Ruth was at the door.
“How shall I get out?” she questioned tearfully. “I am afraid.”
“Oh, forgive me,” he cried, springing to his feet. “I’m not
myself, you know. I forgot you were here.” He put his hand to his
head. “You see, I’m not just right. I’ll take you home. We can
go out by the servants’ entrance. No one will see us. Pull down
that veil and everything will be all right.”
She clung to his arm through the dim-lighted passages and down the
narrow stairs.
“I am safe now,” she said, when they emerged on the sidewalk, at
the same time starting to take her hand from his arm.
“No, no, I’ll see you home,” he answered.
“No, please don’t,” she objected. “It is unnecessary.”
Again she started to remove her hand. He felt a momentary
curiosity. Now that she was out of danger she was afraid. She was
in almost a panic to be quit of him. He could see no reason for it
and attributed it to her nervousness. So he restrained her
withdrawing hand and started to walk on with her. Halfway down the
block, he saw a man in a long overcoat shrink back into a doorway.
He shot a glance in as he passed by, and, despite the high turned-
up collar, he was certain that he recognized Ruth’s brother,
Norman.
During the walk Ruth and Martin held little conversation. She was
stunned. He was apathetic. Once, he mentioned that he was going
away, back to the South Seas, and, once, she asked him to forgive
her having come to him. And that was all. The parting at her door
was conventional. They shook hands, said good night, and he lifted
his hat. The door swung shut, and he lighted a cigarette and
turned back for his hotel. When he came to the doorway into which
he had seen Norman shrink, he stopped and looked in in a
speculative humor.
“She lied,” he said aloud. “She made believe to me that she had
dared greatly, and all the while she knew the brother that brought
her was waiting to take her back.” He burst into laughter. “Oh,
these bourgeois! When I was broke, I was not fit to be seen with
his sister. When I have a bank account, he brings her to me.”
As he swung on his heel to go on, a tramp, going in the same
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direction, begged him over his shoulder.
“Say, mister, can you give me a quarter to get a bed?” were the
words.
But it was the voice that made Martin turn around. The next
instant he had Joe by the hand.
“D’ye remember that time we parted at the Hot Springs?” the other
was saying. “I said then we’d meet again. I felt it in my bones.
An’ here we are.”
“You’re looking good,” Martin said admiringly, “and you’ve put on
weight.”
“I sure have.” Joe’s face was beaming. “I never knew what it was
to live till I hit hoboin’. I’m thirty pounds heavier an’ feel
tiptop all the time. Why, I was worked to skin an’ bone in them
old days. Hoboin’ sure agrees with me.”
“But you’re looking for a bed just the same,” Martin chided, “and
it’s a cold night.”
“Huh? Lookin’ for a bed?” Joe shot a hand into his hip pocket and
brought it out filled with small change. “That beats hard graft,”
he exulted. “You just looked good; that’s why I battered you.”
Martin laughed and gave in.
“You’ve several full-sized drunks right there,” he insinuated.
Joe slid the money back into his pocket.
“Not in mine,” he announced. “No gettin’ oryide for me, though
there ain’t nothin’ to stop me except I don’t want to. I’ve ben
drunk once since I seen you last, an’ then it was unexpected, bein’
on an empty stomach. When I work like a beast, I drink like a
beast. When I live like a man, I drink like a man – a jolt now an’
again when I feel like it, an’ that’s all.”
Martin arranged to meet him next day, and went on to the hotel. He
paused in the office to look up steamer sailings. The Mariposa
sailed for Tahiti in five days.
“Telephone over to-morrow and reserve a stateroom for me,” he told
the clerk. “No deck-stateroom, but down below, on the weather-
side, – the port-side, remember that, the port-side. You’d better
write it down.”
Once in his room he got into bed and slipped off to sleep as gently
as a child. The occurrences of the evening had made no impression
on him. His mind was dead to impressions. The glow of warmth with
which he met Joe had been most fleeting. The succeeding minute he
had been bothered by the ex-laundryman’s presence and by the
compulsion of conversation. That in five more days he sailed for
his loved South Seas meant nothing to him. So he closed his eyes
and slept normally and comfortably for eight uninterrupted hours.
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He was not restless. He did not change his position, nor did he
dream. Sleep had become to him oblivion, and each day that he
awoke, he awoke with regret. Life worried and bored him, and time
was a vexation.
CHAPTER XLVI
“Say, Joe,” was his greeting to his old-time working-mate next
morning, “there’s a Frenchman out on Twenty-eighth Street. He’s
made a pot of money, and he’s going back to France. It’s a dandy,
well-appointed, small steam laundry. There’s a start for you if
you want to settle down. Here, take this; buy some clothes with it
and be at this man’s office by ten o’clock. He looked up the
laundry for me, and he’ll take you out and show you around. If you
like it, and think it is worth the price – twelve thousand – let me
know and it is yours. Now run along. I’m busy. I’ll see you
later.”
“Now look here, Mart,” the other said slowly, with kindling anger,
“I come here this mornin’ to see you. Savve? I didn’t come here
to get no laundry. I come a here for a talk for old friends’ sake,
and you shove a laundry at me. I tell you, what you can do. You
can take that laundry an’ go to hell.”
He was out of the room when Martin caught him and whirled him
around.
“Now look here, Joe,” he said; “if you act that way, I’ll punch
your head. An for old friends’ sake I’ll punch it hard. Savve? –
you will, will you?”
Joe had clinched and attempted to throw him, and he was twisting
and writhing out of the advantage of the other’s hold. They reeled
about the room, locked in each other’s arms, and came down with a
crash across the splintered wreckage of a wicker chair. Joe was
underneath, with arms spread out and held and with Martin’s knee on
his chest. He was panting and gasping for breath when Martin
released him.
“Now we’ll talk a moment,” Martin said. “You can’t get fresh with
me. I want that laundry business finished first of all. Then you
can come back and we’ll talk for old sake’s sake. I told you I was
busy. Look at that.”
A servant had just come in with the morning mail, a great mass of
letters and magazines.
“How can I wade through that and talk with you? You go and fix up
that laundry, and then we’ll get together.”
“All right,” Joe admitted reluctantly. “I thought you was turnin’
me down, but I guess I was mistaken. But you can’t lick me, Mart,
in a stand-up fight. I’ve got the reach on you.”
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“We’ll put on the gloves sometime and see,” Martin said with a
smile.
“Sure; as soon as I get that laundry going.” Joe extended his arm.
“You see that reach? It’ll make you go a few.”
Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the
laundryman. He was becoming anti-social. Daily he found it a
severer strain to be decent with people. Their presence perturbed
him, and the effort of conversation irritated him. They made him
restless, and no sooner was he in contact with them than he was
casting about for excuses to get rid of them.
He did not proceed to attack his mail, and for a half hour he
lolled in his chair, doing nothing, while no more than vague, half-
formed thoughts occasionally filtered through his intelligence, or
rather, at wide intervals, themselves constituted the flickering of
his intelligence.
He roused himself and began glancing through his mail. There were
a dozen requests for autographs – he knew them at sight; there were
professional begging letters; and there were letters from cranks,
ranging from the man with a working model of perpetual motion, and
the man who demonstrated that the surface of the earth was the