_ PART ONE. IN WHICH YOU SEE A SECRET SPRING
CHAPTER I. FATE WALKS BROADWAY
O I have seen a fair mermaid,
That sang beside a lonely sea,
And now her long black hair she'll braid,
And be my own good wife to me.
O woe's the day you saw the maid,
And woe's the song she sang the sea,
In hell her long black hair she'll braid,
For ne'er a soul at all has she!
Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden. Roger Bradley was walking up Broadway. This fact calls sharply for comment, for he had not done it in years; the thoroughfare was intolerable to him. But one of its impingements upon a less blatant avenue had caught him napping and he found himself entangled in a mesh of theatre dribblings, pool-room loungers, wine-touts and homeward bent women of the middle, shopping class. Being there, he scorned to avail himself of the regularly recurring cross streets, but strode along, his straight, trim bulk, his keen, judicial profile--a profile that spoke strong of the best traditions of American blood--marking him for what he was among a crowd not to be matched, in its way, upon the Western Continent.
At the second slanting of the great, tawdry lane he bent with it and encountered suddenly a little knot of flustered women just descended from the elevated way that doubled the din and blare of the shrieking city. They were bundle-filled, voluble, dressed by any standards save those of their native city, far beyond their probable means and undoubted station. As they stopped unexpectedly and hesitated, damming the flood of hurrying citizens, Roger halted of necessity and stepped backward, but in avoiding them he bumped heavily against the person behind him. A startled gasp, something soft against his shoulder, the sharp edge of a projecting hat, told him that this person was a woman, and stepping sidewise into the shelter of a neighbouring news-stall, he raised his hat with a courtesy alien to the place and hour.
"I beg your pardon, madam," he said, "I trust I have not hurt you?"
"No," said the woman, who wore a heavy grey veil, and as that is literally all she said and as her method of saying it was as convincing as it was simple, one would suppose the incident closed and look to see Roger complete his journey to his club without further adventure.
Do I wish he had? God knows. It was undoubtedly the turning-point in his life and he was forty. Had he gone on to the club where I was waiting for him; had we dined, played out our rubber, dropped in at the occasional chamber concert that was our usual and almost our only dissipation in those days, I should not now be ransacking old letters and diaries from which to make this book, nor would Margarita's picture--her loveliest, as
Juliet--lean toward me from the wall. She is smiling; not as one smiles in photographs, but as a flesh-and-blood woman droops over the man she loves and smiles her heart into his lips, reaching over his shoulder. Everything slips behind but you two, herself and you, when you look at it. Sarony, who took it, told me he had never posed such a subject, and I believe him.
Well, well, it's done now. It was twenty years ago that Roger bumped into his fate in that eddy of Broadway and I was as powerless as you are now to disentangle him and keep him for myself, which, selfishly enough, of course, I wanted terribly to do. You see, he was all I had, Roger, and I was hoping we would play the game out together. But--not to have known Margarita? Never to have watched that bending droop of her neck, that extraordinary colouring of her skin--a real Henner skin! I remember Maurice Grau's telling me that he had always thought Henner colour blind till he saw Margarita's neck in her name-part in
Faust.
The things that girl used to tell me, before she had any soul, of course, and in the days when I was the third man to whom she had ever spoken more than ten words in her life, were almost enough to pay for all the pain she taught me. Such talks! I can close my eyes and actually smell the sea-weed and the damp sand and hear the inrush of the big combers. She used to sit in the lee of the rocks, all huddled in that heavy, supple army-blue officer's cloak of hers with its tarnished silver clasps, and talk as Miranda must have talked to Ferdinand's old bachelor friend, who probably appreciated the chance--too well, the poor old dog!
I had reached, I think, when I left off my plain unvarnished tale and took to maundering, that precise point in it which exhibits Roger in the act of replacing his hat upon his even then slightly greyish head and striding on. It seems to me that he would not have checked in his stride if the woman had replied after the usual tautological fashion of her sex (we blame them for it, not thinking how wholly in nature it is that they should be so, like the repeated notes of birds, the persistence of the raindrops, the continual flicker of the sun through the always fluttering leaves,) with some such phrase as, "No, indeed, not in the least, I assure you!" or "Not at all, really--don't mention it!" or even, "No, indeed," with a shy bow or a composed one, as the case might be. But this woman uttered merely the syllable, "No," with no modification nor variation, no inclination of the head, no movement forward or back. Her utterance was grave, moreover, and precise; her tone noticeably full and deep. Roger, pausing a moment in the shelter of the news-stall, spoke again at the spur of some unexplainable impulse.
"I was afraid I had stepped directly on your foot--it felt so," he said.
Again she answered simply, "No," and that was his second chance. Now in the face of these facts it is folly to contend that the woman "accosted" him, as his cousin, who was one of the Boston Thayers, put it to me. She did nothing of the kind; she replied twice, to his distinct questions, in the coldest of monosyllables and he could not even have told if she looked at him, her veil was so thick. Let that be definitely understood, once and for all. The chances were even in favour of her being violently pitted from the small-pox, since even twenty years ago, when the city was less cosmopolitan (and from my point of view more interesting) the women of New York of the class that travels unaccompanied and on foot at dusk were not accustomed to go heavily veiled if they had any fair excuse for the contrary course.
Nevertheless to that veiled woman did Roger address himself--unnecessarily, mark you--for the third time. Why did he? He had his chance; two chances in fact. But this is folly, for of course he had no chance at all. Fate stood by that news-stall, with the blear-eyed, frousy woman that tended it looking vacantly on; Fate, veiled, too, and not even monosyllabic in his behalf. I should have known this, I think, even if I had not lived those curious, long eight months in Algeria and slept those dreamless nights under the Algerian stars that got into my blood and call me back now and then; imperiously and never in vain, though I feel older than the stars, and Alif and the rest are dead or exhibiting themselves at the great American memorial fairs that began to flourish about the time this tale begins. No, there was no help: it was written.
"I am glad I did not hurt you," he said, really moving forward now and again raising his hat, "these crowds are dangerous for women at this hour."
He took two steps and stopped suddenly, for a hand slipped under his arm. (You should have seen his cousin's face, the Boston one, when in that relentless way known only to women and eminent artists in cross-examination she got this fact out of me.)
"Will you tell me the quickest way to Broadway?" said the woman to whom he had just spoken.
"To Broadway?" he echoed stupidly, standing stock still, conscious of the grasp upon his arm, a curious sense of the importance of this apparently cheap experience surging over him, even while he resented its banality. "This is Broadway. What do you want of it?"
"I want to show myself on it," said the woman, a young woman, from the voice.
Roger stepped back against the news-stall, dragging her with him, since her hand did not leave his arm.
"To show yourself on it?" he repeated sternly, "and why do you want to do that?"
"To get myself some friends. I have none," said she serenely.
Now you must not think Roger a fool, for he was not. You see, you never heard the voice that spoke to him. If you had, and had possessed any experience or knowledge of the world, you would have realised that the owner of that voice possessed neither or else was a very great and convincing actress. Mere print cannot excuse him, perhaps, but I give you my word he was as a matter of fact excusable, since he was a bachelor. Most men are very susceptible to the human voice, especially to the female human voice, and it has always been a matter of the deepest wonder to me that the men who do not hear a lovely one once in the year are most under the dominion of their females. I mean, of course, the Americans. It is one of the greatest proofs of the power of these
belles Americaines that they wield it in spite of the rustiness of this, their chief national weapon.
The bell notes, the grave, full richness of this veiled woman's voice touched Roger deeply and with a brusque motion he drew out from his pocket a banknote and pressed it into the hand under his arm.
"Take this and go home," he said severely. "If you will promise me to call at an address I will give you, I will guarantee you a decent means of livelihood. Will you promise me?"
She reached down without a word into a bag that hung
en chatelaine at her waist and drew out something in her turn.
"I have a great many of those," she said placidly, "and more at home. See them!"
And under his face she thrust a double handful of stamped paper--all green.
"Each one of these is called twenty dollars," she informed him, "and some of them are called fifty dollars. They are in the bottom of the bag. I do not think that I need any more."
Roger stared at her.
"Put that away directly," he said, "and lift your veil so that I can see who you are. There is something wrong here."
They stood in the lee of the flaring stall, a pair so obvious in their relation to each other, one would say, as to require no comment beyond the cynical indifference of the red-eyed woman who tended it. No doubt she had long ceased to count the well-dressed, athletic men who drew indifferently clothed young women into the shelter of her stand. And yet no one of his Puritan ancestors could have been further in spirit from her dreary inferences than this Roger. Nor do I believe him to be so exceptional in this as to cause remark. We are not all birds of prey, dear ladies, believe me. Indeed, since you have undertaken the responsibilities of the literary dissecting-room so thoroughly and increasingly; since you have, as one might say, at last freed your minds to us in the amazing frankness of your multitudinous and unsparing pages, I am greatly tempted to wonder if you are not essentially less decent than we. One would never have ventured to suspect it, had you not opened the door....
The woman threw back her veil so that it framed her face like a cloud and Roger looked straight into her eyes. And so the curtain rolled up, the orchestra ceased its irrelevant pipings and the play was begun. _