They had traveled for fully twenty minutes in silence; to Teddy it had seemed as many hours. The patches of waste-land with hoardings, advertising chewing-gums and New York plays, were growing less frequent. A sea-look was softening the blueness of the sky. The greenness by the roadside remained unmarred for longer and longer stretches. They skirted a little bay, where power-boats lay tethered to buoys and a white-winged yacht was spreading sail. They panted through a town of scattered wooden houses, cool with lawns and shadowy with trees. Then they came to a sandy turf-land, across which a horseman distantly galloped, leaping ditches and hurdles.
He paid scant attention to his changing surroundings. He kept gazing at the girl at his side. He feared to raise his eyes from her for a second, lest she should drift away like thistledown.
Was she asleep or pretending? Why should she be asleep, when they had so much to say and she had been up for barely three hours? Her ungloved hand screened her eyes. He suspected that she was spying on him through her fingers. Did it amuse her to torment him with silence? She had done that with variations from the moment of their meeting at Glastonbury. He couldn’t understand her motive in trying to make him wretched. His impulse, if he liked people, was to make them glad. He became ingenious in unearthing reasons for her conduct. Perhaps she was getting ready to confess the thing for which she had to ask his forgiveness. Perhaps she was offended by his request that she should remove her glove. But she hadn’t seemed offended at the time of asking. And, if she were, how trivial! She need only have refused him. She’d given him far graver causes for offense.
He had reached this point in his despair, when suddenly she uncovered her face and sat up vivaciously.
“Smell the sea! Cheer up. We’re nearly there.”
Darting out her hand, she patted his knee, laughing gayly at her familiarity.
“You are restful You don’t expect me to chatter all the time. People need to be very good friends to be able to sit silent. I know men who’d be quite snappy if I—— But you’re different.”
She spoke caressingly, giving him credit for a delicacy which he did not merit. He felt cheap in the accepting of it He wasn’t at all convinced of her sincerity. He had the uncomfortable sense that she was aware that he wasn’t convinced of it.
“Poor you! You do look squashed. One would think you weren’t enjoying yourself. Was it really only business that brought you to America?”
He smiled crookedly, making a lame effort to clamber back to her level of high spirits. “Didn’t you arrange that we were going only to be sensible?”
She clasped her hands and gazed at him wistfully. “But we needn’t be sensible quite always; it wouldn’t be fun. Besides, if it was just business that brought you over, I ought to know, because——”
“Because,” he laughed, “if it was just business, then it wasn’t you that brought me. And, if it wasn’t you, I’ll be going back directly. If it was just business, the only way you could make me stop longer would be by being more lavish with your sweetness. You’ve not changed. Desire; you’re still the dear, imperious Princess, always kindest at the moment of parting.‘’
“Now you’re drizzling.”
“I’m not. But you push me over precipices for the sheer joy of making me thank you when you pull me back to safety. I’m most happy to thank you, little Desire; but I’d be ever so much obliged if you wouldn’t try such risky experiments. You see, you know you’re going to rescue me, but I’m never certain.”
She drooped towards him fluttering with merriment “Oh, youl What a lot you know!”
With a quick transition of mood, she sat erect and became severely solemn. “I shan’t be nice all day unless you tell me. But if you do tell me——” The blank was wisely left for his imagination to fill in with eloquent promises. Then, putting all her charm into the question, “Why did you come?”
He looked away, ashamed that she should see his unshared emotion. “You know already.”
“But I’d rather hear it from your lips. It isn’t half as exciting to have to take things for granted.”
“If you must have it, I came because of you.”
“And not one scrap because of business?”
“Not one scrap because of business. Business was my excuse to my people. I had to tell them something.”
He was staring at her now. His soul stood beckoning in the windows of his eyes, watching for an answering signal.
It was her turn to glance away. She had wakened something which both thrilled and frightened her. She took refuge in disappointment.
“Then you didn’t mention me to them. My father doesn’t know. I wonder why you didn’t mention me. Was it because they—all those old-fashioned people—wouldn’t think me good enough?—No. No. Don’t touch me. Perhaps, after all, it’s better to be sensible. Let’s talk of something else.”
“We’ve got to finish this now that you’ve started it.” His face was stern and he spoke determinedly. “I’d have passed over everything, for your sake, Princess-gone on pretending to take things for granted. But-d’you think you’re fair to me? You said, ‘Come to America if you really care.’ I thought that meant that you’d begun to care.-I hope it does.”
She crossed her feet and resigned herself to the danger she had courted. “You’re spoiling a most glorious day; but I suppose it’s best to get things off one’s chest.” Then, in a composed, cool little voice, “Well?”
He surprised himself by a touch of anger. It came and was gone like a flicker of lightning.
“I’ve obeyed you,” he said slowly; “I’ve come. I’ve done everything decent that I could think of to keep you reminded of me. Since we said ’Good-by,’ I’ve known nothing but purgatory. Even happy things haven’t been happy, because you weren’t there to share. That’s the way I feel about you, Desire: whatever I am or can be must be for you. But you—— From the moment you sailed out of Liverpool, you dropped me. You didn’t answer my letters. You went out of New York the day I landed, leaving no message. When we met last night for five minutes, you were with another man. This morning for about half-an-hour you did seem glad, but since then——”
He bit his lips and watched her. Outwardly she seemed utterly unmoved. “Shall I go on?”
“Just as you like.”
His words came with a rush. “This means too much to me; it’s all or nothing. If it means nothing to you, say so. I’m not playing. I can go away now—there’s time; soon you’ll have become too much a part of me.—When you’ve forced me up to the point of being frank, you say, ’Let’s talk of something else.’ Can’t you understand that you’re becoming my religion—that I do everything thinking, ’This’ll make her happy,’ and dream about you day and night?”
She sat beside him motionless. He had expected her either to surrender or to show resentment. She made no attempt to alter her position; their shoulders were still touching.
At last, when he had come to the breaking-point, she lifted her grave gray eyes. “You’re foolish,” she said quietly. “Of course I’m glad of you. But you’ll spoil everything by being in such a hurry. You don’t know what kind of a girl I am. We’ve not been together twenty-four hours all told, and yet that’s been long enough to teach me that we’re totally unlike. I’m temperamental—-one of those girls who alter with the fashions. You’re one of the people who never change. You’re the same nice boy I used to play with, and fancy that—oh, that on some far-off day I might marry. You’re nearly famous, so mother says. I want to be famous, too; but I’m younger than you—I’ve not had time. But I know much more about the world. Don’t be hurt when I say it: your ideas about love and your generosity, and everything you do, make me feel that you’re such a child. I like you for it,” she added quickly.
Then, speaking in a puzzled way: “You make things difficult. I shouldn’t be doing right by encouraging you, and——” She faltered over her words. The innocent kindness shone in her eyes. “And I can’t bear to send you away. I don’t know what to do. I’d have encouraged you if I’d written to thank you for those flowers, shouldn’t I? But they made me just as happy as—— I was a regular baby over them. Every morning they lay there on my plate and I wore them the whole day. Fluffy used to chaff me. You don’t like Fluffy.” She winked at him provokingly. “Oh, no, you don’t! You think actresses improper persons. You needn’t deny it.—And I do so want to be an actress, so as to prove to my father and Mrs. Sheerug, and all the lot of them, that I’m worth knowing. Can’t you understand? After I’m great, I might be content to chuck the stage and become only a simple good little wife.”
“Wouldn’t it be as fine,” he whispered, “to share some one else’s success?”
She gazed at him wisely. “Philanthropic egotist! You know it wouldn’t. Own up—don’t you know it wouldn’t?”
“For a man it wouldn’t,” he conceded ruefully.
She smiled vaguely. “Then why for a woman? Only love could make it different. You believe in love at first sight. I don’t At least, I’m not sure about it.”
“But you can’t call ours love at first sight.”
“Ours!” She raised her brows. “Yours was. You had your magic cloak ready to pop over me the moment you thought you’d found me. I’m only a lay figure.”
“You’re not,” he protested hotly. “If you’d read my book, you’d know that. Your face is on every page.”
“A lay figure,” she repeated imperturbably.
She did not gratify his curiosity as to whether she had readLife Till Twenty-one.He waited. At last, driven to desperation, he asked, “What am I to do?”
“Do?”
“Yes. I’ve nothing to keep me in America; I had nothing to bring me over except you. If I stay here and don’t give my people an explanation, they’ll begin to wonder. It won’t be playing the game. So if you don’t care——”
She laughed so gayly that she made all his mountain difficulties seem molehills. “What an old serious! You can’t set times and seasons for love. Sooner or later, if you keep on jogging, everything turns out all right. You’ve got to believe that.It does.”
Since she was his prophetess, he let her optimism go undisputed. He almost shared it. But it didn’t provide him with a certain foundation for his future.
“If you’ll stop drizzling,” she said, “I’ll set Miss Independence free for a run. There!” She pulled the glove off her left hand and made it scamper in the blue and green meadow of her gown. Then, of a sudden, the temptress fingers shot out and caressed him for the merest second.
“Life’s so much more surprising when you don’t know where you’re going. That’s what you said, King Arthur. We don’t know where we’re going—we’re both too young. It’s silly to pretend we do. Let’s agree to be immensely kind to each other. Don’t let’s try to be anything closer as yet. If we do—” She wriggled her shoulders; the little curl trembled violently. “I do hate quarreling.—Hulloa! There’s the sea. We’ll be there in a second.”
The taxi had halted in a line of automobiles. They were on a bare, sun-baked road. On every side salt-marshes stretched away, criss-crossed with ditches which drained into a muddy canal The canal crossed the road; the bridge was up to allow a fishing-boat passage. Over to the left a board-walk ran; behind it the sea flashed like a mirror. Straight ahead, in a straggling line of diminishing importance, hotels rose up. A little over to the right an encampment of match-box summer-cottages sweltered in the glare. Hoardings met the eyes wherever they turned, announcing the choicest places to lunch, to garage or to put up for the night in Long Beach. At no great distance a wooden cow, of more than lifelike proportions, gave a burlesque imitation of the rural, stooping its head as if to graze while its back advertised a brand of malted milk.
The landscape would have been dreary enough without the people and the sun. But the people lent the touch of vivacity. The bright colors of women’s dresses stood out boldly in the strong, fluttering air. When seen distantly clumped together, they looked like a stage-garden, a-blow with artificial flowers. The men and women were for the most part in pairs and young—only the older people were in parties. Teddy had the sense that he had joined a carnival of irresponsible lovers. Probably all those men had their problems. And the girls—they, too, didn’t know where they were going. No one was indulging in the careful cowardice which takes thought for the morrow. They were leaving all future evil to take care of itself. They were finding to-day sufficient in its goodness; and of its goodness they intended to miss nothing.
When he turned to Desire, he found her studying her face in a pocket-mirror and dabbing a film of powder on her impertinent little nose. He glanced away, thinking his watching would embarrass her.
She spoke with a bewitching self-composure, still scrutinizing her reflection: “I could hear your brain ticking. I was right, wasn’t I? It’s best at first not to be too much to each other?”
Her naive frankness in not attempting to hide her vanity, sent a wave of affection tingling through him. It was as though by one foolish act she had entrusted him with the key to her character—her unabashed truthfulness.
He leant forward, brushing her shoulder intimately, and peered into the mirror from which her eyes watched him.
“I’ve been an old serious,” he whispered tenderly. “But now I’ll be anything you choose. Let’s be just as kind as we know how.”
“Let’s,” she nodded, “you convenient person.” The curl against her neck shook roguishly.
They pulled up in the courtyard of a hotel. By its architecture it might have been in Spain. Great palms in tubs cast heavy shadows. Somewhere nearby, but out of sight, an orchestra twanged a ragtime tune. He held her hand for one breathless moment as she alighted.
“What next? Are you hungry?”
She closed her eyes with feigned contempt: “Hungry! Glutton.”
Away she fled, light as pollen, dancing in her steps in unconscious rhythm with the unseen orchestra. He caught her up where the flash of waves, rising and falling, burst upon them in tumultuous glory. She was leaning back, clutching at the brim of her hat, while the eager wind dragged at her skirt like a child entreating her to join in its frolic. She laid her hand on his arm.
“This is life. Doesn’t it wake you up—make you wonder why you ever had the drizzles? We’re not the same persons. I’m not. Cling on to me. I’ll blow away. You’ll have to chase me as you would your hat.”
They stepped down on to the sands and strolled along by the water’s edge, watching the bathers bobbing and splashing. When they had reached the point where the crowd grew less dense, they climbed to the board-walk for the return journey. They had made a discovery which their action confessed: aloneness brought silence; they spoke more freely when strangers swarmed about them.
Teddy became aware that, wherever they passed, Desire roused comment. Men, who were themselves accompanied, turned to gaze after him enviously. He compared her with the other women; she was in a separate class—there wasn’t one who could match her. She had a grace, a distinction, a subtlety—an indescribable and exquisite atmosphere of freshness, which lifted her beyond the range of competition. She was like a tropic bird which had flown into a gathering of house-sparrows. Moreover, she had a knack, highly flattering to his masculine vanity, of appearing to have appropriated him, of appearing to be making him her sole interest. The pride of possession shot through him that he, of all living men, should be allowed to walk by her side as if she belonged to him.
“You’re creating quite a sensation,” he told her.
She affected an improvised boredom. “Oh, yes. I always do.” Then, with a flash of girlishness: “Look here, you’re mine to-day absolutely, aren’t you?”
“To-day and always.”
“We’ll leave out the always. But to-day you’ll do whatever I tell you.”
“Anything at all.”
“Then go and bathe.”
He grimaced his astonishment at the smallness of the request What was she after?
“I’ll bathe,” he consented, “if you’ll come with me. But aren’t you hungry?”
“Not a bit I breakfasted late.”
“I didn’t.”
“Well, if you’ll wash first, I’ll let you feed after.”
“I—” he hesitated, “I don’t want to leave you.”
“But I’m keen to see you bathe,” she insisted childishly. Then, employing her most winning manner, “I’ll sit here on the beach and watch you.”
He made a last effort to tempt her. “D’you remember the pool in the woodland—the place where we camped? You thought it would make you a boy. Perhaps, if you tried now——”
“Nonsense.” She shook her head determinedly and sat down.
The situation was too absurd to argue over. Before he left, he gave his watch and money into her keeping. He derived a queer sensation from seeing her pop them into her vanity-case. That was just the matter-of-fact way in which she’d do it if they were married.
As he undressed in the concrete bathing-house, he puzzled to discover what caprice had prompted her order. Had she done it to prove that she had power over him? Or had she wanted to get rid of him? Had he bored her? He reviewed their conversation. All small talk! Not very inspiring! His brain had been weaving a lover’s phrases, which she wouldn’t permit him to utter. The result was that the potentially eloquent lover, when stifled, had been neither brilliant nor entertaining—in fact, a dull fellow.
A horrid little suspicion sprang up. He tried to stamp it out, but it ran from him like flame through withered grass. Had she wanted to be alone to enjoy the admiration she inspired? By Eden Row standards they had no right to be out unchaperoned. It was still less respectable for her to be alone in that fast crowd.
He hurried into his bathing-costume and stepped into the sunshine. She wasn’t where he had left her. She was nowhere in sight He was half-minded to go back and dress, but was deterred by her imagined laughter. He ran down to the sea and swam about. Every time he rose on the crest of a wave he watched for her. When he passed the spot again she was still absent.
Making haste over his dressing, he came out. She wasn’t there. Panic began to seize him—all kinds of feverish alarms. He was setting out to search, when he saw her coming sauntering along the beach.
“Hulloa!” she called breezily. “You haven’t been long. Did you only paddle or did you duck your head as well?”
“Where’d you get to?” he asked pantingly. “I’ve been awfully nervous.”
She cocked her head on one side like a knowing little bird.
“Nervous! I’ve lived years and years without you to take care of me, and haven’t come to much harm.—You silly old thing, I was getting something for you.” She opened her vanity-case and pulled out a tin-type photograph. “There!”
Then she noticed that his hand trembled. “Why—why, youareupset I thought you were only cross. I’m awfully sorry.”
She melted and gazed at him penitently. In the next breath she was chaffing. “If you go on this way, I shan’t bring you out for holidays. You might die in my arms. Nice thing, that! It’d ruin my reputation.”
He was regarding the cheap little picture. It was of her, with the wind breaking against her dress and the sea backing her. It was scarcely dry yet. “For me?”
“Of course. And, before I lose them, here’s your watch and money.”
“And—and that’s why you insisted on my bathing: to get rid of me for a little while so that——”
She cut him short. “Feeding-time. You ask too many questions.”
As they walked to the hotel, she chattered at length of her adventure. “The man who took it, he thought I was an actress. Wanted to know in what show I was playing.—You don’t consider that a compliment?”
“Not much.”
He was only half listening. He was remembering his unworthy suspicion, that she had stolen a respite to court admiration. Perhaps all his suspicions had been equally ill-founded. Perhaps behind each of her inconsideratenesses lay a concealed kindness—a tender forethought. If it had been so in one case, why not in all?
“Sweetly ungrateful,” Vashti had called her; “she feels far more than she’ll ever express—goes out of her way to make people misunderstand her.” And she’d added: “It’s because—— Can’t you guess? She’s afraid to love too much. Her mother got hurt.”
He felt humiliated—unworthy to walk beside her. No wonder she’d smiled at his ideas of love! He’d make it his life’s work, if need be, to teach her what love really meant. He vowed to himself that whatever she did, no matter how compromising the circumstances, for the future he would give her the benefit of the doubt He would never again distrust her. He would keep that pathetically cheap little photograph and gaze at it as a poignant warning.
They were crossing the hotel foyer, when something caught her attention. Without explanation, she darted from his side. Thinking she had seen a friend, he did not follow at first. She made straight for the news-stand; picking up a magazine, she commenced skimming its pages. He strolled over and peered across her shoulder.
“The Theatre!Something in it that you want? Shall I buy it for you?”
She did not seem to hear him. He touched her hand, repeating his question. For answer she turned back to the cover-design. “Isn’t she wonderful?”
He recognized the stooping face and the vague hypnotic smile that he had seen in the many photographs that decorated the walls of the apartment.
“Don’t know about wonderful,” he said carelessly; “she’s all right.”
“All right!” Desire frowned her restrained annoyance. “No one who knows anything about Fluffy would call her ‘all right.’ She’s wonderful. I adore her.”
He chuckled. He hadn’t wakened to the enormity of his offense. “You’re a curious girl Surely you, of all persons, don’t want me to adore her?”
Her frown did not lighten.
“Shall I buy it for you, Princess? You can glance through it while we’re waiting for our meal to be served.”
She ignored his offer and drew out her purse. As they turned away she said, “If you’d liked her, I’d have allowed you to pay for it.”
“But why should I like her? I’ve never met her. You talk as though I detested her.”
“You do. And I know why. You’re jealous.”
Again her daring truthfulness took away his breath. She had discovered something so latent in his mind that he hadn’t owned it to himself. Hewasjealous of Fluffy—just as jealous as if she had been a man. He resented her power to whisk Desire from his side. He dreaded lest she had occupied so much of the girl’s capacity for loving that nothing worth having was left He suspected that the use of powder, the trivial views of marriage, the passion to go upon the stage were all results of her influence. It wasn’t natural that a girl of twenty should focus all her dreams on an older woman. She should be picturing the arrival of Prince Charming, of a home and the graciousness of little children.
Desire lifted to him a face grown magically free from cloud. “That wasn’t at all nice of me—not one bit ladylike. After all, I am your guest.”
Did she say it out of sweet revenge? It was as though she had told him, “I keep my friendships in separate watertight compartments. To-day it’s your turn to be taken but. To-morrow I shall lock you away and remember some one else.” It hurt, this polite intimation of his standing. He wanted to be everything to her—to feel all that she felt, to know her as his very self. To him she was his entire life. And she—she was satisfied to term herself his guest.
She led the way as they entered the grill-room. Heads were turned and glances exchanged, in the usual tribute to her beauty. The orchestra was still madly twanging. Between tables in the centre, a space had been cleared that two paid artistes might give exhibitions of the latest dance-steps. When they rested, the diners took their places and did their best to copy their example. Doors and windows were open. In lulls, while the musicians mopped their foreheads, the better music drifted in of waves breaking and the long sigh of receding surge. They took their seats in a sunlit corner, a little retired, to which they were piloted by a discreet and perspiring waiter. As Desire examined the mena he inquired, “What will madam have?” To every order that she gave he murmured, “Yes, madam. Certainly, madam.”
When he had left, she glanced mischievously across at Teddy. “Why did he call me that?” She knew the answer, but it amused her to embarrass him.
“Because—obviously, he thought we were married.”
“Married!” She was pulling off her gloves. “I shan’t be married for ages—perhaps never. I expect he thought we were married because we looked so separate—so uninterested.”
She didn’t speak again till she had satisfied herself, by means of the pocket-mirror, that no irreparable ruin had befallen her pretty face since the last inspection. Her action seemed prompted by childish curiosity rather than by vanity. It was as though when she saw her own beauty, she saw it with amazement as belonging to another person. It made him think of the first sight he had had of her: a small girl kneeling beside the edge of a fountain and stooping to kiss her own reflection. He remembered her clasped hands and dismay when her lips had disturbed the water’s surface, and her image had vanished.
The examination ended, she gazed at him thoughtfully. “I’ve still to tell you about that—the thing for which I’ve to ask your forgiveness. Shall I tell you now?—No. It’s about Fluffy, and——” Her finger went up to her mouth.
“We don’t agree on Fluffy. And we’ve neither of us recovered from our last—— Was it a quarrel?” She coaxed him with her smile, as though he were insisting that it was. “Not quite a quarrel. Not as bad as that I expect you and I’ll always have to be forgiving. I have a feeling—But you’ll always forgive me, won’t you?” Before he could answer, she leant companionably across the table, “Do you believe in romance? I don’t.”
His sense of humor was touched. One minute she rapped him over the knuckles as though he were a tiny, misbehaving boy, the next it was she who was young and he who was elderly.
“You’re irresistible.”
“Ah!” She gave a pleased little sigh. “When I choose to be fascinating—yes. D’you think the waiter would call me madam, if he could see me now? But tell me, do you believe in romance?”
“Believe in romance!” He felt her slippered foot touching his beneath the table. “I couldn’t look at you and not believe in it. Everything that’s ever happened to you and me is romance: the way Hal and Farmer Joseph brought me to you; the way we met in the dead of night at Glastonbury; and now—— I’ve come like a troubadour as far as Columbus, just to be near you. Isn’t that romance? Romance is like happiness; it’s in the heart It doesn’t shine into you; it shines out Even those people over there, hopping about to rag-time, they don’t seem vulgar; they become romance when you and I watch them.”
“But they’re not vulgar.” She spoke on the defensive. “If you could turkey-trot, I’d be one of them. Oh, dear, what an awful lot of things you disapprove of. I’ll have to make a list of them. There! You see——” She spread out her appealing hands. “I’m being horrid again. I can’t help it.” The babies crept into her eyes. “I’m not the girl you think me. I’m really not.”
The slippered foot beneath the table had withdrawn itself.
“You’re better,” he whispered. “You’re unexpected. None of my magic cloaks fit you. You’re surprising. A man likes to be surprised.”
She refused to look at him. With her chin tucked in the palm of her hand, she gazed listlessly to where the dancers whirled and glided. When she spoke, her voice sounded tired, as if with long contending.
“Why won’t you be disillusioned? Every time I show you a fault, you turn it into a virtue. From the moment we met, I’ve acted as selfishly as I knew how; and yet you still follow, follow, follow. Don’t you ever lose your temper? You can’t really like me.”
To her bewilderment a great wave of gladness swept into his eyes. At last he had stumbled on the hidden forethought that lurked behind all her omissions of kindness. She had been trying to save him from herself. In the light of this new interpretation, every grievance that he had harbored became an infidelity. He stretched out his hand, as though unconsciously, till the tips of his fingers were just touching hers.
“I shall always follow, and follow, and follow. I shall know now that, even when you’re trying to be cross, it only means that you’re——”
What it would only mean he didn’t tell her; at that moment the waiter returned.
When the covers had been removed from the dishes and they had something to distract them from their own intensity, the gayety of the rag-time caught them.
She flashed a friendly glance at him. “We’re always getting back to that old subject, like sitting hens to a nest.”
“We hadn’t got there quite.”
She pursed her lips judiciously. “Perhaps not quite. Wouldn’t it be safer to talk of something else?”
“About what? I can’t think of anything but you, Princess.”
She clapped her hands. “Splendid. Let’s talk about me. You start.”
He bent forward, smiling into her eyes, grateful for the chance. “There’s so much to tell. All day I’ve been making discoveries. I’ve found out that you’re half-a-dozen persons—not just the one person whom I thought you, Desire. Sometimes you’re Joan of Arc, with dreams in your eyes and your hands lying idly in your lap. Sometimes you’re Nell Gwynn, utterly unshockable and up to any naughtiness. That’s the way you are now—the way I like you best. And sometimes you’re a faery’s child, a Belle Dame Sans Merci, a beautiful witch-girl, who won’t come into my life and won’t let me forge.”
She became extraordinarily interested. At last he had absorbed her attention. “That Belle Dam whatever you call her, she sounds rather lurid. Tell me about her.”
All through the meal, to the alternate thunder of the sea and the jiggling accompaniment of rag-time, he told her. How La Belle Dame Sans Merci lay in wait in woodlands to tempt knights aside from their quests and, when she had made them love her, left them spell-bound and unsatisfied. They forgot time and place as they talked. The old trustful intimacy held them hanging on each other’s words. They were children again in the meadows at Ware, hiding from Farmer Joseph; only now Farmer Joseph was their fear of their own shyness.
“I did something last summer,” he said; “it was just before I met you. Perhaps it’ll make you smile. I’d just come to success, and I wanted to tell you; but I hadn’t an idea where to find you in the whole wide world. I tried to pretend that you were still in the woodland beside the pond. I went there and stayed all day, willing that you should come. You couldn’t have been so far away; you may have been in London. Well, I had that poem with me, and—— You know the way one gets into moods? It seemed to me that you weren’t a truly person and never had been—that you were just a faery’s child, a ghost in my mind.”
‘I set her on my prancing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.’
“That sort of thing. Perhaps you were thinking of me at the very time.”
“Perhaps,” she nodded. “Coming back to England after all those years did make me think of you. But how does the whole poem go? Can’t you repeat it?”
He had come to, “And there I shut her wild, wild eyes with kisses four,” when she stopped him.
“I should never let you do that If I did——” She bent towards him flippantly, lowering her voice. “If I did, d’you know what I’d do next? I should marry you.” The curl against her neck shook in emphatic affirmative. “I’m not going to be La Belle Dame whatever you call her any more. I’m going to try to be Nell Gwynn always. You must tell me next time I’m that La Belle person, and I’ll stop it.”
“Ah, but I can’t—that’s a part of the spell When you look that way I can’t speak to you. I’m dazed. It’s as though you’d buried me beneath a mountain of ice. I can only see you and feel unhappy. I can’t even stir.”
He fell to gazing at her. His silence lasted so long that she grew restless. “Say it,” she urged.
“I was thinking that, in spite of all these people and the orchestra and the dancing, we’re by ourselves—not afraid of each other the way we were.”
“Oh!” She twisted her shoulders. “And now I’ll tell you why: it’s because there’s a table between us and, however much you wanted, you couldn’t do anything silly. So, you see, I’m safe, and can afford to be gracious.”
He knew at once that it was the truth that she had stated. How few girls would have said it! They had finished their coffee. She had been very pressing that he should smoke a cigar. He had just lighted one, and was comfortably wondering what they should do next; a drive in the country perhaps, and then back to the tall city lying spectral in moonlight. She consulted her wrist-watch and pushed back her chair. “How about the taxi?”
He at once began to seek the connection between his smoking and the taxi. Behind all her actions lay a motive, which she disguised with an appearance of irresponsibility. Being in her company was like studying the moves in a game of chess. Had she persuaded him to smoke in self-protection, so that he might be occupied when they were alone together?
“The taxi! It’s early. We don’t need to go yet. Or d’you mean that you want to take a longer drive?”
“I’ve——” She winked at him. “This isn’t the great big confession—— I’ve to get back for the theatre. Don’t look crestfallen; you’re coming—just the two of us. If we don’t start now, I shan’t have time to dress.”
As he followed her out into the courtyard, he made a mental note: her insistance that he should smoke had been a precautionary measure for a home-defense. Already her manner towards him was growing circumspect. When she had given the driver instructions, she took her seat remotely in the corner. There was one last flicker of her Nell Gwynn mood when she leant out to gaze at the sea lying red behind the gray salt-marshes.
“Good-by, dear little day; you’ve been a sort of honeymoon.” She spied out of the comers of her eyes at Teddy with an impish raising of her brows. It was as though she were asking him whether the day need end.
“Why go back? Why ever go back? Why not get married?” The hand which he tried to seize happened to be Miss Independence. It gave him a friendly pat in rebuke as it escaped him.
“We’re getting stupid again.” Closing her eyes, she curled herself up against the cushions. Her voice was small and tired.
In an instant he was miles away from her, buried beneath his mountain of ice. She was La Belle Dame Sans Merd, chilling his affection with silence. He was amused. He was beginning to understand her tactics. She was easy of approach, but difficult of capture. He looked back; from a child she had been like that. But he wished that she wouldn’t show distrust of him whenever they were alone. It made love seem less gallant, almost ugly—a thing to be dreaded. Was it what had happened to her mother that made her——? “She’s afraid to love too much. Her mother got hurt.” Was this the price of which Hal had spoken? Was his share of the paying to have his ideal lowered by the girl by whom it had been inspired?
He sat in his corner, smoking and scrupulously preserving the gap that lay between them. He was doing his best to show her by his actions that her defensive measures were unnecessary. One hand shaded her eyes, the other lay half open in her lap. Her head drooped forward slightly and her knees were crossed. Her attitude was one of prayer.
“Please go on talking,” she murmured. “Don’t mind if I’m a little quiet.”
He tried to talk. His monologue grew halting. He asked a question; she returned no answer. He ceased speaking to see if that would pique her and rouse response. She seemed to have divined his intention; he felt that, if he peeped behind her hand, he would find her laughing.
Easy of approach, but difficult of capture! If he didn’t take care, she might keep him dawdling and spellbound forever. Ah, but when she began to learn what love really was, not Fluffy’s kind of tepid flirtation, but the kind of love that thinks no sacrifice too costly—— How long would it take him to fire her with earnestness?
Traffic was thickening. Automobiles, snorting and tooting their horns, came racing up behind and passed. The road ahead was a cloud of dust, which the sunset tinted to a crimson glory. The laughter of women’s voices was in the air. He had glimpses of their faces peering merrily into men’s. In a flash they were gone; but his imagination followed, listening to the happy tendernesses that were said. How closely these other lovers sat! Sometimes beneath the dust-cloth that lay across their knees, he suspected that hands were being clasped. At others he didn’t need to suspect; it was done proudly and bravely. There were disadvantages in being in love with a young lady who gave remarkable names to her hands.
He smiled grimly at the respectable distance that separated him from his praying girl. It so honestly published to the world: “The two people in this taxi are wasting an opportunity—they are not in love.” The waiter, had he had to address her now, would certainly have called her madam.
Teddy tried to see the humor of his situation. He wondered whether she was really as indifferent as she pretended—whether she might not be glad if he were to slip his arm about her? But he refrained from making the experiment; he feared lest she should interpret his action flippantly or resent it. When he pictured the kind of happiness they were losing, he felt a little sick at heart.
They had come to the great cat’s-cradle of girders that spans the East River.
“That’s better. I’m rested. You are good.”
She spoke gratefully and sat up. From his corner, making no attempt to narrow the distance, he watched her quietly. “D’you always do that?”
“What?”
“Pretend to go to sleep when you’re unchaperoned? You don’t need to do it with me. It’s the third time you’ve done it.”
She laughed tolerantly. “Oh, you! What old-fashioned notions! I never am chaperoned.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to say that in her case it wasn’t necessary. Instead he asked: “Do you do that with Tom? Does he appreciate it?”
She threw up her hands in an abandonment to merriment “Tom! He hates it Poor Tom! Haven’t I told you he drizzles?”
When no answer was returned, she began to sing provocatively:
“If no one ever marries me,
And I don’t see why he should.
For Nurse says I am not pretty
And I’m very seldom good,
I’ll——”
She broke off and glanced over at him, making her mouth sad. “You do sit far away.” When he made no motion to accept her invitation, she smiled the unreserved smile of friendship. “Look here, if I come half way over, will you?”
She made the journey and waited for him to follow her example. He came reluctantly, but not all the way; there was still a gap between them.
“Well, if you won’t, I’ll have to be forward.” She closed up the distance. “There! Isn’t that happier?”
“Yes. But what’s the good? We’re in the middle of streets and nearly there now.”
“I was tired,” she said appealingly. “I thought you’d understand.”
It was impossible to resist her. Perhaps she had been tired. Perhaps she had done with him what she would have dared to do with no other man; and what he had mistaken for indifference and distrust had been a reliance on his chivalry.
“I do understand.”
“I wonder.”
Ahead, across the misty greenness of the Park, the troglodyte dwellings of the West Side barricaded the horizon. In some of the windows lights were springing up. It was as though lonely people flashed unnoticed signals to the cold hearts beating in the heavens.
“Desire, why do we try to hurt each other?”
“Do we? I wasn’t trying. I was thinking of something that Fluffy told Horace. She said that men never married the women who said ‘Yes.’ It’s the women who say ‘No’ sweetly that men marry.”
“So you were saying ‘No’ sweetly by keeping quiet.”
“I was looking back to find out if it was true.”
“And is it?”
She gazed down demurely at her folded hands. “I once knew a girl; she didn’t care a straw for her man. He waited for her for five years always hoping, and she made all kinds of cruel jokes about him. Then one night—she didn’t know how it happened—all the ice broke and she felt that she wanted him most awfully. They were alone. Suddenly, without warning and without being asked, she kissed him and put her arms about his neck—— Can you guess what he did? You’re a man. You ought to know.”
“He kissed her back again, I suppose, and after that they were married.”
“Wrong. He picked up his hat and walked out of the house. He’d made her want him ten times worse than he’d ever wanted her. He never went back.”
“But why? I don’t understand.”
They were on Riverside Drive. The taxi was halting. She leant forward and opened the door. “He’d won, don’t you see? Because she’d given in he despised her. It was the holding off that made her value.”
“A parable?”
As she jumped out, she glanced roguishly across her shoulder. “No. A fact.”
To save time, since they both had to dress, they arranged to meet at the theatre. The curtain had gone down on the first act when they entered.
It was a first-night performance; the place was packed. Desire at once became interested in the audience, spying round with her glasses and picking out the critics, the actors and actresses who were present She gave him concise accounts of their careers, surprising him with her knowledge. She was intensely alive; it was difficult to recognize in her the bored praying girl who had traveled with him from Long Beach on that late September afternoon. In her low-cut evening-dress, with her white arms and dazzling shoulders, he found her twice as alluring. But he wished she would show more interest in him and a little less in the audience. Every time he thought he had secured her attention, she would discover a new face on which to focus her glasses.
The curtain had risen only a few minutes, when he realized why she had brought him. From the wings Tom entered; from that moment she became spellbound. Teddy tried to reason away his jealousy—his feeling that he had been trapped into coming. It was quite natural that she should have wanted to see her friend—there was nothing so disastrous in that. But—— And he couldn’t get over thatbut. It would have been fair to have warned him.
In the second interval he found that he was expected to eulogize his rival’s acting. This time, cautioned by the error he had made over Fluffy’s portrait, he was more careful in expressing his opinion. She quickly detected the effort in his enthusiasm. “I didn’t like to tell you,” she whispered apologetically; “but I had to come. Ever so long ago, before I knew you’d be here, I promised him.”
“So that’s the confession that’s been worrying you?”
“One of them.” She touched his hand.
It wasn’t until midnight, when they had had supper and were flying uptown, that she told him.
“We’ve had a good first day, Meester Deek, in spite—in spite of everything.”
Mister Dick had been the name of the hero in the play; Meester Deek had been the caressing way in which the Italian woman who loved him had pronounced it. That Desire should call him Meester Deek seemed an omen.
He turned to her gladly. She was in her Nell Gwynn mood and at her tenderest. Through the darkness he could see the convulsive little curl. The beauty-patch seemed a sign put there to mark the acceptable place to kiss her.
“So I’m Meester Deek! You won’t call me Teddy. I knew you’d have to find a name for me.”
“D’you like my name for you, Meester Deek?”
She sat bending forward, her face illumined by the racing street-lights and her body in darkness. He was tempted to trespass—tempted to reach out for her hand and, if she allowed that, to take her in his arms. She looked very sweet and unresisting, with her cloak falling back from her white shoulders and her head drooping. But instinct warned him: she beckoned attack only to repell it. He remembered what she had told him about the women who said “No,” the women who eked out their affection.
“D’you like my name for you, Meester Deek?” There was all the passion of the south in the way she asked it.
“I like it. But why don’t you call me by my own name? You speak of Horace and Tom.”
“Ah, that’s different.”
“How?”
She shrugged her shoulders and threw back her cloak. The fragrance of her stole out towards him.
“They’ll be always just Horace and Tom to me, while you—perhaps. I can’t explain, Meester Deek, if you don’t understand.”
In her own peculiar way, half shy, half bold, she had told him that, just as he held her separate from all women, so she held him separate.
“I’d rather have you call me Meester Deek than—than anything in the whole world, now that I know.”
“And will you forgive me the big confession?”
He laughed emotionally. “Anything.”
She shrank back into the shadow so that her face was hidden. “I’m just as sorry as I can be. But I can’t break my word. Perhaps you’ll be so hurt that you’ll sail back to England, and won’t wait for me.”
His heart sank. For a moment he had felt so sure of her. Again she was planning to elude him.
“You don’t say anything, Meester Deek. I’m afraid you’re angry. It’s only for two weeks. I start to-morrow.” Two weeks without her! It spelt tragedy. He had a desperate inspiration, “Can’t I come with you?”
“Poor you! No.” She shook her head slowly. “I wish you could. You see, I’ve got to do without you, too. But you don’t like her—I mean Fluffy. She’s on the road in a try-out before she opens in New York.—Only two weeks, Meester Deek! Look on the bright side of things. You can get through all your work while I’m gone and then, when I come back, we can play together.—If you stay,” she added softly.
Two weeks! It seemed a very short time to make a fuss over.
But in two weeks he had hoped to go so far with her. He had hoped to be able to win a promise from her, so that he could send good news to Eden Row. And now, at the end of two weeks, he would be just where he had started.
“I’ll write to you, oh, such long letters.” And then, like a little child on the verge of crying: “You said you’d forgive me. You’re not keeping your promise.”
At the moment of parting, as she was stepping into the elevator, he drew her back. “When d’you start? Mayn’t I come and fetch you, and see you off?”
“It’ll be so early. Won’t that be a lot of trouble for a very little pleasure?”
“But if I think the trouble’s worth it?”
“Then I’d love to have you.”
She held out her hand and let it linger in his clasp. Other revellers, returning from theatres and dinners, passed them. For the first time that day she didn’t seem to care who guessed that he loved her.
“It’s too late to ask you up,” she whispered regretfully. “It’s been a nice day in spite of—of everything, Meester Deek. Thank you.”
She withdrew her hand and darted from him, as if fearing that, if she stayed, she might commit herself irrevocably. He saw her gray eyes smiling pityingly down on him as the iron cage shot up.