CHAPTER ONE
THE PATIENT AND HIS DOCTOR
Christmas Eve in New York! Broadway crowded with happy playgoers, gay promenaders, and belated shoppers! Fifth Avenue resplendent with an abundance of commercially-conceived festivity in the overstocked windows of its fashionable shops! In other and less pretentious localities, gaunt lines of assassinated turkeys exhibiting their sallow nudities in indecent profusion to a steady stream of ever-changing faces! In short, everywhere throughout the big city, the people holding high carnival—even cynicism forgetting itself in the prospect of gallinaceous food and crude sweetmeats. And Central Park West and the Circle, in particular, scintillating with electrical display and wreaths of red-ribboned holly.
In the New Theatre a gala performance of Antony and Cleopatra was nearly over; the last lines of the tragedy were being spoken. Yet, notwithstanding the fact that in another moment the folds of the red velvet curtains would descend on the Egyptian scene, an occupant of one of the stalls, no longer able to control his impatience, hastily left his seat and started up the adjoining aisle.
To say that this young man gave every physiognomical indication of being a soul in distress would be putting it not a bit too strongly. Nor would it have required exceptionally brilliant intuitive faculties to conjecture that someone—presumably in a box across the theatre, on which, all through the evening, his eyes had been riveted—had shamelessly robbed him of his heart. Moreover, judging from his evident haste and the keen anxiety with which all the way up the aisle he followed every movement of the parties in the box, it would seem that he had determined to intercept them on their way out. And, indeed, such was his determination. Life had concentrated itself into a question of hearing from the lips of the woman,—the woman to whom he had offered, and who had refused, the worship of a life,—a word that he could interpret as meaning that there was still a faint possibility of her changing her mind.
To his vexation, however, he found that others likewise had left their seats. In fact, the general exodus had already set in before, even, he had reached the top of the aisle. And yet, despite his being thoroughly aware that any attempt to pass from one side of the house to the other was sure to be resented,—so delirious is the haste in which a metropolitan audience takes leave of the theatre for the invariable restaurant-supper after the play,—he continued to make strenuous efforts to cut his way through, until realising, finally, that it was useless, he let himself be borne along by the crowd. But his chance came when the carriage-vestibule on Sixty-Fifth Street was reached. And there, quick to take advantage of an almost imperceptible cessation of the onward movement—consequent upon the people searching the ingeniously-devised board to ascertain whether the desired motors or carriages headed the long line—he again started in to elbow his way through the crush; and so successfully this time that presently comparatively few persons separated him from an undeniably blond and dashing young woman, in a magnificent opera-cloak of Russian sables, who was laughing and chatting with half a dozen or more vapid youths while following the lead of a portly and somewhat red-faced old gentleman.
Now, though unusual—for want of a better word—as was the young man's behaviour, few people in this scene of orderly confusion, babel of voices and distant humming of motors, gave more than momentary attention to it except the young woman's escort. To these wondrous wise young gentlemen, however, the meaning of his frantic exertions to reach her side was all too plain, no less her feelings towards him; and, exchanging significant glances, they began to nudge one another to watch for the dénouement of the little comedy which was rapidly developing before their eyes.
But alas for the futility of his brave resolutions...!
So far his task had been easy enough. But at the fateful moment, face to face with his divinity, and doubtless for the first time perceiving that no relenting glance softened the faultless contours of her carven features, that no spark of warmth glinted in her big, blue eyes,—eyes that, on the contrary, were brimful of scornful laughter,—his indomitable spirit failed him utterly, was crushed, for once, at least, and he stood gaping at her, to everyone's surprise, more like a country yokel than the man-of-the-world that he undoubtedly was. For the briefest of intervals he remained thus. And then, apparently pulling himself together, he suddenly wheeled round on his heel, and shouldering his way through the press,—heedless alike of a friendly hail, which came in an unmistakably English accent from someone back in the crowd, and of the protesting looks, if not words, of the people he jostled,—he left an ostentatiously, almost vulgarly, ornate limousine to slam its door and move rapidly away with its fair occupant and her admirers.
Into Central Park West the young man turned and walked north. Despite a heavy fur overcoat, his gait was extraordinarily fast, and his face appeared white, almost ghastly, in the thin, yellow fog that was pushing its way under his eyelids, into the penetralia of nose and ears, and depositing superfluous matter on his lungs, larynx, and reckless expanse of linen. A few blocks above the theatre he came to a small apartment-hotel, mounted at a run to the first floor, and quickly entering the sitting-room of the suite, he carelessly tossed his irreproachable high hat on to a lounge. Then he went over to a window and stood gazing out at the sea of fog before drawing the curtain against the gamboge of the December evening. And his countenance was at once savage and inexpressibly sad.
This savageness was habitual, the resultant of bold features: a straight nose which made a sharp angle with the steep brow, bushy eyebrows and a wiry, brush-backed moustache that sprouted aggressively from his upper lip. Strictly speaking it was not a handsome face, though, perhaps, a striking one. Nor in other respects was there anything remarkable about George Trafford—"Nervy" Trafford they had called him at Harvard, and the appellation had always clung to him. As to occupation he had none. Inheriting a modest fortune at an early age, his life had differed little from that of the majority of young Americans in like circumstances, if we except the fact that—before he took up the difficult task of killing time—he had added an Oxford degree to that of Harvard.