THE CROSSROADS

IF EVER was happy wayfarer, that was David Joslin, as now he held his course back to the little Ohio village which had been his home these past two years. He walked eagerly, hurrying as does a man who realizes that there is much to be done with little time for the doing.

He had no staff nor scrip, nor needed any in the course of his journey out from the Cumberlands to the edge of the great plateau. Here he found the railway leading to the north, and followed its line as any common tramp, for the good reason that he had not money for railway fare. Certain gentry of the road he met, but they neither accepted him as one of the guild, nor hindered him in his going, for they could not classify this man who walked slightly stooped, with pale face, but with long and steady stride, a man whose clothing betokened no luxury, but who still had something about him which did not grade him as one of the hopeless drifters of the world.

At a little town along the road another kindly railway conductor lifted him far along his northern journey, so that presently he was coming to the lower edge of what might have been called the North; for now he approached the great Ohio River and its scattered string of thriving communities. He had eaten only when he found the means to pay for what he ate. Twice he found it necessary to stop in a little town and work for a period of a day or so. Rarely did he sleep in a room. He was still a man of the wilderness.

And he was happy, was David Joslin. For the first time, it seemed to him, the clouds were lifting from his soul. Now, it seemed to him, he had done something to offset his own sin.

Driving his worn body mercilessly, he was footsore and weary when at length he arrived in one of the little towns on the banks of the Ohio River, a junction point where all the north and south railway was crossed by one of the greater systems running east and west, a place of some five or six thousand inhabitants—one of those many communities which have their own pretensions at metropolitanism, each like to a thousand others.

Certain features of these centers of civilization still continued to interest Joslin, a man of such extraordinary lack of opportunity. He stood to-day, therefore, boylike, reading the lettering on the Strattonville billboards which announced certain attractions in the theaters and cinema houses for that evening. And he saw something which caused him to flinch as though smitten.

He could not turn away from the great letters which he saw, two feet or more, widely displayed.

POLLY PENDLETON! POLLY PENDLETON!
HER OWN COMPANY
DIRECT FROM HER GREAT BROADWAY SUCCESS

Polly Pendleton! Polly Pendleton! David Joslin knew not how many times the name stood there in print. That a team of vaudeville artists had grown into a certain vogue in the city; that this vogue had become, for one of the performers, a sort of reputation; that a concert singer had grown into being something of an actress, and the actress into some sort of a star heading a company of her own; that this star and her company—whether for reasons of success or lack of success—had left the city to tour “the provinces”—David Joslin knew none of these things. All he knew, or cared to know, or could understand, was that without doubt she was here! She, the corpus delicti of his sin!

As the criminal will return to the very place of his crime, so now David Joslin found his feet going where he did not list. There came into his soul a great recklessness. He forgot the occupation of his last two years, forgot the long road before him. Independence, prodigality, seized him as fully as it might any gilded youth. So, since prodigality also is a wholly relative thing, David Joslin bought him a ticket to the theater that night, repaired to a nearby restaurant, and ate what was to him the most expensive meal of all his life.

No longer the happy wayfarer, but an anxious, downcast and distraught man, on his soul a shadow, he found his way to his seat—his first time in any actual theater. The whirl of it all, the light, the warmth, the color, the music, at first were things rather of torture to him. Where was she?

But presently she came, bowing, smiling, light-footed—it was she, her very self! Yes, these were her eyes, dark and large as ever. Her little mouth, turned up a-corner, was as sweet as ever. Her dark hair curled as it did that other time. Her straight young figure was the same, with all its tender curves. Above all, her frank smile, her compelling air of comradery, were just the same as then, that time, two years ago.

She had the same little habit of balancing up and down on her toes, impatient for the music to give her her cue. Her little chuckling laugh of sheer enjoyment in herself and in life was just the same. She was still the very spirit of life and joy she had been yonder, two years ago—two centuries ago it seemed to David Joslin! Then he had been another man. And now—he was again that other man!

As to the play, so-called, it was nothing to him, and he knew not how long it endured. The concordance of the strings and brasses meant naught to-night, though otherwise they might have meant much indeed, new as they were to his acquaintance. He sat mute, his eyes fixed steadily upon one figure upon the stage, the sum total of the sensuous appeal lost for him in the charm of its central figure.

And then, electric, a clash in the music touched him to the marrow. The orchestra leader waved his baton. A few violins, a flute or two, struck into the opening bars of an air that David Joslin knew!

Polly Pendleton was at that moment off-stage, but now ran tripping from the wings, smiling, shrugging up her scant shoulder strap as she came. Her violin was under her arm. She waved a hand to quiet the enthusiasm, and played with the orchestra a few staves of the air.

“You’re the Only Man for Me”—that was what Polly Pendleton would play, of course. Did not David Joslin know?

When she came to the chorus, she stepped down to the footlights and extended her two round, white arms, bare to the shoulder—her slender, up-curved little fingers reaching almost to the face of the bald-headed leader of the orchestra, himself of a family of eight. To him she sang, her eyes dark and pleading, her little feet tiptoeing, her voice no less than blandishment itself—“For you are my Baby—you are my Baby—you’re the only, only, only man for me!” And then Polly Pendleton laughed with her audience at the jest of it.

She ran off-stage, but must come back again, to be sure. This time she raised her hands and her eyes to a solid-looking citizen, who sat in a proscenium box—a banker and a leading figure of the town, it chanced, well known to all in the audience. To him also, pleadingly, bewitchingly, she asserted, “You’re the only, only, only man for me!”

And so in time Polly Pendleton hitched up her shoulder-strap once more, and ran off in her final exit.

David Joslin found himself, slightly reeling, passing out to the open air with the others. Some men whistled, others bore copies of a song, which they had purchased from the ushers at the door. He never could remember how or why he went to the principal hotel. Certainly it was not to find quarters for himself. Aimlessly he walked down the cross hall of the lobby to another entrance; and so sheer accident favored him.

He knew that the rustle of skirts at the door of the “ladies’ parlor” meant the presence of the woman he sought—knew it by some strange super-sense that came to him. A moment later Polly Pendleton herself appeared at the door, looking across the hall to the open door of the cafÉ upon the other side.

“All right, Jimmy,” she called out to someone beyond, invisible to Joslin. “I’ll be in right away. Order me a milk-fed, won’t you, and a bottle of pale—with you in just a minute.”

She stepped back into the parlor. Without announcement, Joslin followed on in, and so once more found himself face to face with her.

She stepped back, startled, surprised, frightened almost. “Oh!” she exclaimed; and then frowned. “I didn’t ask for anyone. Who are you?” she demanded.

Then with a sudden revelation she remembered. Yes, pale and hot-eyed as when she had seen him last; it was the same man, the wild man from the mountains!

She could not quite evade him. “What do you want? How did you get in here?” she gasped.

He did not answer at first, and she herself, not knowing what manner of scene might be expected, resourcefully took him by the sleeve and led him far over to the further corner, where a sofa afforded seats for two. She pushed him down into one end of it, and moved as far as possible into the other.

“You don’t remember me?” His voice was broken and hoarse. She nodded.

“Don’t talk so loud. They’ll hear us.”

He seemed unconscious of her warning.

“Why are you here?” he demanded, as though she owed him an explanation.

“Haven’t you seen? We’re playing here to-night This one-night business is getting my goat.”

David Joslin stared at her. “I know—I saw it all. Sometimes a man’s hard to manage.” His voice was savage.

“That’s the truth!” said Polly Pendleton. “I’m not big enough to throw you out, and I don’t like to call the porter, but I’ve got to have my supper before long. Have you had yours?”

“Yes. It cost me six bits. That’s the mostest I ever spent for one meal in all my life.”

“Is that so?” said Polly wistfully. “I wish I could get mine down to that scale! Sometimes it’s—well, rather more.”

“It left me thirty-five cents,” said David Joslin, smiling bitterly.

“Huh! That’s just about what you had the last time you saw me. Is it the same thirty-five cents you had then?”

Again she laughed, and then rippled out in her irrepressible generosity, her sympathy. “Poor chap!” said she. “Haven’t you got ahead any farther than that in two years?” Polly Pendleton could not see any suffering unmoved. She herself had lived.

“It’s odd,” she said, something of his old story coming back to her. “You must be thirty-five or six, aren’t you?—or maybe forty?”

“Not yet quite thirty,” said he.

“And you said you were married?”

“I was—once.”

“Then what are you doing here? What were you doing there in my apartments in New York? Don’t you ever stop to think?”

“I’ve stopped to think about everything in my life except this. But now all that’s done. I’m not going back to school any more.” He looked directly at her now.

“Why? What do you mean? Why do you say that? You talk foolish! Why, listen, where do you get this sort of stuff, anyhow? What are you making me out to be? Have I ever asked anything of you, I’d like to know? What do I owe you, or you owe me? I don’t get you, neighbor.”

“No, I reckon not,” said David Joslin, still staring at her steadily from his end of the sofa in the dim light. “I don’t reckon you do. I don’t reckon a woman like you can understand a man like me.”

“Am I so bad, then? God! I wish there wasn’t a man in all the world, that’s all—I’m sick of them! I’ve got to make a living, haven’t I? Well, it’s jolly hard business sometimes to do that. Why, listen—it’s only an angel, and a good one, that’s kept us on our feet. I’m wearing all my old clothes and hats and things. And I don’t know if I can go back to Broadway again. You don’t have all the trouble in the world.”

“An angel?” said David Joslin, not in the least understanding her, more than she had him in his last remark, which she thought so slighting to herself. “Yes, I reckon it was an angel brought you to me. I was walking through here, going back to my school, and here I find you! It was as though an angel of heaven had brought us two together. What for?”

“You can search me!” said Polly Pendleton. “I haven’t got the answer. All sorts of things happen in this game, of course, but I’m free to say I wasn’t looking for you to-night—and to tell the truth”—she rippled out in laughter again—“I don’t know what to do with you now I’ve got you. Won’t you please go away? I’m getting pretty hungry, man!”

“Miss Pendleton,” said David Joslin, “that’s not the way to treat me.”

Silence fell between them. Polly Pendleton, hurt and grieved still over the sting of his earlier words—which he had spoken only in condemnation of himself, not her, began to tremble about her lips.

She heard his low, vibrant voice go on. “I couldn’t bear to see you reach out your hands to those men there to-night. You touched me, once! For sake of that, I’m quitting my school.”

“It was only in a song!” she broke out “I’ve done that to a thousand men, I expect, and I didn’t care a cent for any one of them. It’s in the game—it’s part of my way of making a living. I’ve got to live.”

She laughed now with half a sob. “There can’t be in all the world any one man for me, I suppose—that’s the price we have to pay, who do this sort of thing.”

“I don’t understand you at all.”

“Well, I don’t—I won’t—there isn’t——” replied Polly somewhat incoherently. “Listen, man! You’ve got to stop this! I can’t stand it. This means too much to you. You’ve taken it all in earnest when there wasn’t anything to it but a joke—a game—a business. And besides—I told you——”

“What do you mean that you told me?”

“I told you—that—that I wasn’t good! Do you think that’s easy for me to say?”

“A woman as beautiful as you could not be anything but good.”

“Don’t! I can’t stand this—I told you once before I couldn’t stand it.”

“How can I help it? I told you a man is hard to manage.”

“You’re the hardest to manage I ever saw. What can I do with you? I want to be as good a scout as I can—I don’t really want to take money away from blind babies, nor love’n affection from idiot Johnnies. I don’t want you at all, and you mustn’t want anything to do with me at all. Do you suppose it’s easy for me to say that? Why don’t I let you make a fool of yourself the way they all do? Search me—I don’t know! Listen—have you ever doped this thing out all the way down the line? What’s in your mind—what would you like to do?—what would you like to have me do?”

“I never thought it out I—I don’t know. I don’t understand this at all. I don’t know why I came here to-night, to see you again.”

“Well, let’s suppose now that I was a single woman, and you were a single man. It isn’t true in your case, and we won’t say anything about mine. Suppose we were both free to do as we liked? How far do you suppose, my friend, that thirty-five cents would go in backing a theatrical company like this, that carries thirty-eight performers, its own sets and its own brass?”

Polly Pendleton, dependable always to do the unexpected, was not laughing now, but half sobbing, and wiping her eyes on the corner of her skirt.

“I wish’t you wouldn’t do that. Please don’t!” he exclaimed. “I can’t tell you how it hurts me.”

“Well, it’s you that’s done it,” she flared at him over the corner of her ruffles, forgetting a half limb exposed. “Did I ask you to come here? Is it the part of a real man to make it harder for a fellow like me, that’s trying to get on in the world?”

“I don’t reckon I’ve thought of that,” said David Joslin with sudden contrition. “I reckon I was just thinking of my own self. I know the place in my book that covers that. It’s about Adam——”

“Never mind about Adam!” said Polly Pendleton. “Don’t I know! If you were just a case of an average Johnnie that had money and no brains, I’d maybe take you on and jolly well separate you. Such things have happened. But here you are with no money and a lot of brains. Excuse me, my friend, but you don’t seem to just qualify for running a theatrical company. Besides—I like you a lot. I told you that before. But when I sing, ‘You’re the only man for me,’ that’s what I don’t mean—what I never mean. Can’t you understand that? I wish you’d never seen me.”

“I didn’t know there could be a woman like you in all the world—I didn’t know what a woman really meant.”

“It’d be fine to have a man really believe in you;” half sobbing now. “It’d be mighty fine to listen to that line of talk, even if you couldn’t believe in it.”

Polly Pendleton shrank back into her corner of the sofa, and wrung her little white hands together; but finally she suddenly turned to him once more, one knee bent, her foot under her, as she faced him on the sofa at last.

“There may be women who could break a man and throw away the pieces for the fun of it. Nix on the vamp for little Polly. Oh, dear! I don’t want to talk. I’m tired. What made you come here at all? The trouble with you is, you don’t know what an angel face is. You think I’m the way I look. I’m not!”

Polly was sobbing freely now into the corner of her skirt. “I’m not, I tell you! Don’t you know—and I’d rather have told that to anybody in all the world than you—you’re so damned honest!”

He made no answer at all, and she went on.

“You’ve been such a boob that you haven’t done anything wrong. You’ve got your education ahead of you. I’m twenty-six years old, and I know more than you will when you’re a hundred and twenty-six. You don’t need to have a house fall on you, do you? Come now! I don’t”—and here, in spite of all, she laughed through her unwilling tears—“I don’t want your little old thirty-five cents at all! Take it and go on, and save the country, friend.”

David Joslin sat for a long time. “Sometimes things are hard to figure out,” said he at last.

“Yes!” said Polly Pendleton in a low voice. “Don’t I know?”

There was no answer save his white-knuckled hands.

After a time she hitched up the other foot on the sofa, and sat, her arms about her knees, staring at him that way, her eyes gleaming in the dim light, impulsive still as a child herself—as indeed she was always to remain.

“Listen!” said she. “I’ve got an idea. Come now—you seem rather like a priest to me—it didn’t seem wrong for me to tell you things. Will you make a trade, honor bright?”

“If I gave you my word,” said David Joslin soberly, “I’d keep it.”

“If you’ll promise to go on and do what you said you’d do—your education—your college—I’ll agree to quit this business in about two months, and when I do I’ll go into the Red Cross.”

He did not answer her at all. Unconsciously, after how long a time neither of them could have told, they both had arisen. He stood before her, motionless, she herself slightly swaying. Impulsively, she extended her hands towards him in the twilight of the room.

“I know you!” said she. “I know what you want You want to kiss me, don’t you?” She looked at him gravely.

He could not answer. He made no motion. But Polly Pendleton knew now that if any salutation came from this man it would be from a different man than the one who had entered this room a half-hour previous. In short, she knew, whether or not he knew it, that David Joslin was saved.

“Among so many——” began Polly Pendleton, trying to laugh and half sobbing. “Oh, well——”

He never knew how or when he found the street.

Across the hall appeared the red and irate face of a gentleman who, apparently, had long been waiting.

“Where on earth have you been, kid?” he demanded querulously. “Everything’s getting cold.”

“Oh, have a heart, old dear,” said Polly Pendleton, dabbing indefinitely at her countenance with a handkerchief. “I had to powder my nose, didn’t I?”