The next evening Alexander dined alone at a club, and at about nine o'clock
he dropped in at the Duke of York's. The house was sold out and he stood through
the second act. When he returned to his hotel he examined the new directory, and
found Miss Burgoyne's address still given as off Bedford Square, though at a new
number. He remembered that, in so far as she had been brought up at all, she had
been brought up in Bloomsbury. Her father and mother played in the provinces
most of the year, and she was left a great deal in the care of an old aunt who
was crippled by rheumatism and who had had to leave the stage altogether. In the
days when Alexander knew her, Hilda always managed to have a lodging of some
sort about Bedford Square, because she clung tenaciously to such scraps and
shreds of memories as were connected with it. The mummy room of the British
Museum had been one of the chief delights of her childhood. That forbidding pile
was the goal of her truant fancy, and she was sometimes taken there for a treat,
as other children are taken to the theatre. It was long since Alexander had
thought of any of these things, but now they came back to him quite fresh, and
had a significance they did not have when they were first told him in his
restless twenties. So she was still in the old neighborhood, near Bedford
Square. The new number probably meant increased prosperity. He hoped so. He
would like to know that she was snugly settled. He looked at his watch. It was a
quarter past ten; she would not be home for a good two hours yet, and he might
as well walk over and have a look at the place. He remembered the shortest way.
It was a warm, smoky evening, and there was a grimy moon. He went through
Covent Garden to Oxford Street, and as he turned into Museum Street he walked
more slowly, smiling at his own nervousness as he approached the sullen gray
mass at the end. He had not been inside the Museum, actually, since he and Hilda
used to meet there; sometimes to set out for gay adventures at Twickenham or
Richmond, sometimes to linger about the place for a while and to ponder by Lord
Elgin's marbles upon the lastingness of some things, or, in the mummy room, upon
the awful brevity of others. Since then Bartley had always thought of the
British Museum as the ultimate repository of mortality, where all the dead
things in the world were assembled to make one's hour of youth the more
precious. One trembled lest before he got out it might somehow escape him, lest
he might drop the glass from over-eagerness and see it shivered on the stone
floor at his feet. How one hid his youth under his coat and hugged it! And how
good it was to turn one's back upon all that vaulted cold, to take Hilda's arm
and hurry out of the great door and down the steps into the sunlight among the
pigeons--to know that the warm and vital thing within him was still there and
had not been snatched away to flush Caesar's lean cheek or to feed the veins of
some bearded Assyrian king. They in their day had carried the flaming liquor,
but to-day was his! So the song used to run in his head those summer mornings a
dozen years ago. Alexander walked by the place very quietly, as if he were
afraid of waking some one.
He crossed Bedford Square and found the number he was looking for. The house,
a comfortable, well-kept place enough, was dark except for the four front
windows on the second floor, where a low, even light was burning behind the
white muslin sash curtains. Outside there were window boxes, painted white and
full of flowers. Bartley was making a third round of the Square when he heard
the far-flung hoof-beats of a hansom-cab horse, driven rapidly. He looked at his
watch, and was astonished to find that it was a few minutes after twelve. He
turned and walked back along the iron railing as the cab came up to Hilda's
number and stopped. The hansom must have been one that she employed regularly,
for she did not stop to pay the driver. She stepped out quickly and lightly. He
heard her cheerful "Good-night, cabby," as she ran up the steps and opened the
door with a latchkey. In a few moments the lights flared up brightly behind the
white curtains, and as he walked away he heard a window raised. But he had gone
too far to look up without turning round. He went back to his hotel, feeling
that he had had a good evening, and he slept well.
For the next few days Alexander was very busy. He took a desk in the office
of a Scotch engineering firm on Henrietta Street, and was at work almost
constantly. He avoided the clubs and usually dined alone at his hotel. One
afternoon, after he had tea, he started for a walk down the Embankment toward
Westminster, intending to end his stroll at Bedford Square and to ask whether
Miss Burgoyne would let him take her to the theatre. But he did not go so far.
When he reached the Abbey, he turned back and crossed Westminster Bridge and sat
down to watch the trails of smoke behind the Houses of Parliament catch fire
with the sunset. The slender towers were washed by a rain of golden light and
licked by little flickering flames; Somerset House and the bleached gray
pinnacles about Whitehall were floated in a luminous haze. The yellow light
poured through the trees and the leaves seemed to burn with soft fires. There
was a smell of acacias in the air everywhere, and the laburnums were dripping
gold over the walls of the gardens. It was a sweet, lonely kind of summer
evening. Remembering Hilda as she used to be, was doubtless more satisfactory
than seeing her as she must be now--and, after all, Alexander asked himself,
what was it but his own young years that he was remembering?
He crossed back to Westminster, went up to the Temple, and sat down to smoke
in the Middle Temple gardens, listening to the thin voice of the fountain and
smelling the spice of the sycamores that came out heavily in the damp evening
air. He thought, as he sat there, about a great many things: about his own youth
and Hilda's; above all, he thought of how glorious it had been, and how quickly
it had passed; and, when it had passed, how little worth while anything was.
None of the things he had gained in the least compensated. In the last six years
his reputation had become, as the saying is, popular. Four years ago he had been
called to Japan to deliver, at the Emperor's request, a course of lectures at
the Imperial University, and had instituted reforms throughout the islands, not
only in the practice of bridge-building but in drainage and road-making. On his
return he had undertaken the bridge at Moorlock, in Canada, the most important
piece of bridge- building going on in the world,--a test, indeed, of how far the
latest practice in bridge structure could be carried. It was a spectacular
undertaking by reason of its very size, and Bartley realized that, whatever else
he might do, he would probably always be known as the engineer who designed the
great Moorlock Bridge, the longest cantilever in existence. Yet it was to him
the least satisfactory thing he had ever done. He was cramped in every way by a
niggardly commission, and was using lighter structural material than he thought
proper. He had vexations enough, too, with his work at home. He had several
bridges under way in the United States, and they were always being held up by
strikes and delays resulting from a general industrial unrest.
Though Alexander often told himself he had never put more into his work than
he had done in the last few years, he had to admit that he had never got so
little out of it. He was paying for success, too, in the demands made on his
time by boards of civic enterprise and committees of public welfare. The
obligations imposed by his wife's fortune and position were sometimes
distracting to a man who followed his profession, and he was expected to be
interested in a great many worthy endeavors on her account as well as on his
own. His existence was becoming a network of great and little details. He had
expected that success would bring him freedom and power; but it had brought only
power that was in itself another kind of restraint. He had always meant to keep
his personal liberty at all costs, as old MacKeller, his first chief, had done,
and not, like so many American engineers, to become a part of a professional
movement, a cautious board member, a Nestor de pontibus. He happened to be
engaged in work of public utility, but he was not willing to become what is
called a public man. He found himself living exactly the kind of life he had
determined to escape. What, he asked himself, did he want with these genial
honors and substantial comforts? Hardships and difficulties he had carried
lightly; overwork had not exhausted him; but this dead calm of middle life which
confronted him,-- of that he was afraid. He was not ready for it. It was like
being buried alive. In his youth he would not have believed such a thing
possible. The one thing he had really wanted all his life was to be free; and
there was still something unconquered in him, something besides the strong
work-horse that his profession had made of him. He felt rich to-night in the
possession of that unstultified survival; in the light of his experience, it was
more precious than honors or achievement. In all those busy, successful years
there had been nothing so good as this hour of wild light-heartedness. This
feeling was the only happiness that was real to him, and such hours were the
only ones in which he could feel his own continuous identity-- feel the boy he
had been in the rough days of the old West, feel the youth who had worked his
way across the ocean on a cattle-ship and gone to study in Paris without a
dollar in his pocket. The man who sat in his offices in Boston was only a
powerful machine. Under the activities of that machine the person who, in such
moments as this, he felt to be himself, was fading and dying. He remembered how,
when he was a little boy and his father called him in the morning, he used to
leap from his bed into the full consciousness of himself. That consciousness was
Life itself. Whatever took its place, action, reflection, the power of
concentrated thought, were only functions of a mechanism useful to society;
things that could be bought in the market. There was only one thing that had an
absolute value for each individual, and it was just that original impulse, that
internal heat, that feeling of one's self in one's own breast.
When Alexander walked back to his hotel, the red and green lights were
blinking along the docks on the farther shore, and the soft white stars were
shining in the wide sky above the river.
The next night, and the next, Alexander repeated this same foolish
performance. It was always Miss Burgoyne whom he started out to find, and he got
no farther than the Temple gardens and the Embankment. It was a pleasant kind of
loneliness. To a man who was so little given to reflection, whose dreams always
took the form of definite ideas, reaching into the future, there was a seductive
excitement in renewing old experiences in imagination. He started out upon these
walks half guiltily, with a curious longing and expectancy which were wholly
gratified by solitude. Solitude, but not solitariness; for he walked shoulder to
shoulder with a shadowy companion--not little Hilda Burgoyne, by any means, but
some one vastly dearer to him than she had ever been--his own young self, the
youth who had waited for him upon the steps of the British Museum that night,
and who, though he had tried to pass so quietly, had known him and come down and
linked an arm in his.
It was not until long afterward that Alexander learned that for him this
youth was the most dangerous of companions.
One Sunday evening, at Lady Walford's, Alexander did at last meet Hilda
Burgoyne. Mainhall had told him that she would probably be there. He looked
about for her rather nervously, and finally found her at the farther end of the
large drawing-room, the centre of a circle of men, young and old. She was
apparently telling them a story. They were all laughing and bending toward her.
When she saw Alexander, she rose quickly and put out her hand. The other men
drew back a little to let him approach.
"Mr. Alexander! I am delighted. Have you been in London long?"
Bartley bowed, somewhat laboriously, over her hand. "Long enough to have seen
you more than once. How fine it all is!"
She laughed as if she were pleased. "I'm glad you think so. I like it. Won't
you join us here?"
"Miss Burgoyne was just telling us about a donkey-boy she had in Galway last
summer," Sir Harry Towne explained as the circle closed up again. Lord Westmere
stroked his long white mustache with his bloodless hand and looked at Alexander
blankly. Hilda was a good story-teller. She was sitting on the edge of her
chair, as if she had alighted there for a moment only. Her primrose satin gown
seemed like a soft sheath for her slender, supple figure, and its delicate color
suited her white Irish skin and brown hair. Whatever she wore, people felt the
charm of her active, girlish body with its slender hips and quick, eager
shoulders. Alexander heard little of the story, but he watched Hilda intently.
She must certainly, he reflected, be thirty, and he was honestly delighted to
see that the years had treated her so indulgently. If her face had changed at
all, it was in a slight hardening of the mouth-- still eager enough to be very
disconcerting at times, he felt--and in an added air of self- possession and
self-reliance. She carried her head, too, a little more resolutely.
When the story was finished, Miss Burgoyne turned pointedly to Alexander, and
the other men drifted away.
"I thought I saw you in MacConnell's box with Mainhall one evening, but I
supposed you had left town before this."
She looked at him frankly and cordially, as if he were indeed merely an old
friend whom she was glad to meet again.
"No, I've been mooning about here."
Hilda laughed gayly. "Mooning! I see you mooning! You must be the busiest man
in the world. Time and success have done well by you, you know. You're handsomer
than ever and you've gained a grand manner."
Alexander blushed and bowed. "Time and success have been good friends to both
of us. Aren't you tremendously pleased with yourself?"
She laughed again and shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, so-so. But I want to hear
about you. Several years ago I read such a lot in the papers about the wonderful
things you did in Japan, and how the Emperor decorated you. What was it,
Commander of the Order of the Rising Sun? That sounds like `The Mikado.' And
what about your new bridge-- in Canada, isn't it, and it's to be the longest one
in the world and has some queer name I can't remember."
Bartley shook his head and smiled drolly. "Since when have you been
interested in bridges? Or have you learned to be interested in everything? And
is that a part of success?"
"Why, how absurd! As if I were not always interested!" Hilda exclaimed.
"Well, I think we won't talk about bridges here, at any rate." Bartley looked
down at the toe of her yellow slipper which was tapping the rug impatiently
under the hem of her gown. "But I wonder whether you'd think me impertinent if I
asked you to let me come to see you sometime and tell you about them?"
"Why should I? Ever so many people come on Sunday afternoons."
"I know. Mainhall offered to take me. But you must know that I've been in
London several times within the last few years, and you might very well think
that just now is a rather inopportune time--"
She cut him short. "Nonsense. One of the pleasantest things about success is
that it makes people want to look one up, if that's what you mean. I'm like
every one else-- more agreeable to meet when things are going well with me.
Don't you suppose it gives me any pleasure to do something that people like?"
"Does it? Oh, how fine it all is, your coming on like this! But I didn't want
you to think it was because of that I wanted to see you." He spoke very
seriously and looked down at the floor.
Hilda studied him in wide-eyed astonishment for a moment, and then broke into
a low, amused laugh. "My dear Mr. Alexander, you have strange delicacies. If you
please, that is exactly why you wish to see me. We understand that, do we not?"
Bartley looked ruffled and turned the seal ring on his little finger about
awkwardly.
Hilda leaned back in her chair, watching him indulgently out of her shrewd
eyes. "Come, don't be angry, but don't try to pose for me, or to be anything but
what you are. If you care to come, it's yourself I'll be glad to see, and you
thinking well of yourself. Don't try to wear a cloak of humility; it doesn't
become you. Stalk in as you are and don't make excuses. I'm not accustomed to
inquiring into the motives of my guests. That would hardly be safe, even for
Lady Walford, in a great house like this."
"Sunday afternoon, then," said Alexander, as she rose to join her hostess.
"How early may I come?"
She gave him her hand and flushed and laughed. He bent over it a little
stiffly. She went away on Lady Walford's arm, and as he stood watching her
yellow train glide down the long floor he looked rather sullen. He felt that he
had not come out of it very brilliantly.
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