The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 1

The Man Who Couldn't Sleep.

by Arthur Stringer.

CHAPTER I

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT

To begin with, I am a Canadian by birth, and thirty-three years old.

For nine of those years I have lived in New York. And by my friends in that city I am regarded as a successful author.

There was a time when I even regarded myself in much the same light.

But that period is past. I now have to face the fact that I am a failure. For when a man is no longer able to write he naturally can no longer be reckoned as an author.

I have made the name of Witter Kerfoot too well known, I think, to explain that practically all of my stories have been written about Alaska. Just why I resorted to that far-off country for my settings is still more or less a mystery to me. Perhaps it was merely because of its far-offness. Perhaps it was because the editors remembered that I came from the land of the beaver and sagely concluded that a Canadian would be most at home in writing about the Frozen North. At any rate, when I romanced about the Yukon and its ice-bound trails they bought my stories, and asked for more.

And I gave them more. I gave them blood-red fiction about gun-men and claim-jumpers and Siwash queens and salmon fisheries. I gave them supermen of iron, fighting against cold and hunger, and snarling, always snarling, at their foes. I gave them oratorical young engineers with clear-cut features and sinews of steel, battling against the forces of hyperborean evil. I gave them fist-fights that caused my books to be discreetly shut out of school-libraries yet brought in telegrams from motion-picture directors for first rights. I gave them enough gun-play to shoot Chilcoot Pa.s.s into the middle of the Pacific, and was publicly denominated as the apostle of the Eye-Socket School, and during the three-hundred-night run of my melodrama, _The Pole Raiders_, even beheld on the Broadway sign-boards an extraordinarily stalwart picture of myself in a rakish Stetson and a flannel s.h.i.+rt very much open at the throat, with a cow-hide holster depending from my Herculean waist-line and a very dreadful-looking six-shooter protruding from the open top of that belted holster. My publishers spoke of me, for business reasons, as the Interpreter of the Great Northwest. And I exploited that territory with the industry of a badger. In my own way, I mined Alaska. And it brought me in a very respectable amount of pay-dirt.

But I knew nothing about Alaska, I had never even seen the country. I "crammed up" on it, of course, the same as we used to cram up for a third-form examination in Latin grammar. I perused the atlases and sent for governmental reports, and pored over the R.N.W.M.P. Blue Books, and gleaned a hundred or so French-Canadian names for half-breed villains from a telephone-directory for the city of Montreal. But I knew no more about Alaska than a Fiji Islander knows about the New York Stock Exchange. And that was why I could romance so freely, so magnificently, about it!

I was equally prodigal of blood, I suppose, because I had never seen the real thing flow--except in the case of my little niece, when her tonsils had been removed and a very soft-spoken nurse had helped me out of the surgery and given me a drink of ice-water, after telling me it would be best to keep my head as low as possible until I was feeling better. As for firearms, I abhorred them. I never shot off an air-rifle without first shutting my eyes. I never picked up a duck-gun without a wince of aversion. So I was able to do wonderful things with firearms, on paper. And with the Frozen Yukon and firearms combined, I was able to work miracles. I gave a whole continent goose-flesh, so many times a season. And the continent seemed to enjoy it, for those airy essays in iron and gore were always paid for, and paid for at higher and higher rates.

While this was taking place, something even more important was taking place, something which finally brought me in touch with Mary Lockwood herself. It was accident more than anything else, I think, that first launched me in what is so indefinitely and often so disparagingly known as society. Society, as a rule, admits only the lions of my calling across its sacred portals. And even these lions, I found, were accepted under protest or the wing of some commendable effort for charity, and having roared their little hour, were let pa.s.s quietly out to oblivion again. But I had been lucky enough to bring letters to the Peytons and to the Gruger-Philmores, and these old families, I will be honest enough to confess, had been foolish enough to like me.

So from the first I did my best to live up to those earlier affiliations. I found myself pa.s.sed on, from one mysteriously barricaded seclusion to the other. The tea-hour visit merged into the formal dinner, and the formal dinner into the even more formal box at the Horse-Show, and then a call to fill up a niche at the Metropolitan on a Caruso-night, or a vacancy for an a.s.sembly Dance at Sherry's, or a week at Tuxedo, in winter, when the skating was good.

I worked hard to keep up my end of the game. But I was an impostor, of course, all along the line. I soon saw that I had to prove more than acceptable; I had also to prove _dependable_. That I was a writer meant nothing whatever to those people. They had scant patience with the long-haired genius type. That went down only with musicians. So I soon learned to keep my bangs clipped, my trousers creased, and my necktie inside my coat-lapels. I also learned to use my wits, and how to key my talk up to dowager or down to debutante, and how to be pa.s.sably amusing even before the champagne course had arrived. I made it a point to remember engagements and anniversaries, and more than once sent flowers and Millairds, which I went hungry to pay for. Even my _pourboires_ to butlers and footmen and maids stood a matter, in those earlier days, for much secret and sedulous consideration.

But, as I have said, I tried to keep up my end. I _liked_ those large and orderly houses. I liked the quiet-mannered people who lived in them. I liked looking at life with their hill-top unconcern for trivialities. I grew rather contemptuous of my humbler fellow-workers who haunted the neighborhood theaters and the red-inkeries of Greenwich Village, and orated Socialism and blank-verse poems to garret audiences, and wore window-curtain cravats and celluloid blinkers with big round lenses, and went in joyous and caramel-eating groups to the "rush" seats at _Rigoletto_. I was accepted, as I have already tried to explain, as an impecunious but dependable young bachelor. And I suppose I could have kept on at that role, year after year, until I developed into a foppish and somewhat threadbare old _beau_. But about this time I was giving North America its first spasms of goose-flesh with my demiG.o.d type of Gibsonian engineer who fought the villain until his flannel s.h.i.+rt was in rags and then shook his fist in Nature's face when she dogged him with the Eternal Cold. And there was money in writing for flat-dwellers about that Eternal Cold, and about battling claw to claw and fang to fang, and about eye-sockets without any eyes in them. My income gathered like a snow-ball. And as it gathered I began to feel that I ought to have an establishment--not a back-room studio in Was.h.i.+ngton Square, nor a garret in the Village of the Free-Versers, nor a mere apartment in the West Sixties, nor even a duplex overlooking Central Park South. I wanted to be something more than a number. I wanted a house, a house of my own, and a cat-footed butler to put a hickory-log on the fire, and a full set of _Sevres_ on my mahogany sideboard, and something to stretch a strip of red carpet across when the landaulets and the limousines rolled up to my door.

So I took a nine-year lease of the Whighams' house in Gramercy Square.

It was old-fas.h.i.+oned and sedate and unpretentious to the pa.s.sing eye, but beneath that somewhat somber sh.e.l.l nested an amazingly rich kernel of luxuriousness. It was good form; it was unbelievably comfortable, and it was not what the climber clutches for. The cost of even a nine-year claim on it rather took my breath away, but the thought of Alaska always served to stiffen up my courage.

It was necessary to think a good deal about Alaska in those days, for after I had acquired my house I also had to acquire a man to run it, and then a couple of other people to help the man who helped me, and then a town car to take me back and forth from it, and then a chauffeur to take care of the car, and then the service-clothes for the chauffeur, and the thousand and one unlooked for things, in short, which confront the pin-feather householder and keep him from feeling too much a lord of creation.

Yet in Benson, my butler, I undoubtedly found a gem of the first water.

He moved about as silent as a panther, yet as watchful as an eagle. He could be ubiquitous and self-obliterating at one and the same time. He was meekness incarnate, and yet he could coerce me into a predetermined line of conduct as inexorably as steel rails lead a street-car along its predestined line of traffic. He was, in fact, much more than a butler. He was a valet and a _chef de cuisine_ and a lord-high-chamberlain and a purchasing-agent and a body-guard and a benignant-eyed old G.o.dfather all in one. The man _babied_ me. I could see that all along. But I was already an overworked and slightly neurasthenic specimen, even in those days, and I was glad enough to have that masked and silent Efficiency always at my elbow. There were times, too, when his activities merged into those of a trained nurse, for when I smoked too much he hid away my cigars, and when I worked too hard he impersonally remembered what morning horseback riding in the park had done for a former master of his. And when I drifted into the use of chloral hydrate, to make me sleep, that dangerous little bottle had the habit of disappearing, mysteriously and inexplicably disappearing, from its allotted place in my bathroom cabinet.

There was just one thing in which Benson disappointed me. That was in his stubborn and unreasonable aversion to Latreille, my French chauffeur. For Latreille was as efficient, in his way, as Benson himself. He understood his car, he understood the traffic rules, and he understood what I wanted of him. Latreille was, after a manner of speaking, a find of my own. Dining one night at the Peytons', I had met the Commissioner of Police, who had given me a card to stroll through Headquarters and inspect the machinery of the law. I had happened on Latreille as he was being measured and "mugged" in the Identification Bureau, with those odd-looking Bertillon forceps taking his cranial measurements. The intelligence of the man interested me; the inalienable look of respectability in his face convinced me, as a student of human nature, that he was not meant for any such fate or any such environment. And when I looked into his case I found that instinct had not been amiss. The unfortunate fellow had been "framed"

for a car-theft of which he was entirely innocent. He explained all this to me, in fact, with tears in his eyes. And circ.u.mstances, when I looked into them, bore out his statements. So I visited the Commissioner, and was pa.s.sed on to the Probation Officers, from whom I caromed off to the a.s.sistant District-Attorney, who in turn delegated me to another official, who was cynical enough to suggest that the prisoner might possibly be released if I was willing to go to the extent of bonding him. This I very promptly did, for I was now determined to see poor Latreille once more a free man.

Latreille showed his appreciation of my efforts by saving me seven hundred dollars when I bought my town car--though candor compels me to admit that I later discovered it to be a used car rehabilitated, and not a product fresh from the factory, as I had antic.i.p.ated. But Latreille was proud of that car, and proud of his position, and I was proud of having a French chauffeur, though my ardor was dampened a little later on, when I discovered that Latreille, instead of hailing from the _Bois de Boulogne_ and the _Avenue de la Paix_, originated in the slightly less splendid suburbs of Three Rivers, up on the St.

Lawrence.

But my interest in Latreille about this time became quite subsidiary, for something much more important than cars happened to me. I fell in love. I fell in love with Mary Lockwood, head-over-heels in love with a girl who could have thrown a town car into the Hudson every other week and never have missed it. She was beautiful; she was wonderful; but she was dishearteningly wealthy. With all those odious riches of hers, however, she was a terribly honest and above-board girl, a healthy-bodied, clear-eyed, practical-minded, normal-living New York girl who in her twenty-two active years of existence had seen enough of the world to know what was veneer and what was solid, and had seen enough of men to demand mental camaraderie and not "squaw-talk" from them.

I first saw her at the Volpi sale, in the American Art Galleries, where we chanced to bid against each other for an old Italian table-cover, a sixteenth-century blue velvet embroidered with gold galloon. Mary bid me down, of course. I lost my table-cover, and with it I lost my heart. When I met her at the Obden-Belponts, a week later, she confessed that I'd rather been on her conscience. She generously offered to hand over that oblong of old velvet, if I still happened to be grieving over its loss. But I told her that all I asked for was a chance to see it occasionally. And occasionally I went to see it. I also saw its owner, who became more wonderful to me, week by week.

Then I lost my head over her. That _apheresis_ was so complete that I told Mary what had happened, and asked her to marry me.

Mary was very practical about it all. She said she liked me, liked me a lot. But there were other things to be considered. We would have to wait. I had my work to do--and she wanted it to be _big_ work, gloriously big work. She wouldn't even consent to a formal engagement.

But we had an "understanding." I was sent back to my work, drunk with the memory of her surrendering lips warm on mine, of her wistfully entreating eyes searching my face for something which she seemed unable to find there.

That work of mine which I went back to, however, seemed something very flat and meager and trivial. And this, I realized, was a condition which would never do. The pot had to be kept boiling, and boiling now more briskly than ever. I had lapsed into more or less luxurious ways of living; I had formed expensive tastes, and had developed a fondness for antiques and Chinese bronzes and those _objets d'art_ which are never found on the bargain-counter. I had outgrown the Spartan ways of my youth when I could lunch contentedly at Child's and sleep soundly on a studio-couch in a top-floor room. And more and more that rapacious ogre known as Social Obligation had forged his links and fetters about my movements. More than ever, I saw, I had my end to keep up. What should have been a recreation had become almost a treadmill. I was a pretender, and had my pretense to sustain. I couldn't afford to be "dropped." I had my frontiers to protect, and my powers to placate. I couldn't ask Mary to throw herself away on a n.o.body. So instead of trying to keep up one end, I tried to keep up two. I continued to bob about the fringes of the Four Hundred. And I continued to cling hungrily to Mary's hint about doing work, gloriously big work.

But gloriously big work, I discovered, was usually done by lonely men, living simply and quietly, and dwelling aloof from the frivolous side-issues of life, divorced from the distractions of a city which seemed organized for only the idler and the lotos-eater. And I could see that the pay-dirt coming out of Alaska was running thinner and thinner.

It was to remedy this, I suppose, that I dined with my old friend Pip Conners, just back to civilization after fourteen long years up in the Yukon. That dinner of ours together was memorable. It was one of the mile-stones of my life. I wanted to furbish up my information on that remote corner of the world, which, in a way, I had preempted as my own.

I wanted fresh information, first-hand data, renewed inspiration. And I was glad to feel Pip's h.o.r.n.y hand close fraternally about mine.

"Witter," he said, staring at me with open admiration, "you're a wonder."

I liked Pip's praise, even though I stood a little at a loss to discern its inspiration.

"You mean--this?" I asked, with a casual hand-wave about that Gramercy Square abode of mine.

"No, sir," was Pip's prompt retort. "I mean those stories of yours.

I've read 'em all."

I blushed at this, blushed openly. For such commendation from a man who knew life as it was, who knew life in the raw, was as honey to my ears.

"Do you mean to say you could get them, up _there_?" I asked, more for something to dissemble my embarra.s.sment than to acquire actual information.

"Yes," acknowledged Pip with a rather foolish-sounding laugh, "they come through the mails about the same as they'd come through the mails down here. And folks even read them, now and then, when the gun-smoke blows out of the valley!"

"Then what struck you as wonderful about them?" I inquired, a little at sea as to his line of thought.

"It's not _them_ that's wonderful, Witter. It's you. I said you were a wonder. And you are."

"And why am I a wonder?" I asked, with the drip of the honey no longer embarra.s.sing my modesty.

"Witter, _you're a wonder to get away with it_!" was Pip's solemnly intoned reply.

"To get away with it?" I repeated.

"Yes; to make it go down! To get 'em trussed and gagged and hog-tied!

To make 'em come and eat out of your hand and then holler for more!

For I've been up there in the British Yukon for fourteen nice comfortable years, Witter, and I've kind o' got to know the country. I know how folks live up there, and what the laws are. And it may strike you as queer, friend-author, but folks up in that district are uncommonly like folks down here in the States. And in the Klondike and this same British Yukon there is a Firearms Act which makes it against the law for any civilian to tote a gun. And that law is sure carried out. Fact is, there's no _need_ for a gun. And even if you did smuggle one in, the Mounted Police would darned soon take it away from you!"

I sat staring at him.

"But all those motion-pictures," I gasped. "And all those novels about--"

"That's why I say you're a wonder," broke in the genial-eyed Pip. "You can fool _all_ the people _all_ the time! You've done it. And you keep on doing it. You can put 'em to sleep and take it out of their pants pocket before they know they've gone by-by. Why, you've even got 'em tranced off in the matter of everyday school-geography. You've had some of those hero-guys o' yours mush seven or eight hundred miles, and on a birch-bark toboggan, between dinner and supper. And if that ain't genius, I ain't ever seen it bound up in a reading-book!"

That dinner was a mile-stone in my life, all right, but not after the manner I had expected. For as I sat there in a cold sweat of apprehension crowned with shame, Pip Conners told me many things about Alaska and the Klondike. He told me many things that were new to me, dishearteningly, discouragingly, devitalizingly new to me. Without knowing it, he poignarded me, knifed me through and through. Without dreaming what he was doing, he eviscerated me. He left me a hollow and empty mask of an author. He left me a homeless exile, with the iron gates of Fact swung sternly shut on what had been a Fairy Land of Romance, a Promised Land of untrammelled and care-free imaginings.

That was my first sleepless night.