CHAPTER XXVI
BY and by Atlanta was reached. Slowly and with a clanging bell the train crept into the grimy switch-yards bordered by sooty iron furnaces, factories, warehouses, planing-mills, and under street bridges and on into the big depot. Here his ears were greeted with the usual jumble, din, and babble of voices, the escaping of steam, the calls of train-porters. Hoag left the car, joined the jostling human current on the concrete pavement, and was soon in the street outside. Formerly he had ridden to his hotel in a trolley-car, but none was in sight, and seeing a negro cabman signaling to him with a smile and a seductive wave of his whip he went forward and got in.
“Kimball House,” he said to the man, and with a snap of the latch the door was closed upon him.
Rumbling over the cobblestones, through the active scene which was bisected by the thoroughfare, he strove in vain to recapture the sensation he had formerly had on such outings—the sensation that he was where enjoyment of a certain sensual sort could be bought. Formerly the fact that he was able to pay for a cab, that he was headed for a hotel where servants would obey his beck and call, where food, drinks, and cigars would be exactly to his taste, and where he would be taken for a man of importance, would have given a certain elation of spirits, but to-day all this was changed.
Had he been driving to an undertaker's to arrange the details of his own burial, he could, not have experienced a more persistent and weighty depression. Indeed, the realization of an intangible fate, of which death itself was only a part, seemed to percolate through him. His body was as dead as stone, his soul never more alive, more alert, more desperate.
At the desk in the great noisy foyer of the hotel, where the clerks knew him and where he paused to register, he shrank from a cordiality and recognition which hitherto had been welcome enough. Even the clerks seemed to be ruthless automatons in whose hands his fate might rest. As one of them carelessly penciled the number of his room after lois signature, and loudly called it out to a row of colored porters, he had a sudden impulse to silence the voice and whisper a request for another room the number of which was to be private; but he said nothing, and was led away by a bell-boy.
They took the elevator to the fifth floor. The boy, carrying his bag, showed him to a chamber at the end of a long, empty corridor. The servant unlocked the door, threw it open, and, going in, put down the bag and raised the sash of the window, letting in the din of the street below. Then he waited for orders.
“A pint of best rye whisky, and ice water!” Hoag said. “Bring 'em right away, and some cigars—a dozen good ones. Charge to my account.”
“All right, boss,” the porter bowed and was gone. Hoag sat down by the window and glanced out. He noticed a trolley-car bound for a pleasure-resort near the city. It had been a place to which on warm days he had enjoyed going. There was an open-air theater there, and he had been fond of getting a seat in the front row, and smiling patronizingly at the painted and powdered players while he smoked and drank. But this now was like a thing which had lived, died, and could not be revived. He had, for another amusement, lounged about certain pool-rooms and bucket-shops, spending agreeable days with men of wealth and speculative tendencies—men who loved a game of poker for reasonable stakes and who asked his advice as to the future market of cotton or wheat; but from this, too, the charm had flown.