But up and down that pavement he had to move with Nancy until a tag dance came. He was certain that no one would take Nancy from him but, after a moment, he saw Nick, with a set, rather desperate look on his handsome young face, come sidestepping through the crowd toward him, tapped Kildare, and instantly was gliding away with Nancy. Kildare drifted back toward the rope.
The voice of Weyman growled behind him: “She looks like one of the ones, doc. But whatcha mean bringing her over here where everybody knows you?”
“I didn’t bring her. I was brought. Weyman—it means a good deal to me if I can get out of this without being spoken to. D’you think it’s possible?”
“It’s as good as done, doc,” said Weyman. “Don’t turn your head or maybe she’ll see us talking…Is she a nifty or is she a nifty?…But you can walk all the way through Hell’s Kitchen, now, and nobody’ll see you. There ain’t a cop on a beat that’ll know your face. There ain’t a stevedore down on the docks that’ll be able to see you. There ain’t a lunch-wagon cook that ever laid eyes on you. Nobody ever heard of Doc Kildare before. We’ve put it on the underground wire and the whole damn district is wearing blinders. Here they come again with Nick steering her. Notice the dirty looks he’s getting from some of the boys? They don’t know that it’s part of the game. Go ahead and get her, doc.”
Kildare went ahead and got her.
As Weyman had promised, Hell’s Kitchen was blind to them, and before the night ended they had explored most of it. They went down by the docks where ships were being loaded by night crews and the lifts groaned and the pulleys rattled; they passed in and out of the little night clubs which fed beer and music to the young people of the district; they sat in all-night lunch wagons. Midnight had fallen well behind them and they had reached that hour of four in the morning when even New York grows quiet before Kildare saw commencing in the girl that fear which followed her in the night. Once more with empty eyes she began to consider some huge despair. That burden which invisibly crushed her was the weight which he had to find and transfer to his own hands. One vastly important surety was growing in him constantly: That which she feared was in herself, not in the outside world. Something like the sharp wound of conscience was consuming her.
After four in the morning she once or twice touched him and said: “You’re not too tired, Johnny? You still can keep going?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” he would answer, and then her smile came as a reward and a comfort: but he began to doubt his ability to continue in his own role of a man hounded by inward fear. One careless, unguarded moment of indifference might let her guess the truth and then he would be cast into outer darkness and all of his work with her would be undone. For in a case like this there was no real accomplishment except the final one. There was no question of coming by slow degrees to the ultimate answer. He had to wait for the revelation which might come at any instant. A single word, perhaps, would tell him everything. Such a great compassion grew in Kildare as he watched her that sometimes he almost forgot Gillespie and that wreckage of his hopes that lay behind him.
After six o’clock another idea came to Nancy Messenger.
She said: “Johnny, when you’re in a pinch, is it best to go find out the whole truth, no matter how bad it may be, or is it better to keep guessing—and hoping?”
“I’d rather find out the whole truth and look it in the eye,” said Kildare.
“Do you think you would?” she asked with a faint smile. “Well—I’m going to try now. If there’s an answer for me, it lies nearly two hours away in the country. Will you drive out with me? I’ll take you to an old-fashioned breakfast; really golden biscuits and the only good coffee in the world.”
“Coffee!” said Kildare. “That’s what we want! And two hours right now are what we need to use up.”
In the car she gave up all pretence of cheerfulness. She slumped low in the seat with her head thrown back. She talked, as her habit often was, with her eyes closed and as they slid out over the great, gentle arc of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge with Manhattan like shadowy, lifted hands behind them, she was saying: “Was there something queer about tonight? Was it the people?”
“They were a good lot,” said Kildare. “Beer is a bit easier to handle than champagne, you know.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “They were cheerful and good-natured. But they made me feel like a ghost. Why was that?”
“They didn’t look at you because you weren’t their kind.”
“Oh, but there was that party in the second little night club—you remember?—those people who obviously were slumming? Everybody stared at them. They all were conscious of it. They made fools of themselves patronising and surprising, the waiters with their orders. The crowd didn’t like them and showed it.”
She considered this. Then he was aware that she was shaking her head slowly, dismissing this suggestion.
“They didn’t look at us face to face, but they were terribly interested. Johnny, I never felt such a weight of eyes—from behind. There was something in the hiss of their whispering that was about me. A woman can always tell that sort of thing. I think they would have given a good deal to find out about us; and still they wouldn’t look me in the face. The more I think about it, the stranger it was!”
“I didn’t feel that way,” said Kildare.
After a moment she said: “Did you ever see some important person travelling incognito?”
“No. Just what do you mean?”
“Well, I mean a prince or a king or the prime minister. If they’re trying to be inconspicuous, well-bred people make the most desperate effort not to see them, and their eyes fairly ache with the effort of keeping them away from the prince. But all the time, of course, they’re seeing nothing else. Well, it was like that tonight…Johnny!”
“Yes?”
“Are you somebody’s double? I mean, do you look like some famous moving picture star or prize fighter or something like that?”
“I? Not that I know of.”
“You’ve never found that a crowd of people suddenly become awfully aware of you?”
“No. Never. Just the opposite. I’m the average man,” said Kildare. “I’m the average height and the average mug and the average weight. I disappear into a crowd like sand in the sea.”
“Just the same, those people were terribly aware of you tonight. It’s strange, isn’t it? If they thought you were a celebrity, wouldn’t they have come along and asked you to sign cards for them and all that embarrassing business?”
“What an idea!” said Kildare.
“Almost the strangest thing of all is that you didn’t notice it because you have eyes that see everything.”
“I have? Aren’t you imagining a few things tonight, Nancy?”
“Perhaps I am. I don’t know…Left, Johnny!”
Left he swung. They hit more open country at a higher speed. And as they rolled on among the fields, the sky gradually brightened around the horizon with the beginning of the day. But it seemed to give Nancy none of the pleasure and the reassurance which she had found in it the morning before. She grew more and more silent.
“Are you still thinking about the people in Hell’s Kitchen?” he asked her at last.
“Thinking about them? No, no; I’d forgotten them a thousand years ago.”
What held her was the thing that lay ahead, then. Kildare tried to prepare himself for it. The daylight grew from a hint to a colour and then to a brilliance that made the road lights dull. The sun was almost up when Nancy asked him to stop the car. He paused on the top of a low hill which looked down on a vague chequering of Long Island estates, their boundaries obscured by the trees. A narrow inlet from the sea wound back among the lowlands and joined a mere silver hint of a creek in the distance.