"Come too, Jerry; bring the wife and babies," Miss Doran was tired of sitting alone so long, she stood up as if for going. A flicker of consternation passed in his face between his divided interest and a suspicion of the reason for my desertion.
"Look here, Olivia—oh, impossible!" It was plain that the dancer was going to make it uncomfortable for him for taking so much time to his good-bye. "I'll see you at your steamer." He clasped my hand with a detaining gesture. I could see him looking back at me from the doorway as though for the moment he had seen my destiny hovering over me. I have often wondered if Jerry hadn't provided me with an excuse, what the Powers would have done about getting me to London on this occasion.
I had almost a mind the next day to go out to his house and persuade him to drop everything here and take his family abroad with me. That I did not was, I think, not so much due to what I thought such a plan might contribute toward the saving of Jerry's situation, as the conviction as soon as I had decided, that whatever it was that lay at the end of my journey, I was called to it. I was as certain that in London I would find what I went to seek as though it had been printed in my steamer ticket. I shut up the house and left the key of the flat at the bank. A letter I wrote to Sarah crossed hers to me saying that she thought she would stay on in the West for her vacation. Two days after the theatre closed for the season I sailed for London.
CHAPTER II
For a week, perhaps, I was content merely with being there, simply happy and human. I had brought letters and addresses which I neglected. In spite of the excuse I had made to Jerry about it, I did not even go to the theatres. I turned aside from the traditional goals, to ride on the top of omnibuses and walk miles down the Strand and Piccadilly, touching shoulders with the crowd. The thing that I had striven for in my art, what men paint and write and act for, was upon me. Answers to all the questions about it that I had not the skill to put to myself, lurked for me behind the next one of the Greek marbles and the next. The pictures were luminous with it. In the soft spring nights it took the streets and turned the voices happy. It danced with the maids in the alleyways to the tune of the barrel organs. Then all at once I had a scare. That-Which-Walked-Beside-Me seemed about to take flight. I would be smiling at it secretly. I would catch myself in the motion of saluting it, and suddenly it would be gone. Mornings I would wake up in Chicago to the old struggle and depression; I would have to go out in the streets and court back my joy; it fled from me and concealed itself in the crowd. I followed it by the trail of the first name I lighted on in my address-book. It happened to be Mrs. Franklin Shane; I wrote her a note and then walked out in Hyde Park to see the last of the rhododendrons, and regretted it. Mrs. Franklin Shane was Pauline Mills raised to the nth power, which I did not fail to perceive was due to Franklin Shane being Henry multiplied by a million. The acute sense of values, which had established Pauline at the centre of Evanston, had landed Mrs. Shane at the outer rim of English exclusiveness. What she would do with her time and energy when she had penetrated to its royal core, interested me immensely.
I had been entertained at her house the previous winter when I had been studying a play that made me perfectly willing to be exploited by Mrs. Franklin Shane, for the sake of what I got out of it to fatten my part. There in London she called for me in her car the afternoon of the day that brought her my note. I don't remember that anything was expressly said about it, but it was in the air that Mrs. Franklin Shane had arrived, in her study of Exclusiveness, at knowing that the younger members of it were addicted to the society of ladies of my profession, and meant to make the most of me. I thought it might be amusing to see what, supposing with me as a tolerable bait, she could catch a younger son, she would do with him. She was clever enough not to put the use she was to make of me, too obviously. I was invited to an informal reception the next afternoon in which she found herself involved by her husband's business exigencies; I gathered from her way of speaking of it that the guests were chiefly Americans and that she had made the best of the situation, extracting from it for herself a kernel of credit by not turning down her compatriots, now that she was assured of having the English aristocracy to play with.
The house in front of which a hansom deposited me the next day, was notable; one could guess that the Franklin Shanes had been made to pay a pretty penny for the privilege of occupying it. It was stuffed full of the treasures of four hundred years of the selective instinct.
"You must really see the Velasquez," my hostess had confided to me as soon as I had shaken hands with her, and I judged from the fact of her not mentioning my name to any other of her guests, that she was saving me for a special introduction.
The Velasquez was very wonderful; there was also an early Holbein and a Titian so black with time that there was only one point in the room from which you could make out what it was about. I was slowly making my way to that point. I had been in the house half an hour and had met but one or two people whom I slightly knew, when I was aware of my hostess piloting toward me through the press, a black-coated male in whom I suspected one of the pegs upon which her social venture hung. It occurred to me that she had sent me to look at the pictures so that she might know where to find me. The room was packed with Americans, satisfying in the only way open to them, a natural curiosity as to the shell in which the only kind of society which wasn't open to them, lived, and the man blocking out a passage through it with his shoulders, was so tall that it brought my eyes on a level with his necktie. There was an odd freedom about it that set me at once to correct my impression of him by his face, and the moment I raised my eyes to him I knew him.