Kitabı oku: «The Destroying Angel», sayfa 3
He whirled around to face Peter Stark – Peter quietly amused and very much the master of the situation.
"You needn't think," said he, "that you have any chance on earth of escaping my fond attentions, Hugh. I'll go to the ends of the earth after you, if you won't let me go with you. I've fixed it up with Nelly to wait until I bring you home, a well man, before we get married; and if you refuse to be my best man – well, there won't be any party. You can make up your mind to that."
V
WILFUL MISSING
It was one o'clock in the morning before Whitaker allowed himself to be persuaded; fatigue reënforced every stubborn argument of Peter Stark's to overcome his resistance. It was a repetition of the episode of Mary Ladislas recast and rewritten: the stronger will overcame the admonitions of a saner judgment. Whitaker gave in. "Oh, have your own way," he said at length, unconsciously iterating the words that had won him a bride. "If it must be…"
Peter put him to bed, watched over him through the night, and the next morning carried him on to New Bedford, where they superintended the outfitting of Peter's yacht, the Adventuress. Beyond drawing heavily on his bank and sending Drummond a brief note, Whitaker failed to renew communication with his home. He sank into a state of semi-apathetic content; he thought little of anything beyond the business of the moment; the preparations for what he was pleased to term his funeral cruise absorbed him to the exclusion of vain repinings or anxiety for the welfare of his adventitious wife. Apparently his sudden disappearance had not caused the least ripple on the surface of life in New York; the newspapers, at all events, slighted the circumstance unanimously: to his complete satisfaction.
Within the week the Adventuress sailed.
She was five months out of port before Whitaker began to be conscious that he was truly accursed. There came a gradual thickening of the shadows that threatened to eclipse his existence. And then, one day as they dined with the lonely trader of an isolated station in the D'Entrecasteaux Islands, he fell from his chair as if poleaxed. He regained consciousness only to shiver with the chill of the wind that's fanned by the wings of death. It was impossible to move him. The agonies of the damned were his when, with exquisite gentleness, they lifted him to a bed…
Stark sailed in the Adventuress before sundown of the same day, purposing to fetch a surgeon from Port Moresby. Whitaker said a last farewell to his friend, knowing in his soul that they would never meet again. Then he composed himself to die quietly. But the following morning brought a hapchance trading schooner to the island, and with it, in the estate of supercargo, a crapulous Scotch gentleman who had been a famous specialist of London before drink laid him by the heels. He performed an heroic operation upon Whitaker within an hour, announced by nightfall that the patient would recover, and the next day sailed with his ship to end his days in some abandoned Australian boozing-ken – as Whitaker learned in Sydney several months later.
In the same place, and at the same time, he received his first authentic news of the fate of the Adventuress. The yacht had struck on an uncharted reef, in heavy weather, and had foundered almost immediately. Of her entire company, a solitary sailor managed to cling to a life-raft until picked up, a week after the wreck, by a tramp steamship on whose decks he gasped out his news and his life in the same breaths.
Whitaker hunted up an account of the disaster in the files of a local newspaper. He read that the owner, Peter Stark, Esq., and his guest, H. M. Whitaker, Esq., both of New York, had gone down with the vessel. There was also a cable despatch from New York detailing Peter Stark's social and financial prominence – evidence that the news had been cabled Home. To all who knew him Whitaker was as dead as Peter Stark.
Sardonic irony of circumstance, that had robbed the sound man of life and bestowed life upon the moribund! Contemplation wrought like a toxic drug upon Whitaker's temper, until he was raving drunk with the black draught of mutiny against the dictates of an Omnipotence capable of such hideous mockeries of justice. The iron bit deep into his soul and left corrosion there…
"There is a world outside the one you know
To which for curiousness 'Ell can't compare;
It is the place where wilful missings go,
As we can testify, for we are there."
Kipling's lines buzzed through his head more than once in the course of the next few years; for he was "there." They were years of such vagabondage as only the South Seas countenance: neither unhappy nor very strenuous, not yet scarred by the tooth of poverty. Whitaker had between four and five thousand dollars in traveller's checks which he converted into cash while in Sydney. Memory of the wreck of the Adventuress was already fading from the Australian mind; no one dreamed of challenging the signature of a man seven months dead. And as certainly and as quietly as the memory, Whitaker faded away; Hugh Morten took his place, and Sydney knew him no more, nor did any other parts wherein he had answered to his rightful name.
The money stayed by him handsomely. Thanks to a strong constitution in a tough body (now that its malignant demon was exorcised) he found it easy to pick up a living by one means or another. Indeed, he played many parts in as many fields before joining hands with a young Englishman he had grown to like and entering upon what seemed a forlorn bid for fortune. Thereafter he prospered amazingly.
In those days his anomalous position in the world troubled him very little. He was a Wilful Missing and a willing. The new life intrigued him amazingly; he lived in open air, in virgin country, wresting a fortune by main strength from the reluctant grasp of Nature. He was one of the first two men to find and mine gold in paying quantities in the Owen Stanley country… Now that Peter Stark was dead, the ties of interest and affection binding him to America were both few and slender. His wife was too abstract a concept, a shadow too vague in his memory, to obtrude often upon his reveries. Indeed, as time went on, he found it anything but easy to recall much about the physical appearance of the woman he had married; he remembered chiefly her eyes; she moved mistily across the stage of a single scene in his history, an awkward, self-conscious, unhappy, childish phantasm.
Even the consideration that, fortified by the report of his death, she might have married again, failed to disturb either his slumbers or his digestion. If that had happened, he had no objection; the tie that bound them was the emptiest of forms – in his understanding as meaningless and as powerless to make them one as the printed license form they had been forced to procure of the State of Connecticut. There had been neither love nor true union – merely pity on one side, apathy of despair on the other. Two souls had met in the valley of the great shadow, had paused a moment to touch hands, had passed onward, forever out of one another's ken; and that was all. His "death" should have put her in command of a fair competence. If she had since sought and found happiness with another man, was there any logical reason, or even excuse, for Whitaker to abandon his new and pleasant ways of life in order to return and shatter hers?
He was self-persuaded of his generosity toward the girl.
Casuistry of the Wilful Missing!..
It's to be feared he had always a hard-headed way of considering matters in the light of equity as distinguished from the light of ethical or legal morality. This is not to be taken as an attempt to defend the man, but rather as a statement of fact: even as the context is to be read as an account of some things that happened rather than as a morality…
When at length he did make up his mind to go Home, it wasn't because he felt that duty called him; plain, everyday, human curiosity had something to do with his determination – a desire to see how New York was managing to get along without him – together with a dawning apprehension that there was an uncomfortable amount of truth in the antiquated bromidiom about the surprising littleness of the world.
He was in Melbourne at that time, with Lynch, his partner. Having prospered and laid by a lump of money, they had planned to finance their holdings in the traditional fashion – that is, to let in other people's money to do the work, while they rested and possessed their souls and drew dividends on a controlling interest. Capital in Melbourne had proved eager and approachable; the arrangement they desired was quickly consummated; the day the papers were signed, Whitaker passed old friends in the street. They were George Presbury and his wife – Anne Forsythe that was – self-evident tourists, looking the town over between steamers. Presbury, with no thought in his bumptious head of meeting Hugh Whitaker before the Day of Judgment, looked at and through him without a hint of recognition; but his wife was another person altogether. Whitaker could not be blind to the surprise and perplexity that shone in her eyes, even though he pretended to be blind to her uncertain nod; long after his back alone was visible to her he could feel her inquiring stare boring into it.
The incident made him think; and he remembered that he was now a man of independent fortune and of newly idle hands as well. After prolonged consideration he suddenly decided, told Lynch to look out for his interests and expect him back when he should see him, and booked for London by a Royal Mail boat – all in half a day. From London Mr. Hugh Morten crossed immediately to New York on the Olympic, landing in the month of April – nearly six years to a day from the time he had left his native land.
He discovered a New York almost wholly new – an experience almost inevitable, if one insists on absenting one's self even for as little as half a decade. Intimations of immense changes were borne in upon Whitaker while the steamer worked up the Bay. The Singer Building was an unfamiliar sky-mark, but not more so than the Metropolitan Tower and the Woolworth. The Olympic docked at an impressive steel-and-concrete structure, new since his day; and Whitaker narrowly escaped a row with a taxicab chauffeur because the fellow smiled impertinently when directed to drive to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
A very few hours added amazingly to the catalogue of things that were not as they had been: a list so extensive and impressive that he made up his mind to maintain his incognito for a few days, until familiar with the ways of his home. He was quick to perceive that he would even have to forget most of the slang that had been current in his time, in addition to unlearning all he had picked up abroad, and set himself with attentive ears pricked forward and an open mind to master the new, strange tongue his countrymen were speaking, if he were to make himself intelligible to them – and them to him, for that matter.
So he put up at the Ritz-Carlton, precisely as any foreigner might be expected to do, and remained Hugh Morten while he prowled around the city and found himself. Now and again in the course of his wanderings he encountered well-remembered faces, but always without eliciting the slightest gleam of recognition: circumstances that only went to prove how thoroughly dead and buried he was in the estimation of his day and generation.
Nothing, indeed, seemed as he remembered it except the offerings in the theatres. He sat through plays on three successive nights that sent him back to his hotel saddened by the conviction that the tastes of his fellow-countrymen in the matter of amusements were as enduring as adamant – as long-enduring. Some day (he prophesied) New York would be finished and complete; then would come the final change – its name – because it wouldn't be New York unless ever changing; and when that was settled, the city would know ease and, for want of something less material to occupy it, begin to develop a soul of its own – together with an inclination for something different in the way of theatrical entertainment.
But his ultimate and utter awakening to the truth that his home had outgrown him fell upon the fourth afternoon following his return, when a total but most affable gentleman presented himself to Whitaker's consideration with a bogus name and a genuine offer to purchase him a drink, and promptly attempted to enmesh him in a confidence game that had degenerated into a vaudeville joke in the days when both of them had worn knickerbockers. Gently but firmly entrusting the stranger to the care of a convenient policeman, Whitaker privately admitted that he was outclassed, that it was time for him to seek the protection of his friends.
He began with Drummond. The latter, of course, had moved his offices; no doubt he had moved them several times; however that may be, Whitaker had left him in quiet and contracted quarters in Pine Street; he found him independently established in an imposing suite in the Woolworth Building.
Whitaker gave one of Mr. Hugh Morten's cards to a subdued office-boy. "Tell him," he requested, "that I want to see him about a matter relating to the estate of Mr. Whitaker."
The boy dived through one partition-door and reappeared by way of another with the deft certainty of a trained pantomime.
"Says t' come in."
Whitaker found himself in the presence of an ashen-faced man of thirty-five, who clutched the side of his roll-top desk as if to save himself from falling.
"Whitaker!" he gasped. "My God!"
"Flattered," said Whitaker, "I'm sure."
He derived considerable mischievous amusement from Drummond's patent stupefaction. It was all so right and proper – as it should have been. He considered his an highly satisfactory resurrection, the sensation it created as complete, considered in the relation of anticipation to fulfilment, as anything he had ever experienced. Seldom does a scene pass off as one plans it; the other parties thereto are apt to spoil things by spouting spontaneously their own original lines, thus cheating one out of a crushing retort or cherished epigram. But Drummond played up his part in a most public-spirited fashion – gratifying, to say the least.
It took him some minutes to recover, Whitaker standing by and beaming.
He remarked changes, changes as striking as the improvement in Drummond's fortunes. Physically his ex-partner had gone off a bit; the sedentary life led by the average successful man of business in New York had marked his person unmistakably. Much heavier than the man Whitaker remembered, he wore a thick and solid air of good-natured prosperity. The hair had receded an inch or so from his forehead. Only his face seemed as it had always been – sharply handsome and strong. Whitaker remembered that he had always somewhat meanly envied Drummond his good looks; he himself had been fashioned after the new order of architecture – with a steel frame; but for some reason Nature, the master builder, had neglected sufficiently to wall in and conceal the skeleton. Admitting the economy of the method, Whitaker was inclined to believe that the effect must be surprising, especially if encountered without warning…
He discovered that they were both talking at once – furiously – and, not without surprise, that he had a great deal more enlightenment to impart to Drummond than he had foreseen.
"You've got an economical streak in you when it comes to correspondence," Drummond commented, offering Whitaker a sheet of paper he had just taken from a tin document-box. "That's Exhibit A."
Whitaker read aloud:
"'Dear D., I'm not feeling well, so off for a vacation. Burke has just been in and paid $1500 in settlement of our claim. I'm enclosing herewith my check for your share. Yours, H. M. W.'"
"Far be it from me to cast up," said Drummond; "but I'd like to know why the deuce you couldn't let a fellow know how ill you were."
Whitaker frowned over his dereliction. "Don't remember," he confessed. "I was hardly right, you know – and I presume I must have counted on Greyerson telling."
"But I don't know Greyerson…"
"That's so. And you never heard – ?"
"Merely a rumour ran round. Some one – I forget who – told me that you and Stark had gone sailing in Stark's boat – to cruise in the West Indies, according to my informant. And somebody else mentioned that he'd heard you were seriously ill. More than that nothing – until we heard that the Adventuress had been lost, half a year later."
"I'm sorry," said Whitaker contritely. "It was thoughtless…"
"But that isn't all," Drummond objected, flourishing another paper. "See here – Exhibit B – came in a day or so later."
"Yes." Whitaker recognized the document. "I remember insisting on writing to you before we turned in that night."
He ran through the following communication:
"Dear Drummond: I married here, to-night, Mary Ladislas. Please look out for her while I'm away. Make her an allowance out of my money – five hundred a month ought to be enough. I shall die intestate, and she'll get everything then, of course. She has your address and will communicate with you as soon as she gets settled down in Town.
"Faithfully —
"Hugh Morten Whitaker."
"If it hadn't been so much in character," commented Drummond, "I'd've thought the thing a forgery – or a poor joke. Knowing you as well as I did, however … I just sat back to wait for word from Mrs. Whitaker."
"And you never heard, except that once!" said Whitaker thoughtfully.
"Here's the sole and only evidence I ever got to prove that you had told the truth."
Drummond handed Whitaker a single, folded sheet of note-paper stamped with the name of the Waldorf-Astoria.
"Carter S. Drummond, Esq., 27 Pine Street, City.
"Dear Sir: I inclose herewith a bank-note for $500, which you will be kind enough to credit to the estate of your late partner and my late husband, Mr. Hugh Morten Whitaker.
"Very truly yours,
"Mary Ladislas Whitaker."
"Dated, you see, the day after the report of your death was published here."
"But why?" demanded Whitaker, dumfounded. "Why?"
"I infer she felt herself somehow honour-bound by the monetary obligation," said the lawyer. "In her understanding your marriage of convenience was nothing more – a one-sided bargain, I think you said she called it. She couldn't consider herself wholly free, even though you were dead, until she had repaid this loan which you, a stranger, had practically forced upon her – if not to you, to your estate."
"But death cancels everything – "
"Not," Drummond reminded him with a slow smile, "the obligation of a period of decent mourning that devolves upon a widow. Mrs. Whitaker may have desired to marry again immediately. If I'm any judge of human nature, she argued that repayment of the loan wiped out every obligation. Feminine logic, perhaps, but – "
"Good Lord!" Whitaker breathed, appalled in the face of this contingency which had seemed so remote and immaterial when he was merely Hugh Morten, bachelor-nomad, to all who knew him on the far side of the world.
Drummond dropped his head upon his hand and regarded his friend with inquisitive eyes.
"Looks as though you may have gummed things up neatly – doesn't it?"
Whitaker nodded in sombre abstraction.
"You may not," continued Drummond with light malice, "have been so generous, so considerate and chivalric, after all."
"Oh, cut that!" growled Whitaker, unhappily. "I never meant to come back."
"Then why did you?"
"Oh … I don't know. Chiefly because I caught Anne Presbury's sharp eyes on me in Melbourne – as I said a while ago. I knew she'd talk – as she surely will the minute she gets back – and I thought I might as well get ahead of her, come home and face the music before anybody got a chance to expose me. At the worst – if what you suggest has really happened – it's an open-and-shut case; no one's going to blame the woman; and it ought to be easy enough to secure a separation or divorce – "
"You'd consent to that?" inquired Drummond intently.
"I'm ready to do anything she wishes, within the law."
"You leave it to her, then?"
"If I ever find her – yes. It's the only decent thing I can do."
"How do you figure that?"
"I went away a sick man and a poor one; I come back as sound as a bell, and if not exactly a plutocrat, at least better off than I ever expected to be in this life… To all intents and purposes I made her a partner to a bargain she disliked; well, I'll be hanged if I'm going to hedge now, when I look a better matrimonial risk, perhaps: if she still wants my name, she can have it."
Drummond laughed quietly. "If that's how you feel," he said, "I can only give you one piece of professional advice."
"What's that?"
"Find your wife."
After a moment of puzzled thought, Whitaker admitted ruefully: "You're right. There's the rub."
"I'm afraid you won't find it an easy job. I did my best without uncovering a trace of her."
"You followed up that letter, of course?"
"I did my best; but, my dear fellow, almost anybody with a decent appearance can manage to write a note on Waldorf stationery. I made sure of one thing – the management knew nothing of the writer under either her maiden name or yours."
"Did you try old Thurlow?"
"Her father died within eight weeks from the time you ran away. He left everything to charity, by the way. Unforgiving blighter."
"Well, there's her sister, Mrs. Pettit."
"She heard of the marriage first through me," asserted Drummond. "Your wife had never come near her – nor even sent her a line. She could give me no information whatever."
"You don't think she purposely misled you – ?"
"Frankly I don't. She seemed sincerely worried, when we talked the matter over, and spoke in a most convincing way of her fruitless attempts to trace the young woman through a private detective agency."
"Still, she may know now," Whitaker said doubtfully. "She may have heard something since. I'll have a word with her myself."
"Address," observed Drummond, dryly: "the American Embassy, Berlin… Pettit's got some sort of a minor diplomatic berth over there."
"O the devil!.. But, anyway, I can write."
"Think it over," Drummond advised. "Maybe it might be kinder not to."
"Oh, I don't know – "
"You've given me to understand you were pretty comfy on the other side of the globe. Why not let sleeping dogs lie?"
"It's the lie that bothers me – the living lie. It isn't fair to her."
"Rather sudden, this solicitude – what?" Drummond asked with open sarcasm.
"I daresay it does look that way. But I can't see that it's the decent thing for me to let things slide any longer. I've got to try to find her. She may be ill – destitute – in desperate trouble again – "
Drummond's eyebrows went up whimsically. "You surely don't mean me to infer that your affections are involved?"
This brought Whitaker up standing. "Good heavens – no!" he cried. He moved to a window and stared rudely at the Post Office Building for a time. "I'm going to find her just the same – if she still lives," he announced, turning back.
"Would you know her if you saw her?"
"I don't know." Whitaker frowned with annoyance. "She's six years older – "
"A woman often develops and changes amazingly between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four."
"I know," Whitaker acknowledged with dejection.
"Well, but what was she like?" Drummond pursued curiously.
Whitaker shook his head. "It's not easy to remember. Matter of fact, I don't believe I ever got one good square look at her. It was twilight in the hotel, when I found her; we sat talking in absolute darkness, toward the end; even in the minister's study there was only a green-shaded lamp on the table; and on the train – well, we were both too much worked up, I fancy, to pay much attention to details."
"Then you really haven't any idea – ?"
"Oh, hardly." Whitaker's thin brown hand gesticulated vaguely. "She was tall, slender, pale, at the awkward age…"
"Blonde or brune?"
"I swear I don't know. She wore one of those funny knitted caps, tight down over her hair, all the time."
Drummond laughed quietly. "Rather an inconclusive description, especially if you advertise. 'Wanted: the wife I married six years ago and haven't seen since; tall, slender, pale, at the awkward age; wore one of those funny knit – '"
"I don't feel in a joking humour," Whitaker interrupted roughly. "It's a serious matter and wants serious treatment… What else have we got to mull over?"
Drummond shrugged suavely. "There's enough to keep us busy for several hours," he said. "For instance, there's my stewardship."
"Your which?"
"My care of your property. You left a good deal of money and securities lying round loose, you know; naturally I felt obliged to look after 'em. There was no telling when Widow Whitaker might walk in and demand an accounting. I presume we might as well run over the account – though it is getting late."
"Half-past four," Whitaker informed him, consulting his watch. "Take too long for to-day. Some other time."
"To-morrow suit you?"
"To-morrow's Sunday," Whitaker objected. "But there's no hurry at all."
Drummond's reply was postponed by the office boy, who popped in on the heels of a light knock.
"Mr. Max's outside," he announced.
"O the deuce!" The exclamation seemed to escape Drummond's lips involuntarily. He tightened them angrily, as though regretting the lapse of self-control, and glanced hurriedly askance to see if Whitaker had noticed. "I'm busy," he added, a trace sullenly. "Tell him I've gone out."
"But he's got 'nappointment," the boy protested. "And besides, I told him you was in."
"You needn't fob him off on my account," Whitaker interposed. "We can finish our confab later – Monday – any time. It's time for me to be getting up-town, anyway."
"It isn't that," Drummond explained doggedly. "Only – the man's a bore, and – "
"It isn't Jules Max?" Whitaker demanded excitedly. "Not little Jules Max, who used to stage manage our amateur shows?"
"That's the man," Drummond admitted with plain reluctance.
"Then have him in, by all means. I want to say howdy to him, if nothing more. And then I'll clear out and leave you to his troubles."
Drummond hesitated; whereupon the office boy, interpreting assent, precipitately vanished to usher in the client. His employer laughed a trifle sourly.
"Ben's a little too keen about pleasing Max," he said. "I think he looks on him as the fountainhead of free seats. Max has developed into a heavy-weight entrepreneur, you know."
"Meaning theatrical manager? Then why not say so? But I might've guessed he'd drift into something of the sort."
A moment later Whitaker was vigorously pumping the unresisting – indeed the apparently boneless – hand of a visibly flabbergasted gentleman, who suffered him for the moment solely upon suspicion, if his expression were a reliable index of his emotion.
In the heyday of his career as a cunning and successful promoter of plays and players, Jules Max indulged a hankering for the picturesquely eccentric that sat oddly upon his commonplace personality. The hat that had made Hammerstein famous Max had appropriated – straight crown, flat brim and immaculate gloss – bodily. Beneath it his face was small of feature, and fat. Its trim little mustache lent it an air of conventionality curiously at war with a pince-nez which sheltered his near-sighted eyes, its enormous, round, horn-rimmed lenses sagging to one side with the weight of a wide black ribbon. His nose was insignificant, his mouth small and pursy. His short, round little body was invariably by day dressed in a dark gray morning-coat, white-edged waistcoat, assertively-striped trousers, and patent-leather shoes with white spats. He had a passion for lemon-coloured gloves of thinnest kid and slender malacca walking-sticks. His dignity was an awful thing, as ingrained as his strut.
He reasserted the dignity now with a jerk of his maltreated hand, as well as with an appreciable effort betrayed by his resentful glare.
"Do I know you?" he demanded haughtily. "If not, what the devil do you mean by such conduct, sir?"
With a laugh, Whitaker took him by the shoulders and spun him round smartly into a convenient chair.
"Sit still and let me get a good look," he implored. "Think of it! Juley Max daring to put on side with me! The impudence of you, Juley! I've a great mind to play horse with you. How dare you go round the streets looking like that, anyway?"
Max recovered his breath, readjusted his glasses, and resumed his stare.
"Either," he observed, "you're Hugh Whitaker come to life or a damned outrage."
"Both, if you like."
"You sound like both," complained the little man. "Anyway, you were drowned in the Philippines or somewhere long ago, and I never waste time on a dead one… Drummond – " He turned to the lawyer with a vastly business-like air.
"No, you don't!" Whitaker insisted, putting himself between the two men. "I admit that you're a great man; you might at least admit that I'm a live one."
A mollified smile moderated the small man's manner. "That's a bargain," he said, extending a pale yellow paw; "I'm glad to see you again, Hugh. When did you recrudesce?"
"An hour ago," Drummond answered for him; "blew in here as large as life and twice as important. He's been running a gold farm out in New Guinea. What do you know about that?"
"It's very interesting," Max conceded. "I shall have to cultivate him; I never neglect a man with money. If you'll stick around a few minutes, Hugh, I'll take you up-town in my car." He turned to Drummond, completely ignoring Whitaker while he went into the details of some action he desired the lawyer to undertake on his behalf. Then, having talked steadily for upwards of ten minutes, he rose and prepared to go.
"You've asked him, of course?" he demanded of Drummond, nodding toward Whitaker.
Drummond flushed slightly. "No chance," he said. "I was on the point of doing it when you butted in."
"What's this?" inquired Whitaker.
Max delivered himself of a startling bit of information: "He's going to get married."
