“You don’t understand. They can get me under the Mann Act.”
The girl followed him slowly, a rather miserable, pathetic figure in the darkness.
Amory tried to plan quickly.
“You make a racket and let them in your room,” he suggested anxiously, “and I’ll get her out by this door.”
“They’re here too, though. They’ll watch this door.”
“Can’t you give a wrong name?”
“No chance. I registered under my own name; besides, they’d trail the auto license number.”
“Say you’re married.”
“Jill says one of the house detectives knows her.”
The girl had stolen to the bed and tumbled upon it; lay there listening wretchedly to the knocking which had grown gradually to a pounding. Then came a man’s voice, angry and imperative:
“Open up or we’ll break the door in!”
In the silence when this voice ceased Amory realized that there were other things in the room besides people… over and around the figure crouched on the bed there hung an aura, gossamer as a moonbeam, tainted as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusively brooding already over the three of them… and over by the window among the stirring curtains stood something else, featureless and indistinguishable, yet strangely familiar…. Simultaneously two great cases presented themselves side by side to Amory; all that took place in his mind, then, occupied in actual time less than ten seconds.
The first fact that flashed radiantly on his comprehension was the great impersonality of sacrifice—he perceived that what we call love and hate, reward and punishment, had no more to do with it than the date of the month. He quickly recapitulated the story of a sacrifice he had heard of in college: a man had cheated in an examination; his roommate in a gust of sentiment had taken the entire blame—due to the shame of it the innocent one’s entire future seemed shrouded in regret and failure, capped by the ingratitude of the real culprit. He had finally taken his own life—years afterward the facts had come out. At the time the story had both puzzled and worried Amory. Now he realized the truth; that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power—to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin—the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair.
… Amory knew that afterward Alec would secretly hate him for having done so much for him….
… All this was flung before Amory like an opened scroll, while ulterior to him and speculating upon him were those two breathless, listening forces: the gossamer aura that hung over and about the girl and that familiar thing by the window.
Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.
Weep not for me but for thy children.
That—thought Amory—would be somehow the way God would talk to me.
Amory felt a sudden surge of joy and then like a face in a motion-picture the aura over the bed faded out; the dynamic shadow by the window, that was as near as he could name it, remained for the fraction of a moment and then the breeze seemed to lift it swiftly out of the room. He clinched his hands in quick ecstatic excitement… the ten seconds were up….
“Do what I say, Alec—do what I say. Do you understand?”
Alec looked at him dumbly—his face a tableau of anguish.
“You have a family,” continued Amory slowly. “You have a family and it’s important that you should get out of this. Do you hear me?” He repeated clearly what he had said. “Do you hear me?”
“I hear you.” The voice was curiously strained, the eyes never for a second left Amory’s.
“Alec, you’re going to lie down here. If any one comes in you act drunk. You do what I say—if you don’t I’ll probably kill you.”
There was another moment while they stared at each other. Then Amory went briskly to the bureau and, taking his pocket-book, beckoned peremptorily to the girl. He heard one word from Alec that sounded like “penitentiary,” then he and Jill were in the bathroom with the door bolted behind them.
“You’re here with me,” he said sternly. “You’ve been with me all evening.”
She nodded, gave a little half cry.
In a second he had the door of the other room open and three men entered. There was an immediate flood of electric light and he stood there blinking.
“You’ve been playing a little too dangerous a game, young man!”
Amory laughed.
“Well?”
The leader of the trio nodded authoritatively at a burly man in a check suit.
“All right, Olson.”
“I got you, Mr. O’May,” said Olson, nodding. The other two took a curious glance at their quarry and then withdrew, closing the door angrily behind them.
The burly man regarded Amory contemptuously.
“Didn’t you ever hear of the Mann Act? Coming down here with her,” he indicated the girl with his thumb, “with a New York license on your car—to a hotel like this.” He shook his head implying that he had struggled over Amory but now gave him up.
“Well,” said Amory rather impatiently, “what do you want us to do?”
“Get dressed, quick—and tell your friend not to make such a racket.” Jill was sobbing noisily on the bed, but at these words she subsided sulkily and, gathering up her clothes, retired to the bathroom. As Amory slipped into Alec’s B. V. D.’s he found that his attitude toward the situation was agreeably humorous. The aggrieved virtue of the burly man made him want to laugh.
“Anybody else here?” demanded Olson, trying to look keen and ferret-like.
“Fellow who had the rooms,” said Amory carelessly. “He’s drunk as an owl, though. Been in there asleep since six o’clock.”
“I’ll take a look at him presently.”
“How did you find out?” asked Amory curiously.
“Night clerk saw you go up-stairs with this woman.”
Amory nodded; Jill reappeared from the bathroom, completely if rather untidily arrayed.
“Now then,” began Olson, producing a note-book, “I want your real names—no damn John Smith or Mary Brown.”
“Wait a minute,” said Amory quietly. “Just drop that big-bully stuff. We merely got caught, that’s all.”
Olson glared at him.
“Name?” he snapped.
Amory gave his name and New York address.
“And the lady?”
“Miss Jill—”
“Say,” cried Olson indignantly, “just ease up on the nursery rhymes. What’s your name? Sarah Murphy? Minnie Jackson?”
“Oh, my God!” cried the girl cupping her tear-stained face in her hands. “I don’t want my mother to know. I don’t want my mother to know.”
“Come on now!”
“Shut up!” cried Amory at Olson.
An instant’s pause.
“Stella Robbins,” she faltered finally. “General Delivery, Rugway, New Hampshire.”
Olson snapped his note-book shut and looked at them very ponderously.
“By rights the hotel could turn the evidence over to the police and you’d go to penitentiary, you would, for bringin’ a girl from one State to ’nother f’r immoral purp’ses—” He paused to let the majesty of his words sink in. “But—the hotel is going to let you off.”
“It doesn’t want to get in the papers,” cried Jill fiercely. “Let us off! Huh!”
A great lightness surrounded Amory. He realized that he was safe and only then did he appreciate the full enormity of what he might have incurred.
“However,” continued Olson, “there’s a protective association among the hotels. There’s been too much of this stuff, and we got a ’rangement with the newspapers so that you get a little free publicity. Not the name of the hotel, but just a line sayin’ that you had a little trouble in ’lantic City. See?”
“I see.”
“You’re gettin’ off light—damn light—but—”
“Come on,” said Amory briskly. “Let’s get out of here. We don’t need a valedictory.”
Olson walked through the bathroom and took a cursory glance at Alec’s still form. Then he extinguished the lights and motioned them to follow him. As they walked into the elevator Amory considered a piece of bravado—yielded finally. He reached out and tapped Olson on the arm.
“Would you mind taking off your hat? There’s a lady in the elevator.”
Olson’s hat came off slowly. There was a rather embarrassing two minutes under the lights of the lobby while the night clerk and a few belated guests stared at them curiously; the loudly dressed girl with bent head, the handsome young man with his chin several points aloft; the inference was quite obvious. Then the chill outdoors—where the salt air was fresher and keener still with the first hints of morning.
“You can get one of those taxis and beat it,” said Olson, pointing to the blurred outline of two machines whose drivers were presumably asleep inside.
“Good-by,” said Olson. He reached in his pocket suggestively, but Amory snorted, and, taking the girl’s arm, turned away.
“Where did you tell the driver to go?” she asked as they whirled along the dim street.
“The station.”
“If that guy writes my mother—”
“He won’t. Nobody’ll ever know about this—except our friends and enemies.”
Dawn was breaking over the sea.
“It’s getting blue,” she said.
“It does very well,” agreed Amory critically, and then as an after-thought: “It’s almost breakfast-time—do you want something to eat?”
“Food—” she said with a cheerful laugh. “Food is what queered the party. We ordered a big supper to be sent up to the room about two o’clock. Alec didn’t give the waiter a tip, so I guess the little bastard snitched.”
Jill’s low spirits seemed to have gone faster than the scattering night. “Let me tell you,” she said emphatically, “when you want to stage that sorta party stay away from liquor, and when you want to get tight
