“Mighty sorry to call luncheon off. Am hurrying to catch a train for Philadelphia for the rest of the day. Will see you later.—Broadwell.”
“Mighty sorry to call luncheon off. Am hurrying to catch a train for Philadelphia for the rest of the day. Will see you later.—Broadwell.”
... Bellair folded this thoughtfully. The stenographer brought the letter with copy. The front draft was approved for signature, and Bellair’s morning work accomplished.
In the hall he met Davy Acton, and followed a quick impulse.
“Davy, lad, how soon will you be ready to go out to lunch?”
“In about three minutes——”
“I’ll wait for you. I’m going your way.”
Davy’s customary exit was the side-door. Bellair waited there accordingly. The girls were coming down the iron stairway from the bindery. He stepped back in the shadow to let them pass. There were figures and faces that clutched at his throat.... And then a story began, half way up the first flight, and came nearer and nearer, the voice carrying easily to one who listened with emotion:
“Did you know that Mr. Bellair was back?... Bellair, the absconding clerk—Mr. Sproxley’s assistant. Lot & Company has refused to prosecute. He will not be arrested.... And think of his nerve—asking his old position back——”
... They saw merely the back of a man, if they saw him at all. The talk was not interrupted on the way to the street and beyond.... Bellair came up with a start to find the boy at his side.
5
For a square or two, Davy Acton walking beside him, Bellair did not speak. He had needed that last bit. The morning would have blurred his hard-earned knowledge of Lot & Company and the world, without that moment under the iron stairs. It was hard to take, but a man mustn’t forget such realities as this. He loses his grip on the world when he forgets. Happy to lose, of course, but the point of his effectiveness is gone when these rock-bottom actualities are forgotten.... He looked down, Davy was hopping every third step to keep up. Bellair had quickened his pace to put the stench of the swamp farther behind him, but it was still in his nostrils.... He laughed.
“I was thinking, Davy, and the thoughts were like spurs. We’re in no hurry, really.”
He would not take the boy to a stately and formal dining-room for him to be embarrassed. Bellair felt that he had something very precious along; a far graver solution than luncheon with Broadwell. They sat down at a little table in the corner of one of the less crowded restaurants. As they waited, Bellair said, drawing out the paper he had received from the dreaming Mr. Nathan:
“I want you to see this first. In fact, I was particularly concerned about getting it, just toshow you. Davy, it hit me like a rock—the way you looked at me in the hotel yesterday. I couldn’t have that. We’ve been too good friends——”
Davy read the letter carefully, deep responsibility upon his understanding.
“Did you have trouble getting it?” he asked finally.
“It took the forenoon, Davy. I found that they had not taken the trouble to tell my old friends on the different floors that I was not a thief. What was worse for me, they let you think so——”
“I wouldn’t believe it at first,” said Davy.
“I’m glad of that.”
“I said to Mr. Broadwell, that they’d find out differently and be sorry. They didn’t let us know when they found out——”
“That’s why it was important for me to come back——”
“But why did you go away like that?”
The boy’s mind dwelt in the fine sense of being treated as an equal. Bellair felt called upon to be very explicit and fair:
“I came to the time when I couldn’t live with myself any longer—and stay in the cage with Mr. Sproxley. I saw a ship in the harbour the Sunday before—a sailing-ship,” he began, and then made a picture of it; also of his own hopelessness and what the years would mean, not touching specific dishonesties, but suggesting the atmosphere whichhad suddenly become poisonous to him. He did not forget that Davy had no other place, that he must keep a certain sense of loyalty, or be destroyed in such conditions.
“It would have taken two weeks to get clear in the ordinary way,” he added. “My decision came the day of the squabble with Mr. Prentidd in the office. I had to leave right then—was off for Savannah that very night——”
“And you found the ship there?” Davy asked eagerly.
“I beat her there a day and a half. Then we sailed for South America. I want to tell you the whole story. This is not the place. Could you come up in my room after supper to-night?”
“I think my mother will let me come——”
“Tell me about your mother, Davy. Is she well? I remember I meant to meet her some time.”
“Yes—just the same. You know she works a little, too——”
“Where?” Bellair asked absently.
Davy swallowed, and before he spoke, the man saw with a queer thrill that the boy hadn’t yet learned to lie.
“Well, she goes out three days a week—to do the laundry work—for people who have had her a long time.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I’m hoping to get where she won’t have to.”
“Of course.”
The dinner was brought. Bellair tried to make up for the place—in quantity. Neither spoke for the present. The man was hungry, too.
“I’m glad you told me that,” he said after a time, “glad you told me just that way.”
Davy applied himself further. Manifestly here was a point that he need not follow.
“Davy, you’ll come through. You’re starting in the right hard way—the old-fashioned way. It won’t be so slow as you think——” He was reminded now of what Fleury had said about the little Gleam that first night in the open boat.
“Slow but sure at Lot & Company’s—if a fellow does his part and works hard——”
Davy was being brought up in the usual way.
Bellair said: “I’m coming over to see you at your house some evening soon—if I may.”
“Sure.... It isn’t much of a house.”
“I’m not so certain about that. Anyway, I want to come. We’ll talk about it again this evening. You ask your mother when she’ll let me——”
“You might come to-night—-instead of me coming to the hotel——”
“No, I want to talk with you alone.”
Davy looked relieved.... He was on his way presently, and the town appeared better to Bellair that afternoon. At five he was in the hotel-lobbywhen a hand plucked his sleeve and he looked down into the whitest, most terrified face, he had ever seen.
“I’m fired!” was the intelligence that came up from it, and there was reproach, too.
“Come on upstairs, but first take it from me that you’ll be glad of it, in ten minutes——”
Bellair had to furnish a swift, heroic antidote for that agony.
“You haven’t been home, of course?” the man asked in the elevator.
“No.”
“Could we send a messenger to your mother—so she wouldn’t worry, and you wouldn’t have to go home until after we talk?”
“Yes.”
“All right, I’ll see to that at once.”
Davy wrote with trembling hands. The messenger was asked to bring an answer from Mrs. Acton.
“Now tell me,” said Bellair.
“Old Mr. Seth was down when I got back. You know he only comes down for an hour or two now in the middle of the day. He called me to him, and asked where I had been to lunch. I said with you. That was all, until four o’clock, when Mr. Eben came to me and asked if you had shown me anything—a letter from Lot & Company, for instance. I said yes. He went away, and at half-pastfour, he called me again, handed me my weekly envelope, saying that they would not need me any longer. I came right here. It seemed, I couldn’t go home——”
“Davy, lad, I’m glad I’m not broke, but if I were and couldn’t do a thing to make up—it would be a lucky day for you.”
Bellair ordered supper served in the room. They were free and alone. Faith returned to the boy, enough for the hour. Davy was consulted carefully upon the details of the order, a subtle suggestion from Bellair from time to time. Something of the long dinners on theJadehad come to his mind in this rôle. He had learned much about food that voyage, the profundity and emptiness of the subject. Bellair told his story, making it very clear to Davy—this at first:
“The office was doing to me just what it would do to you, Davy. It was breaking me down. The floors of Lot & Company are filled with heart-broken men. They do not know it well; some of them could never know, but there are secrets in the breasts of men there, that you wouldn’t dream of. It is so all over New York. Trade makes it so—offices, the entire city, crowded with heart-broken men.... They say first, ‘Why, every one is out for himself and the dollar—why not I?’ You and I were taught so in our little schooling. Then Lot & Company taught us. They are old masters—generations of teachers. Crampedand bleak, but loyal to the one verb—get. In all the Lot family, Davy, there is not a true life principle such as you brought to the office in the beginning. But if Lot & Company were unique—they would be an interesting study. The city is crowded with such firms—heart-breakers of men, the slow, daily, terrible grind; every movement, every expression, a lie—until to those inside, the lie is reality—and the truth a forbidden and terrible stranger. Every man has his Lot & Company.
“Davy, I breathed a bit of open that Sunday—so that I could see, but the next morning it closed about me again. It was Mr. Prentidd who helped me out. They stole from him and lied to him. Face to face, eye to eye, old Seth Wetherbee, the Quaker, lied to him, taking hundreds of dollars in the lie—millionaires taking hundreds of dollars from a poor inventor. I had the book of the London transaction before me, which showed the truth as they talked, and Mr. Sproxley came and took the book from me, and shut it in the safe.... And then when I left, they knew I had their secrets. You wondered why they called me a thief, when I was not. It was plain, Davy, to spoil anything I might say about their methods. Instantly they discredited me, because I was one of six or seven in the office who knew that they were thieves and liars. And why did they fire you to-day for lunching with me? Because they wereafraid of what I might have told you. And why did they send Broadwell to Philadelphia when they knew he was to have lunch with me? For fear of what I might tell Broadwell. Even now they will not tell the different floors that I am exonerated.... But they are afraid, Davy—that’s their hell. That is their life—fear and the lie. Imagine men standing straight up to heaven—spines lifted from the ground, but going back to the ground—who knows but their souls already belly-down?—because they break the hearts of men, and live with fear and the lie.”
He told of Fleury and Stackhouse and the Faraway Woman—of McArliss, of striking the reef, and day by day in the open boat.... Davy’s eyes bulged. The boy saw Stackhouse at one end and quiet manhood in the other. He sat with Bellair, whom he could understand, in the point of balance between these forces. Bellair told of the stars and the child, and the distance from which they viewed the little things of the world and the grand simplicity of God. He pictured the man Fleury had become—the straight-seeing, the fearless, the ignited man, who mastered the lie in his heart and the animal in his abdomen—the man he, Bellair, wanted to be, and wanted Davy to be.... TheFormahautcame, with Spika agleam to the northward, and Fleury died—the picture in his mind of a man, rising rather than falling.... Bellair told him of the first moment he heard thereal voice of Fleury, as he stood on the tilted deck of theJadein the dark, while he went back for water.... “I’ll hold a place for you!”
“A real man always says that, Davy. A real man will hold a place for you. And I thought, as I saw Stackhouse die and remembered his life, that he was the saddest and most terrible animal in human form. He was a glutton and a coward, but mainly he broke his own heart and not others. He was a slave to his stomach, but there was life, not creeping death, in his mind. I saw the pictures that moved there, low, vivid pictures, animal dreams, but he was not a destroyer of children or a breaker of the hearts of men. Low Nature was loose in him, but it was not a predatory instinct alone. Having enough, he could give. He could give fifty thousand dollars and a wallet full of valuable papers for a bottle of whiskey—but the Lots and the Wetherbees would have died clutching their money. I learned Stackhouse, Davy—only to understand that there is a depth below his. I think I should have taken you out somehow—if they hadn’t let you go——”
Davy asked questions, and the story came better and better. The thing that held him especially was the last days in the open boat.
“And did you really suffer less when you decided to make it a fast?”
“Yes, that was true in my case. Many have set out to fast ten days, and done with as little as wedid. Of course it was harrowing, because we didn’t know when it would end; then the little baby was there, and the mother.”
“And you thinkhewas really as happy as he said?”
“Davy, lad, Fleury was a prince. He would have given you his shirt. He had himself going so strongfor us—that the fire of happiness ran through him. I’ll give you some books about that. It’s really a fact. You can’t suffer pain, when you’ve got something really fine up your sleeve for another. Perhaps you’ve felt it at Christmas——”
“You’re all out of yourself-like——”
“That’s it,” said the man.
More words would have stuck in his throat. Davy got it—got something of it. Bellair had come to ask so little, that this seemed a great deal.... He followed Davy down and into the street. It was still two hours before he was due at theCastle.
“How long does it take to get to your house, Davy?”
“About twenty-five minutes. It’s ’way down town.”
“Suppose I should go home and meet your mother. I have the time——”
“Yes, come with me. She will be watching.”
They passed a delicatessen-store, ripe cherries in the window, and a counter full of provisions thatwould have been far more thrilling had they not dined so well.
“Do you suppose we might take home an armful of these things?” Bellair asked.
Davy dissuaded weakly.... That clerk must have thought him mad, for Bellair merely pointed to bottles and jars and baskets—until they were both loaded. There was a kind of passion about it for the man. He hated to stop; in fact did not, until it occurred to him that this was not the last night of the world, and that Davy doubtless required many more substantial matters, which would furnish a rapturous forenoon among the stores—to-morrow forenoon....
They sat in an almost empty downtown subway train, their bundles about them, the stops called by the guard. They both hunched a little, when the stop nearest Lot & Company’s was called, but did not speak. Farther and farther downtown—the last passengers leaving. It was the hour the crowds move upward. Strange deep moments for Bellair—moments in which this was more than Davy sitting beside him. This was Boy—Davy Acton but the symbol of a great need.
6
A hurried walk to the east with their bundles to a quarter that Bellair had not known before, past the great stretches of massive buildings which the day had abandoned, to a low[Pg 294]and older sort that carried on a night-life of their own, where children cried, halls were narrow, and the warmth became heaviness.... A plump little woman who had not lost hope (she did not see the stranger at first because the boy filled her eyes); a dark, second-floor hall, a little room with a lamp and a red table-cloth; a door at either end, and opposite the door they entered, one window.... How bewildered she was with the bundles, desiring to prepare something for them right away. Indeed, it would have helped her to be active in their behalf.... Bellair was smiling.
Davy told part and Bellair part. Presently all was forgotten in the presence of the calamity that had befallen. It was slow to change her mind about Lot & Company. Davy had impressed upon her for two years the lessons administered there. Not to be changed in a moment, this estimate—that before all poverty, before all need, and above all hope, a place at Lot & Company’s was a permanent place, “if a fellow did his part”—that Lot & Company was an honest house. Davy told of the paper Mr. Bellair had forced from them, and Bellair touched upon the life he had led in those halls, just a little and with haste. To help him to speak authoritatively, he added that he would help Davy to another position.... Then he looked around, and glanced at his watch. There was a small anteroom which they occupied....Bellair had asked about the other door. “An empty room,” Mrs. Acton told him.
Of course it was for rent. On the spur of the moment, he declared he would take it, asked her to rent it for him, insisting on paying in advance. He would come in the morning—have his things brought later.... No, Davy was not to look for a position to-morrow. Davy must devote himself to him to-morrow. He left them happily. The mother called after him in hopeless excitement that he had left enough to rent the room all summer.
He did not show the Lot & Company paper to Bessie; in fact, he never showed it but once, and that was to Davy Acton immediately after it was obtained. He had thought of taking it across the street to show the landlady, but perhaps that would merely have added to her living confusion. It had been most important for Davy, but to reopen the subject with Bessie, his manner might have touched an “I-told-you-so” indelicacy.... She was happy when he found her that night. Clothes in quantity were already begun—the next ten forenoons at the dressmakers’. She thanked him charmingly, studied him with a quizzical expression that invariably haunted him afterward.
Bellair could never tell just what would do it, but occasionally through an hour’s chat, he would say something, just enough above her comprehension to challenge her. Once opened, her facultieswere not slow, but the life she had chosen, held her mind so consistently to its common level that the habit was formed. Mainly when he spoke above her, she ceased to listen, ignored him; but when something he said just hit home, she praised him with animation, as one would a sudden gleam of unexpected intelligence on the part of a child. It became one of his most remarkable realisations that a man who has anything worth while to say must come down to say it, just as certainly as he must go up to get it.
The sense of adventure with her did not return this night, though she had seemed to accept him differently from before; as if he belonged, part of her impediment mainly, but at moments of surpassing value, like a machine that one packs a day for a half-hour’s work it may do. His money had purchased something.
Bellair sat in the dark of his room, feet on the window-sill, hat still on, at two o’clock, his last night in the hotel where he never had belonged. He was very tired and longed for sleep; and yet there was a different longing for sleep than that which belonged to physical weariness. It had to do with his hunger for the Faraway Woman. This startled him. What was that refreshing mystery afterward? Did he go to her in sleep—did she come? Why was it that the burden of parting invariably increased through the long days? It had been so on the ship. In the morning he couldlive; then the hours settled down, until it seemed he must leap back to her; the ship’s ever increasing distance at times literally twisting his faculties until he was dazed with pain.
He had not thought of this before. Why was it always when the pressure increased and the ardour mounted—that he longed for sleep?... Nothing came to his work-a-day brain from the nights. His dreams were of lesser matters—and yet, something within pulled him to unconsciousness like the rush of a tide. It gave him a sense of the vastness, a glimpse of the inner beauty of life.
Far below in the side-street a heavy, slow-trotting horse clattered by. The motors were more and more hushed, even the hell of Broadway subdued. A different set of sounds came home to him, but he did not interpret for the present; their activity playing upon deeps of their own—a bridge swung open between them and his exterior thoughts....
Slowly all exterior matters slipped away—the mother and Davy and Bessie. The bridge between the surface and the deeps swung to, and he heard the sounds that had been thrilling his real being all the time as he sat by the window—the liner whistles that crossed Manhattan from the harbour, the deep-sea bayings which seemed to be calling him home.
7
Bellair must have rested well in a few hours, for he arose early, feeling very fit in and out. For years the man he had seen in the glass when he was alone, had aroused little or no curiosity; a sort of customary forbearance rather. The fact is, he had not looked close for years. This morning as he shaved, something new regarded him from the face, still deeply dark from the open boat. He called it a glint, but would have designated it as something that had to do with power in another. It was fixed—something earned and delivered.
Perhaps it was something she had seen.
This animated him. It had come from Fleury and the fasting, but most of all from contemplating her face and her nature. Was it the arousing of his own latent will? Was it because he was lifted above Lot & Company? What part of it had come from the anguish of separation? Truly a man must build something if he manages to live against the quickened beat of a hungry heart.
The face was very thin, too. He had felt that so often as he used the morning knife, but he saw it now. Thin and dark, and the boy gone altogether.... Bellair smiled. Lot & Company had tried to take the boy. Had they not failed, the man would never have come, but something cravenin the place of the boy, something tied to its own death, its soul shielded from the light—a shield of coin-metals.
He shuddered, less at the narrowness of his own escape, than at New York whose business came up to him now through the open windows.... The shaving had dragged. He was not accustomed to study his own face. The very novelty of it had held him this time—and especially the thought of what she might have seen there. Suddenly he wanted something big to take back to her—a manhood of mind and an integrity of soul—something to match that superb freedom she had wrung from the world. A thousand times the different parts of her story had returned to his mind, always filling him with awe and wonder. She had come like one with a task, and set about it from a child, against all odds, putting all laws of men beneath—as if the task had been arranged before she came. He knew that the essence of this freedom was in the hearts of women everywhere, but she had made it manifest, dared all suffering for it. And yet with all the struggle behind her, the gentleness which he had come to know in her nature was one of the great revelations. It gave him a vision of the potential beauty of humanity; it made him understand that one must be powerful before one can be gentle; that one must master one’s self before one dare be free. All that he had was far too little to bring home to her. Thismorning he felt that nothing short of the impossible was worth going after.
A little later as he was leaving the room, the telephone rang. The operator said that a gentleman wanted to see him. On the lower floor, Bellair glanced into the eyes of a young man who wanted something; “glancedinto” is somewhat inaccurate; rather his eyes glanced from the other’s, and took away a peculiar, indescribable interest. It was the look of a colt he had seen, a glitter of wildness and irresponsibility in a face that was handsome but not at its best.
Bellair had seen something of the expression in the faces of young men who had been fathered too much; those who had not met the masterful influence of denial, and had been allowed to lean too long. The face had everything to charm and to express beauty and reality with, but the inner lines of it were not formed; the judgments lacking, the personal needs too imperious. He had made the most of well-worn clothing, but appeared to feel keenly the poorness of it.
“I came in here yesterday,” he said hastily. “It all happened because the ledger was turned back. I glanced at it, as one will, and standing out from the page was ‘Auckland, N. Z.’ It was as if written in different colour to me. I followed the line back to the name—and tried to see you yesterday afternoon and last night. You didn’t come in——”
“You come from Auckland?” Bellair asked.
“Yes——”
“How long?”
“It’s more than a year.... Small thing to meet a stranger on, but it was all I had. Auckland is so far and so different—that when I saw it—it seemed there must be a chance——”
“Of course. I know how it is,” said Bellair. “Do you want to get back?”
“That isn’t it, exactly, though I haven’t anything here——”
“Have you had breakfast?”
“N-no.”
“Come in with me and we’ll talk. I have a half-hour to spare.”
Bellair heard his voice and wondered at the coldness of it. He remembered afterward the covered billiard-tables at the far end of the hall and the dimness of the hall’s length, as he led the way. His own custom was a pot of coffee and a bit of toast, but the other’s possible need of food had a singular authority over him, so he made out that this was one of the main feeding features of his day.... But the other was intent upon certain things beside food. He had been unlucky. Everything that he had tried in the year of New York had failed him somehow—little ventures, positions lost—and always some one was to blame, not this one who spoke and had suffered so. Bellair hearkened for one note that would confineitself to the unfinished mouth and the unstable character; one note that would suggest the possibility of a clue that the series of failures lay in his own shortcomings of strength and quality, but the boy had not this suggestion in his heart.
“Are you married?” Bellair asked.
“No.”
There was an instant’s lull, and then was turned off another story of misfortune:
“... I didn’t want to marry her. I got her in trouble down in New Zealand. Her father wanted me to marry her—was willing to pay for it—but a fellow can’t take a chance like that. We came up together with the kid to New York, but everything broke bad for me——”
The voice went on, but Bellair lost his face. There was a greenish-yellow light between their faces, at least, for Bellair’s eyes, and the floor seemed shaken with heavy machinery. Bellair knew the burn of hate, and the thirst to kill—and then he was all uncentred, like a man badly wounded. He arose.
“... The fact is, I don’t think she was quiteright. None of them are——”
“I won’t be able to hear any more of that just now,” Bellair said slowly. “I’m leaving this hotel to-day for other quarters. But to-morrow morning at ten, I shall be here and listen to what you want. Perhaps I can set you straight a bit—for the present,anyway. And this—is so you won’t miss any meals in the meantime——”
Bellair handed him money.
“Please excuse me,” he added. “And finish your breakfast——”
He called the waiter and signed the card. Then he turned as if to look around the room. He located the door by which they had entered, drew his hands strangely across his eyes. Effusive gratefulness was seeking his ears from the young man in the chair. Bellair lifted his hand as if to cut off the voice, and then started for the door, his step hastening.
8
It was truly a tenement quarter in which Davy and his mother lived. The fact awed Bellair somewhat. Had he been a cripple in a wheeled-chair, confined to one side of one block, he could have found a life’s work.... Little faces that choked him everywhere. One might toss coins at their feet, but the futility of that was like a cry to God.
Davy’s mother was making his room ready. By some chance it faced the east; between ten and noon, there was sunlight. Forty years ago it had been the kitchen of a second-floor apartment, doubtless respectable. Only the scars of the kitchen fixtures remained, like organs gone backto a rudiment in swift involution. Water now was to be had in but one place on each floor—in the hall, and the natives came there with their pitchers and cans as tropical villagers, morning and evening to the well.
Mrs. Acton had spared a bit of carpet, which looked as if it had been scrubbed; and just below the window the tip of a heaven-tree waved. It was thin as his single bed, but even that growth seemed miraculously attained, as if the seed must have held all the nourishment. Bellair stared down through shadows and litter, and could discern no more than a crack in the stone pavement, from which this leafy creature had come to him. Quite as miraculously it was, with the myriad children in the streets and halls. Certainly this was a place to keep tender. Davy had gone forth on an errand.
“What was he interested in especially when he was little?” Bellair asked.
“Boats—boats,” said the mother.
It struck the man queerly that he had not noted this. Davy had devoured his little list of sea stories, and had listened as no one else to the open boat narrative, but the man fancied it just the love of adventure. Bellair’s mother might have said the same thing.
“Did he draw them, you mean?” he asked.
“Yes, and played with them. His father was a seaman, Mr. Bellair.”
Bellair’s father had not been a seaman, but there was little to that. They were one in the initial proclivity. Perhaps if the truth were shaken down, there was something in this fact that had to do with their relation.
“Could I have breakfast and supper here with you?” he asked suddenly.
The woman looked startled. “You see, I am away three days a week.”
It was Bellair’s idea to make this impossible, so he insisted:
“My wants are simple. I might not be here always to supper—but, of course, I should want to pay for it. It would be pleasant—we three together—and no matter to me if supper were a bit late. You see, Mrs. Acton, now that I’ve begun, I insist on having a home. I lived in one room for five years, and that sort of thing is ended. A hotel is no better.”
Davy returned and Bellair took him forth at once, impatient to continue the adventure of the purchases, begun the night before. Hours passed. Once Davy looked up to him in a mixture of awe and joy:
“Why are you buying so many things for us, Mr. Bellair?”
“Sit down,” the man answered.
They were in a retail clothier’s. The salesman drew back.
“Davy,” said Bellair, “it’s the most naturalthing. First I have the money and you have the needs. Second, we are friends——”
Bellair had felt many things hammering for utterance, but when he had come thus far, he found that the whole ground was covered.... The boy hurried home, but Bellair was not ready. With all his affection for the lad, he wanted to be alone. He had held himself to Davy’s needs for hours; but through it all, the sentences—so brief and thoughtless across the breakfast table—recurred smitingly. They hurt everything in him and in an incredible fashion. He marvelled that he had been able to reply quietly. His face burned now, and he thought of the Faraway Woman—how gentle she had been, blaming nothing, holding no sense of being wronged. It was that which helped him now, though his heart was hot and aching.... One must have compassion for the world—one whose home is the house of such a woman.
“It must not hurt the Gleam,” he said half-aloud. This was the burden of all his effort. “The Gleam is hers. I must not let the thought of this touch the Gleam—not even in my mind.”
The young man was stranded in New York. They met as arranged the next morning. Many difficulties were related, and the perversities of outside influences and the actions of others. The great regret was that at a certain time whenhehadthe money more than a year ago, the young man had delayed for a day to purchase a certain little tobacconist’s shop on Seventh avenue. A friend of his had advised him against it, and plucked the fruit himself. This gave Bellair an idea.
In the next ten days, everything seemed waiting for the manager of theFolliesto decide the case of Bessie Brealt. Davy was permitted to look for a new job, but Bellair made light of his unsuccess.... He did not look up Broadwell again, understanding clearly that the advertising-man would endanger his position in calling on him. Bellair was not ready to be responsible for such a loss to Broadwell. Employés of Lot & Company did not change easily.... He was frequently, but never long with Bessie during these days. There were moments of disturbing sweetness, and moments that he struggled quickly to forget, as Nature sets about hastily to cover unseemly matters upon the ground.
Now that the great event of her life had come, Bessie required much sleep, and cared for her beauty as never before. She already lived, for the most part, in the actual substance of victory, as only the young dare to do; yet she lost none of her zeal in preparation.... Bellair held to the original idea, though the means was not yet articulate. He was sensitive enough to realise that a man may be impertinent, even when trying to help another.
The tremendous discovery in this interval was that the open boat events which had proved so salutary and constructive in his own case, did not appear to have a comparable effect upon others when he related them. He began to believe that he had not authority, and that he must somehow try to gain authority by making good with men. He had his story to tell. He had seen the spirit and the flesh—beast and saint—watched them die. All life and hope and meaning were caught and held, as he saw it, between the manner of the deaths of two men. This experience had changed him—if not for the better—then he was insane.
It was hard for him to grasp, that the thing which had changed him could not change others—even Bessie. Yet those who listened, except Davy and his mother, appeared to think that he was making much of an adventure for personal reasons. He tried to write his story, but felt the bones of his skull as never before. He began, “I am a simple man,” but deep guile might be construed to that.... “I want nothing,” he wrote, “but to make you see the half that I saw in the open boat,” and he heard the world replying in his consciousness, “The open boat is on this man Bellair’s nerves. It’s his mania. The sun or the thirstdidtouch him a bit.”...
He became afraid to talk much even with Bessie, and New York boomed by, leaving him out—out.... He tried to lift the signs of miseryon the way to the home of Davy’s mother, and in the surrounding halls, but the extent and terror of it dismayed him; and remarkably enough, always this same answer came: that he must get himself and the South Sea business in hand before a true beginning could be made here....
It wasn’t on Seventh avenue that he found a cigar store to suit his purpose in this interval, but the promise was certainly as good as the old one. He put the New Zealand young man in charge, on a basis designed to challenge any one’s quality; and having done this in a businesslike fashion, Bellair made haste to escape. The sense was cool and abiding in his mind that in this case, as in Lot & Company’s, the circle was complete. Still he retained the suspicion that the young man did not believe him sane.
He followed the singer when she permitted, to dressmakers, rehearsals, quartette performances and meals; found other men following singers similarly, in all their byways of routine; he disliked them, disliked himself.
He had not told her of his fortune, because he knew in his heart it would change everything. He helped in many small ways, and allowed her to believe what she chose. She had never identified him with large things, did not think the present arrangement could last, and made as much as possible of the convenience. They were together on the night before her try-out, though as usual itwas but a matter of moments. Bellair used most of them in silence. The tension of hurry always stopped his throat. He longed for one full day with her, a ramble without the clock; yet what would he do with it—he, who dared not go to the water-front alone—to whom the night whistling of steamers in the harbour was like the call of the child of his heart?
“You are at your best,” he said. “Your voice was never sweeter than to-night. You must go now and sleep. To-morrow, of course, you will win, and when may I come?”
Her face clouded. Perhaps because he said the opposite, the thought of possible defeat came now with a clearness which had not before appealed to her unpracticed imagination.
“You may come to my room at twelve—no, at one. I shall go there at once after the trial—and you shall be first.”
It pleased him, and since she did not seem inclined to leave just then, Bellair found himself talking of the future. Perhaps he did not entirely cover his zeal to change a little her full-hearted giving of self to the foam. Bessie bore it. He had not spoken of the open boat, but something he said was related to it in her mind.
“To-morrow will settle everything,” she declared.... “And I don’t like that other woman on the ship. She isn’t human. You think it amazing because she didn’t cry and scream. Thatisn’t everything.... She’d be lost and unheard of here in New York.”
“Yes, that is probably true.”
“It’s all right for people who don’t write or paint or sing—to talk about real life and what’s right work in the world, but artists see it differently. Anyway, it’s the only job we’ve got.”
Bellair never forgot that, or rather what she had meant to say.
“Singing is what drew me to you, Bessie. What I object to is what the world tries to do with its singers, and that so many singers fall for it.”
“The world lets you more or less alone—until you make good. Plenty of time after that to answer back.”
She yawned. It was as near reality as they had gotten, and Bellair, who asked so little, had a glimpse again of the loveliness he had first taken to sea—even to the kiss at the last. She also granted him this:
“You’ve been good to me. I couldn’t have done without you——”
He lay awake long. The house in which he lived was very silent, and it pressed so close to the sea.
9
She was only partly dressed when he came early the next afternoon, but was not long in letting him in. Before any words, he knew that she[Pg 312]had won. A man often has to readjust hastily after the night before. It was so with Bellair now. Her eyes were bright with emotions, but a certain hardness was shining there. It was an effort for her to think of him and be kind. He would have seen it all in another’s story.
His glance kept turning to her bare arm, upon which a hideous vaccination-scar was revealed.Theyhad not thought of her singing in those days.... She had never spoken of her house or her people. It was enough that those days were finished. Bellair could understand that. Her victory was all through her now, satisfying, completing her. She did not love money for its own sake or she would have treated him differently. All her surplus energy, even her passion, was turned to this open passage of her career. Having that, previous props could be kicked away; at least, Bellair felt this.
“Yes, it’s all done. A month of solid rehearsal—then the road. I take the second part, but I hope to come back in the first——”
“You were at your best at the trial?”
“After the first moment or two.... And no more Brandt’s orCastle—no more with the other three—God, how sick I am of them—and of this room!”
“Will you lunch with me?”
“Yes—I have until three.”
It was shortly after one. She talked with animationabout her work, her eyes held to a glistening future. She finished her dressing leisurely, with loving touches, abandoning herself completely to the mirror as an old actress might, having conceded the essential importance of attractions. She studied her face and figure as if she were the maid to them. Bessie dressed for the world, not for herself, certainly not for Bellair. Without, in the world—streets, restaurants, theatres—there existed an abstraction which must be satisfied. She had not yet entered upon that perilous adventure of dressing for the eyes of one man. She did not think of Bellair as she lifted her arms to her hair. On no other morning could she have been so far from the sense of him in her room. Empires have fallen because a woman has lifted her naked arms to her hair with a man in the room.
An older woman would have rewarded him for being there; an older woman never would have put on her hat for the street without remembering her humanity. There was something in Bessie that reserved the kiss for the last. Possibly after the last song of the day, a kiss remained. She put on the flowers he brought; even that did not remind her, nor the dress he had bought for her—asking him if he approved, not that she cared, but because she was turning before the glass with the thing upon her body and mind. She would have asked a child the same.
They went to Beathe’s for luncheon, which wasalso Bessie’s breakfast. There, it may have been that she was ready to forget herself, knowing it would keep for a little. In any event, she seemed to see Bellair as he ordered for her, as if recalling that he had made many things move easily of late, and that it was pleasant to have these matters, even luncheons, conducted by another. Thinking of him, the voyage was instantly associated:
“I said last night that I didn’t like that woman,” she began. “I didn’t mean just that, of course. But a woman can see another woman better than a man. There are women who keep their mouths shut and get great reputations for being wise and all that. They never associate with women. You’ll always find them with men, playing sister and helping and saying little. Men get to think they’re the whole thing——”
“I suppose there are,” said Bellair.
He wished she had not picked up this particular point again; and yet a certain novelty about this impressed him now, and recurred many times afterward—that it was she who had broached the subject.
“Do you think a man knows men better than a woman does?” he asked.
Bessie had not thought of it; she was not sure.
Nor was Bellair. “The fact is, it doesn’t greatly matter what women think of women, and what men think of men—compared to what menand women think of each other,” he observed.
“You say you didn’t know that other man at first—that preacher,” she remarked.
“That’s true. There had to be danger—I had to hear his voice in danger.”
Bellair was lifted to his life-theme. He had never really told it in one piece. He did not mean to now, but Fleury came clearly to mind. The food was served and it was quiet behind the palms. If he could only say something for her heart. She seemed ready. Points of human interest were crowding to mind—perhaps he could hold her with them.
“... His every thought was for others,” he was saying. “I disliked him at first, but he was so kind and good-natured throughout that he could not fail to impress me a bit, but I didn’t really see him before the night of the wreck, when he arose to take things in hand. It was not noise, nor voice, but a different force. He seemed to rise—so that the huge Stackhouse was just a squealing pig before him. He had no fear. You looked into his face and wanted to be near him, and to do what he said. I caught his secret. A fool would. It was because he wasn’t thinking of himself. It seems, Bessie, as sure as you live—that the more a man gives out in that pure way Fleury did for us all—the more power floods into him. It came to him in volumes. We all knew it—even Stackhouse——
“And this is what I’m getting at.You’vegot the chance to use it. I can’t yet. I seem to be all clotted with what I want, but you can! You did. You pulled me out of the crowd, not knowing me at all—made me come to you—changed me. You cangivewith your singing—to hundreds—so that they will answer in their thoughts, and do things strange to themselves at first. They’ll want to die for you—but that isn’t the thing for you. You must want to sing for them—want to give them your soul all the time. Greater things will come to you than this—this which makes you happy. All that the world could give you—you will come to see—doesn’t matter—but what you can give the world——”
He saw her falling away from his story. It crippled him. He did not think he could fail so utterly.
“But youwerea thief,” she said.
“I—was what?”
“You preach all the time, but you were a thief——”
He had heard aright. His hand reached for the wallet, that contained the letter from Lot & Company, but fell from it again.
“If you like,” he answered, “but I saw a beast die in the open boat—and saw a saint die——”
“You preach—preach—preach!” she cried, and her own points of view returned with greater intensity. “You’ve been kind—but, oh, you boreme so! You have been kind—but oh, don’t think you fail to make one pay the price! You were sunstruck, or crazed—and you come back preaching. I’m sick of you—just in my highest day, after the months of struggle—I hate you——”
Bellair heard a ship’s bell. It was dark about him—a cool, serene dark. The air fanned him softly and sweet; the place rocked—just for an instant, as if he were at sea.
“I hate you when you preach,” she finished. Her voice was softer. He knew she was smiling, but did not look at her face. She had delivered him. He was calm, and ineffably free, the circle finished.
“Oh, that we two were Maying——” he muttered, his thoughts far down the seas—remote and insular, serene and homing thoughts.
“It takes two to sing that,” she said.
“Yes.”
“But, I’m so sick of that——”
“You must have sung it many times,” he said.
He did not want to linger. A certain hush had come to her from him. It was not yet three.... He seemed surprised to find it broad day in the street. She touched his sleeve, drawing him to the curb, away from the crowds which astonished him. Clearly something was wrong with his head.
“Bessie—before your salary begins—have you everything? Isn’t there something——?”
She smiled and hesitated. He rubbed his eyes.
“I’m so glad I thought of it,” he said, drawing forth the brown wallet.
His gift bewildered her, but she did not ask him this time what he wanted. Instead she asked:
“But where are you going?”
“Why, Bessie, I’m going home.”