It was the knell of his greater self, of the man he had contrived to be for a few hours. He sat in his chair, dimly realizing it, with vague and wordless regrets. Then, upon the table, he saw the flute, and rose to put it in the cupboard. It would never be useful again, but he did not want to throw it away.
The old dramas, which somehow came so close to reality with so little art—or because of so little art—had a way of straddling time like life itself. "Twenty years elapse between Acts II and III," the playbills said unblushingly, and the fact is that what most men sow at twenty they reap at forty; the twenty years do elapse between the acts. The curtain that goes down on Robert Lucas in his room at Tambov rises on Robert H. Lucas in New York, with the passage of time marked on him as clearly as on a clock. With grey in his beard and patches on his boots, and quarters in a boarding-house in Long Island City, he is still concerned with leather, but no longer prosperous. His work involves much calling on dealers and manufacturers, and their manner of receiving him has done nothing to harden his manner of diffidence and incompetence. His linen strives to be inconspicuous; his clothes do not inspire respect; the total effect of him is that of a man who has been at great pains to plant himself in a wrong environment. Tambov now is no more than a memory; it is less than an experience, for it has left the man unchanged. It is a thing he has seen—not a thing he has lived.
The accident that gave his name and the address of his boarding-house a place in the papers has no part in his story; he was an unimportant witness in the trial of a man whom he had seen in the street cutting blood-spots out of his clothing. He had bought a paper which mentioned him to read on the ferry as he returned home, and had been mildly thrilled to find that an artist had sketched him and immortalized him in his columns. And next morning came the letter.
"Guelder and Zorn" was the name engraved across the head of it, in a slender Italian script; it conveyed nothing to him. The body of the communication was typewritten, and stated that if Mr. Robert H. Lucas would present himself at the above address, the firm would be glad to serve him. Nothing more.
"Mean to say you haven't heard of Guelder and Zorn?" demanded the young man whose place at breakfast in the boarding-house was opposite to him, when he asked a question. "Say—d'you know what money is? Hard, round flat stuff—money? You do know that, eh? Well, Guelder and Zorn is the same thing."
Somebody laughed. Lucas looked round rather helplessly.
"They say," he explained, referring to the letter, "that they'll be glad to serve me."
"Then you might lend me a couple of million," suggested the young man opposite, with entire disbelief. "Them Jews would never miss it."
Lucas had the sense to drop the matter there. He put the letter in his pocket and went on with his breakfast, and listened with incredulous interest to the talk that went on about the wealth, the greatness, the magnificence and power of the financial house which professed itself anxious to be of use to him. He was sorry to have to leave the table before it came to an end.
It is characteristic of him that the letter aroused no wild hopes, nor even an acute curiosity. He came, in the course of the morning, to the offices of Messrs. Guelder and Zorn in much the same frame of mind he brought to his business efforts. They were near, but not in, Wall Street—a fact of some symbolic quality which he, of course, could not appreciate. He stood on the edge of the side-walk for some moments, looking up at the solid, responsible block of building which anchored their fortunes to earth, till some one jostled him into the gutter. Then he recollected himself and prepared to enter the money- mill.