It occurred usually upon the street cars. He would make a study of the women in the car when we were together--it seemed to amuse him--and tell me whether they were married or not. He would not look at their hands--that would be a point of honor between us--but only at their eyes, and then he would say whether any particular woman were married or single, and we would leave it to the rings to decide.
Sometimes he would lose, but then he would only say: "Well, if she didn"t wear a wedding ring she should have done so," and would pay for the cigars we smoked.
He had some sort of fancy about their eyes which I could never quite understand. He said that a woman who had been very close to a man, who had been part of him in any way, had nevermore the same look, and that the difference was perceptible to one who knew the thing. I tested him more than once, and I found that he had never actually failed.
Sometimes the woman with the look had proved unmarried, but there were facts that made the difference.
One night Harlson and I were wandering about the city, mere driftwood, after a dinner, and our mood carried us into the haunts of those without the pale, not that we cared for any new emotion or excitement, but that we wanted to look at something outside the commonplace. To me there might be, of course, some novelty in the things that might confront us, though to Harlson they were, at their utmost, but a reminiscence. We went where a man alone was not in safe companionship, but there were enough who knew my companion well, and all was curious to me, without even the spice of care for self.
It chanced that at one period of the wandering, very late at night, or, rather, early morning, Harlson became hungry, and insisted upon entrance to a restaurant where were gathered the very refuse of the reckless and non-law-abiding, and I went with him, perforce, and saw a motley gathering. There were all sorts of people there, from thief to pander, all save those who might retain a claim to faint respectability. Harlson demanded comparative cleanliness at our table, and the food was fairly decent. We ate, then smoked, and looked about us.
I have seen many people, and many strange faces, but never such a person nor such a face as of an old woman who sat at that early hour of the morning at a table near us. The figure was a warped and withered caricature, the face that of a hag, a creature vixenish and viperish, and mean and crafty. It was the face of a procuress of the lowest and most desperate type, of a deformed she-wolf of the slums, of the worst there is in all abandoned human nature, and Harlson was as interested as I was disgusted and repelled. He noted the woman closely.
"By Jove! look there!" he said.
"What is it?"
"Look at her hand."
I looked. I saw a hand which was a claw, a strong, shriveled thing with long, dirty nails and a vulturous suggestion. It was not a pleasant sight. On the third finger of the left hand, though, was a slight gleam amid the carnivorous dullness. There was a slender band of gold there, a ring worn down to narrowness and thinness. I turned to Harlson, but he spoke first:
"Do you see that old wedding ring?"
"Yes."
"It"s queer. It"s good, too. There"s a streak of what was good left in everything, it seems to me. I"m going to talk to her."
"Don"t do it. She"ll throw the plate in your face."
"No, she won"t." And he rose and went over to the table of the beldame and sat down beside her. She looked up at him glaringly. He did not smile, nor, apparently, make any apology or excuse, but began talking to her, looking at the ring, and saying I know not what. And I watched that miserable old woman"s face and wondered. There was more than one emotion shown--fierce resentment at first, then the half fear of the hound or the hound-b.i.t.c.h yielding to the master, and then the yielding of the heart, not touched, perhaps, for a quarter of a century.
Harlson talked. The woman did not speak for minutes, then made some short reply, and then, a little later, there were tears in her old foxy eyes.
He rose, glared at the one or two hard-faced waiters who had ventured near him, and took upon a card something she said. Then he came back to me as the old woman left the place.
"Queer-looking, wasn"t she?" he said.
"Decidedly," said I. "What were you talking about?"
"Oh, nothing but the ring. It"s wonderful how they always wear the ring when they have the right to."
"But what was the use of it all? What came of your talk?"
"Nothing to speak of. It was only a fad of mine. I have a right to an occasional whim, haven"t I? I"ll be hanged if I"ll see a wedding ring worn that way buried in unbought ground. The old hag was a marvel of all that is unwomanly and sinful. But that ring shall be properly buried, and the hand that wears it, because it _does_ wear it. So I"m going to take the woman out of this and put her where she will not have to be a monster in order to live."
And he did what he said he would do. He found a place in some old women"s home for that aged demon, and one day he made me go with him to see her. Maybe it was the different dress and the different surroundings, but, it seemed to me, her eyes were not as they were in the low restaurant. The hand that wore the thin gold ring was clean in its pitiful shrunkenness. The creature looked neither hunted nor hunting. She was but an old woman going to the grave so near her, and going, I could not but imagine, to find the one who had given her that gold circlet some half century ago. I rather fancied Harlson"s fad.
As for him, when I told him so, he only said:
"Oh, of course. Peter told the third a.s.sistant bookkeeper to credit Harlson with such or such an amount." And he added; "If those people don"t take good care of that old woman there"ll be a new superintendent." But they took good care of her.
This is lugging in an incident at great length as an ill.u.s.tration, but I know of no other way to explain how Harlson so expressed himself when I asked him how he knew whether the woman of whom he had been talking was married or not. He felt confident enough.
"Well, what is she like? Can"t you describe her? Has she seared your eyes with her loveliness?"
"She hasn"t seared my eyes. She has only opened them. Listen to me, you thing of mud! She is just a little brown streak."
"That"s an odd description of a woman."
"It"s the correct one, though. She"s just a little brown streak of a thing."
"Well, I"ve heard of a man in love with a dream, and in love with a shadow, but never before did I hear of one infatuated with a streak.
Where did you meet this creature? Have you known her long?"
"Only for a month or so, and but slightly. We have not met half a dozen times. It was only tonight, you see, that I began to know her well. We talked together, and I got a glimpse of her real self--of her slender little body, of her earthly tenement, of course, I had an idea before. She is a lissom thing, with eyes like wells, and with a way to her which conveys the idea of wisdom without wickedness, and which makes a man wish he were not what he is, and were more fitted to a.s.sociate with her."
"That"s one good effect, anyhow. I don"t know of any man who more needed to meet such a woman. How long do you expect this influence to last?"
"Longer than one of your good resolutions, my son; as long as she will have anything to do with me."
"Does this brown streak of a saint live in the city? Is her shrine easy of access? What are you going to do about it?"
"She"s not a saint; she"s a piquant, cultivated woman; but she is different, somehow, from any other I"ve ever met."
"You"ve met a good many, my boy."
His face fell a little.
"Yes," he said, "and I almost wish it were different; but the past is not all there is of being. There"s a heap of comfort in that."
"Cupid has thumped you with his bird-bolt, certainly. Why, man, you don"t mean to say that you"re in earnest--that you are really stricken; that this promises to be something unlike all other heart or head troubles with you?"
He laughed.
"I am inclined to believe that the gravest diagnosis is the correct one."
"But how about the present Mrs. Harlson?"
No friend less close than I could have asked such a question. I almost repented it myself, when I noted the look which came upon the man"s face after its utterance.
I suppose such a look might come to one in prison, who, in the midst of some pleasant fancy, has forgotten his surroundings, and is awakened to reason and suddenly to a perception again of the grim walls about him, and of his helplessness and, maybe, hopelessness. Harlson left the mantel against which he bad been leaning, and walked about the room for a moment or two before speaking.
"It"s true," he said, "I am certainly a married man. The law allows it, and the court awards it, as things are in this society, bound by the tapes of Justice Shallow and the rest. I entered into a contract which was a mistake on the part of two people. They discovered their error, and rectified it as far as they could. Had they been two men or two women who had gone into ordinary business together, and subsequently discovered they were not fitted for a partnership, the law would have a.s.sisted cheerfully in their absolute separation. But with this, the gravest of all contracts, the one most affecting human welfare, no such kindness of the statutes may exist. Some of the churches say the contract is a sacrament, though the shepherd kings, whose story is our Bible, had no such thought, nor was it taught by the lowly Nazarene; but the law supports the legend, within certain limits.
What are we going to do about it?"
I told him that I didn"t know, and there were several thousand people--good people--in the city facing the same conundrum.
I called attention to the fact that the conventional band was a strong one at this time, and could not be burst without a penalty, even by the shrewdest. The dwarfs were so many that, united, they were stronger than any Gulliver. And I added that, in my opinion, as a mere layman, he was very well off; that he had been at least relieved of the great, continued trouble which follows a mismating, and that it would be time enough for him to chafe at the light chain still restraining him, when he was sure he wanted to replace it by another.
"It"s not your fashion," I said, "to fret over the morrow, and it is my personal and profound conviction that you have no more real idea of marrying again than you have of volunteering in the service of the Akhoond of Swat--if there be an Akhoond of Swat at present. You"re only wandering mentally to-night, my boy, dreaming, because this wisp of a young woman of whom you have been telling has turned your brain for the time. You"ll be wiser in the morning."