"And try to believe, will you?" said Christina, "that perhaps, whoever she was and whatever she did, perhaps she was in distress, after all."
CHAPTER XII
HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE
Herrick came home through a world which he had never seen before, blindly climbed his three flights of stairs, and, shutting himself into his room, sat down on his bed. He stared across the floor at the wall-paper, like a man drugged. Yes, there was wall-paper in the world, just as there had been this morning. This room had existed this morning! And so had he! Incredible! Almost indecent! To-day, for the first time, he had found himself. For he had found Her!
Yes, he had lived twenty-eight years, and it had been so much time wasted! But he need waste little more. She was an actress. Incredibly, she did not abide in a sanctuary! She was stuck up there on the stage for fools to gape at. And, for two dollars a performance, he, too, could gape! Two dollars a vision—eight visions a week. He began to perceive that he would need some money!
And, with the thought of money, there materialized out of the void of the past a quantity of loose scribbled papers, which, last night, had been of paramount importance. They belonged to his Sunday special. Good—that would buy many theater tickets! Yesterday it had been the key to Success. But now he said to himself, "Success?" And he looked dully at the scribbled sheets. "Success?" he thought again, as he might have thought "Turkish toweling?" It was a substance for which, at the moment, he had no use.
He had no use for anything except the remembrance of being near her. First there was the time when she was just a girl, sitting beside her mother. He remembered that he, poor oaf, had been disappointed in her. And then came the time when she turned her head, and he had seen that strange, proud, childish innocence—like Evadne's. At the time he had reminded himself that this effect was largely due to her extraordinary purity of outline; to the curving perfection of modeling with which the length of her throat rose from that broad white collar of hers into the soft, fair dusk of her coiled hair; to the fine fashioning of brows and short, straight nose and little chin and the set of the little head, so that the incomparable delicacy of every slope and turn, of every curve and line and luminous surface at last seemed merely to flower in one innocent ravishment. He had then admitted that for a girl who wasn't a howling beauty she had at least the comeliness of being quite perfectly made. And no bolt from the blue had descended upon his gross complacency to strike him dead!
He remembered next, how, at the end of his testimony, she had, with her first restless movement, begun pulling off her long gloves. Her hands were slim and strong and rather large, with that look of sensitive cleverness which one sees sometimes in the hands of an extremely nice boy. And with the backs of these hands she had a childish trick of pushing up the hair from her ears, which Herrick found adorable. Suddenly his brain became a kind of storm-center filled with snatches of verse, now high, now homely—she had risen to give her testimony! There she stood before that brute; and the thing he remembered clearest in the world was a line from his school-reader—
"My beautiful, my beautiful, that standest meekly by—"