Persons Unknown
CHAPTER XII
HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE
Herrick came home through a world which he had never seen before,blindly climbed his three flights of stairs, and, shutting himself intohis room, sat down on his bed. He stared across the floor at thewall-paper, like a man drugged. Yes, there was wall-paper in the world,just as there had been this morning. This room had existed this morning!And so had he! Incredible! Almost indecent! To-day, for the first time,he had found himself. For he had found Her!
Yes, he had lived twenty-eight years, and it had been so much timewasted! But he need waste little more. She was an actress. Incredibly,she did not abide in a sanctuary! She was stuck up there on the stagefor fools to gape at. And, for two dollars a performance, he, too, couldgape! Two dollars a vision--eight visions a week. He began to perceivethat he would need some money!
And, with the thought of money, there materialized out of the void ofthe past a quantity of loose scribbled papers, which, last night, hadbeen of paramount importance. They belonged to his Sunday special.Good--that would buy many theater tickets! Yesterday it had been the keyto Success. But now he said to himself, "Success?" And he looked dullyat the scribbled sheets. "Success?" he thought again, as he might havethought "Turkish toweling?" It was a substance for which, at the moment,he had no use.
He had no use for anything except the remembrance of being near her.First there was the time when she was just a girl, sitting beside hermother. He remembered that he, poor oaf, had been disappointed in her.And then came the time when she turned her head, and he had seen thatstrange, proud, childish innocence--like Evadne's. At the time he hadreminded himself that this effect was largely due to her extraordinarypurity of outline; to the curving perfection of modeling with which thelength of her throat rose from that broad white collar of hers into thesoft, fair dusk of her coiled hair; to the fine fashioning of brows andshort, straight nose and little chin and the set of the little head, sothat the incomparable delicacy of every slope and turn, of every curveand line and luminous surface at last seemed merely to flower in oneinnocent ravishment. He had then admitted that for a girl who wasn't ahowling beauty she had at least the comeliness of being quite perfectlymade. And no bolt from the blue had descended upon his gross complacencyto strike him dead!
He remembered next, how, at the end of his testimony, she had, with herfirst restless movement, begun pulling off her long gloves. Her handswere slim and strong and rather large, with that look of sensitivecleverness which one sees sometimes in the hands of an extremely niceboy. And with the backs of these hands she had a childish trick ofpushing up the hair from her ears, which Herrick found adorable.Suddenly his brain became a kind of storm-center filled with snatches ofverse, now high, now homely--she had risen to give her testimony! Thereshe stood before that brute; and the thing he remembered clearest in theworld was a line from his school-reader--
"My beautiful, my beautiful, that standest meekly by--"
Did he, then, think that she was beautiful? Had he not denied it? Forthe first time she lifted her eyes, giving their soft radiance, so mild,so penetrating, out fully to the world. And every pulse in him hadleaped with but the one cry,
"Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air, Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!"
"Your name?"
"Christina Hope."
"Occupation?"
"Actress."
"Age?"
"Twenty-two years."
Through the light, clear silver of Christina's speech there ran a straindeeper, lower, richer colored,--Irish girls speak so, sometimes. Ittrailed along the listener's heart; it dragged; it drawled; by theunsympathetic it might have been called husky. Conceivably, creaturesmay have existed who did not care for it. But to those who did, it wasthe last turn of the screw.
"Name?"
"Christina Hope."
"Occupation?"
"Actress."
"The devil hath not yet in all his choice An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice!"
This arrow, with Christina's very first word, pierced to the center andthe quick of Herrick's heart, and nailed it to the mast!
"Name?"
"Christina Hope."
"Age?"
"Twenty-two years."
At the beginning of that scrap of dialogue, Herrick, as a lover, had notyet been born; at its end, compared to him, Romeo was a realist.
He did not tell himself that he was in love with her, and he would havedenied convulsively that he wished her to be in love with him. With him?Fool! Dolt! Lout! Boor! Not to him did he wish her to stoop! All hewanted was to become nobler for her sake, to serve her, to die for her!Merely that! And before dying, to become humbly indispensable to her, toknow her more intimately than any one had ever known her, to take upevery moment of her time! It was entirely for the sake of herperfection, of the holy and ineffable vision, that he objectedprofoundly, almost with nausea, to Deutch's saying that she had actedloony about Ingham. Ingham!--why Ingham? Even he, Herrick, would bebetter than Ingham. For had not he, unworthy, by his deep perception ofher become worthy? Great as her beauty was, it was not for the mob. Itwas too fine, too subtle; slim as a flame and winged as the wind yetApril-colored, its aching ravishment could thrill only sensitive nerves.Yet he remembered something--the elevator boy had thought that, too!Joseph Patrick had declared he supposed that other people thoughtdressier ladies was handsomer, but he preferred Miss Hope! Deutch, too;hadn't he suggested something of the kind? Now he came to think of it,even the beast of a coroner had said so! Then, and not till then, did hefully perceive the cruel trick, the last refinement of her perfectbeauty; that it came to you in such a humble, friendly, simple guise, soslight and helpless did it knock upon your heart, whispering its shy wayinto your blood with the sweet promise that it was yours alone and thatyou alone could understand it. Until, when it had taken you wholly,passion and spirit, it drew aside its veil and revealed itself as thedream of every common prince and laborer and lover; the poet's hope andthe world's desire. He saw her now, coming toward him through the wetwind, shining in the gray day, with a smile on her uplifted face, and,at last, past its candor and its child's decorum, he knew it for theface that launch'd a thousand ships and burned the topless towers ofIlium!
At that moment the summons of a Grubey infant declared him wanted on thetelephone. And through the potent instrument a friendly voice from the_Record_ office brought him back to earth. It said, "Say, Herrick, we'vegot hold of a corking wind-up for your inquest story."
He cared nothing, now, for inquests, since they no longer concerned her.But he said, "Have you?"
"Yes. We thought we'd see what the Cornish girl had to say, and we sentright down, both to her boarding-house and her theater."
"And what had she?"
"Why, that's it. Since the day of the murder she hasn't showed up ateither place. She's disappeared."
BOOK SECOND
THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN