I said it was Jasper Soames."Sure that's a hell of a name," he commented, simply. "The byes 'd never get round the like o' that. Yer name 'll be Brogan. Brogan was what we called the guy that was here before Clancy, and it done very well. All right, then, Brogan. Ye'll have Clancy's locker; and moind ye don't punch the clock a minute later than siven in the mornin', or that little ould divil 'll be dancin' round to fire ye."So Brogan I was at Messrs. Creed & Creed's all through the next two years.CHAPTER VNo lighter-hearted man than I trod the streets of New York that evening. I had breakfasted in the morning; I had shared Bridget's cold meat and bread at midday; I could "blow myself in" to something to eat now, and then go happily to bed.There was but one flaw in this bliss, and that was the thought of Mildred Averill. Whether she would be glad or sorry that for the minute I was landing on my feet, I could not forecast. And yet when I called her up she pretended to be glad. I say she pretended, only because in her first words there was a note of disappointment, perhaps of dismay, though she recovered herself quickly."But I can be easy in my mind about you?" she asked, after I had declined to tell her what my new occupation was."Quite easy; only I want you to know how grateful I am.""Oh, please don't. If I could have done more!""Fortunately that wasn't needed.""But if it should be needed in the future—""I hope it won't be.""But if it should be?""Oh, then we'd—we'd see.""So that for now it's—" that note stole into her voice again, and with a wistful question in the intonation—"for now it's—it's good-by?""Only for now."She seemed to grasp at something. "What do you mean by that?""Oh, just that—that the future—""I hate the future."It was one of her sudden outbursts, and the receiver was hung up.After all, this abrupt termination to an unsatisfactory mode of speech was the wisest method for us both. We couldn't go on sparring and there was nothing to do but spar. Knowing that I couldn't speak plainly she had ceased to expect me to do so, and yet...When I say that this was a relief to me, you must understand it only in the sense that my situation was too difficult to allow of my inviting further complications. Had I been free—but I wasn't free. The conviction that somewhere in the world I had permanent ties began to be as strong as the belief that at some time in my life love had been the dominating factor. There had been a woman. Lydia Blair had seen her. Her flaming eyes haunted me from a darkness in which they were the only thing living. The fact that I couldn't construct the rest of the portrait no more permitted me to doubt the original than you can doubt the existence of a plant after you have seen a leaf from it. The best I could hope for now was the privilege of living and working in some simple, elemental way that would give me the atmosphere in which to re-collect myself,recueillement, the French graphically name the process, and grow unconsciously back into the facts that effort would not restore to me.For that simple, elemental work and life the opportunity came to me at last. I see now that it was opportunity, though I should not have said so at the time. At the time it was only hard necessity, though hard necessity with those products of shelter and food which in themselves meant peace. I had peace, therefore, of a kind, and to it I am able now to attribute that growth and progress backward, if I may so express myself, which led to the miracle.My work next day lay in peeling off the burlap from the newly arrived consignment, stripping the rolls of the sheepskins in which they were wrapped inside, spreading the rugs flat, and sweeping them with a stiff, strong broom. After that we laid them in assorted piles, preparatory to carrying them up-stairs. They were Khorassans, Kirmanshahs, Bokharas, and Sarouks, with a superb lot of blue and gold Chinese reproduced on the company's looms in India.The good-natured Peter Bridget taking his turn up-stairs, my colleague that day was an American of Finnish extraction, whose natural sunniness of disposition had been soured by the thwarting of a strong ambition to "get on." Combining the broad features of the Lapp with Scandinavian hair and complexion, his expression reminded you of a bright summer day over which a storm was beginning to lower. The son of one large family and the father of another, he was at war with the world in which his earning capacity had come to have its limitations fixed at eighteen dollars a week.He was not conversational; he only grunted remarks out of a slow-moving bitterness of spirit."What's the good of always layin' the pipe and never gettin' no oil along it? That's what I want to know. Went to work when I was fourteen, and now I'm forty-two, and in exactly the same spot.""You're not in exactly the same spot," I said, "because you've got your wife and children.""And the money I've spent on that woman and them kids!""But you're fond of them, aren't you?""No better wife no guy never had, and no nicer little fam'ly.""Well, then, that's so much to the good. Those are assets, aren't they? They'll mean more to you than if you had money in the savings bank and didn't havethem.""I can't eddicate 'em proper, or send 'em to high-school, let alone college, or give 'em nothin' like what they ought to have. All I can leave 'em when I die is what my father left me, the right not to be able to get nowhere—and yet you'll hear a lot of gabbers jazzin' away about this bein' the best country for a working-man."During the lunch-hour we drifted into Fifth Avenue, joining the throng of those who for sixty minutes were like souls enjoying a respite from limbo. Limbo, I ask you to notice, is not hell; but it is far from paradise. The dictionary defines the word as a borderland, a place of restraint, and it was in both those senses, I think, that the shop and the factory struck the imaginations of these churning minds. The shop and the factory formed a borderland, neither one thing nor another, a nowhere; but a place of restraint none the less. More than the physical restraint involved in the necessity for working was implied by this; it was restraint of the spirit, restraint of the part of a man that soars, restraint of the impulse to seize the good things of life in a world where they seemed to be free.Though I could understand little of the conversation around me—Yiddish, Polish, Armenian, Czech—I knew they were talking of jobs and bosses in relation to politics and the big things of life."What's the matter with them guys at Albany and Washington that they don't come across with laws—?"That was the question and that was the complaint. It was one of the two main blends in the current of dissatisfaction. The other blend was the conviction that if those who had the power didn't right self-evident wrongs, the wronged would somehow have to right themselves. There was no speechmaking, no stump oratory, after the manner of a Celtic or Anglo-Saxon crowd; all was smothered, sullen, burning, secretive, and intense.On our way back to the cavern the Finn remarked:"No man doesn't mind work. He'd rather work than loaf, even if he was paid for loafin'. What he can't stick is not havin' room to grow in, bein' squeezed into undersize, like a Chinese woman's foot."After all, I reflected, this might be the real limbo, not only of the working-man, but of all the dissatisfied in all ranks throughout the world—the denials of the liberty to expand. Mildred Averill was rebelling against it in her way as much as the Finn in his, as much as any Jew or Pole or Italian in all the crowd surging back at that minute to the dens from which they had come out. Discontent was not confined to any one class or to any one set of needs. Custom, convention, and greed had clamped our energies round and round as with iron hoops, till all but the few among us had lost the right to grow. It wasn't a question of pay; it wasn't primarily a question of money at all, though the question of money was involved in it. More than anything else, it was one of a new orientation toward everything, with a shifting of basic principles. The first must become last and the last must become first—not in the detail of precedence but in that of the laws by which we live—before men, as men, could get out of the prison-houses, into which civilization had thrust them, to the broad, free air to which they were born. The struggle between labor and capital was a mere duel between blind men. It was bluff on the surface by those on both sides who were afraid to put the ax to the root of the tree. No symbol was so eloquent to me of the bondage into which the human elements in Church and State had chained the spirit of man as the Finn's comparison of the Chinese woman's foot.When the Floater paid me another dollar and a half that night he told me that if I worked like a dog, was as meek as a mouse, and "didn't get no labor rot into my nut" I could have Clancy's job as a regular thing. But by this time I was beginning to understand him. I have already called him a terrier, and a terrier he was, with a terrier's bark, but with a terrier's fundamental friendliness. If you patted him, he wagged his tail. True, he wagged it unwillingly, ungraciously, and with a fond belief that you didn't know he was wagging it at all; but the fact that he did wag it was enough for me.It was enough for us all. There was not a man among the "luggers" who didn't understand him, nor among the salesmen either, as I came to understand."Dee ye know how to take that little scalpeen? He's like wan of thim Graaks or Eytalians that's got a quare talk of their own, but you know you can put it into our talk and make it mane somethin'. Wance I was at a circus where a monkey what looked like a little ould man talked his kind o' talk, and it made sinse. Well, that's like the Floater. He's like the monkey what can't talk nothin' but monkey-talk; but glory be to God! he manes the same thing as a man. Don't ye moind him, Brogan. When he talks his talk, you talk it to yerself in yer own talk, and ye'll kape yer timper and get everything straight."This kindly advice was given me by Denis Gallivan, the oldest of the porters, and a sort of dean of our corps. Small, wiry, as strong as a horse, with a wizened, leathery face that looked as if it had been dried and tanned in a hot sunshine, there was a yearning in his blue-black eyes like that which some of the old Italian masters put into the eyes of saints. Denis, Bridget, and the Finn composed what I may call the permanent staff, the two others, excluding myself, being invariably restless chaps who, like Clancy, came for a few weeks and went off again. With the three workers named I made a fourth, henceforth helping to carry the responsibility of the house on my shoulders.It was a good place, with pleasant work. Two or three times I could have had promotion and a raise in pay, but I had reasons of my own for staying where I was.My duties being simple, I enjoyed the sheer physical exertion I was obliged to make. Arriving about seven in the morning I helped to sweep the floors, with a special sweeping of the rugs, druggets, and mattings that had lain out overnight. If there was anything to be carried from the basement to the upper floor I helped in that. Then, having "cleaned" myself, as the phrase went, I took my place in the shop, ready to pull out the goods which the salesmen panted to display to customers, and to put them back again.For this there were always four of us in the spacious, well-lighted shop, which must have been sixty feet long by thirty wide, and I liked the dignity and quiet of all the regulation tasks. As a rule, we were on the floor by nine, though it was generally after ten before we saw a customer. During that hour of spare time we porters hung together at the farther end, exchanging in low tones the gossip of the day, confiding personal experiences, or discussing the war and the reconstruction of society. Now and then one of the four or five salesmen would condescendingly join with us, but for the most part the salesmen kept to themselves, treating the same topics from a higher point of view. The gods of Olympus did little more than enter by the main door from Fifth Avenue, cross to their offices, after which we scarcely saw them. Only the Floater moved at will between us and them, with a little dog's freedom to be equally at home in the stable and the drawing-room.A flicker of interest always woke with the arrival of customers. They entered with diffidence, confused by the subdued brilliance of the Persian and Chinese colors hanging on our walls, by the wide empty spaces, and their own ignorance of what they came in search of."There's not tin women in New York 'll know the difference betwane a Kirmanshah and an Anatolia," Denis said to me one day, "and it'd make ye sorry for thim when they comes to furnishin'. Glory be to God, they'll walk in here knowin' no more than that they want rugs, and it's all wan to thim what ye puts before thim so long as it's the color they like and it lays on the ground. If this wasn't the honestest house that the Lord ever made there'd be chatin' till we was all in danger o' hell fire."But in spite of this ignorance, we received our visitors courteously, a salesman going forward to meet all newcomers and conducting them to the row of reproduced Louis Seize cane-bottomed chairs placed for their convenience. Then it would be, "Bridget, bring that Khorassan—3246, you know, that fine specimen." And Bridget would know, and call the Finn to help him lay it out. Or it would be, "Brogan, can you find the Meshed that came in yesterday—2947? I think madam would like to see it." On this Denis and I would haul out the big carpet, stretch it at the lady's feet, listen to comments which, as Denis put it, had the value of a milliner's criticism of the make of a "floyin'-machine," and eventually carry it back to the pile whence we had taken it. I may say here that for customers we had little respect, except from the point of view of their purchasing power."Did ye ever see wan o' thim that could tell a Sehna knot from a Giordes?" Denis asked, scornfully. "Did ye ever see wan o' thim that knowed which rug had a woolen warp and which a cotton, or which rug 'd wear, or which 'd all go up in flock? If a woman was to boy a shimmy that 'll be in rags before it's been six toimes to the wash with as little sinse as she'll boy a rug that ought to last for a hunderd years her husband 'd be in jail for dit."But for me, customers had one predominant interest. Among them there might be some one I could recognize, or some one who would recognize me. As to the last, I had one fear and many hopes. My one fear was that Mildred Averill or Lulu Averill might one day wander in; but as time went on and they didn't, I ceased to dread the mischance. As it also proved in the end it was the same way with my hopes. No one turned up whom I could hail as an acquaintance; no one ever glanced at me with an old friend's curiosity.So I settled down to the routine which, though I didn't know it then, was the mental rest that, according to Doctor Scattlethwaite, I needed for my recovery. The days were so much alike that I could no more differentiate between them than can a man in prison. On eighteen dollars a week I contrived to live with that humble satisfaction of humble needs which I learned to be all that a man requires. Little by little I accommodated myself to the outlook of my surroundings, and if I never thought exactly like my companions I found myself able to listen to their views complacently. With all three of my more important co-workers—Denis, Bridget, and the Finn—my relations were cordial, a fact due largely to their courteous respect for my private history, into which none of them ever pried. Like Lydia, Drinkwater, and every one else, they took it for granted that there was something I wanted to hide, and allowed me to hide it.In this way I passed the end of the year 1916, the whole of 1917, and all of 1918 up to the beginning of December. Though the country had in the mean time gone to war it made little difference to us. Denis was too old to be drafted; Bridget and the Finn were exempted as fathers of large families; I was examined, and, for reasons I do not yet understand, rejected. I should have made a very good fighting man; but I think I was looked upon as of weak or uncertain mentality.During all those months I courted the obscurity so easy to find. Between Creed & Creed's and my squint-eyed room with the fungi on the mantelpiece I went by what you might call the back ways, in order to risk no meeting with Mildred Averill or her family. Since they frequented the neighboring book store, one of the best known in New York, they might at some time see me going in or out, and so I kept to the direction of Sixth Avenue. Though I often drifted out into the midday throng of which I have spoken already there was little danger in that, because I was swallowed in the crowd. In company for the most part with Sam Pelly, I took my meals in places so modest that Lydia Blair was unlikely to run across me; and I had no one else to be afraid of.Peace therefore stole into my racked soul, though it was the peace of death. While I had recurrences of the hope that my lost sense of identity would one day be restored to me, I dropped into the habit of not thinking much about it. I ate and drank; I had shelter and clothes. The narrow margin on which other working-people lived came to seem enough for me. Toward the great accidents of life, illness or incapacity, I learned to take the same philosophic attitude as they, trusting to luck, or to something too subtle and spiritual to put easily into words, to take care of me. If I developed any deep, strong principle of living it was along the lines of the wish that on a snowy December afternoon had led me to Meeting-House Green. I knew that the universe was filled with a great Will and tried to let myself glide along on it in simplicity, and harmony.CHAPTER VIOn the morning of the eleventh of December, 1918, I had been in the basement helping to unpack a consignment just come in from India, as I had first done two years before. I had, therefore, not known what passed on the floor above during the forenoon, and should have been little interested had I been there. What I needed to know the Floater told me when I appeared after lunch to take my shift on the main floor with Bridget and the Finn."You're to go with the two lads down-stairs"—the two of our six porters who were always transient—"to this number in East Seventy-sixth Street, and show the big Chinee antique, 4792, and the modern Chinee, 3628, to a lady that's stayin' there, and explain to her the difference between them. She'll take the new one if she thinks it's just as good, and you're to show her that it isn't. She's not the lady of the house. Her name is Mrs. Mountney, and she comes from Boston. She saw them both this morning, but said she couldn't judge till she'd viewed 'em private."It was not an unusual expedition, though it was new to me. For special customers, or in cases of big bits of business, we sent out rugs on approval or for private view, though I had never before been intrusted with the mission. I didn't wholly like the job; but we were accustomed to take both things we didn't like and things we did as all in the day's work.At the house in East Seventy-sixth Street we found ourselves expected, the footman explaining that we were to carry our wares to the music-room and lay them out. The ladies were resting after lunch, but Mrs. Mountney would come to us as soon as she left her room. With the pleasant free-masonry of caste he confided to me, as with our burdens we made our way into the hall, that Mrs. Mountney was a nice little bit of fluff, though not so tony as he had looked for in an old girl out of Boston. When it came to class, the lady of the house, whom I thought he spoke of as Luke, could hang it all over her.It was so long since I had been in a house of the kind that I took notes more acutely than was my habit, though my habit was always to be observant. What struck me chiefly was its resemblance on a larger scale to the last of its type I had visited. Perhaps the name Lulie had turned my thoughts backward; but there was certainly the same square hall, containing a few monumental bits of furniture because they were monumental, the same dining-room opening out of it, full of high-backed and Italian ... And then, across a corridor that ran to some region behind the dining-room, I thought I saw a stocky figure grope its way with the kind of movement I had not seen since the last time I had met Drinkwater. A door opened and closed somewhere, and before we reached the music-room I heard the distant click of a typewriter.That I was nervous goes without saying, but there were so many chances of my fear being groundless that I did my best to dismiss it. The music-room was simple, spacious, white-and-gold, admirably adapted not only to the purpose it served but to that which had brought us there. When our carpets were spread they made a magnificent gold spot in the center of a sumptuous emptiness.A few minutes later the nice little bit of fluff tripped in, justifying the description. She was one of those instances, of which we saw a good many among our customers, where a merciful providence had given a great deal of money to some one who would have been quite too insignificant without it. A worn fairness of complexion was supplemented by cosmetics, and an inadequate stock of very blond hair arranged in artistic disarray in order to make the most of it. To offset the laces and pearls of an elaborate negligée by a "democratic" manner, and so put poor working-men at their ease, she nodded to us in a friendly, offhand way, saying, briskly:"Now then! Let's see! Which is the modern one and which is the antique? I can't tell; can you?" Looking at me archly, she changed her tone to the chaffing one which the French describe asblagueur. "But of course you'll say you can, because that's your business. You've got them marked with some sort of secret sign, like a conjurer with coins, so as to tell one from the other, without my knowing it."Having said this, she began to march round the two great gold-covered oblongs with the movement of a prowling little animal. Keeping my eye on the main doorway, I pointed out that while the modern piece would please the ordinary eye only the antique would satisfy the elect. There was no question but that the Indian reproduction was good. Any one who took it would do more than get his money's worth, since it would tone down with the years, while the hard wool of which it was woven would make it stand comparatively rough usage. But—didn't madam see?—the antique, made on the old Chinese looms, was of the softer, richer sheen imparted by the softer, richer wool; and wasn't the heavenly turquoise-blue of the ornaments and border of a beauty which the modern dyes had not begun to reproduce?As I explained this and some other characteristics of rugs, I was more or less talking against time. The suspicion that had seized me on entering the house began to deepen, without my knowing why."Y-yes; y-yes," the little lady agreed; "itislovely, isn't it? And I suppose that if you're buying a good thing it's better to get the—"She paused, looking out through the great doorway into the hall. I, too, looked out, to see Mrs. Averill in a tea-gown, gazing in at us distraitly."Oh, Lulu, do come here. This man, this gentleman, has just been telling me the most interesting things—"She trailed into the music-room with the same graceful languor with which she had trailed into the drawing-room on the occasion when we had last met. The two other porters and myself being negligible figures in the room, her almond eyes rested listlessly on the rugs, which she studied without remark."Lulu," Mrs. Mountney began again, with animation, "did you know that in Persian rugs the designs are outlined in rows of knots, and in Chinese by clipping with the scissors?ciselé, this ma—this gentleman calls it, and you can feel a little line! Do put your hand down.""Oh, I'm too tired," Mrs. Averill protested, in her sweet drawling voice, "and this room's so stuffy. Mildred said she'd have it aired; but I don't know what she's mooning over half her time. She's so dreamy. I often think she ought to be in a convent, or something like that."The little bit of fluff was more interested in rugs than in Mildred."Do tell Mrs. Averill—I'm staying with her—what you've just been saying about the wool. Did you know, Lulu, that Indian wool is hard and Chinese soft?" She looked again toward the hallway, where a second figure had come into view. "Mildred, do come here. There's the most interesting things—I'm so glad I went to that place this morning—and they've sent me the most interesting man—Lulu's like ice, but you're artistic."Miss Averill, too, advanced into the room; but though I was in full view she paid me and my comrades no particular attention. It was the easier for me not to speak, or to draw any one's glance to myself, for the reason that Mrs. Mountney chattered on, repeating for Mildred's benefit the facts I had just been giving her."Just think of having the patience to clip with the scissors round all these designs, and it's the same in the modern rug as in the antique. Do stoop down, Mildred, and let your fingers run along the ciseling; that's what this—this gentleman calls it."As the girl stooped to satisfy Mrs. Mountney, I ventured to look at her more closely. She was perhaps not older than when I had last seen her two years before, but her face had undergone a change. It made you think of faces chastened, possibly purified, by suffering. Where there had been chiefly a sympathetic common sense there was now the beauty that comes of elevation.Luckily for me Mrs. Mountney ran on, while we three men, with the lack of individuality of employees before customers, remained indistinguishable objects in the background."That's the modern and that's the antique; and I'm sure no one but a rug-man could tell the difference between them. This man—this gentleman—says they can, but that's only business. Hundreds of dollars difference in the price, almost as much as between a pair of real pearl ear-rings and imitation ones. What do you say, Mildred? Would anybody ever notice—?""I suppose you'd be buying the best because it's the best, and not because any one would notice—""I should be buying it for what every one would see. What's the good of having a thing if it doesn't show what it is? I hate the way some people have of calling your attention to every fine thing they've got in the house, as if you weren't used to fine things of your own. If I've got to tell every one that that's a genuine old Chinese masterpiece before they notice it—well, it isn't worth it. But at the same time the effect is richer; and some people do know, and talk about it to other people who know—there's that to consider."By this time I was conscious of something else.Having got through so many minutes without recognition I was beginning to hope that, by blotting myself out, as it were, between my fellow-workmen I might finally escape detection. No one had as yet dissociated any of us from another, the very absence of personality on our part reducing us to the place of mere machines. As a mere machine Mrs. Averill and Mildred might continue to overlook me, passing out of the room as unobservant as they had come in.But Lulu had begun a curious movement round the square of the carpets. She seemed to be studying them; though with the long slits of her Mongolian eyes her glance might be traveling anywhere. Having had the opportunity to look me in the face, she moved to where she got me in profile, afterward passing behind me and returning to her original standpoint beside her sister and her friend. Without further reference to Mrs. Mountney, she slipped her arm through Mildred's, leading her toward the grand piano, against which they leaned.For me there was nothing to do but to stand still. A word, a sign, might easily betray me, if I had not been betrayed already. As the conversation went on, Mildred kept her back to me, but Mrs. Averill stood sidewise, so as to be able to throw me an occasional appraising glance. Apparently she was in some doubt, my position and my clothes rendering absolute certainty difficult.But Mildred turned away from the piano at last, and without examining me directly came slowly down the long room. Entirely mistress of herself she walked with sedateness and composure. The shyness and brusqueness which had given her a kind of aura in my thoughts during the past two years seemed to have been overcome by experience. In this self-command more than in any other detail I observed a change in her.Not till she reached the corner of the long carpet did she give me the first clear, straightforward look. That recognition did not come instantly told me that I, too, must have changed. Laborious work and a rough way of living had doubtless aged and probably hardened me. I was dressed, too, like any other working-man, though with the tidiness which our position on the selling floor exacted. A working-man in his Sunday clothes would perhaps have described me, while my features must have adapted themselves to altered inward conditions with the facility which features possess."Is it really you?"She was standing in front of me now, singling me out from the two boys who had fallen a little back. She didn't offer to shake hands; perhaps she wasn't sure enough of my identity; but that the circumstances in which she found me made no difference to her was the one fact apparent. Any emotion she may have felt was expressed in the quiver of a faint smile."I hoped you wouldn't recognize me," was all I found to say."Why?""Oh, for all the reasons that—that almost anybody would see at a glance.""Perhaps I'm not—not almost anybody.""No; you're not.""Have you been doing this ever since—?"I nodded. "It's the job I told you I might get. I did get it; and so—""Have you liked it?""Extremely.""Is that true, or is it just—?"No; it's true. I could have had better jobs. They offered two or three times to make me a salesman; you may remember that I knew a good deal about rugs already—; but I preferred to stay where I am.""For what reason?""I hardly know that I can tell you, unless it was to—to—""To find your soul?""Possibly.""And have you found it?""I've found—something. I'm not sure whether it's my soul or not."All this was said within the space of perhaps two minutes, during which I watched Mrs. Averill and Mrs. Mountney, toward whom Mildred turned her back, putting their head together on a whispered conversation. That it was about me I could have gathered from their glances; but a little crow on the part of Mrs. Mountney left me no doubt about it."Jasper Soames! Why, that's the name—"It was all I caught; but it was enough to put even Mildred Averill on a secondary plane."If you've found your soul—" she was saying."Oh, I'm not sure of that. I only feel that I've found—something. I mean that something has come, or gone, I'm not sure of which; only that—"Mrs. Mountney wheeled suddenly from the piano, trotting back to the edge of the carpet, across which she spoke to me."Did you ever hear of Copley's great portrait of Jasper Soames?"I nodded, speechlessly. I had heard of it. In my mind's eye I saw it, at the head of a great staircase, a full-length figure, wearing knee-breeches of bottle-green satin, a gold-embroidered waistcoat, and a long coat of ruby velvet with a Russian sable collar falling back almost to the shoulders. A plate let into the foot of the frame bore the nameJasper Soames, with the dates of a birth and a death. Somewhere in my life the picture had been a familiar object.I had no time to follow up this discovery before Mrs. Mountney began again:"Are you one of his descendants?""No; but my wife is."The reply came out before I realized its significance. I hardly knew what I had said till I heard Lulu Averill exclaim with as much indignation as her indolent tones could carry:"But you told my husband that you were not a married man! Didn't he, Mildred?"The situation was so unexpected that I felt myself like a bird swinging in a cage. Nothing was steady; everything around me seemed to whirl. Then I heard Mildred speaking as if her voice reached me through a poor connection on a telephone."Oh, that didn't matter. I knew he was married all along—at least I was pretty sure of it. What difference could it make to us?"It made the difference," Mrs. Averill drawled, peevishly, "that we believed him."But Mrs. Mountney intervened, waving the others aside with a motion of the arm."Wait!" She looked at me again across the carpet. "If you married a descendant of Jasper Soames then it was Violet Torrance."The mist that had hitherto enshrined two flaming eyes seemed to part as if torn by-lightning. The figure disclosed was not static like that of Jasper Soames, but alive as the sky is a ive in a storm. It was that of my wife as I had last seen her. My mind resumed its action at the point where its memory of Vio had been shut ott."And," Mrs. Mountney went on, pressing her facts, "you're Billy Harrowby."I could only bend my head in assent."That's my name.""Then why—why—?"She flung her hands apart, unable to continue. Lulu Averill, moving with the tread of a tigress stalking silently, stole down from the piano to the edge of the carpet. Mildred's eyes as she still faced me were all amber-colored fire. I was like a man waking in the morning from a night of troubled dreams.Little Mrs. Mountney dragged her laces across both the rugs to confront me face to face, standing beside Mildred."Do you know who I am?"I shook my head."I'm Alice Tarporley.""Oh yes! You were a friend of Vio's before we were married. I've heard her speak of you; but you lived in Denver.""I went back to Boston only two years ago, when poor Vio was in such trouble because you were—" She cried out, with another wide motion of the arms: "In the name of God, man, what does it all mean?"But I couldn't go into explanations. I didn't know where to begin."Tell me first how Vio is—where she is.""She was perfectly well the day before yesterday, and at your own house in Boston. But don't you know, don't you know—? Why, this is too awful! The more I think of it the more awful it becomes. Don't you know—?""I—I don't know anything."She got it out at last."Don't you know—Vio thinks you're—you'redead?"Iron clampings seemed to press me round the ribs."No; I didn't know that. What made her think so?""Who wouldn't think so? You were reported missing—and when weeks went by—and no news of you—and then, when your uniform was found on the bank of that river, near Tours, wasn't it? and your papers in the pockets—and your letter of credit, and everything— And here you are in New York, going under another name, working like a stevedore, and looking like a tramp! Why, it's enough to drive anybody crazy!"I could only stammer: "I shall explain everything, after I've seen Vio.""You can't explain in such a way that—" She swung toward her hostess. "Lulu, I must go straight back to Boston to-night. There's a train that gets you there in the morning, isn't there? I hate night traveling. I never sleep, and I have a headache all the next day—but what's that when—? If Vio hears this from any one but—" She turned to me again. "Then itwastrue that you'd been seen in New York hotels?""Possibly; I don't know what you're referring to.""Oh, every now and then some report went round in Boston that So-and-so had seen you in this hotel or that; but nothing of the sort has been said for a year or two, and we thought that it was just the kind of fake story that gets about. But now! Well, I must break the news to Vio—""Why shouldn't I break it myself? I could call her up by long distance.""Man, if she heard your voice like that it would kill her. You don'tknow. No, I must go; there's no help for it, headache or no headache. Mildred dear, won't you call Annette? I told her she could go to the theater to-night, but now she'll have to get our tickets, and pack!" She wrung her hands. "Oh, dear! When a man's dead, he'd better stay dead!"Mildred slipped from the room. A suspicion began to creep over me."Is there any special reason for my staying dead?""Howcanyou when you're alive? That's the important point. Vio will never forgive you for being alive—and not telling her.""She will when she's heard.""She's got to hear right away, and I'm going to take charge of it. You may say it's none of my business, but I'm making it mine. I've known Vio Torrance since we were tots together."I ventured to remind her that Vio might be her friend, but that she was my wife."Wife!" she crowed, scornfully. "Have you treated her like a wife—to be alive all this time and never let her know! When I tell you that she's been in mourning for you and out again—positively out again— Well, you can imagine!""I can imagine so many things—"But she jerked her little person away from me toward the two fellows who were trying dully to follow the scene they were witnessing without being able to seize its drift."Take all this stuff back again to where you brought it from. I'm not going to buy any of it. The idea of Billy Harrowby—" She repeated the name with a squeal, "BillyHarrowby!of all people in the world! Why, it's enough to drive me out of my senses. I suppose you don't know," she continued, switching back to me again, "that they've put a new man in your place at the Museum, over a year ago, a Frenchman; and that Vio has given them all your prints and etchings for a William Harrowby Memorial—that's what she called it—she had to do something of the sort after your tragic end, in common decency; and you considered a hero, something like Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger, and now what's it to be—and you alive?" A dramatic gesture seemed to claim this confusion as something for which Fate had made her specially responsible. "Lulu, take me away, for Heaven's sake! I shall never look at a Chinese rug again without thinking—"When the two ladies, with arms around each other's waist, had passed into the hallway, and out of sight, I turned to my colleagues, saying merely:"I think we'd better roll these up and beat it."Neither made any comment till we were in the lorry on our way back to Creed & Creed's, when one of them said in an awe-stricken tone:"For the love o' Mike, Brogan, ain't your name—Brogan?"
I said it was Jasper Soames.
"Sure that's a hell of a name," he commented, simply. "The byes 'd never get round the like o' that. Yer name 'll be Brogan. Brogan was what we called the guy that was here before Clancy, and it done very well. All right, then, Brogan. Ye'll have Clancy's locker; and moind ye don't punch the clock a minute later than siven in the mornin', or that little ould divil 'll be dancin' round to fire ye."
So Brogan I was at Messrs. Creed & Creed's all through the next two years.
CHAPTER V
No lighter-hearted man than I trod the streets of New York that evening. I had breakfasted in the morning; I had shared Bridget's cold meat and bread at midday; I could "blow myself in" to something to eat now, and then go happily to bed.
There was but one flaw in this bliss, and that was the thought of Mildred Averill. Whether she would be glad or sorry that for the minute I was landing on my feet, I could not forecast. And yet when I called her up she pretended to be glad. I say she pretended, only because in her first words there was a note of disappointment, perhaps of dismay, though she recovered herself quickly.
"But I can be easy in my mind about you?" she asked, after I had declined to tell her what my new occupation was.
"Quite easy; only I want you to know how grateful I am."
"Oh, please don't. If I could have done more!"
"Fortunately that wasn't needed."
"But if it should be needed in the future—"
"I hope it won't be."
"But if it should be?"
"Oh, then we'd—we'd see."
"So that for now it's—" that note stole into her voice again, and with a wistful question in the intonation—"for now it's—it's good-by?"
"Only for now."
She seemed to grasp at something. "What do you mean by that?"
"Oh, just that—that the future—"
"I hate the future."
It was one of her sudden outbursts, and the receiver was hung up.
After all, this abrupt termination to an unsatisfactory mode of speech was the wisest method for us both. We couldn't go on sparring and there was nothing to do but spar. Knowing that I couldn't speak plainly she had ceased to expect me to do so, and yet...
When I say that this was a relief to me, you must understand it only in the sense that my situation was too difficult to allow of my inviting further complications. Had I been free—but I wasn't free. The conviction that somewhere in the world I had permanent ties began to be as strong as the belief that at some time in my life love had been the dominating factor. There had been a woman. Lydia Blair had seen her. Her flaming eyes haunted me from a darkness in which they were the only thing living. The fact that I couldn't construct the rest of the portrait no more permitted me to doubt the original than you can doubt the existence of a plant after you have seen a leaf from it. The best I could hope for now was the privilege of living and working in some simple, elemental way that would give me the atmosphere in which to re-collect myself,recueillement, the French graphically name the process, and grow unconsciously back into the facts that effort would not restore to me.
For that simple, elemental work and life the opportunity came to me at last. I see now that it was opportunity, though I should not have said so at the time. At the time it was only hard necessity, though hard necessity with those products of shelter and food which in themselves meant peace. I had peace, therefore, of a kind, and to it I am able now to attribute that growth and progress backward, if I may so express myself, which led to the miracle.
My work next day lay in peeling off the burlap from the newly arrived consignment, stripping the rolls of the sheepskins in which they were wrapped inside, spreading the rugs flat, and sweeping them with a stiff, strong broom. After that we laid them in assorted piles, preparatory to carrying them up-stairs. They were Khorassans, Kirmanshahs, Bokharas, and Sarouks, with a superb lot of blue and gold Chinese reproduced on the company's looms in India.
The good-natured Peter Bridget taking his turn up-stairs, my colleague that day was an American of Finnish extraction, whose natural sunniness of disposition had been soured by the thwarting of a strong ambition to "get on." Combining the broad features of the Lapp with Scandinavian hair and complexion, his expression reminded you of a bright summer day over which a storm was beginning to lower. The son of one large family and the father of another, he was at war with the world in which his earning capacity had come to have its limitations fixed at eighteen dollars a week.
He was not conversational; he only grunted remarks out of a slow-moving bitterness of spirit.
"What's the good of always layin' the pipe and never gettin' no oil along it? That's what I want to know. Went to work when I was fourteen, and now I'm forty-two, and in exactly the same spot."
"You're not in exactly the same spot," I said, "because you've got your wife and children."
"And the money I've spent on that woman and them kids!"
"But you're fond of them, aren't you?"
"No better wife no guy never had, and no nicer little fam'ly."
"Well, then, that's so much to the good. Those are assets, aren't they? They'll mean more to you than if you had money in the savings bank and didn't havethem."
"I can't eddicate 'em proper, or send 'em to high-school, let alone college, or give 'em nothin' like what they ought to have. All I can leave 'em when I die is what my father left me, the right not to be able to get nowhere—and yet you'll hear a lot of gabbers jazzin' away about this bein' the best country for a working-man."
During the lunch-hour we drifted into Fifth Avenue, joining the throng of those who for sixty minutes were like souls enjoying a respite from limbo. Limbo, I ask you to notice, is not hell; but it is far from paradise. The dictionary defines the word as a borderland, a place of restraint, and it was in both those senses, I think, that the shop and the factory struck the imaginations of these churning minds. The shop and the factory formed a borderland, neither one thing nor another, a nowhere; but a place of restraint none the less. More than the physical restraint involved in the necessity for working was implied by this; it was restraint of the spirit, restraint of the part of a man that soars, restraint of the impulse to seize the good things of life in a world where they seemed to be free.
Though I could understand little of the conversation around me—Yiddish, Polish, Armenian, Czech—I knew they were talking of jobs and bosses in relation to politics and the big things of life.
"What's the matter with them guys at Albany and Washington that they don't come across with laws—?"
That was the question and that was the complaint. It was one of the two main blends in the current of dissatisfaction. The other blend was the conviction that if those who had the power didn't right self-evident wrongs, the wronged would somehow have to right themselves. There was no speechmaking, no stump oratory, after the manner of a Celtic or Anglo-Saxon crowd; all was smothered, sullen, burning, secretive, and intense.
On our way back to the cavern the Finn remarked:
"No man doesn't mind work. He'd rather work than loaf, even if he was paid for loafin'. What he can't stick is not havin' room to grow in, bein' squeezed into undersize, like a Chinese woman's foot."
After all, I reflected, this might be the real limbo, not only of the working-man, but of all the dissatisfied in all ranks throughout the world—the denials of the liberty to expand. Mildred Averill was rebelling against it in her way as much as the Finn in his, as much as any Jew or Pole or Italian in all the crowd surging back at that minute to the dens from which they had come out. Discontent was not confined to any one class or to any one set of needs. Custom, convention, and greed had clamped our energies round and round as with iron hoops, till all but the few among us had lost the right to grow. It wasn't a question of pay; it wasn't primarily a question of money at all, though the question of money was involved in it. More than anything else, it was one of a new orientation toward everything, with a shifting of basic principles. The first must become last and the last must become first—not in the detail of precedence but in that of the laws by which we live—before men, as men, could get out of the prison-houses, into which civilization had thrust them, to the broad, free air to which they were born. The struggle between labor and capital was a mere duel between blind men. It was bluff on the surface by those on both sides who were afraid to put the ax to the root of the tree. No symbol was so eloquent to me of the bondage into which the human elements in Church and State had chained the spirit of man as the Finn's comparison of the Chinese woman's foot.
When the Floater paid me another dollar and a half that night he told me that if I worked like a dog, was as meek as a mouse, and "didn't get no labor rot into my nut" I could have Clancy's job as a regular thing. But by this time I was beginning to understand him. I have already called him a terrier, and a terrier he was, with a terrier's bark, but with a terrier's fundamental friendliness. If you patted him, he wagged his tail. True, he wagged it unwillingly, ungraciously, and with a fond belief that you didn't know he was wagging it at all; but the fact that he did wag it was enough for me.
It was enough for us all. There was not a man among the "luggers" who didn't understand him, nor among the salesmen either, as I came to understand.
"Dee ye know how to take that little scalpeen? He's like wan of thim Graaks or Eytalians that's got a quare talk of their own, but you know you can put it into our talk and make it mane somethin'. Wance I was at a circus where a monkey what looked like a little ould man talked his kind o' talk, and it made sinse. Well, that's like the Floater. He's like the monkey what can't talk nothin' but monkey-talk; but glory be to God! he manes the same thing as a man. Don't ye moind him, Brogan. When he talks his talk, you talk it to yerself in yer own talk, and ye'll kape yer timper and get everything straight."
This kindly advice was given me by Denis Gallivan, the oldest of the porters, and a sort of dean of our corps. Small, wiry, as strong as a horse, with a wizened, leathery face that looked as if it had been dried and tanned in a hot sunshine, there was a yearning in his blue-black eyes like that which some of the old Italian masters put into the eyes of saints. Denis, Bridget, and the Finn composed what I may call the permanent staff, the two others, excluding myself, being invariably restless chaps who, like Clancy, came for a few weeks and went off again. With the three workers named I made a fourth, henceforth helping to carry the responsibility of the house on my shoulders.
It was a good place, with pleasant work. Two or three times I could have had promotion and a raise in pay, but I had reasons of my own for staying where I was.
My duties being simple, I enjoyed the sheer physical exertion I was obliged to make. Arriving about seven in the morning I helped to sweep the floors, with a special sweeping of the rugs, druggets, and mattings that had lain out overnight. If there was anything to be carried from the basement to the upper floor I helped in that. Then, having "cleaned" myself, as the phrase went, I took my place in the shop, ready to pull out the goods which the salesmen panted to display to customers, and to put them back again.
For this there were always four of us in the spacious, well-lighted shop, which must have been sixty feet long by thirty wide, and I liked the dignity and quiet of all the regulation tasks. As a rule, we were on the floor by nine, though it was generally after ten before we saw a customer. During that hour of spare time we porters hung together at the farther end, exchanging in low tones the gossip of the day, confiding personal experiences, or discussing the war and the reconstruction of society. Now and then one of the four or five salesmen would condescendingly join with us, but for the most part the salesmen kept to themselves, treating the same topics from a higher point of view. The gods of Olympus did little more than enter by the main door from Fifth Avenue, cross to their offices, after which we scarcely saw them. Only the Floater moved at will between us and them, with a little dog's freedom to be equally at home in the stable and the drawing-room.
A flicker of interest always woke with the arrival of customers. They entered with diffidence, confused by the subdued brilliance of the Persian and Chinese colors hanging on our walls, by the wide empty spaces, and their own ignorance of what they came in search of.
"There's not tin women in New York 'll know the difference betwane a Kirmanshah and an Anatolia," Denis said to me one day, "and it'd make ye sorry for thim when they comes to furnishin'. Glory be to God, they'll walk in here knowin' no more than that they want rugs, and it's all wan to thim what ye puts before thim so long as it's the color they like and it lays on the ground. If this wasn't the honestest house that the Lord ever made there'd be chatin' till we was all in danger o' hell fire."
But in spite of this ignorance, we received our visitors courteously, a salesman going forward to meet all newcomers and conducting them to the row of reproduced Louis Seize cane-bottomed chairs placed for their convenience. Then it would be, "Bridget, bring that Khorassan—3246, you know, that fine specimen." And Bridget would know, and call the Finn to help him lay it out. Or it would be, "Brogan, can you find the Meshed that came in yesterday—2947? I think madam would like to see it." On this Denis and I would haul out the big carpet, stretch it at the lady's feet, listen to comments which, as Denis put it, had the value of a milliner's criticism of the make of a "floyin'-machine," and eventually carry it back to the pile whence we had taken it. I may say here that for customers we had little respect, except from the point of view of their purchasing power.
"Did ye ever see wan o' thim that could tell a Sehna knot from a Giordes?" Denis asked, scornfully. "Did ye ever see wan o' thim that knowed which rug had a woolen warp and which a cotton, or which rug 'd wear, or which 'd all go up in flock? If a woman was to boy a shimmy that 'll be in rags before it's been six toimes to the wash with as little sinse as she'll boy a rug that ought to last for a hunderd years her husband 'd be in jail for dit."
But for me, customers had one predominant interest. Among them there might be some one I could recognize, or some one who would recognize me. As to the last, I had one fear and many hopes. My one fear was that Mildred Averill or Lulu Averill might one day wander in; but as time went on and they didn't, I ceased to dread the mischance. As it also proved in the end it was the same way with my hopes. No one turned up whom I could hail as an acquaintance; no one ever glanced at me with an old friend's curiosity.
So I settled down to the routine which, though I didn't know it then, was the mental rest that, according to Doctor Scattlethwaite, I needed for my recovery. The days were so much alike that I could no more differentiate between them than can a man in prison. On eighteen dollars a week I contrived to live with that humble satisfaction of humble needs which I learned to be all that a man requires. Little by little I accommodated myself to the outlook of my surroundings, and if I never thought exactly like my companions I found myself able to listen to their views complacently. With all three of my more important co-workers—Denis, Bridget, and the Finn—my relations were cordial, a fact due largely to their courteous respect for my private history, into which none of them ever pried. Like Lydia, Drinkwater, and every one else, they took it for granted that there was something I wanted to hide, and allowed me to hide it.
In this way I passed the end of the year 1916, the whole of 1917, and all of 1918 up to the beginning of December. Though the country had in the mean time gone to war it made little difference to us. Denis was too old to be drafted; Bridget and the Finn were exempted as fathers of large families; I was examined, and, for reasons I do not yet understand, rejected. I should have made a very good fighting man; but I think I was looked upon as of weak or uncertain mentality.
During all those months I courted the obscurity so easy to find. Between Creed & Creed's and my squint-eyed room with the fungi on the mantelpiece I went by what you might call the back ways, in order to risk no meeting with Mildred Averill or her family. Since they frequented the neighboring book store, one of the best known in New York, they might at some time see me going in or out, and so I kept to the direction of Sixth Avenue. Though I often drifted out into the midday throng of which I have spoken already there was little danger in that, because I was swallowed in the crowd. In company for the most part with Sam Pelly, I took my meals in places so modest that Lydia Blair was unlikely to run across me; and I had no one else to be afraid of.
Peace therefore stole into my racked soul, though it was the peace of death. While I had recurrences of the hope that my lost sense of identity would one day be restored to me, I dropped into the habit of not thinking much about it. I ate and drank; I had shelter and clothes. The narrow margin on which other working-people lived came to seem enough for me. Toward the great accidents of life, illness or incapacity, I learned to take the same philosophic attitude as they, trusting to luck, or to something too subtle and spiritual to put easily into words, to take care of me. If I developed any deep, strong principle of living it was along the lines of the wish that on a snowy December afternoon had led me to Meeting-House Green. I knew that the universe was filled with a great Will and tried to let myself glide along on it in simplicity, and harmony.
CHAPTER VI
On the morning of the eleventh of December, 1918, I had been in the basement helping to unpack a consignment just come in from India, as I had first done two years before. I had, therefore, not known what passed on the floor above during the forenoon, and should have been little interested had I been there. What I needed to know the Floater told me when I appeared after lunch to take my shift on the main floor with Bridget and the Finn.
"You're to go with the two lads down-stairs"—the two of our six porters who were always transient—"to this number in East Seventy-sixth Street, and show the big Chinee antique, 4792, and the modern Chinee, 3628, to a lady that's stayin' there, and explain to her the difference between them. She'll take the new one if she thinks it's just as good, and you're to show her that it isn't. She's not the lady of the house. Her name is Mrs. Mountney, and she comes from Boston. She saw them both this morning, but said she couldn't judge till she'd viewed 'em private."
It was not an unusual expedition, though it was new to me. For special customers, or in cases of big bits of business, we sent out rugs on approval or for private view, though I had never before been intrusted with the mission. I didn't wholly like the job; but we were accustomed to take both things we didn't like and things we did as all in the day's work.
At the house in East Seventy-sixth Street we found ourselves expected, the footman explaining that we were to carry our wares to the music-room and lay them out. The ladies were resting after lunch, but Mrs. Mountney would come to us as soon as she left her room. With the pleasant free-masonry of caste he confided to me, as with our burdens we made our way into the hall, that Mrs. Mountney was a nice little bit of fluff, though not so tony as he had looked for in an old girl out of Boston. When it came to class, the lady of the house, whom I thought he spoke of as Luke, could hang it all over her.
It was so long since I had been in a house of the kind that I took notes more acutely than was my habit, though my habit was always to be observant. What struck me chiefly was its resemblance on a larger scale to the last of its type I had visited. Perhaps the name Lulie had turned my thoughts backward; but there was certainly the same square hall, containing a few monumental bits of furniture because they were monumental, the same dining-room opening out of it, full of high-backed and Italian ... And then, across a corridor that ran to some region behind the dining-room, I thought I saw a stocky figure grope its way with the kind of movement I had not seen since the last time I had met Drinkwater. A door opened and closed somewhere, and before we reached the music-room I heard the distant click of a typewriter.
That I was nervous goes without saying, but there were so many chances of my fear being groundless that I did my best to dismiss it. The music-room was simple, spacious, white-and-gold, admirably adapted not only to the purpose it served but to that which had brought us there. When our carpets were spread they made a magnificent gold spot in the center of a sumptuous emptiness.
A few minutes later the nice little bit of fluff tripped in, justifying the description. She was one of those instances, of which we saw a good many among our customers, where a merciful providence had given a great deal of money to some one who would have been quite too insignificant without it. A worn fairness of complexion was supplemented by cosmetics, and an inadequate stock of very blond hair arranged in artistic disarray in order to make the most of it. To offset the laces and pearls of an elaborate negligée by a "democratic" manner, and so put poor working-men at their ease, she nodded to us in a friendly, offhand way, saying, briskly:
"Now then! Let's see! Which is the modern one and which is the antique? I can't tell; can you?" Looking at me archly, she changed her tone to the chaffing one which the French describe asblagueur. "But of course you'll say you can, because that's your business. You've got them marked with some sort of secret sign, like a conjurer with coins, so as to tell one from the other, without my knowing it."
Having said this, she began to march round the two great gold-covered oblongs with the movement of a prowling little animal. Keeping my eye on the main doorway, I pointed out that while the modern piece would please the ordinary eye only the antique would satisfy the elect. There was no question but that the Indian reproduction was good. Any one who took it would do more than get his money's worth, since it would tone down with the years, while the hard wool of which it was woven would make it stand comparatively rough usage. But—didn't madam see?—the antique, made on the old Chinese looms, was of the softer, richer sheen imparted by the softer, richer wool; and wasn't the heavenly turquoise-blue of the ornaments and border of a beauty which the modern dyes had not begun to reproduce?
As I explained this and some other characteristics of rugs, I was more or less talking against time. The suspicion that had seized me on entering the house began to deepen, without my knowing why.
"Y-yes; y-yes," the little lady agreed; "itislovely, isn't it? And I suppose that if you're buying a good thing it's better to get the—"
She paused, looking out through the great doorway into the hall. I, too, looked out, to see Mrs. Averill in a tea-gown, gazing in at us distraitly.
"Oh, Lulu, do come here. This man, this gentleman, has just been telling me the most interesting things—"
She trailed into the music-room with the same graceful languor with which she had trailed into the drawing-room on the occasion when we had last met. The two other porters and myself being negligible figures in the room, her almond eyes rested listlessly on the rugs, which she studied without remark.
"Lulu," Mrs. Mountney began again, with animation, "did you know that in Persian rugs the designs are outlined in rows of knots, and in Chinese by clipping with the scissors?ciselé, this ma—this gentleman calls it, and you can feel a little line! Do put your hand down."
"Oh, I'm too tired," Mrs. Averill protested, in her sweet drawling voice, "and this room's so stuffy. Mildred said she'd have it aired; but I don't know what she's mooning over half her time. She's so dreamy. I often think she ought to be in a convent, or something like that."
The little bit of fluff was more interested in rugs than in Mildred.
"Do tell Mrs. Averill—I'm staying with her—what you've just been saying about the wool. Did you know, Lulu, that Indian wool is hard and Chinese soft?" She looked again toward the hallway, where a second figure had come into view. "Mildred, do come here. There's the most interesting things—I'm so glad I went to that place this morning—and they've sent me the most interesting man—Lulu's like ice, but you're artistic."
Miss Averill, too, advanced into the room; but though I was in full view she paid me and my comrades no particular attention. It was the easier for me not to speak, or to draw any one's glance to myself, for the reason that Mrs. Mountney chattered on, repeating for Mildred's benefit the facts I had just been giving her.
"Just think of having the patience to clip with the scissors round all these designs, and it's the same in the modern rug as in the antique. Do stoop down, Mildred, and let your fingers run along the ciseling; that's what this—this gentleman calls it."
As the girl stooped to satisfy Mrs. Mountney, I ventured to look at her more closely. She was perhaps not older than when I had last seen her two years before, but her face had undergone a change. It made you think of faces chastened, possibly purified, by suffering. Where there had been chiefly a sympathetic common sense there was now the beauty that comes of elevation.
Luckily for me Mrs. Mountney ran on, while we three men, with the lack of individuality of employees before customers, remained indistinguishable objects in the background.
"That's the modern and that's the antique; and I'm sure no one but a rug-man could tell the difference between them. This man—this gentleman—says they can, but that's only business. Hundreds of dollars difference in the price, almost as much as between a pair of real pearl ear-rings and imitation ones. What do you say, Mildred? Would anybody ever notice—?"
"I suppose you'd be buying the best because it's the best, and not because any one would notice—"
"I should be buying it for what every one would see. What's the good of having a thing if it doesn't show what it is? I hate the way some people have of calling your attention to every fine thing they've got in the house, as if you weren't used to fine things of your own. If I've got to tell every one that that's a genuine old Chinese masterpiece before they notice it—well, it isn't worth it. But at the same time the effect is richer; and some people do know, and talk about it to other people who know—there's that to consider."
By this time I was conscious of something else.
Having got through so many minutes without recognition I was beginning to hope that, by blotting myself out, as it were, between my fellow-workmen I might finally escape detection. No one had as yet dissociated any of us from another, the very absence of personality on our part reducing us to the place of mere machines. As a mere machine Mrs. Averill and Mildred might continue to overlook me, passing out of the room as unobservant as they had come in.
But Lulu had begun a curious movement round the square of the carpets. She seemed to be studying them; though with the long slits of her Mongolian eyes her glance might be traveling anywhere. Having had the opportunity to look me in the face, she moved to where she got me in profile, afterward passing behind me and returning to her original standpoint beside her sister and her friend. Without further reference to Mrs. Mountney, she slipped her arm through Mildred's, leading her toward the grand piano, against which they leaned.
For me there was nothing to do but to stand still. A word, a sign, might easily betray me, if I had not been betrayed already. As the conversation went on, Mildred kept her back to me, but Mrs. Averill stood sidewise, so as to be able to throw me an occasional appraising glance. Apparently she was in some doubt, my position and my clothes rendering absolute certainty difficult.
But Mildred turned away from the piano at last, and without examining me directly came slowly down the long room. Entirely mistress of herself she walked with sedateness and composure. The shyness and brusqueness which had given her a kind of aura in my thoughts during the past two years seemed to have been overcome by experience. In this self-command more than in any other detail I observed a change in her.
Not till she reached the corner of the long carpet did she give me the first clear, straightforward look. That recognition did not come instantly told me that I, too, must have changed. Laborious work and a rough way of living had doubtless aged and probably hardened me. I was dressed, too, like any other working-man, though with the tidiness which our position on the selling floor exacted. A working-man in his Sunday clothes would perhaps have described me, while my features must have adapted themselves to altered inward conditions with the facility which features possess.
"Is it really you?"
She was standing in front of me now, singling me out from the two boys who had fallen a little back. She didn't offer to shake hands; perhaps she wasn't sure enough of my identity; but that the circumstances in which she found me made no difference to her was the one fact apparent. Any emotion she may have felt was expressed in the quiver of a faint smile.
"I hoped you wouldn't recognize me," was all I found to say.
"Why?"
"Oh, for all the reasons that—that almost anybody would see at a glance."
"Perhaps I'm not—not almost anybody."
"No; you're not."
"Have you been doing this ever since—?"
I nodded. "It's the job I told you I might get. I did get it; and so—"
"Have you liked it?"
"Extremely."
"Is that true, or is it just—?
"No; it's true. I could have had better jobs. They offered two or three times to make me a salesman; you may remember that I knew a good deal about rugs already—; but I preferred to stay where I am."
"For what reason?"
"I hardly know that I can tell you, unless it was to—to—"
"To find your soul?"
"Possibly."
"And have you found it?"
"I've found—something. I'm not sure whether it's my soul or not."
All this was said within the space of perhaps two minutes, during which I watched Mrs. Averill and Mrs. Mountney, toward whom Mildred turned her back, putting their head together on a whispered conversation. That it was about me I could have gathered from their glances; but a little crow on the part of Mrs. Mountney left me no doubt about it.
"Jasper Soames! Why, that's the name—"
It was all I caught; but it was enough to put even Mildred Averill on a secondary plane.
"If you've found your soul—" she was saying.
"Oh, I'm not sure of that. I only feel that I've found—something. I mean that something has come, or gone, I'm not sure of which; only that—"
Mrs. Mountney wheeled suddenly from the piano, trotting back to the edge of the carpet, across which she spoke to me.
"Did you ever hear of Copley's great portrait of Jasper Soames?"
I nodded, speechlessly. I had heard of it. In my mind's eye I saw it, at the head of a great staircase, a full-length figure, wearing knee-breeches of bottle-green satin, a gold-embroidered waistcoat, and a long coat of ruby velvet with a Russian sable collar falling back almost to the shoulders. A plate let into the foot of the frame bore the nameJasper Soames, with the dates of a birth and a death. Somewhere in my life the picture had been a familiar object.
I had no time to follow up this discovery before Mrs. Mountney began again:
"Are you one of his descendants?"
"No; but my wife is."
The reply came out before I realized its significance. I hardly knew what I had said till I heard Lulu Averill exclaim with as much indignation as her indolent tones could carry:
"But you told my husband that you were not a married man! Didn't he, Mildred?"
The situation was so unexpected that I felt myself like a bird swinging in a cage. Nothing was steady; everything around me seemed to whirl. Then I heard Mildred speaking as if her voice reached me through a poor connection on a telephone.
"Oh, that didn't matter. I knew he was married all along—at least I was pretty sure of it. What difference could it make to us?
"It made the difference," Mrs. Averill drawled, peevishly, "that we believed him."
But Mrs. Mountney intervened, waving the others aside with a motion of the arm.
"Wait!" She looked at me again across the carpet. "If you married a descendant of Jasper Soames then it was Violet Torrance."
The mist that had hitherto enshrined two flaming eyes seemed to part as if torn by-lightning. The figure disclosed was not static like that of Jasper Soames, but alive as the sky is a ive in a storm. It was that of my wife as I had last seen her. My mind resumed its action at the point where its memory of Vio had been shut ott.
"And," Mrs. Mountney went on, pressing her facts, "you're Billy Harrowby."
I could only bend my head in assent.
"That's my name."
"Then why—why—?"
She flung her hands apart, unable to continue. Lulu Averill, moving with the tread of a tigress stalking silently, stole down from the piano to the edge of the carpet. Mildred's eyes as she still faced me were all amber-colored fire. I was like a man waking in the morning from a night of troubled dreams.
Little Mrs. Mountney dragged her laces across both the rugs to confront me face to face, standing beside Mildred.
"Do you know who I am?"
I shook my head.
"I'm Alice Tarporley."
"Oh yes! You were a friend of Vio's before we were married. I've heard her speak of you; but you lived in Denver."
"I went back to Boston only two years ago, when poor Vio was in such trouble because you were—" She cried out, with another wide motion of the arms: "In the name of God, man, what does it all mean?"
But I couldn't go into explanations. I didn't know where to begin.
"Tell me first how Vio is—where she is."
"She was perfectly well the day before yesterday, and at your own house in Boston. But don't you know, don't you know—? Why, this is too awful! The more I think of it the more awful it becomes. Don't you know—?"
"I—I don't know anything."
She got it out at last.
"Don't you know—Vio thinks you're—you'redead?"
Iron clampings seemed to press me round the ribs.
"No; I didn't know that. What made her think so?"
"Who wouldn't think so? You were reported missing—and when weeks went by—and no news of you—and then, when your uniform was found on the bank of that river, near Tours, wasn't it? and your papers in the pockets—and your letter of credit, and everything— And here you are in New York, going under another name, working like a stevedore, and looking like a tramp! Why, it's enough to drive anybody crazy!"
I could only stammer: "I shall explain everything, after I've seen Vio."
"You can't explain in such a way that—" She swung toward her hostess. "Lulu, I must go straight back to Boston to-night. There's a train that gets you there in the morning, isn't there? I hate night traveling. I never sleep, and I have a headache all the next day—but what's that when—? If Vio hears this from any one but—" She turned to me again. "Then itwastrue that you'd been seen in New York hotels?"
"Possibly; I don't know what you're referring to."
"Oh, every now and then some report went round in Boston that So-and-so had seen you in this hotel or that; but nothing of the sort has been said for a year or two, and we thought that it was just the kind of fake story that gets about. But now! Well, I must break the news to Vio—"
"Why shouldn't I break it myself? I could call her up by long distance."
"Man, if she heard your voice like that it would kill her. You don'tknow. No, I must go; there's no help for it, headache or no headache. Mildred dear, won't you call Annette? I told her she could go to the theater to-night, but now she'll have to get our tickets, and pack!" She wrung her hands. "Oh, dear! When a man's dead, he'd better stay dead!"
Mildred slipped from the room. A suspicion began to creep over me.
"Is there any special reason for my staying dead?"
"Howcanyou when you're alive? That's the important point. Vio will never forgive you for being alive—and not telling her."
"She will when she's heard."
"She's got to hear right away, and I'm going to take charge of it. You may say it's none of my business, but I'm making it mine. I've known Vio Torrance since we were tots together."
I ventured to remind her that Vio might be her friend, but that she was my wife.
"Wife!" she crowed, scornfully. "Have you treated her like a wife—to be alive all this time and never let her know! When I tell you that she's been in mourning for you and out again—positively out again— Well, you can imagine!"
"I can imagine so many things—"
But she jerked her little person away from me toward the two fellows who were trying dully to follow the scene they were witnessing without being able to seize its drift.
"Take all this stuff back again to where you brought it from. I'm not going to buy any of it. The idea of Billy Harrowby—" She repeated the name with a squeal, "BillyHarrowby!of all people in the world! Why, it's enough to drive me out of my senses. I suppose you don't know," she continued, switching back to me again, "that they've put a new man in your place at the Museum, over a year ago, a Frenchman; and that Vio has given them all your prints and etchings for a William Harrowby Memorial—that's what she called it—she had to do something of the sort after your tragic end, in common decency; and you considered a hero, something like Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger, and now what's it to be—and you alive?" A dramatic gesture seemed to claim this confusion as something for which Fate had made her specially responsible. "Lulu, take me away, for Heaven's sake! I shall never look at a Chinese rug again without thinking—"
When the two ladies, with arms around each other's waist, had passed into the hallway, and out of sight, I turned to my colleagues, saying merely:
"I think we'd better roll these up and beat it."
Neither made any comment till we were in the lorry on our way back to Creed & Creed's, when one of them said in an awe-stricken tone:
"For the love o' Mike, Brogan, ain't your name—Brogan?"