It was on one of these trips to the Atlantic coast that I saw, for the first time, him of the Half-a-Soul.
The hour was late afternoon of a hot mid-summer day. The sun was red as blood and seemed quadrupled in size where it hung on the horizon with its silent warning of another terrible day on the morrow. Block-pavements and cobbles radiated heat, and the sidewalks burned my feet painfully as I stepped on their scorching surfaces coming out of my friend Burnham’s office. The hot air stifled me, and I flinched at the dazzling light. Then I stepped in with the throng, and in a moment more was part of the great surging mass of heat-burdened humanity. Drifting with the pulsating stream, I was for the time listlessly indifferent to what might be coming except that I longed for the night, and for darkness. It might not, probably would not, bring any welcome cool breeze, but at least in the shadows of the night there would be a respite from the torturing white glare that was now reflected from every sun-absorbing brick, or square of granite or stone. I was drifting along the great current of Broadway life when——
There was a sudden clutching at my heart—a tension on the muscles that was an acute pain—a reeling of the brain—and I found myself gazing eagerly into two eyes that as eagerly gazed back into mine. Dark eyes they were, smoldering with evil passions and the light of all things that are bad. The eyes of a man I had never known—had never seen; yet between whom and myself I felt existed a kinship stronger than any tie that my life had hitherto admitted. For one instant I saw those strange black eyes, blazing and baleful, the densely black hair worn rather long, the silky mustache brushed up from the corners of the mouth, the gleam of the sharp white teeth under a lifted lip, the smooth heavy eyebrows slightly curving upward at the outer edges, giving the face the expression we give to the pictures we make of Satan. These I saw. Then he was lost in the crowd.
Where had I seen him before that these details should all seem so familiar? I knew (and my blood chilled as I confessed it to myself) that in all my life I had never seen or known him in the way I had seen and known others. And, more, I knew that we were linked by some strange, unknown, unnamed, unnatural tie. It was as though a hand gloved in steel had clutched my heart in a strangling grip as he moved past. I gasped for breath, staggered, caught myself, and—staggering again—fell forward on the pavement.
“Sunstroke,” they said. “Overcome by the heat.”
And then——
Long afterward I saw him again.
I was traveling in far lands. Going over from Stamboul to Pera I stood on the Galata bridge watching the great flood of living, pulsing human life—those people of many races.