CHAPTER III

He brooded like a sneering Satan for a time upon the meaning of the

dress-parade, and then the glory of it overpowered him again. He felt

that it would be a hideous world without its luxuries. It was well, he

concluded, that men should dig for gold, dive for pearls, climb for

aigrets, penetrate the snows for furs, breed worms for silk, build

looms, and establish shops--all in order that the she half of the world

should bedeck itself.

The scarlet woman on the beast, the pink girl with the box of

chocolates, the white matron, the widow in the most costly and becoming

weeds--they were all more important to the world than any other of man's

institutions, because they were pretty or beautiful or in some way

charming--as useless, yet as lovely as music or flowers or poetry.

He was soon so overcrowded with impressions that he could not arrange

them in order. He could only respond to them. The individual traits of

this woman or that, swaggering afoot or reclining in her car, smote him.

Every one of them was a Lorelei singing to him from her fatal cliff, and

his heart turned from the next to the next like a little rudderless

boat.

Each siren rescued him from the previous, but the incessant impacts upon

his senses rendered him to a glow of wholesale enthusiasm. He rejoiced

to be once more in New York. He began to wish to know some of these

women.

It was apparent that many of them were ready enough to extend their

hospitality. Numbers of them--beautiful ones, too, and lavishly

adorned--had eyes like grappling-hooks. Their glances were invitations

so pressingly urged that they inspired opposition. They expressed

contempt in advance for a refusal. But men easily find strength to

resist such invitations and such contempt.

It was not in these tavern-like hearts that Forbes would seek shelter.

He wanted to find some attractive, some decently difficult woman to make

friends with, make love to. He was heart-free, and impatient for

companionship.

When a man is a soldier, an officer, and young, well-made and well-bred,

it is improbable that he will remain long without opportunity of

adventure.

The woman of the bird-of-paradise feather was buried in Forbes' mind as

deeply as if a balcony full of matinee girls had collapsed upon her.

Forbes fell in love at first sight a hundred and fifty times on the

Avenue. Had he met any one of that cohort again under favoring auspices

he might have found in her arms the response he sought. It might have

brought him tragic unrest, or the sort of home comfort that makes no

history.

Perhaps he did meet some of these potential sweethearts later; but if he

did, he could not remember them and he did not heed them, for he was by

then involved inextricably with the one he had hunted for and lost.

When he found her he did not remember her any more than the others. She

impressed him as a woman of extreme fragility, yet she was to test his

strength to its utmost, his endurance, his courage, his readiness for

hazard.

He had won a name among brave men for caution in approaching danger, for

bravery in the midst of it, and for agility in extricating himself from

ambush and trap. This most delicate lady was to teach him to be

reckless, foolhardy, maladroit. She would wear him out in the pursuit of

happiness and disgust him with his profession, with himself and her.

Under her tutelage he would run through scenes of splendor and scale the

heights of excitement. He would know beauty and pleasure and intrigue

and peril. He would know everything but repose, contentment, and peace.

He would love her and hate her, abhor her and adore her, be her greatest

friend and enemy, and she his.

At his first meeting with her he pursued her without knowing who she was

and without overtaking her. And she, not knowing she was pursued,

unconsciously teased him by keeping just out of his reach and denying

him the glimpse of her face.

Perhaps it would have been better for both if they had never come nearer

together than in that shadowy, that foreshadowing game of hide-and-seek

in the full sun among the throngs.

Perhaps it was better that they should meet and endure the furnace of

emotions and superb experiences in gorgeous scenes.

But, whether for better or worse, they did meet, and their souls engaged

in that grapple of mutual help and harm that we call love.

The world heard much of them, as always, and inevitably misunderstood

and misjudged, ignoring what justified them, not seeing that their most

flippant moments were their most important and that when they seemed

most to sin they were clutching at their noblest crags of attainment.

It is such fates as theirs that make the human soul cry aloud for a God

to give it understanding, to give it another chance in a better world.

The longing is so fierce that it sometimes becomes belief. But while we

wait for that higher court it is the province of story-tellers to play

at being juster judges than the popular juries are.

Meanwhile Forbes was unsuspicious of the future, and unaware of nearly

everything except heart-fag and foot-weariness.

When he returned to his hotel he was a tourist who has done too much

art-gallery. Fifth Avenue had been an ambulant Louvre of young

mistresses, not of old masters.

He crept into a tub of water as hot as he could endure, and simmered

there, smoking the ache out of him, and imagining himself as rich as

Haroun al Raschid, instead of a poor subaltern in a hard-worked little

army, with only his pay and a small sum that he had saved, mainly

because he had been detailed to regions where there was almost nothing

fit to buy.

The price of his room at the hotel had staggered him, but he charged it

off to a well-earned holiday and pretended that he was a millionaire. He

rose from the steaming pool and turned an icy shower on himself with

shuddering exhilaration. His blood leaped as at a bugle-call, a reveille

to life.

He heard the city shouting up to his windows, and he began to fling on

his clothes. And then he realized that he knew nobody among those

roaring millions. He cursed his luck and flung into his bathrobe. As he

knotted the rope he felt that he might as well be a cowled and

cloistered monk in a desert as his friendless self in this wilderness of

luxury.

Happiness was bound to elude him as easily as that woman of the white

query-plume eluded him when he in his ten-cent bus pursued her in her

five-thousand-dollar landaulet. All he had of her was the back of her

hat and the number of her car--N. Y. 41508. Or was it N. Y. 85140,

or--what the devil was the number?

He had not brought away even that!