The Best Short Stories of 1917 Part 84

Outside we paused a moment, waiting for a cab. For the first time since he had told Leila of Bessie Lowe, d.i.c.k spoke to me. "I think," he said, "that it would be just as well if you didn't come."

"I must," I told him, "It isn't curiosity. You understand that, don't you? It is simply that this is the time for me to stand by you, if ever I shall do it, d.i.c.k."

"I don't deserve it." There was a break in his voice. "But I shall try to, my dear. I can't promise you much, but I can promise you that."

Down the brightness of Piccadilly into the fuller glow of Regent Street we rode without speech. Somewhere below the Circus we turned aside and went through dim canons of houses that opened a way past the Museum and let us into Bloomsbury. There in a wilderness of cheap hotels and lodging-houses we found the Meynard.

A gas lamp was flaring in the hall when the porter admitted us. At a desk set under the stairway a pale-faced clerk awaited us with staring insolence that s.h.i.+fted to annoyance when d.i.c.k asked him if we might go to Bessie Lowe's room. "No," he said, abruptly. "The officers won't let any one in there. They've taken her to the undertaker's."

He gave us the location of the place with a scorn that sent us out in haste. I, at least, felt a sense of relief that I did not have to go up to the place where this unknown girl had thrown away the greatest gift.

As we walked through the poorly lighted streets toward the Tottenham Court Road I felt for the first time a surge of that emotion that Leila Burton had voiced, a pity for the dead girl. And yet, stealing a look at d.i.c.k as he walked onward quietly, sadly, but with a dignity that lifted him above the sordidness of the circ.u.mstances, I felt that I could not blame him as I should. It was London, I thought, and life that had tightened the rope on the girl.

Strangely I felt a lightness of relief in the realization that the catastrophe having come, was not really as terrible as it had seemed back there in Leila's room. It was an old story that many women had conned, and since, after all, d.i.c.k Allport was yet young, and my own, I condoned the sin for the sake of the sinner; and yet, even as I held the thought close to my aching heart, I felt that I was somehow letting slip from my shoulders the cross that had been laid upon them, the cross that I should have borne, the burden of shame and sorrow for the wrong that the man I loved had done to the girl who had died for love of him.

The place where she lay, a gruesome establishment set in behind that highway of reeking cheapness, the Tottenham Court Road, was very quiet when we entered. A black-garbed man came to meet us from a room in which we saw two tall candles burning. d.i.c.k spoke to him sharply, asking if any one had come to look after the dead girl.

"No one with authority," the man whined--"just a girl as lived with her off and on."

He stood, rubbing his hands together as d.i.c.k went into hurried details with him, and I went past them into the room where the candles burned.

For an instant, as I stood at the door, I had the desire to run away from it all, but I pulled myself together and went over to the place where lay the girl they had called Bessie Lowe.

I had drawn back the sheet and was standing looking down at the white face when I heard a sob in the room. I replaced the covering and turned to see in the corner the shadowy form of a woman whose eyes blazed at me out of the dark. While I hesitated, wondering if this were the girl who had lived occasionally with Bessie Lowe, she came closer, staring at me with scornful hate. Miserably thin, wretchedly nervous as she was, she had donned for the nonce a mantle of dignity that she seemed to be trailing as she approached, glaring at me with furious resentment. "So you thought as how you'd come here," she demanded of me, her crimsoned face close to my own, "to see what she was like, to see what sort of a girl had him before you took him away from her? Well, I'll tell you something, and you can forget it or remember it, as you like. Bessie Lowe was a good girl until she ran into him, and she'd have stayed good, I tell you, if he'd let her alone. She was a fool, though, and she thought that he'd marry her some day--and all the time he was only waiting until you'd take him! You never think of our kind, do you, when you're living out your lives, wondering if you care enough to marry the men who're wors.h.i.+pping you while they're playing with us? Well, perhaps it won't be anything to you, but, all the same, there's some kind of a G.o.d, and if He's just He'll punish you when He punishes Standish Burton!"

"But I--" I gasped. "Did you think that I--?"

"Aren't you his wife?" She came near to me, peering at me in the flickering candle-light. "Aren't you Standish Burton's wife?"

"No," I said.

"Oh, well"--she shrugged--"you're her sort, and it'll come to the same thing in the end."

She slouched back to the corner, all anger gone from her. Outside I heard d.i.c.k's voice, low, decisive. Swiftly I followed the girl. "You must tell me," I pleaded with her, "if she did it because of Standish Burton."

"I thought everybody knew that," she said, "even his wife. What's it to you, if you're not that?"

"Nothing," I replied, but I knew, as I stood where she kept vigil with Bessie Lowe, that I lied. For I saw the truth in a lightning-flash; and I knew, as I had not known when d.i.c.k perjured himself in Leila's music-room, that I had come to the place of ultimate understanding, for I realized that not a dead girl, but a living woman, had come between us. Not Bessie Lowe, but Leila Burton, lifted the sword at the gateway of my paradise.

With the poignancy of a poisoned arrow reality came to me. Because d.i.c.k had loved Leila Burton he had laid his bond with me on the altar of his chivalry. For her sake he had sacrificed me to the hurt to which Standish would not sacrifice her. And the joke of it--the pity of it was that she hadn't believed them! But because she was Burton's wife, because it was too late for facing of the truth, she had pretended to believe d.i.c.k; and she had known, she must have known, that he had lied to her because he loved her.

The humiliation of that knowledge beat down on me, battering me with such blows as I had not felt in my belief that d.i.c.k had not been true to me in his affair with this poor girl. Her rivalry, living or dead, I could have endured and overcome--for no Bessie Lowe could ever have won from d.i.c.k, as she could never have given to him, that thing which was mine. But against Leila Burton I could not stand, for she was of my world, of my own people, and the crown a man would give to her was the one he must take from me.

There in that shabby place I buried my idols. Not I, but a power beyond me, held the stone on which was written commandment for me. By the light of the candles above Bessie Lowe I knew that I should not marry d.i.c.k Allport.

I found him waiting for me at the doorway. I think that he knew then that the light of our guiding lantern had flickered out, but he said nothing. We crossed the garishly bright road and went in silence through quiet streets. Like children afraid of the dark we went through the strange ways of the city, two lonely stragglers from the procession of love, who, with our own dreams ended, saw clearer the world's wild pursuit of the fleeing vision.

We had wandered back into our own land when, in front of the darkened Oratory and almost under the shadow of Leila Burton's home, there came to us through the soft darkness the ominous plea that heralds summer into town. Out of the shadows an old woman, bent and shriveled, leaned toward us. "Get yer lavender tonight," she pleaded. "'Tis the first of the crop, m'lidy."

"That means--" d.i.c.k Allport began as I paused to buy.

I fastened the sprigs at my belt, then looked up at the distant stars, since I could not yet bear to look at him. "It means the end of the season," I said, "when the lavender comes to London."

THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY FOR 1917

ADDRESSES OF AMERICAN MAGAZINES PUBLIs.h.i.+NG SHORT STORIES

NOTE. _This address list does not aim to be complete, but is based simply on the magazines which I have considered for this volume._

Ainslee's Magazine, 79 Seventh Avenue, New York City.

All-Story Weekly, 8 West 40th Street, New York City.

American Magazine, 381 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

Art World, 2 West 45th Street, New York City.

Atlantic Monthly, 3 Park Street, Boston, Ma.s.s.

Bellman, 118 South 6th Street, Minneapolis, Minn.

Black Cat, Salem, Ma.s.s.

Bookman, 443 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

Boston Evening Transcript, 324 Was.h.i.+ngton Street, Boston, Ma.s.s.

Century Magazine, 353 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

Collier's Weekly, 416 West 13th Street, New York City.

Cosmopolitan Magazine, 119 West 40th Street, New York City.

Delineator, Spring and Macdougal Streets, New York City.

Detective Story Magazine, 79 Seventh Avenue, New York City.

Everybody's Magazine, Spring and Macdougal Streets, New York City.

Every Week, 381 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

Forum, 286 Fifth Avenue, New York City.

Good Housekeeping, 119 West 40th Street, New York City.

Harper's Bazar, 119 West 40th Street, New York City.

Harper's Magazine, Franklin Square, New York City.

Hearst's Magazine, 119 West 40th Street, New York City.

Ill.u.s.trated Sunday Magazine, 193 Main Street, Buffalo, N. Y.

Ladies' Home Journal, Independence Square, Philadelphia, Pa.

Live Stories, 35 West 39th Street, New York City.

McCall's Magazine, 236 West 37th Street, New York City.

McClure's Magazine, 251 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

Metropolitan Magazine, 432 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

Midland, Moorhead, Minn.

Milestones, Akron, Ohio.

Munsey's Magazine, 8 West 40th Street, New York City.

Outlook, 381 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

Pagan, 174 Centre Street, New York City.

Parisienne, Printing Crafts Building, 461 Eighth Avenue, New York City.

Pearson's Magazine, 34 Union Square, New York City.