The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 31

I had squatted there for a full half-hour, I think, before I became even vaguely conscious of the other presence so near me. I had no clear-cut memory of that figure's advent. I had no impression of its movement about my immediate neighborhood, I feel sure, until my self-absorbed meditations were broken into by the discovery that the stranger on the same wharf where I loitered had quietly and deliberately risen to an erect position. It startled me a little, in fact, to find that he was standing at one end of the same string-piece where I sat.

Then something about the figure brought a slow perplexity into my mind, as I lounged there inhaling the musky harbor-odors, under a sky that seemed Italian in its serenity, and a soft and silvery moon that made the shuttling ferries into shadows scaled with Roman gold. This perplexity grew into bewilderment, for as I studied the lean figure with its loose-fitting paddock-coat flapping in the wharf-end breeze I was reminded of something disturbing, of something awesome. The gaunt form so voluminously draped, the cadaverous face with the startlingly sunken cheeks, the touch of tragedy in the entire att.i.tude, brought sharply and suddenly to my mind the thought of a shrouded and hollow-eyed symbol of Death, needing only the scythe of honored tradition to translate it into the finished picture.

He stood there for some time, without moving, studying the water that ran like seamless black velvet under the wharf-end. Then he slowly took off his coat, folded it and placed it on the string-piece, and on top of this again placed his hat. Then he laughed audibly. I looked away, dreading that some spoken triviality might spoil a picture so appealingly mysterious. When I next peered up at him he seemed engaged in the absurd occupation of slowly turning inside out the quite empty pockets of his clothing. Then he once more looked down at the black water.

Those oily velvet eddies, apparently, were too much for him. I saw him cover his face with his hands and sway back with a tragically helpless mutter of "I can't do it!" And both the gesture and the words made my mind go back to the man from Medicine Hat.

A thousand crawling little tendrils of curiosity over-ran resentment at being thus disturbed in my quest for solitude. I continued my overt watch of the incredibly thin stranger who was still peering down at the slip-water. I was startled, a minute or two later, to hear him emit a throat-chuckle that was as defiant as it was disagreeable. Then with an oddly nervous gesture of repudiation he caught up his hat and coat, turned on his heel, and pa.s.sed like a shadow down the quietness of the deserted wharf.

I turned and followed him. The tragedy recorded on that pallid face was above all pretense. He could never be taken for a "dummy-chucker"; the thing was genuine. Any man who could squeeze life so dry that he thought of tossing it away like an orange-skin was worth following. He seemed a contradiction to everything in the city that surrounded us, in that mad city where every mortal appeared so intent on living, where the forlornest wrecks clung so feverishly to life, and where life itself, on that murmurous and moonlit night, seemed so full of whispered promises.

I followed him back to the city, speculating, as idle minds will, on who and what he was and by what mischance he had been cast into this lowest pit of indifferency. More things than his mere apparel a.s.sured me he was not a "crust-thrower." I kept close at his heels until we came to Broadway, startling myself with the sudden wonder if he, too, were a victim of those relentless hounds of wakefulness that turn night into a never-ending inquisition.

Then all speculation suddenly ended, for I saw that he had come to a stop and was gazing perplexedly up and down the light-strewn channel of Broadway. I noticed his eye waver on a pa.s.sing figure or two, whom he seemed about to accost. Then, as though from that pa.s.sing throng he beheld something kindred and common in my face, he touched me lightly on the arm.

I came to a stop, looking him full in the face. There seemed almost a touch of the supernatural in that encounter, as though two wondering ghosts stood gazing at each other on the loneliest edges of a No-man's Land.

He did not speak, as I was afraid he might, and send a mallet of ba.n.a.lity cras.h.i.+ng down on that crystal of wonderment. He merely waved one thin hand toward the facade of a mirrored and pillared caravansary wherein, I knew, it was the wont of the homeless New Yorker to purchase a three-hour lease on three feet of damask and thereby dream he was probing the innermost depths of life. His gesture, I saw, was an invitation. It was also a challenge.

And both the invitation and the challenge I accepted, in silence, yet by a gesture which could not be mistaken. It was in silence, too, that I followed him in through the wide doorway and seated myself opposite him at one of the rose-shaded parallelograms of white linen that lay about us in lines as thick and straight as tombstones in an abbey-floor.

I did not look at him, for a moment or two, dreading as I did the approaching return to actuality. I let my gaze wander about the riotous-colored room into which the flood-tide of the after-theater crowds was now eddying. It held nothing either new or appealing to me.

It was not the first time I had witnessed the stars of stageland sitting in perigean torpor through their seven-coursed suppers, just as it was not the first time I had meekly endured the a.s.saulting vulgarities of onyx pillars and p.o.r.nographic art for the sake of what I had found to be the most matchless cooking in America.

It seemed an equally old story to my new friend across the table, for as I turned away from the surrounding flurry of bare shoulders, as white and soft as a flurry of gull-wings, I saw that he had already ordered a meal that was as mysteriously sumptuous as it was startlingly expensive. He, too, was apparently no stranger to Lobster Square.

I still saw no necessity for breaking the silence, although he had begun to drink his wine with a febrile recklessness rather amazing to me. Yet I felt that with each breath of time the bubble of mystery was growing bigger and bigger. The whole thing was something more than the dare-devil adventure of a man at the end of his tether. It was more than the extravagance of sheer hopelessness. It was something which made me turn for the second time and study his face.

It was a remarkable enough face, remarkable for its thinness, for its none too appealing pallor, and for a certain tragic furtiveness which showed its owner to be not altogether at peace with his own soul.

About his figure I had already detected a certain note of distinction, of nervous briskness, which at once lifted him above the place of the anemic street-adventurer. There was something almost Herac.l.i.tean in the thin-lipped and satyric mouth. The skin on the sunken cheeks seemed as tight as the vellum across a snare-drum. From the corner of his eyes, which were shadowed by a smooth and pallid frontal-bone, radiated a network of minutely small wrinkles. His hands, I could see, were almost femininely white, as womanish in their fragility as they were disquieting in their never-ending restless movements. In actual years, I concluded, he might have been anywhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. He was at least younger than I first thought him. Then I looked once more about the crowded room, for I had no wish to make my inspection seem inquisitorial. He, too, let his eyes follow mine in their orbit of exploration. Then, for the first time, he spoke.

"They'll suffer for this some day!" he suddenly declared, with the vehemence of a Socialist confronted by the voluptuosities of a Gomorrah. "They'll suffer for it!"

"For what particular reason?" I inquired, following his gaze about that quite unapprehensive roomful of decorous revelers.

"Because one-half of them," he avowed, "are harpies, and the other half are thieves!"

"Are you a New Yorker?" I mildly asked him. I had been wondering if, under the circ.u.mstances, even a voluminous paddock-coat would be reckoned as adequate payment for a repast so princely. The man had already proved to me that his pockets were empty.

"No, I'm not," he retorted. "I'm from G.o.d's country."

That doubtlessly irreproachable yet vaguely denominated territory left me so much in doubt that I had to ask for the second time the place of his origin.

"I come from Virginia," he answered, "and if I'd stayed there I wouldn't be where I am to-night."

As this was an axiom which seemed to transcend criticism I merely turned back to him and asked: "And where are you to-night?"

He lifted his gla.s.s and emptied it. Then he leaned forward across the table, staring me in the eyes as he spoke. "Do you know the town of Hanover, down in Virginia?"

I had to confess that I did not. As he sat looking at me, with a shadow of disappointment on his lean face, I again asked him to particularize his present whereabouts.

"I'm on the last inch of the last rope-end," was his answer.

"It seems to have its ameliorating condition," I remarked, glancing about the table.

He emitted a sharp cackle of a laugh.

"You'll have to leave me before I order the liqueur. This," with a hand-sweep about the cl.u.s.ter of dishes, "is some music I'll have to face alone. But what's that, when you're on the last inch of the last rope-end?"

"Your position," I ventured, "sounds almost like a desperate one."

"Desperate!" he echoed. "It's more than that. It's hopeless!"

"You have doubtless been visiting Wall Street or possibly buying mining-stock?" was my flippant suggestion. His manner of speech, I was beginning to feel, was not markedly southern.

"No," he cried with quick solemnity. "I've been _selling_ it."

"But such activities, I a.s.sumed, were far removed from the avenues of remorse."

He stared at me, absently, for a moment or two. Then he moved restlessly in his chair.

"Did you ever hear of a wire-tapper?" he demanded.

"Quite often," I answered.

"Did you ever fall for one of their yarns? Did you ever walk into one of their nice, gold-plated traps and have them shake you down for everything you owned--and even for things you didn't own?"

Here was a misfortune, I had to confess, which had not yet knocked at my door.

"I came up to this town with thirty thousand dollars, and not quite a third of it my own. Twenty of it was for a marble quarry we were going to open up on the Potomac. They sent me north to put through the deal.

It was new to me, all right. I wasn't used to a town where they have to chain the door-mats down and you daren't speak to your neighbor without a police-permit. And when a prosperous-looking traveler at my hotel got talking about horses and races and the string that Keene sent south last winter, he struck something that was pretty close to me, for that's what we go in for down home--horse-breeding and stock-farming.

Then he told me how the a.s.sistant superintendent of the Western Union, the man who managed their racing department, was an old friend of his.

He also allowed this friend of his was ready to phone him some early track-returns, for what he called a big rakeoff. He even took me down to the Western Union Building, on the corner of Dey and Broadway, and introduced me to a man he called the a.s.sistant superintendent. We met him in one of the halls--he was in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, and looked like a pretty busy man. He was to hold back the returns until our bets could be laid. He explained that he himself couldn't figure in the thing, but that his sister-in-law might possibly handle the returns over her own private wire."

"That sounds very familiar," I sadly commented.

"He seemed to lose interest when he found I had only a few thousand dollars of my own. He said the killing would be a quarter of a million, and the risk for holding up the company's despatches would be too great for him to bother with small bets. But he said he'd try out the plan that afternoon. So my traveler friend took me up to a pool-room with racing-sheets and blackboards and half a dozen telegraph keys and twice as many telephones. It looked like the real thing to me. When the returns started to come in and we got our flash, our private tip from the Western Union office, I tried fifty dollars on a three-to-one shot."

"And of course you won," was my sympathetic rejoinder, as I sat listening to the old, sad tale. "You always do."

"Then I met the woman I spoke about, the woman who called herself the sister-in-law of the racing-wire manager."

"And what was _she_ like?" I inquired.

"She looked a good deal like any of these women around here," he said with an eye-sweep over the flurry of gull-wing backs and the garden of finery that surrounded us. "_She looked good enough to get my thirty thousand and put me down and out_."

At which he laughed his mirthless and mummy-like laugh.