XVIII
Graham was before his time. He hurried in, as anxious to get Peter out of that apartment as Peter was to go. He found his brother sitting on one side of the kitchen table and Nellie Pope on the other. Both had magazines. The girl tore herself out of the marble house of the heroine's father with reluctance. Peter had been holding his magazine upside down for an hour. He had been looking right through it and into his father's laboratory. There was not even the remote suggestion of a smile on his pale face when Graham threw open the door.
"Come on, old man," urged Graham. "The taxi's waiting."
Peter got up. "Well, good-bye, Nellie," he said. "I'll come and see you soon."
The girl darted a quick look at him. She saw that she was mistaken. "Oh, yes, that'll be very kind of you. I 'aven't got any friends."
"Yes you have," said Graham,—"two."
Nellie Pope led the way into the narrow passage, stood on tiptoe, made a long arm and got Peter's hat off the peg. Then she stood in front of him and her lips trembled, although her well-practised smile curled up the corners of her mouth. "Not good-bye, but orevoy, eh? Well, good luck and God bless you. I shall miss you both most awfully. It's been a fair treat to 'ave you 'ere."
Peter waved his hand and went down the bare stairs. His knees felt weak and shaky and his eyes seemed to be at the back of his head. He drew back to let a woman pass. She cocked her golden head at him with an enquiring eye and a flash of teeth and pushed open the half-closed door of an apartment. Her high-pitched metallic voice rang out. "Say, Kid, there goes Nellie Pope's boarder. By Gosh, don't yer think some one oughter stop her?"
The two boys drove home in silence. They had both caught the meaning of those significant words.
Graham, the self-imagined man of the world, who had picked up a large collection of half-facts—as all the precocious do—but who, for all that, or in spite of that, had walked into the trap set by Ita Strabosck without the faintest perception of his danger, threw those words aside. Everything would be right, he told himself, and if he had been coming out of Nellie Pope's apartment in the ordinary way and had overheard her rival's loud comment, he would simply have shrugged his shoulders, like the rest of the young men of his type and spirit, and knowing only the tail end of the truth, told himself that all men take "chances" and that the odds were largely in his favor. And what would this attitude of puerile bravado have proved? That he and all the men like him were just as much a menace to society from knowing the half-facts which did nothing more for them than allow them to take "chances," as the men who were wholly ignorant and so blundered blindly into tragedy.
To Peter, the words of the painted woman came as a finishing blow. In his crass and culpable ignorance, into which Kenyon had flung one most terrific fact, he came away from Nellie Pope not knowing whether he was immune—not able to assure himself that he was safe. Think of it! Big and strong as he was, he remained a mere child in the matter of plain, necessary and urgent truths, and if ever a man knew himself for a fool he was Peter Guthrie, as he drove home.
No less grateful to God than ever for having been assisted to go through Harvard and Oxford clean and straight, he cursed himself for not having sought out the facts of life,—not from grinning and salacious arguments of half-informed young men, but from a proper source,—since his father had not conceived it to be his duty to give them to him early in his life. If Kenyon had not opened out a new and awful vista of thought the night that he talked about Graham and Ita Strabosck, Peter's ignorance, so jealously and mistakenly preserved, would have remained so colossal that he would have gone home humiliated, but unworried. As it was, this one thing at any rate—this one most awful thing—had sunk into his mind, making him dangerously less ignorant but without proper knowledge. He arrived home a prey, therefore, to the most hideous fear.
Luckily there were people dining with his father and mother. Belle had gone out of town for several days, suffering from the shock of finding out the truth about Kenyon, and Ethel had returned to school. Peter was able to go up to his own room unnoticed.
Graham, whose loyalty and concern had been good to see, went up with him and threw the suit-case into a corner.
"Gee!" he said, with a touch of emotion that he made no attempt to hide, "but I'm glad you're home, Petey." It was many years since he had called Peter by the name that he had gone by in the nursery. He seemed to have come so close to his big brother during those recent hours.
Peter did a surprising thing. He turned quickly, strode over to Graham, put his arm round his shoulder and kissed his cheek. For just those few moments both men had gone back through the years and were little boys again.
Two things happened to Graham. He blushed to the roots of his hair, and swallowed something that threatened to choke him.
"You said you had something on, didn't you,—supper, or something?" said Peter.
"Yes; but I'll cut it out if you want me to."
"No, don't. Why should you? I feel pretty rotten and I shall turn in right away. Don't bother about me any more, old man."
"I'd rather stay with you."
"Yes, I know you would, old boy, but you push off and have a good time. As a matter of fact, I rather want to—to be alone for a bit. D'you see?"
"All right, then." And to show that he had become a man again and his own master, Graham went off whistling the latest tango.
And by letting his brother go at that moment, Peter did a very unwise thing. He was still weak and ill. His brain, which had not recovered itself from the effects of Kenyon's poisonous mixture, was in no condition to be tortured by solitary thought. He needed to be kept away from self-analysis—to be set to work on the ordinary commonplaces of everyday life. Most of all, his thoughts required to be put to rest by sleep.
Left to himself, Peter sat down, almost in the dark, with his arms folded, his legs stuck out and his chin buried in his chest, and thrashed the tired machinery of his brain into action. All that had happened in the last forty-eight hours coming on top of the suffering that he had undergone through having been separated from Betty and having failed to bring about the new relationship with his father, upon which he had set his heart, gradually became distorted. He began to look at everything through an enormous magnifying glass and to see himself, not as one whose loyal, simple and unsuspicious nature had been taken advantage of by Kenyon, but as a common drunken creature who had had to be lifted into a cab and who had spent two nights in the apartment of a woman of the street. He began to look at himself with so deep a humiliation and disgust that the mere thought of his ever again holding Betty in his arms seemed outrageous. And having by stages, made conceivable by the condition of his health and the strain that had been put upon him by all the things that had happened since his return from England, come up to this morbid and hyperconscientious point in his self-condemnation, he stood up suddenly, obsessed by a new and appalling thought. He said to himself: "I'm not only unworthy of Betty, I'm unclean, and so unfit to live." And having seized at that with the avidity and even triumph that comes with a sudden disorder of the understanding, he began to dramatize his death—to ask himself how to make it most effective. And then his father entered his thoughts. "Ah!" he cried inwardly. "Father—it's father who is responsible—it's father who must be made to pay! I'm his eldest son. He's very proud of me. He shall come into the room to-night in which he spends all his time for the benefit of other men's sons and find the one he neglected lying dead on the floor. That's it! Now I've got it! There's a hideous irony about this that'll sink even into his curious mind. I'd like to be able to see his face when he finds me. There'd be just a little satisfaction in that."
If only Graham could have come back at that moment, or the little mother to put her arms round that poor, big, over-sensitive, uninitiated lad and bring him out of his mental dejection with her love and warmth!
There was a revolver somewhere among his things. He had bought it when he went camping during one of his vacations from Harvard. He hadn't seen it for several years. With feverish haste he instituted a search, going through one drawer after another, flinging his collars and socks and all his personal things aside, talking in a half-whisper to himself, until, with a little cry of glee, he found it with a box of cartridges. And then, with the most scrupulous care he loaded it, slipped it into his pocket and crept out of the room and downstairs. The door of the drawing-room was ajar. He heard laughter and the intermingling of voices, heard some one say "Good-bye." He dodged quickly past, through the library and into the room in which he had last stood with his hand on the shaking shoulders of his father. He would give him something to weep about this time,—yes, by jove, he would! He would make him wake up at last to the fact that his sons were human beings and needed to be treated as such!
He welcomed the fact that away in the distance a storm had broken with the deep artillery of thunder, and that already heavy rain was swishing down on the city. It fitted into his half-maddened mood.
He shut the door. He walked quickly about the room, speculating as to the most effective place to be found outstretched. He had a decision and then, so that there might be no loop-hole for his father, sat down to write a final indictment.
Time fled away. He covered page after page of note paper, pouring out all his soul, making a great appeal for the right treatment of Graham and his sisters, and finally signed his name, having scrawled in his large round writing, "This is my protest."
The storm had come nearer. Outbursts of thunder rolled over the house followed by stabs of lightning.
He then deliberately placed himself on the chosen spot, cocked the trigger and put the cold barrel of the revolver to his temple.
There was a sort of scream.
Peter swung round, with his nerves jangling like a wire struck suddenly with a stick.
There stood his father, unable to form a sentence, his face grey, his eyes distended and his arms thrown out in front of him.