XXVIIBREAKFAST AL FRESCOArmstrong sent Neva a prompt telegram of sympathy and inquiry. He got a telegraphed reply—her thanks and the statement that her father was desperately ill, but apparently not in immediate danger. He wrote her about the highly satisfactory turn in his affairs; to help him to ease, he tried to dismiss herself and himself, but at every sentence he had to stem again the feeling that this letter would be read where he was remembered as the sort of person it made him hot with shame to think he had ever been. He waited two weeks; no answer. Again he wrote—a lover's appeal for news of her. Ten days, and she answered, ignoring the personal side of his letter, simply telling how ill her father was, what a long struggle at best it would be to save him. Armstrong saw that nursing and anxiety were absorbing all her time and thought and strength. He wrote a humble apology for having annoyed her, asked her to write him whenever she could, if it was only a line or so.Two more increasingly restless weeks, and he telegraphed that he was coming. She telegraphed an absolute veto, and in the first mail came a letter that was the more crushing because it was calm and free from bitterness. "In this quiet town," wrote she, "where so little happens, you know how they remember and brood and become bitter. What is past and forgotten for us is still very vivid to him and magnified out of all proportion. Please do not write again, until you hear from me."Thus, he learned that his worst fears were justified. If she had shown that, in the home atmosphere again, she was seeing him as formerly, he could have protested, argued, appealed. But how strive against her duty to her sick, her dying father whose generous friendship he had ruthlessly betrayed and whose life he had embittered? He debated going to Battle Field and seeing Mr. Carlin and asking forgiveness. But such an agitating interview would probably hasten death, even if he could get admittance; besides, he remembered that Frederic Carlin, slow to condemn, never forgave once he had condemned. "He feels toward me as I'd feel in the same circumstances. I have got only what I deserve." No judgments are so terrible as those that are just.The state of Armstrong's mind so preyed upon him that it affected even his giant strength and health, and his friends urged him to take a vacation. He worked only the harder, because in work alone could he get any relief whatever from the torments of his remorse and his baffled love. He became morose, given to bursts of unreasonable anger. "Success is turning his head," was the general opinion. "He's getting to be a tyrant, like the others." In some moods, he saw the lessons of gentleness and forbearance in the fate his selfish arrogance had brought upon him; but it is not in the nature of men of strong individuality and unbroken will to practice such lessons. The keener his sufferings, the bitterer, the harder he became. And soon he began to feel that there was nearly if not quite a quittance of the balance between him and the man he had wronged. He convinced himself that, if Neva's father were dead, he could speedily win her. "Meanwhile," he reflected, "I must take my punishment"; and with the stolid, unwhimpering endurance of those whose ancestors have through countless generations been schooled in the fields, the forests, and the camps, he waited for the news that would mean the end of his expiation.Raphael, taking his walk in Fifth Avenue late one afternoon instead of in Central Park, saw him in a closed motor in the halted mass of vehicles at the Forty-second Street crossing. Boris happened to be in his happiest mood. Always the philosopher, he was too catholic in his interests and tastes to permit disappointment in any one direction or even in many directions to close the other avenues to the joy of life. There were times when he could not quite banish the shadows which the thought of death cast over him—death, so exasperating to men of pride and imagination because, of all their adversaries, it alone cannot be challenged or compromised. But on that day, Boris had only the sense of life, life at its best, with the sun bright and not too warm, with the new garb of nature and of womankind radiantly fresh, and the whole world laughing because the winter had been vanquished once more. As his all-observing eyes noted Armstrong's profile, his face darkened. There was for him, in that profile, rugged, stern, inflexible, a challenge of the basis of his happiness.In all his willful life Boris had never wanted anything so intensely, so exclusively as he wanted Neva. Every man who falls in love with a woman feels that he is her discoverer, that he has a property right securely based upon discovery. Raphael's sense of his right to Neva was far stronger; it was the creator's sense. Had he not said, "Let there be beauty and light and capacity to give and receive love"? And had not these wonders sprung into existence before his magic? True, the beauty and the light and the power to give and to receive were different both in kind and in degree from what he had commanded. But that did not alter his right. And this Armstrong, this coarse savage who would take away his Galatea to serve in a vulgar, sooty tent of barbaric commerce— The very sight of Armstrong set all his senses on edge, as if each were being assailed by its own particular abhorrence.That day the stern, inflexible profile somehow struck into him the same chill that always came at the thought of death with its undebatable "must." Yet there was in his pocket, at the very moment, warming his heart like a flagon of old port, a long letter from Neva, a confidential letter, full of friendly, intimate things about herself, her anxieties, her hopes, and fears; and she asked him to stop off on his way to or from his lectures before the Chicago art students. "Narcisse is here," she wrote. "She will be leaving about that time, she says, and if you stop on your way, she and you can go back together. How I wish I could go, too! Not until I settled down here did I appreciate what you—and New York—had done for me. Yet I had thought I did. Do stop off here. It will be so good to see you, Boris."As he looked at Armstrong's profile, he laid his hand on his coat over the letter and remembered that sentence—"It will be so good to see you." But the shadow would not depart. That profile persisted; he could not banish it.When he descended from the train at the Battle Field station and saw Neva, with Narcisse beside her in a touring car, he saw that ominous profile, plain as if Armstrong were there, too. This, though Neva's welcome was radiantly bright. "What's the matter, Boris?" cried Narcisse, climbing to the seat beside the chauffeur before Neva could prevent. "Get in beside your hostess and cheer up. You ought to look like a clear sunrise. The lecture was a triumph. I read two whole columns of it aloud to Neva and her father this morning. No cant. No hypocrisy. They agreed with me that your art ideas are like an island in the boundless ocean of flap-doodle.""My father used to sell bananas from a cart in Chicago," said Boris, "and we lived in the cellar where he ripened them."Neva glanced at him with quick sympathetic interest. It was the first time he had happened to speak of his origin. "I always thought you were born abroad," said she."I think not," replied he. "I really don't know at exactly what point I broke into the world. Those things matter so little. Countries, governments, races—they mean nothing to me. I meet my fellow beings as individuals."There he caught Neva studying him with an expression so curious that he paused. She forestalled his question by plunging into an animated talk about his lecture. He was well content to listen, enjoying now the surroundings and now the beauty of the woman beside him. Both were wonderfully soothing to him, filled him with innocent, virtuous thoughts, made him envy, and half delude himself into fancying he wished for himself, the joys of somnolescent, corpulent, middle-class life—the life obviously led by the people dwelling in these flower-embedded houses on either side of these shady streets. He sighed; Neva laughed. And he saw that she was laughing at him."Well, why not?" he demanded, knowing she understood his sigh. But before she could answer he was laughing at himself. "Still, I like it, for a change," said he. "And—" he was speaking now in an undertone—"with you I could be happy in such a place—always. Just with you; not if we let these stupid burghers in to fret me."She laughed outright. "I understand you better than you understand yourself," said she. "Change and contrast are as necessary to you as air. If you had to live here, you would commit suicide or become commonplace.... And so should I.""Not with a husband you loved and children you adored and a home you had created yourself. As the world expands, it contracts; as it contracts, it expands. From end to end the universe is not so vast as such a love."Neva, coloring deeply and profoundly moved, leaned forward. "I'm sorry you're missing this," said she, lightly to Narcisse. "Boris is sentimentalizing about the vine-clad cottage with children clambering.""It's about time you quit and came in to settle down," called Narcisse. "A few years more and you'll cease to be romantic. An old beau is ridiculous."Boris gave Neva a triumphant look. "Narcisse votes yes," said he.But they were arriving at the house. As the motor ran up the drive under the elms toward the gorgeous masses of forsythia about the entrance steps, Boris's eyes were so busy that he scarcely heard, while Neva explained that her father was too weak to withstand the excitement of visitors—"especially anyone distinguished. We're not telling him you're here. He would feel it his duty to exert himself.""Distinguished!" he exclaimed. "In presence of these elms and this house built for all time, and these eternal colors, how could mere mortal be distinguished?"It was not until the next morning that he had a chance to talk with her alone. He rose early and went out before breakfast. He strolled through the woods back of the house until he came to a pavilion with a creek rushing steeply down past it toward Otter Lake. In the pavilion he found Neva with a great heap of roses in her lap, another on the table, another on the bench. On her bright hair was a huge garden hat, its broad streamers of pink ribbon flowing upon her shoulders.She dropped her shears and watched him with the expression in her eyes that he had surprised there, as they were coming from the station in the motor. "May I ask," said he, "what is the meaning of that look?""Did you sleep well?" parried she."Without a dream.""I don't know," replied she—"Let us have breakfast here—you and I.... Washington!" she called.There rose from a copse below, near the brim of the creek, a small colored boy, barefooted, bareheaded, with no garments but a blue shirt and a pair of blue cotton jean trousers. She sent him off to the house to tell them to bring breakfast. And soon a maid appeared with a tray whose chief burden was a heating apparatus for coffee and milk."I've heard you say you detested cold coffee," said Neva. "Your frown when I suggested breakfast out here was premature."She scattered and heaped the roses into an odorous, dew-sprinkled mat of green and pink and white, in the center of the rustic table. Then she served the coffee. It was real coffee, and the milk was what is called cream in many parts of the world. "Brother Tom has a model farm," she explained. "These eggs were laid this morning.""So they were," exclaimed Boris, as he broke one. His eyes were sparkling; all that was best in his looks and in his nature was irradiating from him. Her sweet, lovely face, her delicate fresh costume, the sight and odor of the roses, of the forest all round them, the melody of the descending waters, and the superb coffee, crisp rolls, and freshest of fresh eggs— "You criticise me for my appreciation of the sensuous side of life, my dear friend," said he. "But, tell me, is there anywhere anything more delicious, more inspiring than this breakfast?""I never criticised you for loving the joys of the senses," cried she. "Never! We are too much alike there.""What happiness we could have!" exclaimed he. "For do we not know how to make life smooth and comfortable and beautiful, you and I?""Only too well," confessed she. "I often think of it. But——"He waited for her to continue. When he saw that she would not, but was lost in a reverie, he said, "You promised you would think about our going abroad. Have you thought?"She nodded."You will go?"She slowly shook her head."Why not?""I want to, but—I can't.""Why?"He had paused in buttering a bit of roll. Anyone coming up just then would have thought he was looking at her, awaiting an answer to an inquiry after salt or something like that. She said: "Because I do not love you."He waved his knife in airy dismissal. "A trifle! And so easily overcome.""Because I cannot love you, my dear." She looked at him affectionately.He balanced the bit of bread before his lips. "Not that brotherly look, please," said he. "It—it hurts!" He put the bread in his mouth.She leaned forward and laid her hand on his. "We are too much alike. You are too subtle, too nervous, too appreciative, too changeable. You would soon cease to fancy you loved me. I—it so happens—have never begun to fancy I loved you. That is fortunate for us both.""Armstrong!" he exclaimed. And suddenly, despite his ruddy coloring, he suggested a dark Sicilian hate peering from an ambush, stiletto in impatient hand."Don't show me that side of you, Boris," she entreated. "Whether it is Armstrong or not, did I not say the fact that I don't fancy I love you is fortunate for us both?""You love Armstrong," he insisted sullenly."How can you know that, when I don't know it myself?" replied she. "As I told you once before, the only matter that concerns you is that I do not love you." She spoke sharply. Knowing him so well, she had small patience with his childish, barbaric moods; she could not bear pettiness in a man really and almost entirely great. "Will you be yourself?" she demanded, earnest beneath her smiling manner. "How can I talk to you seriously if you act like a spoiled, bad boy? If you'll only think about the matter, as I've been compelled to think about it, you'll see that you don't really love me—that I'm not the woman for you at all. We'd aggravate each other's worst. What you need is a woman like Narcisse.""You are most kind," he said sarcastically."As she told you yesterday, you've got to settle down within a few years or become absurd. And she——""It is because of the women I have known that you will not give me yourself," he said. "Oh, Neva, I have never loved but you." And in his agitation he clasped her hands and, dropping into French, cried with flaming eyes, "I adore you. You are my life, the light on my path—my star shining through the storm. You make me tremble with passion and with fear. Neva, my love, my soul——"She snatched her hands away. She tried to look at him mockingly, but could not."Neva, my girl," he said in English again. "Do not wither my heart!""Boris," she answered gently, "I've tried to care for you as you wish me to care. I sent for you because I thought I had begun to succeed. But when I saw you again— I liked you, admired you, more than ever, more than anyone. But my dear, dear friend, I cannot give you what you ask. It simply will not yield."He became calm as abruptly as he had burst into passion. Taking his heavily jeweled and engraved gold cigarette case from his pocket, he slowly extracted a cigarette, lighted it with great deliberation, blew out the match, blew out the lamp of the portable stove. "Why?" he said in a tone of pleasant bantering inquiry. "Please tell me why you do not and cannot love me."She colored in confusion."Do not fear lest you will offend," urged he. "I ask impersonally. Feminine psychology is interesting.""I'd rather not talk about it.""Let me help you," he persisted amiably, so amiably that she had to remind herself of the sort of nature she knew he had, to quell a suspicion of treachery under his smoothness. "Because I am too—feminine?" he went on.She nodded hesitatingly. Then, encouraged by his cynical, good-humored laugh, "Though feminine doesn't quite express it. There isn't enough of the primitive man left in you for a woman of my temperament. You have been superrefined, Boris. You are too understanding, too sympathetic for a feminine woman like me. There are two persons to you—one that feels, one that reasons—criticises—analyzes—laughs. I couldn't for a moment forget the one that laughs—at yourself, at any who respond to the you that feels. I suppose you don't understand. I'm sure I don't."[image]"'You are my life, the light on my path.'""Vaguely," said he, somewhat absently. "Who'd suspect it?""Suspect what?""That there was this—this coarse streak inyou—this craving for the ultramasculine, the rude, rough, aggressive male, inconsiderate, brutal, masterful?""A coarse streak," she repeated, half in assent, half in mere reflection.He surveyed impersonally her delicately feminine charms, suggesting fragility even. "And yet," he mused aloud, "I should have seen it. What else could be the meaning of those sharp, even teeth—of the long slits through which your green-gray-brown-blue eyes look. And your long, slim, sensitive lines——"The impersonal faded into the personal, the Boris that analyzed into the Boris that felt. The appeal of her beauty to his senses swept over and submerged his pose of philosopher. His eyes shone and swam, like lights seen afar through a mist; the fingers that held the cigarette trembled. But, as he realized long afterwards, he showed then and there how right she was as to his masculinity. For, his was the passive intensity of the feminine, not the aggressive intensity of the male; instead of forgetting her in the fury of his own baffled desire and seizing her, to crush her until he had wrung some sensation, no matter what, from those unmoved nerves of hers, he restrained himself, hid his emotion as swiftly as he could, turned it off with a jest—"And I've let my coffee grow cold!" He was once more Boris of the boyish vanity that feared, more than ridicule, the triumph of a woman over him. He would rather have risked losing her than have given her the opportunity to see and perhaps enjoy her power.Presently Narcisse came into view. The lamp was relighted; the three talked together; he was not alone with Neva again, made no attempt to be.That afternoon, just before the time for him and Narcisse to depart, Neva took her in to say good-by to her father—a mere shadow of a wreck of a man, whose remnant of vitality was ebbing almost breath by breath. As they came from his room, it suddenly struck Narcisse how profoundly Neva was being affected by her father's life, now that his mortal illness was bringing it vividly before her. A truly noble character moves so tranquilly and unobtrusively that it is often unobserved, perhaps, rather, taken for granted, unless some startling event compels attention to it. Neva was appreciating her father at last; and Narcisse saw what there was to appreciate. No human being can live in one place for half a century without indelibly impressing himself upon his surroundings; Narcisse felt in the very atmosphere of the rooms he had frequented a personality that revealed itself altogether by example, not at all by precept; a human being that loved nature and his fellow beings, lived in justice and mercy."How much it means to have a father like yours!" she exclaimed.Neva did not reply for some time. When she did, the expression of her eyes, of her mouth, made Narcisse realize that her words had some deeper, some hidden meaning: "If ever I have children," she said, "they shall have that same inheritance from their father." And presently she went on, "I often, nowadays, contrast my father with the leading men there in New York. What dreadful faces they have! What tyranny and meanness and trickery! And, how wretched! It is hard to know whether most to pity or to despise them."Narcisse knew instinctively that she meant Armstrong, and perhaps, to a certain extent, Boris also. "We've no right to condemn them," said she. "They are the victims of circumstances too strong for them.""Youhave the right," insisted Neva. "You have been tempted; yet, you are not like them. You have not let New York enslave you, but have made it your servant.""The temptations that would have reached my weaknesses didn't happen to offer," replied she. And there she sighed, for she felt the ache of her wound—Alois.But it was time to go. Neva took them to the station; at the parting Boris kissed her hand in foreign fashion, after his habit, with not a hint of anything but self-control and ease at heart and mind, not even such a hint as Neva alone would have understood. She bore up bravely until they were gone; then solitude and melancholy suddenly enveloped her in their black fog, and she went back home like a traveler in a desert, alone and aimless. "He didn't really care," she thought bitterly, indifferent to her own display of selfishness in having secretly and furtively wished for a love that would only have brought unhappiness to him, since, try however hard, she could not return it. "Does anyone care about anyone but himself? ... If I could only have loved him enough to deceive myself. He's so much more worth while than—than any other man I ever knew or ever shall know."XXVIIIFORAGING FOR SON-IN-LAWNarcisse had gone to Neva at Battle Field to get as well as to give sympathy and companionship; to get the strength to tread alone the path in which she had always had her brother to help her—and he had helped her most of all by getting help from her. She had assumed that her brother would marry some day; she herself looked forward to marrying, as she grew older and appreciated why children are something beside a source of annoyance and anxiety. But she had also assumed that he would marry a woman with whom she would be friends, a woman in real sympathy with his career. Instead, he married Amy, stunted in mind and warped in character and withered in heart by the environment of the idle rich. She knew that the end of the old life had come; and it was to get away from the melancholy spectacle of her new brother that, two months after his return from the honeymoon, she went West for that visit with Neva."Amy has ruined him," she said, when she had been at Battle Field long enough to feel free to open her heart wide. "It's only a question of time; he will give up his career entirely."And, like the beginning of the fulfillment of her prophecy, there soon came a letter from him which she showed Neva. With much beating round the bush, he hinted dissolution of partnership. It gave Neva the heartache to read, and she hardly dared look at Narcisse. "I'm afraid you were right in your suspicions," she had to admit."Certainly I was right," replied Narcisse. "But I'm not really so cut up as you think. Nothing comes unannounced in this world, thank heaven. I've been getting ready for this ever since he told me they were engaged.""How brave you are!" exclaimed Neva. "I know what you must feel, yet you can hide it.""I'm hiding nothing," Narcisse assured her. "I've lived a long time—much longer than my birthdays show. I've been making my own living since I was thirteen—and it wasn't easy until the last few years. But I've learned to take life as I take weather. There are sunny seasons, and stormy seasons, and middling seasons. When the sun shines, I don't enjoy it less, but rather more, because I know foul weather is certain to come. And when it does come, I know it won't last forever." There were tears in her eyes, but through them she smiled dauntlessly. "And the sunwillshine again—warm and bright and streaming happiness."Neva's own heart was suddenly buoyant. "It will—it surely will!" she cried."And," proceeded Narcisse, "my troubles are trifles compared with Alois's. I know him; I know he's unhappy. If ever there was a man cheated in a marriage, that man is my poor brother. And he must realize it by this time."She had guessed close to the truth. Alois and his bride had not been honeymooning many weeks before he confessed to himself that he had overestimated—or, perhaps, misestimated—her intellect. Not that she was stupid or ignorant; no, merely, that she lacked the originality he had attributed to her. He had pictured himself doing great work under her inspiration, his own skill supplemented by her taste and cleverness in suggesting and designing. He found that she knew only what he or some book had told her, that her enthusiasm for architecture was in large part one of those amiable pretenses wherewith the female aids the passions of the male to beguile him to her will.But this discovery did not depress him. No man ever was depressed by finding out that his wife was his mental inferior, though many a man has been pitched headlong into permanent dejection by the discovery of the reverse. She was more beautiful than he had thought, more loving and more lovable—and those compensations more than made good the vanished dream of companionship. Soon, however, her intense affection began to wear upon him. Not that he liked it less or loved her less; but he saw with the beginnings of alarm that he was on the way to being engulfed, that he either must devote himself entirely to being Amy's husband or must expect to lose her. It was fascinating, intoxicating, to be thus encradled in love; but it was not exactly his notion of what was manly.He talked of the work "they" would do, of the fame "they" would win; she responded with rapidly decreasing enthusiasm, finally listened without comment. Once, when he was expanding upon this subject, with some projected public buildings at Washington as the text, she suddenly threw herself into his arms, and cried, "Oh, let Narcisse take care of those things. We—you and I, dearest—have got only a little while to live. Let us be happy—happy—happy!""But you forget, you've married a poor man," he protested. "We've got our living to make.""Oh—of course," said she. "I'd hate for you to be anything but independent.""If I were, you'd soon lose respect for me, as I should for myself.""Yes—you must work," she conceded. "But not too hard. You mustn't crowdmeaside." She clasped her arms more tightly about his neck. "I'dhateyou, if you made me second to anybody or anything. I'm horribly jealous, and I know I'd end by hating you."The way to reassure her, for the moment, was obvious and easy; and he took it. They talked no more of "our" work until they got back to New York. There, it was hard for him to find time to go to the office; for she was always wanting him to do something with her, and as luck would have it, the things he really couldn't get out of doing without offending her always somehow came in office hours. Sometimes he had a business appointment he dared not break; he would explain to her, and she would try to be "sensible." But she felt irritated—was he not her husband, and is not a husband's first duty to his wife?"Why do you make so many appointments just when you know I'll need you?" she demanded. "I believe you do it on purpose!"He showed her how unreasonable this was, and she laughed at herself. But her feeling at bottom was unchanged. After much casting about for some one to blame for this, to her, obvious conspiracy to estrange her husband from her, she fixed upon Narcisse. "She hates me because I took him away from her," she thought; and when she had thought it often enough, she was convinced. Yes, Narcisse was trying to drift them apart. And she ought to be doubly ashamed of herself, because what would the firm of A. & N. Siersdorf amount to but for Alois? Narcisse was, no doubt, clever in a way—but almost anybody who had to work and kept at it for years, could do as well. "Why, I, with no experience at all, did wonders down at Overlook—better than Narcisse ever did anywhere." Indeed, had Narcisse really ever done anything alone? "She has been living off Alois's brains, and she's trying to get him back."That was all quite clear; also, a loving and watchful wife's duty in the circumstances. She gave Alois no rest until he had agreed to break partnership and take offices alone. "When you've got your own offices," she cried, "what work we shall do! You must go down early and stay late, and I'll have an office there, too."So weak is man before woman on her knees and worshipful, Alois began dimly to believe that his wife was, in a measure, right; that Narcisse had been something—not much, but something—of a handicap to his genius; that her prudence and everyday practicality had chained down his soaring imagination. He had no illusions as to the help Amy would give him; there, she had not his vanity to aid her in deluding him. But he felt he owed it to himself to free himself from the partnership. Anyhow, something was wrong; something was preventing him from doing good work—and it was just as well to see if that something was his sister. "The sooner I discover just what I am, the better," he reasoned. And he had no misgivings as to the event.Narcisse made the break easy for him. When she came back from Neva's, she met him in her usual friendly way, and herself opened the subject. "I think we'd better each go it alone," said she, as if she had not penetrated the meaning of his letter. "You've reached the point where you don't want to be bothered with the kind of things I do best. What do you say?""I had thought of that, too," confessed he. "But I— Do you really want it, Cis?""No sentiment in business," replied she in her most offhand manner. "If each of us can do better alone, it'd be silly not to separate. Anyhow, where's the harm in trying?""I was going to suggest that we take offices a little further uptown," he went on. "We might do that, and keep on as we are for a while.""No. You move; let me keep these offices. I'm like a cat; I get attached to places."And so it was settled. "Narcisse Siersdorf, Builder," appeared where "A. & N. Siersdorf, Builders," had been. "Alois Siersdorf, Architect," appeared upon the offices, spacious and most imposing, in a small but extravagantly luxurious bank building in Fifth Avenue, within a few blocks of home—"home" being Josiah Fosdick's house.Amy insisted on their living "at home" because her father couldn't be left quite alone; and Alois sat rent and food free; he had made a vigorous fight for complete independence in financial matters, but nothing had come of it—he felt that it was ridiculous solemnly to give Amy each month a sum which would hardly pay for her dresses. "You are too funny about money," she said. "Why attach so much importance to it? We put it all in together, and no doubt some months you pay more than our share, other months less—but what of that? You can't expect me to bother my head with horrid accounts. And I simply won't have you talking such matters with the housekeeper—and who else is there?"Alois grumbled, but gradually yielded. He consoled himself with the reflection that presently his business would pay hugely, and then the equilibrium would be restored. And after a while—an extremely short while—he thought no more about the matter. This, in face of the fact that the business did not expand as he had dreamed. He was offered plenty to do at first, for he had reputation and the rich were eager for his services. But he simply could not find time to attend to business; he had to leave everything, even the making of plans, to assistants. There were all sorts of entertainments to which he must go with Amy—rides, coaching expeditions, luncheons, afternoon bridge parties, week-end visits. And often he was up until very late at balls; she loved to dance, and he found balls amusing, too. Indeed, he was well pleased with all the gayety. Everybody paid court to him; the husband of an heiress, and a distinguished, a successful, a famous man, one whose opinions in professional matters were quoted with respect. And as everybody talked and acted as if he were doing well, were rising steadily higher and higher, he could not but talk and act and feel so, himself—most of the time. He knew, as a matter of theory, that success of any kind, except in being rich, and that exception only for the enormously rich, is harder to keep than to win, must be won all over again each day. But in those surroundings he could not feel this; he seemed secure, permanent.It was not long before all their world, except only her and him, knew he had practically given up the profession of architect for that of husband. The outward forms of deference to the famous young architect deceived him, enabled him to deceive himself; but his friends, in his very presence, and just out of earshot, often in undertones at his father-in-law's table, were sneering or, what is usually the same thing, moralizing. "Poor Siersdorf! How he has fagged out. Well, was there as much to him as some people said? And they tell me he is living off his wife."When matters reach this pass, and when the man is really a man, the explosion is not far off. It came with the first bitter quarrel he and Amy had. She wished him to go away with her for two months; he wished to go, and it infuriated him against himself that he had so far lost his pride that he could even consider leaving his business when it needed him imperatively. He curtly refused to go; by degrees their discussion became a wrangle, a quarrel, a pitched battle. She was the first completely to lose control of temper. She cast about for some missile that would hit hard."What does this business of yours amount to, anyhow?" she jeered. "Sometimes, I can't help wondering what would have become of you if you hadn't married me."She didn't mean it; she was hardly conscious that she was saying it until the words were out. She grew white and shrank before the damage she knew she must have done. He did not, could not, answer immediately. When he did, it was a release of all that had been poisoning him for months."You think that, do you?" he cried. "I might have known! You dare to think that, when you are responsible!""That's manly," she retorted, eager to extricate herself by putting him in the wrong.He strode to her; he was shaking with fury. "We'll not talk about what's manly or womanly. Let's look at the facts. I loved you, and you took advantage of it to ruin my career, to make it impossible for me to work, to drive away my clients. You have taken my reputation, my brain, my energy. And you dare to taunt me! Men have killed women for less.""Alois!" she sobbed. "Don't frighten me. Don't look—speak—like that! Oh, I'm not responsible for what I say. I know I've been selfish—it's all my fault. But what does anything matter except our happiness? Forgive me. You know why I'm so bad tempered now—so different from my usual self." And the sobs merged into a flood of hysterical tears.The reference to her condition, to their expectations, softened him, caused his anger at once to begin to change into bitter shame, a shame to be concealed, to eat, acidlike, in and in and make a wound that would never heal, but would grow in venom until it would torture him without ceasing."I don't want you to work," she wept. "I want you all to myself. Ah, Alois, some time you'll appreciate my love; you'll realize that love is better than a career. And for you"—sob—"to reproach me"—sob, sob—"when I thought you were as happy as I!" A wild outburst of grief.And he was consoling her, had her in his arms, was lulling her and himself in the bright waves of the passion which she could always evoke in him, as he in her. Never again did she speak of his dependent position; it always made her flesh creep and chill to remember what she had said. But from that time she was distinctly conscious that he was a dependent—and she no longer respected him. From that time, he clearly recognized his own position. He thought it out, decided to make a bold stand; but he felt he could not begin at once. In her condition she must not be crossed; he must go away with her, since go she must and go alone she could not. He would make a new beginning as soon as the baby was born.Meanwhile, his office expenses were heavy, and the money he had saved before he was married was gone. He went into debt fast, terrifyingly fast. He borrowed two thousand dollars of Narcisse; he hoped it would last, as usually Amy's bills were all paid by her father. But they were away from Fosdick's house, and she, thinking and knowing nothing about money, continued to spend as usual. He got everything on credit that did not have to be paid for at once; but in spite of all his contriving, when they reached New York again he was really penniless. He went to Narcisse's office; she was out of town. In desperation he borrowed five hundred dollars from his brother-in-law.Hugo loaned the money as if the transaction were a trifle that was making no impression on him. Like all those who think of nothing but money, he affected to think nothing of it. He noted Alois's nervousness, then his thin and harassed look. "How do Amy and Alois live?" he asked his father."Live? What do you mean?" said Josiah. "Why, they're perfectly happy. What put such nonsense in your head?""Oh, bother!" exclaimed Hugo. "Certainly they're happy. Amy'd be a fool not to be happy with as decent a chap as he is. I mean, how do they get along about money?""He's got a good business," said Fosdick. "You know it as well as I do.""He used to have," replied Hugo. "But he's too busy with Amy to be doing much else. He's always standing on her dress. And he has no partner.""I don't know anything about it," said Fosdick. "If Amy needed money, she'd come to me." Fosdick recalled that he had been paying even heavier bills for her since she was married; but he had no mind to speak of it to Hugo, as he did not wish Hugo to misunderstand. "You attend to your own affairs, boy," he continued. "Those two are all right." And he beamed benevolently. He delighted in Amy's happiness, felt that he was entirely responsible for it.But Hugo was not to be put off. "Believe me, father, Alois is down to bed-rock. He can't speak to Amy about it, or to you. He's a gentleman. It's up to you to do something for him.""I guess looking after Amy does keep his time pretty well filled up," chuckled the old man, much amused. "I'll fix him a place in the O.A.D.—something that'll give him a good income and not take his mind entirely off his job.""Why not get Armstrong to make him supervising architect? A big public institution like that ought to pay more attention to cultivating the artistic side. He could think out and carry out some general plan that'd harmonize to high standards all the buildings, especially the dwelling and apartment houses they own in the provinces." Hugo spoke of the O.A.D. as "they" nowadays, though he still thought of it as "we.""That's a good idea, Hugo, as good as any other. I'll see Armstrong to-day. I oughtn't to have neglected putting Alois on the pay rolls. I'll give him something in the railway, too. We'll fix him up handsomely. He's a fine young fellow, and he has made Amy happy. You don't appreciate that, you young scoundrel, as we of the older generation do." And Hugo had to listen patiently to a discourse on decaying virtue and honor and family life; for, like all decaying men, Fosdick mistook internal symptoms for an exterior and universal phenomenon, just as a man who is going blind cries, "The light is getting dim!"Fosdick did not forget. Now that his attention was upon the matter, he reproached himself severely for his oversight. "I've been taking care of scores of people, and neglecting my own. But I'll make up for it." He ordered the president of the railway to put Alois on the pay rolls at once with a salary of twelve thousand a year. "You need somebody to supervise the stations. Everybody's going in for art, nowadays, and we want the best. Mail him his first check to-day, with the notice of his appointment."In the full glow of generosity, he went up to see Armstrong. They were great friends nowadays. Since the peace, not a trace of cloud had come between them; he was careful to keep his hands entirely off the O.A.D.; Armstrong, on his side, gave the Fosdick railway and industrial enterprises the same "courtesies" they had always enjoyed, except that he charged them the current rate of interest, instead of the old special rate."Horace," he began, "I suppose you'll soon be organizing the construction department on broader lines. I've come to put in a good word for my son-in-law. I don't need to say anything about his merits as an architect. As you know, there's none better.""None," said Armstrong heartily. "Anything we want in his line, he'll get.""Thanks. Thanks. My idea, though, was a little more definite. I was thinking you might want a man to pass on all buildings, plans, improvements. He could raise the value of the company's property—particularly the dwelling and apartment houses.""That's a valuable suggestion," said Armstrong. "And Siersdorf would be just the man for the place. But will he take it?""I think so.""But he'd have to be traveling about, most of the time. He'd be in the West and South, where we're trying to get back the ground lost in those big exposés. I shouldn't think he'd care for that sort of life."Fosdick was disconcerted. "I suppose that could be arranged. You wouldn't expect a man of Siersdorf's caliber to go chasing about the country like a retail drummer. He'd have assistants for that, and drawings and pictures and those sort of things could be forwarded to him here.""That would hardly do," replied Armstrong, like a man advancing cautiously, but determined to advance. "Then, there's the matter of pay. The work would take all of his time, and we couldn't afford much of a salary. I should say the job was rather for some talented young fellow, trying to get a start.""You'd simply waste whatever money you paid such a man," Fosdick objected with a restraint of tone and manner that astonished himself. "No, what you want is a high-class, a first-class, man at a good salary—a first-class man's salary.""Say—how much?" inquired Armstrong."I was thinking twenty thousand a year—or, perhaps fifteen." The lower figure was an amendment suggested by the tightening of Armstrong's lips.Armstrong saw the point. What Fosdick was after was a sinecure; a soft berth for his son-in-law to luxuriate idly in; another and a portly addition to the O.A.D's vast family of "fixed charges." "I'd like to oblige you, Mr. Fosdick," said he, with the reluctance of a man taking a new road where the passage looks doubtful and may be dangerous. "And I hate to deprive the O.A.D. of the chance to get Siersdorf's services at what is undoubtedly a bargain. But, as you may perhaps have heard, I'm directing all my efforts to lopping off expenses. I'm trying to get the O.A.D. on a basis where we can pay the policy holders a larger share of the profits we make on their money. Perhaps, later on, I can take the matter up. But I hope you won't press it at present."The words were careful, the tone was most courteously regretful. But the refusal was none the less a slap in the face to a man like Fosdick. "As you please, as you please," he said hurriedly, and with averted eyes. "I just thought it was a good arrangement all around.... Everything going smoothly?""So-so.""Well, good day."And he went, with a friendly nod and handshake that did not deceive Armstrong. He drove to the magnificent Hearth and Home Defender building which Trafford and his pals had built for their own profit out of their stealings from millions of working men and women and children of the poorest, most ignorant class. Trafford received his fellow adept in the art of exploiting as Fosdick loved to be received; he did not let him finish his request before granting it. "An excellent idea, Fosdick," he cried. "I understand perfectly. I'll see that we get Siersdorf at once. Would fifteen thousand be too small?""About right, as a starter, I should say," was Fosdick's judicial answer. "You see, the thing's more or less an experiment.""But certain to succeed," said Trafford confidently. "And, of course, we'll accept any arrangements Mr. Siersdorf may make about assistants. We can't expect him to give us all his time. We'll be quite content with his advice and judgment. You've put me under obligations to you."Fosdick's eyes sparkled. As he went away, he said to himself, "Now, there's a big man, a gentleman, one who knows how to do business, how to treat another gentleman. I must put him in on something good."And he did.
XXVII
BREAKFAST AL FRESCO
Armstrong sent Neva a prompt telegram of sympathy and inquiry. He got a telegraphed reply—her thanks and the statement that her father was desperately ill, but apparently not in immediate danger. He wrote her about the highly satisfactory turn in his affairs; to help him to ease, he tried to dismiss herself and himself, but at every sentence he had to stem again the feeling that this letter would be read where he was remembered as the sort of person it made him hot with shame to think he had ever been. He waited two weeks; no answer. Again he wrote—a lover's appeal for news of her. Ten days, and she answered, ignoring the personal side of his letter, simply telling how ill her father was, what a long struggle at best it would be to save him. Armstrong saw that nursing and anxiety were absorbing all her time and thought and strength. He wrote a humble apology for having annoyed her, asked her to write him whenever she could, if it was only a line or so.
Two more increasingly restless weeks, and he telegraphed that he was coming. She telegraphed an absolute veto, and in the first mail came a letter that was the more crushing because it was calm and free from bitterness. "In this quiet town," wrote she, "where so little happens, you know how they remember and brood and become bitter. What is past and forgotten for us is still very vivid to him and magnified out of all proportion. Please do not write again, until you hear from me."
Thus, he learned that his worst fears were justified. If she had shown that, in the home atmosphere again, she was seeing him as formerly, he could have protested, argued, appealed. But how strive against her duty to her sick, her dying father whose generous friendship he had ruthlessly betrayed and whose life he had embittered? He debated going to Battle Field and seeing Mr. Carlin and asking forgiveness. But such an agitating interview would probably hasten death, even if he could get admittance; besides, he remembered that Frederic Carlin, slow to condemn, never forgave once he had condemned. "He feels toward me as I'd feel in the same circumstances. I have got only what I deserve." No judgments are so terrible as those that are just.
The state of Armstrong's mind so preyed upon him that it affected even his giant strength and health, and his friends urged him to take a vacation. He worked only the harder, because in work alone could he get any relief whatever from the torments of his remorse and his baffled love. He became morose, given to bursts of unreasonable anger. "Success is turning his head," was the general opinion. "He's getting to be a tyrant, like the others." In some moods, he saw the lessons of gentleness and forbearance in the fate his selfish arrogance had brought upon him; but it is not in the nature of men of strong individuality and unbroken will to practice such lessons. The keener his sufferings, the bitterer, the harder he became. And soon he began to feel that there was nearly if not quite a quittance of the balance between him and the man he had wronged. He convinced himself that, if Neva's father were dead, he could speedily win her. "Meanwhile," he reflected, "I must take my punishment"; and with the stolid, unwhimpering endurance of those whose ancestors have through countless generations been schooled in the fields, the forests, and the camps, he waited for the news that would mean the end of his expiation.
Raphael, taking his walk in Fifth Avenue late one afternoon instead of in Central Park, saw him in a closed motor in the halted mass of vehicles at the Forty-second Street crossing. Boris happened to be in his happiest mood. Always the philosopher, he was too catholic in his interests and tastes to permit disappointment in any one direction or even in many directions to close the other avenues to the joy of life. There were times when he could not quite banish the shadows which the thought of death cast over him—death, so exasperating to men of pride and imagination because, of all their adversaries, it alone cannot be challenged or compromised. But on that day, Boris had only the sense of life, life at its best, with the sun bright and not too warm, with the new garb of nature and of womankind radiantly fresh, and the whole world laughing because the winter had been vanquished once more. As his all-observing eyes noted Armstrong's profile, his face darkened. There was for him, in that profile, rugged, stern, inflexible, a challenge of the basis of his happiness.
In all his willful life Boris had never wanted anything so intensely, so exclusively as he wanted Neva. Every man who falls in love with a woman feels that he is her discoverer, that he has a property right securely based upon discovery. Raphael's sense of his right to Neva was far stronger; it was the creator's sense. Had he not said, "Let there be beauty and light and capacity to give and receive love"? And had not these wonders sprung into existence before his magic? True, the beauty and the light and the power to give and to receive were different both in kind and in degree from what he had commanded. But that did not alter his right. And this Armstrong, this coarse savage who would take away his Galatea to serve in a vulgar, sooty tent of barbaric commerce— The very sight of Armstrong set all his senses on edge, as if each were being assailed by its own particular abhorrence.
That day the stern, inflexible profile somehow struck into him the same chill that always came at the thought of death with its undebatable "must." Yet there was in his pocket, at the very moment, warming his heart like a flagon of old port, a long letter from Neva, a confidential letter, full of friendly, intimate things about herself, her anxieties, her hopes, and fears; and she asked him to stop off on his way to or from his lectures before the Chicago art students. "Narcisse is here," she wrote. "She will be leaving about that time, she says, and if you stop on your way, she and you can go back together. How I wish I could go, too! Not until I settled down here did I appreciate what you—and New York—had done for me. Yet I had thought I did. Do stop off here. It will be so good to see you, Boris."
As he looked at Armstrong's profile, he laid his hand on his coat over the letter and remembered that sentence—"It will be so good to see you." But the shadow would not depart. That profile persisted; he could not banish it.
When he descended from the train at the Battle Field station and saw Neva, with Narcisse beside her in a touring car, he saw that ominous profile, plain as if Armstrong were there, too. This, though Neva's welcome was radiantly bright. "What's the matter, Boris?" cried Narcisse, climbing to the seat beside the chauffeur before Neva could prevent. "Get in beside your hostess and cheer up. You ought to look like a clear sunrise. The lecture was a triumph. I read two whole columns of it aloud to Neva and her father this morning. No cant. No hypocrisy. They agreed with me that your art ideas are like an island in the boundless ocean of flap-doodle."
"My father used to sell bananas from a cart in Chicago," said Boris, "and we lived in the cellar where he ripened them."
Neva glanced at him with quick sympathetic interest. It was the first time he had happened to speak of his origin. "I always thought you were born abroad," said she.
"I think not," replied he. "I really don't know at exactly what point I broke into the world. Those things matter so little. Countries, governments, races—they mean nothing to me. I meet my fellow beings as individuals."
There he caught Neva studying him with an expression so curious that he paused. She forestalled his question by plunging into an animated talk about his lecture. He was well content to listen, enjoying now the surroundings and now the beauty of the woman beside him. Both were wonderfully soothing to him, filled him with innocent, virtuous thoughts, made him envy, and half delude himself into fancying he wished for himself, the joys of somnolescent, corpulent, middle-class life—the life obviously led by the people dwelling in these flower-embedded houses on either side of these shady streets. He sighed; Neva laughed. And he saw that she was laughing at him.
"Well, why not?" he demanded, knowing she understood his sigh. But before she could answer he was laughing at himself. "Still, I like it, for a change," said he. "And—" he was speaking now in an undertone—"with you I could be happy in such a place—always. Just with you; not if we let these stupid burghers in to fret me."
She laughed outright. "I understand you better than you understand yourself," said she. "Change and contrast are as necessary to you as air. If you had to live here, you would commit suicide or become commonplace.... And so should I."
"Not with a husband you loved and children you adored and a home you had created yourself. As the world expands, it contracts; as it contracts, it expands. From end to end the universe is not so vast as such a love."
Neva, coloring deeply and profoundly moved, leaned forward. "I'm sorry you're missing this," said she, lightly to Narcisse. "Boris is sentimentalizing about the vine-clad cottage with children clambering."
"It's about time you quit and came in to settle down," called Narcisse. "A few years more and you'll cease to be romantic. An old beau is ridiculous."
Boris gave Neva a triumphant look. "Narcisse votes yes," said he.
But they were arriving at the house. As the motor ran up the drive under the elms toward the gorgeous masses of forsythia about the entrance steps, Boris's eyes were so busy that he scarcely heard, while Neva explained that her father was too weak to withstand the excitement of visitors—"especially anyone distinguished. We're not telling him you're here. He would feel it his duty to exert himself."
"Distinguished!" he exclaimed. "In presence of these elms and this house built for all time, and these eternal colors, how could mere mortal be distinguished?"
It was not until the next morning that he had a chance to talk with her alone. He rose early and went out before breakfast. He strolled through the woods back of the house until he came to a pavilion with a creek rushing steeply down past it toward Otter Lake. In the pavilion he found Neva with a great heap of roses in her lap, another on the table, another on the bench. On her bright hair was a huge garden hat, its broad streamers of pink ribbon flowing upon her shoulders.
She dropped her shears and watched him with the expression in her eyes that he had surprised there, as they were coming from the station in the motor. "May I ask," said he, "what is the meaning of that look?"
"Did you sleep well?" parried she.
"Without a dream."
"I don't know," replied she—"Let us have breakfast here—you and I.... Washington!" she called.
There rose from a copse below, near the brim of the creek, a small colored boy, barefooted, bareheaded, with no garments but a blue shirt and a pair of blue cotton jean trousers. She sent him off to the house to tell them to bring breakfast. And soon a maid appeared with a tray whose chief burden was a heating apparatus for coffee and milk.
"I've heard you say you detested cold coffee," said Neva. "Your frown when I suggested breakfast out here was premature."
She scattered and heaped the roses into an odorous, dew-sprinkled mat of green and pink and white, in the center of the rustic table. Then she served the coffee. It was real coffee, and the milk was what is called cream in many parts of the world. "Brother Tom has a model farm," she explained. "These eggs were laid this morning."
"So they were," exclaimed Boris, as he broke one. His eyes were sparkling; all that was best in his looks and in his nature was irradiating from him. Her sweet, lovely face, her delicate fresh costume, the sight and odor of the roses, of the forest all round them, the melody of the descending waters, and the superb coffee, crisp rolls, and freshest of fresh eggs— "You criticise me for my appreciation of the sensuous side of life, my dear friend," said he. "But, tell me, is there anywhere anything more delicious, more inspiring than this breakfast?"
"I never criticised you for loving the joys of the senses," cried she. "Never! We are too much alike there."
"What happiness we could have!" exclaimed he. "For do we not know how to make life smooth and comfortable and beautiful, you and I?"
"Only too well," confessed she. "I often think of it. But——"
He waited for her to continue. When he saw that she would not, but was lost in a reverie, he said, "You promised you would think about our going abroad. Have you thought?"
She nodded.
"You will go?"
She slowly shook her head.
"Why not?"
"I want to, but—I can't."
"Why?"
He had paused in buttering a bit of roll. Anyone coming up just then would have thought he was looking at her, awaiting an answer to an inquiry after salt or something like that. She said: "Because I do not love you."
He waved his knife in airy dismissal. "A trifle! And so easily overcome."
"Because I cannot love you, my dear." She looked at him affectionately.
He balanced the bit of bread before his lips. "Not that brotherly look, please," said he. "It—it hurts!" He put the bread in his mouth.
She leaned forward and laid her hand on his. "We are too much alike. You are too subtle, too nervous, too appreciative, too changeable. You would soon cease to fancy you loved me. I—it so happens—have never begun to fancy I loved you. That is fortunate for us both."
"Armstrong!" he exclaimed. And suddenly, despite his ruddy coloring, he suggested a dark Sicilian hate peering from an ambush, stiletto in impatient hand.
"Don't show me that side of you, Boris," she entreated. "Whether it is Armstrong or not, did I not say the fact that I don't fancy I love you is fortunate for us both?"
"You love Armstrong," he insisted sullenly.
"How can you know that, when I don't know it myself?" replied she. "As I told you once before, the only matter that concerns you is that I do not love you." She spoke sharply. Knowing him so well, she had small patience with his childish, barbaric moods; she could not bear pettiness in a man really and almost entirely great. "Will you be yourself?" she demanded, earnest beneath her smiling manner. "How can I talk to you seriously if you act like a spoiled, bad boy? If you'll only think about the matter, as I've been compelled to think about it, you'll see that you don't really love me—that I'm not the woman for you at all. We'd aggravate each other's worst. What you need is a woman like Narcisse."
"You are most kind," he said sarcastically.
"As she told you yesterday, you've got to settle down within a few years or become absurd. And she——"
"It is because of the women I have known that you will not give me yourself," he said. "Oh, Neva, I have never loved but you." And in his agitation he clasped her hands and, dropping into French, cried with flaming eyes, "I adore you. You are my life, the light on my path—my star shining through the storm. You make me tremble with passion and with fear. Neva, my love, my soul——"
She snatched her hands away. She tried to look at him mockingly, but could not.
"Neva, my girl," he said in English again. "Do not wither my heart!"
"Boris," she answered gently, "I've tried to care for you as you wish me to care. I sent for you because I thought I had begun to succeed. But when I saw you again— I liked you, admired you, more than ever, more than anyone. But my dear, dear friend, I cannot give you what you ask. It simply will not yield."
He became calm as abruptly as he had burst into passion. Taking his heavily jeweled and engraved gold cigarette case from his pocket, he slowly extracted a cigarette, lighted it with great deliberation, blew out the match, blew out the lamp of the portable stove. "Why?" he said in a tone of pleasant bantering inquiry. "Please tell me why you do not and cannot love me."
She colored in confusion.
"Do not fear lest you will offend," urged he. "I ask impersonally. Feminine psychology is interesting."
"I'd rather not talk about it."
"Let me help you," he persisted amiably, so amiably that she had to remind herself of the sort of nature she knew he had, to quell a suspicion of treachery under his smoothness. "Because I am too—feminine?" he went on.
She nodded hesitatingly. Then, encouraged by his cynical, good-humored laugh, "Though feminine doesn't quite express it. There isn't enough of the primitive man left in you for a woman of my temperament. You have been superrefined, Boris. You are too understanding, too sympathetic for a feminine woman like me. There are two persons to you—one that feels, one that reasons—criticises—analyzes—laughs. I couldn't for a moment forget the one that laughs—at yourself, at any who respond to the you that feels. I suppose you don't understand. I'm sure I don't."
[image]"'You are my life, the light on my path.'"
[image]
[image]
"'You are my life, the light on my path.'"
"Vaguely," said he, somewhat absently. "Who'd suspect it?"
"Suspect what?"
"That there was this—this coarse streak inyou—this craving for the ultramasculine, the rude, rough, aggressive male, inconsiderate, brutal, masterful?"
"A coarse streak," she repeated, half in assent, half in mere reflection.
He surveyed impersonally her delicately feminine charms, suggesting fragility even. "And yet," he mused aloud, "I should have seen it. What else could be the meaning of those sharp, even teeth—of the long slits through which your green-gray-brown-blue eyes look. And your long, slim, sensitive lines——"
The impersonal faded into the personal, the Boris that analyzed into the Boris that felt. The appeal of her beauty to his senses swept over and submerged his pose of philosopher. His eyes shone and swam, like lights seen afar through a mist; the fingers that held the cigarette trembled. But, as he realized long afterwards, he showed then and there how right she was as to his masculinity. For, his was the passive intensity of the feminine, not the aggressive intensity of the male; instead of forgetting her in the fury of his own baffled desire and seizing her, to crush her until he had wrung some sensation, no matter what, from those unmoved nerves of hers, he restrained himself, hid his emotion as swiftly as he could, turned it off with a jest—"And I've let my coffee grow cold!" He was once more Boris of the boyish vanity that feared, more than ridicule, the triumph of a woman over him. He would rather have risked losing her than have given her the opportunity to see and perhaps enjoy her power.
Presently Narcisse came into view. The lamp was relighted; the three talked together; he was not alone with Neva again, made no attempt to be.
That afternoon, just before the time for him and Narcisse to depart, Neva took her in to say good-by to her father—a mere shadow of a wreck of a man, whose remnant of vitality was ebbing almost breath by breath. As they came from his room, it suddenly struck Narcisse how profoundly Neva was being affected by her father's life, now that his mortal illness was bringing it vividly before her. A truly noble character moves so tranquilly and unobtrusively that it is often unobserved, perhaps, rather, taken for granted, unless some startling event compels attention to it. Neva was appreciating her father at last; and Narcisse saw what there was to appreciate. No human being can live in one place for half a century without indelibly impressing himself upon his surroundings; Narcisse felt in the very atmosphere of the rooms he had frequented a personality that revealed itself altogether by example, not at all by precept; a human being that loved nature and his fellow beings, lived in justice and mercy.
"How much it means to have a father like yours!" she exclaimed.
Neva did not reply for some time. When she did, the expression of her eyes, of her mouth, made Narcisse realize that her words had some deeper, some hidden meaning: "If ever I have children," she said, "they shall have that same inheritance from their father." And presently she went on, "I often, nowadays, contrast my father with the leading men there in New York. What dreadful faces they have! What tyranny and meanness and trickery! And, how wretched! It is hard to know whether most to pity or to despise them."
Narcisse knew instinctively that she meant Armstrong, and perhaps, to a certain extent, Boris also. "We've no right to condemn them," said she. "They are the victims of circumstances too strong for them."
"Youhave the right," insisted Neva. "You have been tempted; yet, you are not like them. You have not let New York enslave you, but have made it your servant."
"The temptations that would have reached my weaknesses didn't happen to offer," replied she. And there she sighed, for she felt the ache of her wound—Alois.
But it was time to go. Neva took them to the station; at the parting Boris kissed her hand in foreign fashion, after his habit, with not a hint of anything but self-control and ease at heart and mind, not even such a hint as Neva alone would have understood. She bore up bravely until they were gone; then solitude and melancholy suddenly enveloped her in their black fog, and she went back home like a traveler in a desert, alone and aimless. "He didn't really care," she thought bitterly, indifferent to her own display of selfishness in having secretly and furtively wished for a love that would only have brought unhappiness to him, since, try however hard, she could not return it. "Does anyone care about anyone but himself? ... If I could only have loved him enough to deceive myself. He's so much more worth while than—than any other man I ever knew or ever shall know."
XXVIII
FORAGING FOR SON-IN-LAW
Narcisse had gone to Neva at Battle Field to get as well as to give sympathy and companionship; to get the strength to tread alone the path in which she had always had her brother to help her—and he had helped her most of all by getting help from her. She had assumed that her brother would marry some day; she herself looked forward to marrying, as she grew older and appreciated why children are something beside a source of annoyance and anxiety. But she had also assumed that he would marry a woman with whom she would be friends, a woman in real sympathy with his career. Instead, he married Amy, stunted in mind and warped in character and withered in heart by the environment of the idle rich. She knew that the end of the old life had come; and it was to get away from the melancholy spectacle of her new brother that, two months after his return from the honeymoon, she went West for that visit with Neva.
"Amy has ruined him," she said, when she had been at Battle Field long enough to feel free to open her heart wide. "It's only a question of time; he will give up his career entirely."
And, like the beginning of the fulfillment of her prophecy, there soon came a letter from him which she showed Neva. With much beating round the bush, he hinted dissolution of partnership. It gave Neva the heartache to read, and she hardly dared look at Narcisse. "I'm afraid you were right in your suspicions," she had to admit.
"Certainly I was right," replied Narcisse. "But I'm not really so cut up as you think. Nothing comes unannounced in this world, thank heaven. I've been getting ready for this ever since he told me they were engaged."
"How brave you are!" exclaimed Neva. "I know what you must feel, yet you can hide it."
"I'm hiding nothing," Narcisse assured her. "I've lived a long time—much longer than my birthdays show. I've been making my own living since I was thirteen—and it wasn't easy until the last few years. But I've learned to take life as I take weather. There are sunny seasons, and stormy seasons, and middling seasons. When the sun shines, I don't enjoy it less, but rather more, because I know foul weather is certain to come. And when it does come, I know it won't last forever." There were tears in her eyes, but through them she smiled dauntlessly. "And the sunwillshine again—warm and bright and streaming happiness."
Neva's own heart was suddenly buoyant. "It will—it surely will!" she cried.
"And," proceeded Narcisse, "my troubles are trifles compared with Alois's. I know him; I know he's unhappy. If ever there was a man cheated in a marriage, that man is my poor brother. And he must realize it by this time."
She had guessed close to the truth. Alois and his bride had not been honeymooning many weeks before he confessed to himself that he had overestimated—or, perhaps, misestimated—her intellect. Not that she was stupid or ignorant; no, merely, that she lacked the originality he had attributed to her. He had pictured himself doing great work under her inspiration, his own skill supplemented by her taste and cleverness in suggesting and designing. He found that she knew only what he or some book had told her, that her enthusiasm for architecture was in large part one of those amiable pretenses wherewith the female aids the passions of the male to beguile him to her will.
But this discovery did not depress him. No man ever was depressed by finding out that his wife was his mental inferior, though many a man has been pitched headlong into permanent dejection by the discovery of the reverse. She was more beautiful than he had thought, more loving and more lovable—and those compensations more than made good the vanished dream of companionship. Soon, however, her intense affection began to wear upon him. Not that he liked it less or loved her less; but he saw with the beginnings of alarm that he was on the way to being engulfed, that he either must devote himself entirely to being Amy's husband or must expect to lose her. It was fascinating, intoxicating, to be thus encradled in love; but it was not exactly his notion of what was manly.
He talked of the work "they" would do, of the fame "they" would win; she responded with rapidly decreasing enthusiasm, finally listened without comment. Once, when he was expanding upon this subject, with some projected public buildings at Washington as the text, she suddenly threw herself into his arms, and cried, "Oh, let Narcisse take care of those things. We—you and I, dearest—have got only a little while to live. Let us be happy—happy—happy!"
"But you forget, you've married a poor man," he protested. "We've got our living to make."
"Oh—of course," said she. "I'd hate for you to be anything but independent."
"If I were, you'd soon lose respect for me, as I should for myself."
"Yes—you must work," she conceded. "But not too hard. You mustn't crowdmeaside." She clasped her arms more tightly about his neck. "I'dhateyou, if you made me second to anybody or anything. I'm horribly jealous, and I know I'd end by hating you."
The way to reassure her, for the moment, was obvious and easy; and he took it. They talked no more of "our" work until they got back to New York. There, it was hard for him to find time to go to the office; for she was always wanting him to do something with her, and as luck would have it, the things he really couldn't get out of doing without offending her always somehow came in office hours. Sometimes he had a business appointment he dared not break; he would explain to her, and she would try to be "sensible." But she felt irritated—was he not her husband, and is not a husband's first duty to his wife?
"Why do you make so many appointments just when you know I'll need you?" she demanded. "I believe you do it on purpose!"
He showed her how unreasonable this was, and she laughed at herself. But her feeling at bottom was unchanged. After much casting about for some one to blame for this, to her, obvious conspiracy to estrange her husband from her, she fixed upon Narcisse. "She hates me because I took him away from her," she thought; and when she had thought it often enough, she was convinced. Yes, Narcisse was trying to drift them apart. And she ought to be doubly ashamed of herself, because what would the firm of A. & N. Siersdorf amount to but for Alois? Narcisse was, no doubt, clever in a way—but almost anybody who had to work and kept at it for years, could do as well. "Why, I, with no experience at all, did wonders down at Overlook—better than Narcisse ever did anywhere." Indeed, had Narcisse really ever done anything alone? "She has been living off Alois's brains, and she's trying to get him back."
That was all quite clear; also, a loving and watchful wife's duty in the circumstances. She gave Alois no rest until he had agreed to break partnership and take offices alone. "When you've got your own offices," she cried, "what work we shall do! You must go down early and stay late, and I'll have an office there, too."
So weak is man before woman on her knees and worshipful, Alois began dimly to believe that his wife was, in a measure, right; that Narcisse had been something—not much, but something—of a handicap to his genius; that her prudence and everyday practicality had chained down his soaring imagination. He had no illusions as to the help Amy would give him; there, she had not his vanity to aid her in deluding him. But he felt he owed it to himself to free himself from the partnership. Anyhow, something was wrong; something was preventing him from doing good work—and it was just as well to see if that something was his sister. "The sooner I discover just what I am, the better," he reasoned. And he had no misgivings as to the event.
Narcisse made the break easy for him. When she came back from Neva's, she met him in her usual friendly way, and herself opened the subject. "I think we'd better each go it alone," said she, as if she had not penetrated the meaning of his letter. "You've reached the point where you don't want to be bothered with the kind of things I do best. What do you say?"
"I had thought of that, too," confessed he. "But I— Do you really want it, Cis?"
"No sentiment in business," replied she in her most offhand manner. "If each of us can do better alone, it'd be silly not to separate. Anyhow, where's the harm in trying?"
"I was going to suggest that we take offices a little further uptown," he went on. "We might do that, and keep on as we are for a while."
"No. You move; let me keep these offices. I'm like a cat; I get attached to places."
And so it was settled. "Narcisse Siersdorf, Builder," appeared where "A. & N. Siersdorf, Builders," had been. "Alois Siersdorf, Architect," appeared upon the offices, spacious and most imposing, in a small but extravagantly luxurious bank building in Fifth Avenue, within a few blocks of home—"home" being Josiah Fosdick's house.
Amy insisted on their living "at home" because her father couldn't be left quite alone; and Alois sat rent and food free; he had made a vigorous fight for complete independence in financial matters, but nothing had come of it—he felt that it was ridiculous solemnly to give Amy each month a sum which would hardly pay for her dresses. "You are too funny about money," she said. "Why attach so much importance to it? We put it all in together, and no doubt some months you pay more than our share, other months less—but what of that? You can't expect me to bother my head with horrid accounts. And I simply won't have you talking such matters with the housekeeper—and who else is there?"
Alois grumbled, but gradually yielded. He consoled himself with the reflection that presently his business would pay hugely, and then the equilibrium would be restored. And after a while—an extremely short while—he thought no more about the matter. This, in face of the fact that the business did not expand as he had dreamed. He was offered plenty to do at first, for he had reputation and the rich were eager for his services. But he simply could not find time to attend to business; he had to leave everything, even the making of plans, to assistants. There were all sorts of entertainments to which he must go with Amy—rides, coaching expeditions, luncheons, afternoon bridge parties, week-end visits. And often he was up until very late at balls; she loved to dance, and he found balls amusing, too. Indeed, he was well pleased with all the gayety. Everybody paid court to him; the husband of an heiress, and a distinguished, a successful, a famous man, one whose opinions in professional matters were quoted with respect. And as everybody talked and acted as if he were doing well, were rising steadily higher and higher, he could not but talk and act and feel so, himself—most of the time. He knew, as a matter of theory, that success of any kind, except in being rich, and that exception only for the enormously rich, is harder to keep than to win, must be won all over again each day. But in those surroundings he could not feel this; he seemed secure, permanent.
It was not long before all their world, except only her and him, knew he had practically given up the profession of architect for that of husband. The outward forms of deference to the famous young architect deceived him, enabled him to deceive himself; but his friends, in his very presence, and just out of earshot, often in undertones at his father-in-law's table, were sneering or, what is usually the same thing, moralizing. "Poor Siersdorf! How he has fagged out. Well, was there as much to him as some people said? And they tell me he is living off his wife."
When matters reach this pass, and when the man is really a man, the explosion is not far off. It came with the first bitter quarrel he and Amy had. She wished him to go away with her for two months; he wished to go, and it infuriated him against himself that he had so far lost his pride that he could even consider leaving his business when it needed him imperatively. He curtly refused to go; by degrees their discussion became a wrangle, a quarrel, a pitched battle. She was the first completely to lose control of temper. She cast about for some missile that would hit hard.
"What does this business of yours amount to, anyhow?" she jeered. "Sometimes, I can't help wondering what would have become of you if you hadn't married me."
She didn't mean it; she was hardly conscious that she was saying it until the words were out. She grew white and shrank before the damage she knew she must have done. He did not, could not, answer immediately. When he did, it was a release of all that had been poisoning him for months.
"You think that, do you?" he cried. "I might have known! You dare to think that, when you are responsible!"
"That's manly," she retorted, eager to extricate herself by putting him in the wrong.
He strode to her; he was shaking with fury. "We'll not talk about what's manly or womanly. Let's look at the facts. I loved you, and you took advantage of it to ruin my career, to make it impossible for me to work, to drive away my clients. You have taken my reputation, my brain, my energy. And you dare to taunt me! Men have killed women for less."
"Alois!" she sobbed. "Don't frighten me. Don't look—speak—like that! Oh, I'm not responsible for what I say. I know I've been selfish—it's all my fault. But what does anything matter except our happiness? Forgive me. You know why I'm so bad tempered now—so different from my usual self." And the sobs merged into a flood of hysterical tears.
The reference to her condition, to their expectations, softened him, caused his anger at once to begin to change into bitter shame, a shame to be concealed, to eat, acidlike, in and in and make a wound that would never heal, but would grow in venom until it would torture him without ceasing.
"I don't want you to work," she wept. "I want you all to myself. Ah, Alois, some time you'll appreciate my love; you'll realize that love is better than a career. And for you"—sob—"to reproach me"—sob, sob—"when I thought you were as happy as I!" A wild outburst of grief.
And he was consoling her, had her in his arms, was lulling her and himself in the bright waves of the passion which she could always evoke in him, as he in her. Never again did she speak of his dependent position; it always made her flesh creep and chill to remember what she had said. But from that time she was distinctly conscious that he was a dependent—and she no longer respected him. From that time, he clearly recognized his own position. He thought it out, decided to make a bold stand; but he felt he could not begin at once. In her condition she must not be crossed; he must go away with her, since go she must and go alone she could not. He would make a new beginning as soon as the baby was born.
Meanwhile, his office expenses were heavy, and the money he had saved before he was married was gone. He went into debt fast, terrifyingly fast. He borrowed two thousand dollars of Narcisse; he hoped it would last, as usually Amy's bills were all paid by her father. But they were away from Fosdick's house, and she, thinking and knowing nothing about money, continued to spend as usual. He got everything on credit that did not have to be paid for at once; but in spite of all his contriving, when they reached New York again he was really penniless. He went to Narcisse's office; she was out of town. In desperation he borrowed five hundred dollars from his brother-in-law.
Hugo loaned the money as if the transaction were a trifle that was making no impression on him. Like all those who think of nothing but money, he affected to think nothing of it. He noted Alois's nervousness, then his thin and harassed look. "How do Amy and Alois live?" he asked his father.
"Live? What do you mean?" said Josiah. "Why, they're perfectly happy. What put such nonsense in your head?"
"Oh, bother!" exclaimed Hugo. "Certainly they're happy. Amy'd be a fool not to be happy with as decent a chap as he is. I mean, how do they get along about money?"
"He's got a good business," said Fosdick. "You know it as well as I do."
"He used to have," replied Hugo. "But he's too busy with Amy to be doing much else. He's always standing on her dress. And he has no partner."
"I don't know anything about it," said Fosdick. "If Amy needed money, she'd come to me." Fosdick recalled that he had been paying even heavier bills for her since she was married; but he had no mind to speak of it to Hugo, as he did not wish Hugo to misunderstand. "You attend to your own affairs, boy," he continued. "Those two are all right." And he beamed benevolently. He delighted in Amy's happiness, felt that he was entirely responsible for it.
But Hugo was not to be put off. "Believe me, father, Alois is down to bed-rock. He can't speak to Amy about it, or to you. He's a gentleman. It's up to you to do something for him."
"I guess looking after Amy does keep his time pretty well filled up," chuckled the old man, much amused. "I'll fix him a place in the O.A.D.—something that'll give him a good income and not take his mind entirely off his job."
"Why not get Armstrong to make him supervising architect? A big public institution like that ought to pay more attention to cultivating the artistic side. He could think out and carry out some general plan that'd harmonize to high standards all the buildings, especially the dwelling and apartment houses they own in the provinces." Hugo spoke of the O.A.D. as "they" nowadays, though he still thought of it as "we."
"That's a good idea, Hugo, as good as any other. I'll see Armstrong to-day. I oughtn't to have neglected putting Alois on the pay rolls. I'll give him something in the railway, too. We'll fix him up handsomely. He's a fine young fellow, and he has made Amy happy. You don't appreciate that, you young scoundrel, as we of the older generation do." And Hugo had to listen patiently to a discourse on decaying virtue and honor and family life; for, like all decaying men, Fosdick mistook internal symptoms for an exterior and universal phenomenon, just as a man who is going blind cries, "The light is getting dim!"
Fosdick did not forget. Now that his attention was upon the matter, he reproached himself severely for his oversight. "I've been taking care of scores of people, and neglecting my own. But I'll make up for it." He ordered the president of the railway to put Alois on the pay rolls at once with a salary of twelve thousand a year. "You need somebody to supervise the stations. Everybody's going in for art, nowadays, and we want the best. Mail him his first check to-day, with the notice of his appointment."
In the full glow of generosity, he went up to see Armstrong. They were great friends nowadays. Since the peace, not a trace of cloud had come between them; he was careful to keep his hands entirely off the O.A.D.; Armstrong, on his side, gave the Fosdick railway and industrial enterprises the same "courtesies" they had always enjoyed, except that he charged them the current rate of interest, instead of the old special rate.
"Horace," he began, "I suppose you'll soon be organizing the construction department on broader lines. I've come to put in a good word for my son-in-law. I don't need to say anything about his merits as an architect. As you know, there's none better."
"None," said Armstrong heartily. "Anything we want in his line, he'll get."
"Thanks. Thanks. My idea, though, was a little more definite. I was thinking you might want a man to pass on all buildings, plans, improvements. He could raise the value of the company's property—particularly the dwelling and apartment houses."
"That's a valuable suggestion," said Armstrong. "And Siersdorf would be just the man for the place. But will he take it?"
"I think so."
"But he'd have to be traveling about, most of the time. He'd be in the West and South, where we're trying to get back the ground lost in those big exposés. I shouldn't think he'd care for that sort of life."
Fosdick was disconcerted. "I suppose that could be arranged. You wouldn't expect a man of Siersdorf's caliber to go chasing about the country like a retail drummer. He'd have assistants for that, and drawings and pictures and those sort of things could be forwarded to him here."
"That would hardly do," replied Armstrong, like a man advancing cautiously, but determined to advance. "Then, there's the matter of pay. The work would take all of his time, and we couldn't afford much of a salary. I should say the job was rather for some talented young fellow, trying to get a start."
"You'd simply waste whatever money you paid such a man," Fosdick objected with a restraint of tone and manner that astonished himself. "No, what you want is a high-class, a first-class, man at a good salary—a first-class man's salary."
"Say—how much?" inquired Armstrong.
"I was thinking twenty thousand a year—or, perhaps fifteen." The lower figure was an amendment suggested by the tightening of Armstrong's lips.
Armstrong saw the point. What Fosdick was after was a sinecure; a soft berth for his son-in-law to luxuriate idly in; another and a portly addition to the O.A.D's vast family of "fixed charges." "I'd like to oblige you, Mr. Fosdick," said he, with the reluctance of a man taking a new road where the passage looks doubtful and may be dangerous. "And I hate to deprive the O.A.D. of the chance to get Siersdorf's services at what is undoubtedly a bargain. But, as you may perhaps have heard, I'm directing all my efforts to lopping off expenses. I'm trying to get the O.A.D. on a basis where we can pay the policy holders a larger share of the profits we make on their money. Perhaps, later on, I can take the matter up. But I hope you won't press it at present."
The words were careful, the tone was most courteously regretful. But the refusal was none the less a slap in the face to a man like Fosdick. "As you please, as you please," he said hurriedly, and with averted eyes. "I just thought it was a good arrangement all around.... Everything going smoothly?"
"So-so."
"Well, good day."
And he went, with a friendly nod and handshake that did not deceive Armstrong. He drove to the magnificent Hearth and Home Defender building which Trafford and his pals had built for their own profit out of their stealings from millions of working men and women and children of the poorest, most ignorant class. Trafford received his fellow adept in the art of exploiting as Fosdick loved to be received; he did not let him finish his request before granting it. "An excellent idea, Fosdick," he cried. "I understand perfectly. I'll see that we get Siersdorf at once. Would fifteen thousand be too small?"
"About right, as a starter, I should say," was Fosdick's judicial answer. "You see, the thing's more or less an experiment."
"But certain to succeed," said Trafford confidently. "And, of course, we'll accept any arrangements Mr. Siersdorf may make about assistants. We can't expect him to give us all his time. We'll be quite content with his advice and judgment. You've put me under obligations to you."
Fosdick's eyes sparkled. As he went away, he said to himself, "Now, there's a big man, a gentleman, one who knows how to do business, how to treat another gentleman. I must put him in on something good."
And he did.