CHAPTER XIV
It was not until people on the street began to stare that Danilo discovered that he had come away from the hotel without his hat. He felt no discomfort, but he was annoyed at being an object of curiosity. As a matter of fact, he was curiously devoid of any emotional excitement; instead, his wits seemed to have been sharpened by a cool cunning. All his powers of reasoning were reduced to one impulse—flight. He decided that he must walk on and on without a halt. His escape from the hotel had been extraordinarily easy. He merely had shoved his smoking pistol into his hip pocket and walked calmly out. If he had attempted to run, or looked about excitedly, or even slunk by the liveried flunky at the revolving door, all would have been lost. But he had done none of these things and he was feeling a certain arrogance at the thought of his bravado. But he realized that he must get a covering for his head. It was ridiculous to be sauntering along the street hatless. He beckoned a youth who stood near the curb, smoking a cigarette.
"I should like to buy your cap," he said, simply.
The young man stared, then broke into a laugh. "All right!" he replied, quickly, as if it were the best to humor a madman. "But it will cost you money."
"How much?"
"Two dollars."
Danilo gravely counted out the money. The youth drew back, instinctively clapping a hand upon his head.
"Come!" cried Danilo, roughly. "It will not do for you to trifle with me. You set your price. Here is the money. I want that cap!"
The youth turned pale and attempted to run. Danilo grasped him firmly by the shoulder.
"Give me that cap!" insisted Danilo.
The youth obeyed, trembling from head to foot. One or two passers-by halted, stared a moment, and passed on, shrugging their shoulders indifferently.
"Thank you," said Danilo. "You have done me a great favor. Here is the two dollars. May God reward you." As he said this he made the sign of the cross in midair above the boy's head. The boy cowered and began to whimper. Danilo put on the cap and walked away.
He felt more at ease now; no one was paying the slightest attention to him. He decided to go into a saloon and buy something to drink. The bartender, stout and genial and Irish, passed him the bottle of whisky. Danilo's hand shook as he poured out his drink. The Irishman eyed him quizzically.
"I have just had an unpleasant experience," Danilo began, apologetically, as he spilled some of the whisky. "I saw a woman shot." The barkeeper seemed unimpressed. Danilo felt annoyed. "At the St. Francis Hotel ... in the dressing-room, off the Colonial Ballroom.... She had been fooling a man. I was so excited I walked out of the hotel without my hat.... This cap—I bought it from a boy on the street. Is it not droll?"
The Irishman put the cork in the whisky-bottle and set it in its place under the bar.
"The man was a fool!" he said, bluntly. "I'd like to see myself take a chance at swinging for the likes of any woman."
"Oh, you are mistaken!" Danilo returned, mildly. "The man who shot this woman will not swing."
"Oh, well, if she gets better, of course...."
Danilo leaned forward. "Better?... Oh no, my friend, she is dead, quite dead. He aimed at her mouth.... I saw her fall.... But the man will not swing. He is not that kind. He will shoot himself first."
"It is all the same," returned the barkeeper. "He was a fool!"
"You do not know what you are talking about!" Danilo cried, hotly.
"Neither do you!" said the other, with an indulgent laugh.
Danilo gulped the whisky in silence and went out with a morose air.
"A fool?... A fool?..." he kept repeating.
The issue was at once irritating and impersonal. He felt as if the barkeeper had affronted the whole masculine sex. A man was a fool for allowing himself to be taken in, he was quite ready to grant that. But no man was a fool for collecting the full toll of feminine duplicity. Now this man, in the dressing-room of the St. Francis Hotel, who had shot down a woman....
Danilo halted. Why, the man was he—himself! Somehow it had never occurred to him. He had the same feeling that comes in dreams, when one is in some mysterious way both the actor and the audience. He had been in the picture and out of it. It was all very puzzling.
He tried to review the incidents of the evening. Nothing was very clear. The sound of a pistol-shot was the most vivid memory; then somebody had fallen.... The woman was dead—it could not be otherwise! Why had he walked away so calmly? He should have stayed. After all, he was a physician and he had acted unprofessionally. It was a physician's place to remain and serve, even in the face of utter hopelessness. Well, he had come away and it was too late to turn back. He was very tired. He looked about him. He had drifted down to the water-front.
He went into a cheap lodging-house and paid for a room. The place was frowzy and ill-smelling, but he did not care. He threw himself upon the bed. The dreamlike quality of what had transpired still persisted. He had added another rôle to the drama, that of physician. He had been the murderer, the spectator, the physician. But he could not get under the skin of the victim. He seemed to be able to recall every detail but her face—the blue-green dress, the black-lace shawl, the white tapering arm upraised as she flicked the end of his nose. It was then, as the murderer, he had pulled the trigger.... In the rôle of frightened spectator he had walked out of the hotel.... As physician he had remembered his duty and chided himself.... He took a cigarette from his pocket and began to smoke. He lay there for hours, thinking, thinking. But he could not see the victim's face....
Suddenly toward morning he sat up.
"Ah, I have it! The woman was Claire.... Yes, it is Claire who is dead!..."
He fell back with the satisfaction of one who has solved an irritating puzzle.
He awoke at noon. He was neither surprised nor dazed at finding himself in a strange environment. Sleep had settled all the dust-clouds of thought. He remembered everything perfectly. He was a murderer, and he had killed a woman because he had not been wise or prudent enough to content himself with the fruits of a tempered, frugal passion. He did not rouse himself. He had no wish except to lie still and think.
Looking back, he could see that he always had felt uncertain about Claire. Somehow she was not altogether a virginal type. She was a woman who, lacking any concrete experiences, would mentally create stimulating situations. Even now he admired her, but love was mysteriously killed. Yet he had loved her last night! And never so ardently, so completely as at that moment when he had brought his pistol upon a level with her lips and done his worst.
But this morning he seemed swept clean of all feeling, love and hate and enthusiasm, every sensation killed utterly—dead! Could it be possible that Claire Robson had absorbed every hope, every expectation, making of them a living thing in her own image that died with her? Had she betrayed not only him, but all his visions? What had become of the far-flung horizons which he had always seen so clearly? One black cloud had eclipsed them all.
He remembered the serene blueness of the day on which that black cloud had sprung out of the south, a misty-white fledgling of the sky that grew with the hours until the sun was wrapped in a dull gloom. How quickly Mrs. Condor's words had expanded and drawn every drifting rumor to their confirmation! He had heard it all—everything. It amazed him to discover how easily the truth was uncovered. Uncovered? No, it had lacked even the virtue of concealment; it lay, noxious and festering and unscreened, a rich feast for the scandalmongers circling vulture-like above. But his flight toward happiness had been like the eagle's, too swift and lofty and disdainful for such unlovely sights; eagerly, blindly he had passed them by. He recalled with a shudder the morning that he had gone and bought the pistol. This he had intended for Stillman. But the very thought of it had cut him to the heart. It was only when he had reflected on that million dollars for the Serbian cause that he found himself submerged in bitterness. This was the crowning insult, the culminating deception! The wage of Claire Robson's shame offered in the guise of a free gift! No wonder that the donor withheld his name!
"In my country it is all very simple—we call the man out and shoot him!"
How poignantly these words had come back to Danilo in his agony! But it had not been simple.... He wondered if he were losing the naïve directness of his forefathers. There had been moments when he was almost persuaded that it was not his affair, after all. Claire Robson did not belong to him; she never had. There was no logic in exacting a price from any one who had taken unclaimed property. But there had been insolence and trickery back of the performance.... A million dollars for the Serbian cause! Not only he, but his country, was to have been smirched by the patronage of these two moral derelicts. The purity of his passion for Claire Robson had sharpened his sense of human delinquency and given him the uncompromising judgments of virtue.... Well, he had decided upon Stillman. Some one must pay the price and the woman he loved did not yet seem foul enough for the sacrifice.... Then it was that his ferretings had hunted out the Flint story. From that moment he had been gripped by a blind fury. His thoughts had grown black, formless, devastating. He had been deliberately betrayed—the woman he loved did not exist, not even potentially. It was not a question of what might have been. One did not gather figs from thistles. And above all this angry tumult within him there rose something cool and malevolent and sinister, the fruits of wounded vanity and outraged pride.... And now it was all over. He wondered whether he would be capable of an emotion again. Would he continue to think without the respite of being able to feel, to lie and stare unmoved at the mangled form of his dead hopes? At the sound of the pistol he had closed his eyes upon the horrid sight which he knew must follow. Blood was nothing to him, but the vision of Claire's shattered loveliness was too terrible to face. How easy it was to screen the senses from ugliness! Why was it not possible to shut the inner vision as completely?
He lay for hours, thinking, thinking! He could do nothing else.
Night came on again. Danilo was still thinking. A tray of untasted food sent in by a water-front chop-house drew a half-score of buzzing flies toward the varnished bureau. He lay, still inert, but disquiet had begun to succeed the first hours of emotional exhaustion. And he felt ill, also. His throat was burning and his breathing labored and choked.
"I must have caught cold last night," he thought, "running about without a hat."
Physical discomfort was swinging him back into the paths of every-day experiences. He even had a fleeting impulse to prescribe for himself.
A fever set in. He began to dream.... It seemed to him that Claire was moving about the room, waiting on him, serving him. She had on the peacock-blue dress, but the shawl was gone and her white shoulders and tapering arms gleamed coldly in the uncertain light. "Ah," thought he, "her lips will be red!" He raised his eyes to her face, but he saw only something vague and gray and formless. "She has wrapped her face in a veil," he said, aloud. "What delicacy! She does not wish to remind me of last night.... Yes, that is it!... Last night I pointed my pistol at her mouth. But her mouth was not red last night ... not before I closed my eyes.... Her lips were red once, but she wiped them clean again, for me.... Why did she do this thing for me? I was not her love?" And suddenly the peacock-blue dress was gone and Claire became a gray figure from head to foot, a gray figure with two red lips. Nothing else was visible. She began to move toward him. He tried to turn from her, to lift his body up, to fling himself downward upon his face. But he could not move. She came nearer.... Her lips were widening with every step. She halted by the bed ... she bent over ... she kissed him. Her lips were warm and moist and horrible. He gave a deep, groan and woke up.
He fell asleep again. Now he dreamed of Serbia—his country, a beautiful woman, golden in the morning light. She lay smiling like a blossom in the dawn and her long hair was spread out on either side. Then suddenly a leprous sun beat down upon her and she tried to lift her arms to screen herself from its fury, but could not. Flies gathered, her body grew loathsome, her lips black. Then, coming down a dust-stung road, he saw a gray figure—a gray figure with two smiling red lips showing through a rent in its drab winding-sheet. And his beloved country stirred faintly and gave a deep cry. The gray figure stopped, bent over gently, and, taking two strands of the flowing hair in its wan hands, drew a covering over the festering body.... He looked again. The gray figure was holding out her hands to him! He went toward it joyfully. And at that moment the gray winding-sheet fell away and Claire stood before him, smiling. He dropped on his knees beside her.... He could feel himself being lifted up. "Claire—always Claire!" he cried.... He awoke again, sobbing.
Once he dreamed of Stillman, covered with the lizard-like scales of a million dollars, a venomous creature that darted hither and thither and finally grew confused with the personality of Flint and became a two-headed monster.... In the end the reptile sat calmly down before the cheap varnished bureau and consumed Danilo's untasted meal.
Thus they came and went, dream succeeding dream.
He was roused finally by a voice calling for him to get up. He opened his eyes. The hotel clerk stood at the side of his bed. The tray of untasted food still lay upon the bureau.
"What is the matter," the hotel clerk was saying. "Are you drunk?"
Danilo stirred. "No.... I have been ill. What time is it?"
"Do you realize that you have been here three nights? It is Monday morning. I began to think you had committed suicide."
"No.... Everything is all right. Presently I shall get up."
The man went out, whistling, carrying the tray with him. Danilo felt weak and helpless, but he drew himself to his feet and fell back into a chair.
Monday morning! He had been there since Friday, then. His patients—what about his patients? He felt suddenly irritated at himself for this professional lapse. Suppose some of his patients had died meanwhile? The possibility brought a cold sweat to his forehead. He thought of the young mother whose bedside he had quitted to appear at the Serbian Relief concert; a child who had been run over by a street-car; the last man he had operated on; Mrs. Robson.
"I must see them all, once again," he muttered. "After that...." He shrugged.
For three nights he had slept in his clothes. He had not even removed the pistol from his hip pocket. He stood up and drew it from its place. There was something fascinating and sinister about its cold gleam. The words of the hotel clerk came to him—"I began to think you had committed suicide!"
He put the pistol back in its hiding-place—he had duties, duties. He kept repeating this as he tried to gather strength for a supreme effort. He was extraordinarily weak, and the fever still lit his eyes and burned the vivid red of his lips to a dull, dry purple. He washed himself, tried to brush his clothes, ran his trembling fingers through his hair. It was an hour before he felt able to venture on the street.
It was a dull morning. The fog had mixed itself with the city's smoke, floating like an enormous and malignant black bird whose poised body shut out the sun. Danilo shivered. He still felt very weak.
He decided to go and call on Mrs. Robson. Not until then had he thought of Claire in any concrete, personal way. Would he see her? He remembered now that she was dead. But the thought that he would see her still persisted. Death and Claire Robson were terms that he could repeat, but not really sense. It was only when he had swung off the car at Larkin Street and turned the corner at Clay Street that the horrid realization struck him with relentless force. A hearse was drawn up to the curb in front of the Robson flat and a knot of curious people were watching the pallbearers lift a flower-smothered casket down the shallow steps. He did not go any farther, but stood, motionless, watching the somber pageant.... Presently everything was settled; the hearse began to move forward, followed by three limousines. The procession came toward Danilo. The hearse passed the corner. Instinctively he removed his hat....
When it was all over he turned deliberately toward town.
"Claire is dead," he repeated. "What does the rest matter?"
Suddenly his professional consciousness, the last link that bound him to reality, had snapped.
He went back to his lodgings—the old lodgings on Third Street, where he had been staying for a week.
"Where have you been for three days?" asked the proprietor. "At least a dozen people have been looking for you."
Danilo smiled grimly and said nothing.
"The police are on my trail!" he thought.
He went up to his room and began to pack. There was really very little to assemble; most of his wardrobe still remained at the Robson fiat. After he had finished he sat down. He seemed incapable of forming any plan. What should he do? Where should he go? What did it matter? His thought moved in an irritating circle.... Once he rose to his feet and drew the pistol from his pocket. He looked at it a long time. Finally he laid it on the bureau. A beam of sunlight played upon the polished barrel. Its glint irritated Danilo. He moved the weapon out of the light.... Presently he heard the chimes from St. Patrick's Church. He knew now that it was noon.... He began to count the money in his pocket. Seven dollars and forty cents! How far would that take him? How much nearer would seven dollars and forty cents carry him to Serbia?... He began to laugh.
The telephone tinkled. Danilo hesitated, then walked calmly over and took down the receiver. The voice of the hotel clerk said:
"This is the office. Mr. Stillman is down-stairs."
"Mr. Stillman? Oh yes, of course. Tell him to come up."
This was the end! Well, what was he to do? Stand calmly and let Judas betray him into the hands of his enemies? He fancied Stillman's entrance into the room, the cool cordiality of his manner, the advance with outstretched hands. At that moment the police would dart swiftly forward! Danilo had seen it all a thousand times at the moving-picture shows. The trick was as old as Gethsemane and as young as the screen drama!
He picked up the pistol. This was to have been Stillman's portion. Well, it was not too late! The outlaw's instinct to barricade himself and defy everybody up to the last moment came over him. A knock sounded upon the door.... He flung himself about, bracing his body against the bureau. The pistol was grasped firmly in his hand; he had but to raise it to cover his visitor successfully. He moistened his lips.
"Come in!" The words snapped out with a command that was also a menace.
The door swung back. Stillman stood upon the threshold. Danilo felt his senses reeling. He tried to lift the pistol. He had grown frightfully weak.
"George!" Suddenly Stillman's voice rang out.
The word echoed through the room. It was the first time that Stillman had ever called Danilo by his Christian name. A great yearning came over Danilo, a sense of futility, the feeling that everything, even life itself, was a horrible mistake!
"George!" Stillman was crying to him again, like a brother from the depths of his heart.
Danilo roused himself with a supreme effort, crouched low, narrowed his eyes. Claire was dead! What did it matter?... No, it was too late. He lifted the pistol slowly but surely. Stillman gave one startled look and, throwing his head back, seemed to say:
"Why don't you shoot? I am waiting."
Danilo looked down at the shining weapon. It was on a level with his own heart. Claire was dead! Deliberately he turned the muzzle upon himself.... The noise of the shot sounded far away. He felt Stillman's arms enfold him.
"What have you done? What have you done?... My God! but this is a mistake!"
He heard Stillman's voice trembling with passionate protest. He opened his eyes.
"My brother!" he said, and he lifted his hand to Stillman's wet brow.... "My brother!" he felt himself murmur once more.... Suddenly he was swallowed up in a merciful oblivion.