CHAPTER II
WHO IS ALAN CONRAD?
The recipient of the letter which Benjamin Corvet had written and laterso excitedly attempted to recover, was asking himself a question whichwas almost the same as the question which Constance Sherrill had asked.He was, the second morning later, waiting for the first of the twodaily eastbound trains which stopped at the little Kansas town of BlueRapids which he called home. As long as he could look back into hislife, the question, who is this person they call Alan Conrad, and whatam I to the man who writes from Chicago, had been the paramount enigmaof existence for him. Since he was now twenty-three, as nearly as hehad been able to approximate it, and as distinct recollection ofisolated, extraordinary events went back to the time when he was five,it was quite eighteen years since he had first noticed the question putto the people who had him in charge: "So this is little Alan Conrad.Who is he?"
Undoubtedly the question had been asked in his presence before;certainly it was asked many times afterwards; but it was since that daywhen, on his noticing the absence of a birthday of his own, they hadtold him he was five, that he connected the evasion of the answer withthe difference between himself and the other children he saw, andparticularly between himself and the boy and girl in the same housewith him. When visitors came from somewhere far off, no one of themever looked surprised at seeing the other children or asked about them.Always, when some one came, it was, "So this is little Jim!" and "Thisis Betty; she's more of a Welton every day!" Then, each time with thatchange in the voice and in the look of the eyes and in the feel of thearms about him--for though Alan could not feel how the arms hugged Jimand Betty, he knew that for him it was quite different--"So this isAlan Conrad," or, "So this is the child!" or, "This, I suppose, is theboy I've heard about!"
However, there was a quite definite, if puzzling, advantage at times inbeing Alan Conrad. Following the arrival of certain letters, whichwere distinguished from most others arriving at the house by having noink writing on the envelope but just a sort of purple or black printinglike newspapers, Alan invariably received a dollar to spend just as heliked. To be sure, unless "papa" took him to town, there was nothingfor him to spend it upon; so, likely enough, it went into the squareiron bank, of which the key was lost; but quite often he did spend itaccording to plans agreed upon among all his friends and, in memory ofthese occasions and in anticipation of the next, "Alan's dollar" becamea community institution among the children.
But exhilarating and wonderful as it was to be able of one's self totake three friends to the circus, or to be the purveyor of twenty wholepackages--not sticks--of gum, yet the dollar really made only moreplain the boy's difference. The regularity and certainty of itsarrival as Alan's share of some larger sum of money which came to"papa" in the letter, never served to make the event ordinary oraccepted.
"Who gives it to you, Alan?" was a question more often asked, as timewent on. The only answer Alan could give was, "It comes from Chicago."The postmark on the envelope, Alan noticed, was always Chicago; thatwas all he ever could find out about his dollar. He was about tenyears old when, for a reason as inexplicable as the dollar's coming,the letters with the typewritten addresses and the enclosed moneyceased.
Except for the loss of the dollar at the end of every second month--aloss much discussed by all the children and not accepted as permanenttill more than two years had passed--Alan felt no immediate resultsfrom the cessation of the letters from Chicago; and when the firsteffects appeared, Jim and Betty felt them quite as much as he. Papaand mamma felt them, too, when the farm had to be given up, and thefamily moved to the town, and papa went to work in the woolen millbeside the river.
Papa and mamma, at first surprised and dismayed by the stopping of theletters, still clung to the hope of the familiar, typewritten addressedenvelope appearing again; but when, after two years, no more moneycame, resentment which had been steadily growing against the person whohad sent the money began to turn against Alan; and his "parents" toldhim all they knew about him.
In 1896 they had noticed an advertisement for persons to care for achild; they had answered it to the office of the newspaper whichprinted it. In response to their letter a man called upon them and,after seeing them and going around to see their friends, had madearrangements with them to take a boy of three, who was in good healthand came of good people. He paid in advance board for a year andagreed to send a certain amount every two months after that time. Theman brought the boy, whom he called Alan Conrad, and left him. Forseven years the money agreed upon came; now it had ceased, and papa hadno way of finding the man--the name given by him appeared to befictitious, and he had left no address except "general delivery,Chicago"--Papa knew nothing more than that. He had advertised in theChicago papers after the money stopped coming, and he had communicatedwith every one named Conrad in or near Chicago, but he had learnednothing. Thus, at the age of thirteen, Alan definitely knew that whathe already had guessed--the fact that he belonged somewhere else thanin the little brown house--was all that any one there could tell him;and the knowledge gave persistence to many internal questionings.Where did he belong? Who was he? Who was the man who had brought himhere? Had the money ceased coming because the person who sent it wasdead? In that case, connection of Alan with the place where hebelonged was permanently broken. Or would some other communicationfrom that source reach him some time--if not money, then somethingelse? Would he be sent for some day? He did not resent "papa andmamma's" new attitude of benefactors toward him; instead, loving themboth because he had no one else to love, he sympathized with it. Theyhad struggled hard to keep the farm. They had ambitions for Jim; theywere scrimping and sparing now so that Jim could go to college, andwhatever was given to Alan was taken away from Jim and diminished byjust that much his opportunity.
But when Alan asked papa to get him a job in the woolen mill at theother side of town where papa himself worked in some humble andindefinite capacity, the request was refused. Thus, externally atleast, Alan's learning the little that was known about himself made nochange in his way of living; he went, as did Jim, to the town school,which combined grammar and high schools under one roof; and, as he grewolder, he clerked--as Jim also did--in one of the town stores duringvacations and in the evenings; the only difference was this: that Jim'smoney, so earned, was his own, but Alan carried his home as partpayment of those arrears which had mounted up against him since theletters ceased coming. At seventeen, having finished high school, hewas clerking officially in Merrill's general store, when the nextletter came.
It was addressed this time not to papa, but to Alan Conrad. He seizedit, tore it open, and a bank draft for fifteen hundred dollars fellout. There was no letter with the enclosure, no word of communication;just the draft to the order of Alan Conrad. Alan wrote the Chicagobank by which the draft had been issued; their reply showed that thedraft had been purchased with currency, so there was no record of theidentity of the person who had sent it. More than that amount was duefor arrears for the seven years during which no money was sent, evenwhen the total which Alan had earned was deducted. So Alan merelyendorsed the draft over to "father"; and that fall Jim went to college.But, when Jim discovered that it not only was possible but planned atthe university for a boy to work his way through, Alan went also.
Four wonderful years followed. The family of a professor of physics,with whom he was brought in contact by his work outside of college,liked him and "took him up." He lodged finally in their house andbecame one of them. In companionship with these educated people, ideasand manners came to him which he could not have acquired at home;athletics straightened and added bearing to his muscular, well-formedbody; his pleasant, strong young face acquired self-reliance andself-control. Life became filled with possibilities for himself whichit had never held before.
But on his day of graduation he had to put away the enterprises he hadplanned and the dreams he dreamed and, conscious that his debt tofather and mother still remained unpaid, he
had returned to care forthem; for father's health had failed and Jim who had opened a lawoffice in Kansas City, could do nothing to help.
No more money had followed the draft from Chicago and there had been nocommunication of any kind; but the receipt of so considerable a sum hadrevived and intensified all Alan's speculations about himself. Thevague expectation of his childhood that sometime, in some way, he wouldbe "sent for" had grown during the last six years to a definite belief.And now--on the afternoon before--the summons had come.
This time, as he tore open the envelope, he saw that besides a check,there was writing within--an uneven and nervous-looking but plainlylegible communication in longhand. The letter made no explanation. Ittold him, rather than asked him, to come to Chicago, gave minuteinstructions for the journey, and advised him to telegraph when hestarted. The check was for a hundred dollars to pay his expenses.Check and letter were signed by a name completely strange to him.
He was a distinctly attractive looking lad, as he stood now on thestation platform of the little town, while the eastbound train rumbledin, and he fingered in his pocket the letter from Chicago.
As the train came to a stop, he pushed his suitcase up on to a carplatform and stood on the bottom step, looking back at the little townstanding away from its railroad station among brown, treeless hills,now scantily snow-covered--the town which was the only home he everconsciously had known. His eyes dampened and he choked, as he lookedat it and at the people on the station platform--the station-master,the drayman, the man from the post office who would receive the mailbag, people who called him by his first name, as he called them bytheirs. He did not doubt at all that he would see the town and themagain. The question was what he would be when he did see them. Theyand it would not be changed, but he would. As the train started, hepicked up the suitcase and carried it into the second day-coach.
Finding a seat, at once he took the letter from his pocket and for thedozenth time reread it. Was Corvet a relative? Was he the man who hadsent the remittances when Alan was a little boy, and the one who laterhad sent the fifteen hundred dollars? Or was he merely a go-between,perhaps a lawyer? There was no letterhead to give aid in thesespeculations. The address to which Alan was to come was in AstorStreet. He had never heard the name of the street before. Was it abusiness street, Corvet's address in some great office building,perhaps?
He tried by repeating both names over and over to himself to arouse anyobscure, obliterated childhood memory he might have had of then; butthe repetition brought no result. Memory, when he stretched it back toits furthest, showed him only the Kansas prairie.
Late that afternoon he reached Kansas City, designated in the letter asthe point where he would change cars. That night saw him in histrain--a transcontinental with berths nearly all made up and peoplesleeping behind the curtains. Alan undressed and got into his berth,but he lay awake most of the night, excited and expectant. The lateFebruary dawn showed him the rolling lands of Iowa which changed, whilehe was at breakfast in the dining car, to the snow-covered fields andfarms of northern Illinois. Toward noon, he could see, as the trainrounded curves, that the horizon to the east had taken on a murky look.Vast, vague, the shadow--the emanation of hundreds of thousands ofchimneys--thickened and grew more definite as the train sped on;suburban villages began supplanting country towns; stations became morepretentious. They passed factories; then hundreds of acres of littlehouses of the factory workers in long rows; swiftly the buildingsbecame larger, closer together; he had a vision of miles upon miles ofstreets, and the train rolled slowly into a long trainshed and stopped.
Alan, following the porter with his suitcase from the car, stepped downamong the crowds hurrying to and from the trains. He was not confused,he was only intensely excited. Acting in implicit accord with theinstructions of the letter, which he knew by heart, he went to theuniformed attendant and engaged a taxicab--itself no small experience;there would be no one at the station to meet him, the letter had said.He gave the Astor Street address and got into the cab. Leaning forwardin his seat, looking to the right and then to the left as he was driventhrough the city, his first sensation was only disappointment.
Except that it was larger, with more and bigger buildings and with morepeople upon its streets, Chicago apparently did not differ from KansasCity. If it was, in reality, the city of his birth, or if ever he hadseen these streets before, they now aroused no memories in him.
It had begun to snow again. For a few blocks the taxicab drove northpast more or less ordinary buildings, then turned east on a broadboulevard where tall tile and brick and stone structures towered tilltheir roofs were hidden in the snowfall. The large, light flakes,falling lazily, were thick enough so that, when the taxicab swung tothe north again, there seemed to Alan only a great vague void to hisright. For the hundred yards which he could view clearly, the spaceappeared to be a park; now a huge granite building, guarded by stonelions, went by; then more park; but beyond-- A strange stir andtingle, quite distinct from the excitement of the arrival at thestation, pricked in Alan's veins, and hastily he dropped the window tohis right and gazed out again. The lake, as he had known since hisgeography days, lay to the east of Chicago; therefore that void outthere beyond the park was the lake or, at least, the harbor. Adifferent air seemed to come from it; sounds... Suddenly it all wasshut off; the taxicab, swerving a little, was dashing between businessblocks; a row of buildings had risen again upon the right; they brokeabruptly to show him a wooden-walled chasm in which flowed a river fullof ice with a tug dropping its smokestack as it went below the bridgewhich the cab crossed; buildings on both sides again; then, to theright, a roaring, heaving, crashing expanse.
The sound, Alan knew, had been coming to him as an undertone for manyminutes; now it overwhelmed, swallowed all other sound. It was great,not loud; all sound which Alan had heard before, except the soughing ofthe wind over his prairies, came from one point; even the monstrouscity murmur was centered in comparison with this. Alan could see onlya few hundred yards out over the water as the taxicab ran along thelake drive, but what was before him was the surf of a sea; thatconstant, never diminishing, never increasing roar came from far beyondthe shore; the surge and rise and fall and surge again were of a sea inmotion. Floes floated, tossed up, tumbled, broke, and rose again withthe rush of the surf; spray flew up between the floes; geysers spurtedhigh into the air as the pressure of the water, bearing up against theice, burst between two great ice-cakes before the waves cracked themand tumbled them over. And all was without wind; over the lake, asover the land, the soft snowflakes lazily floated down, scarcelystirred by the slightest breeze; that roar was the voice of the water,that awful power its own.
Alan choked and gasped for breath, his pulses pounding in his throat;he had snatched off his hat and, leaning out of the window sucked thelake air into his lungs. There had been nothing to make him expectthis overwhelming crush of feeling. The lake--he had thought of it, ofcourse, as a great body of water, an interesting sight for a prairieboy to see; that was all. No physical experience in all his memory hadaffected him like this; and it was without warning; the strange thingthat had stirred within him as the car brought him to the drivedown-town was strengthened now a thousand-fold; it amazed, halffrightened, half dizzied him. Now, as the motor suddenly swung arounda corner and shut the sight of the lake from him, Alan sat backbreathless.
"Astor Street," he read the marker on the corner a block back from thelake, and he bent quickly forward to look, as the car swung to theright into Astor Street. It was--as in this neighborhood it must be--aresidence street of handsome mansions built close together. The carswerved to the east curb about the middle of the block and came to astop. The house before which it had halted was a large stone house ofquiet, good design; it was some generation older, apparently, than thehouses on each side of it which were brick and terra cotta of recent,fashionable architecture; Alan only glanced at them long enough to getthat impression before he opened the ca
b door and got out; but as thecab drove away, he stood beside his suitcase looking up at the oldhouse which bore the number given in Benjamin Corvet's letter, thenaround at the other houses and back to that again.
The neighborhood obviously precluded the probability of Corvet's beingmerely a lawyer--a go-between. He must be some relative; the questionever present in Alan's thought since the receipt of the letter, butheld in abeyance, as to the possibility and nearness of Corvet'srelation to him, took sharper and more exact form now than he had daredto let it take before. Was his relationship to Corvet, perhaps, theclosest of all relationships? Was Corvet his ... father? He checkedthe question within himself, for the time had passed for merespeculation upon it now. Alan was trembling excitedly; for--whoeverCorvet might be--the enigma of Alan's existence was going to beanswered when he had entered that house. He was going to know who hewas. All the possibilities, the responsibilities, the attachments, theopportunities, perhaps, of that person whom he was--but whom, as yet,he did not know--were before him.
He half expected the heavy, glassless door at the top of the stonesteps to be opened by some one coming out to greet him, as he took uphis suitcase; but the gray house, like the brighter mansions on bothsides of it, remained impassive. If any one in that house had observedhis coming, no sign was given. He went up the steps and, with fingersexcitedly unsteady, he pushed the bell beside the door.
The door opened almost instantly--so quickly after the ring, indeed,that Alan, with leaping throb of his heart, knew that some one musthave been awaiting him. But the door opened only halfway, and the manwho stood within, gazing out at Alan questioningly, was obviously aservant.
"What is it?" he asked, as Alan stood looking at him and past him tothe narrow section of darkened hall which was in sight.
Alan put his hand over the letter in his pocket. "I've come to see Mr.Corvet," he said--"Mr. Benjamin Corvet."
"What is your name?"
Alan gave his name; the man repeated it after him, in the manner of atrained servant, quite without inflection. Alan, not familiar withsuch tones, waited uncertainly. So far as he could tell, the name wasentirely strange to the servant, awaking neither welcome noropposition, but indifference. The man stepped back, but not in such amanner as to invite Alan in; on the contrary, he half closed the dooras he stepped back, leaving it open only an inch or two; but it wasenough so that Alan heard him say to some one within:
"He says he's him."
"Ask him in; I will speak to him." It was a girl's voice--this secondone, a voice such as Alan never had heard before. It was low and softbut quite clear and distinct, with youthful, impulsive modulations andthe manner of accent which Alan knew must go with the sort of peoplewho lived in houses like those on this street.
The servant, obeying the voice, returned and opened wide the door.
"Will you come in, sir?"
Alan put down his suitcase on the stone porch; the man made no move topick it up and bring it in. Then Alan stepped into the hall face toface with the girl who had come from the big room on the right.
She was quite a young girl--not over twenty-one or twenty-two, Alanjudged; like girls brought up in wealthy families, she seemed to Alanto have gained young womanhood in far greater degree in some respectsthan the girls he knew, while, at the same time, in other ways, sheretained more than they some characteristics of a child. Her slenderfigure had a woman's assurance and grace; her soft brown hair wasdressed like a woman's; her gray eyes had the open directness of thegirl. Her face--smoothly oval, with straight brows and a skin sodelicate that at the temples the veins showed dimly blue--was at oncewomanly and youthful; and there was something altogether likable andsimple about her, as she studied Alan now. She had on a street dressand hat; whether it was this, or whether it was the contrast of heryouth and vitality with this somber, darkened house that told him, Alancould not tell, but he felt instinctively that this house was not herhome. More likely, it was some indefinable, yet convincing expressionof her manner that gave him that impression. While he hazarded, withfast beating heart, what privilege of acquaintance with her Alan Conradmight have, she moved a little nearer to him. She was slightly pale,he noticed now, and there were lines of strain and trouble about hereyes.
"I am Constance Sherrill," she announced. Her tone implied quiteevidently that she expected him to have some knowledge of her, and sheseemed surprised to see that her name did not mean more to him.
"Mr. Corvet is not here this morning," she said.
He hesitated, but persisted: "I was to see him here to-day, MissSherrill. He wrote me, and I telegraphed him I would be here to-day."
"I know," she answered. "We had your telegram. Mr. Corvet was nothere when it came, so my father opened it." Her voice broke oddly, andhe studied her in indecision, wondering who that father might be thatopened Mr. Corvet's telegrams.
"Mr. Corvet went away very suddenly," she explained. She seemed, hethought, to be trying to make something plain to him which might be ashock to him; yet herself to be uncertain what the nature of that shockmight be. Her look was scrutinizing, questioning, anxious, but notunfriendly. "After he had written you and something else hadhappened--I think--to alarm my father about him, father came here tohis house to look after him. He thought something might have ...happened to Mr. Corvet here in his house. But Mr. Corvet was not here."
"You mean he has--disappeared?"
"Yes; he has disappeared."
Alan gazed at her dizzily. Benjamin Corvet--whoever he might be--haddisappeared; he had gone. Did any one else, then, know about AlanConrad?
"No one has seen Mr. Corvet," she said, "since the day he wrote to you.We know that--that he became so disturbed after doing that--writing toyou--that we thought you must bring with you information of him."
"Information!"
"So we have been waiting for you to come here and tell us what you knowabout him or--or your connection with him."
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