[ PART III ]
VII
EARLY the next morning Widder explored his crowded dark room and unearthed the camera that he had once used for commercial photography. After looking it over with a wistful eye, he stoically wrapped it up. With it he went straight to a Seventh Avenue pawnshop. He did so with regret perhaps, but quite without embarrassment, for he had already at various times effected divers transactions in that shop. There a benevolent-eyed man, with a spectacularly bald head, both received him with courtesy and rewarded him with a quick appraisal of his goods. Their conference, amazingly contrary to all tradition of stage and story, was brief and businesslike. Yet Widder, with an additional six dollars in his pocket, knew that the hardest part of his task was still before him.
But he did not hesitate. He took a cross-town car at Thirty-fourth Street, got off at Third Avenue, and walked southward. His heart beat a little faster as he approached the corner of the meat market, but he saw to his relief that the shop was almost empty of customers. That meant there was still a fighting chance of the thing's being done quietly. Of all things, he dreaded a scene. Yet he realized that his mission was an extraordinary one. It might lead to a fusillade of questioning and accusation, or to a tongue lashing, or to an officer's being called, or, worse than all, to his premises' being searched and the telltale suitcase's being unearthed. But he had his duty to do. And although his heart pumped still faster and his color was not of the best, his courage did not crumble as he approached that possible Flavian amphitheater of torture. He stepped in over the floor freshly strewn with sawdust and swept the full length of the marble-topped counter with his eye, in grimly timorous quest of the blond man who had sold him the veal cutlet.
His man, he saw, was nowhere in sight—and the thought flashed through Widder's hectic mind that this burly blond butcher might already be languishing behind prison bar for the passing of that same counterfeit twenty-dollar bill which he, Widder, had forced into an overtempted workman's hands. And at that thought Widder had to tighten the belt of his courage to keep from hasty retreat.
He turned and crossed the sawdust, like a Christian martyr crossing the Colosseum sand. He thrust his head into a lion's cell, in the shape of a small glass-fronted office, wherein a white-aproned man with a pair of spectacles low on his nose was thumbing through what looked like a ledger. Widder had to cough for the second time before the scrutineering eyes looked up over the glass rims.
"I want to give you twenty dollars," announced Widder, extracting an alleviating thrill from the announcement.
"What for?" asked the man without emotion.
Widder, who had visibly squared his shoulders as he counted out the twenty dollars, stood slightly dashed at the lack of response in his audience, even while relieved at the discovery that his offense had obviously not disrupted the company's business. He had pictured some official of that company's placing a hand on his shoulder and telling him, with misty eyes, that he was one man in a million, and, perhaps, forcing on the protesting Widder a compensatory hind quarter of Canada spring lamb.
"The fact of the matter is," Widder began as he shuffled from foot to foot before the office wicket—" the fact is, I had the—er—the misfortune to pass a bad twenty-dollar bill over your counter."
"When?"
"A couple of days ago."
"How'd you know it was bad?" demanded the apathetic man in the office.
"Because I got others like it without knowing it," explained Widder. And he knew that his words were literally true.
The man with the glasses grunted. Then he swung about, reached into an open safe, drew out a drawer, and from under a couple of worn bank books took out a yellow back with a slip of white paper pinned to it. He unpinned the paper, looked at the bill, and turned back to Widder. The latter's somewhat unsteady fingers were pushing twenty one-dollar bills in through the wicket.
"D'you want this bum bill back?"
"Fair exchange is no robbery!" ventured Widder with a forced though valiant smile at his own facetiousness.
"Well, she won't pass a second time," announced the man behind the wicket as he pushed out the bill.
Widder took it up. Clear across the yellowback, cut out by the steel stencil of the bank refusing it harborage, was the telltale word "Counterfeit."
Widder stared at it so closely and so long that by the time he had solemnly and sadly pocketed it the man with the eyeglasses was once more thumbing apathetically through his ledger. So nothing remained for the valiant righter cf past wrongs to do but wheel pensively about and walk dispiritedly ovt of the shop.
In the clear light of the open street, however, he finally forgot his mortification over the discovery that an act such as his could be accepted as a commonplace one. It was at least not commonplace to him. He was once more square with the world. He could look any man straight in the eye from that moment. And any woman, he promptly added, whether it happened to be a hazel eye or an eye of any other color. He had redeemed himself. And if his pocket was light as he made his way down to the jobber's for a fresh supply of tap filters, so also was his heart. He intended to sell filters that day because he had to sell them. He had to sell them, even though he talked himself hoarse and wore off a quarter of an inch of shoe leather. For this putting yourself right with the world could sometimes be a pretty expensive job.
"I guess I gotta right to go into my own room, haven't I?"
At nightfall Widder turned homeward, tired but triumphant. An east wind had brought rain, yet Widder was oblivious of it. He even failed to notice that his feet were wet. For he had sold seven filters, had joked with a squirrel-eyed old Irishwoman who wanted no such contraptions about her house, and had been given a cigar by an amiably discursive Austrian who had himself patented a key ring and a folding toothbrush for travelers.
Widder went home feeling that the day had been a long one and that his rest was earned. He treated himself to the luxury of an open fire, took off his wet clothes, and dined in a quilted dressing gown that had seen better days and in a pair of German felt slippers that curled up at the toes. And having dined he lighted the gas in his dark room, heated his iron, and carefully pressed and creased his still steaming apparel. For he had the morrow to think of, and it behooved a man of business to keep up appearances. Then he quite as methodically unlocked his carpenter's chest, unearthed the Calabrian's suitcase, and restored to its fellows the counterfeit yellowback that he had that morning recovered from the Third Avenue meat market. If he sighed as he relocked the case it was altogether a sigh of satisfaction. The triumph of an Antigone who had finally buried her dead was no keener than Widder's as he packed away that illicit wealth, and packed it away as intact as it first came into his hands. It no longer had a claim on him. He owed it nothing.
He basked in the warming consciousness of this readjustment of moral issues quite as luxuriously as in the heat from his open fireplace, while he continued to sit there listening to the rain drumming on the roof. Then, finding himself drowsing off, he wound his huge nickel watch, let down his folding bed, banked his fire and turned in. There he dreamed of gayly traveling from capital to capital through Europe, with a bag of counterfeit on one arm and a hazel-eyed girl on the other. It was a very pleasant dream. He had just left Paris on a coach and four for Monte Carlo, where crowned heads had already heard of his prodigalities, when he was awakened by a quiet yet unmistakable knock on his door.
As he sat up on his folding bed, feeling tentatively about its edges to make sure it was not indeed a Continental coach rocking southward toward the Côte-d'Azur, the knock was repeated.
Widder, as he padded about for his trousers and dressing gown, felt distressingly suspicious that it was Mrs. Feeney, a retributive Mrs. Feeney with some fresh clew of his iniquities. So he lighted his gas and approached the door reluctantly. When he opened it he opened it only an inch or two.
He could see nothing in the gloom of the hallway. But out of that gloom a voice spoke:
"May I come in?"
It was more of a command than a request, for all its quietness of tone. But what suddenly sent electric needles playing up and down Widder's spine was the discovery that the speaker was Alice Tredwell herself.
"Who is it?" was his supererogatory demand.
"Hush!" whispered the girl instead of answering his question. But she stepped in through the opened door without further waste of words. She turned and noticed his hesitation as he stood with his hand on the knob, pondering whether or not that door should be closed again. Her face was serious, but rich in color, as though ruddied by rapid passage through windy air. There was, too, an unnatural brightness about her eyes as she motioned for him to swing the door shut.
Then she stepped back and slipped the bolt with her own hand.
Widder stood staring at her. She was in rubbers and a dripping raincoat. Her face was still wet and her hat sodden above the brown hair which escaped from one side of it. He noticed that she carried no umbrella. Yet about her, for all her dampness, was a note of determined serenity. And Widder, disturbed as he was by that untimely intrusion and awake as he was to its perils, no longer regretted the collapse of the Paris coach and the Côte-d'Azur.
"What—what's wrong?" he stammered as she stood so calmly facing him.
"Has anything disturbed you?"
"Disturbed me?" he echoed.
"Have you been interfered with in any way?"
"Do you mean about the suitcase?"
"Yes."
Widder shook his head in negation. He could see her breast heave with a sigh of relief.
"I've been worrying about you," she said with a quick yet troubled glance about the room.
"About me?"
"Yes; I was afraid something might happen. I couldn't even sleep."
"What time is it?" asked Widder with almost a tacit note of reproof in his question.
"It's long past midnight," she said without emotion.
"Then how did you get in?"
The girl smiled for the first time.
"I found in the excitement that I'd carried Mrs. Feeney's house key away with me. So that part of it was easy enough!"
Involuntarily Widder shuddered at the thought of what might have occurred had she been intercepted or shadowed by the apparitional Mrs. Feeney herself.
"I've brought you the other six dollars. And I want you to let me take that suitcase!" the girl startled him by saying.
"Why?" asked Widder as he mechanically reached for the money she was holding out to him.
"Because it will never be safe to leave it here. It is here, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Are you positive?"
"Yes, I'm positive," declared Widder. "I just locked it up before I went to bed. I was putting back that twenty-dollar bill, the bill I took out a few days ago. I gave that butcher twenty dollars this morning, twenty good dollars, and got the bad bill back. You see, I thought it would be better to have them all together again."
He had expected some word of commendation from her on this, but she said nothing. Her thoughts, in fact, seemed to be occupied with other things.
"We must get it away from here," she asserted.
"Do you mean to-night?"
"Yes."
"But why?" he persisted.
"Because there's danger," was her reply. "I know there's danger!"
"But it would be just as dangerous for you," he tried to argue.
"I think not."
"But what will you do with it?"
"Anything rather than leave it here."
"But you can't lug a bag like this through the streets," he protested.
She turned and studied him with abstracted eyes.
"Then you'll have to come with me," she announced.
"But where?" he inquired, for the first time nursing a momentary suspicion of her, yet the next instant standing ashamed of it.
"I thought the best way to get rid of it would be to take it to some check room, say to the check room at the Grand Central Terminal."
It was his turn to stare at her.
"You mean to check it and leave it there?"
She nodded. Here was a solution of the difficulty, he saw, which had quite escaped his attention. But there were subsidiary difficulties that promised to intervene.
"But the fact of the matter is I'm—I'm not exactly dressed for the street!"
Her face remained quite serious, though for a moment he thought he detected laughter in her eyes.
"I'll wait outside," she announced, moving toward the door.
"It seems too bad," be began, following her.
"I'll wait," she repeated, and there was a note of finality in the words that seemed to leave the issue a closed one.
Widder fought his way into his clothes as a village fireman might. He hated to think of her standing there, timorous and uncomfortable in the inhospitable darkness of a hallway. And she was doing it, he felt, though he could not quite understand why, for his good.
He hurried to the door and opened it the moment he was ready. He held it wide, with apologetic incoherencies on his lips. But these extenuating murmurs did not come to utterance. For instead of finding her there he found himself confronted by a quite empty hall.
He gaped, with sinking heart, down its vague length. She was not there. She had disappeared. And the mystery of it almost took his breath away.
Then his breath was altogether taken away. For as he stared out into the silent passage, wondering what his next move ought to be, he saw the door of the hall room facing him silently and cautiously drawn back. The next moment he beheld Alice Tredwell herself as silently and cautiously edge backward out of this room, drawing the door to as she came, The rubbers on her feet, Widder noticed, made her movements inaudible. And much as the thought disturbed him, he was compelled to admit that there was stealthiness in her manner of retreat, furtiveness in her very attitude.
She did not openly start, but she looked up quickly when she saw that he was in the door observing her. And her face had lost a little of its color.
"That room's been rented," Widder warned her in a whisper as she stepped back to his door.
"I didn't know," she said with a slight shrug. "I tried to find the key for my typewriter case. I left it on a little hook under the gas jet. But somebody must have taken it."
So the moment's mystery went up like a soap bubble. And after midnight, Widder remembered, people were apt to exaggerate trifles. But he relocked his door before delving through the orderly accumulations of his dark room in search of an umbrella, a sadly worn pair of rubbers, and a grease-stained suitcase filled with counterfeit and the implements of counterfeiting.
The girl stood patiently awaiting his return.
"Is that the suitcase?" she whispered as he dropped into a chair and struggled into his rubbers.
"Yes," he whispered back.
Their moderate tones gave a note of secrecy to the situation. Still again it made him feel like a conspirator. He and the Goddess of Adventure, he felt, were getting to be almost intimates.
"Shall we go together?" asked the girl, staring with what seemed open approval at his rubber-muffled feet.
"Yes," answered Widder as he took up the suitcase. She had already taken possession of the umbrella. He stood with his hand on the gas jet, waiting to turn it out.
"All right,"" she whispered from the open door. A minute later he was at her side and they were groping their way along the stairhead. She caught his hand and held him back for a moment while she leaned over the banister and stared below.
"The coast is clear," she whispered.
Then they stole quietly and cautiously down through the many-odored house. When they reached the street without interruption Widder felt all the exultation of a blockade runner who has successfully broken through the enemy's lines. He looked back with a solemnly triumphant wince at the shabby-fronted habitation that no longer seemed like home to him. The light was too vague to reveal, to even sharper eyes than his, the cautious movement of one of the basement window blinds, or the triumphantly interrogative face that peered out from its uplifted corner. Nor did he chance to hear the prolonged groan of victory that marked Mrs. Feeney's final confirmation of her darkest fears.
VIII
WIDDER, as he walked home through the rain, found many things to think over. He wondered why Alice Tredwell had been so anxious to see the counterfeiter's suitcase off his hands. He fell to pondering how she could have hit on so simple a plan of passing it off on others, how a girl unused to the ways of a great city could resort to a movement so easy and yet so efficient. Her unsuspected reserves of audacity amazed him. He marveled at her courage in coming to him at such a time, and yet at the only time when she could have come with safety. On the way to the Grand Central check room, he remembered, she had casually inquired if the case were locked and if he carried the key. She had not asked for this key.
She had suggested, on the other hand, that she would like to keep the claim check, and Widder had seen no objection to this. For that implied, he finally concluded, that she still nursed some latent doubt as to his strength of resistance against temptation. She seemed foolishly intent on protecting him from his own possible weakness. She had achieved an air of calmness through it all, but under that mask of apathy, he knew, she had been the more excited of the two. All the way to Forty-second Street she had kept looking back, as though to make sure they were not being followed. She had even dipped into a Subway station, leading him down one flight of stairs and up another as craftily as a hounded refugee might dip into a stream to break his trail. He had followed her, inwardly puzzled, but without protest.
And quite beyond these minor bewilderments there was something mysterious, something inscrutable, about the entire midnight excursion. Yet the most mysterious element in the whole adventure, Widder realized, was the fact that he had actually wrung a wayward sort of joy out of it. Out of their whispered colloquies, their silent blockade running, their reckless facing of the rain-swept streets of night, he had drained a tingling delight that made him stop and wonder if his whole character had suddenly and miraculously changed. He even asked himself if, after all, that grease-stained suitcase could have been a sort of Æsop's Fable, or a Magic Rug, lost in the hurrying tides of the centuries.
Widder found even a small thrill of excitement, after turning into Twenty-fourth Street and facing the wet blasts of the east wind, in maneuvering a silent entrance to Mrs. Feeney's slumberous and heavy-aired hallway. It was not often, he remembered, that he had stolen into that catacomb of serried sleepers at three o'clock in the morning. Then he furled his dripping umbrella, like a general sheathing his sword, quietly swung shut the street door and began his familiar climb of over-familiar stairs.
It was on the topmost step of the topmost flight that he came to a sudden pause. His ascent, because of the rubbers on his feet, had been practically noiseless. But across the silence of that upper hall there came to his ear a series of faint metallic rasps and clicks which brought him up short. For these arresting sounds came from the direction of his own door. And thick as was the gloom of those upper regions, Widder realized that some one was working at his door lock.
He promptly and instinctively converted the wet umbrella in his hand into a weapon of offense. This he did by reversing it and grasping it firmly by the ferrule. Then he felt in his pocket for a match, took a noiseless step or two toward the hall gas jet, turned it stealthily on and with a quick stroke of his match end along the wall paper lighted the escaping gas. At the same time he advanced on the intruder. But he drew up at what appeared to be a discreet distance, for Widder was not by nature a belligerent.
"What do you want here?" he demanded, staring into the foolish white face of the startled man who had whipped so suddenly about at the sound of Widder's match.
Yet, after that initial start, the intruder actually turned his back on Widder and again faced the door.
"I guess I gotta right to go into my own room, haven't I?" he demanded over his shoulder.
He spoke a bit thickly, Widder saw, and his head was wobbling significantly from side to side.
"But this isn't your room!" protested Widder.
The man turned and faced him.
"Why isn't it?" he somewhat vacuously inquired.
He was a man with extremely lean face and prominent jawbones, with a pasty skin and an eye which, even in soberness, could not have been over-steady. And Widder promptly decided that he liked neither the man nor that foreign-looking face with so strange a pallor imposed on the original swarthiness of his skin.
"Because it happens to be mine," Widder told the intruder as he stepped closer to the door.
The man laughed a little.
"Then I guess I'm twisted, all right, all right!" He blinked down the hall past the intently watching Widder. "I got to the wrong end o' this palace car, that's what I sure did!"
"You did!" declared Widder.
"That's why my key wouldn't work. It isn't my door." He pointed past Widder's shoulder toward the hall-room door at the head of the stairs. "That's my door!"
He laughed again as he moved unsteadily down the hall. But still Widder stood watching him. He watched him as he fumbled in his pocket for his key again, as he fumbled with the lock and finally got the door open. Widder still stood listening as the stranger moved about the unlighted hall room, out of sight. He stood there, waiting to hear the gas lighted. But instead of hearing that, he saw the door swing back an inch or two and the interrogative white face peer out, for one short moment, from the narrow crack. Then the door itself was silently swung shut.
Widder unlocked his door and went into his room. Somewhere along the horizon of consciousness was a cloud that he could not define. He was disturbed without being able to say just what disturbed him. Any man, he argued, might come home slightly muddled and make a mistake in a door. Such things were done often enough. But
Widder suddenly crossed the room and reopened his door. He carefully examined the face of his lock, and the woodwork in which it was embedded. It was a tumbler-pin, non-take-apart, cylinder lock, and a good one. It could neither be picked nor manipulated with skeleton keys. Yet Widder was machinist enough to know that its upper rim might be partly cut away with a fine hack saw and the springs and plunger pins and the cylinder plug itself removed. By using the same springs and pins a key could be fitted and the lock reassembled and resealed. It meant time and labor, but an expert bent on conquering the lock could thus conquer it, carrying about his key until he saw a favorable time to make use of it.
Widder felt reasonably sure that this had not been done. But as he stood staring at the hall-room door he made a trivial yet disquieting discovery. The lock to the hall room was an ordinary mortised one, calling for an ordinary bit-and-bow key, a key entirely dissimilar to anything that could be fitted to his own lock. And any man sober enough to climb four flights of stairs would find that out, could not fail to find that out, in ten seconds' time.
Widder, with a very solemn face furrowed by a very solemn frown, closed and locked and bolted his door. He did not altogether like the look of things. So instead of going to bed he made himself a pot of coffee, dried and pressed his clothes for the second time, and dozed in his old armchair, with his slippered feet on the coal box, until he heard the postman's whistle in the morning
That postman, he found, brought him a letter from the Tweedie Paint and Chemical Company which made him forget his broken sleep of the night before. It made him forget tap filters and inebriate hall roomers and girlish figures in dripping raincoats. For this letter from Ezra Tweedie intimated that if Augustus Widder would be so good as to call at the company's Brooklyn office, in pursuance of his recent suggestion, the said company officials might not be averse to taking up the matter of the Widder Patent Fireproof Paint.
So transforming was this apparently trivial message, indeed, that when Mrs. Feeney emerged from a lower side door, as softly as a black snake from a cave, she confronted a brisk-stepping and resolute-browed Widder, who for once betrayed no promise of slowing up at the bulk thus suddenly interposed between him and the street.
"Mister Widder, I wantta have a surious talk with yuh!" solemnly announced this eruptive yet adamantine figure.
"Well, I've no time for serious talks this morning, Mrs. Feeney," even more decisively announced her top-floor roomer, brushing so promptly past his interceptor that a cherished lavender woolen shawl was half whisked from her shoulders. But Widder did not stop
Mrs. Feeney, breathing audibly, slowly pulled the lavender shawl, and with it an invisible mantle of dignity, closer about her outraged body. The line of her mouth hardened as the abstractedly hurrying Widder let the street door slam behind him.
"And that feeb goes too!" she laconically yet grimly announced.
High Above Came the Sound of a Pistol Shot, Followed by a Quick Shout or Two
IX
THAT Widder should go to Alice Tredwell with his news seemed in no way remarkable to him. And in going he made it a point to carry no outward signs of his inward transformation. Yet the knowledge of transformation was there, undeniable as a hair shirt, prickling him with the pleasurable discomfort of its all-encompassing intimacy. Augustus Widder was still Augustus Widder. But his world had turned over in an hour. And so important was this sudden bouleversement that he desired time to digest his shock, even while itching to unburden himself of the news. So if he refused to hurry his steps his resolution was like that of the flagellant who endures extended misery in the hope of excessive compensation. For the nursing of a secret could be as disconcerting to Widder as scourge or hair shirt to monastic back. He was not made for such things. Life had startled him with too few of her calisthenics.
But his world had taken its sudden somersault, and the news of it was there under his fifth rib, like acute indigestion. To one person, and one person alone, he felt the need of transmitting that joyous ache. And so staggering, so vital it was that for its transmission to Alice Tredwell he demanded certain austerities of preparation. It involved something too profound for casual utterance. It seemed to call for fluttering pennons and band music going by.
For one reckless moment indeed Widder thought of taking a taxi; but that, he knew, would mean partial betrayal. It would foreshadow the splendid shock of the final announcement. It would be an intimation of something exceptional. And he wanted nothing to unedge that ultimate moment of dramatic surprise. He wanted to catch the full light of wonder from those wide-opened hazel eyes.
So Widder struck north to Twenty-seventh Street on foot, unconscious of the sharpness in the evening breeze, oblivious of the dregs of weariness that a broken night had left in his bones.
He was about to turn in at Alice Tredwell's house, secretly dreading the impending encounter with the stentorian servant, when that door opened and Alice Tredwell herself appeared on its threshold.
She paled perceptibly at the sight of him.
But she did not speak until he had mounted the steps and stood close beside her.
"Something has happened!" she half declared and half inquired.
"It has," announced Widder. She studied his face intently with her habitually interrogative stare. A glance much less intent would have revealed the fact that Widder was steaming under banked fires, but banked fires that crowned his silence with the billowing smoke plumes of excitement.
"What is it?" she asked. Her face had become suddenly tragic, its look of anxiety merging into one of relinquishment.
Widder did not answer her question.
"Can't we have dinner together?" he asked.
The mere utterance of that inquiry betrayed him as an altered Widder, as less forlornly pusillanimous, less meekly apologetic, less self-obliterating. He said it as though it were a matter of course. And the girl, with her preoccupied eyes still on his face, seemed to accept it as a matter of course, for she followed him to the street and turned westward close at his side.
"What have you found out?" she demanded.
"We can go to that German place, where they have music," he temporized, joying in his grim evasion of the great point. "We can talk in comfort there."
"Has anything happened?" she still implored.
And it struck him, suddenly, that she was only a girl, something delicate and fragile, to be held away from life's rougher blows, to be helped across the stonier channels of pain. But he had his secret to nurse.
"Something is going to happen," he luxuriously equivocated.
"It's about the suitcase?" she ventured.
It surprised him to see fear on her face. As for the suitcase, he had forgotten about it completely. He had never acquired the trick of viewing life as a two-ring circus. Even one arena of adventure was too engrossing for his sedentary mind. But he suddenly recalled the incident of the stranger at his door.
"You remember that hall bedroom you used to have?"
She nodded.
"Well, it's been taken—taken by a man I don't like the looks of."
"Yes?" she prompted.
"Last night, or, rather, this morning when I went back, I found him trying to get into my room. I caught him right at my door."
"Yes!" She had unconsciously slackened her pace.
"It's been worrying me," explained, Widder, though for several hours he had quite forgotten that fact.
"What did you do?"
Widder was conscious of anticlimax.
"What was there to do? He pretended to think it was his own door—said he'd got mixed up in the dark."
"And that was all?" she asked, taking a deep breath.
"Yes, that's all. But I don't like that man's face!"
She was able to laugh.
"That room seems to be the haven of undesirables."
Widder's prompt impulse was to say that he wished she was back in that room. But the austere preoccupation of her face garroted the thought before it could be uttered. And little more passed between them until they were seated in the German restaurant, listening to the solemnly blithe Teutonic waltzes ground out by the mechanical orchestra. But a more dominating harmony was singing through Widder's veins. And it could no more be silenced than could his Harz Mountain canary of a bright Sunday morning.
To wait longer was impossible.
"By the way," he finally observed, "I heard from that paint man, Tweedie."
She looked up quickly.
"Was it good news?"
"The Coast is Clear," She Whispered
"He asked me to go to Brooklyn and talk things over."
"Yes!" She had a way of making this mere affirmative a demand for particularity.
"We talked things over," Widder offhandedly acknowledged. "He told me his chemists had practically found out the constituent elements of my fireproofing mixture. Or, if they hadn't got my mixture, he said, they'd hit on something almost as good."
"But isn't yours patented?" inquired the girl.
"Of course," retorted Widder. "And he said he knew that. He'd respect that patent, he declared, and wanted to do the right thing. He said he'd give my claims a fair test. Then he asked me if I'd be willing to come to the factory as an expert worker for six months."
Widder paused, apparently to let this sink in.
"He asked me what would seem a fair salary. So I said sixty dollars a week."
"Sixty dollars?" echoed the girl.
Widder nodded.
"We compromised on fifty," he casually acknowledged.
"You—you mean it's settled?" asked the wide-eyed young woman across the table from him.
And again he nodded.
"The agreement is that if I can make my fireproofing mixture eleven cents a gallon cheaper than the company's they'll buy out the rights for twelve thousand dollars down, or be willing to pay me a fair royalty."
Her appraising eyes were fixed on his tremulous face flushed with its look of excited triumph.
"But can you do it?" she demanded.
"Yes, I can do it," declared Widder. "And I've a marine paint for ships' bottoms, a barnacle-proof paint, that I guess I can work out when I'm over there with them!"
The girl sat silent for a long time. "Then this—this changes everything," she finally ventured.
"Are you sorry?" asked the astounded Widder.
"No, I'm glad—very glad," she told him, but he saw no sign of the triumph that he had looked for in her honest hazel eyes.
"It was really your letter that did the trick," he said, not so much to bridge the silence itself as that wider gulf which seemed to be shouldering abysmally between them.
"So I'm the one that's a failure," she meditated aloud. She laughed a little, but there was a touch of bitterness in that laughter. Two red spots showed on her face, close beside the scarcely discernible cheek-bone hollows.
"But you've got your position," protested Widder, feeling that if they could no longer be linked together by failure they must in some way still be united by success.
"I'm not going to take that position," she said, meeting his gaze, but with an effort.
"You're not going to take it?" repeated the amazed Widder.
She shook her head in negation.
"Why?" he demanded.
"I can't explain the reason to-night."
Widder looked worried.
"But what will you do?" he asked.
"I scarcely know," she told him.
He accused himself, as he stole a glance at her unhappy face, of being a party to her failure. He was undoubtedly the cause of it all. He had brought that medical dictionary into the game and compelled her to sail under false colors. He had bolstered up her hopes and made this final failure of hers all the harder to bear. It astonished him to find that his own success could suddenly mean so little to him. And he wondered if, after all, it could even be called success.
"But something must be done," he protested.
"Oh, I'll get along all right," she said.
But Widder could see that she spoke without spirit.
"Would you rather I drop this?" he suddenly asked.
"Why should you?"
"If it's going to make any difference," he stammered, "I'd—I'd rather go back to the old way."
She raised her head at this and looked steadily into his face. Her own face was very pale. But she did not speak.
"You know," Widder blundered on, "it was really you who elbowed me out of that rut of mine. I'd have gone on and on without ever thinking of changing. And when I got in a tight place—and it is a tight place when you actually get to breaking counterfeit money—it was you that turned me straight again."
"But I was the cause of that too!" she protested.
"Well, I'm not sorry, when I remember it helped you," he said with sudden boldness.
"But I'm afraid it didn't help me."
"Then I've never really repaid you," declared Widder. "All I've done is mix things up for you!"
"You're the one friend, the one honest and disinterested friend, I've known since I came to this city."
Those words were like wine to Widder's thirsty soul. But they were not enough.
"And that's the one thing I want to be," he had the courage to articulate.
"But that's the one thing, I'm afraid, we can't be," was her quiet reply.
"Why not?" he demanded, trying to fight back the rising tide of his misery.
"I can't tell you—now!"
"But when will you tell me?"
It seemed to take all her courage to meet his stare.
"When I tell you, it means that you will despise me," she finally said.
Widder, with his brow wrinkled, stared wonderingly into her white face. Then he felt his heart go down, like a paper balloon with its fuse burned out.
"You—you don't mean that you're married?" he asked with a forlorn gulp of anguish.
Her thin face colored, like a thin glass filled with Burgundy. She was even able to laugh a little at the open misery in his stricken eyes.
"No, I'm not married," she said, looking away from him. Neither of them spoke for a minute or two, for the rotund German waiter was taking away their soup plates and putting a pickled Bismarck herring in front of them.
"And you'd rather not tell me anything?" Widder asked when the waiter had gone.
"Can't we let things go for to-night?" she asked.
"I'd rather let things go forever if it's going to make a difference," Widder said with his eyes on his Bismarck herring. For that, he knew, was a recklessly daring speech, and on occasions of such recklessness he seemed unable to meet her quietly appraising eyes.
X
WIDDER was awakened that night by the sound of nibbling mice. He could hear them distinctly, at work on the wooden boards somewhere about his room. He lay there in the dark, drowsily striving to locate the sound. Then he suddenly sat up in bed, wide awake, for he finally knew that no mouse was making the sound that had disturbed his midnight sleep.
It was a gnawing sound, but it was a continuous to be made by any rodent's teeth. It had the trick of starting, stopping, and going on again. But between each murmur of broken sound was a louder noise of splintering wood and an occasional faint squeak, like that of a cork rubbed on a window pane.
But that sound was not coming from his window, Widder promptly decided. It was coming from the corner where his door stood. And it was being made, he told himself, by a brace and bit. It was someone breaking into his room. That unknown someone was either cutting out a square from the door panel, or was using an auger to make a pad of contiguous holes about the lock, so that it could be lifted away and the door swung open. Widder, for the first time in his life, saw that he was about to be visited by a burglar.
The anticipation of that visit was not altogether pleasant to him. Yet he found himself with scant power to prohibit it. Even as he sat there debating on some plan of action, the noises from the door corner underwent a change. They merged into the sounds of an instrument gently prying and crushing against soft pine. Then came a small noise of parting wood, followed by a scrape of metal against metal. Widder, with his heart in his mouth, realized that the door lock had been lifted away, that an exploring hand had reached in and drawn back his bolt.
His last doubt of this vanished when he heard the familiar and unmistakable squeak of a hinge. This was followed by a silence so prolonged and so profound that the man on the bed finally yielded to the belief that the intruder had retreated. But again the telltale hinge squeak warned him that he was mistaken. The door had been closed again.
Widder did not dare to move. He knew that someone was in the room. Through the operation of some occult sixth sense he could feel a presence there as distinctly as though that intruder stood bathed in light. And at the same time he knew that it was the man from the hall bedroom. Why he knew he could not have explained. But he knew.
He could hear the man, now, padding and feeling cautiously along the wall. He could catch the faint sound of the slowly sliding feet, one after the other, and the minute scrape of a chair leg as the intruder came unexpectedly in contact with it. But that betraying sound was followed by another long interval of silence. Widder, as he waited for that silence to end, remembered that it might be expedient to carry out a pretense of slumber in case a flash-light should be thrown over him. But he was afraid to lie down again, for he knew that ever complaining folding bed would advertise the slightest movement of his own body. So he sat there, peering through the velvety blackness, wondering what the burglar's next movement would be.
He had not long to wait. The studiously deliberate movement along the wall began again. It kept up, cautious and slow, until it had progressed as far as the foot of the folding bed. When the dark-room door was reached Widder could hear a hand padding about the panels, exploring the frame, feeling cautiously for the knob. He could even hear a faint sigh of satisfaction, followed by the infinitely cautious turning of this knob. The man from the hall bedroom, it was clear, knew exactly what he was after, and exactly in what direction to go for it.
It was not until this dark-room door was swung quietly back that the truth came home to Widder. He realized then what the man was after. It was the Calabrian's suitcase!
Widder would have been only too willing to give him that bag full of counterfeit. He would even have been glad to pay him to take the stuff away. But the suitcase was no longer there. It was not even where he could send the man for it, or go fetch it himself. Only the holder of the claim check could ever recover that bag from the Grand Central parcel room where it lay. And that claim check, he remembered, was in Alice Tredwell's possession.
Widder sat there in the darkness, with a moist forehead, debating what to do. The man from the hall bedroom was not a promising type to argue with. His face, from the first, had struck Widder as an especially evil one. It was plain that he wanted the suitcase, that he had determined to possess it, that he was willing to face the gravest of risks to get it. He would be armed, of course. If interfered with, at a time like this, there was no knowing to what extremes he might go. And Widder had no desire to confront him—at least none beyond a vague inclination to ask the intruder to be careful of his working models. For Widder was not of that heroic mold that glories in fighting for the sheer sake of the fight. He possessed, on the contrary, a positive distaste for violence. He liked peace and quietness. Like other equable and mild-mannered men, he was slow to move. But when moved he was apt to move abandonedly, like a bowlder down a hillside, for quietness to him meant civilization, and with the loss of that anchorage he lost all touch with an ordered world.
So Widder sat there, wondering just what he ought to do. He peered through the blackness at the dark-room door. To his surprise he detected a faint pencil of light along the floor where that portal ought to stand. He realized then that the intruder had quietly shut himself in the dark room, had as quietly lighted the gas, and was now apparently engrossed in a thorough and systematic search of that chamber. The effrontery of the man almost took Widder's breath away. Yet it was something more than effrontery, he conceded as he stared at the light streak along the floor. It was the recklessness of a man who could take any risk lightly. And the presence of such a man between one's walls meant added peril with the passing of every minute. The suitcase was not there; and the man was after it. Yet the only way it could be obtained was through Alice Tredwell. And Widder did not want Alice Tredwell mixed up with that particular type of cutthroat.
He realized that he could do nothing, however, without clothes on. One had to have clothes on, even to go out for a policeman. And to go out for a policeman seemed the one sane and natural thing to do. But at this point Widder chanced to remember the key in his dark-room door lock, and there occurred to him still another natural thing to do. And that was to turn the key and trap the intruder where he stood.
This involved certain risks, but Widder took no time to think of them. He worked his way quietly and cautiously over the edge of the bed. Then he tiptoed as cautiously toward the streak of yellow light along the floor. If he shivered a little it was more from the arctic cold of the early morning air than from fear. For he felt that it must be early morning. It was four and after, he surmised, from the increasing rumble of traffic echoing over the house-tops from Twenty-third Street. The pulse of that busier artery advised him that the city would soon be wakening. But there was a soft pedal on the sound, which made him feel sure that it must be snowing again. And the thought of snow, as he stood there in the drafty gloom, tended to sharpen his appetite for apparel. Yet before he could dress he felt the need of turning that key in his dark-room lock
He found the door frame and reached for the key gingerly. Then he stood waiting for some small noise from the inner room with which to synchronize any possible sound of his lock movement. The moment came at last, and the key was turned.
Widder backed cautiously away, with his eye on the door. And as he groped even more cautiously about for his clothing he continued to keep an eye fixed on that ever-menacing door. His prisoner, he knew, was not in a cell, and a door panel was not the most substantial of barriers. And he still pictured that prisoner as being armed, armed to the teeth. He fancied himself staring into the eye of a big blue-barreled automatic, the kind of automatic that graced pawnshop windows and, even in their quiescence, had the power of making one's nerve ends throw up their hands, the same as certain surgical instruments always gave one goose flesh.
The mere thought of firearms brought Widder up short in his tracks. He believed in quietude and common sense. He was by no means given to violent impulses. Yet his thoughts suddenly went out to his automatic fire escape and the prospect of promptly cascading into the safety of Twenty-fourth Street. The fire escape was there, screwed to the woodwork beside his own window. It was a model of his own invention, a spring reel with a double waist-belt at the end of a cotton rope that the reluctant mechanism paid out discreetly, lowering its user danglingly and spiderlike to the street, like a cargo mat at the end of a crane cable. One dive over the sill, Widder knew, meant freedom. But it seemed too undignified. He could not descend on the city, like a Hindu gymnosophist, devoid of apparel and in danger of prompt incarceration.
So he renewed the silent search for his clothing, sadly conscious that the man without his trappings of leather and cotton and wool was the most helpless of animals. If he dressed noiselessly, he also made it a point to dress as hurriedly as his somewhat unsteady fingers would permit. There were divers buttons and accessories about which he did not even bother. His toilet, on the whole, was somewhat of an approximation. Shoes and collar and tie, in fact, he carried in his hand, since the absence of the former insured silence of movement and the adjustment of the latter necessitated both a mirror and a tranquil mind. But Widder overlooked neither his hat nor his overcoat. He even went back to the bed to rescue his faithful nickel watch from under the pillow.
Then he tiptoed slowly and cautiously toward the hall door, swinging it quietly open and shutting it as softly behind him. Tread by tread, feeling carefully for squeaks, he descended the stairway, rounded the third-floor hall, and again took up his descent. It was not until he reached the bottom steps of the last stairway that he stopped. Then, after listening intently, he sat down on the lowest step and proceeded to put on his shoes. He did the same with his hat.
He had just caught the fringe of his right sleeve between his palm and finger-ends, preparatory to thrusting an arm into his overcoat, when that movement was arrested by a sound from the front of the hall. And small as it was, there could be no mistake as to the nature of that noise. It was made by a key being quietly fitted into the lock of the street door.
Widder, as he heard that key being turned, promptly rounded the banister end and backed away into the engulfing gloom. He came to a stop only when he came into collision with a wall and could back no farther. He saw the door open slowly. Then, outlined against the vague light of the street lamps, further dimmed by the snow, he caught sight of a woman's figure.
The first thing that surprised Widder was the fact that she made no movement to enter the house, but stood there, intently whispering to some one whom he could not see. But his vaster surprise came with the discovery that this woman was Alice Tredwell. So great was his astonishment that he raised a hand and rubbed his eyes. And still again his wavering vision declared it to be Alice Tredwell.
As to that, there was no longer a chance of mistake. Vague as that scarcely moving silhouette was, it carried too familiar a line to leave Widder any hope. And with the loss of that hope the bottom suddenly fell out of Widder's world. Whimpering suspicions that he had kept kenneled in his heart suddenly made uproar in his blood. He stood, sick with an apprehension that was all the keener by being undefined, as the softly outlined figure pointed in through the open door. The next moment Widder could see two wide-shouldered men step into the hall. They advanced stealthily. It was not until they had reached the foot of the stairs, and had begun their noiseless ascent, that Alice Tredwell, after watching them for a second or two, quietly closed the street door again.
The closing of that door, Widder felt, closed the portal on certain earthly hopes which had seemed precious because they were absurd. The mystery was solved. She was one of them. He knew now what she had been hinting at, what she had been too weak to acknowledge.
But Widder no longer hesitated. He strode to the street door, opened it, and stepped outside.
He found her there, standing close in beside the dull red brick of the house wall. Her attitude seemed one of waiting, but even more one of weariness. She turned quickly as he faced her. The light was not clear. He could not be sure of the expression of her face. But her body at least did not cower back.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded. His voice, however, was by no means as brusque as his words. It was almost grotesquely querulous. He had decided to be short with her, short and sharp as steel. But for Widder that was an impossibility.
Instead of answering him, she stood staring through the uncertain light into his face. It seemed to take time for her to absorb the full shock of his sudden appearance. So Widder was compelled to repeat his question.
"I had to come," she finally said. She spoke with an abandoned listlessness that he could not understand.
"Why?
"Because I had a key to the house," she equivocated.
"That doesn't answer my question," declared Widder, astounded at his own severity of voice.
"It will be answered sooner than you expect," was her wearily indifferent response.
"But I'd rather you'd answer it."
"Very well," she said, "I'll answer it. I was waiting here to make sure you were quite safe!"
"Why safe?"
"Because there's a dangerous criminal in that house, and I was afraid."
"Afraid of what?"
"That he might kill you."
"What criminal?"
"A coiner named Vasserelli. He's been shadowing you for days now. He even moved into that hall room to be near you. Piazzia sent him word from prison. He would have killed you to get possession of those plates."
"How do you know this?" Widder demanded.
She hesitated a moment before answering.
"Because I've just let these two men in to arrest Vasserelli. He is wanted by the police."
She told her story glibly enough.
"But those two men were not policemen."
"No; they were Federal officers, plain-clothes men.
"But why do they come at this hour?"
"Because this is the safest time. They can get Vasserelli when he's in bed, unarmed. It's"
"But that man's not unarmed and he's not in bed!" was Widder's sudden cry.
"How do you know that?" was her equally quick inquiry.
"Because I've just locked him in my dark room," Widder announced.
She had her key already in the lock.
"Then we must let them know," she gasped.
"But why should you have to let them know?" demanded the perplexed Widder.
"I can't take time to tell you now," she said, shaking his hand from her arm.
"But I can't let you go up there," he protested as he realized that she already had the door open and was moving through it.
Her courage, under the circumstances, was not altogether to his liking. He was vaguely depressed by the absence of the heroic in his own conduct. He seemed to have side-stepped a crisis instead of facing it with his jaws set, as it would have been faced by the gasconading heroes whom the world greets with such ready approval. But it had seemed the sensible thing, to get dressed and go out for a policeman, just as it seemed a sensible thing to keep Alice Tredwell from invading those upper regions of unknown hazard. And he suddenly awakened to the fact that he was actually holding her back.
"I must go," she whispered, though this time she made no effort to break away from him.
"But it isn't safe," he told her.
She had turned about and closed the street door.
"Are you afraid?" she asked him.
"No," he declared.
"Then we'll go together," she announced.
He felt her hand reach out for his in the darkness as they moved slowly forward. Then they drew up short, for out of the darkness a sepulchral voice called out the one pregnant word of "Stop!"
The command was followed by a lugubrious groan. At the same time the gas jet at the bottom of the stairs flared up, and if Widder had stood for a moment uncertain as to the origin of this interception, his doubts were soon dispelled. For there, under the recklessly singing gas jet, stood the apparitional figure of Feeney herself. She wore a soiled and faded peignoir of brocaded silk, and her hair, still done up in "kids," bore a startling resemblance to the coiled serpent coiffure of one of the Grecian Eumenides.
"Yuh'll not come into this house!" she announced with dilated nostrils as she barred all ascent by imposing her own portly figure on the lowest step of the stairway.
"Why not?" asked Widder, so feebly that he was promptly ashamed of the meekness of his own voice. But fear of Mrs. Feeney had become almost an instinct with him.
"Because this is a r'spuctable house," intoned their funereal interceptor. "And them that goes and comes at all hours o' the night will not go and come through my door!" And still again she groaned heavily at the enormity of it all.
"You're a foolish old woman," promptly and calmly declared the girl staring up at her.
"Foolish, am I?" said Mrs. Feeney with a snort. "Foolish I have been, young lady, to endoor goin's on such as there's been under this roof o' mine! Foolish I was not to see what such gallivantin' and lalligaggin'd bring on me and mine! This has been a house o' quiet and r'spuctable people, a house o' peace, a house"
Mrs. Feeney's voice, so vibrant with indignation, trailed suddenly off into silence. For high above her came the distinct sound of a pistol shot, followed by a quick shout or two and much stamping of feet.
"Good heavens!" gasped Widder, never before known to surrender to profanity.
"Listen!" sharply commanded the girl. She stepped close over to the banister, quite ignoring the statuesque Mrs. Feeney, and called up shrilly, "Is it all right?"
"Yes, it's all right!" called back a deep voice after a moment's silence. They could hear heavy footsteps descending the upper stairs, and then the sound of opening doors and high-pitched feminine interrogations and lower-toned masculine calls.
The girl, without knowing it, had once more caught Widder's hand in hers.
"They've got him," she whispered.
They stood watching the stairway until two wide-shouldered men came into sight holding between them the cowering figure of a man with a pair of nickeled handcuffs over his wrists. They even shouldered the cataleptic Mrs. Feeney off her own stairway, and from high abovestairs this blunt dethronement was applauded by a woman's laughter, shrill as a kingfisher's chatter.
"It's all right, miss," explained the taller of the two officers to the white-faced girl. "We just waited until he walked out into our arms. But he shot a hole through the roof before we got his gun."
Mrs. Feeney's breathing became audible.
"Such goin's on!" she chokingly groaned. "Such goin's on!"
"You'd better be at headquarters by ten," continued the officer. "And some one'll have to swear out a warrant for the fleshy dame here. We'll want her as as a witness!"
It was not until that strange trio stepped out through the street door that Mrs. Feeney recovered her voice:
"So it's doo to yuh, Mister Widder, that my roomers is took out o' their beds and my house made a scandal to the neighborhood! So it's doo to yuh and this this" Words seeming to fail her, she filled in the ellipsis with a moan of inadequacy,
"The less you say the better!" Widder told her with unexpected spirit.
"Yuh come into my house, that was a house o' peace, and"
"Well, you're welcome to your house of peace," interjected Widder. "I've had enough of it."
"Well may yuh say that, Mister Widder. But yuh're goin' to hear me out, both o' yuh. Yuh're goin'"
"Take me away from here," commanded the girl in a thin voice as she caught hold of Widder's arm and clung to it. And Widder, straightening back his shoulders, turned and led her to the door.
XI
SNOW, no matter what its beauty, is an unwelcome guest in a great city. It tends to clog the sclerotic arteries of urban life. The hoofs and tires of hurry flail its starry flakes into a formless batter. It is something to be viewed with alarm by the affluent, who have to put shovelers on their walks or chains on their motor wheels, and is welcomed only by the improvident, who slide upon it or whistle cheerily up into its fleeciness.
So Widder, as he led Alice Tredwell away from Mrs. Feeney's rooming house in the first gray light of early morning, saw the steadily falling snow and rather gloried in it. It seemed to frame them off from the rest of the city, leaving them as Edenically isolated as though they walked the fringes of a desert island. It muffled the awakening roar of traffic, and so miraculously heightened the tones of somber asphalt planes that even a side street tended to bewilder the eye, like a garden overcrowded with bloom.
And the girl, who still clung to Widder's arm, seemed to glory in it, for when he timidly told her of a Fourth Avenue oyster house, where they might get a platter of bacon and eggs and a pot of hot coffee, she promptly shook her head.
"I don't think I could swallow," she told him. "Please, let's just walk on like this!"
So they walked on through the steadily falling snow, staring up into the feathery grayness with abstracted and solemn faces. For to Widder that flight from Mrs. Feeney's rooming house began to translate itself into something more than a flight. It became a migration, a pilgrimage, a crusade, a movement involving vast issues. They seemed alone on the peak of a Great Divide which, when once crossed, would throw all the currents of all their life toward another and utterly unknown sea.
They walked along, arm in arm, without sense of direction or thought of destination. It was not until Widder was openly struck by the silence about them, and stared with puzzled eyes at the long vista of the black iron fence that they seemed to be circling, that he realized they were walking round and round the inclosed quadrangle of Gramercy Park. He exulted in the thought that Alice Tredwell was still clinging to his arm. It tended to bridge the abyss that seemed, to Widder, always to stretch between one lonely human soul and another. It made life itself seem a sort of adventure, an inextricably tangled and yet an inexplicably joyous adventure, which led heaven knows where and ended heaven knows how. But it was worth the finding out.
And one twist of it he seemed on the brink of finding out, for the girl at his side suddenly slackened her pace and looked up into his face.
"There's something I suppose I must tell you," she began, and he could see that she was not finding it easy to speak.
"No," he commanded. "Not unless you want to!"
Her eyes thanked him for his bigness. But her wry smile seemed to imply that bigness in another could not condone littleness in herself.
"But I've got to," she declared. "I've been unfair enough as it is!"
"But if we'll both be sorry" he began.
"That doesn't count. I guess it's what's ahead of us in life that counts."
"Yes, what's ahead of us," he agreed with rising hopes, for whatever was past it was plain that she was not utterly divorcing him from her future.
"Do you know why I moved into that hall bedroom?" she demanded.
He did not, of course.
"I moved there to be as near you as I could get," she continued.
"Near me?" he echoed.
"You'd been shadowed for weeks before I came!"
"Shadowed? Why was I shadowed?"
"Because the secret-service division of the Treasury Department had reason to believe you'd come into possession of counterfeit and plates made by an Italian named Piazzia."
"Well, you knew that!"
"Yes, I knew it, for I was sent there to find it out. Can't you understand? I was a spotter. I was sent, by the officials down in that Bowling Green office, just to watch you. I was told to trap you, to make you break one of those counterfeit bills, if I could, and catch you in the act!"
"Then that's—that's what your work is?" inquired the unhappy Widder.
"No, it's not my work! was the girl's vehement declaration. "That's the cowardly part of it. I was driven into it at the last because I'd failed at everything else. I tried to pick up stenography when I saw that my pastel work was hopeless. I answered an advertisement of a man on lower Broadway, and after he'd talked to me for a few minutes he said he could pass me on to a better job. He said I was new to the city and innocent looking, and would be just the sort of woman they'd want. He told me it was confidential Government work. That sounded important and official, and blinded me about what I was really doing. Otherwise I'd never have thought of it. I did refuse it at first, until I began to think I was going to starve. I detested the idea of being a spy, of sneaking about corners and prying into other people's affairs.
"And the cruel part of it is that you—you were the person I was sent to spy on—you, the one and only man who has been kind to me in all this city!"
"But it's done me no harm," expostulated Widder. "It's"
"But see what it made of me!" she cut in. "I was trying to succeed by trading on your bigness of heart, by imposing on your generosity! I tricked you into thinking you were helping me with that medical dictionary when all the while"
"Then that doctor with the jawbreaker words wasn't—wasn't real?"
"Oh, yes, he was real enough, but I found I could twist him into my new line of work. I saw that he could be made to bait my hook, to catch you. And I jumped at the chance when it came. So it was really all a lie, a white lie, the worst kind of a lie!"
"But I did break one of those counterfeit bills!" contended Widder.
"I know it," she acknowledged.
"Then—then why didn't you do what you were sent to do?" he demanded.
"Because I liked you too much," she had the courage to tell him. "I knew you were good at heart, and that I was the—the other thing. So I was too cowardly even to do my work. I failed even in that. I wanted to save you, but I didn't know how. And I knew that if I failed they'd send somebody who'd not fail. But even then I was too cowardly to do anything, until I found out about this other Italian, Vasserelli.
"That's what gave me the courage to take the suitcase away from you. And I hadn't the courage to tell the truth even about that. They think I got it out of Vasserelli's room. But even that may have been a mistake. For you'd already cleared yourself in every way you could. You'd corrected the mistake about the counterfeit. You'd showed that you were honest through and through, while I was everything that was not honest!"
Widder walked on in silence, trying to straighten it all out.
"Then what are we going to do about it?" he finally asked
"There's nothing we can do about it. It's over as far as we are concerned!"
"But you'll go on with your work?" he asked.
"I have no work. I let their two deputies into that house of yours. But I told them that was the end."
"Then what will you do?"
"I don't know," was her listless answer. "But I'll get along somehow or other."
Widder once more walked on in silence. He found himself with a great deal of thinking to do.
"Do you know," he began at last, "I'm glad this happened. I'm glad of everything. For if it hadn't happened I'd be back there in the same old rut. And now everything's changed. I don't know why exactly, but it's terribly changed!"
She nodded her head in silent affirmation.
"You mean you'll have your work now, that you'll succeed as you ought to."
"But what's the good of succeeding if you have to succeed alone. I've just been thinking that that must be about the hardest thing in the world. If you fail it's easy to fail alone. I guess that's why you do fail, why you're satisfied to fail, just because you are alone."
"I don't think failure is ever easy," she said, peering into the grayness of the falling snow.
"I've been thinking about that too," explained Widder. "But I can't exactly put it into words. I want to say it, but I don't know how to say it without seeming to hurt you."
"I think I deserve to be hurt!"
Widder denied that with vigor. He looked at her pale face, slightly flushed over the cheek bones by their early morning exercise. He could see a snowflake melt on the upturned lashes. She seemed something fragile and flowerlike in the desolation of a world made more desolate by its ceaseless blanket of swirling white. She was something to be looked after and protected and kept warm. Even the raincoat she was wearing was not the right sort of clothing for such weather. She needed something warmer—and newer.
"You know this position of mine isn't going to mean much to me," Widder tried to explain to her, "if it's only for my own satisfaction. You'll say it ought to make me happy, and I suppose it does. But you can't teach an old dog new tricks!"
"Don't call yourself old," she commanded. For all her sense of flowerlike fineness, Widder knew, that girl had a mind and a will of her own. It was a practical, clear-cut mind, the sort that he was so sadly in need of. But it left him a little afraid to say what he wanted to say. He wanted to tell her that it was too late for him to look for joy for himself. Life had in some way schooled him to be satisfied without it.
He could catch it now only on the rebound from youth that was no longer his. He could only buy it secondhand, the same as he used to buy his overcoats. Life could be once more an adventure only as he saw it reflected in her adventuring eyes.
But to express this strange feeling seemed beyond him. So he suddenly caught his breath and solved the problem as a man tired of trying to pick a lock suddenly pries open a cabinet door.
"Could you ever think of marrying me?" he heard a voice that did not seem to be his own voice asking. He thought he was saying it casually, but he could feel the pump of sudden pulses in his throat and temples.
The girl stopped short. Then she moved slowly on again.
"No!" she said with her habitual side shake of the head.
"Why?" he asked.
"In the first place, because you don't care for me. People can't marry without"
She did not finish the sentence.
"But there's where I think you're wrong," he said, speaking as quietly as she had spoken. "I do care. Everything seems to change as soon as I'm near you I've noticed it from that first night. I walk in a kind of glow. I could keep on just going round and round this park fence in the snow, if your arm was in mine this way, and be perfectly happy.
He thrilled to the sudden pressure of her fingers on his forearm. But she did not speak.
"I suppose it sounds pretty foolish?" he asked a little timorously.
She stopped short again.
"Foolish?" she repeated. "It—it sounds lovely."
"Then you believe it?"
"Believe what?"
"That I love you."
The level hazel eyes were looking straight into his. He could see her deep-cut underlip trembling a little.
"Do you?" she asked almost imploringly.
"Yes," Widder replied. "I do."
She was silent a moment. Even the two spots of color over the tender line of the cheek bones had faded away.
"Then kiss me!" she said, leaning toward him.
Widder with a gulp essayed a peck at her cheek, like a pigeon snatching at a flower seed.
"Not that way," she said almost in a whisper. "A real kiss.
Widder turned pink. He could feel his knees tremble. But he took a deep breath, like a diver on the edge of his spring board, and drew her into his arms. Then his lips met and clung to the warm lips reaching up to his, and he forgot to remember to be ashamed.
For three factory girls, scurrying arm in arm to work, hooted aloud at the strange sight of a shabbily dressed man holding a white-faced young woman in his arms on the open street.
"Ain't they the foolish ones?" sang out the youngest of the three. Her laugh was loud and reckless with the vulpine courage of her kind. Being one of a flock, she was no longer afraid.
"Oh, momma!" cried the second girl derisively. But in that cry was some ghostly shadow of envy.
"Pipe the deat' clinch!" hooted the third girl. But she, too, turned to look back through the falling snow, and a vague hunger touched her laughing face. Then the three relinked arms and scurried on to their work.
(THE END)