IV
Theblow, which he had many times dreaded, but which for two long years he had thought of as blissfully escaped, had fallen. Until the summer just passed, that length of time had elapsed—the first two years of his University life—during which the affair with Ellen had reverted to its original innocence. Before that they had drifted on, taking what opportunities they could find. Potter, sometimes conscious that the thing was an ordinary slavery, had struggled against it from time to time, but half-heartedly. Habit and gratification were too strong. Then, in a blinding flash of awakened responsibility, he realized that physical consequences followed such relations, and under the guise of moral repentance, he went to her and told her he wished to end it.
Ellen acquiesced simply enough in this, as she acquiesced, perforce, in everything that concerned her. She dumbly worshipped him, but she knew how much that mattered.
Then had come the summer of this year. It was accident that threw them together one night, one very magical night, as Potter recalled. Both were lonely; the Meadowburn family were all away on an August journey. Their old intimacy,which in reality had been sordid and furtive, took on a certain beauty—the sentiment of past things. Under that momentary glamour forgetfulness took possession of them.
“She said,” recalled Potter, “that was the first time she had been thoroughly happy and secure.”
He ruminated on, connecting this sudden, vivid pleasure of hers, this mood of safety and surrender, with the deadening outcome they now faced. His own fear had never left him since that night—that one night, for it had had no sequel. Now he interpreted the event fatalistically. Nature had waited for that happy mood of Ellen’s before making her a mother. Nature was a subtle monster, a thing of scheming purposes. She let you go on and on with impunity and then tripped you when you weren’t thinking, when you felt particularly strong because you had put up a long fight against her. She could even, in this awful moment, make him thrill with the knowledge of having created life....
Potter had never had a confidant in the affair with Ellen. So far as he knew the secret was her own and his, and had been from the beginning. And it was something of a miracle, considering their narrow escapes from detection.
But now that he needed support there was no one to turn to. Roget was the last person in the world to whom he could take such a tale. He had an idea that Roget would laugh him to scorn orquestion his taste in becoming the victim of such an intimacy. Roget had been raised among women and had acquired a knowledge of them that made his relations toward them seem little short of uncanny to Potter. He gave the impression of being successful with many and quite uninvolved with all. To Potter women were the paralyzing mystery. It was one of the subjects on which he and Roget did not meet.
Had there been an older man in town with whom he had developed any sympathy, a faculty member or a person in authority of any kind, he would have gone to him. There were many questions; there was money to be got; there was common-sense guidance needed as to doctors and other such matters, instinctively repugnant and dreadful to him.
Marriage! Sometimes in the dead of night, lying awake with his fears, anticipating just this predicament, he had experienced exaltations, mystic desires for sacrifice and immolation and simple, laborious living; it was a surviving remnant of his intense religious life as a very young boy. In such moments his mind had admitted the idea of marriage. In broad day, the thought became abhorrent. And in all the broad days that had preceded this one, his fears also had melted with the sun; but now they would not melt.... He knew perfectly well that he would urge marriage upon Ellen, sincerely in a fashion. He knewalso that she would flatly refuse, and that he would accept her refusal with relief.
Yet what was she to do? He counted on no sympathy from the prudish Meadowburns. They would loudly invoke the names of their young daughters and fly from the scene. The family physician, Schottman, a tolerant German-born physician of real ability, had taken an odd sort of liking to Ellen and never visited the house without having a talk with her wherever he happened to find her at work. He had been their hope in earlier discussions. With him, there would be no danger, while with others—Potter writhed before the spectres of horrible little operating rooms, of death in agony, of murder and police and squint-eyed judges with nose-glasses. But Ellen’s letter had settled Schottman.
It was past noon before he realized it, and the golf links were becoming populated by a few straggling faculty men with clubs. He aimed for an outlying street which led into town and the act of motion toward a definite objective revived his spirits, which had been sinking hopelessly into the quicksand of despair. He went to the bank and drew out all of his small balance but a dollar. The previous day his check had come and he had paid his scot for October at the fraternity house. It was rare that his remittances from home exceeded forty dollars a month. He converted the larger part of the sum he withdrew into a moneyorder at the Post Office and mailed it to Ellen, with a short note in which he told her he would see her somehow before long, and if possible to do nothing until then.
“Money,” he thought, as he stepped out of the Post Office, “if one just had enough money one could fix up anything!”—an idea that had come to him before in many a tight place and morning after. He fell to day-dreaming about what he would do for Ellen if he had money, money in his hand, money in plenty.
The mailing of the letter had brought a sudden release to his feelings. It would cheer her up to hear from him.
In this state he responded more willingly to passing acquaintances, did not avoid the livery stable man and the candy man, and the dozen other town bodies who were always about. Catastrophes, he reflected, had their good points. They furnished a reason for cutting classes and loafing on a beautiful Fall day. He was tempted for a moment to call on Roget, who lived, as no one but he would have lived, on the native side of Broadway, a short distance off. But he decided against it. He would be pressed to talk about his trouble and that he had resolved not to do except in the worst extremity, and certainly not to Roget.
The decision to avoid Emmet left him no alternative, and he drifted into Steve Ball’s bar. Those dark, quiet, wet-smelling precincts were desertedat that hour, so far as his familiars were concerned. He was glad they were. It would not have been easy to conceal the turmoil within him, if forced into an extended conversation. He would take a drink or two, slowly, he concluded, go home and try to forget the whole thing, and to-morrow with a hard head, he would work out a plan of action.
Frank, the experienced bar man, wiped up the much scarred and initialled table of the private room, and hovered in the doorway with a friendly smile.
“This is the sort of companionship a fellow needs in my fix,” thought Potter. “Nothing like it. A good barkeep.”
Frank, however, soon proved too busy to talk, and Potter was left to his own thoughts. The effect which liquor usually had on him was to produce three distinct stages. It plunged him first into a dreamy and altogether pleasant condition, in which his lot appeared the rosiest in the world, and he radiated good will on all sides. This led to melancholy and a gradual feeling of boredom with everything, aggravated by a tendency to analyze his wrongs and conduct long, unspoken conversations about them with the persons presumed to be responsible for wronging him. Then followed a feverish desire for physical motion, and the making of quick decisions, obeyed on the instant, however ill-advised.
The first state of high spirits brought him agreeably to six o’clock when he left Steve Ball’s for fear of encountering early drinkers from the Campus. He was hungry and bolted sandwiches and coffee in a nameless lunch-wagon around the corner. He found himself after that in the “Bucket of Blood.” Night had fallen; the place was unspeakably sordid with its dim lamps and shuffling bums, and his problem once more assumed proportions that harried him. He began to assail Ellen for ever having permitted the intimacy to start. Then he quickly reacted from that attack. A profound, overwhelming wave of self-abasement engulfed him. If there was suffering to be done poor Ellen would endure all of it. She had been his victim and had given him what she had to give, in all things. Had their ages been precisely reversed, he could not have been more responsible.
As he ordered another bottle of beer, he became acutely conscious that his money was disappearing. There was no more to be had, certainly for several days. Mails had to take their time, even if there was anything to hope for from them. This sense of impecuniousness made his mind veer to another complicated grievance. In one of the banks at home, held for his use at majority, lay what now seemed an incredible sum of money, from his grandmother’s estate. He had twice entreated his father to allow him to draw modestlyon it. His father had not refused in either case, but had probed good-naturedly into his reasons for desiring it. But why, thought the boy, should his father have to know his private business? How could his father understand his peculiar needs? These questions had rankled time and again.
And now, he reflected bitterly, now that the trust fund might be the means of lightening a burden that would follow him all his life, it would be the same old story with his father. He would have to make a full confession of the case. But he could not do this. How could he tell his father such a yarn? Weren’t his whole family concerned as much as he? Was there not a question of blood relationship involving them? Common delicacy and loyal feeling toward them demanded that he conceal the truth, unless he took the burden upon himself and parted with them completely. He had thought all this out before and settled it. There was nothing he could say to his father.
These reflections, repeated over and over again, embroidered upon, attacked at every angle, adorned with many duplications of the same phrases, led nowhere. The bill at the “Bucket of Blood” had to be paid, and nothing was left to do but to get up and go. Well, well, he felt like moving anyhow. If only there were anything he could do now, right now, it would be a relief. He started walking rapidly uptown toward the fraternityhouse. Then at the corner where Broadway turned into his own street he stopped abruptly.
“What a fool!” he muttered aloud. “What a triple-plated iron-head! Why did I send that money to Ellen? Why didn’t I go myself?” He stopped and began to curse his idiocy with all the eloquence and thoroughness of which he was capable.
Then he reflected, again aloud: “But is it too late? The jerk-water goes over to Jamestown in half an hour. I could make it to Jamestown. But I haven’t enough money to go all the way. Well, I’ve got enough to go to Jamestown.”
The thought of bluffing his way on the through train with a promise to pay at the other end rushed into his mind. His name, his identification by letters in his pocket, his father’s acquaintance with railroad officials, these might carry him through. He turned and started toward the station.
“If I can get home I can raise that money. I can raise it on a note. I can get some Jew like Stern to shave the note. Or maybe I can get it from Colonel Cobb. I’ll bet Colonel Cobb would let me have it.”
This line of reasoning had to be exhausted with the usual number of variations and redundancies as he sat in the little branch train of two cars, with its dusty, worn plush seats, its threadbareblue trainmen ambling back and forth, and its scattering of anonymous, unimportant-looking passengers. Fortunately nobody was leaving town that he knew. That was to be expected six weeks after the opening of term. For the first time, the thought struck him that he himself was bolting, perhaps for several days, without the formality of an excuse from the Dean, without even notifying the men at the house. Ordinarily this would have been a serious infraction of the rules, punishable by suspension.
“I can’t help it,” he thought, “I’vegotto go. If they knew why I guess they’d think so.”
This, however, upon reflection, sounded illogical and inadequate. The danger of trouble with the authorities would not down so easily. There’d be mystery in his disappearance, a search would be made for him in the morning, and a wire probably sent to his folks. A moment later he had the solution. How easy! He could fix that up by telephoning the fraternity from Jamestown. It would cost him a quarter and he’d still have more than a dollar left. He would get old Ed Taylor to see the Dean to-morrow. Some lie would do. Ed could turn the Dean around his finger. Maybe he could keep the whole thing from his father. He could, if he slipped back to town on the next night’s train. If his father got hold of it, he’d be puzzled, want to know things, and this was no time to be submitted to questioning of any kind.
“At the same time,” he pursued, “I’d better not try the through train. Fellows have been pinched for it. They might take me off the train at Fayette, and then, oh, my God....”
A picture rose before him of a night in the county jail, of wiring home for money to pay his fine, of his father coming to Fayette, of scandal untold and unending, and no help to Ellen whatever. Rather the reverse, because he would be in disgrace and his hands, therefore, completely tied for some time to come.
“No, I can’t try the through train. Too big a chance. I wonder how about the freight. Hell, plenty of other fellows have done that, with no worse results than a swipe on the ear or a bawling out. Besides I’ve got a little money. Brakies are all right.”
The wind at that moment coming through the leaky train was devilishly sharp, and he had no overcoat, nothing but his fall-weight suit. It would be still colder later, especially on an unprotected freight car roof, which was the only place he could think of to ride.
“Can’t help it,” he concluded. “It’s got to be the freight. I can get a half pint of rot gut at Jamestown. Keep me warm enough. It’s just a nice little ride in the open air.”
An hour later, with his hat pulled down over his eyes, and his bottle in his breast pocket, Potter stepped from the smoke-draped, kerosene-smellingbarroom of the little junction town. By buying a round of beer for two loafers he had obtained the advice and information he wanted. The freight train now resting on tracks just back of those on which the through train was soon expected would pull out for his destination about ten-thirty. He crept down perhaps a half a dozen cars from the station and found himself practically in open country. An overgrown fence lay twenty feet to the side of one of the big, dirty-looking red cars. He sat down in the shadow of the fence to wait, listening to the frogs in the dim, unwelcoming marshes behind him.
Once as he sat there a man ran along the top of the train from the caboose far off at the end of the line of cars and came back. Once just a little before the scheduled hour, he heard cinders being crunched under foot in the direction of the engine. The flashing rays of a lantern, swung from an invisible shoulder, played under the cars and the figure carrying it passed by hurriedly on the other side. At every coupling the lantern was swung up between the cars. Osprey knew now why the roustabouts had told him to lie low and keep away from the train while it was still.
“Wait ’til she gives her first jerk, then grab her and climb like yer momma was after you.”
Whistles shrieked and soon a long, noisy shiver travelled down the length of the cars. Potter jumped for the iron treads closest to him. Thetrain was moving off and he with it. Once on top of the car, he laid full length, making himself as small as possible on the side of the roof farthest from the station, until it should be passed. Beyond the little town he breathed freely, took a comfortable seat on the flat boardway in the centre with his legs dangling over the car’s end, and gripped the rusty steel shaft of the brake.