The two young men looked at each other rather helplessly. Then “Marty” Martin drew a few ragged words over his helplessness. “I’m sorry, Peter—really, awfully. I’ll be back in an hour. And do buck up. But you have bucked up, you really have. You look ever so much better than you did when we went to lunch. And I’ll be back. Oh, you can depend on me.” He drifted off through the door. His muscles were tense with haste, but he fingered chairs and tables as he went—as if trying to put clogs of decency on feet indecorously winged. Even so, he was soon out of sight, and Peter Wayne was alone.
“There’s no point in saying it isn’t rum, because it is,” he murmured to himself. “And here,” he added, looking about. There was no moral support in those crimson walls, those great pier-glasses, those insignificant writing-tables with red-shaded electric lights, those uncomfortable tapestried armchairs. It wasn’t the setting to help you through a crisis. He was in the quietest corner of the most essentially respectable hotel in New York. There were plenty of them—scores—that were incidentally respectable; but at the St. Justin respectability had been cherished through years for its own sake, as more important than the register, the cuisine, or the unimpeachable location that no metropolitan progress could render inconvenient. As a very young bachelor with virtually no family ties, he was not familiar with the St. Justin. It wasn’t a place where you would expect to get the kind of thing his kind of human being wanted. He couldn’t, for example, have induced Marty to lunch there. They had lunched at Plon’s. It was a hotel where you might be perfectly sure your grandparents had stopped. It was natural that his mother should have selected it for their meeting, as she hadn’t been in America for well over twenty years. But there was less backing than he had expected, somehow.
Sitting uncomfortably in one of the corners by a writing-table (his back to the window so that the familiar streets shouldn’t lure him too much to flight), he took the privilege of the consciously crucial moment. He reviewed his life. It was so very short, after all, that it was easily reviewed. He was only a few months out of the university, and he was just twenty-two. The insoluble was there to the point of being either romantic or absurd, he didn’t know which. He had what so many young people long for in vain, a mystery. He had amused himself occasionally with monstrous hypotheses. But what real account could he give of himself? What account, that is, of the sort that Marty Martin and his like had by heart before they could spell? The most that he knew about his parents—except that they were alive and in the tropics—was that they banked in Honolulu and had some natural hold or other on Marty Martin’s uncle. Marty Martin’s uncle had picked out Peter’s school and his college for him, and was telegraphed for when Peter had appendicitis. That was as near the parental relation as anything he had known from experience. Lonely? Well, any fellow was lonely when the other fellows all went trooping home for holidays; but loneliness he had always frankly diagnosed as three-quarters pride. The fellows were always glad to get back to school or college, he noticed. In any case, he had stopped thinking about it much—his plight. That saved his dignity. What he sat now vaguely dreading was the immense, the cataclysmic downfall of his dignity. He tried to put the facts to himself so simply that they should be as reassuring as a primer. Ollendorf, he had once complained to a teacher, would take the zest out of a murder, the sense out of a scandal. Tragedy was a verbal matter. Put a crime into any foreign language, and it sounded like a laundry list. He would try, as it were, to find the French for his situation.
“Oh, rot!” he began, taking his own advice quite seriously. “It isn’t so Sudermannish as all that. My father and my mother chose to go to the tropics to live, a year after I was born. They did not take me with them. They have never sent for me; but they have supported me; they have written to me occasionally; they have got Marty Martin’s uncle to keep me out of the hands of the S.P.C.C., and trained me generally to do without them. I’ve never been invited to go to Tahiti. And Tahiti isn’t like London—if you know any one there, you can’t go without an invitation. They can’t have turned against me, when I was eleven months old, on account of my vices. I’ve kept pretty jolly and managed to regularize the situation with my friends. Now my mother has written that she’s coming to America to see me. Indeed, she has actually come. I wasn’t allowed to meet her at a steamer, decently. I have to meet her here—here.” (He looked gloomily around at the conventional walls.) “Yet she doesn’t seem to be staying here. I don’t know whether she will want tea, or where to take her to dinner. I don’t know her when I see her. I don’t know—oh, hang it, I don’t know anything! And if I could funk it, like Marty, I would. But what can you do when a lady takes the trouble to bring you into the world? If it had been my father, now, I wouldn’t—I positively wouldn’t—have consented to meet him. It’s—it’s no way to treat a fellow.”
His vain attempt at Ollendorfian flatness broke down: the mere facts seemed so very much against him. He had often complained to Marty Martin that it was dashed awkward, this being the only original changeling; but, in point of fact, he had never been so uncomfortable in his life as now, at the prospect of playing the authentic filial rôle. “I’ll make her dine here,” he muttered. He could think of nothing worse without being actually disrespectful. An old lady in a gray shawl walked slowly down the hall past the door, and it suddenly struck him that his mother would perhaps like to dine at the St. Justin. “I ought to have cabled to ask what color her shawl would be,” he began, in a flippant whisper, to himself. The flippant whisper stopped. He was much too genuinely nervous to be flippant any longer without an audience. At the same time, he found himself wondering—oh, insincerely, theatrically, rhetorically wondering—why he had not bought an etiquette book. There was something—well, to be honest, something like an extra gland in his throat, something like a knot in his healthy young nerves—that kept him from putting the question to himself audibly. “If she cries—” he reflected, with anticipatory vindictiveness. What he really meant was: “If she makes me so much as sniff.” For your mother was really the one person in the world who had you necessarily at a disadvantage. Even if you hadn’t the habit of her, you couldn’t count on yourself for reticence. You might be as bored as possible, but that wouldn’t save you. There might be treacheries of the flesh, disloyalties of the cuticle—all manner of reversions to embryonic helplessness. She somehow had your nerves, your physical equilibrium, at her mercy. Old Stein, prodding at you with instruments in the psychological laboratory, was a mere joke in comparison. Even the most deceived, the most docile and voluble student ended respectably in a card catalogue. Peter felt suddenly an immense tenderness for the decencies, the unrealities of “science.” But to meet your mother in conditions like these was the real thing: the naked horror of revelation. “It’s literature,” thought Peter to himself, “and what is literature but just the very worst life can do?” He came back to his familiar conclusive summary. It was rum.
The next quarter of an hour passed more mercifully. The mere empty lapse of time helped him, half duped him into thinking that the scene might not come off at all. It was foolish to be there ahead of time, but what could a man in his predicament do, or pretend to do, between luncheon and an interview like that? They had had, he and Marty, a civilized meal at Plon’s; but he had not been hungry, and to smoke among the stunted box-trees afterward had been—well, impossible. They had got to the St. Justin ridiculously early, and then Marty had bolted. Peter didn’t bear him any grudge for that; of course it was perfectly proper for Marty to bolt. It would have been worse, he began to think, to face her first before a witness.
By this time he had accepted the smallest writing-room of the St. Justin as the predestined scene of the great encounter; accepted it as, perhaps divinely, perhaps diabolically, but at all events supernaturally, appointed. These walls had been decorated by dead people to be unsympathetic and grossly unfit witnesses of Peter Wayne’s embarrassment. To that extent they belonged to him. The sudden superstition was genuine; so genuine that he found himself resenting a bit of chatter that sprang up outside the door and, even more, the immediate quick entrance into the writing-room of one of the chatterers. Why hadn’t his mother given him an appointment in her own sitting-room, at her own hotel—whatever that might be? He didn’t know; he knew nothing of her since the wireless message that had made the appointment; and of course since she was managing the thing that way, he hadn’t even tried to meet her at her steamer, though it had actually docked at some unearthly hour that morning. But she was likely to pay, too, for her perversity, since the lady who had just come in and had sat down rather aimlessly at one of the tables would probably annoy her as much as she did him. He had owned—or pretended?—to Marty Martin a furtive curiosity as to this mother of his, whom he had virtually never seen, of whom he hadn’t so much as a photograph. Now something quite different stirred within him: the instinct to protect her against anything she would not like. He suddenly saw her frail and weary and overwrought and quite old—pathetically, not ironically, like the little old lady who had hobbled past the door—and he resented any detail that might crown her long effort at reunion with an extra thorn. He was sure she would hate this other woman’s being there—the younger woman who had just come in, and sat down so nonchalantly.
This lady obviously intended to stop long enough for their discomfiture, since—just here he got up and looked at his watch as he did so—it lacked scarce two minutes of the appointed hour. He looked at the intruder a little impatiently. She wasn’t writing. Perhaps he could suggest, by some flicker of expression, some implication of gesture, that he wasn’t there in that ridiculous galley for nothing, and still less there for casual company. She was slim and smartly veiled and outrageously made up. That was all he saw out of the corner of his eye, but it was enough to make him feel that she had no such rights at the St. Justin as a reunited mother and child. She wasn’t waiting for a parent, he knew; only for some frivolous friend or other. He was so nervous as to wonder if there were any conceivable way in which one could ask her to go into one of the other rooms. A depopulated chain of them stretched down the corridor. He threw another glance at her. She was well dressed. Peter, though he might know as little as a poodle about the nature of the current fashion, could, like most men, pounce unerringly on the unfashionable. Her exuberance wasn’t a matter of gewgaws; it was all in the meretricious harmonies of her features and complexion. And yet—Peter caught himself away from staring, as he passed her, but one glance was enough to show him that—it was a perfectly honest mask; her paint and powder were as respectable as blue glasses. Again he knew it unerringly. He was glad to recognize it. For at that moment he became so nervous that he did, without a qualm, the most preposterous thing he had ever done, even at two and twenty.
His mother was imminent; he knew it in a hundred ways. The atmosphere was charged with more than the mere prospect, was charged with the actual certainty of her. He found that he was going to put it to the lady who sat there. He stood in the door of the writing-room and looked down the dark hall. It was empty, save for a woman who sat humbly near, bonneted, veiled, faithfully clasping some kind of bag—obviously a servant. Remembering the bit of chatter, he fancied it the maid of the intruding lady. No one else was in sight. Yet somehow he knew that his mother would be on time: the crispness of her earlier cablegrams promised it. The lady really must go elsewhere, and the maid—old and “colored” and manifestly respectable—must move down the hall and sit outside another door. He went back, and this time walked straight across to the stranger.
“Will you pardon me, madam” (“madam” was a deplorable word, but the powder somehow demanded an extravagant formality), “if I speak to you, to ask you something very odd?”