The Brass Bowl/Chapter 9
IX
PROCRASTINATION
The cab which picked Maitland up at his lodgings carried him but a few blocks to the club at which he had, the previous evening, entertained his lawyer. Maitland had selected it as the one of all the clubs of which he and Bannerman were members, wherein he was least likely to meet the latter. Neither frequented its sober precincts by habit. Its severe and classical building on a corner of Madison Avenue overlooking the Square, is but the outward presentment of an institution to be a member of which is a duty, but emphatically no great pleasure, to the sons of a New York family of any prominence.
But in its management the younger generation holds no suffrage; and is not slow to declare that the Primordial is rightly named, characterizing the individual members of the Board of Governors as antediluvians, prehistoric monsters who have never learned that laughter lends a savor to existence. And so it is that the younger generation, (which is understood to include Maitland and Bannerman), while it religiously pays its dues and has the name of the Primordial engraved upon its cards, shuns those deadly respectable rooms and seeks its comfort elsewhere.
Maitland found it dull and depressing enough, that same evening, something before seven. The spacious and impressive lounging-rooms were but sparsely tenanted, other than by the ennuied corps of servants; and the few members who had lent the open doors the excuse of their presence were of the elderly type that hides itself behind a newspaper in an easy chair and snorts when addressed.
The young man strolled disconsolately enough into the billiard-room, thence (dogged by a specter of loneliness) to the bar, and finally, in sheer desperation, to the dining-room, where he selected a table and ordered an evening paper with his meal.
When the former was brought him, he sat up and began to take a new interest in life. The glaring head-lines that met his eye on the front page proved as bracing as a slap in the face.
"'The Maitland Jewels,'" he read, half aloud: "'Daring Attempt at Burglary. "Mad" Maitland Catches "Handsome Dan" Anisty in the Act of Cracking His Safe at Maitland Manor. Which was Which? Both Principals Disappear.'"
A dull red glow suffused the reader's countenance; he compressed his lips, only opening them once, and then to emit a monosyllabic oath, which can hardly have proved any considerable relief to his surcharged emotional nature.
The news-story was exploited as a "beat"; it could have been little else, since nine-tenths of its "exclusive details" had been born full-winged from the fecund imagination of a busy reporter to whom Maitland had refused an interview while in his bath, some three hours earlier. Maitland discovered with relief that boiled down to essentials it consisted simply of the statement that somebody (presumably himself) had caught somebody (presumably Anisty) burglarizing the library safe at Maitland Manor that morning: that one of the somebodies (no one knew which) had overpowered the other and left him in charge of the butler, who had presently permitted his prisoner to escape and then talked for publication.
It was not to this so much that Maitland objected. It was the illustrations that alternately saddened and maddened the young man: the said illustrations comprising blurred half-tone reproductions of photographs taken on the Maitland estate; a diagram of the library, as fanciful as the text it illuminated, and two portraits, side by side, of the heroes, himself and Anisty, excellent likenesses both of the originals and of each other.
Mr. Maitland did not enjoy his dinner.
Anxious and preoccupied, he tasted the dishes mechanically; and when they had all passed before him, took his thoughts and a cigar to a gloomy corner of the smoking-room, where he sat for two solid hours, debating the matter pro and con, and arriving at no conclusion whatever, save that Higgins was doomed.
At ten-fifteen he began to contemplate with positive pleasure the prospect of discharging the butler. That, at least, was action, something that he could do; wherever else he thought to move he found himself baffled by the blank darkness of mystery, or by his fear of publicity and ridicule.
At ten-twenty he decided to move upon Greenfields at once, and telephoned O'Hagan, advising him to profess ignorance of his employer's whereabouts.
At ten-twenty-two, or in the midst of his admonitions to the janitor, he changed his mind and decided to stay in New York; and instructed the Irishman to bring him a suit-case containing a few necessaries; his intention being to stay out the night at the club, and so avoid the matutinal siege of his lodgings by reporters and detectives.
At ten-forty-five a club servant handed him the card of a representative of the Evening Journal. Maitland directed that the gentleman be shown into the reception-room.
At ten-forty-six he skulked out of the club by a side entrance, jumped into a cab and had himself driven to the East Thirty-fourth Street ferry, arriving there just in time to miss the last train for Greenfields.
Denied the shelter alike of his lodgings, his club, and his country home, the young man in despair caused himself to be conveyed to the Bartholdi Hotel, where, possessed of a devil of folly, he preserved his incognito by registering under the name of "M. Daniels." And straightway retired to his room.
But not to rest. The portion of the mentally harassed, sleeplessness, was his; and for an hour or more he tossed upon his bed (upon which he had thrown himself without troubling to undress), pondering, to no profit of his, the hundred problems, difficulties, and disadvantages suggested or created by the events of the past twenty-four hours.
The grey girl, Anisty, the jewels, himself: unflagging, his thoughts circumnavigated the world of his romance, touching only at these four ports, and returning always to linger longest in the harbor of sentiment.
The grey girl: strange that her personality should have come to dominate his thoughts in a space of time so brief! and upon grounds of intimacy so slender! … Who and what was she? What cruel rigor of circumstance had impelled her to seek a livelihood in ways so sinister? At whose door must the blame be laid, against what flaw in the body social should the indictment be drawn, that she should have been forced into the ranks of the powers that prey—a girl of her youth and rare fiber, of her cultivation, her charm, and beauty?
The sheer loveliness of her, her grace and gentleness, her ingenuous sensitiveness, her wit: they combined to make the thought of her, to him, at least, at once terrible and a delight. Remembering that once he had held her in his arms, had gazed into her starlit eyes, and inhaled the impalpable fragrance of her, he trembled, was both glad and afraid.
And her ways so hedged about with perils! While he must stand aside, impotent, a pillar of the social order secure in its shelter, and see her hounded and driven by the forces of the Law, harried and worried like an unclean thing, forced, as it might be, to resort to stratagems and expedients unthinkable, to preserve her liberty. …
It was altogether intolerable. He could not stand it. And yet—it was written that their paths had crossed and parted and were never again to touch. Or was it? … It must be so written: they would never meet again. After all, her concern with, her interest in, him, could have been nothing permanent. They had encountered under strange auspices, and he had treated her with common decency, for which she had repaid him in good measure by permitting him to retain his own property. Their account was even, and she for ever done with him. That must be her attitude. Why should it be anything else?
"Oh, the devil!" exclaimed the young man in disgust. And rising, took his distemper to the window.
Leaning on the sill, he thrust head and shoulders far out over the garish abyss of metropolitan night. The hot breath of the city fanned up in stifling waves into his face, from the street below, upon whose painted pavements men crawled like insects—round moving spots, to each his romance under his hat.
The window was on the corner, overlooking the junction of three great highways of humanity: Twenty-third Street, with its booming crosstown cars, stretching away into the darkness on either hand; Broadway, forking off to the left, its distances merging into a hot glow of yellow radiance; Fifth Avenue, branching into the north with its desolate sidewalks oddly patterned in areas of dense shadow and a cold, clear light. Over the way the park loomed darkly, for all its scattered arcs, a black and silent space, a well of mystery. …
It was late, quite late; the clock in front of Dorlon's (he craned his neck to see), made the hour one in the morning; the sidewalks were comparatively deserted, even the pillared portico of the Fifth Avenue Hotel destitute of loungers. A timid hint of coolness, forerunning the dawn, rode up on the breeze.
He looked up and away northward, for many minutes, over housetops stenciled black against the glowing sky, his gaze yearning into vast distances of space, melancholy tingeing the complexion of his mind. He fancied himself oppressed by a vague uneasiness, unaccountable as to cause, unless. …
From the sublime to the ridiculous with a vengeance, his thoughts tumbled. Gone the glamour of Romance in a twinkling, banished by rank materialism. He could have blushed for shame; he got slowly to his feet, irresolute, trying to grapple with a condition that never before in his existence had he been called upon to consider.
He had just realized that he was flat-strapped for cash. He had given his last quarter to the cabby, hours back. He was registered at a strange hotel, under an assumed name, unable to beg credit even for his breakfast without declaring his identity and thereby laying himself open to suspicion, discourtesy, insult. …
Of course there were ways out. He could telephone Bannerman, or any other of half a dozen acquaintances, in the morning; but that involved explanations, and explanations involved making himself the butt of his circle for many a weary day.
There was money in his lodgings, in the Chippendale escritoire; but to get it he would have to run the gauntlet of reporters and detectives which had already dismayed him in prospect. O'Hagan—ah!
At the head of his bed was a telephone. Impulsively, inconsiderate of the hour, he turned to it.
"Give me Nine-o-eight-nine Madison, please," he said; and waited, receiver to ear.
There was a slight pause; a buzz; the voice of the switchboard operator below stairs repeating the number to Central; Central's appropriately mechanical reiteration; another buzz; a silence; a prolonged buzz; and again the sounding silence. …
"Hello!" he said softly into the transmitter, at a venture.
No answer.
"Hello!"
Then Central, irritably: "Go ahead. You've got your party."
"Hello, hello!"
A faint hum of voices, rising and falling, beat against the walls of his understanding. Were the wires crossed? He lifted an impatient finger to jiggle the hook and call Central to order, when—something crashed heavily. He could have likened the sound, without a strain of imagination, to a chair being violently overturned. And then a woman's voice, clear, accents informed with anger and pain: "No!" and then. …
"Say, that's my mistake. That line you had's out of order. I had a call for them a while ago, and they didn't answer. Guess you'll have to wait."
"Central! Central!" he pleaded desperately. "I say, Central, give me that connection again, please."
"Ah, say! what's the matter with you, anyway? Didn't I tell you that line was out of order? Ring off!"
Automatically Maitland returned the receiver to its rest; and rose, white-lipped and trembling. That woman's voice. …