I remember so well the night the telegram came. I had been vexed all day. Everything had gone wrong. Roger, to meet whom I had come back early to town, had neither turned up nor sent me any message; the day had been sickeningly hot, with that mid-September heat that comes to the Eastern States after the first crisp days and wilts everything and everybody. I found my rooms atrociously stale and dusty, and worse than that, perfectly useless, since by some miracle of carelessness I had left my keys behind me at the shore and hadn't so much as a clean collar to look forward to.
The club valet assured me that he had received no call for trunk or bag, but that Roger had assuredly not entered the house for five days. I went into his rooms, but they told me nothing, and I, worse luck, should have been lost in his collar, so I glared angrily at the drawers of linen, wired for my own keys and made for the Turkish bath. There with a thrill of delight I discovered a complete change of clothing; I had, before leaving for the summer, jumped hastily into dinner things, leaving a heap of forgotten garments behind me and they awaited me now, trim and creased, russet shoes polished, and a wine-colored tie, a particular favourite of mine, topping the fresh linen. It seems absurd, but I recall few moments in my life of such pure, heartfelt thanksgiving. The very colour of life seemed changed for me. I wonder if we do well in despising these small thrills as we do? Surely enough of them sedulously preserved in grateful memory must equal in intensity those great, theoretical moments we all regard as our due but so often pass through life, I am sure, without experiencing.
However that may be, the little gratifications of that evening are graven in my mind, undoubtedly, you will say, because of the startling climax for which they were preparing me. The clean tingling of my soapy scrub, the delicious coolness of the plunge, the leisurely, fresh dressing all caressed my nerves delightfully. In the plunge a pleasant enough fellow had accosted me and we had splashed together contentedly. I expected to recall his name every moment, for his face was vaguely familiar, but I could not, and when we met in the hall and went down the steps together, it still escaped me. We hesitated a bit on the pavement, and then before I realised it we were hailing a hansom and bound for dinner together.
It was a pleasant drive up along the river, for a little breeze had sprung up and the watered asphalt smelt cool. We were both comfortably hungry and very placid after our bath and we chatted in a desultory sort of way, I, amused at my utter inability to place the fellow, he quite unconscious, of course, and perfectly certain of me. He asked after Roger, sympathised with our failure to make connections, remarked to my surprise that he had only been out of town for his Sundays (America had not adopted the "week-end" at that time) and asked me, I remember, if I knew anything about a game called basket-ball. It seemed he was anxious to find someone who did. We drew up at last to our white, glistening little table looking out over the water, looked about for possible friends, nodded to the head-waiter and ordered our dinner. It turned out that neither of us had yet celebrated the oyster month, and leaving my unknown to bespeak the blue points, for the more conservative among us clung to the smaller oyster then, I telephoned the club to let Roger know where to find me in case he should appear there.
Over the soup my companion got on to the subject—somehow—of evolution, and talked about it very ably indeed. It is absurd, but I shall never be able to eat jellied consommé as long as I live without connecting it with the Saurian Period! I remember that those quaint and apparently highly important beasts lasted well into our guinea-chick and lettuce-hearts, and I can see him now, his eager, dark face all lighted with enthusiasm while he spread mayonnaise neatly over the crimson quarters of tomato on his plate, and made short nervous mouthfuls, in order to talk the better. Half amused, half interested I listened, trying to place the fellow, but for the life of me I could not. Was he a scientist, a lecturer, a magazine writer, a schoolmaster? We finished with some Port du Salut and Bar-le-duc—an admitted weakness of mine—and I had decided to regularly pump him and find out his name without his guessing my game, when he began as I supposed, to help me out.
"Heavens!" he said with compunction, "you'll think me an awful bore, Jerrolds, but I've been more or less practising on you, haven't I? But you'll remember, perhaps, this used to be a sort of hobby of mine, and I work it into shape nowadays for a young men's club I'm running."
I yawned and lit a cigar and we sipped our coffee in silence. The plates rattled around us, the curaçoa in my tiny glass smelled sweet and strong, everything was natural, easy, well fed and well groomed (as the phrase goes now) about me, the day and hour were like any other; and yet from that moment on my life was never to be quite the same, for surprise and change were hurrying toward me, and the man opposite—how curiously!—was to be drawn into the wide net that fate had sunk for me and must have even then been preparing to draw smoothly and effectively to the surface.
We think, when we are young, that we live alone. I recall, as a boy of twenty, certain hot-headed, despairing midnight walks when the horror of my hopeless, unapproachable, unreachable identity surged over me in melancholy waves. Heavens! I would have plunged into a monastery if I had believed that any sort of prayer and fasting could bring me close—really close—to God; for to any human creature, I had learned, I could never be close. After that, we grow into that curious stage of irresponsibility which we deduce from this loneliness, and distress our patient relatives with windy explanations of "matters that concern ourselves alone." And later still, if we have the right kind of women about us, some faint idea of the twisted net we weave—you and I and the other fellow, all together, whether we will or no—comes to us, and we stare awhile and then ... shrug our shoulders or bend our knees or set our jaws, according as we are made.
I like to believe, now, that a dim idea of what was going to happen was in some mysterious way growing on me before I got the telegram. I am certain that when the head-waiter touched my arm and told me I was wanted at the telephone, a curious oppression fell over my hitherto contented after-dinner spirit which grew into a kind of excitement as I made my way to the booth. And yet I expected nothing more than to hear Roger's voice with some reasonable explanation of his failure to meet me. It was the night porter, however, reading me a telegram missent to the shore and returned to the club.