Keeban

The quick, quiet unlocking and then the closing of the hall door on the floor below told me that Jerry had come in; so I sat up, roused as I always was when I felt him about. He put life into any place,--even into an Astor Street marble mansion in the somnolence of two-thirty on a morning after everybody else has gone to bed.

Since my light was on, although it was only a shaded reading lamp and although the double blinds before my window must have prevented more than the merest glint outside, I was sure Jerry had noticed from the street that I was awake; for he notices everything; and everything bears to him a meaning which he has the clear head and the nervous energy to make out. I never realized, till I began analyzing Jerry, how much more you need than a brain for thinking; to get anywhere, you must have a sort of habitual energy to tackle incidents and carry them in your mind beyond the first, simple registry of the observed fact.

Take that evening we came home late together, when my cousin Janet with her new husband was stopping with us. They’d arrived only that day, and Jerry hadn’t seen Janet since she married and he had never met Lew Hollings at all or heard anything about him except that they were married and were to visit us. It was a very hot night and they’d gone to their rooms early to rest from the train. We’d given them our best guest rooms,--the pair of bedrooms on the third floor in front with a dressing room in between. I noticed, as we approached the house, that the dressing room light was burning and the bedrooms both were dark with the windows open. Somebody’d forgotten the light; that’s all it meant to me. Jerry looked up at the house.

“Why, that’s too bad, Steve!” he said. “That” was so plain to him that it didn’t occur to him that he needed to explain when he finished. “I thought Janet and Hollings were getting along all right.”

“They are,” I said. “They’re perfectly happy. What gave you the sudden idea they’re not?”

“Oh, closed doors on a night when it’s eighty-eight and no breeze, Steve. Neither has a door open, even to the dressing room; they don’t know the light’s on. They’ve each shut themselves in one room without opening a door even for a current of air to-night.”

“You’re crazy, Jerry,” I said. “I had dinner with them. There’s nothing the matter.” That was what my people thought too until Janet and Lew separated, openly, a couple of weeks later.

Jerry came into my room and, as soon as I saw him, I flung my book to the foot of the bed; for it was perfectly plain, even to my sort of wits, that something mighty amazing to him had happened. He was pale and his blue eyes looked positively big; he has fine eyes, Jerry; you like them, though they take hold of you and seem to look through you; the reason you like them, in spite of this, is that while finding out something of you, they grant you a good deal of him. So they told me now that Jerry was afraid; and, though we have been companions for twenty-eight years--that is, since we were babies--and though that companionship includes service in the Argonne, I had never seen him so afraid before.

He’d come upstairs with his overcoat on, over his evening clothes, for he’d been at Ina Sparling’s wedding, and he hadn’t even dropped his hat downstairs.

“How long you been home, Steve?” he asked, coming beside me.

“Since half-past twelve,” I said.

“Awake all the time?”

“Yes, Jerry.”

“Anybody call for me?”

“No.”

“You’ve not heard the ’phone at all?”

“No. What’s the matter, old fellow?”

“Dot!” said Jerry, staring down at me without now seeing me at all.

“Dorothy Crewe?” I asked, in the way I have of asking perfectly obvious questions.

“Yes, Steve.”

“Oh; you’ve quarrelled?” I said, imagining I saw a light. “That’s it.”

“I’d trade a good many quarrels for what happened--probably, Steve.”

“To her?” I said again, stupidly.

He did not exactly nod his head but he inclined it a trifle lower. “The damnedest thing, Steve; the queerest affair!” he said, looking quickly at me again. He brushed my book to the floor and dropped on the foot of the bed and sat there, staring straight ahead without speaking for a minute while he listened for sounds in the street or below; but there was nothing.

He swung about and demanded of me suddenly, “You noticed Dot to-night?”