father had been abroad, and that he had come down to await the
arrival of their steamer. He told his story plausibly and had no
trouble, since he volunteered to pay for them in advance, in
engaging his rooms; a sleeping room, sitting room, and bath.
Not once, but a hundred times, Paul had planned this entry
into New York. He had gone over every detail of it with Charley
Edwards, and in his scrapbook at home there were pages of
description about New York hotels, cut from the Sunday papers.
When he was shown to his sitting room on the eighth floor he saw
at a glance that everything was as it should be; there was but
one detail in his mental picture that the place did not realize,
so he rang for the bellboy and sent him down for flowers. He
moved about nervously until the boy returned, putting away his
new linen and fingering it delightedly as he did so. When the
flowers came he put them hastily into water, and then tumbled
into a hot bath. Presently he came out of his white bathroom,
resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with the
tassels of his red robe. The snow was whirling so fiercely
outside his windows that he could scarcely see across the street,
but within the air was deliciously soft and fragrant. He put the
violets and jonquils on the taboret beside the couch, and threw
himself down, with a long sigh, covering himself with a Roman
blanket. He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste, he
had stood up to such a strain, covered so much ground in the last
twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all come
about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the
cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy
retrospection.
It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out
of the theater and concert hall, when they had taken away his
bone, the whole thing was virtually determined. The rest was a
mere matter of opportunity. The only thing that at all surprised
him was his own courage-for he realized well enough that he had
always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive dread that,
of late years, as the meshes of the lies he had told closed about
him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and
tighter. Until now he could not remember the time when he had
not been dreading something. Even when he was a little boy it
was always there--behind him, or before, or on either side.
There had always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into
which he dared not look, but from which something seemed always
to be watching him--and Paul had done things that were not pretty
to watch, he knew.
But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had
at last thrown down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner.
Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the
traces; but yesterday afternoon that he had been sent to the bank
with Denny & Carson's deposit, as usual--but this time he was
instructed to leave the book to be balanced. There was above two
thousand dollars in checks, and nearly a thousand in the bank
notes which he had taken from the book and quietly transferred to
his pocket. At the bank he had made out a new deposit slip. His
nerves had been steady enough to permit of his returning to the
office, where he had finished his work and asked for a full day's
holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonable
pretext. The bankbook, be knew, would not be returned before
Monday or Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the
next week. From the time he slipped the bank notes into his
pocket until he boarded the night train for New York, he
had not known a moment's hesitation. It was not the first time
Paul had steered through treacherous waters.
How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the
thing done; and this time there would be no awakening, no figure
at the top of the stairs. He watched the snowflakes whirling by
his window until he fell asleep.
When he awoke, it was three o'clock in the afternoon. He
bounded up with a start; half of one of his precious days gone
already! He spent more than an hour in dressing, watching every
stage of his toilet carefully in the mirror. Everything was
quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always
wanted to be.
When he went downstairs Paul took a carriage and drove up
Fifth Avenue toward the Park. The snow had somewhat abated;
carriages and tradesmen's wagons were hurrying soundlessly to and
fro in the winter twilight; boys in woolen mufflers were
shoveling off the doorsteps; the avenue stages made fine spots of
color against the white street. Here and there on the corners
were stands, with whole flower gardens blooming under glass
cases, against the sides of which the snowflakes stuck and
melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley--somehow
vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus
unnaturally in the snow. The Park itself was a wonderful stage
winterpiece.
When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased and
the tune of the streets had changed. The snow was falling
faster, lights streamed from the hotels that reared their dozen
stories fearlessly up into the storm, defying the raging Atlantic
winds. A long, black stream of carriages poured down the avenue,
intersected here and there by other streams, tending
horizontally. There were a score of cabs about the entrance of
his hotel, and his driver had to wait. Boys in livery were
running in and out of the awning stretched across the sidewalk,
up and down the red velvet carpet laid from the door to the
street. Above, about, within it all was the rumble and roar, the
hurry and toss of thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure
as himself, and on every side of him towered the glaring
affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth.
The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a
spasm of realization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all
romances, the nerve-stuff of all sensations was whirling about
him like the snowflakes. He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.
When Paul went down to dinner the music of the orchestra
came floating up the elevator shaft to greet him. His head
whirled as he stepped into the thronged corridor, and he sank
back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath.
The lights, the chatter, the perfumes, the bewildering medley of
color--he had, for a moment, the feeling of not being able to
stand it. But only for a moment; these were his own people, he
told himself. He went slowly about the corridors, through the
writing rooms, smoking rooms, reception rooms, as though he were
exploring the chambers of an enchanted palace, built and peopled
for him alone.
When he reached the dining room he sat down at a table near a
window. The flowers, the white linen, the many-colored
wineglasses, the gay toilettes of th
e women, the low popping of
corks, the undulating repetitions of the Blue Danube from
the orchestra, all flooded Paul's dream with bewildering radiance.
When the roseate tinge of his champagne was added--that cold,
precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed in his glass--
Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all.
This was what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this
was what all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of
his past. Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a
place where fagged-looking businessmen got on the early car; mere
rivets in a machine they seemed to Paul,--sickening men, with
combings of children's hair always hanging to their coats, and
the smell of cooking in their clothes. Cordelia Street--Ah, that
belonged to another time and country; had he not always been
thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as far back as
he could remember, looking pensively over just such shimmering
textures and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this one
between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.
He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no
especial desire to meet or to know any of these people; all
he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the
pageant. The mere stage properties were all he contended for.
Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in his lodge at the
Metropolitan. He was now entirely rid of his nervous misgivings,
of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show
himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his
surroundings explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had
only to wear it passively. He had only to glance down at his
attire to reassure himself that here it would be impossible for
anyone to humiliate him.
He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting room to go
to bed that night, and sat long watching the raging storm from
his turret window. When he went to sleep it was with the lights
turned on in his bedroom; partly because of his old timidity, and
partly so that, if he should wake in the night, there would be no
wretched moment of doubt, no horrible suspicion of yellow
wallpaper, or of Washington and Calvin above his bed.
Sunday morning the city was practically snowbound. Paul
breakfasted late, and in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San
Francisco boy, a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a
"little flyer" over Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul
the night side of the town, and the two boys went out together
after dinner, not returning to the hotel until seven o'clock the
next morning. They had started out in the confiding warmth of a
champagne friendship, but their parting in the elevator was
singularly cool. The freshman pulled himself together to make
his train, and Paul went to bed. He awoke at two o'clock in the
afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for icewater, coffee,
and the Pittsburgh papers.
On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion.
There was this to be said for him, that he wore his spoils with
dignity and in no way made himself conspicuous. Even under the
glow of his wine he was never boisterous, though he found the stuff
like a magician's wand for wonder-building. His chief greediness
lay in his ears and eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones.
His dearest pleasures were the gray winter twilights in his sitting
room; his quiet enjoyment of his flowers, his clothes, his wide
divan, his cigarette, and his sense of power. He could not
remember a time when he had felt so at peace with himself. The
mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every day and
every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied for
pleasure, even at school; but to be noticed and admired, to assert
his difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good
deal more manly, more honest, even, now that he had no need for
boastful pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used
to say, "dress the part." It was characteristic that remorse did
not occur to him. His golden days went by without a shadow, and he
made each as perfect as he could.
On the eighth day after his arrival in New York he found the whole
affair exploited in the Pittsburgh papers, exploited with a wealth
of detail which indicated that local news of a sensational nature
was at a low ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson announced that the
boy's father had refunded the full amount of the theft and that
they had no intention of prosecuting. The Cumberland minister had
been interviewed, and expressed his hope of yet reclaiming the
motherless lad, and his Sabbath-school teacher declared that she
would spare no effort to that end. The rumor had reached
Pittsburgh that the boy had been seen in a New York hotel, and his
father had gone East to find him and bring him home.
Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a
chair, weak to the knees, and clasped his head in his hands. It
was to be worse than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia
Street were to close over him finally and forever. The gray
monotony stretched before him in hopeless, unrelieved years;
Sabbath school, Young People's Meeting, the yellow-papered room,
the damp dishtowels; it all rushed back upon him with a sickening
vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra had
suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over.
The sweat broke out on his face, and he sprang to his feet,
looked about him with his white, conscious smile, and winked at
himself in the mirror, With something of the old childish belief
in miracles with which he had so often gone to class, all his
lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and dashed whistling down the
corridor to the elevator.
He had no sooner entered the dining room and caught the
measure of the music than his remembrance was lightened by his
old elastic power of claiming the moment, mounting with it, and
finding it all-sufficient. The glare and glitter about him, the
mere scenic accessories had again, and for the last time, their
old potency. He would show himself that he was game, he would
finish the thing splendidly. He doubted, more than ever, the
existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank his
wine recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of those fortunate
beings born to the purple, was he not still himself and in his
own place? He drummed a nervous accompaniment to the Pagliacci
music and looked about him, telling himself over and over that it
had paid.
He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the music and the
chill sweetness of his wine, that he might have done it more
wisely. He might have caught an outbound steamer and been well
out of their clutches before now. But the other side of the
world had seemed too far away and too uncertain then; he could
&
nbsp; not have waited for it; his need had been too sharp. If he had
to choose over again, he would do the same thing tomorrow. He
looked affectionately about the dining room, now gilded with a
soft mist. Ah, it had paid indeed!
Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his
head and feet. He had thrown himself across the bed without
undressing, and had slept with his shoes on. His limbs and hands
were lead heavy, and his tongue and throat were parched and
burnt. There came upon him one of those fateful attacks of
clearheadedness that never occurred except when he was physically
exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay still, closed his
eyes, and let the tide of things wash over him.
His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or
other," he told himself. The memory of successive summers on the
front stoop fell upon him like a weight of black water. He had
not a hundred dollars left; and he knew now, more than ever, that
money was everything, the wall that stood between all he loathed
and all he wanted. The thing was winding itself up; he
had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York, and
had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on his
dressing table now; he had got it out last night when he came
blindly up from dinner, but the shiny metal hurt his eyes, and he
disliked the looks of it.
He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and
again to attacks of nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated;
all the world had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow he was not
afraid of anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had
looked into the dark corner at last and knew. It was bad enough,
what he saw there, but somehow not so bad as his long fear of it
had been. He saw everything clearly now. He had a feeling that he
had made the best of it, that he had lived the sort of life he was
meant to live, and for half an hour he sat staring at the revolver.
But he told himself that was not the way, so he went downstairs and
took a cab to the ferry.
When Paul arrived in Newark he got off the train and took
another cab, directing the driver to follow the Pennsylvania
tracks out of the town. The snow lay heavy on the roadways and
had drifted deep in the open fields. Only here and there the
dead grass or dried weed stalks projected, singularly black,
above it. Once well into the country, Paul dismissed the
carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his mind a
medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an
actual picture of everything he had seen that morning. He
remembered every feature of both his drivers, of the toothless
old woman from whom he had bought the red flowers in his coat,
the agent from whom he had got his ticket, and all of his fellow
passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable to cope with vital
matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftly at sorting and
grouping these images. They made for him a part of the ugliness
of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter burning on
his tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into his mouth
as he walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a
little hillside, where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty
feet below him, he stopped and sat down.
The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he
noticed, their red glory all over. It occurred to him that all
the flowers he had seen in the glass cases that first night must
have gone the same way, long before this. It was only one
splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the
winter outside the glass; and it was a losing game in the end, it
seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is
run. Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat and
scooped a little hole in the snow, where he covered it up. Then
he dozed awhile, from his weak condition, seemingly insensible to
the cold.
The sound of an approaching train awoke him, and he started