Now, however ... P. Sybarite realised suddenly that habit had instilled into his bosom a sort of mean affection for the grim and sordid place. Time had made him sib to its spirit, close to its n.i.g.g.ard heart. Scarcely a nook or corner of it with which he was not on terms of the most intimate acquaintance. In the adjoining room a deserted woman had died by her own hand; her moans, filtered through the dividing wall, had summoned P. Sybarite--too late. The double front room on the same floor harboured an amiable couple whose sempiternal dissensions only his tact and persistence ever served to still. The other hall-bedroom had housed for many years a dipsomaniac whose periodic orgies had cost P. Sybarite many a night of bedside vigil. On the floor below lived a maiden lady whose quenchless hopes still centred about his amiable person. Downstairs in the clammy parlour he had whiled away unnumbered hours a.s.sisting at dreary "bridge drives," or playing audience to amateur recitals on the aged and decrepit "family organ." For an entire decade he had occupied the same chair at the same table in the bas.e.m.e.nt dining-room, feasting on beef, mutton, Irish stew, ham-and-beans, veal, pork, or just-hash--according to the designated day of the week....

The very room in which he sat was somehow dear to him; upon it he wasted a sentiment in a way akin to that with which one regards the grave of a beloved friend; it was, in fact, the tomb of his own youth.

Its narrow and impoverished bed had groaned with the restless weight of him all those many nights through which he had lain wakeful, in impotent mutiny against the outrageous circ.u.mstances that made him a prisoner there. Its walls had muted the sighs in which the desires of youth had been spent. Its floor matting was worn threadbare with the impatient pacings of his feet (four strides from door to window: swing and repeat _ad libitum_). Its solitary gas-jet had, with begrudged illumination, sicklied o'er the pages of those innumerable borrowed books with which he had sought to dull poignant self-consciousness....

A tomb!... Bitterly he granted the aptness of that description of his cubicle: mausoleum of his every hope and aspiration, sepulchre of all his ability and promise. In this narrow room his very self had been extinguished: a man had degenerated into a machine. Everything that caught his eye bore mute witness to this truth: the shabby tin alarm clock on the battered bureau was one of a dynasty that had roused him at six in the morning with unfailing regularity three hundred and sixty-five times per year (Sundays were too rare in his calendar and too precious to be wasted abed). From an iron hook in the window frame dangled the elastic home-exerciser with which it was his unfailing habit to perform a certain number of matutinal contortions, to keep his body wholesome and efficient. Beneath the bed was visible the rim of a shallow English tub that made possible his subsequent sponge bath....

A machine; a fixture; creature of an implacable routine; a spirit immolated upon the altar of habit: into this he had degenerated in ten years. Such was the effect of life in this melancholy shelter for the homeless wage-slave. He was no lonely victim. In his term he had seen many another come in hope, linger in disappointment, leave only to go to a meaner cell in the same stratum of misfortune.

Was this radiant spirit of youth and gentle loveliness (who might, for all one knew to the contrary, be Marian Blessington after all) to be suffered to become one of that disconsolate crew?

What could be done to prevent it?

Nothing that the wits of P. Sybarite could compa.s.s: he was as inefficient as any gnat in any web....

Through the halls resounded the cacophonous clangour of a cracked gong announcing dinner. Sighing, P. Sybarite rose and knocked the ashes delicately from his pipe--saving the dottle for a good-night whiff after the theatre.

Being Sat.u.r.day, it was the night of ham-and-beans. P. Sybarite loathed ham-and-beans with a deathly loathing. Nevertheless he ate his dole of ham-and-beans. He sat on the landlady's right, and was reluctant to hurt her feelings or incur her displeasure. Besides, he was hungry: between the home-exerciser and the daily walks to and from the Brooklyn Bridge, his normal appet.i.te was that of an athlete in pink of training.

Miss Lessing sat on the same side of the main dining-table, but half a dozen chairs away. P. Sybarite couldn't see her save by craning his neck. He refused to crane his neck: it might seem ostentatious.

Violet and her George occupied adjoining chairs at another and smaller table. Their attendance was occasionally manifested through the medium of giggles and guffaws. P. Sybarite envied them: he had it in his heart to envy anybody young enough to be able to see a joke at that dinner table.

By custom, the landlady relinquished her seat some minutes in advance of any guest. When P. Sybarite left the room he found her established at a desk in the bas.e.m.e.nt hallway. Pausing, he delivered unto her the major portion of his week's wage. Setting aside another certain amount against the cost of laundry work, tobacco, and incidentals, he had five dollars left....

He wondered if he dared risk the extravagance of a modest supper after the theatre; and knew he dared not--knew it in wretchedness of spirit, cursing his fate....

There remained half an hour to be killed before time to start for the theatre. George Bross joined him on the stoop. They smoked pensively, while the afterglow faded from the western sky and veil after veil of shadow crept stealthily out of the east, masking the rectangular, utilitarian ugliness of the street, deepening its dusk to darkness.

Street lamps, touched by the flame-tipped wand of a belated lamplighter, bourgeoned spasmodically like garish flowers of the metropolitan night. Across the way gas-lit windows glowed like squares on some great, blurred checker-board. The roadway teemed with shrieking children. Somewhere--near at hand--a pianola lost its temper and whaled the everlasting daylights out of an inoffensive melody from "The Pink Lady." Other, more diffident instruments tinkled apologetically in the distance. Intermittently, across the gaunt scaffolding of the Ninth Avenue L, at one end of the block, roaring trains flashed long chains of lights. On the other hand, Eighth Avenue buzzed resonantly in stifling clouds of incandescent dust. The air smelt of warm asphalt....

And it was Spring: the tenth Spring P. Sybarite had watched from that self-same spot.

Discontent bred in him a brooding despondency. He felt quite sure that the realists were right about Life: it wasn't worth living, after all.

The prospect of the theatre lost its attraction. He was sure he wouldn't enjoy it. Such silly romantical nonsense was out of tune with the immortal Truth about Things, which he had just discovered: Life was a poor Joke....

At his side, George Bross, on his behalf, was nursing his private and personal grouch. Between them they manufactured an atmosphere of gloom that would have done credit to a brace of dumb Socialists.

But presently Miss Prim and Miss Lessing appeared, and changed all that in a twinkling.

VII

AFTERMATH

"Well," observed Violet generously, "I thought little me was pretty well stage-broke; but I gotta hand it to Otis. He's _some_ actor. He had me going from the first snore."

"Some actor is _right_," affirmed Mr. Bross with conviction, "and some show, too, if you wanta know. I could sit through it twicet. Say, I couldn't quit thinkin' what a grand young time I'd start in this old burg if I could only con this _Kismet_ thing into slippin' me _my_ Day of Days. Believe me or not, there would be _a_ party."

"What would you do?" asked Molly Lessing, smiling.

"Well, the first flop I'd nail down all the coin that was handy, and then I'd buy me a flock of automobiles--and have a table reserved for me at the Knickerbocker for dinner every night--and...." Imagination flagged. "Well," he concluded defensively, "I can tell you one thing I wouldn't do."

"What?" demanded Violet.

"I wouldn't let any ward politician like that there _Wazir_, or whatever them A-rabs called him, kid me into trying to throw a bomb at Charlie Murphy--or anythin' like that. No-oh! Not this infant. That's where your friend _Hajj the Beggar's_ foot slipped on him. Up to then he had everythin' his own way. If he'd only had sense enough to stall, he'd've wound up in a blaze of glory."

"But, you bonehead," Violet argued candidly, "he had to. That was his part: it was written in the play."

"G'wan. If he'd just stalled round and refused to jump through, the author'd 've framed up some other way out. Why--blame it!--he'd've _had_ to!"

"That will be about all for me," said Violet. "I don't feel strong enough to-night to stand any more of your dramatic criticism. Lead me home--and please talk baseball all the way."

With a resentful grunt, Mr. Bross clamped a warm, moist hand round the plump arm of his charmer, and with masterful address propelled her from the curb in front of the theatre, where the little party had paused, to the northwest corner of Broadway: their progress consisting in a series of frantic rushes broken by abrupt pauses to escape annihilation in the roaring after-theatre crush of motor-cars. P.

Sybarite, moving instinctively to follow, leaped back to the sidewalk barely in time to save his toes a crushing beneath the tires of a hurtling taxicab.

He smiled a furtive apology at Molly Lessing, who had demonstrated greater discretion, and she returned his smile in the friendliest manner. His head was buzzing--and her eyes were kind. Neither spoke; but for an instant he experienced a breathless sense of sympathetic isolation with her, there on that crowded corner, elbowed and shouldered in the eddy caused by the junction of the outpouring audience with the midnight tides of wayfarers surging north and south.

The wonder and the romance of the play were still warm and vital, in his imagination, infusing his thoughts with a roseate glamour of unreality, wherein all things were strangely possible. The iridescent imagery of the Arabian Nights of his boyhood (who has forgotten the fascination of those three fat old volumes of crabbed type, illuminated with their hundreds of cramped old wood-cuts?) had in a scant three hours been recreated for him by k.n.o.blauch's fantastic drama with its splendid investment of scene and costume, its admirable histrionic interpretation, and the robust yet exquisitely tempered artistry of Otis Skinner. For three hours he had forgotten his lowly world, had lived on the high peaks of romance, breathing only their rare atmosphere that never was on land or sea.

Difficult he found it now, to divest his thoughts of that enthrallment, to descend to cold and sober reality, to remember he was a clerk, his companion a shop-girl, rather than a Prince disguised as Calander esquiring a Princess dedicated to Fatal Enchantment--that Kismet was a quaint fallacy, one with that whimsical conceit of Orient fatalism which a.s.signs to each and every man his Day of Days, wherein he shall range the skies and plumb the abyss of his Destiny, alternately its lord and its puppet.

But presently, with an effort, blinking, he pulled his wits together; and a traffic policeman creating a favourable opening, the two scurried across and plunged into the comparative obscurity of West Thirty-eighth Street: st.u.r.dy George and his modest Violet already a full block in advance.

Discovering this circ.u.mstance by the glimmer through the shadows of Violet's conspicuously striped black-and-white taffeta, P. Sybarite commented charitably upon their haste.

"If we hurry we might catch up," suggested Molly Lessing.

"I don't miss 'em much," he admitted, without offering to mend the pace.

She laughed softly.

"Are they really in love?"

"George is," replied P. Sybarite, after taking thought.

"You mean she isn't?"

"To blush unseen is Violet's idea of nothing to do--not, at least, when one is a perfect thirty-eight and possesses a good digestion and an infinite capacity for amus.e.m.e.nt _a la carte_."

"That is to say--?" the girl prompted.

"Violet will marry well, if at all."

"Not Mr. Bross, then?"

"Nor any other poor man. I don't say she doesn't care for George, but before anything serious comes of it he'll have to make good use of his Day of Days--if _Kismet_ ever sends him one. I hope it will," P.