"'Go forth, and break through all,
Till one shall crown thee, far in the spiritual city.'"
This letter, too, made my leaving New York easier. Possibly it was written with that intent. "Don't try to interpret me," she had said, and I saw the wisdom of following the counsel. As a matter of fact the new turn to the wheel taxed my mental resources to the utmost.
As nearly as I could judge, those mental resources were normal again. My return to the old conditions I can only compare to waking from a drugged unconsciousness. The repair of a broken telegraphic or telephonic connection might also give an idea of what had taken place in me. Re-establishment effected, messages went simply; that was all I could say. The mental rest induced by two years of physical exertion, with little or no thought for the morrow from any point of view, had apparently given the ruptured brain cells the time to reconstruct themselves. Physiologically I may be expressing myself inexactly; but that is of no moment. What is important is the fact that from the instant when Alice Mountney said, "You're Billy Harrowby," the complete function of the brain seemed to be resumed. There was no more in the nature of a shock than there is in remembering anything else forgotten.
More difficult to become accustomed to were the outward conditions. Having accepted the habits of poverty, those of financial ease seemed alien. They were uncomfortable, too, like an outlandish style of dress. To sleep in a luxurious bed, to order whatever I chose for breakfast, was as odd for me as a reversion to laces and ruffles in my costume. There was a marvelous thrill in it, however, with a sense of trembling anticipation. A soul on the outer edge of paradise, after a life of vicissitude and stint, would doubtless have some such vision of abundance and peace as that which filled my horizon.
But before Christian arrives at the Celestial City which is in sight he is reminded that a few difficulties remain to be faced, and in some such light I regarded the interview with Wolf. He came at last, pushing round the revolving door, and standing on the threshold with a searching look in his silly, hungry eyes. Hatted and fur-coated, he had that air of divine right to all that was best on earth which was one of the qualities that, to me at least, had always made him unbearable. Perhaps because I had had the same conviction about myself I could tolerate it less in him.
Every one called him Wolf, partly because of his name, but more because he looked like the animal. With a jaw extraordinarily long and narrow, emphasized rather than concealed by a beard trimmed carefully to a point, his smile lit up a row of gleaming upper teeth best described as fangs. His small eyes were at once eager, greedy, and fatuous; and yet there was that in his personality which stamped him as of recognized social superiority. In the same way that a picture can be spoken of as a poor example of a good school, Wolf might have been reckoned as a second-rate specimen of a thoroughbred stock. Even as he stood you would have put him down as belonging to the higher strata in any community, and in sheer right of his forebears a member of the best among its clubs.
Instead of going forward and making myself known I allowed him to discover me. It was one more proof of my having changed that more than once his eye traveled over me without recognition. It must be remembered that I was no longer seedy; I was only different. It was not the degree but the kind that put him out of his reckoning.
When in the end he selected me from the crowd it was rather as a possibility than as his very man. Coming forward with that inquiring, and yet doubtful, air which people take on when scarcely able to believe what they see, he halted with a bland, incredulous smile.
"Well!"
With feelings in no wise different from those of a man charged with a crime of which he knows himself guilty, I struggled to my feet: