CHAPTER II.
After dinner Reginald seated himself in the office of his hotel. There were the usual number of men about the place, talking and smoking, and watching the women who passed through the office now and then. Hotel life, with its ordinary distractions of seeing and being seen, and newsmongering and time-killing, was rather a bore to Reginald. But he had had little idea of anything else, unless it were a big house on something of the same plan of social divertisement and high hilarity. He had had spells of the blues, of course, in which he longed for something indefinable; and now that his nerves and health were breaking down pretty fast, he had these blues more often than ever. His regular cure for these attacks was a visit to the bar, and then a couple of cigars after it, then more blues, and then more cigars; so, of course, a permanent removal of the cause and the effect did not seem very likely to be secured.
There were one or two women at his hotel, acquaintances of his, who had led the life of dressing, dining, party-going and evening dancing or riding, for an indefinite number of years; women who had tried every popular watering-place in the summer and many southern resorts in the winter, and who were getting stout and flashy, both as to diamonds and general effect; women who had money enough not to need to marry, and knowledge enough of the general quality of some of the men about them, not to care to marry; and such a general sense of loneliness and dissatisfaction with the dullness, staleness, flatness and unprofitableness of life, as made them not to care to live, and quite too keen a certainty of a life to come, to at all desire to risk embarking on that unknown sea on which diamonds and dinners, whist and mature old flirtations, could not be taken as cargo.
Reginald had often wondered as he sat and talked nothing by the hour to these women, whether he or they were the most utter failures and bores. When this problem got too deep for him, he usually went to the bar; in fact, the bar was his grand resort, most of the time. But when these same questions presented themselves to these women, very few of them went to the bar or had the bar brought to them. They usually set to thinking, and then sometimes cried themselves so sick that their suppers were sent up to their rooms and eaten with the salt of tears.
Now the difference in these cases of inanity was, that while the first useless mortal drowned himself in liquor and the second in tears, the result was the inebriation and steady animalization of the faculties of the one, while the other certainly escaped being classed with those who never ate bread in sorrow, and knows not the unseen powers.
The boarders said that there had been what they called “tender passages” in history, between Mrs. Mancredo and Reginald. She had soft Italian eyes, which had cried many passionate hours, but they were always cooled off and black-leaded up; and then with a little pink to make the tear-stain pinker still, Mrs. Mancredo never looked much the worse for the honest but baffled scrutiny which she had made of life in general and her own in particular. But on the reverse, she looked just so much the better, as she was for the time less hard and world encrusted.
At these times, if Reginald had not been too recently to his throne of consolation, the bar, he felt quite impressed by the element of womanliness which was visible in her tear-brightened eyes.
On the evening after he had ventured on Ethelbert’s fuller acquaintance, and had had that ethical and æsthetic conversation, and the interestingtête-a-têtewith the rosebud, Petrarch and himself, Mrs. Mancredo had had a good long cry, so-called.
For a young bride had arrived at the hotel, wife of an invalid person; and in the good gossip after dinner, Mrs. Mancredo had chatted aboutherself (apparently) to this young bride, until she knew all the past history of the girl, and had a pretty clear forecast of her future history as well. Then she commenced with being very sorry for the pretty, ingenuous young thing, and more sorry for herself because of the years in which she was an unenviable wife, and still more sorry for herself in her present mature womanhood. So when she came down to supper she had her pretty round chin well up in the air, while her heavily leaded eyelashes drooped under the languor of her hard weeping. She had that strange sort of expectancy of something better, new, and more satisfactory at last, which sometimes follows on a new discovery of the great disproportion between human aspirations and the ordinary objects, which are palmed off upon them as satisfactory food.
She glanced toward Reginald as she passed his table, and inwardly ejaculated “Horrid thing! Eternally eating, whenever he stops wine-bibbing and smoking long enough.” And then with a flutter and flow of drapery, she permitted the waiter to adjust the paraphernalia of the occasion, as with a flashing of finger-rings and twittering of the pendants in her ears, and heaving of the laces under the diamonds at her breast, she proceeded to practically assert the always conceded fact that she was a splendid-looking woman. Three or four newcomers recognized the fact, and the old habitués were as loyal as ever. She saw all that, while she read and reread the bill of fare, and while the patient John brushed off imaginary crumbs, and did many useless things to remind her he still lived, and lived but to serve. Then—“Oh, anything,” was her order. He had expected that would be all, but he was obliged to wait just the same for its utterance.
Mrs. Mancredo meanwhile had not for a moment lost sight of the fact that Reginald had not once glanced toward her; and also that, though he had not changed his dress otherwise, the moss rosebud which he had worn before was gone now. She began to get up a theory about that rosebud. She had before never seen him with a buttonhole bouquet. Once when he had asked her for a flower he had only held it fora while; he hadn’t worn it. In a polite sort of a way, one time with another, she had snubbed Reginald often; but all the same, if he was going to wear rosebuds, she was going to know why and whence. So she watched him. He was not even reading his paper; he was eating, not without interest in the good things before him: he was not enough far gone in his new love for that. But he was so abstracted that he—oh, horrors!—he had deliberately, firmly, kept his clutch on his knife and fork, and, having struck the butt of the handle of each squarely down on the table, he held them points upwards in the air, while he industriously masticated his food and glared, unconscious, into the abysmal beyond.
“There’s his lineage well defined,” said she to herself, determinedly watching him; till he with a start looked directly at her, and she holding his eye, with a quick gesture imitated his attitude, stare and all; and then sinking back in her chair, fanned herself in a pantomimic swoon.
He shook his head across the dining-hall, signifying that he had an account to settle, for that manœuvre. And when he had picked at a grape or two for dessert, she significantly moved back the empty chair at her emptily table, and he came over and sat down with her.
She sniffed the air as he approached.
“I smell a moss rosebud,” said she, raising her fibbingly black eyelashes and fibbing lips towards him.
Reginald had been getting quite bright that afternoon, and he answered to her direct gaze: “You have a perfect nose.” And just as she took in the compliment he went on, explanatorily, “a double-barrelled, back-action nose; a burglarious, lock-picking nose, that can shoot round three spiral staircases, down a back hall and unlock a door, all for the purpose of getting at a moss rosebud that you saw pinned on my lapel two hours ago, and which you don’t see there now! Do you know why you don’t see it there now? I’ll tell you. It is because it is in a little vase beside a copy of Petrarch’s works up in my room.”
Now she dropped her eyes and pushed her chair back.
“All right, my poetical friend. I believed all your parables till you came to a ‘copy of Petrarch’; but there are limits,” said she, and she looked at him in a way which, with the accompanying words and intonation, would have meant in a man’s mouth, “You are lying, and I know it and you know it.”
Reginald had always taken a good deal of this sort of thing from the sort of women produced by society (?), some of whom think it persiflage, and some of whom habitually talk that way because of the habitual state of unfaith in men, which, with or without cause, fills their minds and hearts.
Reginald had never at any time in his life liked this; for with all his arrest of high manhood, no man could truly accuse him of lying, or of dishonor along that line toward males. And as a boy he never did lie to his mother, and as a son he had never lied to his father; and when these jocular accusations first began to meet him from pretty girls’ lips, he disliked them much. But when he saw all the fellows had to take it, he began to think that was “high style,” and that, after all, may be, if women took it for granted that the fellows lied and were bad, and yet still petted them and invited them to their homes, badness might, after all, not be badness, nor lying be lying; and that, may be, one thing was as good as another, all through the catalogue. At any rate, that women seemed to think so and that no one fellow could stand against this tide, even if he wanted to do so. But he always disliked this thing just the same, and never saw the wit of it.
The word “parables,” somehow, too, this evening, struck him worse than it would if she had said “lies”; for “parables,” as they were taught him at his mother’s knee, were “beautiful words of life”; and besides, “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” was getting to be a fact which he was illustrating in himself.
While he thought of these things he looked so glowering that Mrs. Mancredo said, lightly, “Now what ails you?”
“How many times in a week, on the average, do you suppose you tell us fellows that we lie?”
“Well, the times I tell you so, compared with the times you do it, are so infinitesimally small that a body could not be to the trouble of reckoning them,” said she lazily.
He looked at her seriously. “Do you think men lie?” he said.
She answered him in blank amazement: “Why, of course, child!”
“All men?”
“Might except a deaf mute or two, if you like.”
“Will you except me?”
“Did you say except or accept?”
“I certainly said except. At this point in our conversation I could not ask you to accept me, for I can’t imagine what a woman would ever want of a liar.”
She shrugged her shoulders and ejaculated: “Hobson’s choice as for that!”
She looked as pretty as though she were being real good; in fact, she looked a great deal prettier. There was an impishness about her with which Reginald was more fullyen rapportthan he was with high goodness. True, she expressed disbelief in him, even on the one point on which he could somewhat justly value himself; but she looked “sort of loving” out of her eyes all the time; and Reginald had never resisted that kind of flattery.
And so they sat looking at one another; he a silly slave to her wiles, and crushing back the honest longing he had had for her approbation of his best virtue; and she, a slave to the conditions imposed on disfranchised womanhood, and crushing back her longing for his recognition of her individuality and her right to be of sound use to the world,—practical, sound use. She could not accuse him of deflection from that virtue which woman is taught to most strenuously hold herself, and man’s breach of which most cruelly afflicts her. So she accused him of lying,—a slave’s vice,—which he, not being a slave, need not leantoward. Thus they played at cross-purposes, neither helping the other out of the social tangle.
When he rose from the table it was with an angry perplexity.
“What in the mischief has set her to believe that I am such a liar?” he said to himself.
And as she went up toward her pretty private parlor she was thinking to herself: “He is as truthful a fellow, as far as his words and promises go, as I happen to know. But his fickle passions are what I despise him for. He really thinks I doubt that he has the rosebud and the poem on his table. I as good as saw them when he said it. But that means another love; and that is what he was gazing at, with his knife and fork in the air like a farmer. I’ve got the idea now. They were farmer’s people when he was twelve or so. He of course had that habit then, and he was thinking of his early boyhood and fell back into those rough ways. This new love, this rosebud flame, has something to do with old times. She can’t be a very young girl, then.”
And so soliloquizing, each within self, they walked up the broad stairway together.
“Your rosebud took you to boyhood, didn’t it?” she asked, turning square upon him at the landing, and facing him as he stood on the step below.
“It is no use saying yes or no; you don’t believe me,” said he, with a blunt boy-directness that seemed to touch her.
“You great goose!” she said. “Of course I believe you.”
“You said you didn’t.”
“Well, what of that?”
“A good deal of it,” said he, indignantly. “I believe you when you tell me a thing.”
“More goose you!”
He stood and looked at her like one dazed. He was trying so hard that day to bring his life to firmer foundations; and she stood there laughing at him as though lies and truths were all jokes together.“Good heavens, what do you mean! Do you mean that you lie?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean; always do,” said she.
“Then you are lying now?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, then, if you are lying when you say that you lie, you would be telling the truth then; only if you are telling the truth when you say you lie, then you are lying.”
“You need to go to sleep and clear your head,” said she coolly.
“Look here now, tell me once, are you truthful?”
“Yes, I am full of truths of one kind and another: oppressively full. I should like to unload.”
“And yet you say you are a liar?”
“Oh, yes. Now let us go right over and over it again and again; it is only quarter past eleven,” said she, laughing at his eagerness.
“You call this a great joke, don’t you?” with passionate intensity.
“Perfectly convulsing,” she answered, with a look as if her patience was about gone, and as if, should he dare to browbeat her any longer with that look in his eyes, she would establish her claim to a new line of ability. This possibility was so evident on her countenance that he said:
“I believe if you can lie like this, you can do anything.”
“I seem to feel some undeveloped ability stirring within me myself,” said she; “nothing of course in the chewing, drinking, sweltering animalism line. But let us say some skillful, intellectual achievement, which might rid the world of a few thousands like yourself, and make room for a new race,” said she with a deliberate consideration that had in it thesavoir-faireof a society woman, wrought up beyond much more endurance of the life she had been forced to lead,—a life now coming in sight of the convincing truths of this liberalizing age.
Poor Reginald stood actually aghast. His lower jaw had fallen and his eyes protruded, as, with his third finger pointed to his breast, hestammered: “Me! Rid the world of such as me? What have you against me?”
She looked at him with fury suppressed; and at last, when she had controlled herself enough to speak, said, in a low tone, full of the sense of insult and degradation which our false social conditions have forced on thinking womanhood: “I have just that against you, which you would have against me, if my character, through and through, was a facsimile of yours. Sir, that is what I have against you!”
He looked at her dumb. “I don’t understand, I—”
“Oh, well, take the night to it! Think your life over, every step of the way up, since you have entered young hoodlumism; and just fancy that a twin sister of yours had kept with you all the way, step by step, in all your paths—where would she—”
Reginald had leaned against the balustrade perfectly white. “You are a very fiend,” he said; and then he pulled up stairs as a man gropes who has been struck by blindness.
Mrs. Mancredo was frightened. She wanted to help him up. “You—you’ve done enough,” he said thickly, without looking at her. And she went into her parlor and he went up to the next flight.
When Reginald had closed and locked his door and mechanically thrown himself on a sofa, he lay there for some time—not thinking, yet not unconscious. The room had been quite shut up, and the bud, now half opened, had filled the air with its exquisite fragrance. He sensed this fragrance, and, in the half stupor which had come to him, he felt the presence of tender, soothing hands passing, not over his head, but near the very brain substance within his head. His mind seemed reëchoing the speech he had made about Petrarch’s Laura, on which he had prided himself. And as it repeated itself, there were withdrawn all gross elements, until the spiritualized worship which Petrarch had for his paragon of true virtue, seemed to enswathe his being with a heavenly marvel of pure love. A mellifluous rapture of mind, all separate from the senses, overflowed his highest being; andthen, as clearly as ever he felt the sun’s rays, he felt his own mother’s presence, and knew, or thought he knew, that he was falling down and down serenely into her care, with an ecstasy of the annihilation of self, and all self-burdens.
The next morning Mrs. Mancredo took an early breakfast, and then stayed in the parlor a while, looking about. She breakfasted three times that morning, and then asked if any one had seen Mr. Grove. It was discovered that no one had. Then Mrs. Mancredo, remembering how he had groped up stairs, followed the matter through. The result was, they found him insensible in his room, and one glance at him told it was no inebriate’s sleep.