A view of ten thousand roofs, inexpressibly enchaining… Somewhere – perhaps – in that welter of steel and stone, as eternal and as restless as the sea, was the woman Whitaker had married, working out her lonely destiny. A haphazard biscuit tossed from his window might fall upon the very roof that sheltered her: he might search for a hundred years and never cross her path.
He wondered…
More practically he reminded himself not to forget to write to Mrs. Pettit. He must try to get the name of the firm of private detectives she had employed, and her permission to pump them; it might help him, to learn the quarters wherein they had failed.
And he must make an early opportunity to question Drummond more closely; not that he anticipated that Drummond knew anything more than he had already disclosed – anything really helpful at all events.
His thoughts shifted to dwell temporarily on the two personalities newly introduced into his cosmos, strikingly new, in spite of the fact that they had been so well known to him of old. He wondered if it were possible that he seemed to them as singularly metamorphosed as they seemed to him – superficially if not integrally. He had lost altogether the trick of thinking in their grooves, and yet they seemed very human to him. He thought they supplemented one another somewhat weirdly: each was at bottom what the other seemed to be. Beneath his assumption, for purposes of revenue only, of outrageous eccentricities, Jules Max was as bourgeois as César Birotteau; beneath his assumption of the steady-going, keen, alert and conservative man of affairs, Drummond was as romantic as D'Artagnan. But Max had this advantage of Drummond: he was not his own dupe; whereas Drummond would go to his grave believing himself bored to extinction by the commonplaceness of his fantastical self…
Irresponsibly, his reverie reëmbraced the memory he had of the woman who alone held the key to his matrimonial entanglement. The business bound his imagination with an ineluctable fascination. No matter how far his thoughts wandered, they were sure to return to beat themselves to weariness against that hard-faced mystery, like moths bewitched by the light behind a clouded window-glass. It was very curious (he thought) that he could be so indifferent and so interested at one and the same time. The possibility that she might have married a second time did not disturb his pulse by the least fraction of a beat. He even contemplated the chance that she might be dead with normal equanimity. Fortunate, that he didn't love her. More fortunate still, that he loved no one else.
It occurred to him suddenly that it would take a long time for a letter to elicit information from Berlin.
Incontinently he wrote and despatched a long, extravagant cablegram to Mrs. Pettit in care of the American Embassy, little doubting that she would immediately answer.
Then he set whole-heartedly about the business of making himself presentable for the evening.
When eventually he strode into the white room, Max was already established at the famous little table in the southeast corner. Whitaker was conscious of turning heads and guarded comment as he took his place opposite the little fat man.
"Make you famous in a night," Max assured him importantly. "Don't happen to need any notoriety, do you?"
"No, thanks."
"Dine with me here three nights hand-running and they'll let you into the Syndicate by the back door without even asking your name. P.T.A.'s one grand little motto, my boy."
"P.T.A.?"
"Pays to advertise. Paste that in your hat, keep your head small enough to wear it, and don't givadam if folks do think you're an addle-pated village cut-up, and you'll have this town at heel like a good dog as long as – well," Max wound up with a short laugh, "as long as your luck lasts."
"Yours seems to be pretty healthy – no signs of going into a premature decline."
"Ah!" said Max gloomily. "Seems!"
With a morose manner he devoted himself to his soup.
"Look me over," he requested abruptly, leaning back. "I guess I'm some giddy young buck, what?"
Whitaker reviewed the striking effect Max had created by encasing his brief neck and double chin in an old-fashioned high collar and black silk stock, beneath which his important chest was protected by an elaborately frilled shirt decorated with black pearl studs. His waist was strapped in by a pique waistcoat edged with black, and there was a distinctly perceptible "invisible" stripe in the material of his evening coat and trousers.
"Dressed up like a fool," Max summed up the ensemble before his guest could speak. "Would you believe that despair could gnaw at the vitals of any one as wonderfully arrayed?"
"I would not," Whitaker asserted.
"Nobody would," said Max mournfully. "And yet, 'tis true."
"Meaning – ?"
"Oh, I'm just down in the mouth because this is Sara's last appearance." Max motioned the waiter to remove the débris of a course. "I'm as superstitious as any trouper in the profession. I've got it in my knob that she's my mascot. If she leaves me, my luck goes with her. I never had any luck until she came under my management, and I don't expect to have any after she retires. I made her, all right, but she made me, too; and it sprains my sense of good business to break up a paying combination like that."
"Nonsense," Whitaker contended warmly. "If I'm not mistaken, you were telling me this afternoon that you stand next to Belasco as a producing manager. The loss of one star isn't going to rob you of that prestige, is it?"
"You never can tell," the little man contended darkly; "I wouldn't bet thirty cents my next production would turn out a hit."
"What will it cost – your next production?"
"The show I have in mind – " Max considered a moment then announced positively: "between eighteen and twenty thousand."
"I call that big gambling."
"Gambling? Oh, that's just part of the game. I meant a side bet. If the production flivvers, I'll need that thirty cents for coffee and sinkers at Dennett's. So I won't bet… But," he volunteered brightly, "I'll sell you a half interest in the show for twelve thousand."
"Is that a threat or a promise?"
"I mean it," Max insisted seriously; "though I'll admit I'm not crazy about your accepting – yet. I've had several close calls with Sara – she's threatened to chuck the stage often before this; but every time something happened to make her change her mind. I've got a hunch maybe something will happen this time, too. If it does, I won't want any partners."
Whitaker laughed quietly and turned the conversation, accepting the manager's pseudo-confidences at their face value – that is, as pure bluff, quite consistent with the managerial pose.
They rose presently and made their way out into the crowded, blatant night of Broadway.
"We'll walk, if you don't mind," Max suggested. "It isn't far, and I'd like to get a line on the house as it goes in." He sighed affectedly. "Heaven knows when I'll see another swell audience mobbing one of my attractions!"
His companion raised no objection. This phase of the life of New York exerted an attraction for his imagination of unfailing potency. He was more willing to view it afoot than from the windows of a cab.
They pushed forward slowly through the eddying tides, elbowed by a matchless motley of humanity, deafened by its thousand tongues, dazzled to blindness by walls of living light. Whitaker experienced a sensation of participating in a royal progress: Max was plainly a man of mark; he left a wake of rippling interest. At every third step somebody hailed him, as a rule by