One day John had to go to the office of a great newspaper directory where files were kept of almost all the papers in the United States, his object being to look over the advertised offers for bids on public buildings in a certain New Jersey town. He was sent into the basement of the establishment, where he found the files arranged in compartments in shelves on both sides of a long room. An attendant handed him a catalogue of the papers with the numbered key to their locations, and he soon secured the information he desired. He was about to leave when a terrible thought took hold of him, and he ran his eye over the catalogue. Yes, there it was. The Cranston News. He went to the indicated compartment himself, took down the file it contained, and bore it to the table and seat set aside for patrons. It was a tiny, half-stereotyped weekly, and on that account its compartment held a longer file than otherwise would have been the case. He put the stack of papers on the table before him. Should he look for the thing the mere thought of which seemed to deaden his brain? He knew the time that the item would naturally appear, and with cold, fumbling fingers he drew out the issue under that date. He held it a moment unopened.
"What good would it do?" something seemed to admonish him. "Don't rasp a healing wound."
The attendant noticed his apparent indecision and approached politely. "Is there something else you want to see?" he asked.
"No, thanks; these are all," John answered, and he opened the paper. The clerk left him and he allowed his glance to sweep the columns of local happenings.
It was there. The mere head-line in bold type was sufficient: "Annulment of Young Bride's Marriage and Tragic End of Husband."
John read the crudely considerate item through, folded the sheet, and restored the file to its place. Then he started back to his office. How pitiless seemed the street scene in the garish light of the midday sun! The push-cart men, the newsboys, the hurrying throng, the rattling of the overhead trains, seemed to belong to an earthly hades. And why, he wondered, should he suffer so over a thing that he had already accepted as a fact, and partly conquered? He couldn't have answered, though a psychologist might have classed it under the head of autosuggestion, or called it a mere backward twist of a morbid imagination fed by unsubdued, subconscious longings for things the subject once possessed.
That night strange, dazzling dreams fell to John's portion. If by his hard work he was enabled through the day to keep his old life out of his conscious thought to any extent, it was often otherwise when he slept, and to-night, following the shock he had had that morning, he was living only too vividly over the period in which he had known Tilly. Again he was entranced by her illumined face and thrilled by her mellow treble voice as she read from the Bible that first night of his acquaintance with her. Again he and she were on the lonely, moonlit mountain road together. He felt her loving pressure on his arm, and as by the light of heaven caught her tender, upward glance. Then she became his wife—actually his wife. They were on the train together—in the cab at Ridgeville, and then in that cottage of dreams and delight, shut in from the uncomprehending world without.
Then he awoke and, like the hail of javelins from an omnipotent enemy, the tragic facts of his existence hurtled down upon him. Smothering a cry like that of a wounded beast in a jungle, he found his pillow wet with tears which he had shed against his will or knowledge—tears of joy, or tears of grief, which were they? He sprang from his bed and stood before the window of his boxlike room.
"It is my yellow streak again," he muttered, wiping his eyes and grinding his teeth. "It can't down me awake, and so it coils about me in dreams. Be a man, John Trott! Life was never made for happiness. It was for pain, struggle, and conquest."