The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 18

"St. Luke's Hospital," I told him as I stepped into the car.

At that inst.i.tution, however, I was again refused all information as to the condition of Harriet Walter. It was not even admitted, when I became more insistent, that any such person was in the hospital.

"But I'm a friend of this young lady's," I tried to explain. "And I've a right to know of her condition."

The calm-eyed official looked at me quite unmoved.

"This young lady seems to have very many friends. And some of them seem to be very peculiar."

"What do you mean by that?" I demanded. For answer he pointed to a figure pacing up and down in the open street.

"There's another of these friends who've been insisting on seeing her,"

he explained, with a shrug of extenuation.

The uniformed attendant of that carbolized and white-walled temple of pain must have seen my start as I glanced out at the slowly pacing figure. For it was that of a young man wearing a velour hat. It was the youth I had met the night before in Madison Square.

"Do you happen to know that man's name?" I asked.

"He gave it as Mallory--James Mallory," was the answer.

I wasted no more time inside those depressing walls. I was glad to get out to the street, to the open air and the clear afternoon sunlight. I had already decided on my next step.

Whether the man in the velour hat recognized me or not, I could not say. If he did, he gave no sign of it. Yet I could see that he resented my addressing him, although he showed no surprise as I did so by name. It was not until I point-blank asked if he had been inquiring about Harriet Walter that any trace of interest came into his face.

He replied, with considerable ferocity, that he had. One glimpse of the unsteady fingers and twitching eyelids showed me the tension under which he was struggling. I felt genuinely sorry for him.

"I happen to know Miss Walter," I told him, "and if you'll be so good as to step in my car, I can tell you anything you may want to know."

"Is your name Adams?" the white-faced youth suddenly demanded.

"It is not," I answered, with considerable alacrity, for his face was not pleasant to look at.

"Then why can you tell me what I want to know?" he asked, still eying me with open hostility. I struggled to keep my temper. It was a case where one could afford to be indulgent.

"If we each have a friend in this lady, it's not unreasonable that we should be able to be friends ourselves," I told him. "So let's clear the cobwebs by a spin down-town."

"Gasoline won't wash my particular cobwebs away," he retorted. There was something likable about his audacious young face, even under its cloud of bitterness.

"Then why couldn't you dine with me, at a very quiet club of mine?" I suggested. "Or, better still, on the veranda of the Clairemont, where we can talk together."

He hesitated at first, but under my pressure he yielded, and we both got in the car and swung westward, and then up Riverside to the Clairemont. There I secured a corner piazza-table, overlooking the river. And there I exerted a skill of which I had once been proud, in ordering a dinner which I thought might appeal to the poignantly unhappy young man who sat across the table from me. I could see that he was still looking at me, every now and then, with both revolt and sullen bewilderment written on his lean young face. It would be no easy matter, I knew, to win his confidence.

"I suppose you think I'm crazy, like the rest of them?" he suddenly demanded. I noticed that he had already taken his third drink of wine.

"Why should I think that?"

"I've had enough to make me crazy!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, with that abject self-pity which marks the last milestone on the avenue of hope.

"Perhaps I could help you," I suggested. "Or perhaps I could advise you."

"What good's advice when you're up against what I'm up against?" was his embittered retort.

He was apparently finding relief in the Pommery. I found a compensating relief in merely beholding that look of haunted and abject misery going out of his young eyes.

"Then tell me what the trouble is," I said.

He still shook his head. Then he suddenly looked up.

"How long have you known Harriet Walter?" he asked.

"From the time," I told him, after a moment's thought, "when she first appeared for the Fresh Air Fund at the Plaza. That was about two years ago--when she first went with Frohman."

"I've known her for twenty years!" was the youth's unexpected exclamation. "We grew up together, out West."

"Where out West?" I asked.

"In Medicine Hat--that's a Canadian prairie town."

"But she's younger than you?"

"Only two years. She's twenty-two; I'm twenty-four. She changed her name from Wilson to Walter when she went on the stage."

"Then you are close friends?" I asked, for I could see the wine had loosened his reticent young tongue.

"Friends!" he scoffed. "I'm the man she promised to marry!"

Here, I told myself, was a pretty kettle of fish. I knew the man before me was not Adams. Yet it was several weeks now since Harriet Walter's engagement to young Adams had been officially announced. And there was nothing unstable or predaceous about the Harriet Walter I had known.

"Would you mind telling me just when she promised to marry you?" I asked. "Remember, this is not prying. I'm only trying to get behind that cobweb."

"She promised me over two years ago," he answered me, quite openly.

"Definitely?" I insisted.

"As definite as pen and ink could make it. Even before she gave in, before she gave the promise, we'd had a sort of understanding. That was before I made my British Columbia strike out West. She'd come East to study for the stage. She always felt she would make a great actress. We all tried to keep her from it, but she said it was her career. She'd been having a hard time of it then, those first six months. So I came through to New York and wanted to take her back, to get her out of all that sort of thing. But she put me off. She wouldn't give in to being defeated in her work. She gave me her promise, but asked for a year's time. When that was up, she'd made her hit. Then, of course, she asked for one year more. And in the meantime I made my own hit--in timber limits."

"But hasn't she justified the time you've given her?" I inquired, remembering the sudden fame that had come to her, the name in electrics over the Broadway theater, the lithographs in the shop windows, the interviews in the Sunday papers.

"Justified!" cried the young man across the table from me. "After I'd waited two years, after she'd given me her promise, she's turned round and promised to marry this man Adams!"

"And has she never explained?"

"Explained? She won't see me. She had me put out of her hotel. She went off to Narragansett. She pretended she doesn't even know me."

This sounded very unlike the Harriet Walter I had known. There had seemed little that was deliberately venal or treacherous in that artless-eyed young lady's nature.

"And what did you do?" I asked.