The Captain grandly bestowed his hat upon an eager porter who had already lifted his fur coat tenderly from his arm and stood nursing it. In removing his hat, the Captain exposed a bald, flushed dome, thatched about the ears with yellowish gray hair. “Bad time to sell, doctor. You want to hold on to San Felipe, and buy more. What have you got to raise?”
“Oh, not a great sum. Five or six thousand. I've been buying up close and have run short.”
“I see, I see. Well, doctor, you'll have to let me get through that door. I was out last night, and I'm going to get my bacon, if you lose your mine.” He clapped Archie on the shoulder and pushed him along in front of him. “Come ahead with me, and we'll talk business.”
Dr. Archie attended the Captain and waited while he gave his order, taking the seat the old promoter indicated.
“Now, sir,” the Captain turned to him, “you don't want to sell anything. You must be under the impression that I'm one of these damned New England sharks that get their pound of flesh off the widow and orphan. If you're a little short, sign a note and I'll write a check. That's the way gentlemen do business. If you want to put up some San Felipe as collateral, let her go, but I shan't touch a share of it. Pens and ink, please, Oscar,”—he lifted a large forefinger to the Austrian.
The Captain took out his checkbook and a book of blank notes, and adjusted his nose-nippers. He wrote a few words in one book and Archie wrote a few in the other. Then they each tore across perforations and exchanged slips of paper.
“That's the way. Saves office rent,” the Captain commented with satisfaction, returning the books to his pocket. “And now, Archie, where are you off to?”
“Got to go East to-night. A deal waiting for me in New York.” Dr. Archie rose.
The Captain's face brightened as he saw Oscar approaching with a tray, and he began tucking the corner of his napkin inside his collar, over his ascot. “Don't let them unload anything on you back there, doctor,” he said genially, “and don't let them relieve you of anything, either. Don't let them get any Cripple stuff off you. We can manage our own silver out here, and we're going to take it out by the ton, sir!”
The doctor left the dining-room, and after another consultation with the clerk, he wrote his first telegram to Thea:—
Miss Thea Kronborg, Everett House, New York.
Will call at your hotel eleven o'clock Friday morning. Glad to come. Thank you.
ARCHIE
He stood and heard the message actually clicked off on the wire, with the feeling that she was hearing the click at the other end. Then he sat down in the lobby and wrote a note to his wife and one to the other doctor in Moonstone. When he at last issued out into the storm, it was with a feeling of elation rather than of anxiety. Whatever was wrong, he could make it right. Her letter had practically said so.
He tramped about the snowy streets, from the bank to the Union Station, where he shoved his money under the grating of the ticket window as if he could not get rid of it fast enough. He had never been in New York, never been farther east than Buffalo. “That's rather a shame,” he reflected boyishly as he put the long tickets in his pocket, “for a man nearly forty years old.” However, he thought as he walked up toward the club, he was on the whole glad that his first trip had a human interest, that he was going for something, and because he was wanted. He loved holidays. He felt as if he were going to Germany himself. “Queer,”—he went over it with the snow blowing in his face,—“but that sort of thing is more interesting than mines and making your daily bread. It's worth paying out to be in on it,—for a fellow like me. And when it's Thea—Oh, I back her!” he laughed aloud as he burst in at the door of the Athletic Club, powdered with snow.
Archie sat down before the New York papers and ran over the advertisements of hotels, but he was too restless to read. Probably he had better get a new overcoat, and he was not sure about the shape of his collars. “I don't want to look different to her from everybody else there,” he mused. “I guess I'll go down and have Van look me over. He'll put me right.”
So he plunged out into the snow again and started for his tailor's. When he passed a florist's shop he stopped and looked in at the window, smiling; how naturally pleasant things recalled one another. At the tailor's he kept whistling, “Flow gently, Sweet Afton,” while Van Dusen advised him, until that resourceful tailor and haberdasher exclaimed, “You must have a date back there, doctor; you behave like a bridegroom,” and made him remember that he wasn't one.
Before he let him go, Van put his finger on the Masonic pin in his client's lapel. “Mustn't wear that, doctor. Very bad form back there.”
II
FRED OTTENBURG, smartly dressed for the afternoon, with a long black coat and gaiters was sitting in the dusty parlor of the Everett House. His manner was not in accord with his personal freshness, the good lines of his clothes, and the shining smoothness of his hair. His attitude was one of deep dejection, and his face, though it had the cool, unimpeachable fairness possible only to a very blond young man, was by no means happy. A page shuffled into the room and looked about. When he made out the dark figure in a shadowy corner, tracing over the carpet pattern with a cane, he droned, “The lady says you can come up, sir.”
Fred picked up his hat and gloves and followed the creature, who seemed an aged boy in uniform, through dark corridors that smelled of old carpets. The page knocked at the door of Thea's sitting-room, and then wandered away. Thea came to the door with a telegram in her hand. She asked Ottenburg to come in and pointed to one of the clumsy, sullen-looking chairs that were as thick as they were high. The room was brown with time, dark in spite of two windows that opened on Union Square, with dull curtains and carpet, and heavy, respectable-looking furniture in somber colors. The place was saved from utter dismalness by a coal fire under the black marble mantelpiece,—brilliantly reflected in a long mirror that hung between the two windows. This was the first time Fred had seen the room, and he took it in quickly, as he put down his hat and gloves.
Thea seated herself at the walnut writing-desk, still holding the slip of yellow paper. “Dr. Archie is coming,” she said. “He will be here Friday morning.”
“Well, that's good, at any rate,” her visitor replied with a determined effort at cheerfulness. Then, turning to the fire, he added blankly, “If you want him.”
“Of course I want him. I would never have asked such a thing of him if I hadn't wanted him a great deal. It's a very expensive trip.” Thea spoke severely. Then she went on, in a milder tone. “He doesn't say anything about the money, but I think his coming means that he can let me have it.”
Fred was standing before the mantel, rubbing his hands together nervously. “Probably. You are still determined to call on him?” He sat down tentatively in the chair Thea had indicated. “I don't see why you won't borrow from me, and let him sign with you, for instance. That would constitute a perfectly regular business transaction. I could bring suit against either of you for my money.”
Thea turned toward him from the desk. “We won't take that up again, Fred. I should have a different feeling about it if I went on your money. In a way I shall feel freer on Dr. Archie's, and in another way I shall feel more bound. I shall try even harder.” She paused. “He is almost like my father,” she added irrelevantly.
“Still, he isn't, you know,” Fred persisted. “It wouldn't be anything new. I've loaned money to students before, and got it back, too.”
“Yes; I know you're generous,” Thea hurried over it, “but this will be the best way. He will be here on Friday did I tell you?”
“I think you mentioned it. That's rather soon. May I smoke?” he took out a small cigarette case. “I suppose you'll be off next week?” he asked as he struck a match.
“Just as soon as I can,” she replied with a restless movement of her arms, as if her dark-blue dress were too tight for her. “It seems as if I'd been here forever.”
“And yet,” the young man mused, “we got in only four days ago. Facts really don't count for much, do they? It's all in the way people feel: even in little things.”
Thea winced, but she did not answer him. She put the telegram back in its envelope and placed it carefully in one of the pigeonholes of the desk.
“I suppose,” Fred brought out with effort, “that your friend is in your confidence?”
“He always has been. I shall have to tell him about myself. I wish I could without dragging you in.”
Fred shook himself. “Don't bother about where you drag me, please,” he put in, flushing. “I don't give—” he subsided suddenly.
“I'm afraid,” Thea went on gravely, “that he won't understand. He'll be hard on you.”
Fred studied the white ash of his cigarette before he flicked it off. “You mean he'll see me as even worse than I am. Yes, I suppose I shall look very low to him: a fifthrate scoundrel. But that only matters in so far as it hurts his feelings.”
Thea sighed. “We'll both look pretty low. And after all, we must really be just about as we shall look to him.”
Ottenburg started up and threw his cigarette into the grate. “That I deny. Have you ever been really frank with this preceptor of your childhood, even when you WERE a child? Think a minute, have you? Of course not! From your cradle, as I once told you, you've been 'doing it' on the side, living your own life, admitting to yourself things that would horrify him. You've always deceived him to the extent of letting him think you different from what you are. He couldn't understand then, he can't understand now. So why not spare yourself and him?”
She shook her head. “Of course, I've had my own thoughts. Maybe he has had his, too. But I've never done anything before that he would much mind. I must put myself right with him,—as right as I can,—to begin over. He'll make allowances for me. He always has. But I'm afraid he won't for you.”
“Leave that to him and me. I take it you want me to see him?” Fred sat down again and began absently to trace the carpet pattern with his cane. “At the worst,” he spoke wanderingly, “I thought you'd perhaps let me go in on the business end of it and invest along with you. You'd put in your talent and ambition and hard work, and I'd put in the money and—well, nobody's good wishes are to be scorned, not even mine. Then, when the thing panned out big, we could share together. Your doctor friend hasn't cared half so much about your future as I have.”
“He's cared a good deal. He doesn't know as much about such things as you do. Of course you've been a great deal more help to me than any one else ever has,” Thea said quietly. The black clock on the mantel began to strike. She listened to the five strokes and then said, “I'd have liked your helping me eight months ago. But now, you'd simply be keeping me.”
“You weren't ready for it eight months ago.” Fred leaned back at last in his chair. “You simply weren't ready for it. You were too tired. You were too timid. Your whole tone was too low. You couldn't rise from a chair like that,”—she had started up apprehensively and gone toward the window.—“You were fumbling and awkward. Since then you've come into your personality. You were always locking horns with it before. You were a sullen little drudge eight months ago, afraid of being caught at either looking or moving like yourself. Nobody could tell anything about you. A voice is not an instrument that's found ready-made. A voice is personality. It can be as big as a circus and as common as dirt.—There's good money in that kind, too, but I don't happen to be interested in them.—Nobody could tell much about what you might be able to do, last winter. I divined more than anybody else.”
“Yes, I know you did.” Thea walked over to the oldfashioned mantel and held her hands down to the glow of the fire. “I owe so much to you, and that's what makes things hard. That's why I have to get away from you altogether. I depend on you for so many things. Oh, I did even last winter, in Chicago!” She knelt down by the grate and held her hands closer to the coals. “And one thing leads to another.”
Ottenburg watched her as she bent toward the fire. His glance brightened a little. “Anyhow, you couldn't look as you do now, before you knew me. You WERE clumsy. And whatever you do now, you do splendidly. And you can't cry enough to spoil your face for more than ten minutes. It comes right back, in spite of you. It's only since you've known me that you've let yourself be beautiful.”
Without rising she turned her face away. Fred went on impetuously. “Oh, you can turn it away from me, Thea; you can take it away from me! All the same—” his spurt died and he fell back. “How can you turn on me so, after all!” he sighed.
“I haven't. But when you arranged with yourself to take me in like that, you couldn't have been thinking very kindly of me. I can't understand how you carried it through, when I was so easy, and all the circumstances were so easy.”
Her crouching position by the fire became threatening. Fred got up, and Thea also rose.
“No,” he said, “I can't make you see that now. Some time later, perhaps, you will understand better. For one thing, I honestly could not imagine that words, names, meant so much to you.” Fred was talking with the desperation of a man who has put himself in the wrong and who yet feels that there was an idea of truth in his conduct. “Suppose that you had married your brakeman and lived with him year after year, caring for him even less than you do for your doctor, or for Harsanyi. I suppose you would have felt quite all right about it, because that relation has a name in good standing. To me, that seems—sickening!” He took a rapid turn about the room and then as Thea remained standing, he rolled one of the elephantine chairs up to the hearth for her.
“Sit down and listen to me for a moment, Thea.” He began pacing from the hearthrug to the window and back again, while she sat down compliantly. “Don't you know most of the people in the world are not individuals at all? They never have an individual idea or experience. A lot of girls go to boarding-school together, come out the same season, dance at the same parties, are married off in groups, have their babies at about the same time, send their children to school together, and so the human crop renews itself. Such women know as much about the reality of the forms they go through as they know about the wars they learn the dates of. They get their most personal experiences out of novels and plays. Everything is second-hand with them. Why, you COULDN'T live like that.”
