The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 16

So I sat there listlessly watching the listlessly moving figure with the wide hat-brim pulled down over its face. There was something still youthful about the man, for all the despondent droop to the shoulders.

I asked myself idly who or what he could be. I wondered if, like myself, he was merely haunted by the curse of wakefulness, if the same bloodhounds of unrest dogged him, too, through the dark hours of the night. I wondered if he, too, was trying to escape from the grinding machinery of thought into some outer pa.s.sivity.

I saw him thread his indeterminate way along the winding park walks. I saw him glance wearily up at the ma.s.sive austerity of the Metropolitan Tower, and then turn and gaze at the faded Diana so unconcernedly poised above her stolen Sevillian turrets. I saw him look desolately about the square with its bench-rows filled with huddled and motionless sleepers. These sleepers, with their fallen heads and twisted limbs, with their contorted and moveless bodies, made the half-lit square as horrible as a battlefield. Clouded by the heavy shadows of the park trees, they seemed like the bodies of dead men, like broken and sodden things over which had ground the wheels of carnage. The only murmur or sound of life was the fountain, with its column of slowly rising and slowly falling water, like the tired pulse-beat of the tired city.

The man in the velour hat seemed to find something companionable in this movement, for he slowly drew nearer. He came within three benches of where I sat. Then he flung himself down on an empty seat. I could see his white and haggard face as he watched the splas.h.i.+ng fountain. I could see his shadowy and unhappy eyes as he pushed back his hat and mopped his moist forehead. Then I saw him suddenly bury his head in his hands and sit there, minute by minute, without moving.

When he made his next movement, it was a startling one. It sent a tingle of nerves scampering up and down my backbone. For I saw his right hand go down to his pocket, pause there a moment, and then suddenly lift again. As it did so my eye caught the white glimmer of metal. I could see the flash of a revolver as he thrust it up under the hat-brim, and held the nickeled barrel close against his temple, just above the lean jaw-bone.

It was so sudden, so unexpected, that I must have closed my eyes in a sort of involuntary wince. The first coherent thought that came to me was that I could never reach him in time. Some soberer second thought was to the effect that even my interference was useless, that he and his life were his own, that a man once set on self-destruction will not be kept from it by any outside influence.

Yet even as I looked again at his huddled figure, I heard his little gasp of something that must have been between fear and defeat. I saw the arm slowly sink to his side. He was looking straight before him, his unseeing eyes wide with terror and hazy with indecision.

It was then that I decided to interfere. To do so seemed only my plain and decent duty. Yet I hesitated for a moment, pondering just how to phrase my opening speech to him.

Even as I took a sudden, deeper breath of resolution, and was on the point of crossing to his side, I saw him fling the revolver vehemently from him. It went glimmering and tumbling along the coppery-green gra.s.s. It lay there, a point of high light against the darkness of the turf.

Then I looked back to the stranger, and saw his empty hands go up to his face. It was a quiet and yet a tragic gesture of utter misery.

Each palm was pressed in on the corded cheek-bones, with the finger-ends hard against the eyeb.a.l.l.s, as though that futile pressure could crush away all inner and all outer vision.

Then I turned back toward the fallen revolver. As I did so I noticed a figure in black step quietly out and pick up the firearm. It was the white-faced girl who had sat looking up at the stars. Before I fully realized the meaning of her movement, she slipped the weapon out of sight, and pa.s.sed silently on down the winding asphalt walk, between the rows of sleepers, toward the east. There was something arresting in the thin young figure, something vaguely purposeful and appealing in the poise of the half-veiled head.

I vacillated for a moment, undecided as to which to approach. But a second glance at the man in the velour hat, crouched there in his utter and impa.s.sive misery, caused me to cross over to him.

I put a hand on his flaccid shoulder, and shook it. He did not move at first, so I shook him again. Then he directed a slow and resentful glance at me.

"I want to have a talk with you," I began, puzzled as to how to proceed. He did not answer me.

"I want to help you if I can," I explained, as I still let my hand rest on his shoulder.

"Oh, go 'way!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, in utter listlessness, shaking my hand from his shoulder.

"No, I won't!" I quite firmly informed him. He shrank back and moved away. Then he turned on me with a resentment that was volcanic.

"For G.o.d's sake leave me alone!" he cried.

A sleeper or two on near-by benches sat up and stared at us with their drowsily indifferent eyes.

"Then why are you making a fool of yourself like this?" I demanded.

"That's my own business," he retorted.

"Then you intend to keep it up?" I inquired.

"No, I don't," he flung back. "_I can't._"

"Then will you be so good as to talk to me?" His sullen anger seemed strangely removed from that exaltation which tradition imputes to last moments. It even took an effort to be patient with him.

"No, I won't," was his prompt retort. It dampened all the quixotic fires in my body. Then he rose to his feet and confronted me. "And if you don't get out of here, I'll kill you!"

His threat, in some way, struck me as funny. I laughed out loud.

But I did not waste further time on him.

I was already thinking of the other figure, the equally mysterious and more appealing figure in black.

I swung round and strode on through the trees just in time to see that somber and white-faced young woman cross Madison Avenue, and pa.s.s westward between a granite-columned church and the towering obelisk of a more modern G.o.d of commerce. I kept my eyes on this street-end as it swallowed her up. Then I pa.s.sed out through the square and under the clock-dial and into Twenty-fourth Street.

By the time I had reached Fourth Avenue I again caught sight of the black-clad figure. It was moving eastward on the south side of the street, as unhurried and impa.s.sive as a sleep-walker.

When half-way to Lexington Avenue I saw the woman stop, look slowly round, and then go slowly up the steps of a red-brick house. She did not ring, I could see, but let herself in with a pa.s.s-key. Once the door had closed on her, I sauntered toward this house. To go farther at such an hour was out of the question. But I made a careful note of the street number, and also of the fact that a slip of paper pasted on the sandstone door-post announced the fact of "Furnished Rooms."

I saw, not only that little was to be gained there, but also that I had faced my second disappointment. So I promptly swung back to Madison Square and the fountain where I had left the man in the velour hat. I ran my eye from bench to bench of sleepers, but he was not among them.

I went over the park, walk by walk, but my search was unrewarded. Then I circled about into Broadway, widening my radius of inspection. I shuttled back and forth along the side-streets. I veered up and down the neighboring avenues. But it was useless. The man in the velour hat was gone.

Then, to my surprise, as I paced the midnight streets, a sense of physical weariness crept over me. I realized that I had walked for miles. I had forgotten my own troubles and that most kindly of all narcotics, utter fatigue, crept through me like a drug.

So I went home and went to bed. And for the first time that week I felt the Angel of Sleep stoop over me of her own free will. For the first time that week there was no need of the bitter lash of chloral hydrate to beat back the bloodhounds of wakefulness. I fell into a sound and unbroken slumber, and when I woke up, Benson was waiting to announce that my bath was ready.

Two hours later I was ringing the bell of a certain old-fas.h.i.+oned red-brick apartment-house in East Twenty-fourth Street. I knew little enough about such places, but this was one obviously uninviting, from the rusty hand-rail to the unwashed window draperies. Equally unprepossessing was the corpulent and dead-eyed landlady in her faded blue house-wrapper; and equally depressing did I find the slatternly and bared-armed servant who was delegated to lead me up through the musty-smelling halls. The third-floor front, I was informed, was the only room in the house empty, though its rear neighbor, which, was a bargain at two dollars and a half a week, was soon to be vacated.

I took the third-floor front, without so much as one searching look at its hidden beauties. The lady of the faded blue wrapper emitted her first spark of life as I handed over my four dollars. The listless eyes, I could see, were touched with regret at the thought that she had not asked for more. I tried to explain to her, as she exacted a deposit for my pa.s.s-key, that I was likely to be irregular in my hours and perhaps a bit peculiar in my habits.

These intimations, however, had no ponderable effect upon her. She first abashed me by stowing the money away in the depths of her open corsage, and then perplexed me by declaring that all she set out to do, since her legs went back on her, was to keep her first two floors decent. Above that, apparently, deportment could look after itself, the upper regions beyond her ken could be Olympian in their moral laxities.

As I stood there, smiling over this discovery, a figure in black rustled down the narrow stairway and edged past us in the half-lit hall.

The light fell full on her face as she opened the door to the street.

It outlined her figure, as thin as that of a medieval saint from a missal. It was the young woman I had followed from Madison Square.

Of this I was certain--from the moment the light fell on her thin-cheeked face, where anxiety seemed to have pointed the soft oval of the chin into something mask-like in its sharpness. About her, quite beyond the fact that her eyes were the most unhappy eyes I had ever seen, hung a m.u.f.fled air of tragedy, the air of a spirit both bewildered and baffled. But I could see that she was, or that she had been, a rather beautiful young woman, though still again the slenderness of the figure made me think of a saint from a missal.

I was still thinking of her as I followed the sullen and slatternly servant up the dark stairs. Once in my new quarters, I glanced absently about at the sulphur-yellow wallpaper and the melancholy antiquities that masqueraded as furniture. Then I came back to the issue at hand.

"Who is that young woman in black who happened to pa.s.s us in the hall?"

I casually inquired.

"_Can_ that!" was the apathetic and quite enigmatic retort of the bare-armed girl. I turned to inquire the meaning of this obvious colloquialism.

"Aw, cage the zooin' bug!" said my new-found and cynical young friend.

"She ain't that kind."

"What is she?" I asked, as I slipped a bill into the startled and somewhat incredulous hand of toil. The transformation was immediate.

"She ain't nothin'!" was the answer. "She's just a four-flush, an also-ran! And unless she squares wit' the madam by Sat'rday she's goin' to do her was.h.i.+n' in somebody else's bath-tub!"

Through this sordid quartz of callousness ran one silver streak of luck. It was plain that I was to be on the same floor with the girl in black. And that discovery seemed quite enough.

I waited until the maid was lost in the gloom below-stairs and the house was quiet again. Then I calmly and quietly stepped out into the little hall, pushed open the door of the rear room, and slipped inside.