Lot & Company

by Will Levington Comfort

Bellair had felt many things hammering for utterance, but when he had come thus far, he found that the whole ground was covered.... The boy hurried home, but Bellair was not ready. With all his affection for the lad, he wanted to be alone. He had held himself to Davy’s needs for hours; but through it all, the sentences—so brief and thoughtless across the breakfast table—recurred smitingly. They hurt everything in him and in an incredible fashion. He marvelled that he had been able to reply quietly. His face burned now, and he thought of the Faraway Woman—how gentle she had been, blaming nothing, holding no sense of being wronged. It was that which helped him now, though his heart was hot and aching.... One must have compassion for the world—one whose home is the house of such a woman.

“It must not hurt the Gleam,” he said half-aloud. This was the burden of all his effort. “The Gleam is hers. I must not let the thought of this touch the Gleam—not even in my mind.”

The young man was stranded in New York. They met as arranged the next morning. Many difficulties were related, and the perversities of outside influences and the actions of others. The great regret was that at a certain time when he had the money more than a year ago, the young man had delayed for a day to purchase a certain little tobacconist’s shop on Seventh avenue. A friend of his had advised him against it, and plucked the fruit himself. This gave Bellair an idea.

In the next ten days, everything seemed waiting for the manager of the Follies to decide the case of Bessie Brealt. Davy was permitted to look for a new job, but Bellair made light of his unsuccess.... He did not look up Broadwell again, understanding clearly that the advertising-man would endanger his position in calling on him. Bellair was not ready to be responsible for such a loss to Broadwell. Employés of Lot & Company did not change easily.... He was frequently, but never long with Bessie during these days. There were moments of disturbing sweetness, and moments that he struggled quickly to forget, as Nature sets about hastily to cover unseemly matters upon the ground.

Now that the great event of her life had come, Bessie required much sleep, and cared for her beauty as never before. She already lived, for the most part, in the actual substance of victory, as only the young dare to do; yet she lost none of her zeal in preparation.... Bellair held to the original idea, though the means was not yet articulate. He was sensitive enough to realise that a man may be impertinent, even when trying to help another.

The tremendous discovery in this interval was that the open boat events which had proved so salutary and constructive in his own case, did not appear to have a comparable effect upon others when he related them. He began to believe that he had not authority, and that he must somehow try to gain authority by making good with men. He had his story to tell. He had seen the spirit and the flesh—beast and saint—watched them die. All life and hope and meaning were caught and held, as he saw it, between the manner of the deaths of two men. This experience had changed him—if not for the better—then he was insane.

It was hard for him to grasp, that the thing which had changed him could not change others—even Bessie. Yet those who listened, except Davy and his mother, appeared to think that he was making much of an adventure for personal reasons. He tried to write his story, but felt the bones of his skull as never before. He began, “I am a simple man,” but deep guile might be construed to that.... “I want nothing,” he wrote, “but to make you see the half that I saw in the open boat,” and he heard the world replying in his consciousness, “The open boat is on this man Bellair’s nerves. It’s his mania. The sun or the thirst did touch him a bit.”...

He became afraid to talk much even with Bessie, and New York boomed by, leaving him out—out.... He tried to lift the signs of misery on the way to the home of Davy’s mother, and in the surrounding halls, but the extent and terror of it dismayed him; and remarkably enough, always this same answer came: that he must get himself and the South Sea business in hand before a true beginning could be made here....

It wasn’t on Seventh avenue that he found a cigar store to suit his purpose in this interval, but the promise was certainly as good as the old one. He put the New Zealand young man in charge, on a basis designed to challenge any one’s quality; and having done this in a businesslike fashion, Bellair made haste to escape. The sense was cool and abiding in his mind that in this case, as in Lot & Company’s, the circle was complete. Still he retained the suspicion that the young man did not believe him sane.

He followed the singer when she permitted, to dressmakers, rehearsals, quartette performances and meals; found other men following singers similarly, in all their byways of routine; he disliked them, disliked himself.