CHAPTER VIIDANCE HALL GLITTER“218 Murray Hill,”Lola repeated impatiently into the telephone. “I have been waiting quite five minutes. Hello! Hello! Madam Zelya, please! This is Miss Barnhelm! Hello! Is that you, Madam? Yes, yes, I have just received your note, and I do not think you are quite fair in the matter. Yes, I know that I did promise, but it is quite impossible. What! My father has nothing to do with this matter, absolutely nothing. If you will be patient for two or three days longer the account will be settled. What is that?… Oh! I am sorry that you choose to take that tone. If you call upon my father you will get nothing, either from my father or from me. I will promise to send a check in a day or two; until then please do not annoy me.”With this Lola hung up the receiver, leaving a very angry Hungarian dress-maker to get what satisfaction she might from shrill threats and dire prophecies,and turned away from the telephone in time to meet her father and Dr. Crossett as they entered from the outside hall.“Who has been annoying you, little girl?” inquired her father, who had heard the end of the conversation.“Only that stupid hall-boy,” answered Lola calmly. “He is always making mistakes. What a time you two have been, to be sure. I thought that you had deserted me for good.”“No chance of that, my dear,” said Dr. Crossett. “In fact it was to be sure of having a long talk with you that I hurried your father back.”“I am afraid we must postpone that talk for a little while, Doctor. I am going to my room for a few moments. You will excuse me, won’t you?” She smiled sweetly at him and held out her hand, and he bowed over it gallantly as he answered:“Come back soon. I shall be waiting.”“Oh, I promise you that you shall see quite enough of me, Doctor,” she replied; “before you are here a day you will be glad to get me out of your sight. I know I am going to bore you dreadfully, but I haveso many things I want to talk over with you, and so many questions I want to ask you, about things that happened long ago before I was here to be a trouble to you.”She went gayly down the long hall, stopping at her door to wave her hand at him as he stood watching her.“No sign there of nervous troubles,” he said as he joined her father in the sitting room. “Her eyes are bright and clear, her voice is steady. She looks happy and well. You, Martin, are the greatest inventor in the world’s history.”“Hardly that,” said the Doctor with a laugh.“Ah, yes,” insisted the Frenchman. “Men have made fortunes, fame, history by the children of their brain, but what man before, by the power of his mind, has brought back from the dead his own daughter?”“A curious study,” said Dr. Barnhelm thoughtfully as he seated himself in a deep chair by the table and motioned to his friend to sit opposite to him; “remarkably curious, these things we call life, and death, and body, and soul. It is a queer fact, Paul, that nomatter how we strive our knowledge stops short at the gates of death. What is beyond?”“For many years,” answered the Doctor, as he lighted a cigarette and sank back in his chair with a sigh of comfort, “that troubled me, but as I grow older I find myself thinking less of death and clinging fast to life. Death! Bah! It does not frighten me. It may be a vast nothingness, or it may be a step to a higher existence. What does it matter? Our work is here; we have our friends to love, our duty to be done; that is life, and I like it.”“The body dies,” went on Dr. Barnhelm, “but the soul, can that ever die? I doubt it! Every man of us who has a soul must doubt it.”“Every man of us,” said Paul. “Ah! At least we, all of us, have that in common, I suppose.”“All of us? Do you think so?”“Naturally, to a greater or less degree. Your soul, my friend, may be big and fine; mine may be mean and small, but if in the human body there is such a thing, surely we all of us must have it.”“Do you know the theory of the ‘Sixth Day Men,’ Paul?”“‘The Sixth Day Men,’” repeated Paul, “no. It has a most effective title, this theory of yours; tell me of it.”“In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth; for six days he labored, and on the seventh day he rested.”“I heard rumors to that effect,” commented Dr. Crossett lightly.“Days in that time,” continued Dr. Barnhelm, not noticing his friend’s interruption, “were not of twenty-four hours; they were Alous, cycles of time. During those periods animal life came, evolution went on, bit by bit, with thousands of years between each step of its progress. A man-thing came into the world.”“Before the seventh day,” enquired Paul, with interest, for he dearly loved any discussion of this sort, and he knew that any theory considered worthy of attention by his old friend must at least hold points of interest.“Yes,” said Dr. Barnhelm. “Before the seventh day.”“Ah! This is interesting and new to me. Then our old friend Adam was not the first man?”“Listen, Paul! After the seventh day ‘God breathed the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils.’ He, therefore, was the first ‘man,’ for he had a God-given soul. In him was more of the divine than we can claim, for we are told that he could ‘walk with God.’ That was before the fall. Eve’s fall, in the Garden of Eden, by this theory, was her guilty love for one of these soulless, earth-born ‘men things,’ and of them Cain was born. Born without a soul, and, as the Bible tells us, ‘Cain went away and found himself a wife.’ Where? Where else than from among these Sixth Day people, soulless, all of them, and their descendants could have brought into the world small trace of the divine. Meanwhile sons of Adam were beginning to people the earth, and later these two races mingled. There began a struggle between good and evil in the human heart, a struggle that has never ended. Sometimes will be born a human being in whom occurs a curious ‘throw back’ of generations to these soulless Sixth Day ancestors. Sometimes the good in us conquers the evil, and sometimes the evil conquers, kills the good, and the God-given soul leaves us and there is nothing left but an animal, a ‘man thing,’ a straightdescendant of one of those Sixth Day horrors, whose blood has contaminated us since the fall of Eve.”“Ah!” Dr. Crossett was bending forward now eagerly. “Your theory has taken me by surprise; it is new to me.”“It is not new to the world, or at least not altogether new; some of the old German thinkers wrote of it. Darwin considered it. Each of us is conscious at times of sudden revolts against virtue, sudden reasonless impulses for evil. It is the struggle of the divided soul.”“But, Martin, if your theory is sound, one or the other of these forces must conquer in the end, the good or the evil.”“Evil never conquers in the end, Paul. Or our world would long ago have become chaos. When, in future generations, the last trace of our Sixth Day ancestors has been driven out, this theory holds that the world will once again be as God meant it to be, and we shall have the real brotherhood of Man.” He paused.“What have you to say? What do you think?”“I think,” replied Dr. Crossett, “that I should like a very large drink of your whiskey.”“You are right, Paul,” returned Dr. Barnhelm, rising. “A cigar, a drink, and a game of chess, they are a better prescription for a tired man than a new philosophy.”He rang the bell and asked Maria for whiskey and a syphon, and as she went for it he took from a little wooden box a shabby, worn old set of chessmen.“A talk over old times will freshen my mind for my ordeal to-morrow, for it is to be an ordeal, Paul. My theory of restoring the muscular activity to the heart after death has occurred is admitted to be practical, in fact successful. Laboratory experiments upon animals are within the experience of most of the big men whom I am to face to-morrow. They are ready to admit my theory, but they must be convinced against their will of my ability to always restore life under all conditions where death has resulted simply from the failure of the heart to perform its functions and where there has been no organic decay. They laugh at my claim that I can succeed in performing this experiment after as great a time as five hoursfrom the moment of the last heart beat, and it seems to be the general opinion that five minutes would be a more conservative and a more exact statement.”“It is a very pleasant thing,” commented Paul. “This laughter of fools. In all ages it has been granted to some lucky few, this great distinction, to be laughed at and to be right. You are in good company, Martin. The same sort of persons once laughed at Watts, at Columbus, at Darwin, at Dr. Bell, and at Marconi. Noah was, I believe, the first object of popular ridicule, but that did not affect the value of the Ark when the flood came. Come, we will forget all of this until the time comes, and I will beat you at a game of chess. Unless my memory plays me tricks, I won the last game, all of twenty years ago, and I can do it again.”Maria entered the room with a tray, on which were a bottle of whiskey, carbonic water and glasses, and put it down on the table as Dr. Barnhelm took out a thick pocketbook from his inside pocket and said, “First, I will put this money away until to-morrow.”He crossed the room to a small safe that was set into the wall and hidden from sight by a picture. “Can you open this thing, Maria?”“I think so, sir,” replied Maria, going to the safe at once and turning the combination. “Miss Lola taught me how, if I can remember.”After a moment’s effort the small door of the safe opened, and she said, with evident relief, “There!”“Good!” exclaimed the Doctor, as he placed the pocketbook in the safe and closed and locked it.“Thank you, Maria, and, Maria, ask Miss Lola to come to us when she is ready.”“Yes, Doctor,” and Maria, after a glance to make sure that all was right with her tray, left them alone together.“To the old days, Paul,” said the Doctor, after filling his own glass and his friend’s.“No,” replied Paul, “to now, to to-morrow. May the future be as happy as that old past; and may your daughter, if she lives, be as good a woman as her mother; and if she dies, may she leave as sweet a memory behind her.”They drank in silence, and as they put their glasses down Lola joined them. She had changed to what, to the masculine eye, looked like a very elaboratestreet costume, and she stood there in the doorway buttoning her gloves as she called out gayly:“You two look comfortable!”“Ah, yes,” replied Dr. Crossett. “An old friend, a good drink, a pretty woman, what more could be asked? Ah, my dear.” He looked at her admiringly. “How chic, how fine we look.”“A new dress, Lola?” inquired her father, looking up from his chessmen absently.“Oh, dear, no,” said Lola, carelessly. “Just an old rag.”“A dainty rag,” commented Dr. Crossett.“I am sure I never saw it before,” continued Dr. Barnhelm, looking at her a little anxiously.“It’s just a little thing I had made up. It cost scarcely anything. I am glad if it looks even passable,” remarked Lola.“Passable!” responded Dr. Crossett. “Twenty years ago it would never have passed me, not with its present wearer. Do you know, Lola, what would be the greatest joy that could come to me? To take you to Paris, to show you to my friends, to see you there in the city that of all the world’s cities best knowshow to value a beautiful woman. There is but one word for you to-day, Lola. You are radiant.”He spoke no more than the truth. She had always been a beautiful girl, but since her recovery she had gained the things she had always needed, color, animation, and as she stood there now, laughing at him, but thrilling at his praise, she made a picture that few men could have looked at unmoved. The rich costume set her off to great advantage and her contemptuous description of it would not have deceived any woman’s eye for a moment.“And if you are not careful you will make me frightfully conceited. Now you two be real good, and don’t drink too much of that whiskey before I come back.”“Are you going out?” asked her father as he made the opening move of the game.“Yes, dear, I have a little appointment at three. It really doesn’t matter at all, but I thought that you two would rather be alone.”She bent over her father’s chair, and kissed him tenderly, then turned daringly to Dr. Crossett, her hand on his shoulder and, her face very near to his,she said teasingly, “If you were just the very least little bit older I should kiss you, too.”“I am,” replied the Doctor promptly, “considerably older than I look.”“You are not to be trusted,” she responded gayly. “I am very sure of that! Good-bye, dears. I am going now.”As she turned away, a little hurriedly, for she saw by the clock on the mantel that it was ten minutes of three, John Dorris entered the room; at the sight of him standing there between her and the door for just a fraction of a second a queer, fierce look flashed across her face, such a look as one might see in an angry panther’s eyes, but before John could see it, it was gone, and she was smiling at him sweetly.“How early you are, John,” she exclaimed. “It is awfully sweet of you, but I’m afraid it will be very dull unless you are fond of chess.”“You are going out?” questioned John in what seemed to Dr. Crossett as he rose to shake hands with him rather a curt tone.“Yes,” replied Lola, “I am afraid I must.”“My dear boy, I am very glad to see you,” said Dr.Crossett to John, of whom he had really grown very fond in those few days following Lola’s accident.“Thank you, Doctor,” replied John heartily, as he returned the pressure of the Doctor’s hand. “It is very kind of you to say so,” and he turned away, perhaps a little hastily, and followed Lola up to the door. “Shall I go with you, Lola?”“Oh, dear, no,” replied Lola. “It would bore you dreadfully, and besides I really couldn’t have you, even if you care to come. I am in a great hurry. I promised to be there at three. Sit down and watch the game.” She took him by the arm and led him back to the table. “Father will need your help, I am afraid. See! He is in trouble already. Here——” She stepped to a small table and returned with a box of cigars. “Why don’t you men smoke? Really, you must.” She held the box to each of them in turn, smiling so compellingly that even John was forced to take one, but in spite of her smile he thought he saw in her face a trace of anxious impatience, and to him at least her beautiful new dress was not wholly a pleasure. Little as he knew of the real cost of such a costume, he knew that it was far more expensive thanDr. Barnhelm’s purse could afford, and in some vague manner it associated itself in his mind with Mrs. Harlan and her friends.“Would you mind telling me where you are going, Lola?” he enquired anxiously.“Oh, dear, no; why should I?” she answered as she struck a match and held it, first to her father’s, then to Dr. Crossett’s cigar. “I am going to see poor little Nellie Mooney. She isn’t at all well, you know, father, and I really haven’t the heart to disappoint her. There!” She placed the decanter and glasses on the table near to him. “Do see that they are comfortable, John. You may have just as fine a time as you want to, you selfish male things,” she went on as she crossed quickly to the door. “But don’t quite forget me while I am gone.”She left the room laughing, and as the outside door closed behind her the little clock on the mantel struck three.The chess game went on deliberately, quietly, and the young man sat there watching it, but at the same time letting his thoughts wander, and suddenly he found himself following in his mind Lola’s progress.He pictured her walking down the Drive with the brisk, swinging stride she had assumed of late; then in his mind he saw her cross Seventy-second Street and take a crowded car; in all the changes of her long, complicated trip to the upper East Side he idly kept pace with her, glancing from time to time at the clock, until he seemed to see her running lightly up the dizzy stairs of a shabby tenement house on a side street and entering a tidy little room on the top floor. He saw the room plainly in his mind, for he had often been there with Lola before they had moved to this new apartment. No, now that he came to think of it, not since Lola’s recovery, but before then they had gone there together almost every day. He liked to think of her there; on her errand of mercy she would stop and buy flowers, he thought. Nellie loved flowers. How her poor, tired little face used to brighten when she would look up from the sofa where she lay all day long and saw Lola coming into the room.He closed his eyes, and leaning back in his chair saw the picture in his mind. The poor little room, the white-faced, suffering child, smiling happily now, withthe flowers pressed against her face, and Lola—Lola bending over her, fresh, beautiful, gentle in her face the look he had seen there once, that wonderful radiance that is seen sometimes in a young girl’s face, the foreshadowing of motherhood.The blare of music, too near and too loud. The confused babble of rattling dishes, discordant laughter, high-pitched voices, and the clinking of glasses that were filled again and again, but emptied as fast as they were replenished. A great room, the air heavy with many odors and foul with tobacco smoke.Here at one table an old man, with jewels on his fat fingers, with him a young girl, almost a child, a girl in a shabby dress, with eyes bright with wonder and with fear.Here and there, in this brilliant throng, could be picked out bold-eyed men, who laughed across the tables at nervous, frightened women, women who laughed back with terror in their hearts. Comedy, farce, tragedy, aching hearts, and aching heads. Empty lives and empty pocketbooks. Bluff and sham.Age and youth. Love and hate. Fear and lust. One could feel them all, but one could only hear the ceaseless, empty laughter rising above the music, above the noise.If to laugh is to be happy, here was happiness.
“218 Murray Hill,”Lola repeated impatiently into the telephone. “I have been waiting quite five minutes. Hello! Hello! Madam Zelya, please! This is Miss Barnhelm! Hello! Is that you, Madam? Yes, yes, I have just received your note, and I do not think you are quite fair in the matter. Yes, I know that I did promise, but it is quite impossible. What! My father has nothing to do with this matter, absolutely nothing. If you will be patient for two or three days longer the account will be settled. What is that?… Oh! I am sorry that you choose to take that tone. If you call upon my father you will get nothing, either from my father or from me. I will promise to send a check in a day or two; until then please do not annoy me.”
With this Lola hung up the receiver, leaving a very angry Hungarian dress-maker to get what satisfaction she might from shrill threats and dire prophecies,and turned away from the telephone in time to meet her father and Dr. Crossett as they entered from the outside hall.
“Who has been annoying you, little girl?” inquired her father, who had heard the end of the conversation.
“Only that stupid hall-boy,” answered Lola calmly. “He is always making mistakes. What a time you two have been, to be sure. I thought that you had deserted me for good.”
“No chance of that, my dear,” said Dr. Crossett. “In fact it was to be sure of having a long talk with you that I hurried your father back.”
“I am afraid we must postpone that talk for a little while, Doctor. I am going to my room for a few moments. You will excuse me, won’t you?” She smiled sweetly at him and held out her hand, and he bowed over it gallantly as he answered:
“Come back soon. I shall be waiting.”
“Oh, I promise you that you shall see quite enough of me, Doctor,” she replied; “before you are here a day you will be glad to get me out of your sight. I know I am going to bore you dreadfully, but I haveso many things I want to talk over with you, and so many questions I want to ask you, about things that happened long ago before I was here to be a trouble to you.”
She went gayly down the long hall, stopping at her door to wave her hand at him as he stood watching her.
“No sign there of nervous troubles,” he said as he joined her father in the sitting room. “Her eyes are bright and clear, her voice is steady. She looks happy and well. You, Martin, are the greatest inventor in the world’s history.”
“Hardly that,” said the Doctor with a laugh.
“Ah, yes,” insisted the Frenchman. “Men have made fortunes, fame, history by the children of their brain, but what man before, by the power of his mind, has brought back from the dead his own daughter?”
“A curious study,” said Dr. Barnhelm thoughtfully as he seated himself in a deep chair by the table and motioned to his friend to sit opposite to him; “remarkably curious, these things we call life, and death, and body, and soul. It is a queer fact, Paul, that nomatter how we strive our knowledge stops short at the gates of death. What is beyond?”
“For many years,” answered the Doctor, as he lighted a cigarette and sank back in his chair with a sigh of comfort, “that troubled me, but as I grow older I find myself thinking less of death and clinging fast to life. Death! Bah! It does not frighten me. It may be a vast nothingness, or it may be a step to a higher existence. What does it matter? Our work is here; we have our friends to love, our duty to be done; that is life, and I like it.”
“The body dies,” went on Dr. Barnhelm, “but the soul, can that ever die? I doubt it! Every man of us who has a soul must doubt it.”
“Every man of us,” said Paul. “Ah! At least we, all of us, have that in common, I suppose.”
“All of us? Do you think so?”
“Naturally, to a greater or less degree. Your soul, my friend, may be big and fine; mine may be mean and small, but if in the human body there is such a thing, surely we all of us must have it.”
“Do you know the theory of the ‘Sixth Day Men,’ Paul?”
“‘The Sixth Day Men,’” repeated Paul, “no. It has a most effective title, this theory of yours; tell me of it.”
“In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth; for six days he labored, and on the seventh day he rested.”
“I heard rumors to that effect,” commented Dr. Crossett lightly.
“Days in that time,” continued Dr. Barnhelm, not noticing his friend’s interruption, “were not of twenty-four hours; they were Alous, cycles of time. During those periods animal life came, evolution went on, bit by bit, with thousands of years between each step of its progress. A man-thing came into the world.”
“Before the seventh day,” enquired Paul, with interest, for he dearly loved any discussion of this sort, and he knew that any theory considered worthy of attention by his old friend must at least hold points of interest.
“Yes,” said Dr. Barnhelm. “Before the seventh day.”
“Ah! This is interesting and new to me. Then our old friend Adam was not the first man?”
“Listen, Paul! After the seventh day ‘God breathed the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils.’ He, therefore, was the first ‘man,’ for he had a God-given soul. In him was more of the divine than we can claim, for we are told that he could ‘walk with God.’ That was before the fall. Eve’s fall, in the Garden of Eden, by this theory, was her guilty love for one of these soulless, earth-born ‘men things,’ and of them Cain was born. Born without a soul, and, as the Bible tells us, ‘Cain went away and found himself a wife.’ Where? Where else than from among these Sixth Day people, soulless, all of them, and their descendants could have brought into the world small trace of the divine. Meanwhile sons of Adam were beginning to people the earth, and later these two races mingled. There began a struggle between good and evil in the human heart, a struggle that has never ended. Sometimes will be born a human being in whom occurs a curious ‘throw back’ of generations to these soulless Sixth Day ancestors. Sometimes the good in us conquers the evil, and sometimes the evil conquers, kills the good, and the God-given soul leaves us and there is nothing left but an animal, a ‘man thing,’ a straightdescendant of one of those Sixth Day horrors, whose blood has contaminated us since the fall of Eve.”
“Ah!” Dr. Crossett was bending forward now eagerly. “Your theory has taken me by surprise; it is new to me.”
“It is not new to the world, or at least not altogether new; some of the old German thinkers wrote of it. Darwin considered it. Each of us is conscious at times of sudden revolts against virtue, sudden reasonless impulses for evil. It is the struggle of the divided soul.”
“But, Martin, if your theory is sound, one or the other of these forces must conquer in the end, the good or the evil.”
“Evil never conquers in the end, Paul. Or our world would long ago have become chaos. When, in future generations, the last trace of our Sixth Day ancestors has been driven out, this theory holds that the world will once again be as God meant it to be, and we shall have the real brotherhood of Man.” He paused.
“What have you to say? What do you think?”
“I think,” replied Dr. Crossett, “that I should like a very large drink of your whiskey.”
“You are right, Paul,” returned Dr. Barnhelm, rising. “A cigar, a drink, and a game of chess, they are a better prescription for a tired man than a new philosophy.”
He rang the bell and asked Maria for whiskey and a syphon, and as she went for it he took from a little wooden box a shabby, worn old set of chessmen.
“A talk over old times will freshen my mind for my ordeal to-morrow, for it is to be an ordeal, Paul. My theory of restoring the muscular activity to the heart after death has occurred is admitted to be practical, in fact successful. Laboratory experiments upon animals are within the experience of most of the big men whom I am to face to-morrow. They are ready to admit my theory, but they must be convinced against their will of my ability to always restore life under all conditions where death has resulted simply from the failure of the heart to perform its functions and where there has been no organic decay. They laugh at my claim that I can succeed in performing this experiment after as great a time as five hoursfrom the moment of the last heart beat, and it seems to be the general opinion that five minutes would be a more conservative and a more exact statement.”
“It is a very pleasant thing,” commented Paul. “This laughter of fools. In all ages it has been granted to some lucky few, this great distinction, to be laughed at and to be right. You are in good company, Martin. The same sort of persons once laughed at Watts, at Columbus, at Darwin, at Dr. Bell, and at Marconi. Noah was, I believe, the first object of popular ridicule, but that did not affect the value of the Ark when the flood came. Come, we will forget all of this until the time comes, and I will beat you at a game of chess. Unless my memory plays me tricks, I won the last game, all of twenty years ago, and I can do it again.”
Maria entered the room with a tray, on which were a bottle of whiskey, carbonic water and glasses, and put it down on the table as Dr. Barnhelm took out a thick pocketbook from his inside pocket and said, “First, I will put this money away until to-morrow.”
He crossed the room to a small safe that was set into the wall and hidden from sight by a picture. “Can you open this thing, Maria?”
“I think so, sir,” replied Maria, going to the safe at once and turning the combination. “Miss Lola taught me how, if I can remember.”
After a moment’s effort the small door of the safe opened, and she said, with evident relief, “There!”
“Good!” exclaimed the Doctor, as he placed the pocketbook in the safe and closed and locked it.
“Thank you, Maria, and, Maria, ask Miss Lola to come to us when she is ready.”
“Yes, Doctor,” and Maria, after a glance to make sure that all was right with her tray, left them alone together.
“To the old days, Paul,” said the Doctor, after filling his own glass and his friend’s.
“No,” replied Paul, “to now, to to-morrow. May the future be as happy as that old past; and may your daughter, if she lives, be as good a woman as her mother; and if she dies, may she leave as sweet a memory behind her.”
They drank in silence, and as they put their glasses down Lola joined them. She had changed to what, to the masculine eye, looked like a very elaboratestreet costume, and she stood there in the doorway buttoning her gloves as she called out gayly:
“You two look comfortable!”
“Ah, yes,” replied Dr. Crossett. “An old friend, a good drink, a pretty woman, what more could be asked? Ah, my dear.” He looked at her admiringly. “How chic, how fine we look.”
“A new dress, Lola?” inquired her father, looking up from his chessmen absently.
“Oh, dear, no,” said Lola, carelessly. “Just an old rag.”
“A dainty rag,” commented Dr. Crossett.
“I am sure I never saw it before,” continued Dr. Barnhelm, looking at her a little anxiously.
“It’s just a little thing I had made up. It cost scarcely anything. I am glad if it looks even passable,” remarked Lola.
“Passable!” responded Dr. Crossett. “Twenty years ago it would never have passed me, not with its present wearer. Do you know, Lola, what would be the greatest joy that could come to me? To take you to Paris, to show you to my friends, to see you there in the city that of all the world’s cities best knowshow to value a beautiful woman. There is but one word for you to-day, Lola. You are radiant.”
He spoke no more than the truth. She had always been a beautiful girl, but since her recovery she had gained the things she had always needed, color, animation, and as she stood there now, laughing at him, but thrilling at his praise, she made a picture that few men could have looked at unmoved. The rich costume set her off to great advantage and her contemptuous description of it would not have deceived any woman’s eye for a moment.
“And if you are not careful you will make me frightfully conceited. Now you two be real good, and don’t drink too much of that whiskey before I come back.”
“Are you going out?” asked her father as he made the opening move of the game.
“Yes, dear, I have a little appointment at three. It really doesn’t matter at all, but I thought that you two would rather be alone.”
She bent over her father’s chair, and kissed him tenderly, then turned daringly to Dr. Crossett, her hand on his shoulder and, her face very near to his,she said teasingly, “If you were just the very least little bit older I should kiss you, too.”
“I am,” replied the Doctor promptly, “considerably older than I look.”
“You are not to be trusted,” she responded gayly. “I am very sure of that! Good-bye, dears. I am going now.”
As she turned away, a little hurriedly, for she saw by the clock on the mantel that it was ten minutes of three, John Dorris entered the room; at the sight of him standing there between her and the door for just a fraction of a second a queer, fierce look flashed across her face, such a look as one might see in an angry panther’s eyes, but before John could see it, it was gone, and she was smiling at him sweetly.
“How early you are, John,” she exclaimed. “It is awfully sweet of you, but I’m afraid it will be very dull unless you are fond of chess.”
“You are going out?” questioned John in what seemed to Dr. Crossett as he rose to shake hands with him rather a curt tone.
“Yes,” replied Lola, “I am afraid I must.”
“My dear boy, I am very glad to see you,” said Dr.Crossett to John, of whom he had really grown very fond in those few days following Lola’s accident.
“Thank you, Doctor,” replied John heartily, as he returned the pressure of the Doctor’s hand. “It is very kind of you to say so,” and he turned away, perhaps a little hastily, and followed Lola up to the door. “Shall I go with you, Lola?”
“Oh, dear, no,” replied Lola. “It would bore you dreadfully, and besides I really couldn’t have you, even if you care to come. I am in a great hurry. I promised to be there at three. Sit down and watch the game.” She took him by the arm and led him back to the table. “Father will need your help, I am afraid. See! He is in trouble already. Here——” She stepped to a small table and returned with a box of cigars. “Why don’t you men smoke? Really, you must.” She held the box to each of them in turn, smiling so compellingly that even John was forced to take one, but in spite of her smile he thought he saw in her face a trace of anxious impatience, and to him at least her beautiful new dress was not wholly a pleasure. Little as he knew of the real cost of such a costume, he knew that it was far more expensive thanDr. Barnhelm’s purse could afford, and in some vague manner it associated itself in his mind with Mrs. Harlan and her friends.
“Would you mind telling me where you are going, Lola?” he enquired anxiously.
“Oh, dear, no; why should I?” she answered as she struck a match and held it, first to her father’s, then to Dr. Crossett’s cigar. “I am going to see poor little Nellie Mooney. She isn’t at all well, you know, father, and I really haven’t the heart to disappoint her. There!” She placed the decanter and glasses on the table near to him. “Do see that they are comfortable, John. You may have just as fine a time as you want to, you selfish male things,” she went on as she crossed quickly to the door. “But don’t quite forget me while I am gone.”
She left the room laughing, and as the outside door closed behind her the little clock on the mantel struck three.
The chess game went on deliberately, quietly, and the young man sat there watching it, but at the same time letting his thoughts wander, and suddenly he found himself following in his mind Lola’s progress.He pictured her walking down the Drive with the brisk, swinging stride she had assumed of late; then in his mind he saw her cross Seventy-second Street and take a crowded car; in all the changes of her long, complicated trip to the upper East Side he idly kept pace with her, glancing from time to time at the clock, until he seemed to see her running lightly up the dizzy stairs of a shabby tenement house on a side street and entering a tidy little room on the top floor. He saw the room plainly in his mind, for he had often been there with Lola before they had moved to this new apartment. No, now that he came to think of it, not since Lola’s recovery, but before then they had gone there together almost every day. He liked to think of her there; on her errand of mercy she would stop and buy flowers, he thought. Nellie loved flowers. How her poor, tired little face used to brighten when she would look up from the sofa where she lay all day long and saw Lola coming into the room.
He closed his eyes, and leaning back in his chair saw the picture in his mind. The poor little room, the white-faced, suffering child, smiling happily now, withthe flowers pressed against her face, and Lola—Lola bending over her, fresh, beautiful, gentle in her face the look he had seen there once, that wonderful radiance that is seen sometimes in a young girl’s face, the foreshadowing of motherhood.
The blare of music, too near and too loud. The confused babble of rattling dishes, discordant laughter, high-pitched voices, and the clinking of glasses that were filled again and again, but emptied as fast as they were replenished. A great room, the air heavy with many odors and foul with tobacco smoke.
Here at one table an old man, with jewels on his fat fingers, with him a young girl, almost a child, a girl in a shabby dress, with eyes bright with wonder and with fear.
Here and there, in this brilliant throng, could be picked out bold-eyed men, who laughed across the tables at nervous, frightened women, women who laughed back with terror in their hearts. Comedy, farce, tragedy, aching hearts, and aching heads. Empty lives and empty pocketbooks. Bluff and sham.Age and youth. Love and hate. Fear and lust. One could feel them all, but one could only hear the ceaseless, empty laughter rising above the music, above the noise.
If to laugh is to be happy, here was happiness.