His first sensation on awaking next morning was of that stolen kiss. All night he had been dreaming of it. All night he had been conscious of the porcelain smoothness of her hand held closely in his own. He closed his eyes against the amber shaft of sunlight which streamed from the window across the counterpane. He strove to recall those dreams; but the harder he strove the dimmer grew the lamps in the haunted chamber of remembrance. He saw vague shapes, which receded from him and melted. Since dreams failed him, he flung wide the windows of imagination.
He saw himself walking with his arm about her, between pollarded trees along a silver road. She clung against his breast like a blown spray of lilac. Now he was stretched at her feet in the greenest of green meadows, while above the curve of her knees her brooding smile watched him. He pictured her, always in new landscapes of more than earthly beauty, enacting a hundred scenes of uninterrupted tenderness.
The burden of his longing made him weary. Until he had kissed her, he had had no real understanding of what love meant; she had been to him an idea—an enchanting, disembodied spirit. Now she was white and warm, exquisitely clothed with glowing flesh. It was not the magic cloak any longer, but Desire herself, sweetly perverse and wilfully cold, that he worshiped.
How old he had become since last night, and yet how young! In kissing her he had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge; from now on his thirst would grow unquenchably till he knew her as himself. All that that knowledge might mean passed before his mind in slow procession. Ominous as the rustle of God’s feet in Eden, he could hear her humming her plaintive warning:
“So, honey, jest play in your own backyard.”
He threw back the clothes and jumped out. Such imaginings were not allowed. But they returned. Like a snow-capped mountain in the dawning, his manhood caught the rose-red glow of passion and trembled, a tower of flame and ivory, above the imperiled valleys of experience.
As he dressed he molded the future to any shape he chose, rolled it into a ball and molded it afresh. Now that he had kissed her, all things were possible. His interest in all the world was quickened. His work and success again became important. He thought of her thin little high-heeled shoes, her dancing decorative way of walking, the costly frailty of her dress. He would need money—heaps of it—to marry her.
It was half-an-hour later, while he sat at breakfast, that a small cloud loomed on his horizon. It grew out of the sobering effect which comes of being among everyday people. A doubt arose in his mind as to the propriety of his last night’s actions. He’d whisked her away from the station without letting her see her mother, and had brought her home late after driving for hours through the darkness. Would Vashti consider him a safe person after such behavior? He knew that Eden Row wouldn’t. But in Desire’s company he lost sight of conventions in the absolute rightness of their being together. Besides, as he knew to his cost, she was well able to take care of herself. Strangers might think—— It didn’t matter what they thought. Nevertheless, it was with some trepidation that he approached the telephone and heard Vashti answer; “You brought my baby-girl home rather late. I hope you had a good time.—Oh, no, I didn’t mind; but I should have if it had been any one but Teddy.”
He wondered whether Desire had told her mother that he had kissed her. Did girls tell their mothers things like that?
“May I speak with Desire?”
“She’s not here. Fluffy called with Mr. Overbridge just after you’d brought her back. They took her out to supper. Desire slept with her last night. I don’t know what plans she’s made for to-day.—Yes, I’ll ask her to call you up.”
Fluffy again! He frowned. Overbridge hadn’t wanted her—that was Fluffy’s doing; she had taken her for protection. He didn’t like to think of Desire’s being put to such uses. He didn’t like to think of her being made a foil to another woman’s ill-conducted love-affair. There was a lack of system about not knowing where you were going to sleep up to within five minutes of getting into bed. He felt chagrined that his imagination had been wasted in picturing her thinking of him. He criticized Vashti for the leniency of her attitude; it was proper, if bonds of affection were worth anything, for a mother and daughter to be together after a three weeks’ separation. For his own lack of consideration in keeping Desire from her mother, there was some excuse; but for Fluffy’s—— The thing that hurt most was that Desire should have been willing to telescope the most exalted moment of his life into the next trivial happening, allowing herself no time for reflection.
All that day he waited with trembling suspense to hear from her; it was not until the following morning that she called him and arranged to go to lunch. Almost her first words on meeting were, “I’ve thought it over.”
“Over! Was there anything?”
“Thieves must be punished. You mustn’t do it again.” Then, with a quick uplifting of her eyes—so quick that the gray seas seemed to splash over: “Come, Meester Deek, let’s forget and be happy.”
So he learnt that it was he who had done wrong—he who had to be forgiven. Her forgiveness was offered so generously that it would have been churlish to dispute its necessity. Besides, argument wasted time and might lead to fretfulness.
In the weeks that followed a dangerous comradeship sprang up between them; dangerous because of its quiet confidence, which seemed to deny the existence of passion. Her total ignoring of the fact of sex made any reference to it seem vulgar; yet everything that she did, from the itinerant beauty-patch to the graceful frailty of her dress, was a silent and provocative acknowledgment that sex was omnipresent.
“I wouldn’t dare to trust myself so much with any other man,” she told him.
It was what Vashti had said: “Oh, no, I didn’t mind; but I should have if it had been any one but Teddy.”
So he found himself isolated on a peak of chivalry, from which the old sweet ways of love looked satyrish. Other men would have tried to hold her hands. Given his opportunities, other men would have crushed their lips against her sweet red mouth. Because she had proclaimed him nobler than other men he refrained from any of these brutalities—and all the while his mind was on fire with the vision of them. Instead, he put the poetry of his passion into the parables of love that he told her. They were like children in a forest, hiding from each other, yet continually calling and making known their whereabouts out of fear of the forest’s solitariness.
They showed their need of each other in a thousand ways which were more eloquent than words. Every morning at ten promptly—ten being her hour for rising—he phoned her. Sometimes he found her at Vashti’s apartment, sometimes at Fluffy’s; at Fluffy’s there were frequently sleepy sounds which told him that she was answering him from bed. This morning conversation grew to be a habit on which they both depended.
It was a rare day when they did not lunch together. She would meet him in the foyer of one of the fashionable hotels. They had special nooks where they found each other—nooks known only to themselves. In the Waldorf it was against a pillar at the end of Peacock Alley, opposite to the Thirty-fourth Street entrance which is nearest to Fifth Avenue. In the Vanderbilt it was a deep armchair, two windows uptown from the marble stairs. In the same way they had their special tables; they got to know the waiters, and often to please her he would order the table to be reserved. He learnt that lavish tips and the appearance of wealth were the Open Sesame to pleasures of which the frugality of Eden Row had never dreamt.
She was invariably late to their appointments—or almost invariably; if he counted on her lateness and arrived late himself, it would so happen that she had got there early. Her instinct seemed to keep her informed, even when he was out of her sight, as to what he was thinking and doing, so that she was able to forestall him, thwart him, surprise him. He felt that this was as it should be if she were in love. The contradiction was that, though he loved her, his sixth sense never served him. When he had calculated that this would be her early day and had arrived with ten minutes in hand, he would watch for an hour the surf of faces washed in through the revolving doors. As time passed, he would begin to conjecture all kinds of dismal happenings; underlying all his conjectures was the suspicion of unexpected death. Then, like a comforting strain of music, she would emerge from the discord of the crowd and take his hand. In the joy that she was still alive, he would hardly listen to her breathless apologies.
In all his dealings with her there was this constant harassment of uncertainty. She would never make an arrangement for a day ahead; he must call her up in the morning—she wasn’t sure of her plans. He knew what this meant: she wasn’t sure whether Fluffy would command her attentions. Fluffy came first. He determined at all costs to supplant Fluffy’s premiership in her affections. He had to prove to her, not by talking, but by accumulated acts, how much his love for her meant. So he never complained of her irresponsibility. She could be as capricious as she chose; it never roused his temper. His reward was to have her pat his hand and murmur softly, “Meester Deek, you are good to me.”
Through the blue-gold blur of autumn afternoons they would drift off to a matinée or he would accompany her shopping. There was a peculiar intimacy attaching to being made the witness of her girlish purchases. She would take him into a millinery shop and try on a dozen hats, referring always to his judgment. The assistant would delight him by mistaking him for her husband. Desire would correct the wrong impression promptly by saying: “I don’t know which one I’ll choose; I guess I’ll have to bring my mother.” In the street she would confess to him that she’d done it for a lark and hadn’t intended to buy anything.
“But why do they all—waiters and everybody—think that we’re married?”
“Perhaps because we were made for each other, and look it.”
She would twist her shoulders with a pretense of annoyance; her gray eyes would become cloudy as opals. “That’s stupid. I’m so young—only twenty.”
On one of these excursions she filled him with joy by accepting from him a dozen pairs of silk-stockings. He was perpetually begging her to let him spend his money on her and she was perpetually refusing.
“You tempt me, Meester Deek. What would people think?”
“I don’t know and don’t care. People be hanged. There aren’t any people—only you and I alone in the world. How’d you like a new set of furs?”
“Now, do be good,” she would beg of him, eyeing the furs enviously.
“I don’t know,” he told her, “whether you really mean no or yes.”
“And perhaps I don’t know myself,” she mocked him.
Later, when wild-flowers of the streets flamed in the hedges of the dusk, they would again postpone their parting. Some new palace would magically spring up to lure them. Then they would dine to music and she would insist on acting the hostess and serving him; sometimes by seeming inadvertence their hands would touch. They would dawdle over their coffee; like a mother humoring a child full of fancies, at his repeated request she would sweeten his cup with the lips that were forbidden him. They might sit on all evening; they might stroll languorously off to find a new stimulus to illusion in a theatre. Their evenings were intolerably fugitive. Before midnight they would ride uptown through the carnival of Broadway, where light foamed on walls of blackness like champagne poured across ebony.
At first he was inclined to be dissatisfied that he gained so little ground: when he advanced, she retreated; when he retreated, she advanced. If, to woo him back to a proper demonstrativeness, she had to display some new familiarity, she was careful not to let it become a habit.
“The more stand-offish I am with you,” he said, “the more sweet you are to me. Directly I start to fall in love with you again——”
“Again?” she questioned, with a raising of her brows.
“Again,” he repeated stubbornly. “Directly I do that, you grow cold. The thing works automatically like a pair of scales—only we hardly ever balance. When you’re up, I’m down. When I’m up, you’re down.”
“What charming metaphors you use,” she exclaimed petulantly; and then, with swift tormenting compassion, “Poor Meester Deek.”
But his protestations worked no difference. One night, in crossing Times Square, she said, “You may take my arm if you choose.” When an hour later he tried to do it, she drew away from him, with, “I cross heaps of streets without that.” Sometimes, driving home, she would unglove a temptress hand and let it rest invitingly in her lap. At the first sign that he was going to take it, it would pop like a rabbit into the warren of her muff.
At the moment of parting she became most fascinating; then, for an instant, poignancy would touch her, making her humble. The dread foreknowledge would creep into her eyes that even such loyalty as his could be exhausted; the imminent fear would clutch her that one evening there would be a final parting and the hope of a new dawn would bring no hope of his returning. She would coax him to come up to the apartment; if he consented, she would divert him by chattering to the astonished elevator-boy in what she conceived to be French. She would slip her key into the latch, calling softly: “Mother! Mother!” Sometimes Vashti would come out from the front-room where she had been sitting in the half-light with a man—usually a Mr. Kingston Dak. As often as not she would be in bed. Like conspirators they would tiptoe across the passage. By the piano, with her back towards him, she would seat herself and play softly with one hand, “In the Gloaming, oh My Darling,” one of the few tunes which she could strum without error. He would stand with his face hanging over her shoulder, and they would both wonder silently whether he was going to crush her to him. Just as he had made up his mind, she would swing round with eyes mysterious as moonstones: “Meester Deek, let’s take Twinkles out.”
So, leaving the apartment with its heavy atmosphere of sleepers, they would seize for themselves this last respite.
Loitering along pale streets with the immensity of night brooding over them, the world became wholly theirs and she again the haunting dream of his boyhood. There was only the blind white eye of the moon to watch them. Reluctantly they would come back to the illumined cave which was fated to engulf her.
Their hands would come together and linger. Their lips would stumble over words and grow dumb.
“And to-morrow?” he would falter.
“To-morrow!—Phone me.—It’s one of the nicest days we’ve ever had.”
In a flash she would stoop to Twinkles, tuck the bundle of wriggling fur beneath her arm, wave her hand and run lightly up the steps.
If he stayed, he would see her turn before entering the elevator, wave her hand again and throw a last smile to him—a smile which seemed to reproach him, to plead with him and to extend a promise.
Through the red flame-days of October she danced before him, a tantalizing heart of thistledown. If she settled, it was always well ahead. When he came up with her and stooped, thinking her capture certain, some new breeze of caprice or reticence would sweep her beyond the reach of his grasp.
They discussed love in generalizations—in terms of life, literature and the latest play. They discussed very little else.
“When I’m married———-” he would say.
“Well?” she would encourage him, snuggling her face against her white-fox furs.
“When I am married, every day’ll be a new romance. I can live anywhere I like—that’s the beauty of being an artist. I think I shall live in Italy first, somewhere on the Bay of Naples. I and my wife” (how her eyes would twinkle when he said that!), “I and my wife will dress up every evening. We’ll have a different set of costumes for every night in the week, and we’ll dine out in an arbor in our little garden. Sometimes she’ll be a Dresden Shepherdess, and sometimes a Queen Guinevere, and sometimes——-”
“And won’t she ever be herself?”
“She’ll always be that, with a beauty-patch just about where you wear yours and a little curl bobbing against her neck.”
“But what’s the idea of so many costumes?”
“We shall never get used to each other; we shall always seem to be loving for the first time—beginning all afresh.—Doesn’t it attract you, Princess?”
“Me? I don’t see what I’ve got to do with it. Here’s the kind of woman you’ll marry: a nice little thing without any ambitions, who’ll think you’re a genius. You’ll live in one house forever and ever, and have a large family and go to church every Sunday. And you’ll have a dead secret that you’ll never be able to tell her, about a famous actress whom you once romped with in New York before she was famous.”
She had a thousand ways of turning him aside from confession.
“Men are rotters—all men except you, Meester Deek. Poor little Fluffy! Horace isn’t at all nice to her.”
It transpired on inquiry that Horace wasn’t at all nice to Fluffy because she was dividing her leisure between himself and Simon Freelevy.
“You see, she must,” Desire explained. “It’s business.Octoberisn’t the success they expected—it’s too English in its atmosphere. If Freelevy likes her, he can put her into his biggest productions. Horace won’t understand that it’s business. He sulks and makes rows. That’s why I go about with her so much—her little chaperone, she calls me. Men have to be polite and can’t take advantage when a young girl is present.”
“But what does she give them in return?” Teddy asked.
Desire became cold. “Any man should feel proud to be seen in her company.”
Her way of saying it made him feel that all women were queens and all men their servitors. His idea that love-affairs ended in marriage seemed rustic and adolescent. To be seen in the company of a pretty face was all the reward a man ought to expect for limousines, late suppers, tantalized hopes and the patient devotion of an honorable passion. He couldn’t bear that Desire should class herself with the nuns of pleasure, who dole out their lure as payment, and have blocks of ice where less virtuous women have hearts. In her scornful defense of Fluffy, she seemed to be building up a case for herself.
In the last extremity, when a proposal of marriage threatened, she employed a still more effective weapon.
“Look here, Meester Deek, I like you most awfully and we’ve had some splendid times, but why are you stopping in America?”
He would gaze into her eyes dumbly, thinking, “Now’s my chance.”
His hesitancy would infect her with boldness. “If it’s for my sake, I’m not worth the trouble. I think you’d better go back to England. TheLusitania’ssailing tomorrow.”
Piqued by her assumed indifference, he would pretend to take her at her word: “Perhaps I had better. Would you come to see me off?”
“Maybe.”
“And kiss me good-by?”
“If I felt like it.”
“Then it’s almost worth going.”
“Why don’t you?”
Once he gave her a fright They were passing The International Sleeping Car Company on Fifth Avenue. “I think I will,” he said lightly.
Entering, he made a reservation and paid the deposit money. During the next hour she was so sweet to him, so sad, that they raced back through the thickening night, arriving just as the last clerk was leaving, and canceled the booking.
“Did you mean it?” she whispered.
“Well, didn’t I?”
“But do tell me,” she pleaded. “If you don’t, I shall never be at rest.”
He slipped his arm into hers without rebuff. “Odd little, dear little Princess, was it likely?”
After that, when in this mood of self-effacement, she would insist without fear of being taken seriously that he should sail.
“If you don’t, I’ll refuse to see you ever again. But,” she would add, “that’s only if you really are stopping here on my account.”
To relieve her conscience of responsibility he would lie like a corsair, bolstering up the fiction that business was his sole reason for remaining.
“Then, it’s your funeral, isn’t it?”
“My funeral,” he echoed solemnly.
The Indian summer sank into a heap of ashes from which all heat was spent. November looked in with its thin-lipped mornings and its sudden pantherlike dusks. Still they wandered, separate and yet together, from the refuge of one day to the next, establishing shrines of habit which made them less and less dispensable to each other’s happiness. She was always darting ahead into the uncertain shadows, hiding, and springing out that she might test his gladness in having refound her.
Each new day was an exquisite wax-statue which by night had melted to formlessness in his hands. He made repeated resolutions to organize his energies. He lived im-paradised in a lethargy of fond emotions. His career was at a halt; his opportunities were slipping from him. To encourage his industry he drew up a chart of the hours in the current month that he would work. He pinned it to the wall above his desk that it might reproach him if he fell below his average. The average was never reached. The chart was tom up. His most stalwart plans were driven as mist before the breath of her lightest fancy. Not that she encroached on him by deed or word; but her memory was a delirium which kept him always craving for her presence.
“If you were to drop me to-morrow,” she told him, “you’d never hear from me. I’m like that. I shouldn’t run after you.”
She left him to place his own construction on the statement—to discover its origin in nobility or carelessness. Whichever it was, it made him the needle while she remained the magnet. When he wasn’t with her, he was waiting for her; so the hours after midnight, when he had seen her home, were the only ones free from feverishness. His work suffered; he stole from the hours when he ought to have been in bed. He began to suspect that he was losing his confidence of touch. The suspicion was sharply confirmed when one of his commissioned articles came back with the cryptic intimation that it wasn’t exactly what the editor had expected. That meant the loss of five hundred dollars; what was worse, it filled him with artistic panic.
In the old days—the days ofLife Till Twenty-one—fame had been the goal of his ambitions. He had set before his eyes, as though it were a crucifix, the austere aloofness of his father’s pure motives. He couldn’t afford to do that any longer. He was spending lavishly; the example of the extravagance of Fluffy’s lovers spurred his expenditures. He didn’t care how he won Desire’s admiration; win it he must. Unconsciously he was trying to win it with a display of generosity. Dimly he foresaw that he was doing her an injustice; he would have to cut down and recuperate the moment they were married. In preparation he painted to her the joys of simplicity and of life in the country. Her curl became agitated with merriment.
“That isn’t the way I’ve been brought up. Cottages don’t have bathrooms, and the country’s muddy except in summer. It wouldn’t suit me. And I do like to wear silk.” Then, with a shudder: “Poverty’s so ugly. There’s only one thing worse, and that’s growing old. Please, Meester Deek, let’s talk of something else.”
She was like a child, stopping her ears with her fingers and pleading, “Please don’t tell me any more ghost-stories.” He felt sorry for her; at such times she seemed so inexperienced and young. By her misplaced valuations, she was giving life such power to hurt her. Her sophistication seemed more apparent than real—a disguise for her lack of knowledge. He wanted to comfort her against old age. If one were loved, neither poverty nor growing old mattered. He thought of Dearie and the way she had married his father, with their joint affection and her high belief in him for their sole assets.
There were times when Desire seemed to guess his problem.
“I wish you’d do more work. Why don’t you leave me alone to-morrow? And you oughtn’t to keep on spending and spending. I’d be just as happy if you spent less.”
The joy of her thoughtfulness gave him hope and made him the more reckless. Besides, it wasn’t possible to economize in her company. Her fear of the subway and her abhorrence of crowded surface-cars made taxis a continual necessity. Her shoes were so thin that a mile of walking tired her; her clothes were so stylish that she would have looked conspicuous in any but a fashionable setting. Her method of dress, in which he delighted, limited them both to costly environments. He had named her rightly years ago in calling her “Princess.”
Vashti puzzled him. She seemed to avoid him. When he visited the apartment she was out, just going out or expected back shortly. He had fugitive glimpses of her hurrying off to concert engagements, or going on some pleasure jaunt with the unexplained Mr. Dak, similar to those which he and Desire enjoyed together.
Mr. Kingston Dak was a little grasshopper of a man. He had lemon-colored hair, white teeth, extremely well-kept hands and was nearly forty. His littleness was evidently a sore point with him, for the heels of his shoes were built up like a woman’s. He held himself erectly and when others were seated he usually remained standing. He seemed to be always in search of something to lean against which would enable him to tiptoe unobtrusively and to add another inch to his stature. He was clean-shaven, and in appearance shy and boyish; he would have looked excellently well in clerical attire. By hobby he was an occultist; by profession a stockbroker. His chief topic of conversation was the superiority of Mohammedanism to Christianity.
Desire called him “King” familiarly; Vashti referred to him as “My little broker.” Although in his early twenties he had been divorced and tattered by the thorns of a disastrous passion, neither of them seemed to regard him as dangerously masculine. They treated him as a maiden-aunt—as a pale person receiving affection in lieu of wages, expected to safeguard their comfort and to slip into a cupboard when he wasn’t wanted.
“King’s quite nice,” Desire told Teddy; “he was most awfully fond of her. His troubles have made him so understanding.”
Teddy wondered what had happened to the world that all its women had become Vestal Virgins and all its men unassailable St. Anthonies. He watched Mr. Dak for any sign that he remembered the days of his flesh. The little man was as perfunctory over his duties as a well-trained lackey.
Vashti’s bearing towards himself during their brief meetings was affectionately sentimental. There was a hint of the proprietary in the way she touched him, as though she regarded him already as her son. Her eyes would rest on him with veiled inquiry; she never put her question into words. She was giving him his chance, and he felt infinitely grateful to her—so grateful that he was blind to the unexplained situations which surrounded her. That she should allow his unchaperoned relations with Desire endowed her with broadmindedness. “Unto the pure all things are pure,” seemed the maxim on which she acted. In accepting that ruling for his own conduct, he had to extend the same leniency to Mr. Dak’s.
Desire stretched it a point further and made it apply to herself. He found that frequently after he had said “Good-by” to her at close on midnight, Fluffy would call with a car and carry her off to make a party of three at supper, or sometimes to join a larger party—mostly of men—in her apartment. He remonstrated with her: “It’s all very well for an actress; but I hate to think of you mixing with all kinds of people whose standards are just anyhow, and playing ’gooseberry’ for two people older than yourself.”
“I don’t see that you can complain,” she laughed. “If my standards weren’t theatrical and if I were the kind of girl who sees evil in everything, you wouldn’t be allowed to go about with me so much.”
There was his dilemma in a nut-shell. In joining the ranks of the superiorly pure, he was pledged to see purity everywhere. Divorces were pure. Nobody was to blame for anything. People ought to be sympathized with, not punished, when they got into trouble. He seemed to have made lax conventions his own by taking advantage of them for facilitating his courtship. It would look like hypocrisy to disapprove of them after marriage. It was very jolly, for instance, to hear her whisper in the jingling secrecy of a hansom, “Meester Deek, please light me a cigarette.” Very jolly to convey it from his lips to hers, and to watch the red glow of each puff make a cameo of her face against the blackness. But—— And thatbutwas perpetually walking round new corners to confront him—if she were his wife, would the sight of her smoking afford him such abiding happiness? She had taunted him with being a King Arthur. In the presence of her emotional tolerance, which found excuses for everything and ostracized nobody, his sense of propriety seemed a lack of social charity. He guessed the reason for her continual plea that people should be forgiving—her mother. The knowledge silenced his criticisms and roused his compassion.
Two moods possessed him alternately: in the one he despised himself as an austere person, in whom an undue restraint of upbringing had dammed the stream of youth, so that it lay alone and unruffled as a mountain-tarn; in the other he saw himself as a man with a chivalrous duty.
Little by little he came to see that her faery lightheartedness, her faculty for taking no thought for the morrow, made her an easy prey for the morrow. Her ease in acquiring new friendships made friendship of small value.
Her butterfly Sittings from pleasure to pleasure left her without garnerings. She lived, he calculated, at the rate of at least five thousand dollars per annum. But different people paid for it; she contributed as her share her gay well-dressed schoolgirl self. The chances were that she rarely had a five-dollar bill in her purse, and yet she was accustoming herself to extravagance.
He began to watch her friends. When he ran over the list of them, he found that they were all temporary, held by the flimsiest bonds of common knowledge. They had been met at hotels, in pensions, on transatlantic voyages. A good many of them were divorced or unattached persons. They were all on the wing; none of them seemed to comply with any settled code of morals. The more he saw of her, the more aghast he became at the precariousness of her prosperity. Some day these friends, who could dispense with her for months together, would happen all to dispense with her at the same moment Then the telephone, which was her wizard summons to dinners, balls, and motor-parties, would suddenly grow silent. She would wait and listen; and listen and wait; her round of gayeties would be ended. Perhaps this thirst for the insubstantial things of life was a part of the price which Hal had mentioned. Did she know it? Winged creature as she was, she must covet the security of a nest sometimes, though, while she was without it, she affected to despise it as dullness.
When he married her—— He became lost in thought
If they went on living as they were living now, his career would be torn to shreds by her unsatisfied energy. They would have to settle down. In putting up with any irritations that might result, he’d be helping her to pay the penalty—the penalty which Vashti had imposed on so many lives—on her own most of all—by her early selfishness. Towering above his passion and mingling with it oddly, was the great determination to save her from the ruinous lightness to which her mother’s undefined social position had committed her.
She was fully aware of the unspoken strictures which lent melancholy to his ardor.
“You think I’m a silly little moth. I know you do. I’m pyschic. You think I’m fluttering about a candle and that my wings’ll get scorched. Just you wait. I’ll have to show you.”
Or she would say, leaning out towards him, “I wonder what it is that you like about me, Meester Deek. There are so many things you don’t like, though you never tell me. You don’t like my powdering, or my smoking cigarettes, or—oh, such lots of things. But where’s the harm? And there’s another thing you won’t like—I’m going to dye my hair to auburn.”
This threat, that she would dye her hair, led to endless conversations. It made him bold to tell her how pretty she was, which was exactly what she wanted.
Sometimes she was sweetly grown up, preparing him for disillusionment; but it was when she was little that he loved her best Then she would give him the most artless confidences; telling him about her religion, how she prayed for him night and morning, and of her longings to know her father. She would plead with him to tell her about Orchid Lodge and Mrs. Sheerug, and Ruddy, and Harriet She came to picture the old house as if she had lived there, and yet she was never tired of hearing the old details afresh. Orchid Lodge became a secret between them—one of their many secrets, like the name she had given him. And still they drifted undecided.
Then the series of events happened which forced their love to its first anchorage.
Night was tremulous with the beat of wings. The first snow of the season was falling, giving to familiar streets a theatric look of enchanted strangeness. Large flakes sailed confidently as descending doves; little ones came in flurries like a storm of petals. Perhaps boy-angels in heavenly orchards were shaking the blossoms with their romping. Teddy glanced at the girl beside him; it seemed that an all-wise providence had sent the snow especially as a background for her.
They were returning from the final performance ofOctober. They had been behind the scenes with Fluffy, where friends had been drugging her melancholy with the assurance that, whatever might be said of the play, her acting had scored a triumph.
The illusion of the footlights followed them. Streets were a new stage-setting in which they had become the dominant personalities. The shrieking of motor-horns above the din of traffic seemed the agonized cry of defeated lovers, divided in a chaos of misunderstandings.
As they drove up Broadway Desire crouched with her cheek against the pane. She was trying to make out the hoardings on which the name of Janice Audrey was featured in large letters. While she performed her ritual at each vanishing shrine, Teddy sat unheeded.
Her saint-like hands were clasped against her breast. Her face hung palely meditative, a shadow cast upon the dusk. She filled the night with fragrance. The falling flakes outside seemed to kiss her hair in passing.
He could only imagine the old-rose shade of the velvet opera-cloak that hid her from him. Her white-fox furs lay across her shoulders like drifted snow. He ached intolerably to take her in his arms.
Her eyes were turned away. He could only see the faint outline of her cheek and the slender curve of her girlish neck. She threw out remarks as they traveled—remarks which called for no answer and expected none.
“Horace’ll have to own now that she was wise in cultivating other friendships. Poor old Horace!—And all those bills will be covered up to-morrow with some new great success. Such is fame!—Fluffy’s so discouraged.”
“Do you think that was true?”
“What?” Her question was asked lazily, more out of politeness than curiosity.
“ThatOctoberwas her autobiography?”
“Partly. Artistic people like to think themselves tragic. You do. I’ve noticed.”
“I think it was.” He refused to be diverted. “I think it was real tragedy. She’s given up so much for fame; it’s brought her nothing.”
Desire laughed quietly. “The old subject. I knew where you were going the minute you started. It’s like a hat that you want to get rid of; you hang it on every peg you come to. No, I’m not meaning to be unkind; but you do amuse me, Meester Deek.—Fluffy’s very much to be envied.”
“Why?”
“She’s beautiful.”
“So are you. But being beautiful isn’t everything. Being loved is the thing that satisfies.”
“Does it? And loving too, I expect. But you see I don’t know: I’ve never loved.”
“You won’t let yourself love.” He spoke the words almost inaudibly.
They both fell silent. She still bent forward, her head and shoulders silhouetted against the pane. Her lack of response made his passion seem foolishness.
During the weeks of enforced friendship the physical bond between them had been growing more compelling.
It was only in crowded places that her actions acknowledged it; when they were by themselves her reticence announced plainly, “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” Then she became forbidding; but her sudden gusts of coldness, her very inaccessibility, only added the more to her attraction. He told himself that women who left men nothing to conquer were not valued. He found himself filled with overpowering longings to defy her attempts to thwart him. His mind seethed with pictures of what might happen. He saw himself pressing those hands against his lips, kissing her eyes or her slender neck, where the false curl danced and beckoned. Would this pain of expectancy never end? Did she also suffer beneath her pale aloofness?
With the high-strung sensitiveness of the lover, he began to suspect that his procrastination piqued her. Sometimes he fancied that even Vashti criticized his delay in announcing his intentions. He dreaded lest Desire should think that he was flirting. But why didn’t she help him? Did girls ever help their lovers? She increased his difficulties at every opportunity. Shyness, perhaps! Time and again when he had nerved himself to the point of proposing, she had struck him dumb with a languid triviality or flippancy of gesture.
But to-night it would be different The enchantment of the snow tingled in his blood. The warning of the woman who had procrastinated so long that she had lost her sincerity, spurred him to confession. Surely to-night, if ever——
His hand set out on a voyage of discovery. It slipped into her muff and found her fingers.
She shuddered. It was as though a chill had struck her. “What are you doing? You’re queer to-night. Funny.”
He had no words in which to tell her. He was terribly in earnest. Hammers were pounding in his temples. His face was twitching. The darkness choked him.
He drooped closer. His lips brushed her furs. She sat breathless. His lips crept higher and touched her hair.
“No, please.” Her voice was shaky and childish. “Not now. I—I don’t feel like it.”
He drew back. Though she had denied him, their hands clung together. Hers lay motionless, like the beating heart of a spent bird that has lost the strength to save itself. The power that he knew he had over her at that moment made him feel like a ruffian who had lain in ambush and taken her unaware.
“Shall I let it go?” he whispered.
For answer the slim fingers nestled closer.
“Meester Deek, you were never in love before, were you?”
“Never.”
“Very wonderful. I thought not. You don’t act like it.”
“And you, Princess?”
“Ah!” She smiled mysteriously. “There was a boy who asked permission to marry me once. It was just after I’d put up my hair. I was only fifteen, but I looked just as old as I do now. He told mother that he’d saved fifty dollars, and that he wanted to start early so as to raise a large family. Very sweet and domestic of him, wasn’t it?”
“But that wasn’t serious.”
“No, not serious, you poor Meester Deek; but it makes you jealous.—And there were others.”
“How many?”
“Oh, dozens. I’ve always had some one in love with me, ever since I can remember. That’s why I gave names to my hands.”
“Then no one ever held them before?”
“I shouldn’t say that. But almost no one. I used to let Tom hold them when he wouldn’t stop drizzling. Tom was different; he was a kind of brother.”
“And what am I?”
“I’ve often wondered.” Her brows drew together. “You’re a kind of friend, and yet you’re not.”
“More than a friend?”
They were halting. She freed her hand and stroked his face daringly. “You’re Meester Deck. Isn’t that enough? Some one whom I love and trust.”
She threw the door open. On the point of jumping out, she hesitated. “The pavement’s so slushy. Whatever shall I do with my thin shoes and all?”
“Let me carry you.”
As his arms enfolded her, she stiffened. For a moment there was a rebellious struggle. Then her arm went about his neck and her face sank against his shoulder.
How light she was! How little! How unchanged from the child-Desire of the woodland!
“D’you remember the last time?” he whispered. “It’s years since I’ve done it.”
“Not your fault,” she laughed. “You’d have done it often and often, if I’d allowed you. I guess you wish it was always snowing.”
The distance was all too short. He would have carried her across the lighted foyer, into the elevator, up to the apartment. He didn’t mind who stared at him. He would have gone on holding her thus forever. As they reached the steps she slipped from his arms.
“Oh, you big, strong man!” Her gray eyes were dancing; a faint flush spread across her forehead. “I do hope nobody saw us.” He was stealing his arm into hers. She turned him back. “Forgetful! You haven’t paid the taxi.”
After he had paid, he searched round for her. She had gone. It was the first time she had done it; she always waited for him. So she knew what was coming! By her flight she was lengthening by a few more minutes their long uncertainty. In the quiet of the dim-lit room, with the snow gliding past the window, each separate flake tiptoeing like a faery, he would tell her. But would he need to tell her? She would be waiting for him, her face drooping against her shoulder, looking sweet and weary. She would be like a tired child, its mischief forgotten, ready to stretch out its arms and snuggle in his breast. All that need be said would come in broken phrases—phrases which no one but themselves could understand. And then, after that—— She might cry a little. When they were married, perhaps Hal——
He waited till the elevator had descended before he tapped. Probably she was listening for him, fearing and yet hoping for the pressure of his arms and all the newness that they would begin together. He would read in her eyes the writing of surrender—the same writing that he had read on the dusty panes of childhood, “I love you. I love you.”
He tapped; he tapped more loudly. The door was opened ty Mr. Dak. “Hulloa! Come in.”
“Where’s Desire?”
“In her room getting ready.”
“Ready? For what?”
They entered the dim-lit room where the most splendid moment of life should have been happening.
“Didn’t you know?” Mr. Dak appeared not to notice his emotion. “Everybody else knew. There’s a supper-party to Miss Audrey. Just the six of us.”
They fell to making conversation. Mr. Dak did most of the talking. Teddy found himself agreeing to the statement that Christianity was a colossal blunder, and that Mohammedanism was the only religion worth the having. He would have agreed to anything. As he listened for Desire’s footstep, he nodded his head, saying, “Yes. Of course. Obviously.” All the while he was aware of the embarrassed kindness that looked out from the eyes of the little man. Somewhere, in the silence of his brain, a voice kept questioning, “Mr. Dak, are you in love with Vashti? Does she laugh at you when you try to tell her? Do you wish the world was pagan because then you’d be her lord and master?”
“In the Mohammedan faith,” Mr. Dak was saying, “a woman’s hope of immortality lies in merging her life with a man’s.”
Then he set himself to criticize pedantically the breakdown of the Christian ideal of marriage.
The door-bell rang. Fluffy and Horace entered. The sparkle of laughter was in their eyes. They brought with them an atmosphere of love-making. As Horace helped her out of her sables, his hands loitered on her shoulders caressingly.
She turned to the others with the sad little smile of one who summons all the world to her protection. She looked extremely beautiful and lavish, with her daffodil-colored hair floating like a cloud above her blue, hypnotic eyes. “I’m so depressed. I do hope you’ll cheer me. Fancy having to learn a new part and to worry with rehearsals, and then to go on the road again.” She sat down on the couch, her hands tucked beneath her, her arms making handles for the vase of her body. “I wish I wasn’t an actress. I wish I were just a wife in a dear little house—a sort of nest—with a kind man to take care of me. Only——” She glanced at Horace. “Only I never met the always kind man.”
“Women never know their own minds,” said Horace. “A law ought to be passed to compel every woman who’s loved to marry.”
At supper Desire’s place was empty. Teddy turned to Vashti and whispered, “Where is she? Isn’t she coming?”
Vashti looked at him with her slow, comprehending smile. “She’s coming. But she’s thinking. I wonder what about.”
At that moment Desire entered and slipped into the vacant chair beside him. All through the meal as the atmosphere brightened, she sat silent. She seemed to be doing her best not to notice that he was there.
The talk turned on women and what men thought of them.
“Men may think what they like, but they never know us,”. Fluffy said. “Love’s a game of guess-work and deception. Half the time when a man’s blaming a woman for not having married him, he ought to be down on his knees thanking her for having spared him. She knows what she is, and she knows what he is. He doesn’t. Men invariably confuse friendship with matrimony. They can’t understand how women can enjoy their company and yet couldn’t fancy them as husbands.”
Desire woke up. “And the worst of it is that sometimes we women can’t understand ourselves.”
“Some men can.” Vashti glanced at Mr. Dak, whom she had so often praised for his understanding. Mr. Dak returned her gaze as non-committingly as a Buddhish idol. Horace leant forward across the table. The gleam of tolerant amusement was never absent from his eyes.
“You ladies are all talking nonsense, and you know it. Even little Desire over there knows it. Directly you begin to like a man you begin to think of marriage—only some of you begin to think of running away from it ‘Between men and women there is no friendship possible. Passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship’—you remember Lord Darlington’s lines. When love is trifled with, it sours into hatred. Every man who loves a woman has his moments when he hates her intensely.”
“Did you ever hate me?” Fluffy covered his hand to insure the answer she required.
“Yes. And you’ve hated me. Desire could tell just how much if she dared. You women all discuss your love-affairs. You’re fondest of a man when he’s absent. When he’s present, you never confess.”
Teddy sat quietly listening. He thought how silly these people were to talk so much and to love so little. Life was going by them; none of them had begun to live yet They were like timid bathers at the seaside, who splashed and paddled, but never really got wet. They wouldn’t learn to swim for fear of getting drowned. He wished he could take them to a house in Eden Row, where a man and woman were living bravely and accepting hard knocks as things to be expected. While he listened, he watched Desire, wondering what ghostly thoughts were wandering behind her wistful eyes.
Chairs were pushed back. They were leaving the room. Fluffy turned to meet him in the doorway. Her arm was about Desire. She hung her head, glancing searchingly from one to the other.
“We’re a pack of fools,” she whispered intensely. “Don’t you listen to us.” She took Teddy’s hand and hesitated at a loss for words. With a sudden gust of emotion she kissed him. “Little Desire, why don’t you marry him? He looks at you so lovingly and sadly.”
“Marry him!” Desire faltered. “I don’t know. But we’re very fond of each other, aren’t we, Teddy?”
It was the first time she had called him that. The babies came into her eyes; she broke from Fluffy and ran down the passage. From a safe distance she called laughingly, “I won’t have you hanging about with my beau. You’ll be kissing him again; and I won’t have you kissing him when I’m not present.”
In the room which overlooked the Hudson, Vashti was playing. For a minute Teddy had a vision of how he had first seen her with Hal; only times had changed. The man who bent across her shoulder now was Mr. Dak. It was a child’s song that she was singing, about a lady who was devoted to a poodle-dog which died, and how she fretted and fretted. The last verse leapt out of melancholy into merriment,
“But e’er three months had past
She had bought another poodle-dog.
Exactly like the last”
To Teddy the words were a philosophy of fickleness; that was precisely what she had done on losing Hal. A worrying fear came upon him as he glanced from mother to daughter: in outward appearance they were so much alike. If he were to leave Desire, would she, too, replace him?
The thought was in the air. Mr. Dak, leaning against the piano to make himself an inch taller, began to descant on the transience of affection. He had arrived at his favorite topic and was saying, “Now, among the Mohammedans——” when Horace interrupted.
“It depends on what you mean by transience. One’s got to go on living, so one goes on loving. But if you mean that one forgets—why, it’s not true.”
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! Thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion.’
“One never forgets. There’s always a Cynara. One may love twenty times, but betwixt your lips and the lips of the latest woman there’s always the memory of the first ghostly rapture. You seek Cynara to the end of life; but if you met her again, you would not find her.”
Across the window the snow drifted white as the loosened hair of Time. In the room there was no stir. Unseen people entered. Vashti shaded her face with her hand; it was easy to guess of whom she was thinking. Fluffy gazed into space, a child who finds itself alone and is frightened. Mr. Dak was inscrutable. Horace lay back, staring at the ceiling, watching the ascending smoke of his cigarette. To Teddy the room was like an empty house in which innumerable clocks ticked loudly.
He met Desire’s eyes. “We are young. We are young,” they said. “Why won’t they leave us to ourselves?”
“My God, I wish I were little. I wish I were no older than Desire. I wish I could get away from all this rottenness and wake up to-morrow in the country. Think what it’ll look like, all white and sparkling and shiny! Where’s the good of your telling me you love me, Horace, if you can’t make me good and little—if you can’t put back the hands of Time?”
Fluffy jumped up, half laughing, half crying, and threw wide the window. She leant out, so that the snow fell glistening in the gold of her hair.
“Not a sound. Listen!”
Horace rose and stood beside her. “Would you like to wake up in the country? I’ll manage it. I’d manage anything for you, little girl.”
Mr. Dak broke his silence. “I know a farm. It’s up the Hudson—seventy miles at least from here. The people are my friends.”
In a babel of excited voices it was planned. Of a sudden the triflers had become lovers confessed. They seemed to think that by the childish trick of escaping, their youth could be recaptured. While the women ran off to change and wrap up, the men completed arrangements for the journey.
When the limousine arrived it had seats for only five; cushions were strewn on the floor for Desire and Teddy. She kept far away from him till the light went out. Again it was like standing in an empty house; people’s brains were clocks which ticked solemnly, “And I was desolate and sick of an old passion.”
They two alone had nothing to remember—all the rapture of life lay ahead. In the darkness he felt her hand groping. One by one he coaxed apart the reluctant fingers and pressed the little palm against his mouth. She allowed herself to be drawn closer; he could feel the wild bird of her heart beating its wings against the walls of the flesh.
“Dearest.”
“Hush! Dear is enough,” she whispered.
Long after she was asleep he sat staring into the blackness. To-morrow—all the long to-morrows would be theirs.