The Greater Inclination

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The bald man with the globular stomach, who stood at Mrs. Gildermere's
elbow surveying the dancers, was old Boylston, who had made his pile in
wrecking railroads; the smooth chap with glazed eyes, at whom a pretty
girl smiled up so confidingly, was Collerton, the political lawyer, who
had been mixed up to his own advantage in an ugly lobbying transaction;
near him stood Brice Lyndham, whose recent failure had ruined his friends
and associates, but had not visibly affected the welfare of his large and
expensive family. The slim fellow dancing with Miss Gildermere was Alec
Vance, who lived on a salary of five thousand a year, but whose wife was
such a good manager that they kept a brougham and victoria and always put
in their season at Newport and their spring trip to Europe. The little
ferret-faced youth in the corner was Regie Colby, who wrote the _Entre-
Nous_ paragraphs in the _Social Searchlight_: the women were charming to
him and he got all the financial tips he wanted from their husbands and
fathers.

And the women? Well, the women knew all about the men, and flattered them
and married them and tried to catch them for their daughters. It was a
domino-party at which the guests were forbidden to unmask, though they all
saw through each other's disguises.

And these were the people who, within twenty-four hours, would be agreeing
that they had always felt there was something wrong about Woburn! They
would be extremely sorry for him, of course, poor devil; but there are
certain standards, after all--what would society be without standards? His
new friends, his future associates, were the suspicious-looking man whom
the policeman had ordered to move on, and the drunken woman asleep on the
door-step. To these he was linked by the freemasonry of failure.

Miss Talcott passed him on Collerton's arm; she was giving him one of the
smiles of which Woburn had fancied himself sole owner. Collerton was a
sharp fellow; he must have made a lot in that last deal; probably she
would marry him. How much did she know about the transaction? She was a
shrewd girl and her father was in Wall Street. If Woburn's luck had turned
the other way she might have married him instead; and if he had confessed
his sin to her one evening, as they drove home from the opera in their new
brougham, she would have said that really it was of no use to tell her,
for she never _could_ understand about business, but that she did entreat
him in future to be nicer to Regie Colby. Even now, if he made a big
strike somewhere, and came back in ten years with a beard and a steam
yacht, they would all deny that anything had been proved against him, and
Mrs. Collerton might blush and remind him of their friendship. Well--why
not? Was not all morality based on a convention? What was the stanchest
code of ethics but a trunk with a series of false bottoms? Now and then
one had the illusion of getting down to absolute right or wrong, but it
was only a false bottom--a removable hypothesis--with another false bottom
underneath. There was no getting beyond the relative.

The cotillion had begun. Miss Talcott sat nearly opposite him: she was
dancing with young Boylston and giving him a Woburn-Collerton smile. So
young Boylston was in the syndicate too!

Presently Woburn was aware that she had forgotten young Boylston and was
glancing absently about the room. She was looking for some one, and meant
the some one to know it: he knew that _Lost-Chord_ look in her eyes.

A new figure was being formed. The partners circled about the room and
Miss Talcott's flying tulle drifted close to him as she passed. Then the
favors were distributed; white skirts wavered across the floor like
thistle-down on summer air; men rose from their seats and fresh couples
filled the shining _parquet_.

Miss Talcott, after taking from the basket a Legion of Honor in red
enamel, surveyed the room for a moment; then she made her way through the
dancers and held out the favor to Woburn. He fastened it in his coat, and
emerging from the crowd of men about the doorway, slipped his arm about
her. Their eyes met; hers were serious and a little sad. How fine and
slender she was! He noticed the little tendrils of hair about the pink
convolution of her ear. Her waist was firm and yet elastic; she breathed
calmly and regularly, as though dancing were her natural motion. She did
not look at him again and neither of them spoke.

When the music ceased they paused near her chair. Her partner was waiting
for her and Woburn left her with a bow.

He made his way down-stairs and out of the house. He was glad that he had
not spoken to Miss Talcott. There had been a healing power in their
silence. All bitterness had gone from him and he thought of her now quite
simply, as the girl he loved.

At Thirty-fifth Street he reflected that he had better jump into a car and
go down to his steamer. Again there rose before him the repulsive vision
of the dark cabin, with creaking noises overhead, and the cold wash of
water against the pier: he thought he would stop in a cafe and take a
drink. He turned into Broadway and entered a brightly-lit cafe; but when
he had taken his whisky and soda there seemed no reason for lingering. He
had never been the kind of man who could escape difficulties in that way.
Yet he was conscious that his will was weakening; that he did not mean to
go down to the steamer just yet. What did he mean to do? He began to feel
horribly tired and it occurred to him that a few hours' sleep in a decent
bed would make a new man of him. Why not go on board the next morning at
daylight?

He could not go back to his rooms, for on leaving the house he had taken
the precaution of dropping his latch-key into his letter-box; but he was
in a neighborhood of discreet hotels and he wandered on till he came to
one which was known to offer a dispassionate hospitality to luggageless
travellers in dress-clothes.

II

He pushed open the swinging door and found himself in a long corridor with
a tessellated floor, at the end of which, in a brightly-lit enclosure of
plate-glass and mahogany, the night-clerk dozed over a copy of the _Police
Gazette_. The air in the corridor was rich in reminiscences of yesterday's
dinners, and a bronzed radiator poured a wave of dry heat into Woburn's
face.

The night-clerk, roused by the swinging of the door, sat watching Woburn's
approach with the unexpectant eye of one who has full confidence in his
capacity for digesting surprises. Not that there was anything surprising
in Woburn's appearance; but the night-clerk's callers were given to such
imaginative flights in explaining their luggageless arrival in the small
hours of the morning, that he fared habitually on fictions which would
have staggered a less experienced stomach. The night-clerk, whose
unwrinkled bloom showed that he throve on this high-seasoned diet, had a
fancy for classifying his applicants before they could frame their
explanations.

"This one's been locked out," he said to himself as he mustered Woburn.

Having exercised his powers of divination with his accustomed accuracy he
listened without stirring an eye-lid to Woburn's statement; merely
replying, when the latter asked the price of a room, "Two-fifty."

"Very well," said Woburn, pushing the money under the brass lattice, "I'll
go up at once; and I want to be called at seven."

To this the night-clerk proffered no reply, but stretching out his hand to
press an electric button, returned apathetically to the perusal of the
_Police Gazette_. His summons was answered by the appearance of a man in
shirt-sleeves, whose rumpled head indicated that he had recently risen
from some kind of makeshift repose; to him the night-clerk tossed a key,
with the brief comment, "Ninety-seven;" and the man, after a sleepy glance
at Woburn, turned on his heel and lounged toward the staircase at the back
of the corridor.

Woburn followed and they climbed three flights in silence. At each landing
Woburn glanced down, the long passage-way lit by a lowered gas-jet, with a
double line of boots before the doors, waiting, like yesterday's deeds, to
carry their owners so many miles farther on the morrow's destined road. On
the third landing the man paused, and after examining the number on the
key, turned to the left, and slouching past three or four doors, finally
unlocked one and preceded Woburn into a room lit only by the upward gleam
of the electric globes in the street below.

The man felt in his pockets; then he turned to Woburn. "Got a match?" he
asked.

Woburn politely offered him one, and he applied it to the gas-fixture
which extended its jointed arm above an ash dressing-table with a blurred
mirror fixed between two standards. Having performed this office with an
air of detachment designed to make Woburn recognize it as an act of
supererogation, he turned without a word and vanished down the passage-
way.

Woburn, after an indifferent glance about the room, which seemed to afford
the amount of luxury generally obtainable for two dollars and a half in a
fashionable quarter of New York, locked the door and sat down at the ink-
stained writing-table in the window. Far below him lay the pallidly-lit
depths of the forsaken thoroughfare. Now and then he heard the jingle of a
horsecar and the ring of hoofs on the freezing pavement, or saw the lonely
figure of a policeman eclipsing the illumination of the plate-glass
windows on the opposite side of the street. He sat thus for a long time,
his elbows on the table, his chin between his hands, till at length the
contemplation of the abandoned sidewalks, above which the electric globes
kept Stylites-like vigil, became intolerable to him, and he drew down the
window-shade, and lit the gas-fixture beside the dressing-table. Then he
took a cigar from his case, and held it to the flame.

The passage from the stinging freshness of the night to the stale
overheated atmosphere of the Haslemere Hotel had checked the
preternaturally rapid working of his mind, and he was now scarcely
conscious of thinking at all. His head was heavy, and he would have thrown
himself on the bed had he not feared to oversleep the hour fixed for his
departure. He thought it safest, instead, to seat himself once more by the
table, in the most uncomfortable chair that he could find, and smoke one
cigar after another till the first sign of dawn should give an excuse for
action.

He had laid his watch on the table before him, and was gazing at the hour-
hand, and trying to convince himself by so doing that he was still wide
awake, when a noise in the adjoining room suddenly straightened him in his
chair and banished all fear of sleep.

There was no mistaking the nature of the noise; it was that of a woman's
sobs. The sobs were not loud, but the sound reached him distinctly through
the frail door between the two rooms; it expressed an utter abandonment to
grief; not the cloud-burst of some passing emotion, but the slow down-pour
of a whole heaven of sorrow.

Woburn sat listening. There was nothing else to be done; and at least his
listening was a mute tribute to the trouble he was powerless to relieve.
It roused, too, the drugged pulses of his own grief: he was touched by the
chance propinquity of two alien sorrows in a great city throbbing with
multifarious passions. It would have been more in keeping with the irony
of life had he found himself next to a mother singing her child to sleep:
there seemed a mute commiseration in the hand that had led him to such
neighborhood.

Gradually the sobs subsided, with pauses betokening an effort at self-
control. At last they died off softly, like the intermittent drops that
end a day of rain.

"Poor soul," Woburn mused, "she's got the better of it for the time. I
wonder what it's all about?"

At the same moment he heard another sound that made him jump to his feet.
It was a very low sound, but in that nocturnal silence which gives
distinctness to the faintest noises, Woburn knew at once that he had heard
the click of a pistol.

"What is she up to now?" he asked himself, with his eye on the door
between the two rooms; and the brightly-lit keyhole seemed to reply with a
glance of intelligence. He turned out the gas and crept to the door,
pressing his eye to the illuminated circle.

After a moment or two of adjustment, during which he seemed to himself to
be breathing like a steam-engine, he discerned a room like his own, with
the same dressing-table flanked by gas-fixtures, and the same table in the
window. This table was directly in his line of vision; and beside it stood
a woman with a small revolver in her hands. The lights being behind her,
Woburn could only infer her youth from her slender silhouette and the
nimbus of fair hair defining her head. Her dress seemed dark and simple,
and on a chair under one of the gas-jets lay a jacket edged with cheap fur
and a small travelling-bag. He could not see the other end of the room,
but something in her manner told him that she was alone. At length she put
the revolver down and took up a letter that lay on the table. She drew the
letter from its envelope and read it over two or three times; then she put
it back, sealing the envelope, and placing it conspicuously against the
mirror of the dressing-table.

There was so grave a significance in this dumb-show that Woburn felt sure
that her next act would be to return to the table and take up the
revolver; but he had not reckoned on the vanity of woman. After putting
the letter in place she still lingered at the mirror, standing a little
sideways, so that he could now see her face, which was distinctly pretty,
but of a small and unelastic mould, inadequate to the expression of the
larger emotions. For some moments she continued to study herself with the
expression of a child looking at a playmate who has been scolded; then she
turned to the table and lifted the revolver to her forehead.

A sudden crash made her arm drop, and sent her darting backward to the
opposite side of the room. Woburn had broken down the door, and stood torn
and breathless in the breach.

"Oh!" she gasped, pressing closer to the wall.

"Don't be frightened," he said; "I saw what you were going to do and I had
to stop you."

She looked at him for a moment in silence, and he saw the terrified
flutter of her breast; then she said, "No one can stop me for long. And
besides, what right have you--"

"Every one has the right to prevent a crime," he returned, the sound of
the last word sending the blood to his forehead.

"I deny it," she said passionately. "Every one who has tried to live and
failed has the right to die."

"Failed in what?"

"In everything!" she replied. They stood looking at each other in silence.

At length he advanced a few steps.

"You've no right to say you've failed," he said, "while you have breath to
try again." He drew the revolver from her hand.

"Try again--try again? I tell you I've tried seventy times seven!"

"What have you tried?"

She looked at him with a certain dignity.

"I don't know," she said, "that you've any right to question me--or to be
in this room at all--" and suddenly she burst into tears.

The discrepancy between her words and action struck the chord which, in a
man's heart, always responds to the touch of feminine unreason. She
dropped into the nearest chair, hiding her face in her hands, while Woburn
watched the course of her weeping.

At last she lifted her head, looking up between drenched lashes.

"Please go away," she said in childish entreaty.

"How can I?" he returned. "It's impossible that I should leave you in this
state. Trust me--let me help you. Tell me what has gone wrong, and let's
see if there's no other way out of it."

Woburn had a voice full of sensitive inflections, and it was now trembling
with profoundest pity. Its note seemed to reassure the girl, for she said,
with a beginning of confidence in her own tones, "But I don't even know
who you are."

Woburn was silent: the words startled him. He moved nearer to her and went
on in the same quieting tone.

"I am a man who has suffered enough to want to help others. I don't want
to know any more about you than will enable me to do what I can for you.
I've probably seen more of life than you have, and if you're willing to
tell me your troubles perhaps together we may find a way out of them."

She dried her eyes and glanced at the revolver.

"That's the only way out," she said.

"How do you know? Are you sure you've tried every other?"

"Perfectly sure, I've written and written, and humbled myself like a slave
before him, and she won't even let him answer my letters. Oh, but you
don't understand"--she broke off with a renewal of weeping.

"I begin to understand--you're sorry for something you've done?"

"Oh, I've never denied that--I've never denied that I was wicked."

"And you want the forgiveness of some one you care about?"

"My husband," she whispered.

"You've done something to displease your husband?"

"To displease him? I ran away with another man!" There was a dismal
exultation in her tone, as though she were paying Woburn off for having
underrated her offense.

She had certainly surprised him; at worst he had expected a quarrel over a
rival, with a possible complication of mother-in-law. He wondered how such
helpless little feet could have taken so bold a step; then he remembered
that there is no audacity like that of weakness.

He was wondering how to lead her to completer avowal when she added
forlornly, "You see there's nothing else to do."

Woburn took a turn in the room. It was certainly a narrower strait than he
had foreseen, and he hardly knew how to answer; but the first flow of
confession had eased her, and she went on without farther persuasion.

"I don't know how I could ever have done it; I must have been downright
crazy. I didn't care much for Joe when I married him--he wasn't exactly
handsome, and girls think such a lot of that. But he just laid down and
worshipped me, and I _was_ getting fond of him in a way; only the life was
so dull. I'd been used to a big city--I come from Detroit--and Hinksville
is such a poky little place; that's where we lived; Joe is telegraph-
operator on the railroad there. He'd have been in a much bigger place now,
if he hadn't--well, after all, he behaved perfectly splendidly about
_that_.

"I really was getting fond of him, and I believe I should have realized in
time how good and noble and unselfish he was, if his mother hadn't been
always sitting there and everlastingly telling me so. We learned in school
about the Athenians hating some man who was always called just, and that's
the way I felt about Joe. Whenever I did anything that wasn't quite right
his mother would say how differently Joe would have done it. And she was
forever telling me that Joe didn't approve of this and that and the other.
When we were alone he approved of everything, but when his mother was
round he'd sit quiet and let her say he didn't. I knew he'd let me have my
way afterwards, but somehow that didn't prevent my getting mad at the
time.

"And then the evenings were so long, with Joe away, and Mrs. Glenn (that's
his mother) sitting there like an image knitting socks for the heathen.
The only caller we ever had was the Baptist minister, and he never took
any more notice of me than if I'd been a piece of furniture. I believe he
was afraid to before Mrs. Glenn."

She paused breathlessly, and the tears in her eyes were now of anger.

"Well?" said Woburn gently.

"Well--then Arthur Hackett came along; he was travelling for a big
publishing firm in Philadelphia. He was awfully handsome and as clever and
sarcastic as anything. He used to lend me lots of novels and magazines,
and tell me all about society life in New York. All the girls were after
him, and Alice Sprague, whose father is the richest man in Hinksville,
fell desperately in love with him and carried on like a fool; but he
wouldn't take any notice of her. He never looked at anybody but me." Her
face lit up with a reminiscent smile, and then clouded again. "I hate him
now," she exclaimed, with a change of tone that startled Woburn. "I'd like
to kill him--but he's killed me instead.

"Well, he bewitched me so I didn't know what I was doing; I was like
somebody in a trance. When he wasn't there I didn't want to speak to
anybody; I used to lie in bed half the day just to get away from folks; I
hated Joe and Hinksville and everything else. When he came back the days
went like a flash; we were together nearly all the time. I knew Joe's
mother was spying on us, but I didn't care. And at last it seemed as if I
couldn't let him go away again without me; so one evening he stopped at
the back gate in a buggy, and we drove off together and caught the eastern
express at River Bend. He promised to bring me to New York." She paused,
and then added scornfully, "He didn't even do that!"

Woburn had returned to his seat and was watching her attentively. It was
curious to note how her passion was spending itself in words; he saw that
she would never kill herself while she had any one to talk to.

"That was five months ago," she continued, "and we travelled all through
the southern states, and stayed a little while near Philadelphia, where
his business is. He did things real stylishly at first. Then he was sent
to Albany, and we stayed a week at the Delavan House. One afternoon I went
out to do some shopping, and when I came back he was gone. He had taken
his trunk with him, and hadn't left any address; but in my travelling-bag
I found a fifty-dollar bill, with a slip of paper on which he had written,
'No use coming after me; I'm married.' We'd been together less than four
months, and I never saw him again.

"At first I couldn't believe it. I stayed on, thinking it was a joke--or
that he'd feel sorry for me and come back. But he never came and never
wrote me a line. Then I began to hate him, and to see what a wicked fool
I'd been to leave Joe. I was so lonesome--I thought I'd go crazy. And I
kept thinking how good and patient Joe had been, and how badly I'd used
him, and how lovely it would be to be back in the little parlor at
Hinksville, even with Mrs. Glenn and the minister talking about free-will
and predestination. So at last I wrote to Joe. I wrote him the humblest
letters you ever read, one after another; but I never got any answer.

"Finally I found I'd spent all my money, so I sold my watch and my rings--
Joe gave me a lovely turquoise ring when we were married--and came to New
York. I felt ashamed to stay alone any longer in Albany; I was afraid that
some of Arthur's friends, who had met me with him on the road, might come
there and recognize me. After I got here I wrote to Susy Price, a great
friend of mine who lives at Hinksville, and she answered at once, and told
me just what I had expected--that Joe was ready to forgive me and crazy to
have me back, but that his mother wouldn't let him stir a step or write me
a line, and that she and the minister were at him all day long, telling
him how bad I was and what a sin it would be to forgive me. I got Susy's
letter two or three days ago, and after that I saw it was no use writing
to Joe. He'll never dare go against his mother and she watches him like a
cat. I suppose I deserve it--but he might have given me another chance! I
know he would if he could only see me."

Her voice had dropped from anger to lamentation, and her tears again
overflowed.

Woburn looked at her with the pity one feels for a child who is suddenly
confronted with the result of some unpremeditated naughtiness.

"But why not go back to Hinksville," he suggested, "if your husband is
ready to forgive you? You could go to your friend's house, and once your
husband knows you are there you can easily persuade him to see you."

"Perhaps I could--Susy thinks I could. But I can't go back; I haven't got
a cent left."

"But surely you can borrow money? Can't you ask your friend to forward you
the amount of your fare?"

She shook her head.

"Susy ain't well off; she couldn't raise five dollars, and it costs
twenty-five to get back to Hinksville. And besides, what would become of
me while I waited for the money? They'll turn me out of here to-morrow; I
haven't paid my last week's board, and I haven't got anything to give
them; my bag's empty; I've pawned everything."

"And don't you know any one here who would lend you the money?"

"No; not a soul. At least I do know one gentleman; he's a friend of
Arthur's, a Mr. Devine; he was staying at Rochester when we were there. I
met him in the street the other day, and I didn't mean to speak to him,
but he came up to me, and said he knew all about Arthur and how meanly he
had behaved, and he wanted to know if he couldn't help me--I suppose he
saw I was in trouble. He tried to persuade me to go and stay with his
aunt, who has a lovely house right round here in Twenty-fourth Street; he
must be very rich, for he offered to lend me as much money as I wanted."

"You didn't take it?"

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