-by. Why, you've even got'em tranced off in the matter of everyday school-geography. You've hadsome of those hero-guys o' yours mush seven or eight hundred miles, andon a birch-bark toboggan, between dinner and supper. And if that ain'tgenius, I ain't ever seen it bound up in a reading-book!"
That dinner was a mile-stone in my life, all right, but not after themanner I had expected. For as I sat there in a cold sweat ofapprehension crowned with shame, Pip Conners told me many things aboutAlaska and the Klondike. He told me many things that were new to me,dishearteningly, discouragingly, devitalizingly new to me. Withoutknowing it, he poignarded me, knifed me through and through. Withoutdreaming what he was doing, he eviscerated me. He left me a hollow andempty mask of an author. He left me a homeless exile, with the irongates of Fact swung sternly shut on what had been a Fairy Land ofRomance, a Promised Land of untrammelled and care-free imaginings.
That was my first sleepless night.
I said nothing to Pip. I said nothing to any one. I held that vultureof shame close in my arms and felt its unclean beak awling into myvitals. I tried to go back to my work, next day, to lose myself increation. But it was like seeking consolation beside a corpse. Forme, Alaska was killed, killed forever. And blight had fallen on morethan my work. It had crept over my very world, the world which onlythe labor of my pen could keep orderly and organized. The city inwhich I had seemed to sit a conqueror suddenly lay about me a flat andmonotonous tableland of ennui, as empty and stale as a circus-lot afterthe last canvas-wagon has rumbled away.
I have no intention of making this recountal the confessions of aneurasthenic. Nothing is further from my aims than the inditing of asecond City of Dreadful Night. But I began to worry. And later on Ibegan to magnify my troubles. I even stuck to New York that summer,for the simple reason that I couldn't afford to go away. And it was anunspeakably hot summer. I did my best to work, sitting for hours at atime staring at a blank sheet of paper, set out like tangle-foot tocatch a passing idea. But not an idea alighted on that square ofspotless white. When I tried new fields, knowing Alaska was dead, theeditors solemnly shook their heads and announced that this new offeringof mine didn't seem to have the snap and go of my older manner. Thenpanic overtook me, and after yet another white night I went straight toSanson, the nerve specialist, and told him I was going crazy.
He laughed at me. Then he offhandedly tapped me over and tried myreflexes and took my blood pressure and even more diffidently asked mea question or two. He ended up by announcing that I was as sound as adollar, whatever that may have meant, and suggested as an afterthoughtthat I drop tobacco and go in more for golf.
That buoyed me up for a week or two. But Mary, when she came in totown radiant and cool for three days' shopping, seemed to detect in mea change which first surprised and then troubled her. I was bitterlyconscious of being a disappointment to somebody who expected greatthings of me. And to escape that double-edged sword of mortification,I once again tried to bury myself in my work. But I just as well mighthave tried to bury myself in a butter-dish, for there was no effort andno activity there to envelope me. I was coerced into idleness, withoutever having acquired the art of doing nothing. For life with me hadbeen a good deal like boiling rice: it had to be kept galloping to saveit from going mushy. Yet now the fire itself seemed out. And thatprompted me to sit and listen to my works, as the French idiomexpresses it, which is never a profitable calling for a naturallynervous man.
The lee and the long of it was, as the Irish say, that I went back toDoctor Sanson and demanded something, in the name of God, that wouldgive me a good night's sleep. He was less jocular, this time. He toldme to forget my troubles and go fishing for a couple of weeks.
I _did_ go fishing, but I fished for ideas. And I got scarcely astrike. To leave the city was now more than ever out of the question.So for recreation I had Latreille take me out in the car, when afeverish thirst for speed, which I found it hard to account for, droveme into daily violations of the traffic laws. Twice, in fact, I wasfined for this, with a curtly warning talk from the presidingmagistrate on the second occasion, since the offense, in this case, wascomplicated by collision with an empty baby-carriage. Latreille, aboutthis time, seemed uncannily conscious of my condition. More and morehe seemed to rasp me on the raw, until irritation deepened intopositive dislike for the man.
When Mary came back to the city for a few days, before going to theVirginia hills for the autumn, I looked so wretched and felt sowretched that I decided not to see her. I was taking veronal now, tomake me sleep, and with cooler weather I looked for better rest and areturn to work. But my hopes were ill-founded. I came to dread thenight, and the night's ever-recurring battle for sleep. I lost myperspective on things. And then came the crowning catastrophe, thecatastrophe which turned me into a sort of twentieth-century Macbeth.
The details of that catastrophe were ludicrous enough, and it had nodefinite and clear-cut outcome, but its effect on my over-tensionednerves was sufficiently calamitous. It occurred, oddly enough, onHallow-e'en night, when the world is supposed to be given over tofestivity. Latreille had motored me out to a small dinner-dance atWashburn's, on Long Island, but I had left early in the evening,perversely depressed by a hilarity in which I had not the heart tojoin. Twice, on the way back to the city, I had call
ed out toLatreille for more speed. We had just taken a turn in the outskirts ofBrooklyn when my swinging headlights disclosed the figure of a man, anunstable and wavering man, obviously drunk, totter and fall directly infront of my car.
I heard the squeal of the brakes and the high-pitched shouts from acrowd of youths along the sidewalk. But it was too late. I could feelthe impact as we struck. I could feel the sickening thud and jolt asthe wheels pounded over that fallen body.
I stood up, without quite knowing what I was doing, and screamed like awoman. Then I dropped weakly back in my seat. I think I was sobbing.I scarcely noticed that Latreille had failed to stop the car. He spoketo me twice, in fact, before I knew it.
"Shall we go on, sir?" he asked, glancing back at me over his shoulder.
"_Go on!_" I shouted, knowing well enough by this time what I said,surrendering merely to that blind and cowardly panic forself-preservation which marks man at his lowest.
We thumped and swerved and speeded away on the wings of cowardice. Isat there gasping and clutching my moist fingers together, as I've seenhysterical women do, calling on Latreille for speed, and still morespeed.
I don't know where he took me. But I became conscious of the consolingblackness of the night about us. And I thanked God, as Cain must havedone when he found himself alone with his shame.
"Latreille," I said, breathing brokenly as we slowed up, "did we--_didwe kill him_?"
My chauffeur turned in his seat and studied my face. Then he lookedcarefully back, to make sure we were not being followed.
"This is a heavy car, sir," he finally admitted. He said it coolly,and almost impersonally. But the words fell like a sledge-hammer on myheart.
"But we couldn't have killed a man," I clamored insanely, weakly, as wecame to a dead stop at the roadside.
"Forty-two hundred pounds--and he got both wheels!" calmly protested myenemy, for I felt now that he was in some way my enemy.
"What in heaven's name are you going to do?" I gasped, for I noticedthat he was getting down from his seat.
"Hadn't I better get the blood off the running-gear, before we turnback into town?"
"Blood?" I quavered as I clutched at the robe-rail in front of me. Andthat one word brought the horror of the thing home to me in all itsghastliness. I could see axles and running-board and brake-bardripping with red, festooned with shreds of flesh, maculated withblackening gore. And I covered my face with my hands, and groanedaloud in my misery of soul.
But Latreille did not wait for me. He lifted the seat-cushion, tookrubbing-cloths from the tool-box and crawled out of sight beneath thecar. I could feel the occasional tremors that went through theframe-work as he busied himself at that grisly task. I could hear hisgrunt of satisfaction when he had finished. And I watched him withstricken eyes as he stepped through the vague darkness and tossed histelltale cloths far over the roadside fence.
"It's all right," he companionably announced as he stepped back intothe car. But there was a new note in the man's demeanor, a note whicheven through that black fog of terror reached me and awakened myresentment. We were partners in crime. We were fellow-actors in adrama of indescribable cowardice, and I was in the man's power, to theend of time.
The outcome of that catastrophe, as I have already said, wasindefinite, torturingly indefinite. I was too shaken and sick toferret out its consequences. I left that to Latreille, who seemed tounderstand well enough what I expected of him.
That first night wore by, and nothing came of it all. The morningdragged away, and my fellow-criminal seemingly encountered nothingworthy of rehearsal to me. Then still another night came and went. Iwent through the published hospital reports, and the police records,with my heart in my mouth. But I could unearth no official account ofthe tragedy. I even encountered my good friend Patrolman McCooey,apparently by accident, and held him up on his beat about Gramercy Parkto make casual inquiries as to street-accidents, and if such thingswere increasing of late. But nothing of moment, apparently, had cometo McCooey's ears. And I stood watching him as he flatfooted his wayplacidly on from my house-front, with one of my best cigars tuckedunder his tunic, wondering what the world would say if it knew thatWitter Kerfoot, the intrepid creator of sinewy supermen who snarl andfight and shake iron fists in the teeth of Extremity, had run like arabbit from a human being he had bowled over and killed?
I still hoped against hope, however, trying to tell myself that it isno easy thing to knock the life out of a man, passionately upbraidingmyself for not doing what I should have done to succor the injured,then sinkingly remembering what Latreille had mentioned about theweight of my car. Yet it wasn't until the next night, as I venturedout to step into that odiously ponderous engine of destruction, thatuncertainty solidified into fact.
"_You got him_," announced my chauffeur out of one side of his mouth,so that Benson, who stood on the house-steps, might not overhear thosefateful words.
"Got him?" I echoed, vaguely resenting the man's use of that personalpronoun singular.
"Killed!" was Latreille's monosyllabic explanation. And my heartstopped beating.
"How do you know that?" I demanded in whispering horror. For Iunderstood enough of the law of the land to know that a speeder whoflees from the victim of his carelessness is technically guilty ofmanslaughter.
"A man I know, named Crotty, helped carry the body back to his house.Crotty's just told me about it."
My face must have frightened Latreille, for he covered his movement ofcatching hold of my arm by ceremoniously opening the car door for me.
"Sit tight, man!" he ordered in his curt and conspiratorial undertone."Sit tight--for it's all that's left to do!"
I sat tight. It was all there was to do. I endured Latreille'saccession of self-importance without comment. There promptly grew upbetween us a tacit understanding of silence. Yet I had reason to feelthat this silence wasn't always as profound as it seemed. For at theend of my third day of self-torturing solitude I went to my club todine. I went with set teeth. I went in the hope of ridding my systemof self-fear, very much as an alcoholic goes to a Turkish-bath. I wentto mix once more with my fellows, to prove that I stood on commonground with them.
But the mixing was not a success. I stepped across that familiarportal in quavering dread of hostility. And I found what I was lookingfor. I detected myself being eyed coldly by men who had once posed asmy friends. I dined alone, oppressed by the discovery that I was beingdeliberately avoided by the fellow-members of what should have been anorganized companionability. Then I took a grip on myself, andforlornly argued that it was all mere imagination, the vaporings of amorbid and chlorotic mind. Yet the next moment a counter-shockconfronted me. For as I stared desolately out of that club window Icaught sight of Latreille himself. He stood there at the curb, talkingconfidently to three other chauffeurs clustered about him between theircars. Nothing, I suddenly remembered, could keep the man fromgossiping. And a word dropped in one servant's ear would soon pass onto another. And that other would carry the whisper still wider, untilit spread like an infection from below-stairs to above-stairs, and fromprivate homes to the very housetops. And already I was a marked man, apariah, an outcast with no friendly wilderness to swallow me up.
I slunk home that night with a plumb-bob of lead swinging under my ribswhere my heart should have been. I tried to sleep and could not sleep.So I took a double dose of chloral hydrate, and was rewarded with a fewhours of nightmare wherein I was a twentieth-century Attila driving aracing-car over an endless avenue of denuded infants. It was all sohorrible that it left me limp and quailing before the lash of daylight.Then, out of a blank desolation that became more and more unendurable,I clutched feverishly at the thought of Mary Lockwood and theautumn-tinted hills of Virginia. I felt the need of getting away fromthat city of lost sleep. I felt the need of "exteriorating" what wascorroding my in-most soul. I was seized with a sudden and febrile achefor companionship. So I sent a forty-word wire to
the only woman inthe world I could look to in my extremity. And the next morningbrought me a reply.
It merely said, "Don't come."
The bottom seemed to fall out of the world, with that curt message, andI groped forlornly, frantically, for something stable to sustain me.But there was nothing. Bad news, I bitterly reminded myself, had thehabit of traveling fast. _Mary knew_. The endless chain had widened,like a wireless-wave. It had rolled on, like war-gas, until it hadblighted even the slopes beyond the Potomac. For Mary _knew_!
It was two days later that a note, in her picket-fence script that wasas sharp-pointed as arrow-heads, followed after the telegram.
"There are certain things," wrote Mary, "which I can scarcely talkabout on paper. At least, not as I should prefer talking about them.But these things must necessarily make a change in your life, and inmine. I don't want to seem harsh, Witter, but we can't go on as wehave been doing. We'll both have to get used to the idea of trudgingalong in single harness. And I think you will understand why. I'm notexacting explanations, remember. I'm merely requesting an armistice.If you intend to let me, I still want to be your friend, and I trust noperceptible gulf will yarn [Transcriber's note: yawn?] between us, whenwe chance to dine at the same table or step through the same_cotillion_. But I must bow to those newer circumstances which seem tohave confronted you even before they presented themselves to me. Sowhen I say good-by, it is more to the Past, I think, than to You."
That was the first night, I remember, when sleeping-powders proved ofno earthly use to me. And this would not be an honest record of eventsif I neglected to state that the next day I shut myself up in my studyand drank much more _Pommery-Greno_ than was good for me. I got drunk,in fact, blindly, stupidly, senselessly drunk. But it seemed to drapea veil between me and the past. It made a bonfire of my body to burnup the debris of my mind. And when poor old patient-eyed Benson mixedme a bromide and put me to bed I felt like a patient coming out ofether after a major operation. I was tired, and I wanted to lie thereand rest for a long time.