The Empty Sack Part 29

Jackman's lips formed half a dozen syllables, emphasized by a nod and a lifting of the brows.

"That's the guy all righty," were the words Teddy practically heard.

Like a startled wild thing, he had but one impulse-to run. Actual running in Broad Street at that hour of the day being out of the question, he dived into the procession mounting toward Wall Street, ducking, dodging, pushing, almost knocking people down, and mad with fear. "They'll never get me alive," he was saying to himself; but how in that crowd to find s.p.a.ce in which to turn the pistol to his heart already puzzled him.

At the corner of Wall Street he summoned courage to look over his shoulder. They might not be after him. If not, it would prove a false alarm, such as he had had before. But there they were-Jackman scrambling laboriously up the other side of Broad Street, and Flynn crossing it, picking his way among the vans and motor cars.

Like a frightened rabbit, Teddy scurried on again, meaning to gain Na.s.sau Street and somehow double on his tracks.

CHAPTER XVI

But Teddy did not double on his tracks in Na.s.sau Street, for the reason that, in again looking over his shoulder, he saw that Flynn had taken one side of that thoroughfare and Jackman the other. They were burly men, who moved heavily, while he, in spite of his stocky build, glided in and out among the pedestrians with the agility of a squirrel. He was putting distance between himself and them, and five minutes' leeway would be enough for him. All he needed was the s.p.a.ce and privacy in which to shoot himself.

At the corner of John Street he turned to the left and made toward Broadway. They would expect him to do this, his chief hope being that among the homing swarms they would already have lost sight of him. His mind was not working. He was not looking ahead, even over the few minutes he had still to live. All his instincts were fused into the fear of the hand of the law on his person. It was like Jennie's terror of the hand of a man she didn't love-a frenzy for physical sanct.i.ty stronger than the fear of death.

At the same time, he couldn't run the risk of being more noticeable than the majority of people going his way. As he pushed and dodged, a young man whom he had jostled called out, in ironic good humor, "Say, is the cop after you?" at which Teddy almost lost his head. He expected a crowd to gather, and three or four men to hold him by the arms till Jackman and Flynn came up. But nothing happened. The protesting young man was lost in the scramble, and he, Teddy, found himself in Broadway.

Paying no heed to the jam of street cars, lorries, private cars, and motor trucks, he dashed into the interlaced streams of traffic. He dashed-and was held up. He dashed again-and was held up a second time.

He was held up a third time, a fourth, and a fifth. With every spurt of two or three feet, cries warned him and curses startled him. "Say, sonny, your ma must have lost you," came from a jocose chauffeur beside whose machine Teddy had been brought to a halt. "I'd d.a.m.n well like to run over you," shouted the driver of a van who had narrowly escaped doing it. Teddy wished he had. If he could only be sure of being killed, it might have been the easiest way out.

Reaching the opposite pavement, he had time to see that Jackman had crossed lower down and more easily than he, and was lumbering toward him from the downtown direction. Jackman could have shouted to the pa.s.sers-by to lay hold of Teddy, only that, from a distance and among such numbers, he couldn't indicate his victim. Being younger than Flynn and of lighter build, he could move in his own way almost with Teddy's rapidity. The boy didn't dare to run, because the action would have marked him out, but he started again on his snakelike gliding between pedestrians. He must gain some doorway, some cellar, some hole of any sort, in which to draw his pistol. He would have drawn it there and then, only that a hundred hands would have seized him.

All at once he saw the open portal of a great mercantile building, leading to a vast interior with which he was familiar. There were several exits and many floors. Once he had turned in here, he could cross the scent. In he went, with scores who were doing likewise, pa.s.sing scores who were coming out. His first intention was to avoid the conspicuous exit toward Dey Street and make for the less obvious one into Fulton Street; but in doing that, he pa.s.sed a line of some twenty lifts, of which one was about to close its door. He slipped into it like a hare into its warren. The door clanged; the lift moved upward with an oily speed. Among his companions he was hot, flurried, breathless, and yet not more so than any other young clerk who had been doing an errand against time.

There were nearly thirty floors, and he got off at the twenty-third. He chose the twenty-third so as not to get off too soon, and yet not call attention to himself by remaining in the lift when most of its occupants had left it. The floor was s.p.a.cious and almost empty. A few people were waiting for a lift to take them down; a few were going in and out of offices, but otherwise he had the place to himself.

Mechanically he walked to a window and looked out. He seemed to be up in the sky, with only the tops of a few giant cubes on a level with himself. "Skysc.r.a.pers" they were called, and skysc.r.a.pers they seemed up here even more than down below. The tip of the great city, the stretches of the bay, the green slopes of Staten Island, and the far-off colossal woman with a torch were all within his vision, with the oblique strip that was Broadway, a tiny, ugly gash in which bacteria were squirming, deep down and cutting across the foreground.

Except for the dull roar that came up and the clang of an occasional footstep along the hallways, it was so still and pleasant that the need to shoot himself seemed for the minute less insistent. It would have to be done sooner or later, but when it comes to suicide, even a few minutes' respite is something. He could have done the thing right there and then by the window, where the few people within hearing would have run to him at sound of the shot. If the shot didn't kill him, they would keep him from firing another. Publicity, distasteful in itself, might lead to ineffectuality.

He must find a lavatory, and so began walking up and down the corridors, looking at doors discreetly placed in corners. When he came to his objective, it was locked. Again it was reprieve. The same door would be on other floors, but he was not ready for the moment to forsake his shelter. It was true that at any minute Flynn and Jackman might emerge from the lift, but there were nearly thirty chances that if they had followed him so closely they would not select this landing. Even more were the chances that they had not seen him slip into the building at all.

Fevered and thirsty, he stooped to drink at the fountain crowning the head of a little bronze woman with a pair of dolphins on her shoulders.

She seemed to be of Maya type, and a uniformed guardian had once told him that a great modern sculptor had molded her. With a difference in dolphins, she was repeated on every floor, forever diademed in water.

Teddy's mind had so far suspended operation as to his immediate plight that he went back to the morning, seven or eight months previously, when an errand from Mr. Brunt had brought him into the great ground-floor atrium, revealing the Basilica Julia or the Basilica Emilia of _Ancient Rome Restored_ right there in lower Broadway. Simplicity, immensity, the awesome beauty of mere form! The wide s.p.a.ces, the mighty columns, the tempered white light of majestic Roman windows! The absence of striving for effect! The peace, the restfulness, the cheerfulness, when striving for effect are abandoned, dwarfing the magnitude of crowds and reducing their ebbings and flowing to mere vanity! Like Jennie with her emotions, like Pansy with her intuitions, Teddy had no words for these impressions; but the Scarborough tradition, nursed on _Ancient Rome Restored_, vibrated to their music.

"And here I am, trapped like a rat in a hole!"

So he came back to it. He wondered if he were awake. Was it possible that ten or fifteen minutes could have transformed him from a hard-working, home-loving boy into a fugitive who had no choice left but to shoot himself? As for facing the disgrace, he did not consider it. To stand before his mother charged with theft, even if it was on her behalf, was not to be thought of. He couldn't do it, and there was an end to it. Still less could he go through the other incidentals, handcuffs, a cell, the court, the sentence, Bitterwell, and the lifetime that would come after his release. He could put the pistol to his heart and, if necessary, he could burn in h.e.l.l-if there was a h.e.l.l; but he couldn't do the other thing.

And yet to put the pistol to his heart and burn in h.e.l.l formed a lamentable choice on their side.

"I'm not a thief," he protested, inwardly. "I took the money-how could I help it, with dad sick and ma at the end of everything?-but _I'm not a thief_."

He was sure of that. It became a formula, not perhaps of comfort, but of justification. Had he been a thief, he told himself, he could have faced the music; but it was precisely because he had taken money while preserving his inner probity that he refused to be judged by the standards of men. Once more he couldn't express it in this way to himself; but it was the conclusion to which his instincts leaped. Only one tribunal could discern between the good and evil in his case; so he was resolved to go before it.

In a quiet corner he began to cry. He was only a boy, with a boy's facility of emotion, especially of distress. He cried at the thought of his mother and the girls, with no one to fend for them, and no Teddy coming home in the evenings. It was true that, apart from his filchings, he had been able to fend for them only to the extent of eighteen per, but there was always a chance of better days ahead. Even at the worst of times, they had a good deal of fun among themselves, and now....

Now his mother would be in the kitchen, beginning to get supper, and each of the girls would be making her way back to Indiana Avenue.

Pansy's dog clock would tell her when to watch for them, and the loving little creature would be eying the door, ready to welcome each of them in turn. If she had a preference, it was for himself, and the feeling of her gentle paws against his shin was connected with the tenderest things he knew.

No; it wasn't possible. He couldn't be skyed on that twenty-third floor, unable to come down, unable to go home. It _must_ be a nightmare. Such things didn't happen. He was Teddy Follett, a good boy at heart, with an honorable record in the navy. He had never meant to steal, but what could he do? The money was there, to be stacked in the vaults of Collingham & Law's, not to be touched for months, very likely, and the home needs imperative. He couldn't see his father and mother turned out of house and home because they couldn't pay their taxes. It was not in common sense. Nothing was in common sense. That he should be dragged into court, that his mother should break her heart, that shame should be showered on his sisters was ridiculous. Somewhere in the universe there was a great big principle that was on his side, though he didn't know what it was.

What he did know was that crying was unmanly. Sopping up his tears and trying not to think, he jumped into the first lift that stopped and got out at floor eleven. There he went straight to the lavatory, which he now knew how to place, and once more found the door locked.

Though again it was reprieve, it was reprieve almost unwelcome. The first pa.s.sing lift was going upward, and so he ascended to floor seventeen. Here again the lavatory was locked, as it was on floors nineteen and twenty-five, both of which he tried. He began to understand that they were locked according to a principle, and that for those seeking privacy in which to shoot themselves they offered no resource.

Moreover, offices were closing and the great building emptying itself rapidly. The rush was all to the lifts going downward. He, too, must go downward. To be found skulking in corridors where he had no business would expose him to suspicion. After nearly an hour spent above he descended to the atrium, where Flynn and Jackman might be watching the cages disgorge, knowing that in time he must appear from one of them.

But he walked out without interference. A far hint of twilight was deepening the atmosphere round the heads of the great columns, and the waning sunshine spoke of workers seeking rest. Streams of men and women, mostly young, were setting toward each of the exits, to Broadway, to Fulton Street, to Dey Street; and he had only to drop into one of them.

He chose that toward Dey Street, finding himself in the open air, in full exercise of his liberty.

Once more it was hard to believe that there was a difference between this day and other days. It would have been so natural to go to the gym for a plunge or a turn with the foils, and then home to supper. He discussed with himself the possibility of a last night with the family, recoiling only from the fact that it was precisely there that they would look for him. Much reading of criminal annals had printed that detail on his brain-the poor wretch torn from the warm shelter of his home, with his wife's arms round him and the baby sleeping in the cradle. There was no wife or baby in this case; but to have the thing happen to himself, with his mother and the girls vainly trying to stay the course of the law, would be worse than going to the chair.

He was in the uptown subway, with no outward difference between himself and the scores of other young men scanning the evening papers. Because he didn't know what else to do, he got out at Chambers Street. He got out at Chambers Street because there was a ferry there which would take him over to New Jersey. He went over to New Jersey because it was his habit at this hour of the day, and to follow his habit somehow preserved his sanity. To be on the same side of the river as his home was a faint, futile consolation.

And while on the ferryboat a new idea came to him. In the Erie station he should find a telephone booth from which he could ring up his mother and inform her that he was not to be home that night. Though it would do no good in the end, it would at least save her from immediate alarm.

Flynn and Jackman were unknown by face to the family, and if they rang at the door in search of him they would probably not tell their tale.

Before he reached the other side he had concocted a story of which his only fear was as to his ability to tell it on the wire without breaking down.

It was a bit of good luck to be answered by Gladys, whom he could "bluff" more easily than the rest of them.

"h.e.l.lo, Gladys! This is Ted. Tell ma I'm in Paterson and shall not get home to-night or to-morrow night."

He could hear Gladys calling into the interior of the house:

"Well, _what_ do you know about that? Ted's at Paterson and not coming home to-night or to-morrow night." Into the receiver she said, "But, Ted, what'll they say at the bank?"

"I may not go back to the bank. This is a new job. You remember the fellow I was working for on the side? Well, he's put me into this, and perhaps I'm going to make money."

"Oh, Ted," Gladys called, delightedly, "how many plunks?"

"It-it isn't a salary," he stammered. "I-I may be in the firm. To-morrow I may have to go to Philadelphia. Tell ma not to worry-and not to miss me. I'll try to call up from Philadelphia, but if I can't-Well, anyhow, give my love to ma and everybody, and if I'm not home the day after to-morrow, don't think anything about it."

He put up the receiver before Gladys could ask any more questions, and felt ready to cry again. In order not to do that, he walked out of the station into the street, where the presence of the crowds compelled him to self-control. Having nothing to do and nowhere to go, he walked on and on, getting some relief from his desolation by the mere fact of movement.

So he walked and walked and walked, headed vaguely toward the outskirts of the town. There were vast marshes there into which he could stray and be lost. The rank gra.s.ses in this early August season were almost as high as his shoulders, so that he could lie down and be beyond all human ken. His body might not be found for weeks, might never be found at all.

Teddy Follett would simply disappear, his fate remaining a mystery.

Toward seven o'clock, the shabby suburbs began to show their primrose-colored lights-a twinkle here, a twinkle there, stringing out in longer streets to scattered bits of garland. Teddy felt hungry.

Counting his money and finding that he had two dollars and thirty-one cents, he was sorry not to be able to transmit the two dollars to his mother.

Growing more and more hungry, and knowing he must keep up his nerve, he spied a little bread-and-pastry shop just where the houses were thinning out and the marshes invading the town, as the ocean invaded the marshes.

On entering, he asked for two tongue sandwiches and half a dozen doughnuts. The woman who wrapped up the sandwiches and dropped the doughnuts into a paper bag was an English-speaking foreigner of the Scandinavian type, blond, dumpy, with a row of bad teeth and piercing blue eyes. As she performed her task, she seemed not to take her eyes from off him, though her smile was kind, and she called his attention to the fact that she was giving him seven doughnuts for his six.