Читать книгу The Silent Battle - Gibbs George - Страница 7

A storm of wind and rain had fallen out of the Northwest, and in a night had blown seaward the lingering tokens of Autumn. The air was chill, the sunshine pale as calcium light, and distant buildings came into focus, cleanly cut against the sparkling sky at the northern end of the Avenue; jets of steam appeared overhead and vanished at once into space; flags quivered tensely at their poles; fast flying squadrons of clouds whirled on to their distant rendezvous, their shadows leaping skyward along the sunlit walls. In a stride Winter had come. The city had taken a new tempo. The adagio of Indian Summer had come to a pause in the night; and with the morning, the baton of winter quickened its beat as the orchestra of city sounds swung into the presto movement. Upon the Avenue shop-windows bloomed suddenly with finery; limousines and broughams, new or refurbished, with a glistening of polished nickel and brass, drew up along the curbs to discharge their occupants who descended, briskly intent on the business of the minute, in search of properties and backgrounds for the winter drama.

In the Fifth Avenue window of the Cosmos Club, some of the walking gentlemen gathered in the afternoon and were already rehearsing the familiar choruses. All summer they had played the fashionable circuit of house-parties at Narragansett, Newport and other brief stands, and all recounted the tales of the road, glad at last to be back in their own corners, using the old lines, the old gestures, the old cues with which they had long been familiar.

If its summer pilgrimage had worked any hardship, the chorus at the windows of the Cosmos Club gave no sign of it. It was a well-fed chorus, well-groomed, well-tailored and prosperous. Few members of it had ever played a “lead” or wished to; for the tribulations of star-dom were great and the rewards uncertain, so they played their parts comfortably far up-stage against the colorful background.

Colonel Broadhurst took up the glass which Percy Endicott had ordered and regarded it ponderously.

“Pretty, aren’t they?” he asked sententiously of no one in particular, “pretty, innocent, winking bubbles! Little hopes rising and bursting.”

“Hope deferred maketh the heart sick,” put in the thirsty Percy promptly. “Luck, Colonel!” and drank.

With a long sigh the Colonel lifted his glass. “Why do we do it?” he asked again. “There’s nothing—positively nothing in it.”

“You never said a truer thing,” laughed Ogden Spencer, for the Colonel had set his empty glass upon the table.

“Oh, for the days of sunburnt mirth—of youth and the joyful Hippocrene!” the Colonel sighed again.

“Write—note—Chairman—House Committee,” said Coleman Van Duyn, arousing from slumber, thickly, “mighty poor stuff here lately.”

“Go back to sleep, Coley,” laughed Spencer. “It’s not your cue.”

Van Duyn lurched heavily forward for his glass, and drank silently. “Hippocrene?” he asked. “What’s Hippocrene?”

“Nectar, my boy,” said the Colonel pityingly, “the water of the gods.”

“Water!” and with a groan, “Oh, the Devil!”

He joined good naturedly in the laugh which followed and settled back in his leather chair.

“Oh, you laugh, you fellows. It’s no joke. Drank nothing but water for two months this summer. Doctors orders. Drove the water wagon, I did—two long months. Think of it!” The retrospect was so unpleasant that Mr. Van Duyn leaned forward immediately and laid his finger on the bell.

“Climb off, Coley?” asked Spencer.

“No, jumped,” he grinned. “Horse ran away.”

“You’re looking fit.”

“I am. Got a new doctor—sensible chap, young, ambitious, all that sort of thing. Believes in alcohol. Some people need it, you know. Can’t be too careful in choice of doctor. Wants me to drink Lithia water, though. What’s this Hippo—hippo–”

“Chondriac!” put in Percy.

“Hippocrene,” said Broadhurst severely.

“Sounds like a parlor car—or—er—a skin food. Any good, Colonel?”

“No,” said Colonel Broadhurst with another sigh, “It wouldn’t suit your case, Coley.”

A servant entered silently, took the orders and removed the empty glasses.

“Where were you, Coley?” asked Percy.

“Woods—Canada.”

“Fishing?”

“Yep—some.”

“See anything of Phil Gallatin?”

“No. I was with a big outfit—ten guides, call ’em servants, if you like. Air mattresses, cold storage plant, chef, bottled asparagus tips, Charlotte Russe—fine camp that!”

“Whose?”

“Henry K. Loring. You know—coal.”

“Oh—I see. There’s a girl, isn’t there?”

“Yes.”

Van Duyn reached for his glass and lapsed into surly silence.

But Percy Endicott was always voluble in the afternoon.

“You didn’t hear about Phil?”

“No—not another–”

“Oh, no, he hasn’t touched a drop for weeks. Got lost up there. I heard the story at Tuxedo from young Benson who just come down. He had it from a guide. It seems that Phil got twisted somehow in the heart of the Kawagama country and couldn’t find his way back to camp. He’s not much of a woodsman—hadn’t ever been up there before, and the guide couldn’t pick up his trail–”

“Didn’t he lose his nerve?”

“Not he. He couldn’t, you see. There was a girl with him.”

“A girl! The plot thickens. Go on.”

“They met in the woods. She was lost, too, so Phil built a lean-to and they lived there together. Lucky dog! Idyllic—what?”

“Well, rather! Arcadia to the minute. But how did they get on?” asked the Colonel.

“Famously–”

“But they couldn’t live on love.”

“Oh, they fished and ate berries, and Gallatin shot a deer.”

“Lucky, lucky dog!”

“They’d be there now, if the guides hadn’t found them.”

“His guides?”

“Yes, and hers.”

“Hers! She wasn’t a native then?”

“Not on your life. A New Yorker—and a clinker. That’s the mystery. Her guide came from the eastward but her camp must have been—why, what’s the matter, Coley?”

Mr. Van Duyn had put his glass upon the table and had risen heavily from his easy chair, his pale blue eyes unpleasantly prominent. He pulled at his collar-band and gasped.

“Heat—damn heat!” and walked away muttering.

It was just in the doorway that he met Phil Gallatin, who, with a smile, was extending the hand of fellowship. He glowered at the newcomer, touched the extended fingers flabbily and departed, while Gallatin watched him go, not knowing whether to be angry or only amused. But he shrugged a shoulder and joined the group near the window.

The greetings were cordial and the Colonel motioned to the servant to take Gallatin’s order.

“No, thanks, Colonel,” said Gallatin, his lips slightly compressed.

“Really! Glad to hear it, my boy. It’s a silly business.” And then to the waiting-man: “Make mine a Swissesse this time. It’s ruination, sir, this drinking when you don’t want it—just because some silly ass punches the bell.”

“But suppose you do want it,” laughed Spencer.

“Then all the more reason to refuse.”

Gallatin sank into the chair that Van Duyn had vacated. These were his accustomed haunts, these were his associates, but he now felt ill at ease and out of place in their company. He came here in the afternoons sometimes, but the club only made his difficulties greater. He listened silently to the gossip of the widening group of men, of somebody’s coup down town, of Larry Kane’s trip to the Rockies, of the opening of the hunting season on Long Island, the prospects of a gay winter and the thousand and one happenings that made up the life of the leisurely group of men about him. The servant brought the tray and laid the glasses.

“Won’t change your mind, Phil?” asked Colonel Broadhurst again.

Gallatin straightened. “No, thanks,” he repeated.

“That’s right,” laughed the Colonel jovially. “The true secret of drinking is to drink when you don’t want it—and refuse when you do.”

“Gad! Crosby, for a man who never refuses—” began Kane.

“It only shows what a martyr I am to the usages of society,” concluded the Colonel with a chuckle.

“How’s the crop of buds this year?” queried Larry Kane.

“Ask ‘Bibby’ Worthington,” suggested Percy Endicott. “He’s got ’em all down, looks, condition, action, pedigree–”

“Bigger than usual,” said the gentleman appealed to, “queens, too, some of ’em.”

“And have you picked out the lucky one already?” laughed Spencer.

“Bibby” Worthington, as everybody knew, had been “coming out” for ten years, with each season’s crop of debutantes, and each season had offered his hand and heart to the newest of them.

But the question touched his dignity in more than one tender spot, and he refused to reply.

“They’re all queens,” sighed the Colonel, raising his glass. “I love ’em all, God bless ’em, their rosy faces, their round limpid eyes–”

“And the smell of bread and jam from the nursery,” put in Spencer, the materialist, dryly. “Some newcomers, aren’t there, Billy?”

“Oh, yes, a few Westerners.”

“Oh, well, we need the money, you know.”

The crowd broke up into groups of two and three, each with its own interests. Gallatin rose and joined Kane and Endicott at the window, where the three sat for awhile watching the endless procession of vehicles and pedestrians moving up and down the Avenue.

“Good sport in Canada, I hear, Phil,” said Percy in a pause of conversation.

Gallatin glanced quickly at his companion.

“Fishing—yes,” he said quietly, unable to control the flush that had risen unbidden to his temples. “No shooting.”

“That’s funny,” went on the blissful Endicott with a laugh. “I heard you got a deer, Phil.”

“Oh, yes, one–”

“A two-legged one—with skirts.”

Gallatin started—his face pale.

“Who told you that?” he asked, his jaw setting.

“Oh, don’t get sore, Phil. Somebody’s brought the story down from Montreal—about your being lost in the woods—and—and all that,” he finished lamely. “Sorry I butted in.”

“So am I,” said Gallatin, stiffly.

Percy’s face crimsoned, and he stammered out an apology. He knew he had made a mistake. Gossip that he was, he did not make it a habit to intrude upon other men’s personal affairs, especially men like Gallatin who were intolerant of meddlers; but the story was now common property and to that extent at least he was justified.

“Don’t be unpleasant, Phil, there’s a good chap. I only thought–”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter in the least,” said Gallatin, rising, suddenly aware of the fact that the whole incident would only draw his adventure into further notoriety. “Somebody’s made a good story of it,” he laughed. “I did meet a—a girl in the woods and she stayed at my camp until her guides found her, that’s all. I don’t even know who she was,” he finished truthfully.

Percy Endicott wriggled away, glad to be let off so easily; and after a word with Kane, Gallatin went quietly out.

He reached the street and turning the corner walked northward blindly, in dull resentment against Percy Endicott, and the world that he typified. Their story of his adventure, it appeared, was common property, and was being handed with God knows what hyperbole from one chattering group to another. It didn’t matter about himself, of course. He realized grimly that this was not the first time his name had played shuttlecock to the fashionable battledore. It was of her he was thinking—of Jane. Thank God, they hadn’t found a name to couple with his. What they were telling was doubtless bad enough without that, and the mere fact that his secret was known had already taken away some of the idyllic quality with which he had invested it. He knew what fellows like Ogden Spencer and Larry Kane were saying. Had he not himself in times past assisted at the post mortems of dead reputations, and wielded his scalpel with as lively a skill as the rest of them?

Two months had passed since that day in the woods when he had lost her, but there wasn’t a day of that time when he had not hoped that some miracle would bring them together again. In Canada he had made inquiries at the camps he had passed, and poor Joe Keegón, who had spent a day with her guides, had come in for his share of recrimination. The party had come from the eastward, and had made a permanent camp; there were many people and many guides, but no names had passed. Joe Keegón was not in the habit of asking needless questions.

One thing alone that had belonged to her remained to Gallatin—a small gold flask which bore, upon its surface in delicate script, the letters J.L. On the day that they had broken camp Joe Keegón had silently handed it to him, his face more masklike than ever. Gallatin had thrust it into his coat-pocket with an air of indifference he was far from feeling, and had brought it southward to New York, where it now stood upon the desk in the room of his boyhood, so that he could see it each day, the token of a great happiness—the symbol of an ineffable disgrace.

It seemed now that Gallatin had not needed that reminder, for since he had been back in the city he had been working hard. It surprised him what few avenues of escape were open to him, for when he went abroad and did the things he had always done, there at his elbow was the Bowl. But his resolution was still unshaken, and difficult as he found the task, he went the round of his clubs at the usual hours and joined perfunctorily in the conversation. Always companionable, his fellows now found him reticent, more reserved and less prone to make engagements. Bridge he had foresworn and the card room at the Cosmos saw him no more. He stopped in at the club on the way home as he had done to-day, sometimes leaving his associates with an abruptness which caused comment.

But already he was finding the trial he had set for himself less difficult; and as the habit of resistance grew on him, he realized that little by little he was drifting away from the associations which had always meant so much to him. He had not given up the hope of finding Jane. From a chance phrase, which he had treasured, he knew that New York was familiar to her and that some day he would see her. He was as sure of that as though Jane herself had promised it to him. She owed him nothing, of course, for in the hour of his madness he had thrown away the small claims he had upon her gratitude, and the only memory she could have of him was that which had been expressed in the look of fear and loathing he had last seen in her eyes. To her, of course, time and distance had only magnified that horror and he knew that when he met her, there was little to expect from her generosity, little that he would even dare ask of it except that she would listen while he told her of the enemy in his house and of the battle that was still raging in his heart. He wanted her to know about that. It was his right to tell her, not so much to clear himself of blame, as to justify her for the liberality of her confidence before the tide of battle had turned against him—against them both.

Time and distance had played strange tricks with Jane’s image and at times it seemed very difficult for Gallatin to reconstruct the picture which he had destroyed. Sometimes she appeared a Dryad, as when he had first seen her, running frightened through the wood, sometimes the forlorn child with the injured ankle, sometimes the cliff-woman; but most often he pictured her as when he had seen her last, running in terror and dismay from the sight of him. And the other Jane, the Jane that he knew best, was hidden behind the eyes of terror. The memory was so vague that he sometimes wondered whether he would even know her if he met her dressed in the mode of the city. Somehow he could not associate her with the thought of fashionable clothes. She had worn no hat nor had she needed one. She belonged to the deep woods, where dress means only warmth and art means only artificiality. He always thought of her hatless, in her tattered shirtwaist and skirt, and upon Fifth Avenue was as much at a loss as to the kind of figure he must look for as though he were in the land of the great Cham.

Yes, he would know her, her slender figure, her straight carriage, the poise of her head, her brown hair, her deep blue eyes. No fripperies could conceal them. These were Jane. He would know them anywhere.