The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 49

I shook my head, hopelessly, as he flung himself down in the chair, sobbing out that foolish cry, over and over again.

"Yes, he's got to remember," I could hear Mary Lockwood say as she turned and faced us.

"But what will make him?" I asked, as her studiously impersonal gaze met mine.

"This will," she announced as she held out her hand. I saw then, for the first time, that in this hand she was holding a heavily inscribed and R-stamped envelope.

"What's that?" demanded Criswell, staring hard.

"It's your lost letter," answered Mary Lockwood. "How it fell out, I don't know. But we do know, now, that father shut this letter up in that book. And the Lockwoods, I'm afraid," she continued with an odd little quaver in her voice, "will have a very, very great deal to ask your forgiveness for. I'm sorry, Mr. Criswell, terribly sorry this ever happened. But I'm glad, terribly glad, that it has turned out the way it has."

There was a moment of quite unbroken silence. Then Criswell turned to me.

"It's _you_ I've got to thank for all this," he finally bl.u.s.tered out, with moist yet happy eyes, as he did his best to wring my hand off.

"It's you who've--who've reinstated me!"

We were standing there in a sort of triangle, very awkward and ill-at-ease, until I found the courage to break the silence.

"But I don't seem to have been able to reinstate myself, Criswell," I said as I turned and met Mary Lockwood's level gaze. She looked at me out of those intrepid and unequivocating eyes of hers, for a full half minute. Then she turned slowly away. She didn't speak. But there was something that looked strangely like unhappiness in her face as she groped toward the door, which Criswell, I noticed, opened for her.

CHAPTER XI

THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER

"I hope you slept well, sir," said Benson, as I sat down to my breakfast of iced Casaba and eggs...o...b..ien, a long month later.

"Like a top, thank you," I was able to announce to that anxious-eyed old retainer of mine.

"That sounds like old times, sir," ventured Benson, caressing his own knuckle-joints very much as though he were shaking hands with himself.

"It _feels_ like old times," I briskly acknowledged. "And this morning, Benson, I'd like you to clear out my study and get that clutter of Shang and Ming bronzes off my writing-desk."

"Very good, sir."

"And order up a ream or two of that Wistaria Bond I used to use. For I feel like work again, Benson, and that's a feeling which I don't think we ought to neglect."

"Quite so, sir," acquiesced Benson, with an approving wag of the head which he made small effort to conceal.

It was the truth that I had spoken to Benson. The drought seemed to have ended. The old psychasthenic inertia had slipped away. Life, for some unaccountable reason or other, still again seemed wonderful to me, touched with some undefined promise of high adventure, crowned once more with the fugitive wine-glow of romance. Gramercy Square, from my front windows, looked like something that Maxfield Parrish might have drawn. A milk-wagon, just beyond the corner, made me suddenly think of Phaethon and his coursers of the stellar trails. I felt an itching to get back to my desk, to shake out the wings of creation. I wanted to write once more. It would never again be about those impossible Alaskan demiG.o.ds of the earlier days, but about real men and women, about the people I had met and known and struggled into an understanding of. Life, I began to feel, was a game, a great game, a game well worth watching, doubly well worth trying to interpret.

So when I settled down that day I wrote feverishly and I wrote joyously. I wrote until my fingers were cramped and my head was empty.

I surrendered to a blithe logorrhea that left me contentedly limp and lax and in need of an hour or two of open air.

So I sallied forth, humming as I went. It was a sparkling afternoon of earliest spring, and as I paced the quiet streets I turned pleasantly over in that half-torpid brain of mine certain ideas as to the value of dramatic surprise, together with a carefully registered self-caution as to the author's over-use of the long arm of Coincidence.

Coincidences, I told myself, were things which popped up altogether too often on the printed page, and occurred altogether too seldom in actual life. It was a lazy man's way of reaching his end, that trick of riding the b.u.mpers of Invention, of swinging and dangling from the over-wrenched arm-socket of Coincidence. It was good enough for the glib and delusive coggery of the moving-pictures, but--

And then I stopped short. I stopped short, confronted by one of those calamitous street-accidents only too common in any of our twentieth-century cities where speed and greed have come to weigh life so lightly.

I scarcely know which I noticed first, the spick-and-span cloverleaf roadster sparkling in its coat of Nile-green enamel, or the girl who seemed to step directly in its path as it went humming along the smooth and polished asphalt. But by one of those miraculously rapid calculations of which the human mind is quite often capable I realized that this same softly-humming car was predestined to come more or less violently into contact with that frail and seemingly hesitating figure.

My first impulse was to turn away, to avoid a spectacle which instinct told me would be horrible. For still again I felt the beak of cowardice spearing my vitals. I had the odynephobiac's dread of blood.

It unmanned me; it sickened my soul. And I would at least have covered my face with my hands, to blot out the scene, had I not suddenly remembered that other and strangely similar occasion when a car came into violent collision with a human body. And it had been my car. On that occasion, I only too well knew, I had proved unpardonably vacillating and craven. I had run away from the horror I should have faced like a man. And I had paid for my cowardice, paid for it at the incredibly extortionate price of my self-respect and my peace of mind.

So this time I compelled myself to face the music. I steeled myself to stand by, even as the moving car struck the hesitating body and threw it to the pavement. My heart jumped up into my throat, like a ball-valve, and I shouted aloud, in mortal terror, for I could see where the skirted body trailed in under the running-gear of the Nile-green roadster, dragging along the pavement as the two white hands clung frantically to the green-painted spring-leaves. But I didn't run away. Instead of running away, in fact, I did exactly the opposite. I swung out to the side of the fallen girl, who stiffened in my arms as I picked her up. Then I spread my overcoat out along the curb, and placed the inert body on top of it, for in my first unreasoning panic I a.s.sumed that the woman was dead. I could see saliva streaked with blood drooling from her parted lips. It was horrible. And I had just made sure that she was still alive, that she was still breathing, when I became conscious of the fact that a second man, who had run along beside the car shaking his fist up at its driver, was standing close beside me. He was an elderly man, a venerable-looking man, a man with silvery hair and a meek and threadbare aspect. He was wringing his hands and moaning in his misery as he stared down at the girl stretched out on my overcoat.

"They've killed her!" he cried aloud. "O G.o.d, they've killed her!"

"Do you know this girl?" I demanded as I did my best to loosen the throat of her s.h.i.+rt-waist.

"Yes--yes! She's my Babbie. She's my niece. She's all I have," was his reply. "But they've killed her."

"Acting that way won't help things!" I told him, almost angrily. Then I looked up, still angrily, to see what had become of the Nile-green car. It had drawn in close beside the curb, not thirty feet away. I could see a woman stepping down from the driving-seat. All I noticed, at first, was that her face seemed very white, and that as she turned and moved toward us her left hand was pressed tight against her breast.

It struck me, even in that moment of tension, as an indescribably dramatic gesture.

Then the long arm of the G.o.ddess known as Coincidence swung up and smote me full in the face, as solidly as a blacksmith's hammer smites an anvil. For the woman I saw walking white-faced yet determined toward where I knelt at the curb-side was Mary Lockwood herself.

I stood up and faced her in the cruel clarity of the slanting afternoon sunlight. For only a moment, I noticed, her stricken eyes rested on the figure of the woman lying along the curb-edge. Then they rose to my face. In those eyes, as she stared at me, I could read the question, the awful question, which her lips left unuttered. Yet it was not fear; it was not cowardice, that I saw written on that tragically colorless brow. It was more a dumb protest against injustice without bounds, a pa.s.sionate and unarticulated pleading for some delivering sentence which she knew could not be given to her.

"No, she's not dead," I said in answer to that unspoken question. "She may not even be seriously hurt. But--"

I stared down at the telltale saliva streaked with blood. But the silvery-haired old man at my side put an end to any such efforts at prevarication.

"She's killed," he excitedly proclaimed.

"She's no such thing," I just as excitedly retorted.

"But you saw what they did to her?" he demanded, clutching at my shoulder. "You saw it. They ran her down, like a dog. They've ruined her; they've broken her body, for life!"

I could see Mary Lockwood's hand go out, as though in search for support. She was breathing almost as quickly, by this time, as the reviving girl on the curb-edge.

"Shut up," I curtly commanded the old man as he started in once more on his declamations, for the customary city crowd was already beginning to cl.u.s.ter about us. "It isn't talk we want now. We must get this girl where she can be taken care of."

It was then that Mary Lockwood spoke for the first time. Her voice was tremulous, but the gloved hand that hung at her side was no longer shaking.

"Couldn't I take her home?" she asked me. "To my home?"

I was busy pus.h.i.+ng back the crowd.

"No," I told her, "a hospital's best. I'll put her in your car there.

Then you run her over to the Roosevelt. That's even better than waiting for an ambulance."

I stooped over the injured girl again and felt her pulse. It struck me as an amazingly strong and steady pulse for any one in such a predicament. And her respiration, I noticed, was very close to normal.

I examined each side of her face, and inspected her lips and even her tongue-tip, to see if some cut or abrasion there couldn't account for that disturbing streak of blood. But I could find neither cut nor bruise, and by this time the old man was again making himself heard.