The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 20

"It's not too late!" I blindly persisted.

"What do you know about it?" was her listless and weary retort.

"I know more about it than you imagine," was my answer. "I know where this revolver came from, just when and where you picked it up, and just how near you came to using it."

She covered her face with her hands. Then she dropped them to her side, with a gesture of hopelessness.

"Oh, they'll all know now!" she moaned. "I knew it would come, some day. And I haven't the strength to face it--I haven't the strength!"

I felt, in some way, that the moment was a climactic one.

"But how did it begin?" I asked more gently, as I gazed down at the fragile and girlish body huddled together in the chair.

"It began two years ago," she went on in her tired and throaty monotone. "It began when I saw I was a failure, when I realized that all was useless, that I'd made a mistake."

"What mistake?" I demanded, still in the dark.

"The mistake I wasn't brave enough to face. I thought it was the life I was made for, that they'd never understood at home. Even _he_ couldn't understand, I thought. Then they let me come. I worked, oh, so hard! And when I left the school all I could get was a place in the chorus. I was ashamed to tell them. I pretended I had a part, a real part. He kept arguing that I ought to give it up. He kept asking me to come back. I wasn't brave enough to acknowledge defeat. I still thought my chance would come; I kept asking for more time."

"And then?" I prompted.

"Then I couldn't even stay at the work I had. It became impossible; I can't tell you why. Then I did anything, from extra work with moving pictures to reader in the City Library cla.s.ses. But I still kept going to the agencies, to the Broadway offices, trying to get a part. And things dragged on and on. And then I did this, this awful thing."

"What awful thing?" I asked, trying to bridge the ever-recurring breaks in her thought. But she ignored the interruption.

"We'd studied together in the same cla.s.ses at the Wheatley School. And people had said we looked alike. But she was born for that sort of life, for success. As I went down, step by step, she went up. He wrote me that I must be getting famous, for he'd seen my picture on a magazine-cover. It was hers. I pretended it was mine. I pretended I was doing the things she was doing. I let them believe I'd taken a new name, a stage name. I sent them papers that told of her success. I became a cheat, an impostor, a living lie--I _became Harriet Walter_!"

At last the light had come. I saw everything in a flash. I suddenly realized the perplexities and profundities of human life. I felt shaken by a sudden pity for these two bound and unhappy spirits, at that moment so close together, yet groping so foolishly and perversely along their mole-like trails.

I was still thinking of the irony of it all, of the two broken and lonely young lives even at that moment under the same roof, crushed under the weight of their unseeing and uncomprehending misery, when the girl in the chair began to speak again.

"It was terrible," she went on, in her pa.s.sionate resolve to purge her soul of the whole corroding blight. "I didn't dream what it would lead to, what it would cause. I dreaded every advance she made. It wasn't jealousy, it was more than that; it was fear, terror. She seemed to be feeding on me, day by day, month by month. I knew all the time that the higher she got the lower I had to sink. And now, in a different way, she's taken everything from me. Taken everything, without knowing it!"

"No, you're wrong there," I said. "She hasn't taken everything."

"What is there left?" was her forlorn query.

"Life--all your real life. This has been a sort of nightmare, but now it's over. Now you can go back and begin over again."

"It's too late!" She clasped her thin hands hopelessly together. "And there's no one to go to."

"_There's Mallory_," I said, waiting for some start as the name fell on her ears. But I saw none.

"No," she cried, "he'd hate and despise me."

"But you still care for him?" I demanded.

"I need him," she sobbingly acknowledged. "Yes--yes, I always cared for him. But he'd never understand. He'd never forgive me. He's grown away from me."

"He's waiting for you," I said.

I stood looking at the bowed figure for a moment. Then I slipped out of the room.

I stepped in through my own door and closed it after me. Young Mallory, with his watch in his hand, swung about from the window and faced me.

"Well, it's ten o'clock--and nothing's settled!"

"It is settled," was my answer.

I led him across the quiet hall to the half-lit back room.

I saw his startled and groping motion. Then I heard his cry of "Harrie!" and her answering cry of "Jamie" as the white face, with its hunger and its happiness, looked up into his.

Then I quietly stepped outside and closed the door, leaving them alone.

From that moment I was an outsider, an intruder. My part was over and done. But the sight of those two young people, in each other's arms, made my thoughts turn back to Mary Lockwood and the happiness which had been lost out of my own life. And I didn't sleep so well that night as I had hoped to.

CHAPTER VI

THE IRREPROACHABLE BUTLER

"Are you waiting for some one, sir?"

That question, for all its veneer of respectfulness, was only too patently a message of dismissal. And I resented it, not only because it was an impertinence, but more because it had driven out of my drowsy brain a very beautiful picture of Mary Lockwood as she stooped over an old Italian table-cover embroidered with gold galloon.

"Are you waiting for some one?" repeated that newly arrived all-night waiter, in no way impressed by my silence.

"I am," I announced as I inspected him with open disapproval. I was dreamily wondering why, in the name of common sense, waiters always dressed in such ridiculous and undecorative neckties.

This particular waiter, however, continued to regard me out of a fishy and cynical eye. Then he looked at the clock. Then he looked at my empty wine-cooler, plainly an advertis.e.m.e.nt of suspended circulation in the only fluid that seemed vital to him.

"Was it a lady?" he had the effrontery to inquire.

I could see his eyes roam about the all but empty room. It was the low-ebb hour when a trolley car is an event along the empty street, the hour when chairs are piled on cafe tables, the white corpuscles of the milk wagons begin to move through the city's sleepy arteries, and those steel nerves known as telegraph wires keep languidly awake with the sugary thrills of their night letters.

"Yes, it was a lady," I answered. That wall-eyed intruder knew nothing of the heavenly supper I had stumbled on in that wicked French restaurant, or of the fine and firm _Clos Vougeot_ that had been unearthed from its shabby cellar, or of my own peace of mind as I sat there studying the empty metal cooler and pondering how the mean and scabby wastes of Champagne could mother an ichor so rich with singing etherealities.

"Er--just what might she look like, sir?" my tormentor next asked of me, blinking about in a loose and largely condoning matter-of-factness as though in placid search of some plumed and impatient demirep awaiting her chance to cross the bar of acquaintances.h.i.+p on the careless high tide of inebriacy.

"She moves very, very quietly, and has a star in her hair," I replied to that fish-eyed waiter. "Her breath is soft and dewy, and her brow is hooded. And in her hands she carries a spray of poppies."

The waiter looked down at me with that impersonal mild pity with which it is man's wont to view the harmlessly insane.

"Surely," I said with a smothered yawn, "surely you have met her?

Surely you have been conscious of those soft and shadowy eyes gazing into yours as you melted into her arms?"

"Quite so, sir," uneasily admitted my wall-eyed friend. Then I began to realize that he was waking me up. I grew fearful lest his devastating invasion should frighten away the timorous spirit I had been wooing as a.s.siduously as an angler seeking his first trout. For one long hour, with a full body and an empty head, I had sat there stalking sleep as artfully and as arduously as huntsman ever stalked a deer. And I knew that if I moved from that spot the chase would be over, for that night at least.