Part 24

"Yes."

"About twelve."

"Oh, that's not fair," said Guinevere. "I'm eighteen, and lots of people take me for twenty."

"That is when they can see you," said Hinton.

Guinevere decided that she did not like him. She leaned back in her corner and tried not to talk. But this course had its disadvantage, for when she was silent he seemed to forget she was there.

Once he took a turn up and down the deck, and when he came back, he stood for a long time leaning over the rail and gazing into the water. As he turned to sit down she heard him mutter to himself:

"... That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea."

Guinevere repeated the words softly to herself, and wondered what they meant. She was still thinking about them when a dim red light in the distance told her they were approaching the Cove. She slipped off the heavy overcoat and began to put on her gloves.

"Hello! we are getting in, are we?" asked Hinton, shaking himself into an upright position. "Is that Cove City where the big red light bores into the water like a corkscrew?"

They moved to the bow of the boat and watched as it changed its course and made for the opposite shore.

"Did you mean," said Guinevere, absently, "that you wanted it all to end like that? For us to just go out into nothing, like the river gets lost in the ocean?"

Hinton glanced at her in surprise, and discovered that there was an unusually thoughtful face under the sweeping brim of the red hat. The fact that she was pretty was less evident to him than the fact that she was wistful. His mood was sensitive to minor chords.

"I guess you are eighteen," he said, and he smiled, and Guinevere smiled back, and the chubby gentleman, coming suddenly out upon them, went in again and slammed the door.

The lights on the landing twinkled brighter and brighter, and presently figures could be seen moving here and there. The steamer, grumbling with every chug of the wheel, was brought around, and the roustabouts crowded along the rail, ready to make her fast.

Guinevere and Hinton stood on the upper deck under his umbrella and waited.

Directly below them on the dock a small, fantastic figure made frantic efforts to attract their attention. He stood uncovered, regardless of the rain, madly waving his hat.

"Is that anybody you know?" asked Hinton.

Guinevere, who was watching the lights on the water, started guiltily.

"Where?" she asked.

"Down to the right--that comical little codger in the checked suit."

Guinevere looked, then turned upon Hinton eyes that were big with indignation. "Why, of course," she said; "that's Mr. Opp."

As Willard Hinton stood on the porch of Your Hotel and waited for his host for the night to call for him, he was in that state of black dejection that comes to a young man when Ambition has proposed to Fortune, and been emphatically rejected. For six years he had worked persistently and ceaselessly toward a given goal, doing clerical work by day and creative work by night, going from shorthand into longhand, and from numerical figures into figures of speech. For the way that Hinton's soul was traveling was the Inky Way, and at its end lay Authorship.

Hinton had taken himself and his work seriously, and served an apprenticeship of hard study and conscientious preparation. So zealous was he, in fact, that he had arrived at the second stage of his great enterprise with a teeming brain, a practised hand, and a pair of affected eyes over which the oculists shook their heads and offered little encouragement.

For four months he had implicitly obeyed orders, attending only to his regular work, eating and sleeping with exemplary regularity, and spending all of his spare time in the open air. But the ravages made in the long nights dedicated to the Muses were not to be so easily repaired, and his eyes, instead of improving, were growing rapidly worse. The question of holding his position had slipped from a matter of months into weeks.

As he stood on the porch, he could hear the bustle of entertainment going on within the limited quarters of Your Hotel. Jimmy Fallows was in his element. As bartender, head waiter, and jovial landlord he was playing a triple bill to a crowded house. Occasionally he opened the door and urged Hinton to come inside.

"Mr. Opp'll be here 'fore long," he would say. "He's expecting you, but he had to stop by to take his girl home. You better step in and get a julep."

But Hinton, wrapped in the gloom of his own thoughts, preferred to remain where he was. Already he seemed to belong to the dark, to be a thing apart from his fellow-men. He shrank from companionship and sympathy as he shrank from the light. He longed to crawl away like a sick animal into some lonely corner and die. Whichever way he turned, the great specter of darkness loomed before him. At first he had fought, then he had philosophically stood still, now he was retreating. Again and again he told himself that he would meet it like a man, and again and again he shrank back, ready to seek escape anywhere, anyhow.

"O God, if I weren't so damnably young!" he cried to himself, beating his clenched hand against his brow. "More than half my life yet to live, and in the dark!"