There was an ever present, ugly fear, too, that she meant, by some hook or crook, to rob him of Phoebe. 151
“And she’s as much mine as hers,” he declared to himself a thousand times or more.
Behind everything, yet in plain view, lay his own estimate of himself—the naked truth—he was “no good!” He had come to the point of believing it of himself. He was not a success; he was quite the other thing. But, granting that, he was young and entitled to another chance. He could work into a partnership with Mr. Davis if given the time.
Letting the midweek matinée slip by, he made the plunge on a Thursday. She was to leave New York on Sunday morning; that much he knew from the daily newspapers, which teemed with Nellie’s breakdown and its lamentable consequences. It would be at least a year, the papers said, before she could resume her career on the stage. He searched the columns daily for his own name, always expecting to see himself in type little less conspicuous than that accorded to her, and stigmatised as a brute, an inebriate, a loafer. It was all the same to him—brute, soak, or loafer. But even under these extraordinary conditions he was as completely blanketed by obscurity as if he never had been in existence. 152
Sometimes he wondered whether she could get a divorce without according him a name. He had read of fellow creatures meeting death “at the hand of a person (or of persons) unknown.” Could a divorce complaint be worded in such non-committal terms? Then there was that time-honoured shroud of private identity, the multitudinous John Doe. Could she have the heart to bring proceedings against him as John Doe? He wondered.
If he were to shoot himself, so that she might have her freedom without going to all the trouble of a divorce or the annoyance of a term of residence in Reno, would she put his name on a tombstone? He wondered.
A strange, a most unusual thing happened to him just before he left the house to go to the depot. He was never quite able to account for the impulse which sent him upstairs rather obliquely to search through a trunk for a revolver, purchased a couple of years before, following the report that housebreakers were abroad in Tarrytown, and which he had promptly locked away in his trunk for fear that Phoebe might get hold of it.
He rummaged about in the trunk, finally unearthing 153 the weapon. He slipped it into his overcoat pocket with a furtive glance over his shoulder. He chuckled as he went down the stairs. It was a funny thing for him to do, locking the revolver in the trunk that way. What burglar so obliging as to tarry while he went through all the preliminaries incident to destruction under the circumstances? Yes, it was stupid of him.
He did not consider the prospect of being arrested for carrying concealed weapons until he was halfway to the city, and then he broke into a mild perspiration. From that moment he eyed every man with suspicion. He had heard of “plain clothes men.” They were the very worst kind. “They take you unawares so,” said he to himself, with which he moved closer to the wall of the car, the more effectually to conceal the weapon. It wouldn’t do to be caught going about with a revolver in one’s pocket. That would be the very worst thing that could happen. It would mean “the Island” or some other such place, for he could not have paid a fine.
It occurred to him, therefore, that it would be wiser to get down at One Hundred and Tenth 154 street and walk over to Nellie’s. The policemen were not so thick nor so bothersome up there, he figured, and it was a rather expensive article he was carrying; one never got them back from the police, even if the fine were paid.