The Parts Men Play Part 43

And with that inner challenge came the supreme ordeal of his life.

As rivers, held imprisoned by winter, will burst their confines in the spring and overrun the land, all the pa.s.sions which had been cooled and tempered by his intellectual discipline swarmed through his arteries in revolt. No longer was the brain dominating the body; instead, he was on fire with a hundred mad flames of desire, springing from sources he knew nothing of. They clung to him by day and haunted him at night.

They sang to him that vice had its own heaven, as well as h.e.l.l--that licentiousness held forgetfulness. He heard whispers in the air that there were drugs which opened perfumed caves of delight, and secret places where sin was made beautiful with mystic music and incense of flowers.

When conscience--or whatever it is in us that combats desire--urged him to close his ears to the voices, he cursed it for a meddlesome thing.

Since Life had thrown down the gauntlet, he would take it up! If he had to travel the chambers of disgrace and discouragement, he would go on to the halls of sensual abandonment. Life had torn aside the curtain--it was for him to search the recesses of experience.

IV.

One night towards the end of January Selwyn had tried to sleep, but the furies of desire called to him in the dark. He got up and dressed. He did not know where he was going, but he knew that his steps would be guided to adventure, to oblivion.

There was a drizzling rain falling, and, with his coat b.u.t.toned close about his throat, he walked from street to street, his breath quickening with the ecstasy of sensual surrender which had at last come to him. Men spoke to him from dark corners; women called at him as he pa.s.sed; he caught faint glimmers down murky alleys, where opium was opening the gates to bliss and perdition; but, with a step that was agile and graceful, he went on, his arteries tingling in antic.i.p.ation of the senses' gratification. Once a mongrel slunk out of a lane, and he called to it. It crawled up to him, and he stooped down to stroke its head, when, with a yelp of terror, it leaped out of his reach and ran back into the lane. As if it was the best of jests, he laughed aloud, and picking up a stone, sent it hurtling after the cur. Then he was suddenly afraid. The loneliness of the spot--the horrors lurking in the dark--the dog's howl and his own meaningless laughter. He felt a fear of night--of himself. He hurried on, but it was not until he reached a lighted street of shops that his courage returned, and with the courage his fever of desire, greater than before.

An extra burst of rain warned him to seek shelter, and hurrying down the street, he paused under the canopy of a shabby theatre. There was one other person there--a woman. She came over to speak to him; but when she saw the mad gleam of his eyes she drew back, and, with a frightened exclamation, pressed her hand against her breast.

He made an ironic bow, then, with a smile, looked up at her, and she heard him utter an e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of amazement.

For a moment he had fancied that it might be true. The likeness was uncanny! The burnished-copper hair, the silk-fringed eyes, the poise of her head, the tapering fingers--even in the scarlet of her rouged cheeks, there was a similarity to the high colouring of the English girl. What a jest of the Fates--that they should cast this poor creature of New York's streets in the same mould with her who was the very spirit of chast.i.ty!

'What a mockery!' he muttered aloud. 'What a hideous mockery!'

He was touched with sudden pity. Perhaps this woman had been born with the same spirit of rebellion as Elise. Perhaps her poor mind had never been developed, and so she had succ.u.mbed to the current of circ.u.mstance. She might have been the plaything of environment. The wound in his head was hurting again, and he covered the scar with his moist hand. Horrible as it seemed, this creature had brought Elise to him once more--Elise, and everything she meant. He wanted to cry out her name. His hands were stretched forward as if they could bridge the sea between them.

Like a man emerging from a trance, he looked dreamily about him--at the street running with streams of water--at the silent theatre--at the woman. A weakness came over him, and his pulses were fluttering and unsteady.

A peddler of umbrellas pa.s.sed, and Selwyn purchased one for a dollar.

'Won't you take this?' he asked, stepping over to the woman, who cringed nervously. 'It is raining hard, and you will need it.'

She took the thing, and looked up at him wonderingly, like a child that has received a caress where it expected a blow.

'Say,' she said, in a queer nasal whine, 'I thought you was a devil when I seen you a minute ago. Honest--you frightened me.'

He said nothing.

'Why'--there was a weak quaver in her whine, and she caught his wrist with her hand--'why, you're kind--and I thought you was a devil. Gee!

ain't it funny?'

With a shrill laugh that set his teeth on edge, she put up the umbrella and walked out into the rain. And only a pa.s.sing policeman saw, by the light of a lamp, that her eyes were glistening.

Selwyn remained where he was, blinking stupidly into the rain-soaked night, as one who has been walking in his sleep and has waked at the edge of an abyss.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE CHALLENGE.

I.

It was nearly noon next day before Selwyn woke from a heavy, dreamless sleep. Both in mind and in body there was the listlessness which follows the pa.s.sing of a crisis, but for the first time in many days he felt the impulse to face life again, to accept its bludgeonings, unflinching.

He was almost fully dressed, when a messenger arrived with a letter. It was from Edgerton Forbes.

'MY DEAR AUSTIN,--I have been trying to get hold of you for the past week, but you are as elusive as a hundred-dollar bill. Douglas Watson has returned from the front, minus an arm, and he has asked as many ex-Harvard men as possible to meet him at the University Club. We are having dinner there to-night in one of the smaller rooms, and I want you to come with me. I'll pick you up at your hotel at seven, and we can walk over. If it is all right, send word by the messenger.--As ever, FORBES.'

Selwyn's first instinct was to refuse. He had no desire to meet Watson again just yet, nor did he want to face men with whom he had lived at Harvard. But the thought of another lonely night arose--night, with its germs of madness.

'Tell Mr. Forbes,' he said, 'that I shall expect him at seven.'

A few minutes before the time arranged the clergyman called, and they started for the club. The air was raw and chilling, and people were hurrying through the streets, taking no heed of the illuminated shop windows, tempting the eye of woman and the purse of man. In almost every towering building the lights of offices were gleaming, as tired, routine-chained staffs worked on into the night tabulating and recording the ever-increasing prosperity of the times.

The times!

Ordinary forms of greeting had changed to mutual congratulations on affluence. Anecdotes of business men were no longer of struggle and privation, but of record outputs and maximum prices. Theatres, cafes, cinema palaces, churches, hotels--they had never seen such times.

Success was in the very dampness of the air as thousands of people looked at it from the cosy interior of limousines, people who had never aspired higher than an occasional taxi-cab. The times! Dollars multiplied and begat great families of dollars--and Broadway glittered as never before.

It is difficult to state what trend of thought made conversation between the friends difficult, but after two or three desultory attempts they walked on without speaking. As they were entering the majestic portals of the club, Selwyn was reminded of a question he had intended all day to ask.

'Edge,' he said, 'have you heard anything of Marjory Sh.o.r.eham?'

'She sailed two weeks ago for France,' answered the clergyman.

They were directed to an upper floor, where they found a hundred or so guests who claimed Harvard as their _alma mater_. Although most of his old acquaintances were quite cordial, Selwyn felt oddly self-conscious.

He caught sight of Gerard Van Derwater with his impa.s.sive courtliness dominating a group of active but less impressive men; and behind them he saw Douglas Watson of Cambridge surrounded by a dozen guests; but he pleaded a headache to Forbes, and sought a secluded corner, where he remained until dinner was announced.

Like all affairs where men are alone and the charming artifices of femininity are missing, there was a severity and a formality which did not disappear until the ministrations of wine and food had engendered a glow which did away with shyness. The table was arranged in the form of the letter U, with Watson beside the chairman at the head.

Towards the end of the dinner conversation and hilarity were growing apace. Men were forgetting the scramble of existence in the recollection of old college days, when their blood was like wine and the world a thing of adventure. Mellowed by retrospect, they laughed over incidents that had caused heart-burnings at the time; and as they laughed more than one felt a swelling of the throat. It was, perhaps, just an odd streak of sentiment (and the man who is without such is a sorry spectacle); or it may have been the memory of ideals, aspirations, dreams--left behind the college gates.

'Gentlemen.' The chairman had risen to his feet. Cigars were lit; and he was greeted with the usual applause. 'Gentlemen, we have gathered here at short notice to welcome an old boy of Harvard--Douglas Watson.

He has a message which he wants to deliver to us, and not only because he is one with us in tradition would we listen, but his empty sleeve is a mute testimony that he has fought in a cause which--though not our own--is one which I know has the sympathy of every man in this room. I shall not detain you, gentlemen, but ask your most attentive hearing for Mr. Watson.'

As the guest of the evening rose to speak he was greeted with prolonged applause, which broke into 'For he's a jolly good fellow,' and ended in a college football yell. During it Selwyn sat motionless, his alert mind trying to decipher the difference between Watson's face and the others.

It was not only that they were, almost without exception, clean-shaven, and that Watson wore a small military moustache; the dissimilarity went beyond that. Although he was obviously nervous, Watson's eyes looked steadily ahead as those of a man who has faced death and looked on things that never were intended for human vision. It had left him aged--not aged as with years, but by an experience which made all the keen-faced men about him seem clever precocities whose mentalities had outstripped the growth of their souls.

And studying this phenomenon, Selwyn became conscious of the American business face.

Although differing in colouring and shape, practically every face showed lips thin and straight, eyes narrowing and restlessly on the _qui vive_, the nervous, muscular tension from the battle for supremacy in feverish compet.i.tion, the dull, leaden complexion of those who disregard the sunshine--these combined in a clear impression of extraordinary abilities and capacities with which to meet the affairs of the day. What one missed in all their faces was a sense of the centuries.

No--not in all. At the table opposite to Selwyn was Gerard Van Derwater, whose self-composure and air of formal courtliness made him, as always, a man of distinctive, almost lonely, personality.

'Thank you very much,' said Watson, as the applause and singing died away. His fingers pressed nervously on the table, and his first words were uneven and jerky. 'I needn't tell you I am not a speaker. I have a great message for you chaps, but I may not be able to express it. That was my reason for asking to speak to ex-Harvard men. I did it because I knew I should have men who thought as I did--men who looked on things in the same way as myself. I knew you would be patient with me, and I was certain you would give an answer to the question which I bring from France.'