The Blue Wall Part 10

In the lower hall of the building in which I had quarters there were stationed until six at night a telephone operator and a doorman. Perhaps you have noticed that I tell you these matters in considerable detail, and I will continue to do this, because my natural dread of disclosing the intimate affairs of my life has kept me heretofore from sharing my story with any one, and now that I have lifted the cover and drawn the veil of my experience, I can only find justification, in so narrating the sequence of extraordinary events, by observing the strictest adherence to detail and accuracy in the hope that perhaps you, by the virtue of a fresh and unprejudiced viewpoint, may be able to unravel some of the tangle in which I am, even now, enmeshed.

As I have said, at six the telephone girl at the switchboard and the doorman, for some reason which I could never understand, were replaced by an old negro who served as both, and who was the most garrulous, indiscreet individual I have ever seen.

As if to affirm these characteristics he spoke to me the moment I had entered, in a voice which seemed to be adapted to a general address to the three or four other bachelors who were waiting in the frescoed vestibule for a conveyance.

"Yaas, sah, Mr. Estabrook, sah. De dohman lef' a message, sah. Der has been a lady waitin' foh you, sah, mos' all de ahfternoon. She comin'

back, she say--dis evenin'. She sutt'nly act very queer, sah."

"All right," I snapped. "It's one of my clients."

"Um-um," he said, shaking his head. "I spec she ain't, Mr. Estabrook, sah. She mos' likely has pussonal business, sah!"

The others--Folsom the broker, and Madison, and Ingle the architect--had evidently dined well, preparing for a musical comedy, and they snickered without shame.

"Let my man know when she comes," said I, and without smiling hurried into the elevator.

I had no belief that the woman, whoever she might be, would come back after dark to call upon me. With my conflicting thoughts about Julianna, I forgot the incident. It was therefore with some surprise that I heard Saito, my j.a.p, arouse me from my sleepy reverie, to which exhaustion had reduced my mind, to tell me that a lady was waiting in the reception room downstairs.

You may understand the conservative nature of my life and habits more thoroughly when I tell you that the mere idea that a woman had dared to ask for me at my apartment in the evening caused me the greatest anxiety. As if to prove what dependence we can put upon our intuitions, I felt, on my way down, most strongly, that an evil event was about to take place.

Nothing could, I think, better ill.u.s.trate the nonsense of attaching importance to these fore-warnings than to tell you that the woman who waited for me was Julianna herself!

My first instinct, before I had been seen by her, was to hurry her out of the garish little reception room, where, through the door which opened into the hallway, she might well have been seen by anybody; it was only when she greeted me and turned her face toward the tiled floor, and I saw that her shoulders drooped and that her hands hung down at her side, and that she stood like a guilty, punished, and remorseful child, that my wish to protect her was displaced by a mad desire to take her in my arms and comfort her.

"Julianna!" I cried. "What has happened? Is it the Judge? Tell me! Why did you come?"

She shook her head and lowered it still more, until the sweeping curve of her bare neck, from the fine hair behind her ears to the back of the lace collar of her waist, was visible.

I cannot say what gave me the courage, but I bent over her and kissed her there, softly.

She looked up then without the slightest indication of either surprise or reproach.

"I liked that," she whispered. "I didn't know how I was going to tell you, but now I can."

"Tell me what?" said I, in a choking voice.

"I love you," she said. "I could not let you go. I thought last night that I could carry it through. I thought my duty was to stay with father. But it isn't!"

"And you came _here_ to tell me!" I gasped.

"Why not?" she said, with a catch in her voice. "I was afraid I would never see you again and I love you."

When I think of all the sham there is among women, I treasure the memory of that simple little explanation. It was delivered as a full answer to all the conventionalities from here back to the time of the Serpent. It was spoken in a low but confident voice, with her hands upon her breast as if to calm the emotions within, and was directed toward me with the first frank exposure of her eyes which were still wet with tears.

"I have been miserable!" she said. "A woman is meant for some man, after all. And if she resists, she is resisting G.o.d! It all has been shown to me so clearly. And I knew that you were the one. There's nothing else that makes any difference, and it sweeps you off your feet, so it must be nature, because it gave me the courage to telephone you and then try to find you and come here and wait and come again, and only nature can make any one go against all her habits and education. And I believe I'll call you Jerry, if you still--"

"Good G.o.d! Love you?" said I. "Forever!"

"Always?"

"Forever."

She gave her burning hands to mine, and oblivious of the old negro, whose eyes were upon us, we stood there, looking at each other in awe, very much frightened and very much, for that moment,--and I sometimes wonder if not in truth,--the centre of the universe.

"You belong to me, Jerry?" she said tearfully. "Now?"

"Yes," said I.

"Then I must go back quickly," she explained, after a moment. "I do not want father to know yet. I want to prepare the way. I don't want you to speak with him for a week. I will tell him then. Perhaps you think it is strange. But Friday, when he knows, you may come."

She had a carriage waiting for her, and I walked with her to its door.

"I want to kiss you, Julianna," I whispered.

She looked up to see whether the driver could observe us. He could not.

And then the mischief-loving quality of womankind appeared in her. She gave forth a glad little laugh.

"On Friday," she said.

The door slammed, and I thought, as I caught a last glance at her then, that she was a luminous being of dreams, lighting the dark recess of a common cab.

This impression recurred so often in those following days that at times there rose the uncanny suspicion that the woman who had visited me had not been one of reality, of flesh and blood, and beating heart and sweet, warm breath. Her smile, her voice, her personality had not seemed a part of real life, but almost the manifestations of a spirit which, timidly and with the hope of some reincarnation in life, had come to claim my vows. I believed that I knew well enough why Julianna, if it were she, had planned to avoid a sudden disclosure of our betrothal to the Judge, but, none the less, I fretted at the sluggishness of time, which, like a country horse, will not go faster for the wis.h.i.+ng or the beating.

I wished, too, that she had said she would meet me in her afternoon walks to the Monument and wondered that, if she loved me, she was able to forbid herself a meeting, even though she had felt that good sense demanded a period of reflection and a readjustment of view, so that when we did see each other again, it would be with firmer minds and steadier hearts. I would have gladly foregone all this value of reserve and restraint for one look at her face, one touch of her sleeve, one word from her tender, curving lips.

And yet I was happy in those days--so painfully happy that I heard voices telling me that such happiness does not last, that ecstasies are tricks of fate by which man's joy is fattened for slaughter, that from some ambush a horrible thing was peering.

Strangely enough, these fears were connected in no way with the warnings which I had had from my eavesdropping or even from the definite threat which had come out of my grotesque experience with the Sheik of Baalbec.

The piece of writing, which had begun, "You are in danger," I had dropped into a file of papers, and though I suppose it is somewhere among them now, I have never yielded to the temptation to look at it again. I may have thought of it merely to add to the opinion of Jarvis that the writing was not Julianna's, the apparently indisputable fact that, at the moment the warning had been written, Julianna was, by the word of the apartment house doorman, waiting for me in the little reception room. Furthermore, with my success in winning her, with the intoxication of it, I began to look upon the strange and unexplained matters which had so perplexed me as trivial illusions beneath the consideration of good sense. However much you may be surprised at my willful blindness, your wonder cannot equal that which I myself feel to-night.

And now, when I am about to tell you of that memorable Friday, I must impress upon you that no detail of it is distorted in my memory, that so clear and vivid were the impressions upon my senses that, were I to live to the age of pyramids, I could recall every slight sequence with accuracy. I say this because you are a physician and as such, no doubt,--and it is no different in the case of us lawyers,--have learned the absurd fallibility of ordinary human testimony, not excluding that which proceeds from the highest and most honorable type of our civilization.

The day, as I was about to tell you, had been saved from the heat of the season by a breeze which blew from the water and once or twice even reached the velocity of a storm wind. A hundred times I had looked out my office window and a hundred times I had seen that not one speck of cloud showed in the sky. Yet all day long, while I tried to work, only to find myself all on edge with expectancy, I could hear the flap and rustle of the American flag on the Custom-House roof, which was straining at its cords and las.h.i.+ng itself into a frenzy like a wild creature in chains.

I am not sure that a dry storm of this kind is not freighted with some nerve-tw.a.n.ging quality. I have often noticed on such days a universal irritability on the part of mankind, and I have been informed by those who have traveled much that often a nervous wind of this kind, in countries where such things happen, precedes some disaster such as volcanic eruptions, avalanches, earthquakes, and tidal waves.

My own nervousness, however, took the form of impatience. I was absurdly eager to go at once to Julianna, and the fact that the hour for dinner had finally arrived, and that the remaining time was short, only served to increase my impatience the more. I could not a.s.sign any cause for this other than my wish to see Julianna, for now I knew in my mind and heart, by reason and by instinct, that the Judge had been right, that once having given her love she had given all, and, with that n.o.ble and perhaps pathetic trait of fine women, would never change.

At last I found myself at her door, at last she herself had opened it, and was smiling at me--as beautiful, more beautiful, than I had ever seen her. I remember that, with an innocent and spontaneous outburst of affection, she caught my hand in hers and tucked it under her soft round arm in playful symbolism of capture.

"You must not say a word to me," she said. "I have never been so happy!

But he is in there. He wants to see you alone and you must hurry."

"Hurry?" I protested.

"I don't know why," she said, with a nervous little laugh. "I suppose it's because I want you to talk to him and come to me as quickly as you can."

Then, with a gentle pressure from behind, she pushed me through the curtains into the familiar study and I heard her feet scampering up the soft carpet on the broad, black-walnut stairs.