The Thread of Flame

Chapter 2

Before getting up to make the investigations on which I was so keen I waited to be rid of Jean-Marie. He came in presentlysmall, black, wiry, not particularly clean, and with an oily smell, but full of an ingratiating kindness. When I had trumped up an explanation of my abnormally long sleep I set him to separating my hand-luggage from my cabin-mate's, nominally for the sake of convenience, but really that I might know which was mine.

The minute he had left with my order for breakfast I sprang from my bunk. I searched first the pockets of my clothes. There was nothing in them but a handkerchief, a few French coins, and a card giving the number of a cabin, the number of a seat at a table in the dining-saloon, and the name of Mr. Jasper Soames. It was a name that to me meant nothing. Referring it to my inner self, nothing vibrated, nothing rang. It was like trying to clink a piece of money on wool or cork or some other unresponsive material.

My clothing itself was what I had guessed from the inspection made from my berth. It suggested having been bought ready to wear, a suggestion borne out by the label of what was apparently a big department store, the Bon March, at Tours. My cap had the same label, and my hard felt hat no maker's name at all.

I began on the bags which Jean-Marie had segregated as my property. There were two, a hand-bag and a suit-case, neither of them tagged with a name. The hand-bag contained bottles, brushes, handkerchiefs, all of the cheaper varieties. Where there was anything to indicate the place at which they had been purchased it was always the Bon March at Tours.

In the suit-case, which was unlocked, and which I opened feverishly, there was a suit almost identical with that hanging on the hook, a little linen, a few changes of underclothing, a small supply of socks, collars, and other such necessities, all more or less new, some of them still unworn, but with not so much as an initial to give a clue to the owner. It struck meand I made the observation with a frightened inward laughthat a man running away from detection for a crime would fit himself out in just this way.

Having repacked the bags, I stood at a loss, in the sense that for the first time I felt stunned. The position was promising to be more serious than I had thought it possible for it to become. There were so many things to think of that I couldn't see them all before me at a glance.

Standing in the middle of the narrow floor, steadying myself by a hand on the edge of Drinkwater's bunk, I suddenly caught my reflection in the glass. It was a new line to follow up. A look into my own eyes would reforge those links with myself that had trembled away. I went closer, staring at the man who now confronted me.

It is an odd experience to gaze at yourself and see a stranger; but that is what happened to me now. The face that gazed back at me was one which, as far as I could tell, I had never seen in my life. I had seen faces like it, hundreds of them, but never precisely this face. It was the typical face of the brown-eyed, brown-haired Anglo-Saxon, lean, leathery, and tanned; but I could no more connect it with my intimate self than I could Drinkwater's face, or Jean-Marie's.

It was that of a man who might have been thirty-two, but who possibly looked older. I mean by that that there was a haggardness in it which seemed to come of experience rather than from time. Had you passed this face in the street you would have said that it was that of a tall, good-looking young fellow with a brown mustache, but you would have added that the eyes had the queer, far-away luminosity of eyes that have "seen things." They would have reminded you of Drinkwater's eyesnot that they were like them, but only because of their fixed retention of images that have passed away from the brain.

My next thought was of money. So far I had found nothing but the few odd coins in my pockets; but that I had plenty of it somewhere I took as a matter of course. I know now by experience that people in the habit of having money and people in the habit of not having it are led by different "senses." In the one case it is a sense of limitation; in the other of liberty. It is like the difference between the movements of a blind man and those of one who can seea tactful feeling of every step in contrast with the ease to come and go. Of all the distractions induced by poverty and wealth it is one that appeals to me now as the most significant. Merely to do without things, or merely to possess things, is matter of little importance. A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth, we are told on high authority; but it does consist in his state of mind. To be always in a state of mind in which restriction is instinctive is like always creeping as a baby and never learning to walk.

But as far as money went I was free. I had never been without it. I had no conception of a life in which I couldn't spend as much as I reasonably wished. As I had been in Europe, I probably had a letter of credit somewhere, if I could only put my hand on it. On arriving in New York I should of course have access to my bank-account.

It occurred to me to look under my pillow, and there, sure enough, was a little leather purse. That it was a common little purse was secondary to the fact that it was filled. Sitting on the edge of the couch, I opened it with fingers that shook with my excitement. It contained three five-hundred-franc notes, two for a hundred, some hundred and fifty in gold, and a little silver, nearly four hundred dollars in all. I seemed to know that roughly it was the kind of sum I generally carried on my person when abroad.

After a hasty scrubbing up I crept back into bed, and waited for Jean-Marie to bring my breakfast.

It was my first thought that I must not let him see that anything was wrong. I must let no one see that. The reason I had given him for my extraordinary sleep, that of having long suffered from insomnia and being relieved by the sea air, would have to pass, too, with Drinkwater's friend the doctor, should he come to see me. No one, no one, must suspect that for so much as an hour the sense of my identity had escaped me. The shame I felt at thata shame I have since learned to be common to most victims of the same mishapwas overwhelming. Rather than confess it I could own to nearly anything in the nature of a crime.

But it was no one's business but my own. I comforted myself with that reflection amid much that I found disturbing.

What I chiefly found disturbing was my general environment. I couldn't understand this narrow cabin, these provincial foreign clothes. While I was sorry for Drinkwater's blindness, I disliked the closeness of contact with one I regarded as my inferior. I am not saying that I took this situation seriously. I knew I could extricate myself from it on arriving in New York. The element in it that troubled me was my inability to account for it. What had I been doing that I should find myself in conditions so distasteful? Why should I have wanted to obliterate my traces? It was obvious that I had done it, and that I had done it with deliberation. Being Somebody in the world, I had made myself Nobody, and for that I must have had a motive. Was it a motive that would confront me as soon as I had become Somebody again? That I should have lost the sense of my identity was bad enough in itself; but that I should reappear in a rle that was not my own, and with a name I was sure I had never borne, was at once terrifying and grotesque.