The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 19

"What could I do? I waited and tried again. I felt that if I could only see her face to face she'd be able to explain, to make the whole thing seem less like insanity."

"And she wouldn't even see you, meet you?"

"Not once. Something's set her against me; something's changed her.

She never used to be that sort--never!"

"And you insist all this is without rhyme or reason?"

"Without one jot of reason. That's what made it so hopeless. And last night when I heard of this accident I put my pride in my pocket, and tried still again. It was the same thing over again. They seemed to take me for a crank, or paranoeic of some kind, up there at the hospital. And then I gave up. I felt I'd about reached the end of my rope. I thought it all over, quite calmly, and decided to end everything. I walked the streets half the night, then I sat down and decided to blow my brains out. But I couldn't do it. I was too much of a coward. I hadn't the courage."

"That would have been very foolish," was my inadequate reply, for at a bound my thoughts went back to the night before and the scene in the square.

"Well, what would you have done?" was the prompt and bitter challenge of the unhappy youth facing me.

I thought for a moment before attempting to answer him.

"Why," I temporized, "I'd have tried to get down to the root of the mystery. I'd have made some effort to find out the reason for it; for everything seems to have a reason, you know."

Again I heard him emit his listless little scoff of misery.

"There's no reason," he declared.

"There must be," I maintained.

"Then show me where or what it is," he challenged.

"I will," I said, with sudden conviction. "There's a reason for all this, and I'm going to find it out!"

He studied my face with his tired and unhappy young eyes as I sat there trying to fit the edges of the two broken stories together. It was not easy: it was like trying to piece together a shattered vase of cloisonne-work.

"And how will you find it out?" he was listlessly inquiring.

Instead of answering him, I looked up, fixed my eyes on him and asked another question.

"Tell me this: if there is a reason, do you still care for her?"

He resented the question, as I was afraid he would.

"What concern is that of yours?"

"If all this thing's a mistake, it's going to be some concern of yours," I told him.

He sat there in dead silence for a minute or two.

"I've always cared for her," he said, and I knew what his answer was going to be before he spoke. "But it's no use. It's all over. It's over and done with. There's not even a mistake about it."

"There must be. And I'm going to find out where and what it is."

"And how are you going to find that out?" he reiterated.

"Come along with me," I cried a little presumptuously, a little excitedly, "and by ten o'clock to-night I'll have your reason for you!"

My flash-in-the-pan enthusiasm was shorter lived than I had expected.

The tingling and wine-like warmth soon disappeared. A reaction set in, once we were out in the cool night air. And in that reaction I began to see difficulties, to marshal doubts and misgivings.

The suspicion crept over me that, after all, I might have been talking to a man with a slightly unbalanced mind. Delusions, such as his, I knew, were not uncommon. There were plenty of amiable cranks who carried about some fixed conviction of their one-time intimate a.s.sociation with the great, the settled belief that they are the oppressed and unrecognized friends of earth's elect.

Yet this did not altogether fill the bill; it could not explain away everything. There was still the mystery of the girl in the Twenty-fourth Street rooming-house. There was still the enigma of two persons claiming to be Harriet Walter.

On my way down to that rooming-house an idea occurred to me. It prompted me to step in at my club for a minute or two, leaving Mallory in the car. Then I dodged back to the reading-room, took down from its shelf a _Who's Who on the Stage_, and turned up the name of Harriet Walter.

There, to my discomfiture, I read that Harriet Walter's family name was recorded as "Kellock," and instead of being a Canadian, and born and brought up in the western town of Medicine Hat, as young Mallory had claimed, her birthplace was recorded as Lansing, Michigan. She had been educated at the Gilder Seminary in Boston, and had later studied one year at the Wheatley Dramatic School in New York. From there she had gone on the stage, taking small parts, but soon convincing her management that she was capable of better things. In little over a year she had been made a star in the _Broken Ties_ production.

The St. Luke's officials, after all, had not been so far wrong. The young man in the velour hat was clearly off his trolley.

It was, however, too late to turn back. And there was still the other end of the mystery to unravel. So I ushered young Mallory up the musty stairs to my third-floor room, and seated him with a cigar and a magazine between those four bald and depressing walls with their sulphur-colored paper. Then I stepped outside, and carefully closed the door after me. Then I crossed the hall to the girl's room and knocked.

There was no answer, so I opened the door and looked in. The room was empty. A sense of frustration, of defeat, of helplessness, swept through me. This was followed by a feeling of alarm, an impression that I might, after all, be too late.

I crossed the room with a sudden premonition of evil. Then I turned on the light and pulled open the top drawer of the chintz-covered bureau.

There lay my bank-note. And beside it, I noticed, with a sense of relief, still lay the revolver.

I took the weapon up and looked it over, hesitating whether or not to unload it. I still held it in my hand, staring down at it, when I heard the creak of the door behind me. It was followed by a sudden and quite audible gasp of fright.

It was the owner of the room herself, I saw, the moment I swung around.

It was not so much terror in her eyes, by this time, as sheer surprise.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, with a quaver of bewilderment.

"I'll answer that when you answer a question of mine," I temporized, as I held the revolver up before her. "Where did you get this?"

She did not speak for a second or two.

"Why are you spying on me like this?" she suddenly demanded. She sank into a chair, pulling nervously at her pair of worn gloves.

"You insist on knowing?" I asked.

"I've a right to know."

"Because you are not Harriet Walter," was the answer I sent bullet-like at her.

She raised her eyes to mine. There was neither anger nor resentment on her face. All I could see was utter weariness, utter tragedy.

"I know," she said. She spoke very quietly. Something in her voice sent a stab of pity through me.

"I'm only trying to help you," I told her. "I only want to clear up this maddening muddle."

"You can't," she said very simply. "It's too late."