[ PART II ]
III
IT WAS late in the afternoon of the next day before Widder got back to his room. For an hour and a half he had impatiently waited in a Twenty-third Street cobbler's den while his leaky shoes were being repaired, and all the clocks of the world, during that time, seemed to be thrown into their lowest gear. For once in his life he was not turning home like a tired horse to its manger. He was anxious to hear the news of the girl in the back room.
He found her standing in her open doorway as he climbed the last flight of stairs, and he felt, as he looked into her troubled face, that the day had been one of disaster for her.
"How did it turn out?" he asked a little breathlessly, for he had not tarried in his ascent.
"Doctor Funkhouser said I'd done very well. He still thinks I'm too young, but he's given me the position."
"That's fine!"declared Widder.
"But it's not to begin until a week from to-morrow," explained the girl.
"But you won!" announced the triumphant Widder.
"We won!" she amended. "He even told me he'd made that dictation especially hard, as a sort of test."
"Then the rest will be easier!" Widder assured her.
She was silent a moment. Then she looked him honestly in the eyes.
"I don't even know what your name is," she told him without a trace of the embarrassment which that statement suddenly brought to him.
"My name is Widder," he said.
"And mine is Alice Tredwell."
The man at the stair head felt that this seemingly casual interchange of information as to patronymics took unto itself the nature of a function calling for some further word or promise of friendlier relationship. But he found himself unable to think of anything appropriate or to utter anything definite. Flushing a little, he turned irresolutely about and started for his door. He knew that she was still watching him as he took out his keys and unlocked that door. She was still standing there, staring silently after him, as he stepped into his room.
He wanted to say something to her, but he could not quite make out what that something was. He had been awkward enough, he felt, without making a further fool of himself. So his only safety seemed to lie in flight.
But to swing shut his door while she still stood there would clearly be betraying him as lacking in delicacy. It would be almost as bad as slamming it in her face. So instead of shutting that protective portal, he left it meticulously, yet unmistakably, ajar. He hung up his hat and coat and stood there, before lighting his gas, wondering if Alice Tredwell was still in her own doorway. He even wondered if a word or two more would not redeem his exit from awkwardness. He was, in fact, debating what form these words should take when there came to his ear the sound of footsteps on the fourth-floor stairway.
About these footsteps was something slow and fateful. They mounted laboriously yet resolutely, causing a vague sinking feeling in Widder's visceral region. For even before he heard the confirmatory asthmatic wheeze, so oddly like the intermittent hiss of a leisurely serpent, Widder knew it was Mrs. Feeney.
He stood there for one irresolute second, rooted to the spot. Then, remembering the force of the ancient maxim that a man's house is his castle, he started stealthily for the door, determined to have the advantage of at least that fragile barrier. For Widder's conscience was not so clear as it might have been.
Before reaching that door, however, Widder heard the voice of Mrs. Feeney, arresting and authoritative.
"Well, miss?"
"What Would You Say if I Told You That I'd Stolen That Money?"
In those two mournfully enunciated monosyllables, Widder realized, lay something vaguely accusatory, something portentously interrogative, something that was more an ultimatum than a salutation. It was no wonder Alice Tredwell did not answer. Widder could picture the girl staring in silence at that dolorous apparition which had emerged without warning from the well of the stairway.
"I have come, miss, for my room rent!"
Widder, listening, was struck by the fact that the seemingly innocent word "miss" could be made opprobrious, could be snapped like a whiplash in the face of the guilty.
"But I haven't got it for you," answered the girl.
The asthmatic Mrs. Feeney groaned audibly:
"Yuh was two weeks behind last Saturday!"
"But you distinctly said you would give me another week. And next week I'll have my position. I'll be making almost three dollars a day."
"And I guess I wouldn't be makin' three dollars a year if I tried to run this house on hot air. I want my money or I want my room!"
The girl apparently was studying that inexorable figure confronting her.
"But why should you so suddenly change your mind?"
Again Mrs. Feeney emitted her sepulchral groan:
"Things has happened in this house to make me change my mind!"
"What do you mean by that?" promptly challenged the younger voice.
Widder was a little astonished at her spirit. It was unexpected in one so young. But mingled with his surprise was a trace of envy. Thus openly to defy Mr Feeney was a luxury denied him. Fate had left him with too much at stake. His roots had struck too deep to be lightly transplanted. This carefree girl, on the other hand, was without encumbrances. She was free to move from one hall room to another, to toss a few things together and flit from street to street, and from ward to ward, as free us the birds of the air.
"I keep a respectable house," averred Mrs. Feeney.
"Then be so kind as to keep your speech respectable."
"And my house will be kept respectable," continued Mrs. Feeney, pursuing the straight line of her purpose.
"Otherwise I would not be here," retorted the girl.
"And yuh will not be here unless them debts is paid, and paid to-night!"
Again unbroken silence reigned in the hallway.
"That means you'd turn me out of my room here on an hour's notice?"
"It means I pay my debts! And I expect others to pay theirs!"
The girl laughed a little bitterly.
"Then I suppose you can take the room. I'll have my trunk away inside of an hour!"
Mrs. Feeney's pause was an oratorical one.
"That trunk, young lady, stays right where it sets."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that I know the law. And that trunk ain't moved until I get my money."
"But you insist I move out! I must go, you say, and leave my trunk in your hands?"
"That's the law."
Again a moment's silence reigned.
When the girl spoke she did so with sudden decisiveness:
"Will you wait a moment, please?"
Widder, suddenly conscious that her swift steps were approaching his door, dropped tinglingly back to the canary cage, where he made a pretense of thrusting a bit of cuttle bone through the narrow bars.
Then, in response to her repeated knock, he crossed the room and swung open the door. The girl's face was much whiter than he had expected, but her manner was without precipitancy:
"Mr. Widder, I am in a dilemma. New York rooming houses are something rather new to me. This woman is threatening to turn me out in the street and keep my trunk. Can she do that?"
Widder, staring past the straight-lined figure of the girl, beheld the heavier and gloomier figure of the sibyl-like Mrs. Feeney.
"But on—on what grounds would she do that?" temporized the embarrassed umpire.
"Because I haven't paid my rent for two weeks."
The position was a delicate one, one calling for diplomacy with which Widder knew himself to be unblessed.
"But Mrs. Feeney is really one of the kindest of women, Miss Tredwell—at heart really one of the kindest of women," he repeated over the girl's disdainful shoulder. "And I'm sure there must be"
"There is!" gloomily interpolated Mrs. Feeney.
"I'm sure there must be reasons," stumbled on Widder. "reasons"
"Reasons there is, Mr. Widder, as yuh well know!" avowed the sibyl-like figure.
"As I well know?" inquired Widder with rising spirit.
Mrs. Feeney held up one apostrophic arm. The gesture made her startlingly like Sargent's Isaiah.
"No, Mister Widder, I ain't holdin' yuh up to blame. It ain't yuh. Yuh was imposed on and made use of. Yuh was tempted, and bein' only flesh, yuh fell!"
Widder's denial of this was unexpectedly prompt:
"But believe me, Mrs. Feeney, I have not fallen. I have no intention of falling, whatever you may mean by that absurd word."
The vigor of this disclaimer seemed to pain Mrs. Feeney. But Widder was decidedly averse to appearing ridiculous in the eyes of the girl with the smile of judicial scorn about the lips.
"No, Mister Widder, yuh will be watched over as though yuh was my own. I'll see to that. Yuh're a man as ain't given to shenanigan, when you're let alone. Yuh're as steady and easy-goin' a roomer as ever lived on this top floor. And I ain't holdin' this against yuh. Yuh was loored into it. Yuh was as putty in the hands o' the temptress!"
But Mrs. Feeney's quite unwelcomed vindication of his character was interrupted by the voice of the girl herself, a little tremulous with anger:
"Mr. Widder, this coarse and evil-minded woman seems to think that some great crime has taken place in this house of hers. This seems to have happened, apparently, because you and I have spoken to each other a couple of times. So"
"Spoken? "groaned (he funereal Mrs. Feeney. "Spoken? Young woman, it ain't the kind o' speakin' I favor, goin' and comin' and whisperin' together in the dark, a full half hour after midnight! There's plenty o' houses for the likes o' that and for the likes o' yuh. Rut this ain't goin' to be one o' them!"
The girl gave a gasp of helpless indignation. She stood there apparently racked by some inward struggle to which she could give no outward expression. Then she deliberately turned her back on the accusatory figure of Mrs. Feeney and addressed Widder. She did so with an oddly coerced composure:
"Mr. Widder, can you lend me twelve dollars for two or three weeks if I leave my typewriter with you as security?
"It ain't her typewriter!" promptly and gloomily interpolated Mrs. Feeney.
But Widder paid no attention to that interruption. His mind was preoccupied with the dilemma confronting him. For he painfully remembered that he did not possess twelve dollars. His cash on hand, after paying for his shoe repairs, he remembered, was exactly two dollars and eighteen cents. But to admit this would be to eat the dust of utter humiliation. It suddenly came home to him that his whole method of life had been a too inconsequential one. He had been satisfied to drift along without thinking of the future. He had muddled along in a hand-to-mouth manner, and here was the one person in the world he wanted to do a good turn for, the one person in the world he ought to help, quietly requesting the loan of twelve dollars, while he was compelled to face the ignominy of acknowledging that he did not possess that meager amount of ready capital.
Then Widder remembered his nest egg. He suddenly remembered the suitcase in the bottom of the carpenter's chest. He recalled the neat packets of yellowbacks and knew that they were now wholly and undisputedly his property. If he hesitated it was only for the fraction of a second.
"Of course I can lend you twelve dollars," he said, and his voice was as composed as the girl's when he spoke. "I haven't that amount on me, but I can have it here in five minutes."
"I'm sorry to cause you that trouble," he heard her saying; "but you can see how absurd the situation is!"
"Of course it's absurd," agreed Widder. "And the sooner it's ended the better. So if you'll wait a minute I'll get my hat and coat on!"
He backed meekly in through his open door, closing it quietly after him. He was tempted to lock it, but he thought better of this. As he pulled out the heavy carpenter's chest, however, and struggled with its double locks, he did so without lighting the gas jet in his little dark room. Then he lifted out the suitcase and put it flat on his worktable. To open its lock with his filed-down buttonhook took him longer than he expected.
By the time he was able to swing back the lid he was bathed in a fine perspiration of excitement. But it took him only a moment to unearth one of the yellowbacks, thrust it into his pocket, and relock the suitcase. Then he restored it to its hiding place, wriggling into his overcoat and catching up his hat as he started off.
He saw no sign of Alice Tredwell as he passed her door. But on the second landing down he found himself suddenly accosted by the apparitional Mrs. Feeney.
"Mister Widder, I want to warn yuh," began the lugubrious figure blocking his way.
"And I want to warn you, Mrs. Feeney," retorted Widder with quite unlooked-for heat. "I want to warn you that if you treat that girl up there unfairly you not only lose her but you lose me! You lose me," repeated Widder with a qualifying afterthought, "as soon as my next month is up!"
Mrs. Feeney regarded him with much pity.
"The wool has been pulled over your eyes, Mister Widder, as yuh suttinly will see when yuh know wimmen as I know 'em! Yuh ain't yuhself, or words like them'd never pass between yuh and me!"
"Fiddlesticks!" said Widder as he swept past her; for whatever turn the tide might take, she was now a trivial figure in his scheme of things.
In the street he took out his twenty-dollar yellowback, stealthily crumpled it up in his hand, straightened it out, and still again crumpled it into a compact little ball. This, repeated a few times, gave the note every appearance of age. As he hurried eastward and then northward along Third Avenue, he remembered with sudden regret the Twenty-third Street bartender whom he hated, and on whom, in his dreams, he was so continuously wreaking prodigious revenges. It would serve the bartender right, Widder knew, to take the bill to that simian-faced Hibernian who had openly insulted him for partaking a little too freely of a free lunch which had obviously been set out to be partaken of. But this was no time, Widder remembered as he swung into the street-corner meat market that he had occasionally visited in his days of affluence, for the wreaking of personal vengeance.
He was still quite calm, for he had taken no time for thought. He merely remembered that a young woman with brown hair and honest hazel eyes was in a serious predicament, that he stood, in a way, the basic cause of that predicament, and that on his shoulders rested the task of ending it. So his tone was matter of fact enough as he faced one of the white-aproned butchers and asked for a pound of veal cutlet, sliced thin.
It was not until he watched the slicing and weighing of this veal cutlet that he realized how he stood in the midst of adventure, face to face with danger. He was quietly taking the plunge from which he had shuddered back for many a long day. He was breaking a counterfeit bank note. He was committing a crime against the laws of his country.
Widder had already tossed the bill down on the counter. As it lay there it seemed to be advertising its spuriousness to all the world. It seemed fairly to shout aloud the message that it was bad, bad, bad!
He watched the white-cuffed hand of the big blond butcher as he picked up the yellowback, straightened it out and turned toward his cash register.
But he still stood staring at the bill.
That stare, Widder saw, was one of doubt, of hesitation. Then Widder's heart suddenly came up into his mouth, for the butcher had turned back to him.
"Is this the smallest you've got?" demanded the heavy-bodied man in the white apron.
"Yep!" chirruped Widder with tragically forced facetiousness. " And I wish it was bigger!"
"Is This the Smallest You've Got?"
The butcher turned back to his cash register. Widder breathed more easily as he heard the grind and clutter of the mysterious nickeled mechanism. He took up the nineteen dollars and seventy-two cents in lawful currency of the commonwealth, put it in his pocket and walked out of the shop. It was easier than he had imagined.
But a cloud shadowed him as he went. It was a vague and undefined cloud, as impalpable as a Scotch mist, but it enveloped him in an abiding sense of chill. It submerged completely the sense of triumph that for one brief moment had flashed through him. It made his step hurried and furtive, prompting him to look discreetly back over his shoulder, from time to time, to make sure he was not being followed. It touched him with a feeling of unrest that was quite new to his bovinely tranquil soul.
On the whole it was a pretty bad piece of business. He didn't like it. But the entire thing, he called back to that disquieting inner voice, had been forced on him. He'd had no choice in the matter. And if there were times when the end ought to justify the means, this was surely one of them. Yet, as he made his way homeward, he could not shake off the feeling that he was being followed. It was not a pleasant feeling, and it prompted him to hasten his steps. He suddenly asked himself, as he skulked about into Twenty-fourth Street and dodged into the shelter of Mrs. Feeney's doorway, if this feeling could possibly stay with him and leave him a marked man for life.
He pushed the pound of veal cutlet down into his overcoat pocket as he climbed the stairs. On the top floor he found the hall-room door open and Alice Tredwell busy packing up her belongings.
She flushed a little as she saw him counting out the twelve dollars. Her flush deepened as she took the money from his hand.
"Are you sure that's all you'll need?" he inquired, staring at her with abashed yet anxious eyes.
"I'm sorry to take even this much," she told him. "And I've put the typewriter in its case and left it just outside your door."
"But I don't want the typewriter," he protested, flushing in turn. "I can't and won't take it!"
Her judicial eyes met his for several moments of silence.
"All right," she finally agreed; "for that will leave it more personal, more of a debt of honor for me."
He scarcely caught her viewpoint, but he gave the matter little thought, for he noticed that she had resumed her packing.
"You're not—not going to leave here?" he asked almost with consternation.
"Yes," she answered.
"But now that you can pay up your room rent" he began.
"I could never sleep in the same house with that woman. She said too much that hurt!"
A great sense of deprivation swept through Widder.
"I'm—I'm sorry," he said.
"It's my own fault. And the change was no trouble. I've just found another room in Twenty-seventh Street."
"Another room?" echoed Widder.
"And I've telephoned for an expressman. But even if we do live a few blocks apart, surely we can still be friends."
Those words ran like wine through Widder's tired brain.
"I wish we could be friends," he said quite humbly as he stood watching her while she faced her little gilt-framed mirror and calmly but perilously speared her headgear with two exceptionally long hatpins.
"And now I must go down and face the dragon!" she said with a grim smile.
Widder, realizing what that valedictory speech meant, felt his heart sink.
"Can't I help you with any of your things?" he forlornly inquired.
"The expressman can take everything easily," she said with a half-humorous glance down at the small collection. Then she looked quickly up at Widder, who stood turning his hat round and round in his hands.
"Here I have been keeping you late for your dinner," she cried with a gesture of self-reproof.
A wave of audacity swept through Widder as he stood staring back into those self-accusatory hazel eyes. She seemed to have the trick of instigating such waves.
"Have you had dinner?" he demanded.
"No," she told him. "I haven't even thought of eating."
"Neither had I," he admitted. Then he steeled himself for the great effort, for he was about to do something that he had never before done in all his life.
"Why couldn't we have dinner together?" he said with the ghost of a quaver in his voice.
She shook her head in negation after a second or two of silence. A look of alarm mounted to her eyes.
"I don't mean here," explained Widder. "But there's a German restaurant a few blocks over where you get a cracking good table d'hôte. A table d'hôte with music for fifty cents."
She stood studying his solemnly anxious face. Her alarm seemed slowly to depart. A cracking good dinner, as Widder had described it, carried an appeal that tended to usurp her imagination.
"I will if you'll make it a Dutch treat!" she finally agreed.
But Widder would not hear of this. "And I think we—we rather deserve it," he argued, a little dizzy with the ichor of adventure.
"All right," she said with a reciprocal light of recklessness in her own eyes. Then she asked almost mockingly: "But what would Mrs. Feeney think?"
That lightly asked question translated itself into something momentous to Widder. It served to bracket them together as fellow conspirators. They were sharers of a secret. They were partners now, held together by the bond of an enterprise unknown to the world. They were friends with faith enough in each other to defy convention.
"I don't care what Mrs. Feeney thinks!" announced Widder with such vigor that his ultimatum echoed down the well of the musty staircase and, being overheard by an asthmatic figure emerging from her Plutonian lair to lower the gas—left so prodigally flaring by the Musical Morrisseys—was answered by a faint but funereal groan from the nether darkness.
IV
WIDDER, as he sat opposite Alice Tredwell at the little square table in the German restaurant, felt that his day had been an epochal one. Not only bewildering new vistas of activity but equally new byways of emotion had opened up before him. He had found an unexpected joy in treading his way side by side with a young woman through the circuitous night streets of the city. He rejoiced in the thought that he was, for the time being, her guide and her protector. He enjoyed the lights and the warm air and the heavy smell of coffee and cooked food that filled the restaurant. He enjoyed the noodle soup and the pot roast and the thought that they were to end up with brick ice cream in three colors, and a demi-tasse. And he also enjoyed the player piano with the mechanical violin attachment, that discoursed a repertory of German waltzes, quite merry and dashing, and seemed to give the needed touch of splendor to the occasion.
But his greatest joy, oddly enough, was an entirely subsidiary and vicarious one. It was the delight of seeing another finding open pleasure in what he had placed before her. For Alice Tredwell, he saw, was eating with the honest and impersonal appetite of a healthy boy. The thought, even occurred to him that this was the sort of thing he should like to do quite often. But to make a practice of things such as this, he remembered, meant that one must have money. Fifty-cent tables d'hôte, with music and printed bills of fare, were only for the affluent. And the thought of money brought his mind back to the one subject that he had tried to avoid. He remembered the yellowback in the cash register of a certain market. He had become a "breaker." He had passed counterfeit money.
He had tried to avoid the memory of that fact, to obliterate it by immersing himself in newer sensations. But through every mood and move it had hung above him like a cloud. Even the impulse that had sent him off on this adventure of dining in foreign parts, he tacitly acknowledged, had partly arisen from the dread of sitting alone in his room and wondering if every footstep that mounted the musty stairs meant some minion of the law in search of him. And keen as had been his delight in piloting his lighter-hearted companion through the many-lamped streets, he knew that he had more than once glanced furtively back to make sure he was not being followed. And he wondered, as he sniffed the warm air so redolent with exotic beverages and homelier savors of the kitchen, if all life's highest moments were clouded by some shadow out of the humdrum past, if all earthly grandeur could be had only at the final cost of character. Then he looked down at his place, for he found that the girl on the opposite side of the table was watching him.
"No, Mister Widder, I Ain't Holdin' This Against Yuh. Yuh Was Loored Into It"
"Are you still worrying about Mrs. Feeney?" she asked.
"Not a bit!" he promptly protested, though he was inwardly disturbed at the discovery that his moments of unrest did not escape her attention.
"Will you tell me something?" she said after a minute's silence. "Will you tell me if I put you to much trouble when I borrowed that money from you to-night?"
"Why?" he equivocated.
"Because I thought you looked worried when you came back—not worried exactly, but as though you had been compelled to make sacrifices to get what I asked for."
It both appalled and comforted him to realize how close she had come to guessing his predicament. And he was so awkward and untried a consort with crime that he found it no easy matter to endure that fellowship in silence. But enormities such as his, he felt, were not to be paraded.
"It didn't take me five minutes," he protested without meeting her gaze.
"Then I was wrong?" she persisted. And he knew she was not a woman whom it would be easy to deceive.
He did not want an open lie to stand like an unsheathed sword between them. The scabbarded deceptions of evasion, on the other hand, would never hold back that honest and ardent spirit of hers. And Widder, sitting darkly at the door of his soul's tent, for a moment tried to tell himself that he had a right to his reservations. A horror had dropped from the skies into the quiet garden of his life as a dead shell might drop beside a Belgian nunnery, and he had proceeded to bury that horror away. No, the voice from within the guarded tent retorted, he had not buried it away. He had merely covered it over and left all its potential explosiveness unimpaired. It would always be under his feet now, like a mine of lyddite under his orderly parterres of industry. And the area of his life was too narrow for the secret nursing of such a monster.
"Would you rather not answer that question?" the girl was asking him.
He stared at her with mildly questioning eyes. He realized that she had in some way brought brilliance into his life. But it was a brilliance that had been disrupting. She had invaded his firmament, his timeless firmament of mild tranquillities, like a hot and hurrying comet scoring its path across a pallid Milky Way. If she had lighted up his day she had also lighted up its misdeeds. And he found a black joy in the thought of suddenly confronting her with the truth.
"What would you say if I told you that I'd stolen that money?" he found himself asking her.
"I wouldn't believe it," was her thoughtful answer.
"Why?" he demanded. He knew now that, if she had succeeded in pinning him down, he would have been as helpless as a museum moth.
"Because I think you are essentially honest," was her confident reply.
"Well, it was almost as bad as stealing it," he triumphantly protested, realizing that it was now his turn to bracket her with him as a conspirator.
"Why?" she inquired.
"Because I broke a twenty-dollar counterfeit bill to get the money you wanted." He spoke very quietly, but his voice was tremulous with suppressed excitement.
Equally quiet was the girl as she received the full impact of that message. He had expected her quick hands to fling some fresh brand on his fire of self-immolation. But in this she disappointed him.
"You mean you didn't have twelve dollars?" she asked.
"I'd only a little over two dollars."
"And also this counterfeit bill?" she demanded.
"Yes."
"How long had you had the counterfeit?"
"A long time!"
Her brow, for some reason he could not comprehend, cleared perceptibly at that assertion.
"Why had you never passed it?"
"I'd never needed to," he told her, and it wasn't until he beheld her faint wince that he realized the brusquerie of that confession.
"Then why didn't you give me the counterfeit?" she continued. He stared at her in amazement. The enforced lowness of their voices gave a factitious air of intimacy to all their talk.
"And have you run the risk of breaking a bad bill?" he demanded.
The cloud of that offense had hung heavy enough over his own head. He had already dramatized too many exigencies and imagined too many arresting hands being placed on his shoulder and too many Federal trials and final commitments.
"Yet you ran the same risk yourself, didn't you?"
"Yes, but it's different with a man."
Her face was troubled again.
"You mean you'd done this sort of thing before?"
"No, I'd never done it before. I'd been too cowardly."
She sat staring thoughtfully down into her coffee cup. Then she suddenly looked up at him.
"You don't mind my questioning you this way, do you? You see, it's all so tremendously important."
Although Widder did not see, he felt that her viewpoint ought at least to be respected.
"But the thing's over and done with," he protested. "And no amount of talking can put it right."
"Then you feel that it ought to be put right if you found a way of doing it?" she asked almost hopefully.
"Yes, it ought to be put right," he agreed, but without enthusiasm. Twenty dollars, he remembered, was twenty dollars. And bills of that size did not grow on bushes. Never, in a whole year's time, had he been twenty dollars ahead of the game.
"So, you see, the thing's not over and done with. It's really only beginning."
"Beginning?" echoed Widder.
"And I think it's the biggest thing," she thoughtfully added, "that has ever happened in all your life."
"It would be if I got caught," was Widder's grim amendment.
"But how about the man who got the bad twenty dollars?"
"It was at the branch of a big meat-market company," Widder explained.
"And you went purposely to a place like that?" she asked.
"I shouldn't have relished the idea of passing it off on a poor man."
"Of course!" she agreed. But there was a qualifying tone to her admission. "It won't be such a hardship for a big company like that to wait a few days."
"To wait for what?"
"Oh, don't you see? " she said quietly but almost desperately. "Don't you see that we can't leave things the way they are? It wouldn't be honest! It wouldn't be right!"
In theory Widder agreed with her. But man is the victim of circumstance, and the easier one's circumstances were, the easier it was to keep one's hands clean. And, with the poor, life had to be a perpetual compromise.
"But what are we to do?" he rather helplessly inquired.
"Do you realize that we took twenty dollars away from that company that didn't belong to us, twenty dollars we hadn't earned and had no right to? And don't you see that we'd never be able to forget it—that it would always stand there like a stain, a sort of blot we'd be secretly ashamed of?"
"But I don't see where you're to blame," protested Widder, feeling that his shoulders were broad enough to carry his own burdens.
"I'm in it as deep as you are. I used that money. I caused you to get it the way you did. And I've got to help you pay those people back. It's got to be done. We'll have to save and skimp until we get it together, every cent of it. It may be hard, but we'll have to do it."
Widder sat thinking it over.
"Nobody ever made good on any bad money I ever took in," he said gloomily.
"Can you remember where you got this bill?" she asked him.
"Yes," he acknowledged.
"Where?" she inquired, perplexed by his momentary embarrassment.
"I'd—I'd rather not tell you."
"Why?" she demanded.
"I don't think you'd believe me."
"I would believe you," she averred.
And Widder found something vastly consolatory in that perverse faith in him.
"It came out of a suitcase hidden away in my room. It came out of a suitcase," he continued, compelling himself to meet her questioning gaze, "that still holds twelve hundred bad twenty-dollar bills exactly like the one we're talking about!"
"And where did they come from?" she quietly inquired.
He told her, as circumstantially as he was able, of how the suitcase had come into his possession.
She sat with her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand, deep in thought. It seemed to take her some time to organize the story into acceptable coherence.
"So I was the god from the machine, after all," she finally averred. "It was I who made you break faith after all those months."
The quiet bitterness of her tone disturbed Widder not a little.
"You had no more to do with it than Mrs. Feeney," he protested. It startled him to find her less impressed by the story of the Calabrian's suitcase full of counterfeit than by the fact that she had remotely figured in the breaking of its first bill. But her next speech was even more of a surprise to him.
"Do you know, I'm almost glad of this," she declared as she got up from her chair and reached for her coat.
"Why?"
He was hoping, as he held her coat for her, that she would say because it had brought them together. But that was not the thought in her mind.
"Because it's cut a road out for us that we'll have to stick to. And there are times when people need a road they have to stick to!"
It was as they were walking homeward side by side that she arrested him with a sudden question.
"What are you going to do with that suitcase?" she asked out of a brief silence that had fallen between them. Their pace slackened, as though retarded by the weight of a common burden.
"That's something I was just going to ask you about," Widder explained.
"It will always mean danger," she intimated. "More danger, I think, than you imagine."
Widder did not agree with her.
"The danger is past!" he quietly yet firmly announced.
"I don't mean that sort of danger," she made haste to explain. "I mean danger from some friend or confederate of this Calabrian. He may be in jail for life, as you say, but that would never stop him from sending out a message. And the type of man who would be sent such a message would take a desperate chance to get hold of a fortune like that, even in bad money!"
"But I don't think the man had any confederates or friends. If he had he would never have called on me as he did. And if they were coming after it they've had plenty of time to come!"
"There will always be the danger," she persisted.
"Then what would you advise me to do?"
She walked on in silence without answering.
Widder even repeated the question.
"Will you let me think it over, and tell you when I see you to-morrow night?"
"Will I see you to-morrow night?" he asked with a flutter of hope as they drew up in front of a red-brick rooming house with iron step rails.
She nodded.
"Will you come as soon after seven as you can? Then I'll be able to do those business letters for you."
"I'll come," he said as he shook hands with her a little awkwardly. He watched her as she went up the steps and worked for a moment or two over the unfamiliar lock. He watched her as she stepped inside and quietly closed the door behind her. Then he turned homeward along the quiet side street, viewing that familiar neighborhood as a returning traveler, after the fever of much wandering, views his native shores.
V
WIDDER'S day had been too much for him. Tired as he was that night, he found himself unable to sleep. He had no reserve processes of mind for assimilating the unexpected. His drab and tranquil days had left him inured only to monotony. Excitement seemed to have left his spirit without a leg to stand on. So, poised between heaven and earth, on his folding bed high up above the quiet midnight side street, he lay there with both his mind and his soul wide awake. He lay there trying to achieve an impersonal viewpoint of his own life.
It was not often that Widder tried to reach this viewpoint, but on this night his own existence seemed to stretch before him, plain to the eye, as lucid as that past that presents itself to a drowning man strangled into the ironically belated clairvoyance of death.
For the first time in many a long day Widder was suddenly able to comprehend life in its smallnesses, its meannesses, its eternal concessions to circumstances, its lapses from aspiration into inertia. He had made a failure of things. That was plain. And now he was no longer a young man. He walked doubly saddled by age because he had surrendered to the conditions of age. There had been a time, he forlornly remembered, when things were different, when he was impatient and restless and apt to chafe against his limitations. He had been full enough of hope, as a young man. But the years, with their stealthy erosions of defeat, had taken the edge off his ardor. The dust of time had dimmed his faith in himself. There had been a day when he was as ardent as Alice Tredwell herself, when he looked at life with the same timorous determination and demanded the same straightness of step. He still regarded himself as a business man, but he was without a business. It was only the crumbs of commerce that he had caught up, like a sparrow between cart wheels. He wasn't so good as a Hester Street push-cart man, for if be was a peddler be was one without even a cart.
He had been able to live. That was true. But merely to live was not enough. The thought had come to him, in the German restaurant that night, that there was something both moving and joyous in commanding the reliance of others. But it was a luxury which had to be paid for. To be able to help somebody else implied extra effort, more sustained work. It meant a wider range of reckoning, this taking of young ladies out to German restaurants and watching their cheeks grow rosier with warm dinners and their eyes brighter with Vienna waltz music. It took money, as the old saying had it, to make the mare go! And all Widder had done was to eke out an existence, just as a wharf rat does. He had grown too self-immured and meek and easygoing. He had been too patient about his patents. His fireproof paint had been a good thing. More than one authority had told him that. And there should have been money in it. But he had grown fatalistic over its success deferred; he had not even gone to see the Brooklyn manufacturer who had written asking him to call. He had been too ashamed of his clothes.
That night in the restaurant, too, he had been ashamed of his clothes. They had seemed decidedly weedy. His linen had not been fresh. Alice Tredwell's quick eye had noticed the ragged sleeve edges of his overcoat. She had meditated on that challenging fringe, maternally, as though aching to get at it with needle and thread. Even his hat, twice blocked and rebound by Ginny Joe's Sixth Avenue Hat Shop, was faded almost to a bottle green. And his hair doubtlessly needed trimming. He could cut it himself above the ears of a Sunday morning, but the back of his head was a terra incognita, defying his fiercest contortions before his shaving-mirror. He seldom even thought of such things any more. It was easier not to worry over them. A twilight sleep of indifferency left him forgetful of the labors of respectability. He saw himself as a seedy incompetent, with his youth gone, with his manner of life deepened into the rut of fixed habit, receiving little from the world because he had come to expect little from it.
That impassioned midnight appraisal rather frightened Widder. His work had been desultory, he tried to tell himself, because he had worked without incentive. He had been like a motor car with a broken transmission rod. The force had been there, but it had not been applied. He had developed power without proving achievement. And now, he grimly asserted, he merely stood one step above a bread-line habitué. And again he cowered at the thought of such failure. He groaned aloud.
"I won't be a down-and-outer," he passionately avowed. "I won't!"
Then he lay still, almost holding his breath as still another accusatory memory swept over him. He had always prided himself on his honesty. He had refused to peddle a consumption cure on which there was a clear profit of one hundred and fifteen per cent. Whether it was based on cowardice or not, he wanted to be decent. It may or may not have been a mere accident of temperament. He had at least tried to live up to it. But now he had lost that claim, lost it forever. His weediness had crept even into his morals. Without stopping to realize the enormity of his act, he had that day become a "breaker" for a printer of counterfeit money. In breaking that bill he had broken the law. And the hall-room girl had been right. It was a blot, a blot that would have to be wiped out at any cost. For that, Widder realized in his lonely midnight travail, meant the worst failure of all. It was the kind of failure he couldn't face, for it implied the extermination of his peace of mind. And Widder could not live without peace.
"God help me!" he said with a tired groan as he turned to the wall. And God helped him by finally crowning his weariness with sleep.
VI
WIDDER was up and out early the next morning. The precipitancy of his departure, however, was possibly based more on a vague desire to avoid collision with Mrs. Feeney than on his determination for less erratic activities. But he had work to do and he intended to do it.
It made a difference, Widder began to see—this having a spur to prod one on a bit, this nursing of a secret purpose not to be thrust down. As he made his way northward, breasting the flowing tide of workers already hurrying southward, he refused to be a mere snag in the stream. He claimed his prerogative of right of way. He even bunted back, for the first time in his life, when that stream threatened to trespass on his path. He carried himself with more confidence and eluded with more assurance the superintendents of those buildings where canvassers were not allowed. Janitors and elevator boys he passed with a firmer eye, remembering that he was a man with a solemn obligation to fulfill.
He was less meek and self-obliterating. He was less mechanical and passive, too, in exploiting the virtues of his tap filter. He sang its praises with stridulous enthusiasm. He expatiated on the dangers of bottled water. He pointed out to hesitating housewives how a filter such as his instantly converted their faucet into a crystal spring. It became the watch dog of the household and the purifier of its potations. It insured the health of the little ones and lured husbands who betrayed a saddening tendency to imbibe in bar rooms back to the happy home circle. He gave a touch of enthusiasm to his efforts. Augustus Widder, in other words, for the first time in his life rose above being a day laborer and became an artist. And by five o'clock that afternoon, oddly enough, he had sold out his entire stock of nine filters, which was a record. It was so surprising a record, in fact, that on his way home he invested in a frugal half-dozen fresh collars and a new necktie, to say nothing of a pint of bulk oysters and a bottle of milk; for when you work hard, he solemnly announced, you must remember to feed well.
He was making his way upstairs with these purchases balanced on his arm when he was unexpectedly accosted by Mrs. Feeney, ponderously engaged in her perennial task of moderating gas flames to their most infinitesimal proportions. These sudden confrontations no longer startled Widder. Time had inured him to them. But Mrs. Feeney reversed a habit of life and turned a gas jet to its fullest, that she might have a more disconcertingly explicit view of her top-floor lodger.
"Yuh ain't lookin' your best, Mister Widder," she announced with dolorous triumph.
"I never felt better in my life," countered her lodger with unlooked-for testiness.
"Well, from now on yuh will suttinly be free of interference," asserted Mrs. Feeney.
"From whom?" demanded Widder.
"From them as hoodwinked yuh and bled yuh to the last," was the gloomily resigned response.
"I haven't noticed myself being 'bled,' as you call it," protested Widder.
"Twelve dollars is twelve dollars!" announced the axiomatic Mrs. Feeney. "Which yuh will never see again, Mister Widder, or twenty years o' housekeepin' has learnt me nothing about young women o' that type!"
Widder could not control his anger.
"Have you lost anything through that young woman?" he hotly demanded.
"No, Mister Widder, I have lost nothing. But no thanks to her. Early this morning a gen'l'man took that top-floor back, payin' two weeks in advance. And he ain't the kind who'd be annoyin' yuh night or day!"
"He hadn't better!" averred Widder with vague yet venomous exasperation as he brushed past the obstructing figure and started to mount the next stairway.
"It may seem lonesome like, for a time, Mister Widder," said the sorrowfully consoling Mrs. Feeney.
"That'll be my own business," Widder barked over the banister at her.
She groaned aloud as she turned down the flaring gas jet.
"Yuh suttinly ain't your old self, Mister Widder," she said in pained reproof. And her heavy sigh seemed one of regret for the happier days that were forever gone.
But Widder, as he mounted to his room and fed his canary and fried his oysters and hurriedly made his toilet, gave little thought to either Mrs. Feeney or the past. His mind, in fact, was engrossed on the immediate future. And at seven o'clock sharp, duly collared and scarfed and brushed, he presented himself at the new abode of Miss Alice Tredwell.
"I'm glad you came," she said as they shook hands. And, although Widder did not voice any indorsement of that statement, he was troubled by a perverse and heart-thumping joy at the sight of her. She looked very businesslike in her blue serge skirt and her white shirt waist. And she seemed to have intrenched herself further behind this business-is-business façade by placing her open typewriter on a square oak table in the center of the room, flanked by two chairs.
"Before we begin to work," she said, "I want to give you something."
She lifted her pocketbook from the narrow box couch along the yellow-papered wall and from it took out six one-dollar bills.
"There's six dollars of what I owe you," she said, coloring a little as she handed the money to him.
"But why," he asked—"why are you giving me this back now?"
"I've got to," she replied with a note almost of passion.
He stood frowning down at the money.
"But how did you get this money?" he demanded as he stared into her clouded hazel eyes. Then, noticing her deepening color at that question, he realized that he was once more making a mess of things. "What I mean is, it—it must have taken sacrifices to"
He did not finish the sentence.
"I got it honestly," she said.
And it was Widder's turn to flush.
"I mean we simply mustn't lose time about making that counterfeit bill right. I can't rest with that hanging over us! And by to-morrow night I expect to have the other six dollars."
"I'm going to make it right!" announced Widder with his shoulders back. She seemed to tap undreamed-of reservoirs of valor in the cobwebbed gloom of his will. "And it's going to be made right before I see you again!"
The light that leaped into her eyes as she stood looking at him was not that of relief. It seemed to be more the radiance of triumph, though Widder failed to understand just why she should seem to take pride in his belated arrival at any such decision. The minds of women, he concluded, were inscrutable to mere men.
"And now we can begin your letter," she said, apparently to hide her embarrassment. "But you'll have to tell me first what you've already written."
Widder handed her his letter from the Tweedie Paint and Chemical Company of Brooklyn.
She read it over thoughtfully. Then she sat down behind the typewriter on the oak table.
"Why, this looks distinctly encouraging," she said. "Did you go and see Mr. Tweedie, as he asks?"
Widder acknowledged that he had not gone. He failed to explain, however, that his visit had been postponed, from time to time, because of the saddening consciousness that his clothes had seemed too shabby to confront a paint magnate. Instead, he enlarged a little incoherently on the general tendency of manufacturers to "milk" the ideas of an inventor or to keep you waiting month after month without taking any action. And to verify this claim he handed her his second letter, from the Damant Chemical Company of Newark.
She read it through, still frowning.
"I can't see much promise in this," she acknowledged. "But this other Tweedie letter makes me feel that they are at least interested. Yet, even if they're not, aren't there other firms we can apply to? If this fireproof paint of yours is a good thing, won't it command attention?"
"There are plenty of fireproofing processes already on the market," Widder explained.
"Then what is the advantage of yours?"
"Mine can be manufactured from ten to twenty cents a gallon cheaper than any of the others I know of."
"Then wouldn't theater owners and hotel builders and railroads and ship companies, and all that sort of thing, be interested in getting hold of it?"
"But builders and shipping men won't touch a thing like that on their own hook. They go to the big supply concerns for all that material."
"Concerns like this Tweedie Paint and Chemical Company?" she inquired.
Widder nodded.
"Then isn't this," she said, taking up the letter again, "a chance which we haven't followed up?"
Widder acknowledged that it might be.
"Then why can't we reopen the matter with them and make an appointment?" she suggested. "And if nothing comes of it, why can't we get hold of a business directory and make out a list of the big paint makers and apply to them systematically?"
Again Widder half-heartedly agreed with her. It was of no use, he knew, trying to explain to her that an inventor, on a mission such as this, should be as spick and span as a traveling salesman, should bristle with the promoter's earmarks of prosperity. Yet, as he stood there, the somewhat bewildering thought suddenly occurred to him that by digging in, by digging in tooth and nail, he might make enough to invest in a new hat and coat. Then he sighed audibly, for he knew the hat and coat would have to be accompanied by shoes and gloves and trousers without fringe about the heels.
But Alice Tredwell did not propose to let him linger with his regrets. He felt, as she took up her paper and quietly asked him just how he wished his letters worded, that she was too fine and feminine for these humdrum matters of business. Yet it shamed him a little to find that she was more eager for the accomplishment of the sordid affair in hand than he was. So he gave all his time and thought, during the next hour, to the weighty task of construction. He found it hard at first to blow his own horn, as he expressed it. His initial effort at dictation, accompanied by much surreptitious mopping of his moist forehead, tended to be both apologetic and incoherent. By the time he had reached his third letter he was less uneasy. With his seventh and final epistle a firmness came into his voice and a note of finality into his phrasing. When they were all duly signed and folded and sealed in their envelopes Widder felt that it had been a momentous night.
"You're tired!" he said as he sat watching the girl put the cover on her typewriter. There were shadows under her eyes and her face looked pinched.
"Yes," she acknowledged. "I didn't sleep very well last night. I was thinking about you and your suitcase. And I've been thinking about it all day."
Widder, who had risen from his chair and taken up his hat and coat, felt his shoulders weighed with a fresh burden of guilt. He had given her a sleepless night.
"What do you think I ought to do about it?" he asked.
"I think," she said, looking across the little oak table at him, "it would be safest if you brought that suitcase here and left it with me."
Their glances locked.
"Do you think I would use any of that money?"
"No, I don't think you would. But I don't like to think of it there, for so long as it's there it means danger to you."
Widder laughed.
"I could throw it out of the window, or burn it up, or drop it off the Hoboken ferry, or slip out and leave it on a garbage can. But not one of those things seems quite right, does it?"
"What would happen if you gave it to the police?"
"They wouldn't believe me. They'd probably take my finger prints and shadow me for the rest of the winter!"
"Yet that seems the only honest thing."
"I'd rather do that than shunt the risk on you."
She seemed to be following her own line of thought.
"But the police would never question a successful man, a man of business, a man who was clearly engaged in honest work."
"That's just the point. I'm not a success. I'm a peddler, a floater. They'd cut off my license quick as a wink if they thought I had counterfeit within a mile of me."
She sat in a brown study. "Then we'll have to wait," she finally said.
"Wait for what?"
"Until you are a success!"
"Will I be?" he asked.
"Of course," she asserted.
"Then you'll have to help me," he said with a boldness that made him catch his breath.
"I wish I could," she replied with her studious hazel eyes on his timorous face. Then she turned and gathered up the letters, holding them out to him. "It's made a great difference, knowing you," she said with an impersonal candor that only added to Widder's confusion.
The making of fine speeches was something quite foreign to him. He felt many things, but nothing that he could express in words. So he backed awkwardly away, after taking the letters from her, with his mind reaching frantically for speech like a strangling swimmer reaching for a life raft.
"Good night!" was the most he could gulp out as he backed into the hallway and felt for the stair banister.
(TO be CONCLUDED)