The Thread of Flame

Chapter 8

After a delicious night I woke in a room which gave the same shock to my fastidiousness as the first glimpse of my cabin on board ship. I woke cheerfully, however, knowing that I was in New York and that not many days could pass before some happy chance encounter would give me the clue of which I was in search. Cheerfully I dressed and breakfasted; cheerfully I sat down in the dingy hall to scan the morning's news.

It was the first paper I had opened since landing. It was the first I had looked at since...

I had no recollection of when I had read a newspaper last. It must have been long ago; so long ago that the history of my immediate time had lapsed into formlessness, like that of the ancient world. I knew there was a world; I knew there were countries and governments; I knew, as I have said, that there was a war. Of the causes of that war I retained about the same degree of information as of the origin of the Wars of the Roses.

Bewilderment was my first reaction now; the second was amazement. Reading the papers with no preparation from the day before, or from the day before thatwith no preparation at all but the vague memory of horrors from which my mind retreated the minute they were suggestedreading the papers thus, the world seemed to me to have been turned upside down. Hindus were in France, Canadians in Belgium, the French in the Dobrudja, the Australians in Turkey, the British and Germans in East Africa, and New-Zealanders on the peninsula of Sinai. What madness was this? How had the race of men got into such a tragi-comic topsy-turvydom? A long crooked line slashed all across Europe showed the main body of the opponents locked in a mutual death embrace.

I had hardly grasped the meaning of it when, looking up, I saw a figure of light standing in the lobby before me. It was all in white serge, with a green sash about the waist, and the head wreathed in a white motor veil.

"Hello, kid!" The husky, comic, Third Avenue laugh was Lydia Blair's. I had just time to rehearse the series of irritations I knew I should feel at being tracked down, and to regret my folly for having gone back to Drinkwater on the previous evening. Then I saw the heavenly eyes surveying me with an air of approval. "Well, you look like a nice tailor's dummy at last. Takes me back to Seattle or Boston or Salt Lake Cityand the lady." As she rattled on, a pair of dark eyes began to flash on me from the air. "We haven't got her to-day, but there's some one else who perhaps will fill the bill. Come on out."

Wondering what she could mean, and whether or not the longed-for clue might not be at hand, I suffered myself to be led by the arm to the door of the hotel.

At first I saw nothing but a large and handsome touring-car drawn up against the curb. Then I saw Drinkwater snuggled in a cornerand then a brown veil. I couldn't help crossing the pavement, since Lydia did the same, and the brown veil seemed to expect me.

"Miss Blair thought you might like a drive, Mr. Soames, so we came round to see if we could find you."

"Come on in, Jasper," Drinkwater urged; "the water's fine."

"Come on. Don't be silly," Miss Blair insisted, as I began to make excuses.

Before I knew what I was doing I had stumbled into the seat opposite Miss Averill. She sat in the right-hand corner, Drinkwater in the left, Miss Blair between the two. I occupied one of the small folding armchairs, going backward. In another minute we were on our way through one of the cross-streets to Fifth Avenue.

Having grasped the situation, I was annoyed. Miss Averill was taking the less fortunate of her acquaintance for an airing. Though I could do justice to her kindliness, I resented being forced again into a position from which I was trying to struggle out.

Then I saw something that diverted my attention even from my wrongs. The pavements in Fifth Avenue were thronged with a slowly moving crowd of men and women, but mostly men, that made progress up or down impossible. Looking closely, I saw that they were all of the nations which people like myself are apt to consider most alien to the average American. Of true Caucasian blood there was hardly a streak among them. Dark, stunted, oddly hatted, oddly dressed, abject and yet eager, submissive and yet hostile, they poured up and up and up from all the side-streets, as runlets from a mountain-side into a great stream. For the pedestrian, the shopper, the flneur, there was not an inch of foot room. These surging multitudes monopolized everything. From Fourteenth Street to Forty-second Street, a distance of more than a mile along the most extravagantly showy thoroughfare in the world, these two dense lines of humanity took absolute possession, driving clerks back into their shops and customers from trade by the sheer weight of numbers.

"Good heavens! What's up?" I cried, in amazement.

Miss Averill, who was doubtless used to the phenomenon, looked mildly surprised.

"Why, it's always this way!" she smiled. "It's their lunch-hour. They come from shops and workshops in the side-streets to see the sights and get the air."

"But is it like this every day?"

"Sure it is!" laughed Miss Blair. "Did you never see the Avenue before?"

"I've never seen this before. I'm sure they didn't do it a few years ago."

Miss Averill agreed to this. It was a new manifestation, due to the changes this part of New York had undergone in recent years.

"But how do the people get in and out of the shops?"

Miss Blair explained that they couldn't, which was the reason why so many businesses were being driven up-town. There was an hour in the day when everything was at a standstill.

"And if during that hour this inflammable stuff were to be set ablaze"

Miss Averill's comment did not make the situation better. "Oh, the same thing goes on in every city in the country, only you don't see it. New York is unfortunate in having only one street. Any other street is just a byway. Here the whole city, for every purpose of its life, has to pour itself into Fifth Avenue, so that if anything is going on you get it there."

We did not continue the subject, for none of us really wanted to talk of it. In its way it went beyond whatever we were prepared to say. It was disquieting; it might be menacing. We preferred to watch, to study, to wonder, as, in the press of vehicles, we slowly made our way between these banks of outlandish faces, every one of which was like a slumbering fire. If our American civilization were ever to be blown violently from one basis to another, as I had sometimes thought might happen, the social TNT was concentrated here.

But we were soon in the Park. Soon after that we were running along the river-bank. Soon after that we came to an inn by a stream in a dimple of a dell, and here Miss Averill had ordered lunch by telephone. It was a nice little lunch, in a sort of rude pavilion that simulated eating in the open air. I noticed that all the arrangements had been made with as much foresight as if we had been people of distinction.

So I began to examine my hostess with more attention than I had ever given her, coming to the conclusion that she belonged to the new variety of rich American whom I had somewhere had occasion to observe.

Sensible and sympathetic were the first words you applied to her, and you could see she was of the type to seek nothing for herself. Brown was her color, as it so often is that of self-renouncing charactersthe brown of woodland brooks in her eyes, the brown of nuts in her hair, and all about her an air of conscientiousness that left no place for coquetry.

Conscientiousness was her aura, and among the shades of conscientiousness that in spending money easily came first. I was sure she had studied the whole question of financial inequality from books, and as much as she could from observation. Zeal to make the best use of her income had probably held her back from marriage and dictated her occupations. It had drawn her to working-girls like Lydia Blair, to struggling men like Harry Drinkwater, and now indirectly to me. It had suggested the drive of this morning, and had bidden her gather us round her table as if we were her equals. She knew we were not her equals, but she was doing her best to forget the fact, and to have us forget it, too. With Harry and Lydia I think she was successful. But with me...

She herself knew she was not successful with me, and when, after the coffee, the working-girl had taken the blind man and strayed with him for a few hundred yards into the woods, Miss Averill grew embarrassed. The more she tried to keep me from seeing it the more she betrayed itnot in words, or glances, or any trick of color, but in inner hesitations which only mind-reading could detect.

As we still sat at the table, but each a little away from it, she gathered all her resources together to be the lady in authority.

"I'm glad of a word alone with you because" Apparently she could get no farther in this direction, and so took another line. "I think you said your business was with carpets, didn't you?"

"Somebody may have said it for meespecially after our little talk about the rugbut it didn't come from me."

Her hazel eyes rested on me frankly. "And it's not?"

"No, it's not."

"Oh, then" Her tone was slightly that of disappointment.

"Did you want it to be?" I smiled.

"It isn't that; but my brother thought it was"

"I'm sure I don't know whyexcept for the rug. But one can know about rugs and not have to sell them, can't one?"

"It's not a usual branch of knowledge, except among connoisseurs and artists"

"Oh, well!"

"So my brother thought if you were in that kind of work he'd give you a note to a friend of his-at the head of one of the big carpet establishments in New York"

"It's awfully kind of him," I broke in, as she drew a letter from the bag she carried, "and if I needed it I'd take it; butbut I don't need it. Itit wouldn't be any good to me. I thank him none the less sincerelyand you, too, Miss Averill"

She looked at the ground, her long black lashes almost resting on her cheek.

"I must seem to you very officious, but"

"Not in the slightest. I'm extremely grateful. If I required help there's nobody"

"You don't live in New York?"

"I'm going to stay here forfor the present."

"But notnot to work?"

"That I shall have to see."

"I suppose you're aa writeror one of those things."

"No, I'm not any of those things," I said, gravely; and at that we laughed.