PAGE 11
The Reincarnation of Smith
by
“What are you talking about–what woman?” stammered James Smith, with a strange presentiment creeping over him.
“A Mrs. Smith. Yes,” she said quickly, as he started, “not a sham name like yours, but really and truly SMITH–that was her husband’s name! I’m not lying, Jim,” she went on, evidently mistaking the cause of the sudden contraction of the man’s face. “I didn’t invent her nor her name; there IS such a woman, and Duffy loves her–and HER only, and he never, NEVER was anything more than a friend to me. I swear it!”
The room seemed to swim around him. She was staring at him, but he could see in her vacant eyes that she had no conception of his secret, nor knew the extent of her revelation. Duffy had not dared to tell all! He burst into a coarse laugh. “What matters Duffy or the silly woman he’d try to steal away from other men.”
“But he didn’t try to steal her, and she’s only silly because she wants to be true to her husband while he lives. She told Duffy she’d never marry him until she saw her husband’s dead face. More fool she,” she added bitterly.
“Until she saw her husband’s dead face,” was all that James Smith heard of this speech. His wife’s faithfulness through years of desertion, her long waiting and truthfulness, even the bitter commentary of the equally injured woman before him, were to him as nothing to what that single sentence conjured up. He laughed again, but this time strangely and vacantly. “Enough of this Duffy and his intrusion in my affairs until I’m able to settle my account with him. Come,” he added brusquely, “if we are going to cut out of this at once I’ve got much to do. Come here again to-morrow, early. This Duffy–does he live here?”
“No. In Marysville.”
“Good! Come early to-morrow.”
As she seemed to hesitate, he opened a drawer of his table and took out a handful of gold, and handed it to her. She glanced at it for a moment with a strange expression, put it mechanically in her pocket, and then looking up at him said, with a forced laugh, “I suppose that means I am to clear out?”
“Until to-morrow,” he said shortly.
“If the Sacramento don’t sweep us away before then,” she interrupted, with a reckless laugh; “the river’s broken through the levee–a clear sweep in two places. Where I live the water’s up to the doorstep. They say it’s going to be the biggest flood yet. You’re all right here; you’re on higher ground.”
She seemed to utter these sentences abstractedly, disconnectedly, as if to gain time. He made an impatient gesture.
“All right, I’m going,” she said, compressing her lips slowly to keep them from trembling. “You haven’t forgotten anything?” As he turned half angrily towards her she added, hurriedly and bitterly, “Anything–for to-morrow?”
“No!”
She opened the door and passed out. He listened until the trail of her wet skirt had descended the stairs, and the street door had closed behind her. Then he went back to his table and began collecting his papers and putting them away in his trunks, which he packed feverishly, yet with a set and determined face. He wrote one or two letters, which he sealed and left upon his table. He then went to his bedroom and deliberately shaved off his disguising beard. Had he not been so preoccupied in one thought, he might have been conscious of loud voices in the street and a hurrying of feet on the wet sidewalk. But he was possessed by only one idea. He must see his wife that evening! How, he knew not yet, but the way would appear when he had reached his office in the building opposite hers. Three hours had elapsed before he had finished his preparations. On going downstairs he stopped to give some directions to the porter, but his room was empty; passing into the street he was surprised to find it quite deserted, and the shops closed; even a drinking saloon at the corner was quite empty. He turned the corner of the street, and began the slight descent towards his office. To his amazement the lower end of the street, which was crossed by the thoroughfare which was his destination, was blocked by a crowd of people. As he hurried forward to join them he suddenly saw, moving down that thoroughfare, what appeared to his startled eyes to be the smokestacks of some small, flat- bottomed steamer. He rubbed his eyes; it was no illusion, for the next moment he had reached the crowd, who were standing half a block away from the thoroughfare, and on the edge of a lagoon of yellow water, whose main current was the thoroughfare he was seeking, and between whose houses, submerged to their first stories, a steamboat was really paddling. Other boats and rafts were adrift on its sluggish waters, and a boatman had just landed a passenger in the backwater of the lower half of the street on which he stood with the crowd.