Gradually he began to know more hours of loneliness than suited his tastes. His rooms—the old rooms overlooking Bryant Park, regained and refurnished much as they had been six years before—knew his solitary presence through many a long evening. July came with blistering breath, and he took to the Adirondacks, meaning to be gone a month. Within ten days he was home again, drawn back irresistibly by that strange insatiable craving of unformulated desire. Town bored him, yet he could not seem to rest away from it.
He wandered in and out, up and down, an unquiet, irresolute soul, tremendously perplexed....
There came one dark and sultry night, heavy beneath skies overcast, in August. Whitaker left a roof-garden in the middle of a stupid performance, and walked the streets till long after midnight, courting the fatigue that alone could bestow untroubled sleep. On his return, a sleepy hall-boy with a wilted collar ran the elevator up to his tenth-floor landing and, leaving him fumbling at the lock of his door, dropped clankingly out of sight. Whitaker entered and shut himself in with the pitch-blackness of his private hall.
He groped along the wall for the electric switch, and found only the shank of it—the hard-rubber button having disappeared. And then, while still he was trying to think how this could have happened, he sustained a murderous assault.
A miscalculation on the part of the marauder alone saved him. The black-jack (or whatever the weapon was) missing his head by the narrowest shave, descended upon his left shoulder with numbing force. Notwithstanding his pain and surprise, Whitaker rallied and grappled, thus escaping a second and possibly more deadly blow.
But his shoulder was almost useless, and the pain of it began to sicken him, while the man in his grip fought like a devil unchained. He found himself wedged back into a corner, brutal fingers digging deep into the flesh round his windpipe. He fought desperately to escape strangulation. Eventually he struggled out of the corner and gave ground through the doorway into his sitting-room.
For some minutes the night in that quiet room, high above the city, was rendered wild and violent with the crashes of overthrown furniture and the thud and thump of struggling bodies. Then by some accident little short of miraculous, Whitaker broke free and plunged across the room in what he imagined to be the direction of a dresser in which he kept a revolver. His foot slipped on the hardwood floor, the ankle twisted, and he fell awkwardly, striking his head against a table-leg with such force that he lay half-stunned. An instant later his assailant emptied five chambers of a revolver into the darkness about him, and then, alarmed by a racket of pounding on the hall door, fled successfully by way of the fire-escape to adjoining roofs and neighbouring back-yards.
By the time Whitaker was able to pull himself together and hobble to the door, a brace of intelligent policemen who had been summoned by the hall-boy were threatening to break it down. Admitted, they took his safety into their care and, simultaneously, the revolver which he incautiously admitted possessing. Later they departed, obviously disgruntled by the unprofessional conduct of the "crook" who had left no "clues," with a warning to the house-holder that he might expect to be summoned to court, as soon as he was able to move, to answer for the crime of keeping a weapon of defence.
Whitaker took to his bed in company with a black temper and the aroma of arnica.
He entertained, the next day, several persons: reporters; a physician; a futile, superfluous, unornamental creature misleadingly designated a plain-clothes man; finally his friend (by now their acquaintance had warmed to real friendship) Ember.