CHAPTER XVIII
BOJO FACES THE TRUTH
The next days he spent aimlessly. He had a great decision to make, and he acted as though he had not a thought in the world but to drift indolently through life. He idled through breakfast, reading the morning papers laboriously, and was amazed to find that with all his delay it was only eleven o'clock, with an interminable interval to be filled in before lunch. He began a dozen novels, seeking to lose himself in the spell of other lands and other times; but as soon as he sallied out to his club he had the feeling that the world had been turned inside out.
After luncheon he tried vainly to inveigle some acquaintance into an afternoon's loafing, only to receive again that impression of strange loneliness in a foreign land, as one after the other disappeared before the call of work. He had nothing to do except the one thing which in the end he knew had to be done, and the more he sought to put it from him, idling in moving-picture halls or consuming long stretches of pavement in exploring tramps, the more he felt something always back of his shoulder, not to be denied.
He avoided the company of his chums, seeking other acquaintances with whom to dine and take in a show. Something had fallen into the midst of the old intimacy of Westover Court. There was a feeling of unease and impending disruption. The passion for gain had passed among them at last and the trail of disillusionment it had left could not be effaced. The boyish delight, the frolicking with life had passed. They seemed to have aged and sobered in a night. The morning breakfasts were constrained, hurried affairs. There was not the old give-and-take spirit of horse play. DeLancy was moody and evasive, Marsh silent, and Granning grim. Bojo could not meet DeLancy's eyes, and with the others he felt that though they would never express it, he had disappointed them, that in some way they held him responsible for the changes which had come and the loss of that complete and free spirit of comradeship which would never return.
He had reached the point where he had decided on a full confession to Drake and a certain restitution. But here he met the rock of his indecision. What should he restore? After deducting the sums paid to DeLancy and to the estate of Forshay, he had still almost one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. Why should he not deduct his own losses, amounting to over seventy thousand dollars incurred in the service of a campaign which had netted millions?
His conscience, tortured by the tragic memory of Forshay and the feeling of the spreading circles of panic and losses which had started from his unwitting agency, had finally recoiled before the thought of making profit of the desolation of others. But if he renounced the gain, was there any reason why he should suffer loss; why Drake should not reimburse him as he had reimbursed others? To accept this view meant that he would still remain in possession of upwards of eighty-five thousand dollars, producing a tidy income, able to hold up his own in the society to which he had grown accustomed. To renounce the payment of his losses meant not simply a blow to his pride in the acknowledgment that in the first six months he had already lost two-thirds of what his father had given him, but that his whole scheme of living would have to be changed, while marriage with Doris became an impossibility.
Beyond the first letter he had written her in the first tragic reaction on his return from the office, he had sent Doris no further word. What he had to say was yet too undefined to express on paper. Too much depended on her attitude when they met at last face to face. Her letters, full of anxiety and demand for information, remained unanswered. One afternoon on returning after a day's tramp on the East Side, he found a telegram, which had been waiting hours.
Return this afternoon four-thirty most anxious meet me station.
Doris.