Arthur Stringer

“ That was the strange tie that bound them together; one the open and flashing and opulent, and the other the broken and hidden and hopeless.
"Do you know Harriet Walter?" I asked.
She laughed a little, forlornly, bitterly. The wine, I imagined, had rather gone to her head.
"I am Harriet Walter!" was her somewhat startling declaration.
She was still shaken and ill, I could see. I took the Burgundy glass from her hand. I wanted her mind to remain lucid. There was a great deal for me still to fathom.
"And they say she's going to die?" she half declared, half inquired, as her eyes searched my face. ”

“ It was not until I point-blank asked if he had been inquiring about Harriet Walter that any trace of interest came into his face.
He replied, with considerable ferocity, that he had. One glimpse of the unsteady fingers and twitching eyelids showed me the tension under which he was struggling. I felt genuinely sorry for him.
"I happen to know Miss Walter," I told him, "and if you'll be so good as to step in my car, I can tell you anything you may want to know."
"Is your name Adams?" the white-faced youth suddenly demanded. ”

“ 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 was already thinking of the other figure, the equally mysterious and more appealing figure in black.
I swung round and strode on through the trees just in time to see that somber and white-faced young woman cross Madison Avenue, and pass westward between a granite-columned church and the towering obelisk of a more modern god of commerce. I kept my eyes on this street-end as it swallowed her up. Then I passed out through the square and under the clock-dial and into Twenty-fourth Street. ”

“ I temporized, "I'd have tried to get down to the root of the mystery. I'd have made some effort to find out the reason for it; for everything seems to have a reason, you know."
Again I heard him emit his listless little scoff of misery.
"There's no reason," he declared.
"There must be," I maintained.
"Then show me where or what it is," he challenged.
"I will," I said, with sudden conviction. "There's a reason for all this, and I'm going to find it out!"
He studied my face with his tired and unhappy young eyes as I sat there trying to fit the edges of the two broken stories together. ”

“ I temporized, as I held the revolver up before her. "Where did you get this?"
She did not speak for a second or two.
"Why are you spying on me like this?" she suddenly demanded. She sank into a chair, pulling nervously at her pair of worn gloves.
"You insist on knowing?" I asked.
"I've a right to know."
"Because you are not Harriet Walter," was the answer I sent bullet-like at her.
She raised her eyes to mine. There was neither anger nor resentment on her face. All I could see was utter weariness, utter tragedy.
"I know," she said. She spoke very quietly. ”

“ It was so sudden, so unexpected, that I must have closed my eyes in a sort of involuntary wince. The first coherent thought that came to me was that I could never reach him in time. Some soberer second thought was to the effect that even my interference was useless, that he and his life were his own, that a man once set on self-destruction will not be kept from it by any outside influence.
Yet even as I looked again at his huddled figure, I heard his little gasp of something that must have been between fear and defeat. ”

“ So I promptly swung back to Madison Square and the fountain where I had left the man in the velour hat. I ran my eye from bench to bench of sleepers, but he was not among them. I went over the park, walk by walk, but my search was unrewarded. Then I circled about into Broadway, widening my radius of inspection. I shuttled back and forth along the side-streets. I veered up and down the neighboring avenues. But it was useless. The man in the velour hat was gone. ”

“ Acting on a sudden and a possibly foolish impulse, after one final look at the room and its record of courageous struggles, I took a bank-note from my waistcoat pocket, folded it, opened the top drawer of the bureau and dropped the bill into it. Then I stood staring down into the still open drawer, for before me lay the revolver which the girl had carried away the night before from Madison Square. ”

“ Then she looked at me, for the first time, with comprehending and strangely grateful eyes. She made a move, as though to speak. But as she did so I could see the quick gush of tears that came to her eyes and her gesture of hopelessness as she looked down at the newspaper on the floor.
"Oh, I want to die!" she cried brokenly and weakly. "I want to die!" ”

“ Then I turned back toward the fallen revolver. As I did so I noticed a figure in black step quietly out and pick up the firearm. It was the white-faced girl who had sat looking up at the stars. Before I fully realized the meaning of her movement, she slipped the weapon out of sight, and passed silently on down the winding asphalt walk, between the rows of sleepers, toward the east. There was something arresting in the thin young figure, something vaguely purposeful and appealing in the poise of the half-veiled head. ”

“ They were very slow and faltering steps. As I stood at the half-opened door listening, I felt sure I heard the sound of something that was half-way between a sob and a gasp. Then came the steps again, and then the sound of heavy breathing. ”

“ She's twenty-two; I'm twenty-four. She changed her name from Wilson to Walter when she went on the stage."
"Then you are close friends?" I asked, for I could see the wine had loosened his reticent young tongue.
"Friends!" he scoffed. "I'm the man she promised to marry!"
Here, I told myself, was a pretty kettle of fish. I knew the man before me was not Adams. Yet it was several weeks now since Harriet Walter's engagement to young Adams had been officially announced. And there was nothing unstable or predaceous about the Harriet Walter I had known. ”

“ Yet this did not altogether fill the bill; it could not explain away everything. There was still the mystery of the girl in the Twenty-fourth Street rooming-house. There was still the enigma of two persons claiming to be Harriet Walter.
On my way down to that rooming-house an idea occurred to me. It prompted me to step in at my club for a minute or two, leaving Mallory in the car. Then I dodged back to the reading-room, took down from its shelf a Who's Who on the Stage, and turned up the name of Harriet Walter. ”

“ There were plenty of amiable cranks who carried about some fixed conviction of their one-time intimate association with the great, the settled belief that they are the oppressed and unrecognized friends of earth's elect. ”

“ She came to very slowly. As I leaned over her, waiting for the heavy-lidded eyes to open, I let my glance wander back to the newspaper on the floor. I there read that Harriet Walter, the young star of the Broken Ties Company, had met with a serious accident. It had occurred while riding down Morningside Avenue in a touring-car driven by Percy Alward Adams, the son of the well-known Traction Magnate. The brake had apparently refused to work on Cathedral Hill, and the car had collided with a pillar of the Elevated Railway at the corner of One-hundred-and-ninth Street. ”