“A get-rich-quick man always pays for his own speed”
“A get-rich-quick man always pays for his own speed”
It did not take long to disillusion Steve as to this. Beatrice accepted the news of the stock failure and the new trust so easily that he saw she was incapable of changing her viewpoint.
“Why gamble so, my dear Stevuns?” she began, almost petulantly. “And do you know that every time I make engagements for you you are late? You are nearly a half hour late to-night.”
“I am losing the factory as well. I’ll have to sell out for a song. I can’t compete with cutthroats–––”
“Are you going to hurry and dress so we can go?” She smiled her prettiest.
At one time Steve would have noted only that white tulle and pearls spun witchery, and her skirt possessed the charm of a Hawaiian girl’s dancing costume. Even at this juncture he recalled and smiled at past blindness.
“You don’t seem to understand what I am saying, and all that is happening. First I played Arizona copper until they taught me not to monkey with the band wagon; then I played Cobalt until the same thing took place.” He sank impolitely into an easy-chair. “Then I got the chance to come in with the gang––an insulting proposition any way you want to figure––a paltry sum for everything I have and the statement in veiled terms that I need not expect to have that unless I did as they dictate.”
“Well––sell your business to someone else before this happens!”
“I couldn’t even if I wished to cheat; it is quite the talk of the town.”
“Well––manage. Papa will tell you how. Why do you come running to me? Goodness, don’t stare like that. It’s nothing unusual to manage! I don’t know about business––you made a lot of money once and I should think you could do it again.”
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“It doesn’t bother me as much as you think,” he said, almost breathlessly, eager to know the worst. “It means I am a poor man in your estimation. I can sell out to these people, who have thrown a steel ring round their game, so to speak, and had to do it until your father was out of the running. I can never buck them––I’m not fool enough to be goaded on to try. Your father could not win out the way things are now––but he could have prevented their ever getting the upper hand––because he knows every last turn of the wheel. They could not have fooled him. I didn’t know what was coming until it was too late. A get-rich-quick man always pays for his own speed!”
“Stevuns, you’ll make me so nervous I can’t go to-night. It’s a lovely party. You stay home and tell papa all about it, but leave me in peace.”
“Thank you, I will. And is this the sympathy and the understanding you give me when I say we are being ruined?”
“Don’t keep saying it.” She stamped her little foot. “Papa has lots of money in English and Chinese securities and I don’t know what-all. Why, that factory of his was the least of his fortune.”
“That is why your father deliberately lifted three fourths of his money from the business just before he was taken ill. He was not going to risk cutthroats getting together. He overestimated my ability to keep clear of disaster. But after all, I’m not sorry––I don’t want anything more than I have earned. For you always pay for it in some way. The world may not know but these snap-judgment profiteers, these get-rich-quick phenomena, always have to pay. But you don’t understand,” he added, gently, “do you?286You must not be blamed for not understanding anything unless it comprises a good time!”
“I shall not try,” she said, petulantly, “and if you love me you will hurry to change your things and tell papa briefly. To-morrow will be time enough to go into detail and have him start you into something new.”
“I didn’t take your father’s money to marry you with, and even if I stole it in a sense it was my own efforts that brought it to pass. I took no help from him until I was established. And I shall not sneak back to let my wife’s father support me now. I’m going to drop out of this game, Beatrice. It is for you to decide whether you go with me or stay at the Villa Rosa.” He stood up suddenly and came close to her, looking down at her, in all her fragile loveliness, wondering, half hoping, halfway expecting that a miracle might happen even as he had hoped for the miracle of his fortune––that at this late hour she might cease to be a mere Gorgeous Girl and understand.
Beatrice frowned, playing with her fan. “You look shabby and tired,” she complained; “not my handsome Steve. You don’t mean such things, because you do love me and you know I could never be happy living any other way. I’m all papa has and he wants me to have everything I want. Of course I want this dear house and you and all that both of you mean, so be a lamb and get dressed and papa will help you into some nice safe business that can never fail.”
She stood on her tiptoes, about to kiss him. But he pushed her away.
“You mean you won’t begin with me, you won’t287take our one chance for happiness? Just to begin together to learn and earn, be real? Do you think for one instant I will be like Gay Vondeplosshe, subsisting on a woman’s bounty? No. I shall support my wife; it was never my wish that we come here to live, and you insisted upon luxuries my purse could not afford. In the main, to the outsider, I have supported you. But we both know it is not true; I have merely been a needful accessory. From now on I shall either support you or else not live with you. I ask you to stop having a good time long enough to give me your decision.”
“Oh, Stevuns––you funny old brutish dear!”
“If it were a direct loan of money from your father it would be a different matter––but it is one of those intricate, involved deals that mean more than you or I choose to admit. It means that I have learned the hollow satisfaction in being a rich man and husband of a Gorgeous Girl. I want to be a plain American with a wife who is content with something else save a Villa Rosa and pound-and-a-half lap dogs. I am going to be a mediocre failure in the eyes of your set, since it is the only way in which I can start to be a true success in other than dollar standards. The two elements that collect a crowd and breed newspaper headlines are mystery and struggle; remove them and you find yourself serene and secure. That is what I propose to do. I ask if it is too late for you to come with me or are you going to linger in the Villa Rosa? Answer me––I want something real, common, definite––can’t you understand?”
“If you ever dare treat me like this again–––” she began, whimpering.
Steve brushed by her and up the stairs. He went288into Constantine’s room, where the old man lay in helpless discontent, his dulling eyes looking at the sunken gardens and the chattering peacocks and his heart longing for Hannah and the early days together.
“Why, Steve,” he said in a pleased tone, “you look as if they were after you. Thought you’d forgotten me. That nurse Bea engaged has a voice like a scissors grinder in action.”
Briefly Steve told him what had taken place, not mentioning Beatrice’s name. It had an astonishing effect; as a mental tonic it was not to be surpassed, for the fallen oak of a man throbbed anew with life, as much as was possible, his hands twitching with rage, his teeth grinding, and the dulled eyes bright with interest.
“The dogs! I knew it! Why didn’t you tell me long before? Blocked ’em off––snuffed ’em out. Meddling with wildcat stocks––asinine any way you figure it! Well, I don’t know that I blame you. The first success was too sweet to leave untried again, eh?” He chuckled as if something amused him. “We’ll close out to ’em. We’ll start again–––”
“I don’t want another fortune handed me,” Steve interrupted. “I want to earn it, if you please. I’m not a pauper in the true sense of the word; I am merely trained down to the proper financial weight for a man of my age and experience to carry, and I can now enter the ring with good chances. The other way was as absurd as the four-year-old prodigy who typewrites and is rather fond of Greek. But I loved your daughter and I thought it quite the right thing to do. I asked your daughter just now if she was willing to live with a poor man, according to her289standards, as your wife lived with you––to give me her help and her faith in me.
“Do you know what she answered? She told me to come to you and truckle for another big loan, which I am not capable of handling, to cheat legally and never hint to the world the truth of the affair. She hadn’t the most remote idea that I was in earnest when I told her I was going to be a failure in the eyes of the world––but I was not going to have my wife’s father support me. I’m not sorry this has happened––feel as if the Old Man of the Sea had dropped off me. But this is the thing: either my wife and I will live in a home of our own, and such a home as I can provide, being an independent and proper family and keeping our problems and responsibilities within our gates; or else your daughter is going to stay with you and lose her one chance of freedom while I leave town.”
The Basque grandmother and the Celtic grandfather lent Steve all their passionate determination and keenness of insight, as they once lent him chivalry, humour, and charm. He stood before the old man taut with excitement and flushed with sudden fury.
“It is you I blame,” he added before Constantine could make answer. “You kept her as useless as a china shepherdess; it is not her fault if she fails to rise to the occasion now.”
Constantine’s face quivered; what the emotion was none but himself knew.
“You poor fool boy!” he said, thickly. “Don’t you know I made you a rich man all along the line? You never did anything at all. It wasn’t luck on the stock exchange––it was Mark Constantine back290of you. Gad, to have made what you did in the time you did you’d have had to do worse than dabble your hands in the mud. You’d have had to roll in it––like I did.” He gave a coarse laugh. “That was what I figured out when you said you wanted Beatrice and what you were going to do to try to get her. I liked you, I wanted you for her husband. I hated the other puppies. So I wasn’t going to have Beatrice’s husband a cutthroat and a highbinder as he would have to be if he had turned the whole trick.
“You young fool, don’t you suppose I made the stock exchange yield you the sugarplums? Gad, I knew every cent you spent and made. It was for my girl, my Gorgeous Girl, so why wouldn’t I do it? I saved your ideals and kept your hands white so that you would be good enough for her; that was what I figured out the hour after you had told me your intentions. I followed you like the fairy books tell of; I brought you your fortune and your factory and scotched all the enemies about you––and gave you the girl. And you thought you killed the seven-headed dragon yourself.... I don’t blame you for the foozle, Steve; I cotton-woolled you all along––it was bound to come. But, damme, you’ll come down to brass tacks and take more of my money now and keep her from being unhappy and stop this snivel about earning what you get and needing responsibilities––or you’ll find you’ve put your foot into hell and you can’t pull it out!”
White-heat anger enveloped Steve’s very soul, yet strangely enough he felt not like sinning but rather like Laertes crying out in mental anguish: “Do you see this, O God?”
291CHAPTER XXI
Steve knew he brushed by Aunt Belle, who was coming in to see what her brother was roaring about, and down those detestable gilded curlicue stairs to seek out his wife and try again to make her realize that for once he was determined on what should come to pass as regarded their future together, to force her to realize even if he created a cheap scene.
Whatever blame fell upon Constantine’s shoulders was not within his province to judge––Constantine was a dying man and Steve was not quite thirty-five. So that ended the matter from Steve’s viewpoint. It was his intention not to try to evade his personal blame in the matter but to make reparation to his own self and to his wife if he were permitted. If he could once convince his wife that their sole chance of future happiness and sanity lay in beginning as medium-incomed young persons with all the sane world before them it would have been worth it all––excepting for Mary Faithful.
Even as Steve tried in a quick, tense fashion to dismiss Mary from his mind and say that Beatrice was his wife and that love must come as the leavener once this hideous wealth was removed, he knew the thing was impossible. The best solution of which he was capable was to say that he owed it to both Mary Faithful and Beatrice to play the game from the right angle and that in causing Beatrice to disclaim her292title of Gorgeous Girl and all it implied he at least would find contentment––the same sort of uninteresting contentment of which Mary boasted.
He found Beatrice in a furore of tears and protests, angered at missing the dinner engagement and not understanding why any of it was necessary. She felt her own territory had been infringed upon, since making a scene was her peculiar form of mental intoxication.
But Steve was composed, even smiling, and as he came up to her she fancied her father had made everything all right as his check book had seen fit to do upon so many occasions. The slight worry over Steve’s possible folly vanished, and she felt it safe to proceed to reproach him for having been so horrid.
“Now, my dear Stevuns, why did you get me all upset? And yourself and poor papa, to say nothing of my having to send word at the last moment that we could not attend the dinner. Oh, Steve, Steve, will you ever be really tamed?”
“Come and sit beside me.” He drew out a notebook and pencil. “I must tell you some things.”
Rather curious, she obeyed, but keeping a discreet distance so her frock would not be ruffled. “I’m still cross,” she warned.
Steve was writing down figures, adding them and making notations.
“Look here, dear,” he began, patiently; “this is just where I shall stand––a poor man to your way of thinking, almost as poor as when I set out to win you. I’m going into a salaried job for a few years––a real hope-to-die job––and we can have a house–––”
“I thought we talked that all out before,” she interrupted, half petulantly, half wistfully. “Why293do you keep repeating yourself? You’ll be thumping your fists the first thing we know!”
“Do you fancy I am not going to do this? Are you not sufficiently concerned to listen, to realize that I have been a blind, conceited fool? But I have learned my lesson. I shall support my wife from now on and live in my own house or else I shall no longer be your husband.”
“Steve!”
She opened and shut her fan quickly, then it fell to the floor. But he did not pick it up.
“You were never keen for details, so I shall not irritate you now by introducing them. But the fact remains that I have been made and backed by your father merely because he wished me to be your husband. You picked me out––and I was keen to be picked out––and he decided to make me as proper a companion for you as possible. I am in some ways as untried to-day as any youngster starting out; as I was when I fancied I made the grand and initial stride by myself. Your father feels that I ought to be eternally grateful––but then, what else could the father of the Gorgeous Girl think? He has harmed me––but he has ruined you. I hardly thought you would meet me halfway, still it was worth the try.”
Forgetful of her flounces Beatrice crumpled them in her hands, saying sharply: “Are you taking this way of getting out of it?”
“Good heavens!” Steve murmured, half inaudibly, “I keep forgetting you have never been taught values or sincerity! There is no way I can prove to you how in earnest I am, is there?”
“You mean to say that I am a failure?” she preened herself unconsciously.
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“The most gorgeous failure we have with us to-day! And the worst of it is it is growing to be a common type of failure since gorgeousness is becoming prevalent. There are many like you––not many more gorgeous, and thousands less so. You are a type that has developed in the last twenty years and is developing these days at breakneck speed! And you can’t understand and you don’t want to and I’m damned if I’ll try to explain again.”
“Well,” she asked, shrewdly, quite the woman of the world, “what is it you are about to do? Wear corduroy trousers and a red bandanna and start a butcher-paper-covered East-Side magazine filled with ravings?”
“No; that is another type we plain Americans have on our hands.”
“Don’t spar for time.”
“I’m not. I’m through sparring; I want to go to work. I want–––”
What was the use? He stopped before adding another spark to her wrath.
“I suppose you want to marry that woman––Mary Faithful, who has loved you so long and made herself so useful! She was clever enough to pretend to efface herself and go to work for someone else, but I dare say you have seen her as often as before. Oh, are you surprised I know? I gave you the credit of being above such a thing, but Trudy told me that this woman had told her the truth––so you see even your Mary Faithful cannot be trusted. You had better turn monk, Steve, be done with the whole annoying pack of us! Anyway, Trudy came running to me, but I never lost sleep over the rumour. I felt you were above such things, as I said, but presently little295indications––straws, you know––told me she cared; and if a woman cares for a man and is able to pass several hours each day in his employ, unless she is cross-eyed or a blithering idiot she cannot fail to win the game! Now can she, Stevuns?”
Steve raised his hand in protest. “Please leave her out of it.”
“So––we must talk about my being a failure, my father clipping your wings of industry and all that––yet we must not mention a woman who has loved you––and gossiped about it.”
“She did not! You know Trudy––you know her nature,” he interrupted.
“Taking up her defence! Noble Stevuns! Then you do reciprocate––and you are planning one of those ready-to-be-served bungalows with even a broom closet and lovely glass doorknobs, where Mary may gambol about in organdie and boast of the prize pie she has baked for your supper. Oh, Stevuns, you are too funny for words!”
She laughed, but there was a malicious sparkle in her eyes. She was carrying off the situation as best she knew how, for she did not comprehend its true significance, its highest motive. Underneath her veneer of sarcasm and ridicule she was hurt, stabbed––quite helpless.
With her father’s spirit she resolved to take the death gamely––and make Steve as ridiculous as possible, to have as good a time as she could out of such a sorry ending. But she knew as she stood facing him, so tired and heavy-eyed, the rejected sheet of figures fallen on the brocaded sofa between them, that it was she who met and experienced lasting defeat.
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By turns she had been the spoiled child of fortune, the romantic parasite, the mad butterfly, the advanced woman, the Bolshevik de luxe; and finally and for all time to come she was confronted with the last possibility––there was no forked road for her––that of a shrewd, cold flirt. She realized too late the injustice done her under the name of a father’s loving protection. Moreover, she determined never to let herself realize to any great extent the awfulness of the injustice. It was, as Steve said, a common fate these days––there was solace in the fact of never being alone in her defeat. But at five minutes after twelve she had glimpsed the situation and regretted briefly all she was denied. Still it was an impossibility to cease being a Gorgeous Girl.
She felt cheated, stunted, revengeful because of this common fate. Steve was setting out for new worlds to conquer––he very likely would have a good time in so doing. She must continue to be fearfully rushed and terribly popular, having a good time, too. How dull everything was! Strangely, she did not give Mary Faithful or her part in Steve’s future a thought––just then. She was thinking that Ibsen merely showed the awakened Nora’s going out the door––as have Victorian matrons shown their daughters, urging them to do likewise. But it really begins to be interesting at this very point since it is not the dramatic closing of the door that is so vital, but the pitfalls and adventures on the long road that Nora and her sisters have seen fit to travel.
Beatrice was deprived of even this chance, even the falling by the wayside and admitting a new sort of defeat, or travelling the road in cold, supreme fashion and ending with selfish victory and impersonal297theories warranted to upset the most domestic and content of her stay-at-home sisters. But she, like all Gorgeous Girls, must be content to stand peering through the luxurious gates of her father’s house, watching Steve go down the long road, then glancing back at her lovely habitation, where no one except tradesmen really took her seriously, and where all that was expected of her, or really permitted, was to have a good time.
Steve shrugged his shoulders. He felt a great weariness concerning the situation, nonchalant scorn of what happened in the future of this woman. As for Mary Faithful––that was a different matter, but he could not think about Mary Faithful while standing in the salon of the Villa Rosa with the Gorgeous Girl as mentor.
“Suppose we do not try to talk any more just now?” he suggested. “We are neither one fit to do so. Wait until morning and then come to an agreement.” He spoke as impersonally as if a stranger asking aid interrupted his busiest time.
Beatrice recognized the tone and what it implied. “I am agreed,” she said, after a second’s hesitation. “Do not fancy my father and I will come on our knees to you.”
She swept from the room in a dignified manner. Steve waited until he heard the door of Constantine’s room bang. He knew his wife had rushed to tell her father her side of the matter––to receive the eternal heart’s ease in the form of a check so she could go and play and forget all about Stevuns the brute.
He walked unsteadily through the rooms of the lower floor, out on to the main balcony, and back again. He could not think in these rooms; he could not think298in any corner of the whole tinsel house. It seemed a consolation prize to those who have been forbidden to think.
He went to his own ornate and impossible room, which should have belonged to an actor desiring publicity, or some such puppet as Gay. He tried to sleep, but that too was impossible. He kept pacing back and forth and back and forth, playing the white bear as Beatrice had so often said, wondering if it would be too much the act of a cad to go to Mary Faithful and merely tell her. He could think at Mary’s house––he must have a chance to think, to realize that Beatrice refused to come with him and to tell himself that nothing should force him to remain in the Villa Rosa and be the husband of the Gorgeous Girl, set right by her father’s checks, the laughingstock of the business world that had called his hand.
The humiliation, the failure, the loss––were good to have; stimulating.
Wonderfully alive and keen, he did not know how to express the new sensation that took possession of his jaded brain. He was like a gourmand dyspeptic who has long hesitated before trying the diet of a workingman and when someone has whisked him off to a sanitarium and fed him bran and milk until he has forgotten nerves, headaches, and logginess he vows eternal thankfulness to bran and milk, and is humbly setting out to adopt the workingman’s diet instead of the old-time menus.
Steve could begin to work simply, to find his permanent place in the commercial world. He had enough money––or would have––to start a home in simple yet pleasant fashion; he had knowledge and ability that would place him favourably and furnish299him the chance to work normally toward the top. That was all very well, he told himself toward early morning––but must it be done alone? He had had the Gorgeous Girl as the incentive to make his fortune, and now he had Mary Faithful as the incentive to lose it––and if the Gorgeous Girl stayed on at the villa and became that pitied, dangerous object, a divorcee; and if Mary did care–––-Strange things, both wonderful and fearsome, happen in the United States of America.
300CHAPTER XXII
Beatrice, never having gone to her father for anything save money, did not know how to broach the subject in heartfelt and deep-water fashion. When she went into his room she found him with scarlet spots burning in his grayish cheeks, his dark eyes harsher and more formidable than ever. He tried twisting himself on the bed, resulting in awkward, halfway muscular contortions and gruff moans punctuating the failure. He held out his arms to her and she went flying into them, not the dignified woman of the world putting a cave man in his proper place.
“He is impossible!” was all she said, giving way to hysterical sobs. “Don’t even try talking to him again–––”
More gruff moans before Constantine began coherently: “He’ll do what I say or he’ll not stay in this house. I expected this–––”
“Oh, you don’t understand, papa. He doesn’t want to stay here, not at all! He does not want me. There, now you know it! He must have said something of this to you––perhaps you didn’t believe him. Neither did I––at first. Oh, my head aches terribly and I know I shall be ill. He wants me to be a poor man’s wife––starting again, he calls it––while he earns a salary and we live in a poky house and I do the cooking. I’d think it awfully funny if it was happening to any of my friends––but this is terrible!301Well, goat-tending tells, doesn’t it? And after all we have done for him––to babble on about honesty and earning and all those socialistic ideas. He is a dangerous man, papa; really. I don’t care.”
Constantine stopped moaning. “Look up at me.” He made her lift her face from the tangle of silk bed quilts. “Do you love him?”
“Why, papa, I always adored Stevuns––but of course I can’t give up the things to which I’ve been accustomed! It’s so silly that I think he is queer even to suggest it––don’t you?”
“You won’t love him if he goes out of here and you stay,” the old man said, slowly; “but if he will stay and do as I tell him––then you’ll love him?”
“Yes”––with great relief that she was not called upon to keep on explaining and analyzing her own feelings and Steve’s motives; it was entirely too much of a strain––“that is it. If Steve will stay here and do what you tell him––I think he’d better retire from business and just look after our interests––I shall forgive him. But if he keeps up this low anarchistic talk about dragging me to a washtub––oh, it’s too absurd!––I’m going to Reno and be done with all of it.” She drew away from her father and the same cold, shrewd look of the mature flirt replaced her confusion. “Don’t you think that is sensible?”
Her father closed his eyes for a moment. Then he whispered: “So you don’t love him.”
Beatrice had to stoop to catch the words. “You can’t be expected to love people that make you unhappy.”
“Oh, can’t you?” he asked. “Can’t you? Did you never think that loving someone is the bravest302thing in the world? It takes courage to keep on loving the dead, for instance; the dead that keep stabbing away at your heart all through the years. Loving doesn’t always make you happy, it makes you brave––real love!”
He opened his eyes to look at her closely. Beatrice whimpered.
“Isn’t it time for your drops? You’re too excited, papa dear.”
“Then you don’t love him,” he repeated. “Well, then, it’s best for you both that he go––that’s all I’ve got to say. I thought you cared.”
Beatrice’s eyebrows lifted. “Really, I can’t find any one who can talk about this thing sensibly,” she began.
Suddenly she thought of Gay. There was always Gay; at least she could never disappoint him, which was what she meant by having him talk sensibly. Gay knew everyone, how to laugh at the most foolish whims, pick up fans, exercise lap dogs, and wear a fancy ball costume. What a blessed thing it was there was Gay.
“It has been quite too strenuous an evening,” she said, in conclusion, “so I’m off for bed. Steve and I will talk more to-morrow. Good-night, papa. I’m terribly distressed that this has come up to annoy you.” She bent and kissed him prettily.
“I’ve seen you make more fuss when your lap dog had a goitre operation,” her father surprised her by way of an answer. “It’s all different in my mind now.” The thick fingers picked at the bed quilt. “I thought it would break your heart, but it’s just that you want to break his spirit; so it’s better he should go.”
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Left alone, Constantine lay staring into darkness, his harsh eyes winking and blinking, and the gnarled thick fingers, which had robbed so cleverly by way of mahogany-trimmed offices and which had written so many checks for his Gorgeous Girl, kept on their childish picking at the quilt. Yet his love for Beatrice, monument to his folly, never dimmed. He merely was beginning to realize the truth––too late to change it. And as the pain of loving his dead wife had never ceased throughout the years, so the new and more poignant pain of loving his daughter and knowing that she was in the wrong began tugging at his heartstrings. Well, he was the original culprit; he must see her through the game with flying colours. As for Steve––he envied him!
In the morning Steve was accosted by Aunt Belle, who felt she must say her conventional, marcelled, gray-satin, and violet-perfumed reproaches. All Beatrice had told her was that Steve was now an impossible pauper, that he loved Mary Faithful and had loved her for years, that it was quite awful, and she was going to divorce him. Her aunt, with the proper emotions of a Gorgeous Girl’s aunt, and uncomfortable memories of love in a cottage with the late Mr. Todd, began to upbraid Steve. She began in a cold, stereotyped fashion, calling his attention to the broken-hearted wife, the sick man who lay upstairs and who had befriended him, and of the social ostracism that was to result should he take such a drastic step.
She felt it indelicate to mention Mary but she did say there were “other vicious deceits of which we are well aware, my young man,” warning him that in years to come old age would bring nothing but remorse304and terror, asking him what he would be forced to think when his marriage was recalled?
“My marriage?” Steve answered, too pleasantly to be safe. “I dare say in time I’ll come to realize it is always the open season for salamanders.” Which left Aunt Belle with the wild thought that she must accompany Beatrice to Reno to sit out in the sagebrush for the best part of a year.
Steve found his wife in her dressing room; she had waited as eagerly for his coming as she had done during the first days of their engagement. She, too, during a sleepless night had resolved that the only solution was a divorce, but she was going to have just as gay a time out of the event as was possible, which included making Steve as wretched as could be. Even with the rumours concerning Mary she believed, in the conceited fashion of all persons so cowardly that they merely consent to be loved, that Steve still adored her and that she was dealing with the deluded man of a few years ago.
She wore a sapphire-coloured negligé with slippers to match, and lay in her chaise-longue gondola, her prayer books with their silver covers and a new Pom as touching details to the farewell tableau. Then Steve was permitted to come into the room.
She gazed at him in a sorrowful, forgiving fashion, quite enjoying the situation. Then she held out her hand, wondering if he would kiss it; but he took it as meaning that he might sit down or try to sit down on a perilous little hassock which he had always named the Rocky Road to Dublin despite its Florentine appearance.
“I hope you agree with me,” he began, in businesslike fashion as he noted the prayer books, the untouched305breakfast tray, the snapping Pom, which never tolerated his presence without protest. “I am going to see your father, out of courtesy, and explain more in detail how things stand. It won’t interest you so I sha’n’t bore you. I have enough money and securities to cover the loss of any of his money. I shall apply for a position in another city. I am reasonably sure of obtaining it. It seems to me it would be better that I go away.”
“I forgive you, Steve,” she said, sadly, shaking her golden head.
“I presume you will want to do something about a legal separation––and if you do not I shall.”
The prayer books fell to the floor in collision with the slipping Pom but Beatrice did not notice.
“So you do love her!” There was a hint of a snarl in her high-pitched voice. “So you want to marry her after all!”
“I think,” Steve continued, in the same even voice, “that as you are going to tire of being a divorcee playing about, and will want a second husband to help with the ennui that is bound to occur, you had best select your form of a divorce and let me do what I can to aid in the matter. You are very lovely this morning, as you usually are. There is no doubt but what many men far better suited to you than I will try to have you marry them––they will wisely never expect to marry you. That was our great mistake, Beatrice. I thought I was marrying you––but you were really marrying me.”
“So you do love her,” she repeated, paying no heed to what else he said.
“Yes, I do,” Steve said, with sudden honesty. It was a relief to be as brutal and uncomplimentary306as possible; it offset the silver-covered prayer books, the breakfast tray, the bejewelled Pom, the whole studied, inane effect of a discontented woman trying to play coquette up to the last moment.
“I have loved her a long time. I could no more have refrained from it than you can refrain from feeling a pique at the fact, though you have nothing but contempt for us both and only a passing interest if the truth were known. I am glad you have persisted in asking me until I told you. I think one of the most promising signs that women will survive is the fact that they are never afraid to ask questions, no matter how delicate the situation. Men keep silence and often bring disaster on their sulky heads as a result.”
“So––and you dare tell me this?”
“Of course I do. I dare to tell you the truth, which no one else has ever taken the pains to tell you. If you do not get a divorce I intend to. Not that I champion the custom as a particularly healthy institution, but it is sometimes a necessary one. If it is any satisfaction to you I do not think Miss Faithful has the slightest idea of marrying me. She has put that part of her aside for business and taking care of Luke. The time has passed when she would have married me. Still, I shall try to make her change her mind,” he added with the same spirit he had once displayed toward winning the Gorgeous Girl. “Only this time I shall not bargain for her.”
Beatrice gave an affected laugh. “Quite a satisfactory arrangement all round. I hope you do not bother me again. Tell my father what you like, and then take yourself off to the new position and do as you please. When I decide what course I shall307pursue you will be informed. Would you please pick up my prayer book?” she added, languidly.
Steve bent over to grasp the intricate nothing in his hand and lay it gently in the sapphire-velvet lap.
“Good-bye, Beatrice,” he said, a trifle sadly––for the day the child discovers there are no fairies is one of sadness.
It was something of this Steve felt as he looked at his wife for the last time. How thrilled and adoring he would have one time been. Just such visions, a trifle cruder no doubt, had stirred his young soul in the bleak orphanage days––the boo’ful princess and the valiant young hero chaining the seven-headed dragon. And in America it was just bound to have come true!
“Good-bye, Stevuns,” she answered, in the same gay voice––but a trifle forced if one knew her well. “I hope you have a wonderful time leading a mob somewhere and your wife selling your photographs on the next corner curbstone!”
She pretended to become interested in the prayer book; and, with the Pom shooing him out by sharp, ear-piercing barks, Steve left the room.
308CHAPTER XXIII
Not an hour later Mrs. Stephen O’Valley’s card was taken in to Mary Faithful as she sat trying to work in the new office––it never ceased to be new to her. She had heard the swift rumours of Steve’s failure. Understanding that the visitor’s card had a deeper significance than the messenger who delivered it realized, Mary closed the outer doors of her office and waited for her guest.
It was a very Gorgeous Girl who swept serenely into the room and lost no time in introducing the nature of her errand.
“I don’t know how well informed you are in business reports,” she began in her high-pitched voice, “but perhaps you have heard–––”
“The report of the new leather trust––without including your husband’s factory? Yes––but it was bound to come. I always told him so.”
Beatrice lost sight of the business introduction she had so carefully planned while dressing and then driving downtown.
“You have told my husband a great many things, haven’t you?” she insisted. “Don’t seem to be surprised. I am quite well informed.”
She was scrutinizing Mary as she talked. Within her mind was the undeniable thought that there was something about this thin, tall woman with gray eyes which was real and comforting. She even wished that Steve had fallen in love with someone else, and309that she, Beatrice, might have come to Mary for comfort and advice. If any one could have set her right with herself it would be just such a good-looking thing, as Trudy used to say, a commercial nun who had kept her ideals and was not bereft of ideas. Faith and intellect had been properly introduced in Mary’s mind.
Mary blushed. “I have always wished to speak to you about something Mrs. Vondeplosshe told you shortly before her death. Won’t you sit down? I am sure we have much to say to each other.”
Beatrice found herself obeying like a docile child. As she took a chair facing Mary’s desk she realized that in just such a kind, practical fashion would Mary proceed to manage Steve, that the years of experience in the business world as an independent woman would give Mary quite a new-fashioned charm in his eyes. Whether she was dealing with gigantic business interests in deft fashion or showing tenderness for the little girl who puts away her dolls for the last time, Mary possessed a flexibility of comprehension and power. One could not be cheap in dealings with her. And as the eternal sex barrier was not present in Beatrice’s behalf she realized that her jargon so impulsively planned would never be said. Nor could she dismiss Mary patronizingly and say the halfway melodramatic things she had said to Steve. It occurred to her as Mary began to talk that Mary had been brave enough to love, not merely be loved, the truth of this causing her to wince within.
“In a malicious moment Trudy told you of my––my affection for your husband. It is true, if that is what you have come to ask me about. I told myself months ago that if you did come to ask me this thing310I should answer you truthfully, and we must remain at least polite acquaintances over a hard situation. I think I have played fairly.” Mary’s face had a tired look that bore proof to the statement. “I even left his employ. As I once told you from an impersonal statement, I have a theory that many business women of to-day are in love with someone in their office. Propinquity perhaps and the shut-in existence that they lead account for much of it. Yet no woman is a true woman who forgets her employer is a married or engaged man.
“You and I know, however, that love does not stop to ask if this is the case, and I sometimes feel––impersonally, remember––that the business women earn the love of their employers and associates more than said employers’ and associates’ wives. Does it sound strange? Of course you need not agree––I hardly expect it. Yet the fact remains that we watch and save that you Gorgeous Girls may spend and play. In time the man, tense and non-understanding of it all, discovers that his trust and confidence may be placed in the business woman while romantic love is not enduring in his home. Not always, of course; but many times in these days of overnight prosperity and endless good times. So I have neither shame nor remorse––I have as much right to love your husband as you have––and because of that I shall be as fair to you as I would ask any woman to be toward me in similar circumstances.”
“I think I understand,” the Gorgeous Girl said, swiftly. “I see something of the light.” She laughed nervously. It was easier to laugh than to cry, and one or the other was necessary at this moment. “I wanted to tell you that my husband is311going away to take a rather mediocre position. I shall divorce him.”
“He’s won out,” Mary said, in spite of herself.
“Has he? So you have been the urge behind him and his poverty talk?”
“I’d like to claim the credit,” Mary retorted.
“Really?”
Beatrice found herself in another mental box, undecided how to cope with the situation. She had fancied she could make Mary cry and beg for silence, be afraid and unpoised. Instead she felt as ornate as a circus rider in her costume, and as stupid regarding the truth as the snapping Pom under her arm. Her head began to ache. She wondered why all these people delighted in accepting sacrifice and seeking self-denial––and she thought of Gay again and of what a consolation he was. And through it all ran a curious mental pain which informed her that she had not the power to hurt or to please either of these persons, and she was being politely labelled and put in her own groove by Mary Faithful. This stung her on to action, just as any poorly prepared enemy loses his head when he sees the tide is turning.
In desperation she said, coldly: “After all, I shall play square with you because you have played square with him. I’ll give you the best advice a retiring wife can give her advancing rival. Don’t copy me––no matter how Steve may prosper in years to come, do you understand? Oh, I’m not so terrible or abnormal as you people think. I’d have done quite well if my father had never earned more than three thousand a year and I had had to put my shoulder to the wheel. But don’t ever start to be a Gorgeous Girl––stay thrifty and be not too discerning of handmade312lace or lap dogs. You know, there’s no need to enumerate. Stay the woman who won my husband away from me––and you’ll keep him. What is more, I think you will make him a success––in time for your golden-wedding anniversary! There, that’s as fair as I can be.”
“Quite,” Mary said, softly.
“Once you admit to him there is a craving in your sensible heart to be as useless as I am––then someone else will come along to play Mary Faithful to your Gorgeous Girl.” There was a catch in the light, gay voice. “I don’t want him,” she added, vigorously. “Heavens, no, we never could patch it up! I shall always think of this last twelve months asl’année terrible!My Tawny Adonis was a far more soothing companion than Steve. Nor do I envy you and your future. I don’t really want Steve––and you deserve him. Besides, we women never feel so secure as novelists like to paint us as being in their last chapters! So I’m giving you the best hint concerning our mutual cave man that a defeated Gorgeous Girl ever gave a Mary Faithful. As far as I am concerned the thing is painless. I shall have a ripping time out West, and some day perhaps marry someone nice and mild, someone who will stand for my moods and not spend too much of my money in ways I don’t know about––a society coward out of a job! The thing that does hurt,” she finished, suddenly, “is the fact that I’d honestly like to feel broken-hearted––but I don’t know how. I’ve been brought up in such a gorgeous fashion that it would take a jewel robbery or an unbecoming hat to wring my soul.”
“Thanks,” Mary said, lightly. “I may as well313tell you I’ve determined never to marry Steve, for all your good advice.”
“Why?” All the tenseness of her nature rushed to the occasion. This was decidedly interesting, since it resembled her own whims. She felt almost friendly toward the other woman.
“Because,” Mary answered, handing the psychologists another problem for a rainy afternoon.
Beatrice nodded, satisfied at the answer and the eternal damnable woman’s notion inspiring it, for it was just what she would have replied in like circumstances. She felt there was nothing more to be said about the matter and that Gorgeous Girls and commercial nuns had much in common. As usual, Steve was appointed the official blackguard of the inevitable triangle!
Going home that night Mary felt that truly the “day was a bitter almond.” It even began to be dramatically muggy and threatening, in keeping with her state of mind––the sort of forced weather that issues offstage in roars of thunder the moment the villain begins his plotting. She took a street car, having meant to walk and give herself time to pull together and adopt the fat smile of a professional optimist.
A tired-faced woman, heavily rouged, was talking to another tired-faced woman, also rouged. Mary listened because it was a relief to listen to someone else besides herself, to realize there were other persons in this world occupied with other problems besides a commercial nun with a heartache, a tired cave man about to start again, and a Gorgeous Girl defeated in no uncertain terms. The whole thing was beyond Mary’s comprehension just now; as much as the314graybeards’ lack of understanding when they try to Freud the schoolboy’s mind.
“That’s me, too, Mame, all over––and when she tried telling me she was a natural blonde, never using lemon juice in even the last rinse water––well, when you’ve been handing out doll dope and baby bluster over the counter of a beauty department as long as I have you know there ain’t no such animal! Good-bye, Mame. I hope you get home safe.”
“There ain’t no such animal,” Mary found herself repeating. “No, there sure ain’t!”
There were no real commercial nuns; it was a premeditated affair entirely, merely a comfortable phrase borrowed by the lonesome ones unwilling to be called old maids; a big, brave bluff that women have adopted during these times of commercial necessity and economic stress. Commercial nuns! As foolish as the tales told children of the wunks living in the coalbins––as if there ever could be such creatures! The reason Mary would not marry Steve was because she, Mary, did not want to disappoint him even as the Gorgeous Girl had done. She did not want to be all helpmate, practical comrade; she had fed herself with this delusion during the years of loneliness. She had adopted the veneer, convinced herself that it was true, but she knew now that it was false. It had taken a Gorgeous Girl to scratch beneath the veneer in true feminine fashion. Mary did wish to be dependent, helpless––to have Gorgeous Girl propensities. The cheap phrases of the shopwomen kept interrupting her attempts to think of practical detail. “There ain’t no such animal.”
She found Luke wild-eyed and excited, brandishing an evening paper.