Harold MacGrath

“ ARMITAGE walked back to the hotel. The wind was bitter and there was a dash of rain in it. But he minded neither the wind nor the rain nor the long walk. There are times when the mind is so busy that physical weariness and discomfort are unnoticeable.
He was astounded and miserable and distressed. Not because he had fallen in love with Doris Athelstone. Propinquity made such a thing more or less inescapable. It was not that he had fallen in love with her; it was because he could fall in love with her. He doubted himself. ”

“ For the present, however, his destination was the brownstone house in Seventy-second Street, once ordinary enough, but now endued with a genuine mystery. The house was one of six in a compact row, a survival of the bald, ugly architecture of the seventies.
Upon finding himself in front of this house, Armitage knocked his pipe against the heel of his shoe. "I'm a reasonable man," he mused aloud—a habit he had acquired in the somber solitudes where the homely sound of one's voice is often a buckler against the unknown terrors of the night. ”

“ Then he kissed her—not as he had kissed any woman before. It was less the kiss of a lover than that of a devotee at a shrine. It was something holy, something that breathed of abnegation. And what was that kiss to her? The first in all her recollection that any man had given her.
"I'm so happy, so crazily happy! If you hadn't loved me I'd have died. Always I've hungered for love, and always I've been denied. Your house and mine, forever and forever! God is good. I'm somebody now. I belong!"
Words! thought the man. What a futile thing words were sometimes! ”

“ He would put the letter and the confession in one of his lock-boxes at the bank. Some future day, when he and Doris were going down the golden twilight of middle age, he would tell her. It would be impossible to carry such a secret to the grave. Twenty years hence, if he lived, he would tell her. She would understand then. She would forgive. Youth would have been hers in all its glory. He would tell her then—Doris—when the painful recollections of this hour were no more.
Having determined upon this course, Armitage discovered that he was still young. ”

“ As the door closed Armitage scowled at his luggage, up from which drifted vaguely the unpleasant odor of formaldehyde. Lights—a woman behind the curtains—a butler who wanted to know if he was Mr. Athelstone!
"Hang me!" He climbed over the grips to the telephone and called up a number. "Give me Mr. Bordman, please.... Not at home? ... What? ... Went away last April? ... Thank you."
Armitage turned away from the telephone and twisted his mustache violently. Fear laid hold of him, that indescribable fear which, twist and turn as one may, keeps its face hidden. ”

“ I was not vain, but I wanted to be strong and handsome. I wasn't even ugly, only insignificant. Often I gazed upon you with cold fury because you were endowed with the physical attributes I craved. Every soul has some hidden twist in it. I wasn't satisfied with a soul that had called forth the love of a beautiful woman. I practically kept her in concealment because I lived in terror lest she begin to compare me outwardly with others. I wonder was I insane all those years?"
Never had Armitage known such mental anguish. Only one thought was coherent—Doris must never know. ”

“ The old habits of civilization were clamoring for recognition; and first among these was the sense of shame, not because he had come all this distance, but because his love had been a poor thing and had not been strong enough to survive the ordeal. What an incomprehensible thing was the human heart!
Six long years in the far wildernesses, hugging a cold shadow for a substance, imagining himself to be a martyr when in truth he was only a simple fool! ”

“ He is good and kind and handsome. To me he is like some prince out of a fairy tale. Is it wrong to love the way I do, Daddy? I don't feel any shame in confessing it to you. No, no! It is glorious! Only, I think he's a little afraid of me at times. Please, please, come to me. Daddy! I want you. I hunger all the time for you. You mustn't think the way you do. Only remember that your Doris loves you, loves you!
Armitage felt himself torn between the profound tragedy of it and the blinding glory of the revelation. That his eye had seen this letter was plain sacrilege. ”

“ As he had seldom spent more than half his income, his life might continue along the old grooves with nothing more serious than a deep sense of irritation. He carried Bordman's letter around in his pockets for weeks, and whenever time hung heavy on his hands he reread it. He even perpetrated a mild form of forgery by copying it.
At four-thirty that afternoon his worries evaporated temporarily. He found himself on the lounge in the Burlingham library, his elbow touching Miss Athelstone's; and frequently, whenever she stirred, he caught the vague perfume of lavender. ”

“ I had a soul so big with love that when my wife died my soul left my body and went with hers into the Infinite. You will recall me, a shadow of a man, an insignificant automaton who lived for twenty-odd years in a groove—from my apartment to the office and back—and you will try with difficulty to conjure up the possibility of a woman loving me. What first calls love? A pleasure to the eye. A handsome man and a beautiful woman are first drawn by those attractive qualities which are pleasing to the eye. ”

“ The old man's lips moved, but no sound came through them.
"In your debt!" went on Armitage, a bit wildly. "For if you hadn't rooked me, there would never have come into my life—love! A bit of thistledown with a soul—a fairy, turned into a human being, still retaining the fairy's mind!"
"The other . . . the one who made you run away?" whispered Bordman.
"Lord! she doesn't exist! The more I think of it the more I'm certain that I'm in your debt. But for you I'd never have known her—the daughter of the man you sold the house to. Bordman, you saw that man. ”

“ ARMITAGE had come thirteen thousand miles—across deserts, through jungles, over snow-clad peaks—as fast as camels and trains and ships could carry him, driven by an all-compelling desire. Sixty-odd days ago he had been in the amber-mines in the Hukawng Valley, where Upper Burma ends and western China begins; and here he was, riding up old Broadway—a Broadway that twinkled and glittered and glared with the same old colored clock lights. Men were queer animals. ”

“ Armitage heard Doris move and looked up. She was standing by the fire, gazing down into it. The photograph on the mantel was missing. From her attitude he judged that she was holding it against her heart.
Men rarely weep, at least rarely from tenderness. The tear-ducts which lead down into the sentimentality in a man's heart seem to dry up after childhood. But as Armitage stared at the letter again the lines with their odd but familiar little curlicues and shaded capitals became grotesquely blurred. He recalled a line in another letter written by this hand. ”

“ The full depression of the day rolled tack over his heart. He wanted to lay his head on his arms and weep.
"God help me!" he said, aloud.
"Do you need His help, then?"
He wheeled, thoroughly frightened. He had heard no sound, and here she was, close at his elbow, eying him gravely.
"Don't we always need Him?" he answered. "I was thinking out loud."
He held out his hand rather awkwardly, and as she put hers into it he bent and reverently kissed the hand. Save in light-hearted mockery, he had never kissed a woman's hand before. ”

“ Bordman whispered.
The doctor shook his head. "If you talk . . ."
"Something to deaden the desire to cough for a few minutes!"
"I can do that," said the doctor. "But it will only hasten the end," he added, warningly.
"So much the better. Give it to me!"
A drab little man, with weak eyes, a ragged drab mustache, drab hair; a face that was drab death's sketched on a drumhead. All these years of rectitude, then out of the drab orbit like a comet, only to circle back, beaten, broken! thought Armitage. ”

“ Armitage wondered if there was any color to the heat in his cheeks.
"Afraid? A little. But that doesn't matter. Three essentials in life my father has taught me—I might say, drummed into me—to fight fear, to love truth, and never to miss an opportunity to do a kind act. Your lawyer was very nice to me. He came one afternoon to see if everything was all right. I kept him to tea. He was such a funny little old man, just like a character out of Dickens, or an Italian manikin that had been left out in the rain overnight." ”

“ Armitage always became cynical whenever Bordman came into his mind. He recalled the old curio-dealer in one of Balzac's tales, "The Magic Skin," and how the young wastrel had wished that the old chap fall in love with a ballerina. He never could quite separate Bordman from the idea that some one had accompanied him on his journey. There was no fool like an old fool. Every day in the year the newspapers had some story of this caliber. When a young woman enters the life of an old man there is no folly inconceivable. ”

“ I don't suppose you ever did a mean thing—or an interesting thing. Going into the wildernesses as you have done may teach you some sound facts regarding life. Don't worry about me. What I have done does not appear to me as a crime. I have merely relieved you of half of your responsibilities and half your boredom. I knew, the moment you turned over that power of attorney to me, what I was eventually going to do, provided you remained away long enough. Don't bother to pursue me; you would only waste your time and money.
Samuel Bordman.
"The infernal cheek of him!" cried Armitage, hotly. ”

“ The latent sense of the ethical stirred and awoke for the first time in many months. He felt the itch of the hair shirt of society, and the second sense was one of overpowering shame. He had neither legal nor moral right behind these curtains.
Had the girl come toward him just then she would have discovered him. He was entranced, incapable of mobility. But she did not come his way. She walked over to a window, out of which she gazed for a while. ”

“ Bordman had taken care of everything. Once in a great while Bordman had called him down to the office to sign some paper; but he had never gone there for any other reason. The pale, obsequious little man had always bored him.
Armitage nibbled his mustache as he went along. The whole emptiness of his life stretched out vividly in a kind of processional review. Social routine: a ride in the Park in the morning, tea somewhere in the afternoon, a dinner dance or the theater, and a rubber or two at the club, broken by fishing and hunting trips and weekends in the country. A grasshopper's life! ”

“ I repeat, a thousand times the father-love has burned furiously in my heart, and I have hastened toward you, only to turn back. I wonder if in all this world there is another man so utterly miserable and accursed? ”

“ Burlingham briefly recounted the adventure. If he expected a storm of reproaches from Betty his expectations did not materialize. Instead, she was all silence and tenderness because, somehow, she got farther below the surface of the affair than her husband. She was not impervious to romance, especially romance of this rather wild and unusual sort. She intuitively adjusted herself to Armitage's point of view.
"I'll run down to Atlantic City," said Armitage as they led him to one of the guest-rooms. "I know how to handle wounds. I've been mauled more than once by the big cats. ”

“ It was half after two in the morning when Armitage found himself alone with Bob and his wife. Bob lighted a cigar and walked about for a space.
"I don't know how it came to pass, but Betty and I have grown very fond of that girl next door. We've formed a kind of protectorate over her. She puzzles us. She's a type we haven't run into before. She is both worldly wise and surprisingly innocent. She'll air her views of Turgeniev one moment and then ask why a woman shouldn't go to a restaurant alone at night if she wanted to. We know why she can't. Cities and men have made it impossible." ”

“ He charges a thousand a night for those who consider him a fad of the hour and gives away his genius to those he knows love music. Come along."
"A violin?" Doris threw her cloak over her shoulders. "Isn't it wonderful! Floors that talk and little red-brown boxes with singing souls!"
Armitage's anxiety grew. He knew Bob's voice of old, and Bob was deeply angry about something; and Armitage suspected readily enough what this something was. Hang the world with its right-and-left angles, its fussy old hedges and barricades! ”

“ The swift anger, the naturally savage longing to hunt down the man who had so simply and absurdly robbed him, receded, leaving only a residue of philosophical calm, generously leavened with a sardonic humor. Perhaps, too, he was actuated by a keen idea of shame. Hue and cry would only acquaint the town with the colossal folly of one James Armitage. Moreover, Bordman had six months' leeway; and, because he was so insignificant in appearance, he would be as difficult to locate as the proverbial needle. There were a few hundred thousand individuals in the United States ”