He purchased next morning a pair of gloves and an inexpensive walking stick so as to look as nearly as might be like the smart young men he saw on the pavements of Fifth Avenue. It was not his object to be smart; it was to be up to the standard of the house at which he was to lunch.
To reach that house he went on the top of a bus like the one on which he had ridden with Honey nearly ten years earlier. He did this with intention, to make the commemoration. Honey's suspicions and predictions had then seemed absurd; and here they were on the eve of being verified.
He got off at the corner at which, as he remembered, Honey and he had got off on that August Sunday afternoon. He crossed the road to see if he could recognize the home of the Whitelaw baby as it had been pointed out to him. Recognition came easily enough because in the whole line of buildings it was the only one which stood detached, with a bit of lawn on all sides of it. A spacious brownstone house, it had the cheery, homey aspect which comes from generous proportions, and masses of spring flowers, daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths, banked in the bow-windows.
Being a little ahead of his time, he walked up the street, trying to compose himself and recapture his nerve. The story, first told to him by Honey, and repeated in scraps by many others, returned to him. Too far away to be noticed by anyone who chanced to be looking out, he stood and gazed back at the house. If he was really Harry Whitelaw he had been born there. The last time he had come forth from it he had been carried down those steps by two footmen. He had been wheeled across the street and into the Park by a nurse in uniform. Within the glades of the Park a change had somehow been wrought in his destiny, after which there was a blank. He emerged from that blank into consciousness sitting on a high chair in a kitchen, beating on the table with a spoon, and asking the question: "Mudda, id my name Gracie, or id it Tom?" The memory was both vague and vivid. It was vague because it came out from nowhere and vanished into nowhere. It was vivid because it linked up with that bewilderment as to his identity which haunted his early childhood. The discovery that he was a little boy forced on a woman craving for a little girl was the one with which he first became aware of himself as a living entity.
To his present renunciation of that woman he tried to shut his mind. There was no help for it. He had long kept a veil before this sad holy of holies; he would simply hang it up again. He would nail it up, he would never loosen it, and still less go behind it. What was there would now forever be hidden from any sight, even from his own.
At a minute before one he recrossed the avenue, and went down the little slope. In the rôle of Harry Whitelaw which he was trying to assume going up the steps was significant. The long, devious, apparently senseless odyssey had brought him back again. It was only to himself that the odyssey seemed straight and with a purpose.
The middle-aged man who opened the door raised his eyebrows and opened his eyes wide in a flash of perturbation. It was only for an instant; in the half of a second he was once more the proper stiffened image of decorum. And yet as he took from the visitor the hat, stick, and gloves, Tom could see that the eyes were scanning his face furtively.
It was a big dim hall, impressive with a few bits of ancient massive furniture, and a stairway in an alcove, partially hidden by a screen which might have been torn from some French cathedral. Tom, who had risen to the modest standard of the Ansleys, again felt his insufficiency.
Following the butler, he went down the length of the hall toward a door on the right. But a door on the left opened stealthily, and stealthily a little figure darted forth.
"So you've come! I knew you would! I knew I shouldn't go down to my grave without seeing you back in the home from which twenty-three years ago you were carried out. I've said so to Dadd times without number, haven't I, Dadd?"