The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 17

I experienced, as I did so, a distinct and quite pleasurable quickening of the pulse.

I found myself in a mere cell of a room, with two dormer windows facing a disorderly vista of chimney-pots and brick walls. On the sill of one window stood an almost empty milk-bottle. Beside the other window was a trunk marked with the initials "H. W." and the pretty-nearly obliterated words "Medicine Hat."

About the little room brooded an almost forlorn air of neatness. On one wall was tacked a picture postcard inscribed "In the Devil's Pool at Banff." On another was a ranch scene, an unmounted photograph which showed a laughing and clear-browed girl on a white-dappled pinto. On the chintz-covered bureau stood a half-filled carton of soda-biscuits.

Beside this, again, lay an empty candy-box. From the mirror of this bureau smiled down a face that was familiar to me. It was a magazine-print of Harriet Walter, the young Broadway star who had reached success with the production of _Broken Ties_, the same Harriet Walter who had been duly announced to marry Percy Adams, the son of the Traction Magnate. My own den, I remembered, held an autographed copy of the same picture.

Beyond this, however, the room held little of interest and nothing of surprise. Acting on a sudden and a possibly foolish impulse, after one final look at the room and its record of courageous struggles, I took a bank-note from my waistcoat pocket, folded it, opened the top drawer of the bureau and dropped the bill into it. Then I stood staring down into the still open drawer, for before me lay the revolver which the girl had carried away the night before from Madison Square.

In a few moments I went back to my own room and sat down in the broken-armed rocking-chair, and tried desperately to find some key to the mystery. But no light came to me.

I was still puzzled over it when I heard the sound of steps on the uncarpeted stairway. They were very slow and faltering steps. As I stood at the half-opened door listening, I felt sure I heard the sound of something that was half-way between a sob and a gasp. Then came the steps again, and then the sound of heavy breathing. I heard the rustle of paper as the door of the back room was pushed open, and then the quick slam of the door.

This was followed by a quiet and almost inarticulate cry. It was not a call, and it was not a moan. But what startled me into sudden action was the noise that followed. It was a sort of soft-pedaled thud, as though a body had fallen to the floor.

I no longer hesitated. It was clear that something was wrong. I ran to the closed door, knocked on it, and a moment later swung it open.

As I stepped into the room I could see the girl lying there, her upturned face as white as chalk, with bluish-gray shadows about the closed eyes. Beside her on the floor lay a newspaper, a flaring head-lined afternoon edition.

I stood staring stupidly down at the white face for a moment or two before it came to me that the girl had merely fallen in a faint. Then, seeing the slow beat of a pulse in the thin throat, I dropped on one knee and tore open the neck of her blouse. Then I got water from the stoneware jug on the wash-stand and sprinkled the placid and colorless brow. I could see, as I lifted her up on the narrow white bed, how bloodless and ill-nurtured her body was. The girl was half starved; of that there was no shadow of doubt.

She came to very slowly. As I leaned over her, waiting for the heavy-lidded eyes to open, I let my glance wander back to the newspaper on the floor. I there read that Harriet Walter, the young star of the _Broken Ties_ Company, had met with a serious accident. It had occurred while riding down Morningside Avenue in a touring-car driven by Percy Alward Adams, the son of the well-known Traction Magnate. The brake had apparently refused to work on Cathedral Hill, and the car had collided with a pillar of the Elevated Railway at the corner of One-hundred-and-ninth Street. Adams himself had escaped with a somewhat lacerated arm, but Miss Walter's injuries were more serious.

She had been taken at once to St. Luke's Hospital, but a few blocks away. She had not, however, regained consciousness, and practically all hope of recovery had been abandoned by the doctors.

I was frenziedly wondering what tie could bind these two strangely diverse young women together when the girl beside me gave signs of returning life. I was still sousing a ridiculous amount of water on her face and neck when her eyes suddenly opened. They looked up at me, dazed and wide with wonder.

"What is it?" she asked, gazing about the room. Then she looked back at me again.

"I think you must have fallen," I tried to explain. "But it's all right; you mustn't worry."

My feeble effort at rea.s.suring her was not effective. I could see the perplexed movement of her hands, the unuttered inquiry still in her eyes. She lay there, staring at me for a long time.

"You see, I'm your new neighbor," I told her, "and I heard you from my room."

She did not speak. But I saw her lips pucker into a little sob that shook her whole body. There seemed something indescribably childlike in the movement. It took a fight to keep up my air of bland optimism.

"And now," I declared, "I'm going to slip out for a minute and get you a little wine."

She made one small hand-gesture of protest, but I ignored it. I dodged in for my hat, descended the stairs to the street, got Benson on the wire; and instructed him to send the motor-hamper and two bottles of Burgundy to me at once. Then I called up St. Luke's Hospital. There, strangely enough, I was refused all information as to Harriet Walter's condition. It was not even admitted, in fact, that she was at present a patient at that inst.i.tution.

The girl, when I got back, was sitting in a rocking-chair by the window. She seemed neither relieved nor disturbed by my return. Her eyes were fixed on the blank wall opposite her. Her colorless face showed only too plainly that this shock from which she had suffered had left her indifferent to all other currents of life, as though every further stroke of fate had been rendered insignificant. She did not even turn her eyes when I carried the hamper into the room and opened it. She did not look up as I poured the wine and held a gla.s.s of it for her to drink.

She sipped at it absently, brokenly, reminding me of a bird drinking from a saucer-edge. But I made her take more of it. I persisted, until I could see a faint and sh.e.l.l-like tinge of color creep into her cheeks.

Then she looked at me, for the first time, with comprehending and strangely grateful eyes. She made a move, as though to speak. But as she did so I could see the quick gush of tears that came to her eyes and her gesture of hopelessness as she looked down at the newspaper on the floor.

"Oh, I want to die!" she cried brokenly and weakly. "I want to die!"

Her words both startled and perplexed me. Here, within a few hours'

time, I was encountering the second young person who seemed tired of life, who was ready and walling to end it.

"What has happened?" I asked, as I held more of the Burgundy out for her to drink. Then I picked up the afternoon paper with the flaring head-lines.

She pointed with an unsteady finger to the paper in my hands.

"Do you know her?" she asked.

'"Yes, I happen to know her," I admitted.

"Have you known her long?" asked the girl.

"Only a couple of years," I answered. "Since she first went with Frohman."

The possible truth flashed over me. They were sisters. That was the strange tie that bound them together; one the open and flas.h.i.+ng and opulent, and the other the broken and hidden and hopeless.

"Do you know Harriet Walter?" I asked.

She laughed a little, forlornly, bitterly. The wine, I imagined, had rather gone to her head.

"I _am_ Harriet Walter!" was her somewhat startling declaration.

She was still shaken and ill, I could see. I took the Burgundy gla.s.s from her hand. I wanted her mind to remain lucid. There was a great deal for me still to fathom.

"And they say she's going to die?" she half declared, half inquired, as her eyes searched my face.

"But what will it mean to you?" I demanded.

She seemed not to have heard; so I repeated the question.

"It means the end," she sobbed, "the end of everything!"

"But why?" I insisted.

She covered her face with her hands.

"Oh, I can't tell you!" she moaned. "I can't explain."

"But there must be some good and definite reason why this young woman's death should end everything for you."

The girl looked about her, like a life-prisoner facing the four blank walls of a cell. Her face was without hope. Nothing but utter misery, utter despair, was written on it.

Then she spoke, not directly to me, but more as though she were speaking to herself.

"_When she dies, I die too!_"

I demanded to know what this meant. I tried to burrow down to the root of the mystery. But my efforts were useless. I could wring nothing more out of the unhappy and tragic-eyed girl. And the one thing she preferred just then, I realized, was solitude. So I withdrew.

The entire situation, however, proved rather too much for me. The more I thought it over the more it began to get on my nerves. So I determined on a prompt right-about-face. I decided to begin at the other end of the line.

My first move was to phone for the car. Latreille came promptly enough, but with a look of sophistication about his cynical mouth which I couldn't help resenting.